The Project Gutenberg eBook of The gray wolf's daughter, by Gertrude Warden

BY
GERTRUDE WARDEN,
Author of “A Race for Love,” “Mam’zelle Bebe,” “The Secret of a
Letter,” etc.

[COPYRIGHT]

CONTENTS.

THE GRAY WOLF’S DAUGHTER.

PROLOGUE.—PART I.

On a stormy afternoon in October, in the thirtieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign, a young doctor sat before the fire in his new home at the sleepy old Surrey town of Grayling, warming his hands, and thinking, not too cheerfully, of his prospects.

Ernest Netherbridge was not a genius, but he was a thoughtful, intelligent, painstaking, and unselfish man. Grayling had not yet found out his good qualities; the inhabitants, never greatly distinguished for lucidity of vision, had only had time to discover that his “bedside manner” was less soothing than that of his predecessor, and that he had an unpleasant trick of telling them that they ate and drank too much for their health. Young Dr. Netherbridge had also the bad taste to ascribe melancholy to “liver,” fainting fits and ladylike super-sensitiveness to “anæmia,” and hysterics to ill-temper. Consequently he was not popular, and he knew it.

No one, therefore, was more surprised than he when a handsome closed carriage, drawn by two splendid bays, was pulled up before his door, and a footman, after a reverberating rat-tat-tat, delivered a note, emblazoned with an imposing coat of arms, to Dr. Netherbridge’s housekeeper for her master.

On breaking the seal the doctor’s surprise increased. The letter was sent from the Chase, a very large estate, which extended for several miles in the vicinity of Grayling, and which belonged to Sir Philip Cranstoun, the representative of one of the oldest families in Surrey, a man reputed equally wealthy and eccentric, concerning whom wonderful tales were whispered round Grayling tea-tables. The letter was written in a small and cramped man’s handwriting, and ran as follows:

The doctor put down the letter, surprised and interested. Sir Curtis Clarkson and Sir Percival Hoare were names to conjure with, London physicians of great and established reputation, favored by royalty, and believed in unquestioningly by the wealthier middle classes. Dr. Tracey Wentworth was a highly popular practitioner from Guildford, in his profession a triton against a minnow when compared with the struggling young doctor who was now called to supersede him.

Ernest Netherbridge pondered for a few moments. After all, he reflected, although he might well fail over a case which had puzzled better heads than his, at least he could exercise his favorite and unpopular virtue of candor without fear of the consequences. Should he succeed in pleasing so great a local magnate as Sir Philip Cranstoun, a justice of the peace, and one of the largest landowners in the south of England, it would greatly help to establish his position and practice in the town of his adoption. The thing was at least worth trying for. Taking his overcoat and slipping a scarf round his neck, for he was by no means robust, Dr. Netherbridge stepped out of his house, and entering the roomy and comfortable carriage in waiting for him, was soon whirling along a quiet country road toward the great gates leading to the Chase.

The wind whistled through the scantily clad branches of the swaying trees, scattering their yellow and russet leaves, and whirling them in dancing eddies a little way above the moist earth below. Dr. Netherbridge had never been within the precincts of the great park; indeed, since his marriage three years previously, Sir Philip Cranstoun had discouraged visitors, and no one in Grayling appeared to have even seen Lady Cranstoun, concerning whose remarkable beauty, however, reports were freely circulated. Considerable interest and curiosity dominated the young doctor’s mind as he was driven rapidly along the wide avenue of over-arching giant elmtrees, which formed a characteristic feature of the Cranstoun Chase enclosure.

The house itself was a great rambling, gray stone mansion, closely covered with ivy, of ancient origin, and in some of the older portions possessing a thickness of wall suitable for the old ante-gunpowder days. From time to time the original building had been added to by various members of the family, but although numerous additions had been made in the course of the five hundred years since the first Squire Cranstoun erected his fortified hunting seat within the forest, the gray pile was dignified and imposing still, although it resembled more a fortress than a home.

A very broad flight of shallow steps led to the heavy Gothic entrance, on either side of which life-sized wolves in stone supported the Cranstoun arms. For many hundred years the wolf’s head, grasped in a mail-covered hand, had been the device of the family, to whom tradition assigned many of the wolf’s characteristics of treachery and vindictiveness, while the motto, “Cranstoun, Remember!” was said to be derived from a bloodthirsty legend of long delayed vengeance in the days of the Norman Conquest.

As the carriage drew up before the entrance, the heavy oak doors were thrown open and Dr. Netherbridge ascended the steps, and entered the house. The hall was spacious and impressive as the exterior, hung with ancient swords and spears, and guarded by four glistening figures in complete armor, which, as the firelight from a wide hearth below a massive marble mantelpiece struck them, added to the sombre appearance of the house.

A stout, elderly man, evidently the butler, and two footmen stood in the hall. Sir Philip was out, they informed the doctor. He had been absent since the morning, and had caused a message to be conveyed to his house, together with a letter for Dr. Netherbridge, which he had wished to have immediately delivered.

“For some time, sir. But her ladyship’s maid will be able to inform you as to all that, if you will be so kind as to follow me.”

Lady Cranstoun’s apartments were little less gloomy than the hall. No flowers, no dainty knick-knacks relieved their mediæval simplicity. In the bedroom and the adjoining sitting-room the floors were polished and spread with rugs, the walls covered with moth-eaten tapestry, while the massive bed and the chairs were formed of dark oak. An oak settle was drawn before the fire in the sitting-room, which communicated by a recess draped with heavy velvet curtains with the bedroom beyond. On a fur rug thrown across the settle, a figure in white draperies lay with face turned to the firelight. On a chair near, a white-capped nurse sat, holding in her hand a book from which she had been reading, while a dark-complexioned, pleasant-faced woman, evidently a servant, stood at a little distance, with hands tightly clasped, and a look of keen anxiety printed on her features.

“It is the doctor, my lady,” the servant said, approaching the motionless, recumbent figure of her mistress.

“Of what use is a doctor to me?” she murmured. “Send him away, Margaret! What good have they done me yet?”

The nurse rose at this point and added her entreaties to those of the old servant, before crossing the room to where the doctor stood.

“Lady Cranstoun lies like that hour after hour,” she whispered. “She neither eats nor sleeps, and she can hardly bear to be spoken to.”

Dr. Netherbridge came quietly forward, and placing himself between the oak settle and the fire, looked directly into Lady Cranstoun’s face. The invalid, raising her hollow eyes, perceived a small, slight man of about thirty, with a pale face, a dark mustache and beard, and singularly penetrating and reliable dark blue eyes. He on his part beheld a tall young woman of apparently not more than twenty years of age, and of truly remarkable beauty, even though her face and arms were now slender to emaciation, and her pallor was almost corpselike. Her face was small, her features were delicate, and her hair, of which she possessed a wavy abundance, was the blackest he had ever seen. But her beauty and her fragility, both of which were strongly apparent, were forgotten by the doctor in the effect produced upon him by her eyes, surely the largest, darkest, and most hopelessly sad in expression that ever gazed out of a despairing woman’s face.

Almost mechanically he raised her wrist, and began to feel her quick, feverish pulse. Her hand was extremely cold, although her dry, red lips looked hot and parched. A strong sympathy for her filled his mind as he drew a chair up to the oak settle, and began asking her some questions concerning her illness.

At first she answered in monosyllables and evidently at random, staring into the fire, and speaking in a scarcely audible voice. Gradually, however, she took to watching his face, and at last, sitting up with some show of energy, she asked the nurse to wait in the adjoining room while she described her symptoms to the doctor.

“Seeing you sitting there fidgets me,” she said. “I can’t collect my thoughts.”

She spoke English correctly enough, in a sweet, rich voice, yet something in her manner struck the doctor as rough and unusual in a woman of birth and breeding. As soon as the nurse had moved away, Lady Cranstoun turned impulsively to the dark-complexioned servant.

“Go after her, and prevent her from listening,” she whispered, rapidly, and the woman obeyed.

“Now draw your chair close up,” she said, imperiously, to the doctor. “I have a great deal to say. There is something about your face which makes me think I can trust you. And I do so badly need some one to trust. Stay, though; do you know Sir Philip Cranstoun?”

Thinking it might help him to gain her confidence, Dr. Netherbridge drew from his pocket Sir Philip’s summons.

Lady Cranstoun read it eagerly. After she had returned it to him, silence reigned for a few seconds. Her next question appeared startlingly irrelevant.

“And Sir Philip’s note was sent here from Guildford ordering the carriage to go for you?”

“No doubt he was very anxious about you,” said the doctor, hardly realizing what he was expected to say.

She stared at him for a few seconds, and then broke into a bitter, mirthless laugh.

“You don’t know, then?” she said. “After all, why should you? Yet I feel sure I can trust you. What is your name?”

Silence again. It was obviously impossible to comment upon such an unexpected statement.

She stared at the fire, and then, suddenly clasping her thin white hands, she fixed her great eyes beseechingly upon his face.

“Will you help me?” she asked, in a whisper full of intensity. “I haven’t a friend in the house except Margaret. Every one is against me.”

“Surely your illness makes you fanciful,” he was beginning, when she cut him short impatiently.

“Ah! don’t talk like that—like the others did! Sir Philip so longs for an heir. We had a child, a boy, who died—I am glad, very glad that he is dead—and he wishes me to have every care now, not for my sake, but for the sake of the family name. I have been trying to starve myself; I suppose you can see that; but if you will give me the information I want, I will take your medicines or anything.”

“Find out for me all that took place in court to-day. Sir Philip went to Guildford early—I found out so much—but they will not let me see the papers, they will not let me hear!”

She was quivering from head to foot in fierce, ungovernable excitement, and her eyes were shining with a feverish glitter.

“There is some great anxiety on your mind,” he said, kindly. “Will you not confide in me more fully?”

She glanced nervously about her, and finally thrust her hand among the folds of her dress about her neck, and slipped in his hand a crumpled letter, ill-spelt, and written evidently by an imperfectly educated person.

Dr. Netherbridge read the letter carefully, and returned it to Lady Cranstoun. He was beginning to understand several things which had puzzled him. One point was very clear—Sir Philip Cranstoun had married beneath him, and had forbidden his young wife from communicating in any way with her relations.

“It was a beautifully clear night. I thought Sir Philip was away, but he had returned from London without my knowledge. Somehow, some one—one of the spies who are about me, waking and sleeping—picked up and read this letter. I can only suppose this, for all I know is that as I crept out of the house at about half-past nine I was followed. Just as I reached the shrubbery, and caught sight in the moonlight of my father and brother in waiting under the dark shadow of the trees, I was seized from behind, something was thrust into my mouth and over my eyes, and I was carried back into the house. I fought and struggled, but to no purpose, and I could plainly hear several shots, the sound of a scuffle, and a great cry as of a man in mortal agony. From that day to this I have been able to learn nothing of what happened on that night. But yesterday Margaret overheard Sir Philip telling his steward that he was going to Guildford to-day, where the sessions are held, to appear as a witness against some poachers who were found in his grounds several weeks ago, and who have been in jail ever since. Dr. Netherbridge, I am certain he meant my father and my brother!”

“But how could that be?” he asked, trying to allay her fierce excitement. “Your father and brother are not poachers surely?”

“My people don’t see that the rich are injured by the loss of a hare or a rabbit now and again,” she muttered with lowered eyelids. “They should belong to the people, wild game like that, and a bird or two—but that’s not what we were talking of. It was no poaching brought out Jim and father that night. Sir Philip knew that right enough. He made me take a solemn oath never to betray to anybody what he called my disgraceful origin. Disgraceful!” she repeated, with burning cheeks. “A Carewe’s as good as a Cranstoun any day, as I’ve told him often enough. I’ve never broken my vow until to-day; not even Margaret knows who my people are. But I’ve told you, because I must and will know what has happened to my father and my brother Jim to-day.”

As he watched her talking, and noted the English nature of her beauty, the intense blue-blackness of her hair, and a certain touch of wildness about her free, graceful gestures and rapid speech, another conviction came home to Ernest Netherbridge’s mind, and this was that Lady Cranstoun, wife of Sir Philip Cranstoun, of the Chase, Surrey, Cranstoun Hall, in Aberdeenshire, and Berkeley Square, London, had in her veins the untamable blood of the true “Egyptian,” those despised wanderers over the face of the earth who are found and hated in all the chief countries of Europe.

In spite of his patient’s beauty, Dr. Netherbridge could not help wondering how so proud a man as Sir Philip was considered had ever been so far carried away by his feelings as to wed a girl of gypsy origin. Lady Cranstoun seemed to divine what was passing in his mind. Raising herself to a sitting position, she tapped one slender well-arched foot upon the ground while she said, as though in answer to his thought:

“Of course, you wonder how Sir Philip came to marry me. I can see that in your face. When I was only eight years old I got blamed for something, as we were on the road going from fair to fair in the summer. So I ran away in a rage, and walked till I was tired and fell asleep under a hedge by the wayside, in Devonshire. A rich lady drove by, the Hon. Mrs. Neville, a widow without children, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s eldest sister. Because I was so pretty, she had me lifted into her carriage, and took me to her beautiful home and had me educated, taught French, and music, and dancing, and drawing, and all that, meaning me to be a governess. Every now and then I broke loose and went tramping through the fields and lanes after my own people, whom I loved the best all along. Often and often, when my fingers ached with practising the piano, and I felt all stiff in tight clothes and shoes, I’d long for the old free life again. But when I saw my people, stealing out at night to them, they begged me to stay where I was. I could help them with money, and times were hard. Before my mother died she made me promise to remain a lady, and Mrs. Neville was kind enough to me by fits and starts, and very proud of what training and education had done. She used to show me off as a sort of successful experiment, too, before people, and that made me mad. She was a hard, capricious woman, like all the Cranstouns in nature, and was all for breaking what she called my absurd pride, and reminding me I’d only been a vagrant after all. But she didn’t do so much of that as she’d have liked, because I told her I’d run away, and that wouldn’t have suited her, as I played and read to her, and amused her, and she couldn’t well do without me. But I never could be reconciled to the notion of being a dependent, and so when Sir Philip Cranstoun came on a visit—he was a handsome enough man of five-and-twenty then, and me only a little bit over sixteen—and he glared at me, and could hardly let me out of his sight, and said he loved me, I got all excited between the notion of being a great lady and being loved and being free from Mrs. Neville’s taunts. But Philip wanted me to run away with him, but I wouldn’t hear of it, and refused to speak to him. I was very pretty then, prettier than you can think just seeing me now, and he was regularly crazy about me. So, early one morning, he made me meet him in a church at Torquay, and we were married. Just three years ago it was yesterday, a day I shall curse as long as I live!”

“Surely,” said the doctor, as she paused, apparently lost in sombre thought, “Sir Philip must have been very deeply attached to you?”

“Yes,” she returned, bitterly, “and for how long? First, nothing was too good for me, but that state lasted only a few weeks, and even then I was afraid of him. Then violent, raging scenes of jealousy if, when we were in Italy, I so much as looked at a waiter and asked him for bread. Then, forever storming at me, and reproaching me, if a gondolier so much as called me the ‘beautiful signora.’ And, after that, scenes constantly. I’ve a temper like fire myself, I own. We Carewes have never been known for meekness, and even when I was a baby child I’d been taught to think myself a princess. All his life Sir Philip had his own way in everything, and all who came in his path had obeyed him, cowed by his masterful temper and sullen fury. But I withstood him. I thought he loved me well enough to let me have my way, and when I found out my mistake I began to hate him, and more than once tried to run away from him. But he followed, and swore he would murder me if I dared, gypsy as I was, to bring disgrace upon his ancient name. Gradually, my will and my health seemed to be breaking down. Our first child pined away and died, because I could not care for it—could not look at it. It was his child, like him, I thought, even at that age, and so I could not love it. When his son died, Sir Philip was mad with anger, but I had grown past caring. It isn’t all my fault, Dr. Netherbridge,” she added, suddenly, while big tears rolled down her cheeks. “I may have been silly when I married, but I tried my utmost for over a year to love Sir Philip, and to please him, but he is more a fiend than a man, I think, and I would rather die than see a child of mine grow up resembling him. It is all these thoughts which, together with my awful anxiety for my father and Jim, are breaking my heart, and ruining my health. It is hate, and terror, and misery, and cruel, cruel anxiety, which make me starve myself and hope to die. But now that I have trusted you, and told you everything, you will befriend me, will you not? Come to-morrow early, and let me know everything—everything, mind—that took place in court to-day, and I will let you cure me, if you choose. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” he said, “to do everything in my power to serve you,” and with that assurance he took his leave.

PROLOGUE.—PART II.

As Dr. Netherbridge left Lady Cranstoun’s apartments, and proceeded down the broad oak staircase to the ground floor, he found a man servant waiting for him in the hall.

“Sir Philip has just arrived, sir, and wishes to see you before you go. Will you kindly come to the library?”

The little doctor followed the man, filled with considerable curiosity as to what manner of man could have inspired so strong a sensation of fear and dislike in the breast of his young wife. Lady Cranstoun’s father had spoken of the son-in-law who would not acknowledge his existence as the “gray wolf.” But then Gypsy Carewe was hardly an unprejudiced person, and Dr. Netherbridge, who always desired to preserve an impartial mind, reminded himself of the fact that a girl of Clare Cranstoun’s undisciplined, keenly emotional nature would necessarily be an extremely trying companion to a man as reserved and proud as Sir Philip was popularly supposed to be.

The servant threw open the library door after a deferential tap on its panels, which was followed by a curt “Come in!” The young doctor found himself in a spacious apartment completely lined with oaken book-cases well filled with volumes. Before the fire, in the Englishman’s favorite attitude, his hands behind him, and his feet set rather wide apart on a lion-skin rug, stood a broad-shouldered and deep-chested man, rather below the medium height, with a square pale face, and black hair which, in spite of the fact that he was but eight-and-twenty, was already streaked with gray. In some indefinable way Sir Philip impressed all who saw him with the sense of power, of mental as well as physical force of very exceptional kind. In features he somewhat resembled the first Napoleon Bonaparte, but, if anything, his mouth was even more rigidly compressed and hard in outline than that of the great conqueror. He appeared to be a man of superb health and physique, notwithstanding his exceptional pallor, which contrasted strangely with the inky blackness of his eyebrows, and of the lashes which bordered his deep-set, glittering, steel-gray eyes. He gazed keenly at the doctor, and then with haughty condescension waved his long white hand toward a chair, which the latter did not take, but remained standing.

“You have seen Lady Cranstoun?” Sir Philip began abruptly, in a low-pitched but peculiarly grating voice.

“As I presume your business doesn’t extend to the mind, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me what is wrong with the body?”

“Certainly, Sir Philip. Lady Cranstoun is deliberately starving herself because she does not wish to live.”

Sir Philip’s black eyebrows bent heavily over his eyes, which gleamed with suppressed anger.

“Can’t she be made insensible by drugs, and food be administered to her then?” he asked, harshly.

“Scarcely. But she has promised me to take the medicine which I shall send her as soon as I get back; and there will be no possibility of her death from inanition while she takes that. She seems to me to have naturally a splendid constitution, and there is no doubt that if she can be persuaded to take nourishment, and to cease from worrying, her health will be all that can be desired.”

“You seem to have had exceptional success with your patient,” sneered Sir Philip, with a short and very unpleasant laugh. “Her other doctors couldn’t get a word out of her. Pray what method did you adopt to loosen her tongue?”

Ernest Netherbridge was a quiet tempered man, by no means easily roused to wrath. But there was something in the hard contempt of the Baronet’s manner which seemed to rouse all the latent aggressiveness of his nature. Looking Sir Philip full in the eyes, he answered his question steadily.

“I was extremely sorry for Lady Cranstoun, Sir Philip, and possibly I made up in sympathy for what I lacked in skill.”

“I am extremely grateful for your most kind pity for my wife,” he said, with biting sarcasm. “In her name and my own I offer you my hearty thanks for your sympathy. May I ask how she has merited it?”

“Certainly. Lady Cranstoun is very young. I understood her to say she is still under twenty. She appears to be very dull and lonely, and a prey to great depression. Also, she had not, so she told me, been outside the house for two months. Hers is a temperament imperatively demanding fresh air, plenty of exercise and change of scene, and bright and sympathetic society. Had she more of these things, I think it unlikely that she would entertain the idea of suicide, and require such constant watching as she does now.”

“I am deeply obliged to you for your valuable advice as to how my wife should be treated. Perhaps it is a little outside your province as a general country practitioner; but I am none the less sensible of your generosity in conferring it upon me.”

“Sir Philip,” returned the little doctor, taking his hat from the table, “in your letter you requested me to speak the truth. Unfortunately for my success in my profession, I am unable to do otherwise, and I can only regret that it has been unpalatable to you. I wish you good evening.”

“Stop!” Sir Philip called out, imperiously, as Dr. Netherbridge reached the door. “You will please send Lady Cranstoun’s medicine, and call to see her to-morrow. I will send the carriage for you at noon. If she has taken the whim in her head to be cured by you, she must have her way. Oh, by the bye, I may mention to you what you have no doubt found out for yourself. Lady Cranstoun’s father, Mr. Carewe, of Yorkshire, died in a madhouse, and I have often reason to fear my wife has inherited a touch of the complaint. Her statements since her illness began are incoherent in the extreme, and totally unreliable. But you will, of course, make allowance for that. Good-evening.”

Dr. Netherbridge seemed to breathe more freely when he found himself outside the gray fortress-like walls of the Chase. No patient he had ever yet had could approach in interest that fragile creature with the deathly white face and great dark eyes, whose husband was her worst enemy, and whose servants were her spies.

The words and the pathetic look which accompanied them haunted the young man. Especially since he had seen her husband a deep pity for her had taken possession of his mind. In speaking of his wife, Sir Philip’s voice, naturally hard, grew harder still, and the cold gleam of his eyes appeared absolutely diabolical. The whole of the Cranstouns’ miserable married life seemed to be laid bare before the doctor as he made his way thoughtfully toward his bachelor home, borne along the dark roads in the comfortable carriage in which he had come. He pictured to himself the spoiled, impulsive girl, little more than a child, whose strange beauty and proud maidenliness had won Sir Philip Cranstoun’s short-lived but passionate love. Such a union could only end in one way between so ill-matched a pair, and the woman who, with kind and tender but firm treatment, might have proved herself a loving and devoted wife and mother, had been cowed, terrified, sneered at, and repressed, until she had become the miserable nerve-wracked creature whom he had just seen.

It was with some approach to excitement that the little doctor prepared to inquire of his housekeeper—a garrulous, gossiping, stout woman—concerning what had taken place before the Recorder that day. But the initiative was taken by Mrs. Brooks herself, who, as she laid his frugal supper on the table, plunged at once into the subject on her mind:

“Lor’, sir! to think of your going off in the Cranstoun carriage, like that! It’ll make some folks I know that live in a great house outside the town, with a brass plate, and a boy in buttons to carry round the medicine-bottles in a basket, fit to burst themselves of envy. When you’re rested, sir, I’m just longing to know all about the Chase. I’ve always heard tell it’s such a fine place, grand enough for a royal dook. But to think of poor Sir Philip having such things said to him in court to-day, and all along of an impudent poacher fellow, who, I dare say, fully deserves his five years and more if the truth be known.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Brooks?” he asked. “Tell me just what happened.”

“Willingly, sir. If I might make so bold as to take a chair, being rather bad like, with rheumatism in the knees. It was this way, sir. My young sister-in-law, my brother William’s wife, you know, sir, she lives just across the way to the court-house, and William being in the force, she gets in to see the cases, and mostly drops in to tea with me afterward, to tell me about them; well, to-day she says there was a big, dark, young man, and well enough looking for his class of life, as was brought up on a charge of unlawfully wounding one of Sir Philip Cranstoun’s gamekeepers in a plantation near the Chase some few weeks ago. It appears it was about ten or a little before, and two of Sir Philip’s men, one of them with his arm all bandaged up, and a wound in his head, gave evidence as they were on the lookout for poachers, when they caught sight of this young man and another in a plantation near the Chase. Both were well-known poachers, and awful desperate men. The gamekeepers crept silently until they came upon them; but the poachers were very powerfully built and violent, and in the fight Sir Philip’s men were getting the worst of it, and the older ruffian had his knife out to murder the gamekeeper, as he knelt on his chest, pinning him to the ground, when Sir Philip himself, who was in the woods with his gun, hearing the scuffle, came up in the nick of time, and shot the poacher dead.”

“Dead, do you say?” he asked. “Be quite sure. Do you really mean that Sir Philip Cranstoun, with his own hand, shot one of the poachers dead?”

“With his own gun, sir, most certainly. The man’s been buried for weeks now. It all came out at the inquest, when Sir Philip and his gamekeeper attended to explain the accident. Didn’t you read of it in the papers?”

“No; or if I did, I did not attach much importance to it then. It is different now, and horrible, most horrible! What was the dead man’s name?”

“Hiram Carewe, sir, a man of forty-one, a gypsy fellow, against whom more than one could bear witness he was a confirmed poacher, as was his precious son, James Carewe, who is now starting his five years. But you never heard anything like the savage way in which he turned upon Sir Philip when he saw him in the witness-box. ‘You murdered my father,’ he shouted out. ‘You, Philip Cranstoun, liar, and coward! Your men are liars and perjurers, too. You know right well what father and I came to the Chase for, and that we never struck a blow but in self-defence. We hadn’t a weapon about us but our clasp-knives, and after you’d murdered my father you were three to one against me, and I had to fight for my life. You’re a perjurer and a villain, but I swear I’ll be even with you yet.’ He was hushed down, of course, and when the doctors had proved how bad the gamekeeper’s wounds were, he being dreadfully hacked about the neck and shoulders by James Carewe’s knife, the jury found him guilty of unlawfully wounding with intent to kill, and gave him five years, as served him right. But, lor’, sir, that wasn’t the end of it, for poor Sir Philip, who in his evidence said all he could to screen the man, I’m sure, as soon as he was leaving the building to get on his horse, as his groom was holding for him, up comes a ragged, wicked-looking, old gray-haired gypsy woman, all yellow and wrinkled, with a pair of eyes like burning coals, so William’s wife told me. ‘Where’s my son’s murderer?’ she yelled. ‘Where’s the man who’s killing my Hiram’s child?’ Up she come close to Sir Philip, before any one could stop her, and flings in his face a handful of mud she picked up in the roadway. Sir Philip he swears, and the witch she shrieks with laughter. Then suddenly she stops, lifts her finger, and rolls out the most awful curse a body ever heard. William’s wife said it made her cold to her bones to listen. The woman cursed his whole life and all that he did. He should lose wife and child, she said, his name should become a scoff and a byword throughout the land; he should be wretched at home and hated abroad; no one should ever love him again; and she would live, if it was for fifty years, to laugh at him, as he lay dying in a miserable hovel, deserted and alone.

“She took such a tone of command, and looked so terrible, that the people about seemed afraid to stop her; and even Sir Philip himself, as he stood wiping the mud from his face, seemed sort of dazed like for the minute. As soon as she’d finished, he was for calling for the police, but not as if he was in much of a hurry for them, and no one meddled with the old woman, who went off muttering and cursing. But there was a sharp stone in the mud she threw, and William’s wife saw the blood running down the side of Sir Philip’s face as he wiped it with his handkerchief. But, poor man! what a day for him, to be insulted like that, and out of court, all on account of a pack of filthy gypsies. And they do say, though, of course, I’m not so silly as to believe it, that those gypsies have the evil eye, and that it’s most awful unlucky to be cursed by one of them. William’s wife said she felt she’d rather have died at once than have such things said to her. The old woman’s eyes looked that dreadful that William’s wife was taken with hysterics as she was telling me about the affair. Lor’, sir, I do hope nothing dreadful will happen in consequence.”

Dr. Netherbridge dismissed Mrs. Brooks presently, and going over to the Boar’s Head Hotel, where the latest local gossip was always to be heard, he found that his housekeeper’s account had been in no way exaggerated. James Carewe’s threats in court occupied a measure of public attention, but the gypsy woman’s curse was the cream of the news, and much solemn head-wagging took place over it. Not one person there, however, had the slightest suspicion of the relationship which existed between these poachers and gypsies and the lovely wife of Sir Philip Cranstoun, and Dr. Netherbridge returned to his home oppressed by the terrible responsibility which developed upon him of imparting the news of her father’s death and her brother’s imprisonment to Lady Cranstoun in her present critical state of health.

As to the chief actor in these scenes, Sir Philip Cranstoun, he was in his secret heart less unmoved by to-day’s events than he made himself appear. Old Mrs. Carewe’s curse lingered in his ears as he sat by his lonely dinner-table, trying vainly to dim his recollection of that unpleasant scene outside the court-house by deep draughts of rare old wine. But no amount of drinking had ever yet clouded his faculties, which to-night seemed abnormally on the alert.

His marriage had been a great, a terrible mistake, he told himself, as he sat in a deep, comfortable arm-chair before the great fire-place. Disdaining women of his own rank as silly, and those of a lower position in life as coarse and vulgar, nature had suddenly revenged herself upon him for his indifference to the other sex by inspiring in him a mad love for his sister’s beautiful gypsy protégée. In the height of this he had married her, and his passion had cooled almost as rapidly as it had grown hot. Instead of a docile and humble tool, he found a proud and self-willed girl, who seemed in no way impressed by his extraordinary condescension and kindness in making her Lady Cranstoun. Very speedily his love turned to a sombre dislike, and he set himself to work to crush all opposition out of her nature. On one point particularly he had insisted from the first. She must utterly and forever renounce her kindred, whose very existence he considered as an insult to him. His last remaining spark of affection for her was extinguished when he discovered that she had disobeyed his strenuous orders on this point, and had contrived to see and speak with her relatives. But his wish for an heir, and his fear lest the estates, which were strictly entailed, should pass to his brother, whom he heartily detested, forced him to tolerate his wife’s presence, and his anger, therefore, knew no bounds when, owing, as he believed to Clare’s indifference and neglect, his infant son’s life faded away. On that unlucky night when Hiram Carewe met his death, Sir Philip, who had been informed of the gypsies’ intention to visit his daughter, set his men on to seize the Carewes as poachers, and drive them out of the grounds. His men, over-zealous in executing their master’s orders, attacked the Carewes so savagely that, the wild gypsy blood of the latter being roused, one of the gamekeepers might well have paid for his obedience with his life but for Sir Philip’s shot. The Baronet had no intention of killing his wife’s father, although he was viciously glad of an opportunity to wound him. He hated Lady Cranstoun’s gypsy kindred most heartily, and wished them all out of the world; but it was a momentary matter of regret with him that his hand had fired the fatal shot which made Clare a orphan. After that point, affairs seemed taken out of his hands. The police interference, the inquest, and James Carewe’s trial, had all taken place without any impetus on his side; the one imperative necessity was that Lady Cranstoun should be, for some time at least, kept in ignorance of the fate of her father and brother.

Even as he thus reasoned, the door of the dining-room was suddenly opened, and Clare Cranstoun, corpse-like in her pallor, her long black hair dishevelled about her shoulders, and her eyes gleaming with what looked like madness, advanced toward him, ghost-like in her loose white dressing-gown, and he knew in an instant that she had learned the truth.

Sir Philip’s groom had, indeed, described to Margaret the scene outside the courthouse that afternoon, and the woman, totally ignorant of the interests at stake, had retailed the story to her mistress as she was brushing her hair for the night.

“My father! My brother!” Lady Cranstoun murmured, with parched lips, as she staggered forward into the room. “What have you done with them?”

Looking at her, he realized that it was impossible to deceive her longer. He pushed a chair toward her, but she impatiently declined it.

“I am sorry to say,” he answered then, in those hard, level tones of his, “that your father and your brother plotted with you to disobey my orders. It is you who are to blame for the consequences.”

“Your father was mistaken for a poacher, and was accidentally shot in a scuffle——”

“Murdered! Murdered by you!” she shrieked, wringing her hands as one distraught. “My father—my poor father!”

“For three years,” he said, coldly, “I have been trying to prove to you that it is worse than useless to try to disobey my orders. This unfortunate accident will, I hope, convince you of your folly. As to the other poaching gypsy, James Carewe, I did what I could to get him off, but he had savagely assaulted one of my keepers, and has got five years for it. In future you will know better than to attempt to hold any communication with your disreputable family.”

“In future!” she repeated, in a low, altered voice. “What have you to do with my future?”

Her tone was so singular that he looked into her face for the first time during this interview, and read there a burning hate, stronger and deeper than ever he was capable of cherishing. Without a word she turned from him, and left the room as the servant entered it in response to his master’s ring.

That night, in a storm of wind and rain, an old woman and a lad of sixteen waited in the woods outside the Chase, with a horse stolen from Sir Philip’s stables, the bridle of which was held by Brian Carewe. And at one o’clock a figure, in the black cloak, bonnet, and long veil of a nurse, stole from the great oak doors, and over the slippery dead leaves that cumbered the steps, to join them. The old woman helped her on the horse and mounted it behind her, the lad held the bridle; and so by devious ways through the forest, known only to gypsies, Lady Cranstoun, of the Chase, left her husband’s home never to return.

Rather more than a month later, while still the hue and cry over Lady Cranstoun’s disappearance, as it was rumored during an attack of delirium and fever, rang through the countryside, Dr. Ernest Netherbridge, reading a medical work before his study fire at midnight, was disturbed by a late caller.

His housekeeper was in bed, and he himself opened the door upon a tall, handsome, black-browed lad, and a covered cart, drawn by a powerfully-built horse, with flanks steaming in the frosty air.

It was a case of life and death, the lad said, and the patient was his sister. Dr. Netherbridge was an absolutely unselfish man in following his profession, and slipping on his overcoat, he entered the cart, and was driven for over an hour and a half through the dark country roads until the driver, who had been monosyllabic or silent on the way, drew up near a thatched cottage a little back from the road.

“You’ll find my sister and her grandmother within. I’ll wait here to drive you home,” he said.

Dr. Netherbridge tapped at the cottage door, which was opened by an evil-looking old woman, with unkempt hair bound with a bright-colored kerchief. After hearing his name, she conducted him to the invalid’s room, where two women, apparently nurses, were busy, the one in trying to quiet a baby ten days old, the other bending over the still figure of its mother stretched upon the bed.

One glance at the waxen face, the blue-black hair, delicate features and great dark eyes told Dr. Netherbridge that this mysterious patient was none other than the missing Lady Cranstoun, and that the baby girl whose fretful cries filled the room was the child concerning whom the Baronet was so anxious.

The mother was intensely weak, hardly, indeed, alive at all. Dr. Netherbridge administered and prescribed what remedies he could. But before leaving he thought well to inform old Mrs. Carewe, the sick woman’s grandmother, that he had recognized the patient, and should at once communicate the fact to her husband.

“That is just why I sent for you,” said the old woman, while a smile of malevolent cunning lit up her face. “As soon as my Clare is dead, and she won’t live above a few hours now, doctor or no doctor, that child will be sent to her father, Sir Philip Cranstoun. Poor folks like us, with no men to work for us, can’t afford to bring up a Baronet’s daughter properly. And your word will be needed in proof of her identity.”

On the following day, when he called at the Chase with his statement, Dr. Netherbridge learned that a neighboring farmer had been commissioned to bring a basket to the house, within which reposed an infant eleven days old, upon whose gown was pinned a paper with the following words:

Thus was Sir Philip freed from his matrimonial perplexities, and left with an altogether undesired infant daughter on his hands.

CHAPTER I.
KNIGHTS ERRANT.

Eighteen years had passed since the flight of Clare Lady Cranstoun and the birth of her daughter Stella.

The touch of spring was upon the Surrey meads and Surrey hills, and a tender gray-green veil adorned the boughs laid bare by winter winds.

Before an ideal country-house, low and rambling, with plentiful green lattice-work for the creepers beginning now to bud, and broad terraces sheltered by verandas overlooking a trim tennis-lawn and a flower-garden gay with hyacinths and daffodils, in joyous flower, a comely group was gathered. Two young men, who had been for three days guests, were taking leave of Mr. and Mrs. Braithwaite, the three pretty Misses Braithwaite, their still prettier cousin, and the two young brothers of the family.

A more attractive and typically English group could hardly be imagined. Father and mother, plump, handsome, and well-fed, surveying, with excusable pride, their three fair-haired girls, all of whom possessed wide shoulders, slender waists, fresh complexions, and clear gray eyes. The Misses Braithwaite and their cousin could all ride, drive, play lawn tennis and the newest dance music, and they one and all looked forward to the time when they should marry “well,” and spend every season in London. Between these four young ladies there existed a marked and charming likeness; but the two young men, from one of whom at least they were so regretfully parting, were extremely dissimilar in appearance, voice, and manner.

The elder was a man of seven-and-twenty, fully six feet four inches in height, and of massive build and proud, erect carriage, which made him appear even taller than he really was. His hair, of a golden-brown color, curled closely over his handsome head, which was set upon his broad shoulders like that of a young Hercules. His features were well cut, his brown eyes as clear and beautiful in color as those of a collie-dog, and a drooping yellow mustache shaded the outlines of a mouth which at times, when closely shut, gave a look of hardness to his expression. In a word, he was a superb specimen of young English manhood, and as if nature had never wearied in her gifts, she united to a superb frame and handsome face a particularly rich and mellow voice.

And yet there was but little doubt that if the eyes of the four young ladies occasionally rested upon him with admiration, their serious attentions were all reserved for his companion, who could not, by the grossest flattery, have been termed even ordinarily good-looking.

A short, slight man of five-and-twenty, pale and sallow of skin, with close-cropped black hair, penetrating light gray eyes, set too near together in his head, a long, clean-shaved upper lip, short nose and wide mouth, of which the lower jaw slightly protruded; he was not as directly ugly as this description would suggest, but was fatally plain, insignificant, and uninteresting. His manners, too, in contrast with the easy geniality of his friend, were abrupt and sarcastic, and his voice was far from pleasant. To some men he was attractive by reason of his unusual intelligence and originality; but to the ordinary lawn-tennis-playing young lady there was nothing to recommend his appearance or his manners.

The attention shown to him by the entire Braithwaite family was the more remarkable in that he took very little notice of the girls, scarcely even troubling himself to look at them, and showing clearly his wish to escape from their friendly blandishments. Mrs. Braithwaite was his mother’s second cousin, which accounted somewhat for the favor shown him over and above what was displayed toward his companion; but to his own cynical mind the true reason of the family attentions was that here were four marriageable girls, all in want of a wealthy husband, and that he, Viscount Carthew, only son of the Earl of Northborough, and heir to a splendid rent-roll as well as to the fortune of his mother, who had been an American heiress, was an admirable parti, whereas the handsome young giant beside him possessed little in the world but his muscles and sinews and the big black mare, who stood now pawing the ground, impatient to set off again upon their travels.

When at last the two friends had ridden down the gravel drive, passed out of the gates, and waved a last good-by to Mr. Braithwaite’s pretty niece and daughters, Lord Carthew was not slow in expressing his opinion concerning them.

“Isn’t it truly disgusting, Hilary,” he began, “to see four healthy young women with good looks, for such as admire well-groomed animals without expression, each and every one of them trained to set her cap at an ugly and ill-tempered young man, solely because he will have money and a title? If I were passably good-looking or attractive in manner, I could find it in my heart to make excuses for them. But as it is, they make me long to ‘take some savage woman,’ as the fellow in ‘Locksley Hall’ suggested, and go and live with her in some island where the currency is cowrie shells, and the title of lord means no more than that of chimney sweep.”

Hilary Pritchard laughed with the easy-going good nature characteristic of big young men.

“You talk as if savages were all radicals,” he said. “I’d bet you anything you like that rank and money are quite as much esteemed among them as here with us, and a lady whose husband can hang up fourteen scalps over her front door would think twice before she called on another woman with only six or seven of such trophies. Look at the way in which Africans kow-tow to their chiefs. Rank and titles are visible signs of power, and power will always be reverenced.”

“Yes; but not fallen in love with. Conceive the notion that those nasty girls played at me, sang at me, rode and drove at me for two mortal days, and all in the hope of what? Securing my affection? Not a bit of it. Just with the idea of persuading me that they were in love with me, so that one of them might run a chance of becoming some day Countess of Northborough.”

“How bitter you are against women!” exclaimed his friend, lighting a cigar. “Now I thought them very nice and very pretty girls.”

“You can appreciate them, because you stand on your own merits,” grumbled Lord Carthew. “When you fall in love with a girl, you will know her affection is disinterested. I don’t see how girls can help falling in love with a fellow like you,” he added, glancing with envious admiration at Pritchard’s fine figure.

“My dear Claud, that speech shows how little you understand women’s tastes. Last season I went about a good bit with an aunt who is fond of society, and I never had the ghost of a chance of talking to any specially agreeable women. The little men, writer-chaps, or long-haired, foreign musicians, or else your dapper little, well-oiled and varnished tea-and-scandal-loving exquisites—those are the men who win women’s hearts. I assure you that after remarking with surprise how large I am, they take no more interest in me than if I were so much beef.”

“That’s all your confounded modesty. A man of six feet four can afford to be modest. All this discontent of mine arises from intense self-appreciation. The fact is, I have something of the ridiculous sentimental schoolgirl notion of being ‘loved for myself alone,’ isn’t that the expression? And it chafes me to think, now that my people are forever worrying me to get married, that there is nothing about me but my money and my position to make a girl care for me. Absurd, isn’t it?—and rather bourgeois to cherish these conventional notions about marriage. But I have no doubt I shall live them down, and within the next year or so shall lead to the altar, at St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, or St. Margaret’s, Westminster, quite the conventional young English lady, fair-haired, gray-eyed, pink-skinned, with a waist squeezed into the smallest possible breathing compass, and a train of brocade carried by two dressed-up little boys, and from six to ten bridesmaids, all equally well-born and well-looking, who would all have been equally ready to marry my name and position if I had asked them, unless any other man with more to offer had made a higher bid for their valuable affections.”

He spoke in hard, level tones, but Hilary, who had been Lord Carthew’s chum at Oxford, and both knew and understood him, realized by the slight nervous twitching of the speaker’s eyes and eyebrows how much of truth and of genuine feeling lay under this pretence of cynical indifference.

Very few people thoroughly understood Claud Viscount Carthew. Great things had been expected of him during his University career, where he had distinguished himself by his brilliant acquirements as much as by his notable eccentricities. In politics he was theoretically a radical of radicals, but Hilary, one of the very few men of his time with whom he was really intimate, understood quite well the intensity of the pride which was masked under an affectation of socialistic doctrines. The Earl of Northborough, a powerful and prominent Conservative peer, trusted to time to cure his only son of his levelling tendencies, and was strongly desirous of seeing him married to some lady in his own rank of life, who might be trusted to tone down Lord Carthew’s idiosyncracies.

