The Tragic Muse

XIII.

[Continued.]

FOR an instant Lady Agnes seemed not to understand, and to be on the point of laying her finger quickly to her lips with a " Hush ! ” as if the late Sir Nicholas might have heard the “ only.” Then, as if a comprehension of the young man’s words promptly superseded that impulse, she replied with force,

“You will be in the Lords the day you determine to get there.”

This remark made Nick laugh afresh, and not only laugh, but kiss her, which was always an intenser form of mystification for poor Lady Agnes, and apparently the one lie liked best to practice ; after which he said, “ The odd thing is, you know, that Harsh has no wants. At least it is not sharply, not eloquently conscious of them. We all talked them over together, and I promised to carry them in my heart of hearts. But upon my word I can’t remember one of them. Julia says the wants of Harsh are simply the national Wants — rather a pretty phrase for Julia. She means she does everything for the place ; she’s really their member, and this house in which we stand is their legislative chamber. Therefore the lacunœ that 1 have undertaken to fill up are the national wants. It will be rather a job to rectify some of them, won’t it ? I don’t represent the appetites of Harsh — Harsh is gorged. I represent the ideas of my party. That’s what Julia says.”

“ Oh, never mind what Julia says ! ” Lady Agnes broke out, impatiently. This impatience made it singular that the very next words she uttered should be : " My dearest son, I wish to heaven you 'd marry her. It would be so fitting now ! ” she added.

“ Why now ? ” asked Nick, frowning. “ She has shown you such sympathy, such devotion.”

“ Is it for that she has shown it ? ”

“ Ah, you might feel — I can’t tell you ! ” said Lady Agnes, reproachfully.

Nick blushed at this, as if what he did feel was the reproach. “Must I marry her because you like her ? ”

“ I? Why, we are all as fond of her as we can be.”

“ Dear mother, I hope that any woman I ever may marry will be a person agreeable not only to you, but also, since you make a point of it, to Grace and Biddy. But I must tell you this — that I shall marry no woman I am not unmistakably in love with.”

“ And why are you not in love with Julia—charming, clever, generous as she is ? ’’ Lady Agnes laid her hands on him — she held him tight. “ My darling Nick, if you care anything in the world to make me happy, you ’ll stay over here to-morrow and be nice to her.”

” Be nice to her ? Do you mean propose to her? ”

“ With a single word, with the glance of an eye, the movement of your little finger ” — and Lady Agnes paused, looking intensely, imploringly, up into Nick’s face — “ in less time than it takes me to say what I say now, you may have it all.” As he made no answer, only returning her look, she added insistently, “ You know she’s a fine creature — you know she is ! ”

“ Dearest mother, what I seem to know better than anything else in the world is that I love my freedom. I set it far above everything.”

“ Your freedom ? What freedom is there in being poor? Talk of that when Julia puts everything that she possesses at your feet ! ”

“ I can’t talk of it, mother — it’s too terrible an idea. And I can’t talk of her. nor of what I think of her. You must leave that to me. I do her perfect justice.”

“ You don’t, or you ’d marry her to-morrow. You would feel that the opportunity is exquisitely rare, with everything in the world to make it perfect. Your father would have valued it for you beyond everything. Think a little what would have given him pleasure. That’s what I meant when I spoke just now of us all. It was n’t of Grace and Biddy I was thinking — fancy ! — it was of him. He is with you always ; he takes with you, at your side, every step that you take yourself. He would bless devoutly your marriage to Julia; he would feel what it would be for you and for us all. I ask for no sacrifice, and he would ask for none. We only ask that you don’t commit the crime ” —

Nick Dormer stopped her with another kiss ; he murmured, “ Mother, mother, mother ! ” as he bent over her.

He wished her not to go on, to let him off; but the deep deprecation in his voice did not prevent her from saying: “ You know it—you know it perfectly. All, and more than all that I can tell you, you know.”

He drew her closer, kissed her again, held her there as he would have held a child in a paroxysm, soothing her silently till it should pass away. Her emotion had brought the tears to her eyes ; she dried them as she disengaged herself. The next moment, however, she resumed, attacking him again —

“ For a public man she would be the ideal companion. She’s made for public life; she’s made to shine, to be concerned in great things, to occupy a high position and to help him on. She would help you in everything, as she has helped you in this. Together, there is nothing you could n’t do. You can have the first house in England — yes, the first! What freedom is there in being poor ? How can you do anything without money, and what money can you make for yourself — what money will ever come to you ? That’s the crime — to throw away such an instrument of power, such a blessed instrument of good.”

“ It is n’t everything to be rich, mother,” said Nick, looking at the floor in a certain patient way, with a provisional docility and his hands in his pockets. “ And it is n’t so fearful to be poor.”

“It’s vile—it’s abject. Don’t I know ? ”

“ Are you in such acute want ? " Nick asked, smiling.

“ Ah, don’t make me explain what you have only to look at to see ! ” his mother returned, as if with a richness of allusion to dark elements in her fate.

“ Besides,” Nick went on, “ there is other money in the world than Julia’s. I might come by some of that.”

“Do you mean Mr. Carteret’s ? ” The question made him laugh, as her reference, five minutes before, to the House of Lords had done. But she pursued, too full of her idea to take account of such a poor substitute for an answer : “ Let me tell you one thing, for I have known Charles Carteret much longer than you, and I understand him better. There is nothing you could do that would do you more good with him than to marry Julia. I know the way he looks at things, and I know exactly how that would strike him. It would please him, it would charm him ; it would be the thing that would most prove to him that you are in earnest. You need to do something of that sort.”

“ Have n’t I carried Harsh?” asked Nick.

“ Oh. he ’s very canny. He likes to see people rich. Then he believes in them — then he ’s likely to believe more. He’s kind to you because you 're your father’s son; but I am sure your being poor takes just so much off.” “ He can remedy that so easily,” said Nick, smiling still. “ Is being kept by Julia what you call making an effort for myself ? ”

Lady Agnes hesitated ; then. “ You need n’t insult Julia ! ” she replied.

“Moreover, if I’ve her money, I sha’n’t want his,” Nick remarked.

Again his mother waited an instant before answering; after which she produced, “ And pray would n’t you wish to be independent?”

“You’re delightful, dear mother — you ’re very delightful ! I particularly like your conception of independence. Does n’t, it occur to you that at a pinch I might improve my fortune by some other means than by making a mercenary marriage or by currying favor with a rich old gentleman ? Doesn’t it occur to you that I might work? ”

“Work at politics? How does that make money, honorably?”

“ I don’t mean at politics.”

“ What do you mean, then ? ” Lady Agnes demanded, looking at him as if she challenged him to phrase it if he dared. Her eye appeared to have a certain effect upon him, for he remained silent, and she continued, “ Are you elected or not ? ”

“ It seems a dream,” said Nick.

