CHAPTER I. TWO IN THE FIELD.

Qui n’accepte pas le regret n’accepte pas la vie.

The train technically known as the “Flying Dutchman,” tearing through the plains of Taunton, and in a first-class carriage by themselves, facing each other, two boys.

One of these boys remembers the moment to this day. A journey accomplished with Care for a travelling companion usually adheres to the wheels of memory until those wheels are still. Grim Care was with these boys in the railway carriage. A great catastrophe had come to them. A FitzHenry had failed to pass into her Majesty’s Navy. Back and back through the generations--back to the days when England had no navy--she had always been served at sea by a FitzHenry. Moreover, there had always been a Henry of that name on the books. Henry, the son of Henry, had, as a matter of course, gone down to the sea in a ship, had done his country’s business in the great waters.

There was, if they could have looked at it from a racial point of view, one small grain of consolation. The record was not even now snapped--for Henry had succeeded, Luke it was who had failed.

Henry sat with his back to the engine, looking out over the flat meadow-land, with some moisture remarkably like a tear in either eye. The eyes were blue, deep, and dark like the eastern horizon when the sun is setting over the sea. The face was brown, and oval, and still. It looked like a face that belonged to a race, something that had been handed down with the inherent love of blue water. It is probable that many centuries ago, a man with features such as these, with eyes such as these, and crisp, closely curling hair, had leaped ashore from his open Viking boat, shouting defiance to the Briton.

This son of countless Henrys sat and thought the world was hollow, with no joy in it, and no hope, because Luke had failed.

We are told that there shall be two in the field, that the one shall be taken and the other left. But we have yet to learn why, in our limited vision, the choice seems invariably to be mistaken. We have yet to learn why he who is doing good work is called from the field, leaving there the man whose tastes are urban.

Except for the sake of the record--and we cannot really be expected in these busy times to live for generations past or yet unborn--except for the record it would have been more expedient that Henry should fail and Luke succeed. Everybody knew this. It was the common talk on board the Britannia. Even the examiners knew it. Luke himself was aware of it. But there had always been a fatality about Luke.

And now, when it was quite apparent that Luke was a sailor and nothing else, the Navy would have none of him. Those who knew him--his kindly old captain and others--averred that, with a strict and unquestionable discipline, Luke FitzHenry could be made a first-class officer and a brilliant sailor. No one quite understood him, not even his brother Henry, usually known as Fitz. Fitz did not understand him now; he had not understood him since the fatal notice had been posted on the broad mainmast, of which some may wot. He did not know what to say, so, like the wise old Duke, he said nothing.

In the meantime the train raced on. Every moment brought them nearer to London and to the Honourable Mrs. Harrington.

Fitz seemed to be realising this, for he glanced uneasily at his brother, whose morose, sullen face was turned resolutely towards the window.

“She’ll be a fool,” he said, “if she does not give you another chance.”

“I would not take it,” answered Luke mechanically.

He was darker than his brother, with a longer chin and a peculiar twist of the lips. His eyes were lighter in colour, and rather too close together. A keen observer would have put him down as a boy who in manhood might go wrong. The strange thing was that no one could have hesitated for a moment in selecting Luke as the cleverer of the two.

Fitz paused. He was not so quick with his tongue as with his limbs. He knew his brother well enough to foresee the effect of failure. Luke FitzHenry was destined to be one of those unfortunate men who fail ungracefully.

“Do not decide in too great a hurry,” said Fitz at length, rather lamely. “Don’t be a fool!”

“No, it has been decided for me by my beastly bad luck.”

“It was bad luck--deuced bad luck.”

They had bought a packet of cigarettes at Exeter, but that outward sign of manhood lay untouched on the seat beside Fitz. It almost seemed as if manhood had come to them both in a more serious form than a swaggering indulgence in tobacco.

The boys were obviously brothers, but not aggressively twins. For Luke was darker than Fitz, and somewhat shorter in stature.

It is probable that neither of them had ever seriously contemplated the possibility of failure for one and not for the other. Neither had ever looked onward, as it were, into life to see himself there without the other. The life that they both anticipated was that life on the ocean wave, of which home-keeping poets sing so eloquently; and it had always been vaguely taken for granted that no great difference in rank or success could sever them. Fitz was too simple-minded, too honest to himself, to look for great honours in his country’s service. He mistrusted himself. Luke mistrusted Providence.

Such was the difference between these two boys--the thin end of a wedge of years which, spreading out in after days, turned each life into a path of its own, sending each man inexorably on his separate way.

These two boys were almost alone in the world. Their mother had died in giving them birth. Their father, an old man when he married, reached his allotted span when his sons first donned Her Majesty’s brass buttons, and quietly went to keep his watch below. Discipline had been his guiding star through life, and when Death called him he obeyed without a murmur, trusting confidently to the Naval Department in the first place, and the good God in the second, to look after his boys.

That the late Admiral FitzHenry had sorely misplaced his confidence in the first instance was a fact which the two boys were now called upon to face alone in their youthful ignorance of the world. Fitz was uneasily conscious of a feeling of helplessness, as if some all-powerful protector had suddenly been withdrawn. Their two lives had been pre-committed to the parental care of their country, and now it almost took their breath away to realise that Luke had no such protector.

His was the pride that depreciates self. During the last twenty-four hours Fitz had heard him boast of his failure, holding it up with a singularly triumphant sneer, as if he had always distrusted his destiny and took a certain pleasure in verifying his own prognostications. There are some men who find a satisfaction in bad luck which good fortune could never afford them.

In a large house in Grosvenor Gardens two ladies were at that same moment speaking of the FitzHenrys. It was quite easy to see that the smaller lady of the two was the mistress of the house, as also of that vague abstract called the situation. She sat in the most comfortable chair, which was, by the way, considerably too spacious for her, and there was a certain aggressive sense of possession about her attitude and manner.

Had she been a man, one would have said at once that here was a nouveau riche, ever heedful of the fact that the big room and all the appurtenances thereof were the fruits of toil and perseverance. There was a distinct suggestion of self-manufacture about Mrs. Harrington--distinct, that is to say, to the more subtle-minded. For she was not vulgar, neither did she boast. But the expression of her keen and somewhat worldly countenance betokened the intention of holding her own.

The Honourable Mrs. Harrington was not only beautifully dressed, but knew how to wear her clothes en grande dame.

“Yes,” she was saying, “Luke has failed to pass off the Britannia. It is a rare occurrence. I suppose the boy is a fool.”

Mrs. Harrington was rather addicted to the practice of calling other people names. If the butler made a mistake she dubbed him an idiot at once. She did not actually call her present companion, Mrs. Ingham-Baker, a fool, possibly because she considered the fact too apparent to require note.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker, stout and cringing, smoothed out the piece of silken needlework with which she moved through life, and glanced at her companion. She wanted to say the right thing. And Mrs. Harrington was what the French call “difficult.” One could never tell what the right thing might be. The art of saying it is, moreover, like an ear for music, it is not to be acquired. And Mrs. Ingham-Baker had not been gifted thus.

“And yet,” she said, “their father was a clever man--as I have been told.”

“By whom?” inquired Mrs. Harrington blandly.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker paused in distress.

“I wonder who it was,” she pretended to reflect.

“So do I,” snapped Mrs. Harrington.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s imagination was a somewhat ponderous affair, and, when she trusted to it, it usually ran her violently down a steep place. She concluded to say nothing more about the late Admiral FitzHenry.

“The boy,” said Mrs. Harrington, returning to the hapless Luke, “has had every advantage. I suppose he will try to explain matters when he comes. I could explain it in one word - stupidity.”

“Perhaps,” put in Mrs. Ingham-Baker nervously, “the brains have all gone to the other brother, Henry. It is sometimes so with twins.”

Mrs. Harrington laughed rather derisively.

“Stupid woman to have twins,” she muttered.

This was apparently one of several grievances against the late Mrs. FitzHenry.

“They have a little money of their own, have they not?” inquired Mrs. Ingham-Baker, with the soft blandness of one for whom money has absolutely no attraction.

“About enough to pay their washerwoman.”

There was a pause, and then Mrs. Ingham-Baker heaved a little sigh.

“I am sure, dear,” she said, “that in some way you will be rewarded for your great kindness to these poor orphan boys.”

She shook her head wisely, as if reflecting over the numerous cases of rewarded virtue which had come under her notice, and the action made two jet ornaments in her cap wobble, in a ludicrous manner, from side to side.

“That may be,” admitted the lady of the house, “though I wish I felt as sure about it as you do.”

“But then,” continued Mrs. Ingham-Baker, in a low and feeling tone, “you always were the soul of generosity.”

The “soul of generosity” gave an exceedingly wise little smile--almost as if she knew better--and looked up sharply towards the door. At the same moment the butler appeared.

“Mr. Pawson, ma’am,” he said.

The little nod with which this information was received seemed to indicate that Mr. Pawson had been expected.

Beneath her black curls Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s beady eyes were very much on the alert.

“In the library, James,” said Mrs. Harrington--and the two jet ornaments bending over the silken needlework gave a little throb of disappointment.

“Mr. Pawson,” announced the lady of the house, “is the legal light who casts a shadow of obscurity over my affairs.”

And with that she left the room.

As soon as the door was closed Mrs. Ingham-Baker was on her feet. She crossed the room to where her hostess’s key-basket and other belongings stood upon a table near the window. She stood looking eagerly at these without touching them. She even stooped down to examine the address of an envelope.

“Mr. Pawson!” she said, in a breathless whisper. “Mr. Pawson--what does that mean? Can she be going to alter her--no! But--yes, it may be! Perhaps Susan knows.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker then rang the bell twice, and resumed her seat.

Presently an aged servant came into the room. It was easy to see at a glance that she was a very old woman, but the years seemed to weigh less on her mind than on her body.

“Yes,” she said composedly.

“Oh--eh, Susan,” began Mrs. Ingham-Baker almost cringingly. “I rang because I wanted to know if a parcel has come for me--a parcel of floss-silk--from that shop in Buckingham Palace Road, you know.”

“If it had come,” replied Susan, with withering composure, “it would have been sent up to you.”

“Yes, yes, of course I know that, Susan. But I thought that perhaps it might have been insufficiently addressed or something - that you or Mary might have thought that it was for Mrs. Harrington.”

“She don’t use floss silks,” replied the imperturbable Susan.

“I was just going to ask her about it, when she was called away by some one. I think she said that it was her lawyer.”

“Yes, Mr. Pawson.”

Susan’s manner implied--very subtly and gently--that her place in this pleasant house was more assured than that of Mrs. Ingham-Baker, and perhaps that stout diplomatist awoke to this implication, for she pulled herself up with considerable dignity.

“I hope that nothing is wrong,” she said, in a tone that was intended to disclaim all intention of discussing such matters with a menial. “I should be sorry if Mrs. Harrington was drawn into any legal difficulty; the law is so complicated.”

Susan was engaged in looking for a speck of dust on the mantelpiece, not for its own intrinsic value, but for the sake of Mary’s future. She had apparently no observation of value to offer upon the vexed subject of the law.

“I was rather afraid,” pursued Mrs. Ingham-Baker gravely, “that Mrs. Harrington might be unduly incensed against that poor boy, Luke FitzHenry; that in a moment of disappointment, you know, she might be making some--well, some alteration in her will to the detriment of the boy.”

Susan stood for a moment in front of the lady, with a strange little smile of amusement among the wrinkles of her face.

“Yes, that may be,” she said, and quietly left the room.

CHAPTER II. A MAN DOWN.

Caress the favourites, avoid the unfortunate, and trust nobody.

The atmosphere of Mrs. Harrington’s drawing-room seemed to absorb the new-found manhood of the two boys, for they came forward shyly, overawed by the consciousness of their own boots, by the conviction that they carried with them the odour of cigarette smoke and failure.

“Well, my dears,” said the Honourable Mrs. Harrington, suddenly softened despite herself by the sight of their brown young faces. “Well, come here and kiss me.”

All the while she was vaguely conscious that she was surprising herself and others. She had not intended to treat them thus. Mrs. Harrington was a woman who had a theory of life--not a theory to talk about, but to act upon. Her theory was that “heart” is all nonsense. She looked upon existence here below as a series of contracts entered into with one’s neighbour for purposes of mutual enjoyment or advantage. She thought that life could be put down in black and white. Which was a mistake. She had gone through fifty years of it without discovering that for the sake of some memory--possibly a girlish one--hidden away behind her cold grey eyes, she could never be sure of herself in dealing with man or boy whose being bore the impress of the sea.

The strange thing was that she had never found it out. We speak pityingly of animals that do not know their own strength. Which of us knows his own weakness? There was a man connected with Mrs. Harrington’s life, one of the contractors in black and white, who had found out this effect of a brown face and a blue coat upon a woman otherwise immovable. This man, Cipriani de Lloseta, who contemplated life, as it were, from a quiet corner of the dress circle, kept his knowledge for his own use.

Fitz and Luke obeyed her invitation without much enthusiasm. They were boyish enough to object to kissing on principle. They then shook hands awkwardly with Mrs. Ingham-Baker, and drifted together again with that vague physical attraction which seems to qualify twins for double harness on the road of life. There was trouble ahead of them; and without defining the situation, like soldiers surprised, they instinctively touched shoulders.

It was the psychological moment. There was a little pause, during which Mrs. Harrington seemed to stiffen herself, morally and physically. Had she not stiffened herself, had she only allowed herself, as it were, to go--to call Luke to her and comfort him and sympathise with him--it would have altered every life in that room, and others outside of it. Even blundering, cringing, foolish Mrs. Ingham-Baker would have acted more wisely, for she would have followed the dictates of an exceedingly soft, if shallow, heart.

“I had hoped for a more satisfactory home-coming than this,” said Mrs. Harrington in her hardest voice. When she spoke in this tone there was the faintest suggestion of a London accent.

Fitz made a little movement, a step forward, as if she had been unconsciously approaching the brink of some danger, and he wished to warn her. The peculiar twist in Luke’s lips became momentarily more visible, and he kept his deep, despondent eyes fixed on the speaker’s face.

There are two kinds of rich women. The one spends her money in doing good, the other pays it away to gratify her love of power. Of the Honourable Mrs. Harrington it was never reported that she was lavish in her charities.

“I think,” she said, “that I ought to tell you that I have been paying the expenses of your education almost entirely. I was in no way bound to do so. I took charge of you at your father’s death because I--because he was a true friend to me. I do not grudge the money, but in return I expected you to work hard and get on in your profession.”

She stiffened herself with a rustling sound of silk, proudly conscious of injured virtue, full of the charity that exacteth a high interest.

“We did our best,” replied Fitz, with a simple intrepidity which rather spoilt the awesomeness of the situation.

“I am not speaking to you,” returned the lady. “You have worked and have passed your examination satisfactorily. You are not clever--I know that; but you have managed to get into the Navy, where your father was before you, and your grandfather before him. I have no doubt you will give satisfaction to your superior officers. I was talking to Luke.”

“We all knew that,” said Luke, in a dangerous voice, which trite observation she chose to ignore.

“You have had equal advantages,” pursued the dispenser of charity. “I have shown no favour; I have treated you alike. It had been my intention to do so all your lives and after my death.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker was so interested at this juncture that she leant forward with parted lips, listening eagerly. The Honourable Mrs. Harrington allowed herself the plebeian pleasure of returning the stare with a questioning glance which broke off into a little laugh.

“Have you,” she continued, addressing Luke directly, “any reason to offer for your failure--beyond the usual one of bad luck?”

Luke looked at her in a lowering way and made no reply. Had Mrs. Harrington been a poor woman, she would have recognised that the boy was at the end of his tether. But she had always been surrounded - as such women are--by men, and more especially by women, who would swallow any insult, any insolence, so long as it was gilded. The world had, in fact, accepted the Honourable Mrs. Harrington because she could afford to gild herself.

“It was bad luck, and nothing else,” burst out Fitz, heedless of her sarcastic tones. “Luke is a better sailor than I am. But he always was weak in his astronomy, and it all turned on astronomy.”

“I should imagine it all turned on stupidity,” said Mrs. Harrington.

“I’m stupid, if you like,” said Fitz; “Luke isn’t. Luke is clever; ask any chap on board!”

“I do not need to ask any chap on board,” said Mrs. Harrington. “My own common sense tells me that he is clever. He has proved it.”

“It’s like a woman--to hit a fellow when he’s down,” said Luke, with his hands deep in his pockets.

He turned to Mrs. Ingham-Baker for sympathy in this sentiment, and that soft-hearted lady deemed it expedient to turn hastily away, avoiding his glance, denying all partisanship.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker was not a person given to the disguise of her own feelings. She was plausible enough to the outer world. To herself she was quite frank, and hardly seemed to recognise this as the event she had most desired. It is to be presumed that her heart was like her physical self, a large, unwieldy thing, over which she had not a proper control. The organ mentioned had a way of tripping her up. It tripped her now, and she quite forgot that this quarrel was precisely what she had wanted for years. She had looked forward to it as the turning-point in her daughter Agatha’s fortunes.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker had, in fact, wondered more than a thousand times why the Honourable Mrs. Harrington should do all for the FitzHenrys and nothing for Agatha. She did not attempt to attribute reasons. She knew her sex too well for that. She merely wondered, which means that she cherished a question until it grew into a grievance. The end of it she knew would be a quarrel. This might not come until the FitzHenrys should have grown to man’s estate and man’s privilege of quarrelling with his female relatives about the youthful female relative of some other person. But it would come, surely. Mrs. Ingham-Baker, the parasite, knew her victim, Mrs. Harrington, well enough to be sure of that.

And now that this quarrel had arisen--much sooner than she could have hoped--providentially brought about by an astronomical examination-paper, Mrs. Ingham-Baker was forced to face the humiliating fact that she felt sorry for Luke.

It would have been different had Agatha been present, but that ingenious maiden was at school at Brighton. Had her daughter been in the room, Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s motherly instinct would have narrowed itself down to her. But in the absence of her own child, Luke’s sorry plight appealed to that larger maternal instinct which makes good women in unlikely places.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker was, however, one of the many who learn to curb the impulse of a charitable intention. She looked out of the window, and pretended not to notice that the culprit had addressed his remark to her. To complete this convenient deafness she gave a simulated little cough of abstraction, which entirely gave her away.

Mrs. Harrington chose to ignore Luke’s taunt.

“And,” she inquired sweetly, “what do you intend to do now?”

Quite suddenly the boy turned on her.

“I intend,” he cried, “to make my own life--whatever it may be. If I am starving I will not come to you. If half-a-crown would save me, I would rather die than borrow it from you. You think that you can buy everything with your cursed money. You can’t buy me. You can’t buy a FitzHenry. You - you can’t--”

He gave a little sob, remembered his new manhood--that sudden, complete manhood which comes of sorrow--pulled himself up, and walked to the door. He opened it, turned once and glanced at his brother, and passed out of the room.

So Luke FitzHenry passed out into his life--a life which he was to make for himself. Passionate--quick to love, to hate, to suffer; deep in his feeling, susceptible to ridicule or sarcasm--an orphan. The stairs were dark as he went down them.

Mrs. Harrington gave a little laugh as the door closed behind him. She had always been able to repurchase the friendship of her friends.

Fitz made a few steps towards the door before her voice arrested him. “Stop!” she cried.

He paused, and the old sense of discipline that was in his blood made him obey. He thought that he would find Luke upstairs on the bed with his face buried in his folded arms, as he had found him a score of times during their short life.

“I think you are too hard on him,” he answered hotly. “It is bad enough being ploughed, without having to stand abuse afterwards.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Harrington, “just you come here and sit beside me. We will leave Luke to himself for a little. It is much better. Let him think it out alone.”

What was there in this fair-haired boy’s demeanour, voice, or being that appealed to Mrs. Harrington, despite her sterner self?

So Fitz was pacified by the lady’s gentler manner, and consented to remain. He made good use of his time, pleading Luke’s cause, explaining his bad fortune, and modestly disclaiming any credit to himself for having succeeded where his brother failed. But all the while the boy was restless, eager to get away and run upstairs to Luke, who he felt sure was living years in every moment, as children do in those griefs which we take upon ourselves to call childish.

At last he rose.

“May I go now?” he asked.

“Yes, if you like. But do not bring Luke to me until he is prepared to apologise for his ingratitude and rudeness.”

“What a dear boy he is!” ejaculated Mrs. Ingham-Baker almost before the door was closed. “So upright and honest and straightforward.”

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Harrington, with a sigh of anger.

“He will be a fine man,” continued Mrs. Ingham-Baker. “I shall die quite happy if my Agatha marries such a man as Henry will be.”

Mrs. Harrington glanced at her voluminous friend rather critically.

“You do not look like dying yet,” she said.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker put her head on one side and looked resigned.

“One never knows,” she answered. “It is a great responsibility, Marian, to have a daughter.”

“I should imagine, from what I have seen of Agatha, that the child is quite capable of taking care of herself.”

“Yes,” answered the fond mother, “she is intelligent. But a girl is so helpless in the world, and when I am gone I should feel happier if I knew that my child had a good husband, such as Fitz, to take care of her.”

Neither of these ladies being of the modern school of feminine learning, the vague theology underlying this remark was allowed to pass unnoticed.

Mrs. Harrington drummed with her thin wrinkled fingers on the arm of her chair, and waited with a queer anticipatory little smile for her friend to proceed.