Whether owing or not to the sturdy and independent spirit brought into the family on the side of his mother, a Pennsylvania heiress of old Puritan stock, certain it was that Claud Bromley Viscount Carthew was utterly unlike any other heir to an earldom in England. He was singularly free from vices, and unfashionable enough to be strictly honorable in paying his debts. He held the unusual opinion that it was as necessary and important to pay a tailor for a coat as a friend for a gambling debt. He also worked as hard for his exams as though he intended to be a parson or a schoolmaster, or as though a couple of letters after his name could be of any material value to a man who would some day be worth fifty thousand a year. His theories on marriage were also archaic in the extreme, in the opinion of his equals. He was anxious not only to marry a woman he loved, but a woman who loved him, and until she appeared on the scene he had not the slightest desire to amuse himself in the society of less estimable sirens. Music-halls bored him, and he had too much respect for his own intelligence to cloud it by drink. In field sports and out-door exercises he did not shine, but he liked them, and he heartily admired physical courage, strength, and endurance. Hilary Pritchard, the son of a Yorkshire “gentleman farmer” of very moderate means, had first attracted Lord Carthew’s attention by the ease with which he excelled in running, jumping, leaping, and “putting the stone.” Young Pritchard was as bad at study as he was admirable in athletics, and Lord Carthew was filled with enthusiasm by the evidences in him of just those qualities which he himself lacked. The farmer’s son’s disposition was also a happy foil to that of the Earl of Northborough’s heir. Hilary’s was in no sense an introspective, analytical, or self-torturing mind. He enjoyed life thoroughly in a simple and manly fashion, took people in general as he found them, was cautious in his friendships, shrewd in his judgments, strong and rooted in his rare loves and hates, and for the rest, a most cheery and optimistic companion, of untiring physical strength and unfailing good humor.

For five years the two young men had been great friends; but a break was soon to come between them. It had been arranged in the Pritchard family that in the autumn of the year Hilary was to proceed to Canada, there to start farming on his own account on some land left to him by a relative. Almost at the same time the question of Lord Carthew’s marriage had been prominently discussed in the Earl of Northborough’s family circle, and Claud was well aware that his parents hoped to see it take place within the year, if only a suitable bride could be found.

In view of these coming changes, the two college chums had resolved in this springtime of the year to carry out an oft-proposed plan for a journey in Kent, Surrey, and Hampshire, of about three weeks’ duration, on horseback, and unattended, carrying what luggage they required in their knapsacks on their saddles.

Hilary Pritchard on “Black Bess,” and Lord Carthew on a chestnut cob, had therefore started some ten days previously from a country seat in the Isle of Wight, belonging to the latter’s father. They had had lovely weather, and a very enjoyable tour, but so far no adventures worth mentioning, and the only point which had particularly struck Lord Carthew was what he considered as the unnecessary deference and snobbish attentions paid to him by hotel servants and chance strangers, solely because he was a son to Lord Northborough.

After riding on without speaking a short time, Claud suddenly turned in his saddle, and addressed his friend with twinkling eyes, and a look of great satisfaction.

“Look here, Hilary!” he exclaimed, “you won’t believe me on this subject of the disgusting sycophancy shown toward a title? You won’t admit that everybody treats me much better than they do you? Very well. I have a proposal to make. We have planned out about a fortnight longer of wandering. For the remainder of the time we will change rôles. You shall be Lord Carthew, and I will be Hilary Pritchard.”

“No; but I mean it seriously. In the first place, to convince you that I am right; then again for the humor of the thing. My third reason will sound so ridiculous that I can hardly put it into words. One of my favorite theories is that events happen to us, and opportunities come in our way, just when we are ripe for them. Sometimes a premonition warns us beforehand. Often enough we disregard it, and miss the opportunity. There’s more than you think in the old Jewish notion of being ‘warned in a dream.’ My grandmother was a Scotchwoman, you know, Lady Kate Douglas, and great at second sight. Before I could speak plainly, she had communicated some of her beliefs to me.”

“You’re just like the rest of these very clever fellows,” said his friend, indulgently. “When you’ve left off believing in everything else, you’re bound to have faith in some superstitious fad. Well, and what have you been dreaming about now?”

No one had ever yet succeeded in laughing Lord Carthew out of any idea, however erratic.

“I started this tour,” he said, quietly, “in search of adventures, you know, and so far we haven’t had any. But you must remember I am also in search of a wife, and I have a rooted conviction that if I find one to my liking it won’t be in the beaten track, but that I shall have to go out of my way to seek her out.”

“My dear Claud,” Hilary began, in a tone of some alarm, “does this mean that your radicalism is going to land you in the arms of a milkmaid? A rustic countess, with red elbows and a strong dialect?”

“I should never dream of marrying any woman without good breeding and refinement,” the other returned in quiet, decided tones. “But if she be a lady, it will be immaterial to me whether her parents are received at Court or not. Only she must be something unlike the girls I am used to meeting. My sisters, and my sisters’ friends, and girls like the Braithwaites, I cannot tell you how they bore me. I don’t quite know what I do want, but most certainly I don’t want them.”

“Granted. But what has all this to do with your mad proposal to exchange names with me? Of course, I shouldn’t consent. But what possible connection is there between your ideal ladylove, and your last crazy notion?”

“More than you think. If we should meet her—don’t laugh, anything is possible—if we should, as I say, during the next fortnight, happen to light upon just the woman I am waiting for, I am eccentric enough to wish to stand before her on my own poor merits, with my plain face, and insignificant appearance, my bad temper, and all the rest of it—just Mr. Pritchard, going out to Canada to make his fortune in the autumn. Then I should endeavor to gain her interest, and in time her affection.”

“What an extraordinary chap you are for talking nonsense seriously! One would think you expected your ideal young woman to drop from the clouds at the present moment.”

“Perhaps I do. Did I ever tell you of my visit to Kyro, the fashionable fate-reader, in Bond Street, last Christmas?”

“You don’t mean to say, Carthew, that you are going to take on palmistry?”

“I had an hour to fill in before meeting my father,” Lord Carthew continued, quite unmoved by his companion’s raillery, “and as it was too cold to study the shops, and there were no picture-galleries worth seeing open, I dropped into Mlle. Kyro’s. You know what a success she made of it until the police, tired of running in old women for getting sixpences out of servant girls, shut up her entertainment. Well, she was a very charming woman, and didn’t go in for any ‘fee, faw, fum,’ at all. She studied my face and my hands, and after some very happy guessing at what had already happened to me, she proceeded to foretell that in the spring of this year I should meet unexpectedly, while on a journey, a lady with whom I should fall madly in love. Meeting her would, so she declared, alter the whole course of my life. Furthermore, I should marry, and go through a whole sea of trouble, and as far as she would tell me, even worse misfortunes were in store. Kyro, however, with tears in her eyes—very pretty eyes, by the way—begged me to be the arbiter of my own fate. All these troubles could be avoided, so she assured me, if I would be guided by reason and not by passion. I thanked her for her good advice; she gave me a cup of tea and I left the fee on the table, and there is the end of it—or perhaps, the beginning.”

“You are not going to tell me,” exclaimed Hilary, “that a man of your intellectual attainments attaches the slightest importance to such utter nonsense as professional fortune-telling? I shall begin to believe study has turned your brain.”

“Just as you like,” said Lord Carthew, shrugging his shoulders with sudden indifference. “But to return to our former subject, grant me this favor, Hilary. It will certainly be our last outing together for a long time, possibly forever. You are going to settle out there, you will marry——”

“Not exactly,” broke in Hilary, with hearty emphasis. “Marriage isn’t part of my programme, by any means. I’ve got to make my way and to make money, and I don’t want a burden around my neck to start with.”

“Anyhow, our ways will widen apart. It will do you no harm to lend me your name for a few days. I will solemnly vow not to bring it into discredit, and if the trick be found out, it will only be considered as another freak of ‘mad Carthew,’ as they call me at Oxford.”

“I don’t care to go masquerading about the country in borrowed plumes——”

“Still, you must, just for a day or two, until I have made you own I was in the right, about the snobbishness and all that. How can it affect you? We shall probably only meet innkeepers, chance visitors, waiters, and hostlers, and you are just leaving England and not in the least likely to see any of them again.”

He was so persistent in his arguments that Hilary at length agreed, for peace and quiet, to fall in with his views, at least tacitly.

“But you must do all the lying,” he stipulated. “I lie with the most confounded clumsiness. Besides, I don’t like it. I’ll humor your whim so far as to call you Claud only and not Carthew, and to answer to my own name. And on your head be all the complications which may arise from your silly freak.”

The time had passed swiftly by in talk, and the shadows had grown longer in the lanes, where the air was sweet with budding hawthorn, and birds twittered in the hedges. For the past hour their way had led them alongside of a very spacious and thickly-wooded park, and at this point Lord Carthew, curious as to its ownership, questioned a passing field laborer, who looked at him in surprise.

“That’s the Chase, sir, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s place,” he said, with evident compassion for the inquirer’s ignorance as he passed on.

“Cranstoun?” Lord Carthew repeated the name meditatively. “He’s a Baronet, to be sure, and has a capital place, Cranstoun Hall, near Balmoral. Splendid shooting. He’s a distant connection of ours through his wife, who was Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark. She was my grandmother’s niece; consequently, she is some relation to me, but what I can scarcely define.”

“Not exactly. I know other members of the family. The type is unmistakable. Long, lean, fair, with watery blue eyes, sandy hair, high noses, and the most extraordinary amount of pride and narrowness. I wish Sir Philip Cranstoun joy of his bargain.”

“No. But I’ve heard about him from men who have shot at his Scotch place. Hard as nails and proud as Lucifer, that is the character his guests give him. He has some children, I believe, but I don’t know how many. They must be a most unpleasant lot, if there’s anything in heredity. For myself, I can’t imagine a more disagreeable blend than a Cranstoun and a Douglas.”

They had ridden many miles since lunch, and by six o’clock, when they arrived at a little wayside inn, the Cranstoun Arms, they were both hungry enough to be glad of the simple fare provided. The landlord had not been settled there for more than three years. He was a cheerful and garrulous person, and quite ready to chat about Sir Philip, whom, however, he had only seen on two occasions. As to Lady Cranstoun and the young lady, the former was an invalid, and never drove about except in a closed carriage accompanied by her daughter, and the landlord could not personally express an opinion concerning them.

Concerning Sir Philip’s hard, stern character he had much to impart. The Baronet was especially renowned for his rancor against gypsies. If any one of that nomadic tribe was found trespassing upon his land, he would invariably contrive to have them accused of poaching or thieving.

“Sir Philip, he’d go five miles to hang a gypsy, they say about here. It’s wonderful how he do hate them. There’s a story that some twenty odd years ago one of ’em cursed him in the market-place, nigh the court-house. Folks say a gypsy’s curse sticks. But lor’! what won’t people say?”

CHAPTER II.
STELLA.

By half-past six Lord Carthew and Hilary, having finished their improvised meal, strolled down the country road together, smoking, glad to stretch their legs after being so long in the saddle.

The former especially was in high glee because of mine host’s deferential manner toward Hilary when he was told by Claud that his name was Lord Carthew.

“Until that moment, as you saw,” he exclaimed, “the eggs and bacon and cold beef were supposed to be quite good enough for us. But as soon as the good man found that you had what cockneys call ‘a handle to your name,’ he promptly started profuse and tiresome apologies. It’s such a relief to have that sort of rubbish lavished on you instead of on me.”

One great reason for the warm affection cherished by “mad Lord Carthew” for his friend was Hilary’s utter absence of either arrogance or toadyism. The sturdy Yorkshire independence of young Pritchard never degenerated into the roughness which sometimes characterizes Northerners. He was proud of his family in his way. The Pritchards had farmed their own land for over two hundred and fifty years, and their present homestead had been built in the days of Elizabeth. Lord Carthew had had to make the first advances toward friendship, but once he had succeeded in winning Hilary’s respect and liking, the latter was too sensible to withdraw proudly from his companionship because he was not his equal in social position.

“You worry about things, trifles as it seems to me, in such an extraordinary way,” he said. “Now this evening, what can be pleasanter than this scene, the little wood by the roadside, where every tree is budding into leaf, the primroses in yellow patches among the ground ivy, and that fresh, delicious smell of spring in the air? I’m thankful I was sent away from home to Harrow and Oxford, and an accountant’s office in London. I suppose if I’d never left the country I should never have seen any beauty in it.”

“You would have felt it, but would have been unable to put it into words,” returned his friend. “Let’s explore this wood a bit, and see where it leads to.”

They struck in over the moss under the young trees. Straight ahead of them, as they pushed their way through the branches, they saw a high, precipitous bank, crowned by a low stone wall, and beyond more trees.

“That will be Sir Philip Cranstoun’s place again, I suppose,” observed the Viscount. “He’s got a good bit of land enclosed about here.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when both men heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs trampling over the dry leaves and young twigs behind them. Pressing a little forward, they came to a point where a passage seemed to have been made through the trees, not much more than four feet wide. Standing within the shadow of the woods so that their figures were hidden, both young men turned their gaze in the direction of the horse’s galloping feet, and through an opening in the trees both saw at the same moment a young girl, mounted on a beautiful little black thoroughbred, flying towards them.

She was making straight for the bank. Her small, half-childish face was pale, her mouth fast shut, while her great dark eyes shone with excitement. Under her soft felt hat her dark hair, tossed by the wind, fluttered in soft ringlets round her face, rebellious of the hairpins which held it in check in a coil at the back of her head. In figure she was very slender and youthful looking, and her plain dark green habit emphasized her lack of superfluous curves. Even though she passed so quickly, both the two friends received the same powerful impression of excitement, intensity, and enjoyment stamped upon her features.

The same exclamation was on the lips of both. At the foot of the bank rider and steed paused. The girl stooped over her horse’s neck, and murmured something in caressing tones. Then she lifted the reins, the little thoroughbred ran up the bank like a cat, lifted his forefeet, and disappeared with his rider over the wall.

Just an interchange of these remarks, and then Claud and Hilary instinctively made their way to the bank, and slowly and laboriously ascended its steep sides. The stone wall was about five feet high, and over the other side the ground shelved again in an awkward dip before what seemed the fringe of a dense wood.

Hilary paused by the wall, but found that Claud had already begun to climb it by means of the uneven stones.

“We can’t go any farther,” said the Yorkshireman, quietly; “this is private property.”

“What does that matter? We are out for adventures. I never saw any one with a seat like that child’s, did you?”

“She rides well, certainly,” Hilary returned, deliberately; “but she isn’t a child.”

A few scrambling steps, a slide, and a roll, brought them to the base of the declivity, and within the precincts of Cranstoun Chase enclosure. The identity of the girl had not suggested itself to either of them; but simultaneously within their hearts the sight of her had aroused a strange feeling of interest and excitement. About that small, pale face, shining dark eyes and lithe, girlish form, there clung a fascination which both men felt powerless to resist. And although he had not yet had time to realize it, Lord Carthew, for his part, had fallen in love at first sight with the beauty and the daring of the thoroughbred’s rider.

Dusk was gathering about them; yet they pressed on, both filled with the overmastering desire to catch another glimpse of that charming vision. After forcing their way in silence through the thick undergrowth, they came upon a wide, grassy avenue ploughed by the recent tramp of horses’ feet. As they emerged from among the trees again, upon their ears came the sound of a horse’s flying feet tearing up the turf. A good way off yet they could see her, and see, too, the antics of the small, black horse, beside himself with excitement, rearing, plunging, and throwing up his heels in a way which would have unseated any but a clever and experienced rider.

Suddenly the thoroughbred paused, raised his head, sniffing the air, and then started off at a mad pace along the turf avenue. It seemed patent to the two spectators that he was running away with his daring rider, the more so as a little feminine shriek reached their ears.

Clearly it was their duty to stop him. The girl would most certainly break her neck if thrown at that rate of progress. Their plans were formed after a second’s deliberation. As the horse neared them, coming like the wind, with clods of earth torn up by his heels flying in the rear, Lord Carthew sprang into the open, waving the animal back, and in the moment’s pause of alarm, Hilary dashed forward and seized the reins, hanging on to them with all his weight.

Snorting, and quivering in every limb, the horse at length came to a standstill, and looked with wide-open, bloodshot eyes at his captor. He for his part had his gaze fixed upon the rider.

For a moment she stared down at his face, which was not so very far below her own, without speaking. Her great clear eyes were distended, like those of her horse, and in the twilight her face seemed to wear an unearthly pallor. His hand was still upon her bridle. She withdrew her eyes from his, and asked, petulantly:

“No one ought to ride at such a pace as that,” he said, coolly, still with his brown eyes fixed upon hers. “It is dangerous.”

“Not to me. And who are you, and what right have you to lecture me? Take your hand off my bridle, and let me go.”

As she spoke she gave a sharp cut with her whip on her horse’s shoulder. The animal reared and plunged, and simultaneously the clear, sharp “ping” of a shot rang through the silent woods.

Hilary’s hand dropped from the bridle, and a short exclamation of pain escaped his lips as his arm dropped by his side. Through the sleeve of his shooting-coat near the shoulder the blood oozed out, and began rapidly pouring down his arm. Lord Carthew sprang to his assistance.

“I am shot,” Hilary said. “It serves me right for interfering with a woman. Carthew, let’s get out of this.”

The girl, whose horse had dashed on ahead as soon as Hilary’s restraining hand was withdrawn, returned now, and uttered a little cry of horror as she saw that Hilary was wounded.

“Some one in the woods over there shot him in the shoulder as he was holding your horse,” returned Lord Carthew. “I must get him to the nearest inn as soon as possible.”

“No,” she exclaimed, impulsively. “Look how the blood is pouring from his shoulder! It is all my fault. We have a doctor staying in the house. Your friend must be taken home.”

Even in the hurry of the moment and the anxiety he felt on his friend’s account, for Hilary was very pale and evidently in pain, Lord Carthew could hardly refrain from a look of surprise at the girl’s statement. She was so utterly unlike his ideal of what “the product of a union between a Douglas and a Cranstoun” would be. No “long, limp, watery-eyed fairness” was here, but a small face, eloquent in its every line, a sensitive white skin, mobile red lips whose expression changed constantly, and eyes more wonderful even by this imperfect light than any he had ever seen, eyes strangely luminous, dilated pupils, and a border to the iris of so dark a blue that it seemed almost black. He could not have said at that moment whether she was adorably beautiful or only supremely interesting. She had captured and chained his imagination, and her every movement seemed to him the perfection of grace. Without any assistance she sprang off her horse, and taking his bridle, approached Hilary timidly.

“If you feel faint,” she said, “will you not mount my horse, and let me lead him to the house? Indeed, I don’t think you can walk. And may I try to bind your shoulder?”

Her voice was very sweet, and her gentle, even humble manner of speaking delighted Claud. He was astonished to hear his friend answer so coldly:

“I require no assistance, thank you, Miss Cranstoun. I am only sorry I spoiled your ride. Claud, we must get back to the inn as soon as possible.”

With that he raised his hat with his left hand, and turning his back on the lady, began to make his way through the trees in the direction whence they had come.

“Go after him! Go after him!” the girl whispered to Lord Carthew, clasping her small hands impulsively, while tears sprang to her eyes. “He is not fit to be alone. I can see he is badly hurt.”

Her words were only too true. A few seconds later Claud, hurrying after his friend, found him leaning against a tree, with set, white face, and half-closed eyes.

“I’m all right,” Hilary muttered in response to Carthew’s anxious inquiry. “Let’s—get—on.”

His voice sounded faint and muffled. Under the trees, in the waning light, it was impossible to see his face, but Claud realized that he was in great pain.

Here was a predicament indeed! Hilary weighed nearly fourteen stone. A space of tangled underwood, a bank, a wall, a steep declivity, another wood, and a walk of half a mile, separated the young men from the nearest inn. Even could they contrive to reach it, one wounded and half-insensible man and his slenderly-built companion, the accommodation would be of the poorest, and they were several miles from the nearest town, that of Grayling. Miss Cranstoun had offered the hospitality of her home, but Hilary had refused it, and Claud knew him to be extremely obstinate. Clearly he could not remain where he was, trespassing in the grounds of the Chase, with the night fast approaching, and Lord Carthew tried to rouse him.

“Hilary, old boy,” he said, “remember where we are, and what a distance we have to go. Won’t it be better to accept Miss Cranstoun’s offer and go to her house, to get your wound dressed by the doctor there?”

“I wish I’d let the little vixen break her neck!” he remarked, viciously. “And I certainly am not going to accept the hospitality of a man who takes snapshots at any stranger who is fool enough to try to oblige his daughter.”

There was a sound of quick footsteps over the dead leaves and twigs. Miss Cranstoun had joined them in time to overhear Hilary’s last words. It was too dark to see her face, but her tone was courteous, if cold.

“It was not my father who fired that shot,” she said, quietly, “but one of the keepers. Stephen!” she called, authoritatively, to some one behind her. “This is the gentleman whom you wounded by your stupid mistake.”

The squarely built figure of a young, black-bearded man, in the dress of a gamekeeper and carrying a gun, appeared in attendance on her.

“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” he said, in a dogged manner, without looking at them, “but in the half light I thought it was a tramp worrying the young mistress, and so I fired my gun off to frighten him. I hadn’t any thought to hit any one.”

“Your confounded carelessness may have very serious results,” said Lord Carthew. “My friend is half-unconscious now from loss of blood. You must help me to get him out of this wood, and to bind up his shoulder roughly until we can get a doctor for him.”

Hilary muttered an impatient protest as the gamekeeper, in obedience to a few hurried words of command from Miss Cranstoun, assisted Hilary back to the spot where they had left the horse, with his bridle fastened to a tree. The young Yorkshireman’s coat was already saturated with blood, and Miss Cranstoun stood by, silent and very white, while Lord Carthew and her father’s servant drew off the wounded man’s coat, and made with their handkerchiefs a temporary bandage for the injured shoulder.

“He must come to the house at once,” burst from her lips at last. “You can see quite well he can hardly walk. Stephen, alter the saddle, and help him on to Zephyr.”

“I can very well walk, Miss Cranstoun. There is not the slightest need for all this fuss and trouble,” said Hilary, still with the same coldness he had before shown in his manner towards her.

“Nonsense, man! Miss Cranstoun is perfectly right, and we are very much obliged to her. Now, help us all you can in getting on this horse, for lifting you is no light matter, I can tell you.”

A feeling of growing faintness did more than his friend’s injunctions in inducing Hilary to comply. Zephyr snorted and fidgeted. The difference between seven stone twelve and thirteen stone twelve was an appreciable one; but Stephen’s strong hand was on the bridle, and Zephyr’s mistress walked alongside, patting and caressing the animal, and reducing his nervous excitement into comparative quiet by the magic of her touch.

Lord Carthew followed in silence until, the short cut between the trees becoming narrow, Miss Cranstoun stepped back, and he found himself beside her.

It had grown too dark for him to see more than the outline of her slight figure and delicate profile as she walked behind the horse, lifting her riding-habit from the ground with the hand in which she carried her workmanlike-looking hunting-crop.

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am about this accident,” she said, addressing Lord Carthew suddenly. “I am sure your friend meant to be kind. But I thought there was no one about, and I screamed in that silly way from sheer enjoyment. It isn’t riding that I care for, but flying. And I did not guess that any one would be in the woods so late, so I was just having a gallop before dinner. I have never been thrown in my life. I am never so happy or so comfortable as when I am on horseback, and unless Zephyr is going as fast as he can, neither he nor I enjoy ourselves. But I can understand that to strangers it might look dangerous. And I am dreadfully sorry about the accident to your friend. Will you tell me his name?”

In this young girl’s whole manner there was something so simple, innocent, and frank that Claud was more than ever enchanted with her. That feeling of fate which had haunted him all through his recent tour was upon him now. Here were all the conditions of Kyro’s prophecy fulfilled. The lady whom he was to meet on a journey, and with whom he was to fall madly in love, was walking by his side, and speaking to him in a voice which went straight to his heart, awakening hitherto unknown chords of sweetness there. All the romance, the sentiment, and the poetry, dormant in the nature of this singular young man, started into life at the proximity of this charming creature, at once so daring as a rider, so maidenly and gentle as a woman. Here was an opportunity of applying his test. He remembered it, and said unhesitatingly, in answer to Miss Cranstoun’s question:

It must have been fancy, he told himself, but her ejaculation seemed to express disappointment; and he noticed that she did not, when they struck into a wider path, walk as before by the side of the horse, but remained in the rear, much to his own secret satisfaction.

“I am afraid we shall be disturbing your parents,” he said, after a few moments’ silence.

“My father is in London,” she answered; “and mamma is an invalid. Lately she has been more delicate than usual, and an old friend and doctor of hers is happily staying with us, Dr. Morland Graham. I hope he will be able to set your friend right again. I shall never forgive myself if the wound proves to be a serious one.”

“I can’t see where you are to blame. It was my stupid blundering into private property in the course of an evening stroll with my friend that was the origin of the mischief, and our officious interference during your ride. But your man was certainly too free with his powder and shot. Have you had him in your service long?”

“Four or five years. He is very clever with dogs and horses. My father has a special dislike against tramps, and Stephen, in his over-zeal just now, was only obeying orders. The men are all told to frighten away intruders from the grounds by any means in their power.”

“Still it’s rather drastic to shoot any chance stranger,” he suggested; “especially as I have heard that the Chase is a very interesting old historical mansion, and likely to attract antiquarians.”

“People say that,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But I can never see anything to admire in it myself. It is called mediæval, which makes me feel sorry for the Middle Ages.”

“You have the most wonderful legends in your family—have you not?—connected with your motto, ‘Cranstoun, Remember!’ I am greatly interested in antiquarian researches, and my family—I mean Lord Carthew’s family—being connected by marriage with your mother’s, has made the hunting out of these tales of interest to me.”

“Is Lord Carthew related to my mother?” she asked, with interest. “She will be very glad to welcome him and you also. You have not told me your name?”

“Oh! it is so entirely undistinguished as to be hardly worth mentioning. Claud Pritchard, farmer, from Yorkshire, on a short and last tour with my old college friend before leaving England to try and make my fortune in Canada.”

“Indeed!” she said. “You don’t look in the least like a farmer. But here is the Chase.”

The great, gloomy pile stood before them, occupying a considerable space of land, but hemmed in so closely with trees that its full dimensions were somewhat lost on the spectator. Lights burned here and there in the windows, but the whole impression given by the ivy-hung, gray stone building was one of prison-like silence and solitude.

Stephen Lee’s sturdy ringing of the deep-toned bell brought a man servant in sombre livery to the door, who, after exchanging a few words with the young gamekeeper, descended the broad, shallow steps between the grim-visaged stone wolves that guarded the entrance, and offered to assist Hilary into the house. Miss Cranstoun meanwhile had disappeared into the house. As Lord Carthew and his friend entered it, she returned to greet them on the threshold, accompanied by a portly, gray-haired man of between fifty and sixty, to whom she was rapidly explaining the situation.

The great bare hall, with its timbered roof, and four motionless figures in full armor ranged between the worn and faded tapestry on the walls, surmounted by trophies of arms and implements of the chase, which glittered as the firelight played on them, struck Lord Carthew as a perfectly fitting background for Miss Cranstoun’s slender figure and the strange ethereal beauty of her face. Amid petty or conspicuously modern surroundings she would have seemed, so he told himself, wholly out of place.

Other impressions crowded upon him. For one thing, the servants all looked bewildered and alarmed, and even in the fashionable London doctor’s manner there was a touch of constraint, as though he was not quite certain of his ground. As for Hilary the hall and every one in it seemed rocking round him. The pain in his shoulder was acute, and the action of riding had caused the blood to burst through the temporary bandages over the severe gunshot wound which Stephen Lee’s weapon had inflicted. He had hardly heard what was being said about him as they led him to a room, the library, as he afterwards learned, and laid him on a sofa, at which point he very quietly fainted.

When he came to, he was lying on an old-fashioned four-poster bedstead in a great, ghost-like apartment, hung with tapestry—as he afterwards learned, a guest-chamber of the Chase. A woman was on her knees trying to persuade a fire to burn in a seldom-used chimney, and another servant, elderly and dark-complexioned, stood near his bedside, attending to the instructions of Dr. Morland Graham, while Lord Carthew watched him from the foot of the bed.

“You place the bandage so,” the doctor was saying, “and as soon as he recovers consciousness, give him a dose of this. Your friend has had a nasty accident, Mr. Pritchard, but a man of his superb physique will soon get over a trifle of this kind, provided that fever does not intervene. What a magnificently made young man Lord Carthew is, to be sure! Quite unlike his father the Earl. I was dining with Lord Northborough a few weeks ago. I suppose you will let him know of his son’s accident?”

“Hush, hush! my dear Lord Carthew! You really must not excite yourself. You are in very good hands indeed. I informed Lady Cranstoun that you must not be moved to-night, and she instantly insisted that you and Mr. Pritchard should be her guests until you have completely recovered. She is greatly distressed at your accident, I assure you. I must leave you now and join the ladies at dinner, which has been postponed for over an hour. You will soon be about again, believe me.”

“Poor fellow!” he murmured. “Loss of blood—consequent weakness. He is wandering in his mind.”

CHAPTER III.
A SIREN.

As soon as the doctor had left the room, Hilary endeavored to struggle into a sitting position, from which he was restrained by Margaret, who had been told off to nurse him.

“Do, pray, keep quiet, my lord; you will undo all the doctor’s work. Now, take your medicine and lie still, please.”

“I’ll take the medicine if you like, but on condition that you go away then, nurse, if you please, and leave me to talk to my friend here.”

“Don’t let him talk too much and excite himself,” was Margaret’s parting admonition to Lord Carthew as she left the room.

As soon as they were alone, Hilary plunged into his subject, regardless of his friend’s warning gesture. From where he lay on the bed, the wounded man could not see the kneeling figure of the servant over the fire on the farther side of the great, bare room.

“What is all this foolery about changing names with me?” he began. “It must be stopped at once. I won’t stay for five minutes in the house under false pretences.”

“I am afraid you won’t be able to do much more with that fire,” Lord Carthew observed, raising his voice as he addressed the servant, while he glanced meaningly at his friend.

“I am afraid not, sir,” returned the woman, civilly. A few moments later she left the room, and carefully applied her ear to the keyhole outside, from which position she was enabled now and then to overhear scraps of the conversation within.

“Now let us talk this matter out quietly and in as few words as possible,” Lord Carthew began, drawing a chair to his friend’s bedside. “What does it matter to you for twenty-four hours what they call you? You will probably never see any of these people again. I have introduced us both in one set of names to Miss Cranstoun, and she has passed us on under those names to the doctor and to her mother. It’s impossible to go back now. You had agreed to the arrangement which we started earlier in the day. There is no reason why we should not play our little comedy out just because an unlucky accident has intervened.”

“I utterly decline to be a party to such nonsense,” exclaimed Hilary, angrily, the blood rushing to his face. “It’s all very well for you. A man who assumes a rank lower than his own is at worst a romantic fool; but a commoner who tries to pass himself off as a lord is a paltry cad, and it’s a situation I won’t fill for a single moment.”

“You can’t alter things now, as I said before,” Lord Carthew urged. “When it comes out—I should say, if it comes out at any time that we have changed places—I shall own up that it was a foolish freak of mine, carried out in spite of your opposition. Now lie still and try to go to sleep, there’s a good fellow. I can’t eat a second dinner, and I’m certainly not in drawing-room trim. Still I want to see as much of my—or rather of your—relatives as I can while we’re here, so that unless there’s anything I can do for you——”

“There’s certainly something you can do,” roared the wounded man, “and that at once. You must contradict your former ridiculous statement, and explain our true positions instantly to Miss Cranstoun and her mother. Otherwise, I shall get out of bed and go downstairs and do it myself, in spite of all the doctors in England.”

Almost before he had finished speaking, Lord Carthew had left the room, so quickly indeed that he barely escaped stumbling over the kneeling form of the servant outside the door, who immediately affected to be occupied in straightening the mat. He was extremely sorry for Hilary’s accident, and most anxious to see him well out of it. But he was also already fathoms deep in love, and longing to feast his eyes upon Miss Cranstoun again; besides had not the doctor declared that Hilary would be all right provided that fever did not follow, and that he must not be allowed to excite himself by talking?

In the oak-panelled dining-room, Lord Carthew found three persons seated at dinner, and he was instantly struck by the utter absence of resemblance between Lady Cranstoun and the young girl whom he supposed to be her daughter. The former was just such a Douglas as he had described to Hilary; tall, sandy-haired, and limp, with a thin face, a high nose and colorless blue-gray eyes under white lashes, a perfectly well-bred and entirely uninteresting personage of about eight-and-forty years of age, in gray silk, shrouded by a voluminous white knitted shawl of Shetland wool.

She gave Lord Carthew a long, nerveless, white hand in greeting, and inquired after his friend, expressing her regret at the accident. Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. Her gown was cut low about the throat, and the sleeves were little more than elbow length, showing off the fairness and purity of her skin and the delicacy of her slim wrists. A turquoise brooch was her only ornament, and seemed to carry out in color the intense blue of her eyes between the black pupils and the nearly purple borders to the iris. Her whole appearance was poetic and interesting in a high degree, but the young viscount remarked that her manner had lost something of its naïve frankness, and had become more sedate and restrained than before.

“I am the more interested in Lord Carthew,” Lady Cranstoun was saying, “because we are connections. Lord Northborough’s mother was a Douglas, and my aunt.”

She spoke in slow, unmusical tones, with a slight Scotch accent. Lord Carthew rightly judged that, being a Douglas, she would have an exaggerated pride of birth, which was indeed the poor lady’s chief weakness. A single question from him sufficed to start her on her favorite subject of the numerous marriages and relationships of her father, the Duke of Lanark’s, family. As her appetite was poor, and no one could be rude enough to interrupt her at her own table, she was soon deep in the intricacies of the Douglas ancestry and Douglas marriages, while Dr. Graham set himself steadily to enjoy the good fare before him, and Miss Cranstoun kept her eyes steadily fixed on her plate, her cheeks flushed, and her dark eyebrows contracted with annoyance.

The dinner was good, the wines were few but excellent, and the greater part of the table service was in solid old silver, adorned with the motto “Cranstoun, Remember,” and the mailed hand grasping a wolf’s head, which was the family device. Opposite Lord Carthew, as he sat at table, there hung a portrait of a man in armor, whose sinister light eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Look which way he would, from Stella Cranstoun’s beautiful face to the doctor’s plump, bland visage, or Lady Cranstoun’s washed-out countenance, Lord Carthew found his gaze fascinated and held by the pale, square, inscrutable face of the man in armor, about whose narrow, close-shut lips a bitter smile seemed to be playing.

“That is a wonderful picture opposite, Lady Cranstoun,” he felt compelled to say at last. “By this light and at this distance I can hardly distinguish whether it is really old, or only painted in the old manner.”

His hostess did not at once answer him, and he noted that she grew a shade or two paler, and that a frightened, furtive look came into her eyes. Miss Cranstoun ceased speaking to the doctor, and looked inquiringly toward her.

“It is a portrait of my father,” Stella added, with marked, even, as it seemed, defiant distinctness.

“An excellent piece of work, is it not?” Dr. Graham remarked, breaking in upon the silence which followed Miss Cranstoun’s statement. “The tone really reminds me of a Murillo—so dignified, and sombre, and mellow. Quite a harmony in gray, as we should call it in our latter-day studio slang. The work attracted considerable attention when it was hung in the Royal Academy five years ago. You see Sir Philip is represented in a suit of armor worn by a member of his own family at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In his hand he holds a sword with lowered point, and he stands as though waiting for an enemy to attack him. The manipulation of the armor is most dexterously rendered, the effect of a low light upon it from the sky being reproduced admirably, really admirably. Herkomer has never done anything better.”

Involuntarily, as the doctor rambled on in his deep mellifluous tones, Lord Carthew’s eyes left Sir Philip’s portrait, and fixed themselves upon the face of his daughter. For one brief moment he caught upon her lovely features a cold, mocking expression almost identical with that which distinguished her father’s; but almost before he had had time to feel shocked and astonished thereby, Stella had turned to the doctor, and was asking him if he knew anything of the pictures which would attract the most attention at the forthcoming Academy exhibition, and listening with apparent interest to his replies.

In answer to Claud’s inquiry whether she went often to London to see the pictures, Miss Cranstoun answered that she had only been in London three or four times in her life.

“I read all about pictures and music in the ladies’ papers,” she said. “Mamma is so delicate, the journey to London tires her. But next month I am to be presented by my grandmamma, the Duchess of Lanark, and then, I suppose, I shall be taken to see everything.”

“You must be looking forward to your début, I imagine?” said Lord Carthew.

“Indeed I shall, my dear child,” Lady Cranstoun returned, with a look toward the young girl of so much kindness and affection that in Claud’s eyes it redeemed her plainness.

After the dessert had been served on heavy silver salvers, Lady Cranstoun rose, and followed by her daughter, glided quietly from the room. A pause attended their exit. Then Lord Carthew observed suddenly:

“If that portrait really resembles my absent host, he must be a man of very singular and striking appearance.”

“He is indeed,” returned Dr. Graham, with emphasis. “Shall we adjourn to the smoking-room? The tapestry in this room is liable to be injured by smoke.”

The smoking-room was the most genuinely comfortable room in the house which Claud had yet seen. Presumably Sir Philip, realizing that mediæval furniture did not blend with a proper enjoyment of Sir Walter Raleigh’s weed, had in this one instance adopted wholly modern and fashionable methods of decoration. The books which filled a case against the wall were nearly all French novels, the lounges were the perfection of comfort, and everything, from the shaded lamp to the liqueur stand, was from a London West-end firm.

As Dr. Graham closed the door upon them Lord Carthew unconsciously heaved a sigh of relief. He himself had been reared in a spacious ancestral home, and had spent his boyhood between Northborough Castle in the Isle of Wight, Belgrave Square in London, and the comfortable country seat which his father had built himself in Norfolk. But Lord Northborough was both a man of the world and a patron of the arts, while Claud’s American mother seized with avidity upon every new device for beautifying her homes. The solemn bareness of the Chase was wholly new to him, and being keenly sensitive, Lord Carthew was, moreover, oppressed by an indefinable sentiment in the air of chilly gloom and repression, which Lady Cranstoun’s dejected, nervous manners, and the compressed lips of her beautiful daughter, helped to accentuate.

“Now tell me, Dr. Graham,” he began, stretching his feet toward the pleasant warmth of the wood fire, “what manner of man is this Sir Philip Cranstoun? I have heard a good deal about him, and I am rather anxious to meet him.”

Dr. Graham stirred the fire, cleared his throat, and glanced somewhat apprehensively round the room.

“Sir Philip Cranstoun,” he began, “is a man of five or six and forty, in the prime of life, in fact, a stanch Conservative and belonging to one of the oldest families in England.”

“Yes, I know all about that. But what I mean is—what is he like in his own home, toward his family, for instance, and his servants?”

“Sir Philip,” returned the wary doctor, “is a good deal away, and Lady Cranstoun’s health does not permit her to accompany him to Scotland, or even to London. Miss Cranstoun, who is a most devoted daughter, invariably remains by her mother’s side, and has, I believe, never been out of England. But she has had every advantage of education; masters and mistresses have attended at the Chase ever since she was five years old, when I first made her acquaintance, to instruct her in English, French, German, Italian and Latin, music, singing, painting, dancing, and calisthenics; she is also an admirable horsewoman.”

“The last I know from personal observation,” returned Lord Carthew. “But we were speaking of her father. Is he not proud of such a lovely and accomplished daughter?”

The doctor glanced at him slyly out of the corners of his worldly, good-natured eyes.

“I presume, Mr. Pritchard,” he said, “that you are acquainted with some details of the daily life here and do not need any enlightenment from me?”

“Not at all,” Lord Carthew answered, frankly. “But I am of an observing disposition, and I have already formed an impression that every one in this house is cowed and dominated by its master, his daughter included.”

“You are perfectly right,” the doctor assented, after a short pause. “Miss Cranstoun is a charming girl; I like and admire her greatly. But it is useless to deny the friction which occasionally results from her father’s admonitions. Sir Philip is—er—well—he is not a popular man, and Miss Cranstoun, well-bred and affectionate as she most certainly is by nature, is not the kind of girl to endure being driven. She has a good deal of her father’s spirit, in short. Most certainly she does not get it from her mother, although when I knew Lady Gwendolen Douglas before her marriage, she was the handsomest and liveliest of the Duke of Lanark’s daughters. She has altered very greatly, very greatly indeed.”

Reading between the doctor’s words, Lord Carthew realized several things which the former left unsaid. For one, that Sir Philip was an intolerable tyrant and despot, who tried to grind the hearts of his amiable wife and lovely daughter under the iron heel of his will; for another, that between him and Stella Cranstoun an incessant struggle was waging; and for still another, that Dr. Morland Graham cordially disliked the baronet, although he was too politic to put his feelings into actual words.

“I very much hope,” Dr. Graham went on musingly, as he contemplated the glowing tip of his cigar, “that Miss Cranstoun will soon be happily married.”

“Dear me, no! Beyond her French and German masters, and the old vicar of Grayling, and myself, she has hardly had any acquaintance with the other sex. A more absolutely fancy-free young lady, I should say, never existed. But she has so much charm and individuality, as well as beauty, that when once she enters into social life in London, under the judicious guardianship of her grandmother, the Duchess of Lanark, there is not much doubt that suitors will not long be lacking. Although I understand that the Chase is in strict entail to the heirs male of the Cranstoun family, as well as the Scotch property, Sir Philip’s daughter will no doubt be some day possessed of a very comfortable little income, which in these extravagant, money-loving days,” added the doctor, smiling, as he took a cup of coffee which a servant brought into the room at that moment on a silver salver, “is a thing which is supposed to enhance any young lady’s attraction.”