“ If you are, act accordingly, and don’t mix up things that are as wide asunder as the poles ! ” She spoke with sternness, and his silence might have been an admission that her sternness was wholesome to him. Possibly she was touched by it; at any rate, after a few moments, during which nothing more passed between them, she appealed to him in a gentler and more anxious key, which had this virtue to touch him, that he knew it was absolutely the first time in her life Lady Agnes had begged for anything. She had never been obliged to beg ; she had got on without it and most things had come to her. He might judge therefore in what a light she regarded this boon for which, in her old age, she humbled herself to be a suitor. There was such a pride in her that he could feel what it cost her to go on her knees even to her son. He did judge how it was in his power to gratify her; and as he was generous and imaginative he was stirred and shaken as it came over him in a wave of figurative suggestion that he might make up to her for many things. He scarcely needed to hear her ask, with a pleading wail that was almost tragic, “ Don’t you see how things have turned out for us ; don’t you know how unhappy I am — don’t you know what a bitterness ” — She stopped for a moment, with a sob in her voice, and he recognized vividly this last tribulation, the unhealed wound of her bereavement and the way she had sunken from eminence to flatness. “ You know what Percival is, and the comfort I have from him. You know the property, and what he is doing with it, and what comfort I get from that! Everything is dreary but what you can do for us. Everything is odious, down to living in a hole with one’s girls who don’t marry. Grace is impossible — I don’t know what’s the matter with her ; no one will look at her ; and she’s so conceited with it — sometimes I feel as if I could beat her ! And Biddy will never marry, and we are three dismal women in a filthy house ; and what are three dismal women, more or less, in London? ”

So, with an unexpected rage of selfexposure, Lady Agnes talked of her disappointments and troubles, tore away the veil from her sadness and soreness. It almost frightened Nick to perceive how she hated her life, though at another time it might have amused him to note how she despised her gardenless house. Of course it was not a countryhouse, and Lady Agnes could not get used to that. Better than he could do — for it was the sort of thing into which, in any case, a woman enters more than a man — she felt what a lift into brighter air, what a regilding of his sisters’ possibilities, his marriage to Julia would effect for them. He could n’t trace the difference, but his mother saw it all as a shining picture. She made the vision shine before him now, somehow, as she stood there like a poor woman crying for a kindness. What was filial in him, all the piety that he owed, especially to the revived spirit of his father, more than ever present on a day of such public pledges, was capable, from one moment to the other, of trembling into sympathetic response. He had the gift, so embarrassing when it is a question of consistent action, of seeing in an imaginative, interesting light anything that illustrated forcibly the life of another; such things effected a union with something in his life, and the recognition of them was ready to become a form of enthusiasm in which there was no consciousness of sacrifice — none scarcely of merit.

Rapidly, at present, this change of scene took place before his spiritual eye. He found himself believing, because his mother communicated the belief, that it was in his option to transform the social outlook of the three women who clung to him and who declared themselves dismal. This was not the highest kind of inspiration, but it was moving, and it associated itself with dim confusions of figures in the past — figures of authority and expectancy. Julia’s wide kingdom opened out around him, making the future almost a dazzle of happy power. His mother and sisters floated in the rosy element with beaming faces, in transfigured safety. “The first house in England,” she had called it; but it might be the first house in Europe, the first house in the world, by the fine air and the high humanities that should fill it. Everything that was beautiful in the place where he stood took on a more delicate charm; the house rose over his head like a museum of exquisite rewards, and the image of poor George Dallow hovered there obsequious, as if to confess that he had only been the modest, tasteful forerunner, appointed to set it all in order and punctually retire. Lady Agnes’s tone penetrated further into Nick’s spirit than it had done yet, as she syllabled to him, supremely, " Don’t desert us — don’t desert us.”

“ Don’t desert you ? ”

“ Be great — be great,” said his mother. “ I 'm old, I’ve lived. I’ve seen. Go in for a great material position. That will simplify everything else.”

“ I will do what I can for you — anything, everything I can. Trust me — leave me alone,” said Nick Dormer.

“ And you ’ll stay over — you 'll spend the day with her ? ”

“ I 'll stay till she turns me out! ”

His mother had hold of his hand again now ; she raised it to her lips and kissed it. " My dearest son, my only joy!” Then, “I don’t see how you can resist her,” she added.

“ No more do I! ”

Lady Agnes looked round the great room with a soft exhalation of gratitude and hope. " If you 're so fond of art, what art is equal to all this ? The joy of living in the midst of it — of seeing the finest works every day! You’ll have everything the world can give.”

“ That’s exactly what was just passing in my own mind. It ’s too much.”

“ Don’t he selfish ! ”

“ Selfish ? ” Nick repeated.

“ Don’t be unselfish, then. You ’ll share it with us.”

“ And with Julia a little, I hope,” said Nick.

“ God bless you ! ” cried his mother, looking up at him. Her eyes were detained by the sudden perception of something in his own that was not clear to her ; but before she had time to ask for an explanation of it Nick inquired, abruptly —

“ Why do you talk so of poor Biddy ? Why won’t she marry ? ” “ You had better ask Peter Sherringham,”saicl Lady Agnes.

“ What has he got to do with it ? ”

“ How odd of you to ask, when it’s so plain how she thinks of him that it ’s a matter of common chaff! ”

“ Yes, we ’ve made it so, and she takes it like an angel. But Peter likes her.”

“ Does he ? Then it ’s the more shame to him to behave as he does. He had better leave his actresses alone. That ’s the love of art, too ! ” laughed Lady Agnes.

“ Biddy’s so charming — she 'll marry some one else.”

“ Never, if she loves him. But Julia will bring it about-Julia will help her,” said Lady Agnes, more cheerfully. “ That’s what you 'll do for us — that she ’ll do everything ! ”

“ Why then more than now ? ” Nick asked.

“ Because we shall be yours.”

“ You are mine already.”

“ Yes, but she is n’t. However, she ’s as good ! ” exulted Lady Agnes.

“ She 'll turn me out of the house,” said Nick.

“ Come and tell me when she does ! But there she is — go to her!” And she gave him a push toward one of the windows that stood open to the terrace. Mrs. Dallow had become visible outside ; she passed slowly along the terrace, with her long shadow. “ Go to her,” Lady Agnes repeated — “ she’s waiting for you.”

Nick went out with the air of a man who was as ready to pass that way as any other, and at the same moment his two sisters, freshly restored from the excitements of the town, came into the room from another quarter.

“ We go home to-morrow, but Nick will stay a day or two,” their mother said to them.

“ Dear old Nick ! ” Grace ejaculated, looking at Lady Agnes.

“ He’s going to speak,” the latter went on. “ But don’t mention it.” “ Don’t mention it ? ” said Biddy, staring. “ Has n’t he spoken enough, poor fellow ? ”

“ I mean to Julia,” Lady Agnes replied.

“ Don’t you understand, you goose?” Grace exclaimed to her sister.

XIV.

The next morning brought Nick Dormer many letters and telegrams, and his coffee was placed beside him in his room, where he remained until noon answering these communications. When he came out he learned that his mother and sisters had left the house. This information was given him by Mrs. Gresham, whom he found at one of the tables in the library, dealing with her own voluminous budget. She was a lady who received thirty letters a day, the subject-matter of which, as well as of her punctual answers, in a large, free hand, was a puzzle to those who observed her.

She told Nick that Lady Agnes had not been willing to disturb him at his work to say good-by, knowing she should see him in a day or two in town. Nick was amused at the way his mother had stolen off; as if she feared that further conversation might weaken the spell she believed herself to have wrought. The place was cleared, moreover, of its other visitors, so that, as Mrs. Gresham said, the fun was at an end. This lady expressed the idea that the fun was, after all, rather a bore. At any rate, now they could rest, Mrs. Dallow and Nick and she, and she was glad Nick was going to stay for a little quiet. She liked Harsh best when it was not en fête: then one could see what a sympathetic old place it was. She hoped Nick was not dreadfully tired ; she feared Julia was completely done up. Mrs. Dallow, however, had transported her exhaustion to the grounds — she was wandering about somewhere. She thought more people would be coming to the house, people from the town, people from the country, and had gone out so as not to have to see them. She had not gone far — Nick could easily find her. Nick intimated that he himself was not eager for more people, whereupon Mrs. Gresham said, rather archly, smiling —

“ And of course you hate me for being here.” He made some protest, and she added, “ But I’m almost a part of the house, you know — I’m one of the chairs or tables.” Nick declared that he had never seen a house so well furnished, and Mrs. Gresham said, “ I believe there are to be some people to dinner: rather an interference, isn’t it? Julia lives so in public. But it ’s all for you.” And after a moment she added, “ It’s a wonderful constitution.” Nick at first failed to seize her allusion — lie thought it a retarded political reference, a sudden tribute to the great unwritten instrument by which they were all governed. He was on the point of saying, “ The British? Wonderful!” when he perceived that the intention of his interlocutress was to praise Mrs. I Dallow’s fine robustness. “ The surface so delicate, the action so easy, yet the frame of steel.”

