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Miss Misanthrope 
 
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■SHE SAT DOII-'.V AGAIN AND WAITED.' 
 
S'f 
 
 Miss Misanthrope 
 
 pw 
 
 -V 
 
 JUSTIN M C CARTHY 
 
 AUTHOR OF ''HEAR LADY DISDAIN" *'A FAIR SAXON " ETC 
 
 •Or Miss Misanthrope?' he suggested. ' How would thai do for a young lady's name?' 
 
 A NEW EDITION, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ^fonboii 
 
 CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 
 1879' 
 
LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET 
 
DEDICA TION. 
 
 While this story was yet in progress as a serial through 
 the Gentleman's Magazine, a report of the Author's death 
 found its way into the newspapers. That report drew forth 
 from colleagues of his in literature and journalism so many 
 kindly expressions of regret, and from private friends so many 
 letters to his family — first of condolence, and then, when the 
 report was corrected, of congratulation — that it would be vain 
 for him to attempt to express in separate words to each his 
 thanks for the sympathy so shown. The Author knows no 
 better way of conveying his grateful recognition of friendly 
 feeling, and at the same time proving himself alive, than by 
 dedicating this book to each and all of the kindly men and 
 women who wrote or spoke with regret of him, believing him 
 to be dead. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Miss Misanthrope ........ i 
 
 II. The Eve of Liberty 13 
 
 III. The Man with a Grievance 23 
 
 IV. "Oh, much-desired Prize, sweet Liberty!". . ■ 53 
 V. Miss Grey's first Call , 41 
 
 VI. Is this Alceste? 53 
 
 VII. On the Bridge 62 
 
 VIII. A " Helper of unhappy Men " 74. 
 
 IX. In Society Si 
 
 X. "The Poet in a Golden Age was born" . . . 91 
 
 XI. The Gay Science in a new Illustration . . -99 
 
 XII. "Love, the Messenger of Death" . . . .110 
 
 XIII. A Man of the Time 122 
 
 XIV. A Midnight Confidence 132 
 
 XV. A Morning Confidence 141 
 
 XVI. Chastelard 151 
 
 XVII. "Under Bonnybell's Window-panes" .... 162 
 
 XVIII. "Counsel bewrayed" 169 
 
 XIX. Mr. St. Paul's Mystery 177 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XX. Love and Electioneering 18S 
 
 XXI. An Episode 195 
 
 XXII. Mr. Sheppard's Offer of Surrender . . . 204- 
 
 XXIII. "Mischief, thou art afoot" 215 
 
 XXIV. All the Rivals at once 225 
 
 XXV. Victor — Propositi ? . 233 
 
 XXVI. "Luckless Love's Interpreter". .... 241 
 XXVII. "Was ever Woman in this Humour wooed?" . . 249 
 
 XXVIII. The Member for Keeton 260 
 
 XXIX. A Lounge in the Park 271 
 
 XXX. "Lean'd her Breast up till a Tho^n " . . . 280 
 
 XXXI. "And even for Love will bury Love in Earth" . 2S7 
 
 XXXII. Left lonely . 297 
 
 XXXIII. The Man without a Grievance .... 304 
 
 XXXIV. " He wrung Bassanio's Hand, and so they parted " . 314 
 XXXV. A general Breaking-up • . 321 
 
 XXXVI. "Where I did begin there shall I end" . . 335 
 
MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 THE little town of Dukes-Keeton, in one of the more northern 
 of the midland counties, had in its older days two great 
 claims to consideration. One was a park, the other a sweetmeat. 
 The noble family whose name had passed through many generations 
 of residence at the place had always left their great park so freely 
 open to every one that it came to be like the common property of 
 the public ; and the town had grown into fame by the manufacture 
 of the sweetmeat which bore its name almost everywhere in the 
 track of the meteor-flag of England. But as time went on various 
 other places took to manufacturing the sweetmeat so much better, 
 and selling it so much more successfully than " Keeton," as the 
 town was commonly called, could do, that " Keeton " itself had 
 long since retired from the business, and was content to import 
 the delicacy, which still bore its own name, in consignments of 
 canisters from Manchester or London. During many years the 
 heir of the noble family had deserted the park, and had never 
 come near it or near England even, and everything that gave the 
 town a distinct reason for existence seemed to be passing rapidly 
 into tradition. It had lain out of the track of the railway system 
 for a long time, and when the railway system at length enclosed 
 it in its arms the attention seemed to have come too late. All 
 the heat of life appeared to have chilled out of Dukes-Keeton 
 in the meantime, and it lay now between two railways almost 
 as inanimate and hopeless a lump as the child to whom the Erf- 
 king's touch is fatal in his father's arms. 
 
 The park, with its huge palace-like, barrack-like house, not a 
 castle, and too great to be called merely a hall, lies almost im- 
 mediately outside the town. From streets and shops the visitor 
 passes straightway through the gates of the great enclosure. 
 
2 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Every stranger who has seen the house is taken at once to see 
 another object of interest. In the centre of the park was a 
 broad clear space, made by the felling and removing of every 
 tree, until it spread there sharp and hard as a burnt-out 
 patch in a forest. Gravel and small shells made the pavement 
 of this space, and thus formed a new contrast with the turf, the 
 grasses, and the underwood of the park all around. In the 
 midst of this open space there rose a large circular building: a 
 tower, low in height when the bulk enclosed by its circumference 
 was considered, and standing on a great square platform of solid 
 masonry with steps on each of its sides. The tower itself reminded 
 one of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or some other of the tombs 
 that still stand near Rome. It was, in fact, the mausoleum which 
 it had pleased the father of the present owner to have erected for 
 himself during his lifetime. He lavished money on it, cared 
 nothing for the cost of materials and labour, planned it out 
 himself, watched every detail, and stood by the workmen as they • 
 toiled. Within he had prepared a lordly reception-room for his 
 dead body when he should come to die. A superb sarcophagus 
 of porphyry, fit to have received the remains of a Ccesar, was there. 
 When the work was done and all was ready the lonely owner 
 visited it every day, unlocked its massive gate, and went in, and 
 sat sometimes for hours in his own mausoleum. He was growing 
 insane, people thought, in these later days, and they counted on 
 his soon becoming an actual madman. So far, however, he 
 showed no greater madness than in wasting his money on a 
 huge tomb, and wasting so much of his time in visiting it prema- 
 turely. The tomb proved a vanity in a double sense. For the 
 noble owner was seized with a sudden mania for travel, and 
 resolved to go round the world. Somewhere in mid-ocean he 
 was attacked by fever, or what alarmed people called the plague, 
 and he died, and his body had to be committed without much 
 delay or ceremonial to the sea. He had built his monument to 
 no purpose. He was never to occupy it. It stood a vast and solid 
 gibe at the vanity of its founder. 
 
 Over the great gate through which the mausoleum was entered 
 were three heads sculptured in stone. One was that of a man in 
 the prime of manhood, with lips and eyebrows contracted and 
 puckered, forehead wrinkled, and eyes full of anxious strain, all 
 telling of care, of pain, of sleepless struggle against difficulty, 
 watchfulness to ward off danger. This was life. The next was the 
 face of the same man with the eyes closed and the cheeks sunken, 
 and the expression of one who had fallen into sleep from pain — 
 the struggle and agony gone indeed, but their shadow still 
 
Jl/fSS MISAXTHROPE. 3 
 
 resting on the brows and the lips : and that of course was Death. 
 The third piece of carving showed the same face still, but now 
 with clear eyes looking broadly and brightly forward, and with 
 features all noble, serene, and glad. This was Eternity. These 
 three faces were the wonder and admiration of the neighbour- 
 hood, and had been for now some years back employed to solve 
 the problem of existence for all the little lads and lasses of 
 Keeton who might otherwise have failed sometimes to see the 
 harmonious purpose working in all things. The sculptor had it 
 all his own way, and took care that Life should have the worst 
 of it Keeton was in almost all its conditions a place of rather 
 sleepy contentment, and its people could be trusted to take 
 just as much of the moral as was good for them, and not to carry 
 to extremes the lesson as to the discomfort and dissatisfaction of 
 the probationary life- period. Otherwise there might perhaps be 
 a chance that impressionable, not to say morbid, persons would 
 desire to hurry very rapidly through the dark and anxious vestibule 
 of Life in order to get into the broad bright temple of Eternity. 
 
 Some thought like this was passing through the mind of Miss 
 Minola Grey, who sat on the steps of the tomb and looked up into 
 the faces illustrative of man's struggle and final success. Life had 
 long been wearing a hard and difficult appearance to her, and she 
 would perhaps have been glad enough sometimes if she could have 
 got into the haven of quiet waters which in the minds of so many 
 people and in so many symbolic representations is made to stand 
 for Eternity. She was a handsome, graceful girl, rather tall, fair- 
 haired, with deep blueish-grey eyes which seemed to darken as 
 they looked earnestly at any one — eyes which might be described 
 in Matthew Arnold's words as " too expressive to be blue, too 
 lovely to be grey"— with a broad forehead from which the hair was 
 thrown back in disregard of passing fashions. Perhaps it was her 
 attitude, as she leaned her chin upon her hand and looked up at 
 the mausoleum — perhaps it was the presence of that gloomy 
 building itself — that made her face seem like an illustration of 
 melancholy. Certainly her face was pale and a little wanting in 
 fullness, and the lips were of the sort that one can always think 
 of as tremulous with emotion of some kind. This was a beautiful 
 summer evening, and all the park around was green, sunny, and 
 glad. The little dry, bare spot on which the tomb was built 
 seemed like a grey and withering leaf on a bright branch. And 
 the figure of the girl was more in keeping with the melancholy 
 shadow of the mausoleum than the joyousness of the sun and 
 the trees and the whole scene all around. 
 
 Indeed there was a good deal of melancholy in the girl's mind 
 
 B2 
 
4 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 at that moment. She was taking leave of the place : she had come 
 to say it a farewell. That park had been her playground, her studio, 
 her stage, her world of fancy and romance and poetry since her 
 infancy. She had driven her brother as a horse there, and had 
 played with him at hunting lions. She had studied landscape drawing 
 there from the days when a half staggery stroke with some blotches 
 out of it was supposed to represent a tree, and a thing shaped like 
 the trade mark on Mr. Bass's beer bottles stood for a mountain. 
 As she grew up, she came there to read and to idle and to think. 
 There she revelled in all the boundless fancies and extravagant 
 ambitions of a clever, half-poetic child. There she was in turn the 
 heroine of every book that delighted her, and the heroine of stories 
 which had never been put into print. Heroes of surpassing beauty, 
 strength, courage, and devotion, had rambled under these trees for 
 years with her, nor had the new comer's presence ever been made 
 a cause of jealousy or complaint by the one whom his coming dis- 
 placed. They were a strange procession of all complexions and 
 garbs. Achilles the golden-haired had been with her in his day, 
 and so had the melancholy Master of Ravenswood ; and the young 
 Djalma, the lover of Adrienne, of the "Juif Errant," forgotten of 
 English girls to-day ; and Nello, the proud gondolier lad with the 
 sweet voice, who was loved by the mother and the daughter of the 
 Aldinis ; and the unnamed youth who went mad for Maud ; and 
 Henry Esmond, and Stunning Warrington, and Jane Eyre's 
 Rochester, and ever so many else. Each and all of these in turn 
 loved her, and was passionately loved by her, and all had done 
 great things for her ; and for each she had done far greater things. 
 She had made them victorious, crowned them with laurels, died for 
 them. It was a peculiarity of her temperament that when she 
 read some pathetic story it was not at the tragic passages that 
 her tears came. It was not the deaths that touched her most. 
 It was when she read of bold and generous things suddenly done, 
 of splendid self-sacrifice, of impossible rescue and superhuman 
 heroism, that she could not keep down her feelings and was glad 
 when only the watching untell-tale trees could see the tears in 
 her eyes. 
 
 She had, however, two heroes chief over all the rest whose story 
 she found it impossible to keep apart, and whom she blended 
 commonly into one odd compound. These were Hamlet and 
 Alceste, the " Misanthrope " of Moliere. It was sometimes Alceste 
 who offered to be buried quick with Ophelia in the grave ; and it 
 was often Hamlet who interjected his scraps of poetic cynicism 
 between the pretty and scandalous prattlings of Celimene and her 
 petticoaterie. But perhaps Alceste came nearest to the heart of 
 
MISS MISANTHROPE. 5 
 
 our young maid as she grew up. She said to herself over and over 
 again that " C'est n'estimer rien qu'estimer tout le monde." She 
 refused " d'un coeur la vaste complaisance qui ne fait de merite 
 aucune diffe'rence," and declared that " pour le trancher net, l'ami 
 du genre humain n'est point du tout mon fait." No doubt there was 
 unconscious or only half conscious affectation in this, as there is in 
 the ways of almost all young people who are fond of reading : and 
 her way of thinking herself a girl-Alceste would probably have 
 vanished with other whims, or been supplanted by fancies of imi- 
 tation caught from other models, if everything had gone well with 
 her. But several causes conspired as she grew into a woman to make 
 her think very seriously that Alceste was not wrong in his general 
 estimate of men and their merits. She was intensely fond of her 
 mother, and when her mother died her father married again, his 
 second wife being a young woman who put him under the most 
 absolute control, being not by any means an ill-natured person, 
 but only strong-willed, serene, and stupid. Then her brother, to 
 whom she was devoted, and who was her absolute confidant, went 
 away to Canada, declaring he would not stand a stepmother, and 
 that as soon as his sister grew old enough to put away domestic 
 control he would send for her ; and he soon got married and 
 became a prominent member of the Dominion Legislature, and in 
 none of his not over-frequent letters said a word about his promise 
 to send for her. Now her father was some time dead ; her step- 
 mother had married Mr. Saulsbury, an elderly Nonconformist 
 minister, who was shocked at all the ways of Alceste's admirer, 
 and with whom she could not get on. It won id take a very sweet 
 and resigned nature to make one who had had these experiences 
 absolutely in love with the human race, and especially with men ; 
 and Alceste accordingly became more dear than ever to Miss 
 Grey. 
 
 Now she was about to leave the place and to open of her own 
 accord a new chapter of life. She had to escape at once from 
 the dislike of some and the still less endurable liking of others. 
 She was determined to go, and yet as she looked around upon the 
 place and all its dear sweet memories filled her, it is no wonder 
 if she envied the calmness of the face that symbolised eternal rest. 
 At last she broke down and covered her face with her hands and 
 gave herself up to tears. 
 
 Her quick ears, however, heard sounds which she knew were 
 not those of the rustling woods. She started to her feet and dried 
 her eyes hastily. Straight before her now there lay the long broad 
 path through the trees which led up to the gate of the mausoleum. 
 The air was so exquisitely pure and still that the footfall of a person 
 
6 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 approaching could be distinctly heard by the girl although the new- 
 comer was yet far away. She could see him, however, and recognise 
 him, and she had no doubt that he had seen her. A thought of 
 escape at first occurred to her ; but she gave it up in a moment, for 
 she knew that the person approaching had come to seek her, and 
 must have seen her before she saw him. So she sat down again 
 defiantly and waited. She did not look his way, although he raised 
 his hat to her more than once. 
 
 As he comes near we can see that he is a handsome, rather stiff- 
 looking man, with full formal dark whiskers, clearly cut face, 
 and white teeth. His hat is very shiny. He wears a black frock 
 coat buttoned across the chest, and dark trousers and dainty little 
 boots and grey gloves, and has a diamond pin in his neck-tie. He 
 is Mr. Augustus Sheppard, a very considerable person indeed in the 
 town. EUikes-Keeton, it should be said, has three classes or 
 estates. The noble owners of the park and the guests whom they 
 used to bring to visit them in their hospitable days made one estate. 
 The upper class of the town made another estate ; and the working 
 people and the poor generally made the third. These three classes 
 (there were at present only two of them represented in Keeton) were 
 divided by barriers which it never occurred to any imagination to 
 think of getting over. Mr. Augustus Sheppard was a leading man 
 among the townspeople. His father was a solicitor and a land-agent 
 of old 'standing, and Mr. Augustus followed his father's profession, 
 and now did by far the greater part of its work. He was a mem- 
 ber of the Church of England of course, but he made it part of 
 his duty to be on the best terms with the Dissenters, for Keeton 
 was growing to be very strong in Dissent of late years. Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard had done a great deal for the mental and other 
 improvement of the town. It .was he who got up the Mutual 
 Improvement Society, and made himself responsible for the rent of 
 the hall in which the winter course of lectures, organised by him, 
 used to take place ; and he always gave a lecture himself every 
 season, and he took the chair very often and introduced other 
 lecturers. He always worked most cordially with the Reverend 
 Mr. Saulsbury in trying to restrict the number of public-houses, and 
 he was one of the few persons whom Mrs. Saulsbury cordially 
 admired. He had a word of formal kindness for every one, and 
 was never heard to say an ill-natured thing of any one behind his or 
 her back. He was vaguely believed to be ambitious of worldly suc- 
 cess, but only in a proper and becoming way, and far-seeing people 
 looked forward to finding him one day in the House of Commons. 
 
 As he came near the mausoleum he raised his hat again, and 
 then the girl acknowledged his salute and stood up. 
 
MISS MISANTHROPE. 7 
 
 " A very lovely evening, Miss Grey." 
 
 " Yes," said Miss Grey, and no more. 
 
 " I have been at your house, Miss Grey, and saw your people; 
 and I heard that possibly you were in the park. I thought perhaps 
 you would have been at home. When I saw you last night you 
 seemed to believe that you would be at home all the day." This 
 was said in a gentle tone of implied reproach. 
 
 " You spoke then of walking in the park, Mr. Sheppard." 
 
 " And I have kept my word, you see," Mr. Sheppard said, not 
 observing the implied reason for her change of purpose. 
 
 " Yes, I see it now," she answered, as one who should say " I 
 did not count upon it then." 
 
 Of all men else, Minola Grey would have avoided him. She 
 knew only too well what he had come for. She would perhaps have 
 disliked him for that in any case, but she certainly disliked him on 
 his own account. His formal and heavy manners impressed her 
 disagreeably, and she liked to say things that puzzled and startled 
 him. It was a pleasure to her to throw some paradox or odd 
 saying at him and watch his awkward attempts to catch it, and then 
 while he was just on the point of getting at some idea of it to 
 bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be 
 what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. 
 Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognised as part of the 
 business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, 
 as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of 
 place when adopted by a layman and a man of the world who 
 was still young. 
 
 " I am glad to have found you at last," Mr. Sheppard said, with 
 a grave smile. 
 
 "You might have found me at first," Minola said, quoting 
 from Artemus Ward, "if you had come a little sooner, Mr. 
 Sheppard. I have only lately escaped here." 
 
 " I wish I had known, and I would have come a great deal 
 sooner. May I take the liberty of sitting beside you ? " 
 
 " I am going to stand, Mr. Sheppard, but that need not prevent 
 you from sitting." 
 
 " I should not think of sitting unless you do. Shall we walk a 
 little among the trees ? This is a gloomy spot for a young 
 lady." 
 
 " I prefer to stand here for a little, Mr. Sheppard, but don't let 
 me keep you from enjoying a walk." 
 
 " Enjoying a walk ? " he said, with a grave smile and solemn 
 emphasis. " Enjoying a walk, Miss Grey and without you ? " 
 
 She deliberately avoided meeting the glance with which he was 
 
8 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 endeavouring to give additional meaning to this polite speech. She 
 knew that he had come to make love to her ; and though she was 
 longing to have the whole thing done with, as it must be settled 
 one way or the other, she detested and dreaded the ordeal, and 
 would have put it off if she could. So she did not give any sign 
 of having understood or even heard his words, and the opportunity 
 for going on with his purpose, which he had hoped to extract, was 
 lost for the moment. In truth, Mr. Sheppard was afraid of this 
 girl, and she knew it, and liked him none the more for it. 
 
 " I have been studying something with great interest, Mr. 
 Sheppard," she began, as if determined to cut him off from his 
 chance for the present. " I have made a discovery." 
 
 " Indeed, Miss Grey ? Yes — I saw that you were in deep con- 
 templation as I came along, and I wondered within myself what 
 could have been the subject of your thoughts." 
 
 She coloured a little and looked suddenly at him, asking herself 
 whether he could have seen her tears. His face, however, gave 
 no explanation, and she felt assured that he had not seen them. 
 
 " I have found, Mr. Sheppard, that some of the weaknesses 
 of men are alive in the insect world." 
 
 " Indeed, Miss Grey ? Some of the affections of men do indeed 
 live, we are told, in the insect world. So beautifully ordained is 
 everything " 
 
 " The affectations I meant, not the affections of men, Mr. 
 Sheppard. Could you ever have believed that an insect would be 
 capable of a deliberate attempt at imposture ? " 
 
 " I should certainly not have looked for anything of the kind, 
 Miss Grey. But there is unfortunately so much of evil mixed up 
 with all" 
 
 " So there is. I was going to tell you that as I came here and 
 passed through the garden my attention was directed — is not that 
 the proper way to put it ? " 
 
 " To put it, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 " Yes ; my attention was directed to a large, heavy, respectable 
 blue-bottle fly. He kept flying from flower to flower and burying 
 his stupid head in every one in turn and making a ridiculous noise. 
 I watched his movements for a long time. It was evident to the 
 meanest understanding that he was trying to attract attention and 
 was hoping the eyes of the world were on him. You should have 
 seen his pretence at enjoying the flowers and drinking in sweetness 
 from them — and he stayed longest on the wrong flowers ! " 
 
 " Dear me ! Now why did he do that ? " 
 
 "Because he didn't know any better, and he was trying to 
 make us think he did." 
 
MISS MISANTHROPE. 9 
 
 " But, Miss Grey — a fly — a blue-bottle ! Now really— how did 
 you know what he was thinking of ? " 
 
 " I watched him closely — and I found him out at last. Have 
 you not guessed what the meaning of the whole thing was? " 
 
 " Well, Miss Grey, I can't say that I quite understand it just 
 yet ; but I am sure I shall be greatly interested in hearing the 
 explanation." 
 
 " It was simply the imposture of a blue-bottle trying to pass 
 himself off as a bee ! It was man's affectation put under the 
 microscope ! " 
 
 Mr. Sheppard looked up at her in the hope of catching from 
 her face some clear intimation as to whether she was in jest or 
 earnest and demeaning himself accordingly. But her eyes were 
 cast down, and he could not make out the riddle. Driven by 
 desperation, he dashed in, to prevent the possible propounding 
 of another before he had time to come to his point. 
 
 " All the professions of men are not affectations, Miss Grey ! 
 Oh no : far from it indeed. There are some feelings in our 
 breasts which are only too real ! " 
 
 She saw that the declaration was coming now and must be 
 confronted. 
 
 " I have long wished for an opportunity of revealing to you 
 some of my feelings, Miss Grey, and I hope the chance has now 
 arrived. May I speak ? " 
 
 " I can't prevent you from speaking, Mr. Sheppard." 
 
 "You will hear me ? " 
 
 He was in such fear of her and so awkward about the terms 
 of his declaration of love that he kept clutching at every little straw 
 that seemed to give him something to hold on to for a moment's 
 rest and respite. 
 
 " I had better hear you, I suppose," she said, with an air of 
 profound depression, " if you will go on, Mr. Sheppard. But if 
 you would please me, you would stop where you are and say no 
 more." 
 
 " You know what I am going to say, Miss Grey — you must have 
 known it this long time. I have asked your natural guardians and 
 advisers, and they encourage me to speak. Oh, Miss Grey — I 
 love you — may I hope that I may look forward to the happiness 
 of one day making you my wife ? " 
 
 It was all out now, and she was glad. The rest would be easy. 
 He looked even then so prosaic and formal that she did not 
 believe in any of his professed emotions, and she was therefore 
 herself unmoved. 
 
 " No, Mr. Sheppard," she said, looking calmly at him, straight 
 
io MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 in the face. " Such a day will never come. Nothing that I have 
 seen in life makes me particularly anxious to be married ; and I 
 could not marry you." 
 
 He had expected evasion, but not bluntness. He knew well 
 enough that the girl did not love him, but he had believed that he 
 could persuade her to marry him. Now her point-blank refusal 
 completely staggered him. 
 
 " Why not, Miss Grey ? " was all he could say at first. 
 
 " Because, Mr. Sheppard, I really much prefer not to marry 
 you." 
 
 "There is not anyone else?" he asked, his face for the first 
 time showing emotion and anger. 
 
 The faint light of a melancholy smile crossed Minola's face. 
 He grew more angry. 
 
 " Miss Grey — now, you must tell me that ! I have a right to 
 ask — yes : and your people would expect me to ask. You must 
 tell me that." 
 
 " Well," she said, " if you force me to it, and if you will have 
 an answer, I must give you one, Mr. Sheppard. I have a lover 
 already, and I mean to keep him." 
 
 Mr. Sheppard was positively shocked by the suddenness and 
 coolness of this revelation. He recovered himself, however, and 
 took refuge in unbelief. 
 
 " Miss Grey, you don't mean it, I know — I can't believe it. 
 Why, I have known you and seen you grow up since you were 
 a child. Mrs. Saulsbury couldn't but know" 
 
 " Mrs. Saulsbury knows nothing of me : we know nothing of 
 each other. I have a lover, Mr. Sheppard, for all that — do you 
 want to know his name? " 
 
 " I should like to know his name, certainly," the breathless 
 Sheppard stammered out. 
 
 " His name is Alceste " 
 
 " A Frenchman ! " Sheppard was aghast. 
 
 " A Frenchman, truly — a French gentleman — a man of truth 
 and courage and spirit and honour and everything good. A man 
 who wouldn't tell a lie or do a mean thing, or ■ flatter a silly 
 woman, or persecute a very unhappy girl — no, not to save his soul, 
 Mr. Sheppard. Do you happen to know any such man ? " 
 
 " No such man lives in Keeton." He was surprised into 
 simple earnestness. " At least I don't know of any such man." 
 
 " No ; you and he are not likely to come together and be 
 very familiar. Well, Mr. Sheppard, that is the man to whom I am 
 engaged, and I mean to keep my engagement. You can tell Mrs. 
 Saulsbury if you like." 
 
MISS MISANTHROPE. n 
 
 " But you haven't told me his other name." 
 
 " Oh — I don't know his other name." 
 
 " Miss Grey ! Don't know his other name? " 
 
 " No : and I don't think he has any other name. He has but 
 the one name for me, and I don't want any second." 
 
 " Where does he live, then — may I ask ? " 
 
 " Oh yes — I may as well tell you all now, since I have told 
 you so much. He only lives in a book, Mr. Sheppard ; in 
 what you would call a play," she added with contemptuous ex- 
 pression. 
 
 " Oh, come now — I thought you were only amusing your- 
 self." A smile of reviving satisfaction stole over his face. 
 " I'm not much afraid of a rival like that, Miss Grey — if he is my 
 only rival." 
 
 " I don't know why you talk of a rival," the young woman 
 answered, with a scornful glance at him ; " but I can assure you 
 he would be the most dangerous rival a living man could have. 
 When I find a man like him, Mr. Sheppard, I hope he will ask me 
 to marry him ; indeed, when I find such a man I'll ask him to 
 marry me — and if he be the man I take him for he'll refuse me. I 
 have told you all the truth now, Mr. Sheppard, and I hope you 
 will think I need not say any more." 
 
 " Still I'm not quite without hope that something may be done," 
 Mr. Sheppard said. " How if I were to study your hero's ways and 
 try to be like him, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 A great brown heavy velvety bee at the moment came booming 
 along, his ponderous flight almost level with the ground and not far 
 above it. He sailed in and out among the trees and branches, now 
 burying himself for a few seconds in some hollow part of a trunk 
 and then plodding through air again. 
 
 " Do you think it would be of any use, Mr. Sheppard," she 
 calmly asked, " if that honest bee were to study the ways of 
 the eagle ? " 
 
 " You are not complimentary, Miss Grey," he said, reddening. 
 
 " No : I don't believe in compliments : I very much prefer truth." 
 
 " Still there are ways of conveying the truth — and of course I 
 never professed to be anything very great and heroic " 
 
 He was decidedly hurt now. 
 
 " Mr. Sheppard," she said, in a softer and more appealing tone, 
 " I don't want to quarrel with you or with anybody, and please don't 
 drive me on to make myself out any worse than I am. I don't care 
 about you, and I never could. We never could get on together. I 
 don't care for any man — I don't like men at all. I wouldn't marry 
 you if you were an emperor. But I don't say anything against you ; 
 
12 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 at least I wouldn't if you would only let me alone. I am very un- 
 happy sometimes — almost always now ; but at least I mean to make 
 no one unhappy but myself." 
 
 " That's what comes of books and poetry and solitary walks and 
 nonsense ! Why can't you listen to the advice of those who love 
 you ? " 
 
 She turned upon him angrily again. 
 
 " Well, I am not speaking of myself now, but of your— 
 your people, who only desire your good. Mr. Saulsbury, Mrs. 
 Saulsbury " 
 
 " Once for all, Mr. Sheppard, I shall not take their advice ; and 
 if you would have me think of you with any kindness at all, any 
 memory not disagreeable and — and detestable, you will not talk to 
 me of their advice. Even if I had been inclined to care for you, 
 Mr. Sheppard, you took a wrong way when you came in their name 
 and talked of their authority. Next time you ask a girl to marry 
 you, Mr. Sheppard, do it in your own name." 
 
 He caught eagerly at the kind of negative hope that seemed 
 to be held out to him. 
 
 "If that's an objection," he began, "I assure you that I came 
 quite of my own motion, and I am the last man in the world to 
 endeavour to bring any unfair means to bear. Of course it is not 
 as if they were your own parents, and I can quite understand how 
 a young lady must feel " 
 
 " I don't know much of how young ladies feel," Minola said 
 quietly, " but I know how I feel, Mr. Sheppard, and you know it 
 too. Take my last word. I'll never marry you. You only waste 
 your time, and perhaps the time of somebody else as well — some 
 good girl, Mr. Sheppard, who would be glad to marry you and 
 whom you will be quite ready to make love to the day after to- 
 morrow." 
 
 Her heart was hardened against him now, for she thought him 
 mean and craven and unmanly. Perhaps according to her familiar 
 creed she ought rather to have thought him manly, meanness being 
 man's proper attribute. She did not believe in the genuineness of 
 his love, and in any case no thought was more odious to her than 
 that of a man pressing a girl to marry him if she did not love him 
 and was not ready to meet him half way. 
 
 There was a curious contrast between these two figures as they 
 stood on the steps of that great empty tomb. The contrast was all 
 the more singular and even the more striking because the two might 
 easily have been described in such terms as would seem to suggest 
 no contrast. If they were described as a handsome young man 
 (for he was scarcely more than thirty) and a handsome young woman 
 
THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 13 
 
 the description would be correct. He was rather tall, she was 
 rather tall ; but he was formal, severe, respectable, and absolutely 
 unpicturesque — she was picturesque in every motion. His well- 
 made clothes sat stiffly on him, and the first idea he conveyed was 
 that he was carefully dressed. Even a woman would not have 
 thought, at the first glance at least, of how she was dressed. She 
 only impressed one with a sense of the presence of graceful and 
 especially emotional womanhood. The longer one looked at the 
 two the deeper the contrast seemed to become. Both, for example, 
 had rather thin lips ; but his were rigid, precise, and seeming to 
 part with a certain deliberation and even difficulty. Hers appeared, 
 even when she was silent, to be tremulous with expression. After 
 a while it would have seemed to an observer, if any observing eye 
 were there, that no power on earth could have brought these two 
 into companionship. 
 
 " I won't take this as your final answer," he said, after one or 
 two unsuccessful efforts to speak. "You will consider this again, 
 and give it some serious reflection." 
 
 She only shook her head, and once more seated herself on the 
 steps of the monument, as if to suggest that now the interview was 
 over. 
 
 "You are not walking homeward?" he asked. 
 
 " I am staying here for awhile." 
 
 He bade her good morning and walked slowly away. A rejected 
 lover looks to great disadvantage when he has to walk away. He 
 ought to leap on the back of a horse, and spur him fiercely and 
 gallop off ; or the curtain ought to fall and so finish up with him. 
 Otherwise, even the most heroic figure has something of the look 
 of one sneaking off like a dog told imperatively to " go home." 
 Mr. Sheppard felt very uncomfortable at the thought that he probably 
 did not seem dignified in the eyes of Miss Grey. He once glanced 
 back uneasily, but perhaps it was hardly a relief to find that she 
 was not looking in his direction. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 
 
 Miss Grey remained in the park until tiie sun had gone down, 
 and the stars, with their faint light, seemed as she moved home- 
 ward to be like bright sparkles entangled among the higher branches 
 
14 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 of the trees. She had a great deal to think of, and she troubled 
 herself little about the mental depression of her rejected lover. 
 All the purpose of her life was now summed up in a resolve to get 
 away from Keeton and to bury herself in London. 
 
 She knew that any opposition to her proposal on the part of 
 those who were still supposed to be her guardians would only 
 be founded on an objection to it as something unwomanly, 
 venturous, and revolutionary, and not by any means the result of 
 any grief for her going away. Ever since her mother's death and 
 her father's second marriage she had only chafed at existence, 
 and found those around her disagreeable, and, no doubt, made 
 herself disagreeable to them. She had ceased to feel any respect 
 for her father when he married again, and he knew it and became 
 cold and constrained with her. Only just before his death had 
 there been anything like a revival of their affection for each other. 
 He had been a man of some substance and authority in his town, 
 had built houses, and got together property, and he left his 
 daughter a not inconsiderable annuity as a charge upon his pro- 
 perty, and placed her under the guardianship of the elderly and 
 respectable Nonconformist minister, who, as luck would have it, 
 afterwards married his young widow. Minola had seen so many 
 marriages during her short experience, and had disliked two at 
 least of them so thoroughly, that she was much inclined to say 
 with one of her heroes that there should be no more of them. 
 For a long time she had made up her mind that when she came of 
 age she would go to London and live there. She still wanted a 
 few months of the time of independence, but the manner in which 
 Mr. Augustus Sheppard was pressed upon her by himself and 
 others made her resolve to anticipate the course of the seasons a 
 little, and go away at once. In London she made up her mind 
 that she would lead a life of enchantment : of delightful and 
 semi-savage solitude, in the midst of the crowd ; of wild inde- 
 pendence and scorn of all the ways of men, with books at her 
 command, with the art galleries and museums, of which she had 
 read so much, always within easy reach, and the streets which 
 were alive for her with such sweet and dear associations all around 
 her. 
 
 Miss Grey knew London well. She had never yet set foot in 
 it, or been anywhere out of her native town ; but she had studied 
 London as a general may stud}' the map of some country which 
 he expects one day to invade. Many and many a night, when all 
 in the house but she were fast asleep, she had had the map of 
 London spread out before her, and had puzzled her way through 
 endless intricacies of its streets. Few women of her age, or of 
 
THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 15 
 
 any age, actually living in the metropolis, had anything like the 
 knowledge of its districts and its principal streets that she had. 
 She felt in anticipation the pride and delight of being able to go 
 whither she would about London without having to ask her way of 
 anyone. Some particular association identified every place in her 
 mind. The living and the dead, the romantic and the real, 
 history and fiction, all combined to supply her with labels of 
 association, which she- might mentally put upon every quarter and 
 district, and almost upon every street which had a name worth 
 knowing. As we all know Venice before we have seen it, and 
 when we get there can recognise everything we want to see 
 without need of guide to name it for us, so Minola Grey knew 
 London. It is no wonder now that her mind was in a perturbed 
 condition. She was going to leave the place in which so far all 
 her life, literally, had been passed. She was going to live in that 
 other place which had for years been her dream, her study, her 
 self-appointed destiny. She was going to pass away for ever from 
 uncongenial and odious companionship, and to live a life of sweet, 
 proud, lonely independence. 
 
 The loneliness, however, was not to be literal and absolute. In 
 all romantic adventures there is companionship. The knight has 
 his squire, Rosalind has her Celia. Minola Grey was to have her 
 companion in her great enterprise. It had not occurred to her 
 to think about the inconvenience or oddness of a girl living 
 absolutely alone in London, but without any forethought on 
 her part the kindly destinies had provided her with a comrade. 
 Having lingered long in the park and turned back again and 
 again for another view of some favourite spot, having gathered 
 many a leaf and flower for remembrance, and having looked up 
 many times with throbbing heart at the white, trembling stars that 
 would shine upon her soon in London, Miss Grey at last made up 
 her mind and passed resolutely out at the great gate and went to 
 seek this companion. She was glad to leave the park now in any 
 case, for in the fine evenings of summer and autumn it was the 
 custom of Keeton people to make it their promenade. All the 
 engaged couples of the place would soon be seen there under the 
 trees. When a lad and lass were seen to walk boldly and openly 
 together of evenings in that park, and to pass and repass their 
 neighbours without effort at avoiding such encounters, it was as 
 well known that they were engaged as though the fact had been 
 proclaimed by the town-crier. A jury of Keeton folk would have 
 assumed a promise of marriage and proceeded to award damages 
 for its breach if it were proved that a young man had walked 
 openly for any three evenings in the park with a girl whom he 
 
1 6 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 afterwards declined to make his wife. Minola did not care to 
 meet any of the joyous couples or their friends, and even already 
 the twitter of voices and the titter of feminine laughter were 
 beginning to make themselves heard among the darkling paths 
 and across the broad green lanes of the park. 
 
 From the gates of the park one passed, as has been said already, 
 almost directly into the town. The town itself was divided in 
 twain by a river, the river spanned by a bridge which had a certain 
 fame from the fact of its having been the scene of a brave stand 
 and a terrible slaughter during the Civil Wars after Charles the 
 First had set up his standard at Nottingham. To be sure there 
 was not much left of the genuine old bridge on which the fight 
 was fought, nor did the broad, flat, handsome, and altogether 
 modern structure bear much resemblance to the sort of bridge 
 which might have crossed a river in the days of the Cavaliers. 
 Residents of Keeton always, however, boasted of the fact that one 
 of the arches of the bridge was just the same underneath as it had 
 always been, and insisted on bringing the stranger down by devious 
 and grassy paths to the river's edge in order that he might see for 
 himself the old stones still holding together which had perhaps 
 been shaken by the tramp of Rupert's troopers. On the park side 
 of the bridge lay the genteeller and more pretentious houses, the 
 semi-detached villas and lodges and crescents of Keeton ; and 
 there,, too, were the humbler cottages. On the other side of the 
 bridge were the business streets and the clustering shops, most of 
 them old-fashioned and dark, with low beetling fronts and narrow 
 panes in the windows, and only here and there a showy and modern 
 establishment, with its stucco front and its plate glass. The streets 
 were all so narrow that they seemed as if they must be only pas- 
 sages leading to broader thoroughfares. The stranger walked on 
 and on, thinking he was coming to the actual town of Dukes- 
 Keeton, until he walked out at the other side and found he had left 
 it behind him. 
 
 Minola Grey crossed the bridge, although her own home lay 
 on the side nearest the park, and made her way through the 
 narrow streets. She glanced with a shudder at one formal official- 
 looking house of dark brick which she had to pass, and the door 
 of which bore a huge brass plate with the words " Sheppard and 
 Sheppard, Solicitors and Land Agents." Another expression of 
 dislike or pain crossed her handsome, pale, and emotional face 
 when she passed a little lane, closed at the farther end by the 
 heavy sombre front of a chapel, for it was there that she had 
 even still to pass some trying unsympathetic hours of the Sunday 
 listening to a preacher whose eloquence was rather too familiar 
 
THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 17 
 
 to her all the week. At length she passed the front of a large 
 building of light-coloured stone, with a Greek portico and row 
 of pillars and high flight of steps, and which to the eye of any 
 intelligent mortal had " Court House " written on its very face. 
 Miss Grey went on and passed its front entrance, then turning 
 down a narrow street of which the building itself formed one 
 side, she came to a little open door, went in, ran lightly up a flight 
 of stone steps, and found herself in dun and dimly lighted corridors 
 of stone. 
 
 A ray or two of the evening light still flickered through the 
 small windows of the roof. But for this all would seemingly have 
 been dark. Minola's footfall echoed through the passages. The 
 place appeared ghostly and sad, and the presence of youth, grace, 
 and energetic womanhood was strangely out of keeping with all 
 around. The whole expression and manner of Miss Grey brightened, 
 however, as she passed along these gaunt and echoing corridors. 
 In the sunlight of the park there seemed something melancholy in 
 the face of the girl which was not in accord with her years, her 
 figure, and her deep soft eyes. Now in this dismal old passage of 
 damp resounding stone she seemed so joyous that her passing 
 along might have been that of another Pippa. The place was not 
 very unlike a prison, and an observer might have been pleased to 
 think that, as the light step of the girl passed the door of each 
 cell and the flutter of her garments was faintly heard, some little 
 gleam of hope, some gentle memory, some breath of forgotten 
 woods and fields, some softening inspiration of human love, was 
 borne in to every imprisoned heart. But this was no prison : 
 only the Court House where prisoners were tried ; and its rooms, 
 occupied in the day by judges, lawyers, policemen, public, suitors, 
 and culprits, were now locked, empty, and silent. 
 
 Minola went on, singing to herself as she went, her song grow- 
 ing louder and bolder until at last it thrilled finely up to the stone 
 roofs of the grim halls and corridors. For Minola was of that 
 temperament to which resolve of any kind soon brings the excite- 
 ment of high spirits, and she sang now out of sheer courage and 
 purpose. 
 
 Presently she stopped at a low, dark, oaken door which looked 
 as if it might admit to some dingy lumber-room or closet ; and 
 this door opened instantly and she was in presence of a pretty 
 and cheerful little picture. The side of the building where the 
 room was set looked upon the broadest and clearest space in the 
 town, and through the open window could be seen distinctly the 
 glassy grey of the quiet river and even the trees of the park, a 
 dark mass beneath the pale summer sky. Although the room was 
 
 c 
 
1 8 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 lit only by the twilight, in which the latest lingering reflection of 
 the sunset still lived, it looked bright to the girl who had come 
 from the heavy dusk and gloom of the corridors with their roof- 
 windows and their rows of grim doors. A room ought to look 
 bright, too, when the visitor on just appearing on its threshold is 
 rushed upon and clasped and kissed and greeted as " You dear 
 dear darling." Such a welcome met Miss Grey, and then she was 
 instantly drawn into the room, the door of which was closed behind 
 her. 
 
 The occupant of the room who thus welcomed Minola was a 
 woman not far short probably of forty years of age. She was 
 short, she was decidedly growing fat, she had a face which ought 
 from its outlines and its colour to be rather humorous and mirth- 
 ful than otherwise, and a pair of very fine, deep, and consequently 
 somewhat melancholy eyes. These eyes were the only beauty of 
 Miss Mary Blanchet's face. She had not good sight, for all their 
 brightness. When any one talked with her at some little distance 
 across a room, or even across a broad table, he could easily see by 
 the irresponsive look of the eyes — the eyes which never quite found 
 a common focus with his even during the most animated inter- 
 change of thought — that Miss Blanchet had short sight. But 
 Miss Blanchet always frankly and firmly declined to put on 
 spectacles. " I have only my eyes to boast of, my dear," she said 
 to all her female advisers, " and I am not going to cover them 
 with ugly spectacles, you may be sure." Hers was a life of 
 the simplest vanity, the most innocent affectation. Her eyes 
 had driven her into poetry, love, and disappointment. She was 
 understood to have loved very deeply and to have been deserted. 
 None of her friends could quite remember the lover, but every one 
 said that no doubt there must have been such a person. Miss 
 Blanchet never actually spoke of him, but she somehow suggested 
 his memory. 
 
 Miss Blanchet was a poetess. She had published by subscrip- 
 tion a volume of verses, which was favourably noticed in the local 
 newspapers and of which she sent a copy to the Queen, whereof 
 Her Majesty had been kindly pleased to accept. Thus the poetess 
 became a celebrity and a sort of public character in Dukes- 
 Keeton, and when her father died it was felt that the town ought 
 to do something for one who had done so much for it. It made 
 her custodian of the Court House, entrusted with the charge of 
 seeing that it was kept clean, ventilated, water-besprinkled, that 
 when assizes came on the judges' rooms were fittingly adorned and 
 that bouquets of flowers were placed every morning on the bench 
 behind which they sat. This place Miss Blanchet had held for 
 
THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 19 
 
 many years. The rising generation had forgotten all about her 
 poetry, and indeed as she seldom went out of her own little domain 
 had for the most part forgotten her existence. 
 
 When Minola Grey was a little girl her mother was one of Miss 
 Mary Blanchet's chiefest patronesses. It tvas in great measure by 
 the influence of Minola's father that Miss Blanchet obtained her 
 place in the Court House. Little Minola thought her a great 
 poetess and a remarkably beautiful woman, and accepted some- 
 how the impression that she had a romantic and mysterious love 
 history. It was a rare delight for her to be taken to spend an 
 evening with Miss Blanchet, to drink tea in her pretty and well- 
 kept little room, to walk with her through the stone passages of 
 the Court House, and hear her repeat her poems. As Minola grew 
 up she outgrew the poems, but the affection survived; and after her 
 mother's death she found no congenial or sympathetic friend any- 
 where in Keeton but Mary Blanchet. The relationship between 
 the two curiously changed. The tall girl of twenty became the 
 leader, the heroine, the queen ; and Mary Blanchet, sensible little 
 woman enough in many ways, would have turned African explorer 
 or joined in a rebellion of women against men if Miss Grey had 
 given her the word of command. 
 
 " I know your mind is made up, dear, now that you have 
 come," Miss Blanchet said when the first rapture of greeting was 
 over. 
 
 Minola took off her hat and threw it on the little sofa with the 
 air of one who feels thoroughly at home. It may be remarked as 
 characteristic of this young woman that in going towards the sofa 
 she had to pass the chimney-piece with its mirror, and that she did 
 not even cast a glance at her own image in the glass. 
 
 "Mary," she asked gravel}", "am I a man and a brother that 
 you expect me to change my mind ? You are not repenting, I 
 hope?" 
 
 " Oh no, my dear. I have all the advantages, you know. I am 
 so tired of this place and the work — dear me ! " 
 
 " And I hate to see you at such work. You might almost as 
 well be a servant. Years ago I made up my mind to take you out 
 of this wretched place as soon as I should be of age and my own 
 mistress." 
 
 "Well, I have sent in my resignation, and I am free. But I 
 am a little afraid about you. You have been used to every 
 luxury — and the carriage— and all that." 
 
 " One of my ambitions is to drive in a hansom cab. Another 
 is to have a latch-key. Both will soon be gratified. I am only 
 sorry for one thing." 
 
zo MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " What is that, dear ? " 
 
 " That we can't be Rosalind and Celia ; that I can't put on 
 man's clothes and liberty." 
 . " But you don't like men — you always want to avoid them." 
 
 Miss Grey said nothing in defence of her own consistency. 
 She was thinking that if she had been a man she would have 
 been spared the vexation of having to listen to Mr. Augustus 
 Sheppard's proposals. 
 
 " I suspect," Miss Blanchet said, " that people will say we 
 are more like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza." 
 
 " Which of us the Sancho?" 
 
 '* Oh, I, of course ; I am the faithful follower." 
 
 " You — poor little poetess, full of dreams and hopes and 
 unselfishness ! Why, I shall have to see that you get something 
 to eat at tolerably regular intervals." 
 
 " How happy we shall be ! And I shall be able to complete 
 my poem ! Do you know, Minola," she said, confidentially, " I do 
 believe I shall be able to make a career in London. I do indeed ! 
 The miserable details of daily life here pressed me down, down," 
 and she pressed her own hand upon her forehead to illustrate the 
 idea. " There in freedom and quiet I do think I shall be able 
 to prove to the world that I am worth a hearing!" 
 
 This was a tender subject with Miss Grey. She could not bear 
 to disturb by a word the harmless illusion of her friend, and yet 
 the almost fierce truthfulness of her nature would not allow 
 her to murmur a sentence of unmeaning flattery. 
 
 " One word, Mary," she said ; " if you grow famous, no 
 marrying — mind ! " 
 
 Little Miss Blanchet laughed and then grew sad, and cast her 
 eyes down. 
 
 " Who would ask me to marry, my dearest? And even if they 
 did the buried past would come out of the grave — and " — 
 
 She slightly raised both hands in deprecation of this mournful 
 resurrection. Minola changed the subject and said : 
 " Well, I have all to go through with my people yet." 
 "They won't prevent you?" Miss Blanchet asked anxiously. 
 " They can't. In a few months I should be my own mistress ; 
 and what is the use of waiting? Besides, they don't really care — 
 except for the sake of showing authority and proving to girls 
 that they ought to be contented slaves. They know now that I 
 am no slave. I do believe my esteemed stepfather — or step- 
 stepfather, if there is such a word — would consent to emancipate 
 me if he might do so with the proper ceremonial — the slap on 
 the cheek." 
 
THE EVE OF LIBERTY. 21 
 
 The allusion was lost on Miss Blanchet. 
 
 " Mr. Saulsbury is a stem man indeed," she said, "but very- 
 good ; that we must admit." 
 
 " All good men, it seems, are hard, and all soft men are bad." 
 
 "What of Mr. Augustus Sheppard?" Miss Blanchet asked 
 gently. " How will he take your going away ? " 
 
 " I have not asked him, Mary. But I can tell you if you care 
 to know. He will take it with perfect composure. He has about 
 as much capacity for foolish affection as your hearthbroom there." 
 
 " I think you are mistaken, Minola— I do indeed. I think 
 that man is really " 
 
 "Well. Is really what?" 
 
 " You won't be angry if I say it." 
 
 Minola seemed as if she were going to be angry, but she looked 
 into the little poetess's kindly wistful eyes, and broke into a laugh. 
 
 " I couldn't be angry with you, Mary, if I had ten times my 
 capacity for anger— and that would be a goodly quantity ! Well, 
 what is Mr. Sheppard really — as you were going to say? " 
 
 " Really in love with you, dear." 
 
 " You kind and believing little poetess— full of faith in simple 
 true-love and all the rest of it ! Mr. Sheppard likes what he con- 
 siders a respectable connection in Keeton. Failing in one chance, 
 he will find another, and there is an end of that." 
 
 " I don't think so," Miss Blanchet said gravely. " Well, we 
 shall see." 
 
 " We shall not see him any more. We shall live a glorious, 
 lonely independent life. I shall study humanity from some lofty 
 garret window among the stars. London shall be my bark and my 
 bride, as the old songs about the Rovers used to say. All the weak- 
 nesses of humanity shall reveal themselves to me in the people- 
 next door to us and over the way. I'll study in the British 
 Museum ! I'll spend hours in the National Gallery ! I'll lie under 
 the trees in Epping Forest ! I think I'll go to the gallery of a 
 theatre ! Liberie, liberie cherie ! " And Miss Grey proceeded to 
 chant from the " Marseillaise " with splendid energy as she walked 
 up and down the room with clasped hands of mock-heroic 
 passion. 
 
 " You said something about a man and a brother just now, 
 dear," Miss Blanchet gently interposed. " I have something to 
 tell you about a man and a brother. My brother is back again in 
 London." 
 
 Miss Blanchet made this communication in the tone of one 
 
 who is trying to believe that the news will be welcome. 
 "Your brother? He has come back?" Miss Gr 
 
 Grey did not 
 
22 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 like to add " I am so sorry," but that was exactly what she would 
 have said if she had spoken her mind. 
 
 _ " Yes, my dear— quite reformed and as steady as can be, and 
 going to make a great name in London. Oh, you may trust to 
 him this time, you may indeed." 
 
 _ Miss Grey's handsome and only too expressive features showed 
 signs of profound dissatisfaction. 
 
 " I couldn't help telling him that we were going to live in 
 London — one's brother, you know." 
 
 " Yes, one's brother," Miss Grey said, with sarcastic emphasis. 
 "They are an affectionate race, these brothers ! Then he knows 
 all about our expedition ? Has he been here, Mary?" 
 
 " Oh, no, dear ; but he wrote to me— such beautiful letters ' 
 Perhaps you would like to read them ? " 
 
 _ Miss Grey was silent, and was evidently fighting some battle 
 with herself. At last she said — 
 
 " Well, Mary dear, it can't be helped, and I dare say he won't 
 trouble to come very often to see us. But I hope he will come 
 as often as you like, for you might be terribly lonely. I don't 
 care to know anybody. I mean to study human nature, not to 
 know people." 
 
 " But you have some friends in London, and you are soins 
 to see them." s ° 
 
 " Oh— Lucy Money ; yes. She was at school with me, -and we 
 used to be fond of each other. I think of calling to see her, but 
 she may be changed ever so much, and perhaps we shan't get on 
 together at all. Her father has become a sort of great man 
 in London, I believe— I don't know how. They won't trouble 
 us much, I dare say." 
 
 The friends then sat and talked for a short time about their 
 project. It is curious to observe that though they were such 
 devoted friends they looked on their joint purpose with very dif- 
 ferent eyes. The young woman, with her beauty, her spirit, and 
 her talents, was absolutely sincere and single-minded, and was 
 going to London with the sole purpose of living a free secluded 
 life, without ambition, without thought of any manner of success. 
 The poor little old maid had her head already filled with wild 
 dreams of fame to be found in London, of a distinguished brother, 
 a bright career, publishers seeking for everything she wrote, and 
 her name often in the papers. Devoted as she was to Miss Grey, 
 or perhaps because she was so devoted to her, she had already 
 been forming vague but delightful hopes about the reformed 
 brother which she would not now for all the world have ventured 
 to hint to her friend. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE. 
 
 Late that same night a young man stepped from a window in 
 one of the rooms on die third floor of the Hotel du Louvre in Pans, 
 and stood in the balcony. It was a balcony in that side of the hotel 
 which looks on the Rue de Rivoli. The young man smoked a 
 cigar and leaned over the balcony. 
 
 It was a soft moonlight night. The hour was late and the 
 streets were nearly silent. The latest omnibus had gone its way, 
 and only now and then a rare and lingering voiture clicked and 
 clattered along, to disappear round the corner of the place in 
 front of the Palais Royal. The long line of gas lamps looking 
 a faint yellow beneath the hotel and the Louvre Palace across 
 the way seemed to deepen and deepen into redder sparks the 
 farther the eye followed them to the right as they stretched on to 
 the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elyse'es. To the left 
 the young man leaning from the balcony could see the Tower of 
 St. Jacques standing darkly out against the faint pale blue of the 
 moonlighted sky. The street was a line of silver or snow in the 
 moonlight. 
 
 The young man was tall, thin, dark, and handsome. He was 
 unmistakably "English, although he had an excitable and nervous 
 way about him which did not savour of British coolness and com- 
 posure. He seemed a person not to take anything easily. Even 
 the moonlight and the solitude and the indescribably soothing and 
 philosophic influence of the contemplation of a silent city from the 
 serene heights of a balcony did not prevail to take him out of 
 himself into the upper ether of mental repose. He pulled his long 
 moustaches now and then until they met like a kind ot strap 
 beneath his chin, and again he twisted their ends up as if he desired 
 to appear fierce as a champion duellist of the Bonapartist group. 
 He sometimes took his cigar from his lips and held it between his 
 fingers until it went out, and when he put it into his mouth again 
 he took several long puffs before he quite realised the fact that he 
 was puffing at what one might term dry stubble. Then he pulled 
 out a box of fusees and lighted his cigar in an irritated way, as if 
 he were protesting that really the Fates were bearing down upon 
 him rather too heavily, and that he was entitled to complain at last. 
 
 "Good evening, sir," said a strong full British voice that 
 sounded just at his elbow. 
 
24 MfSS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 The young man, looking round, saw that his next door neigh- 
 bour in the hotel had likewise opened his window and stepped 
 out on his balcony. The two had met before, or at least seen 
 each other before once or twice. The young man had seen the 
 elder with some ladies at breakfast in the hotel, and that evening 
 he and his neighbour had taken coffee side by side on the 
 boulevards and smoked and exchanged a few words. 
 
 The elder man's strong, rather undersized, figure showed very 
 clearly in the moonlight. He had thick, almost shaggy, hair, of an 
 indefinable dark brownish colour — hair that was not curly, that was 
 not straight, that did not stand up, and yet could evidently never 
 be kept down. He had a rough complexioned face, with heavy 
 eyebrows and stubbly British whiskers. His hands were large and 
 reddish-brown and coarse. He was dressed carelessly — that is, 
 his clothes were evidently garments that had cost money, but he 
 did not seem to care how he wore them. Any garment must fall 
 readily into shapelessness and give up trying to fit well on that 
 unheeding figure. The Briton did not seem exactly what one 
 would at once assume to be a gentleman. Yet he was not vulgar, 
 and he was evidently quite at his ease with himself. He looked 
 somehow like a man who had money or power of some kind, and 
 who did not care whether people knew it or did not know it. 
 Our younger Briton had at the first glance taken him for the 
 ordinary English father of a family, travelling with his womankind. 
 But he had not seen him for two minutes at the breakfast-table 
 before he observed that the supposed heavy father was never in 
 a fuss, had a way of having all his orders obeyed without trouble 
 or misunderstanding, and, for all his strong British accent, talked 
 French with entire ease and a sort of resolute grammatical accuracy. 
 
 " Staying in Paris ?" the elder man said — he too was smoking — 
 when the younger had replied to his salutation. 
 
 " No ; I am going home — I mean I am going to England — 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " Aye, aye ? I almost wish I were too. I'm taking my wife 
 and daughters for a holiday. I don't much care for holidays 
 myself. I hadn't time for enjoyment of such things when I could 
 enjoy them, and of course when you get out of the way of enjoying 
 yourself you never get into it again; it's a sort of groove, I suppose. 
 Anyhow, we don't ever enjoy much, our people. You are English, 
 I suppose?" 
 
 " Yes, I am English." 
 
 " Wish you weren't ? I see." 
 
 Indeed the tone in which the young man answered the question 
 seemed to warrant this interpretation. 
 
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE. 25 
 
 " Excuse me; I didn't say that," the young man said, a little 
 sharply. 
 
 "No, no; I only thought you meant it. We are not bound, 
 you know, to keep rattling up the Rule Britannia always among 
 ourselves." 
 
 " I can assure you I am not at all inclined to rattle the Rule 
 Britannia too loudly," the young man said, tossing the end of his 
 cigar away and looking determinedly into the street with his hands 
 dug deeply into his pockets. 
 
 The elder man smoked for a few seconds in silence, and looked 
 up and down the long straight line of street. 
 
 "Odd," he "said abruptly. "I always think of Balzac when I 
 look into the streets of Paris, and when I give myself time to 
 think. Balzac sums up Paris for me." 
 
 "Yes," said the younger man, talking for the first time with 
 an appearance of genuine interest in the conversation ; " but 
 things must be greatly changed since that time even in Paris, you 
 know." 
 
 " Changed ? Not a bit of it. The outsides, of course. The 
 Louvre over there was half a ruin the other day, and now it's 
 getting all right again. That's change, if you like to call it so. 
 But the heart of things is just the same. Balzac stands for 
 Paris, believe you me." 
 
 " I don't believe a word of it — not a word ! I mean —excuse 
 me — that I don't agree with you." 
 
 " Yes, yes : I understand what you mean. I'm not offended. 
 Well?" 
 
 " Well — I don't believe a bit that men and women ever were 
 like that. You mean to tell me that people were made without 
 hearts in Paris or anywhere else ? Do you believe in a place 
 peopled by cads and sneaks and curs — and the women half again 
 as bad as the men ? " 
 
 The young man grew warm and the elder drew him out, and 
 they discussed Balzac as they stood in the balcony and looked 
 down on siient moonlighted Paris. The elder man smoked and 
 smiled and shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly. The younger 
 was as full of gesture and animation as if his life depended on 
 the controversy. 
 
 " All right," the elder said at last. " I like to hear you talk, 
 but Paris is Balzac to me still. Going to be in London some 
 time?" 
 
 " I suppose so : yes," in a tone of sudden depression and dis- 
 content. 
 
 " I wish we might meet some time. I live in London, and 
 
26 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 I wish you would come and see me when we get back from 
 our — holiday, we'll call it." 
 
 The young man turned half away and leaned on the balcony 
 as if he were looking very earnestly for something in the direction 
 of the Champs Elyse'es. Then he faced his companion suddenly 
 and said — 
 
 "I think you had much better not have anything to do with 
 me ; I should only prove a bore to you, or to anybody." 
 
 "How is that?" 
 
 " Well — in short, I'm a man with a grievance." 
 
 "Aye, aye? What's your grievance? Whom has it to do with?" 
 The young man looked up quickly as if he did not quite under- 
 stand the brusque ways of his new acquaintance, who put his 
 questions so directly. But the new acquaintance seemed good- 
 humoured and quite at his ease, and evidently had not the least 
 idea of being rude or over inquisitive. He had only the way of 
 one apparently used to ordering people about. 
 
 " My grievance has to do with the Government," the young 
 man said with a grave politeness, almost like self-assertion. 
 
 " Government here : in France?" 
 
 " No, no: our own Government." 
 
 "Aye, aye? What have they been doing? You haven't 
 invented anything — new cannon — flying machine — that sort of 
 thing?" 
 
 "No : nothing of that kind — I wish I had — but how did you 
 know ? " 
 
 " How did I know what?" 
 
 " That I hadn't invented anything." 
 
 "Why, I knew it by looking at you. Do you think I shouldn't 
 know an inventor? You might as well ask me how I know a man 
 has been in the army. Well, about this grievance of yours?" 
 
 " I dare say you will know my name," the young man said 
 with a sort of reluctant modesty, which contrasted a little oddly 
 with the quick movements and rapid talk that usually belonged to 
 him. Then his manner suddenly changed and he spoke in a 
 tone of something like irritation, as if he had better have the 
 whole thing out at once, and be done with it — " My name is 
 Heron — Victor Heron." 
 
 "Heron — Heron?" said the other, turning over the name 
 in his memory. " Well, I don't know I am sure — I may have 
 heard it — one hears all sorts of names. But I don't remember 
 just at the moment." 
 
 Mr. Heron seemed a little surprised that his revelation had 
 produced no effect. He had made up his mind somehow 
 
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE. rj 
 
 that his new friend was mixed up with politics and public 
 affairs. 
 
 " You'll remember Victor Heron of the St. Xavier's Settle- 
 ments?" he said decisively. 
 
 " Heron of the St. Xavier's Settlements? Ah, yes, yes. To be 
 sure. Yes, I begin to remember now. Of course, of course. 
 You're the fellow who got us into the row with the Portuguese 
 or the Dutch, or who was it? About the slave trade, or some- 
 thing? I remember it in the House." 
 
 " I am the fool," Mr. Heron went on volubly — " the block- 
 head, the idiot, that thought England had principles, and honour, 
 and a policy, and all the rest of it ! I haven't lived in England 
 very much. I'm the son of a colonist — the Herons are an old 
 colonial family — and you can't think, you people always in 
 England, how romantic and enthusiastic we get about England, 
 we silly colonists, with our old-fashioned ways. When I got that 
 confounded appointment — it was given in return for some old 
 services of my father's — I believe I thought I was going to be 
 another sort of Raleigh, or something of the kind." 
 
 "Just so; and of course you were ready to tumble into any 
 sort of scrape. You were called over the coals — snubbed for 
 your pains ? " 
 
 " Yes — I was snubbed." 
 
 " Of course : they'll soon work the enthusiasm out of you. 
 But that's a couple of years ago— and you weren't recalled?" 
 
 " No. I wasn't recalled." 
 
 "Well, what's your grievance then?" 
 
 " Why — don't you see? — my time is out — and they've dropped 
 me down. My whole career is closed — I'm quietly thrown over — 
 and I'm only twenty-nine ! " The young man caught at his mous- 
 tache with nervous hands and kicked with one foot against the 
 rails of the balcony. He gazed into the street, and his eyes 
 sparkled and twinkled as if there were tears in them. Perhaps 
 there were, for Mr. Heron was evidently a young man of quicker 
 emotions than young men generally show in our days. He 
 made haste to say something, apparently as if to escape from 
 himself. 
 
 " I am leaving Paris in the morning." 
 
 " Then why don't you go to bed and have a sleep?" 
 
 " Well, I don't feel like sleeping just yet." 
 
 " You young fellows never know the blessing of sleep. I can 
 sleep whenever I want to — it's a great thing. I make it a rule 
 though to do all my sleeping at night, whenever I can. You 
 leave Paris in the morning? Now that's a thine; I don't like to 
 
28 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 do. Paris should never be seen early in the morning. London 
 shows to best advantage early ; but Paris — no ! " 
 
 '■Why not?" Mr. Heron asked, stimulated to a little 
 curiosity. 
 
 Paris is a beauty, you know, a little on the wane, and wanting 
 to be elaborately made up and curled and powdered and painted, 
 and all that. She's a little of a slattern underneath the surface, 
 you know, and doesn't bear to be taken unawares — mustn't be 
 seen for at least an hour or two after she has got out of bed. 
 All the more like Balzac's women." 
 
 Perhaps the elder man had observed Mr. Heron's sensitiveness 
 more closely and clearly than Heron fancied, and was talking on 
 only to give him time to recover his composure. Certainly he 
 talked much more volubly and continuously than appeared at first 
 to be his way. After a while he said, in his usual style of blunt 
 but not unkindly inquiry — 
 
 " Any of your people living in London ? " 
 
 " No — in fact I haven't any people in England — few relations 
 now left anywhere." 
 
 " Like Meichisedek, eh ? Well, I don't know that he was 
 the most to be pitied of men. You have friends enough, I 
 suppose ? " 
 
 " Not friends exactly — acquaintances enough, I daresay — 
 people to call on, people who remember one's name and who ask 
 one to dinner. But I don't know that I shall have much time 
 for cultivating acquaintanceships in the way of society." 
 
 " Why so ? What are you going to London to do ? " 
 
 "To get a hearing, of course. To make the whole thing 
 known. To show that I was in the right, and that I only did 
 what the honour of England demanded. I trust to England." 
 
 " What's England got to do with it? England is only so many 
 men and women and children all concerned in their own affairs 
 and not caring twopence about you and me and our wrongs. 
 Besides, who has accused you ? Who has found fault with you ? 
 Your time is out, and there's an end." 
 
 " But they have dropped me down — they think to crush me." 
 
 " If they do it mil be by severely letting you alone : and what 
 can you do against that? You can't quarrel with a man merely 
 because he ceases to invite you to dinner : and that's about the 
 way of it." 
 
 ' : I'll fight this out for all that." 
 
 " You'll soon get tired of it. It's beating the air, you know. Of 
 course, if you want to annoy the Government you could easily 
 get some of us to take up your case — no difficulty about that— 
 
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE. 29 
 
 and make you the hero of a grievance and a debate and 
 so on." 
 
 " I want nothing of the kind ! I don't want any one to trouble 
 himself about me, and I don't care to be taken in hand by any 
 one. If Englishmen will not listen to a plain statement of right, 
 why then But I know they will." 
 
 The conviction itself was expressed in the tone of one who 
 by its very assertion protests against a rising doubt and tries 
 to stifle it. 
 
 " Very good," said the other. " Try it on. We shall soon see. 
 I have a sort of interest in the matter, for I had a grievance 
 myself and I have still, only I went about things in a different 
 way — looking for redress I mean." 
 
 " What did you do ? " 
 
 " It's a longish story, and quite a different line from yours, 
 and it would bore you to hear, even if you understood it. I got 
 into the House and made myself a nuisance. I put money 
 in my purse ; it came in somehow. I watch the department that 
 I once belonged to with the eye of a lynx. Well, I shall look 
 out for you and give you a hand if I can, always supposing it 
 would annoy the Government — any Government — I don't care 
 what." 
 
 Mr. Heron looked at him with wonder and incredulity. 
 
 " Terrible lack of principle, you think? Not a bit of it ; I'm 
 a strong politician : I stick to my side through thick and thin. 
 But in their management of departments, you know — contracts, 
 and all that — Governments are all the same ; the natural enemies 
 of man. Well, I hope to see you. I am going to have a sleep. 
 Let me give you my address — though in any case I think we are 
 certain to meet." 
 
 They parted with blunt expression of friendly inclination on 
 the one side and a doubtful, half- reluctant acknowledgment on 
 the other. Heron remained standing in his balcony looking at 
 the changes of the moonlight on the silent streets and thinking 
 of his career and his grievance. 
 
 The nearer he came to England the colder his hopes seemed 
 to grow. Now upon the threshold of the country he had so 
 longed to reach he was inclined to linger and loiter and to 
 put off his entrance. Everything that was so easy and clear a 
 few thousand miles off began to show itself perplexed and 
 difficult. "When shall I be there?" he used to ask himself on 
 his homeward journey. "What have I come for?" he began to 
 ask himself now. 
 
 Times had indeed changed very suddenly with Victor Heron. 
 
30 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 He had come into the active world perhaps rather prematurely. 
 When very young, under the guidance of an energetic and able 
 father who had been an administrator of some distinction in 
 England's service among her dependencies, he had made himself 
 somewhat conspicuous in one of the colonies ; and when an 
 opportunity occurred, after his father's death, of offering him 
 a considerable position, the Government appointed him to 
 the administration of a new settlement. It is hardly necessary 
 for us to go any deeper into the story of his grievance than 
 he has already gone himself in a few words. Except as an 
 illustration of his character, we have not much to do with the 
 story of his career as an administrator. It was a very small 
 business altogether; a quarrel in a far-off, lately appropriated, 
 and almost wholly insignificant scrap of England's dominions. 
 Probably Mr. Heron was in the wrong, for he had been 
 stimulated wholly by a chivalrous enthusiasm for the honour 
 of England's principles and a keen sense of what he considered 
 justice. The Government had dealt very kindly with him in 
 consideration of his youth and of his father's services, and had 
 merely dropped him down. 
 
 This to a young man like Heron was simply killing with 
 kindness. He could have stood up stoutly against impeachment, 
 trial, punishment, any manner of exciting ordeal, and commanded 
 his brave heart to bear it. But to be quietly allowed to go his 
 way was intolerable, and, being accused of nothing, he was rushing 
 back to England to insist on being accused of something. A 
 chief of any kind in a small dependency is a person of over- 
 whelming greatness and importance in his own sphere. Every 
 eye there is literally on him. He diffuses even a sort of impression 
 as if he were a good deal too large for his sphere, like the 
 helmet of such portentous size in the court-yard of Otranto. 
 To come down all at once to be an ordinary passenger to 
 England, an ordinary "No. 257, au 3me" at the Hotel du 
 Louvre in Paris, an obscure personage getting out at the 
 Charing Cross Station and calling a hansom, nobody caring 
 whence he has come or capable, even after elaborate reminder, of 
 calling to memory his story, his grievance, or his identity — 
 that is something to try the soul of a patient man. Mr. 
 Heron was not patient. 
 
 He was a young Quixote out of time and place. He never 
 could let anything alone. He could not see a grievance without 
 trying to set it right. The impression that anybody was being 
 wronged or cheated affected and tormented him as keenly as a 
 discordant note or an inharmonious arrangement of colours might 
 
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE. 31 
 
 disturb persons of loftier artistic soul. In the colonies queer old 
 ideas survive long after they have died out of England, and the 
 traveller from the parent country often comes on some ancient 
 abstraction there as he might upon some old-fashioned garment. 
 Heron started into life with a full faith in the living reality of 
 divers abstractions which we in England have long since dissected, 
 analysed, and thrown away. He believed in and spoke of 
 Progress and Humanity and brotherhood and such like vague- 
 nesses as if they were real things to work for and love. People 
 who regard abstractions as realities are just the very persons 
 to turn solid and commonplace realities into shining and splendid 
 abstractions. Young Heron regarded England not as an island 
 with a bad climate where some millions of florid men made 
 money or worked for it, but as a sort of divine influence inspiring 
 youth to noble deeds and patriotic devotion. He was of course 
 the very man to get into a muddle when he had anything to do 
 with the administration of a new settlement. If the muddle had 
 not lain in his way he would assuredly have found it. 
 
 He had so much to do now on his further way home in helping 
 elderly ladies on that side who could not speak French, and on 
 this side who could not speak English : in seeing that persons 
 whom he had never set eyes on before were not neglected at 
 buffets, left behind by trains, or overcharged by waiters : in giving 
 and asking information about everything, that he had not much 
 time to think about the St. Xavier's Settlements and his personal 
 grievance. When the suburbs of London came in sight with their 
 trim rows of stucco-fronted villas and cottages and their front 
 gardens ornamented with the inevitable evergreens, a thrill of 
 enthusiasm came up in Heron's breast, and he became feverish 
 with anxiety to be in the heart of the great capital once again. 
 Now he began to see familiar spires and domes and towers, 
 and then again huge unfamiliar roofs and buildings that were 
 not there when he was in London last, and that puzzled him 
 with their presence. Then the train crossed the river, and he 
 had glimpses of the Thames and Westminster Palace and the 
 Embankment with its bright garden-patches and its little trees, 
 and he wondered at the ungenial creatures who see in London 
 nothing but ugliness. To him everything looked smiling, beautiful, 
 alive with hope and good omen. 
 
 Certainly a railway station, an arrival, a hurried transaction, 
 however slight and formal, with a Customs officer, are a damper 
 on enthusiasm of any kind. Heron began to feel dispirited. 
 London looked hard and prosaic. His grievance began to show 
 signs of breaking out again amid the hustling, the crowd, the 
 
32 M/SS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 luggage, and the exertion, as an old wound might under exactly- 
 similar circumstances if one in his haste and eagerness were to 
 strain its hardly closed edges. 
 
 It was when he was in a hansom driving to his hotel that Heron, 
 putting his hand in his waiitcoat pocket, drew out a crumpled card 
 which he had thrust in there hastily and forgotten. The card bore 
 the name of 
 
 "Mr. Crowder E. Money, 
 
 Victoria Street, 
 
 Westminster." 
 
 Heron remembered his friend of Paris. "An odd name," 
 he thought ; " I have heard it before somewhere. I like him ! 
 He seems a manly sort of fellow." 
 
 Then he found himself wondering what Mr. Money's daughters 
 were like, and wishing he had observed them more closely in 
 Paris, and asking whether it was possible that girls could be 
 pretty and interesting with such an odd name. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 " OH, MUCH-DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY ! " 
 
 The summer had gone and much even of the autumn, and 
 Miss Grey and her companion were settled in London. Minola 
 had had everything planned out in her mind before they left 
 Dukes-Keeton, and little Miss Blanchet was positively awed 
 by her leader's energy, knowledge, and fearlessness. The first 
 night of their arrival in town they went to a quiet, respectable, 
 old-fashioned hotel, well known of Keeton folk, where Miss 
 Grey's father used to stay during his visits to London for many 
 years, and where his name was still remembered. Then the two 
 strangers from the country set out to look for lodgings, and Miss 
 Grey was able to test her knowledge of London, and satisfy her 
 pride of learning, by conducting her friend straightway to the 
 region in which she had resolved to make a home for herself. She 
 had been greatly divided in mind for a while between Kensington 
 and the West Centre; between the neighbourhood of the South 
 Kensington Museum, the glades of the gardens, and all the charms 
 of the old Court suburb, and the temptations of the National 
 Gallery, the British Museum, and the old-fashioned squares and 
 houses around the latter. She decided for the British Museum 
 
"OH, MUCH-DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY!" 33 
 
 quarter. Miss Blanche:, would have preferred the brightness and 
 the air of fashion which belonged to Kensington ; but Miss Grey 
 ruled that to live somewhere near the British Museum was more 
 like living in London, and she energetically declared that she 
 would rather live in Seven Dials than out of London. 
 
 To find a pleasant and suitable lodging would ordinarily have 
 been a difficulty; for the regular London lodging-house-keeper 
 detests the sight of women, and only likes the gentleman who 
 disappears in the morning and returns late at night. But luckily, 
 there are Keeton folk everywhere. As a rule, nobody is born 
 in London, " except children," as a lady once remarked. Come 
 up to London from whatever little Keeton you will, you can rind 
 your compatriots settled everywhere in the metropolis. Miss Grey 
 obtained from the kindly landlady of the hotel — who had herself 
 been born in Keeton, and was married to a Glasgow man — a choice 
 of Keeton folk willing to receive respectable and well-recommended 
 lodgers — "real ladies" especially. Miss Grey, being cordially 
 vouched for by the landlady as a real lady, found out a Keeton 
 woman in the West Centre who had a drawing-room and two 
 bedrooms to let. 
 
 Had Miss Grey invented the place, it could not have suited 
 her better. It was an old-fashioned street, running out of a 
 handsome old-fashioned square. The street was no thoroughfare. 
 Its other end was closed by a solemn, sombre structure with a 
 portico, and over the portico a plaster bust of Pallas. This was an 
 institution or foundation of some kind which had long outlived the 
 uses whereto it had been devoted by its pious founder. It now 
 had nothing but a library, a lecture-hall, an enclosed garden 
 (into which, happily for her, the windows of Miss Grey's bedroom 
 looked), an old fountain in the garden, considerable funds, a board 
 of trustees, and an annual dinner. This place lent an air of severe 
 dignity to the street, and furthermore kept the street secluded and 
 quiet by blocking up one of its ends and inviting no traffic. 
 The house in which our pair of wanderers was lodging was itself 
 old-fashioned, and in a manner picturesque. It had broad old 
 staircases of stone, and a large hall and fine rooms. It had once 
 been a noble mansion, and the legend was that its owner had 
 entertained Dr. Johnson there, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and 
 that Mrs. Thrale had often been handed up and down that 
 staircase. Minola loved association with such good company, 
 and it may be confessed went up and down the stairs several times 
 for no other purpose whatever than the pleasure of fancying herself 
 following in the footsteps of bright Mrs. Thrale, with whose wrongs 
 Miss Grey, as a misanthrope, was especially bound to sympathise. 
 
34 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 The drawing-room happily looked at least aslant over the grass 
 and the trees of the square. Minola's bedroom, as has been said, 
 looked into the garden of the institution, with its well-kept walks, 
 its shrubs, and its old-fashioned fountain, whose quiet plash was 
 always heard in the seclusion of the back of the house. Had the 
 trunks of the trees been just a little less blackened by smoke, 
 our heroine might well have fancied, as she looked from her 
 bedroom window, that she was in some quaint old abode in a 
 quiet country town. But in truth she did not desire to encourage 
 any such delusion. To feel that she was in the heart of London 
 was her especial delight. This feeling would have brightened and 
 glorified a far less attractive place. She used to sit down alone 
 in her bedroom of nights, in order to think quietly to herself, 
 " Now I am at last really in London ; not visiting London, but 
 living in it." There at least was one dream made real. There 
 was one ambition crowned. " Come what will," she said to 
 herself, " I am living in London." In London and freedom she 
 grew more and more healthy and happy. As a wearied Londoner 
 might have sought out, say Keeton, and found new strength and 
 spirits there, so our Keeton girl, who was somewhat pale and thin 
 when she sat on the steps of the ducal mausoleum, grew stronger 
 and brighter every day in the West Central regions of London. 
 
 A happier, quieter, freer life could hardly be imagined, at least 
 for her. She spent hours in the National Gallery and the Museum ; 
 she walked with Mary Blanchet in Regent's Park, and delighted 
 to find out new vistas and glimpses of beauty among the trees 
 there, and to insist that it was ever so much better than any place 
 in the country. As autumn came on and the trees grew barer, and 
 the skies became of a heavier silver grey, Minola found greater 
 charms in their softened half tones than the brighter lights of 
 summer could give. Even when it rained — and it did rain some- 
 times — who could fail to see the beauty, all its own, of the green 
 grass, and the darker stems and branches of trees, showing faintly 
 through the veil of the mist and the soft descending shower? 
 It was, indeed, a delightful Arcadian life. Its simplicity can 
 hardly be better illustrated than by the fact, that our adventurous 
 pair of women always dined at one o'clock — when they dined at 
 all — off a chop, except on Sundays, when they invariably had a 
 cold fowl. 
 
 Much as Miss Grey loved London, however, it was still a 
 place made up of men whom she considered herself bound to 
 dislike, and of women who depended far too much on these 
 men. Therefore, she made studies of scraps of London life, 
 and amused herself by satirising them to her friend. 
 
"OH, MUCH-DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY!" 35 
 
 " I have accomplished a chapter of London, Mary," she said 
 one evening before their reading had set in ; "I have completed 
 my social studies of our neighbours in Gainsborough Place "—a 
 little street of shops near at hand. " I am prepared to give you 
 a complete court guide as to the grades of society there, Mary, so 
 that you may know at once how to demean yourself to each and 
 all." 
 
 " Do tell me all about it ; I should very much like to know." 
 "Shall we begin with the highest or the lowest?" 
 " I think," Miss Blanchet said with a gentle sigh, expressive of 
 no great delight in the story of the lower classes, " I would rather 
 you began low down, dear, and got done with them first." 
 
 " Very well ; now listen. The lowest of all is the butcher. He 
 is a wealthy man, I am sure, and his daughter, who sits in the little 
 office in theshop, is a good-looking girl, I think. But in private 
 life nobody in Gainsborough Place mixes with them on really 
 cordial terms. Their friends come from other places; from butchers' 
 shops in other streets. They do occasionally interchange a few 
 courtesies with the family of the baker; but the baker's wife, 
 though not nearly so rich, rather patronises and looks down upon 
 Mrs. Butcher." 
 
 " Dear me," said the poetess, " what odd people ! " 
 "Well, the pastry-cook's family will have nothing to do, except 
 in the way of business, with the butcher or the baker; but they 
 are very friendly with the grocer, and they have evenings together. 
 Now. the two little old maids, who keep the stationer's shop where 
 the post office is, are very genteel, and have explained to me more 
 than once that they don't feel at home in this quarter, and that 
 their friends are in the West End. But they are not well off, 
 poor things, I fear, and they like to spend an evening now and 
 then with the family of the grocer and the pastry-cook, who are 
 rather proud to receive them, and can give them the best tea and 
 Madeira cake ; and both the little ladies assure me that nothing 
 can be more respectable than the families of the pastry-cook 
 and the grocer— for their station of life, they always add." 
 
 " Oh, of course ! " Miss Blanchet said, who was listening with 
 great interest as to a story, having that order of mind to which 
 anything is welcome that offers itself in narrative form, but not 
 having any perception of a satirical purpose in the whole explana- 
 tion. Minola appreciated the " of course," and somehow became 
 discouraged. 
 
 " Well," she said, " that's nearly all, except for the family of the 
 chemist, who live next to the little ladies of the post office, and 
 who only know even them by sufferance, and would not for all the 
 
36 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 world have any social intercourse with any of the others. It's de- 
 lightful, I think, to find that London is not one place at all, but 
 only a cluster of little Keetons. This one street is Keeton to the 
 life, Mary. I want to pursue my studies deeper, though ; I want to 
 find out how the gradations of society go between the mothers of 
 the boy who drives the butcher's cart, the baker's boy, and the 
 pastry-cook's boy." 
 
 "Oh, Minoladear!" 
 " You think all this very unpoetic, Mary, and you are shocked 
 at my interest in these prosaic and lowly details. But it is a study 
 of life, my dear poetess, and it amuses and instructs me. Only for 
 chance, you know, I might have been like that, and it is a grand 
 thing to learn one's own superiority." 
 
 "You never could have been like that, Minola; you belong 
 to a different class." 
 
 " Yes, yes, dear, that is quite true, I belong to the higher classes 
 entirely; my father was a country architect, my stepfather is a 
 Nonconformist minister — these are of the aristocracy everywhere." 
 
 " You are a lady — a woman of education — Minola," the poetess 
 said, almost severely. She could not understand hew even Miss 
 Grey herself could disparage Miss Grey and her parentage in 
 jest. 
 
 " I can assure you, dear, that one of the pastry-cook's daughters, 
 whom I talked with to-day, is a much better-educated girl than I 
 am. You should hear her talk French, Mary. She has been 
 taught in Paris, dear, and speaks so well that I found it very hard 
 to understand her. She plays the harp, and knows all about 
 Wagner; I don't I like her very much, and she is coming here 
 to take tea with us." 
 
 The poetess was not delighted with this kind of society, but 
 she never ventured to contradict her leader. 
 
 " You can talk to everyone, I do really believe," she said. 
 "I find it so hard to get on with people — with some people." 
 
 " I feel so happy and so free here. I can say all the cynical 
 things that please me — you don't mind — and I can like and dislike 
 as I choose." 
 
 " I am afraid you dislike more than you like, Minola." 
 
 " I think I could like anyone who had some strong purpose 
 in life ; not the getting of money, or making a way in society. 
 There are such, I suppose ; I don't know." 
 
 " When you meet my brother, I am sure you will acknowledge 
 that he has a purpose in life which is not the getting of money," 
 said Miss Blanchet. " But you don't like men." 
 
 Minola made no reply. Poor little Miss Blanchet felt so 
 
"OH, MUCH-DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY!" 37 
 
 kindly to all the race of men, that she did not understand how 
 any woman could really dislike them. 
 
 " I am going to do something that will please you to-morrow," 
 Miss Grey said, feeling that she owed her companion some atone- 
 ment for not warming to the mention of her brother. " I am 
 positively going to hunt out Lucy Money. They must have re- 
 turned by this time." 
 
 This was really very pleasant news for Miss Blanchet. She had 
 been longing for her friend to renew her acquaintance with Miss 
 Lucy Money, about whom she had many dreams. It did not 
 occur to Mary Blanchet to question directly even in her own mind 
 the decrees of Miss Grey, or to say to herself that the course of 
 life which they were leading was not the most delightful that could 
 be devised. But, if the little poetess could have ventured to 
 translate vague yearnings into definite thoughts, she would, perhaps, 
 have acknowledged to herself a faint desire that the brilliant 
 passages of the London career she had marked out for herself in 
 anticipation should come rather more quickly than they just now 
 seemed likely to do. At present there was not much difference 
 perceptible to her between London and Dukes- Keeton. Nobody 
 came to see them — even her brother had not yet presented him- 
 self. Her poem did not make much progress ; there was no great 
 incentive to poetic work. Minola and she did not know any 
 poets, or artists, or publishers. Mary Blanchet's poetic tastes 
 were of a somewhat old-fashioned school, and did not include 
 any particular care for looking at trees, and fields, and water, and 
 skies, although these objects of natural beauty were made to figure 
 in the poems a good deal in connection with, and illustrative of, 
 the emotions of the poetess. Therefore the rambles in the park 
 were not so delightful to her as to her leader ; and when the 
 evening set in, and Minola and she read to each other, Mary 
 Blanchet was always rather pleased if an opportunity occurred for 
 interrupting the reading by a talk. She was particularly anxious 
 that Minola should renew her acquaintance with her old school- 
 fellow, Miss Lucy Money, whose father she understood to be 
 somehow a great sort of person, and through whom she saw 
 dimly opening up a vista, perhaps the only one for her, into 
 society and literature. But the Money family were out of town 
 when our friends came to London, and Miss Blanchet had to 
 wait; and, even when it was probable that they had returned, 
 Miss Grey did not seem very eager to renew the acquaintance. 
 Indeed her resolve to visit Miss Money now was entirely a good- 
 natured concession to the evident desire of Mary Blanchet. 
 Minola saw her friend's little ways and weaknesses clearly and 
 
38 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 smiled now and then as she thought of them, and liked her none 
 the less for them — rather, indeed, felt her breast swell with kind- 
 liness and pity. It pleased her generous heart to gratify her 
 companion in every way, to find out things that she liked and 
 bring them to her, to study her little innocent vanities that she 
 might gratify them. What little dainties Mary Blanchet liked 
 to have with her tea, what pretty ribbons she thought it became 
 her to wear, these Miss Grey was always perplexing herself about. 
 When she found that she liked to be alone sometimes, that she 
 must have a long walk unaccompanied, that she must have thoughts 
 which Mary would not care to hear, then she felt a pang of re- 
 morse, as if she were guilty of a breach of true camaraderie, and she 
 could not rest until she had relieved her soul by some special 
 mark of attention to her friend. On the other hand, Mary Blanchet, 
 for all her dreams and aspirations, was a sensible and managing 
 little person, who got for Miss Grey about twice the value that 
 she herself could have obtained out of her money. This was a 
 fact which Minola always took care to impress upon her com- 
 panion, for she dreaded lest Miss Blanchet should feel herself a 
 dependant. Miss Blanchet, however, in a modest way, knew her 
 value, and had besides one of the temperaments to which de- 
 pendence on some really loved being comes natural, and is 
 inevitable. 
 
 - So Minola set out next day, about three o'clock, to look up her 
 schoolfellow, Miss Lucy Money. She went forth on her mission 
 with some unwillingness, and with a feeling as if she were abandon- 
 ing some purpose, or giving up a little of a principle, in doing so. "I 
 came to London to live alone and independent," she said to herself 
 sometimes, " and already I am going out to seek for acquaintances. 
 Why do I do that? I want strength of purpose. I am just like 
 everybody else," and she began, as was her wont, to scrutinize her 
 own weaknesses, and bear heavily on them. For, absurd as it may 
 seem, this odd young woman really did propose to live alone — 
 herself and Mary Blanchet — in London until they died. Alone, 
 that is, so far as social life and acquaintanceships in society were 
 concerned. Vast and vague schemes for doing good to her 
 neighbours, and for striving in especial to give a helping hand to 
 troubled women, were in Miss Grey's plans of life ; but society, 
 so called, was to have no part in them. It did not occur to her 
 that she was far too handsome a girl to be allowed to put herself 
 thus under an extinguisher or behind a screen. When people 
 looked after her as she passed through the streets, she assumed 
 that they noticed some rustic peculiarity in her dress or her hat, 
 and she felt a contempt for them. Her love of London did not 
 
"OH, MUCH-DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY/" 39 
 
 imply a love of Londoners, whom in general she thought rude and 
 given to staring. But even if she had thought people were looking 
 at her because of her figure, her face, her eyes, her superb hair, 
 she would have felt a contempt for them all the same. She had a 
 proud indifference to personal beauty, and looked down upon 
 men whose judgment could be affected by the fact that a woman 
 had finer eyes, or brighter hair, or a more shapely mould than 
 other women. 
 
 Once Minola was positively on the point of turning back, and 
 renouncing all claim on the acquaintanceship of her former school 
 companion. She suddenly remembered, however, that in con 
 demning her own fancied weakness she had forgotten that her visit 
 was undertaken to oblige Mary Blanchet. " Poor Mary ! I have 
 only one little acquaintanceship that has anything to do with 
 society, and am I to deny her that chance if she likes it ? " She 
 went on rapidly and resolutely. Sometimes she felt inclined to 
 blame herself for bringing Mary Blanchet away from Keeton, 
 although Mary had for years been complaining of her life and 
 her work there, and beseeching Miss Grey not to leave her 
 behind when she went to live in London. 
 
 It was a beautiful autumn day. London looks to great ad- 
 vantage on one of these rare days, and Miss Grey felt her heart 
 swell with mere delight as she looked from the streets to the sky 
 and from the sky to the streets. She passed through one or two 
 squares, and stopped to see the sun, already going down, send 
 its light through the bare branches of the trees. The western sky 
 was covered with grey, silver-edged clouds, which brightened into 
 blots of golden fire as they came closer in the track of the sun. 
 The air was mild, soft, and almost warm. All poets and painters 
 are full of the autumnal charms of the country ; but to certain 
 oddly constituted minds some street views in London on a fine 
 autumn day have an unspeakable witchery. Miss Grey walked 
 round and round one of the squares, and had to remind herself 
 of her purpose on Mary Blanchet's behalf in order to impel her- 
 self on. 
 
 The best of the day had gone, and the early evening was 
 looking somewhat chill and gloomy between the huge ramparts of 
 the Victoria Street houses by the time that Miss Grey stood in 
 that solemn thoroughfare, and her heart sank a little as she 
 reached the house where her old school friend lived. 
 
 " Perhaps Lucy Money is altogether changed," Miss Grey said 
 to herself as she came up to the door. " Perhaps she won't care 
 about me ; perhaps I shan't like her any more ; and perhaps her 
 mamma will think me a dreadful person for not honouring my 
 
40 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 stepfather and stepmother. Perhaps there are brothers — odious, 
 slangy young men, who think girls fall in love with them. Oh, 
 yes, here is one of them." 
 
 For just as she had rung the bell a hansom cab drove up to 
 the door, and a tall, dark-complexioned young man leaped out. 
 He raised his hat with what seemed to Miss Grey something the 
 manner of a foreigner when he saw her standing at the door, and 
 she felt a momentary thrill of relief because, if he was a foreigner, 
 he could not be Lucy Money's brother. Besides, she knew very 
 well that the great houses in Victoria Street were occupied by 
 several tenants, and there was a good hope that the young man 
 might have business with the upper story, and she with the ground 
 floor. 
 
 The young man was about to ring the bell, when he stopped, 
 and said — 
 
 " Perhaps you have rung already ? " 
 
 " Yes, I have rung," Miss Grey coldly replied. 
 
 " This is Mr. Money's, I suppose ? " 
 
 " Mr. Money lives here," she answered, with the manner of 
 one resolute to close the conversation. The young man did not 
 seem in the least impressed by her tone. 
 
 " Perhaps I have the honour of speaking to Miss Money ? " 
 he began, with delighted eagerness. 
 
 "No. I am not Miss Money," she answered, still in her clear 
 monotone. 
 
 No words could say more distinctly than the young man's ex- 
 pression did, " I am sorry to hear it." Indeed, no young man 
 in the world going to visit Mr. Money could have avoided wishing 
 that the young lady then standing at the door might prove to 
 be Miss Money. 
 
 The door opened, and the young man drew politely back to 
 give Miss Grey the first chance. She asked for Miss Lucy Money, 
 and the porter rang a bell for one of Mr. Money's servants. Miss 
 Grey had brought a card with her, on which she had written 
 over her engraved name, " For Lucy Money," and beneath it, 
 " Nola," the short rendering of " Minola " which they used to 
 adopt at school. 
 
 Then the porter looked enquiringly at the other visitor. 
 
 " If Mr. Money is at home," said the latter, " I should be glad 
 to see him. I find I have forgotten my card-case, but my name 
 is Heron — Mr. Victor Heron; and do, please, try to remember it, 
 and to say it rightly." 
 
41 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 miss grey's first call. 
 
 Mr. Money's home, like Mr. Money himself, conveyed to the 
 intelligent observer an idea of quiet, self-satisfied strength. Mr. 
 Money had one of the finest and most expensive suites of rooms 
 to be had in the great Victoria Street buildings, and his rooms 
 were furnished handsomely and richly. He had servants in 
 sober livery, and a carriage for his wife and daughters, and a 
 little brougham for himself. He made no pretence at being 
 fashionable — rather, indeed, seemed to say deliberately, " I am a 
 plain man and don't care twopence about fashion, and I despise 
 making a show of being rich ; but I am rich enough for all I want, 
 and whatever money can buy for me I can buy." He would not 
 allow his wife and daughters to aim at being persons of fashion had 
 they been so inclined, but they might spend as much money as 
 ever they pleased. He never made a boast of his original poverty, 
 or the humbleness of his bringing up, nor put on any vulgar show 
 of rugged independence. The impression he made upon every- 
 body was that of a completely self-sufficing — we do not say self- 
 sufficient — man. It was not very clear how he had made his 
 money. He had been at the head of one of the working depart- 
 ments under the Government, had somehow fancied himself ill- 
 treated, resigned his place, and, it was understood, had entered 
 into various contracts to do work for the Governments of foreign 
 States. It was certain that Mr. Money was not a speculator. His 
 name never appeared in the directors' list of any new company. 
 He could not be called a City man. But it was certain that he 
 was rich. 
 
 Mr. Money was in Parliament. He was a strong Radical in 
 theory, and was believed to have much stronger opinions than he 
 troubled himself to express. There was a rough, scornful way 
 about him, as of one who considered all our existing arrangements 
 merely provisional, and who in the mean time did not care to 
 occupy himself overmuch with the small differences between this 
 legislative proposition and that. Ifc was not on political subjects 
 that he usually spoke. He was a very good speaker, clear, direct, 
 and expressive in his language, always using plain, effective words, 
 and always showing a perfect ease in the finishing of his sentences. 
 There was a savour of literature about him, and it was evident in 
 many indirect ways that he knew Greek and Latin much better 
 
42 Af/SS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 than most of the University men. The impression he produced 
 was that of a man who on most subjects knew more than he 
 troubled himself to display. It seemed as if it would take a very 
 ready speaker indeed to enter into personal contest with Mr. 
 Money, and not to get the worst of it. 
 
 He was believed to be very shrewd and clever, and was known 
 to be liberal of his money. People consulted him about many 
 things, and to some extent admired him ; some were a little afraid 
 of him, and, in homely phrase, fought shy of him. Perhaps he was 
 thought to be unscrupulous; perhaps his blunt way of going at the 
 very heart of a scruple in others made them fancy that he rather 
 despised all moral conventionalities. Whatever the reason was, 
 a certain class of persons always rather distrusted Mr. Money, and 
 held aloof even while asking his advice. No one who had come 
 in his way even for a moment forgot him, or was confused as to 
 his identity, or failed to form some opinion about him, or could 
 have put clearly into words an exact statement of the opinion he 
 had formed. 
 
 On this particular day of autumn Mr. Money was in his study 
 reading letters. He was talking to himself in short, blunt sentences 
 over each letter as he read it, and put it into a pigeon-hole, or 
 tore it and threw it into the waste-paper basket. His sentences 
 were generally concise judgments pronounced on each correspon- 
 dent. ,"Fool!" "Blockhead !" "Just so; I expected that of you 1" 
 "Yes, yes; he's all right." " That will do." Sometimes a com- 
 ment, begun rather gruffly, ended in a good-natured smile ; and 
 sometimes Mr. Money, having read a letter to the close with a 
 pleased and satisfied expression, suddenly became thoughtful, and 
 leaned upon his desk, drumming with the finger-tips of one hand 
 upon his teeth. 
 
 A servant interrupted his work by bringing him a message and 
 a name. Mr. Money looked up, said quickly, " Yes, yes ; show 
 him in ! " and Mr. Victor Heron was introduced. 
 
 Mr. Money advanced to meet his visitor with an air of cordial 
 welcome. One peculiarity of Mr. Money's strong, homely face 
 was the singular sweetness of the smile which it sometimes wore. 
 The full lips parted so pleasantly, the white teeth shone, and the 
 eyes, that usually seemed heavy, beamed with so kindly an air, 
 that to youth at least the influence was for the moment irresistible. 
 Victor Heron's emotional face sparkled with responsive expres- 
 sion. 
 
 " Well, well ! glad to see you, glad to see yon. Knew you would 
 come. Shove away those blue-books and sit down. We haven't 
 long got back ; but I tried to find you, and couldn't get at your 
 
MISS GREY'S FIRST CALL. 43 
 
 address. They didn't know at the Colonial Institute even. And 
 how are you, and what have you been doing with yourself? " 
 
 " Not much good," Heron replied, thinking as usual of his 
 grievance. " I couldn't succeed in seeing anybody." 
 
 " Of course not, of course not. I could have told you so. 
 People are not yet coming back to town, except hard-working 
 fellows like me. Have you been cooling your heels in the ante- 
 chambers of the Colonial Office ? " 
 
 " Yes, I have been there a little ; not much. I saw it was no 
 use just yet, and that isn't a kind of occupation I delight in." The 
 young man's face reddened with the bare memory of his vexation. 
 " I hate that sort of thing." 
 
 " To go where you know people don't want to see you ? Yes, 
 it tries young and sensitive people a good deal. They've put you 
 off?" 
 
 " As I told you, I have seen nobody yet. But I mean to 
 persevere. They shall find I am not a man to be got rid of in that 
 way." 
 
 Mr. Money made no observation on this, but went to a drawer 
 in his desk, and took out a little book with pages alphabetically 
 arranged. 
 
