"TO MEET MR. AND MRS. KINGSTON."

R RACHEL was away for nearly a year and a half, seeing all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them in the most luxurious modern fashion. It was such a tour as a romantic and imaginative woman born to a humdrum life would feel to be the one thing to "do" and die; and according to her account, she enjoyed it extremely. She came home very much improved by it in the opinion of her aunt and other good judges.

"Certainly," they said, "travel is the very best education: there is nothing like it for enlarging the mind, and for giving polish and repose to the manners."

Mrs. Kingston, indeed, when she took her place in the society of which her husband had long been so distinguished an ornament, was a very interesting study, as exemplifying this soundest of popular theories. She was greatly altered in all sorts of ways. She had quite lost that bashful rusticity which had been Mrs. Hardy's despair, and in her unpretentious fashion, was really very dignified.

There was no hurry and flutter about her now as there used to be; none of that indiscriminate enthusiasm, which in her aunt's eyes branded her as a poor relation who "had never been used to anything nice." She expressed her appreciation of things smilingly and sweetly, with more or less of her natural bright frankness, but with a well-bred moderation and serenity that might have become a duchess. To please her husband she wore rich raiment, "composed" by the most distinguished Parisian artists, and it symbolised the change that all her individuality seemed to have undergone.

She was no longer a girl, an ingÉnue, a bread-and-butter miss, a pretty little nobody; she was an experienced and cultured woman, a leader of society, fully equipped for that high position, with a just appreciation of her own importance, and relatively to that of other people's.

Indeed, there seemed to certain persons—Miss Brownlow amongst others—indications in her reticent and reposeful manner of a tendency to be exclusive, and to think a great deal too much of herself.

Mrs. Hardy, who was immensely interested in the unforeseen development, was beyond measure gratified by it—more especially as the young wife was evidently on the best of terms with her husband, though she had the good taste to refrain from drawing public attention to the fact.

Many apprehensions were set at rest by the sight of her entering a room on his arm, carefully and beautifully dressed, as if she had enjoyed dressing herself, and twinkling with diamonds everywhere, responding to respectful greetings with quiet grace, moving in her comparatively higher sphere as if she felt thoroughly at home in it. It seemed to the anxious matron that an end had been reached which justified all the means that had been taken to compass it.

Mrs. Reade was not so satisfied. She looked at the change in Rachel from another point of view. She did not like to see a girl who had been exceptionally girlish, turned into a sober woman with such unnatural rapidity.

Her sister Laura had come home, and was now settled at Kew, giving entertainments in a severely-appointed high-art house; she had had quite as much of the education of travel as Rachel—perhaps more, inasmuch as her young husband was a dabbler in bric-À-bric, and had a taste for old churches, and palaces, and pictures; whereas Mr. Kingston's interest in foreign cities, however famous, had chiefly concerned itself with the quality of the society and the cuisine of the hotels.

But Laura, though stored with information and experience, and lately the happy mother of twin daughters, was much the same as she had been in her maiden days—cheerful, enterprising, a rider of harmless hobbies, a great believer in herself, and in the force and variety of her fascinations.

She had improved and developed, of course, but the experiences of travel had not changed her as Rachel was changed.

The acute little woman who practically had never solved the meaning of love and marriage, and quite understood her disqualifications in this respect, yet had glimmerings of the state of things that existed in Rachel's heart. She knew—though she had come to the knowledge by slow degrees—that the girl was not weak all through, but only weak as the water-lily is,

And that just as she had been tenacious of certain principles in her earlier life, when living with her father in an atmosphere which she had only her own instinct to teach her was tainted with dishonour, so she would hold fast to some other things, if they had taken root, with a secret, blind integrity in spite of her emotional fluctuations in the winds and waves of circumstance.

She had adapted herself to the conditions of her marriage with the pliant submissiveness of her disposition; but there was a part of her that refused to be reconciled to all the degradation that was involved, and it was a tough and vital part of her.

