The first week of December had not gone by, and already the winter had set in. Mr. Pryor, as he walked from the vicarage up the lonely road to Mitchelhurst Place, said to himself that it was a most unpleasant afternoon. Of his own free will he would not have left his fireside, but Destiny had turned him out, and he went feebly and heavily along the iron road, feeling as if Nature were in a mood of freezing malice and took pleasure in his sufferings. The air was still, yet it came very keenly to his pallid face, his feet were cold, the hand that held his umbrella was remarkably cold, a red-edged manual of prayers and devotional readings, tucked under his left arm, showed a tendency to slip, and altogether Mr. Pryor had a half-numbed sense that it was not fair that any one should want him in such weather.

The sky was grey, a chilly fog narrowed the horizon, and all the hedges and boughs in the little frozen landscape were covered with hoarfrost. It was like a dream of a dead spring. Every little clump of trees was an orchard, white with sterile blossoming, spectral flowers which would vanish as suddenly as they had come. Every sound was deadened, till it was almost startling to come upon a man at work by the wayside, lopping hoary branches from the hedge, and flinging them down, with all their delicate tangle of white sprays, upon the frosted grass. It was a grim task to be the only sign of energy in that ghostlike world; such a task as in an old picture Death himself might have undertaken. Happily, however, for good Mr. Pryor's nerves, it was the face of an ordinary flesh and blood labourer, with the breath steaming from his gaping mouth, that was lifted as he went by.

The vicar crept, shivering, up the avenue to the house, which was more than ever like a great white tomb. He asked the servant who admitted him how Mr. Hayes was that afternoon.

"Much the same, thank you, sir," said the woman, showing him into the yellow drawing-room, and putting a piece of wood on the fire, "I'll tell Miss Strange you are here."

He stood miserably on the rug, looking down into the fender, and squeezing his red-edged book under his arm, till at the sound of the opening door he turned and saw Barbara. The girl came forward quickly, and touched the fumbling fingers which he held out, as she uttered a word of greeting.

"Mr. Hayes is much the same, they tell me," said the clergyman in a melancholy voice.

"Yes," said Barbara, "I suppose there isn't any difference. But I think anyhow he isn't any worse. Mamma is with him, and he was taking some beef-tea just now"—Mr. Pryor nodded grave approval of the beef-tea—"but he'll be very glad to see you in a few minutes. Won't you sit down?"

He sat down, nursing the book, which had a narrow ribbon hanging out of it.

"I hope Mrs. Strange is pretty well—as well as can be expected?" he said, after a pause. "Not over-fatigued, I trust?"

"Oh, no; I don't think so," the girl replied. "Mamma seems very well."

"Ah, quite so. She bears up, she bears up. Well, that is what we must all try to do—to bear up. It is the only thing."

"Yes," said Barbara. She was not quite sure that she ought to have said that her mother seemed very well. "Of course it is a trying time," she added, by way of softening the possibly indiscreet admission.

"Certainly, certainly—very trying for you both," Mr. Pryor agreed. Yet even to his dull eyes it was apparent that this very trying time had not dimmed the bright face opposite. There was a peculiar radiance and warmth of youth about Barbara that afternoon, a glow of life which forced itself on his perception. She did not smile, she was very quiet, and yet it seemed as if some new delight, some unspoken hope, had awakened within her, quickening and kindling her to the very finger-tips. She sat demurely in her low chair, with her face turned towards the window, but there was a soft flame of colour on her cheek, and a light in her eyes when she lifted her drooping lashes. In that great, cold house, through which the shadow of death was creeping, she was the incarnation of life and promise, a curious contrast to her surroundings. It would hardly have seemed stranger if suddenly, in the desolate world without, one had come on a burning bush of pomegranate flowers among the cold frost-blossoms of the Mitchelhurst hedges.

Mr. Pryor felt something of all this. He did not quite like it. Of course he did not want to see the girl haggard and weary, but he was so chilly, as he sat there by the fireside with his book on his knee, that it seemed to him as if the swift, light pulsations of youth were hardly proper. He would have been more at his ease with Barbara if she had had a slight toothache, or a cold in her head. He felt it his duty to depress her a little, quietly, as she sat there.

"The hour of Death's approach is a very solemn one, even for the bystanders," Mr. Pryor began, after a moment's consideration.

