OF MARIANNE AT BROADSTAIRS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A "DREADNOUGHT." AND HOW SHE READ OF HER HUSBAND'S ACCIDENT ON ITS ARMOUR-PLATES, AND AT ONCE STARTED FOR ROYD. BUT SUPPOSE THEY CALLED HER "LADY CHALLIS"!

Marianne Challis, or, as she preferred to be called, Craik, had sentenced herself to an embittered life, and knew it. But she had, as we have said, so much in her of the dogged tenacity and vengefulness of a Red Indian brave that scarcely any idea of surrender had ever, so far, entered her mind. Whenever the smallest suspicion of wavering had approached its outskirts, during the year and a half of her residence with her mother at Broadstairs, she had at once brought into the field an auxiliary force, the consolation to her conscience that she was, at least, no longer "living in sin" with the father of her children. Even if her jealousy of what she found a satisfaction in calling his "connection with" Miss Arkroyd—a phrase first used, dexterously, by Charlotte Eldridge—had been ill-founded, which it wasn't, it would have been a misapprehension to be thankful for, in that it had made her alive to the heinousness of her immoral life, and qualified her to go before the Bar of an Offended God, not only with mere lame apologies for the existence of her two girls, but with a statement of account, claiming payment of Joy over the Sinner that Repenteth. Where would have been the use of pleading, before that Awful Throne, that she was "only Kate's half-sister"?

This story knows that accusation will be brought against it of "sneering" at things sacred; but let the accuser try to depict the frame of mind of this poor lady without seeming to do so. Marianne had accepted her mother's Choctaw Deity, a creation of the sullen vices of her own mind, on the strength of an assurance that he was also the God of the man who paid, in Syria, the penalty of the most intrepid and magnificent attempt to touch the hearts of men the world has ever known. Let him be sure that when he talks of "things sacred" he is really holding those things sacred that that man was tortured to death for proclaiming the truth of, two thousand years ago, and that he is not exalting the comicalities of a Theologism. But the outcome of it all was an embittered life for Marianne. And the bitterness was bound to come out—could not be concealed. It showed itself in severity towards her children to some extent, but very much more in acrimony towards her mother. It was just as well, perhaps, that the safety-valve existed. The worthy old lady would have been quarrelling with some one else if she had not quarrelled with her daughter; so it was all one to her.

This old lady was the soul of dissension and savage righteousness. It must not be understood that what Bob called a "regular set-to between Gran and the Mater" was of daily occurrence. Often a week would pass without a battle-royal. But no hour ever passed without an exchange of shots. Bob's reports to his father of the life at Belvedere Villa, Broadstairs, were highly coloured, perhaps, but they enabled the author to picture to himself a daily routine not far from the truth. When Bob stated that Old Gran was all shaky-waky with rage to begin with, and would pucker up and fly at a moment's notice if you didn't look uncommon sharp, Challis accepted the first clause of the indictment as a false diagnosis of the tremulousness of old age; the second as realistic poetry; and the condition precedent of immunity at the end as an admission that his son's own attitude was not always faultless. When that young man said it was "pray, pray, pray, all day long," and he didn't see the fun, his father perceived that his meaning was that religious exercises were protracted beyond usage, for instance, of the Deanery at Inchester; where, according to Bob, it was "once and done with." Besides, the Dean didn't snuffle, and Old Gran did. Challis remarked that Bob would have cut a poor figure as a Hindu Yogi, and felt grateful in his heart to Dean Tillotson for not snuffling. It might arrest a violent reaction on Bob's part against all Religion, Law, Order, and Morality. For Challis would not trust anyone but himself without the first; weak natures, like other people's, might lose touch with the other three as well, and take to the secret manufacture of melinite. He never suspected himself of a weak nature.

These illuminations had been thrown on Belvedere Villa after Bob's first visit there, a year since. This August he was acquiring more dignified forms of speech, befitting a fifth-form boy. But he was still capable of saying that he had seen "awfully little" of his Governor these holidays. Indeed, if he had not gone with him to a place in Derbyshire for a week, he would hardly have set eyes on him. Then if his Governor was stopping on a week at this beastly little place—Heaven knows why!—why shouldn't he? Why was he to go to Broadstairs? However, he went. And from Broadstairs he wrote to his Governor, at Brideswell-Poulgreave, Derby, saying that Gran was "as bad, if not worse, than ever," and provoked severe criticism of his English in reply. He had his revenge, though, for he pelted his Governor with samples of the same solecism, cut from current literature, till the accumulations became quite formidable.

