'-■■J a 
 

 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 

 DATE DUE 
 
 
 R JUN 
 
 19 1969 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 OAVLOIIO 
 
 
 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 
 arV1431 
 
 Not counting the cost. 
 
 3 1924 031 235 827 
 olin.anx 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031235827 
 
applctons' xrown an& 
 Country? Xibrari? 
 
 No. 175 
 
 NOT COUNTING THE COST 
 
NOT COUNTING THE COST 
 
 BY 
 
 TASMA 
 
 AUTHOR OF UNCLE PIPER OF PIPEr's HILL, 
 IN HER EARLIER YOUTH, ETC. 
 
 ' A Friend loveth at all times, and a brother 
 is born for adversity " Proverbs 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COJVIPANY 
 
 1895 
 
COPTRIGHT, 1895, 
 
 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
 Jlf^7SS^ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 Introduction . . 
 
 I. — Mrs. Frost's News 
 
 II. — A Home in Tasmania 
 
 III. — How ElLA WAS RECEIVED AT THE IVY CoTTAGE 
 
 IV. — Reginald makes an Avowal . 
 V. — A Peculiar Family . 
 VI. — The Wardens 
 VII. — Lucy makes a Confession. 
 VIII. — EiLA AS Emissary 
 IX. — The Voyage 
 X. — In Paris 
 XI. — Eila's Notion 
 XII. — Eila's Notion takes Shape 
 XIII. — Bohemia's Visitors 
 
 XIV. — ElLA prepares for THE SACRIFICE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 u 
 
 6(5 
 85 
 97 
 115 
 133 
 154 
 166 
 178 
 195 
 202 
 220 
 
 PART II. 
 
 I. — At the Antipodes ... . . 
 
 II. — Hubert's Prophecy . 
 III. — Mamy sees the Owner of the Ruby . 
 IV. — Eila's Ordeal . 
 V. — Eila's Discovery 
 
 VI. — Hubert recognises his Australian Cousins 
 VII. — Hubert meets his Cousins 
 VIII. — Hubert adopts the Family 
 IX. — A New Catastrophe 
 X. — The Clouds continue to gather 
 
 XI. — ElLA IS ASKED TO PAY THE CoST 
 
 XII. — Eila's Letter .... 
 XIII.— Reginald's Resolution . 
 XIV.— What Eila was doing Meanwhile 
 
 XV. — Eila's Remorse . 
 XVI. — An Unexpected Arrival 
 XVII.— Conclusion . 
 
 229 
 236 
 248 
 261 
 282 
 291 
 306 
 312 
 321 
 328 
 347 
 368 
 385 
 403 
 421 
 440 
 454 
 
NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A GREAT paddock, full of scattered haycocks, sloping 
 down to a rough mountain road that leads in its turn through 
 straggling outskirts to a town lying in a hollow. Beyond 
 the town, the shining, sparkling waters of a broad blue har- 
 bour, hedged round by purple mountains. The bright sum- 
 mer air of Christmas week at the Antipodes resting upon 
 the scene ; and such a radiance of light shed over it by the 
 afternoon sun that no human eye can gaze upon it unblink- 
 ing for long. This is the setting in which the town of Ho- 
 bart, the capital of the far Southern island of Tasmania, lies 
 between the mountains and the sea. The sloping hay-pad- 
 dock, with the cottage above it, whence a full view of the 
 sparkling harbour below and of mighty Mount Wellington 
 on high — solemn guardian of the town — may be best ob- 
 tained, is the home of the Clare family, residents of Cowa, a 
 rambling property perched on the flanks of one of the abrupt 
 hills clustered round Mount Wellington as children cluster 
 round the knees of their father. 
 
 When we see it first, the paddock is not left to the undis- 
 turbed possession of its haycocks. A tribe of young people, 
 varying from the irresponsible age of the units to that of 
 full-fledged teens, are running wild over it in the most literal 
 sense of the term. With shrieks and jumps they bound into 
 the haycocks and out of them, like so many men of Thes- 
 saly in the legendary quickset hedge, their hair and their 
 clothes so stuck over with straw, so generally tumbled and 
 dishevelled and tousled, that at a first glance you would take 
 
 1 
 
2 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 them for a tribe of juvenile gipsies. A second glance might 
 not entirely correct the first impression, for on a closer in- 
 spection an undeniable strain of gipsy blood does actually 
 betray itself in the swarthy colouring of the black-haired 
 lad of some nine or ten who has just landed head foremost 
 in a hay-mound. And a similar suspicion would suggest it- 
 self in connection with the rich colouring of the very young 
 girl hard by, apparently about fourteen or fifteen, who is pant- 
 ingly engaged in twisting up with both hands an escaped coil 
 of magnificent dark hair, that a moment ago lay gleaming 
 with snake-like undulations on her back. The peculiar dusky 
 darkness of the eyes, a certain heavy-lidded, thick-lashed en- 
 vironment of them, recall dim visions of Lalla Rookhs or 
 Brides of Abydos to those who observe them closely ; and 
 there is a certain untamed suppleness and elasticity, more Ori- 
 ental than English, in the young girl's movements as well. 
 Her face is very much flushed, but the nape of the neck, which 
 is exposed to view as she twists the captured coil into a crown 
 on the summit of her small head, displays an ivory skin — 
 not dead white, but faintly golden, with amber reflections 
 in the simlight. The rusty-headed little girl — a mere five- 
 year-old morsel this, of transient sensations and emotions — 
 that clings round her knees and clamours to be taken on 
 her back, is evidently her sister, yet the different character 
 of this small being's face is already clearly defined. Her 
 eyes, that have not yet lost their native look of baby won- 
 derment, yellow-brown in hue, with ambulant, rust-coloured 
 specks floating in the iris, have individual potentialities of 
 their own. If there is gipsy blood here, it is less evident 
 than in the case of the elder sister. 
 
 The swarthy-cheeked boy is not allowed to stand on his 
 head for long. A little girl, apparently about his own age, 
 with an odd resemblance to him in build and feature— all 
 the odder that, where he is dark and sun-burned, she is fair 
 and sunburned— has run against his legs and thrust him 
 over with a vigorous push ; for an instant he lies kicking 
 and indignant on his back in the straw, then, springing to 
 his feet, turns upon her with his dark eyes aflame. 
 
 " What did you do that for ? " he cries angrily ; but see- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 ing who it is, his voice grows milder. "You shouldn't, 
 Mamy ; I'd just counted up to ten, when you came and 
 spoiled it all." 
 
 " It's a stupid game ! " said Mamy, the fair little girl ; 
 " only one can play at it. Let's race biuidles, Dick ; Eila 
 can pack us up." 
 
 " All right, then," assented the boy ; " only we must 
 begin at the top, you know, and start fair, mind." 
 
 " I always start fair ! " said Mamy indignantly. " I wait 
 all through ' Bell-horses,' till it comes to ' One, two, three 
 and away,' and I don't begin till it's ' aioay ! ' " 
 
 Mamy was toiling after her brother up the hill as she 
 uttered this protest. Arrived at the summit, the two chil- 
 dren tumbled into a sitting posture under a giant elderberry 
 hedge, whence they proceeded to send down loud and im- 
 perative " cooees " to their elder sister below, with a sum- 
 mons to come and make them up into hay-bundles that 
 minute. 
 
 "S'posing we got some strawberries first," said Dick, 
 the boy. 
 
 " No," replied Mamy ; " it's nicer " — I'm afraid she said 
 " ith nither," for she kept her lisp almost as long as she 
 wore short frocks — " to eat them when we've done. I don't 
 know why it's always nicer to wait for things." 
 
 " It isn't always nicer," was Dick's prompt answer. " If 
 you've got to wait too long, you don't care about them in 
 the end." 
 
 " Well, there's just a nice time to wait — I mean, till you 
 want them very badly," said Mamy argumentatively. Ab- 
 stract arguments were as the salt of life to every member of 
 the Clare family with one exception from the cradle up- 
 wards. " I wish Eila would hurry up ! " she continued ; " I 
 see Willie coming up the road down there with a 'great hor- 
 rid boy, and we can't enjoy ourselves one bit now." 
 
 " He won't matter to you," said Dick stolidly. " We 
 needn't take any notice of him ; " and the " cooees " were 
 reiterated with renewed energy, and a carrying power 
 worthy of an Australian black fellow himself. 
 
 " I'm coming, you little monkeys ! " cried a breathless 
 
4 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 voice from below ; " you needn't bring the neighbourhood 
 together with your ' cooees.' " And Eila, with the rusty- 
 haired little one clinging crablike to her back, and squeezing 
 her neck in a childish and merciless grasp, was seen tugging 
 bravely up over the yellow stubble, which is not pleasant 
 walking at the best of times— less than ever when one is 
 handicapped by a burden from behind, apparently bent upon 
 pulling a body over backwards. 
 
 When she had reached the summit of the hill, Eila 
 freed her neck from the encircling grasp of the childish 
 fingers, and gravely mopped her forehead with her handker- 
 chief. 
 
 " I'm streaming," she said shortly. " Truca, you're really 
 getting too heavy to be carried about, you know ; it's cruelty 
 to animals, that's what it is. Well, what do you children 
 want ? I can't do anything till I've had a rest." 
 
 Then, shaking oif the little one, who sli4 down cool and 
 triumphant upon her feet, she flung herself down upon the 
 grassy soil and fanned herself with her hat. 
 
 " Make us into bundles," clamoured Dick and Mamy 
 together ; " we're goin' to have a bundle-race.'' 
 
 " Then you must get the hay. You don't suppose I'm 
 going after the hay for you, do you ? " 
 
 The words were tart, but the voice was honey itself. To 
 be " fetch and carry " to the little ones of the family had 
 seemed such a sweet and natural function to Eila Clare from 
 the first moment that the marvellous and heavenly gift of a 
 twin baby brother and sister had been conferred upon her in 
 her childish days, that she never thought of revolting at 
 their commands. Only of late years their authority had 
 been weakened by the advent of the latest comer, Trucaninni, 
 otherwise Truca, who actually wielded the sceptre of she- 
 who-must-be-obeyed in the family. 
 
 Dick grumbled, as also did Mamy, but they went to col- 
 lect the hay, nevertheless. The operation was assisted, or 
 rather impeded, by Truca, who plodded after them and scat- 
 tered the bundles they had collected in her attempts to 
 appropriate an armful for herself. She was rewarded by 
 being told that she was a "big girl" and a "little duck," 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 and marched proudly with her wisps at the head of the pro- 
 cession. 
 
 The hay heing supplied, Dick and Mamy stretched them- 
 selves upon it on the ground, side by side, each upon a sepa- 
 rate bundle. By dint of rolling their bodies round in it, and 
 with the assistance of their elder sister, who twisted the hay 
 about them with a deftness that spoke of long practice, they 
 were speedily reduced to the appearance of two straw-covered 
 champagne bottles. Which end was head and which feet 
 it would have been difficult, however, to decide. The two 
 bundles lay long and compact at the top of the steep hill, 
 waiting for the signal which was to start them rolling down- 
 wards to the bottom. How these living bundles contrived 
 to breathe was a problem. It is to be surmised that the 
 space between the wisps allowed for the ingress of a certain 
 amount of air.. 
 
 There was a long moment of suspense, during which Eila 
 busied herself in pulling and pushing the bundles into as 
 exact a line as the inequalities of the soil would allow. She 
 had a threefold office to fulfil, to wit, that of judge, of starter, 
 and of umpire — a grave responsibility, with competitors so 
 captiously critical as her younger brother and sister. The 
 bundles lay quite still while they were being placed, and 
 when this task was accomplished, Eila knelt between them, 
 and began to repeat with a chanting intonation the words : 
 
 " Bell-horses, bell-horses, what time of day ; 
 One o'clock, two o'clock, three and " 
 
 but before the word ''away" had crossed her lips the bun- 
 dles, which had been already quivering with impatience, 
 gave a simultaneous convulsive jerk and began to roll away 
 down the incline like the cheeses in Grimm's tal«s. It was 
 giddy work to watch them revolving from the top of the 
 hill. Over they went, bumping and jolting on their down- 
 ward course, with an occasional rebound where the soil took 
 a sudden steepness, or when some unexpected descent had 
 given them a fresh impetus. 
 
 To Eila's horror (she had been laughing heartily at their 
 first set-off), their twisting and twirling progress showed no 
 
6 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 sign of coming to a standstill, even after they had reached 
 the stretch of level ground that lay at the bottom of the pad- 
 dock. This comparatively level space terminated in an ab- 
 rupt precipice, unprotected by fence or hedge of any kind. 
 Below it, at a drop of some eight or ten feet, was the rocky 
 road leading into the town. Now, it was not until the bun- 
 dles had rolled themselves to within two or three feet of the 
 aforesaid precipice that the contents thereof seemed to think 
 it worth while to slacken their speed. 
 
 Seen from above, the aspect was anything but reassuring. 
 Eila, unmindful for once of the protesting bawls of Truca, 
 who threw herself on her face on the ground and kicked her 
 fat legs in speechless fury at being left behind, set off run- 
 ning at her topmost speed down the hill. 
 
 Despite the beautiful legend of Atalanta and the exquisite 
 embodiments of it that artists have painted, the human form 
 does not lend itself to the exercise of rapid running with the 
 same natural grace as is displayed by any fourfooted crea- 
 ture of the forest. Nevertheless, in the reckless course of the 
 young girl down the abrupt decline, there was a freedom of 
 movement that possessed an undeniable grace. Without 
 comparing her to a stag or a fawn, it might have been said 
 that her pace had the spring and elasticity of one of her own 
 native kangaroos, an animal which, as we all know, will 
 hop and bound with such a human air that the Australian 
 natives will mimic its movements in their turn, and succeed 
 in reproducing them as though to the manner born. Once 
 Eila had begun to run down the breakneck declivity, there 
 could be no thought of stopping until she reached the bot- 
 tom. She did so only just in time to see the two bundles 
 come to a standstill at a nicely-calculated (though blood- 
 curdling-in-its-proxiniity) distance, as tiie Germans would 
 say, from the edge of the aforementioned precipice. The 
 bodies within were observed slowly to kick and writhe in 
 the effort to free themselves "of their encircling wrappings 
 of hay, like huge chrysalides seeking to emerge from the 
 grub stage of their attire. The first choked words uttered by 
 both together came from them in hoarse gasps. The words 
 were, " Who won ? " 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 Eila had come up to them by this time, and was panting 
 too, though more from emotion than fatigue. To anyone 
 less accustomed than she to the order of Cowa pastimes, the 
 twins would have appeared pitiable objects indeed. Their 
 faces were almost unrecognisable, swollen and bloated with 
 a heat past description. Wet strands of hair clung round 
 their foreheads and necks. Their entire persons were stuck 
 over with tags and jags of dried grass, wisps of straw, trails 
 of dead weeds, brambles and clots of earth. Their eyes 
 were bloodshot, and as they feebly plucked away the hay 
 bandages, sitting upright on the ground, they wriggled under 
 the pain inflicted by the straws on the unprotected parts of 
 their bodies. 
 
 Mamy was the first to recover her voice. She spoke 
 wheezily, and, between sneezing and lisping, would not have 
 made herself understood to any but a long-practised member 
 of the family. 
 
 "Wathn't it a good race?" she gasped enthusiastically. 
 " It wath neck and neck" — sneeze, sneeze — " I don't believe 
 we ever had such a good one in all our lives ! And I'm sure 
 I won, too. I didn't only stop till I was right close up to 
 the edge." 
 
 " No, you didn't win, then ! " croaked Dick hoarsely, 
 sneezing in his turn. "Why, you came bump up against 
 me from behind, so that shows I was on in front. My word, 
 but these straws are a caution ! I believe I've got one in 
 my eye, for I can't open it one bit. I say, Eila, you're um- 
 pire " — blinking up at her eagerly—" didn't I win the race 
 now, say ? " 
 
 " I don't care who won ; you're little wretches, both ! " 
 said Eila, with a half -sob in her voice ; for she had been 
 really frightened this time. "I'll never do you up again 
 either, so there ! What did you go near the edge for like 
 that ? Don't you know that in one minute more you'd have 
 been over the precipice, and both your necks broken ! " 
 
 The children were silent for a moment. Then they 
 looked at each other and laughed, and Dick said : 
 
 " Don't fluff, Eila ; I always know just when I've got to 
 stop, and Mamy, too." 
 
8 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " It's the last time I'll have a hand in it, anyhow ! " de- 
 clared Eila. 
 
 Mamy meanwhile had been shaking and pluming herself 
 into some semblance of her former round-limbed self. Now 
 she said reflectively : 
 
 "I s'pose breaking necks doesn't hurt too awfully much. 
 If Dick's and mine was broken together it would be nicer 
 for us than going up to heaven alone.'' 
 
 " Nonsense ! " said her sister ; " you needn't think of going 
 to heaven yet, either alone or in company, Mamy." For to 
 guard the younger ones against the intrusion of the terrify- 
 ing apprehension of death had been Eila's constant care ever 
 since she had stood, a little creature of ten, by the side of her 
 father's dead body, and the first awful dawning conscious- 
 ness of the black chasm that yawns before and behind us 
 had well-nigh crushed her under its weight. " You've got 
 to go on doing lots of happy things till you're an old woman, 
 and then there'll be newer and better things to do up above." 
 
 " I don't care," said Mamy, her voice trembhng, and this 
 time it was not from the straw-dust she had swallowed. "1 
 won't ever care to go by myself. I don't think it's at all a 
 good arrangement. I'd like you, and mother, and Dick, and 
 nie, and all of us, to have a big fiery chariot like Elijah's to 
 go right up to heaven in together. I'd like it to be just like 
 Mrs. Warden's double-seated buggy ; then there'd be plenty 
 of room — only not too hot, or we might all get burned.'" 
 
 "I don't want to go to heaven, anyhow," observed Dick; 
 he was lying upon his back looking up at the blue mist over- 
 head. " I don't want to go anywhere. I wish I'd never been 
 made at all." 
 
 "Oh, Dick dear! why do you say that?" said his elder 
 sister reproachfully. " I'm sure you have a good time of it 
 nearly always." 
 
 "No, I don't — not when I'm thinking!" retorted Dick. 
 " I think, and I think, and I wonder how the world's going 
 to be stopped. I don't want it to go on always. I can't bear 
 to think of things going on always. It makes me hate to be 
 alive at all. I do wish people hadn't got to be born." 
 
 " Dear ! " said Eila soothingly, and she stooped to pass her 
 
INTRODUCTIOK. 9 
 
 soft sunburnt hand through the lad's damp hair. " I used to 
 have just that kind of feeling ; it used nearly to drive me 
 mad ; and now I know the only thing to do is to say this : 
 " We haven't got brains to understand the puzzle now. Per- 
 haps we may have a different kind of brain some day — some- 
 where — in some other world." That's the best to hope for. 
 And in the meantime, there's so much else to think about 
 here ; one keeps finding out nice, new, interesting things 
 every day." 
 
 Dick grunted, but whether in assent or dissent his sister 
 could not say. The metaphysical turn the conversation had 
 threatened to take was brusquely diverted by the advent of 
 two lads of the approved schoolboy type. The one, a year 
 or two younger than Eila, bore the unmistakable Clare 
 stamp. There is nothing more subtle than tlie quality of 
 family resemblance which is often seen to exist among peo- 
 ple who have not a single feature in common. Willie Clare 
 was by common accord a plain boy. He was heavy-featured 
 and thick-lipped, and his eyes lacked the lustrous charm 
 that distinguished his brother's. No one would have be- 
 stowed a second look upon Willie, whereas Dick's personal- 
 ity compelled a closer scrutiny. Yet in any part of Hobart 
 where he might present himself, those who had seen either 
 his mother or sisters or brother would say, " You are one of 
 the Clares, I expect," or, " You live up on the hill, don't 
 you ? " as the case might be. Willie was, in fact, a kind of 
 joint reproduction of the rest in whatever they possessed of 
 least handsome. Perhaps he had appropriated even a larger 
 shai'e of the very scant stock of practical wisdom they could 
 boast of collectively, for he was the only one who eschewed 
 the metaphysical discussions in which they indulged, from 
 their mother downwards, upon the faintest provocation. 
 Child as he was, he had been able to turn the garden, the 
 hay-paddock, and the live stock of Cowa to account : and 
 while Dick and Mamy were fleeing to the farthest end of 
 the garden or paddock, tearfully and hysterically declaim- 
 ing against the "beastly cruelty" of "killing the poor dar- 
 ling little baby pigs to eat them," he would stick a juvenile 
 porker with the utmost coolness and neat-handedness, hav- 
 
10 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ing abstained from undertaking the operation until he had 
 thoroughly mastered it in theory, as well as by watching the 
 butcher at work. 
 
 The lad who accompanied him was obviously of a differ- 
 ent stock. If Nature had not such infinite resources at her 
 command, she would be sorely tasked to give variety to the 
 type of ordinary British or colonial born school-boy be- 
 tween the unpromising ages of ten and fifteen. Willie 
 Clare's companion was so complete an incarnation of the 
 everyday order of sturdy, pugnacious, stolid-looking lad, 
 that you might have supposed you had encountered him a 
 hundred times a day, when you were actually doing so for 
 the first time. He was thick-set ; and, notwithstanding the 
 fact that his clothes were infinitely newer and better than those 
 of any member of the Clare family, they were far from set- 
 ting round him in the same shapely way as theirs. His hair 
 grew low on a square forehead, whence it stood straight up 
 in a kind of rough brush. His gray eyes were not without 
 a lurking spirit of fun in them, though the jaw was heavy 
 and the impression conveyed by the face in repose rather 
 sulky than conciliatory. You would have guessed at once 
 that Sydney Warden was not afficted by hypersensitive- 
 ness, or morbid selfconsoiousness, or shocks of perplexed 
 anguish on the score of the mystery of being, as was the 
 case with Dick Clare. 
 
 His face wore an interested and amused expression as he 
 watched the progress of the living hay-bundles down the 
 hill while walking by Willie's side along the road below. 
 Though the way from the town was very steep, and the 
 afternoon of the kind familiarly designated as blazing hot, 
 both boys quickened their speed as they neared the paddock, 
 spurred on by their sympathy for the sport that was going 
 on there. A few rough blocks of stone at the corner served 
 as stepping-stones, by which they were enabled to climb 
 into it, and, once arrived, they hun-ied on towards the scene 
 of action. 
 
 The party grouped at the bottom of the paddock took, 
 however, but little notice of them. Dick and Mamy had 
 been cooling themselves, and talking about heaven. More- 
 
INTRODUCTION. H 
 
 over, Mamy's attitude towards strange boys was capricious. 
 She was so completely Dick's double in everything that she 
 felt it as a bitter grievance when he played by himself with 
 some school-companion of Willie's who had come to spend 
 the afternoon at Cowa without inviting her to share in the 
 game. Admitted to take part in the sport (and there were 
 few boys' games in which Mamy could not hold her own), 
 she was not averse to the occasional society of her brothers' 
 friends. But her preference was for big boys, not for short 
 ones, and whether because Sydney's legs were not long 
 enough to allow of his being included in the former cate- 
 gory, or that Mamy, besides being a romp, was also a prema- 
 ture coquette, and wanted to attract the newcomer's atten- 
 tion, it is certain that as Sydney approached she looked 
 studiously in another direction, even turning her back upon 
 him, and feigning to have no more absorbing interest in 
 life than the picking out of the grass-seeds that had stuck 
 fast in her socks. 
 
 Ella's demeanour was quite different. She could behave 
 upon occasion like a big, grown-up person, as the children 
 called it — though her romping powers were almost equal to 
 theirs — and upon seeing that the new arrival looked awk- 
 ward and shy, she put him at his ease by the friendly way 
 in which she shook hands with him and made him welcome 
 to Cowa. 
 
 "I know you are Sydney Warden," she said; "Willie 
 told us you would perhaps come back with him some after- 
 noon. But it must have beeft dreadfully hot walking up 
 from town. We'll go and get some strawberries, or do you 
 like strawberries and cream better? We have them out 
 here in the hay, and it's such fun. Did you see the great 
 bundle-race from below ? " 
 
 Sydney said "Yes" in a tongue-tied kind of way, and 
 stared helplessly across at the competitors sitting in the hay. 
 They still looked as though they had been dragged at a 
 cart's tail, like criminals in olden times, though their ex- 
 pressions were serene. Dick nodded condescendingly ; Mamy 
 continued to pick the grass-seeds from her socks, until her 
 brother gave her a sideway nudge. 
 2 
 
12 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " Don't show off, Mamy ! " he whispered ; " it's silly. You 
 know somebody's there." 
 
 " I'm not showing off," said Mamy indignantly. " I've 
 got my own business to attend to." 
 
 And attend to it she did, without any sign of relenting. 
 She took off her shoe, shook out the straws, examined it 
 closely, then put it on again, and subjected her second shoe 
 to the same treatment, keeping her bright covered head ob- 
 stinately bent down the whole time, resolutely ignoring the 
 presence of outsiders. Only once she cast a sideway glance 
 at the stranger boy. She lowered her eyes again, however, 
 immediately. There was a gleam of mocking merriment in 
 them. 
 
 " I wish you two would have a race again ! " said Sydney 
 to Dick, after the first antagonistic shyness had worn off ; 
 " it's the best lark in the world to see you spinning round 
 and round. Only you ought to begin right up at the top, 
 where that little girl's screeching over there." 
 
 " It's poor dear little True ! " said Eila, with self-reproach ; 
 and " Eila's coming, darling ! " she shouted, as she sprang up 
 the paddock towards her tyrant. 
 
 Mamy had condescended to raise her head by this time, 
 and to display her defiant and tumbled little visage, and 
 Dick asked her whether she was "on" for another race. 
 Divided between the fear of being left out of the game, and 
 a certain reluctance to give her consent too cheaply, she 
 sought to compromise matters by suggesting that " the boy " 
 and Willie should have a first turn. By some unexplained 
 caprice, she continued to ignore Sydney's presence, only 
 alluding to him loftily as " the boy," while she addressed 
 herself ostentatiously to Dick. 
 
 " We'll have a four-bundle race ! That'll be better fun ! " 
 urged Willie ; for Sydney, upon whose not otherwise lively 
 imagination the attractive novelty of the entertainment had 
 exercised an irresistible and all-powerful fascination, will- 
 ingly agreed, and the four children plodded in company up 
 the steep, prickly, slippery stubble, only stopping occasion- 
 ally to roll over a haycock, or to chase each other round it 
 before tumbling breathless into the midst. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 The scene around them was such as might have gladdened 
 the heart of a painter, but none of the children thought of 
 directing their observation to it. They had been born under 
 the shadow of Mount Wellington, and consulted him now 
 more as a kind of huge weather-glass than from any eesthetic 
 appreciation of his venerable beauties. According to the 
 aspect he wore jin the morning, they built their hopes upon 
 the day before them. When he appeared arrayed, like a 
 monarch, in royal purple, with his giant crown well out- 
 lined against the shining expanse of blue that canopied him, 
 they felt that the heavens would smile upon them. When, 
 on the other hand, he sulked behind the cloud-wreaths, or 
 showed himself grudgingly under rags and tags of wet mist, 
 they got out their umbrellas and waterproofs. For what 
 other motive should the Tasmanians to-day question him ? 
 He has no legends of mediaeval days to recount, though, for 
 all we know to the contrary, he may have a thousand tales 
 as wonderful and dramatic as any of these locked up in his 
 gloomy fastnesses. He has seen a primitive race swept from 
 the face of the earth, goaded convicts hiding like rats in 
 holes and caves, and runaway prisoners hunted to their 
 doom. He has seen fugitives, lost in his mysterious hol- 
 lows, wander round and round in delirious circles, until 
 they have fallen to rise no more. He has witnessed many 
 an act of life's comedy played out besides, unknown to all. 
 He has seen flirtations, and proposals, and betrothals — 
 episodes less easy than these to put into words, though 
 French romance writers do not hesitate to fill long chapters 
 about them. He knows more secrets than many a human 
 father confessor, though he keeps his counsel, like a grim 
 old guardian of public interests that he is. An occasional 
 hint concerning the weather is all that can be extorted from 
 him to-day. He has outlived his own boiling, seething 
 youth, as may be seen by the scars he bears on his surface, 
 and knows that men are but as the grass that springs up in 
 the night-time, and is cut down in the morning. 
 
 To-day, like an ancient patriarch who sees his children 
 playing at his feet, Mount Wellington wore a benignant 
 smile. Unconsciously to themselves, he was an element of 
 
14 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 happiness in the lives of the inmates of Cowa. Upon July 
 days they had seen him robed to his base in a surplice of 
 sparkhng snow. There were summer sunsets in January 
 when he glowed like a huge ruby. His normal hue ranged 
 from cold gray to warm purple. Upon the days when he 
 was hidden altogether the children were ill at ease. It was 
 as though a dark shadow had suddenly descended on their 
 lives. 
 
 Race number two required longer inaugural ceremonies 
 than the first. To begin with, Eila, who had retracted her 
 threat never to do up the culprits again, upon the condition 
 that the bundles should start themselves after she had been 
 given time to get to the bottom of the hill with Truca, and 
 to await them there, had had four packages instead of two 
 to make up. She felt some compunction in packing up 
 Sydney Warden. It was evident that his mother bestowed 
 much thought and money upon his clothes. Then there 
 was the whole descent to accomplish for a second time, 
 with Truca triumphantly reinstated on her back, clinging 
 vengefully this time like a miniature Old Man of the Sea. 
 Dick, it was arranged, should give the signal from under 
 his swathings of hay ; but, just as Eila had anticipated, he 
 gave it long before she had reached the bottom with her 
 load, notwithstanding the fact that she had galloped — as far 
 as a two-legged beast of burden may be said to gallop — as 
 fast as ever she was able. She was fain now to skip out of 
 the way of the irregularly rolling bundles as they revolved 
 rapidly past her; worse still, she was subjected, as before, 
 to a spasm of terror on behalf of the foremost of the lot, 
 which could be none other than the twins. This time the 
 victory rested between Dick and the new-comer, who were 
 in an equally sorry plight as they emerged from their wrap- 
 pings. Each, however, loudly proclaimed himself the win- 
 ner; and when Eila reached the scene, and Willie and 
 Mamy were able to perceive what was going on with their 
 smarting eyes, it had already come to a tussle between the 
 two disputants, in which each was trying to convince the 
 other that he was in point of fact the winner by the illog- 
 ical argument of pulling him over to the ground. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 The tussle was mere sport at first — the kind of wrestling- 
 match in which boys, like young puppies, engage almost 
 instinctively, and without malice prepense, upon the shallow- 
 est pretexts ; but it grew more earnest as each of the com- 
 batants discovered that he had met his match. Dick was 
 lithe and sinewy ; he seemed to have indiarubber springs in 
 his body, which made it impossible to throw him right over. 
 Sydney, for his part, had weight and muscle. In vain Dick 
 twisted round his adversary's body, like a supple panther 
 springing upon a bear. Sydney opposed a dead-weight re- 
 sistance to all the efforts of his adversary. The combat had 
 lasted nearly two minutes — a long time when it is con- 
 sidered that the parties engaged in it were well-nigh breath- 
 less at the outset ; and Willie advised them to desist. " Stop 
 that ! " he called out, with the assertion that Sydney had 
 won the race in any case. Dick felt that he could not hold 
 out any longer. He was on the point of sinking under 
 Sydney's weight, when Mamy, who had been watching the 
 struggle with dilated eyes and quivering lips, suddenly and 
 unexpectedly interposed. Snatching up the first missile to 
 hand in the shape of a potato that had probably been 
 dropped from some sack in the haycart, she flung it with 
 all her might at Sydney's head. He saw the gesture, and 
 ducked in time to elude it. But Dick had meanwhile taken 
 advantage of the unguarded movement, with a sudden dex- 
 terous twist of the foot, to throw his adversary off his bal- 
 ance and cause him to topple over backwards on the ground. 
 Dick went over himself, it is true, clasped in his enemy's 
 arms ; but he had the satisfaction, at least, of being the top- 
 most. Upon seeing this Mamy stalked away, rejoiced and 
 impenitent, hurling over her shoulder the parting taunt : 
 " I knew Dick wasn't going to be beaten, 'cause he won the 
 race." 
 
 The boys picked themselves up none the worse friends in 
 the end, and no allusion was made to the episode of the po- 
 tato. Curiously enough, however, the vision of Mamy with 
 her arm uplifted, in the act of hurling, the straw sticking all 
 over her head and clothes, was destined to remain fixed for 
 evermore in Sydney's mind. He was entirely unaware of 
 
16 NOT COQNTING THE COST. 
 
 the fact at the time. Have we not all a store of mental pho- 
 tographs which seem to have recorded themselves on our 
 hrains with no connivance or volition of our own ? Per- 
 haps there are moods during which the mind is like a sen- 
 sitive plate, so that impressions recorded on it are never to 
 he subsequently effaced. Many things happened at Cowa 
 that day which Sydney also remembered, for this was the 
 first of numberless visits he paid his friends on the hill. 
 For one thing, he remembered that Mamy had disappeared 
 for a very long time. Eude little girl as she was, the play 
 had not seemed quite so interesting when her eager, watch- 
 ful eyes, blue as the agate in Sydney's pockets, under her 
 tousled hair, had been no longer there to follow the games. 
 
 When she returned Sydney would hardly have recog- 
 nised her. She wore a clean holland blouse fastened round 
 her waist with a belt. Her face was washed and seemed to 
 be very fair, and her hair, without a particle of straw in it, 
 hung in a stout, short plait behind her back, tied at the end 
 with a strip of blue ribbon. She looked quite good, and car- 
 ried something that appeared lika a white soup-tureen care- 
 fully in both hands, with soup-plates and spoons on the top 
 of it. Upon being uncovered, the soup-tureen was found to 
 contain piles of luscious strawberries swimming in the thick- 
 est and yellowest of cream, all- properly sugared and mixed. 
 In Sydney's own home there was a professional cook, who 
 made such curries and such trifles as no one in Hobart could 
 approach. Yet it seemed to him now that all he had eaten 
 hitherto at his mother's table was but as Dead Sea fruit, 
 compared with the nectar and ambrosia of that first repast 
 in the hay at Cowa. It was Eila who dispensed it, sitting 
 on the haycock with Truca on her lap, and there was more 
 than anyone could eat at a time. The children had to get 
 up and jump about before they could finish what was left. 
 
 Then Eila told them a story in the hay, while they lay 
 on their backs and stomachs in a state of blissful content- 
 ment that passed all description. Only yesterday Sydney 
 would have scorned such a babyish amusement as that of 
 listening to a girl's "yarns," but these were tales such as he 
 had never heard or imagined before— boys' adventures on 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 desert islands, that made your hair tingle at the roots to 
 listen to ; wonderful n;irratives of giants that you could not 
 help believing from the way in which they were told. It 
 was not in human nature to resist such stories as these. 
 
 Then, as the sun began to creep down behind the moun- 
 tains, burning a hole through his cloudy curtain of purple 
 and gold, and whiffs of cool air blew inwards from the dark- 
 ening harbour, Mamy sprang up from her hay-mound, and 
 climbing the railing into an adjoining paddock (there was a 
 gate a few yards lower, but who would waste the time in 
 opening a gate with rails all ready to scramble over ?), 
 and proceeded to walk slowly up it, calling "Coop — coo- 
 oop ! " in far-reaching, conciliatory tones. Almost simulta- 
 neously a large and a small cow, browsing at the top of the 
 paddock, raised their heads and looked at her. Dick mean- 
 while had run to fetch the milking-pail, and by the time he 
 returned, the cows were coming slowly down the hill, with 
 their heads swaying from right to left from the shoulder, 
 with an indifferent, not-to-be-hurried air. Snow-white, so 
 named after the heroine of Grimm's tales, on account of the 
 fairness of her hide, seemed to swim in an amber light, en- 
 veloped in the rays of the setting sun. Her companion, 
 who answered to the more prosaic name of Strawberry, re- 
 flected the golden brown glow of autumn woods. Both ani- 
 mals came to a halt when Mamy laid her hand upon them. 
 Snow-white, however, she pulled towards her by the horns 
 and kissed upon the forehead before beginning to milk her. 
 There was no milking-stool. Mamy knelt by the cows in 
 turn, with her head leaning against their flanks, and talked 
 soothingly to them in cow-language, as the milk rained and 
 foamed in the pail under the skilful downward pressure of 
 her supple thumb. 
 
 Sydney watched the operation with eyes of naive won- 
 derment. Country scenes and sports were not unknown to 
 him, but of the mysteries of practical dairying he knew little 
 or nothing. His elder sister, Lucy, was timid of animals, 
 and would go specially in another direction when out walk- 
 ing with her governess, to avoid meeting the coavs on their 
 country estiite. Mamy, on the contrai-y, seemed to love them. 
 
18 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 She even condescended to give some explanations between 
 the intervals of milking. Snow-white, it seemed, had the 
 sweetest temper, but Strawberry gave the richest milk. As 
 though to prove her displeasure at the slur cast upon her 
 character, or to give immediate proof of the justice of the 
 accusation. Strawberry whisked her tail with a vicious move- 
 ment as soon as it was her turn to be milked. The first 
 whisk was dexterously contrived to give Mamy a literal slap 
 in the face, and before she had had time to recover from it, 
 a second whisk had scattered the milk over her frock. The 
 hardest part to bear was the peal of hilarious laughter that 
 Strawberry's untoward conduct excited from the rest. 
 
 " How can you eijcourage her in such behaviour ? " cried 
 Mamy, turning round upon them with a strenuous appeal 
 that was almost pathetic in its indignant earnestness. There 
 was a gleam of something like a tear in her troubled blue 
 eyes. 
 
 The others continued to laugh — all save Sydney Warden. 
 Sydney shunned girls as a rule, and Mamy's first manner of 
 recognising him by aiming a " spud " at his head could 
 hardly be looked upon as an inducement to make an excep- 
 tion in her favour. Nevertheless, it is a fact that he darted 
 forward on the impulse of the moment, and laid valiant hold 
 of Strawberry's ofi'ending tail. Nay, though the cow, mor- 
 tally affronted, made as though she would kick him, and 
 did, indeed, partially succeed in boxing his ear with her lib- 
 erated tail, he remained manfully at his post. Nor did he 
 let go his hold until Mamy rose, flushed and trimnphant, 
 from her knees, with the remark : 
 
 " She's as sulky as ever she can be. She's been trying to 
 hold back her milk all the time." 
 
 She did not thank Sydney for his interposition, and it was 
 Dick — not he — who helped her to carry the pail up tlie hill. 
 The pair walked on silently together in front, until Dick re- 
 marked reflectively : 
 
 " I think Sydney Warden's not a bad sort, Mamy, don't 
 you ? " 
 
 Whereat Mamy, who was chewing a straw, tossed her 
 head indifferently, as much as to say that the subject was 
 
INTRODUCTION. I9 
 
 really one which had no interest for her. That Sydney 
 should have been completely subjugated by her warlike atti- 
 tude at the outset ; that her treatment of him to-day was only 
 typical of the treatment she would bestow on him in the long 
 years to come ; that the destinies the Fates were already 
 spinning for both out of the nebulous mass whence human 
 destinies are evolved had been all foreshadowed in the child- 
 ish conflicts of the afternoon — what could Mamy know or 
 dream of this ? For her the events of to-day were but as the 
 sunset coloinis that stained the opposite sky, and that paled 
 and faded as she watched them. Nor was Sydney more con- 
 scious than Mamy that his day's impressions were of those 
 that he would never lose. 
 
 The entrancing evening came to an end with tea on the 
 veranda — a delightful and scrambly tea, in which hot scones 
 and eggs, and jam and dough-cake, succeeded each other un- 
 interruptedly and abim^dantly on the same plates. The tallc, 
 however, was of a kind that Sydney could not always follow. 
 There was a family vocabulary of which he did not as yet 
 possess the key, and he was also conscious of a vague, unde- 
 fined quality of singularity that distinguished the accents 
 and gestures of his new friends. At a little distance he would 
 have supposed them to be talking another language — a lan- 
 guage rather soft and nasal, with an occasional plaintiveness 
 in it that was almost a whine. I need not say that these 
 opinions remained entirely unformulated by him. If he was 
 conscious of them at all, it was only in the guise of swift, 
 unanalyzed impressions, the analytic tendency being foreign 
 to Sydney's practical nature. He thought Mrs. Clare as dif- 
 ferent from other mothers as her children were different 
 from other children he had met. If he could have expressed 
 what he felt, he would have said that she did not look to him 
 like a mother at all. Her face was small and sallow, and 
 the hair, lying smoothly on either side of her narrow head, 
 was of the shiniest blackness he had ever seen. Her- equally 
 black eyes, that struck him as being much larger than ordi- 
 nary eyes, moved hither and thither as rapidly as a bird's. 
 At other momeats they looked straight before them at noth- 
 ing. Under both aspects Sydney felt there was something 
 
20 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 curious about them. He was reminded of an ayah who had 
 come down from India with a sister of his mother's and her 
 baby to visit them at Hobart. He noticed, among other 
 things, that there was no grace said, a ceremony which was 
 never dispensed with at his own home teas. It was Eila who 
 seemed most bent upon keeping order, though her attention 
 was much taken up by Truca, who sat on a high chair beside 
 her ; also by a large retriever dog that rested his paws on the 
 back of her chair, and thrust his head against her neck. 
 Below the veranda darkness was creeping up the hill. It 
 held the town in the hollow, and rested in a broad black 
 shadow upon the harbour. Lights were faintly twinkling 
 on the opposite shore; still the family lingered over their 
 tea. Sydney sat open-mouthed among them now that he 
 had finished eating. It reminded him of being at a play. 
 
 Each one seemed to him funnier than the other. Mamy 
 gave an inimitable rendering of the startled demeanour of 
 an old lady who had seen her fall off the haystack unex- 
 pectedly the day before, and Truca was made to recount her 
 famous dream, in which, as appeared by her own showing, 
 she " flied " and " flied " all the time, " and didn't get no 
 higher " than the cupboard in the schoolroom. 
 
 Dick produced two of the most beautiful beetles in 
 bronze-green armour ever seen, and made believe they were 
 two explorers, wandering over the tablecloth, which was the 
 sea, in search of an enchanted island, which was the butter- 
 dish. To stake impossible simas upon the port they would 
 make for first was a highly exciting game, though it was 
 diversified by an argument between Dick and his mother 
 upon the construction of beetle-brains, which was too sug- 
 gestive of his school-book upon physical science to have 
 much interest or meaning for Sydney. 
 
 By-and-by a golden moon dispelled the darkness. The 
 mounds in the hay-paddock became as silver thrones, whei-e- 
 on the children sat once more in state. Only the occasional 
 alarm of a snake would cause a wild and uncalled-for stam- 
 pede from time to time on the part of the entire party. 
 Sydney remembered how they had tried to unearth the 
 noisy crickets that snapped and whirred beneath the soil, as 
 
INTRODUCTION. 21 
 
 though they had been driving a hundred subterranean lilli- 
 putian mills ; and how Dick had recounted a yam (for 
 surely it could have been nothing but a yarn) about some 
 little people called earthmen, or gnomes, that used to potter 
 undergroiind in olden times. 
 
 The lad carried away more impressions from his first 
 afternoon at Cowa than he could find place for all together 
 in his brain. The crowning impression of all, the one that 
 dominated every other, was the vision of Mamy with her 
 outstretched arm, in the act of hurling the potato at him. 
 Supposing it had really struck him on the temple 1 It was 
 with a smaller missile than a potato that David had slain 
 the giant Goliath. Sydney remembered this fact, for he was 
 better versed in " Stories from the Bible " than his friends 
 on the hill. Supposing it had struck him as the pebble 
 struck Goliath, and killed him dead on the spot ! Would 
 Mamy have been sorry ? Or supposing it had only hurt him 
 a little, raised a bump, or given him a bad bruise, would she 
 still have been sorry — a little sorry ? Then an unaccount- 
 able regret that he had dodged the blow at the critical mo- 
 ment, and thus cut off forever the possibility of knowing 
 whether Mamy would have been sorry, was the main effect 
 of the incident upon Sydney's imagination. Now, his im- 
 agination was not easily stimulated, and if the one being 
 who had been potent to work tliis miracle upon him for the 
 first time in his experience should have been destined to 
 hold her supremacy over him thenceforth and forever, the 
 fact need cause no surprise, physical force led captive by 
 imagination being the theme which has underlain myths 
 and fable-lore from time immemorial, for all such as have 
 sought to penetrate their hidden meaning. 
 
22 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 MRS. frost's news. 
 
 The day had been warm, but the unfailing sea-breeze, 
 borne in from the great mysterious Antarctic Ocean, blew 
 fresh and cold in young Mrs. Frost's face as she set herself 
 to walk across the rugged slopes of Mount Knocklofty 
 towards the ivy-covered cottage on the New Town Road 
 wherein old Mrs. Frost had her habitation. Knocklofty is 
 not, as its name might seem to imply, an Irish mountain, 
 but a furze and bracken covered hill in the neighbourhood 
 of Hobart, which Hobart, as everybody knows, is the chief 
 city of Tasmania, and quite lovely enough and lonely 
 enough to have inspired a colonial Goldsmith with a poem 
 in imitation of the " Deserted Village of the Plain," with 
 the slight difference that it should be entitled " The Village 
 of the Mountains" instead. Mrs. Frost knew Knocklofty 
 under all its aspects, and so far custom had not withered the 
 infinite variety of its charm in her eyes. She had raced 
 over it like a young colt in the days when she wore socks 
 and short frocks, and her defenceless calves had shown a 
 lattice-work of multitudinous scratches inflicted by the 
 briars and the gorse. Some years later she had carried her 
 water-colours on her rambling, or, to speak more correctly, 
 on her scrambling expeditions to its summit, and had made 
 heroic attempts to reproduce Mount Wellington in a state 
 of incandescence at sunset. Truth to tell, she had antici- 
 pated in this line the achievement of certain impressionist 
 painters of to-day, and had accomplished "plein air," as 
 Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, without being aware of it 
 herself. But for want of guidance, her artistic efforts re- 
 mained at much the same stage as those she made in many 
 another direction besides — that is to say, they were sugges- 
 tions rather than performances. 
 
 On the particular summer evening in the month of Janu- 
 ary when you encounter young Mrs. Frost for the first time, 
 impressionist or even "plein air" inspirations are far enough 
 from her thoughts. Not that the scene around her is lack- 
 
MRS. FROST'S NEWS. 23 
 
 ing in elements that might furnish them. The distant har- 
 bour, reflecting the late sunset, wears a blood-red glow, that 
 calls to mind one of the most effective of the many effective 
 plagues devised by Moses for the subduing of the stiff-necked 
 Egyptians. House-tops and hill-tops have caught the rosy 
 reflection, and for the space of a few minutes the landscape 
 seems to swim in an amber light. Young Mrs. Frost's face, 
 beautiful enough for all ordinary and superordinary pur- 
 poses in the garish light of day, becomes celestially trans- 
 figured under its influence. Her silhouette takes the sem- 
 blance of a silver outline, and her cheeks and forehead shine 
 with a wonderful semi-transparent softness, that shows what 
 a beautiful thing human flesh can be for mere light-reflect- 
 ing purposes alone. 
 
 The foregoing phenomenon is familiar to most painters. 
 It presented itself upon the present occasion with the force 
 of a new revelation to a certain Reginald or Mr. Reginald 
 Acton, who accidentally, or with malice prepense, overtook 
 young Mrs. Frost just as she was hesitating whether to take 
 a long and tedious road that led to Ivy Cottage by inhabited 
 ways and protected paths, or a short and devious cut (the 
 two qualifications became quite compatible, whatever Cow- 
 per may have implied to the contrary), with the same end 
 in view. 
 
 " How you startled me ! " she exclaimed, looking sharply 
 round, as she heard Reginald's tramping footstep behind her. 
 "I'm too glad it's only you ! " and she put out her hand. 
 
 " Yes, it's only me ! " he replied with a smile, as he took 
 the ungloved hand and held it for an instant in his own. 
 " Thanks for the compliment ; but I'm ' too glad ' on my own 
 account to have caught you up at last, to mind. Now, where 
 are you going, and which way shall we take ? " 
 
 " I'm going to Ivy Cottage, sir ! " The little grimace that 
 accompanied the reply was more eloquent than words could 
 have been. " But don't pity me ; I believe it's for the last 
 time." 
 
 "For the last time? Why, have you thrown your re- 
 spected father and mother-in-law over, or have they thrown 
 
 you over 
 
24 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " Not they, indeed ! but haven't you heard the news ? 
 Did they tell you nothing at Cowa ? " 
 
 "IVeheard nothing. I stopped at the garden-gate ten 
 minutes ago to see whether you were discoverable; and 
 your brother Dick, who, by-the-by, had no socks on, only a 
 kind of patent sole strapped to his bare feet, told me in his 
 usual superior way that you had gone to see your mother- 
 in-law. He could not tell me, though, which way you had 
 taken, but I was sure it would be across the hill. So I 
 walked on after you at the rate of — of " 
 
 " Nineteen to the dozen ! " interposed Mrs. Frost. 
 
 "Ninety-nine to the dozen would be nearer the mark. 
 Anyhow, here I am. You must have had ten minutes' start 
 of me at least, and you were going fast at that. You are 
 not aware, I suppose, that you were turning your back upon 
 one of the finest harbour-views ever known ? " 
 
 " Was I ? Well, let's look at it now." 
 
 " Yes, lets ! " he said, mimicking her with a smile. 
 
 " And then I'll tell you the news ! " cried young Mrs. 
 Frost, "only I'm not at all sure that it will please you." 
 
 " Not please me ! Then don't tell it to me just for a mo- 
 ment. I want to have a few moments of perfect enjoy- 
 ment. The sun will have gone down in another minute. 
 Here ! will you have my coat to sit upon ? " 
 
 " No, indeed I won't ! " she laughed disdainfully. " Why, 
 I spend most of my time sitting out upon the ground." 
 
 She had suited her action to her words, and was already 
 plumped down after the fashion of a born Australian, to 
 whom the ground or the floor represents an ever-available 
 resting-place, while Reginald was considering how he should 
 dispose himself upon the stony soil by her side. 
 
 " Here's a lovely place to see it from," she said. " I'm 
 glad you told me of it. It is beautiful ! Couldn't one al- 
 most be a Parsee, with a sky like that to worship ? I've 
 heard people talk about a man not being able to set the 
 Thames on fire, but I'm sure it looks as though the Derwent 
 were all aflame, doesn't it ? And what lovely little jags of 
 gold in the clouds ! " 
 
 As she spoke, the rim of the sun, a disc of burning gold, 
 
MRS. FROST'S NEWS. 25 
 
 was still visible above the horizon. A moment lat«r he had 
 slowly dropped behind the mountains, sending up, as he 
 sank, shafts of brightness that seemed to slash the sky with 
 colour. Young Mrs. Frost "fetched a sigh," as our great- 
 grandparents would have said, and turned her illumined 
 face towards her companion. 
 
 Reginald's "few moment's of perfect enjoyment" were 
 plainly written upon his countenance. His was a face that 
 might have belonged to an inhabitant of the fabled Palace 
 of Truth, notwithstanding the fact that he had been through 
 the usual training which enjoins the civilized man to hide 
 his emotions from the world. It was of a blonde hue, upon 
 which, as upon an ivory tablet, all that recorded itself miglit 
 be read by those who ran. His eyes were of the good honest 
 blue often to be seen in the eyes of Norwegian sailors, and 
 when he was troubled, they had a suffused look that would 
 have been very touching to a mother or a woman friend. 
 The cut of his features was far from being classic. There 
 was a curious scoop in the bridge of the nose that gave some- 
 thing of a bovine suggestion to the profile. The front view, 
 however, displaying the pleasant trusting eyes, the broad tip 
 of a sun-burned nose, and the well-disciplined profusion of 
 close-cut whisker, beard and moustache, that concealed all 
 the lower part of the face, never failed to impress the spec- 
 tator agreeably. It was doubtful whether young Mrs. Frost 
 had ever thought of judging it critically. Reginald was 
 " nice " (and this is the paramount consideration from a femi- 
 nine point of view), and he always looked nice, under what- 
 ever circumstances he might be encountered. Besides which, 
 she had perhaps fewer opportunities for judging him impar- 
 tially than other people, seeing that, unconsciously to him- 
 self, his whole being was quickened — in the Scriptural sense 
 of the word — in her presence. He had been her friend and 
 almost her confidant for more than a year ; he had not been 
 in Tasmania more than eighteen months himself ; and the 
 difference of age between them, some twelve or fifteen years, 
 coupled with the fact that he had seen so much of the world 
 in his naval officer days, inclined her to pay more heed to 
 his counsels than she was apt to bestow upon those of most 
 
26 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 other people who were rash enough to offer them. The dif- 
 ficulty of young Mrs. Frost's position (and the sequel will 
 show how really difficult it was) inclined her to resent the 
 well-meant advice that was proffered to her. 
 
 "What is the use of their talking so ? " she would say to 
 herself impatiently. " I get more help out of a page of Her- 
 bert Spencer than out of all the sermons they can preach in 
 a week." 
 
 The " they " referred in this instance to father-in-law, 
 mother-in-law, friends and acquaintances generally, for as 
 far as her own brothers and sisters were concerned, live 
 and let live was too instinctive a principle among them to 
 allow of their assuming a critical attitude towards her, 
 unless their own plans were directly encompassed by 
 hers. 
 
 The gold was fading out of the clouds before young Mrs. 
 Frost broke the silence again. Possibly she was loath to 
 drive the radiant reflection from her companion's eyes until 
 his few moments of enjoyment were well counted. She 
 waited until he turned his glance expectantly towards her. 
 lie was half sitting, half reclining by her side, with his el- 
 bow propped up on a corner of her faded blue cotton frock 
 spread around her as she sat. 
 
 " Well ? " he said interrogatively, and the smile that 
 accompanied the interrogation spoke of the entire sense of 
 well-being and freedom from all constraint he felt in her 
 presence. " Well ? " 
 
 " Well ? " she replied hesitatingly. 
 
 She had picked up some dried wattle twigs from the 
 ground, and was sorting them on her lap as a pretext for not 
 looking at him. 
 
 " You know I warned you that it was news you would 
 not approve of. It is only tliis, that we are thinking of go- 
 ing home." 
 
 Eeginald started up. He did not answer immediately. 
 His face contracted into an expression of pained bewilder- 
 ment. 
 
 "Home, you say? Wliat do you mean? What home 
 are you speaking of ? " 
 
MRS. FROST'S NEWS. 27 
 
 " Why, Home with a capital ' H,' of course. England- 
 Europe, that is to say. What other home is there ? " 
 
 Her companion did not answer. Even the exclamation 
 of surprise that she was waiting for found no utterance. 
 In very truth the light that was fading so slowly from the 
 sky seemed to have passed in one lightning flash from his 
 life. He could not have spoken at this moment, feeling 
 stunned by the announcement, as by a blow. He had some- 
 times fancied, notwithstanding the impassable gulf that 
 separated him from this woman by his side, that she had 
 measured his love for her in her secret heart ; that she had 
 silently divined its strength, its depth, its boundlessness; 
 nay, that she had even made a shrine for it in the inmost 
 recesses of her soul, where none could see or penetrate. And 
 now, like a child that crushes a butterfly for very wanton- 
 ness, she had crushed this blessed trust of his with a word. 
 He was sure, though his eyes were turned seaward, away 
 from Jiers, that a half -triumphant smile was hovering on 
 her lips. He could detect it without looking at her, in the 
 very sound of her voice. She had been waiting pitilessly 
 and cruelly to produce her effect, while he, poor fool ! had 
 been thinking, in the words of Longfellow, " Oh, what a 
 glory doth this world put on ! " for the sole reason that it 
 was with her that he was looking forth upon the sunset this 
 evening. 
 
 Her voice had always possessed an especial charm for 
 him. It was one of those voices set in a flexible treble key 
 that vibrate to fun and pathos at an instant's notice. It had 
 been the most tuneful voice hitherto, to his thinking, that 
 he had ever heard ; but now, for the first time, it rang falsely 
 upon his ear. Surely she could not have required the spoken 
 assurance that he cared for her. Was not his very silence 
 the best proof of it he could give her, seeing how she was 
 situated ? What had he ever asked beyond the privilege of 
 serving her with a dog-like devotion ? And this was his re- 
 ward. This was the way in which she recompensed him. 
 Slie had brought him out this evening (he forgot in his 
 bitterness that he had followed her of his own accord) only 
 to tell him, as though it were the most indiiferent piece of 
 3 
 
28 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 gossip in the world, that "they were thinking of going 
 home," that she was about to put half the globe between her 
 and himself, to take very likely an eternal farewell of him ! 
 How lightly she had spoken of it ! What truth there was in 
 what Tennyson had said of woman ! The lesser man — that 
 was it ! Even her sentiments and passions, compared with 
 his, were but as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto 
 wine ! She was incapable of fathoming the feeling he had 
 for her. There was no measure for it in her nature. It was 
 useless even to allow himself to feel anger against her. 
 
 Yet anger is a palliative, or, rather, a counter-irritant, 
 when the heart is smarting. Reginald felt worse when he 
 ceased to be angry. There was a cold intonation in his 
 voice when he next spoke which reminded his companion 
 of those far-away childish days when people had been " dis- 
 tant" to her because she had been "a bad girl," in the 
 nursery acceptation of the phrase. 
 
 " How long have you been hatching this fine pla#, may 
 I ask ? " were Reginald's words, very stiffly pronounced ; 
 "and when do you think of putting it into execution ?" 
 
 "We've been hatching it in one sense all our lives," re- 
 plied young Mrs. Frost. 
 
 Her lips were curving in spite of herself. Reginald's 
 offended demeanour prompted her to the motiveless laughter 
 we are sometimes inclined to indulge in, sorely against the 
 grain, when some doleful tidings are suddenly imparted 
 to us. 
 
 "I'll tell you all about it from the beginning, if you 
 like, and then you must say just what you think of it, you 
 know." 
 
 Her accents were cajoling. It was incumbent upon her 
 to condone that insane inclination to laugh — the more so 
 that laughter would not have been by any means a true re- 
 flection of her mood of the moment. 
 
 " It will take rather a long time to explain, I am afraid," 
 she went on, in the same conciliatory tones ; "and I dare 
 say it will seem rather a sudden move to you, but it doesn't 
 to us. We have discussed it so long among ourselves • and 
 I would have told you about it ages ago, only thereby hano-s 
 
MRS. FROST'S NEWS. 29 
 
 a tale. We were pledged to secrecy. I had promised 
 mother not to say a word about it to a living soul." 
 
 " Oil, if your mother is in it " replied the young man, 
 
 curtly. 
 
 There was something in the manner of his rejoinder that 
 did not please his companion. She stiffened herself uncon- 
 sciously as she sat upon the ground. Reginald's back (he 
 had drawn up his knees and encircled them with his arms 
 as he gazed gloomily at the bay) looked as though it breathed 
 a challenge. 
 
 "You are not respectful to mother," she said; "in fact, 
 you very seldom are. I have noticed it often before. Don't 
 you think mother is a very clever woman ? " 
 
 Reginald paused for an instant ; then he said : 
 
 "What, clever!" with a certain inflection that was not 
 entirely satisfactory to his interlocutress, for she flushed as 
 she repeated in sharpened tones : 
 
 "Yes, clever — very clever ! Not in a managing, pushing, 
 worldly way, perhaps, but in an intellectual way. You 
 know she is. Did you ever hear anyone talk better than 
 mother on all kinds of subjects ? The cleverest men from 
 England — University men, and writers, and people of that 
 kind — enjoy talking to her. Do you remember Dr. lim- 
 beck, on board the German man-of-war ? I don't believe 
 he missed coming up a single day all the time the Prin- 
 zessin was in port to eat strawberries and cream at Cowa. 
 He said mother had ' an all-embracing soul.' He used to talk 
 to her by the hour together." 
 
 "Yes, and look at you! I remen^ber the old beast!" in- 
 terposed Reginald grimly. "It is not my place to discuss 
 your mother's qualities with you, I know, but I should like 
 to give my real candid opinion about her cleverness for 
 once, if you'll promise not to be offended." 
 
 " Offended ! I couldn't be more offended than I am at 
 the bare suggestion that you could have anything to say 
 that I shouldn't like. You had better speak right out, just 
 to show that you would never have dared to harbour a 
 thought about her I shouldn't approve. You are not going 
 to deny that mother is clever, I suppose ? " 
 
30 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "No, no; not altogether." The slow reluctance with 
 which he spoke added impressiveness to his words. "Of 
 course no one would deny that your mother is what old- 
 fashioned writers would have called a woman of parts. 
 But they want co-ordinating and arranging. You have a 
 weakness for fanciful similes, I know. Well, I will tell you 
 what your mother's abilities remind me of. They remind 
 me of quicksilver spilled upon a table. You know what 
 it is like, don't you ? You must have seen how it breaks up 
 into bright little balls, and runs all over the place, first in 
 one direction, then in another. There's never any getting 
 hold of it, although it's so pretty and effective. And it's tre- 
 mendously useful, you know, when you amalgamate it with 
 something else, or when you shut it up in glass. Only " 
 
 "Only!" interrupted young Mrs. Frost indignantly. "I 
 won't listen to another word. Your quicksilver simile may 
 be very smart; unfortunately, it doesn't apply. We will 
 leave mother's name out of the question in our future dis- 
 cussions, if you please. What I want to know now is, Are 
 you going to Ivy Cottage with me, or are you not ? For if 
 we don't go on at once, it will be long past tea-time when I ^ 
 get there, and I shall be expected to stay to prayers ; then 
 what will become of you, waiting in the dark outside ? " 
 
 " I am quite ready,'' said Reginald, rising to his feet, and 
 holding out a hand to assist her. 
 
 It made him smile half sadly to note the impatient 
 gesture with which she rejected his proffered aid, and, spring- 
 ing to her feet, continued her way a few paces in front of 
 him, half walking and half running at such an accelerated 
 rate of speed that he was obliged to increase his own to a 
 " go-as-you-please " pace to enable him to keep up with her. 
 
 " The Red Indian stride ! " he called out after her, laugh- 
 ing. " I know what mood you are in when you put that on. 
 But you're not going to quarrel with me to-night, are you ? 
 I will take back all I said if you will be friends again; and 
 when will you tell me about the journey home ? I can't be- 
 lieve you are in earnest. Did you mean that you are all 
 going away together ? " 
 
 "Yes— all." 
 
MRS. FROST'S NEWS. 81 
 
 She jerked out her reply over her shoulder with an air of 
 ruffled dignity. 
 
 "What! your mother, and the Philosopher, and the Ni- 
 hilist, and the Warbler, and Truca ? " 
 
 "The whole boiling," said young Mrs. Frost recklessly. 
 "But see! those are the lights of Ivy Cottage. We are 
 almost there. Where shall I find you waiting for me when 
 I come out ? " 
 
 " Here." He pointed to a large boulder with his walking- 
 stick. " I can sit and meditate upon this stone. You won't 
 be very long, will you? Couldn't you by any possibility 
 give me a clue to your reasons, or your mother's reasons, for 
 wanting to leave Tasmania before you go ? " 
 
 " Not by any possibility. Didn't I tell you it was a long 
 story ? " 
 
 "Well, one question only before you go. Have you 
 come into an inheritance ? " 
 
 " No ; and I won't answer. But we have prospects " 
 
 " Prospects ! what prospects ? " he shouted after her. 
 
 But she was gone, and her back was turned upon him 
 before he could say any more. He stood for a moment 
 looking after the elastic figure as it moved swiftly forward 
 in the gathering gloom, telling himself that, amidst unnum- 
 bered crowds, he could swear to its identity, no matter from 
 what distance he should see it. Even now, in the indistinct, 
 fast-waning light, the stately poise of the head, like that of 
 a Rebecca at the well ; the roundness of the waist ; the sup- 
 ple curve in the back, that conferred so pre-eminently what 
 the French call la taille cambree on its possessor; the 
 Diana-like hips, and the buoyant tread, marked her out 
 from all other women he knew. He did not carry out his 
 promise of meditating upon a stone, after all. He set him- 
 self to walk to and fro as he waited for her, so absorbed in 
 his thought of her that ho almost forgot to wonder at her 
 prolonged absence. 
 
 And while he is waiting and thinking, it may be as well 
 to explain why his thoughts did not harmonize with the 
 merry heart which goes all the day, while " your sad tires 
 in a mile-a.'' 
 
33 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Young Mrs. Frost's actual position, and the fate which 
 caused her to tumble into it, have no small share in them ; 
 and by setting it forth I shall best reveal the thoughts that 
 weigh so heavily upon Reginald's mind as he walks up and 
 down in the gathering darkness waiting for her. 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 A HOME IN TASMANIA. 
 
 " That he is mad, 'tia true : 
 'Tis true, 'tis pity ; and pity 'tis, 'tis true." 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 CowA Cottage, young Mrs. Frost's home, might have 
 been aptly described in Maoaulay's words : 
 
 " Lilie an eagle's nest 
 Hangs on the crest 
 Of purple Apennine." 
 
 For " Apennine " it would have been necessary, however, to 
 substitute the less poetic name of " Knocklofty," which, if 
 not as high, forms at least as wild and as purple a back- 
 ground as the one the poet had in his mind. 
 
 Cowa was not only our heroine's home ; it was her birth- 
 place as well. Some seventeen years before she became 
 Mrs. Frost, she made her entry into what Mr. TuUiver called 
 with reason this " puzzling world," at a time when the roses 
 were in full bloom in Tasmania — that is to say, shortly be- 
 fore Christmas. She was named Eila, which is the Russian 
 synonym for "mountain," and promised to exemplify Bal- 
 zac's theory that there is an occult connection between peo- 
 ple and the names they bear by shooting up into a vigorous 
 mountain flower in her own person. Her family name was 
 Clare, and the sequence of Eila Clare had a euphonious ring 
 that was well adapted to the personality it represented. 
 There were not people wanting, however, who said that 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 33 
 
 Eila was as peculiar as her name ; but as this was a charge 
 that was levelled against the Clare family en masse, it may 
 have been only made by those who, to use a Spencerian 
 word, could not contra-distinguish her from her sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 Eila's father, dead some years back, had occupied a 
 modest post in the Treasury. His individuality had been 
 in a great measure extinguished by his wife's, of whom 
 more will be said anon. He died before Eila was in long 
 dresses, the father of four children, the elder of whom re- 
 tained more or less vaguely the recollection of the paternal 
 presence at the breakfast-table, and at late tea, as something 
 kindly, orderly, somewhat silent, appearing and disappear- 
 ing at stated hours as regularly as the sun rose and set. In 
 aftertimes they comprehended that this unobtrusive pres- 
 ence had, to a great extent, kept the household together; 
 that it was owing to its silent influence that the meals had 
 been ready at their appointed hour, and that the boys had 
 been sent regularly to school ; also that the charge of being 
 peculiar had been so much less frequently levelled against 
 their mother and themselves. It required, however, a long 
 experience to enable them to realize this fact, just as it has 
 taken mankind a long time to discover the silent forces at 
 work around them, albeit they have been ready at all times 
 to bow themselves before the thunderbolt and the rainbow. 
 Mrs. Clare maintained her husband's system, in so far as 
 was possible without doing too great a violence to her na- 
 ture, for some years after his death. He had insured his 
 life, in deference to a curious prescience of the fate that 
 finally overtook him, and had left his widow Cowa Cottage, 
 and an income of some three hundred a year that required 
 careful eking out to enable her to feed, and clothe, and edu- 
 cate five children upon it. In justice to Eila's mother, it 
 must be said that the habit of running into debt did not find 
 a place among her other idiosyncrasies. A certain profit, 
 moreover, was reaped from the garden, which was kept in 
 order by the eldest of the boys. As doctors' and apotheca- 
 ries' bills were unknown, Mrs. Clare even found it possible 
 to lay by part of her income every year towards the carry- 
 
34 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ing out of a scheme cherished by all the family, together — 
 of going to Europe at some future time. 
 
 Though each little Clare came into the world with a 
 separate and strongly marked individuality, there were cer- 
 tain traits they possessed in common which made them 
 understand and feel certain things through and for each 
 other as no one out of the family could have done. For 
 example, they all evinced a metaphysical bias, more espe- 
 cially in their younger years ; and there was not one of them, 
 with the exception of Willie, the practical elder son, who 
 did not go through a similar awakening to the crushing 
 apprehension of infinite time and space between the ages of 
 seven and twelve. Eila, despite her vigorous constitution 
 and healthy pagan joy in being, had one of the worst 
 attacks. It was long before she could contemplate the ortho- 
 dox idea that sotds must go on living eternally without a 
 sick terror, that drove her to wish there were no such thing as 
 conscious existence in space. Similarly, in their tender years 
 the Clare children one and all went through the same phase 
 of mystic piety. I fear that Eila's was the shortest. At the 
 time of her friendship with Reginald Acton, she believed 
 she had reached finality of opinion as regarded questions of 
 faith. An agnosticism that wavered between pessimism and 
 optimism according to the mood of the moment, or that fol- 
 lowed the impressions resulting from the latest topic in the 
 home papers, would have best defined her spiritual attitude. 
 As regarded worldly affairs, she had remained exceedingly 
 childish and credulous, notwithstanding the lesson taught 
 her by her early and ill-considered marriage. She had, 
 nevertheless, a naive belief in conventionality, and made 
 conscientious efforts to practise it in her own behalf as a 
 corrective to the total absence of it in her family. She did 
 not Hke to feel that they were looked upon as pariahs. It 
 was she who obliged her mother to return the rare calls that 
 were made at Cowa Cottage, and to tie her bonnet-strings 
 according to the prevailing fashion. Her brother and siste^r, 
 a pair of twin rebels, mocked at her for what they called her 
 " society ways " ; but she was leniently judged in this as in 
 other respects, partly because of her heart-and-soul devotion 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 35 
 
 to her family, and partly, perhaps, by reason of her personal 
 attractions. A mere classic outline woiild not have counted 
 for much. But Eila had something more than a classic out- 
 line. She had the kind of warm, loving, radiant influence 
 that made her presence bring an actual sense of well-being 
 with it, like the light and perfume of apple-blossoms. It 
 was almost worth while having a headache to feel her warm, 
 magnetic touch wander over brows and temples, and gradu- 
 ally charm it away. Truca, the youngest of the baud, a 
 strange little soul, the only delicate member of the family, 
 never forgot how on winter nights her sister had knelt by 
 her bed to hold the little marble-cold feet in her soft warm 
 hands, and bring back the vivifying heat to them. That 
 Eila should have possessed so sympathetic a comprehension 
 of pain and suffering was the mwe extraordinary that she 
 was a very Hygeia in her own person, and might, indeed, 
 have served as a prototype of that radiant goddess when she 
 wandered about the descending hay-field during Christmas 
 week, with her arms full of tall Christmas lilies and scarlet 
 geraniums, gathered from the riotous hedge that bordered 
 the two-acre cow-paddock. At the age of seventeen she 
 committed the crowning error of her life — an error so great 
 that it is necessary to remember that, if seventeen is coupled 
 with sweetness, it is certainly not allied with wisdom, to find 
 any kind of excuse for it. She was not quite so pretty or quite 
 so reflned-looking at this time as she subsequently became, 
 possibly because the very exuberance of her youth and 
 health, like the luxuriant growths that prevent the forest 
 from being seen, obscured what French writers call la ligne 
 in her otherwise charming figure. To put the matter more 
 plainly, she was too stout. Some years later, when time and 
 grief had taken her in hand, the slender throat, the dainty 
 wrists, the delicate framework — all, in fact, that the same 
 French writers include under the name of les fines attaches 
 — were more clearly appreciable. It may have been partly 
 for this reason, and partly because a beauty, like a prophet, 
 of home production sometimes lacks honour in her own 
 country, that the Hobart world did not at first endorse her 
 claims to be considered beautiful. There was, nevertheless, 
 
36 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 a certain uneasy foreboding among enterprising mammas of 
 marriageable daughters that strangers might "see some- 
 thing " in Eila Clare. Strangers, it is well loiown, are looked 
 upon in Hobart much in the light of those sons of God who 
 came down to visit the daughters of men. Amongst those 
 who flock to Tasmania in the season, there is generally one 
 in the shape of an heir to an English estate, or a squatter 
 with hundreds of square miles to his share in Australia, who 
 may be said to represent the winning number. To draw the 
 prize, or at least a good number, for her daughter was the 
 natural and legitimate ambition of many a Tasmanian 
 mother, who would gladly have seen Eila non-existent, or 
 married off-hand, to remove her from the ranks of the 
 competitors. 
 
 By what fatality she played into the hands of these 
 schemers of her own accord, it would be hard to say. In a 
 logical cause-and-effect age, we no longer have the resource 
 of ascribing our foolish deeds to the stars ; and though a 
 new philosophy may show that, under given circumstances, 
 we are mathematically constrained to act in a given way, 
 because our actions are only the sum of countless actions 
 performed by countless progenitors, who in their turn obeyed 
 unconsciously the law of their being, the theory does not 
 satisfactorily explain why we should occasionally go, to all 
 ajjpeafance deliberately and wilfully, out of our way to 
 bring about our own undoing. This is precisely what Eila 
 did, notwithstanding the fact that she prided herself upon 
 having a logical mind ; and it is the more difficult to give a 
 colour of probability to her conduct, that in after-times she 
 was at a loss to account for it to herself. 
 
 It had happened during her first season of gaiety. The 
 Clares would have occupied a place in an undefined border- 
 land if they had been in what is called society at all. But 
 as they gave themselves no trouble in this respect, and 
 thought of nothing but amusing themselves in their own 
 way, they had no defined place or status, no social position, 
 indeed, of any kind. They went where they were invited 
 when they saw a prospect of amusing themselves. Other- 
 wise, the thousand and one reasons for which people o-o to 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 37 
 
 each other's houses against their inclinations had no weight 
 with them. Eila, however, loved dancing, and for the dear 
 delight of waltzing at a subscription ball she would walk 
 with her brother (who at sixteen was allowed to take part in 
 such festivities in a tailless jacket and white gloves) — she 
 would walk with him, I say, down a stony hill-road of im- 
 possible steepness, and through a mile-long, ill-paved street 
 at nine o'clock at night, to return by the same purgatorial 
 path at two in the morning, so light of heart and foot that 
 she could have waltzed up the hill with the most entire-en- 
 joytnent, if any of her evening's partners had presented 
 themselves for the occasion. 
 
 It was at a carpet-dance at the house of some neighbours 
 on the hill that she met Charles Frost, a young man of some 
 eight or nine and twenty, with whom, however, she did not 
 dance, for the reason that his interpretation of his mission in 
 life forbade him to indulge in that exercise. He was the 
 only son of an elderly couple, living, as Eila knew (for 
 every one in Hobart knows where everybody else lives), in 
 a long, low-roofed, dark cottage, known as Ivy Cottage, 
 about a mile from Cowa. Mr. Frost senior had enjoyed a 
 post in connection with the Supreme Court in the old days 
 of transportation (when the island was still known as Van 
 Diemen's Land, and home readers who had no connections 
 in the colonies knew of it principally through the medium 
 of " Gulliver's Travels "), in which capacity he had assisted 
 cheerfully at the flogging and hanging of unnimibered con- 
 victs. He had married somewhat late in life the mature, 
 but still handsome, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, by 
 whom he had had an only son. The rigorous bringing up 
 of the lad had had the usual effect of driving him into wild 
 courses, in which, however, he was violently pulled up at 
 the age of one-and-twenty by the combined efforts of a nar- 
 row escape from drowning and the theatrical declamations 
 of a revival preacher. During his reckless period he had 
 taken to the Bush, where he had distinguished himself prin- 
 cipally as a splendid rider and a hard drinker. He had even 
 reached the point of knocking down his check in a week's 
 debauch in the nearest township with the first boon com- 
 
38 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 panion, broken-dowii gentleman, boundary -rider, or shearer 
 that chance threw in his way. His parents were unable to 
 cope with him, but they wrestled for him (as they termed it 
 themselves) with the Lord. They never doubted that it was 
 their pertinacity in this respect that had saved him . When 
 he returned to them three years later he had become a re- 
 ligious enthusiast. To a disciple of Maudesley there would 
 have been something not entirely reassuring in a certain air 
 of suppressed excitement that betrayed itself when he spoke 
 upon religious subjects. But to Eila, who had not yet fin- 
 ished growing, he appeared in the light of an inspired 
 teacher. She had been nourishing her imagination upon 
 Bret Harte's heroes, as a former generation nourished its 
 romantic craving upon "Lara" and the "Corsair," and 
 could conceive no more delightful ideal than the reckless, 
 chivalrous Jack Hamlyn type, with the athletic frame and 
 the wonderful blue eyes, trusting as a child's and brazen as 
 a profligate's. Many an otherwise pure woman is irresistibly 
 fascinated — especially in early youth — by this particular 
 type. Curioiisly enough, Charles Frost, despite his reUgious 
 enthusiasm, was not unlike it outwardly. Eila would have 
 indignantly repudiated the notion that this cu-cumstance 
 could have had anything to do with her engouement (I 
 wonder what English word could adequately render the 
 meaning of engouement f) for him. Yet I fear there was 
 more of the personal and magnetic in his influence than she 
 had any idea of herself. After her first meeting with him 
 she lay awake the best part of the night, recalling the sensa- 
 tion that had thrilled her as she felt his eyes following her 
 about the room, while she floated round to the " Blue Dan- 
 ube " and " Belle Helene " of an amateur pianist with an in- 
 difl'erent partner. How she glorified him in her imagina- 
 tion ! She behaved, indeed, with a weakness worthy of the 
 stronger sex under the influence of a first overpowering 
 attack of the midsummer madness called "calf love." But 
 calf love is an extenuating circumstance that women are not 
 allowed to plead in their own behalf. We know that in all 
 that concerns the ever-vexed question of the relations of the 
 sexes, it is from the so-called weaker sex that the mature 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 39 
 
 judgment, the cool head, the stoical self-mastery are exacted 
 — at the cost of the heaviest penalties should they fail in any 
 of these qualities. To men the consequences of a first mis- 
 take are comparatively of small account, for, without going 
 so far as to say that they may indulge upon a certain num- 
 ber of trial trips before embarking upon the unknown sea of 
 raatrimony, it is certain that they may play at being in love, 
 or may fall in and out of love, an unlimited number of times 
 without exciting much reprobation. 
 
 Women's experiences are necessarily restricted and timid. 
 Yet they are just as likely, if we would , only admit it, to be 
 taken in by their own first gropings towards love and pas- 
 sion as men. How many there are who, looking back 
 towards their own youthful experiences, would be obliged 
 to own that more than once they could have found it in 
 their hearts to say in Tennyson's words to the hero of the 
 hour, " No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield," and who 
 are fain to bless -their lucky stars, or whatever does duty for 
 these, that circumstances prevented them from saying it, 
 since events have proved that their hero of the hour was 
 emphatically the wrong man in the most extended sense of 
 the phrase. 
 
 Eila did not give herself time to discover that Charles 
 Frost was her wrong man. There was a curious fascination 
 in perceiving how the severity with which he regarded her 
 melted into wistful love as she came close to him. She 
 thought that the tumult of feeling he raised in her was spir- 
 itual, and made no allowance for the influence of six feet 
 of splendidly developed manhood upon the Juliet side of a 
 many-sided nature. And yet, as I have already shown, there 
 was much that was magnetic in his mastery over her. She 
 would turn from white to crimson, and from crimson to 
 white, when she met him. She gave up the dear delight of 
 dancing for his sake, and sat out the seductive waltzes at the 
 Hobart parties with him, making her confession of faith or 
 non-faith behind her fan in the flirtation corners arranged 
 by the hostess. She thought his narrow creed beautiful, be- 
 cause he acted up to it himself ; and though her reason re- 
 belled ao-ainst it, she almost cried with gratitude when he 
 
40 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 proposed to her. He was convinced, he told her, that he 
 would bring her into the fold. Nevertheless, the course of 
 their love did not run smooth. There was strenuous oppo- 
 sition on the part of the young man's parents, who shunned 
 the Clares as a godless family, and looked upon Eila as a 
 brand that might well be left to the burning. There were 
 also protests on the part of Eila's own mother, brothers, and 
 sisters, who had always taken it for granted that, when Ella 
 contributed a husband to the family, he must have some- 
 thing in common with them as well as herself. 
 
 But, in spite of all this opposition, or, perhaps, by reason 
 of it, the marriage took place in due— Eila's relatives would 
 have said in wndue— time. The bride was still in a state of 
 semi-exaltation, half mystic, half sensuous, as she stood 
 before the altar of the Presbyterian church, and endorsed 
 with voice and heart all the impossible vows and promises 
 that the minister put into her mouth. 
 
 The rest of her disastrous history is soon told. She went 
 to live with her husband in Victoria, where he cultivated 
 his garden, not by planting cabbages like Candide, but in 
 the shape of a 600 acre selection. He also performed the 
 office of reader in the nearest Presbyterian church. It was 
 a modest home to which he conducted his radiant bride; 
 but Eila was prepared to be as happy as the day in it (though 
 why a day should bear so blissful an interpretation, I can- 
 not say). But Fate showed her from the first the frowning 
 visage of a Medusa. During their honeymoon, the child- 
 bride made the appalling discovery that her husband was 
 subject to epileptic fits, the consequence, though she ,did 
 not know it, of former excesses. Before the first year was 
 over, he had developed certain symptoms of incipient insan- 
 ity. The shocks of discovery followed each other so quickly 
 and unmercifully, that had it not been for the recollection 
 of mother, brothers, and sisters, and of the place she held in 
 their hearts, Eila must have killed herself in her despair. 
 She liad a constitution that refused to be destroyed by mere 
 mental anguish, though she believed that she suffered enough 
 at this time to make it possible for her to die of grief. The 
 worst of all was the complete revulsion of feelings he under- 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 4^ 
 
 went as regarded her husband. All that she had looked upon 
 before as high and holy inspiration appeared to her now in 
 the light of the outcome of a diseased mind. There could 
 bo no longer any thought of asking for an explanation of 
 fanatical views or gloomy prophecies. It was enough if 
 day followed day without bringing some irremediable catas- 
 trophe in its wake. She was tender of her husband, but 
 unfeignedly terrified of him. She followed him through 
 the weary stages of irritability and loss of memory that 
 obliged him to suspend his work, until the awful, never-to- 
 be-forgotten morning when she went out upon the veranda 
 to consult him upon their approaching departure for Tas- 
 mania, where she looked for help and protection, and saw 
 him advance towards her with a Bible in one hand and a 
 knife in the other, and that in his face that made her heart 
 stand still. Madness and murder were written in it ; and as 
 she fled into the garden, and thence hatless down the bush- 
 track that separated her from the cottages lying on the out- 
 skirts of the township, sending forth shriek upon shriek as 
 she ran, she could fancy she felt, as in some hideous night- 
 mare, his hot breath upon her neck. But help in the shape 
 of some sturdy woodsplitters was near at hand. The mad- 
 man was secured, and finally taken in a bush-buggy, lent by 
 some neighbours for the occasion, to the hospital in the 
 nearest township, " cursing, swearing, and gnawing his fin- 
 gers," as King John is said to have done in Dickens' dra- 
 matic description of the latter end of that unholy monarch. 
 His wife was never at his mercy again. Charles Frost's 
 father came to "Victoria for him by the next steamer, and 
 the now dangerous lunatic was placed among the paying 
 patients in the New Norfolk Asylum near Hobart. A little 
 allowance of twenty pounds a year was doled out to Eila 
 by her father-in-law, after she had returned like a wounded 
 bird to the home-nest. 
 
 It was more than four years now since this tragedy had 
 occurred. Eila was no longer an obstacle to the matrimo- 
 nial chances of the Hobart belles. When the English men- 
 of-war sailed into the harbour, and the Melbourne steamers 
 brought their eagerly expected contingent of strangers, rival 
 
42 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 mothers no longer trembled lest her beauty should carry off 
 the prize. She might grow more beautiful every day for all 
 they cared, and for all the serious harm she could do them 
 now. At the first word of admiration that her appearance 
 excited, a hundred informants were ready to whisper, " She 
 has a husband in the asylum, and they are such a peculiar 
 family." 
 
 For the first year after her return, Eilawas as one stunned 
 by a too great shock. She had gone through experiences 
 sufficient, in the course of a few short months, to fill a five- 
 act drama. She had been madly in love with a creation of 
 her own that she had fastened upon a fiesh-and-blood lover. 
 Before her honeymoon was half over, a black gulf of horror 
 had yawned before her. She had been all but frightened to 
 death while she was still a child- wife, and was so shaken 
 and unstrung when she re-entered her childhood's home 
 that the mere banging of a door sufficed to make her weep 
 hysterically. But she had an elastic nature, and youth and 
 health besides. When, as in John Barleycorn, "the kindly 
 spring came round again," her own spring season seemed to 
 return. She put aside the recollection of her ghastly year 
 of courtsliip and matrimony as an ugly dream, a memory to 
 be locked away like the skeleton in her cupboard, and never 
 brought to light. Though she must not think of love and 
 marriage, she need not, she told herself, forego all the pleas- 
 ures that belonged to her age, though of these I am forced 
 to own there were not a few that might have been qualified 
 as childish in the extreme — to wit, those of romping in the 
 hay, or of swinging upon the roundabout with the younger 
 members of the family. 
 
 Her short experience of wedded life had inclined her to 
 look upon matrimony with horror. But it was as natural to 
 her to sun herself now and again in the admiration she ex- 
 cited as for a fiower to turn to the light. Her own brothers 
 and sisters were the first to bestow it upon her, and it was 
 upon them that she lavished now all the abundance of her 
 young affections. 
 
 Two years after her return she began to appear once 
 more in the Hobart world. It was at a picnic that has re- 
 
A HOME IN TASMANIA. 43 
 
 mained famous in Hobart annals that she met Reginald Ac- 
 ton for the first time, soon after her social resurrection. 
 There are English naval officers scattered about the world 
 who must rememb(n- the prodigious snowstorm that over- 
 took a party of picnickers upon the desolate stony summit 
 of Mount Wellington several years ago, and the adventurous 
 descent amid the blinding snowflakes that followed. More 
 than one excursionist would have remained behind, never 
 perhaps to have been heard of again, but for the timely help 
 of a few brave climbers. It fell to Eeginald's share to take 
 charge of young Mrs. Frost, and as he guided, half leading, 
 half carrying her across that stony ocean of desolation 
 known as the Ploughed Field, it first came into his thoughts 
 that here, by Heaven's grace, was the one maid for him. 
 But Eila was a wife, and not a maid, and Reginald possessed 
 a simple code of honour that forbade him to make love to a 
 married woman. Perhaps his abstention in this respect was 
 a salve to his conscience in others, for he did not hide from 
 himself the fact that he loved her. He became her friend, 
 her confidant, and her counsellor, almost her father confes- 
 sor as well. He believed that he knew all her thoughts, 
 fancies, failings, and faults, and he loved them one and all 
 because they were hers. He had left the navy to remain 
 with a widowed and half -paralyzed mother, living in a quiet 
 suburb of quiet Hobart, and had accepted a modestly-remu- 
 nerated post as secretary to an insurance company. Why 
 he did not marry was a question which exercised many 
 minds, especially feminine ones, in the little community. 
 Something- in his staid and gentle bearing inspired confi- 
 dence, even before two years of an apparently immaculate 
 way of life had established his title to respect. Curiously 
 enough, his friendship for young Mrs. Frost, though it had 
 become a recognised fact in Hobart, had not as yet exposed 
 either of the friends to the most poisoned shafts of Mrs. 
 Grundy. The world, despite its ill-natiu-e, is often sharper 
 in its judgments than we give it credit for. It is true that 
 by a certain portion of the community Eila was talked about, 
 and we know that it is never to her advantage that a woman, 
 be she young or old, is talked about ; but the majority held 
 4 
 
44 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 that Reginald was biding his time until she should be free ; 
 and there were many who believed him capable of biding it 
 for twenty years as faithfully as for twenty months. 
 
 Meanwhile, what view did Reginald himself take of his 
 position ? Not a very hopeful one to-night, it is to be feared, 
 judging by the air of gloomy abstraction that clouds his 
 pleasant Saxon- face as he walks to and fro along the grass- 
 grown border of the quiet little street, round the corner of 
 which Eila has disappeared. A charming twilight view (for 
 Hobart is far enough South to enjoy a short rehearsal of 
 home twilights) lies spread before him in the indigo waters 
 of the harbour and the slate-coloured outline of the hills 
 beyond, cut out against the whitening sky with almost 
 photographic distinctness. But he has no eyes for it now. 
 What is a beautiful landscape, after all, but a subjective en- 
 joyment ? What will the harbour and the hills have to say 
 to him when Eila is no longer there ? What relief can he 
 look for in them from the heart-heaviness that has begun to 
 weigh upon him already ? How is he to reconcile love and 
 duty ? and, above all, how is he to live without Eila ? 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 HOW EILA "WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 
 
 Ivy Cottage represented a curious ramassis of such 
 articles of furniture as may still be found in the back-par- 
 lours of hereditary shopkeepers in small provincial towns in 
 England. At the time when Mr. and Mrs. Frost first set up 
 housekeeping in Hobart, the communication between the 
 mother-country and Tasmania was carried on principally 
 by means of convict and emigrant ships, which succeeded 
 each other at long and irregular intervals. Just as the vis- 
 itor to Eastern towns is sometimes confronted in the out- 
 skirts of some Oriental bazaar with an incongruous heap of 
 ill-assorted sets of tumblers, lop-sided dishes, and tawdry 
 ornaments of divers descriptions, representing the overflow 
 
HOW BILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 45 
 
 of depots of Brummagem ware in England and Germany, 
 so one might encounter in the early days in Tasmania the 
 most heterogeneous assortment of rubbish in the shops and 
 stores that the devices of the exporter could bring together. 
 There was a general impression, which was not destroyed 
 by the splendid specimens of man and woman hood to be 
 found among the early settlers, that the use of the colonies 
 was to serve as the receptacle for all the failures of the old 
 world — not only the moral failures, in the shape of law- 
 breakers and superfluous sons, but the manufactured fail- 
 ures, in the shape of wry mirrors, rickety tables, and other 
 articles that no one would have anything to say to at home. 
 
 Ivy Cottage, furnished under the double disadvantage of 
 belonging to a master and mistress who had nothing to 
 exercise their taste upon, and no taste to exercise — the one 
 being, perhaps, a consequence of the other — might have 
 served as an illustration for an Australian esthete of the 
 depths of Philistinism to which the unregenerate, unaided 
 faculty of judgment in man and woman may arrive. Every- 
 thing it contained was an outrage to the canons of the 
 modern conceptions of art. There was a black horsehair 
 sofa, in the so-called best parlour, that pricked all the unpro- 
 tected parts of the body that reclined upon it, and there were 
 hectic-cheeked apples and peaches in wax under a glass 
 shade upon a table upholstered in green and white beads. 
 There were likewise hideous lithographs of Scriptural scenes 
 that swore, as the French expressively call it, with the 
 bilious background of the inartistic wall-paper, suggestive of 
 beetles sprawling upon a yellow counterpane. To make 
 matters worse, it had been old Mrs. Frost's ambition to act 
 up to the laudatory words of the twenty-seventh verse of the 
 last chapter of Proverbs, which corresponded to the date of 
 her birthday, and which declared that "she looketh well to 
 the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idle- 
 ness." 
 
 Having made a sampler of the aforesaid text in parti- 
 coloured words, and hung it up between the painted photo- 
 graphs of her husband and herself, she set about proving its 
 applicability by manufacturing a set of chair-coverings in 
 
46 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 alternate lozenges of green and violet worsted. The result 
 was so startlingly incongruous, that even to her own untu- 
 tored taste it was necessary to tone down the effect by the 
 aid of crochet antimacassars. It needed, under these adverse 
 circumstances, all the- severely benignant influence of her 
 husband's presence to lend any sort of home-like dignity to 
 their abode. But just as hats and coats acquire, in the course 
 of time, something of the individuality of their wearers, so 
 the inanimate objects that surround us seem ultimately to 
 reflect something of our own personalities to those who see 
 us constantly amongst them. The stiff crude green-and- 
 purple arm-chair in which Eila was accustomed to see her 
 father-in-law seated had almost the solemnity of a Solomon's 
 judgment-seat in her eyes. She would never have thought 
 of mocking at the sampler that her mother-in-law had worked, 
 even in her secret mind. Reginald was the only person who 
 suspected the under-current of resentment that the severe 
 and simple rule of life of the inmates of Ivy Cottage excited 
 in her. She would not even allow her own family to make 
 merry at their expense. Their standard might be narrow, 
 but at least they acted up to it themselves. She was perfectly 
 aware that they judged her severely by it, but she was too 
 loyal to avenge herself by joining with her brothers and 
 sisters in calling them prigs and frumps. She knew that 
 their interpretation of life's mission was quite different from 
 that held by herself and her belongings. For all she knew, 
 it might be a better one than theirs. It was harder to act up 
 to under every-day circumstances ; but when a crushing ca- 
 lamity, such as the affliction which had befallen their only 
 son, came upon the elderly couple, they were enabled to bear 
 it with a certain lofty resignation that she could not but rec- 
 ognise and admire. Her position with regard to her hus- 
 band's parents was peculiar. There were moments when 
 she could almost have found it in her heart to wish that she 
 had the strength to act up to their standard ; but her habitual 
 feehng about them was one of secret annoyance that they 
 should be so indifferent to the qualities in her that seemed 
 to exercise such sway over other people. The things that 
 counted for so much in the eyes of her family seemed to pass 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 47 
 
 unperceived in theirs. She had a va^e half -acknowledged 
 sense that more allowances should be made for a person in 
 her position, who was young and pretty, than for another. 
 Neither of her husband's parents seemed to hold this view. 
 They would have had her lead the life of a recluse, she com- 
 plained ; she was not even sure that they did not blame her 
 in secret for running over the hills with her younger brothers 
 and sisters in her muslin-crowned garden-hat, and house- 
 frock of blue cotton. Evidently they thought her frivolous 
 and heartless. " But how can I change my nature ? " she 
 would say to herself in self-defence. Her thoughts refused 
 to dwell in the neighbourhood of the dreary asylum where 
 her husband spent his time in mouthing out meaningless 
 blasphemies. Why should she force them to revert to it ? 
 Had she been a widow, would it not have been considered 
 pardonable, after a lapse of nearly two years, to smile and 
 laugh when the occasion offered ? And surely her husband 
 was as dead to her as though he had been lying under the 
 churchyard sod ! His soul — his very self had gone away. 
 Nay, had he been dead, she could have clung to his memory. 
 Being what he was, she could only pray Heaven to keep him 
 out of her mind. 
 
 The twilight had already deepened into a semi-darkness, 
 beyond which the horizon looked ghastly white; and the 
 silhouettes of distant objects were pencilled against the sky 
 with strange distinctness as she approached Ivy Cottage. 
 The lamp was alight. Eila could see the reflection through 
 the horsehair blinds that fitted into the window-frame as she 
 walked up the little garden entrance over the flags in white 
 sandstone that separated the geranium bed, on one side, 
 from the rose plot, with the thyme border round it, on the 
 other. The scent of the cut-out, crinkled geranium leaves, 
 with the sparse lilac-hued blossoms sprinkled over them, 
 always brought the Ivy Cottage atmosphere before her as 
 something oppressive, having a faint suggestion of musti- 
 ness in its perfume. She could see that old Mr. and Mrs. 
 Frost were at tea — not afternoon tea (a frivolity they had 
 never sanctioned), but their third solid repast of the day, 
 with an accompaniment of highly-varnished fried smoked 
 
48 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 trumpeter, boiled eggs, muffins and cnunpets, and grace be- 
 fore and after. She hesitated before breaking in upon this 
 simple repast. The front-door was of wood, covered with 
 paint blisters — of the kind that the idle hands of errand 
 boys that would have been anathematized by Dr. Watts 
 found it fascinating to finger and press down. She stood 
 there a long time before she could make up her mind to 
 knock. She could see through the transparent blinds her 
 father-in-law lighting his pipe, and her mother-in-law drain- 
 ing the remains of the hot-water jug into the tea-pot, of 
 which the contents would probably serve, in their doubly 
 diluted form, for the maid-of-all-work, an orphan from the 
 New Town Asylum, whom Mrs. Frost had undertaken to 
 find and clothe in return for her general services. If mur- 
 der was treated by the witty De Quincey as one of the fine 
 arts, parsimony as a fijie art might almost have served as the 
 theme of an essay on Mrs. Frost's housekeeping. It was her 
 aim in life to illustrate the truth of the saying that " enough 
 is as good as a feast " in the smallest details of her domestic 
 arrangements ; and as there was no one — least of all the 
 New Town school orphan — capable of giving her the replique 
 in the words of the more generous French proverb, which 
 declares that " Ce qui est juste assez n'est pas assez," she 
 went through life in the firm persuasion that her economies 
 erred, if anything, on the side of liberality. 
 
 Eila hesitated for a long time in the gloom before making 
 up her mind to enter. She had come with the design of 
 giving her parents-in-law a hint of the family intentions; 
 but her courage failed her as she pictured the manner in 
 which her tidings would be received. A journey to Europe 
 was a project that, from old Mr. and Mrs. Frost's point of 
 view, should be considered for long years before it was put 
 into execution. It was a matter to be talked over, pondered 
 over, and plentifully prayed over by turns. Eila's heart 
 beat high with disagreeable anticipation, when she knocked 
 at last at the door, and entered the little parlour, after be- 
 stowing a passing smile of friendly recognition upon the 
 orphan. 
 
 Old Mr. and Mrs. Frost looked up from the tea-table with 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 49 
 
 staid -welcome as she entered; the welcome, however, was 
 tempered by a large reserve of disapproval. She wore the 
 very muslin-crowned hat she suspected of figuring as a 
 piece de conviction in old Mrs. Frost's eyes, but I fear she 
 had forgotten all about the circumstance now. It was 
 pushed far back behind her head, like a white aureole, ex- 
 posing a natural front of closely-packed, waving, silky dark 
 hair, divided by a gleaming thread of narrow white parting. 
 Her throat was bared in all its white and slender perfection ; 
 two white and red roses dangled upon her breast, fastened 
 by her brooch to her open sailor collar. There were more 
 roses in her belt — a boy's belt — encircling a round and sup- 
 ple waist, guiltless of stays. The firm contour of arms and 
 bust was apparent through her washed-out blue cotton 
 frock — her house attire, to all appearance — in which she 
 had walked across the hills this warm summer evening. 
 Old Mrs. Frost was as great a contrast to young Mrs. Frost 
 as crabbed age to youth in its springtide. Her appearance 
 was that of a stout, elderly lady of a not over-indulgent 
 habit of mind. She wore a black lace cap, with the ribbons 
 thrown back, and displayed thereby a large double chin. 
 Her customary expression was one of surprised displeasure 
 — though this might have been owing more to the peculiar 
 shape of her eyebrows, which, instead of descending with 
 age, seemed to have climbed up behind her spectacles, than 
 to her normal mental attitude. She had no doubt been 
 handsome once on a time, though in a hard way. Her hair 
 was iron-gray, and abundant still beneath her cap. Her 
 skin, puckered though it was by the hand of Time, had yet 
 a fresh-coloured, healthy hue. She did not look as though 
 she had grown more tolerant with advancing years, rather 
 the contrary ; and it was probable that she had never erred 
 on the side of over-indulgence, even at the age we choose to 
 characterize as tender. 
 
 Mr. Frost's elderliness in no way resembled his wife's. 
 His hair and beard were white and bristly, his face was red, 
 and his eyes were a bright blue. He might have served as 
 a perfect impersonation upon the stage of a benevolent 
 elderly gentleman, if it had not been for an unexpected 
 
50 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 trick of dilating and drawing up his nostrils whenever he 
 emphasized his opinions, a thing which he found occasion to 
 do at least a dozen times in the day. Young people found 
 him intimidating to talk to on this account. They were 
 never sure whether he was not sneei'ing at them, but he was 
 probably unaware of the gesture himself. 
 
 Eila's parents-in-law would both have lent themselves 
 easily to caricatural purposes, from the fact that by drawing 
 two angular eyebrows surmounting a pair of spectacles to 
 represent the one, and two dilating nostrils surmounting a 
 pair of harsh moustaches to represent the other, a complete 
 suggestion of their personalities would have been immedi- 
 ately conveyed. Mr. Frost was very careful in his choice 
 of language. All his phrases were uttered with a careful 
 deliberation that made them sound as if they had been 
 written out and studied previously, but his omission of the 
 aspirate in the words that he emphasized most strongly 
 somewhat took from the dignity of his utterance. He prided 
 himself, nevertheless, upon being a purist in the matter of 
 pronunciation, and would take Eila and her brothers and 
 sisters to task every time he detected, or fancied that he de- 
 tected, a colonial " heow " or " keow " from their lips, in lieu 
 of a mouth-filling " how " and " cow." He held the Bible 
 and Milton to be the only worthy deposits of the knowledge 
 suited to human needs, and drew largely upon both sources, 
 not only in the extempore prayers that he pronounced 
 morning and evening before a congregation composed of 
 his wife and the orphan, but in his everyday speech as 
 well. 
 
 "Good-evening, papa, and good-evening, Mrs. Frost," 
 was Eila's hurried greeting in accompaniment of the move- 
 ment by which she presented her blooming cheek, cooled by 
 the evening breeze, to her father-in-law's bristly moustache, 
 and to her mother-in-law's withered cheek in turn, before 
 seating herself upon the aforesaid shiny horsehair sofa in 
 the corner. " I'm not going to disturb you for long." 
 
 " You've never come over alone ? " cried old Mrs. Frost 
 reprovingly. To open a conversation with the young by 
 some form of reproach was a time-honoured habit with 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 61 
 
 Eila's mother-in-law. " I wonder what you and your mother 
 can be thinking of ? " 
 
 " It was quite light when I started," replied Eila colour- 
 ing. She could not feel it was like telling a lie not to 
 tell the whole truth at this moment. "It's aU right in- 
 deed." 
 
 " Well, now, I'm not so sure it is all right," interposed 
 her father-in-law testily, his nostrils receding visibly. He 
 had been taking a preliminary pull at his pipe, still seated 
 in his place before the table, and was looking at his daughter- 
 in-law, not quite as Wordsworth looked at the little maid, 
 whose " beauty made him glad," for he was by no means 
 sure that the outward graces of his son's wife, situated as he 
 and she were, could be considered altogether as a matter for 
 rejoicing. " I ain't so sure by any means," he repeated ; 
 "young women didn't use to be so independent in my day. 
 D'ye think it's seemly, mother ? " turning to his wife, " for a 
 young gentlewoman to go roaming the country alone at this 
 hour o' the night. I've 'ad occasion to remark upon it to 
 Eila more than once already, but she don't seem to Ksten 
 to me." 
 
 ' He gave a vigorous puff at his pipe, inhaling the smoke 
 with unduly open nostrils. Eila's colour deepened visibly. 
 What would she have given for the courage to say, " You 
 are mistaken, I am not alone ; Mr. Acton is taking care of 
 me " ! But moral courage was not Eila's strong point. Be- 
 fore physical danger she was brave, but she shrank within 
 herself when there wds a risk of being reprimanded. Be- 
 sides, if she were to avow that she had a companion now, 
 after concealing the fact with malice prepense at the outset, 
 the avowal might lend a colour to the unworthy suspicions 
 that she half suspected her father-in-law of harbouring. 
 She coloured, therefore, and held her peace. 
 
 But if Eila was silent, old Mrs. Frost made full use of the 
 opportunity. If she was not lavish in other respects, she 
 was, at least, unstinting in the matter of bestowing what 
 she called a piece of her mind upon her friends. It was 
 such a large piece, and she gave it so often, that the wonder 
 was that there was any left for herself. Upon the present 
 
52 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 occasion Eila was made the luckless recipient of this lar- 
 gesse. 
 
 " If you want a piece of my mind," said old Mrs. Frost 
 very angrily to her husband, "I don't countenance any of 
 
 Eila's going-ons " 
 
 " Goings-on, Martha," interrupted her husband dictato- 
 rially, taking the pipe out of his mouth. 
 
 " Goings-on, or whatever you like to call it, it's all the 
 same," said old Mrs. Frost, more angrily still; "stravaghing 
 over the hill morning, noon, and night, that's about all she's 
 fit for. I've never seen her with a needle in her hand all 
 the time I can remember." 
 
 She moved the teacups with an angry, rattling noise, as 
 though to silence any disclaimer on the part of the culprit. 
 But Eila made no disclaimer. She said nothing, indeed, to 
 exculpate hereelf ; she sat quite still, with her hat on her 
 lap, her head a little bent forward, the least suggestion of 
 scorn in the bitter half -smile that hovered around her pretty 
 lips. She was glad now that she had come with something 
 to say which would divert these paltry accusations, heaped 
 upon her by her Puritan relatives, into another channel. 
 She had intended when she came, a few minutes ago, to lead 
 gently up to her startling news. Now she meant to hurl it 
 at old Mr. and Mrs. Frost without a word of warning. 
 
 " Well, I won't have much more chance of stravaghing 
 over the hill for the present," she said, with just a faint in- 
 flexion of an American drawl that might possibly have 
 been adopted for the occasion ; " for I'm going right away 
 home, and mother, too, and the whole lot of us, before the 
 month's out ! " 
 
 To a very acute hearing there would have been a hint of 
 mingled triumph and terror discernible beneath the covert 
 insolence of her tones. The old people, however, heard 
 nothmg but the announcement itself, and it had an effect 
 which can only be adequately rendered by the expressive 
 French word foudroyant. 
 
 Old Mrs. Frost was transfixed in the act of placing the 
 vertebras of the smoked trumpeter with its pendant scraps 
 upon a kitchen-plate for the orphan's supper. Old Mr 
 
HOW BILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 53 
 
 Frost stared solemnly over the pipe suspended in his hand. 
 Both looked as though they suspected their daughter-ia-law 
 of having taken leave of her senses. 
 
 " I don't rightly apprehend your meaning," said old Mr. 
 Frost at last, still eyeing her severely. " I must trouble you 
 to repeat that last sentence again.'' 
 
 Eila looked up and returned his gaze undaunted. 
 
 "I said we were going home!" she repeated defiantly. 
 " We've taken our passages in the Queen of the South." 
 
