Addie's Husband; or, Through clouds to sunshine

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No. 388. Single Number. Price 10 Cents.

THE Seaside Library Pocket Edition.

Addie's Husband; OR, THROUGH CLOUDS TO SUNSHINE.

By the author of "LOVE OR LANDS?"

17 To 27 Vandewater St New York

George Munro PUBLISHER

The Seaside Library, Pocket Edition. Issued Tri-weekly. By Subscription $36 per annum Copyrighted 1885, by George Munro--Entered at the Post Office at New York at second class rates ]

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71 A Struggle for Fame. Mrs. Riddell 20

72 Old Myddelton's Money. By M. C. Hay 20

73 Redeemed by Love. By the Author of "Dora Thorne" 20

74 Aurora Floyd. By Miss M. E. Braddon 20

75 Twenty Years After. By Dumas 20

76 Wife in Name Only. By the Author of "Dora Thorne" 20

77 A Tale of Two Cities. By Dickens 15

78 Madcap Violet. By William Black 20

79 Wedded and Parted. By the Author of "Dora Thorne" 10

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81 A Daughter of Heth. By Wm. Black 20

82 Sealed Lips. By F. Du Boisgobey 20

83 A Strange Story. Bulwer Lytton 20

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85 A Sea Queen. By W. Clark Russell 20

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87 Dick Sand; or, A Captain at Fifteen. By Jules Verne 20

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89 The Red Eric. By R. M. Ballantyne 10

90 Ernest Maltravers. Bulwer Lytton 20

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92 Lord Lynne's Choice. By the Author of "Dora Thorne" 10

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96 Erling the Bold. By R. M. Ballantyne 10

97 All in a Garden Fair. Walter Besant 20

98 A Woman-Hater. By Charles Reade 15

99 Barbara's History. A. B. Edwards 20

100 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. By Jules Verne 20

101 Second Thoughts. Rhoda Broughton 20

102 The Moonstone. By Wilkie Collins 15

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104 The Coral Pin. By F. Du Boisgobey 30

105 A Noble Wife. By John Saunders 20

106 Bleak House. By Charles Dickens 40

107 Dombey and Son. Charles Dickens 40

108 The Cricket on the Hearth, and Doctor Marigold. By Charles Dickens 10

109 Little Loo. By W. Clark Russell 20

110 Under the Red Flag. By Miss Braddon 10

111 The Little School-Master Mark. By J. H. Shorthouse 10

112 The Waters of Marah. By John Hill 20

113 Mrs. Carr's Companion. By M. G. Wightwick 10

114 Some of Our Girls. By Mrs. C. J. Eiloart 20

115 Diamond Cut Diamond. By T. Adolphus Trollope 10

116 Moths. By "Ouida" 20

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118 Loys, Lord Berresford, and Eric Dering. By "The Duchess" 10

119 Monica, and A Rose Distill'd. By "The Duchess" 10

120 Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby. By Thomas Hughes 20

121 Maid of Athens. By Justin McCarthy 20

122 Ione Stewart. By Mrs. E. Lynn Linton 20

123 Sweet is True Love. By "The Duchess" 10

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125 The Monarch of Mincing Lane. By William Black 20

126 Kilmeny. By William Black 20

127 Adrian Bright. By Mrs. Caddy 20

128 Afternoon, and Other Sketches. By "Ouida" 10

129 Rossmoyne. By "The Duchess" 10

130 The Last of the Barons. By Sir E. Bulwer Lytton 40

131 Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens 40

132 Master Humphrey's Clock. By Charles Dickens 10

133 Peter the Whaler. By W. H. G. Kingston 10

134 The Witching Hour. By "The Duchess" 10

135 A Great Heiress. By R. E. Francillon 10

136 "That Last Rehearsal." By "The Duchess" 10

137 Uncle Jack. By Walter Besant 10

138 Green Pastures and Piccadilly. By William Black 20

139 The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. By Thomas Hardy 10

140 A Glorious Fortune. By Walter Besant 10

141 She Loved Him! By Annie Thomas 10

142 Jenifer. By Annie Thomas 20

143 One False, Both Fair. J. B. Harwood 20

144 Promises of Marriage. By Emile Gaboriau 10

145 "Storm-Beaten:" God and The Man. By Robert Buchanan 20

146 Love Finds the Way. By Walter Besant and James Rice 10

147 Rachel Ray. By Anthony Trollope 20

148 Thorns and Orange-Blossoms. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10

149 The Captain's Daughter. From the Russian of Pushkin 10

150 For Himself Alone. By T. W. Speight 10

151 The Ducie Diamonds. By C. Blatherwick 10

152 The Uncommercial Traveler. By Charles Dickens 20

153 The Golden Calf. By Miss M. E. Braddon 20

154 Annan Water. By Robert Buchanan 20

155 Lady Muriel's Secret. By Jean Middlemas 20

156 "For a Dream's Sake." By Mrs. Herbert Martin 20

157 Milly's Hero. By F. W. Robinson 20

158 The Starling. By Norman Macleod, D.D. 10

159 A Moment of Madness, and Other Stories. By Florence Marryat 10

160 Her Gentle Deeds. By Sarah Tytler 10

161 The Lady of Lyons. Founded on the Play of that title by Lord Lytton 10

162 Eugene Aram. By Sir E. Bulwer Lytton 20

163 Winifred Power. By Joyce Darrell 20

164 Leila; or, The Siege of Grenada. By Sir E. Bulwer Lytton 10

165 The History of Henry Esmond. By William Makepeace Thackeray 20

166 Moonshine and Marguerites. By "The Duchess" 10

167 Heart and Science. By Wilkie Collins 20

168 No Thoroughfare. By Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins 10

169 The Haunted Man. By Charles Dickens 10

170 A Great Treason. By Mary Hoppus 30

171 Fortune's Wheel, and Other Stories. By "The Duchess" 10

172 "Golden Girls." By Alan Muir 20

173 The Foreigners. By Eleanor C. Price 20

174 Under a Ban. By Mrs. Lodge 20

175 Love's Random Shot, and Other Stories. By Wilkie Collins 10

176 An April Day. By Philippa P. Jephson 10

177 Salem Chapel. By Mrs. Oliphant 20

178 More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands. By Queen Victoria 10

179 Little Make-Believe. By B. L. Farjeon 10

180 Round the Galley Fire. By W. Clark Russell 10

181 The New Abelard. By Robert Buchanan 10

182 The Millionaire. A Novel 20

183 Old Contrairy, and Other Stories. By Florence Marryat 10

184 Thirlby Hall. By W. E. Norris 20

185 Dita. By Lady Margaret Majendie 10

186 The Canon's Ward. By James Payn 20

187 The Midnight Sun. By Fredrika Bremer 10

188 Idonea. By Anne Beale 20

189 Valerie's Fate. By Mrs. Alexander 5

190 Romance of a Black Veil. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10

191 Harry Lorrequer. By Charles Lever 15

192 At the World's Mercy. By F. Warden 10

193 The Rosary Folk. By G. Manville Fenn 10

194 "So Near and Yet So Far!" By Alison 10

195 "The Way of the World." By David Christie Murray 15

196 Hidden Perils. By Mary Cecil Hay 10

197 For Her Dear Sake. By Mary Cecil Hay 20

198 A Husband's Story 10

199 The Fisher Village. By Anne Beale 10

200 An Old Man's Love. By Anthony Trollope 10

201 The Monastery. By Sir Walter Scott 20

202 The Abbot. By Sir Walter Scott 20

203 John Bull and His Island. By Max O'Rell 10

204 Vixen. By Miss M. E. Braddon 15

205 The Minister's Wife. By Mrs. Oliphant 30

206 The Picture, and Jack of All Trades. By Charles Reade 10

207 Pretty Miss Neville. By B. M. Croker 15

208 The Ghost of Charlotte Cray, and Other Stories. By Florence Marryat 10

209 John Holdsworth, Chief Mate. By W. Clark Russell 10

210 Readiana: Comments on Current Events. By Chas. Reade 10

211 The Octoroon. By Miss M. E. Braddon 10

212 Charles O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon. By Chas. Lever (Complete in one volume) 30

213 A Terrible Temptation. Chas. Reade 15

214 Put Yourself in His Place. By Charles Reade 20

215 Not Like Other Girls. By Rosa Nouchette Carey 15

216 Foul Play. By Charles Reade 15

217 The Man She Cared For. By F. W. Robinson 15

218 Agnes Sorel. By G. P. R. James 15

219 Lady Clare; or, The Master of the Forges. By Georges Ohnet 10

220 Which Loved Him Best? By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10

221 Comin' Thro' the Rye. By Helen B. Mathers 15

222 The Sun-Maid. By Miss Grant 15

223 A Sailor's Sweetheart. By W. Clark Russell 15

224 The Arundel Motto. Mary Cecil Hay 15

225 The Giant's Robe. By F. Anstey 15

226 Friendship. By "Ouida" 20

227 Nancy. By Rhoda Broughton 15

228 Princess Napraxine. By "Ouida" 20

229 Maid, Wife, or Widow? By Mrs. Alexander 10

230 Dorothy Forster. By Walter Besant 15

231 Griffith Gaunt. By Charles Reade 15

232 Love and Money; or, A Perilous Secret. By Charles Reade 10

233 "I Say No;" or, the Love-Letter Answered. Wilkie Collins 15

234 Barbara; or, Splendid Misery. Miss M. E. Braddon 15

235 "It is Never Too Late to Mend." By Charles Reade 20

236 Which Shall It Be? Mrs. Alexander 20

237 Repented at Leisure. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 15

238 Pascarel. By "Ouida" 20

239 Signa. By "Ouida" 20

240 Called Back. By Hugh Conway 10

241 The Baby's Grandmother. By L. B. Walford 10

242 The Two Orphans. By D'Ennery 10

243 Tom Burke of "Ours." First half. By Charles Lever 20

243 Tom Burke of "Ours." Second half. By Charles Lever 20

244 A Great Mistake. By the author of "His Wedded Wife" 20

245 Miss Tommy, and In a House-Boat. By Miss Mulock 10

246 A Fatal Dower. By the author of "His Wedded Wife" 10

247 The Armourer's Prentices. By Charlotte M. Yonge 10

248 The House on the Marsh. F. Warden 10

249 "Prince Charlie's Daughter." By author of "Dora Thorne" 10

250 Sunshine and Roses; or, Diana's Discipline. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10

251 The Daughter of the Stars, and Other Tales. By Hugh Conway, author of "Called Back" 10

252 A Sinless Secret. By "Rita" 10

253 The Amazon. By Carl Vosmaer 10

254 The Wife's Secret, and Fair but False. By the author of "Dora Thorne" 10

[Continued On Third Page Of Cover.]

Addie'S Husband; Or, Through Clouds To Sunshine.

By the author of "Love or Lands?"

New York: George Munro, Publisher, 17 To 27 Vandewater Street.

Addie'S Husband.

Chapter I.

"'Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, policeman, plowboy, gentleman--' Adelaide Lefroy, lift your lovely head, my dear; you're to marry a gentleman."

Miss Adelaide, who is absorbed in the enjoyment of a ruddy ribstone pippin, turns her blooming freckled face to the speaker, and answers pleasantly, though a little indistinctly--

"I'm to marry a gentleman, brother Hal? Well, I guess I've no particular objection! Whenever he comes, he will find me ready to do him homage, and no mistake! Can't you tell me more about him? 'A gentleman' is rather vague. Is he to be rich, poor, or something between? Am I to share his gentility in a Belgravian mansion or a suburban villa?"

"The oracle does not say. I can't tell you any more, Addie. I've come nearer the point with the others, though. Pauline is to be a soldier's bride, Goggles a policeman's!"

"Don't you believe him, Addie!" burst in Goggles, a pale delicate-looking child of twelve, with large protruding eyes and a painfully inquiring turn of mind. "He cheated horribly; he ran the policeman in before the tailor the second time, and left out the sailor."

"I didn't, miss--I did it quite fairly. You had four chances; you got the tinker once and the policeman three times. You're to marry a bobby--there's no hope for you!"

"I won't, I won't, I won't!" she retorts passionately, angry tears welling into her big, foolish eyes. "I won't marry a policeman, Hal! I'd rather die an old maid ten times over."

"First catch your policeman, my dear," chimes in Pauline, languidly waving aside a swarm of gnats dancing round her beautiful dusky head. "You'll not find many of that ilk sneaking round our larder, I can tell you!"

"I don't care whether I do or not. I won't marry a--"

"That will do, Lottie; we have had quite enough of this nonsense," interposes Addie, suddenly and unexpectedly assuming the tones of a reproving elder sister. "You came out here to study, and I don't think either you or Pauline has read that French exercise once, though you promised Aunt Jo you would have it off by heart for her this afternoon. Give me the book; I'll hear you. Translate 'I am hungry; give me some cheese.'"

"_Je suis faim; donnez-moi du--du--_"

"No; wrong to begin with. It is _J'ai faim_, 'I have hunger.'"

"'I have hunger!'" grumbles Lottie. "That just shows what a useless humbugging language French is! Fancy any one but an idiot saying, 'I have hunger,' instead of--"

"Don't talk so much. 'Have you my brother's penknife?'"

"_Avez-vous mon frère's plume-couteau?_"

Miss Lefroy tosses back the tattered Ahn in speechless disgust.

"Never mind, Goggles; I'll give you a sentence to translate," whispers Hal teasingly. "Listen! _Esker le policeman est en amour_--eh? That's better than anything in an old Ahn or Ollendorff, isn't it? _Esker le poli_--"

"Hal, do leave your sister alone, and attend to your own task. I don't believe you have got that wretched sum right yet, though you have been at it all the morning."

"And such a toothsome sum too!" says Pauline, leaning forward and reading aloud the problem inscribed on the top of the cracked greasy slate in Aunt Jo's straggling old fashioned writing--

"'Uncle Dick gave little Jemmy five shillings as a Christmas-box. He went to a pastry-cook's, and bought seven mince-pies at twopence halfpenny each, a box of chocolate, nine oranges at one shilling and sixpence per dozen; he gave tenpence to a poor boy, and had four-pence left. What was the price of the chocolate?'"

"It's a rotten old sum--that's what it is!" says Hal trenchantly. "What's the sense of annoying a fellow with mince-pies and things when he hasn't the faintest chance of getting outside one for--"

"Hal, don't be vulgar!"

"Besides, you can change the pies into potatoes or rhubarb-powders if you like," puts in Goggles spitefully, "and work the sum all the same. I'll tell auntie you did nothing but draw the dogs all the morning."

"Yah! Tell-tale tit, your tongue shall be split!"

"Why did you say I'd marry a--"

"Charlotte, hold your tongue at once!"

There is a ring of authority in Miss Lefroy's fresh voice that insures silence.

Pauline throws herself back upon the mossy sward, yawning heavily; Addie weaves herself a wreath of feathery grasses and tinted autumn-leaves, then picks a milky-petaled flower, which she stealthily and cautiously begins to fray.

"'Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, policeman, plowboy, gentleman--' Again! How very strange! There seems a fate in it! I wish I could find out more, though. I can't bring it to 'soldier'--heigh-ho!"

It is a still slumberous noon in early October: a mellow sun trickles through "th' umbrageous multitude of leaves," which still linger, vivid-hued, on the stately timber that shelters Nutsgrove, the family residence of the pauper Lefroys.