Barbara said, "Yes it was," with an almost disconcerting readiness.

"Yes, yes, and we should endeavour to profit by it. We should spend it, not only in regrets for those who are about to be taken from us, but in thoughts of the future."

Barbara's red lips parted in another "Yes." The future—she was thinking of it. It was easier to think of it than of the old man who was dying.

"Of the future," Mr. Pryor continued, caressing the smooth leather of his book with his ungloved hand, and softly pulling the pendent ribbon, "of the time when we shall be lying—yes, yes, each one of us—as our friend is now." He glanced up at the ceiling, to indicate that he meant Mr. Hayes, taking his beef-tea in the bed-room on the first floor.

The girl said nothing, but looked meditatively at the folds of her dress, as if she were in church. It would have been pleasanter if Mr. Pryor had brought a funeral sermon out of his table drawer, and could have gone on without these embarrassing pauses.

"When our hour is at hand," he said at last, "as—as it must be one of these days. How shall we feel then, Miss Strange?"

Barbara didn't know.

"No," said the vicar, "we don't know. But we must think—we must think. Try to picture yourself in your uncle's position—what would your life look to you if you were lying there now?"

She looked up with a sudden startled flash. "I haven't had my life—it would only look like a beginning," she said with a vision as of a rose-garlanded doorway to a vault. "If I were going to die directly I couldn't feel like Uncle Hayes."

The passionate speech awoke the clergyman's instinct of assent. "No, no," he said, "certainly not. Certainly not." At that moment a message came: "Would Mr. Pryor kindly step up-stairs?" and he went, not altogether sorry to bring his little discourse to a close.

Barbara, left to herself, sat gazing at the window, till at last the hinted smile, which had troubled her companion, betrayed itself in a tender, changeful curve. "Adrian!" she said softly, under her breath. "Oh, how could I? How could I? Adrian! and I thought you didn't care!"

She was restless with happiness. She sprang up, and walked to and fro, too glad at heart to complain of the walls that held her, and yet feeling that she needed air and freedom for her joy. She leaned against the window, and looked out at the wintry world, murmuring Adrian's name against the chilly pane. There was no voice to give her back her tender speech, yet she hardly missed it. No praise is so sweet to a woman as the reproaches she heaps upon herself for an unjust suspicion of her lover. To defend him to others is a mixture of joy and pain, but to feel that she has wronged him, and that to trust him is safer than to trust her doubts, is a passionate delight.

This joy had come to Barbara that very morning. She had been sitting in her uncle's room, reading a novel by the fireside, while the old man slept, as she thought. She softly turned page after page till a feeble voice broke the silence. "Where's your mamma?" said Mr. Hayes.

"Down-stairs, writing letters. Do you want her?" And Barbara stood ready to go.

"No, I don't want her. Writing her daily bulletins, eh? Well, well. What's the time? You haven't given me my medicine."

"It's very nearly time," said Barbara, with a glance at the clock. There was a little clinking of bottle and glass, and then she came to the bedside, and stood looking down at the wrinkled, fallen face among the pillows. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"Wait a bit, can't you?" said the old man.

She waited, looking aside, yet watching for the slightest movement on his part. Her soft young fingers closed round the half-filled glass, and his dim eyes rested on them. Presently he raised himself with an effort, and the girl put another pillow behind him. He stretched out a trembling, dingy-white hand, carried the glass to his lips a little uncertainly, and emptied it.

She set it down. "Shall I take away that pillow?" she asked.

"No—wait."

Barbara, after a minute, shifted her position, and stood by the carved post at the foot of the bed, while her thoughts went back to her novel. She was not heartless, she was only young. Her uncle had never been very much to her, and she found it as difficult to concentrate her mind on this melancholy business of sickness and dissolution as if it were a sermon. And yet she did sincerely desire to behave properly, and to feel properly, too, if it could be managed.

The little old man rested awhile, sitting up in his bed. He perceived that the girl's thoughts were far away. He could keep her standing there as long as he pleased, a motionless figure against the faded green curtains, but he could not narrow her world to his sick-room. Perhaps for that very reason he felt a desire to awaken her from her reverie.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Nineteen."

The answer was given with a lifting of her long lashes. She had not expected any question about herself.

"Nineteen?"

"Yes. At least I shall be nineteen next month."