Nick left Mrs. Gresham to her correspondence and went out of the house ; wondering, as lie walked, whether she wanted him to do the same thing that his mother wanted, so that her words had been intended for a prick — whether even the two ladies had talked over their desire together. Mrs. Gresham was a married woman who was usually taken for a widow ; mainly because she was perpetually “ sent for ” by her friends, and her friends never sent for Mr. Gresham. She came, in every case, and had the air of being répandue at the expense of dingier belongings. Her figure was admired — that is it was sometimes mentioned — and she dressed as if it was expected of her to be smart, like a young woman in a shop or a servant much in view. She slipped in and out, accompanied at the piano, talked to the neglected visitors, walked in the rain, and, after the arrival of the post, usually had conferences with her hostess, during which she stroked her chin and looked familiarly responsible. It was her peculiarity that people were always saying things to her in a lowered voice. She had all sorts of acquaintances, and in small establishments she sometimes wrote the menus. Great ones, on the other hand, had no terrors for her : she had seen too many. No one had ever discovered whether any one else paid her.

If Lady Agnes, in a lowered tone, had discussed with her the propriety of a union between the mistress of Harsh and the hope of the Dormers, our young man could take the circumstance for granted without irritation and even with cursory indulgence ; for he was not unhappy now, and his spirit was light and clear. The summer day was splendid, and the world, as he looked at it from the terrace, offered no more worrying ambiguity than a vault of airy blue arching over a lap of solid green. The wide, still trees in the park appeared to be waiting for some daily inspection, and the rich fields, with their official frill of hedges, to rejoice in the light which approved them as named and numbered acres. The place looked happy to Nick, and he was struck with its having a charm to which he had perhaps not hitherto done justice; something of the impression that he had received, when he was younger, from showy “views” of fine country-seats, as if they had been brighter and more established than life. There were a couple of peacocks on the terrace, and his eye was caught by the gleam of the swans on a distant lake, where there was also a little temple on an island ; and these objects fell in with his humor, which at another time might have been ruffled by them as representing the tawdry in ornament.

It was certainly a proof of youth and health on his part that his spirits had risen as the tumult rose, and that after he had taken his jump into the turbid waters of a contested election he had been able to tumble and splash, not only without a sense of awkwardness, but with a considerable capacity for the frolic. Tepid as we saw him in Paris, lie had found his relation to his opportunity surprisingly altered by his little journey across the Channel. He saw things in a new proportion, and he breathed an air that excited him unexpectedly. There was something in it that went to his head — an element that his mother and his sisters, his father from beyond the grave, Julia Dallow, the Liberal party and a hundred friends were both secretly and overtly occupied in pumping into it. If he was vague about success, he liked the fray, and he had a general rule that when one was in a muddle there was refreshment in action. The embarrassment, that is the revival of skepticism, which might produce an inconsistency shameful to exhibit, and yet very difficult to conceal, was safe enough to come later; indeed, at the risk of making our young man appear a purely whimsical personage, I may hint that some such sickly glow had even now begun to color one quarter of his mental horizon.

I am afraid, moreover, that I have no better excuse for him than the one he had touched on in the momentous conversation with his mother, which I have thought it useful to reproduce in full. He was conscious of a double nature ; there were two men in him, quite separate, whose leading features had little in common, and each of whom insisted on having an independent turn at life. Meanwhile, if he was adequately aware that the bed of his moral existence would need a good deal of making over if he was to lie upon it without unseemly tossing, he was also alive to the propriety of not parading his inconsistencies, not letting his unreconciled interests become a spectacle to the vulgar. He had none of that wish to appear complicated which is at the bottom of most forms of fatuity ; he was perfectly willing to pass as simple; he only aspired to be continuous. If you were not really simple, this presented difficulties ; but he would have assented to the proposition that you must be as clever as you can and that a high use of cleverness is in consuming the smoke of your inner fire. The fire was the great thing, and not the chimney. He had no view of life which counted out the need of learning; it was teaching, rather, as to which he was conscious of no particular mission. He liked life, liked it immensely, and was willing to study the ways and means of it with a certain patience. He cherished the usual wise monitions, such as that one was not to make a fool of one’s self and that one should not carry on one’s subjective experiments in public. It was because, as yet, he liked life in general better than it was clear to him that he liked any particular branch of it, that on the occasion of a constituency’s holding out a cordial hand to him, while it extended another in a different direction, a certain bloom of boyhood that was on him had not resisted the idea of a match.

He rose to it as he had risen to matches at school, for his boyishness could take a pleasure in an inconsiderate show of agility. He could meet electors, and conciliate bores, and compliment women, and answer questions, and roll off speeches, and chaff adversaries, because it was amusing and slightly dangerous, like playing football or ascending an Alp—pastimes for which nature had conferred on him an aptitude not so very different in kind from a gallant readiness on platforms. There were two voices which told him that all this was not really action at all, but only a pusillanimous imitation of it: one of them made itself fitfully audible in the depths of his own spirit, and the other spoke in the equivocal accents of a very crabbed hand, from a letter of four pages by Gabriel Nash. However. Nick acted as much as possible under the circumstances, and that was simplifying — it brought with it enjoyment and a working faith. He had not gone counter to the axiom that in a case of doubt one was to hold off; for that applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it, and that if there was essentially a problem in his life it would only grow tougher with keeping. But if doing one’s sum tomorrow instead of to-day does not make the sum easier, it at least makes today so.

Sometimes, in the course of the following fortnight, it seemed to him that he had gone in for Harsh because he was sure he should lose ; sometimes he foresaw that he should win precisely to punish him for having tried and for his want of candor; and when, presently, he did win, he was almost frightened at his success. Then it appeared to him that he had done something even worse than not choose — he had let others choose for him. The beauty of it was that they had chosen with only their own object in their eye: for what did they know about his strange alternative ? He was rattled about so for a fortnight (Julia took care of that) that he had no time to think save when he tried to remember a quotation or an American story, and all his life became an overflow of verbiage. Thought retreated before increase of sound, which had to be pleasant and eloquent, and even superficially coherent, without its aid. Nick himself was surprised at the airs he could play; and often when, the last thing at night, he shut the door of his room, he mentally exclaimed that he had had no idea he was such a mountebank.

I must add that if this reflection did not occupy him long, and if no meditation, after his return from Paris, held him for many moments, there was a reason better even than that he was tired, or busy, or excited by the agreeable combination of hits and hurrahs. That reason was simply Mrs. Dallow, who had suddenly become a still larger fact in his consciousness than active politics. She was, indeed, active politics ; that is, if the politics were his, how little soever, the activity was hers. She had ways of showing she was a clever woman that were better than saying clever things, which only prove at the most that one would be clever if one could. The accomplished fact itself was the demonstration that Mrs. Dallow could ; and when Nick came to his senses, after the proclamation of the victor and the cessation of the noise, her figure was, of all the queer phantasmagoria, the most substantial thing that survived. She had been always there, passing, repassing, before him, beside him, behind him. She had made the business infinitely prettier than it would have been without her, added music and flowers and ices, a charm, and converted it into a social game that had a strain of the heroic in it. It was a garden-party with something at stake, or to celebrate something in advance, with the people let in. The concluded affair had bequeathed to him not only a seat in the House of Commons, but a perception of what women may do, in high embodiments, and an abyss of intimacy with one woman in particular.