“But, of course,” continued Mrs. Ingham-Baker, blundering into the little feminine snare, “a naval man can scarcely marry. They are always so badly off. I suppose poor Fitz will not be able to support a wife until he is quite middle-aged.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Mrs. Harrington, with a gleam in her hard grey eyes, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker pricked her finger.

“I am sure,” said the latter lady unctuously, when she had had time to think it out, “I am sure I should be content for her to live very quietly if I only knew that she had married a good man. I always say that riches do not make happiness.”

“Yes, a number of people say that,” answered Mrs. Harrington, and at the same moment Fitz burst into the room.

“Aunt Marian,” he cried, “he has gone!”

“Who has gone?” asked the lady of the house coldly. “Please close the door.”

“Luke! He has gone! He went straight out of the house, and the butler does not know where he went to! It is all your fault, Aunt Marian; you had no right to speak to him like that! You know you hadn’t. I am going to look for him.”

“Now, do not get excited,” said Mrs. Harrington soothingly. “Just come here and listen to me. Luke has behaved very badly. He has been idle and stubborn on board the Britannia. He has been rude and ungrateful to me.”

She found she had taken the boy’s hand, and she dropped it suddenly, as if ashamed of showing so much emotion.

“I am not going to have my house upset by the tantrums of a bad-tempered boy. It is nearly dinner time. Luke is sure to come back. If he is not back by the time we have finished dinner I will send one of the men out to look for him. He is probably sulking in some corner of the gardens.”

Seeing that Fitz was white with anxiety, she forgot herself so much as to draw him to her again.

“Now, Fitz,” she said, “you must obey me and leave me to manage Luke in my own way. I know best. Just go and dress for dinner. Luke will come back--never fear.”

But Luke did not come back.

CHAPTER III. A SEA DOG.

There is one that slippeth in his speech, but not from his heart.

The glass door of the dining-room of the Hotel of the Four Nations at Barcelona was opened softly, almost nervously, by a shock-headed little man, who peered into the room.

One of the waiters stepped forward and drew out a chair.

“Thank ye--thank ye,” said the new-comer, in a thick though pleasant voice.

He looked around, rather bewildered--as if he had never seen a table d’hÔte before. It almost appeared as if a doubt existed in his mind whether or not he was expected to go and shake hands with some one present, explaining who he was.

As, however, no one appeared to invite this confidence he took the chair offered and sat gravely down.

The waiter laid the menu at his side, and the elderly diner, whose face and person bespoke a seafaring life, gazed politely at it. He was obviously desirous of avoiding hurting the young man’s feelings, but the card puzzled as much as it distressed him.

Observing with the brightest of blue eyes the manners and customs of his neighbours, the old sailor helped himself to a little wine from the decanter set in front of him, and filled up the glass with water.

The waiter drew forward a small dish of olives and another containing slices of red sausage of the thickness, consistency, and flavour of a postage stamp. The Englishman looked dubiously at these delicacies and shook his head--still obviously desirous of giving no offence. Soup was more comprehensible, and the sailor consumed his portion with a non-committing countenance. But the fish, which happened to be of a Mediterranean savour--served in little lumps--caused considerable hesitation.

“Is it slugs?” inquired the mariner guardedly--as if open to conviction--in a voice that penetrated half the length of the table.

The waiter explained in fluent Castilian the nature of the dish.

“I want to know if it’s slugs,” repeated the sailor, with a stout simplicity.

One or two commercial travellers, possessing a smattering of English, smiled openly, and an English gentleman seated at the side of the inquirer leant gravely towards him.

“That is a preparation of fish,” he explained. “You won’t find it at all bad.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied the old man, helping himself with an air of relief which would have been extremely comic had it been shorn of its pathos. “I am afraid,” he went on confidentially, “of gettin’ slugs to eat. I’m told that they eat them in these parts.”

“This,” replied the other, with stupendous gravity, “is not the slug season. Besides, if you did get ’em, I dare say you would be pleasantly surprised.”

“Maybe, maybe! Though I don’t hold by foreign ways.”

Such was the beginning of a passing friendship between two men who had nothing in common except their country; for one was a peer of the realm, travelling in Spain for the transaction of his own private affairs, or possibly for the edification of his own private mind, and the other was Captain John Thomas Bontnor, late of the British mercantile service.

Being a simple-minded person, as many seamen are, Captain Bontnor sought to make himself agreeable.

“This is the first time,” he said, “that I have set foot in Spain, though I’ve heard the language spoken, having sailed in the Spanish Main, and down to Manilla one voyage likewise. It is a strange-sounding language, I take it--a lot of jabbering and not much sense.”

He spoke somewhat slowly, after the manner of one who had always had a silent tongue until grey hairs came to mellow it.

The young man, his hearer, looked slightly distressed, as if he was suppressing some emotion. He was rather a vacuous-looking young man--startlingly clean as to countenance and linen. He was shaven, and had he not been distinctly a gentleman, he might have been a groom. He apparently had a habit of thrusting forward his chin for the purpose of scratching it pensively with his forefinger. This elegant trick probably indicated bewilderment, or, at all events, a slight mystification - he had recourse to it now--on the question of the Spanish language.

“Well,” he answered gravely, “if you come to analyse it, I dare say there is as much sense in it as in other languages--when you know it, you know.”

“Yes,” murmured the captain, with a glowing sense of satisfaction at his own conversational powers. He felt he was becoming quite a society man.

“But,” pursued the hereditary legislator, “it’s tricky--deuced tricky. The nastiest lot of irregular verbs I’ve come across yet. Still, I get along all right. Worst of it is, you know, that when I’ve got a sentence out all right with its verbs and things, I’m not in a fit state to catch the answer.”

“Knocks you on to your beam-ends,” suggested Captain Bontnor.

“Yes.”

Lord Seahampton settled his throat more comfortably in his spotless collar, and proceeded to help himself to a fourth mutton cutlet.

“Staying here long?” he inquired.

“No, not long,” answered Captain Bontnor slowly, as if meditating; then suddenly he burst into his story. “You see, sir,” he said, “I’m getting on in years, and I’m not quite the build for foreign travel. It sort of flurries me. I’m a bit past it. I’m not here for pleasure, you know.”

This seemed to have the effect of sending Lord Seahampton off into a brown study--not apparently of great value so far as depth of thought was concerned. He looked as if he were wondering whether he himself was in Barcelona for pleasure or not.

“No,” he murmured encouragingly,

“It is like this,” pursued Captain Bontnor, confidentially. “My sister, Amelia Ann, married above her.”

“Very much to her credit,” said Lord Seahampton, with a stolid face and a twinkle in his eye. “And--”

“Died.”

“Dear, dear!”

“Yes,” pursued the captain, “she died nineteen years ago, leaving a little girl. He’s dead now--Mr. Challoner. He’s my brother-in-law, but I call him Mr. Challoner, because he’s above me.”

“I trust he is,” said Lord Seahampton, cheerfully, with a glance at the painted ceiling. “I trust he is.”

The captain chuckled. “I mean in a social way,” he explained. “And now he’s dead, his daughter Eve is left quite alone in the world, and she telegraphed for me. She is living in the Island of Majorca.”

“Ah!”

The kindly old blue eyes flashed round on his companion’s face.

“Do you know it?”

The peer thrust forward his chin and spoilt what small claims he had to good looks.

“No; I’ve heard of it, though. I know of a wom - a lady, who has large estates there--a Mrs. Harrington.”

“The Honourable Mrs. Harrington is a sort of relation of my niece’s, Miss Challoner. I call her Miss Challoner, although she is my niece, because she is above me.”

His lordship glanced at the ceiling again.

“I mean she is a lady. And I’m going to Majorca to fetch her. At least, I’m trying to get there, but I cannot somehow find out about the boat. They’re a bit irregular, it seems, and this stupid jabbering of theirs does flurry me so. Now, what’s this? Eh? Pudding, is it? Well, it doesn’t look like it. No, thank ye!”

The poor old man was soon upset by insignificant trifles, and after he had given way to a little burst of petulance like this, he had a strange, half pathetic way of staring straight in front of him for a few seconds, as if collecting himself again.

It happened that Lord Seahampton was a good-natured young man, with rather a soft heart, such as many horsey persons possess. Something in Captain Bontnor touched him; some simple British quality which he was pleased to meet with, thus, in a foreign land.

“Look here,” he said, “I’ll go out with you afterwards and find out all about the boat, take your ticket, and fix the whole thing up.”

“I’m sure you’re very kind,” began the old sailor hesitatingly. He fumbled at his necktie for a moment with unsteady, weather-beaten hands. “But I shouldn’t like to trespass on your time. I take it you’re here for pleasure?”

Lord Seahampton smiled.

“Yes, I’m here for pleasure; that’s what I’m in the world for.”

Still Captain Bontnor hesitated.

“You might meet some of your friends,” he began tentatively, “in the streets, you know.” He paused and looked down at his own hands; he turned one palm up, showing the faint tattoo on the wrist. “I’m only a rough seafaring man,” he went on. “They might think it strange--might wonder whom you had picked up.”

The spotless collar seemed to be very uncomfortable.

“I’ve always made a practice,” mumbled Lord Seahampton, rather incoherently, “of letting my friends think what they damned well please. May I ask your name?”

“Bontnor’s my name. Captain Bontnor, at your service.”

“My name’s Seahampton.”

Captain Bontnor turned and looked at him.

“Yes, I’m Lord Seahampton.”

“Oh!” ejaculated Captain Bontnor, under his breath. His social facilities did not quite rise to an occasion like this.

“As soon as you’ve finished,” went on his companion rather hurriedly, “we’ll go out and look up these steamer people. Miss Challoner will be anxious for you to get there as soon as you can.”

“Yes, yes!”

The captain laid aside his napkin and began to show signs of getting flurried again.

“Her name is Eve,” he said, in the hurried way which was rather pathetic. “Now, I wonder what I should call her. Poor young thing! if she’s distressed about her father’s death--which is only natural, I’m sure--it would sound a bit chilly like to call her Miss Challoner. What do you think, Mr. - eh--er--Lord--sir?”

“Well, I think I should call her Eve--it’s a pretty name--and take her by the hand, and--yes, I think I’d kiss her. Especially if she was a nice-looking girl,” he added for his own personal edification as he preceded his companion into the hall.

He was fumbling in the tail pocket of his short tweed coat as he went. In the hall he turned.

“Got anything to smoke?” he asked, in his most abrupt manner, as if the cut of his collar did not allow of verbosity.

The old man shyly produced some cigars in a leather case, which had never been of great value, even in the far-off days of its youth.

“I hardly like to offer them to you,” he said slowly. “T--they’re not expensive, and I couldn’t explain to the young woman what I wanted.”

“Rather like the look of them,” said Lord Seahampton, taking one and cutting the end off with a certain show of eagerness. This young man’s reputation for personal bravery was a known quantity on the hunting-field. “Old sailors,” he continued, “generally know good tobacco.”

And all the while he had half-a-dozen of the best Havanas in his pocket. Some instinct, which he was much too practical to define, and possibly too stupid to detect, told him that this was one of those occasions where it is much more blessed to receive than to give.

“And so,” continued Captain Bontnor, as they were walking down the shady side of that noisiest street in the world, the Rambla, “and so you would just call her Eve, if you was me?”

“I should.”

“Remember that she is a lady, you know. Quite a lady.”

“I am remembering that,” replied the peer stolidly; “that’s why I am of the opinion just expressed.”

Captain Bontnor gave a little sigh of relief, as if one of his many difficulties had been removed. At the same time he glanced furtively towards the inexpensive cigar, which was affording distinct if somewhat exaggerated enjoyment.

Together they walked down the broad street and turned along the quay. And here Captain Bontnor found himself talking quite easily and affably about palm-trees and tramways, and other matters of local interest, to the first peer whom he had ever seen in the flesh.

Out of sheer good nature, and with a vague question in his mind as to whether Miss Challoner knew what sort of help she had called in, Lord Seahampton obtained the necessary information--no easy matter in this country--and took the necessary ticket. Ticket and information alike were obtained from a grave gentleman who smoked a cigarette, and did the honours of his little office as if it had been a palace--showing no desire to sell the ticket, and taking payment as if he were conferring a distinct favour.

The steamer left that same afternoon, and Lord Seahampton sent his protÉgÉ back rejoicing to the hotel to pack up. Then the youthful peer bestowed the remainder of the cheap cigar on an individual in reduced circumstances and lighted one of his own. He was quite unconscious of having done a good action. Such actions are supposed to bring their own reward, but experience suggests that it is best not to count upon anything of a tangible nature.

Like lutes of angels, touched so near
Hell’s confines, that the damned can hear.

Time: Five o’clock in the afternoon. Five o’clock, that is to say, by the railway time. There is another time in Barcelona--the town time, to wit--which differs from the hour of the iron road by thirty minutes or thereabouts. But then the town time is Spanish, that is to say that no one takes any notice of it. For into Spanish life time comes but little. If one wishes to catch a train--but, by the way, in Spain we do not catch, we take the train--a subtle difference--if then we wish to take the train, we arrive at the station three-quarters of an hour before the time indicated for departure, and there we make our arrangements with due dignity.

Place: The Rambla, which for those who speak alien tongues has an Arabic sound, and tells us that this, the finest promenade in the world, was once a sandy river-bed. Here now the grave caballero promenades himself from early morning to an eve that knows no dew.

Priest and peasant, the great lady and the gentleman who sells one a glass of water for a centimo, brush past each other. The great lady is dressed in black, as all Spanish ladies are, and on her head she wears the long-lived mantilla, which will last our time and the time of our grandsons. The humbler women-folk wear bright handkerchiefs in place of the mantilla; in dress they affect bright colours.

With the sterner sex, the line of demarcation is equally distinct. There is the man who wears the peasant’s blouse, and the man who wears the cloak.

It is with one of the latter that we have to deal--a tall, grave man, with quiet eyes and a long, pointed chin. The air is chilly, and this promenader’s black cloak is thrown well over the shoulder, displaying the bright-coloured lining of velvet, which is all the relief the Spaniard allows his sombre self.

The caballero’s face is brown, as of one whose walk is not always beneath the shady trees. The expression of it is chastened. One sees the history of a country in the faces of its men. In this there is the history of a past, it is the face of a man living in a bygone day. He notes the interest of the moment with grave surprise, but his life is behind him.

This man has the Spaniard’s thoughtful interest in a trifle. He pauses to note the number of the sparrows, as thick as leaves upon the trees. He carefully unfolds his cloak, gives the loose end a little shake, and casts it skilfully over his shoulder, so that it falls across his back, and, hanging there, displays the bright lining. He pauses to watch the result of an infantile accident. The baby picks itself up and brushes the dust from its diminutive frock with all the earnestness of early youth. And the cavalier walks on.

All this with a contemplative grandeur of demeanour worthy of larger if not better things.

In the roadway at the side of the broad promenade a carriage and pair followed this gentleman--carriage and horses which were beautiful even in this land of horses. For this was Cipriani de Lloseta de Mallorca, a great man in Barcelona, if he wished it, a greater in his own little island of Majorca, whether he wished it or not.

Leading out of this same fascinating Rambla, to the left, up towards the impenetrable fortress of Juich--impenetrable excepting once, and then it was the pestilent Englishman, as usual--leading then to the left is the Calle de la Paz. In the Street of the Peace there is a house, on the left hand also, into the door of which one could not only drive a coach and four, but eke a load of straw. Moreover, the driver could go to sleep and leave it to the horses, for there is plenty of space. This is the Casa Lloseta, the town residence since time immemorial of the family of that name. There are servants at the door, there are servants on the broad marble staircase, there are servants everywhere! for the Spaniard is unapproachable in the gentle art of leaving things to others. In the patio, or marble courtyard, there plays a monotonous little fountain, peacefully plashing away the sunny hours.

In England el SeÑor Conde de Lloseta de Mallorca would be looked upon as a mystery, because he lived in a large house by himself; because it was not known what his tastes might be; because the interviewer interviewed him not, and because the Society rags had no opportunity of describing his drawing-room.

In Spain things are different. If the count chose to live in his own cellar, his neighbours would shrug their shoulders and throw the end of their capes well over to the back. That was surely the business of the count.

Moreover, Cipriani de Lloseta was not the sort of man of whom it is easy to ask questions. His was the pride of pride, which is a vice unbreakable. When the Moors went to Majorca in the eighth century they found Llosetas there, and Llosetas were left behind eight hundred years later, when the southern conqueror was driven back to his dark land. Among his friends it is known that Cipriani de Lloseta lived alone because he was faithful to the memory of one who, but for the hand of God, would have lived with him until she was an old woman, filling, perhaps, the great gloomy house in the Calle de la Paz with the prattle of children’s voices, with the clatter of childish feet in the marble passages.

The younger women looked at him surreptitiously, and asked each other what sort of wife this must have been; while their elders shrugged their ample shoulders with a strange little Catalonian contraction of the eyes, and said--

“It is not so much the woman herself as that which the man makes her.”

For they are wise, these stout and elderly ladies. They were once young, and they learnt the lesson.

This man, Cipriani de Lloseta, leads a somewhat lonely life, inasmuch as he associates but little with the men of his rank and station. It is, for instance, known that he walks on the Rambla, but no one of any importance whatever, no one that is likely to recognise him, is aware of the fact that another favourite promenade of his is the Muelle de Ponente, that forsaken pier where the stone works are and where no one ever promenades. Here Cipriani de Lloseta walks gravely in the evening--to be more precise, on Tuesday or Friday evening--about five o’clock, when the boat sails for Majorca.

He stands, a lonely, cloaked figure, at the end of the long stone pier, and his dark Spanish eyes rest on the steamer as it glides away into the darkening east and south.

Often, often this man watches the boats depart, but he never goes himself. Often, often he gazes out in his chastened, impenetrable silence over the horizon, as if seeking to pierce the distance and look on the bare heights of the far-off island.

For there, over the glassy smoothness of the horizon, behind those little grey clouds, is Majorca--and Lloseta.

Lloseta, a bare, brown village, standing on the hillside, as if it had economically crept up there among the pines, so as to leave available for cultivation every inch of the wonderful soil of the plain. Below, the vast fertile plateau, tilled like a garden, lies to the westward, while to the east the rising undulations terminate in the bare uplands of Inca. Olive-trees cover the plain like an army, trees that were planted by the Moors a thousand years ago.

Amid the rugged heights of the mountains, here at their highest, and in the fastness of a gorge, lies Lloseta itself.

From the heights above a subtle invigorating odour of marjoram, rosemary, lavender, growing wild like heather, comes down to mingle with the more languid breath of tropic plant and flower.

Such is Lloseta--a home to live for, to die for, to dream of when away from it. As a man is dreaming of it now, just across that hundred miles of smooth sea, on the end of the Muelle de Ponente at Barcelona.

He is always dreaming of it--in Spain, where he is a Spaniard--in England, where he might be an Englishman. It is not every one of us who has a home from whence his name is derived, who signs his letters with a word that is marked upon the map.

Such is Cipriani of that name, who has now left the Rambla and is wandering along the deserted pier.

The steamer has loosed its moorings, is slowly picking its way out of the crowded harbour, and it will pass the pier-head by the time that Cipriani de Lloseta reaches that point.

The man walks slowly, cloaked to the mouth, for the evening breeze is chilly. He gravely descends the steps and begins to walk on the little path around the circular tower at the end of the pier. He usually stands at the very end, so as to be as near to Majorca as possible, one might almost think.

He gravely walks on, and quite suddenly he comes upon a youthful Briton smoking a cigar and dangling a thick stick.

“Ah!” the two men exclaim.

“What are you doing in Barcelona?” asks the Spaniard.

“The devil only knows, my dear man. I don’t.”

“I hope he had nothing to do with your coming here--idle hands, you know.”

The Englishman sat gravely down on a small granite column and reflected.

“No,” he answered after a pause, “it was not that. I left England because I wanted to get away from--Well, from an old woman who wants me to marry her daughter. I went to Monte Carlo, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m hanged if she didn’t follow me, bringing the poor girl with her.”

The Spaniard smiled gravely.

“A willing victim!”

“No, Lloseta, you’re wrong there. That’s the beastly part of it. That girl, sir, was actually shivering with fright one night when the old woman managed to leave us on the terrace together. Some one else, you know!”

The dark eyes looking across towards Majorca were not pleasant to contemplate.

“However,” pursued the ingenuous parti, “I spoke to her as one might have done to another chap, you know. I said, ‘You’re frightened of something.’ She didn’t answer. ‘You’re afraid that I’m going to ask you to marry me.’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m not such a cad.’ And after that we got on all right. She would have told who it was if I had let her. Two days later I sloped off here. Spain choked her off--the old lady, I mean.”

Lloseta laughed, and the young man began to think that he had said something rude.

“She did not know what a nice place it is,” he added, with a transparency which did no harm. “Yes, you’re right. The devil had something to do with my coming here. Match-making old women are the devil.”

He paused and attended to his cigar. The steamer passed within a hundred yards of them.

The Englishman nodded towards it.

“Steamer’s going to Majorca,” he said.

Lloseta nodded his head.

“Yes,” he answered gravely, “I know.”

“I came down to see it off!”

The Spaniard looked at him sharply.

“Why?” he asked.

“I know an old chap on board--going across to fetch an English girl, a Miss Challoner. Her father’s dead.”

Lloseta said nothing. Presently he turned to go, and as they walked back together he arranged to send a carriage for the Englishman and his luggage to bring him to the big house in the Street of the Peace, which he explained with a shadowy smile was more comfortable than the hotel.

