"

D DI," said Archie, sauntering up to her on the terrace at Cantalupe, where she was sitting the morning after the ball, and planting himself in front of her, as he had a habit of doing before all women, so as to spare them the trouble of turning round to look at him, "I can't swallow little Crupps."

"No one wants you to," said Di. "If you don't like her, you had better leave her alone."

"Women are not meant to be let alone," said Archie, yawning, "except the ugly ones."

"Well, Miss Crupps is not pretty."

"No, but she is gilt up to the eyes. Poor eyes, too, and light eyelashes. I could not marry light eyelashes."

"I am glad to hear it."

"Oh! I know you don't care a straw whether I settle well or not. You never have cared. Women are all alike. There's not a woman in the world, or a man either, who cares a straw what becomes of me."

"Or you what becomes of them."

"John's just as bad as the rest," continued the victim of a worldly age. "And John and I were great chums in old days. But it is the way of the world."

Men who attract by a certain charm of manner which the character is unable to bear out, who make unconscious promises to the hope of others without ability to keep them, are ever those who complain most loudly of the fickleness of women, of the uncertainty of friendship, of their loveless lot.

Di did not answer. Any allusion to John, even the bare mention of his name, had become of moment to her. She never by any chance spoke of him, neither did she ever miss a word that was said about him in her presence; and often raged inwardly at the ruthless judgments and superficial criticisms that were freely passed upon him by his contemporaries, and especially his kinsfolk. From a very early date in this world's history, ability has been felt to be distressing in its own country, especially in the country. If a clever man would preserve unflawed the amulet of humility, let him at intervals visit among his country cousins. John had not many of these invaluable relations; but, happily for him, he had contemporaries who did just as well—men who, when he was mentioned with praise in their hearing, could always break in that they had known him at Eton, and relate how he had over-eaten himself at the sock-shop.

"One thing I am determined I won't do," continued Archie, "and that is marry poverty, like the poor old governor. He has often talked about it, and what a grind it was, with the tears in his eyes."

"What has turned your mind to marriage on this particular morning, of all others?"

"I don't know, unless it is the vision of little Crupps. I suppose I shall come to something of that kind some day. If it isn't her it will be something like her. One must live. You are on the look out for money, too, Di, so you need not be so disdainful. You can't marry a poor man."

"They don't often ask me," said Di. "I fancy I look more expensive to keep up than I really am."

"Ah! here comes Lady Verelst," said Archie, patronizingly. "I'd marry her, now, if she were a rich widow. I would indeed. She is putting up her red parasol. Quite right. She has not your complexion, Di, nor mine either."

Archie got up as Madeleine came towards them, and offered her his chair. Archie had several cheap effects. To offer a chair with a glance and a smile was one of them. Perhaps he could not help it if the glance suggested unbounded homage, if the smile conveyed an admiration as concentrated as Liebig's extract. His faithful, tender eyes could wear the sweetest, the saddest, or the most reproachful expression to order. Every slight passing feeling was magnified by the beauty of the face that reflected it into a great emotion. He felt almost nothing, but he appeared to feel a great deal. A man who possesses this talisman is very dangerous.

Poor Madeleine, confident of her appearance in her new Cresser garment, with its gold-flowered waistcoat, firmly believed, as Archie silently pushed forward the chair, that she had inspired—had been so unfortunate as to inspire—"une grande passion malheureuse." Almost all Archie's lovemaking, and that is saying a good deal, was speechless. He could look unutterable things, but he had not, as he himself expressed it, "the gift of the gab."

Madeleine was sorry for him, but she could not allow him to remain enraptured beside her in full view of Sir Henry's study windows.

"How delicious it is here!" she said, after dismissing him to the billiard-room. "I never lie in bed after a ball, do you, Di? I seem to crave for the sunshine and the face of nature after all the glitter and the worldliness of a ball-room."

"I don't find ball-rooms more worldly than other places—than this bench, for instance."

"Now, how strange that is of you, Di! This spot is quite sacred to me. I come and read here."

Madeleine had, by degrees, sanctified all the seats in the garden; had taken the impious chill even off the iron ones, by reading her little manuals on each in turn.

"It was here," continued Madeleine, "that I persuaded dear Fred to go into the Church. It was settled he was to be a clergyman ever since he had that slight stroke as a boy; but when he went to college he must have got into a bad set, for he said he did not think he had a vocation. And mother—you know what mother is—did not like to press it, and the whole thing was slipping through, when I had him to stay here, and talked to him very seriously, and explained that a living in the family was the call."

"Madeleine," said Di, rising precipitately, "it is getting late. I must fly and pack."

If she stayed another moment she knew she should inevitably say something that would scandalize Madeleine.

"And I did not say it," she said with modest triumph that evening, as she sat in her grandmother's room before going to bed; having rejoined her at Garstone, a relation's house, whither Mrs. Courtenay had preceded her. "I refrained even from bad words. Granny, you know everything: why is it that the people who shock me so dreadfully, like Madeleine, are just the very ones who are shocked at me? You are not. All the really good earnest people I know are not. But they are. What is the matter with them?"

"Oh, my dear, what is the matter with all insincere people? It is only one of the symptoms of an incurable disease."

"But the being shocked is genuine. They really feel it. There is something wrong somewhere, but I don't know where it is."

"It is not hard to find, Di," said Mrs. Courtenay, sadly; "and it is not worth growing hot about. You are only running a little tilt against religiosity. Most young persons do. But it is not worth powder and shot. Keep your ammunition for a nobler enemy. There is plenty of sin in the world. Strike at that whenever you can, but don't pop away at shadows."

