Watch and Ward: In Five Parts: Part Second

III.

ROGER’S journey was long; and various. He went to the West Indies and to South America, whence, taking a ship at one of the eastern ports, he sailed round the Horn and paid a visit to Mexico. He journeyed thence to California, and returned home across the Isthmus, stopping awhile on his upward course at various Southern cities. It was in some degree a sentimental journey. Roger was a practical man ; as he went he gathered facts and noted manners and customs ; but the muse of observation for him was his little girl at home, the ripening companion of his own ripe years. It was for her sake that he used his eyes and ears and garnered information. He had determtned that she should be a lovely woman and a perfect wife ; but to be worthy of such a woman as his fancy foreshadowed, he himself had much to learn. To be a good husband, one must first be a wise man ; to educate her, he should first educate himself. He would make it possible that dailycontact with him should be a liberal education, and that his simple society should be a benefit. For this purpose he should be stored with facts, tempered and tested by experience. He travelled in a spirit of solemn attention, like some grim devotee of a former age, making a pilgrimage for the we - fare of one he loved. He kept with great labor a copious diary, which he meant to read aloud on the winter nights of coming years. His diary was directly addressed to Nora, she being implied throughout as reader or auditor. He thought at moments of his vow to Isabel Morton, and asked himself what had become of the passion of that hour. It had betaken itself to the common limbo of our dead passions. He rejoiced to know that she was well and happy ; he meant to write to her again on his return and reiterate the assurance of his own happiness. He mused ever and anon on the nature of his affection for Nora, and wondered what earthly name he could call it by. Assuredly he was not in love with her : you could n’t fall in love with a child. But if he had not a lover’s love, he had at least a lover’s jealousy ; it. would have made him miserable to believe his scheme might miscarry. It would fail, he fondly assured himself, by no fault of hers. He was sure of her future; in that last interview at school he had guessed the answer to the riddle of her formless girlhood. If be could only be as sure of his own constancy as of her worthiness! On this point poor Roger might fairly have let his conscience rest; but to test his resolution, he deliberately courted temptation and on a dozen occasions allowed present loveliness to measure itself with absent. At the risk of a terrible increase of blushes, he bravely incurred the blandishments of various charming persons of the south. They failed signally, in every case but one, to quicken his pulses. He studied them, he noted their gifts and graces, so that he might know the range of the feminine charm. Of the utmost that women can be be wished to have personal experience. But with the sole exception I have mentioned, not a charmer of them all but shone with a radiance less magical than that dim but rounded shape which glimmered forever in the dark future, like the luminous complement of the early moon. It was at Lima that his poor little potential Nora suffered temporary eclipse. He made here the acquaintance of a young Spanish lady whose plump and full-blown innocence seemed to him divinely amiable. If ignorance is grace, what a lamentable error to be wise ! He had crossed from Havana to Rio on the same vessel with her brother, a friendly young fellow, who had made him promise to come and stay with him on his arrival at Lima. Roger, in execution of this promise, passed three weeks under his roof, in the society of the lovely Señorita. She caused him to reflect, with a good deal of zeal. She moved him the more because, being wholly without coquetry, she made no attempt whatever to interest him. Her charm was the charm of absolute naïveté and a certain tame, unseasoned sweetness, — the sweetness of an angel who is without mundane reminiscences ; to say nothing of a pair of liquid hazel eyes and a coil of crinkled blue-black hair. She could barely write her name, and from the summer twilight of her mind, which seemed to ring with amorous bird-notes, twittering in a lazy Eden, she flung a scornful shadow upon Nora’s prospective condition. Roger thought of Nora, by contrast, as a creature of senseless mechanism, a thing wound up with a key, creaking and droning through the barren circle of her graces. Why travel so far round about for a wife, when here was one ready made to his heart, as illiterate as an angel and as faithful as the little page of a mediæval ballad, — and with those two perpetual lovelights beneath her silly little forehead ?

Day by day, at the Señorita’s side, Roger grew better pleased with the present. It was so happy, so idle, so secure ! He protested against the future. He grew impatient of the stiff little figure which he had posted in the distance, to stare at him with those monstrous pale eyes : they seemed to grow and grow' as he thought of them. In other words, he was in love with Teresa. She, on her side, was delighted to be loved. She caressed him with her fond dark looks and smiled perpetual assent. Late one afternoon, at the close of a long hot day, which had left with Roger the unwholesome fancy of a perpetual siesta, troubled by a vague confusion of dreams, they ascended together to a terrace on the top of the house. The sun had just disappeared ; the lovely earth below and around was drinking in the cool of night. They stood awhile in silence ; at last Roger felt that he must speak of his love. He walked away to the farther end of the terrace, casting about in his mind for the fitting words. They were hard to find. His companion spoke a little English, and he a little Spanish ; but there came upon him a sudden perplexing sense of the infantine rarity of her wits. He had never done her the honor to pay her a compliment, he had never really talked with her. It was not for him to talk, but for her to perceive ! She turned about, leaning back against the parapet of the terrace, looking at him and smiling. She was always smiling. She had on an old faded pink morningdress, very much open at the throat, and a ribbon round her neck, to which was suspended a little cross of turquoise. One of the braids of her hair had fallen down, and she had drawn it forward and was plaiting the end with her plump white fingers. Her nails were not fastidiously clean. He went towards her. When he next became perfectly conscious of their relative positions, he knew that he had passionately kissed her, more than once, and that she had more than suffered him. He stood holding both her hands ; he was blushing; her own complexion was undisturbed, her smile barely deepened ; another of her braids had come down. He was filled with a sense of pleasure in her sweetness, tempered by a vague feeling of pain in his all-too-easy conquest. There was nothing of poor Teresita but that you could kiss her ! It came upon him with a sort of horror that he had never yet distinctly told her that he loved her. “ Teresa,” he said, almost angrily, “ I love you. Do you understand ? ” For all answer she raised his two hands successively to her lips. Soon after this she went off with her mother to church.

The next morning, one of his friend’s clerks brought him a package of letters from his banker. One of them was a note from Nora. It ran as follows : —

DEAR ROGER : I want so much to tell you that I have just got the prize for the piano. I hope you will not think it very silly to write so far only to tell you this. But I’m so proud I want you to know it. Of the three girls who tried for it, two were seventeen. The prize is a beautiful picture called “ Mozart à Vienne ” ; probably you have seen it. Miss Murray says I may hang it up in my bedroom. Now I have got to go and practise, for Miss Murray says I must practise more than ever. My dear Roger, I do hope you are enjoying your travels. I have learned lots of geography, following you on the map. Don’t ever forget your loving

NORA.

After reading this letter, Roger told his host that he would have to leave him. The young Peruvian demurred, objected, and begged for a reason.

“Well,” said Roger, “ I find I’m in love with your sister.” The words sounded on his ear as if some one else had spoken them. Teresa’s light was quenched, and she had no more fascination than a smouldering lamp, smelling of oil.

“ Why, my dear fellow,” said his friend, “ that seems to me a reason for staying. I shall be most happy to have you for a brother-in-law.”

“ It’s impossible ! I’m engaged to a young lady in my own country.”

“You are in love here, you are engaged there, and you go where you are engaged ! You Englishmen are strange fellows ! ”

“Tell Teresa that I adore her, but that I am pledged at home. I had rather not see her.”

And so Roger departed from Lima, without further communion with Teresa. On his return home he received a letter from her brother, telling him of her engagement to a young merchant of Valparaiso, — an excellent match. The young lady sent him her salutations. Roger, answering his friend’s letter, begged that the Doña Teresa would accept, as a wedding-present, of the accompanying trinket,— a little brooch in turquoise. It would look very well with pink !

