IN THE DARK.

"Well, Dora," he began, "this has been an exciting day."

"Yes," she said softly, and added with tender anxiety, "I hope you have quite recovered? I hope you do not feel any bad effects of--of--of--what happened to you, Jack?" She did not know how he would take even this solicitous reference to his fainting.

"I feel quite well, dearest. Do not let us talk of that affair again. That cabman brought you quite safe?"

"Oh, quite safe," she said gently. "Tell me what happened after you left me?" It gratified her that he thought of her. She had accused him of selfishness, now he was showing that his first thought was of her. With the self-sacrificing spirit of her sex she was satisfied with a little sympathy on her own account. She wanted to give him all her sympathy now. "Of course, I know you found Mr. Leigh. What an extraordinary man. Is he a little mad, do you think?"

"A good deal mad, I fancy, with conceit," he said impatiently. Leigh, personally, had been a misfortune, and now the memory of him was exasperating and a bore.

The ungentleness of the answer jarred upon the girl's heart. Leigh had suffered such miserable wrongs at the hand of fate, that surely he was deserving of all consideration and compassion. His bodily disabilities made him more helpless and piteous than a lonely, deserted child. "Tell me all," she said. "It was so good of you to bring him here. I felt quite proud of you when I saw you coming with him. Many men would have been afraid to trust so uncouth a man with so unpleasant a secret into this room of a Thursday." She spoke to encourage Hanbury, by anticipating in part his account of the generous thing she fancied he had done.

He twisted and turned uneasily on his chair. Whatever Dora or anyone else might think of him, he was not going to pose in plumes that were not his by right. It was very gratifying in one sense that she should give him credit for such extravagant, such Quixotic good nature; but she must not be allowed to run away with the story.

"The fact is, Dora," said he in a tone of deliberation and dissatisfaction, "I did not bring him here of my own free will. Indeed, I do not know how you could imagine I would invite such a man. I found him contemplating a paragraph for the papers, and he promised he would say nothing about what had occurred if I would introduce him to you. He seems to have conceived a romantic interest in you, because of your likeness to some one he knows." Later this evening he should tell her all about this "some one."

"I see," she said, her spirits declining. It was not out of good nature or generosity, but cowardice, moral cowardice, Jack had brought Leigh. The principle which had made Jack flee from Welbeck Place after sending Leigh for the cab, and then made him fly back there again when he learned that the little man knew their names, had forced him against his will to bring Leigh to her mother's At home. She was in the most indulgent and forgiving of humours, but--but--but--"Oh, Jack, I am so sorry!" was all she could think of saying. She was sorry for him, for John Hanbury, who either was not, or would not be, too big to be troubled by such paltry fears, and irritated by such paltry annoyances.

"Sorry! Sorry for what?" he cried. He gathered from her tone and manner that she was not speaking out fully. He could not guess what was in her mind. He had a little lecture or exhortation prepared to deliver her, and in addition to the unpleasantness of not knowing exactly what she meant when she said she was sorry, he had the confusing and exasperating sense of repression, of not being able to get on the ground he intended occupying.

She did not speak for a while. She was looking out into the dark blue air of the street. She had formed a high ideal of what he, her hero, ought to be, nearly was. But now and then, often, he did not reach the standard she had raised. Her ideal was the man of noble thought certainly, but he should still more be the man of noble action. She would have laid down her life freely in what she believed to be a good cause, and to her mind the noblest cause in which a woman could die would be for a noble man whom she loved. She believed the place of woman was by the side of man, not independent of man. She held that in all matters man and wife should be, to use words that had been employed in acts, to think of which rent her heart with agony, one and undivisible. She regarded strong-minded women as wrong-minded women. Strength and magnanimity were the attributes of men; love and gentleness of women. She wanted this man beside her to shine bright in the eyes of men by reason of his great and rare gifts. No one doubted his abilities as a man; she wanted him to treat his abilities as only the foundation of his character. She wanted not only to know that he possessed great gifts and precious powers, but to feel as well that he was fit to be a god. She yearned to pass her life by the side of a man who could force the world to listen to his words, and fill the one pedestal in her earthly temple. She wanted him to be a hero and a conqueror in the face of the world, and she wanted to give him the whole loyal worship of her woman's heart, that she might live always in the only attitude which rests a woman's spirit, the attitude of giving service of the hand and largess of the heart, and homage of the soul. She wanted to give this man all her heart and soul unceasingly. To give him everything that was hers to give, under Heaven.