“So,” he said to himself, as he walked towards his vast home alone, “so the Caballero Challoner is dead. They are passing off the stage one by one.”

CHAPTER V. THE VALLEY OF REPOSE.

A home where exiled angels might forbear
Awhile to moan for paradise.

There is a valley far up in the mountains behind the ancient city of Palma--the Val d’Erraha. Some thousand years ago the Arabs found this place. After toils and labours, and many battles by sea and land, a roaming sheikh settled here, calling it El Rahah - the Repose.

He dug a well--for where the Moor has been there is always sparkling water--he planted olive trees, and he built a mill. The well is there to-day; the olive trees, old and huge and gnarled as are no other olive trees on the earth, yield their yearly crop unceasingly; the mill grinds the Spaniard’s corn to-day.

In the Val d’Erraha there stands a house--a rambling, ungainly Farm, as such are called in Majorca. It runs off at strange angles, presenting a broken face to all points of the compass. From a distance it rather resembles a village, for the belfry of the little chapel is visible and the buildings seem to be broken up and divided. On closer inspection it is found to be self-contained, and a nearer approach discloses the fact that it presents to the world four solid walls, and that it is only to be entered by an arched gateway.

In the centre of the open patio stands the Moorish well, surrounded, overhung by orange trees. This house could resist a siege--indeed, it was built for that purpose; for the Moorish pirates made raids on the island almost within the memory of living persons.

Such is the Casa d’Erraha--the House of Repose. It stands with its back to the pine slopes, looking peacefully down the valley, over terraces where grow the orange, the almond, the fig, the lemon, the olive; and far below, where the water trickles, the feathery bamboo.

The city of Palma is but a few miles away, in its strong thirteenth-century restriction within high ramparts. It has its cathedral, its court-house - all the orthodox requirements of a city, and, moreover, it is the capital of the whilom kingdom of Majorca. King Jaime is dead and gone. Majorca, after many vicissitudes, has settled down into an obscure possession of Spain; and to the old-world ways of that country it has taken very kindly.

But with the unwritten history of Majorca we have little to do, and we have much with the Casa d’Erraha and the owner thereof--a plain Englishman of the name of Challoner--the last of his line, the third of his race, to own the Casa d’Erraha.

Edward Challoner lay on his bed in the large room overlooking the valley and the distant sea. In the House of Repose he lay awaiting the call to a longer rest than earthly weariness can secure. The grave old Padre of the neighbouring village of St. Pablo stood near the bed. Eve Challoner had sent for him, with the instinct that makes us wish to be seen off on a long journey by a good man, of whatsoever creed or calling.

At times the old priest gently patted the hand of Eve Challoner as she stood by his side.

Climate and country and habit have a greater influence over the human frame than we ever realise. Eve Challoner had been subject to these subtle influences to a rare extent. Tall and upright, clad in black, as all Spanish ladies are, she was English and yet Spanish. Of a clear white, her skin was touched slightly by the sun and the warm air which blows ever from the sea, blow which way it may across the little island.

Romance tells of Andalusian beauty, of Catalonian grace--and in sober British earnest (a solid thing) there are few more beautiful women than high-born Spanish ladies. Eve Challoner had caught something - some trick of the head--which belongs to Spain alone. Her eyes had a certain northern vivacity of glance, a small something which is noticeable enough in Southern Europe, though we should hardly observe it in England, for it means education. In the matter of learning, be it noted in passing, the ladies of the Peninsula are not so very far above their duskier sisters of the harem farther east.

The girl’s eyes were dull now, with a sort of surprised anguish, for sorrow had come to her before its time. The man lying on the bed before her had not reached the limit of his years. Quite suddenly, twelve hours before, he had complained of a numb feeling in his head, and the voice he spoke in was thick and strange. In a surprisingly short time Edward Challoner was no longer himself--no longer the cynical, polished gentleman of the world--but a hard-breathing, inert deformity, hardly human. From that time to this he had never spoken, and Heaven knew there was enough for him to say. Death had caught him unawares as, after all, he generally does catch us. There were several things to set in order as usual; for it is only in books and on the stage that folks make a graceful exit, clearing up the little mystery, forgiving the wrongs, boasting with feeble voice of the good they have done--with lowering tone and soft music slowly working together to the prompter’s bell. It is not in real life that dying men find much time to prattle about their own souls. They usually want all their breath for those they leave behind. And who knows! Perhaps those waiting on the other side think no worse of the man who dies fearing for others and not for himself.

In Edward Challoner’s paralysed brain there was a great wish to speak to his daughter, but the words would not come. He looked at those around him with a dreary indistinctness as from a distance, almost as if he had begun his long journey and was looking back from afar.

And so the afternoon wore on to the short southern twilight, and the goat-bells came tinkling up from the valley--for nature must have her way though men may die, and milking-time rules through all the changes.

While the light failed over the land two men were riding through it as fast as horse could lay hoof to the ground. They were on the small road running from the Soller highway up to the Val d’Erraha, and he who led the way seemed to know every inch of it. This was Henry FitzHenry, and his companion, ill at ease in a Spanish saddle, was the doctor of Her Majesty’s gunboat Kittiwake.

Four months earlier, by one of those chances which seem no chance when we look back to them, the Kittiwake had broken down on leaving the anchorage of Port Mahon. Towed back by a consort, she had been there ever since, awaiting some necessary pieces of machinery to be made in England and sent out to her. Hearing by chance that the navigating lieutenant of the Kittiwake was Henry FitzHenry - usually known as Fitz--Mr. Challoner had written to Minorca from the larger island, introducing himself as the Honourable Mrs. Harrington’s cousin, and offering what poor hospitality the Val d’Erraha had to dispense.

In a little island there is not very much to talk about, and the gossips of Majorca had soon laid hold of Fitz. They said that the English seÑorita up at the Casa d’Erraha had found a lover, and a fine, handsome one at that; else, they opined, why should this English sailor thrash his boat through any weather from Cuidadela in Minorca to Soller in Majorca, riding subsequently from that small and lovely town over the roughest country in the island to the Valley of Repose as if the devil were at his heels. That was only their way of saying it, for they knew as well as any of us that love in front can make us move more quickly than ever the devil from behind.

At Alcudia they watched his boat labour through the evil seas. The wind was never too boisterous for him, the waves never too high.

“It is,” they said, “the English mariner from Mahon going to see the SeÑorita Challoner. Ah! but he has a firm hand.”

And they smiled dreamily with their deep eyes, as knowing the malady themselves.

This time there had been two figures clad in black oilskins in the stern of the long white boat. Two horses had been ordered by cable to be ready at Soller instead of one. For Eve Challoner had telegraphed to her countrymen at Port Mahon when this strange and horrid numbness seized her father.

The sun was setting behind the distant line of the sea when Fitz and his companion urged their tired horses up the last slope to the Casa d’Erraha. Within the gateway Mrs. Baines, the only English servant in this English house, was awaiting them. She curtsied in an old-fashioned way to the doctor, who had not seen an Englishwoman’s face for two years and more, and asked him to follow her. Fitz did not offer to accompany them--indeed, he made it quite obvious that he did not want to do so. Two of the vague attendants who are always to be found in their numbers about the doorway and stableyard of a Spanish country-house took the horses, and Fitz wandered round the patio to the southern door which led to the terrace.

There was not very much change in Henry FitzHenry since we saw him in Mrs. Harrington’s drawing-room six years earlier. The promise of the boy had been fulfilled by the man, and here was a quiet Englishman, chiefly remarkable for a certain directness of purpose which was his, and seemed to pervade his being. Here was one who had commanded men--who had directed skilled labour for the six impressionable years of his life. And he who directs skilled labour is apt to differ in manner, in thought and habit, from him whose commands are obeyed mechanically.

The naval officer is a man of detail--he tells others to do that which they know he can do better himself.

They said on board the Kittiwake, which was a small ship, that Fitz,--“old” Fitz, they used to call him--was too big for a seafaring life. In height, he was nearly six feet--six feet of spare muscle and bone--such a man as one sees on the north-east coast of England, the east coast of Scotland, or the west coast of Norway - anywhere, in fact, where the Vikings passed.

The deep blue eyes had acquired a certain quiet which had been absent in the boyish face--the quiet that comes of a burden on the heart; of the certain knowledge that the burden can never be removed. Luke’s life was not the only one that had been spoiled by an examination paper. Examination papers have spoilt more lives than they have benefited. A twin brother is something more than a brother, and Fitz went through life as if one side of him was suffering a dull, aching pain. The face of this man walking alone on the terrace of the House of Repose was not happy. Perhaps it was too strong for complete happiness--some men are so, and others are too wise. This was the face, not of a very wise or a brilliant man, but of one who was strong and simple--something in the nature of a granite rock. Sandstone is more easily shaped into a thing of beauty, but it is also the sandstone that is worn by weather, while a deep mark cut on granite stays there till the end.

Fitz had no intention of going upstairs. He was not a man to take the initiative in social matters. His instinct told him that if Eve wanted him she would send for him. She had cabled to him to bring the doctor. He had brought the doctor, and now he went out on the terrace to “stand by,” as he put it to himself, for further orders. If, as the gossips averred, he was the SeÑorita’s lover, he deemed it wiser to relinquish that position just now.

As a matter of fact, however, no word of love had passed between them.

Fitz was standing by the low wall of the terrace looking down into the hazy, dim depths of the valley, when the further orders which he awaited came to him.

Hearing a light step on the pavement behind him, he turned, and faced Eve, who was running towards him.

“Will you come upstairs?” she said. “I think he wants to see you.”

“Certainly,” he answered.

She had hurried out, but they walked back rather slowly. Nevertheless, they did not seem to have anything to say to each other.

When they entered the room upstairs together, a faint little smile full of wisdom hovered for a second round the old priest’s clean-shaven lips.

The dying man had evidently wanted something or some one. The old priest knew human nature, hence the little shadowy smile called up by Eve’s transparently partial interpretation of her father’s desire.

Edward Challoner looked at him, but did not appear to recognise his face. It seemed that he had left the earth so far behind now that the faces of those walking on it were no longer distinguishable.

He gave a little half-pettish groan, and a stillness came over the room.

The old padre and the doctor, who did not know a word of any common language, exchanged a glance, and in a very business-like way, as of one whose trade it was, the priest got down upon his knees. Then the doctor, half-shyly, approached Eve, and taking her by the arm, led her gently out of the room.

Fitz stayed where he was, standing by the dead man, looking down at the priest’s bowed head, while the bell of the little chapel attached to the Casa d’Erraha told the valley that a good man had gone to his rest.

CHAPTER VI. AN ACTOR PASSES OFF THE STAGE.

We pass; the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds.

The priest was the first to speak.

“You are his friend, I also; but we are of different nations.”

He paused, drawing the sheet up over the dead man’s face.

“He was not of my Church. You have your ways; will you make the arrangements?”

“Yes,” replied Fitz simply, “if you like.”

“It is better so, my son”--the padre took a pinch of snuff--“because--he was not of my Church. You will stay here, you and your friend. She, the SeÑorita Eve, cannot be left alone, with her grief.”

He spoke Spanish, knowing that the Englishman understood it.

They drew down the blinds and passed out on to the terrace, where they walked slowly backwards and forwards, talking over the future of Eve and of the Casa d’Erraha.

In Spain, as in other southern lands, they speed the parting guest. Two days later Edward Challoner was laid beside his father and grandfather in the little churchyard in the valley below the Casa d’Erraha. And who are we that we should say that his chance of reaching heaven was diminished by the fact that part of the Roman Catholic burial service was read over him by a Spanish priest?

Fitz had telegraphed to Eve’s only living relative, Captain Bontnor, and Fitz it was who stayed on at the Casa d’Erraha until that mariner should arrive; for the doctor was compelled to return to his ship at Port Mahon, and the priest never slept in another but his own little vicarage house.

And in the Casa d’Erraha was enacted at this time one of those strange little comedies that will force themselves upon a tragic stage. Fitz deemed it correct that he should avoid Eve as much as possible, and Eve, on the other hand, feeling lonely and miserable, wanted the society of the simple-minded young sailor.

“Why do you always avoid me?” she asked suddenly on the evening after the funeral. He had gone out on to the terrace, and thither she followed him in innocent anger, without afterthought. She stood before him with her slim white hands clasped together, resting against her black dress, a sombre, slight young figure in the moonlight, looking at him with reproachful eyes.

He hesitated a second before answering her. She was only nineteen; she had been born and brought up in the Valley of Repose amidst the simple islanders. She knew nothing of the world and its ways. And Fitz, with the burden of the unique situation suddenly thrust upon him, was, in his chivalrous youthfulness, intensely anxious to avoid giving her anything to look back to in after years when she should be a woman. He was tenderly solicitous for the feelings which would come later, though they were absent now.

“Because,” he answered, “I am not good at saying things. I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am for you.”

She turned away and looked across to the hills at the other side of the valley, a rugged outline against the sky.

“But I know all that,” she said softly, “without being told.”

A queer smile passed over his sunburnt face, as if she had unintentionally and innocently made things more difficult for him.

“And,” she continued, “it is--oh, so lonely.”

She made an almost imperceptible little movement towards him. Like the child that she was, she was yearning for sympathy and comfort.
“I know--I know,” he said.

Outward circumstance was rather against Fitz. A clear, odorous Spanish night, the young moon rising behind the pines, a thousand dreamy tropic scents filling the air. And Eve, half tearful, wholly lovable, standing before him, innocently treading on dangerous ground, guilelessly asking him to love her.

She, having grown almost to womanhood, pure as the flowers of the field, ignorant, a child, knew nothing of what she was doing. She merely gave way to the instinct that was growing within her--the instinct that made her turn to this man, claiming his strength, his tenderness, his capability, as given to him for her use and for her happiness.

“You must not avoid me,” she said. “Why do you do it? Have I done anything you dislike? I have no one to speak to, no one who understands, but you. There is the padre, of course--and nurse; but they do not understand. They are--so old! Let me stay here with you until it is time to go to bed, will you?”

“Of course,” he answered quietly. “If you care to. To-morrow I should think we shall hear from your uncle. He may come by the boat sailing from Barcelona to-morrow night. It will be a good thing if he does; you see, I must get back to my ship.”

“You said she would not be ready for sea till next month.”

“No, but there is discipline to be thought of.”

He looked past her, up to the stars, with a scrutinising maritime eye, recognising them and naming them to himself. He did not meet her eyes--dangerous, tear-laden.

“There is something the matter with you,” she said. “You are different. Yes, you want my uncle to come the day after to-morrow--you want to go away to Mahon as soon as you can. I-- Oh, Fitz, I don’t want to be a coward!”

She stood in front of him, clenching her little fists, forcing back the tears that gleamed in the moonlight. He did not dare to cease his astronomical observations.

“I won’t be a coward--if you will only speak. If you will tell me what it is.”

Then Fitz told his first deliberate lie.

“I have had bad news,” he said, “about my brother Luke. I am awfully anxious about him.”

He did it very well; for his motive was good. And we may take it that such a lie as this is not writ very large in the Book.

The girl paused for a little, and then deliberately wiped the tears from her eyes.

“How horribly selfish I have been!” she said. “Why did you not tell me sooner? I have only been thinking of my own troubles ever since--ever since poor papa-- I am a selfish wretch! I hate myself! Tell me about your brother.”

And so they walked slowly up and down the moss-grown terrace--alone in this wonderful tropic night--while he told her the little tragedy of his life. He told the story simply, with characteristic gaps in the sequence, which she was left to fill up from her imagination.

“I shall not like Mrs. Harrington,” said Eve, when the story was told. “I am glad that she cannot come much into my life. My father wanted me to go and stay with her last summer, but I would not leave him alone, and for some reason he would not accept the invitation for himself. Do you know, Fitz, I sometimes think there is a past--some mysterious past--which contained my father and Mrs. Harrington and a man--the Count de Lloseta.”

“I have seen him,” put in Fitz, “at Mrs. Harrington’s often.”

The girl nodded her head with a quaint little assumption of shrewdness and deep suspicion.

“My father admired him--I do not know why. And pitied him intensely--I do not know why.”

“He was always very nice to me,” answered Fitz, “but I never understood him.”

Talking thus they forgot the flight of time. It sometimes happens thus in youth. And the huge clock in the stable yard striking ten aroused Eve suddenly to the lateness of the hour.

“I must go,” she said. “I am glad you told me about--Luke. I feel as if I knew you better and understood - a little more. Good-night.”

She left him on the terrace, and walked sorrowfully away to the house which could never be the same again.

Fitz watched her slight young form disappear through an open doorway, and then he became lost in the contemplation of the distant sea, lying still and glass-like in the moonlight. He was looking to the north, and it happened that from that same point of the compass there was coming towards him the good steamer Bellver, on whose deck stood a little shock-headed man--Captain Bontnor.

There is a regular service of steamers to and from the Island of Majorca to the mainland, and, in addition, steamers make voyages when pressure of traffic may demand. The Bellver was making one of these supplemental journeys, and her arrival was not looked for at Palma.

Eve and Fitz were having breakfast alone in the gloomy room overshadowed by the trailing wings of the Angel of Death, when the servant announced a gentleman to see the seÑorita. The seÑorita requested that the gentleman might approach, and presently there stood in the doorway the quaintest little figure imaginable.

Captain Bontnor, with a certain sense of the fitness of things, had put on his best clothes for this occasion, and it happened that the most superior garment in his wardrobe was a thick pilot-jacket, which stood out from his square person with solid angularity. He had brushed his hair very carefully, applying water to compass a smoothness which had been his life-long and hitherto unattained aim. His shock hair--red turning to grey--stood up four inches from his honest, wrinkled face. It was unfortunate that his best garments should have been purchased for the amenities of a northern climate. His trousers were as stiff as his jacket, and he wore a decorous black silk tie as large as a counterpane.

He stood quaintly bowing in the doorway, his bright blue eyes veiled with shyness and a pathetic dumb self-consciousness.

“Please come in,” said Eve in Spanish, quite at a loss as to who this might be.

Then Fitz had an inspiration. Something of the sea seemed to be wafted from the older to the younger sailor.

“Are you Captain Bontnor?” he asked, rising from the table.

“Yes, sir, yes! That’s my name!”

He stood nervously in the doorway, mistrusting the parquet-floor, mistrusting himself, mistrusting everything.

Fitz went towards him holding out his hand, which the captain took after a manfully repressed desire to wipe his own broad palm on the seam of his trousers.

“Then you are my uncle?” said Eve, coming forward.

“Yes, miss, I’m afraid--that is--yes, I’m your uncle. You see--I’m only a rough sort of fellow.”

He came a little nearer and held his arms apart, looking down at his own person in humble deprecation.

Eve was holding out her hand. He took it with a vague, deep-rooted chivalry, and she, stooping, very deliberately kissed him.

This seemed rather to bewilder the captain, for he shook hands again with Fitz.

“I-- ” he began, nodding into Fitz’s face. “You are--eh? I didn’t expect--to see--I didn’t know--”

At that moment Eve saw. It came to her in a flash, as most things do come to women. She even had time to doubt the story about Luke.

“This,” she said, with crimson cheeks, “is Mr. FitzHenry of the Kittiwake. He kindly came to us in our trouble. You will have to thank him afterwards--uncle.”

“And in the meantime I expect you want breakfast?” put in Fitz, carefully avoiding Eve.

“Yes,” added the girl, “of course. Sit down. No, here!”

“Thankye--thankye, miss--my dear, I mean. Oh, anything’ll do for me. A bit of bread and a cup o’ tea. I had a bit and a sup on board before she sheered alongside the quay.”

He looked round rather helplessly, wondering where he should put his hat--a solid, flat-crowned British affair. Eve took it from him and laid it aside.

Captain Bontnor sat very stiffly down. His square form did not seem to lose any of its height by the change of position, and with a stiff back he looked admiringly round the room, waiting like a child at a school treat.

As the meal progressed he grew more at ease, telling them of the little difficulties of his journey, avoiding with a tact not always found inside a better coat all mention of the sad event which had caused him to take this long journey after his travelling days were done.

That which set him at ease more than all else was the fact, at length fully grasped, that Fitz was, like himself, a sailor. Here at least was a topic upon which he could converse with any man. General subjects only were discussed, as if by tacit consent. No mention was made of the future until this was somewhat rudely brought before their notice by the announcement that a second visitor desired to see the seÑorita.

With a more assured manner than that of his predecessor, a small, dark man came into the room, throwing off his cloak and handing it to the servant. He bowed ceremoniously and with true Spanish grace to Eve, with less ceremony and more dignity to the two men.

“I beg that your excellency will accept the sympathy of my deepest heart,” he said. “I regret to trouble you so soon after the great loss sustained by your excellency, indeed, by the whole island of Majorca. But it is a matter of business. Such things cannot be delayed. Have I your excellency’s permission to proceed?”

“Certainly, seÑor.”

The man’s clean-shaven face was like a mask. The expressions seemed to come and go as if worked by machinery. Sympathy was turned off, and in its place Polite-Attention-to-Business appeared. From under his arm he drew a leather portfolio, which he placed upon the table.

“The affairs of the late Cavalier Challoner were perhaps known to your excellency?”

“No; I knew nothing of my father’s affairs.”

Sympathy seemed to be struggling behind “Polite-Attention-to-Business,” while for a moment a real look of distress flitted over the parchment face. He paused for an instant, reflecting while he assorted his papers.

“I am,” he said, “the lawyer of his excellency the Count de Lloseta.”

Eve and Fitz exchanged a glance, and as silence was kept the lawyer went on.