She had wrapped him up in something. he didn’t know what — a sense of facility, an overpowering fragrance — and they had moved together in an immense fraternity. There had been no love-making, no contact that was only personal, no vulgarity of flirtation: the hurry of the days and the sharpness with which they both tended to an outside object had made all that irrelevant. It was as if she had been too near for him to see her separate from himself ; but none the less, when he now drew breath and looked back, what had happened met his eyes as a composed picture — a picture of which the subject was inveterately Julia and her ponies: Julia wonderfully fair and fine, holding her head more than ever in the manner characteristic of her, brilliant, benignant, waving her whip, cleaving the crowd, thanking people with her smile, carrying him beside her, carrying him to his doom. He had not supposed that, in so few days, he had driven about with her so much ; but the image of it was there, in his consulted conscience, as well as in a personal glow not yet chilled ; it looked large as it rose before him. The things his mother had said to him made a rich enough frame for it, and the whole impression, that night, had kept him much awake.

XV.

While, after leaving Mrs. Gresham, he was hesitating which way to go, and was on the point of hailing a gardener to ask if Mrs. Dallow had been seen, he noticed, as a spot of color in an expanse of shrubbery, a far-away parasol moving in the direction of the lake. He took his course that way, across the park, and as the bearer of the parasol was strolling slowly it was not five minutes before he had joined her. He went to her soundlessly over the grass (he had been whistling at first, but as he got nearer he stopped), and it was not till he was close to her that she looked round. He had watched her moving as if she were turning things over in her mind, brushing the smooth walks and the clean turf with her dress, slowly making her parasol revolve on her shoulder, and carrying in the hand which hung beside her a book which be perceived to be a monthly review’.

“ I came out to get away,”she remarked when lie had begun to walk with her.

“ Away from me ? ”

“ Ah, that’s impossible,”said Mrs. Dallow. Then she added, “ The day is so nice.”

“ Lovely weather,”Nick dropped. “ You want to get away from Mrs. Gresham, I suppose.”

Mrs. Dallowr was silent a moment. " From everything ! ”

“ Well, I want to get away too.”

“ It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds.”

“ Yes, our noise is n’t so good as theirs,”said Nick. “ I feel as if I had been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me,”he went on. “ But not to you, Julia — nothing so good as that.”

Mrs. Dallow made no answer to this ; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water, which stretched away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed, " How nasty the lake looks ! ” and Nick recognized in the tone of the words a manifestation of that odd shyness — a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably only wanted to be soft — which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so far from being displeasing to him that it represented her nearest approach to extreme charm. He was not shy now, for he considered, this morning, that he saw things very straight and in a sense altogether superior and delightful. This enabled him to be generously sorry for his companion, if he were the reason of her being in any degree uncomfortable, and yet left him to enjoy the prettiness of some of the signs by which her discomfort was revealed. He would not insist on anything yet : so he observed that his cousin’s standard in lakes was too high, and then talked a little about his mother and the girls, their having gone home, his not having seen them that morning, Lady Agnes’s deep satisfaction in his victory and the fact that she would be obliged to “ do something ” for the autumn— take a house, or something.

” I ’ll lend her a house,” said Mrs. Dallow.

“ Oh, Julia, Julia! ” Nick exclaimed.

But Mrs. Dallow paid no attention to his exclamation ; she only held up her review and said, “ See what I have brought with me to read — Mr. Hoppus’s article.”

“ That’s right ; then I sha’n’t have to. You ’ll tell me about it.” He uttered this without believing that she had meant or wished to read the article, which was entitled The Revision of the British Constitution, in spite of her having encumbered herself with the stiff, fresh magazine. He was conscious that she was not in want of such mental occupation as periodical literature could supply. They walked along, and then he added, “ But is that what we are in for — reading Mr. Hoppus ? Is that the sort of thing that constituents expect ? Or even worse, pretending to have read him when one has n’t ? Oh, what a tangled web we weave ! ”

“ People are talking about it. One has to know. It’s the article of the month.”

Nick looked at his companion askance a moment. “ You say things every now and then for which I could kill you.

‘ The article of the month,’ for instance : I could kill you for that.”

“ Well, kill me!” Mrs. Dallow exclaimed.

“ Let me carry your book,” Nick rejoined, irrelevantly. The hand in which she held it was on the side of her on which he was walking, and he put out his own hand to take it. But for a couple of minutes she forbore to give it up, and they held it together, swinging it a little. Before she surrendered it he inquired where she was going.

“ To the island,” she answered.

“ Well, I 'll go with you — and I ’ll kill you there.”

“ The things I say are the right things,” said Mrs. Dallow.

“ It’s just the right things that are wrong. It’s because you 're so political,” Nick went on. “ It ’s your horri ble ambition. The woman who has a salon should have read the article of the month. See how one dreadful thing leads to another.”

“ There are some things that lead to nothing.”

“ No doubt—no doubt. And how are you going to get over to your island ? ”

“ I don’t know.”

“ Is n’t there a boat ? ”

“ I don’t know.”

Nick had paused a moment, to look round for the boat, but Mrs. Dallow walked on, without turning her head. “Can you row?” her companion asked.

“ Don’t you know I can do everything ? ”

“Yes, to be sure. That’s why I want to kill you. There’s the boat.”

“Shall you drown me? ” asked Mrs. Dallow.

“Oh, let me perish with you! ” Nick answered with a sigh. The boat had been hidden from them by the bole of a great tree, which rose from the grass at the water’s edge. It was moored to a small place of embarkation, and was large enough to hold as many persons as were likely to wish to visit at once the little temple in the middle of the lake, which Nick liked because it was absurd and Mrs. Dallow had never had a particular esteem for. The lake, fed by a natural spring, was a liberal sheet of water, measured by the scale of park scenery ; and though its principal merit was that, taken at a distance, it gave a liquid note to the rather stuffy verdure of the prospect, doing the office of an open eye in a dull face, it could also be approached without derision on a sweet summer morning, when it made a lapping sound and reflected candidly various things that were probably finer than itself — the sky, the great trees, the flight of birds.

A man of taste, a hundred years before, coming back from Rome, had caused a small ornamental structure to be erected, on artificial foundations, on its bosom, and had endeavored to make this architectural pleasantry as nearly as possible a reminiscence of the small ruined rotunda which stands on the bank of the Tiber and is believed by tourists to have been dedicated to Vesta. It was circular, it was roofed with old tiles, it was surrounded by white columns and it was considerably dilapidated. George Dallow had taken an interest in it (it reminded him not in the least of Rome, but of other things that he liked), and had amused himself with restoring it.

“ Give me your hand; sit there, and I 'll ferry you,” Nick Dormer said.

Mrs. Dallow complied, placing herself opposite to him in the boat ; but as be took up the paddles she declared that she preferred to remain on the water — there was too much malice prepense in the temple. He asked her what she meant by that, and she said it was ridiculous to withdraw to an island a few feet square on purpose to meditate. She had nothing to meditate about which required so much attitude.

“ On the contrary, it would be just to change the pose. It’s what we have been doing for a week that ’s attitude ; and to be for half an hour where nobody ’s looking and one has n’t to keep it up is just what I wanted to put in an idle, irresponsible day for. I am not keeping it up now — I suppose you have noticed,” Nick went on, as they floated and he scarcely dipped the oars.

I don’t understand you,” said Mrs. Dallow, leaning back in the boat. Nick gave no further explanation than to ask in a minute, " Have you people to dinner to-night?”

“ believe there are three or four, but I 'll put them off if you like.”

“ Must you always live in public, Julia? ” Nick continued.

She looked at him a moment, and he could see that she colored slightly. “ We '11 go home — I '11 put them off.”

“ Ah no, don’t go home ; it’s too jolly here. Let them come — let them come, poor wretches ! ”

“ How little you know me, when, ever so many times, I have lived here for months without a creature ! ”

Except Mrs. Gresham, I suppose.”

“ I have had to have the house going,

I admit.”

“ You are perfect, you are admirable, and I don’t criticise you.”

“ I don’t understand you ! ” she tossed back.