 " I have been making enquiries about you," he said, " of 
 various people who know all about the colonies. Would you like 
 to hear a summary description of your personal character? Don't 
 be offended — this is a way I have; the moment a person interests 
 me and seems worth thinking about, I enter him in my little book 
 here, and sum up his character from my own observation and from 
 what people tell me. Shall I read it for you ? I wouldn't, you may 
 be sure, if I thought you were anything of a fool." 
 
 This compliment, of course, conquered Heron, who was other- 
 wise a good deal puzzled. But there was something in Mr. 
 Money's manner with those in whom he took any interest that 
 prevented their feeling hurt by his occasional bluntness. 
 
 " I don't know myself," Heron said. 
 
 " Of course you don't. What busy man, who has to know 
 other people, could have time to study himself? That work might 
 do for philosophers. I may teach you something now, and save 
 you the trouble." 
 
 " I suppose I ought to make my own acquaintance," said Heron 
 resignedly, while much preferring to talk of his grievance. 
 
 " Very good. Now listen. 
 
 " Heron, Victor. — Formerly in administration of St. Xavier's 
 Settlements. Got into difficulties ; dropped down. Education 
 good, but literary rather than business-like. Plenty of pluck, but 
 
44 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 wants coolness. Egotistic, but unselfish. Good deal of talent 
 and go. Very honest, but impracticable. A good weapon in 
 good hands, but must take care not to be made a plaything." 
 
 Heron laughed. " It's a little like the sort of thing phreno- 
 logists give people," he said, " but I think it's very flattering. I 
 can assure you, however, no one shall make a plaything of me," he 
 added with emphasis. 
 
 " So we all think, so we all think," Mr. Money said, putting 
 away his book. " Well, you are going on with this, then ? " 
 
 " I am going to vindicate my conduct, and compel them to 
 grant me an enquiry, if you mean that." Nothing on earth shall 
 keep me from that." 
 
 "So, so ! Very well, we'll talk about that another time — 
 many other times; and I may give you some advice, which you 
 needn't take if you don't like, and I shan't be offended. Now, 
 I want to introduce you to my wife and my girls, and you must 
 have a cup of tea. Odd, isn't it, to find men drinking tea at five 
 o'clock in the afternoon? Up at the club, any day about that 
 hour, you might think we were a drawing-room full of old spinsters, 
 to hear the rattling of tea-cups that goes on all around." 
 
 He took Heron's arm in a friendly, dictatorial way, and con- 
 ducted him to the drawing-room on the same floor. 
 
 The drawing-room was entered, not by opening a door, but by 
 withdrawing some folds of a great, heavy, dark green curtain. Mr. 
 Money drew aside part of the curtain to make way for his friend ; 
 and they both stopped a moment on the threshold. A peculiar, 
 sweet, half-melancholy smile gave a strange dignity for the moment 
 to Mr. Money's somewhat rough face, and he gently let the 
 curtain fall. 
 
 "Wasn't there some great person, Mr. Heron — Burke, was 
 it ? — who used to say that whatever troubles he had outside, all 
 ceased as he stood at his own door ? Well, I always feel like that 
 when I lift this curtain." 
 
 It was a pretty sight, as he again raised the curtain, and led 
 Heron in. The drawing-room was very large, and was richly, 
 and as it seemed to Heron somewhat oddly, furnished. The light 
 in the lower part was faint and dim, a sort of yellowish twilight, 
 procured by softened lamps. The upper extremity was steeped 
 in a far brighter light, and displayed to Heron, almost as on a 
 stage, a little group of women, among whom his quick eye at once 
 saw the girl who had come up to the door at the same time with 
 him. She was, indeed, a very conspicuous figure, for she was 
 seated on a sofa, and one girl sat at her feet, while another stood 
 at the arm of the sofa, and bent over her. An elderly lady, with 
 
MISS GREY'S FIRST CALL. 45 
 
 voluminous draperies that floated over the floor, was reclining on 
 a low arm-chair, with her profile turned to Heron. On a fancy 
 table near, a silver tea-tray glittered. A daintily dressed waiting 
 maid was serving tea. 
 
 "Take care of the floor as you come along," said Money. 
 " We like to put rugs, and rolls of carpet, and stools now in all 
 sorts of wrong places to trip people up. That shows how artistic 
 we are ! Theresa, dear, this is my friend, Mr. Heron." 
 
 " I am glad to see you, Mr. Heron," said a full, deep, melan- 
 choly voice ; and a tall, slender lady partly rose from her chair, 
 then sank again amid her draperies, bowed a head topped by a 
 tiny lace cap, and held out to Heron a thin hand covered with 
 rings, and having such bracelets and dependent chainlets, that, 
 when Heron gave it even the gentlest pressure, they rattled like 
 the manacles of a captive. 
 
 " We saw you in Paris, Mr. Heron," the lady graciously said, 
 "but I think you hardly saw us." 
 
 " These are my daughters, Mr. Heron, Theresa and Lucy. 
 I think them good girls, though full of nonsense," said Mr. Money. 
 
 Lucy, who had been on a footstool at Miss Grey's feet, gathered 
 herself up, blushing. She was a pretty girl, with brown, frizzy hair, 
 and wore a dress which fitted her so closely from neck to hip, that 
 she might really have been, to all seeming, melted or moulded into 
 it. The other young lady, Theresa, slightly and gravely inclined 
 her head to Mr. Heron, who at once thought the whole group 
 most delightful and beautiful, and found his breast filled with a 
 new pride in the loved old England that produced such homes 
 and furnished them with such women. 
 
 " Dear, darling papa," exclaimed the enthusiastic little Lucy, 
 swooping at her father, and throwing both arms round his neck, 
 " we have had such a joy to-day, such a surprise ! Don't you see 
 anybody here ? Oh, come now, do use your eyes." 
 
 " I see a young lady whom I have not yet the pleasure 
 of knowing, but whom I hope you will help me to know, 
 Lucelet." 
 
 Mr. Money turned to Miss Grey with his genial smile. She 
 rose from the sofa and bowed, and waited. She did not as yet 
 quite understand the Money family, and was not sure whether she 
 ought to like them or not. They impressed her at first as being 
 far too rich for her taste, and odd and affected, and she hated 
 affectation. 
 
 " But this is Nola Grey, papa — my dearest old schoolfellow 
 when I was at Keeton ; you must have heard me talk of Nola 
 Grey a thousand times." 
 
46 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 So she dragged her papa up to Nola Grey, whose colour grew 
 a little at this tempestuous kind of welcome. 
 
 " Dare say I did, Lucelet, but Miss Grey, I am sure, will excuse 
 me if I have forgotten ; I am very glad to see you, Miss Grey — 
 glad to see any friend of Lucelet's. So you come from Keeton ? 
 That's another reason why I should be glad to see you, for I 
 just now want to ask a question or two about Keeton. Sit 
 down." 
 
 Miss Grey allowed herself to be led to a sofa a little distance 
 from where she had been sitting. Mr. Money sat beside her. 
 
 "Now, Lucelet, I want to ask Miss Grey a sensible question 
 or two, which I don't think you would care twopence about. Just 
 you go and help our two Theresas to talk to Mr. Heron." 
 
 " But, papa darling, Miss Grey won't care about what you call 
 sensible subjects any more than I. She won't know anything 
 about them." 
 
 "Yes, dear, she will ; look at her forehead." 
 
 " Oh, I have looked at it ! Isn't it beautiful ?" 
 
 " I didn't mean that," Mr. Money said with a smile ; " I meant 
 that it looked sensible and thoughtful. Now go away, Lucelet, 
 like a dear little girl." 
 
 Miss Grey sat quietly through all this. She was not in the 
 least offended. Mr. Money seemed to her to be just what a man 
 ought to be — uncouth, rough, and domineering. She was amused 
 meanwhile to observe the kind of devotion and enthusiasm with 
 which Mr. Heron was entering into conversation with Mrs. Money 
 and her elder daughter. That was just what a man ought to be — a 
 young man — silly in his devotion to women, unless perhaps where 
 the devotion was to be accounted for otherwise than by silliness, as 
 in a case like the present, where the unmarried women might be 
 presumed to have large fortunes. So Miss Grey liked the whole 
 scene. It was as good as a play to her, especially as good as a 
 play which confirms all one's own theories of life. 
 
 " England, Mr. Heron," said Mrs. Money in her melancholy 
 voice, " is near her fall." 
 
 " Oh, Mrs. Money, pray pardon me — England ! you amaze 
 me — I am surprised — do forgive me — to hear an Englishwoman 
 say so ; our England with her glorious destiny ! " The young man 
 blushed and grew confused. One might have thought his mother 
 had been called in question, or his sweetheart. 
 
 Mrs. Money shook her head and twirled one of her bracelets. 
 
 " She is near her fall, Mr. Heron ! You cannot know; you 
 have lived far away, and do not see what we see. She has proved 
 faithless to her mission." 
 
MISS GREY'S FIRST CALL. 47 
 
 " Something — yes — there I agree," Mr. Heron eagerly inter- 
 posed, thinking of the St. Xavier's Settlements. 
 
 " She was the cradle of freedom," Mrs. Money went on. " She 
 ought to have been always its nursery and home. What have we 
 now, Mr. Heron ? A people absolutely in servitude, the principle 
 of caste everywhere triumphant — corruption in the aristocracy — 
 corruption in the city. No man now dares to serve his country 
 except at the penalty of suffering the blackest ingratitude." 
 
 Mr. Heron was startled. He did not know that Mrs. Money 
 was arguing only from the assumption that her husband was a very 
 great man, who would have done wonderful things for England if a 
 perverse and base ruling class had not thwarted him and treated 
 him badly. 
 
 " England," Theresa Money said, smiling sweetly, but with a 
 suffusion of melancholy, " can hardly be regenerated until she is 
 once more dipped in the holy well." 
 
 " You see, we all think differently, Mr. Heron," said the eager 
 Lucy. " Mamma thinks we want a republic. Tessy is a saint, 
 and would like to see roadside shrines." 
 
 "And you?" Heron asked, pleased with the girl's bright eyes 
 and winning ways. 
 
 " Oh, I — I only believe in the regeneration of England through 
 the renascence of art. So we all have our different theories, you 
 see, but we all agree to differ, and we don't quarrel much. Papa 
 laughs at us all, when he has time. But just now I am taken up 
 with Nola Grey. If I were a man, I should make an idol of her. 
 That lovely statuesque face, that figure — like the Diana of the 
 Louvre ! " 
 
 Mr. Heron looked and admired, but one person's raptures 
 about man or woman seldom awaken corresponding raptures in 
 other and impartial breasts. He saw, however, a handsome, lady- 
 like girl, who conveyed to him a sort of chilling impression. 
 
 " She was my schoolfellow at Keeton," Lucy went on, " and 
 she was so good and clever that I adored her then, and I do now 
 again. She has come to London to live alone, and I am sure she 
 must have some strange and romantic story." 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Money, who prefaced his enquiries by telling 
 Miss Grey that he was always asking information about something, 
 began to put several questions to her concerning the local magnates, 
 politics, and parties of Keeton. Minola was rather pleased to be 
 talked to by a man as if she were a rational creature. Like most 
 girls brought up in a Nonconformist household in a country town, 
 she had been surrounded by political talk from her infancy, but, 
 unlike most girls, she had sometimes listened to it and learned to 
 
48 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 know what it was all about. So she gave Mr. Money a good deal 
 of information, which he received with an approbatory " Yes, yes," 
 or an enquiring " So, so," every now and then. 
 
 " You know that there's likely to be a vacancy soon in the 
 representation— member of Parliament," he added by way of 
 explanation. 
 
 " I know what a vacancy in the representation means," Miss 
 Grey answered demurely, " but I didn't know there was likely to 
 be one just now. I don't keep up much correspondence with 
 Keeton. I don't love it." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Oh, I don't know." 
 
 He smiled. 
 
 " You are smiling because you think that a woman's answer? 
 So it is, Mr. Money, and I am afraid it isn't true, but 1 really 
 didn't think of what I was saying. I do know why I don't care 
 much about Keeton." 
 
 " Yes, yes ; well, I dare say you do. But to return, as the 
 books say — do you know a Mr. Augustus Sheppard ? " 
 
 She could not help colouring slightly. " Yes, I know him," 
 and a faint smile broke over her face in spite of herself. 
 
 " Is he strong in Keeton?" 
 
 " Strong? " 
 
 " Well liked, respectable, a likely kind of man to get good 
 Conservative support if he stood for Keeton ? You don't know, 
 perhaps ? " 
 
 " Yes, I think I do know. I believe he wishes to get into Par- 
 liament, and I am sure he is thought highly of. He is a very 
 good man, a man of very high character," she added emphatically, 
 anxious to repair the mental wrong-doing of thinking him ridiculous 
 and tiresome. 
 
 Just at this moment Mr. Heron rose to take his leave, and Mr. 
 Money left the room with him, so that the conversation with Miss 
 Grey was broken off. Then Lucy came to Nola again, and Nola 
 was surrounded by the three women, who began to lay out various 
 schemes for seeing her often and making London pleasant to her. 
 Much as our lonely heroine loved her loneliness, she was greatly 
 touched by their spontaneous kindness, but she was alarmed by it 
 too. 
 
 A card was brought to Mrs. Money, who passed it on to Lucy. 
 
 " Oh, how delighful ! " Lucy exclaimed. " So glad he has 
 come, mamma ! Nola, dear, a poet, a real poet ! " 
 
 But Nola would not prolong her visit that day even for a poet. 
 A very handsome, tall, dark-haired man, who at a distance seemed 
 
Jlf/SS GREY'S FIRST CALL. 
 
 49 
 
 boyishly young, and when near looked worn and not very young, 
 was shown in. For the moment or two that she could see him' 
 Minola thought she had never seen so self- conceited and affected 
 a creature. She did not hear his name or a word he said, but his 
 splendid dark eyes, deeply set in hollows, took in every outline 
 of her face and form. She thought him the poet of a school-girl's 
 romance made to order. 
 
 Minola tore herself from the clinging embraces of Lucy, with 
 less difficulty, perhaps, because of the poet's arrival, to whose 
 society Lucy was clearly anxious to hasten back. It so happened 
 that Mr. Money had kept Mr. Heron for a few minutes in talk, 
 and the result was that exactly as Miss Grey reached the door, 
 Mr. Heron arrived there too. They both came out together, and 
 in a moment they were in the grey atmosphere, dun lines of houses, 
 and twinkling gas-lights of Victoria Street. Minola would much 
 rather have been there alone. 
 
 Victor Heron, however, was full of the antique ideas of man's 
 chivalrous duty and woman's sweet dependence, which still lingered 
 in the out-of-the-way colony where he had spent so much of his 
 time. Also, it must be owned that he had not yet quite got rid of 
 the sense of responsibility and universal dictatorship belonging to 
 the chief man in a petty commonwealth. For some time after his 
 return to London he could hardly see an omnibus-horse fall in the 
 street without thinking it was an occasion which called for some 
 intervention on his part. Therefore, when Miss Grey and he stood 
 m the street together, Mr. Heron at once assumed that the young 
 woman must, as a matter of couise, require his escort and 
 protection. 
 
 He calmly took his place at her side. Miss Grey was a little 
 surprised, but said nothing, and they went on. 
 
 " Do you live far from this, Miss Money ? " he began. 
 
 " I am not Miss Money— my name is Grey." 
 
 " Of course, yes— I beg your pardon for the mistake. It was 
 only a mistake of the tongue, for I knew very well that you were 
 not Miss Money." 
 
 " Thank you." 
 
 " And your first name is so very pretty and peculiar that I 
 could not easily have forgotten it." 
 
 " I am greatly obliged to my godfathers and godmothers." 
 
 " Did you say that you lived in this quarter, Miss Grey?" 
 
 " No— I did not make any answer ; I had not time." 
 
 " I hope you do not live very near," the gallant Heron observed. 
 
 " Why do you hope that?" Miss Grey said, turning her eyes 
 upon him with an air of cold resolution, which would probably have 
 
50 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 proved very trying to a less sinceie maker of compliments, even 
 though a far more dexterous person than Mr. Heron. 
 
 " Of course, because I should have the less of your company." 
 ~ " But there is no need of your coming out of your way for me. 
 I don't require any escort, Mr. Heron." 
 
 " I couldn't think of letting a lady walk home by herself. 
 That would seem very strange to me. Perhaps you think me old- 
 fashioned or colonial?" 
 
 " I have heard that you are from the colonies. In London 
 people have not time to keep up all these pretty forms and cere- 
 monies. We don't any longer pretend to think that a girl needs 
 to be defended against giants, or robbers, or mad bulls, when 
 crossing two or three streets in open day." 
 
 " Well, it is hardly open day now ; it is almost quite dark." 
 
 " The lamps are lighted," Miss Grey observed. 
 
 " Yes, if you call that being lighted ! You have such bad gas 
 in London. Why does not somebody stir up people here, and 
 put things to rights ? You seem to me the most patient people in 
 all the world. I wish they would give me the ruling of this place 
 for about a twelvemonth." 
 
 " I wish they would." 
 
 "Do you?" and he looked at her with a glance of genuine 
 gratitude in his dark eyes, for he thought she meant to express 
 her- entire confidence in his governing power, and her wish to 
 see him at the head of affairs. Miss Grey, however, only meant 
 that, if he were engaged in directing the municipal government of 
 London, he would probably be rather too busy to walk with her. 
 
 " Yes," he went on, " you should soon see a change. For 
 instance," — they were now at the end of Victoria Street, near the 
 Abbey — " I would begin by having a great broad street, like this, 
 running right up from here to the British Museum — you know 
 where the British Museum is, of course ? " 
 
 " Yes ; I live near it." 
 
 " Do you really ? I am so glad to hear that. I have been 
 there lately very often. How happy you Londoners are to have 
 such glorious places. In that reading-room I felt inclined to 
 bless England." 
 
 Miss Grey was now particularly sorry that she had said anything 
 about her place of residence. Still it did not seem as if much 
 would have been gained by any reticence unless she could actually 
 dismiss her companion peremptorily. Mr. Heron was evidently 
 quite resolved to be her escort all the way along. He was clearly 
 under the impression that he was making himself very agreeable. 
 The good-natured youth believed he was doing quite the right 
 
MISS GREY'S FIRST CALL. 51 
 
 thing, and meant it all for the very best, and therefore could not 
 suppose that any nice girl could fail to accept his attendance in a 
 kindly spirit. That Miss Grey must be a nice girl he was perfectly 
 certain, for he had met her at Mr. Money's, and Money was 
 evidently a fine fellow, a very fine fellow. Miss Grey was very 
 handsome too, but that did not count for very much with Heron. 
 At least, he would have made himself just as readily, under the 
 circumstances, the escort of little Miss Blanchet. 
 
 So he talked on about various things — the Moneys, and what 
 charming people they were ! the British Museum, what a noble 
 institution ! the National Gallery, how hideous the building ! — 
 why on earth didn't anybody do something? — the glorious destiny 
 of England — the utter imbecility of the English Government. 
 
 It was not always quite easy to keep up with his talk, for the 
 streets were crowded and noisy, and Mr. Heron talked right on 
 through every interruption. When they came to crossings where 
 the perplexed currents and counter-currents of traffic on wheels 
 would have made a nervous person shudder, Mr. Heron coolly 
 took Miss Grey's hand and conducted her in and out, talking all 
 the while as if they were crossing a ball-room floor. Minola 
 made it a point of honour not to hesitate, or start, or show that 
 she had nerves. But when he began to run into politics he always 
 pulled himself up, for he politely remembered that young ladies 
 did not care about politics, and so he tried to find some prettier 
 subject to talk about. Miss Grey understood this perfectly well, 
 and was amused and contemptuous. 
 
 " I suppose this man must be a person of some brains and 
 sense," she thought. " He was in command of something somewhere, 
 and I suppose even the Government he calls so imbecile would 
 not have put him there if he were a downright fool. But, because 
 he talks to a woman, he feels bound only to talk of trivial things." 
 
 At last the walk came to an end. "Ah, I beg pardon, you 
 live here," Mr. Heron said. " May I have the honour of calling 
 on your family ? I sometimes come to the Museum, and, if I 
 might call, I should be delighted to make their acquaintance." 
 
 " Thank you," Miss Grey said coldly, " I have no family. My 
 father and mother are dead." 
 
 " Oh, I am so sorry ! I wish I had not asked such a question." 
 He looked really distressed, and the expression of his eyes had lor 
 the first time a pleasing, softening effect upon Miss Grey. 
 
 " We lodge here, all alone. A lady — an old friend of mine — 
 and I. We have no acquaintances, unless Lucy Money's family 
 may be called so. We read and study a great deal, and don't go 
 out, and don't see anyone." 
 
 e 2 
 
52 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I can quite understand," Mr. Heron answered with grave 
 sympathy. " Of course you don't care to be intruded on by 
 visitors. I thank you for having allowed me the pleasure of 
 accompanying you so far." 
 
 He spoke in tones much more deferential than before, for he 
 assumed that the young lady was lonely and poor. There was 
 something in his manner, in his eyes, in his grave, respectful voice, 
 which conveyed to Minola the idea of genuine sympathy, and 
 brought to her, the object of it, a new conviction that she really 
 was isolated and friendless, and the springs of her emotions were 
 touched in a moment, and tears flashed in her eyes. Perhaps 
 Mr. Heron saw them, and felt that he ought not to see them, 
 for he raised his hat and instantly left her. 
 
 Minola lingered for a moment on the doorstep, in order that 
 she might recover her expression of cheerfulness before meeting 
 the eyes of Miss Blanchet. But that little lady had seen her 
 coming to the door, and seen and marvelled at her escort, and now 
 ran herself and opened the door to receive her. 
 
 " My dear Minola, do tell me who that handsome young man 
 was ? What lovely dark eyes he had ! Where did you meet him ? 
 Is he young Mr. Money ? " 
 
 The poetess's susceptible bosom still thrilled and throbbed at 
 the sight, or even the thought, of a handsome young man. She 
 could not understand how anybody on earth could avoid liking 
 handsome young men. But in this case a certain doubt and 
 dissatisfaction suddenly dissolved a way into her instinctive 
 gratification at the sight of Minola's escort. A handsome and 
 young Mr. Money might prove an inconvenient visitor just at 
 present. 
 
 Minola briefly told her when they were safe in their room. 
 Miss Blanchet was relieved to find that he was not a young Mr. 
 Money, for a young Mr. Money, if there were one, would doubtless 
 be rich. 
 
 " Isn't he wonderfully handsome ! Such a smile ! " 
 
 " I hardly know," Minola said, distressedly ; " perhaps he is. 
 I really didn't notice. He goes to the Museum, and I must exile 
 myself from the place for evermore, or I shall be always meeting 
 him, and be forced to listen politely to talk about nothing. Mary 
 Blanchet, our days of freedom are gone ! We are getting to know 
 people. I foresaw it. What shall we do ? We must find some 
 other lodgings ever so far away." 
 
 "Do you like Miss Money, dear?" Mary Blanchet asked, 
 timidly. 
 
 " Lucy ? Oh, yes ; very much. But there is Mr. Money, and 
 
IS THIS ALCESTE? 53 
 
 they are going to be terribly kind to us, and they have all manner 
 of friends; and what is to become of my independence? Mary 
 Blanchet, I will not bear it ! I will be independent ! " 
 
 " I have news for you, dear," Miss Blanchet said. 
 
 " If it please the destinies, not news of any more friends ! 
 Why, we shall be like the hare in Gay's fable, if we go on in this 
 way." 
 
 " Not of any more friends, darling, but of one friend. My 
 brother has been here." 
 
 " Oh ! " 
 
 " Yes ; and he is longing to see you." 
 
 Minola sincerely wished that she could say she was longing 
 to see him. But she could not say it, even to please her friend 
 and comrade. 
 
 " You don't want to see him," said Mary Blanchet, in piteous 
 reproach. 
 
 " But you do, dear," Miss Grey said, " and I shall like to see 
 any one, be sure, who brightens your life." 
 
 This was said with full sincerity, although at the very moment 
 the whimsical thought passed through her, "We only want Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard now to complete our social happiness." 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 IS THIS ALCESTE? 
 
 Minola's mind was a good deal disturbed by the various little 
 events of the day, the incidents and consequences of her first visit 
 in London. She began to see with much perplexity and dis- 
 appointment that her life of lonely independence was likely to 
 be compromised. She was not sure that she could much like the 
 Moneys, and yet she felt that they were disposed and determined 
 to be very kind to her. There was something ridiculous and painful 
 in the fact that Mr. Augustus Sheppard's name was thrust upon 
 her, almost at the first moment of her crossing for the first time a 
 strange threshold in London ; then there was Mary Blanchet's 
 brother turning up ; and Mary Blanchet herself was evidently falling 
 off from the high design of lonely independence. Again, there 
 was Mr. Heron, who now knew where she lived, and who often 
 went to the British Museum, and who might cross her path at any 
 hour. Sweet, lonely freedom, happy carelessness of action, farewell ! 
 
54 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Mr. Heron was especially a trouble to Minola. The kindly, 
 grave expression on his face when he heard of her living alone 
 declared, as nearly as any words could do, that he considered her 
 an object of pity. Was she an object of pity ? Was that the light 
 in which any one could look at her superb project of playing at a 
 lifelong holiday ? And if people chose to look at it so, what did 
 that matter to her? Are women, then, the slaves of the opinion 
 of people all around them ? " They are," Minola said to herself 
 in scorn and melancholy. " They are ; we are. I am shaken to 
 my very soul, because a young man, for whose opinion on any 
 other subject I should not care anything, chooses to look at me 
 with pity!" 
 
 The night was melancholy. When the outer world was shut 
 out, and the gas was lighted, and the two women sat down to 
 work, and talk, nothing seemed to Minola quite as it had been. 
 The evident happiness and purring high spirits of the little poetess 
 oppressed her. Mary Blanchet was so glad to be making 
 acquaintances, and to have some prospect of seeing the inside 
 of a London home. Then Minola's kindlier nature returned to 
 her, and she thought of Mary's delight at seeing her brother, and 
 how unkind it would be if she, Minola, did not try to enter into 
 her feelings. Her mind went back to her own brother, to their 
 dear early companionship, when nothing seemed more natural 
 and more certain than that they two should walk the world arm- 
 in-arm. Now all that had come to an end — faded away somehow ; 
 and he had gone into the world on his own account, and made 
 other ties, and forgotten her. But if he were even now to come 
 back, if she were to hear in the street the sound of the peculiar 
 whistle with which he always announced his coming to her — 
 oh, how, in spite of all his forgetfulness and her anger, she would 
 run to him and throw her arms round his neck ! Why should not 
 Mary Blanchet love her brother, and gladden when he came ? 
 
 "What is your brother like, Mary dear?" she said gently, 
 anxious to propitiate by voluntarily entering on the topic dearest 
 to her friend. 
 
 " Oh, very handsome — very, very handsome I" 
 
 Miss Grey smiled in spite of herself. 
 
 " Now, Minola, I know what you are smiling at ; you think it 
 is my sisterly nonsense, and all that, but wait until you see." 
 
 " I'll wait," Minola said. 
 
 Miss Grey did not go out the next day as usual, although it 
 was one of the soft, amber-grey, autumnal days that she loved, 
 and the Regent's Park would have looked beautiful. She remained 
 nearly all the morning in her own room, and avoided even Mary 
 
IS THIS ALCESTE? 55 
 
 Blanchet. Some singular change had taken place within her, for 
 which she could not account, otherwise than by assuming that it 
 was begotten of the fear that she would be drawn, willingly or 
 unwillingly, into uncongenial companionship, and must renounce 
 her liberty. She was forced into a strange, painful, self-questioning 
 mood. Was the whole fabric of her self-appointed happiness and 
 independence only a dream, or worse than a dream, an error? 
 So soon to doubt the value and the virtue of the emancipation 
 she had prayed for and planned for during years ! Not often, 
 perhaps, has a warm hearted, fanciful, and spirited girl been 
 pressed down by such peculiar relationships as hers at Keeton 
 lately; a twice-removed stepfather and stepmother, absolutely 
 uncongenial with her, causing her soul and her youth to congeal 
 amid dull repression. What wonder that to her all happiness 
 seemed to consist in mere freedom and unrestricted self-develop- 
 ment? And now — so soon — why does she begin to doubt the 
 reality, the fulfilment of her happiness? Only because an im- 
 pulsive and kindly young man, whom she saw for the first time, 
 looked pityingly at her. This, she said to herself, is what our self- 
 reliance and our emancipation come to after all. 
 
 It was a positive relief to her, after a futile hour or so of such 
 questioning, when Mary Blanchet ran upstairs, and with beaming 
 eyes begged that Minola would come and see her brother. " He 
 is longing to see you — and you will like him — oh, you will like 
 him, Minola dearest ! " she said beseechingly. 
 
 Miss Grey went downstairs straightway, without stopping to 
 give one touch to her hair, or one glance at the glass. The little 
 poetess was waiting a moment, with an involuntary look towards 
 the dressing-table, as if Miss Grey must needs have some business 
 there before she descended, but Miss Grey thought of nothing of 
 the kind, and they went downstairs together. 
 
 Minola expected, she could not tell why, to see a small and 
 rather withered man in Mary Blanchet's brother. When they were 
 entering the drawing-room he was looking out of the window, and 
 had his back turned, and she was surprised to see that he was 
 decidedly tall. When he turned round, she saw that not only was 
 he handsome, but that she had recognised the fact of his being 
 handsome before. For he was unmistakably the ideal poet of 
 school-girls whom she had met at Mr. Money's house the day 
 before. 
 
 The knowledge produced a sort of embarrassment to begin with. 
 Minola was about to throw her soul into the sacrifice, and greet her 
 friend's brother with the utmost cordiality. But she had pictured 
 to herself a sort of Mary Blanchet in trousers, a gentle old- 
 
56 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 fashioned, timid person, whom, perhaps, the outer world was apt 
 to misprize, if not even to snub, and whom therefore it became 
 her, Minola Grey, as an enemy and outlaw of the common world, 
 to receive with double consideration. But this brilliant, self- 
 conceited, affected, oppressively handsome young man, on whom 
 she had seen Lucy Money and her mother hanging devotedly, was 
 quite another sort of person. His presence seemed to overcharge 
 the room ; the scene became all compound of tall bending form 
 and dark eyes. 
 
 " I am glad to see you, Mr. Blanchet," Miss Grey began, 
 determined not to be put out by any self-conceited poet and 
 ideal of school-girls. " I must be glad to see you because you 
 are Mary's brother." 
 
 " You ought rather to be not glad to see me for that reason," 
 he said, with a deprecating bow and a slight shrug of the shoulders, 
 " for I have been a very neglectful brother to Mary." 
 
 "So I have heard," Miss Grey said, "but not from Mary. 
 She always defended you. But I have seen you before, Mr. 
 Blanchet, have I not ? " 
 
 " At Mrs. Money's, yesterday ? Oh, yes ; I only saw you, 
 Miss Grey. I went there to see you, and only in the most literal 
 way got what I wanted." 
 
 " But, Herbert, you never told me that you were going, or 
 that you knew Mrs. Money," his sister interposed. 
 
 " No, dear ; that was an innocent deceit on my part. You 
 told me that Miss Grey had gone there, and as I knew the Moneys, 
 I hurried away there without telling you. I wanted to know what 
 you were like, Miss Grey, before seeing my sister again. I hope 
 you are not angry ? She is so devoted to you, that she painted 
 you in colours the most bewitching ; but I was afraid her friendship 
 was carrying her away, and I wanted to see for myself when she 
 was not present." 
 
 Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this be- 
 ginning particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should 
 never be able to like Mary Blanchefs brother. " Oh, why do 
 women have brothers ? " she asked herself. There seemed some- 
 thing dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's proceeding, despite the frank 
 completeness of his confession. 
 
 " Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice — didn't 
 do her common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed. 
 
 " If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, " T 
 would say that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the 
 kind and generous things I have heard of." 
 
 " Yes ; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with 
 
IS THIS ALCESTE? 57 
 
 tears of gratefulness blinking in her eyes, "and we'll not say a 
 word more about it, Minola ; not a word, indeed, dear." And 
 she put a deprecating little hand upon Minola's arm. 
 
 Then they all sat down, and Herbert Rlanchet began to talk. 
 He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the 
 airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of 
 observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the 
 Money girls. 
 
 " You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. " I envy 
 you." 
 
 " If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a 
 good, deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it 
 pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought 
 into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write 
 about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by 
 anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody 
 else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples 
 is the ugliest place in all the world ; that the Roman women have 
 shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the 
 Alps to the Straits of Messina." 
 
 " But you don't think that? " Mary Blanchet said, wonderingly. 
 
 "Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for 
 the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, 
 I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass 
 along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see 
 what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of 
 these things ; they are only done to make a living. I live on such 
 stuff as that. I live/<?r Art." 
 
 " It is glorious to live for Art," his sister exclaimed, pressing 
 her thin, tiny hands together. 
 
 Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's 
 approval. 
 
 " My art isn't yours, Mary," he said with a pitying smile. 
 " Pictures of flowers and of little children saying their prayers, 
 and nice poems about good young men and women, are your 
 ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of 
 the human race, I know." 
 
 " I hope I love my neighbours," Mary said earnestly. 
 
 " I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought 
 to do that. Do you love your neighbour, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 " I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, 
 " except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or 
 theory about it, only that I don't care for people." 
 
 Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like 
 
58 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to 
 display. Perhaps, too, she began to think that this misanthropy 
 rather caricatured her own. 
 
 Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the ques- 
 tion and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces. 
 
 " The more we know people," she emphatically declared, " the 
 more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring 
 of goodness. Oh, yes ! " 
 
 " There isn't in mine, I know," he said. " I speak for myself." 
 
 " For shame, Herbert ! How else could you ever feel impelled 
 to try and do some good for your fellow-creatures?" 
 
 " But I don't want to do any good to my fellow-creatures. 
 I don't care about my fellow-creatures, and I don't even admit that 
 they are my fellow-creatures, those men and those women too 
 that one sees about. Why should the common possession of two 
 legs make us fellow-creatures with every man, more than with every 
 bird? No, I don't love the human race at all." 
 
 " This is his nonsense, Minola ; you won't believe a word of 
 it," the little poetess eagerly said, divided between admiration 
 and alarm. 
 
 " You good little innocent dear, is it not perfectly true ? What 
 did I ever do for you, let me ask ? There, Miss Grey, you see as 
 kind an elder sister as ever lived. I remember her a perfect mother 
 to me. I dare say I should have been dead thirty years ago but 
 for her, though whether I ought to thank her for keeping me alive 
 is another thing. Anyhow, what was my way of showing my 
 gratitude ? As soon as I could shake myself free, I rambled about 
 the world, a very vagrant, and never took any thought of her. We 
 are all the same, Miss Grey, believe me — we men." 
 
 " I can well believe it," Miss Grey said. 
 
 " Of course you can ; in all our dealings with you women we 
 are just the same. Our sisters and mothers take trouble without 
 end for us, and cry their eyes out for us, and we — what do we 
 care ? I am not worse than my neighbours. If you ask me, 
 Do I admire my fellow-man ? I answer frankly, No, not I. What 
 should I admire him for ?" 
 
 "One must live for something," the little poetess pleaded, 
 much perplexed in her heart as to what Miss Grey's opinion might 
 be about all this. 
 
 " Of course. One must live for art ; for music and poetry, and 
 colours and decoration." 
 
 "And Nature ?" Mary Blanchet gently insinuated. 
 
 " Nature — no ! Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy 
 poets. We only affect to admire Nature because people think we 
 
IS THIS ALCESTEt 59 
 
 can't be good if we don't. No one really cares about great cauli- 
 flower suns, and startling contrasts of blazing purple and emerald 
 green. There is nothing really beautiful in Nature, except her 
 decay; her rank weeds, and dank grasses, and funereal evening 
 glooms. - ' 
 
 While he talked this way he was seated on the piano stool, 
 with his face turned away from the piano, on whose keys he touched 
 every now and then with a light and seemingly careless hand, 
 bringing out only a faint note that seemed to help the conversation 
 rather than to interrupt it. He was very handsome, Minola could 
 not help thinking, and there was something in his colourless face 
 and deep eyes that seemed congenial with the talk of glooms and 
 decay. Still, true to her first feeling towards all men, Minola was 
 disposed to dislike him, the more especially as he spoke with an 
 air of easy superiority, as one who would imply that he knew how 
 to maintain his place above woman in creation. 
 
 " I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," 
 she said ; " I mean, you younger poets," and she emphasised the 
 word " younger " with a certain contemptuous tone, which made 
 it just what she meant it to be — " smaller poets." 
 
 " Why, younger poets?" 
 
 " Well, because the elder ones, I think, really were in love 
 with Nature, and didn't affect anything." 
 
 He smiled pityingly. 
 
 " No," he said decisively, " we don't care about Nature — 
 our school." 
 
 "lam from the country : I don't diink I know what your school is." 
 
 "We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't 
 endure to be known in the country." 
 
 "But Fame?" Minola asked; "does Fame not go outside 
 the twelve-mile radius?" 
 
 " Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't under- 
 stand us ; we don't want fame. What is fame ? Vulgarity made 
 immortal." 
 
 " Then, what do you publish for ? " 
 
 He rose from his seat, and seized his hair with both hands, 
 then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again. 
 
 " My dear young lady, we don't publish, we don't intend to 
 publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were 
 never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, 
 thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that 
 the true artist never does have a public, or look for it. The 
 public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, 
 and Tuppers, and all that lot " 
 
6o MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 "That lot !" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified, "that 
 lot ! Browning and Tupper put together ! " 
 
 " My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another ; 
 I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing 
 to me. These persons are not artists ; they are only men trying 
 to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond 
 of politics." 
 
 "Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, 
 now growing rather amused. 
 
 " Oh, no, we never trouble ourselves about such things. What 
 can it matter whether the Reform Bill is carried — is there a 
 Reform Bill going on now? — I believe there always is — or what 
 becomes of the Eastern question, or whether New Zealand has 
 a constitution ? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we 
 don't love man." 
 
 " There I am with you," Miss Grey said; " if that alone were 
 qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, 
 for I don't love man ; I think he is a poor creature at his best." 
 
 " So do I," said the poet, turning towards her with eyes in which 
 for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; 
 " the poorest creature, at his best ? Why should anyone turn aside 
 for a moment from his path to help such a thing ? What does it 
 matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race ? Let us sing, and 
 play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes 
 such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears 
 to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy 
 in our own way, and forgetting him." 
 
 Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. 
 In that instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into 
 his, and he knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a 
 proud fencer suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. 
 For as he was speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to 
 herself, " This man, I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has 
 found people cold, and mean, and selfish — as / have — and he 
 feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him wrong ; he is not a fribble 
 or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer." The sympathy which 
 she felt, showed itself only too quickly in her very eloquent eyes. 
 
 Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his 
 leave, asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would 
 have gladly refused if she could have stood up against the appealing 
 looks of Mary. So she had to grant him the permission, thinking 
 as she gave it that another path of her liberty was closed. 
 
 Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's 
 gratification, remained a long time talking with him there. 
 
IS THIS ALCESTE? 61 
 
 Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing — softly to her- 
 self, that she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal 
 day was already closing in London. Out in the country there 
 would be two hours yet of light before the round, red sun went 
 down behind the sloping fields, with the fresh upturned earth, and 
 the clumps of trees, but here, in West Central regions of London, 
 the autumn day dies in its youth. The dusk already gathered 
 around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe herself. In any 
 troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to clear her 
 spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday at 
 home — in the place that was called her home — she had committed 
 the fraud of singing her favourite ballads to slow, slow time, that 
 they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her 
 voice and way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive 
 recitative ; just the singing to hear in the " gloaming," to draw a 
 few people hushed around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful 
 to lose a single note and miss the charm of expression. In truth, 
 the charm of it sprang from the fact that the singer sang to express 
 her own emotions, and thus every tone had its reality and its 
 meaning. When women sing for a listening company, they sing 
 conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has taught, or in 
 what they believe to be the manner of some great artist; or they 
 sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away 
 from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression 
 of real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather 
 than a means; a relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing 
 away from poor and personal emotions into ideal regions, where 
 melancholy, if it must be, was always divine, and pain, if it would 
 intrude, was purifying and ennobling. So, while the little poetess 
 talked with her brother in the dusk, at the doorway, with the gas- 
 lamps just beginning to light the monotonous street, Minola was 
 singing herself into the pure blue ether, above the fogs, and 
 clouds, and discordant selfish voices. 
 
 She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as 
 Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed — 
 
 " Now, do tell me — how do you like my brother ? " 
 
 To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. " I wonder is 
 he an Alceste ? " she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had 
 made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, 
 and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days 
 when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody. 
 
62 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON THE BRIDGE. 
 
 There was one walk of which Minola Grey was especially fond, 
 and which she loved to enjoy alone. It led by a particular track 
 through Regent's Park, avoiding for the most part the frequented 
 paths, and bringing her at one time to the summit of a little mound 
 or knoll, from which she could look across broad fields, where 
 sheep were grazing, and through clumps of trees and over hedges, 
 and from which, by a happy peculiarity, all sight of the beaten 
 and dusty avenues of the park were shut out. The view from this 
 little eminence was perhaps most beautiful on a moist and misty 
 day. There the soft, loving, artistic breath of the rain-charged 
 clouds breathed tenderly on the landscape, and effaced any of the 
 harsher, or meaner, or in any way more prosaic details. There 
 the gazer only saw a noble expanse of deliriously green grass and 
 darker hedge-rows, and trees of dun and grey, and softly-mottled 
 moss-grown trunks, and here and there a bed of flowers, and all 
 under a silver-grey atmosphere that almost seemed to dissolve 
 while the eye rested on it. When Minola had looked long enough 
 on the scene opening below the mound, she then usually pursued 
 her course by devious ways until she reached one of the bridges 
 of the canal, and there she made another halting-place. The 
 scene from the canal-bridge, unlike that from the mound, looked 
 best on a bright, breezy day, of quick changing lights and shadows. 
 Then the brown water of the canal sparkled and gladdened in the 
 sun, and Minola, leaning over the little bridge, and fixing her eyes 
 on the water as it rippled past the nearer bank, might enjoy, for 
 the hour, the full sensation of one who floats in a boat along a 
 stream, and watches the trees and the grasses of the shore. The 
 place was quiet enough, and rich enough in trees and shrubs and 
 little reeds quivering out of the water, to seem, at least in Minola's 
 pleased eyes, like a spot on the bank of the canal far in the country, 
 while yet there was to her the peculiar and keen delight of knowing 
 herself in London. Sometimes, too, a canal-boat came gliding 
 along, steered by a stalwart and sunburnt woman in a great straw 
 bonnet, and the boat and the woman brought wild and delicious 
 ideas of far-off country places, with woods and gipsies, and fresh, 
 half savage, half poetic life. Minola extracted beautiful pictures 
 and much poetry and romance from that little bridge over the 
 discoloured canal, creeping through the heart of London. 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 63 
 
 The population of London — even its idlers — usually move along 
 in tracks and grooves. Where some go, others go ; where few go, 
 at last none go. It is wonderful what hours of almost absolute 
 solitude Minola was able to enjoy in the midst of Regent's Park. 
 Voices, indeed, constantly reached her : the cries and laughter of 
 children, the shoutings of cricketers, the dulled clamour of the 
 metropolis itself. These reached her as did the bleating of sheep 
 and the tinkle of their bells, the barking of dogs, and occasionally 
 the fierce, hoarse, thrilling growl or roar of some disturbed or im- 
 patient animal in the Zoological Gardens near at hand. But many 
 and many a time Minola lounged for half an hour on her little 
 knoll or on her chosen bridge, without seeing more of man or 
 woman than of the lions in their cages on the other side of the 
 enclosure. There was a particular hour of the day, too, when the 
 park in general was especially deserted, and it appears almost 
 needless to say that this was the time selected usually by Miss Grey 
 for her rambles. It was sometimes a curious, half sensuous pleasure 
 for her thus alone amid the murmur of the trees, to fancy herself, 
 for the moment, back again within sight of the mausoleum at 
 Keeton, where she had spent so many weary and solitary hours, 
 and then awaking, to rejoice anew in her freedom and in London. 
 
 It was a fortunate and kindly destiny which assigned to our 
 heroine a poetess for a companion. Much as she loved occasional 
 solitude, Minola loved still better the spirit of fidelity to the obliga- 
 tions of true camaraderie: and if Miss Blanchet had had any manner 
 of work to do, from the mending of a stocking to the teaching of a 
 school, in which Minola could possibly have assisted her, Minola 
 would never have thought of leaving her to do the work alone. 
 Or even if Miss Blanchet had work to do in which Minola could 
 not have helped her, but to which her presence would be any 
 manner of encouragement, Minola would have stayed with her, 
 and never dreamed of play while her companion had to be at 
 work. But we may safely appeal to all the poets of all time to say 
 whether anybody ever desired companionship while engaged in the 
 composition of poetry. Sappho herself could have well dispensed 
 with the society of Phaon at such a moment. It is true that 
 Corinne threw off some of her grandest effusions in full face of 
 an admiring crowd, and recited them not only with Lord Nelvil 
 but at him. Corinne, however, was of the improvisatrice class, to 
 which Mary Blanchet did not profess to belong, and we own, 
 moreover, to a constant suspicion that Corinne must have sat up 
 late for many previous nights getting her improvisations by heart. 
 At all events Miss Blanchet was not Corinne, and required seclu- 
 sion, and much thought, and comparison of rhymes, and even 
 
64 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 looking out in dictionaries, in order to the composition of her 
 poems. At the present time Minola was well aware that her friend 
 had a new collection of poems on hand, and that the poems would 
 be churned off with less difficulty if the author were occasionally- 
 left to herself for an hour or two. Therefore Minola was free to 
 go into Regent's Park, with untroubled conscience and light heart. 
 The woman who was not a poet revelled in the rustling branches 
 and the sight of the soft grass, and was filled with glad visions and 
 dreams by the flowing even of a poor, clouded, slow canal-stream, 
 and was rapt into the ideal at the sight of a reed growing in the 
 water and shaken by the wind. The poetess remained at home 
 in a dull room, and hammered out rhymes with the help of a 
 dictionary. 
 
 Cut, to do Minola justice, she was not wholly given up, even in 
 these free and lonely hours, to the sweet, innocent sensuousness that 
 fills certain beings when amid trees and the sounds of flowing 
 water. She had many scruples about the possible selfishness of 
 her life, and wondered whether it was not wrong thus to live, and 
 whether it was not through some fault of hers that no opportunity 
 presented itself to her of doing any good for man or woman. She 
 asked herself sometimes whether she had not been impatient and 
 wilful in her dealings with the people at home — she still, when in 
 a self- questioning and penitential mood, thought and spoke of 
 Keeton as "home" — and whether she had not done wrong in 
 leaving the material enclosure of any place bearing even by tradi- 
 tion the name of home, for a life of freedom which some censors 
 might have thought unwomanly. There are metaphysicians who 
 hold that, although man of his nature has no intuitive knowledge, 
 yet that the accumulative experience of generations supplies 
 gradually for men as they are born a something which is like intui- 
 tion to start with, and which they could not now start clear of. 
 So the experiences or the traditions of generations form a sort of 
 factitious and accumulated conscience for women independent of 
 any abstract or eternal laws, and amounting in strength to some- 
 thing like intuition. Over this shadow they cannot leap. Minola, 
 filled as she was with a peculiarly independent spirit, and driven by 
 circumstances to consider its indulgence a right and even a duty, 
 could not keep from the occasional torment of a doubt whether 
 there must not be something wrong in the conduct of any woman 
 who, under any circumstances, leaves voluntarily, and while she is 
 yet under age, the home of her childhood, and takes up her abode 
 among strangers, without guardians, mistress of herself, and in 
 lodgings. 
 
 Perhaps some such ideas were in Minola's mind when she left 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 65 
 
 Mary Blanchet, a few mornings after the meetings described in the 
 last chapter, and set out for a pleasant lonely walk in Regent's 
 Park. Perhaps it was the very pleasure of the walk, and the 
 loneliness, now missed for some days, that made her dread being 
 selfish, and sent her downward into a drooping and penitent 
 reaction. " This will never do," she kept thinking ; " I ought to 
 try to do something for somebody. I am growing to think only 
 of myself — and I broke away from Keeton because I was getting 
 morbid in thinking about myself." 
 
 It was in this remorseful condition of mind that she approached 
 her favourite mound, longing for an hour of quiet delight there, 
 and half ashamed of her longing. When she had nearly reached 
 its height, she discerned that the fates had seemingly resolved to 
 punish her for her love of solitariness, by decreeing that her chosen 
 retreat should that day be occupied. There was a seat on which 
 she usually sat, and now a man was there. That was bad enough, 
 but she could in an ordinary case have passed on, and sought 
 some other place. Now, however, she saw that that was denied 
 to her; for the intruder was Mr. Victor Heron, and at the sound 
 of her footstep he looked round, recognised her, and was already 
 coming towards her, with hat uplifted, and courteous bow. 
 
 The very rapid moment of time between Minola's first seeing 
 Mr. Heron, and his recognising her, had enabled her quick eyes 
 to perceive that when he thought himself alone he was anything 
 but the genial and joyous personage he appeared in company. 
 At first Miss Grey's attention was withdrawn from her own dis- 
 appointment by the air of melancholy, and even of utter despon- 
 dency, about the face and figure of the seated man. He sat 
 leaning forward, his chin supported by one hand, his eyes fixed 
 moodily on the ground ; he seemed to have no manner of concern 
 with sky or scene, and his dark-complexioned face gave the im- 
 pression of one terribly at odds with fortune. Minola felt almost 
 irresistibly drawn towards one who seemed unhappy. Her harmless 
 misanthropy went out at a breath in the presence of any man who 
 appeared to suffer. 
 
 But the change which came over Mr. Heron when he saw her 
 can only be likened to that which would be made by the sudden 
 illumination of a house that a second before was all dark, and 
 seemingly tenantless. He came to meet her with sparkling eyes 
 and delighted expression. Mr. Heron, it should perhaps be ex- 
 plained, considered himself so much older than Miss Grey, so 
 entirely an experienced, mature, not to say outworn man, that he 
 did not think of waiting to see whether Miss Grey was inclined 
 to encourage a renewal of the acquaintance. He considered it his 
 
 F 
 
66 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 duty to be polite and friendly to the pretty girl he had met at 
 Money's, and whom he assumed to be poor, and wanting in 
 friends. 
 
 " How fortunate I am to meet you here to-day ! " he said. 
 " You remember me, I hope, Miss Grey? — I haven't called you Miss 
 Money this time. Come, now — don't say you have forgotten me." 
 
 " I could not say I had forgotten you, for it would not be 
 true, Mr. Heron." 
 
 " Thank you ; that was very prettily said, and kindly." 
 
 " Was it ? I really didn't mean it to be either pretty or kind — 
 only the truth." 
 
 " I see, you go in for being downright, and saying only what 
 you mean. I am very glad. So do I, and I am very much 
 delighted to meet you here, Miss Grey. Come, you won't say 
 as much for me ? " 
 
 " I cannot say that I was glad to see anybody just here ; this 
 place is almost always deserted, except by me." 
 
 " You come here often, and you are sorry to have your retreat 
 broken in upon? Don't hesitate to say so, Miss Grey, and I will 
 promise not to come into this part of the Park — or into any part of 
 the Park for that matter — any more. Why should I disturb you ? " 
 
 He spoke with such earnestness and such evident sincerity that 
 Minola began to feel ashamed of her previous ungraciousness. 
 
 "That would be rather hard upon you, and a little arrogant on 
 my part," she said, smiling. " The Park isn't mine ; and, if it were, 
 I am sure I could not be selfish enough to wish to shut you out 
 from any part of it. But I am in the habit of being a good deal 
 alone ; and I fear it makes me a little rude and selfish sometimes. 
 I was thinking of that just as I came up here and saw you." 
 
 '• Then you saw me before I saw you?" 
 
 " Oh, yes.'; 
 
 " I am afraid you must have seen a very woe-begone personage." 
 
 " Yes ; you seemed unhappy, I thought" 
 
 " There is something sympathetic about you, Miss Grey, for 
 all your coldness and loneliness." 
 
 " Surely," said Miss Grey, " a woman without some feeling of 
 sympathy would be hardly fit to live." 
 
 " You think so ? " he asked, quite earnestly and gravely ; " so 
 do I — so do I indeed. Men have little time to sympathise with 
 men — they are all too busy with their own affairs. What should 
 we do but for the sympathy of women ? Now tell me, why do you 
 smile at that? I saw that you were trying not to laugh." 
 
 " I could not help smiling a little, it was so thoroughly masculine 
 a sentiment." 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 67 
 
 " Was it ? How is that, now ? " His direct way of propounding 
 his questions rather amused and did not displease her. It was 
 like the way of a rational man talking with another rational being 
 — a style of conversation which has much attraction for some 
 women. 
 
 " Well, because it treated women so honestly as creatures only 
 formed to make men comfortable, by coming up and sympathising 
 with them when they are in a humour for sympathy, and then re- 
 tiring out of the way into their corner again." 
 
 " I can assure you, Miss Grey, that never has been my idea. 
 Nothing of the kind, indeed. To tell the truth, I have not known 
 much about the sympathy of women and all that. I have lived 
 awfully out of the world, and I never had any sisters, and I hardly 
 remember my mother. I know women chiefly in poems and 
 romances, and I believe I generally adopt the goddess theory. In 
 honest truth, most women do seem to me a sort of goddesses." 
 
 " You will not be long in England without unlearning that 
 theory," Miss Grey said. " Our writers seem to have hardly any 
 subject now but the faults and follies of women. One might some- 
 times think that woman was a newly-discovered creature that the 
 world could never be done with wondering at." 
 
 " Yes, yes ; I read a good deal of that sort of thing out in the 
 colonies. But I have retained the goddess theory so far, at 
 least. Mrs. Money seems to me a sort of divinity. Miss Money 
 is a born saint ; she ought to go about with a gilt plate round 
 her head. Miss Lucy Money seems like a little angel of light. 
 Are you smiling again? I do assure you these are my real 
 feelings." 
 
 " I was not smiling at the idea, but only at the difference 
 between it and the favourite ideas of most people at present, even 
 of women about women." 
 
 "May I walk a little with you," Mr. Heron said, "or will 
 you sit and rest here, if you are tired, and we will talk ? Don't 
 stand on formality and send me away, although I will go if you 
 like, and not feel in the least offended. But if we might talk for a 
 while, it would give me great pleasure. You said just now that 
 you did not wish to be selfish. It will be very unselfish and very 
 kind if you will let me talk to you a little. I felt very wretched 
 when you came up, quite in a suicidal frame of mind." 
 
 " Oh, no ! Pray don't speak in that way. You do not mean 
 it, I am sure." 
 
 " In one sense I do mean it — that is, it is quite true that I 
 should not have thrown myself into the water or blown my brains 
 out ; that sort of thing seems to me like abandoning one's post 
 
68 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 without orders from head-quarters. But I felt in that condition 
 of mind when one can quite understand how such things are done, 
 and would be glad if he were free to follow the example. For 
 me that is a great change in itself," the young man added with some 
 bitterness. 
 
 " What can I do for him ? " Miss Grey asked herself mentally. 
 " Nothing but to show him the view from the canal bridge. 
 There is nothing else in my power. — There is a very pretty view 
 a short distance from this," she said; "a view from a bridge, 
 and I am particularly fond of looking from bridges. Should 
 you like to walk there ? " 
 
 " I should like to walk anywhere with you," Victor Heron 
 said, with a look of genuine gratefulness, which had not the faintest 
 breath of compliment in it, and could only be accepted as frank 
 truth. 
 
 Perhaps, if Miss Grey had been a town-bred girl, she might 
 have hesitated about setting out for a companionable walk in the 
 Park with a young man who was almost a stranger to her. But, as 
 it was, she appeared to herself to have all the right of free action 
 belonging to one in a place of which the public opinion can in no 
 wise touch her. She acted in London as freely as one speaks 
 with a friend in a foreign hotel room, where he knows that the 
 company around are unable to understand what he is saying. In 
 this particular instance, however, Minola hardly thought about 
 the" matter at all. There was something in Heron's open and 
 emotional way which made people almost at the first meeting 
 cease to regard him as a stranger. Perhaps, if Minola had thought 
 over the matter, she might have cited in vindication of her course 
 the valuable authority of Major Pendennis, who, when asked 
 whether Laura might properly take walks in the Temple Gardens 
 with Warrington, eagerly said, " Yes, yes, begad, of course, you go 
 out with him. It's like the country, you know ; everybody goes 
 out with everybody in the Gardens ; and there are beadles, you 
 know, and that sort of thing. Everybody walks in the Temple 
 Gardens." Regent's Park, one would think, ought to come under 
 the same laws. There are beadles there, too, or guardian function- 
 aries of some sort, although it may be owned that in their walk 
 to and from the canal bridge Heron and Minola encountered 
 none of them. 
 
 It is doubtful whether Heron, at least, would have noticed 
 such a personage even had he come in their way, for the young 
 man talked nearly all the time, except when he paused for an answer 
 to some direct question, and he seldom took his eyes from Minola's 
 face. He was not staring at her, or broadly admiring her ; nor, 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 69 
 
 indeed, was there anything in his manner to make it certain that 
 he was admiring her at all, as man conventionally is understood 
 to admire woman. But he had evidently put Miss Grey into the 
 place of a sympathetic and trusted friend, and he talked to her 
 accordingly. She was amused and interested, and she now and 
 then kept making little disparaging criticisms to herself, in order 
 to sustain her place as the cool depreciator of man. But she was 
 very happy for all that. 
 
 One characteristic peculiarity of this sudden and singular 
 acquaintanceship ought to be mentioned. When people still 
 read " Gil Bias " they would have remembered at once how the 
 waiting-woman received delightfully the advances of Gil Bias, 
 believing him to be a gentleman of fortune, and how Gil Bias paid 
 great court to the waiting-woman, believing her to be a lady of 
 rank. The pair of friends in Regent's Park were drawn together 
 by exactly opposite impulses : each believed the other poor and 
 unfriended. Minola was under the impression that she was giving 
 her sympathy to a ruined and unhappy young man, who had failed 
 in life almost at the very beginning, and was now friendless in 
 stony-hearted London. Victor Heron was convinced that his 
 companion was a poor orphan girl, who had been sent down by 
 misfortune from a position of comfort, or even wealth, to earn 
 her bread by some sort of intellectual labour, while she lived in 
 a small back room in a depressed and mournful quarter of London. 
 
 He told her the story of his grievance ; it may be that he 
 even told her some parts of it more than once. It was a strange 
 sensation to her, as she walked on the soft green turf, in the 
 silver-grey atmosphere, to hear this young man, who seemed to 
 have lived so bold and strange a life, appealing to her for an 
 opinion as to the course he ought to pursue to have his cause set 
 right. The St. Xavier's Settlements do not geographically count 
 for much, and politically they count for still less. But when Mr. 
 Heron told of his having been administrator and commandant 
 there ; of his having made treaties with neighbouring kings (she 
 knew they were only black kings); of his having tried to put down 
 slavery, and to maintain what he persisted in believing to be the 
 true honour of England ; of war made on him, and war made by 
 him in return — while she listened to all this, it is no wonder if 
 our romantic girl from Dukes-Keeton sometimes thought she was 
 conversing with one of the heroes and master-spirits of the time. 
 He made the whole story very clear to her, and she thoroughly 
 understood it, although her imagination and her senses were some- 
 times disturbed by the tropic glare which seemed to come over the 
 places and events he described. At last they actually came to be 
 
70 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 standing on the canal bridge, and neither looked at the view they 
 had come to see. 
 
 " Now, what do you advise ? " Heron said, after having several 
 times impressed some particular point on her. "I attach great 
 importance to a woman's advice. You have instincts, and all 
 that, which we haven't; at least so everybody says. Would you 
 let this thing drop altogether, and try some other career, or would 
 you fight it out ? " 
 
 " I would fight it out," Minola said, looking up to him with 
 sparkling eyes, " and I would never let it drop. I would make 
 them do me justice." 
 
 "Just what I think; just what I came to England resolved to 
 do. I hate the idea of giving in ; but people here discourage me. 
 Money discourages me. He says the Government will never do 
 anything unless I make myself troublesome." 
 
 " Well, then, why not make yourself troublesome ? " 
 
 " I have made myself troublesome in one sense," he said, with 
 a vexed kind of laugh, " by haunting ante-chambers, and trying to 
 force people to see me who don't want to see me. But I can't 
 do any more of that kind of work; I am sick of it. I am ashamed 
 of having tried it at all." 
 
 " Yes, I couldn't do that," Minola said gravely. 
 
 " Then," Heron said, with a little embarrassment, " a man — a 
 very kind and well-meaning fellow, an old friend of my father's 
 — offered to introduce me to Lady Chertsey — a very clever woman, 
 a queen of society, I am told, who gets all the world— of politics, 
 I mean — into her drawing-room, and delights in being a sort of 
 power, and all that. She could push a fellow, they say, wonderfully 
 if she took any interest in him. But I couldn't do that, you know." 
 
 "No?— why not?" 
 
 "Well, I shouldn't care to be introduced to a lady's drawing- 
 room with the secret purpose of trying to get her to do me a 
 service. There seems something mean in that. Besides, I have 
 a cause — at least, I think I have — which is too good to be served 
 in that kind of way. If I can't get a hearing and justice from the 
 Government of England and the people of England for the sake of 
 right and for the claims I have, I will never try to get it through — 
 oh, well, perhaps I ought not to say what I was going to say." 
 
 " Why not ? " Minola asked again. 
 
 " I mean, perhaps I ought not to say it to you." 
 
 " I don't know, really. Tell me what it is, and then I'll tell 
 you whether you ought to say it." 
 
 He laughed. " Well, I was only going to say that I don't care 
 to have my cause served by petticoat influence." 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 71 
 
 " I think you are quite right. If I were a man I should 
 think petticoat influence in such a matter contemptible. But 
 why should you not like to say so? " 
 
 " Only because I was afraid you might think I meant to 
 speak contemptuously of the influence and the advice of women. 
 I don't mean anything of the kind. I have the highest opinion of 
 the advice of women and their influence, as I have told you already; 
 but I couldn't endure the idea of having a lady, who doesn't know 
 or care anything about me and my claims, asked by somebody to 
 say a word to some great man or some great man's wife, in order 
 that I might get a hearing. I am sure you understand what I 
 mean, Miss Grey." 
 
 " Oh, yes, I never should have misunderstood it ; and I know 
 that you are quite right. It would be a downright degradation." 
 
 " So I felt. Anyhow, I could not do it. Then there remains 
 the making myself troublesome, as Money advises " 
 
 " Yes, what is that ? " 
 
 " Getting my case brought on again and again in the House 
 of Commons, and having debates about it, and making the whole 
 thing public, and so forcing the Government either to do me 
 justice or to satisfy the country that justice has already been 
 done," he said bitterly. 
 
 " That would seem to me a right thing to do," Miss Grey 
 said ; " but I know so little, that I ought not to offer a word of 
 advice." 
 
 " Oh, yes, I should trust to your feelings and instincts in such 
 a case. Well, I don't like, somehow, being in the hands of 
 politicians and party men, who might use me and my cause only 
 as a means of annoying the Government — not really from any 
 sense of right and justice. I don't know if I make myself quite 
 understood ; it is hard to expect a lady, especially a young lady, to 
 understand these things." 
 
 " I think I can quite understand all that. We are not so 
 stupid as you seem to suppose, Mr. Heron." 
 
 " Stupid ! Didn't I tell you of my goddess theory?" 
 
 " Some of the goddesses were very stupid, I always think. 
 Venus was stupid." 
 
 " Well, well ; anyhow you are not Venus." 
 
 " No, indeed." 
 
 " In that sense, I mean. Then I do succeed in making 
 myself understood ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " She could see that he was looking disappointed 
 at her interruption and her seeming levity, which was indeed 
 only the result of a momentary impulse to keep up to herself her 
 
72 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 character as a scorner of men. " I think I understand quite 
 clearly that you fear to be made the mere instrument of politicians ; 
 and I think you are quite right. I did not think of that at first, 
 but, now that you explain it, I am sure that you are right." 
 
 He nodded approvingly. " Then comes the question," he 
 said, " what is to be done ? " 
 
 Leaning against the bridge, he thrust his hands into his pockets, 
 and stood looking into her face, as if he were really waiting for 
 her to solve the problem for him. 
 
 "That is entirely beyond me," she said. "I know nothing; 
 I could not even guess at what ought to be done." 
 
 " No ? Now, here is my idea. Why not plead my cause 
 myself?" 
 
 " Plead the cause yourself ! Can that be done ? " 
 
 " Yes ; myself — in Parliament." 
 
 Minola's mind at once formed and framed a picture of a 
 stately assembly, like a Roman Senate, or like the group of King 
 Agrippa, Festus, Bernice and the rest, and Mr. Heron pleading 
 his cause like Cicero or Paul. The thing seemed hardly con- 
 gruous. It did not seem to her to fall in with modern 
 conditions at all. Her face became blank ; she did not well 
 know what to answer. 
 
 " Are people allowed to do such things now, in England ? " 
 she asked, — " to plead causes before Parliament?" 
 
 An odd idea came up in her mind, that perhaps by the time 
 this strange performance came to be enacted, Mr. Augustus 
 Sheppard might be in Parliament, and Mr. Heron's enthusiastic 
 eloquence would have to be addressed to him. She did not 
 like the idea. 
 
 " You don't understand," Heron said. " You really don't, 
 this time. What I mean is to get into Parliament — be elected 
 for some place, and then stand up and make my own fight for 
 myself." 
 
 She kindled at the idea. 
 
 " Oh, yes, of course ! How stupid I am not to see at once ! 
 That is a splendid idea ; the very thing I should like to do if I 
 were a man and in your place." 
 
 " You really think so ? " 
 
 " Indeed, I do. But, then " — and she hesitated, for she feared 
 that she had been only encouraging him to a wild dream — " does 
 it not cost a great deal of money to get into Parliament ? " 
 
 " No ; I think not ; not always, at least. I should look out 
 for an opportunity. I have money enough — for me. I'm not 
 a rich man, Miss Grey, but my father left me well enough off, as 
 
ON THE BRIDGE. 73 
 
 far as that goes ; and you know that in a place like St. Xavie^s 
 one couldn't spend any money. There was no way of getting rid 
 of it. No, my troubles are none of them money troubles. I only 
 want to vindicate my past career, and so to have a career for the 
 future. I ought to be doing something. I feel in an unhealthy 
 state of mind while all this is pressing on me. You understand?" 
 
 " I can understand it," Miss Grey said, turning to leave the 
 bridge, and bestowing one glance at the yellow, slow-moving water, 
 and the reeds and the bushes of which she and her companion had 
 not spoken a word. " It is not good to have to think of 
 oneself. But you are bound to vindicate yourself ; that I am 
 sure is your duty. Then you can think of other things — of 
 the public and the country." 
 
 " He is rich," she thought, " and he is clever and earnest, in 
 spite of his egotism. Of course he will have a career, and be 
 successful. I thought that he was poor and broken-down, and 
 that I was doing him a kindness by showing sympathy with him." 
 
 They went away together, and Heron, delighted with her 
 encouragement and her intelligence, unfolded splendid plans of 
 what he was to do. But Minola somehow entered less cordially 
 into them than she had done before, and Mr. Heron at last became 
 ashamed of talking so much about himself. 
 
 " I hope we shall meet again," he said, as she stopped 
 significantly at one of the gates leading out of the Park, to intimate 
 that now their roads were separating. " I wish you would allow 
 me to call and see you. I do hope you won't think me odd, or 
 that I am presuming on your kindness. I am a semi-barbarian, 
 you know — have been so long out of civilisation — and I haven't 
 any idea of the ways of the polite world." 
 
 " Nor I," said Minola; " I have come from utter barbarism — 
 from a country town." 
 
 " But I do hope we shall meet again, for you are so sympathetic 
 and kind." 
 
 She bade him good-day, and nodded with a friendly smile, 
 but made no answer to the repeated expression of his hope, and 
 she hastened away. 
 
 Heron could not endure walking alone just then. He hailed 
 a hansom and disappeared. 
 
 " How vain men are ! " Minola thought as she went her 
 way. " How egotistic they all are ! " Of course she assumed 
 herself to have obtained a complete knowledge of all the characters 
 of men. " How egotistic he is ! Of course he tells his whole 
 story to every woman he meets. Lucy Money no doubt has it by 
 heart." 
 
74 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 She did not remember for the moment that her own favourite 
 hero, Alceste, was likewise somewhat egotistic and effusive, and 
 that he was very apt to pour out the story of his wrongs into the 
 ear of any sympathetic woman. But she was disappointed with 
 herself and her friend just now, and was not in a mood to make 
 perfectly reasonable comparisons. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 A " HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN." 
 
 Mrs. Money had one great object in life. At least, if it was 
 not an object denned and set out before her, it was an instinct : 
 it was to make people happy. She could not rest without trying 
 to make people happy. The motherly instinct, which in other 
 women is satisfied by rushing at babies wherever they are to be 
 seen, and ministering to them, and fondling them, and talking 
 pigeon-English to them, exuberated in her so far as to set her 
 trying to do the mother's part for all men and women that came 
 within her range, even when their years far exceeded hers. There 
 was, one great advantage to herself personally in this : it kept 
 her content in what had come to be her own sphere. One cannot 
 go meddling in the affairs of duchesses and countesses and 
 Ministers of State, with whatever kindly desire of setting every- 
 thing to rights and making them all happy. People of that class 
 give themselves such haughty airs that they would rather remain 
 unhappy in their own way than obtain felicity at the hand of 
 some person of inferior station. So Mrs. Money believed ; and 
 perhaps one secret cause of her dislike to the aristocracy (along 
 with the avowed conviction that the aristocratic system had 
 somehow misprised and interfered with her husband) was the 
 feeling that if she were among them they would not allow her to 
 do anything for them. She therefore maintained a circle of which 
 she was herself the queen and patroness and Lady Bountiful. 
 She busied herself about everybody's affairs, and was kind to 
 everybody, without any feeling of delight in the mere work of 
 patronising, but out of a sheer pleasure in trying to make people 
 happy. Naturally she made mistakes, and the general system of 
 her social circle worked so as to occasion a continual change, a 
 passing away of old friends and coming in of new. As young 
 men rose in the world and became independent, as girls got 
 
A "HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN." 75 
 
 married and came to consider themselves supreme in their own 
 sphere, the}' tended to move away from Mrs. Money's influence. 
 Even the grateful and the generous could not always avoid this. 
 For beginners in any path of life she was the specially-appointed 
 helper and friend ; and next to these she might be called the 
 patron saint of failures. In her circle were young poets, painters, 
 lawyers, novelists, preachers, ambitious men looking out for seats 
 in Parliament, or beginners in Parliament ; also there were the grey 
 old poets whom no one read ; the painters who could not get 
 their pictures exhibited or bought; the men who were in Parliament 
 ten or twenty years ago, and got out and never could get in again ; 
 and the inventors who could not impress any government or 
 capitalist with a sense of the value of their discoveries. No 
 front-rank, successful person of any kind was usually to be found 
 in Mrs. Money's rooms. Her guests were the youths who were 
 putting their armour on for the battle, and the worn-out cam- 
 paigners who had put it off, defeated. 
 
 Naturally, when Minola Grey came in Mrs. Money's way, 
 the sympathy and interest of the kindly lady were quickened 
 to their keenest. This beautiful, motherless, fatherless, proud, 
 lonely girl — not so old as her own Theresa, not older than her 
 own Lucy — living by herself, or almost by herself, in gloomy 
 lodgings in the heart of London — how could she fail to be an 
 object of Mrs. Money's deep concern ? Of course Mrs. Money 
 must look into all her affairs, and find out whether she was poor ; 
 and in what sort of way she was living; and whether the people 
 with whom she lodged were kind to her. 
 
 Mary Blanchet's pride of heart can hardly be described when 
 an open carriage, with a pair of splendid greys, stopped at the 
 door of the house in the no-thoroughfare street, and a footman got 
 down and knocked ; and it finally appeared that Mrs. Money, 
 Miss Money, and Miss Lucy Money had called to see Miss Grey. 
 Miss Grey, as it happened, was not at home, although the servant 
 at first supposed that she was ; and thus the three ladies were 
 shown into Minola's sitting-room, and there almost instantly 
 captured by Miss Blanchet. We say "almost" because there 
 was an interval long enough for Lucy to dart about the room from 
 point to point, taking up a book here, a piece of music there, an 
 engraving, a photograph, or a flower, and pronouncing everything 
 delightful. The room was old-fashioned, spacious, and solid, very 
 unlike the tiny apartments of the ordinary West-end lodging ; and, 
 what with the flowers and the books, it really looked rather an 
 attractive place to enthusiastic eyes. Miss Money kept her eyes 
 on the ground for the most part, and professed to take little notice 
 
76 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 of the ordinary adornments of rooms ; for Miss Money was a 
 saint, and was furthermore engaged to a man not far from her 
 father's years, who, having made a great deal of money at the 
 parliamentary bar, was now thinking of entering the Church, and 
 had already set about the building of a temple of medieeval style, 
 in the progress of which Miss Money naturally was deeply 
 interested. 
 
 Miss Blanchet was in a flutter of excitement as she entered 
 the sitting-room. As she was crossing its threshold she was 
 considering whether she ought to present a copy of her poems 
 to each of the three ladies or only to Mrs. Money, and whether 
 she ought to tender the gift now or send it on by the post. The 
 solemn eyes and imposing presence of Mrs. Money were almost 
 alarming, and the trailing dresses and feathers of all the ladies 
 sent a thrill of admiration and homage into the heart of the poetess 
 — everything was so evidently put on regardless of expense. Little 
 Mary had always been so poor and so stinted in the matter of 
 wardrobe that she could not help admiring these splendidly- 
 dressed women. Mary, however, luckily remembered what was 
 due to the dignity of poetic genius, and did not allow her homage 
 to show itself too much in the form of trepidation. She instantly 
 put on her best company manners, and spoke in the sweetly- 
 measured and genteel tone which she used to employ at Keeton, 
 when she had occasion to interchange a word with the judges, 
 or the sheriffs, or some eminent counsel. 
 
 " Minola will be home in a few moments — a very few," Miss 
 Blanchet said. " Indeed, I expect her every minute. I know she 
 would be greatly disappointed if she did not see you." 
 
 " Oh, I am not going without seeing Nola ! " said Lucy. 
 
 " I am Minola's friend," Mary explained with placid dignity. 
 " I may introduce myself. My brother, I know, has already 
 the honour of your acquaintance. I am Miss Blanchet." 
 
 " Mr. Herbert Blanchet's sister ? " Mrs. Money said, in melan- 
 choly tone, but with delighted eyes ; " this is indeed an unex- 
 pected and a very great pleasure." 
 
 " Why, you don't mean to say you are Herbert Blanchet's 
 sister?" Lucy exclaimed, seizing both the hands of the poetess. 
 " He's the most delightful creature, and a true poet, oh, yes, a 
 man of genius!" 
 
 The eyes of Mary moistened with happiness and pride. 
 
 " Herbert Blanchet is my brother. He is much younger than 
 I; I need hardly say that. I used to take care of him years ago, 
 almost as if I were his mother. We were a long time separated ; 
 he has been so much abroad." 
 
A "HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN." 77 
 
 The faithful Mary would not for all the world have suggested 
 or admitted that their long separation was due to any indifference 
 on the part of her brother. Indeed, at the moment she was not 
 thinking of anything of the kind, only of his genius, and his beauty, 
 and his noble heart. 
 
 " He never told me he had a sister," Mrs. Money said, "or 
 I should have been delighted to call on you long ago, Miss 
 Blanchet. It is your brother's fault, not mine. I shall tell him 
 so." 
 
 " He did not know that I was coming to London," Mary 
 was quick to explain ; " he thought 1 was still living in Keeton. 
 I only came to London with Minola." 
 
 " Oh ! You lived in Keeton, then, always, along with Miss 
 Grey?" 
 
 " How delightful ! " Lucy exclaimed, desisting from her occu- 
 pation of opening books and turning over music ; " for you can 
 tell us all about Nola, and her love story." 
 
 "Her love story?" Mrs. Money repeated, in tones of melan- 
 choly enquiry. 
 
 " Her love story ! " Miss Blanchet murmured tremulously, and 
 wondering who had betrayed Minola's secret. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said Lucy decisively. "I know there's some love 
 story — something romantic and delightful. Do tell us, Miss 
 Blanchet." 
 
 Even the saint-like Theresa now showed a mild and becoming 
 interest. 
 
 " It's not exactly a love story," Miss Blanchet said, with some 
 hesitation, not well knowing what she ought to reveal and what 
 to keep back. " At least, it's no love affair on Minola's part. She 
 never was in love — never. She detests all love-making — at least, 
 she thinks so," the poetess said, with a gentle sigh. " But there 
 was a gentleman, who was very much in love with her." 
 
 " Oh, she must have had heaps of lovers ! " interposed Lucy. 
 
 Miss Blanchet then told the story of Mr. Augustus Sheppard, 
 and how he was rich and handsome — at least, rather handsome, she 
 said — and how he wanted to marry Minola ; and her people very 
 much wished that she would have him, and she would not ; and 
 how at last she hastened her flight to London to get rid of him. 
 All this was full of delightful interest to Lucy, and still further 
 quickened the kindly sympathy of Mrs. Money. Then Mary 
 Blanchet went into a long story about the death of Minola's 
 mother and the second marriage of Minola's father, and then the 
 father's death and the stepmother's second marriage, and the dis- 
 comfort of the home which fate had thus provided for Minola. 
 
78 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 She expatiated upon the happiness of the sheltered life Minola 
 had had while her mother was living, and the change that came 
 upon her afterwards, until the only doubt Mrs. Money had ever 
 entertained about Minola — a doubt as to the perfect propriety and 
 judgment of her coming to live almost alone in London— vanished 
 altogether, and she regarded our heroine as a girl who had been 
 driven from her home, instead of having fled from it. 
 
 Mrs. Money delicately and cautiously approached the subject 
 of Minola's means of subsistence. On this point no one could 
 enlighten her better than Miss Blanchet, who knew to the sixpence 
 the income and expenditure of her friend. Well, Minola was not 
 badly off for a girl, Mrs. Money thought. A girl could live nicely 
 and quietly, like a lady, but very quietly, on that. Besides, some 
 rich man would be sure to fall in love with her. 
 
 " But she ought to have a great deal of money," the poetess 
 eagerly explained, very proud of her leader's losses. " Her father 
 was a rich man, quite a rich man, and he had quarrelled with her 
 brother, and she ought to have all the money, only for that second 
 marriage." Indeed, Miss Blanchet added the expression of her 
 own profound conviction that there must have been some queer 
 work — some concealment . or something — about Mr. Grey's 
 property, seeing that so little of it came to Minola. 
 
 " I'll get Mr. Money to look into all that," Mrs. Money said 
 decisively. " He understands all about these things, and nothing 
 could be hidden from him." 
 
 Miss Blanchet modestly intimated that she had confided her 
 suspicions to her brother, and begged him to try and find out 
 something. 
 
 " Oh, he never could understand anything about it ! " Lucy 
 said. " Poets never know about these things. It's just in papa's 
 line. He'll find out. They can't baffle him. I know they have 
 been cheating Nola — I know they have ! I know there's a will 
 hidden away somewhere, making her the rightful heir or whatever 
 it is." 
 
 " About this gentleman — this lover. Is he a nice person ? " 
 Mrs. Money began. 
 
 "Mr. Augustus Sheppard?" Mary asked, mentioning his name 
 for the first time in the conversation. 
 
 " Augustus Sheppard ! Is that his name ? " Lucy demanded 
 eagerly. " Why, then, papa knows him ! Indeed he does. I do 
 declare papa knows everything ! " 
 
 " Why do you think, dear, that he knows this gentleman ? " 
 
 " Because I heard him asking Nola about Mr. Augustus Shep- 
 pard the other day, mamma, in our drawing-room." 
 
A "HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN." 79 
 
 " He couldn't have known this, I think," Miss Blanchet said. 
 
 " Oh, no, I suppose not ; but he knows him, and he'll tell us 
 all about him. Why wouldn't Nola have him, Miss Blanchet ? " 
 
 "He is rather a formal sort of person, and heavy, and not the 
 least in the world poetic or romantic ; and Minola does not like 
 him at all. She doesn't think his feelings are very deep ; but there 
 I am sure she is wrong," the poetess added emphatically. " She 
 has never had occasion to make a study of human feelings as 
 others have." 
 
 "You think he has deep feelings?" Mrs. Money asked, turning 
 the full light of her melancholy eyes upon Mary, and with her 
 whole soul already in the question. 
 
 " Oh, yes ; I know he has. I know that he will persevere, 
 and will try to make Minola marry him still. He is a man I 
 should be afraid of, if he were disappointed. I should indeed." 
 
 " Mamma, don't you think we had better have Nola to stay 
 with us for a while?" Lucy asked. "Miss Blanchet could 
 describe him, or get a photograph, and we could give orders that 
 no such man was ever to be admitted, if he should call and ask 
 to see her. Some one should always go out with her, or she 
 should only go in the carriage. I dread this man ; I do indeed. 
 Miss Blanchet is quite right, and she knows more than she says, 
 I dare say. Such terrible things have happened, you know. I 
 read in the paper the other day of a young man who fell in love 
 w r ith a girl — in the country it was, I think, or in Spain perhaps, or 
 somewhere — and she would not marry him ; and he hid himself 
 with a long dagger, and when she was going to church he stabbed 
 her several times." 
 
 " I don't think Mr. Augustus Sheppard would be likely to do 
 anything of that kind," Miss Blanchet said. " He's a very re- 
 spectable man, and a steady, grave sort of person." 
 
 "You never can tell," Lucy declared. "When those quiet 
 men are in love and disappointed, they are dreadful ! I've read 
 a great many things just like that in books." 
 
 " Well, dear," Mrs. Money said, " we'll ask your papa. If he 
 knows this gentleman — this person — he can tell us what sort of 
 man he is. It doesn't seem that he is in London now." 
 
 " He may have come to-day," said Lucy. 
 
 Miss Theresa looked at her watch. 
 
 " Mamma dear, I don't think Miss Grey is coming in just yet, 
 and it's growing late, and I have to attend the Ladies' Committee 
 of the Saint Angulphus Association, at four." 
 
 " You go, mamma, with Theresa," Lucy exclaimed. " I'll wait ; 
 I must see Nola. I begin to be alarmed. It's very odd her 
 
80 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 staying out. I think something must really have happened. That 
 man may have been in town, waiting somewhere. You go ; when 
 I have seen Nola, and am satisfied that she is safe, I can get 
 home in the omnibus, or the underground, or the steamboat, or 
 somehow. I'll find my way, you may be sure." 
 
 " My dear," her mother said, " you were never in an omnibus 
 in your life." 
 
 "Papa goes in omnibusses, and he says he doesn't care 
 whether other people do or not." 
 
 " But a lady, my dear" 
 
 " Oh, I've seen them in the streets full of women ! They 
 don't object to ladies at all." 
 
 " But my dear young lady," Miss Blanchet pleaded, " there 
 is not the slightest occasion for your staying. Mr. Sheppard isn't 
 at all that kind of person. Minola is quite safe. She is often out 
 much later than this, although I confess that I did expect her 
 home much earlier to-day." 
 
 " I'll stay till Nola comes," the positive little Lucy declared, 
 " unless Miss Blanchet turns me out ; and there's an end of that. 
 So, mamma dear, you and Tessy do as you please, and never mind 
 me." 
 
 "When Minola does come " Mary Blanchet began to say. 
 
 " When she does come ? " Lucy interrupted in portentous 
 accents. " Say if she does come, Miss Blanchet." 
 
 " When she does come, please don't say anything of Mr. 
 Sheppard. Of course she would not like to think that we spoke 
 about such a subject." 
 
 "Oh, of course, of course!" all the ladies chorused, with 
 looks expressive of immense caution and discretion ; and in true 
 feminine fashion all honestly assuming that there could be nothing 
 wrong in talking over anybody's supposed secrets so long as the 
 person concerned did not know of the talk. 
 
 " I see Miss Grey," said the quiet Theresa suddenly. She 
 had been looking out of the window to see if the carriage was 
 near. As a professed saint she had naturally less interest in 
 ordinary human creatures than her mother and sister had. 
 
 " Thank Heaven ! " Lucy exclaimed. 
 
 " Dear Lucy ! " Theresa interposed in tones of mild remon- 
 strance, as if she would suggest that not everybody had a right 
 to make reference to Heaven, and that Heaven would probably 
 resent any allusion to it by the unqualified. 
 
 " Well, I am thankful that she is coming all the same ; but I 
 wish you wouldn't call her Miss Grey, Tessy. It seems cold and 
 unfriendly. Call her Nola, please." 
 
IN SOCIETY. 8 1 
 
 Mary Blanchet went to the door, and exchanged a brief word 
 or two with Minola, in order that she might be prepared for her 
 visitors. Minola came in, looking very handsome, with her colour 
 heightened by a quick walk home, and the little excitement of her 
 morning. 
 
 "How lovely you are looking, Nola dear ! " Lucy exclaimed, 
 after the first greetings were over. " You look as if you had been 
 having an adventure." 
 
 " I have had a sort of adventure," Minola answered with a 
 faint blush. 
 
 The one thought went through the minds of all her listeners, 
 at the same moment, and it shaped itself into a name — " Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard." All were silent and breathless. 
 
 " It was not much," Minola hastened to say. " Only, I met 
 Mr. Victor Heron in Regent's Park, and I have been walking with 
 him." 
 
 Most of her listeners seemed relieved. 
 
 " I wish I had met him," Lucy blurted out ; " he is very hand- 
 some, and I should like to have walked with him. Oh, what 
 nonsense I am talking ! " and she grew red, and jumped up and 
 looked out of the window. 
 
 Then they all talked about something else; and the visit closed 
 with a promise that Minola and Mary Blanchet would present 
 themselves at one of Mrs. Money's little weekly receptions out of 
 season, which was to take place the following evening ; and after 
 which Mrs. Money hoped to decoy them into staying for the 
 night. Mary Blanchet went to bed that night in an ecstasy of 
 happiness, only disturbed now and then by a torturing doubt as 
 to whether Mrs. Money would be equally willing to receive her if 
 she had known that she had been the keeper of the court-house 
 at Keeton ; and whether she ought not to forewarn Mrs. Money 
 of the fact ; and whether she ought not, at least, to call Minola's 
 attention to the question, and submit it to her judgment. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 IN SOCIETY. 
 
 Mr. Money was not a very regular visitor at his wife's little 
 receptions out of the season. In the season and when they had 
 larger and more formal gatherings, he showed himself as much 
 
 G 
 
82 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 as was fitting and regular; for many of the guests then were 
 virtually his guests, persons who desired especially to see him, and 
 of whose topics he could talk. A good many foreign visitors were 
 there usually — scientific men, and railway contractors, and en- 
 gineers, and shipbuilders, from Germany, Italy, and Russia, and of 
 course the United States, who looked upon Mr. Money as a person 
 of great importance and distinction, and would not have cared 
 anything about most of Mrs. Money's guests. 
 
 The foreigners were curiously right and wrong. Mr. Money 
 was a person of importance and distinction. Every Londoner 
 who knew anything knew his name, and knew that he was clever 
 and distinguished. If a Russian stranger of rank were dining 
 with a Cabinet minister, and were to express a wish to see and 
 know Mr. Money, the minister would think the wish quite natural, 
 and would take his friend down to the lobby of the House of 
 Commons, and make him acquainted with Mr. Money. We have 
 all been foreigners, ourselves, somewhere, and we know how our 
 longing to see some celebrity, as we suppose, of the land we are 
 visiting, some one whose name was familiar to us in England, has 
 been occasionally checked and chilled by our finding that in the 
 celebrity's own city no one seems to have heard of him. There 
 are only too many celebrities of this kind which shine, like the 
 moon, for those who are a long way off. But Mr. Money was a 
 man of mark in London, as well as in St. Petersburgh and New 
 York. Therein the foreigners found themselves right. Yet Mr. 
 Money's position was somewhat peculiar for all that, in a manner 
 no stranger could well appreciate. The Cabinet minister did not 
 ask Mr. Money to meet his friend at dinner ; or, at all events, 
 would never have been able to say to his friend, "Money? Oh, 
 yes ! Of course you ought to know him. He is coming to-morrow 
 to dine with us — won't you come and meet him?" The most the 
 Cabinet minister would do would be to get up a little dinner- 
 party, suitably adjusted for the express purpose of bringing his 
 friend and Mr. Money together. It would be too much to say 
 that Mr. Money was under a cloud. There rather seemed to be a 
 sort of faint idea abroad that he ought to be, or some day would 
 be, under a cloud, and no one knew why. 
 
 No such considerations as these, however, would have affected 
 the company who gathered round Mrs. Money in the out-of- 
 season evenings, or could have been appreciated by them. They 
 were, for the most part, entirely out of Mr. Money's line. He 
 came among them irregularly and at intervals; and if he found 
 there any man or woman he knew or was taken with, he talked to 
 him or her a good deal, and perhaps, it it were a man, he carried 
 
Z.V SOCIETY. S3 
 
 him and one or two others off to his own study or smoking-room, 
 where they discoursed at their ease. Sometimes Lucelet was sent 
 to her papa, if he was not making his appearance in the drawing- 
 room, to beg him to accomplish some such act of timely interven- 
 tion. Somebody, perhaps, presented himself among Mrs. Money's 
 guests who was rather too solid, or grave, or scientific, or political, 
 to care for the general company, and to be of any social benefit 
 to them ; or some one, as we have said, in whose eyes Mr. Money 
 would be a celebrity, and Mrs. Money's guests counted for nothing. 
 Then Lucy went for her father, if he was in the house, and drew 
 him forth. He was wonderfully genial with his womankind. 
 They might disturb him at any moment and in any way they 
 chose. He seemed to have as little idea of grumbling if they 
 disturbed him as a Newfoundland dog would have of snapping at 
 his master's children if they insisted on rousing him up from his 
 doze in the sun. 
 
 Mr. Money talked very frankly of his daughters and their 
 prospects sometimes. 
 
 " My girls are going to marry any one they like," he would 
 often say; "the poorer the better, so far as I am concerned, so 
 long as they like the girls and the girls like them." As chance 
 would have it, a rich man fell in love with Theresa, and she in her 
 quiet, sanctimonious way loved him, and that was settled. 
 
 " Now, Lucelet, look out for yourself," Mr. Money would say 
 to his blushing daughter. "If you fall in love with some fine 
 young fellow, I don't care if he hasn't sixpence. Only be sure, 
 Mrs. Lucelet, that you are in love with him, and that he is in love 
 with you, and not with your expectations." 
 
 Lucelet generally smiled and saucily tossed her head, as one 
 who should say that she considered herself a person quite qualified 
 to make an impression without the help of any expectations. 
 
 " I sometimes wish the right man would come along, Lucelet," 
 Mr. Money said one day, throwing his arm round his pretty 
 daughter's shoulder, and drawing her to him. 
 
 " Papa ! do you want to get rid of me so soon ? I wonder at 
 you. I know I don't want to get rid of you." 
 
 " No, no, dear ; it isn't that. Never mind ; where's your 
 
 mamma? Just run and ask her" and Mr. Money started 
 
 something else, and put an end to the conversation. 
 
 . Mr. Money's idea with regard to the future of his daughters 
 did not fail to become known among his acquaintances in general, 
 and would doubtless have drawn young men in goodly numbers 
 around his home, even if Lucelet were far less pretty than she 
 really was. But, in any case, Mrs. Money loved to be friendly to 
 
84 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 young people, and her less formal parties were largely attended, 
 almost always, by the young. Miss Theresa's future husband did 
 not come there often. He had known the family chiefly through 
 Mr. Money and Parliament ; and, coming once to dine with Mr. 
 Money, he fell fairly in love with the dove-like eyes and saintly 
 ways of Theresa. Theresa was therefore what her father would 
 have called " out of the swim." She looked tolerantly upon her 
 mother's little gatherings of poets en herbe. artists who were great 
 to their friends, patriots hunting for constituencies, orators who 
 had not yet caught the Speaker's eye, and persons who had tried 
 success in all these various paths and failed. She looked on them 
 tolerantly, but her soul was not in them ; it floated above them in 
 a purer atmosphere. It was now, indeed, floating among the spires 
 of the church which her lover was to build. 
 
 One peculiarity seemed common to the guests whom Mrs. 
 Money gathered around her. On any subject in which they felt 
 the slightest interest they never felt the slightest doubt. The air 
 they breathed was that of conviction ; the language they talked was 
 that of dogma. The men and women they knew were the greatest, 
 most gifted, and most beautiful in the world ; the men and women 
 they did not know were nothing — were beneath contempt. Every 
 one had what Lowell calls an " I-turn-the-crank-of-the-universe 
 air." In that charmed circle every one was either a genius 
 destined yet to move the world, or a genius too great for the dull, 
 unworthy world to comprehend. It was a happy circle, where 
 success or failure came to just the same. 
 
 All in a flutter of delight was Mary Blanchet when preparing to 
 enter that magical circle. She was going at last to meet great men 
 and brilliant women. Perhaps, some day, she might even come to 
 be known among them — to shine among them. She could never 
 be done embracing Minola for having brought her to the gate of 
 that heaven. She spent all the day dressing herself and adjusting 
 her hair ; but as the hours went on she became almost wretched 
 from nervousness. When it was nearly time for them to go she 
 was quivering with agitation. They went in a brougham hired 
 specially for the occasion, because, although Mrs. Money offered 
 to send her carriage, and Mary would have liked it much, Minola 
 would hear of nothing of the kind. Mary was engaged all the 
 way in the brougham in the proper adjustment of her gloves. At 
 last they came to the place. Minola did the gentleman's part, 
 and handed her agitated companion out Mary Blanchet saw a 
 strip of carpet on the pavement, an open door with servants in 
 livery standing about, blazing lights, brightly-dressed women 
 going in, a glimpse of a room with a crowd of people, and 
 
IN SOCIETY. 85 
 
 then Minola and she found themselves somehow in a ladies' 
 dressing-room. 
 
 " Minola, darling, don't go in without me ; I am quite ner- 
 vous — I should never venture to go in alone." 
 
 Minola did not intend to desert her palpitating little com- 
 panion, who now indeed clung to her skirts and would not let her 
 go had she been inclined. Miss Blanchet might have been a 
 young beauty just about to make her debut at a ball, so anxious 
 was she about her appearance, about her dress, about her com- 
 plexion ; and at the same time she was so nervous that she could 
 hardly compel her trembling fingers to give the finishing touches 
 which she believed herself to need. Minola looked on wondering, 
 puzzled, and half angry. The poetess was unmistakably a little, 
 withered, yellowing old maid. She had not even the remains of 
 good looks. No dressing or decoration possible to woman could 
 make her anything but what she was, or deceive any one about 
 her, or induce any one to feel interested in her. The handsome, 
 stately girl who stood smiling near her was about to enter the 
 drawing-room quite unconcerned as to her own appearance, and 
 indeed not thinking about it ; and the homely little old maid was 
 quite distressed lest the company generally should not sufficiently 
 admire her, or should find any fault with her dress. 
 
 " Come along, you silly poetess," said Minola at last, breaking 
 into a laugh, and fairly drawing her companion away from the 
 looking-glass ; " What do you think anybody will care about you 
 or me ? We'll steal in unnoticed, and we shall be all right." 
 
 " It's the first time I ever was in London society, Minola dear, 
 and I'm quite nervous." 
 
 " It's the first time I ever was in London society, and I'm not 
 a bit nervous. No one knows us, dear — and no one cares. So 
 come along." 
 
 She fairly carried Mary Blanchet out of the dressing-room, 
 along a corridor lined with seats, on which people who had been 
 in the drawing-room and had come out, were chattering, and 
 flirting, and lounging — and at last over the threshold of the 
 drawing-room, and into the presence of the hostess. A few 
 friendly words were got through, and Minola dragged her com- 
 panion along through the crowd into the recess formed by the 
 window, where there were some unoccupied seats. 
 
 " Now, Mary, that's done. The plunge is made, dear ! We 
 are in Society ! Let us sit down here — and look at it." 
 
 " This," said Mary faintly — " this, at last, is Society." 
 
 " I suppose it is, dear. At least it will do very well for you 
 and me ; we should never know any difference. Imagine all these 
 
86 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 people marquises and countesses, and what more can we want to 
 make us happy ? They may be marquises and countesses, for all 
 I know." 
 
 " I should think there must be some great poets, and authors, 
 and artists, Minola. I am sure there must be. Oh, there is my 
 brother ! " 
 
 In effect Mr. Herbert Blanchet had already fixed his keen 
 dark eyes on Minola, and was making his way up to her retreat, 
 rather to Minola's distress. He addressed Minola at once with 
 that undefinable manner of easy and kindly superiority which he 
 always adopted towards women, and which, it must be owned, 
 impressed some women a great deal. To his sister he held out, 
 while hardly looking at her, an encouraging hand of recognition. 
 
 " Have you seen Delavar's picture ? " he asked Minola. 
 
 '" No ; who is Delavar ? " 
 
 "Delavar? He mas the greatest painter of our time — at 
 least, ot his school, for I don't admit that his school is the true 
 one." 
 
 " Oh, is his picture here?" 
 
 " In the other room — yes. He painted it for Mr. Money — for 
 Mrs. Money rather I should say, and it has just been sent home. 
 Come with me, and I will show it to you." 
 
 "And Mary?" 
 
 " We'll come back for Mary presently. The rooms are too 
 full. We couldn't all get through. If you'll take my arm, Miss 
 Grey!" 
 
 Minola rose and took his arm, and they made their way slowly 
 through the room. They moved even more slowly than was neces- 
 sary, for Herbert Blanchet was particularly anxious to show off his 
 companion and himself to the fullest advantage. The moment 
 Minola entered the room he saw that she was the handsomest girl 
 there, and that her dressing was simple, graceful, and picturesque. 
 He knew that before a quarter of an hour had passed everybody 
 would be asking who she was, and he resolved to secure for himself 
 the effect of being the first to parade her through the rooms. He 
 was a singularly handsome man — as has been said before, almost 
 oppressively handsome ; and a certain wasted look about his eyes 
 and cheeks added a peculiar and striking effect to his appearance. 
 He was dark, she was fair ; he was a tall man, she was a rather tall 
 girl ; and if his face had a worn look, hers had an expression of 
 something like habitual melancholy, which was not perhaps in 
 keeping with her natural temperament, and which lent by force 01 
 contrast an additional charm to her eyes when they suddenly lit 
 up at the opening of any manner of animated conversation. No 
 
IN SOCIETY. 87 
 
 combination could be more effective, Mr. Blanchet felt, than that 
 of his appearance and hers ; and then she was a new figure. So 
 he passed slowly on with her, and he knew that most people looked 
 at them as they passed. He took good care, too, that they should 
 be engaged in earnest talk. 
 
 " I am delighted to have you all to myself for a moment, Miss 
 Grey — to tell you that I know all about your goodness to Mary. 
 That is why I would not bring her with us now. No — you must let 
 me speak — I am not offering you my thanks. I know you would 
 not care about that. But I must tell you that I know what you 
 have done. I have no doubt that you are her sole support — poor 
 Mary ! " 
 
 " I am her friend, Mr. Blanchet — only that." 
 