 Though it was hateful to her to give offence in any direc- 
 tion, once she was roused she was capable of maintaining 
 her ground. Nevertheless, the angry astonishment depicted 
 in the double pair of eyes directed towards her was more 
 than she could encounter. She looked once more at the 
 carpet, turning the muslin-crowned hat awkwardly round 
 in her lap the while. 
 
 " Well, I never heard the like 1 " her mother-in-law ex- 
 claimed with a gasp. " I think you and your mother must 
 be clean out of your mind. Going home, going to leave 
 Cowa ! How do you expect to pay for it, I'd like to 
 know ! " 
 
 "Yes, that's the question I" broke in her husband. 
 " Where's the money to come from ? " 
 
 Their attitude was that of accuser and judge in one. But 
 the culprit was not to be intimidated. Perhaps she found it 
 easier to speak now that the gauntlet was definitely thrown 
 down. 
 
 " We're not going to ask anyone to assist us," she said 
 quietly ; this time there was nothing but colonial deliberate- 
 ness in her tones. " The journey will be the only expense, 
 and we've saved up enough for that. When we get home 
 we shall manage well enough. We won't be any worse off 
 there than here. Rather better, for everyone says living is 
 less expensive in Europe— in England, any way. Then 
 Willie can look out for something to do, and so can I, and 
 Dick can study art, and Mamy have singing lessons." 
 
 " Well, it seems you've got it all cut and dried," inter- 
 rupted old Mrs. Frost sourly; "but if you want a piece of 
 my mind, it's my opinion you're a pack of fools. I only 
 
54 * NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 hope your mother's not going to have the managing of it 
 all, for your sakes." 
 
 Eila's cheeks flushed. Never had she been made to colour 
 so often within so short a space of time. 
 
 "We are entirely satisfied with mother's arrangements, 
 thank you," she said quickly. 
 
 Her breast was heaving. It was the second time this 
 evening that her mother's judgment had been called in 
 question. Why, she asked herself, should she be so fre- 
 quently called upon to do battle in behalf of her daughterly 
 sentiment ? Why should it be enough that her mother har- 
 boured the idea of going home to bring apparent discredit 
 upon the scheme in the eyes of everybody she spoke to ? 
 How unjust and narrow-minded the world was, and how 
 these experiences intensified her longing to escape to that 
 larger, freer life towards which her aspirations had so long 
 tended, far out of reach of the carping criticism to which 
 the family was ever subjected in this contracted little spot 
 on the very outskirts of the civilized world. 
 
 Old Mrs. Frost was not silenced, for she grumbled some- 
 thing that sounded like "You're as great a fool as your 
 mother," but her further comments were stopped by her 
 husband, who had been ruminating the speech of which he 
 now delivered himself. 
 
 "As regards your journey 'ome," he said (it was only 
 when he was solemnly emphatic that he discarded the aspi- 
 rate so resolutely), "as regards your journey 'ome, there is 
 one point you have not duly considered. Granting you have 
 the means, which I take the liberty of doubting, 'ow are you 
 going to get the necessary permission from your 'usband to 
 absent yourself ? " 
 
 Eila looked up quickly. What she saw was the old man's 
 face bent forward towards her in denunciation ; his eyes 
 bluer, his face redder, his nostrils more distended than ever. 
 She was so taken aback by the spectacle that she continued 
 for a few seconds to turn the hat round without replying to 
 his question. 
 
 " You think it's a very easy thing, no doubt," he contin- 
 ued, with grave reproach, " to turn your back on all vour 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 55 
 
 dooties, though it's no light matter, let me tell you, to leave 
 'ome and countiy, and become wanderers on the face of the 
 earth. But you've got special responsibilities of your own 
 you seem to need remindmg of. I ain't going to say what I 
 think of your mother's conduct, nor yet to offer her my coun- 
 sel. She'd be nigh certain to disregard it if I did ; slie was 
 ever stiffnecked and rebellious to advice, and for the matter 
 of that, none of you are much better. Still, it is my bounden 
 duty to offer you a word of warning. I'm in a kind of a 
 way the delegate of your husband's authority, and I forbid 
 you in his name to run away from him. What call have 
 you to seek to put twelve thousand miles of sea between you 
 and him ? The Lord in His mercy has thought fit to afflict 
 him ; He has laid His 'and upon him more 'eavily than 
 others. Is that a reason why you should want to desert 
 him ? It's the reason why you should stop quietly at home, 
 if you were anything of a wife. Stop at 'ome, and cover 
 yourself with sackcloth and ashes, and maybe the Lord will 
 see fit to restore him to you. There's no saying when the 
 burden may be lifted from him : he might come back to his 
 right mind from one day to another. And what do you sup- 
 pose his feelings would be when he's told that the wife the 
 Lord gave him to be a helpmeet to him has gone away in 
 the vain pursuit of pleasure to t'other end of the world ? 
 ' Who the Lord hath joined together, let no man put asun- 
 der.' Do you bear in mind where those words come from, 
 Eila?" 
 
 " They come from the Bible," replied Eila, in an off-hand 
 tone. 
 
 For a moment she seemed to reflect upon something she 
 had it in her mind to say, for there was a little frown on 
 her forehead ; her eyes were fixed upon the faded rosebuds 
 stamped upon the cabbage-green background of the worn 
 drugget at her feet. Then she raised her head resolutely, 
 and encountering her father-in-law's severe glance in full, 
 said, in firm tones : 
 
 " It is better to speak out at once, Mr. Frost. You have 
 one rule of life, and I have another. We could never look 
 at things in the same way. I am afraid it would be as ira- 
 
56 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 possible for me to see them with your eyes as it would be for 
 you to see them with mine, especially as regards my duties and 
 responsibilities. I have duties, I know, and responsibilities 
 too ; but they seem to me all to lie in my own home — my 
 mother's home, I mean. If I had any other home it might 
 be different, but I haven't. I never can have another. If 
 — if my husband " (she pronounced the words with visible 
 effort) " should get better, it would be my duty to be near 
 him. But nothing — no power in the world — could ever in- 
 duce me to live with him again ; and as things are now, it 
 is not even necessary that I should be near him. He does 
 not want me ; he does not even know me. If any change 
 should come later, and I were needed, why, I could be tele- 
 graphed for " 
 
 " Telegraphed for ! " broke in old Mrs. Frost, with an air 
 of supreme disdain. " Hark at her, father ! That's Eila all 
 over ! We've to telegraph for madam at the other end o' 
 the world, and every word costing a pound if it costs a 
 penny, and we're to pay for it out of our own pockets, I sup- 
 pose." 
 
 "No, no," interrupted her daughter-in-law, with an im- 
 patient sigh ; " of course I would pay for it myself." 
 
 " Oh, you'd pay for it yourself, would you ! " cried her 
 mother-in-law, angrier than ever. " Since when have you 
 had money to throw away on telegrams, pray ? A body 
 might suppose you had a gold-mine of yotu* own, to hear 
 you talk ! And you'd pay for your passage out the same 
 way, I suppose ? " 
 
 " There are always ways of coming out," said Eila care- 
 lessly. " One goes as companion or niu-se if nothing better 
 offers. Anyhow, we're tired of this place, and we mean to 
 leave it. We have prospects in Europe — I can't tell you ex- 
 actly what they are " — old Mrs. Frost sniffed wrathiully 
 
 " but we really have them ; and even if they were to come 
 to nothing, we should find work of some kind to fall back 
 upon. I should not mind working for my bread in Europe. 
 I could not do it here ; people would not take it seriously." 
 
 " A fine lot of work you'll do, I'm thinking," observed 
 old Mr. Frost, with a backward movement of the nostrils 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 57 
 
 that mightily resembled a sneer. "You won't have much 
 thought of anything but vain amusement once you get 
 away, I'm pretty sure of that. It's pleasure you're going 
 after, not work. Don't tell me ! " 
 
 "I hope we shall find work and pleasure too." retorted 
 Ella quietly. " I hope we may learn a good deal and enjoy 
 a good deal on our travels. That's what we're going for, at 
 any rate. You know I never could see that liking to do a 
 thing was a reason for not doing it, as you are always telling 
 me ; it always seemed the best reason of all for doing it, as 
 long as nobody else was to be harmed by it." 
 
 " That is the talk of an unregenerate soul," declared her 
 father-in-law, shaking the ashes out of his pipe with gloomy 
 deliberateness. "If you took any heed of what the Scrip- 
 tures teach us, you'd talk in a different way. What are the 
 things we most of us hanker after in this world ? Isn't it 
 the gratification of our carnal desires? And because we 
 like it, is that the reason we're going to give way to 'em ? 
 Th>t's the devil's plea, not the Lord's. What was the pur- 
 pose of the Almighty, do you suppose, in sending you into 
 the world ? Wasn't it just so as you might 'ave an oppor- 
 tunity of preparing for a better state ? And how are you to 
 do that if it isn't by mortifying the flesh, which the devil 
 makes use of to lead you into sin ? Mark my words. When- 
 ever you set your mind upon an earthly object you may 
 make sure it's a sinful one. It's bound to be sinful. What 
 you've got to do is to pray for strength to keep your mind 
 from dwelling on it ; you must lift your thoughts from 
 earthly things, and fix them on things unseen. Just think 
 a minute how you're placed now. Your first duty is to your 
 husband, whom you've sworn before the altar to honour 
 and obey — ay, and to cleave to for better or worse till death 
 us do part. There's your dooty — the most solemn dooty of 
 all — clear mapped out before you : ' For better or for worse ' 
 — if you can't have the better, you've sworn to put up with 
 the worse. But what have you got it in your head to do ? 
 The first temptation that comes in your way finds you ready 
 to throw your dooty to the winds, and go gadding over the 
 world in search of your own amusement." 
 
58 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " Eila was always fond of gallivanting," remarked old 
 Mrs. Frost parenthetically, while her husband paused to 
 take breath. 
 
 She had been paring the small square of butter she had 
 transferred from her own plate to the orphan's, until it had 
 assumed the consistency of a mere flake. 
 
 " Yes, gadding after amusement," reiterated the old man, 
 solemnly. "But takes my word for it, if you go 'ome, it 
 won't bring you happiness. You'll live to repent it in more 
 ways than one. You're going to run counter to all the laws 
 human and Divine, and you haven't counted the cost. 
 Maybe you won't find it out till it's too late. If there was 
 no other objection, there's the false position you're going to 
 put yourself in. I don't mix much with the world, but I've 
 seen enough in my time to know what I'm saying now. I'm 
 advising you for your own good. If you've no thought of 
 your husband, you might have some for yourself. I tell 
 you there's nought more derogatory to the dignity of a 
 young married woman than to go roaming over the world 
 by herself. You won't have such an easy time of it as you 
 think. You'll be taken in right and left, and the people as 
 you'd like to be friends with won't have anything to say to 
 you. I know the world. Folks won't believe as there ain't 
 somethin' in the background to hide when they see a parcel 
 of women wandering about by them.selves." 
 
 Eila's cheeks glowed with indignation. 
 
 "We won't be a parcel of women by ourselves. We 
 have the boys ; and even if we hadn't, do you think I should 
 mind what people said ? If they were so narrow-minded as 
 to think that a lady and her children— a widow lady, too— 
 were doing anything so extraordinary in travelling about 
 just to please themselves, they would not be the kind of 
 people whose opinion we should be likely to trouble 
 about." 
 
 " They'll make you trouble, whether you will or not. I 
 don't say there's anything extraordinary in ladies travelling 
 a bit by themselves, if they've a mind to see the Avorld— 
 though I think they're better at 'ome myself— as long as 
 they've got a settled 'abitation to go back to, and a banker 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 59 
 
 to di-aw upon to pay their bills ; but that's not the case with 
 you. You know quite well your mother is going to break 
 up her 'ouse without the means to set up a fresh one. A.nd 
 when folks can't afford to have a settled 'ome, and yet keep 
 shifting about, do you know what the law calls them ? It 
 calls them vagrants— that's what it calls 'em." 
 
 He was so angry, that his nostrils were almost like those 
 of a Japanese mask. He had not thought of weighing his 
 words before he delivered himself of this denunciation. 
 Eila was angry too ; her soft dark eyes were shining. Twice 
 she essayed to speak, and when she broke the silence at last, 
 you might have detected in her voice a half-hysterical 
 quaver, that spoke of deeply-wounded susceptibilities. 
 
 " You have no right to call us vagrants, Mr. Frost," she 
 said, " even if it is your opinion that we cannot afford to 
 travel. What we have to spend is our own affair, and as 
 long as we don't ask for assistance, it is nobody's business to 
 criticise the way in which we may choose to live." 
 
 " You think I don't know what you've got of your own, 
 and just how far it'll take you," replied her father-in-law, 
 nothing abashed. " You'll be begging in the streets before 
 you've done ; but, as I said- before, your mother is a head- 
 strong woman. As long as I've known her, she's had a 
 down on the colonies. She's always been what one may 
 call inimical to them " — the word pleased him, and he re- 
 peated it with emphasis — " yes, inimical to them. Haven't 
 I heard her with my own ears deriding our native produc- 
 tions ? ' Trees, Mr. Frost ! ' " He made an attempt to mimic 
 her mother's voice, of which Eila feigned, though not quite 
 successfully, to appear loftily unconscious. " ' Trees ! you 
 'ave no trees in Tasmania, or fish ! Fish ! I've never tasted 
 real fish since I left England ! ' And she has succeeded in 
 inoculating — yes, in inoculating you with her prejudices. 
 You've always been unsettled, and complaining of this or 
 that. You've none of you known when you were well off. 
 And now she's got her own way at last, and she's going to 
 drag you all off on a wild-goose chase to Europe under the 
 pretence of showing you the world. If you're wise, you'll 
 make a stand against it." 
 5 
 
60 ' NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "What! advise mother not to leave Tasmania, when 
 we're all so anxious to go ! " said Eila. 
 
 A sense of the utter hopelessness of bringing her hus- 
 band's parents to understand or sympathize with any of her 
 own individual wants and aspirations was the feeling upper- 
 most in her mind. " I am young," she thought to herself. 
 " I have the misfortune to be cut off from all the dreams 
 that girls of my age so often harbour. I must not think as 
 they do of being a wife and a mother. If I meet a man 
 who seems to care for me, as Reginald does, I must force 
 myself to remember that there is a poor lunatic shut away 
 in the asylum, whose property I am, and to whom the law 
 gives rights over me, although the only use he would make 
 of them, if he were free, would be to strangle me. It is all as 
 hard as it can be. But there is still a home life into which 
 I can throw myself. To travel about, to see Europe with 
 my mother and brothers and sisters, even if we had to pinch 
 and scrape a little, would be a great happiness. And these 
 people would deprive me of it if they could, and take it as 
 a matter of course that I should grow old and withered in 
 this dreary place, with all my senses and faculties slowly 
 starving to death the whole time. And yet Mr. Frost is a 
 good man, and his wife is a good woman in her way, and 
 they would help anyone who was in real trouble, I suppose. 
 And me they would coldly condemn to a life of wretched- 
 ness and stagnation. They would not even be able to un- 
 derstand me if I told them how I feel about it. Why is it, 
 I wonder, that to interfere with the liberty of other people 
 seems quite justifiable to persons one considers good f For, 
 after all, what wretchedness it may cause ! I believe it may 
 spoil one's life far more than deeds the world considers 
 wrong.'' 
 
 " What would you have me do, Mr. Frost ? " she said at 
 the close of this reverie. 
 
 Her voice had lost its offended accents, but there was 
 something dull and hopeless in its tone. Her father-in-law 
 crossed over from the tea-table to the green-and-purple-loz- 
 enged arm-chair, whence his utterances always seemed to 
 take an additional ex-cathedrd importance. 
 
HOW BILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 61 
 
 " You ask me what I would have you do, Eila ? " he said. 
 "Well, I would have you take the stand of a Christian 
 woman. You're not a giddy girl any longer, or you oughtn't 
 to he, any way. If you've got no heart and no conscience, 
 why, then, you may go to Europe ; but the blessing of the 
 Lord won't rest upon your undertaking. You may turn 
 your back upon all your responsibilities and all your doo- 
 ties, but you won't rid yourself of 'em in that way. They'll 
 pursue you wherever you are ; they'll rise up and confront 
 you in the night-time; they'll turn into nettles and sting 
 you." 
 
 He paused in quest of a fresh metaphor whereby to drive 
 his threats home. 
 
 " But how can they pursue me if I don't feel them, don't 
 see them, don't recognise them ? " expostulated Eila. " You 
 tell me they are here ; I say they are with my family." 
 
 " You can sit there, and tell me your first duty is to your 
 family, when you've got a husband belonging to you ! " 
 
 " But I haven't got one I " cried Eila. Her lips trembled 
 as she spoke. " Do you mean to say I could be with him 
 now ? You know yourself it's impossible ! " 
 
 " And who says it's going to be impossible next year, or 
 next month, or next week ? The doctor '11 tell you he might 
 be better any day. Besides, as long as he's within reach, 
 you can't put him out of your mind altogether ; but once 
 you turn your back upon him, it'll be diiferent. When 
 you're three or four months' distance from him, you'll be 
 like to forget you've got a husband at all. Supposing the 
 Lord should work a miracle in his favour, and restore him 
 all on a sudden to his right mind, the first thing he'll do 
 will be to ask for his wife. Why, he's got his intervals 
 even now when he's rational. Don't tell me ! he's more 
 knowing than folks make out. He knows when you 
 haven't been nigh him for ten days just as well as I do. 
 Ten to one, if you go away altogether, he'll begin to fret 
 after you. Don't turn a deaf ear to the voice of his old fa- 
 ther pleading for him, Eila. If you listen to what your 
 heart and your conscience bid you do, you won't desert him 
 now. Stop along here with us, if your mother's set upon 
 
62 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 going. What she does is no business o' mine ; I've nought 
 to do with her coinings and goings. She's got her own no- 
 tions ; it's a pity they ain't the sort that sensible people can 
 approve. But that's neither here nor there. Let her go her 
 own way, and you stay behind with us ; we'll make a place 
 for you. If your mother turns her back on her home, your 
 rightful place is under this roof ; it's nowhere else. I've got 
 my responsibiUty, too. When the Lord sees fit to restore 
 my son, I've got to be able to give you back to him without 
 any misgiving. I must be able to say, 'There, my son; 
 there's your wife just as you left her. Take her to your 
 heart again, my lad ; she's deserving of it — she's your true 
 and faithful wife.' " 
 
 He stopped, overcome with his own emotion, and looked 
 at his daughter-in-law with quivering nostrils. Eila's head 
 was bent ; her fingers were nervously crumpling the muslin 
 border of the hat on her knees. Her cheeks were flushed, 
 and there was a threatening humidity in her downcast eyes. 
 
 " Don't turn a deaf ear, my child," he continued, follow- 
 ing up the advantage he had gained, and too much moved 
 himself to perorate according to his wont. " Listen to an 
 old man who hasn't many more years of life left him. It's 
 the voice of the Lord speaking through me to you, Eila. 
 You may believe it, my child. Your mother has other chil- 
 dren to keep her company, and they haven't any other 
 claims as you have. You stop here quietly with us ; you'll 
 be a daughter to us, and the blessing of the Almighty will 
 rest upon you. Who knows but what He may restore your 
 husband to you in the end to reward your sacrifice ! And 
 you're closer to him than to anybody else ; you're bone of 
 his bone and flesh of his flesh. What did Euth do when she 
 had to choose between her husband's people and her own ? 
 If you like, I'll read you the chapter about it next time you 
 come over. You stay here with us ; you won't have frivol- 
 ity and dissipation. Leave that for them as forgets there's 
 an hereafter. But you'll have the peace of the Lord, which 
 passeth all understanding. You'll be the light of our home, 
 and we've been lonely enough since our poor lad was 
 affilicted. Give me your hand upon it, my dear, and go and 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 63 
 
 kiss your mother-in-law, who's waiting over there to take 
 you to her 'art." 
 
 He stopped short, and for a whole half -minute Eila sat 
 motionless, looking at the ground. A curious struggle was 
 taking place in her mind. A fleeting but clearly defined 
 vision of the consequences of yielding to her father-in-law's 
 importunities, and rushing upon a life of self-imposed sacri- 
 fice hard enough and bitter enough in all conscience to 
 exercise the sway over her imagination that a life of volun- 
 tary martyrdom holds out to us in our moments of spiritual 
 exaltation, was shaping itself before her. 
 
 As she sat, her imagination filled in all the details im- 
 mediately. She saw herself arrayed in a black serge frock, 
 with a loosely knotted girdle and a crape collar, moving 
 about this hopeless, hateful little house, a kind of domestic 
 guardian angel — weeding the geranium plots, cleaning the 
 kerosene lamp, making pilgrimages to the New Norfolk 
 Asylum, reading the Sunday Times to old Mrs. Frost in 
 the evening, and fading away into an early and picturesque 
 tomb, or, better still, a funeral urn, if her narrow-minded 
 relatives would only respect her last wish and have her cre- 
 mated in preference to being buried. 
 
 But before the half-minute was quite at an end, the 
 mocking and sceptical part of her nature was scoffing at the 
 mystic and enthusiastic part of it. Notwithstanding all, 
 she felt a certain secret sense of triumph at the evidence 
 of her father-in-law's desire to keep her under his roof. 
 Though even this was not enough to satisfy her entirely : 
 she would fain have brought him to own that she was right 
 in her desire to go away. Eila not only loved to do as she 
 liked, which is a weakness that most of us might own to ; 
 she also loved to be approved in the doing of it. She felt it 
 would be a drawback to her satisfaction if old Mr. and Mrs. 
 Frost could not be induced to own that it was justifiable 
 and right, to say nothing of its being pleasant, that she 
 should accompany her family to Europe. But how was 
 this desirable end to be accomplished 2 Their points of 
 view, as she had truly said, were wide as the poles asunder ; 
 or, rather, they were like two different points of the com- 
 
64 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 pass. Theirs had the icy north in view. It was that of an 
 explorer who seeks to attain the ocean of eternal peace, lit 
 by the lofty Polar star, across ice-bound waters and deso- 
 late tracts of snow. Hers pointed to the warm west — to re- 
 gions where " it is always afternoon," and the traveller may 
 lie and rest in languorous f orgetf ulness of what lies beyond. 
 How could a meeting-point be found between these two ? 
 Nevertheless, it was Eila's desire to reconcile the irrecon- 
 cilable. "To know all would be to forgive all," says the 
 French proverb. If her father-in-law could but know, as 
 she knew them herself, the longings that beset her youth — 
 the craving to escape from the sad, monotonous associa- 
 tions of her present clouded existence^he might possibly 
 find excuses for her in his heart. But what could his seven- 
 ty years of life, with all their boasted experieiace, know of 
 such sensations as hers ? His lozenge-tapestried arm-chair, 
 his Bible and Milton, his pipe, old Mrs. Frost's comments 
 upon the wicked wastefulness of the orphan, answered to 
 all his requirements. "I can put myself into his place," 
 reflected Eila bitterly ; " why cannot he put himself into 
 mine ? Can it be that, when one is young, imagination 
 supplies the place of experience, and that it is really easier 
 for me to understand his needs and feelings than for him to 
 enter into mine ? " But aloud she said : 
 
 " Don't ask me to make up my mind, please, until I have 
 thought it all over. Perhaps I might not stay away longer 
 than a year. In any case, I could not bear to disappoint 
 them all at home now." 
 
 " And what may not happen in a year ? " she thought to 
 herself. She was still of an age at which the deferring of a 
 question for a whole year is almost tantamount to burying 
 it altogether. "Events may happen that may change the 
 whole position of things ! And it will be so easy to write 
 from home, and find a good reason for not returning, if the 
 worst should come to the worst. So much easier than to 
 find a satisfactory argument now ! Besides, I can't argue 
 with my father-in-law; we start from two different stand- 
 points. There is no means of bringing things home to his 
 comprehension. I should have to make a complete con- 
 
HOW EILA WAS RECEIVED AT IVY COTTAGE. 65 
 
 fession of faith, or want of it, and array Herbert Spencer 
 and my duties to myself against the Scriptures and my du- 
 ties to Mr. Frost's God. There is nothing for it but to tem- 
 porize—and a year is soon gone by," she remarked suavely 
 out loud. 
 
 " Who's going to pay your passage-money, that's what I 
 want to know ? " asked her mother-in-law sharply. Surprise 
 and displeasure kept her eyebrows suspended high over her 
 spectacles. Two conflicting ideas had been struggling for 
 supremacy in old Mrs. Frost's mind. The first was the con- 
 viction that the housing of this radiant-looking girl, whom 
 she called, to her sorrow, her daughter-in-law, would require 
 an entire readjustment of all her exactly measured domestic 
 economies ; the other was the calculation that if the money 
 that would otherwise be wasted upon travelling (for travel- 
 ling, for travelling's sake, represented riotous wastefulness 
 in old Mrs. Frost's eyes) should be poured into the Ivy Cot- 
 tage exchequer, it would not only cover the required read- 
 justments, but would leave a margin for the instituting of a 
 " stocking " for future emergencies as well. " Who's going 
 to pay your passage-money ? " she repeated once more. 
 " One would think, to hear you talk, you took no more ac- 
 count of fifty pounds than if they were so many pebbles ! " 
 
 " I dare say I could save up," said Eila doubtfully. " I 
 mean to earn my living, you know ; but we'll talk it over 
 next time if you like : I shall be over again soon." 
 
 She had risen from the sofa as she spoke, and, heedless of 
 all remonstrances, was putting the muslin-crowned hat over 
 her forehead. For the second time she advanced her rose 
 cheek towards each withered face in turn, and, without wait- 
 ing for an answering good-night, swept out of the room that 
 she had brightened unconsciously with her presence, leav- 
 ing it to the undisturbed occupation of its prickly sofa, its 
 worsted settee, its prismatic mantel-ornaments, and its staid 
 and severe proprietors. 
 
06 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 
 
 The darkness falling, as Longfellow has it, " from the 
 wings of night " had settled upon the prospect while Regi- 
 nald was waiting for Eila. He could only distinguish now 
 the widespread expanse of harbour by the black space that 
 rested upon it, bordered on the town side by the scanty lights 
 that lined the wharves. At his feet the town-lamps twinkled 
 in long irregular columns towards the dark heights around, 
 and away upon the opposite shore he could faintly discern 
 the feeble glimmer of the sparse illuminations of Kangaroo 
 Point. Under cover of the obscurity he had ventiu'ed to 
 creep closer to Ivy Cottage, and was hanging about the gate, 
 like a thief in the night, when the muslin-covered hat 
 emerged from the house. The transient glimpse he had of 
 it before the front-door closed with a bang told him plainly 
 that its owner was trying to beat a dignified retreat. The 
 poise of the head was more erect than ever, and the swift, 
 decided footsteps he heard immediately after upon the stone- 
 flags confirmed him in his suspicion that young Mrs. Frost 
 had been subjected to a more than usually distasteful piece 
 of old Mrs. Frost's mind. 
 
 " Come quickly ! " she said, feeling Reginald's presence 
 more than seeing it, as the gate was opened for her passage 
 through it, " or they will be sending someone after us. I 
 did not tell them there was anybody waiting for me outside. 
 Though, of course, they made a fuss about my coming 
 alone." She had laid her hand within his arm as she spoke, 
 and was walking briskly by his side over the uneven stones 
 of the street in embryo that meandered away towards the 
 hills. The tacit trust in him that the action implied filled 
 him with a mute rapture. This was just what he loved — • 
 that she should take possession of him without so much as a 
 "by your leave." He wondered whether her arm in the 
 neighbourhood of his heart could feel how it had caused 
 that treacherous member to beat, as he walked silently on, 
 almost afraid to speak lest he should break the spell. " Yes " 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 57 
 
 she went on, as he kept pace with her footsteps, rendered 
 unconsciously swifter by her agitation, "my father-in-law 
 opened the proceedings by lecturing me upon the proprieties ; 
 but he forgot all about them, and everything else, when I 
 told him my news. Of course it made him angry, and Mrs. 
 Frost, too. But, then, they see harm in everything. They 
 make me feel like Topsy, ' mighty wicked anyhow.' If you 
 could have heard how they tried to work upon my feelings 
 to make me stay here with them instead of going home ! " 
 
 " I knew they would never approve of that," said Regi- 
 nald. He did laot allow himself to entertain the smallest 
 hope that the influence of the Ivy Cottage inmates would 
 shake her in her resolution. " But is the matter really 
 settled beyond all doubt ? " 
 
 " Quite irretrievably settled ; but I won't say irretriev- 
 able, because it sounds as though we were talking of a mis- 
 fortune, whereas we are really aux anges at the prospect of 
 going away. Even the wiseacre Willie, as you call him, is 
 almost excited for once." 
 
 " If only the anticipation doesn't turn out the best part of 
 it," said Reginald. " It's a curious fact, but I do believe 
 your mother has filled all your minds with a kind of glori- 
 fied image of England that will make the reality a disap- 
 pointment when you come to see it. Have you read Plato ? 
 No 2 You know what his theory was, anyhow. I am sure 
 that you imagine England is like Plato's perfect world — a 
 place that contains the exemplar or archetype of all that 
 you see as through a glass darkly in Tasmania. I've heard 
 her declare that the fruit had no taste here, and the flowers 
 no scent." 
 
 " Nor have they ; the wild-flowers, at least. But what 
 do you think ? You are repeating almost word for word 
 what Mr. Frost has been saying, only he did not mention 
 Plato. But I am not afraid of being disappointed in Eng- 
 land. The only trouble is that we shall have so little money 
 — between three and fom- hundred pounds a year at the 
 most. It won't enable us to live in the lap of luxiiry, will 
 it ? " 
 
 " It isn't enough," said Reginald gravely. " There are 
 
68 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 six of you, and you can have no idea of what it costs to 
 travel, especially for people who have to buy all their ex- 
 perience, which is often the most expensive part of trav- 
 elling." 
 
 Eila was silent for an instant. Though it was too dark 
 to see her face, Reginald felt sure that there was a half- 
 mocking smile of disclaimer hovering on her lips. He had 
 seen it there before upon occasions like the present one, 
 when she set herself against some argument or representa- 
 tion that ran counter to her inclinations. 
 
 "What you say might apply to other people, but it 
 doesn't frighten me for us. I don't think we're the same as 
 most people. We all like nothing better than eggs and 
 bread-and-butter. I believe we could live upon them. And 
 you know we are all very healthy if we are a little morbid. 
 Mother the same as the rest. And we think of going to 
 Paris, to a place they call the Quartier Latin. We've been 
 reading all about the places the students live in, and we 
 mean to manage just as they do. Won't it be fun ? The 
 houses are ever so high, and there are beautiful little flats 
 to be had for next to nothing quite at the top. That would 
 suit us exactly." 
 
 " I hope they won't turn out to be flats in the air," he 
 said grimly. " I've never been to Paris, but everyone I've 
 ever met has led me to suppose that it was one of the most 
 expensive places in the world." 
 
 "Not in the Quartier Latin part," she interrupted him, 
 with the air of one most entirely familiar with the place ; 
 " and if the worst came to the worst, do you think we should 
 be afraid to ' turn to,' as mother calls it, and do something 
 for ourselves? I mean to go on with my painting, and 
 Willie must find employment. Then, Dick is going to be a 
 sculptor, and Mamy and Truca must have lessons. Mamy 
 has quite a Jenny Lind voice, mother says. I wish we had 
 some friends at home, though. I wish you could come and 
 see us in our flat." 
 
 " What ! I ? I wish I could. Perhaps you would find 
 me work, too. But I haven't a Jenny Lind voice, I'm 
 afraid." 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 
 
 69 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 " You're not a bit convinced. I can hear it in the tone of 
 your voice." 
 
 "No ; I am very unhappy about you, if you want to know 
 the truth. It seems to me you are walking deliberately into 
 a trap without waiting to see whether you will be able to 
 find a way out of it." 
 
 " But we won't want to get out of it if we're happy in it 
 
 Besides-besides " She paused. " I wonder if I were to 
 
 confide a great— a very great— a tremendously important 
 secret to you— what you would say ? They would never for- 
 give me at home for telling you. It's the kind of family 
 secret that we all talk about at home in mysterious whispers 
 like conspirators. We have a code of signals to explain 
 when we want to talk of it. I told you about our going 
 home, and that thereby hung a tale. Well, it hangs to the 
 secret, and as you are the only person out of the family I 
 can trust, I am going to tell you about it. But you must 
 pledge yourself to the most absolute secrecy first. What is 
 the promise that is the most binding you can think of ? " 
 
 " My word," said Reginald simply. 
 
 " Is that aU ? " in tones of disappointment. " I thought 
 there was some oath the Freemasons had about being rolled 
 eternally in the flux and reflux of the ocean's tides." 
 
 " What do you know about the Freemasons ? " he laughed ; 
 " but I will give you my hand upon it — there ! " 
 
 She laid her soft, ungloved hand (gloves were Eila's aver- 
 sion, excepting upon state occasions) within his own, and it 
 required all his self-control not to clasp it in both his own, 
 and tell her she was dearer to him than anything else in the 
 world, and that the thought of her going away was breaking 
 his heart. 
 
 " There ! now that ceremony is over." 
 She had returned her hand to its place upon his left arm, 
 and was allowing him to guide her fearlessly over the lonely 
 track that led across the hillside to her home. A crescent 
 moon was poised above them, with a faintly- defined watery 
 globe cradled between its horns. There was the promise of 
 another warm day in the faint haze that obscured ,the stars, 
 
fjQ NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 immeasurably distant in the far-reaching dome of the Tas- 
 manian night sky. The '' one particular star." that Eegmald 
 worshipped was close by his side ; but in another sense was 
 she not as remote from him as those intangible globes over- 
 head, that, swinging through space, fraught with unsolvable 
 mystery, seem to mock the dwellers upon earth by wmkmg 
 down upon them through the black void, like glittermg 
 eyes, that refuse to reveal the secret they hide ? The yomig 
 man felt a heavy load at his heart as he reflected how soon 
 this bright particular star of his must vanish from his hori- 
 zon. And how entirely her life would be separated from his 
 own ! The very face of thq heavens would wear another 
 aspect for her. He would never be able to picture her walk- 
 ing beneath the stars upon such an entrancing night as this. 
 Her seasons of waking and sleeping, of heat and cold, of 
 rising and going to rest, would all be different from his own. 
 There would be no longer any possibility of community of 
 sensation with her, such as even at a distance friends in the 
 same hemisphere may experience. 
 
 And who would watch over her with loyal, unselfish love 
 in that new strange world into which she was about to ad- 
 venture herself ? Hobart was dull and contracted, without 
 doubt, but there was a restraining influence in the very con- 
 traction of its social atmosphere. No one here could escape 
 the eye of Mrs. Grundy ; and though Reginald had no great 
 esteem for Mrs. Grundy himself, he liked to think that the 
 woman he loved was held in check by her presence. The 
 occasional revelations he had had of the Bohemian instincts 
 of Eila and her belongings made him tremble for their fu- 
 ture in Paris.; besides which, they were all, to use a discour- 
 teous but most expressive adjective, gullible to a degree. 
 Whittington, setting out for London to pick up gold in the 
 streets of the great city, was not more innocent than they. 
 In their enthusiasm for all things European, they were ready 
 to be the dupes of the first adventurer they might encounter. 
 Their poverty might be, indeed, a certain safeguard, but, 
 then, Eila was too pretty not to attract notice. He wondered 
 whether she had the least foreshadowing of the dangers that 
 beset her path. What would he have given to be able to 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. fji 
 
 watch over her like a knight errant on her travels ? Here 
 in Tasmania he had been content to let the days drift by 
 without seeking a solution to his position in regard to her. 
 As long as he could see her almost daily — as long as he could 
 believe her to be heart free, he could find strength to wait 
 until Time, the great unraveller of destinies, should work 
 out an issue for him. He did not even ask himself whether 
 Eila was aware of his absorbing love for her. In the peculiar 
 position in which he found himself, he felt that he must 
 dread any kind of catastrophe that would startle her out of 
 the confidential, almost sisterly, relations she had gradually 
 established with him. She must know, at least, he told him- 
 self, that he was in her power to do as she pleased with. 
 There were days when the very frankness of her liking for 
 him brought a chill of terror, lest under no circumstances 
 whatever she could have loved him. But the sweetness of 
 the unconstrained intercourse brought its compensating 
 charm, and upon the very evening when Reginald received 
 the crushing announcement that Eila was to leave him he 
 had been schooling himself to set a guard on his lips and a 
 bridle on his. tongue, lest by some unconsidered word he 
 should betray the passionate nature of his sentiment for her. 
 And now he learned that all his resolutions would be in 
 vain. Even the brotherly attitude that he tried so valiantly 
 to maintain towards her would avail him nothing. She 
 was going away from him, and his secret would remain 
 locked away in his heart. He would never love or seek to 
 love another woman. 
 
 " And there will be an end," he thought to himself, " of 
 all the hopes that I had staked my chances of happiness 
 upon in this world. I expect I shall turn into one of those 
 prosy old bores who live in rooms, and go down to read the 
 papers at the club every afternoon. If it were not for my 
 mother, I would go to sea again. It would need less courage 
 to jump overboard than to face the life of utter stagnation 
 that I see stretched before me in this dreary place. And all 
 for what ? Why must I see the woman I love dragged away 
 to a shiftless and comfortless existence at the other end of 
 the world ? For whom and for what are two lives to be 
 
^2 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 sacrificed ? Because a wretclied maniac, shut up in the 
 asylum, is called her husband. It is a monstrous injustice, 
 based upon a false principle ; it is a case in which a man 
 should make use of his common-sense — one in which we 
 ought to be, as St. Paul says, a law to ourselves. . . . But 
 what if I were in the maniac's place ? How would I feel 
 towards the person who should take advantage of my mis- 
 fortune — surely the worst that can befall a man — to steal 
 my wife away from me ? A man in the possession of his 
 senses can look out for himself. Besides, madness may have 
 its term like any other malady. How wotdd I feel, in the 
 same plight, to discover, when I came to my right mind, 
 that my wife had gone over to a rival ? But if I don't speak 
 to Eila, others will be less scrupulous. Who knows, though 
 she should never be able to return my love, whether the 
 knowledge of it might not help and sustain her ? To know 
 there is someone absolutely and entirely her own : someone 
 who asks for nothing more than to be allowed to put all he 
 has at her disposal — his work, his purse, his very life — and 
 who asks for no other reward than the one of making her 
 path a little smoother for her ; someone who separates her 
 from all accidents of surroundings, circumstances, and con- 
 ditions of life — nay, even from the very faults or follies she 
 might fall into ; someone who loves her very essence, her 
 very being, independently of all change, physical or moral, 
 that might overtake it. Surely the certainty of the existence 
 of such a friend as this ought to be a support and a con- 
 solation " 
 
 But Reginald's train of thought, which he did not formu- 
 late, however, in the foregoing words, was suddenly broken 
 in upon by his companion's remark : 
 
 "Men are not curious like women. I've been waiting 
 for you to say ' Do tell ! ' the whole of this time." 
 
 " "Well, I'll say it now — do tell ! And see, we're not far 
 from your home. Is not that a light moving across the 
 veranda, down there ? " 
 
 Though Cowa was on a hill, they were standing upon a 
 yet higher slope of the same mountainous region, and look- 
 ing down from it they could see the dimly defined outline 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 73 
 
 of the long quadrilateral garden running sideways down 
 the declivity. A faint glimmer in front of the squat mass 
 that represented the house was the light to which Reginald 
 had made allusion. 
 
 "I shall never have time to tell it you all before we 
 reach the house," she said. 
 
 " Not time ! Then let us sit here on the ground and tell 
 strange stories of the deaths of kings " 
 
 " Not of kings," she laughed. " But there are plenty of 
 deaths in it, I warn you." 
 
 She had seated herself as she spoke upon the prone trunk 
 of a sawn gum-tree that lay in readiness to be carted down 
 to town the following day. 
 
 Reginald sat next to her on the same trunk, after beating 
 about the scrub in its vicinity to make sure that no ambu- 
 lant snake had taken refuge there. Eila pulled off her hat. 
 twisting it round in her lap mechanically as she narrated 
 her story. The balmy night breeze lifted the soft rings of 
 hair from her forehead and temples, and played, cool and 
 gorse-scented, round her neck. Her voice had unconsciously 
 assumed the true narrator's tone, and Reginald only inter- 
 rupted her from time to time when it seemed to him that 
 the details of her story were becoming more picturesque 
 than precise. 
 
 " In the first place," she began, " you know the Cheva- 
 lier's portrait, the one that hangs over the drawing-room 
 mantelpiece ? " 
 
 " The Chevalier's portrait I Rather ! " he replied. 
 
 The superlative form of affirmation was not employed 
 without sufficient justification. Who that had ever visited 
 Cowa Cottage could remain ignorant of the Chevalier's por- 
 trait ? It was an oil-painting of the end of the last century, 
 and its bright, classic, somewhat hard perfection of design 
 and colour seemed to point to it as belonging to the school of 
 the great painter of revolutionary times— David. The dress 
 was of a period anterior to the exaggerations of Merveilleux 
 and Incroyables. It was of the accepted decorous type of a 
 somewhat earlier period, much like that of an Usher of the 
 Black Rod in a colonial Parliament in our own day, for it 
 
74 NOT COUNTIKG THE COST. 
 
 consisted of black satin knee-breeches, and a black satin 
 coat, with glittering buttons, opening upon a waistcoat of 
 the same material, and a shirt with white lace ruffles down 
 the front. A cocked hat, shoes with paste buckles, and a 
 dangling sword, completed the costume, which was well set 
 off by the aristocratic head of the wearer, a man of some 
 forty years of age, with smooth fair hair drawn back into a 
 queue behind the nape of the neck. This painting repre- 
 sented Mrs. Clare's maternal grandfather, and was as great 
 an object of veneration in the Cowa household as though 
 the latter had consisted of a Chinese family, and the Cheva- 
 lier's effigy had been that of a pigtailed ancestor, before 
 which they were accustomed to burn candles and let off 
 crackers in token of their everlasting respect for it. The 
 sentiment grew intenser with time, for the longer Ella's 
 mother remained in exile, as she was accustomed to call her 
 life in the colonies, the higher her estimation of the Cheva- 
 lier's portrait seemed to grow. No profane hand was ever 
 allowed to touch this sacred icon, and the Australian-Scotch 
 servant who " did " for the Clare family in more senses than 
 one, would present herself upon cleaning days to Eila with 
 the request that " Mistress Frost wud na forget the chif- 
 fonier." It would have been as much as her place was 
 worth to approach a sacrilegious duster to the picture on her 
 own responsibility. 
 
 " Well, but do you know who the Chevalier was ? " con- 
 tinued Eila, with a dignity that betrayed a latent sense of 
 resentment at Reginald's emphatic assertion of his obvious 
 knowledge of her ancestor. 
 
 " Who he was ? " He paused for an instant's reflection. 
 "Either your grandfather or your great-grandfather. But 
 he couldn't have been your grandfather, now I come to 
 think of it." 
 
 "My great-grandfather, the Chevalier de Merle. It 
 means ' blackbird,' but that doesn't matter. It is his history 
 you have to follow first. He belonged to a French family 
 that lost their estates in the Revolution, and when he was 
 a young man he went to India, and there he married a Be- 
 gum ; at least, we believe he married her." 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 75 
 
 " So you have an Indian ancestress ! " exclaimed Ee^-i- 
 nald. "Dear me! what a number of things that accounts 
 for to a believer in the theory of heredity ! " 
 
 "Does it ? What kind of things ? " He could imagine 
 she was slightly frowning behind the curtain of darkness 
 " You have sent me quite off the track now, for, naturally 
 it is more interesting to discuss one's self than anything else' 
 I feel I can't go on until you have told me what my having 
 a Begum ancestress accounts for." 
 
 " Do you really want to know 2 I shall have to be per- 
 sonal, only perhaps as it is so dark you won't mind. And 
 then you needn't take all I say for Gospel, either. Perhaps 
 you haven't studied the theory of heredity ? " 
 
 " Not much. I suppose we are all more like our fathers 
 and mothers than anybody else ? " 
 
 " Or ought to be, according to the popular theory. But 
 physiologists take account of much remoter relationships. 
 They say that, reckoning a child's parents, together with the 
 parents of those parents, backwards for ten generations, they 
 find that two thousand separate individualities have each 
 had their influence in moulding its nature. However, these 
 two thousand individualities are not blended in equal pro- 
 portions in the child. If that were so, we could reckon up 
 the qualities of every one who is born with the same mathe- 
 matical exactitude that we employ in calculating the ingre- 
 dients of a new dish. But that is not the case. There is 
 always an unknown quantity, or there is one particular an- 
 cestor who gives the lion's share in making up the new de- 
 scendant. Then we have a case of atavism. Yours is almost 
 a case of atavism, but not quite.'' 
 
 " Do you mean to tell me I am like a Begum ? " 
 She was laughing, but there was a suggestion of dryness 
 in her tones. 
 
 " Yes, I do ; but a Begum grafted on to a European, which 
 is something very different. First, there are your eyes. I 
 have lived in the East, you know, and I have the certainty 
 that nowhere away from the East can one find eyes hke 
 yours. One miost connect them with the dark-skinned races. 
 There are all kinds of eyes : les yeux verts, qui menent aux 
 6 
 
76 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 enfers ; and les yeux bleus, qui vont aux cieux (excuse my 
 pronunciation) ; but a Begum's eyes are quite different. 
 There is something opaque, and dusky, and liquid, and in- 
 describably soft about them ; they are more lustrous than 
 other eyes, and yet they have no hardness. Perhaps it is 
 because they have such long, silky, sweeping lashes. In 
 fact, they are Oriental eyes, and that is saying everything." 
 
 " It is saying too much, if you mean aU that for my eyes. 
 But I hope I don't ' feature ' the Begum, as Mrs. Garth says." 
 
 " You do in your hair. I can't say of it : 
 
 " ' It's not her hair, for sure in that 
 There's nothing more tlian common ; ' 
 
 for there is something much more than common in it." 
 " Oh, we all have good wigs in the family.'' 
 " Yes ; but yours looks sometimes as though it were too 
 heavy for your head. And I am sure you may thank the 
 Begum for the way in which it clusters and waves all about 
 your forehead in those silky, shining masses. And you may 
 thank her, too, for being made as you are — so wonderfully 
 straight and supple, I mean ; no, more than supple : lithe is 
 the word. I know now where the Eed Indian stride comes 
 from ! It must come from whole generations of ancestresses 
 who carried chatties poised on their heads. Don't be offended. 
 They couldn't all be Begums, you know ; and I am going 
 back, far back, into the mists of time." 
 
 "I am not offended. Far from it. I think it is very 
 amusing. Only we are not perfectly certain my great- 
 grandfather did marry the Begum, and that is where the 
 dreadful part of the story comes in, for, you see, he had a 
 daughter in India, who was my grandmother— mother's 
 own mother. She was taken home by her father, the Cheva- 
 lier de Merle, when he returned to Europe. She was quite a 
 child then still. And the family would not acknowledge 
 the Begum, who was dead, or the Indian connection at all ; 
 and it could not be proved that the marriage was anything 
 but a Mohammedan marriage, if it was even that ! " 
 " If it was even that ! " echoed Reginald doubtfully. 
 In his heart he was inclined to look upon the title of 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 77 
 
 Begum in connection with Eila's ancestress as a polite figure 
 of speech. The old Chevalier had probably allowed his 
 fancy to be taken captive by a seductive Nautch girl of no 
 acknowledged caste or rank, and had had his paternal in- 
 stincts stirred to life by the child born of the liaison, to the 
 point, as it appeared, of bringing her away with him to 
 Europe. 
 
 "But he brought something besides his daughter. He 
 brought a beautiful precious stone— a ruby— that had once 
 belonged to the Begum, and that ought to prove that she 
 was a genuine Begum, oughtn't it ? " continued young Mrs. 
 Frost, replying to Reginald's unspoken surmises, almost as 
 though she had had to contend against the same form of 
 misgiving herself. " It must have been a beautiful stone, 
 for mother has an imitation— but only an imitation— of it 
 in glass. My great-grandfather especially desired that this 
 ruby should descend to the Indian branch of the family, to 
 the daughters. It was my grandmother's, then it was to be 
 my mother's, and then " 
 
 "Then it was to be yours." He finished the sentence 
 for her. 
 
 " Yes, but that does not matter. One would not think 
 about that. But I am going to show you how it happened 
 that our branch of the family never had the ruby at all. 
 My little grandmother was put to school, a convent-school 
 in England, and my great-grandfather married again ; we 
 all say, at least, that it was a second marriage. He married 
 an Englishwoman, too. They lived in England after that. 
 They had left France for good, and they had children. 
 Well, my poor little grandmother was kept very much in 
 the background in her convent-school, though I believe the 
 Chevalier would have liked to have her very often at the 
 house. One day he died quite suddenly, and then they sent 
 for Maya — ^that was my grandmother's name — and they 
 made her feel she was a kind of outcast now. Her 
 father's second wife was like the stepmothers in Grimm's 
 Tales. It was she who had the care of the ruby, and who 
 ought to have given it to my grandmother. But what do 
 you think she did ? She told the child to choose between 
 
78 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 this heirloom and the portrait of her father, the very paint- 
 ing of the Chevalier that hangs over our mantel-shelf at 
 Cowa. Of course, poor little Maya chose the portrait, and 
 cried over it as though her heart would hreak. They sent 
 her back with that to the convent-school, and her step- 
 mother paid for her education, on condition she should give 
 lessons and try to keep herself later. And she did. But the 
 very first place she went to, the son of the people fell in 
 love with her. Bhe was married to him. He was a Uni- 
 tarian preacher called James Willett, and my grandmother 
 and he lived in London after they were married, and lived 
 there all their lives." 
 
 " And your mother was their only child ? " 
 " The only one that lived. She married our father in 
 England, but they emigrated soon after to Tasmania. Her 
 parents were both dead then. But, meanwhile, the De 
 Merles, the collateral branch — that is the right word, isn't 
 it ? — my grandmother's half-brothers and sisters, you know, 
 had been marrying and having children, too. When my 
 mother was a child, she used to hear her mother speak of 
 them, though she never saw them. The ruby went to one 
 of them called Pierre, and after he died we believe it went 
 to his son Hubert, who must be over forty by this time. 
 Where he is now we don't know. It seems that he was a 
 wanderer for a long time, and that finally he settled in 
 Paris. We have never been able to find out exactly, but we 
 have a plan of looking him up and making this proposal to 
 him. Mother thinks he would be only too glad to accept it, 
 if he has a conscience, and if he is rich, as we suppose. We 
 mean to propose that he should give up the heirloom, which 
 was intended for the girls of the family, in exchange for the 
 original portrait of the Chevalier, which we are going to 
 take home for the purpose. The picture is valuable, too, of 
 course ; but perhaps not quite so valuable to us as the ruby 
 would be, considering how many of us there are with nothino- 
 \>ui mother's little income to depend upon. We have all 
 our plans laid. First, we are going to discover this Hubert 
 de Merle, then to show him the picture, and tell him the 
 whole story. We have family letters— yellow old things. 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 79 
 
 folded over, with the address outside, and no envelope— so 
 funny, you can't think 1 no stamps, either— and these wUl 
 prove that our story is a true one. I should think M. de 
 Merle would want to make restitution when he hears all. 
 He would feel that his grandmother had taken an unfair 
 advantage of ours— a little girl, too. Don't you think he 
 would ? " 
 
 "He might," said Reginald dubiously; "but, you see, 
 you are not even sure that he has any existence at all ex- 
 cepting in your mother's imagination. I don't like to damp 
 your ardour by matter-of-fact objections, but you do seem 
 to be building upon a very shadowy foundation. Let me 
 see. This M. de Merle, if he is alive, is a cousin of your 
 mother's, or a half -cousin at any rate, so he must be a kind 
 of second half-cousin of yours 1 " 
 
 "If he acknowledges the cousinship at all. But you 
 know our grandmother was really cast off by all her home 
 connections. So the only credentials we have are the Cheva- 
 lier's portrait and the imitation ruby." 
 
 " But, tell me, why has the idea been taken up just now ? " 
 objected Eeginald. " Did you never discuss it in your 
 father's lifetime ? " 
 
 "Y — yes!" the answer came slowly and with evident 
 reluctance. " We did, but not often. Poor papa ! he was so 
 wonderfully good and kind, but he was rather matter-of- 
 fact. Mother used to tell him he was what she called terre- 
 d-terre, but she never says it of him now. However, I am 
 afraid he looked upon the ruby rather as moonshine. It 
 was his opinion that we had no legal grounds to go upon, 
 and he said we had better not let our imaginations run upon 
 impractical dreams. But mother always kept the story in 
 her mind ; she thinks M. de Merle would be only too glad 
 to repair the wrong he did (or, rather, the wrong his grand- 
 mother did) to our branch of the family." 
 
 " Why doesn't slie write to him about it, then ? " 
 
 " Well, she did once ; but how can one be sure the letter 
 reached ? Besides, what is writing compared with seeing 
 and talking to people themselves ? " 
 
 " I see you are quite of your mother's way of thinking," 
 
80 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 said poor Reginald, less reassirred than ever by this new 
 evidence of what he was inclined to look upon as almost 
 crazy optimism on young Mrs. Frost's part; "and I can't 
 say how grateful I am to you for telling me the whole 
 story. Especially as I must own to being matter-of-fact, 
 too. I can't help it. A primrose by the river's brim was 
 always a yellow primrose to me, and nothing else. But 
 now that you have trusted me so far, will you trust me a 
 httle bit farther ? I have my secret, too. I have carried it 
 about with me longer than you could imagine, and I dare 
 say I would have found the strength to carry it to the end 
 if it were not for this sudden news about your going away. 
 That seems to alter everything. Perhaps I am not justified 
 in telling it to you even now. I cannot say that, but I feel 
 I must let you know it. Who knows ? It might give you 
 the confidence in me I want you so much to feel when you 
 are away, for I could not bear to think it would be out of 
 sight out of mind with you, as far as I am concerned." 
 
 "It could never be that," said Eila, half sadly and half 
 playfully; "I shall have to keep my father confessor in- 
 formed of all I do." 
 
 "Will you do so really?" he cried eagerly; "will you 
 tell me everything that happens to you in your letters ? 
 They will be the only bit of happiness left to me after you 
 are gone. Must I tell you my secret in so many words, or 
 have you not guessed it long ago ? " 
 
 " No ! " she said in low tones, but whether in answer to 
 his first or second question he could not have told. 
 
 " I may tell it you then, though I think you can hardly 
 have helped finding it out for yourself long ago. Women 
 always know when a man feels towards them in that way. 
 You must know that I love you, and that I have loved you 
 for a long time, from the day we met on Mount Wellino-- 
 ton, you remember, and we came down in the snowstorm 
 together.'' 
 
 He paused, as though waiting for some sign of acknowl- 
 edgment on her part. A soft cloud, blown across the moon, 
 and stained with delicate mother-of-pearl tints, had cast a 
 deeper shade around them as he spoke. In the semi-dark- 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 81 
 
 ness lie perceived that she was lifting the muslin-crowned 
 hat to her head. It was as though his confession had 
 warned her that it would be wise to bring their moonlight 
 interview to an abrupt termination. 
 
 " Do say something, dear," he whispered humbly. 
 
 " What is the use ! " she said half plaintively, slipping 
 down from the trunk as he spoke, and standing by his side 
 while she leaned against its projecting branches. "It is a 
 pity you have said what you did. I am so sorry you 
 said it." 
 
 " Sorry ! Why ? " he questioned eagerly. " Why should 
 you be sorry, my dear ? I love you so entirely and utterly 
 — so through and through — you can't tell. I don't think 
 you understand even now. I love you for yourself, Eila ; 
 don't you see what a difference that makes ? I don't love 
 you selfishly — as men are supposed to love — for my own 
 gratification. I know you are out of my reach— as much 
 out of it as»the moon up there in the sky ; but that does not 
 alter the fact. I love you, and I shall go on loving you to 
 the end of the chapter— for time and eternity, if there is an 
 eternity. And what influence do I want my love to have 
 upon your life 2 Tell me that. Do I ask you to do any- 
 thing wrong, or what the world considers wrong ? What 
 return do I ask for a love that will last as long as life itself 
 —that will keep me not only from marrying, but even from 
 looking at another woman as long as you are in the world ? 
 I think you are shaking your head ; I believe you are laugh- 
 ing—I could see your teeth shining just now in the moon- 
 light. Well, laugh away; I know myself, and time will 
 convince you, if nothing else does, that I am telling you 
 the simple truth. What return, I say, do I ask for such a 
 love as this ? Why, only that you should have confidence 
 in me always-aZwa^/s. Do you hear ? Tell me all that 
 concerns you, dear. If you are in trouble, I will do my ut- 
 most to help you. If you need money, I wiU send you my 
 last penny. Supposing you should have an illness, or some 
 accident that spoiled your beauty, you would always be the 
 same to me. I want you to remember that. I go farther 
 still • for I believe if you were to commit a crime, and ail 
 
82 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the world were to throw stones at you, I should not be able 
 to love you any the less. What can I say more 1 " He 
 stopped; then hurriedly: "Yes, there is one thing more; 
 and you will forgive me for saying it, because I love you. 
 I cannot tell how you will manage to steer your course in 
 life. You have no chart to go by, you know; and I see 
 rocks ahead that you can't know anything about. Well, 
 just remember this: Whatever should happen to you, 
 "don't be afraid to tell me, even if you should let someone 
 else tell you what I have told you this evening— someone, 
 we'll say, who takes a different way of telling it from me. 
 If you should— which God forbid !— make shipwreck of 
 your life, don't keep it from me. Don't even let shame 
 itself stand in the way of your coming to me." 
 
 He stopped short again. Eila felt her cheeks bum in the 
 cool night air. Something prompted her to extend her hand ; 
 he seized it, and held it like a vice in his nervous clasp. 
 The pressure, as he wrung it unconsciously in the earnest- 
 ness of his speech, almost made her cry out with the pain. 
 
 " Could you have cared for me a little, my darling 1 " he 
 whispered. " But I have no right to ask you such a ques- 
 tion. You must forgive me ; I hardly know what I am say- 
 ing. What I want to impress upon you is that nothing can 
 ever change my feeling towards you. It seems a rash vow 
 to make, doesn't it ? But I make it fearlessly. I put my- 
 self in mind of the hero of a silly old melodramatic play I 
 saw somewhere once. It was played by a German, I re- 
 member ; he used to come rushing on to the stage at every 
 critical moment with the word, ' Hee-re I am — stanch and 
 true ! ' Well, remember here I am, and don't be afraid to 
 come to me for help. I know you so well, dear — better than 
 you can imagine ; and I have a fatherly and brotherly feel- 
 ing about you just as much as a loverly one. Will you 
 think of this sometimes, if you feel tempted to do anything 
 rash ? Will you say to yourself, ' There's a poor old fellow 
 out there who only lives for wie, and it will break his heart 
 if I do such and such a thing. I will write to him about it 
 first ; perhaps he will find a way to get me what I want.' 
 Will you promise me this, Eila ? " 
 
REGINALD MAKES AN AVOWAL. 83 
 
 All this time her right hand had lain close in his gi-asp. 
 She left it there, and, placing of her own accord her other 
 hand in his disengaged right, stood fronting him, both hands 
 held firmly now within his own. Standing close to him 
 thus, her figure bore the same proportion to his as that of 
 the maid to her Huguenot lover in Millais's beautiful pic- 
 ture. Her eyes were bent ; but she could feel that he was 
 breathing quickly as he waited for her to speak. 
 
 " What would you have me say ? What ought I to say ? " 
 she began at last, hesitating. 
 
 " Say exactly what you feel, my dear. Don't think of 
 ought; only speak as you feel. I love you.'''' 
 
 " Then I will," she said, with sudden resolution ; " I will 
 speak right out for once. No ' shams,' " with a dreary little 
 laugh, " as Carlyle calls them ; only the truth from my 
 heart. I like you to care about me as you do ; it will be a help 
 to me — more than you can imagine. And I care for you, 
 too — you may believe that I do ; but not as you care for me. 
 It is not my fault. I think the power of loving in that way 
 — the faculty of it altogether — has been somehow destroyed 
 in me. I simply can't recall the love I had for my husband. 
 If he were to come back to me cured to-morrow, I should 
 shudder and run away. I have been through experiences 
 you can never imagine. Sometimes I think they have made 
 a monster of me ; for I like to be loved, and I like people to 
 be fond of me. Perhaps the position in which I am placed 
 makes things so difl'erent — the knowing that I am not free 
 to give myself to anyone I might care about. But what you 
 have told me this evening will make a difference indeed. I 
 shall place you apart now from everybody else in the world. 
 I know you are afraid I am not quite to be trusted. Why 
 do you have that feeling about me ? Tell me." 
 
 " Did I say you were not to be trusted ? " he said. " I did 
 not mean you to think that. But you have a curious nature, 
 Eila. It is full of depths for me who have studied it ; and 
 yet there is a lightness about it that would prevent my being 
 astonished at almost anything that might happen to you. 
 If it were not for that quality, you would not be forced to 
 deplore your marriage to-day." 
 
84 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " But I was so much younger,'' she murmured ; and then 
 suddenly, with the gesture of a child who seeks to disarm 
 the reproachful attitude of an over-fond parent, she raised 
 her lips to his. 
 
 " Oh, my darling ! " he said in low, passionate tones — 
 " my darling ! " For an instant's space he held her close 
 pressed to his heart ; then detaching himself with an effort, 
 " Eila, my love ! " he cried, " it is well you are going away." 
 His voice trembled ; he walked away from her in violent 
 agitation, returning once more to her side with rapid foot- 
 steps. " We will go back at once," he said. " There, your 
 hat has fallen off ! " He picked it up in feverish haste, and 
 set it on her head. " What is that saying about ' Qui vent 
 faire I'ange ? ' But never mind the rest. Take my arm, 
 little girl, and hurry along." 
 
 He led her on swiftly in silence for the space of a few 
 moments, until they were close to the gate of Cowa Cottage, 
 visible in the moonlight as a white break to the indistinct 
 outline of thick hedge that ran round the garden. 
 
 "Good-night, and good-bye," he said, and so vanished 
 into the night. 
 
 Eila's cheeks were still burning as she walked slowly up 
 the garden-path beneath the over-arching branches of apple 
 and cherry trees to the veranda, whence the sound of the 
 family voices, raised in argumentative parley, reached her 
 through the darkness. 
 
 "How can I tell what I might feel if I were free!" she 
 repeated to herself. "Does Reginald look upon what has 
 happened this evening as a pledge of something more than 
 friendship, I wonder ? I hope not. How could I help 
 wanting to show that I was moved by the oiler of such de- 
 votion as his ! " 
 
 As she slowly mounted the veranda steps, illumined by 
 the light of a lamp standing upon an outer window-sill, a 
 little girl flew towards her with outstretched arms. 
 
 " Your face is so warm — so warm ! " said the child, draw- 
 ing it down towards her own, with both arms clasped 
 around her sister's neck. " Dick told us Mr. Acton would be 
 with you ; but you are all alone. What will mother say ? 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. 85 
 
 I suppose you ran all the way back from Ivy Cottage when 
 you found it was so dark ? " 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A PECULIAR FAMILY. 
 
 For a family whose ways were peculiar, there could 
 not have been found a more eminently suitable abode (and 
 I say it without any punning intention) that the mountain 
 fastness of Cowa, which was just such a nattiral stronghold 
 as would have been converted, in the days of marauding bar- 
 ons and robber chiefs, into an impregnable citadel. Its in- 
 mates, however, were never driven, even in the earliest and 
 most lawless times, to entrench themselves against such 
 aristocratic aggressors as these. The only historic robbers 
 that Tasmania annals can show are the now well-nigh extinct 
 race of bush-rangers, who a few centuries earlier might pos- 
 sibly have laid the foundations of an antipodean aristocracy, 
 but whose ultimate fate in our more prosaic age was most 
 frequently to be caught and hanged. Had defensive meas- 
 ures, however, been necessary, Cowa would have afforded 
 every facility for making them. The long veranda in front 
 of the house might have served as a bastion, whence it 
 would have been easy to fling stones at the enemy bold 
 enough to climb the wearisome slope to the attack. Even 
 in peaceful Hobart, and in the peaceful occupation of the 
 Clare family, it served as a vantage-ground for purposes of 
 social, if not of warlike, entrenchment. From the veranda 
 a visitor might be descried, as Elijah descried Elisha, from a 
 long way off, and hasty measures taken for planting behind 
 a haystack, if he were not of the order whose coming w:is to 
 be hailed. Similarly, steps might be taken to receive him 
 becomingly, if the inmates decided upon being at home. 
 The ordinary family habiliments were of a kind in which 
 they objected — the girls at least — to being caught. Eila 
 would roam about all day in her faded cotton gown, of 
 
86 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 « 
 
 which the erstwhile hue was almost as difficult to discern as 
 that of the draperies of those archaic polychrome Greek stat- 
 utes that have recently been unearthed upon the Acropolis, 
 to the great joy of archaeologists. She was rarely seen, it is 
 true, without a magnificent rose, or bunch of roses, stuck in 
 her waistband, dangling from her collar, or hairpinned be- 
 hind her ear ; but even South Sea belles will array them- 
 selves in flowers, and in all other respects their attire is, as 
 we know, of the most elementary and casual description. 
 Mamy affected blouses in season and out of season ; they 
 dated from the epoch when her dress had followed the same 
 lines as her brother Dick's, and she would not abandon 
 them now, neither would she forswear the boy's cricket- 
 ing-belt that held them round her supple waist. It was 
 in a garment of this description, frayed and strawberry- 
 stained, that she had received and refused her first offer of 
 marriage. 
 
 Truca, rendered defenceless by reason of her youth and 
 inexperience, was fain to accept the heritage of the worn- 
 out, washed-out frocks of mother and sisters. Cut short — 
 much shorter than she liked — the coloured prints that had 
 aired their pristine freshness on the persons of Mrs. Clare 
 and her elder daughters might be seen whisking about the 
 place round Truca's stockinged calves throughout all the 
 seasons of the ensuing year. Truca's only thought in con- 
 nection with her personal appearance, the one evidence of 
 self-consciousness that she had inherited from Eve after the 
 Fall, was shown in her sensitiveness upon the score of the 
 plumpness of her nether extrenaities. She cared no more 
 for the make of her dresses or the browning of her neck 
 than a lily of the field or a gipsy ; but a system of banter- 
 ing applied to the calves would have appealed to her keen- 
 est sympathies. Her sisters and brothers made their girth 
 and solidity the subject of much banter. They were known 
 in the family as the champagne bottles, and the little girl 
 never went out without being weighed down by the thought 
 that the passers-by were laughing at them. Knowing that 
 this was her tender point, the family showed the considera- 
 tion usual in families by levelling pleasantries at them upon 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. g«. 
 
 all occasions, until the desire to be grown up and to "so 
 into" long dresses took ardent possession of Truca's little 
 soul. She had her metaphysical moods like the rest and 
 was still m the lisping stage when .she asked piteously'why 
 God "thent little babies into the world when they couldn't 
 tell if they wanted to come." She possessed a collection of 
 small wooden dolls, with which she would play on rainy 
 days after a fashion of her own. With their aid she would 
 readjust the recent chapters of history ,she had learned turn- 
 ing Lady Jane Grey into the Queen of England, in lieu of 
 beheading her; while bloody Queen Mary was bound to a 
 slate-pencil stuck upright on a collection of bits of red tinfoil 
 stripped from the necks of old wine-bottles, and supposed to 
 represent the stake and faggots, to which poetical justice, 
 dealt out by Truca, would have condemned her. Her fa- 
 vourite diversion, however, was to make everybody repent 
 and be good— even to the devil, represented by a black doll 
 enveloped in scarlet flannel, like a fireman, with a black 
 worsted tail. But this pastime was only indulged in on 
 days of sleet and rain, for Truca, like the rest of the family, 
 lived in the open air, and slept in it too, when the nights 
 were unduly warm. Her favourite friend and WDmpanion 
 after her elder sister, who taught her her lessons, was her 
 little Jersey cow, between whom and herself there existed 
 the perfect understanding that only mutual confidence can 
 engender. What with the blouses, the faded cottons, and 
 Dick's sandalled feet, the family at Cowa regarded an un- 
 expected visitor very much as simple Galilee must have re- 
 garded the Assyrian who came down like a wolf on the fold, 
 with his cohorts gleaming in purple and gold. Hence the 
 veranda was invaluable as a post of observation. There was 
 always time before the arrival of the enemy to make a hur- 
 ried clearance of litter, to throw a becoming piece of crewel- 
 work (that was the merest stage adjunct) upon the veranda- 
 table, in lieu of the stocking in process of darning, or to 
 substitute a school-prize of Longfellow's Poems for the 
 heterodox book in course of reading. There was time for 
 this and more, for it was a long pull and a strong pull up 
 the hill ; and even the least enthusiastic admirer of Nature 
 
88 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 found frequent occasion to pause and gaze upon the view in 
 the course of the ascent. 
 
 Ajiother advantage in the position of the homestead was 
 the facility it afforded for retrieving slips of memory. The 
 family dwelt, as we have seen, very much in the clouds— 
 metaphorically as well as actually — and it was no xmusual 
 thing for the person who was going into town for the express 
 purpose of posting the letters to leave them lying upon 
 the first chair to hand. When this was the case, a far- 
 reaching " coo-ee " from the veranda would stop the emis- 
 sary half-way to town, and Truca would skip down the hill 
 in his wake, waving the letters on high, with the speed of a 
 fugitive rahbit. Signals of recognition might also be held 
 out to a person returning from town almost before a " coo- 
 ee " could reach his ears, and questions as to whether the 
 bag of penny tarts, to serve in lieu of pudding, had been 
 purchased might be telegraphically conveyed ; while signals 
 of distress might be held out, should the answer prove to be 
 in the negative. With such advantages as these to boast of, 
 it is small wonder that Cowa was esteemed by its inmates, 
 in spite of its inaccessibility, and perhaps by reason of it, 
 as the mjjst convenient place of residence in the w^orld. 
 There was only Eila who was occasionally heard to lament 
 that then' callers were so limited in number. It was in the 
 summer-time alone that they made their appearance, when 
 the men-of-war lay at anchor in the harbour, and the season 
 of strawberries and strangers was in full swing. Then pass- 
 ing friends among the officers, or some chance acquaintance 
 from a neighbouring colony, would make their way up the 
 hill uninvited, and, with Eila for a guide (she knew every 
 stone and landmark upon the surrounding heights), and the 
 younger tribe for counter-guides (since every one had a dif- 
 ferent road, leading in a different direction, to uphold), the 
 party would make expeditions to the mountain fastnesses in 
 the neighbourhood of Cowa, carrying, the one a kettle to 
 be boiled for tea-making purposes, the other an unlimited 
 supply of matches for kindling the fire, to be built up of 
 scattered brushwood. Such acquaintances as joined in these 
 expeditions were welcome to all, for they came because they 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. 89 
 
 liked to come ; and more than one carried away a pang of 
 regret for the "might-have-been" after picnicking with Eila 
 and her brothers and sisters upon the purple heights of 
 Knocklofty. 
 
 But, well as the Clares loved their home, they loved the 
 land beyond the seas that they had never seen even better. 
 From their earliest infancy they had been imbued with the 
 belief that Europe was the earthly type of that " better land " 
 which the '' eye of man hath not seen, nor his imagination 
 conceived." Though the finality of their mother's judgment 
 respecting all things in heaven and earth had become a little 
 fallible to them since they had arrived at years of discretion, 
 they gave eager credence to her pictures of life in the Old 
 World. To shake the dust of Hobart off their feet, and see 
 the strange, enchanted regions she had described to them, 
 wherein, according to Reginald's ironical simile, was to be 
 found, as in Plato's republic, the exemplar, or archetype, of 
 everything they saw — as through a glass darkly — in Tasma- 
 nia, was the one hope and desire of their lives. None but 
 Eila, who had learned experience with her one year of house- 
 keeping in Victoria, gave thought to their want of means. 
 Whether they imagined that, like Whittington, they would 
 pick up nuggets on the London pavements, or that they had 
 a vague impression that they would inhale sustenance with 
 the very air of European cities, it would be difficult to say. 
 Mrs. Clare's enthusiasm had spread to her children almost 
 as soon as they could speak. From the cradle upwards they 
 had been taught to look upon the land of their birth — for 
 which they had, nevertheless, the instinctive affection that 
 childish associations engender — as a place of exile and dur- 
 ance vile. It would have been against Nature — against 
 child-nature, at least — not to cherish a fondness for the wild 
 hills, the great sloping paddocks, the haystacks, the apple- 
 trees, the cows, the pigs, the dogs, the fowls, and the flowers, 
 that had been familiar facts in their lives as far back as they 
 could remember. But they set no conscious value upon 
 these, supposing that they formed part of the normal con- 
 ditions of life, in the same way as the air and the sunshine 
 form part of it. When visitors from England admired the 
 
90 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 magnificent view to be seen from the Oowa veranda, and 
 expatiated upon the transparent air, and the clear-cut out- 
 line of the mountain range that bordered the sapphire vsraters 
 of the harbour, the family vs^ould listen to such comments 
 with wondering incredulity. Had not their mother told 
 them there were no trees, no grass, no sylvan beauties here 
 that could gladden a cultivated eye ? What could people 
 who had seen the ancestral parks of England find to admire 
 in the vsdld gorges of Knocklofty ? Their secret conviction 
 was that people admired the view to please them, just as 
 they declared that the Cowa strawberries of Willie's plant- 
 ing were the finest they had tasted. They believed that to 
 have been born and brought up in the colonies was to have 
 endured an exceptionally hard fate. But now, at last, the 
 prospect of escaping from their southern Siberia seemed 
 likely to be realized, and, as Eila had told Reginald, all their 
 thoughts, all their dreams, all their talk, converged to the 
 one topic of their journey. 
 
 The day after Eila's visit to Ivy Cottage the family gath- 
 ered in the veranda, where Willie was waiting with hammer 
 and nails in front of a large packing-case. Looking at them 
 in a group, you would have seen at a glance why the epithet 
 of " peculiar " was applied to them, for there was an indefin- 
 able suggestion of something foreign, exotic, and Creole in 
 the appearance of each and all. 
 
 Mrs. Clare looked, at a first glance, almost as young as 
 her daughters. Like Lady Jane in the " Ingoldsby Legends,'' 
 she was tall and slim, and possessed the kind of shoulders 
 for which shawls must surely have been invented before 
 Fashion had decreed that shoulders should be made to look 
 high and square. Her hair was black and shiny, and lay 
 smoothly against the sides of a classically-shaped head. It 
 was only upon closer inspection that the sallow fixity of 
 her complexion accused, as the French say, her maturer 
 years. Her neck had lines that are not seen in the necks of 
 younger women, showing that Time was already tightening 
 his fingers around it. Father Time, as he is undeservedly 
 called, is not unlike certain earthly fathers, who are only 
 caressing to their offspring in early youth, and who press 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. 91 
 
 heavily upon them as they advance to years of discretion. 
 The longer we live, indeed, the harder he lays his hand upon 
 us, until his rude touch effaces well-nigh all the graces he 
 fashioned for us so lavishly at the outset. Mrs. Clare's face 
 was agreeable to look upon, in spite of its sallowness. The 
 eyes were bright and dark ; yet there was something un- 
 reachable about them, and they could gaze at nothing with 
 the obstinate intensity of expression of a visionary. The 
 profile view of the features betrayed a certain flatness, sug- 
 gestive of Japanese or Mongolian origin. The young Clares 
 adored their mother, but from an early age there had been 
 a tacit understanding among them that her moods were 
 not to be depended upon, and that mother's way was like 
 nobody else's way. Her opinions, as Dick had declared, rep- 
 resented an unknown quantity. It would almost have seemed 
 as though each branch of her widely-diverging ancestors 
 exercised a kind of supremacy over her in turn. There were 
 days when she had the quick intelligence and the constitu- 
 tional scepticism of her grandfather, the Chevalier; other 
 days when the superstitious instincts transmitted by the 
 Begum appeared to take the upper hand. Upon yet other 
 occasions the fund of conscientious zeal she had inherited 
 from the Unitarian minister, her father, would a.ssert itself 
 aggressively, and she would set every member of the house- 
 hold hard at work upon some entirely unprofitable task. In 
 one respect she was like more ordinary mothers all the world 
 over, in that she was entirely convinced of the swan-like 
 nature of each and all of her goslings. Dick, however, was 
 her favourite, for Dick and she saw the world through al- 
 most similar glasses. When these two walked out together, 
 people would look after them in the streets, and the uncom- 
 prehending and uneducated would laugh. Dick's black hair 
 hung in pot-hooks round his neck. No persuasions could 
 induce him to have it cut ; and his mother had a fancy for 
 putting on a ribbon or an appendage that falsified all the 
 rest of her attire. They rarely walked out together without 
 going through a preliminary scene with Eila, in which, by 
 dint of coaxing, scolding, and, if the truth must be told, of 
 shedding one or two tears of genuine vexation, she persuaded 
 7 
 
92 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 them to allow her to make them look respectable. Dick and 
 his mother assimilated the newest doctrines and theories of 
 the day, and applied them in ways, and carried them to 
 lengths, that would have greatly astonished their origi- 
 nators. 
 
 Willie and Mamy were known as the fair ones of the 
 family, the phrase being applied strictly to the hue of their 
 skins, for Willie possessed but a modified share of his sister's 
 good looks. He was shorter, sturdier, and more Saxon-look- 
 ing than the rest. It was his constant endeavour to sit upon 
 Dick, who though taller, and possessing more promise of 
 moustache in the dark down upon his upper lip, was two 
 years younger than himself. But Dick was self-assiored with 
 the supreme self-assurance of a " home-keeping " youth, and 
 would not allow himself to be sat upon. He treated his 
 elder brother with a kind of lofty condescension, against 
 which neither words nor fists could prevail, and laid down 
 the law to his mother and sisters in turn. His twin sister, 
 Mamy, was his disciple and his ally. Between this pair 
 there existed the curious community of sensation that is 
 only to be found in twins. In their childish days to punish 
 one was to punish both, and as they grew up, Mamy seemed 
 to be half boy, and Dick to be half girl, when they were to- 
 gether. The family nose was the weak point, and was much 
 the same in all. It was not a finely-turned feature, and was 
 marrred by a tendency to wide-spread nostrils. Dick's lips 
 were also somewhat thick, but this defect was redeemed by 
 the gleam of such teeth as only the dark-skinned races can 
 show when he smiled. 
 
 Truca was an autumn bud. She had been the surprise 
 baby of the band, and so far seemed destined to figure as the 
 ugly duckling in respect of her outward appearance. The 
 defective nose was exaggerated in her case into a snub, and 
 her mouth was larger than was strictly becoming. There 
 was a warm rustiness of hue observable in her hau-, her eyes, 
 and her complexion, which seemed to invest her with a kind 
 of bronze aureole when she sat, like Queen Anne, in the sun. 
 She had a highly-strung, impressionable nature, and would 
 pause in her play at a very early age to run and be kissed by 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. 
 
 93 
 
 mother or sisters, with a wistful expression in her eyes of 
 Vandyck brown, that seemed to ask for reassurance against 
 the thoughts reflected in them. The Phantom of Feai- lurks 
 behind every mystery, and what is the very consciousness 
 of life itself but the most crushing of mysteries to the dawn- 
 ing intelligence of a child ? Nevertheless, there were times 
 when Truca enjoyed running hither and thither in the un- 
 conscious joy of being, as behoves children of her age ; for, 
 like Wordsworth's little maid, she " felt her life in every 
 limb," and disported herself in the simshine in obedience to 
 the law of her nature as instinctively as a Shetland pony or 
 a young kitten. 
 
 That there was a solemn function to be fulfilled in the 
 veranda this afternoon was evident from the fact that the 
 entire family was assembled there. The crude light of the 
 afternoon sun illumined the group, irradiating the faces of 
 the younger members and hardening that of their mother, 
 for the sun is masculine and knows how to flatter youth, 
 while he is sometimes unnecessarily severe upon those who 
 have left it behind. The same light shone down upon the 
 large packing-case, and upon an oil-painting that lay at the 
 bottom of it ; but here its effects were disastrous, for it con- 
 verted the varnished surface into indiscriminate splotches of 
 shininess. The portrait of the Chevalier had been solemnly 
 taken down from its place of honour on the wall, and was 
 about to be nailed down by Willie in presence of the Cheva- 
 lier's descendants. 
 
 " Mind the face ! " said Mrs. Clare fearfully. " Bring me 
 some ragg, Eila. We might lay them over it before the cover 
 goes on." 
 
 " He'll come out like a mummy ! " observed Dick, as the 
 girls brought their contribution of calico-strips and laid them 
 carefully over the painting. " No ! I know : he's hke a fakir, 
 and we're going to bury him for three months, and then 
 bring him to life again to work a miracle for us." 
 
 " It will be a miracle indeed, if he gets us the ruby," said 
 Eila. She was kneeling by the case and gently wiping the 
 picture before hiding it from view. " Eyes, look your last ! 
 What a curious thing ! " she added : " even when he is lying 
 
94 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 on his back his eyes seem to follow us about just as they did 
 when he hung on the wall ; but how strange and crusty the 
 cheeks look when you are quite close to them ! I wonder 
 whether the painting can have any intrinsic value of its 
 own." 
 
 " I wonder ! " echoed Willie. " Say, mother, has the old 
 man any market value, do you think ? " 
 
 " Market value ! " echoed Mrs. Clare indignantly ; " what 
 a way to speak of your great-grandfather, Willie ! You are 
 as bad as the young spendthrift in the play who wanted to 
 sell his ancestors." 
 
 " Well, we're going to sell the Chevalier for what he'll 
 fetch, aren'i we ? " 
 
 " Nothing of the kind," rejoined his mother ; " we're not 
 going to part with him out of the family. I have always 
 looked upon that picture as a kind of pledge, a proof that we 
 are the rightful heirs of the ruby your great-grandfather 
 left to your grandmother — my very own mother. The por- 
 trait will pass into the hands of another branch of the family, 
 but only for a time, I hope. Dick will buy it back for us 
 before long." 
 
 Dick's only comment upon this remark was a self-confi- 
 dent smile. It was a generally accepted thing in the family 
 that Dick's talent would enable him to become rich speedily. 
 A few months under some master in London or Paris, just 
 to get his hand in, and then he would do busts at the rate at 
 which the greatest sculptors did them, and make a rapid 
 fortune. 
 
 "I expect the picture has a value of its own, all the 
 same," he said, in an assured voice. 
 
 "You may be sure it has," asserted Mrs. Clare. "Of 
 course, there is nobody here who could appreciate it ; but, I 
 believe, any sum would be given for it at home. What was 
 that you were telling me the other day, Willie, about sev- 
 enty thousand pounds being paid for some old picture- 
 nothing but a portrait, too ? or was it seventeen ? It was 
 seven something, I know." 
 
 "It was seventy," said Willie— " seventy thousand 
 pounds ; but it was the work of an old master." 
 
A PECULIAR FAMILY. 
 
 95 
 
 " Well, the Chevalier is getting to be an old master, isn't 
 he, mother?" said Mamy, moved by a desire to conciliate 
 her favourite brother. " Isn't it more than a hundred years 
 old?" 
 
 " What ! older than the oldest building in Tasmania ? " 
 said Eila ? " How wonderful that would seem ! " 
 
 " But not so old as the Tower we're going to see in Eng- 
 land," chanted Truca— " the Tower and the block. Oh, I do 
 feel so impatient ; I want to be there now ! " 
 
 "But what would we do if Mr. de Merle would have 
 nothing to say to us when we get home ? " put in Eila medi- 
 tatively. 
 
 " No risk of that when we've made ourselves known to 
 him," said Mrs. Clare confidently; "my only fear is that he 
 will want to adopt all of you children at once, and I would 
 rather we kept our independence. Now, Willie, you may 
 close up the case ; the picture is protected enough, I think." 
 
 There was a moment of silence as the boys adjusted the 
 cover and Willie hammered in the first nail. It was really 
 as Dick had said, as though they were nailing up the Chev- 
 alier in his coffin. He had been a living presence among 
 them for as long as they could remember. From the time 
 that they had been aware of knowing right from wrong, his 
 face had always seemed to wear a stern or a smiling expres- 
 sion, following the verdict uttered by their separate con- 
 sciences. He was a link, too, with that strange, impalpable 
 past whose existence it was so hard to realize in Tasmania. 
 Of their ancestors on their father's side they had no knowl- 
 edge, and very little curiosity. Mrs. Clare's individuality 
 had so effectually impressed itself upon her children, that 
 they constituted what might be called a one-sided progeny. 
 She had kept for herself the part of the queen bee in the 
 domestic hive, and though Mr. Clare had been no drone, 
 and had worked with patient self-effacement to secure his 
 family from want, he had been constrained to play what is 
 commonly called " second fiddle " to his spouse. His quiet, 
 kindly, matter-of-fact presence had been missed and mourned 
 for, but not passionately yearned after. The children had 
 never felt about their father as they felt about their mother. 
 
96 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 that life would not be possible without him. They had 
 never cared to hoar about the humdrum records of his early 
 life at the Custom House in Tasmania. They were secretly 
 a little ashamed of their connection with his brother, their 
 uncle, who was nothing but a homely country store-keeper 
 living near Oatlands. Willie had been wont to spend his 
 holidays with this relative in his school-days, and would 
 have liked to hold forth upon the incidents of his stay on 
 his return, to boast of the opossums he had shot, and the 
 fences he had jumped, and the bush-buggy he had driven 
 round with half -chests of tea and boxes of soap and candles 
 to be left at the houses of the customers. But his mother's 
 face had checked the flow of his narrative. It made him 
 think, he could not tell why, of the Chevalier's queue and 
 sword. 
 
 Uncle William, for his part, rarely came to see them. 
 He had come to town for his brother's funeral, and would 
 have taken Willie back with him, and made him succeed to 
 the business, had he been allowed. But Mrs. Clare's recep- 
 tion of the proposal had too plainly shown him that it was a 
 mistake to have proffered it. Uncle William went away 
 sooner than he had intended, and thenceforth the family 
 heard but little of him. He was a childless widower, and 
 was not supposed to be more than just " comfortable." Mrs. 
 Clare spoke of his calling with disdain. The children had 
 inferred early, from their mother's manner, that it was a 
 very second-rate profession ; and though they had nothing 
 against their Uncle William, who was, if possible, quieter 
 and more taciturn than their father, and who seemed kindly 
 disposed towards them, they saw him^ depart to his country 
 store without regret. 
 
 "Well, that's done,'' said Willie, in tones of triumph, as 
 he hammered the last nail in with a vigorous hand; "I 
 wonder when and where we shall open the case again ? " 
 
 " It's almost a pity we didn't have a photograph taken of 
 the Chevalier," said Eila; "for if anything happens to him 
 on the way, all our journey would be for nothing." 
 
 " Do you call it nothing to see Europe ? " said Mamy re- 
 proachfully. 
 
TUB WARDENS. 
 
 97 
 
 " We can't see much -without money," said her sister, in 
 despondent tones. " None of you seem to consider that we 
 shall have barely enough to live upon at home." 
 
 "If England is anything like what I remember it," said 
 Mrs. Clare hopefully, " a penny there would go as far as a 
 shilling out here. Dear me ! when I remember the quan- 
 tities of things one could get for a shilling I There seemed 
 to be no end to them. And railway travelling, too. How 
 cheap it was ! " 
 
 " I wonder anyone lives here at all," said Mamy ; '' and 
 such rich people, too." 
 
 " They would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, 
 I suppose," said Dick. "I say, I think I see a carriage com- 
 ing up the hill. If it's any of your fine visitors, Eila, I'll 
 clear out ; " and he whistled to a large retriever that lay 
 tapping its tail in idle content on the veranda boards, and 
 walked away. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE WARDENS. 
 
 The carriage to which Dick had called his sister's atten- 
 tion, and which might be descried toiling up the hill, was 
 recognised as that of the Wardens. It had the effect of 
 scattering the family in all directions. 
 
 Mamy ran away, and took refuge in the cottage of an 
 old pensioner of the family called Mrs. Hunter. She had 
 two motives for hiding — one that there were holes in the 
 elbow of her blouse ;, the other that Sidney Warden, who 
 had taken it into his head to ask her to marry him, might 
 repeat his offer, and worldly-minded Eila would be vexed 
 with her if she said " No " a second time. 
 
 Eila meanwhile ran hither and thither, putting things 
 into place, and carrying on her own toilette operations in 
 an ambulant fashion at the same time. She had already 
 seen that Mrs. Warden was accompanied by her son and 
 daughter. The former had developed into the thickset, 
 
98 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 sturdy-looking youth foreshadowed in the boy. There was 
 a suggestion of latent resistance in his whole personality — 
 even to his hair, which was hopelessly straight and harsh. 
 It stuck out like a brush, and refused to lie smooth. The 
 Clares had long ago decided that Sydney was exactly like 
 his hair, though they were fond of him in their own way. 
 As for Eila, the thought that this heir of thousands of acres 
 was perverse little Mamy's wooer set a halo round his 
 stubbly locks they had never worn before. She ran down 
 the veranda steps to welcome the *trio as they arrived, and 
 usher them to seats on the veranda. In Lucy, who was two 
 or three years older than herself, she had a friend who be- 
 longed to the girlish period of her life. While she herself 
 had been tossed about in the worst of life's storms, Lucy 
 had remained moored in the quiet home haven. She was a 
 refined edition of her brother in her outward appearance 
 and demeanour, taller and better formed than he. Her 
 mouse-coloured hair, guiltless of a fringe, was turned 
 smoothly back from her delicate temples, surmounted by 
 a gray straw hat wreathed with crimson roses. The rustle 
 of her skirt, over which some soft gray material, warmed by 
 a skilful intermingling of Oriental stripes, hung in such 
 folds as only a Paris dressmaker might be supposed capable 
 of arranging, sounded imposingly as she walked along. 
 Though not five-and-twenty, she had none of the irresistible 
 attractiveness of youth. One could almost imagine that she 
 had looked as a child, and that she might yet look as an old 
 woman, much as she did now ; that she must keep through 
 life the same unyouthfulness of complexion, the same 
 neatly-turned nose and mouth, the same clear gray eyes and 
 pencilled brows (these brows were Lucy's one beauty), the 
 same unchanging serenity of expression. Loyal and honest 
 that expression denoted her to be. There are faces which, 
 for all their sweetness and softness, do not inspire us with 
 absolute confidence. We have the feeling that perhaps if 
 their owners were subjected to the test proposed by the 
 whimsical old gentleman to the lady who refused a delicacy 
 handed to her in public, " But if you were alone with it, 
 madam ? " we should not be entirely reassured as to the re- 
 
THE WARDENS. 99 
 
 suit. No such misgiving occurred to those who studied 
 Lucy Warden's face. Her straightforward eyes, that were 
 not without a hint of hardness in their direct glance, might 
 have merited the epithet "true as steel." Eila admired 
 Lucy ; but she was conscious, though she could not always 
 have told why, of not being entirely at ease in her presence. 
 There was something in the expression of Lucy's eyes that 
 rendered her vaguely uncomfortable at times. She had a 
 secret notion that if her conduct should fall short of Lucy's 
 standard, the latter would not make sufficient allowances 
 for her. Reginald would do so, and he was quite as honourable 
 in his way as Lucy. But that is the difference between being 
 judged by a man and a woman, thought Eila — ^the one takes 
 account of the person and the circumstances as well as the 
 action ; the other just approves or condemns the action by 
 itself. " I am glad that women don't sit on the bench, after 
 all," she added mentally, " though, of course, I uphold their 
 being doctors and lawyers upon principle." 
 
 The ostensible reason of Mrs. Warden's visit was to find 
 out from her dear young friends whether there was any 
 truth in the report that they were going home. The real 
 reason was that, at a dinner at Grovermnent House the pre- 
 ceding evening, she had heard a Sydney judge and his wife 
 speak with enthusiasm of the picturesque aspect of the Cowa 
 veranda, and refer to young Mrs. Frost as a really charm- 
 ing person. This reminded her that she had owed a call to 
 the mother of the charming person ever since the preceding 
 autumn. She had no compunction about taking Sydney 
 with her. From the time that he had been a small and 
 sulky-looking school-boy, he had been given the liberty of 
 the Cowa demesne, where he felt himself, indeed, far more 
 at home than in the fashionable atmosphere in which he 
 had been nurtured. His mother took it for granted that he 
 was the friend of the Clare boys rather than the girls. Even 
 when he had reached his twentieth year, no suspicion of the 
 real cause of his affection for Cowa crossed her mind. 
 
 After all, the otherwise most dangerous attraction to be 
 found there was married and harmless, and the rest of the 
 inmates were all children together. Even had Mrs. Warden 
 
100 NOT COLTNTING THE COST. 
 
 suspected her son of expending his calf-love upon young 
 Mr*. Frost, the thought would not have been displeasing to 
 her. She was what is called a moral woman, and a strict 
 church-goer ; but she had a naive belief that the only end 
 for which other people existed was to be useful to her and 
 hers. It might be as well that Sydney should have a safety- 
 valve of some kind pending the time when it would be in- 
 cumbent upon his mother to find some nice, rich, well-con- 
 nected, pious, and otherwise eligible young woman for his 
 wife. In the meantime, it was only natural that he should 
 like to keep up his intimacy with friends of his own age 
 with whom he had been on rough-and-tumble terms almost 
 as long as he could remember. 
 
 " It is really true, then, that you are going home ? " asked 
 Mrs. Warden, after she had disposed herself ceremoniously 
 on the chair in the veranda that Truca had dragged from 
 one of the bedrooms when the carriage was seen approach- 
 ing. " So nice, to be sure ! I quite long to be going, too. I 
 suppose we shall have to make up our minds to it one of 
 these days. It is quite the thing to take one's girls home to 
 be presented now. But Lucy doesn't seem to care about it 
 — do you, Lucy ? " 
 
 " I ? not at all ! " said the young lady addressed, in a 
 quiet, decided tone that matched with her expression. 
 
 She had been fixing Eila with her steadfast eyes, not 
 with any air of vulgar curiosity, but with a kind of scruti- 
 nizing, interested gaze that seemed to have some definite 
 object in view. Eila was glad when this intent glance was 
 diverted from her. 
 
 " Mamy and I are not likely to have the chance of refus- 
 ing to go to Court," she said, laughing — she was not, how- 
 ever, entirely at her ease, for Lucy's look and Mrs. Warden's 
 four guinea bonnet combined had a somewhat paralyzing 
 effect—" for that is the last thing that is likely to befall us." 
 
 " Oh, but you will be in time for the London season ! " 
 said Mrs. Warden, with half -implied reproach in her tones. 
 " I was reading the list of the presentations in the Lady of 
 last year, and there was a special mention of the Australian 
 contingent of belles." 
 
THE WARDENS. 101 
 
 Eila smiled again, a little sadly this time. 
 
 " We shan't be able to fefPord much gaiety, I think," she 
 said. " We are going in a sailing vessel, too ; so it may be 
 any time before we arrive. And, really, the great reason 
 of our going is to get proper lessons for Mamy and Dick. 
 Mother thinks Mamy's voice is worth cultivating, and Dick 
 wants to carry on his art studies in Europe in earnest.'' 
 
 " His art studies ! " echoed Mrs. Warden, with feigned 
 interest ; "you don't say so ! We have friends who went to 
 Paris last year to take lessons in painting, too. Fancy going 
 to Paris for nothing but that! The Miss Flyte-Smythes. 
 Lucy had a letter from the eldest the other day. It seems 
 they copy from living models undressed — undraped, I think 
 they call it. It sounds quite shocking, you know. Still, it 
 seems to be the thing at home, and Mr. and Mrs. Flyte- 
 Smythe are most particular people — very highly connected^ 
 too, in London, I am told ; so I suppose there is nothing to 
 say." 
 
 " Have they exhibited, do you know ? " said Eila, feeling 
 something was expected of her. 
 
 The ethics of art was a subject that she did not see her 
 way to discussing with Mrs. Warden and her son and 
 daughter, though it was just the kind that the family de- 
 bating society would have loved to handle. 
 
 " I believe they have, and they work as hard as though 
 they had to make their living by it ; that is the most extraor- 
 dinary part of it.'' 
 
 Mrs. Warden sighed, as though in regret at the aberra- 
 tion of her friends, and Sydney broke in with a husky-voiced 
 inquiry respecting the whereabouts of the others. 
 
 " I'm not sure that my mother and Dick are at home," 
 said Eila— she had reasons for believing that tliey had shut 
 themselves up in one of the back-rooms ; " but Mamy should 
 be somewhere about ; she ran over to old Mrs. Hunter's a 
 few minutes ago." 
 
 Sydney involuntarily turned his head in the direction of 
 the cottage, and Lucy said in her staid voice : 
 
 "Old Mrs. Hunter is your sister's protegee, isn't she? 
 Doesn't she go and read to her sometimes ? " 
 
102 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "Not often," said Eila. A transient gleam of mirth, 
 promptly repressed, flaslied from 'her soft dark eyes. "I am 
 afraid she thinks it is better fun to hear her talk. We did 
 try the plan of reading her a story once, but she was so dis- 
 gusted when she heard it was all a make-up we never tried 
 it again. She said if that was all people got their letters for 
 they'd better leave it alone. There were lies enough in the 
 world without looking for 'em in a book." 
 
 Lucy laughed. 
 
 " She is quite a character, isn't she ? What will she do 
 when you are all gone away, I wonder ? By-the-by, what 
 vessel are you going in ? " 
 
 "The Queen of the South;" and Eila nodded with an 
 air of proprietorship towards the barque lying a little w^ay 
 down the wharf in the far distance, with bare masts reflected 
 in the glassy harbour. 
 
 " The Queen of the South ! " echoed Lucy in dismayed 
 tones ; " that will be making a long journey of it. I suppose 
 it will take twice as long as going by the mail ? " 
 
 "Three times, I dare say," said Eila complacently ; "but 
 what does that matter when one has plenty of time to lose ? 
 You see, the passage does not cost half so much as by the 
 mail, and then we shall be well found all the time, as the 
 first mate was careful to remind us when we were looking 
 over the vessel the other day." 
 
 Lucy said nothing; she was a little puzzled by Eila's 
 manner, and rather inclined to wonder at the ambition that 
 could prompt her friends to desire to see the world when it 
 could only be accomplished under such uncomfortable con- 
 ditions as these. Sydney was fidgeting about, obviously 
 anxious to be on the move. His secret gratitude to Eila 
 was unbounded when she said suddenly : 
 
 " I wish you would call Mamy from old Mrs. Hunter's, 
 if you don't mind the trouble, Sydney. She would be sorry 
 to miss seeing Lucy and wishing her good-bye." 
 
 Sydney started up with alacrity, knocking down a flower- 
 stand in his haste. Before he had picked it up Lucy was on 
 her feet as well. 
 
 " I want to go too," she said. " I have been neglecting 
 
THE WARDENS. 103 
 
 old Mrs. Hunter dreadfully lately. Come along, Eila, and 
 leave mamma to admire the view by herself." 
 
 Eila protested, but Mrs. Warden added her persuasions 
 to her daughter's. There was nothing in the world she 
 would prefer, she declared, to a quiet rest in this most 
 charming spot, while the jtoung people went upon their 
 errand of charity. She even pretended to drive Eila play- 
 fully away with her thickly-embroidered gold and mauve 
 parasol. After this there was nothing for it but to yield, 
 and the trio set off, Eila walking hatless between the 
 brother and sister on their way to the old woman's cottage. 
 
 Mrs. Hunter's abode was situated in a spot that a mon- 
 arch, or, rather, an artist, might have coveted for his in- 
 habiting. Across the rugged descending slopes and the 
 intervening clusters of buildings the winding waters of the 
 Derwent lay broad and sparkling like a sapphire shield 
 undqr the afternoon sun. Seen from this height, the river 
 looked like a broad-bosomed lake, set round with royal 
 mountains. To the right lay the gentle slopes of Mount 
 Nelson, whose long descending sides were broken in places 
 by some high-perched homestead, some patch of green 
 civilization in the midst of the darker vegetation around. 
 To the left Mount Direction reared its craggy steeps sky- 
 ward, and billowy hills, clothed with sombre scrub, rolled 
 away to the horizon; while almost behind the cottage, 
 though plainly visible from it, the frowning mass of 
 mighty Mount Wellington loomed dark and distinct 
 against the shining sky. With a sanatorium of Nature's 
 own making to live in, and the liberal dole that she re- 
 ceived from public and private sources to subsist upon, old 
 Mrs. Hunter's latter end was better than her first. Eila 
 hurried on, ostensibly to prepare her for the visit, though 
 in reality to see that Mamy did not attempt to make her 
 escape by the back-door. The dwelling consisted of a sin- 
 gle room, which was scrupulously clean. Mrs. Hunter, it 
 was well known, was what another euphonious colonial 
 term calls an " old hand," and she maintained the orderly 
 habits she had acquired at the expense of the State. The 
 narrow bed in the corner was covered by a clean patch- 
 
104 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 work quilt. There was even an attempt at decoration in 
 the arrangement of some large shells that flanked the tin 
 basin and bit of cracked looking-glass on the shelf. There 
 were woodcuts from old periodicals pinned against the wall. 
 As Eila approached the cottage, she heard the cracked voice 
 of the old woman recounting in tremulous tones the ex- 
 ploits and shortcomings of her fowls. 
 
 " An' Mrs. Morris, if you'll believe me, dear, 'as been an' 
 het 'er own heggs ; an' if your ma '11 buy 'er hofP me, she 
 shall 'ave 'er cheap ; an' Oh, mercy. Lard, me back ! " 
 
 The sudden ejaculation and the contortion that accom- 
 panied it were caused by the unexpected appearance of 
 Ella's black merino skirt at the open door. 
 
 " It's only me," said the owner of the skirt, laughing and 
 holding out her firm smooth hand, which the old woman 
 seized in her skinny brown claw and mumbled at effusive- 
 ly, " so don't throw away your effect, Mrs. Hunter ; keep it 
 for Miss Warden, who will be here in another minute." 
 
 " The Wardens are not coming here ! " exclaimed Mamy 
 in dismay. "Give me the back-door key, Mrs. Hunter, 
 quick ! " 
 
 " No, don't, Mrs. Hunter ; she's not to have it ! " cried her 
 sister, seizing her by the waist, while Mamy struggled to 
 escape. 
 
 Finding her efforts in vain, she broke from her captor 
 with a sudden quick movement, and with the words, " Then 
 they shall see me as I am, and I don't care," flung forward 
 to the encounter of the enemy. 
 
 ■' As I am " did not signify that Mamy was in the habit 
 of resorting to artifices when called upon to appear before 
 visitors. It meant simply that she had on a pair of kangaroo 
 leather boots past redemption, that her blouse was fruit- 
 stained, and her hair what girls call anyhoiv. In this attire 
 she ran defiantly down the hill towards Lucy Warden and 
 her brother, who were following upon Ella's footsteps. To 
 walk down a declivity of any kind would never have entered 
 the head of any member of the Clare family, who were ac- 
 customed to run "full tilt" down the rubbly descending 
 path, steep and uneven as the bed of a mountain torrent, 
 
THE WARDENS. 105 
 
 that led to the road below, with feet that seemed to fly, as 
 though they had been winged like Mercury's. 
 
 A certain eagerness was apparent in Sydney's manner as 
 this tumbled apparition came rushing forward, but Mamy 
 included him in a general " How d'ye do ?" addressed to his 
 sister and himself, and avoided looking at him as she turned 
 back to walk towards Mrs. Hunter's cottage between the 
 two. 
 
 "We needn't hurry," she said. " Mrs. Hunter wants you 
 to surprise her in her best cap, Miss Warden." 
 
 " How is the poor old lady to-day ? " asked Lucy ; then, 
 with an air of gentle patronage, " You were sitting with her, 
 dear, were you not 8 It is very good of you." 
 
 It was observable that she called Mamy '' dear," whereas 
 the latter addressed her friend by the ceremonious title of 
 " Miss Warden." Seven or eight years of diiference in age, 
 and such a difference in worldly advantages as may be 
 measured by the influence of an income of a few hundreds 
 and an income of several thousands on their daily lives, 
 seemed to have created an impalpable barrier between them. 
 Lucy, it is true, would have destroyed it, had she been 
 allowed. She never saw Mamy — though she saw her but 
 rarely — without saying, " I wish you would call me plain 
 Lucy"; but the younger girl had never felt prompted to 
 follow her bidding. The Wardens lived much in Melbourne, 
 as well as at their country estate — a reaJ manorial demesne, 
 no mere bush home — in Tasmania; and when they occu- 
 pied their house in Hobart, they did so after the fashion of 
 rich people with liveried servants to do their bidding, and 
 horses and carriages that drove them pompously through 
 the quiet Hobart streets. Sydney Warden had been an inter- 
 mittent visitor at Cowa for years past. The Clares, with the 
 exception of Eila, dissociated him in their minds from his 
 own people, and had come to look upon him almost as one 
 of themselves from the first afternoon several years ago, 
 when Willie had brought him to Cowa on a Saturday half- 
 holiday. Mamy had been a turbulent little girl in those 
 days, and Sydney's early and unromantic recollection of her 
 was in the act of hurling a raw potato at him in defence of 
 
106 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 her brother Dick, who was getting- the worst of it in a struggle 
 with him. How he continued to come every holiday until 
 after a lapse of nearly eighteen months, which he had spent 
 in Victoria, he returned to find his little potato-thrower 
 grown into a bewitching young girl, need not be told here. 
 He was certain now that he must have been in love with 
 Mamy from the beginning, and that he had been only wait- 
 ing until she could understand him to tell her so. His feel- 
 ing had been so strong that he never dreamed it could be 
 unshared ; and the blow that had been inflicted when Mamy 
 declared that she could not and would not marry him had 
 been such that even now he was inclined to doubt the reality 
 of her words. He had eagerly accepted his sister's proposal 
 to call at Cowa the day after his repulse, about which he 
 had said nothing to his family, as, indeed, he had said noth- 
 ing regarding the nature of his sentiment for Mamy. Per- 
 haps he had a secret misgiving as to the manner in which 
 his announcement would be received. Perhaps he felt it 
 would be wise to make sure of Mamy's consent in the first 
 instance. Moreover, it is such an accepted thing among 
 colonial youths, be they rich as Croesus or poor as Diogenes, 
 that they have only their own inclination to consult in the 
 choice of a wife, that to invite a preliminary discussion on 
 the subject in the family circle would have seemed to Sydney 
 a superfluous, not to say an indelicate, proceeding. 
 