“ That only adds to the generosity of what you have done for me,” Nick returned, beginning to pull faster. He bent over the oars and sent the boat forward, keeping this up for ten minutes, during which they both remained silent. His companion, in her place, motionless, reclining (the seat in the stern was very comfortable), looked only at the water, the sky, the trees. At last Nick headed for the little temple, saying first, however, “ Sha’n’t we visit the ruin ? ”

“ If you like. I don’t mind seeing how they keep it.”

They reached the white steps which led up to it. Nick held the boat, and Mrs. Dallow got out. He fastened the boat, and they went up the steps together, passing through the open door.

“ They keep it very well,” Nick said, looking round. " It ’s a capital place to give up everything.”

“ It might do for you to explain what you mean,” said Julia, sitting down.

“ I mean to pretend for half an hour that I don’t represent the burgesses of Harsh. It’s charming — it’s very delicate work. Surely it has been retouched.”

The interior of the pavilion, lighted by windows which the circle of columns was supposed, outside and at a distance, to conceal, had a vaulted ceiling and was occupied by a few pieces of lastcentury furniture, spare and faded, of which the colors matched with the decoration of the walls. These and the ceiling, tinted and not exempt from indications of damp, were covered with fine mouldings and medallions. It was a very elegant little teahouse.

Mrs. Dallow sat on the edge of a sofa, rolling her parasol and remarking, " You ought to read Mr. Hoppus’s article to me.”

“ Why, is this your salon ? ” asked Nick, smiling.

“ Why are you always talking of that? It’s an invention of your own.”

“ But is n’t it the idea you care most about ? ”

Suddenly, nervously, Mrs. Dallow put up her parasol and sat under it, as if she were not quite sensible of what she was doing. “ How much you know me ! I don’t care about anything—that you will ever guess.”

Nick Dormer wandered about the room, looking at various things it contained — the odd volumes on the tables, the bits of quaint china on the shelves. “ They keep it very well; you’ve got charming things.”

“ They are supposed to come over every day and look after them.”

“ They must come over in force.”

“ Oh, no one knows.”

“ It’s spick and span. How well you have everything done ! ”

“ I think you have some reason to say so,” said Mrs. Dallow. Her parasol was down, and she was again rolling it tight.

“ But you ’re right about my not knowing you. Why were you so ready to do so much for me ? ”

He stopped in front of her and she looked up at him. Her eyes rested on his a minute ; then she broke out, " Why do you hate me so ? ”

“ Was it because you like me personally ? ” Nick asked. “You may think that an odd, or even an odious question ; but is n’t it natural, my wanting to know ? ”

“ Oh, if you don’t know ! ” Mrs. Dallow exclaimed.

“ It’s a question of being sure.”

“ Well, then, if you ’re not sure ” —

“ Was it done for me as a friend, as a man ? ”

You ’re not a man ; you ’re a child,” said his hostess, with a face that was cold, though she had been smiling the moment before.

“ After all, I was a good candidate,” Nick went on.

What do I care for candidates ? ”

“ You’re the most delightful woman, Julia,” said Nick, sitting down beside her, " and I can’t imagine what you mean by my bating you.”

“ If you have n’t discovered that I like you, you might as well.”

” Might as well discover it ? ”

Mrs. Dallow was grave ; he had never seen her so pale and never so beautiful. She had stopped rolling her parasol now; her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes were bent on them. Nick sat looking at them, too, a trifle awkwardly. " Might as well have hated me,” said Mrs. Dallow.

“ We have got on so beautifully together, all these days : why should n’t we get on as well forever and ever ? " Mrs. Dallow made no answer, and suddenly Nick said to her : “ Ah, Julia, I don’t know what you have done to me, but you have done it. You’ve done it by strange ways, but it will serve. Yes, I bate you,” he added, in a different tone, with his face nearer to hers.

“ Dear Nick — dear Nick — she began. But she stopped, for she suddenly felt that he was altogether nearer, nearer than he had ever been to her before, that his arm was round her, that he was in possession of her. She closed her eyes, but she heard him ask, " Why should n’t it be forever, forever?” in a voice that was kinder in her ear than any voice had ever been.

“ You ’ve done it — you’ve done it,” Nick repeated.

“ What do you want of me ? ” she demanded.

“ To stay with me, this way, always.”

“ Ah, not this way,” she answered, softly, but as if in pain, and making an effort, with a certain force, to detach herself.

“ This way, then — or this ! ” He took such insistent advantage of her that he had quickly kissed her. She rose as quickly, but he held her yet, and while lie did so he said to her in the same tender tone, “ If you ’ll marry me, why shouldn’t it be so simple, so good ? ’ He drew her closer again, too close for her to answer. But her struggle ceased and she rested upon him for a minute, she buried her face on his breast.

“ You ’re hard, and it’s cruel! ” she then exclaimed, breaking away.

“ Hard — cruel ? ”

“ You do it with so little ! ” And with this, unexpectedly to Nick, Mrs. Dallow burst straight into tears. Before he could stop her she was at the door of the pavilion, as if she wished to quit it immediately. There, however, he stopped her, bending over her while she sobbed, unspeakably gentle with her.

“ So little ? It ’s with everything — with everything I have.”

“I have done it, you say? What do you accuse me of doing ? ” Her tears were already over.

“ Of making me yours; of being so precious, Julia, so exactly what a man wants, as it seems to me. I did n’t know you could,” he went on, smiling down at her. “ I did n’t — no, I did n’t.” “ It ’a what I say — that you have always hated me.”

“ I ’ll make it up to you.”

She leaned on the doorway with her head against the lintel. " You don’t even deny it.”

“ Contradict you vow? I’ll admit it, though it s rubbish, on purpose to live it down.”

“ It does n’t matter,” she said, slowly ; “ for however much you might have liked me, you would never have done so half as much as I have eared for you.”

“ Oh, I 'm so poor ! ” Nick murmured, cheerfully.

She looked at him. smiling, and slowly shook her head. Then she declared, “ You never can.”

I like that Haven’t I asked you to marry me ? When did you ever ask me ? ”

“ Every day of my life! As I say, it ’s hard— for a proud woman.”

” Yes? you ’re too proud even to answer me.”

“ We must think of it, we must talk of it.”

“ Think of it ? I ’ve thought of it, ever so much.”

“ I mean together. There are things to be said.”

“ The principal thing is to give me your word.”

Mrs. Dallow looked at him in silence ; then she exclaimed, “ I wish I did n’t adore you ! ” She went straight down the steps.

“ You don’t, if you leave me now. Why do you go ? It’s so charming here, and we are so delightfully alone.”

“ Detach the boat; we ’ll go on the water,” said Mrs. Hallow.

Nick was at the top of the steps, looking down at her. " All, stay a little — do stay ! " he pleaded.

“ I’ ll get in myself, I’ ll put off,” she answered.

At this Nick came down, and he bent a little to undo the rope. He was close to her, and as he raised his head he felt it caught; she had seized it in her hands and she pressed her lips to the first place they encountered. The next instant she was in the boat.

This time he dipped the oars very slowly indeed ; and while, for a period that was longer than it seemed to them, they floated vaguely, they mainly sat and glowed at each other, as if everything had been settled. There were reasons enough why Nick should be happy; but it is a singular fact that the leading one was the sense of having escaped from a great mistake. The final result of his mother’s appeal to him the day before had been the idea that he must act with unimpeachable honor. He was capable of taking it as an assurance that Julia had placed him under an obligation which a gentleman could regard only in one way. If she had understood it so, putting the vision, or at any rate the appreciation, of a closer tie into everything she had done for him, the case was conspicuously simple and his course unmistakably plain. That is why he had been gay when he came out of the house to look for her: he could be gay when his course was plain. He could be all the gayer, naturally, I must add, that in turning things over, as he had done half the night, what he had turned up oftenest was the recognition that Julia now had a new personal power over him. It was not for nothing that she had thrown herself personally into his life. She had by her act made him live twice as much, and such a service, if a man had accepted and deeply tasted it, was certainly a thing to put him on his honor. Nick gladly recognized that there was nothing he could do in preference that would not be spoiled for him by any deflection from that point. His mother had made him uncomfortable by intimating to him that Julia was in love with him (he did n’t like, in general, to be told such things) ; but the responsibility seemed easier to carry, and he was less shy about it, when once he was away from other eyes, with only Julia’s own to express that truth and with indifferent nature all around. Besides, what discovery had he made this morning but that he also was in love ?