Nutsgrove is a low rambling brick manor-house, built in the time of the Tudors, surrounded by a stone terrace leading to a vast parterre, which, in the days of their opulence, the Lefroys were wont to maintain, vied in beauty and architectural display with the famous gardens of Nonsuch, in the reign of Henry VIII., sung by Spenser, but which now, alas, was a ragged wilderness, covered with overgrown distorted shrubs, giant weeds, ruinous summer-houses, timeworn statues, and slimy pools, in which once splashed fairy-mouthed fountains.

"So pure and shiny that the silver floode Through every channel one might running see"

to the bottom,

"All paved beneath with jasper shining light."

Beyond this acreage of desolation is the orchard, protected by crumbling walls, creeping into the famous nut-grove, the uncultured beauty of which the noisome hands of neglect and decay have not touched.

As the nut-grove was in the days of Tristran le Froi, when he established himself on Saxon soil, so it is now--a green-canopied retreat, carpeted with moss and fringed with fern; it is the chosen home of every woodlark, blackbird, thrush, and squirrel of taste in the shire--the nursery, school-room, El Dorado of the five young Lefroys, children of Colonel Robert Lefroy, commonly known as "Robert the Devil" in the days of his reckless youth and unhonored prime, a gentleman who bade his family and his native land goodnight in rather hurried fashion about three years before.

"There goes Bob! I wonder did he get the ferret out of old Rogers?" exclaims Hal, breaking a drowsy silence. "I wish he'd come and tell us."

But the heir of the house of Lefroy, heedless of appealing cry and inviting whistle, stalks homeward steadily, a rank cigarette hanging from his beardless lips, a pair of bull-pups clinging to his heels. He is a tall shapely lad of eighteen, with a handsome gypsy face and eyes like his sister Pauline's--large, dark, full of haughty fire.

"How nasty of him not to come!" grumbles the younger brother. "I wonder what has put his back up? Perhaps old Rogers turned crusty, and wouldn't lend the ferret. Shouldn't wonder, because--"

"The gong, the gong at last!" cries Pauline, springing to her feet. "I didn't know I was so hungry until its welcome music smote my ears. Come along, family."

They need no second bidding. In two minutes the grove is free from their boisterous presence, and they are flying across the lawn, their mongrel but beloved kennel barking, yelping, and scampering enthusiastically around, making the autumn noon hideous.

* * * * *

"What's for dinner?"

"Rabbits!"

"Rabbits! Ye gods--again! Why, this is the fourth day this week that we've fared on their delectable flesh!" cries Robert, striding into the dining-room in grim disgust.

"At this rate we'll soon clear Higgins's warren for him!" chimes in Hal.

"Aunt Jo, let me say grace to-day, will you?"

"Certainly, my dear," Aunt Jo responds, somewhat surprised at the request. She is a mild, sheep faced old gentlewoman, with weary eyes that within the last two years have rained tears almost daily.

Pauline folds her slim sunburnt hands, bows her head, and murmurs reverently--

"Of rabbits young, of rabbits old, Of rabbits hot, of rabbits cold, Of rabbits tender, rabbits tough, We thank thee, Lord, we've had enough!"

"Amen!" respond the family, in full lugubrious choir.

"I wonder if I shall know the flavor of butcher's meat if I ever taste it again?" says Robert presently, with exaggerated exertion hacking a cumbrous limb that covers his cracked plate--a plate which a china-collector would have treasured in a cabinet.

"You certainly won't taste butcher's meat again until the butcher's bill is paid," answers Aunt Jo sharply. "Thirteen pounds eleven and sixpence--so he sent me word when Sarah tried to get a mutton-chop for Lottie the day she was so ill. Until his bill is paid, he won't trust us with another pound of flesh; that was the message he sent to me--to me--Josephine Darcy! Oh that I should live to receive such a message from a tradesman! What would my dear uncle the bishop have felt if he could have heard it?"

"But he can't hear it, auntie dear," says Lottie, consolingly. "He's dead, you know."

"Not dead, but gone before," reproves Miss Darcy, burying her face in her handkerchief.

"Water-works again!" groans Robert, _sotto voce_. "Use the plug, some one."

Addie obeys the elegant order by slipping her arm round the old lady's neck.

"There, there, dear; don't take on so. You fret too much about us; you'll make yourself ill in the end. Cheer up, auntie dear, cheer--"

"Cheer up!" she interrupts, in a wailing voice. "Oh, child, it is easy for you to talk in that light way! Cheer up, when poverty is at the door, starvation staring us in the face! Cheer up, when I look at you five neglected, deserted children, growing up half fed, wholly uneducated, clothed as badly as the poorest laborer on the vast estates your grandfather owned--you my poor dead sister's children! Oh, Addie, Addie, you talk and feel like a child--a child of the summer, who has not the sense, the power to feel the chill breath of coming winter! How can you know? How can you understand? You heard your brothers and your sisters here grumbling and railing at me not five minutes ago because I had not legs of mutton and ribs of beef to feed you with, grumbling because this is the fourth time in one week you have had to dine off rabbit. Well"--with a sudden burst of anguish--"do you know, if Steve Higgins, devoted retainer that he is, had not the kindness, the forethought to supply us, as he has been doing for the last month, with the surplus of his warren, you'd have had to dine off bread and vegetables altogether? For not a scrap of solid food will they supply us with in Nutsford until my wretched dividends are due, and that is four months off yet. Oh, Addie dear, don't try to talk to me; I can bear up no longer! Sorrows have come to me too late in life. I--I can bear up no longer!"

Her voice dies away in hysterical sobs. By this time the family are grouped round the afflicted lady; even Robert's hard young arm encircles her heaving shoulder. He joins as vehemently as any in the sympathizing chorus.

"There, there; don't, auntie dear. Heaven will help us, you'll see!"

"Every cloud has a silver lining, every thorn-bush a blossom."

"Something is sure to turn up, never fear."

"And we shouldn't mind a bit if you wouldn't take on so and fret so dreadfully."

"Don't heed our grumblings; they're only noise. We'd just as soon have rabbit as anything else--wouldn't you, boys, wouldn't you? There, auntie, you hear them. Boys must grumble at something; it wouldn't be natural if they didn't."

"Oh, auntie, auntie, can't you believe us? We're quite, quite happy as we are. As long as we are all together, as long as we have the dear old place to live in, what does anything else matter? We're quite happy. We never want to change or go away, or wear grand clothes, talk French, or thump the piano like other common people. We don't--we don't indeed! If you would only leave off fretting, we'd leave off grumbling, and be all as happy as the day is long."

Somewhat cheered by this unanimous appeal, Miss Darcy wipes her eyes, though still protesting.

"I know that, I know that; as long as you're allowed to wander at your own sweet will, lie on haystacks, rifle birds' nests, strip the apple and cherry trees, hunt rats and rabbits, and, above all, do no lessons, and make no attempt to improve your minds in any way, you will be happy. But the question is, How long will these doubtful means of happiness be left to you? Acre after acre, farm after farm, has slipped from the family within the last thirty years. You have now but nominal possession of the house, garden, orchard, and part of the grove--only nominal possession, remember, for the place is mortgaged to the last farthing; the very pictures on the wall, the chairs you sit on, the china in the pantry, are all security for borrowed money. And--and, children"--impressively--"it is best for you to know the worst. If--if your--your father should cease to pay the interest on this money, why, his creditors could seize on this place and turn you out homeless on the roadside at an hour's notice!"

There is a deep silence; then comes a protesting outburst. Robert's dark face flushes wrathfully as he exclaims--

"But--but, Aunt Jo, he--he will--he must pay the interest, and give me a chance of reclaiming my birthright. He--he couldn't be so--so bad as to let that lapse under the circumstances."

"Circumstances may be too strong for him."

"In any case," says Pauline hopefully, "the creditors couldn't be so heartless, so devoid of all feelings of humanity as to turn us out like that; they must wait until some of us are dead, or married, or something. Where could we go?"

"Your father's creditors are Jews, Pauline; they are not famed for humanity or forbearance. However, as you say, children, it is best to look at the bright side of things, and trust in the mercy of Heaven."

"And in the mercy of a Jew too!" chimes in Addie.

"'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions--fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is? If you prick him, does he not bleed? If you tickle him, does he not laugh? If you poison him, does he not--'"

"Bravo, Addie--bravo; well done!"

"That was tall spouting, and no mistake! Where did you pick it all up?"

"That's Shakespeare," Addie answers, lifting her rosy pale face proudly--"it is from the 'Merchant of Venice;' I read the whole play through yesterday, and enjoyed it greatly."

"You imagined you did, my dear."

"Nothing of the kind, Robert; I found it most interesting."

"Don't tell me, Addie," says Pauline, with a tantalizing laugh, "that you found it as interesting as 'The Children of the Abbey,' 'The Castle of Otranto,' or 'The Heir of Redcliffe,' for I won't believe you."

"The styles are quite distinct; you could not possibly compare them," Addie retorts more grandly still. "I am going up to the grove now to read 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' I believe it's beautiful."

"Don't you think, my dear niece, you had better mend that hole in your stocking, just above the heel, first?" interposes Miss Darcy gently. "It has been in that yawning condition for the last two days; and, to say the least of it, it scarcely looks ladylike."

"I noticed it when I was dressing," assents Addie, placidly, "but quite forgot about it afterward. Who'll lend me a thimble and a needle and some cotton?"

Chapter II.

"Three hundred years, isn't it, Addie, since the Lefroys first settled at Nutsgrove?"

"Three hundred years," repeats Addie automatically. "Since the year of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, A.D., 1572, when Tristran le Froi, Sieur de Beaulieu, fled from his patrimonial estates in Anjou to England, where he settled at Nutsgrove, and married, in 1574, Adelaide Marion, daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Tisdale of Flockton, by whom he had issue, three sons and two daughters--Stephen, Robert, Tristran, who--"

"Three hundred years!" repeats Robert, with fierce bitterness, a lurid light gleaming in his eyes. "What right had he to treat me like that? He got it from his father, who got it from his, and so on backward from son to father for generations. Why should I be made to suffer for his iniquity? Why should I lose what he inherited in solemn trust for his son or next of kin? It is infamous, it is monstrous! I suppose it would be wrong to wish that one's own father--"

"Oh, hush, Robert--hush!"

Addie's hand is placed over the boy's quivering mouth; he is silenced.

Eight months have gone by, and the great evil foreseen by poor Aunt Jo has come to pass.

Colonel Lefroy, out of reach of remonstrance or appeal, has let the old home of his forefathers pass out of his hands and his son's forever. The Jews have seized on the estate, evicted its nominal possessors, sold by public auction the goods and chattels, the pictures, china, plate, moldy tapestries, tattered carpets, curtains, scratched and time stained Chippendale; even the worthless relics of their nursery-days the homeless wretched children have not been allowed to take with them. The house and immediately surrounding land, after some brisk competition, has been purchased by Tom Armstrong, the great manufacturer, owner of some half-dozen of the most unsavory chimneys in Kelvick, which at times, when the wind is blowing due south, carry their noxious effluvia over the dewy acres of Nutsgrove and the surrounding estates, and most unpleasantly tickle the noses of aristocratic county proprietors, who have nothing in common with the busy plebeian heart of commerce and inventive industry throbbing in the very center of their pastures.

And now Tom Armstrong of Kelvick, a man of the people, who has risen from the lowest rung of the social ladder, is master of Nutsgrove. And the dark-eyed, blue-blooded Lefroys stand, some two months after his installation, leaning against a five-barred gate in an upland meadow, gazing mournfully, and, oh! how bitterly down on the beloved home they have lost forever!

"Three hundred years," repeats Robert, with a dreary laugh. "Well, at any rate, it will take some time to wash the stains of our tenancy out of the old house, to remove all traces of our footsteps from the well-worn paths! By Jove, the wretched snob is at work already! Yes, look at his people hacking away at the flower-beds, ripping up the avenue, hammering away at the venerable walls! It's--it's enough to make one's blood boil in one's veins! He might at least have had the decency to wait until we had gone. I'd like to kick him from here to Kelvick."

"I don't think he'd let you, Bob," says matter-of-fact Hal. "He's a bigger man than you."

"Yes, but a plowman can't fight a gentleman; they're out of it in the first round. Look at the way I polished off the butcher's boy the day he insulted you--and he's twice my weight. I shouldn't be afraid to tackle Armstrong if I only had the chance, and souse him in one of his vile vitriol-tanks, too. That would stop his hacking and hammering until I was at least out of hearing."

"But, Bob," interposed Lottie, awed by her brother's lordly threats, "you're mistaken. That man on the ladder by the west wall is not hammering or hacking anything; he's only trying to clean the big lobby window outside the housekeeper's room, which, I heard Aunt Jo say one day, hasn't been cleaned since the year poor mamma died, when I was a wee baby. It's so hard to reach, and doesn't open; and--and, Bob, you can hardly blame Mr. Armstrong for weeding those beds, for there were more dandelions and nettles in them last year than stocks or mignonette."

"You mark my words," continues Robert, with lowering impressiveness, heedless of his sister's explanation; "should any of us Lefroys stand in this meadow, say, this time five years, we shall not recognize the face of our old home. All its beloved landmarks will be swept away; the flickering foliage of the grove will have disappeared to make way for stunted shrubs, starveling pines, and prim Portuguese laurels: the ivied walls, the mossy stonework, the straggling wealth of creeper, will have been carted away to display the gaudy rawness of modern landscape-gardening; the little river gurgling through the tangled fern and scented thorn-bushes will be treated like the canal of a people's park; the whole place will reek of vitriol, of chemical manures and commercial improvements. So say good-by to Nutsgrove while you may, for you will never see it again--never again!"

"Oh, Robert, Robert, do you think it will be as bad as that?" cries Addie, turning her soft gray eyes to his wrathful face in wistful appeal.

"Of course I do! What chance has it of escaping moneyed Vandalism? If even a gentleman had bought it, no matter how poor--But what quarter can one expect from the hands of an illiterate vitriol-monger, a low-bred upstart, like that Armstrong?"

"Do you know, I think you are exaggerating his defects a little, Bob?" says Addie, languidly. "He's a plain kind of man certainly, both in manner and appearance; but--but he would not give me the idea of being exactly ill-bred. He does not talk very loud or drop his 'h's,' for instance."

"No, that's just it. I'd respect him far more if he did; it's the painful veneer, the vague, nameless vulgarity of the man that repels me so, that gives me the idea of his being perpetually on the watch in case an 'h' might slip from him unawares. If he were an honest horny-handed son of toil, not ashamed of his shop or his origin, not ashamed to talk of his 'orse and 'is 'ouse like Higgins and Joe Smith, I should not dislike him so much; but he's not that style of man--he belongs to the breed of the pompous upstart, the sort of man stocked with long caddish words that no gentleman uses, the man to call a house a domicile, a horse a quadruped, a trench an excavation, and so on. Talk of the--There goes the beggar, quadruped and all! I dare say he fancies himself a type of the genuine country squire. Ugh! Down, Hal--down, Goggles; he'd spot you in a moment! I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of thinking we'd look at him."

