The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dulcie Carlyon, Volume 1, by James Grant

'I shall need all my self-possession to get over the esclandre this affair may cause,' exclaimed the lady, fanning herself violently.

'A marriage between you and a penniless girl in her rank of life is not to be thought of, Lennard.'

'Her father's rank was superior to that of the first of our family, when life began with him.'

The excited speakers were a Peer, Cosmo, Lord Fettercairn, his wife, the Lady thereof, and their youngest son, Lennard Melfort, a captain of the line, home on leave from India, who had been somewhat timidly venturing to break—knowing the inordinate family vanity of his parents—we say to break the news of his love for a girl possessed of more beauty than this world's goods; and, in his excitement and indignation, his lordship's usual easy, indolent, and drawling way was forgotten now when addressing his son.

Cosmo, Lord Fettercairn of that Ilk (and Strathfinella in the Mearns) was by nature a proud, cold, selfish, and calculating man, whose chief passion in life was a combined spirit of enormous vanity and acquisitiveness, which he inherited from his predecessors, whom he resembled in political caution and selfishness, and also in personal appearance, to judge from the portraits of three generations, by Sir John de Medina, Aikman, and Raeburn, adorning the walls of the stately room in the house of Craigengowan, where this rather stormy interview took place.

Tall and thin in figure, with flat square shoulders and sandy-coloured hair, cold grey eyes, and irregular features, he was altogether a contrast to his son Lennard, who inherited his slightly aquiline nose and perfect face from his mother, but his firm dark eyes and rich brown hair from a previous generation; and these, together with an olive complexion, rendered more dusky by five years' exposure to an Indian sun, made his aspect a very striking one.

My Lady Fettercairn's birth and breeding were, as Sir Bernard Burke had recorded, irreproachable, and she certainly seemed a grande dame to the tips of her long slender fingers. She was about forty-five years of age, but looked ten younger. The upper part of her aristocratic face was strikingly handsome; but the lower, with its proud and firm lips, was less pleasant to look at. Her complexion was almost colourless, her hair of the lightest brown, like her eyebrows and lashes; while her eyes were clear and blue as an Alpine sky, and, as Lennard often thought with a sigh, they seemed quite as—cold.

Her manner was always calm, assured, and self-possessed. She would smile, but that smile never degenerated into honest laughter, while her pale and impressive face was without a line—especially on her forehead—that seemed to indicate either thought or reflection, and certainly she had never known care or sorrow or even annoyance until now.

'She is beautiful, mother,' urged the young man, breaking an ominous silence, with reference to the object of his love.

'Perhaps; but she is not one of us,' exclaimed Lady Fettercairn, cresting up her handsome head haughtily, and a whole volume of intense pride and hauteur was centred in the last word she spoke.

'Who is this Flora MacIan, as she calls herself?' asked his father in a similar tone; 'but I need not ask. You have already told us she is the governess in a house you have been recently visiting—that of Lady Drumshoddy—a governess, with all her beauty, poor and obscure.'

'Not so obscure,' said Lennard, a wave of red passing under the tan of his olive cheek; 'her father was a gallant old officer of the Ross-shire Buffs, who earned his V.C. at the battle of Khooshab, in Persia, and her only brother and support fell when leading on his Grenadiers at the storming of Lucknow. The old captain was, as his name imports, a cadet of the Macdonalds of Glencoe.'

'With a pedigree of his family, no doubt, from the grounding of the Ark to the battle of Culloden,' sneered his father.

'Then his family would end soon after ours began,' retorted the son, becoming greatly ruffled now. 'You know, father, we can't count much beyond three generations ourselves.'

'We always suspected you of having some secret, Lennard,' said his mother severely.

'Ah, mother, unfortunately, as some one says, a secret is like a hole in your coat—the more you try to hide it, the more it is seen.'

'An aphorism, and consequently vulgar; does she teach you this style of thing?' asked the haughty lady, while Lennard reddened again with annoyance, and gave his dark moustache a vicious twist, but sighed and strove to keep his temper.

'I have found and felt it very bitter, father, to live under false colours,' said he gently and appealingly, 'and to keep that a secret from you both, which should be no secret at all.'

'We would rather not have heard this secret,' replied Lord Fettercairn sternly, while tugging at his sandy-coloured mutton-chop whiskers.

'Then would you have preferred that I should be deceitful to you, and false to the dear girl who loves and trusts me?'

'Married!' exclaimed his father and mother with one accord, as they started from their chairs together, and another ominous silence of a minute ensued.

'My poor, lost boy—the prey of an artful minx!' said Lady Fettercairn, looking as if she would like to weep; but tears were rather strangers to her cold blue eyes.

'Mother, dear mother, if you only knew her, you would not talk thus of Flora,' urged Lennard almost piteously. 'If we had it in our power to give love and to withhold it, easy indeed would our progress be through life.'

'Save to the two most interested, who are judges of it,' said Lennard. 'Surely you loved my father, and he you.'

'Our case was very different,' replied Lady Fettercairn, in her anger actually forgetting herself so far as to bite feathers off her fan with her firm white teeth.

'I little thought that you, who loved me so, would prove all but one of the mothers of Society.'

'That "love seems such a poor and contemptible thing in their eyes in comparison with settlements. Perhaps they forget their own youth; one does, they say, when he outlives romance. And I suppose bread and butter is better than poetry any day."'

'We had other and brilliant views for you,' said his mother in a tone of intense mortification, 'but now——'

'Leave us and begone, and let us look upon your face no more,' interrupted his father in a voice of indescribable sternness, almost hoarse with passion, as he pointed to the door.

'Mother!' said Lennard appealingly, 'oh, mother!' But she averted her face, cold as a woman of ice, and said, 'Go!'

'So be it,' replied Lennard, gravely and sadly, as he drew himself up to the full height of his five feet ten inches, and a handsome and comely fellow he looked as he turned away and left the room.

'Thank God, his elder brother, Cosmo, is yet left to us!' exclaimed Lady Fettercairn earnestly.

It was the last time in this life he ever heard his mother's voice, and he quitted the house. On the terrace without, carefully he knocked the ashes out of his cherished briar-root, put it with equal care into its velvet-lined case, put the case into his pocket, and walked slowly off with a grim and resolute expression in his fine young face, upon which from that day forth his father and mother never looked again.

Then he was thinking chiefly of the sweet face of the young girl who had united her fortunes with his, and who was anxiously awaiting the result of the interview we have described.

Sorrow, mortification, and no small indignation were in the heart of Lennard Melfort at the result of the late interview.

'I have been rash,' he thought, 'in marrying poor Flora without their permission, but that they would never have accorded, even had they seen her; and none fairer or more beautiful ever came as a bride to Craigengowan.'

Pausing, he gave a long and farewell look at the house so named—the home of his boyhood.

It stands at some distance from the Valley of the Dee (which forms the natural communication between the central Highlands and the fertile Lowlands) in the Hollow or Howe of the Mearns. Situated amid luxuriant woods, glimpses of Craigengowan obtained from the highway only excite curiosity without gratifying it, but a nearer approach reveals its picturesque architectural features.

These are the elements common to most northern mansions that are built in the old Scottish style—a multitude of conical turrets, steep crowstepped gables and dormer gablets, encrusted with the monograms and armorial bearings of the race who were its lords when the family of Fettercairn were hewers of wood and drawers of water.

The turrets rise into kindred forms in the towers and gables, and are the gradual accumulation of additions made at various times on the original old square tower, rather than a part of the original design, but the effect of the whole is extremely rich and picturesque.

In the old Scottish garden was an ancient sun and moon dial, mossy and grey, by which many a lover had reckoned the time in the days of other years.

Of old, Craigengowan belonged to an exiled and attainted Jacobite family, from whom it passed readily enough into the hands of the second Lord Fettercairn, a greedy and unscrupulous Commissioner on the forfeited estates of the unfortunate loyalists. It had now many modern comforts and appliances; the entrance-hall was a marble-paved apartment, off which the principal sitting-rooms opened, and now a handsome staircase led to the upper chambers, whilom the abode of barons who ate the beef and mutton their neighbours fed in the valley of the Dee.

The grounds were extensive and beautiful, and Lord Fettercairn's flower gardens and conservatories were renowned throughout Angus and the Mearns.

To the bitter storm that existed in his own breast, and that which he had left in those of his parents, how peaceful by contrast looked the old house and the summer scenery to Lennard—the place on which he probably would never gaze again.

There was a breeze that rustled the green leaves in the thickets, but no wind. Beautiful and soft white clouds floated lazily in the deep blue sky, and a recent shower had freshened up every tree, meadow, and hedgerow. The full-eared wheat grew red or golden by the banks of the Bervie, and the voice of the cushat dove came from the autumn woods from time to time as with a sigh Lennard Melfort turned his back on Craigengowan for ever, cursing, as he went, the pride of his family, for, though not an old one, by title or territory, they were as proud as they were unscrupulous in politics.

The first prominent member of the family, Lennard Melfort, had been a Commissioner for the Mearns in the Scottish Parliament, and for political services had been raised to the peerage by Queen Anne as Lord Fettercairn and Strathfinella, and was famous for nothing but selling his Union vote for the same sum as my Lord Abercairnie, £500, and for having afterwards 'a rug at the compensation,' as the English equivalent money was called. After the battle of Sheriffmuir saw half the old peerages of Scotland attainted, he obtained Craigengowan, and was one 'who,' as the minister of Inverbervie said, 'wad sell his soul to the deil for a crackit saxpence.'

With the ex-Commissioner the talent—such as it was—of the race ended, and for three generations the Lords of Fettercairn had been neither better nor worse than peers of Scotland generally; that is, they were totally oblivious of the political interests of that country, and of everything but their own self-aggrandisement by marriage or otherwise.

Lennard Melfort seemed the first of the family that proved untrue to its old instincts.

'And I had made up my mind that he should marry Lady Drumshoddy's daughter—she has a splendid fortune!' wailed Lady Fettercairn.

'Married my governess—the girl MacIan!' snorted my Lady Drumshoddy when she heard of the dreadful mésalliance. 'Why marry the creature? He might love her, of course—all men are alike weak—but to marry her—oh, no!'

And my Lady Drumshoddy was a very moral woman according to her standard, and carried her head very high.

When tidings were bruited abroad of what happened, and the split in the family circle at Craigengowan, there were equal sorrow and indignation expressed in the servants' hall, the gamekeepers' lodges, and the home farm, for joyous and boyish Captain Melfort was a favourite with all on the Fettercairn estates; and Mrs. Prim, his mother's maid, actually shed many tears over the untoward fate he had brought upon himself.

CHAPTER II.

WEDDED.

'And you will love me still, Flora, in spite of this bitter affront to which you are subjected for my sake?' said Lennard.

'Yes,' said the girl passionately, 'I love you, Lennard—love you so much,' she added, while her soft voice broke and her blossom-like lips quivered, 'that were I to lose you I would die!'

'My darling, you cannot lose me now,' he responded, while tenderly caressing her.

'Yes—or rash. I have heard that it is not lucky for people to love each other so much as we do.'

'I don't think so,' said she simply and sweetly, as he laid her cheek on his breast with her upturned eyes gazing into his.

The girl was slight and slender, yet perfect was every curve of her shapely figure, which was destitute of any straight line; even her nose was, in the slightest degree, aquiline. Her beautifully arched mouth, the scarlet line of her upper lip, and the full round of the nether one were parted in a tender smile, just enough to show her teeth, defied all criticism; her complexion was pure and soft, and her eyes were of the most liquid hazel, with almost black lashes. Her hair was of the same tint, and Flora seemed a lady to perfection, especially by the whiteness and delicacy of her beautifully shaped little hands.

When she walked she did so gracefully, as all Highland women do, and like them held her head poised on her slender neck so airily and prettily that her nurse, Madelon, called her 'the swan.'

'How I trembled, Lennard,' said she, after a pause, 'as I thought of the mauvais quart d'heure you were undergoing at Craigengowan.'

'And ever and anon I felt that strange chill, or shudder, which Nurse Madelon says people feel when some one crosses the place where their grave is to be. How can your parents be so cruel to you?'

'Ah, that is different,' she replied, with her eyes full of unshed tears, and in a pained voice. 'Doubtless they consider me a very designing girl; but in spite of that, you will always care for me as much as you do now?'

'Why such fears? Ever and always—ever and always, my darling,' said Lennard Melfort, stopping her questioning lips most effectually for a time.

'Oh, if you should ever come to regret, and with regret to love me less!' said she, in a low voice, with her eyes for a moment fixed on vacancy.

Then they sat long silent, hand locked in hand, while the gloaming deepened round them, for words seem poor and feeble when the heart is very full.

'How long will they continue to despise me?' said Flora suddenly, while across her soft cheeks there rushed the hot blood of a long and gallant line of Celtic ancestors.

The girl looked passionately into the face of her lover-husband—the husband of a month; and never did her bright hazel eyes seem more tender and soft than now, with all the fire of love and pride sparkling in their depths, for her Highland spirit and nature revolted at the affront to which she was subjected.

The bearing of Lennard Melfort and the poise of his close-shorn head told that he was a soldier, and a well-drilled one; and the style of his light grey suit showed how thoroughly he was a gentleman; and to Flora's loving and partial eye he was every-way a model man.

They had been married just a month, we have said, a month that very day, and Lennard had brought his bride to the little burgh town, within a short distance of Craigengowan, and left her in their apartments while he sought with his father and mother the bootless interview just narrated.

For three days before he had the courage to bring it about, they had spent the time together, full of hopeful thoughts, strolling along the banks of the pretty Bervie, from the blue current of which ever and anon the bull-trout and the salmon rise to the flies; or in the deep and leafy recourses of the adjacent woods, and climbing the rugged coast, against which the waves of the German Sea were rolling in golden foam; or ascending Craig David, so called from David II. of Scotland—a landmark from the sea for fifteen leagues—for both had a true and warm appreciation and artistic love of Nature in all her moods and aspects.

The sounds of autumn were about them now; the hum of insects and the song of the few birds that yet sang; the fragrance of the golden broom and the sweet briar, with a score of other sweet and indefinable scents and balmy breaths. All around them was scenic beauty and peace, and yet with all their great love for each other, their hearts were heavy at the prospect of their future, which must be a life of banishment in India, and to the heaviness of Lennard was added indignation and sorrow. But he could scarcely accuse himself of having acted rashly in the matter of his marriage, for to that his family would never have consented; and he often thought could his mother but see Flora in her beauty and brightness, looking so charming in her smart sealskin and bewitching cap and feather, and long skirt of golden-brown silk that matched her hair and eyes—every way a most piquante-looking girl!

Young though he was, and though a second son, Lennard Melfort had been a favourite with more than one Belgravian belle and her mamma, and there were few who had not something pleasant or complimentary to say of him since his return from India. At balls, fêtes, garden and water parties, girls had given him the preference to many who seemed more eligible, had reserved for him dances on their programmes, sang for him, made unmistakable œillades, and so forth; for his handsome figure and his position made him very acceptable, though he had not the prospects of his elder brother, the Hon. Cosmo.

Lady Fettercairn knew how Lennard was regarded and valued well, and nourished great hopes therefrom; but this was all over and done with now.

To her it seemed as if he had thrown his very life away, and that when his marriage with a needy governess—however beautiful and well born she might be—became known, all that charmed and charming circle in Belgravia and Tyburnia would regard him as a black sheep indeed; would shake their aristocratic heads, and pity poor Lord and Lady Fettercairn for having such a renegade son.

Flora's chief attendant—a Highland woman who had nursed her in infancy—was comically vituperative and indignant at the affront put by these titled folks upon 'her child' as she called her.

Madelon Galbraith was strong, healthy, active, and only in her fortieth year, with black eyes and hair, a rich ruddy complexion, a set of magnificent white teeth, and her manner was full of emphatic, almost violent, gesticulation peculiar to many Highlanders, who seem to talk with their hands and arms quite as much as the tongue.

Sometimes Madelon spoke in her native Gaelic, but generally in the dialect of the Lowlands.

'Set them up indeed,' she muttered; 'wha are the Melforts o' Fettercairn, that they should slight you—laoghe mo chri?' she added, softly (calf of my heart). 'What a pity it is ye canna fling at their heads the gold they love, for even a Lowland dog winna yowl gin ye pelt him wi' banes. But you've begun wi' love and marriage, and a gude beginning mak's a gude ending.'

'But we shall be so poor, Nursie Madelon, and I have ruined my poor Lennard,' urged Flora, as the kind woman caressed her.

'They say a kiss and a cup of water mak' but a wersh breakfast,' laughed Madelon; 'but you're no sae puir as that comes to, my darling.'

'Not quite' said Flora, laughing faintly, in turn. 'Yet I have sorely injured my husband's prospects.'

'Tut, tut, my bairn. Ony man can woo, but he weds only whar his weird lies; and so Captain Melfort wedded you, and wha better? Then what is a Lord that we should lippen to him? As long as ye serve a tod ye maun carry his tail? And your father's daughter may carry her head wi' the highest.'

Lennard Melfort now resolved neither verbally nor by letter to have further intercourse with his family at Craigengowan or elsewhere, but before he could make up his mind what to do or could betake him south, as he meant to quit Scotland without delay, on the day subsequent to the stormy interview Madelon announced a visitor, and on a salver brought in a card inscribed—'MR. KENNETH KIPPILAW, W.S.'

CHAPTER III.

THE SPURNED OFFER.

'The family agent from Edinburgh, Flora,' said Lennard, in answer to her inquiring glance. 'Mrs. Melfort,' he added, introducing her to their visitor, who bowed with a critical glance and appreciative smile.

'I have been telegraphed for by your father, Captain Melfort,' said Mr. Kippilaw, as they shook hands and he was motioned to a chair.

A hale, hearty, unpretentious, business-like man, about forty years of age, Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw was too well-bred and too sensible to begin the matter in hand by any remarks about youthful imprudence, early marriages, or so forth, as he knew the pride and temperament of the young man before him, but laid down his hat, and, after some of that familiar weather talk which is the invariable prelude to any conversation over all the British Isles, he gently approached the object of his mission, which Flora, in the simplicity and terror of her heart, never doubted was a separation of some kind between herself and Lennard, so with a pallid face she bowed and withdrew.

'To what am I indebted for the pleasure of this—a—unexpected interview?' asked Lennard, a little stiffly.

Lennard's face darkened with indignation, and he gave his moustache an angry twist.

'Are my father and mother determined to ignore the fact that she is a lady by birth?' asked Lennard after a gloomy pause.

'Yes—they know, of course, that she is a lady,' stammered Mr. Kippilaw, feeling his mission an ungracious one, 'but poor—one who has sunk into obscurity and dependence—pardon me, I but use their own identical words.

'What is done in this instance unfortunately cannot be undone, Captain Melfort; but his lordship, feeling, of course, keenly in the matter, is willing to continue your allowance, and even to double it, on one condition.

Mr. Kippilaw sighed, for though, as a lawyer, considerably hardened, he felt the delicacy of the whole situation, and Lennard's dark eyes seemed to focus and pierce him.

'Or you may live anywhere out of Britain, but never attempt to intrude Mrs. Melfort upon your family or their circle, and contrive, if possible, to let that circle forget your existence.'

'Insolent—and cruel as insolent!' exclaimed Lennard Melfort as he started from his chair and paced about the room, with his dark eyes flashing and the veins in his forehead swollen like whip-cord.

'Return to Craigengowan, and tell my father that I reject his bribe to insult my wife—for a bribe it is—with the scorn it merits. Not a penny of his money will I accept while my sword and pay, or life itself, are left me. Tell Lord and Lady Fettercairn that I view myself as their son no more. As they discard me, so do I discard them; and even their very name I shall not keep—remember that!'

'A crime I say—yet a day may come when they will repent it; and from this hour I swear——'

'Not in anger,' interrupted Mr. Kippilaw, entreatingly; 'take no hasty vow in your present temper.'

'I swear that to them and theirs I shall be—from this hour—as one in the grave!'

'But,' urged the lawyer, 'but suppose—which God forbid—that aught happened to your elder brother, Mr. Cosmo Melfort?'

'I wish Cosmo well; but I care not for my interest in the title—it may become dormant, extinct, for aught that I care. Neither I nor any of mine shall ever claim it, nor shall I again set foot in Craigengowan, or on the lands around it—no, never again, never again!'

To every argument of the kind-hearted Mr. Kippilaw, who really loved the Fettercairn family and esteemed the high-spirited Lennard, the latter turned a deaf ear.

He departed in despair of softening matters between the rash son and indignant parents. To them he greatly modified the nature of the useless interview, but they heard of Lennard's determination with perfect unconcern, and even with a grim smile of contempt, never doubting that when money pressure came upon him they would find him at their mercy. But that time never came.

The parting words of Lord Fettercairn to him were said smilingly and loftily:—

'The French have a little phrase, which in six words expresses all our experiences in life.'

'Is simply—tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse—that we outlive everything in turn and in time—and so this matter of Lennard's pride will be a matter of time only. Be assured we shall outlive the indignation of our misguided son.'

'I can but hope that you will, my lord. Remember the hackneyed quotation from Pope—"To err is human, to forgive divine."

The name of Lennard was never uttered again by his parents, nor even by his brother Cosmo (then reading up at Oxford) till the hour for forgiveness was past; and even Cosmo they contrived to innoculate with their own cruel and unchristian sentiment of hostility. Lennard's portrait was removed from its place of honour in the dining-hall, and banished to the lumber-attic; the goods, chattels, and mementoes he left at home were scattered and dispersed; even his horses were sold, and the saddles he had used; and the Fettercairn family would—could they have done so—have obliterated his name from the great double-columned tome of Sir Bernard Burke.

Heedless of all that, the young husband and his dark-eyed girl-wife were all the world to each other.

'After mamma followed papa to the grave, Lennard—for she never held up her head after she heard of his death at Khooshab,' said Flora, as she nestled her head in his neck, 'I seemed to be condemned to a life of hardship, humiliation, and heartlessness, till I met you, dearest. I felt that even the love of some dumb animal—a dog or a horse—was better than the entire absence of affection in the narrow circle of my life. I did so long for something or some one to love me exclusively—I felt so miserably, so utterly alone in the world. Now I have you—you to love me. But in winning you I have robbed you of the love of all your people.'

'Talk not of it, and think not of it, dearest Flora. We are now more than ever all in all to each other.'

The money bribe, offered in such a way and for such a purpose, exasperated Lennard still more against his family, and drew many a tear of humiliation from Flora in secret.

She thought that she had wrought Lennard a great wrong by winning his love for herself, and she was now burning with impatience to turn her back on the shores of Britain and find a new home in India; and there, by staff or other employments and allowances, Lennard knew that he could gain more than the yearly sum his father so mortifyingly offered him.

Flora wept much over it all, we say, and her appetite became impaired; but she did not—like the heroine of a three-volume novel—starve herself into a fright.

But a short time before she had been a childish and simple maiden—one sorely tried, however, and crushed by evil fortune; but with Lennard Melfort now, 'the prince had come into her existence and awakened her soul, and she was a woman—innocent still—but yet a woman.'

The scenery of the Mearns looked inexpressibly lovely in the purity and richness of its verdure and varied artistic views, for the woods were profusely tinted with gold, russet brown, and red, when Lennard Melfort turned his back upon it and his native home for ever!

came on the evening breeze together. The old kirk bell was tolling in the distance, and its familiar sound spoke to Lennard's heart of home like that of an old friend. The river was rolling under its great arch of some eighty feet in span, the downward reflection of the latter in the water making a complete circle like a giant O. The old castle of Halgreen, with its loopholed battlements of the fourteenth century, stood blackly and boldly upon its wave-beaten eminence, and the blue smoke of picturesque Gourdon, a fisher village, curled up on the ambient air, as the scenery faded out in the distance.

Flora became marvellously cheerful when their journey fairly began, and laughingly she sung in Lennard's ear—

'The world goes up and the world goes down,
But yesterday's smile and yesterday's frown
Can never come back again, sweet friend—
Can never come back again!'

Means were not forgotten to support nurse Madelon in her native place, where we shall leave her till she reappears in our narrative again.