Lord Carthew said nothing, and remained for a short time plunged in thought. Not only had he fallen in love at first sight, but his instinct had happily guided his affections to exactly the right object. In spite of his thin veneer of almost revolutionary theories, Lord Northborough’s heir was at heart a Tory and an aristocrat, and Sir Philip’s daughter was a thousand times the more desirable in his eyes because she was a Cranstoun on her father’s side, and granddaughter to the Duke of Lanark. Had he experienced the same overmastering feeling of instantaneous love for a lowly-born girl, he would certainly have regretted it, and would possibly have done his best to conquer it. But in this case no such self-restraint was necessary. If only he could gain her affection, above all in the homely guise of Mr. Pritchard, son to a Yorkshire yeoman, perfect married happiness awaited him.

Dr. Morland Graham, leaning back in his chair, smoking, and enjoying an after-dinner mood of benevolent calm, watched his companion with some amusement, and wondered for what freak Lord Northborough’s son and heir, bearing a strong resemblance to his father and sporting on his finger a signet-ring upon which his family crest was plainly discernible as he held his cigar to his lips, was wandering about the county under the alias of Pritchard. Dr. Morland Graham liked to be on good terms with his aristocratic patients; he liked to know their little secrets, and they, being only mortal, were usually ready enough to confide them to “that dear kind, sympathetic Dr. Graham.” He knew quite well that the Earl and his wife were extremely anxious to see their only son, the “mad viscount,” married and settled, and it occurred to the worthy doctor that this might be an excellent opportunity for ameliorating the lot of Stella Cranstoun, who, once under the protecting care of a husband of wealth and position, would be free forever from the petty tyranny of her absolutely detestable father.

Lord Carthew knew nothing of the doctor’s musings. One thought alone possessed him. To see Stella as soon as possible, to talk to her, to draw her out of her reserve and gradually get her to confide in him. As if divining his wishes, Dr. Graham suggested an adjournment to the drawing-room, and proposed to Lady Cranstoun, who was reclining on a sofa, a game of chess.

The drawing-room was extremely large, and furnished in a chilly, old-fashioned style. The faded carpet belonged to the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign and was covered by day with a drugget, for Sir Philip Cranstoun was economical to stinginess in the appointment of his household. The walls were painted in white and gold, the furniture was of old-fashioned shape, covered by day with chintz, and resplendent at night in amber satin. A grand piano and a harp seemed lost in the distant and ill-lighted recesses of the room, which curtained four long windows opening on to a stone terrace at the back of the house. Near a tall standard lamp Lady Cranstoun’s sofa was standing, and close by, on a cushion on the hearthrug, her slender arms clasping her knees, and her eyes fixed on the fire, Stella Cranstoun was seated, with the head of a handsome collie dog resting on her knee.

As the two gentlemen entered the room, she looked up quickly, but did not speak, and it was only after the doctor had suggested the game of chess that Miss Cranstoun inquired eagerly:

Lord Carthew flushed guiltily. In his desire to see Stella again he had forgotten his friend completely. But the doctor’s conscience was not so sensitive, and he answered, in his blandest professional tones, that Lord Carthew had been given a sedative before dinner, and that it was not advisable to disturb him at present.

“You haven’t been up then?” Stella murmured reproachfully to Claud, while Lady Cranstoun rang for the footman to remove her coffee-cup and to draw the chess-table up to her sofa.

He felt it was rather a lame excuse, the more so as he felt her dark eyes fixed almost indignantly upon his face.

“You see,” she said, lowering her gaze, and slightly blushing, “I feel that the accident was all my fault, and that is what makes me so anxious.”

“I will go at once, and let you know how he is,” he returned, and left the room for that purpose after she had rewarded him with a smile of gratitude.

Hilary was not asleep. He was tossing in bed, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Margaret, the nurse, was in the room, so he addressed his friend in an indignant torrent of broken French.

“What possesses you to let the servants suppose you and I have changed places?” he burst out, angrily. “I simply won’t stand their ‘my lording’ me much longer. I didn’t come here to be made a fool of.”

His noisy, excited manner was so unlike his usual easy-going and pleasant disposition that Lord Carthew, watching him, could not but conclude that he was feverish, especially as Hilary seemed desperately thirsty. After handing him some ice, which by the doctor’s orders had been placed by the bedside, Lord Carthew took a seat near, and tried to calm him, while Margaret discreetly left the room.

“Look here, Hilary,” he said, “I will confess the truth. I have fallen in love at last, and Kyro’s prediction is fulfilled. That is why I so particularly wish to remain Mr. Pritchard for a few hours longer.”

“It’s that crazy girl who took the jump, and whose obstinacy and foolhardiness brought me this nice little charge of gunshot in my shoulder, I suppose?” he said.

“Oh! spare me a lover’s rhapsodies, old chap. Under the circumstances, you can scarcely expect me to regard her as you do.”

“She is more sorry about the accident than I can possibly tell you, and blames herself entirely——”

“Oh, I dare say. Well, go back and make love to her by all means. What is that?”

The sweet notes of a pure soprano voice were wafted up to them from the drawing-room immediately below. Some one was singing the Lorelei to the accompaniment of harp.

Lord Carthew crossed to the door and held it open. Something wild and plaintive in the quality of Stella’s voice, for he knew well the singer could be none other than she, touched him deeply, and seemed to draw him like a magnet to her side. Holding the door open, he glanced at the bed whereon Hilary lay with closed eyes and frowning brows, as though asleep, an impression which he carried out further by remaining silent when Claud addressed him.

Feeling his conscience freed from responsibility, Lord Carthew returned to the drawing-room. Lady Cranstoun and the doctor were deep in their game of chess, and in the half light he could see Stella seated at the harp, across the strings of which her delicate hands were straying, while the last note of the old German volkslied lingered on her lips, a strangely poetic picture of beauty and harmony which Lord Carthew was destined to carry in his mind for all time.

CHAPTER IV.
ENEMIES.

“It will soothe him, I should say. Only a faint sound of it can be heard in his room. He seemed to fall asleep just as I left.”

“Did you tell him,” she asked, with flushed cheeks and lowered lashes, while her fingers strayed over the strings without striking them, “how very, very sorry I am for my thoughtless folly?”

“You are too hard upon yourself,” he said, taking a seat near her, and drinking in every detail of the charming picture before him, “and to ease your mind I will make a confession. My friend and I—or, at least, I can answer for myself—were prompted by impertinent curiosity when we entered your grounds. It was not by accident that we strayed into them, but of malice prepense. The fact is, we are both devoted to horseflesh, and as we rambled about, smoking, in a wood by the wayside, you flashed past us on your black horse, and took a jump which seemed almost impossible. In our admiration and delight, we forgot the rules which hold good with regard to our neighbor’s landmark, and scrambling up the bank and over the wall, and down the bank again, we forced our way through the trees and sighted you again. Your horse was rearing and plunging; by the half light at that distance it seemed as though he had got the bit well between his teeth, and was running away with you, and your scream strengthened that impression. Then came our unlucky interference, and its deplorable result.”

“Did you think that jump impossible?” she asked, turning wide-open eyes upon him. “Zephyr and I often take it. Zephyr can jump almost anything. He goes out of his way to find jumps, and he is never happier than when he finds something that looks difficult.”

“Aren’t your people afraid lest some accident should befall you when you ride about the park unattended?”

She looked at him in surprise as she spoke, and then in some confusion struck several chords lightly on the harp.

“My father is a great deal away,” she said, in a somewhat constrained tone; “and of course, I do not make mamma nervous by telling her the pranks Zephyr and I enjoy together.”

“Fond of it!” she repeated, slowly, while her face lit up with sudden enthusiasm; “I could not live without it. After a certain number of hours have passed in the house, my foot seems to tingle to be in the stirrup again, and my fingers burn to take hold of the reins. Whatever the weather it is the same; I want to be away and outside and in it! If I hear the wind wailing and sighing in the trees round the house, I long to feel it whirling round me, blowing sad thoughts away; and even when a thunderstorm is at its height, it seems to draw me like a magnet. I want to be part of the storm, drenched with the rain, wrapped round with the lightning, horse and I both stirred to the last touch of quivering excitement, driven along, with the thunder rumbling and crashing behind us! Then I feel alive and happy—so happy that I can rise in my saddle and scream like a child from sheer delight!”

In the low light where they sat, he could see the faint color come and go in her face as the eager words came softly from her parted lips. Her eyes shone out like sapphire stars and seemed to glow with some inner light. To him she was not a nineteenth century young English lady, but a princess from a fairy tale.

“What would you do,” he asked, half laughing and half tenderly, “if by some accident or illness you were kept a prisoner in the house?”

“I should die—if it were in this house,” she answered quietly, looking straight into his face for the first time. “I suppose to you, who are a stranger here, the Chase appears simply an interesting old historical mansion. To me it seems a prison, haunted by the spirits of all the women who have been unhappy here.”

“They were given to me as soon as I could read. Before I heard of Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty, I had gone through those horrible tales of treachery and murder, and tyranny. Cranstouns of mediæval times hardly ever died in their beds, and the lives of their ladies were records of martyrdom, except in those cases when they also had some spirit, and turned against their brutal lords. Pride of race, cruelty, cunning, and revengefulness—there you have the dominant notes in the characters and lives of my ancestors, qualities which to me are all equally hateful.”

“Yet if there is anything in heredity, you should be intensely proud of your family on both sides,” he said. “The Douglases are to the full as proud as any Cranstoun can be.”

“But mamma wears her pride with a difference,” she said, quickly. “It is more like the interest any one might take in some heirloom, not because it is something peculiar to herself, and raising her above all other people. It is impossible to imagine any one more gentle and kind than mamma. She suffers a deal, and bears it beautifully. Her heart constantly troubles her, yet she must be in terrible pain before she utters a complaint. I am not a bit like her, I am sorry to say,” she added, humbly. “I shall never have her gentleness, her patience and resignation. When I am angry, I hate—mamma is incapable of hatred. I don’t know how I should have lived at all but for her constant kindness.”

Tears suddenly gathered in Miss Cranstoun’s eyes. Hastily brushing them away, she turned to Lord Carthew with a sweet smile.

“I ought to apologize,” she said, “for my very bad manners in talking of myself and my private affairs to you when I have never met you before to-day. But somehow I hardly feel that you are a stranger.”

She spoke in all simplicity, but the most practised coquette could hardly have chosen words better calculated to heighten the feelings of love and admiration which filled the young man’s heart.

She should be painted just so for the Academy, he was telling himself, seated at her harp, with one little hand showing off the supple wrist, slim fingers, and rosy nails, as it strayed over the strings. But what painter could reproduce her charm, the purity of her eyes and lips, the girlish grace of her form, and especially that light shining round her dilated pupils? Would Millais understand her temperament, and do her justice? Hardly. Sargent might. Yes, it must be painted by Sargent, this picture of a young girl in simple white silk dinner-dress, playing a harp before a hazy background; and the name of the picture should be “Portrait of Viscountess Carthew.”

Meanwhile, he was telling her that so far from boring, her talk had interested him greatly.

“I am honored by what you say,” he said, “when you tell me I do not seem wholly a stranger to you. It is the more amiable of you to treat me with such gracious cordiality as I am not at all in your own sphere of life, but just what is now called a ‘gentleman farmer,’ and in the old days before the term gentleman was invented, was simply yeoman, a name quite good enough for me. Altogether, a poor, struggling, and undistinguished person, whose parents denied themselves every luxury to give him a college education, by which he had not the wits to profit; just capable of those simple and ineffective qualities of gratitude, affection, and loyalty, and capable of very little else, believe me.”

“Do you know,” she said, nodding confidentially towards him, “that I believe that is just the reason why I feel as if we were already friends? All my life I have had the value of birth and rank exaggerated to me. I have been taught to consider myself made of too fine a stuff to associate with any one in the neighborhood. I have never been allowed to play with other children, and when I was a baby child my nurses were constantly changed lest I should get too fond of any one so low and common as a nurse. I have been given the ‘Peerage,’ and the ‘County Families of England,’ and ‘Tales of Aristocratic Families,’ and ‘Legends of Ancestral Houses,’ and similar books, to amuse myself with ever since I could read; my German master was a decayed baron, and my French tutor the son of a marquis. I have always been forbidden to speak to the servants, except to give orders, and they also are very frequently changed. This is particularly so in the case of the lady’s maid who waits upon mamma and me; she never remains longer than a year, usually only a few months, just long enough to learn our ways and suit us. And do you know what the consequence of all this has been? As soon as I could be free from the presence of my nursery-governess—a very stiff person of over fifty, who could not forget she had once been in a duke’s family—I used to run away to my great, bare nursery, and dressing my dolls in rags, would pretend they were peasants, and hop-pickers, and beggars. And especially,” she added, her face lighting up with a mischievous gleam, “I loved making my dolls into poachers and tramps, and, best of all, gypsies. This was sheer naughtiness, I know, because Margaret had once told me that Sir Philip particularly detested gypsies, and that I was never on any account to mention them before him. I used to get up a little play in which a gypsy was unjustly accused of stealing and tried for it before my father, who was represented by a black-faced doll in a red coat. My father would try the gypsy and condemn him to be hanged, and then, just as the sentence was being carried out, a gallant young gentleman doll would come riding up on the shaft of an old wheelbarrow and cut him down. There was no game I enjoyed playing so much as that.”

Lord Carthew laughed with her, but was a good deal touched at the same time. The picture of the lonely child, snubbed and repressed and deprived of all healthy young companionship, secretly planning revolutionary dramas with her dolls, struck him as being equally original and pathetic. Stella Cranstoun’s utter dissimilarity from the young ladies of his acquaintance was a source of great delight to him. Her perfectly clear and distinct enunciation and sweet-toned voice came as a blessed relief after the fashionable high key and slipshod speech in vogue in London at that time, which had been aptly aped by the pretty Braithwaite girls. Stella’s somewhat old-fashioned method of speech, which was that of a well-educated girl who had heard little but read much, and her entire ignorance of slang and absence of self-consciousness, were equally charming to him, The one desire of fashionable women, as he knew well, is to speak, move, dress, and behave in precisely the same style as the known leaders of society. But Stella had no idea that it behooved her to mould herself on some one else’s model; she was consequently altogether modest, natural, and unaffected, and unlike any woman he had ever met before.

As to her strong natural sympathy with the poorer classes, the result, as he imagined, of the repressive system on which she had been reared, he himself affected and believed that he possessed the same quality. Theoretically, he looked upon a costermonger as a man and a brother, and failed to see the use of the House of Lords; practically, he regarded the lower orders as interesting curiosities, and strongly resented the admission of brewers into the peerage. Stella’s republican sympathies would impel her, no doubt, in the direction of soup-kitchens and schools when she became Lady Carthew, and soup-kitchens and schools were very desirable outlets for the generous instincts of a future countess. For under her gentle, graceful manner, it was impossible for any one unacquainted with her earliest history to detect an absolute hatred of aristocratic proclivities; in the granddaughter of a Duke her unconventional sentiments were piquant and interesting, and in no way suggestive of the fierce blood dormant in the veins of the daughter of a gypsy.

Stella herself had not the least suspicion of her Romany descent. Not a servant remaining at the Chase had seen the first Lady Cranstoun, or knew aught of her beyond a brief record in the local papers of her death, eighteen years ago, with the one exception of Margaret. And even Margaret knew very little. Only that on the thirteenth day of December, eighteen years ago, Dr. Ernest Netherbridge and two women had arrived at the Chase, immediately after a farmer’s cart had carried thither a certain bundle, from which feeble cries proceeded. For fully an hour the visitors were closeted with Sir Philip in his study, after which time they left in the carriage and were driven to Grayling railway station, where the two women entered a train for London. Three months later, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Sir Philip Cranstoun was married to the Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark, a woman of no particular beauty and rather over thirty years of age. The following Christmas the second Lady Cranstoun gave birth to a girl, a weakly creature who, after a few days of wailing remonstrance, faded out of this life altogether. The mind of Lady Cranstoun, never of the strongest order, gave way under the strain; in the care of nurses she was taken by her husband to London, whence she returned in a few months’ time with a lovely dark-haired and blue-eyed baby girl whom she persisted in regarding as her own, in which belief was upheld by her husband, and by all those about her.

Thus the infant child of Clare Carewe the gypsy made her second entry into the house of her ancestors, having been adopted in order to save her stepmother’s wandering wits. For years Sir Philip, after his wife’s complete recovery, hoped against hope that she might yet bring him an heir; but fate was against him, and the gypsy’s child was the only descendant he might now hope to possess.

Against this daughter, lovely and intelligent as she proved herself to be, the Lord of Cranstoun Chase cherished a deep-rooted and immovable dislike, which showed itself in every glance that he directed toward her. The resemblance which she undoubtedly bore to the woman who had defied him and fled from him intensified this feeling a hundredfold, and the girl’s proud if silent rebellion against his harshness and unkindness was a perpetual reminder of the untamable spirit which she had inherited from her Romany ancestors.

He was morbidly fearful, too, lest that bad strain, as he considered it, should some day break out in her, and prompt her to a course of conduct which might bring discredit upon his name. All that could be done in the way of conventional training, carefully supervised reading, and a closely watched and guarded existence, he had resorted to in her training. So far he could complain of nothing in Stella’s conduct, except indeed, the scornful curl of her lip and flashing of her dark eyes when he indulged in any fresh act of petty domestic tyranny. All that man could do to wipe out the disgraceful mistake of his first marriage he had already done. Not only had he chosen for second wife a duke’s daughter and a Douglas, but he had brought up his daughter Stella, the descendant of a long line of wild gypsy Carewes, in the belief that she also was a Douglas by descent, and that the Duke of Lanark’s daughter was her mother.

The excellent understanding which prevailed between Lady Cranstoun and her supposed daughter, so far from pleasing, annoyed and irritated him. The feeling he inspired in his wife was one of absolute terror. To a woman of Lady Cranstoun’s weak and delicate health, the very sound of her husband’s voice was painful. In his presence she was conscious of a guilty and apologetic feeling. He had wished for an heir to keep the estates among his children, and she had failed to give him one; he had never loved her, and now he wished her dead. Stella’s high spirit and determined will seemed a shield between her and her husband’s displeasure, and the two ladies formed a party in the house tacitly opposed to him, although forced to a show of obedience and resignation.

As to the servants at the Chase, there were three women besides Margaret and the lady’s maid, a butler and two footmen. Not one, except Margaret, had been in the house more than two years, and Margaret, the most discreet and silent of women, was retained chiefly because she was able to explain their business to the newcomers, and because of her notable expertness with her needle and as a sick-nurse. But in a household staff of eight, Sir Philip had seldom much difficulty in filling one post, that of spy. A quiet-mannered housemaid named Dakin, noiseless and freckled, and white about the eyelashes, was at present entrusted with the task of acquainting her master, by letter, telegram, or word of mouth, concerning all the details of home life at the Chase, and it was this person who had lit the fire in the bedroom apportioned to Hilary, and who had subsequently listened at the keyhole to scraps of the conversation between the patient and his friend.

The result of her observation she decided to transmit at once to her master, and during dinner she asked and obtained leave of absence from housekeeper Margaret and hurried down toward the lodge gates, close to which an inn and a few cottages were clustered about the small post and telegraph office of the nearest village.

In her pocket Dakin carried a piece of paper upon which a cipher was written, and by the aid of this she dispatched the following message to Sir Philip Cranstoun’s telegraphic address in London:

While this message was being dispatched to her lord and master in London, Lady Cranstoun was peacefully enjoying her favorite diversion of a game of chess with the doctor. Just after the successful accomplishment of a somewhat difficult move, she remembered that her daughter and Mr. Pritchard were being left altogether in tête-à-tête at the other end of the vast drawing-room. With her fingers nervously touching a bishop, she appealed to her old friend Dr. Graham.

“Ought I to leave Stella with a stranger?” she asked doubtfully. “She has hardly ever talked so much to any one before, and Sir Philip would be furious if there was any idea of a sentimental feeling between Stella and this gentleman. You see, from what he says, he has no money, or family, or anything. Sir Philip is so utterly bent upon Stella making a brilliant marriage. Now if it had been his friend, Lord Carthew—”

“Make your mind easy, my dear lady,” said the doctor, soothingly. “I don’t think there is much fear of any tendresse between Stella and Mr. Pritchard. A little cheerful society will do her good.”

Thus reassured, Lady Cranstoun went on with her game, while Stella naïvely questioned Lord Carthew about his life at Oxford, and he, dropping for the moment his rôle of undistinguished and unintellectual farmer, talked his best to her concerning his way of life and of study at the University.

“Not particularly. But there was no man like him for the long jump, or for running either, in spite of his size. At cricket, football, rowing, and swimming, it was the same. He was facile princeps. A splendid fellow, isn’t he?”

“Well, there are different sorts of cleverness. He doesn’t care very much for reading if there’s a good horse to be had. And by the way, he himself has a beauty—‘Black Bess,’ a long-neck, powerful creature, who carries him as though he were no heavier than a cat.”

“Is Lord Carthew revengeful?” she asked presently. “I mean, do you think he will ever forgive me?”

“Of course he would, if he had anything to forgive. What makes you dwell upon that idea that he would blame you?”

Lord Carthew hardly knew how to explain away his friend’s harsh words. Already he had been greatly surprised by Hilary’s antagonistic attitude toward. Sir Philip’s lovely daughter, although, perhaps, in his secret heart he was not ill-pleased thereby. Hilary had neither the intention nor the desire to get married, and he was far too handsome to be regarded without alarm as a rival. It was, therefore, by no means a misfortune that he should have taken so strong a dislike against Stella, although Lord Carthew was too loyal not to praise his friend to her in his absence.

That evening was one of the most delightful he had ever experienced. Every moment he fell deeper in love with this beautiful girl, who seemed to realize the ideal of perfect womanhood which he had dreamed of since he had arrived at man’s estate. Her manner to him was frank and friendly, and she so evidently liked his society that he went to bed feeling both hopeful and elated. Yet when the subject of his thoughts retired to her own room, it is to be feared that Lord Carthew’s image by no means occupied her mind.

The windows of her bedroom, large, gloomy, and scantily furnished like the rest of the house, were open, and a flood of moonlight poured into the room. Stella walked toward it, and stood within its silver radiance, with delicate face upturned toward the stars.

“He must have disliked me very much to speak like that,” she murmured, as she slowly began to unfasten her gown, without lighting the candles on her dressing-table. “Will he ever forgive me, I wonder? I could ask his pardon better if he were not what he is; if he and that kind Mr. Pritchard could only change places!”

A sudden thought struck her, and caused her to quickly fasten her dress again. Crossing the room she opened her bedroom door and listened. There was no sound in the wide corridor, in which Lady Cranstoun’s rooms as well as her daughter’s were situated. At the other end was the guest-chamber assigned to the wounded man, while Dr. Graham and Lord Carthew occupied rooms in another part of the house.

After a moment’s hesitation Stella ran lightly to the room occupied by Hilary and tapped at the door, which was at once opened, as she expected, by Margaret.

“He’s wandering, miss. Dr. Graham and the other young gentleman came to see him, and he seemed asleep then, though the doctor didn’t quite like the looks of him. But now he seems delirious, and if he gets worse I must rouse the doctor. You needn’t fear to look in; he won’t recognize you.”

Hilary’s face was flushed, and his brown eyes glittered unnaturally as he muttered under his breath an unintelligible string of words and tossed his head from side to side on the pillow.

“Margaret,” she said suddenly, “shall I try to soothe him with my touch on his forehead? I always charm away mamma’s headaches.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll have much effect,” she said, “but there’s no harm in your trying.”

CHAPTER V.
COMING CONFLICTS.

Margaret stood on one side of Hilary’s pillow, and her young mistress on the other, while the latter passed her slim fingers slowly and lightly about the wounded man’s fevered forehead.

As the old servant watched her standing there in her white gown, her pale sensitive face framed in blue-black hair, her black lashes lowered over her luminous eyes, and her mouth hard set in the supreme effort of will-power exercised over the troubled nerves of the patient, the thought came to Margaret that it was truly astonishing that any one could suppose Stella Cranstoun to be the daughter of Lady Gwendolen.

Old Margaret was a silent woman, gifted with but little imagination, and her knowledge of physiognomy was not sufficiently developed to enable her to realize in what special features of the girl before her the Cranstoun characteristics were grafted on the wild Carewe growth. To Margaret’s way of thinking, Stella was not so handsome as her mother, but “a deal more ladylike and amiable.” The first Lady Cranstoun’s eyes were of a brown so dark that it appeared almost black; until her last illness her figure and her handsome red mouth was a trifle coarse in outline. There was no coarseness in Stella’s face, but behind the eyes a light seemed to shine, telling of some strange force and fire within, kept in check by a determined will. Her touch was instinct with magnetism, and soon Hilary ceased his uneasy tossing of his head on the pillows and seemed to pass from a fevered nightmare into sweet and pleasant dreams.

Some one, he thought, some one very lovely, very tender, with dark blue eyes and dusky hair, was soothing and caressing him. He could not clearly see her face in his dream-fancies, but the feeling of her presence was delightful, and presently, half-waking from what seemed a feverish sleep, he heard her voice, sweet and rippling and sounding as though it came from a long way off, speaking to some one.

“You see, Margaret, my touch has soothed him to sleep. I wish he were not a lord.”

“Because I was the cause of his accident. I heard him speak so bitterly about me to his friend. Margaret, do you think he will soon get well?”

“Oh, yes. He’s only a bit weak and light-headed from loss of blood. This time three days he will be miles away.”

“And I shall never see him again. Well, I am sorry. I must go now; he seems to be sleeping quietly. Good-night, Margaret.”

For one moment more, Hilary felt her soft, cool finger-tips upon his eyelids; then he realized that she was gone, and nothing left to him but dreams of her.

“What is your name?” he asked of Margaret in the morning, while he was still pondering how much of his over-night dreams had been true.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he said, irritably and relapsed into silence.

Meantime, Lord Carthew had also spent the night in dreaming of Stella Cranstoun, and was looking eagerly forward to meeting her the next morning.

When the breakfast-gong summoned him, he was shown into a room of moderate size where the table was laid for two, and behind the tea-urn he found the fair Stella awaiting him, with Lady Cranstoun’s apologies for her absence.

“Mamma breakfasts in bed, if a cup of tea can be called breakfast, and Dr. Graham had to leave for London half an hour ago,” Stella explained, while Lord Carthew decided that by daylight, in blue serge with a collar and cuffs of point lace as her only ornaments, she seemed, if possible, even more desirable than in her riding-habit or her white silk evening-gown on the preceding day.

Questioned about his friend, Lord Carthew declared that Hilary had a good night and was certainly no worse.

“There need be no hurry about that,” she said hastily; and then, to his great joy, she blushed.

“I hope we may have the pleasure of meeting Sir Philip Cranstoun before we leave,” he observed presently, and at once noted how her face clouded at the mention of her father’s name.

“I don’t know when he will return,” she said, and at once dropped the subject.

A little questioning as to the way in which she spent her time elicited the fact that already that morning, so early as half-past six, Zephyr had been saddled, and had carried his mistress for half an hour’s canter in the park.

“And tell me what you would like to do after breakfast,” she said. “Would you care to see the curiosities of the Chase—old pictures, and old armor, and old tapestries? Or would you like to quietly study the books in the library or smoking-room, with a cigar? Or would you like a ride or drive in the neighborhood?”

“If you haven’t had enough of riding, I should be very glad of a mount, if you and Zephyr will be so kind as to accompany me. The fact is, my friend and I have left our horses at an inn in a village close by, and I am fearful as to how they may be treated if left longer to the landlord’s tender mercies.”

“I shall not be more than a few minutes putting my habit on, and it will be so nice to have some one to ride with,” she said with a charming smile, as she left the room.

Mental pictures arose again in his mind. He imagined her riding in the Row beside him, the “mad viscount” and his lovely bride, every man there envying him his newly found treasure. Not only would she outshine every woman there in beauty, but also in the management of her horse. He pictured his friends and acquaintances clamoring for an introduction, and Stella talking to them with her sweet seriousness and total absence of coquetry and affectation. He longed, like any romantic schoolboy, for her love, which he set himself with all his heart and all his intellect to win.

She, for her part, liked him immensely. She had seen very few men, and she did not think him ugly by any means, but most interesting looking. She could not divine that as she accepted his aid to spring into her saddle, the mere contact of her slim foot, resting birdlike, in his hand, sent a quiver of delight through the young man’s frame. His manner appeared so unemotional, his face so unmoved, that she never once suspected the passion for her which was taking hold of his entire mind and soul. Nor while she talked freely and gayly to him about the tenantry and the country round, could he guess that before her eyes all the while there seemed to flit the remembrance of a bronzed and handsome face, the brows contracted in pain, the strong white teeth gnawing the lip under the drooping golden mustache, and the short brown curls disordered on a shapely head against the white pillow.

So they rode and talked, under the pale green leaves that were bursting into a delicate lace-work on the branches overhead, happy together to all outward seeming, but at cross purposes in reality; he thinking that she listened and understood, she believing him merely friendly, and wishing she could change his sympathetic kindness for the cold disapprobation of that other one who had been wounded through her folly.

From the darker shadows of the undergrowth a pair of malevolent eyes followed them.

“What is she talking so free and smiling with that ugly swell for?” Stephen Lee asked himself. “Bad luck to the day when he and that hulking giant trespassed into these grounds. I wish I’d ’a’ killed him and this chap, too.”

Down in his fierce heart, Stephen Lee cherished a secret passion for his beautiful young mistress, the existence of which she never once suspected. Unknown to her, his destiny was influenced by hers, and he was the means of communicating news concerning her at stated times to some birds of evil omen who were sometimes to be found at nightfall hovering within the confines of Cranstoun woods. Sir Philip would have been furious indeed could he have guessed that a member of the hated gypsy tribe had been for five years earning his living in his service; yet such was the case. The handsome, black-bearded young keeper, known as Stephen Lee, and one of the best men on the Cranstoun estates, was a true Romany, and hated his master with a hatred to the full as bitter as Sir Philip cherished against the entire gypsy tribe.

Yet at this moment, as he watched Stella and Lord Carthew ride by laughing and talking gayly, Stephen found himself wishing Sir Philip home again.

“The gray wolf would soon put a stop to this,” he said. “If it was the other chap, the lord, he might forgive it. I know right enough he means to try and marry her to some tip-top swell. But old Sarah will see her way to prevent that, I reckon.”

He was muttering to himself, when a hard, rasping voice, speaking in low tones immediately behind him, made him start in surprise.

Sir Philip himself stood among the brushwood, attired in a light tweed suit, as cool and unmoved as though he had not been absent from home for more than a month. The accident had only taken place on the preceding evening, and Stephen judged by the small handbag that Sir Philip was carrying, and by the direction from which he was coming, that he had not been home. Yet already he was quite well acquainted with what had taken place in the woods on the preceding evening. But Stephen Lee had long before this suspected some system of spying by which the master of the Chase contrived to inform himself of the doings of his household in his absence, and he was not therefore much surprised by Sir Philip’s question, to which he responded, after his wont, in a civil monosyllable:

“You have often told me to keep off tramps and trespassers and such like,” the man answered, with a forced and rather sullen civility. “Lord Carthew stopped Miss Cranstoun’s horse and seemed to be annoying her. I fired to frighten him and he got hurt.”

Sir Philip paused for a moment. His eyes followed the retreating figures of Lord Carthew and Stella as, with their heads inclined together in converse, they rode on together to a bend in the avenue between the trees. Then he turned to Stephen, his face set and mask-like as usual.

The gypsy picked it up and glowered after his employer as the latter bent his steps towards the house.

“I’ll drink to your destruction in this world and the next,” he said; “but I’m hanged if I can make out what you are up to. Old Sarah will understand, perhaps. She’s a match in cunning even for you.”

All this time Lord Carthew was learning from Stella’s lips all that there was to tell of her life as it was lived on the surface. She was seventeen last Christmas, she told him, and she believed it to be true, ignoring that first year of life which she had passed in London as the unloved child of a gypsy mother. For months past she had been trained in the correct way of bowing, kissing the Queen’s hand, and backing out of the royal presence over her train by a duly qualified lady, who had attended at the Chase in order to impart to her this highly necessary instruction, and she made Lord Carthew laugh by her lively description of these lessons.

“Oh, no, not in the least,” she answered. “All this London trip I should look forward to eagerly, I think, but for leaving poor mamma, and—and for something else.”

He saw by the sadness in her look and the way in which she shut her mouth fast that some especially anxious thought connected with this stay in London troubled her.

“Won’t you tell me what is the other thing?” he asked, gently. “You have already said you regard me as a friend, and it will be a relief to you to tell me your worries, since you say you have never any one to speak to.”

“I don’t know quite how to put it,” she said, as she meditatively stroked her horse’s neck and ears with her whip. “It seems so egotistical to be boring you with so much about myself. But this season, this presentation to the Queen, and the balls and parties that will follow, for which I have been trained so long, what will it all mean in the end, but that I am to show off my graces and accomplishments and wear smart clothes, so that I may attract an offer of marriage? And if any come, there will be no question of love or liking on my part; my father’s intention is just to hand me over to the best bidder. The Chase is gloomy and dreary and prison-like, and I am often very lonely; but it is a thousand times better than to be married to the man who has the highest title and the largest fortune among those who may condescend to take notice of me,” she went on, bitterly. “Why, if I could stoop to such a marriage, there would not be a scullery-maid at the Chase, or a cottager on my father’s property, who would not have the right to despise me!”

“But you might meet some one among these men of rank and wealth whom you might like,” suggested Lord Carthew. “Having a title and money doesn’t absolutely debar any one from being capable of inspiring love.”

“I suppose it is my training and my contradictory nature,” she said, “but I must own that the fact of a man wearing a title would be a reason with me for having a strong prejudice against him to start with.”

“I suppose it is; but I have had that formula that I was being educated solely with a view to marrying ‘well,’ and adding extra lustre to the name of Cranstoun dinned into me until I have revolted against it. And I know that after this season, when I am to be taken out and dressed, and inspected by eligible London bachelors, there will be terrible quarrels between my father and me, which will worry and terrify poor mamma beyond measure. You see, Mr. Pritchard,” she said, turning to him with that sweet, frank smile he had already learned to love, “I am indeed talking to you as though I had known you all my life. I dare say it is a good deal what you told me about your leaving England so very shortly which makes me so ready to confide in you. It seems much easier to be frank with a friend whom one may not see again for many years; and then when I heard you tell mamma your people were just yeoman farmers, and that you had nothing in wealth or position to be proud of, I warmed to you at once, and quite longed for a talk with you. The very name of Cranstoun and the expressions ‘old family,’ ‘county family,’ ‘blue blood,’ ‘rank, title, wealth, position, and ancestry,’ somehow produce a feeling of intense annoyance in me. I have been so much trained and preached to, in fact,” she concluded, laughing, “that at heart I have reverted to the savage, and that ideal of my father’s of which he constantly speaks as my vocation in life, to marry some man of brilliant position and fortune, is so detestably repugnant to me that I would far rather kill myself than submit to it.”

He listened, deeply interested, but a little puzzled. The romantic novelty of her sentiments amused and attracted him by their dissimilarity from the point of view taken of such subjects by the ordinary young Englishwoman of good education and good family, who is usually quite as anxious as her parents and guardians to make what is called “a good match,” and who only hopes that her future husband may be presentable enough for her to like him.

The clew to the mystery of Stella’s character Lord Carthew did not possess. As much as an emotional woman can dread and hate a man and a system, so strongly had Stella’s mother hated and feared Sir Philip Cranstoun and the aristocratic lords of the soil of whom he was a representative, and a very strong measure of the same rebellion, the same hatred, she had transmitted to her daughter. So that it necessarily came about that Stella tried not to think about Hilary Pritchard because she believed him to be Lord Carthew, while her heart and sympathies went readily out to Lord Carthew, whom she believed to be an altogether poor and undistinguished person.

This was exactly the state of mind in which her father, Sir Philip, desired to find her. The far-seeing Baronet had some time ago set himself to the task of investigating the means and position of certain eligible bachelors among the aristocracy whom Stella was likely to meet in London. And among these, few had a fairer record in the matter of eligibility than Claud Edward Clayton Bromley, Viscount Carthew, heir to the Earl of Northborough.

That horrible blot, the introduction of the gypsy Carewe element into the annals of the Cranstouns, might well be wiped out by such an alliance. Sir Philip’s keen eyes had noted what his daughter’s had totally failed to observe, the intensity of Lord Carthew’s regard as he turned toward Stella on his horse and drank in her words. As to what the girl’s sentiments in the matter were, that did not trouble Sir Philip for one moment. She had only been admitted into his household on suffrage, he told himself, a wretched infant, born in a hovel, and brought to his house by beggars. He did not know, so he argued, that she was even his wife’s child at all. When he said this, however, he lied, for the girl’s resemblance to her mother was very striking. In any case, it was not for her own sake, but to save her noble stepmother’s reason, that baby Stella was taken from her hiding-place in London and brought up in her father’s house. And a hundred times a day Sir Philip punished her for her lost mother’s pride and passionate temper.

If she liked flowers and she planted them, orders were given for them to be uprooted and destroyed. A Miss Cranstoun must not soil her hands by gardening. No servant that she liked was allowed to be about her, and in her growing girlhood books that she seemed to enjoy were invariably taken away. These petty tyrannies Stella had endured for years in proud silence. It was as though she had been reserving her strength for some great struggle which was one day to take place, and to alter for all time the relations between herself and her father. For a long time she had felt it, as it were, hovering in the air, and that it would be upon the subject of her marriage she had no doubt. Only, she supposed that the trip to London would be the starting point for their quarrel, nor could she guess that this kindly new friend, who rode beside her and listened with such sympathetic interest to her little troubles, would be closely associated with the crucial conflict which was shortly to wage between herself and her father.

CHAPTER VI.
LORD CARTHEW’S WOOING.

Mine host at the wayside inn, where the two young men had left their horses on the preceding day, was duly surprised and impressed by the appearance of one of his guests in company with no less a personage than Miss Cranstoun of the Chase.

Sir Philip Cranstoun was the innkeeper’s landlord, and although he had hardly ever caught more than a fleeting glimpse of the young lady, he knew who she must be by the livery of the groom, who rode at some distance behind the young lady, and her cavalier, on a sturdy cob not given to exerting himself.

“I assure you, sir, that I never had the least idea that you and Lord Carthew wouldn’t come back to pay your little trifle here, as you suggest,” the man said, all deference and smiles. “Seeing as you’d left a hundred guineas or more of horseflesh in my stables, it wasn’t likely, sir, was it?”

Stella at once begged to see the horses, and Lord Carthew hastened to help her down from her saddle, a proceeding which took far too little time in his opinion, for Stella was lithe and active as a sailor lad. Gathering her neat, dark green habit into her small hand in its dogskin glove, she followed the landlord and her guest to the inn stables, while the groom held the horses upon which they had come.

Black Bess and the chestnut cob duly made their appearance, and were stroked and made much of by Stella, who, somewhat to Lord Carthew’s chagrin, manifested a decided preference for the big black mare.

“She isn’t what I call a ’andsome ’oss, either, if I may make so bold as to say so,” observed the old hostler of the inn, critically. “At least, not for such a young gentleman as his lordship. But she looks like a good ’un to go and to stay. This ’ere chestnut of yours, sir, ’as a lot more blood in ’im now, ’asn’t ’e?”

“He has a long pedigree, certainly,” returned Lord Carthew. “But my friend weighs fourteen stone against my ten, and wants more bone and muscle than I do in his mount.”

“That ’e do, sure enough, sir. And this ’ere animal,” signifying Black Bess, “she’d carry the Mayor and Corporation o’ London by turns all day long and be as frisky as a colt at bedtime. She’s as strong as a dray ’oss, she is.”

Stella’s fair cheek was pressed against Black Bess’ long, black satin neck, and her soft, cooing voice, beloved of all dumb things, was murmuring friendly speeches into the ears of the mare, which were pricked up, and moving quickly backward and forward in appreciation of the attention paid her.

Lord Carthew meanwhile was increasing Stella’s liking for him by giving minute directions as to the food for the animals until they would be wanted again by their masters. Stella would have suggested that they should be sent to the Chase stables, but Lady Cranstoun had given her no instruction on that point and fear of her father restrained her.

“I should like to take you for some pretty ride in the neighborhood,” she explained to Claud after they had again mounted their horses, “but in that case I must ask the way of the groom. Except for a few mad spins late at night, I have been very little outside the park, except in a closed carriage with mamma. You see, there are a good many square miles enclosed round the Chase, so that I get plenty of riding and some capital hurdles and ditches, too. But Sir Philip has forbidden me to go outside at all.”

“Why, of course I do,” she answered simply. “Just because I am ordered not to, for no other reason. In the evenings, when Sir Philip is away, I ride as near the boundaries of the Chase enclosure as possible, and sometimes I can’t resist taking a jump over and cantering along the roads in the early moonlight. Sometimes, as if he knew we were doing wrong, Zephyr flies so fast his hoofs seem hardly to touch the ground, and I am sure, as we flash by the few country folk trudging along the lonely roads, they think we are wraiths, and go home and make stories about us.”

“Why you are a modern version of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ ” he exclaimed, and then quoted in clear, rhythmical fashion:

That’s a good description of the Chase, isn’t it? even if in your case they do not ‘overlook a space of flowers.’ And the continuation applies:

“I have never read a word of Tennyson,” she said. “The only poetry-books allowed me have been Milton and Wordsworth and some selected readings from Pope and Shakespeare. Sir Philip says that reading poetry fosters romantic and ridiculous notions, and that I should only read the poets his mother read, and know the others by name. But I like what you have quoted better than anything I have ever read yet. What became of the Lady of Shalott?”

“Oh, you must not take her for your prototype,” he said quickly. “She used to ‘weave by night and day, a magic web with colors gay,’ and she was never allowed to look out of the window to see the surly village churls, and red cloaks of the market girls, pass onward to Shalott. She had to content herself with seeing their reflections in a magic mirror which hung on a wall in her room. A curse was to fall upon her should she turn from its reflections and gaze on the realities of life, until one day, when there passed by ‘two young lovers lately wed; “I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott.’ ”

“But that was not the end, surely?” asked Stella, with childlike eagerness. “The day came, of course, when she looked out on life itself, braving any curse which might befall her.”