They descend from the gate and stand together, the five abreast, taking their farewell look, with swelling hearts, at the home where they have spent their happy careless youth in sheltered union. They are not a demonstrative family, the Lefroys--not given to moments of "gushing" or caressing; they quarrel frequently among themselves, coming of a hot-blooded race; yet, they are deeply attached to one another, having shared all the joys and sorrows of each others' lives, having no interests, no sympathies outside their immediate circle; and the thought of coming separation weighs heavily on their young hearts, as heavily as the pall of death.

"Well, we'd best make tracks," says Robert, turning away, his hands shading his eyes, "we'll not forget the 29th of May--your birthday, Hal, old chap. Last year, you remember we had tea in the grove, and old Sarah baked us a stunning cake; this year we have made our last pilgrimage together. Next year I wonder where we shall be? Scattered as far and as wide as the graves of a household, I fear."

At this point Addie, the most hot tempered but the most tender-hearted member of the family, breaks down, and flinging her arms round her brother's neck, sobs out piteously--

"O, Bob, Bob, my own darling boy, I--I can't bear it--I can't bear to have you go away over that cruel cold sea! I shall never sleep at night thinking of you. Don't go away, don't go away; let's all stick together and--and--go--die--somewhere--together! Oh, Bob, Bob, my darling, my darling!"

There is another general break-down; they all cling one to another, Hal and Lottie howling dismally, Robert's haughty eyes swimming too in tears, until the sound of voices in a neighboring field forces them to compose themselves, and they walk slowly across the upland meadow, at the furthest corner of which they separate, the boys, at the urgent invitation of their terriers, making for a rat-haunted ditch in the neighborhood, the girls strolling toward Nutsford through the northern end of the grove.

Miss Lefroy stalks on moodily in front, Lottie, still battling with her emotion, clinging to her firm young arm. Pauline walks behind alone, full of bitter thought, her straight brows painfully puckered. On the morrow a new, strange life is to begin for her, one that she knows will be eminently distasteful; her free young spirit is to be "cribbed, cabined, confined," in the narrow path of conventionality at last, and the prospect dismays her. Look as far ahead as she can, she can see no break in the gathering gloom--can see only that at seventeen the summer of her life is over and the long winter about to begin. Hope tells her no flattering tale; she does not know that in herself she holds the key of a triumphant liberty, of a future of sunlight, of glory, of all that is sweet too, and coveted by womanhood. Pauline does not know that she is beautiful, does not feel the shadow of her coming power, or guess that the lithe willowy grace of her straight young form, the glorious black of her eyes, the pure glow of her brunette skin, the chiseled outline of her small features, will purchase for her goods and pleasures of which her careless innocent girlhood has never dreamed. No lover has whispered in her ear "the music of his honey vows," and the cracked, fly-stained mirrors at Nutsgrove have told her nothing; and so she is sad and sorrow-laden, and the burden of dependence and uncongenial companionship looming before her seems to her almost more than she can bear.

In silence they pass out of the green gloom of the grove, where "fair enjeweled May" has touched with balmy breath each tiny bud, each tender leaf,

"Half prankt with spring, with summer half embrowned."

Under a scented hawthorn-hedge, skirting the main road that leads into the High Street of Nutsford, the Misses Lefroy pause for a moment to adjust the sylvan vagaries of their toilet.

Addie pulls a long limp plume of hartstongue and branch of "woodbine faintly streaked with red" from the battered leaf of her straw hat, which she pitches lightly over her straggling locks, then gives her pelerine a hasty unmeaning twitch that carries the center hook from the right to the left shoulder, and feels perfectly satisfied with her appearance. Pauline steps in front of her sister, with a request to stand on a troublesome bramble caught in her skirt. Addie without hesitation puts forth a patched unlovely boot, and the other moves forward with a brisk jerk, leaving not only the incumbrance well behind, but also a flounce of muddy lining hanging below her skirt; and thus the descendants of the Sieur de Beaulieu saunter down the High Street, with heads erect, callous, haughtily indifferent to public opinion, looking as it the whole county belonged to them.

"Look, mother--look at those poor Lefroys!" cried Miss Ethel Challice, the banker's daughter, as she drives past in her elegantly appointed C-spring landau, perfectly gloved, veiled, and shod. "Aren't they awful? Not a pair of gloves among them! And their boots--elastic sides--what my maid wouldn't wear! Patched at the toes, too! You would never say they were ladies, would you?"

"Poor children! They have no mother, you know, darling, and a bad, bad father."

"Oh, yes, I know! But he was such a handsome, attractive man! Don't you remember, mother, at Ascot, three years ago, when he asked us to lunch on his drag, and introduced me to Lord Squanderford, how fascinating we all thought him?"

Mrs. Challice shrugs her portly shoulders.

"Fascinating, but thoroughly unprincipled, my dear. I do pity his poor children. What will become of them, thrown destitute on the world? Well, I have nothing for which to blame myself. I tried to do my best for them; but--whether it was from want of manner or through senseless pride I can not tell--Miss Lefroy did not respond to my attempted civility, and the last day I called--about a year ago--I saw the whole family flying from the house across the wilderness like a crowd of scared savages, when the carriage stopped at the hall door."

"Oh, it was all want of manners, of course, mother dear! That poor girl would not know how to receive a visitor or enter a drawing-room. She has never been in any society, you know. All the county people have left off calling on them too; they treated them just in the same way that they treated you. They're perfect savages!"

"The second girl promises to be rather good-looking."

"Do you think so? She's too gypsified for my taste--looks as if she would be in keeping at a country fair, with a tambourine and a scarlet cap."

"She's a remarkably good-looking girl--that's what she is," Mr. Percy Challice puts in, with a knowing smile--"steps out like a thoroughbred, she does. 'Twould be well for you, my dear sister, if you had her action on the pavement."

"So I could have, if I wore boots and skirts like hers," retorts Miss Ethel sullenly.

"Then I'd strongly advise you, my dear, to get the address of her milliner and bootmaker at once."

Chapter III.

"I say, Pauline, is that Miss Rossitor going in at No. 3? It's just like what I remember of her dear old-maidish figure. I know she was expected home this month."

"Poor old Rossitor!" laughs Pauline. "Do you remember, Addie, the long mornings she used to spend trying to make Bob and you understand the difference between latitude and longitude?"

"I remember," answers Addie, with a sigh, "that she was wonderfully patient and painstaking with us, and I wish now with all my heart that I had profited more by her teaching. Pauline, I think I'll just run in and see if it is she. You and Lottie can return and let auntie know where I am."

Miss Rossitor, a neat bright-eyed little woman of thirty-five, daughter of a deceased clergyman, had, some three years before, undertaken the education of Colonel Lefroy's neglected children, spending three or four hours every morning in their dilapidated school-room. She had become much attached to her unruly pupils, and it was with sincere regret that she had to give them up and go abroad as resident governess in a French family, being very poor herself, and finding it impossible to get her quarterly applications for salary attended to by the gallant but ever-absent colonel.

"You old dear!" cries Addie, kissing the little lady vehemently. "It is you, really! I'm so glad to see you again! When did you arrive? How did you manage to get leave?"

"I arrived last night; mother did not expect me for another week. I managed to get leave, because, most fortunately--I mean unfortunately--well, well"--with a beaming smile--"we won't try to qualify the circumstance--at any rate, one of my pupils had a bad attack of rheumatic fever, and was ordered to some German baths for a couple of months, and, as the family have accompanied her, I got leave for the time being. Now let me have a look at you, my dear Addie. Well, to be sure, what an immense girl you have grown! But your face has not changed much. And all the others--the boys--I suppose they have shot up too? Three years do make a difference, do they not?"

"Rather!" cries poor Addie, lugubriously plunging at once into the subject of her woes. "It has made an immense difference to us. Oh, Miss Rossitor, you left us three years ago the happiest, the most contented and united family under the sun--you return, to find us the most miserable, destitute outcasts in England! Oh, oh!"

"There, there, child; don't give way so, don't, dear! Tell me all your troubles, Addie; it may lighten them for you. I don't know anything about you clearly: mother has not had time to tell me yet; we've had visitors all the morning."

"There--there is little to tell. About two months ago we were turned out of Nutsgrove. Every article of furniture was sold by auction--even--even mother's wedding-presents--and the place was bought by Tom Armstrong, the great vitriol and chemical manure man of Kelvick. That's the whole story."

"But your--your father, child! What of him? Surely he did not allow--"

"He--he--did nothing. He mortgaged every stick to the place, and did not even pay the interest on the money raised."

"And, Addie, where is he now?"

"I don't know," she answers drearily--"in America somewhere, I believe; he disappeared nearly three years ago. He backed the wrong horse for the Derby, just ran down here for half an hour, burned some papers in his study, kissed us all round, and went away. We never heard from him afterward--at least, not directly."

"But surely he can not have deserted you altogether--have left you five children totally unprovided for?"

"He left us with a capital of four pounds fifteen between us--four pounds fifteen--not a penny more! And we have had nothing from him since; and yet the Scripture tells us to honor our parents!"

"Hush, child--hush! We must not question the commands of Holy Writ. Why, if it comes to that, women are ordered to love, honor, and obey their husbands; and, oh, my dear, my dear," continues the little woman, the corkscrew ringlets of her frisette nodding with impressive emphasis, "if you could only have seen or heard the men some women are called upon to honor--to honor, mind you--why, you--"

"Ah, but that is different, quite different! A woman has the power of choosing her husband; if she selects the wrong man, there is no one to blame but herself. But a child can't choose its own father; if it could, you may be sure poor Bob wouldn't have selected one who would rob him of his patrimony and cast him penniless on the world without even the resource of education."

"Come, Addie dear, are you not too severe on your father? He has had many temptations, has been unfortunate in his speculations; but, when he knows the state you are in, you may be sure he will make an effort to help you--probably send for you all and give you a home in the new world."

Addie does not reply at once; a sudden wave of color floods her soft face, and she says hurriedly--

"After all, why shouldn't I tell you? I--I dare say you will hear it from some one else; I--I suppose half the county knows it."

"Knows what, dear?"

"That our father has abandoned us altogether--that he has other family-ties we--we knew nothing of--"

"Addie, my dear, what are you talking of?"

"He did not leave England alone, Miss Rossitor," she answers excitedly; "he asked none of us to go with him, but he took two other children we had never heard of, and a--a wife. I believe she was an actress at a London theater--"

"My dear child," interrupts Miss Rossitor, much flurried and shocked, "where did you hear all this? Who told you? Do the others know?"

"No; I did not tell them--I don't mean to do so. I heard it all one day accidentally. Aunt Jo and Lady Crawford were discussing it; they did not know I was behind the curtain. My dress was all torn, and I didn't want Lady Crawford to see me, so I hid there, and--and was obliged to hear it all."

Poor Addie's crimson face sinks upon her outstretched arm; for a time she sobs bitterly, refusing to be comforted. However, a cup of tea has a somewhat soothing effect, and after a time she resumes her tale of desolation:

"When he went, poor Aunt Josephine came to take care of us--you know she was our mother's eldest sister, a maiden lady who lived with a widowed childless niece in a pretty little house at Leamington, where everything was peace and quietness and neatness--three things Aunt Jo loves better than anything else on earth; nevertheless she stayed on with us ever since, and has supported us on her annuity of eighty pounds a year."

"Supported six of you on eighty pounds a year! I can't believe that, Addie!"

"And yet it is true. We did not have dinners _à la Russe_, you understand, nor did we get our frocks from Paris, and the boys had to give up their schooling; but we managed to rub along somehow, and were happy enough, all except poor aunt, who has never enjoyed a peaceful hour since she left Leamington. We had the house, you know, and the garden, which was stocked with fruit and vegetables; there was an old cow too, and a few hens, who laid us an egg occasionally. Oh, we didn't mind--we got along famously! But now--now Heaven only knows what is to become of us!"

"My poor, poor child," exclaims Miss Rossitor, with tears in her voice, "this is too sad! Something must be done. You have some other relatives to help you? Where are you staying now?"

"I'll tell you all about it. When we left Nutsgrove, two months ago, we took up our quarters at Sallymount Farm, belonging to Steve Higgins, who was a stable-boy in grandfather's time, and who married our old nurse Ellen Daly. She had some spare rooms, and she asked us to use them while we looked about us and decided what was to be done. We began by sending round the hat, as Bob calls it, to all our kith and kin. You know in the old days we seemed to have a lot of prosperous relatives; I remember, when I was a small child, a whole band of cousins stopping at Nutsgrove for the Kelvick races, with their maids and valets. And so we thought, for the sake of the family name, they would help us; but--but somehow the hat failed to reach them; they seemed to have moved on, to have vanished into space--they weren't to be found, in fact."

"But there is Mrs. Beecher of Greystones, your father's half-sister. She couldn't possibly overlook you."

"No, she couldn't well, living within twenty miles and having no children of her own. She and the admiral came over and reviewed us _en masse_, and, I believe, were nervously indisposed for days afterward--the admiral had to swallow half a bottle of sherry before he recovered from the shock of our combined comeliness. They stayed an hour, and said as many disagreeable and insulting things during that time as we had ever heard in our lives before. However, the upshot of their visit was that Aunt Selina offered to send away her companion, Miss McToadie, and take Pauline in her place. Aunt Jo closed with her at once, not giving poor Polly a voice in her fate; and so she is to go over to Greystones the day after to-morrow. Poor, poor Polly!"

"Well at any rate, she is sure of a home. The Beechers will eventually adopt her; and they are very rich people. You should not pity her, Addie; it would be very injudicious," says Miss Rossitor sagely.

"Oh, I didn't to her face! Adversity is teaching me wisdom, I can tell you. After that, Robert was put up in the market, and found wanting in capacity for commercial or professional pursuits, so an old relative with an interest in shipping got him a berth on board a vessel going to China with a cargo of salt. The most horrid line in the whole mercantile service, poor Bob says; and the worst of it is he won't get a penny of salary for nearly three years, and he'll have to work like a galley-slave all the time. Fine opening, is it not? But beggars can not be choosers, you would say. Well, Miss Rossitor, that is all our relatives have done for us so far, except that dear Aunt Jo--Heaven bless her!--has adopted, or, at least, will try to adopt Lottie, and take her back to Leamington when we break up. There is some talk too of getting Hal into a third-rate endowed school near London. Judge Lefroy, a cousin out in India, promises to pay ten pounds a year toward it if two other members of the family subscribe the same sum. But we've had no other advances; and so Hal's affairs are _in statu quo_ at present; in other words, he's a pensioner on the poor aunt who has taken Lottie."

"And you, my dear, have you any prospect for yourself?"

"I? Miss Rossitor, I am--don't laugh, please--trying to get a situation as governess to some very small and ignorant children. You remember of old my list of accomplishments? Well, I haven't swelled their quantity or quality since. I can't run a clean scale up the piano yet; I don't know the difference between latitude and longitude; compound proportion is as great a mystery to me as ever; and yet three times last week I offered my services to the public in the columns of the 'Daily News,' 'Daily Telegraph,' and the 'Kelvick Gazette,' and received only one answer. It was from a lady who would give me a home, but no salary--which would not do, as I must at least have a few shillings to buy shoes and stockings, _et cætera_."

"Only one answer! That was unfortunate. You can not have worded your advertisement attractively enough, dear."