So Lennard and his girl-wife sailed for India, full of love for each other and hope for their own lonely and unaided future, and both passed for ever out of the lives and apparently out of the memory of the family at Craigengowan.

Times there were when he hoped to distinguish himself, so that the circle there—those who had renounced him—would be proud of him; but in seeking that distinction rashly, he might throw away his life, and thus leave his little Flora penniless on the mercy of a cold world and a proverbially ungrateful Government.

But they could not forget home, and many a time and oft, where the sun-baked cantonments of Meerut seemed to vibrate under the fierce light of the Indian sun, where the temples of Hurdwar from their steep of marble steps look down upon the Ganges, or where the bungalows of Cawnpore or Etwah, garlanded with fragrant jasmine, stand by the rolling Jumna amid glorious oleanders and baubool trees, with their golden balls loading the air with perfume, while the giant heron stalked by the river's bed, the alligator basked in the ooze, and the Brahmin ducks floated overhead, Flora's sweet voice made Lennard's heart thrill as she sang to him the songs of the land they had resolved never to look upon again, even when that sound so stirring to the most sluggish Scottish breast when far away, the pipes of a Highland regiment, poured their notes on the hot sunny air.

At home none seemed to care or think of the discarded son but the worthy lawyer Kenneth Kippilaw, who had loved him as a lad, and could not get his hard fate out of his mind.

From time to time, inspired by kindness and curiosity, he watched his name among the captains in the military lists of that thick compendium which no Scottish business establishment is ever without—'Oliver and Boyd's Almanack.' Therein, after a while, the name of Lennard Melfort disappeared, but whether he was dead, had sold out, or 'gone to the bad,' the worthy Writer to the Signet could not discover, and he not unnaturally sighed over what he deemed a lost life.

CHAPTER IV.

REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.

More than twenty years had elapsed after the episodes we have described, and Lennard and Flora had found a new home, and she, her last one, more than four hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies from where Craigengowan looks down on the German Sea. But none that looked on Lennard Melfort now would have recognised in the prematurely aged man the handsome young fellow who in ire and disgust had quitted his native land.

In two years after he had gone eastward a dreadful fever, contracted in a place where he had volunteered on a certain duty to gain money for the support of his wife and her little Indian establishment—the Terrai of Nepaul, that miasmatic border of prairie which lies along the great forest of the Himalayas, and has an evil repute even among the natives of the country in the wet season when the leaves are falling.

This fever broke Lennard's health completely, and so changed him that his rich brown hair and moustache were grey at six-and-twenty, and ere long he looked like a man of twice his age.

'Can that fellow really be Lennard Melfort of the Fusiliers? Why, he is a veritable Knight of the Rueful Countenance!' exclaimed some old friends who saw him at 'The Rag,' when he came home to seek a place of quiet and seclusion in Devonshire, as it subsequently chanced to be.

Amid the apple bowers of the land of cider, and near a beautiful little bay into which the waters of the British Channel rippled, stood the pretty and secluded cottage he occupied, as 'Major MacIan,' with his son and a nephew.

The wooded hills around it were not all covered with orchards, however, and the little road that wound round the bay ran under eminences that, from their aspect, might make a tourist think he was skirting a Swiss lake. Others were heath-clad and fringed at the base by a margin of grey rocks.

Into the bay flowed a stream, blue and transparent always. Here salmon trout were often found, and the young men spent hours at its estuary angling for rock fish.

A Devonshire cottage is said by Mrs. Bray to be 'the sweetest object that the poet, the artist, or the lover of the romantic could desire to see,' and such a cottage was that of Major MacIan, the name now adopted by Lennard—that of Flora's father—in fulfilment of the vow he had made to renounce the name, title, and existence of his family.

Around it, and in front sloping down to the bay, was a beautiful garden, teeming with the flowers and fruits of Devonshire. On three sides was a rustic verandah, the trellis work of which was covered by a woven clematis, sweetbriar, and Virginia creeper, which, in the first year of her residence there, Flora's pretty hands, cased in garden gloves, were never tired of tending; and now the Virginia creeper, with its luxuriant tendrils, emerald green in summer, russet and red in autumn, grew in heavy masses over the roof and around the chimney stalks, making it, as Flora was wont to say exultingly, 'quite a love of a place!'

On one hand lay the rolling waters of the Channel, foaming about the Mewstone Rock; on the other, a peep was given amid the coppice of the ancient church of Revelstoke, and here the married pair lived happily and alone for a brief time.

Save for the advent of a ship passing in sight of the little bay, it was a sleepy place in which Lennard, now retired as a major, had 'pitched his tent,' as he said—the Cottage of Revelstoke. Even in these railway times people thereabout were content with yesterday's news. There was no gas to spoil the complexions of the young, and no water rates to 'worrit' the old; and telegrams never came, in their orange-tinted envelopes, to startle the hearts of the feeble and the sickly.

No monetary transactions having taken place, and no correspondence being necessary, between Lennard and his family or their legal agent, Mr. Kippilaw, for more than twenty years now, he had quite passed away from their knowledge, and almost from their memory; and many who knew them once cared not, perhaps, whether he or his wife were in the land of the living.

A son, we have said, had been born to them, and Lennard named the child Florian, after his mother (here again ignoring his own family), whom that event cost dear, for the sweet and loving Flora never recovered her health or strength—injured, no doubt, in India—but fell into a decline, and, two years after, passed away in the arms of Lennard and her old nurse, Madelon.

Lonely, lonely indeed, did the former feel now, though an orphan nephew of Flora—the son of her only sister—came to reside with him—Shafto Gyle by name—one who will figure largely in our story.

Would Lennard ever forget the day of her departure, when she sank under that wasting illness with which no doctor could grapple? Ever and always he could recall the sweet but pallid face, the white, wasted hands, the fever-lighted dark eyes, which seemed so unnaturally large when, after one harrowing night of pain and delirium, she became gentle and quiet, and lovingly told him to take a little rest—for old-looking he was; old, worn, and wasted far beyond his years—and he obeyed her, saying he would take a little turn in the garden among the roses—the roses her hands would tend no more—sick at heart with the closeness of the sick-chamber and all it suggested, and maddened by the loud ticking of the watchful doctor's repeater as it lay on a table littered with useless phials; and how, ere he had been ten minutes in the sunny morning air, amid the perfume of the roses, he was wildly summoned by Madelon Galbraith with white cheeks and affrighted eyes, back to the chamber of death it proved to be; for it was on the brow of Death he pressed his passionate kisses, and to ears that could hear no more he uttered his heartrending entreaties that she would not leave him, or would give him one farewell word; and ever after would the perfume of roses be associated in his mind with that morning—the most terrible one of his life!

Beside Revelstoke Church—old, picturesque, and rendered comely by a wealth of luxuriant ivy that Time has wreathed around its hoary walls to flutter in the sea breeze—she was laid, and the heart of Lennard seemed to be buried with her.

It is a lonely old building, spotted with lichens, worn by storms, and perched upon the verge of a low, rocky cliff, up which the salt spray comes at times to the burial-ground. It is near the end of Mothcombe Bay, where the shore makes a turn to the southward.

Not a house is near it, the solitary hills and waves encompass it, and it is said that its smouldering tombstones would furnish ample matter for the 'meditations' of a Hervey. So there Flora was laid, and there Lennard was to be laid by her side when the time came.

Her death hardened his heart more than ever against his own family, and he began almost to forget that he ever bore any other name than hers—his adopted one.

In the kindness of his heart the major, as the lads—his son and nephew—grew up together, introduced both to neighbours and strangers equally as his sons, but most unwisely, as we shall ere long have to record.

Neither to Florian nor to Shafto Gyle did he reveal his real name, or the story of the quarrel with his family and their work; thus in and about Revelstoke all three passed under the name of MacIan now.

Madelon Galbraith, who had attended her mistress on her death-bed, and nursed her baby into boyhood, had now gone back to her native glen in the wilds of Ross. She proved, Lennard found, somewhat unfitted for the locality of Revelstoke, as her ways and ideas were foreign to those of the folks thereabouts; but she will have a prominent place in our story in the future.

But long, long Madelon wept over Florian, and pressed him often to her breast—'the baby of her bairn,' as she had called him—for as she had nursed him, so had she nursed his mother before him in the days when the victorious Ross-shire Buffs set up their tents at Khooshab, on the plains of Persia.

'Gude-by, calf of my heart,' were her parting words; 'I'll see ye yet again, Florian. If it were na for hope, the heart wad break!'

CHAPTER V.

DULCIE.

All trace of Lennard Melfort had been obliterated at Craigengowan, we have said. He was never mentioned there, and though his family tried to think of him as dead, they did not quite succeed; but the disappearance of his name from the Army List first excited a little speculation, but no inquiry, until a terrible event occurred.

The eldest son, the Hon. Cosmo, married the daughter of Lady Drumshoddy, thus securing her thousands, and did his best to console Lord and Lady Fettercairn for 'the disgrace' brought upon them by Lennard, and they regarded him quite as a model son.

He shone as Chairman at all kinds of county meetings; became M.P. for a cluster of northern burghs, and was a typical Scottish member, mightily interested when such grand Imperial matters as the gravelling of Park Lane, the ducks on the Serpentine, and the improvements at Hyde Park Corner were before the House, but was oblivious of all Scottish interests, or that such a place as Scotland existed. When she wanted—like other parts of the empire—but never got them—grants for necessary purposes, the Hon. Cosmo was mute as a fish, or if he spoke it was to record his vote against them.

Lennard saw in a chance newspaper, and with natural grief and dismay, that Cosmo had come to an untimely end when deer-stalking near Glentilt. He had wounded a large stag, the captain of its herd, and approached rashly or incautiously when the infuriated animal was at bay. It broke its bay, attacked him in turn, and ere the great shaggy hounds could tear it down, Cosmo was trampled under foot and gored to death by its horns.

As Lennard read, his sad mind went to the scene where that death must have happened, under mighty Ben-y-gloe, where the kestrel builds his nest and the great mountain eagle has his eyry, and the Tilt comes thundering down over its precipices of grey rock. Never again would his eyes rest on such glorious scenes as these.

Cosmo had left a little daughter, Finella, who took up her abode with her grandparents at Craigengowan, but no son, and Lennard knew that by this tragedy he was now the heir to the peerage, but he only gave a bitter sigh as he thought of Flora in her grave and made no sign.

'Poor Cosmo,' he muttered, and forgetting for a time much that had occurred, and how completely Cosmo had leagued with father and mother against him, his memory went back to the pleasant days of their happy boyhood, when they rode, fished, and shot together, shared the same bedroom in Craigengowan, and conned their tasks from the same books.

He made no sign, we say, but let time pass by, not foreseeing the complications that were eventually to arise by his doing so.

Florian, born two years after the adoption of Shafto Gyle in his infancy, always regarded and looked up to the latter as a species of elder brother and undoubted senior.

In his twentieth year Florian was really a handsome fellow, and if, without absurdity, the term 'beautiful' could be applied to a young man, he was so, in his perfect manliness. Tall in figure, hard and well developed in muscle, regular in features, he had clear, dark, honest eyes, with lashes like a girl's, and a dark, silky moustache.

Shafto's face was in some respects handsome too, but an evil one to look at, in one way. His fair eyebrows were heavy, and had a way of meeting in a dark frown when he was thinking. His pale grey eyes were shifty, and were given him, like his tongue, to conceal rather than express his thoughts, for they were sharp and cunning. His nostrils were delicate, and, like his thin lips, suggestive of cruelty, while his massive jaw and thick neck were equally so—we must say almost to brutality.

They were rather a contrast, these two young men—a contrast no less great in their dispositions and minds than in their outward appearance. They were so dissimilar—one being dark and the other fair—that no one would have taken them for brothers, as they were generally supposed to be, so affectionate was the Major to both, and both bearing his name in the locality.

As a schoolboy Shafto had won an unpleasant reputation for jockeying his companions, 'doing' them out of toys, sweetmeats, marbles, and money, and for skilfully shifting punishments on the wrong shoulders when opportunity offered, and not unfrequently on those of the unsuspecting Florian.

From some of his proclivities, the Major thought Shafto would make a good attorney, and so had him duly installed in the office of Lewellen Carlyon, the nearest village lawyer, while for his own boy, Florian, he had higher hopes and aspirations, to make him, like himself, a soldier; but though far from idle, or lacking application, Florian failed, under the insane high-pressure system of 'cramming,' to pass, and not a few—Shafto particularly—laid it to the account of a certain damsel, Dulcie by name, who was supposed, with some truth, to occupy too much of his thoughts.

Disgusted by the result of his last 'exam.,' Florian would at once have enlisted, like so many others, who rush as privates for commissions nowadays; but his father's fast-failing health, his love for Dulcie Carlyon, and the desperate but 'Micawber'-like hope that 'something would turn up,' kept him hanging on day by day aimlessly at Revelstoke, without even the apparent future that had opened to Shafto when elevated to a high stool in Lawyer Carlyon's office.

As time went on, Lennard Melfort (or MacIan as he called himself), though he had a high appreciation of Shafto's sense, turn for business to all appearance, cleverness, and strength of character, turned with greater pleasure to his own son Florian, whose clear open brow and honest manly eyes bore nature's unmistakable impress of a truer nobility than ever appertained to the truculent and anti-national lords of Fettercairn.

Though to all appearance the best of friends before the world, the cousins were rivals; but as Florian was the successful lover, Shafto had a good basis for bitterness, if not secret hate.

In common with the few neighbours who were in that sequestered quarter, the lawyer liked the Major—he was so gentle, suave, retiring in manner, and courteously polite. He liked Florian too, but deemed him idle, and there his liking ended.

He took Shafto into his office at the Major's urgent request, as a species of apprentice, but he—after the aphorism of 'Dr. Fell'—did not much affect the young man, though he found him sharp enough—too sharp at times; and, like most of the neighbours, he never cared to inquire into the precise relationship of the Major and the two lads, both of whom from boyhood had called the latter 'Papa.'

Dulcie Carlyon was the belle of the limited circle in which she moved, and a very limited circle it was; but she was pretty enough to have been the belle of a much larger orbit; for she was the very ideal of a sweet, bright English girl, now nearly in her eighteenth year, and the boy and girl romance in the lives of her and Florian had lasted since they were children and playmates together, and they seemed now to regard each other with 'the love that is given once in a lifetime.'

'Could I but separate these two!' muttered Shafto, as with eyes full of envy and evil he watched one of their meetings, amid the bushes that fringed an old quarry not far from Revelstoke Church.

From the summit where he lurked there was a magnificent view of the sea and the surrounding country. On one hand lay the lonely old church and all the solitary hills that overlook its wave-beaten promontory; on the other were the white-crested waves of the British Channel, rolling in sunshine; but Shafto saw only the face and figure of Dulcie Carlyon, who was clad just as he was fond of picturing her, in a jacket of navy blue, fastened with gilt buttons, and a skirt with clinging folds of the same—a costume which invests an English girl with an air equally nautical and coquettish. Dulcie's dresses always fitted her exquisitely, and her small head, with smart hat and feather, set gracefully on her shapely shoulders, had just a soupçon of pride in its contour and bearing.

Slender in figure, with that lovely flower-like complexion which is so peculiarly English, Dulcie had regular and delicate features, with eyes deeply and beautifully blue, reddish-golden hair, a laughing mouth that some thought too large for perfect beauty, but it was fully redeemed by its vivid colour and faultless teeth.

'Could I but separate them!' muttered Shafto, through his clenched teeth, while their murmured words and mutual caresses maddened him.

Dulcie was laughingly kissing a likeness in an open locket which Florian had just given her—a likeness, no doubt, of himself—and she did so repeatedly, and ever and anon held it admiringly at arm's length. Then she closed it, and Florian clasped the flat silver necklet to which it was attached round her slender white throat; and with a bright fond smile she concealed it among the lace frilling of her collarette, and let the locket, for security, drop into the cleft of her bosom, little foreseeing the part it was yet to play in her life.

Shafto's face would not have been pleasant to look upon as he saw this episode, and his shifty grey eyes grew pea-green in hue as he watched it.

'Oh, Dulcie!' exclaimed Florian, with a kind of boyish rapture, as he placed a hand on each of her shoulders and gazed into her eyes, 'I am most terribly in love with you.'

'Why should there be any terror in it?' asked Dulcie, with a sweet silvery laugh.

'Well, I feel so full of joy in having your love, and being always with you, that—that a fear comes over me lest we should be some day parted.'

'Who can part us but ourselves?' said she with a pretty pout, while her long lashes drooped.

'Dulcie,' said he, after a little pause, 'have you ever had an emotion that comes uncalled for—that which people call a presentiment?'

'Well—I have a presentiment this evening which tells me that something is about to happen to me—to us—and very soon too!'

Did the vicinity of Shafto, though unknown to Florian, mysteriously prompt this thought—this boding fear. Shafto heard the words, and a strange smile spread over his face as he shook his clenched hand at the absorbed pair, and stole away from his hiding-place, leaving two foolish hearts full of a foolish dream from which they might be roughly awakened—leaving the happy Florian, with that sweet and winsome Dulcie whom he loved, and with whom he had played even as a child; with whom he had shared many a pot of clotted cream; with whom he had fished for trout in the Erme and Yealm; explored with fearful steps and awe-stricken heart the cavern there, where lie thick the fossil bones of the elephant, hyæna, and wolf; and wandered for hours by the moors, among mossy rocks and mossy trees, and in woody labyrinthine lanes, and many a time and oft by the sea shore, where the cliffs are upheaved and contorted in a manner beyond description, but so loosely bound together that waves rend them asunder, and shape them into forms like ruined castles and stranded ships; till, as years went on, heart had spoken to heart; boy and girl life had been left behind; and that dream-time came in which they seemed to live for years.

No one could accuse Dulcie Carlyon of coquetry, her nature was too truthful and open for that; thus she had never for a moment wavered in her preference between Florian and Shafto, and spent with the former those bright and hopeful hours that seldom come again with the same keen intensity in a lifetime, though often clouded by vague doubts.

As yet they had led a kind of Paul and Virginia life, without very defined ideas of their future; in fact, perhaps scarcely considering what that future might be.

They only knew, like the impassioned boy and girl in the beautiful story of Bernardin St. Pierre, that they loved each other very dearly, and for the sweet present that sufficed; while cunning Shafto Gyle looked darkly, gloomily, and enviously on them.

Perhaps it was his fast failing health that prevented Lennard Melfort from looking more closely into this matter, or it may be that he remembered the youthful love of his own heart; for he could never forget her whom he was so soon to join now, and who, 'after life's fitful fever,' slept by the grey wall of Revelstoke, within sound of the restless sea.

Dulcie's father, Lawyer Carlyon, heard rumours of these meetings and rambles, and probably liked them as little as the Major did; but he was a busy man absorbed in his work, and had been used to seeing the pair together since they were toddling children. Lennard, perhaps, thought it was as well to let them alone, as nothing would come of it, while the lawyer treated it surlily as a kind of joke.

'Why, Dulcie, my girl,' said he one day, 'what is to be the end of all this philandering but spoiling your own market, perhaps? Do you expect a young fellow to marry you who has no money, no prospects, no position in the world?'

'Position he has,' said poor Dulcie, blushing painfully, for though an only and motherless child she stood in awe of her father.

Dulcie was silent, and—for the first time in her life—thought sadly, 'Yes, when!' But she pressed a pretty white hand upon the silver locket in her bosom, as if to draw courage therefrom as from an amulet.

'Well, papa, remember our hopeful Devonshire proverb—a good cob, a good hat and shoes, and a good heart last for ever.'

'Right, lass, and a good heart have you, my darling,' said Mr. Carlyon, kissing her peach-like cheek, for he was a kind and good-hearted man, though somewhat rough in his exterior, and more like a grazier than a lawyer. 'You are both too young to know what you are talking about. He'll be going away, however—can't live always on his father, and he, poor fellow, won't last long. The fancy of you both will wear itself out, like any other summer flirtation—I had many such in my time,' he added, with a chuckle, 'and got safely over them all. So will you, lass, and marry into some good family, getting a husband that will give you a comfortable home—for instance, Job Holbeton, with his pits of Bovey coal.'

Poor little Dulcie shivered, and could scarcely restrain her tears at the hard, practical suggestions of her father. Hard-featured, stout, and grizzled Joe Holbeton versus her handsome Florian!

Her father spoke, too, of his probable 'going away.' Was this the presentiment to which her lover had referred? It almost seemed so.

In the sunset she went forth into the garden to work with her wools, and even to have a 'good cry' over what her father had said; but in this she was prevented by suddenly finding Shafto stretched on the grass at her feet under a pine chestnut-tree—Shafto, whom she could only tolerate for Florian's sake.

'Why do you stare at me so hard, Shafto,' she asked, with unconcealed annoyance.

'Don't begin as usual to pay me clumsy compliments, Shafto, or I shall quit the garden,' said Dulcie, her blue eyes looking with a half-frightened, half-defiant expression into the keen, shifty, and pale grey ones of Shafto, who was somewhat given to persecuting her.

He could see the outline of the locket with every respiration of her bosom. Could he but possess himself of it, thought he, as he proceeded to fill his meerschaum pipe.

'I thought gentlemen did not smoke in ladies' society unless with permission,' said Dulcie.

'Thanks; this is jolly,' said he, looking up at her with eyes full of admiration. 'I feel like Hercules at the feet of Omphale.'

'I don't know who he was, or what you feel, but do you know what you look like?'

'Well, like the Athenian weaver, Bottom, with his ass's head, at the feet of Titania. "Dost like the picture?"'

Shafto eyed her spitefully, all the more so that Dulcie laughed merrily, showing all her pearly teeth at her reply.

'Oho, this comes of rambling in quarries,' said he, bluntly and coarsely; 'doing the Huguenot business, the pose of Millais' picture. Bosh! What can you and he mean?'

'Mean!' exclaimed Dulcie, her sweet face growing very pale in spite of herself at the bluntness of Shafto, and the unmistakable anger of his tone and bearing.

'Good evening, Shafto; you are very unpleasant, to say the least of it,' said Dulcie, as she gathered up her wools and sailed into the house, while his eyes followed her with a menacing and very ugly expression indeed.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SECRET PACKET.

The broken health brought by Lennard from the miasmatic Terai of Nepaul was rapidly becoming more broken than ever, and, though not yet fifty, he was a premature old man, and it seemed as if the first part of Florian's presentiment or prevision of coming sorrow would soon be fulfilled.

His steps became very feeble, and he could only get about, in the autumn sunshine, with the aid of a stick and Florian's arm; and the latter watched him with grief and pain, tottering like the aged, panting and leaning heavily on his cane, as ever and anon he insisted on being led up a steep slope from which he could clearly see the old church of Revelstoke on its wave-beaten promontory, overlooked by sad and solitary hills, and his hollow eyes glistened as he gazed on it, with a kind of yearning expression, as if he longed to be at peace, and by the side of her he had laid there, it seemed long years ago—a lifetime ago.

Poor Lennard was certainly near his tomb, and all who looked upon him thought so; yet his calm eye, ever looking upward, betrayed no fear.

One day when Florian was absent—no doubt sketching, boating with Dulcie on the Yealm, or idling with her on the moors—Lennard besought Shafto to stay beside him as he sat feeble and languid in his easy chair, sinking with the wasting and internal fever, with which the country practitioners were totally incapable of grappling; and on this day, for the first time, he began to speak to him of Scotland and the home he once had there; and he was listened to with the keenest interest by Shafto, who had ever—even as a child—been cunning, selfish, and avaricious, yet wonderfully clever and complaisant in his uncle's prejudiced eyes, as he remembered only Flora's dead and devoted sister.

'I have been thinking over old times and other days, Shafto,' said he, with his attenuated hands crossed on the head of his bamboo cane; 'and, all things considered, it seems an occupation I had better avoid did the memory concern myself alone: but I must think of others and their interests—of Florian and of you—so I can't help it, boy, in my present state of health, or rather want of health,' he added, as a violent fit of spasmodic coughing came upon him.

'You, Shafto, are a couple of years older than Florian, and are, in many ways, several years older in thought and experience by the short training you have received in Carlyon's office.'