 " Her only friend too. Her brother has not done much for her! 
 To tell you the truth, Miss Grey, it isn't in his power now. You 
 don't know the struggles of us, the unsuccessful men in literature, 
 who yet have faith in ourselves. I am very poor. My utmost effort 
 goes in keeping a decent dress-coat and buying a pair of gloves ; 
 I don't complain — I am not one bit deterred, and I only trouble 
 you with this confession, because, whatever I may have been in the 
 past, I had rather you knew me to be what I am — a wretched, 
 penniless struggler — than believe that I left my sister to be a burden 
 on your friendship." 
 
 " Mary is the only friend I have," said Minola. " It is not 
 wonderful if I wish to keep her with me. And you will make a 
 great success some time." 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "If one hadn't to grind at things for bare living one might do 
 something. I am not bad enough, or good enough : and that's 
 the truth of it. I dare say if I were mean enough to hunt after 
 some woman with money I might have succeeded as well as others 
 —but I couldn't do that." 
 
 " No, I am sure you could not." 
 
 " I am not mean enough for that. But I am not high-minded 
 enough to accept my path, and be content with it and proud of it. 
 Now I shan't bore you any more about myself. I wanted you to 
 know this that you might not think too harshly of me. I know 
 you felt some objection to me at first ; you need not try politely to 
 deny it" 
 
 " Oh, no ; I don't want to deny it. I prefer truth to politeness 
 a great deal. I did think you had neglected your sister ; but really 
 I was not surprised. I believe other men do the same thing." 
 
 " But now you see that I have some excuse ? " 
 
 " I am glad to hear it, Mr. Blanchet." 
 
88 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Glad to hear that I am so wretchedly poor, Miss Grey ? " he 
 said, with a smile, and bending his eyes on her. " Glad to hear 
 that your friend's brother is such a failure ? " 
 
 "I would rather a thousand times hear that you were poor 
 than that you were heartless. I don't call it a failure to be poor. 
 I should call it a failure to be selfish and mean." 
 
 She spoke in a low tone, but very earnestly and eagerly ; and 
 she suddenly thought she was speaking too eagerly, and stopped. 
 
 " Well," he said, after a moment's pause, " here is the picture. 
 We shall get to it presently, when these people move away." 
 
 They had entered, through a curtained door, a small room, 
 which was nearly filled with people standing before a picture, and 
 admiringly criticising it. Minola, with all her real or fancied 
 delight in noting the jealousies and weaknesses of men and women, 
 could hear no words of detraction or even dispraise. 
 
 " Is the painter here ? " she asked of her companion in a 
 whisper. 
 
 " No ; I haven't seen him. Perhaps he'll come in later on." 
 
 " Would you think it cheap cynicism if I were to ask why they 
 all praise the picture ?— why they don't find any fault with it." 
 
 " Oh, because they are all of the school, and they must support 
 their creed. Our art is a creed to us. I don't admit that I am 
 of Delavar's school any more ; in fact, I look upon him as a heretic. 
 He is going in for mere popularity ; success has spoilt him. But 
 to most of these people here he is still a divinity. They haven't 
 found him out yet." 
 
 " Oh ! " 
 
 This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at 
 length struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the 
 whole of the picture. 
 
 " What is it called ? " she asked. 
 
 " Love stronger than Death." 
 
 The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon rising 
 in a livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator 
 was seen a freshly opened grave. In the foreground were two 
 figures^one that of a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled 
 from her coffin, wrapped as she was in her cerements of the tomb; 
 the other that of the lover. He had propped the body against the 
 broken hillock of the grave, and he was chanting a love song to it 
 which he accompanied on his lute. His face suggested the last 
 stage of a galloping consumption, further enlivened by the fearsome 
 light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary bats flopped and lolloped 
 through the air, and a few sympathetic toads came out to listen 
 to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as if they swayed 
 

IN SOCIETY. 89 
 
 and moaned to the music ; and the rank weeds and grasses were 
 mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn 
 musician. 
 
 Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there 
 followed a shocking inclination to laugh. 
 
 " What do you think of it ? " Blanchet asked. 
 
 " Oh, I don't like it at all." 
 
 " No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness ; just a striving after draw- 
 ing-room popularity. No depth of feeling ; no care for the realistic 
 power of the scene. Pretty, pleasing — nothing more. Surface 
 only ; no depth." 
 
 " But it is hideous," Minola said. 
 
 " Hideous ? Oh, no ! Decay is loveliness ; decay is the soul 
 of really high art when you come to understand it. But there is no 
 real decay there. That girl's face is pretty waxwork. There's no 
 death there," and he turned half away in contempt. "That is what 
 comes of being popular and a success. No ; Delavar is done. I 
 told him so." 
 
 " He is quite new to me," said Minola. " I never heard of 
 him before." 
 
 " He's getting old now," Blanchet said. "He must be quite 
 thirty. Let me see — oh, yes ; fully that. He had better join the 
 pre-Raphaelites now ; or send to the Royal Academy ; or hire a 
 gallery and exhibit his pictures at a shilling a head. I fancy they 
 would be quite a success." 
 
 Some of this conversation took place as they were making their 
 way through the crowd with the intention of entering the drawing- 
 room again. Minola was greatly amused and in a manner interested. 
 The whole thing was entirely new to her. As they passed into the 
 corridor, there were one or two vacant seats. 
 
 " Will you rest for a moment ? " Blanchet said, motioning 
 towards a seat. 
 
 " Hadn't we better go back for Mary ? " 
 
 " We'll go back presently. She is very happy ; she loves above 
 all things observing a crowd." 
 
 Minola would have liked very much to observe the crowd her- 
 self and to have people pointed out to her. Blanchet, however, 
 though he saluted several persons here and there, did not seem par- 
 ticularly interested in any of them. Minola sat down for a while to 
 please him, and to show that she had no thought of giving herself 
 airs merely because she was enabled to be kind to his sister. 
 
 Blanchet threw himself sidelong across his chair and leaned 
 towards Minola's seat. He knew that people were looking at him 
 and wondering who his companion was, and he felt very happy. 
 
go MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I wish I might read some of my poems to you, Miss Grey," 
 he said. " I should like to have your opinion, because I know it 
 would be sincere." 
 
 " I should be delighted to hear them, but I don't think I should 
 venture to give an opinion ; my opinion would not be worth 
 anything." 
 
 " When may I come and read one or two to you and Mary ? 
 To-morrow afternoon ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; we are staying here to-night, but we shall be at 
 home in the afternoon. Are these published poems ? Pray, excuse 
 me — I quite forgot ; you don't publish. You don't care for fame — 
 the fame that sets other people wild." 
 
 He smiled, and slightly shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " We don't care for the plaudits of the stupid crowd," he said ; 
 " that is quite true. We don't care for popularity, and to have our 
 books lying on drawing-room tables, and kept by the booksellers 
 bound in morocco ready to hand, to be given away as gift-books to 
 young ladies. But we should like the admiration of a chosen few. 
 The truth is, that I don't publish my poems because I haven't the 
 money. They would be a dead loss, of course, to any one who 
 printed them ; I am proud to say that. I would not have them 
 printed at all if they couldn't be artistically and fitly brought out ; 
 and I haven't the money, and there's an end. But if I might 
 read my poems to you, that would be something." 
 
 Minola began to be full of pity for the poor poet, between whom 
 and possible fame there stood so hard and prosaic a barrier. She 
 was touched by the proud humility of his confession of ambition 
 and poverty. Three sudden questions flashed through her mind. 
 " I wonder how much it would cost ? and have I money enough ? 
 and would it be possible to get him to take it?" 
 
 Her colour was positively heightening and her breath becoming 
 checked by the boldness of these thoughts, when suddenly there was 
 a rushing and rustling of silken skirts, and Lucy Money, disengag- 
 ing herself from a man's arm, swooped upon her. 
 
 " You darlingest dear Nola, where have you been all the night ? 
 I have been hunting for you everywhere ! Oh — Mr. Blanchet ! I 
 haven't seen you before either. Have you two been wandering 
 about together all the evening ? " 
 
 Looking up, Minola saw that it was Mr. Victor Heron who had 
 been with Lucy Money, and that he was now waiting with a smile 
 of genial friendliness to be recognised by Miss Grey. It must be 
 owned that Minola felt a little embarrassed, and would rather — 
 though she could not possibly tell why — not have been found deep 
 in confidential talk with Herbert Blanchet. 
 
" THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN" 91 
 
 She gave Mr. Heron her hand, and told him — which was now 
 the truth — that she was glad to see him. 
 
 "Hadn't we better go and find Mary?" Blanchet said, rising 
 and glancing slightly at Heron. " She will be expecting us." 
 
 " No, please don't take Miss Grey away just yet," Victor said, 
 addressing himself straightway, and witli eyes of unutterable cor- 
 diality and good-fellowship, to the poet. " I haven't spoken a 
 word to her yet ; and I have to go away soon." 
 
 " I'll go with you to your sister, Mr. Blanchet," said Lucy, 
 taking his arm forthwith. " I haven't seen her all the evening, and 
 I want to talk to her very much." 
 
 So Lucy swept away on Mr. Blanchet's arm, looking very fair, 
 and petite, and pretty, as she held a bundle of her draperies in one 
 hand, and glanced back, smiling and nodding out of sheer good 
 nature at Minola. 
 
 Victor Heron sat down by Minola, and at once plunged into 
 earnest talk. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 " THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN." 
 
 Victor Heron did not leave Mrs. Money's quite as soon as 
 he had intended. He had made a sort of engagement to meet 
 some men in the smoking-room of his club : men with whom 
 he was to have had some talk about the St. Xavier's Settlements. 
 But he remained talking with Minola for some time ; and he talked 
 with Lucy and with other women, young and old, and asked many 
 questions and made himself very agreeable, and, as was his wont, 
 thought everyone delightful, and enjoyed himself very much. Then 
 Mr. Money chanced to look in, and, seeing Heron, bore him away 
 for a while to his study, to talk with him about something very, very 
 particular. Mr. Money saw Herbert Blanchet and only performed 
 with him the ceremony which Hajji Baba describes as "the shake- 
 elbows and the fine weather," and then made no further account of 
 him. Mr. Blanchet seeing Heron invited to the study, and knowing 
 from his acquaintance with the household what that meant, con- 
 ceived himself slighted, and was angry. Mr. Money always looked 
 upon Blanchet as a sort of young man whom only women were 
 ever supposed to care about, and who would be as much out of 
 place in the private study of a politician and man of business as a 
 trimmed petticoat. 
 
92 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 There was, however, some consolation for the poet in the fact 
 that he had Minola Grey nearly all to himself. He secured this 
 advantage by a dexterous stroke of policy, for he attached himself 
 to his sister and did his best to show and describe to her all the 
 celebrities ; and Minola, only too glad, came and sat by Mary, 
 and they made a very happy trio. Herbert was inclined to look 
 down upon his sister as a harmless, old-fashioned little spinster, 
 who would be much better if she did not try to write poetry. He 
 felt convinced for a while that Minola must have the same opinion 
 of her in her secret heart, and would not think the less of him for 
 showing it just a little. But when he found that Miss Grey took 
 the poetess quite seriously, and had a genuine affection for her, his 
 sister's value rose immensely in his eyes ; he paid her great atten- 
 tion, and, as has been said, he had his reward. 
 
 It grew late ; the rooms were rapidly thinning. Minola and 
 Miss Blanchet were to remain at Mrs. Money's for the night. 
 Blanchet could not stay much longer and had risen to go away, 
 when Victor Heron entered. He came up to speak to Minola, and 
 Minola introduced him to her particular friend and camarade, Miss 
 Blanchet ; and he sat beside Miss Blanchet and talked to her for 
 a few moments, while Blanchet took advantage of the opportunity 
 to talk again with Minola. Then Mr. Heron rose, and Herbert 
 rose, and Mary Blanchet, growing courageous, told Heron that 
 that was her brother and a great poet, and in a very formal old- 
 fashioned way, begged permission to make them acquainted. Mr. 
 Heron was a passionate admirer of poetry, and occasionally, 
 perhaps, tried the patience of his friends by too lengthened citations 
 from Shakespeare and Milton, but in modern poetry he had not got 
 much later than " The Arab physician Karshish," which he could 
 recite from end to end ; and " In Memoriam," of which he knew 
 the greater part. He was, however, modestly conscious that his 
 administrative engagements in the colonies had kept him a little 
 behind the rest of the world in the matter of poetry, and it did 
 not surprise him in the least that a very great poet, whose name 
 had never before reached his ears, should be there beside him in 
 Mrs. Money's drawing-room. He felt delighted and proud at 
 meeting a poet and a poet's sister. 
 
 It so happened that after saying his friendly good-night to his 
 hostess — a ceremony which, even had the rooms been crowded, 
 Mr. Heron would have thought it highly rude and unbecoming to 
 omit — our fallen ruler of men found himself in Victoria Street 
 with Mr. Blanchet. 
 
 " Are you going my way ? " Heron asked him, with irrepressible 
 sociability ; " I am going up Pall Mall and into Piccadilly, and I 
 
" THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN:' 93 
 
 shall be glad if you are coming the same way. Are you going to 
 walk ? I always walk when I can. May I offer you a cigar ? I think 
 you will find these good." 
 
 Herbert took a cigar, and agreed to walk Heron's way : which 
 was, indeed, so far as it went, his own. Heron was very proud to 
 walk with a poet. 
 
 " Yours is a delightful calling, sir," he said ; " excuse me if I 
 speak of it. I remember reading somewhere that one should never 
 talk to an author about his works. But I couldn't help it : we 
 don't meet poets in some of our colonies ; and your sister was 
 kind enough to enlighten my ignorance and tell me that you were 
 a poet. I always thought that a charming anecdote of Wolfe re- 
 citing Gray's Elegy, and telling his officers he would rather have 
 written that than take Quebec. Ay, by Jove, and so would I ! " 
 
 Mr. Blanchet had never heard of the anecdote, and had by no 
 means any clear idea as to the identity or exploits of Wolfe. But 
 he was anxious to know something about Heron, and therefore he 
 was determined to be as companionable as possible. 
 
 " You must not believe all my sister says about me. She has 
 an extravagant notion of my merits in every way." 
 
 " It must be delightful to have a sister," Victor Heron said, 
 enthusiastically. "Do you know, I can't imagine any greater 
 happiness for a man than to have a sister. I envy you, Mr. 
 Blanchet." 
 
 Heron was in the peculiar position of one to whom all the 
 family relationships present themselves in idealised form. He had 
 never had sister or brother ; and a sister now rose up in his imagi- 
 nation as a sort of creature compounded of a simplified Flora 
 Maclvor and a glorified Ruth Pinch. His novel-reading in the 
 colonies was a little old-fashioned, like many of his ideas, and his 
 habit of frequently using the word " sir " in talking with men whom 
 he did not know very familiarly. 
 
 Mr. Blanchet was not disposed, from his knowledge of Mary 
 Blanchet, to hold the possession of a sister as a gift of romantic or 
 inestimable value. To say the truth, when Victor spoke so warmly 
 of the delight of having a sister, he too was not setting up the 
 poetess as an ideal. He was thinking rather of Miss Grey, and 
 what a sister she would be for a man to confide in and have always 
 with him. 
 
 Meanwhile Herbert, with all his self-conceit, had common sense 
 enough to know that it would not do to leave Heron to find 
 out from others that the great poet Blanchet had yet to make his 
 fame. 
 
 " My sister and I have been a long time separated," he said ; 
 
94 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " she lived in the country for the most part, and I had to come 
 to London." 
 
 " Of course. The only place for a man of genius ; a grand 
 stage, Mr. Blanchet — a grand stage." 
 
 " So, of course, Mary is all the more inclined to make a sort of 
 hero of me. You must not take her estimate of me, Mr. Heron. 
 She fancies the outer world must think just as she does of every- 
 thing I do. I am not a famous poet, Mr. Heron, and probably 
 never shall be. I belong to a school which does not cultivate 
 fame, or even popularity." 
 
 " I admire you all the more for that. It always seems to me 
 that the poet degrades his art who hunts for popularity— the poet 
 or anybody else for that matter," added Victor, thinking of his own 
 unpopular performances in St. Xavier's Settlements. " I am de- 
 lighted to meet you, Mr. Blanchet. I have seen so much hunting 
 after popularity in England that I honour any man of genius who 
 has the courage to set his face against it." 
 
 " My latest volume of poems," Blanchet said firmly, " I do not 
 even mean to publish. They shall be printed, I hope, and set 
 out in a manner becoming them — becoming, at least, what I think 
 of them ; but they shall not be hawked about book-shops, and 
 reviewed by self-conceited ignorant prigs." 
 
 "Quite right, Mr. Blanchet; just what I should like to do 
 myself, if I could possibly imagine myself gifted like you. But 
 still you must admit that it is little to the credit of the age that a 
 poet should be forced thus to keep his treasures from the public 
 eye. Besides, it may be all very well, you know, in your case or 
 mine ; but think of a man of genius who has to live by his poems! 
 It's easy talking for men who have enough — my enough, I confess, 
 is a pretty modest sort of thing — but you must know better than 
 I that there are young men of genius — ay, of real genius — trying 
 to make a living in London by writings that perhaps their own 
 generation will never understand. That is what seems to me the 
 hard thing." Mr. Heron grew quite animated. 
 
 The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new 
 acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy, 
 evidently regarded him as a person equally favoured by fortune, 
 and therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. 
 Herbert Blanchet had heard from the Money women in a vague sort 
 of way that Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might 
 have been Canada or India for aught he knew to the contrary ; and 
 he assumed that he must be a very aristocratic and self-conceited 
 person. Blanchet would not for the world have admitted at that 
 moment that he was poor ; and he shuddered at the idea that Heron 
 
" THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN." 95 
 
 might somehow learn all about Mary Blanchet's official position in 
 the court-house of Dukes-Keeton. For all the dignity of poetry 
 and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with a painful conscious- 
 ness of being small, somehow, in the company of Mr. Heron. It 
 was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he 
 knew Mrs. Money was rich and that Lucy would be an heiress, and 
 yet he was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to 
 give himself airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him 
 that Mr. Heron's family, friends, and familiar surroundings would 
 probably be very different from his ; and he always found himself 
 at home in the society of women, whom he knew that he could 
 impress and impose on by his handsome presence. Yes, he felt 
 himself rather small in the society of this pleasant, simple, un- 
 pretending young man, who was all the time looking up to him as 
 a poet and a child of genius. 
 
 Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor 
 Heron asked him to come into his rooms and smoke a cirar before 
 going to bed. 
 
 " Y° U d ° n,t sleep much or kee P earl y llours > I dare say, Mr 
 Blanchet ;_ literary men don't, I suppose ; and I only sleep when f 
 cant help it. Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two " 
 
 " Night is my day," said Blanchet. " I don't think people 
 who have minds can talk well in the hours before midnight. When 
 I have to work in the day I sometimes close my shutters, li^ht my 
 gas, and fancy I am under the influences of night." 
 
 "I got the way of sitting up half the night," said Victor simply 
 
 from living in places where one had best sleep in the day • but I 
 
 am sure if I were a poet I should delight in the night for its own sake." 
 
 There was something curious in the feeling of deference with 
 which Heron regarded the young poet. He considered Blanchet as 
 something not quite mortal, or, at all events, masculine ; something 
 entitled to the homage one gives to a woman and the enthusiasm 
 one fee Is to a spiritual teacher. Blanchet did not seem to him 
 exactly like a man ; rather like one of those creatures compounded 
 of fire and dew whom we read of in legend and mythology. The 
 feeling was not that of awe, because Blanchet was young and a od- 
 lookmg, and wore a dress coat and white tie, and it is impossible 
 to have a feeling of awe for a man with a white tie. It was a 
 feeling of delicate consideration and devotion. Had some rude 
 person jostled against or otherwise insulted the poet as they passed 
 along,_ Victor would have felt it his duty to interpose and resent 
 the affront as promptly as if Minola Grey or Lucy Money were the 
 object of the msult. To his unsophisticated colonial mind the 
 poet was the sweet feminine voice of the literary grammar. 
 
96 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Heron occupied two or three rooms on the drawing-room floor 
 of one of the streets running out of Piccadilly. He paid, perhaps, 
 more for his accommodation than a prudent young man beginning 
 the world all over again would have thought necessary; but Heron 
 could not come down all at one step from his dignity as a sort of 
 colonial governor, and he considered it, in a manner, due to the 
 honour of England's administrative system that he should maintain 
 a gentlemanlike appearance in London whilst still engaged in 
 fighting his battle — the battle which had not yet begun. Besides, 
 as he had himself told Minola Grey, his troubles thus far were 
 not money troubles. He had means enough to live like a modest 
 gentleman even in London, provided he did not run into ex- 
 travagant tastes of any kind, and he had saved, because he had 
 had no means of spending it, a good deal of his salary while in the 
 St. Xaviefs Settlements. He had engaged a servant when he esta- 
 blished himself in his lodgings; and his condition seemed to 
 Blanchet, when they entered the drawing-room together, and the' 
 servant was seen to be quietly busy in anticipating his master's 
 wants, to be that of an easy opulence whereof, in the case of young 
 bachelors, he had little personal knowledge. It was very impres- 
 sive for the moment. Genius, and originality, and the School 
 quailed at first before respectability, West-End rooms, and a man- 
 servant. 
 
 The adornments of the room were, to Mr. Blanchet's thinking, 
 atrocious. They were, indeed, only of the better-class London- 
 lodgings style ; mirrors and gilt and white and damask. There 
 were doors where there ought to have been curtains, carpets where 
 artistic feeling would have prescribed mats or rugs ; there were no 
 fans, not to say on the ceiling, but even on the walls. The only 
 suggestion of art in the place was a plaster cast of the Venus of 
 the Louvre which Heron himself had bought, and which in all 
 simplicity he adored. Mr. Blanchet held, first, that all casts were 
 nefarious, and next, that the Venus of Milo as a work of art was 
 beneath contempt. One of the divinities of his school had done 
 the only Venus which Art could acknowledge as her own. This 
 was, to be sure, a picture, not a statue ; but in Mr. Blanchet's 
 mind it had settled the Venus question for ever. The Lady 
 Venus was draped from chin to toes in a snuff-coloured gown, 
 and was represented as seated on a rock, biting the nails of a 
 lank, greenish hand ; and she had sunken cheeks, livid eyes, and 
 a complexion like that of the prairie sage-grass. Any other Venus 
 made Herbert Blanchet shudder. 
 
 The books scattered about were dispiriting. There were 
 Shakespeare, Byron, and Browning. Mr. Blanchet had never read 
 
" THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN? 97 
 
 Shakespeare, considered Byron below criticism, and could hardly 
 restrain himself on the subject of Browning. There were histories, 
 and Mr. Blanchet scorned history ; there were Blue-books, and 
 the very shade of blue which their covers displayed would have 
 made his soul sicken. It will be seen, therefore, how awful is the 
 impressive less of respectability when, with all these evidences of 
 the lack of artistic taste around him, Mr. Blanchet still felt himself 
 dwarfed somehow in the presence of the occupier of the rooms. 
 It ought to De said, in vindication of Mr. Heron, that the poor 
 youth was in nowise responsible for the adornments of the rooms, 
 except in so far as his plaster cast and his books were concerned. 
 He had never, up to this moment, noticed anything about the 
 lodgings, except that the rooms were pretty large, and that the 
 locality was convenient for his purposes and pursuits. 
 
 The two young men had some soda and brandy, and smoked 
 and talked. Blanchet was the poorest hand possible, at smoking 
 and drinking, but he swallowed soda and brandy in repeated doses, 
 while his host's glass lay still hardly touched before him. One 
 consequence was that his humbled feeling soon wore off, and he 
 became eloquent on his own account, and patronising to Heron. 
 He set our hero right upon every point connected with modem 
 literature and art, whereon it appeared that Heron had hitherto 
 possessed the crudest and most old-fashioned notions. Then he 
 declaimed some of his own shorter poems, and explained to Heron 
 that there was a conspiracy among all the popular and successful 
 poets of the day to shut him out from public notice, until Heron 
 felt compelled, by a sheer sense of fellow-feeling in grievance, to 
 start up and grasp his hand, and vow that his position was en- 
 viable in comparison with that of those who had leagued themselves 
 against him. 
 
 " But you must hear my last poem ; you shall hear it," Herbert 
 said magnanimously. 
 
 " I shall be delighted ; I shall feel truly honoured," murmured 
 Victor in perfect sincerity. " Only tell me when." 
 
 " The first reading — let me see — yes, the first reading is 
 pledged to Miss Grey. No one," the poet grandly went on, "can 
 hear it before she hears it." 
 
 " Of course not — certainly not ; I shouldn't think of it," the de- 
 thronedrulerofSt.Xavier'sSettlements hastened to interpose. "What 
 a noble girl Miss Grey is ! You know her very well, I suppose? " 
 
 " I look upon her," said the poet gravely, " as my patron 
 saint." He threw himself back in his chair, raised his eyes to 
 the ceiling, murmured to himself some words which sounded like 
 a poetic prayer, and swallowed his soda and brandy. 
 
 H 
 
98 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Victor thought he understood, and remained silent. His heart 
 swelled with admiration, sympathy, and an entirely innocent, un- 
 selfish envy. 
 
 " Still," the poet said, rising in his chair again, " there is no 
 reason why you should not hear the poem at the same time. I am 
 going to-morrow to read the poem to Minola — to Miss Grey— and 
 Mary. I am sure they will both be delighted if you will come with 
 me and hear it." 
 
 " I should like it of all things, of course ; but I don't know 
 whether I ought to intrude on Miss Grey. I understood from her 
 that she rather prefers to live to herself — with her friends, of 
 course — and that she does not desire to have visitors." 
 
 " You may safely come with me," the poet proudly said. " I'll 
 call for you to-morrow, if you like." 
 
 Victor assumed that he might safely accept the introduction of 
 his new acquaintance, and the appointment was made. 
 
 If Mr. Heron could under any possible circumstances have 
 been brought to admit to himself that the society of a poet was a 
 little tiresome, he might perhaps have acknowledged it in the 
 present instance. The good-natured young man was quite content 
 for the present to sink and even to forget his own grievance in 
 presence of the grievances of his new acquaintance. His own 
 trouble seemed to him but small in comparison. What, after all, 
 was the misprizing of the political services of an individual, in the 
 face of a malign or stupid lack of appreciation which might deprive 
 the world and all time of the outcome of a poet's genius ? Heron 
 began now to infer that his new friend was poor, and the convic- 
 tion made him more and more devotedly sympathetic. He was 
 already dimly revolving in his mind a project for the publication 
 of Blanchet's poems at the risk or expense of a few private friends, 
 of whom he was to be the foremost. Some persons have a genius, 
 a heaven bestowed faculty, for the transfer of their own responsi- 
 bilities and cares to other minds and shoulders. Already two 
 sympathetic friends of a few hours' standing are separately taking 
 thought about the publication of Mr. Blanchet's poems without 
 risk or loss to Mr. Blanchet. Still, it must be owned that Mr. 
 Blanchet's company was growing a little of a strain on the attention 
 of his present host. Blanchet knew absolutely nothing of politics 
 or passing events of any kind in the outer world, and did not 
 affect or pretend to care anything about them. Indeed, had he 
 been a man of large and liberal information in contemporary 
 history, he would in all probability have concealed his treasures 
 of knowledge, and affected an absolute and complacent ignorance. 
 Outside the realms of what he called Art, Mr. Blanchet thought 
 
THE GA Y SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 99 
 
 it utterly beneath him to know anything ; and within his own 
 realm he knew so much, and bore down with such a terrible dog- 
 matism, that the ordinary listener sank oppressed beneath it. 
 Warmed and animated by his own discourse, the poet poured 
 out the streams of his dogmatic eloquence over the patient Heron, 
 who strained every nerve in the effort to appreciate, and in the 
 honest desire to acquire, exalted information. 
 
 At last the talk came to an end, and even Blanchet got some- 
 how the idea that it was time to be going away. Victor accom- 
 panied him as far as the doorway, and they stood for a moment 
 looking into the silent street. 
 
 " You haven't far to go, I hope ? " 
 
 "No, not far ; not exactly far," the poet answered. " I'll find 
 a cab, I dare say. To-morrow, then, you'll come with me to Miss 
 Grey's ? You needn't have any hesitation ; you will be quite wel- 
 come, I assure you. I'll call for you." 
 
 " Come to breakfast, then, at twelve." 
 
 " All right," the complacent Blanchet answered, his earlier awe 
 having given place to an easy familiarity ; " I'll come." 
 
 He nodded, and went his way. Victor Heron looked for a 
 while after his tall, slender, and graceful figure. 
 
 " He's a handsome fellow," Heron said to himself, " and a 
 poet, and I can easily imagine a girl being in love with him, or 
 any number of girls. She is a very fine girl, quite out ot the 
 common track. She must be very happy. I almost envy him. 
 No, I don't ; what on earth have I to do with such nonsense ? " 
 
 He returned to his room, and sat thinking for a while. All 
 his political worrying and grievance-mongering seemed to have 
 lost character somehow, and become prosaic, and unsatisfying, and 
 vapid. It did not seem much to look forward to, that sort of thing 
 going on for ever. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE GAY SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Mary Blanchet was, for the time, one of the happiest women 
 on the earth, when she had to bestir herselt, on her returning home 
 next day, to make preparations for the test-reading of her brother's 
 poems. To hear Herbert's poems read was a delight which could 
 only be excelled by the pride and joy of having them read to such 
 
ioo MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 an audience. She had so long looked up to Minola as a leader 
 and a princess, that she at last came to regard her as the natural 
 arbitress of the destiny of anyone belonging to the Blanchet family. 
 In some vague way she had made up her mind that, if Miss Grey 
 only gave the word of command, the young poet's works must go 
 forth to the world, and going forth must of course be estimated at 
 their proper worth. Her pride was double-edged. On this side, 
 there was the poet-brother to show to her friend ; on that side, the 
 friend who was to be the poet-brother's patroness. Her "animula 
 vagula, blandula," floated all that day on the saffron and rose 
 clouds of rising joy and fame. 
 
 Nor was her gratification at all diminished when Herbert 
 Blanchet called very early to crave permission to bring Mr. Heron 
 with him, and when he obtained it. Blanchet had thought, it 
 prudent not to rely merely on the close friendship with Miss Grey 
 of which he had spoken a little too vauntingly to Victor the night 
 before, and it seemed to him a very necessary precaution to call 
 and ask permission to introduce his friend. He was fortunate 
 enough to find Minola not only willing, but even what Mary 
 might have thought, if she had considered the matter, suspiciously 
 willing, to receive Mr. Heron. In truth, Minola had in her mind 
 a little plot to do a service to Mary Blanchet and her brother in 
 the matter of the poems, and she had thought of Mr. Heron as 
 the kindliest and likeliest person she knew to give her a helping 
 hand in the carrying out of her project. Mary, not thinking any- 
 thing of this, was yet made more happy than before by the pro- 
 spect of having a handsome young man for one of the audience. 
 As has been said already, she had the kindliest feelings to handsome 
 young men. Then the presence of another listener would make 
 the thing quite an assembly ; almost, as she observed in gentle 
 ecstasy more than once to Minola, as if it were one of the poetic 
 contests of the Middle Ages, in which minstrels sang and peerless 
 ladies awarded the prize of song. 
 
 So she busied herself all the morning to adorn the rooms and 
 make them fit for the scenes of a poet's triumph. She started 
 away to Covent Garden and got pots of growing flowers and 
 handfuls of " cut flowers," to scatter here and there. She had an 
 old guitar which she disposed on the sofa with a delightfully artistic 
 carelessness, having tried it in all manner of positions before she 
 decided on the final one, in which the forgetful hand of the 
 musician was supposed to have heedlessly dropped it. All the 
 books in the prettiest bindings — especially poems — she laid about 
 in conspicuous places. Any articles of apparel — bonnets, wraps, 
 and such like, that might upon an ordinary occasion have been 
 
THE GA V SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRA TION. 101 
 
 seen on tables or chairs — were carefully stowed away in their 
 proper receptacles — except, indeed, for a bright-coloured shawl, 
 which, thrown gracefully across an arm of the sofa, made, in con- 
 junction with the guitar, quite an artistic picture in itself. Near 
 the guitar, too, in a moment of sudden inspiration, she arranged 
 a glove of Nola's — a glove only once worn, and therefore for all 
 pictorial effect as good as new, while having still the pretty shape 
 of the owner's hand expressed in it. What can there be, Mary 
 Blanchet thought, more winsome to look at, more suggestive of all 
 poetic thought, than the carelessly-lying glove of a beautiful girl ? 
 But she took good care not to consult the owner of the glove on 
 any such point, dreading with good reason Minola's ruthless scorn 
 of all shams and pre-arranged affectations. 
 
 Mary was a little puzzled about the art fixtures, if such an ex- 
 pression may be used, of the room ; the framed engravings, which 
 belonged to the owner of the house and were let with the lodgings, 
 of which they were understood to count among the special attrac- 
 tions. She had a strong conviction that her brother would not 
 admire them, would think meanly of them, and say so ; and al- 
 though Minola herself now and then made fun of them, yet it did 
 not by any means follow that she should be pleased to hear them 
 disparaged by a stranger. . About the wall-paper she was also a 
 little timorous, not feeling sure as to the expression which its study 
 might call into her brother's critical eye. She could not, however, 
 remove the engravings, and doing anything with the paper was 
 still more completely out of the question. There was nothing for 
 it, therefore, but to hope that his poetry and his audience would 
 so engross the poet, as to deprive his eyes of perception for cheap 
 art and ill-disciplined colours. 
 
 There was to be tea, delightfully served in dainty little cups, 
 and Mary could already form in her mind an idea of the graceful 
 figure which Minola would make as she offered her hospitality to 
 the poet. An alarm, however, began to possess her as the day 
 went on about the possibility of Minola not being home in time 
 for the reception of the strangers. In order that she might have 
 the place quite to herself to carry out her little schemes of decora- 
 tion, the artful poetess had persuaded Minola not to give up her 
 usual walk in the park ; and now suppose Minola forgot the hour, 
 or lost her way, or was late from any cause and had not time to 
 make any change in her walking dress, or actually did not come 
 in until long after the visitors had arrived ! What on earth was 
 she, Mary, to do with them ? 
 
 This alarm, however, proved unfounded. Minola came back 
 in very good time, looking healthy and bright, with some rain- 
 
102 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 drops on her hair, and putting away with good-humoured con- 
 tempt all suggestions about an elaborate change of dress. Miss 
 Blanchet would have liked her leader to array herself in some sort 
 of way that should suggest a queen of beauty or princess of culture 
 or other such imposing creature. At all events, she would have 
 liked trailing skirts and much perfume. She only sighed when 
 Minola persisted in showing herself in very quiet costume. 
 
 The rattle of a hansom cab was heard at last — at last, Mary 
 thought — in reality a few minutes before the time appointed ; and 
 the poet and Mr. Heron entered. The poet was somewhat pale, 
 and a little preoccupied. He had a considerable bulk of manu- 
 script in his hand. The manuscript was in itself a work of art, 
 as he had already explained to Victor. Each page was a large 
 leaf of elaborately rough and expensive paper, and the lines of 
 poetry, written out with exquisitely careful penmanship, occupied 
 but a small central plot, so to speak, of the field of white. The 
 margins were rich in quaint fantasies of drawing by the poet 
 himself and various artists of his brotherhood. Sometimes a 
 thought, or incident, or phrase of the text was illustrated on the 
 margin in a few odd, rapid strokes. Sometimes the artist, without 
 having read the text, contributed some fancy or whimsy of his 
 own ; sometimes it was a mere monogram, sometimes a curious 
 perplexed pictorial conceit : now, merely the face of a pretty 
 woman, and again, some bewildering piece of eccentric sym- 
 bolism, about the meaning whereof all observers differed. It must 
 be owned that, as Minola looked at these ornaments of the manu- 
 script, she could not help feeling a secret throb of satisfaction at 
 the evidence they gave that the reading would not be quite so long 
 as the first sight of the mass of paper had led her to expect. 
 
 Mr. Blanchet did not do much in the way of preliminary con- 
 versation. He left all that to Minola and Victor ; and the latter 
 was seldom wanting in talk when he believed himself to have sym- 
 pathetic listeners. It should be said that the well-ordered guitar- 
 effect proved a failure, for Mr. Blanchet, soon after entering the 
 room, flung himself into what was to have been a poetic attitude 
 on the sofa, and came rather awkwardly on the guitar, and was a 
 little vexed at the thought of being made to seem ridiculous. 
 
 Everyone was anxious that a beginning of the reading should 
 be made, and no one seemed to know exactly how to start it. 
 Suddenly Mr. Blanchet arose, as one awakened from a dream. 
 
 " May I beg, Miss Grey, for three favours ? " 
 
 Minola bowed, and waited. 
 
 " First, I cannot read by daylight. My poems are not made 
 for day. They need a peculiar setting. May I ask that the 
 
THE GAY SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 103 
 
 windows be closed, and the lamps lighted ? I see you have 
 lamps.' 
 
 " Certainly, if you wish ;" and Minola promptly rang the bell. 
 
 " Thank you very much. In the second place, I would ask that 
 no sign of approval or otherwise be given as I read. The whole 
 must be the impression, not any part. It must be felt as a whole, 
 or it is not felt at all. Until the last line is read no judgment can 
 be formed." 
 
 This was discouraging and even depressing, but everybody 
 promised. Minola in particular began to fear that poets were not 
 so much less objectionable than other men, as she had hoped. She 
 could not tell why, but as she listened to the child of genius, she 
 was filled with a strange memory of Mr. Augustus Sheppard. 
 Everything that seemed formal and egotistic reminded her of Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard. 
 
 " Then," continued Herbert, "when I have finished the last 
 line, you will, perhaps, allow me to leave you at once, without 
 formality, and without even speaking ? I ask for no sudden judg- 
 ment ; that I shall hear another time ; too soon, perhaps," and he 
 indulged in a faint smile. " But I prefer to go at once, when I 
 have read a poem ; it is a peculiarity of mine," and he passed his 
 hand through his hair. " Reading excites me, and I am over- 
 wrought. It may not be so with others, but it is so with me." 
 
 " I can quite understand," the good-natured Victor hastened 
 to say. " Quite natural — quite so. I have often worked myself 
 into such a state of excitement, thinking of things — not poetry, of 
 course, but colonial affairs, and such dry stuff — that I have to go 
 out at night, perhaps, and walk in the cool air, and recover 
 myself. Don't you feel so, sometimes, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 " Oh, no; I am neither poet nor politician, and I have nothing 
 to think about." At the moment she thought Blanchet a sham, 
 and Heron rather a weak and foolish person for encouraging him. 
 What would you have of men ? 
 
 " I have felt so, often," Mary Blanchet said, with a gentle sigh. 
 
 Miss Grey did not doubt that people felt so ; that everybody 
 might feel so under appropriate conditions. It was the deliberate 
 arranging of preliminaries by Mr. Blanchet that vexed her; it 
 seemed so like affectation and play-acting. She was prepared to 
 think his poetry rubbish. 
 
 It was not rubbish, however ; not mere rubbish, by any means. 
 Mr. Blanchet had a considerable mastery ot the art ot arranging 
 together melodious and penetrating words, and he caught up 
 cleverly and adopted the prevailing idea and purpose of the small, 
 new group of yet hardly known artists in verse and colour to whom 
 
104 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 it was his pride to belong. His poems belonged to what might 
 be called the literature of disease. In principle, thev said to cor- 
 ruption, " Thou art my father," and to the worm, " Thou art my 
 mother and my sister." They dealt largely in graves and corpses, 
 aad the loves of skeletons, and the sweet virtues of sin, and the 
 joys of despair and dyspepsia. They taught that there is no truth 
 but paradox. Mr. Blanchet read his contributions with great 
 effect ; in a voice now wailing, now threatening, now storming 
 fiercely, now creeping along in tones of the lowest hoarseness. 
 What amazed Minola was, to find that any man could have so 
 little sense of the ridiculous, as to be able to go through such a 
 performance in a small room before three people. In a crowd 
 there might be courage ; but before three ! It was wonderful. 
 She felt horribly inclined to laugh ; but the gleaming eyes of the 
 poet alighted on hers and fastened them every now and then ; 
 and poor Mary, too, she knew, was watching her. 
 
 It was very trying to her. She endeavoured to fill her mind 
 with serious and sad thoughts ; and she could not keep herself 
 from thinking of the scene in Richter's Flegeljahre, where the kin 
 of the eccentric testator are trying in fierce rivalry who shall be 
 the first to shed a tear for his loss, in presence of the notary and 
 the witnesses, and thereby earn the legacy to which that exas- 
 perating condition was attached. After all, it is probably easier to 
 restrain a laugh than to pump up a tear, especially when the 
 coming of the tear must bring the drying glow of a glad success 
 with it. Minola's condition was bearable ; and indeed, when she 
 saw the genuine earnestness of the poet, her inclination to laugh 
 all died away, and she became filled with pity and pain. Then she 
 tried hard to admire the verses, and could not. At first the con- 
 ceits and paradoxes were a little startling, and even shocking, and 
 they made one listen. But the mind soon became attuned to them 
 and settled down, and was stirred no more. Once you knew that 
 Mr. Blanchet liked corpses, his peculiarity became of no greater 
 interest than if his liking had been for babies. When it was made 
 clear that what other people called hideousness, he called beauty, 
 it did not seem to matter much more than honest Faulconbridge's 
 determination, if a man's name be John, to call him Peter. 
 
 The poet sometimes closed his eyes for a minute together, and 
 pressed his hand upon his brow, while drops of perspiration stood 
 distinctly on his livid forehead. But he took breath again, and 
 went on. He evidently thought his audience could not have enough 
 of it. The poem was, in fact, a chaplet of short poem-beads. 
 Many of its passages had the peculiarity that they came to a 
 sudden end exactly when the listeners supposed that the interest 
 
>~1 
 
 
I 
 
THE GA V SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 105 
 
 of the thing was only going to begin. AVhen a page was ended 
 "the poet lifted it, so to speak, with the sudden effort of one hand 
 and arm, as though it were something heavy like a shield, and then 
 flung it from him, looking fixedly into the eyes of some one of the 
 three listeners the while. This formality impressed Mary Blanchet 
 immensely. It seemed the very passion and wrestling of poetic 
 inspiration ; the prophetic fury rushing into action through the 
 prophet. 
 
 Minola once or twice glanced at the face of Victor Heron. At 
 first it was full of respectful and anxious attention, animated now 
 and then by a sudden flicker of surprise. Of late these feelings 
 and moods had gradually changed, and after a while the settling- 
 down condition had clearly arrived. At length Miss Grey could 
 see that, while Mr. Heron still maintained an attitude of the most 
 courteous attention, his ears were decidedly with his heart, and 
 that was far away — with his own grievance and the St. Xavier's 
 Settlements. 
 
 At last it was over. The close, for all their previous prepara- 
 tion, took the small audience by surprise. It came thus : — 
 
 I asked of my soul — What is death? 
 I asked of my love — What is hate ? 
 I asked of decay — Art thou life? 
 And of night— Art thou day? 
 Did they answer ? 
 
 The poet looked up with eyes of keen and almost fierce inquhy. 
 The audience quailed a little, but, not feeling the burden of re- 
 sponse thrown upon them, resumed their expectant attitudes, 
 waiting to hear what the various oracles had said to their poetic 
 questioner. But they were taken in, if one might use so homely 
 an expression. The poem was all over. That was the beginning 
 and the end of it. The poet flung away his last page, and sank 
 dreamy, exhausted, back into his chair. A moment of awful 
 silence succeeded. Then he gathered up his illuminated scrolls, 
 rose from his chair, bowed gravely, and left the room. Mary 
 Blanchet hurried after him. 
 
 Minola was perplexed, depressed, and remorseful. She thought 
 there must be something in the productions which made their author 
 so much in earnest, and she was afraid she had not seemed attentive 
 enough, or that Blanchet had detected her in her early inclination 
 to smile. There was an embarrassed pause when Victor and she 
 were left together. 
 
 " He reads very well," Heron said at last. " A capital reader, I 
 think — don't you ? He throws his soul into it. That's the great 
 thing." 
 
106 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " It is," said Minola, " if it's much to throw — Oh, I don't know 
 what I mean by that. But, how do you like the poems ? " 
 
 " Well, I am sure they must be very fine. I should rather hear 
 the judgment of some one else. I should like to hear you speak 
 first. You tell me what you think of them, and then I'll tell you, 
 as the children say." 
 
 " I don't care about them," said Minola, shaking her head 
 sadly. " I have tried, Mr. Heron ; but I can't admire them. I can't 
 see any originality, or poetry, or anything in them. I could not 
 admire them — unless a command came express from the Queen to 
 tell me to think them good." 
 
 "So you read the Misanthrope — Moliere's Misanthrope?" 
 Victor said eagerly — having caught in a moment Minola's 
 whimsical allusion to the duty of a loyal critic when under royal 
 command. 
 
 " Yes, I used to pass half my time reading it ; I have almost 
 grown into thinking that I have a sort of copyright in it ; Alceste 
 is my chief hero, Mr. Heron." 
 
 " I wish I were like him," said Mr. Heron. 
 
 " I wish you were," she answered gravely. 
 
 " But I am not — unfortunately." 
 
 " Unfortunately," she repeated, determined to pay no com- 
 pliment. 
 
 " You must let me come some day and have a long talk with 
 you about Moliere," Victor said, nothing discouraged, having 
 wanted no compliment, nor thought of any. 
 
 " I shall be delighted : you shall talk, and I will listen. I am 
 so glad to find a companion in Moliere. But I wish I could have 
 admired Mr. Blanchet's poems. I prefer my own ever so much." 
 
 " Your own ! " The audacious self-complacency of the 
 announcement astonished him, and seemed out of keeping with 
 Miss Grey's character and ways. " Do you write poems ?" 
 
 " Oh, no ; if I did, I don't think I could admire them." 
 
 " But how then — what do you mean ? " 
 
 " Well, one can feel such poetry in every blink of sunshine even 
 in this West Centre, and every breath of wind, and every stray 
 recollection of some great book that one has read — when one was 
 young, you know. That poetry is never brought to the awful test 
 of being written down and read out. I do so feel for Mr. Blanchet ; 
 I suppose his poems seemed glorious before they were written out." 
 
 " But I think they seem glorious to him even still." 
 
 " They do— and to Mary. Mr. Heron, tell me honestly and 
 without affectation — are you really a judge of poetry? " 
 
 " Not I," said Heron. " I adore a lew old poets and one or 
 
 
THE CA V SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 107 
 
 two new ones, but I couldn't tell why — and those that I admire 
 everybody else admires too, so that I can't pretend to myself that 
 I have any original judgment. My opinion, Miss Grey, isn't worth 
 a rush." 
 
 " I am very glad to hear it — very. Neither is mine. So you see 
 we may be both of us quite mistaken about Mr. Blanchet's poems." 
 
 " Of course we may — I dare say we are : in fact, I am quite 
 sure we are," said Heron, growing enthusiastic. 
 
 " Anyhow, it is possible. Now, I have been thinking" 
 
 " Yes, you have been thinking ? " 
 
 " I don't know whether I am only going to prove myself a busy- 
 body ; but I am so fond of Mary Blanchet." 
 
 " Yes : quite right ; so am I — I mean, I like her very much. 
 But what do you think of doing ? " 
 
 " Well, if one could do anything to get these poems published 
 or brought out in some way — if it could be done without Mr. 
 Blanchet's knowledge, or if he could be got to approve of it, and 
 was not too proud ? " 
 
 " All that I have been thinking of already," Victor said. " I 
 do think it's a shame that a fellow shouldn't have a chance of 
 fighting his battle for the want of a few wretched pounds." 
 
 " How glad I am now that I spoke of this to you ! Then if 1 
 get up a little plot, you'll help me in it ? " 
 
 " I'll do everything — delighted." 
 
 " But first you must understand me. This is for my dear old 
 friend Mary Blanchet — not for Mr. Blanchet : I don't particularly 
 care about him, in that sort of way, and I fancy that men generally 
 can take care of themselves ; but I can't bear to have Mary Blanchet 
 disappointed, and that is why I want to do something. Now will 
 you help me? — I mean, will you help me in my way?" 
 
 " I will help in any way you like, so long as I am allowed to 
 help at all. But I don't quite understand what you mean." 
 
 " Don't you ? I wish you did without being told so very, very 
 clearly. Well, my Mary Blanchet is proud : and though she might 
 accept for her brother a helping hand from me, it would be quite a 
 different thing where a stranger was concerned. In plain English, 
 Mr. Heron, whatever money is to be paid must be paid by me ; or 
 there shall be no plot. Now you understand." 
 
 " Yes, certainly ; I quite understand your feelings. I should 
 have liked" 
 
 " No doubt : but there are so many things one could have liked. 
 The thing is now, will you help me — on my conditions ?" 
 
 " Of course I will : but what help can I give, as you have 
 ordered things ? " 
 
108 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " There are ever so many things to do which I couldn't do, 
 and shouldn't even know how to go about : seeing publishers and 
 printers, and all that kind of work." 
 
 " All that I'll do with pleasure ; and I am only sorry that you 
 limit me to that. May I ask, Miss Grey, how old are you ? " 
 
 " What on earth has that to do with the matter ? Shall you 
 have to give the publishers a certificate of my birth ? " 
 
 "No, it's not for that. But you seem to me a very young 
 woman, and yet you order people and things as if you were a 
 matron." 
 
 Minola smiled and coloured a little. " I have lived an odd 
 and lonely sort of life," she said, " and never learned manners : 
 perhaps that is the reason. If I don't please you, Mr. Heron — 
 frankly, I shan't try." 
 
 There was something at once constrained and sharp in her 
 manner, such as Heron had not observed before. She seemed 
 changed somehow as she spoke these unpropitiatory words. 
 
 " Oh, you do please me," he said ; " sincere people always 
 please me. Remember that I, too, admire the Misanthrope." 
 
 " Yes, very well ; I am glad that you agree to my terms ; — and 
 we are fellow-conspirators." 
 
 " We are, and" 
 
 "Stop! here comes Mary." 
 
 Mary Blanchet came back. Her face had a curiously depreca- 
 ting expression. She herself had been filled with wonder and 
 delight by the reading of her brother's poems ; but she had known 
 Minola long enough to be as sensitive to her moods and half- 
 implied meanings, as the dog who catches from one glance at his 
 master's face the knowledge of whether the master is or is not in 
 a temper suited for play. Mary had done her very best to reassure 
 her brother ; but she had not herself felt quite satisfied about 
 Minola's admiration. 
 
 " Well ? " Mary said, looking beseechingly at Minola, and then 
 appealingly at Victor, as if to ask whether he would not come to 
 the rescue : '•' Well ? " 
 
 " We have been talking," Minola said, with a resolute effort, 
 "we have been talking — Mr. Heron and I — about your brother's 
 poems, Mary ; and we think that the public ought to have a 
 chance of judging of them." 
 
 " Oh, thank you ! " Mary exclaimed, and she clasped her hands 
 fervently. 
 
 " Yes, Mr. Heron says he is clear about that." 
 
 " I was sure Mr. Heron would be," said Mary, with becoming 
 pride in her brother. She was not eager to ask any more questions, 
 
 ; 
 
THE GAY SCIENCE IN A NEW ILLUSTRATION. 109 
 
 for she felt convinced that when Minola Grey said the poems 
 ought to go before the public, they would somehow go ; and she 
 saw fame for her brother in the near distance. She thought she 
 saw something else, too, as well as fame. The interest which 
 Minola took in Herbert's poems must surely betoken some interest 
 in Herbert himself. Mary knew well enough, too, that there is 
 nothing which so disposes some women to love men as the 
 knowledge that they are serving and helping the men. This 
 subject of love the little poetess had long and quaintly studied. 
 She had followed it through no end of pomes and romances, and 
 lain awake through long hours of many nights considering it. bhe 
 had subjected it to severe analysis, bringing to the aid of the 
 analysing process that gift of imagination which it is rarely per- 
 mitted to the hard scientific enquirer to employ to any purpose. 
 She had pictured herself as the object of all manner of wooings, 
 under every conceivable variety of circumstances. Love by sur- 
 prise ; love by the slow degrees of steady growth ; love pressed 
 upon her by ardent youth ; gravely tendered by a dignified 
 maturity which, until her coming, had never known such passion ; 
 love bending down to her from a castle, looking up to her from the 
 cottage of the peasant ; — love in every form had tried her in fancy, 
 and she had pleased and vexed herself in conjuring up its various 
 effects upon her susceptibility. But the general result of the 
 poetess's self-examination was to show that the love which would 
 most keenly touch her heart would be that which was born of 
 passion and compassion united. He, that is to say, whom she 
 had helped, and patronised, and saved, would be the man she best 
 could love. Perhaps Mary Blanchet's years had something to do 
 with this turn of feeling. The unused emotions of the maternal 
 went, in her breast, to blend with and make up the equally un- 
 satisfied sentiments of love : and her vague idea of a lover was that 
 of somebody who should be husband and child in one. 
 
 Anyhow the result of all this, in the present instance, was that 
 Mary felt a sudden and strong conviction that to allow Minola 
 Grey to do Herbert a kindly service was a grand thing gained 
 towards inducing Minola to fall in love with him. 
 
 So the three conspirators fell to making their arrangements. 
 The parts were easily divided. Mr. Heron was to undertake the 
 business of the affair, to see publishers and printers and so forth ; 
 Mary Blanchet was to undertake, or at least endeavour, to obtain 
 the consent of her brother, whose proud spirit might perhaps 
 revolt against such patronage, even from friendly hands. Miss 
 Grey was to bear the cost. It was soon a very gratifying thing 
 to the conspirators to know that no objection whatever was likely 
 
 , 
 
no MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 to come from Mr. Blanchet. The poet accepted the proffered 
 favour not only with readiness but with joy, and was particularly 
 delighted and flattered when he learned from Mary — what Mary 
 was specially ordered not to tell him — that Miss Grey was his lady 
 patroness. He was to have been allowed vaguely to understand 
 that friends and admirers — whose name might have been Legion 
 — were combined to secure justice for him. But Mary, in the 
 pride of her heart, told him all the truth, and her brother was 
 greatly pleased and very proud. The only stipulation he made 
 was that the poems should be brought out in a certain style, with 
 such paper, such margins, such bindings, and so on : according to 
 the pattern of another poet's works, whereof he was to furnish a 
 copy. 
 
 " She will be rich one day, Mary," he said, " and she can 
 afford to do something for Art." 
 
 " Will she be rich ? " Mary asked eagerly. " Oh, I am so glad ! 
 She ought to be a princess ; she should be, if I were a queen." 
 
 "Yes, she'll be rich — what you and I would call rich," he said 
 carelessly. " Everything is to be hers, when the stepmother dies ; 
 and I believe she is in a galloping consumption." 
 
 " How do you know, Herbert ? " 
 
 "You asked me to enquire, you know," he said, "and I did 
 enquire. It was easily done. Her father left his money and things 
 to his second wife only for her life ; when she dies, everything 
 comes to your friend ; and I hear the woman can't live long. 
 Keep all that to yourself, Mary." 
 
 " I am sure Minola doesn't know anything about it. I know 
 she never asked nor thought of it." 
 
 " Very likely, and the old people would not tell her. But it's 
 true for all that. So you see, Mary, we can afford to have justice 
 done to these poems of mine. If they are stones of any value, let 
 them be put in proper setting or not set at all. I am entitled to 
 ask that much." 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 "love, the messenger of death." 
 
 Victor Heron seemed to Minola about this time in a fairway 
 to let his great grievance go by altogether. He was filled with it 
 personally when he had time to think about it, but the grievances 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH." m 
 
 of somebody else were always coming across his path, and drawing 
 away his attention from his own affairs. Minola very soon noticed 
 this peculiarity in him, and at first could hardly believe in its 
 genuineness ; it so conflicted with all her accepted theories about 
 the ingrained selfishness of man. But by watching and studying his 
 ways, which she did with some interest, she found that he really had 
 that unusual weakness, and she was partly amused and partly 
 annoyed by it. She felt angry with him now and then for neglecting 
 his own task, like another Hylas, to pick up every little blossom of 
 alien grievance flung in his way. She pressed on him with an 
 earnestness which their growing friendship seemed to warrant the 
 necessity of his doing something to set his cause right or ceasing 
 to tell himself that he had a cause which called for justice. 
 
 It would not be easy to find a more singular friendship than that 
 which was growing up between Miss Grey and Victor. She received 
 him whenever he chose to come and see her. Many a night when 
 Mary Blanchet and she sat together he would look in upon them 
 as he went to some dinner-party, or even as he came home from 
 one, if he had got away early, and have a few minutes' talk with 
 them. He came often in the afternoon, and if Minola did not 
 happen to be at home, he would nevertheless remain and have a 
 long chat with Mary Blanchet. He seemed always in good 
 humour with himself and everybody else, except in so far as his 
 grievance was concerned, and always perfectly happy. It has been 
 already shown that, although quite a young man, he considered 
 himself, by virtue of his experience and his public career, ever so 
 much older than Minola. Once or twice he sent a throb of keen 
 delight through Mary Blanchet's heart by speaking of something 
 that " I can remember, Miss Blanchet, and perhaps you may 
 remember it — but Miss Grey couldn't of course." To be put on 
 anything like equal ground with him as to years was a delightful 
 experience to the poetess. It was all the more delicious because 
 there was such an evident genuineness in his suggestion. Of course, 
 if he had meant to pay her a compliment — such as a foolish person 
 might be pleased with, but not she, thank goodness — he would 
 have pretended to think her as young as Minola. But he had 
 done nothing of the kind ; and he evidently thought that she was 
 about the same age as himself. 
 
 At all events, and it was more to the purpose, he set down Miss 
 Grey as belonging to quite a different stage of growth from that to 
 which he had attained. He thought her a handsome and very 
 clever girl, who had the additional advantage over most other girls 
 that she was rather tall, and that he therefore was not compelled to 
 stoop much when speaking to her. He liked women and girls 
 
ii2 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 generally. He hardly ever saw the woman or girl he did not like. 
 If he had known that a woman was insincere or affected, he would 
 not have liked her; but then he never knew it; he never saw it; 
 it never occurred to him. Anybody could have seen that he was 
 a man who had no sisters or girl-cousins. The most innocent and 
 natural affectations of womanhood were too deep for him to see. 
 There really was a great deal of truth in what he had said to 
 Minola about his goddess theory as regarded women. He made 
 no secret about his greatly admiring her — thinking her very clever 
 and fresh and handsome. He would without any hesitation have 
 told her that he liked her best of all the women he knew, but then 
 he had often told her that he liked other women very much. He 
 seemed therefore die man whom a pure and fearless woman, even 
 though living in Minola's odd condition of semi-isolat'-on, might 
 frankly accept as a friend without the slightest fear for the tranquillity 
 of his heart or of hers. Minola, too, had always in her own breast 
 resented with anger and contempt the idea that a man and woman 
 can never be brought together and allowed to walk in the beaten 
 way of friendship without their forthwith wandering off into the 
 thickets and thorny places of love. All such ideas she looked 
 upon as imbecility, and scorned. " I don't like men," she used 
 to say to herself and even to others pretty freely. "I never saw a 
 man fit to hold a candle to my Alceste. I never saw the man 
 who seemed to me worth a woman's troubling her heart about." 
 She" began to say this of late more than ever, and to say it to 
 herself, especially when the day and the evening had closed and 
 she was alone in her own room. She said it over almost as if it 
 were a sort of charm. 
 
 The business of the poems now gave him many occasions to 
 call, and one particular afternoon Victor called when, by a rare 
 chance, Mary Blanchet happened to be out of doors. Minola had 
 had it on her mind that he was not pushing his cause very earnestly, 
 and was glad of the opportunity of telling him so. He listened 
 with great good humour. It is nearly as agreeable to be lectured 
 as to be praised by a handsome young woman who is unaffectedly 
 interested in one's welfare. 
 
 " I shall lose my good opinion of you if you don't keep more 
 steadily to your purpose." 
 
 " But I do keep steadily to it. I am always thinking of it." 
 
 " No; you allow anything and everything to interfere with you. 
 Anybody's affairs seem more to you than your own." 
 
 Victor shook his head. 
 
 " That isn't the reason," he said. " I wish it were, or anything 
 half so good. No ; the truth is, that I get ashamed of the cursed 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH." 113 
 
 work of trying to interest people in my affairs who don't want to 
 take any interest in them. I am a restless sort of person and must 
 be doing something, and my own business is now in that awful 
 stage when there is nothing practical or active to be done with it. 
 I find it easier to get up an appearance of prodigious activity 
 about some other person's affairs. And then, Miss Grey, I don't 
 mind confessing that I am rather sensitive and morbid — egotistic, 
 I suppose — and if anyone looks coldly on me when I endeavour 
 to interest him in my own affairs, I take it to heart more than if 
 it were the business of somebody else I had in hand." 
 
 " But you talked at one time of appealing to the public. Why 
 don't you do that?" 
 
 " Get people to bring my case on in the House of Commons?" 
 
 "Yes; why not?" 
 
 "It looks like being patronised and protected and made a client 
 of." 
 
 " Well, why don't you try and get the chance of doing it your- 
 self." 
 
 He smiled. " I still do hold to that idea— or that dream. I 
 should like it very much, if one only had a chance. But no 
 chance seems to turn up ; and one loses heart sometimes." 
 
 " Oh, no," Minola said earnestly, " don't do that." 
 
 " Don't do what ? " 
 
 He had hardly been thinking of his own words, and he seemed 
 a little surprised at the earnestness of her tone. 
 
 " Don't lose heart. Don't give way. Don't fall into the track 
 of the commonplace and become like every one else. Keep to 
 your purpose, Mr. Heron, and don't be beaten out of it." 
 
 " No ; I haven't the least idea of that, I can assure you : quite 
 the contrary. But it is so hard to get a chance, or to do anything, 
 all at once. Everything moves so slowly in England. But I have 
 a plan — we are doing something." 
 
 " I am very glad. You seem to me to be doing nothing for 
 yourself." 
 
 " Do I ? I can assure I am much less Quixotic than you 
 imagine. Now, I am so glad to hear that you still like the Parlia- 
 mentary scheme, because that is the idea that I have particularly at 
 heart, and if the idea comes to anything there are some reasons 
 why you should take a special interest in it." 
 
 " Are there really ? May I be told what they are ? " 
 
 " Well, the whole thing is only in prospect and uncertainty just 
 yet. _ The idea is Money's, not mine; he has found out that there 
 is going to be a vacancy in a certain borough," and Victor smiled 
 jand looked at her, "before long ; and his idea is, that I should 
 
 1 
 
114 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 become a candidate, and tell the people my whole story right out, 
 and ask them to give me a chance of defending myself in the 
 House. But the thing is not yet in shape enough to talk much 
 about it. Only I thought you would be glad to know that I 
 haven't thrown up the sponge all at once." 
 
 Minola did not very clearly follow all that he had been saying ; 
 partly because she was beginning to be afraid that to put herself 
 into the position of adviser and confidante to this young man was a 
 scarcely becoming performance on her part. Her mind was a little 
 perturbed, and she was not a very good listener then. Some people 
 say that women seldom are good listeners ; that while they are 
 playing the part of audience they are still thinking how they look 
 as performers. Anyhow, Minola was now growing anxious to escape 
 from her position. 
 
 " I am so glad," she said vaguely, " that you are doing some- 
 thing, and that you don't mean to allow yourself to be beaten." 
 
 " I don't mean to be, I assure you," he said, a little surprised 
 at her sudden coolness. " I shouldn't like to be. That isn't my 
 way, I hope." 
 
 "1 hope not too, and I think not ; I wish I had such a pur- 
 pose. Life seems to me such a pitiful thing — and in a man 
 especially — when there is no great clear purpose in it." 
 
 " But is a man's trying to get himself a new appointment a 
 great clear purpose ? " he asked with a smile. He was now trying 
 to draw her out again on the subject, having been much pleased 
 with the interest she seemed to take in him, and a little amused 
 by the gravity with which she tendered her advice. 
 
 " No, but yours is not merely trying to get an appointment. 
 You are trying to have justice done to your past career and to 
 get an opportunity of being useful again in the same sort of way. 
 You don't want to lead an idle life, lounging about London. Mr. 
 Blanchet has his poems ; Mr. Money has — well, he has his 
 business, whatever it is, and he is in Parliament." 
 
 At this moment the servant entered and handed a card to 
 Minola. A gentleman, she said, particularly wished to see Miss 
 Grey, but he would call any time she pleased to name if she could 
 not see him at present. Minola's cheek grew red as she glanced at 
 the card, for it bore the name of Mr. Augustus Sheppard, and it 
 had the words pencilled on it : " Wishes particularly to see you — 
 has important business." Her lips trembled. Nothing could be 
 more embarrassing and painful than such a visitation. The dis- 
 agreeable memory of Mr. Sheppard and of the part of her life to 
 which he belonged had been banished from her thoughts, at least 
 except for occasional returning glimpses, and now here was Mr. 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH" 115 
 
 Sheppard himself in London, and asserting a right to see her. 
 She could not refuse him, for he did, perhaps, come to her with 
 some message from those in Keeton who still would have called 
 themselves her family. Mary Blanchet had only just gone out, 
 and Minola was left to talk to Mr. Sheppard alone. For a 
 moment she had a wild idea of begging Victor Heron to stay and 
 bear her company during the interview. But she put this thought 
 away instantly, and made up her mind that she had better hear 
 what Mr. Sheppard had to say alone. 
 
 " Show the gentleman in, Jane," she said, as composedly as 
 she could. " A friend — at least, a friend of my people, from my old 
 place, Mr. Heron." 
 
 Heron was looking at her, she thought, in a manner that 
 showed he had noticed her embarrassment. 
 
 "Well, I must wish you a good morning," Mr. Heron said; 
 " be sure I shan't forget what you were saying." 
 
 " Thank you — yes ; what was I saying ? " 
 
 " Oh, the very good advice you were giving me ; and I propose 
 to hear it all out another time. Good morning." 
 
 " Don't go for a moment, pray don't," she asked with an 
 earnestness which surprised Victor. " Only a moment — I would 
 rather you didn't go just yet." 
 
 The thought suddenly went through her that Mr. Sheppard 
 was the very man to put an exaggerated meaning on the slightest 
 thing that seemed to hint at secresy of any kind, and that she had 
 better take care to let him see, face to face, what sort of visitor 
 was with her when he came. Victor was glad in any case of the 
 chance of remaining a few moments longer, and was in no par- 
 ticular hurry to go so long as he could think he was not in any- 
 body's way. 
 
 Victor Heron stood, hat in hand, on the hearth-rug near the 
 chimney-piece. As Mr. Sheppard entered, Heron was the first 
 person he happened to see, and the entirely unexpected sight sur- 
 prised him. He glanced confusedly from Heron to Minola before 
 he spoke a word, and his manner, always stiff and formal, seemed 
 to acquire in a moment an additional incubus of constraint. 
 Victor Heron had something about him which did not seem 
 exactly English and which to a provincial mind might well suggest 
 the appearance of a foreigner — a Frenchman. Mr. Sheppard had 
 never felt quite satisfied in his own mind about that mysterious 
 rival of whom Minola spoke to him on the memorable day when 
 he saw her last. She had told him that her Alceste was only " a 
 man who lived in a book, Mr. Sheppard — in what you would call 
 a play." How well he remembered the very words she used, and 
 
 i 2 
 
n6 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 the expression of contempt on her lips as she used them ! And 
 he had got the book — the play — and read it ; toiled through it, 
 and found that there was an Alceste in it. So far she had told the 
 truth, no doubt ; but might not the Alceste have a living embodi- 
 ment, or might she not have found since that time a supposed 
 realisation of her Alceste, and might not this be he — this hand- 
 some, foreign-looking young man, who was lounging there as coolly 
 and easily as if the place belonged to him ? For a moment an 
 awful doubt filled his mind. Could she be married ? was that her 
 husband? 
 
 " Miss Grey ? " he said in hesitating and questioning tone, as 
 that of one who is not quite clear about the identity of the person 
 he is addressing ; but Mr. Sheppard was only giving form uncon- 
 sciously to the doubt in his own mind, Are you still Miss Grey ? 
 
 The words and their tone were rather fortunate for Minola. 
 They amused her and seemed ridiculous, although she did not 
 guess at Mr. Sheppard's real meaning, and they enabled her to get 
 back at once to her easy contempt for him. 
 
 " You must have forgotten my appearance very soon, Mr. 
 Sheppard," she said, in a tone which carried the contempt so 
 lightly and easily that he probably did not perceive it, "or I must 
 have changed very much, if you are not quite certain whether I 
 am Miss Grey. You have not changed at all ; I should have 
 known you anywhere." 
 
 " It is not that," Mr. Sheppard said with a little renewal of 
 cheerfulness. " I should have known you anywhere, Miss Grey. 
 You have not changed, except indeed that you have, if that were 
 possible, improved. Indeed, I would venture to say that you have 
 decidedly improved." 
 
 " Thank you : you are very kind." 
 
 " It would be less surprising if you, Miss Grey, had had some 
 difficulty in recognising me. Fortune, perhaps, has withdrawn some of 
 her blessings from others only to pour them more lavishly on you." 
 
 " I feel very well, thank you ; but I hope fortune has not been 
 robbing any Peter to pay Paul in my case. You, at least, don't 
 seem to have been cheated out of any of your good health, Mr. 
 Sheppard." 
 
 While he made his little formal speeches Mr. Sheppard con- 
 tinued to glance sidelong at Victor Heron. Mr. Heron now left 
 his place at the chimney-piece, and came forward to take his leave. 
 
 " Must you go ? " Minola asked with as easy a manner as she 
 could assume. She dreaded a tete-a-tete with Sheppard, and she 
 also dreaded to let it be seen that she dreaded it. If Mary 
 Blanchet would only come ! 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH." 117 
 
 An expedient occurred to her for putting off the dreaded con- 
 versation yet a moment, and giving Mary Blanchet another chance. 
 " I should like my friends to know each other," Minola said, 
 with a gaiety of manner which was hardly in keeping with her 
 natural ways. " People are not introduced to each other now, I 
 believe, when they meet by chance in London, but we are none of 
 us Londoners. Mr. Sheppard comes from Keeton, Mr. Heron, 
 and is one of the oldest friends of my family." 
 
 Mr. Heron held out his hand with eyes of beaming friendliness. 
 " Mr. Heron ? " Sheppard asked slowly, " Mr. Victor Heron ? " 
 "Victor Heron, indeed !" 
 
 " Mr. Victor Heron, formerly of the St. Xavier's Settlements?" 
 Heron only nodded this time, finding Mr. Sheppard's manner 
 not agreeable. Minola wondered what her townsman was thinking 
 of, and how he came to know Heron's name and history. 
 
 " Then my name must surely be known to you, Mr. Heron. 
 The name of Augustus Sheppard, of Dukes-Keeton?" 
 
 " No, sir," Heron replied, " I am sorry to say that I don't re- 
 member to have heard the name before." 
 
 " Indeed ! " Mr. Sheppard said, with a formal smile, intended to 
 be incredulous and yet not to seem too plainly so ; "yet we are 
 rivals, Mr. Heron." 
 
 Minola started and coloured. 
 
 " At least, we are to be," Mr. Sheppard went on— " if rumour 
 in Dukes-Keeton speaks the truth. I am not wrong in assuming 
 that I have the honour of addressing the future Radical— I mean 
 Liberal — candidate for that borough ? " 
 
 " Oh, that's it ! " Heron said carelessly, " yes, yes : I didn't 
 know that rumour had yet troubled herself about the matter so 
 much as to speak of it truly or falsely. But, of course, since you 
 have heard it, Mr. Sheppard, it's no secret. I have some ideas 
 that way, Miss Grey. I intend to try whether I can impress your 
 townspeople. This gentleman, I suppose, is on the other side." 
 
 " I am the other side," Mr. Sheppard said gravely. " I am to 
 be the Conservative candidate — I was accepted'by the party as the 
 Conservative candidate, no matter who the Radical may be." 
 
 " Well, Mr. Sheppard, we shall not be the less good friends, I 
 hope," Heron said cheerily ; " I can't be expected to wish that 
 the best man may win, for that would be to wish failure for myself, 
 but I wish the better cause may win, and in that you will join me. 
 Good morning, Miss Grey ! " 
 
 The room seemed to grow very chilly to Minola when his bright 
 smile and sweet courteous tones were withdrawn, and she was left 
 with her old lover. 
 
Ii8 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 There was not much in Sheppard's appearance to win her back 
 to any interest in him. He did not compare advantageously with 
 Victor Heron. When Heron left the room, the light seemed to 
 have gone out ; Heron was so fresh, so free, so sweet, and yet so 
 strong, full of youth, and spirit, and manhood, a natural gentleman 
 without the insipidity of the manners of society. Poor Augustus 
 Sheppard was formal, constrained, and prosaic ; he had not even 
 the dignity of austerity. He was not self-sufficing ; he was only 
 self-sufficient. As he stood there he was awkward, and almost 
 cowed. He seemed as if he were afraid of the girl, and Minola 
 was woman enough to be angry with him because he seemed afraid 
 of her. He was handsome, but in that commonplace sort of way 
 which in a woman's eyes is often worse than being ugly. Minola 
 felt almost pitiless towards him, although the girl's whole nature 
 was usually full of pity, for, as has already been said, she did not 
 believe in his affection, and thought, him a thorough sham. He 
 stood awkwardly there, and she would not relieve him from his 
 embarrassment by saying a word. 
 
 " Well, Miss Grey," he began at last, " I suppose you hardly 
 expected to see me." 
 
 " I did not know you were in town, Mr. Sheppard." 
 - " I fear I am not very welcome," he said, with an uncomfort- 
 able smile ; "but your mother particularly wished me to see you." 
 
 " My mother, Mr. Sheppard ! " Minola grew red with pain and 
 anger. 
 
 " I mean your stepmother, of course — the wife of your father." 
 
 " Once the wife of my father ; now the wife of somebody else." 
 
 " Well, well ! at all events, the person who might be naturally 
 supposed to have the best claim to some authority — or influence ; 
 influence, let us say — over you." 
 
 " Has Mrs. Saulsbury sent you to say that she thinks she ought 
 to have some influence over me?" 
 
 " Oh, no," he answered with that gentle deprecation of anger 
 which is usually such fuel to anger's fire. " Mrs. Saulsbury has 
 given up any idea of the kind long since — quite long since, I 
 assure you. I think, if you will permit me to say it, that you were 
 always a little unjust in your judgment of Mrs. Saulsbury. She 
 is a true-hearted and excellent woman." 
 
 Minola said nothing. Perhaps she felt that she never had been 
 quite in a position to do impartial justice to the excellence and the 
 true-heartedness of Mrs. Saulsbury. 
 
 " But," Mr. Sheppard resumed, with a gentle motion of his 
 hands, as if he would wave away now all superfluous and hopeless 
 controversy, " That is not what I came to say." 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH." 119 
 
 Minola bowed slightly to signify that she was glad to know he 
 was coming to the point at last. 
 
 " Mrs. Saulsbury is in very weak health, Miss Grey ; something 
 wrong with the lungs, I fear." 
 
 Minola was not much impressed at first. It was one of Mrs. 
 Saulsbury's ways to cry "wolf ! " very often as regarded the con- 
 dition of her lungs ; and up to the time of Minola's leaving, people 
 had not been in serious expectation of the wolf's really putting his 
 head in at the door. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard saw in Minola's face what she did not say. 
 
 " It is something really serious," he said. " Mr. Saulsbury 
 knows it, and every one. You have not been in correspondence 
 with them for some time, Miss Grey." 
 
 "No," said Miss Grey — "I wrote, and nobody answered my 
 letter." 
 
 " I am afraid it was regarded as — as" 
 
 " Undutiful perhaps ? " 
 
 " Well, — unfriendly. But Mrs. Saulsbury now fears — or rather 
 knows, for she is too good a woman to fear — that the end 
 is nigh, and she wishes to be in fullest reconciliation with every- 
 one." 
 
 " Oh, has she sent for me? " Minola said, with something like 
 a cry, all her coldness and formality vanishing with her contempt. 
 " I'll go, Mr. Sheppard, oh yes, at once ! I did not know — I never 
 thought that she was really in any danger." 
 
 Poor Minola ! with all her wild-bird freedom and her pride in 
 her lonely independence and her love of London, there yet re- 
 mained in her that instinct of home, that devotion to the principle 
 of family and authority, that she would have done homage at such 
 a moment, and with something like enthusiasm, to even such a 
 simulacrum of the genius of home as she had lately known. Some- 
 thing had passed through her mind that very day as she talked with 
 Heron, and feared she had talked too freely ; something that had 
 made her think with vague pain of yearning on the sweetness of a. 
 sheltered home. Her heart beat as she thought, " I will go to 
 her — I will go home ; I will try to love her." 
 
 Mr. Sheppard dispelled her enthusiasm. " Mrs. Saulsbury did 
 not exactly express a wish to see you." 
 
 " Oh ! " 
 
 " In fact, when that was suggested to her — I am sure I need 
 hardly say that I at once suggested it — she thought, and perhaps 
 wisely, that it would be better you should not meet." 
 
 Minola drew back, and stood as Mr. Heron had been standing 
 near the chimney-piece. She did not speak. 
 
120 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " But Mrs. Saulsbury begged me to convey to you the 
 assurance of her entire and cordial forgiveness." 
 
 Minola bowed gravely. 
 
 " And her hope that you will be happy in life and be guided 
 towards true ends, and find that peace which it has been her 
 privilege to find." 
 
 Minola bore all this without a word. 
 
 "What shall I say to her from you?" he asked. " Miss Grey, 
 remember that she is dying." 
 
 The caution was not needed. 
 
 "Say that I thank her," said Minola, in a low subdued tone 
 " Say that, after what flourish your nature will, Mr. Sheppard. I 
 suppose I was wrong as it uch as she ; I suppose it was often my 
 fault that we did not get on better. Say that I am deeply grieved 
 to hear that she is so dangerously ill, but that I hope — oh, so 
 sincerely ! — that she may yet recover." 
 
 Mr. Sheppard looked into her eyes with puzzled wonder. Was 
 she speaking m affected meekness ; or in irony, as was her wont? 
 Was the proud, rebellious girl really so gentle and subdued ? 
 Could it be that she took thus humbly Mrs. Saulsbury's pardon ? 
 Yes, it seemed all genuine. There was no constraint on the lines 
 -of her lips ; there was no scorn in her eyes. In truth, the sympa- 
 thetic and generous heart of the girl was touched to the quick. 
 The prospect of death sanctified the woman who had been so hard 
 to her, and turned her cold self-complacent pardon into a blessing. 
 If the dying are often the most egotistic and self-complacent of all 
 human creatures, and are apt to make of their very condition a 
 fresh title to lord it for the moment over the living — as if none had 
 ever died before, and none would die after them, and therefore the 
 world must pay special attention and homage to them — if this is 
 so, Minola did not then know it or think about it. 
 
 The one thing on earth which Mr. Sheppard most loved to see 
 was woman amenable to authority. He longed more passionately 
 than ever to make Minola his wife. 
 
 " There is something else on which I should like to have your 
 permission to speak," he said; and his thin lips grew a little 
 tremulous. " But I could come another time, if you preferred." 
 
 " I would rather you said now, Mr. Sheppard, whatever you 
 wish to say to me." 
 
 " It is only the old story. Have you reconsidered your deter- 
 mination — you remember that last day — in Keeton? I am still the 
 same." 
 
 " So am I, Mr. Sheppard." 
 
 " But things have changed — many things ; and you may want 
 
"LOVE, THE MESSENGER OF DEATH." 12 1 
 
 a home ; and you may grow tired of this kind of life— and I 
 shan't be a person to be ashamed of, Minola ! I am going to be in 
 Parliament, and you shall hear me speak — and I know I shall get 
 on. I have great patience. I succeed in everything— I really do." 
 She smiled sadly and shook her head. 
 
 " In everything else, I do assure you, so far— and I may even 
 in that ; I must, for I have set my heart upon it." 
 
 She turned to him with a glance of scorn and anger. But his 
 face was so full of genuine emotion, of anxiety and passion and 
 pain, that its handsome commonplace character became almost 
 poetic. His lips were quivering ; and she could see drops of 
 moisture on his shining forehead, and his eyes were positively 
 glittering, as if in tears. 
 
 "Don't speak harshly to me," he pleaded, " for I don't deserve 
 it. I love you with all my heart, and to-day more than ever— a 
 thousand times more — for you have shown yourself so eenerous 
 and forgiving— and— and like a Christian." 
 
 Then for the first time the thought came, a conviction, into 
 her mind—" He really is sincere ! " A great wave of new com- 
 passion swept away all other emotions. 
 
 " Mr. Sheppard," she said, in softened tones, " I do ask of you 
 not to say any more of this. I couldn't love you, even if I tried, 
 and why should you wish me to try ? I am not worth all this— I 
 tell you with all my heart that I am not worth it, and that you 
 would think _ so one day if I were foolish enough to — to listen to 
 you. Oh ! indeed you are better without me. I wish you every 
 success and happiness. I don't want to marry." 
 
 " Once," he said, "you told me there was no one you cared for 
 but a man in a book. I wonder, is that so now ? " 
 
 In spite of herself, the colour rushed into Minola's face. It 
 was a lucky question for her, however unlucky for him, because it 
 recalled her from her softer mood to natural anger. 
 
 " You can believe me in love with anyone you please to select 
 in or out of a book, Mr. Sheppard, so long as it gives you a reason 
 for not persecuting me with your own attentions. I like a man in 
 a book better than one out of it ; it is so easy to close the book 
 and be free of his company when he grows disagreeable." 
 _ She did not look particularly like a Christian then, probably, 
 in his eyes. He left her, his heart bursting with love and anger 
 When Mary Blanchet returned, she found Minola pale and 
 haggard, her eyes wasted with tears. 
 
122 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A MAN OF THE TIME. 
 
 Several days passed away, and Minola heard no more from 
 Mr. Sheppard. She continued in a state of much agitation ; 
 her nerves, highly strung, were sharply jarred by the news of the 
 approaching death of Mrs. Saulsbury. It was almost like watching 
 outside a door, and counting the slow, painful hours of some 
 lingering life within, while yet one may not enter and look upon 
 the pale face, and mingle with the friends or the mourners, but is 
 shut out and left to ask and wait : it was like this, the time of sus- 
 pense which Minola passed, not knowing whether the wife of her 
 father was alive or dead. As is the way of all generous natures, it 
 was now Minola's impulse to accuse and blame herself because 
 there had been so little of mutual forbearance in her old home at 
 Keeton. She kept wondering whether things might not have gone 
 better, if she had said and done this or that ; or, if she had not 
 said and done something else. Full of this feeling, she wrote a 
 long emotional letter to Mr. Saulsbury, which she begged of him 
 to read to his wife, if she were in a condition to heat it. The 
 letter was suffused with generous penitence and self-humiliation. 
 It was a letter which perhaps no impartial person could have read 
 without becoming convinced that its writer must have been in the 
 right in most of the controversies of the past. 
 
 The letter did not reach the eyes or ears for which it was 
 particularly intended. Minola received a coldly forgiving answer 
 from Mr. Saulsbury — forgiving her upon his own account, which 
 was more than Minola had sought, — but adding, that he had not 
 thought it desirable to withdraw, for a moment, by the memory of 
 earthly controversies, the mind of his wife from the contemplation 
 of that well-merited heaven which was opening upon her. Great 
 goodness has one other advantage in addition to all the rest over 
 unconverted error — it can, out of its own beatification, find a 
 means of rebuking those with whom it is not on terms of friend- 
 ship. The expected ascent of Mrs. Saulsbury into heaven became 
 another means of showing poor Minola her own unworthiness. 
 Mr. Saulsbury closed by saying that Mrs. Saulsbury might linger 
 yet a little, but that her apotheosis (this, however, was not his 
 word) was only a question of days. 
 
 There was nothing left for Minola but to wait, and now accuse 
 and now try to justify herself. Many a time there came back to 
 
A MAN OF THE TIME. 123 
 
 her mind the three faces on the mausoleum in Keeton, the 
 symbols of Life, Death, and Eternity ; and she could not help 
 wondering whether the mere passing through the portal of death 
 could all at once transfigure a cold, narrow-minded, peevish, ego- 
 tistical human creature into the soul of lofty calmness and ineffable 
 sweetness, all peace and love, which the sculptor had set out in 
 his illustration of Humanity's closing state. 
 
 Meantime, she kept generally at home, except for her familiar 
 walks in the park, and her now less frequent visits to the British 
 Museum and to South Kensington. Lucy Money, surprised at 
 her absence, hunted her up, to use Lucy's own expression, and 
 declared that she was looking pale and wretched, and that she 
 must come over to Victoria Street, and pass a day or two there, 
 for companionship and change. Mary Blanchet, too, pressed 
 Mmola to go ; and at last she consented, not unwilling to be 
 taken forcibly out of her self-inquisition and her anxieties for the 
 moment. She had made no other acquaintances, and seemed 
 resolute not to make any ; but there was always something pecu- 
 liarly friendly and genial to her in the atmosphere of the Moneys' 
 home. _ The whole family had been singularly kind to her, and 
 their kindness was absolutely disinterested. Minola could not but 
 love Mrs. Money, and could not but be a little amused by her; 
 and there was something very pleasing to her in Mr. Money's 
 strong common sense and blunt originality. Minola liked, too, 
 the curious little peeps at odd groupings of human life which she 
 could obtain by sitting for a few hours in Mrs. Money's drawing- 
 room. All the Schwarmerei of letters, politics, art, and social life 
 seemed to illustrate itself " in little " there. 
 
 Minola, when she accompanied Lucy to her home, was taken 
 by the girl up and down to this room and that to see various new 
 things that had been bought, and the two young women entered 
 Mrs. Money's drawing-room a little after the hour when she usually 
 began to receive visitors. A large lady, who spoke with a very 
 deep voice, was seated in earnest conversation with Mrs. Money. 
 
 " This is my darling, sweet Lucy, I perceive," the lady said in 
 tones of soft rolling thunder as the young women came in 
 
 " Oh ! Lady Limpenny ! " 
 
 " Come here, child, and embrace me ! But this is not your 
 sister ? My sight begins to fail me so terribly; we must expect it, 
 Mrs. Money, at our time of life." 
 
 Lucy tossed her head at this, and could hardly be civil. She was 
 always putting m little protests, more or less distinctly expressed, 
 against Lady Limpenny's classification of Mrs. Money and herself 
 as on the same platform in the matter of age, and talking so openly 
 
154 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 . of " their time of life." In truth, Mrs. Money was still quite a 
 young-looking woman, while Lady Limpenny herself was a re- 
 markably well-preserved and even handsome matron, a little 
 perhaps too full-blown, and who might at the worst have sat fairly 
 enough for a portrait of Hamlet's mother, according to the popular 
 dramatic rendering of Queen Gertrude. 
 
 " No ; this young lady is taller than Theresa. I can see that, 
 although I have forgotten my glass. I always forget or mislay my 
 glass." 
 
 " This is Miss Grey — Miss Minola Grey," said Mrs. Money. 
 " Lady Limpenny, allow me to introduce my dear young friend, 
 Miss Minola Grey." 
 
 " Dear child, what a sweet pretty name ! Now tell me, dearest, 
 where did your people find out that name ? I should so like to 
 know." 
 
 " I think it was found in Shakespeare," Minola answered ; " it 
 was my mother's choice, I believe." 
 
 " A name in the family, no doubt. Some names run in families. 
 I dare say you have had a — what is it ? — Minola — in your family 
 in every generation. One cannot tell the origin of these things — I 
 have often thought of making a study of family names. Now, my 
 name — Laura — there never was a generation of our family ; we are 
 the Atomleys — there never was a generation of the Atomleys without 
 a Laura. Now, how curious, in my husband's family — Sir James 
 Limpenny — in every generation one of the girls was always called 
 by the pet name of ' Chat' Up to the days of the Conquest, I do 
 believe — or is it the Confessor, perhaps ? — you would find a Chat 
 Limpenny." 
 
 " There is a Chat Moss somewhere near Manchester," said Lucy 
 saucily, still not forgiving the remark about the time of life. " We 
 crossed it once in a railway." 
 
 " Oh, but that has nothing to do with it, Lucy darling — nothing 
 at all. I am speaking of girls, you know — girls called by a pet 
 name. I dare say that name was in my husband's family — oh, 
 long before the place you speak of was ever discovered. But now, 
 Miss Grey, do pray excuse me again — such a very charming name — 
 Minola ! but pray do excuse me, may I ask is that hair all your 
 own ? One is curious, you know, when one sees such wonderful 
 hair." 
 
 " Yes, Lady Limpenny," Minola said imperturbably ; " my hair 
 is all my own." 
 
 " I should think Nola's hair was all her own, indeed," Lucy 
 struck in. "I have seen her doing it a dozen times; not likely 
 that she would put on false hair." 
 
A MAN OF THE TIME. 125 
 
 " But, my sweet child, I do assure you that's nothing now," the 
 indomitable Lady Limpenny went on. " Almost everybody wears 
 it now — it's hardly any pretence any more. That's why I asked 
 Miss Grey — because I thought she perhaps wouldn't mind, seeing 
 that we are only women, we here. And it is such wonderful hair — 
 and it is all her own ! " 
 
 " Yes," murmured Lucy, " all her own ; and her teeth are her 
 own too ; and even her eyes." 
 
 " She has beautiful eyes indeed — you have, my dear," the good- 
 natured Lady Limpenny went on, having only caught the last part 
 of Lucy's interjected sentence. " But that does not surprise one ; 
 at least, I mean, when we see lovely eyes, we don't fancy that the 
 wearer of them has bought them in a shop — but hair is very dif- 
 ferent, — and that is why I took the liberty of asking this young 
 lady. But now, my darling Theresa Money, may I ask again about 
 your husband ? Do you know that it was to see him particularly I 
 came to-day — not you. Yes, indeed ! But you are not angry with 
 me — I know you don't mind ; I do so want to have his advice on 
 this very, very important matter." 
 
 " Lucy, dear, will you ask your papa if he will come down for 
 a few moments — I know he will — to see Lady Limpenny." 
 
 Mr. Money's ways were well known to Lady Limpenny. He 
 grumbled if disturbed by a servant, unless there was the most 
 satisfactory and sufficient reason, but he would put up with a great 
 deal of intrusion from Lucelet. The very worst that could happen 
 to Lucelet was to have one of her pretty ears gently pulled. So 
 Lucy went to disturb him unabashed, although she knew he was 
 always disposed to chaff Lady Limpenny. 
 
 " But you really don't mean to say that you are going to part 
 with all your china — with your uncle's wonderful china ? " Mrs. 
 Money asked, with eyes of almost tearful sympathy, resuming the 
 talk which Minola's entrance had disturbed. 
 
 " My darling, yes ! I must do it ! It is unavoidable." 
 
 Minola assumed that this was some story of sudden impoverish- 
 ment, and she could not help looking up at the lady with wondering 
 and regretful eyes, although not knowing whether she ought to have 
 heard the remark, or whether she was not a little in the way. 
 
 Lady Limpenny caught the look. 
 
 " This dear young lady is sympathetic, I know, and I am sure 
 she loves china, and can appreciate my sacrifice. But it ought not 
 to be a sacrifice : it is a duty — a sacred duty." 
 
 " But is it ? " Mrs. Money pleaded. 
 
 " Dearest, yes ! My soul was in danger. I was in danger 
 every hour of breaking the First Commandment ! My china was 
 
126 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 becoming my idolatry ! There was a blue set which was coming 
 between me and Heaven. I was in danger of going on my knees 
 to it every day. I found that my whole heart was becoming ab- 
 sorbed in it! One day it was borne in upon me; it came on me 
 like a flash. It was the day I had been to hear Christie and 
 Manson " 
 
 " To hear what? " Mrs. Money asked in utter amazement 
 
 " Oh, what have I been saying ? Christie and Manson ! My 
 dear, that only shows you the turn one's wandering, sinful thoughts 
 will take ! I mean, of course, Moody and Sankey ; — what a shame 
 to confuse such names." 
 
 " Oh, Moody and Sankey," Mrs. Money said again, becoming 
 clear in her mind. 
 
 " Well, it flashed upon me there that I was in danger ; and I 
 saw where the danger lay. Darling, I made up my mind that 
 moment ! When I came home, I rushed — positively rushed — into 
 Sir James's study. 'James,' I said, 'don't remonstrate, pray don't; 
 my mind is made up — I'll part with all my china.' " 
 
 " Dear me ! " Mrs. Money gently observed. " And Sir James 
 — what did he say ? " 
 
 "Well," Lady Limpenny went on, with an air of disappoint- 
 ment, "he only said 'All right,' or something of that kind. He 
 was writing, and he hardly looked up. He doesn't care." And 
 she sighed. 
 
 " But how good he is not to make any objection ! " 
 
 " Yes, oh yes ; he is the best of men. But he thinks I won't 
 do it, after all." 
 
 Mrs. Money smiled. 
 
 " Now, Theresa Money, I wonder at you ! I do really. Of 
 course I know what you are smiling at— you, too, believe I won't 
 do it. Do you think I would sacrifice my soul — deliberately 
 sacrifice my soul — even for china? You, dearest, might have 
 known me better." 
 
 " But would one sacrifice one's soul ? " 
 
 " Darling, with my temperament, yes ! Alas, yes ! I know 
 it ; and, therefore, I am resolved. Oh, here is Mr. Money. But 
 not alone!" 
 
 Mr. Money entered the room, but not alone, indeed, for there 
 came with him a very tall man, whom Minola did not know ; and 
 then, a little behind them, Lucy Money and Victor Heron. Mr. 
 Money spoke to Lady Limpenny, and then, with his usual friendly 
 warmth, to Minola ; and then he presented the new-comer, Mr. 
 St. Paul, to his wife. 
 
 Mr. St. Paul attracted Minola's attention from the first. He 
 
A MAN OF THE TIME. 127 
 
 was very tall, as has been said, but somewhat stooped in the 
 shoulders. He had a perfectly bloodless face, with keen, bold 
 blue eyes ; his square, rather receding forehead showed deep 
 horizontal lines when he talked, as if he were an old man ; and 
 he was nearly bald. His square chin and his full firm lips were 
 bare of beard or moustache. He might at times have seemed an 
 elderly man, and yet one soon came to the conclusion that he was 
 a young man looking prematurely old. There was a curious hardi- 
 hood about him, which was not swagger, and which had little of 
 carelessness, or, at all events, of joyousness, about it. He was 
 evidently what would be called a gentleman, but the gentleman 
 seemed somehow to have got mixed up with the rowdy. Minola 
 promptly decided that she did not like him. She could hear Mr. 
 St. Paul talking in a loud, rapid, and strident voice to Mrs. Money, 
 apparently telling her, off-hand, of travel and adventure. 
 
 Lady Limpenny had seized possession of Mr. Money, and was 
 endeavouring to get his advice about the sale of her china, and 
 impress him with a sense of the importance of saving her soul. 
 Minola was near Mrs. Money, and had just bowed to Victor 
 Heron, when Mr. St. Paul turned his blue eyes upon her. 
 
 " This is your elder daughter, I presume," he said ; " may I be 
 introduced, Mrs. Money ? Your husband told me she was not so 
 handsome as her sister, but I really can't admit that." 
 
 Mrs. Money was not certain for a moment whether her 
 daughter Theresa might not have come into the room, but when 
 she saw that he was looking at Miss Grey, she said, in her deep 
 tone of melancholy kindness, — 
 
 " No, this is not my daughter, Mr. St. Paul ; and even with all 
 a mother's partiality, I have to own that Theresa is not nearly so 
 handsome as this young lady. Miss Grey, may I introduce Mr. 
 St. Paul ? Miss Grey comes from Dukes-Keeton. Mr. St. Paul 
 and you ought to be acquaintances." 
 
 " Oh, you come from Dukes-Keeton, Miss Grey ! " and he 
 dropped Mrs. Money, and drew himself a chair next to Minola. 
 " So do I — I believe I was born there. Do you like the old 
 place?" 
 
 " No ; I don't think I like it" 
 
 " Nor I ; in fact, I hate it. Do you live there now ? " 
 
 She explained that she had now left Keeton for good, and was 
 living in London. He laughed. 
 
 " I left it for good long ago, or for bad. I have been about 
 the world for ever so many years ; I've only just got back to town. 
 I've been hunting in Texas, and rearing cattle in Kansas — that sort 
 of thing. I left Keeton because I didn't get on with my people." 
 
128 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Minola could not help smiling at what seemed the odd 
 similarity in their history. 
 
 " You smile because you think it was no wonder they didn't get 
 on with me, I suppose ? I left long ago — cut and run long before 
 you were born. My brother and I don't get on ; never shall, I 
 dare say. I am generally considered to have disgraced the family. 
 He's going back to Keeton, where he hasn't been for years ; and 
 so am I, for a while. He's been travelling in the East, and living 
 in Italy, and all that sort of thing, while I've been hunting buffaloes 
 and growing cattle out West." 
 
 "Are you going to settle in Keeton.now?" Miss Grey asked, 
 for lack of anything else to say. 
 
 " Not I ; oh, no ! I don't suppose I could settle anywhere 
 now. You can't, I think, when you've got into the way of 
 knocking about the world. I don't know a soul down there now, 
 I suppose. I'm going to Keeton now chiefly to annoy my brother." 
 And he laughed a laugh of half-cynical good humour, and thrust 
 his hands deep into his pockets. 
 
 " A Christian purpose," Miss Grey said. 
 
 "Yes, isn't it? We were always like that, I assure you ; the 
 elders and the youngers never could hit it off — always quarrelling. 
 I'm one of the youngers, though you wouldn't think so to look at 
 me, Miss Grey? Do look at me." 
 
 Miss Grey looked at him very composedly. He gazed into 
 her bright eyes with undisguised admiration. 
 
 " Well, I'm going to thwart my good brother in Keeton. He's 
 coming home, and going to do all his duties awfully regular and 
 well, don't you know ; and first of all, he's going to have a regular, 
 good, obedient Conservative member — a warming-pan. Do you 
 understand that sort of thing ? I believe the son of some honest 
 poor-rate collector, or something of that sort — a fellow named 
 Sheppard. Did you ever hear of any fellow in Keeton named 
 Sheppard? — Jack Sheppard, I shouldn't wonder." 
 
 " I know Mr. Augustus Sheppard, and he is a very respectable 
 man." 
 
 " Deuce he is ! but not a lively sort of man, I should think." 
 
 " No ; not exactly lively." 
 
 " No ; he wouldn't suit my brother if he was. Hope he isn't a 
 friend of yours ? Well, we're going to oppose him for the fun of 
 the thing. How very glad my brother will be to see me. I am 
 afraid I pass for a regular scamp in the memories of you Keeton 
 people. You must have heard of me, Miss Grey. No ? Before 
 your time, I suppose. Besides, I didn't call myself St. Paul then ; 
 I took on that name in America ; it's my mother's family name ; — 
 
A MAN OF THE TIME. 129 
 
 that's how you wouldn't remember about me, even if you had 
 heard. You know the mausoleum in the park, I dare say ? " 
 
 "Very well indeed. It used to be a favourite place with me." 
 
 "Ah, yes, my last offence was shooting off pistols there, aiming 
 at the heads over the entrance, you know. One of them will carry 
 my mark to his last day, I believe." 
 
 "Yes; I remember noticing that the face of Death has a mark 
 on it — a small hole." 
 
 He laughed again. 
 
 " Just so. That's my mark. Poor father ! It was the great 
 whim of his life to build that confounded thing, and he didn't 
 enjoy it after all. My brother, I am told, proposes to occupy part 
 of it in good time. They won't put me there, you may be sure." 
 
