TO be the son of a noble of high position, to be the heir to vast estates in a western province, and to a palace in the capital, to have large sums safely invested in foreign banks, to be surrounded by every luxury that to most men makes life worth living, to be carefully inoculated with all the most cherished beliefs of the territorial aristocracy, and as carefully guarded from all liberal influences; to be all this does not generally lead a man to be a social reformer as well. Such causes, as a rule, do not produce a very revolutionary effect. But in Russia, tyranny, officialism, and the supreme sway of ignorance and brutality, seem to have reversed all ordinary rules, and upset all ordinary calculations. There the 'gentlemen of the pavement' are nobles, with a longer lineage than the Romanoffs, and progressive views find some of their most doughty champions in the ranks of the old nobility. So Count Michael Litvinoff was not such a startling phenomenon, nor such a glaring anomaly, as he would have been in any other country. His parents died when he was about eighteen, and after their death he spent most of his time in close study of physics, philosophy, and of the 'dismal science,' as expounded by its most advanced apostles. He wrote, too, extensively, though most of his works were published in countries where the censorship was not quite so strict as in his own. When he was about twenty-five, and was deep in the heart of his great work, 'The Social Enigma,' he woke up one morning with a conviction that all his last chapters were utter nonsense, and, what was worse, he couldn't for the life of him make out what they meant even when he read them over. Bewildered and anxious, he hastened to refer the matter to a personal friend and political ally, whose answer was brief and to the point.

'Nonsense? Why, the book's as clear as daylight, and as convincing as Euclid. You've been working too hard—overdoing it altogether. Go to the South of France for a month, and lose a few roubles at Monte Carlo. It will do you good.'

Michael Litvinoff took the first part of this advice; and though he did not take the second part, he did sometimes spend an hour in watching others lose their money.

One night he noticed a young man on whom fortune appeared to be frowning with more than her usual persistence and bitterness. Again and again he staked, and again and again he lost. At last he collected the few coins that remained of the good-sized heap with which he had begun, and staked them all. He lost again. He got up and walked out. Struck by the wild look in his eyes, Litvinoff followed him into the gardens of the Casino. At the end of a dark alley he stopped, pulled something from his breast, which might have been a cigar-case, opened it, and took out something which Litvinoff saw was not a cigar. The Count sprang forward, and knocked the other's hand up just in time to send a tiny bullet whizzing through the orange trees.

THE light was fading among the Derbyshire hills. The trees, now almost bare, were stirred by the fretful wind into what seemed like a passionate wail for their own lost loveliness, and on the wide bare stretch of moorland behind the house the strange weird cry of the plovers sounded like a dirge over the dead summer. The sharp, intermittent rain had beaten all the beauty out of the few late autumn flowers in the garden, and it was tender of the twilight to hasten to deepen into a darkness heavy enough to hide such a grey desolate picture.

Inside Thornsett Edge another and a deeper darkness was falling. Old Richard Ferrier was sick unto death, and he alone of all the household knew it. He knew it, and he was not sorry. Yet he sighed.

'What is it, Richard? Can I get you anything?'

A woman sitting behind his bed-curtain leaned forward to put the question—a faded woman, with grey curls and a face marked with deep care lines. It was his sister.

'Where are the boys?'

'Gone to Aspinshaw.'

'Both of them?'

'Yes; I asked Dick to take a note for me, and Roland said he'd go too.'

The old man looked pleased.

THE curtain had fallen on the last scene of the most popular play in London. The appreciative criticism of the pit and the tearful sympathy of the upper boxes were alike merging in one common thought, that of 'something nice for supper.' The gallery was already empty. Its occupants were thirstier and more prompt of action than the loungers in the stalls and boxes. Ladies, a little flushed by the exertion of fighting their way through the ranks of their peers, were silently disputing for precedence in front of the looking-glasses in the cloak-rooms, while their cavaliers, already invested with overcoat and wrapper, were pacing the carpeted corridor outside with a very poor show of patience. The most impatient of them all was a stout, rubicund old gentleman in a dark coat, who trotted fretfully up and down, and now and then even ventured to peep in through the door at the chaos of silks and laces, raised shawls, and suspended bonnets, in some component part of which he evidently had an interest.

His very manifest objection to being kept waiting made his fellow-sufferers glance at him with some amusement. A young man who had been going leisurely towards the outer door actually stopped and leaned against the wall while he rolled himself a cigarette, and from time to time glanced with a certain interest at him. He looked very handsome leaning there; his light overcoat was open, and showed the gleam of some rather good diamonds in his shirt front. His pose was graceful—his face had less of boredom in it than is usually worn by young men who go to theatres alone. This, with his large dark eyes, Greek nose, and long drooping blonde moustache, gave him a rather striking appearance. He might have been a foreigner but for his want of skill in making cigarettes. The white hands seemed absolutely awkward in their manipulation. Just as his persevering efforts were crowned with success, and the cigarette was placed between his lips, a white muffled figure emerged from the tossing rainbow sea, and a little hand was slipped through the old gentleman's arm.

'Desperately tired of waiting, I suppose, papa?' said a very sweet voice.

'I should think so. What a time you've been, my dear! I thought I had lost you. All the cabs will be gone.'

'Oh no, dear; the theatre isn't half empty. I was quite the first lady to come out, I'm sure.'

'You may have been the first to go in, but there have been lots of ladies come out while I've been waiting—dozens, I should say.'

'Couldn't we walk back, papa?' said the girl. 'It's a lovely night, and the streets are so interesting. It isn't far, is it?'

'No, no—the idea! Make haste, and we'll get a cab right enough. Mamma will never let us have a trip together again if I take you back with a cold.'

By this time they had passed down the stairs, and the tall cigarette-maker sauntered streetwards also.

But getting a cab was not so easy. That white chenille wrap had taken too long to arrange, and now there were so many people ready and waiting for cabs that a man not at home in this Babel had hardly a chance.

'Papa' was so intent on hailing a four-wheeler himself that he was deaf to the offers of assistance from the ragged battalions that infest the theatre doors, and seem to get their living, not by calling cabs, which they seldom if ever do, but by shutting the doors and touching their hats when people have called cabs for themselves.

He was a little short-sighted, and made several attempts to get into other people's broughams, under the impression that they were unattached 'growlers,' and was only restrained by his daughter's energetic interference.

At last, driven from the field by the crowds who knew their way about better than he did, he yielded to the girl's entreaties, and walked towards the Strand, hoping to be able to hail a passing vehicle. They advanced slowly, for the pavement was crowded.

'We really had better walk,' she was saying again, when the crowd round them was suddenly thrown into a state of disturbance and excitement, and they were pushed backwards against the wall.

'Oh, dear, what is it?' she cried.

'Look out, miss!' said a rough-looking man, in a fur cap, catching her shoulders, and pulling her back so violently that her hand was torn from her father's arm, and at the same moment the crowd separated to right and left.

Then she saw what it was. A pair of spirited carriage horses had either taken fright, or had grown tired of the commonplace routine of wood pavement and asphalte, and had decided to try a short cut home through the houses, utterly regardless of the coachman, who was straining with might and main at the reins.

THE funeral was over, and Thornsett Mill was closed for the day. Fortunately the 'Spotted Cow' was not closed, so that the majority of the hands did not find themselves without resources. Added to the subtle pleasure which so many derive from drinking small beer in a sanded kitchen furnished with oak benches, there was to-day the excitement of discussing a great event, for to the average mind of Thornsett the death and burial of old Richard Ferrier were great events indeed. And then there appears to be something inherent in the nature of a funeral which produces intense and continued thirst in all persons connected, however remotely, with the ceremony. So John Bolt, the landlord, had his hands pretty full, and the state of the till was so satisfactory that it was a really praiseworthy sacrifice to the decencies of society for him to persist in not shortening by one fraction of an inch the respectfully long face which he had put on in the morning as appropriate to the occasion.

'Well, for my part, I'm sorry he's gone,' he said, drawing himself a pot of that tap which seemed best calculated to assist moral reflections. 'That I am! He was always a fair dealer, if he wasn't a giving one.'

'He was more a havin' nor a givin' one,' said old Bill Murdoch. 'Givin' don't build mills, my lad, nor yet muck up two acres o' good pasture wi' bits o' flowers wi' glass windows all over 'em. I never seen sic foolin'.'

'Surely a man's a right to do what he will with his own,' ventured a meek-looking man, who had himself a few pounds laid by, and felt acutely the importance of leaving unchallenged the rights of property.

'I'm none so sure o' that,' remarked Bill, who had a conviction which is shared by a few more of us, that one's superiority shows itself naturally and unmistakably in one's never agreeing with any statement whatever which is advanced by anyone else.

'There'll be more flowers than ever now, if Mr Roland has his way,' said Sigley the meek.

'D'ye think, now, Sigley, he'll be like to get that where Mr Richard is?' asked Bill. 'Mr Roland thinks too much o' flowers and singin', and book learnin', to give much time to getten o' his own way.'

'Mr Roland may be this, or he may be that,' Potters, the village grocer, observed, with the air of one clearly stating a case, 'but he can get his way where he cares to.'

'Tha's fond o' saying words as might mean owt—or nowt, for that matter. Can't tha say what tha does mean?'

'Tha'd know what I mean if tha weren't too blind to see owt. How about Alice Hatfield?'

'Gently, gently,' said Bolt. 'Tha was i' the right, Potters, not to name names, but when it comes to namin' o' names I asks tha where's tha proof?'

Here there was a general 'movement of adhesion,' and an assenting murmur ran round, while the mild man repeated like an echo, 'Where's your proof?'

'Her father don't think ther's proof,' said Sigley.

'A man doesn't want to prove the bread out of his mouth, and the roof off his children.'

WHEN Miss Stanley opened her hazel eyes the morning after the mischance on the way home from the theatre, her first waking impression was that something pleasant was to happen. She laughed at herself a little when complete wakefulness made her conscious that, after all, it was only Count Litvinoff's acquaintance and promised call which were answerable for that dreamy feeling of anticipated enjoyment.

She let her thoughts stray in his direction several times that day, and at the table d'hôte looked out for him with interest. But he was not there. Bearing in mind Mr Stanley's invitation, Count Michael Litvinoff had thought it as well to absent himself from the table d'hôte. It would have been rather awkward to meet his new acquaintances at dinner and then to call on them immediately afterwards.

'I don't see our Russian friend, Clare,' remarked Mr Stanley as the fish was removed. 'I think you must have been mistaken about his staying here.'

'Perhaps I was, papa,' said Clare, submissively, but with a sparkle in her eyes that contradicted her words. 'Or perhaps his foot hurt him so much that he couldn't come down.'

'If he doesn't come up after dinner we'd better make inquiries.'

AS a rule, it was not an easy matter to turn Richard Ferrier from any purpose of his, and when his purpose was that of visiting Miss Stanley and at the same time of putting a stop to any chance of a tête-à-tête between his divinity and his brother, no ordinary red herring would have drawn him off the track.

As he walked through the streets with Roland all his thoughts were with the girl he was going to see—all his longing was to hasten as much as might be the moment of their meeting. In his mind just then she was the only woman in the world; and yet it was a woman's face in the crowd that made him start so suddenly—a woman's figure that he turned to follow with so immediate a decision as to give his brother no time to notice his going until he had gone.

The street was one of those long, straight, melancholy streets, the deadly monotony and general seediness of which no amount of traffic can relieve—which bear the same relation to Regent Street and Oxford Street as the seamy side of a stage court suit does to the glitter and gaudiness that charm the pit, and stir the æsthetic emotions of the gallery. There are always plenty of people moving about in these streets whom one never sees anywhere else—and you may pass up and down them a dozen times a day without meeting anyone whose dress does not bear tokens, more or less pronounced, of a hand-to-hand struggle with hard-upness. It is a peculiarity of this struggle that in it those who struggle hardest appear to get least, or at any rate those who get least have to struggle hardest. This Society recognises with unconscious candour—and when it sees a man or woman shabbily dressed and with dirty hands, it at once decides that he or she must belong to the 'working' classes; thus naïvely accepting the fact that those whose work produces the wealth are not usually those who secure it.

The face which had attracted Dick's notice was as careworn as any other in that crowd—the figure as shabbily clad as the majority. But the young man turned and followed with an interest independent of fair features or becoming raiment—an interest which had its rise in a determination to solve a problem, or at any rate to silence a doubt.

Yet it was a young woman he was following—more than that, a pretty young women; and the very evident fact that this handsome, well-dressed young man was openly following this shabby girl with a parcel inspired some of the loafers whom they passed to the utterance of comments, the simple directness of which would perhaps not have pleased the young man had he heard them. He heard nothing. He was too intent on keeping her in sight. Presently she passed into a quieter street, and Dick at once ranged alongside of her, and, raising his hat said, 'Why, Alice, have you forgotten old friends already?'

The girl turned a very white face towards him.

'Oh, Mr Richard! I never thought I should see you again, of all people.'

'Why, everybody is sure to meet everyone else sooner or later. How far are you going? Let me carry your parcel.'

DICK did not feel inclined to go to Morley's after this rencontre, so he turned back towards his hotel. The problem was not actually solved, certainly; but he was disposed to take all that had passed as a confirmation of his worst suspicions—so much so, that he felt he could not meet his brother just then, as if nothing had happened. He took two or three turns up and down that festive promenade, the Euston Road, thinking indignantly that his position ought to have been Roland's, and Roland's his—that he was suffering for his brother's misdeeds, while his brother was enjoying bright glances from eyes that would hardly look so kindly on him could their owner have known how Dick was spending the evening. For the first time, too, he saw, though only dimly, a few of the difficulties that would lie in his way. It would be harder than ever to keep on any sort of terms with his brother now that he could no longer respect him, and to respect a man who had brought misery into a family which he was bound by every law of honour to protect was not possible to Dick. As his rival he had almost hated Roland; as the man who had ruined Alice Hatfield he both hated and despised him, and he knew well enough that between partners in business these sort of feelings do not lead to commercial success. He did not care to follow out all the train of thought that this suggested; but the remembrance of his father's strange will was very present with him as he went to bed.

In the morning things looked different. It is a way things have.

Colours seen by candle light Will not look the same by day.

After all, was it proved? When he came to think over what the girl had said there seemed to be nothing positively conclusive in it all. It was a strange contradiction—he had been very eager to trace the matter out—to prove to himself that Roland was utterly unworthy to win Clare Stanley; and yet now he felt that he would give a good deal to believe that Roland had not done this thing. And this was not only because of the grave pecuniary dilemma in which he must involve himself by any quarrel with Roland. Perhaps it was partly because blood is, after all, thicker than water.

It did not seem to Dick that his knowledge was much increased by his conversation with Alice. The blackest point was still that mysterious holiday trip, taken at such an unusual time, and about which his brother had been so strangely reticent. And that might be accounted for in plenty of other ways. Alice's disappearance at that particular time was very likely only a rather queer coincidence.

Dick had thought all this, and more, before he had finished dressing, and he was ready to meet his brother at breakfast with a manner a shade more cordial than usual—the reaction perhaps from his recent suspicions. Roland was in particularly high spirits.

'Wherever did you get to last night?' he asked. 'I was quite uneasy till I heard you were safe in your bed.'

'What time did you get home?'

It seemed that Roland's uneasiness had been shown by his not turning in till about two.

THE average English citizen and his wife have a certain method of spending Sunday which admits of no variation, and is as essential to their religion as any doctrine which that religion inculcates. Indeed, it is very often the only tribute which they pay to those supernatural powers who are supposed to smile upon virtue and to frown upon vice.