Roger reached home in the autumn, but left Nora at school till the beginning of the Christmas holidays. He occupied the interval in refurnishing his house, and clearing the stage for the last act of the young girl’s childhood. He had always possessed a modest taste for upholstery; he now began to apply it under the guidance of a delicate idea. His idea led him to prefer, in all things, the fresh and graceful to the grave and formal, and to wage war throughout his old dwelling on the lurking mustiness of the past. He had a lively regard for elegance, balanced by a horror of wanton luxury. He fancied that a woman is the better for being well dressed and well domiciled, and that vanity, too stingily treated, is sure to avenge itself. So he took her into account. Nothing annoyed him more, however, than the fear of seeing Nora a precocious fine lady ; so that while he aimed at all possible purity of effect, he stayed his hand here and there before certain admonitory relics of ancestral ugliness and virtue, embodied for the most part in hair-cloth and cotton damask. Chintz and muslin, flowers and photographs and books, gave their clear light tone to the house. Nothing could be more tenderly propitious and virginal, or better chosen to chasten alike the young girl’s aspirations and remind her of her protector’s tenderness.

Since his return he had designedly refused himself a glimpse of her. He wished to give her a single undivided welcome to his home and his heart. Shortly before Christmas, as he had even yet not laid by his hammer and nails, Lucinda Brown was sent to fetch her from school. If Roger had expected that Nora would return with any marked accession of beauty, he would have had to say “ Amen ” with an effort. She had pretty well ceased to be a child; she was still his grave, imperfeet Nora. She had gained her full height, — a great height, which her young strong slimness rendered the more striking. Her slender throat supported a head of massive mould, bound about with dense auburn braids. Beneath a somewhat serious brow her large, fair eyes retained their collected light, as if uncertain where to fling it. Now and then the lids parted widely and showered down these gathered shafts ; and if at these times a certain rare smile divided, in harmony, her childish lips, Nora was for the moment a passable beauty. But for the most part, the best charm of her face was in a modest refinement of line, which rather evaded notice than courted it. The first impression she was likely to produce was of a kind of awkward slender majesty. Roger pronounced her stately,” and for a fortnight thought her too imposing by half; but as the days went on, and the pliable innocence of early maidenhood gave a soul to this formidable grace, he began to feel that in essentials she was still the little daughter of his charity. He even began to observe in her an added consciousness of this lowly position ; as if with the growth of her mind she had come to reflect upon it, and deem it rather less and less a matter of course. He meditated much as to whether he should frankly talk it over with her and allow her to feel that, for him as well, their relation could never become commonplace. This would be in a measure untender, but would it not be prudent ? Ought he not, in the interest of his final purpose, to force home to her soul in her sensitive youth an impression of all that she owed him, so that when his time had come, if imagination should lead her a-wandering, gratitude would stay her steps ? A dozen times over he was on the verge of making his point, of saying, “ Nora, Nora, these are not vulgar alms ; I expect a return. One of these days you must pay your debt. Guess my riddle ! I love you less than you think, — and more ! A word to the wise.” But he was silenced by a saving sense of the brutality of such a course, and by a suspicion that, after all, it was not needful. A passion of gratitude was silently gathering in the young girl’s heart: that heart could be trusted to keep its engagements. A deep conciliatory purpose seemed now to pervade her life, of infinite delight to Roger as little by little it stole upon his mind, like the fragrance of a deepening spring. He had his idea: he suspected that she had hers. They were but opposite faces of the same deep need. Her musing silence, her deliberate smiles, the childish keenness of her questionings, the growing womanly cunning of her little nameless services and caresses, were all alike redolent of a pious sense of suffered beneficence, which implied perfect self-devotion as a response.

On Christmas eve they sat together alone by a blazing log-fire in Roger’s little library. He had been reading aloud a chapter of his diary, to which Nora sat listening in dutiful demureness, though her thoughts evidently were nearer home than Cuba and Peru. There is no denying it was dull ; he could gossip to better purpose. He felt its dulness himself, and closing it finally with good-humored petulance, declared it was fit only to throw into the fire. Upon which Nora looked up, protesting. “ You must do no such thing,” she said. “ You must keep your journals carefully, and one of these days I shall have them bound in morocco and gilt, and ranged in a row in my own bookcase.”

“ That’s but a polite way of burning them up,” said Roger. “ They will be as little read as if they were in the fire. I don’t know how it is. They seemed to be very amusing when I wrote them : they ’re as stale as an old newspaper now. I can’t write : that’s the amount of it. I’m a very stupid fellow, Nora : you might as well know it first as last.'’

Nora’s school had been of the punctilious Episcopal order, and she had learned there the pretty custom of decorating the house at Christmas-tide with garlands and crowns of evergreen and holly. She had spent the day in decking out the chimney-piece, and now, seated on a stool under the mantel-shelf, she twisted the last little wreath, which was to complete her design. A great still snow-storm was falling without, and seemed to be blocking them in from the world. She bit off the thread with which she had been binding her twigs, held out her garland to admire its effect, and then : “ I don’t believe you ’re stupid, Roger,” she said ; “ and if I did, I should n’t much care.”

“Is that philosophy, or indifference ? ” said the young man.

“ I don’t know that it’s either ; it’s because I know you ’re so good.”

“That’s what they say about all stupid people.”

Nora added another twig to her wreath and bound it up. “ I’m sure,” she said at last, “that when people are as good as you are, they can’t be stupid. I should like some one to tell me you ’re stupid. I know, Roger; I know ! ”

The young man began to feel a little uneasy ; it was no part of his plan that her good-will should spend itself too soon. “ Dear me, Nora, if you think so well of me, I shall find it hard to live up to your expectations. I ’m afraid I shall disappoint you. I have a little gimcrack to put in your stocking to-night ; but I’m rather ashamed of it now.”

“ A gimcrack more or less is of small account. I’ve had my stocking hanging up these three years, and everything I possess is a present from you.”

Roger frowned ; the conversation had taken just such a turn as he had often longed to provoke, but now it was too much for him. ‘ O, come,” he said ; “ I have done simply my duty to my little girl.”

“ But, Roger,” said Nora, staring with expanded eyes, “ I’m not your little girl.”

His frown darkened ; his heart began to beat. “ Don’t talk nonsense ! ” he said.

“ But, Roger, it’s true. I ’m no one’s little girl. Do you think I’ve no memory ? Where is my father ? Where is my mother ? ”

“ Listen to me,” said Roger, sternly. “You mustn’t talk of such things.”

“ You must n’t forbid me, Roger. I can’t think of them without thinking of you. This is Christmas eve I Miss Murray told us that we must never let it pass without thinking of all that it means. But without Miss Murray, I have been thinking all day of things which are hard to name, —of death and life, of my parents and you, of my incredible happiness. I feel to-night like a princess in a fairy-tale. I’m a poor creature, without a friend, without a penny or a home ; and yet, here I sit by a blazing fire, with money, with food, with clothes, with love. The snow outside is burying the stone-walls, and yet here I can sit and simply say, ‘How pretty!’ Suppose I were in it, wandering and begging, — I might have been ! Would I think it pretty then ? Roger, Roger, I’m no one’s child ! ” The tremor in her voice deepened, and she broke into a sudden passion of tears. Roger took her in his arms and tried to soothe away her sobs. But she disengaged herself and went on with an almost fierce exaltation: “ No, no, I won’t be comforted ! I have had comfort enough, I hate it. I want for an hour to be myself and feel how little that is, to be my poor, wicked father’s daughter, to fancy I hear my mother’s voice. I’ve never spoken of them before ; you must let me to-night. You must tell me about my father; you know something I don’t. You never refused me anything, Roger ; don’t refuse me this. He was n’t good, like you ; but now he can do no harm. You have never mentioned his name to me, but happy as we are here together, we should be poorly set to work to despise him! ”