It may seem strange, but the story must record it, that almost the only thing that gave poor Marianne any real pleasure during this year-and-a-half in her mother's house was the reading from time to time in the newspapers of the literary successes of "Titus"; for to her he never ceased to be Titus. So self-contradictory was her frame of mind that, when "Aminta Torrington" made such a sensation just after Christmas, her bosom swelled with pride over the play's success, just as though she herself had been by the author's side at the fall of the curtain. Her curiosity was intense to know whether or not the name of the actress who personated Aminta was her own or one assumed by that detestable woman to whom she owed all her unhappiness. "Silvia Berens" puzzled her, because it sounded familiar. But not sufficiently so to be sure she had known it in those last days she had spent at the Hermitage.

It was a grievous vexation to have no one she could take into her confidence. She would have shrunk from showing her inner mind to her mother, even if there had been the slightest prospect of the old woman knowing anything on dramatic or literary subjects; and when she threw out a feeler to Charlotte Eldridge, that lady irritated her by taking for granted that the pleasure she had expressed was a creditable impulse of generosity, and not spontaneous at all. Just like Charlotte! And all the while her pleasure was a reality she had a right to indulge in—a luxury she could allow herself without any weak concession to feelings she had destined to extinction.

For the fact is Marianne had never ceased to love the father of her children. Can a woman ever succeed in doing so, except by hating him? Now, Choctaw as she was, she was under no obligation to detest her husband as long as she could fully gratify her hatred elsewhere. Judith Arkroyd had the full benefit of it—drew the fire of her batteries on herself. Oh, the hypocrisy of that letter the girl had the impertinence to write to her! But she saw through it. As for Titus, did she not know him well enough to know he would be mere wax in the hands of a designing woman like that? Oh yes!—she knew how to flatter him, no doubt! And how to make the best of herself, too. Charlotte could at least sympathize about that; she knew the sort this Judith was! Indeed, Charlotte had been liberal in her realistic suggestions about Judith, who may have been in some ways no better than she made her out, but who was certainly short of the standard of depravity this moralist vouched for in telegraph-girls, her bÊtes-noires in all that touched the purity of the domestic hearth. Charlotte's sidelights on the Tophet incident, as explained in "that hypocritical letter from the girl herself," would have done credit to Paul de Kock.

Chewing this cud—or these cuds; which should it be?—would take the poor woman so perilously near a fit of exculpation of Titus that she was often forced to have recourse to the old story of their consanguinity to keep her resentment up to the mark. Yes!—she would—she could—go through a mental operation technically called "forgiving" Titus. But go back to him? No! She had sinned, all those years, in ignorance, and with a false ideal of her husband, who had now fallen from his high estate. And look you!—it was not only this Judith business. How about that other story? How about that Steptoe story, not an hour's walk from here? She found the neighbourhood of Ramsgate oppressive to her.

No—she could never go back to Titus, whatever happened. Not even if this Bill that was to come into Parliament were to make marriages like hers and Titus's lawful for the future. What was wrong was wrong, and how the House of Lords could make it right was more than Marianne could understand. She wasn't aware that it was the House of Lords that originally made it wrong.

But if she did her duty towards the supposed instructions of Holy Writ—which she did not doubt could be found somewhere, as her mother was so positive about them—she might claim as a set-off the pleasure of reading the literary columns of the daily Press in the hope of coming on Titus's name. She did more reading in that year-and-a-half than she had done in all the rest of her life put together. And as she was not literate enough to skim, she had to plod; and plodding is slow work in the columns of a voluminous Sunday paper—the largest possible paper in the smallest possible type. But one does get a lot for one's penny, whether it's Lloyd's Weekly, or the Dispatch, or the People; and there's sure to be all the theatrical news and recent publications, whichever you take. So Marianne pored intently over one or the other, every Sunday afternoon, on the sofa; while her parent dipped into sermons, or ran her eye through the Prayer-book, now and then looking at the newspaper. Not, that is to say, in the mere cant sense of the phrase, but glaring at it wolfishly over her own more legible type, with a basilisk eye to slay the profane intruder. The presence of the unhallowed secular abomination in the house on the Lord's Day was a bone of contention between the mother and daughter; but the old lady had had to give in, and every Sunday afternoon saw strained relations in abeyance, and the tension of a skin-deep concord, that might or might not last until the children should be allowed down, and given the obnoxious thing to make boats of.