When church and chapel—St Waltheof's and Little Bethel—unite in teaching that ceremonial observance is at least as important as moral practice, is it to be wondered at that their congregations, feeling that it would be more than human to combine the two, choose to move along the line of least resistance? It is comparatively easy, though perhaps somewhat tiresome, especially in hot weather, to get up only a little late on Sunday mornings, instead of a good deal late, as the 'natural man' would prefer to do; to assume a more or less solemn aspect at the breakfast-table; to wear garments of unusual splendour, which do not see daylight during the week, and in assuming them to feel tremors of uneasiness lest they should be outshone by Mr Jones' wife, Mr Smith's daughter, Mr Brown's sister, or Mr Robinson's maiden aunt. It is not quite so easy, but still possible, to sit for two hours on a narrow seat, evidently made by someone who knew he would never have to sit on it, and to keep awake (in the old pews this was not imperative), while a preacher, whom one does not care for, talks, in language one does not understand, on subjects in which one takes not the slightest interest. And then, as a compensation, one has the heavy early dinner and the afternoon sleep, in itself almost a religious exercise. Perhaps one's ungodly neighbours curse the day they were born as they hear one, after tea, playing long-drawn hymn tunes on a harmonium, till the bells begin to go for evening 'worship'; then one's wife goes to put on her bonnet (which has been lying in state all day on the best bed, covered with a white handkerchief), and one goes to one's 'sitting' again with a delicious sense that the worse of it is over. All this is not so difficult, and an eternity of bliss is cheap at the price—distinctly.

But to refrain from sanding the sugar or watering the milk—especially for a 'family man,' who has 'others to think of besides himself'—to keep one's hand from this, and one's tongue from evil-speaking, lying and slandering, to keep one's body in temperance and soberness, to be true and just in all one's dealings—this would be not only difficult but absurd, nowadays.

There are a good many who try to carry out the moral teachings and let the ceremonial observances alone, and there are far more who disregard the one and the other; and for both these classes there are ways of spending Sunday evening of which the strict Sabbatarian has no conception. Among others are the entertainments provided by working men's clubs. These are not the wildest form of dissipation; but, as a rule, they have some practical bearing on this world and its affairs and, though rather solid pudding, are appreciated by the audiences, mostly working men, who have a strong and increasing taste for solids, and no small discernment in the matter of flavours.

Miss Stanley smiled to herself rather wickedly as she folded this note. She had noticed that her interest in the Russian acquaintance did not seem to enhance theirs, and she thought to herself that whatever the dinner might be at which those three assisted, it certainly would not be dull for her.

In Derbyshire, where her amusements were very limited, she would have thought twice before permitting herself to risk offending the masters of Thornsett, but here that risk only seemed to offer a new form of amusement. But experimenting on the feelings of these gentlemen was an entertainment which was somehow not quite so enthralling as it had been, and she now longed, not for a fresh world to conquer—here was one ready to her hand—but for the power to conquer it. She would have given something to be able to believe that she had anything like the same power over this hero of romance, whom fate had thrown in her way, as she had over the excellent but commonplace admirers with whom she had amused herself for the last year.

Litvinoff had distinctly told her that the goddess of his idolatry, the one mistress of his heart, was Liberty, and though this statement was modified in her mind by her recollection of certain glances cast at herself, she yet believed in it enough to feel a not unnatural desire to enter into competition with that goddess. Her classical studies taught her that women had competed successfully with such rivals, and she was not morbidly self-distrustful, especially when a looking-glass was near her.

With the letter in her hand she glanced at the mirror over the mantelpiece, and the fair vision of dark-brown lashes, gold-brown waving hair, delicate oval face, and well-shaped if rather large mouth, might have reassured her had she felt any doubts of her own attractions. But the glance she cast at herself over her shoulder was one of saucy triumph, and the smile with which she sealed her letter one of conscious power.

Would she have been gratified if she could have seen the effect of her note? It was not at all with the sort of expression you would expect to see on the face of a man who had just received a dinner invitation transmitted through the lady of his heart from that lady's papa, that Richard Ferrier passed the note over to his brother next morning.

AT SPRAY'S BUILDINGS.

IT seemed a very long walk home to Alice Hatfield, after that Sunday evening lecture. She felt almost as though she could never reach her lodging. It was such weary work to keep putting one tired foot before the other. And somehow she was so much more easily tired now than she used to be in her Derbyshire home, where she had been used to breast the steepest hills without even a quickened breath. She wished she had not gone; she had derived no pleasure from the evening, and had only gained a sharper heartache from the sight of a certain face, which had been, and was still for that matter, the dearest face in the world to her. She felt re-awakened too in her a liking for a different life among different surroundings; the life she had given up of her own free will three months ago. She had been much alone in that other life, it is true, and her thoughts had not made solitude sweet; but she had seen him sometimes, and now she was quite alone—always—save for the few slight acquaintances she had made in the house where she lived. In that other life, which now looked brighter than it had ever done when it was hers, she had been racked and tortured by her conscience, which had at last forced her to try and silence it by renouncing what she had sacrificed everything to gain, and by voluntarily adopting this strange, hard way of living. But now that that gloomy monitor was on her side, it failed to give that comfort and support which one is taught to expect from it.

'Be virtuous and you will be happy,' say the copy-books. A somewhat higher authority (Professor Huxley) thinks otherwise. 'Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent,' he says, 'but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in any wise playful; and though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire. She is an awful goddess, whose ministers are the furies, and whose highest reward is peace.'

Alice Hatfield hadn't read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this; and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.

It is given to all of us, at one time or another, to repent—more or less—of the evil; but many of us also know what it is to look back, with something like remorse, on what we believe to have been the good. And good and evil, get so mixed up sometimes, when we have often heard the world's 'right' skilfully controverted and made to seem wrong, by the tongue whose eloquence once made wrong seem to us right.

Alice had to collect all her energies to enable her to climb the steep dark stairs which led to her room, and when she had gained it at last, and had lighted her little benzoline lamp, she sank down on her chair bedstead, exhausted and breathless. What a hateful room it was; how cold, and cheerless, and wretched. The few poor articles of furniture did not relieve its bareness in the least. There was no fire, of course, and her little lamp quite failed to light up the dark corners. There must be something wrong with that lamp—it was going out surely—the room was growing so dark; or was it her eyes from which the power of seeing was going? The room seemed to swim before her sight, and a feeling of deadly faintness came over her, a horrible sensation of going through the floor. She staggered to her feet and drank some water, which gave her strength to go unsteadily down to the floor below, and to knock at the landlady's door.

'Oh, I am so ill—so ill! I think I'm dying,' she said, holding out both hands as the woman appeared; 'help me.'

Then she knew no more. Her troubles, her tiredness, her regrets, her very self, all were swallowed up in the horror of great darkness that overwhelmed her.

'Here's a nice set out,' grumbled Mrs Fludger, as her lodger fell at her feet; 'as if one hadn't enough troubles o' one's own—what with Jenny being out o' work, and the master on the booze since Friday. Jenny!'

'Here I am.'

Miss Jenny Fludger, a muscular young woman, with her hair in a long beaded net, responded to the call, and lent her help in carrying Alice back to her room. Then the unsympathetic hands of the two women undressed the girl and laid her in her bed. Then they looked meaningly at each other.

'If she don't soon come round I'll send Joe for the doctor,' said the mother. 'You never knows what may happen.'

Then Mrs Fludger dashed cold water in the patient's face, slapped her hands with a vigour that would have brought tears to her eyes had she been conscious, and made a horrible smell with the benzoline lamp and a pigeon's feather hastily begged from a lodger who had leanings ornithological. Alice showing no signs of being affected by the application of these generally efficacious remedies, Mrs Fludger decided that this was a case of 'going off' quite beyond her experience, and feeling the responsibility too much to be borne alone, she despatched her third son in quest of a doctor, regardless of Miss Jenny's opinion that the lodger was 'shamming.' Joe Fludger was not particularly pleased at being sent. He was busy just then shaking up a mangy kitten and a recently-acquired guinea-pig in a box, with a view of getting them to fight, which they showed no signs of doing, and he did not care to relinquish this enthralling pastime until he had compassed his end. He put his two 'pets' into one pocket, hoping that that position would urge them to fulfil their destiny and have it out, and as he met several friends, and felt it incumbent on him to exhibit his treasures to each of them, it was some time before he carried out his instructions, and brought medical science, as represented by Dr Moore, to 15 Spray's Buildings. But even when the doctor did at last stand by her bedside, Alice was still insensible.

He raised her eyelids, felt her pulse, asked one or two brief questions, and then stood holding her hand till she sighed, and moved slightly.

'She's coming round,' he said. 'Not married, I see,' he added, glancing at the hand he held, on which shone no golden circle, not even the brass substitute which takes its place occasionally, when times are very hard.

'Not as I ever heard of,' said Miss Jenny with a toss of the net, which drew down upon her a glance of disapproval from the old doctor, and a sharp recommendation from her mother to go downstairs. 'Give the girl air; there's too many of us here a'ready.'

Miss Fludger withdrew with a gesture expressive of a sovereign contempt for faints in general, and this collapse in particular.

'How does this poor thing get her living?' asked the doctor; 'she looks as if she got it honestly.' He, being an observant man, glanced as he spoke at the roughened forefinger of her left hand, and then round the bare, dreary attic.

IT was a bright, perfectly clear, moonlight night, one of those nights in which there seems to be no atmosphere, in which the smallest architectural details of every building show with even a greater distinctness than in mid-sunshine. The great full moon and the vast unfathomable expanse overhead seemed to have cast a spell of their own peace over even London's unpeaceful heart. The streets were empty, for the night had worn itself away to the only hour at which they are really deserted.

The clocks had just expressed their different views on the subject of two A.M. The night was so clear that Alice Hatfield, though her eyes were smarting and aching, thought she could see the hands on the big clock of St Paul's as she came on to Blackfriars' Bridge. She walked slowly, and when she reached the second arch she stopped and leaned her elbows on the parapet. How still the night was! The tide was high, and had just started on its journey seawards; it seemed to flow in one unbroken sheet save for the stir and fret that it made round the supports of the bridge. The lights along the Embankment, with their perfect reflections, might have seemed almost Venetian to anyone inclined to take a more rose-coloured view of things than she. To her they only brought a maddening remembrance of the time when she—not alone then—had first seen them from the windows of the Arundel Hotel. The noise of the water against the bridge was very like the sound of the waters rushing round the stones in the Derbyshire streams—only those waters had always made a song that was to be enjoyed, not understood—and this dark tide, as it broke against the stone, seemed to be whispering constantly some message to her, which she as constantly, but vainly, tried to catch.

It made her shiver. She turned and leaned back against the parapet. The other side of the bridge was in the ruthless hands of the paviors, who had literally left no stone unturned in order to produce that utter chaos in which the heart of the contractor delighteth. The large slabs of paving-stones, standing and lying about in all sorts of positions, made the place look—ugh!—like a graveyard, and the displaced earth and heaps of sand looked like half-made graves, in which the spade and pick of the sexton had ceased to clink. There was a bright red spot of fire about a hundred yards from her—someone was comfortable beside it, she supposed—and somehow she hated that patch of red light more than anything else in the whole picture.

Alice had found a fresh lodging easily enough, and this time she had adopted the badge of marital servitude, and had taken another name. The new room struck her as cheerless and unwelcoming, and her poor possessions looked less friendly than they had done in the old attic at Spray's Buildings. Her bundle of work had been brought with the rest, but she seemed to have no heart to begin it, nor yet to get herself food, and she sat on there, hour after hour, till the sense of complete isolation grew too much for her. At Spray's Buildings she had had no friends, and had valued her few acquaintances but slightly, and she did not realise the amount of comfort that could be got out of a chance meeting with Miss Fludger on the stairs until such meetings were things of the past.

'I will go out,' she had said, rising at last with a feeling that even in strange and unregarding faces there would be companionship of a kind. So she had left her room and had wandered about, passing more than one spot hung thickly round with memories of her short day of sunshine. Then when night fell she felt that she could not go back to that new inhospitable room of hers.

She pictured it dark, cheerless, and cold, shuddered as she thought of the broad streak of moonlight which would come through the uncurtained window, and lie on that bare floor. How dark the corners of the room would be. So she wandered on, and the people grew scarcer and scarcer, and she grew fainter and fainter. She would have been glad of food now, but all the shops were shut, and when she came to Blackfriars' Bridge she was too tired to go any further. And as she stood and looked at the river gleaming in the moonlight, the question came into her mind.

'Need she go further? Was not this the fitting end for such as she?'

A spasm of madness caught her. What an easy way out of all her troubles; what an obvious solution of all her difficulties!

She walked straight before her, stooping to pass under the protecting pole in the middle of the road, falling once over a block of stone and cutting her hands, she thought. She climbed the tomb-like stones, and in a moment was on her hands and knees partly on the parapet and partly on some stones that leaned against it. She looked over without changing her attitude for quite a minute. It made her giddy to look down. She could not stand up, as she had pictured herself doing when that madness first came upon her.

She could drop over, though, and she would. Courage! In another minute it would all be over.

She had made a movement to turn her feet towards the water, when her shoulders were caught by two hands, and she was lifted bodily back on to the bridge.

'You little fool!' said the owner of the hands, which gave her a little shake before they loosened their hold of her. 'What do you want to go drinking of that poison for? It ain't fit to drown a cat in, let alone a human woman female.'

Alice's face was in her hands. She had sunk down against the stones on which she had climbed before. She shivered.

'Oh, I am so cold!' she said, almost in a whisper, without taking her hands away. The madness had died out of her completely.

'You'd have been colder if it hadn't been for me; and oh, the taste in your mouth would have been something dreadful. Come and have a drop of my missus's coffee, by my fire; it's a deal sweeter than wot you was after. The Government ought to take it up,' he said, sententiously, but whether he meant the river, the coffee, or the fire, he did not explain.

He helped her to rise, took her by the elbow in a sort of amateur-constable way, and led her over and round the snares and pitfalls which lay between them and that red eye which had seemed to watch them.

It was a sort of openwork iron pot, full of hot coals, and a species of shelter was contrived round it by means of a judicious arrangement of paving stones and tarpaulin. When he had made her sit down on an inverted basket placed in the warmest corner by the fire, she glanced at him for the first time. He was a big, burly, black-bearded man; he had a kindly expression, and merry eyes, with a sort of cast in one of them which made it difficult to be sure which way he was looking.

'Still cold?' he asked, with one eye on her and the other apparently on the pole star. 'Have this coat; I'm warm enough. I had to hurry up so to catch you, young woman.'

AT the moment when Mrs Fludger's sense of propriety was being outraged by what she termed, in a subsequent recital of her wrongs to her first-floor front, 'that shindy on the stairs,' Miss Stanley was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room at Morley's Hotel, reading the novel that had taken the last season by storm, and pushed everything else out of sight on the bookstalls. But even the thrilling interest of this work did not keep her from falling fast asleep in the middle of the fourth chapter; and she passed the next half hour in a dreamland more pleasant than Morley's Hotel; for that hostelry, especially when her father was, as usual, in the City, seemed to her to be deadly dull. She had just come back to the world of solid furniture and characterless window curtains; her first waking thought was that some tea would be worth anything to her just then—except the trouble of getting up to ring for it—and she wished dreamily that waiters could know by intuition when they were wanted. It almost seemed as if they did, for a tap came at the door, and she had to stop her reflections to say,—

'Come in.'

'Mr Richard Ferrier,' said the waiter who appeared. 'Are you at home, ma'am?'

'Oh, yes; show him up,' she said; and to herself, wonder ingly, 'How funny of him to come at this time.' Then, as he entered, 'Good afternoon, Mr Ferrier. What a dreadful day! Papa has not come home yet.'