"Oh, yes, I did! Bob composed it in strict orthodox fashion. Unfortunately there were lots of other governesses advertising, and no one seeming to want them; but there was a great run on cooks and barmaids and housemaids. I don't know what is to become of me, for I can not and I will not live on poor auntie--that I'm determined! I'd--I'd rather scrub kitchen floors, or pick potatoes in the field like a laborer's daughter!" cries the girl passionately, her cheeks flushing.

"Addie," says Miss Rossitor slowly, hesitatingly, "I think I know of a situation that might suit you, if you really wish--"

"You do? Oh, you dear, you dear! Tell me quickly where it is."

"It's so wretched I'm almost ashamed to mention it; but you seem so anxious, dear," says Miss Rossitor deprecatingly. "A friend of mine is there at present; but she is leaving this week to better herself, as indeed she might easily do. No, no, Addie dear, I won't tell you about it--it's too miserable, too mean--"

"Oh, Miss Rossitor, dear friend, don't refuse to help me! I am not what I was; all my stupid pride is gone; work is all I crave. Oh, can't you feel for me, can't you understand me?" she pleads vehemently.

Miss Rossitor gently kisses the pleading upturned face, and then answers gravely--

"That will do, child; I will hesitate no longer. The family I allude to are retired Birmingham tradespeople, not particularly refined, I fear, in their habits or surroundings. They have four children ranging in age from five to twelve--one boy and three girls; these you would have to educate, and you would have to be with them all day, take them for walks, help the nurse to dress them in the mornings, even, I believe, occasionally to mend their clothes. Your salary for all this would be twenty-two pounds a year--think of that--twenty-two pounds a year!"

"Will you give me their address?" is all Addie says.

"I will write for you myself, dear child, it you wish it. You can at least make a trial; but I warn you that the life of a nursery-governess in an underbred household cramped probably in a suburban villa is very different from what you--"

"I know, I know; but I am prepared to bear anything. What does anything matter now that we are all separated and have lost our beloved home for ever? Oh, Miss Rossitor"--springing to her feet and pacing up and down the room with clinched hands--"that is the thought that stings, that paralyzes hope, that deadens energy--to think that it is gone from us for ever! Sometimes I feel that, if Heaven had made me a man, it would not have been so."

"What would you have done, Addie?"

"I would have thrown myself into the fight, and have struggled undaunted against any odds--against hardship and disappointment and failure--until I had won it all back, until I had ousted the upstart who supplanted us. If he, an illiterate tradesman, friendless, alone, without money, without education, without help of any kind, succeeded in amassing a large fortune, succeeded in becoming master-mariner on the great tide of industry in his native town, why should not I, with such a heart-moving aim in view--I, with the blood of heroes running in my veins--do so likewise? But what is the use of talking? What can a woman do, tied down, hampered, checked on every side by the superstition of ages? Oh, it is too stifling, too exasperating! Sometimes I wish I had never been born. What good am I? What place have I in the world? What--"

"You will find your use in the place Heaven gives you, my dear, if you only put your trust in Providence. Tell me, Addie, something about this prosperous upstart, Armstrong of Kelvick. Have you met him? What sort of man is he?"

"Oh, a very ordinary style of man indeed! There's nothing remarkable about him in one way or another. He seemed quiet and heavy, I thought; I didn't notice him very particularly. He came two or three times to the farm to talk over some business matters with auntie."

"Then you did not find him oppressively vulgar, did you?"

"No, not oppressively so; but I'm no judge of manners, you know, having so little to boast of myself; Bob and Polly, however, who understand these things, say that he is an out-and-out cad, that his every movement betrays him, and that no one but a person utterly devoid of delicacy and good taste would have sent us a present of flowers and vegetables out of our own garden as he did."

"He sent you flowers and vegetables! How was that?"

"Yes, to Aunt Jo. The last time he called she asked him, when he was leaving, how the peas were doing this year down near the currant-bushes--for you know our garden was supposed to produce the finest peas in the county; and that evening he sent her up a basket of flowers and vegetables, and a couple of quarts of gooseberries, enough to make a glorious 'fool;' but Robert pitched the whole lot out of the window indignantly, and when auntie sent the young Higginses to pick them up again, he went out and kicked them all round. He's awfully proud, you know, dear Robert; I remember you used to call him 'Robert the Magnificent.'"

"Yes; I have seldom met a young gentleman of his years who had such a high opinion of himself and his social dignity."

"He has just the same opinion now. I sometimes tell him he ought to have been born a sultan. And to think of him swabbing decks and tarring ropes--oh, dear!"

"The chances are that Mr. Armstrong sent you the flowers and vegetables only in a spirit of harmless kindness," says Miss Rossitor musingly.

"I dare say. People of that sort don't understand our feelings. Bob said that, had we given him the slightest encouragement, he'd have probably asked us to dinner. Well, I must be going now. Thank you sincerely for your much-needed kindness, dear friend. You'll let me know my fate as soon as possible, won't you? And may I sometimes come down to you in the morning for a practice? They haven't a piano at the farm. I've been reading up my French for the last week. _Bonsoir, bonne amie, bonsoir!_"

Chapter IV.

"Addie, where are you going?"

"Only up to the grove for a good long morning's study, auntie; don't wait for dinner for me if I'm not back at three. I have some bread and apple in my satchel."

"Why can't you study quietly in the house, like any other sensible girl?" says Aunt Jo querulously. "I never saw such children as you all are; you'd live like squirrels if you were allowed. People may say what they like about the grand Carlovingian dynasty of the Lefroys; it's my firm belief they're the descendants of Bedouins or gypsies--nothing else!"

"I couldn't study in the farm this morning, auntie dear," answers Addie, laughing; "there is such a heavy smell of cabbage-water and soap-suds all over the place; and then the baby, poor little dear, is teething, and not a very soothing companion. Will you tell Bob where I'm going, if he asks for me?"

* * * * *

It is a fortnight since Miss Lefroy confided her troubles to her old governess, and the first break in the family has taken place. Pauline is safely established at Greystones, and in ten days more Addie is to enter on her new duties as nursery-governess to the family of Mrs. Augustus Moggeridge Philpot, of Burlington Villa, Birmingham. That estimable lady, having been fascinated by Miss Rossitor's recommendation of her candidate, has accepted Addie's services without inconvenient questioning, and she is now busy storing her mind with knowledge, unencouraged by advice or assistance from her more experienced friend, who has gone to the seaside with her mother.

Addie stretches herself at full length on the scented sward, and honestly tries to occupy her powerful intellect solely with the dry pages of Noel and Chapsal, tries to banish the fleeting fancies of the summer hour and all the worries and sorrows crowding her life so heavily, tries--hardest task of all--to forget for the moment that this is her beloved Robert's last week on shore, that three days more will see him sailing down Channel with his sloppy cargo into the thundering Biscay waves.

"'Adjectives ending in _x_ form their feminine in _se_--as, _heureux, heureuse_; _jaloux, jalouse_. But there are many exceptions to this rule--such as _doux, douce_; _roux, rousse_; _faux, fausse_.' Oh, dear me, what a language French is for exceptions! Poor Goggles was about right in her grumblings; it's a miserable language when you come to look into it," sighs Addie wearily. "I've had enough of it for one morning. I think I'll have a tussle now with the Tudors and those bothering Wars of the Roses. I wonder how long it will be before the Moggeridge Philpots--what an awful mouthful!--find me out! Not very long, I fear; and, after that, the Deluge!"

The drowsy hours creep by; Noel and Chapsal, Ince and Mangnall lie unheeded on the turf; crowds of ants, wood-lice, and earwigs are exploring their dry surfaces; Addie, her soft rosy cheek resting on a mossy bank, is fast asleep, dreaming that she is home again, helping old Sally to make gooseberry-jam in the big tiled kitchen, when an adventurous beetle, scampering sturdily across her nose, awakens her. She rises, yawning heavily, collects her property, and sets forth to refresh herself with a look at Nutsgrove. But the trees are too luxuriant in foliage; she walks up and down and stands on tiptoe without getting a glimpse of its brickwork. Near the high-road she comes to a stalwart tempting-looking oak, with giant blanches outstretched, inviting her into their waving shelter, promising her a delicious peep into the green dell they overhang. She climbs nimbly, firmly clutching her Mangnall, rests for a minute clinging to the trunk, and then, advancing cautiously out, balances herself most luxuriously on the swaying branch, an arm of which supports her back and shoulders in most obliging fashion.

"This is jolly, and no mistake!" she laughs delightedly, nibbling a wrinkled sapless apple. "If the aunt could see me now, there would be some sense in calling me a squirrel. How sweet and still the old place looks! Not a soul about hacking or hammering at anything to-day. I am in luck. Now to work steadily and conscientiously. 'For what was ancient Babylon famed?' Let me see--let me see. Oh, yes, I know! For its hanging gardens, lofty walls, and the luxurious effeminacy of its inhabitants. Hanging gardens! How funny! I wonder if they were as nice as mine! I wonder if ever a poor Babylonian girl came up and swung in one to have a peep at her dear lost home that she never--never--"

A sudden heavy swaying movement, an angry, cracking sound, and the next second, with a sounding thud, Miss Lefroy and her book are deposited side by side on the turf beneath.

"I think--I think I have broken something--something besides the branch," pants Addie, half-stunned with pain--"my--my ankle I suppose. Oh, oh, it is awful! I--I never felt anything like it before. Oh, what shall I do? I feel so queer--so faint--so--so--"

A cold perspiration breaks over her quivering face, she swerves from side to side, and then her head falls forward helplessly on the ground, on a line with her crippled foot.

How long she lies thus she does not know; but, after a time, she is dimly conscious of a man's arm raising her head, and forcing some strong spirit through her lips, which, after reviving her for a moment, sends her into a pleasant painless dream, from which she at last awakens to find herself lying on a soft couch, her foot firmly bandaged, a pile of cushions supporting her head, and a picture of a Dutch fishing-scene which hung between the drawing room windows at Nutsgrove facing her. She can not be mistaken; there is the same "soapsuddy" sea, the same fat grimy boat all over on one side, the same lovely gamboge sunset behind the distant pier, the same massive molded frame, only well dusted and regilt.

She glances round and quickly recognizes other friends of her childhood--an old Chippendale cupboard, a Louis Quatorze table, a tapestried screen, and a pair of large Dresden vases.

"Why, it is Nutsgrove! I am in the drawing-room!" she cries, rubbing her startled eyes. "The chairs, the carpet, the curtains, are different; but the room--the room is the same. What does it mean? Who brought me here?"

A buxom housekeeper who has been bandaging her foot answers at once,

"The master, Mr. Armstrong, brought you here, miss, in his dog-cart about twenty minutes ago. He saw you lying in a dead faint under a tree in the grove as he was driving home from Kelvick. I hope you feel better now; I bathed your foot in hot water according to his directions, and the swelling went down a good deal. The doctor will be here in a minute. Ah, here he is already!"

Dr. Newton, after a hurried inspection, says that the ankle is only slightly sprained, bandages it up again, orders an embrocation to be applied twice a day, and then speeds off to a dying patient.

"You are looking much better, Miss Lefroy; are you quite free from pain now?"

Addie turns with a start and finds the new master of Nutsgrove standing behind her.

He is a tall heavily-built man of about thirty-eight, keen-eyed, rugged-featured, with a dark strong face, the lower part of which is entirely concealed by a tawny brown beard hanging low on his broad chest. A decidedly powerful looking plebeian is Tom Armstrong of Kelvick.

"Thank you--almost," she answers, a little flurried by his massive incongruous appearance in that well-known room. "I feel quite restored now; and I have to thank you, Mr. Armstrong, very much for your prompt and kindly rescue."

"Pray don't mention it, Miss Lefroy; I was only too glad to have been of assistance to you. You quite startled me at first, you looked so still and white lying on the ground."

"I wish he'd sit down, or move away, or do something," thinks Addie impatiently; "he's so big, he oppresses me and spoils the room." Aloud she says, with a slightly nervous laugh, "I fell from the tree, you know, and broke your lovely branch. It was so--so funny! I had just been reading about the hanging gardens of--of--what's its name?"

"Babylon."

"Yes, Babylon--when down I came with such a thud! I suppose I must have fainted then, or something, though I can't understand how I did such a silly thing; it's the first time in my life it ever happened."

"You must have had a very heavy fall."

"Oh, but I've had much worse falls than that! I've come through trap doors in lofts no end of times. I crashed through a glass-house once and cut myself horribly. I've been bitten by dogs, had my hands squeezed in doors and wedged in machinery--all sorts of accidents, in fact--and I certainly never fainted after them. I'm sure I don't know what the boys will say when they hear of it." She stops suddenly, with an air of startled dignity, seeing the ghost of a smile hover round her host's bearded mouth. "But I am detaining you, Mr. Armstrong; pray--"

"You are not indeed, Miss Lefroy," he answers easily. "I am free from business in the afternoon. Would you not like me to send a message to your aunt to let her know where you are, as the doctor thinks it advisable that you should rest here for an hour before moving again?"

"It is not necessary, thank you. I told her I should probably not return until the evening, so she won't be uneasy. I'm very sorry to have to trespass so long on your hospitality," she says stiffly.

He waves aside the apology without comment.

"You must have found it very strange to awake and discover yourself in this room, Miss Lefroy. Did you know where you were at once?"

"Yes, and--no. It was such a surprise, I could not tell whether I was asleep or awake at first," she answers more naturally. "You--you have not changed the room so much, Mr. Armstrong; the tone of the paintings, of the carpet and curtains, is much as it was, and you have many of the old things too. That's mother's old screen by the fireplace, just as it always stood. She worked it when she was a girl at school. But that corner over there by the second window is quite different--where that _jardinière_ stands, I mean. That used to be my special little parlor. I kept my old work-box there, papier-mâché desk, and two little padded baskets for Andrew Jackson and the Widow Malone."

"For whom?"

"My dog and cat; we had one each. I gave Andrew to Mr. Rossitor, but the poor Widow disappeared two days before the--the--auction, and I have never seen her since."

There is a short uncomfortable pause.

"You--you were fond of your old home, were you not, Miss Lefroy?" he asks presently.

The girl's gray eyes flash angrily, her cheeks deepen to a dusky glow; she answers not a word. He looks at her seriously, a little sadly, in no whit abashed by the eloquent rebuke of her silence. She glances at the clock and half rises.

"I--I really must be going now, Mr. Armstrong; my aunt will be getting uneasy, and my foot feels much better."

"Won't you at least wait to take a cup of tea, Miss Lefroy? The carriage is not round yet--let me persuade you."

She hesitates; her eyes fall on the tea-tray that is being brought that minute into the room, bearing most appetizing fare--a pile of hot-buttered toast, a jug of delicious cream, home-made plum-cake, a few dishes of fresh fruit resting on cool green leaves.

The servant lays his burden on a side-table, preparing to officiate, when he is interrupted by a shrill cry from Miss Lefroy.

"Our old Crown Derby set! Our dear old set! Oh, have you got it--have you really got it? Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Armstrong, let me pour out the tea; do--just for this once! I always did it--always since I was seven years old--and I never broke anything. Let me--do!"

Mr. Armstrong laughs outright at this impulsive appeal, at the eager, childish face and outstretched hands. He motions to the butler to bring the table to Miss Lefroy's couch. Blushing somewhat at the effect of her outburst, and heedless of medical advice, she struggles into an upright position and softly caresses the delicate surface of the sugar-basin.