The Major paused again, leaving Shafto full of wonder and curiosity as to what this preamble was leading up to.

The former had begun to see things more clearly and temperately with regard to the sudden death of Cosmo, and to feel that, though he had renounced all family ties, name, and wealth, so far as concerned himself, to die, with the secret of all untold, would be to inflict a cruel wrong on Florian. At one time Lennard thought of putting his papers and the whole matter in the hands of Mr. Lewellen Carlyon, and it was a pity he did not do so instead of choosing to entrust them to his long-headed nephew.

When this was done he selected a packet from a private drawer, and briefly and rapidly told the story of his life, his proper name, and rank to Shafto, who listened with open-eyed amazement.

When the latter had thoroughly digested the whole information, he said, after a long pause:

And with Florian came the thought of Dulcie, and how this sudden accession of her lover to fortune and position would affect her.

'Nay, Shafto—not yet—not till I am gone—a short time now. I can trust you, with your sharpness and legal acumen, with the handling of this matter entirely. When I am gone, and laid beside your aunt Flora, by the wall of the old church yonder,' he continued with a very broken voice—one almost a childish treble, 'you will seek the person to whom this packet is addressed, Kenneth Kippilaw, a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh—he is alive still; place these in his hands, and he will do all that is required; but treasure them, Shafto—be careful of them as you would of your soul's salvation—for my sake, and more than all for the sake of Florian! Now, my good lad, give me the composing draught—I feel sleepy and so weary with all this talking, and the thoughts that have come unbidden—unbidden, sad, bitter, and angry thoughts—to memory.'

Shafto locked the desk, put it aside, and, giving his uncle the draught, stole softly away to his own room with the papers, to con them over and to—think!

He had not sat at a desk for three years in Lawyer Carlyon's office without having his wits sharpened. He paused as he put the documents away.

'Stop—stop—let me think, let me consider!' he exclaimed to himself, and he certainly did consider to some purpose. He was cold and calculating; he was never unusually agitated or flustered, but he became both with the thoughts that occurred to him now.

Among the papers and letters entrusted to him were the certificates of the marriage of Lennard and Flora, and another which ran thus:

'Certificate of entry of birth, under section 37 of 17 and 18 Vict., cap. 80.' It authenticated the birth of their child Florian at Revelstoke, with the date thereof to a minute.

These documents were enclosed in a letter written in a tremulous and uncertain hand by Lennard Melfort to Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, part of which was in these terms:

The child was baptized by a neighbouring clergyman—the Rev. Paul Pentreath—who has faithfully kept the promise of secrecy he gave me, and, dying as I now feel myself to be, I pray earnestly that my father and mother will be kind to my orphan son. Let them not—as they one day hope for mercy at that dread throne before which I am soon to appear—visit upon his innocent head my supposed and most heavily punished offence. Let him succeed in poor Cosmo's place to that which is his due; let him succeed to all I renounced in anger—an anger that has passed away, for now, my dear old friend, I am aged beyond my years, and my hair is now white as snow through ill-health contracted in India, where, to procure money necessary for my poor Flora, I volunteered on desperate service, and in seasons destructive to existence. In your hands I leave the matter with perfect hope and confidence. The bearer will tell you all more that may be necessary.'

After having read, reread, and made himself thoroughly master of the contents of this to him certainly most astounding packet, he requested the Major to re-address it in his own tremulous and all but illegible handwriting, and seal it up with his long-disused signet ring, which bore the arms of Fettercairn.

Prior to having all this done, Shafto had operated on one of the documents most dexterously and destructively with his pen-knife!

'A peerage! a peerage!—rank, wealth, money, mine—all mine!' he muttered under his breath, as he stored the packet away in a sure and secret place, and while whistling softly to himself, a way he had when brooding (as he often did) over mischief, he recalled the lines of Robert Herrick:

'Our life is like a narrow raft,
Afloat upon the hungry sea;
Hereon is but a little space,
And all men, eager for a place,
Do thrust each other in the sea.'

'So why should I not thrust him into the hungry briny? If life is a raft—and, by Jove, I find it so!—why should one not grasp at all one can, and make the best of life for one's self, by making the worst of it for other folks? Does such a chance of winning rank and wealth come often to any one's hands? No! and I should be the biggest of fools—the most enormous of idiots—not to avail myself to the fullest extent. I see my little game clearly, but must play warily. "Eat, drink, and be merry," says Isaiah, "for to-morrow we die." They say the devil can quote Scripture, and so can Shafto Gyle. But I don't mean to die to-morrow, but to have a jolly good spell for many a year to come!'

And in the wild exuberance of his spirits he tossed his hat again and again to the ceiling.

From that day forward the health of Lennard Melfort seemed to decline more rapidly, and erelong he was compelled by the chill winds of the season to remain in bed, quite unable to take his place at table or move about, save when wheeled in a chair to the window, where he loved to watch the setting sun.

Then came one evening when, for the last time, he begged to be propped up there in his pillowed chair. The sun was setting over Revelstoke Church, and throwing its picturesque outline strongly forward, in a dark indigo tint, against the golden and crimson flush of the west, and all the waves around the promontory were glittering in light.

But Lennard saw nothing of all this, though he felt the feeble warmth of the wintry sun as he stretched his thin, worn hands towards it; his eyesight was gone, and would never come again! There was something very pathetic in the withered face and sightless eyes, and the drooping white moustache that had once been a rich dark-brown, and waxed à l'Empereur.

His dream of life was over, and his last mutterings were a prayer for Florian, on whose breast his head lay as he breathed his last.

The two lads looked at each other in that supreme moment—but with very different thoughts in their hearts. Florian felt only desolation, blank and utter, and even Shafto, in the awful presence of Death, felt alone in the world.

CHAPTER VII.

A FAREWELL.

As he lay dead, that old-looking, wasted, and attenuated man, whose hair was like the thistledown, none would have recognised in him the dark-haired, bronzed, and joyous young subaltern who only twenty-four years before had led his company at the storming of the Redan, who had planted the scaling-ladder against the scarp, and shouted in a voice heard even amid the roar of the adverse musketry:

'Come on, men! ladders to the front, eight men per ladder; up and at them, lads, with the bayonet,' and fought his way into an embrasure, while round-shot tore up the earth beneath his feet, and men were swept away in sections of twenty; or the hardy soldier who faced fever and foes alike in the Terai of Nepaul.

Snow-flakes, light and feathery, fell on the hard ground, and the waves seemed to leap and sob heavily round the old church of Revelstoke, when Lennard Melfort was laid beside the now old and flattened grave of Flora, and keen and sharp the frosty wind lifted the silver hair of the Rev. Paul Pentreath, whistled among the ivy or on the buttresses, and fluttered the black ribbon of the pall held by Florian, who felt as one in a dreadful dream—amid a dread and unreal phantasmagoria; and the same wind seemed to twitch angrily the pall-ribbon from the hand of Shafto, nor could he by any effort recover it, as more than one present, with their Devonian superstition, remarked, and remembered when other things came to pass.

At last all was over; the mourners departed, and Lennard Melfort was left alone—alone with the dead of yesterday and of ages; and Florian, while Dulcie was by his side and pressed his hand, strove to commit to memory the curate's words from the Book of Revelation, 'There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor sighing; for God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'

Shafto now let little time pass before he proceeded to inform Florian of what he called their 'relative position,' and of their journey into Scotland to search out Mr. Kippilaw.

It has been said that in life we have sometimes moments so full of emotion that they seem to mark a turn in it we can never reach again; and this sharp turn, young and startled Florian seemed to pass, when he learned that since infancy he had been misled, and that the man, so tender and so loving, whom he had deemed his father was but his uncle!

How came it all to pass now? Yet the old Major had ever been so kind and affectionate to him—to both, in fact, equally so, treating them as his sons—that he felt only a stunning surprise, a crushing grief and bitter mortification, but not a vestige of anger; his love for the dead was too keen and deep for that.

The packet, sealed and addressed to Mr. Kippilaw, though its contents were as yet unknown to him, seemed to corroborate the strange intelligence of Shafto; but the question naturally occurred to Florian, 'For what end or purpose had this lifelong mystery and change in their positions been brought about?'

'It seems we have been very curiously deluded,' said that personage, not daring to look the sorrowful Florian straight in the face, and pretended to be intent on stuffing his pipe.

'How often am I to tell you,' exclaimed Shafto, with petulance and assumed irritation, 'that the contents of this packet prove that I am the only son of Major Melfort (not MacIan at all), and that you—you——'

'Are Florian Gyle, the nephew—adopted as a son. Mr. Kippilaw will tell you all about it.'

'And you, Shafto?' queried Florian, scarcely knowing, in his bewilderment, what he said.

'Mean to go in for my proper position—my title, and all that sort of thing, don't you see?'

'Not the proverbial beggar on horseback, I hope. I'll do something handsome for you, of course.'

'As you please,' replied the latter, puffing vigorously at his pipe. 'I have had enough of hopeless drudgery for a quarterly pittance in the dingy office of old Carlyon,' said he, after a long pause; 'and, by all the devils, I'll have no more of it now that I am going to be rich.'

Indeed, from the day of Lennard Melfort entrusting him with the packet, Shafto had done little else at the office but study the laws of succession in Scotland and England.

'Do I? Well, I suppose that comes from having had so precious little of it in my time. I am a poor devil just now, but,' thought he exultantly, 'this "plant" achieved successfully, how many matrons with daughters unmarried will all be anxious to be mother to me! And Dulcie Carlyon I might have for asking; but I'll fly at higher game now, by Jove!'

As further credentials, Shafto now possessed himself of Major Melfort's sword, commissions, and medals, while Florian looked in blank dismay and growing mortification—puzzled by the new position in which he found himself, of being no longer his father's son—a source of unfathomable mystery.

Shafto was in great haste to be gone, to leave Revelstoke and its vicinity behind him. It was too late for regrets or repentance now. Not that he felt either, we suppose; and what he had done he would do again if there was no chance of being found out. In the growing exuberance of his spirits, he could not help, a day or two after, taunting Florian about Dulcie till they were on the verge of a quarrel, and wound up by saying, with a scornful laugh:

'You can't marry her—a fellow without a shilling in the world; and I wouldn't now, if she would have me, which I don't doubt.'

Poor Dulcie! She heard with undisguised grief and astonishment of these events, and of the approaching departure of the cousins.

The cottage home was being broken up; the dear old Major was in his grave; and Florian, the playmate of her infancy, the lover of her girlhood, was going away—she scarcely knew to where. They might be permitted to correspond by letter, but when, thought Dulcie—oh, when should they meet again?

The sun was shedding its light and warmth around her as usual, on woodland and hill, on wave and rock; but both seemed to fade out, the perfume to pass from the early spring flowers, the glory from land and sea, and a dim mist of passionate tears clouded the sweet and tender blue eyes of the affectionate girl.

He would return, he said, as he strove to console her; but how and when, and to what end? thought both so despairingly. Their future seemed such a vague, a blank one!

'I am penniless, Dulcie—a beggar on the face of the earth—twice beggared now, I think!' exclaimed Florian, in sorrowful bitterness.

'Don't speak thus,' said she imploringly, with piteous lips that were tremulous as his own, and her eyes drowned in tears.

They had left the road now, and wandered among the trees in a thicket, and seated themselves on a fallen trunk, a seat and place endeared to them and familiar enough in past time.

He gazed into her eyes of deep pansy-blue, as if his own were striving to take away a memory of her face—a memory that would last for eternity.

'Yes—with Shafto. I am in a fever, darling, to seek out a position for myself. Surely Shafto may assist me in that—though I shrink from asking him.'

'Yes—but sometimes he looks like a supplanter now, and his bearing has been so unpleasant to me, especially of late,' said Florian. 'But you will wait for me, Dulcie, and not be persuaded to marry anyone else?' he added imploringly, as he clasped each of her hands in his.

'I shall wait for you, Florian, if it should be for twenty years!' exclaimed the girl, in a low and emphatic voice, scarcely considering the magnitude and peril of such a promise.

'Thank you, darling Dulcie!' said he bending down and kissing her lips with ardour, and, though on the eve of parting, they felt almost happy in the confidence of the blissful present.

'How often shall I recall this last meeting by the fallen tree, when you are far, far away from Revelstoke and—me,' said Dulcie.

'Do you think, Florian, I will require to be reminded of you?' asked the girl, with a little tone of pain in her sweet voice, as she kissed the silver locket containing his likeness, and all the sweet iteration of lover-talk, promises, and pledges went on for a time, and new hopes began to render this last interview more bearable to the young pair who were on the eve of separation, without any very distinct arrangement about correspondence in the interval of it.

The sun was setting now redly, and amid dun winter clouds, beaming on each chimney-head, on Revelstoke Church, and the leafless tree-tops his farewell radiance.

Florian took a long, long kiss from Dulcie, and with the emotion of a wrench in his heart, was gone, and she was alone.

A photo and a lock of red-golden hair were all that remained to him of her—both to be looked upon again and again, till his eyes ached, but never grew weary.

Dulcie's were very red with weeping, and the memory of that parting kiss was still hovering on her quivering lips when, in a lonely lane not far from her home, she found herself suddenly face to face with Shafto.

She had known him from his boyhood, ever since he came an orphan to Lennard Melfort's cottage; and although she always distrusted and never liked him, his face was a familiar one she might never see more; thus she resolved to part with him as with the best of friends, and to remember that he was the only kinsman of Florian, whose companion and fellow-traveller he was to be on a journey the end of which she scarcely understood. So, frankly and sweetly, with a sad smile in her eyes, she proffered her pretty hand, which Shafto grasped and retained promptly enough.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SILVER LOCKET.

Shafto had just been with her father. How contemptuously he had eyed the corner and the high old stool on which he had sat in the latter's legal establishment, and all its surroundings; the fly-blown county maps of Devon and Cornwall; advertisements of sales—property, mangold wurzel, oats and hay, Thorley's food for cattle, and so forth; the tin boxes of most legal aspect; dockets of papers in red tape; the well-thumbed ledgers; day and letter books, and all the paraphernalia of a country solicitor's office.

The three poor lads in the office, whose cheap cigars and beer he had often shared at the Ashburton Arms, he barely condescended to notice, while they regarded him with something akin to awe, as he gave Lawyer Carlyon his final 'instructions' concerning the disposal of the lease of the Major's pretty cottage, and of all the goods and chattels that were therein.

Had Florian been present he would have felt only shame and abasement at the tone and manner Shafto adopted on this occasion; but worthy Lawyer Carlyon, who did not believe a bit in the rumoured accession of Shafto to family rank and wealth, laughed softly to himself, and thought his 'pride would have a sore fall one of these fine days.'

And even now, when face to face with Dulcie, his general bearing, his coolness and insouciance, rendered her, amid all her grief, indignant and defiant ultimately.

How piquant, compact, and perfect the girl looked, from the smart scarlet feather in her little hat to her tiny Balmoral boots. Her veil was tightly tied across her face, showing only the tip of her nose, her ripe red lips, and pretty white chin—its point, like her cheeks, reddened somewhat by the winter breeze from the Channel. Her gloved hands were in her small muff, and the collar of her sealskin jacket was encircled by the necklet at which her silver locket hung—the locket Shafto had seen her kiss when Florian had bestowed it on her, while he looked close by, with his heart full of envy, jealousy, and hatred, and now it was the first thing that attracted his eye.

'Yes, Dulcie, by the train for Worcester and the north. My estates, you know, are in Scotland.'

'These changes are all strange and most startling,' said she, with a sob in her slender throat.

'We live in whirligig times, Dulcie; but I suppose it is the result of progress,' he added sententiously. 'I wonder how our grandfathers and grandmothers contrived to mope over and yawn out their dull and emotionless existence till they reached threescore and ten years.'

'Who knows; though life, however sweet now, won't be worth living for then, I fancy.'

Dulcie sighed, and he regarded her in admiring silence, for he had a high appreciation of her bright and delicate beauty, and loved her—if we may degrade the phrase—in his own selfish and peculiar way, though now resolved—as he had often thought vainly—to 'fly at higher game;' and so, full of ideas, hopes, and ambitions of his own, if he had ceased to think of Dulcie, he had, at least, ceased for a space to trouble her.

'Wouldn't approve, of course. My farewell advice to you, Dulcie, is—Don't put off your time thinking of Florian—his ship will never come home.'

'I have read somewhere that ships of the kind rarely do come home in this prosaic and disappointing world; that some get wrecked almost within sight of land; others go down without the flapping of a sail, and sometimes after long and firm battling with adverse winds and tides; but my ship is a sure craft, Dulcie,' he added, as he thought of the packet in his possession—that precious packet on which all his hopes rested and his daring ambition was founded.

'Why is he so sure? But his ideas were always selfish and evil. Tide what may,' she added aloud, 'I shall wait twenty years and more for Florian.'

'And if he never can marry you—or marries some one else when he can?' asked Shafto viciously.

'Oh, then I'll take to æstheticism, or women's rights, and all that sort of thing,' said the poor girl, with a ghastly and defiant attempt at a jest, which ended in tears, while Shafto eyed her angrily.

'Is that the reason you wear it with all kinds of dresses? What is in it—anything?'

'That is my secret,' replied Dulcie, putting her right hand on it and instinctively drawing back a pace, for there was a menacing expression in the cold grey eyes of Shafto.

'Never!' exclaimed Dulcie, her eyes sparkling now as his grasp upon her hand tightened.

An imprecation escaped Shafto, and with his eyes aflame and his cheeks pale with jealousy and rage he tore her hand aside and wrenched by brutal force the locket from her, breaking the silver necklet as he did so.

'Coward!' exclaimed Dulcie; 'coward and thief—how dare you? Surrender that locket instantly!'

'Not if I know it,' said he, mockingly, holding the prized trinket before her at arm's length.

'Your own, for you wouldn't like to have your old pump of a father down on you; and so you dare not make a row about it, my pretty little fury.'

'Shafto, I entreat you, give me back that photo,' said Dulcie, her tears welling forth.

'More than you imagine,' said Shafto, to whom a villainous idea just then occurred.

'I entreat you,' said Dulcie, letting her muff drop and clasping her slim little hands.

'This robbery is cruel and infamous!' exclaimed Dulcie, trembling with grief and just indignation; but Shafto only laughed in anger and bitterness—and a very hyena-like laugh it was, and as some one was coming down the secluded lane, he turned away and left her in the twilight.

He felt himself safe from opprobrium and punishment, as he knew well she was loth to make any complaint to her father on the subject; and just then she knew not how to communicate with Florian, as the darkness was falling fast, and the hour of his departure was close at hand. She thought it not improbable that Shafto would relent and return the locket to her; but the night was far advanced ere that hope was dissipated, and she attained some outward appearance of composure, though her father's sharp and affectionate eyes detected that she had been suffering.

He had heard from her some confused and rambling story about the family secret, the packet, and the peerage, a story of which he could make nothing, though Shafto's bearing to himself that evening seemed to confirm the idea that 'there was something in it.' Anyway, Mr. Carlyon was not indisposed to turn the event to account in one sense.

'Likely—likely enough, Dulcie lass,' said he; 'and so you'll hear no more of these two lads, if they are likely to become great folks, and belong to what is called the upper ten; they'll never think again of a poor village belle like you, though there is not a prettier face in all Devonshire than my Dulcie's from Lyme Regis to Cawsand Bay.'

He meant this kindly, and spoke with a purpose; and his words and the warning they conveyed sank bitterly into the tender heart of poor Dulcie.

By this time the cousins were sweeping through the darkness in the express train by Exeter, Taunton, and so forth; both were very silent, and each was full of his own thoughts, and what these were the reader may very well imagine.

Heedless of the covert and sneering smiles of Shafto, Florian, from time to time, drew forth the photo of Dulcie, and her shining lock of red-golden hair, his sole links between the past and the present; and already he felt as if a score of years had lapsed since they sat side by side upon the fallen tree.

Then, that he might give his whole thoughts to Dulcie, he affected to sleep; but Shafto did not sleep for hours. He sat quietly enough with his face in shadow, his travelling-cap of tweed-check pulled well down over his watchful and shifty grey-green eyes, the lamp overhead giving a miserable glimmer suited to the concealment of expression and thought; and as the swift train sped northward, the cousins addressed not a word to each other concerning those they had left behind, what was before them, or anything else.

After a time, Shafto really slept—slept the slumber which is supposed to be the reward of the just and conscientious, but which is much more often enjoyed by those who have no conscience at all.

Dulcie contrived to despatch a letter to Florian detailing the outrage to which she had been subjected by Shafto; but time passed on, and, for a reason we shall give in its place, the letter never reached him.

Again and again she recalled and rehearsed her farewell with Florian, and thought regretfully of his passionate pride, and desperate poverty too probably, if he quarrelled with Shafto; and she still seemed to see his beautiful dark eyes, dim with unshed tears, while her own welled freely and bitterly.

When could they meet again, if ever, and where and how? Her heart and brain ached with these questions.

Dulcie did not bemoan her fate, though her cheek paled a little, and she felt—even at her early years—as if life seemed over and done with, and in her passionate love for the absent, that existence alone was left to her, and so forth.

And as she was her father's housekeeper now, kept the keys and paid all the servants, paid all accounts and made the preserves, he was in no way sorry that the young men were gone; that the 'aimless philandering,' as he deemed it, had come to an end; and that much would be attended to in his cosy little household which he suspected—but unjustly—had been neglected hitherto.

To Dulcie, the whole locality of her native place, the breezy moors, the solitary hills, the mysterious Druid pillars and logan stones, the rocky shore, and the pretty estuary of the Yealm, where they had been wont to boat and fish for pilchards in summer and autumn, were all full of the haunting presence of the absent—the poor but proud and handsome lad who from boyhood, yea from infancy, had loved her, and who now seemed to have slipped out of her existence.

Spring melted into summer; golden sunshine flooded hill and dale, and lit up the waters of the Erm, the Yealm, and the far-stretching Channel, tinting with wondrous gleams and hues the waves that rolled upon the shore, or boiled about the Mewstorre Rock, and the sea-beaten promontory of Revelstoke; but to Dulcie the glory was gone from land and water: she heard no more, by letter or otherwise, of the love of her youth; he seemed to have dropped utterly out of her sphere; and though mechanically she gathered the fragrant leaves of the bursting June roses—the Marshal Neil and Gloire de Dijon—and treasured them carefully in rare old china jars and vases, a task in which she had often been assisted by Florian, she felt and thought—'Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory has departed!'

CHAPTER IX.

MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

Shafto found himself a little nervous when he and Florian were actually in Edinburgh, a city in its beauty, boldness and grandeur of rock and mountain, fortress, terrace, and temple, so foreign-looking to English eyes, and so utterly unlike everything they had ever seen or conceived before.

Florian's thoughts were peculiarly his own. His father's death—though called an uncle now, but Florian always felt for and thought of him as a parent—the loss of Dulcie, their abrupt departure from Devonshire, and rough uprootal of all early associations, had made a kind of hiatus in the young fellow's life, and it was only now when he found himself amid the strange streets and picturesque splendour of Edinburgh that he began—like one recovering consciousness after a long illness—to gather up again the ravelled threads of thought, but with curious want of concern and energy; while Shafto felt that he personally had both, and that now he required to have all his wits about him.

Florian stood for a time that night at the door of their hotel in Princes Street looking at the wonderful lights of the Old Town sparkling in mid air, and some that were in the Castle must, he thought, be stars, they were so high above the earth. Scores of cabs and carriages went by, eastward and westward, but no carts or wains or lorries, such as one sees in London or Glasgow—vehicles with bright lamps and well muffled occupants, gentlemen in evening suits, and ladies in ball or dinner dresses, and crowds of pedestrians, under the brilliant gas lights and long boulevard-like lines of trees—the ever-changing human panorama of a great city street before midnight.