“Three generations ago,” he said, “a Count de Lloseta, the grandfather of this present excellency, made over on ‘rotas’ the estate and house known as the Val d’Erraha to the grandfather of the late Cavalier Challoner--a Captain Challoner, one of Admiral Byng’s men.”

Again he paused, arranging his papers.

“The Majorcan system ‘rotas’ is known to your excellency?”

“No, seÑor.”

“On this system an estate is made over for one or two or three generations by the proprietor to the lessee who farms or sublets the land, and in lieu of rent hands over to the proprietor a certain proportion of the crops. Does your excellency follow me?”

Eve did not answer at once. Then the lawyer’s meaning seemed to dawn upon her.

“Then,” she said, “the Casa d’Erraha never belonged to my father?”

“Never”--with a grave bow.

“And I have nothing--nothing at all! I am penniless?”

The lawyer looked from her to Fitz, who was standing beside her listening to the conversation, but not offering to take part in it.

“Unless your excellency has private means--in England, perhaps.”

“I do not know--I know nothing. And we must leave the Casa d’Erraha. When, seÑor? Tell me when.”

The lawyer avoided her distressed eyes.

“Well,” he said slowly, “the law is rather summary. I--your excellency understands I only do my duty. I am not the principal. I have no authority whatever--except the law.”

“You mean that I must go at once?”

The lawyer’s parchment face was generously expressive of grief now.

“Excellency, the lease terminated at the death of the late Caballero Challoner.”

Eve stood for a moment, breathing hard. Fate seemed suddenly to have turned against her at every point. At this moment Captain Bontnor made bold--one could see him doing it--to take her hand.

“My dear,” he said, “I don’t quite understand what this foreign gentleman and you are talkin’ about. But if it’s trouble, dear, if it’s trouble--just let me try.”

CHAPTER VII. IN THE STREET OF THE PEACE.

Measure thy life by loss instead of gain,
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth.

“MY DEAR MISS CHALLONER,--I learn that you are in Barcelona, and at the same time I find with some indignation that my lawyer in Mallorca, with a deplorable excess of zeal, has been acting without my orders in respect to the property of the Val d’Erraha. I hasten to place myself and possessions at your disposition, and take the liberty of writing to request an interview, instead of calling on you at your hotel, for reasons which you will readily understand, knowing as you do the gossiping ways of hotels. As an old friend of your father’s, and one who moved and lived in neighbourly intercourse with him before your birth, and before the deplorable death of your mother, I now waive ceremony, and beg that you and your uncle will come and take tea with me this afternoon at my humble abode in the ‘Calle de la Paz.’--Believe me, dear Miss Challoner, yours very sincerely,
“CIPRIANI DE LLOSETA DE MALLORCA.”

Eve read this letter in her room in the Hotel of the Four Nations at Barcelona. She had only been on the mainland twenty-four hours when it was delivered to her by a servant of the Count’s, who came to her apartment and delivered it into her own hands, as is the custom of Spanish servants.

Eve Challoner had grown older during the last few days. She had been brought face to face with life as it really is, and not as we dream it in the dreams of youth. She was not surprised to receive this letter, although she had no idea that the Count de Lloseta was in Spain. But the varying emotions of the last week had, as it were, undermined the confident hopefulness with which we look forward when we are young, and sometimes when we are old, to the management of our own lives here below. She was beginning to understand certain terms which she had heard applied to human existence, and to which she had hitherto attached no special meaning as relating to herself. More especially did she understand at this time that life may be compared to a stream, for she was vaguely conscious of drifting she knew not whither.

Fitz had come suddenly into her life; Captain Bontnor had come into it; and now this man, Cipriani de Lloseta, seemed to be asserting his right to come into it too. And she did not know quite what to do with them all. She had never, in the quiet, dreamy days of her youth, pictured a life with any of these men in it, and the future was suddenly tremendous, unfathomable. There were vast possibilities in it of misery, of danger, of difficulty; and behind these a vague, new feeling of a possible happiness far exceeding the happiness of her peaceful childhood.

Without consulting her uncle, who had gone out into the street to walk backwards and forwards before the door, as he had walked backwards and forwards on his deck for forty years, she sat down and accepted the Count’s informal invitation. She seemed to do it without reflection, as if impelled thereto by something stronger than pro or con, as if acknowledging the Spaniard’s right to come into her life, bringing to bear upon it an influence which she never attempted to fathom.

Thus it came about that Eve and Captain Bontnor found themselves awaiting their host in the massive, gloomy drawing-room of the Palace in the Calle de la Paz at five o’clock that afternoon.

Captain Bontnor had learnt a great deal during the last few days; among other things he had learnt to love his niece with a simple, dog-like devotion, which had a vein of pathos in it for those who see such things. He placed himself well behind Eve, and looked around him with a wondering awe.

“I think, my dear,” he said, “that it would have been better if you had come alone. I--you know I am getting too old to learn manners now--eh--he! he! Yes. Having been so long at sea, you know.”

“I think the sea teaches men manners, uncle,” said Eve, with a little smile which he did not understand. “At any rate,” she went on, touching his rough sleeve affectionately, “it teaches them something that I like.”

“Does it, now? What, now? Tell me.”

“I do not know,” answered the girl, as if speaking to herself, and at this moment the door was opened. The man who came in was of medium height, with a long, narrow face, and singularly patient eyes.

“I should have known you,” he said, approaching Eve, and holding out his hand. “You do not remember your mother? I do, however. You are like her--and she was a good woman. And this is Captain Bontnor--your uncle.”

He shook hands with the old sailor without the faintest flicker of surprise at his somewhat incongruous appearance.

“I am glad,” he said suavely, “to make Captain Bontnor’s acquaintance.”

He turned to draw forward a chair, and the light from the high, barred window falling full on his head, betrayed the fact that his hair, close cut as an English soldier’s, was touched and flecked with grey. His lithe youthfulness of frame rather surprised Eve, who knew him to be a contemporary of her father’s.

“It is very good of you to come,” he went on in a low voice. “I took the privilege of the elder generation, you see! Captain, pray take that chair.”

He did the honours with a British ease of manner, strangely touched by a Spanish dignity.

“When I heard of your great bereavement,” he said, turning to Eve with a grave bow, “I ought perhaps to have gone to Mallorca at once to offer you what poor assistance was in my power. But circumstances, over which I had no control, prevented my doing so. My offer of help is tardy, I know, but it is none the less sincere.”

“Thank you,” replied Eve, conscious of a feeling of pleasant reliance in this new-found ally. “But I have good friends - the Padre Fortis, my uncle, and--a friend of ours, Mr. FitzHenry.”

“Of the Kittiwake--at Mahon?”

“Yes.”

“I have the pleasure of knowing Mr. FitzHenry,” murmured the Count. “Now,” he said, with a sudden smile which took her by surprise by reason of the alteration it made in the whole man, “will you do me a great favour?”

“I should like to,” answered Eve, with some hesitation.

“And you?” said the Count, turning to Captain Bontnor.

“Oh yes,” replied that sailor bluntly, “if it’s possible.”

“I want you,” continued the Count de Lloseta, “to forget that this is the first time we meet, and to look upon me as a friend--one of the most intimate--of your father.”

“My father,” said the girl, “always spoke of you as such.”

“Indeed, I am glad of that. Now, tell me, who have you in the world besides Captain Bontnor?”

“I have no one. But--”

“We was thinking,” put in the Captain, in ungrammatical haste, “that Eve would come and live with me. It isn’t a grand house--just a little cottage. But such as it is, she’ll have a kindly welcome.”

“And, I have no doubt, a happy home”, added the Count, with one of his dark smiles. “I was merely wondering whether Miss Challoner intended to live in the Casa d’Erraha or to let it?”‘

Eve looked up in surprise, and Captain Bontnor’s blue eyes wandered from her face to the dark and courteous countenance of Cipriani de Lloseta.

“Perhaps,” continued the Spaniard imperturbably, “you have not yet made up your mind on the subject.”

“But the Casa d’Erraha does not belong to me,” said Eve, and Captain Bontnor wagged his head in confirmation. “Your own lawyer explained to me that my father only held it on ‘rotas.’”

“My own lawyer, my dear young lady, thereby proved himself an ass.”

“But,” said Eve, somewhat mystified, “the Val d’Erraha belongs to you, and you must know it. I have no title-deeds--I have nothing.”

“Except possession, which is nine points of the law. Will you take tea, and cream? I do not know how many points the law has, but one would naturally conclude that nine is a large proportion of the whole.”

While he spoke he was pouring out the tea. He handed a cup to her with a grave smile, as if the matter under discussion were one of a small and passing importance.

“I suppose,” he added, “you have learnt to love the Casa d’Erraha. It is a place--a place one might easily become attached to. Do you know”--he turned his back to her, busying himself with the silver teapot--“Lloseta?” he added jerkily.

“Yes. My father and I used to go there very often.”

“Ah--” He waited--handing Captain Bontnor a cup of tea in silence. But Eve was not thinking of Lloseta; she was thinking of the Casa d’Erraha.

“My father did not speak to me of his affairs,” she said. “He was naturally rather reserved, and--and it was very sudden.”

“Yes. So I learnt. That indeed is my excuse for intruding myself upon your notice at this time. I surmised that my poor friend’s affairs had been left in some confusion. He was too thorough a gentleman to be competent in affairs. I thought that perhaps my small influence and my diminutive knowledge of Majorcan law--the Roman law, in point of fact--might be of some use to you.”

“Thank you,” she answered; “I think we settled everything before we left the island, although we did not see SeÑor PeÑa, your lawyer. I--the Casa d’Erraha belongs to you!” she added, suddenly descending to feminine reiteration.

“Prove it,” said the Count quietly.

“I cannot do that.”

He shrugged his shoulders with a smile.

“Then,” he said, “I am afraid you cannot shift your responsibility to my shoulders.”

The girl looked at him with puzzled young eyes. He stood before her, dignified, eminently worthy of the great name he bore--a solitary, dark-eyed, inscrutable man, whose whole being subtly suggested hopelessness and an empty life. She shook her head.

“But I cannot accept the Casa d’Erraha on those terms.”

The Count drew forward a chair and sat down.

“Listen,” he said, with an explanatory forefinger upheld. “Three generations ago two men made a verbal agreement in respect to the estate of the Val d’Erraha. To-day no one knows what that agreement was. It may have been the ordinary ‘rotas’ of Minorca. It may not. In those days the English held Minorca; my ancestor may therefore have been indebted to your great-grandfather, for we have some small estates in Minorca. You know what the islands are to-day. They are two hundred years behind Northern Europe. What must they have been a hundred and twenty years ago? We have no means of finding out what passed between your great-grandfather and my grandfather. We only know that three generations of Challoners have lived in the Casa d’Erraha, paying to the Counts of Lloseta a certain proportion of the product of the estate. I do not mind telling you that the smallness of that proportion does away with the argument that the agreement was the ordinary ‘rotas’ of the Baleares. We know nothing--we can prove nothing. If you claimed the estate I might possibly wrest it from you--not by proof, but merely because the insular prejudice against a foreigner would militate against you in a Majorcan court of law. I cannot legally force you to hold the estate of the Val d’Erraha. I can only ask you as the daughter of one of my best friends to accept the benefit of a very small doubt.”

Eve hesitated. What woman would not?

Captain Bontnor set down his cup very gravely on the table.

“I don’t rightly understand,” he said sturdily, “this ‘rotas’ business. But it seems to me pretty plain that the estate never belonged to my late brother-in-law. Now what I say is, if the place belongs by right to Miss Challoner she’ll take it. If it don’t; well, then it don’t, and she can’t accept it as a present from anybody. Much obliged to you all the same.”

The Count laughed pleasantly.

“My dear sir, it is not a present.”

The Captain stuffed his hands very deeply into his pockets.

“Then it’s worse--it’s charity. And she has no need of that. Thank ye all the same,” he replied.

He stared straight in front of him with a vague and rather painful suggestion of incapability that sometimes came over him. He was wondering whether he was doing right in this matter.

“If,” he added, half to himself, as a sort of afterthought on the crying question of ways and means--“if it comes to that, I can go to sea again. There’s plenty would be ready to give me a ship.”

The Count was still smiling.

“There is no question,” he said, “of charity. What has Miss Challoner done that I should offer her that? I am in ignorance as to her affairs. I do not know the extent of her income.”

“As far as we can make out,” said Eve gently, “there is nothing. But I can work. I thought that my knowledge of Spanish might enable me to make a living.”

“No,” said Captain Bontnor, “I’m d--- I mean I should not like you to go governessing, my dear.”

The Count was apparently reflecting.

“I have a compromise to propose,” he said, addressing himself to Eve. “If we place the property in the hands of a third person--you know the value of land in Majorca--to farm and tend; if at the end of each year the profits be divided between us?”

But Eve’s suspicions were aroused, and her woman’s instinct took her further than did Captain Bontnor’s sturdy sense of right and wrong.

“I am afraid,” she said, rising from her chair, “that I must refuse. I--I think I understand why papa always spoke of you as he did. I am very grateful to you. I know now that you have been trying to give me D’Erraha. It was a generous thing to do--a most generous thing. I think people would hardly believe me if I told them. I can only thank you; for I have no possible means of proving to you how deeply I feel it. Somehow”--she paused, with tears and a sad little smile in her eyes--“somehow it is not the gift that I appreciate so much as - as your way of trying to give it.”

The Spaniard spread out his two hands in deprecation.

“My child,” he murmured gently, “I have not another word to say.”

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!

A howling gale of wind from the south-east, and driving snow and darkness. The light of Cap Grisnez struggling out over the blackness of the Channel, and the two Foreland lights twinkling feebly from their snow-clad heights. A night to turn in one’s bed with a sleepy word of thanksgiving that one has a bed to turn in, and no pressing need to turn out of it.

The smaller fry of Channel shipping have crept into Dungeness or the Downs. Some of them have gone to the bottom. Two of them are breaking up on the Goodwins.

The Croonah Indian liner is pounding into it all, with white decks and whistling shrouds. The passengers are below in their berths. Some of them--and not only the ladies--are sending up little shamefaced supplications to One who watches over the traveller in all places and at all times.

And on the bridge of the Croonah a man all eyes and stern resolve and maritime instinct. A man clad in his thickest clothes, and over all of them his black oilskins. A man with three hundred lives depending upon his keen eyes, his knowledge, and his judgment. A man whose name is Luke FitzHenry.

The captain has gone below for a few minutes to thaw, leaving the ship to FitzHenry. He does it with an easy conscience--as easy, that is, as the maritime conscience can well be in a gale of wind, with the Foreland lights ahead and infinite possibilities all around. The captain drinks his whisky and hot water with a certain slow appreciation of the merits of that reprehensible solution, and glances at the aneroid barometer on the bulkhead of his cabin.

Overhead, on the spidery bridge, far up in the howling night, Luke FitzHenry, returning from the enervating tropics, stares sternly into the night, heedless of the elemental warfare. For Luke FitzHenry has a grudge against the world, and people who have that take a certain pleasure in evil weather.

“The finest sailor that ever stepped,” reflects the captain of his second officer--and he no mean mariner himself.

The Croonah had groped her way up Channel through a snowstorm of three days’ duration, and the brunt of it had fallen by right of seniority on the captain and his second officer. Luke FitzHenry was indefatigable, and, better still, he was without enthusiasm. Here was the steady, unflinching combativeness which alone can master the elements. Here was the true genius of the sea.

With his craft at his fingers’ ends, Luke had that instinct of navigation by which some men seem to find their way upon the trackless waters. There are sailors who are no navigators just as there are hunting men who cannot ride. There are navigators who will steer you from London to Petersburg without taking a sight, from the Thames to the Suez Canal without looking at their sextant. Such a sailor as this was Luke FitzHenry. Perfectly trained, he assimilated each item of experience with an insatiable greed for knowledge--and it was all maritime knowledge. He was a sailor and nothing else. But it is already something--as they say in France--to be a good sailor.

Luke FitzHenry was a man of middle height, sturdy, with broad shoulders and a slow step. His clean-shaven face was a long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes--eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face--a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke’s lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who worked with him feared him, and in so doing learnt the habit of his ways. The steersman, with one eye on the binnacle, knew always where to find him with the other; for Luke hardly moved during his entire watch on deck. He took his station at the starboard end of the narrow bridge when he came on duty, and from that spot he rarely moved. These little things betray a man, if one only has the patience to piece them together.

Those who go down to the sea in ships, and even those who take their pleasure on the great water, know the relative merits of the man who goes to his post and stays there, and of him who is all over the ship and restless.

Luke was standing now like a statue--black and gleaming amid the universal grey of the winter night, and his deep eyes, cat-like, pierced the surrounding gloom.

Here was a man militant. A man who must needs be fighting something, and Fate, with unusual foresight, had placed him in a position to fight Nature. Luke FitzHenry rather revelled in a night such as this - the gloom, the horror, and the patent danger of it suited his morose, combative nature. He loved danger and difficulty with the subtle form of love which a fighting man experiences for a relentless foe.

From light to light he pushed his intrepid way through the darkness and the bewildering intricacies of the Downs, and in due time, in the full sunlight of the next day, the Croonah sidled alongside the quay in the Tilbury Dock. The passengers, with their new lives before them, stumbled ashore, already forgetting the men who, smoke-begrimed and weary, had carried these lives within their hands during the last month or more. They crowded down the gangway and left Luke to go to his cabin.

There were two letters lying on the little table. One from Fitz at Mahon, the other in a handwriting which Luke had almost forgotten. He turned it over with the subtle smile of a man who has a grudge against women. But he opened it before the other.

“DEAR LUKE,--I am glad to hear from Fitz that you are making your way in the Merchant Service. He tells me that your steamer, the Croonah, has quite a reputation on the Indian route, and your fellow-officers are all gentlemen. I shall be pleased to see you to dinner the first evening you have at your disposal. I dine at seven-thirty.--Believe me, yours very truly, MARIAN HARRINGTON.

“P.S.--I shall deem it a favour if you will come in dress clothes, as I have visitors.”

And, strange to say, it was the feminine stab in the postscript that settled the matter. Luke sat down and wrote out a telegram at once, accepting Mrs. Harrington’s invitation for the same evening.

When he rang the bell of the great house in Grosvenor Gardens at precisely half-past seven that evening, he was conscious of a certain sense of elation. He was quite sure of himself.

He thought that the large drawing-room was empty when the butler ushered him into it, and some seconds elapsed before he discerned the form of a young lady in a deep chair near the fire.

The girl turned her head and rose from the chair with a smile and a certain grace of manner which seemed in some indefinite way to have been put on with her evening dress. For a moment Luke gazed at her, taken aback. Then he bowed gravely, and she burst into a merry laugh.

“How funny!” she cried. “You do not know me?”

“No-o-o,” he answered, searching his mind. For he was a passenger sailor, and many men and women crossed his path during the year.

She came forward with a coquettish little laugh and placed herself beneath the gas, inviting his inspection, sure of herself, confident in her dressmaker.

She was small and very upright, with a peculiarly confident carriage of the head, which might indicate determination or, possibly, a mere resolution to get her money’s worth. Her hair, perfectly dressed, was of the colour of a slow-worm. She called it fair. Her enemies said it reminded them of snakes. Her eyes were of a darker shade of ashen grey, verging on hazel. Her mouth was mobile, with thin lips and an expressive corner--the left-hand corner - and at this moment it suggested pert inquiry. Some people thought she had an expressive face, but then some people are singularly superficial in their mode of observation. There was really no power of expressing any feeling in the small, delicately cut face. It all lay in the mouth, in the left-hand corner thereof.

“Well?” she said, and Luke’s wonder gradually faded into admiration.

“I give it up,” he answered.

She shrugged her shoulders in pretended disgust.

“You are not polite,” she said, with a glance at his stalwart person which might have indicated that there were atoning merits. “I must say you are not polite, Luke. I do not think I will tell you. It would be still more humiliating to learn that you have forgotten my existence.”

“You cannot be Agatha!” he exclaimed.

“Can I not? It happens that I am Agatha Ingham-Baker - at your service!”

She swept him a low curtsey and sailed away to the mantelpiece, thereby giving him the benefit of the exquisite fit of her dress. She stood with one arm on the mantel-shelf, looking back at him over her shoulder, summing him up with a little introspective nod.

“I should like to know why I cannot be Agatha,” she asked, with that keen feminine scent for a personality which leads to the uttering of so much nonsense, and the brewing of so much mischief.

“I never thought--” he began.

“Yes?”

He laughed and refused to go any farther, although she certainly made the way easy for him.

“In fact,” she said mockingly, “you are disappointed. You never expected me to turn out such a horrid--”

“You know it isn’t that,” he interrupted, with a flash of his gloomy eyes.

“Not now,” she said quietly, glancing towards the door. “I hear Mrs. Harrington coming downstairs. You can tell me afterwards.”

Luke turned on his heel and greeted Mrs. Harrington with quite a pleasant smile, which did not belong to her by rights, but to the girl behind him.

Fitz had been away for two years. Mrs. Harrington in making overtures of peace to Luke had been prompted by the one consistent motive of her life, self-gratification. She was tired of the obsequious society of persons like the Ingham-Bakers, whom she mentally set down as parasites. There is a weariness of the flesh that comes to rich women uncontrolled. They weary of their own power. Tyranny palls. Mrs. Harrington was longing to be thwarted by some one stronger than herself. The FitzHenrys even in their boyhood had, by their sturdy independence, their simple, seamanlike self-assertion, touched some chord in this lone woman’s heart which would not vibrate to cringing fingers.