He was her fate, I suppose. Anyhow, as a modern writer would say, the ‘exact psychological moment of her life had arrived,’ and:

“And what was the end?” asked Stella. She had followed each line, conjuring up mental pictures of the scenes. But bold Sir Lancelot she saw in a brown-eyed giant, with a golden mustache drooping over a mouth that was a little hard in outline. And for the lady it was pardonable girlish egotism if she saw herself, living as she did in semi-imprisonment, confined within those “four gray walls” and the demesnes adjacent. What did she herself know more of life than was pictured in the old-fashioned books to which she had access, or hinted at in the prim and guarded talk of her instructors? Of life as it really was, its passion, its pain, its hopes, and fears, and sorrows, its mad delights and long regrets, its brilliant colors and heavy shadows, she knew no more than the Lady of Shalott learned from her mirror as she caught sight of the village maidens and gay young knights reflected there. Until he came! And how would it end after that, she wanted to know.

“Oh, poor Lady of Shalott, she had better have been content with her looking-glass and her needlework,” said Lord Carthew. “Apparently, she went straight to her death resignedly, after falling in love at first sight with Lancelot. She ‘found a boat, beneath a willow left afloat, and round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott.’ In this she was wafted up along the river to ‘many-towered Camelot,’ where all the gay knights and ladies were enjoying themselves, foremost among them being Sir Lancelot of the Lake, lover of Queen Guinevere:

Tears had started to Stella’s eyes as Lord Carthew finished reciting the verses.

“Not in that poem. But you are taking it quite seriously, Miss Cranstoun. I shall be angry with myself if I have saddened you.”

“You will think me very silly,” she said, “but I never get a chance of reading poetry, or of listening to stories told. And you repeat poetry so well, and tell tales in such an interesting manner, I could listen for weeks at a stretch.”

His heart leaped up with delight at her words; but when he spoke again, after a slight pause, he had perfect control of his voice.

“Do you know,” he said, “that during the last half hour I have been thinking a great deal of what you were telling me a little while ago about your dread of the consequences of going to London. You have been amiable enough to treat me as your friend, and in that character I have been trying to discover some way out of your difficulties. You are tired of living here, and find the life intolerably dull, do you not? You long to see the world with your own eyes, to travel, to go out and come in as you like, to be no longer repressed and restrained, and blamed when you do not deserve it? You would like to visit strange countries, to sail in ships to foreign places, to see something of gayety and brightness in the great cities of the world?”

Her gypsy blood had mantled in her cheeks, her breath came quickly, and her eyes sparkled with excitement at the pictures his words conjured up before her.

“And you also long, I am sure, sometimes, when you are alone in that great dreary house,” he went on, softly, “for love and affection, for a tenderness that shall wrap you round, and guard you from all worry and trouble, for the arms of some one who would love you above everything else in the world clasped round you; for the loving companionship of some one who would think of you always, understand you in everything, and answer your mind with his, for love that is friendship, and friendship that is love; the love that will grow gray beside you, and find you dearer and more beautiful when your youth is past than even you are now.”

“I have mamma——” she was beginning, when he stopped her by laying his hand lightly upon her own, which held the reins on her horse’s neck.

“Wait a moment, please, Miss Cranstoun. I don’t want you to speak until you have heard me out. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. Don’t start and draw back. There is nothing after all so very wonderful in such a statement. I knew when I first saw you last night that I should ask you to marry me, and since that moment I have only been waiting for the terms to come to me. I am not in the least attractive, I know. But there’s this to be in my favor, that I am too plain to be conceited, or to have my head turned by women’s flatteries. You are not happy here, and you lead a caged-bird sort of life. As my wife, you would be free as air, and your will would be law. Of course I don’t expect you to love me—not for a long time yet. But in time,” he added, wistfully, “in time, as you realize that you are everything in the world to me, I think you will grow to like me a little. You see, we are such good friends, and I should understand you, and that is something to begin with, is it not? And we would travel all over Europe—all over the world, if you like. Of course,” he went on in some confusion, noting her look of surprise, “it is not as though I were very rich. But I have some money saved, quite enough to enable me to give my bride a long and delightful wedding tour by sea and land before starting for my Canadian farm. Don’t answer me directly—don’t say anything at all just now. Think it over, and let me know. I will speak to Lady Cranstoun when we get back, and you can consult with her.”

“But, Mr. Pritchard,” she said, turning her great, startled eyes upon him, “do you think for a moment my father would consent? He would be furiously angry, and horribly insulting at the mere idea. Don’t, pray don’t speak of this any more. Let us forget all about it, and go on being merely friends.”

“That is impossible,” he answered, gently. “Tell me truthfully, Miss Cranstoun, is your objection to a marriage with me based solely upon the fear of your father’s disapproval?”

“Yes—no—that is—I don’t want to marry you, Mr. Pritchard! I have never thought of such a thing!”

The words burst from her lips, and a bewildered, troubled look clouded her fair face.

“Well, I will give you time to think of it,” he said, quietly. “As to Sir Philip’s objections, I have little doubt that I can overcome them.”

“You don’t know my father,” she said, with meaning. “Sometimes I wonder why he hates me us he does. But I am certain of one thing: he would far rather see me dead than married to any one who is not my superior in rank and fortune.”

“Still I don’t fear his opposition,” returned Lord Carthew, with a smile. “I am better off than you know, and may possibly even succeed to a title some day.”

“Had you told me that at first,” she said reproachfully, “we should not have been such friends.”

“You would soon forget it,” he said, smiling again. “A title, after all, is not a thing a man wears on his coat. May I take it that if your parents consent you will at least not decide against me?”

“Don’t!” she exclaimed. “You have surprised and startled me so much I can hardly think coherently. You see, I am not used to receiving offers of marriage. This is my first. I suppose it is a great honor, but—let’s have a gallop, shall we? The horses must be quite tired of walking.”

Away she flew, at break-neck speed, after a shake of the reins and a word to Zephyr, who needed no whip to urge his pace, and gave Lord Carthew work indeed to follow him.

Flushed and out of breath, they at length drew up their steeds before the steps of the Chase, having re-entered the lodge gates after a spirited canter through the lanes, the horses neck to neck part of the time, but eventually with Zephyr a long way ahead. Stella was radiant and laughing as Lord Carthew sprang from his horse to assist her to dismount, the groom having been left jolting steadily far behind. Lord Carthew felt at that moment happier and more hopeful than he had ever been before, and both were talking and laughing in merry boy and girl fashion upon the result of their extempore race as they ascended the broad, shallow steps to the entrance of the house.

Before they had had time to touch the bell, the massive doors were opened to them, and just within the hall immediately before them stood the master of the house, pale, gray-haired, gray-eyed, his square face, with its handsome clear-cut features and unpleasantly sinister expression, shown up by the clear sunshine of an April day.

Lord Carthew glanced at Stella. All gayety and brightness had died from her face at sight of her father, and instead came that look of fixed self-repression and endurance which he had once before noted there.

“So you have been enjoying an early ride,” Sir Philip remarked to his daughter, in grating tones. “Have you and this gentleman been unattended, may I ask? If not, where is the groom?”

“And who is this gentleman? May I have the honor of being presented to him?”

“Mr. Pritchard, my father, Sir Philip Cranstoun,” said the girl, in level tones, from which all the glad youthful ring had departed. “If you will excuse me,” she added, “I will go and change my habit.”

With a little formal bend of the head, she left them, and walked in stately fashion up the staircase until she passed out of their sight, when she suddenly quickened her steps, and flew like a bird down the corridor to Lady Cranstoun’s room.

She found that lady lying on a couch, very white and feeble, wrapped in a cashmere morning-gown, and trembling in every limb.

“Oh! my dear, my dear!” Lady Cranstoun murmured, wringing her limp, white hands, “I am so thankful that you have come back. Your father has returned, and has been asking me questions. He compelled me to tell him where you were. I expected a storm, but he said nothing, which seems so much more dangerous. I am in such terror of what he may say to you.”

Stella drew a footstool to the side of Lady Cranstoun’s sofa, and taking one of her hands in both her own, gently kissed it, and rubbed her cheek against it.

“Mamma,” she said, “how would you like to leave the Chase, and come and stay with me in a nice house, where every one would love you, and no one would bully and frighten you, and where you would have nice servants instead of spies, and where your relations would be honored and welcomed, instead of being insulted whenever they came to visit you?”

“It sounds delightful,” returned the poor lady, sighing, “but, of course, it is impossible. What put such ideas into your head?”

“He says he decided to propose to me as soon as he saw me yesterday,” returned Stella, demurely.

“But it is utterly out of the question. Of course he is a gentleman, and well educated, and has very agreeable manners; but, my dear, he told me himself that he is a farmer’s son, and has neither money nor family. Oh, dear—oh dear! it is all my fault for allowing you to be so much with him. But he seemed so little like a love-making sort of man, so plain and intellectual, I never dreamed any harm would come of it. I did certainly suggest to Dr. Graham that I ought not to leave you together while we were playing chess; but he reassured me so strongly that I thought no more about it. Sir Philip will be furious. He will never forgive me. And you—my poor dear child—I hope, oh, I do hope, that you have not grown fond of him.”

“Don’t worry, dear mamma. I don’t care a bit about him, at least not in that way. He is very clever, and very kind, and, I believe, very good, too, and I am sure he is fond of me, and would be very good to both of us; and it would be lovely, wouldn’t it, to be free of the Chase forever? As to his farm in Canada, he says it doesn’t matter about going to that yet, and that he has a lot more money saved than any one knows of, and that he will take me all over the world. You know Dr. Graham has always said a voyage to the Cape would do you good, and I thought of that directly; we would all go to the Cape together in a sailing ship. Think,” she exclaimed, springing up from her kneeling position, and beginning to pace restlessly up and down the room, “how beautiful it would be to be upon the great, wide sea, which I have only once seen in my life, with the bright sun sparkling on the waves, and you and I on deck under an awning, such as I have read about in books of travel; you on a deck-chair, and I mixing you your iced lemonade, and reading aloud while beautiful warm breezes blew over you and made you well; and above all,” here she came and knelt by Lady Cranstoun’s side, and lowered her voice to an impressive whisper, “with no Sir Philip!”

“Hush, hush, dear!” the elder lady exclaimed, nervously glancing at the door. “In your picture you leave out the man, I see. But what does it matter? Even if you loved him, and wanted to marry him for other reasons than to escape from this house, your father would not hear of it. He has said thousands of times that you must marry a title. Now, if it had only been Lord Carthew——”

“Don’t, mamma!” exclaimed the girl, for the first time blushing scarlet. “Lord Carthew detests me. Anyhow, we were not talking of him. Mr. Pritchard isn’t a bit afraid of Sir Philip. He says if he is the only obstruction, he can soon remove that. It appears he is coming into a title and fortune, and can prove it to Sir Philip. But even then,” she added, “I couldn’t marry him, could I, without loving him?”

“I should like to see you happy with a good husband, my darling,” said Lady Cranstoun, tears coming into her faded eyes as she stroked the girl’s cheek. “Of course, I would much prefer you to marry a man of good birth and of some fortune; but your happiness is the chief thing.”

A little later, Stella, going down to the drawing room for a novel which Lady Cranstoun was reading, was joined there by Lord Carthew.

“He offers no objection against me, provided I can succeed in winning your affections.”

“I am quite sure Sir Philip didn’t say that,” she exclaimed, laughing. “He wouldn’t think my affections had anything to do with the matter.”

“But they have everything to do with it, from my point of view,” he said, standing before her, and looking steadfastly into her face. “I don’t expect or hope that you will love me yet. But if you will marry me, I will engage that you shall be a great deal happier than you are now.”

She spoke half under her breath, and as it were involuntarily, and then stood a few moments, reflecting. Lord Carthew was a little, a very little, shorter than she, and even such a fancy-free maiden as Stella had her ideals of the man she might some day grow to love. Like most very young girls’ ideals, he was of exaggerated height and length of limb. Lord Carthew was of pale and sallow complexion, in spite of the fact that he usually enjoyed excellent health. Gazing at him thus in the sunlight, and regarding him for the first time in the light of a possible husband, Stella noted that his deep-set, intelligent eyes were of a greenish-gray, and set too near together in his head for beauty or symmetry. Herself a brunette, she admired fair, florid skins and light hair in others. Lord Carthew was clean-shaved, and Stella’s conventional ideal invariably wore a golden mustache, similar to the one on the face of the wounded man upstairs. Lord Carthew’s upper lip was long, and his lower jaw slightly protruded. To a student of physiognomy, his mouth and chin clearly indicated an intense loyalty and fidelity in love and friendship, combined with a bull-dog obstinacy and tenacity of purpose, and his whole face denoted unusual intelligence, will, and power of loving.

But Stella was a young girl of eighteen, and saw none of these things. Her feminine instinct taught her that this man was an honorable gentleman, but what she particularly noted with dissatisfaction was that, in moments of repressed excitement, as in the present instance, Lord Carthew’s eyes and eyebrows twitched in a nervous fashion peculiar to some oversensitive temperaments.

Her survey over, she turned away with a half-sigh. Why was not this man, who loved her, more like that other man, who disliked her? But the next moment she tried to put that thought away as humiliating. She was certain Lord Carthew would be very good to her, and to her mamma also. And oh! to be free from Sir Philip’s sneering, and bullying, and hectoring!

“No, no! How could you possibly have? I have hardly spoken to a man before, except Sir Philip, and the doctor, and my teachers. No, it isn’t that I love any one else, but—but——”

“But you don’t love me? Well, that would be impossible. There is nothing about me to make a beautiful young girl fall in love at first sight. But, my dear Miss Cranstoun, you have certainly beauty enough for two!”

She laughed and blushed with pleasure. She had so far in her life had hardly any compliments.

“Would you take mamma away from here as well?” she asked. “I mean, if—if I ever said yes.”

“Of course I would, if she would come. She is my kinswoman, you know—at least, my friend’s kinswoman.”

“I’ll think about it, and tell you later,” she said, springing away with one of her swift, bird-like movements, and was gone before he could speak again.

On the way to her own room, she passed the apartments which had first been occupied by the first Lady Cranstoun, and which were now given to the supposed Lord Carthew. The doors both of the bedroom and sitting-room were wide open. Stella glanced into the latter, and perceived the wounded man lying fully dressed on a sofa near the fire, apparently asleep, for his eyes were closed and his dark eyelashes rested on his cheek. He looked paler than usual, but handsomer than ever, with the extra touch of delicacy imparted by loss of blood and unaccustomed weakness.

Stella looked again, and creeping in, stood gazing down upon him until her breath came quickly, and tears gathered in her eyes. Under his half-closed lids, Hilary was watching her, and when he saw her red lip quiver and her arms involuntarily moving toward him, his self-control broke down. Suddenly stretching up his right arm, he drew her head down to his, and pressed his lips passionately to hers.

CHAPTER VII.
A KISS TOO LONG.

Stella had never heard the verses, but something of the same thought entered into her mind as she drew back, pale and quivering, after that one passionate kiss interchanged between her and Hilary.

In one magical moment she had learned so much—had learned that she loved Hilary, that he loved her, and, moreover, that the thought of marrying her suitor of the morning, which up to now she had been able to cherish at least without aversion, had suddenly grown intolerable to her. All this had been taught her by a kiss, the first which ever a man had laid upon her lips.

With downcast eyes and rapidly beating heart, she stood now before Hilary, as he rose from the sofa and bent down toward her, holding both her little trembling hands in one of his.

“I—I have nothing to forgive,” the girl said, unsteadily, still without looking up. “I must go, Lord Carthew.”

“If I were really Lord Carthew,” he said, “there might be some excuse. But I am not. By a freak of my friend’s, we had changed names for a while when that accident happened to me. But I never intended the trick to continue. It is true that he begged me, as a favor, to keep silence on the subject, especially before you. But, after my folly and imprudence, I must confess the truth. I cannot masquerade any longer. Miss Cranstoun, try to forgive me.”

“You see,” he went on, unheeding, letting her hands go, and standing at some distance from her, “I was half-dreaming—weakness, I dare say, proceeding from the ridiculous semi-invalid position I’ve been in during the last eighteen hours. Suddenly, on opening my eyes, I saw a face, a very lovely woman’s face, close to me. It seemed a part of my dreams; I did not stop to consider who she was, and I kissed her.”

“I forgive you. I understand; I was only a part of your dream. Please tell me again what you were saying just now. I could not quite grasp it. What is your real name?”

“Hilary Pritchard. Here,” he continued, fumbling with one hand in his pocket, “here are cards, letters, and papers, to prove it. No one who knows the Northborough family could suppose that I belong to it. But Lord Carthew was my college chum, and I like him as well almost as one man can like another. I am all the more sorry because I have annoyed a lady whom I know he very greatly admires.”

“So it is Lord Carthew I have been talking to all last evening and this morning,” Stella observed, reflectively. “That explains a great deal.”

She broke off abruptly. What she really meant was that it explained the fact of her father’s acquiescence to the proposed marriage between herself and his younger guest; and also to the latter’s way of talking as though he were wealthy and heir to a title, as well as other points which had puzzled her.

The door of the sitting-room in which they stood was wide open, and Dakin, the housemaid, passed along the corridor, apparently without paying any particular attention to Stella and Hilary; but Stella disliked and distrusted the woman, and moved toward the door as Dakin made a great pretence of going down the staircase to the ground-floor.

“I will say good-by now, Miss Cranstoun,” said Hilary, in a constrained voice. “I shall be leaving the house almost immediately. May I leave it to you to make my apologies to Lady Cranstoun?”

“But you will stay to luncheon, surely?” Stella suggested. “It will seem so strange if you go like this. And besides, you are not nearly strong enough to be moved yet. You can hardly walk, and last night you were delirious, I know.”

“I charm away mamma’s headaches,” she answered, in confusion. “I believe I have some kind of magnetism in my touch. So I asked Margaret to let me soothe you.”

“It was you, then. I woke out of a horrid nightmare, and felt your touch, and heard your voice.”

His tones vibrated with deep feeling, which he was trying vainly to suppress. Stella, on her part, was torn between a desire to escape and a longing to remain near him.

The first luncheon-gong rang out in the interval of silence. Stella held out her hand to him.

He was holding her hand close, and through both their frames electric currents seemed to tingle. The very air about them was charged with electricity to them, so that both were quivering and excited.

They were standing near the open door, when suddenly Stella turned, laid her two small hands lightly upon Hilary’s sleeve, and looked up in his face, her own pale, but transfigured into more than its usual loveliness by passionate feeling.

“Was it only a dream?” she breathed rather than said. “Or do you love me?”

Mortal man could hold out in pride no longer. In an instant he had gathered her up in his arms, and was covering her cheeks, her eyes, and her lips with close, hot kisses, while he murmured incoherent words of love into her ear.

Only for one mad, never-to-be-forgotten moment did he hold her thus, she unresisting, clinging timidly to him, letting her soft lips meet his in answering passion.

Then he remembered all the difference between them, all the barriers, all the impossibilities. As in a flash he realized her father’s wrath, her mother’s astonishment, and the indignation of his loyal friend, Lord Carthew, and leading Stella gently to the door, he kissed her hands in token of farewell.

Then he shut the door, and finding herself alone in the corridor, dazed and agitated, Stella fled to her own room, and kneeling down before an arm-chair by the fire, buried her face in her hands, to enact in imagination the scene again which she had just gone through, to thrill with ecstasy as she recalled Hilary’s kisses, to blush until her delicate skin seemed scorched as she remembered her own timid response, and to long with every fibre of her being for the moment when she would see him again.

She knew full well now what even to herself she would not own, she hardly understood before, that from the moment when that man of superb figure and perfect face had laid his hand upon Zephyr’s bridle on the preceding evening, and looked into her eyes, she had loved him, and that but for that she would hardly have braved her father’s anger by insisting upon Hilary’s removal to the Chase.

She had believed that he positively disliked her, and had secretly reproached herself for letting her thoughts dwell so persistently upon a man who scorned her. Only during the past ten minutes had she learned the truth, that against his will he loved her as passionately as she loved him. That one glorious fact outweighed all other considerations in her mind. As to Lord Carthew, he was as completely forgotten as though he had never existed. His intelligence, his kindly sympathy, his interesting talk, were of no more account in her eyes than his wealth and title. The strain of wild gypsy blood in her veins was showing itself fully now. She loved as gypsy natures can, with a passionate self-abandonment, counting the world and all that it contains of no value when compared with the love of the one person existing who could make life worth living.

Yet she was a Cranstoun, too—trained in habits of strict self-control from her infancy; and when the second summons to luncheon came, she sprang up instinctively, smoothed her hair, looked at herself fixedly in the glass, and hoped that others would not notice the strange glow in her cheeks and light in her eyes, and went down to lunch in her plain serge gown, her eyes like two dancing stars, and her mouth all tremulous with smiles.

It was almost with a start that she came face to face with Lord Carthew, and realized that he was staying in the house. Lady Cranstoun glanced at her nervously. She was a few minutes late, and Sir Philip never overlooked the least unpunctuality. To-day, however, to her great astonishment, he made no comment upon it. He and Lord Carthew seemed to get on unusually well together; both had travelled a good deal in Europe, the former unaccompanied by his wife and daughter, and they naturally fell to discussing the various hotels at which they had stayed.

Stella was heartily glad that no part of the conversation devolved upon her. She sat in her usual place at the head of the table, Lady Cranstoun not being equal to any of the duties of hostess, mechanically doing all that was required of her, and all the time wondering whether Hilary had left the house yet, how he would stand the journey in his weak condition, whether by any chance she should see him again before his departure, and if not, how soon he would write to her. Lord Carthew noticed the brightness of her eyes and her absent-minded expression, and with a thrill of joy hoped it might arise from her half-given promise to himself. His interview with her father had been short, but characteristic of both men.

He had followed the dreaded gray wolf into his vast library, surrounded by well-filled oaken bookcases, and had watched him take his accustomed place with his back to the fire, sarcastic, and critical.

“Sir Philip,” Lord Carthew had begun, plunging at once into his subject, as he seated himself deliberately in a deep arm-chair, “first, I must thank you for the hospitality extended to my friend and myself since yesterday evening. You have no doubt heard of my friend’s unlucky accident, entirely the result of our trespassing in your grounds. Next, I must inform you that while out riding this morning, I made your daughter an offer of marriage.”

“No, that is not my name, but that of my friend upstairs. To please a whimsical fancy of my own, we had changed names for the nonce during our travels. My name is Lord Carthew, and my father, Lord Northborough, is connected with Lady Cranstoun’s family.”

“I don’t think I have ever had occasion to use any name but my own until yesterday. The point is, that as Miss Cranstoun expressed an indifference to titles which almost amounted to hostility, I took advantage of the fact to continue the jest, and to do my wooing in the name of my old college friend, whose people are gentlemen farmers in Yorkshire.”

“Very romantic,” sneered Sir Philip. “May I ask whether this ‘Lord of Burleigh’ style of courtship won my daughter’s heart?”

“I could not say that. Miss Cranstoun has known me a few hours only, and I am not possessed of those graces and attractions which charm at first sight. But at least she did not repel me, and even promised to think about the matter, subject, of course, to your approval.”

It was difficult for Sir Philip to keep all signs of his satisfaction from his hard and impassive face.

“I will tell you plainly, Lord Carthew,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “that after what you have told me, I shall require better proofs of your identity than your bare word if you wish me to consider you in the light of a suitor to my daughter’s hand. We Cranstouns are, as you may know, among the oldest, absolutely the oldest families in England, and on her mother’s side my daughter is granddaughter to the Duke of Lanark. I do not think my daughter is especially attached to me, although she is most devoted to my wife. But she has been brought up in habits of the strictest obedience, and would not think of encouraging any admirer without my full sanction. Had you been this Mr. Pritchard you were pleased to personate, I should most certainly have never given it.”

“My friend is a gentleman, sir,” returned Lord Carthew, coldly; “and a man of such high character and superb appearance that any girl might well fall in love with him, and any father be proud to be connected with him.”

“In that case, you must pardon me for saying so, but are you not committing an error of judgment in taking him with you when you go wife-hunting?”

The bitterness of the sarcasm, reflecting as it did upon his undistinguished appearance, stung Lord Carthew for one moment only, and he winced. Then, recovering himself, with an easy smile, he answered that fortunately for him Mr. Pritchard was not a marrying man, and proposed, indeed, shortly to leave England and seek his fortune out West. In the mean time he should be glad to know whether Sir Philip had any objection to offer against him, Lord Carthew, in the character of candidate for his daughter’s hand.

“My parents are extremely desirous that I should at once marry some lady of birth and beauty,” he continued. “My father intends settling fifteen thousand a year and a house in town upon me as soon as my choice is made. But I have hardly ever hoped to see my ideals all realized so perfectly as they are in your lovely and charming daughter.”

The two men having come to a thorough understanding, it was hard to say which was the more eager to hurry on the marriage. Even the strongest and hardest of men, to all appearance, usually have one weak spot, one touch of human foolishness about them, and in Sir Philip Cranstoun’s mind there lingered always a haunting fear lest the old gypsy woman’s prophecy of disgrace and shame to be brought upon him by his descendants might some day be verified. Over his wife he exercised the same unquestioned, domineering authority as over the servants of his household; but he had long ago recognized the proud, dumb protest in his daughter’s obedience, and had realized that she inherited something of his own will-power, together with a capability for passionate resentment and other qualities at the existence of which he could but guess.

He was all the more relieved at the thought that she would, by her brilliant marriage with the future Earl of Northborough, at once retrieve the mistake he himself had made twenty years ago in wedding Clare Carewe, and relieve his mind from all lurking anxiety on her account. Lord Carthew was evidently a man of originality and strength of purpose; even Sir Philip, who cherished a chronic contempt for nearly all his kind, was compelled to recognize this, and he congratulated himself heartily on his own sagacity in keeping as secret, even from herself, his daughter’s half humble origin.

After luncheon Lord Carthew, instead of joining his host in the smoking-room, repaired to the drawing-room, which Stella quitted almost as soon as he entered.

He noted her action, and erroneously attributed it to her natural modesty and shyness in not wishing his offer of marriage to be discussed before her mother. But in truth, Stella was not thinking of him at all. She merely wished to be alone that she might think over the emotions of the morning, and she had hardly given a moment’s thought to Lord Carthew and his proposal after that brief but momentous interview with Hilary Pritchard.

It was easy enough, so Lord Carthew found, to win Lady Cranstoun’s approval of the match. Seating himself near her sofa, he told her in a few well-chosen words of his love for her daughter, and the ruse he had practised in pleading his cause in his friend’s name.

“I can never understand my dear Stella’s extraordinary objections against wealth and position!” exclaimed Lady Cranstoun. “For my part I am delighted about the whole affair. I thought from the moment when I first saw you that you had the Douglas eyes. Do you know, with her strange opinions, I have always been nervous as to whom Stella would marry? She is so utterly unlike ordinary girls, you see, and I am the more relieved that it has all turned out so well.”

“Certainly I do,” returned Lady Cranstoun, opening her pale blue eyes in surprise. “Of course, as she says, she has not known you long enough to love you; but she has a very high regard for you, and you seem to have similar tastes. She even—I hope I am not betraying her confidence—but she even asked me if I should like to go for a voyage with you after you were married, and drew a most charming picture of the deck of a ship with all of us assembled there.”

A faint color came into the poor lady’s face as she spoke. The prospect of leaving the Chase, and her husband’s cold, tyrannical dislike, seemed to momentarily restore her lost youth and health. Lord Carthew was delighted at her encouraging words.

“There is no breach of confidence,” he said. “Your daughter said as much to me. I think I may consider myself as the happiest man in England at this moment.”

Meanwhile, under the trees of the same shrubbery where her grandfather, Hiram Carewe, was shot down and murdered nineteen years before, Stella Cranstoun walked, with feet that seemed hardly to touch the ground, her thoughts absorbed by Hilary. She would not think of the future. The fact that he loved her should be enough for her for one happy day at least, until she could hear from him.

Turning into a fresh glade, where the branches overarched above her, she came unexpectedly face to face with her father. The flush died from her cheeks, the light from her eyes. She bowed coldly and would have passed on, when he barred her progress with his arm.

“Wait!” he said. “I have something to ask you. What is this about a proposal of marriage made to you this morning by a Mr. Hilary Pritchard?”

She looked at him scornfully. She knew quite well that he was trying to deceive her.

“You have been misinformed,” she said. “The gentleman who asked me to marry him was Viscount Carthew.”

CHAPTER VIII.
AN OLD FRIEND.

Father and daughter faced each other under the delicate spring foliage, both pale, set, and determined.

“If Lord Carthew has done you the honor to ask you to marry him,” he said, “you will most certainly accept him.”

“That I shall never do,” she answered, her heart beating high with excitement at her own temerity.

“What imbecile school-girl freak is this?” he asked, harshly. “This morning you were encouraging him.”

“I did not know my own mind this morning,” she said, blushing deeply; “and I did not know Lord Carthew’s real position. He belongs to a class I greatly dislike.”

“He belongs to the class from which your husband will come, or you will die an old maid. You have been reared, trained, educated, solely for this end, and you will be presented at Court next month as Viscountess Carthew on her marriage.”

He took her roughly by the shoulder. He hated her proud, pale face, so like her dead mother’s at that moment that he could almost hear Clare’s voice speaking to him from the dead. He longed to strike those firmly shut lips, to bring a look of fear into those dauntless eyes. But he contented himself by gripping her shoulder with all his strength, so that for days afterward five dark bruise-marks showed the clutch of his cruel fingers.

“You have never yet set your will up in opposition to mine,” he said, in a low voice. “And I warn you not to try. In dealing with me it is better to bend, to avoid being broken. Go back to the house now, to your own room, and think over what I have said. Before this month is over you will marry Lord Carthew.”

Her voice rang out in clear defiance, accentuated a little by the sharp pain of his grasp upon her arm. He threw her roughly off, and proceeded on his walk through the grounds, while she retraced her steps, trembling with indignation and anger, toward the house. As she emerged from among the trees, she came upon Stephen Lee, the keeper. His face was flushed, and his eyes shone so strangely that the idea occurred to her that he must have been drinking, and she was walking quickly past him when he stopped her.

“I beg your pardon, miss. But may I make so bold as to ask whether he—Sir Philip, I mean—was hurting you in any way just now? It seemed to me he gripped your arm that tight he must have hurt you.”

“My father, do you mean?” Stella asked in cold surprise. “Certainly not, Stephen. Why did you ask such a thing?”

“Because,” answered Stephen, with a sudden half-suppressed savagery of manner, “if he laid a finger upon you to really hurt you like, I’d shoot him down like a dog!”

“You must be mad!” the girl exclaimed, with a fine mixture of pity and disdain. “Quite mad!”

“Maybe, miss. But not so mad as you think, and not so much beneath you as you think, neither. Anyway, I’m not too mad to have heard and understood every word as you and Sir Philip were saying just now under the trees. And if you are going to be tormented by this Lord Carthew as I shot in the shoulder—lord or no lord, I’d put another lot of shot through him as soon as look at him.”

Stella was intensely surprised by the man’s method of address, and still inclined to the belief that he had probably been drinking. But it occurred to her on the instant that there might be danger to the man she loved in allowing Stephen to continue in the dark as to his identity.

“The gentleman who was wounded by your clumsiness last night was not Lord Carthew, but a friend of his, named Mr. Pritchard,” she said. “And please understand, Stephen, that the interest you appear to take in my affairs is neither pleasant nor desirable to me. I must ask you to say no more on the subject, and not to offend in this way again.”

The young man ground his teeth with anger as she passed him on her way to the house, with heightened color, and her proud little head more erect than usual.

“I oughtn’t to ha’ said so much,” he muttered to himself, as he watched her. “But when I see the gray wolf grip her shoulder, I could ha’ murdered him. It would take her haughtiness down a bit to learn as she and me are second cousins, come of the same old gypsy stock. But Granny Sarah will tell her the truth some day, she swears, and bring her pride a peg lower. Sarah’s got some deep game in her wicked old head lately; I can see that by her nods and grins, and mutterings to herself. She and Uncle James are hatching a plot together, I’ll be bound; and between them they’ll serve the gray wolf out, if they swing for it!”

Lord Carthew was still chatting comfortably with Lady Cranstoun in the library when Stella returned to the house. On the floor above, she noticed in passing that the two rooms which had been used by Hilary were wide open and empty. Her heart sank at the sight, and she turned eagerly toward Margaret, whom she saw approaching down the corridor.

“Has he gone?” the girl asked, anxiously. “And when did he go? And oh, Margaret, do you think it was safe for him to be moved yet?”

“Of course it wasn’t safe,” the woman answered, rather crossly. “But, dear me, when young gentlemen get notions in their heads there’s no stopping them. If you’ll come into your room, miss, I notice the hem of your dress is frayed, and I’ll see to it for you.”

Stella passed into her bedroom, and Margaret, following her, carefully closed the door. Then she came over to where her young mistress stood, and whispered in her ear:

“There’s spies about. One can’t be too careful. Here’s a bit of a note was left for you. Read it, while I pretend to see to your dress.”

With trembling fingers, Stella tore open the envelope, and read the following words, written in pencil on a half-sheet of paper:

“Where has he gone, Margaret?” she whispered, while the tears started to her eyes. “To London, or to Yorkshire? Can you tell me?”

“He didn’t say a word, miss; but he seemed in a great hurry to get off. If I was you I wouldn’t trouble my head about him. Handsome is as handsome does, I say.”

“Surely he ought not to be alone. Lord Carthew should go after him!” Stella exclaimed. “I must speak to him!”

She made a quick movement toward the door, and then checked herself. It was impossible, she felt, to face Lord Carthew at this moment. She had forgotten until now her half-promise of the morning, but it recurred to her as she realized the difficulty of explaining to the Viscount the knowledge she possessed of Hilary’s movements. She must trust to chance for Lord Carthew to find out that his friend had left the house. Meantime, resentment against her father kept her from going downstairs lest she should meet him. Anxiety on Hilary’s account made her restless. Putting on her hat and cloak, she ran lightly downstairs at about five o’clock, and stealthily out by the front entrance. The wind had freshened, and a little rain was blown into her face. She hurried on beneath the thickly planted trees in the park, urged by she knew not what impulse, until, as she neared the lodge gates, she met coming in her direction a horsey-looking man, whom she at once recognized as the hostler of the inn where Hilary’s Black Bess and Lord Carthew’s chestnut cob were put up.

“Are you going to the house?” she asked. “Have you a message for some one? And has anything happened?”

“Well, miss, the fact is that Lord Carthew, one of the young gentleman as was staying up at the Chase, we think as he’d got a bit of fever over his wound, for about two o’clock this afternoon in he staggers to the inn-yard all alone, and pale as a co’pse. ‘Hullo, my lord, is it you?’ I begins, being the first to see him, when he cuts me short like, telling me it ain’t his name, and that he’s called plain Mr. Pritchard. Then he orders me to saddle Black Bess at once, and be quick about it. I thought he looked a bit queer and feverish, so I makes a long job of it, but I had to get it through at last. When mounted, he was that weak he could hardly hold the reins, but he chucks me a sovereign and rides out of the yard, sitting as upright as you or me could do—begging your pardon, miss. I felt sort of anxious about him, but I’d a deal of work on hand, being market-day in Grayling, when about an hour later who should come clattering back into the yard but bonny Black Bess, with her master hanging half unconscious over her neck, and his shoulder all covered with blood, owing to his wound having broken out again. I never did see a sensibler animal nor that mare. It’s my belief that Lord Carthew had nothing to do with it, but that that there animal’s own instinct told him to make the best of his way back to us. My master, he wanted to drive his lordship back here to the Chase, miss; but Lord Carthew, he was conscious by that time, and he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Send for a doctor,’ he said; ‘any one about here will do. Let him patch up this wretched scratch so that I can get on with my journey to London.’ So, as they couldn’t spare me, our boy was sent to Grayling in the cart to fetch Dr. Netherbridge, as has been settled in the town twenty years or more, and is a very good doctor as doctors go, though I don’t much believe in ’em myself. The boy he couldn’t find the doctor at first, and when at last he brings him, his lordship was pretty bad, particular when he was called by his own name. Dr. Netherbridge he takes the boss aside and asks him a few questions. Then he says, ‘Send some sensible person to the Chase to inform Lord Carthew’s friend of his condition.’ Says the boss, hemming and ha’ing, ‘Sir Philip’s my landlord,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want to be party to nothing that’ll put his back up. He’s a very difficult gentleman to deal with.’ Says Dr. Netherbridge, with a queer sort o’ smile to himself like, ‘I don’t need to be told,’ says he, ‘of what Sir Philip Cranstoun is like. I’ve had some dealings with him a good many years ago. Don’t send a message by a boy,’ he says, ‘but by some one you can trust.’ With that the boss asks me to do the office, as I ain’t specially afraid of anything, living or dead, miss, saving your presence, and away I comes.”

They were nearing the lodge gates now, Stella having turned in that direction as soon as the man had arrived at his recital of what had befallen Hilary.

“I will come with you,” she said, in tones that allowed of no opposition. “I must see how he is. He is my mother’s guest, and it was partly my fault that the accident happened to him. He stopped my horse last night, thinking it was running away with me, and one of the keepers fired to frighten him and accidentally hit him. And what he says about his name is not a proof of fever, but perfectly true. Lord Carthew, his friend, had changed names with him in jest; his name is Mr. Hilary Pritchard.”

“Well, young gentlemen are up to queer larks certainly,” the man observed, but Stella’s manner did not encourage him to talk, and she walked so fast that it was all he could do to hasten his slow, bow-legged, stableman’s gait sufficiently to keep up with her.

Dusk was falling fast as they reached the inn. Before the door stood the light cart in which the doctor had arrived, ready for his return journey. Already Stella was beginning to feel nervous and self-conscious, as she noted the curious glances of the farming folk gathered under the old-fashioned arched entrance to the yard. The bar stood on one side of the building, the coffee-room on the other; the latter room was empty as Miss Cranstoun was shown into it, and she glanced around in some curiosity. It was a low-ceilinged apartment of considerable antiquity, but marred and vulgarized by a cheap varnished paper above the dark wood wainscoting round the walls, by flaming gas-jets, the light from which flickered on colored prints of racing scenes and tradesmen’s calendars, and by a small, mean fireplace, totally inadequate to the size of the room.

A man’s gloves and walking-stick lay on the long wooden table, stained with the rings left by glasses and pots, and almost as soon as Stella entered the room a gentleman came in hastily to claim them.

The newcomer was short and pale, with brown hair and beard plentifully streaked with gray, and a face redeemed from plainness by thoughtful and penetrating blue eyes.

He came in with his hat on, but at sight of Stella he removed it, exclaiming as he did so, in evident surprise:

“I knew you directly, by your remarkable likeness to your mother,” he answered, and then suddenly stopped and blushed very red.

For he had seen the look of astonishment in her face, and remembered that every one in Grayling supposed Miss Cranstoun to be the daughter of Lady Gwendolen, a rumor which, as he had never seen the young lady, he was not in a position to discredit, though he often wondered what had been the fate of the infant girl whom he himself had seen conveyed to her father’s house and sent away from thence in the nurse’s care, one winter’s morning eighteen years ago.

The mystery was solved now. She stood there before him, a slimmer, more fairy-like, and more refined version of her mother; even her voice, in its rich, soft intonation, recalled to his mind the unhappy Clare Lady Cranstoun.

“No one has ever called me like my mother before,” she was saying. “I did not know you had ever met her. She is a great invalid.”

“A man from the stables here met me in the park,” she answered, her color rising high, “and told me of an accident to a gentleman who was staying at our house last night. I suppose you know all about it—about how it happened, I mean, and how the wound broke out again. You have just come from seeing him, have you not? How is he? Pray tell me!”

Dr. Ernest Netherbridge was a man of extremely observant mind, and he drew his own conclusions from the evident interest shown by the young lady before him for the handsome young giant upstairs.

“He is very feverish, and has a nasty wound in the shoulder, which has not been improved by the shaking and jolting he has gone through to-day. I understand that he was your father’s guest last night?”

“My father has never seen him; he only returned home to-day, and Mr. Pritchard left before luncheon. He seemed very anxious to get back to London,” faltered Stella, conscious that she was blushing crimson under the steady gaze of Dr. Netherbridge’s blue eyes. “You have not told me yet whether there is any danger, and whether—whether I can see him.”

“I should not say there was any absolute danger except the risk that fever might supervene after the very unwise exertions of to-day. I intended going myself to Grayling to fetch a reliable nurse of my acquaintance. As to seeing him——” he paused, and looked at her doubtfully. “May I ask,” he inquired, abruptly, “whether the sight of you is likely to disturb him?”

“It might perhaps excite him a little,” she stammered; “but I would be very quiet, and would not speak more than you let me.”

“I am afraid it would be inadvisable,” said the little doctor, shaking his head. “Quiet is so essential. With rest and care, and obedience to orders, he ought to be as right as possible within a week. But any excitement to-night might produce the worst possible effect.”

“Dr. Netherbridge,” she said, humbly, “I have an idea that I shall not have another opportunity of seeing Mr. Pritchard, perhaps, for a very long time. If I write something on a slip of paper, will you let him have it when he is better, and will you yourself tell him that I came, and that I may not be allowed to do so again? And may I see him just for one moment, without his seeing me?”

“He was sitting in an arm-chair when I left him,” he said. “He had refused strenuously to go to bed, and persisted in declaring he must get on to London to-night. If you will promise not to let your presence be known, you might come with me now, and see him at least.”

She stole up the stairs after the doctor, her heart beating wildly. Before a half-open door on the floor above he paused, and beckoned to her to join him. She was so much taller than he that she easily saw over his shoulder into the room. Hilary was leaning back in an old chintz-covered arm-chair. His coat was half off, and his wounded arm was resting in a sling fastened round his neck. His eyes were closed, and his brows contracted as if in pain. Tears rolled down Stella’s face as she looked at him. The room was lit by a single candle, and where she stood she was in semi-darkness, and undistinguishable. Something seemed to tell her that it might be long, very long, before she looked upon his face again, and that this love which had so suddenly sprung up within her heart was destined to be “tried by pain” indeed. A sob rose in her throat, and turning quickly away, that it might not be overheard by Hilary, she groped her way down to the coffee-room through her tears, and taking pen and paper from a side table, she scribbled the following lines:

She folded the note, placed it in an envelope addressed to “Hilary Pritchard, Esq.,” and placed it in Dr. Netherbridge’s hands.

“You are surely not returning to the Chase alone? It must be half an hour’s walk, and it is so late.”

“Twenty minutes, as I walk it. And it isn’t half-past six yet. I will send Lord Carthew to his friend. Good-night!”

Before he could say another word she had fled from the room, passed swiftly out from the arched entrance to the inner yard on to the road, and disappeared in a bend of the way, leaving Dr. Netherbridge to ponder on the strange chance which had made him acquainted with the girl whom he had first seen as a helpless infant of not more than two days old, more than eighteen years before.