On this particular Sunday—the day following the events of last chapter—Marianne's attention seemed deeper and more prolonged than usual. She had found something that interested her. It was taxing her apprehension severely, and she had no one to go to for enlightenment. But it is not human to accept exasperation in silence, and Marianne saw a prospect of relief in putting her mother's uselessness as an informant on record. So she said, as though referring to a matter of course, "I suppose it's no use asking you what these Parliament things mean," and went on reading.

Few people admit complete ignorance in any department without a struggle. "Perhaps I know nothing about anything," said the old woman, snarling meekly. "Perhaps I know more than you choose to think I know. Now snap!" These last words claimed the position of a private reflection made by a person of rare self-restraint in a den of mad dogs. There was nothing unlike her mother in them, and Marianne left them unnoticed, and continued:

"I suppose you don't know what is meant by 'an amendment to remove from the Bill its retrospective character'?" For Marianne had got at the report of the sitting of the House of Lords of two days since; and though she had kept herself uninformed, intentionally, on the subject related to, still, when she saw it all in print, her curiosity took the bit in its teeth, and she read.

"It happens that you are entirely wrong, because it happens that that is just the one thing I do happen to know. But I shall not talk about it on this day." This resolution lasted quite three minutes, when the speaker resumed, under a kind of protest that the little she had to say wouldn't count. "You know perfectly well what Mr. Tillingfleet said in his last letter about this wicked Bill business."

"What did he say?"

"You know perfectly well"

"I do not."

The self-denying ordinance of Sabbath silence became too hard to keep. The old lady broke out, "You know perfectly well that Mr. Tillingfleet said that, if this Bill was given a retrospective character, you would have to be Mr. Challis's wife again, and live with him, whether you liked it or not."

"I don't recollect that he said any such thing. I don't believe he did."

"You can get his letter and look at it, if you doubt your mother's word on Sunday." This was not an admission of fibs on week-days; it referred to the intensification of unfiliality as a Sabbath vice. The speaker closed her eyes and began saying nothing about the subject again, in fulfilment of her manifesto.

Marianne ran her eyes over the scanty fringe of letters stuck in the mirror-frame over the chimney-piece. Mr. Tillingfleet's business handwriting was soon found. "He does say no such thing," said she, after reading it to herself. "What he says is absolutely and entirely different."

"I am corrected. When you are quiet once more, perhaps you will kindly tell me what he says?"

"Grandmamma, I tell you plainly it is no use trying to make me out in a temper, because I'm not...."

"Go on. I am accustomed to being snapped at."

"I shall not go on if you talk like that."

"I have no wish to hear the letter again. Don't read it if you don't want to. I know perfectly well what's in it." The venerable lady then murmured to herself, most offensively, "Three little Liver Pills." It was one of her practices to sketch correctives for controversial opponents, the doses increasing in proportion to the degree of diversity of opinion.

Marianne, armed with a combative immobility of face and monotony of accent, read aloud from Mr. Tillingfleet's letter. "'The retrospective action of the measure now before Parliament will, if carried, seriously affect the relations of Sir Alfred Challis and your daughter. It will undoubtedly determine the technical legitimacy of their children, and give their de facto father a legal right to their guardianship.' There!" says Marianne in conclusion, replacing the letter in the looking-glass.

But her mother rallies her forces with asperity against the assumptions of this monosyllable, saying enigmatically that she is "not going to be 'there'd.'" It is ridiculous, she says, to pretend that she said that Mr. Tillingfleet said there was anything in the Bill to compel anyone to do anything. But, for all that, Marianne would have to live with her husband again, or go without her children. Marianne walked up and down the room over this, chafing. She couldn't believe such disgraceful injustice was possible. Besides, if the Bill passed ever so, Titus would never have the meanness to take her children from her. To think that, all this year past, he could have married that girl at any moment, and then to have a right to his children!

Grandmamma said she would never be the least surprised at any freethinker committing bigamy. All freethinkers committed something, or many things, for that matter, avoiding felony from motives of policy. "He knows that his children are contrary to the Act of Parliament now, and that he's no right to them, and that's why he keeps his distance. You'll see, Marianne, that it will be quite another story if this wicked Bill passes."