It was necessary to make some reply, and she had none ready. In the pause she had not been thinking. She had been seeing visions, dreaming dreams, from which occupations thought is always absent.

He became still more uneasy. Her hand was in his. He pressed it slightly, to recall her attention to him, "What are you sorry for, Dora? What are you thinking of, dear? Are you angry with me still?"

She started without turning her eyes away from the blue duskness of the street, and in a tone of wonderful tenderness and sadness, said:

"I don't know exactly what I was thinking of, Jack. The evening is so fresh and still it is not necessary for one to think. Angry with you, dear! Oh, no! Oh, no! Angry with you for what?"

"About the harsh words I said of Leigh. It seems to me your manner changed the moment I mentioned his name. Let us not speak of him any more this evening."

He pressed her hand, and stole his arm round her waist. She returned the pressure of his hand, but did not turn her eyes inward from the still street.

"But why should we not speak of him, Jack?"

"Because, dear, we are here together, and we are much more interesting to one another than he can be to either."

"Yes, dear, in a way more interesting to one another than all the world besides; but in another way not nearly so interesting as this poor clockmaker," she said slowly, in a dreamy voice.

"I own," he said testily, "I do not see the matter as you put it. How can he, a mere stranger, and a mere stranger who might have done us harm, be more interesting in any light than we are to one another?" He was a man, and thought as the average man thinks, of getting not giving. He was here alone with this beautiful girl who was to be his wife one day, and his chief concern was to get the most pleasure out of her presence by his side, the sound of her voice, the assurance of her love, the contemplation of their future happiness, the sense that she was his very own, that she would be bound to render him obedience which would, of course, never be exacted, and that he was about to lay before her his views of what her conduct ought to be, of where she had declined to accept his advice with regard to their walk of that day, and above all of his determination as to his future course, and the desirableness of their early marriage. He wanted in fact to get her disapproval of the expedition which had led to the unpleasantness of that day, her disapproval of her venturesome overruling of his judgment and her approval of all his plans for the future. He did not state his position thus. He simply wanted certain things, and never thought of referring his wants to any principle.

"In this way," she answered softly, "all about us is happy and assured. For ourselves we have everything that is necessary not only for mere life, but for enjoyment. The things we lack are only luxuries----"

"Luxuries!" he cried. "Do you consider the ardours of a public life luxuries? Do you not yet know me better than to believe I would lead an existence of idle pleasure? Why, a public man now-a-days works harder than a blacksmith, and generally without necessity or reward!" He spoke indignantly. She had attacked his class, she was showing indifference to the usefulness and disinterestedness of his order.

Neither his words nor his manner roused her. "I am not at all forgetting what you speak of. I am thinking, Jack dear, of things more common and essential than fame or the reputation of a benefactor to man. You know I hold that the first sphere of woman is her home. People like us are rarely grateful for food or shelter, or even health, and no people of any kind are grateful for the air they breathe." She paused and sighed. She did not finish her thought in words.

"Well," said he, withdrawing his arm from her waist and taking a chair opposite her in the window-place, "how does this apply? Of course, when you realize the fact that you could not live without air, you are grateful for it. I don't see what you are driving at."

"I cannot help thinking of the man and pitying him. He will go into his grave having missed nearly everything in the world."

"Why, the man has enough conceit to make a battalion of Guards happy. He is a greater man in his own opinion than the Premier, the Lord Chancellor and the Commander-in-Chief rolled into one."

"But even if he is, Jack, that is not all. The Premier and the Lord Chancellor and the Commander-in-Chief, over and above their great successes and fame, have the comforts ordinary men enjoy as well. They are not afflicted in their forms as he is. You say he is interested in me because I remind him of some one. How must it be with an ordinary human heart beating in such a body? Would it not be better for such a man to be born blind than to find his Pallas-Athena, as he calls her?"