 "Your brother is the Duke?" Minola said, a faint memory 
 returning to her about a wild youth of the family who had had to 
 leave the army in some disgrace, and went away somewhere 
 beyond seas. 
 
 "Yes; I thought I told you, or that Money had mentioned it. 
 Yes; I was the good-for-nothing of the family. You can't imagine, 
 though, what a number of good-for-nothings are doing well out 
 Denver City way, out in Colorado. When I was there, there were 
 three fellows from the Guards, and some fellows I knew at Eton, 
 all growing cattle, and making money, and hunting buffalo, and 
 potting Indians, and making themselves generally as happy as 
 sandboys. I've made money myself, and might have made a lot 
 more, I dare say." 
 
 Mr. St. Paul evidently delighted to hear himself talk. 
 
 " It must be a very dangerous place to live in," Minola said, 
 wishing he would talk to somebody else. 
 
 " Well, there's the chance of getting your hair raised by the 
 Indians. Do you know what that means — having your hair 
 raised ? " 
 
 " I suppose being scalped." 
 
 " Exactly. Well, that's a danger. But it isn't so much a 
 danger if you don't go about in gangs. That's the mistake fellows 
 make, they think it's the safe thing to do, but it isn't. Go about 
 in parties of two, and the Indians never will see you — never will 
 notice you." 
 
 Minola's eyes happened at this moment to meet those 01 
 Heron. 
 
 " You know Heron ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; very well." 
 
 " A good fellow — very good fellow, though he has such odd 
 philanthropic fads about niggers and man and a brother, and all 
 
 K 
 
i 3 o MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 that sort of thing. Got into a nice mess out there in St. Xavier's, 
 didn't he?" 
 
 "I heard that his conduct did him great honour," Minola said 
 warmly. 
 
 "Yes, yes — of course, yes; if you look at it in that sort of way. 
 But these black fellows, you know, it really isn't worth a man's 
 while bothering about them. They're just as well off in slavery 
 as not — deuced deal better, I think ; I dare say some of their 
 kings and chiefs think they have a right to sell them if they like. 
 I told Heron at the time I wouldn't bother if I were he. Where's 
 the use, you know? " 
 
 " Were you there at the time ? " Minola asked, with some 
 curiosity. 
 
 " Yes, I was there. I'd been in the Oregon country, and I met 
 with an accident, and got a fever, and all that ; and I wanted a 
 little rest and a mild climate, you know ; and I made for San 
 Francisco, and some fellows there told me to go to these Settle- 
 ments of ours in the Pacific, and I went. I saw a good deal of 
 Heron — he was very hospitable and that, and then this row came 
 on. He behaved like a deuced young fool, and that's a fact." 
 
 " He was not understood," said Minola, " and he has been 
 treated very badly by the Government." 
 
 " Of course he has. I told him they would treat him badly. 
 They wouldn't understand all his concern about black fellows — 
 how could they understand it? Why didn't he let it alone? The 
 fellow who's out there now, you won't find him bothering about 
 such things, you bet — as we say out West, if you will excuse such 
 a rough expression, Miss Grey. But of course Heron has been 
 treated very badly, and we are going to run him for Dukes- 
 Keeton." 
 
 Several visitors had now come in, and Mr. Heron contrived to 
 change his position and cross over to the part of the room where 
 Minola was. 
 
 •'Look here, Heron," Mr. St. Paul said, "you have got a 
 staunch ally here already. Miss Grey means to wear your colours, 
 I dare say — do they wear colours at elections now in England ? — 
 I don't know — and you had better canvass her for her influence in 
 Keeton. If I were an elector of Keeton, I'd vote for the Pope or 
 the Sultan if Miss Grey asked me." 
 
 Meanwhile, Lady Limpenny was pleading her cause with Mr. 
 Money. It may be said that Lady Limpenny was the wife of a 
 physician who had been knighted, and who had no children. Her 
 husband was wholly absorbed in his professional occupations, and 
 never even thought of going anywhere with his wife, or concerning 
 
A MAN OF THE TIME. 131 
 
 himself about what she did. He knew the Money women pro- 
 fessionally, and except professionally he could not be said to know 
 anybody. Lady Limpenny, therefore, indulged all her whims freely. 
 Her most abiding or most often recurring whim was an anxiety for 
 the salvation of her soul, but she had passionate flirtations mean- 
 while with china, poetry, flowers, private theatricals, lady-helps, and 
 other pastimes and questions of the hour. 
 
 "You'll never part with that china," Mr. Money said; "you 
 know you can't." 
 
 " Oh, but my dear Money, you don't understand my feelings. 
 You are not, you know — an old friend may say so — you are not a 
 religious man. You have not been penetrated by what I call re- 
 ligion — not yet, I mean." 
 
 " Not yet, certainly. Well, why don't you send to Christie 
 and Manson's at once ? " 
 
 " But, my dear Money, to part with my china in that way, to 
 have it sent all about the world perhaps ? Oh, no ! I want to 
 part with it to some friend who will let me come and see it now 
 and again." 
 
 "Have you thought of this, Lady Limpenny? Suppose, when 
 you have sold it, you go to see it now and then, and covet it — 
 covet your neighbour's goods, perhaps long even to steal it. 'Where 
 is the spiritual improvement then ? " 
 
 " Money ! You shock me ! You horrify me ! Could that be 
 possible ? Is there such weakness in human nature ? " 
 
 "Quite possible, I assure you. You have been yourself de- 
 scribing the influence of these unregulated likings. How do you 
 know that they may not get the better of you in another way ? 
 Take my advice, and keep your china. It will do you less harm 
 in your own possession than in that of anybody else." 
 
 " If I could think so, my dear Money ! " 
 
 " Think it over, my dear Lady Limpenny ; look at it from this 
 point of view, and let me know your decision — then we can talk 
 about it again." 
 
 Lady Limpenny relapsed for a while into reflection, with a 
 doubtful and melancholy expression upon her face. Money, how- 
 ever, had gained his point, or, as he would himself have expressed 
 it, " choked her off" for the moment. 
 
 " I don't like your new friend," said Minola to Victor. 
 
 " My new friend ? Who's he ? " 
 
 " Your friend Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " Oh, he isn't a new friend, or a friend at all. He is rather an 
 old acquaintance, if anything." 
 
 " Well, I don't like him." 
 
132 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Nor I. Don't let yourself be drawn into much talk with him." 
 
 " No ? Then there is somebody you don't like, Mr. Heron. 
 That's a healthy sign. I really thought you liked all men and all 
 women, without exception." 
 
 " Well, I am not good at disliking people, but I don't like 
 him, and I didn't like to see him talking to you." 
 
 "Indeed? Yet he is a political ally of yours and of Mr. 
 Money now." 
 
 " That's a different thing ; and I don't know anything very bad 
 of him, only I had rather you didn't have too much to say to him. 
 He's a rowdy, that's all. If I had a sister, I shouldn't care to have 
 him for an acquaintance of hers." 
 
 " Is it a vice to know him ? " 
 
 "Almost, for women," Heron said abruptly ; and presently, 
 having left Minola, interposed, as if without thinking of it, between 
 Lucy Money and St. Paul, who was engaging her in conversation. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCE. 
 
 Mr. St. Paul stayed to dinner that day, being invited by Money 
 without ceremony, and accepting the invitation in the easiest way. 
 Victor Heron declined to remain. The family and Minola, with 
 Mr. St. Paul, made up the party. St. Paul was very attentive to 
 Mrs. Money, who appeared to be delighted with him. He talked 
 all through the dinner— he hardly ever stopped ; he had an adven- 
 ture in Texas, or in Mexico, or in the South Sea Islands, dpivpos 
 of everything ; he seemed equally pleased whether his listeners 
 believed or disbelieved his stories, and he talked of his own affairs 
 with a cool frankness, as if he was satisfied that all the world must 
 know everything about him, and that he might as well speak 
 bluntly out. He could not be called cynical in manner, for 
 cynicism presupposes a sort of affectation, a defiance, or a de- 
 liberate pose of some kind, and St. Paul seemed absolutely without 
 aftectation — completely self-satisfied and easy. Victor had spoken 
 of him as " a rowdy, that's all." But that was not all. He was — 
 if such a phrase could be tolerated — a "gentleman rowdy." His 
 morals and his code of honour seemed to be those of a Mexican 
 horse-stealer, and yet anybody must have known that he was by 
 birth and early education an English gentleman. 
 
A MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCE. 133 
 
 " I don't think I know a soul about town," he said. " I looked 
 in at the club once or twice — always kept up my subscription 
 there during my worst ot times — and I didn't see a creature I could 
 recollect. I dare say the people who know my brother won't care 
 to know me. I did leave such a deuce of a reputation behind me ; 
 and they'll all be sure to think I haven't got a red cent — a penny, 
 I mean. There they are mistaken. Somehow, the money-making 
 gift grows on you out West." 
 
 " Why don't you settle down ? " Money asked. " Get into 
 Parliament, marry, range yourself, and all that — make up with your 
 brother, and be all right. You have plenty of time before you yet." 
 
 " My good fellow, what do you call plenty of time ? Look at 
 me — I'm as bald as if I were a judge." 
 
 " Oh, bald ! that's nothing. Everybody is bald nowadays." 
 
 " But I'm thirty-five ! Thirty-five — think of that, young ladies ! 
 a grizzled, grim old fogey — what is it Thackeray says? — all gills 
 know Thackeray. Who on earth would marry me ? My brother 
 and his wife have given me such a shockingly bad character. Some 
 of it I deserved, perhaps ; some of it, I didn't. They think I have 
 disgraced the family name, I dare say. What did the family name 
 do for me, I should like to know? Out in Texas we didn't care 
 much about family names." 
 
 " I entirely agree with your view of things. Mr. St. Paul," Mrs. 
 Money said, in her soft melancholy tone. " England is destroyed 
 by caste and class. I honour a man of family who has the spirit 
 to put away such ideas." 
 
 " Oh, it would be all well enough if one were the eldest brother, 
 and had the money, and all that. I should like to be the Duke, I 
 dare say, well enough. But I can't be that, and I've been very 
 happy hunting buffaloes for months together, and no one but an 
 old Indian to speak to. I don't disgrace the Duke's family name, 
 for I've dropped it, nor any courtesy title, for I don't use any. I 
 believe they have forgotten me altogether in Keeton. Miss Grey 
 tells me so." 
 
 " Excuse me," Minola said, " I didn't say that, for I didn't 
 know. I only said I didn't remember hearing of you by your 
 present name ; but I didn't know any of the family at the Castle. 
 AVe belonged to the towns-people, and were not likely to have 
 much acquaintance with the Castle." 
 
 " Except at election time — I know," St. Paul said, with a laugh. 
 " Well, I'm worse off now, for they won't know me even at election 
 time." 
 
 Then the talk went off again under St. Paul's leadership, and 
 almost by his sole effort, to his adventurous life, and he told many 
 
134 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 stories of fights with Indians, of vigilance committees, of men 
 hanged for horse-stealing, and of broken-down English scamps, 
 who either got killed or made their fortune out West. A cool 
 contempt for human life was made specially evident. " I like a 
 place," the narrator more than once observed, "where you can kill 
 a man if you want to and no bother about it." Perhaps still more 
 evident was the contempt for every principle but that of com- 
 radeship. 
 
 After dinner Mr. St. Paul only showed himself in the drawing- 
 room for a moment or two, and then took his leave. 
 
 " Papa," Lucy said instantly, " do tell us all about Mr. St. 
 Paul." 
 
 "Are you curious to know something about him, Miss Grey?" 
 Money asked. 
 
 " Well, he certainly seems to be an odd sort of person. He is 
 a little like what I should imagine a pirate of romance." 
 
 " Not a bad hit. He is a sort of pirate out of date. But he 
 represents, with a little exaggeration, a certain tendency among 
 younger sons to-day. Some younger sons, you know, are going 
 into trade ; some are working at the bar, or becoming professional 
 journalists ; some are rearing sheep in Australia, and cattle in 
 Kansas and Texas. It's a phase of civilisation worth observing, 
 Miss Grey, to you who go in for being a sort of little philosopher." 
 
 " Dear papa, how can you say so ? Nola does not go in for 
 being anything so dry and dreadful." 
 
 " The tendencies of an aristocracy must always interest a 
 thoughtful mind like Miss Grey's, Lucy," Mrs. Money said gravely. 
 " There is at least something hopeful in the mingling of classes." 
 
 " In young swells becoming drovers and rowdies ? " Money 
 observed. " Hum ! well, as to that " and he stopped. 
 
 "I think I am a little interested in him," Minola said; "but 
 only personally, not philosophically." 
 
 " Well, that's nearly all about him. He was a scamp, and he 
 knocked about the world, and settled, if that can be called settling, 
 out West for a while ; and he has made money, and I hope he has 
 sown his wild oats ; and he has come home for variety, and, I 
 think, to annoy his brother. I met him in Egypt, and I knew him 
 in England too ; and so he came to see me, and he found a sort of 
 old acquaintance in Heron. That's all. He's a clever fellow, 
 and not a bad fellow in his way. I dare say he would have made 
 a very decent follower of Drake or of Raleigh if he had been born 
 at the right time." 
 
 Minola's attention was drawn away somewhat from the charac- 
 ter, adventures, and philosophical interest of Mr. St. Paul to 
 
A MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCE. 135 
 
 observe some peculiarity in the manner of Lucy Money. Al- 
 though Lucy had set out by declaring herself wildly eager to 
 know something about St. Paul, she very soon dropped out of 
 the conversation, and drew listlessly away. After a while she sat 
 at the piano, and began slowly playing some soft and melancholy 
 chords. Minola had been observing something of a change in 
 Lucy this present visit, something that she had not seen before. 
 Mr. Money presently went to his study ; the women all dispersed, 
 and Minola sat in her bedroom, and wondered within herselt 
 whether anything was disturbing Lucy's bright little mind. 
 
 It was curious to note how Lucy Money's soft ways had won 
 upon Minola. Lucy twined herself round the affections of the 
 stronger girl, and clung to her. Mrs. Money was pleased, amused, 
 and touched by the sight. The calm Theresa was a little annoyed, 
 considering Lucy to show thereby a lack of the composure and 
 dignity befitting a woman ; and Mary Blanchet was sometimes 
 disposed to be jealous. Minola herself was filled with affectionate 
 kindness for the overgrown child, not untempered with a dash of 
 pity and wonder. She was sometimes inclined to address the girl 
 in certain lines from Joanna Baillie, forgotten now even of most 
 readers of poetry, and ask her, " Thou sweetest thing that e'er 
 didst fix its lightly-fibred spray on the rude rock, ah ! would'st 
 thou cling to me ? " For whatever the outer world and its lookers- 
 on may have thought of her, it is certain that Minola did still 
 believe herself to be cold, unloving, hard to warm towards her 
 fellow-beings. The unrestrained, unaffected love ot Lucy filled 
 her at once with surprise and a sweeter, softer feeling. 
 
 So when she heard the patter of feet at her door she hardly had 
 to wait for the familiar tap and the familiar voice to know that 
 Lucelet was there. Minola opened the door, and Lucelet came 
 in with her hair all loosely around her, and her eyes sparkling. 
 
 " May I sit a little and talk ? " and, without waiting for an 
 answer, she coiled herself on the hearthrug near the chair on which 
 Minola had been sitting. " You sit there again, Nola. Are you 
 glad to see me ? " 
 
 " Very, very glad, Lucy dear." 
 
 " Do you love me, master ? — no ? " For Minola had, among 
 other things, been teaching Lucy to read Shakespeare, and Lucy 
 had just become enamoured of Ariel's tender question, and was 
 delighted to turn it to her own account. 
 
 " Dearly, my delicate Ariel," said Minola, carrying on the 
 quotation ; and Lucy positively crimsoned with a double delight, 
 having her quotation understood and answered, and an assurance 
 of affection given. 
 
136 Mx'SS MISANTHRO.PE. 
 
 " Why don't you let down your hair, No!a ? Do let me see it 
 now completely down. I'll do it — allow me." And she sprang 
 up, came behind Minola, and " undid " all her hair, so that it fell 
 around her back and shoulders. Minola could hardly keep from 
 blushing to be thus made a picture of and openly admired. 
 " There, that is perfectly beautiful ! You look like Lady Godiva, 
 or like the Fair One with the Golden Locks, if you prefer that. 
 Did you ever read the story of ' The Fair One with the Golden 
 Locks,' when you were a little girl ? Oh, please leave your hair 
 just as it is, and let me look at it for a while. Do you remember 
 Lady Limpenny's nonsense to-day ? " 
 
 Minola allowed her to please herself, and they began to talk ; 
 but after the first joy of coming in, Lucy seemed a little distraite, 
 and not quite like herself. She fell into little moments of silence 
 every now and then, and sometimes looked up into Minola's face 
 as if she were going to say something, and then stopped. 
 
 Minola saw that her friend had something on her mind ; but 
 thought it best not to ask her any questions, feeling sure that if 
 Lucy had anything she wished to say, Lucy would not keep it long 
 unsaid. 
 
 After a moment's pause, " Nola ! " 
 
 "Yes, dear." 
 
 " You don't much like men in general ? " 
 
 " Well, Lucy dear, I don't know that anybody much likes men 
 in general, or women either. Good Christians say that they love 
 all their brothers and sisters, but I don't suppose it's with a very 
 ardent love." 
 
 " But you rather go in for not liking men as a rule, don't you?" 
 
 Minola was a little amused by the words "go in for not liking 
 men." They seemed to be — what she knew Lucy never meant 
 them for — a sort of rebuke to the affectation which would formally 
 pose itself as misanthropic. Minola had of late begun to entertain 
 doubts as to whether a certain amount of half-conscious egotism 
 and affectation did not mingle in her old-time proclamations of a 
 dislike to men. 
 
 " I think I rather did go in for not liking men, Lucy; but I 
 think I am beginning to be a little penitent. Perhaps I was rather 
 general in my ideas ; perhaps the men I knew best were not very 
 fair specimens of the human race ; perhaps men in general don't 
 very much care what I think of them." 
 
 " Any man would care if he knew you, especially if he saw you 
 with your hair down like that. But, anyhow, you don't dislike all 
 men ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, dear. How could I dislike your father, Lucelet ? " 
 
•7HERE, THAT IS 1'EKFECTLY BEAUTIFUL.' 
 
A MID.XIGHT COKFIDEA'CE. 137 
 
 " No," Lucy said, looking round with earnest eyes ; " who could 
 dislike him, Nola? I am so fond of him; I could say almost 
 anything to him. If you knew what I have lately been talking to 
 him about, you would wonder. Well, but he is not the only man 
 you don't dislike ; I am sure you don't dislike Mr. Heron." Her 
 eyes grew more enquiring and eager than before. 
 
 •'No, indeed, Lucy; I don't think anyone could dislike him, 
 either." 
 
 " I am delighted to hear you say so ; but I want you to say 
 some more. Tell me what you think of Mr. Heron ; I am curious 
 to know. You are so much more clever than I, and you can un- 
 derstand people and see into them. Tell me exactly what you see 
 in Mr. Heron." 
 
 " Why do you want to know all this, Lucy ?" 
 
 " Because I want to hear your opinion very particularly, for you 
 are not a hero-worshipper, and you don't admire men in general. 
 Some girls are such enthusiastic fools that they make a hero out of 
 every good-looking young man they meet. But you are not like 
 that, Nola." 
 
 " Oh, no ! I am not like that," Nola echoed, not without a 
 thought that now, perhaps, there were moments when she almost 
 wished she were. 
 
 " Well, then, tell me. First, do you think Mr. Heron handsome?" 
 
 " Yes, Lucy ; I think he is handsome " 
 
 " Then, do you like him? Do tell me what you think of him." 
 
 " In the name of heaven," Minola asked herself, " why should 
 I not speak the truth in answer to so plain and innocent a 
 question?" She answered quietly, and looking straight forward 
 at the fire, 
 
 " I like Mr. Heron very much, Lucy. I don't know many 
 men — young men especially. — but I like him better than any 
 young man I have met as yet." 
 
 "As yet ! Yes, yes ; I am glad to hear you say that," Lucy 
 said, with beaming eyes, and growing good-humouredly saucy in 
 her very delight. " As yet ! Yes, you put that in well, Nola." 
 
 " How so, dear?" 
 
 "Oh, you know. Because of the one yet to present himself; 
 the not impossible He — nearly impossible, though — who is to be 
 fit for my Nola. I tell you I shall scrutinise him before I allow 
 his pretensions to pass. Well, now, about Mr. Heron?" 
 
 " I think him a very brave, generous, and noble-hearted young 
 man. I think he has not a selfish thought or a mean purpose 
 about him, and I think he has spirit and talent ; and I hope one 
 day to hear that he has made himself an honourable name." 
 
13? MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Lucy turned now to Minola a pair of eyes that were moist 
 with tears. 
 
 " Tell me,_ Nola," — and her voice grew a little tremulous — 
 " don't you think he is a man a woman might fall in love with?" 
 
 There was a moment's silence, and Lucy leaned upon Nola's 
 knees, eagerly looking into her face. Then Nola answered, in a 
 quiet, measured undertone, 
 
 " Oh, yes, Lucy ; I do indeed. I think he is a man a. woman 
 might fall in love with." 
 
 " Thank you, Nola ; that is all I wanted to ask you." 
 
 There was another pause. 
 
 "Nola!" 
 
 " Yes, Lucy." 
 
 " You don't ask me anything." 
 
 " Perhaps, dear, because there is nothing I want to know." 
 
 " Then you do guess ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, dear, I do guess." 
 , "Well— but what?" 
 
 " I suppose — that you are — engaged to Mr. Heron." 
 
 Lucy started up with her face all on fire. 
 
 " Oh, no, Nola, dear darling ! you have guessed too much. 
 I wish I had told you, and not asked you to guess at all. We're 
 not engaged. Oh, no. It's only — well, it's only — it's only that I 
 am in love with him, Nola. Oh, yes, so much in love with him 
 that I should not like to live if he didn't care about me— no, not 
 one day!" Then Lucy hid her head in Minola's lap and sobbed 
 like a little child. 
 
 Perhaps the breakdown was of service to both the girls. It 
 allowed poor Lucy to relieve her long pent-up feelings, and it gave 
 Minola time to consider the meaning of the revelation as com- 
 posedly as she could, and to think of what she ought to say and do. 
 
 Lucy presently looked up with a gleam of April brightness in 
 her eyes. 
 
 " Do you think me foolish, Nola, for telling you this?" 
 
 " Well, dear, I don't know whether you ought to have told it 
 to me." 
 
 " I couldn't do without telling it to somebody, Nola. I think 
 I must be like that king I read about somewhere — I forget his 
 name ; no, I believe it was not the king, but his servant — who had 
 to tell the secret to some listener, and so told it to the reeds on 
 the sea-shore. If I had not told this to somebody, I must have 
 told it to the reeds." 
 
 Minola almost wished she had told it to the reeds. There 
 were reeds enough beneath the little bridge which Nola loved in 
 
A MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCE. 139 
 
 Regent's Park, and had they been possessed of the secret, she 
 might have looked over the bridge for ever, and dreamed dreams 
 as the lazy water flowed on beneath, and even noted and admired 
 ' the whispering reeds, and they would never have whispered that 
 secret to her. 
 
 " I think papa guesses it," Lucy said. " I am sure he does, 
 because he talked to me of — oh, well, of a different person, and 
 asked me if I cared about him, and I told him that I didn't. He 
 said he was glad, for he didn't much like him ; but that I should 
 marry anyone I liked — always provided, Nola, that he happened 
 to like me, which doesn't at all follow. I know papa likes Mr. 
 Heron." 
 
 " Then, Lucy, would it not be better to tell Mr. Money?" 
 
 " Oh, Nola ! I couldn't tell him that — I could tell him almost 
 anything, but I couldn't tell him that. Are you not sorry for me, 
 Nola ? Oh, say you are sorry for me ! The other day — it only 
 seems the other day — I was just as happy as a bird. Do say you 
 are sorry for me." 
 
 " But, my dear, I don't know why there should be any sorrow 
 about it. Why should not everything prove to be perfectly 
 happy?" 
 
 " Do you think so, Nola ? " 
 
 She looked up to Nola with an expression of childlike anxiety. 
 
 " Why should it not be so, Lucy ? If I were a man, I should 
 be very much in love with you, dear. You are the girl that men 
 ought to be in love with." 
 
 There was a certain tone of coldness or constraint in Minola's 
 voice which could not escape even Lucy's observation. 
 
 " You think me weak and foolish, I know veiy well, Nola, be- 
 cause I have made such a confession as this. For all your kind- 
 ness and your good heart, I know that you despise any girl who 
 allows herself to fall in love with a man. You don't care about 
 men, and you think we ought to have more dignity, and not to 
 prostrate ourselves before them ; and you are quite right. Only 
 some of us can't help it." 
 
 "No," said Minola sadly; " I suppose not." 
 
 " There ! You look all manner of contempt at me. I should 
 like to have you painted as the Queen of the Amazons — you would 
 look splendid. But I may trust to your friendly heart and your 
 sympathy all the same, I know. You will pity us weaker girls, and 
 you won't be too hard on us. I want you to help me." 
 
 "Can I help you, Lucy? Shall I ask Mr. Heron if he is in 
 love with you? I will, if you like." 
 
 " Oh, Nola, what nonsense ! That only shows how ridiculous 
 
140 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 you think me. No, I only mean that you should give me your 
 sympathy, and let me talk to you. And — you observe things so 
 well — just to use your eyes for my sake. Oh, there is so much a 
 friend may do ! And he thinks so much of you, and always talks 
 to you so freely." 
 
 Yes, Minola thought to herself ; he always talks to me very 
 freely — we are good friends. If he were in love with Lucy, I dare 
 say he would tell me. Why should he not? She tells me that she 
 is in love with him — that is a proof of her friendship. 
 
 We can think in irony as well as speak in it, and Minola was 
 disposed at present to be a little sarcastic. She did not love such 
 disclosures as Lucy had been making. There seemed to be a lack 
 of that instinctive delicacy in them, which, as she fancied, might 
 be the possession of a girl were she brought up naked in a South- 
 Sea islet. Fresh and innocent as Lucy was, yet this revelation 
 seemed wanting in pure self-respect. Perhaps, too, it was in 
 keeping with Minola's old creed to believe that this was just the 
 sort of girl whom most men would be sure to love. At any rate, 
 she was for the moment in a somewhat bitter mood. Something 
 of this must have shown itself in her expression, for Lucy said, in 
 a tone of frightened remonstrance, 
 
 " Now, Nola, I have told you all. I have betrayed myself to 
 you, and if you only despise me and feel angry with me, oh, what 
 shall I do ? Isn't it strange— you both came the same day here — 
 you and he, for the first time — I mean the first time since I saw 
 you at school. Am I to lose you too ? " 
 
 There was something so simple and helpless in this piteous 
 appeal, with its implied dread of a love proving hopeless, that no 
 irony or anger could have prevailed against it in Minola's breast. 
 She threw her arm round the child's neck, and petted and soothed 
 her. 
 
 "Why should you lose both — why should you lose either?" 
 Minola said. " I can promise you for one, Lucy dear ; and if I 
 could promise you for the other too, you might be sure of him. 
 He must be a very insensible person, Lucy, who fails to appreciate 
 you. Only don't make it too plain, dear, to anyone but me. 
 They say that men like to do the love-making for themselves — ■ 
 and you have not the slightest need to go out of your way. Tell 
 me — does he know anything of this ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, Nola." 
 
 " Nor guess anything at all ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, — I am sure not — I don't think so. You didn't guess 
 anything — now, did you ? — and how could he ? " 
 
 Minola felt a little glad to hear of this — for the dignity of 
 
A MORNING CONFIDENCE. 141 
 
 womanhood, she said to herself. But she did not know how long 
 it would last, for Lucy was not a person likely to accomplish great 
 efforts of self-control for the mere sake of the abstract dignity of 
 womanhood. For the moment, all Minola could do was to express 
 full sympathy with her friend, and at the same time to counsel her 
 gently not to betray her secret. Lucy went to her bedroom at last, 
 much fluttering and quivering, but also relieved and encouraged, 
 and she fell asleep, for all her love-pains, long before Minola did. 
 
 " She will be very happy," Minola sat thinking, when she was 
 alone. " She has a great deal already. A loving father and mother 
 and sister ; a happy home, where she is sheltered against every- 
 thing ; a future all full of brightness. He will love her — I sup- 
 pose. She's very pretty, and sweet, and clinging ; and he is 
 simple and manly, and would be drawn by her pure, winning 
 ways ; and men like him are fond of women who don't profess to 
 be strong. Well, if I can help her, I will do so — it will be some- 
 thing to see her completely happy, and him too." 
 
 Whereupon, for no apparent reason, the tears sprang into 
 Minola's eyes, and she found a vain wish arising in her heart that 
 she had never renewed her acquaintance with Lucy Money, never 
 been persuaded by Mary Blanchet to visit her, never stood upon 
 her threshold and met Victor Heron there. 
 
 " Why not wish at once that I had never been born ? " she 
 said, half tearful, half scornful of her tears. " One thing is as easy 
 now as the other, and as useful, and not to have been born would 
 have saved many idle hours and much heartache." 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 A HORNING CONFIDENCE. 
 
 Minola rose next morning with a bewildering and oppressed 
 sense of disappointment and defeat. The whole of her scheme of 
 life had given way. Her little bubble-world had burst. All her 
 plans of bold independence and of contented life, of isolation from 
 social trammels, and freedom from woman's weaknesses, had 
 broken down. She had always thought scorn of those who said 
 that women could not feel friendship for men without danger of 
 feeling love — and now, what was she but a cruel mocking evidence 
 of the folly of her confidence ? Alas, no romantic school-girl could 
 have fallen more suddenly into love than Minola had done. There 
 
142 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 was but one man whom she ha'l ever seen with whom she had 
 coveted a friendship, and she now knew, only too well, that in her 
 breast the friendship had already caught fire, and blazed into love. 
 Where was Alceste now, and the Alceste standard by which she 
 had proposed to test all men and women, well convinced before- 
 hand that she would find them wanting ? She could not even 
 flatter herself that she had been faithful to her faith, and that if 
 she had succumbed at the very outset it was because the first- 
 comer actually proved to be an Alceste. No, she could not 
 cram this complacent conviction into her mind. Victor Heron 
 was a generous and noble-hearted young man, she felt assured ; 
 but she had not fallen in love with him because of any assu- 
 rance that he was like the hero of her girlhood. She made no 
 attempt to deceive herself in this way. In her proud resent- 
 ment of her weakness she even trampled upon it with undeserved 
 scorn. " I fell in love with him," she said to herself, " just as 
 the silliest girl falls in love — because he was -there, and I couldn't 
 help it." 
 
 It was not merely Lucy's revelation which had forced upon 
 Minola a knowledge of her own feelings. This had perhaps so 
 sent conviction home as to render illusion or self-deception im- 
 possible any longer, but it was not that which first told her of her 
 weakness. That had long been more and more making itself 
 known to her. It was plain to her now that since the first day 
 when she stood upon the bridge with him in the park, and looked 
 into the canal, she had loved him. " Oh, why did I not know it 
 then?" she asked, wearily, of herself. "I could have avoided 
 him — have never seen him again — and it might so have come to 
 nothing, and at least we should not have to meet." 
 
 Amid all her pain of the night and the morning, one question 
 was ever repeating itself, " Will this last ? " That the fever which 
 burned her was love — genuine love — the regular old love of the 
 romances and the poets — she could not doubt. She knew it be- 
 cause it was so new a feeling. Had she walked among a fever- 
 stricken population, refusing to believe in the danger of infection, 
 and satisfied that the fearless and the wise were safe, and had she 
 suddenly felt the strange pains and unfamiliar heats, and found 
 the senses beginning to wander, she would have known that this 
 was fever. The pangs of death are new to all alike when they 
 come, but those who are about to die are conscious — even in their 
 last moments of consciousness — that this new summons has the one 
 awful meaning. So did Minola know only too well what the 
 meaning was of this new pain. " Will it last ? " was her cry to 
 herself. " Shall I have to go through life with this torture always 
 
A MORNING CONFIDENCE. 143 
 
 to bear? Is it true that women have to bear this for years and 
 years — that some of them never get over it ? " 
 
 " Oh, I shall never get over it — never, never ! " she cried out 
 in bitterness. She was very bitter now against herself and fate. 
 She did not feel that it is better to love vainly than not at all. 
 Indeed, such consoling conviction belongs to the poet who philo- 
 sophises on love, or to the disappointed lover who is already 
 beginning to be consoled. It does not do much good to anyone 
 in the actual hour of pain. Minola cordially and passionately 
 wished that she had not loved, or seen anyone whom she could 
 love. She was full of wrath and scorn for herself, and believed 
 herself humbled and shamed. Her whole life was crossed ; her 
 quiet was all gone ; she was now doomed to an existence of per- 
 petual self-constraint and renunciation, and even deception. She 
 had a secret which she must conceal from the world as if it was a 
 murder. She must watch her words, her movements, her very 
 glances, lest any sudden utterance, or gesture, or blush, should 
 betray her. She would wake in the night in terror, lest in some 
 dream she might have called out some word or name which had 
 roused Mary Blanchet in the next room, and betrayed her. She 
 must meet Victor Heron, Heaven knows how often, and talk with 
 him as a friend, and never let one gleam of the truth appear. She 
 must hear Lucy Money tell of her love, and be the confidante of 
 her childlike emotions. Not often, perhaps, has a proud and 
 sensitive girl been tried so strangely. " I thought I hated men 
 before," she kept saying to herself. " I do hate them now ; and 
 women and all. I hate him most of all, because I know that I so 
 love him." 
 
 All this poor Minola kept saying or thinking to herself that 
 morning as she listlessly dressed. It is not too much to say that 
 the very air seemed changed for her. She had only one resolve 
 to sustain her, but that was at least as strong as her love, or as 
 death — the resolve that, come what would, she must keep her 
 secret. Victor Heron believed himself her friend, and desired to 
 be nothing more. No human soul but her own must know that her 
 feeling to him was not the same. She would have known the need 
 of that resolve even if she had never been entrusted with poor dear 
 little Lucy's secret. But the more calmly she thought over that 
 little story, the more she thought it likely that Lucy's dream might 
 come to be fulfilled. 
 
 The world — that is to say, the breakfast-room and the Money 
 family — had to be faced. The family were as pleasant as ever, 
 except Lucy, who was pale and seemed troubled, and at whom her 
 father looked once or twice keenly, but without making any remark. 
 
144 JlffSS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I have had a letter from Lady Limpenny already this morn- 
 ing," Mr. Money observed. 
 
 All professed an interest in the contents of the letter, even 
 Theresa. 
 
 Mi. Money began to read: 
 
 " Thank you a thousand times, my dear Money " 
 
 " We are very friendly, you' see, Miss Grey," he said, breaking 
 off. " But it's not any peculiar friendship for me. She always 
 calls men by their names after the first interview." 
 
 " She generally addresses papa as ' my dear,' without any 
 proper name appended," said Lucy, who did not much like Lady 
 Limpenny. " She always likes the men of a family, and always 
 hates the women." 
 
 " Lucy, my dear," her mother pleaded, " how can you say so ! 
 Laura Limpenny and I are true friends." 
 
 " She is giving us good help with our schools and our church," 
 Theresa Money said ; " and Reginald " (Theresa's engaged lover) 
 " thinks very highly of her." 
 
 "She always praises men, and they all think highly of her," 
 Lucy persisted ; " and it is something to be Lady Anything." 
 
 " I assure you, Miss Grey," Mrs. Money said, " that Lady 
 Limpenny is the most sincere and unpretending creature. She is 
 not an aristocrat — she has nothing to do with aristocracy ; if she 
 had, there could be little sympathy, as you may well believe, be- 
 tween her and me, for you know my convictions. The aristocracy 
 of this country are its ruin ! When England falls — and the hour 
 of her fall is near — it will not be due to beings like Laura Lim- 
 penny." 
 
 "There I a?ree with you, dear," Mr. Money gravely said. 
 " Shall I go on ?"" 
 
 He went on. 
 
 " Thank you a thousand times, my dear Money, for your wise 
 and Christianlike advice. I will keep my china. I am convinced 
 now that my ideas of yesterday were wrong, and even sinful. I had 
 a charming talk with a dear aesthetic man last evening, after I saw 
 you, and he assures me that my china is a collection absolutely 
 unique ; and that, if I were to part with it, Mrs. De Vallancey 
 would manage, at any cost, or by any contrivance, to get hold of 
 it ; and your darling wife knows how I hate Mrs. De Vallancey. 
 I now feel that it is my duty to keep the china, and that a love for 
 the treasures of art is in itself an act of homage to the Great 
 Creator of all. 
 
 " My sweetest love to your darling wife and angel-girls. Kind 
 regards to the young lady with the hair; and when you see our 
 
A MORNING CONFIDENCE. ■ 145 
 
 dear friend Heron, do tell him that I expect him to call on me 
 very soon. . " Ever yours, 
 
 " Laura Limpenny." 
 
 " ' Our dear friend Heron ! ' " exclaimed Lucy, in surprise and 
 anger. " Does she know Mr. Heron so well as that?" 
 
 " She met him here, yesterday, for the first time," Mr. Money 
 said; "but that's quite enough for Lady Limpenny. She has 
 taken a violent liking to him already, and enrols him among her 
 dear friends. Seriously, she would be rather a useful person for 
 Heron to know. She knows everyone, and will do anything. Her 
 husband attends all the old women of quality, and a good many 
 of the young women too. I shouldn't be surprised if Sir James 
 Limpenny— or his wife— could get Heron a hearing from some 
 great personage." 
 
 " I ani sure he won't do that," said Lucy warmly. " I don't 
 believe Mr. Heron would condescend to be helped on in that sort 
 of way." 
 
 "Why not?" Minola asked. "I think Lady Limpenny is a 
 more creditable ally than a person like Mr. St. Paul. If a man 
 wants to succeed in life, I suppose he must try all the usual arts." 
 
 " I didn't think you would have said that of Mr. Heron, Nola," 
 said Lucy, hurt and wondering. 
 
 Nola did not think she would have said it herself twelve hours 
 ago. Why she said it now she could not tell. Perhaps she was 
 womanish enough to feel annoyed at the manner in which Lucy 
 seemed to appropriate Victor Heron's cause, and womanish enough, 
 too, to relieve her mind by saying disparaging things of him. 
 
 Mr. Money's eyes twinkled with an amused smile. 
 
 " See how you wrong a man sometimes, you ladies — even the 
 most reasonable among you. Heron is more Quixotic than you 
 think, Miss Grey. I have had a letter from him this very morning 
 about St. Paul. I'll read it if you like — it need not be kept secret 
 from anybody here." 
 
 Mrs. Money and Lucy earnestly asked to have the letter read, 
 and Mr. Money read it accordingly : — 
 
 "My dear Money, — I don't like St. Paul, and I won't march 
 through Coventry with him. I think he is unprincipled and dis- 
 creditable, and if I can't get in for Keeton without his helping- 
 hand, I'll stay out of Keeton, and that's all about that. I know 
 you will agree with me when you think this over. Excuse haste 
 and abruptness. I want to make my position clear to you withou 
 any loss of time, "Yours faithfully, 
 
 " Victor Heron." 
 
146 3HSS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Now, Nola, you see you were wrong," the triumphant Lucy 
 exclaimed. 
 
 "I do not like Mr. St. Paul," the quiet Theresa observed. 
 "He seems to me godless and demoralised. He spoke in the 
 lightest and most scoffing way of the labours of the Church among 
 the heathen populations." 
 
 " I liked him," Mrs. Money sighed. " I liked him because he 
 had the spirit to resign his rank and fling away his title." 
 
 " I think his rank rather resigned him," Mr. Money observed. 
 " Anyhow, one must in the ordinary world consent to take up with 
 a scamp now and then. Heron says he won't have anything to do 
 with St. Paul, and Lucy undertakes to say for him that he won't 
 be patronised by Lady Limpenny. I ask you all calmly, as civi- 
 lised and Christian beings, how is a young fellow to get on in 
 London who won't consent to be helped by scamps and old 
 women ? " 
 
 " Mr. Heron represents a political cause," the eager Lucy 
 began. 
 
 Her father looked quietly round at her. 
 
 "Why, Lucelet, my dear, when did you come to know any- 
 thing about political causes, or to care about them? I thought 
 you only cared for the renascence of art — isn't it renascence you 
 call it ? I understood that politics were entirely beneath the notice 
 of all your school. Pray tell me, Mistress Politician, to which 
 side of politics your father belongs ? " 
 
 " Oh, papa, for shame ! What nonsense ! As if I didn't know. 
 Of course you are a Liberal — an advanced Liberal." 
 
 "Good; and our friend Heron?" 
 
 " An advanced Liberal too. Of course I know that you are 
 on his side." 
 
 " That I am on his side ? That he is on my side wouldn't do, 
 I suppose, although I am somewhat the elder, and am in Parlia- 
 ment while he is not, and is not particularly likely to be if he 
 continues to be so squeamish. What are the political views of our 
 young friend the artist, the poet, the bard, or whatever you 
 please to call him ? " 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet ? " — Lucy slightly coloured. 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet, yes. Am I on his side ? " 
 
 " Oh, he has no side. He knows nothing of politics," Lucy 
 said, contemptuously. 
 
 " Stupid of him, isn't it ? " 
 
 " Very stupid. At least, I suppose so: I don't know. Oh, yes; 
 I think every man ought to understand politics." 
 
 Mr. Money smiled, and let the subject drop. 
 
A MORNING CONFIDENCE. 147 
 
 When breakfast was over, Mr. Money suddenly said, 
 
 "Miss Grey, you always profess to know something about poli- 
 tics. Anyhow, you know something about Keeton folks, and you 
 can give me some useful hints about their ways with which I can 
 instruct our dear friend Heron, as Lady Limpenny calls him. 
 Would you mind coming to my study for a quarter of an hour, 
 away from all this womankind, and answering me a few ques- 
 tions?" 
 
 Minola was a little surprised, but showed no surprise, and only 
 said that she would be delighted, of course. Mr. Money offered 
 her his arm with a somewhat old-fashioned courtesy which con- 
 trasted not unbecomingly with his usual cheery bluntness of manner 
 to women and men alike. 
 
 " Not many ladies come here, Miss Grey," Money said, offer- 
 ingher a chair when they were in the study. " Lucelet looks in 
 very often, to be sure, but only as a messenger ; she doesn't come 
 into council." 
 
 "Do I come into council?" Minola asked, with a smile and 
 a little of heightened colour. " I shall feel myself of great impor- 
 tance." 
 
 " Well, yes, into council. First about yourself. I have been 
 looking into your affairs a little, Miss Grey — don't be angry ; we 
 are all fond of you in this house, and you don't seem to have 
 anyone in particular to look after your interests." 
 
 " It was very kind and good of you. I have not many friends, 
 Mr. Money ; but I am afraid the word ' interests ' is rather too 
 large for any affairs of mine. Have I any interests ? Mary Blan- 
 chet understands all my affairs much better than I do." 
 
 "Yes, they may be called interests, I think. You know that 
 anybody who likes can find out everything about people's wills, 
 and all that. Do you know anything about your father's will ? " 
 
 ' " No," Minola said, with a start, and feeling the tears coming 
 to her eyes. " I don't, Mr. Money. At least, not much. I know 
 that he left me some money — so much every year ; not much — it 
 would not be much for Lucy — but enough for me and Mary 
 Elanchet. Mary Blanchet manages it for me, and makes it go 
 twice as far as I could. We never spend it all — I mean, we 
 haven't spent it all this year. I should never be able to manage or 
 to get on at all only for her." 
 
 Minola spoke with eagerness now, for she was afraid that 
 she was about to receive some of the advice which worldly people 
 call wise, and to be admonished of the improvidence of sharing 
 her little purse with Mary Blanchet. 
 
 " And, indeed, I ought to do something for her — something 
 
1 48 M/SS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 particular," she hastened to add, for she was seized with a sudden 
 fear that Mr. Money might have heard somewhere of her resolve 
 to have Mr. Blanchet's poems printed at her own expense, and 
 might proceed to remonstrate with her. 
 
 Mr. Money smiled, seeing completely through her, and only 
 thinking to himself that she was a remarkably good girl, and that 
 he much wished he had a son to marry her. 
 
 " Do you know what I was thinking of?" he asked bluntly. 
 " I am sure you were thinking about me, for you laughed — at 
 my ignorance of business ways, I suppose?" 
 
 " Not at all ; I was thinking that I should like to have a son, 
 and that I should like you to marry him." 
 
 Minola laughed and coloured, but took his words as they were 
 meant, in all good humour and kindness. 
 
 " If you had a son, Mr. Money, I am sure I would marry him 
 if you asked me, and he " 
 
 " Thank you. Well, I am only sorry I can't take you at your 
 word. But that wasn't exactly what I brought you here to tell you. 
 What I want to tell you is this. You are likely to have a good 
 deal of property ot one kind and another, Miss Grey. Your father, 
 I find, made a good deal of money in his time, and saved it ; 
 bought houses and built houses ; bought up annuities, insurances, 
 shares in companies — all manner of things. He only left his 
 property to his present wife for her use of what it brings every 
 year during her life. At her death it all comes to you, and I'm 
 told she can't live long." 
 
 " Oh, but she may. I hope and pray that she may," Minola 
 exclaimed. " It seems shocking to watch for a woman's death, 
 especially when we were not very friendly to each other. I don't 
 want the money ; I have enough, quite enough. I shouldn't know 
 what to do with it. I don't care much about new dresses, and 
 bonnets, and the fashions, and all that ; and what could I do with 
 money, living alone in my quiet way ? I think a girl of my age, 
 living all to herself, and having much money, would be perfectly 
 ridiculous. Why could not her husband get it, if the poor creature 
 dies ? That would be only right. I am sure he may have it 
 for me." 
 
 " He mayn't have it for me, though," Mr. Money said. " You 
 have no one, it seems to me, to look after your interests, and 
 I'll take the liberty to do so, for lack of a better, whether you 
 like it or not. However, we can talk about that when the time 
 comes." 
 
 Minola gave a sort of shudder. 
 
 " When the time comes ! That seems so dreadful ; as if we 
 
A MORNING CONFIDENCE. 149 
 
 were only waiting for the poor woman to be dead to snatch at 
 whatever she left behind her. Mr. Money, is there really no other 
 way? — must I have this property?" 
 
 " If she dies before you, yes — it will come to you. Of course 
 you know that it isn't great wealth in the London sense. It won't 
 constitute you an heiress in the Berkeley Square sense, but it will 
 give you a good deal of miscellaneous property for a young woman. 
 Well, as to that, I'll see that you get your rights ; and the only 
 thing I have to ask is just that you will not do anything decided, 
 or anything at all, in this business without consulting me." 
 
 " Oh, indeed, I can faithfully promise you that. I have no 
 other friend whom I could possibly consult, or who would take any 
 interest in me." 
 
 " Come, now, I can't believe that. If you wish, you can be 
 like the young lady in Sheridan's song — friends in all the aged 
 you'll meet, and lovers in the young." 
 
 " I don't want to be like her in that." 
 
 '• In having friends in all the aged?" 
 
 " Oh, I don't know ; in anything. I am well content with 
 the friends I have." 
 
 " Well, some of them, at least, are well content with you. 
 Now, Miss Grey, I want to speak to you of something that con- 
 cerns me. You and my daughter Lucy are great friends ? " 
 
 Minola almost started. 
 
 " I am very fond of Lucy." 
 
 " And she is very fond of you. We all are, for that matter. 
 Did you ever hear of an old Scottish saying about a person 
 having a face like a fiddle — not in shape, you know, but in power 
 of attracting people, and rousing sympathy ? " 
 
 " Yes. I think I remember it in some of Scott's novels." 
 
 " Very well. I think you have a face like a fiddle ; all our 
 sympathies are drawn to you. Now, that is why I speak to you of 
 something which I wouldn't talk about to any other woman of your 
 age — not even to my own daughter Theresa, an excellent creature, 
 but not over sympathetic. I am very fond of my Lucelet. She 
 isn't strong ; she hasn't great intelligence. I know my little goose 
 is not a swan, but she is very sweet, and sensitive, and loving; the 
 most affectionate little creature that ever was made happy or un- 
 happy by a man. I am morbidly anxious about her happiness. 
 Now, you are her friend, and a thousand times cleverer and stronger 
 than she, and she looks up to you. She would tell you anything. 
 Has she told you anything lately?" 
 
 Minola hesitated. 
 
 " Oh, you needn't hesitate, or think of any breach of confidence. 
 
ISO MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 You may tell me. I could get it all from herself in a moment. 
 It isn't about that I want to ask you. Well, I'll save you all 
 trouble. She has told you something." 
 
 "She has." 
 
 " She is in love !" 
 
 Minola assented. 
 
 Mr. Money ran his hand through his hair, got up, and walked 
 a turn or two up and down the study. 
 
 " The other day she was a child, and cared for nobody in the 
 world but her mother and me. Now a young fellow comes along, 
 and, like the Earl of Lowgave's lassie in the old song, she does 
 not love her mammy nor she does not love her daddy." 
 
 " Oh, but I don't think that at all," Miss Grey said earnestly. 
 " No girl could be fonder of her father and mother." 
 
 Mr. Money smiled good-humouredly, but with a look of pity, 
 as one who corrects an odd mistake. 
 
 " I know that very well, Miss Grey, and I was not speaking 
 seriously, or grumbling at my little lassie. But it does astonish 
 us elderly parents, when we find out all of a sudden that there are 
 other persons more important than we in the eyes of our little 
 maidens, and we may as well relieve our minds by putting the 
 feeling into words. Well, you know the hero of this little 
 romance ? " 
 
 Minola was looking steadily at the fire, and away from Mr. 
 Money. She did not answer at once, and there was a pause. The 
 suddenness of the silence aroused her. 
 
 " Oh, yes, Mr. Money. I know who he is," she said, without 
 looking round. 
 
 "Very well. Now comes the delicate part of my questioning. 
 Of course you can't be expected to read the secrets of other 
 people's hearts, and I suppose you are not in his confidence." 
 
 " No, indeed," she said very quietly. 
 
 " No — you couldn't tell how he feels towards my Lucelet ? " 
 
 Minola shook her head. 
 
 "If I were a man, I am sure I should be in love with her," she 
 said. 
 
 "You think so ? Yes, perhaps so ; but in this case, somehow 
 
 Well, Miss Grey, another question, and then I'll release you : and 
 speak to me frankly, like a true girl to a plain man, who treats her 
 as such. Is there any woman, as far as you know, who is more 
 to him than Lucelet ? " 
 
 Mr. Money had now come near to where Minola was sitting. 
 He stood leaning against the chimney-piece, and looking fixedly 
 into her face. At first she did not even understand the meaning of 
 
CHASTELARD. 151 
 
 his question. Then suddenly she felt that her cheeks began to 
 burn and her heart to beat. She looked up in wonder and pain, 
 but she saw so much of earnestness and anxiety in Mr. Money's 
 face that it would have been impossible not to understand and 
 respect his purpose. In his anxiety for his daughter's happiness 
 his whole soul was absorbed. Minola's heart forgot its own 
 pain for the moment. Her own memory of a father was not of 
 one thus unselfishly absorbed. She answered without hesitation 
 and with quiet self-possession, 
 
 " Oh, no, Mr. Money. I know of no such woman. So far as I 
 can guess, none such exists." 
 
 Mr. Money drew a deep breath, and his eyes brightened. 
 
 " Miss Grey," he said, " I think any other woman in the world 
 
 would have told me she wasn't in Mr. , in his, secrets, or given 
 
 me some evasive or petulant answer. I thank you a thousand times. 
 We may then — I may — pursue without compunction my match- 
 making schemes. They are not very selfish ; they are only for 
 Lucelet's happiness. 1 would ask one of my office clerks to marry 
 her if she loved him and he was likely to make her happy ; and 
 I would set them up in life. You may guess, then, whether this 
 idea pleases me. But I confess I didn't think — well, of course, 
 your assurance is enough, but I began to think of something 
 different." 
 
 Minola rose to go away. 
 
 " One word, Miss Grey. Pray don't say anything to my wife 
 about this. She is the truest and kindest of women, as you know, 
 but she can't understand keeping anything a secret, and she always 
 begs of us to leave her out of the smallest plot of the most 
 innocent kind, because she must let it all out prematurely. Now 
 I'll release you, and you have, at all events, one friend in life to be 
 going on with — friend among the aged I mean : the rest will come 
 fast enough." 
 
 With a bewildered head and a bursting heart, Minola found 
 her way to her own room. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 CHASTELARD. 
 
 "So you are really going to be an heiress, my dearest?" Mary 
 Blanchet said to Minola, when our heroine was settled at home 
 
r-52 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 again. " I knew you ought to be, and would be if right were 
 done ; but right so often isn't done. My brother will be so glad 
 to hear it !— but not as other people might be glad, you know." 
 For Mary began to be afraid that by a hasty word she might be 
 filling the heart of her friend with suspicion of her brother. 
 
 " I don't know, Mary. Mr. Money, and others I suppose, say 
 so. I wish it were not true ; I am all right as things are, and I 
 hate the idea of gaining by this poor woman's death. I think I 
 should not feel so if we had been friends, and if I could think 
 that it was like a kindly gift from her, and that she wished me to 
 have it. But it is all so different. And then, what do I want of 
 it?" 
 
 " One can do so much good with money," said little Mary, 
 sighing. She was thinking of her brother. 
 
 " Yes, that is true," Minola said, thinking of Mary herself and 
 of what she might perhaps do for her. " But don't tell anyone 
 about this, Mary — not even your brother — if you can well help 
 it," Minola added, knowing what little chance there would be of 
 Mary's keeping such a thing secret from her brother. *' It is all 
 uncertain and only talk as yet, you know." 
 
 " These things are never secret, dearest," Mary said, with a 
 wise shake of the head. " Men always get to know of them. I 
 think the birds of the air carry the news abroad that a woman has 
 money, or that she has not;" and Mary sighed again gently. 
 
 " Do you see much of an alteration in the ways of men towards 
 me already, Mary ? Do they hang around me in adoring groups ? 
 Do they lean enraptured over me as I sweep the chords of the 
 harp ? Do they who whispered that I sang like the crow before, 
 now loudly declare that my voice puts the nightingale out of 
 conceit with his own minstrelsy?" 
 
 " Now you are only talking nonsense, dear ; for we know so 
 few men — and then you don't play the harp, and you never 
 sing in company. But, if you ask me, I think I do see some 
 difference." 
 
 " Already, Mary ? " 
 
 " Well, yes, I think so ; in one instance at least. Not, surely, 
 that you were not likely to have attentions enough paid to you 
 in any case, if you cared about them or encouraged them, and 
 that, even if you hadn't a sixpence in the world — but still " 
 
 " But still it does enhance one's charms, you think ? Come, 
 Mary, tell me the name of this mercenary admirer. Depend 
 upon it, all his arts shall fail." 
 
 " You are only laughing at me still, dearest ; but there is some- 
 thing in it, I can tell you, for all that. It is not my idea alone, I 
 
CHASTELARD. 153 
 
 can assure you. What do you think of a duke's brother for an 
 admirer, Minola ? " 
 
 Little Mary Blanchet was a crafty little personage. She thought 
 she could not too soon begin working for her brother's cause by 
 trying to throw discredit on the motives of all other possible 
 wooers. She had observed when going now and then to the 
 house of the Moneys, during the last few days, that the returned 
 cadet of the one great ducal house whereof she had any knowledge 
 was there every day, and that he was very attentive to Minola. 
 The same remark had been made by Mrs. Money, and had called 
 forth an indignant objection from Lucy, who protested against the 
 thought of her Nola having a broken-down outcast like that for a, 
 lover. But Mary, who was almost terrified at the idea of sitting 
 down in the same room with any member of the great family 
 who owned the mausoleum at Keeton, was not certain how far 
 the name of a family like that might not go with any girl, even 
 Minola, and believed it not an unwise precaution to begin as 
 soon as possible throwing discredit on his purposes. 
 
 Minola tried not to seem vexed. She had liked to talk to Mr. 
 St. Paul when he came, as he did every day of her stay in Victoria 
 Street. She had liked it because it gave her no trouble in thinking, 
 and it saved her from having to talk to others with whom she 
 might have felt more embarrassed, and because it turned away 
 attention from what might perhaps have otherwise been observed 
 — as she feared, at least — by too keen eyes. If Mary must suspect 
 anything, it was a relief to find that she only suspected this, and 
 Minola tried to make merry with her about her absurdity. But 
 in her secret heart she sickened at such talk, and such thoughts, 
 and felt as if the very shadow of the fortune which was expected 
 for her, falling already on her path, was making it one of new pain 
 and of still less accustomed shame. 
 
 " Poverty parts good company, used to be said," Minola 
 thought; "a little money seems much more likely to part good 
 company in my case." 
 
 Yet that there aie advantages in a command of money was 
 soon made very clear to Minola. When she returned from a 
 walk a day or two after, she found a specimen copy of Herbert 
 lilanchet's poems awaiting her, with a letter from Victor Heron. 
 The letter was somewhat awkward and rueful. Mr. Heron explained 
 that, by her express instructions, he had allowed Blanchet to have 
 it all his own way in the arrangement of the style of his appearance 
 in paper and print ; and that the cost had become something far 
 greater than he had anticipated. 
 
 " You should never have been troubled about this," Victor 
 
154 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 went on to say, " but that you made me promise that you alone 
 should pay for this thing ; I wish I hadn't made any such promise, 
 or consented that Blanchet should have his way in the business. 
 To think of a grown man, who has seen the world, leaving a 
 matter of money and business in the hands of a girl and a 
 poet ! Blanchet has been going it." 
 
 Minola in all her trouble found room for wonder, delight, and 
 something like alarm in looking at the superb edition in which the 
 poems of Mr. Blanchet were to go before a world scarcely pre- 
 pared for so much artistic gorgeousness. All that vellum paper, 
 rare typography, costly and fantastic binding, and lavish illustration 
 could do for poetry had been done, without stint, on behalf of 
 Herbert Blanchet. The leaves were as thick as parchment and 
 as soft as satin. Only a very few lines of verse appeared on each 
 broad luxurious page. Every initial letter of a sentence was a 
 fantastic design. The whole school of Blanchet's artistic friends 
 had rushed into combination to enrich the pages, the margins, 
 and the covers, with fanciful illustration. If they only had been 
 great or even successful and popular artists, the book might have 
 been worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately, Mr. Blanchet's 
 artistic friends were not yet great or famous. The outer world — 
 that world, which, in the opinion of the school, was wholly com- 
 posed of dullards and Philistines — knew as yet nothing about 
 these artists, and neither blamed them nor praised them. The 
 volume was as large in its superficial extent as an ordinary 
 atlas, and some of the poems which occupied a whole page were 
 not more than four lines in length. The whole thing seemed 
 truly, in the words of a poet whom Mr. Blanchet especially 
 despised, " all a wonder and a wild desire." 
 
 Thinking of herself as the patroness and in some sort the parent 
 of such a volume, Minola felt some such mixture of pride and 
 timidity as a modest girl might own who has suddenly been made a 
 princess, and is not quite certain whether she will be able to sup- 
 port her position with becoming nerve and dignity. 
 
 There came a little letter, too, from the poet himself. It ran in 
 this fashion : — 
 
 Dear Patroness and Queen, — The Poet has not dared to send in unfitting 
 casket the offering which your approval has made precious. The poems which 
 are addressed to you must at least offer themselves in form not unworthy to 
 be touched by your hand. 
 
 In all devotion yours, 
 
 Herbert Blanchet. 
 
 Nor did the volume want a poetical dedication. The second 
 leaf contained the following : — 
 
CHASTELARD. 155 
 
 Unto my Lady Patroness and Queen. 
 
 Upon my darkness may there well befall 
 Light of all darkness, darkness of all light ; 
 
 Starfire of amber, dew of deathlike sheen ; 
 
 Waters that burn, pale fires that sicken all, 
 And shadows all aglow with saffron light ; 
 
 But comes my lady, who is Glory's queen, 
 And all the bright is dark, and pallid dark the bright. 
 
 Minola read this dedication again and again, puzzled, amused, 
 angry, hardly knowing whether to laugh or to cry. " Am I Glory's 
 queen ? " she asked of her own soul. " And if I am, am I letting 
 light or darkness in upon my poor poet? Am I depriving him 
 of the amber, the dew, and the saffron light, or not? Is it praise 
 or blame, this dedication ? I suppose it must be praise, but I 
 don't think anybody could tell from its words. Oh, my dear 
 little Mary Blanchet, why must you have a brother? — and why 
 must that brother be a poet ? " 
 
 There was one consolation the dedication did not set forth her 
 name, and nobody could know who the lady patroness of the poet 
 might be. Minola felt inclined to be offended that she should be 
 in any way brought into this folly, but she was not certain whether 
 remonstrance or complaint might not be more ridiculous than 
 utter silence. After all, nobody knew anything about her or 
 cared, she said. If she were to complain in any way, it would only 
 grieve poor Mary, whom the thought that her brother could have 
 offended her friend and leader would drive well-nigh distracted. 
 " What does it matter if I am made a little ridiculous in my own 
 eyes ? " she asked herself. " It is only in my own eyes, I suppose. 
 Mary will look on it all as delightful ; her brother of course means 
 it for the best, and thinks it superb poetry ; and there is no one 
 else likely to care either way. It is not much to be a little more 
 ridiculous in my own eyes than I have already made myself." 
 
 Perhaps — perhaps — let it be said with hesitation and much 
 caution — there was something not wholly unwelcome to our heroine 
 in the idea that she could be Glory's queen and all the rest of it 
 to any human creature, not to say any poet, just now. She felt 
 humbled and deeply depressed. In her own eyes she was lowered 
 by what she knew of her own heart. Her pride had received a 
 terrible wound, almost a death-wound. The little world she had 
 made so proudly for herself had all crumbled into dust. It is not 
 wonderful if at such a time there should be, in spite of her sense 
 of the ridiculous and her senses generally, a certain soothing 
 influence in the fact that there still was some one in whose eyes 
 she appeared a person of account and even of dignity. At all 
 events, let it be frankly said that, when the first shock and stir 
 
156* MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 of the ridiculous were passed, Minola was not inclined to think 
 more harshly than before of the poor poet who called her his 
 patroness and his queen. As to the expense of the publication, 
 she was a little startled at first, but that sensation very quickly 
 passed away. She was not enough of a woman of business yet to 
 care about the cost of anything so long as she had the money to 
 pay. It would run her hard in her first year of independent life 
 to pay this much; but then she could pay it and live somehow, 
 and it would only be a case for strict economy in the future for 
 some time. Besides, it seemed that, whether she would or not, 
 she was likely to have much more money than she wanted or could 
 use for any purposes of her own. Then she was further stimulated 
 to carelessness by Mr. Heron's letter. 
 
 " If he thinks I care about money, or the cost of serving a 
 friend, he is mistaken," she said ; " his caution and his protes- 
 tations are thrown away on me." 
 
 For she was much inclined to be unjust and harsh in her mind 
 towards Heron now. He had committed, all unconsciously, a 
 terrible offence. He had, without knowing it, made her fall in 
 love with him. So she made the best of the whole affair, cost, 
 dedication, Glory's queen, and all ; and when Mary Blanchet came 
 to look at the precious volume, and to go into raptures over it, 
 Minola did her very best to seem contented, and not even to 
 suggest a criticism, or to ask what this or that meant. She re- 
 minded herself that the late Lord Lytton had written con- 
 temptuously of the " fools on fools " who " still ask what Hamlet 
 means." 
 
 " This may be as far off from me as Hamlet from other 
 people," she told herself. "Why confess myself a fool by asking 
 what anything means ? And in any case Mary Blanchet would not 
 know any better than I." 
 
 By this resolve she made one woman happy. 
 
 But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred 
 happiness. Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister 
 could have wished him to be. The head of the poet swam in 
 delight. He had never before been so proud and blest. He hung 
 over his volume for hours ; he could hardly get away from it. 
 When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from its fasci- 
 nations he found himself drawn back again into its presence. 
 He touched fondly its soft satiny leaves as though they were the 
 cheek of Beauty ; he pressed his own cheek against them ; he 
 committed all the follies which we understand and admire in the 
 immemorial raptures of the young lover or the father of the first • 
 born. 
 
CHASTELARD. 157 
 
 "They must see this," he cried aloud. " They can't overlook 
 a volume like this." " They " being, of course, that public whose 
 opinion he had always despised — those critics whose praise he had 
 always declared to be the worst censure to a man of true genius. 
 
 To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his 
 breast for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That 
 emotion came there with a strange overwhelming force, like that 
 of intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola 
 had had him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any 
 greater thing for him. Few men on earth can ever have had their 
 dearest ambition so sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, 
 the poet, to find his ambition gratified now. To have his poems 
 so set before the world would have been a glory and a rapture, no 
 matter though the patron's hand had been that of a withered old 
 man or some fat frump of a dowager ; but to be thus lifted to his 
 longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and beautiful woman 
 was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and seldom 
 allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The 
 emotion called up by the experience was as new as the experience 
 itself. Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of 
 excitement he would probably, if need were, have laid down his 
 life for Minola. 
 
 If Minola had known what strange effect had been wrought in 
 the breast of her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money 
 well laid out, even although she had wanted it far more than 
 she did. " To making a man happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar 
 entry on which a famous essay in the Spectator was founded. To 
 make a man grateful for the first time is surely a nobler piece 
 of work than to make him merely happy, and it ought fairly to cost 
 a good deal more. Minola had made a man for the first time both 
 grateful and happy. The work was a little expensive in this case, 
 but what miser will say that the money was thrown away ? 
 
 It is not likely, however, that Minola would have been quite so 
 much delighted if she could have known all the feelings that her 
 generous, improvident patronage had awakened in the poet's breast. 
 For Mr. Blanchet knew women well, he thought ; and he did not 
 believe that mere kindness alone could have impelled Minola to 
 such an act of bounty. Nor, making every needful allowance 
 for the friendship between Miss Grey and his sister, did he find 
 in that a sufficing explanation of Minola's liberality. He set 
 himself to think over the whole matter coolly and impartially, and 
 he could come to no other conclusion than that Miss Grey admired 
 him. He was a handsome fellow, as he knew very well, and tall, 
 and romantic in appearance ; what could be more natural than 
 
158 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 that a poetic young woman should fall in love with him ? He felt 
 sure that he had fallen in deepest love with her, but it is doubtful 
 whether he was yet in a condition to analyse his own excited 
 feelings very clearly. It is certain that he was madly in love with 
 his poems, with their gorgeous first edition, with the pride and the 
 prospect of the whole affair; and of course likewise in love with 
 the patroness to whom he was indebted for so much of a strange 
 delight. But how much was love of himself and how much of 
 Minola he did not take time to consider. 
 
 There was an artistic and literary association to which Blanchet 
 belonged, and amid which he passed most of his nights. It was 
 not exactly a club, for it had neither definite rules nor even a 
 distinct habitation. It was a little sect rather than a club. It was 
 an association of men who believed each in himself, and all, at 
 least for the present, in each other. Their essential condition of 
 existence was scorn of the world's ways, politics, and theories of 
 art. They held that man himself was a poor creature, unworthy of 
 the artist's serious consideration. All that related to the well- 
 being of that wretched animal in the way of political government 
 they looked down upon with mere contempt. The science which 
 professed to concern itself about his health, the social philosophy 
 which would take any account of his moral improvement, were 
 alike ridiculous in the eyes of this aesthetic school. If, however, 
 any uninitiated person should imagine that in setting up art as the 
 only serious business of life they were likely to accept any common 
 definition of art, he would find himself as open to their scorn as if 
 he had tried to improve a bad law or subscribed to the funds 
 of some religious organisation. Art with them was their own art. 
 The enlightened parson Thwackum, in "Tom Jones," observes 
 that " When I mention religion I mean of course the Christian 
 religion, and when I speak of the Christian religion I mean the 
 Protestant religion, and when I speak of the Protestant religion 
 I mean the religion of the Church of England." It was in this 
 spirit that the confraternity to which Mr. Blanchet belonged 
 defined art. They only meant their own particular sect ; out of 
 that there was no salvation. Art, it is said, hath no enemy but 
 the ignorant. These artists, however, were the enemies of all art 
 but their own. 
 
 At the present these genial brothers regularly met of nights 
 in the lodgings of one of them, who happened to have a large 
 studio in the West-Central region of London, where so much of 
 this unfashionable story happens to be cast. Victor Heron had 
 many times been told of the genius that burned by night in that 
 favoured haunt, and had expressed a modest wish to be allowed to 
 
CHASTELARD. 159 
 
 pass for an hour within its light. Mr. Blanchet was glad of the 
 opportunity of introducing such a friend ; for it somehow seemed 
 as if the consideration of any member of the fraternity was enhanced 
 among his brothers not a little by the fact that he could introduce 
 into their midst some distinguished personage from the despised 
 outer world. With them Victor Heron might very well pass for a 
 distinguished public man, as, in fact, he already did, with no design 
 of his own that way, in the eyes of Herbert Blanchet. To Victor 
 the school was all composed of gifted and rising men, whom it was 
 a pride to know or even to meet. To the school, on the other hand, 
 Victor was a remarkable public man, a tremendous " swell," who 
 had done some wondrous things in some far-off countries, and 
 who, for all they knew at the time, might be regarded by the world 
 as the prospective Prime Minister of England. 
 
 There was a peculiar principle of reciprocity tacitly recognised 
 among these brothers in art. No one of them would admit that 
 there was anything which his brother knew and he did not know. If 
 one of them read an author for the first time, and came to meet 
 his fellows proud of his freshly-acquired knowledge, he found no 
 man among them who would admit that he had not from his birth 
 upwards been equally familiar with the author in question. It 
 would be easy, surely, some one may say, to expose such pretension. 
 Just so ; of course it would. But when one brother had shown 
 to-night that his friends had never read Schopenhauer, and in 
 point of fact could not read him if they tried, who should guarantee 
 that same brother against a similar exposure of his own harmless 
 little false pretences to-morrow when he professed to know all about 
 Euripides ? It was not found convenient in this little circle to 
 examine too closely into the pretensions of each other. " Live 
 and let live " was the motto of the school, so far as their esoteric 
 professions were concerned. 
 
 There was indeed a legend that some malign person, acquainted 
 with the peculiarities of the school, had once compelled them to 
 invent a patron poet. It was done in this fashion : the malign 
 person talked confidently and fluently to one of the order con- 
 cerning a French poet, whom he described as a gifted apostle of 
 a kindred school, and whom he was pleased to name De Patroque. 
 The youth thus talked to was not to be outdone, or even to be 
 instructed. He gave out that he had long had his eyes fixed 
 reverently on the genius of the gifted De Patroque. He talked 
 largely, not to say bouncingly, of the great De Patroque among his 
 friends, who, not to be outdone in their turn, talked to him and to 
 others of the new apostle. The fame of De Patroque grew and 
 grew, until at last ill-natured persons affirmed that several essays 
 
igo MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 on his genius, and fraternal hymns of honour, were composed for 
 hiin by the admirers of his mythical career. 
 
 To this select circle Mr. Blanchet had for some time proposed 
 to introduce his friend Victor Heron. On the very day when the 
 first copies of the gorgeous poems were submitted to privileged 
 eyes, Mr. Blanchet called on his friend. He found the friend a 
 little put out by the unexpected lavishness of the manner in which 
 the poetic enterprise had been carried on. 
 
 " This will be an awfully expensive business, I'm afraid," Heron 
 said, in an embarrassed tone, for he felt that it was a sort of pro- 
 fanation to talk of money matters with a young poet. " I wish you 
 had let me do this thing myself, Blanchet. I'd not have minded so 
 far as I'm concerned. But I don't know about her, you see — she 
 may not have much money. Then, young ladies are generally so 
 enthusiastic ; she may not have thought of what the thing would 
 cost." 
 
 " You need not think about that," Herbert said loftily. " Miss 
 Grey will be a rich woman one of these days " 
 
 " But I don't see that that much alters the matter, although I 
 am decidedly glad to hear it for her own sake, if it will make her 
 any happier than she is now — which, I take it, is not by any means 
 certain. But I don't see throwing away her money without her 
 knowing all about it any the more." 
 
 " Throwing away her money ? " Herbert asked, in tones of 
 lofty protest. 
 
 " Well, I don't mean that, of course," the good-natured Heron 
 hastened to explain in all sincerity. " You know very well, my 
 dear Blanchet, what I think of your merits and your poems, and 
 of all true poets. I know that it is an honour for anyone, whether 
 man or woman, to be allowed to help a poet to come out before 
 the world and make a success. I only wish I had had the chance 
 of doing such a thing for you ; but this young lady, you know, I 
 don't feel quite certain whether I ought to have spent her money 
 so freely." 
 
 " I can reassure you, I think," the poet said, with chilling 
 •dignity; " I should never have allowed anyone to do anything for 
 me without having satisfied myself that it was done in the un- 
 stinting spirit of friendship, and by some one whom such kindness 
 would not hurt." 
 
 " All right ; I am glad to hear you say so, of course, but you 
 won't wonder at my scruples, perhaps " 
 
 " Your scruples, my dear fellow, do you infinite honour," Mr. 
 Blanchet said, with a slight dash of irony in his tone, which Heron 
 did not at the moment perceive, being in truth engrossed by some 
 

CHASTELARD. iui 
 
 other thoughts. " But you may accept my assurance that there is 
 no further occasion for them, and we will, if you please, change 
 the subject." 
 
 Victor did not feel by any means well satisfied that there was 
 no occasion for scruple, nor did he at all like his poetic friend's 
 way of looking at the matter. But he reflected that Blanchet might 
 after all have good warrant for what he had said, and that it was 
 not for him to cavil at the generosity of a rich girl — if she were 
 rich — towards a poor poet. 
 
 So they went along, the poet and his distinguished political 
 friend, to the scene of the artistic and literary gathering, which the 
 latter was so proud to see, and the former so proud to show. 
 
 We have all read in story about the effect of some little magic 
 word, which once spoken makes that which was lovely before seem 
 but loathly, and what was kindly wisdom sound like fatuous malig- 
 nity. Was there some such ill-omened charm working all that 
 night on Victor Heron ? Nothing seemed to him like what he had 
 expected. He was not impressed as he had felt sure he would be 
 by the poets and other sons of genius. They did not seem to con- 
 stitute an assembly of noble minds in whose midst he was to feel 
 such reverence as the rude Gauls of history or legend felt in the 
 presence of the Roman senators. The thoughts that he heard did 
 not strike him as celestial in their origin. There was a good deal of 
 disparagement and denunciation of absent authors and artists, 
 which, if the talkers had not been men of genius, Victor would 
 certainly have thought ill-natured and spiteful. There seemed, at 
 least to his untutored mind, to be little more than a technical relish 
 of art in all they said. It was not art they cared for, but only a 
 clique and its tricks. A group of discontented spinsters girding at 
 their younger sisters who were married could hardly have shown 
 themselves more narrow-minded and malign. The effect on Victor 
 was profoundly depressing. It was like that which might be 
 wrought upon a youth who, after gazing in rapture on the per- 
 formance of some queen of classic tragedy, is at his earnest desire 
 taken to see her in her private life, and finds her slatternly of dress, 
 mean of speech, wholly uninspired by her art, and only taking a 
 genuine pleasure in disparagement or slander of her rivals. 
 
 If Victor had known the world better, he would have known 
 that much, very much, of all this was but the mere affectation and 
 nonsense of youth. These young men were as yet among the 
 " odious race of the unappreciated." Yet a little, and some of 
 them will make a success, and will have the credit of the world 
 for what they do, and they will turn out good fellows, kindly, 
 true, and even modest. Nothing makes some young men so 
 
 H 
 
162 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 insufferably conceited and aggressive as the idea that they are 
 not successful, and that people know it. There are many of us 
 mortals with whom prosperity only agrees. On the other hand, 
 some of these youths will fail early, completely, and wholesomely 
 in their artistic attempts, and will find out the fact for good, and 
 will retire from the field altogether, and settle down to something 
 else, and make a success, or at least a decent living, in some other 
 way of life ; and will forget all the worser teaching of their earlier 
 days, and will look back without bitterness on the time when they 
 tried to impress a dull world, and will have no feeling of hatred 
 for those who have done better, but will marry and bring up chil- 
 dren, and be Philistines and happy. Youth has only one season 
 — luckily for a good many of us, who are decent fellows enough 
 as long as we are content to be ourselves, and can do without 
 affectation. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 " UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES." 
 
 But there was something more in Victor Heron's feeling of 
 depression that night than came from the mere fact that he had 
 found a few young artists not quite such heroic spirits as he thought 
 they ought to be. It was the demeanour of Herbert Blanchet 
 that especially spoiled the evening for him. In truth, the head 
 of the poet was not a strong one, and was very easily turned by 
 any little stimulant of whatever kind. His volume of poems this 
 night affected all his being. He felt sure that he was at last about 
 to force himself upon the recognition of the world, and he made 
 up his mind that Miss Grey was in love with him. He conveyed 
 hints of his approaching good fortune to his companions ; and he 
 received at first, with benign courtesy, their compliments on the 
 success that seemed to await him in life and love. But when 
 some too forward person suggested that he could possibly guess 
 at the name of the heiress whose heart and hand were to bless 
 the lucky poet, then Blanchet became gravely and even severely 
 dignified. 
 
 " You will excuse me, Mellifont," he said grandly, the brandy 
 and soda having, as was the wont of any such liquor taken by our 
 poor poet, gone straight upward to his head, "you will excuse me, 
 I am sure, if I say, this is not exactly a subject for jocularity, or 
 
"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES." 163 
 
 even, permit me to add, for general conversation, although among 
 friends. My distinguished friend, Mr. Heron, will, I am sure, 
 exactly appreciate what I say. Things may not be so completely 
 settled as to make it proper that they should be spoken of as if — 
 as if, in short, they were settled ; you will excuse me, Mellifont, my 
 dear fellow — you will excuse me." 
 
 Victor Heron thought it time for him to go, and rose accord- 
 ingly, and Mr. Blanchet insisted on accompanying him down the 
 stairs and to the door of the house. 
 
 " I thought it right, you know," the over-dignified poet said, 
 " to put a stop to that sort of thing. Men have no right to make 
 such inferences. I should have no right myself to assume that 
 things were settled in that sort of way. It is not just to others — 
 to another, at least. You appreciate my motives, I am sure, 
 Heron, my dear friend ? " 
 
 " I don't know that I even quite understand what your friend 
 was talking about," said Heron coldly. " But if it was about any 
 lady, I should think such conjecturing highly improper and im- 
 pertinent ; and I should be rather inclined to put a stop to it even 
 more quickly." 
 
 " Quite my idea — I am glad you entirely concur with me, and 
 approve of the course I have taken. But of course you would do 
 so. I knew I could count on your approval. By the way, you 
 know Mellifont ? " 
 
 " The man you talked to just now ? " 
 
 " Yes, Mellifont — a very good fellow, though a little too fond of 
 talking — I have had to reprove him more than once, I can tell you. 
 But a very good fellow for all that, and one of the only true artists 
 now alive. He is a composer— you must hear him play some 
 bits from his opera. He is at work on an opera, you know — or 
 perhaps you have not heard ? " 
 
 " I have not heard — no. I am rather out of the way of such 
 things, I fear," said Victor, beginning to feel, in spite of himself, 
 a certain awe of a man who could compose an opera, and think- 
 ing that, after all, a certain allowance must be made for the genius 
 of one who could do such things. 
 
 " Oh, you must hear some of it soon ! We feel satisfied that 
 it will sound the death-knell of all the existing schools of music. 
 They are all wrong, sir, from first to last, from Mozart to Wagner 
 — all wrong except Mellifont." 
 
 Victor was for the moment really staggered by the genius of 
 this great man. 
 
 " What is his opera to be called?" he asked, not venturing 
 to hazard any compromising observation. 
 
166 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 in that one lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's 
 room, he thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of 
 him in her mind. It was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon 
 that shone on the near roof of the British Museum seemed as 
 poetic and as sad as though it fell on the ruins of the Parthenon. 
 No practice in colonial administration can wholly squeeze the 
 poetic and the romantic out of the breast of a young man of 
 Heron's time of life. As he stood there, his grievance seemed as 
 far off as the moon herself, but not by any means so poetic and 
 beautiful. He paced up and down, feeling very young and odd, 
 and unlike his usual self. He was happy in a queer, boyish way 
 that had a certain shamefaced sensation about it, as when a youth 
 for the first time drinks suddenly of some sparkling wine, and 
 feels his brain and senses all aflame with delicious ecstasy, and is 
 afraid of the feeling although he delights in it. 
 
 It was a natural part of the half-fantastic chivalry of his 
 character that he should have felt a sort of satisfaction in thus for 
 the moment being near Minola, as if by that means he were in 
 some sort protecting her against danger. If at that time any 
 softer and warmer feeling than mere friendship were mingling 
 itself with Heron's sensations, he did not then know it. He 
 thought of the girl as a sweet friend, new to him, indeed, but very 
 dear, in whose happiness he felt deeply interested, and over whom 
 he had taken it into his head that he had a right to watch. She 
 seemed to be strangely alone in the world of London, and in- 
 deed, to be at the same time not suited for anything in London 
 but just such isolation. He never could think of her as mixing in 
 the ordinary society of the metropolis. He could not think of her 
 as one of the common crowd, following out mechanically the 
 registered routine of the season's amusements, listening to the 
 commonplace talk, and compliments, and cheap cynicism of the 
 drawing-room and the five o'clock tea. To him she appeared 
 as different from all that, and as poetically lifted above it, as if she 
 were Hawthorne's Hilda, high up in her Roman tower, among her 
 doves, and near to the blue sky. Except in the home of the 
 Moneys, Heron had never seen Minola in anything that even 
 looked like society ; and there was a good deal of the odd and 
 the fresh in that home which took it out of the range of the com- 
 monplace, and did not interfere with his poetic idealisation of 
 Minola. Her presence and her way of life appeared alike to him 
 a poetic creation. So quiet, self-sufficing a life, alone in the midst 
 of the crowd, such simple strength of purpose, such a tranquil 
 choice of the kind of existence that suited her best, such gene- 
 rosity, and such gracious loving kindness, — all this together made 
 
"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES." 167 
 
 up a picture which had a natural fascination for a chivalrous young 
 man, who had never before had time to allow the softer and 
 more romantic elements of his nature any chance of expression. 
 It may be that for the present Minola was to him but the first 
 suggestion of an embodiment of all the vague, floating thoughts 
 and visions of love and womanhood that must now and then cross 
 the spiritual horizon of every young man, no matter how closely 
 he may be occupied with colonial affairs and the condition of the 
 coloured races. The hero of a French story, whereof there is not 
 otherwise overmuch good to be said, speaks with a feeling as 
 poetic as it is true when he says that in the nightingale's song 
 he heard the story of the love that he ought to have known, 
 but which had not yet come to him. Perhaps in the eyes and 
 in the voice of Minola, Victor Heron unconsciously found this- 
 story told for him. 
 
 However that might be, it is certain that Heron found a 
 curious satisfaction this night in passing again and again before 
 Minola's door, and making believe to himself as if he were 
 guarding her against danger. He might have remained on guard 
 in this way, Heaven knows how long — for, as we know, he was 
 not fond of early going to bed — but that he suddenly "was aware," 
 as the old writers put it, of another watcher as well as himself. 
 It was unmistakable. Another man came up and passed slowly 
 once or twice under the same windows, and on the side of the 
 street where Heron had put himself on guard. Then the new- 
 comer, observing, no doubt, that he was not alone, had crossed 
 to the other side of the street, and Heron thought he was only a 
 chance passer and was gone altogether. Presently, however, he 
 crossed the road again, and stood a short distance away from 
 Heron as if he were watching him. Now, though Victor Heron 
 was not a lover, he had just as much objection as any lover could 
 have to being seen by observant eyes when watching under a girl's 
 window. The mere thought recalled him at once to chilling 
 commonplace. He was for going away that moment; all the 
 delight was gone out of his watching. But he was a little curious 
 to know if the new-comer were really only a casual stranger whom 
 his movements had stirred into idle curiosity. So he went straight- 
 way down the street and passed the unwelcome intruder. He 
 felt sure the face of the man was known to him, although he 
 could not at first recall to mind the person's identity. He felt 
 sure, too, by the way in which the man looked at him and then 
 turned suddenly off, that the new-comer had recognised him as 
 well. This was tormenting for the moment, as he went on per- 
 plexing himself by trying to think who it was that he had seen in 
 
1 66 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 in that one lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's 
 room, he thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of 
 him in her mind. It was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon 
 that shone on the near roof of the British Museum seemed as 
 poetic and as sad as though it fell on the ruins of the Parthenon. 
 No practice in colonial administration can wholly squeeze the 
 poetic and the romantic out of the breast of a young man of 
 Heron's time of life. As he stood there, his grievance seemed as 
 far off as the moon herself, but not by any means so poetic and 
 beautiful. He paced up and down, feeling very young and odd, 
 and unlike his usual self. He was happy in a queer, boyish way 
 that had a certain shamefaced sensation about it, as when a youth 
 for the first time drinks suddenly of some sparkling wine, and 
 feels his brain and senses all aflame with delicious ecstasy, and is 
 afraid of the feeling although he delights in it. 
 
 It was a natural part of the half-fantastic chivalry of his 
 character that he should have felt a sort of satisfaction in thus for 
 the moment being near Minola, as if by that means he were in 
 some sort protecting her against danger. If at that time any 
 softer and warmer feeling than mere friendship were mingling 
 itself with Heron's sensations, he did not then know it. He 
 thought of the girl as a sweet friend, new to him, indeed, but very 
 dear, in whose happiness he felt deeply interested, and over whom 
 he had taken it into his head that he had a right to watch. She 
 seemed to be strangely alone in the world of London, and in- 
 deed, to be at the same time not suited for anything in London 
 but just such isolation. He never could think of her as mixing in 
 the ordinary society of the metropolis. He could not think of her 
 as one of the common crowd, following out mechanically the 
 registered routine of the season's amusements, listening to the 
 commonplace talk, and compliments, and cheap cynicism of the 
 drawing-room and the five o'clock tea. To him she appeared 
 as different from all that, and as poetically lifted above it, as if she 
 were Hawthorne's Hilda, high up in her Roman tower, among her 
 doves, and near to the blue sky. Except in the home of the 
 Moneys, Heron had never seen Minola in anything that even 
 looked like society ; and there was a good deal of the odd and 
 the fresh in that home which took it out of the range of the com- 
 monplace, and did not interfere with his poetic idealisation of 
 Minola. Her presence and her way of life appeared alike to him 
 a poetic creation. So quiet, self-sufficing a life, alone in the midst 
 of the crowd, such simple strength of purpose, such a tranquil 
 choice of the kind of existence that suited her best, such gene- 
 rosity, and such gracious loving kindness, — all this together made 
 
"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES." 167 
 
 up a picture which had a natural fascination for a chivalrous young 
 man, who had never before had time to allow the softer and 
 more romantic elements of his nature any chance of expression. 
 It may be that for the present Minola was to him but the first 
 suggestion of an embodiment of all the vague, floating thoughts 
 and visions of love and womanhood that must now and then cross 
 the spiritual horizon of every young man, no matter how closely 
 he may be occupied with colonial affairs and the condition of the 
 coloured races. The hero of a French story, whereof there is not 
 otherwise overmuch good to be said, speaks with a feeling as 
 poetic as it is true when he says that in the nightingale's song 
 he heard the story of the love that he ought to have known, 
 but which had not yet come to him. Perhaps in the eyes and 
 in the voice of Minola, Victor Heron unconsciously found this- 
 story told for him. 
 
 However that might be, it is certain that Heron found a 
 curious satisfaction this night in passing again and again before 
 Minola's door, and making believe to himself as if he were 
 guarding her against danger. He might have remained on guard 
 in this way, Heaven knows how long — for, as we know, he was 
 not fond of early going to bed — but that he suddenly " was aware," 
 as the old writers put it, of another watcher as well as himself. 
 It was unmistakable. Another man came up and passed slowly 
 once or twice under the same windows, and on the side of the 
 street where Heron had put himself on guard. Then the new- 
 comer, observing, no doubt, that he was not alone, had crossed 
 to the other side of the street, and Heron thought he was only a 
 chance passer and was gone altogether. Presently, however, he 
 crossed the road again, and stood a short distance away from 
 Heron as if he were watching him. Now, though "Victor Heron 
 was not a lover, he had just as much objection as any lover could 
 have to being seen by observant eyes when watching under a girl's 
 window. The mere thought recalled him at once to chilling 
 commonplace. He was for going away that moment; all the 
 delight was gone out of his watching. But he was a little curious 
 to know if the new-comer were really only a casual stranger whom 
 his movements had stirred into idle curiosity. So he went straight- 
 way down the street and passed the unwelcome intruder. He 
 felt sure the face of the man was known to him, although he 
 could not at first recall to mind the person's identity. He felt 
 sure, too, by the way in which the man looked at him and then 
 turned suddenly off, that the new-comer had recognised him as 
 well. This was tormenting for the moment, as he went on per- 
 plexing himself by trying to think who it was that he had seen in 
 
168 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 this unexpected and unwished-for way. He walked slowly, and 
 looked back once or twice. He could not see his disturber any 
 more. The man had either gone away or was, perhaps, standing 
 in the shadow of a doorway. Suddenly an idea flashed upon 
 Heron. 
 
 " Why, of course," he exclaimed, " it's he ! I ought to have 
 known ! It's the man from Keeton — the hated rival." 
 
 By " hated rival," however, Heron did not mean a rival in love, 
 but only in electioneering ; for he now knew that it was Mr. Shep- 
 pard he had seen, and he remembered how Mr. Sheppard, when 
 he met him in Minola's room, had seemed oddly sullen and un- 
 willing to fraternise. This was the reason why Heron called him 
 the hated rival. His own idea of a rival in an election contest was 
 that of a person whom one ought to ask to dinner, and treat with 
 especial courtesy and fair offer of friendship. 
 
 Suddenly, however, another idea occurred to him. 
 
 " What on earth can he be doing there," he asked, " under her 
 window? Can it be possible that he, too, is a lover?" 
 
 He, too ? Who, then, was the lover — the other lover ? Heron 
 did not believe, and would not admit, that Blanchet was a genuine 
 lover at all. The whole theory of Victor's duty to watch under 
 Minola's windows was based on the assumption that Blanchet was 
 no true lover, but a cunning hunter of fortune. Why, then, ask, 
 Was Mr. Sheppard, too, a lover ? Heron did not at the moment 
 stop to ask himself any such question, but, after a while, the ab- 
 surdity of his words occurred to him, and he was a little amused at, 
 and a good deal ashamed of, his odd and hasty way of putting the 
 question. 
 
 " Why shouldn't he be there as well as I ?" he said. " Why 
 should he be a lover any more than I ? " 
 
 Then he began to assure himself that the hated rival must have 
 been there only by chance ; and it is doubtful whether, if he had 
 thought much longer over the question, he would not have ended 
 by convincing himself that nothing but the merest chance had 
 brought him, too, under Minola's window-panes. 
 
 It was, indeed, Minola's window under which he had been 
 watching ; and she, too, was watching, and never dreamed that he 
 was so near. She looked from her window not long after he had 
 gone, and saw the street all lonely, and felt lonely herself, and 
 shuddered, thinking that life would ever be a dreary piece of work 
 for her. It is a melancholy fact that all that time, and even long 
 after she had gone in shuddering from the window, poor Sheppard 
 was standing in a doorway at the opposite side of the street, and 
 that she not only never saw him, but never thought of him. Her 
 
"COUNSEL BEWRAYED." 169 
 
 thoughts were of Victor Heron, and of her own folly and her own . 
 love — that love which seemed such folly, which was so hopeless, 
 which she knew, or, at least, believed, it was a sort of treason 
 against friendship to indulge, although in absolute secret. 
 
 In Uhland's pretty poem called "Departure" a youth is going 
 on his wanderings, and his comrades escort him a little on his way, 
 and as they go along they pass beneath the windows of a pretty 
 girl. The lad looks up, and would fain, if he might, have a rose 
 from her hand, and yet tells himself that he would not have it — 
 for to what end to have the rose, when she whom he loved cared 
 nothing for him, and the rose would only wither with him, and to 
 no purpose ? When he has gone, the girl strains her eyes after him 
 in grief, and wonders what the world is to be to her now that he 
 she loved is going far away, and never knew of her love. A few 
 timely words might have spared all the heart-ache, no doubt ; but 
 it will be a very different world from that which we have known 
 when all the words that might have been timely are spoken in 
 time, or even when the feelings that might prompt the timely 
 words have learned their own meaning at the right moment to give 
 it breath. 
 
 CHAPTEIl XVIII. 
 
 "counsel bewrayed." 
 
 The next morning Heron rose with a distinct purpose of doing 
 something to put Minola on her guard. His purpose to do 
 something was much more clear than his knowledge of what he 
 had better do. Anyhow, he thought he would go and see Minola, 
 and say something to her. When he began to speak, he would 
 probably hit upon the thing to say. As he might have put it 
 himself, Providence would pull him through somehow. The first 
 thing was to get to speech of Minola. This, at least, ought not 
 to be hard to compass. 
 
 His first idea was simply to go to her house and ask to see lier. 
 But when he was near the scene of his mounting guard the past 
 night he began to think of the difficulties that would be put in his 
 way if anyone else were present. How, for example, could he pos- 
 sibly say what he specially wanted to say if Mary Blanchet were 
 present, or were even coming and going in and out of the room, as 
 she was almost sure to be ? On the other hand, how could he 
 
17° MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 formally ask for a private conversation with Minola without stirring 
 all manner of absurd curiosity and conjecture ? At the very least, 
 Mary Blanchet would be sure to ask, when he had gone, what he 
 had come to say ; and that would, under the circumstances, be 
 rather embarrassing for Minola. He gave up, therefore, the idea 
 of seeing Miss Grey at her own house. 
 
 Another plan at once occurred to him. He knew how often 
 Minola walked in Regent's Park— he would go and walk there 
 about the time which she usually chose, and he would go again 
 and again until he met her. So he started off for the Park, greatly 
 relieved in mind to be doing anything. All the time there was a 
 good deal of work on his own account which he might, and, if he 
 had been at all a sensible young man, would, have been doing. 
 The time that he was spending in trying to ward off from Minola 
 a supposed danger might, if properly used, have procured him an 
 interview with a Cabinet Minister, or paved the way for easy 
 success at the future election for Keeton. There were twenty things 
 which Mr. Money had often told him he must do if he would have 
 the faintest hope of any success in anything ; and all these things 
 he was utterly neglecting because he chose to think that he was 
 called on to give some advice to a girl who perhaps would repay 
 him with little thanks for his officious attempt at interference. 
 
 He walked slowly through the Park, along the paths which he 
 knew that she loved, and made for the canal. It was a soft, grey 
 day, with no sky seen. The air was surcharged with moisture ; 
 but it was not raining, and the grass was only as if a heavy dew 
 had settled on it. The soft breath that floated over the fields was 
 warm and languid. Only three colours were to be seen all across 
 the Park : the green of the grass, the grey of the clouds, or of the 
 one cloud rather, and the dull black of the tree-trunks. These 
 colours, indeed, were softened, and shaded away, and blended into 
 each other, with indefinable varieties of tone and delicate inter- 
 changes of effect. It was just the day to make a certain class of 
 observer curse the stupid and foggy monotony of the English 
 climate. It was the day, too, to gladden the heart of a certain 
 refined class of artist with whom delicate effects of tone and shade 
 are precious and familiar. Certainly it might be called a day of 
 poetic cloud. To Victor, who had long been used to the unwinking 
 steadiness of a tropical sun, there was something specially refreshing 
 and delightful in the grass, the trees, and the cloud. He found 
 himself yearning in heart for a life which would leave him more 
 time and thought for the skies, the trees, and the grass. 
 
 Suddenly the scene vanished from his eyes, and he only saw 
 Minola Grey. He was now approaching the canal, and he saw her 
 
"COUNSEL BEWRAYED." 171 
 
 leaning over the bridge and looking into the water. It was early 
 in the day — too early for the nursemaids and the children and the 
 ordinary walkers, and there was no one but Minola now in Heron's 
 sight. 
 
 The girl, as she leaned on the railing of the bridge and looked 
 into the water, might have been adopted by any artist as a model- 
 figure of Melancholy. If Victor had been less in a hurry with 
 everything — if he had remained where he then was and looked 
 at her unperceived for a few moments, Heaven knows what in- 
 spiration of ideas, what reveaiings about himself and her, might 
 have come into his mind. But Victor waited for nothing — seldom 
 in life gave himself much time to think ; and, in any case, would 
 have had an instinctive objection to even a moment's unperceived 
 watching of a meditating girl. He was so rejoiced at the readiness 
 with which his desire to meet her had been gratified, that he 
 thought he could hardly seize his chance too soon. In his eager- 
 ness he even forgot that the task he had undertaken was rather 
 embarrassing, and that he had not yet made up his mind as to 
 what he was going to say. He was by Minola's side in a moment. 
 
 She was so much surprised and startled that Victor was quite 
 ashamed of having come upon her in such a sudden way. He had 
 forgotten that all women have nerves, and get startled in ways 
 unknown to men. At least, he assumed it must be for some 
 reason of this kind that Minola seemed so much disturbed when 
 he came up, but he certainly had not supposed that girls so clever 
 and healthy as Miss Grey were usually troubled with nerves. 
 
 Minola recovered herself very soon, however, and got rid of 
 all appearance of mere nervous embarrassment, although there 
 was for a while a certain constraint in her manner. 
 
 " Have you been long here ? " he asked. 
 
 " Not very long ; at least, it did not seem long. I like to be 
 here at this time ; there are so few people." 
 
 " Yes ; I knew you were likely to be here about this time if 
 you were coming at all to-day," he said ; an awkward remark, as 
 it suggested that he had come expressly to meet her. 
 
 " I come here at all manner of times," she said ; " but I think 
 I like this time the best." 
 
 " You are not going any farther, I suppose ? " 
 
 " No ; I thought of turning back now, and going home." 
 
 " I'll walk a little way with you, if you will allow me ? " 
 
 Of course she had no objection 10 make. They had walked 
 in that place often before, and it was a matter of certainty that 
 when they did meet they would walk together. He need hardly 
 have asked her if she would allow him to walk with her now. 
 
172 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 So they turned and walked a little off the beaten track, and 
 under the trees. When they had walked a certain distance in one 
 direction Victor turned round and she turned with him, as if she 
 were merely obeying his signal of command. It has already been 
 said more than once that Mr. Heron always went on as if he were 
 ever so much older than she, and belonging, indeed, to a different 
 stage of life. He bore himself as a man of forty or thereabouts 
 might do with a young woman of Minola's age. 
 
 " How do you like Blanchet's book ? " he asked abruptly. 
 
 " It is very beautiful, I suppose ; it's a little too ornamental and 
 fantastic perhaps for my taste ; but I suppose that is in keeping with 
 the style of the poems ; and he is delighted with the book." 
 
 " It has cost a great deal of money— much more than it ought 
 to have cost ; I don't like the thing at all." 
 
 " But think of the joy given to the poet. It is surely not very 
 dearly bought at the price. I never knew of a man so happy." 
 
 " Yes, yes ; that is all very well for him " 
 
 " It is very well for me too, Mr. Heron— to be able to do a 
 kindness for any human creature. I dare say it has given me as 
 much pleasure as it has given him, and made me quite as proud 
 too — and is not that something to gain ? " 
 
 " Still, I can't help feeling uneasy about this thing. It has cost 
 a heap of money, much more than I ever supposed it would, and I 
 seem as if I had brought you into all the expense." 
 