Roger yielded to the vehemence of this flood of emotion. He stood watching her with two helpless tears in his own eyes, and then he drew her gently towards him and kissed her on the forehead. She took up her work again, and he told her, with every minutest detail he could recall, the story of his sole brief interview with Mr. Lambert. Gradually he lost the sense of effort and reluctance, and talked freely, abundantly, almost with pleasure. Nora listened with tender curiosity and with an amount of self-control which denoted the habit of constant retrospect. She asked a hundred questions as to Roger’s impression of her father’s appearance. Wasn’t he wonderfully handsome ? Then taking up the tale herself, she poured out a torrent of feverish reminiscence of her childhood and unpacked her early memories with a kind of rapture of relief. Her evident joy in this frolic of confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must have cost her. But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of his tenderness and charity. She rose at last, and stood before the fire, into which she had thrown the refuse of her greenery, watching it blaze up and turn to ashes, “ So much for past ! ” she said, at last. “ The rest is the future. The girls at school used to be always talking about what they meant to do in coming years, what they hoped, what they wished ; wondering, choosing, and longing. You don’t know how girls talk, Roger; you’d be surprised ! I never used to say much ; my future is fixed. I’ve nothing to choose, nothing to hope, nothing to fear. I ’m to make you happy. That’s simple enough. You have undertaken to bring me up, Roger ; you must do your best, because now I’m here, it’s for long, and you’d rather have a wise girl than a silly one.” And she smiled with a kind of tentative daughterliness through the traces of her recent grief. She put her two hands on his shoulders and eyed him with arch solemnity. “ You shall never repent. I shall learn everything, I shall be everything ! Oh ! I wish I were pretty.” And she tossed back her head in impatience of her fatal plainness, with an air which forced Roger to assure her that she would do very well as she was. “If you are satisfied,” she said, “ I am ! ” For a moment Roger felt as if she were twenty years old, as if the future had flashed down on him and a proposal of marriage was at his tongue’s end.

This serious Christmas eve left its traces upon many ensuing weeks. Nora’s education was resumed with a certain added solemnity. Roger was no longer obliged to condescend to the level of her intelligence, and he found reason to thank his stars that he had laid up a provision of facts. He found use for all he possessed. The day of childish “ lessons ” was over, and Nora sought instruction in the perusal of various classical authors, in her own and other tongues, in concert with her friend. They read aloud to each other alternately, discussed their acquisitions and digested them with perhaps equal rapidity. Roger, in former years, had had but a small literary appetite ; he liked a few books and knew them well, but he felt as if to settle down to an unread author were very like starting on a journey, — a case for farewells, a packing of trunks, and buying of tickets. His curiosity, now, however, imbued and quickened with a motive, led him through a hundred untrodden paths. He found it hard sometimes to keep pace with Nora’s pattering step ; through the flowery lanes of poetry, in especial, she would gallop without drawing breath. Was she quickerwitted than her friend, or only more superficial ? Something of one, doubtless, and something of the other. Roger was forever suspecting her of a deeper penetration than his own, and hanging his head with an odd mixture of pride and humility. Her youthful brightness, at times, made him feel irretrievably dull and antiquated. His ears would tingle, his cheeks would burn, his old hope would fade into a shadow. “ It’s a — ” he would declare. “ How can I ever have for her that charm of infallibility, that romance of omniscience, that a woman demands of her lover ? She has seen me scratching my head, she has seen me counting on my fingers ! Before she’s seventeen she ’ll be mortally tired of me, and by the time she’s twenty I shall be fatally familiar and incurably stale. It’s very well for her to talk about life-long devotion, and eternal gratitude. She does n’t know the meaning of words. She must grow and outgrow, that’s her first necessity. She must come to woman’s estate and pay the inevitable tribute. I can open the door and let in the lover. If her present sentiment is in its way a passion, I shall have had my turn. I can’t hope to be the object of two passions. I must thank the Lord for small favors ! ” Then as he seemed to taste, in advance, the bitterness of disappointment, casting him about him angrily for some means of appeal ; “ I ought to go away and stay away for years and never write at all, instead of compounding ponderous diaries to make even my absence detestable. I ought to convert myself into a beneficent shadow, a vague tutelary name. Then I ought to come back in glory, fragrant with exotic perfumes and shod with shoes of mystery ! Otherwise, I ought to clip the wings of her fancy and put her on half-rations. I ought to snub her and scold her and bully her and tell her she’s deplorably plain, — treat her as Rochester treats Jane Eyre. If I were only a good old Catholic, that I might shut her up in a convent and keep her childish and stupid and contented ! ” Roger felt that he was too doggedly conscientious ; but abuse his conscience as he would, he could not make it yield an inch; so that in the constant strife between his egotistical purpose and his generous temper, the latter kept gaining ground and Nora innocently enjoyed the spoils of victory. It was his very generosity that detained him on the spot, by her side, watching her, working for her, and performing a hundred offices which in other hands would have lost their sweet precision. Roger watched intently for the signs of that inevitable hour when a young girl begins to loosen her fingers in the grasp of a guiding hand and wander softly in pursuit of that sinuous silver thread of experience which deflects, through meadows of perennial green, from the dull gray stream of the common lot. She had relapsed in the course of time into the careless gayety and the light immediate joys of girlhood. If she cherished a pious purpose in her heart, she made no indecent parade of it. But her very placidity and patience somehow afflicted her friend. She was too monotonously sweet, too easily obedient. If once in a while she would only flash out into petulance or rebellion ! She kept her temper so carefully : what in the world was she keeping it for ? If she would only bless him for once with an angry look and tell him that he bored her, that he worried and disgusted her !

During the second year after her return from school Roger began to fancy that she half avoided his society and resented his share in her occupations. She was fonder of lonely walks, readings and reveries. She had all of a young girl’s passion for novels, and she had been in the habit of satisfying it largely. For works of fiction in general Roger had no great fondness, though he professed an especial relish for Thackeray. Nora had her favorites, but “ The Newcomes,” as yet, was not one of them. One evening in the early spring she sat down to a twentieth perusal of the classic tale of “ The Initials.” Roger, as usual, asked her to read aloud. She began and proceeded through a dozen pages. Looking up, at this point, she beheld Roger asleep. She smiled softly and privately resumed her reading. At the end of an hour, Roger, having finished his nap, rather startled her by his excessive annoyance at his lapse of consciousness. He wondered whether he had snored, but the absurd fellow was ashamed to ask her. Recovering himself finally: “ The fact is, Nora,” he said, “ all novels seem to me stupid. They are nothing to what I can fancy ! I have in my heart a prettier romance than any of them.”

“A romance?” said Nora, simply. “ Pray let me hear it. You ’re quite as good a hero as this poor Mr. Hamilton. Begin ! ”

He stood before the fire, looking at her with almost funereal gravity. “ My dénouement is not yet written,” he said. “Wait till the story is finished; then you shall hear the whole.”

As at this time Nora put on long dresses and began to arrange her hair as a young lady, it occurred to Roger that he might make some change in his own appearance and reinforce his waning attractions. He was now thirty-two ; he fancied he was growing stout. Bald, corpulent, middle-aged — at this rate he would soon be shelved ! He was seized with a mad desire to win back the lost graces of youth. He had a dozen interviews with his tailor, the result of which was that for a fortnight he appeared daily in a new garment. Suddenly amid this restless longing to revise and embellish himself. he determined to suppress his whiskers. This would take off five years. He appeared, therefore, one morning, in the severe simplicity of a mustache. Nora started and greeted him with a little cry of horror. “ Don’t you like it ? ” he asked.

She hung her head on one side and the other. “ Well no — to be frank.”

“ Oh, of course to be frank ! It will only take five years to grow them again. What’s the trouble ? ”

She gave a critical frown. “ It makes you look too — too fat; too much like Mr. Vose.” It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who recently-—Roger with horror only now remembered it — had sacrificed his whiskers to a greater singleness of effect.

“ I’m sorry ! ” said Roger. “ It was for you I did it! ”

“ For me ! ” And Nora burst into a violent laugh.

“ Why, my dear Nora,” cried the young man with a certain angry vehemence, “ don’t I do everything in life for you ? ”

She relapsed into sudden gravity. And then, after much meditation : “ Excuse my unfeeling levity,” she said. “You might cut off your nose, Roger, and I should like your face as well.” But this was but half comfort.