“ You must be a very great man,” she said to him, in the middle of the lake. “ I don’t know what you mean, about my salon ; but I am ambitious.”

“ We must look at life in a large, fine way,” Nick replied, resting his oars.

“ That’s what I mean. If I did n’t think you could I would n’t look at you.”

“ I could what ? ”

“ Do everything you ought — everything I imagine, I dream of. You are clever : you can never make me believe the contrary, after your speech on Tuesday. Don’t speak to me! I 've seen, I’ve heard, and I know what’s in you. I shall hold you to it. You are everything that you pretend not to be.”

Nick sat looking at the water while she talked. “ Will it always be so amusing?” he asked.

“ Will what always be ? ”

“ Why, my career.”

“ Sha’n’t I make it so ? ”

“ It will be yours ; it won’t be mine,” said Nick.

“ Ah, don’t say that; don’t make me out that sort of woman ! If they should say it’s me, I’d drown myself.”

“ If they should say what’s you ? ”

“ Why, your getting on. If they should say I push you, that I do things for you.”

“ Well, won’t you do them ? It’s just what I count on.”

“ Don’t be dreadful,” said Mrs. Dallow. “ It would be loathsome if I were said to be cleverer than you. That’s not the sort of man I want to marry.”

“ Oh, I shall make you work, my dear ! ”

“Ah, that!” exclaimed Mrs. Dallow, in a tone that might come back to a man in after years. “ You will do the great thing, you will make my life delightful,” Nick declared, as if he fully perceived the sweetness of it. “ I dare say that will keep me in heart.”

“In heart? Why should n’t you be in heart ? ” Julia’s eyes, lingering on him, searching him, seemed to question him still more than her lips.

“ Oh, it will be all right ! ” cried Nick.

“ You ’ll like success, as well as any one else. Don’t tell me — you ’re not so ethereal! ”

“ Yes, I shall like success.”

“ So shall I! And of course I am glad that you ’ll be able to do things,” Mrs. Dallow went on. “ I 'm glad you ’ll have things. I ’m glad I’m not poor.”

“ Ah, don’t speak of that,” Nick murmured. “ Only be nice to my mother ; we shall make her supremely happy.”

“ I’m glad I like your people,” Mrs. Dallow dropped. " Leave them to me ! ”

“ You’re generous—you’re noble,” stammered Nick.

“ Your mother must live at Broadwood ; she must have it for life. It’s not at all bad.”

“ Ah, Julia,” her companion replied, “ it’s well I love you ! ”

“ Why should n’t you ? ” laughed Julia ; and after this there was nothing said between them till the boat touched the shore. When she had got out Mrs. Dallow remarked that it was time for luncheon; but they took no action in consequence, strolling in a direction which was not that of the house. There was a vista that drew them on, a grassy path skirting the foundations of scattered beeches and leading to a stile from which the charmed wanderer might drop into another division of Mrs. Dallow’s property. This lady said something about their going as far as the stile; then, the next instant, she exclaimed, “ How stupid of you — you’ve forgotten Mr. Hoppus ! ”

“ We left him in the temple of Vesta. Darling, I had other things to think of there.”

I ’ll send for him,” said Mrs. Dallow.

“ Lord, can you think of him now ? ” Nick asked.

“ Of course I can — more than ever.”

“Shall we go back for him ?” Nick inquired, pausing.

Mrs. Dallow made no answer; she continued to walk, saying they would go as far as the stile. “ Of course I know you ’re fearfully vague,” she presently resumed.

“ I was n’t vague at all. But you were in such a hurry to get away.”

“ It does n’t signify. I have another one at home.”

“ Another summer - house ? ” suggested Nick.

“ A copy of Mr. Hoppus.”

“ Mercy, how you go in for him! Fancy having two 1 ”

“ He sent me the number of the magazine ; and the other is the one that comes every month.”

“ Every month — I see,” said Nick, ina manner justifying considerably Mrs. Dallow’s charge of vagueness. They had reached the stile and he leaned over it, looking at a great mild meadow and at the browsing beasts in the distance.

“ Did you suppose they come every day ? ” asked Mrs. Dallow.

“ Dear, no, thank God ! ” They remained there a little ; he continued to look at the animals, and before long he added : " Delightful English pastoral scene. Why do they say it won’t paint ? ”

“ Who says it won’t ? ”

“ I don’t know — some of them. It will in France ; but somehow it won’t here.”

“ What are you talking about ?” Mrs. Dallow demanded.

Nick appeared unable to satisfy her on this point; at any rate, instead of answering her directly he said. " Is Broadwood very charming ? ” “ Have you never been there It shows how you’ve treated me. We used to go there in August. George had ideas about it,” added Mrs. Dallow. She had never affected not to speak of her late husband, especially with Nick, whose kinsman, in a manner, he had been and who had liked him better than some others did.

“ George had ideas about a great many things.”

Julia Dallow appeared to be conscious that it would be rather odd, on such an occasion, to take this up. It was even odd in Nick to have said it. " Broadwood is just right,” she rejoined at last. " It’s neither too small nor too big, and it takes care of itself. There’s nothing to be done ; you can’t spend a penny.”

“ And don’t you want to use it? ”

“ We can go and stay with them,” said Mrs. Dallow.

“ They ’ll think I bring them an angel.” And Nick covered her hand, which was resting on the stile, with his own large one.

“ As they regard you yourself as an angel they will take it as natural of you to associate with your kind.”

“Oh, my kind!” murmured Nick, looking at the cows.

Mrs. Dallow turned away from him, as if she were starting homeward, and he began to retrace his steps with her. Suddenly she said, “ What did you mean, that night in Paris ? ”

“ That night ? ”

“ When you came to the hotel with me, after we had all dined at that place with Peter.”

“ What did I mean ? ”

“ About your caring so much for the fine arts. You seemed to want to frighten me.”

“ Why should you have been frightened ? I can’t imagine what I had in my head : not now.”

“ You are vague,” said Julia, with a little flush. " Not about the great thing.”

“ The great thing ? ”

“ That I owe you everything an honest man has to offer. How can I care about the fine arts now ? ”

Mrs. Dallow stopped, looking at him. " Is it because you think you owe it ” — and she paused, still with the heightened color in her cheek ; then she went on — " that you have spoken to me as you did there ? ” She tossed her head toward the lake.

“ I think I spoke to you because I could n’t help it.”

“You are vague! ” And Mrs. Dallow walked on again.

“ You affect me differently from any other woman.’

“ Oh, other women ! Why should n’t you care about the fine arts now ? ” she added.

“ There will be no time. All my days and my years will be none too much to do what you expect of me.”

“ I don’t expect you to give up anything. I only expect you to do more.”

“ To do more I must do less. I have no talent.”

“ No talent ? ”

“ I mean for painting.”

Mrs. Dallow stopped again. " That’s odious ! You have — you must.”

Nick burst out laughing. “You ’re altogether delightful. But how little you know about it — about the honorable practice of any art! ”

“ What do you call practice ? You ’ll have all our things — you ’ll live in the midst of them.”

“ Certainly I shall enjoy looking at them, being so near them.”

“ Don’t say I ’ve taken you away

“ Taken me away ? ”

“ From the love of art. I like them myself now, poor George’s treasures. I did n’t, of old, so much, because it seemed to me he made too much of them — he was always talking.”

“ Well, I won’t talk,” said Nick. “ You may do as you like —they ’re yours.”