 " How could that be, Mr. Heron ? I expressly wished Mr 
 Blanchet to do as he pleased ; and he understood me exactly as I 
 wished him to do. You had nothing to do with it." 
 
 " Oh, yes ! I had something to do with it ; and then — excuse 
 me — you are rather young perhaps " 
 
 " Perhaps I can't be expected to know my own mind ; or ought 
 not to be trusted with the spending of my own money ? " 
 
 " No, I didn't mean that ; but you might not have known 
 exactly what you were being let in for ; and it is a good deal of 
 money for a girl to pay." 
 
 " And in fact you don't think a girl ought to be allowed to 
 spend her money without some wise person of the superior sex to 
 guide her hand ? Thank you very much, Mr. Heron, but I think 
 I may have my own way in this at least. I have otten told you 
 that I left Keeton because I could not stand the control of wiser 
 and better persons than myself. I am not at all a good girl, Mr. 
 Heron ; I never said I was. The counsels of the wise are sadly 
 thrown away on me, I fear." 
 
 She spoke in a hard and ungenial tone, which he had not 
 heard her use before. He could not help looking at her with 
 
"COUiXSEL BEWRAYED:' 17 3 
 
 an expression of wonder. She saw the expression and under- 
 stood it. 
 
 "You are shocked at my want of sweet feminine docility? I 
 ought not to have any ideas of my own, I suppose ? " 
 
 "No; I am not shocked, and I am not at all such a ridiculous 
 person as you would seem to suppose, and I have none of the 
 ideas you set down to me ; but you don't seem quite like yourself, 
 and you speak as if you were offended with me for something." 
 
 "Offended? — oh, no; how could I possibly be offended? I 
 am very much obliged, on the contrary, for the trouble you take 
 for one who seems to you quite unable to take care of herself." 
 
 Victor did not like her tone. There was something aggressive 
 in it. He was not experienced enough in the ways of society to 
 cry content to that which grieved his heart, and his thoughts 
 therefore showed themselves pretty clearly in his face. 
 
 " I don't like Blanchet's taking all this money," he said, after a 
 moment of silence. " I don't think a man ought to take such a 
 helping hand as that from — well, from " 
 
 " From a woman, you were going to say ? Why not from a 
 woman, Mr. Heron ? Are we never to do a kind thing, we unfor- 
 tunate creatures, because we are women and are young ? " 
 
 " No; I don't say that ; but there are things it may become a 
 woman to do, and which it doesn't quite so well become a man to 
 profit by. I don't think Blanchet " 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet seems to have a higher idea of what a woman's 
 friendship may be than you have, Mr. Heron. He does not see 
 any degradation in allowing a woman to hold him out a helping 
 hand when he wants one. I like his ideas better than yours. You 
 say you would have done this little service for him if you had been 
 allowed. Why should there be any greater degradation to him 
 in having it done by me ? At all events, you can't wonder if I 
 don't see it all at once." 
 
 " Of course, if you are satisfied and pleased, there is nothing 
 more to be said in the matter." 
 
 " I am satisfied and pleased — why should I not be ? I asked 
 a friend to let me do something to help him, and he answered me 
 just in the spirit in which I spoke. Of course I am glad to find 
 that there is even one man who could take a friendly offer in a 
 friendly way. There are not many such men, I suppose ? " 
 
 Victor could not help smiling at her emphatic way of expressing 
 her scorn of men. 
 
 " I do believe you have really turned yourself misanthropical 
 by reading ' Le Misanthrope,' " he said. 
 
 " Well, why should there not be a woman Alceste ? — although 
 
174 MISS MISANTHROPE, 
 
 m 
 
 I never knew any woman in real life more worthy to be classed 
 with him than the men we meet in real life are. Miss Alceste, I 
 think, would sound very pretty. I wish I could think myself entitled 
 to bear such a name." 
 
 " Or Miss Misanthrope," he suggested. " How would that do 
 for a young lady's name ? " 
 
 " Admirably, I think. That would get over all the difficulty, 
 too, and save foolish persons from thinking that one was setting 
 up for another Alceste. I should like very much to be called 
 Miss Misanthrope." 
 
 " If you go on as you are doing, you will soon be entitled to 
 bear the name," said Victor gravely. " At the present moment, 
 I don't know that I should much object to that." 
 
 " No ? I am glad that anything I am likely to do has a chance 
 of pleasing you. But why should you not object just at present? 
 Why not now as well as at any other time ? " 
 
 " Because I should like you to be a little misanthropical just 
 now, and a little distrustful — of men, that is to say, Miss Grey." 
 
 She coloured slightly, although she had no idea of his meaning 
 yet. ' 
 
 " I always thought you were full of trust in the whole human 
 race, Mr. Heron ; I thought you liked everybody and believed in 
 everybody. Now you tell, me to distrust all mankind." 
 
 " I didn't say that." 
 
 " No ? Some particular person, then ? " 
 
 " Some particular person, perhaps. At least, I don't mean 
 exactly that," Heron hastened to' explain, his conscience smiting 
 him at the thought that perhaps after all he might be suggesting 
 unjust suspicions of an absent man who was a sort of friend. " I 
 only mean that you are very generous and unselfish, and that there 
 might be persons who might try to make use of your good-nature, 
 and whom perhaps you might not quite understand. I don't know 
 whether I ought to speak about this at all." 
 
 " Nor I, Mr. Heron, I am sure ; for I really don't know what 
 youare speaking of, or what mysterious danger is hanging over me. 
 But I hope there is something of the kind, for I should so like to 
 resemble a heroine of romance." 
 
 " There is not anything very romantic in prospect so far as 
 I know," he said, now almost wishing he had said nothing, and 
 yet feeling in his heart a serious fear that Minola might be led to 
 put too much faith in Blanchet. " But if I might speak out freely, 
 and without any fear of your misunderstanding me or being 
 offended, there is something, Miss Grey, that I should veiy much 
 like to say." He spoke in an uneasy and constrained way, forcing 
 himself on to an unsrracious task. 
 
"COUNSEL BEWRAYED." 175 
 
 " You have been preaching distrust to me, Mr. Heron, and you 
 have been finding fault generally with all women who trust any- 
 body. To show you how your lessons are thrown away on me, 
 I shall certainly trust you as much as you like, and I shall not 
 misunderstand anything you say, nor be offended by it." There 
 was something of her old sweet frankness in her manner as she 
 spoke these words, and Heron was warmed by it. 
 
 " Well," he said at last, " you are a girl, and young, and living 
 almost alone, and people tell me you are going to have money. 
 You have promised to excuse my blunt way of talking out, haven't 
 you ? I almost wish for your sake, as you like to live this kind 
 of life, that you had just enough of money to live upon and no more ; 
 but I hear that that is not the case, or at all events is not to be. 
 Well, the only thing is that people who I think are not true, and 
 are not honest, and who are not worthy of you in any way 
 whatever, may try to make you think that they are true, and 
 sincere, and all the rest of it." 
 
 "Well, Mr. Heron, what if they do? " 
 
 " You may perhaps be persuaded to believe them." 
 
 " And even if I am, what matter is that ? I had much rather 
 be deceived in such things than know the truth, if the truth is to 
 mean that people are all deceitful." 
 
 " I don't think you want to understand me," he said. 
 
 " Indeed I do ; I only want to understand you ; but I fail as 
 yet. Why not speak out, Mr. Heron, like a man and a brother ? 
 If there is anything you want me to know, do please make me 
 know it in the clearest way." 
 
 She was growing impatient. 
 
 " You will have lovers," he said, driven to despair when it 
 seemed as if she could not understand a mere hint of any kind; 
 " of course you must know that you are attractive and all that — 
 and if you come to have money, you will be besieged with fellows 
 — with admirers, I mean. Do be a little distrustful — of one at 
 least; I don't like him, and I wish you didn't — and I can't very 
 well tell you why, only that he does not seem to me to be manly 
 or even honest." 
 
 She coloured a little; but she also smiled faintly, for she still 
 did not understand him. 
 
 " I suppose I must know the man you mean, Mr. Heron ; for 
 I think he is the only man I ever heard you say anything against, 
 and I have not forgotten. But what can have made you think 
 that I needed any lecture about him? I don't suppose he ever 
 thought about me in that way in his life, or would marry one of my 
 birth and my bringing up even if I asked him. And in any case, 
 
S76 MISS MISANTHROPE.- 
 
 Mr. Heron, I would not marry him even if he asked me. But 
 what a shame it seems to arrange in advance for the refusing of 
 a man who never showed the faintest intention of making an 
 offer ! " 
 
 At first Heron did not quite understand her. Then he sud- 
 denly caught her meaning. 
 
 " Oh, that fellow ? I didn't mean him. I never could have 
 supposed that you were likely to be taken in by him." 
 
 " To do him justice, Mr. Heron, he never seems to have any 
 thought of taking anyone in. Such as he is, he always shows 
 himself, I think." 
 
 " Oh, I don't care about him " 
 
 " Nor I, Mr. Heron, I assure you. But whom, then, do you 
 care about — in that sense ? " 
 
 " I distrust a man who takes a woman's money in a thoughtless 
 and selfish way," Heron said impetuously. " That is a man I 
 would not trust. Don't trust him, Miss Grey; believe me, he is a 
 cad — I mean, a selfish and deceitful fellow. I can't bear the 
 thought of a girl like you being sacrificed— or sacrificing- yourself, 
 as you might do perhaps, and I tell you that he is just the sort of 
 man ■ " 
 
 " Are you speaking of Mr. Blanchet now, Mr. Heron ? " Her 
 tone was cold and clear. She was evidently hurt, but determined 
 now to have the whole question out. 
 
 " Yes, I am speaking of Blanchet, of course — of whom else 
 could I be speaking in such a way ? " 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet is my friend, Mr. Heron ; I thought he was 
 a friend of yours as well." 
 
 " Well, I thought he was a manly, honest sort of fellow — I 
 don't think so now," Victor went on impetuously, warming himself 
 as he went into increasing strength of conviction. " I know you 
 will hate me for telling you this, but I can't help that. I am as 
 much interested in your happiness as if — as if you were my sister 
 — and if you were my sister I would just do the same." 
 
 It would, indeed, be idle to attempt to describe the course of 
 the feelings that ran through Minola's breast as she listened to the 
 words of this kind which he continued to pour out. But out of 
 all that swept through her — out of shame, surprise, anger, grief — 
 the one thought came uppermost, and survived, and guided her 
 — the thought that she had only to leave Heron's appeal un- 
 answered, and her secret was safe for ever. 
 
 She made up her mind, and was self-contained and composed 
 to all appearance again. 
 
 " Let us not say any more about this, Mr. Heron ; I am sure 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 177 
 
 you mean it as a friend ; and I never could allow myself to feel 
 offended by anything said in friendship. I am sorry you have such 
 an opinion of Mr. Blanchet. I have a much better opinion of him ; 
 I like him better than I like most men ; but you know we have 
 just agreed that I ought to be called ' Miss Misanthrope,' and I 
 assure you I mean to do my very best to deserve the name. 
 No — please don't say any more— I had rather not hear it, indeed ; 
 and if you know anything of women, Mr. Heron, you must know 
 that we never take advice on these matters. No ; trust to my 
 earning my name of Miss Misanthrope, but don't tell me of the 
 demerits of this or that particular man ; I had rather hate men 
 in the general than in all the particular cases — and how long we 
 must have talked about this nonsense, for here is the gate of the 
 Park ; and Mary Blanchet will be thinking that I am lost ! " 
 
 They almost always parted at this park gate. This time he felt 
 that he must not attempt to go any farther with her. She smiled 
 and nodded to him with a manner of constrained friendliness, and 
 went her way; and Heron's heart was deeply moved, for he feared 
 that he had lost his friend. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 mr. st. Paul's mystery. 
 
 Two events occurring almost together affected a good deal some 
 of the people of this story. The first was the death of Mrs. 
 Saulsbury. 
 
 Miss Grey was at once invited by the lawyers who had the 
 charge of her father's affairs to visit Keeton, in order to become 
 fully acquainted with the new disposition of things in which she 
 had so much interest. Thereupon Mr. Money announced that, as 
 Miss Grey had no very close friend to look after her interests, he 
 was resolved to put himself in the place of a parent or some 
 near relation, and go with her and see that all her interests 
 were properly cared for. Minola was unwilling to put him to so 
 much trouble and loss of time, well knowing how absorbed in 
 business he was ; but he set all her remonstrances aside with blunt, 
 good-humoured kindness. 
 
 " Lucy is coming with us," he said, " if you don't think her 
 in the way; it might be pleasant for you to have a companion." 
 
 " I should so much like to go with Nola," pleaded Lucy. 
 
 " Oh, I shall be delighted if Lucy will go," Minola said, not 
 
 N 
 
1 568 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 well knowing how to put into words her sense of all their kindness. 
 It was really a great relief to her to have Lucy's companionship in 
 such a visit. Mary Blanchet did not like to go back even for a 
 few days to Keeton. The poetess objected to seeing ever again 
 the place where she considered that art and she had been de- 
 graded by her servitude in the Court-house. So the conditions 
 of the visit were all settled. 
 
 But there arose suddenly some new conditions which Minola 
 had never expected. The long-looked-for vacancy at length oc- 
 curred in the representation of Keeton. The sitting member 
 announced his determination to resign his seat as soon as the 
 necessary arrangements for such a step could be put into effect. 
 It was imperative that Victor Heron should lose no time in 
 throwing himself upon the vacant borough. Mr. Money and 
 Lucy rattled up to Minola's door one morning breathless with the 
 news. Lucy's eyes were positively dancing with excitement and 
 delight. 
 
 " It seems to me that there's going to be a regular invasion 
 of. your borough, Miss Grey," Mr. Money said. " We're all going 
 to be there. You see that you are under no manner of obligation 
 to me. I must have gone down to Keeton in any case ; it's one 
 of the lucky things that don't often befall a busy man like me to 
 be able to kill the two birds with the one stone. I must take care 
 of our friend Heron as well as of you. He. would be doing some 
 ridiculous thing if there were no elder to look after him. He is 
 as innocent of the dodges of an English election as you are of 
 the ways of English lawyers. So we'll be all together ; that will 
 be very pleasant. Of course we'll not interfere with you — you shall 
 be just as quiet as you like while we are doing our electioneering." 
 
 What could Minola say against all this arrangement, which 
 seemed so satisfactory and so delightful to her friends ? It was 
 not pleasant for her to be brought thus into a sort of companionship 
 with Victor Heron. But it would be far less pleasant, it would 
 indeed be intolerable and not to be thought of, that she should 
 in any way raise an objection or make a difficulty which might 
 hint of the feelings that possessed her. 
 
 " After all, what does it matter ? " she asked herself as Mr. 
 Money was speaking. " I shall have to suffer this kind of thing 
 in some way for half my life, I suppose. It is no one's fault but 
 my own. Why should I disturb the arrangements of these kind 
 people because of any weaknesses of mine ? If women will be 
 fools, at least they ought to try to hide their folly. This is as good 
 practice for me as I could have." 
 
 So she told Mr. Money and Lucy that any arrangement that 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 179 
 
 suited them would suit her, and that she would be ready to go the 
 moment he gave the word. Then Mr. Money hastened away to 
 look after other things, and Lucy remained behind " to help Nola 
 with her preparations," as she insisted on putting it, but partly, as 
 Minola felt only too sure, to talk with her about Victor Heron. 
 
 Since Heron had offered her his advice in the Park, and she had 
 put it aside, Minola and he had only met once or twice. Then he 
 had attempted, the first time of their meeting, to renew his apolo- 
 gies, and she had put them lightly away, as she already had done 
 the advice, and had given him to understand that she wished to 
 hear no more of the matter. She had hoped that by assuming a 
 manner of indifference she might lead him to forget the whole 
 affair. But he did not understand her, and really believed that 
 he had lost her friendship for ever by the manner in which he 
 had spoken against Herbert Blanchet. He was troubled for her 
 much more than for himself, believing, or at least fearing, that 
 she had set her heart on a man unworthy of her. He kept away 
 from her therefore, assuming that his society was no longer welcome, 
 and resolute not to intrude on her. 
 
 Minola had hoped that the worst was over, and that he and 
 she were likely to settle gradually and unnoticed by others into 
 a condition of ordinary acquaintanceship. This melancholy hope, 
 to her a cruel necessity in itself, but yet the best hope she could 
 see now left for her, was likely to be disturbed for a while by this 
 ill-omened visit to Keeton. 
 
 Minola was busy making her preparations for going to Keeton, 
 and with a very heavy heart. Everything about the visit was now 
 distressing to her. The occasion was mournful ; she dreaded long 
 talks and discussions with Mr. Saulsbury ; she dreaded meeting 
 old acquaintances in Keeton ; she shrank from the responsibilities 
 of various kinds that seemed to be thrust upon her. When she 
 left Keeton she thought she had done with it for ever. Where 
 was the free life she had arranged for herself? Nothing seemed to 
 turn out as she had expected. 
 
 Meanwhile Mary Blanchet and Lucy Money were both de- 
 lighted, and in their different ways, at the prospect of Minola's visit 
 to Keeton. Mary saw her leader and patroness come back rich, 
 and ready to be distinguished and to confer distinction. Lucy 
 Money had the prospect of variety, of a holiday with Minola 
 whom she loved, and of being very often in the society of Victor 
 Heron. Minola was, if anything, made additionally sad by the 
 thought that it was not in her power to share their feelings, and. 
 the fear that she might seem a wet blanket sometimes on their 
 happiness. 
 
180 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Lucy had been with her all the morning, helping her with Mary 
 to make preparations for the journey. Minola was glad when it 
 was found that some things were wanting, and Lucy and Mary 
 offered to go out and buy them in Oxford Street. 
 
 Minola was enjoying the sense of being alone, and was, at 
 the same time, secretly accusing herself of want of friendship be- 
 cause she enjoyed it, when a card was brought to her, and she was 
 told that the gentleman said he wanted to speak to her, if she 
 pleased, " rather particular." The card was that of Mr. St. Paul. 
 He had never visited Minola before, nor was she even aware that he 
 knew where she lived. She was surprised, but she did not know 
 of any reason why she might not see him. She hastened down to 
 her sitting-room, and there she found Mr. St. Paul, as she had 
 found Mr. Blanchet once before. Mr. St. Paul looked even a 
 stranger figure in her room than . Mr. Blanchet had done, she 
 thought. He seemed far too tall for the place, and had a heedless, 
 lounging, half- swaggering way, which appeared as if it were com- 
 pounded of the old manner of the cavalry man and the newer 
 habits of the Western hunter. Nothing, however, co\ild have 
 been more easy, confident, and self-possessed than the way in 
 which he came forward to greet Minola. If he had been visiting 
 her every day for a month before, he could not have been more 
 friendly and at his ease. 
 
 " How d'ye do, Miss Grey ? Just in time to see you, I suppose, 
 before you go ? I've been down to Keeton already. I'm going 
 down again — I mean to make my mark there somehow." 
 
 Minola thought, with a certain half-amused, half-abashed feeling, 
 of the remarks she had heard concerning herself and Mr. St. Paul, 
 but she did not show any embarrassment in her manner. Indeed, 
 Mr. St. Paul was not a person to allow any one to feel much 
 embarrassment in his presence. He was entirely easy, self-satisfied, 
 and unaffected, and he had a way of pouring out his confidences 
 as though he had known Minola from her birth upwards. 
 
 " I hope you found a pleasant reception there." 
 
 " Yes, well enough for that matter. I find my brother and his 
 wife are not anything like so popular as I was given to understand 
 that they were. I saw my brother in London — didn't I tell you ? — 
 before I went down to Keeton, you know." 
 
 " No, I did not know that you had seen him; I hope he was 
 glad to see you, Mr. St. Paul?" 
 
 " Not he ; I dare say he was very sorry I hadn't been wiped 
 out by the Indians. Do you know what being wiped out means?" 
 
 " Yes, I think I could guess that much. I suppose it means 
 being killed ? " 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 1S1 
 
 " Of course. I mean to teach you all the slang of the West ; 
 I think a nice girl never looks so nice as when she is talking good 
 expressive slang. Our British slang is all unmeaning stuff, you 
 know ; only consists in calling a thing by some short vulgar word — 
 or some long and pompous word, the fun being in the pompous- 
 ness ; but the Western slang is a sort of picture-writing, don't you 
 know?— a kind of compressed metaphor, answering the purposes 
 of an intellectual pemmican or charqui. Do you know what these 
 things are, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; compressed meats of some kind, I suppose. But 
 I don't think I care about slang very much." 
 
 " You may be sure you will when you get over the defects of 
 your Keeton bringing-up. But what was I going to tell you? 
 Let me see. Oh, yes, about my brother and his wife. The honest 
 Keeton folks seem to have forgotten them. But I was speaking, 
 too, about my going to see my brother in town. Oh, yes, I went 
 to see him ; he didn't want me, and he made no bones about 
 letting me know it. He thinks I have disgraced the family ; it 
 was quite like the scene in the play— whose play is it? — I am sure 
 I don't remember — where Lord Foppington's brother goes to see 
 him, and is taken so coolly. I haven't read the play for more 
 years than you have lived in the world, I dare say, but it all came 
 back upon me in a moment. I felt like saying ' Good-bye, 
 Foppington,' only that he would never have understood the allu- 
 sion, and would think I meant to say he was a 'fop,' which he 
 is not, bless him." 
 
 " Then your visit did not bring you any nearer to a reconcilia- 
 tion with your brother ? " 
 
 " Not a bit of it — pushed us farther asunder, I think. The 
 odd thing was that I told him I wanted nothing from him, and 
 that I had made money enough for myself in the West. You 
 would have thought that would have fetched him, wouldn't you? 
 Not the least in life, I give you my word." And Mr. St. Paul 
 laughed good-humouredly at the idea. 
 
 "I am sorry to hear it," said Minola. "I think there are 
 quarrels and spites enough in the world, without brothers joining 
 in with all the rest." 
 
 " Bad form, isn't it — don't you think ? But 1 don't suppose 
 in real life brothers and sisters ever do care much for each other — 
 do you think they do ? I haven't known any such cases ; have 
 you?" 
 
 Minola could not contribute much from her own family history 
 to demonstrate the affection and devotion of brothers; but she had 
 no idea of agreeing in the truth of Mr. St. Paul's philosophic re- 
 flections, for all that. 
 
1 82 MISS MISANTHROPE 
 
 " I believe what you say is true enough as regards the 
 brothers, but I can't admit it of the sisters." 
 
 " Come, now, you don't really believe that nonsense, I know." 
 
 " Believe what nonsense ? That sisters may be fond of their 
 brothers sometimes ? " 
 
 " No, I don't mean that ; but that there is any real difference 
 between men and women in these ways — that men are all bad and 
 women all good, and that sort of thing. One's as bad as the 
 other, Miss Grey. When you have lived as long in the world as 
 I have, you'll find it, I tell you. But I don't find much fault 
 with either lot. I think they are both right enough, all things 
 considered, don't you know?" 
 
 " I am sure Mary Blanchet is devoted to her brother," Miss 
 Grey said warmly. 
 
 " That little old maid ? Well, now, do you know, I shouldn't 
 wonder. That's just the sort of woman to be devoted to a brother; 
 and, of course, he doesn't care twopence about her." 
 
 " Oh, for shame ! " said Minola, not, however, feeling quite 
 satisfied about the strength of Herbert Blanchet's affection for his 
 sister, even while she felt bound, for Mary's sake, to utter her 
 protest against his being set down as wholly undeserving. 
 
 " But, I say," Mr. St. Paul observed, " what a fool he is ! I 
 don't think I ever saw a more conceited cad and idiot." 
 
 " He is a very particular friend of mine, Mr. St. Paul," Miss 
 Grey began. " At least, his sister is one of my oldest friends." 
 
 " Yes, yes ; just so. The good old spinster is a friend of yours, 
 and you try to like the cad-brother on her account. All quite 
 right, of course. I should say he was just the sort of fellow to 
 borrow the poor old girl's money, if she had any." 
 
 " Oh, Mary has no money, and I am sure, if she had, she would 
 be only too glad to give it to him." 
 
 " Very likely ; anyhow, he would be only too glad to take it, 
 you may be sure. But I don't want to say anything against your 
 friends, Miss Grey, if you don't like it. Only women generally do 
 like it, you know — and then, you may say anything you please, 
 in your turn, against any of my friends or relatives. I shan't be 
 offended one bit, I can assure you." 
 
 Minola had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing. Her 
 new acquaintance did not allow any silence to spring up. 
 
 " Talking of friends," he said, " there is one of your friends 
 who politely declines any helping hand of mine in the election 
 business at Keeton, although I think I could do him a good turn 
 with some of the fellows who are out of humour with my brother. 
 Our Quixotic young friend will have none of the help of brothers 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 183 
 
 who quarrel with brothers, it seems. Easy to see that he never 
 had a brother." 
 
 " Mr. Heron is a man of very sensitive nature, I believe," 
 Minola said ; " he will not do anything that he does not think 
 exactly right, Mr. Money says." 
 
 " Yes, so I hear. Odd, is it not? Heron always was a con- 
 founded young fool, you know. He got into all his difficulties 
 by bothering about things that oughtn't to have concerned him 
 one red cent. Well, he won't have my disinterested assistance. 
 There again he is a fool, for I could have done something for 
 him, and Money knows it — it was partly on Money's account that 
 I thought of taking up Heron's side of the affair, because, so far 
 as I am concerned, anybody else would do me just as well so 
 long as he opposed my brother's man." 
 
 " I can quite understand that Mr. Heron would not allow him- 
 self to be made a mere instrument to work out your quarrel with 
 your brother. I think he was quite right." 
 
 The good-humoured St. Paul laughed. 
 
 " All very fine, Miss Grey, and it does for a lady uncommonly 
 well, no doubt ; but, if you want to get into Parliament, it won't do 
 to be quite so squeamish. I am sure I should be only too happy 
 to get the help of Cain against Abel or Abel against Cain, if I could, 
 in such a case." 
 
 " Most men would, I dare say," Minola answered, with as much 
 severity as she could assume under the possible penalty of Mr. St. 
 Paul's laughter. " But I am glad that there are some men, or 
 that there is one man, at least, who thinks there is some object 
 in life higher than that of getting into Parliament." 
 
 "Oh, as far as that goes, I quite agree with you, Miss Grey; 
 I shouldn't care twopence myself about a seat in Parliament — a 
 confounded bore, I think. But if you go in for playing a game, 
 why, you ought to play it, you know." 
 
 "But are there not rules in every game? Are there not such 
 things as fair and unfair?" 
 
 " Of course, yes ; but I fancy the strong players generally 
 make the rules to suit their own ideas in the end. Anyhow, I 
 never heard of anyone playing at electioneering who would have 
 hesitated for a moment about accepting the hand I offered to our 
 Quixotic young friend." 
 
 " I am glad he is Quixotic," Minola said eagerly. " I like to 
 think of a man who ventures to be a Quixote." 
 
 " Very sorry to hear it, Miss Grey, for I am afraid you won't 
 like much to think about me. Yet, do you know, I came here to 
 make a sort of Quixotic offer about this very election." 
 
1 84 Af/SS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I am glad to hear it ; the more Quixotic it is, the more I shall 
 like it. To whom is the offer to be made? — to Mr. Heron?" 
 
 " Oh, no, by Jove ! — excuse me, Miss Grey — nothing of the 
 sort. The offer is to be made to you." 
 
 "To me?" Minola was a little surprised, but she did not 
 colour or show any surprise. She knew very well that it was not 
 an offer of himself Mr. St. Paul was about to make, but it amused 
 her to think of the interpretation Mary Blanchet, if she could have 
 been present, would at once have put on his words. 
 
 "Yes, indeed, Miss Grey, to you. I have it in my power to 
 make you returning-officer for Keeton. Do you understand what 
 that means ? " 
 
 "I know in a sort of way what a returning-officer is; but I 
 don't at all understand how I can do his office." 
 
 " I'll show you. You shall have the fate of Keeton as much in 
 your hands as if you owned the whole concern — a deuced deal 
 more, in fact, than if you owned the whole concern in days of 
 ballot like these. I believe you do own a good many of the houses 
 there now, don't you?" 
 
 " I hardly know ; but I know that, if I do, I wish I didn't." 
 
 " Very well ; just you try what you can get out of your in- 
 fluence over your tenants — that's all." 
 
 " Then how am I to become returning-officer for Keeton?" 
 
 " That's quite another thing. That depends on me." 
 
 " On you, Mr. St. Paul ? " 
 
 " On me. Just listen." St. Paul had been seated in his 
 favourite attitude of careless indolence in a very low chair, so low 
 that his long legs seemed as if they stretched half-way across the 
 room. His position, joined with an expression of self-satisfied 
 lawlessness in his face, might have whimsically suggested a sort of 
 resemblance to Milton's arch-fiend " stretched out huge at length," 
 in one of his less malign humours. He now jumped up and stood 
 on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fireplace, his slightly 
 stooping shoulders only seeming to make him look taller than 
 otherwise, because they might set people wondering as to the height 
 he would have reached if he had only stood erect and made the 
 most of his inches. His blue eyes had quite a sparkle of excited 
 interest in them, and his prematurely bald forehead looked oddly 
 infantine over these eyes and that keen, fearless mouth. 
 
 " Look here, Miss Grey, it's all in your hands. You know 
 both these fellows, don't you ? " 
 
 " Both what fellows ? " 
 
 " These fellows who want to get in for Keeton. You know 
 them both. Now, which of them do you want to win ? " 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 185 
 
 " What can it matter which way my wishes go — if they went 
 any way ? " 
 
 " How like a woman ! how very like a woman ! " and he laughed. 
 
 " What is like a woman ? I know when a man says anything is 
 like' a woman, he means to say that it is ridiculous." 
 
 " Well, that's true enough ; that is about what we do mean in 
 most cases. What I meant in this case was only that you would 
 not answer my question. I put a plain direct question, to which 
 you must have some answer to give, and yt>u only asked me a 
 question in return which had nothing to do with mine." 
 
 " Perhaps I have no answer to give. I may have the answer in 
 my own mind, and yet not have it to give to anyone else." 
 
 " Oh, but you may really give it to me ! — in strictest con- 
 fidence, I assure you ; no living soul shall ever know from me. 
 Come, Miss Grey, let me know the truth. It can't possibly do 
 you any harm — or anybody harm, for that matter, except the wrong 
 man — for I take it for granted that the man you don't favour must 
 be the wrong man." 
 
 " But I don't know that I ought to have anything to do with 
 such a matter " 
 
 " Never mind these scruples ; it's nothing ; there's to be no 
 treason in the business, nor any unfair play. It's only this : I 
 couldn't get in for the borough myself, even if I tried my best, but 
 I can send in the one of the two whom I prefer — or, in this case, 
 whom you prefer. I can do this as certainly as anything in this 
 uncertain world can be certain." 
 
 " But how could that be ? " 
 
 " That it would not suit me to tell you just at present. I know 
 a safe way, that's all. In the teeth of the ballot I can promise you 
 that. Now, Miss Grey, who is to have the seat? " 
 
 " Are you really serious in all this, Mr. St. Paul ? " 
 
 "As serious as I ever was in my life about anything — a good 
 deal more serious, I dare say, than I often was about graver things 
 and more important men. Now then, Miss Grey, which of these 
 two fellows is to sit for Keeton ? " 
 
 " But why do you make this offer to me ? " she asked, with 
 some hesitation. " What have I to do with it ? " There was 
 something alarming to her in his odd proposition, about which he 
 was evidently quite serious now. 
 
 " Why do I make the offer to you ? Well, because I should 
 like to please you, because you are a sort of woman I like— a 
 regular good girl, I think, without any nonsense or affectation about 
 you. Now, that's the whole reason why I offer this to you. I 
 don't care much myself either way, except to annoy my brother, 
 
1 86 MlSS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 and that can be done in fifty other ways without half the trouble 
 to me. I was inclined to draw out of the whole affair until I re- 
 membered that you knew both the fellows, and I thought you 
 might have a wish for one of them to go in in preference to the 
 other — they can't both go in, you see — and so I made up my 
 mind to give you the chance of saying which it should be. Now 
 then, Miss Grey, name your man." 
 
 He put his hands into his pockets and coolly waited for an 
 answer. He had not the appearance of being in the least amused 
 at her perplexity. He took the whole affair in a calm, matter-of- 
 fact way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. 
 
 Minola was perplexed. She did not see what right he could 
 have to control the coming contest in any way, and still less what 
 right she could have to influence him in doing so. The dilemma 
 was one in which no previous experience could well guide her. 
 She much wished she had Mr. Money at hand to give her a word 
 of counsel. 
 
 " Come, Miss Grey, make up your mind — or rather, tell me 
 what you have already made up your mind to, for I am sure you 
 have not been waiting until now to form an opinion. Which of 
 these two men do you want to see in Parliament?" 
 
 There did not seem any particular reason why Minola or any 
 girl might not say in plain words which of two candidates she 
 would rather see successful. 
 
 Mr. St. Paul appeared to understand her difficulty, for he said 
 in an encouraging way — 
 
 " After all, you know, if you had women's rights and all that 
 sort of thing you would have to give your vote for one or other of 
 these fellows, and I dare say you would be expected to take the 
 stump for your favourite candidate. So there really can't be any 
 very serious objection to your telling me in confidence which of 
 the two you want to win." 
 
 Minola could not see how there could be any objection on any 
 moral principle she could think of just then — being in truth a 
 little confused and puzzled — to her giving a voice to the wish she 
 had formed about the election. 
 
 "It's not the speaking out of my wish that gives me any 
 doubt," she said ; " it is the condition under which you want me 
 to speak. I seem to be doing something that I have no right to 
 do ; that is, Mr. St. Paul, if you are serious." 
 
 " I remember reading, long ago," he said, " some Arabian 
 Nights' story, or something of the kind, about a king, I think it was, 
 who was brought at night to some mysterious place and told to cut 
 a rope there, and that something or other would happen, he did 
 
MR. ST. PAUL'S MYSTERY. 1S7 
 
 not know what or when. The thing seemed very simple, and yet 
 he didn't quite like to do it without knowing why and how and 
 all about it. It strikes me that you seem to be in the same sort 
 of fix." 
 
 " So I am ; just the same. Why can't you tell me what you 
 are going to do ? " 
 
 " I like that ! That is my secret for the present." 
 
 "And your king— the king in your story— did he cut the rope at 
 last?" 
 
 " I am afraid I have forgotten that ; but I have no doubt he 
 did, for he was a reasonable sort of creature, being a man, and I 
 know that everything came right with him in the end." 
 
 " Very well ; I accept the omen of your king, and I too will 
 cut the rope without asking why. Of course I wish that Mr. Heron 
 should be elected. He is a Liberal in politics. Why do you 
 laugh when I say that, Mr. St. Paul ? " 
 
 " Well, I didn't know that you cared much for that sort of thing , 
 and women are generally supposed to be reactionaries all the world 
 over, are they not ? Well, anyhow, that's one reason, his being a 
 Liberal. What next ? " 
 
 " I don't know that any next is wanting. But of course I think 
 Mr. Heron is a much cleverer man, and is likely to be much better 
 able to get on in the House of Commons ; and then he has his 
 complaint to make against the Government " 
 
 "Yes; and then?" 
 
 " Then, he is very much liked by people whom I like— and I 
 like him very much myself." Minola spoke out with perfect 
 frankness, believing that that was the best thing she could do, and 
 not showing the least sign of embarrassment. 
 
 Mr. St. Paul laughed. 
 
 " You don't like the other fellow so well ? " he said. 
 
 " I am sure he is a very good man " 
 
 " That's enough ; you need not say another word. We all can 
 tell what a critic means when he speaks of some actor as a careful 
 and painstaking performer. It's just the same when a woman says 
 a man is very good. Then you pronounce for Heron?" 
 
 " I pronounce for Mr. Heron decidedly, if you call saying what 
 I should like to happen pronouncing for anyone." 
 
 " In this case it is of more effect than many other pronuncia- 
 mentos. You have elected Heron, Miss Grey, if I am not much 
 more out in my calculations than I have been this some time. All 
 right, I am satisfied. If you have money to throw away, just back 
 what's-his-name ? — Sheppard — heavily, and you are sure to get rid 
 of it." 
 
iSS MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " And you won't tell me what all this means ?" 
 
 "Not I, indeed ; not likely. Good-day, Miss Grey; you have 
 elected your friend Heron, I can tell you. Odd, isn't it, that he 
 should come to be elected after all by me ? " 
 
 He bade her good-day again, and strode and shambled out of 
 the room and down stairs, leaving Minola much perplexed and not 
 quite pleased, and yet full of a secret wonder and pride at the 
 possibility of her having helped to do Mr. Heron a service. 
 
 " I wonder what he would say if he knew of it ? " she asked 
 herself, and she could hardly think that he would be greatly de- 
 lighted with the promise of such influence. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 LOVE AND ELECTIONEERING. 
 
 The soul of Keeton, as a local orator expressed it, was stirred 
 to its depths by the events which succeeded. The three estates of 
 the town, whereof we have already spoken, were alike concerned 
 in the election. Had it never occurred, there would have been 
 enough in the death of Mrs. Saulsbury and the rearrangement of 
 Mr. Grey's property to keep conversation up among the middle 
 grade of Keeton folks. But business like that would not interest 
 the park, and of course it had no interest for the working class of 
 the town. The election, on the contrary, was of equal concern to 
 park, semi-detached villa, and cottage, or even garret. A contest 
 in Keeton was an absolute novelty so far as the memory of living 
 man could go back. 
 
 It may perhaps be said that the opinion of the class who alone 
 concerned themselves about her affairs had been on the whole de- 
 cidedly unfavourable to Minola. She had gone as a sort of rebel 
 against legitimate authority out of Keeton, and had flung herself 
 into the giddy vortex of London life. No one well knew what had 
 become of her; and that with Keeton folks was another way of 
 saying that she must have rushed upon destruction. Some persons 
 held that she must have gone upon the stage. This idea became 
 almost a certainty when a Keeton man, being in London on 
 business, brought back with him from town a play-bill announcing 
 a new opera bonffe in which one of the minor performers was named 
 " Miss Mattie Grey." If the good Keeton man had only looked 
 in a few other play-bills he would have no doubt found Greys in 
 abundance — Matties, Minnies, Nellies, and such-like ; Grey being 
 
LOVE AND ELECTIONEERING. 1S9 
 
 rather a favourite name with young ladies in the profession. But 
 he made no such investigation, and it was at once assumed that 
 Mattie Grey was Minola Grey in disguise — a disguise as subtle as 
 that of the famous knight, Sir Tristram, who, when he wanted to 
 conceal his identity from all observers and place himself beyond 
 all possibility of detection, called himself Sir Tramtrist. 
 
 When, however, it was found that Minola was to have her father's 
 property after all, a certain change took place in the opinion of 
 most persons who concerned themselves about the matter. It was 
 assumed generally that Mr. Grey was far too good and Christian a 
 man to have left his property to a girl who could be capable of 
 acting in an opera bouffe. Then, when Miss Grey in person came 
 to the town in the company of so distinguished a man as Mr. 
 Money, even gossip started repentant at the sound itself had made, 
 and began to deny that it had ever made any sound at all. Mr. 
 Money was a sort of hero among the middle class everywhere. 
 He was known to have fought his way up in life, and to be now 
 veiy rich ; and when Miss Grey came into the town in the com- 
 pany of Mr. Money and his daughter, the report went about 
 forthwith that Minola Grey had got into the very best society in 
 London, and that she was going to many the eldest son of Mr. 
 Money, and tp be presented at Court. 
 
 Mr. Money had taken a couple of floors of the best hotel to 
 begin with. He had brought his carriage with him — a carriage in 
 which he was hardly ever known to take a seat when in town. He 
 had brought a sort of retinue of servants. He went deliberately 
 about making what Mr. St. Paul would have called " a splurge." 
 Mr. Money knew his Pappenheimers. He knew that he was well 
 known to have sprung from nothing, but he also knew that the 
 middle and lower classes of Keeton would have given him little 
 thanks if he had tried to please them by exhibiting there a modesty 
 becoming his modest origin. He knew well enough that the more 
 he put on display, the more they would think of him and of his 
 clients. Therefore he put on display like a garment — a garment to 
 which he was little used, and in which he took no manner of 
 delight. There was generally a little group of persons round the 
 hotel doors at all hours of the day waiting to see Mr. Money and 
 his friends go out or come in. At first Minola positively declined 
 to go out at all, except at night ; and the recent death of her 
 father's widow gave her a fair excuse for remaining quietly indoors. 
 Lucy delighted in the whole affair, and often declared that she 
 felt as if she had been turned into a princess. When Mr. Heron 
 came down, he too seemed rather to enjoy it. At least, he took 
 it all as a matter of course. The experiences of colonial days, 
 
igo MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 when the ruler of a colony, however small it may be, is a person 
 of majestic proportions in his own sphere, enabled him to take 
 Mr. Money's pomp quite seriously. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Augustus Sheppard had got his committee- 
 rooms and his displays of various kinds, and was understood to be 
 working hard. The election contest, so long looked for, had taken 
 everyone a little by surprise when it showed itself so near. It was 
 natural that Mr. Sheppard and his friends should feel confident of 
 the result. The retiring representative was now an old man. He 
 had faithfully served out his time ; he had always voted as his 
 patrons wished him to do ; he had never made a speech in the 
 House of Commons ; he had never indeed risen to his feet there 
 at all, except once or twice to present a petition. The delights 
 of a parliamentary career were, therefore, this'long time beginning 
 to pall upon him. He had been notoriously anxious to get out 
 of Parliament. He had been sent into the House of Commons by 
 the late duke to keep the seat warm until the present duke should 
 come of age. But the present duke succeeded to the peerage 
 before he came of age, and therefore never had a chance of sitting 
 in the House of Commons. The man in possession was allowed 
 to remain there through years and years until the present duke 
 could be induced to return from abroad and take some interest in 
 the political and other affairs of Keeton. His own son was yet 
 too young for Parliament, and as the sitting member found himself 
 getting too old, and begged for release, there was nothing better to 
 do than to get some safe and docile person to take on him the 
 representation of the borough for some time to come. Those 
 who knew Keeton could recommend no one more fitting in every 
 desirable way than Mr. Augustus Sheppard. 
 
 The time was when Mr. Sheppard would only have had to 
 present the orders of the reigning duke to the constituency of 
 Keeton and to take his seat in the House of Commons accordingly 
 as if by virtue of a sovereign patent in ancient days. But times 
 had changed even in sleepy Keeton. The younger generation had 
 almost forgotten their dukes, it was so long since a chief of the 
 house had been among them. Even the women had grown com- 
 paratively indifferent to the influence of the name, seeing that it 
 had so long been only a name for them. There had been for 
 many years no duchesses and their lady daughters to meet at 
 flower-shows and charitable bazaars, by the delight of whose face, 
 and the sound of whose feet, and the wind of whose tresses, as the 
 poet has it, they could be made to feel happy and exalted. There 
 once were brighter days, when the coming and going of the ladies 
 at the Castle gave the women of Keeton a perpetual subject of 
 
LOVE AND ELECTIONEERING. 191 
 
 talk, of thought, of hope, and of quarrel. Some of the readers of 
 this story may perhaps have spent a little time in small towns on 
 the banks of foreign — say of American — rivers which have a habit 
 of freezing up as winter comes, and becoming useless for navi- 
 gation — in fact, being converted from rivers into great frozen roads, 
 until spring unlocks the flowers and the streams again. Such tra- 
 vellers must have noticed what an unfailing topic of conversation 
 such a river supplies to those who dwell on its banks. How soon 
 will it freeze this season ? On what precise day was it closed to 
 navigation last year — the year before — the year before that ? In 
 what year did it freeze soonest ? Do you remember that particular 
 year when it froze so very soon, or did not freeze for such an un- 
 precedented length of time ? That was the same year that — no, 
 not that year ; it was that other year, don't you remember? Then 
 follow contradictions and disputes, and the elders always remember 
 the river having been regularly in the habit of performing some feat 
 which now it never cares to repeat. The time of the frost melting 
 and the river becoming really a river again is a matter just as 
 fruitful of discussion. The stranger is often tempted to wonder 
 what the people of that place would have to talk about at all if 
 suddenly the river were to give up its trick of freezing, and were to 
 remain always as fluent as our own monotonous Thames. There 
 seems to him some reason to fear that the tongues of the people 
 would become frozen as the river ceased to freeze. 
 
 Like the freezing and the melting of their river to those who 
 lived on its banks, was the annual visit of the ladies of the ducal 
 family to the womankind of Keeton in Keeton's brighter days. 
 Girls were growing up there now who had never seen a duchess. 
 The arrival, the length of stay, the probable time of departure, the 
 appearances in public, whether more or less frequent than this time 
 last year, the dresses worn by the gracious ladies, the persons 
 spoken to by them, the persons only bowed to, the unhappy 
 creatures who got neither speech nor salutation — it is a fact that 
 there was a generation of women growing up in Keeton with whom 
 these and such questions had never formed any part of the interest 
 of their lives. They could not be expected to take much interest 
 all at once and as it were by instinct in the political cause of the 
 ducal family. 
 
 There was therefore a good deal of uncertainty about the con- 
 ditions of the problem. The followers of the ducal family were 
 some of them full of hope. The reappearance of a duke and 
 duchess, and their train, might do wonders in restoring the old 
 order of things. In Keeton petticoat influence counted for a great 
 deal, and in other days those who had the promises of the wives 
 
192 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 hardly thought it worth while to go through the form of asking the 
 husbands. But now there was a new condition of the political 
 problem even in that respect. The ballot, which had made the 
 voter independent of the influence of his landlord or his wealthy 
 customer, had converted the power of the petticoat into a sort of 
 unknown quantity. There could be little doubt that the moral 
 influence and the traditional control would still prevail with some; 
 but he must be a rash electioneering agent who would venture to 
 say how many votes could thus be counted on. It is a remarkable 
 tribute to the moral greatness of an aristocracy, that the influence 
 thus obtained in old days over the wives and daughters of Keeton 
 was absolutely unearned by any overt acts of favour or conciliation. 
 The later dukes and their families had always been remarkable for 
 never making any advances towards the townspeople. None of 
 the traders of the town, however wealthy and respectable, found 
 themselves or their wives invited to any manner of festivity up at the 
 ducal hall. All that the noble family ever did for the townspeople 
 was to come at certain seasons to Keeton and allow themselves to 
 be looked at. This was enough for the time. The illustrious ladies 
 could be seen, and, as has been said, they did sometimes speak a 
 word to favoured and envied persons. They were loved for being 
 great personages, not for anything they did to win such devotion. 
 " Love is enough," says the poet. 
 
 All these considerations, however, rendered it hard to calculate 
 the exact chances of opposition in the borough of Keeton. Of 
 course revolutionary opinions were growing up, old people found, 
 there as well as elsewhere. There was a new class of Conservatives 
 springing up whom steady, old-fashioned politicians found it not 
 easy to distinguish from the Radicals of their younger days. On 
 the other hand, keensighted persons could not fail to perceive that, 
 whereas in their youth almost all young men had a tendency to be 
 or to fancy themselves Radicals, it was now growing rather the 
 fashion for immature politicians to boast themselves Tories, and to 
 talk of a spirited foreign policy and the dangers of Cosmopolitanism. 
 It would be hard to say how things might turn out, knowing people 
 thought, as they shook their heads, and hoped the expected contest 
 might not come on for some time. 
 
 Now the contest was at hand. At least, the sitting member 
 had positively declared that he would sit no longer, and it was 
 announced that the duke was coming to Keeton, and that Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard was to be the duke's candidate. No more 
 striking proof could be given of the recent change in the political 
 condition of Keeton, than is found in the fact that the adoption of 
 Mr. Sheppard as a candidate by the ducal family did not even to 
 
LOVE AND ELECTIONEERING. 193 
 
 the most devoted and sanguine followers of the great house make 
 Mr. Sheppard's election seem by any means a matter of absolute 
 certainty. There was a tolerably strong conviction everywhere, 
 long before any opposition was announced, that the duke's candi- 
 date would not be allowed to walk over the course and right into 
 the House of Commons this time. Nobody in the town would 
 oppose the duke, very likely, but the man to oppose would come. 
 
 Now the man actually had come. Victor Heron had issued 
 his address, and was in Keeton. His address was original ; he had 
 positively refused from the first to make any grand professions of 
 superior statesmanship or patriotism. He would tell Englishmen, 
 he said, that he was seeking a seat in Parliament as a way of getting 
 redress for a great wrong done to him, and through him to some 
 of the principles most dear to the country. When he had fought 
 his battle in Parliament, and won or lost, he promised that he would 
 then place himself in the hands of his constituents and resign the 
 seat if they desired. The whole address was frank, odd, original, 
 and perhaps seemed a little self-conceited. The author's absorption 
 in his subject was mistaken by many people, as will happen some- 
 times, for self-conceit. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard's address, on the contrary, talked only of the good 
 old Conservative principles which had made England the envy and 
 admiration of all surrounding States; of the local interests of Keeton, 
 and the candidate's acquaintance therewith ; and of the many 
 splendid things done for the town by the noble family who had 
 done it the honour to have a park there. 
 
 " I don't think Heron's address reads half badly," Mr. Money 
 said, one evening in the absence of Heron, to his two companions ; 
 " on the whole, I shouldn't wonder if it took some people, the 
 women particularly. Anything personal, anything in the nature of 
 a grievance, is likely to have a good effect on many people, 
 especially where the injured personage is young, and good-looking, 
 and plucky. I wish the women had the votes here just for this 
 once, for I think we should stand to win if they had." 
 
 " Then, papa, do you think we shan't win now ? " Lucy asked. 
 
 Minola looked up eagerly for his answer. 
 
 " Well, Lucelet, I don't like to say ; I am not quite charmed 
 with the look of things. I find there are a good many very strong 
 Radicals grown up in this place since there was a contest here 
 before ; and Heron's not wild enough for them by half. They are 
 a little of the red-hot-social-revolution sort of thing — the proletaire 
 business, with a dash of the brabbling atheist — the fellows who 
 think one is not fit to live if he even admits the possibility of 
 another world. I am afraid these fellows will hold aloof from us 
 
194 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 altogether, or even take some whim of voting against us, and they 
 may be strong enough to turn the scale." 
 
 Minola hoped that if her friend Mr. St. Paul had really any 
 charm by which to extort victory for Heron as he had promised he 
 would not forget to use it in good time. But she began to have 
 less faith, and less, in the possibility of any such feat. She was a 
 little in the perplexed condition of some one of mediaeval times, 
 who has entered into a bargain for supernatural interference, and 
 is not quite certain whether to wish that the compact may be really 
 carried out or that it may prove to have been only the figment of 
 a dream. 
 
 " I'm told we ought to have some poems done," Money went 
 on to say. " Not merely squibs, you know, but appeals about right 
 and justice, and the cause of oppressed humanity, and all that." 
 
 " I'm sure Minola could do some beautifully ! " Lucy exclaimed, 
 looking beseechingly towards her friend. 
 
 " Oh, no ; I couldn't indeed ! My appeals would be dreadfully 
 weak ; they could not rouse the spirits of any mortal creature. 
 Now, if we only had Mary Blanchet ! " 
 
 This, it must be owned, was Minola's fun, but it gave an idea 
 to Mr. Money. 
 
 " Tell you what," he said, " we ought to have her brother — 
 the bard, you used to call him, Lucelet." 
 
 " Oh, no, papa ; indeed I never called him anything of the 
 kind. I never did, indeed, Nola." 
 
 " Well, whatever you called him, Lucelet, we can't do better 
 than to have him. We'll put Pegasus into harness, by Jove — a 
 capital good use to make of him too ! I'll write to what's-his- 
 name ? — Blanchet — at once." 
 
 " But I don't think he would like it, papa ; I think he would 
 take offence at the idea of your asking him to do poems for an 
 election. I don't think he would come." 
 
 " Oh, yes, he would come ! we would make it worth his while. 
 These young fellows give themselves airs, to make you girls admire 
 them, that they never think of trying on with men. It would 
 be a rather telling thing here, too, if it got about that we had 
 brought a real poet specially down from London. I'll write at 
 once." 
 
 This seemed rather alarming to Minola. 
 
 " I doubt whether Mr. Heron would much like it," she pleaded. 
 " I don't know whether they are such very good friends just now 
 — I am rather afraid." 
 
 " Oh, yes ; of course they must be good friends ! Heron is 
 not to have it all his own way in everything, anyhow. He must 
 
AN EPISODE. j 9S 
 
 like the idea ; he shall. I'll write without telling him anything 
 about it, and Heron couldn't help being friendly to any fellow who 
 came under his roof, as one might say." 
 
 No one made any further objection. 
 
 "I wish Heron had not been so confoundedly particular about 
 °*L* aul >' Mn Money went on to say in a discontented tone. 
 1 hat was absurd. St. Paul's no worse than lots of other fellows, 
 and in such a thing as this we can't afford to throw away any offer 
 of support. We have to fight against the duke and his lot anyhow, 
 and the help of St. Paul couldn't have done us any harm in that 
 quarter, and it might have done us some good in others I 
 shouldn't wonder if St. Paul had some friends and admirers here 
 still ; and it is as likely as not that his being with us might con- 
 ciliate a few of the mad Radicals. They might like him just 
 because he is against his brother, the duke." 
 
 _ " But Mr. Heron would not have such help as that," Lucy said, 
 in tones of pride. 
 
 " Oh, by Jove ! if you want to carry an election and now, 
 
 1 suppose, if St. Paul has any influence at all, it will be given 
 against us." 
 
 Minola thought of her unholy compact, and did not venture to 
 say a word on the subject. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 AN EPISODE. 
 
 That was an odd and, on the whole, a wondrous pleasant time. 
 In all her mental trouble and perplexity Minola could not help 
 enjoying it. It was like a great holiday— like some extravagant 
 kind of masquerading or private theatricals. It was impossible 
 that one's spirits could go down, or at least that they could remain 
 long down, under such circumstances. Life was a perpetual rattle 
 and excitement ; and the company was full of mirth. Even Victor 
 Heron himself, for all his earnestness, went on as if the whole 
 affair were some enormous joke. Electioneering appeared to be 
 the best sort of pastime devisable. They all sat up until the 
 morning concocting appeals to the electors, addresses to this or 
 that interest supposed to be affected, attacks on the opposite party 
 —not however on Mr. Sheppard personally— squibs about the 
 Tones, denunciations of the Ministry, exhortations to the women 
 of Keeton, the mothers of Keeton, the daughters of Keeton, and 
 
 02 . 
 
196 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 every class in and about Keeton who could be regarded as in the 
 least degree open to the impulses of national or patriotic feeling. 
 Some of these appeals had to be prepared in the absence and 
 without the knowledge of the candidate whom they were intended 
 to serve. Heron was so sensitive about what he considered fair 
 play, that he was inclined as far as he could to restrain rather 
 unduly even the good spirits of his chief supporters, and not to 
 allow them to deal half as freely as they could have wished in the 
 weapons of sarcasm and ridicule. Minola was developing quite 
 a remarkable capacity for political satire, and Lucy Money was 
 indefatigable at copying documents. There were meetings held 
 day and night, and Victor sometimes made a dozen speeches in the 
 course of a single afternoon. 
 
 Scarcely less eloquent did Mr. Money prove himself to be. He 
 never failed when called upon to stand up anywhere and recount 
 the misdeeds of the Ministry, and the crimes generally of the 
 aristocracy of Britain, in language which went to the very hearts of 
 his hearers ; and he had a rough telling humour which kept his 
 audience amused in the midst of all the horrors that his description 
 of the country's possible ruin might have brought up before their 
 minds. Mr. Money took the middle-aged electors immensely ; 
 but there could be little doubt that the suffrages of the women, if 
 they had had any, would have been given freely in favour of the 
 eloquence and the candidature of Victor Heron. 
 
 Sometimes it was delightful when a night came, after all the 
 meetings and speech-makings were over — and it happened by 
 strange chance that there was nothing more to do in the way of 
 electioneering just then ; for then the little party of friends would 
 shut themselves up in their drawing-room, and chat and laugh, and 
 sing and play on the piano, and make jokes, and discuss all 
 manner of odd and fantastic questions, until long after prudence 
 ought to have commended sleep. Minola sang whenever anybody 
 asked her, although she never sang for listeners in London ; and 
 she sang, if she could, whatever her audience wished to hear. 
 Lucy played and sang very prettily too. Victor Heron had picked 
 up in his colonial experiences and his wanderings about the world 
 many sweet, wild, untutored songs of savage and semi-savage races 
 and tribes, and he sang them with a dramatic skill and force for 
 which none of his hearers had ever before given him credit The 
 little company seemed in fact to be entering into a condition of 
 something like wild simplicity and frankness, when all the affecta- 
 tions of civilisation were let fall, and each did everything he could 
 to the best effect, unconcerned by forms or by critics. 
 
 To Lucy in especial all this was delightful. It was not an 
 
AN EPISODE. 197 
 
 effort to her to throw herself into the spirit ot the enjoyment as it 
 was to Minola. To her the happiness of the present had no alloy. 
 Over the passing hours there were no present clouds. In the whole 
 world the two persons she most admired were Victor Heron and 
 her father ; and these two were the heroes of the occasion, seeming 
 to have the eyes of the world on them, and to be the admired of all 
 as orators and statesmen. To hear them address cheering crowds 
 brought tears of pride and delight into the eyes of the kind little 
 maid. She was glorious in their glory ; their successes were hers. 
 Then she had Minola too always with her, and they were all to- 
 gether, and walled off from the world into a little commonwealth of 
 their own, and had nothing to do but to be great politicians all 
 day, and listen to splendid speeches, and at night retire as it were 
 into their tent, and be musical and joyous, and full of glorious 
 hope. It was all a dream of love and pride to the gentle little 
 Lucelet. 
 
 More than once — ah ! more than twenty times — did Lucy teli 
 Minola that her father had taken her to the House of Commons, 
 and that she had ofcen heard all the good speakers, and that she 
 had never heard one who could in her estimation compare with 
 Mr. Heron. She had heard Gladstone ; " and, of course, he was 
 very good — oh, yes, very good indeed ! — but if you had heard him, 
 Nola dear, you would say with me that he is not to be compared 
 to Mr. Heron." She had heard Mr. Disraeli too — " oh, yes, many 
 times, and he was very clever ! " she quite admitted that, " and he 
 made people laugh a great deal ; " and she had heard Mr. Bright, 
 whom her papa always considered the best speaker of all — " but 
 wait until you hear them, Nola — and you shall hear them all, 
 darling — and you will say yourself that none of them is like Mr. 
 Heron. I don't know what it is, but there is something about Mr. 
 Heron that none of them seems to have — at least, to my mind, 
 Nola dear." 
 
 Indeed, Nola knew well enough that there was for Lucy a 
 charm in the eloquence of Mr. Heron which Mr. Gladstone and 
 Mr. Bright would have vainly tried to rival. For herself, although 
 she may be supposed to have been under the same influence as 
 Lucy, she did not rate the eloquence of Mr. Heron quite so highly. 
 The charm in her case did not work in just the same way. She 
 listened with a certain admiration and surprise to the vivacious, 
 earnest, and often highly impassioned speeches that Victor Heron 
 threw off daily by the dozen, and she recognised with sincere de- 
 light the genuine freshness and force that were in them, and thought 
 them a great deal better than she had expected to hear ; but she 
 would not have had the least difficulty in admitting that Mr. 
 
193 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Gladstone and Mr. Bright were probably much finer speakers than 
 Mr. Heron ; and, without having heard either of these orators, she 
 was already quite prepared to consider their eloquence as higher in 
 order than his. What concerned her far more was that she saw 
 nothing in Victor Heron that did not compel her to hold to or to 
 increase the opinion she had already formed of his manly and un- 
 selfish character. She had hoped in a strange, reluctant way that, 
 while seeing so much of him as she must needs do during their 
 stay in Keeton, she might see in him, not indeed anything to lower 
 her opinion of his courage, and truthfulness, and manhood, but 
 some little weaknesses or affectations which, harmless in them- 
 selves, might lower him in her mind from his place, and give her 
 relief and rest. Yes, she had in her secret heart sometimes longed 
 passionately and despairingly to be able thus to dethrone him from 
 her heart, and to see him as a young man like another. She was 
 suffering so much from the part which she had imposed on herself 
 and was determined to play, that she would have welcomed relief 
 even at the cost of the overturning of her idol. There were times 
 when she almost wished she were able to hate him or to despise 
 him, but she could do neither. The more she saw of him, the 
 more she was compelled to see that, under that exterior of almost 
 boyish impulsiveness and restless energy, there were only too many 
 of the qualities which she held to be especially heroic. He was so 
 frank and simple, and yet so clever ; so full of courage, and yet 
 so modest ; so strong, and yet so sweet and gentle. He would not 
 flatter Neptune for his trident, she thought, nor Jove for his power 
 to thunder. But there is many a man as good as Coriolanus in 
 that, who, like Coriolanus, would brag, and bully, and be coarsely 
 haughty; and Mr. Heron could do nothing like that. To her he 
 seemed all kindness and frank, simple sweetness, and she could 
 not dethrone him from his place in her heart. 
 
 Perhaps we may well ask ourselves whether the clever and 
 sarcastic Minola was not, after all, as extravagant a hero-worshipper 
 as little Lucelet ? Is it, to say the least, not quite possible that 
 when Lucy believed Victor Heron to be as fine a speaker as 
 Demosthenes, she was only exaggerating his merits in one way as 
 much as Minola was exaggerating them in another? Is it likely 
 that he was by any means that pure and perfect hero, all strength, 
 and truth, and nobleness, that Minola was resolved to believe him ? 
 To many of us, perhaps, if we had known him, he might have 
 seemed a clever, agreeable, honest, but rather simple and im- 
 practicable young man, and nothing more. We might have probed 
 his character with the most impartial and even benevolent purpose, 
 hoping to find there our ideal type of manhood, and honestly found 
 
AN EPISODE. 199 
 
 ourselves unable to see anything of the kind in him. But it may 
 be, too, that Minola really did see what we failed to see, and that 
 she had got with her love, not a dazzled sight, but clairvoyance. 
 You cannot make a touchstone of every pebble. The other pebbles 
 may do their honest best, and give their judgment, and be wrong. 
 
 This, however, we shall not be able to decide. It has already 
 been said in favour of the impartiality of Minola's judgment that 
 at least she had done her best to prove it a mistake, and had to 
 ratify it against her will. But, right or wrong, it affected her all 
 the same. Every day that she passed in Keeton under these 
 peculiar circumstances only added to the strength of the feelings 
 which oppressed her, and against which she fought her fight in 
 vain. 
 
 " I do wish this election would last for ever, Nola dear," Lucy 
 said, with a sigh of mingled pleasure and fear. " I never liked 
 any part of my life half so well." 
 
 There was, it must be owned, a great deal of pleasure in it for 
 Minola as well. The pleasure was a fearful joy, and was mixed 
 up with very acute pain ; still, the exhilaration and the delight were 
 there. All the time there was a feeling that she was not only 
 working with Victor Heron, but for him. It is true that the time 
 had many bitter moments ; it is true also that not for years had 
 her spirits risen so often to so high a point. 
 
 That was, for instance, a delightful night when they all went 
 out to the park, and rambled about there, and looked at the great 
 mausoleum. It was near midnight when they set out, for it was 
 well-nigh impossible for them to get any time to themselves at any 
 earlier hour. The great gates of the park were closed long before 
 that time ; but Minola knew of a little stile at one of the boundaries 
 of the park, through which they might easily enter, and this gave 
 quite a romantic air of trespassing and law-breaking to the whole 
 escapade, which much enhanced its charm. The duke and his 
 family had not come to the place, but were expected every day, 
 and there was something rather piquant in the notion of thus tres- 
 passing on the lands of their political enemy. Mr. Money was 
 much amused at the idea of their all being arrested as trespassers — 
 perhaps even as robbers — and brought before some country justice, 
 who might take it into his head to render a service to the duke 
 and Mr. Sheppard by committing them to prison. They were all 
 in the highest spirits. 
 
 The night was one to inspirit any heart. It was soft and warm, 
 with a pale, poetic crescent moon just showing itself over the park 
 trees, and a planet of shining silver just beneath the crescent of 
 the moon, looking like the emblem of the Ottoman done in light 
 
200 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 upon the sky. There was something fantastic, poetic, and a little 
 uncanny about this half-moon with the planet just within the en- 
 closure of her bow. 
 
 " Can anything be more beautiful ?" Minola asked aloud, and 
 in her heart she thought, " I ought to be very happy and very 
 thankful. When last I was here, how lonely I was ! — I had hardly 
 a friend ; and now, what good, kind friends I have, whom I love, 
 and who, I believe, are really fond of me. How ungrateful I 
 should be if I were to repine because I have not everything that an 
 idle fancy makes me ask for!" The whole influence of the place, 
 the hour, the conditions entered into her soul, and made her think 
 life very sweet and gracious then. 
 
 They were standing near the steps of the mausoleum. 
 " Now," said Lucy, " there is one thing I should so like just 
 at this moment ; it would be delightful." 
 
 " Well, Lucelet, what is it ?" her father asked. " Is it to have 
 several hairs of the duke's beard? Perhaps Mr. Heron will 
 pledge himself to get them if you only ask him prettily." 
 
 " Papa, dear, what nonsense ! " Lucy was not acquainted with 
 the adventures of Sir Huon of Bordeaux. " No ; I only want 
 Nola to sing for us just here. It would be delightful in this air 
 and at this spot." 
 
 " Don't know that it would do Miss Grey's voice much good 
 to be exerted at midnight in the open air, Lucelet" 
 
 " It couldn't do it any particular harm," Minola said, only too 
 happy in her present mood to have a chance of pleasing anybody. 
 "My voice is not good enough to get any harm. I am only 
 afraid that you may not be able to hear me." 
 
 " We'll come close around you and make a ring, so far as our 
 numbers will allow us," Victor said. 
 
 Minola mounted the steps of the mausoleum to get some ad- 
 vantage over her audience, as her voice was not strong, and they 
 stood below, not in a ring, but in a row. 
 " What shall I sing ? " she asked. 
 
 Of course she was only besought to sing any song she pleased ; 
 so, rather than keep them waiting and make herself appear as if 
 she were attaching too much value to a trifle, she sang at once the 
 first song that came into her mind. It was the story of the luckless 
 lover of Barbara Allen. 
 
 Minola's voice was singularly fresh, pure, and sweet. It wanted 
 strength, and would have sounded to little advantage in a concert 
 room. It had some exquisite shades, if we may use such an expres- 
 sion, which would have been lost altogether in a great hall and on 
 an ordinary audience. Minola, conscious of the lack of strength 
 
•SBE LOOKS LIKE C0R1NNE: 
 
AN EPISODE. 201 
 
 in her voice, and yet compelled by her dramatic instincts to seek 
 for the fullest expression even when she only sang to please herself, 
 had tried to make her singing obey her feelings and her perception 
 of poetical meaning by giving its fullest value to every syllable and 
 every tone. The songs she sang seemed to have much more in 
 them than as they were sung by anyone else. New meanings and 
 shades of meaning appeared to come out as the words came from 
 her lips. But it required appreciative listeners to get at the genuine 
 beauty of her singing ; and the listeners must not be far away from 
 the singer, or, no matter how appreciative, they must lose much of 
 the effect. In the open air her voice would usually have failed to 
 impress one ; but this night the air was so pure and clear and soft, 
 and the whole place was so silent, that the voice seemed made for 
 the place, the hour, and the atmosphere ; and the voice, indeed, 
 became to the ears of some of the audience as if it were a part of 
 the scene, an essential condition of its charm. As the song went 
 on, the listeners found themselves drawn on to ascend the first step 
 of the mausoleum, that they might not lose a syllable of the sweet, 
 sad, old-fashioned story thus tenderly arid sympathetically told. 
 
 The song was over. No one said a word directly in its praise. 
 For a moment, indeed, there was silence. 
 
 "I wish she would not come down from the steps just yet," 
 said Lucy. " Stay a moment, Nola dear ; we shall ask you to sing 
 something else if you will. I do like to see her standing there," 
 she explained to her father and Heron ; " she looks like Corinne." 
 
 They asked her to sing something else, and of course she was 
 only too glad to please them. This time she chose a little ballad of 
 Walter Scott's, to be found in " The Pirate," of which in her young 
 days of romance Minola used to be fond. This song she had put 
 of her own conceit to the music of a little-known folk-song of the 
 border, which seemed to her to suit its spirit and words. It is the 
 ballad which gives the betrayed lover's farewell to the " wild ferry 
 which Hacon could brave, when the peaks of the skerry were white 
 with the wave," and to the maid who " may look over those wild 
 waves in vain for the skiff of her lover, he comes not again." For 
 the broken vows, the maiden may fling them on the wild current, 
 and the mermaiden may sing them. " New sweetness they'll give 
 her bewildering strain; there is one who will never believe them 
 again." If Minola had really been a betrayed lover, she could not 
 have expressed more simply and more movingly the proud passion 
 of a broken heart. As Lucy's face was upturned in the moonlight, 
 Victor saw that her eyes were swimming in tears. He was greatly 
 charmed and touched by her sensitiveness, and felt drawn to her in 
 an unusual way. He turned his eyes away, fearing she might 
 know that he had seen her tears. 
 
202 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Minola came down from the steps silently. As yet, no one 
 had thanked her or said her songs gave pleasure ; but Minola felt 
 that she had pleased them, and that they liked her to sing, and for 
 the time she was happy. If she could have known that her song 
 had brought Victor Heron nearer in feeling than ever he was before 
 to her friend Lucy, she would perhaps have felt an added although 
 a rather melancholy pleasure in the power of her song. Certainly 
 the sensation that passed through Victor's breast as he heard the 
 last lines of the song, and looked on Lucy's face, and saw the 
 sparkling tears in her eyes, was something new to him, and in 
 itself no poor tribute to the influence of the music. 
 
 Mr. Money was the first to speak. 
 
 " Your way of singing, Miss Grey, reminds me of what I once 
 heard a very clever man say of the reading of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets. He said he never heard them properly read except by a 
 man who was dying, like your friend the lover of Barbara Allen, 
 and who could hardly speak above his breath." 
 
 " My dear papa, what a compliment to Nola ! " the astonished 
 Lucy exclaimed. 
 
 " You don't understand it, Lucelet — Miss Grey does, I am sure, 
 and I hope Heron does, although I am not so sure in his case. It 
 means that this poor dying poet — he was a poet, didn't I say ? " 
 
 " No, indeed you didn't," said Lucy. 
 
 " Oh, yes, he was a poet. Well, this poor dying poet had to 
 make such use of his failing voice to express all the meaning of the 
 poems he loved above all others, that he would not allow the most 
 delicate touch of meaning or feeling to escape in his reading. Now 
 you begin to understand, Lucelet ? Miss Grey's singing is as fine 
 as that."" 
 
 " Oh, if Nola is compared to a poet I don't mind. But a dying 
 poet is rather a melancholy idea, and not a bit like Nola. I always 
 think of Nola as full of health and life, and everything bright and 
 delightful." 
 
 " Still I quite understand what Mr. Money means, and it is a 
 great compliment," Minola said. " There must have been some- 
 thing wonderful, supernatural, in hearing this dying poet recite 
 such lines." 
 
 " People with great strong voices hardly ever think much of 
 what can be done by mere expression," Money remarked. 
 
 " Then we ought to be glad if we have not good voices ? " 
 Minola asked. 
 
 " Well, yes; in many cases, at least. I think so. It makes 
 you sing all the better." 
 
 "And perhaps they would sing best who had no voice at all." 
 
AN EPISODE. 203 
 
 " Perhaps so," said Money gravely; " I shouldn't wonder." 
 
 After this they all laughed, and the moment of sentiment was 
 gone. But yet Victor Heron remained very silent and seemingly 
 thoughtful. The new and strange sensation which had arisen in 
 him from hearing Minola's voice and seeing Lucy's tear-sparkled 
 eyes had not faded yet. It perplexed him, and yet had something 
 delightful in it. The author of " Caleb Williams " declared that in 
 it he would give to the world such a book that no man who had 
 read it should ever be quite the same man again. Such a change 
 it happens to more ordinary beings to work unconsciously in 
 many men or women. A verse of a ballad, an air played on a 
 harp, a chance word or two, the expression of a lip or an eye, an 
 all unstudied attitude, shall change a whole life so that never again 
 shall it be exactly what it was before. 
 
 " We must be getting home," said Money. " There are speeches 
 to be made to-morrow, Heron, my good fellow — there are deputa- 
 tions to receive, and I own to being a man who likes to sleep." 
 
 "Just here and just now," said Victor, "the speech-making 
 and the deputations seem rather vulgar business." 
 
 He thought so now very sincerely. A sense of the vulgarity 
 and futility of commonplace ambitions and struggles is one of the 
 immemorial effects of moonlight, and music, and midnight air, and 
 soft skies. But in Heron's case there was something more than 
 all this which he did not yet understand. 
 
 " The things have to be got through anyhow," Mr. Money 
 insisted, " and these young ladies will be losing altogether their 
 beauty-sleep." 
 
 " Oh, I think the idea of going to sleeD on such a night is 
 odious, when we might be out under the stars in this delightful 
 place ! " Lucy exclaimed. " And besides, papa, the truth is that 
 Nola and I always sit up together for ever so long after everybody 
 else has gone, no matter what the hour may be — and so we might 
 as well be here as anywhere else. If our beauty depends on early 
 hours it is forfeited long since, and there's no use thinking about it 
 now." 
 
 " I know Miss Grey is far too sensible a girl to share any 
 such sentiments— so come with me, Miss Grey, and we shall at 
 least set a good example." 
 
 He took Minola's arm and drew it within his own with good- 
 humoured mastery, and led her away. Lucy and Victor had 
 perforce to follow. They ran after Money and his companion. 
 Minola could hear their laughter and the sound of their quick feet 
 as they approached. Then when they came near they slackened 
 their speed, and lagged a little behind. She could hear the sound 
 
204 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 of their voices as they talked. They spoke in low tones, but the 
 sweet pure midnight air allowed at least the faint murmur of the 
 tones to reach her ear as she walked quickly on, leaning on Mr. 
 Money's arm, and trying to talk to him about the prospects of the 
 coming election. 
 
 " If he loves her, he must tell her so now — here," Minola 
 thought. " This surely is the place and the hour for a declaration 
 of love, and he does love her — she is so very sweet and good." 
 
 She tried to make herself believe that she was very happy, 
 and that she rejoiced to know that Lucy was loved — by him, and 
 even that she was rather amused in a high, unconcerned way by 
 their love-making. When they had crossed the stile of the park 
 and passed into the streets, Victor and Lucy came up with them 
 again, and walked by their side. 
 
 " It is done," Minola thought. " She has heard him now, and 
 she has all her wish." Aloud she said, " I suppose you are right, 
 Mr. Money, about the ballot — I had not thought much of that, but 
 I am sure you must be right." 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 MR. SHEPPARD'S OFFER OF SURRENDER. 
 
 Minola heard no word from Lucy that night about Heron. Lucy 
 seemed to avoid all speech on any subject that had to do with the 
 midnight walk in the park. 
 
 The next day brought Mr. Blanchet, very proud of having been 
 sent for, and for the present, at least, filled with the novelty of a 
 political contest. As Money had predicted, any objection which 
 Heron might have to Blanchet gave way and vanished for the time, 
 when Blanchet became in a manner a guest of his. But the poems 
 which Blanchet was to contribute to the contest did not prove a 
 great success. They were a little difficult to understand. When 
 they were supposed to rouse the souls of Keeton electors on the 
 subject of England's honour and duties, they were involved in 
 such fantasy of thought and expression, that they would have had 
 to be published with a glossary if they were to illuminate by a spark 
 of meaning the mind of the acutest voter in the borough. Blanchet 
 made, however, rather a picturesque figure on the platforms of 
 meetings, and was useful as an attendant on the two young women 
 when Money and Heron had to be busy elsewhere; and Mr. 
 Money liked, for electioneering effect, the appearance of a large 
 
MR. SHEPPARUS OFFER OF SURRENDER. 205 
 
 suite. Minola never saw the poet, except before the general com- 
 pany. He had consented to come to Keeton solely because he 
 thought it would give him more than one opportunity of speaking 
 a word or two to her in private ; and no such chance seemed 
 ever likely to present itself there. Minola was utterly unconscious 
 of his wish or of its purpose. She did not know that when he 
 was invited to Keeton he went to his sister, and told her that the 
 happy chance had come at last ; and that she had kissed him with 
 tears in her eyes, and prayed for his success. Minola was as 
 friendly with him as possible — far more so than she seemed to be 
 with Heron, for example ; but he got no such chance of trying 
 his fortune as his sister and he had believed to be coming. 
 
 Is there often a political election with such cross-purposes going 
 on in the midst of it ? It would almost seem as if all the persons 
 more directly concerned were either the planners or the objects of 
 some little side game of love. We know what thoughts and hopes 
 were formed on Victor Heron's account by poor Lucy and her 
 father ; and Minola soon learned that the Conservative candidate 
 had still a purpose at his heart which no lawful returning-officer 
 could gratify. Add to this, to go no further for the present, the 
 purpose which we know that Mr. Blanchet had in consenting to 
 try the part of Poet Laureate to the Liberal candidate, and we 
 shall see that the game was a little complex which all these were 
 playing. 
 
 Minola had made a grave mistake in judging the character of 
 her discarded lover. She thought him a hypocrite, and he was 
 not ; she thought his love for her was all a sham, and it was not. 
 He was a slow, formal man ; formal in everything — in his morals 
 as well as in his manners. For him the world's standard was all. 
 He could not lift his mind above the level of the opinion of 
 respectable people. What they said became the law of life to 
 him. What they called proper he believed to be proper ; what 
 they condemned became in his eyes only deserving of condemna- 
 tion. But he was quite sincere in this. What he came by this 
 process to regard as wrong he would not have done himself — except 
 under such circumstances of temptation or provocation as may 
 ordinarily be held to excuse our human nature. 
 
 His love for Minola was very strong. It was the one genuine 
 passion of his life. He had made up his mind that he would 
 succeed in life, that he would become a person of importance in 
 London, and that he would marry Minola Grey. Nor did her 
 refusal much discourage him. After the first pang was over, he 
 said to himself that all would come right yet ; that at least she did 
 not love anyone else, and that the world would come to him who 
 
206 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 waited, as he had known it to come to himself in other ways 
 when he waited before. He had resolved to represent Keeton in 
 the House of Commons, and now that resolve seemed to have 
 nearly worked out its purpose. But the night when, passing under 
 Minola's windows, he saw Victor Heron produced a terrible reaction 
 within him. He felt satisfied that Heron must be in love with her, 
 and he thought with agony that such a lover was very likely 
 indeed to fascinate such a girl. He began to pay repeated visits 
 to London in a half secret way, and to watch the movements of 
 Minola, and to try to find out all he could about Victor and his 
 friends. The thought of having Heron for his rival in both ways, 
 in love and in ambition, was almost more than he could bear. 
 There seemed something ominous, fateful in it. He became filled 
 with a kind of superstitious feeling that if he lost the election he 
 must lose all. He hated Heron with a passion that sometimes 
 surprised himself. There appeared to him to be something wicked 
 in this young man coming from the other side of the earth to 
 cross him in his two great desires. His slow, formal nature worked 
 itself up into dense consistency of hate. The election contest 
 became a relief to him. It was like meeting his rival in battle. 
 The fierce joy was heightened when Minola came to Keeton. To 
 win under such conditions would be like killing his rival under her 
 very eyes. 
 
 It was when at the very height of his hope, and when the anti- 
 cipation of revenge was turning our formal moralist into a sort of 
 moral Berserker, that a piece of news reached his ears which well- 
 nigh changed his purpose. He was told that Victor Heron was 
 to marry Mr. Money's daughter, and that that was the reason 
 why Money took such interest in the contest. He was assured 
 of this on what seemed to him good authority. In fact, the report 
 hardly needed any authority to confirm it in his mind. What could 
 be more probable ? What could more satisfactorily explain every- 
 thing? What other purpose could a man like Money have in 
 taking all that trouble about a stranger like Heron ? Mr. Shep- 
 pard trembled to think of the mistake he had nearly made. 
 
 So, then, it was not certain that Minola was lost to him, after 
 all ? A moment before, he was only thinking of revenge for an 
 irreparable injury. Now hope sprung up again. At the bottom 
 of Sheppard's nature was a very large reserve of that self-confidence 
 or self-conceit which had carried him so far on his way to 
 success ; and he was easily roused to hope again in his chances of 
 conquering Minola's objection to him. 
 
 He became suddenly filled with an idea which, in all the thick 
 and heat of his preparations for the contest, he determined to 
 
MR. SHEPPARD' S OFFER OF SURRENDER. 207 
 
 put to proof. By this time it should be said that he had little 
 doubt of how the struggle would go if it were left to be a duel 
 between him and Heron. What it cost him to take the step he 
 is now taking will be better appreciated if this conviction of his 
 is kept in mind. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard dressed one afternoon with even more than 
 his usual care, but in style a littie different from that which he 
 commonly adopted. He had got a vague idea that his usual 
 manner of dressing was rather too formal to please a girl like 
 Minola, and that it was wanting in picturesqueness and in artistic 
 effect. He had studied many poems and works of art lately, with 
 much pain and patience, and tried to qualify himself for an under- 
 standing of those schools and theories of art which, as they were 
 said to be new, and were generally out of Keeton's range, he 
 assumed to be those of the London circles which Minola was 
 reported to frequent. He got himself up in a velvet coat, with a 
 tie of sage-green silk and a bronze watch-chain, and a brazen 
 porte-bonheur clasping his wrist He looked like a churchwarden 
 masquerading as an actor. Thus attired, he set forth to pay a 
 visit to Minola. 
 
 He had met her several times during the settlement of the 
 business consequent on the death of Mrs. Saulsbury. He had 
 met Mr. Money often, and acted sometimes as the representative 
 in business matters of Mr. Saulsbury. He had always demeaned 
 himself on such occasions with a somewhat distant courtesy and 
 respect, as if he wished to stand on terms of formal acquaintance- 
 ship, and nothing more. He was very anxious to get once more 
 on such terms with Minola as would allow him to see her and 
 speak with her now and then, without her being always on her 
 guard against love-making. It seemed clear to him that he had 
 better retire for a while from his former position, and try to take 
 the attitude of one who, having been refused, has finally accepted 
 the refusal. His manner did in fact impose upon Minola. Never 
 having believed in the reality of his love, she found no difficulty 
 in believing that he had easily reconciled himself to disappoint- 
 ment, and that he had, perhaps, his eyes turned somewhere else 
 already. Whenever they did meet they were friendly, and Minola 
 saw no great necessity for avoiding him, except such as might 
 seem to be imposed upon her by the fact that her friends were on 
 one side of the political contest, while he was on the other. Mr. 
 Sheppard even called to see her once or twice about some of the 
 affairs of Mr. Saulsbury, and saw her alone, and said no word 
 that did not relate to matters of business. It was a great relief to 
 Minola to see him and not Mr. Saulsbury, and she was even frank 
 
208 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 enough to tell him so. He only said, with a grave smile, that he 
 feared she " really never had done justice, never had done quite 
 justice," to the motives and the character of Mr. Saulsbury. But 
 he admitted that Mr. Saulsbury's austere manners were a little 
 against him. 
 
 No surprise, therefore, was created in the mind of any of our 
 friends when one morning Mr. Sheppard's card was brought to 
 Minola, and she was told that he wished to speak a few words 
 with her. 
 
 Mr. Money had never heard anything about Sheppard's former 
 attentions to Minola. He was inclined to think Sheppard a very 
 good fellow for taking any trouble about Minola's affairs at a time 
 when he had so much of his own to occupy him. 
 
 So Minola received Mr. Sheppard in one of the sitting-rooms 
 of the hotel, and was not displeased to see him. She even asked 
 if he would not like to see Mr. Money. This was after he had 
 talked to her about the particular object of his coming — some- 
 thing relating to what seemed in her mind the interminable 
 arrangements about the house property which had fallen to her 
 share. 
 
 " I should have no objection to see Mr. Money, Miss Grey — 
 none whatever ; I hope we may be good friends, although Provi- 
 dence has decreed that we should be on opposite sides of this 
 political controversy. But I am not sure whether under the cir- 
 cumstances it would be agreeable to all parties if I were to see 
 Mr. Heron, or whether, not being on such terms with him, I ought 
 to call on his friend. These are points, Miss Grey, on which you, 
 as a lady, might not like to decide." 
 
 " Oh, I couldn't think of deciding ! " Minola said hastily, for 
 she had made her suggestion in obedience to a sudden impulse, 
 and was not sure that she had not done something wrong ; " I 
 don't know anything about it, and perhaps I ought not to have 
 said anything at all." 
 
 " Your suggestion, Miss Grey, was only in accordance with all 
 the impulses of your generous nature." Mr. Sheppard still loved 
 as much as ever his long and formal sentences. Minola could not 
 help wondering how the House of Commons would like such a 
 style, if Mr. Sheppard ever got a chance of displaying it there. 
 
 " You do not, I hope," he continued, " disapprove of my 
 ambition to distinguish myself in political life ? You know that I 
 have for years cherished such an ambition ; that hope still remains 
 to me. It is not, surely, an illegitimate or unreasonable hope ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, Mr. Sheppard, far from it ; I am sure that I, like 
 all your friends, shall be very glad to hear that you have been 
 
MR. SHEPPARD'S OFFER OF SURRENDER. 209 
 
 successful in your ambition — I think it ought to be the ambiticjn 
 of every man who has any talents." 
 
 " Thank you, Miss Grey. You do not, I observe, wish me 
 success in this particular contest. That, I suppose, would be too 
 much for me to expect ? " 
 
 Minola only shook her head. 
 
 " I am afraid I shall only grieve you in this then," he said, 
 dropping his eyes, " for I am certain to win, Miss Grey." 
 
 Minola thought of her unholy compact, and wishtd he would 
 talk of something else, or, better still, go away. 
 
 " I am sorry you can't both win," she said good-humouredly, 
 " then we could all be pleased, and we might say all we liked 
 without fear of seeming unfriendly to one or the other." She could 
 not help feeling that this speech was a little like one of Mr. 
 Sheppard's own. 
 
 " Is it true," Mr. Sheppard asked abruptly, " what people say 
 in Keeton — this about Mr. Heron and Miss Money? " 
 
 " I don't know much about the gossip of Keeton, Mr. Sheppard, 
 and it would not have much interest for me — I don't like Keeton." 
 
 " It is not, perhaps, mere gossip. They say that Mr. Heron is 
 to be married to Mr. Money's daughter ; that, they say, is the 
 reason why we in Keeton are favoured with the personal inter- 
 ference of Mr. Money in our local affairs." 
 
 Minola rose, and seemed as if she were resolved that the con- 
 versation must end there. 
 
 " I can't tell you anything about that, Mr. Sheppard ; even 
 if I knew anything, which I don't, I could hardly be expected 
 to talk about it. It does not concern you or me much, I suppose." 
 
 " It concerns me greatly," he said warmly. " Of course it con- 
 cerns me that a stranger should come down here to Keeton inter- 
 fering in our affairs, and making discord and confusion where we 
 are all inclined to harmony. But I tell you this, Miss Grey, and 
 you may tell your friends so, if you like — they haven't a chance 
 here, except through you." 
 
 Minola was amazed, and could not help looking up with an 
 expression of curiosity. Was this to be another offer to put the 
 decision of the contest in her hands? 
 
 " Yes," he went on, as if he had understood her thought, " it 
 shall be in your hands if you wish it. I am very ambitious of 
 representing my native town in Parliament ; but I have an ambition 
 twenty times stronger than that, and an older ambition too. If 
 you wish to see your friends succeed in this affair, declare your 
 wish, and I will withdraw to please you. I can find a chance 
 somewhere else ; I am not likely to fail in anything I set my heart 
 
 p 
 
210 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 upon ; and no other man but myself could carry this borough in 
 the duke's interest at such a time as this. I can carry it, and if 
 we two stand alone — Mr. Heron and I — I am safe to carry it ; 
 but if you only say the word, I will give up the place this moment. 
 Think of it, Miss Grey — do give it a moment of thought. I don't 
 want to bind you to anything ; I don't put any condition ; I only 
 ask you to let me do this for you." 
 
 His eyes were full of eagerness, and his manner had almost lost 
 its formalism. He did not seem to her the man she had ever 
 known before. She felt something like respect for him. 
 
 " I could not ask you to do anything of the kind for me, 
 Mr. Sheppard," she said gently. " Why should I ? What right 
 could I have to allow you to make any sacrifice for me? This 
 would be a great sacrifice ; and I suppose a thing a man ought 
 not to do for any personal feeling." 
 
 " You are quite right ; you had always a clearer understanding 
 than women are supposed to have about these things — I remember 
 your father saying so often. It would raise an outcry here against 
 me. My own party would denounce me ; I should never be looked 
 at by any of the duke's people again. You can hardly think what 
 a sacrifice it would be to a man like me. But that's why I offer it. 
 I want to make some great sacrifice — I do ! — to prove to you that 
 I am sincere, and that there is nothing I would not do for you. 
 Mind, I am not talking of making a bargain. I only say, if you 
 wish me to do this, it shall be done. That's all." 
 
 " I don't wish you, Mr. Sheppard ; it would be most unfair 
 and wrong of me to do so. It would be a shameful thing of me, 
 I think, and I wish you had not thought of it, although I can't 
 help feeling that I owe you some thanks even for the offer." 
 
 " Think of it, Miss Grey — just think a little more of it. I 
 mean it, I assure you ; I mean it all. Let him have the seat if 
 it pleases Mr. Money and his daughter, and if you want to please 
 them. It will be all your doing, mind ! I should be glad to 
 make Mr. Money's acquaintance more than I have done ; I have 
 no ill-will to Mr. Heron ; why should I have ? I am not in love 
 with Miss Money," he added, with rather a sickly smile, that it 
 pained Minola to see. 
 
 " I don't need to think it over, Mr. Sheppard ; I know already 
 what I ought to say. I could not ask you to do such a thing for 
 me, or allow you to do it it I could prevent you. I don't under- 
 stand much about such things, but it seems to me that what you 
 propose would be dishonourable to you. No, Mr. Sheppard; go 
 on and fight out your fights-why should you not ? We may be 
 friends all of us just the same." 
 
MR. SHEPPARD'S OFFER OF SURRENDER. 211 
 
 " I want to do this for you — to show you that I am sincere in 
 all that I — all that I ever said to you." 
 
 Minola felt a colour coming on her cheeks. 
 
 " I can believe you to be sincere without such a proof as that," 
 she said. 
 
 " But do you — do you ? I could be content if I thought you 
 did believe that. Tell me that you do believe that." 
 
 " Why should I not believe it ? I have always heard you 
 spoken of as a man of the highest character " 
 
 " It isn't that," he said cutting off her words abruptly ; " it 
 is not that I am speaking about. You know it is not that ! I 
 want you to tell me whether you believe that I am sincere in 
 loving you." 
 
 " I thought we were never to speak of this again," she said, 
 and she was moving almost in alarm towards the door. He quietly 
 stood in her way and prevented her. 
 
 " I never said so. I told you I would not give up my hope, 
 and I don't mean to give it up. I told you in the park here, the 
 first day that I spoke out — I told you that I would not give up, 
 and I will not. I love you always ; I did from the time when you 
 were a child, and I was not so very much more. I am slow some- 
 times, but when I get a feeling like that it never leaves me. I 
 know you used to laugh at me and to make fun of me, but I didn't 
 care much about that, and I don't care. It wasn't a very generous 
 thing to do, knowing what you did about me. No, no, Minola, you 
 shan't go yet ; indeed you shan't. You must hear me now, once 
 for all." 
 
 " If it will be once for all, Mr. Sheppard ; if you will promise 
 me that " 
 
 " No, no ! I'll promise nothing. I'll never give up this hope, I 
 tell you fairly ; never, never, Minola. Yes, you used to laugh at 
 me, and it wasn't generous ; but who expects generosity from a 
 woman? — and in any case it couldn't change the feelings of a man 
 like me to you — no, not if you treated me like a dog. You don't 
 know what it is to be insanely in love with some one who does 
 not care about you. . If you did, you could make some allowance 
 for me." 
 
 His whole manner was so strange and so wild that it compelled 
 the attention of Minola, and almost made her afraid. She had 
 never seen in him anything like this before. Some of his words, 
 too, fell touchingly and painfully on her ear. Did she, then, not 
 know what it was to be foolishly in love without hope of return ? 
 Did she not ? and ought not what she knew to make her more 
 tender towards this man, who, in so strange a way, seemed to be 
 
 p 2 
 
212 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 only in like case with herself? She ceased to fear Mr. Sheppard, 
 or to feel her old repugnance for him. Her manner became gentle 
 and even sweet, as she spoke to him, and tried to reason with him. 
 
 " If I ever did laugh at you, Mr. Sheppard, it was only as 
 girls who know no better will laugh at people whom, if they only 
 did know better, they would respect. I was wrong and silly, and 
 I ask your pardon most sincerely. I don't think, Mr. Sheppard, 
 I am likely to offend many people by any excess of good spirits 
 for the future." 
 
 ." You never offended me," he said eagerly; " or, if you did, it 
 was only for the moment, and I didn't care. You were welcome 
 to say anything you liked, and to laugh at me as much as you 
 liked ; you are still. You may laugh at me, Minola, the moment 
 my back is turned, if you like. That won't make me love you 
 the less, or give up trying to make you change your mind." 
 
 " Why can't we be friends, Mr. Sheppard? I could like you 
 much, I am sure now, if you would only let me." 
 
 " No, no ! we never can be friends," he said, taking up his hat, 
 as if he felt that it would be useless to say any more then. " We 
 might be enemies, Minola— although I can't well think of myself 
 as your enemy — but I'll never consent to be your friend." 
 
 "We never can be anything else then," Minola said more 
 firmly. " I don't mean to marry ; the man does not live in the 
 world," she declared with positive energy, "whom I would many; 
 and I couldn't love you, Mr. Sheppard ; and for heaven's sake, I 
 beseech of you, let us not have all this to go over again and again. 
 I wonder men can degrade themselves in such a manner — it is 
 pitiful; it is shameful !" she added. " I would not, if I were a man, 
 so lower myself for all the women in the world." 
 
 "There is nothing I would not lower myself to for you — 
 nothing I would not do for you. I don't call it lowering myself; 
 I am in love with you, and I would do anything to carry my 
 point; and I don't give up yet. Don't let it be war to the 
 knife between us two, Minola." 
 
 " I want no war, but only peace," she said gently. " I want to 
 be your friend, Mr. Sheppard ; I will not be your enemy even if 
 you do persecute me." 
 
 He made no further effort to detain her, but opened the door 
 for her, and allowed her to go without another word. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard's passion, strong as it was, did not whollyf.doib 
 him. He saw that he had gained an advantage worth trying rln 
 He saw that Minola had been impressed for the first time with a 
 certain respect for him. This was something to have gained, and 
 he went away with a feeling of satisfaction. He had offered to give 
 
MR SHEPPARD'S OFFER OF SURRENDER. 213 
 
 up one great and, as he believed, almost certain chance of gratifying 
 his ambition for her sake. He was perfectly sincere in the offer, 
 and he would have been wild with pride and delight if she had 
 accepted it. Now that she had refused, he felt that the best thing 
 he could do was to fight the battle out as she had said herself, and 
 win it. "When I defeat her friend, she can't laugh at me then," 
 he thought. Mr. Sheppard had not had much experience in the 
 ways of women, nor had he studied women and courtship in 
 romance or poetry. But he had enough at least of instinctive 
 knowledge to understand that power and success count for more 
 usually in the eyes of women than piteous appeal. He went 
 home prepared again for the battle, and again longing for it. 
 
 It is quite true that Minola for her part felt a higher respect for 
 him than she had ever known before. Her own experiences had 
 taught and had softened her. He really was sincere; he was in 
 love, and with her, she now felt. Perhaps a woman can never 
 feel merely anger or scorn for one who she believes does really 
 love her. The whole bearing of the man had seemed to be 
 dignified by genuine emotion. His strange offer had something in 
 it that she recognised as chivalrous in a sort of perverted way. 
 When Minola used to read " Ivanhoe," and think over all its people 
 as if they were living beings whom she either loved or hated, she 
 always felt driven in despite of all propriety to feel a certain admira- 
 tion for the Templar, Brian de Bois Guilbert. Especially was she 
 struck with admiration for him when he offered to throw away 
 career and reputation in Europe if Rebecca would love him, and 
 go with him to seek out some new sphere of life. The memory of 
 these readings and thinkings came oddly back upon her now. 
 
 "This poor Sheppard is a sort of Templar," she could not 
 help thinking. "To offend the duke's people is just as great a 
 sacrifice for him as for my old friend Bois Guilbert to throw away 
 the chances of rising to be Grand Master of his Order. The 
 public opinion of Keeton is as much to one hero as the voice of 
 Europe to the other. Going to look for a new borough is as 
 bad a thing perhaps in our days as trying for a new career among 
 the Saracens or wherever it was. I begin to think poor Mr. 
 Sheppard is as good a hero as anyone else. He is a fool to make 
 such an offer, and I suppose it is rather dishonourable — at least, 
 it looks a little like that to me — but I suppose all men will twist 
 their code of honour a little to suit themselves, and at all events 
 it is no worse than the conduct of the Templar, and I used to 
 admire him." 
 
 Of course in all this Minola assumed herself to be talking 
 ironically, and in fact to be relieving her mind of many sarcasms 
 
214 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 at the expense of man. But there was a little of earnest too in her 
 enforced jesting. 
 
 " Our rival must have a good deal of time to spare," Mr. Money 
 observed when Minola saw him shortly after; "or he must be very 
 good-natured to take so much trouble about Mr. Saulsbury's affairs. 
 I suspect the truth is that he feels pretty sure of the result." 
 
 " Then you think we have lost ? " Minola asked, dismayed. 
 
 " All except honour, I fear," he answered coolly. " I don't 
 see much chance, Miss Grey. The extreme ' Rads ' won't have 
 anything to do with us, I am pretty sure. Your Keeton friend 
 stands to win unless something wonderful happens." 
 
 " But will those extreme people vote for him — for Mr. Shep- 
 pard?" 
 
 " There's no knowing ; you can't count upon these fellows. 
 But even if they don't, you see it will come to about the same 
 thing — at least, unless they all hold back in a mass, which is not at 
 all likely. I think it will be this way : a few of them will vote for 
 Sheppard, just because they hate no one so much as a Liberal 
 who is not strong enough for them; and those few will be enough 
 to give your Keeton friend the seat." 
 
 Lucy and Minola both looked rather blank at this prospect. 
 Minola began almost to wish she had taken Sheppard at his word. 
 Suddenly Mr. Money was called away by some political fellow- 
 worker, who had a face which was like a title-page to some won- 
 derful volume of news. 
 
 In a few moments Mr. Money returned full of excitement, 
 and holding a paper in his hand. 
 
 " I say, young ladies," he exclaimed, " here's a new incident 
 for you ; something sensational, I should say. Here's our friend 
 St. Paul coming out himself at the last moment as a candidate for 
 Keeton in the Red Republican interest, and denouncing the duke, 
 his brother, as if the duke were Cain and he were the ghost of 
 Abel." 
 
 " But can he do that, papa ? " asked Lucy indignantly. 
 
 " Can he do what, Lucelet ? " 
 
 " Become a candidate now, dear, at this time ? " 
 
 " Why, of course he can — what should hinder him ? The 
 nomination isn't until the day after to-morrow." 
 