How odd, how strange and lonely poor Florian felt; he seemed to belong to no one, and, like the Miller o' Dee, nobody cared for him; and ever and anon his eyes rested on the mighty castled rock that towers above streets, monuments, and gardens, with a wonderous history all its own, 'where treasured lie the monarchy's last gems,' and with them the only ancient crown in the British Isles. 'Brave kings and the fairest of crowned women have slept and been cradled in that eyrie,' says an enthusiastic English writer; 'heroes have fought upon its slopes; English armies have stormed it; dukes, earls, and barons have been immured in its strong dungeons; a sainted Queen prayed and yielded up her last breath there eight centuries ago. It is an imperishable relic—a monument that needs no carving to tell its tale, and it has the nation's worship; and the different church sects cling round its base as if they would fight again for the guardianship of a venerable mother..... And if Scotland has no longer a king and Parliament all to herself, her imperial crown is at least safely kept up there amid strong iron stanchions, as a sacred memorial of her inextinguishable independence, and, if need were, for future use.'

Florian was a reader and a thinker, and he felt a keen interest in all that now surrounded him; but Shafto lurked in a corner of the smoke-room, turning in his mind the task of the morrow, and unwisely seeking to fortify himself by imbibing more brandy and soda than Florian had ever seen him take before.

After a sound night's rest and a substantial Scottish breakfast had fitted Shafto, as he thought, for facing anything, a cab deposited him and Florian (who was now beginning to marvel why he had travelled so far in a matter that concerned him not, in reality) at the residence of Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, W.S., in Charlotte Square—a noble specimen of Adams Street architecture, having four stately symmetrical corresponding façades, overlooked by the dome of St. George's Church.

'Lawyers evidently thrive in Scotland,' said Shafto, as he looked at the mansion of Mr. Kippilaw, and mentally recalled the modest establishment of Lawyer Carlyon; 'but foxes will flourish as long as there are geese to be plucked.'

Mr. Kippilaw was at home—indeed he was just finishing breakfast, before going to the Parliament House—as they were informed by the liveried valet, who led them through a pillared and marble-floored vestibule, and ushered them into what seemed a library, as the walls from floor to ceiling were lined with handsome books; but every professional man's private office has generally this aspect in Scotland.

In a few minutes Mr. Kippilaw appeared with a puzzled and perplexed expression in his face, as he alternatively looked at his two visitors, and at Shafto's card in his hand.

Mr. Kippilaw was now in his sixtieth year; his long since grizzled hair had now become white, and had shrunk to two patches far apart, one over each ear, and brushed stiffly up. His eyebrows were also white, shaggy, and under them his keen eyes peered sharply through the rims of a gold pince-nez balanced on the bridge of his long aquiline nose.

Shafto felt just then a strange and unpleasant dryness about his tongue and lips.

'Mr. Shafto Melfort?' said Mr. Kippilaw inquiringly, and referring to the card again. 'I was not aware that there was a Mr. Shafto Melfort—any relation of Lord Fettercairn?'

'This gentleman with the dark eyes?' asked Mr. Kippilaw, turning to the silent Florian.

'You are most unlike the family, who have always been remarkable for regularity of features. Then you are the son—of—of—'

'On the west coast of Devonshire, near Revelstoke, where he had long resided under the assumed name of MacIan.'

'And this young gentleman, whose face and features seem curiously familiar to me, though I never saw him before, he is your brother of course.'

'No, my cousin, the son of my aunt Mrs. Gyle. I am an only son, but the Major ever treated us as if he had been the father of both, so great and good was his kindness of heart.'

'Be seated, please,' said the lawyer in a breathless voice, as he seated himself in an ample leathern elbow chair at his writing-table, which was covered with documents and letters all arranged by his junior clerk in the most orderly manner.

'This is very sudden and most unexpected intelligence,' said he, carefully wiping his glasses, and subjecting Shafto's visage to a closer scrutiny again. 'Have you known all these years past the real name and position of your father, and that he left Kincardineshire more than twenty years ago after a very grave quarrel with his parents at Craigengowan?'

'No—I only learned who he was, and who we really were, when he was almost on his deathbed. He confided it to me alone, as his only son, and because I had been bred to the law; and on that melancholy occasion he entrusted me with this important packet addressed to you.'

With an expression of the deepest interest pervading his well-lined face, Mr. Kippilaw took the packet and carefully examined the seal and the superscription, penned in a shaky handwriting, with both of which he was familiar enough, though he had seen neither for fully twenty years, and finally he examined the envelope, which looked old and yellow.

'If all be true and correct, these tidings will make some stir at Craigengowan,' he muttered as if to himself, and cut round the seal with a penknife.

'You will find ample proofs, sir, of all I have alleged,' said Shafto, who now felt that the crisis was at hand.

Mr. Kippilaw, with growing interest and wonder, drew forth the documents and read and re-read them slowly and carefully, holding the papers, but not offensively, between him and the light to see if the dates and water-marks tallied.

'The slow way this old devil goes on would exasperate an oyster!' thought Shafto, whose apparently perfect coolness and self-possession rather surprised and repelled the lawyer.

There were the certificate of Lennard's marriage with Flora MacIan, which Mr. Kippilaw could remember he had seen of old; the 'certificate of entry of birth of their son, born at Revelstoke at 6 h. 50 m. on the 28th October P.M., 18—,' signed by the Registrar, and the Major's farewell letter to his old friend, entrusting his son and his son's interests to his care.

'But, hallo!' exclaimed Mr. Kippilaw, after he had read for the second time, and saw that the letter of Lennard Melfort was undoubtedly authentic, 'how comes it that the whole of your Christian name is torn out of the birth certificate, and the surname Melfort alone remains?'

'There is a rough little hole in the document where the name should be. Do you know the date of your birth?' asked Mr. Kippilaw, partly covering the document with his hand, unconsciously as it were.

'Quite correct—as given here,' said Mr. Kippilaw; 'but you look old for the date of this certificate.'

Florian, who might have claimed the date as that of his own birth, was—luckily for Shafto—away at a window, gazing intently on a party of soldiers marching past, with a piper playing before them.

'Another certificate can be got if necessary,' said Mr. Kippilaw, as he glanced at the Registrar's signature, a suggestion which made Shafto's heart quake. 'It must have come from the Major in this mutilated state,' he added, re-examining with legal care and suspicion the address on the envelope and the seal, which, as we have said, he had cut round; 'but it is strange that he has made no mention of it being so in his letter to me. Poor fellow! he was more of a soldier than a man of business, however. Allow me to congratulate you, Mr. Melfort, on your new prospects. Rank and a very fine estate are before you.'

He warmly shook the hand of Shafto, who began to be more reassured; and saying, 'I must carefully preserve the documents for the inspection of Lord Fettercairn,' he locked them fast in a drawer of his writing-table, and spreading out his coat-tails before the fire, while warming his person in the fashion peculiar to the genuine 'Britisher,' he eyed Shafto benignantly, and made a few pleasant remarks on the Fettercairn family, the fertility and beauty of Craigengowan, the stables, kennels, the shootings, and so forth, and the many fine qualities of 'Leonard'—as he called him—and about whom he asked innumerable questions, all of which Shafto could answer truly and with a clear conscience enough, as he was master of all that.

The latter was asked 'what he thought of Edinburgh—if he had ever been there before,' and so forth. Shafto remembered a little 'Guide Book' into which he had certainly dipped, so as to be ready for anything, and spoke so warmly of the picturesque beauties and historical associations of the Modern Athens that the worthy lawyer's heart began to warm to so intelligent a young man, while of the silent Florian, staring out into the sun-lit square and its beautiful garden and statues, he took little notice, beyond wondering where he had seen his eyes and features before!

CHAPTER X.

ALONE IN THE WORLD.

'And you were bred to the law, you say, Mr. Melfort?' remarked the old Writer to the Signet after a pause.

'Very good—very good indeed; that is well! We generally think in Scotland that a little knowledge of the law is useful, as it teaches the laird to haud his ain; but I forgot that you are southland bred, and born too—the more is the pity—and can't understand me.'

Shafto did not understand him, but thought that his time spent in Lawyer Carlyon's office had not been thrown away now; experience there had 'put him up to a trick or two.'

'I shall write to Craigengowan by the first post,' said Mr. Kippilaw after another of those thoughtful pauses during which he attentively eyed his visitor. 'Lord and Lady Fettercairn—like myself now creeping up the vale of years—(Hope they may soon see the end of it! thought Shafto) will, I have no doubt, be perfectly satisfied by the sequence and tenor of the documents you have brought me that you are their grandson—the son of the expatriated Lennard—and when I hear from them I shall let you know the result without delay. You are putting up at—what hotel?'

'He failed to pass for the army,' said Shafto bluntly and glibly, 'so I don't know what he means to do now. I believe that he scarcely knows himself.'

'Follow the drum, most probably,' replied Florian bitterly and a little defiantly, as Shafto's coldness, amid his own great and good fortune, roused his pride and galled his heart, which sank as he thought of Dulcie Carlyon, sweet, golden-haired English Dulcie, so far away.

'I have some little influence in many ways, and if I can assist your future views you may command me, Mr. Florian,' said he with fatherly kindness, for he had reared—yea and lost—more than one fine lad of his own.

It has been said that one must know mankind very well before having the courage to be solely and simply oneself; thus, as Shafto's knowledge of mankind was somewhat limited, he felt his eye quail more than once under the steady gaze of Mr. Kippilaw.

'It is a very strange thing,' said the latter, 'that after the death of Mr. Cosmo in Glentilt, when Lord and Lady Fettercairn were so anxious to discover and recall his younger brother as the next and only heir to the title and estates, we totally failed to trace him. We applied to the War Office for the whereabouts of Major Lennard Melfort, but the authorities there, acting upon a certain principle, declined to afford any information. Advertisements, some plainly distinct, others somewhat enigmatical, were often inserted in the Scotsman and Times, but without the least avail.

'Yes,' said he, reddening, 'was no more likely to see such a provincial print in Devonshire than the Roman Diritto or the Prussian Kreuz Zeitung; and the Times, if he saw it—which I doubt—he must have ignored. Till the time of his death drew near, his feelings were bitter, his hostility to his family great.'

'I can well understand that, poor fellow!' said Mr. Kippilaw, glancing at his watch, as he added—'You must excuse me till to-morrow: I am already overdue at the Parliament House.'

'You seem to have lost your tongue, Florian, and to have a disappointed look,' said Shafto snappishly, as they walked slowly towards the hotel together.

'Disappointed I am in one sense, perhaps, but I have no reason to repine or complain save at our change of relative positions, but certainly not at your unexpected good fortune, Shafto. It is only right and just that your father's only son should inherit all that is legally and justly his.'

It was apparent, however, to Florian, that he had for some time past looked restless and uneasy, that he started and grew pale at any unusual sound, while a shadow rested on his not usually very open countenance.

Betimes next morning a note came to him at the Duke of Rothesay Hotel from Mr. Kippilaw, requesting a visit as early as possible, and on this errand he departed alone.

He found the old lawyer radiant, with a letter in his hand from Lord Fettercairn (in answer to his own) expressive of astonishment and joy at the sudden appearance of this hitherto unknown grandson, whom he was full of ardour and anxiety to see.

'You will lose no time in starting for Craigengowan,' said Mr. Kippilaw. 'You take the train at the Waverley Station and go viâ Burntisland, Arbroath, and Marykirk—or stay, I think we shall proceed together, taking your papers with us.'

'Thanks,' said Shafto, feeling somehow that the presence of Mr. Kippilaw at the coming interview would take some of the responsibility off his own shoulders.

'Craigengowan, your grandfather says, will put on its brightest smile to welcome you.'

'Very kind of Craigengowan,' said Shafto, who felt but ill at ease in his new role of adventurer, and unwisely adopted a free-and-easy audacity of manner.

'A cheque on the Bank of Scotland for present emergencies,' said Mr. Kippilaw, opening his cheque-book, 'and in two hours we shall meet at the station.'

'I would do much for your father's son, Mr. Shafto,' said the lawyer, emphatically.

'The letter ignores him—a curious omission. In their joy, perhaps Lord and Lady Fettercairn forgot. But, by the way, here is a letter for him that came by the London mail.'

'A letter for him!' said Shafto, faintly, while his heart grew sick with apprehension, he knew not of what.

'Mr. Florian's face is strangely familiar to me,' said Mr. Kippilaw aloud; but to himself, 'Dear me, dear me, where can I have seen features like his before? He reminds me curiously of Lennard Melfort.'

The letter was a bulky one, and bore the Wembury and other post-marks, and to Shafto's infinite relief was addressed in the familiar handwriting of Dulcie Carlyon.

In the solitude of his own room at the hotel, he moistened and opened the gummed envelope, and drew forth four closely written sheets of paper full of the outpourings of the girl's passionate heart, of her wrath at the theft of her locket by Shafto, and mentioning that she had incidentally got the address of Mr. Kippilaw from her father, and desiring him to write to her, and she would watch for and intercept the postman by the sea-shore.

'Bosh,' muttered Shafto, as he tore up and cast into the fire Dulcie's letter, all save a postscript, written on a separate scrap of paper, and which ran thus:—

'You have all the love of my heart, Florian; but, as I feel and fear we may never meet again, I send you this, which I have worn next my heart, to keep.'

'Three stamps on all this raggabash!' exclaimed Shafto, whom the girl's terms of endearment to Florian filled with a tempest of jealous rage. He rolled the locket he had wrenched from Dulcie's neck in soft paper, and placed it with the postscript in the envelope, which he carefully closed and re-gummed, placed near the fire, and the moment it was perfectly dry he gave it to Florian.

If the latter was surprised to see a letter to himself, addressed in Dulcie's large, clear, and pretty handwriting, to the care of 'Lawyer Kippilaw,' as she called him, he was also struck dumb when he found in the envelope the locket, the likeness, and the apparently curt farewell contained in one brief sentence!

For a time he stood like one petrified. Could it all be real? Alas! there was no doubting the postal marks and stamps upon this most fatal cover; and while he was examining it and passing his hand wildly more than once across his eyes and forehead, Shafto was smoking quietly at a window, and to all appearance intent on watching the towering rock and batteries of the Castle, bathed in morning sunshine—batteries whereon steel morions and Scottish spears had often gleamed of old.

Though his soul shrank from doing so, Florian could not resist taking Shafto into his confidence about this unexplainable event; and the latter acted astonishment to the life!

Was the locket thus returned through the post in obedience to her father's orders, after he had probably discovered the contents of it?

But Shafto demolished this hope by drawing his attention to the tenor of the pithy scrap of paper, which precluded the idea that it had been done under any other influence than her own change of mind.

'Poor Florian!' sneered Shafto, as he prepared to take his departure for Craigengowan; 'now you had better proceed at once to cultivate the wear-the-willow state of mind.'

Florian made no reply. His ideas of faith and truth and of true women were suddenly and cruelly shattered now!

'She has killed all that was good in me, and the mischief of the future will be at her door!' he exclaimed, in a low and husky voice.

'Oh, Florian, don't say that,' said Shafto, who actually did feel a little for him; and just then, when they were on the eve of separation, even his false and artful heart did feel a pang, with the sting of fear, at the career of falsehood to which he had committed himself; but his ambition, innate greed, selfishness, and pride urged him on that career steadily and without an idea of flinching.

After Mr. Kippilaw's remarks concerning how the face of Florian interested him, and actually that he bore a likeness to the dead Major—to his own father, in fact—Shafto became more than desirous to be rid of him in any way. He thought with dread of the discovery and fate of 'the Claimant,' and of the fierce light thrown by the law on that gigantic imposture; but genuine compunction he had none!

'Well,' he muttered, as he drove away from the hotel with his portmanteau, 'I must keep up this game at all hazards now. I have stolen—not only Florian's name—but his place, so let him paddle his own canoe!'

'I'll write you from Craigengowan,' were his parting words—a promise which he never fulfilled. Shafto, who generally held their mutual purse now, might have offered to supply the well-nigh penniless lad with money, but he did not. He only longed to be rid of him—to hear of him no more. He had a dread of his presence, of his society, of his very existence, and now had but one hope, wish, and desire—that Florian Melfort should cross his path never again. And now that he had achieved a separation between him and Dulcie, he conceived that Florian would never again go near Revelstoke, of which he—Shafto—had for many reasons a nervous dread!

Full of Dulcie and her apparently cruel desertion of him, which he considered due to calm consideration of his change of fortune—or rather total want of it—Florian felt numbly indifferent to the matter Shafto had in hand and all about himself.

While very nearly moved to girlish tears at parting from one with whom he had lived since infancy—with whom he had shared the same sleeping-room, shared in the same sports and studies—with whom he had read the same books to some extent, and had ever viewed as a brother—Florian was rather surprised, even shocked, by the impatience of that kinsman, the only one he had in all the wide world, to part from him and begone, and to see he was calm and hard as flint or steel.

'Different natures have different ways of showing grief, I suppose,' thought the simple Florian; 'or can it be that he still has a grudge at me because of the false but winsome Dulcie? If affection for me is hidden in his heart, it is hidden most skilfully.' No letter ever came from Craigengowan. The pride of Florian was justly roused, and he resolved that he would not take the initiative, and attempt to open a correspondence with one who seemed to ignore him, and whose manner at departing he seemed to see more clearly and vividly now.

The fact soon became grimly apparent. He could not remain idling in such a fashionable hotel as the Duke of Rothesay, so he settled his bill there, and took his portmanteau in his hand, and issued into the streets—into the world, in fact.

CHAPTER XI.

SHAFTO IN CLOVER.

About six months had elapsed since Shafto and Florian parted, as we have described, at Edinburgh.

It was June now. The luxurious woods around Craigengowan were in all their leafy beauty, and under their shadows the dun deer panted in the heat as they made their lair among the feathery braken; the emerald green lawn was mowed and rolled till it was smooth as a billiard-table and soft as three-pile velvet.

The air was laden with the wafted fragrance of roses and innumerable other flowers; and the picturesque old house, with its multitude of conical turrets furnished with glittering vanes, its crow-stepped gables and massive chimneys, stood boldly up against the deep blue sky of summer; and how sweetly peaceful looked the pretty village, seen in middle distance, through a foliated vista in the woodlands, with the white smoke ascending from its humble hearths, the only thing that seemed to be stirring there; and how beautiful were the colours some of its thatched roofs presented—greenest moss, brown lichen, and stonecrop, now all a blaze of gold, while the murmur of a rivulet (a tributary of the Esk), that gurgled under its tiny arch, 'the auld brig-stane' of Lennard's boyhood, would be heard at times, amid the pleasant voices of some merrymakers on the lawn, amid the glorious shrubberies, and belts of flowers below the stately terrace, that had long since replaced the moat that encircled the old fortified mansion, from whence its last Jacobite lord had ridden forth to fight and die for James VIII., on the field of Sheriffmuir—King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, as the unflinching Jacobites had it.

A gay and picturesquely dressed lawn-tennis party was busy tossing the balls from side to side among several courts; but apart from all, and almost conspicuously so—a young fellow, in a handsome light tennis suit of coloured flannels, and a beautiful girl were carrying on a very palpable flirtation.

The gentleman was Shafto, and his companion was Finella Melfort, Cosmo's orphan daughter (an heiress through her mother), who had returned a month before from a protracted visit in Tyburnia. They seemed to be on excellent terms with each other, and doubtless the natural gaiety of the girl's disposition, her vivacity of manner, and their supposed mutual relationship, had opened the way to speedy familiarity.

She was a dark-haired and dark-eyed, but very white-skinned little beauty, with a perfect mignonne face, a petite but round and compact figure, gracefully formed, and very coquettish and spirituelle in all her ways.

She had received her peculiar Christian name at the special request of her grandfather, that silly peer being desirous that her name might go down in the peerage in connection with that of the famous Finella of Fettercairn.

'A winsome pair they would make,' was the smiling remark of Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, who was of the party (with three romping daughters from Edinburgh), to Lord Fettercairn, who smirked a grim assent, as if it was a matter of indifference to him, which it was not, as his legal adviser very well knew; and my Lady Drumshoddy, who heard the remark, bestowed upon him a bright and approving smile in return for a knowing glance through the glasses of his gold pince-nez.

In Craigengowan the adventurous Shafto Gyle had found his veritable Capua—he was literally 'in clover.' Yet he never heard himself addressed by his assumed name without experiencing a strange sinking and fluttering of the heart.

The once-despised Lennard Melfort's sword, his commission, and his hard-won medals earned in Central India and the Terai of Nepaul were now looked upon as precious relics in his mother's luxurious boudoir at Craigengowan, and reclaimed from the lumber-attic, his portrait, taken in early life, was again hung in a place of honour in the dining-hall.

'What a fool my old uncle was to lose his claim on such a place as this, and all for the face of a girl!' was the exclamation of Shafto to himself when first he came to Craigengowan, and then he looked fearfully around him lest the word uncle might have been overheard by some one; and he thought—'If rascally the trick I have played my simple and love-stricken cousin—and rascally it was and is—surely it was worth while to be the heir of this place, Craigengowan. To reckon as mine in future all this grand panorama of heath-clad hills, of green and golden fields, of purple muirland, and stately woods of oak and pine where the deer rove in herds; as mine the trout-streams that flow towards the Bervie; the cascades that roar down the cliffs; the beautiful old house, with its stables, kennels, and terrace; its cellars, pictures, plate, and jewellery, old china and vases of marble and jasper, china and Japanese work; and I possess all that rank and wealth can give!' and so thought this avaricious rascal, with a capacity for evil actions far beyond his years.

To the fair inheritance he had come to steal he could not, however, add as his the blue sky above it, or the waves of the German Sea, which the North Esk flowed to join; but he was not without sense appreciative enough to enjoy the fragrance of the teeming earth, of the pine forests where the brown squirrels leaped from branch to branch, and on the mountain side the perfume of the golden whin and gorse.

Appraising everything, these ideas were ever recurring to his mind, and it was full of them now as he looked around him, and at times, like one in a dream, heard the pretty babble of the high-bred, coquettish girl, who, to amuse herself, made œillades at him; who called him so sweetly 'Cousin Shafto,' and who, with her splendid fortune, he was now beginning to include among the many goods and chattels which must one day accrue to him.

Lord and Lady Fettercairn were, of course, fully twenty years older than when we saw them last, full of wrath and indignation at Lennard for his so-called mésalliance. Both were cold in heart and self-absorbed in nature as ever. The latter was determined to be a beauty still, though now upon the confines of that decade 'when the cunning of cosmetics can no longer dissemble the retribution of Time the avenger.' The former was bald now, and the remains of his once sandy-coloured hair had become grizzled, and a multitude of puckers were about his cold, grey eyes, while there was a perceptible stoop in his whilom flat, square shoulders.

He was as full of family pride as ever, and the discovery of an unexpected and authentic heir and grandson to his title, that had never been won in the field or cabinet, but was simply the reward of bribery and corruption, and for which not one patriotic act had been performed by four generations, had given him intense satisfaction, and caused much blazing of bonfires and consumption of alcohol about the country-side; and smiles that were bright and genuine frequently wreathed the usually pale and immobile face of Lady Fettercairn when they rested on Shafto.

We all know how the weak and easy adoption of a pretender by a titled mother in a famous and most protracted case not many years ago caused the most peculiar complications; thus Lady Fettercairn was more pardonable, posted up as she was with documentary evidence, in accepting Shafto Gyle as her grandson.

We have described her as being singularly, perhaps aristocratically, cold. As a mother, she had never been given to kissing, caressing, or fondling her two sons (as she did a succession of odious pugs and lap-dogs), but, throwing their little hearts back upon themselves, left nurses and maids to 'do all that sort of tiresome thing.'

So Finella, though an heiress, came in for very little of it either, with all her sweetness, beauty, and pretty winning ways, even from Lord Fettercairn. In truth, the man who cared so little for his own country and her local and vital interests was little likely to care much for any flesh and blood that did not stand in his own boots.

Lady Fettercairn heard from her 'grand-son' from time to time with—for her—deep apparent sympathy, and much genuine aristocratic regret and indignation, much of the obscure story of his boyhood and past life, at least so much as he chose to tell her; and she bitterly resented that Lennard Melfort should have sought to put the 'nephew of that woman, Flora MacIan,' into the army, while placing 'his own son' Shafto into the office of a miserable village lawyer, and so forth—and so forth!

Fortunate it was, she thought, that all this happened in an obscure village in Devonshire, and far away from Craigengowan and all its aristocratic surroundings.