"Ah! but, granny, these people do such harm. They bring such discredit on religion. That is what enrages me."

"My dear, you are wrong; they bring discredit upon nothing but their own lamentable caricatures of holy things. These people are solemn warnings—danger-signals on the broad paths of religiosity, which, remember, are very easy walking. There's no life so easy. The religious life is hard enough, God knows. Providence put those people there to make their creed hideous, and they do it. Upon my word, I think your indignation against them is positively unpardonable."

Di was silent.

"You don't mind being disliked by these creatures, do you, Di?"

"Yes, granny, I think I do. I believe, if I only knew the truth about myself, I want every one to like me; and it ruffles me because they make round eyes, and don't like me when their superiors often do."

"Mere pride and love of admiration on your part, my dear. You have no business with them. To be liked and admired by certain persons is a stigma in itself. Look at the kind of mediocrity and feebleness they set on pedestals, and be thankful you don't fit into their mutual admiration societies. That 'like cleaves to like,' is a saying we seldom get to the bottom of. These unfortunates find blots, faults, evil, in everything, especially everything original, because they are sensitive to blots and faults. They commit themselves out of their own mouths. 'Those that seek shall find,' is especially true of the fault-finders. The truth and beauty which others receptive of truth and beauty perceive, escape them. Good nature sees good in others. The reverent impute reverence. This false reverence finds irreverence, as a mean nature takes for granted a low motive in its fellow. Oh dear me, Di! Have I expended on you for years the wisdom of a Socrates and a Solomon, that at one and twenty you should need to be taught your alphabet? Go to bed and pray for wisdom, instead of complaining of the lack of it in others."

Di had had but little leisure lately, and the unbounded leisure of her long visit at Garstone came as a relief.

"I shall have time to think here," she said to herself, as she looked out the first morning over the grey park and lake distorted by the little panes of old glass of her low window.

Two very old people lived at Garstone, who regarded their niece, Mrs. Courtenay, as still quite a young person, in spite of her tall granddaughter. Time seemed to have forgotten the dear old couple, and they in turn had forgotten it. It never mattered what time of day it was. Nothing depended on the hour. In the course of the morning the butler would open both the folding doors at the end of the long "parlour" leading to the chapel, and would announce, "Prayers are served." Long prayers they were. Long meals were served too, with long intervals between them, during which, in spite of a week of heavy rain, Di escaped regularly into the gardens and so away to the park. The house oppressed her. She was restless and ill at ease. She was never missed because she was never wanted; and she wandered for hours in the park, listening to the low cry of the deer, standing on the bridge over the artificial 1745 lake, or pacing mile on mile a sheltered path under the park wall. The thinking for which she had such ample opportunity did not come off. It shirked regularly. A certain vague trouble of soul was upon her, like the unrest of nature at the spring of the year. And day after day she watched the autumn leaves drop from the trees into the water, and there was a great silence in her heart, and underneath the silence a fear—or was it a hope? She knew not.

There was one subject to which Di's thoughts returned, and ever returned, in spite of herself. John was that subject. Gradually, as the days wore on, her shamed remorse at having wounded him gave place to the old animosity against him. She had never been angry with any of her numerous lovers before. She had, on the contrary, been rather sorry for them. But she was desperately angry with John. It seemed to her—why she would have been at a loss to explain—that he had taken a very great liberty in venturing to love her, and in daring to assert that they were suited to other.

She went through silent paroxysms of rage against him, sitting on a fallen tree among the bracken with clenched hands. Her sense of his growing power over her, over her thought, over her will, was intolerable. Why so fierce? why such a fool? she asked herself over and over again. He could not marry her against her will. Indeed, he had said he did not want to. Why, then, all this silly indignation about nothing? There was no answer until one day Mrs. Courtenay happened to mention to Mrs. Garstone, in her presence, the probability of John's eventually marrying Lady Alice Fane—"a very charming and suitable person," etc.

Then suddenly it became clear to Di that, though she would never marry him herself, the possibility of his marrying any one else was not to be borne for a moment. John, of course, was to—was to remain unmarried all his life. Her sense of the ludicrous showed her in a lightning-flash where she stood.

To discover a new world is all very well for people like Columbus, who want to find one. But to discover a new world by mistake when quite content with the old one, and to be swept towards it uncertain of your reception by the natives assembling on the beach, is another thing altogether. For the second time in her life Di was frightened.

"Then all these horrible feelings are being in love," she said to herself, with a sense of stupefaction. "This is what other people have felt for me, and I treated it as of little consequence. This is what I have read about, and sung about, and always rather wished to feel. I am in love with John. Oh, I hope to God he will never find it out!"

Probably no man will ever understand the agonies of humiliation, of furious unreasoning antagonism, which a proud woman goes through when she becomes aware that she is falling in love. Pride and love go as ill together in the beginning as they go exceeding well together later on. To be loved is incense at first, until the sense of justice—fortunately rare in women—is aroused. "Shall I take all, and give nothing?"

Pride, often a very tender pride for the lover himself, asks that question. Directly it is asked the battle begins.

"I will not give less than all. How can I give all?" The very young are spared the conflict, because the future husband is regarded only as the favoured ball-partner, the perpetual admirer of a new existence. But women who know something of life—of the great demands of marriage—of the absolute sacrifice of individual existence which it involves—when they begin to tremble beneath the sway of a deep human passion suffer much, fear greatly until the perfect love comes that casts out fear.

Some natures, and very lovable they are, give all, counting not the cost. Others, a very few, count the cost and then give all.

Di was one of these.