“ Too fat ! ” Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him with one of his own cleavers.

He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his absence ; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that his future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too. One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally confounded his calculations,— an evening of perfect mid-spring, full of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting sap and fresh-turned earth. Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on things with an opera - glass. Nora, who had been strolling in the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the portico. “ Roger,” she said, after a pause, “ has it never struck you as very strange that we should be living together in this way ? ”

Roger’s heart rose to his throat. But he was loath to concede anything to her imagination, lest he should concede too much. “It’s not especially strange,” he said.

“ Surely it is strange,” she answered. “ What are you ? Neither my brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by law, my guardian.”

“By law! My dear child, what do you know about law ? ”

“ I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you could n’t force me to return.”

“ That’s fine talk ! Who told you that ? ”

“ No one ; I thought of it myself. As I grow older, I ought to think of such things.”

“Upon my word ! Of running away and leaving me ? ”

“ That’s but one side of the question. The other is that you can turn me out of your house this moment, and no one can force you to take me back. I ought to remember such things.”

“ Pray what good will it do you to remember them ? ”

Nora hesitated a moment. “ There is always some good in not losing sight of the truth.’

“ The truth ! you ’re very young to begin to talk about it.”

“ Not too young. I ’m old for my age. I ought to be ! " These last words were uttered with a little sigh which roused Roger to action.

“ Since we ’re talking about the truth,” he said, “ I wonder whether you know a tithe of it.”

For an instant she was silent; then rising slowly to her feet: “ What do you mean ? ” she asked. “ Is there any secret in all that you’ve done for me?” Suddenly she clasped her hands, and eagerly, with a smile, went on : “You said the other day you had a romance. Is it a real romance, Roger ? Are you, after all, related to me, — my cousin, my brother ? ”

He let her stand before him, perplexed and expectant. “ It’s more of a romance than that.”

She slid upon her knees at his feet. “ Dear Roger, do tell me,”she said.

He began to stroke her hair. “You think so much,”he answered ; “ do you never think about the future, the real future, ten years hence ? ”

“ A great deal.”

“ What do you think ? ”

She blushed a little, and then he felt that she was drawing confidence from the steady glow of his benignant eyes.

“ Promise not to laugh ! ” she said, half laughing herself. He nodded. “I think about my husband ! ” she proclaimed. And then, as if she had, after all, been very absurd, and to forestall his laughter: “And about your wife !" she quickly added. “ I want

dreadfully to see her. Why don’t you marry ? ”

He continued to stroke her hair in silence. At last he said sententiously : “ I hope to marry one of these days.”

“ I wish you’d do it now,” Nora went on. “ If only she’d be nice ! We should be sisters, and I should take care of the children. ’

“ You ’re too young to understand what you say, or what I mean. Little girls should n’t talk about marriage. It can mean nothing to you until you come yourself to marry — as you will, of course. You ’ll have to decide and choose.”

“ I suppose I shall. I shall refuse him.”

“ What do you mean ? ”

But without answering his question : “ Were you ever in love, Roger ? ” she suddenly asked. “ Is that your romance ? ”

“ Almost.”

“Then it’s not about me, after all ?”

“It’s about you, Nora; but, after all, It’s not a romance. It’s solid, it’s real, it’s truth itself; as true as your silly novels are false. Nora, I care for no one, I shall never care for any one, but you ! ”

He spoke in tones so deep and solemn that she was impressed. “ Do you mean, Roger, that you care so much for me that you ’ll never marry ? ”

He rose quickly in his chair, pressing his hand over his brow. “ Ah, Nora,” he cried, “ you ’re terrible ! ”

Evidently she had pained him ; her heart was filled with the impulse of reparation. She took his two hands in her own. “ Roger,”she whispered gravely, “if you don’t wish it, I promise never, never, never to marry, but to be yours alone — yours alone ! ”

IV.

The summer passed away ; Nora was turned sixteen. Deeming it time she should begin to see something of the world, Roger spent the autumn in travelling. Of his tour in Europe he had ceased to talk ; it was indefinitely deferred. It matters little where they went; Nora vastly enjoyed the excursion and found all spots alike delightful. For Roger, too, it was full of a certain reassuring felicity. His remoter visions were merged in the present overflow of sympathy and pride, in his happy sense of her quickened observation and in the gratified vanity of possession. Whether or no she was pretty, people certainly looked at her. He overheard them a dozen times call her “ striking.” Striking! The word seemed to him rich in meaning ; if he had seen her for the first time taking the breeze on the deck of a river steamer, he certainly would have been struck. On his return home he found among his letters the following missive :—

MY DEAR SIR : I have learned, after various fruitless researches, that you have adopted my cousin. Miss Lambert, at the time she left St. Louis, was too young to know much about her family, or even to care much ; and you, I suppose, have not investigated the subject. You, however, better than any one, can understand my desire to make her acquaintance. I hope you ’ll not deny me the privilege. I am the second son of a half-sister of her mother, between whom and my own mother there was always the greatest affection. It was not until some time after it happened that I heard of Mr. Lambert’s melancholy death. But it is useless to recur to that painful scene ! I resolved to spare no trouble in ascertaining the fate of his daughter. I have only just succeeded, after having fairly given her up. I have thought it better to write to you than to her, but I beg you to give her my compliments. I anticipate no difficulty in satisfying you that I am not a humbug. I have no hope of being able to better her circumstances ; but, whatever they may be, blood is blood, and cousins are cousins, especially in the West. A speedy answer will oblige

Yours truly,

GEORGE FENTON,

The letter was dated in New York, from a hotel. Roger was shocked. It had been from the first a peculiar satisfaction to him that Nora began and ended so distinctly with herself. But here was a hint of indefinite continuity ! Here, at last, was an echo of her past. He immediately showed the letter to Nora. As she read it, her face flushed deep with wonder and suppressed relief. She had never heard, she confessed, of her mother’s half-sister. The “ great affection ” between the two ladies must have been anterior to Mrs. Lambert’s marriage, Roger’s own provisional solution of the problem was that Mrs. Lambert had married so little to the taste of her family as to forfeit all communication with them. If he had obeyed his immediate impulse, he would have written to his mysterious petitioner that Miss Lambert was sensible of the honor implied in his request, but that never having missed his society, it seemed needless that, at this time of day, she should cultivate it. But Nora had become infected by a huge curiosity ; the dormant pulse of kinship had been quickened; it began to throb with delicious power. This was enough for Roger. “ I don’t know,” he said, “ whether he’s an honest man or a scamp, but at a venture I suppose I must invite him down.” To this Nora replied that she thought his letter was “ lovely ” ; and Mr. Fenton received a fairly civil summons.