She also thought it strange that Shafto—('Whence came that name?' she would mutter angrily)—should be so unlike her dark and handsome Lennard. His eyebrows were fair and heavy; his eyes were a pale, watery grey; his lips were thin, his neck thick, and his hair somewhat sandy in hue. Thus, she thought, he was not unlike what her husband, the present Lord Fettercairn, must have been at the same age.

As for the Peer himself, he was only too thankful that an heir had turned up for his ill-gotten coronet, and that now—so far as one life was concerned—Sir Bernard Burke would not rate it among the dormant and attainted titles—those of the best and bravest men that Scotland ever knew.

As for their mutual scheme concerning Shafto and their granddaughter Finella, with her beauty and many attractive parts, the former was craftily most desirous of furthering it, knowing well that, happen what might in the future, she was an heiress; that marriage with her would give him a firm hold on the Fettercairn family, though the money of her mother was wisely settled on the young lady herself.

Indeed, Finella had not been many weeks home from London, at Craigengowan, before Lady Fettercairn opened the trenches, and spoke pretty plainly to him on the subject.

Waving her large fan slowly to and fro, and eyeing Shafto closely over the top of it, she said:

'I hope, my dearest boy, that you will find your cousin Finella—the daughter of my dead darling Cosmo—a lovable kind of girl. But even were she not so—and all say she is—you must not feel a prejudice against her, because—because——'

'Why, haven't I money enough?' asked Shafto, with one of his dissembling smiles.

'Of course, as the heir of Fettercairn; but one is always the better to have more, and you must not feel——'

'Please not to interrupt me thus. I mean that you must not be prejudiced against her as an expected parti.'

'In novels, I suppose; but as she is so pretty and eligible, why the dickens——'

'What now?' he asked, with some irritability, as she often took him to task for his solecisms.

'Dickens is not a phrase to use. Exclamations that were suited to the atmosphere of Mr. Carlyon's office in Devonshire will not do in Craigengowan!'

'Oh, you flattering pet!' exclaimed my Lady Fettercairn, with a smile and pleased flush on her old wrinkled face, for her 'pet' had soon discovered that she was far from insensible to adulation.

Shafto certainly availed himself of the opportunities afforded by 'cousinship,' propinquity, and residence together in a country house, and sought to gain a place in the good graces or heart of Finella; but with all his cunning and earnest wishes in the matter—apart from the wonderful beauty of the girl—he feared that he made no more progress with her than he had done with Dulcie Carlyon.

She talked, played, danced, and even romped with him; they rambled and read together, and were as much companions as any two lovers would be; but he felt nearly certain that though she flirted with him, because it was partly her habit to appear to do so with most men, whenever he attempted to become tender she openly laughed at him or changed the subject skilfully; and also that if he essayed to touch or take her hand it was very deliberately withdrawn from his reach, and never did she make him more sensible of all this than when he contrived to draw her aside to the terrace on the afternoon of the lawn-tennis party.

She had long ere this been made perfectly aware that love and marriage were objects of all his attention, yet she amused herself with him by her coquettish œillades and waggish speeches.

'Finella,' said he, in a low and hesitating voice, as he stooped over her, 'I hope that with all your flouting, and pretty, flippant mode of treating me, you will see your way to carry out the fondest desire of my heart and that of our grandparents.'

'Such a fearfully elaborate speech! And the object to which I am to see my way is to marry you, cousin Shafto?'

'Firstly, people should marry to please themselves, not others. Grandpapa and grandmamma did, and so shall I; and I am quite independent enough to do as I please and choose.'

'I have not said so, you tiresome Shafto!' said she, looking upward at him with one of her sweetest and most bewitching smiles.

His fair beetling eyebrows knit, and a gleam came into his cold, grey eyes as he asked, after a pause:

'You have no right to inquire,' replied she, and a keener observer might have detected that his question brought a tiny blush to her cheek and a fond smile to her curved lips; 'so please to let this matter drop, once and for ever, dear Shafto, and we can be such delightful friends—such jolly cousins.'

And so ended one of many such conversations on this topic—conversations that developed indifference, if not quite aversion, on the part of Finella, the clue to which Shafto was fated to find in a few weeks after.

CHAPTER XII.

VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY.

The persistent attentions of Shafto were alternately a source of amusement and worry to Finella Melfort; and when she found them become the latter, she had more than once retreated to the residence of her maternal grandmother, Lady Drumshoddy, though she infinitely preferred being at Craigengowan, where the general circle was more refined and of a much better style; for Lady Drumshoddy—natheless her title—was not quite one of the 'upper ten,' being only the widow of an advocate, who, having done without scruple the usual amount of work to please his party and the Lord Advocate, had been rewarded therefor by an appointment (and knighthood) in Bengal, where he had gone, at a lucky time, with the old advice and idea—

'They bade me from the Rupee Tree
Pluck India's endless riches,
And then I swore that time should see
Huge pockets in my breeches.'

Thus Sir Duncan Drumshoddy's pockets were so well filled that when he came home to die, his daughter was heiress enough to be deemed a 'great catch' by the Fettercairn family, though her grandfather had been—no one knew precisely what.

And now Finella, by education, careful training, and by her own habit of thought, was naturally so refined that, with all her waggery and disposition to laughter and merriment, Shafto's clumsy love-speeches occasionally irritated her.

'I have somewhere read,' said he, 'that a man may get the love of the girl he wants, even if she cares little for him, if he only asks her at the right time; but, so far as you are concerned, Finella, the right moment has not come for me, I suppose.'

'Nor ever will come, I fear, cousin Shafto,' she replied, fanning herself, and eyeing him with mingled fun and defiance sparkling in her dark eyes.

Ere Shafto could resume on this occasion Lord Fettercairn came hurriedly to him, saying,

'Oh, by-the-bye, young Hammersley, from London, will arrive here to-morrow for a few weeks' grouse-shooting before he leaves for his regiment in Africa. You will do your best to be attentive to him, Shafto.'

'Of course,' said the latter, rather sulkily, however, all the more so that he was quick enough to detect that, at the mention of the visitor's name, a flush like a wave of colour crossed the cheek of Finella.

'After the 12th I hope you will find a legitimate use for your gun—you know what I mean.'

Shafto coloured deeply with annoyance, as his grandfather referred to a mischievous act of his, which was deemed a kind of outrage in the neighbourhood.

In the ruins of Finella's Castle at Fettercairn a pair of majestic osprey had built their nest, guarded by the morass around them, and there they bred and reared a pair of beautiful eaglets. No one had been allowed to approach them, so that nothing should occur to break the confidence of safety which the pair of osprey acquired in their lonely summer haunt, till soon after Shafto came to Craigengowan, and by four rounds from his breech-loader he contrived to shoot them all, to the indignation of the neighbourhood and even of my Lord Fettercairn.

Not that the latter cared a straw about these eagles as objects of natural history; but the fact of their existence formed the subject of newspaper paragraphs, and his vanity was wounded on finding that one of his family had acted thus.

So on the morrow, at luncheon, the family circle at Craigengowan had two or three accessions to its number—friends invited for the 12th of August—among others Mr. Kippilaw the younger, a spruce and dapper Edinburgh Writer to the Signet, 'who,' Shafto said, 'thought no small beer of himself;' and Vivian Hammersley, a captain of the Warwickshire regiment, a very attractive and, to one who was present, most decided addition to their society.

His regular features were well tanned by the sun in Natal; his dark hair was shorn short; his moustaches were pointed well out; and his dark eyes had a bright and merry yet firm and steady expression, as those of a man born to command men, who had more than once faced danger, and was ready to face it again.

He was in his twenty-seventh year, and was every way a courteous and finished English gentleman, though Shafto, in his secret heart, and more than once in the stables, pronounced him to be 'a conceited beast.'

Hammersley had fished in Norway, shot big game in Southern Africa, hunted in the English shires, taking his fences—even double ones—like a bird; he had lost and won with a good grace at Ascot and the Clubs, flirted 'all round,' and, though far from rich, was a good specimen of a handsome, open-handed, and open-hearted young officer, a favourite with all women, and particularly with his regiment.

After luncheon he was seated beside Lady Fettercairn; he was too wise in his generation to have placed himself where he would have wished, beside Finella, whose little hand, on entering, Shafto thought he retained in his rather longer than etiquette required; for if Shafto's eyes were shifty, they were particularly sharp, and he soon found that though Finella, to a certain extent, had filled up her time by flirting in a cousinly way with himself, 'now that this fellow Hammersley had come,' he was 'nowhere' as he thought, with a very bad word indeed.

We have said that Finella had paid a protracted and—to her—most enjoyable visit to Tyburnia. There at balls, garden parties, and in the Row she had met Vivian Hammersley repeatedly; and these meetings had not been without a deep and tender interest to them both; and when they were parted finally by her return to Craigengowan, though no declaration of regard had escaped him, he had been burning to speak to her in that sweet and untutored language by which the inmost secrets of the loving heart can be read; and now that they had met again, they had a thousand London objects to talk about safely in common, which made them seem to be what they were, quite old friends in fact, and erelong Lady Fettercairn began, like Shafto, to listen and look darkly and doubtfully on.

But when they were alone, which was seldom, or merely apart from others, there was between them a new consciousness now—a secret but sweet understanding, born of eye speaking to eye—all the sweeter for its secrecy and being all their own, a conscious emotion that rendered them at times almost afraid to speak or glance lest curious eyes or ears might discover what that secret was.

What was to be the sequel to all this? Hammersley was far from rich according to the standard of wealth formed by Lady Fettercairn, and the latter had destined her granddaughter with all her accumulated wealth to be the bride of Shafto. Hammersley knew nothing of this; he only knew his own shortcoming in the matter of 'pocketability;' but then youth, we are told, 'is sanguine and full of faith and hope in an untried future. It looks out over the pathway of life towards the goal of its ambition, seeing only the end desired, and giving little or no heed to hills and dales, storms and accidents, that may be met with on the way.' So, happy in the good fortune that threw him once more in the sweet society of bright Finella Melfort, Captain Hammersley gave full swing in secret to the most delightful of day-dreams.

But, like a wise man, while the luncheon lasted he was most attentive to his hostess, from whose old but still handsome face, like that of Tennyson's Maud, 'so faultily faultless, icily regular, and splendidly null,' he ever and anon turned to that of Finella—that mignonne face, which was so full of varying expression, warmth, light, and colour.

'Try that Madeira, Captain Hammersley,' said Lord Fettercairn. 'You will scarcely credit how long I have had it in the cellar. I bought a whole lot of it—when was it, Grapeston?' he asked, turning to the solemn old butler behind him.

'Everything at Craigengowan seems to take date before or after that event,' said Lord Fettercairn, with knitted brow. 'Do you mean for India, Grapeston?'

'Yes, my lord,' replied the butler, who had carried 'Master Lennard' in his arms as a baby.

And now, understanding that Shafto was to be his chief companion at the covies on the morrow, Hammersley talked to him of hammerless guns, of central fire, of the mode of breaking in dogs, training setters, and so forth; and as these subjects had not been included in Shafto's education at Lawyer Carlyon's office, he almost yawned as he listened with irritation to what he could not comprehend.

'If you care for fishing, Hammersley,' said Lord Fettercairn, 'the Bervie yields capital salmon, sea and yellow trout. Finella has filled more than one basket with the latter, but Shafto is somewhat of a duffer with his rod—he breaks many a rod, and has never landed a salmon yet.'

'Well, the best in the county are Drumtochty, Fasque, Hobseat, and my own, as I hope you will find to-morrow.'

'I have close on 5,000 acres, and the probable bag of grouse and black game is from 400 to 500 brace.'

After dinner that evening Finella was found singing at the piano—singing, as she always did, without requiring pressure and apparently for the mere pleasure of it, as a thrush on a rose bush sings; but now she sang for Vivian Hammersley, Shafto felt instinctively that she did so, and his bitterness was roused when he heard her, in a pause, whisper:

'Please, Captain Hammersley, let Shafto turn the leaves. He likes to do it, though he can do little else in the way of music.'

This kind of confidence seemed to imply foregone conclusions and a mutual understanding, however slight; but, to some extent, Finella had a kind of dread of Shafto.

Hammersley smiled and drew back, after placing a piece of music before her; but not before remarking:

'No—it is old as the days when George IV. was king—it is one you gave me some weeks ago in London, you remember?'

'Turn the leaves, Shafto, please,' said Finella, adjusting her dress over the music-stool; 'but don't talk to me.'

'Captain Hammersley will do that better than I,' said Shafto, drawing almost sulkily away, while the former resumed his place by Finella, with an unmistakable smile rippling over his face.

This song, which, it would seem, Hammersley had given her, was an old one, long since forgotten, named the 'Trysting Place,' and jealous anger gathered in Shafto's heart as he listened and heard Hammersley's voice blend with Finella's in the last line of each verse:

'We met not in the sylvan scene
    Where lovers wish to meet,
Where skies are bright and woods are green,
    And bursting blossoms sweet;
But in the city's busy din,
    Where Mammon holds his reign,
Sweet intercourse we sought to win
    'Mid fashion, guile, and gain;
Above us was a murky sky,
    Around a crowded space,
Yet dear, my love, to thee and me,
    Was this, our trysting place.'

'They are who say Love only dwells
    'Mid sunshine, light, and flowers;
Alike to him are gloomy cells
    Or gay and smiling bowers;
Love works not on insensate things
    His sweet and magic art;
No outward shrine arrests his wings,
    His home is in the heart;
And dearest hearts like thine and mine,
    With rapture must retrace—
How often Love has deigned to shine
    On this our trysting place.'

'Miss Melfort, you have sung it more sweetly than ever!' said Hammersley in a low voice as he bent over her.

'Confound him!' muttered Shafto to himself; 'where was this trysting place? I feel inclined to put a charge of shot into him to-morrow. I will, too, if the day is foggy!'

Finella, though pressed, declined to sing more, as the Misses Kippilaw, who were rather irrepressible young ladies, now proposed a carpet-dance, and she drew on her gloves; and while she fumbled away, almost nervously, with the buttoning of one, she knew that Hammersley's eyes were lovingly and admiringly bent on her, till he came to the rescue, and did the buttoning required; and to Shafto it seemed the process was a very protracted one, and was a pretty little connivance, as in reality it was.

Miss Prim, Lady Fettercairn's companion, was summoned, and she—poor creature—had to furnish music for the occasion, till at last Finella good-naturedly relieved her.

So a carpet-dance closed the evening, and then Shafto, though an indifferent waltzer, thought he might excel in a square dance with Finella; but he seldom shone in conversation at any time, and on this occasion his attempts at it proved a great failure, and when he compared this with the animation of Hammersley and Finella in the Lancers, he was greatly puzzled and secretly annoyed. The former did not seem to undergo that agony so often felt by Shafto, of having out-run all the topics of conversation, or to have to rack his brain for anecdotes or jokes, but to be able to keep up an easy flow of well-bred talk on persons, places, and things, which seemed to amuse Finella excessively, as she smiled brightly and laughed merrily while fanning herself, and looking more sparkling and piquante than ever.

'What the deuce can he find to say to her?' thought Shafto; but Hammersley was only finding the links—the threads of a dear old story begun in London months ago.

So passed the first day of Hammersley's arrival at Craigengowan, and Finella laid her head on her pillow full of bright and happy thoughts, in which 'Cousin Shafto' bore no share.

But while these emotions and events were in progress, where, in the meantime, was Florian? Ay, Shafto Gyle, where?

CHAPTER XIII.

AMONG THE GROUSE.

Nathless the vengeful thoughts of the unamiable Shafto and his threats muttered in secret, the shooting next day passed off without any peril being encountered by the unconscious Hammersley—unconscious at least of the enmity his presence was inspiring. However, it was not so the second; and Finella and her fair friends agreed that if he looked so well and handsome in his heather-coloured knickerbocker shooting-dress, with ribbed stockings of Alloa yarn, his gun under his arm, and shot-belt over his shoulder, how gallant must he look when in full uniform.

In the field the vicinity of Shafto was avoided as much as possible, as he shot wildly indeed. By the gamekeepers, servants, and people generally on the estate he was simply detested for the severity of his manner, his tyranny, his disposition to bully, and meanness in every way; though at first, when he came to Craigengowan, they had laboured in vain, and vied with each other in their attempts to initiate him into those field-sports so dear to Britons generally, and to the Scots in particular; but when shooting grouse especially, the beaters or 'drivers' had genuine dread of him, and, when fog was on, sometimes refused to attend him, and he was, as they said among themselves, 'a new experience i' the Howe o' the Mearns.'

'I've seen as fu' a haggis toomed on a midden,' said the old head-gamekeeper wrathfully, as he drew his bonnet over his beetling brows, 'but I'll keep my mind to mysel', and tell my tale to the wind that blaws o'er Craigengowan.'

Though well past sixty now, Lord Fettercairn, hale and hearty, was in the field with his central-fire gun with fine Damascus barrels. Shafto, Hammersley, young Kippilaw, and four others made up the party.

The morning was a lovely one, and lovely too was the scenery, for August is a month richly tinted with the last touches of summer, blended with the russet tones of autumn; the pleasant meadows are yet green, and over the ripened harvest the breeze murmurs like the ocean when nearly asleep.

Apart from the joyous exhilaration of shooting, and that out-door exercise so dear to every English gentleman, Vivian Hammersley felt all that which comes from the romantic beauty of his surroundings—the scenery of the Howe of the Mearns, which is a low champaign and highly cultivated country, studded with handsome mansions, and ornamented by rich plantations and thriving villages.

Ere long the open muirs were reached, and the hill-sides, the steep, purple ridges of which the sportsmen had to breast; and, keen sportsman though he was, Hammersley had soon to admit that grouse-shooting was the most fatiguing work he had yet encountered; but soon came the excitements of the first point, the first brood, and the first shot or two.

To the eye chiefly accustomed to brown partridges, grouse look dusky and even black, and they seem to hug the purple heather, but when one becomes accustomed to them they are as easy to knock over as the tame birds; and now the crack of the guns began to ring out along the hill-slopes.

Shafto and Hammersley were about twenty yards apart, and twice when a bird rose before the latter, it was brought down wounded but not killed by the former.

Hammersley felt that this was 'bad form,' as Shafto should not have fired, unless he had missed or passed it; but he only bit his lip and smiled disdainfully. Lord Fettercairn remarked the discourtesy, and added,

'He kills his game clean—few birds run from him with broken wings and so forth.'

'I am glad to hit when I can,' said Shafto, whose mode of life in Devonshire had made him rather soft, and he was beginning to think that nerves of iron and lungs like a bagpipe were requisite for breasting up the hill-slopes, and then shoot straight at anything.

Hammersley worked away silently, neither looking to his right nor left, feeling that though several elements are requisite for 'sport,' the chief then was to kill as much grouse as possible in a given time, but was more than once irritated and discomposed by Shafto, and even young Kippilaw, shooting in a blundering way along the line even when the birds were not flying high; and he proceeded in a workmanlike way to bring down one bird as it approached, the next when it was past him, and so on.

The first portion of the day the Fettercairn party shot to points, and then to drivers, and in their fear of Shafto's wild shooting, the latter kept shouting while driving, and, as he loathed the whole thing, and was now 'completely blown—pumped out,' as he phrased it, he was not sorry when the magic word 'lunch' was uttered; and Hammersley certainly hailed it, for with the lunch came Finella, and with her arrival—to him—the most delightful part of the day.

She came tooling along the sunny pathway that traversed the bottom of a glen, driving with her tightly gauntleted and deft little hands a pair of beautiful white ponies, which drew the daintiest of basket-phaetons, containing also Mr. Grapeston and an ample luncheon-basket; and the place chosen for halting was a green oasis amid the dark heather, where a spring of deliciously cool water was bubbling up, called Finella's Well.

'Now, gentlemen,' said Lord Fettercairn, 'please to draw your cartridges. I was once nearly shot in this very place by a stupid fellow who omitted to do so. So glad you have come, Finella darling, we are all hungry as hawks, and thirsty too.'

Lovely indeed did the piquante girl look in her coquettish hat and well-fitting jacket, while the drive, the occasion, and the touch of Hammersley's hand as he assisted her to alight gave her cheek an unwonted colour, and lent fresh lustre to her dark eyes, and the soldier thought that certainly there was nothing in the world so pleasant to a man's eye as a young, well-dressed, and beautiful girl.

'You have had good sport,' said she to the group, while her eye rested on Hammersley, and then on the rows of grouse laid by braces on the grass; and she 'brought a breeze with her,' as the gentlemen thought, and had a pleasant remark for each. Her mode of greeting the members of the party was different, as to some she gave her hand like a little queen, while to others she smiled, or simply bowed; but provoked an angry snort from Shafto by expressing a hope that he 'had not shot anyone yet.'

And then he grew white as he recalled his angry thoughts of the preceding night.

'Because I chose to come; and I do so love driving these plump darlings of ponies,' replied the girl, patting the sleek animals with her tiny, slim hand.

'Old Grapeston would have done well enough; and why did you not bring one of the Kippilaw girls?'

'They are at lawn-tennis. If I thought I could please you—not an easy task—I should have tried to bring them all, though that is rather beyond the capacities of my phaeton.'

Shafto never for a moment doubted that she had come over to superintend the luncheon because 'that fellow Hammersley' was one of the party; and in this suspicion perhaps he was right.

As for Hammersley, being ignorant of Shafto's antecedents, his present hopes, and those of Lady Fettercairn, he could not comprehend how the grandson and heir-apparent of a peer came to be 'such bad form—bad style, and all that sort of thing,' as he thought; and all that became rather worse when Shafto was under the influence of sundry bumpers of iced Pommery Greno administered by Mr. Grapeston.

As the sportsmen lounged on the grass, and the luncheon proceeded under the superintendence of old Jasper Grapeston, Finella, the presiding goddess, looked unusually bright and happy—a consummation which Shafto never doubted, in his rage and jealousy, came of the presence of Vivian Hammersley, and that her brilliance was all the result of another man's society—not his certainly, and hence he would have preferred that she was not light-hearted at all.

He could see that with all her espieglerie Finella found no occasion to laugh at Hammersley or tease or snub that gentleman as she did himself, but the attentions of Hammersley were delicately and seductively paid. Deferential and gentle at all times, to all women, he had always been so to Finella Melfort, and she was able to feel more than his words, looks, or manner suggested to others; and he imagined—nay, he was becoming certain—and a glow of great joy came with the certainty—that Finella's sweet dark eyes grew brighter at his approach; that a rose-leaf tinge crossed her delicate cheek, and there came a slight quiver into her voice when she replied to him,

Fate was soon to decide that which he had been too slow or timid to decide for himself.

But looks can say so much more than the voice, the eyes surpassing the lips, breaking or revealing what the silence of months, it may be years, has hidden, and leading heart to heart.

'Grandpapa,' said Finella, suddenly, and just before driving off, 'do you shoot over this ground to-morrow?'

'So, then, this shall be our trysting-place!' said she, with a bow to all, and a merry glance which included most certainly Vivian Hammersley, to whom the landscape seemed to darken with her departure.

'Now is the time for shooting to advantage,' said Lord Fettercairn, who knew by old experience that when the afternoon shadows, and more especially those of evening, begin to lengthen, the slopes of the hills are seen better, that the birds, too, lie better, and that as the air becomes more fresh and cool, men can shoot with greater care and deliberation than in the heat of noon. But Hammersley, full of his own thoughts, full of the image of Finella and that tale-telling glance they had exchanged, missed nearly every bird, to the great exultation of Shafto, who made an incredible number of bad and clumsy jokes thereon—jokes which the young Englishman heard with perfect indifference and equanimity.

Shafto, however, scarcely foresaw the result of the next day's expedition, and certainly Hammersley did not do so either.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TWO FINELLAS.

Next day, when the grouse-shooting had been in progress for an hour or two, a mishap occurred to Hammersley. He twisted his ankle in a turnip-field, fell heavily on one side, and staggered up too lame to take further share in the sport for that day at least.

'When Finella comes with the lunch in the pony-phaeton, she will drive you home,' said Lord Fettercairn, who then desired one of the beaters to give Hammersley the assistance of an arm to the well, where the repast was to be laid out as before.