Since this was violently repressed, comprehending as it did all those aspiring ideals which had had so much poetry and promise, and which represented for her, in their loss as in their possession, the meaning of human happiness and the diviner aspect of human life, there was naturally a great vacuum somewhere—a great emptiness for which no compensating interests were available. Hence that serene inexpressiveness of mien and manner which had so mature and distinguished an air.

Mrs. Reade's own marriage was very much of the same pattern in one respect—it was but an outward and visible sign of marriage that had no inward and spiritual grace; but then she did not know what it was that she missed, and Rachel did. And the difference between the two cases was perfectly obvious to that intelligent woman.

On the return of Mr. and Mrs. Kingston to Melbourne, a number of fashionable parties were of course given in their honour. At the chief of these, a great ball in the Town-hall, the dramatic action of this story, temporarily suspended by our heroine's absence from the country which held all its elements in solution, so to speak, was suddenly set going again.

It was towards the end of October, just when the gay season of the races was about to set in, and when the spring was in its glory. It strangely happened to be also the anniversary of the night of her clandestine betrothal to Roden Dalrymple, which was the memorable last time—two whole years ago—that she had seen or heard of him.

Nowadays she never mentioned Roden Dalrymple's name. She had never mentioned it to her husband since he and she came to a certain understanding on their wedding-day, and her husband had scrupulously avoided mentioning it to her; which reticence on his part was odd and uncomfortable rather than considerate and delicate, inasmuch as she was intensely anxious to pursue the line of conduct that she had laid down for herself in her relations with him—to have no secrets and to tell the truth—and to bring their companionship into such harmony and sympathy as the nature of things made possible.

And since her return she had never even suggested the existence of her lost lover to any of those who might have given her information about him—not even to Beatrice. She "would not recognise that she felt" any interest in his existence.

Nevertheless, she lived in a perpetual, absorbing, all-pervading consciousness that he and she were "in the world together," and that the key to the whole system of the universe lay somehow in that fact.

And the years and months, and days and hours were all dates in the first place, and periods of time in the second; and every date was a register of ineffaceable memories of him, which she could not destroy or ignore.

So on this great anniversary, as the hour approached which witnessed their last interview in the solitude of the half-built house (the boudoir was in the hands of the decorators now, and the sacred spot of floor was covered over with inlaid woodwork), she tried to put the thought of it out of her mind—tried to shut her eyes to the inevitable agonising and tantalising perception of what might have been—and yet was acutely responsive to every tick of the clock on her mantelpiece, checking off the reminiscent moments one by one. She followed the events of that long-ago happy night perforce as an unquiet spirit "raised" against its will.

"Now we were sitting together," she remembered, as the little clock struck nine silvery notes. "We were looking at the moonlight on the bay. Ah, me, how lovely that moonlight was!"

"Rachel," called her husband from his dressing-room within, whither he had just arrived from a dinner at the club, "aren't you dressed yet? I met that young woman of yours on the stairs; she seems to have more time on her hands than she knows what to do with. Why don't you make her wait on you better? She ought to be getting you ready by this time."

Rachel jumped up hastily and rang for her maid, whose ministrations, essential to the dignity of her present position, she certainly did not appreciate.

"I shall not be long dressing," she replied; "and it is early yet."

And then she went into his room to ask him if he had had a pleasant party at dinner, and whether he had enjoyed it, anxious to show him some special tenderness on this special night—anxious to find some shelter in his affection from the reminiscences that beset her.

He was a little irritable, for his gout was troubling him, and he did not respond to her advances. He patted the hand that she laid on his arm in a perfunctory manner, and sent her back to begin her preparations for the ball. He did not wish her to dress herself quickly; he wanted her to make the most of her beauty and her supplementary resources on such a great occasion.

He was very fond of his wife still, and proud of her, and good to her in his own rather tyrannical way; but his marriage with her, after a year and a half of it, had become to himself—as under the circumstances was inevitable—a very unromantic and commonplace affair.

They had lived together in tolerable peace and comfort; they had never quarrelled, simply because it was Rachel's habit to efface herself at the first symptoms of rising temper; but neither had they been companions, in any proper sense of the term.