"I don't believe it. Anyhow, it hasn't passed yet! Besides, the amendment was withdrawn."

"Well!"

"Well, of course! Then the Bill won't have a retrospective character." But the old lady was too sharp to fall into this topsy-turvy view of the case, and presently succeeded in convincing her daughter of her mistake. However, Perplexity was only scotched, not killed. "Suppose Titus had married this girl already, I mean, and the Bill passes, which of us would be his wife? I don't see how any amount of retrospects could unmarry them." Thus Marianne; and her mother can't meet the difficulty off-hand.

But consideration lights on a solution. "It would make your children legitimate, and he would claim them," says she, with the sort of glee in ambush people feel over a fellow-creature caught in a legal man-trap.

But Marianne's short sight is often clear sight. "What rubbish!" says she. "If Miss Arkroyd had a baby.... No!—I don't care, Grandmamma. She wouldn't be Titus's wife, if she married him at all the churches in London, and you know it.... Yes!—I say again, if she had a baby, Titus would have two legitimate families at once, and she would be his Law-wife, and I shouldn't. It's silly!"

Those who read the Debates on this question at the time—it is not so long ago all this happened—will remember that arguments akin to this one of Marianne's repulsed the forlorn hopes of the Bill's opponents, and clinched its retrospective character. What has happened to women who had married their sister's husbands, and been superseded by a "lawful" wife, before the passing of this Bill, the story knows not. Have the husbands been convicted of retrospective bigamy? But this story has little more concern with the intricacies of difficult legislation in this matter than with those that have arisen in any other coercion by Law of the private lives of the non-aggressive classes. It is hopeless, apparently, to look forward to a day when the guiding rule of the law-giver will be non-interference with all but molestation; but one may indulge in satisfaction at each removal from the Statute Book of an enactment that infringes it.

Marianne's last speech, recorded above, shows a curious frame of mind. She had thrust her husband away from her in a fit of jealousy—not an ill-grounded one, by any means—and had bolstered up her conscience by what she more than half suspected to be a false pretext; but one in which she felt sure of the support of Grundydom in Great Britain, passim. How if this new legislation, or abrogation of old legislation, should undermine the fortress of her powerful allies, and leave a small and unconsidered band of bigots to fight the battle of an imaginary consanguinity? Those are not the words of her mind—only the gist of her thought. What she said to herself was that now there was to be an Act of Parliament everyone would go round the other way. To her that included the thought that the old catchwords that had done duty for so long would begin to ring false when brought into collision with that powerful agency, a Parliamentary majority. Since she had been dwelling so constantly on the subject she had more than once found herself face to face with impeachments of well-worn arguments derived from Scripture; notably when she found that one Biblical denunciation treated a marriage with a woman who might have one day become her husband's Deceased Wife's Sister, but who would not have been so when he married her, unless he had waited for that sine qua non, his wife's death. Thoughts of this sort strengthened and multiplied as the time drew nearer for this Parliamentary discussion, and here was the Bill apparently going to become Law, and by a backhanded thrust to make her Titus's "Law-wife" again, as well as what her own heart in some mysterious way proclaimed her to be—namely, his real wife, whatever that meant! She was certainly in a very curious, confused, self-contradictious frame of mind, was Marianne.

Perhaps her contradiction and confusion had never been much greater than on this Sunday afternoon, where the story has left her for so long, feverishly pacing up and down the room, after puzzling her poor stupid head trying to follow the Debate, and make some sense of it. She had succeeded in finding out that the Bill was nearly through Parliament, and that it would affect her and Titus more than she had conceived possible hitherto. She was working herself up into a state of bitten lips and sobs kept in abeyance. Her mother was not the person to encourage this sort of thing. "If you must prowl, Marianne," said she, "can't you go and prowl somewhere else?"

Her daughter may have shown her state of mind; for as she returned to her sofa, her amiable mother added, "If you are going to sniff and make a scene, Marianne, you had better have the children down." The old woman was sitting with her eyes shut, and really had very slight data to go on.

"Whatever Titus was, at least he wasn't unkind!" said Marianne tartly. But she touched the bell-handle, and its sound was followed by the prompt appearance of Mumps and Chobbles, now no longer known by those names, which had been to some extent their father's private property. The younger child came into the room shouting, with jumps as emphasis, "Now we may have the Thunday papers to make boats of, long ones and short ones."