'I am very sorry to say,' said Richard, as he took her offered hand, 'that I shall not be able to come this evening.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry!' she said, cheerfully. 'I hope there's nothing wrong. Can't your brother come, either?'

'I don't know, Miss Stanley,' he answered, leaning one arm on the mantelpiece, and looking down, but not at her, though she had seated herself in a low chair near the fire, and was quite within easy visual range. 'I am not likely to know much more about my brother.'

'Not know much more about your brother, Mr Richard?' she said, opening her eyes very wide. 'What can you mean? Surely you haven't quarrelled?'

'I suppose we have quarrelled. At anyrate, my brother told me half an hour ago never to speak to him again on this side of the grave.'

Clare felt that this promised to be several degrees more interesting even than her book. She couldn't help wondering what they had quarrelled about. Was it perhaps—

'What did you say to him?'

'I said nothing—he went away, and I came here.' He spoke in that particularly even and monotonous voice which, with some people, is always the token of suppressed agitation.

'I mean what had you said to make him say that?'

'I told him the truth.'

'But perhaps you said the truth too sharply, and, besides, you ought to make it up with him—especially as you're the eldest. It's so terrible for brothers to quarrel.' She ended with a little didactic air which became her very well.

'I am afraid this is one of the quarrels that can't be made up. I can't alter facts; neither can he, unfortunately.'

THE only good thing about life is that it's interesting, but it's quite possible to have too much interest at once, and then it begins to be irritating and depressing, and the best sedative is tobacco, and the best stimulant is whisky.'

So said the Count when he returned to his room, and he accordingly acted on his convictions. But both whisky and tobacco seemed to fail of the effect expected of them. He sat looking broodingly at the fire for a moment or two; then he got up, paced the length of the room, and, turning sharply, stamped his foot on the ground, muttered a curse or two, and flung his hands out with a vigorous gesture of annoyance.

'So, these sons of the millowner—these playfellows of childhood, these friends of innocence—are men, not ugly, not fools, and not better than their fellows. This Richard is apparently so much interested as to go nearly mad about her disappearance; and as for Roland, there must have been pretty strong grounds before his brother would have started that charming scene on the staircase. I wonder if conscience had as much to do with her conduct as I believed. As a rule, when a woman gives up the substantial goods of this life, it's as well to look for some more commonplace motive than conscien tious scruples. Perhaps it was only a yearning towards the old love. Pardieu, though,' he added, with something like a laugh; 'the old love and conscience together don't provide very good quarters. It would be too much to believe that that little rustic had actually humbugged me. But it's not impossible, young man,' and he glanced mockingly at his reflection over the mantelpiece; 'and at present I should advise you to go to bed; you'll need all your senses about you to-morrow. The threads are lying loose round, as the Yankees say, and you must gather them up.'

He finished his glass of grog.

'I would have given a few hundred francs to have been present in spirit at that interview which depressed la belle Clare and crushed the unhappy Richard. But perhaps a little adroitness to-morrow will fill up the blanks of to-day. And as for the other matter, the future is more to me than the past—to conclude with a fine revolutionary sentiment.'

'I'm sorry I shall have to be out all the morning again,' said Mr Stanley next morning at breakfast, as he opened his letters. 'Would you like to come with me?'

'No, thanks, papa,' said Clare. She had been into the City with him before, and had a vivid recollection of draughty passages, steep staircases, and impertinent glances from junior clerks.

'What will you do with yourself all the time?' asked her father. 'You can't be always reading.'

'I'll run over to the National Gallery, I think, and spend an hour or two there.'

'Why, you've been there once with me.'

'It's no good going to a picture gallery once.'

'I don't know that it's any good, my dear, but it's quite enough for me. However, please yourself—please yourself.' To Mr Stanley's idea it was quite as safe to send a daughter alone to the National Gallery as to send her to church on a week day. The two places seemed to him to be the one as uninteresting as the other, and both of them as absolutely free from possible snares and pitfalls as any convent in the land. 'I meant to have given you lunch at the "Ship and Turtle,"' he went on.

'My dear papa, I'm not greedy. I'm not an alderman.'

'The aldermen of London are an essential—'

'An essential part of the British Constitution,' she interrupted, laughing. 'Yes, I know, dear, and I'm not an essential part. That's just the difference.'

With which she smoothed his hair, arranged his tie, kissed him on both cheeks, and watched him out of sight from the window. Then she went and wrapped herself in a good deal of brown fur, and walked quickly across the square to the hideous casket in which the nation cherishes its gems of art.

She was wandering from one picture to another in a desultory sort of way, and thinking, it must be confessed, more of her own affairs than of the paintings, when she almost ran against Count Litvinoff, who was standing, his hat off and his hands behind him, in rapt contemplation of the Martyrdom of Saint Somebody.

He turned and bowed, with an air of pleased surprise. She had never seen him look so little English—so very foreign.

'Ah! this is good fortune,' he said; 'your father is with you?'

'No,' said Clare. 'Papa doesn't care about pictures, except pictures of dead fish and game, and horses and fat cattle; and I don't care about the City—at least, not the parts of it that he goes to—and this is a sort of paddock where I am allowed to run loose when he is away.'

'I often spend an hour here; I find pictures help one to think. How do you like this Claude?'

A FAIR MORNING'S WORK.

PETROVITCH waited at the corner for some moments, but as his protégée did not return, he concluded that she had found the house door open, and would be all right, so he turned his face west. The new feeling that had possessed him at the sound of Alice's surname had, while he waited, only shown itself in a restless movement of his hand over his beard; but now it found vent in the swinging pace at which he walked. He slackened it now and again, to glance with a frown at the heaps of dirty rags that filled the corners of doorways and the embrasures of walls, and hid human flesh and blood: the flesh and blood of your brothers and sisters, my esteemed Royal Commissioners. These door-steps and archways and out-of-the-way corners are not, of course, to be included in an investigation into the homes of the poor; but perhaps they might be if these royal, noble, and eminent brothers realised that these are the only homes of a large proportion of the poor.

Petrovitch only stopped once, and that was before a door-step on which something gleamed brightly, and caught his attention. There was a group there of the usual type—a man and woman, and a child, a little girl, from whose eyes the gleam came. She was sitting up, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand; a wizened, stunted child of some eight or nine years, with tangled dark hair that fell over her face, and through which her eyes were staring wide and vacant at the clear sky. As he stopped she transferred the gaze to him, but it was still a gaze void of hope and expectation. He did not speak to her, but patted her shoulder, dropped some coppers and a bar of chocolate in her lap, and hurried on, with a muttered curse which the child did not hear.

He stopped no more till he reached a tall house in a quiet street near Portland Road Station. He let himself in with a key, and softly mounted the stairs to the second floor. The room he entered was large, and looked bare until one noticed the shelves on shelves of well-bound, well-kept books, the pigeon-holes full of manuscripts, the brackets supporting good busts and statuettes, the one or two choice prints, the antique writing-table and chairs. There were no curtains to the window, and there was no carpet to the floor; but there was a reading-lamp of uncommon design, with a green shade. It was the luxury of literary asceticism.

Petrovitch turned up the lamp and rekindled his fire. Then he went into the adjoining room, from which presently came the sound of splashing water, followed by hard breathing, as of one wrestling with a rough towel. It was a ghastly hour for tubbing, and many an Englishman who plumes himself on taking a bath at eight or nine in the morning would have shuddered at the idea of thus taking one four or five hours earlier; but it seemed to agree with Petrovitch, for he came back to the fireside glowing, and seeming to have washed from his face the look of mingled weariness and anger which he had brought in with him.

His hand hovered a moment along the line of a certain bookshelf, then he picked out a book, and for the next three hours read steadily, only pausing to make notes.

ON the morning after that which he had spent in the study of Art, Count Litvinoff was busily engaged in turning out the pockets of coats, and 'making hay' of the contents of portmanteaus, conducting a vigorous search for something or other, and singing softly to himself the while,—

'Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round; Every day beneath his sway fools old and young are found. 'Tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round.'

'It may do that,' he said, dropping suddenly into prose, 'but it doesn't find missing property. I shall have to buy one, which will be annoying, when that one has been kicking about ever since I came from Liverpool. Ah! here it is. I've saved at least four and sixpence, which to a man in my delicate position is a largish sum. For, after all, you can't insult a man by pursuing him about London with a cigar-case that cost less.'

He opened the little crocodile-skin trifle and looked into it.

'It has been used as a letter-case before now, and it would rather complicate matters if I left one of somebody's notes sticking in the lining. Things are a little bit that way as it is. The world is very, very small. A remark, by the way, which is invariably made by people who have more than one creditor. But it is strange that I should have run right into the midst of this Ferrier set. One would think that there was only one county in England, and that was Derbyshire.'

He sighed a little, but brightened as his eye fell on the chair which Roland had occupied two nights before. His voice took up the song again as he returned his belongings to something like order. He had just made his sitting-room presentable again when the waiter appeared, and offered, with an air of virtuous and respectful protest, a folded piece of paper, which had been white once, but since that time had apparently sojourned in the pockets of one who carried his meals about with him.

'Seductive billet-doux,' said Litvinoff, as he took it. 'Is it by chance a tinker's bill?'

'It was brought, sir,' said the waiter, 'by a man who appears to be a foreigner. He said he'd wait for an answer.'

'Show that distinguished gentleman up.'

While his order was being obeyed, Litvinoff looked at the paper again. It was not a letter or a bill, after all; but seemed intended to answer the purpose of a visiting card, for all that was written on it was 'Johann Hirsch.'

Litvinoff was not altogether unaccustomed to being called upon by foreign gentlemen with bold and original views on the subject of visiting-cards. He never refused to see any of these visitors, and always sent them away charmed with the beauty of his sentiments and the liberality of his intentions, and occasionally with something more substantial.

As the waiter closed the door and retreated with a glance of politely veiled contempt, the man whom he had shown in came forward, and Litvinoff recognised in him at once the person who had been so interested in the 'Prophetic Vision' on Sunday evening. He offered the visitor his hand with sunny cordiality.

WELL, I hope you will enjoy the evening, my dear; at anyrate, it will be a new experience for you, and will show you that some of us can be earnest even in the midst of our life of frivolity and heartlessness. You know, I have been a Socialist almost from my birth.'

The speaker sighed gently, and adjusted the folds of her rich black satin dress.

'Oh, I am sure I shall enjoy it immensely, dear Mrs Quaid,' answered Clare Stanley, she being the person addressed; 'you know, since papa was rescued from those dreadful horses, I have taken such an interest in all these questions. It is too good of you to have asked such an outsider as I am to a gathering like this. I don't feel frightened of you, because I know how kind you are, but I'm afraid I shall be at a loss with all the rest of the clever people.'

Mrs Quaid smiled benignantly. 'Oh, my dear, intellect is not what we care for. The great thing is character.'

Mrs Quaid emphasised every third or fourth word in such a way as to give to her smallest remarks an apparently profound significance. She was a distinguished member of the Cleon, a small society which met at the houses of members for the purpose of discussing social questions. To-night the meeting was to take place in her own drawing-room, and she had invited her daughter's school friend, Clare Stanley, to spend the evening, which that young woman was glad enough to do, as her father was going to dine at the 'Travellers'' with a friend, and she did not care to face the long lonely evening in the hotel sitting-room. Besides, Mrs Quaid in herself was always amusing to the girl, whose sharp eyes noticed all the little inconsistencies overlooked by more constant associates. Mrs Quaid had, as she said, been a Socialist almost from her birth, and repudiated with scorn what she termed the 'sad distinctions of class,' but she had such tender consideration for those who did not share her views that she never invited those whom she naïvely styled 'one's own friends' to meet any of those members of the working class whom she warmly but fitfully patronised. She was one of those who, while professing the strongest sympathy with the fashionable Socialism, are able to avail themselves of all the advantages which the present system offers to a limited number; and while ardently looking forward to a time when all men would be equal, appear to view with sweet resignation the probable continuance of the present system during their lifetime and that of their children.

On this particular occasion both she and her daughter, a charming specimen of frank English girlhood, were more interested than usual in the business before them.

This evening was to be a field night. The secretary of the Cleon had captured a genuine Russian Socialist, and the society was disposed to make the most of him.

Nearly every member was to bring a friend, so the gathering would be a large one. It was very amusing to Miss Stanley to watch the arrivals, and to ticket them in her own mind each with his appropriate epithet, and the more uncomplimentary these epithets were, the more demure and unconscious she looked. Mrs Quaid introduced to her several personal adherents, for the Cleon, like larger assemblies, was not without its party differences. Miss Stanley did not feel particularly drawn towards any of them. They had not had to fly across Russian frontiers, nor had they ever, to her knowledge, imperilled their lives at the heads of runaway horses.

There was a Civil Service clerk whose strong point was statistics, and another one whose strong point was so obvious an adherence to the principles of the hostess, that he was secretly styled by the irreverent Irreconcilables 'the member for Quaid.' He was an advocate for short hours of labour, particularly in Government offices. Then there was an enthusiastic young stockjobber, with a passion for morality in public life, who believed in levelling down—to the level of stockjobbers, and who systematically avoided revolutionary literature, on the grounds that it would prevent his keeping good tempered, and he wished to keep good tempered, which Clare thought very nice of him.

Then there was the man whose friends thought he was like Camille Desmoulins, and the man who himself thought he was like Danton.

Then there was a George Atkins, whose care for humanity in the abstract was so great as to soar far above the level of his own wife, who was popularly supposed to have rather a bad time of it.

The 'great proletariat,' on whose behalf the Cleon met and discussed, was represented by one stone-mason. Clare was surprised when she heard what his calling was, as there was nothing in his dress or bearing to distinguish him from the other men present. Perhaps that was why Mrs Quaid had specially invited him.

There were about a score of other members who were less noticeable on account of any peculiarity. They formed the real strength of the society, and did all the work, owing to which it held a position in the Socialist movement altogether out of proportion to its numbers.

The majority of the ladies gave a business-like aspect to the evening by severely retaining their outdoor garments. Some of these were of peculiar shape and make, a fact which Mrs Quaid explained in a whisper to be the result of their employment of inexperienced dressmakers, on the highest moral grounds.

By the time Clare had noticed all this the room was pretty full, and as everyone talked at once, and very loud, one might, by shutting one's eyes, have fancied oneself at an ordinary 'at home,' instead of at a serious gathering, whose note was earnestness, and whose motif was social regeneration.

She was just thinking something like this when Mrs Quaid touched her on the shoulder.

'Clare, my love,' she said, 'you must let me introduce dear Mr Petrovitch to you. You know he has been so exceedingly good as to consent to read us a paper to-night.'

Clare knew by experience that all her hostess's male friends were 'dear,' and her female ones 'sweet,' for at least three weeks after their first introduction, but when she turned to receive Petrovitch's bow, it did strike her that the epithet was more than usually incongruous. He was about the last person, she thought, to whom terms of indiscriminate endearment could be applied.

After the Continental manner, he had put on evening dress. The wide shirt-front showed off the splendid breadth of a chest that would not have disgraced a Life Guardsman in uniform. Miss Stanley, as she looked at him, admitted to herself that on some people the claw-hammer coat was not without its æsthetic attraction.

As the people settled down into chairs he took a seat be side her, but in such a position that she could see his face without turning her own.

Then, after a few business preliminaries, Petrovitch began to speak. He did not read, as had been announced, but spoke from notes, with a little hesitation, caused, perhaps, by his speaking in a foreign language. To most of his hearers what he had to say was well-known, no doubt; but to Clare all he said came as a revelation. She had come to be amused, to criticise, to 'make fun,' perhaps; but what she heard from this man beside her was not in the least amusing or funny. It seemed to her more like the gospel of a new religion. She listened intently, and after a while, unconsciously influenced by the interest and light in her face, he began to feel less and less as though he were talking to the room, and more and more as though he were speaking solely to the girl beside him. If he saw comprehension in her eyes, he did not trouble to explain a point further; if he saw a question there, he answered it; a doubt, he solved it. Some eyes are easy to read, and Petrovitch was a master of that art.