 He could not refr|iin, however, from casting an appealing 
 glance at the object of his passion, as he entered the cottage 
 by her side in Lucy's wake. But Mamy resolutely ignored 
 it. Her attention was taken up by watching the comedy of 
 Mrs. Hunter's reception of her grand visitors. The old 
 woman's expression as she received the tract and the half- 
 pound of tea that Lucy silently deposited on the table by her 
 side was a thing to be treasured up. The feigned depreca- 
 tion and the covert mockery betrayed in the twinkle of the 
 monlrey-like eyes formed a combination as comic as it was 
 diabolic. 
 
 Lucy, for her part, would never have dreamed of inter- 
 preting an expression in this light. When she was in 
 Hobart she did not fail to take her due share of parish work 
 
THE WARDENS. 107 
 
 and to fulfil the same zealously and conscientiously. To 
 analyze the particular point of view whence her recipients 
 regarded her bounty did not come within her province. 
 Old Mrs. Hunter had no more individuality for Lucy than 
 any other old woman in the parish to whom it was fitting to 
 present tracts and tea. She was naively and sincerely con- 
 vinced that she was the best judge of what was suited to the 
 spiritual as well as to the corporeal needs of those she bene- 
 fited. She applied it accordingly, a little austerely, perhaps, 
 as she was wont to perform all her other duties in that state 
 of life into which, as she would have said herself, it had 
 pleased God to call her. 
 
 When the tea and the tract had been bobbingly acknowl- 
 edged, Lucy proceeded to make inquiries after old Mrs. 
 Hunter's health. Though the words were kind and the 
 glance that accompanied them well-meaning and benevo- 
 lent, there was an unconscious stiffening in Miss Warden's 
 entire person as she entered into conversation with the old 
 reprobate that seemed to give quite a different signification 
 to her utterance from that of any member of the Clare fam- 
 ily. The difference was subtle ; it was of a kind to be felt 
 rather than described. Yet it seemed to invest the visit with 
 a formality it had not worn before, and made Eila feel 
 vaguely uncomfortable on old Mrs. Hunter's behalf. She 
 tried to create a diversion by drawing out the latter upon 
 the ever-fertile subject of the delinquencies of her fowls, and 
 even Lucy was obliged to laugh when she heard of the dam- 
 age wrought by Master 'Enery's beak upon Miss Hemily^s 
 tail. The party stood awkwardly silent for a moment, until 
 Eila said in cordial society accents : 
 
 " Now we will leave Mrs. Hunter to discipline her fowls, 
 and go back to tea at Cowa. I'm afraid your mamma has 
 had no one but Truca to entertain her all this time." 
 
 " I'm sure Truca's quite equal to the task," said Lucy, 
 with conventional politeness; "but if you must go now, I 
 think I will stop behind a little if you don't mind. You 
 see, it is a long time since I last read to Mrs. Hunter, and 
 she can't complain that what / read to her isn't true, at 
 any rate." 
 
108 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Perhaps there was the faintest hint of an implied rebuke 
 in Lucy's tones as she said these words, glancing down 
 meanwhile at a little volume she had drawn from her pocket 
 while speaking. Eila perceived that it was a daintily-bound 
 Testament, with a gilt cross stamped on the black cover. 
 She knew that Lucy had strong High Chiirch sympathies, 
 and looked doubtfully across at old Mrs. Hunter, who was 
 standing with an air of exaggerated and devoutly expectant 
 humility that boded no good result from the reading to 
 which Lucy was about to subject her. 
 
 "I wish you would come, all the same, Lucy," urged 
 Eila weakly ; " you might go back to Mrs. Hunter after- 
 wards, you know." 
 
 "Afterwards!" echoed Lucy. "Why, it's late already; 
 there wouldn't be time, indeed." The small sacrifice of the 
 tea, which she felt to be a sacrifice nevertheless, was an ad- 
 ditional inducement to remain. The others prepared to go, 
 and Lucy followed them, to say demurely at the door, " You 
 will tell mamma I will join her at the bottom of the hill, 
 please," when another shadow darkened the entrance, and 
 her voice suddenly faltered and stopped. 
 
 I think she had divined whose figure this shadow repre- 
 sented even before she lifted her eyes towards it. The figure 
 was tall, square, and manly ; the eyes were blue, and also 
 had a manly, trust-inspiring expression, though just now 
 there was a hint of something anxious and expectant in 
 them, too. That Lucy Warden had divined that this unex- 
 pected presence was that of Eeginal Acton would not have 
 been doubted by any one who had known the secret of 
 Lucy's heart. Did she not, indeed, carry the influence of 
 this very presence in her waking thoughts and her nightly 
 dreams, when she would fain have been fixing them upon 
 things above ? and of what other earthly presence could the 
 same have been said ? It is true that she had never ex- 
 changed long conversations with Reginald at any time ; and 
 yet she believed, and perhaps she was not very far out in her 
 belief, that she knew him as he reaUy was. It is a fact that 
 when people are entirely themselves— that is to say, when 
 they are simple and natural in all the relations of life, a 
 
THE WARDENS. 
 
 109 
 
 thing which is falsely supposed to be only possible when 
 there is nothing to hide— we may be supposed to know 
 them, as far as one human being can know another from 
 the first moment of their meeting. Lucy thought that 
 Eeginald liked talking to her. His eyes were so kind and 
 his manner so cordial and interested ; and Heaven, or Lucy 
 herself, only knew how much she liked talking to him! 
 Maidenly reticence seemed to Lucy at this time one of the 
 saddest attributes that it is incumbent upon self-respecting 
 young women to possess. For all she knew to the contrary, 
 Eeginald was heart-free. There was no reason against his 
 making her his wife if he had known what a lifelong, heart- 
 felt, body-and-soul devotion she was prepared to bestow 
 upon him. But how was he to divine her sentiment, and, 
 failing his divination of it, who was to inform him of it ? 
 Eeginald was poor. Lucy was looked upon as an heiress. 
 She was well aware that there were men who would marry 
 her for her money to-morrow, but Eeginald was not of this 
 kind. Her fortune, that constituted such a powerful attrac- 
 tion in the eyes of others, was, as she believed, an obstacle 
 in his. It would preclude, perhaps, the very first idea of 
 paying his addresses to her from his mind. And there was 
 no one whom she could take into her confidence. Her 
 mother least of all, for Lucy well knew that it was Mrs. 
 Warden's ambition that she should marry "an English 
 title.'' The rest mattered little. Only the title was a sine 
 qud non. There had been times when Lucy had entertained 
 wild ideas of sending Eeginald an anonymous letter — ideas 
 that were discarded as soon as they arose with a blush of 
 burning shame, for her sense told her that the real author of 
 such an epistle would be instantly divined. It seemed so 
 hard that the thing which was called "filthy lucre'' should 
 create a barrier between herself and him. When she saw 
 him unexpectedly, as to-day, not having met him for what 
 seemed like a very long time, a nervous tremor passed over 
 her usually impassive face. She was too taken up with her 
 own emotions to notice that Eila was almost as agitated as 
 herself. To tell the truth, the scene of the preceding evening 
 was still very vivid in young Mrs. Frost's memory. If Lucy 
 
110 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 had known ! Nay, if any one had known ! If those present 
 could have imagined that not twenty-four hours ago Regi- 
 nald's arms had held her encircled in their passionate em- 
 brace ! What would they have said ? What would they 
 have thought ? How would they have looked at her then ? 
 
 It was Reginald, however, who set all the company at 
 ease now. Eila could not but admire his serenely usual 
 manner. One swift glance of intense feeling, of brother-like, 
 lover-like solicitude and reassurance, directed for one instant 
 at her troubled countenance, and then he was addressing the 
 party collectively in the pleasant, deliberate male voice that 
 matched so well with his face. 
 
 " What is the palaver about, Mrs. Hunter ? " he asked, 
 turning to the old woman with his hand extended, after he 
 had shaken hands with the rest. " Were you telling Miss 
 Warden that Mrs. Morris had the pip ? " 
 
 " The Lard forbid, sir ! " ejaculated Mrs. Hunter piously, 
 " though she ain't long for this world, anyhow ! I was tellin' 
 the company 'ere assembled as 'ow she'd been an' het 'er own 
 hegg, and into the pot she goes if I don't find a charitable 
 lady as '11 buy 'er hoff me 'fore the end o' the week." 
 
 She looked with a meaning blink of the monkey orbs 
 towards Lucy, but Lucy's lips were severely closed, and Eila 
 said laughingly : 
 
 " Mrs. Hunter won't keep any fowls whose morals are at 
 all questionable — ^will you, Mrs. Hunter ? " 
 
 " Ah, them fowls knows when they're breakin' the laws, 
 same as if they was Christians," declared the old woman, 
 bustling about to find seats for the party. 
 
 Old Mrs. Hunter possessed the savoir vivre that belongs 
 to a wicked past. Some people might have appeared at a 
 disadvantage under the contingency of providing seats for 
 five visitors where, strictly speaking, there was only accom- 
 modation for two. Not so this ancient inmate of Hobart 
 Gaol. She waved Reginald to a seat on the edge of her 
 patchwork-covered bed in the corner, and Sydney to another 
 on a reversed wash-tub, while she offered the two wooden 
 chairs to the young ladies as though she had been a Du 
 Maurier duchess receiving her latest lions at an afternoon 
 
THE WARDENS. jjj 
 
 crush. Mamy was already sitting upon the table, and was 
 therefore provided for. There was a little friendly talk, dur- 
 ing which Lucy's Testament was somewhat slipped back into 
 her pocket, seeing which Eila said persuasively : 
 
 " Do let me induce you to come back with us, Lucy, for 
 we really must go now. Truca will be in despair if we let 
 the tea get cold. She has had all the responsibility of getting 
 it ready for us." 
 
 " I don't deserve any tea," said Miss Warden hesitatingly ; 
 in her heart she felt that the temptation to return now Eegi- 
 nald was of the party was too powerful to be resisted. " I 
 said I wouldn't have any a minute ago." 
 
 " Never mind ; you can retract. I won't behave like Mrs. 
 Fry," said Eila, laughing. 
 
 " What did Mrs. Fry do ? " asked Reginald, looking at her 
 with eyes whence he essayed to withhold the love-light that 
 illumined them. 
 
 " What she did ? " Eila spoke hurriedly ; it was evident 
 that she was nervous. " Oh, it is just a silly little story I 
 read in a goody-goody book once. Mrs. Fry asked a little 
 girl to have a piece of cake, and the little girl refused. I 
 suppose she was shy, poor little thing. But next time she 
 was asked she had grown braver, so she said, ' Yes, please.' 
 ' Nay, then, thee shalt not have it now,' Mrs. Fry said, ' for 
 thou hast told a lie in the first instance.' Wasn't she a hor- 
 rid old thing ? " 
 
 " I should have told her she was telling a lie too," said 
 Reginald quietly, " if she had offered me the cake without 
 meaning me to have it." 
 
 Lucy listened to this conversation with a grave expres- 
 sion of countenance. If it had been anyone but Reginald, 
 she was not sure that she would have approved of the com- 
 ment made on the story of Mrs. Fry. And now the party 
 trooped to the wide-open door with repeated good-byes to 
 Mrs. Hunter. 
 
 Innumerable were the wrinkles in the old woman's mum- 
 mified face as she responded to their farewell greeting, with 
 an occasional well-contrived contortion of her whole body 
 as a reminder of the existence of her rheumatics. More 
 
112 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 monkey-like than ever the closing of her dried-up and shriv- 
 elled brown fingers upon the separate shillings that Regi- 
 nald and Sydney dropped into her parchment palm at part- 
 ing. 
 
 " Ah, me dears ! " she cried, in forlorn, worn-out trem- 
 bling tones, loud enough, however, for them to hear her as 
 they went trooping away, " I wish ye all long life and 'appi- 
 ness, an' rich 'usbands an' wives ; and ye won't 'ave far to 
 look for 'em neither, I'm thinkin' ; you mark an old woman's 
 words.'' 
 
 It was a short downward walk or run to Cowa, but short 
 as it was, Sydney contrived to make Mamy loiter behind 
 with him for a short space. The absence of all beard and 
 moustache might have further accentuated his unmistak- 
 ably boyish aspect, had it not been for a certain air of dogged 
 resolve which gave premature maturity to his iace. A 
 person seeing the torso only would have concluded that it 
 belonged to a tall man. The shortness, however, of Syd- 
 ney's legs laid him open to the uncomplimentary charge of 
 stumpiness. 
 
 He had the same honest eyes as Lucy's, but just now 
 they wore a somewhat bewildered air. Maniy walked, not 
 too willingly, by his side. With her bare head, over which 
 the tumbled shiny hair lay guiltless of parting, like a boy's, 
 and her collarless, fruit-stained blouse, she was in anything 
 but courting trim. The incongruity of her attire discon- 
 certed her. It is a well-known fact that our moods are 
 largely influenced by the clothes we wear. Mamy felt that 
 it would have been easier to repulse Sydney with dignity had 
 she been dressed in a silk gown, with a train like Lucy's. 
 
 " Did you tell your sister about what I asked you yester- 
 day ? " inquired Sydney at last, in dejected tones. 
 
 " Yes," said Mamy shortly. 
 
 " And what did she say ? " 
 
 " Said I was a fool," was the prompt reply. 
 
 " Did she ? Oh, Mamy, does that mean you might come 
 round after all ? " he cried, for the admission seemed to 
 imply that Mamy had possibly reconsidered her decision. 
 " You know I wouldn't mind waiting any time." 
 
THE WARDENS. II3 
 
 " What's the use of waiting ? " put in Mamy disconso- 
 lately. " I know quite well I shall never change." 
 
 " But how can you tell ? " he urged. " You don't hate 
 me so much, do you, Mamy ? " 
 
 " Hate you ? Don't be so silly ? You know quite well I 
 like you tremendously." 
 
 " Then, if that's so, why couldn't you like me just a little 
 more ? " Sydney's ordinary unmodulated, matter-of-fact 
 voice was trembling now with eagerness. " I'm not asking 
 you to be in love with me if you can't feel like it. Only let 
 me be your husband, and I'll take my chance of the rest." 
 
 " Let you be my husband ? " repeated Mamy slowly, with 
 a curious look in her childish eyes. " Do you know, Syd- 
 ney, I really think I'm older than you in some ways, after 
 all. Can't you understand that it is just because I like you, 
 and don't love you, that it would be impossible — altogether 
 impossible — to marry you I Why, I could not do you such 
 a wrong." 
 
 " How could it be a wrong," urged Sydney moodily, 
 " when I'm willing to take the chance ? I told you yester- 
 day I was ready to run the risk, and I'll stick to what I said. 
 Look here, Mamy, don't bother y6ur head about liking me a 
 lot or liking me a little. Just give me what you can, and 
 let me make the best of it. I can't settle to anything as long 
 as you keep trying to choke me off as you do. People 
 might think I was young to know my own mind, but I'm 
 over twenty-one — going on for twenty-two — and I've made 
 up my mind longer than you think ; I've always had 
 you in my thoughts one way and another. You were a 
 little kid, Mamy, the first time I saw you. You remember 
 that day you shied the potato at my head, only I dodged it. 
 Well, I've always felt the same about you ever since that 
 day. I've always admired you, I can't say how much. 
 You've got no nonsense about you like other girls. Besides 
 — I don't know what's the reason — I only know I can't care 
 for other girls. I can't care for anybody but you." 
 
 " Well, what can I do ? " cried Mamy desperately ; " it 
 isn't my fault ! " 
 
 " I don't say it is," replied Sydney humbly ; " but you 
 
114 NOT COUXTIXG THE COST. 
 
 might hare a little pity for a fellow, anyhow. I can never 
 feel any other way ; I'm sure of that. Look here ; I came 
 up to-dar on purpose to ask you something, Mamy. if I got 
 the chance. I'm not going to worry you, I promise you. I 
 don't want you to bind yourself. Besides. I know you 
 wouldn't, so it would be no use asking you ; but if I choose 
 to be boimd myself, you cant stop me — can you ? Xow, I'm 
 going to bind myself to you for five years, whatever hap- 
 pens. I'm going to swear it to you. so help me, God ! and 
 may I be burned up in hell if I don't keep my word ! " 
 
 '■ Stop, you ^cked boy I "' cried Mamy, roimd-eyed with 
 horror, and putting a finger into each ear. " I won't listen 
 to another word." 
 
 '■ Burned up in hell ! " repeated Sydney with gusto, pull- 
 ing her hands with gentle force from her head ; they had 
 been upon brotherly and sisterly terms almost as long as she 
 could remember. " I bind myself for five years, and I shall 
 wait to see if you won't give me a hearing at the end of 
 them. I shall consider myself engaged just the same as if 
 you had said " Tes,' you know." 
 
 'And what if I were to go and get married ?" said 
 Mamy defiantly. 
 
 "'"Well, it would be oil then. But you won't?"' he 
 pleaded. '' You might say you would be bound for a year, 
 at least" 
 
 •■ "^'hat ! for a year only ; "^ith pleasure," replied 
 Mamy. in mock society accents. 
 
 " "Well, give me your hand upon it here behind the hay- 
 stack," he cried eagerly, as they passed through the paddock 
 towards the side-entrance to the homestead. "Xo, give me 
 a kiss upon it, Mamy ; you never kiss me now, darling." 
 
 ""What's the use; " 
 
 She extended her cheek to him ; but, breaking away the 
 second after, she ran at all her speed away from him to the 
 house. She was full of elation at the satisfactory hiatus in 
 her courtship. The compromise proposed by Sydney was 
 aU to her advantage. EUa would not scold or lecture her 
 any more now ; for Sydney was stiU to be had for the ask- 
 ing, and she herself was free as the air of heaven. Then 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. II5 
 
 five years, as everybody knows, are an immense lapse of 
 time. What might not happen in five yeare ? There was 
 space for all the family to die, or for Sydney to change a 
 hundred times over. Her face wore a triumphant expression 
 as she joined the rest of the party on the veranda. Eila 
 tried to keep the anxious query from her eyes that was 
 present in her mind as the pair approached. But Sydney 
 did not wear the aspect of a crest-fallen lover, though there 
 was a look of wicked triumph in Mamy's face that boded no 
 good from her sister's point of view. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 
 
 The conversation had turned upon the all-absorbing 
 theme of the approaching journey. Reginald, leaning 
 against the veranda balustrade, was talking to Mrs. Warden, 
 allowing his glance to wander, nevertheless, towards the 
 two girls (Eila appeared more like a girl than Lucy), who 
 sat in close proximity under the decorative tendrils of pas- 
 sion-vine and convolvulus. Lucy's demure face wore an 
 expression of sedate bliss in presence of the man to whom 
 her heart had gone out unasked. Eila was secretly enjoying 
 the curious sense of conscious power and elation that Regi- 
 nald's avowal had conferred upon her. Mrs. Warden had 
 been so far struck by it as to observe how well she was look- 
 ing. It was an ordinary formality with strangers to remark 
 of young Mrs. Frost every time they saw her that she was 
 looking well. Perhaps their real impressions would have 
 been more truly rendered by the use of the word "hand- 
 some " ; but handsomeness, as we all know, is largely de- 
 pendent upon health, and in Eila the two seemed to be 
 inseparably bound up together. At the time of her great 
 grief, when she had returned heart-stricken to her child- 
 hood's home, her rich bloom of colouring had abandoned 
 her for a while, and no one would have divined how hand- 
 
116 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 some she could look upon occasion. It is not the mere 
 colour of the skin that is dependent upon health for its 
 charm ; the sparkle of the eye, the lustre of the hair, the 
 polished whiteness of the teeth (as every quack advertise- 
 ment tells us) rest upon it as well. And besides the posses- 
 sion of redundant health, Eila was going at this time through 
 an experience that seemed to stimulate all the secret fibres 
 of her being. Reginald's vow of undying, unselfish love 
 and devotion lay warm and ever-present at her heart. There 
 need be no alloy of self-reproach or consideration of wrong 
 done to another in her secret. She was robbing no other 
 woman of a love that should have been hers, and in the 
 gratitude and affection she felt for Reginald there was no 
 consciousness of treason. There are women who can detect 
 when one of their sex is under the influence of a sentiment 
 of this kind, by a certain indescribable radiance in her 
 manner, as of one who has found an unexpected treasure. 
 Lucy wondered at Eila's transfigured aspect for the second 
 time to-day. She was one of those who held the theory that 
 all the Clare family were peculiar, and certainly it was 
 strange that anyone placed in the circumstances in which 
 young Mrs. Frost found herself should continue to wear so 
 debonnaire and joyous an air. 
 
 Lucy, meanwhile, was nursing a daring project in her 
 mind on Reginald's behalf — a project that she would have 
 shrunk from with dismay had anyone else proposed it to 
 her, but that she had begun to regard as actually feasible by 
 dint of harbouring it in her secret imagination. Fancies 
 that we cherish in this way are apt to gain, in the long run, 
 an insidious influence over our better judgments. Familiar- 
 ity breeds contempt in behalf of ideas as well as of situations, 
 and many of the crimes known judicially as crimes of pre- 
 meditation are the outcome, we may be sure, of ideas that 
 the perpetrators have shrunk from, in the first instance, as 
 from a kind of ghastly joke. To Lucy it would have ap- 
 peared at one time a matter of the most monstrous improb- 
 ability that she should ever deliberately take the first step 
 towards establishing closer and warmer relations with a 
 man who had not even avowed his preference for her. But 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 117 
 
 the thin end of the wedge had been suffered to insert itself 
 when the idea had first entered her mind. 
 
 " Oh, if only what we were told as children could be true, 
 and there were really and truly a little bird that flew about 
 telling secrets, and that could whisper into Mr. Acton's ear 
 that I would joyfully accept him for a husband ! It is so 
 dreadful to think that our two lives might be ruined for 
 want of a word in season. Perhaps he only keeps out of my 
 way now for the reason that I am supposed to be an heiress, 
 and that he is so poor and so proud himself." 
 
 Between allowing our imaginations to run upon the im- 
 palpable little bird of our childish days, and contriving to 
 materialize such a bird when its services are needed, there 
 is but a short step. Lucy set herself to consider whether 
 there was no one among her friends who might be trusted 
 to play the part of the little bird confidentially and dis- 
 creetly ; and when she had reached this point, not without a 
 pitiful sense of helplessness and shame — for the natural in- 
 stinct that would prompt women to select their own mates 
 is one they are taught to shrink from with horror under our 
 actual social system — it was but natural that Eila's name 
 should suggest itself as that of the bird or the friend in 
 need. Was not the friendship that existed between Mr. 
 Acton and young Mrs. Frost the common talk of Hobart ? 
 Was it not a friendship open as the day, and strong in its 
 own blamelessness ? Who could be better fitted to give 
 Eeginald disinterested and sisterly advice, such as the little 
 bird would have given had its services been available, than 
 Eila ? No stronger proof of the utter guilelessness of Lucy's 
 nature could be afforded than her entire faith in Eila's will- 
 ingness to play the part she designed for her. That friend- 
 ship for such a woman as young Mrs. Frost might render it 
 difficult for a man to bestow his love in another quarter, or, 
 in other words, that a man who was Eila's accredited friend 
 might not be available as another woman's lover, was a con- 
 tingency that it never entered Lucy's mind to contemplate. 
 For her there was no tampering with the sixth, seventh, or 
 eighth commandments, an infringement of any of which 
 three seemed to her to bear equal proportions of dreadful- 
 
118 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ness. She would not even have suspected Reginald of 
 breaking the second clause of the last commandment of all, 
 and never doubted that Eila's heart, like that of any self- 
 respecting wife under a similar affliction, was dutifully im- 
 prisoned in the asylum where her lunatic husband hurled 
 Scriptural blasphemies at all who came within his reach. 
 Before the Clares should take their departure, Lucy intended 
 to bring her courage to the point of delicately sounding 
 Eila on the subject of Reginald's persistent state of bache- 
 lorhood, and perhaps of making her understand, at the same 
 time, the main points of the communication that the afore- 
 said little bird would have whispered into the ear of Regi- 
 nald himself. 
 
 The latter, meanwhile, was far from divining the plans 
 that were being laid for his regeneration. He had been 
 thinking with profound sadness of the coming separation, 
 while Eila pointed out with triiunph to Lucy the position of 
 the Queen of the South, lying against the wharf in the 
 glassy harbour, with her bare masts tapering skywards, 
 stately and slender in the luminous atmosphere. Reginald 
 did not follow Eila's explanations in the matter. His back 
 was turned towards the vessel. He hated the Queen, and 
 everything connected with her. I doubt, indeed, whether 
 the spectacle of the Flying Dutchman entering the bay 
 with phantom sails set, and a skeleton helmsman directing 
 her course, could have struck a greater chill to his heart. 
 
 " Sydney went over your ship the other day," remarked 
 Lucy blandly ; " he said she smelt of apples and wool. But 
 you are lucky to be going to England all the same, and I 
 suppose you are very glad. But don't you dread the ' good- 
 byes ' ? I should, I know, in your place." 
 
 Lucy was complacently sipping her tea as she made the 
 foregoing remark, and the transient, mocking smile, plainly 
 observable to Reginald, that accompanied Eila's reply was 
 all unnoticed by her. 
 
 "There are not many 'good-byes* we need shed tears 
 over," she said grimly. " I don't suppose the Hobart people 
 will break their hearts about our going away." 
 
 "You naughty thing!" cried Lucy with playful re- 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. II9 
 
 proach ; " and you have so many friends, too." She cast a 
 meaning glance at Eeginald, whose blue eyes were looking 
 unusually solemn. " I never go anywhere without hearing 
 it said, ' The Clares are such a clever family. What a loss 
 to the community they will be ! ' " 
 
 Eila smiled, but her eyes remained ostensibly uncon- 
 vinced. 
 
 " What a talent Lucy has for putting things pleasantly ! " 
 she observed. " It is so much nicer to be called clever than 
 peculiar, though that is what she really hears us called, if 
 she would admit it." 
 
 " No, indeed ! " Lucy protested eagerly ; " at least, only 
 when it is coupled with cleverness, for surely it is a way of 
 being peculiar to be clever. Stupid people are never called 
 peculiar, are they ? " 
 
 How far the quality of peculiarity might be said to 
 couple distinction upon its possessors was a question which, 
 however, was apparently destined to remain unsolved upon 
 the present occasion ; for Truca created an unexpected di- 
 version by an appeal to Reginald to accompany her to the 
 cow-paddock, enforced by passing two small hands witliin 
 his arm, and pulling him forward in the direction she 
 wanted. 
 
 " I believe my cow knows we're going to leave her," she 
 said mournfully ; " she looks at me with such a sad expres- 
 sion sometimes, like that. I've told her you're going to be 
 her master when we're gone ; but you've got to be properly 
 introduced to her, you know, so do come, please." 
 
 Reginald having been led away, Mrs. Warden rose to 
 take her departure, but Lucy interposed : 
 
 " If you can't stay any longer, mamma, will you send 
 the carriage back for me ? I want to have Eila all to my- 
 self for a little ; perhaps it's the last time of our being to- 
 gether. Sydney "—turning to her brother— "you can go 
 back with mamma if you choose." 
 
 " I don't choose, thank you," said Sydney shortly. 
 
 He accompanied his mother, however, down the hill; 
 but though the carriage was seen driving away a moment 
 later in the sole occupation of the four-guinea bonnet and 
 
120 NOT COUNTINa THE COST. 
 
 the mauve and gold parasol, he did not return. Mamy had 
 also disappeared, whence Eila augured that things were 
 going as was fitting. 
 
 Meanwhile, she and Lucy were left to the enjoyment of 
 each other's undisturbed society on the veranda. 
 
 " There is such a lot I want to say to you," began Lucy, 
 settling herself back in the low wicker-chair in which she 
 was seated. Eila looked properly sympathetic ; but instead 
 of proceeding further, Lucy paused, cast down her eyes, and 
 appeared absorbed in the occupation of stirring round the 
 remnants of her tea in the bottom of her cup. When she 
 broke the silence at last, the startling confidence she im- 
 parted was as follows : " What nice tea you do have at 
 Cowa ! I always say no tea tastes like yours anywhere ! " 
 
 "Do you mean that really, Lucy ?" There was genuine 
 gratification in Eila's tone — the complimentary comments 
 on the family cleverness had not been nearly as grateful to 
 her as the praise of their tea — showing that it was possible, 
 after all, to have things " nice " in what she considered their 
 hopeless household. " One is afraid to ofi'er you people tea 
 or anything else ; it is all such grand luxe in your own 
 home." 
 
 " Our own home ! Why, we live, as our cook says, ' as 
 plain as plain.' It is very simple fare, I assure you. You 
 should hear Sydney talk about the dinners you give him at 
 Cowa, and the apple-dumplings running over with cream. 
 He always says, ' Why don't we have things like they do 
 at Mrs. Clare's ? ' " 
 
 " Does he ? What an absurd boy ! " laughed Eila. She 
 did not think it necessary to avow her belief that Love was 
 the sauce that seasoned the Cowa dinner of herbs to Syd- 
 ney's palate. " I can't compliment him upon his discrimi- 
 nation, I grieve to say ; but, of course, it's nice to think such 
 an illusion is possible in any case." 
 
 " How do you know it's an illusion ? " asked Lucy grave- 
 ly, " I am sure I would change our way of life for 
 yours." 
 
 " I am sure you wouldn't if you'd tried it ! " declared Eila 
 shortly. 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 121 
 
 Lucy seemed to ponder again over something she would 
 have said, but decided upon second thoughts to leave unsaid. 
 She was thoughtfully balancing her spoon upon the edge of 
 her cup, and, after a pause, Eila's speech reverted to the sub- 
 ject that was always uppermost in her mind. 
 
 " Do you know, Lucy, when I look at the Queen of the 
 South down there" — she glanced at the far-away vessel 
 towering in stripped majesty above the smaller craft 
 around — " and think of all the time we shall have to spend 
 on board her, I wonder sometimes what we shall find to do 
 with ourselves all day. I can't realize somehow that we 
 are going to be nailed to that one little spot in all the wide 
 ocean for weeks and months, with no earthly chance of get- 
 ting away." 
 
 " No waterly chance, you mean," said Lucy, who occa- 
 sionally hazarded a mild joke of which this must be re- 
 garded as a fair specimen. " Yes, it must seem strange. But 
 I hope you don't mean what you said a little while ago, Eila, 
 about people not missing you in Hobart. There are our- 
 selves, to begin with. The place won't seem the same to us 
 when you are gone — you know that. Wliy, Sydney almost 
 lives here ! " 
 
 "Oh, your brother will be a little sorry, I dare say,'' as- 
 sented Eila, and there was more in her speech than met her 
 friend's ear. 
 
 "Look at the family ties you have, too," urged Lucy 
 gently — " that kind old Mr. and Mrs. Frost, to begin with." 
 She uttered the names timidly, with a halting accent. Young 
 Mrs. Frost's brow darkened visibly. A half-imperceptible 
 shrug of the shoulders, that might have signified denial, or 
 doubt, or indifference, or something that partook of all three, 
 testified alone that she had heard the observation. "And 
 there is Mr. Acton," continued Lucy warily; "you are not 
 going to pretend he won't be sorry, are you ? " 
 
 " No, I'm not going to pretend it," said Eila, with a laugh 
 that had something forced in its ring; " why should I ? " 
 
 "Only that you're so fond of pretending you have no 
 friends in Hobart. I could think of heaps of people besides. 
 I suppose " — Lucy's unyouthful complexion became curi- 
 
122 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ously suffused — "you have known Mr. Acton for a long 
 time, have you not ? " 
 
 " Pretty long, almost ever since he's been here — nearly 
 two years," Eila made reply, raising her soft dark eyes 
 gravely towards the face of her interlocutress. " Why ? " 
 
 Lucy answered neither the question nor the look. She 
 had become engrossed once more in her cup and her spoon. 
 
 " Give me some more tea, dear. You'll believe I think it 
 nice now, I suppose ? " Then, as Eila busied herself with the 
 spirit-lamp and kettle, "By the way, I wonder," she added, 
 in an off-hand tone, " whether there is any truth in a report 
 I once heard — I haven't heard it lately, though — about Mr. 
 Acton being engaged to some girl he knew in England." 
 
 Lucy had not uttered these words before she would fain 
 have recalled them. She felt lowered in her own estimation 
 by the artifices to which she had recourse to obtain the 
 knowledge she coveted. Only as it is consistent with human 
 egoism to suppose that people are interested in what concerns 
 ourselves rather than in what concerns them, it did not oc- 
 cur to Eila that her friend could have any private and par- 
 ticular end of her own to serve in selecting Reginald's love 
 affairs for the theme of her confidential talk. On the con- 
 trary, Eila's fear was that Lucy might be about to exercise 
 the privilege of a friend, and read her a private lecture upon 
 her conduct in relation to Mr. Acton. It was a suspicion 
 that a little time ago would have made her smile. Fortified 
 by the consciousness of Reginald's loyal friendship, it would 
 have been easy to laugh to scorn the suspicion of carrying 
 on a vulgar flirtation with him. But to-day her position 
 seemed to have changed. From the moment that she had 
 been clasped in Reginald's arms, from the moment that she 
 had realized how frail a barrier held her aloof from him, her 
 attitude towards the world as regarded him had changed. 
 Yesterday she felt that she could return the inquisitorial 
 stare of all the Mrs. Grundys in Hobart with the serene 
 gaze of self-assured innocence. There had not been a single 
 exchange of confidences between Reginald and herself that 
 might not have been listened to by Mrs. Grundy and all her 
 tribe, had they been so minded. To-day it seemed to her 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 123 
 
 that she would quail under Mrs. Grundy's stare. She shrank 
 from being cross-examined by Lucy. She, a married woman, 
 in a position that was rendered almost sacred by the tragedy 
 that overshadowed her life, to be warned by a girl-companion 
 against undue flirting — to be told most likely that she was, 
 in the expressive French formula, "on people's tongues." 
 Her pride revolted against the notion. Yesterday she would 
 have been amused and brave ; to-day a feeling that resem- 
 bled anger as well as apprehension took possession of her 
 soul. 
 
 And while these uncomfortable misgivings were engross- 
 ing her mind, Lucy, on her side, was far from feeling at ease. 
 Why did young Mrs. Frost take so long to answer the ques- 
 tion put to her ? Had she seen through the motives that 
 prompted it ? and did she despise the speaker as she deserved ? 
 It was quite a relief to Lucy when Eila said, in an indifferent 
 voice : 
 
 " Mr. Acton engaged ? I never heard that before. Who 
 told you so, Lucy ? " 
 
 " Who told me ? " repeated Lucy guiltily ; " I don't quite 
 remember. It was only a surmise, only a rumour. Perhaps 
 I am mixing him up with somebody else. People think, you 
 know, there must be some attraction in England or some- 
 where, because of his not marrying. It is rather curious, 
 when one comes to think of it, you know." 
 
 " Curious ? Why ? " A little flush overspread Ella's 
 cheek. She was quite sure now that there was a veiled sig- 
 nificance in Lucy's words. " People are so absurdly fond of 
 judging for others. I suppose he has his own reasons. He 
 is not rich, for one thing : in fact, he is what mothers with 
 daughters would not consider a catch by any means : he is 
 too poor. He has a mother to keep besides, and she is half 
 paralyzed." 
 
 " AU the same, there must be plenty of girls who would 
 be glad to marry him, and he might choose one with money, 
 you know," said Lucy naively. 
 
 " Reginald— Mr. Acton, I mean— is not that kind of man," 
 said Eila, waraily. " He is the last person in the world to 
 marry for money." 
 
124 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Lucy's only reply was a profound sigh. There was a long 
 interval of silence, at the end of which she said bitterly : 
 
 "Oh dear! how heavily one is handicapped when one 
 has money, to be sure ! How I do hate being rich ! " 
 
 The form in which this reflection was couched did not in 
 the least detract from its solemnity in Eila's estimation. 
 Neither of these young women spoke slang with malice pre- 
 pense. When they employed it, it was as unconsciously as 
 Monsieur Jourdain employed prose. 
 
 " One is much more handicapped when one is poor," she 
 retorted. " You should try what poverty is like before you 
 talk, Lucy. It is an experiment rich people may indulge in 
 if they choose, though we can't try the counter-experiment 
 of being rich in our turn. I only wish we could." 
 
 " Ah, you don't know the drawbacks ! " said Lucy, nod- 
 ding her head sagely. '' You don't know what a nightmare 
 the fear of being married for one's money becomes in a girl's 
 life. And, really, there is good reason for it. What you 
 were saying just now about Mr. Acton is an instance. Some- 
 how, I don't believe the men most worth caring about — the 
 proud, honourable, independent natures, I mean — ever pro- 
 pose to a girl with money ; they would rather go out of her 
 way. You said as much about Mr. Acton yourself. You 
 said he was the kind of man who would disdain to marry a 
 rich person. I suppose you think he would be more likely 
 to avoid anyone who was looked upon as an heiress, don't 
 you ? " 
 
 "He might, perhaps," admitted Eila; she was secretly 
 immensely relieved at the turn the conversation was taking; 
 " but he is not everybody. Others might be different. And 
 then there are men with proud, honourable, independent 
 natures, as you call it, Lucy, who have the good luck to be 
 rich as well, and who can afford to marry anyone they 
 please— men whose fortune lifts them above any kind of 
 suspicion, for whom no girl need be too rich or too poor. 
 What do you say to that ? " 
 
 " Say it bears out what I said," persisted Lucy, with a 
 melancholy shake of the head. " It shows that a girl need 
 not have money to get the best kind of husband in the end. 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 125 
 
 I had rather the rich man you speak of afforded himself the 
 luxury of having me with my poverty than with my money. 
 It would make me doubly sure." 
 
 " Then there is another great advantage money confers," 
 continued Eila doctorally ; " it gives one such a power of se- 
 lection. You can choose out of so many. You might almost 
 make sure of finding the right one at last. Just think what 
 a range of observation you have, Lucy, compared with other 
 people ! " 
 
 "I don't really know that that is an advantage," said 
 Lucy doubtfully. " I find people less interesting every year 
 — men, I mean. Perhaps I see through them too clearly. But 
 there is one question I want to ask you. Supposing — only 
 supposing, you know — that just such a man as we have been 
 talking about, one of the proud, honoiwable, independent 
 sort — not at all rich — should happen to please a girl with 
 money very much indeed — supposing she felt she could care 
 for him with all her heart and soul, and that he had some- 
 how given her a little reason to think that he might come 
 to care for her in the same way in time, if only the wretched 
 money were not there to put an obstacle in his way, don't 
 you think she would hate having money then, and want to 
 be rid of it, and wish that she could have known him with- 
 out it from the first ? " 
 
 A light dawned upon Eila's mind. What if it were as a 
 suppliant rather than as a monitress that Lucy had beguiled 
 her into speaking of Reginald ? The supposition was re- 
 sponsible for raising certain curiously conflictive emotions 
 in her breast. The sensation evoked by Lucy's confession — 
 for that the supposititious case the latter had described was 
 none other than her own Eila felt secretly assured — was a 
 feminine, if an unworthy one, and it had a thoroughly 
 feminine origin. Hitherto young Mrs. Frost had cherished 
 Reginald as a friend. She had valued his friendship as a 
 precious element in her existence, but from the moment that 
 she suspected Lucy of bestowing her afl'ections upon him 
 unasked, his value as something more than a friend seemed 
 to increase to a notable extent She told herself that this 
 feeling was mean and unworthy. Had she cared for Regi- 
 
126 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 nald as unselfishly as she believed him to care for her, the 
 probability conveyed by Lucy's words should have made 
 her rejoice for him in her heart. What happier fate could 
 be desired for so good a man than that of being loved and 
 -worshipped by a wife like Lucy, endowed, as Eila felt in- 
 stinctively, with a nature that could love but once and for 
 ever — a wife who would be a crown to her husband in more 
 senses than one ; who, in bestowing upon him her worldly 
 goods, would make him rich in earthly possessions ; who 
 would heap his invalid mother with largesses, and would 
 joyfully share with him the task of brightening her declin- 
 ing days ! Yet, with the contradiction that forms part of a 
 woman's nature, Eila could not bring herself honestly to 
 wish that this happy consummation might be realized. She 
 could not even wish Reginald to desire that a similar piece 
 of good fortune should happen in her own case. Mingled 
 with these feelings there was yet another, in the sense that 
 Reginald's worship of her might be worth even more appre- 
 ciation than she had hitherto bestowed upon it. Were there 
 not othei^ who could repay it so much more richly in tangi- 
 ble benefits than herself, ready to set the highest of all pos- 
 sible values upon it ? 
 
 Eila did not formulate the foregoing thoughts in her 
 mind! They floated vaguely through her brain before she 
 replied to Lucy's anxious question. How completely she 
 would have scattered the illusions of her simple friend to 
 the wind, how she would have crushed her virginal hopes 
 to the earth, had she put into words the thought that rose 
 unbidden in her mind ! " Poor Lucy ! " was the thought ; 
 " as if you or anyone else in the world could win Reginald 
 from me ! " Eila, it need not be said, did not utter her 
 thought. She used her speech in the sense in which Tal- 
 leyrand discovered the use of speech, for the purpose, that 
 is to say, of concealing it. 
 
 " As to wanting to be rid of one's money for the sake of 
 marrying a poor man," she said at last, " I don't see any 
 reason in that, Lucy. I should congratulate myself, if I 
 were in the place of the girl you speak of, that I was rich 
 enough for both." 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 127 
 
 Lucy's face brightened, but fell again immediately. 
 
 " You don't- see the difficulty," she said in depressed ac- 
 cents. " How could one accept a man unless he proposed to 
 one first ? No girl could. How could one even show a man 
 one liked him, unless he gave one the opportunity ? It 
 would be a quite too impossible thing." 
 
 " Opportunities are never wanting," said Eila oracularly. 
 " If a girl wants to show a man that she prefers him to every- 
 one else, there are plenty of ways of doing so." 
 
 " Tell me only one way,'' said Lucy eagerly. 
 
 " Well, when she meets him at balls, for instance, she 
 might give him all the dances he asks for, and say ' no ' to 
 all her other partners." 
 
 " But supposing he doesn't dance ? " interposed Lucy 
 helplessly. 
 
 " All the better ; she can give up the dances altogether 
 then, and sit them out with him." 
 
 " Yes ; but supposing he had begun to avoid one for the 
 reason I told you of — the horrid question (Vargent, I mean " 
 — Lucy had a French maid, and was not averse to interlard- 
 ing her sentences with an occasional French expression — 
 " just, too, as one was beginning to feel he might like one." 
 In her effort to maintain the conversation upon an imper- 
 sonal footing, " ones " abounded in Miss Warden's phrases. 
 " What could one do then ? " 
 
 " One could speak to a friend, as you are doing," said 
 Eila, laughing ; while Lucy blushed a pained crimson all 
 over her face and neck. 
 
 " Don't be unkind, Eila I " she said imploringly. " I am 
 so miserable sometimes, if you only knew ; and there is not 
 a soul I can talk to about it." 
 
 " It is he, then ? " said Eila interrogatively, with a back- 
 ward inclination of her head towards the cow-paddock. 
 
 Her lips were dry, and her voice sounded hard in her 
 own ears. 
 
 " How did you know ? " Lucy was holding her head 
 down like a culprit. " Oh, Eila ! do you think it is very 
 dreadful to let one's self care about anybody in that way 
 before he has even uttered a single word of love ? If it is, I 
 
128 NOT COCNTINa THE COST. 
 
 can't help it. It began more than two years ago— when we 
 were spending the summer here before, you i^member. We 
 saw a good deal of Mr. Acton then. I think he went out 
 more than he does now, and he used to seem to like talking 
 to me then — he did indeed." 
 
 There was a trembling intensity in Lucy's tones that 
 surprised her friend not a little. If Eila had been asked her 
 previous opinion of Miss Warden, it would probably have 
 represented her as an embodiment of the placid type of a 
 virgin of the school of Perugino. But the actual Lucy was 
 more like a flesh and blood Juliet than a painted virgin. 
 How to deal with the delicate problem submitted to her 
 judgment was the difficulty that Eila had now to solve. 
 If she encouraged Lucy's flame, she would only increase the 
 bitterness of the disappointment that awaited her. If, on 
 the other hand, she appeared desirous of repressing it, might 
 not Lucy suspect her of a dog-in-the-mangerish desire to 
 keep Reginald's undivided allegiance for herself ? She 
 paused for reflection before she remarked diplomatically : 
 
 "People woixld say you were throwing yourself away, 
 you know, Lucy." 
 
 " What should I care what people said ? " cried Lucy pas- 
 sionately. " I know one thing : I shall never care for any- 
 one else." Now that the avowal had been made, she seemed 
 to find a kind of relief in enlarging upon it. " I always 
 thought Mr. Acton nice from the beginning ; but it was only 
 after we came away from Hobart last time that I began to 
 think about him so much. When we were up on the station 
 in Victoria, and when we went to Melbourne for the Cup 
 week, I thought of nothing but when we should leave for 
 Tasmania. I was overjoyed the first hot wind day we had, 
 when people prophesied that we were going to have such 
 a hot summer. I knew we should come away all the sooner, 
 and so we did ; but it seems we are to go to Melbourne again 
 before long, and it has been a disappointment from begin- 
 ning ' end. If you had not said what you did about Mr. 
 P orror of being taken for a fortune-hunter, I believe 
 
 wer have had the courage to speak to you ; but 
 ^ explain so much, doesn't it ? " 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 129 
 
 " Y-yes," assented Eila doubtfully, " I suppose it does.' 
 
 " Do you think, now " — Lucy spoke in shamefaced haste, 
 as though she dared not trust herself to weigh the full im- 
 port of her words — " it would be possible for you, who know 
 him so well, to find out whether there was anything at all in 
 the attention he paid me last time I was here ? I know 
 •I could trust you not to commit me in the very smallest de- 
 gree — couldn't I ? You may think it absurd, but I don't 
 believe I could live " — there was a pathetic break in Lucy's 
 voice as she uttered this word — " if, without his caring for 
 me himself, Mr. Acton should ever find out that I was — that 
 I was gone upon him as I am." For the second time Lucy's 
 feelings found vent in an expression that is not usually 
 associated with deep and tragic sentiment ; but its inade- 
 quateness passed, as before, entirely unperceived by her 
 hearer. " Couldn't you sound him just a little on the sub- 
 ject, and if what he says should make you 'fancy that he 
 might have cared for me without my money, why, then you 
 could advise him as a friend — you are his friend, I know — 
 not to take the money question into account at all. I would 
 rather give up my share of what I am to have altogether, if 
 it came to that ; besides which, I am not rich now at all, you 
 might tell him ; my dress allowance is only two hundred a 
 year — not a penny more." 
 
 "You don't call that rich!" exclaimed Eila, purposely 
 
 breaking in at this point ; for the delicate mission entrusted 
 
 , to her became doubly embarrassing in the face of her secret 
 
 knowledge. " Why, I shouldn't know how to spend it if I 
 
 tried." 
 
 " It doesn't go far when one has to go out so much," said 
 Lucy plaintively. " But to go back to what we were saying. 
 The others will be here directly, and I may never have an- 
 other chance of talking to you alone. Will you do me the 
 favour I want, Eila ? There is no one in the world who could 
 do it for me but you ; and don't think meanly of me, please. 
 I will trust you entirely; and when you have found out 
 something you might write and tell me. I shall be eternally 
 grateful to you, and I won't rest until I hear from you— you 
 may be sure of that." 
 
130 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 For a moment the idea of laying the whole situation bare 
 before Lucy suggested itself to young Mrs. Frost's mind. 
 Supposing she were to say simply, "Eeginald loves me, 
 Lucy, profoundly and hopelessly; he knows that nothing 
 can come of it, but his love so possesses his soul that he has 
 no room left for the image of another woman ? " The very 
 words in which she would make her avowal had already* 
 taken shape in her brain, when a glance at Lucy's face 
 stopped her. It required someone with larger experience of 
 the world, someone possessed of a full share of what has 
 been well called the dramatic instinct, which is, after all, 
 only the outcome of an intensely sympathetic nature, to un- 
 derstand the natm-e of the tie between Eeginald and herself. 
 Lucy would probably be pained and shocked to learn the 
 existence of such a tie ; but the first effect of the revelation 
 would be to lower Eila in her eyes, the next to make her 
 bitterly repent' of having confided in her at all. How hu- 
 miliating, besides, for Lucy to feel that she had betrayed her 
 innocent impression that Reginald cared for her in his heart 
 to the person who, of all others, had the best reasons for 
 knowing the contrary ! To spare her friend as well as her- 
 self, Eila refrained from following her first impulse to reveal 
 the real facts, and, deeming it prudent to temporize, hastened 
 to assure Lucy that she would hold her confidence sacred. 
 
 "And not even hint it to your sisters or your mother," 
 urged Lucy anxiously. " I know what a family you are for 
 telling each other things. Sydney says it is like a debating 
 society to hear you all talk on the veranda sometimes." 
 
 " Oh ! only about vegetarianism, or capital punishment, 
 or something of that kind that matters to nobody," said 
 Eila. "Well, Lucy dear, I am tremendously touched by 
 what you have told me. I wish I had it in me to feel as you 
 do still. It was all killed long ago, I believe. I mean if I 
 were a girl again," she added hurriedly, in answer to the 
 shocked astonishment painted on Lucy's face. "I shall 
 know what I am to find out for you, and I will write to you 
 when there is anything to say; that is a settled matter." 
 
 " And you will be able to do it all without giving Mr. 
 Acton the faintest suspicion of the truth ? " 
 
LUCY MAKES A CONFESSION. 131 
 
 " Of course I shall. Nothing could be easier. We often 
 talk people over. But let me say just one thing : Don't be 
 too bitterly disappointed if he should turn out to be a hard- 
 ened bachelor after all. There are people like that, you 
 know, and it is a mere waste of sentiment to care for them ; 
 and then remember about there being as good fish in the sea 
 as ever came out of it." 
 
 " "What of that ? They may stop in the sea to the end, 
 for all I care ! " said Lucy recklessly. 
 
 At this moment voices were heard approaching the ve- 
 randa in a descending scale. Lucy and her confidant, who 
 were both afraid for private reasons of their own of going 
 more deeply into the subject of their confidences, started off 
 to encounter the party returning from the cow-paddock. 
 They came upon them in the flower-garden — a mere longi- 
 tudinal strip taken from the hill that sloped upwards from 
 the house. 
 
 Flower-garden it was called by courtesy, for in the tangle 
 of blooms and weeds that encumbered the soil, there was 
 nothing to recall the trim parterres we have learned to asso- 
 ciate with the name. Such as it was, thanks to the Tasmanian 
 air and soil, wherein flowers seem to grow, as Mrs. Stowe's 
 Topsy did, for no assignable cause, there was always to be 
 found in it the wherewithal to provide a bouquet of fuchsias 
 and geraniums, bordered by sprigs of fragrant lemon-thyme, 
 for a friend returning to town. It was Dick who undertook 
 to hoe the beds on Sunday morning — less, it is to be feared, 
 in deference to the flowers, than by way of -upholding his 
 right to garden on the Sabbath. As no one, however, showed 
 any inclination to call his right into question, his interest in 
 weeding suffered a gradual abatement, and latterly the 
 garden had been left pretty much to take care of itself. 
 Reginald and Truca were discovered seated upon a bench 
 gravely discoursing upon the cow. The bench was under 
 an antiquated gum-tree that would long ago have fallen a 
 victim to the axe, had not Truca pleaded for its life, in be- 
 half of the amber-coloured blobs of gum yielded by its 
 decrepit branches. To a person seated here the view was 
 even finer than from the veranda. In its rear rose magnifi- 
 
132 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 cent Mount Wellington, bare to its summit, with patches of 
 dusky purple marking its deeper hollows, its topmost crown 
 softly outlined against the background of shining blue. 
 The hardy shrubs and gaily-painted weeds and flowers wove 
 a garland of colour and perfume round the assembled party, 
 and across the city, lying at their feet, the sea glittered and 
 sparkled beneath the afternoon sun. 
 
 We may be sure that the animals are spared one most 
 tormenting factor in human existence — in their freedom 
 from the thing we call sentiment. Provided they can 
 browse harmoniously in a congenial pasturage, all their 
 wants are satisfied. To us who look before and after, life 
 wears a much more complicated aspect. What might be 
 the precise degree of sympathy that Reginald felt for her 
 was the problem that occupied Lucy's mind upon the present 
 occasion, to the exclusion of all enjoyment of the beautiful 
 scene and the agreeable society around her. And Reginald, 
 in his turn, was more exercised by a similar problem in be- 
 half of young Mrs. Frost than by appreciation of the sun- 
 steeped landscape outspread before his eyes. The Cowa 
 estate was situated upon a declivity, and might be. easily 
 clambered over (walking was not a term that could be fit- 
 tingly applied in such a connection) within a quarter of an 
 hour, and a bright descending panorama of houses and trees 
 wa$ visible from every point. But for the reasons I have 
 mentioned, its brightness failed to impress the actual be- 
 holders of it. 
 
 Eila contrived, however, that Lucy should be left alone 
 with Reginald for a few moments before the party broke up, 
 but the experiment did not tend to raise Miss Warden's 
 spirits. Mr. Acton did not afford her a loophole for making 
 even the most innocent advances. Certainly her money was 
 a more effectual barrier than she could have supposed. 
 Worse still, when she timidly offered him a seat in the car- 
 riage to town with her brother and herself, he declared that 
 he preferred walking. 
 
 It was hardly to be wondered at if but few words were 
 exchanged between, the brother and sister on their home- 
 ward way. 
 
BILA AS EMISSARY. 
 
 133 
 
 " They are awfully kind people, the Clares, if they are a 
 little peculiar ! " Lucy had remarked. " It is a pity Mamy 
 is not a little more soignee. I thought her quite pretty to- 
 day." 
 
 And Sydney had grunted some inarticulate words in re- 
 ply. If he had said what was in his mind, it would have 
 heen to the effect that his friends at Cowa could do without 
 Miss Lucy's patronage. Had the real nature of his sister's 
 meditations been divulged to him, it would have caused him 
 almost as great a surprise as a similar discovery with regard 
 to his own secret thoughts would have occasioned Lucy. 
 
 For it was his private opinion, when he thought about 
 the matter at all, that his sister was of the stuff of which old 
 maids are created ; while Lucy, for her part, looked upon 
 her brother as a good-natured hobbledehoy, who would not 
 be ripe for love for a long time to come. Nothing would 
 have astonished them more than to learn that they were 
 undergoing almost a precisely similar experience as regarded 
 their first initiation into the mysteries of love. So true it is 
 that those who live side by side may have no insight into 
 the hidden workings of each other's natures. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EILA AS EMISSARY. 
 
 The interval that elapsed between the conversation with 
 Lucy in the veranda and the final departure for England 
 passed like a troubled dream. Eila could never look back 
 to the last days of her sojourn at Cowa without an impres- 
 sion of vague bewilderment and unrest. A second-hand 
 furniture-dealer had agreed to take their household goods 
 off her mother's hands ; but they made so poor a show when 
 they were dragged in their battered nakedness into the search- 
 ing light of day, that the family felt almost ashamed of own- 
 ing them. Mrs. Clare's estimate of the sum they would fetch 
 proved to be exactly eleven times and a half what the dealer 
 
134 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 offered. Willie advised that they should be left behind to 
 be sold by auction, but the money was needed for the board- 
 ship outfit. As many things as could be parted with were 
 therefore carted to town a few days before the departure, 
 and the family slept upon the mattresses and bedding, pre- 
 pared for their bunks, spread upon the bare boards. There 
 was more than one heartrending leave-taking to be gone 
 through — notably with the Jersey cow, the successor of 
 Snow-white and Strawberry, and with the brown retriever 
 dog, the former being transferred to Reginald, and the latter 
 to Sydney. I think Reginald would have been better pleased 
 to keep the dog, whose curly head he had so often seen Eila 
 fondle in times gone by ; but the cow was a sacred charge 
 laid upon him by Truca, and was also a link with Eila in 
 her own way. 
 
 The veranda looked more than ever like an old curiosity- 
 shop during the last days. There were so many objects, 
 utterly worthless in themselves, with which the family had, 
 nevertheless, sentimental associations, that the difficulty was 
 to know what to leave behind — Truca's ancient collection of 
 dolls; piles of manuscripts and drawings of Dick's; old 
 school-books, music, and copy-books ; presents that had been 
 broken and never mended, and that the recipients were loath 
 to leave behind ; odds and ends of stuffs and household bric- 
 a-brac that Mrs. Clare cherished under the impression that 
 they possessed an intrinsic value of their own, apart from 
 the use they had rendered her. All these had to be thrust 
 away and wedged into the spare spaces in the packing-cases 
 and trunks that encumbered the place. Mrs. Clare's spirits 
 rose to the occasion. She and Dick revelled in the disorder, 
 and for five consecutive days dinner represented a kind of 
 movable feast, spread out in the guise of tinned sheep- 
 tongues and penny buns, upon the top of a packing-case or 
 a corner of the kitchen table, the only one that remained. 
 Eila found that, despite all there was to do, the time passed 
 unsatisfactorily enough. With no more clocks to consult, 
 the hours would sometimes seem to fly, whereas at others 
 they would drag wearily through a whole afternoon. It was 
 comfortless to walk through the dismantled rooms, strewn 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 135 
 
 ■with a litter of paper and straw, of crumbs and dust. But 
 this was the normal atmosphere in which the family now 
 dwelt; and had it been for no other motive than that of 
 feeling tidy once more, Eila longed for their going away to 
 be finally accomplished. 
 
 The evening before they sailed Reginald came to Cowa 
 in the dusk for the last time. Eila was already in her board- 
 ship attire, everything else having been packed away on the 
 Queen of the South. It was of some shrunken gray mate- 
 rial, that left her wrists and ankles exposed, though the neck 
 was encircled by one of the blue-white paper collars of which 
 she had laid in a store in view of the impossibility of having 
 linen washed on board. No less becoming dress could well 
 have been conceived ; but to Reginald's thinking its sole 
 effect was to make the wearer look pathetically young and 
 irresponsible. The excitement of the approaching change 
 lent a strange lustre to her eyes. All her emotions had been 
 called into play, and they seemed to have infused a new in- 
 tensity and rare glow into her expression. 
 
 She had come out to Reginald as he opened the garden- 
 gate in the twilight, and now accompanied him to the bench 
 under the decrepit gum-studded eucalyptus, where it was 
 their wont to sit of an evening. 
 
 " We had better stay outside," she said, as she seated her- 
 self by his side. " Dick is making no end of dust in the 
 front-room, though there is little result from it ; for he came 
 upon a loose page of our old anthology— ' It must be so, 
 Plato ; thou reasonest well '—and, of course, he began to 
 spout it to mother; and when I came away they were argu- 
 ing about the concluding part, and looking everywhere for 
 the next leaf to see how it went on. I left them then, for I 
 have been packing ever since tea-time." 
 
 " You have not been tiring yourself too much, I hope," 
 said Reginald, looking at her anxiously. " You don't look 
 quite like yourself this evening." 
 
 " Don't I ? It's this absurd old frock that I grew out of 
 
 years ago." 
 
 " No ; it's your face. You look etherealized somehow— a 
 little pale too. What have you been doing all day ? " 
 
136 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "What have I been doing?" repeated Eila gravely. 
 " Two not very happy things, you will say. First, I have 
 been to see my husband, and secondly, I have bought some 
 poison." 
 
 Eeginald looked at her quickly. There was a deliberate- 
 ness in her manner of speaking which prevented him from 
 supposing that she was making an ill-timed joke. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he asked almost gruflSy. " What 
 do you want with poison ? " 
 
 " I don't want it for myself— at least, not now — so you 
 need not look so angry. Indeed, I hope we may never have 
 to use it all our lives. But knowing the risks we shall run 
 at sea, and the horrible deaths of lingering agony we might 
 have to endure if the vessel caught fire or foundered in a 
 gale, mother and I agreed that the best thing we could do 
 would be to find some kind of swift, sure, painless poison." 
 She enumerated each of these qualities in an impressive 
 voice, having obviously rehearsed the sequence many times. 
 " Enough for the whole family. If all hope were over, and 
 we had no alternative left but to die like rats in a hole, it 
 would be the greatest consolation to know that we could at 
 least die together, and comfortably, without too much suffer- 
 ing. Don't you think so too ? " 
 
 She put the final question doubtfully, though in giving 
 her explanation she had seemed to be quite carried away by 
 her own earnestness. 
 
 Eeginald did not answer immediately. He was sitting 
 a little bent forward, with his elbows resting on his knees 
 and his hands covering his eyes. 
 
 " I don't wonder people say you are a peculiar family," 
 he said at last, uncovering his face, and looking moodily in 
 front of him, " with the wild ideas you are all so ready to 
 take up. You talk of dying like rats in a hole. I should 
 think an all-round poisoning would be the nearest approach 
 to that you could make. The whole idea is foolish and dan- 
 gerous. It doesn't hold water. You never can say, no mat- 
 ter in what extremity you may find yourself, whether you 
 will not be rescued at the eleventh hour. Why, I read of a 
 man the other day who was sucked down— sucked right 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 13Y 
 
 under, mind— with a sinking ship. It's impossible to say 
 how far he went below, but he rose again with some wreck- 
 age, floated clear of the vortex, and got saved somehow. 
 Where would he have been if he had been coward enough 
 to drink your poison, I should like to know ? " 
 
 "Better off than if he had gone through what he did, 
 perhaps," said Eila promptly. " Life would cost too dear if 
 one had to buy it back upon those terms. If I had got so 
 far into the valley of the shadow of death, I should not 
 thank anyone for pulling me out again. That man you 
 speak of must feel as though he had died once already, and 
 now it will all ha've to be gone through again." 
 
 "Well, then, there's another thing," continued Reginald, 
 unheeding her objections. "As you know nothing about 
 the exact degree of danger to which you may be exposed, 
 there is a risk of your going to the poison when there is not 
 the least excuse for it. There are Cape Horn gales any 
 landsman might be a bit frightened in, though they're 
 nothing when you're used to them. I shan't have a quiet 
 moment now I know what you've got in your minds. I 
 shall picture you, every time there's a bit of a toss, doling 
 out a dose of strychnine" — he shuddered — "like Lucretia 
 Borgia or Mrs. Manning. For God's sake, Eila," he im- 
 plored, " listen to reason ! Don't go away with any thought 
 of taking your own lives. Think about getting to your 
 journey's end as fast and as comfortably as you can ; that's 
 quite enough. It would be just as reasonable to keep a 
 stock of poison here at Cowa on the chance of there being 
 an earthquake or a landslip, as to take it along with you on 
 board ship. My only consolation is that no chemist would 
 give you what you wanted. I believe your sure and pain- 
 less poison would turn out to be a little rose-water when 
 you came to test it." 
 
 "That it wouldn't," cried Eila emphatically. "The 
 chemist's assistant who sold it to me used to be our garden- 
 er's boy years ago, when I was quite a little girl, and though 
 he was much bigger than me, it was I who taught him to 
 read. I used to teach him in the wood-shed in the evening. 
 You know, he could never have got on as he has if he 
 
138 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 hadn't first learnt to read. He thinks all his success in life 
 is owing to it, and he is ever so grateful. He needn't be, of 
 course, for it used to be fun to teach him ; but I know he 
 would not deceive me. I went one day to the shop when 
 his master was out, and I told him the whole story : why 
 we wanted the poison, and how it must be of a kind that 
 could not hurt. I told him everything, in fact, and he 
 understood thoroughly. First he begged and implored me, 
 just as you are doing, not to use it. He opposed my idea on 
 every groixnd, especially the religious one; for he belongs 
 to the Baptists here, and goes to chapel on week-days as 
 well as on Sundays. It was all no use ; I made him yield 
 in the end. He said he was committing a sin knowingly, 
 and that I was the only person in the world who could 
 make him commit it ; but he gave his consent all the same 
 in the end, and to-day I went for the bottle. It is in blue 
 glass, octagonal, in a screwed-down metal case, beautifully 
 contrived ; but nothing would make him tell me what it 
 cost. I could not induce him to take a penny for it. He 
 said it would be like receiving blood-money. That reminds 
 me. I wish you would buy things at his shop, or give him 
 a present, if it could be managed. I am' sure my commis- 
 sion must have put him to trouble and expense." 
 
 " I will do so," said Eeginald, " without fail ; " and he 
 entered the name and address that Eila gave him in his 
 note-book. 
 
 " There, that is enough about the poison," she cried, when 
 he had finished. " I promise we shall not go to the bottle — 
 how fimny that sounds, doesn't it ? — unless we have good 
 reason for it — unless a worse death should actually be staring 
 us in the face. Try and forget I told you about it. You 
 said you must know everything, so it is a little your own 
 fault. Now I have another favour to ask of you." 
 
 " A favour ! "—he interrupted her with a deprecating 
 gesture ; " don't speak ,of favours between you and me 
 Eila." 
 
 "Well, a thing, then. It is not a pleasant charge. It is 
 miserable to talk about, and it will be even vTovse to do. I 
 want you, please, at least once every month to pay a visit to 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 139 
 
 my husband at the asylum." He bowed his head. The 
 mute assent conveyed a more solemn assurance than the 
 most vehement declarations in words, and after a pause Eila 
 continued in an agitated voice : " It was sadder than you 
 can imagine to-day. I went with old Mr. Frost by the 
 coach yesterday, and came back in the steamer this morn- 
 ing. You know how lovely the river passage is to New 
 Norfolk between those magnificent rocks. Well, I cannot 
 see it now without shuddering. It is full of such cruel asso- 
 ciations for me. To-day it was sadder than ever. My hus- 
 band was walking about in the small reserved enclosure in 
 the big garden under the high walls, preaching a sermon 
 with all kinds of gesticulations in a muttering, delirious 
 voice that made his words sound like cursing. They were 
 curses, too, I believe. All the maledictions, the ' woes unto 
 you,' the ' anathema maranathas ' one can find throughout 
 the Bible. One of the keepers was with us, and I stood be- 
 tween him and old Mr. Frost just within the door, and tried 
 to make my husband hear. I said, ' Charlie, you do remem- 
 ber me, don't you ? ' as clearly as I was able, for my voice 
 seemed to choke me somehow when I spoke. He looked 
 round then for a moment. As long as I live I believe the 
 recollection of that look will haunt me. There was a kind 
 of horrible, ghastly, threatening mirth in it that made one's 
 blood run cold to see. How well I understand the idea 
 people had in olden times that madness was only being in 
 the possession of a devil ! You could feel that there was 
 nothing to appeal to in the face — nothing to save you from 
 whatever death-torture the diabolical fancy of the mad 
 brain might devise. The keeper made us move away quietly. 
 We were only just inside, as I told you. He kept his eye on 
 him the whole time. Then, when we were through the 
 door, I heard a kind of wild scrabble, followed by a perfect 
 torrent of texts from the Old Testament about women, and 
 the things for which they were to be stoned. Oh, it was 
 horrible ! horrible ! " 
 
 Eeginald felt her shiver in the warm evening air. In- 
 stinctively he held out his hand for hers, and enclosed it in 
 his large warm grasp that seemed to promise all kinds of re- 
 10 
 
140 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 assurance and protection. Furthermore, he placed his dis- 
 engaged arm about her waist, and drew her nearer to his 
 side. 
 
 "My darling," he said tenderly, "you are going away, 
 and you know you are everything in life to me. When I 
 think of your position, I find myself wondering whether, 
 after all, I am best befriending you by putting myself on the 
 side of the laws that govern society. It is monstrous that 
 you should be debarred from finding some compensation for 
 the grievous experiences you have been through. Some of 
 the best and most beautiful years of your life have been 
 spoiled — ^irretrievably, for you can never get them back. 
 But you have many left. You are the sort of woman, Eila, 
 to make a home a kind of paradise for your husband and 
 children. People pretend there are limits to earthly happi- 
 ness. I suppose the happiness of being loved by you, and 
 living with you, is beyond what can be looked for in this 
 world. But I sometimes think if I had been richer and 
 cleverer than I am I would have tried to persuade you to 
 come away with me in spite of everything. Situated as you 
 are, I believe you would be justified in making a fresh tie, 
 even though society might not sanction it. As for me, dear, 
 I think, if it were any way possible, my love would be 
 stronger for the thought that you had no legal claim on me. 
 It would seem to make you so completely my own. I am a 
 matter-of-fact fellow, as you know ; but there are times 
 when I picture to myself what life would be if I could sail 
 away with you to one of those South Sea Islands we used to 
 cruise around when I was on the Clytie, and I get a notion 
 of such dazzling, bewildering happiness, it almost hurts me 
 to think of. Even as things are, you know that if you made 
 the least sign I would throw everything over and follow you 
 round the world." 
 
 He looked at her with wistful passion. Her eyes were 
 luminous in the gathering twilight; they wore an intent, 
 listening expression. 
 
 "And your mother!" she said; "and mine, and Mamy 
 and Truca ! How wretched we should make them all ! You 
 would not be a bit happy, nor I either." 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 141 
 
 " What right would they have to be wretched ? " he cried 
 vehemently. " What business have they to sacrifice you to 
 a false and conventional standard ? Let them put themselves 
 in your place before they judge. Besides, I think I know 
 your family better than you do yourself. They have never 
 troubled themselves much about the world's opinion — that is 
 certain. They go their own way more than any people I 
 ever saw. I believe that even now, if I were to talk to your 
 mother seriously, and to tell her I wanted to devote my 
 whole life to you, always supposing you cared for me one 
 half -quarter as much as I do for you, which you don't — I 
 believe if I were to argue with her and get her to look at the 
 matter in its true natural aspect — not through society glasses, 
 but as it really exists — it would not be so hard to get her 
 round to my way of thinking. That doctor from the Prin- 
 zessin used to air theories that would have made another 
 person's hair stand on end, and I have heard her agree with 
 them all." 
 
 " Ah, but you mustn't trust her," said Eila, with a meaning 
 laugh ; " you'll find yourself dreadfully deceived if you do. 
 You don't know mother. There's nothing you couldn't con- 
 vince her of at the time if you get the best of an argument. 
 That's where she is so different from other people, and so 
 delightful to argue with. Butjt doesn't last. It never lasts. 
 The next day she has thought of something else, or her feel- 
 ings have spoken, which are much stronger than reason, and 
 she has gone back to her old way of thinking more strongly 
 than ever. So if I ran away with you as you propose, you 
 might expect mother to go with us to the station, and wish 
 us joy and a pleasant journey and all that kind of thing, 
 under the influence, of course, of all you had been saying ; 
 and when we got to Launceston, we should receive a frenzied 
 telegram from her, imploring me to return instantly to save 
 the family from perdition and I don't know what besides." 
 
 Reginald smiled, but it was a gloomy smile. 
 
 " I can answer for my own poor mother better," he said : 
 " she is the tenderest-hearted creature in the world, and 
 would kiss the feet of my wife if she really loved me. But 
 she has hard and fast rules about the duty of wives and hus- 
 
142 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 bands that nothing can move by a hair's breadth. You see 
 from her own point of view she is logical enough. She be- 
 lieves life here is only a probationary stage, and that you 
 must accept the worst trials as a special token of favour on 
 the part of the Almighty, since, by coming out of them tri- 
 umphantly, you score so much to the good hereafter. She 
 would believe, if we came together now, that we should have 
 to expiate it eternally in another state ; not like Paolo and 
 Francesca, who, at least, were 'blown together on the ac- 
 cursed air ' — I found that line in ' The New Republic ' you 
 lent me — but in frizzling separately in the lower regions. 
 Out of consideration for her feelings, I should never let her 
 know the truth." 
 
 " I wonder she can be happy, though, with such a be- 
 lief," said Eila meditatively. 
 
 " I used to wonder, too ; I don't now. You see, she has 
 the primary, the fundamental belief that iniiiiite Wisdom is 
 controlling it all. Can't you see what a difference that 
 makes ? The very appearance of cruelty becomes merely a 
 test of faith. People made like her believe they believe in 
 hell, and act as though it were an existing fact ; but they 
 don't let that or an5rthing else destroy their fixed belief that 
 all is wisely ordained. After all, those who think at all for 
 themselves need not go to the doctrine of hell in search of 
 a motive for doubting that there is a good Providence. 
 They may find it quite ready to hand in the world about 
 them.'' 
 
 " Yes ; but suffering has its term here at least," put in 
 Eila ; " it is the going on of the other that is so diabolical— 
 though, for the matter of that, the going on of anything 
 without knowing how you are to stop it does not bear think- 
 ing of, and don't let us talk of it. It frightens me." She 
 drew a long breath. Then in an altered voice : " You will 
 write to me, then, every fortnight ? " 
 
 " Every fortnight-yes-and as much oftener as I can." 
 
 " And you will tell me every scrap of news that concerns 
 yourself-f or the confidences are not to be all on my side- 
 especially if you meet anyone who makes you think a Uttle 
 less of me." 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 143 
 
 "Especially if I meet anyone who makes me think a 
 little less of you. But how can I meet her if she has no 
 existence ? " 
 
 " You can't tell that — one never knows. What a pity it 
 is our last evening 1 I shall be tormented to-morrow with 
 the recollection of a hundred things I wanted to say — and 
 you will never know them now." 
 
 "Put them down," he said eagerly. "Every scrap of 
 your handwriting will make me so much the richer. Never 
 mind if it is about the veriest trifles ; that is just what I 
 shall most want to hesir. The important matters can take 
 care of themselves. Never stop to think what you put in 
 your letters. I want the words to come warm from your 
 moods, just as I am used to hearing you say them." 
 
 " Then you must write like that, too," said Eila, nodding 
 her head. " You must tell me how many quarts of milk the 
 Jersey cow gives, and how often you meet Diocletian." 
 (Diocletian, it may be explained, was the retriever dog, so 
 named in virtue of the resemblance between his much-curled 
 coat and the sculptured presentment of the Roman Emper- 
 or's hair.) " Sydney is taking him, you know. By-the-by," 
 as a sudden thought struck her, "you do go and see the 
 Wardens sometimes, don't you ? " 
 
 " Only when they invite me to a tennis afternoon, or a 
 dance, or something of that sort, that I shall never go to 
 when you are gone," said Reginald indifferently. 
 
 " You ought to go,'' she insisted ; " you can condole with 
 Sydney when we are gone. I am going to tell you a secret 
 about him— he cares for Mamy." 
 
 " What ! Mamy has an admirer ! " exclaimed Reginald, 
 smiling. " I have always looked upon her as quite a little 
 girl ; but I am delighted to hear it, all the same. I believe 
 young Warden is a first-rate fellow, though he wants lick- 
 ing into shape a little ; and rich, too — there is no doubt of 
 that." 
 
 " That makes no difference to Mamy," said Eila dolefully. 
 " She is terribly trying ; just because it would be the best 
 and most reasonable match in the world, she sets her face 
 against it. She refused Sydney point-blank the other day ; 
 
144 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 only he has managed to persuade her to promise that she 
 will listen to no one else for a year." 
 
 " I suppose it is a pity," said Reginald reflectively—" from 
 a worldly point of view, at any rate ; and she can't take to 
 him, you say ? I believe myself he is the best of the lot." 
 
 "Oh, but Lucy is nice, too!" exclaimed Bila deprecat- 
 ingly. Her promise to her friend rose accusingly in her 
 memory. " You do think she is nice, don't you ? " she added 
 pleadingly. 
 
 " What do you call nice ? " said E«ginald, laughing ; " to 
 me she is entirely uninteresting. She does not even seem 
 like a flesh-and-blood woman; only like a laced-up card- 
 board or guttapercha kind of imitation of one to hang fash- 
 ionable dresses upon. I am sure she hasn't an idea or a 
 thought that hasn't been put into her by her pastors and 
 masters. She goes to balls as she goes to church — by rule of 
 thumb. She does everything automatically, even to visit- 
 ing old Mrs. Hunter over the way." 
 
 Eila made a protesting gesture. 
 
 " Poor Lucy ! " she interrupted him ; " how little you 
 know her ! It is incredible that one person should judge 
 another so falsely." 
 
 " You say it is false ? " said Reginald. " But I don't 
 think you are a good judge. Miss Warden wakes up, I dare 
 say, in your society. Some people have the faculty of ra- 
 diating, you know — they warm and brighten everything 
 that comes within their influence ; and you are one of those 
 people. But to outside mortals like myself, she is very com- 
 monplace and uninteresting. If I wanted you to under- 
 stand the difference between you and her, from a man's 
 point of view, I should have to go back to the age of gold 
 when the earth was young, and to picture a landscape with 
 airily-clad figures in the foreground. You would be just in 
 your place in such a setting ; you would seem to belong to 
 it, as though you had grown out of it. But Miss Warden ! " 
 — his voice assumed an unconscious inflexion of pitying dis- 
 dain — "what a poor, inappropriate, shivering figure she 
 would cut ! She would be nowhere without the latest 
 fashionable clothes. What is that saying about God mak- 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 145 
 
 ing the country, and man making the town ? I should say 
 Nature made you, and the milliner made Miss Warden." 
 
 He stopped, and Eila, though she laughed in a vexed 
 way, did not immediately reply. The moon had risen and 
 deepened since they had seated themselves on the bench, and 
 the descending garden looked weird and bleached under her 
 pale rays. The soothing sounds of coming night blended 
 themselves into a soft, discordant chorus, chanted in a sub- 
 dued key. There were feeble chirps and squeaks from the 
 birds in the apple-trees, and a whining accompaniment that 
 sounded now near, now far, from the mosquitoes circling in 
 the air. The crickets and grasshoppers whuTed and snapped 
 above and beneath the bushes, and a distant sound of whis- 
 tling or singing from the veranda below stole upwards 
 through the darkness. Eila revolved the words she had 
 heard for some time before she answered : 
 
 " I believe you are rather an exception in your way of 
 judging — I hope you are, at least. Men like women to be 
 beautifully dressed, as a rule ; I don't mean expensively 
 only, but suitably, in soft colours that harmonize well, and 
 in things that fit and are fashionably cut. Your chief griev- 
 ance against Lucy seems to be that she wears pretty things, 
 and that they are made in the latest fashions ; yet you say 
 yourself — what was it you said ? — that she would be such a 
 "poor, inappropriate figure" without them, and yet you 
 blame her for wearing them. You are very inconsequent 
 and un,iust." 
 
 " I blame her ! Not in the least," he declared. " I say 
 she is dependent on her dress and on her teaching, that is 
 all, for being what she is ; and I am indifferent to people 
 who have no objective individuality of their own, either 
 physical or mental — they don't interest me." 
 
 " That is such an unreasonable charge ! " complained 
 Eila. As an introduction to the sounding of Reginald's 
 heart on Lucy's behalf, the conversation seemed by no 
 means promising. " It all comes of not knowing her. You 
 say you like to do things for me. Well, will you cultivate 
 Lucy's acquaintance a little, for my sake, when I am gone ? 
 Talk to her by herself — no matter about what — ^just as you 
 
146 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 talk to me. Not quite like that, then," as she felt rather 
 than saw the indignant disclaimer provoked by her words, 
 " but as you used to talk to me when I first met you ; and 
 then write and tell me whether your opinion has not changed 
 a little." 
 
 " And if it should— what then ? What is to be gained by 
 it 1 " he asked, with a certain surprise in his tones. " That 
 I like to do things for you, as you call it, goes without say- 
 ing ; but here you want to inflict a useless penance upon an- 
 other person, as well as upon me, for I don't think Miss 
 Warden would be particularly grateful to you for inciting 
 me to bore her when you are gone." 
 
 " On the contrary," said Eila gravely, " I think she would 
 be very grateful to me, and very, very glad." 
 
 She said the words so solemnly that Reginald checked 
 his rising inclination to laugh. To a man who had been 
 anything of a Lothario, her affirmation could have borne 
 but one interpretation ; but besides the fact that there was 
 only room for one image at the present time in Reginald's 
 heart, he had never looked upon himself in the light of a 
 conquering hero, as far as women were concerned. If it 
 had not been too dark to allow her to see his expression, the 
 look of almost alarmed perplexity that her words had 
 brought into his face might have amused his companion in 
 her turn. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he said. " I am a bad hand at 
 taking a hint. You don't want me to run away with the 
 absurd idea that Miss Warden honours me with her prefer- 
 ence, do you ? " 
 
 " What would there be so surprising in it if she did ? " 
 retorted Eila, with soft-voiced, unconscious flattery. " It is 
 always the round man in the square hole in this world in 
 everything. I haven't the least right to betray Lucy to 
 you ; only you are not like ordinary men. If you thought 
 she cared about you hopelessly, you would not be vain 
 about it: you would only feel pitiful, and perhaps more 
 kindly disposed towards her than before. Besides, you 
 should not have spoken as you did just now ; it seemed to 
 egg me on to tell what I knew, just to show you how mis- 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. i^r^ 
 
 taken you were. You say Lucy is made of cardboard and 
 guttapercha," with a scornful little laugh; "whereas in 
 reality she has much more of a steadfast woman's heart 
 than I have. I know it ; I feel it. I don't say it is a merit • 
 she is made so. Where she places her affections, she makes 
 a sacred, durable shrine for them. Nothing could alter her. 
 She dresses as you see because her mother likes it ; besides^ 
 I suppose it is a habit. I would do it, too, if I could afford 
 it; I should love to do it. She is not the less a woman for 
 that, with a strong nature and a very feeling heart. I 
 thought men looked upon constancy to one ideal in a 
 woman as the most beautiful quality she could have. I 
 don't know why; but I believe they do. Remember, I 
 know Lucy ; I have had talks with her in which we have 
 gone far below the surface— deep down beneath the little 
 conventional crust at which you have stopped short, which 
 you have never pierced, and on the strength of which you 
 think you are entitled to pronounce an opinion. Well, you 
 will have to own yourself wi-ong. I have said enough now 
 to make that plain to you, I hope ; and for the rest, many 
 men would think that, even without her money, Lucy War- 
 den's love was not a thing to be despised." 
 
 She stopped a little out of breath. Her emotion had 
 spurred her on to talk rapidly, without a pause or break. 
 Several times Reginald would have interrupted her, but she 
 paid no heed to him. Perhaps the very certainty that she 
 was pleading a hopeless cause lent additional energy to her 
 manner. She did not deliberately set herself to simulate 
 generous sentiments in Lucy's behalf, but she could not 
 help feeling that it was easier to feel generous, easier to 
 constitute herself Lucy's champion with the foregone con- 
 viction that Lucy's cause was lost, than if there had been 
 any risk of her gaining it. 
 
 " Is the prisoner at the bar to have a chance of being 
 heard ? " Reginald asked humbly ; and as she made no re- 
 ply, he went on hesitatingly : " If you are not mistaken " 
 (she shook her head energetically), — " well, then, granting 
 you are not mistaken, I need not say that what you have 
 told me is a very great surprise to me. Of course, I take 
 
148 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 back a part of what I said. Gutta-percha women have not 
 got hearts. They don't even take fancies that I know of. 
 But granting-, as I said, that all you have been telling me is 
 a fact, what would you advise me to do ? What is to be the 
 upshot of it all ? Do you counsel me to cultivate Miss 
 Warden's acquaintance without delay ? " 
 
 He put the question carelessly, but his heart was beating 
 with painful suspense as he awaited her reply. Eila was 
 almost deceived by his tone ; they had entered unwillingly 
 upon a game of cross-questions and crooked answers. What 
 if his allegiance to her had been really affected by the un- 
 expected revelation she had made him ? Could it be pos- 
 sible there was a remote chance that she might gain her 
 friend's cause after all ? Then what signified the moonlit 
 vows on Mount Knocklofty — the protestations of eternal, 
 unswerving love and constancy she had heard ? A little 
 bewildered, vaguely apprehensive, moved withal by the de- 
 sire to be loyal at all costs to her friend, Eila answered in a 
 constrained voice : 
 
 " Of course I cotmsel you. Lucy is as good as she is 
 rich." 
 
 There was a dead silence which seemed to last an inter- 
 minable time to the couple on the bench. Then Reginald 
 said in a dry voice : 
 
 " You advise me to see her, then, with a view to marriage ? 
 Is that how I am to understand it ? " 
 
 A simple " Yes" rose to Eila's cold lips, but she changed 
 
 it for " That is the advice I ought to give you as a friend " 
 
 "Never mind the ought!" he exclaimed breathlessly. 
 " You would advocate it from your own point of view ? " 
 
 " Well, it would be what all your friends would consider 
 
 a tremendously lucky stroke," she said guardedly. "A wife 
 
 who would idolize you, and bring you a big fortune besides." 
 
 " Oh, Eila, Eila ! " cried Eeginald, and for a few moments 
 
 he said no more. 
 
 Nevertheless, if he had uttered the most eloquent and 
 beautifully-worded appeal in the world, his protest could not 
 have sunk more deeply into his hearer's heart. So deeply 
 did it sink, indeed, and so clearly was it read by her, that 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. I49 
 
 she clasped his arm spontaneously with her two hands, and 
 rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, while she said only 
 these three words, " Do forgive me ! " which had the effect, 
 however, of the sweetest balm poured into a wound. 
 
 They sat silent for awhile, and he stroked her head in 
 token of forgiveness. 
 
 " Why do you like to try me ? " he said. " Is it to show 
 your power ? That is an old story, surely. Why, you al- 
 most made me believe for a moment that you expected me 
 to take your words seriously. Do you know what it means 
 when a man loves a woman as I love you ? It means that no 
 other woman exists for him in the world. That if a fairy- 
 tale princess, with diamonds dropping from her mouth with 
 every word, were to offer herself to him, he would turn 
 away from her. I don't believe you understand that kind 
 of feeling. You said just now you had not the quality of 
 steadfastness, but you inspire it in others, if you don't feel it 
 yourself. Of what use would it be for me to cultivate Miss 
 Warden's acquaintance ? The sooner she forgets my exist- 
 ence the better." 
 
 " What a number of different ways of loving there are, 
 to be sure ! " exclaimed Eila, irrelevantly — " as many as there 
 are people who feel it, I believe. I am sure there must be 
 many men who would say in your place : ' Well, since I 
 can't have the woman I would have fancied, I will give up 
 thinking of her, and just keep her as my friend ; and mean- 
 while I will make the best of life with a wealthy, loving, 
 virtuous young woman as my wife.' Don't you think there 
 are many men who would argue in that way ? " 
 
 " Not if they felt as I do. Besides, I can't and won't give 
 up all hope as long as you and I are above-ground. I would 
 love you with wrinkles and white hair as I love you now. 
 And long, long before that time we may have found a so- 
 lution.'' 
 
 " That is another way in which you are different from 
 me," she said regretfully. " You can wait and be brave. It 
 always seems to me, when a thing is worth having, it is 
 worth having noiv, or not at all. I cannot tell whettier I 
 may care for it even by-and-by. I suppose natures are dif- 
 
150 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ferent. We can't make ourselves feel other than we do, 
 can we ? " 
 
 " I don't know. I suppose the feelings may be moulded 
 too — to a certain extent, at leastr— by the will. But, then, 
 which acts upon which ? That is always the puzzle. As 
 you said just now of Miss Warden, it is no merit of mine 
 that I am constant to you. I simply can't help myself. I 
 don't believe, all the same, that there is anyone else who 
 would have had the power to develop the faculty of con- 
 stancy in me to the same extent. Promises of fidelity mean 
 nothing. You can't promise to feel. You can only prom- 
 ise to act, and the action is worth nothing w^ithout the feel- 
 ing. I won't ask you to keep your affection for me as I keep 
 my love for you. If once you come to think of it as a duty, 
 it will have pretty well ceased to be. But I will ask you to 
 make me a promise, Eila, and to keep it, and that is, first to 
 tell me the truth about everything. Don't hide things out 
 of consideration for me. There is no sufl^ering you can in- 
 flict from which I might not recover ; but to deceive me, 
 that would be indeed dealing me my death-blow. I de- 
 serve your confidence — I do indeed, my dear. Supposing I 
 had used such influence as you have let me gain over you to 
 persuade you to run counter to social conventions ; or if not 
 to run counter to them openly, to let us be all in all to each 
 other in secret ? Supposing I had worked upon your fine, 
 pitying, sympathetic nature to induce you to surrender your- 
 self wholly and entirely into my hands, don't you think " 
 — he spoke rapidly and nervously — " don't you think mat- 
 ters might have ended so ? " 
 
 " Yes," Eila answered. 
 
 Her head was bent, and the moonbeams seemed to trace 
 her silhouette in silver by her lover's side. Her simple 
 answer moved him inexpressibly ; the chivalrous as well as 
 the passionate element in his nature was stirred to its depths. 
 He bowed low over her hand and pressed his lips to it 
 deferentially. 
 
 " You are my queen and my darling," he said humbly. 
 " Whatever may come in the future, I hope I shall always 
 have the strength to be glad that these years of our friend- 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 151 
 
 ship have passed as they have. I know that from the ordi- 
 nary point of view I have acted like a fool — the greater fool, 
 perhaps, that the kind of scruples which weigh with other 
 people have no weight with me. My conscience would not 
 have reproached me if you had been indeed what the old 
 romancers called 'my lady love' all this time. I would 
 not have worshipped or venerated you the less ; but I would 
 have introduced a disturbing element, a terror, and an 
 unrest into your life. I should have proved that I loved 
 you for myself— in short, more than for yourself. You 
 understand ? " 
 
 " Yes," Bila said again ; and he continued once more : 
 
 ■" Then I may believe you will give me your trust and 
 your confidence, by right of my love for you ? " 
 
 "I will indeed," she said earnestly. "I will tell you 
 everything, I promise you." 
 
 Reginald was fain to be content with this assurance. 
 But after he had torn himself away from her, and was walk- 
 ing down the rough road through the moon-steeped radiance 
 of the summer night, misgivings and forebodings that made 
 the future lie black before him crowded upon his mind. He 
 loved her so dearly — so dearly ! It was because he loved 
 her after so exalted a fashion that he had refrained from 
 avowing his passion to her until she was on the point of 
 leaving him. But he could not say even now whether he 
 had acted wisely ; he could not be sure that he had taken 
 the best means iafter all of ensuring her fidelity to him in 
 the future. Supposing he had persuaded her to regard her 
 first miserable marriage as a thing to be disregarded, and had 
 bound her to him, as wives are bound to their husbands, by 
 a tie the stronger for its secrecy ? Might she not have looked 
 upon him then as her very lord and master, and have re- 
 mained heart and fancy-proof even when she was separated 
 from him ? Might she not, indeed, have refused to separate 
 from him altogether, and have braved the world ? No, he 
 could not have let her do that in this little place, where the 
 stones aimed at her glass house from every hand would 
 have wounded and well-nigh crushed her. But might she 
 not at least have remained under the roof of her father-in- 
 
152 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 law, and have given Reginald such hours as she could spare ? 
 If his renunciation had but procured him the loss of this 
 imaginary Paradise, cast her loose, too, upon the world, in- 
 stead of attaching her to an anchor of safety, how bitterly, 
 how eternally he would rue it ! If it had but exposed her, 
 with her impressionable, exotic nature, her irresistible at- 
 tractions, and her defenceless position, to become the mark 
 of someone less scrupulous, less tender of her than himself, 
 how more than ever, how unavailingly, would he repent 
 himself ! The very thought made him shiver in the warm 
 night air. On the other hand, if, by teaching her to deceive, 
 he had exposed her to a different kind of danger, what then ? 
 Had he not read in some French novel, w^herein he had 
 come upon some other wonderful truths, that a woman 
 might have no lovers or several, but rarely one alone ? 
 Supposing he had only succeeded in inclining her to lend a 
 readier ear to the next person who should impress her fancy 
 after she had gone far out of his own reach ? That was a 
 thought not to be harboured, not to be borne for an instant. 
 Reginald walked far past the little cottage he shared at 
 Sandy Bay with his mother, under the influence of the 
 dreary thoughts that pursued liim. The scene around him 
 might have whispered peace to a less troubled heart than 
 his, for town and harbour lay wrapped in a silver dream. 
 Not a leaf rustled, not a ripple stirred upon the water. It 
 was as though Natm-e herself had feared to break the spell. 
 And while he was hurrying along the road, blind to the 
 calm beauty of the night, Eila at the cottage was seated in 
 her own little room writing a letter, with deep intervals for 
 reflection. She had only her mattress on the littered floor 
 for a seat, only a lead pencil, with a page torn from an old 
 copy-book, for her writing materials. But Lucy must not 
 be kept waiting. Poor Lucy! Even now, perhaps, the 
 strain of hope deferred was keeping her awake while all 
 about her slept. Eila tried to temper her news as best she 
 could. It could not be very wrong, she thought, to employ 
 a subterfuge in the telling of it. 
 
EILA AS EMISSARY. 153 
 
 " Dear Lucy " (said the letter), 
 
 "I would have written before, but, indeed, I have 
 had no chance of speaking until this evening. I am sure 
 Mr. Acton likes you very much ; but, Lucy dear, it seems 
 there is a reason, after all, for his putting marriage with 
 anyone on this side of the world away from him — for the 
 present. You hinted at something, you remember, when 
 we were talking about this matter in the veranda, and I dare 
 say you were right. You must look upon that as the rea- 
 son if he does not go out much or accept many invitations. 
 I should try and put it out of my head for a time if I were 
 you, especially as many others are ready to kneel at your 
 feet. I wish I had more satisfactory news, but I can only 
 give my impression for what it is worth. I don't think the 
 money would be an insuperable obstacle if the heart were 
 still free, but I have strong doubts of that after the con- 
 versation I have just had. 
 
 " Your affectionate friend, 
 
 " ElLA. 
 
 " P. S. — You will forgive the scrappy paper and the pen- 
 cil. Everything is packed up, even the ink and pens." 
 
 This letter did not reach its recipient until after the 
 writer's departure. The only line that detached itself from 
 the rest like a golden rift in a black cloud was the line, " I 
 am sure Mr. Acton likes you very much." But to Lucy's 
 great sorrow there was no longer any opportunity of cross- 
 examining her friend as to the means by which she arrived 
 at this knowledge. The Queen of the South was already 
 lost to view, and the degree of liking professed by Reginald 
 must remain at the unsatisfactory stage of a tormenting 
 hypothesis, to be interpreted in its best or its worse sense, 
 according as Lucy was borne up by heaven-high hope or 
 cast down by cruel and sad despondency. 
 
154 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 HoBAET Harbour had never looked brighter or glassier 
 than upon the night when the family from Cowa was rowed 
 on board the Queen of the South;, lying some three or four 
 hundred yards away from the wharf, in readiness to haul 
 up her anchor and sail away with the morning breeze. Tug 
 there was none. Dependent upon the winds of heaven alone, 
 the Queen would have to spread her canvas and tack down 
 the bay and out into the stormy ocean as best she might. 
 Mrs. Clare and her children represented the only contingent 
 of passengers, save a paralytic old man who had come into 
 a fortune in the Old World when all power of profiting by 
 it had left him, and who was therefore a striking illustration 
 of the truth of the cynical French proverb that Providence 
 gives us nuts when we have no teeth left to crack them with. 
 Mrs. Clare and her children were placed in possession of 
 the stern-cabins. Among the smaller craft in the harbour, 
 the Queen of the South appeared worthy of her royal name ; 
 and as the family from Cowa climbed on to the poop-deck, 
 and surveyed her length from stem to stern, they compared 
 her in turn to their long veranda at home, to the manifest 
 disadvantage of the latter. Their point of view changed, 
 however, next day, when those sinister-sounding contriv- 
 ances called "dead lights" having been put up over the 
 large ports, the stern cabins were converted into dark dun- 
 geons, and the occupants thereof lay sick unto death, heed- 
 less of the crazy tumbling and staggering of the frail little 
 ship abandoned to her fate in the midst of the mighty Ant- 
 arctic waves. The heavy Cowa trunks that were not as yet 
 lashed to the posts of the bunks in which the travellers lay, 
 slid over the uncarpeted floors, and collided against each 
 other as the storm increased. The shrill shrieking of the 
 wind was an appalling sound to unaccustomed ears and the 
 creakmg and groaning of cordage and timbers was only less 
 terrible than the occasional heavy thuds that marked the 
 onslaught of some giant wave upon the vessel's stern caus- 
 
THE VOYAGE. I55 
 
 ing her to shiver from end to end, as though some mighty- 
 hand had seized her by the keel and was shaking her wildly 
 to and fro. 
 
 These early experiences came upon Mrs. Clare and her 
 children as a terrific and crushing surprise. For the first 
 few days they lay like souls in purgatory, writhing in their 
 cold and dismal prisons. A horrible feeling as of being 
 caught in a trap from which there was no escape had taken 
 hold of their minds. They had been warned that they must 
 expect little alteration in the weather until such time as they 
 should round Cape Horn, but the date when this glorious 
 consummation might be looked for was as vague as the one 
 fixed for the advent of the millennium. Shortly after they 
 started, two Tuesdays were crowded into the same week, " as 
 though," said Mamy, "the weeks were not already seven 
 days too long for all we have to suffer in them." Eila's 
 misery was sixfold increased by witnessing the wretched- 
 ness of all the beloved members of the family. Each one 
 suffered according to his temperament — some uncomplain- 
 ingly, the others clamorously. 
 
 Dick, who had maintained that vegetarians and Buddhists 
 were never sick, or that being sick they retained their " philo- 
 sophic calm," was one of the worst. His groans were audi- 
 ble even in the cuddy, where the morose captain and his 
 mates dined at one upon scalding pea-soup and bruised boiled 
 fowl. At the end of five purgatorial days, Eila took heart 
 of grace. Someone, she told herself, must set an example, 
 unless they were to have recourse to the desperate expedient 
 of emptying the poisoned bottle among them. That it would 
 come to this in the end, she was occasionally driven to fear, 
 especially upon nights when the wind blew so furiously that 
 the vessel seemed lost in a boiling sea of foam, and even to 
 stand upright for an instant was a physical impossibility. 
 The reflection brought such a sickening clutch of anguish 
 with it, that upon one memorable night she could bear it no 
 longer. With her knees trembling beneath her, she threw 
 a shawl over her head— she had been lying half dressed on 
 her bunk — and staggered up the companion-way to the deck. 
 The hatches were only half closed, and she was just able to 
 II 
 
156 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 put out her head and look around her. Her hair, which had 
 been tightly coiled up a moment ago, was torn down by the 
 wind. She felt, as the long dark locks streamed out behind 
 her, as though the whole mass were being pulled away from 
 the roots by invisible hands. The vessel lay under close- 
 reefed topsails, and the noise of the gale, as it rushed howl- 
 ing through the bare rigging, was like the yelling of an 
 army of demons. The night was dark, but the reflection of 
 the starlight from the lashed-up foam showed that the vessel 
 was lying at an angle which made it appear like death to 
 walk across the deck. There could be no thought of sea- 
 sickness now. A kind of numbness that was almost resig- 
 nation seemed to creep over Eila as she contemplated the 
 awful scene. "I do not see how any vessel could live 
 through such a tempest for long," she reflected in her igno- 
 rance ; " but all thought, all feeling would be battered out 
 of one's brains by those waves. I should think one would 
 be knocked down breathless and swept away in an instant, 
 and surely there would be no sense or consciousness of suf- 
 fering after that. It would be a more dignified way of 
 dying, too, than by sneaking to the bottle of poison." In 
 the midst of her reflections a careless movement in steering 
 on the part of the two sailors lashed to the wheel caused the 
 Queen to ship a tremendous sea. A mighty wave swept 
 over her deck, almost submerging her under its terrific mass. 
 She staggered from stem to stern. Eila, drenched from head 
 to foot, seeing the water rain into the cuddy and swirl over 
 the floors of the stern cabins, had the presence of mind to 
 rush below and cry in a voice whence she strove with des- 
 perate calm to expel all hint of the heart-sick terror that 
 moved her. " Such fun, everybody — I have had a salt 
 shower-bath ! " and thereupon she ran to encircle Truca in 
 her arms. The little girl was shivering and whimpering 
 with cold and misery. She had been dreaming of the green 
 paddocks of Cowa, wherein she had been blissfully milking 
 her Jersey cow upon a fragrant summer's evening. But the 
 cow would not stand still, and the milk-pail rocked to and 
 fro ; the milk had streamed on to the grass, and Truca awoke 
 to see the salt water dashing over the cabin-floor. 
 
THE VOYAGE. 
 
 157 
 
 "Oh, let us go home, Eila!" cried the child, sobhing and 
 clinging to her elder sister ; " tell the captain we all do want 
 so badly to go home again. Mother wants to, and all of us." 
 
 Eila tried to preach reason and patience, but her words 
 carried scant conviction, even to her own ears. The terrific 
 turmoil above seemed to drown the sound of them. If the 
 truth must be told, she was privately very much of the .same 
 opinion as Truca ; and there was nothing, even to the Cheva- 
 lier's picture and the imitation ruby, that she would not now 
 have gladly thrown overboard in consideration of being 
 landed safe and sound with all the rest of the family upon 
 Hobart wharf. To look forward to the arrival in England 
 seemed little more practical than to look forward to landing 
 in heaven. In fact, the last-named place, if it existed at all, 
 seemed ranch the more probable goal of the two. It is need- 
 less to say that under these conditions the beginning of the 
 journey was not auspicious. And yet, before the first fort- 
 night had passed away, Eila and her brothers and sisters — 
 such is the elasticity of youth — were dancing up and down 
 the slippery decks in the chill, ice-laden air of the desolate 
 Southern Ocean. They had passed New Zealand, and were 
 in the region of gales, icebergs, and white squalls. " In 
 these seas," says the chart, " there are few signs of life." 
 
 They saw no vessels, and but rarely a whale. The small- 
 est incident in their lives became an event to be talked about 
 for days. The sweeping away of fifty fowls in a gale, the 
 capture of a shining white albatross, and the speculations 
 after he had been chloroformed by the mate, despite all 
 Dick's counter-arguments concerning the future fate of the 
 spiritual essence of albatrosses, all these were subjects of the 
 deepest interest. Upon a vessel of five hundred tons the 
 crew is necessarily small. Before the Horn was reached^ 
 the Clare family knew the names and histories of every 
 mate, every able seaman, and every deck-swabber on board. 
 They knew, besides, the names of every sail, spar and rope, 
 and could take the ship's bearings with a little help from 
 Mr. Jonson or Mr. McKenzie, the first and second mates, as 
 well as though they had been destined to a seafaring life. 
 Upon a French vessel, these young men— they were young 
 
158 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 men still, though there was a Mrs. Jonson at Poplar and a 
 Mrs. McKenzie in Glasgow — would have lost their heads, if 
 not their hearts, under the influence of the beauty of young 
 Mrs. Frost. But Mr. Jonson and Mr. McKenzie had not a 
 drop of French blood in their veins, and belonged to the 
 race of unconscious heroes who, in trying to act up to the 
 principle they have learned in the Catechism, of doing their 
 duty in that state of life unto which it has pleased their God 
 to call them, practise a daily code of self-denial by the side 
 of which fastings, flagellations and hair-shirts are as noth- 
 ing. There was the most entire good understanding be- 
 tween the Clare family and these simple and loyal sailors. 
 Eila forgot for the nonce that there was a great wearisome 
 solid earth, for which they were bound, where everybody 
 was trying to push everybody else out of his place, and be- 
 came as simple in her thoughts and aims as the people about 
 her. Dick renounced vegetarianism under the irresistible 
 temptation of pickled pork and peas upon a day when the 
 cold salt air overhead had rendered him ravenous. What 
 with gales and violent winds, before which the Queen of the 
 South was powerless to run, it was six weeks before the 
 Horn was rounded. Never would the travellers forget the 
 eventful day when this great feat was accomplished. The 
 sea was calm as a lake, and its sapphire depths showed deep- 
 lying emerald gleams. Two ships, the first that had been 
 seen, were sighted, and Truoa shed tears at the idea that 
 there were other human beings besides themselves at Cape 
 Horn. A distant iceberg appeared like a glittering jag 
 against the horizon, and the snorting whales spouted reck- 
 less fountains in honour of the travellers. With the ves- 
 sel's prow turned northwards, the family began to think 
 that England might possibly be nearer after all than heaven. 
 Then came the fierce pamperos, sweeping down the South 
 American coast at Pernambuco, and the tearing gales of the 
 roaring forties. Thereupon increasing warmth and sun- 
 shine, during which the afore-mentioned sinister dead lights 
 were taken down, and the stern-cabins submitted to a spring 
 cleaning, while Mother Carey's chickens fiuttered brightly 
 around the vessel's stem. And now the travellers entered 
 
THE VOYAGE. I59 
 
 the Tropics, and were driven by the Trades towards the Line. 
 Here the Queen had a fit of the sulks. For eight mortal 
 days she stretched and groaned in the steaming Doldrums 
 with her sails flapping drearily to and fro, while the sea ap- 
 peared to turn stagnant and greasy around her. Hideous 
 sharks swam close to the vessels side, and Eila read the 
 " Ancient Mariner " to her brothers and sisters in the midst 
 of the realistic mise-en-scine. It was unspeakable joy to 
 wake one morning and hear the lapping of the waves be- 
 neath the port-holes. The awful calm, the unnatural stag- 
 nation was over ; the Queen had wakened, and was walking 
 through the waters like a thing of life once more. 
 
 The last interest was that of fishing for seaweed and 
 shells in the Sargasso Sea ; then came a final toss in the Bay 
 of Biscay, followed by the overpowering excitement of en- 
 tering the English Channel. At this point a change came 
 over everyone on board. The steward, a little man with an 
 amount of dignity in inverse proportion to his height, and 
 two eyes that took contrary directions — the one being fixed 
 on his lazareet, and the other on the lookout that no dis- 
 respect was intended — relaxed visibly. The captain, who 
 affected taciturnity, not to say grumpiness, became almost 
 loquacious. Even the paralytic passenger accomplished the 
 half of-a smile. Mrs. Clare and her children were in a con- 
 dition of jubilant excitement that found vent in filling their 
 diaries with pages of impassioned word-painting respecting 
 the green English coast, as smooth as a billiard-table, and 
 the gleaming chalk cliffs that supported the marvellous turf. 
 Their emotions upon passing up the Thames to the docks 
 were so keen that, when night came, they were literally 
 worn out with the work of wondering. It was a fine night, 
 and, marvellous to say, the air was comparatively clear. 
 The mighty city, with its lights "flaring like a dreary 
 dawn," lay close at hand. Next day they would walk 
 through those wonderful streets, and see with their bodily 
 eyes the dome of St. Paul's, and the Parliament clock, and 
 the Tower, where Lady Jane was beheaded. They had 
 been familiar with all these from the time they could 
 speak ; but the rapture of beholding them face to face had 
 
160 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 seemed utterly impossible of realization in those early- 
 days. 
 
