“PROFESSOR THEOBALD, if you are able to resist the fascinations of this old house you are made of sterner stuff than I thought.”

“I can never resist fascinations, Lady Engleton.”

“Do you ever try?”

“My life is spent in the endeavour.”

“How foolish!” Whether this applied to the endeavour or to the remark, did not quite appear. Lady Engleton’s graceful figure leant over the parapet.

“Do you know, Mrs. Temperley,” she said in her incessantly vivacious manner, “I have scarcely heard a serious word since our two Professors came to us. Isn’t it disgraceful? I naturally expected to be improved and enlightened, but they are both so frivolous, I can’t keep them for a moment to any important subject. They refuse to be profound. It is I who have to be profound.”

“While we endeavour to be charming,” said Professor Theobald.

“You may think that flattering, but I confess it seems to me a beggarly compliment (as men’s to women usually are).”

“You expect too much of finite intelligence, Lady Engleton.”

“This is how I am always put off! If it were not that you are both such old friends—you are a sort of cousin I think, Professor Fortescue—I should really feel aggrieved. One has to endure so much more from relations. No, but really; I appeal to Mrs. Temperley. When one is hungering for erudition, to be offered compliments! Not that I can accuse Professor Fortescue of compliments,” she added with a laugh; “wild horses would not drag one from him. I angle vainly. But he is so ridiculously young. He enjoys things as if he were a schoolboy. Does one look for that in one’s Professors? He talks of the country as if it were Paradise Regained.”

“So it is to me,” he said with a smile.

“But that is not your rÔle. You have to think, not to enjoy.”

“Then you must not invite us to Craddock Place,” Professor Theobald stipulated.

“As usual, a halting compliment.”

“To take you seriously, Lady Engleton,” said Professor Fortescue, “(though I know it is a dangerous practice) one of the great advantages of an occasional think is to enable one to relish the joys of mental vacuity, just as the pleasure of idleness is never fully known till one has worked.”

“Ah,” sighed Lady Engleton, “I know I don’t extract the full flavour out of that!”

“It is a neglected art,” said the Professor. “After worrying himself with the problems of existence, as the human being is prone to do, as soon as existence is more or less secure and peaceful, a man can experience few things more enjoyable than to leave aside all problems and go out into the fields, into the sun, to feel the life in his veins, the world at the threshold of his five senses.”

“Ah, now you really are profound at last, Professor!”

“I thought it was risky to take you seriously.”

“No, no, I am delighted. The world at the threshold of one’s five senses. One has but to look and to listen and the beauty of things displays itself for our benefit. Yes, but that is what the artists say, not the Professors.”

“Even a Professor is human,” pleaded Theobald.

Valeria quoted some lines that she said expressed Professor Fortescue’s idea.

Lady Engleton’s artistic instinct seemed to occupy itself less with the interpretation of Nature than with the appreciation of the handiwork of man. The lines did not stir her. Professor Theobald shared her indifference for the poetic expression, but not for the reality expressed.

“I quarrel with you about art,” said Lady Engleton. “Art is art, and nature is nature, both charming in their way, though I prefer art.”

“Our old quarrel!” said the Professor.

“Because a wild glade is beautiful in its quality of wild glade, you can’t see the beauty in a trim bit of garden, with its delightful suggestion of human thought and care.”

“I object to stiffness,” said Professor Theobald.

His proposals to improve the stately old gardens at the Priory by adding what Lady Engleton called “fatuous wriggles to all the walks, for mere wrigglings’ sake,” had led to hot discussions on the principles of art and the relation of symmetry to the sensibilities of mankind. Lady Engleton thought the Professor crude in taste, and shallow in knowledge, on this point.

“And yet you appreciate so keenly my old enamels, and your eye seeks out, in a minute, a picturesque roof or gable.”

“Perhaps Theobald leans to the picturesque and does not care for the classic,” suggested his colleague; “a fundamental distinction in mental bias.”

“Then why does he enjoy so much of the Renaissance work on caskets and goblets? He was raving about them last night in the choicest English.”

Lady Engleton crossed over to speak to Miss Du Prel. Professor Theobald approached Mrs. Temperley and Joseph Fleming. Hadria knew by some instinct that the Professor had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to her. As he drew near, a feeling of intense enmity arose within her, which reached its highest pitch when he addressed her in a fine, low-toned voice of peculiarly fascinating quality. Every instinct rose up as if in warning. He sat down beside her, and began to talk about the Priory and its history. His ability was obvious, even in his choice of words and his selection of incidents. He had the power of making dry archÆological facts almost dramatic. His speech differed from that of most men, in the indefinable manner wherein excellence differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term “second class,” though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult to say.

Sometimes his words allowed two possible interpretations to be put upon a sentence. He was a master of the ambiguous. Obviously it was not lack of skill that produced the double-faced phrases.

He did not leave his listeners long in doubt as to his personal history. He enjoyed talking about himself. He was a Professor of archÆology, and had written various learned books on the subject. But his studies had by no means been confined to the one theme. History had also interested him profoundly. He had published a work on the old houses of England. The Priory figured among them. It was not difficult to discover from the conversation of this singular man, whose subtle and secretive instincts were contradicted, at times, by a strange inconsequent frankness, that his genuine feeling for the picturesque was accompanied by an equally strong predilection for the appurtenances of wealth and splendour; his love of great names and estates being almost of the calibre of the housemaid’s passion for lofty personages in her penny periodical. He seemed to be a man of keen and cunning ability, who studied and played upon the passions and weaknesses of his fellows, possibly for their good, but always as a magician might deal with the beings subject to his power. By what strange lapse did he thus naÏvely lay himself open to their smiles?