CHAPTER IX.
THE GYPSY’S PROPHECY.

“Let me cross your hand with a bit of silver, my pretty lady! Let me tell your fortune, deary—all about the fair young gentleman you love so true, and the dark one you won’t have, for all his gold and rank.”

The words, uttered in a hoarse, croaking voice close to Stella’s ear, as she sped through the trees of the park in the darkness, made her start and utter a little cry of fright. The terms, too, were so strangely appropriate to her own circumstances that it seemed as though they were spoken in response to her thoughts. Turning in considerable alarm, she perceived a few steps behind her the small, bent form of a very old woman, in appearance almost a centenarian, wrapped in a hooded cloak of some dark woollen material. From under the scattered white locks straying over her wrinkled brow an extraordinarily brilliant pair of eyes gleamed out, belying her apparent decrepitude, and carrying out still further the weird and witch-like effect of her whole appearance as she stood before Stella, leaning heavily on a stick, with skinny, trembling fingers.

Stella Cranstoun possessed the instinctive reverence for age which exists in all generous-minded young people. The uncanny appearance of the old woman considerably startled her in her overwrought state of mind; but she easily forgot her temporary alarm in an unselfish fear as to what might befall the aged creature before her should Sir Philip chance to hear of her presence within his grounds.

“Are you a gypsy?” Stella asked, stopping short, and looking fixedly at the old woman.

“Ay, my deary; I’m a gypsy, sure enough. Old Sarah is a true Romany. But the Romanys are your friends, my pretty. You’ve got no call to be afraid of them.”

“Do you know who I am, then?” the young girl asked, fascinated in spite of herself by those strangely bright eyes.

Sarah Carewe burst into a hoarse, mirthless laugh, which reminded Stella more of a raven’s croak than of the ordinary way of expressing amusement.

“Do I know my Clare’s girl when I see her?” she asked. “My Clare, that died in my arms when you was a little, helpless baby. You’ve got her eyes, my pretty, and her face; for all you’re not so round and dimber as she was in her prime.”

“You are making some mistake,” Stella said. “I am the daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun, of the Chase. If you want money I will give you what I have about me with pleasure; but you must get out of the park as soon as possible, for my father is dreadfully bitter against tramps and gypsies, especially gypsies.”

“Sallah!” she muttered, under her breath; and although Stella did not understand her, she easily guessed that the expression conveyed a malediction. “He’s hard on us, is he? Let him wait a bit.” Then, changing suddenly to a wheedling tone, she begged again to be allowed to tell Stella’s fortune. In vain the girl pressed money upon her, and tried by warnings and entreaties to get rid of her, while she hurried on toward the house. Old Sarah was not to be shaken off, and professed herself fearless as to the consequences which might befall her if seen by one of Sir Philip’s keepers. Stella began to be seriously frightened at length lest the woman might come to some harm, knowing her father’s orders.

“Now, pray, take this half-sovereign,” she urged, “and go back out of the park at once. In a few seconds we shall be in sight of the house, and the dogs are trained to fly at any one who is not smartly dressed. And only yesterday Stephen Lee, one of the keepers, shot a gentleman, who was accidentally trespassing, in the shoulder, and wounded him very seriously.”

“Don’t I know, my pretty? And isn’t Stephen Lee son to my own daughter’s child, and am I not his old mami? He won’t hurt me, never fear. Cross my hand with the bit of gold, and I’ll go.”

In order to rid herself of her, as it was now close on the dinner-hour at the Chase, Stella let her soft white hand be clutched within Sarah’s lean fingers, and stood watching, impatient, and yet a little interested in spite of herself, as the gypsy took a box of matches and a dirty end of candle from her pocket, and peered into her victim’s palm under the lightly falling rain.

“I see a prison, my deary, and a marriage forced upon you—marriage with a dark gentleman, who loves you, dear, and who is a great lord; but your heart is given to the fair man. I see starvation and a death, and only one way of help for you.”

She droned the words monotonously, as though some inner force were dictating them to her, doubtless a trick of her trade, but none the less impressive to an imaginative young girl.

“You must ask your own people to save you,” said the old woman, raising the forefinger of her right hand impressively. “Only the Romanys can help you. Trust no one else, and when despair comes, send this token to me—to old Sarah Carewe, that held you in her arms when you first opened your eyes on this wicked world.”

Suddenly blowing out the candle, she fumbled in her pocket, and then thrust into Stella’s hand what appeared to be a small silver coin strung on a piece of dirty red silk cord.

“When you want my help,” she said, “give this to Stephen Lee, and I will save you. You shall marry the man you love, and live a life of freedom and happiness, as a Romany doxy should; and the black lord and the gray wolf may go hang together. Good-night, my pretty. Beenship rat. And remember old Sarah!”

She waved her shrivelled hand in token of parting benediction, and slunk away among the trees with a swiftness astonishing in a woman of her years, leaving Stella, with her brain filled by bewildering questions and ideas, to make the best of her way to the house.

The first dinner-bell had already rung as she entered her room to dress for dinner. The lady’s maid, who attended both upon her and Lady Cranstoun, was full of comments upon her moist dress and boots.

“Dear me, miss! how wet your things are! And you seem all flushed as though you had hurried. I do hope you won’t have taken a chill.”

Stella disliked the girl—a tall, shifty-eyed creature, with a retreating chin and a tendency to gossip, who had only been in Sir Philip’s service a short time.

“Don’t waste time in remarks, Ellen,” she said, quietly, “but help me into my white silk dress.”

Fortunately, she was able to enter the dining-room at a quarter past seven, on the last stroke of the gong, but by the peculiarly cold and evil gleam of Sir Philip’s eyes as they rested upon her she knew that he was already greatly angered against her. This she attributed to the fact of their conversation in the shrubbery that morning; but what she did not guess at was a certain short interview which had taken place between her father and the housemaid Dakin a few minutes before dinner, while Lady Cranstoun and Lord Carthew were still dressing for that meal.

Dakin knew that Sir Philip, who carried punctuality to an excess extremely uncomfortable for other people, would be in his study long before dinner; she therefore tapped at the door discreetly, and on being admitted, stated that she had “something to say which she thought Sir Philip might like to hear.”

She was a plain, sallow-faced woman of forty, with a slight cast in her dark eyes, and extremely quiet in dress and manner, and she stood, rolling a little corner of her snowy muslin apron over and over in her fingers while she spoke.

“It was before lunch, sir,” she said, in a low, apologetic voice. “I was passing along the corridor, when, as I was walking by the rooms of the young gentleman that was wounded, and that first of all called himself Lord Carthew, what did I see by accident, but——”

“Spare me all this circumlocution, Mrs. Dakin. You were spying, as I pay you to do, and you saw—what?”

“Only Miss Stella, sir, hugging and kissing the young gentleman,” returned Dakin, with humble vindictiveness.

“Mr. Pritchard, sir, that got his arm shot. You didn’t see him, I think. He was very big and very handsome, and he was calling Miss Stella his dear and his darling, which, begging your pardon, sir, she seemed quite to like and encourage him.”

Sir Philip muttered an oath under his breath, and stamped his heel on the carpet.

“After, sir; oh, some time after. Miss Cranstoun had had time to change into her serge housedress. Indeed, it was just before luncheon, for it was the first luncheon-bell that gave them a fright. You see, sir, it was rather indiscreet, for they stood in the sitting-room quite near the door, which was wide open, so as I couldn’t help seeing them.”

“He said he would write, sir, and then he kissed her again, and she him; and they said good-by. And during luncheon he went away, after giving me orders not to tell any one he had gone until an hour or two had passed, and half a sovereign. And he gave a pound to Margaret, and two letters, one for Lady Cranstoun, and one for Lord Carthew.”

“I placed them on the dressing-tables in Lady Cranstoun’s and in Lord Carthew’s rooms, sir. But neither of them went upstairs after lunch until just now to dress for dinner.”

“Not so far as I know, sir. Directly after lunch Miss Cranstoun went out in the grounds for a short time. Then she came back to her own room, but she wasn’t there at six o’clock, as I found out from her maid, who couldn’t tell me what had become of her.”

He almost trembled with apprehension during the few minutes of Dakin’s absence. Her news had very seriously disturbed him, coming as it did after Stella’s defiant declaration in the shrubbery that she would never marry Lord Carthew. Her words, taken by themselves, had affected him but little; but in conjunction with the fact that she had had the audacity and the folly to choose a lover for herself, they became very serious indeed. Was it possible that she had already actually eloped with this farmer’s son, whom she had only met for the first time yesterday evening? Was all his cunning concealment of her mother’s humble origin to be wasted if once the wild gypsy blood in her had a chance of asserting itself? Was his name to be disgraced, after the pains he had taken to clear it from all possible taint of his miserable first marriage? That old gypsy hag, when she cursed him before the court-house eighteen years ago, had prophesied that his children should bring disgrace upon his name. Were her words coming true already?

“I listened outside the bedroom door, sir,” the woman said, “and Ellen was dressing Miss Cranstoun, and remarking that her serge gown and her boots are wet. So she must have been out walking.”

Sir Philip was puzzled. Could the fellow be hanging about the grounds still? he wondered. But if he wished to make love to Stella, why had he, hampered as he was by a wounded limb, already left the shelter of the Chase?

“Understand,” he said, to the woman, sternly, “I am extremely annoyed that you should have let Miss Cranstoun give you the slip this afternoon. Every movement of hers must be watched at this point and reported tome. Either you or the lady’s maid, Ellen, must dog her footsteps everywhere. She must never be again allowed to leave the house alone.”

At dinner Lord Carthew informed his host that he was much disturbed by a letter he had just read which had been left for him by his friend.

“I dropped into his sitting-room a little before luncheon,” he explained, “and found him lying, fully dressed, asleep on the sofa. I didn’t like to disturb him, and half hoped to see him at lunch. After lunch, I was so pleasantly employed talking to Lady Cranstoun, chiefly about you, Miss Stella, that the afternoon flew by I can’t tell how. Then when I went just now to see my friend, I found that he had flown, leaving only a note in which he asks me to make his excuses to Lady Cranstoun, and to thank her for her kindness, but that as he is quite well, he will not trespass upon it any longer, but will at once return to London, where a doctor of his acquaintance will soon set him up again.”

“Mr. Pritchard left a note for me also,” put in Lady Cranstoun, “in which he said much the same thing. It seems so curious that he should have been our guest, and yet that I have never seen him. But I very much hope that he will come to no hurt through making a move so suddenly. He is a very dear friend of yours, is he not?” She turned to Lord Carthew with almost an affectionate touch in her manner. She was slightly flushed this evening, and her pale blue eyes positively shone. It had always been a subject of dread with her lest her beloved Stella should be forced into some marriage totally distasteful to her by her father’s tyranny. But her short interview with Stella that morning, and her long talk with Lord Carthew in the afternoon, had convinced her that here was the ideal husband for her daughter—rich, titled, a connection of her own, and at the same time intellectual, generous, affectionate, and of a singularly high character. His manner to her was perfect. After so many wretched years of slighting and snubbing and terrorizing which she had patiently endured from her husband, the gentle deference and kindly sympathy of Lord Carthew came to her as something altogether new and delightful. If only she herself at Stella’s age had had the good fortune to secure the affection of such a man, she felt that her lot would have been different indeed. Knowing something, too, of the volcanic depths of Stella’s nature, of her determination, her impulsiveness, and her powers of loving and hating in what seemed to poor Lady Cranstoun an exaggerated and incomprehensible degree, her motherly heart was the more rejoiced that a man of originality and evident force of character had seen fit to throw the handkerchief to her.

What Lady Cranstoun, unfortunately, altogether failed to take into account was that strange magnetism which occasional members of opposite sexes exercise over each other, not always with the happiest results. Beautiful, luckless Clare Carewe had aroused such a passion in the breast of even the cold and calculating Sir Philip twenty years ago, and at the present moment Sir Philip’s daughter was consumed by just such an unreasoning and overwhelming love for Hilary Pritchard, who, after all, had done little more than look into her eyes, speak somewhat disparagingly about her, catch her in his arms in that one mad embrace, and then leave the house, apparently without the wish or the intention to see her again. Hilary had neither rank, nor fortune, nor family; he was not Lord Carthew’s equal in intelligence, nor was he a man of such original and large-minded views. He had sometimes flirted with nice and pretty girls of his acquaintance, but he had seldom devoted much thought to any woman, a good run to hounds being in his opinion far better than the most fascinating courtship, and no woman in the world the equal of his mare, Black Bess.

As to marriage, Hilary had no wish for such a binding and fettering arrangement for many years to come. There was the Canadian legacy to be made into a profitable investment first. In time, no doubt, a wife and children would be nice to come home to on winter evenings, but he had scarcely ever regarded even their remote possibilities except as so much more or less ornamental and expensive furniture in his future homestead.

He had not meant to fall in love with Stella Cranstoun. Nothing was, in fact, further from his thoughts than to fall in love with anybody. Against his will, her personality affected him, and from the moment when he laid his hand upon her bridle-rein until he parted from her in the corridor, through all the physical pain of his wound, the thought of her beauty haunted his mind, try as he would to cast it out. She was altogether unsuited to him, and marriage with her would be impossible. What was there in common between the granddaughter of a Duke, the child of one of the proudest men in England, and himself, the son of a plain yeoman, of neither family nor fortune?

Stella, of course, could not guess that this was her lover’s state of mind, but something of it she gathered from Lord Carthew’s talk when, in answer to Lady Cranstoun’s inquiry as to whether Hilary was a particular friend of his, he said, warmly:

“I am extremely attached to him. I attribute his sudden departure to-day to his intense independence of character, which he sometimes carries even to an aggressive extent. He was very angry over what he chose to consider as the false position in which he was placed by my whim in changing names with him, for which trick I have not yet sufficiently apologized to you or to Miss Cranstoun.”

He turned eagerly to Stella as he spoke, but she rewarded him only by a frigid bend of the head.

“I have already told you,” he went on, a little chilled by her manner, “of my disgust at the snobbishness of those people who, because of my superior rank, loaded me with attentions, and almost ignored the existence of my handsome friend. At a house where we recently visited, four pretty girls, set on, I suppose, by their parents, hardly so much as talked to him, and made a dead set at me. Now, this was ridiculously unnatural, for my friend is the most superbly handsome man I have ever seen, a giant in height, and one of the finest athletes in the University, with a face, too, which cannot fail to attract women, to whom, however, I must own, he is extremely indifferent.”

“Your friend, then,” interposed Sir Philip, who was keenly watching the effect of this talk upon his daughter, “has no intention of marrying at present, I presume?”

“So far from it,” Lord Carthew returned, “he has not the slightest wish to settle down in matrimony for many years to come. He has the bad taste, indeed, not to think about women at all; which is, perhaps,” he added, with a laugh, “considering Hilary’s remarkable natural advantages, a very good thing for us plain little fellows.”

CHAPTER X.
FATHER AND DAUGHTER.

Lord Carthew spoke as he did of his friend’s prospects and intentions with perfect frankness and loyalty, never for one moment suspecting the effect which his words might produce in the mind of Stella Cranstoun.

He really believed that Hilary had the bad taste to dislike that young lady, and he was certainly not ill-pleased by such a manifestation of feeling on the part of his handsome friend. Not for an instant did the suspicion cross his mind that two persons present were listening with intense, even breathless, interest to his careless words.

“I must go up to town the first thing to-morrow morning,” he said, presently, “to find out how Hilary is. Of course he is enormously strong, but for that very reason he is the more likely to overestimate his powers of recuperation. Early in the autumn he will be going out to settle in Canada on a farm which has been left to him, and I believe he proposes to spend some years there, so that we shall not long have a chance of being together. He is a capital business man, as long-headed and keen-sighted over a bargain as most Yorkshiremen are, and I have no doubt that he will carry out his expressed determination, and make the property pay.”

“By which time, probably, he will modify his views on the marriage state sufficiently to permit of his mating with some honest, robust person in his own rank of life, who will rear for him a squarely built and solid brood of Anglo-Canadian olive-branches,” remarked Sir Philip, still with his eyes furtively watching his daughter.

“Here is to your friend the farmer’s health and prosperity,” he added, sipping his brown sherry with the air of a connoisseur. “A man in that position is very wise in deferring marriage as long as possible. In the case of the lower middle-class, too often ‘a young man married is a man that’s marred.’ ”

“One must always take Anne Hathaway into consideration when one recalls Shakespeare’s reflections on the marriage state,” observed Lord Carthew. “A man who at eighteen marries a woman of six-and-twenty, beneath him in rank, and of questionable character, is hardly likely to entertain a high opinion of wedded life. Speaking for myself, I have always looked forward with out-of-date eagerness and interest to the day when I should bring home my bride. And I am most anxious to see my father and mother on the subject at the present time.”

His eyes rested lovingly upon Stella, but as he had not directly used her name, she could hardly utter a disclaimer. The blood rushed to her cheeks as she realized that she was being placed in a wrong position altogether. Lord Carthew treated her, spoke to her, and alluded to her, as though there were some compact between them; and yet, as she had promised nothing, there was nothing to retract. If she were to assure him again privately, after dinner, that she did not love him, that would but be repeating what she had said to him before; he had said that he did not expect her love, and was glad to be content as yet with merely her liking. How could she say:

“This morning I hardly knew that I had fallen in love with your friend at first sight, and I believed he disliked me extremely; also, the prospect of an escape from the Chase, and from my father’s tyranny, for both my mother and myself, seemed too good to be missed. But after you had spoken to me, and I had more than half encouraged you, your friend kissed me, and instantly I knew that I loved him with all my heart, as he loved me, and that marriage with you was absolutely impossible.”

Clearly she could not make such a statement, especially in the face of what Lord Carthew himself had said of Hilary’s rooted aversion against marriage, together with the significant fact of his hasty departure from the Chase, without so much as telling her in so many words that he loved her.

Stella was intensely miserable that evening. Every now and then she told herself, in passionate self-reproach, that hers was the fault, that Hilary had not loved her, had not meant to kiss her. It was merely, as he himself had said, like a part of his dream; it was that little gesture of hers toward him which had hastened that one quick embrace of which he had already so plainly repented. She almost cried aloud in humiliation at the thought, and the blushes coursed over her cheeks under her lowered lashes so swiftly and unaccountably that poor Lord Carthew was to be pardoned if he began to lay the dear delight to his soul that she was thinking of him. Of what else, indeed, could she be thinking? he asked himself, as he noted her evident abstraction, her strange reserve, and those sudden changes of color.

When Lady Cranstoun and Stella retired to the drawing-room, the former, settling herself upon her sofa, motioned to the young girl to draw her low stool up beside her, and tenderly stroked her hair.

“I am so glad, my dear,” she murmured, while her gentle eyes filled with tears, “so very, very glad. And I like him extremely. He is the ideal son I always wished to have. I cannot tell you what a relief it all is to my mind. He is my own relation, too. I have not felt so happy for many, many years.”

“Ah, my child, you know well enough. And now I will tell you something, dear; if I have often seemed rather selfish in the way in which I have taken care of myself, and tried to avoid excitement and ward off attacks of illness, it has been because of my awful dread of leaving you with him—your father. Heaven knows, I have been always a poor companion for a lovely, bright, young girl, and not much protection for you against his anger. But still, you have always felt, have you not, that your mother was with you, that she loved you, and sympathized with you, and suffered with you? You have never felt the bitter loneliness of being without a friend to love you among enemies? When I have been feeling tired, ill, and worn out, I have said to myself, ‘I must not give way; I must not die until my Stella is happily provided for.’ I could not die and leave you with him. But now if, as Lord Carthew suggests, the marriage takes place almost immediately—and, indeed, what is there to hinder it?—I shall have my mind at peace, knowing that you will be safe under the protection of a good man’s love. I can die quietly, happily, and thankfully, remembering that.”

“Don’t, don’t talk about dying!” cried Stella, bursting into a flood of tears, and covering Lady Cranstoun’s wasted hands with kisses. “I could not lose you—you must not die! And—and I don’t love Lord Carthew. I never shall. I know he is good and clever, and all that you say, but—but I cannot marry him!”

“Don’t, darling, for my sake, be capricious any more,” she whispered. “As to disliking him because he is a viscount instead of a farmer, as you thought at first, that is foolish and beneath you. You are only joking, my dear, are you not? You would not disappoint me so bitterly, after all our talk this morning, about that voyage to the Cape, and how I was to come and stay with you, and—and——”

The words died upon her lips. An ashen gray tint spread over her face, and she fell back among her cushions in a fainting-fit. Her feeble frame was not equal to the strain of the day’s excitement, culminating in the shock of Stella’s refusal to carry out the contract to which she seemed so willing a party in the morning, and on which Lady Cranstoun had set her heart.

Stella overwhelmed herself with reproaches as she assisted Margaret to restore the invalid to consciousness. The gentlemen were still in the dining-room; they were, indeed, discussing the question of marriage settlements in a highly amicable manner. But to Stella’s great relief, Dr. Morland Graham returned from town just at the moment when his patient recovered consciousness, and by his advice she was taken off to bed, where she soon fell asleep, worn out by the fatigue and excitement of the day.

“I want to talk to you about your dear mamma,” said Dr. Graham, in his most benevolent professional manner, as he accompanied Miss Cranstoun back to the drawing-room. “I don’t think even you quite realize her extreme weakness. Her heart is in such an enfeebled state that she must on no account be exposed to the slightest shock. She may die in a fainting-fit similar to the one she had to-night, and the finest medical skill in the world would not save her. She must not be thwarted or disappointed, if her life is to be prolonged, say for a year or two longer. May I ask whether there was any apparent reason for her last seizure?”

“Yes,” answered Stella, after a moment’s hesitation. “We—we were talking about an offer of marriage which I have just received.”

“Indeed! That is most interesting. May I be allowed to congratulate you? And who is the happy man?”

“Wait, please! The man is Lord Carthew, who for some silly freak changed names with his friend when he came here last night.”

“The young gentleman did not deceive me,” he said, complacently. “I know Lord Northborough well, and the family likeness between him and his son is remarkable.”

“Apparently,” said the young lady, angrily, “I was the only person whom it was deemed necessary to deceive. In the name of Pritchard, Lord Carthew asked me to marry him, and I told him I would think about it. I did think about it, and I decided against him, but in the mean time he had had interviews with my father and mother in which he appears to have presented himself in the light of an accepted suitor. But I haven’t the slightest intention of marrying him. In fact,” she added, vigorously, “the very idea of it makes me hate him!”

“I really,” began the doctor, “can see nothing in the young gentleman’s manners or style to justify your dislike——”

“It isn’t that!” she interrupted, eagerly. “Dr. Graham, you are a clever man—you understand men and women. Don’t you know quite well that it is possible to like people very much as friends, but to loathe them in the suggested capacity of husbands or wives?”

“Certainly, certainly. But in this case the match appears so exceptionally happy—however, the subject in discussion is your mamma’s health. You tell me you were talking over the proposed marriage with her. I suppose that she is in favor of it?”

“She has set her heart upon it,” said Stella, with a sigh. “And as soon as I told her my objections she fainted.”

“One thing is quite certain,” said Dr. Graham, emphatically. “If you wish to preserve her life, you must at least affect to fall in with her views for the present.”

“But they want to marry me off at once,” she cried, desperately, “even before I am presented at Court!”

“Well, well!” returned the doctor, soothingly, “I shouldn’t think your fate such a very hard one, after all. The Earl of Northborough is one of the most distinguished statesmen in England, in high favor at Court, with a wife who brought him about a million, and Lord Carthew is the only son. All the beautiful and well-bred girls in London have been setting their caps at him for the past two years.”

“You don’t understand!” she cried. “These things are nothing, less than nothing, to me. So far from coveting wealth and rank, I would avoid them. My ideal of marriage is quite—quite different.”

“I can understand two things, Miss Stella,” he answered, gravely; “caprice on the one hand, and duty on the other.”

“The daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun and granddaughter of the Duke of Lanark is not in a position to marry for mere caprice any person she may happen to take a fancy to,” he said. “Noblesse oblige. You must keep up the traditions of your family and marry some one in your own rank of life. It is a duty which you owe to your family, your training, and your parents. In your case, the duty is all the more clearly marked out for you, as Lady Cranstoun’s health depends entirely upon your fulfilment of her clearly expressed wishes; if you disappoint her in her very natural and loving wish to see you happily married to so intellectual and high-minded a nobleman as Lord Carthew, her death may lie at your door.”

Stella rose from her chair and walked away from him toward the window. She felt that a net was being drawn about her feet, and her former liking for Lord Carthew turned to a resentful dislike. With her heart throbbing in her bosom at the very thought of another man, with every fibre of her being tingling with passionate love for him, how could she tamely endure the suggestions that, even for her mother’s sake, she must marry Lord Carthew? It was useless to reason with her. The gypsy Carewe blood in her veins was burning with unreasoning passion. She loved Hilary Pritchard, loved him with such unquestioning ardor that she would only too gladly have left her home that night to follow him, penniless and barefooted, throughout the world. Arguments were wasted upon such a nature. There was no trace of the cold and proud Douglas element in her temperament; eccentric, strong-willed Cranstoun, and wild, lawless Carewe had united to produce this strange, half-tamed creature, with only a coating of education and repressive training over the primeval passions, the wandering instincts, and the marked rebellion against all constituted authority which characterize her race.

All the gypsy in her was dominant to-night as, with flushed cheeks and glittering eyes, she went up to her harp, and striking a few effective chords, sat down before it, and broke into a Hungarian air, which had greatly taken her fancy among some new music which had arrived from town during her father’s absence. Perhaps her strange meeting with old Sarah Carewe had put the thought of the gypsy race into her head; or else it was that in her present excitable, rebellious, and agitated mood, the wild Zingari music appealed to her feelings; certain it is that she threw all the repressed intensity of her nature into the song. She was an excellent musician, and played from memory, suggesting the air, now wild, now plaintive, by a succession of chords. The words, too, a lament supposed to be uttered by a dying “Egyptian,” chimed in with her own frame of mind sufficiently well to enable her to throw her whole soul into her voice.

Even that well-regulated person, Dr. Morland Graham, was astonished and excited by her performance. How came the daughter of Lady Gwendolen to possess such dramatic intensity and fire? he asked himself, while the girl’s sweet soprano notes clove the air, and the strange wailing pathos of her tones brought actual tears to his eyes.

Two other listeners had entered the room. Stella sang on, unheeding them, while Lord Carthew watched her, entranced in admiration, and her father regarded her with a heavy scowl of intense disapprobation.

The picture she made, sitting there in her slender, girlish beauty, her cheeks pale with excitement, her eyes aglow, her dusky hair framing her small, sensitive face, and that sweet, pathetic voice ringing out the wild love, the longing for liberty, and the loneliness of the dying gypsy—all these things, which filled the other two men present with wondering admiration, irritated Sir Philip beyond measure. How dared she sing gypsy songs in his presence? Above all, how dared she reveal in her singing that warm southern nature which he so strongly mistrusted, and the possession of which in his daughter he regarded as something in the light of a disgrace?

The song ceased. The singer drooped her head, as though exhausted by the effort, while her fingers still lingered about the strings. A burst of applause, coming simultaneously from Lord Carthew and Dr. Graham, caused her to start violently. She had completely forgotten that she was not quite alone.

“I have never heard singing like yours,” the young viscount said, coming to her side. “You made me cry, and I am not very easily moved. It is not only your voice which is lovely, but your expression. Do you know what you made me think of as you sat there, telling of your longing for fresh air and freedom, and the joys of life?”

“Of that line I told you of this morning, when Tennyson’s heroine saw the lovers pass:

She looked up at him, and smiled involuntarily. He certainly understood at least a portion of what was in her mind.

“Your daughter is a most accomplished musician, and a beautiful singer,” Dr. Graham was saying to Sir Philip.

“I do not approve of that class of song,” Sir Philip’s rasping voice made answer. “It is theatrical and tawdry in sentiment, and in my opinion not a song for a gentlewoman to sing.”

Stella glanced at her father. Seeing that he appeared to be engaged in conversation by Dr. Graham, she resolved to tell Lord Carthew that his friend Hilary Pritchard was not in London, but lying at the inn near the lodge gates of the Chase.

“I have something I want to say to you,” she began, speaking very softly, lest her father might overhear her. But she was not quick enough for the gray wolf. In an instant he had left the doctor and joined her.

“I understand,” he said, addressing Lord Carthew with an affectation of geniality, “that you are a good chess-player. Dr. Graham here is a great authority on chess, and one of the best players in London. Will you and he have a game while I go with my daughter to see how my wife is now?”

His guests could do no less than follow his suggestion, while Stella, her heart beating fast with apprehension, followed her father out of the room.

CHAPTER XI.
AN OLD STORY.

In the study, Sir Philip Cranstoun assumed his favorite position, with his back to the fire, and his feet planted firmly on the hearth-rug.

Stella stood at a little distance, her hands folded over the back of a tall, carved oak chair. Looking at her under his heavy black eyebrows, her father was instantly reminded of another scene which had taken place in that same house more than eighteen years ago, on the night when Clare Lady Cranstoun first learned of her father’s murder.

“I called you in here,” the Baronet began, abruptly, “to speak of your forthcoming marriage.”

Stella tightened her lips, and held fast to the back of the chair, but she did not speak.

“Your forthcoming marriage,” reiterated Sir Philip, “with my friend, Lord Carthew.”

“Carthew is noted for his eccentricity,” he sneered. “Hence, no doubt, his lucky admiration for you. Very few men would have forgiven the exhibition you made of yourself just now over that silly and vulgar song.”

The color came faintly into her cheeks, but she still kept silent. Silence was her best weapon against her father, as she knew well.

“The marriage will take place early in May,” he proceeded; “so you must make your preparations, and name a date for the ceremony not later than the sixteenth of the month. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” she answered, raising her eyes at length, and steadily meeting his gaze, “I hear you; but I shall not marry Lord Carthew.”

“You will marry him,” he said, a dark flush spreading under his pallid skin. “So surely as you stand there you will marry him!”

Her voice rang out now clear and sharp, and into her fair face came a look of dogged resistance, at sight of which Sir Philip’s smouldering wrath broke into a flame.

“You will do as I tell you!” he swore, the veins in his forehead starting into ugly prominence. “You, a beggar’s brat, born in a hovel, dare to set your will against mine! You should by rights be tramping from door to door at the heels of some filthy caravan, selling brooms, and stealing chickens, with a hedge to sleep under, and the police on your track! Do you know what you are—you, with your white face, and your defiant airs and graces, who do not consider an earl’s son good enough for you, but must needs disgrace yourself by a servant-girl flirtation in the corridor with a man who will make your folly a smoking-room jest? You think yourself a duke’s grandchild, a Douglas by descent, and daughter to my wife, Lady Gwendolen. But you came into this world some months before I ever saw that lady; you were born in a miserable cabin, and your mother was a wayside tramp, a common gypsy!”

He hurled the words at her with stinging emphasis. She stood before him, pale as ashes, her eyes distended, quivering in every limb. But for the support of the chair she would have fallen to the ground. A hundred little incidents seemed to start simultaneously to prominence in her mind as she listened to him, chief among them being the old fortune-teller’s assurance that she was a “Romany,” and that the gypsies would befriend her.

Stephen Lee, too, through whom she was to communicate if necessary with old Sarah, had he not told her only that day that there was not so much difference between her rank and his as she supposed? And Dr. Netherbridge’s strange recognition of her by her “likeness to her mother,” was not that also a link in the chain?

The room seemed to rock round her, and the ground to give way under her feet. Something told her that her father was speaking the truth, and her heart contracted with pain as she realized that gentle, affectionate Lady Cranstoun, from whom she had received the only tenderness and kindness which had as yet warmed her young life, might not really be her mother after all.

But whatever she felt, however great her astonishment, dismay, and even horror at his words, it was chiefly necessary to retain her self-control, and no cry, no exclamation escaped her lips as she mutely waited for her father to say more.

“When my wife, Lady Gwendolen, lost her child,” Sir Philip went on, mercilessly, “you were sent for and admitted into this house on sufferance, lest she should lose her reason. The poor, weak-witted thing chose to believe that you were hers, and partly to humor her, partly to conceal your disgraceful origin, I allowed the deception to be kept up until now. You would never have known from what beggar’s stock you sprang but from your folly and pride, which to me, who know the truth about your origin, is equally offensive and ridiculous.”

“Will you tell me one thing?” she asked, in an unnaturally steady voice. “You say I am not Lady Cranstoun’s child; am I yours?”

She could not keep the eagerness she felt out of her tones. He glanced at her curiously, ignoring her reason for the question.

“Not yours?” she cried, a ray of unmistakable relief flashing into her face. “Not yours! Oh, thank Heaven!”

In an instant he saw his mistake. The thought that she owed him neither reverence nor respect had come as a joyful relief to her.

“You are my daughter,” he said, harshly, “and you have to obey me. Fortunately for you, no one suspects the truth, or you would certainly not have been honored by an offer of marriage from the heir to Lord Northborough.”

He had purposely chosen such words in alluding to her mother that Stella might infer that she had no legal title to the name she bore. The object he had in view was to humble her pride, and whether or not he broke her heart at the same time was a matter of perfect indifference to him.

As he finished speaking, she began to move toward the door. A mist seemed to hang before her eyes, and she was trembling so much that her feet could hardly bear her weight; but she was as proud as he, and fully resolved that he should not see the full effect of his words upon her.

“Understand,” he called after her, “your marriage will take place early in May.”

“Lord Carthew shall hear to-night every word that you have said to me. Then, as you suggest, he will cease from troubling me.”

Joining her by the door, he gripped her arm in his fingers as he had done in the morning. The pain of his clutch was intense, but she never winced under it.

“It is my duty to tell him, Sir Philip,” she said, as though she were addressing a stranger.

“Go to your room at once, and do not presume to leave it until you have my permission.”

“As you please. But as soon as I meet Lord Carthew, he shall hear every word.”

Baffled and furious, he released his hold on her arm, and following her upstairs, he watched her enter her own room, and drawing out the key, turned it on the outside, and slipped it into his pocket. He had totally miscalculated the effect upon her of the announcement he had made. He imagined that it would lower her pride to the dust, and break down once and forever her opposition to his will. But she had gone from the study with head erect and flashing eyes; and so far from dreading lest the secret of her humble birth should become known, she had instantly decided upon sharing it with the last person in the world who ought to be made aware of it.

More than ever it was necessary to hurry on this match with Lord Carthew. In such a spirit as that in which Stella now found herself, it was impossible to say what reckless step she might take. On returning to the drawing-room, therefore, Sir Philip pretended to read a newspaper, while his two guests finished their game, and he afterward contrived, in the course of a short talk with Lord Carthew, to strongly encourage that young gentleman’s hopes, and indeed to turn them to certainties.

“I have been having a little talk with my daughter,” he began, as the gentlemen sipped their grog and enjoyed a parting smoke before retiring for the night. “She is quite willing that the wedding shall take place during the second week in May. I haven’t a doubt that this house is extremely lonely for Stella, and that in her secret heart she is overjoyed at the thought of leaving it. The only difficulty is that she has never been separated from her mother, and I rather fancy that that is what she wanted to speak to you about just when I came up and interrupted her.”

“I shall be delighted if Lady Cranstoun will come with us when we set up housekeeping in town,” Lord Carthew answered, his plain face radiant with happiness. “I will talk over all arrangements with my mother when I go up to town to-morrow. I ought to go up early, because I am really anxious about my friend Hilary. Dr. Graham has been declaring how extremely rash it was for him to leave the shelter of your roof at present, and I am most anxious to find out whether he has suffered any ill effects from the journey.”

Lord Carthew retired to his room that night with a light heart, which not even the recollection of the palmist Kyro’s prediction could depress. “A passionate love affair, a hasty marriage, followed speedily by overwhelming misfortunes,” such were the terms of the prophecy made for his future a few weeks before. But now, in the belief that he had secured at least the warm friendship and willing consent of a lovely, high-born, fascinating, and gifted bride, Claud felt that he could laugh such gloomy predictions to scorn. Stella liked him, and would soon grow to love him, for Lord Carthew fully believed, as do so many men, that love is a plant which can be induced to grow in any woman’s heart with proper care and trouble.

Not for one moment did he suspect that the beautiful girl whom he hoped so shortly to make his wife was at that moment pacing up and down the boards of her bedchamber, completely dressed, with all idea of slumber banished from her mind, and her head in a whirl of passionate and rebellious thoughts, of which not one was devoted to him.

Her father’s statements had affected her to the full as much as he intended, but in a totally different direction from that which he had expected. So far from the knowledge of her mother’s humble origin inclining her to gratefully accept Lord Carthew’s offer, it seemed to her to place an insuperable and not unwelcome barrier between them.

“Hilary thought I was his superior in position,” she said to herself; “and oh, how glad I am that that is altered now! He was so humble, he begged my pardon so earnestly for having taken me into his arms; and I am only a poor gypsy’s daughter after all—beneath him, not above him! He must know that. I must tell him, and as soon as possible, before he has time to leave the neighborhood.

“And my mother—what became of her? Is she dead? Can any one tell me of her? Would Margaret know? She has been in the house many years, but she would not tell, I think. But there was the little doctor, who knew I was Miss Cranstoun because I was so like my mother. He must have known her, then. Did not the hostler tell me that when Dr. Netherbridge sent him here last night he told him that he knew the Chase, and knew Sir Philip, and had been here years ago? I must see this doctor privately, and at once must find out who and what my mother was. If she ever loved my father—and could any one love him, I wonder?—she must have been very, very miserable.”

Until the day broke, Stella remained lost in excited thought, wide-awake, and either walking restlessly up and down the room, or rocking herself backward and forward in a rocking-chair. Her desire to see Hilary immediately grew stronger every moment. She fully believed that when he knew her to be of humble birth, he would no longer avoid her, but would give his love as frankly as he would accept hers. Yet she felt that she must first of all see Dr. Netherbridge, and learn from him the truth about her mother. Her cheeks grew hot with shame at the thought that she had perhaps no right to bear the name of Cranstoun. The idea was so inexpressibly painful that she tried to banish it from her mind; but it returned again and again with a persistency not to be denied. Could she once ascertain that to be a fact, she decided, in an outburst of grief and humiliation, that she would escape from the Chase, and hide herself as far away as possible, unknown to any one. If she was indeed without either legal father or mother, she would no longer live upon grudgingly doled-out charity, but would go into the world and earn a living for herself, as many other poor and friendless girls were doing daily, banishing from her mind forever all thoughts of love and marriage.

She was fully resolved of one thing: that no man but Hilary Pritchard should be her husband; but she would never come to him with a stain upon her name.

Then, again, her reflections were disturbed by the memory of the gentle lady who believed her to be her daughter. How could she possibly desert her under any circumstances? Whatever the amount of her obligation toward Sir Philip, Stella realized that the love and duty she owed to Lady Gwendolen were none the less, but rather the more, urgent, should there, indeed, be no blood relationship between them. The more she pondered, the more troubled her mind became, and she longed above all things for the daybreak in order that she might put into action some of the plans which were formulating in her brain.

Meantime, she was locked in, and could only be let out at Sir Philip’s pleasure. This reflection filled her with a deep annoyance, and she set about evolving methods of escape.

There were two windows in her room, both tall and wide, divided by woodwork into squares about a foot high. She was only on the first floor, and the ivy which clung about every part of the walls would appear to offer a tolerably easy means of descent to one as light and agile as she. By half-past five o’clock she could endure her attitude of waiting and thinking no longer. Performing her toilet hastily, she changed her white silk evening gown into her serge morning costume, donned her hat and jacket, and pushing up the heavy sash of one of the windows, looked down on the terrace below and across at the trees to see whether her movements were observed.

No one was astir yet. A faint morning haze lay upon the fresh spring foliage about the treetops, and the morning sun, as it tried to burst through the vapor which rose from the damp earth, turned the dewdrops on the grass to shimmering diamonds. Catching her skirts close to her, she ventured one slender foot over the ledge of the window, testing the strength of the support accorded by the ivy. Luckily for her, the roots of a great ivy tree started at a point exactly between the windows of her room, and the branches were strong enough to support a far heavier burden than her light frame. A few scrambling steps, a prodigious rustling of ivy leaves, some tiny stones displaced, and then, with a flushed face, a dusty dress, and the palms of her soft hands a little cut and scratched, Stella found herself standing on the terrace, free.

A few moments later, she was running like a startled hare in the direction of a weak point in the wall which surrounded the Chase enclosure, as she particularly wished to avoid awaking the lodge-keepers from their slumbers. By a quarter past six she had reached the inn where Hilary was staying. The window-blinds were all drawn down, and no one was stirring but her friend the hostler, who, whistling an air popular in London some months before, was pottering about the stable-yard.

Catching sight of the tall, slight, girlish figure in plain blue serge gown and close-fitting serge jacket, he dropped in surprise the great horse-sponge and the bucket with which he was laden, and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.

“Miss Cranstoun, as I’m alive!” he exclaimed. “Why, who’d ha’ thought of seeing you so early, miss?”

“I have to go into Grayling as soon as possible, and I want you to lend me a horse,” she explained. “I will bring it back to your stables very shortly, and will take great care of it. I could not get one at home, as every one was asleep when I left.”

The man’s eyes twinkled. Not being a householder, and coming as he did from London, the hostler had none of the local dread of Sir Philip Cranstoun’s displeasure.

“How would you like to borrow our young gentleman’s Black Bess, that you admired so much, for a little spin?” he suggested. “She takes a bit of riding, but I lay you’ll manage her.”

The offer was one after Stella’s own heart, and after a short time spent in fitting upon Black Bess’ back the unaccustomed side-saddle, Stella sprang lightly into her seat, and stroking the mare’s glossy black neck, turned her head toward Grayling and started her off in a gallop.

At first the mare, who had never before been ridden by a lady, was sorely puzzled by the flapping of Stella’s gown, and curved her long neck every now and then in a vain attempt to bite at her rider’s skirts. Gradually, however, getting used to this phenomenon, and realizing the difference between Stella’s weight and Hilary’s, she put her head down and made one determined effort to run away with her unusual burden. Baffled in this attempt, she settled down to the inevitable, and carried Stella as the girl had never been carried before, skimming over the ground in a way which would have left even fleet-footed Zephyr far behind.

Grayling, at seven o’clock, was still chiefly asleep, but a red-cheeked Grayling boy, who was spinning a top in the principal thoroughfare, desisted from his occupation in order to stare at Stella, and to inform her, in a drawling Surrey dialect, of the whereabouts of Dr. Ernest Netherbridge’s house.