"There was a chip on the lip of the cream-jug. Yes, it's there still. Hal did it when he was a baby. I see you've had a handle put on to this cup. How neatly it is done!" sighs Addie, discontentedly acknowledging to herself that even during his short tenancy the bachelor-master of Nutsgrove has made some marked efforts to remove the stains, rents, seams of their untidy reckless childhood, to purify his orderly household from all trace of their damaging footprints, as Bob said he would. What wonderful penetration, what knowledge of the world the dear boy had! Yes, all would come to pass as he had prophesied; a few years more and she would not know the old home again. This was her last glimpse, her farewell view; that handle to the cup was the beginning of the end, the key-note to the reign of paint, of varnish, of vandalic renovation and commercial "improvements" that were to wreck the home she loved.

But Addie does not linger long over these somber forebodings, for the urn is hissing at her elbow, and duty and instinct claim her undivided attention for the moment. In virtue of her twelve years' office she has arrived at a pitch of perfection in the art of tea-making which commands the family respect. Before the tea-pot she reigns supreme; no one ever questions her authority or presumes to criticise the quality of her brew, and her sarcastic information in reply to a request for a fourth cup--"Certainly; as long as there's water there's tea"--is always received in meek silence, from fear lest she, being a hot-tempered and ofttimes hopelessly huffy young person, might throw up office and leave the family at the mercy of either Pauline or Aunt Jo, both of whom have been tried and found dismally wanting during her temporary illnesses. She knows to a grain the quantity of sugar each member requires, to a drop the cream; she knows who likes "mustard," whose nerves and tender years exact "wash," who requires a sensible and palatable "go between."

Therefore, Addie unable to throw aside the patronizing attitude of years, more or less overcome by the beloved familiarity of her surroundings, rattles the enemy's rich-toned crockery with the same freedom and brisk importance as if she were handling Ellen Higgins's coarse "chaney" in the farm parlor.

"Do you take cream and sugar, Mr. Armstrong?"

"Cream and sugar," he repeats stupidly, as if half asleep--"cream and sugar? How? Where?"

"Where?" Addie answers, a touch of elder-sisterly impatience in her voice. "Where? In your tea, of course!"

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure. How dull I am! Yes, both, please."

This is the first time in his thirty-eight years of life that a lady has presided at Tom Armstrong's tea-board, and the strangeness of the circumstance has for the moment paralyzed his attention. He has had a motherless, sisterless, almost homeless childhood; no woman's gentle influence and refining contact have smoothed the rugged upward path that he has been climbing for more than a quarter of a century. In his springtide, when men's fancies are apt to "lightly turn to thoughts of love," he was too absorbed in prosaic business and ambitious dreams of wealth and power to have time for sweethearting like most young fellows of his age and position. He has never strolled down country lanes on soft Sabbath morns, his arm encircling the plump waist of some apple-cheeked Mary Jane or Susan Ann; he has never picnicked with her under scented hawthorn-hedges, or drunk tea with her, seasoned with shrimps and radishes, at rustic inns or in beer-tainted summer-houses. So to him the unusual position is unmarred by even shadow-clouds of dead joys and by-gone pleasures. Addie's fresh flower face awakes no ghost of fevered memory to taunt him with the sweets of lost youth.

"Here is your tea, Mr. Armstrong; you must tell me if it is right. I don't know your tastes yet."

"It is delicious," he answers slowly, while a sudden thought strikes his musing brain, flooding it with a stream of sunshine--a thought he has never entertained before. What a pleasant thing it would be to have a woman, a young, fresh-faced, gray-eyed woman like Miss Lefroy, to sit by his fireside every night and hand him his tea, just as she does that moment, with that quaint inimitable little air of business-like patronage, of half-matronly, half-childish, yet wholly graceful self-possession! Yes; how very pleasant it would be! He has a house now, a rapidly-growing estate--he has a position of unimpeached respectability, if not of aristocratic quality--he has a clear future, a clean past, a goodly name at his banker's--why should he not take a wife to himself at last, and create ties to dispel the gloom of coming age--a wife just like Addie Lefroy--who would grace his hearth as she does, who would refine and enliven with her graceful youth the atmosphere of the heavily-draped room, which already he has begun to find so still and wearisome after the bustling life outside his den at the factory in Kelvick?

A wife just like Addie Lefroy--not one whit more elegant, more beautiful, more fascinating, but just as she is--soft-faced, irregular-featured, simple-mannered, gentle-voiced, yet with a suggestion of hot-breathed, breezy youth about her every movement, her every gesture. Yes; if ever he marries, it will be some one like her, very like her--her exact counterpart, in fact; and where is he to find that? That is the question. Rapidly, while he sips his tea, he runs his eye, as he would down a stiff column of figures, over the many eligible young ladies whose acquaintance he owns in his native town; but none of them suits his prejudiced eye. One is too handsome, another too tall, another too fashionable, another too affected--all of them are everything that is not Addie Lefroy. Addie Lefroy, Addie Lefroy! Softly he repeats her name again and again, as if the words themselves tickle his palate and season his tea pleasantly, fragrantly. Addie Lefroy! How the name suits her! It has a sort of liquid, swinging sound. If ever she changes it, will she get another to suit her as well? For instance, Addie--Addie--Arm--

With a start he "pulls himself together," and swallows a big lump of cake that he loathes, which he hopes will act as a sort of break in the dangerous current of his imagination.

Meanwhile Miss Addie, quite unconscious of the agreeable turmoil that her presence is awaking in the breast of her massive middle-aged host, sips her tea and munches cake in blissful unconcern.

"I suppose," she muses, with a little ruefulness, "if the boys and Polly knew, they would think it awfully mean of me, feeding on the enemy like this; but--but--I really can not help it--I'm half famished. Perhaps, if they hadn't eaten anything from seven A.M. until five P.M. but half a moldy apple, they wouldn't be so particular. I don't know about Bob, though; I think his pride would stomach a longer fast than that. I don't believe any strait of body would induce him to eat a crumb under this roof now--and yet Mr. Armstrong hasn't behaved so badly. I might have been lying in the wood but for him. Oh, dear, how horrible! I've actually cleared the whole plate of toast alone! I--I hope he won't notice; I'll shove the dish behind the urn. Yes; he can't see it there. How did I do it? I never felt myself eating. That cake is delicious too--better than any of Sally's. I feel so much better now; I suppose it must have been hunger that helped me to go off in that ridiculous fashion in the grove."

Her head sinks back pleasantly on the soft cushions; she looks out on the sunny lawn and the timbered wealth she knows so well. Both the windows are wide open, and a faint evening breeze brings to her couch a breath of mignonette from a parterre outside, which her mother laid out with her own hands when she came to Nutsgrove, a happy bride, twenty-two years before. A thrush that has yearly built his nest in the heart of the gloire de Dijon, the shining leaves of which are fluttering against the casement, bursts into song. Addie closes her eyes, and she is at home once more, living over again the sweet spring evenings of her blissful neglected youth. Armstrong of Kelvick and his trim purified apartments vanish into space; the notched and rickety chairs are back again, the threadbare carpet with its sprays of dim ghostly terns, the dusky curtains. Her work-box is standing in its old place, she hears Pauline's light footsteps flying down the stairs, the boys are calling the dogs

"With wild halloo and brutal noise"

away to "marshy joys" in the grove, and old Sally is hunting the chickens out of the kitchen with a peculiar hooting noise that no throat but her own can produce.

"Miss Lefroy, you have not answered my question yet. You were very fond of Nutsgrove, were you not?"

She starts up, an angry crimson dyeing her face, to find her host leaning forward, his keen hazel eyes fixed intently on hers. She answers vehemently, passionately--

"No, I did not answer you, because I thought it was a senseless question; but I will answer you now, if you insist. Were we fond of Nutsgrove? We were--we were--we were! Will that satisfy you? What else had we to be fond of? We had no father, no mother, no friends, no outside amusements or pleasures, and we wanted nothing--nothing but to be left here together. We were content--oh, yes! Even--even when Polly and I began to grow up, we never longed to go away to London or Paris, to fashionable places, or balls and parties, like other girls; and the boys--they never asked to go to school or foreign parts, never wanted to see the world, like other boys. The woods, the river, the gardens, the dear old farm-yard, gave us all we wanted the whole year round--summer, winter, autumn, spring. Fond of Nutsgrove? Ah, we were! We loved every blade of grass, every mossy stone, every clump of earth; every flower and every leaf of the trees was dearer to us than they can be to you if you live here half a century. Now you are answered, Mr. Armstrong, and very rudely and impertinently too; but--but I could not help myself. I--I am very hot-tempered, and you should not have persisted when you saw--when you saw--"

"I know, I know," he interrupts earnestly; "but, believe me, Miss Lefroy, I did not persist out of idle curiosity or for the purpose of giving you wanton pain. Will you bear with me yet a little longer, and permit me to ask you another question, which--which may appear to you even more impertinent than the first? I have a purpose--an extenuating purpose in both. You are leaving this house very soon, are you not, to become a governess--a nursery-governess if I have heard aright--in a family of inferior position, and at a salary so mean as to exclude the idea of helping your family, who are--are almost completely unprovided for, thrown on the world without any visible means of support? Is my information correct?"

"Your information is perfectly correct, Mr. Armstrong," Addie retorts, springing to her feet, her eyes blazing; "but I fail to see your object in forcing me to discuss such--"

With a gesture he silences her, motioning her back to her seat almost impatiently.

"A moment more, if you please; then I shall have done. On your own admission, therefore, I may conclude that your future prospects, both personally and collectively, are not, to put it mildly, in a flourishing condition, and that at present you see no glimmer of improvement, no chance of reprieve from a life of servile drudgery, for which you feel yourself totally unfitted, first of all from a strong distaste to teaching, and secondly from the unconventional nature of your early life and education."

She is too amazed to resent even by a gesture this extraordinary speech. After a slight pause, he resumes, in the same low mechanical voice, with a faint tinge of color in his swarthy cheek:

"Therefore, I presume to ask you, Miss Lefroy, if in these circumstances you would deem it any improvement to your condition to--to--marry me and live out your life at Nutsgrove?"

She looks at him with eyes wide open, staring stupidly, and blank white face.

"To--to marry you? I--I don't understand. Are you joking, Mr. Armstrong?"

"No, Miss Lefroy, I am not joking; on the contrary, I am very much in earnest. Men mostly are, I believe, when they ask a woman to be their wife."

"You ask me to--to be your wife?"

"Yes, I most assuredly do. If you consent, I will settle this place on you unreservedly, so that, whatever happens to me, nobody will be able to oust you from it again. Nutsgrove will belong to you, you alone, as virtually as it belonged to your grandfather sixty years ago, before an acre was mortgaged. Will you marry me, Miss Lefroy? Is the bribe sufficient?" he asks sharply.

But poor Addie has no power to answer; she sits gazing into the frowning, flushed face of her suitor with the same blank expression, without a tinge of shyness, hesitation, or embarrassment in her attitude, or flicker of color in her cheek. Armstrong feels as if he would like to shake her.

"She looks at me as if I were not human, as if I were some strange animal escaped from a menagerie. She's a woman, I'm a man; why should I not ask her to marry me?" he thinks. "Well," he says aloud, with an irritation he strives in vain to repress, "have you understood my question, Miss Lefroy? Must I repeat it? No? Then will you kindly put me out of pain--that is the correct term, I believe--as soon as you can?"

"Oh!" pants Addie, waving her hands nervously, as if pushing him from her. "Can't you give me a moment to breathe--to feel--to understand?"

"Certainly, if you wish it."

He walks to the window, steps out, and paces up and down the terrace, smoking furiously.

Addie, left to herself, heaves a great sigh of relief, then glances languidly round the room, and tries to realize her situation, to understand that she can be mistress of the old place again, that she need never yawn the dreary hours away in the Moggeridge school-room, need never darn alien socks, help to tub peevish babies, never bow her haughty young head to the yoke of uncongenial servitude, but spend her days by the familiar fireside, rambling through the leafy grove and mellow orchards, her own, her very own forever. A flood of sunshine bathes the park in flickering glory; every leaf trembling with the pulse of coming summer, every bird singing in the budding grove, every gurgling ripple of the stream that feeds the marshy pond behind the park, seems to whisper to the girl's troubled heart words of welcome and entreaty, seems to sing in gladsome chorus, "Come back, Addie, come back, come back; we miss you sorely!" At that moment a shadow falls across her path, the song of the birds dies into a wordless twitter, the glory of the evening fades, as the burly, massive form of the vitriol-manufacturer stands between her and the sunset.

"To live with him alone here!" she thinks, with a shudder, while the hot blood dyes her face and neck. "Oh, I couldn't--I couldn't! He would spoil everything; he would take the beauty, the poetry out of everything I love. I couldn't--I couldn't! Nobody would expect it of me. The bribe is big, but not sufficient--not sufficient, unless--unless--Oh, I wish I knew what to do--what to say to him! If he would let me be his gover--I mean his housekeeper, his dairy-maid--anything--anything but his--his--wife! Oh, dear, dear, what put it into his head? What made him think of such a thing? He never even looked at me when he came to the farm; and now he wants to marry me. He is a strange man; when he turns to me with that stern straight look in his eyes, I feel--I feel as if I didn't belong to myself, as if I had no power over my life. Ellen Higgins says that he always gets everything he wants, that every one gives in to him sooner or later in Kelvick--nice prospect for me! And the flowers told me last autumn that I was to marry a gentleman--a gentleman they told me over and over again--a gentleman!"

Chapter V.

A quarter of an hour later Mr. Armstrong re-enters the room, and stands with still impenetrable face before his guest.

"You--you have given me good measure," she says, rather hysterically. "I have been trying to think, to understand it all thoroughly."

"Yes?"

"It is very kind, very thoughtful of you to make such a suggestion, to--to offer to give me back what I--I value so dearly and believed forever out of my reach; and, you--you understand, I would not have spoken as freely as I did--"

"I understand perfectly. Do you accept or reject my offer then?"

"Oh, dear, dear, how point-blank you are!" she answers flutteringly. "I--I do neither yet. Of course it is a great bribe, a great temptation; but--but--"

"But what? Do not be afraid of me, Miss Lefroy. Please tell me unreservedly what is on your mind. I am not a very sensitive plant, I assure you."

"I will then. I dare say it would be better always to come to the point as you do," she says, with a weak laugh. "But women never can, you know; they must flutter round corners and by-ways a little at first--'tis their nature to, Bob says. What I mean is that, dearly as I love the old place for itself, it--it was more the surroundings, it was being all together--we five--that--that made it what it was to me. I know, I feel sure it would--would never be the same, never be the old home to me, if I were living in it all alone and they outside struggling in the world. I'm afraid," continues Addie, her fingers nervously crimping the ragged flounces of her cotton dress, "that I don't express myself very--very clearly; but I think you--you will understand what I mean."