She had sent for Luke because Fitz was away. She wanted to be thwarted. She would have liked to be bullied. And also there was that subtle longing for the voice, the free gesture, the hearty manliness of one whose home is on the sea.

As Luke turned to greet her with the rare smile on his face he was marvellously like Fitz. He was well dressed. There was not the slightest doubt that this was a gentleman. Nay, more, he looked distinguished. And above all, he carried himself like a sailor. So the reconciliation was sudden and therefore complete. A reconciliation to be complete must be sudden. It is too delicate a thing to bear handling.

Luke had come intending to curse. He began to feel like staying to bless. He was quite genial and pleasant, greeting Mrs. Ingham-Baker as an old friend, and thereby distinctly upsetting that lady’s mental equilibrium. She had endeavoured to prevent this meeting, because she thought it was not fair to Fitz. She noted the approval with which Mrs. Harrington’s keen eyes rested on the young sailor, and endeavoured somewhat obviously to draw Agatha’s attention to it by frowns and heavily significant nods, which her dutiful daughter ignored.

Mrs. Harrington glanced impatiently at the clock.

“That stupid Count is late,” she said.

“Is the Count de Lloseta coming?” asked Mrs. Ingham-Baker eagerly.

From the strictly impartial standpoint of a mother she felt sure that the Count admired Agatha.

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Harrington, with a cynical smile.

And Mrs. Ingham-Baker, heedless of the sarcasm, was already engaged in an exhaustive examination of Agatha’s dress. She crossed the room and delicately rectified some microscopic disorder of the snake-like hair. With a final glance up and down, she crossed her arms at her waist and looked complacently towards the door.

The Count came in, and failed to realise the hope that apparently buoyed Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s maternal heart. He did not strike an attitude or cover his dazzled eyes when they rested on Agatha. He merely came forward with his gravest smile and uttered the pleasant fictions appropriate to the occasion. Mrs. Ingham-Baker was marked in her gracious reception of the Spaniard, and the hostess watched her effusions with a queer little smile.

At dinner Mrs. Ingham-Baker was opposite to the Count, who seemed preoccupied and somewhat absent-minded. Her attention was divided between an anticipatory appreciation of Mrs. Harrington’s cook and an evident admiration for her own daughter.

“Agatha was just saying,” observed the stout lady between the candle shades, “that we had not seen the Count de Lloseta for quite a long time. Only yesterday, was it not, dear?”

Agatha acquiesced.

“The loss,” answered the Count, “is mine. But it is more than made good by the news that my small absence was noted. I have been abroad.”

Mrs. Harrington at the end of the table looked up sharply, and a few drops of soup fell from her upraised spoon with a splash.

“In Spain?” she asked.

“In Spain.”

CHAPTER IX. CUT FOR PARTNERS.

Beware equally of a sudden friend and a slow enemy.

A wise man had said of Cipriani de Lloseta that had he not been a Count he would have been a great musician. He had that singular facility with any instrument which is sometimes given to musical persons in recompense for voicelessness. The Count spoke like one who could sing, but his throat was delicate, and so the world lost a great singer. Of most instruments he spoke with a half-concealed contempt. But of the violin he said nothing. He was not a man to turn the conversational overflow upon self-evident facts.

He invariably brought his violin to Grosvenor Gardens when Mrs. Harrington invited him, in her commanding way, to dine. It amused Mrs. Harrington to accompany his instrument on the piano. Her music was of the accompanying order. It was heartless and correct. Some of us, by the way, have friends of this same order, and, like Mrs. Harrington’s music, they are not in themselves either interesting or pleasant.

The piano stood in the inner drawing-room, and thither the Count and Mrs. Harrington repaired when the gentlemen had joined the ladies. In the larger drawing-room Luke was fortunate enough to secure a seat near to Agatha--quite near, and a long way from Mrs. Ingham-Baker, digestively asleep in an armchair.

He did not exactly know how this arrangement was accomplished--it seemed to come. Possibly Agatha knew.

Mrs. Harrington struck a keynote and began playing the prelude of a piece well known to them both.

“Why did you not tell me that you were going to Spain?” she asked somewhat tersely, under cover of her own chords.

“Had I known that it would interest you--” murmured De Lloseta, tightening his bow. There was a singular gleam in his eye. The gleam that one sees in the eye of a dog which has been thrashed, telling the wise that one day the dog will turn.

“I am always interested,” said the grey lady slowly, “in Spain--and even in Mallorca.”

She used the Spanish name of the island with the soft roll in the throat that English people rarely acquire. He was prepared for it, standing with raised bow, looking past her iron-grey head to the music. She glanced back over her shoulder into his face with the cruel cat-like love of torture that some people possess. Far away in the distant wisdom of Providence it had been decreed that this woman should have no child less clever than herself to tease into hopelessness.

The Spaniard laid his magic bow to the strings, leaving her to follow. He tucked the violin against his collar with a little caressing motion of his chin, and in a few moments he seemed to forget all else than the voice of the instrument. There are a few musicians who can give to a violin the power of speech. They can make the instrument tell some story--not a cheery tale, but rather like the story that dogs tell us sometimes--a story which seems to have a sequence of its own, and to be quite intelligible to its teller; but to us it is only comprehensible in part, like a tale that is told dramatically in a tongue unknown.

The Count stood up and played with no fine frenzy, no rolling eyes, no swaying form; for such are the signs of a hopeless effort, hung out by the man who has heard the story and tries in vain to tell it himself.

Even Agatha was outdone, for Luke drifted off into absent-mindedness, and after a little effort she left him to return at his own time. She listened to the music herself, but it did not seem to touch her. For sound ascends, and this was already above Agatha Ingham-Baker’s head. The piece over, Mrs. Harrington selected another.

“You did not go across to Mallorca?” she inquired, in a voice that did not reach the other room. “No,” he answered, “I did not go across to Mallorca.”

He stepped back a pace to move a chair which was too near to him, and the movement made it impossible for her to continue the conversation without raising her voice. She countered at once by rising and laying the music aside.

“I am too tired for more,” she said. “You must ask Agatha to accompany you. She plays beautifully. I have it from her mother!”

Mrs. Harrington stood for a moment looking into the other room. Luke and Agatha were talking together with some animation.

“I have been very busy lately,” she said conversationally. “Perhaps you have failed to notice that I have had this room redecorated?”

He looked round the apartments with a smile, which somehow conveyed a colossal contempt. “Very charming,” he said.

“It was done by a good man and cost a round sum.” She paused, looking at him with a mocking glance. “In fact, I am rather in need of money. My balance at the bank is not so large as I could wish.”

The Count’s dark eyes rested on her face with the small gleam in their depths which has already been noted.

“I am not good at money matters,” he said. “But, so far as I recollect, you have already exceeded our--”

“Possibly.”

“And, unless my memory plays me false, there was a distinct promise that this should not occur again. Perhaps a lady’s promise--”

“Possibly.”

The Count contented himself with a derisive laugh beneath his breath, and waited for her to speak again. This she did as she moved towards the other room.

“I think five hundred pounds would suffice--at present. Agatha,” she continued, raising her voice, “come and play the Count’s accompaniment. He finds fault with me to-night.”

“No. I only suggested a little piÙ lento! You take it too fast.”

“Ah! Well, I want to talk to Luke. Come, Agatha.”

“I tremble at the thought of my own temerity,” said Miss Ingham-Baker, as she seated herself on a music-stool with a great rustle of silks and considerable play of her white arms.

“Are you bold?” inquired the Count, with impenetrable suavity.

“I am--to attempt your accompaniments. I expect to be found fault with.”

“It will at all events be a novelty,” he answered, setting the music in order.

The Spaniard opened the music-book and indicated the page. Agatha dashed at it with characteristic confidence, and the voice of the violin came singing softly into the melody. It was a better performance than the last. Agatha’s playing was much less correct, but as she went on she forgot herself, and she put something into the accompaniment which Mrs. Harrington had left out. It was not time, neither was it a stricter attention to the composer’s instructions. It was only a possibility, after all.

In the other room Mrs. Ingham-Baker slumbered still. Mrs. Harrington, unmoved in her grey silk dress, was talking with her usual incisiveness, and Luke was listening gravely. When the piece was done, Mrs. Harrington said over her shoulder--

“Go on. You get on splendidly together.”

And she returned to her conversation with Luke.

The Count looked through his music.

“How devoted she is to her nephews!” said Agatha, tapping the ivory keyboard with a dainty finger.

“Yes.”

“And apparently to both alike.”

There was a little flicker beneath the Count’s lowered eyelids.

“Apparently so,” he answered, with assumed hesitation.

Agatha continued playfully, tapping the ivory notes with her middle finger--the others being gracefully curled.

“You speak as if you doubted the impartiality.”

“I am happy to say I always doubt a woman’s impartiality.”

She laughed and drew the stool nearer to the piano. It would have been easier to drift away into the conversational channel of vague generality which he opened up. He waited with some curiosity.

“Do you think there is a preference?” she said, falling into his small trap.

“Ah! There you ask me something that is beyond my poor powers of discrimination. Mrs. Harrington does not wear her feelings on her sleeve. She is difficult.”

“Very,” admitted Agatha, with a little sigh.

“I am naturally interested in the FitzHenrys,” she went on after a little pause, with baffling frankness. “You see, we were children together.”

“So I understand. I too am interested in them--merely because I like them.”

“I am afraid,” continued Agatha, tentatively turning the pages of the music which he had set before her, speaking as if she was only half thinking of what she was saying--“I am afraid that Mrs. Harrington is the sort of person to do an injustice. She almost told my mother that she intended to leave all her money to one of them.”

Again that little flicker of the Count’s patient eyelids.

“Indeed!” he said. “To which one?”

Agatha shrugged her shoulders and began playing. “That is not so much the question. It is the principle--the injustice - that one objects to.”

“Of course,” murmured De Lloseta, with a little nod. “Of course.”

They went on playing, and in the other room Mrs. Harrington talked to Luke. Mrs. Ingham-Baker appeared to slumber, but her friend and hostess suspected her of listening. She therefore raised her voice at intervals, knowing the exquisite torture of unsatisfied curiosity, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker heard the word “Fitz,” and the magic syllables “money,” more than once, but no connecting phrase to soothe her aching mental palate.

“And is your life a hard one?” Mrs. Harrington was asking. She had been leading up to this question for some time--inviting his confidence, seeking the extent of her own power. A woman is not content with possessing power; she wishes to see the evidence of it in the lives of others.

“No,” answered Luke, unconsciously disappointing her; “I cannot say that it is.”

He was strictly, sternly on his guard. There was not the faintest possibility of his ever forgiving this woman.

“And you are getting on in your career?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Mrs. Harrington’s grey eyes rested on his face searchingly.

“Perhaps I could help you,” she said, “with my small influence, or--or by other means.”

“Thank you,” he said again without anger, serene in his complete independence.

Mrs. Harrington frowned. A dream passed through her mind--a great desire. What if she could crush this man’s pride? For his six years’ silence had never ceased to gall her. What if she could humble him so completely that he would come asking the help she so carelessly offered?

With a woman’s instinct she hit upon the only possible means of attaining this end. She did not pause to argue that a nature such as Luke’s would never ask anything for itself--that it is precisely such as he who have no pride when they ask for another, sacrificing even that for that other’s sake.

Following her own thoughts, Mrs. Harrington looked pensively into the room where Agatha was sitting. The girl was playing, with a little frown of concentration. The wonderful music close to her ear was busy arousing that small possibility. Agatha did not know that any one was looking at her. The two pink shades of the piano candles cast a becoming light upon her face and form.

Mrs. Harrington’s eyes came surreptitiously round. Luke also was looking at Agatha. And a queer little smile hovered across Mrs. Harrington’s lips. The dream was assuming more tangible proportions. Mrs. Harrington began to see her way; already her inordinate love of power was at work. She could not admit even to herself that Luke FitzHenry had escaped her. Women never know when they have had enough.

“How long are you to be in London?” she asked, with a sudden kindness.

“Only a fortnight.”

“Well, you must often come and see me. I shall have the Ingham-Bakers staying with me a few weeks longer. It is dull for poor Agatha with only two old women in the house. Come to lunch to-morrow, and we can do something in the afternoon.”

“Thank you very much,” said Luke.

“You will come?”

“I should like nothing better.”

And so the music went on--and the game. Some played a losing game from the beginning, and others played without quite knowing the stake. Some held to certain rules, while others made the rules as they went along--as children do--ignorant of the tears that must inevitably follow. But Fate placed all the best cards in Mrs. Harrington’s hand.

Luke and the Count Cipriani de Lloseta went out of the house together. They walked side by side for some yards while a watchful hansom followed.

“Can I give you a lift?” said De Lloseta at length. “I am going down to the Peregrinator’s.”

“Thanks, no. I shall go straight to my rooms. I have not had my clothes off for three nights.”

“Ah, you sailors! I am going down to have my half-hour over a book to compose my mind.”

“Do you read much?”

De Lloseta called the cab with a jerk of his head. Before stepping into it he looked keenly into his companion’s face.

“Yes, a good deal. I read somewhere, lately, that it is never wise to accept favours from a woman; she will always have more than her money’s worth. Good-night.”

And he drove away.

CHAPTER X. THE GAME OPENS.

Ce qu’on dit À l’Être À qui on dit tout n’est pas la moitiÉ de ce qu’on lui cache.

Agatha sent her maid to bed and sat down before her bedroom fire to brush her hair.

Miss Ingham-Baker had, only four years earlier, left a fashionable South Coast boarding-school fully educated for the battle of life. There seem to be two classes of young ladies’ boarding-schools. In the one they are educated with a view of faring well in this world, in the other the teaching mostly bears upon matters connected with the next. In the last-mentioned class of establishment the young people get up early and have very little material food to eat. So Mrs. Ingham-Baker wisely sent her daughter to the worldly school. This astute lady knew that girls who get up very early to attend public worship in the dim hours, and have poor meals during the day, do not as a rule make good matches. They have no time to do their hair properly, and are not urged so much thereto as to punctuality at compline, or whatever the service may be. And it is thus that the little habits are acquired, and the little habits make the woman, therefore the little habits make the match. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So Agatha was sent to a worldly school, where they promenaded in the King’s Road, and were taught at an early age to recognise the glance of admiration when they saw it. They were brought up to desire nice clothes, and to wear the same stylishly. On Sunday they wore bonnets, and promenaded with additional enthusiasm. Their youthful backs were straightened out by some process which the writer, not having been educated at a girls’ school, cannot be expected to detail. They were given excellent meals at healthy hours, and the reprehensible habits of the lark were treated with contumely. They were given to understand that it was good to be smart always, and even smarter at church. Religious fervour, if it ran to limpness of dress, or form, or mind, was punishable according to law. A wholesome spirit of competition was encouraged, not in the taking of many prizes, the attending of many services, or the acquirement of much Euclid, but in dress, smartness, and the accomplishments.

“My girls always marry!” Miss Jones was wont to say with a complacent smile, and mothers advertised it.

Agatha had been an apt pupil. She came away from Miss Jones a finished article. Miss Jones had indeed looked in vain for Agatha’s name in that right-hand column of the Morning Post where fashionable arrangements are noted, and in the first column of the Times, where further social events have precedence. But that was entirely Agatha’s fault. She came, and she saw, but she had not hitherto seen anything worth conquering. So many of her school friends had married on the impulse of the moment for mere sentimental reasons, remaining as awful and harassed warnings in suburban retreats where rents are moderate and the census on the flow. If there was one thing Miss Jones despised more than love in a cottage, it was that intangible commodity in a suburban villa.

Agatha, in a word, meant to do well for herself, and she was dimly grateful to her mother for having foreseen this situation and provided for it by a suitable education.

She was probably thinking over the matter while she brushed her hair, for she was deeply absorbed. There was a knock at the door--a timid, deprecatory knock.

“Oh, come in!” cried Agatha.

The door opened and disclosed Mrs. Ingham-Baker, stout and cringing, in a ludicrous purple dressing-gown.

“May I come and warm myself at your fire, dear?” she inquired humbly; “my own is so low.”

“That,” said Agatha, “is because you are afraid of the servants.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker closed the door and came towards the fire with surreptitious steps. It would not be truthful to say that she came on tiptoe, her build not warranting that mode of progression. Agatha watched her without surprise. Mrs. Ingham-Baker always moved like that in her dressing-gown. Like many ladies, she put on stealth with that garment.

“How beautifully the Count plays!” said the mother.

“Beautifully!” answered Agatha.

And neither was thinking of Cipriani de Lloseta.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker gave a little sigh, and contemplated her wool-work bedroom slippers with an affection which their appearance certainly did not warrant. There was a suggestion of bygone defeats in sigh and attitude--defeats borne with the resignation that followeth on habit.

“I don’t believe,” she said, “that he will ever marry again.”

The girl tossed her pretty head.

“I shouldn’t think any one would have him!”

She was not of the campaigners who admit defeat. Mrs. Ingham-Baker sighed again, and put out the other slipper.

“He must be very rich!--a palace in Barcelona--a palace!”

“Other people have castles in Spain,” replied Agatha, without any of that filial respect which our grandmothers were pleased to affect. There was nothing old-fashioned or effete about Agatha - she was, on the contrary, essentially modern.

The elder lady did not catch the allusion, and dived deep into thought. She supposed that Agatha had met and danced with other rich Spaniards, and could have any one of them by the mere raising of her little finger. Her attitude towards her daughter was that of an old campaigner who, having done well in a bygone time, has the good sense to recognise the deeper science of a modern warfare, being quite content with a small command in the rear.

To carry out the simile, she now gathered from this conversational reconnaissance that the younger and abler general at the front was about to alter the object of attack. She had, in fact, come in not to warm, but to inform herself.

“Mrs. Harrington seemed to take to Luke,” said Agatha, behind her hair.

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Ingham-Baker, proceeding carefully, for she was well in hand--“wonderfully so! Poor Fitz seems to stand a very good chance of being cut out.”

“Fitz will have to look after himself,” opined the young lady. “Did she say anything to you after I came to bed? I came away on purpose.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker glanced towards the door, and drew her dressing-gown more closely round her.

“Well,” she began volubly, “of course I said what a nice fellow Luke was, so manly and simple, and all that. And she quite agreed with me. I said that perhaps he would get on after all and not bring disgrace upon all her kindness.”

“What do you mean by that?” inquired Agatha.

“I don’t know, my dear, but I said it. And she said she hoped so. Then I asked her if she knew what his wages or salary, or whatever they are called, amounted to, and what his prospects are. She said she knew nothing about his salary, but that his prospects were quite a different matter. I pretended I did not know what she meant. So she gave a little sigh and said that one could not expect to live for ever. I said that I was sure I wished some people could, and she smiled in a funny way.”

“You do not seem to have done it very well,” the younger and more scientific campaigner observed coldly.

“Oh, but it was all right, Agatha dear. I understand her so well. And I said I was sure that Luke would deserve anything he got; that of course it was different for Fitz, because his life is all set out straight before him. And she said I was quite right.”

The report was finished, and Agatha sat for some moments with the brush on her lap looking into the fire with the deep thoughtfulness of a cool tactician.

“I am sure he was struck with you,” said the mother fervently.

After all she was only fit for a very small command very far in the rear. She never saw the singular light in Agatha’s eyes.

“Do you think so?” said the girl, half dreamily.

“I am sure of it.”

Agatha began brushing her hair again.

“What makes you think so?” she inquired through the snaky canopy.

“He never took his eyes off you when you were playing the Count’s accompaniment.”

The girl suddenly rose and went to the dressing-table. The candles there were lighted, one on each side of the mirror. Agatha saw that her mother was still admiring her bedroom slippers. Then she looked at the reflection of her own face with the smooth hair hanging straight down over either shoulder. She gazed long and curiously as if seeking something in the pleasant reflection.

“Did she say anything more about Fitz?” she asked suddenly, with an obvious change of the subject which Mrs. Ingham-Baker did not attempt to understand. She was not a subtle woman.

“Nothing.”

Agatha came back and sat down.

“And you are quite sure she said exactly what you have told me, about not expecting to live for ever.”

“Quite.”

Then followed a long silence. A belated cab rattled past beneath the windows. There was apparently a cowl on the chimney connected with Agatha’s room, for at intervals a faint groaning sound came, apparently from the fireplace.

Agatha leant forward with her chin on her two hands, her elbows on her knees. Her hair hung almost to the ground. She was looking into the coals with thoughtful eyes. The elder tactician waited in respectful silence.

“Suppose-- ” said the girl suddenly, and stopped.

“Yes, my darling.”

“Suppose we accept the Danefords’ invitation?”

“To go to Malta?”

“Yes, to go to Malta.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker fell into a puzzled, harassed reverie. This modern warfare was so complicated. The younger, keener tactician did not seem to demand an answer to her supposition. She proceeded to follow out the train of her own thoughts in as complete an absorption as if she had been alone in the room.

“The voyage,” she said, “would be a pleasant change if we selected a good boat.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker reflected for a moment.

“We might go in the Croonah with Luke,” she then observed timidly.

“Ye-es.”

And after a little while Mrs. Ingham-Baker rose and bade her daughter good-night.

Agatha remained before the fire in the low chair with her face resting on her two hands, and who can tell all that she was thinking? For the thoughts of youth are very quick. They are different from the thoughts of maturity, inasmuch as they rise higher into happiness and descend deeper into misery. Agatha Ingham-Baker knew that she had her own life to shape, with only such blundering, well-meant assistance as her mother could give her. She had found out that the world cannot pause to help the stricken, or to give a hand to the fallen, but that it always has leisure to cringe and make way for the successful.