 The family held a last meeting in the stem-cabin on the 
 eve of their final departure from the Queen of the South. 
 They had Gravesend prawns and fresh butter ; best of all, 
 the Gravesend pilot had brought on board a bunch of sweet- 
 smelling daifodils and a basket of English strawberries. 
 The strawberries were amazingly dear, and the dafPodils 
 were not to be had for nothing ; but one does not come to 
 England every day. Mrs. Clare changed the first of the 
 sovereigns belonging to the slender hoard that was to go so 
 much farther, and to do so much more, than any other hoard 
 in the world ; and though the Gravesend strawberries could 
 not be really said to compare with the Cowa strawberries, 
 every member of the family declared them to be the most 
 wonderful and delicious they had ever tasted. It was the 
 same with the butter, which was not like the butter they 
 had obtained from Truca's cow. But were they not close to 
 the dome of St. Paul's and the Tower ? and could butter and 
 strawberries with such associations as these be anything but 
 the best butter and the most delicious strawberries in the 
 world ? 
 
 Next day it behoved the family to leave the Queen of 
 the South for good. Dark and dreary prison as the vessel 
 had appeared in their eyes during the desolate days of the 
 early part of their journey, they were inclined to look upon 
 her now as an ark of refuge. She was already abandoned 
 by the mates and the crew, and with every fresh departure 
 there was a fresh and heart-rending leave-taking to be gone 
 through. Mrs. Clare, with Willie and Mamy, went up from 
 the docks to Bayswater in quest of lodgings ; while Eila, 
 with Dick, Truca, and an old caretaker from the docks, re- 
 mained upon the deserted ship. To while away the time, 
 they made-believe to navigate the vessel on her way home 
 from the Antipodes. Dick shouted orders through his hands 
 from the captain's bridge, while Truca stood at the helm. 
 One rang the appointed number of bells from the bell upon 
 the poop-deck, while the other responded by striking the 
 cracked bell upon the forecastle, and making it echo the 
 
THE VOYAGE. 161 
 
 sound. Eila meanwhile counted for the twentieth time the 
 boxes and cases that represented the family belongings — 
 seventeen in all — without counting shawls and rugs made 
 up into various emigrants' bundles. She did a great deal of 
 thinking as she wandered up and down the familiar poop- 
 deck through the long June afternoon, looking now at the 
 masts of some wonderful East-Indiaman at hand, by the 
 side of which the Queen looked pitifully small and mean ; 
 now directing her gaze towards the vast mysterious city 
 upon whose threshold she was standing ; anon looking over 
 the vessel's sides at the rank, city-soiled water of the docks. 
 A strange lost feeling crept over her during her solitary 
 watch. Oh for one friend only to come and take them by 
 the hand, and bid them welcome to this unknown land ! 
 What rapture it would be to have Reginald come down to 
 meet them, and lead them to a place he had made ready for 
 them ! Dreams of this nature were so much more satisfac- 
 tory than the reality, that Eila gave herself up to the plan- 
 ning of a long and delightful romance in which Reginald 
 was supposed to have made a gigantic fortune in mining 
 shares the very week after the Queen of the South had 
 sailed. Naturally his first thought was to follow his friends 
 home in the mail-steamer, and to take a furnished house for 
 them in one of the places Eila had read about — Hyde Park, 
 for instance, or Tower Hamlets ; she had not the least idea 
 where Tower Hamlets might be, but the name sounded 
 green, and homely, and historic. She even composed the 
 phrase in which he would tell them the news, and planned 
 the exact drive they would all take the next day to the 
 Crystal Palace, to Hampton Court, and, if there was time, 
 to Madame Tussaud's as well. She had got to the point of 
 their starting all together upon a European tour which was 
 to embrace Venice and St. Petersburgh, when, to her great 
 joy, the rest of the party returned. It seemed untold ages 
 since they had gone away in the morning, and she wel- 
 comed them back as though they had returned from an ex- 
 pedition to the North Pole or the heart of Central Africa. 
 Dick and Truca were summoned by a shrill " Coo-ee ! " from 
 their posts of responsibility on the bridge and at the helm. 
 
162 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 The little girl had been overwhelmed by Dick's condescen- 
 sion in taking her play seriously, and had spent a very en- 
 joyable afternoon ; but a dinner of condensed milk and yes- 
 terday's rolls had inclined them all to be hungry, and they 
 greeted their mother with effusion in the expectation that 
 she had come to take them to supper and bed on shore. 
 
 Mrs. Clare, however, looked dismally tired — more tired, 
 indeed, than they ever remembered seeing her. She had an 
 almost weather-beaten air, and there were dark rings under 
 her eyes. Willie and Mamy also wore a solemn aspect. 
 Their faces were lined with dust and railway smoke. One 
 carried a bag of buns, the other some slices of ham wrapped 
 in paper. The grease had worked through, and Mamy had 
 taken off her gloves to save them. The first thing the trio 
 did was to sink down upon the bench by the skylight, from 
 which they had so often seen the bulwarks climb above the 
 horizon and sink below it again as the vessel swung and 
 rolled through the long monotonous days spent upon At- 
 lantic waves. During the voyage the bench had served the 
 double duty of seat and hen-coop, and had been carefully 
 avoided by Truca from the day that her hapless calves had 
 been pecked at through the grating by an inquisitive fowl. 
 Now it was as empty as all the rest, and the family might 
 seat themselves along it in an undisturbed row. Mamy was 
 the first to break the silence. 
 
 " London is too big ! " she said despondently. Her voice 
 sounded weak and cracked with fatigue and underground 
 railway smoke. " And, oh, so dirty, you can't think, Eila ! 
 First we went over forests of houses with red roofs. I 
 thought they would never end ; and such miserable houses ! 
 Then we got to an enormous dark railway-station, with 
 crowds and crowds of people. The air smelt so funny, and 
 everything looked huge and dingy. After that we went in 
 a train in the dark for I don't know how long, and we came 
 out among streets and houses with dingy gardens in front 
 of them. It was still London— all London ; and then we 
 looked for rooms ! " 
 
 " And are we going to them now ? " cried Eila in tones of 
 trembling expectation. 
 
THE VOYAGE. 163 
 
 " Ask mother," said Mamy gloomily. " All I want to do 
 is to get into my own little berth and stop there." 
 
 " We will leave the ship to-morrow, children, I hope," 
 said Mrs. Clare, in answer to the appealing look cast upon 
 her by the others. " But London is all changed since I knew 
 it ; it is not the London I remember ; and rooms are horri- 
 bly dear ; and I might have thought it was the season." 
 
 "Then we must undo all our rugs again," said Eila de- 
 jectedly, " and camp down on the bunks ; for the mattresses 
 are stitched up in canvas. Dick and I did them up this 
 morning. Well, it won't matter for one night. And now 
 shall we have tea 1 " 
 
 " Mother is just dying for tea, and so am I," said Mamy. 
 
 " There's some tea left, but nothing else ; and we must 
 bribe the old caretaker to let us stop on board for to-night.'' 
 Eila looked doubtfully in the direction of the old man. 
 " Willie, couldn't you find some place close by where you 
 could get a loaf and some milk ? and then we can get our 
 tea on the skylight, you know.'' 
 
 Thus it was that Mrs. Clare and her children spent the 
 first night of their arrival in the great capital of the world. 
 This was their opening experience of the renowned London 
 season, within a stone's-throw, or, rather, within a few min- 
 utes by railway, of all the most marvellous appliances of 
 nineteenth-century luxury and civilization that the mind of 
 man can conceive. They dared not adventure themselves 
 in any of the dingy-looking eating-houses in the neighbour- 
 hood of the docks. Even Willie's short absence in quest of 
 a loaf caused them more anxiety than they had ever known 
 when he had set out upon a Bush tramp of indefinite dura- 
 tion in Tasmania. They remembered all they had ever 
 heard or read about mysterious and never-accounted-for dis- 
 appearances in London, and Mrs. Clare mentally resolved 
 that henceforth they should never go out less than two or 
 three together. Perhaps, indeed, it would be as well for all 
 the family to go in one party everywhere, upon the principle 
 of there being safety in numbers. People were never garrotted 
 in large parties, as far as she knew. Willie's return with 
 the loaf was hailed with a shout. It had been already pro- 
 
164: NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 posed that Eila should go with the caretaker in quest of him. 
 There was still a tank of fresh water on board — the allow- 
 ance had been scant at sea, but now they might revel in it, 
 if they pleased — and the steward had left a clean tea-cloth 
 in a forgotten corner, which did duty for a towel. When 
 the travelled trio had washed underground soot and smoke 
 from their eyes and hands, they came much refreshed to the 
 supper Eila had prepared on the skylight. It was late in 
 June, and the air was dank, but warm. The long twilight 
 was a joyful discovery to be made the most of. It was 
 nearly nine before the supper, consisting of a pasty-looking 
 London loaf, cold ham, buns and tea, was all in readiness. 
 The number of cups and glasses, even counting the one 
 from the washstand below, only came to four ; but Dick 
 went shares with Mamy, and Eila with Truca. Fortunately, 
 it was possible to boil their kettle by means of a spirit-lamp, 
 unearthed from the bag of linen for the wash. Thus it came 
 about that the Clare family supped merrily, like shipwrecked 
 mariners, in the very heart of London. But their spirits 
 rose with the ham, the tea, and the buns. The very next 
 day they would be sure to find rooms exactly suited to their 
 tastes, and not too expensive. Restored by the tea and the 
 rest, Mamy gave a concise and graphic account of the day's 
 adventures. She described the fine lodgings they had been 
 to at first, and imitated the disdainful sniff of the landlady 
 upon their asking to see the rooms. She acted the scene in 
 which they had tried to look as though the bedrooms were 
 too small, after the price — an outrageous one — had been 
 named. She related how, upon boldly mentioning the price 
 they could afford to give at a modest-looking house in a 
 back street, the landlady had said "she could give 'era a 
 basement, but nothink more for that," and had led them 
 triumphantly down a dark staircase to an underground 
 room, covered with oil -cloth, in which was an old gentle- 
 man, with spectacles and a nose like a radish covered with 
 knobs, who had shaken hands with Mamy, and asked her 
 huskily if she would like to see his collection of butterflies. 
 
 " I thought the season was like the weather," said Mamy 
 in conclusion, " something that everybody in London had a 
 
THE VOYAGE. 165 
 
 share in and a right to enjoy ; but I see it isn't that at all. I 
 think it's only meant for people who are dressed differently 
 from us." 
 
 " And I thought you looked so nice, all in your Hobart 
 mantles, and Willie with his best suit not a year old, when 
 you left the ship this morning," said Eila in a pained voice. 
 
 "Well, perhaps it isn't our clothes, after all. I don't 
 know what it is ; but if you could see how people stared at 
 us, and how the landladies, the ones who condescended to 
 listen to us at all, looked at us ! " 
 
 " They looked as if you were country cousins, I suppose ? " 
 said Eila cheerfully. " Well, we needn't mind that." 
 
 " Oh, it was worse than that ! Some of them had a look 
 of suspicion and contempt. And when I remember how in 
 Hobart everybody had a smile and a nod for us, to-day I had 
 a feeling of terror when I thought how awfully alone we 
 were." 
 
 " Well, it's done now," said Willie, " so we'd better make 
 the best of it. I've got my recommendation from the bank 
 to back me up. I mean to look for a billet as soon as we're 
 any way settled. Good night, mother. I'm going to camp 
 down upon the forecastle. We'd better be all off in a body 
 to-morrow morning. The captain said we could stop on one 
 night, and we'd better not wait to be told to clear out, for 
 that's what it'll come to next, I expect." 
 
 " I wish I knew if people could help doing things in this 
 world," said Mamy. 
 
 " I- don't believe they can altogether," said Willie. 
 
 His brothers and sisters looked up in surprise. It was an 
 extremely rare occurrence for Willie's voice to be heard when 
 the ever-recurring metaphysical discussions were started by 
 
 the rest. 
 
 ■' How do you know whether they can at all ? " queried 
 Eila slowly. She paused, as though seeking for words to 
 appropriately clothe a thought that had been long turned 
 over in her mind. " I have very often thought," she con- 
 tinued—" I don't think I've said it before— I have very often 
 thought, though, that perhaps what people call the " course 
 of time " may be really only a kind of slow unfolding of 
 
166 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 some tremendous chart, upon which every single event, the 
 biggest and the tiniest, that is to happen in the universe, is 
 stamped beforehand in indelible ink." 
 
 " The ' as it was in the beginning ' and ' is now, and ever 
 shall be. Amen ! ' " said Dick, with a lugubrious laugh. 
 "Well, if that is so, our journey home was traced on the 
 chart before we were born, and— we couldn't help our- 
 selves." 
 
 A dismayed silence fell upon the group, until Truca's 
 childish voice was piped in plaintive protest : 
 
 " But what a trouble for anyone to make such a chart, 
 and to put all the mistakes in too, and then just to sit down 
 and wait for them all to happen ! I don't see any good in 
 that." 
 
 " It will have to be made clear to our spiritual essences 
 by-and-by," began Mrs. Clare. 
 
 But as this assertion was the accustomed signal for a 
 discussion of indefinite length, and as the stars had now 
 come out, the family crept below, to stretch themselves 
 upon their hard couches and wish they were back in the 
 Tropics — even at this pass they could not wish themselves 
 back near the Horn — with their dinner of boiled fowl and 
 bacon a prospect to be reckoned upon with certainty for 
 the morrow, and no thought to be taken for the secur- 
 ing of their bed and board. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 IN PARIS. 
 
 Evolutionists tell us, and our own experience has 
 taught us, that improved conditions of living are conducive 
 to the maintenance and propagation of the human race. 
 Yet we occasionally meet with instances— as in the case of 
 the Australian blacks— where the substitution of clothes 
 and houses for bare bodies and the naked earth has the un- 
 expected result of destroying rather than preserving the 
 
IN PARIS. 167 
 
 individual. If, on the other hand, we apply the experiment 
 in an inverse sense, and take an ordinarily healthy man in 
 the prime of life who has heen born in what is called the 
 lap of luxury — who has had his coats made at Poole's, and 
 his rooms warmed by hot-water tubes — and place him in the 
 same conditions as those which surround the primitive man, 
 we shall iind, to our surprise, that he will adapt himself 
 admirably to the new order of things — that he can subsist 
 upon fish and roots, can sleep upon the ground, can make 
 shift with the skins of wild beasts for a garment, or even, if 
 the weather is warm, with the sole skin that Nature has 
 given him at his birth ; and that, far from dying under this 
 unfamiliar regime, he will frequently, as Rip Van Winkle 
 says, "live long and prosper," the prosperity being under- 
 stood naturally in a purely physical sense. What are wo to 
 infer from this fact ? That the higher the organism, the 
 more easily it can adapt itself to altered conditions ; or only 
 that it is always easier to descend than to mount in the 
 scale of being, whether we regard ourselves as social units 
 or merely as superior specimens of apes. 
 
 If the former hypothesis be correct, it is to be feared that 
 the Clare family had not as yet reached the height which 
 makes descent easy. They could have adapted themselves, 
 certainly, like the gipsies, the savages, or other of the chil- 
 dren of Nature, to living under a tent or in a waggon, pro- 
 vided there had been open spaces to roam over, and the free 
 air of heaven to blow in their faces ; but the lack of elbow- 
 room consequent upon being crowded together in a few 
 dingy rooms was a change to which they could not accus- 
 tom themselves. Even at Cowa there had been occasional 
 friction. Members of the same family are not intended by 
 Nature to live all together under one roof after they have 
 reached a certain age, any more than the pea-pods are des- 
 tined to remain pressed in the same husk when they arrive 
 at bursting-point. While individuals are yet in their in- 
 fancy and childhood, they have the resource of sparring 
 and fighting, a process more conducive to the establishment 
 of fundamental good-fellowship than the good Dr. Watts 
 suspected ; but when they reach the age of reason, they ai-e 
 
168 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 deprived of this wholesome outlet for their preponderant 
 individualities. 
 
 Among Eastern races, where rigid custom so moulds the 
 individual that he has little or no identity of his own, and 
 where an entire class is submitted to the authority of an 
 autocratic patriarch, adult family life may perhaps be car- 
 ried on smoothly enough. Not so among our independent 
 Western communities, where all the members feel and 
 think for themselves, and where many among them are 
 endowed with passionate individualities and strong idio- 
 syncrasies. In their case it is difficult for grown-up mem- 
 bers of the same family to live in entire harmony in each 
 other's unrelieved society. That no house is large enough 
 to shelter two families is a proverb of Western origin. The 
 v«ry points that brothers and sisters share in common serve 
 to disunite them, for defects we tolerate in ourselves become 
 intolerable when we see them reflected in others. In fact, 
 notwithstanding the deeply-rooted affection that members 
 of the same family will and do profess for each other, they 
 are often obliged to own that they " get on " better with 
 strangers. 
 
 Lack of elbow-room did not, however, cause the members 
 of the Clare family to " fall out" and rage and fight (to quote 
 Dr. Watts again) at this crisis of their lives. They felt, indeed, 
 more inclined to cling to each other than before by reason of 
 their utter loneliness. The Clare family fled from London 
 to Paris almost as soon as they had regained the possession 
 of their luggage from the docks, carrying away only a night- 
 mare impression of the bewildering marvels of the mightiest 
 of cities. Their first attempt at housekeeping in Paris was 
 to " camp down," in the most literal sense of the word, upon 
 the fourth story of a large house on the Boulevard de I'Ob- 
 servatoire, the which, as denisons of the Quartier Latin 
 know, is but a new and showy enlargement of the noisy 
 Boulevard St. Michel. This part of Paris, indeed, tacked on 
 to the old classic precincts of the Pantheon, the ancient 
 Church of St. Genevieve, and the venerable Musee de Gluny 
 is all brand-new and modern. The locality pleased the wan- 
 derers—in the first place, because it allowed them to look 
 
IN PARIS. 169 
 
 across a wide open space, with a fountain in its midst, that 
 lay in front of the house, to the gardens of the Observatoire, 
 an offshoot of the Luxembourg Gardens farther down, while 
 a wide expanse of gay green tree-tops greeted their eyes 
 every time they looked forth from the little balcony in front 
 of their rooms ; in the second, because the changing scene 
 in the wide space below was an amusing aspect of Paris life 
 to watch from their windows. All kinds of unfamiliar 
 sights and sounds called them to the balcony at odd mo- 
 ments. Now it was a monster tram that went rolling by, 
 the conductor blowing his note of warning upon a dreary 
 horn that emitted a sound like a donkey's bray ; then the 
 workmen in blouses, or the fat hatless women, in neat black 
 skirts with whit* morning camisoles, who sat on the top. 
 Grisettes, with their shiny black hair coiled up in unim- 
 peachable twists, passed below the windows ; little soldiers 
 in their uniforms of blue and turkey -red ; students of every 
 colour and nationality — from the coal-black elegant of the 
 Isle of Bourbon or Martinique, in the latest cut of coat, to 
 the unkempt Russian Nihilist, the American eleve des beaux 
 arts, or the rapin from the provinces. Most of the men car- 
 ried a portfolio, a book, or a box of colours ; everyone had 
 the badge of his calling. The family from tlie Antipodes 
 beheld the life around them as though they had been dropped 
 into it from another planet ; they had no comprehension of 
 it, nor it of them. In the general way, visitors to Paris of 
 the country cousin or tourist kind gain some slight knowl- 
 edge of the inhabitants and their customs from the conver- 
 sations they hear in the pensions at which they stay ; or, 
 failing this, through the yet more insufficient medium of 
 hotel-life and the theatres. But none of these sources of in- 
 formation were at the command of Mrs. Clare and her chil- 
 dren. They had drifted to Paris with bag and baggage, had 
 left their luggage at the Gare du Nord on a July morning, 
 and had. straggled in a band of five in search of shelter. 
 Willie was not with them. Through the recommendation 
 of the manager of the Tasmanian branch of the bank to 
 which he had applied in London, he had been taken on for 
 a short time to supply the place of a junior clerk who was ill. 
 
170 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 The salary was barely forty pounds a year ; but Willie had 
 snatched at the opportunity, and, in the proud sense of be- 
 ing left behind alone, self-supporting and independent, in 
 the wonderful city of London, was perhaps the least to be 
 pitied of the exiles. As to the remainder of the family, they 
 had turned their gaze to Paris as to a kind of Promised 
 Land. They had studied a map of it, and had learned that 
 the Luxembourg side of the river was less dear than the 
 Elysees side. 
 
 Towards the Luxembourg, therefore, they had directed 
 their steps, and after a fruitless search in quest of furnished 
 apartments, which seemed to be all ludicrously beyond their 
 means, had " fetched up " in front of a gaunt new building on 
 the Boulevard de I'Observatoire, placarded all over its yet 
 damp walls with " Appartements grands et petits a louer 
 presentement," in great capitals. There were two concierges, 
 a man and his wife, who occupied a dark den at the back of 
 the entrance-passage on the lower floor, and to these they 
 had applied for information. The man was small and evil- 
 looking. The woman was large and bore a falsely jovial 
 air, for there lurked a something in her eye which betrayed 
 that it would not be well to fall out with her, and that re- 
 minded Eila of Victor Cherbuliez's warning that it is well 
 in this lower world to be on good terms with your conscience 
 and your concierge. Both concierges stared at the travellers 
 with suspicion in their look. It was evident that they had 
 no accredited protector with them, for Dick was a minor, 
 and therefore did not count. The male concierge consented, 
 however, to lead them up the four flights of stairs that led 
 to the quatrieme, and to show them the apartment they 
 coveted. Wearied out with their long trudge and the dusty 
 glitter of a July day in the noisy Paris streets, they could 
 have found it in their hearts to sit upon the staircase and 
 weep. The rooms, nevertheless, excited their enthusiasm. 
 There were three with a front view upon the Place de I'Ob- 
 servatoire, and one in the rear that overlooked a small court- 
 yard enclosed by the backs of a block of prodigiously tall 
 houses. The aspect of this yard was as the abomination of 
 desolation, in its fcetid darkness. It was almost impossible 
 
IN PARIS. 171 
 
 to see to the bottom of its gloomy depths. The sides of the 
 houses surrounding it were smirched with hideous stains. 
 Its very existence suggested a nightmare of being " hurled 
 headlong to bottomless perdition," and the family turned 
 away from contemplating it with a shudder. The front 
 rooms, however, they declared with one accord to be "jolly." 
 The house was new, and the ceiling of the centre-room was 
 painted, to Truca's immense delight, in imitation of the sky, 
 with a lark on the wing darting across it. The floors were 
 of highly polished wood. There was a miniature kitchen at 
 the back, somewhat dark, but still large enough to allow a 
 full-sized person to turn round in it, where the concierge 
 patronizingly informed them they could " faire leur petit 
 tripot." No bath, but water laid on in the kitchen, and 
 small stone balconies in front of each window, wherein, if 
 one were not over-stout, one might wedge a chair and sit as 
 in an opera-box, with the Place de I'Observatoire for a stage. 
 It was certainly a dizzy height to look down from, but the 
 concierge declared proudly that it was a view "commeon 
 n'en trouve pas— quoi!" His final "quoi" was a kind of 
 challenge to contradict him if you dared, and though the 
 July sun flooded the rooms oppressively, it could not be 
 gainsaid that there would be compensation in looking out 
 by-and-by upon the red and gold of the sunset sky across 
 the summer greenery of the Luxembourg Gardens. The 
 mention of the rent, which amounted with the " contribu- 
 tions " to little less than fifty pounds, sent a shiver through 
 the family collectively ; but they reflected that, if it came 
 to the worst, they could always do with less food and clothes 
 than other people, and that air and space were the first 
 necessities of all. Eila for one declared herself vehemently 
 in favour of securing the rooms without delay, and the 
 matter being put to the vote, only Dick was fou.id to enter 
 an objection on the score of the vulgarity of the decorations. 
 Now the pale sky-blue ceiling with the lark, and the gilt- 
 edged panels, that adorned the largest room, had exercised a 
 powerful fascination upon the others. That the rooms had 
 been devised to attract an entirely different order of occu- 
 pants from themselves, and that the mirror in particular 
 12 
 
172 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 had been designed as a bait for some petite dame with 
 blackened eyelashes, was a matter of which they could not 
 well be expected to have any knowledge. Mrs. Clare de- 
 clared her readiness to pay the first quarter in advance, and 
 was even business-like enough to give the concierge, un- 
 asked, the " gratification " he was looking for, in return for 
 allowing the family to enter into possession the same after- 
 noon. She shared her children's enthusiasm for the gilt 
 panels, the lark on the wing, and the view, and pointed out 
 to them all the advantages of being once more in the midst 
 of civilization. London had grown too big, she declared. 
 It was like an unwieldy raonster, of which the proportions 
 were all swallowed up in superfluous flesh, but Paris was 
 the embodiment of harmonious perfection. Dick wished to 
 be informed of the area and population of Paris as compared 
 with London, by way of establishing some standard of judg- 
 ment ; but Mrs. Clare evinced her accustomed fine disdain 
 for facts and statistics, and the argument between mother 
 and son was carried on to the utter forgetfulness of the 
 business in hand. Matters, however, did arrange themselves 
 somehow ultimately, and steps were taken to convert the 
 garish apartment into the semblance of a home. Well naght 
 the family feel, in contradiction to the poet's words, that 
 things were not what they seemed. The novel surroundings 
 induced in all alike a curious and dreary sensation of dreami- 
 ness and unreality. Never could Eila forget the impressions 
 of that flrst night spent in their Paris home. Dick had been 
 sent to the Gare du Nord, armed with the mysterious slip of 
 paper that was to release the things of which the family 
 stood most in need from the depot. Mamy stayed with her 
 mother to aid in receiving and arranging them, and Eila, 
 with Truca holding her hand, went out provender-hunting 
 in the neighbourhood. She purchased some bread, a mys- 
 terious kind of meat-mosaic, known as charcuterie, and a 
 bottle of milk, besides the few indispensable articles that 
 were needed in the shape of a kettle, one or two kitchen 
 utensils, a table, and some chairs. 
 
 How the small hoard of money melted away under these 
 successive outlays is not to be told. Evening found the 
 
IN PARIS. 173 
 
 travellers still engaged in the process of camping down in 
 their rooms. They had their board-ship mattresses still- 
 one apiece — and their pillows, which were distributed on the 
 floors of the three rooms. 
 
 "Like the Japanese," said Eila cheerfully. "After all, 
 climbing into bed is a very superfluous thing." 
 
 The blankets were short. It was never discovered who 
 had appropriated the two best between the London docks 
 and the Paris railway-station ; but, fortunately, the July 
 nights were warm, when a little covering goes a long way. 
 The rest of the furniture was composed mainly of trunks, 
 that bore dreadful evidence of rough usage in Cape Horn 
 gales and railway depots. It is not easy to furnish a home 
 artistically with mattresses and trunks ; still, if we have a 
 roof to cover us, and a mattress to lie down upon, we are better 
 off even then than countless myriads of our fellow-creatures, 
 and of this fact the Clare family reminded each other now. 
 
 Their first meal, however, in their new home could not 
 honestly be called entirely satisfactory. To go out and dine 
 comfortably at a modest restaurant was a commonplace, 
 practical idea that would never have occurred to them. 
 Restaurants were dangerous places when you had no pre- 
 vious knowledge of them. Mrs. Clare believed that they 
 were conducted upon the fixed principle of taking people in 
 — not in the good sense of the word. Besides, what a dread- 
 ful waste of money that might be so much more profitably 
 spent, and that, to tell the truth, was sorely needed, to spend 
 it upon mere eating and drinking. It is true that there were 
 difficulties in the way of arranging a supper for five people 
 with the aid of a small spirit-lamp and a new kettle for all 
 utensils. For instance, the boiling of the eggs in the kettle 
 is not always an assmi-ed success. To fish out the egg with a 
 small spoon is to run the risk of breaking it, which is fatal 
 both to the egg and the water of which the tea is to be made. 
 Yet so inured had the family from Cowa become to these 
 minor disasters, that when a catastrophe of the kind oc- 
 curred, and the water Dick was boiling for the tea was con- 
 verted into a kind of egg-soup, it excited nothing but a burst 
 of hysterical hilarity from the rest. 
 
174: NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " It won't spoil the tea," Mrs. Clare remarked, when the 
 laughter had subsided. "Now I think of it, people some- 
 times stir an egg in their tea instead of milk." 
 
 " But not a half-cooked one, mother," remonstrated Eila. 
 "They don't make tea with thin egg-soup, either ; but, I sup- 
 pose, no one cares to wait until the kettle boils again ; and 
 what are we to do for egg-cups ? " 
 
 " Use bread, of course," said Dick scornfully. 
 
 He had made no comment upon the episode of the egg. 
 
 " But there's no salt," remarked Truca dolefully. " Eggs 
 are so horrid without salt." 
 
 There was an uncomfortable pause. Every member of 
 the family was dead-beat. The four- flights of stairs were 
 very steep, and by the time the salt should have been pro- 
 cured from the grocer's next door, what would be the condi- 
 tion of the eggs ? Dick, nevertheless, rose reluctantly, when 
 Mamy quickly interposed : 
 
 " No, not you, Dick. Why, you carried all the mattresses 
 up yourself. I'll go." 
 
 "Your hat, Mamy!" shrieked Eila after her. It was 
 hard to sacriflce the last vestige of superiority at the very 
 outset of their settling in Paris. "And buy another cup 
 and saucer — the commonest you can get ; or else you'll have 
 to share a tumbler with True for your tea." 
 
 Mamy darted off. She did not stay to look for her hat, 
 after all, and more heads than those of the concierge turned 
 round to bestow a long stare upon the auburn locks as she 
 hurried into the neighbouring shop and asked in Ollendorff 
 French for " some salt, if you please, and one cup and one 
 
 " " Saucer," however, had not been provided for by 
 
 Ollendorff, and Mamy was reduced to pointing with one 
 finger to the article of which she was in quest. No one 
 would have denied the influence of heredity who had wit- 
 nessed the family meal on the Paris quatrieme that even- 
 ing. If Mrs. Clare had not possessed an ancestress of the 
 mysterious race that sends us wandering fortune-tellers and 
 expounders of the occult doctrines of the Mahatmas, such a 
 group would never have been possible. It was, indeed, sug- 
 gestive of nothing but a band of gipsies gathered round the 
 
IN PARIS. 175 
 
 pot, caldron, kettle, or camp oven, that from time immemo- 
 rial has served as the badge and rallying-point of their or- 
 der. Truca crouched next to her elder sister upon the Chev- 
 alier's packing-case. Dick sprawled upon his stomach on 
 the floor, his bread-and-butter spread out upon a piece of 
 newspaper in front of him, while he peeled his hard-boiled 
 egg with his fingers. Mamy was comfortably seated like a 
 Turk on a mattress she shared with her mother, holding a 
 tumbler of beery-looking tea in one hand, and a hunk of 
 elastic Paris bread in the other. All the family were in 
 high spirits. Mamy was inimitable in her rendering of the 
 man concierge ; she had caught the exact nasal accent in 
 which he uttered his defiant " Quoi ! " She also showed 
 how the portly woman concierge had come out of her den 
 and stood looking after her as she flew up the stairs with the 
 salt and the teacup. Eggy water had been tolerated for the 
 tea-making, but a fresh supply was prepared for washing up. 
 The trouble was to find a cloth suitable for wiping-up pur- 
 poses. The bundles that were opened in the search, and the 
 contents of trunks that were scattered over the floor thereby, 
 would have stocked a rag and bone shop. The collection of 
 birds' eggs that had been presented to Mamy by one of her 
 juvenile admirers was tossed out among other things. The 
 eggs rolled in all directions on the smooth floor, and a spir- 
 ited hunt on all fours ensued. Finally, Dick conceived the 
 brilliant idea of prizing open the Chevalier's packing-case, 
 and extracting some strips of the penitentiary calico. But 
 this necessitated a hunt for tools, and a long and reverent 
 examination of the family totem. Though the July even- 
 ings are long in Paris, the stars were shining where the last 
 red streak had faded from the sky behind the Luxembourg 
 trees ere the cups were washed and the shake-down prepared 
 for the night. Only a board-ship swing candlestick and 
 candle were available for purposes of illumination, which, 
 as they could not be stuck upon end, were confided to Truca 
 as torchbearer. But the light was wanted in half a dozen 
 different places at once, and Truca grew tired of skipping 
 round with it at every fresh call. 
 
 Finally the mattresses received their separate loads. 
 
lYG NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Dick established his lair in the back-room, placing the 
 table end upwards on its hind-legs before the window, to 
 shut out the horror of the well it looked upon. Mamy and 
 her mother installed themselves in state in the gilt-panelled 
 centre-room, which they pompously christened the recep- 
 tion-room. Truca shared Eila's shake-down in the adjoin- 
 ing chamber, Eila's prospective bedroom. The child lay so 
 still under the sheltering protection of the warm arm that 
 encircled her, that it was only when a long-drawn sponta- 
 neous sigh broke the stillness that her sister discovered she 
 was still awake. 
 
 " What is the matter, darling ? Why don't you sleep ? " 
 
 " I was listening to that big bell sounding two o'clock in 
 French. Eila," with a wistful intonation, "what do you 
 think we are going to do all day here 3 " 
 
 " Do ? In what way do you mean, dearie ? " 
 
 " Why, like we did at Cowa. I spent so much time with 
 Daisy, you know. Then there used to be such a lot to do 
 among the fowls, there was hardly time for lessons — don't 
 you remember ? I used to forget that the minutes were 
 going on always — always. If one begins to think of that, it 
 gets so monotonous. It does frighten me so sometimes to 
 think how God can ever manage to put a stop to the min- 
 utes going on. Even He can't help it — can He ? " 
 
 " Don't think about it, dear — think we are all together, 
 whatever happens. It is only because you don't understand 
 it here that it seems so dreadful to you ; it is as though you 
 tried to make Daisy understand what to-morrow means. 
 And we'll find plenty to do in Paris, never fear ! First we 
 must all learn to speak French properly. You and I to- 
 gether—won't it be fun ? Then we'll take splendid long 
 walks ; and when we get settled, you'll see what good times 
 we'll have. We'll begin to fix things up properly to- 
 morrow." 
 
 "And do you think we might go back to Cowa some 
 day ? It didn't matter if we didn't know French so well 
 there." 
 
 " Of course— why not ? Only we must all try to make a 
 little money, and choose a nicer ship than the Queen of the 
 
IN PARIS. 177 
 
 South— sorae great big steamer that would, paddle smoothly 
 and quickly all the way out, you know." 
 
 " Yes, that would be nice ; and I would write to Mr. 
 Acton to bring Daisy down to the wharf to meet us," mur- 
 mured Truca, in convinced and sleepy reassiu-ance. 
 
 The little girl slept ; but her sister lay awake until the 
 stars faded from the west, and a reflection of dawn in the 
 opposite sky peered coldly through the windows of the 
 quatrieme. For all they called her the optimist, the moder- 
 ator, and the rose-coloured spectacles, her heart was heavy 
 within her. The misgivings she had soothed away from 
 Truca's childish breast had not been lifted from her own. 
 It seemed to her that the family had embarked upon un- 
 known seas, without chart or compass to guide them. There 
 was Dick, with his enthusiastic artist-nature, his utter ig- 
 norance of the world and its temptations, and his over- 
 weening and blind self-conceit, the result of having lived 
 among isolated women-folk from his boyhood upwards. 
 What pitfalls might he not stumble into unwittingly! 
 Mamy, too, with her vagrant fancy and her unsuspecting 
 innocence — who would mount guard over her here ? They 
 were utterly friendless, though their mother believed they 
 had come to carry the world before them. There was not a 
 human being in all this million-thronged city to take them 
 by the hand, and declare them to be worthy of the trust of 
 their fellow-men. As far as Eila could judge from the little 
 glimpse she had obtained that day of the marvellous city 
 of her dreams, she could fully share in Truca's vaguely-ex- 
 pressed apprehensions of the difficulty of making a home in 
 it. It appeared to her that people lived here in public. Had 
 she not seen them, to her great astonishment, eating and 
 drinking at tables on the pavement ? Then the perch the 
 family had found, with people located above and below 
 them, separated from them by the mere thickness of a 
 plank, how could such an abode be called a home compared 
 with the acres of solitude and freedom that encircled their 
 real home at Cowa ? 
 
 A confused vision of the Botilevard St. Michel, sloping 
 widely upwards towards the Observatoire between a hedge 
 
178 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 of green trees and towering houses, mingled itself with the 
 memories that approaching sleep was fast effacing from her 
 brain. She had a dream in which she saw the family wan- 
 dering hatless, with swags on their backs, looking for a 
 camping-place under the trees, and being driven oflf by long- 
 waisted gendarmes. And when they would have made their 
 escape, she dreamed that they were held fast by the nails in 
 the Chevalier's packing-case. There was no means of re- 
 lease, except by hammering on the case and its contents ; 
 and, as it fell to pieces at her feet, behold the fragments were 
 eggshells ! 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 eila's notion. 
 
 It is doubtless true, as moralists tell us, that we are wrong 
 to lay upon the impalpable shoulders of Destiny the responsi- 
 bility of the misfortunes that attend our course. Such mis- 
 fortunes, they assure us, are almost always the result of our 
 own actions. To be sure, we might retort that our actions 
 are dictated by our natures and temperaments, and might 
 point out that the problem of how far we control these, or 
 are controlled by them in our turn, is of a kind to which no 
 Q. E. D. has so far been attached. But this would only in- 
 volve us in the toils of the everlasting discussion which, 
 under its theological title of Free Will versus Predestination, 
 or its scientific title of Moral Eesponsibility versus Heredity, 
 has divided humanity into two camps from time immemorial. 
 Enough that there is perhaps something to be said in behalf 
 of those who complain of the destiny that presided at their 
 creation or evolution in the same way that there is a plea to 
 be made for the clay that complained to the potter, " Why 
 hast thou made me thus 1 " There is a gloomy prophecy 
 that it is perhaps better not to think of in this connection 
 (for it seems to foreshadow all the sinister discoveries made 
 by the science of statistics), to the effect that it must needs 
 
EILA'S NOTION. I79 
 
 be that offences come, though woe be unto him by whom 
 the offence coraeth. Now, to ensure the coming of the 
 offences, it must "needs be" that a certain percentage of 
 moral failures should be born into the world to accomplish 
 them, or what would become of the prophecy ? Perhaps 
 only severe sectarians would include young Mrs. Frost and 
 her brothers and sisters among the moral failures ; but, with- 
 out going so far as the sectarians, it must be admitted that 
 the Clare family might have been excused for asking, like 
 the potter's clay, why they had been made thus. Even from 
 the little we have seen of them, we must conclude that by 
 birth, by inheritance, and by bringing up, they are only 
 fitted, when brought into contact with the world, to play the 
 part of the earthenware vessel against the vessel of iron. 
 We know which of the two came to grief in their passage 
 down the stream. Eila was, perhaps, the only member of 
 the family who was occasionally troubled by a dim forebod- 
 ing that she and her belongings had been sent into the world 
 without the proper equipment of offensive and defensive 
 weapons, as necessary to human beings as to animals, if they 
 are not to be trampled under foot in the battle of life. In 
 the beginning of knowledge, especially of self-knowledge, 
 there is wisdom ; but Eila's, so far, was only a faint and 
 dawning perception of the truth. Her mistrust of herself 
 and her kin did not teach her how to avert the consequences 
 of past errors. It only inclined her to silence when her 
 mother was prophesying a brilliant future for the family. 
 Mrs. Clare's conviction on this point was indeed so deeply 
 rooted and immovable that it almost attained the elevation 
 of a religious faith, founded, not on external evidences, but 
 on pure inward assiu-ance. She was entirely confident that 
 her children, one and all, would shine some day as stars of 
 the first magnitude. How and when this happy consumma- 
 tion was to be brought about — how Dick was to obtain the 
 Grand Prix de Rome, and Mamy to marry a title — she did 
 not stop to inquire. When the spirit of prophecy was upon 
 her, she would declare that these and similar good things 
 were in store for them : and Mamy and Truca, and even 
 Dick, though they affected to laugh at their mother's predic- 
 
180 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 tions, were inclined to think secretly that there might be 
 something in them, after all. 
 
 Meanwhile, the difficulty of making both ends meet was 
 becoming more and more evident. Far from meeting, in- 
 deed, they seemed to stretch daily farther apart, until Eila, 
 who acted as treasurer, saw with dismay that the family ex- 
 chequer would be well-nigh empty some v/eeks before the 
 next slender instalment of her mother's inadequate income 
 should come due. 
 
 What now was to be done ? Certainly neither mother 
 nor children could be a,ccused of undue extravagance — at 
 least, as regarded their mode of living. If only to maintain 
 their standing in the eyes of the concierge couple, who had 
 both remarked at different times with threatening suavity, 
 " Faut faire entrer vos meubles— ^quoi ! " it had been found 
 necessary to purchase some bedsteads, a second-hand table, 
 and some chairs. The table and chairs were placed in the 
 tiny entrance-hall to the reception-room, which was made to 
 serve as a dining-room. The splendour of the reception- 
 room itself was such that no one would have ventured to 
 suggest eating in it. Certainly it was, in familiar parlance, 
 bare as your hand ; but so, for the matter of that, were the 
 other rooms, and Eila, who had developed a great notion of 
 order with the decline of the family fortunes, tried to im- 
 part an appearance of comfort and respectability to them by 
 keeping them scrupulously clean. She had invested at sec- 
 ond-hand in a whole waxing apparatus — a reckless piece of 
 extravagance that she bitterly regretted when funds were 
 lower — and between five and six on summer mornings 
 might be seen, clad in the same airy attire as that in which 
 she had roved about the garden at Cowa, sliding across the 
 reception-room with a heavy brush strapped to her bare 
 white foot, swaying backwards and forwards, as she rubbed 
 it across the newly waxed floor, in imitation of the con- 
 cierge, whom she had seen carrying on a similar operation 
 on the landing outside. It was her glory to maintain the 
 floor in a condition that rendered it dangerous to walk 
 across it. The active exercise was a temporary relief, though 
 all the time she was brushing her mind was engaged in pro- 
 
EILA'S NOTIOX. 181 
 
 jecting imaginary furniture into the apartment— an otto- 
 man here ; a Turkey carpet there ; a cabinet just under the 
 Chevalier's picture, the only adornment the room possessed. 
 Youth attaches little value to its lease of existenqe. It is not 
 too much to say that Eila would have given a year of her 
 life at these times for each article of imaginary furniture 
 she could have caused to be materialized as she thought of it. 
 It was not long, however, before the desire for mere fur- 
 niture gave way to a more imperative need. Eila perceived 
 that at their present rate of living the family would soon be 
 without the means to purchase even the bare necessaries of 
 life. Those were terrible moments during which she 
 whisked about in the early morning, as light of foot as she 
 was heavy of heart, wondering how she should conjure the 
 hideous spectre of want that threatened to stalk into the gar- 
 ish apartment uninvited. The reception-room, with its 
 empty parade of blue ceiling, gilt-bordered panels and long 
 mirror, seemed to mock her misery. It was as though she 
 had been condemned to starve in an opera-box. And what 
 could she do ? Where turn for help ? She could not bring 
 herself to warn the others of the impending horror that 
 came nearer daily until she had tried every possible means 
 of averting it. As for Hubert de Me»le, she had come to 
 think of him now as a myth. After bringing the family all 
 across the world for the ostensible purpose of finding him, 
 her mother seemed to have lost interest in the search. One 
 or two spasmodic efforts had been made which had resulted 
 in utter failure. The address Mrs. Clare possessed in the 
 Colonies had proved useless. The very street indicated had 
 ceased to exist, and no one in the newly-built quarter had 
 ever heard of the name of Hubert de Merle. The object of 
 their search failing them, what was Eila to do ? She could 
 not put the family upon half rations. Their fare even now 
 was so poor and meagre that it wrung her heart to set them 
 down to it. She wished they would have grumbled at it or 
 at her. After the bounteous regime of apple-pudding and 
 Cowa cream to which they had been accustomed, they could 
 not but feel the actual privations sorely; yet they never 
 complained. There seemed to be a tacit miderstanding 
 
182 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 among them that there was nothing to be done. Eila tried 
 what the severest self-privations could accomplish. She had 
 already foresworn butter and sugar for herself, upon the 
 shallow pretext that she found them too fattening ; but she 
 could not find it in her heart to condemn the others to dry, 
 bread, when bread-and-butter formed their principal suste- 
 nance. A larger proportion of chicory and less milk fouiad 
 their way into the morning coffee. The allowance of broth 
 or meat which came from the rotisserie at one o'clock, and 
 which would have been ample for three, was barely enough 
 for five ; and when she ventured upon the experiment of 
 leading the whole party to a Bouillon Duval for a Sunday 
 square meal, five francs melted away before they had hon- 
 estly satisfied their hunger, and it was additional suffering 
 to note the involuntary looks of longing they directed 
 towards the pastrycook's window on their way home. And 
 all the time she felt as regarded their presence in Paris that 
 the question, " What went ye out for to see ? " was the one 
 that might most fittingly have been asked them. What had 
 they gained, indeed, excepting hunger, humiliation, and the 
 Tantalus delight of being surrounded by beautiful sights and 
 objects that they had neither the means nor the spirits to 
 enjoy ? Dick, it was true, would take out his charcoal and 
 sketching-block, as long as the paper held out ; and it was 
 an understood thing that he should attend a studio when 
 funds should be forthcoming. But meantime Eila felt that 
 the aimless life he was leading was bad for him in every 
 sense. When he had carried down the bac d' ordure in the 
 morning, and had set it on the pavement outside to await 
 the advent of the scavenger's cart ; when he had cleaned the 
 boots, while the blacking lasted, and filled and emptied the 
 family bath, which had been hired at five francs a month in 
 the first burst of their triumph, Dick's household duties 
 were at an end. His time was then his own, and he would 
 ransack the case of books, and toss the contents on the floor, 
 in search of a Shelley or a Shakespeare, which he would read 
 desultorily for an hour; or saunter to the Luxembourg 
 Gallery, or walk to the other side of the river along 
 the Grands Boulevards; or hold forth upon Buddhism 
 
EILA'S NOTION. jgo 
 
 Socialism, or Nihilism, as the case might be. He was the 
 only one who thought it worth while to lay out a sou upon 
 a. Petit Journal, as long as the sou was procurable, and who 
 would read it conscientiously from beginning to end in 
 order to obtain an insight into French politics. He found 
 out where the Communists held their meetings at Mont- 
 martre, and would come back from a gathering in the Salle 
 Levis glowing with sympathy for Louise Michel. It was 
 always entertaining to hear Dick talk when he was in the 
 vein. He was almost as good a mimic as Mamy, and kept 
 the family amused a whole evening by his rendering of the 
 gestures and declamatory air of a fat and comfortable-look- 
 ing Communist orator who had demonstrated the absurdity 
 of the popular belief in a G-od. 
 
 " What kind of a god would he be," the Communist had 
 asked derisively, " who would direct the world so clumsily 
 as at present ? Why, I who speak to you would make a 
 more intelligent god. In the first place, under my man- 
 agement humanity should always be young; the women 
 should never be older than eighteen, the men than twenty- 
 four." 
 
 But Eila had a notion. It came into her head one morn- 
 ing as she was waxing the expanse of floor in front of the 
 long gilt-framed mirror between the windows. The recep- 
 tion-room was still in its primitive condition of glittering 
 barrenness, save for the presence of two battered trunks 
 that served as family wardrobes. Young Mrs. Frost sighed 
 as she looked over its polished, carpetless space. Perhaps 
 she was reflecting that the manner in which she expended 
 her time and energy over this same bare refuge, upon the 
 unlikely hypothesis that it would be converted some day 
 into a habitable home, was typical of the conduct of the 
 family in coming to Paris at all. Had they not also for- 
 feited the substance to run after the shadow ? Allured by 
 the glittering attraction of a jewel that existed perhaps only 
 in their mother's imagination, had they not abandoned 
 home and comfort, and the manifold blessings of a secure 
 position ? 
 
 " We may soon find ourselves literally without bread to 
 
184 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 eat," she thought bitterly; "and meanwhile here I am 
 spending my time in polishing these bare boards, and the 
 only end we seem to have served in coming to Paris is to 
 keep this wretched apartment new and shiny for the people 
 who will occupy it when we are turned out." 
 
 She threw down her waxing-brush, and sighed heavily 
 once more ; but, perceiving a blur upon the gilt-bordered 
 mirror, instinctively took up the Petit Journal, upon which 
 she had laid her triangular piece of wax, to rub it off. 
 Every housewife knows that there is nothing better than a 
 newspaper for polishing glass. As she did so the words 
 " Prix de Beaute," printed in large capitals on the page, 
 caught her eye; and, in obedience to an impulse of idle 
 curiosity, she proceeded to read the xjaragraph beneath 
 them. An amused and half -incredulous smile flitted across 
 her face as she read. The paragraph set forth with elabo- 
 rate detail that the director of an establishment called the 
 Polies-Pantassin (which Eila did not know to be a kind of 
 music-hall or cafe concert) made a bond-fide offer of fivo 
 thousand francs to the most beautiful woman who shoiild 
 compete for a prize of beauty upon a certain evening on a 
 certain date before a jury of connoisseurs at the aforesaid 
 Folies-Fantassin. 
 
 " It can't be true," she thought ; but she read the an- 
 nouncement again, nevertheless, and upon a second reading 
 was more than half inclined to believe it. Certainly one 
 must come to Europe to hear of such things as these. How 
 could it be worth anybody's while to give five thousand 
 francs — a whole two hundred pounds — to a person for being 
 merely pretty ? What could the director hope to gain when 
 he had paid the money ? To be sure, the exhibition in itself 
 might attract people, though even upon that point Eila 
 could not help having her doubts. Possibly the director 
 was himself a very rich man, with a mania for seeing a 
 variety of pretty faces— she had heard of such people— and 
 perhaps this was his way of gratifying his mania. Still, 
 was it not extraordinary that in our sober nineteenth cen- 
 tury men should amuse themselves by aping the pastimes 
 of the gods of mythology ? Though, for the matter of that, 
 
EILA'S NOTION. 1S5 
 
 the gods were more reasonable, since the prize that Paris 
 ofEered was nothing more than an apple, between which 
 and five thousand francs there was certainly a considerable 
 difference. She wondered what kind of beautiful women 
 would contend for the prize. To compete for it at all would 
 be a tacit avowal that one was very vain ; but naturally 
 only completely beautiful creatures would think of com- 
 peting. Would they be divinely tall and most divinely 
 fair ? or, failing this, might passably good-looking young 
 women still have a show ? Eila raised her eyes as this re- 
 flection occurred to her, and they fell directly with unpre- 
 meditation upon her own image in the glass. Quick as 
 thought the idea flashed across her mind : 
 
 " Supposing I were to try for the prize ? " 
 
 But almost as quickly it was discarded with an accompa- 
 nying warm flush of shame. Low as the family had fallen, 
 they had not fallen so low as that. The next step would bo 
 to stand at the door of a booth in tights and spangles, or to 
 walk in a procession singing dolorous songs through the 
 streets. What would Reginald say when she told him of 
 her thought ? But she would not tell him of it. He would 
 be too grievously hurt. Mechanically Eila took up her wax- 
 ing-brush again, but before a few more minutes had passed 
 at her work, the idea she had discarded rushed back with 
 new and overwhelming force. An idea once admitted has 
 all the efficacy of the proverbial thin end of the wedge. Be- 
 fore the day was over, the notion of exhibiting herself at the 
 Folies-Fantassin did not seem nearly so awful as at first. 
 Her mother, who had been indisposed for some days, and 
 whose spirits had descended proportionately, was seized with 
 a kind of faint in the afternoon. In the wild panic that en- 
 sued, a doctor, recommended by the two concierges, who 
 showed themselves more curious than sympathizing upon 
 the occasion, was sent for. He was a very young man, with 
 the exaggerated dignity of youth ; but he unbent in pres- 
 ence of the anguish of this strange-looking family, whose 
 members reminded him vaguely of a group of sculptured 
 castaways. He wrote prescriptions for the patient, whom 
 he declared to be attacked by a kind of "grippe," a name 
 
186 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 that had the effect of immeasurably increasing the terror of 
 the others; and, with unconscious irony, insisted that, so 
 soon as the fever had left her, she should be given " surtout 
 des choses nourissantes,'' and he emphasized the ncurissantes 
 in a manner that recalled visions of Sunday sirloins and 
 bowls of Cowa cream to the family, and that increased a 
 thousandfold the remorseful misery that possessed our hero- 
 ine's soul. 
 
 How cruel and heedless she had been ! How could she 
 ever forgive herself ? She had allowed her mother to share 
 in all the wants and privations to which they had been of 
 necessity subjected, and the awful consequences lay at her 
 door alone. She had foreseen that the money could not hold , 
 out in any case, but had thought that, by reckless parsimony, 
 it might yet be possible to avoid making debts they could 
 never hope to pay. She had been most awfully penny wise 
 and pound foolish. Nay, if it had been only a matter of 
 pounds, it would not have mattered, though, like Marjory 
 Daw, she had had to sell her bed and lie upon straw ; but it 
 was a matter of health, of life itself, perhaps, to the one being 
 for whom she and her brothers and sisters would have laid 
 down their young lives unflinchingly. Mrs. Clare's chil- 
 dren, indeed, could criticise their mother's conduct freely, 
 they could dispute her views, they could feel she had ruined 
 their prospects; but continue to live without her in this 
 world they could not. The very expression of the doctor 
 as he felt her pulse had made them sick with terror. More- 
 over, without any intention on her part, Mrs. Clare unwit- 
 tingly intensified their alarm by her manner of behaving 
 under the affliction. She had one of those instinctively 
 dramatic natures whose very identity seems to disappear in 
 illness, by reason of the tragic aspect their owners uncon- 
 sciously assume. The moods of most of us are subject to 
 the vacillations that we call familiarly '" ups and downs,'' 
 but Mrs. Clare's "ups" went to impossible heights, and her 
 "downs" descended to unfathomable depths. When her 
 children saw her extended on her bed, with the dark flush 
 of fever on her cheeks, and a wild, half-resentful light in 
 her eyes, they were paralyzed with fear. All but Eila seemed 
 
EILA'S KOTION. 187 
 
 to lose their heads completely, and even to her the vision 
 of the octagonal bottle recurred more than once with a 
 deadly and horrible fascination. She thought of it that 
 night as she sat by her mother's pillow, after sending the 
 others to bed, and listened despairingly to her incoherent 
 mutterings and fevered breathings. 
 
 "You must make the Chevalier carry his sword un- 
 sheathed when he takes you to dine at the Elysee," Mrs. 
 Clare said. " Mind he doesn't forget the sword ; and ask 
 the President from me why they don't have an alabaster 
 crematorium built. How does he suppose our spiritual es- 
 sences are going to be liberated, if he shuts us up in coflins ? 
 Tell him it wouldn't cost any more ; and we're going to be 
 rich — rich.'' 
 
 Eila pressed her palms against her temples distractedly, 
 as she heard her mother's ravings. The old sensations of 
 anguish and terror that she had experienced a few years 
 back seemed to leap up in her again. She had thought them 
 dead and forgotten, and here they were assailing her with 
 new vigour. It was as though a nerve that had been seared 
 by a red-hot iron had awakened unexpectedly to life. Yet 
 it was incum.bent upon her at all costs to maintain her out- 
 ward cahn. She felt that if she were to give way now, it 
 would indeed be the end of all things for the family. Her 
 sister, for one, was not to be depended upon. There are na- 
 tures that glow like molten metal in the furnace of affliction ; 
 others, less strong, cannot hold together under the fiery 
 ordeal. Trouble and terror seemed to have demoralized 
 Mamy. She could not look beyond the present, or act upon 
 the advice of the Sunday-school refrain she had so often 
 chanted over the Cowa hills, to wait till the clouds rolled 
 by. Age is apt to wonder that youth should allow itself to 
 be so completely cast down by the troubles that beset it. 
 "As if," says Age, "youth were not compensation enough 
 in itself, since in youth all things are possible, even to the 
 striking of new roots into new soils, and the sowing of a fresh 
 harvest of loves, of joys, and of heart-interests, in the place 
 of those we have lost. But this is the argument of mature 
 years ; for youth does not foresee the inevitable appeasement 
 13 
 
188 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 that Time will bring, nor comprehend that his scjrthe has a 
 blunt as well as a keen edge, and has as much power to heal 
 as to wound. Moreover, in youth our feelings are all at 
 their keenest. We extract from joy and grief alike the very 
 fullest flavour they can yield us ; and though in later years 
 we know that the separation and bereavements which befall 
 us are absolute and final, we yet take them more calmly 
 than of yore, for the reason that we have lost the faculty of 
 feeling the intense and heart-wringing anguish that moved 
 us before. Perhaps the knowledge that it will all be the 
 same, not a hundred years hence, as we are told in youth, 
 but in a very few years, and that these years will rush like 
 all things on their downward course, with an added mo- 
 mentum to the end, may help to render us philosophical, not 
 to say stolid. Or perhaps it is only that our feelings, like 
 rubber bands that have been long in use, have lost their 
 early power of tension. Whatever may be the cause, grief, 
 as a rule (for to every rule there are exceptions), is intenser 
 in early than in advanced years, and this in spite of the extra 
 elasticity of youth. Even to enjoin it to look ahead is oft- 
 times but a vain consolation, since the prospect of living an 
 indefinite number of years in a world where we have already 
 suffered so much seems to increase rather than diminish the 
 burden of our afiliction. 
 
 While Mamy gave herself up to an abandonment of de- 
 spair, Eila set herself to think what were best to be done in 
 the pass to which they had now arrived. She saw no help 
 either at hand or from afar. Willie could hardly be ex- 
 pected to do more than keep body and soul together in Lon- 
 don, and unless their mother should grow so much worse as 
 to necessitate their sending for him (how Eila shuddered at 
 the thought !), it would be cruel to tell him of their dire need. 
 There was Reginald, certainly ; and he would sell the coat from 
 his back to help them ; but Reginald, for all his goodwill, was 
 a poor man, with a paralyzed mother depending upon him. If 
 the worst came to the worst, and they were threatened with 
 expulsion— if it came to their following their mother upon a 
 stretcher to the hospital, and having to beg a night's shelter 
 for themselves in a refuge, she would pawn or sell the 
 
EILA'S NOTION. 189 
 
 Chevalier, and telegraph as a last resource to Hobart. But 
 would it not be better in the first place to try and earn 
 money legitimately by seizing the present opportunity ? 
 There was nothing, she told herself, she would not do to 
 save her mother and brother and sisters, even to selling her- 
 self body and soul, like the people she had read of in books. 
 The only question was how she should set about it. She 
 had but vague notions of the manner in which people 
 earned money by selling themselves. In books the heroine 
 threw a shawl over her head, and went out with a hectic 
 flush on her cheeks and a feverish light in her eyes, return- 
 ing in the dawn with her pockets full of gold. But to whom 
 did she address herself for the gold ? and would not one die 
 of shame if the first person addressed should drive one con- 
 temptuously away ? Eila felt drearily resentful towards Fate 
 as she compared her lot with that of other women. If she had 
 been given at least some means of making money by honest 
 labour ! But there was nothing she could do. She was a 
 poor hand with her needle. She could neither draw, nor 
 sing, nor play the piano. She could not keep accounts ; she 
 might, indeed, have undertaken the care of young children, 
 or given lessons in English, though even in this respect she 
 had neither system nor method. But how could she help 
 her family upon the wretched pittance either of these call- 
 ings would bring ? " I am only a cumberer of the ground," 
 she thought bitterly ; yet she had all the time a vague con- 
 sciousness of possessing certain qualities which, albeit they 
 were not marketable like accomplishments, had yet a certain 
 value of their own. She had youth and health, a beautiful 
 body, quick sympathies, an impressionable mind, and a 
 warm heart. If she could only find^an employment where 
 such qualities as these might be turned to account ! Had 
 she not heard that models were well paid by the artists who 
 drew from them ? If the Folies-Fantassin venture failed, if 
 some poor second or third prize should be yet beyond her 
 grasp, she might turn model as a last expedient, and so tide 
 the family over the evil 'days that had befallen them. Wild 
 ideas of going into the street and studying the faces that 
 passed her until she found one that looked kind and sym- 
 
190 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 pathizing enough to be trusted with her story next occurred 
 to her. Tears of pity for her mother and Truca welled into 
 her eyes as she reviewed the position. By-and-by she crept 
 out upon the balcony again, and felt the cool night wind 
 blow across her wet cheeks. It was one in the morning, 
 and the city was bathed in the balmy light of a golden 
 autumn moon. Eila could distinguish the mighty dome of 
 the Pantheon a little farther down, duskily defined against 
 the starless night sky. Farther still the airy spire of the 
 beautiful Sainte Chapelle pierced the soft gloom ; one by 
 one the separate monuments she had learned to recognise 
 shaped themselves before her gaze in gray but separate 
 distinctness. She could even see where the river-lights 
 twinkled at long intervals that marked the bridges of the 
 Seine. How vast and solemn the wondrous city looked at 
 this tranquil hour of the night, and how tiny a fraction of 
 it she and her belongings represented, camped down in 
 their bare rooms in the tawdry building behind her! If 
 they should all be swept away to-night, not a single eye 
 would grow dim, not a tear would be shed by any one of 
 the unknown millions of fellow creatures around them. At 
 most the milk-woman and the auvergnat who brought the 
 braise, from both of whom she had obtained a fortnight's 
 credit, would feel justifiably indignant at having been 
 cheated of their due. To arouse friendly sympathy among 
 total strangers, it was evident that money was the flrat 
 requisite. They must pay their way before they could hope 
 to make friends ; and they had barely suflacient to keep a 
 roof, to say nothing of a ceiling, over their heads. Their 
 mother's illness would exhaust the last penny, and more 
 would not be forthcoming for a long time to come. 
 
 Some belated students went past at this moment with 
 unsteady step, and seeing the dark figure standing in the 
 moonlit balcony, perched midway between earth and heaven, 
 like a sculptured saint enshrined in a niche between the 
 flamboyant arches of some ancient Gothic cathedral, took 
 off their hats and sang, " Le voila ! Nicholas ! Ah ! ah ! 
 ah!" in a mocking chorus. Eila retreated hastily into the 
 shadow until they had gone by. Looking despairingly 
 
EILA'S NOTION. 191 
 
 across the dark expanse of the far-stretching Paris roofs, she 
 recalled similar nights at Cowa, when she had stood under 
 the creeper-wreathed frame of the veranda in their dear 
 despised colonial home ; and surely no Peri lamenting her 
 exile from Paradise could have felt more bitter regret at her 
 banishment from that peaceful haven. But it would be 
 unjust to suppose that it was the hardness of her own indi- 
 vidual lot that moved her. All such egoistic regrets were 
 merged into passionate sympathy for the lot of the othei-s. 
 It had been the height of happiness in her younger days to 
 stand treat for her little brothers and sisters. She loved to 
 see them eat their fill ; to give them a pleasure and to see them 
 enjoy it was the keenest delight she knew. And now piti- 
 less Destiny was constraining her to deny them the satisfac- 
 tion of their very hunger and thirst. As long as boiled beef 
 from the rdtisserie, and bread and tea (of which latter they 
 had brought a supply from Tasmania) were forthcoming, 
 they could do without luxm-ies. But even this poor fare 
 had been unduly cut down to-day. Chicken broth would be 
 needed for the invalid, and meanwhile cough-mixtures and 
 other medicaments, to say nothing of lemons and barley- 
 water, were immediate requirements. 
 
 How often Eila went backwards and forwards between 
 the balcony and her mother's bed that night she could not 
 have told. Four o'clock sounded from the distant Pantheon, 
 and the great and small clocks of churches and public build- 
 ings boomed and rang the same hour in a confused and 
 irregular chorus. The air was growing chiller ; behind the 
 trees of the Luxembourg Gardens the sky held a far promise 
 of dawn in its ash-coloured expanse. Eila felt that her 
 hands were clammy, and her hair dank with the dews of 
 night. A spasm of self-reproach seized her as she hiuried 
 back into her mother's room. What if she should have been 
 courting the advance of the same wearisome malady as had 
 laid her mother low ? Upon her health and courage the 
 very lives of the others seemed to depend, though, for the 
 matter of that, what were their lives worth to them under 
 present circumstances ? 
 
 Mrs. Clare, however, was still sleeping, and Eila crept 
 
192 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 softly into the reception-room, where Mamy lay asleep face 
 downwards on her mattress, and took the Petit Journal from 
 the cupboard into which she had thrust it. It was growing 
 light enough now to read without the aid of a candle. She 
 took it to the window and glanced over the " Faits Divers," 
 wherein a host of daily tragedies are laconically recorded ; 
 among them, a short paragraph entitled "Les Drames de la 
 Misere " described the suicide by charcoal, after the approved 
 Paris fashion, of a mother and her four children. 
 
 " Why them and not us ? " reflected Eila, shuddering. 
 
 And suddenly she recalled Mamy's childish wish, that 
 the whole family could ascend to heaven altogether upon 
 the same fiery car, or if not to heaven, at least to rest and 
 forgetfulness. To forgetfulness ! To the " sleep eternal " 
 in an eternal night, of which Swinburne had sung. If 
 it had been in her power to procure instant annihilation 
 at this moment for herself and those she loved, to blot them 
 out of existence as completely as though they had never 
 had part nor lot in it, Eila would not have hesitated. Per- 
 haps the Buddhists were right, after all, in regarding life as 
 an opportunity afforded them for ridding themselves of the 
 nightmare of existence, and who anticipated and thus averted 
 the worst of the horrors life had to offer. And yet — and yet 
 — when one was young and strong and comely, when the 
 world had such a marvellous store of interest and delight to 
 offer to brain and heart and senses, it was hard that, for 
 want of a few round bits of metal, existence should be 
 nothing but a torture-hole of Tantalus ! Surely there must 
 be some place left that she and her belongings could still fill 
 in the world. 
 
 It was curious that in the present crisis Eila did not think 
 of consulting her brother. That Dick would have thrown 
 himself heart and soul into any project she might devise for 
 their rescue was certain, but she doubted his caipacity for 
 being of use ; and she could not bring herself to tell him 
 that the family was on the brink of starvation until she had 
 made a last desperate effort to save them. 
 
 From the " Drames de la Misere " she turned once more 
 to the " Prix de Beaute," and this time she read the para- 
 
EILA'S NOTION. 193 
 
 graph carefully, weighing every word. She smiled iron- 
 ically as she read that only les demoiselles honorables were 
 invited to take part in the exhibition. It was furthermore 
 declared that no favour would be shown, that the strictest 
 impartiality would be observed in awarding the prizes, and 
 that beauty pure and simple, beauty alone, would gain the 
 suffrages. A second prize of two thousand francs was to be 
 awarded to the second on the list, and the director declared 
 his willingness to receive the applications of all the belles 
 dames who should present themselves between ten and 
 twelve in the morning at the Folies-Fantassin within a 
 specified date. The list would be closed next day. When 
 Eila came to the end of the paragraph, her mind was made 
 up. The pallor of a great resolution blanched her cheeks as 
 she laid the paper down. She would make her application 
 next day at the eleventh hour. She would brave all the 
 consequences : the publicity, the notoriety, the shame, the 
 insolent looks of the men who would pass her "points" 
 under review ; the insults of the crowd, who would have 
 purchased the right of insulting her. She would thankfully 
 take her seat, if need be, among the painted queens of fairs 
 and casinos, and bare her neck and arms for the ribald ap- 
 preciation of her judges. And she would have room for no 
 other feeling than a prayer uttered from the depth of her 
 heart that she might find favour in their eyes, and that they 
 might award her at least the two-thousand-franc prize which 
 was to save her family from starving. The flve-thousand- 
 franc prize was certainly beyond her reach. Whatever 
 might be thought of the plan, it was preferable to seeing 
 Truca and the rest gasp out their strong young lives amid 
 hideous charcoal fumes. 
 
 Young Mrs. Frost's next operation was to walk softly in 
 the growing dawn to the gilt-edged mirror, and to look at 
 herself therein with intent and severe scrutiny. I think she 
 was reassured by the reflection that met her gaze. A night- 
 watch, with an accompaniment of tear-shedding, is not a 
 becoming process ; but Eila's beauty was proof against more 
 than this. The mental sufi'ering she had endured had had 
 no other apparent effect than that of darkening her eyes 
 
194 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 strangely. They seemed to shine out of her face, which 
 was as white as a Pierrot's with an almost disquieting lustre. 
 There was not the faintest trace of a line or a seam to be 
 seen in the colourless face ; hardly the vaguest indication of 
 a crease in the round, sculptured throat. The setting of 
 low-growing hair framed her forehead and cheeks with 
 dark tendrils, as fine and soft as though they had been 
 painted against the flesh. Not all the threadbare shabbi- 
 ness of the old jacket and skirt she had thrown on over her 
 nightdress could conceal the beautiful proportions of her 
 form, nor disguise the firm roundness of her arms and 
 bust ; it could not even destroy the statuesque line from the 
 hip downwards, that Greek sculptors have defined so per- 
 fectly in the marble effigies they have bequeathed us of their 
 draped goddesses. Eila turned away, nevertheless, from her 
 inspection in the glass with a sigh ; but a sigh may mean 
 many things. For one thing, she reflected that she had no 
 dress in which to appear upon the scene. Perhaps the direc- 
 tor of the Folies-Fantassin could teU her where to hire one. 
 It mattered so little what she put on, as long as she gained 
 a prize. Perhaps the less she wore the better. When Vir- 
 ginia in the romance refused to disrobe on the sinking ves- 
 sel, and to suffer herself to be carried minus her clothes 
 through the waves, she had no starving brothers and sisters 
 whose lives depended upon her own. She was haunted by 
 no visions of a home besieged by the grim spectre of Want. 
 She might throw away her own life in deference to an arti- 
 ficiality of civilization ; she would not, surely, have thrown 
 away the dear lives that depended upon hers. 
 
 Eila felt almost relieved now that her resolution was final- 
 ly taken. She intended to keep her plan a secret from the 
 others. She even cherished the hope that she might so man- 
 age matters that they would never know the truth. The 
 very next day she would call upon the director of the Folies, 
 and if he held out a reasonable hope of success, she would 
 feel herself justified in selling or pawning the few little per- 
 sonal belongings that were still hers, and spending the money 
 thus procured in keeping the household together until the issue 
 of the contest for the " Prix de Beaute " should be decided. 
 
EILA'S NOTION TAKES SHAPE. 195 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 eila's notion takes shape. 
 
 Almost everyone has experienced the strange fact that 
 trivial words and unimportant scenes will engrave them- 
 selves enduringly in the memory, while golden maxims and 
 spectacles of grave import will leave but shadowy impres- 
 sions in their wake. It is in vain that we attempt to explain 
 this humiliating circumstance. The explanation least mor- 
 tifying to our vanity is that, when the meaningless joke or 
 trivial occurrence inscribed itself so indelibly in our minds, 
 our brains chanced to be in a peculiarly receptive condition, 
 so that, like highly-sensitive plates, they retained whatsoever 
 was recorded on them. We will not admit that foolish and 
 risqiii refrains could appeal more strongly to our recollec- 
 tion than weighty and solemn discourses ; but we are fain 
 to wish sometimes that the discourses could have found our 
 brains in the same condition of supersensitiveness as enabled 
 us to retain the refrains. 
 
 When Eila took her long drive on the top of the Clichy- 
 Odeon omnibus in search of the beauty-hunting director of 
 the Folies-Fantassin, the Paris that lay about her feet was 
 the normal workaday Paris with which she was now famil- 
 iar. Even had it been otherwise, her mind should have been 
 too absorbed by the weighty matters that filled it— her moth- 
 er's illness, the wretched condition of the family, and her 
 own desperate resolution — to allow of her noticing what 
 passed in the outward world. Yet it was a remarkable fact 
 that her absorption seemed rather to increase than to dimin- 
 ish the acuteness of her vision. It was as though the tension 
 of her mind had affected all her senses, and had strained 
 them, so to speak, to concert-pitch. For ever after the recol- 
 lection of this drive was photographed on her brain with all 
 its minutest circumstances— photographed, moreover, accord- 
 ing to latest discoveries, in all the vivid colours that the 
 reality had worn. Her eyes seemed to embrace in one sweep 
 the pale autumn sky overhead, the drooping leaves that 
 clung weakly to the branches on the boulevard trees, the 
 
196 NOT COUNTING THE COST; 
 
 Brobdingnagian gilt letters tliat adorned the fronts of the 
 endlessly tall houses, the glimpses of indoor life in the en- 
 tresols with which she was now at a level upon her perch, 
 the sweeping Seine, with its changing patches of light and 
 shade, the bright crowd in the streets below — rich and poor, 
 busy and idle, virtuous and vicious, fat and lean — all so 
 much alike in their outward aspect of trimness and neat- 
 ness. A double train of thought was coursing through her 
 mind as she watched the scene. While her eyes were taking 
 it all in, her thoughts were busy with the home she had left. 
 Her mother had seemed inclined to doze, and might safely 
 be left to Mamy's care. Mamy herself, upon whom the least 
 ray of hope acted as a charm, had been up betimes to help 
 in the tidying-up. This was a process soon accomplished 
 where there were literally but a few sticks of furniture to 
 tidy. She had also run down before seven in the morning 
 with the hac d'ordure rather than allow Dick, who was still 
 asleep, to be awakened to perform the operation. Two stu- 
 dents from the Ecole de Medecine had turned round to stare 
 in astonished admiration at the vision of the white-throated, 
 sunny-haired maiden setting down her scavenger's burden 
 upon the pavement. Next Dick, after he had devoured half 
 the spiral loaf and a bowl of chicory coffee of Eila's prepar- 
 ing, had been sent off to a co-operative chemist's where a re- 
 duction was made upon all the drugs. Eila herself had taken 
 advantage of his absence to prepare for her expedition, and 
 Mamy had been not a little surprised at the time she be- 
 stowed upon her preparations. Her surprise was still greater 
 as Eila emerged from her room dressed in her best, looking 
 radiantly handsome in her shiny black alpaca and her little 
 Marie Stuart bonnet, the latter covered by a flimsy trans- 
 parency of gauze, through which her dark eyes and virginal 
 complexion looked unutterably soft. She had unearthed 
 from the depths of one of the battered trunks a small square 
 of Maltese lace, a relic of better days, which encircled her 
 throat of marble. Mamy did not dissimulate her astonish- 
 ment as she noted the transformation in her sister's ap- 
 pearance. 
 
 " What are you dressed up to the nines like that for?" 
 
BILA'S NOTION TAKES SHAPE. 197 
 
 she asked in discontented tones, in which a certain admira- 
 tion was, however, discernible. 
 
 " The only decent rig I have, dear," replied Eila, apoleget- 
 ically. " One mustn't cry misery when one is in search of 
 work, you know.'' 
 
 ' You in search of work ! " echoed Mamy derisively. 
 '■ People will be more likely to think they've got to bow you 
 out to your carriage ! I should never believe you wanted 
 work if you came to me like that ; I should think you were 
 joking. No one will venture to offer you work, you'll see." 
 
 " What ! not if I asked for it ? You may be sure they 
 will. Why shouldn't they ? " 
 
 " Why shouldn't they ? " echoed Mamy. " Just look at 
 yourself in the glass ! You might be a princess in disguise. 
 One can't help looking grand when one is so handsome, I 
 suppose.'' 
 
 "Do you really think I look handsome this morning, 
 Mamy dear ? " Eila asked, with an eagerly appealing air. 
 
 Mamy shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. 
 
 " You can't think how cross you make me feel ! You 
 know you're frightfully good-looking. What's the use of 
 talking about it ? What good is it here, excepting to make 
 people stare at you and follow you about in the street ? " 
 
 To this objection, however, Eila did not reply. She was 
 drawing on the pair of kid gloves that had been destined for 
 her visit to her cousin. Latterly she had foregone gloves 
 altogether, or concealed her hands out of doors in an old 
 muff that had reached its limit of perennial shabbiness sev- 
 eral years ago. 
 
 " You'll bring something in with you for dinner, any- 
 how," said Mamy anxiously, as she followed her sister to the 
 landing. 
 
 Eila nodded, and ran lightly down the long uncarpeted 
 flight of stairs. The man-concierge, who was waxing the 
 landing of the premiere, made way for her surlily as she 
 passed. He was too much of a Frenchman to withhold his 
 staring tribute of admiration as she flitted by ; but, as he 
 slid his foot backwards aiid forwards over the boards, a mut- 
 tered " 'Cre-nom " betrayed the perplexity of his mind. In- 
 
198 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 deed, the family from outremer, on the quatrieme, was the 
 occasion of chronic bewilderment to the concierge pair. In- 
 mates such as these were a new and unexplained fact in 
 their experience. Not only had they no furniture to speak 
 of, which was a suspicious feature in itself, but they had ho 
 apparent calling or occupation. That they were miserably 
 poor was certain; yet they did nothing, and mother and 
 daughters were obviously without an amant. Anything so 
 hopelessly unpractical, so utterly irreconcilable with the 
 dictates of the most elementary intelligence, had never been 
 witnessed during all the concierge's term of office. He had 
 endeavoured to make something of the letters from Australia 
 that it occasionally behoved him to carry to the quatrieme, 
 and of which he had begged the stamps ; but here, too, his 
 efforts had proved unavailing. He would have set the 
 family down as Nihilists had such a suspicion been compati- 
 ble with their evident ignorance of even the names of those 
 who held the reins of power in France, and with the gener- 
 ally " gullible " and innocent air that characterized them. 
 
 Eila meanwhile was looking down into the Paris streets 
 from her elevated seat on the top of the omnibus. All her 
 life long she would remember the aspect of the river as she 
 saw it dancing beneath her while she crossed the bridge, 
 with the autumn sun pricking it into sparkles, and the trail 
 of the steamers scoring its silver-gray surface with undulat- 
 ing bands. Clattering across the Place du Carrousel, the 
 heavy vehicle rolled beneath the narrow Louvre archway, 
 and came to a standstill near the Palais Eoyal before taking 
 a fresh freight of passengers for Clichy ; then up the busy 
 Rue de Richelieu, with its old-world air and great library, 
 where students bury themselves in past ages in the heart of 
 modern Paris, and thence into the seething life of the Grands 
 Boulevards, framed in an indistinct setting of pale, gold- 
 broidered facades and tremulous yellow-green leaves. Here 
 Eila left the omnibus, and set herself to walk bravely through 
 unknown streets to the Folies-Pantassin. She had enough 
 of the Marie Bashkirtseff element in her nature to have felt 
 excited and elated under other circumstances at the evident 
 admiration she aroused on her passage. Now she only valued 
 
BILA'S NOTION TAKES SHAPE. I99 
 
 it as an encouragement to carry out the thing she had under- 
 taken. She was obliged to retrace her steps more than once 
 before she found the building, for the streets were tortuous, 
 and she was diflttdent of asking her way. She found it at 
 last — a leprous-hued edifice, with a side-entrance that led 
 into a dark, descending passage. The front-doors appeared 
 to be closed, and she was hesitating whether to penetrate 
 into the passage by the side-entrance, or to knock boldly at 
 the front-door, when a middle-aged gentleman of large girth, 
 with very prominent eyes, and the kind of fat French face 
 she had so often seen caricatured in Punch, came through 
 the side-entrance smoking a cigar. " Gentleman," she would 
 have called him, in deference to his clothes, which had an 
 air of premeditated smartness, though it flashed across her 
 mind that the French title of Monsieur, which is of almost 
 universal application, would have described him more cor- 
 rectly. She had lived in Paris just long enough to compre- 
 hend that it is possible for a monsieur to be a gentleman, but 
 just as likely that he may be the reverse. An individu, on 
 the other hand, can hardly fail to be anything but a doubt- 
 ful, ill-dressed personage. 
 
 The monsieur she encountered to-day started back as he 
 came suddenly face to face with her, and said in perfectly 
 audible tones : 
 
 " Bonte du ciel ! quelle jolie fllle ! " 
 
 But her sense of the exceeding gravity of her mission 
 prevented her from being disconcerted by the compliment. 
 She hardly' noticed it, in fact; only her cheeks grew visibly 
 paler, and her lips quivered as she inquired timidly in her 
 best French whether it was here that she might expect to 
 find the director of the Folies-Fantassin. 
 
 " Mais c'est moi, mademoiselle 1 " replied her new ac- 
 quaintance, with a delighted bow. "Venez done, je vous 
 ferai inscrire sur I'instant." 
 
 Eila followed him down the dark passage, with a trepi- 
 dation tempered by a general feeling of unreality, to a lit- 
 tered room, looking out upon one of those foul, damp, dark, 
 and contracted stone spaces that are assumed to be yards in 
 Paris. The office seemed, however, only to form part of 
 
200 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 a wing attached to the main, building, which apparently 
 stretched in its turn a long way back until it culminated in 
 a photographer's studio perched upon so elevated a house-top 
 that it made the neck as well as the eye ache to look up at 
 it. Eila felt her heart flutter like a frightened bird as she 
 took the seat the director pointed out to her. Though he had 
 a second-rate theatrical cast of face, which made her think 
 vaguely of circus-riders and organ-grinders, and especially 
 of a certain brigand hero she had seen long ago on the Hobart 
 stage, and whom she had passionately worshipped in her 
 imagination throughout an entire evening, there yet seemed 
 to her to be something in it that might be appealed to. His 
 eyes, it was true, goggled undisguised admiration of her 
 charms, but there was nothing deliberately insulting in their 
 expression. On the contrary, there was a certain comic stu- 
 pefaction in their regard, as though they had been saying : 
 " Que diable vient-elle faire dans cette galere ! " 
 
 She was spared the embarrassment of explaining her 
 mission, for the director seemed to know it intuitively, and 
 she was innocently struck by what she regarded as evidence 
 of great tact and discrimination on his part. If he had not 
 guessed why she had come, it seemed to her that she would 
 never have found the courage to tell him. She did try, 
 however, to explain that it was the need of money that had 
 driven her to take such a step, whereat he looked at her 
 again with an air of half-incredulous, half-mocking per- 
 plexity that might have been interpreted in many different 
 ways. As she said nothing, but only blushed under the 
 look, he shrugged his fat shoulders, as though to imply that 
 he gave up trying to solve the mystery for the present. 
 Eila gave herself the name of Clara Rose, of which she had 
 thought in the night, but admitted that it was an assumed 
 one. The director seemed to hesitate between his desire to 
 question her farther and the necessity for keeping an en- 
 gagement. He pulled out his watch, and uttered an in- 
 voluntary " Diable ! " as he rose from his chair. But the 
 object of young Mrs. Frost's visit had been fulfilled. The 
 last step had been taken. The director had even given her 
 the address of the theatrical costumier who would provide 
 
EILA'S NOTION TAKES SHAPE. 201 
 
 her the costume she was to wear. He had hurriedly jotted 
 down the items of it as he scanned her person. She was 
 also directed to return the mornuig before the exhibition, in 
 order that she might be shown the place she would have to 
 occupy on the stage. The whole affair had been so easily 
 and rapidly arranged, and the director seemed to look upon 
 it as so normal and practical a proceeding, that Eila felt 
 half reassured as she turned away from him on her home- 
 ward way, after he had ushered her through the dark pas- 
 sage to the street. There was yet a little time to spare 
 before she would be expected home, and she availed herself 
 of it to go once more to the address her mother had brought 
 from Hobart, and to see whether she might discover some 
 news of her cousin. It seemed a forlorn hope, but this 
 time she was more successful, though the news she obtained 
 filled her with despair. She heard that a Monsieur Huljert 
 de Merle had actually occupied an apartment hereabouts 
 before the street was changed many years ago. It was be- 
 fore the Franco-Prussian War. Monsieur de Merle was 
 supposed to have had friends among the Communists, and 
 perhaps he had thought it prudent to leave France. Some 
 exiles who returned from New Caledonia had reported that 
 he had become a " squattere " in Australia. In Australia ! 
 Eila's voice faltered as she thanked the man who gave her 
 this explanation. Nothing more definite was to be obtained, 
 and she trudged home (three sous saved counted for some- 
 thing) with a depressing sense that the family migration 
 had been even a greater act of folly than she had supposed. 
 Not only had they pursued an ignis fatuus across the world, 
 but they had left the solid substance behind them in a 
 double sense. 
 
 Hubert had been, in all probability, within a very few 
 days of them, while they had been making the most un- 
 heard-of sacrifices to come to Europe in search of him. 
 Perhaps he had been living for years in their very neigh- 
 bourhood, for Australians and Tasmanians are neighbours. 
 Nay, he might even have come to Hobart itself among the 
 army of summer strangers, without their knowing any- 
 thing about it. 
 
202 NOT COUNTING THE COST, 
 
 They could have sympathized with.his life and his work, 
 for doubtless he spoke the same language as themselves, 
 and got at the rights of the wonderful ruby story that con- 
 cerned them. Pondering over these things, Eila returned 
 home, and, to the eager questions poured forth by Mamy as 
 she opened the door, replied gravely that she had put in a 
 claim for a kind of work she thought she might be capable 
 of undertaking, but that it was useless to question her fur- 
 ther, as she had made up her mind to say nothing until the 
 matter was decided. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 
 
 About ten days later, as Eila was returning along the 
 old Eue St. Jacques from a secret expedition to the theat- 
 rical costumier, who was arranging her a kind of Bacchante 
 costume, taken from a mythological ballet, a very different 
 aspect of Paris was greeting the eyes of Lucy Warden and 
 her brother, standing in one of the balconies in front of an 
 upper room of the Hotel Continental, overlooking the gar- 
 den of the Tuileries. The branches of the famous ehns over 
 the way were only sprinkled now with limp leaves, that the 
 faintest breeze brought fluttering down. The air was just a 
 little chill, for the summer heats had long been cooled by 
 the frigid nights of autumn, and Lucy had thrown a seal- 
 skin tippet, as new and sleek and rich-looking as everything 
 else she possessed, over her not too plump shoulders. Lucy 
 was not what the French expressively call etoffee in a fleshly 
 sense. On the other hand, she heaped upon her spare little 
 person stuffs both rich and rare, and it was a belief in the 
 family that you might stick a pin into any part of Lucy's 
 attire, when she was "dressed for the day," with the sole ex- 
 ception of her waistband, without the risk of encountering 
 her flesh. 
 
 Mrs. Warden, with her son and daughter, had arrived in 
 
BOHEJIIA'S VISITORS. 203 
 
 Paris only the day before, and Sydney had already inscribed 
 their names in the hotel-book, with a proud flourish of Black 
 Swan Station, Victoria, and Emu Villa, Tasmania, appended 
 to them. He had consulted the list of theatres posted up for 
 the benefit of inmates, and had taken his mother and sister 
 to see Sarah Bernhardt in "La Tosca." The young- people 
 had been immensely impressed, and their mother a trifle 
 bewildered. Indeed, Mrs. Warden found it necessary to 
 remind herself more than once during the course of the 
 drama that it was really the thing, after all, to go and ad- 
 mire Sarah Bernhardt in this particular piece. Otherwise, 
 there were details in it she would rather, for her own part, 
 have avoided witnessing. To-day their time was all their 
 own, and Mrs. Warden was casting about for the best means 
 of improving the shining hours of the bright Paris afternoon, 
 and moving rather laboriously about the charming room she 
 shared with her daughter, when Lucy and her brother dis- 
 cussed their plans outside. 
 
 " How pretty it is over there, to be sure ! " said Lucy re- 
 flectively. " Do look at the ribands of that woman with the 
 children ! A nurse, I suppose. They almost sweep the 
 ground ! And what smart gold pins she has in her cap, 
 too ! " 
 
 " Just look how that fellow holds his reins," said Sydney, 
 for whom the aspect of the riders and their mounts on the 
 way to the Bois was more interesting than the pins and rib- 
 ands of the nounous. " Did you ever see such a duffer ? " 
 
 " He has a nice horse, though,'' observed Lucy doubt- 
 fully. " By-the-by, Sydney, if we go and see the Clares to- 
 day, will you come with us ? We have their address, you 
 know." 
 
 " Why ? Did mother say she was going ? " asked Sydney, 
 after a pause. 
 
 His tone sounded more sulky than encouraging, for his 
 mother's attitude towards his friends had been long a sore 
 point with the young man. He knew that she looked upon 
 it as a condescension to visit them, and was prepared to re- 
 sent her patronage on his own account as well as on theirs. 
 
 " She didn't exactly say she was going," Lucy replied 
 14 
 
204 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 guardedly; "but I know she will if I ask her. After all, 
 Sydney '' — this after a moment's reflection — " you must see 
 that neither Mrs. Clare nor young Mrs. Frost is altogether 
 mother's sort." 
 
 " They're not always chattering about the fashions, if you 
 mean that," said Sydney warmly. He did not reply, " I 
 never said they were," for Lucy's words showed that she had 
 divined to a certain extent what was passing in his mind. 
 
 " No, I don't mean that," said Lucy calmly. Her face, 
 however, was a trifle suffused ; Sydney's contemptuous ut- 
 terance of the word " fashions " seemed like a reflection upon 
 her mother and herself. " I mean something quite different, 
 though, as far as that goes, it is silly to be always attacking 
 the fashion as you do. I am sure there are heaps of clever, 
 fashionable people in the world, whatever you may say, just 
 as there are stupid unfashionable ones. I wasn't thinking 
 about the Clares in that way, nor about the peculiar style in 
 which they dress. If that were all, one would not mind so 
 much " 
 
 " If what were all ? " interrupted Sydney grulHy. " I don't 
 know what on earth you're talking about ! " 
 
 " If their being outwardly peculiar were all," replied Lucy 
 frostily, " one would not mind so much, though they are un- 
 like everybody else one knows. But they have such pecul- 
 iar ideas. They scoff at religion, for one thing ; still, I sup- 
 pose they are to be pitied, for they really are an unfortunate 
 family. There's young Mrs. Frost, for instance; if she 
 hadn't married in such a hurry, she might really have made 
 a good match in the end. People think her very good-look- 
 ing, and she is pretty, in a way, if she were only a little bet- 
 ter dressed ; and Mamy, too. I can't think how she could 
 be so silly as to behave as she did in Hobart." 
 
 Sydney pulled his travelling-cap — he had set it on his 
 head as he came out upon the balcony — farther over his fore- 
 head. 
 
 " How did she behave ? " he said, with studied indiffer- 
 ence, but quailing inwardly. 
 
 He had looked away from his sister as he asked the ques- 
 tion, and Lucy affected to yawn as she replied : 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 205 
 
 " Why, everyone knows she was an outrageous little flirt. 
 She was going the right way to ruin all her chances of get- 
 ting settled in life." 
 
 " Getting a husband, you mean ! " said her brother shortly. 
 " I don't suppose she'd got to the end of her chances, as you 
 call it, seeing she was only seventeen last March." 
 
 " How well you know her age for a stranger ! " observed 
 Lucy, with meaning. She had coloured a little at Syd- 
 ney's comment ; for Lucy was sensitive upon the score of 
 her age, and often secretly regretted that she was not three 
 years her brother's junior instead of his senior. " I know 
 Mamy's only a child, if it comes to that," she continued ; 
 " but she was a most precocious little flirt, all the same. 
 Well, I suppose we shall have to go and see them this morn- 
 ing. You got their address from the bank in London, you 
 know. How astonished they will be, to be sure ! We are 
 the last people in the world they would think of seeing in 
 Paris." 
 
 Sydney would infinitely have preferred calling upon his 
 friends alone. So completely, indeed, did he incorporate 
 himself with them, that he would have liked to send them 
 timely warning of his mother's intended visit. He did not 
 do so ; and the consequence was, that a couple of hours later 
 a carriage from the Hotel Continental drew up before the 
 tall house in the Boulevard de I'Observatoire, and two richly- 
 clad ladies, accompanied by a young man whose morning- 
 suit of finest serge proclaimed him to be dressed by a genu- 
 ine English tailor — no counterfeit tailleur Anglais — in- 
 quired of the evil-looking concierge the number of Madame 
 Clare's apartment. Little did the visitors imagine, as they 
 rustled up the stairs, that their visit was equivalent to bring- 
 ing a week's rent in their pockets, since it had the effect of 
 inducing the concierge to extend to a fortnight the week's 
 credit he had given Eila. 
 
 The mid-day meal that day consisted of a franc portion 
 of cabbage-soup and some bread. Ever after Eila trembled 
 to reflect that if Mrs. Warden had arrived just five minutes 
 earlier, she must have seen Dick mounting the stairs with 
 the tin of soup in one hand, and a loaf like a spiral walk- 
 
206 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ing-stick in the other. Fate, however, was kind, for the 
 family were all indoors. Unfortunately, the table in the 
 ante-chamber was laid — that is to say, it was covered with 
 two newspapers in lieu of a cloth, and four coarse soup- 
 plates, into which Eila was about to pour the soup from the 
 saucepan in which she had been heating it over an inade- 
 quate fire of braize in the miniature kitchen, when voices 
 and the trailing of silk skirts were distinctly heard upon the 
 landing. A peremptory knock at the door followed, and for 
 one breathless moment the family lost their presence of 
 mind. Eila rushed into the kitchen with her saucepan, and 
 tlu-ew off her soiled blue apron. Truca made a bolt into her 
 mother's room, and hid behind the door. Mamy, attired in 
 an old walking-jacket which had shed half its front buttons, 
 whereby a long line of milk-white throat was displayed, ad- 
 vanced boldly to the door. She opened it cautiously, with 
 an air of frightened expectancy, and found herself face to 
 face with Sydney. It was with difficulty that the poor child 
 repressed a cry of emotion. Her very home in Hobart 
 seemed to have walked upstairs in his person. Yet the dis- 
 tance that separated her from him appeared greater than 
 ever, for Mamy had begun to understand that social barriers 
 are more difficult to surmount than geographical ones. But 
 Sydney's face wore the same expression of dog-like devotion 
 as ever. No heed took he of the absence of collar or the 
 lack of buttons on Mamy's jacket. Buttons or no buttonsi 
 she was always the one maid in the world for him. His 
 eager grip of her timidly-extended hand almost hurt her 
 fingers, and contrasted oddly with the fashionable hand- 
 shake bestowed by Mrs. Warden's daintily-gloved fingers, 
 and Lucy's conventional kiss ; for Lucy had no understand- 
 ing of kissing, which is a thing that comes naturally, or 
 that never comes at all. And now Eila emerged from the 
 kitchen with a grim determination to keep up appearances in 
 the teeth of everything. She led the party promptly through 
 the dark ante-chamber into the brilliantly bare reception- 
 room, against the walls of which the battered trunks stood 
 in a helpless row, feeling inwardly wi-ath with Dick for 
 leaving his coat and boots upon the floor. 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 207 
 
 "You see we are all in confusion," she said apologet- 
 ically ; " but we hope to make this room look pretty by-and- 
 by when we get the furniture in." 
 
 " It will look sweet, I am sure ! " said Lucy graciously. 
 " I suppose you have only just come here ? " 
 
 "We have not been here long," said Eila, with a frown- 
 ing aside in the direction of Mamy, who was just about to 
 say, "Six weeks." "What we most delight in is the view. 
 Go and get some chairs — will you, Dick ? You won't mind 
 their being kitchen ones ? " with a smile at her visitors ; 
 " nothing is in its place yet." 
 
 The chairs were brought, and Mrs. Warden and her 
 daughter were ensconced in them at the open window, 
 whence the well-nigh bare Luxembourg trees, brushed with 
 a haze of lilac, were to be seen to the best advantage. Mrs. 
 Warden inquired after each member of the family in turn, 
 and professed herself overcome with sympathy for poor dear 
 Mrs. Clare, whom she would have been so charmed to see. 
 Deeply interested she declared herself, too, in the young 
 people's pursuits. She carried on a conversation with Eila 
 in an under-tone respecting art studies in Paris generally. 
 
 " Lucy — dear child ! — would so like to improve herself in 
 her flower-painting. She wants me to leave her for a time in 
 Paris with Miss Flyte-Sm5rthe — the Archdeacon's sister, you 
 know. Quite a charming person ! I told you about her in 
 Hobart, I believe. It seems they have living models in the 
 studios, after all ; and I have heard, though I can't quite be- 
 lieve it, that— they have nothing on. However, Miss Plyte- 
 Smythe is entirely in favour of the Paris method — she at- 
 tends the best studios, and she is invited to the Embassy, 
 and all ; so I suppose it must be the thing, though it sounds 
 very queer. Where does your brother take lessons, may I 
 ask ? " 
 
 " We are waiting until we are a little more settled to de- 
 cide," said Eila, with calm assurance. " There is so much 
 to see to and to do just at first— so many new impressions to 
 take in." 
 
 "Quite so," rejoined Mrs. Warden blandly; "and when 
 you are settled you will be gathering a little circle of friends 
 
208 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 around you. The great thing is to get in with the best 
 people at first. You don't know perhaps that the Tomlin- 
 sons and the Miss McCreadys, and quite a number of Aus- 
 tralians and Tasmanians, are staying in a pension in the 
 Eue Marboeuf. They have found some delightful society 
 there, and they have most agreeable reunions. One of the 
 gentlemen was secretary to Marshal Bazaine. Then the 
 Honourable Mr. and Mrs. de Lisle are at the same pension — 
 they go to all the receptions at the Embassy, you know. 
 We are to make a party to lunch with them at Robinson's 
 to-morrow. I've never been there, but it seems it is quite 
 the thing to go and take your lunch in a tree. Now^, if you 
 and your sister would join us we should be very pleased. 
 Then you must stay and dine with us at the Continental in 
 the evening. Perhaps Marshal Bazaine's secretary will 
 honour us by coming." 
 
 Many conflicting thoughts came into Eila's mind before 
 she replied to this invitation. Her first impulse was to de- 
 nounce herself as an impostor. If the Tomlinsons, the 
 McCreadys, and the Archdeacon's sister — nay, if Mrs. Warden 
 herself — could imagine the dire straits to which the family 
 was reduced ; if they could have been told that the very 
 next night she herself was pledged to appear in a Bacchante 
 costume on the stage of a low music-hall to be gazed at by a 
 ribald crowd ! If they could have known that she was on 
 the eve of selling herself to gain bread for her family — for, 
 after all, what did the exhibition of her personal graces on 
 a public platform amount to but to selling herself ? — where, 
 then, would have been the invitation to Robinson's ? Young 
 Mrs. Frost passed through a severe mental ordeal at this 
 moment. Like the peasant in ^sop's Fables, she would 
 have liked to blow hot and cold at the same time. It occa- 
 sioned her the keenest anguish to think of cutting herself 
 adrift from the charmed circle to which Miss Flyte-Smythe 
 and the Archdeacon's sister belonged. On the other hand, 
 how could she sacrifice the only chance that seemed to offer 
 itself of improving the miserable condition of the family ? 
 Then, as long as the Wardens took them by the hand, might 
 there not still be a chance for Mamy ? If ever her roving 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 209 
 
 fancy was capable of being fixed, should it not be during 
 the actual crisis, when the mere difficulty of living had been 
 brought home to her in so cruel a fashion ? There could be 
 no deceit in accepting the invitation for Mamy, at least, 
 who, indeed, knew nothing of the degradation to which her 
 sister was about to subject herself of her own free will, and 
 who never should know it, if Eila could possibly prevent it. 
 
 " It is very good of you," she replied at last to Mrs. 
 Warden in grateful tones. " I can't say how much I should 
 like to go, but I could not feel easy at leaving mother for 
 the present. Mamy, I am sure, will think it a great treat. 
 I will call her in to thank you herself." 
 
 She stepped on to the balcony, where Sydney and Mamy 
 were leaning over the railing side by side, with their backs 
 turned to her. She called to them softly, and it rejoiced her 
 heart to see that, as they turned hastily round, there was a 
 startled, almost guilty, expression in the eyes of both, and 
 that their cheeks were unmistakably flushed. 
 
 "Mrs. Warden has a treat in store for you, Mamy," she 
 said, in unconsciously elated tones. " She has invited you 
 to go to the Bois with her to-morrow, and to picnic in a tree 
 at Robinson's. Did you ever hear of anything so lovely ? 
 And you are to dine with them at the Continental after- 
 wards, she says." 
 
 " I can't go," protested Mamy in a vehement undertone ; 
 "I've nothing to wear." 
 
 " Not go ! Nonsense ! You must, dear," said Eila with 
 insistence. Her tone was playful, but there was a hint of 
 almost threatening urgency in it that did not escape Mamy's 
 attention. " Come and thank Mrs. Warden yourself." Then, 
 as the younger girl pushed irresolute past her, she whis- 
 pered hurriedly : " You shan't refuse— you mustn't. I'll see 
 that you are decently dressed, I promise ; but say yes, what- 
 ever you do." 
 
 And Mamy said " Yes," being conscious all the time of a 
 
 desire to say " No." 
 
 " Then we may look for you at eleven to-morrow, my 
 dear ?" said Mrs. Warden amiably, after Mamy had uttered 
 her timid and reluctant acknowledgment of the invitation. 
 
210 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "You haven't seen Robinson's yet, nor we either, I'm 
 ashamed to say. I will send your sister safely back to 
 you to-morrow evening," she added, turning to Eila, "so 
 don't be uneasy if you should not see her till late." 
 
 Nothing could have fallen out better. The visitors now 
 took their leave, and Dick conducted them gravely to the 
 very door of their carriage, and put them in with as digni- 
 fied an air as was compatible with his frayed and coUarless 
 Crimean shirt and rough knitted ulster. In returning, he 
 bounded up the staircase four steps at a time, and, whether 
 under the influence of some pent-up feeling it was incum- 
 bent on him to work off, or because the visit had produced 
 an emotion not translatable in words, he was no sooner 
 within the shelter of the apartment than he tilted himself 
 on his head like an acrobat near the entrance-door, and 
 tapped his heels against the panels. 
 
 " Good gracious, Dick ! are you out of your senses ? " cried 
 his sister. " What do you do that for ? " 
 
 " That's how I'm going to receive Marshal Bazaine's sec- 
 retary," said Dick, bestowing a kick upon the panels. 
 
 " G-et up, for goodness' sake. How can you be such an 
 idiot?" 
 
 " And the Honourable Mr. and Mrs. de Lisle," said Dick, 
 with another tapping of the heels, which caused him, how- 
 ever, this time to lose his balance, and to come down with a 
 full-length flop on the floor. 
 
 " Come and take your bouillon," said Eila. 
 
 She had donned her kitchen apron again, and was filling 
 the plates with the scalding mess. She found it an economy 
 to serve the soup as hot as possible. It seemed to make it 
 go farther and last longer. A hunk of bread was set by 
 each plate. The family would have liked to make the meal 
 Jast a long time (though it was certainly an unsatisfactory 
 thing to begin and end with soup), had they not been too 
 hungry to brook delay. 
 
 Meantime a savoury sweetbread, browned to perfection, 
 and having an aroma that might have been added to the 
 list of appetizing whiffs that tortured the unhappy Tantalus, 
 was borne past the hungry diners to the invalid's room. As 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 211 
 
 Eila carried it to her mother's bed and set it before her, Mrs. 
 Clare took up the fork eagerly, then let it drop. 
 
 " What good thing have you brought me here, my 
 dear?" 
 
 " Sweetbread, mother. The doctor said you might have 
 some.'' 
 
 " I won't touch it unless you tell me what you have had 
 for dinner. What meat did you have ? " 
 
 "Steak," said her daughter in a low voice. "We've all 
 eaten as much as we can. But you must take this at once. 
 You are not to talk, the doctor says, only to eat and get 
 strong." 
 
 And Mrs. Clare did as she was told, and her children 
 forgot that their dinner that day had been but a Barmecides' 
 feast after all in their joy at hearing that mother had eaten 
 nearly every scrap of her sweetbread. The precious morsel 
 that was left would have been given by common accord to 
 Truca, only she could not be persuaded to take it ; and it 
 was only when Eila, losing patience, threatened to throw it 
 away altogether, that Dick rushed forward to appropriate it. 
 
 Her mother having dined, Eila was free to give all her 
 attention to the important question of Mamy's dress for the 
 morrow. When she had washed the soup-plates, and hung 
 her blue apron in the kitchen, she proceeded to overhaul the 
 trunks, while Mamy stood by her side, lending only a half- 
 hearted acquiescence to the operation. 
 
 " You should be so delighted at such a chance," Eila said 
 admonishingly, as she knelt before the trunk in which she 
 hoped to make a find. " I think it was wonderfully kind of 
 Mrs. Warden to ask you. And just look here! Mother's 
 mantle with the beads will be the very thing for you to 
 wear. I don't think Mrs. Warden ever saw her in it. And 
 you can have my Hobart gloves and boots — only do be care- 
 ful of them this time. And your black merino skirt looks 
 quite decent since we arranged it. The body is all to pieces, 
 but I can lend you my jersey to wear with it." 
 
 " But I haven't got a parasol," said Mamy dejectedly. 
 
 " No more you have. That's a pity ! I never thought of 
 it, either. I would lend you my umbrella, but it's dread- 
 
212 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 fully Mrs. Gampish. Never mind ; it's always allowable to 
 forget one's parasol. They may think you left it behind. 
 And, what's more, it's sure to be shady if you lunch in a 
 tree. Let me see what you look like in this mantle. Mother 
 won't mind lending it to you for once." 
 
 Eila continued to chatter on while Mamy donned the 
 mantle. 
 
 " It's too fine for me," she said, shaking her head, as she 
 tied the string round her supple waist, and turned to admire 
 herself in the long mirror with juvenile curves. " Why are 
 you so set on my going to-morrow, Eila ? " she continued. 
 " I shall only be miserably uncomfortable and out of my 
 element all day. What am I to do if the Rawlinsons and 
 McCreadys, and all those people Mrs. Warden talked about, 
 were to ask me about our life in Paris, and offer to come 
 and call upon us ? " 
 
 "Say you'll let them know as soon as we're settled. 
 We're not obliged to give them an account of what we have 
 for dinner, or how we may choose to live, are we ? " 
 
 "Of how we're forced to live," interrupted Mamy dole- 
 fully. 
 