The little doctor was no longer a bachelor. A knowledge of the fact that many steady-going provincial patients preferred their doctors married, together with the extreme dulness of having “no one to come home to,” had induced him some few years before to relinquish his vague ideals of a beautiful and attractive helpmeet, and to satisfy his wish for companionship and a more extensive income in the person of a spinster of uncertain age who was popularly supposed in Grayling to have been “setting her cap at the doctor” for over fifteen years.

And this person it was, in brown woollen and a large white apron, who opened the door on lovely Stella Cranstoun and Black Bess, and waspishly demanded to know her business with the doctor.

CHAPTER XII.
FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE.

“I have to see Dr. Netherbridge on business,” said Stella, while the doctor’s wife peered out with disapproval at her matutinal visitor’s fresh young face.

“My husband, Dr. Netherbridge, is not accustomed to receive visitors who do not come about illness at seven o’clock in the morning. He isn’t down yet. If you want to see him, you had better call again.”

And with that, Dr. Netherbridge’s helpmeet was shutting the door in Stella’s face, when a man’s voice from the floor above was heard inquiring who the visitor was.

“I am Miss Cranstoun, from the Chase, Dr. Netherbridge, and I shall be grateful if you can spare me a few minutes’ conversation.”

“Certainly—certainly. I will be down immediately. Letitia, show Miss Cranstoun into the drawing-room.”

The top-spinning boy, finding time hanging heavily on his hands, had followed Stella to the doctor’s house, and remained near, staring, while the young lady, holding Black Bess’ bridle, stood parleying with Mrs. Netherbridge by the open door. Stella caught sight of him now, and addressed him, with one of her charming smiles.

“Are you clever enough to hold this horse for me while I go inside the house for a few minutes?” she inquired. “You shall have sixpence for your trouble.”

The boy nodded, and Stella followed Mrs. Netherbridge, who, with frosty civility, showed her into a prim and old-maidish drawing-room, where she was soon joined by Dr. Netherbridge.

“Forgive me for disturbing you so early,” Stella began. The little doctor’s face inspired in her exactly the same feeling of confidence and friendliness which her mother had felt toward him years ago.

“I have come,” she continued, “because I think you are the only person who can and will tell me the truth on a most important point. Yesterday, when you saw me for the first time, you said you recognized me by my likeness to my mother. The present Lady Cranstoun and I are totally dissimilar; you cannot, therefore, have meant her.”

Her brilliant dark-blue eyes were fixed searchingly, imploringly upon his face. Dr. Netherbridge was too sincere not to change color and show some slight sign of embarrassment.

“Family likenesses are unaccountable things,” he was beginning, when she cut him short.

“There is no longer any need for concealment,” she said, eagerly. “Last night Sir Philip Cranstoun told me I was born in a hovel, and daughter of a gypsy. Are those things true?”

“You were certainly born in a small cottage on your father’s property in this neighborhood,” the doctor answered; “and your mother was of gypsy extraction.”

“She must have been extremely beautiful when in good health. At the time when I first met her, she was very little older than you are now, but she was deliberately starving herself to death, and her beauty was necessarily impaired.”

“How did you come to know her?” she asked, hanging upon his words in deep anxiety. “Was she—was she allowed to come to the Chase?”

“Allowed to come? Surely. Lady Cranstoun lived there until a few weeks before your birth, when, presumably after a quarrel with your father, she fled from her home at night, and went back to her own people.”

Stella sank into a chair, her hands tightly clasped together. Dr. Netherbridge saw the unmistakable relief in her face, and hastened to remove any doubt which might still trouble her as to her position.

“Your mother’s maiden name was Clare Carewe. She herself told me her history. As a very little girl, she ran away from the caravan in which she was brought up, and her beauty having attracted the attention of a very rich lady, who was Sir Philip Cranstoun’s sister, she was educated and adopted by her; and from her house at Torquay, Sir Philip secretly married her. Their first child died, and, so far as I could judge, it was a most unhappy marriage. Finally, one night, when some of your mother’s relations made their way into the plantation to speak to her, they were savagely attacked by gamekeepers as poachers; one of the gypsies, who was unhappily Lady Cranstoun’s father, was accidentally shot, and her brother was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, in spite of Sir Philip’s efforts to save him.”

“How terrible!” burst from Stella’s lips. “How she must have suffered!”

“She did indeed. Very soon after your birth, I was sent for by a gypsy lad, and on the following day I accompanied two nursewomen to your father’s house. Your mother, meanwhile, had died, and the gypsies had removed her body. I broke the news to Sir Philip, but as soon as he heard that the child was a girl, he flew into a furious passion, and ordered the women to take you away; nor could I do more than insist that he should know the address in London to which you were taken and provide some money for your maintenance. From that day I never met you until yesterday. But I shall never forget your mother’s face, and at first sight of you the likeness impressed me so strongly that I spoke without thinking.”

“Thank you,” she said, after a pause, rising and giving him her hand. “Thank you for your kindness to my mother, and to me also. I must be getting back now.”

“Very big, handsome men, from what I remember, and evidently of very strong family affections. There was an old woman, too, reputed to be a witch. I believe she is still alive, and that the peasants about here actually go to her to have illnesses or scars and moles charmed away. I hope I have told you nothing to distress you,” he added, kindly.

“No; I am grateful to you,” she answered, rewarding him with a smile as she passed from the room, almost colliding with Mrs. Netherbridge, who was fluttering about in the passage outside suspiciously near the keyhole.

Stella threw a shilling to the boy who held Black Bess, and with very slight assistance from him, vaulted into the saddle and turned the mare’s head in the direction where her master lay. Black Bess flew like an arrow from a bow, and the journey occupied even less time than in coming. The blood rushed over Stella’s face and neck as she saw, standing in the courtyard of the inn, watching her ride up, the tall, massive figure of Hilary Pritchard, with one arm in a sling, the sun shining on his yellow curls.

Without a word, he helped her to dismount, and entered the coffee-room with her. It was but a little after eight o’clock, and no one was there except a servant, bustling in and out, laying the breakfast things. To her Hilary turned, and begged her not to trouble, as he should not want the meal for a long while yet, and the girl, with a demure nod that was almost a wink, left the room, and contented herself with peeping through the glass upper portion of the door.

Hilary led Stella to a seat and sat beside her, looking down into her lowered face. Until now she had been self-possessed and buoyed up by a determination to carry her mission through. Now she faltered and trembled, hardly daring to look into her lover’s face.

“Forgive you! What a request! She has never carried a lady before, and never will again any other than you. But won’t your parents be angry with you for coming off here like this? It was my friend the hostler who woke me up to tell me that Miss Cranstoun had borrowed my mare to go into Grayling, and that at the pace she was going she would soon be back. I got up at once—there is nothing the matter with me to-day.”

“You look certainly better than you did yesterday night,” she said, and then stopped short, blushing deeply.

“I know about your goodness in coming to see how I was,” he said, lifting her hand to his lips. “Our good genius the hostler told me of it this morning. But, my dear girl, are you wise in coming this morning? It is all so hopeless. Look at the difference between us. It was the height of presumption on my part to dare to fall in love with you; and, indeed, nothing was farther from my intention.”

“I loved you the moment you laid your hand on Zephyr’s bridle and looked up into my face,” she murmured, nestling closer to him, and letting her hand steal into his. “I really wanted to obey you as soon as you spoke to me, but I suppose a spirit of perversity urged me the other way. When you were wounded, I was in an agony of anxiety and remorse; otherwise, I should never have dared to bring you to the house. But all that about our not being equals is done away with now. It is true that I am Sir Philip Cranstoun’s daughter, but my mother was his first wife, and she was nothing more than a beautiful gypsy, brought up on charity by a rich lady. So you see,” she added, triumphantly, “it is all the other way round, and I am not good enough for you!”

“His offer?” he repeated, in surprise. “Has he made you an offer, then?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know? Oh, of course, I have never had an opportunity of telling you. Lord Carthew asked me to marry him while we were out riding yesterday morning.”

“You did not say ‘No’ outright?”—in a disappointed tone. “Stella, was all that before, or after, I woke up and saw you?”

“Don’t—don’t—be hard on me, and don’t look so stern and cold. How can I make you understand? You had said things against me that I had overheard. I believed, I really and truly believed, that you couldn’t bear me. And it made me mad with myself to find that I couldn’t keep you out of my thoughts for one minute. It seemed so dreadful—so forward and unwomanly—to be always thinking of a man who cared nothing for me. Then, too, you must remember that I longed with all my heart to escape from the Chase. You don’t know what our lives have been, poor mamma’s and mine, ever since I can remember. Lord Carthew knows——”

“Oh, Lord Carthew knows?” interrupting her, jealously. “You could confide in him, but not in me.”

“Dear Hilary,” she said, “remember that it is only two days since we first met, and that this is the first chance of a real talk we have had together. Whereas Lord Carthew and I——”

“You have had many interesting talks, I have no doubt,” he said, morosely, his handsome face clouding. “He is far cleverer than I, and can talk well on any subject. The wonder is that you don’t prefer him to me.”

“Isn’t it?” she assented, demurely, rubbing her cheeks softly against his coat-sleeve. “But there is no accounting for tastes, and—it may be my mad gypsy origin—but I decidedly prefer you.”

He raised one of her little hands to his lips and covered the finger-tips with kisses, smiling in spite of himself at the coquetry which had come so naturally to her in so short a time.

“Go on with what you were saying about the sadness of your life,” he said. “I want to know everything that you told Carthew.”

Stella had had hardly any experience of men; but she was a true woman, and her keen feminine instinct taught her that this man she loved was of a totally different temperament from the man who loved her. Hilary’s mind was of a direct, practical, common-sense order. In all his life he had thought but little of love for women, and now that the feeling overmastered him, he was inclined to question its authority, as well as to fly into paroxysms of jealousy without sufficient reason. He was not in the least conceited, and rather overrated Lord Carthew’s higher mental endowments, together with his eloquent tongue, high rank and wealth, when pitted against his own dower from nature of bone, and muscle, and manly beauty. He knew that Carthew loved Stella, and it would have seemed very natural to him that his passion should be returned. Above all, he did not wish to act toward his friend in a dishonorable and disloyal manner. Against his will, his blood leaped in his veins, as the young girl leaned toward him, lifting her beautiful, innocent eyes, with the light of love shining in them, to his face. Against his will, he clasped his arm about her waist, and felt that the world before him, with all its hopes, was well lost for the sake of a kiss from her soft, red lips.

“I can’t talk to you if you stop me like that,” Stella remonstrated, with a happy little laugh; “and do, pray, remember that that door is partly of glass, and people can see through it. Another moment and they will be having breakfast at the Chase. If my father finds out where I have been, he will half kill me.”

“He is, indeed. You haven’t even seen him, and you cannot, therefore, understand. Hilary, he hates me, and until this morning I have never been able to understand why, or why, try as I might to like him, and to feel dutifully toward him, a cold shudder of dislike creeps over me when he comes near. Last night he grew furiously angry with me because I refused to marry Lord Carthew, and he told me then for the first time, with the idea, I suppose, of humiliating me, that my dear mamma was not my mother at all, but that I was really the daughter of an ignorant gypsy woman. It seemed too strange to be believed, but it was all true. This morning at six o’clock I climbed out of my bedroom window, as he had locked me into my room, and came here to borrow a horse with which to find out Dr. Netherbridge at Grayling. He confirmed Sir Philip’s words. The first Lady Cranstoun was a lovely gypsy girl, brought up on charity by Sir Philip’s sister, with whom he fell in love, and made a most wretched marriage. Not many days before I was born, my mother, heart-broken at the treatment she received, ran back to her own people, and among them, in a tumble-down little cottage not far from here, I was born, eighteen and a half years ago. So now you understand,” she concluded, triumphantly, “that so far from being a great lady, I come from the class of people who are driven from town to town by the police, branded as thieves and poachers, with the band of every respectable man and woman against them.”

She spoke bitterly, and something in her words and tone shocked Hilary a little. He had none of the love for the original and the unexpected in woman which had probably come to Lord Carthew from his brilliant little American mother. Hilary’s mother was the pretty and graceful daughter of a country clergyman, who had in her youth revelled in lawn-tennis and crewel-work, and whose ideas on all subjects were equally orthodox and limited. Hilary was fond of his mother, and she had heretofore supplied his ideal of femininity; he had not yet had time to adjust his aspirations toward a different standard.

“Do you quite realize what you are doing, I wonder?” he asked her suddenly, turning and taking her face into his hand while he scrutinized it closely, with a half-angry, half-hungry look. “What you are doing, I mean, in throwing over a man like Carthew for the sake of a man like me? He is heir to an earldom; his father is well off, and in a very brilliant position; his mother is extremely wealthy; he distinguished himself so greatly at college that people expect great things of him. While, as for me, the higher education was wasted on me; I was never good for anything but athletics. I am leaving England to rough it in Canada, trying to make a farm pay. I can keep a wife, certainly, upon what I have, but not such a wife as you.”

“Want you? Good heavens! I would give my soul for you! But I won’t be played with. By some magic of your own you have made me love you, and you must take the consequences. Stella, I love you, and if you plight me your troth now, I must marry you. If you now, in the face of what I have put before you and what you know, still choose to cling to me, I swear to you that I will marry no woman but you, and that you shall marry no man but me!”

She looked into his face, flushed and excited as it was, his brown eyes shining like her own.

“On my honor, I swear,” she said, solemnly, “that whatever pressure is brought to bear upon me, I will marry no one but you, Hilary Pritchard.”

Their lips met in that interminably long kiss of first love, given and returned, the kiss which comes once in a lifetime to a chosen few, and to many comes never at all—a kiss in which time and space are obliterated, and in which two spirits seem to meet in regions far beyond this work-a-day world of ours.

Moved out of herself, in an ecstasy of emotion, perhaps at the happiest, certainly at the first perfectly happy moment of her life, Stella felt rather than heard a harsh, low-pitched voice, asking for Miss Cranstoun in the hall immediately outside the coffee-room.

He flung his arm round her and held her to him a moment. The next, the door was burst open, and Sir Philip Cranstoun stood before them, white and quivering with rage. For a moment he stared at the pair before him, taking in every detail of Hilary’s appearance. Then he addressed his daughter in tones of withering scorn.

“May I ask who is this person with whom you appear to be on such extremely familiar terms?”

“It is Mr. Hilary Pritchard,” she said, “the gentleman I have promised to marry.”

CHAPTER XIII.
THE SENDING OF THE TOKEN.

At seven o’clock that same morning, Sir Philip had been aroused from his slumbers by Dakin.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the spy, “but I can’t help thinking Miss Cranstoun has somehow got away. You see, you have taken away the key of her room, and I can see a good way in through the keyhole. And the bed’s empty; it doesn’t look as if it had been slept in, and I can’t see any sign of her walking about the room.”

With a muttered execration, Sir Philip dismissed Dakin, and, hastily dressing himself, repaired to the door of Stella’s room and rapped several times sharply upon the panels. Getting no answer, he turned the key in the lock and called to her to come out, before throwing the door open, to find that the bird had flown.

It was easy enough to see how she had escaped. The window was wide open, and the ivy a little below torn and disarranged. Rage and alarm combined to give Sir Philip an extremely bad quarter of an hour, as he turned over in his own mind all possible places to which she might have gone, while his horse was bearing him toward the nearest gates of the Chase enclosure.

Sir Philip had no idea of Hilary’s detention at the inn, but as the hostlery was on the direct road to Grayling, from which town he surmised that Stella would take the train for London, he resolved to stop for a moment to inquire whether anything had been seen of her.

Hilary’s friend, the hostler, was holding the bridle of Black Bess at the entrance, when the Squire rode up on his gray hunter, and Sir Philip noticed at once that the mare carried a side-saddle.

“So you have lady visitors here, I see?” he said, pulling up his horse before the archway.

Jim the hostler’s sympathies were all with the lovers, and he recognized at once the necessity for putting the angry father off the scent.

“I suppose the missis is going for a ride, sir,” the man answered, with an affectation of stupidity in his face and manner.

“No, sir. It’s been left here by a gentleman for a day or two, and we’ve got to exercise it every day.”

Still Sir Philip did not appear satisfied, and the hostler was wondering whether he could not by some means convey a warning to the young couple in the coffee-room, when, as ill-luck would have it, his master, the landlord, came out into the courtyard at that identical moment, and in answer to Sir Philip’s point-blank inquiry as to whether he had seen Miss Cranstoun, blurted out that she was at that moment within the house, talking to a friend in the coffee-room.

The landlord was thinking of his lease, and not of Stella’s love affair, and he volunteered the further information that Miss Cranstoun had only been there about ten minutes, having borrowed Mr. Pritchard’s horse to go to Grayling and back.

This was the first intimation which the baronet received that Hilary was not in London, and it made instantly clear to him Stella’s disappearance from the Chase in the evening of the preceding day. She, his own daughter, Miss Cranstoun of the Chase, was actually carrying on a love affair at his very lodge gates, and making appointments with a farming adventurer at an inn on her father’s land, under the eyes of hostlers, and potmen, and farm laborers.

Rage almost choked him as he laid his hand on the door of the coffee-room, and the sight which met his eyes as he opened it was hardly calculated to assuage his anger. A superbly handsome young giant, with one arm in a sling, was seated close to Stella in a window-seat at the farther end of the room. It was easy enough to see that they were lovers. He was speaking eagerly, and she was hanging on his words, with her two hands clasped in one of his.

On Sir Philip’s entrance they started, and both of them rose to their feet; but Hilary still retained Stella’s hand.

Sir Philip carefully closed the door behind him, and came close up to the other two occupants of the room. In spite of the storm which raged within him, he was beyond everything anxious to avoid any scene by which his private affairs would become known to the people of the inn.

It was therefore in a voice so low as to be inaudible to any possible listeners outside the room that he addressed himself to Hilary, fixing him with his cold, glittering, light eyes as he spoke.

“You are not aware, then, that she is already engaged to be married to Lord Carthew, by whose want of judgment a fellow like you got introduced into a respectable house.”

“You have made some mistake, I think,” returned the young man, resolutely keeping his temper in the face of provocation. “Your daughter loves me, and she will never marry Lord Carthew.”

“My daughter is under age, sir, and her folly and inexperience would make her an easy prey to the wiles of a cad and an adventurer such as you. Luckily, I have interfered to save her good name. You entered my house on sufferance, and taking advantage of my absence, and of your friend’s foolish confidence in you, you presumed to make love to this young lady in much the same rough-and-ready style as you would adopt toward the haymakers and farmhands in your own rank of life. You, a nobody, a penniless, intending emigrant, dared to try to steal my daughter’s affections from your friend, to whom she had pledged them. I have no hesitation in saying that your conduct has been mean, cowardly, treacherous, and unmanly in the extreme. I would rather see my daughter dead than lowered by any association with a low-born and ungrateful pauper such as you.”

As he spoke, by a sudden movement he wrenched their hands asunder, and seizing that of his daughter’s within his own, began to move toward the door.

Hilary Pritchard had grown very pale under Sir Philip’s fierce invective, but he did not condescend to defend himself against the latter’s accusations.

One last, long look was interchanged between them, and then Stella was dragged from the room by her father, who had pulled her hand through his arm, and who, as soon as he reached the courtyard, gave orders in an unconcerned voice that the side-saddle should be changed from Black Bess to a horse belonging to the inn, the loan of which he required for an hour or two.

“I fear we shall be late for breakfast,” he said, turning to his daughter with an assumption of geniality, and speaking in a raised tone of voice so that he might be overheard by all within range. “Stella, you managed to get through your business in Grayling with wonderful celerity. I never expected to find you back here so soon. I am glad we found Mr. Pritchard none the worse for his unlucky accident.”

Stella disdained to act up to his pretence of fatherly affection. It was nothing to her if the whole world knew that she loved Hilary Pritchard and that her father had come to part them. Sir Philip’s family pride was, from her point of view, equally incomprehensible and ridiculous. So she stood by his side, he detaining her hand in his arm with a grasp which, while it affected to be fatherly, was really vindictive and painful to bear, and which she endured with a set, white face, blazing eyes, and tightly compressed lips.

In much the same fashion they rode away, she sitting straight upon her horse, staring before her, unheeding the friendly talk he affected to address to her. But Jim the hostler noticed that all the while he spoke Sir Philip’s fingers touched his daughter’s bridle-rein.

“He’s a brute, that’s what he is, for all his soft sawder,” was Jim’s comment.

More than once during the ride home a mad longing seized Stella to escape from her father’s tyranny. But Sir Philip’s gray would easily have outstripped in speed the sorry hack upon which she was mounted, even if her father’s hand had not held her bridle. Every cruel and bitter taunt which his brain could conceive was hurled at her on their progress between the inn and the Chase. But no words could provoke a response from her. She was trying to remind herself that he was her father, and that even if she could not love him she must at least endeavor not to hate him.

At the doors of the house she sprang from her horse and ran swiftly up the stairs to Lady Cranstoun’s room. Her stepmother was still in bed, sitting up, wrapped in a white woollen shawl, drinking her coffee. She had not quite recovered from the strain of the preceding day, and Dr. Graham had prescribed complete rest and freedom from all excitement.

“I was wondering you had not come to say good-morning to me,” she said, “but Margaret said Sir Philip had locked you in your room. Was that true?”

“Don’t let’s talk of him, dear,” returned the young girl, kissing her affectionately, and kneeling down at the bedside, caressing one of her hands. “Let’s try to think he doesn’t exist.”

“Something has happened!” exclaimed the poor lady, apprehensively. “You are dreadfully pale, and your hands are quivering. There are tears in your eyes, too. Tell me, Stella, quickly, what is the matter?”

“It is nothing,” she answered. “I am overtired after a bad night. That is all.”

“It was not true—what you said last night in fun—about not marrying Lord Carthew, was it, dear?”

Sir Philip’s voice broke sharply in upon their talk. He had entered the room unperceived, and was standing on the other side of the bed.

“The marriage will take place in the second week of May,” Sir Philip proceeded, fixing a threatening glance upon his daughter.

Stella did not speak. She dared not at the moment undeceive her or banish from her face that unwonted look of happiness and hope.

Lady Cranstoun kissed her affectionately, and then as though nerving herself for a great effort, and timidly retaining the girl’s hands in hers, she addressed her husband.

“I have not told you before, Philip,” she began, “in fact, I have not had an opportunity, that while you were away, feeling that I might die any minute, I sent to town for my father’s lawyer.”

“Yes. You see, there is that legacy of my Uncle Charles, which I came into last year——”

“It isn’t very much—only five thousand pounds, in fact—but I have left it by will to Stella when she attains the age of twenty-one. You see, the estates being entailed, I did not like the idea of my little girl being without pocket-money. And it will be a nice little sum for herself when she marries Lord Carthew.”

Sir Philip was for the moment struck dumb with surprise and indignation. That his colorless, obedient wife should dare in his absence to make a will, leaving money away from him to his rebellious daughter, struck him as a most unwifely and outrageous liberty, and the desire to sting and humiliate both his wife and daughter became too strong to be resisted.

“Your little girl!” he repeated, with a hard laugh. “Haven’t you grown out of that silly delusion yet? Your child died years ago, as a weakly, miserable baby. That girl beside you, to whom you are so anxious to will your money, is no relation to you, but simply the daughter of my first wife, who died at her birth, exactly three months before I married you.”

“Philip! Stella! It is not true—say it is not true!” gasped Lady Cranstoun.

“How can you be so cruel?” exclaimed the young girl, turning in passionate reproach upon her father. “Don’t worry, and don’t listen, mamma, dear. You know that I am yours, and that I love you!”

“Your dutiful affection is not without its reward,” sneered Sir Philip. “Five thousand pounds is certainly a great deal more than you would ever get from me. But it is time this mother and daughter nonsense was done away with, except for the purpose of giving the girl a more respectable ancestry than she could show as the daughter of a gypsy. Where did you suppose she got her beauty from? You Douglases have always been an ugly, high-cheekboned race. There is nothing of the Douglas about her.”

Lady Cranstoun was moaning as if in pain, and her pale eyes had a hunted, terrified expression as she turned them helplessly from her husband to Stella.

“Not my child,” she whispered. “Not—my—child!” and as the words left her lips, she fell backward in Stella’s arms, cold and motionless, to all appearance dead already.

“You have killed her!” the latter cried, as she vainly tried to restore animation to the still figure, and for a few moments Sir Philip believed, not without a momentary pang of self-reproach, that she was right. Gradually, however, under Dr. Graham’s care, consciousness returned, but only feebly; and throughout the morning she fell from one fainting-fit into another. Stella never left her for a moment, and everything that skill and care could do was done to prolong the faint flicker of life within her wasted frame. A heart specialist was telegraphed for from London, and Lord Carthew, who had intended leaving for town early in the day, having heard no word of Hilary’s presence in the vicinity, delayed his journey until he could hear the doctor’s verdict.

It was unfavorable in a high degree. Lady Cranstoun was, so the great man agreed with Dr. Graham, slowly dying, and could not possibly last through the night. Toward evening she suddenly appeared to rally, recognized and spoke to Stella, and asked in a clear, distinct voice for Lord Carthew. When the young man came, she gave him her hand, and drew his toward that of Stella, which rested on the coverlet beside her.

“Be—very good—to her,” she murmured; and so, still occupied with thoughts for Stella’s future, she closed her eyes and fell asleep, never to open them on this world again.

To Stella the blow was terrible, overwhelming. The tie between her and her step-mother, as she now knew her to be, had been extremely strong, cemented by unselfishness on both sides, the girl patiently giving up the greater portion of her day in attendance and nursing, and the woman keeping silent about her sufferings, lest she might too greatly sadden her young companion. Such faults and foibles as Lady Cranstoun possessed, her intense timidity and cowardice, her limited intelligence, and excessive pride of birth, were but trifling when weighed against her kindly and affectionate nature. Stella’s own mother, had she lived, could not possibly have shown more sympathy and affection toward her child, whom she would probably have tormented by her violent and jealous nature.

Lord Carthew’s heart was deeply touched by the sight of Stella’s grief. He had no opportunity of speaking to her between the time of leaving the house and his attendance at Lady Cranstoun’s funeral four days later. Even then he did not see her. She was utterly prostrated by grief, Sir Philip informed him, and he did not think fit to add that from the hour of Lady Cranstoun’s death, the girl had been kept a close prisoner, the maid Ellen or Dakin sleeping in her room, which had been changed, so that no escape by the window was possible.

“I think the sooner you marry her and take her away with you the better,” Sir Philip said, as the two men were returning in the mourning-coach from the scene by the Cranstoun vault in Grayling Cemetery after the ceremony. “The poor child has cried herself ill; she will scarcely eat, and refuses to leave the house. I am really growing extremely anxious about her. Your letters are the only things that seem to give her any pleasure, although, as she says, she hasn’t the heart to answer them yet.”

As a matter of fact, Lord Carthew’s letters had been opened and read by Sir Philip on their arrival each day, and subsequently laid upon the dressing-table of Stella, for the amusement, apparently, of Dakin and Ellen, since the lady to whom they were addressed had never so much as touched one of them. They were good letters, too; full of affection and intelligence, if a little didactic in tone; too good by far to be wasted upon a cynical man of the world and two uneducated female spies.

“I am almost afraid for her reason,” continued Sir Philip. “A change of surroundings is imperative, so the doctor tells me. The attachment between mother and daughter was so great that the blow is proportionately heavy. In fact, my dear Carthew, it is now the twentieth of April, and I propose that the marriage, which, of course, will be strictly private, should take place at the date originally fixed—the tenth of May. It was her poor mother’s last wish, as you know, and under such circumstances should have with us the weight of a command.”

To this suggestion Lord Carthew agreed warmly. He was greatly disappointed at not seeing his fair fiancée, but was to some extent soothed by a fictitious message, brought to him by her maid Ellen, to the effect that Miss Cranstoun was so ill that she had not risen that day, but that she sent her love and asked him to excuse her.

Just for the few minutes while Ellen was repeating these words to Lord Carthew, in her master’s presence, having been previously taught them by Sir Philip himself, Stella was left alone in her bedroom, the door of which was carefully locked, and the window securely barred. It was her first moment of solitude since Lady Cranstoun’s death, and as luck would have it, Stephen Lee was standing on the terrace immediately beneath her window, which was situated in a turret on the third floor of the building.

For the past four days, although Stella knew it not, Stephen had taken every possible opportunity of hanging about the house, the serious illness of one of the collies—an illness so opportune for his plans that he might be almost suspected of having some hand in it—forming an excellent excuse for loitering near the house, young Stephen being renowned for his success as a horse and dog doctor.

As soon, therefore, as Stella’s pale face was pressed against her prison bars, her eyes fell upon the handsome, swarthy countenance and black beard of the young gamekeeper, and the words spoken by old Sarah, the gypsy fortune-teller, flashed back into her mind.

The hag had sworn to her that the “Romanys” were her friends, her people, and that they would help her to escape, if escape were necessary. At the time, her words seemed mere incomprehensible jargon, and her allusions to “Clare,” and assertions that Stella was “Clare’s child,” had seemed the idle chatter of a woman whose wits were wool-gathering in second childhood.

But now all that was changed. The key to the mystery was in Stella’s possession, and her cheeks flushed and her heart beat high with excitement and hope as she recalled the fact that her mother had escaped out of Sir Philip’s power back to her own people, if it was only to die, and that she, Stella, might well do the same. Old Sarah had told her what to do if she needed her help. She had but to place within the hands of Stephen Lee that little old coin, slung on a piece of red silk string, which she still carried about her, and succor would most certainly come.

In an instant she had made a rapid gesture to Stephen, whose eyes were upturned to her window. He glanced quickly round, and nodded; then noted, with the keen eye of a man who spent his life out of doors, the direction taken, in falling, by the little medal as it was cast down by Stella’s hand, caught it in his fingers, slipped it in his pocket, and walked leisurely away, as though nothing had happened.

Stella had just time to close the window and retire from its vicinity, when the maid Ellen returned. Her presence and that of Dakin were detestable to Stella, who could not even weep for Lady Cranstoun’s death free from their curious and vulgar gaze, nor would she ever exchange a word with either of them.

To-day, for the first time, buoyed up by this new hope of escape, she seemed indifferent to the woman’s presence.

Her hope lay in the gypsies, and with all the wild gypsy element in her blood, she was longing to be free.

CHAPTER XIV.
“THE ROMANYS HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.”

On leaving the terrace before the Chase, Stephen Lee struck immediately into the forest in a northerly direction.

The circumference of the Chase enclosure measured fully ten miles, but there was barely a yard of the space that was not known to the gypsy-bred lad, who had been familiarized with it in bygone poaching days of childhood long before the period when, as a decently dressed and apparently respectable lad, he had applied for and obtained a situation about the dairy farm on the property. Very soon his usefulness caused him to be promoted. He had “ways” with horses, dogs, cows, and sheep; could repair a fence or sow a field, break in a horse or administer medicine to a sick dog, with equal cleverness.

He was, so his fellow-servants decided, inordinately proud and unsociable, for what reason none of them could satisfactorily fathom. He broke in Sir Philip’s hunters and taught Miss Cranstoun to ride, being himself little more than three years older than she. He did not drink, and had, so far as others knew, neither sweetheart nor friends; yet now and then he would mysteriously disappear for hours together, nor would he afterward even attempt to explain his absences.

The evening was closing in as he made his way in and out the undergrowth in a direct cut through the wood; and it was only after more than an hour of very rapid walking that he began to slacken his speed.

The trees grew very closely together at this point, so closely, indeed, that it seemed impossible to force a path between them. But Stephen knew the track and could almost have found it blindfold, and after about a quarter of an hour more of difficult walking he came upon an open space of grassy mounds, crowned by the ruins of an ancient hunting tower, dating back to a very early period, of which, however, little more than four stout ivy-hung walls, and a portion of a low battlemented tower remained. The ruin was not large enough to be imposing, nor had it any known historical interest. Very few people knew of its existence, as it was not discernible over the tops of the tall trees by which it was surrounded; yet that it was known to at least one person was evident now, for from the ruined tower a thin blue line of smoke rose into the clear evening air.

No way of entering the ruin was visible, the base of the tower and of the low building attached to it being blocked up by rubble, by overgrown bushes, and by fallen masonry. But Stephen Lee made straight for a portion of the ruin heavily veiled with ivy, and removing this with one hand, he came upon a low archway of stonework completely blocked by a solid wooden door. Upon this he tapped with the handle of a knife he carried in his belt, and softly whistled. The signal was answered, and the sound of a rusty bolt being withdrawn was the prelude to the apparition of old Sarah Carewe’s face in the doorway.

Entering, Stephen found himself in an improvised chamber formed partly by the tower and partly by roughly hewn timber roofing to the adjacent walls. Dry leaves thickly covered the ground, and on a heap of them in front of the fire the brawny figure of a man in the prime of life was stretched, revelling in the smoky warmth of a fire of peat and sticks.

An oil lamp, hanging from the roof, lit up the scene, which was not wanting in elements of the picturesque. By its feeble illumination, assisted by the firelight, a few pieces of extempore furniture could be discerned, such as a wooden table, two or three stools, an iron pot, and some other cooking utensils, and in the far corner a long, shallow box of wood, upon which some rags and rugs were stretched to form a not unacceptable couch for such as needed not luxury to induce slumber.

To Stephen all these details were familiar, as was the bent and shrunken form of his great-grandmother, Sarah Carewe, of whom he stood in some considerable awe. In her seventy-ninth year, Mrs. Carewe might well have lived through the century with which she was popularly credited; her energy was boundless, and her brain as keen and cunning as when, nearly sixty years before, she had become the proud mother of Hiram Carewe, shot down by Sir Philip Cranstoun’s hand on that memorable evening eighteen and a half years ago.

“Baish down, lad,” she said, pointing to a stool by the fire. “Uncle Jim and me have been looking for you for the past two hours. What’s the news up at the house?”

“This,” he said. “She is a prisoner, as you know, and she threw it me from her room window. The lord was there to-day at the burying. They’re driving her close to marry him, curse him! He’s as ugly as a monkey, and I could throttle him with one hand.”

“Her fancy is a lot handsomer,” laughed the old crone. “I don’t blame Clare’s girl for fixing on a good-looking man.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, half-fearfully, half-savagely, pausing in the act of knocking the ashes out of a pipe he had taken from his pocket.

Sarah Carewe shook with creaking laughter, holding her hands to her sides as she looked at her angry descendant.

“Why, I mean as how you shot the right chap when you potted the big ’un,” she said. “That’s the one she’s set her mind on.”

“Who? That Pritchard cove? He’s left the place, and gone to the Cranstoun Arms and then to London——”

“A lot you know,” she cried, in her shaky treble. “He went to the Cranstoun Arms right enough, and Stella visited him there twice. The morning of the day that cursed Sir Philip’s mort went to glory, Stella was nabbed by her father, chatting with her spark, with his arm still tied up from your shot.”

“Hang him! I wish I’d killed him!” muttered Stephen. “And I would if I’d known what was coming. Something told me as he caught Zephyr’s rein, and stared up at her, that he’d be after her; that’s why I fired. But why didn’t you tell me all this before, mami Sarah? It’s all along of your promise to me about her that I’m working for you. You know right well you swore by your tricks and magic to make her come to me, and love me, and choose me for her mate before every one. And here I stand by to see her in love with one man, and married to another. I haven’t done your bidding, and your spying, ay, and your choaring and thieving too, if it comes to that, in the pay of a man whose throat I’d like to cut, all these years, to be hocused and laughed at now. I tell you, mami Sarah,” he added, starting from the stool, and stamping heavily upon the ground, having worked himself up to a frenzy, “I won’t be made a fool of any longer!”

The man by the fire rolled over, and looked up at him, speaking for the first time.

“You talk of wanting to cut Philip Cranstoun’s throat,” he began, slowly. “What call have you to hate him, like I have, and mami here? For eighteen years, come last October, we’ve been waiting, mami and me, to get our knife into him, and our chance has come at last! You’re young and green, lad; we don’t let you into all our secrets. You follow orders, and do as the nais nort tells you—she’s got her head screwed on right. Do you think a man forgets to pay a debt like mine? Think of it, lad! I was younger than you are now, and I loved my sister Clare—Sarah here can tell you how I loved her. When she was brought up grand as a regular been rawnie, she used to steal away to see brother Jim on the sly. The girl Stella you’re so sweet on ain’t a patch on her mother—my sister Clare. She’d a pair of eyes like stars dancing in a pool at moonlight, and teeth like little round dewdrops. And he married her, and broke her heart, and swore he’d shoot down any of her relations as he should find loitering about his place. But that night, which was to be my last in England afore I sailed to America, to a splendid opening there with uncle Pete, that’s long ago dead, says I to father, ‘I must have one more look at Clare, for maybe I’ll never come back again.’ Father was against it at first, but I’d take no advice, and he wanted badly to speak to her, seeing she’d written to say she was breaking her heart; so we went. Oh, you’ve heard the story of how, so soon as she’d crept over the grass to us, her father and brother, by the moonlight, all in white silks and satins, to wish us good-by, she was seized and blindfolded, and dragged away, while he, that double villain, that cursed Philip Cranstoun, shot my father down where he stood by my side! No call to tell you how I fought to punish them, nor how, when they’d nabbed me, being three to one, they made a pretence of a trial, and give me five years—five years in prison for seeing my father murdered in cold blood, and trying to get at them as shot him down. Well, I’ve lived through them five years; I’m a tough un to kill. You think of it, lad—you as lives as I lived for the most part, under the sky, with the free air blowing in your face all day—think what prison is: Four bare walls, a dog’s work in front of you, and a slave-driver to see as you do it; and all the while eating your heart out with knowing it was unjust, the cruel injustice of a titled scoundrel as had broken your sister’s heart, and made a jailbird of you, and murdered your father. And all for what? For his own dirty pride—pride of his family, as are no older than us Carewes; pride that I’ll humble in the dust yet, if I spend the rest of my life in quod for it.”

“There ain’t no talk of quod for this business of ours, dearie,” put in the old crone, as she stirred the fire with a bent iron stick. “You shall have your revenge, sure enough, and so will I. Your dadi Hiram was my own first-born, that I’d seen grow up from the stoutest and prettiest kinchin to the finest man in the country-side. And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘Mami, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.”

She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. A wonderful Rembrandtesque study they would have made, those three generations of gypsies, had any Dutch painter been there to fix the scene on canvas, with its sombre tone lit by the ruddy firelight. The woman, in her heavy cloak, the hood fallen back, and disclosing a faded red and yellow silk handkerchief wound round her head, from which scattered white elf locks fell over her wrinkled brow and sunken cheeks. Only a great artist could have reproduced the look in her glittering black eyes, a look that took in a past of wrongs and sufferings, and brooded in cruel, anticipative joy over a future of revenge.

The man at her feet was himself a model of rugged power and a certain swarthy beauty. His coal-black hair and beard were plentifully streaked with gray; his dark skin was unnaturally pallid, and in his sunken black eyes there lurked an expression not good to see, the look of a strong man deeply wronged, at war with society, and ripe for revenge. His dress was careless and dirty; long ago he had ceased to have any pride in his appearance, and those years of prison life, followed by the misery of police supervision, had changed him from a handsome, gallant lad, full of strength and possibilities, to a surly and brooding loafer, whose hand was against every man’s and whose whole nature was in sullen revolt against the established order of things.

The third member of the group by the fire added no little to the strange picturesqueness of the scene as he leaned with folded arms against the wall, listening eagerly while his elders recounted their past experiences. Stephen Lee was grandson to Sarah’s second child, a daughter, married to a gypsy of the name of Lee. But for some years past Stephen’s lines had fallen in comparatively pleasant places, and in his smart velveteen coat, corduroy breeches, and gaiters, he formed a strong contrast to the ragged and neglected appearance of his uncle, and to the tatters of old Sarah.

“You’ve got good cause to hate the gray wolf,” he said, after a pause. “I’ve been taught to hate him ever since I could speak, and I never set eyes on him without tingling to put a bullet through him. It’s the way he treats Stella as maddens me. You talked of prison just now; well, she’s imprisoned, shut in with two cursed women spies, one or the other, turn and turn about, watching her all the time. Lady Cranstoun was good to her, I will say that, for all she wasn’t her mother. But now she’s gone, that girl’s heart’s wellnigh broken; and when I pass the house at night and see the light up in her turret-window, I’m mad to burn the place down with everything and every one in it except her. But you two don’t know her as I do. You haven’t watched her grow up each day. She’s a regular lady, and looks down on such as me, for all I’m her cousin if she but knew it. Say what you like, mami, she won’t love a fellow like me. And on the tenth of May they’re going to marry her to this lord. I heard the gray wolf tell the other so, coming from the burying. Stella’s sent you that token, and you’ve got to save her. Though how in thunder you’re going to do it, and bring the disgrace upon Philip Cranstoun’s name as you talk so much about, it beats me to imagine.”

Again the old woman laughed the mirthless, rattling laugh of old age, and this time James Carewe raised his head from his arms, exchanged a glance with her, and turned over on his side again to face the fire, with the nearest approach to a laugh he ever made. Their incomprehensible merriment annoyed Stephen greatly, and he muttered an oath or two under his breath as he watched them.

“Chee, chee, lad!” remonstrated the crone. “You will laugh too when we’ve done the trick, and spirited the girl away, and hocused her father and her bridegroom. Your part of the business now is, first, to carry her a letter I mean to write her; and next, to make believe you’ve fallen in love with one of them two women as spy upon her. Have you got paper and pencil about you?”

Stephen took from his pocket a thick leather-covered account-book, and, tearing out a sheet, handed it to her.

“Not me!” she returned, shaking her head. “I leave all that to boys like you. Write down what I say: ‘From Sarah Carewe to Stella Cranstoun—The Romanys have not forgotten. Pretend to agree to the marriage, so that the watch may be relaxed. On your wedding-eve help will come. Hope and trust. Your mother’s friends watch over you, and soon you will be free.’ And now,” old Sarah added, “you must contrive that this shall be given her. Hang about until you see Margaret. She’s timid, but she’s square. If Stella plays her part, and cods them into thinking she’s come round, we’ll cheat the gray wolf yet, and within a month—ay, less than that, Jim, my boy—you and me will have a laugh, a right good laugh together, and even Steve here can join in then!”