Other girls had been successful. Why should not she? And if--and if--

The next morning at breakfast Mrs. Ingham-Baker took an opportunity of asking Mrs. Harrington if she knew Malta.

“Malta,” answered the grey lady, “is a sort of Nursery India. I have known girls marry at Malta, but I have known more who were obliged to go to India.”

“That,” answered Mrs. Ingham-Baker, “is exactly what I am afraid of.”

“Having to go on to India?” inquired Mrs. Harrington, looking over her letters.

“No. I am afraid that Malta is not quite the place one would like to take one’s daughter to.”

“That depends, I should imagine, upon the views one may have respecting one’s daughter,” answered the lady of the house carelessly.

At this moment Agatha came in looking fresh and smart in a tweed dress. There was something about her that made people turn in the streets to look at her again. For years she had noted this with much satisfaction. But she was beginning to get a little tired of the homage of the pavement. Those who turned to glance a second time never came back to offer her a heart and a fortune. She was perhaps beginning faintly to suspect that which many of us know - namely, that she who has the admiration of many rarely has the love of one; and if by chance she gets this, she never knows its value and rarely keeps it.

“I was just asking Mrs. Harrington about Malta, dear,” exclaimed Mrs. Ingham-Baker. “It is a nice place, is it not, Marian?”

“I believe it is.”

“And somehow I quite want to go there. I can’t think why,” said Mrs. Ingham-Baker volubly. “It would be so nice to get a little sunshine after these grey skies, would it not, dear?”

Agatha gave a little shiver as she sat down.

“It would be very nice to feel really warm,” she said. “But there is the horrid sea voyage.”

“I dare say you would enjoy that very much after the first two days,” put in Mrs. Harrington.

“Especially if we select a nice large boat--one of those with two funnels?” put in Mrs. Ingham-Baker. “Now I wonder what boat we could go by?”

“Luke’s,” suggested Mrs. Harrington, with cynical curtness. There was a subtle suggestion of finality in her tone, a tiniest note of weariness which almost said--

“Now we have reached our goal.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Ingham-Baker doubtfully, “that it is really a fine vessel?”

“So I am told.”

“I really expect,” put in Agatha carelessly, “that one steamer is as good as another.”

Mrs. Harrington turned on her like suave lightning.

“But one boat is not so well officered as another, my dear!” she said.

Agatha--not to be brow-beaten, keen as the older fencer--looked Mrs. Harrington straight in the face.

“You mean Luke,” she said. “Of course I dare say he is a good officer. But one always feels doubtful about trusting one’s friends--does one not?”

“One does,” answered Mrs. Harrington, turning to her letters.

All such things touch secret strings
For heavy hearts to bear.

“And you don’t seem to care.”

Agatha smiled a little inward smile of triumph.

“Don’t I?” she answered, with a sidelong glance beneath her lashes.

Luke stared straight in front of him with set lips. He looked a dangerous man to trifle with, and what woman can keep her hands out of such danger as this?

They were walking backwards and forwards on the broad promenade deck of the Croonah, and the Croonah was gliding through the grey waters of the Atlantic. To their left lay the coast of Portugal smiling in the sunshine. To their right the orb of day himself, lowering cloudless to the horizon. Ahead, bleak and lonely, lay the dread Burlings. The maligned Bay of Biscay lay behind, and already a large number of the passengers had plucked up spirit to leave the cabin stairs, crawling on deck to lie supine in long chairs and talk hopefully of calmer days to come.

Agatha had proved herself to be a good sailor. She walked beside Luke FitzHenry with her usual dainty firmness of step and confidence of carriage. Luke himself--in uniform--looked sternly in earnest.

They had been talking of Gibraltar, where the Croonah was to touch the next morning, and Luke had just told Agatha that he could not go ashore with her and Mrs. Ingham-Baker.

“Don’t I?” the girl reiterated with a little sigh.

“Well, it does not sound like it.”

“The truth is,” said Agatha, “that I have an inward conviction that it would only be more trouble than it is worth.”

“What would be more trouble than it is worth?”

“Going ashore.”

“Then you will not go?” he asked eagerly.

“I think not,” she answered, with demure downcast eyes.

And Luke FitzHenry was the happiest man on board the Croonah. There was no mistaking her meaning. Luke, who knew himself to be a pessimist--a man who persistently looked for ill-fortune--felt that her meaning could not well be other than that she preferred remaining on board because he could not go ashore.

The dinner bell rang out over the quiet decks, and, with a familiar little nod, Agatha turned away from her companion.

The next morning saw the Croonah speeding past Trafalgar’s heights. There was a whistling breeze from the west; and over the mountains of Tarifa and the far gloomy fastness of Ceuta hung clouds and squalls. The sea, lashed to white flecks, raced through the straits, and every now and then a sharp shower darkened the face of the waters. There was something forbidding and mysterious in the scene, something dark and foreboding over the coast-line of Africa. All eyes were fixed on the Rock, now slowly appearing from behind the hills that hide Algeciras.

Luke was on duty on the bridge, motionless at his post. It was a simple matter to these mariners to make for the anchorage of Gibraltar, and Luke was thinking of Agatha. He was recalling a thousand little incidents which came back with a sudden warm thrill into his heart, the chilled, stern heart of a disappointed man. He was recollecting words that she had said, silences which she had kept, glances which she had given him. And all told him the same thing. All went to the core of his passionate, self-consuming heart.

The bay now lay before him, dotted here and there by close-reefed sails. A few steamers lay at anchor, and, beyond the old Mole, black coal hulks peacefully stripped of rigging. Suddenly Luke lifted the lid of the small box affixed to the rail in front of him and sought his glasses. For some seconds he looked through the binoculars fixedly in the direction of the Mole. Then he moved towards the captain.

“That is the Kittiwake,” he said.

“Thought it looked like her!” replied the captain, intent on his own affairs.

Luke went back to his post. The Kittiwake! And he was not glad. It was that that puzzled him. He was not glad. He was going to see Fitz after many years, and twins are different from other brothers. They usually see more of each other all through life. They are necessary to each other. Fitz and Luke had always corresponded as regularly as their roaming lives allowed. But for three years they had never met.

Luke stood with beating heart, his eyes fixed on the trim rakish-looking little gunboat lying at anchor immediately off the Mole. He was suddenly breathless. His light oil-skins oppressed him. There was a vague feeling within him that he had only begun to live within the last two weeks--all before that had been merely existence. And now he was living too quickly, without time to define his feelings. But the sensations were real enough. It does not take long to acquire a feeling.

After all he was not glad. His attention was required for a few moments to carry out an order, and he returned to his thought. He did not, however, think it out. He only knew that if Agatha had not been on board the Croonah he would have been breathlessly impatient to see his brother. Therefore he did not want Agatha and Fitz to meet. And yet Fitz was quite different from other men. There was no harm in Fitz, and surely he could be trusted to see Agatha for a few hours without falling in love with her, without making Agatha love him.

Yet--Fitz had always succeeded where he, Luke, had failed. Fitz had always the good things of life. It was all luck. It had been luck from the very beginning. Another order required the second officer’s full mind and attention. There were a thousand matters to be attended to, for the Croonah was enormous, unwieldy.

In the execution of his duties Luke began presently to forget himself. He did not attempt to define his thoughts. He did not even reflect that he knew so little of his brother that this meeting could not possibly cause him this sudden uneasiness, this foreboding care, from that side of the question. He did not fear for Fitz to meet Agatha, he really dreaded Agatha seeing Fitz.

The Croonah moved into her anchorage with that gentle strength which in a large steamer seems to indicate that she is thinking about it and doing it all herself. For in these days there is no shouting, no call of boatswain’s whistle; and the ordinary observer hardly notices the quiet deus ex machinÂ, the man on the bridge.

Hardly had the anchor splashed home with a rattle of cable that vibrated through the ship, when a small white boat shot out from behind the smart Kittiwake, impelled by the short and regular beat of ten oars. There was a man seated in the stern enveloped in a large black boat cloak--for Gibraltar harbour is choppy when the westerly breezes blow - a man who looked the Croonah up and down with a curious searching eye. The boat shot alongside the vast steamer--the bowman neatly catching a rope that was thrown to him--and the officer clambered up the swaying gangway.

He pushed his way gently through the passengers, the cloak flying partially open as he did so and displaying Her Majesty’s uniform. He treated all these people with that patient tolerance which belongs to the mariner when dealing with landsmen. They were so many sheep penned up in a conveyance. Well-dressed sheep, he admitted tacitly by the withdrawal of his dripping cloak from their contact, but he treated them in the bulk, failing to notice one more than another. He utterly failed to observe Agatha Ingham-Baker, dainty and fresh in blue serge and a pert sailor hat. She knew him at once, and his want of observation was set down in her mind against him. She did not want him to recognise her. Not at all. She merely wanted him to look at her, and then to look again--to throw a passing crumb of admiration to her greedy vanity, which lived on such daily food.

Fitz, intent on his errand, pushed his way towards the steps leading up through the awning to the bridge. He seemed to know by some sailor instinct where to find it. He paused at the foot of the iron steps to give an order to the man who followed at his heel, and the attitude was Luke’s. The onlookers saw at a glance who this must be. The resemblance was startling. There was merely Luke FitzHenry over again, somewhat fairer, a little taller, but the same man.

The captain gave a sudden bluff laugh when Fitz emerged on the little spidery bridge far above the deck.

“No doubt who you are, sir,” he said, holding out his hand.

Then he stepped aside, and the two brothers met. They said nothing, merely shaking hands, and Luke’s eyes involuntarily went to the smart, simple uniform half hidden by the cloak. Fitz saw the glance and drew his cloak hastily round him. It was unfortunate.

And this was their meeting after three years.

“By George!” exclaimed Fitz, after a momentary pause, “she is a fine ship!”

Luke rested his hands on the white painted rail--almost a caress to the great steamer--and followed the direction of his brother’s glance,

“Yes,” he admitted slowly, “yes, she is a good boat.”

And then his deep eyes wandered involuntarily towards the tiny Kittiwake - smart, man-of-war-like at her anchorage--and a sudden sharp sigh broke from his lips. He had not got over it yet. He never would.

“So you have got away,” he went on, “from Mahon at last?”

“Yes,” answered Fitz.

“I should think you have had enough of Minorca to last you the rest of your life,” said Luke, looking abruptly down at the quarrelling boatmen and the tangle of tossing craft beneath them.

“It is not such a bad place as all that,” replied Fitz. “I--I rather like it.”

There was a little pause, and quite suddenly Luke said--

“The Ingham-Bakers are on board.”

It would almost seem that these twin minds followed each other into the same train of thought. Fitz frowned with an air of reflectiveness.

“The Ingham-Bakers,” he said. “Who are they?”

Luke gave a little laugh which almost expressed a sudden relief.

“Don’t you remember?” he said. “She is a friend of Mrs. Harrington’s, and--and there is Agatha, her daughter.”

“I remember--stout. Not the daughter, the old woman, I mean. Oh--yes. Where are they going?”

“To Malta.”

It was perfectly obvious, even to Luke, that the Ingham-Bakers’ immediate or projective destination was a matter of the utmost indifference to Fitz, who was more interested in the Croonah than in her passengers.

They were both conscious of an indefinite feeling of disappointment. This meeting after years of absence was not as it should be. Something seemed to stand between them--a shadow, a myth, a tiny distinction. Luke, with characteristic pessimism, saw it first--felt its chill, intangible presence before his less subtle-minded brother. Then Fitz saw it, and, as was his habit, he went at it unhesitatingly

“Gad!” he explained, “I am glad to see you, old chap. Long time, isn’t it, since we saw each other? You must come back with me, and have lunch or something. The men will be awfully glad to make your acquaintance. You can look over the ship, though she is not much to look at, you know! Not up to this. She is a fine ship, Luke! What can she steam?”

“She can do her twenty,” answered the second officer of the Croonah, indifferently.

“Yes, she looks it. Well, can you get away now?”

Luke shook his head.

“No,” he answered almost ungraciously, “I can’t leave the ship.”

“What! Not to come and look over the Kittiwake?” Fitz’s face fell visibly. He did not seem to be able to realise that any one should be equal to relinquishing without a murmur the opportunity of looking over the Kittiwake.

“No, I am afraid not. We have our discipline too, you know. Besides, we are rather like railway guards. We must keep up to time. We shall be under way by two o’clock.”

Fitz pressed the point no further. He had been brought up to discipline since childhood--moreover, he was rather clever in a simple way, and he had found out that it would be no pleasure but a pain to Luke to board a ship flying the white ensign.

“Can I stay on board to lunch with you?” he asked easily. “Goodness only knows when we shall run against each other again. It was the merest chance. We only got in last night. I was just going ashore to report when we saw the old Croonah come pounding in. That”--he paused and drew his cloak closer - “is why I am in my war-paint! We are going straight home.”

“Stay by all means,” said Luke.

Fitz nodded.

“I suppose,” he added as an afterthought, “that I ought to pay my respects to Mrs. Ingham-Baker?”

Luke’s face cleared suddenly. Fitz had evidently forgotten about Agatha.

“I will ask them to lunch with us in my cabin,” he said.

And presently they left the bridge.

In due course Fitz was presented to the Ingham-Bakers, and Agatha was very gracious. Fitz looked at her a good deal. Simply because she made him. She directed all her conversation and eke her bright eyes in his direction. He listened, and when necessary he laughed a jolly resounding laugh. How could she tell that he was drawing comparisons all the while? It is the simple-minded men who puzzle women most. Whenever Luke’s face clouded she swept away the gathering gloom with some small familiar attention - some reference to him in her conversation with Fitz which somehow brought him nearer and set Fitz further off.

Suddenly, on hearing that Fitz hoped to be in England within a week, Mrs. Ingham-Baker fell heavily into conversation.

“I am afraid,” she said, “that you will find our dear Mrs. Harrington more difficult to get on with than ever. In fact--he, he!--I almost feel inclined to advise you not to try. But I suppose you will not be much in London?”

Fitz looked at her with clear, keen blue eyes.

“I expect to be there some time,” he answered. “I hope to stay with Mrs. Harrington.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker glanced at Agatha, and returned somewhat hastily to her galantine of veal.

Agatha was drumming on the table with her fingers.

CHAPTER XII. A SHUFFLE.

To love is good, no doubt, but you love best
A calm safe life, with wealth and ease and rest.

The Croonah ran round Europa Point into fine weather, and the wise old captain--who felt the pulse of the saloon with unerring touch--deemed it expedient to pin upon the board the notice of a ball to be given on the following night. There was considerable worldly knowledge in this proceeding. The passengers still had the air of Europe in their lungs, the energy of Europe in their limbs. Nothing pulls a ship full of people together so effectually as a ball. Nothing gives such absorbing employment to the female mind which would otherwise get into hopeless mischief. Besides they had been at sea five days, and the captain knew that more than one ingenuous maiden, sitting in thoughtful idleness about the decks, was lost in vague forebodings as to the creases in her dresses ruthlessly packed away in the hold.

The passengers were, in fact, finding their sea-legs, which, from the captain’s point of view, meant that the inner men and the outer women would now require and receive a daily increasing attention. So he said a word to the head cook, and to the fourth officer he muttered -

“Let the women have their trunks!”

When, on the evening of the ball, Agatha appeared at the door of her mother’s cabin, that good lady’s face fell.

“What, dear? Your old black!”

“Yes, dear, my old black,” replied the dutiful daughter. She was arranging a small bouquet of violets in the front of her dress - a bouquet she had found in her cabin when she went to dress. Luke had, no doubt, sent ashore for them at Gibraltar--and there was something of the unknown, the vaguely possible, in his manner of placing them on her tiny dressing-table, without a word of explanation, which appealed to her jaded imagination.

There was some suggestion of recklessness about Agatha, which her mother almost detected--something which had never been suggested in the subtler element of London drawing-room. The girl spoke in a short, sharp way which was new to the much-snubbed rear-commander. Agatha still had this when Luke asked her for a dance.

“Yes,” she answered curtly, handing him the card and avoiding his eyes.

He stepped back to take advantage of the light of a swinging hurricane lamp, and leant against the awning which had been closed in all round.

“How many may I have?” he asked.

She continued to look anywhere except in his direction. Then quite suddenly she gave a little laugh.

“All.”

“What?” he added, with a catch in his breath.

“You may have them all.”

There was a pause; then Agatha turned with a half-mocking smile, and looked at him. For the first time in her life she was really frightened. She had never seen passion in a man’s face before. It was the one thing she had never encountered in the daily round of social effort in London. Not an evil passion, but the strong passion of love, which is as rare in human beings as is genius. He was standing in a conventional attitude, holding her programme--and that which took the girl’s breath away lay in his eyes alone.

She could not meet his look, for she felt suddenly quite puny and small and powerless. She realised in that flash of thought that there was a whole side of life of which she had never suspected the existence. After all, she was learning the lesson that millions of women have to learn before they quite realise what life is.

She smiled nervously, and looked hard at the little card in his strong, still hands--wondering what she had done. She saw him write his name opposite five or six dances. Then he handed her the card, and left her with a grave bow--left her without a word of explanation, to take his silence and explain it if she could. That sense of the unknown in him, which appealed so strongly to her, seemed to rise and envelop her in a maze of thought and imagination which was bewildering in its intensity--thrilling with a new life.

When he came back later to claim his first dance, he was quietly polite, and nothing else. They danced until the music stopped, and Agatha knew that she had met her match in this as in other matters.

The dancers trooped out to the dimly-lighted deck, while the quartermaster raised the awning to allow the fresh air to circulate. Luke and Agatha went with the rest, her hand resting unsteadily on his sleeve. She had never felt unsteady like this before. She was conscious, probably for the first time in her life, of a strange, creeping fear. She was distinctly afraid of the first words that her partner would say when they were alone. Spread out over the broad deck the many passengers seemed but a few. It was almost solitude--and Agatha was afraid of solitude with Luke. Yet she had selected a dress which she knew would appeal to him. She had dressed for him--which means something from a woman’s point of view. She had welcomed this ball with a certain reckless throb of excitement, not for its own sake, but for Luke’s. The unerring instinct of her vanity had not played her false. She had succeeded, and now she was afraid of her success. There is a subtle fear in all success, and an indefinite responsibility.

Luke knew the ship. He led the way to a deserted corner of the deck, with a deliberation which set Agatha’s heart beating.

“What did you mean when you said I could have all the dances?” asked Luke slowly. His eyes gleamed deeply as he looked down at her. And Agatha had no answer ready.

She stood before him with downcast eyes--like a chidden child who has been meddling with danger.

And suddenly his arms were round her. She gave a little gasp, but made no attempt to escape from him. This was all so different, so new to her. There was something in the strong salt air blowing over them which seemed to purify the world and raise them above the sordid cares thereof. There was something simple and strong and primitive in this man--at home on his own element, all filled with the strength of the ocean--mastering her, claiming her as if by force.

“What did you mean?” he asked again.

She pushed him away, and turning stood beside him with her two hands resting on the rail, her back turned towards him.

“Oh, Luke,” she whispered at length, “I can’t be poor--I can’t--I can’t. You do not know what it is. It has always been such a struggle--there is no rest in it.”

It is said that women can raise men above the world. How often do they bring them down to it when they are raising themselves!

And Luke’s love was large enough to accept her as she was.

“And if I were not poor?” he asked, without any of the sullen pride that was his.

She answered nothing, and he read her silence aright.

“I will become rich,” he said, “somehow. I do not care how. I will, I will--Agatha!”

She did not dare to meet his eyes.

“Come,” she said. “Come--let us go back.”

They danced together again, but Agatha refused to sit anywhere but beneath the awning. While they were dancing they did not speak. He never took his eyes off her, and she never looked at him.

Then, just as he was, with a pilot jacket exchanged for his dress coat, Luke had to go on duty on the bridge. While he stood there, far above the lighted decks, alone at his post in the dark, keen and watchful, still as a statue, the sound of the dance music rose up and enveloped him like the echo of a happy dream.

Presently the music ceased, and the weary dancers went below, leaving Luke FitzHenry to his own thoughts.

All the world seemed to be asleep except these two men--one motionless on the bridge, the other alert in the dimly lighted wheelhouse. The Croonah herself seemed to slumber with the regular beating of a great restless heart far down in her iron being.

The dawn was now creeping up into the eastern sky, touching the face of the waters with a soft, pearly light. A few straight streaks of cloud became faintly outlined. The moon looked yellow and deathlike.

Luke stood watching the rise of a new day, and with it there seemed to be rising within him a new life.

Beneath his feet, in her dainty cabin, Agatha Ingham-Baker saw that dawn also. She was standing with her arms folded on the upper berth breast high. She had been standing there an hour. She was alone in the cabin, for Luke had secured separate rooms for the two ladies.

Agatha had not moved since she came down from the ball. She did not seem to be thinking of going to bed. The large square port-hole was open, and the cool breeze fluttered the lace of her dress, stirring the dead violets at her breast.

Her finely cut features were set with a look of strong determination. “I can’t--I can’t be poor,” she was repeating to herself with a mechanical monotony.

CHAPTER XIII. A CHOICE.

’Tis better far to love and be poor,
Than be rich with an empty heart.

Mrs. Harrington was sitting in the great drawing-room in Grosvenor Gardens, alone. The butler was fuming and cleaning plate in his pantry. The maid was weeping in the workroom. Mrs. Harrington had had a busy afternoon.