 " Only for a little time, dear," said Eila, with well- 
 assumed cheerfulness. " What with mother's illness and 
 our money being delayed, we have had to go through rather 
 a rougher time than we reckoned upon. But it will all 
 come right in the end, you'll see. Only mind you try and 
 have a good time to-morrow for once ; and don't go refusing 
 things at dinner when they're handed to you. It's not like 
 being at a Duval to dine at the Continental, you know. All 
 the courses are paid for beforehand, so just make the most 
 of the opportunity." 
 
 Mamy shook her head. 
 
 " I couldn't," she said vehemently. " I shall be thinking 
 the whole time of all of you at home. If only Dick had 
 been invited too ! I shall feel as though every mouthful 
 would choke me." 
 
 " Nonsense ! " said Eila. " I shall never forgive you, if 
 you don't tell me when you come home that you ' reg'lar 
 enjoyed ' yoiir dinner — like the woman we met on the New- 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 213 
 
 haven steamer. Don't fret about things, either. It's no 
 use ; and I suppose it is better to eat one's black bread first, 
 after all." 
 
 She sighed, however, as she made the admission, kneel- 
 ing before the trunk filled with home relics — the flotsam 
 and jetsam of their early Cowa possessions. How foolish 
 they looked as she tumbled them out on the smooth floor ! 
 How much money had been wasted in dragging these poor 
 remnants over the world ! There was something grotesque 
 as well as pathetic in their aspect. Flounces and soiled 
 artificial flowers from old ball-dresses, broken fans and odd 
 gloves, the remains of a little Neapolitan costume in which 
 Dick had achieved his one social success in his childish days 
 at a juvenile fancy ball. All that the trunk contained 
 would hardly have been worth the trouble of carting it 
 away, yet how many happy associations, how many mo- 
 ments of careless, unconscious joy in living, were bound up 
 with the worthless frippery. Eila bowed her head to pre- 
 vent her sister from seeing the tears that were welling into 
 her eyes. What demon of folly could have prompted her 
 to advocate the scheme of bringing the family to Europe- 
 she who had always prided herself upon her prudence ? 
 Was she not in a measure responsible for reducing her loved 
 ones to beggary ? 
 
 " I suppose it is better to eat our black bread first," she 
 repeated drearily ; " but oh, Mamy, when one thinks what a 
 big white loaf you might have to yourself if you chose, and 
 what slices you could give us all out of it ! Did Sydney 
 speak to you again, dear, to-day, on the balcony ? " 
 
 " He spoke to me, of course," was Mamy's flippant reply. 
 "He said he thought Paris a fine place— much too fine for 
 the little monkeys of men that lived in it." 
 
 " Did he ? How absurd ! But I don't want to know his 
 opinion about Paris. I want to know what he said to you 
 particularly. You know about what " 
 
 Mamy reflected for a moment. 
 
 " He said nothing about that, and I don't want him to, 
 
 either." 
 
 "Not want him to!" Eila looked up reproachfully. 
 
214 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " It's no use telling me you care about mother and the rest 
 of us, Mamy. If you did, you could not see us brought to 
 such a pass and not be anxious to help us out of it ; when it 
 would not cost you more trouble, either, than to raise your 
 little finger." 
 
 "It's not the trouble I'd mind," said Mamy gravely, 
 "and you know quite well I would do anything in the 
 world to help mother ; but this is different. I don't believe 
 you know how I feel one bit. Supposing you were free, 
 would you marry the first person, no matter who, so long as 
 he could give you money ? " 
 
 " No matter whom," said Eila solemnly, though with ref- 
 erence to the sentiment, rather than the grammatical con- 
 struction of her sister's question, " I would try to make him 
 a good wife. I would do my duty by him ; but I would 
 look upon my whole existence as a sacrifice made to the 
 family. I would try to crush down all personal feelings, 
 and to find my happiness in putting poor mother into decent 
 surroundings, and providing for you and the others. When 
 people are as poor as we are, Mamy, as absolutely, abjectly 
 poor, they are forced to sacrifice themselves in some way or 
 other. What are all our lives now but one perpetual strain 
 of self-denial ? If, by making no greater sacrifice than the 
 little one of not marrying for love, you could raise yourself 
 and all who are dear to you out of the mire, you should con- 
 sider yourself a most wonderfully fortunate girl. Look at the 
 thousands and millions of girls whose husbands are chosen 
 for them by their parents. Look at the princesses, who have 
 no voice in the matter at all. In what way would you be 
 worse off than they ? and why should you be so selfish as to 
 put your own feelings first, and to consider them so exclu- 
 sively, when one might almost say that the very lives of the 
 others are in the balance ? " 
 
 " But it's not myself and my own feelings only that I'm 
 considering," protested Mamy, almost whimpering. " You 
 were always the special pleader, Eila, and I never could 
 make black look white as you can. Still, you ought to un- 
 derstand that I am considering the man I would have to 
 marry quite as much as myself. I couldn't help hating him. 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 215 
 
 if I didn't marry him for love. It's no use pretending I 
 should make him a good wife, for I shouldn't ; I feel it in 
 my heart. I should make him the worst wife in the world. 
 The fonder he was of me, the more I should dislike him." 
 
 Eila had already shaken out the folds of the black merino 
 skirt carefully, but some unacknowledged irritation induced 
 by Mamy's words caused her now to shake it again more 
 vigorously. When next she spoke she made a visible effort 
 to control herself. 
 
 " How like a romantic little schoolgirl you do talk some- 
 times ! What do you know about the way in which you 
 would feel towards a husband until you try, I should like to 
 know ! Nothing would m.ake me believe that you have such 
 a cold, ungrateful nature as you want to make out. Why 
 should you think you would dislike a person all the more 
 for being fond of you ? On the contrary, you would be 
 grateful first, and then affection would come, and then love. 
 Besides, when you are a little older, Mamy, you will under- 
 stand that marrying for love signifies nothing at all. You 
 must know how many cases there are of people who love 
 each other passionately at first, and who quite turn against 
 each other at the end of a few years, or who get tired out of 
 each other's society in the course of time. People can never 
 really tell whether they suit each other or not until they 
 come to live together ; and often the very ones who seem the 
 least suited to each other in the beginning hit it the best in 
 the long-run. If your whole heart were set upon another 
 man to whom you were already engaged, I would not advise 
 you as I do ; but see how many times you have had fancies 
 for different people already. That shows how little impor- 
 tance you need attach to your feelings. You may believe 
 me that they will never really be fixed for good at all until 
 you are a wife. Then, it is not as though I were asking you 
 to make any pretence, either. If Sydney still wants you to 
 marry him, with the full knowledge that you are not in love 
 with him, it is because he is sure of being able to win your 
 heart in the end." 
 
 Mamy had listened somewhat abstractedly to her sister's 
 argument, and her next observation seemed to show that she 
 
216 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 had been rather following out a mental speculation of her 
 own than attending to it closely. 
 
 " I wonder," she said slowly, finding her words with 
 effort, "whether, if a man persists in wanting a girl to marry 
 him after she has told him she can't care for him, and she 
 married him in the end, whether he or she is the most to 
 blame if they are unhappy afterwards." 
 
 " It depends upon how the woman behaves after they are 
 man and wife, I should think," said Eila. " For if she con- 
 sents to marry him at all, she should at least intend to try 
 and make the best of him. . . But, talking of Sydney, you 
 used to be rather fond of him at one time, Mamy — don't you 
 remember ? " 
 
 " When I was quite young, perhaps," said Mamy with a 
 sigh ; " but there were other boys 1 liked better afterwards ; 
 and as soon as Sydney wanted me to marry him in earnest, 
 1 felt 1 did not care for him in that way at all. Besides, 
 only think of what Mrs. Warden would say ! She would be 
 horribly disgusted ! " 
 
 Mamy emphasized the " horribly" with pathetic earnest- 
 ness, and Eila paused in smoothing out the pleats of the 
 black merino skirt, while a little flush mounted in her 
 cheeks. 
 
 " You are shifting your ground now, Mamy. Mrs. War- 
 den is a worldly woman, but she cares to see her children 
 happy first of all." 
 
 " She cares more to have them make grand marriages," 
 interposed Mamy, nodding her head with an air of wisdom ; 
 " and, after all, I think I could understand her being a little 
 disgusted, too, at my marrying Sydney. What would he 
 gain in return for giving his heart — to say nothing of his 
 money — but a pauper wife who wouldn't care for him, taken 
 out of a pauper family ? " 
 
 " He would gain the wife he cares to have, and that is all 
 that really matters," said Eila warmly. " You need not in- 
 sult us by calling us a pauper family, either, Mamy. We 
 are not paupers as long as we don't ask for charity.'' 
 
 " What else do you want me to marry Sydney for, then ? " 
 said Mamy bluntly. 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 217 
 
 Eila's cheeks glowed a deeper red. 
 
 " We won't discuss the matter any more," she answered 
 loftily. " You take everything I say in a wrong sense. If 
 you were Sydney's wife, you would be entitled to a share of 
 all he possesses. There would be no question of charity in 
 that ; and the fact of your being rich and having influence 
 would enable you to open all kinds of careers to the others 
 that are hopelessly closed to them now. It would not be 
 charity to have Truca to stay with you sometimes, I suppose ? 
 nor to put Dick in the way of earning his bread ? " 
 
 " It is strange that Mrs. Warden doesn't seem to have 
 any idea that Sydney cares about me," observed Mamy re- 
 flectively. She had ignored Eila's indignant refutation of 
 the charge of being a pauper. " As for his marrying me, I 
 don't believe she would let him, if it came to the point." 
 
 "She couldn't help herself," cried her sister eagerly. 
 She thought she divined a faint indication of wavering in 
 Mamy's last words. "Sydney has more power than you 
 think. Mrs. Warden only has a part of the revenue of his 
 fortune and Lucy's to spend in her lifetime. She can't 
 really interfere in the marriage of either. I think you are a 
 little unjust to her, too, Mamy. I am sure she would be 
 very fond of you as a daughter-in-law, once there was no 
 help for it. Why should she have come all the way here 
 to-day just to invite you to Robinson's to-morrow ? " 
 
 " She invited us all. She would leave Paris to-night if 
 she thought such a fearful catastrophe as the one you want 
 to bring about could overtake her. What a cruel way of 
 repaying her, too, it would be ! She would be like the en- 
 gineer 'hoist with his own petard.' " 
 
 Mamy was pleased to air this grown-up metaphor, which 
 she had only chanced upon the day before ; but Eila was 
 thinking more of what her words implied than her choice of 
 them. If it were really possible for her to bring about what 
 Mamy called the " catastrophe " of her engagement to Syd- 
 ney Warden, what a joy and triumph it woiild be ! She 
 told herself that she would move heaven and earth to pro- 
 cure so blessed a consummation. 
 
 " Though I don't suppose it would be heaven I should 
 
218 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 move in the matter," she reflected grimly ; "they say mar- 
 riages are made there, but I am. afraid this one would not 
 be recognised. Am I doing wrong, I wonder, in urging the 
 match upon Mamy against her will ? I am acting in the 
 full trust that it will be for her ultimate happiness. If we 
 could only see ahead ever such a little way — just far enough 
 to enable us to foresee the result of our actions and com- 
 binations before their consequences are quite irretrievable ! 
 But what is life, after all, but a groping in the dark ? Even 
 the next hour is hidden behind a black veil. I can see no . 
 farther now than that we have fallen into a kind of quag- 
 mire of discomfort and misery, and that Sydney's arm is 
 stretched forth to pull us out of it. If Mamy were rescued, 
 the rest would be saved too. And what is the sacrifice de- 
 manded of her ? Only to let herself be loved and adored by 
 a worthy, honourable, pure-minded young fellow, sound in 
 mind and body, who would give her all that makes life 
 worth living. I don't believe there is any sentiment in the 
 world that can make up for the want of a dinner and a bed. 
 What miracle does Mamy expect to happen, I should like to 
 know ? Does she think a Prince Charming is going to climb 
 into this miserable apartment on purpose to look for her ? 
 There is much more danger, so pretty and young and light- 
 minded as she is, that some handsome adventurer will take 
 her fancy, and make utter shipwreck of her life. Even if 
 we were not as wretched as we are — even if the family had 
 not to be considered at all — I should still consider it my 
 duty to persuade her to listen to reason. Marriage is her 
 only port of refuge — I see that clearly. I should feel her to 
 be safely anchored if she were Sydney Warden's wife." 
 
 Thus Eila mused, while apparently engrossed in the ar- 
 rangement of Mamy's apparel for the morrow. For the 
 latter part of her task, she was amply rewarded by her 
 sister's appearance next morning as she tripped into her 
 mother's room to bestow a good-bye kiss upon the invalid's 
 sallow cheeks before taking herself off for the day. 
 
 Wonderful is the elasticity of youth ! The morning was 
 soft and balmy ; a faint mist rested upon the half-stripped 
 branches of the trees in the Observatoire G-ardens, while 
 
BOHEMIA'S VISITORS. 
 
 219 
 
 the dome of the lofty sky overhead showed a smooth ex- 
 panse of turquoise blue. There was a promise of an ex- 
 quisite day in the prospect from the little balcony outside, 
 and Mamy's face was a radiant reflection of the same. 
 
 " Will I do in my borrowed plumes ? " she called out, in 
 tones of tremulous excitement, as Eila hurried from the 
 kitchen in her blue check apron, carrying the coffee-pot in 
 her hand. 
 
 "Do! It is a perfect get-up! It is ejmtant, as the con- 
 cierge says. You might be a princess. Listen to me, 
 Mamy," solemnly; "you must always wear black when 
 you want to look your best.'' 
 
 "And jingly things," said "Mamy, surveying the bead 
 fringe of her mother's mantle with naive admiration. 
 
 " And a little sailor hat like that," continued her sister. 
 " Dick is going to walk with you as far as the Continental. 
 You will go down the Rue de Seine, past the brocanteur's, 
 you know." 
 
 " I don't want Dick," said Mamy quickly. " I know the 
 way quite well by myself." 
 
 " Dick is going with you, all the same." There might be 
 detected occasionally a note of calm decision in Eila's soft 
 tones that spoke of a hidden, inflexible will. "He is put- 
 ting on his boots. Good-bye, dear;" and she bestowed a 
 warm kiss on Mamy's pouting lips; then, in a hurried 
 whisper : " And have a little pity on us all, pray.'' 
 
 "You haven't any pity on me," protested Mamy, her 
 bright blue eyes suddenly suffused. 
 
 It seemed to her that she was like a lamb led to the 
 slaughter; but there was nothing in her air that would 
 have suggested a sacriflcial lamb, save the skip of joyous 
 anticipation with which she prepared to descend the stair- 
 case in her brother's wake. 
 
 In a world where, as Eila had reflected, even the com- 
 ing hour is hidden behind a black veil, the best philosophy 
 is to make the most of every passing minute. Now, the 
 minutes this morning were fraught for Mamy not only 
 w^ith joyous expectation, but with actual and positive de- 
 light. Every step down the Boulevard St. Michel by Dick's 
 15 
 
220 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 side was a joy in itself ; the air was so bright that she could 
 have danced instead of walking. Her insufficient diet had 
 had no other effect, so far, than that of making her feel like 
 a young racehorse in training. Her sedate and seemingly 
 pompous attire formed a quaint contrast to the round and 
 childlike face, fair and delicate as a painted Greuze. To 
 look beyond the next few hours would have been a work of 
 supererogation. Was there not a long drive in the Bois 
 awaiting her, and a lunch in the open air up a tree (was 
 ever such a delightful notion heard of out of Tasmania ?), 
 and, superlative treat of all, a dinner at the table d'hote of 
 the Continental ? With such a prospect in store, life was 
 indeed a boon, and Paris was the place to enjoy it in. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 EILA PREPARES FOR THE SACRIFICE. 
 
 How the long day of Mamy's absence wore away Eila 
 did not rightly know. She was only conscious that there 
 was little repose for her in it, either of body or of mind. 
 While she was carrying on such household duties as could 
 still be performed in a home that was well-nigh stripped of 
 all that rendered it deserving of the name, her thoughts 
 were fixed upon the ordeal that awaited her in the evening. 
 As the afternoon dragged on, she found herself trembling 
 under the influence of a strange feverish excitement that 
 nothing would allay. A sudden spasm of realization of the 
 thing that was to come, such as a criminal condemned to 
 the gallows might experience, overcame her at unexpected 
 moments, when the whole scene of a few hours hence would 
 shape itself vividly before her imagination. The building, 
 the people, and the lights made a hoi'rid impressionist pic- 
 ture that thrust itself on her consciousness by anticipation. 
 She could see herself advancing slowly to her seat upon the 
 stage in her Bacchante dress, her flowing hair crowned with 
 a garland of fabricated wild vine-leaves, the leopard-skin 
 
EILA PREPARES FOR THE SACRIFICE. 221 
 
 that encircled her body partly opened to display her shapely 
 knee. Thousands of eyes like burning glasses directed at 
 her, through which the hot rays would travel over her per- 
 son and scorch and wither it up ! How should she bear 
 these glances and not cover her face with her hands as 
 before a blast from a furnace ? Would she have the forti- 
 tude to remember that Famine was knocking at the door of 
 the apartment, and that his skeleton form was more dread- 
 ful to encounter than her own reflection in the glass clothed 
 in a leopard-skin ? She had found among the battered vol- 
 umes that Dick flung about on the floor of his room an early 
 volume of Punch, with a caricature of Father Thames in 
 the days of his pollution, presenting his offspring to the fair 
 city of London. There was a ghastly suggestion of Truca's 
 face in the presentment of the youngest member of the ter- 
 rifying trio, which never failed to make Eila feel that the 
 martyrdom she had imposed on herself in Truca's behalf 
 was but a light one after all. To give herself courage, she 
 studied the caricature at odd moments in the day. She also 
 tried to divert her mind by speculating upon the possible 
 result of the day's expedition with the Wardens. If Mamy 
 would only be wise and good (our use of these terms is for 
 the most part purely subjective), her own sacrifice might 
 prove unnecessary. But it was too late to turn back. As 
 the Fi-ench proverb said : " The wine was drawn, and it must 
 now be drunk ! " Bitter as was its flavour, she would drain 
 it to the dregs. She had put her hand to the plough, or, 
 rather, she had stretched it forth for the martyr's palm, and 
 she would not draw it back. In any case, it was too late to 
 save herself, since by breaking her engagement she would 
 only succeed in aggravating the family distress. Even 
 should Mamy be reasonable, Mrs. Warden might be less easy 
 to convince than Eila herself had been willing to believe ; 
 and in any case the marriage could not take place for some 
 time to come. With reflections of this nature, our heroine 
 strove to arm herself for the evening's ordeal. She thought 
 of Sainte Blandine, an early Chi-istian saint, martyred many 
 centuries ago by being placed in a red-hot chair, whereby 
 her fair young flesh was frizzled living upon her bones. 
 
222 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "And she suffered this for Christianity," said Eila to 
 herself. " Surely I care for my family as much as Sainte 
 Blandine could have cared for an abstract idea ! and there 
 is no red-hot chair — no positive physical suffering of any 
 kind, indeed — awaiting me. I have nothing to say, nothing 
 to do, only to sit still and let myself be stared at, and to try 
 and keep my thoughts fixed upon the possible joy of gaining 
 eighty pounds to save my dear ones from starving." 
 
 It drew to a close at last — the long and weary day. Mrs. 
 Clare had been assisted out of bed in the afternoon, and had 
 spent two hours by the window lying back in a cane arm-chair, 
 hired from the furniture dealer on the boulevard, upon the un- 
 derstanding that it should be paid for in English lessons to 
 the dealer's daughter, a demoiselle de magazin in the Rue de 
 la Paix, by young Mrs. Frost. Mrs. Clare had been eager to 
 hear all the details of Mrs. Warden's visit, and had listened 
 to them with a kind of bitter-sweet satisfaction depicted in 
 her countenance. For the twentieth time she had reminded 
 her children of that epoch before they were born, when it 
 had been considered a condescension on their mother's part 
 to invite Miss Lydia Simpson into the parlour of the Davey 
 Street house wherein Mr. and Mrs. Clare, recently arrived 
 in Hobart, had taken their iirst lodgings. 
 
 "Mrs. Simpson was a most vulgar-looking person, my 
 dears, and there were some very queer stories connected with 
 her coming to Hobart. As for Mrs. Warden, she never 
 looks a lady, whatever she may put on." Eila had been giv- 
 ing her mother a detailed description of a blue fox boa worn 
 by their visitor the day before. " There is something essen- 
 tially commonplace in her appearance." 
 
 " It was kind of her to think of coming, anyhow," said 
 Eila deprecatingly ; " and really, mother, you would have 
 admitted that Lucy looked charming at least." 
 
 " Don't talk to me of Lucy ! " replied Mrs. Clare impa- 
 tiently. " She's all very well in her fashionable clothes, I 
 dare say ; but I should like to know where Lucy would be 
 without them — tell me that if you can. Not that it's to be 
 wondered at, either ; for of all the bad figures I ever saw, 
 Mrs. Warden's is one of the worst." 
 
EILA PREPARES FOR THE SACRIFICE. 223 
 
 "She hasn't much figure," Eila allowed— her mother was 
 in the stage of convalescence which requires humouring — 
 '■ but she has a kind heart. She seemed really anxious about 
 you yesterday when I told her how ill you had been." 
 
 " Well, if she has any memory at all, she must remember 
 that she has good cause to be grateful for what I did for her 
 in the past. I remember when Mr. Warden first came to 
 stay in the Davey Street house where we were lodging. We 
 were very particular — at least, I was — about the acquaint- 
 ances we made in a colony in those days, and we did not ask 
 him into the parlour in the beginning. But would you be- 
 lieve ? He would be found sitting on the staircase outside 
 whenever I was playing or singing at the piano. Nothing 
 could drag him away ; and Miss Simpson — Mrs. Warden now 
 — who was a buxom-looking girl with a false chignon, would 
 seize the opportunity to go up and down stairs upon all 
 kinds of pretexts, until the poor young man was inveigled 
 into proposing to her. He came to ask me what I thought 
 of it first, and if I had discountenanced it, Lydia Simpson 
 would never have been Mrs. Warden to-day. But I dare say 
 she finds it convenient to forget those times now." 
 
 "I suppose Mr. Warden was something like Sydney is 
 to-day," said Eila. 
 
 "Just the same thick-set, awkward-looking youth — such 
 a contrast to your poor father, my dear ! " 
 
 "Yes; I know our father must have been handsome," 
 said Eila. " So many people have told me so ; and, then, I 
 can just remember what he was like myseH." 
 
 "Ay, that is one thing no one can rob you of," observed 
 Mrs. Clare proudly, " your heritage of good looks. It is cu- 
 rious that, though I was married first, you were not born 
 until Lucy was three or four years old. A plain little crea- 
 ture she was, too, with quite an old face. But you get your 
 looks on both sides, one may say, though Mamy is the only 
 one who has her father's skin.'' 
 
 In talk of this kind did Eila beguile the invalid's hours 
 by the open window of the bare reception-room through the 
 long afternoon. Conversation upon the present and future 
 was avoided. There seemed to be so little to look forward 
 
224 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 to, and a review of the actual condition would have heen 
 more depressing still. Under these circumstances it was 
 advisable to fall back upon a long-vanished past. Involun- 
 tarily Eila was driven at this time to study certain aspects 
 of her mother's character. It was evident that the lower the 
 present declined, the more the past became magnified. Mrs. 
 Clare had always been proud of her origin and early associ- 
 ations, but now she glorified herself in them to an extent 
 unheard of before. To judge by her present impressions, 
 there had never been such a commingling of blue blood and 
 lordly descent as in the alliance between the De Merles and 
 her father's family of the Wiltons. Of Mr. Clare less was 
 said, the existence of Uncle William and the half -boxes of 
 candles being impossible to ignore. On the other hand, the 
 Chevalier was raised to an elevated perch in the genealogical 
 tree. 
 
 The disappearance of Hubert de Merle, whom Mrs. Clare 
 had come across the world to discover, was not often alluded 
 to by her children. They felt that this must be a peculiarly 
 sore point with their mother, and Eila's discovery that their 
 cousin had possibly been in Australia while they were 
 coming away in search of him was the last drop of bitter- 
 ness added to the already overfiowing cup of their dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 The young Clares, moreover, were tender of their mother 
 — tender of her weakness as of all that belonged to her ; and 
 even though their faith had become a little shaken in the 
 royal antecedents of the Begum, they liked to have their 
 imaginations stimulated by the ever-fascinating tale of her 
 early adventures in the land of her adoption. 
 
 The days closed in earlier now. It was soon after six 
 when the sun went down in a blaze of crimson and gold 
 behind the soft lilac haze that shrouded the trees over 
 the way. 
 
 When Eila had put her mother to bed, and given Truca 
 her tea, she left Dick in charge, and prepared to go out upon 
 her dread mission. She had found the pretext of a lesson 
 to be given to the furniture dealer's daughter, adding that 
 she had half arranged with her pupil to go to a Ifite choral 
 
EILA PREPARES FOR THE SACRIFICE. 225 
 
 service at St. Roch's ; and never had she been more inclined 
 to rejoice at her few years of seniority over Dick, which 
 enabled her to put her foot upon his well-meant attempts at 
 brotherly surveillance. 
 
 " You have enough to do in looking after Maniy," she 
 said, in answer to his offer of accompanying her down the 
 boulevard. "Don't trouble your head about me, Dick. 
 Even in Paris a married woman is supposed to be able to 
 take care of herself." 
 
 Nevertheless, her heart stood still as she walked past the 
 man-concierge, who was smoking his pipe at the entrance to 
 the porte-cochere, and who nodded at her, as she thought, 
 with an insolent air, as though he had divined the object 
 of her expedition. She pretended not to notice him, and 
 walked stiffly by with her head erect, out upon the boulevard. 
 Here she found herself in the midst of noise and turmoil. 
 The clamorous orchestra of the Bal Bullier, towards which 
 students and grisettes were hurrying, was distinctly audible, 
 playing a wild waltz from the " Mousquetaires au Couvent." 
 The lovely evening air was full of cigar-smoke and whiffs 
 from patchouli and powder scented grisettes. Eila had con- 
 cealed her face entirely in her board-ship veil, and covered 
 her house-frock with a long ulster that was beginning to 
 look sadly shabby in the day-time. Experience had taught 
 lier that it was wise to dissimulate the outward graces of her 
 person on the Boulevard St. Michel. 
 
 She reached the Odeon unmolested, and clambering on 
 the top of the huge omnibus waiting outside, took her seat on 
 the farthest corner of the bench at right angles to the driver. 
 The moon was rising in the night sliy, and Eila thought of 
 her childish contests with Dick on the score of its size as she 
 drove solitary through the brilliant heart of Paris. The 
 blinds against the windows of the entresols through which 
 she had looked the other day were not all drawn, and occa- 
 sionally she had a glimpse of a family seated at a round 
 table at their evening meal. So small was the space, so low 
 the ceilings, it almost looked as though they were living in 
 a box. The river looked more beautiful than ever this 
 evening, with tlie long spiral reflections from the lamps that 
 
226 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 lined its shores trembling in its depths, and the red, green, 
 and golden lights of the small river steamers darting hither 
 and thither in the gloom. The Place du Carrousel looked 
 fantastically lovely, with its triumphal arch and mighty 
 Louvre Palace illumined by the heaven-high splendour of 
 the Jablokoff electricity. Yet all the time Eila felt as 
 though this beautiful night aspect of Paris were nothing 
 but an imaginary and fanciful background to a weird and 
 troubled dream, out of which she would presently wake to 
 find herself leaning over the veranda at Cowa, watching the 
 moon rise over the harbour. She had reached, in a measure, 
 the state of feeling which all who sacrifice themselves heart 
 and soul for a cause, Buddhists as well as Christians, enthu- 
 siasts of all creeds and all colours, seek to attain. She was 
 fast losing the oppressive consciousness of her own person- 
 ality. Her identity was becoming merged into her idea. If 
 she could have maintained this feeling, G-alatea in her 
 marble coldness could not have shown herself more indif- 
 ferent to the ardent glances of her sculptor-lover than she 
 to the gaze of the crowd that awaited her. But the dread- 
 ful conviction that "life is real and life is earnest" came 
 back to her with a tightening of her heart-strings as she de- 
 scended from the omnibus and made her way with knees 
 that trembled under her towards the Folies-Pantassin, along 
 the ascending street, to where she saw the name of her tor- 
 ture-chamber picked out in flaming gas letters against the 
 impalpable background of the night. 
 
 The sight of her actual goal did not make her pause for 
 an instant. Before her mental vision this evening there 
 rose a spectre that beckoned' her on. She must keep her 
 mother out of the hospital and her sisters and brothers from 
 the streets, at whatever cost. Also, she must keep her 
 thoughts from reverting to the ghastly little bottle in dark- 
 blue glass, with octagonal sides, that the Hobart chemist 
 had given her. She had allowed her imagination to wander 
 to the poisoned phial more than was wise during the long 
 night hours she had spent by her mother's bedside. Better 
 be blotted out of existence, it had seemed to her sometimes, 
 than continue to live upon such terms as these. What was 
 
EILA PREPARES FOR THE SACRIFICE. 227 
 
 life worth, unless for the satisfaction of the senses with 
 which we apprehend it ? When it was merely an instru- 
 ment for the torturing of these, what resource was left but 
 to escape from it ? Even if, as the Buddhists said, we were 
 chained indefinitely to the wheel of existence, it was more 
 than likely that the individualities with which we were ac- 
 tually burdened would come to an end with our lives upon 
 this earth. And what mattered most at present was that 
 Truca, and Mamy, and all of them, should cease to be tor- 
 mented in their existing forms. Eila, I fear, was destitute 
 of the quality known as moral courage ; but, then, she had 
 no foundation to rest it upon. The smallest spark of faith 
 would have been more sustaining in such a plight as hers 
 than all the philosophical reasoning in the world. But faith 
 is no more to be got for the asking than any other desirable 
 possession we may covet. It is confined, indeed, to a very 
 limited number of minds. For the faith of a large propor- 
 tion of the human race, in Ceylon and elsewhere, which 
 holds that existence is a bad business on the whole, and that the 
 sooner we free ourselves of it the better, is hardly deserving 
 of the name. Neither is the faith that foreshadows stagnant 
 beatitude or perpetual misery for the whole human race a 
 staff to lean upon in time of trouble. The natural ground- 
 less faith peculiar to the optimist temperament, which holds, 
 without knowing why, that everything will come right in 
 the end, is the only kind of faith really worthy of being 
 so called, and even this is apt to be affected by the liver. 
 Eila had known this kind of unreasoning faith, induced by 
 the mere ecstasy of living, upon certain heavenly mornings 
 at Cowa, but it crumbled away, not before a liver out of or- 
 der, which was a thing of which she was happily ignorant, 
 but before the accumulation of family troubles that beset her. 
 The leprous-hued building, like many a battered belle in 
 real life, gained by being surveyed by gaslight. Its leprous 
 surface looked soft and creamy-hued behind its brilliant 
 adornment of gas. The spectators were already crowding 
 down the wide descending entrance, which made Eila think 
 vaguely of the broad path that leadeth to destruction. She 
 stood for an instant on one side, anxiously scanning their 
 
228 NOT COUNTINa THE COST. 
 
 faces through her veil, before seeking the side-entrance by 
 which she had been told to enter. For an instant she felt a 
 wild impulse to stop each person who passed her, and to say, 
 " Please let me tell you why I am going to do this to-night ; 
 it is because we are without bread . in the house, and my 
 mother is ill — not for any other reason." Yet why torment 
 herself after all about the construction the spectators might 
 put upon her action ? Why think of them as human beings 
 at all ? For her the crowd should be like the corporation of 
 Sir Edward Coke — a thing that had no soul. What matter 
 what the crowd thought of her if it only gave her the pref- 
 erence ! What were the people to her or she to them ? They 
 would never see her again. For them she was a mere pass- 
 ing apparition, without name or individuality — not the Eila 
 Clare of Hobart of whose fair repute Reginald was so jeal- 
 ous. Thus reflecting, she passed into the building. 
 
PART II. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 AT THE ANTIPODES. 
 
 Some two or three years before the Hegira of the Clare 
 family, Tarragunyah Station, situated on the border of 
 Queensland and New South Wales, presented, at the end of 
 the shearing season, a vast undulating expanse of brown 
 and yellow carpet, covered with dark-toned trees and shrubs, 
 among which a Linnseus would doubtless have discovered 
 endless varieties of different families in the vegetable world, 
 but which to the ordinary observer, like the squatter who 
 now rode among them, conveyed no impression but that of a 
 most disastrous sameness. Indeed, scraggy she-oak trees, and 
 scraggier gums, whether blue or red ; native cherry, mimosa, 
 and myrtle — all look equally black and uncultured upon a 
 cursory inspection. There is nothing green and bounteous 
 in their demeanour, like that of their leafier sisters in the 
 Old World — no sweet change of fashion with every succeed- 
 ing season; no ermine mantle in the winter, no coat of 
 many colours in the autumn ; no downy budding in the 
 spring, nor luxurious thicket of verdure in the summer. 
 Dark, sullen, and frowning, ofttimes with their ragged bark 
 hanging in tatters about them like the torn apparel of some 
 sturdy beggar, they wear the same forbidding aspect from 
 year's end to year's end ; and save where groves of native 
 plum-trees cast a soft blue halo upon the distant landscape, 
 or where in certain favoured gullies giant ferns and tropic 
 creepers twine round each other with Brazilian luxuriance, 
 or where, again, upon fertile mountain slopes the mighty 
 
 229 
 
230 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 eucalyptus towers to heaven wreathed with the wild convol- 
 vulus, they could never inspire that feeling of love and rev- 
 erence which led the Druids of old to kneel beneath the 
 shadow of the oak, and which has moved poets in all ages 
 to sing impassioned songs of the forest trees and sylvan 
 bowers of " merrie England." 
 
 The squatter, however, riding over the Tarragunyah 
 plains to-day did not bestow much thought upon the mo- 
 notony of their aspect. Years of familiarity had bred, if not 
 contempt, at least indifference, in his mind. He knew 
 eternal sameness to be the prevailing characteristic of the 
 Australian Bush — knew that it presented, indeed, one of 
 those rare types in which a study of the part is almost equal 
 to a study of the whole ; and knew at the same time that he 
 had not come to Australia, like Dr. Syntax, upon a tour in 
 search of the picturesque, but simply because it had served 
 his purpose and his interests to expatriate himself. He had 
 had reasons for preferring to invest his money in a station 
 in Australia to sinking it in some vague speculation in the 
 Old World, though, for all the return it had given him, he 
 might as well have hidden it, like the man with his one 
 talent, in a napkin. He had sunk some ten thousand pounds 
 in Tarragunyah, and sometimes it appeared to him that he 
 had sunk them so effectually that he would never he able to 
 bring them to the surface again. He had thought as much, 
 at least, until quite lately, when Dame Fortune had suddenly 
 waved her wand in the direction of a certain ridge of hills 
 that ran slantwise across his run. Whether she was merely 
 mocking him, or whether she had some serious purpose in 
 her action, he had yet, however, to determine, and it was 
 this thought that was uppermost in his mind as he rode on 
 his homeward way. The homestead stood upon rising 
 ground in the midst of far-stretching plains. These plains 
 were dotted, as we have seen, with sombre, ungraceful trees, 
 and clothed in parts with a tangle of scrub. At their best, 
 when the grass was at its prime, their surface was sparsely 
 brushed with yellowish green ; at their worst, they were 
 brown and shrivelled, and scored by cracks and fissures, 
 with a burning air shimmering over them, and traces of the 
 
AT THE ANTIPODES. 231 
 
 passage of starving sheep and bullocks in the bones that 
 strewed their tracks. The season of the year when the 
 squatter rode over them was a summer's evening in Febru- 
 ary, and pleasant are the images that the words call up to 
 those who connect summer with English fields and hedge- 
 rows, moist with falling dew, and echoing with the song of 
 thrush and lark. How different a vision do they evoke in 
 the mind of a native-born Australian ! As the squatter rode 
 on his way, an occasional whirl of dust, driven high into 
 the air by the scorching wind, enveloped his head like a 
 cloud. The air was heavy with dust ; the harsh leaves of 
 the trees were hidden under it. A colony of hungry flies 
 followed horse and rider, settling in black clusters wherever 
 they could find settling-place ; and each time the hungriest 
 of the band was driven away, he returned, like the devil in 
 the Scriptures, with seven devils worse than himself. 
 
 The horse clearly knew his way home ; for his rider, 
 holding a slack rein, allowed him to take his own direction, 
 and to go at his own preferred jog-trot pace. There was no 
 living soul to observe either ,though. had there been such an 
 one, his attention would not long have rested upon the horse. 
 Not that the animal was unworthy of notice, albeit of wild 
 stock and unknown pedigree ; for he had points that would 
 have recommended him instantly to a connoisseur. But as 
 we are ever more apt to be struck by the strange and gro- 
 tesque than by the beautiful and well-proportioned, these 
 points would only have served to bring into stronger relief 
 the uncouth form of the person who bestrode him. It was 
 only too evident at a glance that the squatter was what the 
 French expressively call mal venu. He had taken ofi' his 
 coat, which was strapped in front of him on his saddle ; and, 
 in his gray Crimean shirt, his deformity became doubly ap- 
 parent. It was a deformity that there was no disguising. The 
 squatter was a hunchback : and, in common with aU hunch- 
 backs, his head appeared to protrude angularly from between 
 his misshapen shoulders. The face, like those of the un- 
 fortunates to which he belonged, must have been long and 
 peaky in extreme youth; now it was large, harsh, and 
 rugged, partly concealed, however, under a coarse black 
 
232 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 beard and moustache. Even so, it would have worn the 
 pathetic expression that comes from the constant strain of 
 the eyes in an upward direction, in the effort to talce in sur- 
 rounding objects, had it not been for the determination its 
 owner betrayed that he would not allow himself to be pitied. 
 There is no such thing as a habitual scowl, except, perhaps, 
 on the face of a stage Quilp ; but there are expressions 
 which are not far removed from it. The eyes of the squatter 
 
 seemed to say, " Pity me if you dare, and be d d ! " and, 
 
 as no one cares to gain the latter form of benediction, there 
 were not many found to risk bestowing the former. What 
 Hubert de Merle really thought about himself, no one knew. 
 Nature — that is, God and devil in one — had employed her 
 twofold power when she fashioned him ; for she had given 
 him the perception and understanding of grace and beauty, 
 and then had mocked him by imprisoning these faculties 
 in a distorted body. 
 
 The human imagination has loved at all times to picture 
 a sphere in which the outward presentment of the individual 
 shall be the complete expression of his inward nature — a 
 sphere where the body shall be nothing but the plastic garb 
 of the spirit animating it, like the delicate and transparent 
 drapery that clings round the sculptured form of a Greek 
 goddess. There is compensation in such a fancy for the 
 melancholy fact that in our actual state our bodies are often 
 sad misfits. We can cast off at om- will an xmgainly or ill- 
 fitting garb ; but what are we to do when our immaterial 
 selves are encased in a fleshly covering that is a constant 
 outrage to them ? To bring ourselves into harmony with 
 om- personalities, we should have to do constant violence 
 to our instincts. This was the fate of Hubert de Merle, 
 owner or part owner of Tarragunyah. If his outward 
 man could have been moulded by his inner spirit, he 
 would have possessed in all likelihood the form of an 
 Apollo Belvedere— not, perhaps, that his moral character, 
 or even his mind, would have been completely and fault- 
 lessly balanced, far from it ; but that his appreciation of 
 perfect proportions and harmony of outline was so instinc- 
 tive and keen. Under such circumstances, it might also 
 
AT THE ANTIPODES. 233 
 
 have happened that his better qualities would have gained 
 the ascendant. It is so easy to feel benevolently dis- 
 posed and indulgent towards the world when we are well 
 satisfied with ourselves, since, after all, it is only our own 
 moods that the people and objects about us reflect. Hubert, 
 being made as he was, could not give expression to the 
 transcendental part of his nature, for the reason that he 
 was too morbidly alive to the incongruity of the material 
 part of it. From the time when he had attained to self -con- 
 sciousness, which is almost coincident in intelligent beings 
 with the consciousness of existence itself, this terrible truth 
 had been borne in upon his mind — that he must stifle all 
 impulses of admiration, of enthusiasm, and of love, for they 
 could never react upon himself. In his childish days, he 
 had found it in his heart to wish that he had been born 
 blind as well as deformed. Better be enveloped eternally 
 in the darkness of Hades than dwell open-eyed and sentient 
 in the hell of Tantalus. Perhaps if he could have brought 
 himself to accept pity and sympathy, his lot would have 
 been less hard ; but pity he resented even more fiercely than 
 repulsion. What was it but another way of reminding him 
 that he was an outcast and a pariah — a creature of whom 
 the most that could be said by his fellow-creatures was " Poor 
 devil ! " as they turned their heads in another direction ? 
 
 It was in giving Hubert this particular kind of tempera- 
 ment that Nature had dealt so hardly by him. There was 
 no reason why, when she gave him a hump, she should not 
 have given him at the same time the mirthful qualities which 
 cause the French to say of a person who laughs heartily, 
 " II rit comme un bossu '' ; no reason why she should have 
 bestowed extra clear-sightedness, sensitiveness and apprecia- 
 tion of form and colour upon him. She might have given 
 him recklessness, or indifference, or stolidity, in which case 
 he would speedily have discovewid that his deformity made 
 no more difi'erence to others than it did to himself, and that 
 it need not, and did not, stand in the way of his doing and 
 enjoying most things that other men did and enjoyed. The 
 world, as we all know, takes us at our own valuation. There 
 are only a very few with discernment enough to establish a 
 
234 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 standard of their own. Had Hubert taken his affliction in- 
 differently, the world would have taken it indifferently. If 
 he had taken it merrily, the world would have taken it mer- 
 rily. He chose to take it tragically. It was in the order of 
 things that the world should take it tragically also. It was 
 a satisfaction to him to say bitter and caustic things, though 
 the opportunity for saying them was limited, seeing that for 
 some ten or fifteen years he had led an almost isolated exist- 
 ence in the heart of the Australian Bush. Whence he had 
 come no one knew. There were rumours that he had been 
 in New Caledonia in his earlier years, though in what ca- 
 pacity no one ventured to inquire. His library bore evi- 
 dence that he had studied much, and that he still continued 
 to study. The latest works on scientific subjects found their 
 way from Europe to his homestead. He remained in touch 
 with the Old World, and kept pace with new developments 
 of literature in France and England. Thus, he was familiar 
 with the "decadents" and the " symbolistes " in his far-away 
 retreat — centuries away, to all seeming, from modern civil- 
 ization — before the echo of their writings had spread to Eng- 
 land. A man with an active intellect, who never sleeps 
 more than six hours out of the twenty-four, who has (even 
 when allowance is made for meals, and dressing, and riding 
 upon a squatter's rounds) six or seven hours per diem to give 
 to his books — a man who possesses, moreover, a memory like 
 a vice — may lay in a large fund of book-lore in the course 
 of ten years of a solitary and studious existence. It was not 
 surprising that Hubert should carry about a kind of ency- 
 clopsedia in his brain. Unfortunately the heart has claims 
 as well as the brain, but of this fact he did his utmost to 
 fight down all reminders. 
 
 Before he came to the end of his ride, the homestead, 
 standing upon a piece of rising ground, loomed in view. 
 The horse had taken, as he might well be trusted to do, the 
 shortest and directest route home, and the white walls of the 
 cottage shone, as in a picture, from amid their setting of 
 wild fuchsia-bushes, interspersed with the bright green fo- 
 liage of the native plum. The station buildings formed 
 three sides of a square, of which the dwelling-house repre- 
 
AT THE ANTIPODES. 235 
 
 sented one side, the stores another, the kitchen and men's 
 hut a third. There were outlying buildings and sheds at a 
 certain distance from the house, and post and rail fences en- 
 closing paddocks where the station-milkers and horses un- 
 groomed were running at liberty. The buildings were made 
 of cob, a kind of sun-dried clay, tempered and worked with 
 water and dry grass ; they looked compact and comfortable. 
 The walls of the homestead were whitewashed, and sur- 
 rounded by a deep, cool veranda. The roof was thatched 
 with coarse grass. Four kangaroo dogs and a collie ran 
 lightly forward with yelps and bounds of welcome as the 
 squatter approached, and a man who was leaning against a 
 fence smoking his pipe sauntered across the square past the 
 monster wood-heap to take his employer's horse. It was 
 past seven in the evening, and all the inmates had time and 
 to spare on their hands. Hubert dismounted with his habit- 
 ual half-sullen nod at the man. Standing next to him, the 
 misshapen outline of his dwarfed body was more perceptible 
 than ever against the whitening evening sky. He walked 
 slowly towards the house and entered it by the back-door, 
 standing^ike all the other doors in the establishment — 
 wide open. There was no upper story. A broad passage, 
 covered with coir matting, ran lengthways through the 
 house, connecting the front and back doors. Along this 
 passage a young man with a pipe in his mouth, and with a 
 generally sun-burnt and sunny face, came forward to meet 
 him. 
 
 The squatter's expression brightened visibly as he ap- 
 proached. 
 
 " So you're back, Wilton ? " he said. His voice was mu- 
 sical, and might have suggested that of a rejuvenated Faust, 
 had you heard it from behind a screen. " I didn't expect 
 you so soon." 
 
 He had raised his eyes as he spoke — dark, resentful, brood- 
 ing eyes, that were scarcely on a level with the young man's 
 chest — and the look of welcome that shone in them trans- 
 formed them pleasantly for a moment. 
 
 " Yes, I'm back," replied the young man, holding out his 
 hand and exchanging a cordial greeting with the "boss." 
 16 
 
236 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Half the conversation in life is made up of obvious remarks 
 of this kind. "I've got through with the business sooner 
 than I expected." 
 
 Hubert looked up quickly with a half-eager gesture of 
 inquiry. He had been standing with his riding-whip in his 
 hand, his coat carelessly attached by one button round his 
 neck, while the empty sleeves dangled loosely over his half- 
 discovered breast — hairy as an Orson's. He wore a conical- 
 ly-shaped felt wideawake of the approved brigand pattern, 
 beneath which his thick grizzled hair, that greatly needed 
 trimming, hung dusty and unkempt. He might have been 
 still under forty, or considerably over that age. It would 
 have been difficult to determine whether the lines on the 
 forehead were the result of much working of the brows in 
 frowning, in straining the eyes upwards, or of age. The 
 nose was rugged, with a suggestion of Hebraic origin in its 
 curves. The eyelids were singularly thick, with a short 
 stubble of dark lash. As he stood there, with the dust of 
 the plains marking every seam upon his harsh countenance, 
 as though with a charcoal pencil, his whip in his hand and 
 his hat thrust back from his temples, he was an object out 
 of whose path a woman or child meeting him alone would 
 have stepped hastily. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 
 
 " Well, what did the experts say ? " was his first eager 
 question. " Is our discovery worth following up ? " 
 
 Jack Wilton did not answer immediately in words. He 
 was one of those people to whom Nature seems to have ac- 
 corded the privilege, in a mood of kind caprice, of doing 
 ungraceful things gracefully. The gesture with which he 
 replied to the squatter's question by laying his right finger 
 against his nose and playfully kicking up his left leg like a 
 colt that has been touched on the hock, would have been 
 
HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 237 
 
 offensively vulgar and flippant in another person. Per- 
 formed by him, it conveyed nothing but the expression of a 
 concentrated glee and triumph past conveying in words, 
 and that the squatter apprehended it in this sense was clear 
 from the gleam of corresponding satisfaction that flitted 
 for an instant across his sombre face. 
 
 " So it's turned out trumps ? " he said. " Well, I'm not 
 surprised. Come in, and let me hear all you've done from 
 the beginning." 
 
 Jack Wilton obeyed. "It" related to a notable dis- 
 covery that had been made some months ago at Tarra- 
 gunyah. Riding one day upon his rounds — for Jack con- 
 descended to do amateur boundary-rider upon occasion — 
 his attention had wandered to a strange jagged line of low 
 hills on Tarragunyah run. Along the top of this ridge was 
 a heavy outcrop of rusty, burned-looking stone, that he 
 recognised at once as iron-stone. He had broken off a piece 
 of it, more from curiosity than from any other motive, and 
 had carried it to the head station, where it had lain kicking 
 about until Hubert, who had a knowledge of geology, as of 
 all else, picked it up and declared it to be the outcrop of 
 some mineral lode. The matter did not rest there. Two 
 days later, Hubert himself, accompanied by Jack, the 
 boundary-rider, a shepherd, and a worn-out miner, who 
 happened to be knocking about the run in the undefined 
 capacity of "generally useful man," sallied forth with picks 
 and shovels, and sunk a small shaft. The stuff extracted 
 was judged by Mr. de Merle to be worth testing, and Jack, 
 who was equally pleased to leave Tarragunyah or to come 
 back to it, upon the "anything for a change " principle, was 
 despatched to Sydney, where his father was a physician 
 with a fashionable practice, to have the ore analyzed. The 
 analyst had declared the specimen to be exceptionally rich 
 in silver, and as the possession of a silver-mine may signify 
 the holding of an Aladdin's purse to the happy possessor. 
 Jack's triumph as he recounted the good news was not 
 unnatural. 
 
 " It'll be a glorious thing if it does turn out trumps, as 
 you say," he concluded confidentially. " I've been having 
 
238 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 a talk with the old governor this time down in Sydney, and 
 he's got a lot of worry, I tell you." 
 
 " Why, I thought your father had such a good practice," 
 interposed Hubert. 
 
 " So he has ; but they keep up a lot of style. You've no 
 idea how much it costs. I've got three sisters out now, and 
 not one of 'em married or even engaged ; and it's driving 
 and shopping from morning till night. The poor old gov- 
 ernor has all his work cut out for him, I tell you." 
 
 This " I tell you " was Jack Wilton's watchword ; he em- 
 ployed it almost unconsciously, in season and out of season, 
 to give an additional weight to the statements which his 
 limited phraseology seemed to him to convey inadequately 
 to the understanding of his hearers. Eloquence, indeed, 
 was not one of his strong points, but he had others which 
 served him, perhaps, in better stead. He was essentially 
 well favoured and pleasant to look upon. His eyes were 
 blue enough to be attractive for their colour alone, inde- 
 pendently of all their other qualities ; and he bore the air of 
 having been warmed and gilded by the sun, until something 
 of the influence of that radiant orb had passed into his hair, 
 his glance, and even his expression. Hubert could have 
 found it in his heart to say of Jack as Desdemona said of 
 Othello, that he wished " Heaven had made him such a 
 man." Jack was his David, and without the aid of a harp 
 could charm the evil spirit from his breast by the mere 
 magic of his presence. He was the only being in whose 
 society the deformed man was able to forget that he was not 
 as other men, and from the day that Jack had come to do 
 " jackaroo " on Tarragunyah station, its owner had tasted 
 for almost the first time the sweets of human companion- 
 ship. 
 
 Not that Jack was in any respect the intellectual mate of 
 his friend and employer. He had no pretensions and no 
 ambitions other than to be a good shot and a first-rate rider. 
 In the eyes of the world he was simply a more than ordi- 
 narily good-looking and good-hearted young fellow, whom 
 men and women — women especially — were certain to like. 
 In his own eyes his physical graces counted as nothing. He 
 
HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 239 
 
 had not sufficient imagination to picture existence without 
 them, and would have told you in all good faith that he 
 would as lief be Hubert de Merle as himself. It was this 
 want of appreciation of personal gifts that the other would 
 have esteemed so passionately that had drawn Hubert to 
 him in the first instance. The gulf which separated the 
 hunchback, 'to his own thinking, from his fellowmen seemed 
 to disappear when he was in Jack's company.* The lad, more- 
 over, had a wondering veneration for the squatter's lore. 
 Though he did not understand a word of Greek or German 
 or French, and though his vocabulary was limited to an 
 Australian slang rendering of his mother-tongue, there had 
 yet been evenings in camp upon cattle-mustering expedi- 
 tions, when the two men had lain wrapped in their rugs, 
 with their feet to the fire and their eyes to the stars, and 
 when the younger had tasted a new pleasure in hearing the 
 elder roll out fragments of Euripides, scenes from " Faust," 
 or sonorous passages from Victor Hugo. His nearest ap- 
 proach to an understanding of intellectual delights was era- 
 bodied in the hearing of these spontaneous recitations. He 
 experienced, unknown to himself, the symbolist's pleasure 
 of gathering sensation and emotion from the juxtaposition 
 of words, unhampered by ideas. 
 
 Hubert had taken him upon his station some two years 
 previously, at the age of nineteen, and at the outset it would 
 have been difficult to say whether he would regard his jack- 
 aroo aid with liking or with hatred. The latter contingency 
 might have seemed the more probable, for there was some- 
 thing almost insolent in Jack's good looks when seen by the 
 side of his ill-favoured boss. The contrast was suggestive of 
 nothing but Apollo and Vulcan keeping house together; 
 and no one was more keenly alive to the contrast than 
 Hubert himself. But Jack was so unconscious of it on his 
 own side, and so blunt in his perceptions of beauty in any 
 of its manifestations, that the morbid self-consciousness of 
 the other was mollified. From tolerating the young man, 
 he had come to like him. Jack Wilton served as a perpetual 
 reminder of the fact that there was, after all, something in 
 the consoling theory of the equalization of lots : 
 
240 NOT COUNTING THE"" COST. 
 
 " For some ha' meat and canna eat, 
 And some can eat and have na meat, 
 So let the Lord be praised." 
 
 Jack had the attributes of Phcebus, the sun-god, and no ap- 
 preciation of them. Hubert had appreciation, but no attri- 
 butes. There were, nevertheless, times when it angered him 
 to think of the keen pleasure he would himself have ex- 
 tracted from life had he been clothed in Jack's body. What 
 riches are comparable to those of youth, and health, and 
 outward graces bound up with our very being ? With 
 Jack's physical advantages, Hubert would have given the 
 reins to all his impulses, for he possessed an Oriental imagi- 
 nation. The Turkish idea of Paradise had the stronger hold 
 upon his secret fancy that he had been but grudgingly ad- 
 mitted into its outer courts upon earth. Had he been in the 
 position of a Nero, he would have wished, not that his fel- 
 low-men had one neck, that he might decapitate them at a 
 blow, but that his sister women had one mouth, that he 
 might press his lips to theirs in a single embrace. Such 
 stormy episodes as he had been through in his earlier years 
 were only vaguely hinted at in the colonies. It was noticed 
 when he was beside himself with anger that he swore 
 strange oaths, which those versed in such matters declared 
 to be French. It was also rumoured that he had played a 
 rSle in the Commune, and had escaped being shot judicially 
 for the sole reason that he had been wounded in a street 
 fray, and had been carted away to the hospital. Whether 
 there was any truth in the rumour, whether, as was asserted 
 by some, he had really seen gaol life in New Caledonia, or 
 whether he had only gone thither, as he himself gave out, 
 upon a mission from the French Government, no one in 
 Australia rightly knew. Nor did anyone make a particular 
 point of inquiring. " The world forgetting, by the world 
 forgot," Hubert kept, as the common saying goes, " himself 
 to himself " in his lonely homestead at Tarragunyah, and 
 no one had any motive for dragging him out of it. Even 
 Jack, to whom he felt nearer than to any being upon earth, 
 had never ventured to question him about his past career. 
 It was the young man's belief that the squatter had omnipo- 
 
HUBEET'S PROPHECY. 241 
 
 tent knowledge, not only as regarded books, but as regarded 
 all that men may do, can do, and dare do in the world. He 
 would have liked to hear all about his experiences of life in 
 the wonderful European capitals, but though, when HubeSrt 
 was in the vein, he would condescend to enter into a few 
 details concerning the Grand Prix or a masked ball at the 
 opera, in response to Jack's eager questions, no reference to 
 his own doings ever crossed his lips. Jack had ended by 
 accepting his silence upon these points as final. The station 
 and its a£Fairs offered congenial topics for general conversa- 
 tion, or, when these were exhausted, there was always the 
 theme of colonial politics to fall back upon. Besides which, 
 the two men had been long upon the intimate footing that 
 renders silence on both sides a natural and easy way of en- 
 joying mutual companionship. Hubert could read and 
 smoke by the hour together without apparent fatigue, his 
 uncomely, shaggy head hardly reaching to the top of the 
 old station armchair in which he sat crouched. Jack, 
 though he could not read for long at a time, could smoke 
 unobtrusively through an entire evening, content, after he 
 had read the colonial papers and studied the Queenslhnd 
 Mail from end to end, to sing or whistle, or, if these resources 
 failed, to go 'possum-shooting by moonlight with the dogs 
 at his heels. 
 
 Tarragunyah w^as not a magnificent specimen of a squat- 
 ter's abode. The room chiefly inhabited by Hubert and his 
 aid had no pretensions to style. Tables and sideboard heaped 
 with the evidences of the male presence in pipes, tobacco- 
 pouches, cartridge-boxes, odd straps, bags of seeds, news- 
 papers, writing materials, the inevitable whisky-bottle and 
 tumblers, with some odd samples of wool, represented its 
 principal appointments. Guns and native weapons were 
 ranged around the walls. Bookshelves, whereon books of 
 every description lay piled in confusion, were the only 
 superfluous luxuries. Hubert's books, indeed, overflowed 
 the establishment. They climbed from floor to ceiling in 
 the sitting-room, reduced his sleeping-room to the size of a 
 cabin by the space they filled upon the walls, and besides 
 appropriating the whole of the spare room, thrust themselves 
 
242 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 into every available corner in Jack's chamber wherein they 
 could find standing or lying room. 
 
 For two years the monotony of life upon the station had 
 been broken by nothing more eventful than the every-day 
 occurrences of Bush life. The lambing and the foaling, the 
 breaking in of two-year-olds and three-year-olds, cattle- 
 mustering and cattle-draughting, bullock-branding and bul- 
 lock-slaying, two Bush fires, and one flood, these had been 
 the only events that had marked the even tenour of the way 
 at Tarragunyah. Jack had taken periodical leaves during 
 the so-called Carnival Week in Melbourne and Eace Week 
 in Sydney, returning for the most part a sadder if not a 
 wiser man. For the rest, he put his mind and heart into 
 the interests of Tarragunyah, in which his father, a Sydney 
 doctor with aristocratic pretensions, had bought him a part 
 share. 
 
 But now had come the first hint of a change, which 
 promised to lift Tarragunyah and its owners from the ruck 
 of Australian stations worked by their own proprietors for 
 evermore. It was upon a February evening that Jack had 
 returned with the great news of the analyst's verdict on the 
 Tarragunyah ore, and the same night he and Hubert dis- 
 cussed the matter as they sat smoking together in the warm 
 blackness of the front veranda after dinner. The rough- 
 and-ready (rougher, perhaps, than ready) married couple 
 who served them had cleared away the roast wild turkey 
 and the omelette of emu's eggs that had formed their even- 
 ing meal, and now they had carried their cups of black 
 coffee, the only foreign innovation introduced by Hubert, 
 into the less stifling atmosphere without. Less stifling in a 
 relative sense only, for even here the air was thick with 
 heat and flies, and had it not been for the tobacco-smoke 
 they would have drawn but dust-laden breaths. No tune- 
 ful note disturbed the sullen stillness of the hour. Only 
 from time to time the sad wail of the curlew was borne 
 through the night, while from beneath a native shrub in 
 the darkening garden a morepork uttered his solemn croak- 
 ing refrain. Hubert liked the friendly veil of darkness that 
 covered him. In his younger days he had had dreams of 
 
HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 243 
 
 adoring a beautiful mistress upon the terms on which Cupid 
 possessed Psyche — a mistress who should know him as a 
 wooer by night alone. He leaned back in his wicker-chair, 
 taking slow puffs at his cigar, while the lithe kangaroo dog, 
 that, by a curious contradiction, never noticed Jack when 
 Hubert was by, thrust his head between his' master's knees 
 and whined for a caress. Jack was sitting, American fashion, 
 with his feet thrown over the veranda railing as he tilted 
 back his chair at an angle that only long practice guaran- 
 teed against the ignominy of a capsize. The accustomed 
 pipe was between his lips, and unwonted dreaminess in the 
 gaze he directed through the darkness at the night sky. 
 
 " It's a rum go,'' he said at last, in abstracted tones, after 
 a long and profound silence. 
 
 " What is ? " asked Hubert, with lazy scorn in his accents. 
 
 " Why, life altogether — the whole blessed business. I'm 
 hanged if I can make head or tail of it when I get to think- 
 ing about it. It's a good thing for me, I tell you, that I 
 don't often puzzle my brains about it, for I believe I should 
 go off my chump altogether if I did. Look at those patches 
 in the sky up there — right up beyond the Southern Cross — 
 the white and the black ; you don't mean to tell me those 
 are all filled up with worlds ? " 
 
 " What white and what black ? " asked Hubert, always 
 with the same inflexion of good-natured contempt. " The 
 Milky Way, do you mean ? Well, I believe it is pretty gen- 
 erally allowed by those who know that there are millions of 
 planetary systems in the course of formation over there, not 
 to speak of those that are in full swing already. Apres f " 
 
 " And then that black patch," Jack went on ; " the bound- 
 ary-rider told me the other daj^— he's a regular learned chap, 
 the boundary-rider— he told me if there were any stars in it, 
 or planets, as he called 'em, they were so far off you couldn't 
 get a sight of them even through the telescope. What I 
 want to know is, where does it come to a stop ? " 
 
 "It doesn't stop at all," said Hubert quietly. "It's eter- 
 nity, whose end no eye can reach." 
 
 " It's got to come to some kind of a stop, anyhow," de- 
 clared Jack oracularly, " though it beats me, I tell you." 
 
244 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "You're not the only one who's been beaten by that 
 problem," said Hubert indifferently. " Time and space are 
 nicely calculated to shake our dispositions 
 
 " ' With -thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.' 
 
 But what has induced these profound reflections ? I always 
 took it for granted you were of those who accepted the 
 green-cheese theory of the moon, if you gave the moon a 
 thought at all. Have the bookmakers been making things 
 unpleasant for you at Randwick ? " 
 
 " The bookmakers ? Not they ! I haven't given them 
 another chance of lambing me down, I tell you. No ! it all 
 came into my head while I was looking at the stars. I've 
 been thinking about the silver-mine and one thing and an- 
 other till my head's in a whirl. All of a sudden something 
 seemed to tell me it wasn't worth making such a fuss about, 
 any way ; for if it's all true, what you've been saying, our 
 own affairs are such a drop in the bucket, after all " 
 
 "Our own affairs!" exclaimed Hubert. "Why, man, 
 for all you know, the world, the very universe itself, is a 
 mere drop in the ocean. But unless you turn Trappist, 
 which would be one way of settling the difSculty, you'll 
 have to give your own affairs the biggest place in it, after 
 all. What were you telling me about your father this after- 
 noon ? He's not in any serious difficulties, I hope " 
 
 " No — oh no ! " said Jack hastily. He got up from his 
 chair as though to shake off the unusual thoughts that had 
 been oppressing him, and took one or two turns up and 
 down the veranda. When he next spoke, his voice had re- 
 sumed its usual unemotional tones. There was no ring of 
 English cultivation, but a pleasant well-to-do, sure-of -your- 
 self, devil-may-care colonial inflexion in it. " You see," he 
 said thoughtfully, " the governor's had his nose to the grind- 
 stone the best part of his life. It's about time he thought of 
 taking a rest ; but while my mother and the gu-ls go the 
 pace, as they do, there's not much chance of his getting a 
 holiday. He told me this time I mustn't draw upon him 
 the same as I did last year, or he'd never be able to go on 
 paying his life-policy to the end." 
 
HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 245 
 
 Hubert smoked gravely in silence for a few moments. 
 Then he said between the puffs : 
 
 " I don't believe in counting your chickens before they're 
 hatched, but I wouldn't take a hundred thousand pounds 
 down in cash at this moment for my share in the new mine. 
 If I'm not very much mistaken, you won't want to draw on 
 your father, and he can double his life-policy and retire with 
 a fortune before two years are over." 
 
 Jack grunted, whether from satisfaction or as a sign of 
 incredulity it would be hard to say. 
 
 " First thing I'd do," he said after a pause, " when every- 
 thing was fixed, I'd take a trip home. A fellow doesn't feel 
 half a man, I tell you, until he's seen the world, and I 
 reckon you'd come too. If we could go together, and you 
 were to show me the ropes ! What a lark it would be — eh, 
 commander ? " 
 
 The foregoing appellation was a title Jack had hit upon 
 for his patron from the outset without having given, how- 
 ever, the subject any previous consideration. He could not 
 call Hubert "governor," wliich was a name sacred to his 
 own father. "Boss " was too familiar, and " sir " or " Mr. de 
 Merle " savoured of the schoolmaster or Mentor. At the 
 same time, as Jack was in the position of a subordinate, and 
 almost young enough to be his employer's son, he did not 
 like to address him by either of his names stripped of a pre- 
 fix, nor yet to address him upon all occasions without nam- 
 ing him at all. There was, moreover, a suggestion of some- 
 thing not to be trifled with in Hubert's manner of giving 
 his orders that made the title of commander peculiarly suit- 
 able to him, and once adopted. Jack continued to employ it 
 almost unconsciously. 
 
 In answer to the proposal that he should accompany Mr. 
 Wilton to Europe, if things turned out as might be expected, 
 Hubert shook his head. The words, however, were respon- 
 sible for inducing a state of mind that Jack was far from 
 divining ; though, even had he divined, he would have been 
 equally far from comprehending it. In his secret heart Mr. 
 de Merle was gratified that his companionship should be 
 desired by his unsophisticated "jackaroo,'' for -the wish 
 
246 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 could not possibly be prompted by any other motive than 
 the original and humorous one of a personal sympathy and 
 liking for him. Had he been a woman, the case might have 
 worn another aspect, for then Jack might have desired to 
 have him as a foil, though even so, a woman with Jack's 
 looks would have been handsome enough to hold her own 
 without the aid of any such grotesque contrast. A hundred 
 conflicting thoughts coxu'sed through Hubert's brain as he 
 pondered over the questions that Jack's words seemed to 
 open up. Supposing he could bring himself to get a kind of 
 flavour at second-hand out of Jack's experiences and adven- 
 tures, or even to take a vicarious enjoyment in his conquests 
 and bonnes fortunes during their travels ? Might not such 
 a course be preferable to the one he had hitherto forced 
 himself to follow, of crushing down every germ of senti- 
 ment and emotion in himself ? If he should, indeed, make 
 up his mind to accompany this young Adonis on his Euro- 
 pean travels, he must prepare to accept one of two alterna- 
 tives. Either he must be devoured by a burning jealousy 
 of him, and must endure purgatorial tortures every time a 
 woman's glance should wander with pitying repulsion from 
 Jack's face to his own, or he must force himself once for all 
 to seek his own personal and individual satisfaction in 
 Jack's triimiphs. The proverb says, "Half a loaf is better 
 than no bread ; " but this seemed hardly to fit the case, for 
 Hubert would not have even a crumb of Jack's loaf to his 
 share. On the contrary, the only appeasement he could 
 look for would be that the more he himself should starve 
 the more Jack would eat his fill. Hitherto the line already 
 quoted of "Some have meat and canna eat," had most fit- 
 tingly described Jack's position ; but Hubert was stire that 
 neither the appetite nor the meat would be wanting when 
 the young man came to realize the full meaning of travel- 
 ling " for his pleasure." But he could not review the situa- 
 tion in his own mind as calmly as he would have wished. 
 The hardest reflection was the consciousness that in so far 
 as he himself was concerned a whole volcano full of mis- 
 spent enthusiasm and passion lay hidden beneath his un- 
 couth and repellant exterior. Why was he made so ? Why 
 
HUBERT'S PROPHECY. 247 
 
 had Nature singled him out as her special butt and victim ? 
 Why had she given him a temperament that rendered his 
 misshapen body so sorry a joke ? Why had she caused his 
 pulses to beat more quickly, his blood to flow more rapidly 
 than other men's ? He felt as though a beaker of the warm 
 South had been poured into his veins to ferment and turn 
 to vinegar. Had he not fought against the wild impulses 
 that surged up within him ? When he condemned himself 
 to the life of a recluse in the Australian Bush, it was not, as 
 some said, to increase his store of wealth, or, as others 
 hinted, because he bore a branded name. The thing that 
 had driven him into the wilderness was the conflict between 
 his own dreams and the horrible reality. Nothing could 
 alleviate the bitterness of that, though he would have rushed 
 into the most reckless of dissipations to purchase an hour of 
 forgetfulness. If he could have found relief in the wildest 
 orgies, such orgies as laid the Roman Empire in the dust, he 
 would not have hesitated to take part in them. But here 
 again Nature had interposed with a diabolical refinement of 
 cruelty. He could not drown his trouble in debauch. It 
 would have been not only indifl'erent, but hateful to him. 
 He must have all or nothing — a grand passion or nothing 
 at all — his ideal made incarnate, or the crushing out of the 
 ideal altogether. But where was the woman who would 
 stoop to him, or who would dream of looking for the prince's 
 soul through the life-long disguise of the beast ? Away 
 with such pitiful illusions ! Let him flee to the uttermost 
 limits of the earth. He would not even assume the mask of 
 a woman-hater, lest he should draw down added ridicule 
 upon his person. He would content himself with ignoring 
 the existence of one-half of the human creation entirely. 
 And upon this principle he acted, or tried to act throughout 
 his Australian career. The only representative of the fair 
 sex who had ever been seen at Tarragunyah was the bigger 
 if not the better half of Alexander, the stockman, a bony, 
 weather-beaten Scotchwoman with about as much sugges- 
 tion of feminine graces as a jointed Dutch doll. . . . But 
 now St. Anthony was to be dragged from his cave, and 
 Hubert was to be forced away from Tarragunyah. 
 
2J:8 ^'OT COUKTING THE COST. 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 MA3IY SEES THE OWITER OF THE RUBY. 
 
 It -was not at the Continental, after all, that Mamy was 
 introduced to the splendours of a table d'hote in a first-class 
 Paris hotel. Mrs. Warden had declared herself in favour of 
 the Louvre, which had not yet been swallowed up in the 
 mighty Magazin du Louvre, and thither the party repaired 
 after a day full of entrancing delights to at least one among 
 its members, ilamy was intoxicated by the atmosphere of 
 luxury into which she had been plunged since the morning. 
 The sight of the magnificent equipages that thronged the 
 tree-lined Champs Elysees on their way to the Bois, and an 
 occasional glimpse of some especially gracious and lovely 
 lady inside (despite her knowledge of the works of Balzac 
 and Dumas Fils, our little girl was not versed enough in 
 the ways of the world to recognise the queens of the demi- 
 monde when she saw them), were still in her mind as 
 she took her seat between Lucy and her brother at a 
 side-table in the splendid dining-room of the hotel She 
 was not already so satiated with magnificence as to be 
 indifferent to the new phase of it she now beheld. A 
 Boulevard St. Michel Duval was the grandest type of 
 restaurant Mamy had hitherto seen ; and at the Louvre the 
 gorgeous painted ceiling, the heavy gilding of the cornices", 
 the glow of coloxu- represented by the pictures on the walls 
 — real suggestions of real old masters, freshly painted and 
 varnished — appeared to her a combination of palatial pomp 
 and splendour that surpassed all her imaginings. It was 
 pleasant to experience for once how kings and queens fared 
 in their daily lives, for assuredly kings and queens could 
 not sit down to table amid grander surroundings than these. 
 A little sun-burned, owing to the lack of the parasol, her 
 eyes shining with the reflection of all they absorbed and 
 were still absorbing, Mamy leant back in her chair, and 
 looked up at the ceiling with naive awe and wonderment. 
 In this posture she looked so like a seraph let loose for a 
 holiday that she attracted the notice of two travellers, who, 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OP THE RUBY. 249 
 
 it is needless to say, were of the male sex, and who were 
 likewise seated at a little table in the vicinity of the one 
 selected by Mrs. "Warden. 
 
 The travellers in question did not appear to find the 
 same charm as Mamy did in detailing the decorations of the 
 dining-room, which, doubtless, conveyed no other impres- 
 sion to their minds than that of furnishing a suitable back- 
 ground to a tolerable repast. Mamy's personality attracted 
 them more than the goddesses who figured in the pseudo 
 " old masters " on the walls ; and, finally, the younger of 
 the two, a man with close-clipped yellow hair and pleasant 
 blue eyes, remarked approvingly : 
 
 " What a jolly little girl over there staring up at the 
 ceiling ! She's bound to be English or American, though 
 she might be Australian, too ; for I could take my oath I've 
 seen that other girl next to her somewhere — the one with 
 the pale cheeks, I mean. I've seen her on some lawn in 
 Australia — at a cup-meeting or a tennis-meeting, I don't 
 know which. What a queer thing memory is ! If I'd seen 
 her at a ball, I dare say I shouldn't have known her again." 
 
 The person addressed looked in the direction indicated 
 by the speaker, but immediately turned away his head. He 
 had encountered a glance of pained and startled bewilder- 
 ment that did not encourage further investigation. The 
 personality of this individual was not, indeed, of a kind to 
 be overlooked, if only for the painful reason that he was 
 not as other men. Apart, however, from the prominence of 
 his deformity, which seemed to suggest the presence of a 
 yoke like that of a beast of burden concealed under his coat, 
 there was something in the face that immediately impressed 
 itself upon the imagination. There are faces that have this 
 peculiar power ; we hardly know why, though perhaps when 
 the secrets of hypnotism and magnetism are better under- 
 stood, the explanation may be found in the simple fact that 
 their owners have compelling wills. Set upon an ordinary 
 man's shoulders, a certain rugged attractiveness might have 
 been found in the head ; in the rough-hewn features and 
 dark eyes full of a smouldering fire— eyes that could not by 
 any possibility belong to a native of Northern climes, or to 
 
250 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 one of phlegmatic Teutonic origin. Mamy had turned away 
 after an involuntary glance of half-terrified curiosity at 
 the strange figure. She thought that Orson, in the story of 
 Valentine and Orson, might perhaps have resembled him, 
 or, for the matter of that, the devil in "Paradise Lost." 
 
 The young man opposite to him was as great a contrast 
 as a spring sunrise to a midnight storm. Jack Wilton had 
 gained his end, and congratulated himself both secretly and 
 openly upon being " shown the ropes " by such an authority 
 as his friend and "boss," the commander. His respect for 
 Hubert was more than ever increased by perceiving that he 
 spoke French like a native. 
 
 " I'll be hanged if the French you and the rest of 'em 
 talk over here is the same we learned at the grammar- 
 school ! " he said naively one day. " I was top of the French 
 class, too ; but. Lord ! it's no particle of use to me in France." 
 
 At the Louvre it was Hubert who arranged the menu, 
 and gave the orders to the waiter, handing, however, the 
 wine-card to his friend to make such choice as might please 
 him. 
 
 " Lafltte and Mumm," Jack said diffidently, after a long 
 pondering of the names, many of which were unknown to 
 him ; " but if you would rather have any other sort " 
 
 " Lafltte and Mumm are good enough for me," Hubert 
 said shortly, as he signed to the waiter, and pointed to the 
 names selected. 
 
 " I don't see any Australian wines on their list," Mr. Wil- 
 ton said, between the intervals of radish-crunching and 
 olive-munching. " I always believed they thought such a 
 lot of our wines in France, judging by the reports of the ex- 
 perts in the Australian papers. 
 
 Hubert shrugged his distorted shoulders. It was the only 
 answer he vouchsafed, and Jack continued plaintively : 
 
 " You can't believe a word they say in the papers." Then, 
 after a pause, suddenly changing his tone : " What a devil- 
 ish lucky thing our mining venture was, when one comes to 
 think of it ! Who would have thought, two years ago, that 
 we should be swelling it here in Paris in this way ? To 
 think of the fortunes that were lying under the stones of 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OF THE RUBY. 251 
 
 Tarrag^unyali all the time we were bursting ourselves riding 
 after those blessed cattle ! Memory is a dashed queer thing, 
 anyhow," he continued reflectively, reverting once more to 
 the subject of the Australian appearance of the people seated 
 at the neighbouring table. " I can't for the life of me tell 
 where I've seen that girl before ; but I'll swear I've seen her 
 somewhere. Doesn't she remind you of anybody, com- 
 mander ? " 
 
 " I can't say she does," replied Hubert, after he had taken a 
 second and more deliberately critical glance at the occupants 
 of Mrs. Warden's table ; " but the little girl next to her puts 
 me in mind somiehow of my youthful days. She's not un- 
 like a Greuze." 
 
 Jack was not sure whether a Greuze was a person or an 
 animal, and thought it wise to bring the conversation back 
 to the Australian wine topic, in which he was more sure of 
 his ground. For the next half -hour, therefore, Albury wines, 
 sugar-planting, Chinese labour. Protectionist policy, and the 
 prospects of the Northern Territory, formed fertile and con- 
 genial themes of discussion. In the meantime the potage 
 financier, croustades and tourne dos Rossini, and all the 
 endless other pompously and fantastically-named delicacies 
 that comprised the Louvre menu, were duly brought and 
 disposed of. 
 
 At the neighbouring table, the talk, though continuous, 
 had been of a fragmentary and disjointed description. An 
 occasional burst of silvery laughter, childishly joyous and 
 unrestrained, from the little girl with the seraph head, had 
 more than once caused people to turn round in the direction 
 whence it emanated. 
 
 It is true that there was nothing to warrant such ex- 
 travagant mirth, and Mrs. Warden did not join in her chil- 
 dren's laughter. She was discussing Bon Marche mantles 
 with the Miss McCready who trimmed her own bomiets ; 
 and if she thought of the young people at ail, it was as a 
 parcel of children together. To suppose that Sydney was 
 actually pasdng court to his little playmate under cover of 
 their noisy merriment was a thing she would never have 
 imagined ; yet in the midst of all her mirth Mamy was per- 
 17 
 
252 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 fectly aware that Sydney loved her and desired her. Per- 
 haps the feeling was in a measure responsible for her un- 
 reasoning laughter, in which there might have been detected 
 a hint of something unstrung and hysterical. The contrast 
 between her own home surroundings and those in which 
 she found her friends, the longing to possess some of the 
 same enjojrments and luxuries as they, without having 
 Sydney attached to them, real liking and pity for Sydney 
 himself, and a loyal aversion to allow him to woo her with 
 no warmer feeling for him in her heart — all these warring 
 emotions required an outlet of some kind. If Mamy had 
 not laughed, she must have cried. A few more years added 
 to her life, and she would probably have acted very differ- 
 ently. It is the first and early ideal of love that holds so 
 lofty a sway, and which it is so hard to dislodge — harder, in- 
 deed, than a flesh and blood lover ; for it is a creation of the 
 immaterial part of our natures, and we have put into it all 
 that seems to render our individual existences worthy of 
 being projected into a hereafter. Tet, unconsciously to 
 herself, Mamy was being brought nearer to Sydney step by 
 step through the sheer tenacity of his purpose. Do not 
 mathematicians describe two lines that continue to approach 
 each other through infinite space without ever actually 
 meeting ? But human hearts cannot act like these mathe- 
 matical lines. In Hobart Mamy had been fain to promise 
 Sydney that she would engage herself to no other man for a 
 whole year. Two-thirds of the year had already slipped 
 away. No sign of a lover had appeared on the horizon, and 
 Mamy had willingly renewed her promise to Sydney that 
 she would pledge herself to him conditionally for yet an- 
 other twelvemonth. Sydney had little doubt that at the 
 end of this second year his patience would be finally re- 
 warded. He was not of those whose fancy " lightly turns 
 to thoughts of love," and he was sure of knowing his own 
 mind. Physiologists, indeed, may maintain that the love 
 of a man for a maid is not called forth by the maid herself, 
 but only by his own spring-time mood made incarnate in 
 her. Lovers of the Sydney Warden type are a refutation 
 of this purely physiological theory of love. The young 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OP THE RUBY. 253 
 
 man, indeed, had no eyes for any woman save his child- 
 hood's sweetheart, and the graces and charms of other 
 maidens were powerless to fire his imagination. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, he had no opportunity of judging, for he never be- 
 stowed any attention upon them. Even upon the homeward 
 voyage, during the long trip across the Indian Ocean, when 
 board-ship becomes a very hot-bed of flirtations, and the 
 passengers play at being in love as they watch the phos- 
 phorus fly through the foam over the vessel's sides on nights 
 of heat and darkness — even under such influences as these 
 Sydney had remained faithful to the one image he carried 
 in his heart. He would sit in the smoking-room with the 
 elderly card-players while the sound of moonlight dancing; 
 was heard on the deck. In the day he would carry his pipe 
 and book to the fo'c's'le, and curl himself up against the 
 bowsprit, far from the madding crowd on the hurricane 
 deck. He was uncouth in the society of ladies, and was 
 conscious of his defect. He did not know what subjects to 
 talk about that might interest them. The only woman with 
 whom he had ever felt entirely at his ease was Mamy, who 
 had introduced herself to his notice in the first instance by 
 aiming a potato at his head. How well he remembered her 
 Amazonian attitude on that occasion, with the flushed little 
 face, and straw-tangled hair, and childish arm uplifted in 
 the act of throwing ! Young as he had been at the time, he 
 had felt vaguely that the unconventionality of his first in- 
 troduction would facilitate his future relations with her. 
 Mamy was likewise the only girl in whose society he had 
 never felt himself hampered by any Irind of awkward self- 
 consciousness. It was his delight to picture her running or 
 riding by his side over the sheep-station he intended to pur- 
 chase in Victoria on his return. For Mamy was not only 
 his fancy in the passional sense : he felt towards her as 
 towards a sister, a mate and a boon companion as well. The 
 side of her character that could not rest satisfied with him 
 for a husband was closed to Sydney. Had he been capable 
 of understanding it, he might have found it easier to win her. 
 As Mrs. Warden's party prepared to leave the room, Mamy 
 cast a last lingering look around at its varied splendours, 
 
254 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 and in so doing her eyes swept over the table where Hubert 
 and his friend were seated. By this means she made the 
 discovery that the blue orbs of the latter were fixed intently 
 upon herself. Jack was so clearly detected in the act of 
 looking his fill, that he shifted his gaze with something of a 
 shame-faced consciousness, though not before Mamy's glance 
 had been involuntarily arrested by his own. He saw her 
 colour and turn her head away, and by looking in the mirror 
 he could follow her progress as she walked out of the room 
 with something of a vacant and wondering look in her eyes 
 that he felt himself responsible for bringing there. She 
 gazed no more at the glories of the epergne on the long cen- 
 tral table or the dusky glory of the goddesses on the walls. 
 She hardly knew herself whether it was from elation or vex- 
 ation that her heart beat as she descended the stairs by Syd- 
 ney's side and passed out into the white light of the Louvre 
 court. She only knew that the worshipful admiration she 
 had seen depicted in the pleasant, sunny, manly face would 
 stamp that face upon her memory for some time to come. 
 
 Poor little Mamy ! It was not to be expected that in this 
 great overflowing world of Paris she would ever see the face 
 again ; but even the fact that it had momentarily impressed 
 itself upon her fancy made her feel that it would be right for 
 her to fortify herself against Eila's pleadings as regarded 
 her attitude towards Sydney. Poor Sydney ! It was not his 
 fault if she could not bring herself to care about him in the 
 right way. Rather, it was the fault of her own perverse 
 temperament that placed all kinds of obstacles in the way. 
 Yet how could she consent to bind herself to him for ever- 
 more, when the first stranger she ran across, and the most 
 unlike him in appearance, was able to stimulate her imag- 
 ination as Sydney had never done merely by looking at 
 her ? 
 
 Mr. Wilton did not speak for a few moments after the 
 party of Australians had disappeared. Apparently he was 
 engrossed in finishing his cigarette and in looking over the 
 list of theatres in the Figaro. He made no further allusion 
 to the little girl whom his friend had compared to a Greuze, 
 but studied the paper while Hubert was settling the bill (for 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OP THE RUBY. 255 
 
 the functions that come under the head of " shepherding " 
 include those of paymaster). 
 
 " What shall we do with ourselves this evening ? " he said 
 at last with a half -yawn. 
 
 Hubert reflected for a moment. 
 
 "What's going on at the Fran^ais ? " he asked. 
 
 " The Fran^ais ! " repeated Jack interrogatively. 
 
 " The Fran^ais— the Theatre Fran^ais, man ! There's no 
 better acting in the world." 
 
 " Isn't there ? " said Mr. Wilton naively. He stroked his 
 blonde moustache with an embarrassed air. " You'll think 
 me a frightful Goth, I know," he added, with a shame-faced 
 laugh ; " but I'd rather knock about some of the music-halls 
 to-night. It's better fun. Where does Judic play ? And 
 there's a place the fellows used to tell me about— not Mabille 
 — the Folies—Folies— something— it was called." 
 
 " The Folies-Bergere," said Hubert, with a half -contemp- 
 tuous smile ; " but you could never put through a whole even- 
 ing there." 
 
 " Couldn't I ? Well, then " Mr. Wilton picked up 
 
 the neglected Figaro and applied himself once more to a 
 laborious study of its contents. The result of his inspection 
 was to make him exclaim an instant later in a gleeful voice : 
 " Here's a lark ! I never heard of such a thing in all my 
 born days ! Just listen to this, commander, only don't make 
 fun of my accent — ' Prix de Beaute ' " (he called it, however, 
 " Botay "). Thereupon he read the announcement referring 
 to the exhibition promised for that evening at the Folies- 
 Fantassin. " From what I can make out," he concluded, 
 "it's going to be a genuine beauty show — the real article, and 
 no deception. Let's go and have a look at it." 
 
 But Hubert's face showed little enthusiasm. 
 
 " Where is it ? " he asked, with an unmistakably discour- 
 aging intonation. 
 
 "Here, you'd better read it yourself," replied Mr. Wil- 
 ton, handing him the Figaro. " Of course, it may be all a 
 take in, there's no saying ; but there's a big sum offered, 
 anyhow." 
 
 Hubert made no further comment until he had cast his 
 
256 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 eye over the announcement without removing his cigar 
 from his lips. Then he held it in his fingers, and a smile of 
 half -pitying irony flitted across his face. 
 
 " Beauty and virtue, too ! " he said meaningly. " Thus 
 saith the Figaro ! A large order truly ! but I have no doubt 
 there will be at least as much of the one as of the other. I 
 don't remember any place called the Folies-Pantassin in 
 my day. It must be a kind of second-rate Eden, I imagine 
 — the very place in which to look for a first-class collec- 
 tion of Eosieres. You're not really going to be such a 
 fool as to go there, Jack ! It's all a hoax— take my word 
 for it" 
 
 " I don't care ; I want to go ! " said Mr. Wilton obsti- 
 nately ; " and what's more, I want you to come too : you 
 might give in this once, commander, and I'll go anywhere 
 you want the rest of the time. But I'd rather you came 
 with me to-night. I won't answer for the consequences if 
 you let me go alone, I tell you." 
 
 Hubert smiled a second time — a somewhat grim and bit- 
 ter smile. The beauty and virtue promised in the bill 
 formed a bait very appropriate to the kind of fish that 
 nibbled at it. Certainly five francs for the stalls and eight 
 francs for a closer inspection of these attractions on the 
 stage itself were not much out of the pockets of two silver- 
 kings ; but Hubert regarded them nevertheless as eight 
 francs thrown away. Not so his companion. There was 
 still much that was unsophisticated in Jack's nature : he 
 had spent the best part of his youth hitherto in the Bush, 
 and the feeling of the shearer who thirsts to knock down his 
 cheque in the nearest township was not unknown to him. 
 The feeling was strong upon him to-night, and so evident 
 was his hankering after the cafe-concert seductions that 
 Hubert said at last, in the tone in which one would hu- 
 mour a child out for a holiday: "Well, if nothing else 
 will content you ! Only don't say afterwards that I didn't 
 warn you." 
 
 " Oh, it's only for the fun of the thing ! " said the young 
 man deprecatingly ; he was beginning to feel a little 
 ashamed of his eagerness. " We needn't do more than just 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OP THE RUBY. 257 
 
 take a look in, you know, and then come away. I dare say 
 it's all humbug, as you say." 
 
 Hubert nodded, and the curiously matched pair left the 
 hotel and sauntered through the arcades of the Palais Royal 
 and thence up the comparatively deserted Eue de Richelieu 
 towards the Grands Boulevards, where they seated them- 
 selves in front of the Maison Dore and called for an ab- 
 sinthe. The air was becoming a little chilly for outdoor in- 
 action, but the Continental races, who will shudder at the 
 idea of sleeping with their bedroom windows open by a fin- 
 ger's breadth in the warmest weather, think nothing of 
 sitting up to all hours and almost in all seasons in the damp 
 night air. Therefore there were numberless people grouped 
 behind the small tables upon the pavement outside the cafe. 
 The crowd of pleasure seekers was streaming by with 
 faces illumined and bleached like a harlequin's by the strong 
 electric light. Mr. Wilton found great amusement in 
 watching them pass. Hubert sat back in the shade, with 
 his hump against the wall and his hat over his eyes, paying 
 little attention to Jack's comments. 
 
 Besides the theatre-goers and ordinary fldneurs, there 
 were the unmistakable family parties from across the Chan- 
 nel who came to a standstill before the brilliantly-illumi- 
 nated windows of all the chocolate shops and jewellers' ; then 
 there were the powdered and perfumed petites dames, who, 
 albeit most elegantly attired, were yet abroad with an eye 
 to business ; these appeared and reappeared at regular inter- 
 vals, like the circular processions that pass behind the scenes 
 in the theatre and then emerge again upon the stage ; there 
 were also specimens of the real genuine boulevardier, who 
 has an amazing knowledge of the world that lies between 
 the Madeleine and the Vaudeville, but is ignorant as a Hot- 
 tentot of all that lies beyond it. Jack's attention was quite 
 absorbed in watching these varied specimens of his kind 
 defile past him, though I will not answer for it that the eyes 
 of the little girl with the seraph head did not occasionally 
 look out from the smoke-wreaths that went curling up from 
 his second Havana. The pipe was discarded now. 
 
 As for Hubert, sitting with his hat over his eyes, his 
 
258 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 thoughts were busy in a past in "which Jack had no share. 
 To no one in the world had he spoken of the scenes in which 
 he had taken part in the Paris of the siege and the Com- 
 mune. Looking back upon that time now, he felt as though 
 he had lived two distinct lives, and possessed a distinct per- 
 sonality in each. In the first he had been young, and the 
 enthusiasm of youth for a lofty ideal might have animated 
 his soul had it not been for the oppressive consciousness of 
 his bodily affliction that haunted him. This it was that had 
 poisoned his youth and dried up all the founts of enthusiasm 
 in his natm-e. It had made a social and political rebel of 
 him. It had driven him to throw in his cause with whosoever 
 revolted against the established order of things. He had 
 hated the organized army, whence his pitiable deformity ex- 
 cluded him — hated the entire existing social edifice, wherein 
 there seemed no place or scope for one cursed like himself. 
 Under the influence of this hatred he had taken part and lot 
 with the Commune. He had not said to himself, however, 
 in so many words, "I hate m.y fellow-creatures who are 
 better off than myself, and I will revenge my mischance — 
 my own hard lot in life — upon them ! " On the contrary, he 
 had masked his real motives even to himself, and said (be- 
 lieving that he was sincere in saying so), " I love my fellow- 
 creatures who are worse off than myself. I will help them 
 to equalize lots by the exercise of justifiable violence. A has 
 les bourgeois ! and Place au soleil for the oppressed ! " 
 
 The Commune, however, had been stamped out by the 
 hoofs of MacMahon's chargers, and Hubert was obliged to 
 own that even if his impulses had been pure and unalloyed 
 his action had been unwise and blamable. From the Spen- 
 cerian and utilitarian standpoint, which judges by results 
 alone, it was without a plea, for it had ended in ruin and 
 defeat. It was true that when he had thrown himself so 
 passionately into the cause he had not foreseen the bloody 
 issue of the experiment. He had fought for a change for 
 the same reason as his feUow-combatants — to wit, that he 
 was miserable and discontented. Only whereas their ills 
 were remediable, his was incurable. An unexpected inher- 
 itance would have solved the question for the majority of 
 
MAMY SEES THE OWNER OP THE RUBY. 259 
 
 his colleagues, while for himself Hubert had money and to 
 spare. 
 
 He had paid dearly for the incorporation of his own per- 
 sonal embitterment with the holy cause of freedom. The 
 accusation that he had been taken red-handed on the dread- 
 ful day of massacre and carnage that closed the Commune 
 administration had sufficed for his instant conviction. It 
 was not a time at which solitary cases could be very care- 
 fully investigated, and perhaps he had been lucky after all 
 to escape being shot down in the streets, as had been the 
 fate of many an innocent man, woman, and child, during 
 that awful time. He had been sent to New Caledonia, and 
 upon leaving it had assumed another name that very much 
 resembled his own. His own was identified with failure 
 and disgrace, for though patriate may be a better-sounding 
 title than deporte, it was still as a dSportS that he figured on 
 the prison-lists of Noumea, and he who had been ready — 
 ostensibly — to shed his blood for the liberty of his fellow- 
 creatures, had been now deprived by the law of his own. 
 When the amnesty came he did not rush back, like his fel- 
 low-communists, to the m&re patrie. England was at least 
 as bound up with his early associations as France, and his 
 revolutionary ardour, that had an egoistic foundation, had 
 had time to cool. Putting himself and his affliction out of 
 the question, he was not better satisfied with the conditions 
 under which human societies are organized than before ; but 
 the futility of seeking to transform them by violent means 
 in one generation had been brought home to him. 
 
 His mother was dead. He believed he had had some 
 share in breaking her heart, and this to a man with French 
 blood in his veins is one of the most appalling reflections 
 that can well be imagined. The actual organization of the 
 Republic, with the mild Grevy at its head, he looked upon 
 as a mere compromise; but what was human life, or, in- 
 deed, life altogether, but a compromise ? Instead of play- 
 ing the part of a disturbing element, and kicking against 
 the pricks, he would go into the desert and hide there. 
 His sister had entered the Order of Carmelites, and was to 
 all intents and purposes dead to him and to the world. He 
 
260 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 gathered together such moneys as he could procure by the 
 sale through an agent of his small property in France, and 
 took up land on the New South Wales border of Queens- 
 land. Fortune had not smiled upon him at first, and what 
 with droughts and bad seasons, Tarragunyah station ap- 
 peared an unlucky investment, until the afore-described 
 silver discovery gave to things quite another aspect. 
 
 Hubert Merrilies' name had been little heard of before 
 this great event which made Tarragunyah a household 
 word in Australia. The buyers of Tarragunyah wool, or of 
 cattle with the Tarragunyah brand, hardly knew of the ex- 
 istence of the misanthropic hunchback who directed opera- 
 tions in the background. Even the vague rumours of his 
 enforced association with New Caledonia interested nobody 
 after a time. He had known Jack's father professionally 
 through an illness that had detained him three months in 
 a Sydney hotel soon after his arrival in Australia, and bad 
 made an exception in the lad's favour to his rule of allow- 
 ing no gentleman-loafer, or gentleman in any other capa- 
 city, to show his face at Tarragunyah. Jack showed his 
 appreciation of the favour by proving himself an energetic 
 and useful aid, and an unfailingly cheerful companion. 
 Hubert was an oracle in the lad's eyes. A certain sideway 
 shrug of his protruding shoulder had an almost magical 
 effect in carrying instant conviction or refutation to Jack's 
 ruind. Even this evening Mr. Wilton had been almost 
 ■' choked off," as he would have called it himself, by Hu- 
 bert's attitude with regard to the Folies-Fantassin exhibi- 
 tion. He had held his ground, nevertheless, for the matter 
 was one which really aroused his curiosity. He had seen 
 cattle and sheep shows by the score ; he had heard of cat- 
 shows and baby-shows; but an exhibition of professional 
 beauties, whose attractions were to be reviewed and ap- 
 praised in cold blood, was a decided novelty. It would be 
 something new to tell the fellows about out in Australia, 
 and now that it was settled there could be no motive for 
 going back upon it. 
 
 Thus argued Jack with himself as, somewhere about ten 
 o'clock that evening, he left the cafe and took his seat by 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 261 
 
 Hubert's side in a passing carriage hailed upon the boule- 
 vard. The streets that had seemed so steep and tortuous to 
 Eila, making her way up them with trembling knees and a 
 failing heart, were quickly traversed in a cab. Jack was 
 still secretly nursing the opinion that this was the kind of 
 spree he liked as he followed Hubert down the narrow en- 
 trance to the turnstile where the tickets were sold. 
 
 "Take one for the stage," he whispered, as he waited an 
 instant by Hubert's side while the latter was paying for the 
 places, " then I can go up and sUng 'em some parley- voo, 
 you know." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 eila's ordeal. 
 
 Upon entering the theatre, Hubert perceived that his pre- 
 diction that the Folies-Fantassin would prove to be a kind 
 of second-class Eden was verified. Besides the pit and stalls, 
 there was but one gallery or dress-circle, which widened out 
 in the rear into a carpeted space where the spectators sat as 
 in a cafe before small tables, at which they might drink and 
 smoke at their ease. The entire theatre would not have con- 
 tained more than a thousand people. There were private 
 boxes under the gallery, of which the occupant was gener- 
 ally a lady, either alone or accompanied by a duenna. In 
 either case she was sure to be dressed in the height of the 
 reigning fashion, and to wear also a fashion-book complex- 
 ion. The decorations of the Folies-Fantassin were Moorish, 
 and they might have been reproached with an exaggeration 
 of local colour in respect of their want of cleanliness. Now, 
 the shade that gathers upon real mouch-arabia, upon ala- 
 baster or enamel, in the genuine East, is one thing, and 
 that which disfigures painted imitations of the same is an- 
 other. A little less local colour in this respect would have 
 greatly improved the appearance of the Folies-Fantassin, 
 which, to do it justice, was not otherwise inartistically ar- 
 ranged and devised. 
 
262 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 There was an acrobatic performance going on as Hubert 
 and his friend entered. A female trapezist was hanging by 
 her two pink-silk-encased legs to a horizonal bar, swinging 
 from the roof of the stage. With her head downwards and her 
 muscular arms extended in the same direction, she was hold- 
 ing another female acrobat by the hands, swinging her slowly 
 backwards and forwards like a pendulum in the void. There 
 was no net, and the problem that thrilled the spectators all 
 down their backs, giving them their full money's worth of 
 " sensation, " was ho w the held-up woman was to escape break- 
 ing her neck. To get into her perilous position had been com- 
 paratively easy, but to get out of it was another matter. 
 After several long slow swings backwards and forwards, 
 she solved the problem by raising herself at the cost of an 
 effort that caused the muscles in her arms to rise like hil- 
 locks, throwing her legs meanwhile around the waist of the 
 trapezist who was holding her. The strain to which the 
 former was subjected was plainly and painfully written to 
 the gaze of those below in her pink-silk calves, and more 
 than one feminine spectator turned away her head with an 
 involuntary " Misericorde ! " as the interlocked bodies of the 
 trapezists oscillated in the void. 
 
 " By George ! " exclaimed Mr. Wilton, " they're plucked 
 uns, those two, and no mistake ! " For the next few mo- 
 ments he forgot all about the purpose for which he had 
 come, in the interest of watching the trapezists, who, by way 
 of what is vulgarly termed "piling up the agony," went 
 through two or three elaborately-feigned, blood-curdling es- 
 capes, before they swung themselves into the comparatively 
 secure position of a seat upon the horizontal bar. A cafe 
 concert-song followed next, sung, or rather declaimed, by an 
 imitator of Paulus, with a clean-shaved face and a marvel- 
 lously mobile mouth that conveyed volumes of meaning in 
 its faintest twist. To translate the words to Mr. Wilton's 
 satisfaction was not an easy task, for they were made up of 
 a kind of argot that had not been in vogue in Hubert's time. 
 After this song had been encored, and the audience had 
 clamoured for "Le voila! Nicholas! Ah! ah! ah!" the 
 curtain fell, and Jack amused himself by endeavouring to 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 263 
 
 decipher the meaning of the various advertisements that cov- 
 ered it. He was laboriously spelling out the words beneath 
 the etfigy of a woman in a cap, holding a carefully stiffened 
 infant in her arms, when the curtain was drawn up a second 
 time, and the audience beheld ten seats arranged in a half- 
 moon, fronting the stage, whereon ten ladies were en- 
 sconced, each in a costume of a more or less fancy descrip- 
 tion. At the same moment the orchestra struck up the 
 waltz from " Faust," and a Bengal light being adroitly 
 caused to flare up behind the stage, the young women were 
 bathed in a rose-coloured atmosphere that greatly enhanced 
 their charms. 
 
 " What a lark ! " Jack Wilton said again. He had 
 screwed the opera-glass he had hired at the door to the re- 
 quired focus, and was sweeping it carefully along the range 
 of human exhibits, as he was accustomed to do when fol- 
 lowing the horses he had backed in a race. " I guess you 
 were about right though, commander," he added in disap- 
 pointed tones. " I can't spot more than one or two good- 
 looking girls in the lot ! " 
 
 " There is only one," said Hubert indifferently. 
 
 He made use of no opera-glass, having eyes that for accu- 
 racy and sweep of vision could almost have vied with those 
 of the black-fellows on his station of Tarragunyah, but kept 
 his gaze fixed upon the central figure of the group, whom 
 he had immediately singled out from the fact that it seemed 
 to bear an entirely distinct personality of its own. 
 
 The competing beauties had been arranged in crescent 
 order by Monsieur Masse himself. This second-rate manager 
 of a second-rate music-hall had dreamed in his youthful 
 days of leaping into fame by painting a fifty -foot square 
 canvas for the Salon, portraying Jezebel's doom. The jury, 
 however, had refused to be impressed by Jezebel's " defenes- 
 tration," and Monsieur Masse had turned actor in disgust. 
 ' He retained, however, a certain experience in the combining 
 of colours, and had himself designed the costumes for the 
 fair candidates, as well as the particular arrangement of 
 hair, either real or false, that was to accompany these. He 
 had decided at a glance who was fitted to assume the role of 
 
264: NOT COUNTINa THE COST. 
 
 a Sultana, and who might pass muster as Salammbo. Over 
 Eila's costume he had pondered longer than the others, 
 being perplexed, not so much upon the score of what would 
 suit her, as of what would suit her best. His imagination 
 had run riot for a while among Cleopatras, Byzantine 
 virgins, and Venuses ; but finally he had decided in favour 
 of the disguise in which she appeared to Hubert's eyes to- 
 night. She had made no protest on the score of its appro- 
 priateness ; had it been a shirt of Nessus instead of a leopard- 
 skin, it would have been all one to her. Her resolution once 
 taken, she had made up her mind to accept all the conse- 
 quences it might entail. Thus it was in the special dress de- 
 vised for her by Monsieur Masse that she was on view this 
 evening behind the footlights, like '' poor Lorraine-Loree," 
 for all the world to see. Dress is, perhaps, too elaborate a 
 term to be applied to her attire, which was none other than 
 that of a mythological Bacchante, as interpreted by the 
 canons of art that ruled at the Folies-Fantassin. An imita- 
 tion leopard-skin, with properly jagged edges, though ex- 
 quisitely supple in texture, was girded round her body to 
 below the knee, leaving disclosed, as in the dress of Mignon 
 at the opera, ostensibly bare feet, modelled like those of a 
 Greek statue. The neck and the whole of one polished arm 
 and shoulder were bared in their marble whiteness. A mass 
 of half -curling, half -waving dark hair, streaked with warm 
 gleams of gold, streamed over her back and hips. The head 
 was crowned with red-splashed vine-leaves that formed a 
 narrow circlet round the temples, while a pendent tendril 
 mingled its tiny sprouts with the coils of loosened hair. In 
 her right hand she held an antique cup half filled with a 
 red liquid, which she had been instructed to hold aloft in- 
 vitingly at a specified bar of the waltz from " Faust." Faith- 
 ful to tradition as her pose and her attire might appear, 
 Eila's expression was powerless to render the true Bacchante 
 suggestion. Her look was rather that of a person whose 
 mind has soared to some far-away region, and is no longer 
 in touch with its material surroundings. 
 
 We all know what it is, when thinking deeply upon some 
 abstract subject, to find that our eyes are fixed upon vacancy. 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 265 
 
 The gaze of a person looking at nothing, or of one looking 
 inwardly rather than outwardly, seems to remove him far 
 from those about him ; and so entirely was this impression 
 conveyed by Eila's eyes to-night, that all the efforts of the 
 spectators to intercept her glance seemed to be in vain. The 
 colour in her cheeks, despite the tinge of rouge that had 
 been applied to them, was but faint ; yet the line of her lips 
 was a vivid crimson. It was not long before the Fatimas, 
 Sultanas, Gitanas, and other cigar-box beauties to the right 
 and left of her, were forgotten. After a very few minutes, 
 all eyes and all glasses were directed towards the beautiful 
 Bacchante sitting steadfast on her simulated rock in the 
 centre of the stage. Her expression puzzled and disconcerted 
 the audience. " C'est une pose ! " Hubert heard a man next 
 to him say. But was it a pose, or was she acting uncon- 
 sciously in a kind of hypnotic trance ? He fixed his eyes 
 upon her with a searching look — such a look as had enabled 
 him, in times gone by, to distinguish a crouching native 
 from a charred tree-stump in the far north of Australia 
 (surely one of the hardest feats that eyes of white man ever 
 accomplished) ; but no sign of a pose could he detect. The 
 red lips were compressed as though they held a secret that 
 none might learn — a secret too distressful to be told ; the 
 far-away look, if it were simulated, was yet such a look as a 
 painter might have chosen for a Joan of Arc rather than for 
 a music-hall cabotine. The look that a soldier led forth to 
 be shot might wear when the ring of muskets closes round 
 him was what it most suggested to Hubert's mind — a soldier 
 who had made up his mind, Heaven knew at what cost, to 
 die bravely without allowing his eyes to be bandaged, yet 
 could not bring himself to direct them towards the instru- 
 ments of torture and death that were levelled at him. The ex- 
 pressions of the remaining women were all marked by a cer- 
 tain family resemblance. Whether simply brazen, or wear- 
 ing a feigned coyness, they were alike stamped with the same 
 brand. Those who had good teeth assumed a mirthless smile. 
 After some ten minutes had elapsed, the holders of red 
 tickets am^ong the spectators were allowed to mount upon the 
 stage, which was speedily filled to overflowing. 
 