Whether or no he was an honest man remained to be seen ; but on the face of the matter he appeared no scamp. He was, in fact, a person difficult to classify. Roger had made up his mind that he would be outrageously rough and Western; full of strange oaths and bearded, for aught he knew, like the pard. In aspect, however, Fenton was a pretty fellow enough, and his speech, if not especially conciliatory to ears polite, possessed a certain homely vigor in which ears polite might have found their account. He was as little as possible, certainly, of Roger’s monde; but he carried about him the native fragrance of another monde, beside which the social perfume familiar to Roger’s nostrils must have seemed a trifle stale and insipid. He was invested with a loose-fitting cosmopolitan Occidentalism, which seemed to say to Roger that, of the two, he was provincial. Whether or no Fenton was a good man, he was a good American ; though I doubt that he would, after the saying, have sought his Mahomet’s Paradise in Paris. Considering his years, — they numbered but twenty-five,— Fenton’s precocity and maturity of tone were an amazing spectacle. You would have very soon confessed, however, that he had a true genius for his part, and that it became him better to play at manhood than at juvenility. He could never have been a ruddy-cheeked boy. He was tall and lean, with a keen dark eye, a smile humorous, but not exactly genial, a thin, drawling, almost feminine voice and a strange Southwestern accent. His voice, at first, might have given you certain presumptuous hopes as to a soft spot in his tough young hide ; but after listening awhile to its colorless monotone, you would have felt, I think, that though it was an instrument of one string, that solitary chord had been tempered in brine. Fenton was furthermore flat-chested and highshouldered, but without any look of debility. He wore a little dead black mustache, which, at first, you would have been likely to suspect unjustly of a borrowed tint. His straight black hair was always carefully combed, and a small diamond pin adorned the bosom of his shirt. His feet were small and slender, and his left hand was decorated with a neat specimen of tattooing. You would never have called him modest, yet you would hardly have called him impudent; for he had evidently lived with people among whom the ideas of modesty and impudence, in their finer shades, had no great circulation. He had nothing whatever of the manner of society, but it was surprising how gracefully a certain shrewd bonhomie and smart good-humor enabled him to dispense with it. He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching punctilio taking its course, and thinking, probably, what a d—d fool she was to go so far roundabout to a point he could reach with a single shuffle of his long legs. Roger, from the first hour of his being in the house, felt pledged to dislike him. He patronized him ; he made him feel like a small boy, like an old woman ; he sapped the roots of the poor fellow’s comfortable consciousness of being a man of the world. Fenton was a man of twenty worlds. He had knocked about and dabbled in affairs and adventures since he was ten years old ; he knew the American continent as he knew the palm of his hand ; he was redolent of enterprise, of “ operations,” of a certain fierce friction with mankind. Roger would have liked to believe that he doubted his word, that there was a chance of his not being Nora’s cousin, but a youth of an ardent swindling genius who had come into possession of a parcel of facts too provokingly pertinent to be wasted. He had evidently knowm the late Mr. Lambert— the poor man must have had plenty of such friends ; but was he, in truth, his wife’s nephew ? Was not this shadowy nepotism excogitated over an unpaid hotel bill ? So Roger fretfully meditated, but generally with no great gain of ground. He inclined, on the whole, to believe the young man’s pretensions were valid, and to reserve his mistrust for the use he might possibly make of them. Of course Fenton had not come down to spend a stupid week in the country out of pure cousinly affection. Nora was but the means ; Roger’s presumptive wealth and bounty were the end. “ He comes to make love to his cousin, and marry her if he can. I, who have done so much, will of course do more ; settle an income directly on the bride, make my will in her favor, and die at my earliest convenience ! How furious he must be,” Roger continued to meditate, “ to find me so young and hearty ! How furious he would be if he knew a little more!” This line of argument was justified in a manner by the frank assurance which Fenton was constantly at pains to convey, that he was incapable of any other relation to a fact than a desire to turn it to pecuniary account. Roger was uneasy, yet he took a certain comfort in the belief that, thanks to his early lessons, Nora could be trusted to confine her cousin to the precinct of cousinship. In whatever he might have failed, he had certainly taught her to know a gentleman. Cousins are born, not made ; but lovers may be accepted at discretion. Nora’s discretion, surely, would not be wanting. I may add also that, in his desire to order all things well, Roger caught himself wondering whether, at the worst, a little precursory love-making would do any harm. The ground might be gently tickled to receive his own sowing; the petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more accessible to his own vertical rays.

It was cousinship for Nora, certainly ; but cousinship was much, more than Roger fancied, luckily for his peace of mind. In the utter penury of her native gifts, her tardy kinsman acquired a portentous value. She was so proud of turning out to have a cousin as well as other folks, that she lavished on the young man all the idle tenderness of her primitive instincts, the savings and sparings, such as they were, of her girlish good-will. It must be said that Fenton was not altogether unworthy of her favors. He meant no especial harm to other people, save in so far as he meant uncompromising benefit to himself. The Knight of La Mancha, on the torrid flats of Spain, never urged his gaunt steed with a grimmer pressure of the knees than that with which Fenton held himself erect on the hungry hobby of success. Shrewd as he was, he had perhaps, as well, a ray of Don Quixote’s divine obliquity of vision. It is at least true that success as yet had been painfully elusive, and a part of the peril to Nora’s girlish

heart lay in this melancholy grace of undeserved failure. The young man’s imagination was a trifle restless ; he had a generous need of keeping too many irons on the fire. It had been in a kind of fanciful despair of doingbetter, for the time, that he had made overtures to Roger. He had learned six months before of his cousin’s situation and had felt no great sentimental need of making her acquaintance ; but at last, revolving many things of a certain sort, he had come to wonder whether these good people couldn’t be induced to play into his hands. Roger’s wealth (which he largely overestimated) and Roger’s obvious taste for sharing it with other people, Nora’s innocence and Nora’s prospects — it would surely take a great fool not to pluck the rose from so thornless a tree. He foresaw these good things melting and trickling into the shallow current of his own career. Exactly what use he meant to make of Nora he would have been at a loss to say. Plain matrimony might or might not be a prize. At any rate, it could do a clever man no harm to have a rich girl foolishly in love with him. He turned, therefore, upon his charming cousin the sunny side of his genius. He very soon began to doubt that he had ever known so delightful a person, and indeed his growing sense of her sweetness bade fair to make him bungle his naughtiness. She was altogether sweet enough to be valued for herself. She made him feel that he had never encountered a really fine girl. Nora was a young lady : how she had come to it was one of the outer mysteries ; but there she was, consummate ! He made no point of a man being a gentleman ; in fact, when a man was a gentleman you had rather to be one yourself, which did n’t pay ; but for a woman to be a lady was plainly pure gain. He had a fine enough sense to detect something extremely grateful in the half-concessions, the reserve of freshness, the fugitive dignity, of gently nurtured maidenhood. Women, to him, had seemed mostly as cut flowers, blooming awhile in the waters of occasion, but yielding no second or rarer freshness. Nora was fast overtaking herself in the exhilarating atmosphere of her cousin’s gallantry. She had known so few young men that she had not learned to be fastidious, and Fenton represented to her fancy that great collective manhood of which Roger was not. He had an irresistible air of action, alertness, and purpose. Poor Roger, beside him, was most prosaically passive. She regarded her cousin with something of the thrilled attention which one bestows on the naked arrow, poised across the bow. He had, moreover, the inestimable merit of representing her own side of her situation. He very soon became sensible of this merit, and you may be sure he entertained her to the top of her bent. He gossiped by the hour about her father, and gave her very plainly to understand that poor Mr. Lambert had been more sinned against than sinning. His wrongs, his sufferings, his ambitions and adventures, formed on Fenton’s lips not only a most pathetic recital, but a standing pretext for Western anecdotes, not always strictly adapted, it must be confessed, to the melting mood. Of her mother, too, he discoursed with a wholesale fecundity of praise and reminiscence. Facts, facts, facts was Nora’s demand: she got them, and if here and there a fiction slipped into the basket, it passed muster with the rest.

Nora was not slow to perceive that Roger had no love for their guest, and she immediately conceded him his right of judgment. She allowed for a certain fatal and needful antagonism in their common interest in herself. Fenton’s presence was a tacit infringement of Roger’s prescriptive right of property. If her cousin had only never come ! It might have been, though she could not bring herself to wish it. Nora felt vaguely that here was a chance for tact, for the woman’s peacemaking art. To keep Roger in spirits, she put on a dozen unwonted graces; she waited on him, appealed to him, smiled at him with unwearied iteration. But the main effect of these sweet offices was to deepen her gracious radiance in her cousin’s eyes. Roger’s rancorous suspicion transmuted to bitterness what would otherwise have been pure delight. She was turning hypocrite ; she was throwing dust in his eyes ; she was plotting with that vulgar Missourian. Fenton, of course, was forced to admit that he had reckoned without his host. Roger had had the impudence not to turn out a simpleton ; he was not a shepherd of the golden age ; he was a dogged modern, with prosy prejudices ; the wind of his favor blew as it listed. Fenton took the liberty of being extremely irritated at the other’s want of ductility. “ Hang the man ! ” he said to himself, “why can’t he trust me ? What is he afraid of? Why don’t he take me as a friend rather than an enemy ? Let him be frank, and I ’ll be frank. I could put him up to things ! And what does he want to do with Nora, any way ? ” This latter question Fenton came very soon to answer, and the answer amused him not a little. It seemed to him an extremely odd use of one’s time and capital, this fashioning of a wife to order. There was in it a long-winded patience, a broad arrogance of leisure, which excited his ire. Roger might surely have found his fit ready made! His disappointment, a certain angry impulse to rescue his cousin from this pitiful compression of circumstance, the sense finally that what he should gain he would gain from her alone, though indeed she was too confoundedly innocent to appreciate his fierce immediate ends ; — these things combined to heat the young man’s humor to the feverpoint and to make him strike more random blows than belonged to plain prudence.