When Shafto saw his rival limping he was delighted, and thought, 'This will mar his waltzing for a time at least;' but he was less delighted when he heard of Lord Fettercairn's natural suggestion.

'It is likely a cunning dodge,' was his next thought, 'to get a quiet drive with her to Craigengowan.'

And Finella's look and exclamation of alarm and interest were not lost upon him when she arrived and found Hammersley seated on the grass by the side of the well, and saw the difficulty with which he rose to greet her, propping himself upon his unloaded gun as he did so; and soft, indeed, was the blush of pleasure that crossed her delicate face when she heard of 'grandpapa's arrangement;' and certainly it met, secretly, with the entire approbation of Hammersley, who anticipated with delight the drive home with such a companion.

After a time the luncheon—though skilfully protracted by Shafto—was over, and Finella and her 'patient' were together in the phaeton, and she, with a smile and farewell bow, whipped up her petted ponies, Flirt and Fairy, whom every day she fed with apples and carrots.

Shafto thought jealously and sulkily that she was in great haste to be gone; but more sulky would he have been had he seen, or known that when once an angle of the glen was reached where the road dipped out of sight, the ponies were permitted to go at their own pace, which ere long dwindled into a walk, till they passed the vast ruined castle of Fettercairn. Finella and Hammersley were, however, if very happy, very silent, though both enjoyed the drive in the bright sunshine amid such beautiful scenery, and he quite forgot his petty misfortune in contemplating the delicate profile and long drooping eyelashes of the girl who sat beside him, and who, with a fluttering heart, was perhaps expecting the avowal that trembled on his lips, especially when he placed his hand on hers, in pretence of guiding the ponies, which broke into a rapid trot as the lodge gates were passed; and glorious as the opportunity accorded him had been, Hammersley's heart, while burning with passionate ardour, seemed to have lost all courage, for he had a sincere dread of Lady Fettercairn, and suspected that her interests were naturally centred in Shafto.

At seven-and-twenty a man, who has knocked about the world, with a regiment especially, for some nine years or so, does not fall over head and ears in love like a rash boy, or without calculating his chances of general success; and poor Hammersley, though he did not doubt achieving it with Finella herself, saw deadly rocks and breakers ahead with her family, and his spirit was a proud one. To make a declaration was to ruin or lose everything, for if the family were averse to his suit he must, he knew, quit their roof for ever, and Finella would be lost to him, for heiresses seldom elope now, save in novels; and he knew that in her circle the motives for marriage are more various and questionable than with other and untitled ranks of life. Rank and money were the chief incentives of such people as the Melforts of Fettercairn. 'Venal unions,' says an essayist, 'no doubt occur in the humbler classes, but love is more frequently the incentive, while with princes and patricians the conjugal alliance is, in nine instances out of ten, a mere matter of expedience.'

Craigengowan was reached, and not a word of the great secret that filled his heart had escaped him, for which he cursed his own folly and timidity when the drive ended, and a groom took the ponies' heads.

Yet the day was not over, nor was a fresh opportunity wanting. Lady Fettercairn and all her female quests had driven to a flower-show at the nearest town—even Mrs. Prim was gone, and the house was empty!

Everything in and about Craigengowan seemed conducive to love-talk and confidences. The great and picturesque house itself was charming. The old orchards would ere long be heavy with fruit, and were then a sight to see; on the terrace the peacocks were strutting to and fro; there were fancy arbours admirably adapted for flirtation, and a quaint old Scottish garden (with a sun and moon dial) now gay with all the flowers of August.

On a lounge near an open window facing the latter Hammersley was reclining, when Finella, after changing her driving dress, came into the drawing-room, and finely her costume suited her dark and piquante style of beauty. She wore a cream-coloured silk, profusely trimmed with filmy lace, and a cluster of scarlet flowers on the left shoulder among the lace of the collarette that encircled her slender neck; and Hammersley, as he looked at her, thought that 'beauty unadorned' was rather a fallacy.

His undisguised expression of admiration as he partly rose to receive her caused her to colour a little, as she inquired if his hurt was easier now; but, instead of replying, he said, while venturing slightly to touch her hand:

'Tell me, Miss Melfort, how you came by your dear pretty name of Finella? Not from Finella in "Peveril of the Peak"?'

'But neither dumb nor pretending to be so,' said the girl, with one of her silvery little laughs.

'Finella!' said Hammersley, as if to himself, in a low and unconsciously loving tone; 'whence the name? Is it a family one?'

'Of course you could not know. The origin of my name is one of the oldest legends of the Howe of the Mearns.'

'No; "hollow" is the English for howe,' replied Finella, laughing, as she recalled a quip of Boucicault's to the same purpose. 'You saw the great old castle we passed in our drive home?'

'No joke at all,' said she, quite seriously; 'you can read about it in our family history—or I shall read it to you in the "Book of Fettercairn."'

She took from a table near a handsome volume, which her grandfather—to please whom she was named Finella—had in a spirit of family vanity prepared for private circulation, and as if to connect his title with antiquity, prefaced by a story well known in ancient Scottish history, though little known to the Scots of the present day.

We give it from his Lordship's book verbatim as she read it to Vivian Hammersley, who—cunning rogue—was not indisposed with such a charming and sympathetic companion as Finella to make the most of his fall, and reclined rather luxuriously on the velvet lounge, while she, seated in a dainty little chair, read on; but he scarcely listened, so intent was he on watching her sweet face, her white and perfect ears, her downcast eyelids with their long lashes—her whole self!

The Melforts, Lords Fettercairn (Strathfinella) and of that Ilk, take their hereditary title from the old castle of that name, which stands in the Howe of the Mearns, and is sometimes called the Castle of Finella. It is situated on an eminence, and is now surrounded on three sides by a morass. It is enclosed within an inner and an outer wall of oblong form, and occupying half an acre of ground. The inner is composed of vitrified matter, but no lime has been used in its construction. The walls are a congeries of small stones cemented together by some molten matter, now harder than the stones themselves; and the remarkable event for which this castle is celebrated in history is the following:

When Kenneth III., a wise and valiant king (who defeated the Danes at the battle of Luncarty, and created on that field the Hays, Earls of Errol, Hereditary Constables of Scotland, and leaders of the Feudal cavalry, thus originating also the noble families of Tweeddale and Kinnoull), was on the throne, his favourite residence was the castle of Kincardine, the ruins of which still remain about a mile eastward of the village of Fettercairn, and from thence he went periodically to pay his devotions at the shrine of St. Palladius, Apostle of the Scots, to whom the latter had been sent by Pope Celestine in the sixth century to oppose the Pelagian heresy, and whose bones at Fordoun were enclosed in a shrine of gold and precious stones in 1409 by the Bishop of St. Andrews.

The king had excited the deadly hatred of Finella, the Lady of Fettercairn, daughter of the Earl of Angus, by having justly put to death her son, who was a traitor and had rebelled against him in Lochaber; and, with the intention of being revenged, she prepared at Fettercairn a singular engine or 'infernal machine,' with which to slay the king.

This engine consisted of a brass statue, which shot out arrows when a golden apple was taken from its hand.

Kenneth was at Kincardine, engaged in hunting the deer, wolf, the badger and the boar, when she treacherously invited him to her castle of Fettercairn, which was then, as Buchanan records, 'pleasant with shady groves and piles of curious buildings,' of which there remained no vestiges when he wrote in the days of James VI.; and thither the king rode, clad in a rich scarlet mantle, white tunic, an eagle's wing in his helmet, and on its crest a glittering clach-bhuai, or stone of power, one of the three now in the Scottish regalia.

Dissembling her hate, she entertained the king very splendidly, and after dinner conducted him out to view the beauties of the place and the structure of her castle; and Kenneth, pleased with her beauty (which her raiment enhanced), for she wore a dress of blue silk, without sleeves, a mantle of fine linen, fastened by a brooch of silver, and all her golden hair floating on her shoulders, accompanied her into a tower, where, in an upper apartment, and amid rich festooned arras and 'curious sculptures' stood the infernal machine.

She courteously and smilingly requested the king to take the golden apple from the right hand of the statue; and he, amazed by the strange conceit, did so; on this a rushing sound was heard within it as a string or cord gave way, and from its mouth there came forth two barbed arrows which mortally wounded him, and he fell at her feet.

Finella fled to Den Finella, and Kenneth was found by his retinue 'bullerand in his blude.'

Den Finella, says a writer, is said, in the genuine spirit of legendary lore, to have obtained its name from this princess, who, the more readily to evade her pursuers, stepped from the branches of one tree to those of another the whole way from her castle to this den, which is near the sea, in the parish of St. Cyres, as all the country then was a wild forest.

Buchanan deems all this story a fable, though asserted by John Major and Hector Boece, and thinks it more probable that the king was slain near Fettercairn in an ambush prepared by Finella.

As the girl read on, Vivian Hammersley had bent lower and lower over her, till the tip of his moustache nearly touched her rich dark hair, and his arm all but stole round her. Finella Melfort was quite conscious of this close proximity, and though she did not shrink from it, that consciousness made her colour deepen and her sweet voice become unsteady.

'And to this awful legend of the dark ages, which only wants blue-fire, lime-light, and a musical accompaniment to set it off, you owe your name?' said he, laughingly.

'It is odd that you—the belle of the last London season, should be named after such a grotesque old termagant!'

She looked up at him smilingly, and then, as their eyes met, the expression of that glance exchanged beside the well on the hills came into them again; heart spoke to heart; he bent his face nearer hers, and his arm went round her in earnest.

'Finella, my darling!' escaped him, and as he kissed her unresisting lips, her blushing face was hidden on his shoulder.

And this tableau was the result of the two days' shooting—a sudden result which neither Shafto nor Hammersley had quite foreseen.

Of how long they remained thus neither had any idea. Time seemed to stand still with them. Finella was only conscious of his hand caressing hers, which lay so willingly in his tender, yet firm, clasp.

Hammersley in the gush of his joy felt oblivious of all the world. He could think of nothing but Finella, while the latter seemed scarcely capable of reflection at all beyond the existing thought that he loved her, and though the avowal was a silent and unuttered one, the new sense of all it admitted and involved, seemed to overwhelm the girl; her brightest day-dreams had come, and she nestled, trembling and silent, by his side.

The unwelcome sound of voices and also of carriage-wheels on the terrace roused them. He released her hand, stole one more clinging kiss, and forgetful of his fall and all about it started with impatience to his feet.

Lady Fettercairn and her lady guests had returned from the flower-show, and to avoid them and all the world, for a little time yet, the lovers, with their hearts still beating too wildly to come down to commonplace, tacitly wandered hand in hand into the recesses of a conservatory, and lingered there amid the warm, flower-scented atmosphere and shaded aisles, in what seemed a delicious dream.

Finella was conscious that Vivian Hammersley was talking to her lovingly and caressingly, in a low and tender voice as he had never talked before, and she felt that she was 'Finella'—the dearest and sweetest name in the world to him—and no more Miss Melfort.

It would be difficult, and superfluous perhaps, to describe the emotions of these two during the next few days.

Though now quite aware that Finella and Hammersley had met each other frequently before, Shafto's surprise at their intimacy, though apparently undemonstrative, grew speedily into suspicious anger. He felt intuitively that his presence made not the slightest difference to them, though he did not forget it; and he failed to understand how 'this fellow' had so quickly gained his subtle and familiar position with Finella.'

It galled him to the quick to see and feel all this, and know that he could never please her as she seemed to be pleased with Hammersley; for her colour heightened, her eyes brightened, and her eyelashes drooped and flickered whenever he approached or addressed her.

Shafto thought of his hopes of gaining Finella and her fortune against any discovery that might be made of the falsehood of his position, and so wrath and hatred gathered in his heart together.

He was baffled at times by her bright smiles and pretty, irresistible manner, but nevertheless he 'put his brains in steep' to scheme again.

CHAPTER XV.

AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN.

Her father had been dull and gloomy of late, and had more than once laid his hand affectionately on her ruddy golden hair, and said in a prayerful way that 'he hoped he might soon see her well married, and that she might never be left friendless!'

Dulcie had felt a sense of apprehension for some time past. Was it born of her father's forebodings, or of the presentiment about which she had conversed with Florian? A depression hung over her—an undefinable dread of some great calamity about to happen. At night her sleep was restless and broken, and by day a vague fear haunted her.

With these oppressive thoughts mingled the memory of the tall and handsome dark-eyed lad she loved—it seemed so long ago, and she longed to hear his voice again, and for his breast to lay her head upon. But where was Florian now? Months had passed without her hearing of him, and she might never hear again!

Little could she have conceived the foul trick that Shafto had played them both in the matter of the locket; but, unfortunately for herself, she had not seen the last of that enterprising young gentleman.

She felt miserably that her heart was lonely and heavy, and that, young as she was, light and joy, with the absence and ruin of Florian, had gone out of her life. She was alone always with her great sorrow, and longed much for tears; but as her past life had been a happy and joyous one, Dulcie Carlyon had been little—if at all—given to them.

One morning her father did not appear at breakfast as usual. As yet undressed her red-golden hair, that the old man loved to stroke and caress, was floating in a great loose mass on her back and shoulders, and her blue eyes looked bright and clear, if thoughtful.

She had, as was her daily wont, arranged his letters, cut and aired the morning papers for him, adjusted a vase of fresh flowers on the table, with a basket of delicate peaches, which she knew he liked, from the famous south wall of the garden, with green fig leaves round them, for Dulcie did everything prettily and tastefully, however trivial. Then she cut and buttered his bread, poured out his tea, and waited.

Still he did not appear. She knocked on his bedroom door, but received no answer, and saw, with surprise, that his boots were still on the mat outside.

The room was empty, and the morning sun streamed through the uncurtained window. The bed had not been slept in! Again she called his name, and rushed downstairs in alarm and affright.

The gas was burning in his writing-room; the window was still closed as it had been overnight; and there, in his easy chair, with his hands and arms stretched out on the table, sat Llewellen Carlyon, with his head bent forward, asleep as Dulcie thought when she saw him.

'Poor papa,' she murmured; 'he has actually gone to sleep over his horrid weary work.'

She leaned over his chair; wound her soft arms round his neck and bowed grey head—her lovely blue eyes melting with tenderness, her sweet face radiant with filial love, till, as she laid her cheek upon it, a mortal chill struck her, and a low cry of awful dismay escaped her.

It was disease of the heart, the doctors said, and he had thus passed away—died in harness; a pen was yet clutched in his right hand, and an unfinished legal document lay beneath it.

Dulcie fainted, and was borne away by the servants to her own room—they were old and affectionate country folks, who had been long with Llewellen Carlyon, and loved him and his daughter well.

Poor Dulcie remained long unconscious, the sudden shock was so dreadful to her, and when she woke from it, the old curate, Mr. Pentreath, who had baptized Florian and herself, was standing near her bed.

'My poor bruised lamb,' said he, kindly and tenderly, as he passed his wrinkled hand over her rich and now dishevelled tresses.

'She don't seem to remember, sir,' whispered an old servant, who saw the vague and wild inquiring expression of her eyes.

'Drink this, child, and try to eat a morsel,' said the curate, putting a cup of coffee and piece of toast before her.

'Something happened—something dreadful—what was it—oh, what was it?' asked Dulcie, putting her hands to her throbbing temples.

'I beat up an egg in the coffee,' said he; 'I feared you might be unable to eat yet.'

Her blue eyes began to lose their wandering and troubled look, and to become less wild and wistful; then suddenly a shrill cry escaped her, and she said, with a calmness more terrible and painful than fainting or hysterics:

'Oh, I remember now—papa—poor papa—dead! Found dead! Oh, my God! help me to bear it, or take me too—take me too!'

'How long ago was it—yesterday—a month ago, or when? I seem—I feel as if I had grown quite old, yet you all look just the same—just the same; how is this?'

'My child,' said the curate, with dim eyes, 'your dire calamity happened but a short time ago—little more than an hour since.'

Her response was a deep and heavy sob, that seemed to come from her overcharged heart rather than her slender throat, and which was the result of the unnatural tension of her mind.

'Come to my house with me,' said the kind old curate; but Dulcie shook her head.

'I shall not leave you so; it is a mistake in grief to avoid contact with the world. The mind only gets sadder and deeper into its gloom of melancholy. If you could but sleep, child, a little.'

'Sleep—I feel as if I had been asleep for years; and it was this morning, you tell me—only this morning I had my arms round his neck—dead—my darling papa dead!'

She started to her feet as if to go where the body lay under the now useless hands of the doctor, but would have fallen had she not clutched for support at Mr. Pentreath, who upheld and restrained her.

The awful thought of her future loneliness now that she had thus suddenly lost her father, as she had not another relation in the world, haunted the unhappy Dulcie, and deprived her of the power of taking food or obtaining sleep.

In vain her old servants, who had known her from infancy, coaxed her to attempt both, but sleep would not come, and the food remained untasted before her.

'A little water,' she would say; 'give me a little water, for thirst parches me.'

All that passed subsequently seemed like one long and terrible dream to Dulcie. She was alone in the world, and when her father was laid in his last home at Revelstoke, within sound of the tumbling waves, in addition to being alone she found herself well-nigh penniless, for her father had nothing to leave her but the old furniture of the house they had inhabited.

That was sold, and she was to remain with the family of the curate till some situation could be procured for her.

She had long since ceased to expect any letter from or tidings of Florian. She began to think that perhaps, amid the splendour of his new relations, he had forgotten her. Well, it was the way of the world.

Never would she forget the day she quitted her old home. Her father's hat, his coat and cane were in the hall; all that he had used and that belonged to him were still there, to bring his presence before her with fresh poignancy, and to impress upon her that she was fatherless, all but friendless, and an orphan.

The superstitious people about Revelstoke now remembered that in Lawyer Carlyon's garden, blossom and fruit had at the same time appeared on more than one of his apple-trees, a certain sign of coming death to one of his household. But who can tell in this ever-shifting world what a day may bring forth!

One evening—she never forgot it—she had been visiting her father's grave, and was slowly quitting the secluded burial-ground, when a man like a soldier approached her in haste.

'Florian!' She attempted to utter his name, but it died away on her bloodless lips.

CHAPTER XVI.

''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'

'Not by appointment do we meet delight
And joy: they need not our expectancy.
But round some corner in the streets of life,
They on a sudden clasp us with a smile.'

Florian it was who stood before her, but though he gazed at her earnestly, wistfully, and with great pity in his tender eyes as he surveyed her pale face and deep mourning, he made no attempt to take the hands she yearningly extended towards him. She saw that he was in the uniform of a private soldier, over which he wore a light dust-coat as a sort of disguise, but there was no mistaking his glengarry—that head-dress which is odious and absurd for English and Irish regiments, and which in his instance bore a brass badge—the sphinx, for Egypt.

He looked thin, gaunt, and pale, and anon the expression of his eye grew doubtful and cloudy.

'Florian!' exclaimed Dulcie in a piercing voice, in which something of upbraiding blended with tones of surprise and grief; and yet the fact of his presence seemed so unreal that she lingered for a moment before she flung herself into his arms, and was clasped to his breast. 'Oh, what is the meaning of this dress?' she asked, lifting her face and surveying him again.

'It means that I am a soldier—like him whose son I thought myself—a soldier of the Warwickshire Regiment,' replied Florian with some bitterness of tone.

'Oh, my God, and has it come to this!' said Dulcie wringing her interlaced fingers. 'Could not Shafto—your cousin——'

'I had no other resort, Dulcie; I would not stoop to seek favours even from him, and our paths in life will never cross each other again; but a time may come—I know not when—in which I may seek forgiveness of enemies as well as friends—the bad and the good together—for a soldier's life is one of peril.'

'This tenderness is strange, Dulcie! Why did you cast me off in my utter adversity and return to me my locket?'

'What do you mean, Florian—have you lost your senses?' she asked in sore perplexity. 'Where have you come from last?'

'Plymouth; in a paper there I saw a notice of your terrible loss, and resolved to see, even if I could not speak with you.'

'To see you, my lost darling, once again. Oh, Dulcie, I thought I should die if I left England and sailed for Africa without doing so. I got a day's leave and am here.'

'Penniless, hopeless, what else could I do?—besides, I thought you had cast me off when you sent me back this locket,' he added, producing the gift referred to.

'That locket was stolen from me on the night you left Revelstoke—literally wrenched from my neck, as I told you in my letter—the letter you never answered.'

'The double villain! He must have intercepted that letter, and utilised the envelope with its postmarks and stamps to deceive me, and effect a breach between us.'

'After all,' said she, taking his face between her hands caressingly, 'what does poverty matter if we love each other still?'

'But I am so much beneath you now in position, Dulcie—and—and——' his voice broke.

'My poor Florian, how gaunt and hollow your cheeks are! You have suffered——'

'Much since last we parted here in dear old Devonshire. But Shafto's villainy surpasses all I could have imagined!'

'With his grand relations, I suppose. I am glad that we have unravelled that which was to me a source of sorrow and dismay—the returned locket. So you cannot take back your heart, Dulcie, nor give me mine?' said Florian.

'Nor would I wish to do so,' she replied, sweetly and simply. 'Though poor, we are all the world to each other now.'

'Hard and matter-of-fact as our every-day existence is, there is—even in these railway times—much of strange and painful romance woven up with many a life; and so it seems to be with mine—with ours, Dulcie.'

'Oh that I were rich, Florian, or that you were so!' exclaimed the girl, as a great pity filled her heart, when she thought of her lover's blighted life, their own baffled hopes, and the humble and most perilous course that was before him in South Africa, where the clouds of war were gathering fast. 'I, too, am poor, Florian—very poor; dear papa died involved, leaving me penniless, and I must cast about to earn my own bread.'

'This is horrible—how shall I endure it?' said he fiercely, while regarding her with a loving but haggard expression in his dark eyes.

'Loafed about till the last moment, and then done something desperate. I would have seen you, and after that—the Deluge! In two days we embark at Plymouth,' he added, casting a glance at the old church of Revelstoke and its burying-ground. 'There our parents lie, Dulcie—yours at least, and those that I, till lately, thought were mine. There is something very strange and mysterious in this change of relationship and position between Shafto and myself. I cannot understand it. Why was I misled all my life by one who loved me so well? How often have I stood with the Major by a gravestone yonder inscribed with the name of Flora MacIan and heard him repeat while looking at it—

'A thousand would call the spot dreary
    Where thou takest thy long repose;
But a rude couch is sweet to the weary,
    And the frame that suffering knows.
I never rejoiced more sincerely
    Than at thy funeral hour,
Assured that the one I loved dearly
    Was beyond affliction's power!

Why did he quote all this to me, and tell me never to forget that spot, or who was buried there, if she was only Shafto's aunt, and not my mother?'

Florian felt keenly for the position of Dulcie Carlyon, and the perils and mortifications that might beset her path now; but he was too young, too healthy and full of animal life and spirits, to be altogether weighed down by the thought of his humble position and all that was before him; and now that he had seen her again, restored to her bosom the locket, and that he knew she was true to him, and had never for a moment wavered in her girlish love, life seemed to become suddenly full of new impulses and hopes for him, and he thought prayerfully that all might yet be well for them both.

To Dulcie there seemed something noble in the hopeful spirit that, under her influence, animated her grave lover now. He seemed to become calm, cool, steadfast, and, hap what might, she felt he would ever be true to her.

He seemed brave and tender and true—'tender and true' as a Douglas of old, and Dulcie thought how pleasant and glorious it would be to have such a handsome young husband as he to take care of her always, and see that all she did was right and proper and wise.

A long embrace, and he was gone to catch the inexorable train. She was again alone, and for the first time she perceived that the sun had set, that the waves looked black as they rounded Revelstoke promontory, and that all the landscape had grown dark, desolate, and dreary.

What a hopeless future seemed to stretch before these two creatures, so young and so loving!

Florian was gone—gone to serve as a private soldier on the burning coast of Africa. It seemed all too terrible, too dreadful to think of.

'Every morning and evening I shall pray for you, Florian,' wailed the girl in her heart; 'pray that you may be happy, good, and rich, and—and that we shall yet meet in heaven if we never meet on earth.'