 " Oh, but I call it so unfair !" 
 
 " My dear little Lucelet, what do you think he cares what you 
 call it or what anybody else calls it ? " 
 
 " Then does this destroy our chances altogether ? " Lucy 
 plaintively asked. " I always thought he was a treacherous man." 
 
 " Stuff mv good little girl; there are no treacheries in politics 
 
"MISCHIEF, THOU ART AFOOT:' 215 
 
 and elections. But I must think this over a little. I am not 
 by any means sure that it may not prove an uncommonly good 
 thing for us, by Jove. Where's Heron ? I must get at him at 
 once; and so, young ladies, good-bye for the moment." 
 
 Mr. Money hurried away. During the few moments he had 
 stopped to talk to the girls several excited heads had been thrust 
 into the room, as if entreating him to come away. 
 
 Minola, too, was not by any means sure that this new incident 
 was not meant to turn to trie account of Victor Heron. This, then, 
 was clearly Mr. St. Paul's plot. She understood quite enough of 
 the explanation Mr. Money had been giving to see that if any of 
 the extreme Radical votes could be taken from Sheppard's side the 
 chances of Heron would go up at once. She could not doubt that 
 Mr. St. Paul knew this still better. She became full of excitement ; 
 and, such is the demoralising effect of all manner of competition 
 on human creatures, that Minola now found herself wishing that 
 the candidate she favoured might win by Mr. St. Paul's device 
 or that of anyone else; but win somehow. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 "mischief, thou art afoot." 
 
 Never was the aspect of a community more suddenly changed 
 than that of Keeton from the moment when St. Paul flung himself 
 into the contest. Up to that hour a grave decorum had governed 
 even its most strenuous efforts. There was plenty of speech- 
 making, of crowds, confusion, and noise ; but everything was 
 in decent order. There were no personal attacks; and the Liberal 
 candidate had not allowed a great scope even to the good spirits 
 and the humorous powers of all his followers. A somewhat elaborate 
 courtesy had been observed between the candidates and their 
 leading supporters on both sides. Mr. Heron had always spoken 
 with high respect of Mr. Sheppard, who of course had not failed 
 on his part to do justice to the personal character of his opponent. 
 In fact, as the orators on both sides were in the habit of observing 
 about twenty times a day, it was a contest of political principles 
 altogether, and by no means a contest of persons. 
 
 All this was now changed. Mr. St. Paul had leaped into the 
 arena with a vivacity which proved only too contagious. His 
 speeches were alternations of vehement personal abuse and broad, 
 audacious humour. Throne, altar, and caste seemed alike to be 
 
216 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 the targets of his oratory. He was the reddest of all Red Repub- 
 licans. He was the typical protttaire of prol'etaires. Mr. Monev 
 had denounced the Ministers and the Tories; Mr. St Paul de- 
 nounced the Ministers, the Opposition, the Tories, the Liberals, 
 the aristocracy, and the middle-class with equal fervour The 
 employers of labour and the clergy of all denominations came in 
 for rattling vituperation at his hands. He assailed the two candi- 
 dates and their political professions with good-humoured con- 
 tempt. He declared that if the Liberal candidate had a personal 
 grievance which he wanted to put right in the contest, he, St. 
 .Paul, had a personal grievance of a nature far more nearly con- 
 cerning the people of Keeton— a grievance against the brother 
 who had disowned and cast him off; who had slandered him, 
 ousted him from the affections of his father, driven him into 
 exile; but who, thank heaven, could not intimidate him, or turn 
 him into a crawling sycophant. He boasted that in spite of his 
 brother, who had tried to ruin him, he had made a fortune by his 
 own hands and his own brains in the great Free Republic, the 
 land where there were no dukes, where all men were equal, where 
 there was no hireling State clergy, and no trampling tyranny of 
 employers-need he say it was the glorious republic beyond 
 the Atlantic? He made dreadful work of the allusion in Mr. 
 bhepparc Is address to the services rendered to Keeton by the ducal 
 lamily He indignantly asked of his hearers what a duke had ever 
 done for tne town. When had a duke pressed the honest hand 
 oi a Keeton workmg-man? When had a duke or a duchess 
 taken the slightest interest in the poor and virtuous working-women 
 of Keeton ? Nay, he asked, when had a Keeton tradesman— and 
 the Keeton tradesmen had done more to make the place than 
 the dukes— when had a Keeton tradesman or his wife been 
 invited inside the doors of the ducal residence ? The very men 
 who were fighting the duke's battle to-day would find them- 
 selves very lucky indeed if they got even a civil bow from the 
 duke or the duchess to-morrow. 
 
 * There was quite enough of truth in these hits to make them 
 tell. St Paul managed to "fetch," as he would himself have 
 expressed it, a good many among the discontented middle-class 
 of the p lace. But with the proletaire he was a tremendous suc- 
 cess. 1 here had been some quarrel lately between the employers 
 and the workpeople m the town, in which the latter were finally 
 defeated, and the defeat rankled in their hearts, and they were 
 glad of any chance of giving vent to their sense of wrong St 
 Paul was, of course, all the more successful when he denounced 
 aristocracy and caste because of his being one of the aristocracy 
 
"MISCHIEF, THOU ART AFOOT." 217 
 
 and the ruling caste himself. He proudly declared that he had re- 
 nounced his courtesy title, and that he stood on his merits as a 
 man — a working-man who had worked with his own hands in 
 a free land, and made a fortune there by manly energies, and brains, 
 and strength. 
 
 One little incident made him more than ever a hero. At 
 the second meeting he held — it was in the large room of a great 
 public-house — there was a good deal of noisy interruption, which 
 seemed to come from one man in especial. He was recognised at 
 once as a person employed in some way by Mr. Sheppard: a 
 man of great muscle and a sort of local bully. Loud cries of 
 "Turn him out!" were raised. The disturber bawled a defiant 
 request to the general company to let him know who proposed to 
 turn him out. 
 
 St. Paul paused in his flow of eloquence. 
 
 "The honourable elector wishes to know," he said, in his 
 familiar tone of imperturbable good-humour, " who will turn him 
 out? I can tell him at once. I'll turn him out if he interrupts 
 again in any way. This meeting is called by me. This hall 
 is hired by me. I beg of my friends here not to interfere in 
 the slightest. If that honourable elector interrupts again I will 
 throw him down those stairs." 
 
 Amid tremendous cheering the intrepid St. Paul resumed his 
 eloquent argument. His boisterous enemy at once began his 
 interruption all over again. St. Paul stopped. 
 
 " Let no one interfere," he quietly said, " while I put that person 
 out of the room." 
 
 He promptly came down from the platform, amid vociferous 
 cheering and wild excitement. 
 
 Then followed a tumultuous scene, in which cheering, scream- 
 ing, stamping, struggling, swearing, and indescribable noise of all 
 kinds deafened every ear. A way was made for St. Paul, who 
 advanced towards his antagonist. The latter awaited him in atti- 
 tude of utter defiance. St. Paul seized him round the waist and 
 a furious struggle set in. It was not of long endurance, however. 
 The local bully was well enough in Keeton " rows." He had 
 strength enough and all the skill that Keeton quarrels could teach; 
 but St. Paul had had the training of Eton, and Oxford, and London, 
 and all the practice of the rugged West. He was the Gamin and 
 the Rowdy in one. The outlawry of two hemispheres had taught 
 him its arts of defence and offence. He lifted the unlucky and too 
 confident disturber clean off his feet. He carried him out through 
 frantically-cheering ranks, and he kept his word by literally 
 throwing him down the stairs. 
 
21 8 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Then he came back, good-humoured and cool as ever, and 
 he went on with his speech. He was the idol of the Keeton mob 
 from that moment forth. He was escorted that night to his hotel 
 by a tumultuous throng of admirers, who would probably have 
 offered to pull down the ducal hall if the rebel of the ducal family 
 had hinted that it would give him any pleasure to see it done. 
 
 All this changed completely the character of the contest. It 
 became fierce and turbulent on both sides. Some of the followers 
 of Mr. Sheppard tried retaliation, very much against the prudent 
 advice of that candidate himself. The few days remaining before 
 the election were so furious and riotous, that Mr. Money began 
 to think it would be best to send his daughter and Minola home 
 to London. Mr. Heron was so much engrossed in his cause and 
 his speeches that he hardly heeded the tumults. He had been 
 used to rougher scenes, and these made scarcely any impression on 
 him. It sometimes seemed to Minola that Mr. Blanchet liked 
 the tumult less than anyone; that even Lucy did not shrink from 
 it with so much abhorrence. It was natural, she thought, that 
 one who was at least of poetic nature, even if he were not a great 
 poet, should shrink away from such degrading scenes. She felt 
 her half-assumed dislike for men grow more and more into reality 
 as she saw these specimens of the way in which they conduct their 
 political contests. 
 
 In truth, there had been springing up in sleepy Keeton of late 
 years a class of whom the park knew nothing, of whom the middle- 
 class knew little more, but which was likely to make a con- 
 siderable change in the way of conducting local politics. The 
 park and the middle-class heeded nothing, while this rough new 
 body was growing into ideas about its own strength, its own wrongs, 
 and its own rights. In Keeton, as in other places, people would 
 probably have thought it wise to shut away from themselves all 
 knowledge of unpleasant facts as long as they could; and if it had 
 been hinted that there was a somewhat self-conceited and fierce 
 proletaire class growing up in the town during all the years while 
 the middle-class were fawning on the dukes and duchesses, and 
 the dukes and duchesses were languidly patronising the middle- 
 class, the prudent persons would have preferred to hear and say no 
 more about such unlikely and disagreeable things. The election 
 contest first made it evident that some of the seed grains scat- 
 tered by modern socialism had been blown as far as Keeton, and 
 had sunk into the soil there and begun to grow up into rugged 
 stems and prickly leaves. 
 
 Minola absolutely refused to save herself by flight to London, 
 or to believe that there could be any danger of serious disturbance. 
 
"MISCHIEF, THOU ART AFOOT." 219 
 
 If nothing else had kept her from leaving Keeton, her curiosity 
 would have been enough. She was intensely anxious to see what 
 would come of St. Paul's appearance on the scene. She was almost 
 afraid to think of the part she had innocently consented to play. 
 She remembered now St. Paul's illustration about the king who was 
 summoned to cut the mysterious rope, and she thought that she was 
 really in a position very much like his. She was perplexed, amused, 
 curious, a little afraid, but still anxious above all things for Victor 
 Heron's success, and determined to see the contest out, come what 
 might. 
 
 It was the night before the polling-day. Minola and Lucy were 
 alone in their room. Victor Heron and Money were away speech- 
 making somewhere. Since the appearance of St. Paul in the strife 
 the girls had not gone to many meetings, or left the hotel after 
 nightfall. Things were looking rather uncheerful now, and the two 
 young women no longer regarded the whole affair as a great 
 holiday or masquerade. 
 
 Lucy in especial was melancholy. The little weather-glass of 
 her temperament rose and fell very readily to the changes of the 
 atmosphere around her. The two friends were silent for a while. 
 Lucy began at last to talk of what filled her mind. 
 
 " I wish this was all over, Nola dear; I have a horrid fore- 
 boding as if something were going to happen — something unplea- 
 sant, I mean, of course." 
 
 "This room is dull," Minola said. "Come out on the balcony, 
 Lucy. The evening is beautiful. It is a sin to sit here and 
 not see the sky." 
 
 The girls went into the balcony, and stood there and looked 
 out upon the scene. The hotel stood not far from the Court House, 
 which Minola used to know so well in former days. The roof of 
 the Court and the capitals of some of its white pillars could be 
 seen from the balcony. In another direction lay the bridge, a 
 little to the right of the girls in the balcony. The place where 
 the hotel and the Court House stood was one of the few broad 
 openings among the iittle maze of narrow streets which made up 
 the town of Keeton. Minola could see the bridge plainly, and 
 across the bridge the dark trees of the park. A faint continuous 
 murmur was in their ears all the time. It might perhaps be the 
 rush of the river, a little louder of sound than was its wont ; but 
 Minola fancied it was the noise of shouting mobs somewhere — 
 a noise to which Keeton streets, once so sleepy, were growing of 
 late to be somewhat accustomed. This, however, was louder and 
 longer than the sound of such popular manifestations as it usually 
 reached the hotel. Minola, if she felt any alarm or misgiving, 
 
220 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 thought the best thing would be not to call her companion's atten- 
 tion to the sounds. 
 
 The night was beautiful, as Minola had said. It was yet 
 summer, although the evenings were growing short ; no breath 
 of autumnal chilliness yet saddened the soft air. 
 
 " I wish they would come back, ' Lucy murmured. " I don't 
 at all like our being left alone in this way, Nola. I feel as if we 
 ought to be afraid. Don't you ? " 
 
 " No, dear; there is nothing to be afraid of." 
 
 " Do you think so really ? Ah ! but it is different with you." 
 
 Lucy sighed, and Minola knew well what she would have said 
 if she had spoken out her thoughts. She would have said, " It 
 is so different with you ; you can afford to be composed and not 
 alarmed, for you have not a father engaged in all this, nor a man 
 whom you love." Minola read her thoughts and was silent, 
 thinking all the more herself for the silence. 
 
 " Hush, there is somebody," Lucy suddenly said, looking back 
 into the room. " There certainly is some one there." 
 
 So there was ; but it was not either of the two Lucy wished 
 to see. It proved to be Mr. Blanchet, who had come into the 
 room unseen while the girls were in the balcony. Minola felt glad 
 to see him on the whole. It was a relief from the melancholy 
 monotony of the evening, and of poor little Lucy's bodings and 
 fears. 
 
 Herbert Blanchet came out into the balcony in his familiar 
 way, the way of a picturesque poet conscious of his poetry and 
 his picturesqueness. It was a curious study, if any unconcerned 
 observer there and then could have made the study, to notice 
 the difference between the manner of Blanchet towards the two 
 girls. To Lucy he was easy and even patronising, as if he would 
 convey the idea that it was a kindness on his part to make himself 
 agreeable to her. But to Minola he went on as if she were his 
 acknowledged patroness and the ruler of his destiny. In good 
 truth, however, there was not then much of a place for him in the 
 mind of either girl. 
 
 " Where have you come from ? Where is papa ? " Lucy asked 
 with eagerness. 
 
 " I have not been in the town," he said ; " I was away by 
 the river. I heard noises — shouting and all that — and I did not 
 care to get among the fellows in their electioneering work. I 
 have had rather more than I care for of it. My fellow-man seems 
 a particularly offensive creature to me when he is in his political 
 and robustious moods. I don't, as a rule, care much about Nature, 
 but I prefer her company by far to that of such bellowing humanity 
 as we see down yonder." 
 
"MISCHIEF, THOU ART AFOOT." 221 
 
 " I hope nothing has happened to papa, or to Mr. Heron ? " 
 
 " Oh, nothing has happened, you may be sure ! " the poet 
 replied coolly. " They both rather revel in that sort of thing — it 
 seems to be their native element. It won't harm them. In my 
 case it is different ; I don't belong to the political arena ; I have 
 nothing to do with the political elevation of my fellow-man. If he 
 is to be elevated, I am content ; if not, I am content also." 
 
 " I don't know how any man can be content to stand here in 
 a balcony talking to two girls," said Minola, "while there is so 
 much excitement down there. I could not, if I were a man." 
 
 " I will go down there if you wish," he replied with deprecating 
 grace, " although I don't know that I could be of much use ; but 
 I don't suppose there is any real danger." 
 
 " I did not speak of danger," Minola said, rather con- 
 temptuously. " I only meant that there seemed to be some 
 manly excitement there. There is no danger. It is not a battle, 
 Mr. Blanchet." 
 
 " There was some talk of a row," he answered ; " your friend 
 St. Paul seems to have set the people wild somehow. But I should 
 not think it would come to anything. Anyhow, Miss Grey, if you 
 think I ought to be there, or that I could do any good, you have 
 only to send me there." 
 
 " No, no, Mr. Blanchet " — Minola was recovering her good 
 humour — " I don't want you to go. But Miss Money was a little 
 uneasy about her father, and perhaps we were both disappointed 
 that you did not come bringing us some news from the seat of 
 war. You see, they won't allow us to go to the front any more." 
 
 Meanwhile the noise grew louder and louder ; it came nearer 
 and nearer too. There was a fury in the sound as clearly to 
 be distinguished from the shouting to which they were well accus- 
 tomed as the obstreperous clamour of boys at play is from the cry 
 of pain or passion. 
 
 " Something bad is going on, I know," Lucy said, turning 
 pale and looking at Minola. 
 
 Minola and Blanchet both leaned from the balcony, and could 
 see a straggling group of women, and boys, and a few men making, 
 as in a sort of stampede, for the neighbourhood of the hotel. 
 They all kept looking eagerly behind them, as if something were 
 coming that way which they feared, and yet were curious, to see. 
 These fugitives, if they were to be called so, seemed to increase 
 in numbers even as the watchers in the balcony looked out. 
 
 Mr. Blanchet went languidly downstairs to ask what the com- 
 motion was about, but could hear nothing more precise in the 
 hotel than the rumour that a riot of some kind had broken out in 
 
222 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 the town, and that there were not police enough to put it down. 
 He came back to the balcony again. For his own part, he felt no 
 manner of curiosity. He had always supposed that there were 
 riots at elections, and he assumed that some persons of the lower 
 classes generally got their heads broken. There was nothing in 
 that to interest him. It might happen even that the candidates 
 or their friends sometimes came in for rough treatment; Mr. 
 Blanchet would not have been very much disturbed by that in 
 the present case. If Mr. Heron had got hurt he would have 
 thought that on the whole it served him right. 
 
 Minola watched eagerly from the balcony. Some affrighted 
 people were now running past under the windows of the hotel, for 
 the most part women dragging their children after them. Minola 
 called out to some, and asked what was happening; but they only 
 answered in some inarticulate attempt at explanation, and kept on 
 their way. Some men passed almost in as much haste, and 
 Blanchet called to them grandly to ask what was "up." One 
 shouted out that there was a terrible row going on in the town, 
 got up by the " St. Paul's men," and that the military were sent 
 for. Two of Money's servants, one his own man, were seen going 
 out of the hotel in the direction of the increasing clamour. Lucy 
 cried to them, and asked where they were going, and what had 
 happened; but they only returned a respectful reassurance, some- 
 thing to the effect that it was nothing of any consequence, and 
 then ran on towards the scene of the supposed disturbance, 
 looking as if they thought it of much greater consequence than 
 they said. The waiters and other servants of the hotel were 
 presently seen to make preparations for closing the doors and 
 windows. 
 
 " Things are beginning to look serious," said Blanchet, begin- 
 ning to look very serious himself. 
 
 " They must not close these windows," Minola said. " I mean 
 to stay here and see what happens. If they do close the windows, 
 I will stay here in the balcony all the same." 
 
 " And so will I, Nola," Lucy exclaimed, looking pale, but 
 showing no want of pluck. " Something may have happened to 
 papa." 
 
 " I don't know that it would not be better for you ladies to 
 go in," Blanchet gravely urged. " I think, Miss Grey, you can 
 hardly do much good here, and you would be quite safe indoors. 
 Suppose you go in, and let them close these windows ? " 
 
 " You don't seem to understand women's curiosity, Mr. 
 Blanchet, if you fancy that Lucy and I could be content to be 
 shut up while all you men were in the midst of some exciting 
 
"MISCHIEF, THOU ART AFOOT:' 223 
 
 adventure, and perhaps in most poetic danger." Minola spoke 
 with a contempt she cared to make no effort to conceal. She 
 thought Mr. Blanchet was selfish, and had no interest in the 
 safety of other people. She had not yet formed the suspicion 
 which later was forced into her mind. 
 
 Some of the servants of the hotel came to say that they believed 
 there was a rather serious riot going on in the town, and that 
 it would be prudent to close the windows and have the shutters 
 put up, as it was quite possible that stones might be thrown, 
 and might do mischief. Both the girls steadily refused to leave 
 the balcony. Mr. Blanchet added his remonstrances, but without 
 any effect. Minola suggested that the windows might be closed 
 behind them as they stood on the balcony, and that Mr. Blanchet 
 might, if he pleased, withdraw into the hotel; but she declared that 
 Lucy and she would remain in the balcony. 
 
 " I don't believe there is a bit of real danger to us or to any- 
 one," she declared. 
 
 " But, my dear young lady," Mr. Blanchet urged, " what pos- 
 sible good can you do in any case by remaining in this balcony? 
 I don't see how you could help Mr. Money and Mr. Heron, 
 supposing them to be in any danger, by staying out there when 
 these people evidently want us to come in." 
 
 " For a poet, Mr. Blanchet," Minola said coldly, " you do not 
 seem to have much of the dramatic instinct that helps people to 
 understand the feelings of other people. Do you think Lucy 
 Money could be content to hide herself in a cellar, and wait until 
 some one kindly remembered to come and tell her how things 
 were going with her father and — her friends ? " 
 
 Minola spoke in immense scorn. 
 
 The argument was cut short. The flying crowd had been 
 increasing every moment, and now the space before the windows 
 of the hotel was thickly studded with people, who, having run thus 
 far, appeared inclined to make a stand there, and see what was 
 next to happen. The shadows were falling deeply, and it was 
 beginning to be difficult to discern features clearly among the 
 crowd under the windows. The clamour, the screaming, the noise 
 of every kind had been increasing with each moment, until those 
 in the balcony might almost have fancied that a battle of the old- 
 fashioned kind, before the use of gunpowder, was being fought at 
 a little distance. 
 
 In another moment a small group of persons came hurrying up 
 to the door of the hotel in a direction opposite to that from which 
 the clamour of strife was heard. Minola could see the uniforms 
 of policemen among this hurrying and seemingly breathless group, 
 and she thought she recognised one face in their midst. 
 
224 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 The group consisted of a few policemen, wild with the haste 
 and the excitement of their movements, and some civilians mixed 
 up with them ; and Minola soon saw that her first conjecture was 
 right, and that they were forming a body-guard to protect Mr. 
 Augustus Sheppard. She could now see Sheppard's face dis- 
 tinctly. It was pale, and full of surprise and wrath ; but there did 
 not seem much of fear about it. On the contrary, Mr. Sheppard 
 seemed to be a sort of prisoner among his protectors and guardians. 
 Apparently they were forcing him away from a scene where they 
 believed there was danger for him, and he was endeavouring to 
 argue against them, and almost to resist their friendly pressure. 
 All this Minola, having tolerably quick powers of observation, 
 took in, or believed she took in, at a glance. 
 
 The policemen and some of the civilians with them were 
 knocking at the door of the hotel, and apparently expostulating 
 with some of the people within. At first Minola could not under- 
 stand the meaning of this. Mr. Blanchet was quicker. He 
 guessed what was going on, and by leaning as far as his long form 
 allowed him over the balcony he was able to hear some of the 
 words of parley. 
 
 "I say," he said, drawing back his head, "this is rather too 
 good. This fellow — what's-his-name? Sheppard — is the unpopular 
 candidate now, and the mob is after him, and these policemen 
 are asking the people to take him in here, and bring all the row 
 on us. I do hope they won't do that. What do we care about 
 the fellow ? Why should we run any risks if the police themselves 
 can't protect him ? " 
 
 Mr. Blanchet was very pale. 
 
 " For shame, Mr. Blanchet ! " Minola said indignantly. " Would 
 you leave him to be killed ? " 
 
 " Oh, they won't kill him ! you may be sure " 
 
 " No, not if we can save him," Minola said. " These people 
 shall take him in ! Lucy, these rooms belong to your father now — 
 run to them and insist on their letting him in. I'll go down myself 
 and open the doors, and bring him in." 
 
 " They shall let him in," Lucy exclaimed, and ran downstairs. 
 Minola was about to follow her. 
 
 " This is very generous," said Blanchet, with a sickly effort 
 a composure, " but it is very unwise, Miss Grey. I don't know 
 that in the absence of Mr. Money I ought to allow you-to expose 
 yourselves to such risks." 
 
 " Try if you can hinder us, Mr. Blanchet ! For shame ! Yes, 
 I am ashamed of you. Oh, no, don't talk to me ! I am sorry to 
 find that you are a coward." 
 
ALL THE RIVALS AT ONCE. 225 
 
 With this hard word she left him and ran downstairs. Just 
 at this moment he heard the doors opened, in compliance with 
 the insistance of Lucy. He heard her say with a certain firm 
 dignity, which he had hardly expected to find in the little maid, 
 that if any harm were done to the hotel because of Mr. Sheppard 
 being taken in, her father would make it good to the owner. Then, 
 in a moment, the two girls returned, doing the honours as hostesses 
 to Mr. Sheppard. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 ALL THE RIVALS AT ONCE. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard made what he must have felt to be a sort of 
 triumphal entrance. Perhaps he might have said with perfect 
 truth, in the language appropriate to election contests, that that 
 was the proudest moment of his life. He was almost dragged 
 into the room by the two breathless girls, who, in the generous 
 delight of having saved him from danger, seemed as if they could 
 not make too much of him. He felt Minola's hand on his, as she 
 forced him into the room. She would not let him go until she 
 had fairly brought him into the room and closed the door behind 
 him. For Mr. Sheppard had really resisted with some earnestness 
 the attempt to make him prisoner for his own safety. The genial 
 constraint of Minola's hand was a delight. There was, less per- 
 ceptibly to himself, another sensation of delight in his heart also. 
 He had for the first time in his life been in serious danger, and 
 he knew that he had not been afraid. 'It is no wonder if he felt 
 a little like a hero now. 
 
 He came in a good deal flushed, and even, if we may say so, 
 rumpled ; but he made a gallant effort to keep up his composure. 
 The first sight he met in the room was the pale, pitiful, angry, 
 and scowling face of the insulted Blanchet. "Are they going to 
 embrace the fellow ? " the embittered poet asked of his indignant 
 soul, as he saw the unpopular candidate thus led forward by the 
 eager girls. 
 
 Blanchet fell back into a corner, not deigning to say a word 
 of welcome to the rescued Sheppard. Mr. Sheppard, however, 
 hardly noticed him. 
 
 " I am sorry to disturb you, ladies," he said ; " and I am 
 obliged beyond measure for your kindness. I am not afraid myself 
 ot any danger in Keeton, but the police thought some disturbance 
 
 Q 
 
226 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 might happen, and they insisted on my going out of the streets ; 
 but I shall be able to relieve you of this intrusion in a few minutes, 
 I feel quite certain." 
 
 " You shan't stir from this place, Mr. Sheppard, until everything 
 is perfectly safe and quiet," Minola said. " If necessary, Lucy — 
 Miss Money — and I will hold you prisoner until all danger is 
 over. We are not afraid either." 
 
 At this moment there was such a renewal of the clamour that 
 Minola could not restrain her curiosity, but, having begged Mr. 
 Sheppard to- remain where he was, and not show himself, she ran 
 into the balcony again. 
 
 The sight she saw was so turbulent, and to her so unusual, 
 that for a second or two she could make nothing of it. She saw 
 only a confusion of heads and faces, and whirling arms and lights, 
 and men falling, and furious blows interchanged, and the confusion 
 was made almost bewildering by the shouting, the screaming, and 
 the curses and yells of triumph which seemed to her excited ears 
 to fill all the air. At last she got to understand, as if by a kind 
 of inspiration, that a fierce mob were trying to break into the 
 hotel, and that the police were doing their best to defend it. 
 The poor police were getting the worst of it. At the ?ame time 
 she was aware of a certain commotion in the room behind her, 
 which she felt somehow was occasioned by the efforts of Mr. 
 Sheppard to get out at any risk to himself, and the attempts of 
 Lucy and some of the servants to dissuade him. To this, however, 
 Minola now could pay but slight attention. She felt herself grow- 
 ing sick and faint with horror as she saw one policeman struck 
 down, and saw the blood streaming from his face. She could 
 not keep from a wild cry. Suddenly her attention was drawn 
 away even from this ; fo*r in a moment, she could not tell how, 
 a diversion seemed to be effected in the struggle, and Minola 
 saw that Heron and Mr. Money were in the thick of it. 
 
 Her first impulse was to spring back into the room and tell 
 Lucy of her father's danger, Luckily, however, she had sense 
 enough to restrain this mad impulse, and not to set Lucy wild with 
 alarm to no possible purpose. She saw that Heron, at the head 
 of a small, resolute body of followers, had fought his way in a 
 moment into the very heart of the crowd, and was by the side 
 of the policemen. He dragged to his feet the fallen policeman ; 
 he seized with vehement strength one after another of those who 
 were pressing most fiercely on the poor fellow ; she could see two 
 or three of these in succession flung backwards in the crowd ; 
 she could see that Heron had some shining thing in his hand 
 which she assumed to be a revolver ; and she put her hands to her 
 
ALL THE RIVALS AT ONCE. 227 
 
 ears with a woman's instinctive horror of the sound which she 
 expected to follow ; and, when no sound came, she wondered 
 why Heron did not use his weapon and defend the police. She 
 could see Mr. Money engaged now in furious remonstrance and 
 now in furious blows with some of the mob, whom he appeared 
 to drag, and push, and drive about, as if there were no such thing 
 in the world as the possibility of harm to himself, or of his getting 
 the worst of it. For a while the resolute energy of the attempt at 
 rescue made by Heron and Money appeared to carry all before 
 it ; but after a moment or two the mob saw how small was the 
 number of those who were trying to effect the diversion. As 
 Minola came to know afterwards, Heron and Money had only 
 heard in another part of the town that a riot was going on near 
 the hotel, and hurried on with half a dozen friends, arriving just at 
 a very critical moment. They came by the same way as the police 
 and Sheppard had come, and, falling on the mob unexpectedly, 
 made for a moment a very successful diversion. But they were 
 soon surrounded by the rallying crowd, and Minola saw her two 
 friends receive many savage blows, and she wondered in all her 
 wild alarm how they seemed to make so litrie of them, but went 
 on struggling, striking, knocking down, just as before. Above all 
 she wondered why Victor Heron did not use his revolver to 
 defend his friends and himself, not knowing, as Victor did, that the 
 weapon was good for nothing. At least, it was good for nothing 
 just then but inarticulate dumb show. He had not loaded it, never 
 thinking that there was the least chance of his having to use it ; 
 and, indeed, it was only by the merest chance that he happened 
 to have it in his pocket. Such as it was, however, it had done 
 him some service thus far ; for more than one sturdy rioter had 
 fallen back in sudden dismay, and given Victor a chance to knock 
 his heels from under him when he found the muzzle of the 
 revolver close to his forehead. This could not last long. The 
 mob began to understand both the numbers and the weapons of 
 their enemies. The police fought with redoubled pluck and 
 energy for a while, but the combatants were all too crowded to- 
 gether to allow coolness and discipline to tell, as they might have 
 done otherwise ; and the numbers were overwhelming against our 
 friends. Just as Minola saw Victor Heron struck with a stone on 
 the head, and saw the red blood come streaming, she heard some 
 one beside her in the balcony. 
 
 " Go back, Lucy," she cried ; " go back ! — this is no place for 
 you." 
 
 " Is it a place for you, Miss Grey ? " a melancholy voice asked. 
 
 Q2 
 
228 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " It is not Lucy ; it is I. You said I was a coward, Miss Grey ; 
 I'll show you that you have wronged me." 
 
 The poet, for all his excitement, was as grandly theatric as was 
 his wont. He looked calmly over the exciting scene, and tried to 
 keep his lips from quivering at its decidedly unpleasant aspect. 
 That fierce, savage, unromantic, and even vulgar struggle was in 
 truth a hideous whirlpool for a picturesque poet to plunge into. 
 Yet was Mr. Blanchet's mind made up. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Blanchet, they will be killed!" 
 
 "Who? — who?" the poet cried, peering wildly down into the 
 horrible mob-caldron below. 
 
 "Oh, don't you see?— Mr. Heron, Mr. Heron — and Lucy's 
 father ! Oh, merciful heaven, he is down — they will kill him ! " 
 
 " I'll save him," the poet wildly exclaimed ; " I'll save him, 
 Miss Grey, or perish with him!" He was armed with a poker, 
 which he flourished madly round his head. 
 
 Even at that moment Minola was startled to see Blanchet 
 preparing to scramble over the balcony, and fling himself that way 
 into the thick of the fight. 
 
 " Oh, don't, don't ! " she cried to him ; "you will be killed." 
 
 He smiled back a wild smile. 
 
 " At least you shall say I am no coward," he exclaimed ; and 
 in another moment he had scrambled over the balcony and dropped 
 himself, floundering, poker in hand, on the moving mass of heads 
 below. 
 
 At any other moment Minola might have thought of the prayer 
 in " Firmilian " for a poet to be sent down from above, and the 
 unexpected and literal manner in which the prayer is answered. 
 At any other moment, perhaps, she might have found it hard to 
 restrain her laughter at the manner in which Mr. Blanchet came 
 crashing down on the heads of some of the combatants, and the 
 consternation which his descent created among them. At his first 
 coming down he carried a dozen or so of combatants tumbling on 
 the ground along with him, and Minola in her Rebecca-post of 
 observation could see nothing but a confused mass of struggling 
 legs and arms. But Mr. Blanchet somehow scrambled to his feet 
 again, and he laid about him with his poker in such insane fashion, 
 and with such advantage of long arms, that his single and wholly 
 untutored prowess did really for the moment effect an unexpected 
 diversion in favour of those he came to rescue. In a moment 
 Minola saw Victor Heron on his feet again ; and she saw him 
 amid all the thick of the affray give Blanchet an encouraging and 
 grateful clap on the back ; and then she thought she saw Blanchet 
 down again ; and then confusion inextricable seemed to swallow 
 up all. 
 
 
■5; 
 
 
 
ALL THE RIVALS AT ONCE. 229 
 
 All this, it will be understood, occupied but a few minutes. 
 Suddenly the trampling of horses was heard, and a cry was raised 
 that the cavalry were coming. 
 
 "Oh, thank God! " Minola said to herself and to the night air; 
 " if it be not too late." 
 
 It was not the cavalry, however, but an interposition which at 
 the moment proved as effective. Minola saw some men on horses 
 gallop into the thick of the crowd, forcing their way as if human 
 beings were not liable to any inconvenient consequences from 
 having the hoofs of horses plunging among them. Wild and mad- 
 dened as it was, the mob had to pay some little attention to these 
 new-comers. One of them, who led the way, kept shouting in 
 strident and occasionally shrilly tones a command to all who heard 
 him to disperse and " stop the row." His voice and his presence 
 were recognised in another moment, and the nearest rioters set 
 up a tremendous cheer for him, which others caught up and 
 renewed again and again, until Minola might have thought that 
 the whole business in which they were engaged was to hurrah for 
 the new-comer. Men actually in hand-to-hand fight with some 
 policeman or other representative of the cause of order gave up 
 for the moment defence or offence, and let the antagonist hammer 
 away as he thought fit, while they cheered for their favourite. 
 Minola had recognised him already. There was no mistaking 
 the bald head, the bold blue eyes, the stooping shoulders, the 
 general air of reckless bravado and good-humour. She could see 
 his face and head plainly, for he carried his hat in his hand and 
 waved it gallantly at every cheer of the crowd. He forced a way 
 right up to the door of the hotel where the thick of the struggle 
 was, and in passing under the balcony he looked up and saw 
 Minola, and made her a courteous bow. There was some further 
 scuffling, clamour, and altercation ; but Minola could see that the 
 influence of the popular candidate was all-prevailing, and that the 
 battle was over. In a few seconds the crowd began to melt 
 away. The air was rent with shouts of civil strife no longer, but 
 with repeated cheers for the hero of the night. The police made 
 some futile efforts to retain a few prisoners ; but not much seemed 
 to come of that. Minola was rejoiced to hear the voice of Mr. 
 Money say, in its usual tones of blunt self-possession — 
 
 " Never mind, officers ; you know the names of some of the 
 fellows ; you can see to them to-morrow ; better look after your- 
 selves just now. Where's the poor fellow who was hurt ? " 
 
 In another moment or two Minola found herself out of the 
 balcony, and trying to make a way into the room which she had 
 quitted, and which seemed now a general resort. First she saw 
 
230 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Lucy throwing her arms round her father's neck. Then some 
 shifting figure intervened, and she saw no more of Lucy, but was 
 aware of Victor Heron and Mr. Sheppard exchanging friendly 
 words. The room was full of people. She could hear various 
 voices declaring that their owners were not in the least hurt ; but 
 she could see that Victor Heron had the mark of a large cut on 
 the forehead, and that some one was tying Money's arm in a sling. 
 
 " Oh, I'm all right ! " she heard Victor say; " nothing much 
 happened to me ; Money came off much worse. But that poor 
 policeman — I am greatly afraid he was badly hurt." 
 
 " Never saw such scoundrels," Money observed ; " by Jove, 
 Heron, I thought at one time that your grievance was about to 
 be settled for ever. It was all that confounded St. Paul's doings." 
 
 At this moment Minola saw the intrepid St. Paul himself enter 
 the room. She, standing with her back to the window, saw him 
 before anyone else did. 
 
 Mr. St. Paul pushed his way with his easy and indolent hardi- 
 hood. 
 
 " I have come to offer an apology to the ladies," he said, 
 while everyone turned round amazed at the sound of his voice, 
 and he stood meeting with cheery composure the gaze of all the 
 eyes, and all their various expressions. " I wish to offer an 
 apology to the ladies, who, I am sorry to hear, were alarmed by 
 the violence of some of my supporters — of course by no en- 
 couragement of mine, as every gentleman here will understand. 
 But I am very sorry to hear that Miss Money and Miss Grey were 
 alarmed by the little row, and I've come to offer them the assu- 
 rance of my regret." 
 
 Victor Heron broke from those around him, and went up to 
 St. Paul. 
 
 " Mr. St Paul, I hold you responsible for the whole of what 
 has happened to-night," he said. " You set your blackguards 
 on to disturb this town, and if any harm comes of it — if that 
 poor policeman who has been hurt should come to any grief — you 
 shall be accountable for it. I promise you that you shall." 
 
 " We are all rather confused to-night," St. Paul coolly replied, 
 " and we are in a humour for making rather sweeping assertions. 
 I am sorry you got hurt, Heron, on my honour ; but there's no 
 use in making a fuss about these things. I tell you what, my 
 good fellow, you owe it to me altogether that you have not had 
 your brains knocked out." 
 
 "Your gang of hired bravoes were capable of anything in 
 the way of crime," Heron said ; " but if they hadn't been twenty 
 to one we shouldn't have wanted the intervention of their employer. 
 Thank God, I put my mark on some of them ! " 
 
ALL THE RIVALS AT ONCE. 231 
 
 " Dare say you did — that's the way with all you peaceful fellows. 
 I'm glad I came in time, however ; and it's no use our losing our 
 tempers about the whole affair. It wasn't much of a row, after all." 
 
 " Let me tell you, Mr. St. Paul," Money said, coming to the 
 rescue, " that if you think you can carry things off in this way 
 you are confoundedly mistaken. You know as well as I do that 
 you will never be allowed to hold a seat got by such flagrant and 
 such — such infernal intimidation." 
 
 " You may rely upon it, Mr. St. Paul," Mr. Sheppard said, 
 likewise interfering in the dispute, " that neither Mr. Heron nor 
 I will allow the proceedings of this night to go without a full 
 judicial inquiry. Violence, sir, shall never be allowed to triumph 
 in the parliamentary elections of this ancient and honourable 
 borough." 
 
 " Bravo, Sheppard ; that's very well said, indeed," the incorrigible 
 St. Paul observed. " You have evidently been preparing for the 
 place of its representative. But wouldn't it be as well, gentlemen, 
 to wait until the close of the poll before we go into all this ? I have, 
 of course, all the confidence which a good cause and the support 
 of the people must give a man ; but in such a borough there 
 are unfortunately other influences at work, as our friend Sheppard 
 knows, and it is just possible that I may not be elected. For the 
 present I only came to offer to the ladies the expression of my 
 sincere regret that they should have been annoyed or alarmed in 
 any way. I don't see Miss Money present ; but I am happy 
 enough to see Miss Grey, and I hope she will allow me to offer 
 my apologies for what was, however, no fault of mine." 
 
 Minola had kept near her window all this time, and was in 
 hope of escaping without notice. But Mr. St. Paul coolly made 
 his way to her, pushing all intervening persons aside, as if they 
 hardly counted for anything in his progress. 
 
 " I hope you don't think all this absurd affair was my personal 
 doing," he said, when he was close to her. 
 
 " I hope it was not your doing," Minola replied emphatically ; 
 " I should think it disgraceful for anyone to have caused so much 
 disturbance and done so much harm." 
 
 " Hadn't a thing to do with it, I give you my word. But don't 
 you mind these fools — lucky for some of them that I came in 
 time." 
 
 " It was disgraceful," said Minola ; " a poor man was very 
 much hurt, I am told." 
 
 "It was not a very big row, after all," he observed calmly ; 
 " I have seen twenty bigger, about which there wasn't half the 
 talk. Anyhow, you'll find I have kept my word, Miss Grey 
 your man stands to win." 
 
232 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 He made her a polite bow, took in the company generally 
 in a friendly salute, and left the room with the same entirely self- 
 satisfied good-humour which he had brought in with him. 
 
 Minola felt that in a manner the eyes of the world were on 
 her. She went up to Mr. Money, passing Victor Heron on her 
 way. 
 
 " Where is Lucy, Mr. Money ? " she asked. 
 
 " Oh, we sent her out of the room ! I really thought I saw 
 you going with her. She got frightened when she saw that Heron 
 — and myself, I suppose, were a little hurt. She is very nervous, 
 and she seemed like fainting." 
 
 " I'll go to her," Minola said. 
 
 She was hastily leaving the room, when Victor Heron stopped 
 her. He seemed greatly annoyed at something. 
 
 " What was that fellow saying to you, Miss Grey ? I advised 
 you before not to let that man talk to you so much. You are too 
 young; you don't understand ; but I do wish you would not en- 
 courage him. He seems to go on as if he were a personal friend 
 of yours. Don't let him, Miss Grey — do have sense and take my 
 advice." 
 
 Minola thanked him with a grave and perplexing politeness, 
 and made haste to follow Lucy. While she was speaking to, 
 or rather listening to, Heron, the eyes of Mr. Sheppard had been 
 on them, even as the eyes of Heron had been on her while she 
 spoke to Mr. St. Paul. Sheppard saw that her manner to Heron 
 was cool and indifferent, and he was glad once more. 
 
 Victor Heron turned away disappointed. As Minola was 
 leaving the room, she heard him ask — 
 
 " Where's Blanchet ? Has anyone seen Blanchet ? I saw him 
 last in the thick of the fight — he came to my help in good time, 
 and I hope he isn't hurt. Look for Blanchet, somebody." 
 
 A pang went through Minola's heart. She thought that if any 
 harm had befallen the poet it might have been her bitter words 
 which drove him in the way of it. " And I was quite unjust to 
 him, and he is no coward," she said to herself remorsefully. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 V I C T O R — P ROPOSITI? 
 
 The election was over. All the principal persons with whom we 
 are concerned had come back to town. Keeton had nearly 
 
VICTOR— PROPOSITI? 233 
 
 relapsed, for the time at least, into its ordinary condition. The 
 riot, noisy and alarming as it was, had cost no life, not even that 
 of the poor policeman who seemed most in danger. No doubt 
 the seeds of a popular discontent were sown pretty broadly in the 
 place, which will bear thorny growth some future day ; but Keeton 
 just now seems only the sleepier for the reaction after its unwonted 
 excitement. The persons of this story who were concerned in 
 the election might be said to be in somewhat similar condition. 
 They seemed much the same as before ; but the days in Keeton 
 had sown some seeds for them, too, which will probably grow into 
 influence on all their lives. 
 
 Lady Limpenny paid a visit to Mrs. Money. She had not seen 
 her friends in Victoria Street since the election, and she was in great 
 curiosity to hear something about it, and about some rumours 
 indirectly connected with it, which had reached her ears. She 
 went early, in order that she might find Mrs. Money alone. 
 
 Mrs. Money might be described as alone, so far as visitors 
 were concerned. Only her younger daughter was with her. Lucy 
 was looking very pretty, but pale ; and she had a certain restlessness 
 of manner and quick brilliancy of eyes which Lady Limpenny 
 observed, although usually a woman rather imaginative than actually 
 observant. Lady Limpenny smiled and nodded to herself, as it 
 might seem ; after the fashion of one who congratulates herself 011 
 having judged correctly, and who says to her own soul, " Exactly ; 
 it is just as I thought it would be." But the smile and nod might 
 be taken as partly intended for the general company in this case. 
 Lady Limpenny appeared as if she were willing that Mrs. Money 
 and her daughter should be taken, in an unacknowledged and 
 modest way, into the confidence of her self-congratulations. 
 
 Mrs. Money went eagerly forward to welcome her old friend, 
 and was cordially glad to see her, as, indeed, she was usually glad 
 to see most persons. Lucy, as we know, did not greatly care 
 for Lady Limpenny. She had now to submit to a peculiarly tender 
 embrace, which she did with a particularly bad grace, looking all 
 the time away from Lady Limpenny, even while she submitted to 
 be kissed by her. Then she withdrew to a little sofa of her own, 
 and was heard to express a wish that Nola Grey would come 
 soon. On hearing this utterance Lady Limpenny looked round 
 at her, and smiled and nodded again more benignly than ever. 
 
 " And so our dear friend Heron is in Parliament," Lady Lim- 
 penny said, in her soft, thunderous voice. " He is actually an 
 M.P. ! I am so glad; and you have all had such delightful adven- 
 tures ! Your names in the papers ! I read it all with such envy. 
 Yes ; I always longed to be in an adventure and to have my name 
 
234 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 in the papers. I tried to get Sir James to listen to it, but lie 
 does not care for these things. You were all near being killed ! 
 And our friend, the handsome poet — now, do tell me again what 
 his name is — he was lost, and actually supposed to be killed, or 
 taken prisoner, or assaulted, or something of the kind. How 
 delightful ! I should so like to have been with you." 
 
 " Oh ! Mr. Blanchet was not much hurt," Lucy said in a 
 rather scornful tone. " He only got into the fight somehow ; I 
 don't know, I'm sure, what brought him there ; and then he went 
 away to London. I think something must have offended him." 
 
 Lucy had seen, and had not forgotten or forgiven, the poet's 
 conduct when Mr. Sheppard was brought to the hotel during the 
 riot, and she had not seen his subsequent dash into the strife, 
 and paid but little attention to what was told her about it. But 
 in any case poor Blanchet had long ceased to be a hero of hers. 
 There was a time when he was her idol, and when she tried to 
 believe in all manner of quaint artistic theories because they were 
 his ; and when, if he had expressed an aesthetic opinion that a 
 lady ought to wear a coalscuttle on her head, Lucy would have 
 fought hard to get her mother's permission to mount the article. 
 It is strange, as the once popular song used to say, how a woman 
 can think the man a bore, she thought a god before. At least, it 
 is strange, perhaps, that she should make the change so soon ; or, 
 if it be contended that even that is not strange, it will surely be 
 admitted that it is strange she could not contrive or attempt to 
 make the change a little less glaringly apparent. One might 
 have thought that this good little Lucy had already forgotten 
 that she ever looked to Mr. Blanchet with wonder and admiration. 
 
 " Mr. Heron says that Mr. Blanchet was in great danger, 
 Lucy, my dear," her mother interposed in remonstrance ; " and 
 Minola Grey speaks very highly of his conduct all the time." 
 
 " But why did he disappear in that abrupt sort of way? why 
 didn't he tell anyone where he was going ? " the pertinacious Lucy 
 kept on. " We were all alarmed about him, and all for nothing; 
 and we had quite enough to think about without that." 
 
 " But, my dearest darling Lucy, don't you look on a poet 
 as different from ordinary people ? I am sure I do. I should not 
 like to think of our dear friend — now, do tell me again what is his 
 name — I shouldn't like to think of his acting just as everyone else 
 would do. Oh, no ; I like a poet to be a poet. I am so pas- 
 sionately fond of poetry ; and I have had to give it all up of 
 late. I dare not read a poem now." 
 
 " For your soul's sake, Lady Limpenny ? " the irreverent Lucy 
 asked saucily. 
 
VICTOR— PROPOSITI? 235 
 
 " Darling, yes. For my soul's sake, as you say. I was for- 
 getting all my higher duties in life, and all that I owe, dearest, to 
 the future life, in my love for the poetry of that delightful writer — 
 oh, now what was his name ? — who wrote that lovely poem in the 
 winter that everybody was talking about. My dear, the doctrines 
 taught in that poem were something awful — I do assure you, awful. 
 No one could read them long and be assured of safety in the 
 higher sphere." 
 
 " I think I remember the book," Mrs. Money said ; " I think 
 yoj lent it to me, Laura ; but it did not strike me as containing 
 any doctrines of a dangerous kind. It did, indeed, protest in 
 powerful accents against the system under which this country is 
 rushing to her destruction." 
 
 " I dare not read it, dearest Theresa : I dare not, indeed ; 
 it would unhinge my mind. But I dare not read any poems now." 
 
 Lady Limpenny presently rose to go ; but she paused even in 
 the act of making her adieus, and, taking Lucy's hand in a manner 
 of the tenderest affection, she asked : 
 
 " But now, darling, what is this I hear about you? Is it true, 
 this very delightful piece of news — at least, delightful if it is true ? 
 Do tell me, dearest ; it can't be always kept a secret, you know." 
 
 Lucy tried to get her hand away ; the unconscious Lady 
 Limpenny retained it as if she were a privileged lover. Lucy 
 could only look away and try to keep as composed as possible. 
 
 "Really, I don't know what you mean, Lady Limpenny. I 
 don't know what the news is ; and so I don't know whether it is 
 delightful or not." 
 
 " You very very naughty, sly little thing ! So you won't tell 
 even such an old friend ? Well, your mamma won't be so naughty, 
 I am sure. I'll come in and talk to her to-morrow or next day, 
 when I am quite sure that you are not here. Oh, indeed, I will ! 
 I am sure now it is true ; and I offer you my congratulations." 
 
 Mrs. Money seemed as if she would try to interpose some 
 protest against Lady Limpenny's conclusions ; but there was no 
 possibility of stopping that lady, or of correcting any apprehen- 
 sions she might have formed. She gathered her skirts about her 
 and was gone, chattering all the time, before anyone could put 
 in a word of explanation, and firmly convinced that she knew all 
 the truth about everything, and that her way of exhibiting it must 
 have been delightful to everybody. 
 
 Her display of knowledge was certainly not pleasing to Lucy 
 Money in this instance. She seemed greatly annoyed, and, when 
 Lady Limpenny had gone, she left the room and hid herself away 
 somewhere. Mr. Money came home almost immediately, and his 
 
236 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 wife took the opportunity of expressing some of her fears to him 
 about Lady Limpenny's talk and Lucy's way of taking it. 
 
 " She's quite put out by it, Money dear, I do assure you. 
 I never saw her so much hurt by anything of the kind before." 
 
 " I wish that silly old Laura Limpenny didn't talk in that 
 way," Money said with more earnestness in his manner than the 
 talk of Lady Limpenny might have seemed to be worth. " It 
 annoys Lucy, of course ; and then, what she said here she will say 
 in half a dozen places before the day is over." 
 
 "But, Money dear, it can't always be kept a secret. These 
 things always do get talked about. I really don't see what harm 
 it does even if they were." 
 
 " No, perhaps not ; in an ordinary case, perhaps not. But 
 somehow I don't like it in this case. I wish nothing had been 
 said. Do you think Lucelet is quite happy, Theresa ? " 
 
 " Surely, dear, I should think so — oh, yes, she must be happy, 
 very happy. Of course it is a trial — all girls feel it so, especially 
 when they are brought up so much at home." 
 
 Mr. Money seemed unusually grave. He stood and beat time 
 on his chin with his fingers. 
 
 " I don't know," he said, " somehow ; but I think everything 
 is not quite right with the little girl. She is fond of him ? " he 
 asked, turning abruptly to his wife. 
 
 " Oh, yes, dear— she adores him." 
 
 " Yes ? You think so ? Well, I am sure I think so too ; I 
 was quite certain of it. Of course she is young, and girls often 
 don't know their own minds a bit — no, confound it, nor boys 
 either, for that matter. I think at one time she used to be fond 
 of that fellow Blanchet ; and now she does not care twopence 
 about him. I say, Theresa, if this should be the same sort of 
 thing?" 
 
 " But, my dear, it isn't ; you may be quite sure of that. I can 
 tell you that for certain. Why, only look at her eyes when he 
 is near! and Lucy has told me again and again that she never 
 thought about Mr. Blanchet in that sort of way." 
 
 " Yes, I have watched her, Theresa, as you say, and I have 
 looked at her eyes and all that ; and I did believe, certainly, 
 that it was quite a different thing this time. If I hadn't thought 
 it — my good heavens ! — should I have meddled or made in the 
 affair?" 
 
 Mr. Money walked uneasily up and down the room once or 
 twice. His wile looked at him anxiously, but she did not quite 
 follow his meaning or appreciate his alarms. She was indeed, at 
 the moment, engaged in thinking whether something could not 
 
VICTOR— PROPOSITI ? iyj 
 
 be done to make the life of poor Mr. Blanchet a little more 
 happy than it seemed at present to be. She was convinced in 
 her heart that Blanchet must be suffering keenly on account of 
 Lucy, and, as the helper of unhappy men, she burned with a wish 
 to do something for him. She had so completely made up her 
 mind that Lucy was having all her desire in life, and, having it, 
 must be satisfied, that all her anxiety on her daughter's behalf 
 seemed to have come to an end, and her cares properly reverted 
 to the outer world. 
 
 " Yes, I thought it was all right." Mr. Money suddenly came 
 to a stop in his walk. " I had not the least idea that it was not all 
 right ; but then one doesn't know — at least, I don't — whether it 
 isn't a peculiarity of girls that when you get for them what they 
 want, then, by Jove, they don't want it any more : and I tell you, 
 Theresa, I have been thinking of this a good deal lately — in the 
 last few days." 
 
 There are, perhaps, women who might have been disposed to 
 remark to Mr. Money that anyhow the affair was pretty well all 
 his own doing. There are women who possibly would have given 
 him no better comfort than the reminder that they had not advised 
 him to do the things he had done; and that, perhaps, if he had 
 sought the advice of his wife a little more, the result might have 
 been more satisfactory. Mrs. Money had no ideas of the kind. 
 Even if she had known more clearly than she did the meaning of 
 his alarm, it would never have occurred to her to doubt that he 
 had done the very best thing possible under any given circum- 
 stances. If things went wrong after that, it must be the fault of 
 the things ; it could not be the fault of Mr. Money. 
 
 The talk was interrupted for the present by the arrival of 
 visitors, for this was one of Mrs. Money's days of reception. 
 Presently Lucy herself returned. Mr. Money drew her aside, and 
 asked her one or two casual questions. Then he said suddenly, 
 and fixing his eyes on his daughter, without giving her any time 
 to think of herself or to conceal her feelings : 
 
 " Isn't Victor coming here to-day, Lucelet ? " 
 
 The eyes of the girl sparkled again as she answered, and his 
 eyes watched her answer : 
 
 " Oh, yes, papa dear ; I expect him every moment ; you don't 
 think he is not coming, do you ? " 
 
 The smile that sometimes made Mr. Money's rough face look 
 almost handsome came over it as he saw the expression in his 
 daughter's eyes. He took Lucy playfully by the chin. 
 
 " I should think he was coming indeed, Lucelet ; I rather 
 think you know more about his movements than I do. So Laura 
 Limpenny has been talking her nonsense ! " 
 
238 MISS MISANTHROPE, 
 
 am 
 
 Lucy coloured. 
 
 " Oh, yes, papa dear. I wish that dreadful woman did not come 
 here ; she talks of such things ; it is humiliating to hear oneself 
 talked about in that way." 
 
 " Oh, that's all, is it ? don't you mind her talk, Lucelet ; it can't 
 be helped, anyhow; and remember that if you were a princess 
 all the gossips of Europe would be talking about you." 
 
 Then he left his daughter and went to talk to some one else, 
 somewhat relieved in his mind for the moment. He watched 
 his Lucelet, however, all the time. 
 
 Presently he saw her eyes light up and her cheeks colour, and 
 then her eyes droop again ; and she looked wonderfully pretty, 
 he thought, — and so, indeed, might anyone else have thought as 
 well who happened to see her just then. If any one of us looking 
 on might have admired the expression on the pretty girl's crim- 
 soning face, what admiration must he have felt for whom that 
 brightening colour came and those eyes sparkled? — the king 
 for whom — as Lady Castlewood so prettily said — that red flag 
 was displayed ? For Mr. Money knew, before he had seen any 
 new-comer enter the room, that the visitor whose coming caused 
 all that brightness was the member for the borough of Keeton. 
 Victor Heron had entered the room, and was already talking 
 to Lucy. 
 
 Victor, then, had won everything for which he strove, and some- 
 thing too for which he had not striven. He had won a brilliant 
 and an unexpected victory. Never before in the memory of man 
 had the borough of Keeton been represented by a Liberal. 
 There was nothing else of any particular interest going on in 
 politics, and the attention of the country had really been turned 
 for some days very keenly on Keeton. The riot, the family 
 quarrel, the fact that Heron had to fight against family influences, 
 Tory influences, and the red republicans all at once, had made 
 his enterprise seem so dashing that, even if he had lost, he would 
 have got a certain repute by it. But, when it was found that he 
 had positively won, he became the hero of the hour with the 
 public, while with his own party he was a person to be made 
 the very most of, and applauded to the echo. No fear of his not 
 finding men of mark to take up his grievance now. 
 
 The adventurous St. Paul had kept his word. Nothing but his 
 intervention could possibly have carried the place for Victor, 'or 
 kept poor Sheppard out of Parliament. Coming just at the right 
 moment, St. Paul had caught the affections of the fierce democrats, 
 the proletairiate with the dash of atheist in it, and had drawn 
 the voters away from Sheppard. Many of them had determined 
 
VICTOR— PROPOSITI? 239 
 
 to give their votes rather for the man whom they called their out- 
 spoken enemy — the Tory, that is to say — than for the doubtful 
 friend, as every professing Liberal seemed to them to be who 
 could not go all the way with the social revolution and them. 
 St. Paul captivated enough of them to leave Sheppard solely to the 
 support of the thorough Tories, who had no grievance against the 
 ducal family; and the result was that Victor Heron won the election, 
 or had it thus won for him without his knowledge or consent. Not 
 the faintest suspicion of " a put-up thing " existed in any mind. 
 It was perfectly well known in Keeton and elsewhere that Victor 
 Heron had positively refused to have anything to do with St. Paul, 
 and that they had all but quarrelled ; and, indeed, the general 
 opinion was that St. Paul had undertaken his candidature for the 
 sake of spoiling Victor's chance. He fancied, people thought, 
 that the extreme "rads" or "reds" might give their votes to 
 Victor for lack of any stronger Liberal, and he therefore cut in 
 between merely for the sake of destroying the game of the man 
 who would not accept his assistance. A great many people were 
 amused at his folly and his odd miscalculation; and even Money 
 wondered how he could have been so badly advised, and how 
 be could have failed to see that in what he did he was playing 
 Victor's game and not spoiling it. 
 
 Victor Heron, then, has won, and is on the high road to be a 
 political and a social success, and to have his grievance set right 
 now, if he cares about it or has time to think about it any more. 
 It is said that he is to be married to Mr. Money's pretty daughter, 
 who will have a great fortune, people are certain ; to say nothing 
 of the fact that Money has no son, and that at his death most of 
 his property will probably go to his rising son-in-law. Truly does 
 young Heron seem to many persons a man who has dropped from 
 the clouds to fall into fortune. A disappointed politician of sixty 
 who started with splendid self-conceit, good abilities, and very 
 fair chances, and with all has come to nothing, draws the moral of 
 his personal failure from the story he hears of Victor Heron's suc- 
 cess. " You see, he can do what I never could do," he says ; " he 
 can entertain the party. I defy any man to make his way in 
 political life in a country like this if he has not the means to 
 entertain his party, and this fellow will be able to do that with the 
 girl's fortune and what Money must leave him some time." 
 
 It is true, then, what the people say — what Lady Limpenny 
 has been so broadly hinting at? It was, then, as Minola Grey sup- 
 posed? See, she herself has just come in, and is talking with 
 Mr. Money now. She seems full of spirits ; at least, she is talking 
 in a very animated way. A lady who is present has already 
 
240 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 remarked, in a low tone, to another lady, that she thinks Miss Grey 
 talks too much, and is too sarcastic for a young person. Was it 
 as Minola supposed, and did the influence of the moonlight and 
 the walk home that night in the park at Keeton prove too much 
 for the inflammable heart of Victor Heron? No ; that night had 
 passed over, and although Heron had felt the influence of the 
 place, the hour, and the circumstances, he had not been able to 
 understand his own feelings clearly enough to give them expression 
 in words or in acts. It was when he came in fresh from the 
 excitement of the Keeton riot, and when he saw that Lucy, who 
 with all her love for her father had borne up gallantly against 
 the sight of his hurts, became faint the moment she caught a 
 glimpse of Heron's wounded face, and had to be taken from the 
 room — it was then that the truth was borne in upon Heron for the 
 first time, and he was made aware that Lucy Money loved him. 
 He was almost overwhelmed by the discovery. This was some- 
 thing of which he had never thought. It was all true what he had 
 said to Minola Grey that long-past day in Regent's Park — he had 
 really had a sort of goddess theory about women. He had lived 
 so .much out of the world of fashion, and of what we call life, 
 that he had no chance of having his ideal destroyed. If the few 
 Englishwomen whom he met in a far colony — the wives and 
 daughters of elderly, experienced officials, and such like — were not 
 all that his fancy painted womanhood, he had always the con- 
 viction to fall back upon that these were not fair illustrations of 
 the maids or the matrons of merry England at home. He had 
 always thought of a woman as a being whom a man courted and 
 served, and at last, by immense exercise of devotion and merit of 
 all kinds, persuaded to listen while he told her of his deep and 
 reverent love. It had not occurred to him to think that some- 
 times, even among the maids of merry England, the woman makes 
 the love, and the man only puts up with it. When it flashed upon 
 his mind that Lucy Money loved him, he was like one to whom 
 some wholly new and unexpected conditions of life have suddenly 
 revealed themselves. He felt, in a strange sort of way, stricken 
 humble by the thought that so sweet and good a girl could love 
 him, and wish to trust her life into his hands. Is it any wonder if, 
 in the flush of his shame and his gratitude, he told himself that 
 he was in love with her ? 
 
241 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 " LUCKLESS LOVE'S INTERPRETER." 
 
 The event in which so much success had fallen to the share 
 of Victor Heron had not, on the whole, turned out badly for his 
 rival, Mr. Sheppard. The latter had lost the election, it is true, 
 but he had made a certain repute for himself as a Conservative 
 candidate. He was now before the eyes of his party and the 
 country as one who had fought a good fight, who had made sacri- 
 fices for his cause, and who therefore ought to be considered when 
 another vacancy brought an opportunity of choosing and supporting 
 a candidate. Mr. Sheppard's name was in the political playbill, 
 and that was something. After the defeat of Novara, Count 
 Cavour, then only a rising politician, remarked that Piedmont had 
 gained enough to compensate for all her losses in having got the 
 right to hoist the national flag. Mr. Sheppard had got by his 
 defeat the right to hoist the flag of his party, to be one of 
 its bearers, and that was something. He was now looked upon 
 everywhere as a man sure to be seen in Parliament before long. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard made arrangements for the carrying on of his 
 business by other hands than his, and he came to live in London. 
 He took handsome lodgings in a western street, not far from where 
 Victor Heron lived. He was elected a member of a new Conser- 
 vative club, and apparently he went about the task of getting 
 into society, at least into the political dinner-parties and crowded 
 drawing-rooms of society. In that which he had set out to himself 
 as the great object of his life he was not, as we have seen, by any 
 means despondent. He saw that he had greatly risen in the good 
 opinion of Minola Grey. She had never been so kind and 
 respectful to him as during the contest at Keeton. Always before 
 she had treated him with contempt, which she took no trouble to 
 hide; then, for the first time, she had shown some respect and 
 even regard for him. He settled himself in London, a hopeful 
 and almost a confident man as regarded alike his ambition and 
 his love. He could afford to wait, he said to himself. He culti- 
 vated as much as possible the acquaintanceship of Mr. Money and 
 of Victor Heron, whom, it is needless to say, he no longer regarded 
 with any feelings of jealousy. Mr. Money and every one else 
 admitted that nothing could be more manly and creditable than 
 Sheppard's manner of taking his defeat. Minola seldom heard 
 him spoken of but with respect. 
 
 The women are not many on whom the public opinion of those 
 
 R 
 
242 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 immediately around them has no influence in determining their 
 estimate of a man. Minola began to see that there were qualities 
 in her old lover for which she had not given him credit. This, 
 indeed, she had seen for herself during the contest at Keeton. He 
 had, at all events, a certain manly dignity, even if he was slow and 
 formal. She may, too, have been impressed in certain moods with 
 the strength and patience of his feelings for her. In some melan- 
 choly moments she felt a sympathy for him, and found a sort of 
 sad amusement in admitting to herself that she and her old lover 
 were alike in one part of their destiny, at all events. But she was 
 sincerely glad to hear that Sheppard was beginning to go out a 
 good deal, and she had a strong hope and conviction that in society 
 he must very soon get over his old feelings for her. All that was 
 natural enough, she thought, when they both lived in the country, 
 and he knew very few women; but here in London he must meet 
 with many girls a thousand times more attractive— so she was 
 honestly convinced — than she could possibly appear even to the 
 most prejudiced eye, and he would soon get over the weakness 
 that exalted a country girl into a heroine and a goddess. He 
 would meet with women who knew the world — the .world of 
 politics and of society — who could assist a man in his public 
 career and in his natural ambition, and some one of whom would 
 doubtless be found to marry him. The thought gave Minola sin- 
 cere gratification. 
 
 Some of this is told a little in anticipation ; for we are, as yet, 
 in the first few weeks that followed the Keeton election. There 
 is one, nay, there are two, of the personages most prominent to 
 our eyes in that contest, of whom we have some account to render 
 before the story resumes its regular march. 
 
 Poor Herbert Blanchet found himself a man sadly changed in 
 his own estimate when the subsidence of the riot in the Keeton 
 streets left him stranded high and dry, and still alive. Not only 
 was he alive, but he was absolutely uninjured. The dignity of the 
 slightest wound was not on him to make him interesting. All that 
 commotion that had seemed to him so terrible that his very soul 
 shrank from it, turned out to be, so far as he was concerned, more 
 innocent and harmless than a schoolboy game of wrestling. He 
 had been ridiculous when shrinking from the riot, and he now felt 
 that he must have been ridiculous when by sheer force he mastered 
 his quivering nerves and threw himself literally into it. In the very 
 thick of the battle, and when he came to Heron's aid, he thought 
 he saw an inclination to good-humoured laughter on Heron's face 
 at the sight of him and his weapon. When the riot was over, 
 and the crowd began to disperse, and the Liberal leaders went 
 
'■LUCKLESS LOVE'S INTERPRETER." 243 
 
 into the hotel, nobody took any notice of him. He seemed to be 
 of no account in the eyes of any one. Men whose companion he 
 had been during his share of the campaign in Keeton passed him 
 rapidly by and did not seem to recognise him ; they were all think- 
 ing of other things and other persons, clearly. Even Heron, to 
 whose help he had come, did not think it worth his while appa- 
 rently to make any inquiry about him. 
 
 We know, of course, that Heron did find time and thought to 
 ask about the poet ; but the poet did not know this. The thought, 
 however, which most disturbed Blanchet's mind was not that Heron 
 had been ungrateful to him, but that clearly, in the mind of men 
 like Heron, the whole affair was a matter of no moment — an 
 ordinary event at an election, involving an amount of danger such 
 as men encounter in their huntings and their other pastimes of 
 which Elanchet knew little, and not enough to be seriously thought 
 of a moment after it was past. It was, then, for danger such as 
 this that the poet had twice made himself ridiculous in the eyes of 
 Minola Grey. It was for danger like this that he had exposed 
 himself to hear from her the bitterest words that man can hear 
 from woman. In truth, it is not certain that poor Blanchet was 
 really a coward. He had been put suddenly in front of a sort 
 of trial entirely new to him, and his physical nerves had shrunk 
 from it at first. He had not a virile nature ; he had none of 
 the strong animal spirits which carry so many men through all 
 manner of danger without giving them time to think about it. He 
 had not much, if we may say so, of the English nature in him; of 
 that cool, strong, unimaginative nature which takes all tasks set 
 to it very much as a matter of course, and goes at them accord- 
 ingly to win or lose. When Nature was making Herbert 
 Blanchet, there was for some reason or other a little too much of 
 the feminine material put into his composition. We often see 
 these slight mistakes on the part of Nature. We meet with a 
 tall and bearded creature in whom a superabundance of the feminine 
 is always showing itself; we find some pretty and delicate being 
 in whom the judgment, the inclinations, the way of looking at 
 things, are all unmistakably masculine. Blanchet had not lived 
 a manly life ; he had, indeed, not lived a life that would be whole- 
 some for man or woman. It was not, be it understood, harmful 
 or immoral, as lives are accounted on our somewhat dwarfed 
 and forma] principles of social good or harm ; but it was a life 
 without bracing strength of any kind. It was a life of sickly 
 affectations and debauching conceits. It made sham as good as 
 effort. In that sort of life it sufficed to think yourself a great 
 person, and to say to your friends that you were so, and there 
 
244 MJSS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 ■St. 
 
 was no occasion for the long, healthy, noble labour that, with 
 whatever genius, is needed to develop success. It was a life of 
 ghastly groping after originality; a life in which one became 
 fantastic," not out of superabundant fancy, but of set purpose. 
 The moment an entirely new situation was presented to Blanchet, 
 and he was called upon to act under circumstances not previously 
 thought out and reduced to theatric form, all the shams were sud- 
 denly blown away, and the weakly, naked nature was left shivering 
 and shuddering in the rough, unaccustomed air of reality. 
 
 Little Mary Blanchet was sitting alone the day after the riot 
 at Keeton. It was drawing on towards evening, and she had her 
 books of manuscript out on the table and was at work at her poems. 
 She was very particular about the copying of her poems ; she 
 began a long poem in a bound volume with ruled leaves, and if, 
 in copying, she made any mistake, even of a word, she put that 
 volume aside and began another. Therefore the one poem at 
 which she was now engaged had already produced several of these 
 manuscript books, without itself approaching much nearer to com- 
 pletion. She was seated before the work with her pen in her 
 mouth and her eyes fixed on the ceiling, and was in a little doubt 
 between a rhyme which was of excellent sound but doubtful 
 grammar, and one of which the grammar was all right but the 
 sound was open to challenge. Her own sympathies went 
 altogether with the good rhyme, and she was strongly inclined 
 to run the risk of being a little superior for once to those narrow 
 grammatical rules which offend so many poetesses. While thus, 
 like the Achilles of Pope's Homer. " in anguish of suspense 
 delayed," she was told that her brother wished to see her. 
 
 Mary sprang up in excitement, let her ink-steeped pen fall on 
 her book, thus reducing a new volume to worthlessness, and, 
 scarcely stopping even for a plaintive murmur, ran out and brought 
 Herbert Blanchet into the room. She was convinced that he must 
 have some important intelligence. Could it be that he had pro- 
 posed for Minola, been accepted, and had come back to London 
 in all speed to arrange for the wedding? His face, however, did 
 not look like that ; it was haggard and miserable, and the poet 
 had evidently not slept the past night. Mary felt her heart sink 
 within her as she looked at him. 
 
 Blanchet sat down and passed his hands wildly through his 
 unkempt hair — hair that, however, looked so beautiful, Mary 
 thought. 
 
 " Well, my sister," he said, with a gloomy effort at being light 
 and careless of speech, " I have come back, you see." 
 
 "What has happened, Herbert dear?" the affrighted old maid 
 asked; and she trembled all over. 
 
"LUCKLESS LOVES INTERPRETER." 245 
 
 " Nothing particular, Mary; only that your brother has made 
 a fool of himself." 
 
 Then he smiled in a dismal way, with ghastly lips and livid 
 face ; and then he ■ put his hands to his forehead, and burst into 
 tears. 
 
 Never was a woman more frightened than poor Mary. She had 
 never seen a man in tears before ; she remembered having read 
 and shudderingly admired a line in a poem of Mrs. Hemans's, in 
 which she, Mary Blanchet, and all the world in general were 
 advised not to talk of grief until they had seen the tears of bearded 
 men. Poor Mary always thought that the tears of bearded men 
 must be something very dreadful to see; but she never expected 
 to see them, for she did not think it possible that Englishmen, 
 the only race of men she knew, could shed tears under any pro- 
 vocation. Now she was compelled to look on the tears of a bearded 
 man whom she dearly loved ; and she found that 'Mrs. Hemans's 
 suggestions fell far short of the dreadful reality. She tried all she 
 could to comfort her broken-hearted brother; but comfort is par- 
 ticularly unavailing when one does not even know the source of 
 the trouble. It was some time before poor Blanchet could give 
 his sister any coherent account of his distress. When the story 
 was told, however, it did not seem so hopeless to Mary as she 
 had expected. He had not been refused by Minola; he had not 
 even proposed to her. She did not attach much importance to 
 the fact that Minola had supposed him — wrongfully, of course — 
 to be a coward. He could easily prove, if indeed he had not 
 done it already, that he was as brave as she, Mary, knew her 
 brother must be. It was wrong of Minola to judge so quickly 
 and so harshly, and very unlike Minola ; but, after all, what did it 
 prove but the deep interest which she took in Herbert? She was 
 disappointed when she thought he was not all that she had ex- 
 pected. What did that prove but that she had expected great 
 things ? Well, it was not by any means too late to prove that her 
 first expectations were true estimates of Mary's brother. 
 
 It is a truth that Herbert Blanchet gradually became encou- 
 raged, and almost restored, if not to his good opinion of himself, 
 yet to his hopes. It was wonderful what a person of importance, 
 a wise counsellor, a trusty friend, his sister grew to be in his eyes 
 all at once. How long is it since he thought her an absurd little 
 old maid in whom no person of artistic soul could possibly feel any 
 interest? How long is it since he fully believed that Minola Grey 
 was kind to her partly out of pity, and partly because it looked 
 picturesque and charming for a handsome young woman to be the 
 patroness and friend of an unattractive elderly woman ? How 
 
246 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 long is it since he was ashamed of the relationship, and would 
 gladly have given Minola to understand that he considered his 
 sister only a poor little, old-fashioned person, whose pretences at 
 poetry and art had his entire disapproval ? And now he wept 
 upon her faithful bosom, and drew comfort from her flattering 
 but very sincere assurances ; and poured out his feelings over 
 and over again ; and asked her to tell him over and over again 
 this, that, and the other thing that Minola had said ; and found 
 comfort in her talk ; and would rather have been in her com- 
 pany that evening than in the centre of the beloved school, or in 
 the drawing-room of a lady of rank. If poor little Mary could 
 have thought of such a thing as being revenged upon her brother 
 for all his long neglect, his selfish desertion of her, she might have 
 found herself well avenged that night when he clung to her, and 
 hung upon her words, and was only restored to think life worth 
 having by her flatteries and her promises that she would do all for 
 him, and had good hope to make everything come right even yet. 
 
 So far as Mary was concerned, she had hardly ever been 
 so happy. It was enough to make her happy at any time to know 
 that she was of importance to her poet-brother. But she had also 
 now from him the confession of his passionate love for her friend. 
 It had always smote a little on Mary's conscience that, in helping 
 her brother in his scheme about Minola, she was not quite certain 
 whether, after all, the poet really loved Minola as Mary thought 
 Minola deserved to be loved. Now she was satisfied on this point. 
 Herbert had poured out his whole heart to her, and had showed 
 her that his love for Minola was deep, passionate, eternal. It did 
 not occur to Mary to suspect that there could be a woman on earth, 
 even Minola, who was capable of rejecting the love of a man 
 like Herbert Blanchet. That was Mary Blanchet's happiest night 
 thus far in London ; her happiest night thus far in life. 
 
 In his misery Blanchet had told the truth. He was really in 
 love with Minola. He had gone in for money and a beautiful 
 wife, and he had lost himself hopelessly in the game. His self- 
 conceit had readily made him believe that the handsome, simple 
 country girl who thought so much of his sister must fall in love 
 with him. It was only by degrees it dawned upon him that there 
 was a ciear strength in Minola's character such as he had thought 
 no women ever had. He began to see that she was friendly to him, 
 but otherwise unconcerned ; and that he was fairly in love with her. 
 He began to be ashamed of the pitiful hopes he had formed about 
 her money ; he began to be ashamed of a good deal of his cha- 
 racter and career. The genuine extravagance of the delight which 
 he felt when she enabled him to put his poems before the world 
 
"LUCKLESS LOVE'S INTERPRETER. 9 247 
 
 in such splendid dress, had almost as strange an effect on him as 
 the gift of the bishop's candlesticks on poor Jean Valjean. It 
 shook all his previous theories of life and its philosophy, to find 
 that there was so much of simple generosity in the world; 
 especially to find it in the heart of a girl over whom his charms 
 and his affectations seemed to have no manner of influence. He 
 found that he had his world to reconstruct. He went home and 
 passed some wretched days. He looked back on his life, its 
 theories, its affectations, its pitiful little vanities, and he won- 
 dered how he could ever have thought to make genuine poetry out 
 of such shams of emotion and simulacra of beauty. It would 
 require fairy power indeed to spin such rubbish of straws into gold. 
 _ Still, he had some hopes from Mary and her influence over 
 Minola. It had come to that ; his sister now was his chief resource 
 and his star of hope. The artful Mary was not long in bringing 
 her plans to maturity and to proof. 
 
 " Minola, dear," she said one evening after Miss Grey had 
 settled down in London again, " do you really never think of 
 getting married ? " 
 
 " Never, Mary ; why should I, if I don't like?" 
 
 " Well, you can't live always alone in this kind of way." 
 
 " But I am not living alone in any kind of way." 
 
 " Not now ; not exactly now. But I may not live, you know; 
 I don't feel at all like myself lately; and I shudder at the idea of 
 your being left alone. I am so much older than you, Minola." 
 
 " But, Mary, my dear little poetess, if you think marriage such 
 a good thing, why didn't you marry ? " 
 
 Mary sighed, and cast at her leader a look of gentle, melan- 
 choly reproach. 
 
 " Ah ! there were reasons for my not marrying which happily 
 don't exist for you. And then my life would be a wretched one. 
 Minola, but for ycu. Where are you to get a Minola, dear, when 
 you come to be as old as I am now ? " 
 
 The prospect of growing old never frightens the young. It 
 is their conviction that, at worst, they will die before that comes 
 about. It was not, therefore, the thought of becoming like Mary 
 Blanchet, that made Minola seem melancholy for the moment. 
 It was the thought of the weariness that life must have for her 
 m any case, young or not. She remained thinking for a second or 
 two, until she became conscious that Mary was waiting for her to 
 say something. Then she tried to get rid of the subject. 
 
 "Well, Mary, at all events I need not trouble myself about 
 marriage just at this moment ; I don't want to be like the girl in 
 the old song, who refused the men before they asked her. No one 
 has been asking me lately." 
 
248 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I know some one," Mary broke out, " who would ask you if 
 he dared. I know some one who loves you — who adores you." 
 
 Minola looked round in amazement. It did not occur to her 
 at the moment to think of what or whom poor Mary meant. 
 
 Mary rose from her chair and ran to Minola, and threw herself 
 on the ground near her in supplication, with her eyes full of tears. 
 
 " It's my brother, Minola ; it's my brother ! He adores you. 
 He would die for you. He will die for you if you won't listen to 
 him. Oh, do listen to him, darling, and make us all happy ! " 
 
 Minola rose from her chair in such anger as she had seldom 
 known before. She was not even particularly careful how she 
 extricated herself from Mary's clinging grasp. 
 
 " Are you speaking seriously, Mary?" she asked, in a low tone, 
 and with determined self-restraint. 
 
 " Oh, Minola darling, it's only too serious ! He was here the 
 other day. He is wretched, he is miserable, because he thinks 
 you were angry with him. I thought he would die — I think he 
 will die. He didn't want to tell any one ; but a sister's eyes can't 
 be deceived. And it's no use, and he so loves you." 
 
 Minola could have found it in her heart to curse Love and all 
 his works. This distracting revelation was too much for her. 
 It was utterly unexpected. She had never for a moment thought 
 of this. Herbert Blanchet had always seemed to her a person to 
 help and pity, and sometimes to be angry with and despise. Even 
 if she had been a vain girl, it is not likely that the announcement 
 of his love would have gratified her vanity. 
 
 " Did he send you to tell me this, Mary?" 
 
 " No, dear," Mary said humbly, losing heart and hope with 
 every moment, as she looked into Minola's face, which was pale, 
 and cold, and almost hard in its expression. " No, dear ; but I 
 thought it would be better, perhaps, if I were just to speak to you 
 a little about it first, just to know how you felt, and then I 
 might perhaps encourage him or not, you know; and I thought 
 that might not be so unpleasant, perhaps, Minola." 
 
 " You are right, Mary ; it is much less unpleasant. But I think 
 I need not give you any further answer, need I?" 
 
 Minola's manner was strangely cold and hard. She could not 
 help feeling as if there were something like treachery in this secret 
 arrangement of brother and sister to try to persuade her into a 
 marriage which she would otherwise never have thought of. Both 
 brother and sister seemed for the moment mean in her eyes ; and 
 Minola hated meanness. 
 
 Mary looked wistfully into her leader's cold, stern face. It must 
 be said for Minola that the coldness and sternness came from 
 
"WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 249 
 
 disappointment rather than from anger. It seemed to her that 
 her closest friend had betrayed her. 
 
 " Is there no hope for h'im?" Mary asked, faintly. 
 
 " I wish you would not talk in that foolish way," Minola said 
 coldly. " It is not worthy of you. It ought to be no hope to any 
 man that a girl who does not love him or think about him in any 
 such way should marry him. And if a man is so silly, his sister 
 ought to have better wishes for him. I would not degrade my 
 brother— if I could say I had one and were fond of him— by 
 speaking of him in such a way. I hope your brother has more 
 sense, Mary, and more spirit, than you seem to think." 
 
 " He so loves you, Minola ; he does indeed," Mary feebly 
 pleaded. 
 
 " If he really loves me— and I hate to use the word, and I 
 hate to hear it— I am sorry for him, Mary ; and I am ashamed of 
 him, and I feel a contempt for him, and that's all. I hate to think 
 9s men grovelling in that way, or of women either; but I do 
 think that if women are such idiots, they, generally at least, have 
 the spirit to hide their folly and not to degrade themselves." 
 
 " But, Minola, a man must speak some time, you know, or how 
 can he tell?" Mary argued, plucking up a little spirit on behalf of 
 her misprized brother. 
 
 " Your brother might have known perfectly well. He must 
 have known. What word did I ever say to him that could make 
 him think I cared for him ? Do you think, if a girl cares for a man, 
 and wants him to know it, she doesn't let him see it ? I believe," 
 Minola added, in her bitterness, and with a meaning known only 
 to herself, " women have trouble enough to hide their feelings 
 even when they don't want them to be known." 
 
 With this word she left the room abruptly, and would hear 
 no more. 
 
 So ended poor Mary Blanchet's first attempt to plead the 
 love-cause of her brother. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 "WAS EVER WOMAN IX THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 
 
 The days were not pleasant for Minola or Mary which followed 
 this disclosure. The two friends for a time did not seem as if 
 they were the same persons ; there was a cold constraint between 
 them. Minola soon got over her anger to poor Mary, and was 
 
250 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 only angry with herself for having spoken harshly to the unhappy 
 old maid ; but she could not revive the confidence that had existed 
 between them before. She felt that between them now was some- 
 thing that killed confidence. She tried to speak to her companion 
 in tones and words if possible more kindly and friendly than ever ; 
 but the genial heart of friendship which makes mere words into 
 sweet realities was hardly there any more. 
 
 Mary Blanchet was not very good at disguising her feelings. 
 Even from Minola, whom she loved, and of whom she stood in 
 some awe, she made little effort to conceal the fact that she felt 
 herself a sufferer. The curse in the dead man's eye, which told 
 so heavily on the Ancient Mariner, was far more bitter, doubtless, 
 than the silent reproach in Mary's eye ; but Minola was much 
 oppressed by the latter. She felt as if she had been doing some 
 wrong to Mary and to the cause of friendship and common sisterly 
 womanhood; and, like all generous natures, she was disposed, 
 when the heat of anger and surprise was over, to throw all the 
 blame on herself, or at least to be troubled with the fear that she 
 mus,t have been to blame. She began to long for a full recon- 
 ciliation with Mary. She reproached herself with having brought 
 the poetess away from her home and her friends at Keeton; as if 
 poor Mary had any home there, or any friends there or elsewhere, 
 except Minola herself. 
 
 " I am going to see my brother," Mary Blanchet said one 
 evening, not without a gentle reproach in her voice. 
 
 "Yes, Mary? I am glad. You will give him my regards — 
 my very kind regards — will you not?" 
 
 " Oh, yes ; certainly, if you wish it." This was followed by 
 a little sigh, as if Mary would have said, " I don't think there is 
 much comfort in that, if that is all." 
 
 Minola looked up and saw the melancholy little face. She 
 was greatly touched. She thought of their long friendship, going 
 back to the days when she was a little child, and regarded Mary 
 as another Elizabeth Barrett. She remembered her own brother 
 and her love for him, and her heart was pierced by the expression 
 in Mary's face. She went to the poetess and put her arms round 
 her neck, and the poor poetess fairly gave way and was drowned 
 in tears. 
 
 " It's so unhappy ; it's all so unhappy," sobbed Mary. " I never 
 thought it would come to this. I can't bear to think of him so, 
 and that he should be so wretched ; I can't, indeed." 
 
 Minola waited for a while to let this grief have way ; and, 
 indeed, it must be owned that her own tears were hard enough 
 to restrain. Then, when the passion of the poetess had a little 
 
"WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 251 
 
 abated, and Minola thought she could listen to reason, she began 
 to reason gently, very gently. 
 
 " I know you blame me for this, Mary, my dear old friend, 
 even when you try not to show it. But tell me, Mary, where am 
 I to blame ? You know I don't want to marry, and you know 
 I ought not to marry any one if I don't — if I don't love him, dear. 
 I do not love your brother in that way; and it would be doing 
 him a great wrong if I were to marry him merely because I was 
 fond of you, you foolish, kind old Mary. He would only feel 
 offended by such an idea ; and quite right. I almost wish I could 
 marry him, dear, for your sake, and for the sake of all the old 
 times and the pleasant days we have had together, and the even- 
 ings, and the confidences — all the dear old times ! But you would 
 not ask me to do that, Mary? you would not let me do it, if I were 
 inclined?" 
 
 Mary sobbed a doubtful assent to this proposition. It is to 
 be feared she felt in her own heart that she would be glad if her 
 friend would marry her brother on any account. 
 
 " You don't know what it is to me," Mary murmured out, " to 
 see him so unhappy." 
 
 " But, my dear, that won't last always ; he will get over that. 
 I am not so foolish, Mary dear, as to believe that there is anything 
 in me which your brother will not find in twenty other girls." 
 
 " But that's because you don't believe he has any strong feelings 
 at all," Mary said, reproachfully. " You do him wrong, Minola. 
 You don't mean it, I know ; but you do him wrong. He has strong 
 feelings, indeed he has. Don't you think / know?" 
 
 Minola might, perhaps, with truth have said that she had 
 no profound reliance on Mary's power of reading character even 
 in the case of her brother; but she did not touch that point. 
 
 " I am sure he has strong feelings, Mary; I am sure of it now. 
 I didn't think so once, perhaps — you are quite right in that — but 
 I am sure now that I was mistaken. I have a great regard for 
 your brother ; much too great a regard," she added, with a certain 
 bitterness in her tone, " to believe he could waste much of his life 
 in idle regret because a girl like me did not marry him." 
 
 " It's all very well for you, Minola," Mary said, raising her head 
 and throwing something like downright anger into her voice ; " it's 
 all very well for you, who don't have any of these feelings. You 
 don't care for any one — in that way, I mean. You don't care for 
 any man. Other people can't have such strong feelings." 
 
 Minola broke down. Why she did so, only the benign powers 
 that understand human and especially womanly weaknesses can 
 tell ; certainly Minola never could explain. She had gone through 
 
252 MISS MISANTHROPE 
 
 ordeals, one might have thought, far worse than this, and kept a 
 serene face and her secret safe. But there was something in this 
 unjust reproach coming from the poor old friend whom she had 
 known so long, and for whom she had persistently done so much, 
 that quite overcame her. The words found out the very heart of 
 her womanhood and her weakness ; the place where her emotions 
 had no steel plates of caution ready put on to protect them. Half 
 in tears, half in hysterical laughter, she broke away from Mary. 
 
 " Oh, you unjust, silly, foolish old Mary ! It's not true a 
 word that you are saying. I am as great a fool as he, and as you, 
 and as all the rest, I suppose ! Don't I know what such feelings 
 are ? Oh, how I wish I didn't ! " 
 
 Mary looked up in utter amazement. 
 
 "Why, Minola darling, it can't be " 
 
 " But I tell you it can be and it is, Mary — and now do let 
 me alone for the future. Oh, yes, I am in love — up to the roots of 
 my hair, dear, if you like the words — I can't think of any other. 
 There, I have made a fool of myself and humbled myself enough 
 for one day, I think ! Now go and see your brother, like a good, 
 dear creature, and leave me to myself for a little. Don't ask me 
 to tell you any more ; if I ever do tell you any more, it shan't be 
 now. I hate and despise myself for all this ; but it's true, Mary, 
 as true as death, or any other certain thing you like." 
 
 Then Minola turned away, and resolutely sat down to the piano 
 and began to play. Mary knew that there was nothing more to be 
 got out of her just then ; and, indeed, she was too much over- 
 whelmed by what she had heard to have any clear purpose of 
 extorting more. She made her preparations to go out in silence ; 
 but the very manner in which she tied her bonnet-strings gave 
 expression, somehow, to a sound of wonder. She went out with 
 no other good-bye to Minola than was conveyed by a gentle 
 pressure on her shoulder as she passed, meant to express all a 
 world of renewed sympathy, fellowship, and devotion. 
 
 It could hardly be said that Mary had yet had breathing- 
 time enough to allow her to begin forming any conjecture as to 
 the person who must needs be involved in Minola's bewildering 
 confidence. The revelation itself filled her mind for a while, to 
 the exclusion of all other thought. But, as she was going along 
 the street, she saw coming towards her a figure which, even with 
 her short sight, she thought she recognised. It was that of a man 
 taller than any one else she knew, even than her brother, and who 
 had stooping shoulders and a walk of lounging complacency — a 
 walk as cf one who rather fancied that all the street belonged to 
 him. When this person came near he raised his hat and made a 
 
" WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?'' 253 
 
 bow of recognition to Mary, and then the poetess saw that she 
 was not wrong in supposing that it was Mr. St. Paul. He was 
 evidently going in the direction of Minola's lodgings. A sudden 
 thought flashed upon Mary Blanchet's mind. 
 
 " Can it be he ? " she thought. " I should never have sup- 
 posed such a thing. But he was very attentive to her, certainly ; 
 and of course he is a man of high family — not like poor Herbert. 
 But I never should have thought of him." 
 
 While Mary went her melancholy and meditative way, Mr. 
 St. Paul arrived at Minola's door, and asked to see her, adding 
 that he came to take leave, and would not keep her long. The 
 servants at Minola's lodgings had an immense awe and veneration 
 for Mr. St. Paul. When he called there once before and saw 
 Minola, on the day of the unholy compact, Mary, having heard of 
 the visit, could not keep down the pride of her heart, but let out 
 the fact that he was a duke's brother. In that quiet region the 
 brothers of dukes are rare visitors, and it was not likely that the 
 face and form of this one could have been forgotten. Therefore, 
 even if Minola had taken the precaution to say that she would see 
 no one that day, it is very doubtful whether the servants would 
 have understood this general order to apply to a duke's brother. 
 Anyhow, it was intimated to Minola, in tones of some awe, that 
 the gentleman who was a duke's brother wanted very particularly 
 to see her. 
 
 Minola was not in spirits for enjoying the visits of dukes, not 
 to say of the brothers of dukes. But she felt that she really owed 
 some thanks to Mr. St. Paul ; and she had never seen him since 
 the night of the Keeton riot; and if he was really going away, she 
 did not wish him to go without a word of thanks from her. It may 
 be said, too, that, in spite of all his defects and his odd ways, 
 Minola rather liked him. There was a sort of reckless honesty 
 about him ; and his talk was not commonplace. So she agreed 
 to see him, not without a dread that there might still be traces 
 of the tears which had lately been in her eyes. " What does it 
 matter," she asked of herself in scorn of her own weaknesses, 
 "even if he does see? I suppose he knows very well that 
 women are always in tears about something." 
 
 " Well, Miss Grey," he said as he came in — and he seemed 
 positively to grow taller in the gathering dusk, like the genie in the 
 story of Bedreddin Hassan — " I haven't seen you since the night 
 of the row at Keeton. Wasn't it capital fun ? The poet ran away, 
 I hear; they say he never stopped until he reached London." Mr. 
 St. Paul laughed his usual good-humoured laugh, and he held, as 
 if unconsciously, Minola's hand a moment in his own. His man- 
 
254 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 ner was never a love-making one, and Minola hardly noticed 
 this slight familiarity. 
 
 " Oh, there was no truth in all that!" she said hastily, and not 
 without a half-smile. " Mr. Blanchet did nothing of the kind ; 
 although, like me, he does not like noisy crowds." 
 
 " Well, I kept my word, you see, Miss Grey. I sent your man 
 in, in spite of them all." 
 
 " You did, indeed ; and I ought to feel very much obliged to 
 you, and I do feel obliged, Mr. St. Paul ; although my conscience 
 is still sadly distressed to know if I did anything very wrong in 
 allowing you to do anything of the kind." 
 
 " Don't you mind that ; it's all right ; it was a much more 
 honest trick than half the dodges by which elections are won, I 
 can assure you. There are always wheels within wheels in these 
 affairs, you know. You were in your rightful place too ; in all these 
 things there is sure to be a petticoat in the background. It might 
 as well be you as any one else — as my sister-in-law, for instance." 
 
 " And you are going away, Mr. St Paul ? " 
 
 " I think so ; yes. If things don't turn out as I want them to, 
 I shall go away again, I think. I don't see what I want here ; I 
 have done my duty as a brother, you know, and kept old Shep- 
 pard, my brother's man, out of Keeton." 
 
 " Are you going back to America ? " 
 
 " In the end, yes ; I suppose so. But not just for the present. 
 I feel inclined to take a run through Thibet. I am told by some 
 fellows that the yak is the most extraordinary creature ; and the 
 place hasn't been used up. You see, Miss Grey, I have enough of 
 money one way and another ; and I am inclined to consult my 
 own whims now a little. Come, what are you smiling at? " 
 
 "I don't feel inclined to explain, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " I'll do it for you — you smile because you think I never did 
 consult any whims but my own ; is not that it ? " 
 
 " Yes; if I must give an answer, that was it." 
 
 " Of course; I knew it. What I meant was that I don't intend 
 to bother any more just now about the making of money. But I 
 do particularly want to be allowed to consult the whims of some 
 one besides myself." 
 
 "Indeed?" 
 
 " You say that sarcastically, I know. You don't think much of 
 us men, it seems ; at least, you say you don't." 
 
 " Do vou, Mr. St. Paul ? " 
 
 " Do I what?" 
 
 " Think much of men ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, by Jove ! if you come to that. I never said I did, 
 
"WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 255 
 
 nor women either. But we all like to believe, I suppose, that 
 you women think us fine fellows and greatly admire us — that is, 
 when you are young. Anyhow, I don't mean to discuss the 
 defects of the human race with you just now, Miss Grey. I 
 have come for a different purpose. But won't you sit down ? " 
 
 She had not asked him to be seated ; and it seemed like a mild 
 rebuke of her lack of hospitality when Mr. St. Paul now handed her 
 a chair. But he had no such meaning. He was positively a little 
 embarrassed, and did not well know for a moment how to get on. 
 Even Minola noticed the fact, and made a good-natured attempt 
 to help him out of his difficulty, greatly amazed to find that he 
 could have any hesitation about anything. 
 
 " You were saying that you want to consult somebody's whims, 
 Mr. St. Paul ? " 
 
 " Yes, so I was ; that's what I have come about. I should 
 like to be allowed to consult your whims, Miss Grey." 
 
 " That's very kind ; but I don't know that I have any whim 
 just at present. When there is another election coming off some- 
 where, then, indeed " 
 
 St. Paul laughed. He was holding a chair. He turned it 
 and balanced it on two of its legs, and then leaned on the top of 
 it with both his hands in such a manner that Minola began to be 
 afraid it would give way under his bulky pressure and send him 
 prostrate at her feet. The odd attitude seemed, however, to give 
 him a little more self-possession. 
 
 "Look here, Miss Grey; let's come to the point. Will you 
 marry me ? " 
 
 He now let go the chair and stood upright, looking straight 
 at her, or rather, down upon her. 
 
 Minola felt her breath taken away. She actually started. 
 
 " That's what I am here for, Miss Grey. To come to the point 
 at once, will you marry me ? " 
 
 " To come to the point at once, Mr. St. Paul, I will not." 
 
 " Why not ? " He put his hands into his pockets, and coolly 
 waited for an answer. 
 
 " But there are so many reasons " 
 
 "All right ; tell me some of them." 
 
 " But really I don't know where to begin." 
 
 " Well, just think it over ; I can wait. May I take a seat ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; pray be seated." 
 
 He sat quietly near her. His manner was now once more 
 perfectly assured, but, with all his odd roughness, perfectly 
 respectful. 
 
 "Now we can talk the matter regularly out, like sensible 
 people,' he said. 
 
256 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 The situation was new, to say the least of it. Minola began 
 to be a little amused now that she had recovered from the first 
 shock of her embarrassment ; and she saw that with such a wooer 
 it would be far the wisest policy to talk the matter out as he had 
 proposed. So she began to rack her brain, not for reasons against 
 accepting the proposal, but for the reason which ought properly 
 to come first. 
 
 "To begin with, Mr. St. Paul, I am not sure that you are 
 in earnest in such an offer." 
 
 " Oh, if that's all, I can easily reassure you. I am confoundedly 
 in earnest, Miss Grey ! As you say, I have generally been in the 
 habit of pleasing myself more than other people ; and the truth 
 is, that nothing on earth would please me now half so much as 
 for you to take me as I offer myself. But I think I shouldn't 
 make half a bad husband, after all ; and honestly, do you know, 
 I don't believe you would be sorry in the end? " 
 
 " But why do you want to marry me ? why not some other 
 woman? why not some one in your own class?" 
 
 "My class? Fiddle-de-dee! what's my class? I am a cattle 
 grower from Texas ; I am a land speculator from California. If I 
 had been depending on what you call my class, I shouldn't have 
 enough now to give a girl bread and cheese, to say nothing of her 
 milliner's bill. I have plenty of money, thanks to myself. I'm 
 the son of my own works ; I'm the son of Marengo, as what's- 
 his-name — Napoleon — said." 
 