“ Give them to the nation,” Niek went on.

“ I like that! When we have done with them.”

“ We shall have done with them when your Vandykes and Moronis have cured me of the delusion that I may be of their family. Surely that won’t take long.”

‘‘ You shall paint me,” said Julia.

“ Never, never, never ! ” Nick uttered these words in a tone that made his companion stare; and he appeared slightly embarrassed at this result of his emphasis.

To relieve himself he said, as they had come back to the place beside the lake where the boat was moored, “ Sha’n’t we really go and fetch Mr. Hoppus ? ”

She hesitated. “ You may go; I won’t, please.”

“ That’s not what I want.”

“ Oblige me by going. I ’ll wait here.” With which Mrs. Dallow sat down on the bench attached to the little landing.

Nick, at this, got into the boat and put off; he smiled at her as she sat there watching him. He made his short journey, disembarked and went into the pavilion ; but when he came out with the object of his errand he saw that Mrs. Dallow had quitted her station — she had returned to the house without him.

He rowed back quickly, sprang ashore and followed her with long steps. Apparently she had gone fast; she had almost reached the door when he overtook her.

“ Why did you basely desert me ? ” he asked, stopping her there.

“ I don’t know. Because I ’m so happy.”

“ May I tell mother ? ”

“ You may tell her she shall have Broadwood.”

XVI.

Nick lost no time in going down to see Mr. Carteret, to whom he had written immediately after the election and who had answered him in twelve revised pages of historical parallel. He used often to envy Mr. Carteret’s leisure, a sense of which came to him now afresh, in the summer evening, as he walked up the hill toward the quiet house where enjoyment, for him, had ever been mingled with a vague oppression. He was a little boy again, under Mr. Carteret’s roof — a little boy on whom it had been duly impressed that in the wide, plain, peaceful rooms he was not to " touch.” When he paid a visit to his father’s old friend there were in fact many things — many topics — from which he instinctively kept his hands. Even Mr. Chayter, the immemorial blank butler, who was so like his master that he might have been a twin brother, helped to remind him that he must be good. Mr. Carteret seemed to Nick a very grave person, but he had the sense that Chayter thought him rather frivolous.

Our young man always came on foot from the station, leaving his portmanteau to be carried : the direct way was steep and he liked the slow approach, which gave him a chance to look about the place and smell the new-mown hay. At this season the air was full of it — the fields were so near that it was in the small, empty streets. Nick would never have thought of rattling up to Mr. Carteret’s door. It had an old brass plate, with his name, as if he had been the principal surgeon. The house was in the high part, and the neat roofs of other houses, lower down the hill, made an immediate prospect for it, scarcely counting, however, for the green country was just below these, familiar and interpenetrating, in the shape of small but thicktufted gardens. There was something growing in all the intervals, and the onlydisorder of the place was that there were sometimes oats on the pavements. A crooked lane, very clean, with cobblestones, opened opposite to Mr. Carteret’s house and wandered towards the old abbey ; for the abbey was the secondary fact of Beauelere, after Mr. Carteret. Mr. Carteret sometimes went away and the abbey never did ; yet somehow it was most of the essence of the place that it possessed the proprietor of the squarest of the square red houses, with the finest of the arched hall-windows, in three divisions, over the widest of the last-century doorways. You saw the great abbey from the doorstep, beyond the gardens of course, and in the stillness you could hear the flutter of the birds that circled round its huge, short towers. The towers had never been finished, save as time finishes things, by perpetuating their incompleteness. There is something right in old monuments that have been wrong for centuries : some such moral as that was usually in Nick’s mind, as an emanation of Beauelere, when he looked at the magnificent line of the roof, riding the sky and unsurpassed for length.

When the door with the brass plate was opened and Mr. Chayter appeared in the middle distance (he always advanced just to the same spot, like a prime minister receiving an ambassador), Nick saw anew that he would be wonderfully like Mr. Carteret if he had had an expression. He did not permit himself this freedom ; never giving a sign of recognition, often as the young man had been at the house. He was most attentive to the visitor’s wants, but apparently feared that if he allowed a familiarity it might go too far. There was always the same question to be asked — had Mr. Carteret finished his nap? He usually had not finished it, and this left Nick what he liked — time to smoke a cigarette in the garden, or even, before dinner, to take a turn about the place. He observed now, every time he came, that Mr. Carteret’s nap lasted a little longer. There was, each year, a little more strength to be gathered for the ceremony of dinner; this was the principal symptom — almost the only one — that the clear-cheeked old gentleman gave of not being so fresh as of yore. He was still wonderful for his age. To-day he was particularly careful: Chayter went so far as to mention to Nick that four gentlemen were expected to dinner — an effusiveness perhaps partly explained by the circumstance that Lord Bottomley was one of them.

The prospect of Lord Bottomley was, somehow, not stirring; it only made the young man say to himself with a quick, thin sigh, " This time I am in for it ! ” And he immediately had the unpolitical sense again that there was nothing so pleasant as the way the quiet bachelor house had its best rooms on the big garden, which seemed to advance into them through their wide windows and enlarge their dullness.

“ I expect it will be a lateish eight, sir,” said Mr. Chayter, superintending, in the library, the production of tea on a large scale. Everything at Mr. Carteret’s appeared to Nick to be on a larger scale than anywhere else — the tea-cups, the knives and forks, the door-handles, the chair-backs, the legs of mutton, the candles and the lumps of coal: they represented, and apparently exhausted, the master’s sense of pleasing effect, for the house was not otherwise decorated. Nick thought it really hideous, but he was capable at the same time of extracting a degree of amusement from anything that was strongly characteristic, and Mr. Carteret’s interior expressed a whole view of life. Our young man was generous enough to find a hundred instructive intimations in it even at the time it came over him (as it always did at Beauelere) that this was the view he himself was expected to take. Nowhere were the boiled eggs, at breakfast, so big or in such big receptacles ; his own shoes, arranged in his room, looked to him longer there than at home. He went out into the garden and remembered what enormous strawberries they should have for dinner. In the house there was a great deal of Landseer, of oilcloth, of woodwork painted and “grained.”

Finding that he should have time before the evening meal, or before Mr. Carteret would be able to see him, lie quitted the house and took a stroll toward the abbey. It covered acres of ground, on the summit of the hill, and there were aspects in which its vast bulk reminded him of the ark, left high and dry upon Ararat. At least it was the image of a great wreck, of the indestructible vessel of a faith, washed up there by a storm centuries before. The injury of time added to this appearance — the infirmities around which, as he knew, the battle of restoration had begun to be fought. The cry had been raised to save the splendid pile, and the counter-cry by the purists, the sentimentalists, whatever they were, to save it from being saved. They were all exchanging compliments in the morning papers.

Nick sauntered round the church — it took a good while : he leaned against low things and looked up at it while he smoked another cigarette. It struck him as a great pity it should be touched : so much of the past was buried there that it was like desecrating, like digging up, a grave. And the years seemed to be letting it down so gently : why jostle the elbow of slow-fingering time ? The fading afternoon was exquisitely pure; the place was empty; he heard nothing but the cries of several children, which sounded sweet, who were playing on the flatness of the very old tombs. He knew that this would inevitably be one of the topics at dinner, the restoration of the abbey; it would give rise to a considerable deal of orderly debate. Lord Bottomley, oddly enough, would probably oppose the expensive project, but on grounds that would be characteristic of him even if the attitude were not. Nick’s nerves, on this spot, always knew what it was to be soothed ; but he shifted his position with a slight impatience as the vision came over him of Lord Bottomley’s treating a question of aesthetics. It was enough to make one want to take the other side, the idea of having the same taste as his lordship : one would have it for such different reasons.