The girl was no fool, and though the whole theory of Socialism was new to her, she was able to follow the rigorous train of logic with which he led up to his conclusions. He attacked all the stock ideas which she had been brought up to respect. It somehow did not seem like blasphemy. He flung scorn and derision on the social ideals which she had heard lauded from her cradle. Some things which she had been taught to consider admirable and desirable, grew, as he spoke of them, to seem mean and paltry. Life, as she listened, took new meanings, and became of deeper significance. Even the affairs of every day, the chance stories of misery, and the 'painful' paragraphs of the newspapers, which she felt, and shuddered as she felt, had hitherto seemed only occasions for the sprinkling of a little Radical rose-water—little stings of passing horror, which heightened rather than detracted from the pleasures of existence—seemed now to be worth considering in some other light.

This was not the first time that Clare's heart had been stirred and her sympathies quickened by a spoken discourse. More than once she remembered having left the doors of parish church or cathedral in a tumult of emotion when some specially earnest and eloquent preacher had succeeded in casting a new and fierce light into the inmost depths of her soul; but, she remembered, those feelings had been transient, and strong though the new convictions and resolutions had been when she left the sacred portals, the small things of life—the duties of school, the light worries of home, the social bagatelles, things trivial and tenuous enough in themselves—had soon settled down upon her like a thick atmosphere, and by their aggregate weight had crushed, not out of existence, but back to her soul's remoter recesses, the new-born life.

As Petrovitch finished speaking, and, folding up his notes, thanked his hearers for their patience and attention, she wondered to herself, so quick is thought, whether what had happened before would not happen again, and whether by this time to-morrow her mind would not be running with its accustomed smoothness in its accustomed channels. She hoped no; she feared yes. But somehow something seemed to tell her that in these past experiences her emotions only had been affected, but that this time her reason also had been forced into life and action, and it would be harder to chloroform that, she thought.

For some minutes after he had ceased she was so preoccupied with these thoughts that she hardly noticed the sharp fire of questions which was levelled at him from visitors in different parts of the room. When she did begin to listen to them, it was only to wonder how people could so have misunderstood what seemed to her so clear. There was one lady in particular who asked inconsequent questions in such a feebly deliberate manner, dropping her words out as though they were some precious elixir of which it was not well to give out much at a time, that Clare felt an insane desire to shake her words out of her, and at the same time a little sense into her.

The genial young stockbroker wanted to know whether the best part of Petrovitch's scheme was not included in the present Radical programme, but his suggestion was received with disapprobation by the large majority, and he hastily withdrew into obscurity. It struck Miss Stanley that all the questions and remarks were on side issues, and left untouched the main contentions.

When the chairman of the evening announced that the discussion was at an end, everybody rose and began to talk at once—in most cases not about the paper. Perhaps they were all glad to get away from the larger questions of life's possibilities, and to return to the trivial personalities which form the chief interest of most of our lives.

'You are interested in these questions, Miss Stanley?' Petrovitch said, as he turned to bid her good-night.

'I—I—shall be.'

'Yes, I think you will. Good-bye.'

He left alone, and at once, telling his hostess he had an appointment to keep.

Just outside the door he met Count Litvinoff's visitor of the morning. Hirsch had evidently been waiting for him with some impatience. He turned, and they walked away together.

'I've been here some time,' he said. 'I thought you must have gone.'

'I am sorry,' said Petrovitch; 'I could not leave earlier.'

THERE are people, we are told, on whom the rapid action of railway travelling acts as a soothing influence; but to the majority of us, when suffering from any loss or grief, a long train journey is simply maddening. The rattling of the windows, the vibration of the carriage, the banging of doors and shouting of porters at the stations, the prolonged and ear-piercing shriek of the whistle, occurring at such moments as to convince the thinking mind that it is not let off with any good intention or to serve any useful purpose, but simply to gratify the torturing instinct of the engine-driver at the expense of the passengers' nerves and tempers—all these only aggravate any trouble which may be part of one's invisible luggage. For all these together are not enough to distract one from the contemplation of one's special skeleton, and each is in itself enough to keep one from contemplating it with any good result. And as for seeing the bright side of one's troubles, that is quite impossible when one is moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour; the only wonder is that more people are not overcome by the peculiarly dismal aspect which one's position assumes under these circumstances, and that we don't hear of more suicides in railway carriages.

The three o'clock Midland express was tearing through the quiet country. A faint mist lay over the fields and hedges, faint, but still thick enough to hold its own against the pale yellow sunbeams that seemed striving to disperse it.

Richard Ferrier, idly gazing at the flying hedges and gates and squalid cottages, did not feel any less sad for the sadness of the outside world through which he was speeding home.

He had spent the previous evening in a vigorous search after Alice—a search which had been unsuccessful, even though he had offered Mrs Fludger the best inducement to frankness. It had needed that golden token to mitigate the wrath with which she had received his first question. She had, indeed, hinted, not darkly, in the first flush of indignation, at worse designs on his part than even Bible-reading; but gold itself, though it had softened her asperity, had been powerless to extort from her any information of the slightest value. Having tried all he knew, and failed, to discover any trace of what he sought, Richard had given up the search. He had met Roland once on the hotel staircase. They had passed each other like strangers.

As the train rushed on, he went over and over again all the circumstances of his quarrel with his brother. A fire of hate burned in him fiercely, a stern and deep indignation surged in his heart, and blinded his eyes to any possible palliation of his brother's conduct. This state of mind was the outcome of months of heart soreness and suppressed bitterness of spirit,—months in which he had vainly tried to disguise from himself that if Clare Stanley did incline to one more than the other, it was Roland who was the favourite. During that month of Roland's unexplained holiday Richard had fancied he made some progress in her good graces, but when his brother came back again she had turned on him just the same smiles and glances that had bewildered Dick. And from that time it had seemed to him that Roland was gradually elbowing him out. Miss Stanley had a taste for poetry, and Roland read poetry extremely well. Miss Stanley called herself a Radical, and Roland had been a shining light on that side in a small debating society at Cambridge. Miss Stanley liked to chatter about Art, and Roland always had a stock of the latest Art prattle at the tip of his tongue. Roland had grown fond of solitary walks, and in these was constantly meeting Miss Stanley 'by accident'—'accident' which Richard could not always bring himself to believe in. It was to be noticed, by the way, that in the walks of both these young men all roads led, not to Rome, but past Aspinshaw. Richard had borne all this, sustaining himself with a hope that Miss Stanley did not really feel interested so much in Roland as in the tastes he affected. He had still hoped that she might come to care for him,—for the man who loved her with such a passionate intensity. It is so hard, so very hard, to believe that the love that is everything to us is absolutely nothing to the beloved. Men have even dreamed that their passion could warm marble to life. How much easier to fancy that it can stir a heart to love.

But the sting in the pain he had suffered while his lady smiled on Roland had been a half unselfish fear that these smiles of hers were being bestowed on a man unworthy of them. Now that he believed this unworthiness to be proved, all the latent doubts, distrusts, suspicions he had kept down 'sprang full statured in an hour,' and with them sprang a hatred of his brother, so fierce as to frighten himself; for however he might seek to deceive himself about it, he knew in his inmost heart that it was less as a heartless profligate than as a possibly successful rival that he had learned to hate him.

But he knew that now this rivalry could not be successful. His great love for her prevented his seeing the realities that underlay the superficial side of her character, so that he actually believed her to be the last woman in the world one could dare to ask to share poverty. He knew that his own chance, such as it had been, was lost; but he knew, too, that his brother's chance was also at an end. This did not make him less determined that the quarrel should be à outrance.

'Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face' is such a wildly irrational act that one would never expect any reasonable being to be guilty of it, and yet hundreds of people do it every day. Dick was doing it now, practically, though he kept reminding himself that this was really the only honourable course open to him, and that he was influenced mainly by irreproachable motives.

It was nearly eight o'clock when his journey ended at Thornsett Edge.

He went straight into the dining-room, where Miss Ferrier sat filling in the groundwork of some canvas slippers, which she hastily pushed out of sight when she saw him. It was one of her habits, kept up since the days when they were children, to make some present for each of the brothers every year, and give it to them at Christmas as a 'surprise.'

'My dear Dick, how ill you look! Why didn't you write? Have you had any dinner?'

'No, auntie,' said he, kissing her. 'Just order up something cold, will you? I want to run up to Gates this evening. I won't wait for anything to be cooked.'

Miss Letitia suppressed her curiosity as to what could be taking Dick to his father's solicitor at this time of night, and hurried off to see about the meal herself. While he was busy with the cold beef and pickles he told her briefly that he had run down on business, which had been rather worrying lately.

'That accounts,' said the good lady, 'for your looking so poorly. I hope you've not been keeping bad hours.'

'Not I!' said Dick, as he drew the cork of a bottle of stout. 'Nor yet bad company, aunt—don't you think it.'

THE train which brought Count Litvinoff from London was punctual to the minute, but the trap which was to take him to Thornsett Edge was not, and he was lounging discontentedly among his rugs and luggage at the melancholy little station of Firth Vale.

When Roland had left London, some weeks before, he had parted from Litvinoff with the understanding that he was to spend Christmas with him at Thornsett Edge. Young Ferrier had felt that the Count would be a thousand times better company than his own thoughts, and he preferred asking him to inviting any of his college friends, from whom Richard's absence would provoke comment, and to whom it would have to be explained. For Richard had gone away, leaving no address save that of a solicitor in London, and he had written to the trustees, and steps were being taken for closing the mill. Roland would rather have been anywhere than near the property he was so soon to lose, but Gates urged him to stay at Thornsett till the New Year, and with Count Litvinoff as his guest he hoped to keep ghosts of old times at bay as successfully in his old home as he could hope to do anywhere else. And Litvinoff had accepted the invitation with fervour, for the Stanleys were back at Aspinshaw.

The day he had pitched on for his journey was a bitterly cold one in the middle of December, and the waiting-room at Firth Vale had no big fires, soft carpets, and luxurious lounges. It had nothing but a bench, a table, a Bible, a Prayer-book, and a large stone jug of cold water. Litvinoff was got up quite after the English manner, in a light, long travelling ulster with a hood, and a tourist hat of the same stuff; but in spite of his precautions against weather he was very cold, and not a little cross at his prolonged waiting. He was just debating whether it would not be better to walk, and trust his traps to the mercy of chance, when the station shivered and shuddered as the 'local' came slowly and heavily in.

As it stopped, a stout woman, of about forty-five, with the usual number of blue bandboxes, bundles in handkerchiefs, and brown baskets disposed about her person, came hurrying down the stone steps, accompanied by a hard-featured, grizzled man some years older. Litvinoff watched their descent with a smile, but as they reached the bottom step his face grew suddenly serious. He turned sharply, and, passing into the little waiting-room, became deeply absorbed in the 'Scripture roll' which hung opposite the door, until the train had glided out of the station.

He saw without turning his head that only the woman had gone. The man remained on the platform, gazing after the retreating line of carriages till he started and turned round at Litvinoff's voice.

'I beg your pardon, but do you know a place about here called Thornsett Edge?'

'Ah do,' said the man, after a prolonged stare. 'It's a matter o' three miles off.'

'Can I get a trap here?' In reply he learned that there was no trap nearer than the fly at the 'Jolly Sailors,' and that was half a mile the other side of Thornsett.

'Then I suppose I must walk. Can you tell me the way?'

'Ah can show you,' said the man. 'Ah'm going up to the village; Ah live there.'

He spoke shortly; but Litvinoff had a reason for wishing to talk to the man, and so was content to ignore a curtness of manner which at any other time he would have been the first to resent.

In a few minutes the two were walking over the hard road side by side.

'Do you happen to know Mr Ferrier?'

'Ay; Ah work i' their mill.'

'I suppose they are great favourites hereabouts?'

'They're good lads enow,' said the elder man; 'better nor most o' them.'

'Better than most of whom?'

'Most of the masters and gentlefolks and that like,' said the man, rather sullenly.

'You don't seem to like gentlemen, my friend.'

'Ah don't like them well enough to believe either as they're my friends or as Ah'm theirs,' was the answer, given with a haughty resentment of Litvinoff's epithet, which that gentleman found amusing.

'I'm afraid that's true enough in most cases.'

The man looked a little surprised at having his sentiments met by this ready echo from such an unlikely quarter.

'The toad don't love the harrow,' he said slowly; 'but it ain't often as you can get the harrow to see that.'

'Are you quite sure the toad sees it? It seems to bear it quietly enough.'

'What else can we do?' asked the man fiercely.

'That's exactly what I'm giving my life to trying to find out,' said Litvinoff, very quietly.

The workman stopped short, and looked at the gentleman from head to feet. His gaze was calmly returned.

He turned and went on with a half laugh:

'Have you came down here to find that out, and is Mr Roland going to help you?'

'I can't answer for Mr Roland Ferrier, but as for myself— look here, my friend' (with an emphasis on the word), 'in trying to help the "toads," as you call them, I was driven from my own country, and had to fly for my life, with a pack of soldier wolves at my back.'

'Ay? How was that?' The man was interested in spite of himself, and Litvinoff forthwith plunged into an account of the flight across the frontier on that most exciting night of all his life.

His listener had not heard many exciting stories—they are not rife in Firth Vale—and to this story the fact that it was told by the chief actor lent an unusual interest. The Count was a good story-teller, and the way in which he told his tale left room for no doubt of its truth. When the recital was ended the listener drew a long breath.

'Ah'm glad you gave them the slip,' he said; 'the devils! Eh, but you're a lucky man to have had such things in your life, and to have done something. You don't know what it's like to have your life all bearing and no doing. Why, sometimes when you see how things go wi' some poor folks you're most ready to curse the A'mighty as lets such things be.'

The tone of the words, and the words themselves, told Litvinoff that the man's icy distrust of him had melted in the warmth of admiring sympathy.

'Ah! here comes Mr Roland,' he said a minute after, as a tall figure came in sight; 'he'll show you now. My nearest way's over here,' pointing to one of those uncertain erections of loose stones which do duty for walls in that part of the country. 'Ah hope Ah shall see you again. If you have nothing better to do any time I shall be right glad to see you at our place. Any one at Thornsett'll tell you where I live. My name's Hatfield—John Hatfield.'

'As I thought,' said Litvinoff, as he advanced to meet Roland, and to receive his profuse regrets at the sudden casting of a shoe, which had prevented the mare from getting to the station with the dog-cart, which ought to have been in attendance. 'But come along,' he said; 'it's a jolly day for a walk, and I'll send down for your things as soon as we get home. That was John Hatfield you were with. He's rather a character.'

'He seems to be one of us,' said Litvinoff, as they walked on together.

'How do you mean?'

'He doesn't appear to be particularly satisfied with the present system.'

'No; and he has good wages too,—nearly two pounds a week.'

'Affluence,' said Litvinoff.

'Ah, well,' said Roland, laughing—'it's very good as things go—but he has some reason for hating his betters.'

'Some reason besides the two pounds a week, do you mean?'

'Yes; his daughter, an awfully pretty, nice girl, made a fool of herself—but I'll tell you about that some other time. Shall we go this way? It is a little longer, but it leads round by Aspinshaw, and I want to call there to ask after Mrs Stanley; she has a cold. Old Stanley will be delighted to see you; he's always talking about you. I don't know how he stands your revolutionary ideas.'

Litvinoff laughed.