The autumn being well advanced, the warmth of the sun had become very grateful. Nora used to spend much of the morning in strolling about the dismantled garden with her cousin. Roger would stand at the window with his honest face more nearly disfigured by a scowl than ever before. It was the old, old story, to his mind : nothing succeeds with women like just too little deference. Fenton would lounge along by Nora’s side, with his hands in his pockets, a cigar in his mouth, his shoulders raised to his ears, and a pair of tattered slippers on his absurdly diminutive feet. Not only had Nora forgiven him this last breach of civility, but she had forthwith begun to work him a new pair of slippers. “ What on earth,” thought Roger, “ do they find to talk about ? ” Their conversation, meanwhile, ran in some such strain as this : —

“ My dear Nora,” said the young man, “ what on earth, week in and week out, do you and Mr. Lawrence find to talk about ? ”

“ A great many things, George. We have lived long enough together to have a great many interests in common.”

“ It was a most extraordinary thing, his adopting you, if you don’t mind my saying so. Imagine my adopting a little girl.”

“ You and Roger are very different men.”

“ We certainly are. What in the world did he expect to do with you ? ”

“Very much what he has done, I suppose. He has educated me, he has made me what I am.”

“You’re a very nice little person; but, upon my word, I don’t see that he’s to thank for it. A lovely girl can be neither made nor marred.”

“ Possibly ! But I give you notice that I’m not a lovely girl. I have it in me to be, under provocation, anything but a lovely girl. I owe everything to Roger. You must say nothing against him. I won’t have it. What would have become of me—” She stopped, betrayed by her glance and voice.

“ Mr. Lawrence is a model of all the virtues, I admit! But, Nora, I confess I ’m jealous of him. Does he expect to educate you forever ? You seem to me to have already all the learning a pretty woman needs. What does he know about women ? What does he expect to do with you two or three years hence ? Two or three years hence, you ’ll be—” And Fenton, breaking off. began to whistle with vehement gayety and executed with shuffling feet a momentary fandango. “ Two or three years hence, when you look in the glass, remember I said so ! ”

“He means to go to Europe one of these days,” said Nora, laughing.

“ One of these days ! One would think he expects to keep you forever. Not if I can help it. And why Europe, in the name of all that’s patriotic ? Europe be hanged ! You ought to come out to your own section of the country, and see your own people. I can introduce you to the best people in St. Louis. It’s a glorious place, worth a thousand of your dismal Bostons. I ’ll tell you what, my dear. You don’t know it, but you ’re a regular Western girl.”

A certain foolish gladness in being the creature thus denominated prompted Nora to a gush of momentary laughter, of which Roger, within the window, caught the soundless ripple. “ You ought to know, George,” she said, “you ’re Western enough yourself.”

“ Of course I am. I glory in it. It’s the only place for a man of ideas ! In the West you can do something! Round here you ’re all stuck fast in a Slough of Despond. For yourself, Nora, at bottom you ’re all right ; but superficially you ’re just a trifle overstarched. But we ’ll take it out of you ! It comes of living with stiff-necked — ”

Nora bent for a moment her lustrous eyes on the young man, as if to recall him to order. “ I beg you to understand, once for all,” she said, “ that I refuse to listen to disrespectful allusions to Roger.”

“ I ’ll say it again, just to make you look at me so. If I ever fall in love with you, it will be when you are scolding me. All I've got to do is to attack your papa — ”

“ He’s not my papa. I have had one papa ; that’s enough. I say it in all respect.”

“ If he’s not your papa, what is he ? He’s a dog in the manger. He must be either one thing or the other. When you ’re very little older, you ’ll understand that.”

“ He may be whatever thing you please. I shall be but one, — his best friend.”

Fenton laughed with a kind of fierce hilarity. “You’re so innocent, my dear, that one does n’t know where to take you. You expect, in other words, to marry him ? ”

Nora stopped in the path, with her eyes on her cousin. For a moment he was half confounded by their startled severity and the flush of pain in her cheek. “ Marry Roger ! ” she said with great gravity.

“ Why, he’s a man, after all ! ”

Nora was silent a moment; and then with a certain forced levity, walking on : “I’d better wait till I’m asked.”

“ He ’ll ask you ! You 'll see.”

“ If he does, I shall be surprised.”

“You ’ll pretend to be. Women always do.”

“ He has known me as a child,’ she continued, heedless of his sarcasm. “ I shall always be a child, for him.”

“ He ’ll like that,” said Fenton, with heat. “ He ’ll like a child of twenty.”

Nora, for an instant, was sunk in meditation. “ As regards marriage,” she said at last, with a slightly defiant emphasis, “ I ’ll do what Roger wishes.”

Fenton lost patience. “ Roger be hanged ! ” he cried. “ You ’re not his slave. You must choose for yourself and act for yourself. You must obey your own heart. You don’t know what you ’re talking about. One of these days your heart will say its say. Then we ’ll see what becomes of Roger’s wishes ! If he wants to mould you to his will, he should have taken you younger — or older! Don’t tell me seriously that you can ever love (don’t play upon words : love, I mean, in the one sense that means anything ! ) such a solemn little fop as that! Don’t protest, my dear girl; I must have my say. I speak in your own interest; I speak, at any rate, from my own heart. I detest the man. I came here in all deference and honesty, and he has treated me as if I were n’t fit to touch with a tongs. I’m poor, I’ve my way to make, I’m on the world ; but I’m an honest man, for all that, and as good as he, take me altogether. Why can't he show me a moment’s frankness ? Why can’t he take me by the hand and say, ‘ Come, young man, I’ve got capital, and you’ve got brains; let’s pull together a stroke.’ Does he think I want to steal his spoons or pick his pocket ? Is that hospitality ? If that’s the way they understand it hereabouts, I prefer the Western article ! ”

This passionate outbreak, prompted in about equal measure by baffled ambition and wounded sensibility, made sad havoc with Nora’s strenuous loyalty to her friend. Her sense of infinite property in her cousin — the instinct of free affection alternating more gratefully than she knew with the dim consciousness of measured dependence — had become in her heart a sort of boundless and absolute rapture. She desired neither to question nor to set a term to it: she only knew that while it lasted it was potently sweet. Roger’s mistrust was certainly cruel ; it was crueller still that he should obtrude it on poor George’s notice. She felt, however, that two angry men were muttering over her head and her main desire was to avert an explosion. She promised herself to dismiss Fenton the next day. Of course, by the very fact of this concession, Roger lost ground in her tenderness, and George acquired the grace of the persecuted. Meanwhile, Roger’s jealous irritation came to a head. On the evening following the little scene I have narrated the young couple sat by the fire in the library ; Fenton on a stool at his cousin’s feet holding, while Nora wound them on reels, the wools which were to be applied to the manufacture of those invidious slippers. Roger, after grimly watching their mutual amenities for some time over the cover of a book, unable to master his fierce discomposure, departed with a tell-tale stride. They heard him afterwards walking up and down the piazza, where he was appealing from his troubled nerves to the ordered quietude of the stars.

