'In the first place, my dear aunt,' said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte's drawing-room fire, 'you may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a serious thought to me.'

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.

'Stuff and nonsense!' replied the lady with her usual emphasis; 'I never flatter you, Hugh, and I don't mean to begin now, but it would be mere folly not to recognise that you have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in Miss Leyburns position.'

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable trouser-knees.

'I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,' he said, still stooping, 'but Miss Leyburn doesn't care twopence about my advantages.'

'Very proper of you to say so,' returned Lady Charlotte sharply; 'the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your head.'

'In the next place,' he went on undisturbed, 'why you should have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don't quite see.'

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.

'You know my weaknesses,' she said presently, with an effrontery which delighted her nephew. 'She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I can't do without her. As to you, I can't remember that you wanted much encouragement, but, I acknowledge, after all these years of resistance—resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you—there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!'

'Upon my word!' he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to him, her powerful loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as could be found. The room behind her and the second and third drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were awaiting the arrival of the evening's guests upstairs.

Lady Charlotte's mind had been evidently much perturbed by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the latter half. She was labouring under an uncomfortable sense of being hoist with her own petard—an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning of her husband's, delivered at Murewell.

'And now,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'having confessed in so many words that you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?'

'Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,' she replied with judicial imperativeness, 'marriage is another. In these democratic days we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.'

The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Mr. Flaxman's expression changed.

'I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, 'and you know I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon that argument.'

'Good gracious, Hugh!' cried Lady Charlotte crossly; 'you talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself—I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last few weeks since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I have got you into the scrape—now I want to get you out of it! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses—and you know what the duke will say.'

'The duke be—translated!' said Flaxman coolly. 'Nothing of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care—or I am very much mistaken—for somebody else.'

He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.

'What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of hers?'

'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' replied her nephew. 'However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.

'Another instance of what university reputation is worth!' said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the force majeure of a rival—and that a rival whom she regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.

Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical amused eyes.

'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious slowness and suavity, 'I should greatly like to know why you asked him here to-night?'

'You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody—a convict, a crossing-sweeper—if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with him!'

Flaxman laughed.

'Well, it may be convenient to-night,' he said reflectively. 'What are we to do—some thought-reading?'

'Yes. It isn't a crush. I have only asked about thirty or forty people. Mr. Denman is to manage it.'

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the moment.

Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.

'I want to make a few notes,' he said drily, when it was arranged; 'I should be glad to satisfy myself.'

When the Misses Leyburn were announced, Rose, though the younger, came in first. She always took the lead by a sort of natural right, and Agnes never dreamt of protesting. To-night the sisters were in white. Some soft creamy stuff was folded and draped about Rose's slim shapely figure in such a way as to bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte's innumerable candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese fan of the same colour, gave just that touch of purpose and art which the spectator seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced towards Lady Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there, planing away awkwardness, emphasising grace, disengaging as it were, week by week, and month by month, all the beauty of which the original conception was capable. And the process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, a kind of effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes beauty more beautiful and grace more graceful.

The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his aunt.

'You failed us at rehearsal,' he said with smiling reproach; 'we were all at sixes and sevens.'

'I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady Charlotte, Catherine couldn't come. Agnes and I are alone in the world. Will you chaperon us?'

'I don't know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night—in that new gown,' replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.

'On the contrary,' she said, 'one always feels so particularly good and prim in a new frock.'

'Really? I should have thought it one of Satan's likeliest moments,' said Flaxman, laughing—his eyes, however, the while saying quite other things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.

Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose's smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.

'I have made a muddle as usual,' she said to herself in disgust, 'perhaps even a worse one than I thought!'

Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman's state of mind, however, he never showed greater self-possession than on this particular evening.

A few minutes after Rose's entry he introduced her for the first time to his sister Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for the opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin Street, all ardour to see Hugh's new adoration, and the girl whom all the world was beginning to talk about—both as a beauty and as an artist. She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to anything so light and airy as Lady Helen's movements, caught the girl's hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration, said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible. Rose—who with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen—took the advances of Hugh Flaxman's sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister, saw Rose's eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly searching and then returning.

Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a well-known form emerging.

'Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how dreadful he looks!'

Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyse what had struck her so. The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet-black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose's attention was claimed by the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up. Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous agitated manner contrasted oddly with his athlete's looks. Among other magnetisms he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to Rose, staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy lids,—much longer than the girl thought fair.

'Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?' he asked her, with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace bearded face.

'Oh yes!' she said flippantly. 'We have tried it sometimes. It is very good fun.'

He drew himself up. 'Not fun,' he said impressively, 'not fun. Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend upon it. If established it will revolutionise our whole views of life. Even a Huxley could not deny that!'

She studied him with mocking eyes. 'Do you imagine this party to-night looks very serious?'

His face fell.

'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted, sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man. Why was he not cricketing or shooting or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?

'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings with the devil?'

'Nothing. Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 'Come, Denman.'

And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside Rose, while old Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell his chagrin had been not to feel, not to struggle, to have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the experience in good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how little the exquisite child beside him knows of it, or of the man on whom she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.

The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his restless eye wandering every other minute to the farther drawing-room in which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch of black and white,—Rose's dress and the dark form beside her.