'I never air them to him. I never talk revolution unless there is some chance of making a convert; but some things are too impossible, and Mr Stanley as a revolutionist is not to be conceived.'

'Miss Stanley seems to be quite a convert, however, although she always had a leaning that way. But I don't think the conversion is a star in your crown. She lays the credit of it to some man—I forget his name—whom she heard in town. I suppose you know him?'

'Ah, yes; I remember Miss Stanley took me down splendidly one morning by saying that now she understood our views, thanks to this man Petrovitch. And I, who had been vainly flattering myself that I had made them intelligible to her!'

'By George, yes!' said Roland, secretly pleased. 'That was rather a facer. But then she didn't hear you at the Agora. Is this Petrovitch a gentleman?'

'Upon my word, I don't know. It seems he knows me, but somehow or other we never seem to meet. It is not impossible that I may have known him under some other name. I must ask Miss Stanley to describe him to me.'

'Oh, she'll do that with a great deal of pleasure,' said Roland; 'it's her great topic at present. That's Aspinshaw, over there to the right.'

It was a very pretty house, and somehow managed to escape, even at this dreary season, such dreariness as hung over Thornsett Edge, though it was built of the same grey stone, and had the same moorland background. There was a good deal of ivy about it, and the grounds were less regular and more full of evergreens and shrubs than the Ferriers' garden.

As the two young men walked up the private road they heard from the rear of the house a confused barking of dogs, and above the noise a girl's clear voice, raised in vain endeavour to still the joyful tumult.

'La belle Clare,' Litvinoff spoke softly, raising his hat as though he saw her, and quickening his pace a little.

'Shall we go round this way?' said Roland; 'we don't stand on ceremony with each other down here.'

'By all means,' said Litvinoff, and they turned into the stable-yard, passing down by the laurel hedge that alone divided it from the garden.

'By God! what's that?' cried the Count, suddenly stopping; and then both men sprang through the hedge. No time to go round now, for there had been the sharp report of a gun, a woman's shriek, and a heavy fall.

IT was Sunday afternoon. The rather festive look of Petrovitch's room, in which he now sat alone, was not, however, due to any desire to specialise the day. He had simply made his home as cheerful as possible because he was about to entertain guests.

His table was spread with a snowy cloth, and with the preparations for a tea of a distinctly convivial character. There was jam, and more than one kind of cake; and the room was further brightened by bunches of chrysanthemums. Chairs were drawn round the fire in an inviting-looking circle. The least cheerful object in the room was the owner of it, who sat in his usual chair between the fire and the writing-table. He looked pale and weary, for the frosty weather had strongly renewed the pain in a wound in his breast—an old wound, and a wound that had just missed being a deadly one. Contrary to his usual custom, he was neither reading nor writing. The pipe he had been smoking had gone out, and his thoughts were far back in the past, among the memories which had re-awakened with that aching in his breast. His thoughts went further back than the date of that wound,—went back to the days before he had lost friends, home, and country. He saw again in fancy the brilliant gaiety of the winters in St Petersburg, he heard again the exquisite music of the concerts and the opera,—the balls where Majesty itself had deigned to be present, with anxious brow and uneasy, restless eyes. His memory dwelt longest on a certain torchlight fête on the Neva, when the ice had been a yard thick, and when the élite had been shut off from the common herd by walls made of blocks of solid ice, between which fir trees were planted; when coloured lamps and Chinese lanterns had thrown indescribable magic over the crowd of bright military uniforms and the exquisite toilettes of lovely women who had never in all their lives been troubled by any thought of what their dresses cost. And even at this distance he could not think without half a pang of a certain fair-faced girl, with golden hair, who, in her sapphire velvet and swansdown, had been the star of that fête to his boyish eyes. And she had been kind to him on this the last evening he had spent near her before his new faiths and duties had separated him from her for ever. That was the first loss his creed had cost him. He wondered what would be the last—life itself perhaps. Then he fell to thinking how these beliefs of his had grown up. How the reading of a certain book—an English book—had done for his mind what a successful operation for cataract does for one nearly blind—had shown him the facts of life, no longer half hidden in a mist of falsity, but in all their naked truth and ugliness. How for a time he had closed his eyes again and had tried hard to live on in the life of luxury, beauty, love, and (now he knew) selfishness which had been his by 'right of birth.' He remembered the night when, belated miles from his home, and overtaken by a snowstorm, he had sought refuge in a peasant's hut, how he had talked to his hosts, how one visit had led to many, and how what he had learned from these miserable serfs had forbidden him to forget or to set aside the teaching of the great author whose book had first set him thinking. He remembered that time, perhaps the happiest in his life, when he first began to write—when the ideas which had so long been seething in his brain had found literary expression. He remembered the joy with which he had corrected his first proof, the pride with which he read his first article in a magazine. So thoroughly back in the old time was he that he had stretched out his hand towards this very magazine, which stood bound on a bookshelf, when a heavy foot sounded on the stairs, and a moment after a knock at the door heralded the entrance of Mr Toomey, whom Petrovitch came forward to greet with an almost courtly welcome.

'But your wife,' he said; 'can she not come? I trust all is well with her?'

'All's well with her, and thanking you for the question; but all's not well with that young woman o' yours.'

'Of mine? I do not happen to possess a young woman, my good Toomey.'

'I suppose you and me and my Mary Jane possesses about equal shares of her, then, for I saved her from keeping company with the dead cats and dogs, and you sent her to our place, and now my missus is let in for looking arter her.'

'Come to the fire. I hope it's nothing serious.'

'I don't rightly know. My missus told me I should be better out of the way, and I sent the doctor in as I came by.'

'I am very sorry,' said Petrovitch, 'but I am sure poor Mrs Litvinoff could not be in better hands than those of your good, kind wife.'

It was noticeable that he never spoke of Alice save as Mrs Litvinoff.

'You've a snug little place up here, sir,' said Toomey, looking round him. 'And do you really like reading—those sort of books, I mean,' pointing to Hegel's 'Logic,' which lay open on the table.

'I like doing better than reading, but one must read much to be able to do little in the line of work I am on at present.'

THANK God!' was Count Litvinoff's inward ejaculation, as, followed by Roland, he sprang through the laurel bushes into the gravel path that skirted the lawn. For what he saw was not what he had feared to see. Clare was safe. She was standing on the last of the stone steps that led down from the verandah, her hands clasped over her eyes, as if to shut out some intolerable sight.

On the lawn before her, half-a-dozen yards off, in brown shooting suit and gaiters, lay her father, face downwards, on the grass, his gun beside him, and his two sporting dogs sniffing round the hand that had held it.

The two young men were at his side in an instant, and had half raised him by the time Clare had shaken off the horror that had paralysed her and had sprung towards them. Roland glanced at Mr Stanley's face, and, passing his arm round the old man's neck, drew his head towards him, and bent over it in such a manner as to keep it from her eyes.

'Take her in, Litvinoff,' he said, still bending forward; 'make her go in.'

'Come in, Miss Stanley; you can do no good here,' said Litvinoff, rising and taking the girl by the arm. She shook him off.

CLARE STANLEY was the mistress of Aspinshaw, and of a good deal of bricks and mortar, stocks and shares, and Three per Cent. Consols besides. Mrs Stanley was comfortably provided for, but it was Clare who was to profit by the hard work, the self-denial and forethought of some three generations of Stanleys, or, as some might think, of their greed, their grasping, and their over-reaching of their less crafty fellow-men.

The will that had laid the burden of wealth upon her, at an age when most young women of her class are engaged in constant differences with their parents and guardians on the subject of pin-money, had been the one act of eccentricity of Mr Stanley's whole life.

For some days her grief for her father's loss had been too absorbing to permit of her thinking of much else besides, but on this first day of the new year she felt more able to think, and as she sat alone by the drawing-room fire she began for the first time to realise her position. About one thing she had made up her mind; she must leave this horrible house, where the shadow had fallen on her which she felt just then could never be lifted again.

Between Clare and her father's second wife there had always been perfectly cordial relations, but they were not bound together by any ties of love.

Mrs Stanley had always done her duty to her husband and his child, but hers was a cold nature, and not one which had drawn out Clare's heart towards itself. She was now going to stay with her own relatives, and was perfectly willing to take her step-daughter with her; but the girl decided, without much need for reflection, that there would be many things better than to be buried alive in a Yorkshire village, with no one more congenial to talk to than Mrs Stanley or Mrs Stanley's relations, whom Clare had been wont to term 'the fossils.'

An unposted letter lay on the little table at her elbow, in which she had accepted an invitation to spend an indefinite time with the Quaids. She thought that in London, away from the associations of the recent past, she would be better able to plan out the course of her future life. She knew that that course would now be a very different one from what it would have been had she had the planning of it three months ago, before she met Count Litvinoff or spent that evening at the Cleon. She was sorrowfully glad that her father's will was what it was, for she was conscious in a vague sort of way that wealth meant power, and she was determined that in her hands it should mean power to do good and to make others happy. Her plans went no further than this at present, and she knew that even to carry this out she would need teaching and help and counsel from those who had more experience of the world and its needs than she had. It was, perhaps, this thought that had mainly influenced her in her acceptance of Mrs Quaid's very kind and cordial invitation, for Marlborough Villa was not the most unlikely place in the world at which to meet some one who had just that which she lacked. There she had first been forced to think; perhaps there she would first be taught how to act.

Why does one never learn at school the things one needs when one leaves it? 'How much there is to know—how much there is for me to learn,' she said to herself, with a little sigh, leaning forward and gazing into the glowing fire, resting her elbow on her knee and her cheek on her clasped hands.

She started and rose at a loud, clanging ring of the door-bell. As she had expected, the servant announced 'Count Litvinoff.' He came forward with a low and deferential bow.

'You must forgive me,' he said, 'for calling on you on Sunday afternoon, which, I believe, is not the rule in England; but I heard that you were leaving Aspinshaw to-morrow, and I could not run the risk of not seeing you again.'

'We are always pleased to see you,' said Clare; 'but I am not going to London for some time yet. There will be a good deal of law business, I suppose, and it is not fair to carry the trouble of that to my friend's house. Is Mr Roland well?'

'He is on duty,' said Litvinoff; 'he has gone to a chapel with his aunt, which is good of him, as his views are not that way.'

Clare drew a breath of relief. She had not felt comfortable in Roland's presence since that interview with Litvinoff in the National Gallery.

'I myself shall be returning to London in a few weeks,' the young man went on. 'I have already stayed as long as I at first intended to do, but now Ferrier is good enough to wish me to stay until the household at Thornsett Edge is broken up.'

'Ah, yes, I had forgotten that. What a horrible thing! What are they going to do?'

'I believe Mr Roland will live with his aunt at Chelsea.'

'We seem to be all going to London,' said Clare, with an effort to be as cheerful as possible.

'True; but London is so vast, and in it I know so few people whom you are likely to know, that I feel I might as well be going back to Siberia for any chance I shall have of seeing you.' This with the air of one who would as soon go to Siberia as not while he was about it.

'Oh, I daresay we shall see each other,' she answered, leaning back in her chair and trifling with a big screen of peacock's feathers, which she had idly taken up. 'I'm going to stay with a lady who is madly anxious to know you.'

GOING out again, John?' spoke Mrs Hatfield, a little plaintively, as her husband rose and took down his hat from its peg, ten days after Thornsett Mill had been closed. Not closed for a day on account of a wedding, as had once been suggested, but closed, it might be for ten years, or practically for ever.

'Ay, lass,' said her husband shortly, but not unkindly; 'Ah should go clean daft if Ah stayed i' the house. Lazying about don't suit me—it's only my betters as takes their pleasure i' that way.'

'Tha'lt do no good down at t' Spotted Cow,' returned Mrs Hatfield, compressing her lips; 'tha might as well be idle i' tha own house as wi' all they gomerils—spending tha money too, as if tha was i' full work.'

'Well,' he said, pausing with his hand on the back of the settle where she sat, 'we'll all have to be shifting out o' this soon, and tha knows, lass, as Ah were never one to drink nor to talk out o' season. Ah mun hear where the lads is going for work. It won't ne'er do for us a' to be going the same way.'

'It seems hard tha should have to go after work at tha time o' life, John. But likely it's as hard for Rowley and Dick as for thee and me. Poor lads, poor lads! Ah, Heaven help us a' in this hard world.'

'They're fur enow fro' want, tha may be sure, or they wouldn't ha' sacrificed the mill to their mucky pride. It's little they care who starves, so long as they have enow. Tha must remember as what they'd call being poor we'd call being rich. "Hard up" for a gentleman ud be enow and to spare for a working man.'

And he went out, slamming the door behind him, and his wife took up her knitting with a sigh. She could rarely follow her husband in his reasonings, but troubles are not the less hard to bear because we don't clearly see their causes. They had saved a little money, but that would soon be gone, and then there would be nothing before them but 'the house.' Both their sons were away—one a sailor, and the other in a warehouse in Liverpool—but neither was earning enough to be able to help their parents. Vaguely she hoped that her husband might take it into his head to go to London for work. An idea is prevalent in the provinces that in London there is work for every one, and besides, Alice had written from London, and there would be a chance of finding her poor lost child and bringing her back.

The sudden closing of the mill made affairs indeed terribly serious for most of the men in Thornsett. It was in the middle of winter, when journeying was not pleasant, nor work easy to get; and though the 'hands' employed in the mill had been told that it would close, very, very few among them had made any effort to secure other work before the time for closing came. Perhaps it had seemed to them that the closing of the mill was one of those calamities too terrible to happen. But it had happened, and after ten days of idleness the men were beginning to see clearly what it would mean to them. For there was no other work to be got within anything like easy reach of the village; and even if work could be obtained somewhere else, the little community must be broken up, and each family must separate itself from friends and neighbours and relatives in order to journey thither. This alone is thought a terrible calamity for middle-class men and women, but it is the least of the troubles which are always hanging over the heads of the workers. The exodus that must shortly take place had not yet begun, but every one knew that it could not now be long delayed; and Potters and the few other tradespeople being, of course, involved in the general distress, could no longer give credit. This had never been withheld in slack times, when the shopkeepers knew that good ones were certain to come in which the scores would be wiped off or reduced very considerably; but now there was no chance of things growing brighter again, and even the small accounts then owing were not very likely ever to be paid.

During the past ten days, as the men's money was being spent, and as the want of work gave them more time to reason on the causes of their trouble, a strong feeling of resentment had been growing up among them against the two young masters, who had held, as it were, the happiness, the comfort, perhaps the lives, of all these men in their hands, and had thrown all to the dogs rather than humble their own insensate pride and abate their own insensate obstinacy. This feeling had found vent, not only in the scowls and black looks on which Litvinoff had commented, but in certain faint groans and hisses with which Roland had been greeted on more than one occasion when he passed down the village street.

What right had these two, on whose forbearance and good fellowship hung the fate of all these families, to go quarrelling with each other?

'It's a' their darn'd selfishness,' Murdoch was saying, just as Hatfield kicked open the door of the tap-room at the Spotted Cow, and passed in. 'What's the odds to them if we clem or if we dunna't?'

'It's my belief,' said Potters bitterly, 'as they done it to show their independence.'

'They might have hit on a cheaper way,' growled Hatfield, as Murdoch and Sigley made room for him to sit between them.

IF the frequenters of the Spotted Cow had only known, this was about the most unpropitious moment for obtaining a hearing for their petition. A hearing was all they could possibly obtain for it, but that they did not know either.

Litvinoff's host had not found him as great a comfort as he had expected. For one thing, the Count's almost universal sympathy seemed unaccountably to stop short at Roland Ferrier. The young man felt that he had been terribly ill-used and naturally expected every one else to see things in the same light, and it was 'riling' to find all the sympathy of his guest turned, not towards him, but towards his workmen, which did not seem reasonable; for, as Roland said, they could get other work, but where was he to get another mill? Then he did not like a certain change which he noticed in the other's tone when he spoke of Miss Stanley. He had sympathy enough for her, goodness knows—a trifle too much Roland sometimes thought.