266 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Like the fair and legendary Eve when she first perceived 
 that she was without raiment in the Garden of Eden, so felt 
 Eila in her Bacchante costume in the midst of the staring 
 crowd. The glare of the gas, the heat of the footlights, the 
 atmosphere reeking with cigar-smoke and patchouli, her 
 own overwhelming emotion and fear, perhaps, too, the fact 
 that a diet of indiarubber bread and much diluted bone soup 
 does not conduce to physical strength — all these causes com- 
 bined were beginning to produce their effect. A curious diz- 
 ziness was creeping over her, a sense of drowsy torpor she 
 had never felt before. The people and the lights in front 
 of her grew blurred and indistinct ; the red points of the 
 cigars seemed to trace fiery circles upon a dark background ; 
 her head bent forward, lower and lower, while her cheeks 
 grew whiter and whiter. The last thing she was conscious 
 of was that her face seemed to have grown suddenly cold ; 
 an instant later everything around her was dark. Sight and 
 hearing were alike gone. She had swooned away into un- 
 reachable, infinite night. 
 
 Whence she came back a few minutes afterwards, when 
 her eyes again took cognizance of their earthly surround- 
 ings, she never knew. She could not even think of it with- 
 out a shudder, for it seemed to her as though she had re- 
 turned from never-ending blank space, and that she had 
 been lost for a time in a black and limitless void. The feel- 
 ing was one to be felt rather than described. Gradually, 
 however, the perception of the tangible objects around her 
 returned. She found herself lying back upon a bench with a 
 cushion under her head. Her forehead and temples were wet, 
 and there was a strong odour of eau-de-Cologne and brandy 
 in the air. Someone standing by her side, who hardly 
 seemed like a real personage at first, but rather like a con- 
 tinuation of her dream, was trying to keep back the crowd 
 that pressed around her. 
 
 " II lui f aut de I'air ! " she heard him say in imperative 
 tones. " C'est surtout de I'air qu'il lui faut ! " 
 
 Next he addressed himself to a fair-moustached youth, 
 standing tall and shy by his side, and this time he spoke in 
 English. 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 267 
 
 " Keep them off if you can," he said ; " these brutes are 
 stifling her amongst them." 
 
 The sound of the English voice acted like a charm upon 
 the prostrate Bacchante. She made an effort to raise herself 
 from her recumbent position, while a warm flush of shame 
 mounted to her temples. Hubert saw the attempt, and im- 
 mediately came to her assistance. As she raised herself to 
 her feet with the aid of his outstretched hands, she essayed 
 to thank him. 
 
 " Oh, you are English ! " she said eagerly, in a voice that 
 trembled, in spite of all her efforts to command it. " I heard 
 you speaking just now. Oh, do help me ! I want so to get 
 away from this place ! I am afraid I did a very foolish thing 
 in coming. It was only to earn a little money for them at 
 home, indeed, and I thought it would be a kind of tableau 
 vivant — nothing more — and that I might come away directly 
 the curtain fell." 
 
 She was talking rapidly, almost incoherently. The horror 
 of anybody supposing that she had come there with another 
 motive than the real one was more than she could endure. 
 What would Reginald say if he could see her now ? In- 
 stinctively she covered her face with her hands and sobbed. 
 
 Hubert answered her gravely, but not unkindly. 
 
 " Don't distress yourself. You can leave when you like. 
 Are you "—he hesitated—" are you quite alone ? " 
 
 "Yes, quite. They don't know where I am at home. 
 They haven't the least idea, and I would not have them know 
 for anything. Oh, please, do you think I might get away 
 now ? " 
 
 She looked up at him imploringly. It was, perhaps, the 
 first time in his life that Hubert de Merle had been appealed 
 to thus by a woman for help and protection. Women as a 
 rule shrank away from him. Even the most considerate 
 tortured him unconsciously by the efforts they made not to 
 seem aware of his deformity. He did not know to what an 
 extent his own morbid susceptibility was responsible for 
 their attitude, nor how it reacted upon all those with whom 
 he came into contact, rendering it impossible for them to 
 feel at ease with him. However this might be, to play the 
 18 
 
268 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 part of a rescuing knight to a beautiful damsel in distress 
 was a thing undreamed of in his experience. He was reas- 
 sured at the same time by feeling that the Bacchante who 
 sought his assistance really paid no heed to his appearance. 
 She was evidently prepared to look upon him in the light of 
 a deliverer, and as such she gave no thought to his " ques- 
 tionable shape." These reflections, which passed with light- 
 ning speed through Hubert's brain, gave him such unwonted 
 assurance that he exclaimed cordially : 
 
 " Get away ? Of course you can ! Who has any right 
 to stop you ? "Will you take my arm through the crowd and 
 let me see you safely out ? " 
 
 Eila jumped at the offer, metaphorically speaking, for, in 
 point of fact, her knees were trembling from fatigue and 
 agitation ; but she could not make her escape in the Bac- 
 chante disguise, with no other head-covering than a wreath 
 of artificial vine-leaves. 
 
 " I must leave my costume here," she explained, " it is 
 not my own ; and my other things are in a room behind the 
 scenes." 
 
 Hubert ofi'ered to conduct her to the dressing-room, and 
 wait for her while she put on her every-day attire. Their 
 conversation had lasted but a few seconds. The crowd that 
 pressed around them, without gathering its purport, was only 
 aware that an understanding had been come to between the 
 beautiful Bacchante and the deformed hunchback. Already 
 an audible whisper of "La Belle et la Bete," accompanied by 
 a cynical laugh, had reached Eila's ears, and made her heart 
 sink for her companion. 
 
 But Hubert was quite unheeding. He turned to the fair- 
 moustached youth, who had remained by his side, silently 
 watching the interview with a countenance in which pity, 
 admiration, bewilderment, and doubt were all naively ex- 
 pressed, and said imperiously : 
 
 " Call a cab, will you, Wilton, and have it waiting out- 
 side when I bring this lady out." 
 
 Jack disappeared in an instant. But it was one thing to 
 order a cab, and another to reach it. Monsieur Masse, the 
 director, incited by the holders of the red tickets, who had 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 
 
 269 
 
 paid their money for the express purpose of forming a closer 
 acquaintanceship with the candidates for the prize of beauty 
 on exhibition at the Folies-Fantassin, was less amenable. A 
 formal resistance was made to the Bacchante's exit, and it 
 needed all Hubert's loiowledge of his language and of his 
 countrymen to enable him to carry on single-handed the 
 battle in her behalf. He almost thought at one moment that 
 he should have to attempt some feat of the kind in which 
 Ouida's heroes excel, to clear a passage for her. 
 
 She stood meanwhile, trembling and very pale, by his 
 side. It was by dint eventually of representing himself as 
 a friend and " parent " of mademoiselle's — an inspiration of 
 the moment wherein he little guessed that there was any 
 actual substratum of truth — that he succeeded in leading 
 her away. She clung gratefully to his arm, and for once 
 Hubert almost forgot that he occupied among his fellow- 
 men the place that Vulcan occupied among the gods when 
 they derided him in Olympia. The dressing-rooms of the 
 Folies-Fantassin, no larger than cupboards, were in the rear 
 of the stage. By dint of inquiries on the way, he was en- 
 abled to lead the Bacchante thither without obstruction. 
 Before she disappeared behind the shabby curtain that 
 screened the cabin she recognised as her own, Eila paused. 
 There was evidently something on her mind that she longed 
 yet feared to communicate. *' 
 
 " I can't thank you enough,'' she said, with a quaver in 
 her voice ; " but — but I hardly know how to say it — only I 
 did hope so much that perhaps one of the prizes — there is a 
 second one, you know, of eighty pounds — might have been 
 awarded to me. It was only in that hope I came ; and how 
 am I ever to find out if I go away now ? Perhaps they will 
 say I have forfeited it." 
 
 Her tones faltered. Hubert reassured her once more. 
 
 " I'll find out at once for you if you like," he said, " only 
 you had better wait here until I come back." 
 
 The cordiality of his tone, the ready courtesy of his man- 
 ner, in which he seemed to take it for granted that he must 
 treat her as a gentleman is wont to treat a woman and a 
 lady, were indescribably grateful to her. She thanked him 
 
270 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 by her look, more eloquently than by her words, and twenty 
 minutes later — a very long twenty minutes they seemed, for 
 before the first ten had elapsed she was already clad in her 
 ordinary attire, and the Bacchante leopard-skin (not her 
 own property this) had been handed over to the dresser who 
 claimed it — she heard his voice again. 
 
 A terrible misgiving, a mighty panic, had assailed her as 
 she waited alone. What if he should have gone away and 
 left her to her fate ? How should she ever find the courage 
 to face that terrifying crowd again, and try to discover for 
 herself whether she had gained a prize ? 
 
 Her face was pale with apprehension as she emerged 
 from behind the curtain at the sound of Hubert's voice. He 
 could not refrain from taking a sharp and rapid survey of 
 her as she came out into the narrow descending corridor, 
 deserted by everyone save a dresser and a scene-shifter, who 
 cast ciu-ious glances in his direction. He motioned her to 
 walk a little farther down the passage, where they might 
 talk at their ease. She understood that he had come to tell 
 her the result of his self-imposed mission, and followed him 
 in trembling expectation. One swift glance had satisfied 
 him that she was not a whit less pretty clothed and in her 
 right mind than before — that is to say, in a shabby ulster 
 and low, round straw hat, instead of in a leopard-skin and 
 vine-leaves; and there was assuredly something infinitely 
 pitiful in the air of over-weening anxiety with which she 
 turned toward him and mutely questioned his face. Among 
 the lies which the recording angel effaces with a tear, I 
 think Hubert de Merle's lie that night may be considered 
 deserving of a place. What ulterior purpose the director of 
 the Folies-Fantassin might have had in promising a five- 
 thousand-franc prize, which he certainly could have had no 
 intention of paying, Mr. de Merle did not stop to consider. 
 
 From the investigations he made during those long 
 twenty minutes while Eila waited for him in the so-called 
 dressing-room, he discovered that the appearance of the 
 human exhibits upon the stage was merely the first step in a 
 speculation of a Circassian slave-mart order. Not that the 
 young ladies who competed for the prize could be in any 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 271 
 
 way compared to ignorant fielpless slaves. They knew per- 
 fectly well what they were about when they lent their 
 willing co-operation to the speculation in question. They 
 considered that if the director of the Folies-Fantassin had 
 an eye to his own benefit in the transaction, the opportunity 
 he afforded them of advertising their attractions was a 
 direct benefit to them, and they were the more indifferent 
 to the bait held out in the shape of a prize that they looked 
 upon the Prix de Beaute competition as a means and not as 
 an end. This was why, when Hubert went to interview the 
 director, he was received with a series of shrugs that entirely 
 and successfully evaded dealing with the point in question. 
 All that could be gathered was that ces dames were alto- 
 gether content with the conditions imposed upon them ; that 
 they had unlimited confidence in their director ; that the 
 result of the votes could not possibly be known until the 
 ladies had afforded the jury more ample opportunities of 
 forming an opinion ; that the charmante dem,oiseUe who 
 had had the misfortune to be indisposed must present her- 
 self again before she could hope to obtain a favourable ver- 
 dict, and that one of the conditions attached to the exhibi- 
 tion was that the portrait of the winner of the prize should 
 be exhibited in all the shop-windows, with her signature. 
 
 Hubert did not wait to hear more. He made up his mind 
 instantly. He went back to' the Bacchante, and in answer 
 to the eager inquiry he read in her eyes — for she was too 
 overcome to speak — he replied, with well-disguised assur- 
 ance: "Well! I have good news for you. It seems I must 
 congratulate you upon having won the first prize. Five 
 thousand francs, is not that it ? " 
 
 In yielding to the quixotic impulse that led him upon 
 the spur of the moment to fabricate this tremendous false- 
 hood, Hubert was not prepared for the immediate conse- 
 quences that ensued. The Bacchante — a Bacchante no 
 longer, but a poorly-dressed, sweet-visaged young woman, 
 with most eloquent eyes — ^broke down completely at the 
 news. Leaning against the stained wall of the narrow cor- 
 ridor, dimly lighted by sparse jets of flickering gas, she had 
 covered her face with her handkerchief, and was weeping 
 
272 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 into it with the abandonment of a child who has been un- 
 duly punished. The convulsive sobbhig, that could not be 
 repressed, told of a previous strain of cruel intensity. What 
 must she not have suffered before she had nerved herself to 
 go through the terrible ordeal of this evening ? The anguish 
 of pent-up shame, as well as the bliss of a great deliverance, 
 found expression in her tears. Hubert allowed her to have 
 her cry out in silence. He did not regret his lie of a mo- 
 ment ago. It was God's truth, if not the stage-director's, that 
 he had uttered, for fairer than she he had never seen — not 
 on the ignoble stage of the Folies-Fantassin alone, but in 
 the whole wide world. But how should he carry his fiction 
 to its completion without detection ? How naake it appear 
 that the five thousand francs he intended to bestow upon the 
 Bacchante (upon the Bacchante ? — no, a thousand times no ! 
 but upon this poor weeping child by his side) had been sent 
 to her by the administration of the theatre instead of by 
 himself ? Hubert was a man of ready resources. The dif- 
 ficulty had hardly presented itself before he had concocted 
 a plan for meeting it in the short interval during which 
 Eila was wiping her eyes and framing her broken apologies. 
 
 "Don't mind!" he said; "it is not to be wondered at if 
 you are a little unnerved. This is no place for you to be in, 
 you know." 
 
 His manner was elder-brotherly and kind in the extreme, 
 just such a manner as the Beast might have had when the 
 distracted Beauty was weeping in his enchanted palace for 
 her home. 
 
 Eila hung her head. "I know— it isn't," she said, catch- 
 ing her breath painfully; "but the money — was so badly 
 needed — you can't think ! Things happened we could never 
 have expected, and now we are saved." A look of almost 
 incredulous joy illumined her countenance. " Only it seems 
 too good to be true. I can hardly believe it even now. 
 Would you mind telling it me just once again ? " 
 
 "Telling you what?" When Hubert was amused, his 
 face lost its expression of sullen defiance, and became hu- 
 man again. " That you are to receive five thousand francs 
 for being the ' fairest of the fair ' ? I have told you that 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 
 
 273 
 
 already. What a sceptical person you are I But I suppose 
 you want me to give you the details? Well, then, the 
 money is to be sent you in a registered letter to-morrow, as 
 you did not choose to stay and receive it iu public. Only 
 you must be at home to receive it. I got all the particulars 
 upon the score of my being a 'parent,' you remember. Tou 
 need not have the least imeasiness about the matter, I 
 assure you." 
 
 Eila's face, which had been very bright at the outset of 
 his address, suddenly fell. 
 
 "Oh," she cried, ia alarmed tones, "I never gave them 
 my address ! I refused to give it on purpose. How could 
 they say they would send the money, not knowing where I 
 was to be found ? Oh, ivhat shall I do ? " 
 
 Hubert's presence of mind was equal to the occasion. 
 
 " To begin with, don't lose your head," he laughed. The 
 excessive composure of his manner had a tranquillizing ef- 
 fect. "They knew you would send for the money if you 
 did not receive it; but it would be more business-like to 
 leave your address with the director. I will take you to 
 him, if you like, at once ; or — no — wait a miuute. I should 
 be glad to spare you another meeting with him. Supposing 
 I were to take a message for you instead ? You had better 
 not go into the crowd again, for your own sake. They were 
 going to dance as I came away ; at least, a lady was going 
 to perform the can-can. Had you not better put your name 
 and address down in writing '' — he took out his pocket-booki 
 and extracted a blank leaf and a pencil, which he handed 
 to her — " and let me take it for you to the manager ? I will 
 give you my own card by-and-by. I am staying at the 
 Hotel du Louvre, and I will see that you have your due, I 
 promise you." 
 
 He said these words with an air of such calm assurance 
 that Eila's courage returned. She essayed to find words in 
 which to express her gratitude; but her wet lashes (the 
 comeliness of her face was proof against even the unbecom- 
 ing process of tear-shedding) said more than her phrases. 
 Hubert had the intense gratification of feeling that she 
 trusted him completely. Why, indeed, should she doubt 
 
274 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 him ? In obedience to his instructions, she wrote her name 
 upon the paper he had given her, holding it against the wall 
 for that purpose. She attached no prefix to it, but wrote 
 simply, in a somewhat schoolboy hand, the words, "Eila 
 Frost," with her address beneath. As she handed the paper 
 to her companion, he glanced instinctively at the name, 
 and immediately noticed that there was no indication as to 
 whether she were wife or maid. He concluded she must be 
 the latter — a conclusion to which her air of extreme youth, 
 and generally wrimarried aspect, seemed also to point. 
 
 It was wonderful, Eila thought, how quickly he accom- 
 plished this second mission as compared with the first. 
 Perhaps, she reflected further, her brain was in too great a 
 whirl to allow of her estimating time properly. He might 
 have been away, after all, longer than she supposed. The 
 wonderful, wonderful and most wonderful news he had 
 brought her seemed to put all other thoughts out of her 
 head. When he did return, nevertheless, she could not re- 
 frain from interrogating him eagerly once more with her 
 eyes. Hubert understood the look, and smiled reassuringly. 
 
 " What ! not convinced yet ? I give you my word it is 
 all right. The whole business is sealed, and you may sleep 
 on your two ears, as they say here. Tell yourself that to- 
 morrow afternoon by four o'clock the money will be deliv- 
 ered to you at the address you gave me. Are you ready to 
 come away now ? My friend will be wondering what has 
 become of us all this time." 
 
 Eila murmured some words to the effect that she was 
 quite ready, and inexpressibly grateful. It was necessary 
 to have recourse to an ouvreuse, after all, with a ghoul-like 
 face and pink-rouged cheeks that matched unwholesomely 
 with her ribbons, to find the way out through the network 
 of passages behind the theatre. 
 
 With a two-franc acknowledgment, the woman went 
 away contented, smirking, and Eila and her protector found 
 themselves on the pavement without, where the fair-mous- 
 tached young man was walking up and down, smoking a 
 thifd cigar to while away the time. There was a slight, gray 
 drizzle, to which he seemed entirely indifferent ; but Eila 
 
EILA'S ORDEAL. 275 
 
 noticed that the white glazed hat of the driver on the box 
 of the carriage in waiting was wet and shiny. 
 
 "Thanks, old fellow," Hubert said to his friend, without 
 apologizing, however, for keeping him waiting. " Are you 
 going into that place again, or shall I find you at the Louvre 
 in another hour ? I am going to see this lady safe to her 
 own door first.'' 
 
 "All right," replied Mr. Wilton, in the same natural 
 tones. "You'll find me in the smoking-room, 1 expect, if 
 you want me for anything before you turn in. I hope you 
 are feeling better ? " he added, addressing himself to the 
 ci-devant Bacchante, and lifting his hat as she hurried past 
 him to the carriage. 
 
 Eila uttered a timid " Thank you, much better ! " from 
 behind her drawn-down veil, and Mr. Wilton stood for a 
 moment looking after the carriage as it drove away with 
 Mr. de Merle and the Bacchante. He did not make any 
 comment upon the proceeding. The boss was the boss, and 
 as such could do no wrong, however perplexing the fact of 
 his absconding with a vine-crowned damsel from the stage 
 of the Folies-Fantassin might appear to the young man's 
 thinking in connection with his age and personality. 
 
 Eila, meanwhile, was feeling all the relief of leaving the 
 scene of her martyrdom behind her. Overcome by the 
 emotions she had been through, she leaned back in the car- 
 riage by the side of her self -constituted friend without utter- 
 ing a word. The vehicle was of the much-worn, springless, 
 clattering, battered type that is still to be met with among 
 the petites voitures in the neighbourhood of the Gare St. 
 Lazare, and neither of the occupants spoke until they had 
 been jolted down the descending streets to the lull of the 
 asphalted boulevard and smooth Rue Richelieu. Then Eila 
 awoke from her reverie, and addressed herself to her com- 
 panion : 
 
 " What should I have done if you had not been there to- 
 night, I wonder ? I never fainted before, and it seemed just 
 as though I were dying." She shuddered. " The thing that 
 seemed to bring me back to life in the end was hearing you 
 tell your friend in English to keep the crowd away. You 
 
276 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 can't imagine what a comfort the English voice and the 
 English words seemed to bring. Still, even now " (at this 
 point her tones grew somewhat ditfident) " I don't know 
 whether you are English or not. I made sure you were 
 when I heard you first, but afterwards, when you spoke to 
 the ouvreuse, you seemed to be quite French." 
 
 Hubert uttered a short laugh. His laugh, as well as his 
 voice, had a pleasant ring. A tete-a-tete in the dark with a 
 mysterious and beautiful young woman, who was also as 
 good a counterpart of Psyche in respect of her outward ap- 
 pearance as one could hope to find in this world of imper- 
 fections, was very nearly a realization of the fanciful dream 
 of his earlier years. Behind the kindly veil of night he felt 
 no longer at a disadvantage. He could even talk of himself 
 Avithout infusing an unconscious inflexion of scorn and bit- 
 terness into his words. He was partly French and partly 
 English, he informed young Mrs. Frost, and he had had a 
 kind of alternate French and English bringing up, which 
 accounted for his familiarity with both languages. 
 
 "We have French blood, too," exclaimed Eila, in a tone 
 of childish pride, when she had heard him to the end. . " My 
 grandmother — our mother's mother — was French, or half 
 French, at least ; and her father was a pure Frenchman.'' 
 
 " Were you born in France ? " asked Hubert. 
 
 " No ; in Tasmania." 
 
 The words were uttered with the accompaniment of an 
 involuntary sigh. Hubert could not know the multitude of 
 sad and tender thoughts with which the name of her birth- 
 place was linked. Oowa and Reginald ! home and peace ! 
 love and security ! The vision of the far-away haven in the 
 land of her birth rose clear and distinct before her mind. A 
 morning in spring was breaking over it at this moment, and 
 Reginald, who was probably walking back from his morn- 
 ing swim, might be looking across the hills towards the 
 white cottage on the heights, and thinking of her. What 
 would he say if he could have followed her in an invisible 
 coat this evening ? How should she ever be able to act up 
 to her solemn pledge that she would tell him, not only 
 everything that befell her, but everything she contemplated 
 
BILA'S ORDEAL. 277 
 
 doing, concealing nothing ? Supposing she had kept her 
 promise literally, what could he have done but suffer ? And 
 did not recent events prove that she had done well to keep 
 her counsel ? If she had consulted him about her project 
 of exhibiting herself before carrying it out, he would have 
 moved heaven and earth to make her abandon it, to say 
 nothing of ruining himself to send her assistance. 
 
 Hubert interrupted her mournful reflections by saying : 
 
 " That is rather a curious coincidence. My grandmother 
 was French too ; and you and I are compatriots in anotlier 
 sense as well, for I have lived a great deal in Australia. 
 How long is it since you left Tasmania ? " 
 
 " Hardly eight months,'' was the mournful reply ; " and 
 we would give anything to be back there." 
 
 As the latter remark seemed to pave the way for gaining 
 a little more information of a personal character, Hubert 
 put a few questions, by which he elicited the main facts 
 connected with the migration of the Clares to Europe. He 
 learned under what conditions the great enterprise had been 
 undertaken; how the family had set out on their travels 
 with insufficient means, and even with less experience, and 
 what the consequences had been. Eila did not conceal the 
 fact that they had been reduced to dire straits, advancing it 
 rather as a plea by which to condone her rash experiment 
 of this evening. The strangeness of confiding the family 
 history to a total stranger, of whose very name she was 
 ignorant, did not occur to her until afterwards. As the sage 
 old saw says, " Circumstances alter cases." If it had befallen 
 her to be shipwrecked upon a desert island, and if Hubert 
 had suddenly emerged from a grotto, like Caliban, whom he 
 might very well have personated, and had offered her his 
 assistance, she would certainly not have thought of asking 
 him his antecedents before telling him of her plight. His 
 human kinship would have. been enough, and more than 
 enough, to warrant her confidence. Now, as regarded her 
 adventure of this evening, she had felt, in a certain sense, 
 quite as forlorn and stranded as though she had suffered 
 actual shipwreck, as though, indeed, the Folies-Fantassin, in 
 lieu of being a noisy music-hall, in a noisy street, in the 
 
278 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 heart of a noisy city, had been the veriest surf -washed rock 
 in the whole desolate Atlantic. The hand that had been 
 stretched out to rescue her had been none the less a saving 
 one that it had reached her across a crowd of her fellow- 
 creatures instead of across the angry waves. It seemed 
 quite natural to her that she should continue to cling to it 
 now. That in coming to her help her companion had been 
 actuated by pure and chivalrous motives she had taken for 
 granted from the outset. Perhaps, if he had been a hand- 
 some youth instead of an ungainly and hairy hunchback, 
 she would have spoken with more reserve. As the case 
 stood now, she felt instinctively that the best way of prov- 
 ing her gratitude, and of showing him tacitly that she un- 
 derstood and appreciated the unselfishness of his kindness, 
 was to answer his questions fully and trustingly. 
 
 Nevertheless, the situation was an unusual one. Hubert 
 looked out more than once to see the direction the cab might 
 be taking. For the first time in his life he was not inclined 
 to quarrel with the crawling pace of the voiture a Vheure. 
 Sometimes he failed to find out the bearings. The soft 
 gloom of the November night obscured the light from the 
 gay lamps, and the moon that Eila had watched from the 
 top of the omnibus on the way to Montmartre was hidden 
 behind dark clouds. It was not always easy to speak co- 
 herently, owing to the jolting ; but Hubert found occasion 
 to comment wonderingly in his own mind upon the soft re- 
 fijiement of the Bacchante's voice, which was pitched in a 
 key that could not fail to be pleasing to sensitive ears. As 
 the white stream from the electric light flashed into the cab 
 on their way across the Place du Carrousel, it illuminated 
 Eila's profile for an instant's space, and brought back the 
 impression of her face to Hubert's mind. What a purely- 
 modelled, innocent-looking face it was ! a little pale and 
 tired, but so confiding and youthful withal. Married ? 
 Surely not ! There were no married lines in the virginal 
 contour of the features, or in the girlish, though bountifully 
 moulded, figure. How was it possible that such a type 
 should have been discoverable in the place where he had 
 found it this evening, among such surroundings and in such 
 
BILA'S ORDEAL. 2Y9 
 
 company ? He remembered his own ironical suggestion, 
 that they should search for a Eosiere among the candidates 
 for the prize of beauty. Perhaps this young woman was 
 only acting the part of an ingenue, after all ; but if so, she 
 was the most consummate mistress of her art he had ever 
 encountered. Whatever the truth might be, her manner 
 was perfect. It was so simple and straightforward ; there 
 was such an utter absence of anything resembling pose or 
 coquetry that it commanded involuntary respect. But how 
 had she come to accept his escort so readily ? Hubert did 
 not know whether he was to regard her conduct in this re- 
 spect as eminently flattering or the reverse. The point about 
 which he felt most curious, as to whether she were married 
 or single, was just the one upon which she had given him 
 no enlightenment ; but he thought he could gather from her 
 answers that his impression of her being unmarried was 
 correct. She spoke of mother, sisters, and brothers, but made 
 no mention of a husband ; and she could not, as he judged, 
 be more than twenty or thereabouts. 
 
 "What put it into your head to go to that place this 
 evening ? " he asked her abruptly, after she had given him 
 an outline of the family history. " You can't have had any 
 idea of the risks you were running." 
 
 There was a pause, then : 
 
 " I thought of nothing but how I might earn a little 
 money," Eila answered humbly. " It will be two months 
 before the next remittance comes from Tasmania. They 
 won't let us have it earlier, and even then it will be terribly 
 little, for we drew in advance all they would let us have to 
 pay for our passages. As we are strangers in Paris, there 
 was not a soul to whom I could turn for help, and mother's 
 illness was the last straw. I had to pay away at once the 
 little that was left, and there was none to go on with. It 
 was like a horrible nightmare, to come to such a pass all in 
 so short a time. There has not even been enough to buy 
 bread lately ; and I could think of nothing. Even if we had 
 sold all we had in the world, it would only have helped us 
 to struggle on for a very little longer ; and no one in the 
 family knew that there was no money left. It is I who have 
 
280 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the responsibility of laying it out and keeping house upon it 
 since mother's Ulness, and I could never have believed it 
 would have melted away as it did. Just when matters were 
 becoming desperate, I happened to see the Prix de Beaute com- 
 petition announced in the Petit Journal. I did not think 
 it was a thing to be taken seriously at first, but I went to see 
 about it, all the same, as a kind of forlorn hope. Even when 
 I found it was a bond-fide competition, and everything was 
 arranged, I did not guess what the reality would be like. I 
 had an idea it would be like figuring in a kind of tableau ^ 
 vivant "—this was the euphemism behind which Eila had 
 sheltered herself from the beginning—" and I have played 
 in tableaux vivants often when we were children in the 
 happy old days in Hobart. I could not have dreamed that 
 it would be as dreadful as it was." 
 
 She bent her head. The recollection of the eyes and 
 pince-nez of the man who had ofi'ered her " chevaux et voi- 
 ture " rose before her, and her cheeks burned in the dark. 
 
 " You did not have to go through any preliminary re- 
 hearsals, then ? " Hubert asked. 
 
 " No. I was only shown where my seat was to be on the 
 stage. I had to see the director once or twice. He looks a 
 hateful man, but he was really not unkind. He treated me 
 very politely. He said I need only come on the night of the 
 performance, but that I must wear the dress he ordered. He 
 sent me to a woman who makes theatrical costumes, and 
 when I got tp the theatre to-night I found someone waiting 
 with my dress ready to put on." 
 
 " They wanted you to be photographed in it, you know," 
 observed Hubert dryly, "to stick in the shop-windows.'' 
 
 " To be photographed ? Who said so ? " cried Eila in 
 tones of unfeigned terror. " I would not let them photo- 
 graph me for anything in the world. Why, I never would 
 have gone if I had thought there were any danger of being 
 recognised again." 
 
 " I am afraid that is asking rather much of the thousand 
 odd spectators who gazed at you to-night. But you need not 
 give your consent to be photographed, if you object to it so 
 strongly. Perhaps, too, if the director is discreet as regards 
 
EILA'S OKDEAL. 281 
 
 your name and address, which you say are not to he di- 
 vulged, you may escape the worst consequences of your ven- 
 ture. But if you will let me advise you as a friend, you 
 won't try the experiment again. You don't quite understand 
 all the dangers you were courting. You might even find 
 the five thousand francs a poor set-off next time." 
 
 He put his head out of the window, and changed his tone 
 as he drew it back again. What motive had he, after all, 
 for preaching prudence to this strange young woman he had 
 befriended ? 
 
 " Where are we now ? " he asked her. 
 
 " On the Boulevard St. Michel." Her tone betrayed that 
 she was humiliated. " I am afraid it is taking you ever so 
 far out of your way. But we shall be at the Place de I'Ob- 
 servatoire in another minute. How can I ever thank you 
 enough for what you have done for me ? I wish I could 
 think you knew how grateful I feel." 
 
 " There is nothing to thank me for." The words were 
 uttered in all sincerity, though the tone was brusque. " Will 
 you" — he hesitated — " will you allow me to call and see how 
 you are getting on the day after to-morrow ? I shall be 
 leaving Paris shortly, and I should like to have your assur- 
 ance that the director has paid up as he promised. As you 
 allowed me to conduct that transaction for you, I consider 
 myself responsible for his good faith." 
 
 Eila did not answer at once. When she did, it was evi- 
 dent that she was ill at ease. 
 
 "It is wonderfully kind of you to interest yourself in 
 us," she said in constrained tones, wondering the while what 
 pretext she should find for introducing this deformed 
 stranger into their miserable home. " You know my mother 
 has been ill, and I have told you how we live ; but if you 
 
 don't really mind, and it is not too much trouble " She 
 
 stammered, finding her words with difiiculty, and Hubert 
 cut her short. 
 
 " Thanks — at four o'clock, then, the day after to-morrow. 
 But stay, let me give you my card." 
 
 The carriage had (Jrawn up before the heavy closed door 
 of the porte-cochere. He got out and rang the bell, and 
 
282 NOT COaNTING THE COST. 
 
 Eila, as she descended in her turn, saw beneath the lamp- 
 light his misshapen shadow lying upon the pavement at her 
 feet. For an instant she was conscious of an inward shrink- 
 ing. She had almost forgotten his uncouth appearance dur- 
 ing their exchange ,of confidences in the dark. 
 
 She held her hand out to him at parting, and felt it taken 
 into a powerful and friendly grasp. The door opened sud- 
 denly and noiselessly upon the dark entrance-way as she 
 bade him a last good -night. 
 
 "You don't mean to say you will have to grope your 
 way upstairs in the dark ? " he called after her as she turned 
 away from him. 
 
 " I will indeed. The lights are all out at half -past ten, 
 and we have to call out our names when we pass the little 
 den at the foot of the stairs where the concierge lives." 
 
 " What a barbarous arrangement ! Wait a moment, 
 won't you take my match-box ? " 
 
 "No; I know every step," said Eila, laughing; "but I 
 hear the concierge calling out. He knows in his sleep w^hen 
 the door is not shut. G-ood-night, again, and thank you 
 once more with all my heart ! " 
 
 Hubert turned away. He drove back to the hotel in the 
 rattling cab, but did not look for Jack Wilton when he ar- 
 rived there ; he was in no mood to answer the unconsidered 
 questions of the young man, or perhaps he preferred to re- 
 main alone with the recollection of his night drive with the 
 Bacchante. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 eila's discovery. 
 
 Eila meanwhile bounded up the stairs in the dark with 
 a sense of wild elation and dream-like elasticity of tread. 
 Her footfall made no sound as it flew from step to step. En- 
 tering the apartment noiselessly with the aid of her pass- 
 key, she crept through the empty reception-room into her 
 chamber. A plaintive voice gi-eeted her from the bed on 
 
EILA'S DISCOVERY. 283 
 
 the floor, and a little figure, dimly outlined in white in the 
 darkness, rose up to throw two tightly clinging arms round 
 her neck. 
 
 " Not asleep ? " said Eila, gently chiding, but holding the 
 little figure close to her heart at the same time. " Is Mamy 
 back ? " 
 
 " Long ago," said the child wearily ; " she had such a 
 lovely day. And only think ! they had a big ice-cream 
 made just like a polar bear at dinner. She brought us back 
 some chocolate, too ; I wouldn't eat mine till you came, but 
 I couldn't help just nibbling a little corner of it." 
 
 She held out her prize to her elder sister, and Eila, havmg 
 shut the door and lighted the candle, seated herself on the 
 edge of the mattress on the floor, while Truca nestled close 
 up against her for the double enjoyment of feeling her 
 sister's protecting arm and eating the chocolate simultane- 
 ously. She bit hungrily and contentedly into her treasure, 
 and Eila said : 
 
 " You shall have chocolate and croissants to-morrow 
 morning for breakfast, darling, and veal and spinach for 
 dinner." 
 
 " What me, and all of us ? " cried the child in delighted 
 wonderment. 
 
 " Yes, I promise you ; only just let me see the name on 
 this card with the candle first, will you, dear ? " 
 
 Truca lighted the candle obediently, and held it close to 
 her sister. Eila drew Hubert's card from her pocket and 
 proceeded to examine it. The name that confronted her 
 was that of Mr. Hubert de Merle. The words " Tarragunyah, 
 Queensland," were also printed in the corner, but across 
 these a line had been drawn. The card was slim and 
 polished, and the type was in neat italics ; but had the 
 name it recorded been inscribed in the same fiery characters 
 as those which God's avenging finger traced upon the walls 
 of the Babylonian palace, their import could hardly have 
 been more startling to the person who read them. Few and 
 far apart are the coincidences in our everyday lives which 
 make us realize the truth of the saying that " fact is stranger 
 than fiction." When they do occur, their first eflPect is to 
 19 
 
284 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 induce a feeling of grim reality best expressed in the im- 
 mortal words, " Do I sleep ? Do I dream ? Are there 
 visions about ? " Eila gazed stupidly at the card for a few 
 moments. She did not call out, or disturb Truca in the 
 enjoym.ent of her chocolate. She sat as one turned to stone, 
 uttering neither word nor sound. So the thing the family 
 had come across the world to seek, in so foolish and so mad 
 a fashion, had dropped across their path unsought. Even 
 the wildest of their mother's prophecies had never pointed 
 to a more unlikely conclusion than this. How came their 
 cousin to be in Paris unknown to them, after all, and why 
 out of the two millions inhabitants in that city, nay, out of 
 the twelve or thirteen hundred millions that form the pre- 
 sumable population of the globe (upon the strength of her 
 being Truca's instructress, young Mrs. Frost kept her memory 
 of school -room statistics green) — should he be the very one to 
 go to the Folies-Fantassin on this eventful night, and to come 
 forward as her sole champion and protector ? Let scientific 
 people laugh her to scorn, let her own veneration for the cause- 
 and-efi:'ect theory of the universe be shaken to its foundations, 
 she must yet feel that there was something more than a mere 
 coincidence in this miracle. Only a short time ago she had 
 been led to believe that Hubert de Merle was non-existent, 
 or that if he existed at all it was in the guise of a back- 
 woodsman, or a back-block squatter in the remotest wilds 
 of Queensland. He had seemed to her under this aspect as far 
 removed from her earthly sphere as the woodcutter in the 
 moon, that had been such a familiar object to her in the 
 Southern Hemisphere, until he had been turned topsy-turvy 
 in the Northern one, and transformed into a bloated-looldng 
 face. Hubert de Merle actually alive and in Paris, and 
 coming to see them the day after to-morrow of his own 
 accord ! The day after to-morrow ? — nay, to-morrow itself, 
 for it was already past midnight. There could not be two 
 Hubert de Merles, both having been in Queensland, and 
 both owning to a French grandmother. This Hubert bore 
 the same relationship to the Chevalier as herself. He was 
 the Hubert of the ruby, the Hubert of her mother's legends 
 and her own sea-inspired dreams ; yet not that Hubert, either, 
 
EILA'S DISCOVERY. 285 
 
 for the first had been a fairy prince, and this one v,^as a Caliban. 
 Should she wake the household, and narrate the whole mi- 
 raculous incident to them at once ? Should she cause them 
 to lie awake throughout the remainder of the night for 
 sheer joy and excitement ? No ; she would be prudent, and 
 keep her secret to herself for the present. The night brings 
 counsel, says the proverb. Perhaps, on second thoughts, she 
 might deem it wiser to leave the family in ignorance of all 
 that had passed until Hubert declaimed himself. Reviewing 
 the position more calmly, she reminded herself that they 
 had no kind of claim on their cousin. He might have 
 neither the will nor the means to help them. Their mother 
 had taught them to look upon the name as a magic one ; 
 but had not their mother also led them to believe that Eu- 
 rope was to be their promised land, and what had it proved 
 to them so far but a place of exile and sorrow ? Supposing, 
 too, that none of the anticipated wonder should be realized, 
 that neither the two hundred pounds nor Hubert himself 
 should be forthcoming in the next forty-eight hours ? Eila 
 felt as though the strain of expectation would be almost 
 more than she could bear. It was well for her that there 
 was her little sister to consider. She found an outlet for her 
 overwrought feelings by heaping caresses upon Truca, mur- 
 muring soothing words of consolation to her, and hinting 
 vaguely at better times in store as she lay down upon the 
 mattress with her arm round the little body by her side. 
 Truca fell after awhile into blissful unconsciousness, but for 
 Eila there was no sleep. Her thoughts were so vivid that 
 they seemed to beat at pulses in her brain. Hopes and 
 fears raced after each other at lightning speed through 
 her mind — hopes that her dear ones might be rescued from 
 the slough of despond into which they had fallen, and res- 
 cued by means of the ordeal she had been through that 
 night, and the wonderful consequences that were to result 
 from it ; fears lest some unlooked-for catastrophe should 
 happen before the morrow, lest the director who was to send 
 her the money should die or fail, lest Hubert, who was like 
 a magician or a dwarf out of the " Arabian Nights,'' should 
 somehow be spirited away. Of his good faith she never 
 
286 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 once doubted. Lies did not look through his eyes nor speak 
 in his voice. But how should she contrive to appear like 
 her ordinary self on the morrow ? How endure the slow 
 creeping on of the hours, marked by the one little clock that 
 had been brought away from Cowa ? How reply to her 
 mother's questions in her customary calm voice when her 
 heart would beat so wildly with the sound of every step on 
 the stairs ? The small hours of the night grew apace. She 
 heard the clock of the Vol-de-Grace sound each fourth until 
 the morning broke. The market carts from Montrouge lum- 
 bered down the boulevard. The early workmen's train 
 rolled by, and the doleful notes of the conductor's horn 
 sounded upon the dawn. By-and-by the milk-woman came 
 to fill the tin can hanging outside the door, and Eila rose 
 from her mattress to order a double quantity. 
 
 Nights such as these bring lines to maturer faces, and 
 eyes set in mourning circles ; to our heroine they brought 
 shining orbs, and an ethereally intensified expression of 
 countenance. Next day she found that her strength was 
 equal to the trial that awaited her. She went singing about 
 the apartment in the forenoon, and prevailed upon her 
 mother to appear at the dinner-table for the first time since 
 her illness. She declared that the great occasion must be 
 fittingly celebrated, and never surely was such satisfaction 
 depicted on the faces of a hungry group as when the por- 
 tions from the rotisserie made their appearance puactually 
 at half -past twelve, and a full plate of veal and spinach was 
 set before each member of the family. Dinner was drawing 
 to a close, and the party was feasting upon a long glazed loaf 
 and fromage de Brie, when a ring at the electric bell made 
 everyone start. Eila hurried with chalk-white cheeks to the 
 door. A man in uniform, in reality a commissionaire from 
 the Hotel du Louvre, but to the ignorant family assembled ^ 
 formidable public functionary, entered the room, and asked 
 with an air of assurance for Mademoiselle Frost. The 
 family was struck dumb, but Eila replied, "C'est moi!" 
 in tones which were actually audible though the speak- 
 er's voice trembled ; then turning hurriedly to the rest, she 
 added in an undertone, "I will take him through to 
 
EILA'S DISCOVERY. 287 
 
 the reception-room ; I think it must be something about a 
 — a lottery I put into, only I didn't tell you." The family 
 was so far held in check by the commissionaire's appear- 
 ance that they forbore to question further, and Eila led him 
 boldly into the adjoining room and closed the door. To say 
 that her heart throbbed wildly as he pulled a small bag out 
 of a breast-pocket, which it had unduly bulged out, would 
 be to give but a faint idea of the well-nigh sick tumult of 
 sensation that beset her. With a dream-like feeling of be- 
 wilderment she received the bag in her hands and clutched 
 it closely, while the man informed her that his instructions 
 were to ask her to verifier. To verify 1 Was it not enough 
 to feel the weight of the enchanted bag, in thickest brown 
 paper, carefully sealed, that she was holding ? Mechanically 
 she sat upon one of the battered trunks, broke open the bag 
 with trembling fingers, and poured the contents into her 
 lap, a cataract of shining coins which she counted carefully 
 before returning them to the bag. Two hundred and fifty 
 bright gold pieces of twenty napoleons each — and what had 
 she done to earn them ? There was the shame and the 
 sting ; yet, if people chose to throw away their money so 
 insanely, why should not she, as well as another, stoop to 
 pick it up ? She had done what she had undertaken to do, 
 and the prize had been fixed by the director himself. In the 
 first flush of joy and triumph she fancied she must have re- 
 ceived fifty coins too much. Fortunately, a speedy mental 
 calculation set her right before she had yielded to the first 
 impulse of returning them and enriching the commission- 
 aire by the amount. The counting being accomplished, the 
 next formality was the signing of a receipt handed her by 
 the messenger, bearing the words, " Prier de rendre la quit- 
 tance signee au porteur." The receipt was drawn up for a 
 sum of five thousand francs, but bore no reference to the 
 transaction for which Eila supposed the money to have been 
 sent her. Having signed the document with fingers that 
 trembled with excitement, she changed her first twenty francs 
 in order to bestow five upon the messenger. She took the 
 first napoleon at random for this purpose, and the sensation 
 in her hand of the three bulky five-franc pieces that the 
 
288 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 man returned her with a "Je yous remercie infiniment, 
 mademoiselle," brought her the first realization of the sig- 
 nificance of the magic bag. Had she followed him down 
 the staircase, she would have seen him go a little way along 
 the Boulevard towards a closed brougham, in which a de- 
 formed man was seated. She would have seen him hand 
 the receipt to the latter, who, after examining it for an in- 
 stant, would have been further seen to put it away in his 
 pocket-book and to sign to the coachman to drive away. 
 
 As for Eila, left alone in possession of the money, she 
 was inclined to doubt the evidence of her own senses. Often 
 had she wondered what she should do and how she would 
 act if some heaven-sent shower of gold could rain upon her 
 in the night-time as it rained upon Danae imprisoned in her 
 tower. She had dreamed of how she would assemble the 
 family in their dire distress around her in the morning and 
 give them handfuls of gold all round. Now her dream had 
 come true. It was on the point of being realized. Her wild 
 fancy had turned into an actual positive fact. 
 
 She had closed the reception-room door during her parley 
 with Hubert's messenger, taking thereby all the relish out 
 of the fromage de Brie for the family, who were devoured 
 by uneasiness and curiosity. But as soon as he was gone 
 she uttered a whoop of summons which brought them all 
 tumbling into the room upon each other's heels. First, 
 however, she had taken the precaution to hide fifty gold 
 pieces in her pocket as a reserve fund. Even her mother 
 was not to be told of the existence of this provision for a 
 rainy day. The rest of her money she held in her apron, 
 which she had gathered up in front of her like a bag. 
 
 " I want to tell you, darlings all," she said quaveringly, 
 as the astonished group gathered round her — any great emo- 
 tion is apt to make us effusive, for what is emotion, after all, 
 but a transient form of intoxication ?— " I want to tell you 
 that I have some good news for you. I have won a prize- 
 never mind how. I didn't tell you about it, for of course I 
 might have lost. But I won, and the prize is here "—she 
 rattled her apron—" and now I am going to distribute it all 
 round. Mother comes first." 
 
EILA'S DISCOVERY. 289 
 
 Then solemnly, as Mrs. Clare incredulously and mock- 
 ingly extended her hand as though entering into the spirit 
 of the joke, Eila took the gold pieces up separately one by 
 one, and dropped them into her mother's palm until the 
 gold overflowed and the napoleons fell upon the polished 
 floor. It was a pity .that Hubert was not at hand with his 
 Kodak to fix the faces in the family group during the course 
 of this stupendous operation. As the process of counting 
 went on from twenty to thirty, from thirty to fifty, from 
 fifty up to a hundred, an expression more akin to fear and 
 awe than to pure joy was painted upon each countenance. 
 
 Mrs. Clare was the most composed. 
 
 "I knew it," she said solemnly; "I was quite sure of it. 
 I knew it must come before long. How much is there here, 
 my dear ? A hundred napoleons ? It's a pity they're not 
 sovereigns ! Such trumpery gold pieces as the French have, 
 to be sure ! I wonder they're not ashamed of them. And 
 how much more is there where that came from ? Anyhow, 
 it could not have come when it was more needed." 
 
 " It is the turn of the others now," said Eila ; " but they 
 must make me a promise that at least half of what I give 
 them shall be spent on useful clothes, also that I may help 
 them to chooSe. Hold out yotu- hands ! " 
 
 " It's what they used to say at school when a fellow was 
 goidg to get a cut with the Cane," observed Dick, stretching 
 forth his hand, nevertheless, and closing his fingers eagerly 
 upon the ten napoleons that Eila counted into it. 
 
 Mamy received a similar sum with feigned squeaks of 
 delight that reached their crescendo pitch as the tenth gold 
 piece was counted. Some objections were raised to the be- 
 stowal of an equal largess upon Truca by reason of her 
 youth; but Eila declared she was sole dispenser of the 
 fortune. 
 
 " Ten must go to Willie," she said, " and that only leaves 
 me fifty to carry on the housekeeping with, to buy the ne- 
 cessary furniture, and to pay our debts. Even when the 
 remittance comes, we must steer our way very carefully, 
 for prizes are not won every day. But I suppose mother 
 will help." 
 
290 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Mrs. Clare, who had been nursing schemes of sending a 
 detective to Australia in search of the lost cousin, smiled 
 mysteriously. 
 
 " I will go to the studio to-morrow," declared Dick. 
 
 "And I," said Truca gravely, "will send Mr. Acton 
 money to pay Daisy's passage home to Paris." 
 
 The greater part of the afternoon was spent in discuss- 
 ing the plans that each m.ember of the family proposed in 
 turn. A hundred times did they together and separately 
 count and finger each piece of gold. A horrible suggestion 
 having been made by Dick that the coins might turn out 
 to be false, they were rung in turn upon the floor of the 
 reception-room, until the other inmates of the tall house 
 supposed the eccentric family from outre-mer to be playing 
 pitch-and-toss among themselves. As even this test was 
 not considered sufficiently conclusive, Dick w^as despatched 
 with a napoleon taken at random to the baker's. He was 
 a long time away, and the family went through an anguish i 
 of suspense, compared with which even the Cape Horn 
 horrors were as nothing. He meditated a diabolical plan 
 of terrifying them on his return by declaring that the baker 
 had refused the money ; but long before he reached the top 
 of the stairs the sound of his step had reassured them. 
 
 Joy, like grief, leaves a curious lassitude behind it. Be- 
 fore the afternoon was over, Eila was relieved and grateful 
 that Hubert should only have suggested calling on the mor- 
 row. Such a combination of impossibly exciting events 
 would have been too much for the family nerves, to say 
 nothing of their mother's health. Almost depressed by the 
 magnitude of the emotions they had been through, the 
 family went early to bed. 
 
 Dick found vent for his overwrought soul by standing 
 upon his head while the eggs were being boiled — a large 
 new-laid egg per head — for tea. But he looked even graver 
 than before after the feat was accomplished, and Eila re- 
 tracted a project she had meditated of taking him into her 
 confidence with regard to the event of the morrow. 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 291 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 
 
 No one was found to raise a disclaimer the following day 
 when Eila proposed that the family should dine sumptuously 
 at^ one o'clock at the Duval's at the corner of the Rue de 
 I'Ecole de Medecine. Mrs. Clare, upon whom joy had acted 
 as a tonic, declared herself well enough to accompany her 
 children ; and the happy party defiled down the boulevard 
 in a straggling line, and entered the afore-mentioned choco- 
 late-and-gold palace of cheap repasts. No necessity now for 
 bringing their menu within the limits of seventy-flve cen- 
 times for each. 
 
 " Eat what you like, dears, and as much as you like," was 
 Eila's repeated injunction, as they sat all together at a square 
 marble table on the ground-floor near the window. 
 
 Even with this encouragement, it was almost in fear and 
 trembling that they gave the reins to their appetites, and 
 ordered full portions of puree, raie au beurre noir, and other 
 delicacies of the kind. Mamy was secretly ashamed that the 
 carnal satisfaction of eating her fill should make such a dif- 
 ference in her sense of the value to be attached to existence. 
 Hei'e were only three successive days during which she had 
 been living, so to speak, upoi: the fat of the land, and already 
 the thought of going back to the pinching and scraping 
 emptiness of the previous weeks made her shudder. She felt 
 a sudden pang of pity for the hungry poor. 
 
 " How can we sit down to our meals with the thought 
 that so many people about us are suffering that horrid ache 
 of emptiness ? " she thought. " Can it be that they get used 
 to it ? But no ; I should think it only went on getting worse. 
 I will give some of my money every day to that blind man 
 who sits on the boulevard, thou!gh I suppose if we gave away 
 every centime that we have in charity, things would be as 
 bad as ever in a few weeks, and we would be in the same 
 miserable plight as before. It is so much worse to see one's 
 own people hungry than others. We simply could not stand 
 it if we really felt that the poor were our brothers and sisters 
 
292 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 in any kind of way, as we are told we should feel. After all, 
 it is nonsense, that notion of telling people how they ought 
 to feel. One may tell them how to speak and how to act ; 
 but what is the good of telling them how to feel ? Their 
 feelings are under nobody's control — not even their own ; 
 they feel, or they don't feel, because they can't help them- 
 selves." 
 
 Mamy's meditations, which rendered her unusually silent 
 during the meal, resulted in her giving fifty centimes to the 
 blind man as she passed him on her way home the same day. 
 Next time she passed she had no change, and the following 
 day she purposely walked on the other side of the boulevard, 
 to avoid being confronted by his red-rimmed, sightless eyes ; 
 she had discovered that her desires increased with her money, 
 and that it would be quite possible to come to the end of even 
 ten napoleons after all. Eila's only extravagance was the 
 purchase of a faience pot, splashed with blue, and a heap of 
 golden brown chrysanthemums. With the aid of these she 
 imparted a decorative aspect to the reception-room, and called 
 the family to admire the effect. Mrs. Clare was, as usual, the 
 most appreciative. 
 
 " It is considered quite vulgar in Japan to display more 
 than one work of art at a time," she observed. "I forget 
 where I read it, but you may be sure the room of a Japanese 
 grandee is as bare, or barer, than this. It is a thousand 
 pities there is nobody to see it. What if we were to invite 
 Mrs. Warden and her party to an afternoon tea." 
 
 " We have a visitor coming, I think," Eila replied with 
 a mysterious smUe ; " but I want you to let me receive him 
 here first, and prepare liim for your coming. I will call 
 you very soon after, I promise. Only don't ask me about 
 it," as her mother began to question her eagerly ; " it isn't 
 Willie, that's all I can tell you, and it's a secret. But I 
 hope it's going to turn out a pleasant surprise." 
 
 " More secrets and more surprises ! " exclaimed Mrs. 
 Clare. "You surely haven't gone and put into another 
 lottery ? " 
 
 " No, there's no money in this surprise," said Eila cheer- 
 fully, "but something almost as good. Only I can't pre- 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 293 
 
 pare it properly if everyone doesn't keep out of the way 
 when the bell rings.'' 
 
 Almost as she uttered the words the ting of the electric 
 bell rang sharply through the apartment. The family, 
 with the exception of Eila, scuttled into Dick's room at the 
 back, the door of which was heard to close with a bang, 
 followed by loud expostulations from inside. Eila mean- 
 time ran precipitately to the little front-door of the apart- 
 ment. But she paused with her fingers on the handle, 
 afraid to open it lest she should betray the overweening 
 agitation that mastered her. Her very breath seemed to 
 fail her, though, as often happens when our emotions are 
 keenest, she was outwardly exceedingly calm. Though 
 fully prepared for the sight that encountered her as she 
 opened the door, she could hardly forbear starting back as 
 she perceived Hubert standing on the landing wrapped in 
 an enormous cloak, from the folds of which his shaggy 
 head protruded uncannily, like that of some bird of prey. 
 
 Though, by reason of his deformity, he was fully half a 
 head shorter than herself, he struck her as looking bigger 
 and more forn^dable than on the occasion of their first 
 meeting. She made no demonstration, however, and to this 
 fact may be attributed all that subsequently befell her in 
 connection with him. Hubert had resolved, as he laboured 
 up the staircase, to- watch the Bacchante's demeanour nar- 
 rowly. If, upon a second encounter with him, in the day- 
 light, she should remind him by word or gesture of the 
 hideous truth she had charmed away from his conscious- 
 ness for two blissful hours the first time he had met her — 
 if, even though involuntarily and unwittingly, she should 
 force him to remember that he was not as other men, he 
 would leave her there and then, never to cross her path or 
 to mock her beauty by his accursed presence again. Bitter- 
 ly had he regretted his promise to call upon her. The recol- 
 lection of that one hour during which she had leaned upon 
 his arm, looked confidingly into his eyes, reclined by his 
 side like a tired child in the jolting cab, should have suf- 
 ficed him to the end of his days. Such an experience had 
 never come to him before, and could never come a second 
 
294 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 time. Tortune, in a sportive mood, had sent him. to the aid 
 of beauty in distress at the psychologic moment, and should 
 he never see the Bacchante again, she would probably think 
 of him henceforth under a no more untoward aspect than 
 that of her defender and preserver. To appear bodily before 
 her in the liglit of day would be to destroy the spell and to 
 embitter eternally the remembrance he would so willingly 
 have cherished of her in his own behalf. But he had prom- 
 ised, and though he was angry with himself for having 
 promised, he was yet glad that he had so good an excuse 
 for acting in defiance both of his anger and of his better 
 judgment. 
 
 If Eila maintained her presence of mind, the same might 
 be said of her cousin. During the sharp half -defiant glance 
 he cast at her, he had time to perceive that the Bacchante 
 was no mere ballroom and footlight beauty. Perhaps the 
 pure rich colour of her skin, with its youthful smoothness 
 and firmness of outline, showed even to greater advantage 
 in the garish light of day. Her much-worn black merino 
 was encircled by a frilling of soft white muslin, which be- 
 comingly framed her statuesque neck, whije the inevitable 
 flower nestled against her fair throat. Her hair, that grew 
 la\-ishly on her temples and forehead, a rare beauty in a 
 woman, was a bounteous adornment in itself. It was suffi- 
 cient for EUa to perform the process known as tidying her 
 hair to look fit for a Parisian coiffeur's window. 
 
 Hubert took off his hat and shook hands with her cere- 
 moniously, and she cried almost simultaneously : 
 
 "The money came yesterday— two hundred and fifty 
 gold pieces ! Can you believe it ? " 
 
 "Hardly,'' he said, smiling. There was no betrayal in 
 his smile ; then, more gravely : " I think you came out of 
 that transaction very well." 
 
 " So do I ! " triumphantly ; " and there is more to teU be- 
 sides.'' 
 
 She preceded him into the reception-room as she spoke, 
 where a chair, bought especially for the occasion, had been 
 placed at an angle whence the occupant could command an 
 elaborate view of the vase of chrysanthemums, the Cheva- 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 295 
 
 lier's picture above it, the highly-polished mirror to the 
 right, and the wide expanse of autumnal sky and bare tree- 
 tops through the curtainless window. The weather was 
 just chilly enough to make the first fire of the season that 
 had been lighted that morning in the new and highly orna- 
 mental stove a pleasant feature in the room. Eila invited 
 her visitor to seat himself, and took the only remaining 
 chair for herself. 
 
 For conversational purposes two stiff chairs in an unfur- 
 nished room form the most uninspiring background that 
 can well be imagined, but in the present instance there were 
 topics so weighty to be discussed that these minor considera- 
 tions were of no account. 
 
 Young Mrs. Frost did not give her visitor time to make 
 any conventional observations as to the brightness of the 
 view or the chilliness of the day. She plunged without pre- 
 amble into her great news. 
 
 " What do you suppose I have found out since I saw you 
 — since I read your name on the card you gave me the other 
 night ? " she said with mounting colour ; and, as Hubert 
 raised his eyebrows inquiringly : " Why, that you and I 
 are cousins ! " she added in tones that trembled with excite- 
 ment. 
 
 She spoke with such assurance, her expression Was so 
 radiant, he could not doubt 'that she intended him to accept 
 the startling announcement as the literal truth. 
 
 For a moment Hubert could only look his astonishment. 
 Then: "I am exceedingly flattered," he said courteously, 
 though with evident bewilderment, ''unless"— he paused 
 and smiled sceptically — "unless, as they say in Australia, 
 you are taking a rise out of me." 
 
 " How could you think such a thing ? " Her eyes flashed 
 an eloquent disclaimer. " It is the simple truth I am telling 
 you. I will explain it all directly. But first would you 
 mind looking at the picture over there on the wall— almost 
 opposite — just above the chrysanthemums ? " 
 
 Hubert obeyed. He lifted his eyes with effort, but hav- 
 ing observed the picture, he left his chair and walked to- 
 wards it leisurely for a closer inspection. He had refused 
 
296 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 to lay aside his cloak, which somewhat resembled that of a 
 stage hero, and which he wore as a disguise as well as a 
 covering. We know that the Abyssinians are able to ex- 
 press a whole scale of emotions, varying from the deepest 
 respect and humility to the loftiest pride and defiance, by 
 the simple gesture with which they throw the corner of 
 their mantle over the shoulder or the arm. Hubert had un- 
 consciously adopted something of the Abyssinian custom in 
 his manner of draping himself in his inseparable cloak. 
 When he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms be- 
 neath its folds, he was satisfied with the company in which 
 he happened to find himself and willing to' talk. When he 
 sat huddled up under it with his head on his breast, he was 
 brooding over the curse of his life. When he stood up and 
 threw the two sides back over either shoulder, he was inter- 
 ested and animated, and had a motive for dissimulating his 
 deformity to the uttermost. This was the gesture he now 
 employed almost instinctively as he turned towards Eila, 
 who had remained seated the while, and who was watching 
 him with eagerly expectant eyes. 
 
 "Are you any connection of the gentleman with the 
 queue ? " he a.sked deliberately enough, " for in that case I 
 may certainly claim the honour of the relationship you at- 
 test. This picture is the same that used to hang in my 
 mother's bedroom when I was a boy — or, rather, it is the 
 original, for I believe ours was only a copy : it is the por- 
 trait of my grandfather — my mother's father ^" 
 
 "And my mother's grandfather — our great-grandfather," 
 interrupted Eila joyously. " Is it not the most wonderful 
 coincidence in the world ? If one were to read it in a book, 
 would not one say directly that it was too improbable ? " 
 
 Her eyes were sparkling. Was it kinship only that 
 caused so unwonted a glow to make itself felt in Hubert's 
 breast ? He held out both hands, and Eila rose to give him 
 her own. They remained in his grasp while he said, looking 
 at her with undisguised pleasure : 
 
 " So you are my cousin. I might have known you had 
 some claim on me when I was prompted to go and look 
 after you the other night. It looks as though there were 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 297 
 
 something in the old saying that 'blood is thicker than 
 water,' doesn't it ? " 
 
 He did not release her hands immediately. His own 
 were pleasant-feeling, powerful hands that knew to a nicety 
 how to make play with a sword or to manage a horse's 
 mouth. They knew also how to express the fervour of 
 newly-discoyered cousinship with a beautiful young woman, 
 though this was instinctive, and not the result of practice. 
 Before their hands separated, Eila and her cousin looked for 
 an instant into each other's eyes, and a certain mutual liking 
 grew out of this transient glance. To be indifferent to 
 Hubert's deformity was impossible. If it did not repel, it 
 inspired a pitying interest. 
 
 Now, Eila's nature was not one to be repelled by any 
 form of affliction, and if she had been drawn to her cousin 
 in the first instance by his knight-errantry in her behalf, 
 the feeling was not diminished by the fact that he was also 
 an object for her pity. As he looked at her, she became 
 magnetically aware that she had found favour in his eyes, 
 and the reflection was not displeasing to her. 
 
 Nothing more readily facilitates the establishment of a 
 good understanding between two people of opposite sexes, 
 no matter what their age, looks, position or separate re- 
 sponsilj^ities may be, than a perception of the kind afore- 
 said in the mind of the woman. When we are sure of 
 pleasing we remain instinctively our natural selves, which 
 is tantamount to saying that we show ourselves at our best ; 
 and this is already a great step towards the engendering of 
 agreeable relations. 
 
 The family undergoing durance vile in Dick's room had 
 time afforded them to wax justifiably wroth with their 
 gaoler. They had begun to rebel long before their sum- 
 mons of release arrived, for Eila had important matters to 
 plot with her newly-found cousin and champion, before she 
 could reveal her secret. Hubert had stepped out upon the 
 balcony, after releasing her hands. Perhaps he wanted to 
 collect his thoughts, or perhaps it was only that the tete-a-tete 
 upon the two stiff chairs struck him as unendurably formal, 
 and Eila following him out, the two leaned over the railings 
 
298 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 together — where they seemed more upon a level — hatless, 
 despite the chill in the November air, and there upon that 
 airy perch, with the quiet gray sky above them, and the 
 noisy rumble from below helping to screen her confusion 
 by the opisortunity it afforded of exclaiming at intervals : 
 " I can't make it clearer, there is such a noise ! " or " Can 
 you hear with all that clatter ? " she had in a measure con- 
 fessed herself to him. He had asked her a few leading and 
 direct questions. How many were they in family ? What 
 was their previous history ? Why had they come to Eu- 
 rope ? Eila had answered with simple straightforwardness. 
 She had alluded in the course of her narrative to her own 
 unhappy marriage, and had related her husband's incarcera- 
 tion in a lunatic asylum in Tasmania. She had kept her 
 face averted from her cousin, looking across at the fountain 
 on the broad place below, as she imparted these facts ; there- 
 fore she could not tell how Hubert looked on hearing them, 
 nor what he had thought, but she fancied (was it only 
 fancy ?) that his voice sounded more constrained the next 
 time he spoke ; she likewise informed him of her mother's 
 widowhood, of the castles in the air the family had built 
 from their childhood upwards, of their reckless journey 
 home and the terrible penance they had paid, of the cruel 
 straits to which they had been finally reduced, and of the 
 desperate resolution she had taken to exhibit herself on the 
 stage of the Folies-Fantassin ; furthermore, of the miracu- 
 lous aid afforded them by the result of her experiment, and 
 of the marvellous good fortune of receiving two hundred 
 pounds the very next day without further parley. 
 
 " I told you the director did not seem an unkind man," 
 she said naively ; " but I could not have dreamed he would 
 have acted in such a high-minded, delicate, honourable 
 manner. The money was sent without question or condi- 
 tion, and you remember I was only for a very short time 
 at the theatre. All I had to do was to sign a receipt, and 
 the man who brought the money was so respectful, you 
 can't think. He looked like a kind of superior official — not a 
 bit like those hateful ouvreuses. I dare say he was chosen on 
 purpose, for it was a great sum,to trust him with, wasn't it ? " 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 299 
 
 Hubert smiled rather enigmatically at her outburst of 
 enthusiasm in the director's behalf. Perhaps his own ex- 
 perience of this gentleman would not have led him en- 
 tirely to endorse her testimony. He made no comment, 
 however, and young Mrs. Frost proceeded to assure him of 
 her firm resolve to " manage better for the future." 
 
 " It all comes of not having a profession or a handicraft 
 of some kind at one's finger's ends," she said, with a wise 
 little nod of her head. " I have thought since all these 
 troubles came upon us that people who don't work — who 
 can't earn what they consume, I mean — are really cumberers 
 of the ground. In old Mrs. Frost's cottage in Hobart — she 
 was my mother-in-law, you know — there was a text, worked 
 in green and yellow wools, hanging on the wall " — a gleam 
 of retrospective amusement flitted across her face — " ' She 
 eateth not the bread of idleness.' I don't need the green and 
 yellow wools to remind me of those words now, for I could 
 never, never forget what we have suffered for want of know- 
 ing how to set about making or earning some money. I 
 mean now always to have a little sum laid by for an emer- 
 gency, and with what we have, and what I shall try to earn 
 by giving English lessons, I think we shall be safe for the 
 future." 
 
 Despite the confident words, there was an undercurrent 
 of anxiety in her manner. Hubert was touched by the un- 
 reserved trust she placed in him. He had encouraged her 
 to confidence by his manner as well as by his questions, and 
 already she felt herself upon the footing of an old friend 
 with him. Besides, was he not her cousin— the only creature 
 among the strange millions who surrounded her to whom she 
 could unburden herself of a portion of her fears and misgiv- 
 ings ? It was true that she might carry them all to Eeginald 
 in her letters, but the fact of having to wait eleven or twelve 
 weeks for an answer was a motive for checking her outpour- 
 ings in that direction. Besides, why torment him by dwelling 
 upon troubles he was powerless to alleviate ? Yet it was a re- 
 lief to talk about them to a man who could give her practical 
 advice and who seemed so earnest and sincere in his proffer 
 of sym'pathy and counsel. Encouraged by these reflections, 
 20 
 
300 J^OT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 and acquitting herself of the charge of disloyalty to Reginald 
 by resolving that she would tell him everything now that 
 the worst of their money- troubles was over, she continued 
 to reply to the questions that Hubert addressed to her. She 
 did not attempt to extenuate the folly and imprudence that 
 had characterized the family move, which, indeed, had never 
 sounded more imprudent or more foolish to her own think- 
 ing than when she came to narrate it to a disinterested 
 listener ; but she closed her narrative with an involuntary 
 sigh. 
 
 "Still, I can't be sorry I did what you know,'' she re- 
 sumed suddenly, as though in answer to some adverse crit- 
 icism she had been formulating in her mind. " It has made 
 such a wonderful difference in our lives all at once. If I 
 live to be a hundred, I shall never forget the scene that took 
 place yesterday afternoon when we found ourselves sud- 
 denly rich." 
 
 " Does your mother know where the money came from ? " 
 inquired Hubert. 
 
 " No." Her colour deepened. " She hasn't the least idea. 
 None of them know. They think I won it in a lottery ; and 
 it tuas a kind of a lottery." She cast a doubtful glance side- 
 ways at her cousin, but quickly changed her tone. " You 
 are laughing at me. ... I know what you are thinking. 
 They used to call me the special pleader at home, because I 
 never would call things by disagreeable names. I know it 
 means nothing to call the affair of the other night a lottery. 
 It wasn't even a tableau vivant, as I tried to persuade my- 
 self at first. But whatever one calls it, I should be miserably 
 humiliated if the others ever came to know about it. That 
 I should have had the pretension to be paid for being stared 
 at ! That I should have made a public exhibition of myself 
 in that awful place ! Why, they would want to send the 
 money back, as I do myself when I think of how I came by 
 it. . . . Only I don't know what we should do without it," 
 she added despondently. 
 
 " You need have no scruples about the money, I assure 
 you," Hubert said encouragingly; "but you must allow me 
 to remark that you have a curious method of reasoning. 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 301 
 
 What did you take part in the show for at all, if it was not 
 in the hope of gaining a prize ? " 
 
 "A prize — yes ; but not such a big one." 
 
 " Oh ! if it's the bigness you object to, I dare say the 
 young lady with the three chins who sat next to you would 
 not object to sharing it with you. Most probably she con- 
 siders it should have been all hers by rights." 
 
 Eila laughed. 
 
 " She was enormous, wasn't she ? And, really, some of 
 them were rather awful 1 . . . But we haven't settled how I 
 am to account for having met you. My mother and the 
 rest are waiting in a back-room all this time until I call 
 them. I would not tell them of my great discovery until 
 you had ratified it ; so I only told them a visitor was coming 
 in whom they would be interested, so, of course, they are 
 impatient to see you. But do give me a suggestion. I don't 
 want to involve myself more than I can help." 
 
 "You want to make me responsible this time,'" said 
 Hubert mockingly. " But why not make a clean breast of 
 the whole business ? There is nothing discreditable to you 
 in it." 
 
 " I cari't ! " she interrupted him quickly. " If I were to 
 tell my mother, she would never keep it to herself ; and — 
 and — it would put all sorts of notions into the head of my 
 younger sister that would do no end of harm. You don't 
 understand, indeed." 
 
 Hubert held his peace. He thought, nevertheless, that 
 he was beginning to understand. Her last words had 
 revealed even more than she intended. He gathered from 
 them that this fair young cousin felt herself responsible for 
 the moral as well as the physical well-being of the younger 
 portion of the tribe, and concluded somewhat hastily that 
 the mother must possess but little force of character. 
 
 " I must explain how you found us out, too," Eila con- 
 tinued helplessly. " We are all very credulous, but I can't 
 tell the others you were guided to us by a miraculous in- 
 stinct — can I ? " 
 
 " Well, hardly ; but you might say you allowed me to 
 see you to your door the other night to protect you from 
 
302 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 some roughs who were annoying you. How would that be ? 
 There is nothing untrue in it, and it is quite a likely occur- 
 rence. There is nothing to conceal either in the fact that I 
 gave you my card at parting, and asked leave, as a com- 
 patriot and a stranger, to call upon you." 
 
 "No ; that will do nicely,'' said Eila, relieved. 
 
 She was about to leave him in quest of the incarcerated 
 members of the family, when a thought struck her that 
 caused her to turn an eager face towards him again. 
 
 " There is just one other thing I want to ask you before I 
 call my inother," she began hesitatingly. "How can I be 
 sure you care to know us at all after what I have told you ? 
 All my life long I shall be grateful to you for helping me 
 the other night, but I would rather keep the memory of that 
 to myself and never see you again, than have you think you 
 were under any kind of obligation to be our friend just be- 
 cause of the accidental discovery that om' families are con- 
 nected." 
 
 Hubert did not answer immediately. He was folding 
 his cloak around him as though in preparation to depart, 
 and Eila remained watching him in pained and bewildered 
 discomfiture. Her sensibilities were deeply wounded by 
 his silence. After a mortified pause, she continued hur- 
 riedly : 
 
 " You may believe me — there is not the slightest neces- 
 sity for you to make yourself known if you don't wish to do 
 so. I purposely kept my knowledge of yoiu* name to my- 
 self, and no one in the family has the remotest idea of who 
 you are." 
 
 But even as she gave him this assurance, a sense of bitter 
 disappointment was making her breast heave. To play the 
 part of protector and good fairy of the family had become 
 the ruling ambition of Eila's soul, ever since Fate had denied 
 her the legitimate outlet for hit- early and more passionate 
 impulses. Even as a child, to prepare a " surprise " for the 
 little ones had been the greatest delight she knew, and the 
 feeling had returned to her when she found herself back 
 among her brothers and sisters once more. To produce the 
 mythical cousin Hubert de Merle as a sequel to showering 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 303 
 
 gold pieces into the apartment would have been a crown- 
 ing triumph — a consummation such as even her mother's 
 prophecies and her own day-dreams had never been able 
 to surpass. But to make such a consummation possible, 
 Hubert, like Barkis, must be willing. The least misgiving 
 or drawing back on his part would spoil the entire pro- 
 gramme ; and, after all, when she came to think of it, why 
 should he show himself anxious to recognise the claims of 
 cousinship advanced by a penniless family of Bohemians, 
 such as she and her belongings must undoubtedly appear in 
 his eyes ? What wonderful consequences were to follow 
 his sensational introduction to the family circle she could 
 not clearly have explained. But the introduction in itself 
 was a coup de thddtre it was hard to be called upon to sur- 
 render. 
 
 Eila did not see, or perhaps it was only that she did not 
 rightly interpret, the expression in Hubert's face. Neither 
 . did she understand that his hesitation had nothing to do 
 with the impoverishment of her surroundings. Had she 
 been able to look into his mind, she would have seen that 
 considerations of a v6ry different kind were influencing it. 
 In the first place, he hated to meet strangers. However they 
 might seek to disguise their feelings, he was morbidly con- 
 scious that the first impression he aroused in them must be 
 one of pained astonishment. To meet blood relations in the 
 guise of strangers was even worse than to meet ordinary 
 strangers, for it was odious to think how they would proceed 
 to discuss his deformity the instant his back was turned. 
 He might be as clever as a Crichton and as generous as a 
 Haroun al Raschid, his hump would overshadow these and 
 all his other qualities, and remain eternally associated with 
 his image, to the detriment of all besides. 
 
 There was another point still, though with respect to this 
 he heaped scorn upon himself for letting it bias him. From 
 what he had seen of Eila, he did not deem that she could be 
 classed among the women who are capable of kindling a pure 
 flame of friendship in men's hearts. She was too captivating, 
 too troublant, to use the suggestive French word that oc- 
 curred to him in connection with her, and for which there is 
 
304 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 no fitting English equivalent. To know her and to be pos- 
 sessed by her — and the one seemed almost a consequence of 
 the other — would unfit a man for carrying on the daily af- 
 fairs of life in the workaday world. And to hope to establish 
 any warmer ties than those of friendship with the Bac- 
 chante was out of the question. Unless, indeed . . . What 
 dark possibilities went whirling through Hubert's mind in 
 the wake of this " unless " I would not venture to say. To 
 be sure, she was a wedded wife ; but that was the least of 
 the obstacles that weighed with him, seeing in what man- 
 ner and degree she was wedded. The one insurmountable, 
 insuperable, damnable obstacle was in himself, and his de- 
 formity, which rendered it impossible and ludicrous that he 
 should court the favoiir of whatsoever fair and gracious 
 woman he might adore. And yet, what had women not 
 been known to do for money ? In the case of his beautiful 
 cousin there was a still stronger chord than mere cupidity 
 to play upon. Let anyone stretch forth a hand to hurt her 
 belongings, who were evidently as the Lord's anointed in ' 
 her eyes, and it would be seen of what her nature was 
 capable. To save them from penury and suffering she 
 might be induced to advance many paces farther along the 
 road upon which she had taken the first step when she sat 
 with vine-crowned temples and bared shoulders in the midst 
 of a ribald crowd in the French music-hall. As for sunning 
 himself platonically in the Bacchante's beauty, and becom- 
 ing the benefactor of her family for the pure pleasure it 
 afforded him, this was an alternative that Hubert aban- 
 doned almost as soon as it suggested itself. The mainte- 
 nance of a friendship that should go thus far and no farther 
 was an ideal in which he had but little faith. He had seen 
 his cousin only once before, and already he foresaw with 
 certainty that such a friendship would speedily overleap 
 itself, like vaulting ambition, and fall on the other side, as 
 far, at least, as his own feelings were concerned. 
 
 His better impulse prompted him to bestow some sub- 
 stantial aid on her family in gratitude for the one illumined 
 hour of his dark existence that he owed her, and then to 
 leave her presence for ever. But even if he adopted this 
 
HUBERT RECOGNISES HIS AUSTRALIAN COUSINS. 305 
 
 course, it might be accomplished without his allowing him- 
 self to be drawn into the circle of her belongings, and be- 
 fore he had time to succumb still farther to her influence. 
 To benefit her, it was not necessary that he should also bum 
 his wings like the proverbial moth at the candle, and carry- 
 away a life-long scar. It is possible that Hubert would have 
 acted upon this second and more chivalrous impulse if he 
 had not happened to raise his eyes at this moment and to 
 catch an expression in Ella's face that instantly overthrew 
 his resolution. Though his reflections and hesitations had 
 lasted in reality but a very few seconds, the time had seemed 
 unendurably long to his companion. Such mortification 
 and humiliation were written in her eloquent eyes that he 
 thought of nothing but how to drive them most speedily 
 away. Whatever might be her motive, the evidence of her 
 anxiety to retain him was secretly very gratifying to him, 
 and he hastened now to reassure her by saying warmly : 
 
 " Pray don't think me very rude. I am very much hon- 
 oured by your offer. As a rule I avoid making fresh ac- 
 quaintances. I need not tell you why." 
 
 It was the first allusion he had made to his affliction, 
 and without premeditation Eila found her eyes suddenly 
 suffused. Hubert noted the change in her face, and, curi- 
 ously enough, felt himself drawn magnetically closer to 
 her. 
 
 " I am something of a bear, I admit," he continued hur- 
 riedly ; " and you will allow that there are excuses for me. 
 I would never have dreamed of coming forward the other 
 evening if there had been anyone by to help you." 
 
 " What a happy thing for me that you did," said Eila 
 heartily, her face beaming once more with gratitude and 
 pleasure. " Then I may call the others at once ? " 
 
 " You may prepare them," he made reply, meaningly, 
 but she would not appear to understand. She left him 
 abruptly, and he turned away from the balcony to make a 
 fresh examination of the picture. As he crossed the room 
 to view it more closely, he caught a transient and unex- 
 pected glimpse of his own distorted reflection in the pol- 
 ished mirror, with the silhouette of the square protruding 
 
306 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 shoulders that seemed to hold his large head wedged be- 
 tween them, and the unshapely mould of the back. He 
 mentally apostrophized this image with something that, 
 uttered aloud, would have been not unlike " You damned 
 fool ! " and turned his back upon it, as he stood in contem- 
 plation of the straight and courtly effigy of his own and 
 the Bacchante's joint ancestor— the distinguished Chevalier 
 de Merle. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 HUBERT MEETS HIS COUSINS. 
 
 " I KNEW it ! " cried Mrs. Clare triumphantly, as Eila 
 concluded her story. " Children, what did I promise you 
 when we came away from Hobart ? I knew we should find 
 him all along, I always said so. Where is he ? Where is 
 Hubert ? Take me to him at once." 
 
 " He is waiting to see you, mother,'' said Eila in subdued 
 tones, as a hint to her mother to repress the exuberance of 
 her delight ; " but, oh ! please wait ; don't rush off in such 
 a hurry : there is something I want to tell you all first. Om: 
 cousin is not like other people. Perhaps he had a fall, or 
 something, when he was young.'' Eila could not resist her 
 instinct to smooth away a disagreeable tauot. " I don't know 
 — but he is — is " She drew up her shoulders in uncon- 
 scious portrayal of Hubert's normal attitude, for the parti- 
 tion wall was flimsy, and she was sensitively afraid lest he 
 should catch the ugly word. Her pantomime was uninten- 
 tionally more expressive than her words, and the family 
 shrank back dismayed. All but Mamy, who had not seen 
 the gesture, but who had read the expression written upon 
 the faces of the rest. 
 
 " He is not mad ? " she said in an awed stage whisper. 
 
 "Mad! nonsense!" retorted Eila in the same tones. 
 " Only a little disfigured." 
 
 The relief which this announcement caused found vent 
 in a violently repressed hysterical giggle on the part of the 
 
HUBERT MEETS HIS CODSIKS. 307 
 
 others. It was one of the peculiarities of the Clare family 
 to laugh in season and out of season— more frequently out 
 than in. Under the present emergency it took a long time 
 to bring their facial muscles back to a decorous society 
 angle. When this was partially accomplished they made 
 an advance to the door, following their mother in single 
 file, like Alpine tourists, or a troop of Indians on the war- 
 path. 
 
 If Hubert was a bear, he was at least a well-trained one. 
 He did not glower at women and girls. There was, besides, 
 something so gipsy-like, so unconventional and so nai've, in 
 the aspect of the lady and children (for his young cousins 
 struck him as- being very childish when he saw them 
 grouped together) who defiled into his presence, that they 
 might almost have passed for more curious specimens of hu- 
 manity than himself. This in itself was a reassuring reflec- 
 tion. It was to be also recorded in their favour that they 
 were better trained in the art of dissimulating than any 
 young people he had met hitherto, or was it that their sister 
 had coached them for the occasion ? In either case they ap- 
 peared utterly and absolutely unimpressed by the fact that 
 Nature had handicapped him so cruelly. They clustered 
 round him, each with a hand extended, and a nasal-sound- 
 ing chorus of greeting, in which he had the surprise of hear- 
 ing his Christian name chanted by the youngest of the 
 band. It would appear, then, that he had been a household 
 word among them for years, while he himself was ignorant 
 of their very existence. 
 
 " How we have looked forward to this day, my dear own 
 cousin ! " Mrs. Clare cried on entering. The others clam- 
 oured their welcome. Hubert had retained his cloak, and 
 the vision he presented to the family was that of a dark 
 bearded face, sallow-hued, but not red, with a broad dented 
 forehead and two oblique eyebrows. The nose was big and 
 rugged, but not unduly wide. The jaw was concealed under 
 a harsh grizzled beard and moustache. There was an ex- 
 pression peculiar to the face which presented a curious com- 
 bination of feelings, and which the young Clares learned to 
 identify with it from the first time of their seeing their cous- 
 
308 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 in. It was made up of many emotions, part vexation, part 
 deprecation, part ironical mirth, and part reproach. It was 
 an entirely characteristic and individual expression, and 
 Eila for one knew in a very short time just what kind of 
 things to say in order to provoke it. To refuse the oiler of a 
 treat, or of a benefit of some kind, for instance, upon the 
 ground of not liking to give trouble, was a sure way of 
 bringing it. From the outset, the appearance and behaviour 
 of his new relatives had brought this expression into Hu- 
 bert's face. It was the exact rendering of the kind of sensa- 
 tion they aroused in him. "Very intelligent, but utter 
 fools,'' might have been his first rough verdict upon them, 
 for the two qualities, be it said, are quite compatible. The 
 very enthusiasm they were prepared to lavish upon him, 
 when for all any one of them knew to the contrary he 
 might have been an escaped bushranger in disguise, was a 
 , proof of their utter ignorance of the ways of the world. Yet 
 he could not look upon their effusions entirely as hysterical 
 gush. It was so evident that, for some reason or other he 
 could not divine, they were really spontaneous and sincere. 
 It was perhaps the easier to tolerate them that the girls of 
 the family were so good-looking. Though far from possess- 
 ing the beauty of her sister, Mamy was a vision that might 
 have rejoiced the eyes of rnost people. As for the swarthy 
 lad with the glowing black eyes, Mr. de Merle reserved his 
 opinion about him, though I am afraid the idea flashed 
 through his mind that, if he required an instrument to en- 
 able him to play upon the corde sensible in the beautiful 
 Bacchante's organization, he would not have far to look 
 for it. 
 
 ' " And how did you fijid us, Hubert ? I may call you 
 Hubert ? " said Mrs. Clare radiantly, after the first effusions 
 were over. " For all our efforts to find you were in vain." 
 
 " I must suppose Providence directed me," said Hubert, 
 with a swift look in Eila's direction, which caused her to 
 blush guiltily. " Anyhow, is it not a singular coincidence 
 that, upon the one occasion in my life when I was able to 
 render a slight service to a charming young lady, she should 
 turn out to be my cousin ? " 
 
HUBERT MEETS HIS COUSINS. 309 
 
 " I knew it must come some day," Mrs. Clare affirmed, 
 with jaunty assurance. " Why, our main object in coming 
 home, Hubert, was to find you out — to show you our precious 
 heirloom over there " — she pointed majestically to the pic- 
 ture — " and to ask you whether you — you " 
 
 But the rest of the sentence was destined to remain eter- 
 nally incomplete, for Eila interposed at this juncture with 
 a sudden suggestion that their cousin should be given 
 some tea. 
 
 The suggestion was couched in the friendliest tones ; yet 
 there was, nevertheless, a hint of menace in Eila's soft voice 
 that was clearly understood by her mother and the remain- 
 ing members of the family, and which apprised them dis- 
 tinctly that on no account must they venture to allude to 
 the ruby at this early stage of the proceedings. 
 
 Afternoon tea is a meal which is possible in the most 
 Bohemian of milieus. It is the one refuge and resource of 
 hospitably-inclined but straitened-in-circumstances gentility. 
 Of the store of tea that had been brought from the Antipodes, 
 a small and precious deposit still remained, which Eila pro- 
 duced as a connoisseur in wines might produce a bottle of 
 crusted port a century old. 
 
 The family kettle was set on the stove. Mamy arranged 
 the cups upon the marble mantelpiece ; they were the latest 
 addition purchased with one of the magic coins. Dick 
 slipped outside after a hurried consultation with his sister, 
 and reappeared a few moments later with a bottle of cream 
 and a St. Honore. There were seats for everybody, for 
 Truca had made various excursions into the adjoining rooms, 
 and had returned upon each occasion carrying a straw-cov- 
 ered chair. When the kettle began to sing, the company 
 gathered in an irregular circle round the stove, and Mamy 
 cut half the St. Honore in six pieces — with more to follow — 
 and handed them round. The tea was excellent, and it 
 seemed to have the effect of still further loosening the 
 tongues. Had Mr. Wilton been able to see his misanthropic 
 boss in the midst of the family party at the Boulevard de 
 I'Observatoire, he would have declared that the Bacchante 
 had wrought some spell upon him. Hubert, indeed, was 
 
310 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 like Saul when the evil spirit had been charmed away from 
 him. His impressions were somewhat of the following 
 nature : This curious family of Antipodean cousins was evi- 
 dently prepared to treat him like a long-lost brother. Why 
 should he not enter into the spirit of the joke, and show 
 himself deeply and vitally interested in the separate history 
 of each member in turn ? While the mother was recounting 
 these with all a mother's enthusiastic annotations, he might 
 look from time to time at the beautiful and incomprehensible 
 Bacchante, and enjoy the sense of the secret power over her 
 that the secret they shared in common seemed to confer 
 upon him. He noticed that Eila was magnetically aware of 
 it when he looked at her in this way, though her eyes might 
 be fixed on the ground or she might essay to give herself a 
 countenance by making some entirely superfluous observa- 
 tion to her sister. There was a fascination in compelling 
 her to turn her eyes towards him, and in reading the depre- 
 cation that was written in them. After all, she had willed 
 that things should shape as they were doing. He would 
 have gone away if he had been allowed. She had compelled 
 him, in a measure, to remain, and now events must take 
 their course. Hubert was a superstitious fatalist as well as 
 a scientific fatalist. He would have said that since it is in 
 the nature of pigeons to be eaten by hawks and serpents, it was 
 evident that a certain proportion of pigeons must be infallibly 
 destined to fulfil this law of their nature. Moreover, would 
 it not be the best thing that could happen to this guileless 
 family, stranded in the midst of Paris, to find someone who, 
 for reasons of his own, would adopt them, so to speak, and 
 set them on their legs ? They represented the pigeons in the 
 human world, and might consider themselves lucky if the 
 inevitable hawk only devoured one of their number, and 
 feathered the nests of the remainder with its soft down. 
 Though, if you came to that, the metaphor of devouring sig- 
 nified nothing. A woman is not devoured even metaphor- 
 ically because she finds a generous protector who benefits 
 her and her family in acknowledgment of favours secret, 
 sweet, and precious. 
 
 Hubert had never in his life talked so much on the surface 
 
HUBERT MEETS HIS COUSIXS. 31I 
 
 while his thoughts were so far removed from the topic of 
 his talk. But he proved himself equal to the occasion. So 
 delightfully did he converse, and, what was still more to the 
 point, so delightfully did he listen, that he made, as the 
 French say, the conquest of one and all of the members of 
 the Clare family. 
 
 He went away after obtaining their promise to dine with 
 him in a body at the table d'hote of the Louvre the follow- 
 ing day. The invitation made the hearts of the assembled 
 family leap — Truca especially, whose imagination had been 
 fired by Mamy's description of the palatial splendours of the 
 hotel, and of the iced Polar bear, whereof she had eaten the 
 paws. After Dick had ushered his cousin to the bottom of 
 the four flights of stairs, he returned to the apartment look- 
 ing thoughtful ; he did not even, as was the case after Mrs. 
 Warden's visit, stand on his head to relieve himself. 
 
 He found his sisters eagerly discussing the visitor with 
 their mother. 
 
 " Of course it is something of a drawback," Mrs. Clare 
 was saying, " though for a man it does not matter so much. 
 And what a powerful head he has ! " 
 
 " Wasn't ^sop a hunchback, mother ? " piped Truca. 
 "And he was so clever ! "—with a sigh. 
 
 " He's not like Quasimodo, that's one's comfort," remarked 
 Mamy pensively. " I don't think I could stand a one-eyed, 
 red-headed cousin with a hump, even though it should be 
 
 Hubert." 
 
 " No " said Dick. " I guess he's more like Caliban — a 
 shaggy kind of monster. Well, I wouldn't mind being in 
 his skin and having his tin— that's poetry, you'll observe." 
 
 " I would, then ! " exclaimed Mamy ; " and so would you, 
 whatever you may say. What's the good of money, except- 
 ing to buy happiness ? And you couldn't be happy if you 
 were made like that ! " 
 
 "Couldn't I?" said Dick meaningly. "That's all you 
 know about it. But one can't argue with a girl." 
 
 "I'm not a girl — I'm a woman grown,'' retorted Mamy ; 
 " and, at any rate, I'm as old as you, so there ! " 
 
 And a moment later the family was engaged in a warm 
 
312 NOT COUNTING THE COST. - 
 
 and closely-contested battle of words, turning upon the ques- 
 tions of the age when people might be considered adults, of 
 what the end and aim of money implied, and of what were 
 the different interpretations to be attached to that portent- 
 ous and indefinable word " happiness." 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 HUBERT ADOPTS THE FAMILY. 
 
 The fortunes of the Clares had taken an upward swing. 
 The two concierges could not accuse the family from outre- 
 mer of being without a protector any longer. From the 
 day when Hubert made his way up the long flight of stairs 
 that led to the apartment on the quatrieme their position in 
 this respect had changed. 
 
 Madame Potin was used now to seeing the deformed 
 stranger drive daily to the door, and stump slowly up the 
 steps, carrying now some exquisite roses with genuine trail- 
 ing stalks, anon a small parcel, which doubtless contained 
 some charming present for "ces dames." Many were the 
 conjectures made by the husband and wife_ as to which of 
 the aforementioned " dames " was the favoured one of the 
 three, for Monsieur and Madame Potin would have shrugged 
 their shoulders disdainfully had you suggested to them that 
 the visitor was upon mere terms of friendship with the in- 
 mates of the apartment on the fourth.' Even had they been 
 made to believe this strange fact, it would not have in- 
 creased their respect for any of the parties concerned. Upon 
 the strength of the present hypothesis, their opinion of the 
 family had gone up with a bound, for their friend evidently 
 had "la bourse bien garnie." Upon the first occasion of his 
 calling, Madame Potin had spoken of him contemptuously 
 to her husband as "ce bossu." After Hubert had given her 
 five francs she had changed his title to " ce pauvre monsieur 
 avec la bosse " ; and with the next largesse she dropped the 
 
HUBERT ADOPTS THE FAMILY. 313 
 
 " bosse " altogether, and referred to him as " ce pauvre cher 
 monsieur " only. 
 
 Speculations went on in the den-like loge for a fortnight, 
 for Monsieur Potin was inclined to think that " la chataine " 
 was the lucky one, from the fact that he had seen Mamy 
 open the door one day to her cousin, while he was waxing 
 the landing outside. Madame Potin declared her belief that 
 it was " la noire." " Apres cela," she added cynically, 
 " c'est peut-etre toutes les deux." Monsieur Potin allowed 
 that the " noire " was " un morceau friand." But as for that, 
 " la maman " was not to be disdained even now. 
 
 The family, though entirely unconscious of the cause of 
 the new prestige they had acquired, could not help noticing 
 that the concierges were no longer either surly or insolent. 
 True, they cast a meaning look at the girls and their mother 
 every time they went in and out ; but this might have been 
 owing to the fact that the hats of the latter had been re- 
 trimmed and their bonnet-strings renovated. In the mean- 
 time, moved by her children's entreaties, Mrs. Clare ab- 
 stained from making any reference to the history of the 
 ruby in Hubert's presence. She could afford to bide her 
 time and to enjoy the accomplishment of her prophecies to 
 the full. Her attitude at this time was one of complete and 
 continued triumph. Had not all her predictions been rea- 
 lized, and more than realized ? Had not Hubert of the ruby 
 — ^whom her incredulous children had almost begun to look 
 upon as a mythical personage, or a male Mrs. Harris — 
 proved himself all and more than she had promised ? Down 
 with the cold counsels of prudence and the so-called dictates 
 of reason. Instinct was surer than either. More than ever 
 was Mrs. Clare convinced that the one and only guide to be 
 followed was her own unaided inspiration. Where would 
 she have been now if she had allowed herself to be withheld 
 by the fears of a pack of inexperienced children ? All she 
 had reckoned upon had come to pass. She had brought the 
 family home, and they had found Hubert de Merle, and he 
 had immediately recognised that his mission in life was to 
 provide for them. Mrs. Clare was secretly convinced in her 
 own mind that even his deformity was a Providential dis- 
 
314 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 pensation, granted for the sole purpose of preventing him 
 from founding a home of his own, and of obliging him to 
 keep his affections and his fortune free, until those who 
 were predestined to reap the benefit of them should come 
 his way. The thing seemed so self-evident and so reason- 
 able, now that it had come to pass, so entirely the result of 
 her own foresight as well, that Mrs. Clare could hardly 
 bring herself to feel grateful to their cousin for his lavish- 
 ness. Also if she avoided the topic of the ruby, it was not 
 only in consideration of Eila's representations, but because 
 there was really no present call for mentioning it, or for 
 proposing to give up the picture in exchange for the pre- 
 cious heirloom. After all, a whole silver-mine counts for 
 more than a single ruby. When the latter is converted into 
 money you soon come to an end of its fiery splendour, 
 whereas the former, if well located and well managed, is as 
 inexhaustible as Aladdin's purse. It was a bewildering 
 thing to the Clare family at first to see three gold coins 
 handed to a waiter for a dinner and no change given, as 
 was the case when Hubert took them all to dine one even- 
 ing at Bignon's. They could have sunk beneath the table 
 and hidden themselves under the folds of the satin table- 
 cloth at the reflection that they had swallowed all this 
 money in pistachio sauce with salmon trout, iced cham- 
 pagne, and bombe glacee a la Eusse. But as time went on 
 and the francs and gold pieces flowed from Hubert's purse 
 like a stream of Pactolus, especially, too, as no faintest 
 change of expression, no hint of a suspicion that he was 
 being asked to give more than was reasonable, betrayed 
 itself in his rough-cast features, the family grew reassured. 
 It was understood that they should meet their cousin's 
 friend, Mr. Wilton, a genuine Australian like themselves, 
 some evening at dinner ; but the evening was long in com- 
 ing, for Jack had been called to England by the unexpected 
 arrival of a friend with a racehorse, and had no idea of the 
 nature of the sequel to the evening at the Folies-Fantassin, 
 which was keeping his boss in Paris. 
 
 Several weeks went by, during which Mrs. Clare and her 
 children grew more and more habituated to the new order 
 
HUBERT ADOPTS THE FAMILY. 315 
 
 of things. If Hubert had no intention of adopting the fam- 
 ily permanently, it was conferring but a cruel kindness upon 
 them to steep them in the luxury they were enjoying now. 
 It is hard to go back to a portion of bouilli from which all 
 the flavour has been soaked and boiled, when you have been 
 toying with f oie gras in aspic and salini de perdreaux ; hard 
 to await your turn in a struggling crowd at the tail of a f ast- 
 fllling omnibus, when a springy landau or swiftly-rolling 
 brougham has borne you hither and thither at your pleasure. 
 
 The only person who felt an occasional misgiving at be- 
 ing immersed in these Oapuan delights was EUa, but, con- 
 formably with her nature, she could not find it in her heart 
 to cast even a transient shadow upon the joy of the rest. 
 Nothing could have been more evident than that they were 
 made for the enjoyment of money. After the first awkward- 
 ness of astonishment and unaccustomedness had worn off, 
 they could one and all step into a carriage, enter a restaurant 
 or a theatre, or give a direction to a coachman or a waiter, 
 with as natural an air as though to the m.anner born. Dick 
 was, perhaps, the aptest pupil. He seemed to be always pro- 
 vided now with pocket-money, and would spend it royally. 
 Surrounded by the aiireola shed upon him by his silver-king 
 cousin, he began to be noticed in the streets for his handsome 
 eyes and supple figure. Eila felt something of a mother's 
 pride and tender alarm^ as she intercepted the glances cast in 
 his direction by the tastefully-attired grisettes. True to their 
 principle of taking no thought of the future, save only the 
 remote and intangible future of what Mrs. Clare called their 
 spiritual essences, the young Clares continued to sun them- 
 selves in their good fortune as though it were to last for 
 ever. 
 
 Willie alone refused to be seduced from his post in the 
 London bank, or to become a pensioner upon his cousin's 
 bounty. In vain his mother sent him a crossed letter of 
 eight pages — Mrs. Clare's letters were masterpieces of elo- 
 quent reasoning, in which she showed him point by point 
 that Hubert de Merle, being in possession of the ruby which 
 rightly belonged to herself and her daughters, was only ac- 
 quitting himself of a debt of long standing in providing for 
 21 
 
316 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the family — in vain declared that, though no open reference 
 to the subject had been made, Hubert was proving tacitly in 
 the clearest way that he appreciated the situation precisely 
 as she did. 
 
 Willie's only reply was a blunt inquiry as to what steps 
 were being taken to piit Dick in the way of earning his live- 
 lihood, and to suggest that, as their cousin was so generously 
 disposed, Truca should be placed in a good school. 
 
 The family exchanged pitying glances as this letter was 
 read aloud. Poor Willie was always hopelessly matter-of- 
 fact It is possible, nevertheless, that even the delights of 
 theatres, restaurants, and long expeditions to Versailles, St. 
 Cloud, and other famous parks and palaces, would have be- 
 gun to pall in time. But before the novelty had had time 
 to wear off, Hubert made a most entrancing proposition. It 
 was none other than that of combining a tour through Cen- 
 tral Europe in a family party. He had proposed the plan to 
 Mrs. Clare in a way that made it impossible to refuse, even 
 had she been minded so to do, which, it is needless to say, 
 she was not. 
 
 " You see what a helpless old fellow I am," he said ; it 
 was upon the occasion of Truca's sewing a button on his 
 glove for him. " If you will take ca**^ of me on our travels, 
 and make up your minds about thej^ces you want to see, 
 I will be paymaster and choose the hotels. That's a fair 
 division of labour, and I dare say we won't quarrel about 
 the route." 
 
 To say that the family were transported into the seventh 
 heaven by this proposal is to give but a faint idea of the 
 ecstatic delight with which they hailed it. The seventh 
 heaven of soberer folk became a sevenfold seventh to them. 
 Dick alone did not share the transports of the rest. His atti- 
 tude of late had given Eila some uneasiness. After dinner, 
 which was now a sumptuous evening meal that seemed 
 upon the rare occasions when the family dined at home to 
 come as easily as though it had sprung from some magic 
 table-cloth, Dick would find a pretext for taking himself off, 
 and once he had disappeared, Eila knew that the night 
 would be on the wane before his step was heard ascending 
 
HUBERT ADOPTS THE FAMILY. 317 
 
 the staircase again. He had entirely thrown over Comte 
 and the Positivist creed. Alfred de Musset's poems and the 
 " Fleurs du Mai " of Beaudelaire were the books that tum- 
 bled out from behind his pillow when Eila went to make his 
 bed in the morning ; for Eila was still Cinderella in the 
 early part of the day. She had refused to let Hubert engage 
 a servant for the bare wards of the quatrieme, which, de- 
 spite the golden atmosphere in which the family moved, re- 
 mained as bare as ever. It was useless to furnish on the 
 eve of a journey, and Hubert had suggested that they 
 should look for a pavilion at Passy in a garden on their re- 
 turn. It seemed to be taken for granted now that he had, 
 in the literal sense of Mrs. Clare's vague prophecy, uttered a 
 year ago on the Cowa veranda, really adopted the family. 
 Nor could he be accused of showing any preferences. He 
 never invited one member of Ijhe household without the 
 others. Whatever might be the nature of the daily enter- 
 tainment or festivity, all alike were bidden to share in it. 
 Neither did he address his conversation more particularly 
 to one than to another. Upon days of threatening snow, 
 when the air outside seemed to pinch the cheeks and make 
 the eyes smart, he would spend his afternoons by the stove 
 of the reception-room smoking. Eila had speedily discov- 
 ered that he preferred his pipe to a cigar, and the family, 
 taking their cue from her, declared with one accord that if 
 there was one thing they liked better in the world than an- 
 other, it was tobacco-smoke. The talk on these occasions 
 would be pleasant enough. The Bush and Tasmania were 
 fertile themes of interest ; Hubert never alluded, however, 
 to what might be called the middle distance of his life. 
 Then, it was always a pleasure to hear of the days when the 
 duplicate portrait of the Chevalier had watched over his child- 
 hood. But more interesting still to the Clare family was 
 the topic of the Unknowable, and the speculative domain it 
 opened up. The earnest persistency with which Mrs. Clare 
 would revert to this fathomless subject, and pour out the 
 same stream of conjectures daily, as the Danaides poured 
 water into their unfillable pails, seemed to afford Hubert 
 much amusement. The interruption for afternoon tea would 
 
318 NOT COUNTINGf THE COST. 
 
 make an agreeable break. If it were only the sound of the 
 kettle singing on the stove, and the sight of the girls bestir- 
 ring themselves to arrange the cups and cut the thin bread- 
 and-butter, there was a suggestion of domestic intimacy and 
 cosiness in the function peculiarly grateful to one who, like 
 Hubert, had led a hermit's life for so long. 
 
 It might have been supposed that nothing now was want- 
 ing to fill Eila's cup of satisfaction to the brim. Whence 
 came, then, the feeling that haunted her perpetually, that a 
 price would be exacted for all these blessings, which she, 
 and she alone, would be called upon to pay ? 
 
 It came upon her suddenly one rainy afternoon with 
 the force of a thunderbolt. She had turned round without 
 warning after filling her teapot, and encountered Hubert's 
 eyes resting upon her. It was evident to her that he had 
 not expected her to intercept his glance, and that he had no 
 time to change hia expression before she caught its mean- 
 ing. So clearly and relentlessly this meaning was expressed 
 that her soul quailed before it. Sooner or later, at his own 
 hour, Hubert would appear before her and claim the pay- 
 ment of his debt. In what coin, and after what fashion 
 he might claim it, she could not say ; but claim it he 
 would, and at her hands alone. The conviction came upon 
 her with the unreasoning force of an inspiration. She had 
 seen the look in her cousin's eyes that Mephistopheles might 
 have worn when he stood behind Marguerite in the church. 
 It spoke of such a masterful certainty of having and hold- 
 ing her in his own good time that she trembled lest others 
 besides herself should have guessed its meaning. But Mamy 
 and Truca were laughing over some trivial joke, and Mrs. 
 Clare was posing for Dick, who had not found a studio to 
 go to as yet, but exercised his talent, when the fit took him, 
 upon mother and sisters. Eila lowered her eyes in relief, 
 but the impression of Hubert's glance made her shudder 
 when she thought of it afterwards. In vain she essayed to 
 reason down her fears, to treat her terror as the fancy df a 
 sick brain. That the expression she had read in Hubert's 
 eyes conveyed the mute betrayal of his belief that she 
 was his prey, was an idea which began to take possession of 
 
HUBERT ADOPTS THE FAMILY. 319 
 
 her mind. Nothing but time could dislodge it. She told 
 herself that with this feeling it would have been her imme- 
 diate duty to come to an understanding with her cousin. 
 She should take him aside and tell him that she could not 
 continue to allow him to heap favours upon them as he had 
 been doing hitherto. If he would assist her to find an hon- 
 ourable employment, and give Dick some sound advice upon 
 the score of the studio, well and good. He would still have 
 earned their undying gratitude, and she hoped he would 
 allow them to look upon him. as a friend for life. 
 