The eyes of the girl could not be seen in the darkness of the room; they were full of tears and there were tears in her voice.

Hanbury started, he could not tell why. He exclaimed: "Good Heavens, Dora! you do not mean to tell me that you feel seriously concerned in the love affairs, if there are such things, of this man?"

"No, dear, but I am saddened when I think of them. However absurd it may seem, I cannot help believing this finding of his ideal must be a dreadful misfortune to him."

"Even if you yourself were the ideal, Dora?"

"Even so. But you tell me he had found it before he came here. Of course, dear, my mind is influenced only for the moment by the thought of him and his affairs; but ever since I heard him speak, grotesque as it may seem, my heart has been feeling for him with his poor deformed body and his elaborate gallantry of manner and his Pallas-Athena."

Now was the time to tell Dora of this Miss Grace, but it seemed to him the story was too long for so late an hour, and that it could be told with pleasanter effect when Dora was less exercised about the dwarf. The conversation was too sentimental for him. He had matters of practical moment to speak about, and this subject obstinately blocked the way. The best thing for him to do was to give the matter an every-day aspect at once. "Well, Dora, in any case, Leigh isn't in the first glory of youth, and if he ever does fall in love and marry, it will, I am sure, be no Pallas-Athena, but a barmaid, with practical views, and a notion of keeping an hotel, or something of that kind."

"But how do you think a man with his imagination, his Pallas-Athena, and his incomparable clock and his miracle gold----?"

"Which is nonsense, of course. You don't mean that you believe in transmutation in this end of the nineteenth century?" he said impatiently.

"I do not know. I am not scientific. I suppose more wonderful things have been done. If there ever was a time for making gold it is now. All the wonders that poets dreamed of long ago are coming true in prose to-day. Why not the great dream of the alchemists too? At all events, the fancies are bad for him. Suppose there is to be no Pallas-Athena or wonderful clock or miracle gold in his life, what is there left to him? It seems to me he is all the poorer for his delusions. Jack, I will not try to disguise it. I am intensely interested in this poor clockmaker, this mad visionary, if you prefer to call him that."

This was not at all the kind of preface Hanbury wanted to the communications he had to make to her. He felt disconcerted, clumsy, petulant. "I have been so unfortunate as to introduce the cause of all this anxiety to you. It would have been much better for every sake I had not gone back and met the man the second time, much better I should cut a ridiculous figure before all the town to-morrow!" He was growing angry as his speech went on. His own words were inflaming his mind by the implication of his wrongs.

She placed her hand gently on his, and said in a reproachful voice, a voice quite different from the meditative tones in which she had been speaking, "Jack, I did not mean that. You know I did not mean that. Why do you reproach me with thoughts you ought to know I could not harbour?" She had turned in from the window, and was looking at him opposite her in the dim darkness. She was now fully alive to his presence and everything around her.

"No doubt," he said bitterly, "I am ungenerous to you. I am unjust. I am afraid, Dora, I am but an ill-conditioned beast----"

"Jack, that is the most unjust thing you could possibly say to me. In saying it you seem to use words you fancy I would like to use, only I am not brave enough."

"I know you are brave enough for anything. I know it is I who am the coward."

"Jack! Oh, Jack!"

"You told me so yourself to-day. You cannot say I am putting that word into your mouth." He was taking fire.

"Have you no mercy for me, Jack; my Jack?"

"You told me with your own lips I had no thought but of my miserable self in the miserable thing that happened."

"Jack, have you no pity. My Jack, have you no pity for your own Dora." She seized his hands with both her own. There were no tears in her voice now, there was the blood of her heart.

"Ay, and when I, yielding to my cowardly heart----"

"Oh God!" She took her hands away from his and covered her face with them.

"--And brought that man here as the price of his silence, you--knowing the chicken-livered creature I am--absolutely asked him to come next week. To come here where his presence is to cure me of my cowardice or accustom me to the peril of ridicule which you know I hate worse than death!" He was blazing now.

"Good night."

"After this, how can I be sure that you may not consider it salutary to betray me yourself?" He was mad.

"Good bye, Jack. Oh God, my heart is broken!"

"I tell you----" He turned around. He was alone.