'Are you convinced? Do you believe?' said Rose, merrily looking up at her companion.

'In telepathy? Well—so far—I have not got beyond the delicacy and perfection of Mr. Denman's—muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!'

'Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!' she said gaily. 'We know that some people have an extraordinary power over others.'

'Yes, that certainly we know!' he answered, his voice dropping, an odd strained note in it. 'I grant you that.'

She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together, conscious only of each other.

'Now,' said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two drawing-rooms, 'I have done all I can—I am exhausted. But let me beg of you all to go on with some experiments amongst yourselves. Every fresh discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will arrange everything, if any one will volunteer?'

The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this and that. Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dictatorial voice made itself heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her guests.

'Somebody must venture—we are losing time.'

Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. 'Miss Leyburn—you are always public-spirited—will you be victimised for the good of science?'

The girl got up with a smile.

'And Mr. Langham—will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn? Hugh—we all choose her task, don't we—then Mr. Langham wills?'

Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose—a wild fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and towering cap bent towards him. Refusal was impossible.

'Command me!' he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a flush on the pale cheek. 'I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very bad partner.'

'Well, now then!' said Flaxman; 'Miss Leyburn, will you please go down into the library while we settle what you are to do!'

She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out unconscious of him—rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.

'Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?' asked Lady Charlotte in the same loud emphatic tone.

'If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has been yet tried,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'suppose we require Miss Leyburn to kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?'

'What you please!' said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed between the two men. In Langham's there was a hardly sane antagonism and resentment, in Flaxman's an excited intelligence.

'Now then, said Flaxman coolly, 'fix your mind steadily on what Miss Leyburn is to do—you must take her hand—but except in thought, you must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?'

Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being watched—tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.

Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr. Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham moved desperately forward.

But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and this thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp—he was the man, the master—and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.

There was a moment's silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the two figures—on the dark handsome man—on the blindfolded girl.

At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her bright colour was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in which her hand was held—otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under the partial influence of an anÆsthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on all her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she was going.

Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them a slight sense of chill, as though they had just been laid to something cold.

She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham's face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.

'Have I done it?' she asked in a tremulous whisper.

For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still bewildered.

He nodded, smiling.

'I am so glad,' she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at him. There was the most adorable abandon in her whole look and attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the other.

The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.

'She has done it! Hurrah!' cried Mr. Flaxman. 'What a rush that last was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind.'

Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A rush? She had known nothing about it!

Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt, who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging themselves.

'Did she do it exactly?' said Lady Helen eagerly.

'Exactly,' he said, standing still.

Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her look.

'Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?' said Rose, coming up from the back room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.

It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood's offer of a seat in her carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal later, and relying on Lady Charlotte's promise that she should be safely put into a hansom.

'I must go,' said Rose, putting her hand to her head. 'How tiring this is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?'

'Exactly three minutes,' he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an expression that only Lady Helen noticed.

'So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!' and giving her hand first to her hostess then to Mr. Flaxman's bewildered sister, she moved away into the crowd.

'Hugh, of course you are going down with her?' exclaimed Lady Charlotte under her breath. 'You must. I promised to see her safely off the premises.'

He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step forward, but he caught her arm.

'Don't spoil sport,' he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and sister.

They looked at him—the one amazed, the other grimly observant—and caught a slight significant motion of the head towards Langham's distant figure.

Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady Helen's large astonished eyes followed him to the door.

'Oh, Hugh!' was all she could say as they came back to her brother.

'Never mind, Nellie,' he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy of her look; 'I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!'

And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.

Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale child-like fatigue in her looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.

'Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?'

'Will you ask for a hansom, please?'

'Take my arm,' he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they reached the door.

Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked, a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns. Which of them suggested, 'Shall we walk a few steps?' At any rate, here they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.

'We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,' he said. 'Are you warm?'

'Perfectly.'

A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the colour was coming back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.

Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they passed within the power of the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness every line and feature in the other's face. They swept on—the night, with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen's voices; before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this wandering of theirs.

A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could close it again, an arm was flung around her. She could not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.

'Oh, stay there!' a voice said close to her ear. 'Rest there—pale tired child—pale tired little child!'

That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing and protecting her from the cold—not kissing her—till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.

'Are you sure at last?' she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the far depths of her own thought to his.

'Sure!' he said, his expression changing. 'What can I be sure of? I am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor, insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be miserably throwing yourself away!'

She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.

'Do you know,' he repeated—a tone of intense melancholy replacing the tone of passion,—'how little I have to give you?'

'I know,' she answered, her face turned shyly away from him, her words coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. 'I know that—that—you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that——'

'Oh, hush,' he said, and his voice was full of pain. 'You know so little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell, though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. There is something paralysing in me, which is always forbidding me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical disability—the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort. Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony? Oh, impossible!' he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him. 'You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a crime—an infamy—that I should be speaking to you like this!'

Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.

'No, no,' she said wistfully; 'not if you love me.'

He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.

'You will not say you love me!' she cried, with hurrying breath. 'But I know—I know—you do.'

Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from him—'At least, if you don't, I am very—very—unhappy.'

The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself saved, like Faust,—saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment's impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.