As yet he had no active sense of injury and injustice, in that the possession of his treasure gave him such meagre compensation for all that he had paid for it, but he did feel, in a general way, that matrimony was—as he confessed he had been well warned that it would be—very tame and dull, and uninteresting, and that it would be too unreasonable altogether to expect a man to devote himself exclusively to its demands. Even little Rachel herself, he was quite sure, would not wish him to be bored to death.

And so he fell back insensibly into many of his old self-indulgent habits, and the pleasures of his bachelor life grew more than ever pleasant. This was particularly the case after his return to Melbourne, where his face became as familiar to club men as in the ante-nuptial days. Some excuse for this independence was supposed to lie in the fact that he and his wife had not yet settled down to housekeeping.

The Toorak mansion was being furnished and decorated with the treasures of art and upholstery that they had brought out with them; and until everything was completed, and the entire establishment was in proper order for their reception, and for the giving of that magnificent house-warming to which the world of Melbourne fashion was looking forward, they were inhabiting a suite of rooms in an hotel, and domestic life, consequently, was to a certain extent disorganised.

On this night of which we are speaking, Rachel thought it was very kind and attentive of him to come home to her a full hour before he needed to have done. It never occurred to her, any more than to him, that he neglected her.

The servants of the hotel, who were on the watch for a sight of her as she went to her carriage, thought her not only one of the most lovely, but one of the most fortunate of women; and so did the majority of the gay company at the Town Hall, when she made her appearance amongst them.

She had come back from Europe and all her sea-voyaging, in excellent physical health, and the last year or two of her life, in spite of sorrowful vicissitudes, had ripened and developed her beauty in a very marked degree.

She was dressed in white, but with great richness, of course—her husband had seen to that; covered with precious lace, that was as attractive to the eyes of the Melbourne ladies as the delicacy of her pure complexion was to those of the men. And she wore her necklace of diamond stars, and diamonds on her arms, and on her bosom, and in her hair; and she was altogether very magnificent, and made a great sensation.

Amongst her many admirers she noticed, when she had been in the room a little while, a short, stout man, of about forty or fifty years of age, apparently, who was a stranger to her, regarding her with much attention.

He had rather an air of distinction about him in spite of his low stature, and a noticeable absence of beauty; and she had a dim—very dim—impression that she had seen him, or someone like him, before.

He wore a fair moustache but no beard or whiskers, and his florid face was marked down one side with the puckered white scar of an old wound.

His eyes were quick and bright, and the keen observation that he brought to bear upon her through an eyeglass that he put into one of them whenever she came near, obviously with the intention of studying her to the best advantage, was a little disconcerting even to an acknowledged beauty.

She was waltzing with Mr. Buxton—it was her second waltz, and he danced very well—when suddenly, high in the air over her head, the great clock chimed eleven, and all the associations of that sacred hour gathered like ghosts around her, Roden Dalrymple holding the lighted match to his watch, while she sheltered the little flame from the wind—her head touching his cheek and his huge moustache as they looked down together to see the time—the mystic light and stillness of the peaceful night, through which the sound of the city bells came up to them, to warn them that their happiness was a thing too good to last.

"Eleven p.m.," he had called it; and "you must go home, little one," he had said. Could it have been at that moment that he meant to send her away so far, and never to take her back to his arms and his heart again?

"Aw—what's the matter? Are you dizzy?" asked her partner, feeling a break and a jar in the rhythm of the measure that had been flowing so very harmoniously.

"A little," she whispered. "I should like to sit down for a few minutes—we'll go on again, if you like, presently."

He led her to a retired bench, and while she rested stood beside her, silently watching the people who continued to revolve before them. She had hardly sat down, and was beginning mechanically to fan herself, when the stranger with the eyeglass came up, with a lady, who was also unknown to her, on his arm.

"Here's a seat," said the little stout man; and his partner, an elderly and amiable matron, sat down, bestowing the deprecatory smile of old-fashioned courtesy upon the two already in possession.

He took the end of the bench himself, and chatted away to her—she was his aunt, apparently—leaning a little forward, with an elbow on his knee; and Rachel, dreamily occupied as she was, was quite conscious that his keen eyes dwelt persistently, not upon his neighbour's face, but upon her own.