“’Tis always thus when she’s alone in the house,” the cook had said, with a grandiosity of style borrowed from the Family Herald. It is easy for the cook to be grandiose when the butler and the lady’s-maid are in trouble. Thus philosophy walketh in at the back door.

Mrs. Harrington’s sharp grey face twitched at times with a certain restlessness which was hers when she had no one at hand to bully. She could not concentrate her attention on the newspaper she held in her hands, and at intervals her eyes wandered over the room in search of something to find fault with. She made the mistake common to persons under such circumstances--she forgot to look in the mirror. Mrs. Harrington was tired of herself. She wished someone would call. At the same time she felt a cordial dislike to all her friends.

It was a hopelessly grey afternoon early in December, and every one was out of London. Mrs. Harrington had a certain circle of friends - middle-aged or elderly women, rich like herself, lonely like herself - whom she despised. They all rather disliked each other, these women, but they visited nevertheless. They dined together seriously; keeping in mind the cook, and watchful over the wine. But the majority of these ladies had gone away for the winter. The Riviera was created for such.

Mrs. Harrington, however, never went abroad in the winter. She said that she had travelled too much when she was younger--in the lifetime of her husband--to care about it now. The Honourable George Henry Harrington had, in fact, lived abroad for financial reasons, and the name was not of sweet savour in the nostrils of hotel-keepers. The married life referred to occasionally in cold tones by the Honourable Mrs. Harrington had been of that order which is curtly called “cat and dog,” and likewise “hand to mouth.”

Therefore Mrs. Harrington avoided the Continent. She could easily, of her affluence, have paid certain large debts which she knew to be outstanding, but she held a theory that dead men owe nothing. And with this theory she lubricated an easy-going conscience.

The mistress of the large house in Grosvenor Gardens was wondering discontentedly what she was going to do with herself until tea-time, when she heard the sound of a bell ringing far down in the basement. Despite the grand drawing-room, despite the rich rustle of her grey silk dress, this great lady peeped from behind the curtain, and saw a hansom cab.

A few minutes later the door was thrown open by the angry butler.

“Miss Challoner--Captain Bontnor.”

Eve came in, and at her heels Captain Bontnor, who sheered off as it were from the butler, and gave him a wide berth.

Mrs. Harrington could be gracious when she liked. She liked now, and she would have kissed her visitor had that young lady shown any desire for such an honour. But there was a faint reflex of Spanish ceremony in Eve Challoner, of which she was probably unaware. A few years ago it would not have been noticeable, but to-day we are hail-fellow-well-met even with ladies--which is a mistake, on the part of the ladies.

“So you received my letter, my dear,” said Mrs. Harrington.

“Yes,” replied Eve. “This is my uncle--Captain Bontnor.”

Mrs. Harrington had the bad taste to raise her eyebrows infinitesimally, and Captain Bontnor saw it.

“How do you do?” said Mrs. Harrington, with a stiff bow.

“I am quite well, thank you, marm,” replied the sailor, with more aplomb than Eve had yet seen him display.

Without waiting to hear this satisfactory intelligence, Mrs. Harrington turned to Eve again. She evidently intended to ignore Captain Bontnor systematically and completely.

“You know,” she said, “I am related to your father - ”

“By marriage,” put in Captain Bontnor, with simple bluntness. He was brushing his hat with a large pocket-handkerchief.

“And I have pleasant recollections of his kindness in past years. I stayed with him at the Casa d’Erraha more than once. I was staying there when--well, some years ago. I think you had better come and live with me until your poor father’s affairs have been put in order.”

Captain Bontnor raised his head and ceased his operations on the dusty hat. His keen old eyes, full of opposition, were fixed on Eve’s face. He was quite ready to be rude again, but women know how to avoid these shallow places better than men, with a policy which is not always expedient perhaps.

“Thank you,” replied Eve. “Thank you very much, but my uncle has kindly offered me a home.”

Mrs. Harrington’s grey face suggested a scorn which she apparently did not think it worth while to conceal from a person who wiped the inside of his hat with his pocket-handkerchief in a lady’s presence.

“But,” she said coldly, “I should think that your uncle cannot fail to see the superior advantages of the offer I am now making you, from a social point of view, if from no other.”

“I do see them advantages, marm,” said the captain bluntly. He looked at Eve with something dog-like peering from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.

“Of course,” continued Mrs. Harrington, ignoring the confession, “you have been brought up as a lady, and are accustomed to refinement, and in some degree to luxury.”

“You needn’t make it any plainer, marm,” blurted out Captain Bontnor. “I don’t need you to tell me that my niece is above me. I don’t set up for bein’ anything nor what I am. There’s not much of the gentleman about me. But--”

He paused, and half turned towards Eve.

“But, ’cording to my lights, I’m seeking to do my duty towards the orphan child of my sister Amelia Ann.”

“Not overlooking the fact, I suppose, that the orphan child of your sister Amelia Ann has a very fair income of her own.”

Captain Bontnor smiled blandly, and smoothed his hat with his sleeve.

“Not overlooking that fact, marm,” he said, “if you choose to take it so.”

Mrs. Harrington turned to Eve again with a faint reflex of her overbearing manner towards the Ingham-Bakers and other persons who found it expedient to submit.

“You will see at a glance,” she said, “that it is impossible for you to live with Captain Bontnor.”

“I have already accepted his kind offer,” returned the girl. “Thank you, nevertheless.”

“But,” said Mrs. Harrington, “that was before you knew that I was ready to make a home for you.”

Captain Bontnor had turned away. He blew his nose so loudly that Mrs. Harrington frowned. There was something trumpet-like and defiant in the sound. Opposition had ever a strange effect on this spoilt woman. She liked it, as serving to enhance the value of the wish which she rarely failed to gratify in the end.

“You must remember your position,” she continued. “These are very democratic days, when silly people think that all men are equal. A lady is nevertheless still a lady, and a gentleman a gentleman, though one does not often meet them. I wish you to come and live with me.”

Eve’s dark eyes flashed suddenly. She glanced at her uncle, and said nothing.

“A girl with money is a ready dupe to designing persons,” added Mrs. Harrington.

“I am saved that danger, for I have no money,” replied Eve.

“Nonsense, child! I know the value of land in Mallorca. I see already that you are being deceived.”

She glanced significantly towards the captain, who was again smiling blandly.

“The matter has been fully gone into,” explained Eve, “by competent persons. The Val d’Erraha does not belong to me. It was held by my father only on ‘rotas’--the Minorcan form of lease--and it has now been returned to the proprietor.”

Mrs. Harrington’s keen face dropped. She prided herself upon being a woman of business, and as such had always taken a deep interest in the affairs of other people. It is to be presumed that women have a larger mental grasp than men. They crave for more business when they are business-like, and thus by easy steps descend to mere officiousness.

Eve’s story was so very simple and, to the ears of one who had known her father, so extremely likely, that Mrs. Harrington had for the moment nothing to say. She knew the working of the singular system on which land is to this day held in tenure in Majorca and Minorca, and there was no reason to suppose that there was any mistake or deception respecting the estate of the Val d’Erraha.

A dramatist of considerable talent, who is not sufficiently studied in these modern times, has said that a man in his time plays many parts. He left it to be understood that a woman plays only one. The business woman is the business woman all through her life--she is never the charitable lady, even for a moment.

Mrs. Harrington had wished to have the bringing out of a beautiful heiress. She had no desire to support a penniless orphan. The matter had, in her mind, taken the usual form of a contract in black and white. Mrs. Harrington would supply position and a suitable home--Eve was to have paid for her own dresses--chosen by the elder contractor--and to have filled gracefully the gratifying, if hollow, position of a young person of means looking for a husband.

Mrs. Harrington’s business habits had, in fact, kept her fully alive to the advantages likely to accrue to herself; and the small fact that Eve was penniless reduced these advantages to a mythical reward in the hereafter. And business people have not time to think of the hereafter.

It is possible that simple old Captain Bontnor in part divined these thoughts in the set grey eyes, the grey wrinkled face.

“You’ll understand, marm,” he said, “that my niece will not be in a position to live the sort o’ life” - he paused, and looked round the vast room, quite without admiration - “the sort o’ life you’re livin’ here. She couldn’t keep up the position.”

“It would not be for long,” said Mrs. Harrington, already weighing an alternative plan. She looked critically at Eve, noting, with the appraising eye of a middle-aged woman of the world, the grace of her straight young form, the unusual beauty of her face. “If you could manage to allow her sufficient to dress suitably for one season, I dare say she would make a suitable marriage.”

Eve turned on her with a flash of bright dark eyes. “Thank you; I do not want to make a suitable marriage.”

Captain Bontnor laid his hand on her arm.

“My dear,” he said, “don’t take any heed of her. She doesn’t know any better. I have heard tell of such women, but”--he looked round the room--“I did not look to meet with one in a house like this. I did not know they called themselves ladies.”

Mrs. Harrington gasped. She lived in a world where people think such things as these, but do not say them. Captain Bontnor, on the other hand, had not yet encountered a person of whom he was so much afraid as to conceal a hostile opinion, should he harbour such.

He was patting Eve’s gloved hand as if she had been physically hurt, and Eve smiled down into his sympathetic old face. It is a singular fact that utter worldliness in a woman seems to hurt women less than it does men.

Mrs. Harrington, with frigid dignity, ignored Captain Bontnor, and addressed herself exclusively to Eve.

“You must be good enough to remember,” she said, “that I can scarcely have other motives than those of kindness.”

A woman is so conscious of the weak links in her chain of argument, that she usually examines them publicly.

“I do remember that,” replied Eve, rather softened by the grey loneliness of this woman’s life--a loneliness which seemed to be sitting on all the empty chairs--“and I am very grateful to you. I think, perhaps, my uncle misunderstood you. But--”

“Yes--but--”

“Under the circumstances, I think it will be wiser for me to accept his kind offer, and make my home with him. I hope to be able to find some work which will enable me to--to help somewhat towards the household expenses.”

Mrs. Harrington shrugged her shoulders.

“As you like,” she said. “After a few months of a governess’s life perhaps you may reconsider your decision. I know--”

She was going to say that she knew what it was, but she recollected herself in time.

“I know,” she said instead, “girls who have lived such lives.”

With the air of Spain Eve Challoner seemed to have inhaled some of the Spanish pride, which is as a stone wall against which charity and pity may alike beat in vain. From her superior height the girl looked down on the keen-faced little woman.

“I am not in a position to choose,” she said. “I am prepared for some small hardships.”

Mrs. Harrington turned to ring the bell. With the sudden caprice which her money had enabled her to cultivate, she had taken a liking to Eve.

“You will have some tea?” she said.

Eve turned to thank her, and suddenly her heart leaped to her throat. She caught her breath, and did not answer for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said; and her eyes stole back to the mantelpiece, where a large photograph of Fitz seemed to watch her with a quiet, thoughtful smile.

The whole room appeared to be different after that. Mrs. Harrington seemed to be a different woman--the world seemed suddenly to be a smaller place and less lonely.

During the remainder of the short visit they talked of indifferent topics, while Captain Bontnor remained silent. Mrs. Harrington’s caprice grew stronger, and before tea was over she said--

“My dear, if you will not come and live with me, at all events make use of me. Your uncle will, no doubt, have to make some small changes in his household. I propose that you stay with me a week or ten days, until he is ready for you.”

This with a slight conciliatory bow towards Captain Bontnor, who stared remorselessly at the clock.

“Thank you; I should very much like to,” said Eve, mindful of the mantelpiece.

CHAPTER XIV. A QUATRE.

There is so much that no one knows,
So much unreached that none suppose.

“I want you to put on a nice dress to-night. I have two friends coming to dine.”

Eve looked up from the book she was reading, and Mrs. Harrington tempered her curt manner of expressing her wishes with a rare smile. She often did this for Eve’s benefit, almost unconsciously. In some indefinite way she was rather afraid of this girl.

“I will do my best,” answered Eve, her mind only half weaned from the pages.

She had been ten days in the house, and the somewhat luxurious comfort of it appealed to a faintly developed love of peace and ease which had been filtered into her soul with the air of a Southern land. She had found it easier to get on with Mrs. Harrington than she at first anticipated. Her nature, which was essentially womanly, had in reality long craved for the intimate sympathy and intercourse which only another woman could supply. There was something indolent and restful in the very atmosphere of the house that supplied a distinct want in the motherless girl’s life. There were a number of vague possibilities of trouble in the world, half perceived, half divined by Eve; which possibilities Mrs. Harrington seemed capable of meeting and fending off.

It was all indefinite and misty, but Eve felt at rest, and, as it were, under protection, in the house of this hard, cold woman of the world.

“It can only be a black one,” the girl answered.

“Yes; but people don’t know what a black dress is until they have seen one that has been made in Spain.”

Eve did not return at once to her book. She was, in fact, thinking about her dress--being in no way superior to such matters.

When she came down into the drawing-room, an hour later, she found awaiting her there the two men about whom she thought most.

Cipriani de Lloseta and Fitz were standing on the hearthrug together. Mrs. Harrington had not yet come down. They came forward together, the Count taking her hand first, with his courteous bow. Fitz followed, shaking hands in silence, with that simplicity which she had learned to look for and to like in him.

“I wonder,” said Eve, “why Mrs. Harrington did not tell me that you were the two friends she expected to dinner?”

The Count smiled darkly.

“Perhaps our hostess does not know that we have met before - ” he began; and stopped suddenly when the door opened, and the rustle of Mrs. Harrington’s silk dress heralded her coming.

Her quick eyes flashed over them with a comprehensive appreciation of the situation.

“You all seem to know each other,” she said sharply. “I knew that Fitz had been of some service to you at D’Erraha; but I was not aware that you knew the Count de Lloseta.”

“The Count de Lloseta was very kind to me at Barcelona--on a matter of business,” explained Eve innocently.

Mrs. Harrington turned upon the Spaniard quickly, but nevertheless too late to catch the warning frown which he had directed towards Eve. Mrs. Harrington looked keenly into his face, which was blandly imperturbable.

“Then you are the owner of D’Erraha?”

“I am.”

Mrs. Harrington gave a strange little laugh.

“What a rich man you are!” she said. “Come! Let us go to dinner.”

She took the Count’s arm, and led the way to the dining-room. She was visibly absent-minded at first, as if pondering over something which had come as a surprise to her. Then she woke from her reverie, and, turning to Fitz, said--

“And what do you think of the Baleares?”

“I like them,” returned Fitz curtly.

He thought it was bad taste thus to turn the conversation upon a subject which could only be painful to Eve. He only thought of Eve, and therefore did not notice the patient endurance of the Count’s face.

De Lloseta was taking his soup with a slow concentration of his attention upon its flavour, as if trying not to hear the conversation. Mrs. Harrington looked sharply at him, and in doing so failed to intercept a glance, exchanged by Fitz and Eve across the table.

“Why are you here?” Fitz seemed to be asking.

And Eve reassured him by a little smile.

“There is one advantage in your long exile at Mahon,” pursued the hostess inexorably. “It must have been economical. You could not have wanted money there.”

Fitz laughed.

“Hardly so Arcadian as that,” he said.

The Count looked up.

“I suppose,” he said, “that the port where one does not want money is yet to be discovered?”

Mrs. Harrington, sipping her sherry, glanced at the speaker.

“Surely,” she said lightly, “you are talking of what you know absolutely nothing.”

“Pardon me”--without looking up.

Mrs. Harrington laughed.

“Ah,” she said, “we three know too much about you to believe that. Now, what can a lone man like you want with money?”

“A lone man may happen to be saddled with a name of--well, of some repute--an expensive luxury.”

“And you think that a great name is worth spending a fortune upon, like a garden, merely to keep it up?”

“I do.”

“You think it worth all that?”

The dark, inscrutable eyes were raised deliberately to her face.

“Assuredly you must know that I do,” he said.

Mrs. Harrington laughed, and changed the subject. She knew this man’s face well, and her knowledge told her that he was at the end of his patience.

“So you saw Luke at Gibraltar?” she said, turning to Fitz.

“Yes, for a short time. I had never seen the Croonah before. She is a fine ship.”

“So I understand. So fine, indeed, that two friends of mine, the Ingham-Bakers, were induced to go to Malta in her. There is no limit now to feminine enterprise. Mothers are wonderful, and their daughters no less so. N’est-ce pas, SeÑor?”

“All ladies are wonderful!” said the Count, with a grave bow. “They are as the good God made them.”

“I don’t agree with you there,” snapped Mrs. Harrington. “So you saw the Ingham-Bakers also, Fitz?”

“Yes; they lunched with us.”

“And Agatha was very pleasant, no doubt?”

“Very.”

“She always is--to men. The Count admires her greatly. She makes him do so.”

“She has an easy task,” put in De Lloseta quietly. It almost seemed that there was some feeling about Agatha between these two people.

“You know,” Mrs. Harrington went on, addressing herself to Fitz, “that Luke and I have made it up. We are friends now.”

Fitz did not answer at once. His face clouded over. Seen thus in anger, it was almost a hard face, older and somewhat worn. He raised his eyes, and they as suddenly softened, for Eve’s eyes had met them, and she seemed to understand.

“I am not inclined to discuss Luke,” he said quietly.

“My dear, I did not propose doing so,” answered Mrs. Harrington, and her voice was so humble and conciliatory that De Lloseta looked up from his plate, from one face to the other.

That Mrs. Harrington should accept this reproof thus humbly seemed to come as a surprise to them all, except Fitz, who went on eating his dinner with a singular composure.

It would appear that Mrs. Harrington had been put out of temper by some small incident at the beginning of the dinner, and, like a spoilt child, proceeded to vent her displeasure on all and sundry. In the same way she would no doubt have continued, unless spoken sharply to, as Fitz had spoken.

For now her manner quite changed, and the rest of the meal passed pleasantly enough. Mrs. Harrington now devoted herself to her guests, and as carefully avoided dangerous subjects as she had hitherto appeared to seek them.

After dinner she asked the Count to tune his violin, while she herself prepared to play his accompaniment.

Fitz lighted the candles and set the music ready with a certain neatness of hand rarely acquired by landsmen, and then returned to the smaller drawing-room, where Eve was seated by the fire, needlework in hand.

He stood for a moment leaning against the mantelpiece. Perhaps he was waiting for her to speak. Perhaps he did not realise how much there was in his long, silent gaze.

“How long have you been here?” he asked, when the music began.

“Ten days,” she answered, without looking up.

“But you are not going to live here?”--with some misgiving.

“Oh no. I am going to live with my uncle in Suffolk.”

He moved away a few steps to pick up a fallen newspaper. Presently he came back to her, resuming his former position at the corner of the mantelpiece.

It was Eve who spoke next--smoothing out her silken trifle of needlework and looking at it critically.

“I never thanked you,” she said, “for all your kindness to me at D’Erraha. You were a friend in need.”

It was quite different from what it had been at D’Erraha. Possibly it was as different as were the atmospheres of the two places. Eve seemed to have something of London in the reserve of her manner - the easy insincerity of her speech. She was no longer a girl untainted by worldliness--sincere, frank, and open.

Fitz was rather taken aback.

“Oh,” he answered, “I could not do much. There was really nothing that I could do except to stand by in case I might be wanted.”

Eve took up her needle again.

“But,” she said, “that is already something. It is often a great comfort, especially to women, to know that there is some one ‘standing by,’ as you call it, in case they are wanted.”

She gave a little laugh, and then suddenly became quite grave. The recollection of a conversation they had had at D’Erraha had flashed across her memory, as recollections do--at the wrong time. The conversation she remembered was recorded at the time--it was almost word for word with this, but quite different.

Fitz was looking at her with his impenetrable simplicity.

“Will you oblige me,” he said, “by continuing to look upon me in that light?”

She had bent her head rather far over her work as he spoke, and as he said the last five words her breath seemed to come with a little catch, as if she had pricked her finger.

The musicians were just finishing a brilliant performance, and before answering Fitz she looked round into the other room, nodded, smiled, and thanked them. Then she turned to him, still speaking in the light and rather indifferent tone which was so new to him, and said -

“Thank you very much, but of course I have my uncle. How--how long will you be--staying on shore? You deserve a long leave, do you not?”

“Yes, I suppose I do,” said Fitz absently. He had evidently listened more to the voice than the words. He forgot to answer the question. But she repeated it.

“How long do you get?” she asked, hopelessly conversational.

“About three weeks.”

“Is that all? Ah! here is tea. I wonder whether I ought to offer to pour it out!”

But Mrs. Harrington left the piano, and said that her sight was failing her. She had had enough music.

During the rest of the evening Fitz took one or two opportunities of looking at Eve to discover, if he could, what the difference was that he found in her. He had left a girl in Majorca--he found a woman in London. That was the whole difference; but he did not succeed in reducing it to so many words. He had passed most of his life at sea among men. He had not, therefore, had much opportunity of acquiring that doubtful knowledge--the knowledge of women--the only item, by the way, which men will never include among the sciences of existence. Already they know more about the stars than they do about women. Even if Fitz had possessed this knowledge he would not have turned it to account. The wisest fail to do that. We only make use of our knowledge of women in the study of those women with whom other men have to do.

“Fitz has grown rather dull and stupid,” said Mrs. Harrington, when the two guests had taken their leave.

Eve was folding up her work, and did not answer.

“Was he like that in Mallorca?” continued the grey lady.

“Oh--I think so. He was very quiet always.”

They also serve who only stand and wait.