Thoroughly mystified, but accustomed from childhood to unquestioningly obey the orders of old Sarah, whose reputation for abnormal sagacity, together with her undoubted magnetic powers, had earned her a great reputation among her own class, as well as among credulous and open-handed members of the public, Stephen presently left the ruins and returned to the Chase. Joining the other servants at supper that night, and listening to their talk about the coming marriage, he contrived by a look to signify to Margaret that he had something to say to her. Greatly surprised, but ready-witted as women of all classes usually prove in an emergency, she presently, as she sat next to him at table, contrived to knock her supper-plate off on to the floor with a great clatter.

Down went her head under the table, and down went Stephen’s. The result was a collision, and under cover of the laughter which ensued, she felt him slip a tiny piece of folded paper into her hand, and heard him whisper:

CHAPTER XV.
THE WEDDING EVE.

Housekeeper Margaret was a quiet, reserved, and cautious woman with the caution bred of extreme nervousness and dread of being bullied.

Her fear of Sir Philip was extreme. She was a woman of limited intelligence, and much addicted in the privacy of her own room, when there was no one to observe her, to the consumption of cheap sensational literature. Ever since the night of Clare Lady Cranstoun’s disappearance Margaret had cherished the conviction that Sir Philip had secretly murdered her; luckily she kept this belief to herself, but it naturally did not lessen her fear of him.

She was not at all popular with her fellow-servants, and, strange to say, they were somewhat afraid of her. The fact that she was the only female servant who had been retained at the Chase more than a few years, together with her silent, reserved manners, really born of nervousness, made the others restrained and uncomfortable before her; even Dakin, the spy, did not know how far Margaret might be in her master’s confidence, and invariably treated her with elaborate respect, an example which was followed by all the other servants, the more willingly as Sir Philip doled out the housekeeping money both before and after his second wife’s death into Margaret’s hands.

In her secret heart Margaret was far from preserving the adamantine character with which she was credited. So far from it, indeed, she took an intense interest in Stella’s love affair, and considered Hilary Pritchard an ideal hero of romance, his splendid figure, handsome face, and genial, grateful manners having made a strong impression upon her during the short period while he remained under her care.

When, therefore, Stephen Lee handed her the note for Stella, under pretence of assisting her to pick up the plate she had purposely dropped from the kitchen table, Margaret instantly jumped to the conclusion that it must be another communication from Stella’s handsome sweetheart, Hilary, which the latter had contrived to transmit to the young gamekeeper.

It was very desirable, so Margaret decided, that Stella should receive the note that same night. “It will comfort the poor dear,” she said to herself, “and, maybe, make her sleep better to know that her young gentleman is thinking of her.”

But since her lady’s death, Margaret had had no opportunity of seeing Stella, and it would have provoked comment and inquiry had she tried to do so now. Presently, however, when Ellen, the lady’s maid, gave vent to a grumbling remark that she “supposed some supper would have to be taken up to Miss Stella, since she hadn’t touched anything that day, and she must be kept alive somehow until she was married and done for,” it occurred to Margaret that her chance had come. Miss Cranstoun’s supper consisted of a wing of a bird, some Camembert cheese and salad, and some Burgundy in a decanter, the doctor having ordered her that wine. Margaret decided intuitively that even if Stella ate nothing, long fasting would have made her so faint that she would probably sip a glass of wine. Risking detection, therefore, she contrived to slip the piece of folded paper she had received from Stephen under the decanter under pretence of smoothing the cloth under the tray in passing. Only Stephen Lee saw her do it; not much escaped his keen gypsy eyes. But in order to complete her work it was necessary that Ellen’s attention should be turned in some other direction than the tray she was about to carry up to her mistress, and towards that end he suddenly made a remark in an awkward shamefaced manner, all the more effective because it appeared spontaneous and genuine.

“If I was Lord Carthew,” he said, “it’s not the missus I’d be after, but the maid.”

The lie almost choked him as he mentally contrasted the limp, round back, colorless eyes, and retreating chin of Ellen with the willowy, supple form, delicate features, and luminous eyes of his adorable cousin. But the lady’s maid herself saw no inappropriateness in the compliment, which was the more valuable as the young gamekeeper seldom joined the kitchen circle and had never before paid the least attention to any of the women. Ellen therefore bridled with pride and satisfaction as she caught up the supper-tray and made her way to Miss Cranstoun’s room in the turret, the door of which was opened to her by Dakin.

“What a time you’ve been!” exclaimed the latter. “I’ve been just longing to get down to my supper.”

“Young Stephen Lee’s been in the servants’ hall,” said Ellen, in a loud whisper, and Stella, hearing the words, listened with all her ears.

“Lor’, he’s that complimentary,” giggled Ellen. “Says he, ‘If I was Lord Carthew,’ he says, ‘it’s not the mistress I’d be after, but the maid.’ I got that hot and uncomfortable at the way he said it and looked at me that I had to ketch up the tray and run upstairs out of the way. It never seemed to me he was a marrying sort of man; but there, perhaps he was only waiting until Miss Right came along.”

Dakin stared, with a striking absence of sympathy. She was wondering what a fine, handsome young fellow like Stephen could see in the pallid, watery-eyed, flabby-looking young woman before her. Only Stella, as she reclined on a sofa in the bedroom, to all appearance absorbed in listlessly turning over the pages of a novel, could guess at anything between the lines of Stephen Lee’s compliment. That Stephen should dare to lift his eyes as high as her, his master’s daughter, had not entered her mind. But she knew now that he was a gypsy of the same wild, untamed race as herself, and she guessed that his motive for entering the servants’ hall that night was to bring some message from old Sarah, and that his unwonted gallantry toward the far from comely Ellen was a trick to cover some scheme of his for the future.

It was therefore not without prescience of what might be in store for her that Stella watched the tray which was placed on a little table near her couch. She fully expected, indeed, that a communication of some kind would be lurking among the articles upon it, and when, presently, waiting her opportunity until Ellen, under pretence of rearranging the ornaments on the mantelpiece, became absorbed in the reflection of her own plain features in the looking-glass, she began to closely examine the contents of the supper-tray, the result was that her fingers speedily closed on Sarah’s message. Slipping it into the open pages of her book, with her heart beating high with excitement, Stella read the pencilled words with eager eyes. Not for one moment did she doubt the gypsy’s power to help her. “Your mother’s friends watch over you, and soon you will be free.” The words came as light in the darkness to the girl, drooping under the forced confinement to the house, and the detestable system of espionage by which she was never for one moment free from Dakin’s or Ellen’s prying eyes. It was true that when she thought of Lord Carthew, and recalled his sympathetic talk on the morning when he had compared her to the “Lady of Shalott,” and the charm of his manner toward the late Lady Cranstoun, she was not so unjust or so prejudiced as to believe that he was a party to the system which was depriving her of her liberty and breaking down her health in order to force her into an uncongenial marriage. She believed, on the contrary, that could she only obtain an hour’s uninterrupted talk with the young Viscount, he would be the first to condemn her father’s drastic treatment and to yield his claim to her hand when she informed him that she was passionately in love with another man. She knew all this, but knew, too, that Sir Philip would never allow a meeting between her and Lord Carthew, whose town address she did not even know. Grief for Lady Cranstoun’s death, desperate anxiety as to her own future, a perpetual longing to see Hilary again and to be assured of his love and faithfulness, the impossibility of even communicating with him, the misery of her present situation, bereft of love, hope, sympathy, and even of seclusion, and above all, the terrible trial of absence of fresh air and outdoor exercise to a girl of her race and temperament, these things were seriously affecting her health. But for the hope held out in Sarah’s message Stella would hardly have lived through the twenty days that followed.

Her nights were sleepless, and what slumber she enjoyed came to her by day and by the use of opiates, which her father, who would allow no doctor to see her, caused to be administered to her in her tea and coffee; and it was in a deep sleep, brought on by a dose of this kind, that Lord Carthew saw her, lying fully dressed on the sofa, the window, which was open to allow the fresh spring air to blow through the room, letting in a torrent of clear, bright sunlight, which seemed absolutely to shine through the girl’s attenuated form as she lay resting among cushions, her cheeks of a marble whiteness under her long, black eyelashes.

Sir Philip himself brought his future son-in-law to see his daughter, as the latter, on his third visit, would not be denied.

“If you don’t let me see her, I shall think she is dead,” he said, half laughing, but half seriously, too.

“My dear Carthew, I have really been afraid of startling you. The poor child’s grief has been so excessive that she is wasted to a shadow. She is morbidly fearful lest you may be shocked at the change in her; but I will myself go and prepare her for your visit, and entreat her to receive you.”

“Seeing that we are to be married in a week, it would seem very strange if I could not see her for a few minutes,” observed Lord Carthew; and Sir Philip recognizing a certain doggedness in his tone, knew that he had made up his mind. Not for the first time the Baronet realized that his future son-in-law had a strong will of his own, and he rejoiced to see it manifested. A husband with a strong will, he told himself, was imperatively necessary in the case of a girl with Stella’s erratic and vagrant instincts. It was, indeed, almost pitiful to consider Sir Philip’s anxiety that the marriage between Lord Northborough’s heir and his daughter should come off without any hitch. The chatelain of the Chase was accustomed to be obeyed in fear and trembling, and he never once questioned the wisdom of his own decrees. It was of vital importance, so he told himself, that Stella should marry Lord Carthew, and he was placed in a position of extreme difficulty by the fact that if Stella and Claud once met before the ceremony, the girl would undoubtedly blurt out the terrible facts of her preference for Hilary Pritchard, and of her gypsy descent. The dread of such a contingency prevented Sir Philip from resting by night or by day. He did not like the Chase, but he remained in the house simply and solely to prevent his daughter from running away, as he felt sure she would do should the least opportunity present itself.

On the day, therefore, when he conducted Lord Carthew into the presence of his lovely fiancée, Sir Philip ascertained first of all that the latter was under the influence of an opiate which would prevent her from recognizing and speaking to her future husband. Thus satisfied that no ill result could ensue, Sir Philip led Lord Carthew to the couch of his pale lady love, as she lay asleep, with her thin face on her thinner hand, Dakin, the black-browed and shifty-eyed, hovering in close attendance.

Stella’s heavy mourning accentuated her unearthly pallor. Even Sir Philip was startled, so deathlike was her appearance, while Lord Carthew’s heart was stirred to infinite pity.

Kneeling by her side, he very tenderly, very reverently lifted the hand which hung over the side of the sofa to his lips before he took from his pocket and slipped on her third finger a superb diamond engagement-ring.

“I wish she would awaken and speak to me,” he said, wistfully. “I wanted to ask her about our honeymoon—whether she would like to go at once in my yacht to the Mediterranean, or, as she is so delicate, whether a stay of a few days in the Isle of Wight before setting out on our travels might not be the best thing for her. My father has placed Northborough Castle at my disposal, and it would not be much of a journey from here. Has she been asleep long?” he inquired of Dakin.

“No, my lord, not long. Poor young lady, she was awake all night. She do grieve dreadfully over her mamma’s death; she don’t seem to have the heart to sleep or eat or go out. But she gets a bit excited about her trousseau, my lord. That’s the only thing now that seems to interest her.”

This was a daring flight of fancy on the part of Dakin, for Stella had not even troubled to look at the patterns for materials, the gloves, and shoes, and cloaks, and dresses, which every day brought her.

“She looks dreadfully ill,” said the lover, anxiously. “What does the doctor say?”

“There’s nothing the matter with her but fretting, my lord, and change of scene is bound to cure her in no time.”

“I have brought down a present from my mother to my bride,” Lord Carthew next remarked, drawing a large, flat jeweller’s case from his pocket. “I had hoped to have clasped them round Stella’s neck myself.”

He opened the lid and displayed before Sir Philip’s approving eyes five rows of superb pearls, caught here and there by diamond clasps.

“My mother would like to have presented the gift in person,” he explained, “but when I told her of Stella’s extreme delicacy and nervous depression, she agreed that it would be better not to see her until the wedding-day. She pleaded so hard, however, to be allowed to come to the wedding that I could not refuse her. Of course she perfectly understands how essentially quiet the affair will be, so soon after Lady Cranstoun’s death. I suppose you have made every arrangement for the service to be read in the chapel here?”

“Certainly. It is a little in disrepair and I have workmen employed at this moment in putting it right,” answered Sir Philip. “Only my father-in-law, the Duke of Lanark, will be present besides myself. He has not seen Stella for some time, but she was always his favorite grandchild, and he much desires to be present. Stella is fond of him and glad to have him.”

With much relief Sir Philip saw his future son-in-law depart for town that same evening. He had been dreading lest Stella should unexpectedly awaken and spoil all. Everything was going on as well as could be expected. According to Dakin and Ellen, Stella, although she took no active interest in her trousseau, consented to stand passive while hats and gowns were tried upon her, and made no remark even when she was “fitted” for her wedding-dress. The servants thought that she must be getting reconciled to the idea of the marriage; but as she never spoke, it was difficult for them to pronounce on the subject with certainty. This neutral attitude was at least better than active opposition, and Sir Philip’s heart was elated by hope that nothing would occur to mar the ceremony.

It was the more irritating to him, therefore, when on the night before the wedding eve a strange and ominous dream troubled his repose. He thought that he was standing within some vast cathedral, in which, amid much pomp and magnificence, to the strains of a superb organ, and before the eyes of the highest in the land, the nuptials of his daughter and Lord Carthew were being celebrated. He thought he was giving his daughter away, was standing close by her side and placing her hand within that of her bridegroom, when a cold film seemed to hang across him, and he perceived the spirit of his dead wife Clare, with one hand uplifted in warning, and the other stretched protectingly around her daughter, who seemed unconscious of her presence.

Suddenly the light in the church flickered and paled; people looked at each other, whispering and alarmed. Bride and bridegroom sprang apart, affrighted, and instead of the rich notes of the organ came the shrill, eldritch laughter of the hag Sarah Carewe, as she croaked again in his ears the curse which she had uttered on the day when James Carewe was sentenced for defending his father.

It was a horrible dream, and Sir Philip awoke unnerved and alarmed. At the same hour of the night visions of help and escape hovered over Stella, the memory of which kept her in a fever of excitement throughout the day. Mechanically she let them attire her in her bridal robes in the afternoon, and Sir Philip was sent for to see her in them.

She was white as her dress, and her eyes shone strangely. The look of strain and tension about her face startled her father, suggesting, as it did, a state of mind bordering on insanity. Had these three weeks of solitary confinement been too much for her? he wondered.

“I am glad,” he said, speaking more gently than usual, “to see that you are prepared to accept with pleasure the brilliant fate in store for you.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then disconcerted him by giving vent to a low, mirthless laugh as she turned away.

Alarmed by something unexpected and uncanny in her manner, Sir Philip took Dakin apart, and gave orders that for the rest of the evening Miss Cranstoun was to be closely watched, but allowed apparent liberty of action.

“Does she seem to you at all light-headed?” he asked, and Dakin owned that that idea had occurred to her.

“Let her move about the house,” Sir Philip said, “always, of course, with one or two persons within call. Fretting and starving in that foolish way have pulled her down badly.”

All the watching during that evening, however, fell to Dakin’s share, for handsome Stephen Lee presented himself in the servants’ hall, and made such open love to Ellen that that young woman forgot everything in the joy of her supposed conquest.

Finding that she was able to leave her room unmolested, and remembering well old Sarah’s promise of help on the wedding eve, Stella took the opportunity while her father was at dinner of running lightly down the broad oak staircase toward the hall door. Here she paused a moment, and then suddenly, with trembling fingers and thumping heart, she drew back the bolt of the door.

Dakin was close behind her, although she knew it not; and Dakin followed her young mistress out on the terrace, hiding in the shadow of the doorway, and watched her hesitate a moment, and then speed across the grass to where the woods began, and lose herself among the gathering shadows.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE CHARM.

She had believed the girl to be too seriously ill to attempt to run away. But, after all, as she told herself, stepping gingerly on to the wet grass after her errant charge, Miss Cranstoun couldn’t go very far. Still she was nervous. Sir Philip had given particular orders that his daughter should have more liberty this evening, but he had said nothing about permitting her to stray about the grounds.

Mrs. Dakin was not wholly inhuman, although of a mean, hard, vulgar, and sordid nature. She had been promised five and twenty pounds, to be divided between her and Ellen, to whom she decided that the odd five pounds should go as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, and she wanted to earn it. At the same time Stella’s appearance this evening had been so strange, her eyes had appeared so unnaturally large and bright, and her face of so waxen and unhealthy a pallor, that the spy had serious misgivings as to whether she would be alive and in her right mind for the ceremony of the morrow. Consequently, she had decided that a little fresh air might do the girl good, and as Stella was wearing a white woollen shawl over her shoulders, there was no particular danger of her catching a cold, even though the evening was damp and chilly.

Mrs. Dakin approached the outskirts of the wood and called Stella’s name, not too loudly, being in great dread lest she should draw Sir Philip’s anger upon her own head for losing sight of her.

“Miss Cranstoun! Miss Cranstoun! Miss Stella! Pray come in. You’ll be catching cold!”

Only a faint echo thrown from the thick walls of the Chase answered her. Unaccustomed to country sights and sounds, the last murmurs of the birds twittering good-nights to each other from the trees and the sound of the light rain which began to patter on the leaves made her nervous. The wood seemed full of rustlings, and almost, as it appeared to her, of human laughter, fitful and mocking.

Was Miss Stella hidden anywhere and laughing at her? Such a course of conduct seemed very unlike her young mistress, who never scrupled to show her proud dislike and distrust for the paid spies by whom she was surrounded. And yet, if it was not Stella, who could it be, for there undoubtedly was laughter sounding somewhere in the twilight woods?

Dakin was growing frightened. It was now fully twenty minutes since Stella had given her the slip. She did not know her way about the property, and could see no sign of Miss Cranstoun anywhere. With her neat black gown torn and her hands badly scratched by the brambles, she made her way out again into the open, resolved upon engaging further help in the discovery of her mistress. To her great relief, she caught sight of Stephen Lee, sauntering along with his hands in his pockets from the direction of the kitchen quarters. He looked less saturnine than usual, and a smile actually lurked about his mouth. Without hesitation, Dakin ran toward him.

“Mr. Lee!” she exclaimed; “the very man I want! I came out here with my young lady for her to get a breath of fresh air, and I’ve lost her somehow in the wood. You know your way in and out of them trees—find her at once, there’s a good fellow, and I’ll give you five shillings for yourself. She’s ill and upset, and I’m almost afraid,” she added, lowering her tone, “if she’s left alone that she’ll be doing herself a mischief.”

The blood rushed all over the young gypsy’s face in an instant. He guessed that old Sarah had some hand in Stella’s disappearance, yet he had no more idea than Dakin as to where Stella was or what old Mrs. Carewe’s plans with regard to her could be. His own instructions had been simply to make love to the lady’s maid, and so to withdraw her attention from her mistress, and at this task he had succeeded only too well.

He stood now, hesitating a moment, as Dakin addressed him. Old Sarah was about in the woods, probably, and James Carewe also; of that he felt as certain as that a gypsy’s caravan was encamped immediately outside the Chase demesne on a piece of waste land, not very far from the ruined tower. He must not meddle in grandame Sarah’s concerns for certain. If Sarah intended to spirit Stella away that night, she would most certainly do so, and if she did not mean that, what was the sense of all her prophecies about Stella’s relenting toward him—Stephen—and showing signs of returning his love?

“Why, man,” she cried, “why are you standing, staring, there? She is lost in the wood—your young mistress—can’t you understand?”

“I understand right enough,” he answered in a surly tone; “but I’ve got to think out for myself which path she’d be likely to take. You wait on the terrace steps, missis, and I’ll see if I can find her.”

He struck into the wood, and made his way rapidly through the branches until he reached a point at which he calculated that Dakin could not hear him. The sky had grown very dark by this time with falling dusk, and the rain-clouds. Here, under the overarching branches, it was difficult even for Stephen’s hawk-eyes to distinguish anything. Stopping still, he uttered three times the same low, peculiar whistle with which he had heralded his approach to the ruined tower. Then he listened, and very faintly, as from some distance, he caught an answering sound.

Again he gave the signal, and this time the responsive whistle was nearer, and the sound of breaking twigs heralded the approach of one or more persons through the brushwood. He hardly knew whether or not to feel surprised when, through an opening of the boughs, he perceived two female figures approaching him. One was Stella, with her white woollen shawl drawn about her head and shoulders, the other was mami Sarah, looking very bent and tiny, as she hobbled along beside her tall companion.

“You are here all right, then,” said the old woman to him. “Good boy—good boy! Now, see this young lady back into the house. She’s been having a little talk with poor old Sarah. She knows old Sarah’s her friend, don’t you, deary?”

The girl bent her head in a dazed fashion, as it seemed to Stephen. He, for his part, utterly failed to understand the whole business.

“I came into the woods to find Miss Cranstoun,” he said, doubtfully. “It was that spy woman sent me. I thought—I hoped,” he stammered, “that you, mami Sarah, might have helped Miss Cranstoun to escape.”

“Leave it to me, Steve,” she muttered; “old Sarah knows her business. Steve needn’t teach his great-grandmother. Remember all I’ve said to you, dearie,” she added, turning to Stella, “and as for this young man, though you’re Miss Cranstoun of the Chase, he’s your cousin, and you may trust him. Now, good-night to you, my dearies, both. A handsome pair they make, a handsome pair!”

So, muttering and gibbering to herself, old Mrs. Lee disappeared again among the trees, huddled in her hooded cloak, and as like the realization of a witch in a fairy-tale as could be imagined, leaving Stephen and Stella standing opposite each other in the dusk, while the rain pattered on the branches above their heads.

Stephen was the first to break the silence. Some strange fear of the girl possessed him; he had always been in awe of her, and her unmoved manner of receiving Sarah’s communication struck him as being out of place and strange.

“You have no desire to escape? Because you have only to say the word, and I will lay down my life trying to set you free. Don’t you want to be free?”

She spoke mechanically, although he felt that in the darkness her eyes were fixed searchingly upon him.

“The woman Dakin is waiting for you on the terrace. Shall I take you to her?”

Without another word he led the way through the trees on to the grass before the house. It was considerably more than half an hour since Dakin had lost Stella, but she was there on the terrace, anxiously awaiting her.

The rain had ceased, and the sky was clear. There was still sufficient light for Stephen, as he suddenly turned to look at his young mistress, to distinguish her features and expression.

As he did so, his heart grew cold within him, for the look in her dilated dark eyes was not only wild, but absolutely wicked.

CHAPTER XVII.
A MAD BRIDE.

“I thought you were lost, miss—I did, indeed,” protested Dakin, as Miss Cranstoun, hardly deigning to notice her, swept past her into the house. “And if Sir Philip thought I’d let you run out of the house like that—— Lor’, here he is!”

Mistress and maid were crossing the wide hall as Sir Philip entered it from the dining-room. Miss Cranstoun’s shawl had fallen back, and her plentiful blue-black hair, disarranged by the woollen wrap, curled in picturesque disorder round her face. The Baronet advanced to meet her, and then suddenly stopped. He did not even see Dakin in attendance as his pale face grew paler still, and his dry lips murmured:

It was only a trick of light, no doubt, but he had never seen Stella look so startlingly like her dead mother as she did to-night; the same proud, defiant carriage of the head, the same flashing dark eyes, and curved, scornful, red lips. Twenty years seemed to have slipped away, and he himself to be taken back into the body of a young fool, bringing his beautiful, low-bred bride into the home of his fathers.

Speech would dispel the hateful illusion; he realized that, and uttered his daughter’s name sharply:

“Be sure that you are dressed in time to-morrow. The train for Portsmouth leaves Grayling Station at two o’clock. Neither Lord Carthew nor I like to be kept waiting. Do you hear me?”

“I shall probably not see you to-morrow until you are dressed for the ceremony. You will, of course, wear the pearl necklace Lady Northborough sent you. I hope you have by this time realized fully the honor that Lord Carthew is conferring on you by making you his wife.”

No answer. She was looking him full in the eyes with an expression he had never before seen in hers, such an expression as his own face often wore—scornful, sarcastic, and hard.

“On my side,” he continued, longing to humble her untamable spirit, “on my side, indeed, there is no question of honoring. The Cranstouns can vie with the Guelphs for antiquity of race; but as the daughter of such a mother as yours, it should, indeed, be gratifying to you that a man of Lord Carthew’s rank should have asked for your hand.”

She did not answer in words, but broke into a low laugh of unmistakable contempt. It was the second time that evening that she had laughed at him, and something defiant and insolent in her manner provoked him beyond endurance. He seized both her slender hands in one of his, and shook her savagely.

Into her dark eyes there flashed a look which seemed the reflex of his own in savagery. Then, suddenly lowering her head, she buried her teeth in his fingers, causing him instantly to let her go; whereat she looked at him, laughed again, and fled away up the stairs.

The assiduous Dakin, who had stolen to the floor above unobserved during the little passage of arms between father and daughter, led the way to the turret bedroom. It made her flesh creep, she admitted afterward, to hear Miss Cranstoun laughing to herself as she glided in. Stella walked straight up to the wedding-dress, which lay upon the bed, a perfectly plain garment of high-necked white satin, with a long tulle veil.

As Miss Cranstoun turned the dress over, she laughed again, and flitting about the room, she next lighted on the case containing the pearl necklace. A little exclamation of pleasure escaped her lips as she opened it; until that moment she had not troubled to do so. Now she clasped it round her neck and stood before the looking-glass, trying the effect.

Dakin, watching her, decided that she had never seen her look so handsome. A feverish flush tinged her ordinarily pale face, and her eyes shone with unnatural brilliancy. Seizing the wedding-dress, she motioned to Dakin to assist her into it, grumbling the while in a low undertone, quite unlike her usual clear, sweet voice, about the fit.

Dakin had very little doubt by this time that the poor girl’s mind was temporarily deranged. She had been but a comparatively short time in the Cranstoun service, but she knew enough of Stella’s outward manner to be sure that this strange, restless irritability, these low, cunning fits of laughter, and this rough impatience of movement, differed entirely from Stella’s natural deportment. Once convinced that Miss Cranstoun was a little “off her head,” Dakin was extra anxious to please her. It was not her place, but Ellen’s, to help her to dress, and to make alterations in the fit of her gown; but rather than excite her to any outward paroxysm, Dakin pinned and stitched for a good hour, and felt genuinely thankful that it was Ellen, and not she, who had to sleep that night in the same room with the bride of to-morrow.

When the lady’s maid at length entered the bedroom after supper, Dakin was curious to see whether she also would note the alteration for the worse in Stella’s manner. At first, the young woman was too much absorbed in Mr. Stephen Lee’s compliments to pay heed to anything around her; but gradually, as she whispered apart to Dakin, she became aware that Miss Cranstoun, seated by the fire in a white cashmere dressing-gown, with her black hair loose about her shoulders, was listening to her silly confidences, and staring at her with great, gleaming eyes.

Dakin, with her back to her young mistress, touched her forehead significantly, and shook her head.

“They get that sharp when they’re that way,” she whispered, confidentially. “If she’s violent in the night I’ll be sleeping in the next room, and I’ll come to you.”

But this was not enough for Ellen. Shaking with fear, she protested that she could not be left alone with a mad woman, and that unless Dakin promised to sleep with her she would go right down to Sir Philip and tell him then and there that the marriage must be put off because his daughter was crazy. This threat had the effect of persuading Dakin to stay, the more so as she could see Miss Cranstoun watching them, and laughing softly to herself as the unhappy spies took whispering counsel together. Neither of them slept that night, except for occasional broken snatches, from which they were awakened with a start by fitful bursts of the same crazy laughter from the bride of the ensuing day.

Stella’s wedding morn was clear and fair. Scarcely a cloud marred the blue clearness of the sky, and the sun shone bright upon the bridegroom as he drove with his mother from Grayling Station in the carriage sent from the Chase to meet them. Lord Northborough had been unable to attend the ceremony, owing to a sudden Parliamentary crisis and impending change of Ministry. But Lady Northborough made up by her vivacity and high spirits for her husband’s absence. She was a typical American, highly educated, witty, fascinating, and sympathetic. She was not beautiful, but always exquisitely dressed, and dainty as a Dresden china statuette. This morning, in silver-gray brocade and rare old white lace, she looked a little picture as she chattered and smiled at her son during the drive.

“I’m just mad with anxiety to see your lovely Stella,” she was saying. “I’m so glad you are going to marry a beauty. I do love pretty women.”

“There isn’t the slightest doubt about Stella’s beauty, mother; but I’m afraid you’ll think she looks terribly delicate. She has been wearing herself to a shadow, crying over her mother’s death. There seems to be no sympathy at all between her and her father. The man is made of cast-iron. But Stella’s prettiness is her least charm. She is so frank and innocent, so naïve, and at the same time so refined; her face is as pure as a child’s, and yet as tender as a woman’s; but if I once begin, I shall rhapsodize over her until we reach the house. She has been bought up in the most conventual manner; even Tennyson has been kept from her, and she listened to the ‘Lady of Shalott’ as a child does to a fairy-tale. She has herself lived like that; shut up, as the Lady of Shalott was, among dreams. It is by that name that I like to think of her.”

“Fanciful boy!” his mother murmured, fondly tapping his cheek lightly with her gloved fingers. “How can people consider you hard and sarcastic? Only your little mother understands you as you really are.”

“Dear little mother! But one thing disappoints me. I can find no trace of Hilary Pritchard. He has not returned to his rooms in town, nor is he at his Yorkshire home. In the state he was in, with a gunshot wound in his shoulder, his disappearance is the more inexplicable.”

“Don’t you think,” Lady Northborough suggested, with her fine woman’s instinct, “that he, too, may have fallen a victim to the charms of your beautiful Miss Cranstoun, and that that may be his reason for stopping away?”

“Quite impossible,” her son answered, decidedly. “He had taken a most unaccountable dislike against her at first sight.”

“And he saw nothing of her. He left the very day after his arrival, while every one was having luncheon, rather than stay an hour longer in the house, although he was not fit to travel.”

“Oh, part of his pride and independence, I suppose. Besides, why should he keep away? He doesn’t even know that I am going to be married to Miss Cranstoun.”

“Not when the fact has been announced in every society paper for the past fortnight?”

“I forgot that. But I repeat, little mother, his absence has nothing to do with my marriage, and his conduct in avoiding me hurts me very deeply—unless, indeed, it may arise from illness. But here we are within the Chase enclosure. Splendid timber, isn’t it?”

The Chase chapel had been unused, save as a lumber-room, for very many years. The Cranstouns were not a religious race, and the beautiful little mediæval building had been desecrated by being utilized alternately as a barn and a box-room. But for the masses of white flowers on the altar, there was no attempt at decoration, an omission accounted for by Lady Cranstoun’s recent death.

Round about the arched graystone doorway of the chapel the servants and retainers of the Chase were assembled, and a faint cheer went up as Lord Carthew helped his mother to descend from the carriage. The Squire was not popular with his tenants any more than with his domestics; he had an absolute genius, indeed, for making himself disliked by all classes among whom he moved. Still, he was all powerful in the district, and great interest was felt in the beautiful daughter whom hardly any one had ever seen outside the Chase enclosure. The crowd round the chapel doors was necessarily a comparatively small one, comprising, as it did, only the tenants of farms and cottages within easy distance of the house, and among them a little, wrinkled, aged woman, neatly dressed in a cotton gown, a shawl, apron, and large straw bonnet, was hardly noticed at first, each group supposing her to belong to some other in the party.

There was no way into the chapel save through the Norman archway, and to enter it from the house it was necessary to walk some yards along the terrace. Inside the little building, which smelt musty and disused, two clergymen were waiting: Canon Wrextone, who had been a college contemporary of Sir Philip Cranstoun, and the Rev. John Turner, of Grayling. The Canon was a stout, genial man of the world; the Vicar of Grayling, a pale, ascetic-looking man of middle age. In one of the few high oak pews, too, there sat his Grace the Duke of Lanark, the late Lady Gwendolen’s father, a tall, bent, old gentleman of seventy-five, in deep mourning, with the pallor of eld upon his face, which was almost as colorless as his snow-white hair.

The head of the house of Douglas had felt it to be his duty to grace by his presence the union of her whom he believed to be his daughter’s child with Lord Northborough’s heir, who himself had the extreme honor of being connected by marriage with the Douglas family. His duchess had not accompanied him, as she had an equally strong objection against the Chase and its master, and considered that a wedding so close on the heels of her daughter’s death was indecorous in the extreme. But Lord Northborough and the Duke were political allies, and the Earl had joined with Sir Philip in begging the favor of his presence. The old gentleman had therefore journeyed down, attended by his valet, who sat at some distance behind his master. The Duke was curious to see his granddaughter, of whose remarkable beauty he had heard with surprise. The Douglases had been plain for generations, and it seemed a little sacrilegious for a Douglas’ daughter to be beautiful.

But no eyes watched for the bride’s appearance more keenly than those of the little, wizened old woman in the neat cotton gown and straw bonnet. Her bent frame was actually quivering with excitement as she hung on her stick, with her piercing eyes fixed upon the entrance doors to the house through which the bride must pass on her way to the chapel. Stephen Lee, having received strict orders not to recognize his old relation, kept at some distance from her, attired, as were all the grooms, gamekeepers, stable and farmhands among the crowd, in his best clothes, and looking a handsome and attractive figure in his brown velveteen coat, smart corduroys, and gaiters.

In his secret heart he was profoundly angry, anxious, and unhappy. What did old Sarah mean by her promise to save Stella from a distasteful marriage, when here they were at the church doors, waiting for the girl to appear in her wedding-dress, and be married to this infernal whipper-snapper of a swell, whom he, Stephen, could have felled with one hand? What, too, had passed between Stella and Sarah in the course of that interview in the woods last night, and what was the meaning of that strange look he had seen in Stella’s eyes?

Sarah was up to some trick, that was certain, but of what nature he had no means of divining; meantime the chapel held already a duke, a countess, two ministers of the Church, and the young bridegroom, only waiting for Stella’s appearance to begin the ceremony.

At last she came, radiant sunshine falling down on her as she emerged from the doors on to the terrace, her fingers laid upon her father’s arm, towering over him in height, and looking, in her plain trained gown of white satin, taller and more commanding than she had ever yet appeared. Sir Philip’s face was set like a mask. It was impossible to say what were his feelings, but his cold heart in reality was aflame with astonishment, indignation, and rage.

Stella had kept him waiting in the hall, watch in hand; had then sauntered leisurely down the broad oak staircase in her wedding-gown, attended at a distance by the two frightened satellites, Ellen and Dakin, and by old Margaret, whose features wore a scared and troubled look. Miss Cranstoun had offered no apologies to her father for keeping him waiting, but had coolly crossed to where he was standing, and looked at him with shining eyes, in which some strange laughter seemed hidden, from behind her veil.

There was more than defiance, there was an insolence in her tone and manner utterly new to him. Nevertheless, there was no time to be lost in reprimands or punishments now. He dreaded beyond all things lest she might make a scene in church before Lady Northborough and the Duke. Her fear of him and constraint in his presence seemed to have vanished. Some subtle change had come over her state of mind toward him. She actually shook his arm impatiently as he stood a moment, pale with anger, regarding her.

The grasp of her fingers tightened on his arm. This time it was actually she who was hurting him, as she clutched his skin through his coat. He glanced at her quickly, and then at the faces of the women behind her. The idea which possessed their brains entered his also, and he asked himself whether grief and harsh treatment could have temporarily deprived his daughter of her reason.

As Sir Philip led the bride along the terrace toward the church door, a murmur of admiration ran through the crowd. Her face had lost its pallor; through the tulle veil a bright color showed in her cheeks, and contrasted with the intense purple-blue of her restless, gleaming eyes. Two persons her gaze sought in the crowd about the doors. First they lighted upon old Sarah Carewe, and that look in her eyes which was almost a smile deepened and broadened. Next, her gaze sought out Stephen Lee, and seemed to read in one piercing glance, as she passed close to him, the hopeless passion for her which consumed him. As though by accident, she dropped her lace handkerchief at the church door. One or two persons among the crowd pressed forward to pick it up, and among them Stephen, who, as he transferred it to the bride’s hand, felt, to his utter astonishment, that she had slipped a piece of paper into his fingers.

Speechless with amazement, he watched her enter the church; the doors were clanged to behind her, and every eye was fixed upon her as she walked proudly up the aisle, leaning on her father’s arm. Lady Northborough could hardly refrain from a little cry of admiration. Her son’s description had prepared her for something ethereal, thin and pale to a fault; but this queenly young creature, with the proud little dark head, the perfect figure, and startlingly brilliant coloring, was no subject for pity, but rather for wondering admiration.

“Gad! Where did the girl get her good looks from?” muttered the old Duke, who had occasionally an awkward habit of thinking aloud.

As to Lord Carthew, he was enraptured by the alteration for the better in his lovely bride’s appearance. The strange restlessness of her glances he attributed to her natural nervousness, which caused her also to whisper and mumble the necessary responses in the service with even less than the ordinary bride’s accuracy. Sir Philip, watching his daughter closely, felt every moment more convinced that the girl’s brain and memory were momentarily clouded. She stared about her without reverence, but with evident curiosity, during the service, to which she paid not the slightest attention, and her bridegroom especially she continually regarded with a kind of amused wonder, as some specimen of humanity the like of whom she had never seen before. But no one else seemed to heed her irreverent behavior or to note that strange look as of suppressed laughter in her dancing eyes, and Sir Philip drew a deep sigh of relief when the ceremony was over, and the signing of the book followed.

Here again a strange thing happened. The newly made Lady Carthew, after receiving with an odd little laugh the congratulatory kisses of her grandfather, the Duke, and the Countess, her mother-in-law, murmured that her hand shook so badly she could not hold a pen, and was with difficulty persuaded to scrawl “Stella Cranstoun,” in an almost undecipherable hand, on the page before her. Strange fears and fancies filled Sir Philip’s mind. Was her feverish color, her strange behavior, due to a partially paralyzed brain and nerves, he wondered. Still, she was Lady Carthew, and he had triumphed; but that strange likeness to her dead mother, which seemed so much stronger to-day than it had ever been before, troubled him, and that incomprehensible laugh in her eyes.

“I wish Carthew joy of his bargain,” was Sir Philip’s mental comment. “But, in any case, she is in his charge now, and safely off my hands, so that there is no chance of that senseless old gypsy prophecy being realized.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WEDDING JOURNEY.

Such was the message, scrawled in a shaky handwriting, on the scrap of paper thrust by the bride into Stephen Lee’s hand.

It perplexed him beyond measure, but it seemed to him that her will was law, and he must obey. For more than five years he had cherished a dog-like devotion, of which she had been apparently quite unconscious. Yet now she wanted him, and he could not choose but obey her orders. First, however, he must contrive to show the paper to old Sarah, and this he succeeded in doing while the bridal party were leaving the church, at which time the crowd had eyes for none but the chief actors in the ceremony.

Quickly running her eye over the bit of paper he had slipped into her hand, for the old woman’s sight was excellent in spite of her years, Sarah grinned in intense and evident amusement as she thrust it back upon him. Stephen was angry with her for her inexplicable merriment, but there was no time for controversy now; and abruptly leaving the group about the doors, he strode away in the direction of Grayling.

“Your daughter’s a handsome girl, sir,” the Duke observed to Sir Philip Cranstoun, as he and his host, with Lady Northborough and her son, sat in the vast and gloomy dining-hall of the Chase, facing that sardonic gray portrait in armor which had so greatly interested Lord Carthew on the occasion of his first visit to the house—“a very fine girl indeed. And I don’t wonder that Carthew here had his head turned. Can’t think where she gets her looks from. You’re not a beauty yourself, Cranstoun, and we Douglases have never been good-looking. Only known her a month, eh, Carthew? Well, well, marry in haste and repent at leisure, you know!”

“Now, Duke, you are just too cruel!” exclaimed Lady Northborough, as the old gentleman wheezed with elderly laughter over his own humor. “Stella is quite too lovely, and would certainly have been the most beautiful débutante at the Drawing-Room this year but for her unhappy mourning. Now mind, Claud, dear, that you get her quite well at Northborough Castle, and on the yacht. Though, really, she doesn’t look a bit ill now; but that’s on account of her lovely complexion.”

“Handsome is as handsome does,” persisted the old gentleman, teasingly. “Cranstoun, I am a judge of character, and I shouldn’t be surprised if Carthew here had caught a Tartar in your child and my granddaughter.”

For the first time in his life, Sir Philip seemed to have lost his gift of bitter speech. The Duke of Lanark’s words filled him neither with indignation nor amusement, but with something approaching alarm. The Stella he had always known, with her sensitiveness, refinement, and proud self-control, seemed to have altered into something strange and fierce, wholly beyond his influence. This impression deepened when she presently entered the room, in her going-away costume of soft gray crape, and gray velvet cape trimmed with gray ostrich feathers, which last also adorned her large, shady hat. It had seemed unlucky to start a honeymoon in black, so for the time her mourning for her mother had been mitigated by this very becoming compromise.

The new Viscountess Carthew was buttoning one of her long gray Suède gloves as she came in. She stopped in her employment at the threshold of the dining-room, and gazed with a sort of bold, amused curiosity at the group who sat discussing an elegant lunch of old wines and cold viands at the other end of the room. Her bridegroom hurried to meet her, followed by the Duke of Lanark.

“Allow me, my dear,” the latter said, and deftly fastened the button, while almost at the same time he clasped round her wrist a magnificent bangle of rubies and diamonds.

She flushed with pleasure, and her wonderful eyes sparkled at sight of the jewels. She was almost as tall as he, and seemed to tower over her bridegroom, her father, and little Lady Northborough, who tripped up to her, full of compliments and admiration.

Under a thin gray net veil the bride looked more beautiful than ever, and Claud found himself wondering why he had never before noted the wonderful tints of her skin, where the whites and reds were indeed “cunningly laid on” by Nature’s lavish hand. She was strangely silent, though, and hardly spoke one word in reply to Lady Northborough’s fluent effusiveness. As to her father, she pointedly ignored him, and every one present noted with a shock of surprise that when, at the very last moment of leaving her home, as she stood on the terrace steps before entering the carriage, Sir Philip took her hand and would have kissed her cheek, she drew sharply back, and laughed in a way not pleasant to hear.

The next moment she had sprung lightly into the open carriage, and Lord Carthew, after taking an affectionate leave of his mother, got in beside her, the signal was given to the coachman, the gray horses started at a brisk pace, and without rice, or satin slippers, or any other harbingers of good luck in their rear, the bridal pair started on their journey.