The construction of a Navy had been a great piÈce de rÉsistance at the Hermitage in old days. The vessels had weak points; notably that when the deck was flattened out on completion, the cut-water was apt to part amidships, unless firmly held together by a neighbouring shipwright, or stuck together with a pin. But this last practice was looked upon with suspicion, as hardly legitimate. The question does not arise, so far as we are aware, at Chatham or Devonport; as in no case are ships first constructed with decks analogous to the bottoms of wine-bottles seen from within, and levelled down before launching.

Traditions of bygone Dockyards naturally survived, and gave rise to controversy. Marianne was always in dread of some painful reminder of the past during ship-building. But it kept the children quiet; so, though she had not seen the whole of the paper, owing to the difficulty of analyzing that Debate, she conceded it to the Contractors.

Now, a practice obtained between them quite at variance with the care and foresight usually shown in the placing of new ships on the stocks. If in any of the Government Dockyards it is common for the actual length of a ship to remain an open question until the moment of construction, it should surely be made the subject of a question in Parliament! Mumps and Chobbles, having obtained the paper, differed about the length of the first hull to be put in hand. Chobbles preferred a normal full sheet, alleging that vessels built of two sheets were only just seaworthy, owing to weakness of the backbone. Mumps was ambitious, advocating a ship of huge length, made with two full sheets. Chobbles opposed this scheme on the ground that, if pushed, such a vessel would collapse, or go scrunch. Mumps, however, had set her heart on it.

"Papa thaid it wouldn't go scrunch—not if we sticked it over in the middle—not if we pulled bofe the edges across—not if we doo'd like viss." Mumps ended an imperfect description with a practical demonstration of how the vessel might be strengthened in the middle if some of the length were sacrificed. "Overlap" was the word she wanted.

"Then we must have wafers," said Chobbles. Because otherwise, you see, the ship might come in half, and founder—who knows?—with all on board.

"You may have wafers if you won't quarrel," said the mother of the shipwrights. And wafers being obtained from her writing-desk, a threat of violence from Mumps was withdrawn, and overlooked.

Now it so chanced that, the newspaper being large and difficult to control, Chobbles, as principal, gave instructions to Mumps to hold the two sheets the long ship was to be made from as directed, while she herself stuck the two together, cautiously advancing across the paper on her knees. A more mature shipwright would have wafered the two corners first, and distributed the remaining wafers over the space between, so as to make the most of them. As it turned out, Mumps shifted her corner while Chobbles was yet half-way, and when Chobbles completed, dismay ensued. For the paper didn't lie straight, and all the wafers were used up. Words followed, and recriminations. Mumps maintained that she had held on to her corner loyally, unwaveringly; Chobbles that she could not have done so, because she herself had selected a passage in large type as the point Mumps was to remain faithful to. She was in a position to show that if her little sister had adhered to her instructions, the accident would not have happened.

"What are those children fighting about?" said their Grandmamma, who had fallen asleep—had been snoring, in fact—and who waked suddenly. "It all comes, Marianne, of your letting them play on Sunday afternoon. When I was a child I should have been writing out the sermon, and well whipped if I couldn't recollect it...." And so forth.

"What's all that noise about, children?" said their mother. "If you can't make less I shall ring for Martha to take you back to the nursery. Be quieter!"

Chobbles plunged straight into indictment, Mumps into justification. "I said, 'Hold the corner to Motor Car,' and Mumps didn't."... "I did held it to Motor Car, and never leaved it loose one minute."... "You did not hold it to Motor Car, or it would be up against Motor Car now."... "Be-because you shov-oveled it all crooked, and it wors your fault and it worsn't my fault" ... and more to the same effect, came mixed with heart-broken lamentations over the ruin of the great ship's chances; for all the wafers but two were licked and used, and the wobble of the raw material was too disheartening for any attempt to be made to rectify it.

"It just serves you right for quarrelling about it," said Grandmamma savagely, taking a mean advantage of the difficulties youth has in convicting maturity of defective reasoning. "And it serves you right, Marianne, for letting the children have the horrible things at all." She went on to point out that all the benefit of Afternoon Service was lost if contact with such profanities was permitted afterwards.

Meanwhile Marianne, painfully conscious that in these days she could not say, as of old, "What would your father say if he heard you quarrel like that?"—for fear of complications—went to the children, still at daggers drawn over the newspaper on the floor, to make an official investigation of the facts.