“Come down to my club and have a cigar!”

The Count stood under a yellow lamp enveloped in his fur-lined coat, looking with heavy, deep-browed eyes at his young companion.

Fitz paused. The Count had been kind to Eve. Fitz had noticed his manner towards the girl. He liked Cipriani de Lloseta - as many did--without knowing why.

“Thanks,” he said, “I should like to.”

The Count’s club was a small and a very select one. It was a club with a literary tendency. The porter who took charge of their coats had the air of a person who read the heavier monthly reviews. He looked upon Fitz, as a man of outdoor tastes, with some misgiving.

The Count led the way up to the luxurious silent smoking-room, where a few foreign novels and a host of newspapers littered the tables.

As they entered the room a man looked up from his paper with some interest. He was a peculiar-looking man, with a keen face, streaked by suffering--a face that was always ready to wince. This man was a humorist, but he looked as if his own life had been a tragedy. He continued to look at De Lloseta and Fitz with a quiet scrutiny which was somewhat remarkable. It suggested the scrutiny of a woman who is taking notes of another’s dress.

More particularly perhaps he watched the Count, and the keen eyes had a reflective look, as if they were handing that which they saw, back to the brain behind them for purpose of storage.

The Count met his eyes and nodded gravely. With a little nod and a sudden pleasant smile the other returned to the perusal of his evening paper.

Cipriani de Lloseta drew forward a deep chair, and with a courteous gesture invited Fitz to be seated. He took a similar chair himself, and then leant forward, cigar-case in hand.

“You know Mallorca,” he said.

Fitz took a cigar.

“Yes,” he answered, turning and looking into the Count’s face with a certain honest interest. He was thinking of what Eve had said about this man. “Yes--I know Mallorca.”

The Count struck a match and lighted his cigar with the air of a connoisseur.

“I am always glad,” he said conversationally, “to meet any one who knows Mallorca. It--was my home. Perhaps you knew?”

And through the blue smoke the quick dark eyes flashed a glance.

“I saw your name--on the map,” returned Fitz.

The Count gave a little Spanish deprecatory nod and wave of the hand, indicating that it was no fault of his that an historical name should have attached itself to him.

“Do you take whisky--and soda?” inquired the Count.

“Thanks.”

De Lloseta called the waiter and gave the order with a slight touch of imperiousness which was one of the few attributes that stamped him as a Spaniard. The feudal taint was still running in his veins.

“Tell me,” he went on, turning to Fitz again, “what you know of the island--what parts of it--and what you did there.”

In some ways Fitz was rather a simple person.

“Oh!” he answered unconsciously. “I went to D’Erraha mostly. I used to sail across from Ciudadela to Soller--along the coast, you know.”

“And from Soller?”

“From Soller I rode by the Valdemosa road, and then across the mountain and through that narrow valley up to the Val d’Erraha.”

The Count was smoking thoughtfully.

“And you were happy there?” he said.

Fitz looked pensively into his long tumbler.

“Yes.”

“I also,” said the Count. Then he seemed to remember his duties as host. “Is that cigar all right?” he asked.

“I think it is the best I have ever smoked,” replied Fitz quietly; and the Count smiled.

The two men sat there in a long silence--each thinking his own thoughts. They were just the sort of men to do it. No other but Cipriani de Lloseta would have sat with that perfect composure, wrapt in an impenetrable Spanish silence, providing with grave dignity such a very poor evening’s entertainment. And Fitz seemed quite content. He leant back, gravely smoking the good cigar. There seemed to be some point of complete sympathy between them--possibly the little sunlit island of the Mediterranean where they had both been happy.

The poem of a man’s life is very deeply hidden, and civilisation is the covert. The immediate outcome of civilisation is reserve and--nous voilÀ. Are we not increasing our educational facilities with a blind insistence day by day? One wonders what three generations of cheap education will do for the world. Already a middle-aged man can note the slackening of the human tie. Railway directors, and other persons whose pockets benefit by the advance of civilisation, talk a vast deal of rubbish about bringing together the peoples of the world. You can connect them, but you cannot bring them together. Moreover, a connection is sometimes a point of divergence. In human affairs it is more often so than otherwise.

True, a generation lay between these two men, but it was not that that tied their tongues. It was partially the fact that Cipriani de Lloseta had moved with the times--had learnt, perhaps, too well, to acquire that reserve which is daily becoming more noticeable among men.

Nevertheless, it was he who spoke first.

“I asked you to come and smoke a cigar with me for a purpose,” he said.

Fitz nodded.

“Yes,” he answered; “I thought so.”

A shadowy smile acknowledged this simple statement of a simple fact. The Count leant forward on his seat, resting his somewhat hollow cheek on his hand and his elbow on the arm of his chair.

“Some years ago,” he said, “before you were born, I passed through a--well, a bad time. One of those times, I take it, when a man finds out the difference between a friend and an acquaintance. The circumstances would not interest you. They are essentially personal. Some men, and many women--I am not cynical, that is the last resource of one who has himself to blame, I am merely stating a fact--many women turned their backs upon me. There was, however, one man--an Englishman--who held to me with that unflinching courage of his own opinion which makes an Englishman what he is. I accepted nothing from him at the time. In fact, he could do nothing for me. I think he understood. An Englishman and a Spaniard have much in common. He is dead now. It was Challoner.”

Fitz nodded. The Count changed his position slightly.

“I want you to use what influence you have with Miss Challoner. She is proud.”

Fitz made no attempt to disclaim the implied influence.

“Yes,” he said; “I know.”

And he looked at the end of his cigar with a deep interest. The man who loves a proud woman loves her pride. He is also a happy man, because her pride will kill her vanity, and it is a woman’s vanity that spoils a husband’s love.

“It would be a great satisfaction to me,” the Count went on, “to pay off in some small degree the debt of gratitude which I never even acknowledged to Challoner. Eve”--he paused, and repeated the name with a certain sense of enjoyment--“Eve is not fully equipped with worldly wisdom. Thank God, for I hate a worldly-wise woman. She is hardly old enough or--plain enough to fight her own battles.”

Fitz gave a sudden, sharp sigh, which made the Count pause for a moment.

“You also have received kindness from Challoner,” went on the elder man, after a short silence.

Fitz nodded comprehensively.

“And, like myself,” the Count continued, rather quickly, “you are naturally interested in his daughter, and sorry for her in her great change of circumstances. Now, it has occurred to me that together we might do something towards helping her. You know her better than I do. I only know that she is proud.”

“Very much to her credit,” put in Fitz, looking fixedly at his own boots.

“Entirely so. And I respect her for it. Unfortunately, assistance could hardly come from you--a young man. Whereas, I might be her grandfather.”

He looked up with a smile--keen, black-haired, lithe of frame--a young man in appearance.

“We might help each other,” he added, “you and I, quite alone. Captain Bontnor is a very worthy old fellow, but - ” and he shrugged his shoulders. “We cannot leave her to the wayward charity of a capricious woman!” he added, with sudden bluntness.

He looked rather wonderingly at Fitz, who did not respond to this suggestion, as he had expected him to do. The coalition seemed so natural and so eminently practical, and yet the sailor sat coldly listening to each proposition as it fell from his companion’s lips, weighing it, sifting it with a judicial, indifferent apathy.

The Count de Lloseta threw himself back in his chair, and awaited, with all the gravity of his race, the pleasure of his companion. At length Fitz spoke, rather deliberately.

“I think,” he said, “you mistake the footing upon which I stand with respect to Miss Challoner. I shall be most happy to do all in my power; but I tell you frankly that it does not amount to much. I am indebted to her indirectly for some very pleasant visits to D’Erraha; her father was very kind to me. Hardly sufficient to warrant anything that would look like interference on my part.”

The Count was too discreet a man to press the point any further.

“All this unfortunate difficulty would have been easily averted had I been less stupid. I shall never cease to regret it.”

He spoke conversationally, flicking the end of his cigar neatly into the fire, and without looking at Fitz.

“I never foresaw the natural tendency of lawyers to complicate the affairs of life. My man in Palma was unfortunately zealous.”

Fitz nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “I was there.”

Cipriani de Lloseta glanced at him sharply.

“I am glad of that,” he said. “It was very stupid of me. I ought to have telegraphed to him to hold his tongue.”

“But Miss Challoner could not have accepted the Val d’Erraha as a present?”

“Oh yes, she could, if she had not known. These little things are only a matter of sentiment.”

Fitz leant forward, looking into the Count’s face without attempting to conceal his surprise.

“Do you mean to say you would have given it to her?” he asked.

“No; I should have paid it to her in settlement of a debt which I owed to her father.”

The Count moved rather uneasily in his chair. His eyes fell before his companion’s steady gaze.

“Another matter of sentiment,” suggested Fitz.

De Lloseta shrugged his shoulders.

“If you will.”

They lapsed into silence again. The Count was puzzled by Fitz, as Fitz in his turn had been puzzled earlier in the evening by Eve. It was merely the old story of woman the incomprehensible, and man the superior--the lord of the universe--puzzled, completely mystified, made supremely miserable or quite happy by her caprice of a moment.

It was a small thing that stood between these two men, preventing them from frankly co-operating in the scheme which both had at heart. It was nothing but the tone of a girl’s voice, the studied silence of a girl’s eyes, which had once been eloquent.

It was getting late. A discreet clock on the mantelpiece declared the hour of midnight in deliberate cathedral chime. Fitz looked up, but he did not move. He liked Cipriani de Lloseta. He had been prepared to do so, and now he had gone further than he had intended. He wanted him to go on talking about Eve, for he thirsted in his dumbly enduring way for more details of her life. But he would not revert to the subject. Rather than that he would go on enduring.

While they were sitting thus in silence, the only other occupant of the room--the man with the pain-drawn face--rose from his seat, helping his legs with unsteady hands upon either arm of the chair. He threw the paper down carelessly on the table, and came across the room towards the Count de Lloseta. He was a surprisingly tall man when he stood up; for in his chair he seemed to sink into himself. His hair was grey--rather long and straggly--his eyes hazel, looking through spectacles wildly. His cheeks were very hollow, his chin square and bony. Here was a man of keen nerves and quick to suffer.

“Well,” he said to Lloseta, “I haven’t seen you for some time.”

“I’ve been away.”

The tall man looked down at him with the singular scrutiny already mentioned.

“Spain?”

“Spain.”

He turned away with a little nod, but stopped before he had gone many paces.

“And when are you going to write those sketches of Spanish life?” he asked, with a cheery society laugh, which sounded rather incongruous. “Never, I suppose. Well, the loss is mine. Good-night, Lloseta.”

He went away without looking back.

“Do you know who that is?” the Count asked Fitz when the door was closed.

Fitz had risen, with his eye on the clock.

“No. But I seem to know his face.”

The Count looked up with a smile.

“You ought to. That was John Craik.”

CHAPTER XVI. BROKEN.

The Powers
Behind the world that make our griefs our gains.

The small town of Somarsh, in Suffolk, consists of one street running up from the so-called harbour. At one end is the railway-station; at the other the harbour and the sea, and that is Somarsh. There are records that in days gone by--in the days of east coast prosperity - there was a Mayor of Somarsh, or Southmarsh, as it was then written. But Ichabod!

All Somarsh was in the street one morning after Fitz had gone to sea again, and those of the women who were not talking loudly were weeping softly. The boats were not in yet, but the weather was fine, and the still, saffron sea was dotted with brown sails. There was nothing wrong with the boats.

No; the trouble was on shore, as it mostly is. It came not from the sea, but from men. It was pinned upon the door of Merton’s Bank in the High Street. Its form was unintelligible, for the wording of the notice was mostly outside the Suffolk vocabulary. There was something written in a clerkly hand about the withdrawal of “financial facilities necessitating a stoppage of payment pending reconstruction.”

But the people in the street were saying that Merton’s was “broke.” The constable said so, and he was a recognised authority on matters pertaining to dry land and the law. The door was locked on the inside, the shutters were up, the blinds down, as if mourning the death of a good East county credit.

“And them a drivin’ behind their two horses,” said one old weather-beaten fisherman, who was suspected of voting on the wrong side at electioneering time.

Some shook their heads, but the word went no farther, for the man who does his business on the great waters has a vast respect for ancient institutions. And Merton’s had been a good bank for many generations.

“P’raps,” said an old woman who had nothing to lose--for the sea had even kept her corpses from her--“p’raps what they say ’bout reconstruction may be all right. But here comes the capt’n.”

The crowd turned like one man and watched the advent of Captain Bontnor.

The old man was dressed in his best pilot cloth suit. He had worn it quite recklessly for the last month, ever since Eve had come to live with him. He had been interrupted in his morning walk - his quarter-deck tramp--forty times the length of his own railing in front of Malabar Cottage. The postman bringing letters for Eve, had told him that there was trouble down in the town, and that he would likely be wanted.

When he saw where the crowd was stationed he caught his breath.

“No,” he said aloud to himself, “no, it can’t be Merton’s.”

And when he joined the townspeople they saw that his sunburnt, rugged face was grey as ashes.

“Mates,” he said, “what is it?”

“Merton’s is broke--Merton’s is broke!” they answered, clearing a way for him to read the notice for himself. In Somarsh Captain Bontnor was considered quite a scholar. As such he might, perhaps, have deciphered the clerkly handwriting in a shorter time than he now required, but on the east coast a reputation is not easily shaken.

They waited for the verdict in silence. After five minutes he turned round and his face gave some of them a shock. His kindly blue eyes had a painfully puzzled, incompetent look, which had often come across them in Barcelona and in London. But in Somarsh only Eve was familiar with it.

“Yes, mates,” he said, falling back into his old seafaring vernacular, forgetful of his best suit, “yes, shipmates, as far as I rightly understand it, the bank’s broken. And--and there’s some of us that’s ruined men.”

He stood for a moment looking straight in front of him--looking very old and not quite fit for life’s battle. Then he moved away.

“I’ll just go and tell my niece,” he said.

They watched him stump away--sturdy, unbroken, upright--still a man.

“It’s a hard end to a hard life,” said the old woman who had suggested hope; and being only human, they fell to discussing the event from the point at which it affected their own lives.

Malabar Cottage stood at the top end of the High Street--almost by itself--looking out over the little green plot of common land, where the coastguard flagpost stands towards the sea. It was a low-roofed, solidly built cottage--once a coastguard station, but superseded in the heyday of east coast smuggling by a larger station further up the hill. There was a little garden in front, which the captain kept himself, growing such old-fashioned flowers as were content with his ignorant handling. The white jasmine ran riot over the portico.

Eve had apparently received a letter of some importance, for she was standing at the gate waiting for him. She ran out hatless to see him on his quarter-deck, and to her surprise found him not. She soon saw him coming, however, and to beguile the time fell to reading her letter a second time, with a little frown, as if the caligraphy gave her trouble.

She did not look up until he was quite close.

“Uncle,” she cried, “what is the matter?”

He gave a smile, which was painfully out of place on his bluff features - it was wan and twisted.

“Nothing, my dearie; nothing.”

He fumbled at the gate, and she had to find the latch for him.

“Just come below--I mean indoors, my dear. I’ve had some news. I dare say it will be all right--but just at first, you understand, it is a little--keen.”

He bustled through the porch, and Eve followed him. She watched him hang up his old straw hat, standing on tiptoe with a grunt, as was his wont.

“I must unship that peg and put it a bit lower,” he said, as he had said a hundred times before.

Then he went into the little dining-room and sat somewhat heavily down, with his two hands resting on his knees. He looked puzzled.

“Truth is, my dear,” he said breathlessly, “I don’t seem to take to this long-shore life. I--I rather think of going back to sea. There’s plenty will give me a ship. And I want you to keep this cottage nice for me, dearie, against my coming home.”

He paused, looking round the room with a poor simulation of interest at the quaint ornaments and curiosities which he had brought home from different parts of the world. He looked at the ceiling and the carpet--anywhere, in fact, except at Eve. Then he pushed his fingers through his thick grey hair, making it stand on end in a ludicrous manner.

“I’ve got all my bits of things collected here--just bits of things--oh, dear!--oh, dear--Eve, my child, I wonder why the Almighty’s gone and done this?”

Eve was already sitting on the arm of his chair, stroking back his hair with her tender fingers.

“What is it, uncle?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“Merton’s,” he answered. “Merton’s, and them so safe!”

“Is it only money?” cried Eve. “Is that all?”

“Yes,” he answered rather wearily, “that’s all. But it’s money that’s took me fifty-five years to make.”

“And had you it all in Merton’s Bank?”

“Yes, dearie, all.”

“But are you sure they have failed--that there is no mistake?”

“Quite sure. I’ve read it myself pinned on the door, and the shutters up, like a thing you read of in the newspapers. No, it’s right. There’s not often a mistake about bad news.”

Eve bent over him very tenderly and kissed him. He was holding her hand between his, patting it gently with his rough, weather-beaten fingers. He was looking straight in front of him with that painful look of helplessness which had earned him the friendship of Lord Seahampton in Barcelona.

“But,” said the girl at length, “you cannot go to sea again.”

She knew that he would never get a ship, for his seamanship, like all other things that were his, was hopelessly superannuated. He was not fit to be trusted with a ship--no owner would dream of it, no crew would sail under him.

“There’s men,” said the captain humbly, “who learnt their seamanship from me--who sailed under me--p’raps one of them would give me a berth as first mate or even second mate under him--for a shipmate they would do it.”

Captain Bontnor had fallen behind the times even in his sentiments. He did not know that in these days of short voyages, of Seamen’s Unions, and Firemen’s Friendlies and Stokers’ Guilds, a shipmate is no longer a special friend--the tie is broken, as are many other ties, by the advance of education.

Then the old man pulled himself together, and smiled bravely at his niece.

“It is not for myself that I’m worrying,” he said, “but for you. I don’t quite see my way clear yet. It’s sort of sharp and sudden. I cannot get the poor Mertons out of my head--people that have been accustomed to their carriages and all. It’s hard for them! You see, what they say is that their financial facilities have been withdrawn, and I dare say nobody is to blame. It is just what they call the hand of God, in a bill of lading--just the hand of God.”

“Yes, dear,” answered Eve. “And now I am going to serve out a glass of sherry; you want it after your quick walk. That is what you did at sea, you served it out, did you not?”

“He, he! yes, dearie; that is it.”

His rugged hand shook as he drank the wine.

“Only,” he went on, after wiping his moustache vigorously with a red pocket-handkerchief--“only it was rum, dearie--rum, you know, for heavy weather. It puts heart into the men.”

His face suddenly clouded over again.

“And we’ve run into heavy weather, haven’t we? Just the hand of God.”

“Finish the glass,” said Eve, and she stood over him while he drank the wine.

“And now,” she went on, “listen to me. I have had a very important letter, which could hardly have come at a more opportune moment. In fact, I think we may call it also . . . what they say in a bill of lading.”

She opened the letter, as if about to read it aloud, and on glancing through she seemed to change her mind.

“It is from Mrs. Harrington,” she said. “It is a very kind letter.”

She looked at her uncle, whose face had suddenly hardened. He seemed to be schooling himself to hear something unpleasant.

“Ay!” he muttered, “ay! I suppose she’ll get her way now. I suppose I can’t hope to keep you now. She’ll get you--she’ll get you.”

“Then I think you are a very mean old man!” exclaimed Eve. “I don’t believe you are a sailor at all. You are what you call a land-lubber, if you think that I am the sort of person to accept your kindness when you are prosperous, and then - and then when heavy weather comes to go away and leave you.”

The old man smiled rather wanly, and fumbled with the red pocket-handkerchief.

“As it happens, Mrs. Harrington does not ask me to go and stay with her--she asks me--” She paused and laid her hand on his shoulder gently. “She asks me--to accept money.”

Captain Bontnor sat upright.

“Ay-y-y,” he said, “charity.”

“Yes,” said Eve quietly, “charity; and I’m going to accept it.”

Captain Bontnor scratched his head. His manners were not, as has already been stated, remarkable for artificiality or superficial refinement. He screwed up his features as if he were swallowing something nasty.

“Read me the letter,” he said.

Eve opened the missive again, and looked at it.

“She puts it very nicely,” she said. “She asks if you will permit me to accept a dress allowance from a rich woman who does not always spend her money discreetly.”

It must be admitted that Mrs. Harrington’s nice way of putting it lost nothing by its transmission through Eve’s lips.

Thus poor Charity creeps in wherever she can shelter. She is not proud. She does not ask to be accepted for her own sake; though Heaven knows she frequently is. She masquerades in any costume - she accepts the humiliation of any disguise. She is ready to be cast down before swine, or raised high before the eyes of fools. She is used as a tool or a stepping-stone--the humble handmaid of the tuft-hunter and the toady. She is dragged through the mire of the slums to the dwellings of the wealthy and idle. She is hounded up and down the world--the plaything of Fashion, the trap of the unwary, the washerwoman of the unclean who wish to try the paths of virtue--for a change. And she is still Charity, and she lives strong and pure in herself. It has been decreed that we shall ever have the poor beside us, and so long shall we also possess those who live on them.

Charity begetteth charity, and it was for Charity’s sake that Eve Challoner took the bitter bread to herself, and accepted Mrs. Harrington’s offer.

Her own pride lay between her and this woman whom she knew to be capricious, uncertain, lacking the quality of justice. Her duty towards Captain Bontnor lay between her and high Heaven.

So Eve Challoner learnt her first lesson in that school where we all are called to study sooner or later--the school of Adversity; where some of us pass creditably, whilst others are ploughed, and a few--a very few--take honours.