“He hates me so,” said Fenton, “ that I believe if I were to go out there he ’d draw a knife on me.”

“ O George !” cried Nora, horrified. “ It’s a fact, my dear. I ’m afraid you ’ll have to give me up. I wish I had never seen you ! ”

“ At all events, we can write to each other.”

“ What’s writing ? I don’t know how to write ! I will, though ! I suppose he ’ll open my letters. So much the worse for him ! ”

Nora, as she wound her spool, mused intently, “ I can't believe he really grudges me our friendship. It must be something else.”

Fenton, with a clinch of his fist, arrested suddenly the outflow of the skein from his hand. “ It is something else,” he said. “It’s our possible — more than friendship ! ” And he grasped her two hands in his own. “ Nora, choose ! Between me and him ! ”

She stared a moment; then her eyes filled with tears. “ O George,” she cried, “you make me very unhappy.” She must certainly tell him to go ; and yet that very movement of his which had made it doubly needful made it doubly hard. “ I ’ll talk to Roger,” she said. “No one should be condemned unheard. We may all misunderstand each other.”

Fenton, half an hour later, having, as he said, letters to write, went up to his own room ; shortly after which, Roger returned to the library. Half an hour’s communion with the starlight and the long beat of the crickets had drawn the sting from his irritation. There came to him, too, a mortifying sense of his guest having outdone him in civility. This would never do. He took refuge in imperturbable good-humor, and entered the room with a bravado of cool indifference. But even before he had spoken, something in Nora’s face caused this wholesome dose of resignation to stick in his throat. “Your cousin’s gone?” he said.

“ To his own room. He has some letters to write.”

“Shall I hold your wools?” Roger asked, after a pause, with a rather awkward air of overture.

“ Thank you. They are all wound.”

“ For whom are your slippers ? ” He knew, of course; but the question came.

“For George. Didn’t I tell you? Are n’t they pretty ? ” And she held up her work.

“ Prettier than he deserves.”

Nora gave him a rapid glance and miscounted her stitch. “ You don’t like poor George,” she said.

“ Poor George ” set His wound athrobbing again. “ No. Since you ask me, I don’t like poor George.”

Nora was silent. At last: “ Well! ” she said, “ you’ve not the same reasons as I have.”

“ So I’m bound to believe ! ” cried Roger, with a laugh. “ You must have excellent reasons.”

“ Excellent. He’s my own, you know.”

“ Your own — Oho ! ” And he laughed louder.

His tone forced Nora to blush. “ My own cousin,” she cried.

“ Your own fiddlestick ! ” cried Roger.

She stopped her work. “ What do you mean ? ” she asked gravely.

Roger himself began to blush a little. “ I mean — I mean — that I don’t half believe in your cousin. He does n’t satisfy me. I don’t like him. He’s a jumble of contradictions. I have nothing but his own word. I’m not bound to take it. He tells the truth, if you like, but he tells fibs too.”

“ Roger, Roger,” said Nora, with great softness, “do you mean that he’s an impostor ? ”

“ The word is your own. He’s not honest.”

She slowly rose from her little bench, gathering her work into the skirt of her dress. “ And, doubting of his honesty, you’ve let him take up his abode here, you’ve let him become dear to me ? ”

She was making him ten times a fool ! “ Why, if you liked him,” he said. “When did I ever refuse you anything ? ”

There came upon Nora a sudden unpitying sense that then and there Roger was ridiculous. “ Honest or not honest,” she said with vehemence, “ I do like him. Cousin or no cousin, he’s my friend.”

“ Very good. But I warn you. I don’t enjoy talking to you thus. But let me tell you, once for all, that your cousin, your friend,—your — whatever he is ! ” — He faltered an instant; Nora’s eyes were fixed on him. “ That he disgusts me ! ”

“ You ’re extremely unjust. You’ve taken no trouble to know him. You’ve treated him from the first with small civility ! ”

“Good heavens! Was the trouble to be all mine? Civility! he never missed it; he does n’t know what it means.”

“ He knows more than you think. But we must talk no more about him.” She rolled together her canvas and reels ; and then suddenly, with passionate inconsequence, “ Poor, poor George!” she cried.

Roger watched her, rankling with that unsatisfied need, familiar alike to good men and bad when vanity is at stake, of smothering feminine right in hard manly fact. “ Nora,” he said, cruelly, “ you disappoint me.”

“ You must have formed great hopes of me ! ” she cried.

“ I confess I had.”

“ Say good by to them then, Roger. If this is wrong, I ’m all wrong ! ” She spoke with a rich displeasure which transformed with admirable effect her habitual expression of docility. She had never yet come so near being beautiful. In the midst of his passionate vexation he admired her. The scene seemed for a moment a bad dream, from which, with a start, he might awake into a declaration of love.

“ Your anger gives an admirable point to your remarks. Indeed, it gives a beauty to your face. Must a woman be in the wrong to be charming ? ” He went on, hardly knowing what he said. But a burning blush in her cheeks recalled him to a kind of self-abhorrence. “ Would to God,” he cried, “ your abominable cousin had never come between us ! ”

“ Between us ? He’s not between us. I stand as near you, Roger, as I ever did. Of course George will leave immediately.”

“ Of course ! I’m not so sure. He will, I suppose, if he’s asked.”

“ Of course I shall ask him.”

“ Nonsense. You ’ll not enjoy that.”

“We’re old friends by this time,” said Nora, with terrible malice. “ I sha’n’t in the least mind.”

Roger could have choked himself. He had brought his case to this : Fenton a martyred proscript, and Nora a brooding victim of duty. “ Do I want to turn the man out of the house ? ” he cried. “Do me a favor, — I demand it. Say nothing to him, let him stay as long as he pleases. I’m not afraid! I don’t trust him, but I trust you. I’m curious to see how long he ’ll have the hardihood to stay. A fortnight hence, I shall be justified. You ’ll say to me, ‘ Roger, you were right. George is n’t a gentleman.’ There ! I insist.”

“ A gentleman ? Really, what are we talking about ? Do you mean that he wears a false diamond in his shirt ? He ’ll take it off if I ask him. There’s a long way between wearing false diamonds — ”

“ And stealing real ones ! I don’t know. I have always fancied they go together. At all events, Nora, he’s not to suspect that he has been able to make trouble between two old friends.”

Nora stood for a moment in irresponsive meditation. “ I think he means to go,” she said. “If you want him to stay, you must ask him.” And without further words she marched out of the room. Roger followed her with his eyes. He thought of Lady Castlewood in “ Henry Esmond,” who looked “ devilish handsome in a passion.”

Lady Castlewood, meanwhile, ascended to her own room, flung her work upon the floor, and, dropping into a chair, betook herself to weeping. It was late before she slept. She awoke with a keener consciousness of the burden of life. Her own burden certainly was small, but her strength, as yet, was untested. She had thought, in her many reveries, of a possible rupture of harmony with Roger, and prayed that it might never come by a fault of hers The fault was hers now in that she had surely cared less for duty than for joy. Roger, indeed, had shown a pitiful smallness of view. This was a weakness ; but who was she, to keep account of Roger’s weaknesses ? It was to a weakness of Roger’s that she owed her food and raiment and shelter It helped to quench her resentment that she felt, somehow, that, whether Roger smiled or frowned, George would still be George. He was not a gentleman : well and good ; neither was she, for that matter, a ladyBut a certain manful hardness like George’s would not be amiss in the man one was to love. There was a discord now in that daily commonplace of happiness which had seemed to repeat the image of their mutual trust as a lucid pool reflects the cloudless blue. But if the discord should deepen and swell, it was sweet to think she might deafen her sense in that sturdy cousin ship.