"Yes I understand what you mean, Miss Lefroy," he returns slowly, meditatively, and then relapses into silence, which she does not break. "Perfectly, young lady, perfectly!" he echoes to himself grimly enough. "You mean me to understand that, if I marry you, I must also marry your entire family circle--the tall, dark-eyed sister, the small sickly one, the two cubs of brothers, the hysterically-disposed maiden aunt, who would do duly as mother-in-law--the whole interesting group--just a round half dozen. Hum! Rather a formidable number, Tom, my man, wherewith to plunge into the doubtful sea of matrimony--as a maiden venture too--you who have hitherto steered so clear of petticoats, who never until now felt any attractions in their refining rustle! To start with a family of six--six useless dependent pauper aristocrats, who would probably consider you the favored party in being allowed the honor of feeding, housing, clothing, educating them--By Jove, 'twould be a position to make a stouter-hearted man than I am quail! I'd better hedge a bit while there is yet time, pause on the brink of--what? Ten to one, on the brink of a gulf of irreparable folly!"

He looks stealthily at the origin of his troublous irresolution, at the shabby gray-eyed girl whom half an hour before he had no more idea of marrying than he had of marrying his cook, whose presence he has barely noticed during the few times he has found himself in her company. "Is the game worth the candle?" he asks himself for the twentieth time in impatient iteration. She is no beauty, this Addie Lefroy. Her features are not the least bit regular; her skin, though pure and fresh, is thickly freckled; her figure, willowy and rounded enough, is not the type of figure Madame Armine of Kelvick would love to adorn. Then she has no accomplishments, scarcely any education, no money, no connection, save her nightmare of a family; and--most damning fact of all--she does not like him personally. He, Tom Armstrong of Kelvick, is repugnant to her--that he can see clearly enough. Therefore is he not making an ass of himself--an unmitigated ass? A man of his years and experience to introduce on the impulse of a moment an element into his hitherto self-sufficing contented life that may bring with it infinite discord, life-long annoyance! Is there sense or meaning in his vague intangible longing to possess that callous undisciplined child who almost shrinks from his touch, just because she has sat in his drawing-room as if she were at home there, and has handed him a cup of tea gracefully? What is her fascination, her attraction? Not her beauty, certainly, for she is not half as good-looking as other girls he knows--as Miss Ethel Challice, for instance--no, certainly not!

He turns aside and unsuccessfully tries to recall to his mind's eye the vision of that young lady as he sat by her side on the night before in her father's elegant drawing-room. How handsome, how graceful she looked in her shimmering silk, roses clustering in her golden hair! How sweetly and kindly she smiled on him when he went to help her at the tea-table! Why did he not fall in love with her, or have the sense to invite her to come up to Nutsgrove and pour him out a cup of tea from that magical exasperating pot? It might have done the business for him just as well; and how infinitely more suitable and sensible it would have been in every way! She--Miss Challice--would have been just the wife for him, eligible all round--a handsome accomplished young woman, six years nearer his age than the other, with eighteen thousand pounds dowry and no incumbrance--a young woman who would have sat at the head of his table, ruled his house, and reared his children, with comfort and pleasant smooth-working skill.

"I think she might have said 'Yes' had I asked her," he muses ruefully. "Now that I come to think of it, she always seemed pleased to see me; and her parents are continually asking me up to their place. But I never even thought of it, never noticed--If I had--well, well, if I had, she wouldn't have stared at me as if I had just escaped from a lunatic asylum or the Zoölogical Gardens. No, I think not; her pretty eyes would have drooped a little, her cheeks have flushed ever so faintly, no matter which way her answer would have gone. And she has such lovely hair, too--though I remember a brute at the club said it was dyed, one night. I don't believe it a bit, not a bit! How stupid, how exasperating of me never to have noticed how handsome and attractive--yes, really attractive, by Jove!--Challice's daughter is--his only daughter too! And now--now--"

He turns from the window to take another covert look.

Miss Lefroy has left her couch and is kneeling on the carpet, a gaunt, green-eyed, grimy-coated cat clasped to her breast, over which she is cooing with the rapturous joy of a mother over a downy-pated infant whom she has lost and unexpectedly recovered.

"It's the Widow, Mr. Armstrong," she explains, with dewy upturned eyes. "My own dear, darling, long-lost Widow, whom I thought never to see again! She must have heard my voice through the open window; she came flying in straight to my arms five minutes ago. Oh, you don't know what a cat she is! We've had her nine years, and she's had about eighty-seven kittens. Hal kept an account; and the rats and the mice she has killed--no one could keep an account of them--could they, my darling, could they?"

"She seems glad to see you again--hungrily glad," says Armstrong, stroking her dusty fur; "and she is giving you a demonstrative welcome, and no mistake! I wonder if anything or any one in the world would be as glad to see me after a few months' absence?"

"Why, of course, Mr. Armstrong, your brothers and sisters--and other relatives would!"

"I have no brothers and sisters, or other relatives--at least, no near ones," he answers a little wistfully.

"Dear, how lonely you must feel!"--looking at him with compassionate eyes.

"Miss Lefroy," he says quickly, swallowing a lump in his throat, "With regard to the difficulty we were discussing a few minutes ago, I wish you to understand that, in case you--you--should decide on accepting my offer, I--should quite sympathize with your family feeling in the matter, and sincerely hope you would be able to induce your sisters to come and live with you here--in fact, to look on Nutsgrove as their home as long as they liked."

"Oh!"

"As regards your brothers, the case is different. You see, my chi--I mean, Miss Lefroy, I am much older than you or they, and I am satisfied I should only be doing them an irreparable injustice if I asked them to continue to live the life they have hitherto led here. Men must go out into the world, fight their way, and learn the value of independence and success--must earn the birthright of self-respect to transmit to those who come after them. I know it will be a harder struggle for them than for others brought up differently; but I should be always by to give them an encouraging hand and help them with my advice and experience; and then, when their occupation allowed it, they could always come here for a holiday--in fact, continue to look upon the old place as their head-quarters until they built up separate homes and shaped interests for themselves, as most men do sooner or later."

"You are very kind--you are very kind," she answers breathlessly.

"You have said that before."

"I know; but what else can I say?"

"Say that you will marry me."

"Oh, I think I will soon--not just yet--not just yet! Will you give me a few hours more--until to-morrow--to think and talk it over with the others?"

"I will give you until to-morrow morning."

"Thank you--you are very kind. There is a brougham at the door--for me, isn't it? I must be going now"--with a great sigh of relief.

"But can you walk?"

"Oh, yes, with a little help, quite easily."

"Here is my stick--not a Rotten Row crutch, you see--lean on it well on one side, and on my arm on the other--so."

At the threshold of the door she pauses to rest a moment and take one backward glance at the beloved flower-scented room, at the dainty table all awry, at the Widow Malone, her raptures exhausted, sipping a saucer of cream on the spotless carpet.

"Oh, what a mess I have made of your beautiful tidy room!" she cries in childish dismay. "It is easily seen a Lefroy has been in possession. It's quite disgraceful--the cushions all upside down, the antimacassars crumpled, saucers on the floor, and an old bow from my polonaise, with two crooked hairpins, stuck in the arm of the sofa. I must get them, let me go."

"No," he says, laughing; "leave the room exactly as it is, and consider your property confiscated, Miss Lefroy."

With an impulse that she can not control, she looks up into his face and says quickly, with a puzzled frown--

"What made you do it? What put it into your head?"

"What put what into my head?"

"Oh, you know what I mean! What made you ask me to marry you?"

Here is a splendid opportunity for the orthodox declaration as yet unuttered in this strange courtship; but Armstrong takes no advantage thereof, he answers lightly enough, with smiling, careless face--

"What made me? I hardly know myself as yet. A variety of intangible emotions that I must analyze at my leisure."

"Pity, compassion?" she suggests softly.

"For whom?"

"For--for your neighbor."

He shakes his head.

"No, they were not the chief ingredients certainly. I doubt if they had anything to say to it."

"A feeling of wider philanthropy perhaps, more in the Don Quixote line?"

"No, Miss Lefroy. It is of no use; you can not thus lay light finger on the crotchets of man's 'most sovereign reason;' do not try."

"Well, I--I don't mind much, so long as you don't think I--I was trying to--"

She stops, blushing furiously.

"Trying to what?"

"Nothing, nothing."

"I'll not let you leave the room until you finish that sentence," he says decisively.

"You are a tyrant! Trying--trying to catch you--there! Oh, why will you make me say such things?"

"Trying to catch me!" he exclaims vehemently. "Good gracious, child! how could I imagine such a thing?"

"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure!" she answers, floundering helplessly under the half-amused, half-bitter expression of his dark face. "They say all men are conceited, no matter what they're like, and--and Ellen Higgins says that--that a great many of the Kelvick girls had their eyes on you, but that--that Miss Challice made--made the running too hot for--Oh, what am I saying--what am I saying? Mr. Armstrong, don't mind me; I'm a light-headed fool--a regular fool! Bob always said I hadn't an ounce of ballast, and I haven't--I haven't! Let me go, let me go!"

"If I let you go like this, how do I know I shall ever get you back again?"

"You said you would give me until to-morrow to decide--you know you did."

"I repent of my promise, then. I'd rather know now, if you please."

"But I can't decide in such a hurry. You, as a business man, ought to know it's ill-judged to rush at decisions in such--"

"I'm not in my office now, and don't feel at all like a business man; it's of no use appealing to me as such, Miss Lefroy. Listen, while I tell you a crisp anecdote that may help to throw light on the crotchets of my character."

"It's very late. I must go; auntie will be--"

"One soft spring day I was sitting in a room alone with a young lady--"

Addie stops unconsciously, interested in spite of herself.

"A young lady whom I knew very slightly, and in whom I had hitherto taken not the faintest interest."

"Yes?"

"Until she happened to hand me a cup of tea--"

"Oh!"

"And the fancy suddenly struck me that I should like to marry that girl; and, before I had finished my cup, my mind was made up--I determined she should be my wife. That's all."

"That's all, is it?" says Addie, drawing a long breath. "I--I don't like your story much. You were determined, were you? And do you always get what you determine on?"

"I don't want to boast; but I've been rather lucky up to the present."

"And, if the thing--the person is determined the other way, what then?"

"What then? You know every Britisher has a bit of the bull in him, and enjoys his fight, and you have heard also that flowers out of reach--nearly out of reach--smell the sweetest."

"Oh, there speaks the man all over! You've one touch of nature with my boys, at any rate, Mr. Armstrong--anything well out of reach has the most attraction for them. Bob always gathers his fruit from the ridge of the wall, and Hal would climb the tallest elm in the grove to rob a nest, and yet never lay hand on that of the thrush that builds every year in the gloire de Dijon under the window."

"Well, my limbs are not as supple as they were twenty years ago. I wonder shall I have to climb very high for the nest I want?"

Addie looks down and makes no reply.

They have now reached the brougham, into which he assists her carefully, placing his stout ash by her side.

"Better keep it for a day or two, Miss Lefroy--you may find it serviceable; and remember the doctor's instruction."

He busies himself for a few moments propping up her foot with shawls and cushions, and then, as the horse is about to start, says in a low voice, looking up in her face entreatingly--

"I would try to make you happy."

"You are very kind," says poor Addie for the fourth and last time that day; and then the horse plunges forward, and she is off.

Chapter VI.

"What will they say? What will they do?" thinks Addie, with shuddering presentiment as she is being driven along the high-road to Nutsford. "And how can I tell them about it? Oh, the worst part of all is before me now! How can I tell them about it--how can I tell them? If I only knew how they'd take it--could only guess! But I can't--I can't! Aunt Jo will be pleased, I think. She will say it's an intervention of Providence, the turning of the tide, perhaps; but Aunt Jo is old, and can't feel like the young--and then of course she's not a Lefroy. That's the great point--she's not a Lefroy. Perhaps Bob will never speak to me again for letting him say so much to me as he did; perhaps Pauline will disown me too, if she hears Bob is so proud, so resentful, so tetchy about the family prestige! It may be an awful blow to him, poor darling--and he going away, too, full of sorrow and trouble already! Wouldn't it be better if I said nothing at all about it until he had left? But then--then--I've got only until to-morrow, and I've promised an answer. Oh, dear! oh, dear! what am I to do? Why did I go clambering up into that wretched tree, like the shameful tomboy that I am? Why didn't I study quietly at home as the aunt suggested--why, why? Good gracious, the farm already! How that horse flies! Perhaps they'll guess, they'll suspect something, when they see me in his brougham? And Hal is so vulgar, so exasperating when he begins to chaff, and Lottie asks such dreadful, dreadful questions!"

She peers forth anxiously before venturing to descend, and, to her great relief, sees that so far the coast is clear. Neither of the boys is about. Hal is not at his usual noonday pastime of shying stones at the pump, or worrying the donkey in the stubble-field. Bob is not, as is his wont, leaning against the hay-rick, smoking away in sullen gloom his last hours on shore. She hobbles up the little garden path and pushes open the farm-house door.

A dismal wailing sound issues from the stuffy, low-roofed parlor to the right, sacred to the family gentility.

"Oh, dear, dear, the aunt is at it again--worse than ever!" thinks Addie ruefully. "She's an awful spendthrift in tears, poor soul! At the rate she has been weeping for the last three months, she really must cry herself dry soon!"

At that moment the door opens, and the old lady half stumbles out, looking so utterly limp and woe-begone that her niece's heart sinks with the fear of some fresh disaster.

"Oh, what is it, aunt? Has--has anything else happened? The boys?"

"My dear, my dear, we'd best give it up--throw up our hands and have done with the struggle at once; it's of no use, of no use! I can hold out no longer."

"Oh, what has happened? Tell me--tell me!"

"Pauline is home again. She came back half an hour ago."

"Pauline back!" echoes Addie, aghast. "Wouldn't they--wouldn't they keep her?"

"She ran away from them."

After a moment's pause, Addie enters, and sees the young culprit, with crimson cheeks and streaming eyes, standing in the center of the room, the boys glaring at her in furious bitterness.

"Pauline!"

"Yes, that's my name; and here I am," the young lady answers, in a shrill taunting voice. "What have you to say to me, Adelaide? I've just been receiving the greetings of my brothers and aunt, and am ready to receive yours now. Open fire, my dear; I'm prepared for any charge. Don't be afraid."

But Addie says nothing--simply sinks into a chair, feeling that the waters are closing round her on every side.

"Oh, Addie, Addie!" exclaims Pauline, disarmed by her mute dejection, "don't be too hard on me, for I couldn't help it--oh, I couldn't help it! You don't know, you can't conceive what a life I've led since I left you--it was unbearable!"

"You've had good food to eat, a soft bed to lie on, warm walls to shelter you, servants to wait on you," says Robert, with a fierce sneer, "which is more than the rest of us have in prospect--more than I shall enjoy for many a long day, Heaven knows!"

"More than I shall have in the charity-school they're trying to get me into," adds Hal, moodily.

"More than your sister will have as a nursery governess in a grocer's family," says Aunt Jo, with dreary emphasis.

"No, no, it isn't--it isn't!" bursts in Pauline passionately. "I'd rather be cabin-boy on board a coal-barge, I'd rather starve at a charity-school, I'd rather teach all the young grocers in England, I'd rather be--be maid-of-all-work in a--a lunatic asylum than go on living with Aunt Selina. Oh, you don't know what it was--what I had to put up with! The very first evening I arrived she began nag, nag, nagging at me, and she has kept it up ever since; her voice is dinning in my ears even now; it haunted me every night in my sleep. Nothing I did, nothing I said, was right. I was clumsy, awkward, uncouth, boisterous, stupid. I could not enter a room, move a chair, or lift a book without making her shiver and the admiral swear. I knew nothing, I could do nothing, not even read the 'Naval Intelligence' without stumbling at every second word. Five times running," continues the girl, with quivering lip, "she has made me walk across the room, shut and open the door, her own maid watching me, until--until I felt inclined to slam it with a force to bring her warm walls about her wretched head. You don't know what it was!"