A month more or less made little difference to Barbara.

"As much as that?" he said. "Barbara, perhaps I ought to say something before I go."

Her attention was effectually aroused, and her brilliant gaze rested on the dull, waxen mask before her. But after a moment his eyes fell away from hers.

"I thought I did right," he said.

"Yes?" Barbara questioned.

"That young man who came here—what was his name?"

"Mr. Harding."

"No, no, no!" he cried irritably. "No! What made you think of him? The first one?"

"Mr. Scarlett?"

He nodded.

"But it doesn't matter," he said. "If you were thinking of the other one it doesn't matter about Scarlett."

"What about him?"

"He wanted to speak to you before he went away, and I told him to wait. Better to wait—you were so young, you know."

"He did want to speak to me!" the girl exclaimed under her breath.

"Plenty of time," said Mr. Hayes. "He's young too. I told him he could come again to Mitchelhurst if he felt the same. I thought it was best—I thought it was best," he repeated, trying to drown a faint consciousness that to have parted with Barbara would have upset all his arrangements.

"I'm sure you did," she answered soothingly.

"I know your mother would say it was best—wouldn't she? Besides, I didn't do any harm, since you were thinking of the other one."

"He was here last," said Barbara.

"So he was," the sick man answered, with a flash of his old briskness. "And girls soon forget."

Barbara said nothing. What was the good of protestations? She would never utter a word against Reynold Harding—never. And what could she say about Adrian Scarlett? She had not owned to herself that she cared for him. If she did—and she was conscious of strong pulsations, which flushed her face, and filled her veins with tingling warmth—the more reason for silence. She laid a hand on the carved foliage of the post, and faced the dim figure propped in the bed. There was something grotesquely feeble about the little man's attitude. His face, discoloured and pale, drooped in the greenish shadow of the hangings, his unshaven chin rested on his breast, his parchment hands lay in a little nerveless heap on the counterpane before him. One would have said that he was set up in sport, as children set up dolls and nine-pins, on purpose to be knocked over.

"Hadn't you better lie down?" said Barbara, after considering him for a while. She wanted to speak tenderly, for the sake of the strange new gladness which was throbbing at her heart; yet the facts of sickness and hopeless decay had never seemed so distasteful. When he assented, she put her arm about him with the utmost care, but she could hardly help shrinking from the clutch of his chilly fingers on her wrist.

"Rothwells are a bad lot," he said, "bad and poor. Scarlett would be a better match. Some of his people have money."

The habit of deference to her Uncle Hayes prevented her from resenting this speech.

"Never mind about that, please, uncle," she said gently.

"Good family, too," said Mr. Hayes, indistinctly to himself. "I did it for the best, as your mamma would see."

"Never mind about mamma, Uncle Hayes," said the girl again. "I'm sure you had better rest a little."

And when he acquiesced she went back to her novel, which was all about Adrian Scarlett. After all, he had not gone off without a thought of her—he had not slighted her. Perhaps she was too young, and at any rate she could not be angry with her uncle since he had told her of Adrian's love. She had a right to think of him as Adrian, surely, if he loved her. So he had been sent away—where? Perhaps he would see somebody else, somebody better and more beautiful, and she would be forgotten. Well!—Barbara's eyes were fixed intently on the page—even if he did forget her, it might break her heart, but she need not be ashamed that she had thought of him, since she held the happy certainty that he had thought of her. Happen what might in his after life, he had loved her once—he had!—he had! And she had feared that he had only laughed at her, she had thought that he might be heartless—Oh how was it possible that she could have been so wickedly unjust! She deserved that he should never come back to her.

It was an incongruous business altogether. It was as if a breath from a burial vault had quickened the faint flame in Barbara's heart to sudden splendour, for if old Hayes had actually been the mummy he very much resembled, he could not have been more remote from any comprehension of the message which he had delivered. His lips had relaxed in utter feebleness, and the secret had escaped. He did not see the look which flashed into the girl's eyes, and when Mrs. Strange, who might have been more observant, came to take her place by the bedside, Barbara stole softly away, hanging her head in the consciousness of those flushed cheeks, which seemed too like holiday wear for such a melancholy time. Her mother might have been surprised, for she had been a little uneasy, fancying that the girl looked sad. Barbara was but a young thing, and had been left too long shut up with but dismal company.