Hadria was amused at his occasional impulse of egotistic frankness (or what appeared to be such), when he would solemnly analyse his own character, admitting his instinct to deceive with an engaging and scholarly candour.

His penetrating eyes kept a watch upon his audience. His very simplicity seemed to be guarded by his keenness.

Hadria chafed under his persistent effort to attract and interest her. She gave a little inward shiver on finding that there was a vague, unaccountable, and unpleasant fascination in the personality of the man.

It was not charm, it was nothing that inspired admiration; it rather inspired curiosity and stirred the spirit of research, a spirit which evidently animated himself. She felt that, in order to investigate the workings of her mind and her heart, the Professor would have coolly pursued the most ruthless psychical experiments, no matter at what cost of anguish to herself. In the interests of science and humanity, the learned Professor would certainly not hesitate to make one wretched individual agonize.

His appeal to the intellect was stimulatingly strong; it was like a stinging wind, that made one walk at a reckless pace, and brought the blood tingling through every vein. That intellectual force could alone explain the fact of his being counted by Professor Fortescue as a friend. Even then it was a puzzling friendship. Could it be that to Professor Fortescue, he shewed only his best side? His manner was more respectful towards his colleague than towards other men, but even with him he was irreverent in his heart, as towards mankind in general.

To Hadria he spoke of Professor Fortescue with enthusiasm—praising his great power, his generosity, his genial qualities, and his uprightness; then he laughed at him as a modern Don Quixote, and sneered at his efforts to save animal suffering when he might have made a name that would never be forgotten, if he pursued a more fruitful branch of research.

Hadria remarked that Professor Theobald’s last sentence had added the crowning dignity to his eulogium.

He glanced at her, as if taking her measure.

“Fortescue,” he called out, “I envy you your champion. You point, Mrs. Temperley, to lofty altitudes. I, as a mere man, cannot pretend to scale them.”

Then he proceeded to bring down feminine loftiness with virile reason.

“In this world, where there are so many other evils to combat, one feels that it is more rational to attack the more important first.”

“Ah! there is nothing like an evil to bolster up an evil,” cried Professor Fortescue; “the argument never fails. Every abuse may find shelter behind it. The slave trade, for instance; have we not white slavery in our midst? How inconsistent to trouble about negroes till our own people are truly free! Wife-beating? Sad; but then children are often shamefully ill-used. Wait till they are fully protected before fussing about wives. Protect children? Foolish knight-errant, when you ought to know that drunkenness is at the root of these crimes! Sweep away this curse, before thinking of the children. As for animals, how can any rational person consider their sufferings, when there are men, women, and children with wrongs to be redressed?”

Professor Theobald laughed.

“My dear Fortescue, I knew you would have some ingenious excuse for your amiable weaknesses.”

“It is easier to find epithets than answers, Theobald,” said the Professor with a smile. “I confess I wonder at a man of your logical power being taken in with this cheap argument, if argument it can be called.”

“It is my attachment to logic that makes me crave for consistency,” said Theobald, not over pleased at his friend’s attack.

Professor Fortescue stared in surprise.

“But do you really mean to tell me that you think it logical to excuse one abuse by pointing to another?”

“I think that while there are ill-used women and children, it is certainly inconsistent to consider animals,” said Theobald.

“It does not occur to you that the spirit in man that permits abuse of power over animals is precisely the same devil-inspired spirit that expresses itself in cruelty towards children. Ah,” continued Professor Fortescue, shaking his head, “then you really are one of the many who help wrong to breed wrong, and suffering to foster suffering, all the world over. It is you and those who reason as you reason, who give to our miseries their terrible vitality. What arguments has evil ever given to evil! What shelter and succour cruelty offers eternally to cruelty!”

“I can’t attempt to combat this hobby of yours, Fortescue.”

“Again a be-littling epithet in place of an argument! But I know of old that on this subject your intellectual acumen deserts you, as it deserts nearly all men. You sink suddenly to lower spiritual rank, and employ reasoning that you would laugh to scorn in connection with every other topic.”

“You seem bent on crushing me,” exclaimed Theobald. “And Mrs. Temperley enjoys seeing me mangled. Talk about cruelty to animals! I call this cold-blooded devilry! Mrs. Temperley, come to my rescue!”

“So long as other forms of cruelty can be instanced, Professor Theobald, I don’t see how, on your own shewing, you can expect any consistent person to raise a finger to help you,” Hadria returned. Theobald laughed.

“But I consider myself too important and valuable to be made the subject of this harsh treatment.”

“That is for others to decide. If it affords us amusement to torment you, and amusement benefits our nerves and digestion, how can you justly object? We must consider the greatest good of the greatest number; and we are twice as numerous as you.”

“You are delicious!” he exclaimed. Mrs. Temperley’s manner stiffened.

Acute as the Professor was in many directions, he did not appear to notice the change.

His own manner was not above criticism.

“It is strange,” said Lady Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, “it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o’-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and inoffensive way.”

The only means of procuring the indispensable afternoon tea was to go on to the Red House, which Mrs. Temperley proposed that they should all do.

“And is there no shaking your decision about the Priory, Professor Theobald?” Lady Engleton asked as they descended the steps.

The Professor’s quick glance sought Mrs. Temperley’s before he answered. “I confess to feeling less heroic this afternoon.”

“Oh, good! We may perhaps have you for a neighbour after all.”