Nobody makes reply. She looks round at the sullen averted faces, and then bursts out again--

"I wish I hadn't come back to you--you hard-hearted, unfeeling, cruel--I wish--I wish I had thrown myself into the lake at the back of the park, as I ran out one night to do in my anger and pain. But I didn't, because--because I thought of you all and how sorry you'd be. I wish I had now; it would have been better."

Robert shrugs his shoulders and flings a half-consumed cigarette into the grate.

"Better!" he repeats, with a callous laugh. "I won't gainsay you, Polly. I think it would be better still if we made a family-party of the dive--just plunge in in silence together, we five Lefroys. It could be done poetically enough even in the old mill-pond behind the grove. You girls could twine lilies in your hair, Ophelia-wise, and afterward we would haunt the old place, five cold slimy ghosts, and drive the vitriol-man back to the smoke whence he sprung."

"Bob, Bob, don't say such dreadful things! You frighten the life out of me!" screams Lottie, clinging to her aunt.

"Bob, you're a--a wretch, and I wish I was dead!" cries Pauline, flinging herself across the table in a storm of sobs.

Then Addie rises and speaks for the first time, her arm around her sister's heaving shoulders.

"Don't fret, Polly, don't fret. Never mind them; you'll live at Nutsgrove with me. I'll give you a home, dear."

"Addie!"

"I'm quite serious, Pauline--I mean what I say."

Adelaide's voice is very steady and grave, and there is a tone in it that arrests the stormy attention of the family.

"Mr. Armstrong asked me this afternoon to marry him."

"Eh? What did you say?"

"Kindly repeat that statement, Addie, will you?"

She looks into her brother's startled face, and complies with mechanical firmness, as if she were saying a lesson.

"Mr. Armstrong of Kelvick asked me this afternoon to marry him. I fell from a tree and hurt my foot in the grove, and he found me there, and drove me on to the house, where he asked me to marry him. He said that, if I would, he'd settle Nutsgrove on me altogether, that I might have the girls to live with me always, and that he'd help on you boys as well as he could in the world."

"And what did you say?" comes in trembling eager chorus.

"I said nothing particular--neither 'Yes' nor 'No.' I said I wanted time to consider and consult with you all."

"Thank Heaven, thank Heaven!" Miss Darcy's quivering voice breaks the silence as she half staggers with arms outstretched toward her niece. "And I had begun to doubt--to question Providence! I am rebuked now--I am rebuked now. Addie, my dearest, you have made me a happy old woman to-night!"

"I knew you would be pleased--would wish me to--to accept him," says Addie softly, a little impressed by her heartfelt emotion; "it was the others I felt doubtful about--whose opinion I wanted."

She looks round at the flushed faces of her brothers and sisters; but, of the four, three, though evidently eager to give their opinions, are afraid to open their mouths until "Robert the Magnificent," the recognized head of the family, arbiter of its ethics and manners, has first given tongue.

He walks round slowly from the fireplace, lays his hand heavily upon his sister's shoulder, and then says, in a tone crisp, terse, Napoleonic--

"Marry him! Shut your eyes, my girl, and swallow him as if he were a pill."

"Oh, Robert, I--I couldn't do that! One could swallow anything but a husband. A husband is always there; he can't be swallowed."

"Yes, he can. You don't understand those things, child. After the first gulp, you won't notice him; one husband is much the same as another, after a bit. It's his surroundings, not his personality, that will affect your life and your happiness; and they are good--the best of their kind."

"Oh, Bob, Bob, I never thought you would take it like this!" breaks in Addie, half crying.

"Addie, child, my first thought is your welfare; all selfish emotions, all inward stings must subside before that consideration. You'll not get another chance like this; and we Lefroys must e'en bow our haughty heads and swim with the tide. We're not prepared to pull against it; we should only sink in the struggle. Marry him, Addie, my dear. It will be as I have said, a bit of a wrench at first, but you'll soon get over it, and you will always have your family to fall back upon. We shall be always there, never you fear, to stand by you--to brush him up for you, to--"

"Oh, yes, yes," bursts in an eager impassioned chorus, "we'll stand by you, Addie, darling!"

"We'll brush him up for you!"

"We'll tone him down; you'll see--you'll see!"

"Marry him--marry him, dear! Never mind his vulgarity."

"Never mind the vitriol or the chemical ma--"

"Or the grocer's van, or anything. You'll have us and the old place back again. What does anything else signify? Marry him, marry him, Addie!"

Poor Addie, overwhelmed by the vigor and unanimity of the verdict against her, so different from what she has expected, turns from one to another, and then whimpers pathetically--

"It's all very fine you talking like that; but--but, if you were in my place, how would you feel? I don't believe you'd marry him, Pauline, not for all--"

"Wouldn't I, just?" breaks in Pauline stoutly. "Why, I'd marry him if he were three times as old and as plain and as common as he is! Marry him? Why I'd marry an Irish invincible, I'd marry the hangman himself, in the circumstances! His age is another score in your favor, Addie; he's a man pretty well on in life, I should say."

"Only thirty-seven," she puts in moodily.

"Well, thirty-seven is a good age--nearly double your own, child; and a man like him, who has had such a hard life of it, who has been scraping up sixpences since he was four years old, is sure to break up early--he can't stand the strain much after his prime. The chances are ten to one you'll be a free woman before you're thirty. Think of that, my dear!"

"Oh, yes, think of that, Addie! Think of yourself as a lovely--well, not exactly lovely, but extremely nice young widow, with lots of money, living at Nutsgrove, and we all around you, happy as the day is long! Oh, wouldn't it be too awfully lovely!"

Addie shakes her head, wipes her eyes slowly, and tries to smile. Pauline kisses her wet cheek coaxingly, Robert pats her plump shoulder. There is a moment's soothing silence, broken by Lottie, who has also crept up to her side, asking in an eager whisper--

"Addie, tell us what he said--what he did. Is he awfully in love, like Guy was in the 'Heir of Redcliffe,' you know? Did he try to--"

"Lottie, Lottie," Addie answers angrily, with flaming cheeks, "what silly, what absurd questions you do ask! I never met a child like you."

"I don't see how I am so idiotic," she rejoins aggrievedly. "Why should Mr. Armstrong want to marry you unless he were in love with you, I'd like to know?"

"Why?" repeats Robert loftily. "I think the reason ought to be patent even to your immature comprehension, Lottie."

Addie looks at him with an expression of sudden interest.

"Bob, do you know I'm afraid I'm quite as dull as Lottie--for--for--I don't see his reason for wishing to marry me. What is it?"

"He is marrying you for your position, of course. What other reason could he have?"

"My position? Oh!"

"Yes, your position. He has money, he has lands, he wishes to found a family and sink the manufacturer in the squire; therefore, like all of his class, he looks about him for a wife who will bring breeding, ancestry, position as a dowry, the only means by which he can creep into county society. His eye naturally falls on you, the eldest daughter of the House of Lefroy; he seeks to reinstate you as mistress of your forefathers' acres. And what follows this move? Why, without an effort on his part, without one introductory cringe, the gates of county society are swung open to him through you, and his end effected. By Jove, now that I come to think of it, it's a jolly smart move on his part! I didn't give him credit for such clear-sightedness; he's a sharp fellow, and no mistake. Good thing for you, Addie--you'll have me at hand to look after your settlements. I'll keep a sharp eye on him!"

"So that is his reason, his motive!" thinks Addie, with contemptuous bitterness. "Of course it is a much more likely solution than--than that airy nonsense about the cup of tea. I wonder how a man, a big middle-aged man like him can be so full of littleness, of meanness, and--and--hypocrisy!"

"Yes," resumes Bob, with cynical fluency, "that is his little game; and his next move will be to gently push the family cognomen from behind the scenes and bring our identity to the fore. He'll begin after a year or two by tacking 'Lefroy' on to 'Armstrong;' you'll be 'Mrs. Lefroy Armstrong of Nutsgrove,' my dear; then a hyphen will be smuggled in; after that you'll become 'Mrs. Armstrong-Lefroy of Nutsgrove;' and, by Jove, before your son and heir reaches maturity probably, he'll be as clean a Lefroy, at least in name, as would have been his poor disinherited uncle but for the irony of fate. You must call him 'Robert,' after me, Addie."

But this generous speech has not the soothing effect intended, for Addie, with red, angry face, starts to her feet and shakes off her clinging family passionately.

"How do you know I shall ever marry him at all? I never said I would; and I'm sure I won't now--I'm sure I won't. I might have done so before--before, when I didn't understand; but, now that you have shown me what he is, I won't be the staff to prop his mean snobbishness. Let him get pedigree and breeding somewhere else; he shall not buy them from me, big as his price is!"

Dismay appalls the family at this unexpected turn of affairs; the unfortunate orator and elucidator stands staring with open mouth, not able to produce a protesting sound. Aunt Jo it is who briskly and successfully comes to the rescue. She has taken no part in the discussion, but has sat at the window apart in a soothing daydream, her heart singing a canticle of joy that the days of her bondage are at last closing in--sat, living through in happy prospective the coming year, established once more in her neat, comfortable little house, where the day worked itself out from sunrise to sunset with the soothing regularity of clock-work, where the voice of insulting tradesmen never penetrated, where all was peace, neatness, comfortable economy, and respectability.

"Robert, Pauline, Henry," she cries sharply, roused by Addie's disastrous wrath, "what are you tormenting the poor child about, talking of things you do not in the least understand? Don't you see that she is perfectly worn out with exhaustion and excitement and the pain of her foot. Come to bed, child, come to bed; you're not in a state to be up. I'll make you a nice hot drink that will send you to sleep at once. Here's your stick. What a grand one it is! Where did you get it? From Mr. Armstrong? Well, it's like himself, strong, reliable, and stout-limbed."

Chapter VII.

"How does your ankle feel this morning?"

"Better--much better, thank you. In a day or two it will be quite strong again."

Miss Lefroy is seated in a moldy old summer-house at a corner of the farm-house garden, shelling a dish of peas, little Emma Higgins, her landlady's youngest but two, helping her with zealous dirty fingers. Unable any longer to bear the horsehair hardness of the parlor sofa and the stuffiness of the house, she has escaped hither, heedless of her aunt's protestations.

Mr. Armstrong stands leaning against the rotting woodwork, supporting a starved clematis-stalk, making the whole building creak and quiver with the weight of his brawny shoulders.

"Mr. Armstrong, spare us!" laughs Addie nervously. "We're two such miserable little specimens of the Philistine, Emmy and I--we're scarcely worth destruction."

"I don't know about that. If measles or croup had carried off Delilah when she was as young and harmless-looking as you, Miss Lefroy, why, Samson might have died in his bed. May I enter? There are no scissors on the premises?"

"No; your beard is quite safe; you may enter if you like."

"I went to the farm first, and your aunt directed me here," he says, taking a seat beside her on the stone slab.

"I got tired of the house--it was so close. The smell of the laborers' dinner toward midday is very strong everywhere; it flavors even the sweetbrier outside the parlor window; so I came here."

"Yes, it was a good move."

A silence follows; Addie wildly racks her brain for a sensible remark, but finds not one. He, resting his arm on the table, for some moments contentedly watches the movement of her slim brown fingers.

"Miss Lefroy, you are throwing the pods into the dish and the peas on the ground. Is that--"

"So I am, so I am!" she answers petulantly. "But I can't do anything when I'm--I'm watched like--that. Mr. Armstrong"--with sudden desperate bluntness--"you have come for your answer, have you not? Well, I have consulted them all, and they think it ought to be 'Yes.'"

"Then you will marry me, Miss Lefroy?"

"I suppose so."

He takes her unresisting hand and holds it in a strong cool clasp, while every nerve in her body tingles with the impulse to snatch it rudely from him; but she resists it, and merely says, panting a little--

"I must go in now with the peas."

"Oh, not yet! There is time enough surely!"

"No; they are wanted for early dinner, and take a great deal of boiling."

"Where's little Emmy? Gone off! Then I will take them in myself and bring you out some cushions and footstools; your ankle is not at all properly supported. I wonder your brothers or sisters did not look after you better!"

As soon as he disappears Addie hobbles out eagerly, and looks around. Spying Lottie prowling among the gooseberry bushes she hails her imperatively.

"Lottie, come here at once! Where are the others?"

"Mooning about. Auntie gave orders that no one, on any account, was to disturb you and Mr. Armstrong in the summer-house. She said I was not even to peep through the cabbage-plot at the back. I wonder why? Is it because he may want to kiss you?"

"Go and tell them all, all--to come to the arbor at once, and to stay with me the whole time that Mr. Armstrong is here; do you hear? Tell them--tell aunt, too--that, if they don't, I'll send him about his business as sure as my name's Addie Lefroy! Go quickly, miss; I'm in earnest. Let them come back before him now, or else--"

Lottie obeys, duly impressed by her sister's determined manner, and, when the happy suitor returns, laden with footstools and cushions, prepared for a long morning's _tête-à-tête_ with his love, he finds the rickety bower in possession of the whole family, who linger by him all the morning, favoring him with their views, and opinions of things in general, favoring him also with diffuse reminiscences of personal biography, and systematically intercepting the faintest exchange of word, or even look, with his sweet-voiced betrothed.

He bears it with tolerable patience for an hour or so, and then relapses into moody taciturnity, thus leaving the burden of entertainment on the able shoulders of "Robert the Magnificent," who fancies that the brilliancy and aristocratic flavor of his conversation are creating a most favorable, in fact, overpowering effect on his plebeian guest, little deeming, honest lad, that the said guest at the time is inwardly voting his future brother-in-law one of the most insufferably flippant young prigs and bores it has ever been his misfortune to meet. At last, unable to stand it any more he takes an irritated turn round the garden, where he is immediately joined by the two younger Lefroys.

"Are you fond of gooseberries, Mr. Armstrong?" begins Lottie, whose voice has not had fair play in the arbor. "Would you like me to pick you some?--though they are wretched in this garden--little sour hard balls scarcely worth picking."

"They're splendid up at Nutsgrove," he answers eagerly, struck with a happy thought--"splendid, large, soft, sweet, and yellow. Suppose you all trot up there now--Robert, Pauline, Hal, and you, and have a good morning's feed--eh?"

"Oh, it would be delicious! You'd come with us, too, wouldn't you?"

"Well--ah, no; I would remain with your sister and aunt--keep them company until you come back."

"Would you? Oh, dear, then we can't go."

"Why not, pray?"

"Because Addie made us all promise faithfully, while you were away with the peas, that we would remain and help her to entertain you whenever you came, and never to leave her. She has no conversational powers, she says; but Rob and Polly have a lot--haven't they? And they have promised, so have Hal and I too. It's an awful pity, isn't, it? I--I wish you'd come with us; I know Addie wouldn't mind a bit. She's very hot-tempered, you know--worse than any of us--but awfully good-natured, and not a scrap huffy, like Bob and Poll."

Armstrong takes no notice of the suggestion, but walks straight back to the arbor and bids the attached family farewell.

They stand in a group watching his tall massive figure stalking down the path.

"How big he looks in this bit of a garden--regularly dwarfs the old shrubs into plants!"