 Eila rehearsed the interview nightly in various forms in 
 her own mind, as she lay awake through the slowly-creeping 
 hours, while the happy family slumbered. And when the 
 morning came she put off for yet another day the carrying 
 out of her resolve. All manner of objections presented 
 themselves. Supposing she should only provoke the catas- 
 trophe she was so anxious to avoid. Supposing Hubert 
 should read her meaning wrongly, and suspect her of seek- 
 ing to obtain some permanent benefit for the family. 
 
 The warning to let a sleeping dog lie would recur to her 
 in connection with his look, and render her yet more fearful 
 of breaking the spell. There was also the impending jour- 
 ney to be taken into account. Would it not be a cruel thing 
 to disturb the joyous and confident anticipations that the 
 family indulged in from morning to night ? Perhaps there 
 would yet be time to speak when they returned from their 
 travels. Let them at least enjoy undisturbed the wondrous 
 treat they had been promised. Eila could almost have found 
 it in her heart to envy them their confidence. How entirely 
 happy would she have been without the hidden terror that 
 oppressed her ! Hubert was not only kindly and courtly : 
 he possessed such a store of knowledge that to go out with 
 him upon the usually profitless round of sight-seeing was to 
 come back with one's mind filled with fresh views and in- 
 terests undreamed of before. Life would have been one 
 dream of bliss under its present aspect had she only been 
 able to exorcise the spectre she had raised. But all her en- 
 deavours were powerless to drive it away. 
 
 And yet even before this nightmare had come upon her, 
 
320 NOT COUNTINa THE COST. 
 
 and when she had found her dreams of pleasure most en- 
 tirely realized, had she not felt that it was impossible to 
 maintain a constant sense of rapture and surprise ? It is a 
 comforting theory to those who ponder upon the hideous 
 mystery of physical pain that the sensation of suffering, 
 like that of joy, has certain fixed limits beyond which it 
 cannot go. This at least is the belief of those amongst us 
 who have not realized the meaning of the word " infinity " 
 in connection with joy or sorrow. Eila would have de- 
 clared that the theory was true as regarded happiness if not 
 as regarded misery, for even when there had been no night- 
 mare, and all her wishes for the family had seemed on the 
 point of coming true, she had not been able to rise to the 
 pitch of ecstatic satisfaction she considered it incumbent 
 upon her to feel. 
 
 A few weeks ago the idea of travelling with the family 
 through Europe in comfort and luxury would have appeared 
 a wild and unattainable dream of delight. Now that prepa- 
 rations were being actually made to carry it into effect, the 
 lassitude of reaction was creeping over her. The phase of 
 misery through which the family had passed seemed "far 
 enough away, but she could not forget that, though they 
 themselves had escaped, millions of their fellow-creatures, 
 with no silver-king cousin to help them, were groaning un- 
 der a similar load. 
 
 Mamy was oppressed by no such thoughts. She was still 
 at the age when happiness for ourselves means happiness, 
 or the possibility of it, for all the universe around. It had 
 been a delicious moment for Mamy when she had informed 
 Mrs. Warden that they were going to travel through Ger- 
 many and Italy, and she had seen the surprise bordering 
 upon incredulity depicted upon that lady's face. 
 
 " What ! all of you together ? " she had exclaimed. 
 
 "Yes,'' said Mamy; "there is a cousin of my mother's in 
 Paris who is going with us— Mr. de Merle, of Tarragunyah." 
 
 " What ! the silver-mine De Merle ! " ejaculated Mrs. War- 
 den, more profoundly astonished than ever. "Dear mel 
 how extraordinary ! Since when has he been your cousin ? " 
 
 This was not exactly the form in which she had in- 
 
A NEW CATASTROPHE. 321 
 
 tended to put her question, but astonishment rendered her 
 incoherent. She found herself called upon to make a rapid 
 and complete readjustment of the mental focus whence she 
 had been accustomed to view the peculiar family. Such a 
 volte-face was not to bo accomplished without a sense of 
 giddiness. 
 
 " Since when have we found out, you mean," said Mamy 
 composedly. "We always knew Mr. de Merle was our 
 cousin, but we did not expect to find him in Paris so soon." 
 
 " He is not married, I believe ? " asked Mrs. Warden cu- 
 riously. 
 
 " Married I Oh no ! he is not -^ 
 
 It would have seemed as though Mamy had been on the 
 point of making some confidence she might have regretted, 
 for she stopped suddenly short and said no more. 
 
 " Not what ? Not a marrying man ? " 
 
 "No, not a marrying man at all," repeated Mamy, catch- 
 ing at the vague formula, and all Mrs. Warden's efforts to 
 make her more explicit failed in their object. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A NEW CATASTROPHE. 
 
 It was a bright morning in New Year's week — such a 
 morning as the frost and sunshine working in harmony will 
 occasionally produce for the delight of shivering humanity. 
 Mamie stood on the balcony of the quatrieme, beating her 
 arms with both hands, as she had seen the coachmen do, to 
 keep out the cold. She had left her elder sister to the task of 
 turning out the contents of the weather-beaten trunks on the 
 polished floor of the reception-room as a preliminary to fill- 
 ing them with wearing apparel for the contemplated tour. 
 An animated discussion had been carried on between Eila 
 and her mother upon the subject of what to take and what 
 to leave behind. Mrs. Clare insisted that the greater portion 
 of the lamentable family bric-d-brac should be included in 
 
322 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the baggage, and Eila found it necessary to fight a fresh bat- 
 tle over every object she took up from the heap of odds and 
 ends scattered on the floor. 
 
 Partly to escape the discussion, and partly because there 
 was so much to look at out of doors, Mamy danced out upon 
 the balcony, shutting the folding glass-doors behind her as 
 she passed out of the room. The frosty air seemed to bite 
 her cheeks and tweak her nose, but it was impossible not to 
 have an illusion of warmth under so brilliant a sun, and by 
 continuing to beat her arms and to breathe upon her finger- 
 tips, she contrived to cheat her sensations while she leaned 
 over the railing and watched the scene below. 
 
 If the fresh delight of youth in change and variety could 
 be indefinitely maintained, Flammarion's conception of an 
 after-existence devoted to a tour among ever new celestial 
 bodies might have much to recommend it. To our little girl 
 from Hobart, the aspect of the booths that had sprung up in 
 the Paris streets during New Year's week, and that converted 
 the beautiful city into the semblance of a monstrous fair, 
 was a spectacle as exhilarating as it was novel. She could 
 follow the line of booths a long way down the boulevard 
 from her elevated post of observation. And first came a 
 shed filled to overflowing with shining globes, in silver and 
 gold, in red and blue, that dangled from the ceiling and lay 
 heaped upon the counter in resplendent profusion, like the 
 treasures of Aladdin's cave in a theatrical extravaganza. 
 Next came a canvas-covered booth that Mamy passed over 
 quickly. It seemed like a discordant note in a gay chorus ; 
 for the exterior walls displayed the efflgy of a murderer in 
 the act of strangling his victim, painted in bright vermilion 
 and yellow ochre. Close by was a ginger-bread stall, with 
 the contents bedecked in bindings of pink and white sugar. 
 There were orange stalls overflowing with oranges in silver 
 wrappings, and cosy booths where crisp hot gau£fres were 
 served at a sou per head. The roofs of the booths sparkled 
 with glittering rime, and in the streets the ambulant vendor 
 of the new toy of the season (a miniature guillotine that 
 adroitly decapitated a Prussian assassin) was walking up 
 and down, and stopping the passers-by with his cry of 
 
A NEW CATASTROPHE. 323 
 
 " Achetez le nouveau jouet de I'aniiee — achetez le Prussien 
 decapite." 
 
 Mamy would have liked to spend all her morning in 
 watching the New Year junketers pass in and out of the 
 booths. She felt herself in a holiday frame of mind. Syd- 
 ney Warden had betaken himself to the Riviera with his 
 mother and sister, and though Mamy would not have gone 
 so far as to say that his absence was a boon, she could not 
 help feeling that it was a relief to be spared the necessity for 
 encouraging or discouraging him. for the present. The pros- 
 pect of the European tour was another motive for feeling 
 joyful. And to crown all, Mamy had been ordered by Hu- 
 bert to procure herself a new tailor-made travelling suit at 
 a grand costumier's on the other side of the Seine. Even 
 this last delightful consideration, however, could not pre- 
 vent her from perceiving that the air was very biting. If 
 you cannot hold fire in your hand by thinking on the frosty 
 Caucasus, neither can you keep your hands warm with the 
 thermometer below zero by filling in the details of a tailor- 
 made dress in your imagination. Mamy danced back into 
 the reception-room as she had danced out of it, and burst 
 into a gay laugh as she discovered Eila seated on the floor, 
 her lap filled with a heterogeneous collection of nondescript 
 articles over which she was shaking her head despairingly. 
 
 " You look cross for once, Eila," she cried mockingly ; 
 " one would think you were playing a game of forfeits with 
 mother. Here's a thing and a very pretty thing, and what's 
 to be done with the owner of this pretty thing 1 " She 
 snatched up an old glove and waved it in the air trium- 
 phantly. 
 
 " What indeed ! " said Eila dolefully ; " perhaps you can 
 make mother listen to reason, Mamy, for I can't. What we 
 are going to do with ' Selections from the Poets,' and a Tas- 
 manian cookery-book, and Dick's first attempt at drawing — 
 to say nothing of a broken Chinese workbox and an old 
 bird-cage — on our travels I can't imagine. Mother wants 
 them all to be packed in with our clothes." 
 
 "They take no room to speak of," said Mrs. Clare 
 promptly ; " and they're all worth something. Dear me ! I 
 
324 NOT COTJNTINa THE COST. 
 
 had that box when I was your age, Mamy. I wouldn't part 
 with it for any money. They don't send such objects as 
 that out of China any longer, I believe. I dare say they 
 have lost the secret of making them. I know I never saw 
 another like it anywhere.'' 
 
 "And the cage," interrupted Eila with a sigh, "it cost 
 seven and sixpence in Hobart when it was new, and we had 
 it in use for years. It's only fit for the hac d'ordure now." 
 
 "That cage ! Why, it's the very thing to pack small ob- 
 jects in," Mrs. Clare said, with cheerful assurance; "you 
 can find what you want in it directly — and that is a great 
 advantage. Besides, if it was worth seven and sixpence be- 
 fore, it's worth quite five francs now ; and I'm not going to 
 throw away five francs, or put temptation into the way of 
 the concierge after we've gone." 
 
 The discussion was interrupted by the sudden vibration 
 of the electric bell. Everyone started, and Eila composed 
 her countenance as well as she was able, expecting to see 
 her cousin's ungainly form cross the threshold. But it was 
 not Hubert ; only the postman, who walked in, uninvited, 
 as Paris postmen are wont to do, and who handed her a 
 small blue paper, stamped with strange hieroglyphics, and a 
 paper book, which he requested her to sign. Eila had risen 
 hastily from the floor, and stood abashed in the midst of the 
 flotsam and jetsam of the family relics. She received the 
 paper with so dazed an air that the postman eyed her sus- 
 piciously, and asked her for the second time if she was 
 " bien Madame Frost," before he handed her the book for 
 her signature. 
 
 It was a relief to find that her mother and sister had left 
 the room. Even Truca was not present, for she had run 
 away after opening the door to the postman ; therefore, when 
 Eila had signed the book and despatched the messenger 
 with three sous for his pour-boire, she proceeded to inspect 
 the missive at her leisure. It proved to be a money-order 
 for twelve hundred and fifty francs — fifty pounds of English 
 money. While she was engaged in wondering, with some- 
 thing like a feeling of terror, whether it was Hubert who 
 had sent her this money, and, if so, with what purpose, a 
 
A NEW CATASTROPHE. 325 
 
 second pressure of the electric bell, -which she answered in 
 person this time after thrusting the paper hastily into her 
 pocket, brought her the explanation of the mystery. It 
 came in the guise of a telegram, with the curt address of 
 " Frost,'' the number of the house, and the words " Observa- 
 toire," Paris. Eila tore it open. The contents were the fol- 
 lowing three words : " Eeceiye fifty. — Reginald.'' 
 
 So it was Reginald who had sent her the money. Alas ! 
 how much must it have cost him to send her even this curt 
 message, was Eila's first thought. She turned the telegram 
 round as tenderly as though Reginald's own fingers had 
 handled it. The evidence of his remembrance touched her 
 deeply; but why had he committed the uncalled-for ex- 
 travagance of sending her money by cable ? And why had 
 he chosen this moment of all others for doing so ? What 
 reason had he for supposing that the family was in such 
 urgent need of help ? If he had fifty pounds to spare, why 
 could he not have waited to send them by the mail with a 
 letter of explanation which would have reached her five or 
 six weeks hence, and which would have cost so much less 
 than the telegram ! 
 
 " I will send the money back to him," she reflected ; " he 
 needs it more than we do, though I dare say he thinks we 
 are just as hard up as we can be. How true his warnings 
 were, all the same ! A few weeks ago we were almost with- 
 out bread, and if the money had come at that time, I should 
 never have gone to the Folies-Fantassin, but then we should 
 have been without the two hundred pounds, and we should 
 never have known Hubert. And yet fifty pounds coming 
 then would have saved us. Only instead of living upon our 
 cousin's bounty, as we are doing now, I should have been 
 obliged to look for work, and perhaps — who knows ? — it 
 would have been better for us all in the end." 
 
 A third reverberation of the electric bell broke in once 
 more upon her musings. And yet another telegram was 
 placed in her hands. Tremblingly she signed her name for 
 the third time in a third book. Some special providence 
 seemed to keep the family out of the way, as these succes- 
 sive missives, of which none but herself must know the im- 
 
326 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 port, reached her. But for greater safety she carried the 
 last-arrived despatch into the tainiature kitchen, which was 
 regarded as her own especial doniesne, and feigned to rattle 
 the saucepans to avert suspicion while she looked at the con- 
 tents. The telegram was from London, and was sent by her 
 brother. It contained the news of an unlooked-for and 
 overwhelming disaster : 
 
 " Assurance Company failed. Expect no more remit- 
 tances. Family ruined. Will send ten pounds." 
 
 Eila read these fatal words to the end, but upon the first 
 reading she only half grasped their significance. That they 
 conveyed tidings of a disastrous nature was clear to her from 
 the fact that her cheeks and lips felt so unaccountably cold, 
 and that the blue and white tiles that lined a portion of the 
 miniature walls seemed to grow all blurred and indistinct in 
 an instant. Upon a second reading, the full extent of the 
 catastrophe was borne in upon her, descending with the force 
 of a well-aimed blow. She, her mother, her brothers and 
 sisters, were beggars. Not in the sense of standing like the 
 blind man on the Boulevard St. Michel, with hand out- 
 stretched to the passers-by, but in the sense of being actually 
 dependent upon their fellow-creatures to keep them alive. 
 Small as their income had been, they had never doubted that 
 it was certain — as certain as the rising of the sun or the 
 blowing of the wind. To be suddenly and unexpectedly de- 
 prived of it through no fault of their own at one fell stroke, 
 seemed as incomprehensible and inexplicable as it was cruel 
 and unjust. The money their father had paid for his insur- 
 ance had not been dissipated by themselves. It must still be 
 theirs, no matter how assurance companies might mismanage 
 their affairs. There could be no law that allowed men to 
 steal what belonged to a widow and her children — all they 
 had to live upon— and to turn them into paupers at a mo- 
 ment's notice. Eila knew that misfortunes did occasionally 
 overtake people through no fault of their own. She had 
 heard of whole families being ruined by the unexpected 
 failure of a bank, but the meaning of such catastrophes had 
 never been quite understood by her before. She had listened 
 to such tales with something of the incredulity of ignorance. 
 
A NEW CATASTROPHE. 327 
 
 Could it be possible that the system upon which money m.at- 
 ters were arranged ia the world was so iniquitous that inno- 
 cent people might be robbed by those who had charge of 
 their money. That burglars should commit robbery was 
 another matter. That, at least, was honest robbing, for it 
 allowed people to take their precautions, and even to knock 
 the burglar on the head, or to hand him over to the police 
 when he was caught. But to steal the money that had been 
 given you to take care of — the money that a poor dead man 
 had left in trust for his wife and children when he should 
 be no longer there to work for them ! That was indeed a 
 cowardly, cruel and dastardly action. Burning tears, that 
 seemed to sear her eyelids as they rose, forced their way 
 down. Eila's cheeks. Now she understood the meaning of 
 Reginald's gift of money and telegram. Pitifully, gen- 
 erously, indeed, had he forestalled the news of the disaster. 
 He could hardly have had time to hear of it in Hobart before 
 he had sent his poor fifty pounds to Paris. Well, with that 
 and the napoleons she had stored away after her Folies- 
 Tantassin exploit, there was time to turn round. But after- 
 wards ! what would become of the family then ? What 
 would have become of them, indeed, all this time if Hubert 
 had not taken them under his protection ? In the midst of 
 her tears a bitter smile crossed Eila's lips as she pictured the 
 pauper band embarking upon their Continental tour. But 
 was it not folly to embark at all while they depended for 
 their very subsistence upon the caprice of a rich relation, 
 who might drop them, if he were so minded, as suddenly 
 and inexplicably as he had taken them up ? What if Hubert 
 should fall down dead while they were travelling, and before 
 the hotel bill was paid ? Such things had been heard of, and 
 should she not see to it that proper precautions were taken 
 before they set out ? Ought she not, indeed, to inform their 
 cousin instantly of the catastrophe that had befallen the 
 family, and to make him understand the wild absurdity of 
 their travelling about in luxurious idleness while they were 
 literally without the means of procuring themselves a meal ? 
 One thing, at least, Eila was resolved upon. The burden of 
 the catastrophe, and the new and terrible responsibility it 
 
328 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 laid upon her, must not be shared with the others. The next 
 remittance would not be due for three months. In her ca- 
 pacity of family treasurer, it was she who had charge of the 
 funds, and before three months were over, Hubert might 
 propose to assist the family permanently, or Mamy might 
 be induced to accept her rich suitor. In any case, she felt 
 determined to keep all knowledge of the blow from her 
 mother and sisters until the news could be communicated 
 without the risk of occasioning them the same feeling of 
 helpless desperation and utter heart-sickness as she herself 
 had experienced on reading her brother's telegram. And 
 then, Cinderella-like, she seated herself on the edge of the 
 little blue-tiled stove, and half closed her eyes in the effort 
 of thinking how she could avert the consequences of the 
 new disaster. It was borne in upon her, as she sat, that the 
 power to avert them was hers if she had the will. For when 
 virtue and talent and innocence are at a discount, there is 
 always a market for beauty. It is the one ware of all others 
 of which the value may be instantly realized. Nor would 
 she have to look far for a bidder ; the Prince of Darkness, 
 who whispered this suggestion in her ear, conjured up a 
 vision to enforce it. No vision of a casket filled with jewels 
 was it, like that which the fair Marguerite found on her 
 path ; nothing but five separate pictures of mother and Willie 
 and Dick and Mamy and Truca, each in the assured enjoy- 
 ment of food and clothes and home, anduU that they wanted 
 to make life beautiful and pleasant. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CLOUDS CONTINtTE TO GATHER. 
 
 It seemed to be Eila's fate now to have to decide mo- 
 mentous questions by her own unaided judgment. Having 
 kept the family in ignorance of their dire poverty upon a 
 former occasion, she resolutely carried out her latest con- 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 329 
 
 ceived project of hiding from them the new stroke of des- 
 tiny that had descended upon them. 
 
 They were ruined, but to all outward appearance their 
 position was as secure, and even as luxurious as before. 
 Why should she drive them out of their fools' paradise as 
 long as she could help to maintain them in it ? She wrote 
 to her brother in London, telling him his ten pounds were 
 not needed, and imploring him to keep the tidings of the 
 catastrophe a secret, until fuller details should be forth- 
 coming, promising at the same time that she would herself 
 break the news to her mother when she might do so with 
 safety. Her own interpretation of this phrase meant when 
 she should have laid the matter before her cousin and ascer- . 
 tained how far he intended to help them. If Hubert prom- 
 ised permanent pecuniary assistance, she might fearlessly 
 impart the news of the disaster to the other members of the 
 family — albeit it was a cruel thing for them to be robbed of 
 their little all (for nothing could shake Eila's conviction 
 that the directors of the insurance company were actual 
 robbers) ; still, the knowledge that they would not be left 
 destitute would give them courage. And, meanwhile, would 
 it not be an act of unnecessary and wanton cruelty to cast 
 so dismal a shadow over their preparations for the coming 
 journey, since every day of happiness was, after all, a day 
 to the good in the dreary comedy of life ? While reasoning 
 thus, Eila delayed, nevertheless, to carry out her plan of 
 taking Hubert into her confidence. The unaccountable 
 misgiving he had inspired in her kept her silent in spite of 
 herself. Yet every day she was aware that the necessity 
 for speaking was growing more urgent. Before long the 
 family would be in the same plight as when she had res- 
 cued them by exhibiting herself at the Folies-Fantassin — 
 an episode of which none but Hubert had any knowledge. 
 She had decided upon keeping Reginald's money after send- 
 ing him a letter which had both touched and mortified him. 
 The outpouring of gratitude that formed its principal theme 
 was pitiful in its heart-felt sincerity, but this was not what 
 the donor wanted. With a little more understanding of 
 his sentiment for her, prompted by ever so little of a corre- 
 
330 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 spending sentiment on her own side, she must have under- 
 stood that there could be no question of gratitude from her 
 to him. 
 
 She devoted her energies now to eking out the money as 
 carefully as possible, and thanks to Hubert's practice of in- 
 viting the family to dine almost daily at a restaurant, Regi- 
 nald's donation promised to hold out for a considerable 
 time. Moreover, there was still her reserve fund from the 
 two hundred pounds to fall back upon, and neither her 
 mother nor sisters had entirely spent their separate share of 
 the gain. 
 
 The time of the departure upon the tour of pleasure was 
 fixed for the end of January. It was arranged that the 
 party should travel to Brussels ; thence to Cologne, Berlin, 
 Prague, Dresden, Vienna and Buda-Pesth. It was to be en- 
 tirely Hubert's treat ; and upon the strength of the ruby, to 
 which no allusion had been m^ade openly, but which Mrs. 
 Clare fiourished before her children's imagination when- 
 ever she was alone with them, they were to be accompanied 
 by a courier, who would look after their luggage, pilot them 
 to the best hotels, and perch himself upon the box of their 
 carriage when they were out sight-seeing. Here was a con- 
 trast to their erstwhile experience in the London docks. 
 With so brilliant a prospect in view, it seemed almost an 
 impertinence to suggest that they were literally penniless ; 
 and though Eila carried the dreary knowledge of the truth 
 constantly about with her, there were yet times when she 
 could hardly bring herself to believe that it really was the 
 truth. Never before had the concierges heaped such cour- 
 tesies upon them. One or other 6f the evil-looking pair 
 would run out of their den whenever a parcel for the 
 quatrieme was delivered below, and carry it up to ces 
 dames in person. The girls were perfectly aware that it 
 was the reflected lustre of their cousin's gold which pro- 
 cured them, these attentions. Nevertheless, they could not 
 help feeling that they were agreeable. For one thing, it 
 was so much easier to follow one's natural prompting to 
 smile and nod when one was bowed to, instead of being 
 scowled at ; and for another, it was nice to make sure of 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 331 
 
 having one's parcels and letters brought up the moment 
 they arrived. 
 
 Ella had, however, more than one burden to bear in 
 secret at tliis time. After enduring great uneasiness on ac- 
 count of Dick's frequent absences, she had been relieved to 
 find that he had developed a sudden sympathy for Hubert, 
 and that he was constantly to be found in the society of the 
 latter. The oddly-contrasted pair, looking like the magician 
 and the prince out of a tale in the " Arabian Nights," seemed 
 to have special haunts of their own. Dick was also em- 
 ployed by his cousin in his room at the Louvre to copy his 
 business letters and sort his papers for him. Even this 
 small temporary occupation was better than nothing, and 
 Eila had ceased to let the thought of her brother's aimless 
 existence weigh upon her, when an event occurred which 
 proved that her first forebodings had been only too well 
 founded. It came about in this wise, upon a Sunday even- 
 ing. 
 
 Mamy had been reading " Zanoni " to her mother all the 
 afternoon by the side of the stove, for the siaow was whirling 
 down in fine-drawn flakes, and at four o'clock the prospect 
 out of doors was so black through the gray-white moving 
 screen, that the blinds had been drawn and the family had 
 clustered round thfe red-hot centre of warmth. It was taken 
 for granted that Hubert would come with a carriage before 
 seven o'clock to take them to a restaurant. The squeezing 
 in of six people into the large closed landau that he would 
 have waiting for them was part of the pleasure of the expe- 
 dition, for the family seemed to be all of similar eel-like 
 proportions, capable of curling into a very small space when 
 occasion required. There were evenings when no landau 
 came. Only a boy from the restaurant, with a white paper 
 cap on his head, would appear with a column of most appe- 
 tizing dishes, which were immediately set out for consump- 
 tion upon the table from the ante-chamber that had been 
 previously dragged into the reception-room for the sake of 
 the warmth. On this particular Sunday evening, however, 
 Hubert failed to make his appearance. More inexplicable 
 still, Dick did not return, and a dismal circumstance in con- 
 22 
 
332 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 nection with these two perplexing facts was that no boy in 
 a paper cap presented himself from the restaurant. The 
 family (though their interest in " Zanoni " had begun to 
 wane about six) kept up heart until seven. But as their 
 hunger increased, their uneasiness increased with it, and 
 when half -past seven had struck, the faces of the group were 
 eloquently long. Eila was suffering a tenfold strain of 
 anxiety. " What a thin volcano crust we are living on!" 
 she thought ; " we have no claim on our cousin, and no ab- 
 solute warrant for trusting him. If he chooses to drop us 
 from one day to another, we can have nothing to say. Per- 
 haps his forgetting us to-night is a sign that he has had 
 enough of us. I must speak to-morrow, at all costs ; but, 
 oh, what a relief it would be if we had learned to depend 
 upon ourselves ! The others are not to blame as I am, for 
 they do not know that we are standing on the brink of beg- 
 gary." 
 
 Her anxiety grew keener as the hours dragged on. 
 Where was Hubert ? Where was Dick ? Were they to- 
 gether ? and if so, how could it be possible that they 
 should have left the family, hungry and forlorn, to await 
 their coming ? Some fatal accident must have happened ; 
 or was it, perhaps, that one had missed the other ? Cer- 
 tainly no definite arrangement had been made; but 
 it was tacitly understood that both of them — Dick, in any 
 case — should appear before dinner could be thought of. 
 Seven o'clock laboured slowly on to eight, and eight to 
 nine, and the consternation of the family reached a point 
 at which it became manifest that something must be done. 
 Even their hunger was almost forgotten in their uneasiness. 
 Eila insisted, when nine o'clock struck, that they should 
 have some toast and tea, after which she proposed to make 
 an expedition to the Hotel du Louvre through the whirling 
 snow to make inquiries. Mamy declared that she would 
 accompany her sister; and the two girls crept down the 
 stairs in their old board-ship ulsters, feeling almost guilty 
 as they passed the concierge's den, shrinking from the 
 glances of insolent curiosity with which their exit was fol- 
 lowed. They took refuge, shivering, in the first tram that 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 333 
 
 passed silently down the boulevard through the snow, but 
 had to wait a long time in the cold outside the office for the 
 advent of their second omnibus. They exchanged but a few 
 words on their way. Both alike were feeling the terrific 
 contrast between their late mode of life and the actual ex- 
 perience. To Eila it seemed as though the existence they 
 had led during the last few weeks had been nothing but a 
 brilliant dream, and that this forlorn trudge through the 
 winter snow was a coming back to the bitter reality. And 
 both, Mamy more especially, were devoured by anxiety on 
 Dick's behalf. It was true that he had gone his own way 
 much of late, but he could not have ceased to care for his 
 family so entirely as to put them through this cruel ordeal 
 of his own free will. They reached the hotel at last, and 
 here a bitter disappointment awaited them. Hubert was out, 
 and no one could give them the least information as to 
 where he had gone, or with whom. Their mortification was 
 so great that Mamy declared afterwards she understood how 
 tyrants had been incited to order the bearers of evil tidings 
 to be scourged. Her indignation would have been less had 
 there been the least appearance of interest or sympathy ex- 
 pressed in the face of the man behind the counter who gave 
 them the unwelcome information. But after communicating 
 with a voice in the upper regions through a rubber tube, 
 while th^y stood by waiting with sinking hearts, the man 
 said, in tones of completest indifference, "Monsieur de 
 Merle est sorti." Fuller details it was impossible to obtain. 
 To return with such a message was out of the question. 
 Eila boldly suggested that they should go and knock at 
 their cousin's door, "And if he is not there, we will sit 
 down and wait for him, for they can't turn us out," she 
 said, with determination. But it was no easy matter to find 
 Hubert's door in the labyrinth of rooms spread over all the 
 stories, and when they succeeded at last, it was only to find 
 that their labour was in vain. The door was locked. There 
 was no response from within, and they were humiliated by 
 the tones in which a chambermaid asked them sharply, 
 " Qui cherchez-vous, mesdemoiselles ? Le monsieur du dix- 
 sept est sorti." Downstairs they went again, and, after a 
 
334 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 hurried consultation at the foot, decided to take it by turns 
 to watch in the electric-lighted courtyard, while the one 
 who was not on duty was having a " warm " in the reading- 
 room. In all their future lives, neither Eila nor Mamy 
 would forget the dreariness of their sensations that evening. 
 The carriages that rattled in and out of the yard with ladies 
 in rich furs or brilliant opera-cloaks, and the gentlemen in 
 fur-lined coats with crush hats and opera-glasses : the aroma 
 of mingled sauces, cigars, and perfumes ; the brilliant light ; 
 the constant movement to and fro ; the tumult of voices 
 and gay bustle — all gave the impression of a world devised 
 for pleasure. Mamy compared her present impression of 
 the Louvre to her first acquaintance with it upon that joy- 
 ous evening when she had dined at table d'hote for the first 
 time ; and when it was her turn to wait in the lighted court- 
 yard, the consciousness of the desolation of her present situ- 
 ation was intensified by the contrast between then and now. 
 She felt almost like an intruder as she walked through the 
 courtyard in her threadbare ulster and shabby sailor hat, and, 
 fearful of remaining there, went outside, and took her stand 
 before a window in the Rue de Rivoli, where she pretended 
 to look at the photographs. As she gazed disconsolately 
 into the brilliant window, with sensations akin to those of 
 the Peri excluded from Paradise, she became suddenly 
 aware of a man's figure that had come to a halt by her side 
 for the purpose of looking, not at the photographs, but at 
 herself. She was magnetically conscious of this fact, and 
 magnetically impelled to turn her face towards the person 
 who regarded her, with a look of half -terrified, half-indig- 
 nant remonstrance in her blue eyes. But the expression 
 died away instantly. The face that was looking at her was 
 a face Mamy knew ; though she had seen it but once in her 
 life, and for one short moment only, it had imprinted itself 
 on her imagination with the force of an indelible impres- 
 sion. The brilliant scene at the Hotel du Louvre flashed 
 back upon her memory like a landscape seen under the play 
 of summer lightning. It was there against the backgroimd 
 of the glowing mythological paintings, in the midst of the 
 warmth and splendour within, that she had seen the face 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 335 
 
 before. Mamy's eyes were not only blue, they were tell-tale 
 eyes as well. The fact that she recognised this stranger by 
 her side was so instantly and naively revealed in them, and 
 tlie half -startled " Oh ! " which accompanied the astonishing 
 discovery was so thoroughly artless and spontaneous, that 
 the object of her recognition might well be excused for ad- 
 vancing a step nearer. He, too, remembered the face of the 
 " seraph out for a holiday," as Mamy had appeared to him 
 at the memorable Louvre dinner, and was shocked and per- 
 plexed to find her standing, apparently alone and shabbily 
 attired, between ten and eleven on a winter's night, on the 
 pavement of the Rue de Rivoli. But under whatever cir- 
 cumstances she might be standing there, the unprotected- 
 ness of her position seemed to furnish an excuse for offering 
 his services, if only upon the plea of her being English — 
 nay, Australian it might be — like himself. Another point 
 to be considered : There was nothing of what Mr. Wilton 
 would himself have characterized as " stand off " in the atti- 
 tude of this pretty little girl, whose "laugh full of mirth 
 without any control " had attracted his attention in the first 
 instance. He was therefore doubly inclined to address her, 
 the only drawback being the consideration that, in our con- 
 ventional world, the fact that a young man is attracted by a 
 young woman whom he does not know from Adam — or 
 from Eve-^is not considered reason sufficient for speaking 
 to her. 
 
 " Bother it all ! " Jack reflected ; "if I had met her in 
 Collins Street, I would soon have found a way of being in- 
 troduced to her in the orthodox style. But there's no one to 
 do it here, and if I let this opportunity escape, I may never 
 set eyes on her again. Besides, if she can go abroad by 
 herself in Paris at this time of night, she's not the sort to 
 take offence at nothing, so here goes ! " 
 
 And with " here goes " Jack took off his hat and replaced 
 it on his head, after a friendly bow of recognition. Mamy's 
 answering salute was timid, but not conclusive. Jack ad- 
 vanced closer, and said with assurance : 
 
 " I think I have had the pleasure of meeting you before ; 
 you were dining with some friends of mine at the Louvre." 
 
336 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 The " friends of mine " was a sudden inspiration of the 
 moment, but Jack tranquillized his conscience by telling 
 himself that he knew they were Australians. 
 
 " I remember," murmured Mamy, casting down her eyes. 
 
 " Do you ? " said Jack heartily ; " I'm awfully glad to 
 hear it: I know /wasn't likely to forget." And then he 
 paused, and Mamy made a little movement as though to 
 take her leave, while the young man continued eagerly : 
 "Won't you let me see you on your way home, if you're 
 alone ? Paris isn't a nice place for a — a — young lady to be 
 going about in by herself at night." 
 
 "I'm not alone," said Mamy promptly; "I'm with my 
 sister. She's waiting for me at the Hotel du Louvre. We 
 came to see a relation of ours who's stopping there, but he 
 was out, and — and — I was tired of waiting. But I must go 
 back to my sister now.'' 
 
 " It's not the last time of our meeting, though, I hope," 
 said Jack, following her. " I'm stopping at the Louvre, too ; 
 I only arrived from London to-night. What is your friend's 
 name ? Perhaps I might be able to help you to find him." 
 
 " Oh, I wish you could ! " said Mamy plaintively — she 
 was walking demra'ely back under the archway that led 
 into the courtyard, and Jack was walking by her side — " but 
 no, you needn't trouble ; " her voice broke suddenly into an 
 eager cry: "he is there, and my sister has seen him; she 
 is coming down the steps to meet him. Ohl I am so 
 glad " 
 
 Her tones were quavering. Jack followed the direction 
 of her eyes in bewilderment. 
 
 " Where is he ? " he asked ; " I don't see him ; " but be- 
 fore he had finished speaking his companion had escaped 
 from him, and was running eagerly in the direction of a 
 misshapen figure wrapped in a Rubens cloak, whom the 
 young man recognised as his friend and boss, Hubert de 
 Merle. The discovery was one that in Mr. Wilton's own 
 phraseology " licked creation.'' 
 
 So the little seraph waif claimed Hubert de Merle as a 
 relative. But, then, why had he ignored her presence when 
 he saw her at the Louvre, and since when had he thought 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 337 
 
 fit to make the discovery that he was of her kith and kin ? 
 An instant later, Jack's astonishment was increased a hun- 
 dredfold, for in drawing nearer to the group at the foot of 
 the Louvre steps he recognised in the seraph's sister, en- 
 gaged in earnest conversation with Hubert himself, the 
 identical Bacchante of the Folies-Fantassin. The coinci- 
 dence seemed almost too wonderful to be believed. Jack 
 looked harder at the Bacchante, telling himself that he 
 might be mistaken. But no ; even to the hat and ulster, 
 which she had substituted for her leopard's skin the first 
 evening he had seen her, he could have sworn to her 
 identity. She was the same young woman who had driven 
 away from the door of the theatre with Hubert de Merle in 
 a cab. But was she indeed the sister of the fair little girl 
 with the seraph head, whom Jack had perceived at table 
 (Thdte with a party of rich and reputable Australians, or 
 had Hubert found means of coining family relationships 
 with and amongst all the pretty young women he encoun- 
 tered ? 
 
 ~ Thoroughly mystified, the young man continued to hang 
 about the neighbourhood of the talking trio, unwilling to 
 go away lest he should lose sight of the emancipated seraph, 
 yet afraid to intrude upon what appeared like an exchange 
 of family confidences. Hubert put an end to his uncertainty 
 by beckoning him to come nearer, and introducing him to 
 the two girls. 
 
 " My friend, Mr. "Wilton," he said, directing a searching 
 look at Eila, who was turning from white to red as Jack 
 approached; "Jack," addressing himself to the latter, "I 
 don't think I told you of my cousins in Paris, Mrs. Clare 
 and her family. I only found out they were here the other 
 day. These are her two daughters — Mrs. Frost and Miss 
 Clare." 
 
 Jack bowed with exaggerated deference, as though to 
 ask forgiveness for his former unofficial relations with the 
 ladies in question. The appealing air with which Eila re- 
 sponded to his salutation did not escape his notice. That 
 the recognition was mutual was beyond a doubt. Mamy 
 kept her countenance better. Both girls appeared to be 
 
338 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 under the impression of some piece of disquieting news 
 communicated by Hubert, for their eyes were shining and 
 dilated, and Mamy's face was working in the effort to keep 
 back her tears. 
 
 " What can we do ? " she repeated with trembling em- 
 phasis. " Oh, Dick ! Dick ! " 
 
 The cry was like the bursting forth of a pent-up terror. 
 Hubert turned towards her quickly. He spoke sharply and 
 decidedly. 
 
 " There is nothing to be frightened about," he said ; 
 "your brother prefers to amuse himself in -his own way, 
 that is all." 
 
 "Oh no, he doesn't," sobbed Mamy, protesting. "You 
 say he left you at four, and it was arranged that he should 
 go back to the hotel for you before you came to us. If 
 something had not happened, he would never have dreamed 
 of breaking his engagement — would he, Eila ? " and she 
 turned her despairing eyes towards her sister. 
 
 "I shouldn't have thought so," said Eila hesitatingly; 
 "but " 
 
 She stopped short, uncertain. 
 
 " And you wouldn't dare to think it," interrupted Mamy 
 defiantly. "He might be a little late after dinner some- 
 times. He had night effects to study — he told me so ; but 
 he would never, never have been late on purpose when 
 mother and all of us were waiting to go to dinner." 
 
 " Did you reassure mother about him, at least ? " Eila 
 asked of Hubert, addressing herself timidly to her cousin, 
 while Mamy, who had broken down completely at the end 
 of her protest, pressed her handkerchief against her face and 
 wept recklessly into it, oblivious of her surroundings. 
 
 Eila was calmer than her sister. Though she loathed 
 herself for the feeling, her relief at Hubert's appearance, 
 bringing the evidence that he had neither fallen down dead 
 nor left the family to its fate, had been strong enough to 
 overcome her anxiety on her brother's behalf. Mamy would 
 have sacrificed all she had in the world, and thrown Hubert 
 and his fortune into the balance — she would have accepted 
 the fate of a beggar in the streets — to have Dick restored safe 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 339 
 
 and sound to her arms. But Mamy did not know what Eila 
 knew. She had not the same motives for believing that the 
 fate — nay, the very lives — of mother, brother, and sisters, 
 rested upon her shoulders, and that she, and she alone, was 
 responsible, not for their well-being only, but for their very 
 means of sustenance. For four long hours this evening 
 young Mrs. Frost had been undergoing an ordeal of which 
 none but herself could know the secret cause and mean- 
 ing. " I could have kept Hubert," she repeated to herself 
 over and over again ; " it was in my power to keep him, 
 and he wanted me to use the power. If he has gone away 
 for good and left us to our fate, it is nobody's fault but mine. 
 Why have I hesitated so long — I, who am always preaching 
 to Mamy about the duty of sacrificing herself for her family, 
 and wanting to force her to marry a man she cannot love, 
 for their sakes ? If I condescend to use a few woman's wiles, 
 I can make Hubert do anything I please. But I have 
 thought of myself instead of the others, and now I am being 
 punished for it.'' 
 
 The longer the waiting had lasted, the more bitter her 
 self-reproaches had grown, until, in wandering from the 
 warmth of the reading-room into the freezing atmosphere 
 without to look after Mamy, she had caught sight of the dis- 
 torted outline thrown by Hubert's shadow as he crossed the 
 courtyard, and had run to meet him with such unfeigned joy 
 in her manner that his dark face had been momentarily 
 transfigured. Under the eyes of all who might happen to be 
 present, she had flung down the steps, crying out, " Oh, Hu- 
 bert, are you there at last ? " She all but threw herself into 
 his arms. Even upon the supposition that he was, being 
 fooled, such fooling was sweet to a man who possessed a 
 voluptuary's soul imprisoned in a deformed body. Hubert, 
 however, had hardly had time to respond to his beautiful 
 cousin's efllusions, for Mamy had run forward with frantic 
 inquiries for Dick, and he had been obliged to give an ex- 
 planation of his own proceedings. He had been to the 
 Boulevard de I'Observatoire, he said, where Mrs. Clare and 
 Truca were waiting in great uneasiness. He had told them 
 he had the best of reasons for believing that Dick was all right. 
 
340 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " I suppose it was because you were waiting for Dick that 
 you did not come to us ? " Eila interrupted, fixing her dark 
 eyes upon him with caressing anxiety. He had never seen 
 this particular expression in them before. 
 
 " Yes, I was waiting for your brother," Hubert said, look- 
 ing at her intently. Was it possible that she had really been 
 anxious about him ? "I was going to send a message by 
 him that you were on no account to wait for me if I did not 
 turn up with my friend here by eight o'clock.'' 
 
 " It was past eight before we got into the station," in- 
 terposed Jack; he was feeling much discomposed at the 
 sight of the fair little girl's tears. " And you've lost a broth- 
 er, it seems," he added, turning sympathetically to Eila. " Is 
 he quite a little chap ? " 
 
 " N-no ; he's g-grown up," said Mamy, sobbing. 
 
 " Oh, then he's bound to be all right," said Jack, smiling. 
 " I suppose it's not the first time he's been late for dinner, 
 is it ? " 
 
 Treated in this way, Dick's disappearance seemed a little 
 less tragic than the sisters had supposed, though Eila replied 
 with a grave sadness : 
 
 " But he promised to be back by seven. He might have 
 been sure we should not have gone to the restaurant with- 
 out him." 
 
 "You're bound to find him when you get home,'' said 
 Jack, with assurance. " But if you shouldn't, we'll soon be 
 on his track, take my word for it. I hope you'll let me 
 know, for I want to be one of the search-party ; and I 
 promise you we'll bring him back to you all right. I might 
 as well be making myself useful as loafing about the streets, 
 for I've nothing to do in Paris but amuse myself. I mean," 
 he explained, " that I've got all my time on my hands." 
 
 "But we don't know where to look," wailed Mamy. 
 " We can't think of any place Dick could have stopped at 
 between here and home." 
 
 "Oh, you mustn't suppose your brother tells you the 
 names of all his acquaintances. Miss Clare," observed Jack 
 demurely. " Hadn't you better let me call a cab for you 
 now ? And I'll follow you to your place in another. Then, 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 341 
 
 if your brother hasn't turned up, you can just let me know, 
 and we'll get the police to help us without loss of time.'' 
 
 Mamy turned pale at the mention of the police, and 
 Hubert silently signed to Eila to follow him. 
 
 " Wait for us a moment," he said to Mamy, who was pre- 
 paring to come as well; "I have a word to say to your 
 sister." 
 
 " I "v^ill take care of Miss Clare," said Jack promptly, and 
 Mamy was fain to remain behind. Eila meanwhile was fol- 
 lowing her cousin with trembling apprehension. Hubert 
 preceded her in grim silence to the reading-room, making 
 no response to her breathless inquiries until he had led her 
 to a comparatively secluded corner, where he obliged her to 
 seat herself upon an unoccupied divan, drawing forward a 
 chair for himself opposite to her. 
 
 The formality of these preparations increased Eila's 
 alarm. 
 
 " There is something you have not told me," she cried, 
 feeling sick with terror. " You know what has happened 
 to Dick, and you won't tell me." 
 
 Hubert's dark, enigmatic face did not convey either 
 affirmation or negation. 
 
 " Tell me,'' she cried imploringly, laying her hand on 
 his arm; "what reason can you have for torturing me, 
 Hubert?."' 
 
 " I don't want to torture you," he said in embarrassed 
 tones ; " that is just the difficulty : I don't know how to 
 avoid it.'' 
 
 " Is it such bad news ? " she whispered, and her face 
 grew livid. " Is Dick dead ? " 
 
 "Dead ? No ; very much the contrary, I fancy." 
 
 The almost scornful tone of the reply brought the colour 
 back to her cheek with a rush. " Thank God (if there was 
 a God) for that." But why did Hubert adopt so heartless 
 an attitude ? What was there to mock at in his sister's 
 tears ? 
 
 " Is he hurt, then ? " 
 
 " Not that I know of. Not bodily, at least " 
 
 "Not bodily," she sighed impatiently. "Oh, Hubert, 
 
342 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 what satisfaction can it be to torment me when I am in 
 such awful anxiety ? Something has happened, and it con- 
 cerns Dick, and you won't tell me what it is." 
 
 " Because I'm sure of nothing myself, and I don't know 
 how you wiU take the news, only I have a strong suspicion 
 that Master Dick is neither more nor less than a thief." 
 
 "A what ? " she repeated, bewildered. 
 
 " A thief ! " He reiterated the word harshly. " It is a 
 curious coincidence that a roll of napoleons I put by in 
 your brother's presence this morning should have disap- 
 peared this afternoon, and that he himself is nowhere to be 
 found." 
 
 A silence as of death followed this announcement. Rais- 
 ing his eyes, Hubert saw that his beautiful cousin's face was 
 suddenly transformed. It was no longer white as when she 
 had fainted at the Folies-Fantassin. A gray horror had 
 overspread it, making it as leaden in hue as the face of a 
 two days' corpse ; and all living warmth seemed to have 
 fled from her cheeks. Doubtless the cold she had endured 
 while waiting outside had contracted the facial muscles, but 
 only a spiritual chill could have changed so utterly the ex- 
 pression they rendered. 
 
 Those who siiffer a tremendous bodily shock, like the 
 victims of a railway accident, are never able to describe the 
 sensations that immediately follow the blow. A paralysis 
 of the very nerves and centre of feeling are the first merciful 
 consequence, to be followed — alas, how soon ! — by the re- 
 awakening faculty for extremest suffering. The immediate 
 effect of Hubert's words had been to aim a blow at the most 
 sensitive part of Eila's organization, that inborn, ingrained 
 sentiment of family love and pride which was the dominant 
 quality of her nature. At first she was simply stunned, but 
 as the full significance of Hubert's accusation dawned upon 
 her slowly, the acutest misery she had ever been conscious 
 of feeling overcame her. Not even the moments of frenzied 
 terror that had marked her escape from tlie clutches of her 
 lunatic husband were comparable in misery to those she ex- 
 perienced now. Could she have brought herself to recall 
 this phase of cruel mental anguish at a later time, she might 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 343 
 
 have wondered how so many forms of torturing conjectm^e 
 could hold one poor helpless human mind in their grasp at 
 one and the same time. Dick was innocent; of that she 
 could no more doubt than that the sun was lire. But the 
 accusation brought against him made her wince as though 
 she had seen the red-hot brand of a criminal pressed hissing 
 against his smooth young flesh before her eyes. He was in- 
 nocent. She and Q-od — if, once more, there were a God — 
 knew that. But supposing Hubert refused to believe it. Or 
 supposing, again, that Hubert should be a fiend — an arch- 
 villain, like the Lucifer of which he was so apt a counter- 
 part — and that this accusation brought against her brother 
 should be the result of some deep-laid plot to get all the 
 family, herself to begin with, into his power. Yet how mon- 
 strous and unnecessary such a scheme would be ! Had she 
 not made up her mind that as long as Hubert was good to 
 the others, as long as he gave them the wherewithal to nour- 
 ish themselves with, she would do and be whatever he chose 
 to make her — his thing, like Beatrice in Shakespeare's com- 
 edy. For an instant she felt nothing but a wild desire to 
 fling back the accusation in Hubert's teeth, and spurn all the 
 benefits, past, present, or to come, that the family might owe 
 to his bounty — to escape with Mamy into the street and look 
 for poor, ill-used Dick, to confront him there and then with 
 their cousih, and to force Hubert to retract with abject apol- 
 ogies the hideous charge he had made. Alas for these heroic 
 resolves ! Had not Hubert purchased the right to treat the 
 family as he chose ? What could their defiance of him lead 
 to but his desertion of them ? And what would be left them 
 then but the octagonal blue bottle that haunted Eila's dreams, 
 as the vengeful vision of the Holy Grail haunted the erring 
 Lancelot ? The eyes she turned towards her cousin as she 
 came to this politic conclusion were like those of an animal 
 at bay. More eloquent than any words was the expression 
 of trapped and helpless misery they conveyed. Hubert con- 
 tinued rapidly, though in softer tones : 
 
 " I have not the least doubt myself of what I say, but 
 there is no necessity for you to tell your mother. I have 
 only told you because I want you to know that there is good 
 
344 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 reason to believe your brother has come to no bodily harm. 
 But he has got into bad hands. I need not say there is a 
 woman in the case." The words were accompanied by a 
 sneering laugh of Mephistophelian significance. " There 
 always is. But your brother is a young fool. I don't look 
 upon him as a deliberate criminal. I mean to find him and 
 bring hira back, and if he is not frightened out of playing 
 the burglar for the rest of his days, it will not be my fault. 
 What you had better do now is to go home with your sister. 
 You may tell your mother that I know where Dick is ; tell 
 her that he has got into a scrape, and she must wait until 
 I get bim out of it. Do you understand ? " 
 
 There was certainly a warrant for asking the last ques- 
 tion, for the stony despair that had settled upon young Mrs. 
 Frost's face made it look more like an uncomprehending 
 mask than the countenance of a listening human being. A 
 reply of some kind, however, was necessary, but how was 
 she to frame it ? The mere physical anguish she felt in the 
 muscles about the throat when she essayed to speak forced 
 her to temporary silence. At last the agonized words, " It is 
 a mistake — it can't be ! If it were as you say, there would 
 be nothing left — but to kill ourselves," came forth in half- 
 stifled phrases, pronounced with cruel diiHculty. Hubert 
 could not have said whether sobs or mere hysteric gasps in- 
 terfered with their utterance. Either pity or anxiety to ward 
 off a possible scene, an unpleasant contingency in a public 
 place, with a hunchback man and a beautiful woman for the 
 actors, prompted him to say, in tones of reassuring firmness : 
 
 " I thought you had more self-control, Eila, or I would 
 not have spoken to you about the matter at all. What I 
 want you to do is to help me, and to reassure your family. 
 I think your brother has been tempted to take the money by 
 a woman. Perhaps she made him believe it would be re- 
 turned. He is simple enough to believe anything. But he 
 is your brother, and that is enough for me. His fate will 
 depend upon yourself ; you may go home now with the cer- 
 tainty that he is in no danger. I am going to find your 
 sister, and I need not warn you to repeat nothing to her of 
 what I have told you." 
 
THE CLOUDS CONTINUE TO GATHER. 345 
 
 Jack's efforts to pacify Mamy had been more successful 
 than those that Hubert had attempted in the direction of 
 her sister. The young man's logic might be at fault, but 
 his certainty was so unassailable and absolute that it in- 
 spired the confidence of a kind of inspiration. After five 
 minutes' parley with him, Dick's escapade had begun to 
 assume the proportions of a natural and almost an inevitable 
 incident in Mamy's eyes, the only wonder being that Dick 
 had waited so much longer than other brothers to absent 
 himself some fine night without rhyme or reason from the 
 maternal roof. 
 
 A cab was soon found. The Bacchante's ghastly expres- 
 sion did not escape Mr. Wilton's observation as he put the 
 sisters inside. Hubert forbade the notion of following the 
 girls home, declaring that he had found a clue to Dick's 
 whereabouts, and replying to Mamy's eager string of in- 
 quiries by the oracular words, " I know what I know. Your 
 brother is in no danger. But I must help him out of a little 
 scrape he has got into before you can see him home again." 
 
 Mamy clung to her cousin's arm imploring to be told 
 more. But despite Hubert's refusal, the relief of driving 
 home with even the half -assurance that he had given her 
 was so enormous that she found her spirits and her voice to- 
 gether. But Eila was deaf to Mamy's observations. She was 
 deaf to all, indeed; save a sentence of Hubert's that rang in 
 her ears in the darkness as she drove home with Mamy. 
 Hubert had placed the money to pay for the cab into her 
 hands at parting as he bade her good-night at the door of the 
 vehicle, while Jack was speaking to Mamy on the other side. 
 
 " Your brother's fate is in your hands," he had repeated 
 to her in low tones, and Eila knew in her heart what was 
 implied in his words. 
 
 Had the sisters been possessed of an invisible coat of 
 armour, one of them at least might have found her burden 
 greatly lightened if she could have followed Hubert an hour 
 later into his room. For there she would have seen him 
 draw forth a letter addressed in Dick's large unformed hand, 
 and read it, apparently for the second time, by the light of a 
 candle standing on his chest of drawers. She might have 
 
346 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 taken comfort, too, from the half -contemptuous amusement 
 portrayed in his eyes as he read. Greatest comfort of all, 
 however, would she have found in reading the letter itself, 
 couched in the following terms : 
 
 " Dear Sir : Adele , to whom you introduced me, is 
 
 to be turned out of her rooms into the streets if she cannot 
 pay a debt of twenty pounds contracted for helping her 
 brother. The man is waiting to turn her out, and he will 
 not listen to me. I know if you were here you would lend 
 me or give me the twenty napoleons that are to save her 
 from ruin. I have waited as long as I dared, and now I am 
 going to take the roll of five hundred francs from your 
 drawer and run with them to Adele. Not an instant is to 
 be lost, or it will be too late. I know I have no means of 
 paying you back, and that you can have me taken up as a 
 robber if you choose. But there is one way in which I can 
 pay the debt. You have said you would take me to Cologne 
 with the others. Now, instead of going, I will stay and 
 drudge at the meanest occupation — I will be a chiffonier, if 
 nothing else turns up — until I have saved you the sum you 
 would have spent upon me. Did not the body of the debtor 
 belong to the creditor according to the old Roman law ? 
 Well, then, my body is in your possession. Put me to the 
 meanest tasks. Try tortures on me if that is your pleasure. 
 I shall not complain. Take the pound of flesh, and the 
 blood, too. I want to pay my debt in any way you choose 
 to suggest I cannot go to my home for a day or two, and 
 would rather not see my people until they return from the 
 trip, but you will tell them I have come to no harm. 
 
 " It is not for Adele's bodily salvation alone that the 
 money was required. When you sent me to her, you had 
 no idea I should discover one of those rare and grand types 
 of women who are capable of rising as high as they have 
 fallen low. I use this expression of fallen because it is sup- 
 posed to render the meaning I want to convey, but I don't 
 endorse it in the sense the world gives it at all. I have 
 sworn to make Adele worthy of herself, and even if I go to 
 prison for it, my own conscience will acquit me."' 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 347 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 
 
 Such a night as Eila spent after hearing Hubert's reve- 
 lation might be fitly described as a groping in the valley of 
 the shadow of death. Her mattress on the floor was but a 
 rack of torment. Not of bodily anguish (though to toss and 
 turn about through a long sleepless night is physical dis- 
 comfort of a kind that borders on suffering), but of utter 
 mental prostration and humiliation. Bitter scalding tears 
 coursed down her cheeks in the darkness as the whole mis- 
 erable scene of the previous evening recurred to her. What 
 if Hubert's accusation were really true — if Dick had really 
 done the deed ascribed to him ? But no — it could not be. 
 Dick, with his lofty speech and high-as-heaven aspirations, 
 to fall so "pitiably low ! Dick, who could talk with the tongue 
 of men and of angels, to be denounced as a common cowardly 
 thief ! If it were indeed true, then he must be mad. How 
 otherwise could he have consented, in one short hideous mo- 
 ment, to annihilate the dear early Dick they had all believed 
 in and loved, and to substitute a low criminal in his place ? 
 Only a few years ago he would have been hanged for steal- 
 ing Hubert's money. Her father-in-law had seen men 
 hanged in Hobart in the old days for a less crime than this. 
 And then the heartless cruelty of leaving his family to sur- 
 mise that he had been killed ! Thank Heaven, their mother 
 did not know the horrible motive for his absence. To have 
 the truth suspected at home would indeed have filled Eila's 
 cup to overflowing. Bitter as the draught was, as long as 
 she alone tasted the full flavoiu" of its bitterness, she could 
 put on a brave face under her anguish. But to see the others 
 Towered to the dust by Dick's crime would have been more 
 than she could bear. Again and again the vision of the 
 octagonal blue bottle shaped itself before her fevered vision. 
 Why was life given to us entangled with so much that cor- 
 roded and spoiled it ? If it were in reality the gift of a 
 responsible Power — not a mere accident resulting from the 
 working of blind forces — why was it not permissible to re- 
 23 
 
348 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 turn it to the source whence it came ? No reasonable person 
 could expect another to accept a gift against his will. As 
 for herself, she was tired of struggling for the well-being of 
 the family. Some power stronger than her own was perpet- 
 ually fighting against her. When it was not poverty it was 
 something more terrible still. As for Dick, if he were not 
 mad, as she half dreaded, half hoped might prove to be the 
 case, he must at least have cast off his family for ever. Had 
 he retained but a spark of his former feeling for them he 
 could never have acted as he had done. He would have 
 paused before branding Mamy, upon whose marriage so 
 much depended, as the sister of a criminal. Burning, unre- 
 lieving tears coursed down Eila's cheeks as the consequences 
 of her brother's crime rose before her like avenging ghosts. 
 
 After a night passed in solitary weeping, it was easy to 
 pretend a headache as a reason for remaining the following 
 day in her darkened room, ^nd hiding her swollen eyes from 
 the commiseration of her sisters. She heard much fragmen- 
 tary talk concerning Dick during the course of the morning 
 through the half -closed door, and more than once her mother 
 or Mamy crept to her bedside to make her repeat the assur- 
 ance that Hubert had given her of his being bodily safe. 
 At twelve Truca brought her a cup of broth from the restau- 
 rant, together with a letter that had been left by a man from 
 the Hotel du Louvre. 
 
 " Take away the broth, I can't touch it ; and pull up the 
 blind a little — quick ! " Eila cried, eagerly snatching at the 
 letter, unheedful of the dismay portrayed in Truca's face ; 
 the little girl had never in all her experience been treated 
 so by her sister, and the rude rejection of her broth, in place 
 of the loving kiss she had looked for, was an additional mor- 
 tification. The letter was from Hubert, and Eila's face crim- 
 soned as she read the few laconic lines in his clear, smooth 
 handwriting, so utterly unlike the writer : 
 
 " Can you meet me to-day at half -past tlu-ee, by Chapu's 
 Jeanne d'Arc in the Luxembourg Gallery ? I have some- 
 thing to say that is not for the ears of the others ; you may 
 make your mind easy about your brother for the present, 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 349 
 
 and as regards his ultimate fate, the decision rests with 
 yourself." 
 
 With herself! Eila trembled as she read these words. 
 What would she not do to rescue Dick ? She was a physical 
 coward, it was true. Pain to others as well as to herself — 
 the very thought and conception of it, even without the 
 realization, made her sick at heart. Yet she believed that if 
 Hubert had proposed to inflict some physical torture upon 
 her as a means of purchasing Dick's salvation — such, for in- 
 stance, as the wrenching out of her beautiful firm teeth or 
 the racking of her supple joints — she could have braced 
 herself to endure the martyrdom. Happily, such a con- 
 tingency was not to be taken into account. Though there 
 was something disquieting and mysterious in her cousin's 
 personality, it was absiu-d to regard him in the light of a 
 melodramatic monster. Nevertheless, as Eila made her 
 hasty preparations for meeting him secretly, she suflrered a 
 severe strain of mental tension. Hubert was exacting upon 
 the point of neatness. Despite her agitation, she was care- 
 ful to tie her small spotted veil as neatly as possible over 
 the little Marie Stuart bonnet, and even to sew a missing 
 button on her glove with shaking hands. The veil hid the 
 traces of her morning tears, and she hurried through the 
 reception-room with the announcement that she was going 
 to air her headache on the boulevards. 
 
 But Mrs. Clare and Mamy had gone out, and Eila knew 
 that they were seeking for a clue to Dick's whereabouts. 
 Though it was hardly past the half -hour as she entered the 
 Luxembourg Gallery, Hubert was there before her. The 
 sight of his figure in a public place never failed to awaken 
 a pang of pity in her breast. She hurried towards him now 
 by a side-passage between the statues, hoping to make it ap- 
 pear that she had not seen him from far off ; but her feint 
 was unsuccessful. The piercing eyes surveying her over 
 the double eyeglass from beneath the rugged brows con- 
 veyed a mute comprehension of her manceuvre in their 
 saturnine expression, and Eila felt almost too intimidated 
 to speak. " I am not late ? " was all she found breath to 
 
350 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 utter, in a tone that conveyed more of apology than affirma- 
 tion. 
 
 " No ; and if you are, we have plenty of time," he said 
 composedly ; " the gallery is open until five." 
 
 She followed him silently, as he continued to examine 
 the statues and busts around him. The contrast between 
 the idealized marble forms and the grotesque mould in 
 which Nature had cast him impressed her so painfully 
 that she hurried past sculptured gods and dancing nymphs 
 with downcast eyes. Hubert seemed resolved upon pro- 
 longing the penitential promenade without regard to her 
 feelings ; but at last they found themselves in the long pic- 
 ture-gallery that runs at right angles to the hall of sculp- 
 ture. Eila was wont to turn in here at odd moments of the 
 day, and could have found the way to her favourite pictures 
 blindfold ; but now the luminous reflection from past Diazes 
 and modern Duezes had lost its charm for her. She might, 
 indeed, have been walking in the catacombs under her feet, 
 for all she saw of the pictures. Hubert made a feint of 
 being entirely absorbed in them, pausing before the balus- 
 trade with his hands resting upon the bar, and critically 
 examining each painting in turn. 
 
 " He is doing it to torment me," thought Eila to herself ; 
 "he is like Quilp, after all." 
 
 Her anxiety for news of her brother was overwhelming, 
 but she shrank from the terror of hearing his name coupled 
 with the word " thief." Whatever horror the idea of Dick's 
 crime might inspire, he was, after all, of her own flesh and 
 blood, one of the sacred band, and the thought that this man 
 by her side had the power, nay, perhaps the will, to brand 
 him with lifelong infamy was unendurable to her. But 
 Hubert seemed to have forgotten the object which had been 
 the ostensible motive of his sending for her. He had halted, 
 for what appeared to his victim an interminable time, in 
 front of Cormont's mighty canvas, looking mth gi-im satis- 
 faction at the wonderful scene depicted thereon. Here we 
 see the wild descendants of Cain, hawk-nosed and tawny- 
 haired, sweeping fiercely on their restless tramp through 
 the desert. The curse which impelled them to fly before the 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 351 
 
 face of the Lord is interpreted with terrifying realism. 
 Mighty hunters are they, with the bleeding fragments of 
 the wild beasts they have slain dangling in ghastly prox- 
 imity to the half-clad women and children borne along 
 upon a litter. In her normal state Eila would have gazed 
 at this picture with the bright fresh interest all works of 
 art aroused in her, delighting in its realistic and imagina- 
 tive power. To-day it impressed her differently. Cormont's 
 masterpiece only seemed to emphasize the dreariness of 
 human destiny from the beginning of the world. In the 
 hunted children of Cain she seemed to see her own remote 
 ancestors, to realize that the curse which rested on them 
 had descended upon herself and her belongings. Perhaps 
 Dick, poor Dick ! had a forefather like these among the 
 mountain tribes of India, whose raids he was now to expiate 
 in a nineteenth-century gaol. Where, then, did individual 
 responsibility begin and end, and if scapegoats and victims 
 must inevitably be called into being, should we not rather 
 pity than blame them ? 
 
 Under the influence of these sombre reflections, Eila was 
 turning away from her contemplation of the picture, when 
 Hubert's voice recalled her : 
 
 " A fine painting, is it not ? " he remarked suavely, 
 " though there is a suggestion of sandy blight in the atmos- 
 phere I don't like." 
 
 His tone was interrogatory, and her reply betrayed the 
 bitterness she was feeling. 
 
 " You know I am no judge of pictures, Hubert," she said 
 wearily. " All I can see in this one is a reminder of how 
 miserable we were doomed to be from the beginning. But 
 if it is only for the pictures you came, I will ask you to let 
 me go away. They want me at home, and I have not been 
 well; indeed " 
 
 Her lips quivered. She could have found it in her heart 
 to cry for sheer pity of herself at this moment. Never had 
 she felt more completely discouraged and forlorn. Hubert's 
 manner changed. If he felt a secret sense of elation at tlie 
 certainty that he had the beautiful Bacchante in his power, 
 he did not show it. He assured his cousin courteously that 
 
352 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 he had had no intention of luring her to the Luxembourg 
 on false pretences. 
 
 " The fact is that I have a very important communica- 
 tion to make to you," he added. " You do look rather pale 
 and tired, and as it may take somewhat long in the saying, 
 suppose we go upstairs and find a seat in some empty room 
 where nobody is likely to disturb us." 
 
 Eila mutely expressed her acquiescence. 
 
 Her heart was beating with loud apprehensive throbs as 
 she followed him up the staircase. Feeling it flutter with a 
 quick, irregular movement as she paused to take breath, she 
 wondered in her inexperience whether this might be a 
 symptom of heart disease — a preliminary, indeed, to the 
 stopping of the heart's action altogether. She had heard of 
 people dying suddenly in this way, and it seemed to her at 
 this moment that their lot was one to be envied. 
 
 Hubert led the way to a square room terminating an ob- 
 long gallery. The few sober pictures against the walls — a 
 green riverside with a flower-strewn meadow, from the 
 brush of Daubigny — attracted few visitors. In the recess of 
 the window was a bench upon which Eila seated herself with 
 her face turned from the light. Hubert remained standing, 
 his arm resting upon the balustrade that guarded the pictures. 
 
 In this position he could look down upon his victim, al- 
 most dominate her, for young Mrs. Frost appeared indeed 
 like a trembling culprit before him. The sense of family 
 solidarity, the ruling sentiment in her nature, surged up 
 within her in the presence of her brother's accuser. Her 
 dark eyes assumed unconsciously an expression of resentful 
 defiance. Hubert watched her for some time in silence. 
 Then casting a furtive glance round the room to see that no 
 one was in hearing, he addressed her in words so unlocked 
 for that a shock of surprise was the first sensation they 
 awakened. Surely they were the last she could have ex- 
 pected to hear from him at such a moment. 
 
 " Eila, have you cared for many men in your life ? " he 
 asked abruptly, though in low, softly-pitched tones, while 
 his eyes seemed to question her inmost soul. 
 
 " No ! " she replied wonderingly ; " why ? " 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 353 
 
 Her astonishment was great, but the feeling of being im- 
 pelled by a will stronger than her own seemed to make her 
 answer come of its own accord without any exercise of voli- 
 tion on her own part. She could almost understand now 
 how criminals might be brought to avow a crime that it had 
 been the object of their lives to conceal, for the sole reason 
 that they were brought into subjection by the stronger will 
 of the questioner. 
 
 "Do you care for anyone now, either here or in Aus- 
 tralia ? " Hubert insisted, still keeping his eyes intently 
 fixed upon her. 
 
 " No," said Eila again ; '" no one." 
 
 Her voice sounded far-away and almost dreamy. She 
 could not feel in her heart that she returned Eeginald's love 
 in kind. Rather, she let herself be loved by him, because 
 she was in need of someone to trust and to lean upon. But 
 she found the separation from him by half the world's cir- 
 cumference endurable enough, not hungering for his bodily 
 presence, as undoubtedly he hungered for hers. 
 
 " You are a strange woman," was Hubert's next remark. 
 " Now that the way is cleared, I may as well come to the 
 end of what I have to say. But first of all you must let me 
 warn you that I am taking it for granted that you are en- 
 tirely without prejudices ; you have led me to infer as much 
 more than once." 
 
 He paused, and she interposed with, "What kind of 
 prejudices ? " 
 
 She felt the question to be a weak one, but her curiosity 
 was aroused, and she would fain have obtained some notion 
 of the ground upon which she was treading. 
 
 " Every kind," Hubert said, frowning : " religious, social, 
 traditional, familiar — any name by which you choose to call 
 them ; received or preconceived notions of whatever sort. 
 You are free of them all, are you not ? " 
 
 "It depends," Eila made reply, "upon what you call 
 'prejudices.' " 
 
 The argumentative family instinct was beginning to 
 assert itself. Her eyes lost their vacant look, and became 
 earnest and interested as she raised them towards his. 
 
354 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " What I call prejudices ! " he repeated after a pause for 
 reflection. " Well, I should call a prejudice anything that 
 prevented me from affirming my individuality whenever 
 and however I may choose. There are ways, of course, with 
 which the law interferes, and then one is helpless. I value 
 my freedom too much to give the law a pretext for depriv- 
 ing me of it. Perhaps I was not always so wise. However, 
 that has nothing to do with present affairs. I never run 
 counter to the law now ; the game is not worth the candle. 
 Short of that, I have no law but my own inclinations. I 
 thought you had much the same principle of action." 
 
 " Did you ? Well, I am a kind of individualist, I sup- 
 pose," said Eila, hesitating — "for myself, at least, because I 
 would institute Socialism for the rest of the world if I 
 could." 
 
 " A very convenient theory." Hubert smiled grimly. 
 " Well, as it appears we are both individualists, I may affirm 
 my particular form of individualism without fear of shock- 
 ing you. There is one point especially in which mine dif- 
 fers from yours, that I should like to discuss with you. In- 
 stead of being a beautiful woman in the full heyday of her 
 youth, I am — well, what you see." He hurried over the last 
 words with sneering accents. " Yet, being what I am, I still 
 cling to the illusion of introducing the element into my life 
 that you seem to have put so quietly out of yours. You look 
 astonished, Eila. Those very remarkable eyes of yours are 
 easier to read than you suspect ; it is a fact, all the same. 
 For all the years that I have passed in exile I have never 
 lost my hold of the vision that had to do duty for the reality. 
 You see, the reality never came in my way — and if it had it 
 would not have helped me much — never, that is to say, until 
 I met 2/OM." 
 
 He stopped. She made no rejoinder, and Hubert con- 
 tinued passionately : 
 
 " I never dreamed of meeting such a woman as you. I 
 should not have thought it possible. But having met you 
 face to face, how could I ever fall back on my vision again ? 
 It would not be possible, however I might try. It must be 
 you or nothing, Eila. Listen to me, and don't look from 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 355 
 
 side to side like a frightened bird. Those people are much 
 more interested in studying the landscape upside down in 
 the water than in watching you. When they see nothing 
 else in a picture they can always appreciate the reflection. 
 I say, again, it must be you or nothing. I am not going to 
 mock you by asking you to bestow your love upon me. 
 Don't be afraid of that. But you have assured me that you 
 are heart-whole. I have watched you closely from the very 
 outset of our acquaintance, and I am inclined to believe 
 you. You have no one depending upon you, no social posi- 
 tion to keep up, no children, no ties, none that matter, at 
 least, no responsibilities of any kind : you are as free as air. 
 Now, I admire you with an intensity of which you can form 
 no conception. It is like a new life to me to be near you. 
 What the hold is I cannot say. I suppose yoiu- beauty 
 has the strongest share in it. Beauty-worship is my 
 only religion, as you are aware. It is like the sun to 
 a fire-worshipper. I have more than the ordinary mascu- 
 line craze for it, for reasons which we need not go into 
 now. Now, why should you not let yourself be wor- 
 shipped by me in my own way '' — his eyes seemed to con- 
 tract with the intensity of the gaze he fastened upon her 
 downcast face — "in exchange for the services I can render 
 your family ? There is Dick to be discovered, and — not 
 punished, do you say ? Helped, rather, into an honourable 
 and paying berth. Nothing is easier, if one pays for it. 
 Then you would like your other brother to be given a better 
 bUlet, would not you ? and have an annuity settled upon 
 your mother and sisters, that would make you easy about 
 them for the rest of their natural lives. You have the power 
 to accomplish all this, and more, if you choose. What 
 price are you asked to pay for it ? — you will want to know. 
 Well, nothing more than t» be a little kind to me in my 
 own way. My adoration of you in secret need not trouble 
 anybody. I shall not proclaim it on the house-tops, I 
 promise you, though there are men who in my place might 
 like to figure as the ass that carried the image of gold. I 
 want your permission to place you all in comfortable cir- 
 cumstances ; that is all. You may say my action is unchiv- 
 
356 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 alrous. I can't help that. I have my own views, and noth- 
 ing can change my resolution. Let me say, too, that you 
 are not likely to hear of your brother before you have hon- 
 oured me with an answer. I have no desire to punish him 
 for his clumsy theft, but there is no motive for my preventing 
 the law from taking its course, unless you bid me do so. 
 To-night it will be too late. Now, will you have a few mo- 
 ments to consider while I go and admire the landscape up- 
 side down in the river-picture ? To save useless discussion, 
 suppose you take it for granted, once for all, that my mind 
 is irrevocably made up as regards the conditions. You will 
 surrender yourself entirely, and trust to me to do what is 
 best for the family, or the law will take its course, and I 
 leave you and your belongings to your fate henceforth and 
 for ever ! " 
 
 He walked away ; he had given her time to reflect, and 
 she sat with her hands folded in her lap, her head a little 
 bent forward, looking at the ground. It was curious that 
 even at this crisis of her life she noticed the polished smooth- 
 ness of the Luxembourg boards, and wondered whether 
 they were waxed every morning, and whether one man 
 did all the work alone. Her recent experiences in that 
 line had given her almost a professional interest in floor- 
 waxing. She wished she could force herself to think se- 
 riously over the question she had been left to decide. She 
 wondered whether if her life and death had been in the 
 balance she would have experienced the same kind of 
 numbed, half -alive sensation she was conscious of now. It 
 might be that condemned criminals did not really suffer so 
 excruciatingly in their minds at the last moment, after all. 
 But it was not about other criminals, it was about herself, 
 she had to think. Let her reflect a moment. Hubert had 
 proposed that she should put herself in his hands — or, in 
 other words, that she should become his unaccredited wife ; 
 and in return for this concession he was prepared to liberate 
 her brother, to place the family upon a footing of wealth 
 and outward respectability, and to leave her, at least in 
 appearance, to continue her home-life upon its ordinary 
 footing. Looking at the matter dispassionately, was there 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 357 
 
 anything monstrous in the proposition ? Though she was 
 legally bound to her husband, circumstances had given her 
 the most absolute freedom as regarded her movements. 
 There was not a being upon earth whose rights or interests 
 she would be damaging — as far as she could see at present 
 — in pursuing the course suggested by Hubert. It would 
 be a mere hypocritical pretence to urge that her husband 
 would be injured by it — she had no husband. The man 
 she had married existed no longer — would never exist 
 again — and the poor lunatic who had taken his place, away 
 in the asylum in the Antipodes, would be neither the better 
 nor the worse for any use she might make of her freedom. 
 Hubert himself had no ties. There was the objection, to be 
 sure, that she did not love him ; but, then, if she had loved 
 him, where would have been the sacrifice ? Was she not 
 always urging upon Mamy the necessity of sacrificing her- 
 self for her family by marrying a man with whom she was 
 not actually in love ; and should she not herself practise 
 what she preached, now that the opportunity presented it- 
 self ? What behoved a person who loved her family was to 
 do the thing that seemed most advantageous to their inter- 
 ests, putting herself and her own feelings entirely out of 
 the question. Certainly some people might shrink from 
 binding themselves by a secret chain, unhallowed by love, 
 and from entering deliberately upon a life of deceit and 
 subterfuge. But only let these people have a brother on 
 the brink of being dragged to prison, and a mother and 
 sisters who would go mad with grief — let them know what 
 it felt like to see their belongings threatened with ruin and 
 starvation, and then see how they would act. Life was 
 made so easy for some persons, and so cruelly hard for 
 others. But she would not complain if the rest were spared 
 and she alone should be made the family scapegoat. There 
 was even a foretaste of bitter triumph in the prospect of 
 becoming their secret saviour and deliverer. 
 
 Another sentiment, not clearly defined or acknowledged 
 even to herself, helped to bias Eila's mind. She foresaw 
 vaguely that her power over Hubert would be a thousand- 
 fold increased by her apparent abdication of it. By acced- 
 
358 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ing to his proposal she would hold him by every fibre of his 
 being, and could make him do whatever she chose in behalf 
 of the others. 
 
 Never was a bargain where two human souls were in the 
 balance more coldly considered. Never did maiden on the 
 eve of going to the altar with a wealthy and detested suitor 
 count the cost more deliberately. Had Hubert returned at 
 this moment, it is even possible that the unholy contract 
 might have been sealed off-hand. 
 
 "Take me, Hubert," Eila would have sobbed out. "I 
 don't love you, and I am terrified of you. But to have you 
 do all you promise for the others, why, you might cut me 
 in little pieces, if you chose.'' 
 
 Or, if she had not uttered these words, she would have 
 thought them, and, acting upon the thought, would have 
 made Hubert understand that she was prepared to accept 
 his conditions without further parley. She would have 
 taken upon herself the mission that Beauty assumed when 
 she sallied forth, alone and trembling, into the garden of 
 the Beast; that which devolved upon the unconscious 
 daughter of Jephthah when she danced along with airy 
 step to meet and greet her returning sire. And she would 
 have justified herself by declaring that the sacrifice exacted 
 of her was harder than that exacted from either of these 
 doomed maidens. It was, indeed, upon her tongue to call 
 Hubert back, and to whisper with white lips that she was 
 prepared to pay the price he demanded of her. One con- 
 sideration, and one only, made her pause — her promise to 
 Reginald. 
 
 Poor Reginald ! Eila's feeling about him at this mo- 
 ment was almost akin to anger. What right had he to 
 claim her promise, with nothing but his love to offer her in 
 exchange ? Ah, if he could have sealed her lips with gold, 
 as Hubert could have done, it would have been a very differ- 
 ent matter. But the family might perish at his feet ; he 
 would be powerless to help them. Nevertheless, the scene 
 of her parting with him on the moonlit heights of Cowa the 
 night before her fatal departure recurred to her with sudden 
 and startling vividness. Reginald's tone, his look, the prom- 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 359 
 
 ise she had given him to take no irretrievable step without 
 consulting him, his almost prophetic foreboding of the 
 thing that had happened to her now— all these considera- 
 tions rushed upon her memory in one overwhelming flood! 
 The simple force of a promise given, of an obligation that 
 must be fulfilled before she was even free to act, rose clear 
 and strong in her mind. And now softer recollections of 
 the farewell interview intervened to make her pause. The 
 impression of the parting scene seemed to grow in intensity. 
 The silver sparkle of the bay at her feet, the misty glory of 
 the mountain looming against the night sky, the dear 
 familiar homestead whence the assured sounds of the col- 
 lective family voice reached her across the moonlit strip of 
 garden, her own fond and foolish anticipations of all she 
 would see and achieve upon the enchanted soil of Europe, 
 Reginald's absorbing self-effacing love and worship of her — 
 the vision of this scene and its accompanying sensations 
 rose vividly before her. Yes, she was bound by the most 
 solemn of promises. Though all else might be dark, that at 
 least was clear : to take no decisive step, to let no man gain 
 possession of her until she had consulted her best and near- 
 est friend. Hubert might place the knife at her throat, he 
 might threaten to sever the hair which held the shadowy 
 sword of Damocles suspended over her head, he should not 
 make her break her promise to Reginald. Her momentary 
 irritation against the latter was followed by a mood of re- 
 morseful penitence, coupled with the sense of a great de- 
 liverance. Whatever the future might have in store for 
 her, Reginald had saved her in the present crisis. And now 
 she must gain time to consult him before deciding for her- 
 self. The colour returned to her cheeks. She sighed as one 
 who awakes from a nightmare, and seeing Hubert approach 
 her, felt a sudden inspiration move her from without. She 
 noticed that his hue was ghastly. This, however, was the 
 only evidence . of emotion he betrayed. He drew nearer. 
 Neither spoke for a moment. Then he seated himself delib- 
 erately on the bench by her side, and laid his hat upon his 
 knees. The air that enveloped them was heavy with warmth. 
 Nevertheless, Eila felt her forehead grow cold as though 
 
360 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 a hand of ice had been laid upon it. No one was in 
 sight. 
 
 " Well ? " said Hubert at last interrogatively ; and it 
 seemed to her that there was a note of inflexible significance 
 in the' short, smooth-sounding monosyllable. 
 
 What power moved her to say the words she uttered in 
 reply she could not have told. But it was a power that 
 seemed distinct from herself. She felt as she uttered them 
 that they were the most fitting she could have employed, 
 and that if she had spent days and nights in thinking over 
 them, she would not have found any to serve her purpose 
 better. 
 
 " Hubert," she began, and very soft and sweet the name 
 sounded in her utterance of it, " you and I are not in the 
 least like ordinary people, so I am going to speak to you not 
 like an ordinary person. I am not offended by anything 
 you have said — only don't you think the thing you have 
 been proposing sounds rather a cold-blooded arrangement ? 
 You say that you have taken it for granted that I have no 
 prejudices, and there you are right. I know I have often 
 thought, if I could begin my life over again, I should not 
 care to be bound to the man I loved by any other tie than 
 the one of mutual inclination ; unless, of course, there were 
 the question of children and their interests to consider. But 
 holding those views, I could not feel hurt by your wanting 
 me to care for you altogether, situated as we are. Only 
 while you were walking about just now I thought the mat- 
 ter over, and I found that I was hurt and wounded. Shall 
 I tell you why ? It is because, instead of trying to win me 
 by being as you have always shown yourself until now " — 
 this was the most insidious form of flattery that could have 
 been employed — " you threaten me all of a sudden that, if I 
 do not do as you want instantly, you will revenge yourself 
 on the family. I don't believe you meant what you said. 
 You only wanted to try me. I would not insult you by 
 even supposing you were in earnest, or that you would be 
 capable of using your power over poor miserable Dick as 
 you say. What would be the object of using force ? Why 
 should you not make me care for you by fair means ? Talk 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAT THE COST. 361 
 
 to me reasonably, and give me a little time to reflect. I have 
 been so grateful to you all this time, Hubert — you can't 
 think. I have been wanting for ever so long" to find an op- 
 portunity of proving my gratitude and — and — affection. 
 Don't spoil everything so needlessly. It is such a pity. If 
 you care about me as you say you do, surely I am worth 
 waiting for a little. To hold me to the terms you proposed 
 would be to treat me like a Circassian slave, or one of the 
 worst of the Luxembourg grisettes. And I have done noth- 
 ing to deserve it, indeed. I thought you understood there 
 were things that had no value unless they were freely 
 given." 
 
 She paused, waiting for his reply. Hubert did not look 
 at her as he framed his answer. Her stately, well-poised 
 head seemed almost out of reach of his lowering eyes. He 
 kept his face averted and spoke with passionate rapidity : 
 
 "Your reasoning is clever, Eila — too clever. It is not the 
 _true expression of what you feel. You only want to gain 
 time. All that you say would be perfectly true as applied 
 to other people. It is not true of us. If I were an ' ordi- 
 nary man ' — as you said just now — if I were free of the 
 accursed deformity that has ruined all my life, I would not 
 speak to you as I have done : I would trust to winning you 
 by gentler means. But that is out of the question. It is 
 against Nature that you should feel for me as I feel for you. 
 Whether now or later, our union must be a violence done 
 to your instincts. But herein lies m.y sole excuse. I have 
 a presentiment that, once you are wholly mine, I can make 
 you fond of me. It sounds outrageously fatuous, doesn't it ? 
 But I maintain my point, notwithstanding. You are like a 
 person who is asked to take a leap over a precipice. As 
 long as you linger on the edge, you will shrink from the 
 prospect with terror and horror. But once the leap is taken, 
 I swear to you that you will have no cause to regret it. If 
 I tried to drive you over by unfair means, you must not be 
 too angry with me. It was for your sake as much as my 
 own. I am so certain of being able to make your life a 
 happy one. The present position is not tenable. If I pass 
 for a monster, I am none the less a man ; and I love you 
 
362 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 with all the accumulated intensity and passion of a man 
 who has been starved of love all his life.'" 
 
 " What a number of different ways of loving there are ! " 
 interrupted Eila reflectively, her mind reverting to Regi- 
 nald's vows of utterly disinterested fidelity. " Tell me truly, 
 Hubert, would you marry me if I were free ? " 
 
 " Would to God you were ! " he said fervently. " Would 
 you marry me ? That is more to the purpose." 
 
 " I would soon answer you if I were," she replied 
 quickly. 
 
 There was no direct affirmation in her words, but he 
 cauglit at the assent implied in them. 
 
 " That is all I wanted to know," he said. " There are 
 women without end who pretend to be horrified at the no- 
 tion of free marriages who would yet sell themselves with- 
 out scruple under cover of the Church. But you are not 
 one of those. If you were to send me away, it would be 
 simply because I am repugnant to you." 
 
 " Oh, no — no ! Don't say that ! " she cried. " It isn't that 
 at all. It is for the sole and simple reason that I gave you. 
 I want time to get used to the idea. If you had asked me 
 to marry you, I should have said just the same. I should 
 have begged you to let me think over it for a little. It 
 could not inspire confidence in a person to hear him say as 
 you did, ' You must come to me at once — this moment — or 
 I will leave you and all your belongings to starve ! ' " 
 
 He made an impatient gesture of denegation. 
 
 " You don't understand ; I can't bring you the conviction 
 I want until you have trusted me, and that is why I am so 
 intolerant of delay. As things are now, I have the constant 
 terror of losing you before my eyes. It makes me feel al- 
 most like a devil sometimes. Once I am sure of you, my 
 sole object in life will be to make you rejoice that you con- 
 sented to listen to me. I will refuse you nothing. What 
 do you most desire in all the -world for your brothers and 
 sisters ? I will be your slave of the lamp, ready to do your 
 secret bidding, and no one in the world will suspect where 
 your magic cave lies hidden." 
 
 She shook her head with a doubtful half -smile. 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 363 
 
 " People would know, all the same ; and there are things 
 that even you could not do. Supposing that I were am- 
 bitious for Mamy, and that I cherished a dream of seeing 
 her figure in fashionable society ? " 
 
 " The easiest thing in the world with money," declared 
 Hubert promptly. " We would give her the income of an 
 imaginary fortune in the background, and find some impe- 
 cunious old dowager to present her at Court, and take her 
 to balls and parties in the season. Is that the summit of 
 your ambition for your sister ? " 
 
 " No ; I would rather she had singing lessons, and I only 
 wanted to see what you would say. Hubert " — she turned 
 towards him suddenly with a pleading gesture — " you will 
 let Dick come back to us to-night ? " 
 
 " That is as you choose," he replied doggedly ; '' you laiow 
 the conditions." 
 
 " Oh, don't say that ! " she cried piteously. " Don't use 
 your power over me so cruelly. Indeed, it is for your sake, 
 as much as for mine, that I want you to give me time. To 
 force me like that would be to spoil everything. Let things 
 remain as they are for a little bit longer. Don't you want 
 me to be fond of you, too ? " 
 
 " You fond of me ! " he repeated incredulously. " "Why, 
 what new ' Midsummer Night's ' miracle would you tempt 
 me with, Eila ? " 
 
 '' It would not be a miracle at all," she answered earnest- 
 ly. " Already I could worship you for all you have done 
 for the family. I don't care whether it was for me you did 
 it or not. The good to them was the same. It would not 
 take such a much longer time before I was ready to prove 
 my gratitude. I should want to prove it. But there are 
 things one cannot do all of a sudden. I don't know why I 
 should feel so. But it almost seems as though it would kill 
 me, if you refused to give me a little time." 
 
 "You could not plead more vehemently if you were 
 pleading for your life," he observed with a touch of 
 bitterness. 
 
 " Oh, but you frighten me so ! " she said in childishly 
 quavering accents, "when you speak as you did a few 
 24' 
 
364 NOT COUNTING -THE COST. 
 
 minutes ago ; I feel then as though there were nothing left 
 to appeal to, and it makes me desperate. Besides which I 
 am really tired. So many ups and downs do tire one so." 
 She broke ofP to wipe her eyes apologetically, and continued : 
 " One never seems to be able to think properly when one is 
 so upset — only you don't want to make me afraid of you, do 
 you, Hubert ? You would rather it was out of gratitude and 
 trust, and — and — fondness than for any other reason that I 
 was willing to go to you in the end ? It would be all so dif- 
 ferent then.'' 
 
 She stopped short once more. It would have been diffi- 
 cult for her at this instant to define the limit of the true and 
 the false in her appeal. To let Hubert escape was ruin, 
 hopeless and irretrievable, yet her soul revolted at the 
 notion of becoming his mistress. Her only hope of salva- 
 tion lay in gaining time. But if Hubert should suspect that 
 there was a hidden motive in her urgent prayer for a delay, 
 he would be merciless in the conditions he imposed. 
 
 No condemned criminal, pleading for a respite at the 
 eleventh hour, could have attached more value to every 
 moment won than she. Nor were her prayers entirely in 
 vain. If Hubert had sought in the first instance to storm 
 the citadel, it was with the foregone conclusion that it would 
 never yield to pacific measures. But upon the bare possibility 
 that it might surrender of its own accord, he was prepared to 
 be generous as regarded the terms of the capitulation. 
 
 After the interview was over, Eila marvelled at the crafl; 
 with which she had conducted her own defensive opera- 
 tions. Dissimulation is the legitimate arm of weakness, but 
 she could not have believed that it was in her to handle the 
 unaccustomed weapon so adroitly. Looking back upon the 
 part she had played, it seemed as though Hubert had fallen 
 into the trap she had laid for him with a naivete worthy of a 
 guileless devil of mediasvl legends, who is represented to us as 
 continually fooled and overreached by the mortals he seeks 
 to ensnare. The trap was the implied possibility that she 
 might train her heart to surrender itself in the end, provided 
 due time was allowed her for the operation. This point con- 
 ceded, the limit of time only remained to be fixed. A rapid 
 
EILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 365 
 
 mental calculation of the space in which a letter could be 
 sent to Tasmania and an answer received, allowing for pos- 
 sible delays in the interval, was gone through before Eila 
 pronounced herself upon this point. But, like the dealers 
 who demand the highest price for their wares with a mental 
 reserve of what they will accept as the lowest, she began 
 reflectively : 
 
 " One hears of very long engagements sometimes, doesn't 
 one ? " 
 
 " One does " — there was a half -scornful, half -amused note 
 in Hubert's assent — " but the obstacles are not supposed to 
 come from the lovers themselves. In our case there is no 
 reason why the date of our unofficial union should be de- 
 layed. You shall have the trousseau of a princess after, in- 
 stead of before the ceremony." 
 
 " Oh, don't say that, please ! " she protested in a pained 
 voice, her face suffused with a crimson flush ; then, difli- 
 dently : " Are you so tremendously rich, Hubert ? " 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " What would you say if I told you I had Aladdin's cave 
 in the mountains of Australia ? It is true, but I have sworn 
 that no living person shall say ' Open, sesame ' to it save 
 one. So far I have only opened it a very little way. When 
 you choose to use the magic password, you may tumble out 
 the treasures at your pleasure. Tell me, Eila, when will 
 you give me the joy of hearing you say it ? " 
 
 She was silent. Confused thoughts of making him de- 
 vote the bulk of his money to some grand philanthropic 
 purpose, refusing all but a modest competence for herself 
 and her belongings, were surging up in her mind. Surely 
 if there were any moral blame attached to the selling of 
 herself, the blessing of thousands of her unknown fellow- 
 creatures must help to condone it. 
 
 " When is the ' Open, sesame ' to be pronounced ? " he 
 continued, seeing her hesitate. "But I am not going to 
 urge you any more after what you have said, though to 
 remain here in this state of uncertainty, seeing you every 
 day, is out of the question. I will leave Paris to-night "— 
 he saw her face pale with a sudden apprehension— " but 
 
366 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 you shall have my address, and wherever I may be, you 
 can. recall me by a word. The signal I told you of will be 
 sufficient. When you are ready, telegraph those two words, 
 ' Open, sesame.' I shall know what they signify, and I will 
 come at once. By leaving you now I shall be giving you 
 the best proof that I have no intention of taking undue ad- 
 vantage of the situation, as you accused me of doing a few 
 moments ago. Furthermore, I will send your brother home 
 to you, and leave it to his own conscience to punish him for 
 his ingratitude towards me. As for you, Eila, you and 
 your belongings will only be in the position in which I 
 found you — neither better nor worse. I take my solemn 
 oath that whenever you send me the password we have 
 settled upon, I will make your family rich for the remainder 
 of their lives. Meanwhile let there be no mistake. To 
 write to me would be useless. I will not answer your letters. 
 There is only one summons I shall answer, and that will be 
 in person. I shall leave for London to-night. Telegraph to 
 me at the Bank of New South Wales when you are ready to 
 enter the enchanted cave. Wherever I may be, your mes- 
 sage will bring me to you instantly. Should I die, you will 
 be informed of it. And now good-bye ; you will neither see 
 me nor hear of me again unless . . . But I will not repeat 
 what I said just now. Yours is not the childish intelligence 
 to which repetition brings conviction. You know that 
 every word I have uttered is the absolute and final expres- 
 sion of what I feel and of what I intend to do. I have 
 given you your password ; it only remains for you now to 
 use it." 
 
 " But why need you go at all ? " urged Eila, in a low 
 voice ; " you cannot say it is my fault if you take yourself 
 away from us Hke that. All I asked for was time to think 
 over the plan you proposed." 
 
 She brought out the last words jerkily, after hesitating 
 painfully in quest of them. She could not forget that Hu- 
 bert's departure would mean an immediate cutting-off of 
 supplies. She would have liked to persuade him to remain 
 until she had found at least a solution or a compromise, or, 
 rather, until such time as, unknown to him, she had com- 
 
BILA IS ASKED TO PAY THE COST. 367 
 
 municated with Reginald and received his reply. But Hu- 
 bert was obdurate. It was evident that he intended to re- 
 duce the garrison by starvation, having failed to achieve its 
 capitulation by gentler means. The shadow of the Future 
 seemed already to loom before Eila with eyes of spectral 
 hunger. 
 
 " I do wish you would not go," she pleaded once more, 
 as he grimly extended his hand in leave-taking. "We 
 shall feel so — so lost without you." 
 
 This appeal was undoubtedly genuine, but it had the 
 contrary effect of fortifying the person to whom it was 
 made in his resolution. Hubert was not acting upon the 
 impulse of the moment. He had considered deeply the 
 plan of action into which his departure entered as a conse- 
 quence of his beautiful cousin's attitude. In his own mind 
 he did not give her many weeks to hold out against his 
 abandonment of the family. The most impolitic thing, as 
 it seemed to him, would have been to remain by her side at 
 present. As long as he was at hand and she could be sure 
 of obtaining what she wanted for her belongings — he had 
 long ago discovered that she took first thought for them 
 and second for herself— she would find a thousand pretexts 
 for delaying to give him a definite answer. He had but 
 small faith in the efficacy of personal influence in his own 
 particular case. Propinquity, which Miss Edgeworth makes 
 so powerful a factor in the bringing about of marriages, had 
 been given a fair trial. Absence, and the withdrawal of all 
 the benefits that his presence conferred, might prove more 
 effective. Let the beautiful Bacchante feel for a second 
 time the pinch of poverty, let her find herself constrained 
 once more to apply the dieting process to her mother and 
 sisters, and it would not be long before the cabalistic words 
 — so meaningless to all save himself — would summon him 
 back to her side, never, please Heaven, or the other place, to 
 leave it again. 
 
 In reply to Eila's renewed appeal, he pulled the Rubens 
 cloak resolutely over his shoulders, throwing the long fold 
 over the hump with a leftward gesture of the right hand 
 that signified resistance unto death. In vain she essayed to 
 
368 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 make him listen to her pleading. He cut her short with the 
 same inflexible words : 
 
 "You know my conditions. Nothing can alter them. 
 You have three months to think it over." 
 
 And before she had bethought herself of recasting her 
 petition in another form, he was gone. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 eila's letter. 
 
 While Eila moves about in a white and wintry world, 
 Hobart is basking in the radiant glow of an Antipodean 
 summer. Mount Wellington wears his summer robe of 
 purple-hued velvet, and even upon the topmost peak of his 
 lofty head no trace of his winter crown is visible. The little 
 Sandy Bay cottage is almost hidden under the trailing em- 
 brace of roses, convolvuli, and jessamine, and the cherries 
 hanging in profusion to the boughs are red and ripe to 
 bursting-point. 
 
 Upon one of the loveliest of these lovely summer even- 
 ings, Reginald was walking up and down the gravelled path 
 of the cottage garden between the thyme-borders, with his 
 dog at his heels and his pipe between his lips. Every time 
 he turned his face seawards his gaze rested upon the Queen 
 of the South, lying in dismantled state with bare masts 
 against the Hobart wharf. He had hardly waited for the 
 vessel to cast anchor before he had boarded her, and with 
 the aid of Eila's ship-diary, which he had brought with 
 him (quite unnecessarily, seeing that he knew every word 
 of the manuscript by heart), had reconstituted the voyage of 
 the Clare family almost day by day. He knew the exact 
 spot where young Mrs. Frost had sat at table by the side of 
 the first mate, and he even went to the trouble of reversing 
 the swing-back of the bench in order that he might intro- 
 duce himself into the identical place she had occupied. By 
 cross-examining the bo'sun in a circuitous fashion, he was 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 369 
 
 enabled to determine in the same way the portion of the 
 bulwarks upon which Eila had been wont to perch herself 
 upon moonlight nights in the tropics. But most joyful dis- 
 covery of all, upon the edge of the rough bunk she had oc- 
 cupied in the stern cabin, which upon the present voyage 
 was filled up with a consignment of sausage-machines for a 
 hardware dealer in Hobart, he found a capital R scratched 
 with the point of a pair of scissors on the inner side. Eila 
 had told him in her diary of this performance of hers, per- 
 petrated upon a day when the heavy seas near the Horn had 
 well-nigh swamped the Queen. It had been impossible, she 
 said, to keep one's feet, and the cuddy was running with 
 water. Against the ports there was nothing but the angry 
 green of a boiling boisterous sea to be descried. It had been 
 too dark in the stern cabins to read, and it was bitterly, bit- 
 terly cold. Eila confessed that her thoughts had wandered 
 miserably enough in the direction of the octagonal blue 
 bottle ; and that to give herself courage she had traced with 
 infinite pains the first letter of Reginald's name as she lay 
 prostrate in her berth. He had never thought to find the 
 precious memento. It was more than probable, he told 
 himself, that it had been painted out when the Queen was 
 overhauled previous to her departure for Tasmania. But 
 there it was, and when, after displacing the sausage-ma- 
 chines without regard to the consequences, the young man 
 discovered it, in the exact place that had been described to 
 him, he committed the extravagance of hoisting himself on 
 the berth for the sole purpose of pressing his lips to it. He 
 would have liked, had he dared, to cut out the piece of 
 planking upon which the E was traced and to carry it 'away 
 with him. But no pretext for performing this act of muti- 
 lation occurring, he was obliged to leave it behind in the 
 unsympathetic neighbourhood of the sausage-machines ; 
 only the ship's carpenter reaped the benefit of the discovery 
 in the shape of an unexpectedly munificent tip. 
 
 Seawards, then, he beheld the Queen from the garden this 
 evening, and the Queen meant Eila, and Eila alone. On 
 the land side, as he paced backwards and forwards, he saw 
 the mountain, and the mountain signified Eila, and none 
 
370 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 but Eila. The mountain and the sea, the whole universe, 
 indeed, was full of her presence. Yet what reward could he 
 hope to reap from his constancy ? The more he clung to 
 Eila's image, the more he cherished it, the deeper the iron 
 entered his soul. He would not have forfeited his love for 
 all the gold of the Australias ; bu.t so far, instead of bringing 
 him any happiness, it was the cause of a perpetual and heart- 
 corroding anxiety. More than ever was he anxious now, for 
 the news of the total failure of the insurance company, on 
 which the Clare family depended for their sole means of 
 living, had been confirmed only that very day. Hitherto he 
 had hoped that something might be saved from the wreck 
 for the families of the shareholders, and it was rather with a 
 view to helping his friends in Paris to tide over the evil day 
 occasioned by a. temporary stoppage of supplies, than in the 
 fear of their being left literally without a penny, that he 
 had sent fifty pounds to Eila some three months ago. But 
 now the disastrous certainty of their being left without any 
 resources of their own was placed beyond a doubt, and Eegi- 
 nald was in no enviable frame of mind as he walked to and 
 fro in the little thjrme-scented garden. He could have cursed 
 his poverty that kept him chained like some worn-out old 
 steed to the same jog-trot round of daily duties, and that 
 prevented him from rushing across the world to succour his 
 love. Had it not been for his mother, he would have thrown 
 up his employment upon the spot, placed the few hundred 
 pounds he possessed in his pocket-book, and gone to Paris to 
 pour them at Eila's feet. He felt as though he would have 
 found the strength to rescue the whole family for her sake. 
 They sorely needed a man with a practical head to take 
 charge of them. He would have found an ally in Willie, 
 the only one of the Clares whom he was inclined to credit 
 with an ounce of commonsense, and Dick should have been 
 made to work, if only as a house-painter. Reginald himself 
 would have been responsible for the well-being of the rest, 
 and it would have gone hardly with him, he thought, if he 
 had not found the means of keeping a decent roof over their 
 heads. What they would do now, Heaven only knew. His 
 fifty pounds had probably saved them from going under 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 371 
 
 completely, but the little fund would soon be exhausted, and 
 then what was to become of them ? He was earning himself 
 a salary of some four hundred a year, and the greater por- 
 tion of it was devoted to the sustenance of a paralyzed 
 mother. Old Mrs. Acton required a special attendant of her 
 own. It had also been Reginald's delight to surround her 
 with every imaginable comfort he could devise for her. No 
 empress could have had a softer couch or choicer wines. All 
 the appliances that modern science has invented for giving 
 a poor helpless body the delusion of being independent were 
 purchased by him almost as soon as they appeared. The 
 cottage spare-room was filled with automatic couches and 
 reading-tables that had been supplanted one after the other 
 by still later patented contrivances. A happy old lady was 
 Mrs. Acton, despite her helpless limbs, for she lived in the 
 belief that she occupied the first place in the heart of the best 
 of sons. It was certain that her dependence upon him had 
 intensified his filial tenderness. Constant contact with suf- 
 fering and weakness acts upon different natures in very dif- 
 ferent ways. Some grow indifl'erent and callous ; others 
 (and these are not necessarily the most unfeeling) become 
 irritated and resentful. It is only a few rare natures that 
 are able to remain constantly pitying and patient, and to 
 remember that, if we can grow used to witnessing pain, it 
 does not follow that the sufferers get used to feeling it. 
 Reginald's was one of these rare natures. A sentiment that 
 had once found place in his heart remained unchanged to 
 the end. It is to be supposed that his antipathies were as 
 steadfast as his sympathies, though he found but rarely the 
 occasion for manifesting them. As he continued to walk up 
 and down the thyme-bordered path turning the question of 
 Ella's situation over in his mind, and pondering ways and 
 means of helping her, the postman handed him a letter over 
 the garden fence. Even before he felt it in his hands he knew 
 whence it came ; these Paris missives did not arrive very regu- 
 larly, though he would continue to hope against hope when- 
 ever mail-day came round. His heart throbbed now with 
 an anticipation that was almost painful as he carried off his 
 prize to the farthest extremity of the garden, like a dog with 
 
372 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Ms bone, before examining the contents. Despite all his 
 philosophy, it jarred upon his nerves to be spoken to by 
 anyone whomsoever when he was reading one of his Paris 
 letters. Habitually he skimmed through them rapidly at a 
 first reading, and it was almost a matter of regret to him 
 that Eila wrote so clear a hand, for it deprived him of the 
 pleasure of prolonging this preliminary examination. The 
 next reading was more deliberate. Phrases were studied 
 with reference to what was left unsaid as well as to what 
 was said. The next perusal, and the next — Reginald could 
 not have told you how many nexts — suggested numberless 
 questions he would have to ask the writer when he came to 
 answer her letter. Upon the present occasion it was a satis- 
 faction to feel even before he opened it that the envelope 
 was more than usually thick. Eila had already acknowl- 
 edged the arrival of his fifty pounds with grateful outpour- 
 ings that had moved and pained him as he read them, and 
 this time she would possibly have something more to tell 
 him about the mysterious hunchback cousin, whose dis- 
 covery she had narrated in one of her former letters. He 
 leaned against the trunk of a walnut-tree, surrounded by a 
 screen of currant-bushes, and pulling his wideawake over 
 his eyes, and sticking his pipe in a branch — he could not 
 have committed the sacrilege of approaching a pipe to Eila's 
 letter — proceeded to read as follows : 
 
 " Dear Reginald " (sometimes it was " Dear Friend "), 
 " I am going to write you the most curious letter a 
 woman ever wrote to the man who cared for her, as I know 
 and feel you do for me. From one point of view it wiU al- 
 most make you inclined to look upon me as a monster, but 
 indeed I am the same Eila you knew at Cowa, the same 
 about whom you said once that nothing she might do would 
 take you very much by surprise — you remember saying that, 
 don't you? The same, too, from whom you exacted a 
 solemn promise that, in consideration of your love for her, 
 she would tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
 but the truth, about herself, no matter what it might be." 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 3^3 
 
 At this point in his reading it behoved Reginald to sum- 
 mon all his resolution. The dread of what was to come was 
 so great that a mist seemed to hide the characters from his 
 eyes. His fingers were trembling. He closed them fiercely- 
 round the paper and read on : 
 
 "Furthermore, that she would let nothing important 
 happen in her life, and make no change in it of her own 
 accord, without giving you due warning, and waiting to 
 hear what you might have to say about it first." 
 