For Litvinoff to be a bore was impossible; but still it did happen rather often that he would bring forward political economy of the most startling pattern when the other wanted to talk literature, or art, or personal grievances.

On this particular night Roland had been led, much against his will, into a discussion of the nature which Litvinoff so much affected, and he had to admit to himself that, as usual, he had much the worst of it.

'It's all very well,' he said (people always say, 'It's all very well,' when they can find no other answer to an argument); 'it's all very well, and that sort of thing may do for Russia, but you will never get an economic or any other revolution here— Why what the deuce is all that row?'

'That row' was a tramping of many feet on the gravel, and a hum of voices just outside the window.

Litvinoff, who was sitting nearer the window, rose and looked through the laths of the venetian blinds.

'Well, my dear Ferrier,' he said, turning round with a smile, 'it strikes me that there is a revolution in England, and that it has begun at Thornsett. The whole population of Derbyshire appears to have assembled in your front garden—yes, that's it, evidently,' he went on, as a ring was given to the door bell, 'and they are going to try gentle measures to begin with, just as I have always advised,' he concluded, for the ring was not a loud one.

Roland had risen from his easy-chair and had made towards the window, when the door opened and the maid announced that Clayton and one or two of the hands wanted to speak to Mr Ferrier.

'Show them in,' said Roland curtly; and, as she withdrew, 'One or two,' echoed Litvinoff; 'that young woman's ideas on the subject of numbers are limited and primitive. Now, Ferrier, just repeat those arguments you have been using against me, and I doubt not, so lucid and convincing are they, that they will reconcile Clayton and the "hands" here to the starvation that awaits them.'

Only three men followed old Clayton as he entered the room.

'Well, my men,' said Roland Ferrier, turning to them, and with a faint irritation in his tone, as Litvinoff, leaning one elbow on the mantelpiece, waved a recognition to the deputation, 'What can I do for you at this time of night?'

'Well, sir,' began Clayton, 'me and my mates here has come to speak to you for ourselves and them as is outside.'

'Who are numerous and noisy,' murmured the Count softly to himself.

'Well, go on,' said Roland, chafing.

'We knows well enow,' continued the old man, 'as it ain't all your doing as t' mill's to stop, but we thowt as you might work things so as to make it easier for us. It's on'y nat'ral as you shouldn't know till it's put to you what stoppin' work 'ill mean to most of us. What 'ill it mean? Why, hard want is what it 'ill mean, and clemming to more nor one. So wot we've come to ask is, won't you keep the works on till summer comes, and let the stoppin' be a bit less sudden like, and give us time to get other work? This is bitter weather, and it's bitter hard as we must all leave our homes just because—' He paused in some confusion.

'Because what?' asked Roland sharply.

'Because our masters has fell out,' struck in No. 2 of the deputation.

'Look here, my men,' Roland stamped his foot impatiently, 'I thought I made it perfectly clear to you a month ago that the closing of this mill was no fault of mine. Do you take me for a born fool? Do you suppose I should throw away this money if I could help it? Don't you know I lose as much as any of you? As much? I lose more than all of you put together.'

'Oh, just division of profits!' murmured Litvinoff confidentially to the clock on the mantelpiece.

'You've had long enough notice of this,' Roland went on, casting a goaded glance at Litvinoff; 'why didn't you get work elsewhere?'

FIRE!

TO run at full speed across a Derbyshire moor by the uncertain light of a wintry moon is a feat not unattended with difficulty and danger, especially when the runner is not quite accustomed to the course; but it would have taken greater pitfalls than even those moors present to have made Count Litvinoff choose a longer and easier way. For when that shout had been borne to him on the wind he scented excitement and danger, and excitement and danger were to him as the breath of life. He was almost certain that the men meant mischief, and he intended to do his best to prevent it. His sympathies really were, as he had told Roland, entirely with them, and he was genuinely anxious that they should not add a criminal prosecution for riot to their other troubles. At the same time he looked forward with some pleasure to the scene in which he was now hastening to take a part.

He had been in a fretful and irritable state of mind ever since he had left London, and he cordially welcomed a row, and did not care much if in that row he got a knock on the head that would put an end to his visit and his life at the same time. At any rate, the situation offered a chance of action, and it was action more than anything that he had been longing for lately.

As he got nearer the valley in which the mill lay he was able to form a better idea of what was toward, for the shouts seemed to get louder and louder. He quickened his pace at the moment when he reached the brow of the hill, from the foot of which all the noise and clamour arose, and paused, looking down; a lurid flash of flame lighted up for an instant the semi-darkness before him, and as suddenly died out again.

'Diable!' he said. 'I shall be too late for anything. I have some power over men, but I am not a fire-engine—'

He made the descent rather more cautiously, though not much less rapidly, than he had done the rest of the journey, and pushed his way through the little wood to within a hundred yards or so of the mill. Then he stopped, peering forward to ascertain the exact state of things before he went on.

The mill was not one of those square, many-windowed blocks which remind one of children's toy-houses, but a group of irregular buildings of all sorts and sizes, built of grey stone and roofed with slate. There was a paved yard surrounded by outhouses, some mere sheds of wood and thatch, and it was round the outhouse nearest to the mill itself that the men were crowding. There was plenty of light now for Litvinoff to discern every detail of the scene before him, for two sheds were on fire and burning merrily in the frosty air. The door of a certain room where he remembered to have seen quantities of cotton waste and inflammable rubbish, and which opened directly on to the yard, had been battered in by the men, and, the hinges having given way, hung crookedly by its strained, bent, but still strong, lock. Some of the men were hurrying to and fro between this room and the outbuilding, carrying armfuls of wood and straw, and these men were for the most part silent. The shouting, of which there was a good deal, was done by those who were doing nothing else.

Count Litvinoff had not been the only one to hear that first yell, and to interpret it as the note of something unusual, for dark heads were moving along the brow of the hill on the other side, and dark figures were hurrying down the stone steps.

BEFORE daybreak next morning John Hatfield had taken Count Litvinoff's advice, and he and several others who had borne an active part in the night's work had shaken the dust of Thornsett off their feet and taken their departure in various directions. Had they not been quite so precipitate their leave-taking might have been more dignified and less secret, for Litvinoff's confidence in his own powers of diplomacy had been more than justified. When, somewhat to his chagrin, his eloquence failed to reconcile Roland Ferrier to the idea of taking no legal steps to punish the intending incendiaries—for, in spite of the way in which the Count had watered the story down, Roland had managed to get a pretty accurate idea of the truth—he made a hasty journey over to Aspinshaw. He found Miss Stanley in a state of great excitement about the events of the night before, of which she had heard a very much embroidered and highly-coloured version.

'Oh, Count Litvinoff,' she said, coming forward to meet him, 'I am so glad you have come. I have just sent two of the servants down to Thornsett to find out who was hurt. Mr Clarke, of Thorpe, has just been here, and told us that you saved so many lives last night.'

'Saved so many lives last night!' repeated Litvinoff. 'They must have been the lives of rats and mice, then.' And he gave her a plain and unvarnished account of the whole story, from the interview of the deputation with Roland to his own visit to the man he had cut down. He had the very rare faculty of telling the exact truth in a particularly exciting way—any adventure in which he had been personally engaged he always told from some point of view not his own—so that the hearer saw him playing his part in the scene rather than heard the chief adventurer recounting his adventures.

As he skilfully put before her the picture of the one man facing the infuriated crowd, he could see her eyes sparkle with sympathy, and could read interest and admiration in her face.

'And so you were not hurt, after all?' she said. 'I am so glad. But what of the men? Will they be punished? They've got themselves into trouble, I'm afraid, poor fellows.'

'Ah!' he answered, meeting her questioning glance with an earnest expression on his serious face. 'It was about them I came to speak to you. Our friend Ferrier is determined, not unnaturally perhaps, to resent and to punish last night's madness. I've done my utmost to reason him out of his resolve to be avenged on these poor fools, but he's not in a humour to listen to reason. It will need something stronger than that to induce him to let the men escape the natural consequences of their folly.'

'Oh, but Hatfield—surely he'd not punish him?'

'Well, I advised Hatfield to make himself scarce, and I hope he's done it. It's more on behalf of the other men that I'm here.'

'Why, what can I do in the matter?'

'Your word will have great weight with young Ferrier. I want you to go to him and ask him to let the affair rest just where it is,' he said bluntly.

Clare coloured painfully. 'I go to Mr Ferrier?' she repeated. 'Count Litvinoff, you must know that that is quite impossible.'

MDEAR Clare, let me implore you to shut that book. You are becoming quite too dreadfully blue. I don't believe you take any interest in any of the things you used to like—even me,' ended Cora Quaid, with a pout. The two girls were sitting very snugly in Miss Quaid's special sanctum, where were enshrined her girlish treasures, her books, and the accessories of the art in which she hoped some day to rival Rosa Bonheur. Having had a picture admitted to the Academy the season before, she was more hopeful and consequently more industrious than ever. But on this afternoon she had not been painting. She had been sitting looking at her friend and thinking what a pretty picture she made with her sweet serious face and sombre crape draperies; but even the contemplation of one's prettiest friend will become fatiguing at last, when talking is one's very greatest pleasure. So Cora broke silence with the remark we have reported, and the silence she broke had been a very long one.

'You silly child,' Clare answered, laughing, and tossing her book on to the sofa, 'it isn't that at all. It is that I take an interest in all sorts of other things besides.'

'Mamma says,' remarked Miss Quaid, picking up the little red-covered pamphlet and looking at it with disfavour, 'that this book is not fit for any one to read.'

IT took Richard Ferrier just three months to decide what course his future life should take. He was too old for the Army or Civil Service. The Church was equally out of the question, for a reason equally potent. Need we say that his first idea had been to earn his living by literature? In these days of extended education and cheap stationery, it always is the very first idea of any one whose ordinary source of income is suddenly cut short. Richard had always felt at college that he had a decided faculty for writing; but an uninterrupted stream of returned MS., 'declined, with thanks' by all sorts and conditions of editors, convinced him in less than three months that, if writing indeed were his vocation, it was one that he must forego until he could pay for the publishing of his own works, which was not exactly the view he had in wishing to adopt it.

He had no interest in the law, and he knew well enough that he had not talent to enable him to dispense with interest. Besides, his leanings had never been that way. The medical profession inspired him with far more interest. His favourite study had always been biology. He had enough money to live on sparingly till the necessary four years should have expired, and it seemed to him better to adopt a profession than to go in for trade in any form or shape. He had had enough of trade. He made a round of visits among special chums of his own, and during the time so occupied had thought long and seriously about his future, and, of all the ideas that came to him, that of being a doctor was the one with most attractions and fewest drawbacks. So early in March he entered himself as a student at Guy's, determined to throw himself heart and soul into his new career, and to let the dead past be. No return to the conditions of that past seemed possible to him, and, though he determined to think of it as little as he could, there were some things about it that haunted him disturbingly. But he hoped, among new friends and with new ambitions, to forget successfully. A man has his life to live, and life is not over at twenty-five, even when one has lost father, fortune, and heart's desire.

One windy, wild, bright March morning he was walking up to the hospital as usual from his lodgings in Kennington. He looked as cheerful as the morning itself as he strode along with an oak stick in his hand, and under his arm two or three shiny black note-books with red edges. Opposite St Thomas's Street he paused to watch for a favourable moment in which to effect a crossing; and before he had time to plunge into the chaos of vans, omnibuses, cabs, carriages, trucks, barrows and blasphemy, the touch of a hand on his arm made him turn sharply round. It was his foster-mother, with a basket on her arm, her attire several shades shabbier than he had been used to see it, and her worn face lighted up with pleasure at meeting him.

'Eh, but Ah'm glad to see thi face, my lad,' she said earnestly, as he turned and shook her hand heartily. 'I thowt as there was na more nor two pair o' shoulders like these, and I know'd it was thee or Rowley the minute Ah seed thee.'

The familiar North-country sing-song accent sent a momentary pain through the young man's heart as he answered,—

THERE was rejoicing in the house of Robert Gates, as over a prodigal returned, when Richard Ferrier avowed that he had been mistaken all through in his quarrel with his brother, and that he was now only anxious to acknowledge his error, and to do his best to set things going again on the old footing. But he had some days to wait before he could make his confession.

Thornsett Edge had remained unoccupied, for there was some difficulty in letting a furnished house near a deserted village. People did not seem to care about the vicinity of all those empty shells of homes. So Roland had decided to occupy it again, and he was coming down there to get things ready for his aunt's reception, and was making a few visits to old friends on his way. He had written down to the old couple in charge to have the place ready, as he might come down any day.

Two days passed and he had not come, and Richard was getting tired of the constant inquiries and congratulations which assailed him at The Hollies. He thought he would go home, and be there to welcome Roland when he arrived. So he sent over his portmanteau, and took up his quarters in his old room at Thornsett Edge. He was in a very tender and remorseful frame of mind in those days. He wandered all over the old house, full filled of memories of the time when he and his brother played together there as children; of the time when, later, they thrashed each other as schoolboys, with right good will. There were haunting thoughts of the dissension that had grown up between them, and of the shadow that the knowledge of it had cast upon their father's deathbed. The necessity which he felt himself to be under of keeping a sharp look-out for John Hatfield, fortunately served as a kind of antidote to the rush of memories and associations which came over Richard, now that he was once again in his home.

He walked down to the village to seek out the few 'hands' who had clung like rooks to their old haunts, and there he saw sad sights and heard sad stories enough to have driven him mad had he not known that it would soon be in his power to set things in some degree right again. He resolved, and felt sure of Roland's co-operation in his scheme, to seek out as many of the old 'hands' as could be got word of, and to give each of them enough to get a home together again.

Of course he thought often of Miss Stanley; but the past months of unusual action and changed surroundings had altered his feeling for her, which was fortunate for him, since he had falsely accused his own brother to her—a meanness which he knew it to be quite impossible for such a woman as Clare ever to forget or forgive. He thought of her now without any of the old passion, as he might have thought of one who had died long before, or of one whom he had loved in some other life.

This did not prevent him from feeling furiously jealous of Litvinoff, to whom he seemed to have transferred all the anger that had burned in him against his brother, intensified by a galling consciousness of the complete success which Litvinoff had achieved in his attempt to deceive and mislead him. There should be a reckoning for that, Richard thought. He felt glad he had always mistrusted the man. It showed that his judgment was worth something sometimes, and this pleased his self-love.

On the third day came a telegram from Matlock, which said that Roland would be at home that evening. Richard roamed about the house in restless impatience all day. How should they meet? He should not dare to go to the door to greet his brother lest he should imagine that it was a renewal of hostilities, not a welcome home, that was intended. Richard had no eye for dramatic effects, nor any leaning thereto, but he charged the old people to say nothing of his presence, and to leave him to announce himself to his brother when he should think well.

His brother would have done exactly the same thing from absolutely opposite motives.

So when Roland walked up to his home in the teeth of the wild March wind the only welcome that met him was that of the old woman in charge, and this seemed to him to be so inconsequently effusive, and the good lady herself seemed so unreasonably radiant, that he was quite flattered. It was pleasant to him to be appreciated and admired, even by a 'person in charge.'

'The fire's i' the dining-room, Mr Roland,' she said; 'an' I'll dish ye up the supper in less nor half a minute, sir. It's a glad day for Thornsett as sees yer back agen.'

Mrs Brock's son had worked in the mill—a fact which made the anticipated reconciliation peculiarly interesting to her.