"Yes, he's what Sally would call a fine figure of a man. Well, Addie, you'll have quantity, if you don't have qua--"

"I say, Addie," bursts in Bob, excitedly, "did you ask him about my ship?"

"No, Robert, of course not."

"You didn't? And yet you know I have to sail on Saturday, and leave here to-morrow afternoon. Quick, quick; run and ask him about it now!"

"What am I to ask him?"

"What? Why, hang it, there's a question! Ask him if I may write and throw up the whole thing, of course."

"Oh, Bob, Bob," cries the poor little maid, coloring and shrinking. "I--I couldn't ask him yet; I couldn't begin so soon--the very first day!"

"What?" cries Bob, with angry bitterness. "Then you'll actually let me sail in the beastly rotten old tub to-morrow, and live the life of a water-rat for the next six months--perhaps never see me again--rather than say one word that would save me? Oh, I never heard of such confounded selfishness in all my life! I never imagined that any one calling herself a sister could behave so!"

"Oh, Addie, Addie, don't be so hard, so selfish!"

"Don't send away poor Bob like that. Go after him--go after him, quick!"

"But my foot--my foot--I can scarcely walk! I should never catch him now," she pleads.

"Yes, you could--here's your stick; he has stopped to light his cigar at the gate. Go!"

Thus urged, she limps painfully after him, calling his name, but he does not hear her, and the distance between them increases. She is about to give up the pursuit in despair, when he stops a second time to caress a tawny mongrel that has wriggled itself fawningly between his legs; then her voice is borne to him on the light summer breeze. He turns and advances quickly to meet her, with a glad smile and outstretched hands.

"Have you come to say good-by to me, Addie?"

"Yes--no--yes," she answers breathlessly, unconsciously clinging to him to steady her shaking knees. "It's--it's--about Robert. Need he--must he join his ship on Saturday?"

He looks thoroughly bewildered.

"Need he join what ship--where? I don't understand."

"Oh, don't you remember? I told you about it yesterday--such a dreadful service--no salary--articles for three years--cargo of salt to China!"

"Yes, yes, to be sure; I remember. He does not care for his appointment. Tell him he may write to cancel it at once; I'll make it right at head-quarters for him; and then we must find him a more suitable berth on shore."

"Oh, thank you, thank you! How very kind you are!"

She is about to move away; but he lays his hand on her shoulder.

"Wait a moment; you're not half rested. You--you will try to like me a little, won't you, Addie?"

"Oh, yes!" she answers fervently, her shining eyes looking straight into his. "I will begin at once, and try as hard as ever I can to like you, Mr. Armstrong; you are so very kind!"

With a laugh that is half a sigh his hands drop and he turns away.

"I'm a fool, a fool--a blind, besotted fool!" he says to himself a little later. "I wish I could throw it all up; I wish I had the strength of mind. It won't do--it won't do! I shall live to reap in remorse and sorrow what I've sown in doubt and weakness--something tells me I shall. Well, well, so be it, so be it! I must go through with it now to the end, come what may."

* * * * *

Addie somewhat sulkily imparts the good news to her family, and then goes up to her room, locks the door, and lifts from the bottom of her trunk her cracked old papier-mâché desk, from which she takes a photograph wrapped in tissue paper, with the remains of a gloire de Dijon rose that was nipped from the parent-stem one soft June night three years before and fastened near her throat by warm boyish fingers--cousinly, not brotherly fingers. She scatters its loose stained petals out of the window, and then takes a long look at the picture of her soldier-cousin, Edward Lefroy, who spent a month at Nutsgrove the last time the colonel visited his home.

It is a bright laughing young face, fair and unbearded, as different in form, color, and expression from the face of her present lover as it possibly can be. The difference seems to strike the girl with painful reality, for tears fall from her downcast eye and drop upon the smiling features.

"Oh, Ted, Ted, did you mean anything on that day when you were rushing away? It was all so quick, so hurried, when the order came for you to rejoin, that I had not time to think, to understand. Did you mean anything in that hot farewell whisper, 'Good-by, good-by, little woman; we're as poor as a pair of church-mice now, but, should I come back for you one day with a lac of rupees, you'll be ready for me, won't you, Addie darling?' That was three years ago, Ted, three years ago--and never a word from you since! I'm a goose to think of you now--I know I am; something tells me you've whispered the same to half a score of girls since; but, Teddy, if you did mean anything, come back for me now, before it's too late, before it's too late!"

"Addie, Addie, dinner is up, and there's a batter-pudding! Come down quick!"

"Coming!" she shouts; and then, carefully wiping the precious cardboard, she opens the well-thumbed family album. "I needn't destroy you, poor Ted; but you must leave my old desk now, and spend the rest of your days with the family"--placing him opposite to a simpering crinolined relative leaning against a pillar, with a basket of flowers in her hand. "Good-by, good-by, dear boy; I've watered your grave for the last time! And now for batter-pudding and a breaking heart!" she adds, with a light, half-contemptuous, half-wistful laugh, as she runs down-stairs.

* * * * *

The next morning, when Miss Lefroy appears at breakfast, she finds the parlor heavy with the breath of roses; eagerly she inhales their delightful fragrance.

"Aren't they lovely?" cries Lottie. "Did you ever see such a basketful? They are all for you, Addie, with 'T. A.'s compliments.' And look at the dishes of cherries and strawberries! Bob has been at them already--has polished off a couple of pounds. If you don't be quick, you'll not have any left. Fall to, Addie, fall to!"

But Addie turns away her head, and declares that she does not care for fruit so early in the day; and presently she even finds fault with the flowers--they are too much for the small close room--they give her a headache. She goes forth to the clover field opening out from the yard, and stretches herself at full length on the fresh sward to while away the long morning hours, her idle mind no longer troubled by the irregularities of French grammar, or the habits and manners of ancient Babylonia.

* * * * *

"Addie, Mr. Armstrong is in the parlor with Aunt Jo. Will you go in to him, or are we to bring him out here?"

"I'll go in to him; you're all there, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes. Don't you fear; we're all there, and we mean to stop."

"All right then; I'll follow you in presently," says Addie; and then, after a minute or two, she moves toward the house, muttering to herself as she does so, "'Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, policeman, plowboy, gentleman--' Oh, you wretches, you mocking little wretches, you shameful little fibbers, can you not tell me the truth even now? I'm to marry a gentleman still, am I? Oh, Ted, Ted, does it mean that you are coming across the sea to me--now--now, at the eleventh hour? I wish I knew!"

* * * * *

Mr. Armstrong does not stay long this afternoon, having business of importance at Kelvick. He waits to drink a cup of tea poured out by his love's nimble hands; and so, during a lucky moment, while the family are engaged in a light skirmish, he manages to slip unperceived a hoop of diamonds on her unwilling finger, and then he takes his leave.

After this they are not troubled very much with his society. About two or three times a week he looks in for half an hour to enjoy a peep at his future wife, whom he always finds enshrined in a circle of her devoted family, a circle which, after the first unsuccessful attempt, he does not try to rout. Miss Darcy is the only member with whom he is able to enjoy the favor of an uninterrupted _tête-à-tête_; and one morning toward the end of June, after being closeted with her for a couple of hours, it is decided to their mutual satisfaction that the sooner Miss Lefroy becomes Mrs. Armstrong the better for herself and all those interested in her.

This conclusion is delicately conveyed to the young person, who has not a tangible objection to raise, not a single plea to urge for delay, particularly as Aunt Jo skillfully cuts the ground from under her feet by complaints of her failing health and her longing for the restoring air of Leamington, which would be sure to set her up again at once, she feels.

Addie's marriage is settled to take place during the second week in August, a little over two months from the day of her betrothal; and the reign of bustle begins by an immediate migration from the undignified shelter of Sallymount Farm to Laburnum Lodge, just outside Nutsford, the residence of Mrs. Doctor Macartney, who has gone to the seaside for a couple of months with her family, and who was quite ready, for a smart pecuniary consideration, to let her neatly appointed house even to the reckless Lefroys for the time being.

Addie hotly opposed the change at first, but, as usual, was overruled by the family, backed by Aunt Jo.

"We can't afford it--you know we can't!" she pleaded earnestly. "You told me not a fortnight ago that you had only seven pounds ten to finish the quarter; therefore how can we afford to take Laburnum Lodge, Aunt Jo?"

"We must manage it somehow, child," Miss Darcy answered, with a slight blush. "Don't trouble your head about it any more, for the thing must be done. It would be too unseemly to have you married from Steve Higgins's farm, your sisters and brothers quite agree with me; and--and--Mr. Armstrong wishes it besides--so there is nothing more to be said about it."

It was the same with her _trousseau_. In vain she protested, objected, revolted, against each article of attire added daily to her miserable wardrobe--against dresses, bonnets, mantles, against shoes, gloves, umbrellas, underclothes; it was all of no use. Aunt Jo and Pauline went on ordering and suggesting just as if she had not spoken. It seemed to the pained, bewildered girl that she was in the hands of every tradesman and tradeswoman in the town of Kelvick, and, after a couple of hours' shamefaced agony, she used to escape from Madame Armine's smooth wily fingers and approving exclamations in a state of impatient revolt that strangely puzzled that experienced lady. "Oh, it is unbearable," she would cry, "to be lodged, fed, clothed by him thus--unbearable to think that every pound of meat that comes to the table is paid for by him, as well as the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the gloves I shall wear standing beside him at the altar! It is unbearable to think he is paying for me before I am purchased! How can they stand it, all of them? How can Robert, whom I thought so haughty, so proud, so sensitive, take it as he does? They must know--of course they must know--and yet don't seem to mind."

At other times a mad impulse would urge her to take up the finery that was fast filling the house, and fling it at Mr. Armstrong's feet, refusing to be further suffocated by his benefits; but luckily the opportunity failed for the uncomfortable feat, as Armstrong was called away on business of importance to the North of England just a fortnight before his wedding-day, and did not reappear at Laburnum Lodge until all her boxes were safely corded and standing in a row in the hall, labeled in Robert's round schoolboy hand--"Mrs. Armstrong, Charing Cross, London."

Chapter VIII.

It is just a week before the wedding-morning. Aunt Jo and Pauline are discussing the bill of fare for the breakfast; Addie is lying on a sofa by the open window, languidly reading the newspaper.

"You have quite made up your mind then, Addie?" asks the elder lady. "You won't have any one at the ceremony but just our immediate circle--not even your Aunt and Uncle Beecher?"

"Quite!" answers Addie sharply. "I'll have no one but you and the boys, Polly and Lottie--not another soul. I'll be married in my traveling-dress, not in the white _broché_ at all; and no one is to be let into the church. The doors are to be locked when we have entered."

"It will be a Quakerish kind of festival, certainly," says Pauline regretfully. "If ever I get married, I'll make a little more noise than that. And I suppose Mr. Armstrong will have none of his friends or relatives either?"

"No."

"Heigh-ho! I think you might have let some one in, just to temper the chill of the first family breaking-up--Teddy Lefroy, for instance. How he'd stir us up! And I'm sure he'd come, if you'd ask him, Addie."

The newspaper drops from her hands; she turns quickly, with flushed cheeks.

"Teddy Lefroy? What do you mean, Polly? How could I ask him? He's in India."

"No, he isn't; he came home about a month ago for a year at the depot. I heard it when I was at Aunt Selina's, but forgot to tell you until now."

"Where is he--in England?"

"No, somewhere in Ireland, near Kilkenny. I forget the name of the place."

"I wonder," says Addie, after a short pause, "if he has heard of my intended marriage?"

"Can't say, I'm sure," answers Pauline, carelessly. "Oh, yes, though, I should think the chances are that he has, for there was a pretty brisk correspondence going on between him and the admiral while I was at Greystones! You know he's the old gentleman's godson; and I suspect Master Teddy had been dipping pretty freely and asking assistance, to judge by the expression of the godpapa's benign countenance while reading his letters. Poor Teddy, he's a regular Lefroy in that way; his purse was a perfect sieve. Do you remember, Addie, the presents he used to bring us from Kelvick--the blue silk handkerchief he brought you, which Hal upset the pot of blackberry jam over? How mad you were, to be sure! How you did pinch and cuff the poor child until the tears ran down his face! It seems but yesterday. Dear Ted, how bright and bonny he was, to be sure! I wish he'd come and see us while you are away, Addie; and I wish you were not going in for such a tremendous honeymoon--a whole month! How shall we get on without you, love? Oh, dear, I hope you'll miss us awfully! I hope Mr. Armstrong will get tired of you, and send you home to us before the time is half gone."

Every morning and evening for the rest of that eventful week Addie, with straining eyes and quickly-beating heart, watches the postman; but he never brings her what she wants, never brings her a line of congratulation, renunciation, reproach, or regret from the neighborhood of Kilkenny.

Her wedding-morning comes cloudless and sunny. She is married uneventfully, with the quivering rays from the stained-glass windows erected to the memory of René, Comte le Froi, and his wife Clothilde, A.D. 1562, bathing her pale emotionless face in purpling golden light. And then she signs her maiden name--Adelaide Josephine Lefroy--for the last time on earth.

The breakfast is tearless, but a little strained, remarkable only for an able and grandiloquent speech from Robert, which is however somewhat marred at the close by the arrival of a costume from Madame Armine at the eleventh hour, which entails the reopening of trunks and much excitement and fuss.

Miss Darcy follows the bride up to her room, where she finds her gazing blankly out of the window alone. She steals behind her and puts her arms round her neck.

"Heaven bless you, my child, and give you every joy, every happiness in the new life that lies before you!"

"Thank you, auntie darling; thank you also for your goodness to me, and for all you have ever done and suffered for me and mine. I think I never felt it, never understood it, until now," she adds, breaking down a little at last. "But I'll never forget--never! You have been the dearest, the truest friend we have ever had, and one day you will meet with your reward."

"Not truer, my dear," Miss Darcy answers gravely, "than the friend, generous, strong, and unselfish, into whose hands Heaven put you but a few hours ago. You have a good husband, Addie, a truly good husband, my dear--one whom you can respect, honor, and obey all the days of your life. I am leaving you in his hands without a shadow of doubt, a twinge of apprehension. He may not have the outward polish, the surface-attraction of those born in the purple; but he is nevertheless a gentleman at heart--a gentleman in the true sense of the word, liberal, large-minded, incapable of a mean or ignoble act or thought. You feel that you believe me, don't you, dear, don't you?" she repeats, peering anxiously into the girl's wistful weary face.

"Yes--oh, yes!" Addie answers in a whisper. "I think I do, auntie, I think I do."

For during the last month the theory of Mr. Armstrong's motive in matrimony so unluckily broached by the keen-sighted Robert, and which had awakened her active contempt, daily lost hold of her mind. She had but little opportunity of studying his character, or even of ascertaining the bent of his sympathies and tastes: nevertheless she was forced to acknowledge to herself that, low-born as he undoubtedly was, Armstrong of Kelvick was not a snob, that, though he respected rank and its many attributes of power, he did not love a lord with the servile fondness of the British tradesman, and that the end and aim of his existence were not to have the gates of county society flung open to him--nor was that the motive which had urged him to marry her.

"I could not tell you before, dear," resumes Aunt Jo softly, drawing her niece to a chair beside her--"but now that you are a wife it is different--what your husband has done for you and yours. I can not even now