Lord Carthew was very loath to begin his married life with fault-finding. But his bride’s conduct on the steps had startled and shocked him.

“I am sorry, dearest,” he said, gently, “that you did not part friends from Sir Philip.”

She turned her head sharply, and looked straight into his eyes under the brim of her shady gray hat.

“I hate him!” she whispered, emphatically, drawing her full red lips back from her white teeth, with a grimace which had something animal in its ferocity.

He felt startled and chilled by the sight. He knew quite well that Stella did not love her father. In her frank and naïve confidences, she had acknowledged this, but always with regret. To-day, with her beauty enhanced by what seemed a sudden and astonishing return to bodily health, she seemed already to have lost some of the womanly charm which had gone as far to win his heart as her personal attraction.

Even before the bridal pair had entered the train at Grayling Station, Lord Carthew began to be glad of his bride’s silence.

So long as she sat by his side without speaking, beautiful as a poet’s dream, he could go on attributing to her all kinds of ideal qualities. But, although he would hardly yet acknowledge it even to himself, when she spoke she dispelled the illusion.

Not only did she display the utmost vindictiveness on the mention of her father’s name, but she appeared hardly to listen when he spoke to her of his mother, and of the latter’s admiration for his bride; and when he went on to descant on the beauties of the scenery in which they were going to pass the first days of the honeymoon, she cut him short by saying, abruptly, that she would “sooner go to London.”

Her voice jarred upon him. Hitherto he had admired its melodious accents—to-day they sounded hoarse and rough, and he inquired anxiously if she had taken a chill.

“I have a bad cold,” she said, quickly. “I did not like to worry you about it before. I caught it last night. Sir Philip had kept me a prisoner in my room ever since my mother’s death, and last night while dew and rain were falling I managed to give them all the slip and ran into the wood. I got my feet wet, lost my voice, and have been feeling queer ever since.”

This was the longest speech she had made that day. Lord Carthew listened to it, trying in vain to catch the sweet cadences of the voice which he had loved so well. In some way, for which he was at a loss to account, the soul seemed to have gone out of the girl beside him, leaving only the beautiful body behind it.

He tried to think that she was nervous in her new position, and hoped that time and companionship would bring back that frank confidence which had so much delighted him. But meantime he also relapsed into silence, which was hardly broken until they reached the railway station at Grayling.

Here they were met by Lord Carthew’s valet, and Lady Northborough’s maid, lent by the Countess to her daughter-in-law for the honeymoon on account of her exceptional tact and cleverness. Lady Carthew’s bright eyes, glancing about beyond these persons, sought for Stephen Lee, and perceived him at length by the third-class portion of the train.

Dispatching Lord Carthew for a book, she beckoned to Stephen, who, flushed and confused, came at her bidding.

“I shall take you on as my groom,” she said. “You shall leave the Chase, and enter my service.”

“We’re a bit late for the train, and can’t talk here,” she said, her restless eyes roving about the platform. “When the train stops at Peterstone, come to my carriage.”

Stephen retired as Lord Carthew returned, book in hand, and assisted his bride into a luxurious saloon which he had reserved for their use on the journey.

“Was not that the keeper who shot poor Hilary I saw you speaking to just now?” he asked, carelessly, as the train began to start, while he was still arranging on the table the baskets of flowers which had been prepared by the station-master as a compliment to Sir Philip’s daughter.

“Yes; Stephen Lee. He taught me to ride, and I want him in my service now as a groom. He’s in this train.”

Lord Carthew did not speak for a few moments. He was, indeed, too much surprised at first to make any remark.

“Is it by your wish that the man is coming by this train?” he asked, at length, in a constrained voice.

“The fact is,” he said, after another pause, “I have a not unnatural prejudice against the fellow who was clumsy enough to have wounded my friend. I own, too, I don’t like the appearance of the man. There is a surly, gypsy-like look about him, which sets me against him.”

“You don’t like his looks?” she repeated. “Well, in my opinion, he’s a lot better looking than you are.”

Was this his ideal Lady of Shalott, this the girl like a fairy princess come to life, all poetry, romance, and charm? She looked back at him, full in the eyes. Suddenly her face changed, and seemed to grow softer, and more what used formerly to appear to him.

“I was only laughing,” she said, in a very low voice. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-day. I think I am over-excited, and too glad to get away from that dreary prison, which the Chase has been to me. Why do you look at me in that shocked sort of way? Are you sorry you married me now that you have got me safe?”

Before he could answer, she had taken off her large hat and veil. Without them she looked more beautiful than ever, with the naturally waving and silky curls of her blue-black hair framing her exquisite face. Coming nearer to him, she nestled her head on his shoulder with a spontaneous gesture of affection, and lifting her long, soft eyes to his, she inclined her red lips toward his face in a little moue, irresistible in so beautiful a woman.

Lord Carthew was only a man, and in an instant he had forgotten all that she had said and done amiss in his delight at her unexpected tenderness. In a transport of passionate love, he pressed her in his arms, and repeatedly kissed her lips, her eyes and cheeks, and the soft curls about her brow.

“How adorably beautiful you are, my darling!” he exclaimed, as he caressed her face with his hand. “It is strange that I never until to-day realized your wonderful loveliness. You were always so pale, but to-day you have a color like a la France rose, and eyes that will make your diamonds look dowdy and dull. Have you the least idea how beautiful you are, Stella?”

She smiled for answer, and appeared pleased at his kisses and caresses. It was not until afterward that her ready affection struck him as unusual in a girl of her training. At the time, being very much in love, he was too much delighted to analyze her conduct.

At Peterstone Station there was a stoppage of a few minutes, and Lady Carthew, who was intensely restless, ran to the window, looked up and down the platform, and then suddenly turning on her bridegroom, informed him that she was longing for a cup of tea.

“I will tell Trevor,” he said, and was hurrying to the window to summon his servant when she laid her hands on his arm.

“I would rather you fetched it me yourself,” she said, coaxingly. “I shall not enjoy it from any one else.”

Thus adjured, Lord Carthew could do nothing less than spring out of the carriage at once to carry out his lady’s behests. The moment he had gone, his bride stretched herself, yawned, arranged her hair at the looking-glass, and then leaned out of the window again. As she expected, Stephen Lee stood a little way down the line, watching her saloon, and she motioned with her hand for him to join her.

All the other passengers by the Portsmouth train were fully aware that Lord Northborough’s heir was travelling toward his father’s seat, in the Isle of Wight, on his honeymoon journey with Sir Philip Cranstoun’s daughter. The rank of the pair and the extreme beauty of the bride naturally attracted many curious glances in the direction of the saloon, and at Peterstone several of their more inquisitive fellow-travellers left their seats in order to stroll about the platform, in the hope of getting a good look at the newly made Viscountess Carthew.

The bride herself appeared utterly indifferent to their scrutiny. She was sitting by the open door of the saloon, talking in low and, as it appeared, familiar tones with a handsome, black-bearded man in the dress of a gamekeeper, and her conversation, could the bystanders have heard it, would have considerably surprised them.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Stephen,” she was saying. “You know we are cousins. Old grandmother Sarah told me so. It’s a relief to look at a handsome man after being shut up in this carriage with that little monkey of a Carthew.”

“Well, isn’t he ugly?” she asked, and began to mimic the slight nervous twitching of the facial muscles which characterized Lord Carthew in moments of excitement. “Now, if he was like you,” she added, looking straight into the young gypsy’s eyes with a long, soft glance, “perhaps I shouldn’t get so bored over his compliments and his love-making.”

Sarah Carewe’s prophecy was certainly coming true. And yet, such is the contrary disposition of men, Stephen, who had for years passionately longed for the right to address one word, one look of love, toward his young mistress, felt a shock of disappointment, and even of disgust, when she thus went out of her way to lower herself to his level, and hardly knew how to answer her.

She had closed the saloon door, and was leaning out of the window, whispering something to Stephen, with her cheek actually touching his, when Lord Carthew returned with the tea. At first he could hardly believe his eyes when they rested upon his bride and her father’s servant in this familiar and even affectionate converse. It seemed too horrible, too degrading, to be true that here, under the gaze of grinning railway porters and curious and amused third-class passengers, his wife, his lovely, refined and innocent Stella, was publicly flirting with her father’s gamekeeper on a railway platform at three o’clock in the afternoon of her wedding-day! But the evidence of his eyes could not be doubted, and if anything were needed to acquaint Lord Carthew with the extent of his misfortune, Lady Carthew’s next words, which he plainly overheard, would have done so.

The words, very quietly uttered immediately behind him, made Stephen start. But the bride merely laughed as she saw her husband’s white face, and heard his voice, in hard, level tones, suggesting that she should sit farther away from the door, as her movements were being watched by a crowd.

“I do not,” he returned, closing the door, drawing up the window, and placing the tea upon the table before her.

Stephen Lee strolled back to his own compartment, but his indifference was only assumed. He was utterly dazed and puzzled. “ ’Tis some trick of old Sarah’s,” he kept on repeating to himself, and his bewilderment was so great that he hardly troubled his mind by surmises as to what would pass between the bride and bridegroom, left alone together again after the episode of the station.

What did actually happen became a fruitful topic for society newspapers for many, many months afterward.

Lord Carthew’s face was fixed like a mask as he seated himself on the opposite side of the carriage to his bride, while the train began slowly moving out of the station. It vexed him that presently he could not control that nervous twitching at this moment when he needed all his firmness, all his dignity. He could not speak to her, for with all his radical notions he was essentially a proud man, with a very high ideal of womanhood, and a still higher ideal of the position and duties of the woman he had chosen for his wife. Her conduct filled his mind with the utmost dismay, and a sensation of strong repulsion against her began to overmaster him.

“Are you cross?” she asked at last, lightly, breaking the silence. “I only mean to tease you.”

“Stella,” he exclaimed in desperation, “are you mad? Are you not capable of appreciating the value of your own actions, or has grieving over your recent loss turned your brain? Do you understand that you are my wife, Lady Carthew, that my honor is yours, and that it is outraging my name and your own reputation to make yourself a laughing-stock for station idlers by vulgar familiarity with one of your father’s servants? Stella, I can hardly believe it possible that I should have to address such words to you; you, whom I have reverenced as the most innocent, most refined of women! You cannot surely know what you are doing; fever must have mounted to your brain—great Heaven! If I thought you were truly responsible for such coarse and immodest behavior, I would never willingly look upon your face again!”

He had risen in his excitement, and stood staring across at her, noting with ever-increasing wonder and disgust the way in which she leaned forward, with her elbow on the table, and her face resting on her right hand, while with her left she drummed an impatient tattoo in front of her.

“You are to understand,” he broke out, passionately, “that only temporary insanity would, in my eyes, excuse your revolting conduct.”

“Well,” she cried, suddenly opening the carriage-door, “here goes for a little more insanity! I’m tired of you already. By-by, dearest!”

On the last word, to Lord Carthew’s horror, she sprang from the open door of the now rapidly moving train, and was lost to sight almost immediately as the engine entered a tunnel.

To communicate with the guard was hopeless until the train had passed through, by which time, after a prolonged search, Lord Carthew realized that in this particular carriage the communicator was missing.

His nerves were stunned by the unexpectedness of the blow. That Stella was mad, he had now not the slightest doubt, but this conviction did not decrease his anxiety on her account. An overwhelming dread, too, of the scandal which her crazy conduct would cause, increased his mental disquiet. What if his unfortunate bride were crushed to pieces, or maimed for life by her terrible leap! It seemed impossible that she could escape some such fate, for he could not even say for certain that she had jumped clear of the tunnel. The train was an express from this point to Portsmouth, and every moment the speed was increasing. He tried thrusting his head through the window of the saloon, and endeavored to attract the guard’s attention; but the wind, driving through his hair, and seeming to cut his face as the express darted on, blew his cries in the other direction. All that he could do was to draw down the blinds of the saloon so that Lady Carthew’s disappearance should not be noted by curious passers-by when the train stopped, and to possess his soul with such patience as he might until Portsmouth was reached at last.

Arrived there, he summoned the guard and the station-master, pledged them to secrecy, and informed them of the disastrous accident by which his bride, leaning against an imperfectly closed door, had been precipitated on to the line, not far from Peterstone Station.

Instantly the telegraph wires were set at work, but no trace of the missing bride could be found at first, until a telegram, addressed to Lord Carthew, care of station-master, Portsmouth, and sent from Clapham Junction Station, was handed in to the distracted husband.

CHAPTER XIX.
FOUND!

It was three days after Lord Carthew’s wedding. Hilary Pritchard was lodging in an hotel off the Strand, and was sitting in the coffee-room at breakfast on a misty May morning.

He was in extremely low spirits and very bad temper, and while waiting for his tea and eggs, he drew from his pocket a notice, cut from a newspaper two days old, which set forth that on a given date, Stella, only daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun, J. P., of the Chase, Surrey, and Cranstoun Hall, Aberdeenshire, was married to Viscount Carthew, eldest son of the Earl of Northborough, by the Rev. Canon Wrextone, assisted by the Rev. John Turner.

Hilary had read the words until long ago he had known them by heart. He had even, sorely against his will, written down to Northborough Castle to congratulate his friend in as few words as possible on his marriage, and to inform him that he purposed starting for Canada at least two months earlier than he had originally intended. In this letter he had mentioned the name of the hotel at which he was staying. Until now he had been anxious to keep his address a secret from his friend, from a feeling that he had not acted fairly by Lord Carthew in the matter of Stella Cranstoun; but now, since she had elected to marry her wealthy and titled suitor, Hilary’s conscience was clear. There was no longer any need for mystery, and he therefore told Lord Carthew, in his extremely brief congratulatory letter, that he was staying in this place for a few days, settling his affairs, before going north to take leave of his parents, on setting out for his new home across the sea.

He was conscious of a feeling of disloyalty in that he could not banish from his mind those two short love-scenes which had passed between himself and Stella. He told himself again and again that she was now his friend’s wife, and that she was most certainly a coquette, who had been amusing herself at his expense. “She would presently, if I were still in England, ask her husband to invite me to stay at one of their country seats,” he told himself, bitterly. “That’s how flirts always behave toward their old sweethearts when they’ve married another fellow. Ask them to stay, that he may see and envy the other fellow’s happiness. See them make love to their husbands at him, and call him by his Christian name when they are alone. ‘Dear Jack,’ or ‘dear Hilary, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t marry you, you know. I am very happy now, of course, but I was forced into it, and—you don’t bear me any grudge, do you?’ Then if they can, and if the husband is fool enough to stand it, they make a tame cat of the old sweetheart, and do their best to prevent him from marrying any one else, sacrificing his life’s happiness on the altar of their own petty, miserable vanity.”

With which cynical, if partially true, reasoning he strove to allay the gnawing bitterness at his heart, and to forget the passionate love which Stella had so suddenly aroused there.

He was very “hard hit,” for certain. Stella’s shining dark-blue eyes seemed to be gazing at him from every corner, and with her voice they haunted his dreams, from which he awoke with outstretched arms to meet the empty air. He had never meant to fall in love with her or with anybody, and it angered him to think that even incessant occupation and bodily activity could not stifle the constant pain at his heart. To a man of his essentially manly and practical nature, it seemed little short of contemptible to be thus dominated by a hopeless feeling of love for a woman, particularly now that she had become the wife of his friend; and he longed, with all his soul, for the moment when he should set sail for Canada, and, among new work and new surroundings, forget this foolish infatuation.

So he sat, brooding, over the breakfast-table, in a moody frame of mind with which, until the past few days, he had been totally unacquainted, until the voice of the elderly, greasy-looking English waiter recalled him to his immediate surroundings.

“A gentleman, sir, to see you on very pressing business. ’Ere is ’is card, sir.”

A touch of unwonted reverence in the man’s voice and manner attracted Hilary’s attention. He took up the card and read thereon, with great surprise, the name of Lord Carthew.

But two days married, and already in London visiting his bachelor friends! Hilary had read in an evening paper that the bridal pair intended spending a few days at the Earl of Northborough’s seat in the Isle of Wight before undertaking a lengthened cruise in the Mediterranean. A presentiment of something wrong filled his mind as he told the waiter to show the gentleman in.

It was half-past eight o’clock, and as yet Hilary was the sole occupant of the coffee-room. There were no strangers present to note the pale and worried appearance of the man who only two days before had made a love-match with a beautiful and accomplished lady.

“Carthew!” Hilary exclaimed, springing from his seat and grasping his friend by the hand. “What is wrong?”

“Don’t you know? Thank Heaven! it hasn’t got about much yet, then! But, of course, it can’t be kept a secret much longer.”

“Man alive, what do you mean? What is it that should be kept a secret? Has anything happened to her—to Lady Carthew?”

“I haven’t slept for three nights,” he said. “Anxiety about her has banished rest by night and day. She is mad, Hilary, I am certain of it. No other explanation could explain, could justify her conduct. She sprang from the train on our wedding journey, and I have not seen her since.”

“And you can sit quietly there and tell me such a thing!” almost shouted Hilary, stirred to violent indignation by what he supposed to be his friend’s callous apathy. “Good heavens! Carthew, what are you made of?”

“There is no need for this excitement on your part,” he said, coldly. “Lady Carthew was not injured by her escapade. Indeed, within three hours of her leap, she telegraphed to me from Clapham Junction, informing me that she was on her way to London. I was forced to go on first to Northborough, where all manner of rejoicings had been prepared, to quiet them with some story of Lady Carthew’s health which had necessitated a change of plans. But I wired to a detective agency to find out her address, and communicate with me at my club. Imagine, Hilary, the awful disgrace of the thing. Having to call in professional spies to find out one’s own wife! Worst of all, this girl, who seemed the perfection of modesty and refinement, has, through her mental affliction, become so strangely different that you would hardly know her. All her reserve, all her delicacy and grace have left her. In the short time we spent together, she contrived to make me the laughing-stock of a vulgar crowd by her open flirtation with her father’s gamekeeper, that gypsy fellow who shot you in the arm.”

Hilary’s face betokened amazement, largely tinctured by incredulity; but the latter quality he refrained from expressing, as he asked, quietly:

“So far, with two incorrect ones. I have in my hands now a third address to a lodging-house in Duchess Street, Oxford Street, whither they have tracked a woman who exactly answers to the description I have furnished. I was on my way thither from the detective office when, passing this street, I resolved to speak with you. Hilary, I hardly know whether I hope or dread to find her. I have suffered so much during the past three days that I have come to wish that she or I were dead.”

“She herself killed that. My great dread is lest the affair should reach the ears of my people. If I can only find her first, and put her away somewhere quietly until she recovers her reason! That is my one hope now.”

Hilary, on his part, was so profoundly shocked by his friend’s story that he knew not what to suggest by way of alleviating his grief and anxiety. The pair very shortly afterward parted, Lord Carthew having promised to return and report the success or failure of his mission.

Hilary had long ago forgotten his breakfast. Swallowing a cup of tepid tea, he sought the open air, there to reflect on the strange story he had just heard. He had struck into the Strand, and was about to cross Trafalgar Square, when his attention was attracted by the figure of a girl, tall, slender, and attired in shabby black, who stood, hesitating and frightened, between the rows of hurrying cabs, carriages, and omnibuses which were incessantly passing.

Something in the outline of her figure, for her face was concealed by a thick black crape veil, attracted Hilary’s attention so strongly that he resolved at once to see her over the crossing, that he might set at rest a strange suspicion which shot across his heart.

In a few seconds he was at her side, addressing her as a stranger, and offering to escort her over the road through the crowded traffic. But she, regardless of the publicity of the spot, gave a little cry of surprise and delight at sight of him, and throwing back her veil, displayed the lovely, flushed face and brilliant eyes of Stella.

“Hilary!” she murmured, joyfully. “Oh, I am so glad! Yes, see me across the road—I am not used to crowds, and take me somewhere where we can have a beautiful long talk. It is my first walk alone in London, and I haven’t the least idea where we are.”

He listened to her in ever-increasing wonder, and after piloting her safely through the vehicles, he led her down to the comparative seclusion of St. James’ Park.

“Is this a jest?” he asked, impressively, taking from his pocket-book the announcement of the marriage, cut from the Morning Post, and thrusting it into her hand.

She read it with knitted brows and evident amazement, and then looked up at him, pale to the lips.

“What can it mean, Hilary?” she faltered. “Surely I can’t have been married without knowing it! And yet of what happened between my leaving the Chase and finding myself here in London I can remember nothing at all!”

CHAPTER XX.
LORD CARTHEW FINDS HIS WIFE.

Hilary stared at Stella in undisguised amazement as she made the astonishing confession that, from the time of leaving the Chase until her arrival in London, she could remember nothing of what had happened to her.

Her statement seemed to fit in only too well with Lord Carthew’s belief that she was not in her right mind on her wedding-day.

It was necessary to learn fuller details, and Hilary led her to a bench in the Park, and seated himself beside her.

“Now, tell me,” he said, kindly but firmly, “all that has happened since you and I were parted by your father at the Cranstoun Arms.”

Willingly enough she obeyed, beginning with Lady Cranstoun’s death, and her own subsequent close imprisonment and supervision, and the pressure which was brought to bear upon her to induce her to marry Lord Carthew. She left out nothing, and dwelt particularly over the gypsy Sarah Carewe’s offer of help “on her wedding-eve,” in the note conveyed to her by means of Stephen Lee.

Hilary’s brows darkened as she uttered the gamekeeper’s name, and he recalled what Lord Carthew had said of Stella’s extraordinary conduct toward him on her wedding journey.

“Are you on such close and confidential terms with this Lee, then, may I ask, that you entrust letters and messages to him?”

“Close and confidential terms?” she repeated. “Why, he is the gamekeeper! I hardly ever see him, and I shall never forgive him for hurting you. Surely, Hilary, you are not going to be jealous of the servants?”

He noticed that she dwelt affectionately upon his name, not in the least as if she realized that she was now another man’s wife.

“Not since I dropped him the signal from the window,” she answered, promptly. “Old Sarah told me to employ him, so I suppose he must be a gypsy, too. But let me get on with my story. I can’t tell you how ill I got by being kept shut in my room all those days, and half-starved; but that was my fault, since I was too unhappy to eat. By the wedding-eve, the date on which I was promised help from the gypsies, I was half-desperate, and the strangest fancies began to crowd into my head. I wanted to tear down the bars in my room and jump from the window. I had an idea that if once I could get away to the forest, I might join the gypsies and escape. That afternoon and evening I was not so closely watched; for the first time for weeks I was able to creep out of my room, and down the stairs to the front door. When once I stood in the open air again, I felt intoxicated with joy, and I ran as fast as my feet could carry me into the wood. An idea came into my mind that if the gypsies could not help me, rather than marry any one but you I would drown myself in a tarn I know of, where no one would think of looking for me for weeks, perhaps for months. But before I had run more than a few yards, the old gypsy, Sarah Carewe, who is really, I believe, my great-grandmother, suddenly appeared before me among the trees, like some witch in a fairy-tale. She took my hand, and made me walk very fast beside her into the woods; then she suddenly stopped, and drawing down my face to hers in the gathering darkness, she peered into my eyes with her wonderful bright stare, and stroked my face down with both hands, murmuring soothing words in some language I did not understand. Just as I felt myself growing strangely weak and sleepy, she took a small bottle from her pocket, drew the cork out, and commanded me to drink out of it. I obeyed her without hesitation. I seemed to have no power of resistance. From that moment I can remember nothing at all until two days ago, when I found myself in small, shabby rooms which I had never seen before, with an elderly woman, who slept in another bed in the same room with me. She told me that she was a nurse, that her name was Julia Tait; that she had held me in her arm as a tiny baby, and had seen my mother die. Further, that I had been put in her care for a few days by friends, and that I must not ask questions, or leave the house except in her company. She got me these clothes, and treated me kindly enough, taking me out twice. But she would not talk, and this morning, while she was still asleep, I dressed and slipped out. I was mad to be in the open air after living so long shut up at the Chase. Then, too, I knew you had come to London, and you had told me you always stayed somewhere near Charing Cross and the Strand. So I made my way here, and just as though you had dropped from the clouds, I found you. Why, Hilary, you haven’t yet said you are glad to see me.”

She had evidently again forgotten the tie which bound her to his friend. With an effort, he resolved to recall it to her.

“Duchess Street, Oxford Street. Mrs. Tait thinks I haven’t noticed it painted up, but I have.”

“Stella,” he said, gravely and impressively, “your husband, Lord Carthew, is at Duchess Street at this very moment searching for you. Some detectives whom he employed to find you, after you had jumped out of the train on your wedding journey, set him on your track. When he comes back to my hotel, what can I say to him?”

“Hilary!” she said, “I can see you believe I am mad. But do I look or speak like a mad woman? Is it possible that I could do all these things of which you tell me and yet remember nothing?”

“I cannot say,” he answered. “On my soul, I understand nothing of the business. But, my dear child, you must see plainly what my duty is. Carthew confided in me; I cannot act against him in this.”

“Hilary!” she exclaimed again, while a hunted, terrified look came into her eyes, “you could not be so cruel as to give me up to him, after all I have suffered for your sake! If—if Lord Carthew’s tale and that notice in the paper are true, then I am mad, quite, quite mad. And if I am sane, I would rather die than be Lord Carthew’s wife. I have no friend in the world but you; for after what you have told me, I cannot tell whether Sarah Carewe is my friend or—my worst enemy. I have told you that I meant to kill myself rather than be married to any one but you; and yet you would give me up to this man, whose wife I will never be. I would rather die!”

She spoke in low tones of passionate intensity, standing before him with clasped hands and tears shining in her eyes. Very pale, very slender and fragile she looked, in her shabby and ill-fitting clothes, which yet could not wholly conceal the graceful outlines of her tall, slim figure. The flush of pleasure which had tinged her cheeks at first sight of him had died away and given place to a look of absolute despair. As he looked at her, Hilary’s resolution was taken. Rising from the bench, he drew her hand through his arm.

“Listen, dear,” he said. “I can no more explain this wretched business than you can. But until it becomes clear, you must trust me and look upon me as a brother, and I, so Heaven help me, will treat you and think of you as a dear sister. I have an aunt, Mrs. Sinclair, who lives in Bayswater. She is a rich woman, a childless widow, and very kindly. I will place you in her care for the present, while I thoroughly investigate this business. Meantime I will pledge myself on my honor to say no word to any one which shall reveal your whereabouts. Will that suit you?”

While they were driving together in a hansom in the direction of Mrs. Sinclair’s residence, Lord Carthew, in his search after his wife, was undergoing a very strange experience. At the Duchess Street lodgings he gathered little but that an elderly woman named Tait, a professional nurse, lived there, and that three days ago a very old woman had driven up in a four-wheeled cab, and had placed a pretty young invalid lady, who appeared to be in a fainting condition, in Mrs. Tait’s care. On this particular morning the young lady had gone out alone at about seven o’clock, and shortly afterward Mrs. Tait, who appeared distressed at the girl’s absence, had left, presumably in search of her.

Puzzled and anxious, Lord Carthew left, deciding that he would call again, and he was proceeding down Regent Street when, to his astonishment, from the doors of a well-known fashionable millinery establishment he saw, as he believed, his newly made bride emerge, followed by a bowing shopman, laden with parcels.

She was dressed in the identical gray crape costume she had worn on her wedding journey, and she walked leisurely, with her proud head held erect and the sunshine lighting up her lovely face, to a smart victoria which waited for her by the pavement.

A man-servant in dark livery opened her carriage-door, a tall, finely-built man in whom, in spite of the absence of beard about his chin, Lord Carthew traced a marked resemblance to the gamekeeper, Stephen Lee.

Neither the lady nor the man perceived Lord Carthew, who, as the victoria drove away, sprang into a hansom which he directed to follow on the track of the carriage. Down Regent Street, the Haymarket, and across Trafalgar Square, went pursuer and pursued, until, passing down Northumberland Avenue, the victoria drew up with a flourish before the doors of a fashionable hotel greatly patronized by Americans and wealthy travellers passing through London.

The swarthy groom assisted his mistress to alight, and she then, conscious of the admiring ogle of several smart young men who were lounging about the hotel entrance, stopped to give a prolonged order to the coachman before leisurely walking up the hotel steps, throwing, as she did so, many glances of bold coquetry to right and left of her.

Lord Carthew waited for her to have time to proceed to her room before entering himself, and after asking at the office for an imaginary friend, inquired the name of the lady who had just entered.

“That, sir, is Viscountess Carthew. She was only married three or four days ago, and she is waiting here until her husband, who is detained in the country on urgent private affairs, joins her.”

There was something embarrassed about the clerk’s manner. Evidently he was of opinion that the new Viscountess Carthew was a lady whose exact position needed explaining.

“I am Lord Carthew,” said Claud, quietly. “Lady Carthew is suffering from the effects of recent brain fever.”

“We understood, my lord,” he went on, “that the lady was the daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun, who has visited this hotel several times. We therefore communicated with him last night on the subject of Lady Carthew. We thought ourselves that she seemed—ill.”

From the curious emphasis which the man laid on the words, Lord Carthew guessed that his wife had already gained an unenviable notoriety by her behavior in the establishment. There was a look of evident relief on the face of the manager of the hotel, to whom the clerk communicated the news that Lord Carthew had arrived to join his bride. Claud noted this, being hypersensitive on the subject, and he smarted with an indignant sense of injury as he followed an attendant up the wide marble stairs to Lady Carthew’s rooms on the first floor.

The apartment into which the unhappy bridegroom was shown was a palatially furnished drawing room. On a side-table several bottles of champagne were standing, and at the moment when Lord Carthew entered, a vapid and vicious-looking youth, of the ordinary “stage-door loafer” type, was drinking the health of the lady, whose name he mentioned in loud, drawling tones as he drained his glass.

“Here’s Lady Carthew’s health, and my love to her! Lady Carthew,” he repeated, raising his voice louder, so as to be heard by the occupant of the adjoining room, “do hurry up, there’s a good soul. We’re boring ourselves dreadfully without you.”

“We” consisted of another youth of much the same calibre, and of a stout, florid, dark man of foreign appearance, whom his companions addressed as “Count.” By the table stood Stephen Lee, opening another bottle of champagne, his face set in a sullen frown of disapproval.

“I say, Count,” drawled the youth who sprawled on the sofa, “hope you travel with your stiletto up your sleeve. Lady Carthew’s man here has such a confoundedly cut-throat look that he makes me quite nervous.”

The noise of the door closing made the youth turn his head. At sight of Lord Carthew he stared superciliously.

“Hullo! Here’s another chap to luncheon! Quite a party we shall be. Ah, here she is at last, lookin’ rippin’, positively rippin’!”

Was it, could it be, his Stella, his modest and refined lady-love, this bold-eyed woman with the coarse laugh, who, in a gorgeous tea-gown of red brocade, far too elaborate and vivid in color for morning wear, swept into the room, returning the vulgar and silly banter of her chosen acquaintances in the style of a fourth-rate barmaid?

She did not at first notice Lord Carthew as he stood, pale and motionless, by the door. But even when she perceived him, she was in no way abashed.

“Why, I declare,” she cried, with a loud laugh, “there’s my husband. Where did you boys pick him up? Glad to see you, Carthew. Have a drop of fizz? Stephen, open another bottle for his lordship.”

The three men had risen in surprise at the mention of Lord Carthew’s name, and now glanced undecidedly from their hostess, whom they had met for the first time in the hotel entrance a few hours ago, to the small, plain man whom she claimed as her husband. Lady Carthew had flung herself easily into a deep arm-chair, and was to all appearance heartily enjoying their embarrassment, when another tap at the drawing-room door heralded the entrance of a short, pale man of about fifty, with a handsome, sinister face, which displayed a marked resemblance to that of the black-haired, blue-eyed woman in scarlet who lounged and laughed before him.

“Well, I’m blest if it isn’t my dad!” she cried in a hoarse voice, which did much to counteract the effect of her remarkable beauty. “A jolly old family party we’ll make, though I can’t say I’m as fond of my papa as I ought to be, seeing what a nice, affectionate old gentleman he is. Don’t go, boys! The fun is just going to begin!”

“Mad! Not a bit of it,” laughed the lady. “As sane as you are, and a lot saner. I should never have made the mistake you did,” she continued, addressing her father, “of marrying a gypsy out of a caravan, and then thinking you could bring her daughter up and palm her off as a Duchess’ grandchild merely by stuffing her head full of book-learning. You and Carthew there are both a couple of fools. But I mean to lead you a pretty dance, and thoroughly enjoy myself. I’m not mad enough to be shut up, and not bad enough to be divorced; and I shall remain Sir Philip Cranstoun’s daughter and Lord Carthew’s wife for years to come. I know a good thing when I see it!”

The three men had taken their hats, and now clumsily excused themselves; they did not care for the expression on Sir Philip Cranstoun’s face. As the door closed upon them, Lord Carthew turned to his father-in-law.

“Is what she says true?” he asked, sternly. “That you deceived me, and that she is really the daughter of a gypsy?”

“It is quite true,” said the woman, laughing again. “My mother’s name was Clare Carewe, and that fellow who was waiting at table—don’t go, Stephen—is a relative of mine, a second cousin. He’d have been my fancy, not a little, ugly whipper-snapper like you,” she added, candidly, addressing her husband; “only the title was a temptation, you see. I do like having a handle to my name!”

“Sir Philip,” said Claud, turning sharply toward the Baronet, “this is not Stella. Who is it?”

“Your wife and Sir Philip Cranstoun’s daughter,” she cried, rising to her full height, and filling herself a brimming glass of champagne. “And I’ve let most people know all about me and my relations since I came here, I can tell you. Luncheon-parties, tea-parties, supper-parties, every day—rare old time; not a man but envied you your luck for having such a daughter, Sir Philip Cranstoun, and such a wife, my Lord Carthew!”

She made each of them a mock curtsey as she spoke, and then tossed off the wine.

“Here’s to our happy married life!” she cried. “You’ll both of you be pleased to hear that a newspaper man called upon me yesterday afternoon, and took down all about me—an interview, they call it, don’t they? All about my esteemed daddy marrying a gypsy, and me bolting on my wedding journey. He did laugh at that, I can tell you! And it’ll all be in the papers to-morrow morning!”

CHAPTER XXI. AND LAST.
THE CURSE FULFILLED.

He and Lord Carthew were equally powerless before this woman, whose audacity, vulgarity, and cunning were equally astonishing as revolting to both of them.

The gray wolf had been scoffed at and insulted to his face, not only by this hoarse-voiced virago, whose features resembled so strangely those of his late wife and of her daughter Stella, but by his own former servant, Stephen Lee, who had laughed to scorn his threats of punishment and dismissal.

“I’ve always hated you,” the young gamekeeper had said. “I only entered your service that I might bide my time, and see you made a fool of, and disgraced in the eyes of the world; and if your daughter here can’t do it, nobody can. You’ll rue the day you meddled with the Romanys and shot down Hiram Carewe in cold blood before you’ve done.”

Lord Carthew’s resentment against his father-in-law knew no bounds. Not for an instant did he believe the Baronet’s labored explanation. He remained convinced that he had been the victim of a trick, and that Sir Philip, having two daughters, had palmed off upon him the other instead of Stella, and now refused to own to his villany.

“Your conduct has been infamous, sir. It places you outside the pale of decency. I shall at once call in the law to get your daughter, whom you have married to me under a false name and by a knavish trick, returned upon your hands.”

Such was the nature of his parting words to Sir Philip as he left him at the hotel door.

That hateful old woman’s prophecy returned upon Sir Philip’s brain with maddening iteration.

“You shall be wretched at home, and hated abroad! No one shall ever love you! Your children shall bring disgrace and shame upon you! You shall die in a miserable garret, and I, Sarah Carewe, shall live to laugh at you as you lie dying!”

The first part of the prophecy was being verified indeed; as to the last, that was, of course, sheer mouthing. No doubt the old hag who uttered it, and who would by this time have been over eighty, had long been mouldering in her grave, while he, Sir Philip Cranstoun——

The speaker was a respectably dressed man of swarthy complexion and handsome features, apparently about five and thirty years of age.

“Why do you want to know?” the Baronet inquired curtly, eying the stranger, who had the appearance of a well-to-do mechanic, with suspicion.

“I beg pardon, sir, but it’s about your daughter, a young lady called Miss Stella Cranstoun, I want to speak to you.”

“Well, sir, I’m a Surrey man, and I know you and her by sight. I’m working in London now, and in the house in Whitechapel where I’m lodging a young lady was brought three days ago, in the care of two elderly women, who won’t let her put her head outside the door. And I’d take my oath, sir, she’s your daughter, Miss Stella Cranstoun. I can take you to the house, sir, in a cab, if you like. I was half a mind to write about it down to the Chase, but I thought how you’d think it a liberty; but as soon as I spotted you just now as I was going back to my work, thinks I, I must up and speak to him.”

The man’s manner was so genuine, and the affair of such pressing importance that Sir Philip, after a moment’s hesitation, decided to accompany him. A four-wheeled cab was crawling past, driven by a dark-faced, clean-shaven man, no longer young. The cabman pulled up as he saw Sir Philip looking for a conveyance, and the latter sprang in and ordered the man who had addressed him to take his place on the box and direct the driver.

This order was at once obeyed. Once on their way toward Whitechapel, the two men looked at each other. The Fates were against Sir Philip Cranstoun that day, for the driver was his brother-in-law, James Carewe, whom he had caused to serve five years in prison, and his companion was James’ younger brother Brian, who had helped Clare Lady Cranstoun to escape from her husband’s home.

It had been Brian’s business to “shadow” his family enemy, and this cab-driving plan was only one out of many plots woven by the moving and directing spirit of the Carewes, old Sarah, to get her prey into her hands. No suspicion of his danger crossed Sir Philip’s mind as he let himself be rapidly driven eastward. He was longing to revenge himself by extra harshness of treatment upon his daughter Stella for daring to escape from his control and send a substitute in her stead to be wedded to Lord Carthew.

Suddenly, while these malevolent thoughts filled his mind, a violent lurch of the cab hurled him upon his hands and knees; the next moment a blow in the chest from the shaft of a heavy van into which the cab had been deliberately driven, felled him, stunned and bleeding, as he attempted to rise. He heard the crash of glass, the noise of loud talking; then insensibility came to dull the exquisite pain he was suffering, and he knew no more until he opened his eyes in a mean and squalid room, and became conscious that several people were standing round his bed, and that the cracked and quavering voice of a very old woman was sounding close to his ear.

“Make him conscious—make him conscious for a bit, dear, good doctor, before he dies. You see, he’s a relation of mine; he married the daughter of my boy Hiram—oh, you needn’t look surprised! Sixty years ago I was pretty enough for a swell to have married me.”

“Doctor,” muttered the injured man, “where am I? And what has happened to me?”

“You have had a very serious accident—a heavy van ran into your cab in a street not far from here. This is Elizabeth Street, Whitechapel.”

“He won’t die, doctor, dear, until I have spoken to him,” put in the old crone, pressing close to the wounded man’s pillows. “That’s what he’s waiting for. He’s waiting to hear the voice of old Sarah Carewe, whose son he murdered, and whose grandchild’s heart he broke; the voice he heard cursing him outside the court-house, where he swore James Carewe’s liberty away. But James Carewe has been even with you, Philip Cranstoun, for it was he who drove your cab to-day. And Clare, my dear grandchild, will rest in her grave when she knows how I’ve carried out her prayer to bring up your children to hate and to disgrace you when those twin girls, Stella and Lura Cranstoun, were born to her. I let you keep the one, and you well-nigh broke her heart as you broke her mother’s. But old Sarah saved her, and she’ll marry her own young spark, the farmer, while I’ll wager my little Lura will set all tongues wagging with her doings. She’s an imp of evil even I can’t manage, and she’s been trained to hate you as I do. Romanys have good memories, Sir Philip Cranstoun. Old Sarah told you she would live to laugh at you as you lay dying in a garret, and her words have come true!”

Her voice rose to a shriek of triumph on her last words, and there was a fiendish glee in the shrill laugh that accompanied them. The dying man turned his head aside with a shudder of repugnance, and motioned to the doctor to approach him.

The doctor turned to the old woman, who, as though exhausted by the excitement of the moment for which she had waited so long, had sunk upon a chair, looking extraordinarily old and feeble.

“Oh, he can see her if she likes,” she mumbled. “His bullying days are over.”

Not until late that same evening could Stella be found, Brian Carewe having applied in vain at the lodgings in Duchess Street, where she had been placed by old Sarah after the latter had brought her, drugged and insensible, in the caravan to London. But Brian had the gypsy instinct of tracking, and enlisting the aid of his nephew, Stephen Lee, who had long ago discovered the fraud perpetrated upon Lord Carthew, he sought out the address of Hilary Pritchard, and through him that of the latter’s aunt, in whose care Stella had been placed that day.

And by the light of a candle flickering in the wind, which blew through the broken window-panes of a wretched garret, Stella saw her father for the last time, and on her knees beside his bed freely forgave him for any grief he might have caused her, and soothed his last moments with a daughter’s tenderness as freely given as it was wholly undeserved.

Mr. and Mrs. Hilary Pritchard are settled in the Canadian homestead now, where they live in perfect happiness and ever-increasing worldly prosperity. The law has long since freed Lord Carthew from his unfortunate marriage, concerning which the world has forgotten to talk; but the money which he settled upon Lura only accelerated her end by enabling her to indulge in her passion for drinking. At once the means and the victim of a long-deferred vengeance, she died miserably at the age of four and twenty. Old Sarah only survived her enemy, Sir Philip, by a few months; and as to James Carewe, and Brian, and Stephen Lee, they are living out unprofitable lives in the way best suited to their roving, restless temperaments.

But Stella was only one-third gypsy after all. Such freedom-loving instincts as she has are tempered by a gracious womanliness and unobtrusive refinement, which make her a queen among the settlers and farmers in her new home, where, blessed with her husband’s and her children’s love, she can forget the sorrows and the trials of her girlhood’s years.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. evening-gown/evening gown, stepmother/step-mother, etc.) have been preserved.

“William’s wife she said she felt she’d rather have died at once” delete first she.

Change “a neighboring farmer had been commisioned to bring” to commissioned.

“saw the unimstakable relief in her face, and hastened” to unmistakable.

“Stephen’s hawk-eyes to distinguish anything Stopping still” add period after anything.

“He did not even see Dakin in attendancce as his pale face” to attendance.

“to whisper and mumble the necessary reponses in the service” to responses.

(“Handsome is as handsome does,” persisted the old old gentleman) delete one old.

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