 " But there are so many women whom you must have met 
 and who would be suited to you so much better " 
 
 " Look here, Miss Grey ; cut that ! You are the only girl I 
 ever saw — I mean, of course, since I was a boy — that I care a 
 red cent for. There's something about you that other girls don't 
 have. You have no nonsense in you, not a bit ! A man need not 
 feel ashamed of caring about you or trying to please you. I saw 
 that long ago; you are a woman to do a man some good. You 
 are not spoiled by society, and all that rot. I suppose you never 
 were in society — what they call society — in your life ? " 
 
 " No, Mr. St. Paul ; I never was. I never was in any house 
 in London but Mr. Money's ; I suppose that isn't society ? " 
 
 " Well, there it is, you see. I like a girl who is not just the 
 same pattern as every other girl. Look here ! I don't say that I 
 am madly in love with you in that sentimental way ; I suppose 
 that sort of thing does not last at my time of life with a man who 
 has knocked about the world as I have ; but I do say that you 
 are the pleasantest woman I know, and the cleverest, and I'm sure 
 the best ; and you are the only woman I would marry." 
 
" WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 257 
 
 " But I am afraid, Mr. St. Paul, that we like to be loved in that 
 sentimental way, we foolish girls. I don't think I could be quite 
 pleased with anything else ; and I am glad you are so candid as 
 to tell me the whole truth." Minola now thought she saw a way 
 of getting good-humouredly out of the affair without seeming to 
 take it too seriously. 
 
 " Not a bit of it ; you are not that sort ; you have too much 
 sense for nonsense like that. Why, just listen. I was sentimen- 
 tally in love before I was quite twenty years old — I wonder what 
 age were you then ? — and I was wild to be allowed to marry a 
 poor girl, the daughter of the fellow who taught me French. 
 Didn't I get into a nice row at home? and the poor girl, they 
 hunted her out of the place — my people did — as if she and her 
 old father had been mad dogs. I dare say my people were right 
 enough in opposing such a marriage ; I dare say I should have 
 been tired of her long ago ; but if you want sentimental love and 
 so forth, that was my time for it, and that was what it all came to." 
 
 " You are glad now you did not marry her," Minola said ; "you 
 will be glad some time that you did not marry me. I will be 
 generous to you, Mr. St. Paul ; I will not take you at your word." 
 
 " No, no ! that's all nonsense ; you don't understand. I only 
 told you about that to show you how that sort of sentimental love 
 is nothing at all. I know what I am about now ; I know my 
 own mind; it would be time for me, by Jove ! Yes; I know my 
 own mind." 
 
 " So do I ; and I can't accept your offer, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " But you have not told me a single reason yet " 
 
 " I don't want to marry ; I had much rather remain as I am. 
 I am not a great admirer of men in general, and I think I am 
 more likely to be happy living as I do " 
 
 "If you marry me," he said, "you may live in any part of 
 the world you like, and any street you like, and any way you like." 
 
 Minola smiled. " How happily you would pass your life," 
 she said, "living in the West Centre of London with me and 
 Alary Blanchet ! " 
 
 " Well, if the wandering fit came on me, and I wanted a rush 
 half across the world, and you did nat care to come too, you might 
 please yourself, and remain here with old Mary until I came back. 
 I rather like old Mary ; I met her a few moments ago." 
 
 " I fear it would not do, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " You bet it would — I mean, I am quite sure you and I could 
 hit it off admirably, if you'll only give us the chance and let 
 us try." 
 
 " But if we tried it, and did not hit it off, what then ?" 
 
 s 
 
2j8 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I know we should ; I know it. And do you know, Miss 
 Grey, I have often thought that you rather liked me — I don't 
 mean the sentimental falling in love, and all that: you are too 
 sensible a girl for that ; and I'm not exactly the sort of fellow 
 to make a woman feel in that way — but I often thought that you 
 rather liked me, and liked to talk to me, and did not look at me 
 with horror as if I were a sort of outcast, don't you know ? " 
 
 Minola saw the great viitue of being frank and outspoken 
 with this strange lover. 
 
 "You are quite right, Mr. St. Paul ; I did rather like you, and 
 I do still. I did like to talk with you, and I did not feel any par- 
 ticular alarm when you were good enough to talk to me. I fancied 
 that you liked to talk to me " 
 
 "You couldn't well avoid thinking that," he said with a smile; 
 " for whenever I saw you in the corner of a room I made for you 
 at once. I liked you from the first moment I saw you.. Do you 
 remember the day I first saw you ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, Mr. St. Paul ; perfectly well." 
 . "Come, then; tell me something about it." 
 
 " It was at Mrs. Money's one day. I was there in the drawing- 
 room, and you came in with Mr. Money. It is not so long ago 
 that I should forget it." Minola had other memories, too, con- 
 nected with the day which she did not disclose to Mr. St. Paul, but 
 which brought a faint colour into her cheeks. 
 
 " Yes, yes ; that was the day. I had seen one of old Money's 
 daughters — the younger one, the girl that is going to be married to 
 that young fool Heron — and when I came into the drawing-room 
 I thought you were the other daughter ; and I said to myself that, 
 by Jove, Money's elder daughter was worth a dozen of the other, 
 and that I shouldn't be half sorry if she would marry me. I 
 hadn't spoken a word to you then. So, you see, it is not an idea 
 taken up on the spur of the moment." 
 
 " I am greatly obliged to you, Mr. St. Paul " 
 
 He made a deprecating gesture. Minola went on : 
 
 " And I do feel indeed that you have paid me a compliment, 
 and done me an honour. But will you take me at my word, and 
 believe that indeed, indeed, I never could accept your offer? 
 It is out of the question. Mr. St. Paul — I may speak out with 
 you ? — if I were in love with you, I would not marry you " 
 
 " Why not ? " he asked almost vehemently, as he confronted 
 her. 
 
 " Well, because we are not the sort of people to be married ; 
 we have such different ways, and such different friends " 
 
 " By the way," he struck in, " that reminds me — your speaking 
 
" WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WOOED?" 259 
 
 about friends — of something I wanted to say ; I am glad I have 
 thought of it before you made up your mind. It's this — I hear 
 you have money, or houses, or something of that kind. Well, 
 don't you see, if you marry me, you can give it all, whatever it is, 
 to old Mary what's-her-name. I don't want a dollar of it ; I have 
 plenty : so just take that into account before you decide." 
 
 " Thank you, Mr. St. Paul. I should have expected some 
 generosity from you " 
 
 " It isn't every fellow would do it, take my word for that." 
 
 " No, I suppose not ; if I gave anyone the chance. But I don't 
 mean to do so, Mr. St. Paul. If I wished to marry I don't really 
 know that I should refuse your offer. I am sure you would be 
 more generous than most men, and I do like you; but, indeed, the 
 thing is out of the question. We have no tastes or habits in com- 
 mon ; and you would be tired of me very soon." 
 
 " Not a bit of it ; we have tastes in common. I don't know 
 any woman who can understand a joke so well as you can ; and 
 you don't always suppose everybody is in earnest, as women gene- 
 rally do. Most women are so dreadfully serious — don't you know? 
 — that I find it a trial to talk to them. You are not like that." 
 
 " No," said Minola quietly ; " I don't insist on people always 
 being in earnest ; and so I shan't treat you as if you were in earnest 
 now." 
 
 " But I am in earnest ; and I tell you what, Miss Grey, you 
 must be in earnest too. I must have a serious, deliberate answer 
 from you. I tell you on my honour, and on my oath, if you will 
 allow me, that you are the only girl in the world I would marry ; 
 and I must be treated like a man in earnest, and have a serious 
 answer." 
 
 " I have given you my answer already, Mr. St. Paul. I can't 
 say anything more." 
 
 "Then you won't have me?" he asked, taking his hat from 
 the table on which he had laid it. 
 
 " No, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 "And this is quite serious and for the very last time? — as 
 the children say ; " and he held out one hand towards her. 
 
 She put her hand frankly into his. 
 
 " It is quite serious and for the very, very last time." 
 
 She felt a strong grip on her hand, so strong that it hurt her 
 keenly for the moment. But she did not wince or make any 
 attempt to draw the hand away. He released it in an instant. 
 
 " Well, I'm sorry," he said, " and that's all about it. I had 
 hopes that I might have persuaded you, don't you know?- — not 
 that I thought a fine girl like you was likely to be in love with a 
 
^60 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 fellow like me ; but that I fancied you could do with me, on the 
 whole, better than with some others. You see, I was not too self- 
 conceited in the matter, Miss Grey. Well, that's all over, and 
 there's an end of it. Good-bye ; I dare say I shan't see you soon 
 again. I shall be off for another run round the world. On the 
 whole, I don't see anything better to do just now." 
 
 He was going. 
 
 " I am sorry if I have disappointed you ; I am indeed," she 
 said, and held out her hand to him again. 
 
 The bold blue eyes showed a gleam of a softer light in them. 
 
 " Oh, never mind about me, Miss Grey ; I shall come all right, 
 you needn't fear. I told you, you know, that I had outlived the 
 age when men break their hearts ; and, by Jove, a year ago I 
 should have said I had outlived the age when I could ask any 
 woman on earth to marry me. But I'll come all right ; and I 
 forgive you," he added with a laugh ; " although at my time of 
 life we don't like to make fools of ourselves before women. 
 Good-bye. If you are in London when I come here next, I'll 
 look you up ; and if you want anything done then in the elec- 
 tioneering way, I'm your man Hullo! here's old Mary back ; 
 
 I saw her passing the window. Good morning, Miss Grey ; good 
 morning." 
 
 He nodded in his old, familiar, easy way, and was out of the 
 room somehow before Mary Blanchet got into it. Minola hardly 
 saw how lie got away. There was an odd moisture in her eyes 
 and a swimming in her head which made it hard for her all at 
 once to fall into talk with little Mary. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 
 
 " The member for Keeton ! " How strange it seemed to Minola 
 that Victor Heron should thus have come to be connected in 
 the mind of everyone with the old home of her youth ! On the day, 
 not to be forgotten by her, when she saw him for the first time at 
 Mr. Money's door, who could have thought that such a thing as 
 that was likely to come to pass? Ah, who could have thought 
 that other things yet more deeply concerning her were likely to 
 come to pass ? We may be all excused if sometimes under the 
 pressure of some peculiar pain, or in the exaltation of some pecu- 
 liar joy, we tell ourselves that there is a special fate in the things 
 
THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 261 
 
 that concern us, and that the Destinies have our lives expressly 
 in their care to gladden or to punish us. It is something of a con- 
 solation apparently to think that this trial, which we find it hard to 
 bear, is not such as falls to the chance lot of ordinary mortals, 
 but is set out by some special destiny for us a'one. To Minola 
 there seemed something fateful in the way in which Victor Heron 
 had been so often and strangely made to cross her path. " The 
 member for Keeton!" — and she had, it would seem, made him 
 member for Keeton. In her brighter moments she was some- 
 times amazed and amused to think of the extraordinary part she 
 had been made to play in the political affairs of her native town. 
 If she had been inclined to vanity, she might have found some 
 consolation for any disappointment of her own in the homage 
 that had been paid to her by such different admirers. But it 
 gave her neither pride nor pleasure to know that some men 
 admired her whom she could not admire in turn. " Lord, what 
 fools these mortals be!" was the thought that often filled her; 
 and she cordially applied it to herself as well as to others. In 
 truth, her secret love would in any case have kept her pure of vanity. 
 Her pain gave her sympathy and made her strong. 
 
 Meanwhile the months went on, and she saw little or nothing 
 of the member for Keeton — her member in a double sense : the 
 representative of her borough, and returned by herself. The time 
 of the honourable gentleman was now pretty fully engaged. He 
 had no free hours left for strolls in Regent's Park, even if he had 
 been at all inclined to go in that direction. He found himself more 
 and more closely occupied by day and night. Victor Heron was 
 successful in a double sense ; he was a political and a social suc- 
 cess. He had spoken in the House of Commons, and he had, by 
 universal acknowledgment, made a hit. There is hardly any other 
 success so delightful, so rich in immediate effect, left in our modern 
 English life. His manner was fresh, easy, and animated, with now 
 and then a stronger dash of something that went as near to elo- 
 quence as our House of Commons will endure in these days. He 
 knew his subject — a question of foreign policy — thoroughly, and 
 he was never dry or heavy. Then he became a social success 
 as well, and at once. He was invited everywhere. He was envied 
 for many things : for his political chances, for his prospects as one 
 who would probably be able to " entertain his party," and for the 
 prospective possession of the very pretty girl who was seen so 
 often with him, who was known to carry with her a large fortune, 
 and whom he was, everybody said, about to marry. 
 
 Heron never knew what an important person he had become 
 until he saw the difference which his altered position made in the 
 
362 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 number and kind of the letters which he found on his table every 
 morning. They lay there in piles ; letters on all manner of poli- 
 tical, social, industrial, educational questions ; letters from in- 
 ventors, from theorists, from men — oh, how many of these there 
 were ! — from men with grievances ; not a few from women with 
 grievances. He soon found that even to look into half the ques- 
 tions of this kind which he was besought to investigate for himself 
 would take up his whole time every day and night, making no 
 allowance for food or sleep. At first, remembering his own 
 grievance, he used to make a desperate effort to grapple with this 
 huge bulk of complaint. Then he called in the aid of a secre- 
 tary, and tried in this way to accomplish the task, and to be 
 member for the aggrieved generally. But even this had to be 
 given up. A staff of secretaries would have been necessary to 
 get through the mere reading and answering of letters in cases 
 with which, when he had mastered their details, he usually found 
 that he could do absolutely nothing. This was in itself a dis- 
 appointment and a pain to our young Quixote. He found that 
 the task of redressing all or half the supposed human wrong that 
 thrust itself querulously upon his notice would have been beyond 
 his power, even though his summers to such length of years should 
 come as those of the many-wintered crow himself. 
 
 He was approaching, and with every prospect of success, the 
 great business which had brought him back to England. He had 
 given notice of a motion to call the attention of the House of 
 Commons to the whole subject, connected with his administration 
 of the St. Xavier's Settlements and to move a resolution on it ; 
 and he had obtained a day for the debate, and a very animated 
 and interesting discussion was expected. It had been hinted to 
 him that if he merely wanted another appointment, and a much 
 better one, the Government would be only too delighted to avail 
 themselves of his services, and it was gently suggested that there 
 never was any intention to visit his former administration with 
 any censure whatever. But Victor remained, it is needless to say, 
 absolutely deaf to all such suggestions as this. He desired to vin- 
 dicate a principle, he said, and not to satisfy any personal interest. 
 It is needless, perhaps, also to say that the suggestion was made to 
 him in the most cautious and unofficial way. It was made by a 
 mediator, who, if Heron had shown any disposition to accept it, 
 would soon have put him in the way of receiving an official offer, 
 but who the moment it was declined was able to speak of it as a 
 personal suggestion or conjecture, only offered in the beaten way 
 of friendship, and binding nobody to anything. 
 
 All this made a change in the position of Mr. Heron since 
 
THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 263 
 
 the time, not so long ago, when he came to London almost un- 
 known, and for a while haunted vainly the ante-chambers of great 
 officials, and could not even get 10 speech of them. Victor was 
 modest enough, and often thought with a kind of wonder and 
 humiliation of the chance he once so nearly ran of sinking down to 
 be the mere possessor of a grievance, or one possessed by it, going 
 round the world of London pestering people with the tale of a 
 wrong in which they felt no manner of interest. He could not but 
 feel proud and happy at some moments when he thought of the 
 change a short time had brought about for him. He was well 
 aware that he owed three-fourths of his success to the advice and 
 the energy of Mr. Money. If he had not stepped out on the 
 balcony of the Louvre Hotel in Paris that memorable night, he 
 might never have met Mr. Money, and things might have been 
 so different. In all his pride and his gratitude, were there ever 
 moments when he was inclined to wish that he had not stepped 
 out on that balcony, and that things had been different ? 
 
 Was our young Quixote ungrateful or hard to satisfy ? was he 
 morbidly discontented, or mean, or intolerably fickle, or absurdly 
 self-conceited? No; he was not any of these things. Yet it is 
 certain that he was not happy. He had won success ; he seemed 
 likely to win much more, and he was already looking back many a 
 time, and with genuine bitterness of regret, to the bright days when 
 he appeared to be all a failure. Except in moments of excitement, 
 Victor Heron was unhappy. He made his moments of excitement 
 as many as he could, and he dreaded when they w r ere over. . He 
 dreaded to be alone ; and even that was not the worst, for there 
 was society which gave him more pain than any solitude. When he 
 came home of nights he sometimes sat in his chair and leaned his 
 chin on his hand, and remained there for an hour thinking. Any- 
 one who had seen him at such times would have wisely said that 
 the late hours of the House of Commons were telling heavily on 
 him already, he looked so haggard. 
 
 He was indeed in a miserable dilemma, if that could by any 
 possibility be called a dilemma which seemed to have no alternative, 
 or second way to it or out of it. He had made a fearful mistake 
 and found it out too late. In an impulse of gratitude, regard, sur- 
 prise, generous humiliation, he had believed himself in love with 
 Lucy Money — when he saw beyond mistake that she was in love 
 with him. For an instant that light seemed to surround her in 
 which a man sees the chosen one — the only one, the loved. The 
 moment he saw that the sweet, good girl was in love with him, 
 it seemed as if Heaven, and gratitude, and fate ordered him to 
 marry her, and lor the hour it was easy for him to believe that he 
 
264 Af/SS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 loved her. Nor did the glamour pass away all at once. For some 
 time yet he continued to believe that he had all he desired in 
 life ; that he loved and was happy, and had indeed found measure- 
 less content. There may have been even then a sense of unsatisfied 
 craving in his heart, as of something missing which he had once 
 hoped to find and possess. But he shut all such vague emotions 
 down, and pressed the lid of what he told himself were his real 
 convictions strongly down upon them. He told himself that he 
 was happy. It has come far on the way towards unhappiness 
 when a young man has to tell himself that he is happy in the 
 woman he is to marry. Victor Heron caught himself arguing the 
 question sometimes, and started and turned his thoughts another 
 way, as some good person might have done in older days if he 
 found a diabolical temptation inducing him to blaspheme a saint 
 or question his own faith. 
 
 The horizon only began to grow darker as his knowledge ol 
 himself and his state of mind grew clearer. Then there followed an 
 interval during which he felt like one conscience-stricken. It 
 seemed to him that, in admitting to himself what he felt, he was 
 doing a wrong to poor Lucy which no kindness and no devotion 
 on his part could atone for. Now came fits of devoted attention 
 to her, when the poor little maid thought that never had there been 
 lover like hers, and her soul floated softly in a golden haze of 
 affection and gratitude. Then came what we may call the common- 
 sense and worldly mood, when Victor Heron strove to get himself 
 to regard his engagement as an ordinary young man of sense would 
 doubtless have regarded it. He told himself that, after all, he 
 ought to be one of the happiest of men ; that he was going to have 
 a charming young wife, as sweet a woman as any in the world. 
 He remembered how Coleridge had said that a Desdemona is the 
 wife that in his heart every man would like to have. He argued 
 with himself about the impossibility of having everything exactly as 
 one would appoint it for himself; and he sometimes marvelled 
 how so sweet a girl as Lucy ever could have cared about him. On 
 the whole he reasoned with himself as a sensitive and unworldly 
 young man like him might be supposed to do, who has in a moment 
 of impulse committed himself to a responsibility which he cannot 
 any longer even wish to avoid. In truth, it was his grievance 
 and not himself that was to blame. His grievance had so possessed 
 and absorbed him that he had not had time or thought for anything 
 else. He had never asked of his heart what it would have until 
 the hour for such a question had gone by. There was left to him 
 one general frank resolve, to do his duty and make the very best 
 of everything, and make, above all, those happy whose happiness 
 
THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 265 
 
 in any way depended on him. After all, perhaps, marriage is not 
 very often undertaken in much better spirit. A man's life, he had 
 always heard from wise people, lies for the most part outside home 
 and love. 
 
 But the member for Keeton kept clear of Minola Grey. He 
 did so rather in obedience to an undefined instinct than to any 
 deliberate resolve. He had not searched into his own feelings — 
 rather, indeed, he had resolutely kept from all such search. But he 
 avoided Minola Grey. Their sudden and sincere friendship had 
 suddenly come to an end somehow. He thought that for some 
 reason she had lately been displeased with him, and on the whole 
 he was not sorry. It was better so. He heard of her a great deal 
 from Lucy and from others, but he saw her very seldom. 
 
 One afternoon, early, Minola set out to pay a visit to Lucy 
 Money. Lucy had written her a reproachful letter because she 
 had not come more often lately, and insisting that she must see 
 " dear, darling Nola at once, at once" because of something most 
 particular on which she wanted her advice " so much, oh, so 
 much ! " Minola had not great faith, perhaps, in the importance 
 of the matter in hand, but she went promptly to see her friend. 
 When she got to the house in Victoria Street she was shown at 
 once into the drawing-room, and sat down, expecting every moment 
 to hear the light step of Lucelet. But Lucelet had gone out for a 
 short time, and had only left instructions that if Miss Grey came 
 she was to be shown into the drawing room without a word, lest 
 she might go away if she were told in the first instance that she, 
 Lucy, was not at home. While Minola was waiting, the member 
 for Keeton called ; and the member for Keeton now was hardly 
 supposed to ask any question, but to go and come in the house 
 as though it were his own. If Lucy was not at home, some other 
 member of the family was likely tj be, and, if anyone was there, 
 it was assumed that Mr. Heron would come in and talk and wait. 
 
 Minola sat down to the piano to beguile the time, and began 
 to sing and play to herself in her soft, pure, low tones. She sang 
 the song of the lover's farewell to Northmaven, and to the maid 
 who was to look over the wild waves in vain for the skiff of him 
 who came not again — the song from " The Pirate," which she 
 had herself adapted to the music of an old ballad. When Victor 
 approached the drawing-room, and heard the sound of the piano, 
 he thought at first that Lucy was the performer, and he paused a 
 moment to listen, without interrupting her. But as the voice 
 reached his ears, he knew its tones and he knew the song, and re- 
 membered when he had heard it last — when he had heard it first. 
 The blood rushed into his face, and he literally started back. His 
 
566 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 sensitive lips trembled ; his hands caught at his moustache in his 
 old way when something excited or embarrassed him ; and a 
 sound almost like a groan involuntarily broke from him. Oh, 
 how unhappy, how wretched he felt that moment ! and how like 
 some one guilty of a crime or a deceit, merely because of the pain 
 that he could not conceal from himself any more ! At first he drew 
 back and was about to go away. But he recovered himself, and 
 asked of himself what possible excuse he could give to Lucy when 
 she heard that he had actually been in the house, as she must 
 hear from the servants, and that he had gone away without seeing 
 her. He assumed that Lucy was in the drawing-room with Minola, 
 and at that very moment they might come out and see him re- 
 treating as if he were a detected robber. He felt ashamed now 
 of the sudden, absurd instinct of flight, and the ignoble, guilty 
 suggestions it brought with it. " In Heaven's name," he thought, 
 " why should I back out ? Why should I not see Miss Grey or 
 anybody else ? Am I a fool or a boy ? " He went on and crossed 
 the threshold ; and then for the first time he saw that Miss Grey 
 was alone. It was too late to retreat, even though she was alone, 
 for she had heard his footsteps, and stopped her song and rose from 
 the piano, and waited to receive him. 
 
 " Oh — Miss Grey — I hope you are well ! " was the remarkable 
 observation with which Victor began. 
 
 " Quite well, thank you," was the appropriate reply. 
 
 There was much embarrassment on both sides. Naturally the 
 man was the more embarrassed of the two. On him fell in all duty 
 the responsibility of conducting the conversation. Yet, having got 
 thus far, he did not seem inclined to try any farther. 
 
 " I thought I should find Lucy in," Minola said, since it seemed 
 clear that she must say something, or let silence settle down upon 
 them. 
 
 " I thought she would be here too," he said. " I suppose she 
 has gone out." 
 
 This was so obvious an inference that it hardly called for 
 addition or supplement of any kind. Minola said, " I suppose 
 so," and that attempt appeared likely to come to an end. 
 
 " I hope you like the House of Commons," Minola began 
 again. 
 
 " Oh, yes, certainly ; very much ; that is, I like it very well 
 indeed. Have you never gone to hear a debate ? " 
 
 " No, never." 
 
 " You must go. Oh, yes, you ought to go ! You could go some 
 night with Miss Money." 
 
 "With Lucy?" 
 
THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 267 
 
 " Yes, with Lucy I mean, of course." 
 
 He spoke in a sort of irritated way, very unlike the old manner 
 of the chivalrous man with a grievance. 
 
 " I should like to go very much," I linola said ; " I should like 
 to hear you speak.' 1 
 
 " Oh, I shan't speak often ; I shan't speak, perhaps, more than 
 once again ; I don't care to be one of the talkers ; I haven't the 
 gift to make much of that sort of thing." 
 
 " I heard that you were a great success." 
 
 "Who told you so? " He put the question with some of his 
 old directness, but not with the kind of boyish friendliness that 
 used to make his simple straightforwardness seem sweet and genial. 
 Now his tone sounded almost harsh. Minola began to think that 
 his manners were not improving in his parliamentary career. Is it 
 possible, she thought, that success is already spoiling him ? 
 
 "Several persons told me," she answered quietly; "and I read 
 it in the papers. I am fond of reading the papers." 
 
 " Several persons told you so ? Who were they ? " 
 
 " Well, let me see " Minola became all the more composed 
 
 and mistress of herself in proportion as his manner seemed to grow 
 more brusque and odd. " Mr. Money told me, for one ; and of 
 course Lucy told me ; but she is prejudiced, and counts for 
 nothing ; and Mr. Sheppard told me." 
 
 " Do you see him often — Sheppard ? " 
 
 " Not very often." 
 
 " When is he trying for Parliament again ? " 
 
 " I don't know." 
 
 " But you wish him success, surely ? " 
 
 " I shall wish him success if it does him any good, or makes 
 him at all happy — or improves him in any way," Miss Misanthrope 
 said demurely. 
 
 " You think it does not always improve people to be in the 
 House of Commons ? " Victor said, with a somewhat forced 
 smile. 
 
 " Not always, perhaps ; but I have had so little opportunity of 
 judging." 
 
 There was a moment of silence. 
 
 " I don't think I can wait any longer," Victor said. " Are you 
 waiting to see Lucy, Miss Grey ? " 
 
 If Minola had spoken out the plain truth, she would have 
 said that if he was going to wait she was not, and that if he was 
 going away she would stay. Perhaps, if he had spoken out the 
 plain truth, he for his part would have said much the same thing. 
 As he was evidently going, she said — ■ 
 
2(53 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Yes, I shall stay until she comes in ; I shall take up a book 
 and read ; she will not be very long away, I should think." 
 
 " Will you be kind enough to tell her that I was here, and 
 waited for her some time ? " 
 
 " Certainly ; with pleasure." 
 
 He seemed to be going, and yet he did not go ; in truth, he 
 was only thinking whether he ought to shake hands with her in 
 ordinary friendly fashion, or whether he had better make a bow, 
 and so take himself off. Not a matter of great moment, it might 
 appear, and yet it was enough to torment Heron just then. If he 
 seemed cold and distant and unfriendly, would not Miss Grey 
 wonder at his manner, and perhaps think him rude and uncivil ; 
 or think him changed, and begin to conjecture what the reason of 
 the change might be ? If he showed himself friendly in the old 
 way, would she become also friendly in the old way ? and would 
 not that perhaps be rather more of an ordeal than he could safely 
 bear ? But as he glanced towards her he thought he saw a look 
 of surprise on her face, and this settled the matter. He could not 
 allow her to think him cold or rude ; and why should he not try to 
 show himself as a friend ? 
 
 Minola was seated, and had already taken up a book. He went 
 up to her and held out his hand. Then he noticed for the first 
 time how pale she was looking. 
 
 " Good-morning, Miss Grey," he said ; " I am sorry I have to 
 go so soon ; it seems so long since we exchanged a word." 
 With this happily-chosen speech he came to a pause. 
 
 A faint colour came over the paleness of her face. 
 
 " You have become a public man now," she sa ; d, with desperate 
 ease, "and your time is occupied. But we shall meet sometimes, 
 I hope. I shall be always delighted." 
 
 There are incidents of martyrdom, perhaps, with which it is less 
 difficult for the sufferer to deal than it was for Minola to assume 
 the expression of smiling friendly ease that accompanied these 
 words. Even as she spoke them she was thinking of how often 
 she had warmly disputed the truth ofThackeray's constant assertion, 
 that women are all skilled by nature in hypocrisy. She felt that 
 she was then playing the hypocrite with a skill which she would 
 once have believed it impossible for her to attain, and with a skill, 
 too, which once she would have despised herself for possessing. 
 
 " Uo you still walk in Regent's Park sometimes ? " Victor asked. 
 
 " Yes, very often." 
 
 " I have not been there this long time." 
 
 " Oh, no ; you have no time for that sort of thing now, I am 
 glad to think. That is for idlers." 
 
THE MEMBER FOR KEETON. 263 
 
 Meanwhile the ceremony of shaking hands had been duly- 
 executed. Victor was going, when his eyes fell on the book she 
 had in her hand. He stopped again. 
 
 "That is Blanchet's volume of poems, isn't it?" he asked. 
 
 "Is it? Oh, yes, of course it is ! I had only just taken it up, 
 and I hadn't noticed." She coloured a little, a very little. She 
 was somewhat embarrassed by his discovery of the fact that she had 
 not known what book she held in her hand. 
 
 "Do you know, Miss Grey, that I always feel some remorse of 
 conscience about that book ? It was a shame that you should have 
 been allowed to pay all that money ; you ought to have allowed 
 some one to share the cost with you at least." 
 
 " But I explained to you at the time all about that ; I could not 
 allow my Mary Blanchet to be indebted to anyone but me for 
 any kindness. There was some selfishness in that, I know ; but I 
 could not help the feeling. And in any case I am sure Mary 
 would have been wretched at the idea of anyone doing it but me. 
 So it was not all selfishness on my part." 
 
 " The idea of your doing anything selfish ! I don't believe 
 you ever thought of yourself in all your life. Well, you were 
 very generous to poor Blanchet ; I hope at least he will not prove 
 himself ungrateful." 
 
 " Oh, I don't want him to be grateful ! I daresay he would be 
 as grateful as anyone else — any other man, I mean, of course 
 — if I wanted him to be." 
 
 Victor smiled the most natural and genuine smile he had yet 
 shown during their conversation. 
 
 " Now you want to become the Miss Misanthrope again," he 
 said " But it doesn't deceive us who know you, Miss Grey. It was 
 I who called you Miss Misanthrope, wasn't it — who suggested the 
 name, I mean ? " 
 
 " Yes, I believe it was ; I am very well content with the name, 
 and I think myself fairly entitled to bear it." 
 
 " Not you," he said. " I knew it didn't apply then, and I know 
 it far better now." 
 
 " But to be a Miss Misanthrope isn't to be a criminal." 
 
 " No ; but you couldn't be a misanthrope, unless in some time 
 when there was no possibility left of trying to prove that you loved 
 the human race." 
 
 " Which, however, I can assure you, I do not." 
 
 "All the same, you try to help people. Well, good-morning." 
 
 " Here is Lucy," said Minola, looking up ; " I am so glad you 
 did not go at once." 
 
 Lucy ran into the room dressed as she had just come in from 
 the carriage. She rushed at Minola and embraced her. 
 
2fo MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " So you were not going to wait for me?" she said breathless, 
 and pointing to the hat which Victor held in his hand. " Yes, I 
 know you were impatient, like all men, and you were for darting 
 away, only dear Nola kept you and would not let you go ! Now 
 that was so kind of you, Nola." 
 
 " But, dear, I can't take the compliment or the thanks ; it was 
 no doing of mine ; Mr. Heron was just going, only that you came 
 in time and stopped him." 
 
 " I did not know when you were coming back, or whether you 
 were coming at all," Victor said, "or I shouldn't have thought 
 of going away ; but I really have lots of things to do." 
 
 " Well, I am glad to hear that you were growing impatient," 
 Lucy said with a smile, " for it looks as if you missed me, Victor ; 
 and I like you to miss me when I am away. It was Theresa who 
 would have me to go out with her ; and she said that there was 
 some committee or something, and that you could not be here to- 
 day, Victor — somebody told her." 
 
 Lucy looked very pretty. There was a light of surprise and 
 gratification on her face because of the unexpected coming o 
 Victor, which almost supplied the place of the expression that 
 high intelligence can lend. Minola looked at her with sincere 
 admiration, and could not wonder that she had found a lover 
 even in a man who might be supposed to seek naturally for a 
 level of intellectual companionship higher than hers. But Victor 
 was for the moment silent, nor did he and Minola speak to each 
 other again until Victor rose to go, saying he had only looked in 
 to see Lucy for a moment, and that he had an appointment. 
 
 " You are coming to dinner ? " Lucy asked, with a colour of 
 anxiety and hope on her pretty face. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 li I am afraid not," he said ; " I fancy your father and I must 
 put up with a hasty dinner got anyhow this evening, Lucy." 
 
 He was bowing to Miss Grey, and about to go, when Lucy 
 said — 
 
 " Have you two been quarrelling, might I ask ? Victor, do you 
 generally take leave of Nola in that cool sort of way ? Why, you 
 used to be such friends." 
 
 " I am sure I hope we are ' such friends ' still," Minola began 
 with a strenuous effort to be at ease. 
 
 " As good friends as ever," Victor rather awkwardly added. 
 
 " Then, why don't you shake hands ? " inquired the pertinacious 
 little Lucy. " Give me thy hand, terrestrial — so," she said, seizing 
 one of Victor's hands in hers, and continuing one of the Shakes- 
 pearian quotations which she had caught up from Minola, and was 
 
A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 271 
 
 rather proud to display. " Give me thy hand, celestial — yes, Nola 
 darling, you deserve to be called celestial, I think — give me thy 
 hand, celestial — so ;" and with pretty and gracious compulsion she 
 drew Minola and Victor together, and placed Minola's hand in his 
 and made them clasp. 
 
 The friendly clasp was over in a moment. But in that short 
 moment the eyes of Minola and of Victor met unavoidably, 
 suddenly, for the first time that day, and then were as suddenly 
 withdrawn ; and each knew for the first time, and now to the full, 
 what a misfortune had fallen on them all ; and Lucy looked from 
 one face to the other, and felt her heart stand still. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 
 
 It is true that this man and woman knew by one single meeting 
 of the eyes that secret which he had never known before, and 
 which she had never dreamed of. But each, as we have seen, was 
 fatally prepared for the discovery. Each had for some time — one 
 of the two for a long time — been brooding over the thought which 
 represented one-half of the secret. Each heart was prepared to 
 receive the. impression of the other. The two natures were ready 
 to affect each other as two substances are — as flint and steel are, as 
 the burning-glass and the darkened paper. If anyone could have 
 asked Minola Grey whether she thought Victor Heron loved her, 
 she would have answered, if she thought such a question worth 
 answering at all, that he did not ; that he never had cared about 
 her except perhaps as a friend. If Victor were asked whether he 
 thought Minola cared about him, he would have answered, in all 
 good faith, that he believed of late she rather disliked him than 
 otherwise. Yet it is certain that each learned the secret of the 
 other in the same moment as each glance betrayed its own secret. 
 Come what would, from that moment these two were isolated from 
 all others by their common knowledge of the truth. 
 
 That was a trying hour for Minola which she spent in Victoria 
 Street after Heron had gone. It was not perhaps less trying for 
 Lucy ; but Minola did not then know that. Fortunately for both 
 of them, Lucy and her mother had an engagement that evening 
 which made it impossible for Mrs. Money to press Minola to stay 
 long with them. It was lucky, too, that visitors came in, and that 
 while Minola was there she and Lucy were not left alone. If 
 
2172 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Minola had been less distracted than she was, she must have seen 
 how very different Lucy's manner was from that which was usual to 
 her ; and how she was in alternation of wild, flighty spirits, and 
 strange, shy, shrinking despondency. But in truth Minola's soul 
 was all engrossed in the terror of the discovery she had made, and 
 the necessity of hiding it, of burying it, at all risks. She was so 
 little used to concealment or suspicion of any kind that it never 
 occurred to her to think that perhaps Lucy might have seen what 
 she had seen. Had the two girls been left alone for a moment, 
 some revelation, some explanation, must perhaps have come. But 
 contrary to her usual way, Lucy did not try to get her friend into 
 a separate corner or a separate room with her, and Minola was 
 only filled by the one desire to get decently away, out of the 
 house, and into the open air. She felt like some one shamed and 
 guilty, like some treacherous, deceitful friend who had no right to 
 stand beneath that roof any more. There were moments when 
 the whole horizon of her hope seemed bounded by the moment 
 when she could once more be in the open street, and free of the 
 house which had always given her so kind a welcome. 
 
 Victor Heron walked slowly along Victoria Street. The day 
 was warm and sunny ; the spring was growing rapidly towards 
 summer. Even the sombre lines of Victoria Street were cheered 
 and gladdened by the bright and youthful beauty of the season and 
 of the day. The sense and sight of all this spring loveliness, tan- 
 talising often even to happy dwellers in the town, because it told 
 them of the delights of the country they could not reach just then, 
 sent a new pang into the heart of the distracted Heron. He had 
 some appointments to keep, some persons to see, but he was unable 
 to think of anything then but himself and his misfortune. He 
 sauntered slowly with dragging steps, almost like an invalid, into 
 St James's Park, and sat down there and looked on the ground, 
 and appeared for the time to be engrossed in drawing lines on 
 the dust of the walk beneath him with the point of his cane. 
 
 He knew it all now. For some time back he had known only 
 too well the state of his own feelings. He had known it although 
 he shrank, as far as he could, from any search into his heart to find 
 what stirred it so, holding it a sort of treasqn to his engagement 
 and to the girl who loved him to ask any question of himself which 
 must be a secret from her. But despite of this it had become 
 known to him only too well that he had made a terrible mistake 
 so far as his own fate was concerned. Yet what was that com- 
 pared with what he now knew? This morning his course was 
 clear. He had nothing greatly to repent of. He believed that 
 he could not possibly have had the woman he loved and would 
 
A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 273 
 
 have chosen ; it was not much of a sacrifice to marry the sweet 
 girl who loved him, certainly not wisely, but far too well. But 
 now he had the misery of knowing that it was only his own fatal 
 and stupid blindness that had stood in the first instance between 
 the girl he loved and him. She too was to be a sacrifice. There 
 were three unhappy creatures linked together in a cruel bond of 
 misfortune, which might never have been forged for them but for 
 his astounding folly and darkness. There was no way out of it 
 now but with misery to all. He was so tortured by the thought of 
 the unhappiness he had brought on others that he had hardly yet 
 a sense of mere regret for the happiness that might have been his. 
 It was but after some period of distracted emotion that he began 
 to be able to think of this. 
 
 Sudden and wholly unexpected as the discovery of the morning 
 had been, there was no shadow of a doubt left on his mind as to 
 its genuineness. It was an instant — a flash of bewildered, pathetic 
 light in a girl's eye that drooped and turned away in the very 
 glance, and he was as certain that Minola Grey and he stood 
 isolated from all the world by a reciprocal and hopeless love as 
 he was that the sun was now shining on his pain. He had little 
 experience in love-making, but he knew this. All now seemed 
 clear to him. Every strange word, or mood, or look of Minola 
 which had puzzled him in other days was made clear to him now. 
 Words and looks that he positively had forgotten came back, 
 living and burning, on his memory. All was now made consistent, 
 like a well-written tale, like a harmony. Yes ; he might have 
 been happy. She would have loved him. She was the only being 
 on earth in whose company he had always felt that he could be 
 quite himself, and all that was best in him seemed to grow without 
 effort. She would have loved him. He would have had in her a 
 companion to share every mood, and feeling, and hope. To her 
 intellect he could have looked up as well as to her heart. Good 
 heavens! how did he fail to know all that before? \Yhen he 
 found that involuntarily there was growing up in him a love for 
 every place in which he knew that she walked ; when the sound 
 of her footfall brought a joy with it ; when the voice of her singing 
 made his heart thrill — how could he have failed even for a 
 moment to know that it all meant, not friendship, but love? 
 
 She knows it all now, he kept thinking. He knew by the 
 expression in her eyes that he had betrayed his secret as she had 
 betrayed hers. Her life, too, was spoiled. And poor Lucy — the 
 affectionate, innocent girl whose unsuspecting little freak of 
 playful, childish confidence had of itself brought about all this 
 discovery — was there to be no feeling, no pity for her ? The very 
 
 T 
 
274 AfISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 thought of the simplicity with which Lucy had brought their 
 hands together was a new pain. She seemed so innocent, and he 
 seemed so treacherous. In his misery he grievously exaggerated 
 his own fault, and thought of his impulsive error as if it were a 
 treason and a crime. 
 
 What fatality sent him into that place to remain there so long ? 
 Why did he not shake off all the brooding that was so futile, at 
 least until his hours of work were over, and he was free to brood 
 and be miserable alone ? What has a busy man, for whom all sorts 
 of persons and affairs are waiting, to do with sentimental regrets 
 and the lamentations of a ruined lover — at least, what has he to 
 do with them in the daytime ? He was sitting there in a broad 
 walk, near the little lake ; and the seat he sat on was just near a 
 turn of the walk, so that any promenader might come on him un- 
 thinking, and recognise him before he had time either to rise and 
 go away or to compose himself into attitude and demeanour less 
 likely to attract attention. Poor Victor thought nothing of all 
 this. He had forgotten for the time all business, and ap- 
 pointments, and constituents, and only knew what had happened 
 that morning, and that he was very unhappy and had made others 
 so. But, if he committed a breach of duty as a public man in 
 thus idling away his time, his error did not go unpunished, for a 
 step came near him, and he looked up, and he saw Minola Grey. 
 He had just been saying to himself again and again, as one who 
 is stamping a resolve down into his mind — "Come what will, let 
 anyone suspect what he likes, I must not see her any more." He 
 was thinking with a certain grim satisfaction of the probability of 
 his soon getting some colonial appointment, and of the quickness 
 with which he would leave England ; and when he could not help 
 asking himself how poor little Lucy would like such exile from 
 her family and her friends, he answered firmly that anything 
 would be better than the chance of seeing Minola Grey. And 
 now he looked up and Minola Grey was there before him, and 
 saw him. 
 
 He had stayed too long in that place. For Minola, leaving 
 Lucy with a heart bursting to be relieved from the restraint that 
 was on it, had remembered just as she was in the street that if 
 she went any way in the direction of the House of Commons 
 she might very possibly meet Victor Heron, or at least Mr. Money. 
 So she turned away, and made up her mind to go through the 
 Park and out into Waterloo Place, and home to the West Centre 
 by that way. 
 
 She was close upon Victor before she saw him, and they saw 
 each other at the same moment. So much chang eaobeen 
 
A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 275 
 
 made for both of them by that one glance from each in the 
 morning, that it did not seem possible to Minola to make any 
 attempt at mere acquaintanceship and casual conversation any 
 more. She had no time to think ; she did not well know what 
 she was doing ; but she was passing Heron without a single word 
 or more than a scared and startled look. 
 
 An instant before, Victor had made up his mind that, come 
 what would, he must not meet her any more. Yet, by a strange 
 inconsistency, he was made angry by her attempt to pass him 
 without a word. He resented it as though it were a casting of 
 deliberate scorn on him. For the moment he almost looked on 
 Minola as one might look on an accomplice who turns away from 
 his fnend in some hour of trial. 
 
 He leaped from his seat and went towards her, and prevented 
 her from going any farther. 
 
 " Are you not going to speak to me ? " he asked. 
 
 She stopped and looked down, and tried to seem composed 
 A woman seldom so loses her sense of the proprieties of things' 
 as not to keep in mind the fact that there are people likely to 
 pass by and take account of unusual demeanour. Minola saw 
 too, that Victor Heron was not in a mood to remember that or 
 anything else just then, and that for his sake and hers she must 
 give some way to his humour. She was trying to compose herself 
 to this, when he repeated his question. 
 
 " What shall I say, Mr. Heron?" she asked gently, and in a 
 tone of subdued remonstrance. " I don't see any use in anything 
 I can say ; it is all so very unhappy." 
 
 It was strange how 'they both assumed the reality of the 
 discovery that each had made. It was curious how each assumed 
 that m the other's mind was a clear understanding of the meaning 
 of every word. There was no supposed need of explanation! 
 Between two natures alike so candid there was not the faintest 
 attempt at any fencing off the reality. 
 
 Victor turned the way she was going and walked by her side. 
 She had no power to prevent him, and was only somewhat relieved 
 to find that they were going on. 
 
 There was silence for a moment or two ; then Victor spoke 
 'We are very unfortunate," he said; and there seemed to 
 Minola something almost terrible in the simple acknowledgment 
 of companionship involved in the little monosyllable " we." 
 
 " We are indeed," she said, accepting the companionship as an 
 acknowledged reality. 
 
 " It was all my fault," he said; "I was a fool-a blind and foolish 
 diot. I only wish that I alone had to suffer for it. I do, indeed " 
 
276 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I am sure you do," Minola said. She knew him too well 
 to doubt that it must be an added pain to him, things being as 
 they were, that she should feel for him as he felt for her. 
 
 "You blame me for all this, Miss Grey? " 
 
 "Oh, no ! I don't blame anyone ; yes, I blame myself, but 
 only for allowing anyone to know — it would not have been so bad, 
 only for that." She stopped ; she feared she had said too much. 
 
 "How long have you known of this?" Victor asked. He 
 walked slowly by her side, and looked, not at her, but down at 
 the dusty path. It was curious how both spoke without any 
 distinct reference to the matter of which they talked. All that 
 was assumed between them. Between them now, as between the 
 brother and sister in Goethe's tragedy, was to be only the truth. 
 That was the necessity of their condition. 
 
 "This long time ; I don't know how long, but very long," she 
 answered. There was something peculiarly pathetic in the simple 
 humility of her answer. 
 
 A groan came from Victor. A long time — and he had never 
 known anything or thought of anything until lately, but rushed 
 headlong on like a blind fool. 
 
 " Then all might have been well if I hadn't been a fool and 
 a madman!" He struck the point of his walking-cane fiercely 
 at the ground, as if he were stabbing at some enemy — himself, 
 perhaps. 
 
 Minola plucked up heart to say something, which she thought 
 she ought to say. 
 
 " I don't know, Mr. Heron ; I am afraid it would not h°ve 
 been much better — somebody would have had to suffer. There is 
 — there is Lucy, you know ; we must not forget her." 
 
 "Yes, yes," he said, "we must not forget her; it is not any 
 fault of hers." 
 
 " Oh, no ! " 
 
 " But when you knew this," he said, suddenly looking into 
 Minola's face for the first time during this curious promenade, 
 ■" why did you go on as if you never could like anyone in the 
 world? How was I to know? Good God ! it never occurred to 
 me to think that a woman like you could care for a man like me — 
 in that sort of way. Do you remember when I told you one day, 
 long ago, that I had a goddess theory about women? Do you 
 remember my saying anything like that to you one day?" 
 
 " Oh, yes, Mr. Heron, quite well ! " 
 
 " That was true enough," he said, with a sort of smile. " I 
 did think of women like that. I thought of you as if you were a 
 goddess, Miss Grey ; and I did not believe it possible that such a 
 
A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 277 
 
 woman as you could care about me. I was quite grateful when 
 I found that poor little Lucy was foolish enough to think about 
 me ; I was, indeed. But why did you play at being a hater of men 
 and all that? Why did you deceive me ? You should not have 
 stooped to any such follies. I knew you didn't really hate men 
 or hate anybody ; I knew you were a great deal too good for that ; 
 but I did believe you were not a girl to care about any of us, in 
 that way." 
 
 " I am sorry for any affectation of any kind ; I don't suppose 
 any good ever came of it ; but I did believe that my feelings were 
 like that, at one time." 
 
 " But when you found that they weren't, then why did you 
 keep up such a pretence any more?" He remonstrated in the 
 earnest way of one who believes that he has been heavily wronged. 
 
 " I will tell you — I will tell you all the truth. I suppose we 
 ought not to speak in this way at all ; I suppose it is like a 
 treason to Lucy, and to all our friends ; I feel now almost like 
 a traitor. But this is only for once, Mr. Heron, and to settle all ; 
 and perhaps we shall both be better, and see our way the clearer 
 for having said this — although I came into this place only because 
 I was afraid that if I went the other way I might meet you — 
 and see how things happen ! " 
 
 She felt ashamed to go on ; it was as if they were culprits. 
 He, too, felt humbled to think that she should have had to try to 
 avoid him. 
 
 " Well," he said, " you may as well speak out now the whole 
 truth, and let us know once for all ; I wish we had been a little 
 more outspoken before this, both of us." 
 
 For the moment, in his pain, he seemed to forget that only 
 he could have spoken out, and that he had not known truly what 
 he would have until it was too late. 
 
 " No, it would have been of no use," Minola said simply ; " at 
 least, somebody would have had to suffer. The truth is this, Mr. 
 Heron : Lucy told me long ago all that she felt, poor child. She 
 trusted all her secret to me ; what could I do after that, but try at 
 least to keep my own ? You do not suppose I was to go round 
 the world — our little world, I mean — as the girl who was in love, 
 and whom nobody cared about?" There was a natural touch of 
 the " Miss Misanthrope" in Minola as she spoke these words. 
 
 " Then this was why you seemed to dislike people — because 
 of that?" 
 
 " I didn't see anything else to do." 
 
 They walked on a few steps in silence. 
 
 " It's all hopeless now," Victor said. 
 
278 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Hopeless as far as that goes, but not hopeless otherwise for 
 you, Mr. Heron. You will be very happy some time." 
 
 He turned upon her almost angrily. 
 
 " Do you call that happy," he asked, " to be married to a 
 woman I don't love, and to know that I might have married the 
 woman I do love, and to know that it is all my own fault, and that 
 I have done as much wrong and brought as much unhappiness to 
 one as to the other ? Do you think that is a prospect for a man to 
 look out to, and be happy ? I wish to Heaven I had been killed 
 in any of these trumpery affairs out there ! " He tossed his head 
 impatiently and contemptuously, as indicating the St. Xavier's 
 Settlements, and the slight esteem in which he held his colonial 
 career now. " I wish to God I had been killed there and forgotten 
 before I ever saw her face or yours ! " 
 
 The intensity of his tone when he spoke the word " forgotten " 
 might have served as an indication of his character, for one of 
 the passionate dreams of his youth and his manhood had been 
 that his name should be remembered somehow, as that of a man 
 who had done good work in the service of England. It may be 
 that if he had had less of that sort of manly ambition he might 
 have better understood how to see his way in the more familiar 
 trials of character. That ambition had supplied for him the place 
 of the dreams of love, and of loving women, and of romance, and 
 all the rest of it ; and when the new feelings — new to him — came 
 at last, he did not understand them as a commonplace young man 
 would have been sure to do. 
 
 Minola listened to him quietly, and let him speak all he cared 
 to say just then. She answered after a while : 
 
 " Oh, no, Mr. Heron, I don't mean that; I don't mean that 
 you could help feeling this for a while. But you will grow 
 reconciled after a little time ; and you know how Lucy deserves 
 to be loved — anyone must love her, I think ; and then you will 
 have a career and success ; and the lives of men are so full and so 
 active, and you have so many things to think of; while we " 
 
 She stopped. She did not care to utter the immemorial 
 lament, the ever true, ever pathetic, pitiful lament, over the 
 narrowness of woman's life, that was wailing in her heart at that 
 moment — on that bright spring day in pleasant St. James's Park. 
 
 But the words touched Victor profoundly. He turned away 
 from thoughts of self to her. 
 
 " It's true," he said ; " I suppose we have the best of it always ; 
 I was thinking of the shame that all this is to me. You don't 
 feel that ; you have done wrong to no one." . 
 
 " I don't know," Minola answered sadly ; " I think I am 
 
•ITS THE HANDKERCHIEF, SIX, THE LADY DROPPED.- 
 
A LOUNGE IN THE PARK. 279 
 
 doing wrong in speaking of all this to you ; I think I must 
 have done some wrong when that can come to be possible, and 
 when it seems the best thing left to do. I am Lucy's friend ; 
 she trusted all her secret to me — and now " 
 
 " There is nothing to be done," Heron said moodily. As if 
 it were possible to think of anything that could be done ! 
 
 " Nothing, except to make the best of what is ; and for you 
 to make her happy, and to be a success ; and to go back to the 
 House of Commons now;" she tried to speak in a firm and 
 cheery tone. 
 
 " I can't even ask you to remember me " 
 
 "Oh, yes, Mr. Heron ! why not? If you think it likely that 
 I should forget how kind you were and what a friend, then ask 
 me to remember you by all means. I shall remember you whether 
 you ask me or not." 
 
 " And you," he asked, looking round at her, "do you ask me 
 to remember you ? " 
 
 "No ; you will remember me, I know — why should you not? 
 We shall have to meet again sometimes, I suppose, and why 
 should we not be friends?" 
 
 He understood her this time. She was making a determined 
 effort to replace their relation to each other on the basis of friend- 
 ship. She had said all she meant to say about other feelings, 
 and how they came to be felt in vain. He respected her decision, 
 as indeed he now respected all she said or did. Up to that time 
 they had both spoken with a certain shamefacedness and con- 
 trition, as if both alike were conscious of degradation in their 
 strange and chance confidence. From the time when she spoke 
 these words they both became calmer, and looked around with 
 less sense of humiliation. 
 
 A hurrying step was heard behind them. Victor stopped and 
 turned round. " How is it with me when every noise appals 
 me ? " How is it with us when we start at a hurried step on the 
 path behind us? This was a very harmless intruder. It was a 
 poor woman who had picked up something, with which she was 
 hastening after Minola. As Victor stopped and she came up with 
 him first, she spoke to him in good-natured breathlessness — ■ 
 
 " It's the handkerchief, sir, the lady dropped — your good lady; 
 I saw it on the walk, and I said to my husband, It belongs to 
 the gentleman or his wife." She handed the kerchief to Victor, 
 delighted to have been of any service to anyone. 
 
 Minola heard the well-meant words as well as Victor. She 
 could not keep the colour from her cheeks ; but she took the 
 kerchief and was able to thank the poor woman in coherent words, 
 and even with a bright smile. 
 
280 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 They only walked a few yards on together. At the first turning 
 to which they came Minola stopped. 
 
 "Good-bye, Mr. Heron; I am going this way." She did not 
 give her hand. 
 
 " Good-bye," he said ; and then came towards her and held 
 out his hand. She put hers in his ; there was a formal farewell- 
 no pressure which either might feel ; they did not allow their eyes 
 to meet this time. Then he went his way and she went hers, 
 neither at the moment knowing or thinking whither the ways led ; 
 and that was all, and all was over. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 "lean'd her breast up till a thorn." 
 
 Mr. Money and Victor Heron walked home that night together 
 from the House of Commons. It was more than half an hour 
 after midnight when they left the House, but both considered 
 themselves getting off rather well so early as that, and neither loved 
 going to bed at prudent and wholesome hours. Victor walked 
 with Money to the door of the Victoria Street house, and then 
 Money asked him to come in that they might talk a little. " There 
 are two or three things I want to talk about," he said, "and we 
 are sure to have a quiet hour now." Victor was willing, and 
 Money brought him up to his study, where a fire was looking very 
 cheery, although the spring was a little advanced, and there were 
 cigars and other preparations for making a quiet hour pass 
 agreeably. 
 
 " I like this time of night," Money said, " because one is sure 
 to be let alone. There can't be any people wanting to see one 
 now ; and there are no newspapers and no letters, and all the 
 house is in bed. This is about the only time of the day when I 
 really feel that I am my own master. Come, take a cigar ; there's 
 Apollinaris and anything you like." 
 
 Victor sat down and began to smoke, and they fell to talking 
 for a while about things in the House, and the debate on Victor's 
 great question, which was soon to come off. 
 
 " By the way," Money said suddenly, " and before I forget, I 
 saw our friend, your rival, to-day — Sheppard, you know ; and he had 
 something to say to me that I want to ask your opinion about, 
 although perhaps it ought to be a sort of secret as yet. What 
 would you think of him as a husband for our friend, Miss Grey?" 
 
"LEAN'D HER BREAST UP TILL A THORN." 281 
 
 Victor almost started. He looked up so suddenly that Money- 
 followed unconsciously the direction of his eyes, fancying perhaps 
 he had seen some unexpected sight. 
 
 " Did you think you heard some one stirring?" Money asked. 
 
 " No, I didn't. Well, about Sheppard ?" 
 
 "What would you think of him, I was saying, as a husband 
 for Minola Grey?" 
 
 Heron blew several straight puffs of smoke from his cigar 
 before he answered. When he did speak his answer was not 
 encouraging. " Absurd," was the remark he made. 
 
 Money smiled. 
 
 " Well, I should have thought so too, perhaps ; but I believe 
 there is something to be said for the idea after all. This man 
 Sheppard came to me in rather a frank and straightforward way 
 to-day, and asked me straight out to give him the help of my 
 influence in persuading Miss Grey. He did propose for her before. 
 Did you know that ?" 
 
 " No, I did not." 
 
 " Nor I, although I dare say my women-folk did. Oh, yes, 
 he told me candidly that he had proposed for her not only once 
 but twice, or more often perhaps ! " 
 
 "Yes ; and she — what did she say?" Victor seemed to have 
 some difficulty about his cigar ; apparently it required tremendous 
 puffing to keep it alight. 
 
 " That's a bad cigar, I think, you have got hold of ; an odd 
 thing, too, in that box. Throw it away ; have another." 
 
 " No, thanks ; this is all right. Well, what did she say ?" 
 
 " Well, of course, you know, we may easily infer what she 
 said when, after his having pressed her in that sort of way, she 
 is not Mrs. Sheppard yet." 
 
 "Oh !" A kind of groan broke from Victor at the bare idea 
 of Minola being Mrs. Sheppard. " I can't imagine how any man 
 can persecute a girl in that way," he went on indignantly. " I 
 think he ought to be kicked; if I were the brother of a girl like 
 that I would kick him, by Jove ! " 
 
 "Yes, just so, and perhaps the girl would not thank her brother 
 in the least for his kindly intervention. My dear fellow, have you 
 never heard that in such things nineteen naysays make one grant? 
 It's all very well for you good-looking fellows, with a sort of con- 
 quering, careless air about you, who find the girls only too glad 
 when you ask them— it's all very well for you to talk about not 
 persecuting girls. But a man like Sheppard must press his case 
 a little or he will have no chance at all. He isn't by any means 
 a bad looking fellow either, but he has not the way that takes 
 
m 
 282 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 women ; he must be content to ask, perhaps, and ask again. I 
 have a good deal of sympathy for fellows like Sheppard." 
 
 " Well, but what does he want ? He has asked Miss Grey, 
 and she refused him — I should think so ; what does he want 
 now ? " 
 
 " To ask again and not to be refused, I suppose." 
 
 " But what can you do for him?" 
 
 " He thinks that if I were to see the thing as he does, and 
 to speak to Miss Grey about it, and advise her to think it over as 
 favourably as she could, it might perhaps have some influence on 
 her. You see, it's all very well just now while she is young, but 
 she must grow tired some time or other of the kind of lonely life 
 she leads, and she will not make new friends, and we are all in a 
 manner breaking up. Theresa will be married very soon, and 
 then Lucelet of course ; and when the girls are married, I think 
 sometimes of leaving England, Victor, my boy." 
 
 This was said with an air of carelessness, but, at the same 
 time, Mr. Money closely watched Heron's face to see how he took 
 the announcement. Victor certainly did look surprised. 
 
 " What on earth do you think of doing that for ?" 
 
 " Well, you know my interests in a money way are much more 
 in other countries than in this. In Russia, for instance, I have 
 found people in authority to appreciate the things I do in a way 
 that the people here never did. As long as the girls remained 
 unmarried, of course, I should never have thought of that ; but 
 now, thank God, they are both going to be married in the 
 happiest way, and my wife does not care for this country any more 
 than I do, and one cnnlH often see one's children — a journey is 
 nothing in our days — and on the whole I don't think I am much 
 longer for England if things go as I expect. But there's time 
 enough to talk about that," and he seemed a little relieved for 
 having got even so far. " The thing I wanted to speak to you 
 about now is this business of our friend Sheppard. You don't 
 like the idea?" 
 
 " The thing seems to me absurd and preposterous. He is a 
 slow, formal, dull sort of Philistine, and to marry him to such a 
 girl — good heavens ! how could you think of it ?" 
 
 Victor Heron jumped up in his usual excitable way, and began 
 to walk up and down the room. 
 
 "Look here," he said, stopping suddenly, "how should you 
 like the idea of your own daughter — either of your daughters — - 
 being married to a man she cared nothing about, and had refused 
 again and again? Put it in that light." 
 
 " But, my good fellow, a girl like that must marry some one. 
 
"LEAN'D HER BREAST UP TILL A THORN." 283 
 
 She can't help herself. She is handsome and clever, and she has 
 some money, and fellows will get around her, and the more 
 generous she is the more easily she will be imposed upon. That 
 fellow Blanchet has been trying hard to get her to fall in love with 
 him. I'd rather trust her happiness a thousand times to a man 
 like Sheppard than to a fellow like that. And, do you know? — 
 our friend St. Paul actually fell in love with her — downrignt in 
 love — and wanted her to marry him, and offered as a proof of his 
 sincerity that she should begin by handing over every sixpence 
 she has to little Mary Blanchet." 
 
 Heron flung himself down in his seat again, to give due ear to 
 this revelation. 
 
 " How do you know?" he asked. 
 
 "St. Paul himself came and told me ; he said she was the 
 only girl he ever could have cared about, and that he would have 
 given her money enough to make ducks and drakes of in any 
 benevolent projects she liked. Confess, Heron, that there must 
 have been some thing tempting in that — at least, there would have 
 been to most girls. St. Paul, after all, is the son of a duke and 
 the brother of a duke, and a clever girl might have hoped to cure 
 him of all his nonsense, and bring him to terms with his people 
 again, and get him back into society, and get herself there along 
 with him. I tell you what — my wife is a terrible Radical and 
 all that, and yet I am not by any means certain that if such an 
 offer had been made to one of our girls a year or so back she 
 would not have been delighted at the chance. But our friend 
 Minola would not hear of it." 
 
 This was trying news to Victor. He knew only too well, 
 because only too late, why Minola refused every love offer that 
 could be made. 
 
 " According to all established ideas," Money said, " the girl 
 ought to have been in love with some one else ; but that is not 
 so, I suppose, in this case. It seems that she knew no one in 
 Keeton but this poor Sheppard. He tells me that she told him 
 she was in love with nobody but a man in a book — that was while 
 she was in Keeton ; and here in London she only knew just the 
 two or three fellows we have now been talking about ; and so far 
 as I can see she has refused them everyone in turn. There's 
 positively no one left but you, Victor, and I suppose you never 
 proposed for her?" Mr. Money smiled good-humouredly. 
 
 " No," Victor replied ; " I never proposed for her." 
 
 " The right man has not come along, I suppose ; but the 
 question is, will he ever come ? " 
 
 " Suppose he never comes?" Victor said, with sudden energy 
 
m 
 284 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 and jumping from his seat again. " Suppose he never comes, 
 what then? It would be a thousand times better for a girl like 
 that to live alone — yes, and die alone — than to marry a man she 
 did not love, and to have to drag through life with that sort of 
 man or with any man she did not care for in the right way. She 
 is too good for him ; she is too good for anyone, for that matter; 
 but to marry him would be a shame. Don't have anything to do 
 with it, Money ! Think of your own daughters. How would you 
 like to have Lucy married to a man she did not care for ? " 
 
 " That would not be the worst," Money said. " There might 
 be much worse than that. It might be Lucelet's chance — thank 
 God, it isn't — not to be able to love anyone in that sort of way, 
 and yet she might marry some good fellow, and make him a good 
 little wife, and be happy in the end. No ; it isn't that I should 
 dread for Lucelet so much. It would be her marrying a man who 
 did not really and truly love her." 
 
 Money said all this in a thoughtful, almost dreamy sort of 
 way, holding his cigar in his hand the while. He spoke as one 
 might speak of a danger which exists no longer, but of which he 
 can hardly think even yet without a certain drear impression ; and 
 he ended with a sigh of relief. 
 
 " She is saved from that, my boy, thanks to you," he said, and 
 he stretched out his hand to Heron, who was near him at the 
 moment, pacing up and down in his still unquelled excitement. 
 
 Heron felt his heart torn with pain and shame. He hardly 
 knew how to take that outstretched hand. He seemed as if he 
 were driven along to say, " It's not true ; I don't deserve your 
 confidence, and you and your daughter ought to hate me." What 
 might have come of the impulse no one can know, for just at that 
 moment the attention of Mr. Money was suddenly drawn away. 
 
 " I certainly heard some one stirring outside the door there," 
 he said ; " odd, that. I thought everyone was in bed long ago. 
 Stop a moment, Heron ; I will go and see." 
 
 He went to the door and opened it. Heron was hardly even 
 listening to his words. 
 
 " Why, it's Lucelet ! " Money exclaimed. " What on earth are 
 you doing here, you little creature, at this time of night ? Look 
 here, Victor, here's a little eaves-dropper." 
 
 He came into the room, bringing with him the palpitating and 
 rather affrighted little Lucy. She blushed crimson red at being 
 thus caught, and finding that Victor was with her father. 
 
 " Oh, no, papa — for shame to say such a thing ! I was not 
 eaves-dropping ; I was only listening to be sure that you were 
 alone. At first I thought you were ; and then I heard you 
 
"LEAN'D HER BREAST UP TILL A THORN." ;Ss 
 
 talking, and I did not know who was with you, and I listened just 
 for one moment, in order to be sure." 
 
 "You did not think it was Victor who was with me, I daresay?" 
 
 " No ; at least, I didn't think so at first." 
 
 Lucy still looked embarrassed and alarmed. It must be 
 owned that Victor Heron did not seem quite at his ease. Money 
 was considerably amazed, for he had never had a visitation of this 
 kind before. 
 
 " Take a seat with us, Lucy," Victor said at last, " since you 
 have paid us a visit." He handed her a chair. She looked at 
 him timidly and only said, " Thank you, Victor," but did not sit 
 down. Her father put his hands on her shoulders and scrutinised 
 her with a manner of good-humoured authority. 
 
 "So you have not been in bed at all, Lucelet? But that isn't 
 anything very new — for you to sit up too late. But what did you 
 want, pray, in this part of the building at this hour? Think of the 
 possible shock to our nerves, you foolish young person. Suppose 
 we had fancied we saw a ghost and expired of fright ? " 
 
 Lucy smiled a rather wan smile. 
 
 " I wanted to speak to you, papa, and I thought I would sit 
 up until you came in — it wouldn't be very late, perhaps ; and then 
 I heard you come, and I was not quite certain if you were alone, 
 and after a while I came down to try." 
 
 " Was it such very important business, Lucelet, that it would 
 not keep until to-morrow? and must it be told to me in solemn 
 seclusion and at the deadest hour of night ? " 
 
 " I thought I should like to see you by yourself, and when you 
 were not likely to be disturbed " 
 
 " Likely to be disturbed by anyone but yourself, you mean, I 
 suppose, Lucelet?" 
 
 Lucelet somehow had no mirth in her to-night. She still 
 looked scared and uneasy, and unlike herself. 
 
 " You have been to the House, Victor ? " she said, as if she 
 would turn the conversation away from herself. 
 
 Before Victor could answer, Money struck in : 
 
 " Confess, Lucelet," he said, with something like gravity of 
 tone, " that you expected Victor here ; and that that was the 
 reason why you came stealing down to our midnight conference ? " 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " No, indeed, dear; it was not that. I did not expect to find 
 Victor here." 
 
 " And I ought not to be here," Victor said, " at such an hour 
 as this. You want to talk to your papa, Lucy, and I must not 
 interrupt you." He seemed as if about to go. 
 
286 ■ MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Oh, it's nothing ! " Money said. " Can't it be told before 
 Victor, Lucelet — or can't it wait just a little ? We were talking of 
 something that would greatly interest you, I know, when you came 
 in ; and since you have given us the benefit of your company at a 
 time when you ought to be in bed, I don't object at all to taking 
 you into our council. Do you, Victor ? " 
 
 " Oh, no, if Lucy would not rather speak to you now alone. 
 
 I can come in to-morrow, and we can talk of the other matter 
 >t 
 
 " I think when Lucelet hears what it is, she will not be inclined 
 to put it off for any business of her own. It is about Miss Grey, 
 Lucelet." 
 
 Lucy looked up with a start, and the colour came again into 
 the face that was pale a moment before. 
 
 " About Nola? You have something to say about Nola ? " 
 " Yes, we have. Will you come into council, Lucelet ? " 
 " I don't know — if you wish, yes ; what is it about? " 
 " No, no ; it would be cruelty," said Victor resolutely. " It is 
 clear that Lucy is too tired for much consultation ; and as she has 
 stayed up for a particular purpose, she ought not to be interfered 
 with. No, thank you, Money ; I'll not stay now. It's quite time 
 for me to go." 
 
 Lucy made no attempt to induce him to stay. Money looked 
 at her and then at Victor in some surprise. 
 " Good-night, Lucy," Victor said. 
 
 " Good-night, Victor." She put her little cold and tremulous 
 hand into his, and she looked up at him. There was such an 
 expression in her eyes as made Victor's heart thrill with pain. 
 Their eyes met for a moment, and her look was full of unhappiness. 
 There was no complaint in it ; there was no angry protest against 
 man, or fate, or heaven, or anything; only such settled unhappiness 
 as one might have thought that young and pretty face could never 
 be made to show. As she looked into his face, and her hand was 
 still held in his, a tear began to gather in the child-like soft eyes, 
 and the little lips began to quiver. She withdrew her hand 
 quickly but not ungently. 
 
 Victor was going; Money rose to accompany him to the door, 
 but Victor saw Lucy put her hand upon her father's arm as if to 
 detain him; and he at once insisted that Money must not leave his 
 room. As Heron went out and closed the door behind him, he 
 heard Money say to his daughter : 
 
 " Why, Lucelet, my dear, what is this all about ? " 
 Victor hastened away lest he might hear any more. He felt 
 miserably unhappy. He felt conscience-stricken, although it might 
 
"LEAN'D HER BREAST UP TILL A THORN." 2S7 
 
 have puzzled a casuist to say where there could be found anything 
 to blame in any part of his conduct in which Lucy was concerned. 
 It is much to be feared, however, that in real life only those feel 
 the stings of conscience much who have done little to deserve the 
 torture. In the realms of poetry and art, indeed, conscience may 
 " call her furies forth to shake the sounding scourge and hissing 
 snake," and may show " what lesson may be read beside a sinner's 
 restless bed." But in ordinary life the sounding scourge is usually 
 only for the sensitive skin of the man or woman who is always 
 trying to do right, and the regular sinner sleeps a sleep of infantile 
 depth and sweetness. For Victor Heron, although it was not 
 certain that poor Lucy's melancholy eyes had anything to do with 
 him at all, there was little sleep that night. " Conscience, antici- 
 pating time," in the lines from which we have just quoted, 
 " already rues the unacted crime." In Heron's case, conscience 
 rued a wrong which it never had been in Heron's heart to do. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 " AND EVEN FOR LOVE WILL BURY LOVE IN EARTH." 
 
 When Minola made that sudden confession to Mary Blanchet 
 which was told in a former chapter, she did it under the impulse 
 of a feeling which she could no more restrain than she could 
 explain it. After it was done she was sorry, perhaps, that she had 
 made the confession, but she had no fear that it would be 
 betrayed. Devoted as Mary was to her brother, Minola felt 
 certain that she would never let one word of such a secret escape 
 from her to him; and Minola did not even consider the possibility 
 of her telling it to anyone else. They hardly spoke of it after- 
 wards. Minola only once impressed on Mar}' the necessity of 
 keeping it the profoundest secret, which, to do the poetess justice, 
 was hardly necessary. If there was one obligation which Mary 
 respected above all others, it was the confidence of a woman's 
 love-secret. She became, if possible, more devoted than ever to 
 her leader ; first, because the leader had proved herself a very 
 woman by having a love-secret, and, next, because Minola had 
 confided the secret to her. Mary did not ask who the hero of 
 the secret story might be. She easily got to know that Mr. St. 
 Paul was not the person ; because by questions and by inferences 
 she came to understand that he had really offered himself for the 
 place, and had not been accepted. This was a subject of immense 
 
288 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 delight and pride to Mary. In her wildest dreams of day or night 
 she had never hoped for such an honour as to have a friend who 
 had refused the son of a duke. No matter about the character 
 of the duke's son ; no matter if he was cast off by his own family 
 and his own class; all the same he was the son of a duke — nothing 
 could alter that. He, then, being out of the way, it was not, per- 
 haps, very difficult for the astute Mary to guess at the real person; 
 and it did indeed seem to her a great misfortune for her leader to 
 have fallen into an attachment so hopeless as that must be. Still, 
 the sympathies of Miss Blanchet were always rather with hopeless 
 than with hopeful attachments. Minola became in her eyes only 
 all the more interesting, all the more beautiful, all the more 
 womanly and queenly, because of this unhappy love. 
 
 One great advantage Minola gained by her sudden outburst of 
 confession was that Mary ceased from that time forth to tell her 
 of her brother's love and disappointment. But Minola did not 
 know that Mary grew rather more hopeful about her brother than 
 before. Since Miss Grey absolutely could not marry the man she 
 loved, there was all the more chance that she might resign herself 
 to marry some one who at least loved her. When Victor Heron 
 was married once for all, then, perhaps, Mary thought, Minola 
 might begin to reconcile herself to realities. Herbert Blanchet's 
 chance might come then after all. 
 
 Meanwhile a marked change for the better was coming over 
 Blanchet himself. He really had been awakened, as a certain class 
 of pious person might say, to a sense of the goodness that was in 
 life and in some human hearts. He had had these feelings stirred 
 within him for the first time by Minola's spontaneous kindness. 
 He fell in love with Minola, and he grew ashamed of himself, 
 and the pitiful affectations of his life. He asked her to love him, 
 and he was refused, as we know, but very kindly and considerately. 
 Minola showed, perhaps, only too much consideration for his 
 feelings. She assured him that she had no intention to marry, and 
 that in any case she could not say she felt for him any of the 
 sentiments he professed to feel for her. He went away not with- 
 out hope, and he set himself to work to redeem his life from the 
 reproach of idleness. Mrs. Money, as we know already, took 
 him lately under her special care as helper of unhappy men. 
 Perhaps she guessed well enough what were his pains and his hopes. 
 He went to see her often, at hours, as she took care it should be, 
 when Minola was not likely to be there. Mrs. Money grew more 
 and more fond of him as she helped him on, and perhaps thought 
 it would not be a bad thing for either if in the end Minola came 
 to marry him. "The dear child must marry some one in the 
 
"AND EVEN FOR LOVE WILL BURY LOVE." 289 
 
 end," Mrs. Money took for granted, and, as she had means 
 enough of her own, why might she not marry this handsome and 
 gifted young fellow ? Why might she not come to love him ? Of 
 all these ideas Mrs. Money communicated none to her husband, 
 for she knew that he had ideas of his own on the same subject 
 which were not the same as hers. For once, Mr. and Mrs. 
 Money were, as regarded a girl's settlement in life, almost as much 
 divided as Mr. and Mrs. Page. Under the influence of her ideas, 
 however, Mrs. Money was determined to extend a helping hand to 
 the poet. She induced her husband to exert his influence so far 
 on Blanchet's behalf as to recommend him to some newspaper 
 editors whom Mr. Money knew, and to obtain for his talents as a 
 writer of light and brilliant articles a chance of success and pay. 
 The poet went to work very steadily. He joined with a literary 
 friend to take chambers in the Temple ; he renounced poetry for 
 the present, until he should have shown that he really had in him 
 a capacity for hard work, and until some inspiration should arise 
 compelling him to attempt a poem, and therefore proving him a 
 man of at least poetic calling. In truth, the meaning of all this 
 was that Blanchet was disappointed, was penitent, was disposed 
 to blame himself for his failure hitherto — another and very subtle 
 and satisfying mood of self-conceit — and that he was ready to 
 plunge from extreme of self-indulgence to extreme of self- 
 restraint. 
 
 In all this, however, he was working still with a purpose and a 
 hope. He had in his life experienced most things except pros- 
 perity. He had fallen on bad chances and into a bad school for 
 a petulant and fitful nature like his. He had been left for the 
 most part to a companionship which had little regard for the 
 manly virtues of character. He had consoled himself for disap- 
 pointments and failures by wrapping himself in a ragged mantle of 
 self-conceit, and affectation, and cynicism. It was easier to talk 
 and think with scorn of an unappreciating world than to work 
 patiently to deserve appreciation. The break-down of all this, 
 his strong love for Minola and her generous kindness, together 
 wrought on him so as to dispose him for more wholesome struggles 
 and a fresh life. His self-conceit now worked in a new form. 
 He was strongly persuaded that Minola was only trying what he 
 could do in the way of manly struggle and achievement before 
 she listened to him, and he told himself that the present was, after 
 all, only a period of probation. 
 
 Once he allowed some hope of this kind to escape him in 
 talking with his sister, and she did not wholly discourage it. 
 Some faint whisper, some half-breathed, unconscious utterance of 
 
 u 
 
290 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 hers, filled him, however, with a terrible suspicion. He had never 
 before thought of the possibility of Miss Grey loving anyone if she 
 did not love him. He always complacently regarded her as he 
 regarded fame, as something which, perhaps, has to be wooed amid 
 disappointments, and which may not come all at once or without 
 trouble, but which was sure to be his portion when he had exerted 
 himself enough to deserve it. The new suspicion breathed so un- 
 consciously into his mind by poor Mary filled it with a strange 
 power. It held him day and night. It turned him suddenly and 
 almost completely from his steady work of self-improvement. He 
 felt that he could do nothing until he was clear upon that point, 
 and he set himself to watch and find out. 
 
 There never could have been a sermon against suspicion and 
 against mean watchfulness half so impressive as the sum total of 
 what his suspicions and his spyings cost Herbert Blanchet, if he 
 only could have known it. Minola had heard of his steady work 
 from Mrs. Money as well as from Mary, and she was glad of the 
 improvement, and felt a higher respect for him because he had not 
 allowed himself to be wholly crumpled up by a disappointment in 
 love. When all was first known between her and Victor Heron, 
 she felt so miserable and so guilty, that she could have found it in 
 her heart to wish she had married anyone, or gone to the other end 
 of the world, or drowned herself, rather than have Lucy and 
 Heron and herself entangled in such a miserable web of per- 
 plexity, and of something like deceit. 
 
 One dim, foggy evening, when spring seemed to have suddenly 
 turned back into winter, Minola sat in her room, drearily touching 
 some chords on her piano, and meanwhile asking herself, "'What 
 is to be done now? what is to come next?" 
 
 " One thing is to be done," she said, speaking aloud and rising 
 from the piano. " I am going out, Mary." 
 
 " Isn't it wet and foggy, dear?" Mary asked. Mary never 
 saw any use in going out when the weather was not very fine. 
 
 " I don't care, Mary; I'll battle with the elements. Is not 
 that the heroic way of putting it?" 
 
 " I suppose so ; I wish I were a hero, dear." 
 
 " What has become of your poetry, Mary? Your poems ought 
 to be your heroism." 
 
 " What has become of them, dear ? Oh, I don't know ! What 
 has become of everything?" 
 
 " Yes," Minola said, in irrepressible despondency ; " I wonder 
 what has become of everything we cared about, Mary ? I wonder 
 what will become of you and me ? " 
 
 Mary sighed. 
 
" AND EVEN FOR LOVE WILL BURY LOVE!' 291 
 
 " Oh, you are well enough, Minola dear ! you have youth and 
 beauty and everything ; and you could do so much good and 
 make people happy, and by making them happy you would be 
 happy yourself." 
 
 There was silence for a moment or two. 
 
 " How is your brother, Mary ?" Minola asked abruptly. 
 
 " He is very well, dear," Mary said, looking up timidly. " I 
 think he is very well; he does not complain of anything. He is 
 working very hard, and he tells me it does him good, and he 
 seems very hopeful, I think." 
 
 " I am very glad to hear it; indeed I am, Mary," Minola said 
 in an almost penitent tone ; and then she made preparations for 
 what she called battling with the elements. 
 
 She went her usual way through the Park, thinking sadly 
 enough of the first days when she knew that walk, and when she 
 was full of the joy of her newly-acquired independence. It seemed 
 to her, knowing all that had passed in that short interval, as if 
 no human creature could have shown herself less fitted for inde- 
 pendence than she. She began to be sick of her purposeless life, 
 which had, so far as she saw, only brought distress on herself and 
 on her friends. A woman of the world would have thought little 
 of all that had passed — would have thought, perhaps, that nothing 
 that could be called anything had passed. But Minola's proud 
 spirit and sensitive conscience had not been subdued or seared by 
 the ways of the world. She had tried the past chapters of her life, 
 and she had condemned them ; and from her own sentence there 
 was no appeal. 
 
 Soon Miss Misanthrope stood on the bridge that spans the 
 canal, her favourite spot. She had come there for quiet and for 
 though. The day had been wet and foggy, so much so that at 
 one time it seemed impossible for her to get out of doors at all, 
 and she dreaded a whole day caged up with Mary Blanchet — at 
 least, until she had made up her mind on a question of deep 
 moment to her. But the rain ceased to stream and was succeeded 
 by a thick, warm fog, and Minola did not heed the fog; and so 
 she started for her solitary walk. By the time she had crossed the 
 Park the fog was beginning to lift, and when she stood on the 
 bridge she saw a curious and a very lovely sight. On the canal, 
 across it, all along its banks for a certain distance, the heavy, 
 damp fog brooded. It brooded thick, and soft, and dank, as 
 though the season were early winter instead of late spring rapidly 
 melting into summer. It was rather late in the evening ; the ap- 
 pearance of the scene was for a certain distance around rather 
 that of a November night than of a spring evening, however late. 
 
 u 2 
 
292 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 But high up in the heavens, above the region of the fog, the sky 
 was clear, was all of a faint delicate blue, and the moon was now 
 bright. Immediately beneath Minola's feet, in the water, the 
 reflection of the moon was brilliant, and the sluggish ripples were 
 glorified in its light. Yet if she allowed her gaze to follow the 
 canal, though but a very little way, she came on the fog-bank and 
 the region of the mist again. So, if she raised her eyes slowly from 
 the canal to the sky, she saw in succession of almost imperceptible 
 change the murky hue of the water in the fog, the blackish grey 
 of the spectral trees seen dimly through it, and then shades of 
 softening grey, until in some manner which the gazer could not 
 clearly make out the grey had all given way to the pale blue, and 
 at last, following the lighting heaven to the source of light, she 
 reached the glittering effulgent yellow in which the moon was 
 circled. A strange and beautiful condition of atmosphere and 
 sky thus brought the fogs and chilly waters of November and the 
 soft blue skies and mild moonlight of May into one picture. 
 
 The picture had this effect upon Minola, that it took her for 
 the moment away from her own brooding troubles. It told her, 
 too, that, come what would, the beauty of sky and water would 
 remain a living possession for her. She began to wonder whether, 
 after all, we do not exaggerate in our romantic or petulant moods 
 those sorrows that are said to be especially of the heart. It 
 seemed to her, under the softening and purifying influence of the 
 scene around, that there was much left for her to do and to enjoy 
 in life. Hers was a nature of that mould that is peculiarly alive to 
 the influences of sky, and scene, and atmosphere — a nature that, 
 under other conditions of training would have been profoundly 
 superstitious, and for which, to adopt the picturesque expression 
 of Schiller, the door of the ghost-kingdom would easily open. 
 Had she not been brought up in prosaic and well-informed 
 England of the midland counties it is probable that the door of 
 that ghost-kingdom would always have stood ajar for her, and that 
 amid the commonplace work and joys of every day she would often 
 have had sight of the vast lost regions of the supernatural— that 
 Eden of fearful fascination from which man, by reason of his eating 
 the fruit of the tree of science, has shut himself out. But, even 
 as it was, she retained enough of the thrilling temperament that 
 admits of superstition to feel peculiarly influenced, now encouraged, 
 and now depressed, by the movement of a cloud, the gleam of a 
 star, the sudden, unexpected ripple of water among concealing 
 reeds. Therefore as she stood this night, and studied the picture 
 all around her, she felt her soul growing exalted, and saw the 
 heavy mists of her personal troubles begin to roll away and show 
 some gleam of brightness beyond. 
 
"AND E VEN FOR LOVE I VILL BURY LOVE." 293 
 
 Wien she came slowly away she was filled with a resolve. If 
 it was not a very wise one, it was at least unselfish, and it was the 
 result of the calmest thought she could take, alone and wholly 
 uncounselled. She had clearly seen for some time that her first 
 theory of life was all a failure. It had completely broken down. 
 She brooded hopelessly over this mournful conviction for a while, 
 and then, like all beings of healthy, unselfish nature, she began to 
 ask herself what was to be done next ? She could not give up all 
 her life to grieving over the irreparable. It was not enough for 
 her to sit down and cry because things had not gone well with 
 her. Something must be done ; what was to be done ? 
 
 She could not remain in London and live this kind of life any 
 more. It would be intolerable if she had to run the risk of meet- 
 ing Victor Heron day after day. She knew well enough his 
 sudden energy of nature, and she feared for him more than for 
 herself that he might make some effort to break away from the 
 pledge that as yet alone held him to poor Lucy. It seemed clear 
 to Minola that in the miserable game of cross-purposes they had 
 been playing they had left no way out except with unhappiness 
 to some one. It was equally clear to her that Lucy ought not to 
 be the sufferer. She did not doubt that time would soften or 
 wholly remove the effect of his mistake and his disappointment for 
 Victor Heron, and that he would come to love Lucy as she ought 
 to be loved, and. to be as happy as men can well expect to be. 
 'When a thing is inevitable she knew that souls with any manhood 
 in them will always make the best of it; and she well knew that 
 Heron's was a soul filled with genuine manhood. The one thing, 
 therefore, most needful to be done was to make the complete 
 separation of herself and Victor inevitable. 
 
 At first she had ideas of going to live far away from England. 
 She spent more than one musing hour in thinking on the place 
 to be chosen for her retreat. ■ She thought of the East, and was 
 almost amused at the idea of her being another Hester Stanhope, 
 for in her very childish days Hester Stanhope used to be a sort of 
 heroine with her: She thought of Rome ; and, indeed, her heart 
 yearned for a life wholly given up to Rome. She thought of 
 Athens ; and she thought, too, of the fresh, new world across the 
 Atlantic, where every new idea and every free assertion of individual 
 energy is believed to have a fuller and fairer chance of justifying 
 itself than here among us. But there came up amid all these 
 dreamings the reflection that, after all, this would be doing little 
 good for any mortal but herself. It would only be a sort of 
 sensuality of the soul indulged to the full. It was then the 
 thought rose in her mind that perhaps it was her duty to make 
 
294 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 some manner of sacrifice for the happiness of some one else. " I 
 cannot be happy myself in my own way," she said to herself; 
 " that is certain. Why should I not try to order things so that, 
 by some self-denial, I may yet be the means of making some 
 one else more happy than he might otherwise be ? " How very 
 happy she might make poor Mary Blanchet by marrying her 
 brother ! And Blanchet, too, who professed to love her so much 
 — and who was surely quite sincere, for Minola had lately learned 
 to have great faith in the sincerity of human love — if she could 
 make him happy, would it not be a better use to which to put her 
 life than to moon it away in the indulgence of a vain lament for 
 the unattainable ? There were some gifts in him, and under favour- 
 ing auspices they might shine into something really great. Why 
 should she not apply her life to the task of endeavouring to give 
 them a full development ? It seemed to Minola that this would 
 be a far better way of spending her youth than surrendering it 
 wholly to solitude and her own indulgence in vain regret. One 
 dread sometimes made her shudder at the idea. Suppose Victor 
 Heron were to think that she never really had had any steady and 
 enduring love for him ? Suppose he set her as down as a woman 
 of no real heart, no strong emotion at all ? But then came quick 
 as a ray of light the conviction, " He will never think that;" and 
 afterwards, in melancholy resignation, the reflection, " If he should, 
 it is only all the better." 
 
 So she made up her mind. The resolve was an unwise one, no 
 doubt. A girl who had known more of the world's ways would 
 never have made it — at least, she would never have made it with 
 such a purpose and such a hope. A woman of the world might have 
 married for money when she could not get the man she loved ; 
 she would have married for a home, and a protector, and a settle- 
 ment, and all the rest of it ; and we should most of us have said 
 that she did sensibly and well. She might have married to please 
 her father and mother, as the good girls were always taught that it 
 was their duty to do in the formal old days, and her filial piety would 
 have been apolauded. But the idea of marrying a poor young man 
 without even the excuse of loving him, the idea of marrying him 
 merely because he loved her, and she thought she might do him 
 good, and make his life happy; this would undoubtedly have 
 seemed to all sensible persons not only very absurd, but perhaps 
 rather unwomanly as well. Such, however, was the resolve Minola 
 made, and it was made deliberately and in honest purpose for the 
 right. In the perplexed way of her life she saw nothing better to 
 do than this. This would secure the happiness of poor Lucy, who 
 then would never know that her happiness had been in danger ; 
 
" AND EVEN FOR LOVE WILL BURY LOVE." 295 
 
 it would make Heron's course clear and inevitable; it would 
 perhaps make Blanchet happy ; it would certainly make Mary 
 very happy ; and for Minola herself, it would at least give her the 
 knowledge that her life was of some use to some human hearts. 
 She came away from the Park with a resolve. In that sense she 
 was less unhappy than before. 
 
 " I will see Herbert Blanchet. I will trust to his honour and 
 his generosity. I will tell him that I love — that I did love — a 
 man whom I cannot marry ; and, if he is. willing to have me for 
 his wife with that knowledge, I shall not hold back any longer." 
 
 "After all, perhaps I shall thus be acting out my part of Miss 
 Misanthrope in the spirit and the letter," she said, with a gleam 
 of her old humour, as she walked homeward. 
 
 " Mary, I should like to see your brother very much, and as 
 soon as he could come," Minola said to her companion that 
 evening, as they sat alone, and tried to get up an appearance of 
 their old cheerfulness. 
 
 Mary looked up surprised. 
 
 " I am sure, Minola, he ought to be only too delighted ; but 
 do you think it would be well to ask him to come?" 
 
 " Would it be any harm ? " . 
 
 "He feels such a great deal, you know; or, indeed, I don't 
 think you could well know. There are feelings we can all only 
 have for ourselves. I am afraid, Minola dear, it would only renew 
 his unhappiness, poor fellow. He loves you so much, Minola." 
 
 Minola coloured and felt distressed. Almost her heart failed 
 her, but she kept to her purpose. 
 
 " If I wanted to see him very particularly, Mar)', don't you 
 think he would come then?" 
 
 Mary looked up again in doubled wonder. A wild hope came 
 into her mind which she would not dare to express, but which set 
 her all trembling and brought the tears into her eyes. 
 
 " Oh, yes, Minola dearest, of course he would come ! Of 
 course he must know, as well as I know, that you would not bring 
 him here to give him needless pain, and that you have some good 
 purpose." 
 
 " I want to say something to him very particularly, Mary, 
 which I think now I ought to say. I want to ask him something. 
 I don't know how he will answer it ; but I feel that I ought to 
 give him the chance of answering it. Now, don't begin puzzling 
 your head about it, Mary dear ; you will know it all soon, what- 
 ever way things turn out ; but at present, dear, it specially con- 
 cerns him and me, and I could not tell even you, Mary, until I 
 had spoken to him first." 
 
296 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Mary was a little cast down from her wild hopes. She feared 
 that, after all, it was only some explanation Minola proposed to 
 give to Herbert, with a view, perhaps, of making him more 
 reconciled to his fate, a result about which Mary had but little 
 hope. She accepted her part, however, and promised to go and 
 see her brother the very first thing in the morning. 
 
 It would be needless to deny that, in thinking over her project 
 of self-sacrifice, Minola had thought of other names as well as 
 that of Herbert Blanchet. She had thought, for instance, of her 
 too faithful old lover, Mr. Sheppard ; but she could not see the 
 possibility of a life spent with Mr. Sheppard. She did not see that 
 she could be of any manner of use to him in his career; rather, 
 indeed, she felt that she must necessarily be something of a 
 hindrance. Then there was no Mary Blanchet in that case to 
 be joined in the objects of the sacrifice. Mr. Sheppard had 
 money enough, and wanted no help in that way. Her money 
 might enable Blanchet, she thought, to give his genius full sway 
 — to give it its head, without regard to prudence, and publishers, 
 and pot-boilers. " I suppose he has genius ; I think he has 
 genius," she kept saying to herself. If she was to sacrifice herself 
 — and this must in any case be an absolute sacrifice — she felt she 
 must justify the act to her own heart and conscience by the 
 assurance that it would do the fullest good in her power to do. 
 
 When Mary, full of doubt and hope, went to see her brother 
 next morning, she was startled by the change that appeared to 
 have suddenly taken place in him. He seemed to have thrown 
 away his hard-working mood, and to be reckless and almost 
 ferocious. When Mary told him she had brought him a'message 
 from Minola, he looked almost as if she had said she brought a 
 warrant for his arrest. 
 
 " What does she want of me, Mary ? You must know. Come, 
 let us hear it ; tell it out." 
 
 " But, Herbert dear, indeed I don't know. She did not tell 
 me anything." 
 
 "And you don't guess, my sister?" he asked, with a sickly 
 smile that made her uncomfortable to see. ; 
 
 " No, Herbert. She only said that she wanted to ask you 
 a question, and that you ought to have a chance of answering 
 it, or something of that kind." 
 
 "Yes, I thought so. Very well, Mary; tell her I will not 
 go ; tell her to think anything she likes of me — the very worst will 
 not be too bad ; but I will not see her." 
 
 He turned his back on his sister. Mary, however, had seen 
 him in heroic and in despondent moods often enough not to feel. 
 
" AND EVEN FOR LOVE WILL BURY LOVE." 297 
 
 quite discouraged by this demonstration. She endeavoured to 
 argue with him ; and ventured to hint that probably he might 
 find everything turning out for the very best when he came to 
 speak with Minola. 
 
 " You. think so ?" he asked, with a laugh. " Very well, Mary, I 
 will go ; it may as well be got done with once for all. Come, my 
 sister, let us go. Are you to be present at the interview, Mary?" 
 
 "No, Herbert; oh, no! She wants to speak to you alone 
 first. But I dare say I shall know some time." 
 
 "I dare say you will ; I only wonder you have not known 
 it already. Tell me, Mary ; don't you think one had best tell the 
 truth, when it is certain that he must be found out if he tells 
 a lie?" 
 
 " Oh, Herbert, what a question !" 
 
 " You think it very absurd, don't you ? Well, Mary, there is 
 some sense in it, too. You may be sure I shall answer Miss 
 Grey's question very truthfully to-day." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 LEFT LONELY. 
 
 That was a time of strange and painful emotion during which 
 Minola waited for the coming of Blanchet and his sister. There 
 were moments when she would have given all the world to be able 
 to recall what she had said and done. There were even moments 
 of agonising reaction, when she felt inclined to descend the stairs 
 softly, and open the door, and go into the street, and disappear for 
 evermore somehow from the sight of all who knew her. Once 
 or twice she covered her face with her hands as if she felt an 
 intolerable shame. Once or twice she burst into tears. She was 
 only sustained by the thought that the extraordinary step she had 
 resolved on would secure poor Lucy's happiness, and that it 
 would make both Mary Blanchet and her brother very happy. 
 Other way to make her wretched failure of a life useful to any 
 human creature she saw none. She got up and walked about the 
 room like some half wild and caged creature, whose limitations 
 sometimes become almost unbearable. She was terrified at the 
 fate she had brought upon herself ; she looked back with miserable 
 regret to the few free and happy days she had spent when she first 
 came to London. " Let no wretched woman ever try to be inde- 
 pendent!" she cried out in her bitterness. 
 
298 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 What a long time they were in coming ! for now she began 
 to wish that the interview were over, and anything resolved upon 
 that could not be undone. Trifling little things came into her 
 mind, and perplexed and distressed her. If, for instance, Mary 
 Blanchet should remain in the room ! " If she is there I shall not 
 be able to say out what I want to say," Minola thought ; " and if 
 she wishes to remain, will she think it strange and wrong if I ask 
 her not to stay ? If it is all settled, how shall I have to behave to 
 him ? Will he understand that I am not going to play any love 
 part ? If he comes, and I tell him all this, and he is content, then 
 will he kiss me, and must I seem willing to be kissed ? Will he 
 
 accept me at all on such terms? " A wild gleam of hope lit 
 
 up within her for a moment, and then died out. " Oh, yes, he 
 will accept me — he does not care ! " she said ; and she trembled 
 with pain and shame at the strange humiliation she had brought 
 upon herself. She will never forget the agony of that hour while 
 she waited there alone. 
 
 At length they are come. She heard the voice of Mary 
 apparently reasoning with Blanchet. Then one point of perplexity- 
 was presently settled for her, because the door opened and Mr. 
 Blanchet came in, and he was alone. Minola heard the soft patter 
 of Mary's receding feet. Then a sudden revulsion took place in 
 her feelings, and she wished that Mary had come in with her 
 brother. It was too late now, however, to think of that, for 
 Blanchet was in the room unaccompanied, and came towards her. 
 
 Minola was greatly surprised and even shocked at the appear- 
 ance of Blanchet. She would have been still more pained if she 
 could have persuaded herself that his present aspect and manner 
 were the result of his love, and that she was to blame for having 
 brought him to this pass. But there was something sullen and 
 almost fierce about him which did not seem even to her inex- 
 perienced eyes to speak merely of the pangs of misprized love. He 
 looked like a man who has come to meet an accusation and is 
 determined to brazen it out. His very manner of saluting her had 
 in it something of defiance which was strangely unlike his old 
 ways of poetic devotion, when he used to place himself, meta- 
 phorically at least, at her feet, and look up to her as his patroness 
 and saint. 
 
 Perhaps Minola now wished she had not sent for him. Perhaps 
 her mind misgave her as to her purpose of self-sacrifice. Perhaps 
 she would gladly have had Mary Blanchet or anyone else in the 
 room, to bear her company. 
 
 She had sent for Mr. Blanchet, however, and she had to receive 
 him becomingly. It seemed marvellous to her now how she ever 
 
LEFT LONELY. 299 
 
 could have invited him with the intention of offering herself to him 
 to be his wife.. Taking her courage, as the French phrase has 
 it, in her two hands, she went to meet Herbert with a friendly 
 greeting. 
 
 To her surprise Blanchet did not take her hand when she 
 offered it, but made a bow, and placed himself at some distance 
 from her, standing near the chimney-piece. 
 
 " I know why you have sent for me, Miss Grey," he said, " and 
 I had better not take your hand until we understand one another. 
 I am told by Mary that you wish to ask me a question. Well, let 
 me save you trouble and myself too. I answer the question at 
 once. 1 say yes — yes ! " 
 
 Then the poet threw back his dark hair, and stood as one 
 who cares not now what is to follow. If he had ever been a 
 reader or a stage-struck admirer of Shakespeare, one might have 
 supposed that the attitude and look were got up after Othello, 
 when he says, " 'Twas I that killed her," and is thenceforth pre- 
 pared for the worst. 
 
 This was a mystery to Minola. It seemed absolutely impos- 
 sible that he could have learned or guessed at the nature of the 
 question she had meant to put to him. It had only been settled 
 in her own mind the evening before, and was never whispered, 
 even to the reeds along the canal. Nor even if he had known it 
 by supernatural inspiration did his tone and manner seem ap- 
 propriate to the occasion, and to the answer he had given. 
 
 " 1 don't understand you, Mr. Blanchet, and you can't, I think, 
 have any.idea of the reason why I asked you to come and see me." 
 