Did not the story note, a page ago, that she had altogether missed a sheet of the paper? She had, and it was an important one; the one containing the very Latest Intelligence and Stop-the-press News. And the words "Motor Car," chosen by Chobbles as a finger-guide for her small sister, formed part of the following piece of Latest Intelligence:—"Fatal Motor-Car Accident.—An accident, which has already caused one death, and which it is feared may have other fatal results, occurred yesterday morning at Royd, in Rankshire, close to the seat of Sir Murgatroyd Arkroyd, Bart., some years since Member for the County. The car, the property of Lord Felixthorpe, Sir Murgatroyd's son-in-law, was turning a sharp corner near the picturesque and interesting spot known as 'The Abbey Well,' when the deceased, a man known as 'Blind Jim,' stepped incautiously into the middle of the road, so suddenly that the promptest action of the chauffeur in his application of the brake could not avert a catastrophe. Unfortunately, as the car swerved, one of its occupants, a gentleman whose name had not transpired at the moment of writing, rose to his feet in his apprehension that a mishap was impending, and was thrown violently into the road, falling on his head. He was conveyed to Royd Hall insensible, but we understand that hopes are confidently entertained of his recovery. We are glad to be able to add that the lady who was the other occupant of the car, Miss Judith Arkroyd, the eldest daughter of Sir Murgatroyd, had the good fortune to sustain no injury beyond the inevitable shock attendant on so tragic an occurrence." Jim's death was rather taken for granted in this paragraph; no doubt the wire on which it was founded had felt the greater importance of the motorists. No one ever knew who sent it. In such cases, no one ever does.

The overlap amidships just hid all but the first three lines; and when Marianne examined it, with a view to remedying the miscarriage, she attached no more importance to "Fatal Motor Accident," in large capitals, than to any other mishaps the newspaper world gets killed in. There are always accidents! But in the course of a laborious detachment of the last two or three wafers, to be employed in reconstruction if gummy enough, the words "Royd in Rankshire" were uncovered, and caught her eye.

"Stop, children!—don't fuss and worry. I want to read this.... Royd Hall in Rankshire."... The last words were said to herself in relief of thought, not as information for the children, who didn't matter.

"What's that about Royd in Rankshire?" Grandmamma waked suddenly, and put a good deal of side on her snarl, provisionally, not knowing how much acrimony might turn out to be needed.

"Wait till I've read it, and I'll tell you."

"Oh, don't tell me if you don't like. It's no concern of mine." Nevertheless, Marianne, after reading through the paragraph to herself—during which the old lady affected perusal of a sermon—took her anxiety to hear for granted, and read it through aloud. It met with the comment:

"I suppose that's what you grunted at, the first time?"

"Suppose what's what I grunted at ... oh! 'had the good fortune to sustain no injury,' do you mean? Well, Grandmamma, I suppose you wouldn't expect me to cry my eyes out if...."

"If 'handsome Judith' got her beauty spoiled—is that it?"

"I shouldn't cry my eyes out. I wonder who her other gentleman was, in the car! I'm glad it wasn't Titus, at any rate."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, mamma, how can you be such a fool, when Bob heard from his father only yesterday, at that place in Derbyshire; he got the letter this morning." Bob had been at Broadstairs a week at this date, and, in pursuance of a policy of avoiding his grandmother on Sundays, when she was liable to malignant forms of piety, had started early in the day to walk to Canterbury—his beloved Tillotson was staying there with an ecclesiastical relative—where he would stop the night, and whence he would walk back next day, accompanied probably by Tillotson. Well!—it was only eighteen miles!

Marianne was as sure that her husband was safe, leagues away from Royd Hall, yesterday morning, as she was that she had packed off Bob with sandwiches and cake after an early breakfast twelve hours ago, and that he and Tillotson were enjoying Choral Services and Purple Emperors alternately to their hearts' content. She was satisfied—not reasonably; but then, it was comfortable to be unreasonable—that he had posted the letter as soon as it was written; and as it reached on Sunday, it was posted on Saturday. What could be clearer?

She was so comfortable about it that she re-read the paragraph once or twice, not quite without a kindling hope that Miss Arkroyd's motoring about with a gentleman unnamed might "mean something"—mean something, that is, that would end the chapter of Titus's admiration for, or "connection with," Miss Arkroyd. It didn't matter which you called it.