"Why don't you go and get a partner, James?" said the elderly matron. "You don't want to dance attendance upon me, my dear—I shall do very well here until Lucy wants me. Go and find some pretty young lady, and enjoy yourself like the rest of them."

"I don't believe in pretty young ladies," replied the little man, rather bluntly. "Except Lucy—and she is engaged for the whole night, as far as I can make out."

Here ensued some comments upon Lucy, who appeared to be the lady's daughter, generally favourable to that young person. And the little man then began to inveigh against the abstract girl of the period with trenchant vigour—obviously to the great embarrassment of his companion, who tried her best, but vainly, to divert him to other topics.

"In fact, there are no girls nowadays," he remarked coolly; "they are all calculating, selfish, heartless, worldly women—always excepting Lucy, of course—as soon as they cease to be children. They have only one object in life, and that is to marry a man—no, not a man necessarily, a forked stick will do—who has plenty of money."

"My dear, that is a popular sentiment, I know, and supposed to be full of wit and wisdom, but it always seems to me that it is just a little vulgar," replied his companion, frowning surreptitiously, and giving uneasy sidelong glances at Rachel. "There are girls and girls, of course, just as there are men and men; we see bad and good in every class. How beautifully this place lights up, to be sure!"

"They like a fellow to dance with them and dangle after them, and make love to them, and break his heart for them—nothing pleases them better—when they have no serious business on hand," the little man proceeded, with unabashed composure, and still gazing steadily at Rachel; "but when it comes to marriage—"

"My dear James, I am not recommending marriage to you—only a harmless waltz."

"Then they are for sale to the highest bidder, whoever he may happen to be. The poor, impecunious lover—be he ever so much a lover, and the best fellow that walks the earth into the bargain—must take himself off—and cut his throat for all she cares."

At this sudden change from the plural to the singular, and at something personal and impertinent that she recognised in the tone and look of the speaker, a deep blush flooded Rachel's face, and she rose from her seat with dignity, but trembling in all her limbs.

"Aw—who the dickens is that fellow?" Mr. Buxton whispered, with a scowl—supposing, however, that he could only be a disappointed aspirant for Rachel's hand. "He's an impudent brute, whoever he is, and I have a good mind to tell him so. What's his name, eh?"

"I don't know," said Rachel. But as she spoke, and was about to move away, the stranger rose and stood with an air of courteous deference to let her pass him—an air that somehow indicated the breeding and manners of a gentleman; and all at once it flashed across her where and when she had seen him before. He was the man who had called at Toorak and been closeted with her aunt at the time when Roden Dalrymple had promised to come for her, nearly two years ago. She had gone out into the garden, thinking he might possibly have been Roden, to intercept him as he was going away. She had had only a distant glimpse of him—of his short, square figure, and the lower part of his face—but she recognised now that this was the same man. She had not gone many steps into the room, feeling strangely overwhelmed by her discovery, when a pair of exhausted waltzers went trailing by, and one of them said to the other, "Didn't somebody say Jim Gordon was here to-night? Where is the old fellow hiding himself? I should like to see him again."

The little man with the eyeglass was—of course he was—Roden Dalrymple's friend and partner.

She drew her hand from her cousin's arm, turned round, and walked deliberately back to the seat she had just quitted.

"No," she said to her pursuing cavalier, "do not come. Go and dance with somebody, and fetch me presently."

"My dear Rachel, you must allow me—aw, I couldn't really—"

"I want to speak to Mr. Gordon," she said, pausing in front of that gentleman. "Mr. Gordon, I want to ask you something. Will you kindly take me out to the lobbies—somewhere where it is quiet—if this lady will excuse you for a few minutes?"

Mr. Buxton was utterly bewildered, as well he might be. He stared, stiffened himself, and then went off to find Laura, and to tell her of the extraordinary proceedings of her cousin "with some insolent beggar whose name she said she didn't know, though she addressed him by it almost in the same breath," and to intimate (merely by way of soothing his own injured dignity) that there seemed to him something "rather fishy" going on.