On the second morning after this separation, when Dulcie was pillowed in sleep, and the rising sun was shining brightly on the waves that rolled in Cawsand Bay and danced over the Mewstone, a great white 'trooper' came out of Plymouth Sound under sail and steam, with the blue-peter flying at its foremasthead, her starboard side crowded with red coats, all waving their caps and taking a farewell look at Old England—the last look it proved to many—and, led by Bob Edgehill, a joyous, rackety, young private of the Warwickshire, hundreds of voices joined chorusing:

    'Merrily, my lads, so ho!
They may talk of a life at sea,
    But a life on the land
    With sword in hand
Is the life, my lads, for me!'

But there was one young soldier whose voice failed him in the chorus, and whose eyes rested on Stoke Point and the mouth of the Yealm till these and other familiar features of the coast melted into the widening Channel.

Dulcie was roused to exertion from the stupor of grief that had come upon her by tidings that a situation had been found for her as companion—one in which she would have to make herself useful, amiable, and agreeable in the family of a lady of rank and wealth, to whom she would be sent by influential friends of Mr. Pentreath in London.

The poor girl thought tearfully how desolate was her lot now, cast to seek her bread among utter strangers; and if she became ill, delicate, or unable to work, what would become of her?

'Tis but the old, old story,
Yet it ever abideth new;
And to whomsoever it cometh
The heart it breaks in two.'

Dulcie had been born and bred there, and all the villagers in Revelstoke loved and knew Lawyer Carlyon well, and were deeply interested in the future of his daughter; thus, on the day of her departure no one made any pretence of work or working. Heads were popping out and in of the windows of the village street all morning, and a cluster—a veritable crowd—of kindly folks accompanied Mr. Pentreath and the weeping girl to the railway station, for she wept freely at all this display of regard and sympathy, especially from the old, whom she might never see again.

When the train swept her away, and she lost sight of the last familiar feature of her native place, a strange and heavy sense of utter desolation came over poor Dulcie, and but for the presence of other passengers she would have stooped her head upon her hot hands and sobbed aloud, for she thought of her dead parents—when did she not think of them now?

'Oh!' exclaims a writer, 'if those who have loved and gone before us can see afar off those they have left, surely the mother who had passed from earth might tremble now for her child, standing so terribly alone in the midst of a seething sea of danger and temptations?'

CHAPTER XVII.

AT CRAIGENGOWAN.

With the new understanding—the tacit engagement that existed between herself and Vivian Hammersley—Finella writhed with annoyance when privately and pointedly spoken to on the subject of her 'cousin' Shafto's attentions and hopes.

'Grandmamma,' said she to Lady Fettercairn, 'I don't see why I may not marry whom I please. I am not like a poor girl who has nothing in the world. Indeed, in that case I am pretty sure that neither you nor cousin Shafto would want me.'

'She must settle soon,' said Lady Fettercairn, when reporting this plain reply to Lady Drumshoddy. 'I certainly shall not take her to London again, yet awhile.'

'You are right,' replied that somewhat grim matron; 'and when once this Captain Hammersley, who, to my idea, is somewhat too èpris with her, is gone, you can easily find some pretext for remaining at Craigengowan; or shall I have her with me?'

'As you please,' replied Lady Fettercairn, who knew that the Drumshoddy mènage did not always suit the taste of Finella; 'but I think she is better here—propinquity and all that sort of thing may be productive of good. I know that poor Shafto's mind is quite made up, and, as I said before, she must settle soon. We can't have twenty thousand a year slipping out of the family.'

Finella thought little of their wishes or those of Shafto. She thought only of that passionate hour in the lonely drawing-room, where she was alone with Vivian, and his lips were pressed to hers; of the close throb of heart to heart, and that the great secret of her young girl's life was his now and hers no longer, but aware of the opposition and antagonism he would be sure to encounter just then, she urged upon him a caution and a secrecy of the engagement which his proud spirit somewhat resented.

He thought it scarcely honourable to take advantage of Lord Fettercairn's hospitality, and gain the love of Finella without his permission; but as both knew that would never be accorded—that to ask for it would cut short his visit, and as he was so soon going on distant service, with Finella he agreed that their engagement should be kept a secret till his return.

And to blind the eyes of the watchful or suspicious he actually found himself flirting with one of the Miss Kippilaws, three young ladies who thought they spoke the purest English, though it was with that accent which Basil Hall calls 'the hideous patois of Edinburgh;' and, perceiving this, Lady Fettercairn became somewhat contented, and Finella was excessively amused.

'It is all a d——d game!' muttered that young gentleman; 'a red herring drawn across the scent.'

'Why do you look so unhappy, dearest?' asked Finella one evening, when she and her lover found themselves alone for a few minutes, during which she had been contemplating his dark face in silence.

'My leave of absence is running out so fast—by Jove, faster than ever apparently now!'

'Is that the sole reason?' asked the girl softly and after a pause, her dark eyes darkening and seeming to become more intense.

'But in one sense my love is so liable to misconstruction—so hopeless of proof.'

'I have heard a rumour that one of the Melforts who made a pure love-marriage was cut off root and branch.'

'They will never consent; and when I am far away, as I soon shall be, if their evil influence——'

'Should prevail with me? Oh, Vivian!' exclaimed the girl, her dark eyes sparkling through their unshed tears. 'Think not of their influencing me, for a moment.'

'Thank you a thousand times for the assurance, my love. It was vile of me to think of such things. I have a sure conviction that your cousin Shafto dislikes me most certainly,' said Hammersley, after a pause.

'I know they do—but don't tease me by speaking of a subject so distasteful,' exclaimed Finella, making a pretty moue expression of disdain.

He pressed a kiss on her brow, another on her hair, and his lips quickly found their way to hers, after they had been pressed on her snow-white eyelids.

'And I you,' said the artless girl again, in that style of iteration of which lovers never grow weary, with an adoring upward glance, which it was a pity the gathering gloom prevented him from seeing.

As they walked slowly towards the house, she quickly withdrew her hands, which were clasped clingingly to his arm, as Shafto approached them suddenly. He saw the abrupt act, and drew his own conclusions therefrom, and, somewhat to Finella's annoyance, turned abruptly away.

'Did I not say you were not to speak of him? To tell you the truth, I am at times somewhat afraid of him.'

'My darling—I must give you an amulet—a charm against his evil influence,' said Hammersley, laughing, as he slipped a ring on her wedding-finger, adding, 'I hope it fits.'

'What is this—oh, Vivian! actually a wedding-ring—but I cannot wear, though I may keep it.'

'Then wear this until you can, when I return, darling,' said he, as he slipped a gemmed ring on the tiny finger, and stooping, kissed it.

'My heart's dearest!' cooed the girl happily. 'Well, Vivian, none other than the hoop you have now given me shall be my wedding-ring!'

Had Lady Fettercairn overheard all this she would have had good reason to fear that Finella's twenty thousand a year was slipping away from the Craigengowan family, all the more so that the scene of this tender interview was a spot below the mansion-house, said to be traditionally fatal to the Melforts of Fettercairn, the Howe of Craigengowan—for there a terrible adventure occurred to the first Lord, he who sold his Union vote, and of whom the men of the Mearns were wont to say he had not only sold his country to her enemies, but that he had also sold his soul to the evil one.

It chanced that in the gloaming of the 28th of April, 1708, the first anniversary of that day on which the Scottish Parliament dissolved to meet no more, he was walking in a place which he had bought with his Union bribe—the Howe of Craigengowan, then a secluded dell, overshadowed by great alders and whin bushes—when he saw at the opposite end the figure of a man approaching pace for pace with himself, and his outline was distinctly seen against the red flush of the western sky.

As they neared each other slowly, a strange emotion of superstitious awe stole into the hard heart of Lord Fettercairn. So strong was this that he paused for a minute, and rested on his cane. The stranger did precisely the same.

The peer—the ex-Commissioner on Forfeited Estates—'pulled himself together,' and put his left hand jauntily into the silver hilt of his sword—a motion imitated exactly, and to all appearance mockingly, by the other, whose gait, bearing, and costume—a square-skirted crimson coat, a long-flapped white vest, black breeches and stockings rolled over the knee, and a Ramillie wig—were all the same in cut and colour as his own!

Lord Fettercairn afterwards used to assert that he would never be able to describe the undefinable, the strange and awful sensation that crept over him when, as they neared each other, pace by pace, he saw in the other's visage the features of himself reproduced, as if he had been looking into a mirror.

A cold horror ran through every vein. He knew and felt that his own features were pallid and convulsed with mortal terror and dismay, while he could see that those of his dreadful counterpart were radiant with spite and triumphant malice.

Himself seemed to look upon himself—the same in face, figure, dress; every detail was the same, save that the other clutched a canvas bag, inscribed '£500' the price of the Union vote (or, as some said, the price of his soul)—on seeing which my Lord Fettercairn shrieked in an agony of terror, and fell prone on his face—a fiendish yell and laugh from the other making all the lonely Howe re-echo as he did so.

How long he lay there he knew not precisely; but when he opened his eyes the pale April moon was shining down the Howe, producing weird and eerie shadows, the alder and whin bushes looked black and gloomy, and the window lights were shining redly in the tall and sombre mass of Craigengowan, the gables, turrets, and vanes of which stood up against the starry sky.

He never quite recovered the shock, but died some years after; and even now on dark nights, when owls hoot, ravens croak, toads crawl, and the clock at Craigengowan strikes twelve, something strange—no one can exactly say what—is to be seen in the Howe, even within sound of the railway engine.

Though a day for parting—for a separation involving distance, time, and no small danger to one—was inexorably approaching, Finella was very happy just then, with a happiness she had never known before, and with a completeness that made life—even to her who had known London for a brilliant season—seem radiant. She had been joyous like a beautiful bird, and content, too, before the renewal and fuller development of her intimacy with Vivian Hammersley; but she was infinitely more joyous and content now. ''Twas but the old, old story' of a girl's love, and in all her sentiments and all her hopes for the future Vivian shared.

The beautiful dreams of a dual life had been partly—if not fully—realised through him, who seemed to her a perfect being, a perfect hero: though he was only a smart linesman, a handsome young fellow like a thousand others, yet he possessed every quality to render a girl happy.

Shafto felt that Hammersley had quite 'cut the ground from under his feet' with Finella, as he phrased it; and hating him in consequence, and being a master in cunning and finesse, wonderfully so for his years, he resolved to get 'the interloper's' visit to Craigengowan cut short at all hazards, and he was not long in putting his scheme in operation.

The lovers thus were not quite unconscious of being watched by eyes that were quickened by avarice, passion, and jealousy; yet, withal, they were very, very happy—in Elysium, in fact.

Finding that Hammersley had suddenly become averse to gambling, after a long day among the grouse, Shafto strove hard to lure him into play one evening in the smoke-room.

Hammersley declined, aware that Shafto was remarkably sharp at cards, having become somewhat efficient after years of almost nightly play in the bar-room of the Torrington Arms at Revelstoke.

Shafto's manner on this evening became almost insulting, and he taunted him with 'taking deuced good care of such money as he had.'

''Pon my soul, young fellow, do you know that you are rather—well—ah—rude?' said Hammersley, removing his cigar for a moment and staring at the speaker.

'Perhaps you had better make that your way,' said Hammersley, his brown cheek reddening as he indicated the room-door with his cigar. Then suddenly remembering that he must preserve certain amenities, and as guest—especially one circumstanced as he was secretly—he pushed his cigar-case towards Shafto, saying—'Try one of these—they are Rio Hondos, and are of the best kind.'

At last, piqued by the manner of the latter, and having been lured into drinking a little more brandy and soda than was good for him after dinner, the unsuspecting Englishman sat down to play, and though he did so carelessly, his success was wonderful, for, while not caring to win, he won greatly.

Higher and higher rose the stakes, till a very considerable sum had passed into his hands, and, handsome though Shafto's quarterly allowance from his 'grandfather,' paid duly by Mr. Kippilaw, he could not help the lengthening of his visage, and the growing pallor of it, while his shifty eyes rolled about in his anxiety and anger; and Lord Fettercairn and young Kippilaw, who were present, looked on—the former with some annoyance, and the latter with amused interest.

'The ace of spades! By heaven, you have already played that card!' exclaimed Shafto, with fierce triumph.

'Your luck has been marvellous, but not so much so when we know that you play with double aces,' said Shafto, throwing down his cards and starting from the table, as the other did, now pallid with just rage.

'I insinuate nothing; but the disgraceful fact speaks for itself; and I think you have been quite long enough among us in Craigengowan,' he added, coarsely.

Vivian Hammersley was pale as death, and speechless with rage. He thought first of Finella and then of his own injured honour; and we know not what turn this episode might have taken had not Lord Fettercairn, who, we have said, had been quietly looking on from a corner, said gravely, sharply, and even with pain, as he started forward:

'Shafto! I saw you drop that card, where Mr. Kippilaw picked it up—drop it, whether purposely or not I do not say—but drop it you did.'

'It is not impossible,' said the peer, irately; 'and I am not blind or liable to make mistakes; and you too manifestly did so; whence this foul accusation of a guest in my own house—a gentleman to whom you owe a humble and most complete apology.'

Shafto was speechless with rage and baffled spite at the new and sudden turn his scheme had taken, and at being circumvented in his own villainy.

'My Lord Fettercairn, from my soul I thank you!' said Hammersley, drawing himself up proudly, looking greatly relieved in mind, and, turning next to Shafto, evidently waited for the suggested apology.

But in that he was disappointed, as the 'heir' of Fettercairn turned abruptly on his heel and left the room, leaving his lordship to make the amende, which he did in very graceful terms.

As it was impossible now for both to remain longer under the same roof after a fracas of this kind, Hammersley proposed at once to take his departure for the south by a morning train; but Lord Fettercairn, who, with all his selfish shortcomings, had been shocked by the episode, and by several other ugly matters connected with his newly found 'grandson,' would by no means permit of that movement; and in this spirit of hospitality even Lady Fettercairn joined, pressing him to remain and finish his visit, as first intended, while Shafto, in a gust of baffled rage and resentment, greatly to the relief of Finella and of the domestics, betook himself to Edinburgh, thus for a time leaving his rival more than ever in full possession of the field.

'Whether she is influenced by Captain Hammersley I cannot say,' were the parting words of Lady Fettercairn to this young hopeful; 'but you seem by this last untoward affair to have lost even her friendship, and it will be a dreadful pity, Shafto, if all her money should be lost to you too.'

And Shafto fully agreed with his 'dear grandmother' that it would be a pity indeed.

As a gentleman and man with a keen sense of honour, Hammersley disliked exceedingly the secrecy of the engagement he had made with Finella, and felt himself actually colour more than once when Lord Fettercairn addressed him; but his compunctions about it grew less when he thought of the awful escape he had made from a perilous accusation, that might have 'smashed' him in the Service, and of the trickery of which Shafto was capable—a trickery of which he had not yet seen the end.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AT THE BUFFALO RIVER.

The evening of the 10th January was closing in, and the blood-red African sun, through a blended haze of gold and pale green, red and fiery, seemed to linger like a monstrous crimson globe at the horizon, tinging with the same hues the Buffalo River as its broad waters flowed past the Itelizi Hill towards Rorke's Drift.

There a picquet of the Centre or Second column of infantry (of the army then advancing into Zululand), under Colonel Richard Glyn of the 24th Regiment, was posted for the night. The main body of the picquet, under Lieutenant Vincent Sheldrake, a smart young officer, was bivouacked among some mealies at a little distance from the bank of the river, along the margin of which his advanced sentinels were posted at proper distances apart, and there each man stood motionless as a statue, in his red tunic and white tropical helmet, with his rifle at the 'order,' and his eyes steadily fixed on that quarter in which the Zulu army was supposed to be hovering.

To reach the Buffalo River the various columns of Lord Chelmsford's army could not march by regular roads, as no such thing exists in Zululand, and the sole guides of our officers in selecting the line of advance through these savage regions were the grass-covered ruts left by the waggon-wheels of some occasional trader or sportsman in past times.

As the column had been halted for the night, at a considerable distance in rear of the outlying picquet, the men of the latter had their provisions with them ready cooked, and were now having their supper in a grassy donga or hollow. The earthen floor was their table, and Lieutenant Sheldrake, being more luxurious than the rest, had spread thereon as a cloth an old sheet of the Times; but the appetites of all were good, and their temperament cheery and hearty. Their rifles were piled, and they brewed their coffee over a blazing fire, the flame of which glowed on their sun-burned and beardless young faces, and a few Kaffirs squatted round their own fire, jabbered, gesticulated, and swallowed great mouthfuls of their favourite liquor 'scoff.'

Sheldrake was too ill or weary to attend closely to his own duties, and the moment the evening meal was over, he desired the sergeant of the picquet to 'go round the advanced sentries.'

The sergeant, a young and slender man, and who was no other than Florian, touched the barrel of his rifle and departed on his mission—to visit the sentinels in rotation by the river bank, and see that they were in communication with those of the picquets on the right and left.

The scenery around was savage and desolate; long feathery grass covered the veldt for miles upon miles. The chief features in it were some blue gum trees, and on a koppie, or little eminence, the deserted ruins of a Boer farm under the shadow of a clump of eucalyptus trees; and in the foreground were some bustards and blue Kaffir cranes by the river bank.

Short service and disease had given Florian rapid promotion; for our soldiers, if brave, had no longer the power of manly endurance of their predecessors under the old system. According to General Crealock, the extreme youth of our soldiers in South Africa rendered their powers for toil very small; while the Naval Brigade, composed of older men, had scarcely ever a man in hospital. The Zulu campaign was a very trying one; there were the nightly entrenchments, the picquet duty amid high grass, and the absence of all confidence that discipline and that long mutual knowledge of each other give in the ranks. He added most emphatically that our younger soldiers were unfit for European campaigning; that half the First Division were 'sick;' there were always some 200 weak lads in hospital, 'crawling about like sick flies,' and, like him, every officer was dead against the short-service system.

The face of our young sergeant was handsome as ever; but it was strangely altered since late events had come to pass. There was a haggard and worn look in the features, particularly in the eyes. The latter looked feverish and dim—their brightness less at times, while a shadow seemed below them.

Florian having, as he now deemed, no right to the name of Melfort, or even that of MacIan, had enlisted under the latter name, as that by which he had been known from infancy, lest he might make a false attestation. The name of Gyle he shrank from, even if it was his—which at times he doubted! His regiment was the brave old 24th, or Second Warwickshire, which had been raised in the eventful year 1689 by Sir Edward Dering, Bart, of Surrenden-Dering, head of one of the few undoubted Saxon families in England, and it was afterwards commanded in 1695 by Louis, Marquis de Puizar.

Second to none in the annals of war during the reigns of Anne and the early Georges, the 24th in later times served with valour at the first capture of the Cape of Good Hope, in the old Egyptian campaign, in the wars of Spain and India, and now they were once again to cover themselves with a somewhat clouded and desperate glory in conflict with the gallant Zulus.

Florian in his new career found himself occasionally among a somewhat mixed and rough lot—the raw, weedy soldiers of the new disastrous system—but there were many who were of a better type; and the thought of Dulcie Carlyon—the only friend he had in the world, the only human creature who loved him—kept him free from the temptations and evil habits of the former; and he strove to live a steady, pure, and brave life, that he might yet be worthy of her, and give her no cause to blush for him.

He got through his drilling as quickly as he could, and soon discovered that the sooner a soldier takes his place in the ranks the better for himself. He found that though many of his comrades were noisy, talkative, and quarrelsome, that the English soldier quicker than any other discovers and appreciates a gentleman. His officers soon learned to appreciate him too, and hence the rapidity with which he won his three chevrons, and Mr. Sheldrake felt that, young though he was, he could trust Florian to go round the sentinels.

Each was at his post, and the attention of each increased as the gloom after sunset deepened, for none knew who or what might be approaching stealthily and unseen among the long wavy grass and mossy dongas that yawned amid the country in front.

'Hush, Bob!' said he to his comrade, Edgehill, whom he heard singing merrily to himself, 'you should be mute as a fish on outpost duty, and keep your ears open as well as your eyes. What have you got in your head, Bob, that makes you so silly? But, as the author of the "Red Rag" says, we soldiers have not much in our heads at any time, or we wouldn't go trying to stop cannon balls or bullets with them.'

'Right you are, Sergeant,' replied Bob, 'but I can't think what made you—a gentleman—enlist.'

'The handsome young girl,
With her fringe in curl,
That worked a sewing-machine,'

—sung the irrepressible Bob; and Florian returned to report 'all right' to Mr. Sheldrake.

Though the actual cause of the Zulu war lies a little apart from our story, it may be necessary to mention that we invaded the country of Cetewayo after giving him a certain time, up to the 11th of January, to accept our ultimatum; to adopt an alternative for war, by delivering up certain of his subjects who had violated British territory, attacked a police-station, and committed many outrages,—among others, carrying off two women, one of whom they put to a barbarous death near the Buffalo River.

But instead of making any apology, or giving an indemnity, Cetewayo prepared to defend himself at the head of an enormous army of hardy Zulu warriors, all trained in a fashion of their own, divided into strong regiments, furnished with powerful shields of ox-hide, and armed with rifles, war clubs, and assegais—a name with which we are now so familiar. The shaft of this weapon averages five feet in length, with the diameter of an ordinary walking-stick, cut from the assegai tree, which is not unlike mahogany in its fibre, and furnished with a spear-head. Some are barbed, some double-barbed, and the tang of the blade is fitted—when red-hot—into the wood, not the latter into the blade, which is then secured by a thong of wet hide, and is so sharp that the Zulu can shave his head with it; and it is a weapon which they can launch with deadly and unerring skill.

The Zulu king, says Captain Lucas, was unable to sign his own name, 'and was as ignorant and as savage as our Norman kings,' and he thought no more of putting women, 'especially young girls, to death, than Bluff King Hal' himself; yet a little time after all this was to see him presented at Osborne, and to become the petted and fêted exile of Melbury Road, Kensington.

This night by the Buffalo River was Florian's first experience of outpost duty, and he felt—though not the responsible party—anxious, wakeful, and weary after a long and toilsome day's march.

He knew enough of military matters to be well aware that the importance of outposts, especially when dealing with a wily and savage enemy, could scarcely be exaggerated, for no force, when encamped in the field, can be deemed for a moment safe without them. Thus it was a maxim of Frederick the Great that it was pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.

'I don't understand all this change that has come over my life,' thought he, as he stretched himself on the bare earth near the picquet fire; 'but I wonder if my father and mother can see and think of me where they are. Yet I sometimes feel,' he added, with a kind of boyish gush in his heart, 'as if they were near me and watching over me, so they must see and think too.'

Where was Dulcie, then, and what was she doing? How supporting herself, as she said she would have to do? Had she found friends, or, months ago, been trodden, with all her tender beauty, down in the mire of misfortune and adversity?

These were maddening thoughts for one so far away and so utterly powerless to help her as Florian felt himself, and rendered him at times more reckless of his own existence because it was useless to her.

The air around was heavy with the dewy fragrance of strange and tropical plants, and vast, spiky, and fan-shaped leaves cast their shadows over him as he strove to snatch the proverbial 'forty winks' before again going 'the rounds,' or posting the hourly reliefs, for they are always hourly when before an enemy.

And when our weary young soldier did sleep, he dreamt, not of the quick-coming strife, nor even of blue-eyed Dulcie, with her wealth of red golden hair, but, as the tender smile on his lips might have showed, of the time when his mother watched him in his little cot, with idolizing gaze, and when he, the now bronzed and moustached soldier, was a little child, with rings of soft dusky hair curling over his white forehead; when his cheeks had a rosy flush, and his tiny mouth a smile, and she fondly kissed the little hands that lay outside the snow-white coverlet her own deft fingers had made—the two wee hands that held his mother's heart between them—the heart that had long since mouldered by Revelstoke Church.

And so he slept and dreamed till roused by the inevitable cry of 'Sentry, go!' and, that duty over, as he composed himself to sleep again, with his knapsack under his head for a pillow, he thought as a soldier—

CHAPTER XIX.

ELANDSBERGEN.