One thing was clear enough. The injured man was a stranger to the purveyor of the news; not the owner of the car, just mentioned, nor any other of the habituÉs of Royd Hall, all of whom would be well known in the neighbourhood. Oh yes!—that was all right. She hoped, however, that if he was an aspirant to Miss Arkroyd's hand, he was not seriously damaged, so as to diminish his probabilities of success. As for "Blind Jim," she was sorry for him, with a general feeling that "handsome Judith" was responsible for his mishap, but without any definite recollection of him. She may never have heard him mentioned at all, for Mrs. Steptoe was not communicative about her brother; and although Challis had certainly made Lizarann's acquaintance before Marianne left her home, it was only on that last day of his abruptly terminated visit to Royd. And that was all ancient history by now.

She resumed the reconstruction question quite at ease in her mind; if anything, with a sense of something not unpleasant having happened. Further search yielded two or three more wafers, and the ship was completed and launched. But the resistance, to shearing-force, of the bolts that held the fore and aft parts together had not been properly calculated. A dissension between the owners led to an attempt to drag her two ways at once, and—to use very un-nautical language—she gave at the wafers. Mumps, seized with despair, was told that if she roared and stamped, she shouldn't be allowed to make ships at all; and her mother, to show that she was in earnest, picked up the shattered vessel, and proceeded to re-embody it as the Sunday paper. But a something caught her eye, and she read again.

A moment after Grandmamma, rousing herself wrathfully, exclaimed, "What is all this horrible noise about? Those children had better go upstairs. I tell you they shall go, Marianne; I won't have the noise any longer!" and began pulling the bell to summon Martha, the nurse. She must have taken a sound that came from her daughter for protest or remonstrance; for she stormed on, heedless that the voice of the two children had changed from mere unruliness to terror. "It's no use your saying 'yow,' because I tell you I won't have it. On Sunday afternoon, too!... What?" She turned furiously, but her fury gave place to alarm as she caught sight of her daughter, ashy white, gasping to speak, but speechless; clutching with one hand the paper that had been the ship, pointing to something in it with the other.

Then Marianne found a voice, or a voice she hardly knew as her own, to cry out chokingly, "Oh, Titus, Titus!—dying!" She relinquished the paper to her mother, saying, "Oh yes—here!—oh, here! Look, look! ..." still pointing, and then covering her eyes, with a cry of despair: "He is dying—dying! Oh, children, children, your father will die, and I shall not be beside him!"

"You fool!" said the old lady. "Don't go on like a mad thing. Before the children!" She was scared, but it must be admitted she showed discipline. "You might at least be quiet while I read it.... No!—Wait, Martha!... can't you see? ... you servants never can see...." She took the paper to the window—for the light was failing—and read to herself. After a minute, she said abruptly, "Ho!" and then sotto voce, "He'll die in her arms, at any rate." And then this venerable woman—let us hope with an affectation of indifference to the fate of her son-in-law, contrived something nearly approaching a snigger as an accompaniment to the remark, aloud, "He won't die! You needn't fret yourself. Handsome Judith will see that he's properly doctored up." Leniency might have supposed this an attempt to strengthen her daughter against her trouble by appealing to her resentment. If so, it was an impolitic one. For Marianne, apparently as a response, said decisively, "I shall go to him at once," and seemed to mean it.

"Don't be an idiot! You can't pay for your ticket. You haven't any money, and I shan't give you any." But it seemed that Marianne had money, so this attempt to hinder her departure only hastened it. She was not one to submit to coercion tamely. To be brief, she put a few necessaries in a bag, hugged her children well, consoling them as best she could, begged that the news should be kept from Bob till more was known—for this Marianne, with all her faults, had a strong leaven of family affection—and caught the quick train for London.

She would have travelled all night had there been a train. As it was, she was up very early at the Hotel, got a poor breakfast, and left Euston by the first express, before eight o'clock struck. Would Titus be alive on her arrival?

For the item of "Stop-the-press News" that had caught her eye, and thrown a light on the paragraph she had just read, ran as follows: "Name of gentleman thrown from motor-car yesterday morning at Royd, Sir Alfred Challis, well-known author and playwright; condition precarious, but not despaired of."

In the greatest stress of trouble absurd thoughts hang about like imps, and vex one with their insignificance. All through that five hours' rail Marianne was plagued with the question:—Suppose those people chose to address her as "Lady Challis," what should she do?