Richard from his ambush in his own room heard the greeting, heard the well-known voice giving orders about rugs and hat-boxes in the well-known tones. Then he heard doors open and close. After a while a savoury smell from the hot supper that was being carried in rose to his altitude. The dining-room door was opened, and shut several times. At last it was closed with a more decided touch, and in the noise of its closing was a settled sound as of a door that did not mean to open again just yet. Richard knew that the supper had been cleared away, and that Roland was most likely assisting digestion with tobacco and grog. This would be the time, he decided, to put in an appearance and to get through his proposed reconciliation. He went softly downstairs, and paused a moment with his hand on the dining-room door. The house was very still. As he stood there he heard a cinder fall from the fire in the dining-room, and the great hall clock at the foot of the stairs ticked louder than usual, as it seemed. He turned the handle and went in. Roland was sitting in the big arm-chair by the fire where their father had been used to sit. As the door opened he looked up with a sort of displeased curiosity to see who it was that had the assurance to enter unannounced. When he saw who it was he gave a start, and the expression of his face changed to something deeper and sterner.

He got up.

'I understood from Gates,' he said, 'that you renounced all claim to be in this house so long as half the possible rent was paid you. I mean to pay you your half. May I ask, then, what you want here?'

'I want to beg your pardon,' began Richard, his hand still on the lock—when his brother interrupted him with,—

'Hadn't you better close the door? I suppose you don't want all the world to hear anything you may have to say.'

His tone was so icily cold that the other found it hard to go on as he had intended. He did his best, however.

'I am very sorry for all that happened in the autumn. I was quite deceived and misled, and I beg your pardon. I can't say more, and I hope you'll let bygones be bygones.'

JOHN HATFIELD had left Dartford, his wife, and his work, driven by an impulse as vague as it was irresistible. He did not know what he meant to do; his one idea was that he must face his daughter's betrayer, and tax him with his crime. He did not very much care what came after. But the long tramp through England, broken though it was by many a lift from good-natured waggoners, had given him time for thinking. Reflection did not soften his resentment. On the contrary, the more he thought, the harder his heart felt, and each new hour of solitary musing left him more bitter, more vindictive, more angered than he had been the hour before. His wife's story convicted him of the one fault from which he had always believed himself to be free—blind stupidity. The loss of his daughter had never been out of his mind for half an hour at a time since she had gone away, and he had thought and thought, till his brain had seemed to spin round, over every least detail of her flight, and of the time just before it, in the hope of finding out who was her betrayer. And yet in all his thinking he had never come anywhere near the truth. Other people had, though; he knew that, as he remembered hints he had sneered at from some of the least brilliant of the hands—fools he had often called them. Yet, fools as they were, they had been able to see more clearly than he, the father, whose brain sharpest love and sorrow ought surely to have had power to quicken.

Added to all this, the thought that he had gone on working for, taking the money of, and, to a certain extent, living in a condition of dependence on, the man who had wronged him, and then had turned him out on to the world, stung his spirit almost to madness.

The spring woke early that year, and the weather was bright and glad, the air clear and sweet and joyous with a thousand bird-voices. The Midland woods and hedges that he passed were beginning to deck themselves in the fresh greenness of their new spring garments. Their beauty brought no peace to him. He but noticed them to curse their monotony and apparent endlessness. The only things he did notice with anything like satisfaction were the milestones and fingerposts, which told him that so much more ground had been got over. He put up at night at the cheapest and poorest-looking inns he could find. They were good enough to lie awake in, for his feverish longing and impatience to reach his end almost consumed him and made sleep an impossibility. Eager as he was to get on, he had self-restraint enough to spend none of his store of money—such a little store as it was—on travelling. Roland Ferrier might not be at Thornsett after all, and he might have to follow him, or mayhap return to Dartford and bide his time; and so, though his progress was straight and steady it was slow, and he did not reach Thornsett until the night that had witnessed the explanations between the brothers.

He had done more than twenty-five miles that day, and he was footsore and tired out when, as night was falling, he reached the top of the hill at whose foot lay the village which had been his home for thirty years. All along he had been determined to make straight for Thornsett Edge, and to confront Roland at once. He felt that the young man might be surprised into more admissions than he would choose to make if he were prepared. But physical fatigue is wonderfully effective in upsetting mental decision. Hatfield felt that neither in body nor in mind was he fit to go through at once with the part he had chosen. He must rest—sleep, if possible. He threw himself down on the heather by the pathside, and leaned his head on his arm, while he debated what to do. Nature decided for him, and he fell asleep.

When he woke, a young moon was shining coldly down upon him. He felt stiff, and not rested. The heather was wet with night-dew. How late was it? He thought by the moon about eight o'clock.

He would go down to the village and see who was left in the old place; perhaps he might get a lodging there. The Spotted Cow was closed, he had heard. He limped down the steep stony street. There were no lights to be seen. As he reached the house that had been his, he saw that it was empty, and a longing came over him to get inside it. Why not sleep there? So, turning aside, he went up the three stone steps and along the narrow paved pathway that ran under the windows separating the house from the tiny front garden. His hand fell on the latch of the door quite naturally, and it never occurred to him that it would not yield to his touch as it had been wont to do. But it did not yield. He was in that frame of mind when any resistance is intolerable. He drew back and then threw himself against the door with all his weight. It gave way noisily and he went in. He passed round the wooden screen, and stood in the middle of the flagged floor.

To return to a house where we have been happy, even if we have left it for greater happiness, is always sad if not painful; but to go back to a house that seems to hold within its desolate walls, not only all our memories but all our possibilities of happiness—when we have left it in sorrow, to take back to it an added load of new, unexpected, intolerable trouble—this, let us be thankful, is not given to many of us.

John Hatfield could not bear it. He cast one look round at the dark, fireless hearth, the uncurtained window, turned, and came out. Sleep there? He would rather sleep on the bare hillside, or in the churchyard itself, for that matter.

The rush of memories drove him before it. He could not stay in the village. Every other house in it had been a home too, and was crowded with recollections almost as maddening as those that peopled his own home, in which—bitterest thought of all—Roland Ferrier had lisped out childish prattle, and climbed on his knee to share his caresses with baby Alice. And at the remembrance his resolution came back. He would go to Thornsett Edge then and there, let come what might. Weak as he was, he was strong enough to make his tired feet carry him so far, and once there his passion could be trusted to give him strength to say and do all that needed to be said and done. He clenched his nerves, as though the pain of his bruised feet would grow less by being despised, and he walked on. But when he reached the turn in the road that brought the mill in sight his mood altered again, and almost before he knew that his intention had changed he found himself limping painfully down the stone steps into the little hollow. As he caught sight of the door where Litvinoff had stood on the night of the fire he muttered a curse on the man who had stood between the 'hands' and their purpose that night. He felt faint and giddy. The many square windows of the mill seemed to look on him like eyes, and the broken panes in them lent them a sinister expression. The few past months had changed the face of the mill wonderfully. No one had repaired the damage done by the rioters, and the wind and rain had had their will of the place. It looked now, Hatfield thought, as though it had been deserted for years instead of months.

Everything was deadly still. The only sounds were the trickling of the stream as it flowed past, and his own heavy breathing. He was becoming unaccountably sleepy. Why should he not sleep here? He would go on to Thornsett in the morning. He stumbled downward till he reached the wall of the mill. He soon found a window that could be unfastened by passing his hand through one of its broken panes and turning round the primitive hasp. It was rusty, and moved, as it were, reluctantly. Still, it did move, and he opened the window and crept through it. He found himself on the edge of a huge stone tank, or vat. One more forward movement and he would have been plunged in the dark-looking water that half filled it. He shuddered. How could he have been such a fool as to forget the position of that tank? He crept round the edge of it, and reached the stone-paved floor of the basement. There lay a mass of something dark. It was the great stone that had thundered through the roof of the mill just after young Roland Ferrier had given the deputation their answer. Hatfield looked up at the ugly hole in the ceiling, a hole that repeated itself in the two upper floors and the roof, through which he could see the sky. The moon was shining brightly by this time, and the many-windowed building was lighted well enough for the man to find his way about. Had it been dark, he thought he should not have had much difficulty. He went up the stairs, and made his way to a room on the second storey, where he fancied there would be some soft rubbish he could lie down on. He was not disappointed, and, yielding to the utter weariness that had come to him, he lay down, and in a moment slept.

He had not been asleep three minutes when he awoke with a start to find himself sitting up and listening. What had he heard? The click of a door and a footstep. He was widely, nervously, intensely awake now. Had it been fancy, born of the utter desolation and loneliness of the place where he was? He listened strainedly. No. This at least was no fancy. There was a footstep resounding hollowly through the great empty rooms.

Some watcher, perhaps, from whom he ought to keep himself hidden if he did not want to be handed over to the constable as a vagrant. What an ending, that, to his journey! Yes, he must lie quiet, and yet, how could he? Suppose—and at the thought his blood ran coldly through his veins—suppose old Richard Ferrier had got up from under that white stone in Thornsett churchyard, and had come down to keep watch over what his sons had so little regarded. The footsteps came nearer, and Hatfield sprang to his feet and walked not away from, but towards, the sound. The impulse of a naturally brave man when he is frightened is to face the fearsome thing as speedily as may be. Hatfield opened the door. Then he sprang forward, for he saw no ghost, but, as it seemed to him, the object of his search—not old Richard, but young Roland, standing with his back to him. The bright moonlight lighting up the figure left no room in his mind for a doubt. At the sight, all his ideas of asking for explanation vanished in an instant, and left him with no impulse but to catch the young man by the throat and to squeeze the life out of him.

As the other turned at the sound of the opening door he gave a cry of horror at the sight of the wild, haggard figure springing at him—the white, angry, maddened face close to his own.

'Keep back!' he almost screamed, as Hatfield rushed upon him, but even as he spoke the man's hands fastened on his throat, and the two closed in a silent, deadly struggle. They had hardly grasped each other when both remembered the danger that lay behind them—that black gap in the floor—and each tried to edge away from it without loosening his hold. Too late, though. The strain of the strong men wrestling was too much for the splintered boards already rotted through by the rain and snow of the past months. Crash went the flooring beneath their feet, and as the two went through, fast locked in each other's arms, Hatfield, above his adversary, saw, in a flash of intensest horror, that the face below him was not that of Roland, but of Richard.

It was the last thing he ever saw in this world. In another moment he was lying, a dead man, at the bottom of the great tank. Again the stillness of the empty mill was undisturbed, and the only movement in it was that of the heavy-coloured water as it settled down again into stagnation over him.

Roland went to bed that night without troubling himself much about his brother. He had been deeply wronged, and he was a man who, not easily offended, was, when once alienated, implacable. He did not find it easy to forgive. Though he had shaken hands with his brother he had not forgiven him, and he came down to breakfast the next morning quite prepared to keep up his rôle of injured innocence, and to prevent his brother from experiencing much satisfaction in the reconciliation. Richard had always been an early riser, and Roland quite expected to find him in the dining-room waiting, but he was not there. He waited some little time, and then desired Mrs Brock to see if Mr Ferrier was in his room, and it was not till she returned with the intelligence that he was not and that his bed had not been slept in, that Roland began to wonder in anxious earnest where his brother could be.

A very short search showed that he was not in the house or grounds. Could he have gone to the churchyard? No, thought Roland; Dick wasn't that sort of fellow. Perhaps he had gone over to Gates, and had stayed all night. In a very short time Roland was at The Hollies questioning eagerly, and, with an inexplicable feeling of dread and anxiety growing stronger upon him with each moment, he learned that Dick had not been there. He would go down to the village, and Mr Gates volunteered to come with him, though he laughed cheerfully at the idea of there being anything to worry about in Dick's non-appearance. 'He's playing off some trick on you,' he said. 'However, come along, and we'll soon find him.' So they walked together towards the village.

'Hullo,' said Mr Gates, as they passed the mill, 'that door's no business open! Perhaps Dick's up to some games in there.'

The door he pointed at was one opening from the mill on to a flight of stone steps that ran sideways outside the building from the second storey to the ground.

'Whether he's there or not,' the lawyer went on, 'some one has been there, and we'd better see who it is.'

So they went down, and, crossing the courtyard, between whose stones the grass was springing already, ran up the steps and passed through the open door.

The whole place was flooded with the brilliant morning sunlight.

The two made a few steps forward. They saw the hole in the floor, and paused. Then Roland's heart seemed to stand still, for he saw on the board at the edge of the gap a hat, and his brother's silver-headed walking stick, and he knew what had happened. With an exceeding bitter cry he turned from Gates and sprang down an inner staircase, glancing at each floor as he passed it, and on the stones at the bottom he found what he sought—Dick. Or was it Dick? Could this mangled, twisted, bloody mass be his brother? The pitiless light came through the cobwebbed windows, and showed plainly enough that it was Dick, or Dick's body.

'Run for Bailey,' he shouted to Gates, who had followed him; and he went.

Then Roland lifted Richard's head. Was he alive? Yes. At the movement a spasm of agony contracted his face, and his eyes opened. A look of relief came into them when he saw his brother.

'Don't move me, old man,' he whispered; and the other knelt beside him, his arms under the poor head. He could not speak, for he saw that his brother was dying.

After a moment Richard spoke again, very faintly.

'I'm glad you've come.' He could only say a few words at a time, and between the sentences came long pauses, in each of which Roland fancied the last silence had come.

'I wanted you, old fellow. It's nearly over now. It's been like hell lying here. I know he's somewhere near, and I couldn't help him. It was Hatfield, and he mistook me for you. It was through me he believed you had wronged Alice. He was hiding here, and attacked me. We struggled and fell. I'm afraid he's dead. You'll see presently.'

Then came a longer pause than any that had gone before, and still Roland could not speak.

Gates had sent down a man from the cottage above, but when he came Richard made impatient signs, and he went and stood outside.

'You didn't care about making it up, Rowley; but it's all right between us now, isn't it?'

Roland's tears were falling over his brother's face.

'Oh, Dick, Dick, Dick!' He could say nothing else.

'It's hard lines,' Richard said; 'but it's all my own fault. Never mind, old chap. Water!'

THE Clare Stanley who studied Bakounin and quoted Matthew Arnold was a very different girl from the Clare Stanley who had in the autumn entertained the reprehensible idea of bringing to her feet the interesting stranger at Morley's Hotel. In looking back on that time, which she did with hot cheeks and uncomfortable self-condemnation, it really seemed to her that she had changed into another being—development, when it is rapid, being always bewildering. It would be interesting to know with what emotions the rose remembers being a green bud. Pleasanter ones perhaps than those of the woman whose new earnest sense of the intense seriousness of life leads her to look back—not with indulgent eyes—on the follies of her unawakened girlhood. The story of the sleeping beauty is an allegory with a very real meaning. Every woman's mind has its time of slumber, when the creed of the day is truth and the convention of the day is morality. The fairy prince's awakening kiss may come in the pages of a book, in the words of a speaker, through love, through suffering, through sorrow, through a thousand things glad or sad, and to some it never comes, and that is the saddest thing of all. Clare had slept, and now was well awake, and it was no word of Count Litvinoff's that had broken the slumbrous spell.

Sometimes she almost wished it had been, for she could not conceal from herself the fact that she had succeeded in doing what she had desired to do, and that Count Litvinoff was at her feet. The position became him, certainly, but she felt a perverse objection to being placed on a pedestal, and a new conviction that she would rather look up to a lover than down at one. And yet why should she look down on him? He was cleverer than she, with a larger knowledge of life—had done incomparably more for the cause she had espoused. He was brave, handsome, and, to some extent, a martyr, and he loved her, or she thought so, which came to the same thing. Verily, a man with all these qualifications was hardly the sort of lover for a girl under the twenties to look down upon. But could she help looking down on him, for was he not at her feet? And that was not the place, she thought, for a man who had drawn the sword in such a war as she and he had entered upon. What right had a man who had taken up arms in that cause to lay them down, even at her feet? No, no. Her lover, if she had one, must be at her side—not there.