And, if Mrs. Strange had only known it, the poor little girl had been her own most dismal company. From the time that Reynold Harding went away she had been restless, frightened, and miserable. When the exaltation of that evening had passed, a sudden terror at the thought of her own daring overtook her. She was not only afraid of her uncle's anger, but doubtful whether she had not really committed an unpardonable sin against the social law. When she hurried to Harding with the letters, she had somehow vaguely believed that he would shelter her, that he would stand by her if she were blamed. And when he had played with her, refused to trust her, and vanished into the night with a mocking smile, leaving her utterly alone, she had felt absurdly desolate. At first she had waited, in sickening apprehension, for her uncle to hear of her visit to Mr. Harding. Fate, however, seemed whimsically inclined to protect her. First there was the storm of rain which prevented a meeting with all the gossips of Mitchelhurst at the Penny Reading. Then, a day or two later, came Mr. Hayes' accident—a mere slip on the stairs, it was supposed, till the doctor hinted at something in the nature of a fit. Barbara saw that detection was postponed, but still she felt that the sword hung over her head, and night after night she tossed in an agony of doubt. Had she really done anything very dreadful? She recalled Mr. Harding's ambiguous words and glances—did they mean that he thought lightly of a girl who would go to him as she had done? Over and over again she asked the useless questions—Did they mean that?—Did they not?—-What did they mean? And leaving his meaning out of the matter, what would other people say? Suppose she went and told them—ah! but how and what would she tell them? She might say, "I found I hadn't posted Mr. Harding's letters, so I took them to him at once: wasn't that the best thing to do?" How right and reasonable it sounded! But if she said, "I went secretly to a man's lodgings at night——" at the mere thought a blush passed over her like a scorching wave of fire. What would her mother say?

Even in her misery she was childish enough to wince at the thought of her sisters at home. She had been proud to be mistress of a house while they were still in the school-room, and the idea that she had been wanting in dignity, perhaps even in modesty, and that she might be ostentatiously controlled and watched, by way of punishment, was intolerable to her. To be humiliated before Louisa and Hetty—how could she endure it? They were not ill-natured, but they had a little resented her advancement, and Barbara, as she lay in her great over-shadowing bed, could fancy all the out-spoken comments and questionings in the roomy attic where the three used to sleep. She did not want to go back to the Devonshire vicarage, and yet Mitchelhurst was fast becoming hateful to her. The pictures on the walls gazed at her with Reynold's eyes, his presence haunted the house from which he had been banished. What was the wrong that she had done him? She did not know, and the uncertainty seemed to mock her as he had mocked her that night. The poor child said to herself quite seriously that he had taken away all her youth and happiness. She fancied that she felt old and weary as the days went by, fretting her simple heart with unacknowledged fear.

And now suddenly came the message of Adrian's love, and lifted her above all her dreary little troubles. What did it matter that it was uttered by those dry, bloodless lips, which stumbled over the blissful words? What did anything matter since Adrian cared for her, and life was all to come? Why had she tormented herself about Reynold Harding! Reynold Harding! He was utterly insignificant, he was nobody! She could tell Adrian about that expedition of hers, it was so unimportant, so trivial, that he could not be jealous; he could not mind. Adrian's jealousy! There was something delightful, even in that terrible possibility. But he would not be jealous, everything was warm, and glad, and full of sunshine when Adrian was there.

She resented Mr. Pryor's professional allusions to the uncertainty of life. There are moments so perfect that they ought not to be degraded by thoughts of disease and death, ought not to be measured or weighed in any way whatever. Barbara felt this, and she thrust aside the clergyman's lecture as soon as he left the room. Let him talk of such things to Uncle Hayes. As for her, she lingered at the window, thinking of her newly-found happiness, while she gazed at the hoary fields, with their black boundaries of railing or leafless hedge, till a faint pink flush crept over the pale sky, as if it were softly suffused with her overflowing joy. Mitchelhurst Place, of which Harding had dreamed so tenderly a few months earlier, as a home for himself and his love, was to the eager girl at that moment only a charnel-house, full of death and clinging memories, from which she panted to escape. It was true that she had first met Adrian Scarlett there, but she had the whole world in which to meet him again. "And he will always know where to find me," she said to herself with a touch of practical common sense in the midst of her rapture. "He can look out papa's name in the Clergy List, any day."