And Mr. Gordon, after losing his presence of mind for about half a minute, and then only partially recovering it, silently offered his arm to the lady who had made that strange appeal to him. He had never seen her until to-night; he had hoped he never should see her, or have anything to do with her. She had been, in his imagination of her, the embodiment of all that was detestable in woman. But now something in the candid young face, unnaturally set and pale, and in the suppressed passion and purpose of her manner, gave him compunctious misgivings, and a vague but alarming impression that there had been some blundering somewhere.

"You are Mr. Gordon, are you not?" she began hurriedly, as soon as they were out of the crowd and glare of the ball-room. "Yes, I thought so; but I did not recognise you at first. I should have waited for an introduction, but I was afraid you might go away. I think you know who I am. What you were saying just now—had it not some reference to me?"

The little man began to stammer incoherently. He was completely overbalanced by the shock of this unexpected attack. Rachel, on the contrary, usually so fluttered by an emergency, had a sort of fierce, collected calm about her.

"I am sure it had," she said. "And I want to know what you meant?"

"I—a—perhaps you are aware that I am Mr. Dalrymple's friend, Mrs. Kingston. I am therefore, perhaps, something of a partisan—forgive me, if I forgot myself for the moment—"

"Ah," she broke out sharply, "there has been some great mistake! Tell me—quickly—before anyone is here to interrupt us—did you come to see my aunt that Christmas—the Christmas before last?"

"Certainly I came to see her and you," he replied.

"Did he send you?"

"Of course he did."

"Why?"

"Why!" he echoed angrily. "Do you mean to say you don't know why?"

"I know nothing," said Rachel. She stood before him shining in her satin and diamonds, without a trace of colour in her face; and the anguish of her beseeching eyes told him plainly that she spoke the truth.

"Oh, dear me, this is terrible!" he exclaimed, in a flurry of dismay and consternation. "Do you mean to say that you didn't know that he was ill?—that you didn't tell Mrs. Hardy to write that letter?—that it was all done without your knowing anything about it? Good Heavens! would anybody believe there were such malignant fiends in existence—and such fools!" he added bitterly.

Then he told her the whole story—how her lover had got hurt, and had lain insensible for many days, between life and death—how his first anxiety upon recovering consciousness was about his appointment with her—how he had deputed his friend to go to Melbourne and explain his inability to keep it; and how he (Mr. Gordon) had seen Mrs. Hardy and afterwards Mr. Kingston, and been led by them to an apparently unavoidable conclusion.

"She said you were not willing to see me, but that she would give you my messages and explanations," said the little man, thinking it would be best for his friend (and not much caring what it would be for other people) to have it all out at once, while he was as about it; "and that she would send me a note to the club, where I was staying, in the evening, or instruct you to do so. She had already told me that you were re-engaged to—a—your present husband. At night I got the letter, in which she repeated this assertion, stating that you had empowered her to do so."

"And you went and told him that?"

"I did not go and tell him that—for I did not want to kill him—until I had taken every possible precaution to get it corroborated."

"Yes?" ejaculated Rachel, breathlessly.

"I obtained an introduction to Mr. Kingston at the club, and I asked him on his honour to tell me if what Mrs. Hardy had said was true."

"You told him why you wanted to know?"

"I did."

She stood still for a few seconds to collect her strength; whole years of effort and agony were concentrated in that little interval.

"Shall you be going back to Queensland soon?" she asked quietly.

"I am going back to-morrow," he said—though he had not previously thought of doing so.

"Tell him when you see him—tell him from me—that I never knew anything—never, never, from the day I saw him last until to-night."

"It will break his heart to hear it, Mrs. Kingston."

"No—he will be glad to know that I was not utterly base. And I—I want him to know it."

"And shall I—can I—tell him that you were really not engaged when they said you were—when he thought you were waiting for him?"

She flushed deeply and drew herself up with a little stately gesture.

"He will not wish you to go into those particulars, Mr. Gordon. If you will give him my message simply, that is all I want you to do. He will understand it. Will you take me back to the ball-room now? I should like to find my cousin, Mrs. Reade."