This reaction to the Count's detriment had set in on New Year's Day, when he had told her that he held no cause sacred enough to give her even inconvenience for the sake of it, and the tide was still ebbing. Litvinoff appeared quite unconscious of that fact though, for he continued to call on Mrs Quaid with a persistence which quite justified all Cora's animadversions. Miss Quaid's penetration was at fault, but the Count's was not. He was perfectly conscious of the change in her state of mind, and knew that his chance of being master of the Stanley money-bags was far less than he had thought shortly after their late master's death.

Suspense was the one thing Count Litvinoff could not bear—at least, he could bear it when the balance of probabilities was in his favour; but when the chances did not seem to be on his side—no. He knew perfectly well that it is hardly 'correct' to ask a girl to marry one three months after her father's death; but he was not an enthusiastic devotee of 'correctness.' He habitually posed as a despiser of conventions, and this attitude very often stood him in good stead, even with people who preferred the stereotyped rôles of life for themselves. Avowed unconventionality serves as a splendid excuse for doing all sorts of pleasant things which conventional people daren't do; hence perhaps its growing popularity.

'He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.'

The lines ran in Count Litvinoff's head persistently one spring morning while he sat at his late breakfast. As he despatched his last mouthful of grilled sardine and looked round for the marmalade, the servant came in with a letter.

'It really is time I struck for fortune. I do hope this is not a bill,' he said to himself as he took it. 'I retrench and retrench, and still they come.'

He tore it open. It was not a bill. It ran thus:—

'The mysterious stranger doesn't waste his words. He's almost as careful of them as the fellow with the dirty collar—Bursch, or Kirsch, or Hirsch, or whatever it was. The best of being mixed up with the revolutionary party is that such beautifully unexpected things are always befalling one. I wonder why he couldn't have waited till to-morrow night. It lends a spice to an important matter to discuss it at forbidden times and in a secret manner at the houses of friends. That's another of our characteristics—to plot when we're supposed to be talking frivol only, and to play cards or go to sleep when we're supposed to be plotting. Wonder what the important matter is. The distressed lady friend again, perhaps. Well, before I commit myself on that matter, I'd better settle things one way or the other with la belle Clare. Upon my soul, I don't much care which way they are settled. If I'm not to shine as the county magnate and the married man at Aspinshaw, by Heaven, I'll find out my own little girl, and go in for virtuous retirement in the Quartier Latin. When I do swallow my principles they go down whole, like oysters; and if Miss Stanley doesn't care to add the title of "countess" to her other endowments, some one will be glad to take that and me, even with nothing a year to keep state upon.'

He pushed his chair back, and sat biting his moustache irresolutely, and frowning heavily at the breakfast-table.

'Yes,' he said at last, rising; 'I'll have a shot for it now, as I've gone so far, and I'll shoot as straight and as steady as I can. As for the other matter—well, Aspinshaw and the fruits thereof would not be a bad drug for inconvenient memories. I wonder if this is one of my good-looking days?' he added, moving towards the looking-glass, and scrutinising his reflection therein. He seemed satisfied, lighted the inevitable cigarette, and half an hour after noon was in Mrs Quaid's library, alone with Clare Stanley.

Mrs Quaid, he had known, would be absent on some educational errand, and Cora would be at the National Gallery. He knew that Miss Stanley was not averse to a quiet morning spent in uninterrupted reading and copying, and he had rightly thought that he should have a very fair chance of finding her alone. The resolution of his, which had faltered before the remembrance of that other face, grew strong again as he saw her, for she looked charming, and it was not in his nature to be indifferent to the charms of any woman, even if she were not the woman.

Miss Stanley had been making notes in a MS. book, and Litvinoff noticed with a feeling not altogether pleasurable that 'The Prophetic Vision' and the 'Ethics of Revolution' both lay open on the writing-table, and that she seemed to have been comparing them one with the other.

'I am afraid you will hate me for interrupting your studies,' he began, apparently ignorant of the direction those studies had been taking, 'but when the servant told me you were alone in the library, I could not resist the temptation of coming in.'

'I don't at all mind being interrupted,' she answered, when he had settled himself down in a chair opposite to her with the air of a man who, having come in, meant to stay. 'I was just looking through two of your books. One of them, indeed, I almost know by heart.'

'And that is?'—carelessly, as one who is sure of the answer—

'"The Prophetic Vision."'

Somehow Count Litvinoff did not look delighted. Perhaps he wanted to talk about something else.

'But, oh,' she went on, 'what a long way off it all seems!'

'Yes, it does; I was an enthusiastic young rebel when I first put on the Prophet's Mantle.' Then, as a faint change in her face showed him that he had made a false move, he hastened to add, 'But it will all happen some day, you know. It is a true vision, but knocking about in the world has taught me that the immediately practicable is the thing to aim for.'

'Oh, no, no, no,' she said. 'Never let us lower our standard. We shall not do less noble work in the present for having the noblest of all goals before us.'

Then she looked at him, at his handsome, insouciant face, at the half-cynical droop of his mouth, at the look in his eyes—the sort of look an old cardinal who knew the Church and the world might turn on an enthusiastic young monk—and she felt a sudden regret for that heart-warm speech of hers. What had she in common with this perfectly-dressed, orchid-button-holed young man? Why should she expect him to understand her? And yet had he not written "The Prophetic Vision"? She went on, smiling a little,—

'You must make allowances for the hopeful faith of a new convert. Perhaps when I've held my new belief a little longer I shall be less en l'air. But I must say I hope not.'

'Your new beliefs make you very happy, then?'

'They make me want very much to live to see what will happen. It would be terrible to die now before anything is accomplished. You see, I can't help believing that we shall accomplish something, although I know you think me very high-flown and absurd.'

'You know I think you perfect,' he said, in a very low voice, and went on hurriedly: 'But, for Heaven's sake, don't talk about dying; the idea is too horrible. Can't you guess why I have seemed not sympathetic with your new religion? I have known what it is to believe strongly, to work unceasingly, never to leave off hoping, and trying to show others my hope. I have known what it is to have no life but the life of the cause; to go through year after year still hoping and striving. I have known all this, and more. I have known the heart-sickness of waiting for a dawn that never comes. I know how one may strain every nerve, tax every power, kill one's body, wear out one's brain, break one's heart against the iron of things as they are, and when all is sacrificed, all is gone, all is suffered, have achieved nothing. It is from this I would save you. That you should suffer is a worse evil than any your suffering could remedy. The cause will have martyrs enough without you.'

'Martyrs, yes; but how can it have too many workers?' she asked, not looking at him.

BEFORE the echo of that cry had died away, the man who had uttered it swayed sideways, his face grew deadly white, the clasp of his arms loosened, and only the sudden firm grip of the other saved him from falling. Petrovitch laid him on the sofa. Then he passed into the adjoining bedroom, and came back with a wet sponge.

'What a fellow it is,' he said to himself, as he applied it to the hands and face of the insensible man. 'As brave as a lion, and as hysterical as a schoolgirl.' But he looked very kindly on the pale face as he administered his remedies.

In a little while the eyes opened, and the younger man struggled into a sitting position, and looked into the face that bent over him.

'Litvinoff, it is you, then?' he said in a low voice, and covered his face with his hands. The joy of seeing once more the man he had loved seemed to be swallowed up in the shame of meeting the man he had wronged.

'Yes, Percival, it is I,' said Petrovitch; 'but let this be the last time you call me Litvinoff, and I must not call you Percival either. I think I have a right to ask that. You have chosen to put on the Prophet's Mantle, and for all our sakes you must wear it a little longer.'

'What do you mean?'

'MY LITTLE GIRL.'

THE suggestion was a good one, and the dinner to which the two sat down had a steadying effect on the nerves of the younger man. He became calmer, and when they returned to his rooms he was able to bear his part in a long, earnest, quiet talk over events past and to come.

The talk lasted far into the night, and before they parted it was settled that Litvinoff should leave for Servia in two days, taking with him certain important papers from Petrovitch to another of the Nihilist leaders. That he should there wait instructions, and should enter Russia by the southern frontier, and rejoin the circle at St Petersburg, leaving his assumed name at Belgrade. That the following imaginative announcement should be inserted in as many English papers as possible for the special edification of the Russian Embassy.

'Count Michael Litvinoff left London for Dover this morning, en route for Belgrade. He was accompanied by Countess Litvinoff, an English lady to whom he was secretly married some time ago. Count Litvinoff, so well known to many of our readers through his "Social Enigma," his "Hopes and Fears for Liberty," and his many revolutionary brochures, has never been a familiar figure in London society, his literary labours having compelled him to live in strict retirement. It will be remembered that he was the hero of an adventure on the Russian frontier some years ago, was wounded, captured, and sent to a Russian prison, from which he escaped to England.'

It was also settled that the money for the journey should be taken from the remainder of the Litvinoff capital.

When Litvinoff began to speak of the money he had spent and the debts he had incurred, Petrovitch stopped him with,—

'I'll see to your debts—and what is gone is gone. Don't let us waste words over that.'

It was arranged that Petrovitch should seek out John Hatfield and his wife, and should let them know that their daughter was happily married. They judged it best not to subject Alice to an interview which could not but involve most painful explanations, and they agreed that it would be cruel both to her and to her parents to let them meet, merely to part again at once. Of Clare Stanley neither of them spoke one word.

A new day was some way into its small hours when they said good-bye.

'We meet in St Petersburg, then, as soon as may be,' Petrovitch said. 'I shall not see you again till then.'

'I hope by that time I shall have done something to prove to you that you have indeed brought me back to the ranks of duty and the Revolution.'

'I don't need proof,' said the other with one last hand-pressure. And so they parted.

Next morning early, Litvinoff went down into the City, where he paid a disproportionate sum of money for a paper which empowered him to marry his wife at once, instead of waiting three weeks for that privilege. Then he went down to Chislehurst. The sky was clear and pale and blue, and the sun shone divinely. The trees that had been brown seemed at a little distance to be wrapped in a grey gauze veil, as they always do when the green buds first break out to new life.

As Litvinoff walked up the hill to Chislehurst Common, he tried to think what he should say to Alice, how she would look, how she would speak to him. With a touch of ingrained cynicism, he laughed at himself to find that his heart was beating tumultuously, and that his hands were trembling.

'And this is the man,' he said contemptuously to himself, 'who walked behind her for half-an-hour last autumn, and never spoke to her! No, not the same man,' he added, after a pause, 'I am purged of a crime since then.'

The house where he was to seek Alice was a little yellow-brick building near the church.

He looked at the pretty old-fashioned churchyard as he passed, and then at the building itself.

'I suppose,' he said to it, 'you will be the balm the child will choose to ease her sorrow—and you will bring comfort to her, as you have to thousands of others. I don't grudge them their comfort, but I do grudge you your influence. However, you won't keep it much longer. Tant mieux.'

His hand was on the garden gate—he unlatched it, and walked up to the smallest detached house he had ever beheld. He raised the diminutive knocker, and assaulted therewith the tiny brown door. Would she open it? She did not. It opened—and Litvinoff at first really thought it opened of its own accord. At anyrate it opened by some agency invisible to him. He stood and looked; but when the door slowly began to close again, he thought it was time for action. He came a step forward, and addressing nothing, said,—

'Is Mrs Litvinoff in?'

Then a very small girl in a yellow pinafore and a lilac frock showed herself from behind the door; but shyness and an incomplete knowledge of her native tongue combined to render her speechless. Litvinoff, with an impatient but perfectly gentle movement, lifted her bodily from her position as guard, and placed her outside the door.

In the same envelope was a letter from Alice's husband, and it did not begin in the same way as hers. It ran thus,—

Petrovitch sighed as he replaced the letters in their envelope. He had given himself up wholly to the cause he served, and he had suffered for it, and was prepared to suffer more, and generally he was contented, even glad, that it should be so. But sometimes a sudden sense of the utter loneliness of his life came over him, saddening and oppressing him. Then he seemed to himself to be not a man with a life of his own to live and hopes of his own to cherish, but a power passing through the lives of others, helping, guiding, saving, and always after a while fading out of those lives. He had brought these two together, and they were all in all to each other, and he was much to them perhaps, but mainly because he had brought them together. Now he felt that they were lost to him, and he had loved them both—Alice with the love of a strong man for a child, and the other with a deep attachment which dated from the first moment of their meeting, and which had unaccountably withstood all the other's shortcomings. Unaccountably? No? the essence of love is its boundless capacity for pardon; the unaccountable part of it was that he should ever have loved him at all. And they were gone; and gone, as Petrovitch knew well enough, to begin a life whose end, sooner or later, must be the scaffold or the death-in-life of perpetual imprisonment. He had led many a man and many a woman into that path, knowing all that it meant, and he was not sorry. Was it not the path he had himself chosen as being the noblest that any man's feet could tread—the path of utter self-renunciation? But though he was never sorry he was often sad, and sadder than usual on the day when his two friends bade farewell to safety and English soil. He felt lonely and desolate. But Michael Petrovitch never felt his own moral pulse for more than half a minute at a time. He sighed, raised his hand to his chin, and smiled at finding himself reminded that the gesture of passing his hand over his beard, which had grown into a settled habit with him in moments of annoyance or excitement, was no longer possible.

He turned to his table and wrote half-a-dozen letters. There were many arrangements still to make for his journey. Then he rose, put on his hat, and started for Marlborough Villa.

He had not cared to face that dinner where he was to have met his fellow revolutionist. He had written a hasty note of excuse, and had spent the evening and the best part of the night in conference with his morose friend Hirsch, who was a little more morose even than usual on this occasion, owing to what he thought the absurd and unjust leniency with which the pseudo Litvinoff had been treated. He would have been much better satisfied had some sudden and awful judgment overtaken the adventurer who had dared to personate his hero—even had that judgment come in the form of a trial for forgery at the Old Bailey; which fact showed that he was but a weaker brother in the faith that teaches that crime is a disease to be cured, not an offence to be punished. In that conversation with Hirsch the date of Petrovitch's departure had been finally settled, and now he had a few farewell visits to pay. One must certainly be to Mrs Quaid—he had a fancy that he would try to make his parting with Miss Stanley something more than it could be in the presence of that estimable lady. He thought that Clare would not hesitate to say good-bye to him without her hostess's surveillance. At any rate, a chance of being alone with her to say his farewell was what he was bent on trying for. At Marlborough Villa he was shown into the morning-room. It was empty, but in a moment Clare came in.

He was standing with his back to the window. When she saw him she started visibly, and, with an unmistakable gesture of annoyance, was turning to leave the room, when he made a step forward, and she paused and looked at him, and, turning with a complete change of expression, held out her hand.

'How could I have been so absurd?' she said. 'Do you know for the moment I really thought it was Count Litvinoff.'

'I don't wonder at your not quite recognising me. You see I had to sacrifice my beard. I am going back to Russia next week. Disguise will be de rigeur, and beards and disguises are incompatible.'

'Going back to Russia next week?' she repeated slowly, 'and I had so much to say—to ask—'

'Do you still need advice?' he said, smiling.

'Yes,' she said, speaking quickly and eagerly, 'more than ever, for now I have made up my mind. I am quite certain that my money ought to go—not to simply alleviating the miseries that wring one's heart, but to helping to overthrow the system that causes them. I have felt it a strong temptation to help first the individual sorrows that I know of; but I know that the right thing to do is to help not those, but the revolution that will render them impossible. I am right, am I not?'