Dear Mr. Carteret would be deliberate and fair all round, and would, like his noble friend, exhibit much more architectural knowledge than he, Nick, possessed : which would not make it a whit less droll to our young man that an artistic idea, so little really assimilated, should be broached at that table and in that air. It would remain so outside of their minds, and their minds would remain so outside of it. It would be dropped at last, however, after half an hour’s gentle worrying, and the conversation would incline itself to public affairs. Mr. Carteret would find his natural level — the production of anecdote in regard to the formation of early ministries. He knew more than any one else about the personages of whom certain cabinets would have consisted if they had not consisted of others. His favorite exercise was to illustrate how different everything might have been from what it was, and how the reason of the difference had always been somebody’s inability to “ see his way ” to accept the view of somebody else — a view usually, at the time, discussed, in strict confidence, with Mr. Carteret, who surrounded his actual violation of that confidence, thirty years later, with many precautions against scandal. In this retrospective vein, at the head of his table, the old gentleman always enjoyed an audience, or at any rate commanded a silence, often profound. Every one left it to some one else to ask another question; and when by chance some one else did so every one was struck with admiration at any one’s being able to say anything. Nick knew the moment when he himself would take a glass of a particular port and, surreptitiously looking at his watch, perceive it was ten o’clock. It might as well be 1830.

All this would be a part of the suggestion of leisure that invariably descended upon him at Beauclere — the image of a sloping shore where the tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning. But there was another admonition that was almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit in a summer hour, in a stroll about the grand abbey ; to sink into it as the light lingered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England — a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place appeared to be in the air (foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries. all corn-fields and magistrates and vicars), and these things were connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich land so infinitely lived in, and laid on him a hand that was too ghostly to press and yet, somehow, too urgent to be light. It produced a throb that he could not have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination and half responsibility. These impressions melted together and made a general appeal, of which, with his new honors as a legislator, he was the sentient subject. If he had a love for this particular scene of life, might it not have a love for him and expect something of him ? What fate could be so high as to grow old in a national affection ? What a grand kind of reciprocity, making mere soreness of all the balms of indifference !

The great church was still open, and he turned into it and wandered a little in the twilight, which had gathered earlier there. The whole structure, with its immensity of height and distance, seemed to rest on tremendous facts — facts of achievement and endurance — and the huge Norman pillars to loom through the dimness like the ghosts of heroes. Nick was more struck with its human than with its divine significance, and he felt the oppression of his conscience as he walked slowly about. It was in his mind that nothing in life was really clear, all things were mingled and charged, and that patriotism might be an uplifting passion even if it had to allow for Lord Bottomley and for Mr. Carteret’s blindness on certain sides. Presently he perceived it was nearly half past seven, and as he went back to his old friend’s he could not have told you whether he was in a state of gladness or of gloom.

“ Mr. Carteret will be in the drawingroom at a quarter to eight, sir,” Chayter said ; and Nick, as he went to his chamber, asked himself what was the use of being a member of Parliament if one was still sensitive to an intimation on the part of such a functionary that one ought already to have begun to dress. Chayter’s words meant that Mr. Carteret would expect to have a little comfortable conversation with him before dinner. Nick’s usual rapidity in dressing was, however, quite adequate to the occasion, and his host had not appeared when he went down. There were flowers in the unfeminine saloon, which contained several paintings, in addition to the engravings of pictures of animals; but nothing could prevent its reminding Nick of a comfortable committeeroom.

Mr. Carteret presently came in, with his gold-headed stick, a laugh like a series of little warning coughs and the air of embarrassment that our young man always perceived in him at first. He was nearly eighty, but he was still shy — he laughed a great deal, faintly and vaguely, at nothing, as if to make up for the seriousness with which he took some jokes. He always began by looking away from his interlocutor, and it was only little by little that his eyes came round ; after which their limpid and benevolent blue made you wonder why they should ever be circumspect. He was clean shaven and had a long upper lip. When he had seated himself he talked of “ majorities,” and showed a disposition to converse on the general subject of the fluctuation of Liberal gains. He had an extraordinary memory for facts of this sort, and could mention the figures relating to elections in innumerable places in particular years. To many of these facts he attached great importance, in his simple, kindly, presupposing way ; returning five minutes later and correcting himself if he had said that some one, in 1857, had had 6014 instead of 6004.

Nick always felt a great hypocrite as he listened to him, in spite of the old man’s courtesy — a thing so charming in itself that it would have been grossness to speak of him as a bore. The difficulty was that he took for granted all kinds of positive assent, and Nick, in his company, found himself immersed in an atmosphere of tacit pledges which constituted the very medium of intercourse and yet made him draw his breath a little in pain when, for a moment, he measured them. There would have been no hypocrisy at all if he could have regarded Mr. Carteret as a mere sweet spectacle, the last, or almost the last, illustration of a departing tradition of manners. But he represented something more than manners ; he represented what he believed to be morals and ideas — ideas as regards which he took your personal deference (not discovering how natural that was) for participation. Nick liked to think that his father, though ten years younger, had found it congruous to make his best friend of the owner of so nice a nature : it gave a softness to his feeling for that memory to be reminded that Sir Nicholas had been of the same general type — a type so pure, so disinterested, so anxious about the public good. Just so it endeared Mr. Carteret to him to perceive that he considered his father had done a definite work, prematurely interrupted, which had been an absolute benefit to the people of England. The oddity was, however, that though both Mr. Carteret’s aspect and his appreciation were still so fresh, this relation of his to his late distinguished friend made the latter appear to Nick even more irrecoverably dead. The good old man had almost a vocabulary of his own, made up of old-fashioned political phrases and quite untainted with the new terms, mostly borrowed from America ; indeed, his language and his tone made those of almost any one who might be talking with him appear by contrast rather American. He was, at least nowadays, never severe nor denunciatory ; but sometimes, in telling an anecdote, he dropped such an expression as “ the rascal said to me,” or such an epithet as “ the vulgar dog.”

Nick was always struck with the rare simplicity (it came out in his countenance) of one who had lived so long and seen so much of affairs that draw forth the passions and perversities of men. It often made him say to himself that Mr. Carteret must have been very remarkable to achieve with his means so many things requiring cleverness. It was as if experience, though coming to him in abundance, had dealt with him with such clean hands as to leave no stain, and had never provoked him to any general reflection. He had never proceeded in any ironic way from the particular to the general; certainly he had never made a reflection upon anything so unparliamentary as Life. He would have questioned the taste of such an obtrusion, and if he had encountered it on the part of another would have regarded it as a kind of French toy, with the uses of which he was unacquainted. Life, for him, was a purely direct function, not a question of phrasing. It must be added that he had, to Nick’s perception, his variations — his back windows opening into more private grounds. That was visible from the way his eye grew cold and his whole polite face rather austere when he listened to something that he did n’t agree with or perhaps even understand ; as if his modesty did not in strictness forbid the suspicion that a thing he did n’t understand would have a probability against it. At such times there was something a little deadly in the silence in which he simply waited, with a lapse in his face, without helping his interlocutor out. Nick would have been very sorry to attempt to communicate to him a matter which he probably would not understand. This cut off, of course, a multitude of subjects.

The evening passed exactly as Nick had foreseen, even to the rather early dispersal of the guests, two of whom were “ local ” men, earnest and distinct, though not particularly distinguished. The third was a young, slim, uninitiated gentleman whom Lord Bottomley brought with him, and concerning whom Nick was informed beforehand that he was engaged to be married to the Honorable Jane, his lordship’s second daughter. There were recurrent allusions to Nick’s victory, as to which he had the fear that he might appear to exhibit less interest in it than the company did. He took energetic precautions against this, and felt, repeatedly, a little spent with them, for the subject always came up once more. Yet it was not as his but as theirs that they liked the triumph. Mr. Carteret took leave of him for the night directly after the other guests had gone, using at this moment the words that he had often used before —

“ You may sit up to any hour you like. I only ask that you don’t read in bed.”

Henry James.