 "Yes, yes ; I know it very well — only too well." 
 
 " Then you must tell me what it is ; for, really, Mr. Blanchet, 
 if you know it, I don't." 
 
 Minola seated herself quietly on a little sofa, and waited for 
 him to explain all this. His theatrical ways were so absurd and 
 offensive in her eyes that they impelled her to fall back upon a 
 reserved and distant demeanour. He could hardly have gone 
 mad, she thought; and in any case she now only wished to be 
 well out of the whole affair. Minola could not believe that real 
 emotion and stage-play could go together in the one part in 
 private life, and she judged Blanchet wrongly for this reason. 
 There are people in whom the instinct of the theatrical is as 
 strong as the common instinct of self-preservation. Blanchet 
 was as much in earnest now and as near to actual despair as he 
 could be in this life. 
 
 " Oh, yes, I know ! " he said, " and I may as well save you 
 all trouble in reproaching me. You need not tell me you despise 
 
300 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 me, Miss Grey ; you can't despise me more than I despise myself. 
 You need not tell me I have been ungrateful ; I know that there 
 never was a more ungrateful wretch on earth. If you could 
 care for any thanks from me or believe in their sincerity, I 
 would thank you for one thing — for not telling poor Mary any- 
 thing about this. It was like your magnanimous nature to do 
 this. She will come to know of it some time, I suppose ; but not 
 from you — not from you." 
 
 Minola began to be really alarmed and shocked. This was 
 no play-acting. His eyes were burning with wild emotion. He 
 was in thorough earnest. Her idea was that he must have com- 
 mitted some crime and got it into his head that she knew of it. 
 She got up and went kindly over to him. He shrank away. 
 
 " We are talking at cross-purposes, Mr. Blanchet ; and I am 
 afraid you are going to tell me something I ought not to know. 
 You must not say any more — at least, without thinking of what 
 you are saying. I have no reproach to make against you, Mr. 
 Blanchet; what could I have ? If you have done anything that 
 deserves all the reproach you are giving to yourself, I don't know 
 anything of it— and indeed I don't believe it." 
 
 " You don't know ; you really don't know ? " and his eyes 
 lighted up with a momentary ray of surprise and hope. Then 
 he became despairing again. " You are sure to know before 
 long ; and I may as well tell you myself." 
 
 " No, no, Mr. Blanchet, I don't want to know ; I have no 
 right to know. Pray don't say any more — let us ask Mary t.o 
 come in." He put his hand upon her arm and stayed her. 
 
 " No, no, you must hear it all now ; we had better have an 
 end to it. It concerns you, Miss Grey, and you have a right to 
 know of it. 'Twas I who saw you and Heron in St. James's 
 Park; it was I who told Lucy Money, and made you seem a 
 treacherous friend to her ; 'twas I who did mischief that I sup- 
 pose can never be set right, and did it all to the only woman in 
 the world who ever was really kind to me. Yes — what do you 
 think of me now?" 
 
 Minola felt herself growing giddy and sick as he talked on in 
 his wild way. Little as she understood of what he was saying, 
 yet she knew enough to make her feel as if the ground reeled 
 beneath her. It was enough that Victor and she had been seen 
 and watched and misunderstood by somebody, and that all her 
 efforts to make things happy for Lucy were in vain. For the 
 moment she did not think of herself. She knew -that there was 
 nothing she had done to be ashamed of, or which two simple 
 words to Lucy would not explain. But when that explanation 
 
'THERE IS JUST ONE FAVOUR YOU CAN DO ME NOIV: 
 
LEFT LONELY. 301 
 
 once began, where was it to stop ? For the moment she did not 
 even think of the degradation to herself in having her movements 
 watched, and reported, and misrepresented ; or of the shameful 
 ingratitude of Blanchet, whom, an hour ago, she almost looked 
 upon as her destined husband. 
 
 Blanchet now stood leaning both his elbows on the chimney- 
 piece, his head turned away from her. 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet," Minola said quietly, " you say you have done 
 me some great wrong. There is just one favour you can do me 
 now, and that is, to tell me in the simplest words what you saw, 
 and what you said of it, and why you came to say it." 
 
 She stood and waited, with a manner seemingly of the most 
 perfect composure. Within her breast all was pain, shame, anger, 
 and distraction. But she contrived to keep an air of entire self- 
 restraint and calmness. It appeared to her that the mere dignity 
 of womanhood exacted from her that much of self-control at least. 
 
 Then Blanchet told his story. It was a little incoherent here 
 and there, and dashed with theatric expressions of passion and 
 despair. But its general purpose was only too clear. He was 
 going to call on Mrs. Money that unhappy day, and as he was 
 crossing the Park he saw Victor Heron seated, and apparently 
 waiting for some one. The poet confessed that, prompted by 
 some demon of jealousy and suspicion, he watched, and he saw 
 Minola come up, and he saw them meet and saw them walk 
 together. Then, still and further inspired by the demon on whom 
 he was disposed to throw so much responsibility, he hastened to 
 Mrs. Money's house ; he learned that Heron had left a full hour 
 before Minola ; he even found out that they had parted formally 
 from each other ; and then he told Lucy for her private information ■ 
 that he had just seen them together in the Park, an hour after 
 Heron had left Lucy declaring that he must hasten to the House 
 of Commons. 
 
 Minola heard all this, bending her head slightly every now 
 and then to signify that she understood his meaning. At the end 
 she quietly asked what Lucy had said to the story he told her. 
 
 She looked very pale, Blanchet said ; but she only begged of 
 him not to say anything to her mother, and then she went away. 
 But he saw too well, he added, that she was struck to the heart by 
 what she had heard. Then first, when his rage of jealousy and 
 madness had passed away, he began to understand the full 
 measure of his shame. When Minola sent for him — to ask him a 
 question, as Mary had told him — he felt sure it was to put the 
 question of guilty or not guilty. He might as well plead guilty at 
 once. It must all come out. There must be explanations, and he 
 
302 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 must stand confessed. That did not trouble him now, he said. 
 His one only thought was that Minola had been his best friend in 
 all the world, and that he had betrayed her. 
 
 Minola listened to these explanations with a heart in which 
 scorn and anger were longing for utterance, but with serene and 
 imperturbable composure. Once again she thought to herself, 
 " Yes, it is true — women are born hypocrites ;" and she thought, 
 too, " I am glad of it just now." 
 
 " Things are not quite so bad as your excited conscience 
 would make them out, I hope, Mr. Blanchet," she said, with a half 
 smile of contempt. " It was not well done of you to play such a 
 part, nor exactly what I should have expected ; but I hope it will 
 prove that you have not done much harm to anyone — except to 
 your own feelings and conscience, of course. I met Mr. Heron 
 by the merest chance that day in the Park, and I never met him 
 there or anywhere else except by chance. That can be explained 
 in two words, if Miss Money thinks any explanation necessary. 
 She will believe anything I tell her or that Mr. Heron tells her." 
 
 Blanchet shook his head. 
 
 " You think she will not believe him or me ?" Minola asked, 
 with quiet contempt. " Oh, yes, Mr. Blanchet, you are mistaken !" 
 
 " I didn't mean to doubt that," the poet said, with downcast 
 head. To do him justice he had not the least doubt that either 
 Minola or Heron would tell the truth ; his doubt was whether 
 the full acknowledgment would be entirely satisfactory to Lucy 
 Money ; and Minola guessed his meaning. 
 
 "That, at any rate, can be left to Miss Money's own judgment, 
 Mr. Blanchet. I was only anxious to assure you that you have 
 not after all done so much harm as you seemed to fear just now." 
 
 She looked very cold and cruel. As he turned his eyes to 
 hers he caught no light of ancient kindness or pity in them ; only 
 a cold and merciless dislike and contempt. He cast one abject, 
 penitent glance at her, a glance that seemed to implore for some 
 merciful consideration. 
 
 " You don't even reproach me," he said, appealing to her with 
 outstretched hands of sudden passion and despair. 
 
 " Oh, no ! I have no right to complain of anything you may 
 choose to say. You did see me in the Park with Mr. Heron ; it 
 is quite true. You have said nothing untrue of me ; what right 
 have I to complain ?" 
 
 Then she made a slight, hardly perceptible movement — one 
 of those movements which it comes by nature to even the least 
 affected women to make, and which convey so much with such 
 little effort. It indicated to Blanchet, beyond the possibility of 
 mistake, that the interview was at an end. 
 
LEFT LONELY. 303 
 
 " At least try to forgive me," he said despairingly. " I thought 
 all you Christians were bound to do that." 
 
 " It is not a question of forgiving," she said with the same 
 composed air ; " I have no power to punish, Mr. Blanchet, and I 
 don't see why we should speak of forgiving. You don't ask me, 
 I suppose, to think just the same of you to-day as I thought 
 yesterday ? I could hardly do that, even as a Christian duty." 
 
 As Blanchet was hurrying out of the house he met his sister in 
 the hall. She ran to him with inquiring eyes, seeking in his face 
 for some sign of coming happiness to all of them. He stopped 
 and looked at her, and then a sudden thought seemed to take 
 possession of him, and he caught her arm. 
 
 " Come away with me," he said ; " get your things and come 
 away this moment. This is no place for you." 
 
 She has refused him again, poor Mary thought. Oh, why 
 then did she send for him at all ? 
 
 " But, Herbert, my dear, how can I leave her ? Do you want 
 me to go away from Minola for ever?" 
 
 " Yes, yes, for ever. Come away this moment, I tell you. 
 I'll take care of you ; I'll provide for you, if that is it. But come 
 away from this place. We have no right to be here, either of us." 
 
 " What has she said to you, Herbert — what have you done ? " 
 
 "She has said nothing to me ; I wish she had said something 
 to me. What have I done ? I have acted like a treacherous 
 cad " 
 
 " Oh, Herbert, it can't be ! " 
 
 " It is, I tell you. Come away from this, Mary ; you have no 
 right to be here ; come away this moment, I tell you." 
 
 His energy quite overbore poor Mary. She had never seen 
 him in such a mood before ; indeed she had never seen anyone 
 else in such a mood. She could no more have stood out against 
 him than against a storm. But the idea of her going away from 
 Minola seemed like an overturning of the world. 
 
 " But won't you tell me what this is all about ? What have you 
 done, Herbert? Why must I leave her? How could I live 
 without her? What would she say ? " 
 
 " I'll tell you all when you come with me ; I'll tell you nothing 
 now. Get your things; I will give you five minutes — go along, 
 Mary, and be quick." 
 
 Mary looked wildly up and down as one who hopes, perhaps, 
 that some supernatural intervention may come at die last moment to 
 rescue her from a doom which she has no strength to fight against 
 herself. She looked up the stairs and along the hall, and even to 
 the ceiling. Nothing came to save her. She burst into tears. 
 
304. MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " Come," said Herbert, turning his dark eyes on her with a 
 wildness in them which she could not trifle with any longer. 
 
 " I'll come, Herbert ; I'll come." 
 
 She ran upstairs ; she rushed into the room where Minola was, 
 and clasped Minola in her arms, and clung about her and kissed 
 her, and stammered some incoherent words of fondness and good- 
 bye, and ran out again before Minola could understand what she 
 meant or what she was about to do. In another moment Minola 
 heard the street door shut, and going to the window saw Mary 
 hurrying off with her brother. 
 
 Minola felt dazed by the sudden occurrences of the day. 
 She looked after the departing figures of Mary Blanchet and her 
 brother, and at first could hardly understand the situation. Then 
 she turned and looked into the darkening lonely room, and she 
 felt very much alone indeed. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 
 
 The man with the grievance had got his chance at last. His time 
 had come. The hopes with which he came over to England, and 
 which had so often seemed to fail and fade from him, were likely 
 to be realised now. He was about to have a hearing for his cause. 
 He was to make his statement in the presence of all England — 
 that is to say, from the floor of the House of Commons. The 
 night fixed for the hearing of Victor Heron's motion in the House 
 had come, and it had excited a great deal of public interest, and 
 was certain of a patient consideration. 
 
 The destinies had surely been very kind to Heron since his 
 coming to England. He thought of this as he was crossing the 
 Park from his lodgings to get to the House of Commons this 
 .particular evening, and found his nerves becoming tremulous with 
 the anticipation of the coming fight, of the speech he had to 
 make, and of the success which he felt confident the justice of his 
 case must win for it. When he landed in England, under a sort 
 of cloud and otherwise obscure, he found at first that it was hardly 
 possible to get anyone of influence even to listen to what he had 
 to say. He could not now but admire, to use the old phrase, the 
 change which had been wrought for him in the. condition of things. 
 There was a time when he would readily have given ten or twenty 
 years of his life for the chance that now was coming so easily to 
 
THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 305 
 
 him. He ought to be a proud and happy man. Proud he might 
 perhaps have been, were it not that he felt terribly nervous now 
 that the time was so near ; but happy he certainly did not feel. 
 To be happy in any manner of political success, or at least to 
 enjoy it thoroughly, one ought to have no heart, he began to 
 think. He was very unhappy ; his unhappiness rose up between 
 him and his grievance — between him and his speech. He was 
 glad to take refuge in the thought of the inevitable speech, and in 
 the nervous trepidation that it called up ; even that was better 
 than thinking of other things. He endeavoured to fix his 
 attention exclusively on the approaching debate, and to make 
 himself believe that the end of all things would come the moment 
 it was over. He had gained the great object of his life — at least, 
 he stood on the direct way to gain it — and this was the spirit in 
 which he received the crowning of his hopes. 
 
 Mr. Augustus Sheppard went down to the House that night to 
 hear the debate. It was not a party question, everyone said, and 
 he was free to wish that Victor might gain his cause. Indeed, it 
 was Victor himself who was obtaining a seat for his former rival to 
 hear the debate. Mr. Sheppard quite understood now that it was 
 good form to be on friendly terms with a man whom you had 
 opposed unsuccessfully at an election. He had some interest, 
 too, of his own in the present debate and in Heron's success. 
 There was a general impression that if Heron made out a real 
 case the Government would certainly give him the very next good 
 appointment in the colonial administrations that came to their 
 hand ; and Sheppard assumed that that and not a parliamentary 
 life would be the object of Heron's ambition. Heron then would 
 resign the seat for Keeton which he had only obtained by a fluke ; 
 and Mr. Sheppard would have a capital opportunity next time, 
 when it was not likely that the odd chances that had defeated him 
 could occur again. He felt still a sort of superstitious longing for 
 success at Keeton, because it had so long been in his hopes ; and 
 he had a faith that if he carried Keeton he would also carry 
 Minola Grey. He was, then, in a peculiarly hopeful mood as he 
 walked towards the House of Commons the evening of Heron's 
 motion. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard was a little too early ; he generally took care to 
 be a little early for everything. He was never known to be late 
 for an appointment. He began to walk more slowly when he came 
 near Westminster Palace, for he saw by the clock on the tower that 
 he had plenty of time to spare. He slowly entered Westminster 
 Hall, and found himself entangled in a crowd there. A case of 
 some public interest was going on in one of the law courts on the 
 
 x 
 
306 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 right of the hall, and people were waiting to see some of the wit- 
 nesses pass out; while on the left of the hall others were watching 
 to see members of Parliament pass in. Sheppard remembered 
 that the case was one in which a good many noblemen were more 
 or less interested, and that among others the duke, who was his 
 feudatory chief, had expressed some opinion about it, and had 
 even been present at some of the sittings of the court. He stood 
 a moment, therefore, with a sort of respectful and well-regulated 
 curiosity, and he asked a question of one or two persons around 
 him ; and it happened that he saw a friend or two passing through 
 the crowd, and he interchanged a few words. He pleased himself 
 with thinking of the time, now perhaps very near, when people 
 would see him passing into the House of Commons with other 
 members, and then he began to make his way forward, believing 
 it not becoming that a person of such expectations should be seen 
 standing in a curious crowd. He was making his way clear of 
 the throng when a tall man passed him, whose appearance seemed 
 familiar to Mr. Sheppard. Mr. Sheppard, however, went on his 
 way; but the other stopped and looked after him, and then strode 
 in pursuit and speedily overtook him. A hand was laid on Mr. 
 Sheppard's shoulder, and a friendly voice was heard in his ear. 
 
 " Hullo, Sheppard — how are you? Don't bear malice, I hope — 
 especially as I lost as well as you." 
 
 Mr. Sheppard turned round and saw a figure which he could 
 not mistake. He forgot, however, for the moment some of the con- 
 ditions under which the figure chose to present itself to society ; 
 and he began in a doubtful and embarrassed tone : 
 
 " Oh, yes ; I beg your pardon, Lord Hugh " 
 
 " I say, Sheppard, cut that ! I have dropped all that sort of 
 thing ; I'm the opposite to the dog, don't you know, in the fable : 
 he dropped the substance to get at the shadow ; I drop the 
 shadow seeing that I can't have the substance ; and I think you'll 
 own, Sheppard, that I am the more sensible animal of the two." 
 
 " I am pleased to see you, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " Thank you, Sheppard, it's very kind of you. You don't look 
 particularly pleased, and that makes it all the more good of you to 
 say it." And Mr. St. Paul laughed his familiar laugh. 
 
 "Well, we met last time under circumstances that don't of 
 themselves tend to make men pleased to see each other, Mr. St. 
 Paul," Sheppard said ; for he was not to be long kept in awe of a 
 person of noble family when that person was not respectable in his 
 conduct, and was not on good terms with the head of the house. 
 
 " I don't know ; it was a fair fight, Sheppard ; I lost as well 
 as you. I dare say if I had got in, you would have had a petition ? " 
 
THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 307 
 
 " I think it highly probable we should have taken some such 
 course, Mr. St. Paul. There would certainly have seemed to be 
 some justification for such a course." 
 
 " I wonder who would have paid the expenses if there had been 
 a petition against me." 
 
 " I should have found the means to pay them, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " Found the means, I dare say ; but would not the means have 
 been found in my brother's purse, Sheppard ? " 
 
 " I am not dependent on your noble brother, Mr. St. Paul, 
 greatly as I respect him, and as everyone must respect him." 
 
 " Quite right, Sheppard ; quite right. But we will not fight 
 about that now. I am going off again, and I had rather part 
 company on good terms with as many old friends as will do me the 
 favour to be civil to me." 
 
 " I thought you had left England, Mr. St. Paul." 
 
 " No ; I am getting off to-morrow or next day ; one has such a 
 lot of things to do, don't you know. But, I say, have you heard 
 the news about our old friend Money ? " 
 
 " No, I have heard nothing about Mr. Money or his family," 
 Sheppard said with some appearance of interest. " Nothing bad, 
 I hope. I should be sorry if " 
 
 " Well, that is pretty much as you choose to take it. I should 
 not call it bad to leave this confounded country ; but I don't 
 know how you may look at the matter." 
 
 " Is Mr. Money going to leave the country?" 
 
 " Right away. He has sent in his retiring address to his con- 
 stituents. A chance for you there, Sheppard, perhaps. Money 
 helped to put a Liberal in for Keeton — you might retaliate by 
 getting yourself in for his borough." 
 
 " But why does he take so strange and sudden a step ? Not 
 any business calamity, surely?" 
 
 " No, no; a business affair, but not a business calamity — unless 
 your patriotic soul, Sheppard, sees a calamity in anything done by 
 a Briton in the service of a foreign country. Our friend Money is 
 going to let the Emperor of Russia have all the benefit of his 
 services as an inventor and constructor of engines chiefly used 
 in the unchristian work of destruction." 
 
 " Indeed ? You astonish me." 
 
 " Do I ? I am glad of it ; it is something to have anyone 
 to astonish with a piece of news. / knew it must come to this 
 long ago. It was all very well while everything looked peaceful, 
 and the lion lying down with the lamb, and all that sort of thing, 
 you know. But, by Jove ! we may have a big fight now any day, 
 and pur friend would soon find he couldn't serve the two masters. 
 
303 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 He's a sensible fellow — Money ; and he makes his choice while he 
 can do so decently, without actually seeming to go over to the 
 enemy, don't you know. Of course, he is quite right ; we wouldn't 
 pay him, and t'other party will ; and why should he not get the 
 best pay he can in times like these, Sheppard, my boy? That's 
 business, isn't it? We all live by business, you know." 
 
 " Still, I should have thought that there was more of patriotic 
 feeling in Mr. Money — and he having sat so long in Parliament 
 too " 
 
 "Ah,- that's it, you know!" St. Paul said carelessly. "He has 
 been behind the scenes, and sees how things are done ; you have 
 not as yet. He knows what it all comes to ; he is a sensible 
 fellow — Money ; you may be sure he knows uncommonly well 
 what he is about, Sheppard. I knew this long time it must come 
 to this." 
 
 " And this is beyond doubt ?" Sheppard asked, still dubitating, 
 and at the same time trying to follow out a train of ideas applying 
 to himself more exclusively. 
 
 " True as Gospel. I have just read his retiring address — in 
 which, however, he takes good care, of course, not to be very ex- 
 plicit about the cause of his going off; and I have been talking to 
 the man who is going to marry his daughter in a few days." 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Heron?" 
 
 " No, not Heron ; the other man — I forget his name, who was 
 at the bar, you know — I remember him at Oxford ; the fellow who 
 marries the elder sister " 
 
 Mr. Sheppard signified that he understood the meaning of 
 Mr. St. Paul's reference. 
 
 " Well, of course, he did not say exactly what I knew to be 
 the fact ; but he did not contradict it. I fancy he is not very 
 sorry that Money is going out of the country. He wants to be in 
 society, you know ; and, of course, Money is not just the sort of 
 father-in-law for a man in society." 
 
 " You don't know, Mr. St. Paul," Sheppard said, becoming 
 almost friendly in his anxiety to learn all about this affair ; " you 
 don't know, I suppose, whom Mr. Money. takes with him to 
 Russia?" 
 
 "No, I don't know; only his wife, I suppose. If the other 
 girl marries our young friend Heron, it isn't likely she would be 
 going off to Russia, I suppose. They say Heron will get a colony 
 somewhere. Well, glad to see you, Sheppard ; good-bye." 
 
 " You are very kind, I'm sure, Mr. St. Paul," Sheppard said 
 with a certain fervour, for he really thought it was friendly of 
 St. Paul to speak to him so good-humouredly after all that had 
 
THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 309 
 
 passed between them on the memorable night of the riot at 
 Keeton. 
 
 St. Paul laughed. 
 
 " I am going to be a great deal more kind to you now, Shep- 
 pard ; for I'm going to leave you just in time to save your credit. 
 I see my brother coming ; and if you were caught in conference 
 with me, you would never set foot inside any house of his again. 
 Good bye, Sheppard." 
 
 St. Paul nodded, smiled, and turned away. Sheppard stood 
 for a moment and looked after his great stooping form, as it made 
 its way out through the crowd, and then he prepared to pay his 
 respects to the chief of the ducal house. He felt a little humiliated 
 by the parting words of St. Paul, but it must be confessed that it 
 was a source of some gladness to him not to be found in parley 
 with the disreputable younger brother when the duke came up. 
 The duke was hurrying by, and only gave Mr. Sheppard a hand to 
 shake, and a " How d'ye-do, Sheppard ? " But this was something 
 to have got unalloyed by any qualification or suspicion which the 
 presence of St. Paul might have infused into it. 
 
 But even while the dry cool fingers of the duke were still in 
 his momentary possession, Mr. Sheppard was thinking of how 
 the disappearance of the Money family from Minola's horizon 
 would affect his chances with her. He thought of this as he sat and 
 listened to Victor Heron's speech. It may be said, in passing, 
 that Sheppard did not greatly admire the speech. It seemed to 
 him to want order and finish. He was surprised that Heron should 
 have plunged into the subject so directly. Mr. Sheppard had been 
 studying rhetoric of late, and he had formed for himself a very- 
 clear idea of how Victor's subject ought to be treated. He thought 
 the speaker should have begun with a sketch of the growth and 
 greatness of England's colonial system ; should have shown how 
 the glory of England depends in great measure on the way in 
 which she governs her colonies ; should have had a good deal to 
 say about the manner in which the great Mr. Pitt had condemned 
 slavery ; might even, perhaps, have quoted a passage from Mr. 
 Pitt's famous peroration about the sunlight streaming in upon the 
 mind of Africa as it did, while he spoke, through the windows of 
 the House of Commons ; and thus brought the House, as it were, 
 into tune with the particular question to be debated that day. 
 Victor did nothing of all this, but began in an easy conversational 
 tone, and in three sentences was right into the heart of his subject, 
 only warming into anything like eloquence as he came to deal with 
 occasional passages on which he felt deeply, and then as soon as 
 possible resuming the quietly argumentative tone again. The 
 
310 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 House seemed to like it evidently, and Sheppard heard people near 
 him saying it was going to be a great success. Mr. Sheppard was a 
 little astonished, but felt that he ought to be pleased for more rea- 
 sons than one. He was satisfied he could make a far more eloquent 
 speech than that ; and if that sort of thing was successful, he might 
 fairly expect to take rank among the great orators of the House when 
 he got his chance. 
 
 But he was only thinking of all this at passing moments. For 
 the most part his mind was occupied with thoughts of Minola, and 
 of the manner in which the departure of the Moneys would affect 
 her and by consequence him. If Mr. and Mrs. Money went to 
 Russia, and Heron and his wife went to some colony, then Minola 
 would be left almost absolutely alone in London. He knew the 
 girl too well to think that she would look for new friends. Surely, 
 then, she would come to value his steady, faithful love ? He would 
 have become a success by that time, and no woman is indifferent 
 to success. She would see that in his love there was nothing 
 interested or selfish. Indeed, his love for her was not selfish in 
 the ordinary sense. It would have surprised both him and her 
 to know it, but it was true all the same that in one respect at least 
 he did strongly resemble her beloved Alceste. His extreme love 
 went so far as to form wishes against her who was its object : he 
 could have wished that she were reduced to miserable condition — 
 that Heaven, in giving her birth, had given her nothing — that she 
 had neither money nor friends — in order that he might have the 
 happiness of seeing her depend for everything upon the helping 
 hand of his love. Mr. Sheppard was less acquainted even with 
 Tibullus than with Moliere, but the Latin poet had expressed many 
 hundreds of years before Alceste the wish that often filled Shep- 
 pard, as it had filled Minola's hero, the " Utinam possis uni mihi 
 bella videri, displiceas aliis; sic ego tutus ero." This wish was 
 strong in Sheppard's mind while Victor Heron was addressing 
 the House. Indeed, no love from the most romantic and pas- 
 sionate lover could have been a better tribute to a woman's worth 
 than that of Sheppard for Minola Grey. All her other lovers were 
 taking her on mere trust All the others were caught by some 
 charm in her which they could perhaps not define. She might 
 for aught they could tell be in reality something quite different 
 from what she seemed to be. Sheppard had known her almost 
 from her cradle time ; he saw her faults as the others probably did 
 not ; he had often winced under her occasional touches of 
 sarcasm ; he knew very well that she had always done injustice to 
 him, but he knew how sterling, how sweet, how true was the 
 woman's heart that was within her breast ; he had seen her tried 
 
THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 311 
 
 in all manner of ways, and he had seen that trial always only 
 brought out the simple nobility of her nature ; he was as certain 
 as he was of life that if once he could induce her to marry him 
 she would never have any other thought than how to make him 
 happy. In his love there was undoubtedly that calculating spirit 
 which belonged to all his nature. He sometimes admitted this to 
 himself in a manner ; for he occasionally said to himself, " No 
 one else would lose so much in losing her as I should, for no one 
 else knows so well what she is worth." 
 
 The debate did not last a very long time. It was over in 
 rather a sudden way, Mr. Sheppard thought. As far as he could 
 understand, some one on behalf of the Government was put up to 
 say that Mr. Heron had done quite the right thing in all he did, 
 and that his only mistake was in supposing that there was the 
 faintest idea of disapproving of any part of his administration. 
 Then Mr. Money got up, and in a few short and very telling sen- 
 tences seemed to say that if the Government had felt approval 
 they had a very odd way of showing it, and that he thought the 
 honourable member for Keeton had much better press his motion 
 for inquiry. Then other Opposition members said something to 
 the same effect ; and one or two grave and independent members 
 on the Ministerial side said something of the same kind ; and then 
 at last a very leading member of the Government got up, and 
 made the most emphatic assurances of respect and regard for all 
 Mr. Heron had done, and declared that the Government were 
 quite prepared to accept a simple resolution expressing the 
 approval of the House of the manner in which the St. Xavier's 
 Settlements had been administered. There was no possibility ot 
 fighting any further. Heron had won a complete victory, and the 
 whole affair was over. Before Mr. Sheppard had time to rise from 
 his seat the House of Commons was occupied with something 
 else, and its benches were nearly empty. 
 
 He hurried into the lobby, and had a chance of saying a 
 word or two of congratulation to Mr. Heron. Then he saw Mr. 
 Money come out, and he pushed his way up to him and held him 
 fast. 
 
 " Is this true, Mr. Money, this strange news that I hear ? Is 
 it true that you are going to leave old England ? " 
 
 " Quite true, Mr. Sheppard ; at least, that I am going to leave 
 old England for a time. I dare say she can muddle on somehow 
 without me." 
 
 " And you are going soon ? " 
 
 " As soon as I can get away. I came down here to-night for 
 the last time to give a vote for Heron's motion, if a vote were 
 
3i2 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 needed, which you see it was not. You heard the debate ? Didn't 
 they get shabbily out of it ? " 
 
 Mr. Sheppard was not thinking much of the debate. 
 
 " I suppose you take some of your family with you to Russia 
 Mr. Money?" 
 
 " Some, yes ; but not all." 
 
 " Oh, no ! I know," Mr. Sheppard said, with the air of one who 
 understands everything. " I was going to ask whether Miss Grey 
 is going with you ? " 
 
 " Miss Grey? No ; why should she go ? " 
 
 " Well, I didn't know ; she and your ladies appear to be such 
 friends, and she is so much alone that I thought perhaps " 
 
 " Miss Grey would be only too welcome," Money said gravely, 
 " if she cared to exile herself, Mr. Sheppard ; but I don't think it 
 at all likely that she will leave London." 
 
 " Then she will be quite alone ? " 
 
 Mr. Money looked Sheppard fixedly in the face with a curious 
 expression, in which there was a dash of pity. 
 
 " Well, I don't know, Sheppard, I'm sure. Perhaps she will 
 not be so much alone after all.. Good-night; if we should not see 
 you again, why then good-bye and good luck." 
 
 He wrung Sheppard's hand with a grasp of unusual warmth and 
 friendship. There was something in the pressure as of one who 
 sympathises or commiserates. It was perhaps because he was 
 going away, Mr. Sheppard thought ; and he felt touched by the 
 kindness even while he was glad that the Moneys were going 
 away, and that Victor Heron was to be married, and doubtless to 
 go away too ; for then Minola would be left to him without a 
 friend to come between the two ; and in the end she must marry 
 him. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard left the House of Commons and walked to the 
 West Centre, and took up his stand for a while under Minola's 
 windows, thinking of how much alone she soon must be, and 
 having very little idea of how utterly alone she actually was then. 
 If Minola could have looked out of her window and seen him ; if 
 she could have known of all his faithful watching ; if she could 
 have realised the fact that now in her utter loneliness, when all 
 others seemed to have gone from her, he still remained and was 
 only longing to make himself endurable to her, would she have 
 thought of making to him the offer she had so nearly made to 
 Blanchet ? It would be rash to conjecture. She was very 
 wretched, and life seemed to have no hope any more. The 
 desertion of Mary Blanchet had touched her to the very core. It 
 is hard to say what the presence of any love and devotion, how- 
 
THE MAN WITHOUT A GRIEVANCE. 313 
 
 ever formal and inartistic, might not have done at such a time. 
 Perhaps had she seen Sheppard in that moment, and had he spoken 
 out, the cross-purposes of the story of all their lives might have 
 been made complete and inextricable. 
 
 Meanwhile Victor Heron had got rid of most of his con- 
 gratulating friends, and stood alone for a moment in a corner 
 of the thinning lobby. He had won a success, complete and 
 beyond his hopes ; it had been a success for his cause, and with 
 that, too, a success for himself. Although Mr. Sheppard had not 
 thought very highly of his style of eloquence, it had taken the 
 House of Commons completely. He could not possibly doubt 
 the reality of the success he had made. Member after member 
 came up to grasp his hand and congratulate him, in that spirit of 
 fellowship which is so remarkable in the House of Commons. 
 Men who were entirely opposed to him in political views — men 
 who had never spoken to him before — men who would have 
 voted against him if the Government had opposed his motion and 
 it had gone to a division, now rushed up to offer him the most 
 sincere congratulations on the success of the speech he had made. 
 Victor was very emotional as we know, and there were moments 
 when he could not reply to these kindly words, and when strange 
 lights seemed to twinkle before his eyes, and he only saw as 
 through a mist. He was proud ; he was humbled. In the pride 
 and in the humility, however, there was a dull pain always at his 
 heart. He kept thinking of her who had urged him on again and 
 again to perseverance in his course ; who had faith in him when 
 no one else had ; who stimulated him to new exertion when no 
 one else saw into his heart and his purpose, and believed in his 
 success. He might have had her to share in the success ; her 
 bright eyes might even now be moistening near his own in the joy 
 of this great triumph. In whatever career this might open up to 
 him, he might have had her companionship. She would have 
 helped him to serve his country, and to leave a name which 
 perhaps might be written down with honour in the list of 
 England's servants who had done faithful work. He stood there 
 pulling his moustache and thinking ; quite depressed amid all his 
 success, and feeling that, if his cause had had a victoiy, his life 
 was only a failure. 
 
 While he thus stood, some one who had passed into the House 
 of Commons came out into the lobby again ; and an arm was put 
 through Heron's, and he heard Mr. Money's voice, and he awoke 
 from his mekncholy brooding. 
 
 " Will you walk out with me, Heron ? There's nothing going 
 on here that you and I are likely to care about. I am going up to 
 
3H MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Pall Mall ; will you walk with me across the Park? I want to 
 speak to you as soon as possible on a matter of some interest to 
 both of us." 
 
 Mr. Money's manner was unusually grave. There was no 
 need for him to tell Victor that he had something serious to say. 
 Victor saw that well enough as he looked in Money's face. Heron 
 felt the blood rush into his own face. He seemed to himself 
 somehow as one to whom an accusation of guilt is suddenly 
 brought home. He did not say a word just then, but allowed 
 Money to lead him away ; and they left the lobby together. 
 
 As they were passing down Westminster Hall, Money stopped 
 suddenly and turned round : 
 
 " I was fond of this old place," he said ; " I am sorry to leave 
 it. I had a sort of ambition to get on here once. Odd, is it not, 
 Heron you are just beginning here as I am giving up ? I suppose I 
 shall never cross the floor of the House of Commons again. Well, 
 I arn sorry ; but then there are so many things to be sorry for ! " 
 
 He said no more, and they walked in silence out of the great 
 Hall and into the streets. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 " HE WRUNG BASSANIO'S HAND, AND SO THEY PARTED." 
 
 Mr. Money and Heron crossed the lighted and noisy enclosure 
 in front of Westminster Hall, amid the rattling hansoms, the 
 flashing lamps of carriages, the rushing and shouting of policemen, 
 the cantering up of grooms with horses for the senators who were 
 to ride home, the eager crowd going in, coming out, and hanging 
 round generally, in the hope of seeing anything. They passed out 
 of the enclosure, and across Parliament Square, and so into the 
 road through the Park. A contrast was ready for them there. The 
 place was all silent, dark, and lonely. Over the broad arid spaces 
 that opened out before them, along by the Horse Guards and up 
 to where the column on Waterloo Place could be seen faintly 
 marking the dark grey sky with its darker grey, there were hardly 
 any living figures but their own. Up to this time they had not 
 spoken a word. Then Money began : 
 
 " That's turned out all right, Heron ? You are satisfied, of 
 course, with the way things went ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; everything turned out better even than I expected. 
 I owe you a great deal for your part in it." 
 
"HE WRUNG BASSANIO'S HAND." 315 
 
 " That's nothing. They acted shabbily at first — the Govern- 
 ment, I mean ; but they always do ; and it's all the better for you 
 that they had to give in so completely. Your speech was capital ; 
 a complete success ; everybody says so. You are all right, 
 whether you choose to stay in Parliament or whether you don't." 
 
 " I don't know what I shall do," Victor said despondingly. 
 He was not thinking much now of his parliamentary success, or 
 of his righted grievance. He knew that it was not to talk to him 
 about this that Money had brought him this way, and he waited 
 for what he knew must be coming ; reluctant to hear it, longing to 
 have it out and done with. There was a moment's silence ; then 
 Money said, " Oh, you have time enough to think about all that ! " 
 
 This had reference to Victor's last answer. Victor had once 
 more the pain of expecting that the real business was coming and 
 of being deceived. Nothing more was said on that subject ; they 
 walked on silent again. Victor was making up his mind to 
 abridge his agony by telling Money that he knew what he had 
 come to speak about, and begging that they might get to it at 
 once ; when at last Mr. Money, after a cough or two, and one 
 or two hasty hard puffs at his cigar, began to speak in a voice 
 which made Heron quite certain that the real moment had arrived. 
 
 " About this little girl of mine — I am afraid, Heron, we 
 have been getting into rather a false position, and I think we had 
 better get out of it as soon as we can." 
 
 " Lucy has been speaking to you?" Heron said, in the tone 
 of one who has no defence to make. 
 
 " She has. She spoke out very sensibly, I think ; I am glad 
 my little maid has so much sense. She has made up her mind." 
 
 " Made up her mind to what? " 
 
 "She thinks that you and she would make a great mistake if 
 you were to get married. You have both made a mistake already, 
 and she thinks — and I think, Heron — it would be only making 
 things infinitely worse, and incurable in fact, if you were to carry 
 on the thing any longer." 
 
 " Why does Lucy think of this ? " 
 
 " She says she is convinced that between you and her there 
 is not — well, that there is not that sort of love which would 
 make it safe and happy for you to marry. She thinks that there is 
 some one you would care for more if you had the chance, and who 
 would care more for you — and, in short, she is resolved that you 
 and she are both to be set free." 
 
 " Lucy never said a word of this to me — she never complained 
 to me of anything — she never spoke of such a thing. Some one 
 must have been telling her something " 
 
3i6 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " I don't know anything about that — she has not told me, and 
 I have asked her no questions. I believe the truth is, Heron, that 
 she fancies Miss Grey and you would be much better suited 
 to each other, and that you made a sort of mistake when you 
 thought of her, and that she is now in the way between you and 
 her friend ; and she is resolved not to be so any longer." 
 
 " If this is my fault " Heron began. 
 
 " If it is your fault, Heron, it is partly my fault as well, and 
 more mine than yours or hers " 
 
 " Oh ! as to her," Heron broke in, " what fault is there in 
 her? — except that she fancied for a moment she could care 
 about such a fellow as I am, wrapped up in my own trumpery 
 affairs and my twopenny grievances. What other fault could 
 there be in her ? " 
 
 " Well, I know there is some fault in me — and I am the cause 
 of all this, in a manner, at least. I made a dead set at you, 
 Heron ; I confess it. I thought you would make a capital husband 
 for my girl ; I own that I did my very best to throw you two 
 together. Odd, isn't it, that a man should do such a thing? Her 
 mother was as innocent of the whole affair as the child unborn. 
 I was the matchmaker. The plot was innocent enough, Heron ; 
 for I should have done all the same if you had not sixpence in the 
 world, or the chance of getting it ; I should have found the 
 sixpences, if Lucy liked you and you her. I liked you, Heron, 
 and that's a fact, and I do still ; and I thought you were the sort 
 of man to whom I could trust my daughter's happiness when I 
 left England, as I always knew I must do sooner or later, and 
 went to live in a country which may be at war with this any day, 
 Heaven knows when or wherefore. / have grievances enough 
 against the governments and the systems of this country, but I 
 am Englishman enough to wish that my girls should both be 
 married to genuine, loyal lovers of the old country. Well, I am 
 disappointed ; but I see that I have myself to blame. I'll take 
 Lucy to Russia with me ; she will not stay here, she says, although 
 she might stay with her sister, if she would." 
 
 Victor Heron groaned. 
 
 "I wish Lucy and you had never seen me," he said. "You 
 have been the kindest friends to me that man could have — and 
 this is how I make you amends ! " 
 
 "Well," said Money, "in helping you on, of course I was 
 playing a game of my own part of the time, for I thought I 
 was pushing along a husband for my daughter. I don't blame 
 you, Heron, one bit ; it would be out of the nature of things that 
 a boy and girl should not fancy they were in love with one 
 
"HE WRUNG BASSANIO'S HAND." 317 
 
 another who were thrown together, as I took care that Lucy 
 and you should be. But, mind, I meant you to love each 
 other really ; it was no part of my plan to marry my Lucelet to any 
 man who was not deep and downright in love with her, and she 
 with him. I never calculated on the possibility of both of you 
 making a mistake." 
 
 " Then Lucy finds that she has made a mistake ? " Heron 
 asked, a strange light of hope burning up within him. If he could 
 but think that Lucy wished of her own accord to be free of him, 
 he felt that he could be happy once more. 
 
 " Yes," said Money gravely, " my daughter now thinks, Heron, 
 that she has made a mistake. She does not think she is as much 
 in love with you as she ought to be if you were to be married and 
 to be happy ; and I fancy she is a good deal relieved to know or 
 to think that you are not in love with her. It will be a case of 
 quits and good friends, I hope, Heron." 
 
 Victor was silent and thoughtful for a moment. He was 
 stricken with amazement. It was, indeed, the profoundest relief 
 to find that he was positively thrown over by Lucy. But who 
 could have believed in such a sudden change ? All that the 
 worst cynics had ever said of woman could not equal this. There 
 was something shocking in the thought that he might have been 
 married to a girl so light of purpose. He could hardly believe it. 
 Certainly, if anyone but Lucy's father had said it, he would have 
 denied it angrily. Is it possible, he thought, that women generally 
 can be like this ? 
 
 "She has changed her mind very soon," Victor said; and 
 there was a bitterness in his tone which he could not repress. 
 
 "Why she?" Money asked coldly. " Is she the only one? 
 You made a mistake, Heron ; so did she, it seems." 
 
 " Well, I am glad to know that Lucy will not suffer much by 
 this; I am glad there is to be no breaking of hearts." 
 
 " On either side ; yes, so am I. In truth, Heron, I don't mind 
 admitting to you that I fear my little girl is not a very constant 
 little person, and that she does not always know her own 
 mind. Odd, too ; for her mother was and is the most steadfast 
 and devoted of women. But there's a great deal of stuff 
 talked about the influence and example of parents and so forth. 
 No, I don't think Lucelet is a girl who always knows her own 
 mind." 
 
 " I should not have thought she was like that," Victor said. 
 
 " No ; you would rather, I suppose, that she cried her eyes 
 out when she found that you were not exactly as fond of her 
 as she thought you ought to be ? That's the way of us men, 
 
318 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Heron, I suppose. But I don't mind saying that I am a little 
 surprised, too ; and I don't know that I am quite pleased. I am 
 not sure that I wouldn't rather see my girl suffer a little of the 
 heart-ache than have so little heart to suffer in. I shouldn't have 
 thought it of her. But I remember now that she used to be half in 
 love with that Blanchet creature at one time. Well, she isn't like 
 her mother in that way ; all the happier, perhaps, for her in 
 the end." 
 
 They walked on for a while in silence. Each had enough of 
 his own thoughts to occupy him. 
 
 " Oh ! one thing I ought to tell you," Money suddenly said, 
 and he touched Victor lightly on the arm. " It may interest 
 you by and by. When I first laid my plans for you, Heron— these 
 plans that have turned out so successful — I had certain ideas of 
 my own. I thought, perhaps, there was some one else who had a 
 better claim on you than Lucelet, and I took some trouble to find 
 out. I had it on the best authority, as the phrase goes, that there 
 was no such person; I would not have moved a step otherwise. 
 If I moved at all, it was because I was assured that the coast was 
 clear." 
 
 " I don't think I quite understand " 
 
 "No? I don't think you quite understood yourself at that 
 time. Shall I put it plainer ? " 
 
 " Oh, for Heaven's sake, as plainly as words can make it ! We 
 have been playing at cross-purposes quite long enough." 
 
 "Very well," said Money coolly. "I talked to Miss Grey, 
 and I asked her directly if she knew of anyone who was likely 
 to be nearer to you than Lucelet. I tell you plainly I thought 
 you were much more likely to care for her than for Lucelet, and 
 that she was a girl far better suited to you. She knew perfectly 
 well what I meant; and she answered me." 
 
 Even in the darkness of the night Victor knew that the blood 
 was crimsoning his face. He groaned again. 
 
 " Yes, she answered me ; she told me she knew of no such 
 woman. I believed her then, and I believe her now. I am 
 sure that was what she thought then. It must be owned, Heron, 
 my good fellow, that you don't seem exactly to shine in the art of 
 knowing your own mind. You were very near making a nice 
 muddle of this." 
 
 " I have made a nice muddle of everything. I am ashamed 
 to look anyone in the face." 
 
 " You will get over that, I dare say. Don't make a muddle 
 again, that's all. You are well out of this, and so are we. I 
 am hardly sorry that Lucelet hasn't her mother's steady true heart, 
 
"HE WRUNG BASS AN ID'S HAND." 319 
 
 when I think what she might have suffered. Well, that is ajl about 
 it. We have said all we need to say, I think ; for the rest, the 
 more silence the better." 
 
 "And I am dismissed ?" said Heron, with a melancholy smile. 
 
 " You are dismissed. It is my daughter's wish that you and 
 she should see no more of each other, and under the circumstances 
 it is mine. The thing is at an end." 
 
 " Will Lucy not even see me?" 
 
 " No ; she is of opinion that it would be much better she and 
 you should not meet again, and I think so too. She will always 
 think of you with a friendly feeling, and so shall I. Nothing that 
 has happened need make you and me anything but friends, I 
 hope." 
 
 By this time they had reached the foot of the flight of steps 
 that leads up to the column on Waterloo Place. They had been 
 walking very slowly. Money came to a stand there as if they 
 were to go no farther together. 
 
 " I am so confused by all this," said Heron, " I don't know 
 what to say. _ I should like to ask Lucy to forgive me ; I want to 
 ask you to forgive me. I seem to myself like a criminal, and yet 
 I think you ought to have been all more frank with me ; I don't 
 know. I am like one in a dream." 
 
 " Better remain in the dream for the present ; the rights and 
 wrongs of all this are too puzzling for you or me. All I know 
 is, that the thing is over, and that I am disappointed, and that I 
 feel somehow it serves me right. I bear you no ill-feeling what- 
 ever, Heron; I hope you feel the same to me. I liked you; 
 we were good friends. I don't like many men ; I am sorry to 
 lose you, and the House of Commons, and my little Lucelet's 
 settlement in life, which I thought was so secure, and I am glad 
 she takes it so easily, and sorry she hasn't feelings a little deeper, 
 perhaps ; and altogether I'm somewhat in the condition of the man 
 in the old proverb, who had lost a shilling and found sixpence, 
 and so makes up his mind that things might have been worse." 
 
 " I don't see how things could very well have been worse," 
 Heron said despondingly. 
 
 " Yes, they would have been a great deal worse if Lucelet and 
 you had found out all this after you were married and not before, 
 and I were away in Russia and couldn't look after my little girl 
 any more. Not that you wouldn't be an excellent husband in any 
 case, Heron, I'm sure, but it would not be the sort of thing we any 
 of us wanted ; and it would be too late to set things right then, 
 and it is not now. That's how things might have been worse. 
 Heron." 
 
320 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " There is something in all this I don't understand at all," 
 Heron said vehemently ; " I don't mean as regards you, Money, 
 of course; but this sudden change of Lucy's. It isn't like her; 
 I can't make it out " 
 
 "My good fellow, would you have it otherwise? Do you 
 want to persuade Lucelet to change her mind again and to marry 
 you ? I tell you openly, that if there were the least chance of her 
 doing so — which there is not — I would not allow her." 
 
 " No, I don't mean that ; but I am sure she must have been 
 told something about me — this is so unlike her " 
 
 " What does all that matter ? The affair is best left as it is. 
 She says she will not marry you ; you don't want to marry her ; I 
 don't want now that you should marry each other. In Heaven's 
 name what can we all do better than to say no more about it, 
 and shake hands and part ? Do you think it is a state of things that 
 is likely to be any the better for asking the why and the wherefore 
 of this and that? I don't. It's all over, Heron, and that's the 
 long and the short of it. I am going to a new country, and a new 
 country is a new career, they say. I dare say you'll hear some day 
 of Lucelet being married to a Russian prince. Anyhow, think of 
 us kindly as wa shall of you always, and if you can do anything 
 here and I over there to keep the two countries on terms of 
 friendship, let us do so, in God's name, my boy. I don't want to 
 finish up my career by firing upon the old flag or failing to stand 
 by the new one ; and so good-bye." 
 
 He held out his hand. Victor took it in silence. Indeed, 
 he would have found it hard to say anything very coherent just 
 then. 
 
 " Oh ! by the way," Money said, " I was near forgetting. 
 You have a cigar-case about you?" 
 
 Victor produced his cigar-case. 
 
 " Give it to me," Money said, " and take mine. It will be 
 a friendly exchange, and will remind us of each other if we need 
 any reminding. Here — that's the cigar-case I had when we met 
 and talked together that first night in Paris." 
 
 Heron took the case and gave his own, saying, as well as 
 he could, " And this is the one that I had then, too." 
 
 "Ah, yes, I was in hopes it would be so. Well, that's all 
 right. You told me then I had better have nothing to do with 
 you — don't you remember ? — because you were a man with a griev- 
 ance." 
 
 " I wish to Heaven you had followed my advice." 
 
 " No, no, Heron ; don't say that. You are not to blame for 
 anything, and we were good friends, and we always shall be I hope, 
 
A GENERAL B RE A KING-UP. 321 
 
 and we have had some pleasant times together, and I hope to 
 hear lots of good news of you in every way. Well, good-bye, 
 and whenever either of us pulls out his cigar-case to have a 
 smoke, he can't help thinking of the night we first talked together 
 in Paris." 
 
 " Yes," Heron said, " and of the last night we talked together 
 in London." 
 
 Not another word was said. They shook hands again, and 
 went their different ways. Money went up the steps to Waterloo 
 Place, and Heron walked slowly along the dark road by the 
 railings of the Park, hardly knowing indeed whither he was going. 
 If, out of all the sudden confusion, some brighter way was likely 
 to open upon him than that which he had of late been so darkly 
 treading, it is only justice to him to say that he did not then think 
 of that or of anything that directly concerned himself. For the 
 moment he only thought of the voice which had always sounded 
 so friendly in his ears since first he heard it on the balcony of the 
 Paris hotel, which had never told him of anything but friendliness 
 and encouragement, and kindness, and which in all probability 
 he was never to hear again. Had any other thoughts tried to 
 force themselves into his mind, he would have resolutely put them 
 away for that hour. The woman whom he loved would surely 
 have been the last on earth to blame him, could she have known of 
 it, because in that moment he gave up his thoughts to the friend 
 he had lost. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 
 
 Was Lucy, then, really that fickle light-o'-love that her father 
 had regretfully reported her to be ? The answer is a little com- 
 plex, as most answers are which seek to explain human character. 
 She certainly was no light-o'-love in the sense of having actually 
 changed in any of her personal devotion to Heron. She loved 
 him very deeply for the present ; and her love was as likely to 
 prove an abiding emotion if it had the chances in its favour as 
 any sentiment entertained by a girl whose whole nature was 
 affectionate and tender rather than strong. But she had for 
 some time begun to doubt whether Heron was really devoted 
 to her, and whether, if he were not so, they could be very 
 happy together. She had begun to see that her presence was 
 not necessary to his happiness. Many a time she had noticed 
 
332 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 that he always put aside his favourite topics when he came to talk 
 to her. She had tried to get up such political subjects as she 
 knew to be interesting to him, but she could not throw her soul 
 into them ; and, in spite of all that she could do, she saw that he 
 began to think he was boring her when he talked of such things, 
 and he persisted in turning to something else. There were times, 
 indeed, as we have already said, when Victor, stricken with a 
 kind of remorse because he did not love her more, became suddenly 
 so attentive and so tender that Lucy was very happy. But even 
 then she came by degrees to see that this, too, was only a coming 
 down to her level, not a lover's rapturous delight in the society of 
 her he loved. In truth, she had had the greatest desire of her 
 young life gratified so far, and she found that she was not more 
 happy but less happy than before. She began to look forward to 
 the future with a deepening dread. 
 
 All this, however, was only a dim apprehension, such as 
 might well trouble the soul of any girl about to enter into an 
 entirely new way of life, and to give up her happiness into the 
 keeping of one who was, after all, comparatively a stranger. Lucy 
 had been so happy at home, so closely cared for, so tenderly 
 loved by father and mother, that she might well feel a little doubt 
 and sinking of the heart at the prospect of leaving for ever the 
 nest in which she had been so sweetly sheltered. Her home life 
 had almost no duties. She was only asked to be happy, and to 
 love her father, mother, and sister ; and she could not help doing 
 all this in any case. It would not, therefore, be possible that 
 she could look out with mere delight to the leaving of such a 
 home. But if things had gone on in the ordinary course, she 
 would, perhaps, have begun to think less and less of the danger of 
 not being loved enough by her future husband ; and once they 
 were married, she would probably, after a few months, have 
 ceased to think about the matter at all. For up to this time 
 she had only feared that Victor Heron was not as much in love 
 with her as she knew she was with him. The idea had not arisen 
 in her mind that he might all the time be in love with some one 
 else. 
 
 These fears and doubts came by fits and starts. There 
 were bright days when she seemed to wake up in the morning 
 with no fears and doubts at all. Such a day was that on which 
 she expected and received the visit from Minola. The very 
 evening before she had been tormented by serious alarms, and 
 begun to think that she must lay open her doubts to some 
 stronger intelligence than her own, and once for all take counsel. 
 There was only one friend to whom she could trust such a con- 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 323 
 
 fidence, and on whose heart and judgment she thought she could 
 rely, and that was Minola Grey. She wrote to Minola therefore, 
 begging her to come to Victoria Street and see her. This was the 
 letter of which we have already heard, in which she insisted on 
 seeing " dear darling Nola at once, at once," because of something 
 "most particular" on which she wanted her advice "so much, oh, 
 so much!" Strangely enough, when she had written the letter, 
 and thus as she thought made up her mind to seek a confidante 
 and counsel, her doubts and dreads seemed to disappear at once. 
 On the morning when she expected Minola she rose as happy 
 as a bird. She was entirely her old self ; she had no doubts or 
 alarms about anything. She felt as she used to do in the childish 
 days when she thought her papa was the richest, greatest, and 
 most powerful man in all the world, who could give his daughter 
 anything she liked to have if it would be good for her. She 
 was satisfied about Victor, about herself, about everything. She 
 determined that when Nola came she would say nothing about 
 the absurd notions that had been in her head and now were com- 
 pletely out of it, and that she would devise some excuse for 
 having sent for Nola, and they would have a delightful day as ot 
 old, and she would talk a great deal to Nola about her coming 
 happiness, and the gifts and graces of Victor; and perhaps she 
 would ask Nola whether it would be well for her, Lucy, to keep 
 trying to get herself up in politics, or whether Victor would not 
 rather be free of her embarrassing attempts to follow him up such 
 steep and toilsome, not to say misty, heights ? She was so happy 
 and so full of good-nature that she could not refuse her sister 
 Theresa when the latter asked Lucy to go out with her for a short 
 time. 
 
 Perhaps the least important person in this story came to be 
 the one whose chance movement most deeply affected all the 
 other persons in' it. If Theresa Money had not asked her sister 
 to go out with her that day, the lives of most of the persons we 
 know in these pages would probably have turned out some- 
 thing quite different. Lucy could not refuse darling Theresa just 
 when they were so soon to separate, in a manner at least, and she 
 went out ; and when she came back Minola and Victor Heron 
 were together. 
 
 She was so happy and in such high spirits. She loved them 
 both so much. She wondered to see them, as she thought, not 
 friendly enough to each other. She brought them together and 
 made their hands clasp. Then she saw how the colour ran to 
 Minola's face, and how her eyes fell, and how Victor Heron's 
 lips quivered and his hand trembled. She looked from one to 
 
324 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 the other in surprise, and felt for the moment as if some strong 
 electric influence had flung her forcibly out of a circle in which 
 they two remained. Yet nothing came of it. They parted and 
 went their way, as any mere friends might do. Lucy had not the 
 faintest suspicion of any treachery. She was sure that she knew 
 all that was to be known. She felt sure that if she was right in 
 the terrible conjecture that came into her mind, it was a dis- 
 covery for them as well as for her. But she could not persuade 
 herself that she had not made a discovery. She was pierced 
 through and through by the conviction that that one moment had 
 made a change in their lives which nothing on earth could repair. 
 She was distraite, wild, almost hysterical, during the remainder 
 of Mmola's short visit; and Minola had not left her very long 
 when Blanch et came and told the story he had to tell. 
 
 She did not doubt the literal truth of the story, but she did 
 hot interpret it in Blanchet's way. She was sure it was a chance 
 meeting ; but she was sure also that some words must then have 
 passed between Minola and Victor which came of the unhappy 
 contact she had forced upon them. Her truthful, genial soul go 
 at the reality of things at once, and she saw Victor and Minola 
 in the Park forming noble, disinterested plans of self-sacrifice 
 and of utter silence for her sake. Then her mind was made up. 
 She resolved to see her father at once and tell him that she would 
 not marry Victor Heron; but she resolved, too, to take the 
 burden of the change of mind wholly on herself. She would not 
 make her father and mother unhappy by telling of her owi un- 
 happiness. If Minola and Victor were fond of each other, as 
 now seemed but too sure, she would not offer to give Heron up in 
 any way which might allow of a futile and barren rivalry in self- 
 sacrifice. She would make it impossible for anyone to interfere 
 with the course she had determined to follow. It was only wonder- 
 ful to her now how she could have avoided seeing something 
 of this before — how it never occurred to her that Minola would be 
 a so much more suitable wife for Victor than she could ever be. 
 Now it all seemed so obvious and clear. Now she understood 
 the strange habitual chilliness which seemed to envelope, like 
 an atmosphere, herself and Victor. Now she understood why 
 their engagement, which she had so longed for, brought her so 
 little happiness. Now her mind went back to that night when she 
 first took Minola into her confidence, and told her of her love for 
 Heron. She remembered how cold, and strange, and unlike her- 
 self Minola seemed then; and how from that very hour Minola 
 had always seemed to avoid the company of Heron, with whom 
 she had always before been so friendly; and how sometimes, as 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 325 
 
 Lucy had seen with wonder, Minola had almost appeared to 
 dislike him. "When I told her about myself," Lucy now felt 
 certain, " she was already in love with him, and from that time 
 out she only tried to hide it and to keep away from him." 
 
 Therefore Lucy made her sacrifice, such as it was. Let us 
 not undervalue it, even though there had been growing up in her 
 mind for some time a conviction that when she and Heron 
 became engaged to each other it was the result of a sudden im- 
 pulse—of an impulse rather from her than from him, and that it 
 was a mistake. She still loved him, not indeed with the depth 
 and strength of a more vigorous nature, but very much. She 
 would probably have been very happy if married to him. Her 
 resolve was not the freak of fickleness, even if her love had not 
 the depth of passion. For the hour, at least, she did not believe 
 it possible she could ever love another man as she had loved 
 Heron, and she never was more deeply impressed with this belief 
 than in the moment when she made up her mind to say that 
 she loved him no more. 
 
 Now the thing was done. Some days had passed over, and 
 Lucy's family were all made aware of the change that had taken 
 place, and of the necessity of turning public attention away from 
 it as much as possible. They were making preparations for 
 Theresa's marriage and for the removal to Russia. Lucy kept up 
 her spirits remarkably well, and saw people as if nothing had hap- 
 pened. She even remained in the room with her mother one 
 afternoon, when Lady Limpenny was announced, although a gentle 
 shudder ran through her when she heard the name of the visitor. 
 " She comes to find out all about everything," Lucy said despair- 
 ingly, as Lady Limpenny rustled, fluttered, and rattled into the 
 room, bringing with her the idea of what Heine called " a tempest 
 in petticoats." 
 
 " My dearest Theresa, now do tell me, what is this that all the 
 town is ringing with ? I do so want to know, for it is so shocking 
 to hear things said that one does not like to hear, and not to be 
 able to say if they are true or false." 
 
 " What are the things, Laura ? " Mrs. Money asked, in a voice 
 the soft, deep melancholy of which had received from recent occur- 
 rences an additional depth of melancholy. 
 
 "Oh, well, everything — all sorts of things — you can't have any 
 idea ! Is it true that Mr. Money and you are going away to live 
 in Russia? " 
 
 " It is quite true, Laura." 
 
 " And to be an enemy of this country, perhaps, when every- 
 body says there is sure to be a war. I declare to you, darling 
 
326 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 Theresa, I felt when I heard it as if the end of the world were cer- 
 tainly coming. I do believe it is coming." 
 
 " I am sure I wish it would come quickly," Lucy interposed. 
 
 "Now, you dear, darling creature, why should you wish that? 
 Of all persons in the world, you to wish that ! Do tell me why 
 you wish to have the end of the world come so quickly? " 
 
 " Because," Lucy answered coolly, " if the end of the world is 
 to come at all, I should like it to come in my time ; I should like 
 to see it, Lady Limpenny." 
 
 "Oh, that's it? Oh, yes, yes! But I should be dreadfully 
 afraid ; I should not have the courage ; you young people have so 
 much courage. I am quite afraid to think of it. But it will come 
 very soon, my dear, very soon ; you may depend on that. All the 
 signs are there, I am told. Sir James laughs ; he only laughs — 
 think of that ! But you are going to live in Russia, all of you, at 
 once ? " 
 
 " After Theresa is married," Mrs. Money explained. " She, of 
 course, will not go with us." 
 
 " Of course not — of course not, dearest Theresa. And this 
 darling girl whom I see before me now — does she go ? " 
 
 "Yes, Lucy goes with us, of course." 
 
 " Indeed ! " Lady Limpenny opened her eyes to their utter- 
 most capacity of expansion at this answer, and she prolonged the 
 first syllable of her "indeed" so that it resembled some linked 
 sweetness of music long drawn out. When she had said the word 
 once aloud she appeared to say it over two or three times to herself, 
 for she turned and bowed her head with exactly the same wonder- 
 ing, enquiring expression which she put on when she indulged in 
 her public demonstration of amazement. 
 
 " Oh, yes ! Lucy goes with us, of course. She intends to pick 
 up a Russian prince." 
 
 This little pleasantry Mrs. Money had borrowed from her hus- 
 band, believing it to be rather a subtle and clever device for 
 throwing enquiring people off the scent. 
 
 " Indeed ! A Russian prince. How very nice ! And to have 
 a great many serfs, I suppose, like the lady in Les Danischeffs — 
 only I know our dear young friend would not be quite so cruel ; 
 and, besides, I believe there are no serfs now. But now tell me, 
 you dears, how does our distinguished friend in Parliament — Mr. 
 Heron, I mean— how does he like this? Won't he be apt to 
 quarrel with the Russian prince ? " 
 
 " Oh, dear, no ! " said Mrs. Money ; " why should he ? " 
 
 " Why should he ? Oh, indeed ! Well, now, really, you do 
 surprise me. Why should he? Well, I should have thought — 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 327 
 
 but of course you know best. And so you are all going to leave 
 us, and to go to Russia ! And if there should be a war ? I 
 thought Mr. Money was too much of a patriot " 
 
 " Mr. Money is a. patriot,'' his wife solemnly said ; " he is too 
 much of a patriot to be able to see his country degraded by an 
 aristocratic system which is inconsistent either with her national 
 progress or with the progress of humanity. England is not the 
 English Government, Laura Limpenny. The English Government 
 have always systematically denied to Mr. Money an opportunity 
 of making his genius serviceable to his country. His genius has 
 no place in this land under such a system. He leaves England; 
 but he loves the land and the people ; it is against the system he 
 protests." 
 
 " And you are willing to go, Theresa dearest ? " Lady Lim- 
 penny asked, feeling herself quite unable to make head against the 
 eloquence and power of this speech. 
 
 " I have urged him to go where he will be appreciated, Laura." 
 
 " Well, I shall miss you all, I am sure," Lady Limpenny said 
 with a profound sigh ; " but these are the ways of life, I suppose. 
 Such changes ! Our dear young friend the poet — I never can. 
 think of his name — do tell me, Lucy darling, what was the name 
 of that very charming young man that I used to meet here." 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet? " Lucy said, not very graciously. 
 
 " Mr. Blanchet, of course. They tell me that he has left the 
 country — gone to America, they say. He has gone to the far 
 West ; that is in America, is it not ? " 
 
 " But is this true ? " Lucy asked. Her pale face coloured at 
 the mention of the luckless poet's name. It had bitter associa- 
 tions for her. 
 
 " It is true, Lucy dear," her mother answered, looking at the 
 girl with kindly, tender eyes ; " I had not time to tell you about 
 it," she added significantly, meaning that she had not desired to 
 bring up his name unnecessarily to poor Lucy. " He was anxious 
 to go ; he thought he could make a career for himself out there, 
 and he was anxious to get out of this anyhow; and I spoke to 
 your papa, and papa thought he had much better go as soon as 
 possible ; and he helped him all he could, with letters of intro- 
 duction and all that; and he has taken his sister with him, and he 
 is gone, my dear." 
 
 The helper of unhappy men did not mention the fact that the 
 assistance she and her husband had given to Blanchet was not by 
 any means confined to mere letters of introduction, although of 
 these too he had goodly store. 
 
 Lucy withdrew to the window, and looked listlessly out. The 
 
328 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 poor poet ! Once she admired him greatly ; and the memories 
 came back of that pleasant girlish time when he was a hero and a 
 sort of god in her eyes. Lately, when he had acted with such 
 treachery, and brought about such strange confusion, she had 
 found some excuse for him because she fancied that perhaps it 
 was disappointed love for her that had made him try to set her 
 against Heron ; and although the result had been so sad for her, 
 yet what woman during all the centuries before and since Lady 
 Anne was born would not look with more lenient eye upon the 
 treacheries that were done for love of her ? There was something 
 of added loneliness in the knowledge that he too had passed 
 beyond the horizon of her history. 
 
 " We hope he will do well in America," Mrs. Money said, 
 " and perhaps become a great man one day, and come back to 
 Europe and see his friends, who will be proud of his success, I 
 am sure." 
 
 Lucy came forward again, and stood as it were in her mother's 
 shadow. Lady Limpenny began again complacently : 
 
 " So you see, Lucy, darling, I was not wrong in all my news, 
 and your mother knew this as well as I did. You see everybody 
 is going away ; and our young friend too with the odd, pretty 
 name, the girl with all the lovely hair, you know — the hair that 
 you tell me is really all her own. What is that pretty girl's odd 
 name? I ought to remember it, I am sure." 
 
 Mrs. Money would much rather this pretty girl's name had not 
 been brought up just then. But there was no escaping Lady 
 Limpenny, and she quietly answered : 
 
 " You mean Miss Grey, Laura — Minola Grey ? " 
 
 " Yes, to be sure ; how could I forget that sweet, pretty, odd 
 name ? Minola Grey, of course. And she too has gone away and 
 never means to come back any more, I am told." 
 
 " Minola Grey gone away?" Lucy asked in genuine astonish- 
 ment. " It can't be, Lady Limpenny ; why should she go away, 
 mamma ? Do you know anything of this tpo ? " 
 
 " No, my dearest," her mother said ; " I know nothing at all 
 about it. Are you certain, Laura ? It looks so unlikely, you 
 know, that Minola Grey could go anywhere without letting us 
 know something about it." 
 
 " Quite certain, darling Theresa. I have only just been at 
 the young lady's lodgings, and so ridiculous I did seem, you can't 
 think — oh ! you really can't ! " 
 
 Lucy looked as if she found no difficulty in thinking of Lady 
 Limpenny making herself seem ridiculous. 
 
 " Because," Lady Limpenny explained, in answer to enquiring 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 329 
 
 looks from Mrs. Money, " the very moment I got to the door I 
 forgot the dear young lady's name. I could not remember it. I 
 could only ask for the young lady. But of course they knew whom 
 I meant, for there was no other young lady living there." 
 
 " Well, but about her— about Minola ? " Mrs. Money asked 
 with a little impatience. 
 
 " About her? Oh ! yes, yes, to be sure. Well, my dear, they 
 told me she had left that place and left London ; and that they did 
 not expect her back any more ; they thought she was going to 
 live abroad somewhere — Italy, I think." 
 
 " This is extraordinary," Lucy said. " I can't understand it, 
 .Tiamma ; I'll go at once and see if Minola has really gone." 
 
 " You'll find it all true, darling," Lady Limpenny affirmed, with 
 a grave shake of the head. At first it did not seem to her a 
 matter of great interest, for she assumed that Miss Grey had simply 
 gone to live on the Continent with the knowledge of her friends. 
 But now that there was evidently some mystery about it, she was 
 disposed to make the utmost possible of the mystery, and to plume 
 herself considerably on having been the first to find out the strange 
 thing's occurrence. The truth was that Lady Limpenny had gone 
 first to see Minola in the hope that, under pretence of paying her 
 a gracious and friendly visit, she could induce Minola to tell her 
 more about the Moneys and their present purposes than they 
 would be likely to tell of themselves. Lady Limpenny was really 
 very fond of the Moneys in her own way ; but she could not 
 resist the anxiety to find out, if possible, something more about 
 their affairs than they would wish to have known, especially since 
 these affairs had become just now matter of rather common specu- 
 lation. In Lady Limpenny's eyes, a friend was Mr. Money ; a 
 greater friend was Mrs. Money ; but the greatest friend of all was, 
 the truth — about their private affairs. 
 
 There was nothing more to be got now, however, about the 
 affairs of the Moneys or of anybody else, and Lucy had announced 
 her intention of going to find out something about Miss Grey. 
 It was in Lady Limpenny's mind to offer her companionship, 
 when a card was brought to Mrs. Money, who handed it to Lucy, 
 saying significant!}', " Mr. Sheppard, my dear ; " and Lady Lim- 
 penny decided at once to remain and see this visitor, about whom 
 she had heard a great deal, and whom, from Mrs. Money's look, 
 she at once assumed to be in some way an object of especial 
 interest at the present moment. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard looked remarkably pale and perturbed when 
 he entered the room. He had of late become well known to 
 Mrs. Money, who always regarded him with a peculiar interest 
 
330 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 since the day, now seeming so long ago, when she heard from 
 Mary Blanchet that he was a lover of Minola Grey. She knew 
 too that her husband lately had leaned to the side of Sheppard 
 as a possible husband for Minola, while she herself had in 
 secret preferred the cause of Herbert Blanchet. She did not 
 doubt that Mr. Sheppard's present visit had something to do with 
 Minola and the strange story Lady Limpenny had been telling, 
 
 Mr. Sheppard explained that he had not at first had any 
 intention of intruding on the ladies — no emotion or surprise 
 could make him forego his formalism of manner — but that as 
 he found Mr. Money was not at home, he had taken the liberty 
 of paying them a visit. Both ladies expressed themselves as 
 greatly delighted. Mr. Sheppard did not get much further, how- 
 ever, except into such matters as the weather and the debates 
 in Parliament, and Mrs. Money made no effort to draw him into 
 any closer converse. Lady Limpenny penetrated the meaning of 
 this with that remarkable astuteness on which she prided herself, 
 and which she was convinced could never be deceived. " They 
 won't speak before me," she said in her own mind. " It's 
 something very serious and shocking; Miss Grey has gone off 
 and married some dreadful person ; or something has occurred 
 which they don't want me to know. But I'll find it all out." 
 
 She had nothing better for it at the moment, however, than 
 to take her leave, which she did with many vows that they must 
 all see a great deal of each other before they left England. 
 
 " Lady Limpenny is a very dear old friend of mine, Mr. 
 Sheppard/' Mrs. Money explained, " but I did not wish to speak 
 of anything concerning some of our friends in the presence even 
 of her. You have come to tell us something about a very dear 
 friend, Mr. Sheppard, have you not?" 
 
 " I have come rather to ask you for some information about 
 a very dear friend," Sheppard said, with white and trembling lips, 
 as he rose from his seat and came near Mrs. Money. " I have 
 come to ask you if you can tell me anything about Miss Grey ? " 
 
 " Nothing at all, Mr. Sheppard, I am sorry to say. I thought 
 you had come to relieve our anxiety. Is this true, this story we 
 have just been hearing — is it true that she has left London ? " 
 
 Sheppard looked from one woman's face to the other. He 
 was always naturally suspicious, and at first he could not believe it 
 possible that they two were not in some plot against him. 
 
 "Don't you really know?" he asked. "Don't either of you 
 ladies really know? Don't you know where she has gone, nor 
 why, nor anything about her? Is it possible she can have gone 
 away from London and you not know ? " 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 331 
 
 " I never heard a word about it until a moment ago," Mrs. 
 Money said. " I am all in amazement, Mr. Sheppard ; I really 
 felt sure that you knew, and were coming with some explanation 
 from her, perhaps." Mrs. Money had begun to think that perhaps 
 for some inscrutable reason Minola might have consented to 
 marry Mr. Sheppard, and gone down into the country or to 
 Scotland to do it. 
 
 " From her," Sheppard said, with a sickly smile ; " oh, no ! 
 I shall never be entrusted with a message from her. I only want 
 to know now who is the person likely to be entrusted with such 
 a message. I want you ladies to let me know the worst at once, if 
 you can ; it isn't any kindness to keep it from me." 
 
 Mrs. Money only repeated her assurances and her wonder. 
 Lucy was standing with her eyes looking on the ground, and a faint 
 colour in her cheeks. She did not know anything indeed, but she 
 suspected that Minola's disappearance could in any case bode 
 little good to the hopes of poor Sheppard. Mrs. Money glanced 
 at her daughter with wondering, pitying eyes. 
 
 Sheppard turned to Lucy : " You were her friend, Miss Money 
 — her dearest friend. It is impossible she can have left London 
 for good without your knowing something of why she has done so. 
 She could not be ungrateful ; nobody that knew her could believe 
 that of her. She must have told you — and you may tell me 
 something. Don't think me rude or pressing ; you can hardly 
 understand my feelings, but still I would ask you to make allow- 
 ance for them." 
 
 " Oh, yes, Mr. Sheppard ! " said Lucy gently, her eyes filling 
 with tears, " I can perhaps understand your feelings ; or, at least, 
 I can make allowance for them. But I can't tell you why Nola 
 has gone away, if she has gone away. She has not told me any- 
 thing ; only I am sure it was with some good purpose, and because 
 she thought she was doing right — or was in some one's way — oh, 
 indeed, I can't explain, and can hardly guess ! But I do sympathise 
 ■with you, Mr. Sheppard, if you will allow me to speak to you 
 plainly and like a friend— and indeed — indeed, there is no use in 
 your thinking of Nola. Don't be angry, mamma, and think that I 
 am talking as a girl oughtn't to talk ; I know what I am saying, 
 and I would spare Mr. Sheppard useless pain if I could. Ah ! " 
 
 With a start and this exclamation she turned away, for a 
 servant at that moment brought her a letter, and she saw that 
 it was in the handwriting of Minola Grey. She left the room 
 without saying another word. 
 
 " Your daughter knows something which she will not tell," 
 Mr. Sheppard said gloomily. 
 
332 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 " No," Mrs. Money answered ; " she said she knew nothing ; 
 but she guesses something, perhaps, which she does not think it 
 right to tell. It would be of no use asking her any more questions, 
 Mr. Sheppard ; and she is a good deal disturbed at present." 
 
 "Certainly, certainly," Mr. Sheppard hastened to say; "I 
 am quite aware of that : and I have to apologise again for in- 
 truding upon you and her at such a time. I may perhaps be 
 allowed to congratulate her and you on the happy marriage she 
 is about to make with one who is so certain of distinction ; and 
 indeed I had some hopes, perhaps, that her own happiness would 
 render her only more ready to sympathise with one to whom the 
 fates have been less kind." 
 
 " Allow me to remove a misconception, Mr. Sheppard," Mrs. 
 Money said, turning her deep eyes on him and speaking in tones 
 of double-distilled melancholy. " My daughter is not about to 
 be married ; she is going to Russia with us ; any reports you may 
 have heard to the contrary are entirely untrue." 
 
 " But — I beg your pardon," the aghast Sheppard asked ; '' is 
 it possible? — is it not true that Miss Money is to be married to 
 Mr. Heron?" 
 
 " It is not true, Mr. Sheppard ; distinctly not true. Whatever 
 thoughts of that kind may once have existed, exist, I can assure 
 you, no longer. Miss Money is not going to marry anyone — at 
 present, at least ; she is going to Russia with her father and me." 
 
 " Then I see it all ! I need not ask any more explanations, 
 and I have only to beg pardon again for having intruded upon 
 you. I see it all now only too clearly ; I see that I have thrown 
 away half my life for nothing, and been made a fool of all the 
 time — and this is the end! " 
 
 Mrs. Money looked at him in wonder. He was white with 
 anger and excitement. She did not understand him in the least. 
 She had not yet been told the full reason of the breaking-off of 
 the engagement between Lucy and Heron, and knew no more 
 than that Lucy now thought she did not care about him. Her 
 mind was therefore filled with a certain pity for the discarded 
 lover whom she pictured as suffering greatly in secret, and the 
 meaning of Sheppard's words was lost on her. When with a 
 formal bow he quitted the room, she could only think that his 
 disappointment in love must have somewhat disturbed his brain. 
 
 Mr. Sheppard went and walked the Victoria Embankment for 
 hours. He was very angry, bitter, and miserable ; and yet he was 
 in his secret heart longing to know the worst. He began to be 
 ashamed of the manner in which his life was wasting away in 
 fruitless pursuit of a girl who he now saw could not be made to 
 
A GENERAL BREAKING-UP. 333 
 
 care for him. If the worst were over he thought he would begin 
 to shake off some of his passion and be like a man again. The 
 worst in his eyes was what he now felt an almost perfect assurance 
 that he was soon destined to hear — the news that Minola Grey 
 and Victor Heron had been married. Why they should have 
 chosen to do this in secret, and by means of a sort of flight, 
 instead of in the open light of day, Mr. Sheppard could not 
 guess ; but he felt sure that that would be, or was already, the end 
 of all that long chapter of his existence. How much of his passion 
 had been pure, unselfish love, and how much the eager desire of 
 a self-conceited and ambitious man to succeed in something he 
 had greatly set his heart upon, Mr. Sheppard did not himself 
 know, and had never asked of his consciousness. There were 
 moments, as we know, but as he did not know, when perhaps if 
 chance had set him on to say the right word, or even to present 
 himself at the right instant, he might have found himself in pos- 
 session of his dearest hope ; and made some one else, and 
 perhaps himself, unhappy for life. But the fates had been in 
 league with himself against him ; and he was at last growing weary 
 of the long pursuit in which, like the people in a dream who fain 
 would run but cannot, he found some vague, insuperable obstruction 
 always keeping him back. He was growing ashamed of himself. 
 It was not in his nature voluntarily and manfully to give up so 
 long as there seemed to him the faintest possibility that in any 
 moment of good fortune on his side, or of weakness on Minola's, 
 he might yet be successful. But in that bitter evening of dis- 
 appointment and rage which followed his visit to Mrs. Money, he 
 did think many a time that it would be a relief to him when 
 the worst was known ; that he would become a different man 
 when all this tormenting hope and futile struggle was at an end ; 
 and that he might be able to take up his life again and turn it 
 to better purpose. It will be a source of consolation to all tender 
 natures to know, that after all Mr. Sheppard is not likely to die of 
 a broken heart even if he should lose Minola Grey. 
 
 Meanwhile Lucy in her room had read the letter from Minola. 
 It was a letter which it had cost much pain to write and surely 
 gave much pain to read. It was full of the proud humiliation of 
 a spirit that not willingly humbles itself, but which, brought face 
 to face with the duty, does it to the full. Only one who like Lucy 
 knew already most of the story it had to tell could well have 
 understood all or half it meant to say. Minola took much for 
 granted ; she was speaking only to the heart of her friend. She 
 spoke in the briefest manner possible of her meeting with Heron 
 in the Park, and of what Blanchet had told Lucy and had told 
 
334 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 her about it. She assumed that Lucy would know there was 
 nothing in that chance meeting of which anyone had to be 
 ashamed — except indeed the unworthy friend who had miscon- 
 strued it, and over him, too, Minola passed with the fewest 
 words. What the letter was meant to tell was that Minola had 
 determined to leave England, and not to return for many, many 
 years ; making no pretence at concealment of the truth that she 
 did so because of an unhappy, a long-cherished, and a long- 
 hidden love. Long since she would have gone away, Minola 
 said, but that she dreaded to have her secret guessed at, and 
 believed she could otherwise conceal it for ever. So far as the 
 letter told, it was but the unhappy love of the writer for a man 
 she could not marry. No word in it hinted at the possibility of 
 the unhappy love being unhappily too well returned. Minola's 
 only thought still was to keep Lucy and Victor Heron together. 
 
 " So now, dear, dear Lucy, good-bye. I shall only be a day 
 or two more at Keeton, and shall merely rush through London 
 on my way outwards, so that I shan't see you any more for 
 the present. But we shall meet again some time, when I have 
 got over all this, and am not ashamed of myself or of you any 
 more ; and we shall be friends, as we are. I could say ever so 
 much more, but to what end, dear ? I leave you to do with my 
 wretched secret as you please ; to hide it or proclaim it just as 
 you like ; only I can't claim for this mood of mind even the 
 courage of desperation or the merit of self-inflicted penance, for 
 I know well enough all the time how very safe it is in your dear 
 little kindly hands. Say whatever you think right for me in the 
 way of good-byes and of good wishes to your father, and mother, 
 and sister, and to anyone else you think fit ; you could not 
 possibly say anything too strong in the way of affection and gra- 
 titude from me to all who are close to you and whom you love. 
 " Always, dear Lucy, your friend, 
 
 " Nola." 
 
 As soon as she could do anything for her tears Lucy sat down 
 and wrote a few lines to Victor Heron, telling him that Nola 
 was at Keeton, and that if he went there at once he might find 
 her before she left England, and bidding him go to her, and 
 wishing her and him all happiness. This letter she gave to a 
 servant, telling him to take a hansom cab and find Mr. Heron 
 wherever he was, and give it to him. Then Lucy quietly came 
 downstairs and sat by her mother's side, and whispered to her : 
 
 " Mamma, I am ready to go to Russia now any time. I think 
 we shall be much happier there than here." 
 
" WHERE I DID BEGIN, THERE SHALL I END." 335 
 
 The letter found Victor Heron in a sort of despair. He had 
 written to Minola, and got no answer ; he had gone to her old 
 place, and found that his letter was still lying there. Nothing was 
 known of Minola, except that she had left London, that she was not 
 expected there any more, and that it was supposed she had gone 
 to live " in France, or Italy, or somewhere ; " and that Mary 
 Blanchet had gone with her brother to America. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 "WHERE I DID BEGIN, THERE SHALL I END." 
 
 When Minola began to realise the fact that Mary Blanchet had 
 actually left her, and that she was now for the first time alone in 
 very deed, an utter sense of desolation came over her. It showed 
 itself first in the shape of complete inaction. She sat down and 
 moodily thought, and seemed to have nothing else to do. She 
 had never before understood how completely helpless a woman 
 may become, nor how much she is compelled by the necessities of 
 her being, or by the social laws, or by all together, to be a dependent 
 creature. The falling off of Mary Blanchet seemed to be the last 
 blow. She had now not a friend left in London, not a friend indeed 
 in the world, to whom she could turn for guidance or comfort. 
 The mere physical sense of loneliness was something hardly to be 
 borne. 
 
 She ought to have found consolation, perhaps sufficient, in 
 the knowledge that she had done no wrong, and that her troubles, 
 such as they were, had not been the result of any fault of hers. 
 But it is to be feared that Minola did not belong to that class of 
 persons whose well-regulated minds can always show them when 
 they have done no wrong, and who can therefore wrap themselves 
 up in their comfortable mantle of self-satisfaction and go to sleep, 
 as Byron did on the deck of the vessel when the storm was raging 
 and he found that he could neither help nor hinder. Minola 
 kept racking her mind to know whether she had not in some way 
 done wrong, and been thus to blame for the troubles that had come 
 on her and on so many of her friends. She felt as if in some 
 way she must have done wrong to Lucy Money. Even when she 
 found herself breaking into tears at the defection of Mary Blanchet, 
 she went on asking herself whether there must not be something 
 strangely defective in her own nature, seeing that she could not 
 keep even poor Mary, for whom she had done so much, still faith- 
 ful to her. 
 
336 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 One thing was clear to her during all her depression ; and it 
 was that, as soon as she could rally enough of mental strength to 
 do anything, she must efface herself from the association of the 
 few friends she had known in London. She must absolutely take 
 herself away from those to whom her presence henceforth could 
 only be an embarrassment All her scheme of lonely and proud 
 independence had been a disastrous failure ; and her only business 
 now was to get out of it with the least harm to those she still so 
 much loved. If she were absolutely gone out of sight and reach of 
 Lucy and Heron, all, she thought, might yet come right. The 
 suddenly discovered love of Heron and her, too early seen un- 
 known and known too late, would be but an episode in his life, 
 to be looked back upon hereafter with kindly, unembittered emo- 
 tion. For herself she should at least have always the sweet memory 
 that she had loved and been loved when she was young. 
 
 She prepared, therefore, after one miserable night, for what 
 she called effacing herself. She had determined to go and live in 
 Rome. It became more and more an idea of hers that she would 
 be able to find peace in Rome — that refuge to which so many 
 sick hearts are always turning, they know not why. But in the 
 mean time there must be arrangements made for enabling her 
 project of living at Rome to be conveniently carried out. The 
 best thing, therefore, that she could think of was to go down 
 to Keeton and consult the lawyer in the hands of whose firm the 
 yet unarranged affairs of her father and herself remained. She 
 had a pleasant recollection of a motherly, kindly woman, his wife, 
 who showed a deep interest in her during her last visit to 
 Dukes-Keeton — that visit which was fraught with such momentous 
 consequences. She thought, too, she would be glad to have a 
 look at Keeton for the last time ; it should, she felt resolved, be 
 the very last time. Wherever she might go afterwards, whether 
 she remained in Rome or wandered on to some other resting- 
 place, she was determined that she would not return to England. 
 She remembered one or two pleasant girls in the lawyer's house : 
 and she thought that they would help her among them to make her 
 arrangements, and get her some intelligent, well-brought-up Keeton 
 lass, who would like to travel and see the world, and be her maid and 
 companion, and who would have no brother, or sweetheart, or other 
 male attraction of any kind whose memory must be dragged at 
 each remove a lengthening chain. It would not take long to make 
 these arrangements, and then she would efface herself from England 
 for ever. 
 
 She would write, of course, to Lucy and to her mother. But 
 not, she thought, until she was fairly out of London, and so far 
 
" WHERE I DID BEGIN, THERE SHALL I END" 337 
 
 on her way to her project of self-exile. It would be idle to try 
 to ignore what had happened, and to go to see the Moneys and 
 try to make them believe, or to seem as if they believed, that 
 she was leaving England simply because she had taken a whim 
 for travel. All that would be absurd now. For her own sake and 
 the sake of all others concerned she had only to go out of England 
 as soon as possible, and begin for the second time a new life. 
 Her arrangements for leaving town were soon made; and one soft 
 spring evening she found herself straining her eyes from the window 
 of a railway carriage for a last look at the London of her dreams 
 and hopes. 
 
 She found in Keeton all the welcome and kindness she had 
 expected. She had no trouble in making her arrangements to 
 go to Rome. She even went and paid a visit of friendly farewell 
 to Mr. Saulsbury, and was civilly received, and tried at first to 
 think the civility was warmth. But it soon grew plain, even to 
 her disturbed powers of observation, that Mr. SauLbury regarded 
 her resolve to visit Rome as only a preliminary to her passing over 
 altogether to the faith of Rome, and therefore could not bring 
 himself to receive her on any terms of cordiality. He seemed now 
 such an absurd old person to Minola, that she wondered how she 
 could ever have been so foolish as to have any misunderstanding 
 with him, or to complain of anything he said or did. 
 
 She left him, never in all probability to see him again. He 
 felt convinced that he had impressed her rather profoundly at this 
 their final interview, and trusted that even in Rome itself some 
 of his severe admonitions might remain in her memory and ring 
 in her ears. 
 
 She wrote to Lucy the letter we have already heard of; and 
 then she began to feel as if she had taken leave of all the breathing 
 world, and were about to enter a tomb. If she had ever been of 
 the faith which so alarmed poor Mr. Saulsbury, it is certain that 
 she would have gone to Rome with the resolve to shelter herself 
 within one of its sanctuaries. 
 
 A day or two passed away ; and she was almost on the eve of 
 her going. She meant to travel so as to reach London at night, 
 and only to drive from one station to another, and cross to the 
 Continent at once. She got out a map of Rome many a time and 
 tried to study it, as once she used to study the map of London, in 
 order that when she arrived there she might not be a stranger. 
 But she could not recall the old spirit ; and for fellow-traveller 
 now she had not her friend Mary Blanchet, but a pretty and red- 
 cheeked Keeton girl, who felt no manner of curiosity about Rome 
 or any other place. 
 
 z 
 
338 MISS MISANTHROPE. 
 
 One farewell she had to make, which could not be dispensed 
 with. She must see the park and the mausoleum for the last 
 time. She must be alone there. She must sit once more on the 
 steps of that monument, and think of the past days there, and say- 
 it a good-bye for ever. She had been very sad there, and the 
 sadness endeared it to her now ; she had had sweet dreams and 
 bright hopes there, and the place where they had floated round her 
 was sanctified like the spot where some ones we have loved lie 
 buried. 
 
 It was a calm, beautiful evening as she passed through the 
 streets in Keeton and into the park. The business of the town, 
 such as it was, was stili going on, and she knew that she was 
 likely to have the trees all to herself for more than an hour to 
 come. She went on to the mausoleum and met no one. 
 
 The voices of the woods were sweet, musical, and liielancholy 
 in her ears. She allowed the influence of the scene and its 
 memories to sink into her soul. As she sat on the steps of the 
 monument, she seemed to pass through a series of experiences as 
 long drawn out as those of the Persian king in the story, who 
 during his moment's plunge in the water lived whole years of trial, 
 and toil, and love, and loss. It was strange, and sweet, to close 
 her eyes, and in the murmur of the trees to fancy that she 
 heard the laugh of her brother as he and she played together in 
 the old time that now for the moment seemed to-day again. 
 Then there came back to recollection her girlish days ; her romantic 
 fancies and hopes ; the heroes of her imaginary, harmless loves ; 
 the weary home-life when no one within the four walls that were 
 assumed to constitute her home appeared to care for her any more. 
 And then Mary Blanchet, so kind, and quaint, and good ! Ah ! but 
 if our lonely heroine meant to enjoy the dreamy, half-sensuous 
 delight of her hour among the trees and the associations of her 
 childhood, she ought not to have allowed any memory of Mary 
 Blanchet to steal in among the recollections ; for with that name 
 came all the rest : came the names of the friends she had lost ; 
 came with such intensity of regret the thought of the one man 
 whom he had so deeply loved, and whom she must never see more. 
 One little moment of acknowledged love, one moment with a 
 bitterness of secrecy and shame mingled in its passionate, fleeting 
 joy — and this was all, and all was over ; and she was going away 
 to lead a lonely life of renunciation and repression, and never to 
 know one ray of happy love. It was hard ; she was so very 
 young. She covered her face with her hands, and gave way to a 
 passion of tears. But her tears, even in their starting, brought 
 a new and painful memory with them — the memory of the day 
 
" WHERE I DID BEGIN, THERE SHALL I END." 339 
 
 when she sat on those very steps before, and was resolved to 
 leave Keeton, and go to be independent and happy in London ; 
 and when poor Sheppard came up through these very trees and 
 tried to make her love him. Her heart was softened to him now. 
 He and she were in a manner companions in misfortune. She 
 reproached herself now for having been cold, and sarcastic, and 
 bitter to him that day. She wondered how she could have found 
 it in her heart to be so hard and unkind to anyone who loved ; 
 and she felt inclined to own that she deserved any fate that might 
 have come on her since she had been so unsympathetic with 
 others. She still kept her head down and her face hidden in her 
 hands, and was ashamed, reluctant to look up and meet the soft, 
 unpitying brightness of the sun. But she suddenly seemed to 
 hear a sound among the trees that made her start, and she raised 
 her face all flushed and tear-stained as it was, and, with her eyes 
 glittering in grief and alarm, looked eagerly to see if anyone was 
 coming, and if she must fly from her refuge. The last day when 
 she sat in tears there, she was disturbed by the coming of poor 
 Sheppard. He at least was not near to trouble her now. Yet her 
 face kept its shamed and startled expression. Her quick ears had 
 surely caught some sound which did not belong to the rustlings 
 and murmurings of the woods, every distinct voice of which she 
 knew and could assign to the oak, or the beech, or the chestnut, 
 or the plane that owned it. She stood up, ready to escape if 
 anyone should be coming. Yes, surely that was the decided, 
 rapid sound of some one approaching through the wood. She 
 stood in startled attitude, ready for flight, looking more hand- 
 some even than usual in her embarrassment and alarm. Up 
 through that very path before her came poor Sheppard that 
 day. See, there actually was some one coming — a man ; she 
 could see him plainly. He was far enough away yet to allow 
 her to make the most dignified retreat possible before he 
 could reach the steps of the mausoleum. Did she try to escape ? 
 No ; she stood still ; still as a statue, although not indeed so 
 pale — her face crimsoned with wonder, dread, insane hope, all 
 unspeakable emotion. " Am I losing my reason ? " she asked. 
 She did not know whether to advance or escape now ; and she 
 could not stand any longer, but sat or fell on the steps of the 
 mausoleum, and waited there for what was to happen. For there 
 was no longer any possibility of mistake or doubt ; and it was 
 Yictor Heron himself who was coming with rapid steps towards her. 
 
 He was breathless when he came up to her. 
 
 " I knew I should find you here," he said, and he flung himself 
 on the steps of the mausoleum beside her. 
 
J* 
 340 MISS MISANTHROFE. 
 
 "Where is Lucy — has anything happened?" she stammered. 
 
 " Many things have happened that concern you and me; I'll 
 tell you all, only I must say this first — I am free to tell you how 
 I love you, and to ask you to forgive me for not saying this long 
 ago, when I ought to have known it ; and I have so much to say — 
 
 and " and seated beside her he threw his arm round her, and 
 
 tried to draw her towards him. 
 
 " But Lucy, where is Lucy?" Minola asked, still endeavouring 
 to retain her self-command and to withdraw from his clasp. 
 
 " It was Lucy who told me you were here, and sent me to you. 
 No, Minola, you shall not get away from me now; no more cross- 
 purposes ! I have come for you. You do love me ? You will 
 not send me away? No ; I'll never leave you again." 
 
 " I was going away," said Minola, trembling, and still bewildered, 
 and hardly knowing what she and he were saying. " I was going 
 away to Rome for ever, to avoid you all, and leave you and Lucy 
 to be happy and free ;" and the tears came into her eyes again, and 
 she could not say any more. 
 
 " Oh, you shan't go to Rome, or anywhere, unless I go with 
 you ! " he said ; " but I have so much to tell you. Can you listen 
 now, and understand, do you think?" 
 
 " Oh, yes, I can ; I am not so absurd ! " she answered; feeling, 
 nevertheless, very absurd — if it is absurd to be greatly agitated 
 under the influence of a sudden hope that even yet seems a 
 bewildering impossibility. 
 
 Then he began to explain in very rapid and incoherent manner, 
 and with his natural vivacity and impetuosity intensified a hundred- 
 fold by the emotions of the moment. Much of what he said 
 only she could well have followed or even guessed at ; some of 
 it she allowed to pass by without quite understanding it. The 
 burden of it all was clear, however : Lucy had found out that she 
 did not really love him, and the breaking off of the engagement 
 had come from her and her father. Heron was absolutely free. 
 
 They talked together for a long time. It was strange ; he did 
 not, after the few hurried utterances of the first breathless moment, 
 say one word about their becoming man and wife. That was 
 understood and settled somehow without any further speech. Only 
 when he had done his explanation, and made repeated protestations 
 of his sorrow for his own blindness and stupidity, and had declared 
 half-a-dozen times over that she was the most generous creature 
 living to forgive him and endure him, he at last drew her to him 
 and kissed her — and their compact was made. 
 
 There were many little intervals of silence. Now that the 
 first rush of surprise and emotion was over, the lovers were rather 
 shy of each other in their new relations. 
 
'/ IK-IS GOING All'AV; SAW MINOLA. 
 
" WHERE I DID BEGIN, THERE SHALL I END.'- 341 
 
 " I am distressed about Lucy in all this," Minola said. " I 
 wish she could be happy as well as I." 
 
 Then she became thoughtful, and glanced inquiringly into 
 Heron's face. She wondered if he had any glimpse of the suspicion 
 that was strong in her mind, and that filled her eyes with new tears, 
 and made her think of Lucy as a heroine of romance and a bene- 
 factress. No, he had clearly no such thought. 
 
 " Dear, sweet, brave little Lucy !" broke from Minola's lips. 
 
 " Yes, yes," Victor said, looking up with sparkling eyes, " wasn't 
 it spirited and sensible of her? She found that she really could 
 not care about me, and she had the courage and truthfulness to 
 say so. Why, another girl would have been afraid of being thought 
 fickle, and would just have let the thing go on and made us both 
 unhappy for life." 
 
 Minola remained silent for a moment. Some day, she thought, 
 she would speak with him of all that again, but not now. 
 
 '• I have to go back to town to-night," he said. " I shall leave 
 Keeton at seven, and be in the House in time for the division." 
 
 " I think," she said hesitatingly, " I should like to go to Rome 
 still ; I should like to be away from London and from all the 
 people we know for a little." 
 
 Heron thought for a moment. 
 
 " It would be better, perhaps," he said decisively. " I shall 
 be free in a few days, and I will go to you there. Besides, how 
 glorious to be married in Rome !*' 
 
 She did not speak. Her heart and eyes were too full. After 
 a moment she rose. 
 
 " We must go," she said. 
 
 They both looked around them at the scene, the trees, the 
 paths, the mausoleum, in silence. Victor, however, gave his looks 
 after a moment to her upturned beautiful face. 
 
 " You are happy, dearest ? " he asked, not doubtingly, but 
 for reassurance of the happiness he felt. 
 
 " Oh, yes, only too happy ! I cannot realise it — yet." 
 
 " And you don't dislike men any more ? " 
 
 "No," she answered with a brightening face; and added, 
 " Nor women either," for she was still thinking of Lucy. 
 
 " No more Miss Misanthrope ? " he said, and he drew her 
 towards him again. 
 
 "No more," she replied, with a blush and a smile; and, 
 hardly knowing what she did, she kissed him. 
 
 Then he gently drew her ami within his, and, as the evening 
 was beginning to fall, they went out of the park together. 
 
 S/ottimoode &* Co., Primers, New-street Square, London. 
 
October, 1878. 
 
 CHATTO & WINDUS'S 
 
 ILtst of Books. 
 
 vAs? 
 
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ON BOOKS AND BOOK-BUYERS. 
 
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 ' ' / say we have despised literature ; what do we, as a nation, care 
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24 
 
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26 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
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CHATTO <Sf WIND US, PICCADILLY. 27 
 
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28 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
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CHATTO &■ WIND US, PICCADILLY. 29 
 
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