Next morning when the picquet was relieved young Sheldrake, who paid Hammersley's company in absence of the latter, who was soon expected with a strong draft from England, said to Florian—

'Look here, MacIan, I've made a stupid mistake. The company's money I have left among my heavier baggage in the fort beyond Elandsbergen, and I have got the Colonel's permission to send you back for it. This is just like me—I've a head, and so has a pin! The Quartermaster will lend you his horse, and you can have my spare revolver and ammunition. Have a cigar before you go,' he added, proffering his case, 'and look sharp after yourself and the money. There is a deuced unchancy lot in the quarter you are going back to. We don't advance from this till to-morrow, so you have plenty of time to be with us ere we cross the river, if you start at once.'

'Very good, sir,' replied Florian, as he saluted and went away to obtain the horse, the revolver, and to prepare for a duty which he intensely disliked, and almost doubted his power to carry out, as it took him rearward through a country of which he was ignorant, which was almost without roads, and where he would be single-handed, if not among savages, among those who were quite as bad, for in some of these districts, as in the Orange Free State and Boerland, there swarmed broken ruffians of every kind, many of them deserters; and, says an officer, 'so great, in fact, was the number of these undesirable specimens of our countrymen assembled in Harrysmith alone that night was truly made hideous with their howlings, respectable persons were afraid to leave their houses after nightfall, and the report of revolvers ceased to elicit surprise or curiosity. I have been in some of the most notorious camps and towns in the territories and mining districts of the United States, but can safely assert that I never felt more thankful than when I found my horse sufficiently rested here to continue my journey.' There were lions, too, in the wild plains, for some of our cavalry horses were devoured by them; the tiger-cat and the aarde-wolf also.

With a knowledge of all this Florian loaded his revolver, looked carefully to the bridle and stirrup leathers of his horse, received a note from Mr. Sheldrake to the officer commanding the little fort near the foot of the Drakensberg, and left the camp of No. 2 column on his solitary journey, steering his way by the natural features of the country so far as he could recall them after the advance of the 10th January, and watching carefully for the wheel tracks or other indications of a roadway leading in a westerly direction; and many of his comrades, including Bob Edgehill, watched him with interest and kindly anxiety till his white helmet disappeared as he descended into a long grassy donga, about a mile from Rorke's Drift.

The evening passed and the following day dawned—the important 12th—when Zululand was to be invaded at three points by the three columns of Lord Chelmsford; the advance party detailed from Colonel Glyn's brigade to reconnoitre the ground in front got under arms and began to move off, and Sheldrake and others began to feel somewhat uneasy, for there was still no appearance of the absent one.

The country through which Florian rode was lonely, and farmhouses were few and many miles apart. Its natural features were undulating downs covered with tall waving grass, furrowed by deep, reedy water-courses; here and there were abrupt rocky eminences, and dense brushwood grew in the rugged kloofs and ravines.

The air was delightful, and in spite of his thoughts the blood coursed freely through his veins; his spirits rose, and, exhilarated by the pace at which his horse went, he could not help giving a loud 'Whoop!' now and then when a gnu, with its curved horns and white mane, or a hartebeest appeared on the upland slopes, or a baboon grinned at him from amid the bushes of a kloof.

Before him stretched miles of open and grassy veldt, and the flat-topped hills of the Drakensberg range closed the horizon. The vast stretch of plain, across which ever and anon swept herds of beautiful little antelopes, was covered with luxuriant grass, which seemed smooth as a billiard-table, and over it went the track, which he was always afraid of losing. But, if pleasant to look upon, the veldt was treacherous ground, for hidden by the grass were everywhere deep holes burrowed by the ant-bears, and into these his horse's forelegs sank ever and anon, to the peril of the animal and his rider too. Thus Florian was compelled to proceed at a canter with his reins loose, while he sat tight and prepared for swerving when his nag, which was a native horse, prepared to dodge an apparent hole, which they can do with wonderful sagacity.

So Florian was not sorry when he left the veldt behind him, and after a ride of about thirty miles saw the earthworks of the small fort at the foot of Drakensberg appear in front with a little Union Jack fluttering on a flagstaff.

Anxious to return as soon as he could rest his horse, he lost no time in delivering Sheldrake's note to the officer in command, and with the key of a trunk indicated therein among his best uniform, and amid girls' photos, bundles of letters, old button bouquets, rare pipes, and an omnium-gatherum of various things, the bag was found, with the company's money, and delivered to Florian, who, after a two hours' halt, set out on his return journey; but he had not proceeded many miles when he found that his horse was utterly failing him, and, regretting that he had not remained at the post for the night, he resolved to spend it in the little town of Elandsbergen, towards which he bent his way, leading the now halting nag by the bridle.

Elandsbergen consisted of a few widely detached cottages studding both sides of a broad pathway, amid a vast expanse of veldt or prairie, with fragmentary attempts at cultivation here and there; and how the people lived seemed somewhat of a mystery. Rows of stunted oaks lined the street, if such it could be called, and through it flowed a rill of pure water, at which the poor nag drank thirstily.

Elandsbergen boasted of one hostelry, dignified by the title of the Royal Hotel, where 'civil entertainment for man and beast' was promised by the landlord, 'Josh Jarrett.' It was a somewhat substantial edifice of two storeys, built of baked brick, square in form, with a flat roof composed of strong lattice-work, covered with half-bricks and with clayey mortar to render it impervious to the torrents of the South African rainy season.

In some of the windows were glass panes; in others sheepskin with the wool off, which, in consequence of extreme tension, attains a certain transparency. Giving his horse to a Kaffir ostler, whose sole raiment was a waistcoat made of a sleeveless regimental tunic, Florian somewhat wearily entered the 'hotel,' the proprietor of which started and changed colour at the sight of his red coat, as well he might, for, though disguised by a bushy beard, sedulously cultivated, and a shock head of hair under his broad-leaved hat, he was one of the many deserters from our troops, already referred to, and, though apparently anxious to appear civil, was secretly a ruffian of the worst kind.

The room into which he ushered Florian was bare-walled, the furniture was of the plainest and rudest kind, and the floor was formed of cow-dung over wet clay, all kneaded, trodden, and hardened till it could be polished, a process learned from the Zulus in the construction of their kraals.

A fly-blown map of Cape Colony, a cheap portrait of Sir Bartle Frere, and the skull of an eland with its spiral horns were the only decorations of the apartment, and the literature of 'the day' was represented by three tattered copies of the Cape Argus, Natal Mercury, and the Boer Volksteem.

Josh Jarrett was dressed like a Boer, and in person was quite as dirty as a Boer; his loose cracker-trousers were girt by a broad belt with a square buckle, whereat hung a leopard-skin pouch and an ugly hunting-knife with a cross hilt. In the band of his broad hat were stuck a large meerschaum pipe and the tattered remnant of an ostrich feather.

The Kaffir ostler now came hurriedly in, and announced something in his own language to the landlord, who, turning abruptly to Florian, said—

Florian in no small anxiety and excitement hurried out to the stable, in which two other nags were stalled, and there he saw the poor animal he had ridden lying among the straw in strong convulsions, labouring under that curse of South Africa, the horse-sickness, a most mysterious disorder, which had suddenly attacked it.

The animal had looked sullen and dull all morning, and in the stable had been assailed by the distemper and its usual symptoms, heaving flanks, disturbed breathing, glassy eyes, and a projecting tongue tightly clenched between the teeth. Then came the convulsions, and he was dead in half an hour, and Florian found that he would probably have to travel afoot for more than twenty miles before he could rejoin the column on the morrow.

'Where have you come from, Sergeant?' asked Josh Jarrett, when they returned to the public room.

'Taking French leave, eh?' said Jarrett, with a portentous wink and a brightening eye.

'The dismounted now, I think,' replied Florian. 'I should like to rest here for the night, and push on as best I can to-morrow; so what can I have for supper?'

Josh Jarrett paused a moment, as if he thought a sergeant's purse would not go far in the way of luxuries, and then replied:

'Rasher of bacon and eggs, or dried beef and a good glass of squareface or Cape smoke, which you please.'

'The first will do, and a glass of the squareface, which means Hollands, I suppose. Cape smoke is a disagreeable spirit,' replied Florian wearily, as he took off his helmet and seated himself in a large cane-bottomed chair.

'As you please,' said the other surlily, and summoning in a loud voice a female named 'Nan,' left the room.

The latter laid the table, brought in the frugal supper, with a case bottle of squareface, and, instead of leaving the room, seated herself near a window and entered into conversation, with what object Florian scarcely knew, but he disliked the circumstance, till he began to remember that she probably considered herself his equal.

When his hasty repast was over, taking a hint from a remark that he was weary, she withdrew, and then Florian began to consider the situation.

He was fully twenty miles from the regiment; a rough country, not to be traversed even by daylight, infested with wild animals, and many obnoxious things, such as puff-adders, perhaps Zulus, lay between; and unless Jarrett would accommodate him with a horse, which was very unlikely (he seemed such a sullen and forbidding fellow), he would have to travel the journey on foot, and begin betimes on the morrow as soon as dawn would enable him to see the track eastward.

He examined Sheldrake's handsome revolver and its ammunition, reloading the six chambers carefully. Then he thought of the company's money; and tempted, he knew not by what rash impulse unless it was mere boyish curiosity, he untied the red tape by which the paymaster had secured the mouth of the bag to have a peep at the gold.

He had never seen a hundred sovereigns before, and never before had so much money in his possession. Some of the glittering coins fell out on the clay floor; and as he gathered them up a sound made him look round, and from the window he saw a human face suddenly vanish outside, thus showing that some one had, hitherto unnoticed, been furtively watching him, and he strongly suspected it to be the woman Nan, prompted, perhaps, by idle curiosity, and in haste he concealed the gold.

He was the more convinced of the lurker being she when, soon after, she entered, retook her seat by the window, through which the evening sun was streaming now, and began to address him in a light and flippant manner, as if to get up a flirtation with him for ulterior purposes; but his suspicions were awakened now, and Florian was on his guard.

He perceived that she had made some alterations and improvements in her tawdry dress, and had hung in her ears a pair of large old-fashioned Dutch ear-rings shaped like small rams' horns of real gold.

She seemed to be about thirty years of age, and was not without personal attractions, though all bloom was past, and the expression of her face was marred by its being alternately leering, mocking, and—even in spite of herself—cruel. Yet her eyes were dark and sparkling. She wore a fringe of thick brown hair close down to them, concealing nearly all her forehead. Her mouth, if large, was handsome, but lascivious-looking, and Florian, whose barrack-room experience had somewhat 'opened his eyes,' thought—though he was not ungallant enough to say so—that her absence would be preferable to her company, which she seemed resolved to thrust upon him. But guests were doubtless scarce in these parts, and the 'Royal Hotel,' Elandsbergen, had probably not many visitors.

She asked him innumerable questions—his age, country, regiment, and so forth—and all in a wheedling coaxing way, toyed with his hair, and once attempted to seat herself on his knee; but he rose and repelled her, and then it was that the unmistakably cruel expression came flashing into her eyes.

'You are too young and too handsome to be killed and disembowelled by the big Zulus,' said she after a pause; 'they could eat a boy like you. Why don't you desert and go to the Diamond Fields?'

'I have read—I have some book-knowledge, you see—that when a Swiss officer was reproached by a French one that he fought for pay, and not like himself for honour, "So be it," replied the Swiss, "we each of us fight for that which he is most in need of."'

'I don't see the allusion in this instance: a soldier, I do my duty and obey orders.'

'Have a drop more of the squareface—you can't be so rude as to refuse a lady,' she continued, filling up a long glass, which she put to her lips, and then to those of Florian, who pretended to sip and then put the glass down.

He was at a loss to understand her and her advances. Vanity quite apart, he knew that he was a good-looking young fellow, and that his uniform 'set him off;' but he remembered the face at the window, and was on his guard against her in every way. Would she have acted thus with an officer? he thought; and in what relation did she stand to the truculent-looking landlord—wife, daughter, or sister? Probably none of them at all.

Suddenly her mood changed, or appeared to do so, and seating herself at a rickety old piano, which Florian had not noticed before, she, while eyeing him waggishly, proceeded to sing a once-popular flash song, long since forgotten in England, and probably taken out by some ancient settler, generations ago, to the Cape Colony:

'If I was a wife, and my dearest life
Took it into his noddle to die,
Ere I took the whim to be buried with him,
I think I'd know very well why.

'If poignant my grief, I'd search for relief—
Not sink with the weight of my care:
A salve might be found, no doubt, above ground,
And I think I know very well where.

'Another kind mate should give me what fate
Would not from the former allow;
With him I'd amuse the hours you abuse,
And I think I'd know very well how.

''Tis true I'm a maid, and so't may be said
No judge of the conjugal lot;
Yet marriage, I ween, has a cure for the spleen,
And I think I know very well what.'

This she sang with a skill and power that savoured of the music hall, and then tried her blandishments again to induce Florian to drink of the fiery squareface; but he resisted all her inducement to take 'just one little glass more.'

Why was she so anxious that he should imbibe that treacherous spirit, which he would have to pay for? And why did the landlord, who certainly seemed full of curiosity about him, leave him so entirely in her society?

'That is Josh,' said she impatiently; 'bother him, what does he want now? Josh is getting old, and nothing improves by age.'

'Right; and squareface, perhaps. Have one glass more, dear, before I leave you.'

But he turned impatiently away, and she withdrew, closing a scene which caused Florian much suspicion and perplexity. He remembered to have read, that 'man destroys with the horns of a bull, or with paws like a bear; woman by nibbling like a mouse, or by embracing like a serpent.' And he was in toils here unseen as yet!

The light faded out beyond the dark ridges of the Drakensberg, and Florian requested to be shown to his sleeping-apartment, which was on the upper storey.

'You may hear a roaring lot here by-and-by,' said his host; 'but you are a soldier, and I dare say will sleep sound enough. You will be tired, too, after your ride.'

The man had now a sneaking and wicked look in his eyes, which avoided meeting those of Florian, and which the latter did not like, but there was no help for it then.

'You will call me early if I sleep too long,' said Florian, as Jarrett gave him a candle.

The hand of the latter shook as he did so—he had evidently been drinking heavily, and his yellow-balled eyes were bloodshot, and his voice thick, as he said:

With a sigh almost of relief Florian found himself alone. He set down the sputtering candle, and turned to fasten the door. It was without a lock, and secured only by a latch, by which it could be opened from the outside as well as within.

On making this startling discovery, Florian's heart glowed with indignation and growing alarm! He felt himself trapped!

CHAPTER XX.

BAFFLED!

The room was small, low-ceiled, and its only furniture was a table, chair, and truckle-bed—all obviously of Dutch construction—and, unless he could find some means to secure his door, he resolved to remain awake till dawn. The only window in the room overlooked the roof of the stable where the dead horse lay. The sash was loose, and shook in the night wind, and he could see the bright and, to him, new constellations glittering in the southern sky.

Florian contrived to secure the door by placing the chair on the floor as a wedge or barrier between it and the bedstead, on the mattress of which—though not very savoury in appearance—he cast himself, for he was weary, worn, and felt that there was an absolute necessity for husbanding his strength, as he knew not what might be before him, so he extinguished the candle.

Something in the general aspect and bearing of the man Josh Jarrett, and in those of the woman, with her efforts to intoxicate him, and something, too, in his general surroundings and isolated situation—for the few scattered houses of Elandsbergen were all far apart—together with the memory of the prying face he had seen at the window, at the very moment he was picking up the gold, all served to put Florian on his guard; thus he lay down without undressing, and, longing only for daylight, grasped ever and anon the butt of his pistol.

For some time past he had been unused to the luxury of even a truckle-bed or other arrangements for repose than his grey greatcoat and ammunition blanket, with a knapsack for a pillow; hence, despite his keen anxiety, he must have dropped asleep, for how long he knew not; but he suddenly started up as the sound of voices below came to his ear, and the full sense of his peculiar whereabouts rushed on him.

Voices! They were coarse and deep, but not loud—voices of persons talking in low and concentrated tones in the room beneath, separated from him only by the ill-fitting boarding of the floor, between the joints of which lines of light were visible, and one bright upward flake, through a hole from which a knot had dropped out.

'Curse him, he's but a boy; I could smash the life out of him by one blow of my fist!' he heard his host, Josh Jarrett, say.

Others responded to this, but in low, stealthy, and husky tones. Certain that some mischief with regard to himself was on the tapis. Florian crept softly to the orifice in the floor, and looked down. Round a dirty and sloppy table, covered with drinking-vessels, pipes and tobacco-pouches, bottles of squareface and Cape smoke, were Josh Jarrett and three other ruffians, digger-like fellows, with Nan among them, all drinking; and a vile-looking quintette they were, especially the woman, with her hair all dishevelled now, and her face inflamed by that maddening compound known as Cape smoke.

'When I was ass enough to be in the Queen's service,' said Jarrett with a horrible imprecation, 'these 'ere blooming officers and non-comms. led me a devil of a life; they said it was my own fault that I was always drunk and in the mill. Be that as it may, I've one of the cursed lot upstairs, and I'll sarve him out for what they made me undergo, cuss 'em. One will answer my purpose as well as another. Nan, you did your best to screw him, but he was wary—infernally wary. Blest if I don't think the fellow is a Scotsman after all, for all his English lingo.'

'Yes, he did shirk his liquor,' hiccupped the amiable Nan; 'you should have drugged it, Josh.'

'That must be ours,' growled a fellow who had not yet spoken, but was prodding the table with a knife he had drawn from his belt; 'we'll give him a through ticket to the other world—one with the down train.'

Florian felt beads of perspiration on his brow; he was one against five—entrapped, baited, done to death—and if he did not appear at headquarters with the fatal money, what would be thought of him but that he had deserted with it, and his name would be branded as that of a coward and robber.

'He has money galore on him—Nan saw the gold—money in a canvas bag. How comes he, a sergeant, to have all this in his grab, unless he stole it?' said Jarrett, in explanation to the new-comer.

'Of course he stole it—it's regimental money, and evidently he is deserting with it,' said the other, who was no doubt, like Jarrett, a Queen's bad bargain also; for he added, 'What the devil do Cardwell's short-service soldiers care about their chances of pension or promotion—that's the reason he has the bag of gold; so why shouldn't we make it ours? It is only dolloping a knife into him, and then burying him out in the veldt before daylight. Even if he was traced here, who is to be accountable for a deserter?'

And this practical ruffian proceeded at once to put a finer edge and point upon his long bowie knife.

'I don't,' said Jarrett; 'but he ain't likely to use it in his sleep, especially when we pin him by the throat.'

He was but one against five armed and reckless desperadoes; and there was the woman, too, whose hands were ready for evil work. The stair that led to his room was narrow—so much so that there was but space for one on a step. The lower or outer door he knew to be securely locked and bolted. The window of his room, we have said, overlooked the lean-to roof of the stable, where he knew that two horses were in stall—a sure means of escape could he reach one; but the door, he was aware, was locked, and the key in possession of the Kaffir groom.

He was maddened by the thought that his barbarous and obscure death would brand him with a double disgrace; and death is more than ever hard when suffered at the hands of cowards.

'What is the use of all this blooming talk?' said one, starting from the table; 'let us set about the job at once!'

'Look you,' said Jarrett, 'if roused he'll perhaps try to escape by the stable-roof, so while you fellows go up the stair, I go round to the back of the house and cut off his retreat.'

He opened the window at the very moment that stealthy steps sounded on the wooden stair, and a red light streamed under the door, which their felon hands failed to force, so firmly was the chair wedged between it and the bed. He slid down the stable-roof, and dropped safely on the ground, to be faced by Josh Jarrett, who came rushing on, knife in hand, but Florian shot him down, firing two chambers into his very teeth, and then he sprang away like a hare out into the open veldt, leaving the ruffian wallowing in his blood.

He knew not and cared not in what direction he ran at first, as he could hear the oaths and imprecations of his pursuers, over whom his youth, lightness, and activity gave him an advantage; but after a time red-dawn began to streak the eastern sky, and he knew that was the direction which, if he was spared, would take him to the bank of the Buffalo River.

He continued to run at a good steady double, saving his wind as he did so, and his courage and confidence rose when he found that he was distancing his pursuers so much that he could neither see nor hear anything of them.

As he ran on he thought for a moment or two of the fierce gleaming eyes and glistening teeth of Jarrett—of the blood he had shed, and the life he had perhaps taken for the first time, remorsefully; but had he not acted thus, what would he have been? A gashed corpse!

'Bah!' he said aloud, 'I am a soldier—why such thoughts at all? Why should I have mercy when these wretches would have had none?' and he began to regret that he had not fired a random shot or two through the room-door and knocked over some of them on the staircase.

A sound now struck his ear; it was the thud of galloping hoofs upon the veldt, and his heart sank as he remembered the two horses in the stable, where his dead nag was lying.

He looked back, and there, sure enough, in the grey dawn were two mounted men riding in scouting fashion, far apart, and he could not for a moment doubt they were two of Jarrett's companions in pursuit, thirsting with avarice and for revenge.

He made his way, stumbling wildly and breathlessly down a wooded ravine to elude their sight; on and on he strove till a vine root caught his foot: his hands outstretched beat the air for a moment, and then he fell headlong forward and downward into a donga full of brushwood.

For a moment he had a sense of strange palms, and giant cacti, and of great plants with long spiky leaves being about him, and then he became unconscious as he lay there stunned and bleeding profusely from a wound in his forehead, which had come in contact with a stone.

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DULCIE CARLYON.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE HOWE OF THE MEARNS.

CHAPTER II.

WEDDED.

CHAPTER III.

THE SPURNED OFFER.

CHAPTER IV.

REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.

CHAPTER V.

DULCIE.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SECRET PACKET.

CHAPTER VII.

A FAREWELL.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SILVER LOCKET.

CHAPTER IX.

MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

CHAPTER X.

ALONE IN THE WORLD.

CHAPTER XI.

SHAFTO IN CLOVER.

CHAPTER XII.

VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY.

CHAPTER XIII.

AMONG THE GROUSE.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TWO FINELLAS.

CHAPTER XV.

AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN.

CHAPTER XVI.

''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'

CHAPTER XVII.

AT CRAIGENGOWAN.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AT THE BUFFALO RIVER.

CHAPTER XIX.

ELANDSBERGEN.

CHAPTER XX.

BAFFLED!

DULCIE CARLYON.

CHAPTER I. IN THE HOWE OF THE MEARNS.

CHAPTER II. WEDDED.

CHAPTER III. THE SPURNED OFFER.

CHAPTER IV. REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.

CHAPTER V. DULCIE.

CHAPTER VI. THE SECRET PACKET.

CHAPTER VII. A FAREWELL.

CHAPTER VIII. THE SILVER LOCKET.

CHAPTER IX. MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

CHAPTER X. ALONE IN THE WORLD.

CHAPTER XI. SHAFTO IN CLOVER.

CHAPTER XII. VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY.

CHAPTER XIII. AMONG THE GROUSE.

CHAPTER XIV. THE TWO FINELLAS.

CHAPTER XV. AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN.

CHAPTER XVI. ''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'

CHAPTER XVII. AT CRAIGENGOWAN.

CHAPTER XVIII. AT THE BUFFALO RIVER.

CHAPTER XIX. ELANDSBERGEN.

CHAPTER XX. BAFFLED!

CHAPTER I.

IN THE HOWE OF THE MEARNS.

CHAPTER II.

WEDDED.

CHAPTER III.

THE SPURNED OFFER.

CHAPTER IV.

REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.

CHAPTER V.

DULCIE.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SECRET PACKET.

CHAPTER VII.

A FAREWELL.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SILVER LOCKET.

CHAPTER IX.

MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

CHAPTER X.

ALONE IN THE WORLD.

CHAPTER XI.

SHAFTO IN CLOVER.

CHAPTER XII.

VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY.

CHAPTER XIII.

AMONG THE GROUSE.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TWO FINELLAS.

CHAPTER XV.

AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN.

CHAPTER XVI.

''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'

CHAPTER XVII.

AT CRAIGENGOWAN.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AT THE BUFFALO RIVER.

CHAPTER XIX.

ELANDSBERGEN.

CHAPTER XX.

BAFFLED!