A simpler soul than Fenton’s might have guessed at the trouble of this quiet household. Fenton read in it as well an omen of needfu departure. He accepted the necessity with an acute sense of failure, — almost of injury. He had gained nothing but the bother of being loved. It was a bother, because it gave him a vague importunate sense of responsibility. It seemed to fling upon all things a gray shade of prohibition. Yet the matter had its brightness, too, if a man could but swallow his superstitions. He cared for Nora quite enough to tell her he loved her ; he had said as much, with an easy conscience, to girls for whom he cared far less. He felt gratefully enough the cool vestment of tenderness which she had spun about him, like a web of imponderous silver ; but he had other uses for his time than to go masquerading through Nora’s fancy. The defeat of his hope that Roger, like an ideal ancle de comédie, would shower blessings and bank-notes upon His union with his cousin, involved the discomfiture of a secondary project ; that, namely, of borrowing five thousand dollars. The reader will smile : but such is the naïveté of “ smart men.” He would consent, now, to be put off with five hundred. In this collapse of his visions he fell a-musing upon Nora’s financial value.

“ Look here,” he said to her, with an air of heroic effort, “ I see I’m in the way. I must be off.”

“ I’m sorry, George,” said Nora, sadly-

“ So am I. I never supposed I was proud. But I reckoned without my host! ” he said with a bitter laugh. “ I wish I had never come. Or rather I don’t. My girl of girls ! ”

She began to question him soothingly about his projects and prospects ; and hereupon, for once, Fenton bent his mettle to simulate a pathetic incapacity. He set forth that he was discouraged ; the future was a blank. It was child’s play, attempting to do anything without capital.

And you have no capital ? ” said Nora, anxiously.

Fenton gave a poignant smile. “Why, my dear girl, I’m a poor man ! ”

“ How poor ? ”

“ Poor, poor, poor. Poor as a rat ”

“ You don’t mean that you ’re penniless ? ”

“ What’s the use of my telling you ? You can’t help me. And it would only make you unhappy.”

“ If you are unhappy, I want to be! ”

This golden vein of sentiment might certainly be worked. Fenton took out his pocket-book, drew from it four bank-notes of five dollars each, and ranged them with a sort of mournful playfulness in a line on his knee. “ That’s my fortune.”

“ Do you mean to say that twenty dollars is all you have in the world ? ”

Fenton smoothed out the creases, caressingly, in the soiled and crumpled notes. “It’s a great shame to bring you down to these sordid mysteries of misery,” he said. “ Fortune has raised you above them.”

Nora’s heart began to beat. “ Yes, it has. I have a little money, George. Some eighty dollars.”

Eighty dollars ! George suppressed a groan. “ He keeps you rather low.”

“Why, I have little use for money, and no chance, here in the country, to spend it. Roger is extremely generous. Every few weeks he forces money upon me. I often give it away to the poor people hereabouts. Only a fortnight ago I refused to take any more on account of my having this unspent. It’s agreed between us that I may give what I please in charity, and that my charities are my own affair. If I had only known of you, George, I should have appointed you my pensioner-in-chief.”

George was silent. He was wondering intently how he might arrange to become the standing recipient of her overflow. Suddenly he remembered that he ought to protest. But Nora had lightly quitted the room. Fenton repocketed his twenty dollars and awaited her reappearance. Eighty dollars was not a fortune ; still it was a sum. To his great annoyance, before Nora returned, Roger presented himself. The young man felt for an instant as if he had been caught in an act of sentimental burglary, and made a movement to conciliate his detector. “ I’m afraid I must bid you good by,” be said.

Roger frowned and wondered whether Nora had spoken. At this moment she reappeared, flushed and out of breath with the excitement of her purpose. She had been counting over her money and held in each hand a little fluttering package of bank-notes. On seeing Roger she stopped and blushed, exchanging with her cousin a rapid glance of inquiry. He almost glared at her, whether with warning or with menace she hardly knew. Roger stood looking at her, half amazed. Suddenly, as the meaning of her errand flashed upon him, he turned a furious crimson. He made a step forward, but cautioned himself; then, folding his arms, he silently waited. Nora, after a moment’s hesitation, rolling her notes together, came up to her cousin and held out the little package. Fenton kept his hands in his pockets and devoured her with his eyes. “ What’s all this ? ” he said, brutally.

“ O George ! ” cried Nora ; and her eyes filled with tears.

Roger had divined the situation ; the shabby victimization of the young girl and her kinsman’s fury at the disclosure of his avidity. He was angry; but he was even more disgusted. From so vulgar a knave there was little rivalship to fear. “I ’m afraid I’m rather a marplot,” he said. “ Don’t insist, Nora. Wait till my back is turned.”

“ I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Nora.

“ You ? O, nothing whatever ! ” cried Roger, with a laugh.

Fenton stood leaning against the mantel-piece, desperately sullen, with a look of vicious confusion. “It’s only I who have anything to be ashamed of,” he said at last, bitterly, with an effort. “ My poverty ! ”

Roger smiled graciously, “ Honest poverty is never shameful ! ”

Fenton gave him an insolent stare. “ Honest poverty ! You know a great deal about it.”

“ Don’t appeal to poor little Nora, man, for her savings,” Roger went on. “ Come to me.”

“ You ’re unjust,” said Nora. “ He did n’t appeal to me. I appealed to him. I guessed his poverty. He has only twenty dollars in the world.”

“ O, you poor little fool ! ” roared Fenton’s eyes.

Roger was delighted. At a single stroke he might redeem his incivility and reinstate himself in Nora’s affections. He took out his pocket-book. “ Let me help you. It was very stupid of me not to have guessed your embarrassment.” And he counted out a dozen notes.

Nora stepped to her cousin’s side and passed her hand through his arm. “ Don’t be proud,” she murmured caressingly.

Roger’s notes were new and crisp. Fenton looked hard at the opposite wall, but, explain it who can, he read their successive figures, — a fifty, four twenties, six tens. He could have howled.

“ Come don’t be proud,” repeated Roger, holding out this little bundle of wealth.

Two great passionate tears welled into the young man’s eyes. The sight of Roger’s sturdy sleekness, of the comfortable twinkle of patronage in his eye, was too much for him. “ I sha’n’t give you a chance to be proud,” he said. “ Take care ! Your papers may go into the fire.”

“ O George ! ” murmured Nora ; and her murmur seemed to him delicious.

He bent down his head, passed his arm round her shoulders, and kissed her on her forehead. “ Good by, dearest Nora,” he said.

Roger stood staring, with his proffered gift. “You decline?” he cried, almost defiantly.

“ ‘ Decline ’ is n’t the word. A man does n’t decline an insult.”

Was Fenton, then, to have the best of it, and was his own very generosity to be turned against him ? Blindly, passionately, Roger crumpled the notes in his fist and tossed them into the fire. In an instant they begun to blaze.

“ Roger, are you mad ? ” cried Nora. And she made a movement to rescue the crackling paper. Fenton burst into a laugh. He caught her by the arm, clapsed her round the waist, and forced her to stand and watch the brief blaze. Pressed against his side, she felt the quick beating of his heart. As the notes disappeared her eyes sought Roger’s face. He looked at her stupidly, and then turning on his heel, he walked out of the room. Her cousin, still holding her, showered upon her forehead half a dozen fierce kisses. But disengaging herself: “ You must leave the house ! ” she cried. “ Something dreadful will happen.”

Fenton had soon packed his valise, and Nora, meanwhile, had ordered a vehicle to carry him to the station. She waited for him in the portico. When he came out, with his bag in his hand, she offered him again her little roll of bills. But he was a wiser man. than half an hour before. He took them, turned them over and selected a one-dollar note. “ I ’ll keep this,” he said, “ in remembrance, and only spend it for my last dinner.” She made him promise, however, that if trouble really overtook him, he would let her know, and in any case he would write. As the wagon went over the crest of an adjoining hill he stood up and waved his hat. His tall, gaunt young figure, as it rose dark against the cold November sunset, cast a cooling shadow across the fount of her virgin sympathies. Such was the outline, surely, of the conquering hero, not of the conquered. Her fancy followed him forth into the world with a tender impulse of comradeship.

H. James Jr.