 The mist cleared away, and the reader gave unconscious 
 vent to a profound sigh of relief. Let her say her worst 
 now. He could brace himself to hear it. There was time 
 still, for she had kept her promise to him, and he blessed 
 her for it in his heart. The letter went on : 
 
 " I hardly know how to put into words the step I con- 
 template taking, or, rather, the fate that is hanging over 
 me : for when I try to put it down in cold blood I seem to 
 realize exactly the horror my conduct would inspire in other 
 people. To say that I feel it is inevitable, and to resign my- 
 self to it beforehand, almost looks as though I were conniv- 
 ing at it, but indeed this is not so. It is simply that I can- 
 not help myself. Of course I could escape my fate if I 
 chose, but it would be at the cost of sacrificing five persons 
 to one ; or, to speak the strict truth, four persons, for Willie 
 can manage to keep his head above water in a way. Those 
 four persons are my naother, and Mamy, and Dick, and 
 Truca, and when I have told you this you will be prepared 
 to understand a little better how it is that I shall be able to 
 bring myself to accept the fate that is in store for me, with- 
 out counting the cost. It is dreadful to be at such a dis- 
 tance from you, for I feel that I am torm.enting you all this 
 time by not coming to the point, and yet I can't summon 
 up the courage to make my confession to you before I have 
 put down all the extenuating circumstances." 
 
 Reginald's face grew grim again at this point. He was 
 preparing to read eagerly on, when the sound of his mother's 
 
374 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 voice, faintly calling to him from her bath-chair, which she 
 had caused to be wheeled in his vicinity, reached his hiding- 
 place. 
 
 "Reginald! Reginald!" it said, with mild persistency. 
 " I shall say to you, like the rude boy in Punch, ' Is it from 
 Frederic, or Frederica, my dear ? ' I never knew you so 
 absorbed in a letter before. I want you to wheel me round 
 to the kitchen door, if you please. If I don't warn Mary 
 once more about putting your new merino vests into hot 
 water, she will make them quite un wearable, just as she did 
 the last." 
 
 Reginald came forward mechanically. There was an ex- 
 pression of such intense and suffering abstraction in his 
 clouded blue eyes that even his mother, who had come to 
 believe that she possessed the sole monopoly of exciting the 
 sympathy of people who had the use of their limbs, could 
 not fail to notice it. 
 
 " Tell me what has happened, Reginald," she cried, in a 
 tone of alarmed curiosity, eyeing the letter suspiciously. 
 
 " Happened ? Notliing ! " He smiled down at her with 
 an effort, thrusting the letter into his pocket as he spoke. 
 " Let us go and save the merino vests while there is time." 
 
 But after he had wheeled the bath-chair to the kitchen 
 door he found means to slip away without taking part in 
 the discussion upon the merino vests after all, for when 
 Mrs. Acton looked round to appeal to him, it was the sedate 
 face of the attendant, and not her son's blue eyes, that an- 
 swered her inquiring glance. 
 
 The invalid shivered, though the evening was very 
 warm. It was not to be wondered at, perhaps, that a young 
 man should occasionally find the company of a paralytic 
 old woman somewhat tedious, even though the latter should 
 be his mother. But if the writer of the letter he had been 
 reading was able to make him happier than she could, why 
 had he worn so pained an expression when he looked up 
 from reading it, and why did he exclude his mother from 
 his confidence ? 
 
 Old Mrs. Acton would not have asked this question twice 
 if she had been able to look over her son's shoulder as he 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 375 
 
 continued to peruse Eila's missive. I doubt, however, 
 whether she would have read on after she had reached the 
 point he had come to, and especially after a comprehension 
 of the significance of the communication had dawned upon 
 her. It is more likely she would have drawn the letter 
 from her son's hands, and adjured him, as he valued his 
 soul, to cease all intercourse with so utterly depraved a 
 creature as the writer. She would not have understood, in- 
 deed, how depravity could go to the length of pleading its 
 own cause in so shameless a fashion. 
 
 But she never knew what the mysterious epistle con- 
 tained, for the reason that Reginald carried it beyond the 
 walnut-tree this time. He carried it as far out of reach of 
 his mother's voice as possible, to the lane behind the house, 
 and it was only when he was out of sight and hearing of 
 the inmates that he drew it from his pocket once more. No 
 one being in view, he walked slowly on, reading as he went, 
 and overwhelmed by the unconscious cruelty of the con- 
 tents. 
 
 Eila could not bear to inflict pain. Yet her manner of 
 beating about the bush before imparting the tidings at which 
 she had hinted in the beginning of her letter was like tor- 
 turing a patient with prods of the lancet before perform- 
 ing an operation upon him. His apprehensions increased 
 with every line. He felt as though he were being dragged 
 along the edge of a precipice before being hurled over it to 
 (bottomless) perdition. "Why cannot she come to the 
 point ? " he said to himself resentfully ; and he remembered 
 the nick-names of " Jesuit " and " special pleader " that he 
 had heard applied to her by her brothers and sisters at Cowa. 
 She had always been a casuist. He remembered her telling 
 him that when she was a child she had liked to take sides 
 against herself with reference to every point she held for 
 truth, and how it had often happened that the assumed 
 opponent had been too strong for her, and that she had been 
 obliged to leave untied the knot she had herself woven. 
 She had also told him how she had discovered at a very 
 early age that the frequent repetition of the same word will 
 convert it into sound without sense, and how the discovery 
 
376 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 had tempted her to make experiments that were not quite 
 fair in her arguments with the family, and to entangle them 
 in a mesh of words when she found she was losing the day. 
 But surely she need not have had recourse to such a subter- 
 fuge in writing to him. He loved her. Was not that 
 enough ? She might tell him she had broken all the Com- 
 mandments in a string. He must go on loving her in spite 
 of all. Some men will love a woman for her beauty ; others 
 for her virtue ; others for some abstract qualities which 
 they find incorporated in her. Reginald loved in quite an- 
 other fashion. No matter what might befall her, she would 
 always be the same for him. If she should lose herself in 
 the world's estimation, he would hate and execrate the evil 
 chance or the weakness that had proved her undoing. But 
 nothing could sully the image he cherished of her in his 
 heart. But it was cruel of her to inflict this long preamble 
 upon him. The sooner he knew what fatal step she was 
 contemplating, the sooner he could devise a way of saving 
 her from it. And she ought to have taken this into consid- 
 eration when she wrote. The letter continued from the part 
 where he had broken off : 
 
 " I wish you could be more reasonable about me, Regi- 
 nald ; it is the exaggerated kind of value you set upon me 
 that makes it so difficult for me to tell you the particular 
 kind of way in which I should have to sacrifice myself. If 
 you did not feel about me as you do, I am sure I should 
 think much less of the matter myself. I should try to re- 
 member the principle of the political economists, that the 
 chief thing to be considered is the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number, and that for one person out of six to come 
 to grief, or what the world calls coming to grief, really mat- 
 ters very little if all the rest are saved." 
 
 " You see, it is on your account much more than on my 
 own that I am so troubled. As far as my own feelings are 
 concerned, I have really almost reasoned them into subjec- 
 tion. The experience we went through some months ago 
 taught me a lesson I shall never forget. I would not tell 
 you about it then, for you were too far away to help us, and 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 377 
 
 it could only have given you pain. But all our money was 
 spent. Mother was ill, and I realized the horror of feeling 
 that we might not know where to turn for bread in a few 
 days, and that we should have to go through the degrada- 
 tion of begging for assistance (though I don't know where 
 we could have appli,ed for it). It was so awful that I cannot 
 look back upon it now without shuddering. That time is 
 like a black nightmare in my memory, and it was worse for 
 me than for the others, because I did not let them know 
 quite how bad things were. I made up my mind then that 
 rather than go through such an experience again, or see 
 Truca go to bed with the pinched, hungry look I saw once 
 in her face, I would sell myself. After writing down these 
 two words I have prepared you for the worst, and now you 
 will be able to nerve yourself to hear me to the end, espe- 
 cially as I give you my solemn word of honour that I am 
 referring to the future and not to the past, that I have taken 
 no irretrievable step so far, and that I mean to keep my 
 promise of telling you everything— fee/oreAand." 
 
 The evening, as I have said, was very warm. The sun 
 shone redly on the waters of the harbour as upon the night 
 when Eeginald had made Eila turn round to behold the 
 glories of the sunset sky from the rugged heights of Knock- 
 lofty. Yet as he read this paragraph to the end the young 
 man shuddered as though the chill of winter had descended 
 upon him. Was it too late ? Was the long preamble but a 
 slow preparation for the inevitable fall of which an ensuiag 
 letter would bring him the hideous details 1 If this were 
 so ! If it were indeed too late ! But it could not be too late. 
 Had she not given him her word of honour in this very let- 
 ter that she was the same Eila he loved and trusted, the 
 same who had bound herself by a solemn promise to make 
 no change in her life without consulting him ? But the 
 letter was written six weeks ago, and the writer had evi- 
 dently been skirting the precipice when she wrote. She 
 could not have approached much nearer without falling 
 over altogether. But surely such a sacrilege could never 
 have been permitted; the pity of it would have been too 
 
378 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 tremendous. Eila, with all her beauty, her youth, her power, 
 and her purity — her generous instincts, and her love for her 
 belongings — to seek her place voluntarily among the out- 
 casts of her sex ! To ruin and degrade herself beyond re- 
 demption in the zenith of her sweetness and charm ! A 
 curse u]30n her exaggerated solicitude for her family ! She 
 had always carried it to a point, that bordered upon insanity. 
 Curses, too, upon her cheap estimation of herself and her 
 attractions! What inexplicable delusion made her act as 
 though her sole mission in life were to grovel in the dust 
 and mud in order that her family might walk clean-shod 
 over her body ? If the hideous sacrifice should have been 
 accomplished, the world would suppose she had bargained 
 herself away for her own profit. None but he would know 
 how in truth she had but one object in view, and that object 
 was her family. But she had brothers. If they possessed 
 the least spark of manhood among them, they would not 
 suffer their sister to go to her destruction. Ought not two 
 strong lads to be capable of working for their mother and 
 sisters ? But the vision of Dick in his sandals rose before 
 Reginald's mind at this moment, and his discouragement 
 returned afresh. He could not take comfort in the hope 
 that Dick would be a staff to lean upon in the time of trouble, 
 and it was with a sinking heart that he resumed once more 
 the reading of his letter : 
 
 " You have not forgotten the story I told you that night 
 upon Mount Knocklofty about our cousin Hubert de Merle, 
 and the ruby that ought to have belonged to mother which 
 he had in his possession ? I know you looked upon him as 
 a mythical personage, and though you did not say it in so 
 many words, I could guess from your tone that you thought 
 we must be mad to expect to find him in Europe. Well, we 
 have found him, and though nothing has been said about 
 the ruby, he has taken us under his protection. Prom the 
 day that he first came to visit us, the cloud of poverty has 
 been lifted from our lives. We have had all the comforts 
 and luxuries that rich people enjoy, and oh ! Reginald, if 
 you could know what it means to be poor and hungry in a 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 379 
 
 place like Paris, to be afraid to stir out* of doors because 
 your clothes are shabby, and to have people treat you almost 
 as though you were a criminal, you would not wonder at 
 our appreciating the difference in our position now. The 
 thought of going back to our former misery is the night- 
 mare of my life. I need not say it is not for myself that I 
 mind. You know me well enough to be sure of it even 
 without my telling you. You know that if I were alone 
 in the world I would turn nurse or parlourmaid (I should 
 not be fit for much else), and make a respectable liveli- 
 hood. But no ; I think I would come straight to you, and 
 we would go off somewhere into the wilds, out of the 
 reach of Mrs. Grundy, and build ourselves a little hut, and 
 earn the right to live by the sweat of our brow." 
 
 A sudden flush suffused Eeginald's face as he read these 
 words. One cannot wish for the demise of an entire family 
 without being a kind of potential Tropmann, but there is no 
 crime in wishing that they might never have existed, and 
 if the desire of Reginald's heart could have been realized at 
 this moment, the writer of the letter he held in his hands 
 would have been a foundling. 
 
 "But I am not alone,'" Eila continued, "and my one 
 thought night and day is how to place the others out of the 
 reach of want. Coming to Europe " — Reginald noticed she 
 no longer spoke of coming " home " — " has taught me a 
 great many things. It has shown me that we are really 
 worth nothing as a family in the world, excepting to each 
 other. We have no kind of marketable accomplishments 
 or qualities. From what I have seen here of the struggle 
 for life, one must have a talent for some particular kind of 
 profession, or else one must remain among the unskilled on 
 the lowest rung of the ladder. It is almost impossible to 
 make a living if one has no vocation. Besides, it would 
 kill my mother, or Mamy, or Truca, to be put to any sort of 
 drudgery, even if they were capable of performing it. They 
 do not need much to live upon, but what they have must be 
 something they can depend upon, and it must leave them 
 25 
 
380 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 free to go out and come in as they choose, and to be at no- 
 body's bidding. Then Dick may have to practise his art for 
 many years (and he is not even at the beginning of it) be- 
 fore he can hope to keep himself. You see now what our 
 position is. The one thing we had to reckon upon, namely, 
 the sum paid us by the insurance company during mother's 
 lifetime, is gone. Even while we had it we could not man- 
 age to keep our heads above water, but now we should be 
 literally beggars without our cousin. Your munificent and 
 generous gift " (Reginald winced as he read these grandilo- 
 quent words) " would have been our salvation under other cir- 
 cumstances, but we should have come to the end of it in time. 
 (Even as it is I am troubled by the thought that you may have 
 deprived yourself of many things that are really necessary.) 
 And when that money was spent, what was to become of us ? 
 The future lay black before us, like the coal-hole in infinite 
 space we used to look up at in the Hobart sky. We had no 
 plans and no prospects. The most likely thing to happen to 
 us was that the family would be broken up, and that each 
 one would make an attempt to earn a miserable livelihood 
 alone. But we are all so awfully unfitted for regular or 
 constant work of any kind. I could see only one means of 
 salvation, and that was in Mamy's marriage with Sydney 
 Warden. But Mamy is without pity. Sydney is not of age, 
 and when his mother came to find we were utter paupers, 
 standing on the brink of beggary, she would naturally do 
 her utmost to prevent the marriage. Now you understand 
 just how we would be situated if it were not for our 
 cousin. Without his making any kind of definite proposals 
 or arrangement, and simply upon the grounds of his being 
 a connection and apparently very rich, it seems to have been 
 taken for granted that we are to let him spend a small fortune 
 upon us every day, take us to dine at grand restaurants, treat 
 us to the theatre, make us drive out with him in a splendid 
 carriage, and send us presents of money for clothes. This 
 condition of afi'airs has lasted for some months. Poor moth- 
 er quite believes that it is a tacit recognition on Hubert de 
 Merle's part of the claims we have on the ruby. But he has 
 spent the price of a hundred rubies on us already, whatever 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 381 
 
 mother may say to the contrary, and now he proposes taking 
 us all for a grand tour through Europe. The others are be- 
 side themselves with delight. We were already making our 
 preparations, when the awful news of the crush of the insur- 
 ance company reached me, with your beautiful telegram and 
 present, and I have been coward enough to say nothing of 
 it yet to the rest. It would be too awful a wet-blanket in 
 the midst of their joy. But the thought is ever present with 
 me, that we are walking over the thin crust of a volcano. 
 We have no earthly claims upon our cousin. Even our 
 imaginary claims have been paid, and more than paid. Sup- 
 posing he should suddenly tire of us, and turn his back upon 
 us ! I do believe in that case there would be nothing but 
 the octagonal blue bottle to fly to. But no ! I don't quite 
 mean that. I can see your vexed look even while I write 
 the words. But you will admit that our position would be 
 as bad as it could be. 
 
 " Now, Reginald, I have been making this long explana- 
 tion for no other purpose than to lead up to the conclusion 
 which I have already hinted at in the beginning of my let- 
 ter. It is given to me to be able to save the others, and to 
 put them out of the reach of want once and for ever. I have 
 had a presentiment of this all along, and now I have the cer- 
 tainty of it. Our cousin is not a Don Quixote. Neither has 
 he taken such a fancy to the family all round as to feel that 
 he must provide for us all to the end of our lives. He is 
 what I vaguely suspected him to be from the beginning, a 
 man with a fixed and unswerving purpose, to gain which he 
 would sacrifice not one poor family alone, but the whole 
 world, if it were in his power to do so, and if it could further 
 the object he had in view. 
 
 " It is awfully diflftcult for me to tell you the price he de- 
 mands for saving the family from poverty. More difBcult 
 in one way to tell you than any other person in the world, 
 although you are so pitiful and understanding, and al- 
 though, strangely enough, being my father confessor, you 
 are the only living soul, save myself and the partner of my 
 guilt (for that is the way in which it must be expressed), 
 who will know anything about the matter. But I am telling 
 
382 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 you without telling you, and oh, Reginald, do keep your pity 
 and some little affection for me in spite of all. I shall be 
 driven to accept my fate, because there will be no help for it. 
 There is no way out of it, whichever way I look. "Why is 
 life made so hard for us ? I do desire to walk along a 
 straight path with all my heart, but things have been so 
 dreadfully against us from the beginnijig. How can I let 
 my mother and Mamy and Truca suffer cold and hunger ? 
 If I were not married, and Hubert were to propose to marry 
 me (and you may believe on my sacred word of honom* that 
 this is the solution he would offer if I were free), I would 
 not be looked upon as a depraved woman for accepting his 
 offer, even though I could not possibly love him. It would 
 be considered quite a meritorious action on my part to marry 
 a deformed man with a great fortune and to enrich all my 
 belongings. But if one looks at the matter in its true light — 
 remembering that my marriage is really no marriage, and 
 that I am free in fact, if not in name — there is no greater 
 wrong in becoming Hubert's mistress than in becoming his 
 wife. The wrong lies in the violence done to my own senti- 
 ment ; but whether I sell myself with the sanction of the 
 world or without it, the deed in itself must surely remain 
 the same. In truth, when it comes to selling one's self, I 
 almost think the offense to morality must be less if one does 
 not ask the Law and the Church to ratify it. 
 
 " I am afraid you will think that I am tutoring myself 
 weakly to accept an alternative which I might escape if I 
 were to act differently. You will say, ' Eila was always a 
 wretched creature without any backbone ; why does she not 
 appeal to her cousin's honour and chivalry, and make him 
 feel that he is acting like a villain ? ' But oh, Reginald, if 
 you knew Hubert de Merle, you would know how little such 
 reasoning meant. He is not like other men. It is the one 
 fixed, unchanging idea of a solitary and brooding life that 
 he is resolved to carry out at all costs. And because it has 
 never been realized, he is the more determined to put it into 
 execution now. He would see one after the other of the 
 family perish of hunger at his feet, and I with them, un- 
 moved. I feel it when I am with him. He has put us under 
 
EILA'S LETTER. 383 
 
 even greater obligations than I knew of. It would take too 
 long to tell you of them all. He even has Dick in his 
 power, and can save him or lose him at his pleasure. He 
 has told me that Dick's fate and the fate of all my dear ones 
 rests with me, and is in my hands alone. If I listen to him 
 he will have a proper a^t drawn up (you know I don't un- 
 derstand legal terms, but it would be something that a great 
 firm of London lawyers would undertake) by which jBlve 
 hundred pounds would be paid mother yearly for the whole 
 term of her life, and two hundred a year to each of the 
 others. I have always thought — and really this is no pre- 
 tence — that, if I could procure a certainty for the others like 
 the one contained in Hubert's offer, I would gladly consent 
 to die. Of course I should bargain for an easy death, for I 
 hate pain. Every fibre in my body seems to shrink from it. 
 But if I would accept actual physical death, why should I 
 not accept the social death that an acquiescence in his plan 
 would bring upon me ? I know which course the family 
 would prefer me to take if you were to ask them their opinion 
 by turns quite independently of each other. 
 
 " I have thought the matter over until I seem to have no 
 power of judgment left. I believe thinking of a subject too 
 long and too intently must trouble our point of view about 
 it, like repeating the same word over and over again. Both 
 subject and word cease to have any meaning after a time. 
 Sometimes I think what a wicked fool I must be not to close 
 with the bargain at once. Between forcing Mamy to marry 
 without love, and acting upon the same principle myself— 
 without marriage— the last course would be much less wrong 
 than the first. I have no position to lose, and my own feel- 
 ings are much fainter than Mamy's. It could not be other- 
 wise after the dreary experience of my first marriage. Be- 
 fore you give me advice, Reginald, try for pity's sake to put 
 yourself in my place. Remember that there can be no 
 scandal in taking the step I contemplate, and no wrong 
 done to another. Hubert is free, and if I go to live with 
 him after a time (for that is part of the contract) he would 
 take me to some foreign place where I would pass for his 
 wife, and be respected by the people about us. If I should 
 
384 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 become a widow, or we cau obtain a divorce, he would 
 marry me. But meanwhile all I have been able to obtain 
 from him is a few weeks' respite to allow me to make up 
 my mind. And all this time the others are wondering why 
 the journey they have been counting upon for so long has 
 been delayed. If I say 'No' to Hubert's proposal he will 
 abandon us for ever. He has told me so in a way that forces 
 me to believe him. Then there would be nothing to look 
 for but utter misery and shame. Indeed, I cannot face the 
 thought of telling my mother that we are without a penny 
 in the world, and that Hubert has left us to our fate. I 
 might as well dole out the contents of the octagonal bottle 
 at once, for to be left stranded in Paris would mean to die 
 by slow starvation, and that is worse than poison. 
 
 " I told you I could not think clearly of the situation 
 any longer, for the reason, I suppose, that I have thought of 
 it too much. Hubert has placed the knife against my throat, 
 as they say here when one is forced nolens volens to accept 
 the conditions of the stronger party. The only definite no- 
 tion I have clung to is my promise to tell you everything 
 that concerns me. If it were not for you, the arrangement 
 I told you of would have been carried out already. You 
 will say I am a poor specimen of what a true woman ought 
 to be. My feeling for Hubert should by rights be one of 
 intense horror and loathing, but really it comes nearer to 
 indifference than anything else. There is a vague wonder 
 in my mind all the time at his attaching such a tremendous 
 price to the doubtful advantage of annexing an indifferent 
 woman ; but I have given up trying to understand men's 
 natures. They are so different from one's own. Even you 
 are beyond my comprehension ; I only know that if I were 
 free I should feel quite safe and happy by your side, and it 
 would be a relief to surrender my judgment to yours. I 
 have come to the conclusion that I have no head for practi- 
 cal matters; and as for abstract ones, after all, Pilate's ques- 
 tion is the only fitting answer to them. 
 
 "Now good-bye, Reginald— though it is not good-bye 
 unless you choose it to be so; and, at any rate, when you 
 receive this letter, there will be nothing that need hinder 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 385 
 
 your thinking of me as you say you like to recall me. If it 
 were not that it would be cowardly and selfish to abandon 
 the others to their fate, I sometimes think the solution of 
 the octagonal bottle emptied by me alone would be the best 
 and easiest, after all. One does get so tired sometimes of 
 the contrariness of everything in the world." 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 
 
 For long hours after Reginald had read the foregoing 
 letter, he remained outside in the soft evening air pondering 
 over its contents. He had wandered down the lane as far 
 as the beach, and found a rock that served him for a rest- 
 ing-place. Mount Wellington behind him had turned from 
 purple to rose, and from rose to misty gray. The harbour 
 had lost the flame-coloured reflection cast upon it by the 
 sunset, and mirrored now a full-globed moon, whose rays 
 lay spread like a silver shield upon the quiet waters. The 
 sea-breeze was soft as a zephyr, hardly ruffling the smooth 
 expanse of liquid light and shade. Only the lazy advance 
 of the tide was marked by the oncoming of a swirling 
 fringe of sea, that wetted the sand near Reginald's feet, and 
 then retired noiselessly as though regretful for having in- 
 truded upon his solitude. 
 
 Yet he took but scant notice of moonlight reflection or 
 gently-curling tide. "Only the heart," saith the Bible, 
 " knoweth its own bitterness." No one passing by the spot 
 where he was seated, and observing the quiet figure rumi- 
 nating upon a stone, would have thought of connecting it 
 with the elements out of which a five-act tragedy is made. 
 Yet if the reflections of this solitary figure had found utter- 
 ance in words, if the conflicting emotions of love and hate, 
 and hope and despair, that tortured its soul had been ren- 
 dered in Greek hexameters, the impression of a very true 
 and overwhelming mental anguish, which constitutes, after 
 
386 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 all, the underlying theme of all tragedy, would certainly 
 have resulted from the experiment. 
 
 What, then, was the nature of Reginald's reflections ? 
 They were of so complex a kind that his condition might 
 have been compared to that of a man who, undergoing vari- 
 ous kinds of torture at the same moment, is unable to say 
 which inflicts the acutest pain. That if Eila had loved him 
 she could not have written as she did, could not have rea- 
 soned so coldly upon the hideous barter of her person ; that 
 under happier circumstances she might and could have 
 loved him ; that she was going to perdition, and that her 
 letter was really an appeal to him to save her ; that he was 
 powerless to save her, and that she would not thank him 
 for doing so, even were he able — all these conjectures, and 
 a thousand others of a like description, presented them- 
 selves to his mind in a confused succession, and added each 
 its fresh quota of torment. Worst of all was a degrading 
 idea that came, he knew not whence, and that took posses- 
 sion for an instant of his troubled brain, though he could 
 have loathed himself for having harboured it directly after- 
 wards — the idea that, though he could not cease to love 
 Eila, he would love her upon a lower level; that perhaps, 
 after all, it was not himself, but his senses, that she had en- 
 chained, and that in that case she need not be lost to him 
 irretrievably. She did not love her monstrous adorer. She 
 was only terrified at the spectre of poverty and misery that 
 he had invoked to coerce her. If she listened to him, it 
 was not because he had won her heart, but simply because 
 he had threatened the family with ruin. Supposing she 
 were to accept the arrangement he tried to force upon her, 
 would he not be treated according to his deserts if the first 
 use she made of the liberty his money conferred should be 
 to follow the inclination of her heart in another direction ? 
 To gain her for himself, Reginald felt that the shortest plan 
 would be to thrust her into Hubert's arms. For, once "she 
 had been dragged down from her pedestal, the motive for 
 worshipping her like a saint from a distance would exist no 
 longer. From a purely material point of view there was 
 everything to gain by the execution of the plan she had 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 38Y 
 
 divulged in her letter. As she had herself said, she had no 
 social position to lose, no children with a future to consider. 
 Whether she sent her cousin away and starved with her 
 family in a garret, or whether she went to live with him, 
 and placed them out of the reach of want, neither her luna- 
 tic husband nor his aged parents, living in an out-of-the-way 
 corner of the world, would be affected by her decision. 
 Moreover, old Mr. and Mrs. Frost had already marked her 
 place among the goats assembled before the Judgment-seat 
 at the Last Day, and under these circumstances the culprit 
 might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. 
 
 Reginald, howeve^ did not allow his idea to reach so ad- 
 vanced a stage as this. It had hardly suggested itself, like 
 the whisper of an unseen Mephistopheles, before he had re- 
 pelled it with horror. 
 
 Among the doubtful benefits which the gradual refining 
 of our natures has conferred upon us may be reckoned the 
 capacity for an enormous amount of suffering through those 
 intangible appurtenances called the sentiments. If Reginald 
 could have divested himself of these, his way would have 
 been easy. But so far was he from being able to find com- 
 fort in the " lower level " theme of love, that I believe if a 
 magician had appeared to him upon the Hobart beach at 
 this moment, and had offered to convey young Mrs. Frost 
 to a nunnery where she might have lived and died in chaste 
 seclusion out of the reach of Reginald himself, as well as of 
 all mortal men, he would have fallen at that magician's 
 feet and blessed hLin. Yet what advantage could he hope 
 to reap from such a solution, save that of being able to pre- 
 serve his ideal intact in the exalted shrine he had fashioned 
 for her ? And it was the ideal herself that now besought 
 him to couple her image with an act that would topple it 
 down from its shrine like the idol in the temple of Dagon, 
 and shatter it to pieces at his feet ! At one moment he 
 could have spurned Eila for her confidence in him, and the 
 moment after he could have blessed her for it. 
 
 But I think it was the latter mood that prevailed, after 
 all. Through all the elaborate arguments, the special plead- 
 ing of which her letter was so full, the one clear truth was 
 
388 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 evident to him. She confided in him and trusted him, not 
 because she loved him, but because, as far as her heart 
 could be moved, it had been moved by his love for her. 
 She had been loyal to the promise she had made him, and 
 in the closing part of her letter, " It is not good-bye unless 
 you wish it to be so," he read between the lines that she 
 hoped he might yet be able to save her at the eleventh hour. 
 Unless, indeed, the cynical suggestion that had flitted through 
 his mind had occurred to her as well as to him, and she 
 meant him to understand that her alliance with her cousin 
 would not put an insurmountable barrier between them as 
 far as her own affections were cencewied. But he repelled 
 the thought with a " Ketro, Satanas ! " as it rose. If such a 
 solution were monstrous in his eyes, it should be doubly 
 monstrous in hers, and he would not sully his thought of 
 her by dwelling upon it. The first interpretation he had 
 given to her words was the only one worthy of her, and in- 
 stead of sitting like a moon-struck fool all night upon the 
 beach he should be up and doing in her behalf. If she were 
 really in earnest, he could save her still. There is an lui- 
 speakable relief in presence of a soul-crushing disaster in 
 the mere act of considering practical ways and means. Hope 
 revives with the possibility of action. Reginald considered 
 first what money he had to dispose of. Never had he found 
 more reason to rejoice over his simple and economical habits 
 of life than now, for with what he had saved, and with what 
 he could borrow (and even at this crisis he would not bor- 
 row more than he could see his way to returning), he fore- 
 saw that he would be able to raise at least five hundred 
 pounds. Now, five hundred pounds in ready money will 
 accomplish a great deal under proper management. With 
 five hundred pounds he could bring Eila and all her be- 
 longings to Tasmania again, and feed them and house them 
 and look after them until some kind of position should have 
 been found for them. To have them back would be an im- 
 mense step gained. Here in this generous land there need 
 be no fear of their starving. Their peculiarities would be 
 all forgotten in their misfortunes. But how was he to let 
 Eila know his plan ? It would be more than five weeks be- 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 389 
 
 fore she could receive a letter from him, and what might not 
 happen if the wolf were at the door of the Paris apartment, 
 and a worse wolf in the shape of Hubert de Merle were lying 
 in wait outside it while the five weeks were passing away ? 
 
 He could telegraph, however. He could send a few short 
 words of passionate appeal to Paris, adjuring Eila to wait. 
 No doubt it is difficult to condense an impassioned appeal 
 into words with the knowledge that each word costs half a 
 guinea. But Reginald was not to be debarred by such con- 
 siderations as these. He made his way the very next morn- 
 ing to the telegraph-office, and wired the despatch he had 
 thought of in the night. The words for which he paid at 
 the afore-mentioned rate were as follows : " Plenty money 
 coming. Wait ! " " Plenty money " was not unlike an ab- 
 original rendering of English, but it seemed to him to con- 
 stitute the most powerful as well as the most practical form 
 of appeal. He had thought in the first instance of giving 
 expression to his passionate distress, of telling Eila that she 
 was killing him. But by dint of repeating the words, " You 
 are killing me," over to himself, they seemed to lose their 
 force. Besides, though telegraph operators should be re- 
 garded as priests in a confessional, he could not hand this 
 formula in cold blood to a clerk with whom he had played 
 cricket only a few years before. It had also occurred to him 
 that he would wire one word only—" Don't; " but this was 
 discarded in its turn, as he remembered that it contained 
 Mr. Punch's advice to young ladies about to marry. 
 
 How Eeginald went through his work that day he could 
 not have told. His figures were as correct as usual. He was 
 even able to enter into technical questions of a kind that 
 would have been a stumbling-block to any but a clear-headed 
 adept, before a board of directors, the same afternoon. And 
 all the time he was aware that an automatic double of him- 
 self was casting up the figures and arguing about the tech- 
 nicalities, and that his real self was twelve thousand miles 
 away in that garish apartment that Eila had described to 
 him in her letters, kneeling at the feet of the woman he 
 loved, and beseeching her for pity of herself and him to re- 
 frain from going to perdition. 
 
390 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 When he left his office at the end of his day's work, 
 though hardly at the end of the day itself, for the sun was 
 still above the mountains, he turned his steps mechanically 
 in the direction of the hilly street that led to Eila's old home. 
 His memory travelled back to the evening when he had as- 
 cended it for the last time to take his final leave of her. If 
 he could have foreseen what had come to pass now, would 
 he have let her go away then ? Would he have spoken to 
 her as he had spoken, while they sat upon the bench in the 
 moonlight side by side ? Had he not almost opened the door 
 to the catastrophe that threatened now ? He had told her 
 that nothing she might do would surprise him or detach him 
 from her, and that even if she should listen to words of love 
 from another man, she must not be afraid to avow the same 
 to him. But he had never contemplated such a disaster as 
 this. He had thought it possible that her impressionable 
 nature might be touched by someone more gifted than him- 
 self, and had she written to him that she had truly lost her 
 heart, he would have done his utmost to perform a brother's 
 part towards her. Though in that case the position would 
 have been tenfold worse than now. Reginald wandered on 
 absorbed in his thoughts, heedless of the path he was follow- 
 ing, until he had left the town behind him, and found him- 
 self in a narrow gorge between two hills. The rays of the 
 sun fell slantwise upon the dark trees that towered above 
 him in the solitude, turning the layers of foliage of the na- 
 tive cherry-tree into screens of verdant velvet, and warming 
 the red-splashed gum-leaves into fiery splendour. Did Eila 
 really mean what she had written about going away with 
 him into the wilds, and earning the right to live by helping 
 him to redeem the wilderness, or was this only one of the 
 vague phrases in which she occasionally indulged, with the 
 knowledge that she could not be taken at her word 2 What 
 was the secret of the witchery she exercised over him ? 
 Apart from her love for her family, which was bound up 
 with the strongest fibres of her being, he doubted whether 
 she was capable of harbouring a strong or steadfast senti- 
 ment. Would not a woman who could feel deeply have 
 been crushed to the earth by such experiences as she had 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 391 
 
 been through ? Yet they had not brought her one gray hair, 
 or set the shadow of a wrinkle on her face. How came it, 
 then, that she had the power of inspiring such passionate 
 devotion, of making all other women seem as puppets by 
 her side ? Was it her beauty ? Was it magnetism ? Had 
 she inherited some secret charm from her mysterious ances- 
 tors in the East ? He recalled her image in the washed-out 
 cotton frock that clung so meagrely to her Hebe-like form, 
 and shrank away from her wrists and ankles, and he thought 
 for the thousandth time how beautiful and lovable she had 
 looked in this guise, as she came down the garden path to 
 wish him good-bye. She had spoken to him of Lucy Warden 
 that last night ; he would rather she had spoken less of Lucy 
 and more of herself. The Wardens were in Europe now, 
 but since Eila had spoken it had been hinted to him in other 
 quarters that Miss Warden was still unmarried. Supposing, 
 if all other expedients failed, he should travel to Europe and 
 ask Lucy to m.arry him, with the sole end in view of saving 
 Eila with her money ? Which of two evils would be the 
 worst — to see Eila cut off from him by her or by his undoing ? 
 For in, either case she would be cut off from him. Only 
 marriage with Lucy would make the separation final and 
 irretrievable. Then, what right had he to sacrifice Lucy 
 upon the altar of his flame for Eila ? Though he had said 
 Miss Warden was made of gutta-percha, she had proved that 
 she possessed a heart, and it would be a sorry return for her 
 constancy to break it in behalf of her rival. 
 
 If our power of obtaining a thing were in proportion to 
 our power of wishing for it, we may be sure that as the sun 
 went down that evening, and Reginald turned his back upon 
 the solitary gorge and followed a cross-cut over the hills that 
 led to the Sandy Bay cottage, Eila would have come to meet 
 him in her shrunken cotton frock with outstretched arms, 
 and together they would have turned their steps towards the 
 wild hills, and there dwelt in an Eden composed of a bark 
 hut of their own building. But though the wish may be fa- 
 ther to the thought, it is not father to the accomplishment, 
 and no living Eila, only a shadowy and tantalizing semblance 
 of her walked by Reginald's side that night over the hills. 
 
392 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 By half-past eight the normal condition of the little 
 Sandy Bay cottage was one of dark abandonment. The 
 helpless occupant would be in bed, and only a faint light 
 shining through the drawn blind of a side-window would 
 prove that her attendant was reading to her. Eeginald had 
 made it a rule that he should not be waited for. He was, 
 therefore, not a little astonished to see an apparent illumina- 
 tion in the two front rooms as he opened the garden-gate. 
 Hurrying up the path, he discerned the shadow of an un- 
 known figure — clearly a man's — of large girth, seated in a 
 chair at the table. His mother's condition had long de- 
 barred him from inviting friends of his own sex to drop in 
 in the evening, for an hour of man's talk over whisky-and- 
 water and cigars, and as he entered the room his transparent 
 face wore the expression of uneasy expectancy which makes 
 the unbidden caller feel so like an intruder. The man who 
 corresponded to the shadow of large girth on the blind did 
 not appear, however, to notice Reginald's expression. He 
 rose from his chair and stood in the full light of the gas, 
 while saying in plain-spoken, deliberate accents, with a 
 strong suggestion of provincialism, " I shall have to intro- 
 duce myself to you, sir, I expect. My name is Clare — 
 William Clare. Maybe you've heard the family up on the 
 hill speak of me — though I won't answer for it, notwith- 
 standing that I'm their nearest relative on this side of the 
 world." 
 
 " Pray be seated, Mr. Clare ; I'm very glad to make your 
 acquaintance. Of course I've heard your nephews and 
 nieces speak of you many a time," Reginald said. 
 
 This was not a strict truth, for only once had Eila men- 
 tioned her uncle's existence to him. However, he shook the 
 new-comer cordially by the hand. This delightful stranger 
 had evidently come to speak about Eila, whose very kith 
 and kin he was, and who had possibly dandled her on his 
 knees in the days of her entrancing babyhood. Mr. Acton 
 would fain have discovered some far-off suggestion of the 
 niece in the face of the uncle ; but Mr. Clare's features, of 
 the broad, fleshy, clean-shaven, honest description, which 
 might belong equally to Farmer John or to the first gentle- 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 393 
 
 man in the land, conveyed no hint of exotic lineage. A not 
 unpleasant aroma of recently-smoked pipes clung about his 
 person. His clothes were of country make, but good and 
 new. Altogether a fresh-coloured, likeable, trust-inspiring, 
 and to all appearance inwardly and outwardly clean indi- 
 vidual was Mr. Clare. 
 
 "Pray sit down," said Reginald again. He drew for- 
 ward a chair for himself and motioned his visitor to his for- 
 mer seat by the table. " You don't often come to town, I 
 think, Mr. Clare ? I never had the pleasure of meeting you 
 at Cowa that I remember." 
 
 Mr. Clare did not answer immediately. Then : 
 "There were reasons why I kept away," he said shortly, 
 and Reginald detected a motion of the left eyelid that might 
 almost have been construed into a wink. " It's not my way 
 to speak ill of people behind their backs, more than thfit my 
 brother's children was as nice a family as you'd wish to 
 see. But my sister-in-law was a peculiar woman, there's no 
 gainsaying it. She had her notions, and it wasn't any use to 
 run counter to them. One of 'em was to give a wide berth 
 to uncles that sold half -chests of tea. Well, I've never been 
 yet where I wasn't sure of a welcome, and that's why you 
 didn't see me oftener at Cowa, if you want to know the 
 truth. No ; never mind " — as Reginald made a gesture of 
 polite deprecation — " I know what you're going to say. But 
 I never cared a snap of the fingers for Mrs. Clare's opinion, 
 good or bad. I liked the children ; I liked 'em for their fa- 
 ther's sake, and their own as well. A fine girl, the eldest ! A 
 pity they let her throw herself away like that ! But it's a 
 long lane that has no turning, and it seems we've come to the 
 end of it at last. And by-the-by, Mr. Acton, that's just the 
 business I've come to speak to you about this evening. It 
 seems you're such friends with my brother's family that 
 you've got their address in Paris. But I want you to give 
 it me now for a very particular reason. You see, I got word 
 to day that my niece's husband, Charles Frost, died quite sud- 
 den-like in the Norfolk Asylum this morning. . . . Why, 
 whatever's up with you ? Your face has turned just as white 
 as my shirt. I hope, sii-, I haven't been indiscreet ? I wasn't 
 
394 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 aware the young man was a friend of yours. Anyhow, it 
 was a hopeless case ; and what's a man without his reason ? 
 Better far for him, and all belonging to him, that he should 
 be out of the world. Don't you agree with me, sir ? " 
 
 The anxiously-inquiring expression portrayed in the 
 honest eyes of Mr. William Clare would have struck Regi- 
 nald as somewhat serio-comic, or comic-serious, at any 
 other time ; but now there was room for one thought, and 
 for one only, in his mind. True, it was a thought that 
 made his brain reel and his temples throb. Eila was free ; 
 she was free at last. Like the hero in Longfellow's 
 " Dream," her burden had fallen from her ; it had fallen 
 into the sea. Hitherto she had been in the position of one 
 of those criminals of legendary times who were chained 
 for their lives to a corpse. She might wander where she 
 would over the world. All . she could do was to lengthen 
 her chain a little. The ghastly thing at the other end was 
 always there. Wherever she might go, she must feel its 
 clogging weight — must be haunted by the certainty that 
 it would drag her back in the end. But now it was gone, 
 and she was free — free to listen at her will to a suitor's 
 wooing ; in a certain sense, she was to be had for the ask- 
 ing. Reginald went down upon his knees before her in 
 imagination, and laid his love and his life at her feet. His 
 first impulse was to telegraph the news instantly to Paris ; 
 but hardly had this idea occurred to him than it was rejected. 
 Had she not hinted in her terrible epistle that Hubert 
 would undoubtedly have proposed marriage to her had she 
 been free, and that for her own part she would have jumped 
 at his offer ? Reginald never doubted that she would, in- 
 deed, in this respect have been as good, or as bad, as her 
 word. With the fear before her eyes of seeing the family 
 starve, no power on earth could have withheld her. Even 
 the most impassioned letters, the most urgent appeals, might 
 fail to move her at a distance. He believed her to have, 
 among other womanly qualities, a quality which, though a 
 womanly one, is none the less a defect. She was curiously 
 accessible to the influence of personal persuasion. Though 
 she might fill reams of paper with carefully considered ar- 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 395 
 
 guraents, it was not to counter-arguments that she might be 
 expected to yield most readily. A tender word, a heart-felt 
 caress, had more effect than all the reasoning in the world. 
 A wild desire to be by her side took possession of Reginald's 
 soul. It was true that he had nothing to offer her but the 
 shelter of a modest roof, and the prospect of being fairly 
 well nourished and clothed. But had she not told him of 
 her own accord that she would like to go into the wilds with 
 him ? He felt that he could have performed prodigies of 
 work to place her in a setting worthy of her. . . . But the 
 family — the poor, helpless, unpractical, visionary family I 
 How should he provide for them ? How dispose of them ? 
 It was all very well to say he would bring them to Tasma- 
 nia. They must live when they got there, and slave as he 
 would, to provide for five people (he would not even include 
 Willie in the number) is a different matter to providing for 
 one. The almost miraculous rapidity with which one im- 
 pression will follow upon another when the brain is abnor- 
 mally excited was the reason why the silence wherewith 
 Reginald greeted Mr. William Clare's announcement lasted 
 for so relatively short a time. In the course of a very few 
 seconds, joy, hope, terror, despair, and, last of all, a great 
 and supreme resolution, had held alternate sway over his 
 mind. The resolution, however, had driven the other emo- 
 tions away. Come what might, and though he should sacri- 
 fice his last penny in the effort, Reginald told himself that 
 he would start that week for Europe. In five weeks he 
 would clasp Eila in his arms, and if he let her escape from 
 them again, why, all that could be said would be that he de- 
 served his fate. But would he let her escape from them, 
 once he held her ? To those who knew Mr. Acton under 
 his ordinary and demure aspect of a quiet, unemotional 
 Hobart bachelor, his expression as this question surged up 
 in his mind would have been a revelation. Mr. William 
 Clare, who saw him for the first time, and who could not 
 therefore establish a comparison between the man with his 
 face working under the gaslight and the business-like, 
 phlegmatic secretary who mechanically walked up and 
 down Macquarrie Street to and from his office every day, 
 2G 
 
396 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 was only aware that, for some unknown reason, his new ac- 
 quaintance was strangely and unduly agitated. 
 
 " Maybe you were a friend of that poor fellow's, sir," he 
 ventured at last, moving uneasily in his seat. " If that's so, 
 why, I must ask you to excuse me for being so abrupt." 
 
 " No — no ; you weren't abrupt at all," Reginald said, 
 mastering himself by a tremendous eif ort ; " but I certainly 
 never expected to hear of his going so suddenly. You see, 
 it was a sacred charge I had undertaken (I undertook it at 
 Eila's — at Mrs. Frost's — request), to see her— her husband 
 every week. He was in his usual condition last Friday. 
 There was no reason for supposing then that he would not 
 live to be a hundred " 
 
 " 'Twas a stroke," interposed Mr. Clare in relieved tones. 
 "I had to come down to town on business this morning, and 
 I timed myself to catch the train from New Norfolk. The 
 first man I met in the compartment as I got in was a chap 
 who's got a brother in the asylum. Drink, of course. 
 ' You've got a nephew— or, rather, you had a nephew— in 
 there, too, Mr. Clare,' says he, looking at me solemn-like. 
 'A nephew by marriage,' I said; 'and a damned bad job 
 for everybody concerned.' ' Well, you're quit of him now,' 
 he says, 'for I've just come away from seeing his dead 
 body' 'What do you mean?' I asked him. I was kind 
 of dazed by the news, and didn't rightly know for a minute 
 whether I was glad or sorry. 'He had a stroke,' he says. 
 ' It was on the brain, so I was told. And, upon my word, 
 it's a happy release.' 'Upon my word, I believe it is,' I 
 said. And I got out my traps and left the train there and 
 then. I went up to the asylum and got the news confirmed. 
 I had a sight of the body, too. It looked just as calm and 
 rational as if the poor fellow had died in fuU possession of 
 his senses. They telegraphed the news to his old father and 
 mother here in Hobart; but, from what I've heard of them 
 they ain't the people to wire it on to his wife ; and, anyhow, 
 if thoy do, they won't break the news very gently I 
 guessed you were the right person to come to ; and I wasn't 
 mistaken, since it appears you were delegated by my niece 
 to keep a kind of watch over her husband. Now sir will 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 397 
 
 you take it upon yourself to tell her the news ? Tell her, too, 
 that she knows I'm no hand at letter-writing— if it isn't a 
 business letter ; but if she wants a home, or assistance of any 
 kind, why, she's only got to write to me, and, whatever her 
 mother may say, she'll find blood's thicker than water in 
 the end. I'm not of opinion that it would be advisable to 
 wire the news. It's a heavy expense, and there's nothing- to 
 be gained, if it isn't giving a body an extra start. Still, if 
 you think it's our duty to do it, you'll please draw on me 
 for what's necessary. And that reminds me again, Mr. Ac- 
 ton. It's a delicate matter to speak about, and I don't rightly 
 know how the widow and children were provided for by my 
 brother, but I calculate they're pretty hard up, if they're not 
 too proud to confess it ; and wouldn't you advise me to just 
 send 'em a hundred pounds or so to help them along, with- 
 out waiting to be asked ? " 
 
 " Indeed, I think it's an excellent idea, Mr. Clare," Regi- 
 nald said earnestly. 
 
 He scanned the face of Eila's uncle closely as he uttered 
 these words, and what he saw there prompted him all upon 
 a sudden, and without premeditation, to speak as he had 
 never thought to speak to a living soul of his relations with 
 the family on the hill. He did not say, or even hint, that 
 his heart was hopelessly and irretrievably bound up in one 
 of their number, and that this was the real true reason why 
 he pleaded for them now as though he had been their 
 brother. But he spoke, nevertheless, as one who speaks of 
 the thing that lies nearest to his heart. He described their 
 home-life as he had known it at Cowa : their strong affec- 
 tion for each other, their quixotic ideas, their illusions, their 
 terrible lack of any practical comprehension of the realities 
 of existence. He showed how Fate as well as their own 
 natures had worked against them in depriving them of 
 what constituted their only means of existence. He de- 
 clared that the failure of the insurance company in which 
 Mr. Clare had insured his life had left them actually penni- 
 less ; and in answer to a sympathizing request for advice as 
 to how best to help them in this pass, he answered that to 
 assist the family back to Tasmania, and reinstate them at 
 
398 NOT COUNTIKG THE COST. 
 
 Cowa, would be the best and surest means of saving them 
 from starvation — or worse. But the worst he kept to him- 
 self, deeming the " starvation " a suflB^cient plea in itself. 
 He did not tell Eila's uncle of the existence of the silver- 
 king cousin, whose help had been offered at a price which 
 it made him shudder to contemplate ; nor did he say that he 
 had himself sent the wherewithal to stave off the first inroad 
 of want. That he had said enough, however, to gain his 
 friends the help they needed so sorely was evident from the 
 reassuring manner in which Mr. William Clare received 
 his account of their troubles. The latter, it is true, was a 
 raan of business, and men of business do not, as a rule, sym- 
 pathize with the misfortunes that unpractical dreamers 
 ■ bring upon themselves. But if his manner was that of a 
 business man, his expression was that of Eila's uncle, and it 
 was owing to this circumstance that Reginald found the 
 courage to speak. 
 
 Before Mr. William Clare took his departure that night, 
 the liking of two honestly-intentioned men for each other 
 had sprung up between himself and his host. The Sandy 
 Bay cottage showed its illumined blind until long after 
 midnight, and it was Reginald himself who placed on the 
 table the whisky-and-water over which the pipe of counsel 
 was smoked. After his visitor had gone and a hearty shake 
 of the hands had been exchanged with him at the little 
 garden-gate under the rays of the descending moon, Regi- 
 nald returned to the cottage to ponder over all that had 
 been said and accomplished that night. He had been 
 through emotions enough in the last twenty-four hours to 
 turn his hair white like that of the hero of Byron's poem. 
 And now the great, the crowning emotion of all had come. 
 Eila, his love, was free. No maniac form, armed with a hus- 
 band's rights, need mingle itself henceforth with his dreams 
 of her. She was free — free in mind and in body. But stay ! 
 Had she not spoken to him of an accursed chain that threat- 
 ened to fetter her in yet another direction ? Well, from 
 this danger he trusted to be in time to deliver her. His 
 talk with her uncle had raised his hopes and his spirits. 
 He recapitulated to himself the essential points that had 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 399 
 
 been discussed that eyening, and the resolutions arrived at. 
 First of all, it had been arranged that he himself should be 
 responsible for carrying the news of her bereavement (for 
 such was the conventional word that had been employed) 
 to young Mrs. Frost. Uncle William had appeared to look 
 upon the curious fact that Mr. Acton was on the point of 
 starting himself for Europe as a mere happy coincidence 
 and nothing else. If he thought more than this, he dis- 
 guised it successfully, like the non-loquacious parrot of the 
 proverb. It had also been arranged that Reginald should 
 be the bearer of a hundred pounds to the family on Uncle 
 William's account, with the offer of assistance towards re- 
 embarking them for Tasmania. Likewise the announce- 
 ment that Mr. William Clare was prepared to help Willie 
 towards a selection, and to find a place for Dick in his store. 
 And at this proposal it had been Reginald's turn to think 
 thoughts he refrained from divulging. Another point ar- 
 ranged between the friendly conspirators, was that Regi- 
 nald should inform Bila's parents-in-law of the plans that 
 had been made in the family's behalf, and likewise sound 
 them as to their intentions with regard to their son's 
 widow. All this appeared to Reginald to constitute a 
 good night's work when he came to think it over. Of 
 the part of the programme that Uncle William knew 
 nothing about, or professed to know nothing about, Regi- 
 inald, we may be sure, thought the most of all. He had not 
 closed his eyes the night before, but his wakefulness to-night 
 was appalling. The intensity of his apprehension of the sit- 
 uation was so keen that he felt as though he were all one 
 throbbing sentient brain. Instead of mocking rest by going 
 to bed, he went to his room for his towels, turned out the 
 gas and stole softly, in order not to disturb his mother, 
 through the back-garden down to the strip of beach. The 
 moon had quite disappeared. Only the ashy light that pre- 
 cedes the dawn made the sea dimly visible. The tide was 
 high, and the waves looked cold and gray. He threw off 
 his clothes and, running like the primitive man into the 
 advancing sea, swam far out upon its swaying surface— al- 
 most too far, indeed, for the flood of thoughts and fears that 
 
400 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 overwhelmed him made him unmindful of the distance. 
 He took his strokes mechanically, pricked on by the cold 
 and a certain inward fever of excitement. It was only when 
 he saw how near the crimson band that scored the sky over 
 the opposite shore looked to his eyes, and when a feeling of 
 physical lassitude began to creep upon him, that he under- 
 stood the danger of what he had done. Could there be folly 
 more monstrous than to go to his death when Eila was wait- 
 ing for him at the other end of the world ? The thought 
 seemed to paralyze him at first, and then to give him a des- 
 perate strength. He turned with the skill of a practised 
 swimmer upon his back, and slowly, and with infinite care, 
 paddled himself gently along in the direction of the beach. 
 The incoming tide helped his efforts, and, staring up at the 
 sky with eyes that smarted from the washing of the sea over 
 them, he saw the stars pale gradually in the lightening sky. 
 Arrived within two or three hundred yards of shallow 
 water, he struck out again with renewed vigour, but was 
 obliged to confess to himself that it was touch-and-go with 
 him more than once before his feet finally found the bottom. 
 The anger he felt against himself as he threw himself 
 down, utterly exhausted, upon the beach, and realized how 
 near he had been to his death, was more on Ella's account 
 than on his own. But the physical fatigue had had the 
 effect of a strong narcotic. He never remembered clearly 
 how he had dried himself, or put on his clothes, or made his 
 way back to the cottage. But that he must have done these 
 things mechanically was certain, for when he next regained 
 consciousness it was eleven in the morning, and he was in 
 his own bed in his own room. A profound and blessed 
 sleep had obliterated all sense of being in him during the 
 intervening hours. He admired the certainty of his moth- 
 er's instinct, that, instead of causing him to be waked in 
 time to go to his office, had actually sent the servant with a 
 message to the effect that he was detained at the house by 
 illness. He felt like a giant refreshed by wine as he rose 
 and dressed himself, his mind full of all the things he had 
 undertaken to do. There was leave of absence to obtain, in 
 the first instance. He was entitled to a two-months' h'oli- 
 
REGINALD'S RESOLUTION. 401 
 
 day, having purposely postponed taking his month when 
 his turn had come in the course of the last half-year. He 
 must make interest with the board of directors to obtain, a 
 six-months' leave upon ''urgent private affairs." To pre- 
 pare his mother for the separation would be worse than to 
 confront all the directors of all the companies in Australia. 
 Then he must, in popular parlance, "raise the wind," and 
 contrive to have at least five hundred pounds in cash within 
 two days' time. He must be ready himself in three days to 
 catch the Launceston boat, which was bound to deliver pas- 
 sengers and letters in Melbourne in time for the outgoing 
 mail-steamer. But he must not neglect to see old Mr. and 
 Mrs. Frost in the interval, and to use his best and most dip- 
 lomatic endeavours in behalf of young Mrs. Frost. Diplo- 
 macy, indeed, would be needed, for he would certainly be 
 asked by what right he had constituted himself guardian of 
 the interests of the family on the hill. To this, however, he 
 had his answer ready, the answer being nothing but the 
 truth, pure and simple. It was a curious circumstance that, 
 had there been anything to conceal (though none but he 
 and the woman he loved should have been in the secret), 
 that answer could not have been uttered by him. Now he 
 could look old Mr. Frost straight in the face— and he meant 
 to do so— could meet his inquisitorial eyes unflinchingly, 
 could say to him in so many words : " Why do I take upon 
 myself to speak to you of your responsibilities ? Well, if 
 your daughter-in-law had been free, she would have been 
 the one woman in the world I would have desired to make 
 my wife. She is free now, and I intend to try to win her 
 heart. That is the reason why I interest myself in her fam- 
 ily as well as in herself." 
 
 Even judged by the old man's own narrow and Calvin- 
 istic creed, such an avowal could not be an ofPence either to 
 God or to man. So much for the tasks that Reginald had 
 to perform before he took his departure. As to the course 
 he would follow when he reached his destination, there 
 would be time and to spare to think of that during the long 
 journey across the Indian Ocean, the vacant days of pant- 
 ing idleness in the Bed Sea, the slow steaming along the 
 
402 NOT COUNTING THE COST, 
 
 Mediterranean towards Marseilles (slow it must be in any 
 case, judged by his sensations). No earthly plea, no rea- 
 sonable excuse, save his great and overmastering love, 
 could he urge when he should appear before Eila. He 
 would tell her he had come to save her. If she went to 
 Hubert, it could only be by treading upon his own dead 
 body stretched at her feet. He would not live to see the 
 work of desecration accomplished. True, he had no money. 
 He would be obliged to admit that the thing he had done 
 was wild, unreasonable, unpardonable, from a common- 
 sense point of view. But love is beyond common-sense. 
 "With what he had and what had been confided to him, he 
 was bringing at least a sufficient sum of money to convey 
 the family back to Tasmania, and once there, he and his 
 new ally would not let them come to grief. Looked at in 
 this light the enterprise was not, perhaps, so wild as it ap- 
 peared at first sight. 
 
 Though promising himself that he would not think of 
 the real object for which he had undertaken the voyage 
 until he was fairly started, Reginald did in point of fsict 
 think of little else during the few agitated days that pre- 
 ceded his departure. We may take it for granted that he 
 carried out the programme he had laid down to the letter ; 
 that he scraped together five hundred pounds in cash, 
 whereof almost a hundred went immediately for the pur- 
 chase of a return ticket by the Messageries steamer to Mar- 
 seilles ; that he broke the news of his projected flight to his 
 mother without breaking her heart at one and the same 
 time; that he conducted himself with the skill of a born 
 tactician in his interview with old Mr. and Mrs. Frost, 
 whom he found more incensed than ever against their 
 daughter-in-law, anger being a derivative from grief ; that 
 he obtained the necessary leave from his directors without 
 forfeiting his position ; that he packed the things into his 
 portmanteau with a true sailor's adroitness, and that all the 
 time he was carrying on these multifarious operations his 
 spirit was leaping on before him to the garish apartment in 
 the unknown regions of the Boulevard de I'Observatoire 
 inhabited by young Mrs. Frost. To discover what the latter 
 
WHAT EILA "WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 403 
 
 was doing meanwhile will oblige us to return to Paris, and 
 to take up our narrative from the time when Hubert quitted 
 her, with the menace made at the last moment, giving her 
 only three months in which to make up her mind to accept 
 or reject the plan he had proposed to her. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 
 
 Three months' respite! Twelve weeks, nay, fourteen, 
 well counted — in which to lay her plans and find a door of 
 escape ! This was the thought that was paramount in our 
 heroine's mind, as, pale and weary, she toiled up the polished 
 steps that led to the quatrieme after her interview with Hu- 
 bert was over. He was gone. Adieu henceforth to the din- 
 ners at the restaurant, the drives to the theatre in the closed 
 landau, the intoxicating taste of the splendours of the bril- 
 liant Paris of the rich. Back to her ashes must Cinderella 
 return. Her fairy-coach was once more a common pump- 
 kin, her gorgeously-caparisoned chargers eight mean rats, 
 and her own bejewelled train a blue kitchen apron. True, 
 by means of two little words she might transform herself 
 into a princess again, and drive in a carriage and eight once 
 more ; but it was just these two words she could not bring 
 herself to pronounce. Whether, by dint of rehearsing them 
 in her thoughts by day and her dreams by night, she would 
 find the strength to utter them by the time the three months 
 were at an end, Eila dared not ask herself. It would depend 
 upon so many things. If the wolf, for instance, should 
 show his fangs at the door of the quatrieme, she could 
 not answer for what she might be driven to do. For the 
 time being, at least, she had the wherewithal to throw him 
 sops in plenty. But supposing a malignant Fate should 
 deprive Hubert of life and fortune before the period of pro- 
 bation was over ! The very thought of such a catastrophe 
 made Eila shake and shiver. Before she had reached the 
 
404 >fOT COUNTIKG THE COST. 
 
 door of the apartment she felt strongly tempted to run 
 down the staircase again, hail a cab, drive to the Louvre, 
 and fling herself into her cousin's arms. There should be 
 no more half-measures. She would take her place by his 
 side in the full light of day, call herself boldly Madame de 
 Merle, and spend the rest of her life in making him devote 
 his great fortune to worthy purposes — iirst, and above all, to 
 securing the prospects of the family. 
 
 How many diverse points of view succeeded each other 
 in her mind as she mounted the steps can never be told. If 
 she could have felt towards Hubert as she felt towards Regi- 
 nald, she would not have hesitated for a moment. But then 
 where would have been the virtue — where the self-sacrifice ? 
 On the other hand, if Hubert had shown himself capable of 
 behaving as Reginald had done, might he not really have 
 succeeded in inspiring her with something more than mere 
 cousinly gratitude and affection ? She had no shrinking 
 from his person. Deformed, distorted, Vulcan-like as he 
 might be, there was nothing that repelled her in his ugli- 
 ness. Had she not told him she would have married him 
 had she been free ? " Then how doubly illogical and un- 
 reasonable I am," she reflected, perplexed by the apparent 
 inconsistency of her scruples. " What do I want, after all ? 
 Since I would marry Hubert if I were free, and since I attach 
 no particular value to the institution of marriage, what is 
 the obstacle to my living with him at once, as he wishes, 
 and making everything right for the family ? It is Regi- 
 nald who prevents me, and nothing but Reginald. What- 
 ever I may come to in the end, I cannot act without warn- 
 ing him. Perhaps I shall do just the contrary to what he 
 advises. But at least he cannot say that I have not kept my 
 promise." 
 
 The short February day had merged into darkness as 
 Eila entered the -ante-chamber, where Mamy's bright head, 
 bending over the table under the light of the kerosene lamp, 
 was the first object her eyes encountered. To be the bearer 
 of bad tidings to the family was the heaviest burden that 
 could be laid on young Mrs. Frost's shoulders. She in- 
 stantly cast about for a formula by which to soften the un- 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 405 
 
 welcome announcement that Hubert had suddenly been 
 called away— "pour affaires," she repeated to herself, using 
 unconsciously the French form she had heard employed in 
 this connection— and that the coveted Continental tour 
 must be put off for a whole three months, during which it 
 would behove the family to live very sparingly. But Mamy 
 lifted two eyes that reflected almost as much brightness as 
 her auburn crown to her sister, while the latter dropped 
 with a fatigued air into the nearest chair. 
 
 " You don't ask me where I've been," cried Mamy, with 
 some elation in her voice. " To the Hotel du Louvre. And 
 who with ? Why, with the Mr. Wilton we saw in the court- 
 yard last night. He came to call this afternoon and we 
 found him trying to explain who he was looking for to the 
 concierge below, for he had forgotten our names. The man 
 and his wife — you know how greedily curious they are — 
 were pretending not to understand him, just to find out all 
 they could about him. He brought us the solemn promise 
 we should see Dick to-morrow. Hubert had told him so. 
 Dick has committed some escapade — nothing more " — a cer- 
 tain triumph was observable in Mamy's manner at this point, 
 for was she not the first to whom the secret had been con- 
 fided ? — " nothing that matters, you know ; but it had to be 
 settled (or the consequences had to be settled) before he 
 could come home. And Mr. Wilton was so awfully kind 
 about it, Eila, you can't think. He insisted on making us 
 drive back to the hotel with him in a closed flacre — and a 
 very good one it was, too, for a wonder ; and he made it wait 
 for us the whole time we were there, and he simply wouldn^t 
 let us go away until he had given us afternoon tea in the 
 Louvre dining-room — that wonderful place, you know, 
 where I dined with the Wardens, only it doesn't look quite 
 so wonderful now. And what do you think ? He remem- 
 bers seeing me there! It was the evening of my day at 
 Eobinson's, when you stayed out so late after you had been 
 to give a lesson in the Eue de la Paix — you remember ? " 
 
 Assuredly Eila remembered. Yes, it was certainly a co- 
 incidence, but there were yet stranger coincidences than 
 this, of which Mamy must know nothing. 
 
406 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " He asked about you, too— a little curiously, I thought," 
 continued Mamy; "not too curiously, though. He had 
 been so surprised to hear you were married. He thought 
 you were quite a young girl." 
 
 Remembering under what circumstances Mr. Wilton had 
 probably made his first estimate of her age, Eila maintained 
 a troubled silence, and Mamy rattled on : 
 
 " I said it was a pity you were not. I could not help tell- 
 ing him a little about the reason why you came to be here 
 without your husband, Eila— or else he would think it so 
 strange. And he does so want to be allowed to come in and 
 out like Hubert while he is in Paris. It is the first time of 
 his being here, and you know how dull it is going about by 
 one's self. But the best of all is that mother has actually 
 promised to give him some French lessons. You never saw 
 anyone so eager about learning. He wanted to begin to- 
 night, straight off. But mother won't do anything till she 
 has looked up the books. You may think how proud she is 
 at producing the old dog's-eared school-books, and proving 
 they have actually come in useful again. But, anyhow, she 
 wouldn't begin until Dick comes back. Still, Mr. Wilton is 
 coming to-morrow to see if she is ready for him. Fancy 
 mother with a pupil ! Won't it be fun ! " 
 
 "Truca will be having one next," said Eila, with a faint 
 smile, but it was obviously for the sake of saying something. 
 " We'd better set up a school, I think. Mamy dear, would 
 you be very much disappointed if our trip were put off until 
 the summer ? " 
 
 " Disappointed ! " Astonished indignation almost de- 
 prived Mamy of utterance. " Disappointed is no word for 
 it ! Who talks of putting it off, I should like to know ? " 
 
 " I was afraid you would mind," said Eila apologetically ; 
 "but something has happened that nobody could foresee. 
 Hubert is called away suddenly on — on — business, for three 
 months. That is not a long time to wait, after all ; and 
 travelling will be so much pleasanter in the warm weather. 
 You must help me to reconcile mother and Truca to it." 
 
 " But I can't reconcile myself," cried Mamy, in doleful 
 accents. " Oh dear ! oh dear ! it was too much happiness. I 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 407 
 
 felt this morning: it couldn't last — something would have to 
 go snap." 
 
 " But nothing has gone snap. We've only got to wait a 
 little for the treat. We shall have the pleasure of looking 
 forward. Don't you remember, Mamy, when you were quite 
 a little girl you used to say things were so much nicer if one 
 waited for them." 
 
 ' Oh yes, if one waited to eat the strawberries and cream 
 at the top of the hill instead of the bottom. I did not mean 
 waiting half a lifetime. One may wait until all the zest is 
 gone at that rate." 
 
 Eila did not continue the discussion. She had taken off 
 her thick boa — a present from Hubert — and was smoothing 
 it absently across her knees. Seeing Mamy's face working 
 as a preliminary to shedding a few relieving tears of morti- 
 fication, she said quickly: 
 
 " Oh, don't cry, Mamy dear ! I never dreamt you would 
 have minded it so much. Perhaps it can be arranged still." 
 
 " Our b-boxes — all p-packed ! " whimpered Mamy. " How 
 can one ever settle d-down to anything again ? " 
 
 " Mamy," said her sister suddenly, " if by marrying Syd- 
 ney you could set out at once on the journey — not only 
 you, but all of us together — just as it was arranged, with the 
 courier and all, would you make the sacrifice ? " 
 
 Mamy dried her eyes before she answered decidedly : 
 
 " No ; having to take Sydney along would spoil it all. 
 He'd be so dreadfully in the way— as a husband, I mean. I 
 should like him to come well enough in any other capacity." 
 
 " Supposing we invited him to come with us ? " said Eila. 
 " I'm sure he'd ask no better " 
 
 " I'm sure he wouldn't, either," agreed Mamy ; " but he 
 would tease me, as he always does when we are together." 
 Then, after a short silence : " I had a letter from him to-day 
 from Nice." 
 
 " A letter from Sydney ! Oh, tell me what he says." 
 
 " I haven't read it all," pulling a crumpled document 
 from her pocket. " What a school-boy hand he does write, 
 to be sure ! Shall I read it to you ? " 
 
 "Do!" eagerly. 
 
408 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " ' My dear Mamy, I ' Oh, the rest doesn't matter." 
 
 " It does— it does matter," protested her sister ; " it's just 
 what I want to hear." 
 
 "Then I'll give it you to read for yourself. But wait 
 till I look at the rest of it. He says he could almost 
 fancy himself back in Australia, because of the gums and 
 wattles.'' 
 
 " Nothing more ? " 
 
 " That his mother has found out ' it's the thing ' to go to 
 the gambling-tables, and since she won forty francs one 
 evening she can't be kept away from them.'' 
 
 "IsthataU?" 
 
 " Oh, read it yourself ! " said Mamy impatiently, flinging 
 the letter across the table to her sister. 
 
 Sydney Warden was not more eloquent with his pen than 
 with his tongue ; but words spoken straight from the heart 
 move us more than the most elaborately-concocted phrases. 
 
 The letter furnished a list of the names of various fash- 
 ionable young ladies upon whom Sydney's mother had cast 
 an eye for her son. " But there isn't any of them a patch on 
 you," he declared ; " and if my mother showed me the great- 
 est beauty in creation I wouldn't look twice at her. When 
 a fellow cares for anyone as I do for you, he hasn't eyes for 
 other girls.'' 
 
 Eila's only comment upon the epistle was a significant 
 sigh as she handed it back to the owner. The same evening 
 she informed the family, in the persons of her mother and 
 Truca, of the proposed delay in their long-expected Conti- 
 nental trip. Mrs. Clare's first comment upon the news was 
 an outburst of righteous wrath against her cousin. 
 
 "And he is gone, you say ? No chance of speaking to 
 him ? But I wiU write and tell him what I think. All 
 these moves and counter-moves are mere pretexts for defer- 
 ring to execute the just exchange I proposed. I have a good 
 mind to send the picture after him. We have the packing- 
 case— or did you burn it, Eila, in the winter ? I hope not. 
 He will know what it means when he sees it. I won't have 
 my girls kept out of their inheritance any longer." 
 
 " If it is the ruby you mean, mother," said Eila wearily. 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 409 
 
 " we have no legal claim to it, and we owe Hubert enough 
 by this time to buy a hundred rubies." 
 
 " There you are wrong," cried Mrs. Clare with the calm- 
 ness of a certainty that nothing could alter or swerve ; 
 " that ruby was a stone that could not be valued. It was 
 beyond value. I believe myself it was like the Koh-i-Nur, 
 and if we have no legal claim — a point about which I am 
 not at all sure — we have a moral claim, and that is worth 
 all the legal claims in the world." 
 
 Truca looked in dismay from her mother to her elder 
 sister while this discussion was going on. As Eila made no 
 reply, but stared drearily in front of her, the child went and 
 took her stand by her sister's side with an arm clasped round 
 her neck. Eila felt for the small hand that was fondling 
 her neck, and held it tightly in her own as Mrs. Clare con- 
 tinued, " When I am dead and gone you will discover the 
 truth of what I say. Why my children spend their lives in 
 thwarting my plans for them. Heaven only knows. Did I 
 not bring you home on purpose to discover Hubert ? And 
 how long had we been here before we found him ? Has not 
 every word I told you proved to be the exact truth ? But if 
 I was so anxious to find your cousin, it certainly was not 
 for his company alone — though he has been very kind and 
 cousinly ; I am the first to admit it ; still, I could not know 
 before we met him what he might turn out to be — my real 
 object in coming was to obtain the restitution of the family 
 heirloom, of which my mother was defrauded — which be- 
 longs of right to me first, and to my daughters after me — 
 and through the possession of which Hubert de Merle is 
 now in the position of a millionaire." 
 
 "But, mother, a ruby does not give interest ! He cannot 
 have the jewel and the revenue too," expostulated Mamy, 
 while Eila continued to gaze gloomily in front of her. 
 
 " Tou reason like a child," said her mother impatiently. 
 " The possession of a jewel of that value is a fortune in itself. 
 Perhaps it is hired out to some potentate. I have heard of 
 people hiring diamonds for court balls. Money may always 
 be raised upon jewellery. How else could people pawn 
 their jewels— a thing which is done every day ?" 
 
410 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 That, if Hubert's address had been forthcoming at this 
 moment, Mrs. Clare would instantly have carried out her 
 threat her daughter's did not doubt for an instanj. Eila, 
 however, declared that she had no means of making it 
 known until Hubert wrot«, and Mamy adroitly diverted 
 her mother's thoughts into another channel by asking 
 when the self -constituted pupil was to have his first lesson. 
 
 The answer was given by the pupil himself the follow- 
 ing day. Jack had taken the best means of ensuring a 
 cordial welcome by bringing the runaway Dick with him. 
 Perhaps it was not to be regretted that the first effusions 
 called forth by the prodigal's return were held in check by 
 the presence of a stranger, for in the face of Dick's drawn 
 countenance and solemn eyes, and in the relief from the 
 tension they had endured, it is more than , probable that 
 mother and sisters would have cried over him as a victim 
 and a martyr. Dick in his turn would have been tempted 
 to make plenary confession, and the first result would have 
 been a procession of the family to the refuge of the penitent 
 Adele, with an enthusiastic offer of the shelter and protec- 
 tion of the apartment of the quatrieme. Dick would have 
 sworn to assist in the work of regeneration, and would have 
 actually believed in his own power of keeping his oath. 
 Stranger still, Mrs. Clare and her daughters would guile- 
 lessly and uncomprehendingly have subscribed thereto in 
 their turn ; and as for the consequences, none could have 
 foreseen them. Mr. Wilton's presence, however, prevented 
 this inevitable sequel from taking place, and before the pro- 
 cession to Mademoiselle Adele's apartment could be organ- 
 ized, that young person had taken herself and Hubert's five 
 hundred francs to pastures new. She disappears henceforth 
 from these pages. Subsequent to her disappearance, Dick 
 went through a phase of savage cynicism and misanthropy. 
 But this is a forestalling of history. For the present it is 
 enough to know that he is safely restored to the bosom of 
 his family. 
 
 As for Mr. Wilton, it was edifying to witness the zeal 
 which animated him for the acquisition of the French lan- 
 guage under the guidance of the blue-eyed seraph's mother. 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 4,11 
 
 " Nothing on earth," he vehemently assured the assembled 
 family, " had ever interested him so much as the French 
 grammar. Hubert isn't best pleased at my giving him the 
 slip, I tell you," he added contidentially, "but I wasn't going 
 to throw away a chance like that to please him." 
 
 From the box of Cowa books that still enciunbered Dick's 
 bedroom, Mrs. Clare had triumphantly disinterred a torn 
 volume of OUendorf's complete method, and a venerable 
 copy of Hamel's exercises. It would have been as much as 
 Jack's place, as pupil, was worth to suggest that he should 
 provide himself with more recent and cleaner publications. 
 In her first enthusiasm for her self -chosen task, Mrs. Clare 
 would suffer none but herself to approach Jack with a gram- 
 mar or exercise-book, and the young man found his deep- 
 laid schemes scattered to the winds, and himself rendered 
 very uncomfortable, one afternoon when Mamy was actually 
 requested to leave the room because she laughed in concert 
 with him at his unsuccessful efforts to pronounce a French 
 M. One of the strongest symptoms of a sincere passion is 
 the desire to prove one's self worthy in the eyes of the be- 
 loved object, but there were days when Jack could have 
 cursed his fate for providing him with no more congenial 
 field for his exploits than the French irregular verbs. Mrs. 
 Clare, moreover, was quite oblivious of the proverb that it 
 is not fair to overwork the willing horse. Accustomed to 
 measure the capacities of others by those of her own quick- 
 witted though worldlj-unwise offspring, she set her defence- 
 less pupil tasks of appalling length to get by heart. 
 
 " If it were anything but French now ! " Jack said help- 
 lessly one day, after floundering in the vain attempt to con- 
 jugate the verb bouillir. But Mrs. Clare was inflexible. 
 The not unlikely hypothesis that the young man had some 
 other end in view, in the unfailing regularity with which he 
 came, than that of merely learning to assert that he " boiled " 
 in the subjunctive mood, never suggested itself to her mind. 
 How Jack might regard her daughters did not concern her 
 at present. Before and above all he was her pupil, and Mrs. 
 Clare's first aim in amateur teaching was to make her pupils 
 understand that she was not to be trifled with. StiU, to pay 
 
 2r 
 
412 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 vicarious court to the object of his adoration through the 
 conjugating of the verb aimer was a pastime Mr. Wilton 
 had no intention of continuing indefinitely. Never since 
 the days when he had maintained his place as bottom boy 
 in the French class at the Sydney Grammar School had his 
 mental powers been so severely taxed. Had it not been for 
 those delicious intervals during- which Eila made the tea, 
 and Mamy served it, and Jack could rest his tongue by talk- 
 ing his own language in the form of Australian slang, he 
 told himself he could never have endured the strain. But 
 there were episodes that took away all the sting from his 
 task, as, for instance, when Mamy dropped an extra lump of 
 sugar (she had noticed he liked his tea sweet) into his cup 
 with her own fingers over his shoulder as she went by. Jack 
 had to hold himself with the strength of four, as the French 
 say, not to stoop and kiss them. He hoped it was not vanity 
 that made him think Mamy returned his liking a little, but 
 he could not help noticing that whenever his eyes rested 
 upon her (and somehow they were always turning in her 
 direction), he was sure to meet with an answering look in a 
 second's time. He was secretly filled with gratitude to Hu- 
 bert for taking himself off, as it gave him an opportunity of 
 inviting the family in Hubert's place. He found to his great 
 joy that they rarely refused to be " treated." Thus, he took 
 seats for them all at the Opera, at the Fran^ais, at the Vaude- 
 ville, at the Opera Comique, in the same week, and insisted 
 upon their coming to a sumptuous supper with him after- 
 wards. The family prestige, which had suffered severely in 
 the concierge's estimation from Hubert's disappearance, be- 
 gan to mount higher than ever. Jack bestowed royal tips 
 upon the evil-looking pair for no better reason than the one 
 conveyed in the words of the waltz-song, " Oh, be glad, my 
 heart ! Hilda "—or whoever takes Hilda's " place "— " smiled 
 to-day." 
 
 To be sure. Jack could not be credited with the possession 
 of a ruby, and Eila had some misgivings lest he should be 
 spending his money too freely. Mrs. Clare was convinced 
 that his largesses were a delicate token of his appreciation 
 of his French lessons, and set him longer tasks than ever. 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 413 
 
 Jack "was beginning to dream of the irregular verbs, and 
 was convinced that his severe studies were undermining his 
 health. It was time to bring things to a climax, but how ? 
 Kind fate in the shape of a fortunate accident sent him the 
 longed-for opportunity. 
 
 It was getting on towards April. The Luxembourg 
 Gardens had broken out into myriads of tiny crumpled 
 leaves of shimmering green, over which the family went 
 into ecstasies regularly every morning when the sun shone. 
 Eila was biding her time. Spring clothes were sadly needed, 
 but she dared not spend the money necessary to procure 
 them. On the other hand, she had abstained from com- 
 municating with Hubert since his departure, six weeks 
 previously. An occasional terror of the consequences, 
 should he disappear altogether, weighed upon her at times ; 
 but the very day her letter to Reginald should have reached 
 Tasmania, a telegram from the latter was handed to her 
 containing the words, "Plenty money coming. Wait." 
 Now she could breathe freely. Whence the money was to 
 be procured she did not stop to inquire. Perhaps Reginald 
 had been fortunate in the mines (though it was not like him 
 to speculate), or perhaps he had come in for a legacy. In 
 any case his assurance took away all shadow of an excuse 
 for recalling Hubert for the present. Eila even ventured to 
 invest in some light-hued material at the Bon Marche to 
 make afternoon and theatre-going frocks for the family. 
 And not only was the money for Dick's attendance at the 
 studio regularly forthcoming, but her constant effort was 
 to keep intact the twenty pounds she had laid aside out of 
 her own share of the two hundred wherewith to refund the 
 money abstracted by him from Hubert. Deep would have 
 been her mortification had she known that she was only 
 restoring to her cousin what was his own, for Eila still be- 
 lieved that the five thousand francs she had received from 
 the director of the theatre had been legitimately awarded 
 her as the price of the exhibition of her charms upon the 
 stage of the Folies-Fantassin. 
 
 But to return to Jack. The accident that favoured his 
 suit was the unlooked-for absence of his taskmistress one 
 
41 i NOT COUNTINa THE COST. 
 
 afternoon when he presented himself as usual at the Boule- 
 vard da rObservatoire with his French exercises in the 
 pocket of his great-coat. Never did schoolboy, with a 
 caning in prospect, rejoice more heartily over the provi- 
 dential disappearance of his tyrant. To add to his delight, 
 it was Mamy who, after opening the door to him, mischiev- 
 ously proposed to give him his French lesson in lieu of her 
 mother. Whether by accident or design, young Mrs. Frost 
 did not appear. Her voice in conversation with her little 
 sister, and the snip of her scissors, were plainly heard in the 
 adjoining room. Meanwhile Jack found himself alone for 
 the first time in his life with the object of his adoration. 
 His mind was made up. He had only been waiting for an 
 opportunity to declare himself. Upon every occasion of his 
 seeing the blue-eyed seraph after her first apparition at the 
 Louvre dinner-table, his impression of her had grown 
 stronger and stronger. He thanked Heaven that he was a 
 rich man — rich enough to place the seraph in a golden 
 frame, and to set up the family properly. A year or two 
 ago the most he could have offered her would have been a 
 boundary rider's hut on a station. But times were changed 
 since then. He had an inexhaustible bank now in the 
 bowels of the earth. Even his own family, whom he had 
 also " set up " in the first instance, did not know quite how 
 rich he was. And excepting in the matter of horses he had 
 no expensive tastes. He could not understand why people 
 should spend so much upon old pictures and china when 
 new were to be had at a quarter the price. Nor had he ever 
 felt tempted to deck the triumphal car of some queen of the 
 demi-monde with golden trophies. A wife after his own 
 heart was the object of his worthier ambition, and if he in- 
 dulged in any airy castle-building upon the strength of his 
 silver-mine, it took no more extravagant form than that of 
 a dwelling in the Bush of princely dimensions, with a tower 
 a hundred feet high, and stables and loose-boxes fashioned 
 after the latest and most approved models. 
 
 Finding himself alone with Mamy this afternoon, Jack 
 feigned to take her proposal to play the part of professor se- 
 riously. He seated himself at the table by her side,"stroked 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 415 
 
 his blonde moustache with a good-boy air, and produced his 
 exercises with becoming gravity. Mamy performed her 
 own rdle in the comedy with equal decorum, but her eyes 
 were dancing and the corners of her lips were twitching. 
 She did not see the mistakes in the laboured composition 
 upon which her eyes rested. She did not even gather the 
 meaning of the words she was looking at in Jack's hand- 
 writing. Though her face was bent over the paper, she felt, 
 without seeing, that the young man was devouring her with 
 his eyes. A delicious confusion was the clearest sensation 
 Mamy was conscious of. Her hand, that lay palm down upon 
 the paper outspread on the table, was trembling. All of a sud- 
 den she was aware that Jack had stooped down and kissed it. 
 
 Mamy's face and neck became in an instant one great 
 burning blush. 
 
 " Why do you do that ? " she whispered, raising two half- 
 frightened, half -acquiescing eyes to his face. 
 
 " Because I love you," said Jack boldly ; " I love you, 
 and want you to marry me. If I took a month telling you, 
 it would come to the same thing in the end. And you don't 
 dislike me altogether, do you, Mamy ?— I always call you 
 Mamy to myself. You've no idea how much I care for you, 
 I tell you. If you'll only say you'll have me, I'll be the 
 happiest chap in creation." 
 
 He had not only kissed her hands again, but had taken 
 them in his own, and as he pleaded his cause with her, his 
 face was very close to hers. As Mamy looked shyly into it 
 while she listened to his words, a great trust in him grew up 
 in her mind. To be sure, Sydney Warden had been just as 
 much in earnest when he had asked her the same question 
 in almost the same way, but Sydney's eyes did not possess 
 the same magnetic quality as Jack's. They awakened no 
 corresponding message in her own, the outcome of sensa- 
 tions too deep and subtle for words. Mamy wished at this 
 moment that no one in the world had ever spoken of love to 
 her before or had kissed her hands, save Jack. The expression 
 of her face was so complete and artless a transcript of her 
 mood that the young man, still holding her hands, bent for- 
 ward instinctively and pressed his lips to hers. 
 
416 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 " My own Mamy— my own little girl— you are going to 
 say ' Yes: " 
 
 Whether she ever really said it is still a matter of doubt. 
 In after days Mamy declared that this " Yes " had never 
 been uttered, nor her consent formally given. That Jack 
 should have taken it informally was perhaps the more ex- 
 cusable that she had hidden her face against his shoulder 
 after he kissed her, and in that position it was easier to take 
 a yes for granted than to wait until it was audibly pro- 
 nounced. 
 
 A proposal of marriage is for the most part the culmina- 
 tion of the pleasant process variously described under the 
 headings of courting, billing and cooing, flirting, or, more 
 vulgarly, spooning. This order was reversed in Mamy's 
 case. The proposal having come first, it was wonderful 
 how matters were facilitated for the carrying out of the 
 earlier portions of the programme afterwards. It was more 
 interesting to Mamy, however, than it would probably prove 
 to the readers of her biography to hear Jack retrace the ori- 
 gin and progress of his passion. If he had studied the Pla- 
 tonic theory, he would have declared that he had recognised 
 his other half from the first instant of beholding her fair 
 sunburnt face at table d'hote. Mamy, too, might have 
 avowed that Jack's glance had been responsible for the un- 
 accountable mood of seriousness which overcame her as she 
 descended the Louvre staircase by Sydney Warden's side 
 after their laughing-match at the dinner-table. But these 
 were confessions that were to come later. At present it was 
 joy enough to discover that they had liked each other (this 
 was Mamy's . way of expressing it, though Jack used a 
 stronger term to depict his own feelings) from the begin- 
 ning. 
 
 " You must let me tell your sister — now," the young man 
 urged after these avowals had been satisfactorily commented 
 upon. 
 
 " Oh, I'm afraid she'll be angry," said Mamy anxiously. 
 
 It had never occurred to her to wonder whether Jack 
 had the means of keeping a wife ; and of course that, and 
 the paramount consideration of whether he was in a position 
 
WHAT EILA WAS DOIKG MEANWHILE. 417 
 
 to help the family, were the first things the worldly-minded 
 Eila would think of. 
 
 " Why ! She doesn't want you to be an old maid," he 
 laughed. "She looks awfully nice — quite worthy to be 
 your sister, in fact; and that's the highest compliment I 
 could pay her." 
 
 "Yes. But her own marriage has been so unhappy," 
 murmured Mamy. Then, vexed with herself for prevaricat- 
 ing in intention, if not in words, she added hurriedly : " No ; 
 it is not for that. I will tell you the reason some time. And 
 — and — if you want to tell her very much now, you may." 
 
 " I will call her, then," said Jack ; and he tapped at the 
 door of separation and uttered a formal " Mrs. Frost, may I 
 trouble you to come for a minute ? " through the keyhole. 
 
 "She will be astonished," said Mamy, with a nervous 
 laugh, as the door opened, and Eila, serene and beautiful, 
 entered with her thimble on her finger and a threaded 
 needle hastily stuck in the bosom of her dress. 
 
 "Did you call me, Mr. Wilton ? " 
 
 " I did, Mrs. Frost," replied Jack, with entire composure. 
 " I wanted to ask your permission to introduce my future 
 wife to you." And thereupon he took Mamy by the hand 
 and led her forward. " Won't you wish us good luck ? " 
 
 " Mamy ! Mr. Wilton ! You don't mean it ? What will 
 mother say 8 I can^t believe you are in earnest." 
 
 Eila spoke in breathless and uncertain tones. The an- 
 nouncement had come so suddenly that she had no time to 
 weigh the " for " and " against " with any kind of certainty, 
 or to adapt her attitude to the result. To lose Sydney with- 
 out hope of recovery, to forfeit irretrievably the advantages 
 of the connection with the Warden family, was a blow that 
 might well make the against weigh down the balance at 
 once. Certainly Mr. Wilton seemed to have money to throw 
 about as he liked ; but young men are so careless. He might 
 have been living on his capital, squandering his little for- 
 tune all this time, for anything Eila knew to the contrary. 
 And how deceitful Mamy had been not to tell her how 
 things were shaping ; for of course she must have known 
 for a long time past that Jack admired her, and that, for 
 
418 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 her own part, she was ready to fling herself at his head with 
 the least encouragement he gave her. Eila felt she had not 
 deserved to be treated with so little confidence by her sister. 
 It was not because, in her anxiety to further Mamy's ovni 
 interests, and perhaps those of the family a little as well, 
 she had favoured Sydney's suit that she merited to be treated 
 as a stranger now. Her voice was drier than Mamy had 
 ever heard it as she said, after a long pause : 
 
 " I'm afraid you are not giving yourselves time to think. 
 There are so many things to be considered. Mamy is still 
 very young ; and so are you, for that matter, Mr. Wilton. 
 A wife is sometimes a hindrance to a man in the beginning, 
 if he has to make his way in the world." 
 
 A smile of understanding spread upwards from Jack's 
 moustache to the corners of his bright blue eyes. He had 
 divined the cause of young Mrs. Frost's misgivings. 
 
 " Mamy will help me to make my way," he said, with 
 cheerful assurance. " I've got a little selection out in Aus- 
 tralia that'll keep two people very comfortably ; and when 
 we've made our pile we'll come back and have another fling 
 in Paris." 
 
 Eila directed a glance of eager interrogation at her 
 younger sister. A selector's * wife I Was that the fate that 
 Mamy could contemplate exchanging in cold blood for the 
 brilliant position offered her by Sydney Warden ? A vision 
 of Mamy in a sun-bonnet, baking the bread in a camp-oven 
 outside a bark hut in the Australian Bush, in the midst of the 
 heat and the flies, flitted instantly through her brain. And 
 the family ? Their only resource would be to drag them- 
 selves to the selection on foot, in the character of sun- 
 downers, and camp down round the hut like a tribe of 
 primitive blacks. Well, that might be all they were fit for ; 
 but while she was alive their deserts should be meted out to 
 them after another fashion. If the worst came to the worst, 
 she could still telegraph to Hubert, and it would be Mamy 
 who had driven her to take the fatal step. 
 
 * " Selector " — one who chooses or selectB 350 acres of good land upon 
 the station of a squatter. 
 
WHAT BILA WAS DOING MEANWHILE. 419 
 
 When she had left the room, Jack had his arms about 
 his betrothed in an instant. He was so much taller than 
 Mamy that he had to turn her face up to his like a child's in 
 order to look into her eyes. If he had dreaded to read any 
 reluctance in them upon the score of the selection, her 
 bright glance reassured him. 
 
 " Your sister isn't best pleased, I'm afraid," he said, in 
 tones of feigned concern. " But I know where the shoe 
 pinches : I'm not rich enough. Perhaps I ought to have 
 asked you first of all, Mamy, if you'd mind very much liv- 
 ing in the Bush." 
 
 This time the anxiety was genuine. But, strangely enough, 
 even the threat of being exiled to the wilds of Australia did 
 not seem to have the least effect upon Mamy's resolution. 
 
 " And you'd live in a slab hut with me ? " cried Jack in a 
 fervour of enthusiasm. "Tou'd give up Paris, and the 
 FranQais, and Sarah Bernhardt, all for me ? Oh, my dar- 
 ling, it beats me, I tell you ! Well, I only hope I may be 
 able to reward you for it some day as you deserve." 
 
 The temptation to tell the truth was never stronger than 
 at this moment. Nevertheless, Jack went away leaving his 
 betrothed under the impression that she had pledged her 
 future to a poor man. Yet radiant as the day Mamy looked 
 as she communicated the news to her mother, upon the re- 
 turn of the latter in the dusk of the evening. The matter 
 was immediately discussed in family conclave, each one 
 giving a different and personal opinion. Jack was liked, 
 and heartily, up to a certain point, by all. But Eila con- 
 tended that there was no reason why a person who could 
 give her heart to Jack should not be able to give it with 
 equal facility to Sydney. - One wouldn't be a bit more inter- 
 esting as a companion than the other, she declared, and 
 " what Mamy can see in Jack to make her ready to sacrifice 
 thousands and thousands of pounds for him, to say nothing 
 of ruining all the chances of the family for evermore, I 
 
 catCt see." 
 
 "She'll never cure him of his English accent, I'll answer 
 for that," said Mrs. Clare gloomily, "for its quite past re- 
 demption." 
 
420 NOT COUNTING TEJE COST. 
 
 The argument was interrupted by the advent of a little 
 packet for Mamy, who coloured as she received it into her 
 hands, remembering that Jack had insisted upon measuring 
 her finger for an engagement-ring not two hours ago. 
 
 Six curious eyes, to say nothing of those of the owner 
 herself, were directed at the little leather box that Mamy, 
 with a nervous smile, detached from its multifarious wrap- 
 pings. She turned it over. The name of a great Paris house 
 was printed in gold letters round the lower rim. 
 
 " How extravagant ! " said Eila indignantly ; " what 
 right has a selector to go to such a jeweller's as that ? " 
 
 But sheer astonishment prevented her from saying more. 
 Mamy had lifted the ring from its resting-place upon a 
 mound of white velvet with a half-frightened look, and 
 slipping it upon her finger, silently thrust it forward for 
 approval. The length between the two lower joints of the 
 finger was covered by a triad of precious stones of dazzling 
 brightness and surpassing beauty. A ruby, a sapphire, and 
 a diamond, of grand dimensions and blazing colour, shone 
 and scintillated upon Mamy's pretty hand — pretty with the 
 native prettiness of youth and smoothness, for the care be- 
 stowed upon it by its proprietor was of the slightest. 
 
 Eila drew a long breath. 
 
 "How too magnificent! I thought only queens could 
 have such rings. But Jack must be out of his senses. Who 
 ever saw a selector's wife washing her husband's Crimeans 
 with such a ring on as that ? " 
 
 Mrs. Clare meanwhile had fastened an eager gaze upon 
 the ruby. 
 
 "Why, I do believe it isn't very far behind the one Hu- 
 bert has in his possession. It is very strange. I really think 
 we ought to make a few inquiries about your young man, 
 Mamy, my dear. I don't want to frighten you, but there 
 have been extraordinary oases of burglars passing themselves 
 off for gentlemen, and we can't be too careful in a place 
 like Paris." 
 
 "Oh, but Hubert knows Jack, mother," expostulated 
 Mamy indignantly. 
 
 Mrs. Clare raised her eyebrows meaningly. 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 421 
 
 " I'm not too sure of Hubert himself. Where has he dis- 
 appeared to all this time and what has he done with the 
 ruby?" 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 eila's remorse. 
 
 It was the first European spring the Clare family had 
 seen, and indescribably beautiful it appeared to their unac- 
 customed eyes. Despite the sudden clouding over of a ceru- 
 lean April sky, and the scattering of sleet and raindrops 
 upon their common umbrella, the days were few when Eila 
 and her sisters failed to reconnoitre their favourite haunts 
 in the Luxembourg Gardens, and rhapsodize over the cir- 
 clets of green that wreathed the black elm-branches, or the 
 sheets of pink and white blossoms that decked the apple- 
 trees, planted espalier-wise, in the orchard part of the gar- 
 den. Jack, it is needless to say, was invariably of the party, 
 though his enthusiasm for spring glories was less marked 
 than that of his companions. Perhaps he bestowed so much 
 upon Mamy that he had none left to lavish upon Mother 
 Nature. Every time he returned to the hotel, he would tell 
 himself that the comedy had lasted long enough. Next day 
 he would send rivulets of precious stones and mountains of 
 costly stuffs to his darling. He would tell her that she 
 might choose a palace for her habitation, and a four-storied 
 manion for the family. What would she say when she 
 learnt that she was about to wed a silver-king, and to be- 
 come in her own sweet little person a silver-queen ? If she 
 had read the papers, or been in correspondence with Aus- 
 tralian friends— nay, if the Wardens, of whom she had 
 spoken to him so often, had known that she was engaged to 
 him— the knowledge of his wealth must perforce have 
 reached her ears. But, like the rest of her family, Mamy 
 dwelt (as it seemed to her lover) in a kind of world of her 
 own. Not the real world— as Jack knew it himself, where 
 
422 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 men and women nourish all sorts of worldly ambitions, and 
 are tremendously interested in criticising each other's say- 
 ings and doings — but in a fancy-world belonging to the 
 Clare family exclusively, in which it was not necessary to 
 take any thought for the morrow, though one might specu- 
 late unendingly upon the mysteries of a far-off hereafter. 
 But every day, after making the aforesaid resolution, Jack 
 would defer carrying it out. It was indescribably sweet to 
 him to obtain fresh proof that he was cared for in the only 
 way in which it is worth being cared for at all — that is to 
 say, for himself alone. He had had, it is true, to submit to 
 a cross-examination concerning his princely gift of the 
 ring, but had declared that the jewels were heirlooms never 
 to be parted with excepting in the case of pressing necessity, 
 and that he had merely had them reset for Mamy, to whom 
 they would belong henceforth. Eila was quite sure now 
 that he was recklessly spending his capital, and that he 
 would take Mamy back to a selector's hut, bare of every- 
 thing save a camp-bed and a tin basin. He was like those 
 shearers, she declared, who knock down their cheque in 
 a week's orgy in town. It could not be denied, however, 
 that Jack's orgy was of a highly respectable kind. Mrs. 
 Clare had washed her hands of him as a pupil, and he 
 found courting Mamy a more congenial occupation than 
 the conjugating of the irregular verbs. He still invited the 
 family to the theatre, and though they protested upon prin- 
 ciple, and Eila would say, " There goes an easy-chair for 
 Mamy," or, " You might have had no end of rugs for the 
 hut for the money those tickets cost," upon every fresh occa- 
 sion, they invariably ended by accepting. Jack had given 
 them but few details concerning his family, who were in 
 London at that moment. He suggested that the wedding 
 should take place quietly in Paris, after which he would 
 write to his people, and announce that he intended produc- 
 ing his bride to them on Ms way through London. 
 
 " I always told 'em I should be married that way if I 
 ever married at all," he said. " My sisters are so curious. If 
 I let out that I was engaged they'd be wanting to come over 
 to Paris directly, and we shouldn't have a moment to our- 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 423 
 
 selves. I'm of age, and I'm my own master. I know what 
 I'm about, I tell you ; " and so forth. 
 
 The explanation of Jack's conduct, which, however, he 
 did not divulge to his Paris friends, was a fear lest the qua- 
 trieme and its inmates might reflect in the eyes of his own 
 conventional belongings upon the wife he had chosen. 
 When he had Mamy to himself it would be all right. And 
 meanwhile, as fortune had decreed that he should suddenly 
 become a millionaire, and as father, mother, and sisters owed 
 the astonishing circumstance that they had likewise come 
 into unexpected wealth to himself alone. Jack considered 
 that he had purchased the privilege of conducting his pri- 
 vate affairs as privately as he might please, and of present- 
 ing his bride to his kith and kin after, instead of before, his 
 wedding, if such were his good pleasure. 
 
 Eila, meanwhile, was greatly exercised upon the question 
 of the coming marriage. Mamy gone, there would be one 
 mouth less to feed. Then, Reginald had promised supplies, 
 and if she could hold out until they came, Hubert might be 
 allowed to remain away indefinitely. If Reginald had only 
 been at hand to counsel her ! She waited with ever-increas- 
 ing anxiety for the answer to her letter to him. The tele- 
 gram had doubtless contained the pith of his arguments, but 
 she still had to learn how her communication had affected 
 his sentiment for her. She felt that things would have been 
 easier if her brother had behaved differently, but since his 
 return Dick had relapsed into a mood of self -concentrated 
 gloom that made it difficult for her to confide in him. 
 Mamy's engagement seemed to have had the unaccountable 
 effect of estranging him from her as well. He never took 
 part in the walking, driving, or sight-seeing expeditions, and 
 only made a concession in favour of the theatre when he 
 had a mind to see some particular play. He seemed to take 
 it for granted that money must be forthcoming when neces- 
 sary, and Eila found a secret excuse for her own weakness 
 in hiding the news of the catastrophe from him on the plea 
 that it would divert his mind from his work. Dick went 
 mechanically to the studio, but brought back no more amus- 
 ing tales, as in former times, of the students. One or two 
 
424 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 life-studies of a model's back that his sister found in cleaning 
 his room appeared to her unitiated eyes marvels of promise. 
 Who could tell ? He might be pondering some great work 
 in his mind, the achievement of which would bring him 
 fame and fortune in one glorious day. A favourite dream 
 of Eila's at this time was that the family should discover 
 that the picture of the year at the Salon had been painted by 
 Dick. As by the stroke of a magic wand they would all be 
 lifted to a pinnacle of prosperity immediately, and by what 
 a joyful means ! The vision was such a fascinating one that 
 Eila felt as though she would have consented to lay down 
 her life to have it realized. 
 
 But there were times when these fancies brought her no 
 consolation. In spite of all her efforts, her little hoard was 
 fast melting away. She could not accuse herself of extrava- 
 gance. The family menus were very elementary and simple, 
 though the days of bone-broth and boiled eggs for dinner'— 
 or of bone-broth and bread alone — were over. This hard 
 cash — these diabolical little rounds of metal without which 
 we may starve as in a desert in the midst of plenty — were 
 beginning to be sorely needed. Reginald's fifty pounds had 
 gone to settle the doctor's bill for her mother's illness and 
 other pressing claims. Her own savings were well-nigh ex- 
 hausted. And yet while there were so many possibilities of 
 rescue, she told herself that she could surely have patience 
 for a little while longer. A great oppression seemed to have 
 been lifted from her daily life by the absence of Hubert. If 
 he could but have continued to play the part of the slave of 
 the lamp without wanting to appropriate her, she felt that 
 she would have hailed his return with unfeigned joy and 
 relief. But now he appeared almost like an ogre lying in 
 wait to devour her. Another fancy she indulged in was that 
 she would call Hubert back (and it occasioned her a half- 
 sympathizing shudder when she pictured his feelings as he 
 came to open the telegram containing the words "Open, 
 sesame ! ") and agree to all his conditions. He should there- 
 upon settle a sum upon the family that would place them 
 out of the reach of want for evermore. Then she would pay 
 her debt. He should not be able to say she liad cheated him. 
 
ELIA'S REMORSE, 425 
 
 And then — having written a letter to her mother and to 
 Reginald — she would uncork that long-neglected octagonal 
 blue bottle, the gift of the true-hearted chemist's assistant in 
 Hobart, and, applying it to her lips, gasp away in one short 
 second all the burden of shame and dishonour and dreary 
 struggle and shattered hopes that overcame and ruined her 
 life. The impossibility of providing Mamy with a suitable 
 trousseau under the actual circumstances was another argu- 
 ment in favour of recalling Hubert. In her lighter moods 
 she would pack an imaginary trunk with an imaginary out- 
 fit for the Bush. And there was nothing, even to the buff 
 leather shoes for board-ship wear, that she neglected to take 
 account of in filling in the details of the unreal equipment. 
 The question of the trousseau was settled, however, unex- 
 pectedly one day by no other person than the bridegroom- 
 elect, who disposed of it in an off-hand way that charmed 
 and terrified Eila at the same time. It was upon the occasion 
 of his announcing triumphantly that he had succeeded in 
 gaining Mamy's consent to an immediate marriage at the 
 Embassy under the sanction and protection of English laws. 
 
 "Oh! but she has nothing ready," pleaded Eila. She 
 was walking home with her future bi-other-in-law across 
 the Luxembourg Gardens, while Mamy and Truca hurried 
 on in front to waylay Dick on his return from the studio. 
 
 "That doesn't matter. We'll fix her up all right after 
 the wedding's over," said Jack, with an air of easy assur- 
 ance. 
 
 "But she'll need so many things," objected Eila, "and 
 we have to calculate, you know; and— and Paris is vertj 
 expensive," she added, crimsoning. 
 
 Jack feigned to look concerned. 
 
 "Is it? Well, I suppose it can't be helped. Anyhow, 
 Mrs. Frost, Mamy's my property now, so I'll only ask your 
 help in the matter of advising her what to choose. But if 
 she wants a frock to be married in, and a few little things 
 at once, I've got a hundred pounds I'll ask you to lay out 
 for me. You know I can't get her to take anything but the 
 ring until we're man and wife. But she'll be more reason- 
 able by-and-by, I expect." 
 
4:26 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Joy mingled with alarm filled Ella's breast. The han- 
 dling of a hundred pounds for immediate use on Mamy's be- 
 half was such an unexpected realization of her vision that 
 she looked steadfastly at the Luxembourg elms, with their 
 sprouting green leaves, to assure herself that they were real 
 and tangible. As the leaves continued to flicker under the 
 April sun, and Jack's voice sounded very real, she concluded 
 that her dream was a reality, and her next step was to utter 
 the hesitating disclaimer : 
 
 "You won't mind if I say something that perhaps I 
 ought not to say. Only you do seem a little careless about 
 money. Don't you think you and Mamy may be very sorry 
 some day that you spent so much in Paris ? You know she 
 has not a penny of her own in the world." 
 
 Jack stroked his blond moustache with an air of reflec- 
 tion, successfully concealing by this manoeuvre the smile 
 that hovered round his lips. 
 
 " I was never much of a hand at saving, that's a fact," he 
 said penitently; "but you needn't be afraid, Mrs. Frost, I 
 assure you. I've no intention of outrunning the constable, 
 I tell you. Why, what do you suppose my little selection 
 in New South Wales brings me in a year ? You'll see that 
 there is a margin for putting by if one cares about it." 
 
 Jack had yielded to a sudden and childish desire to 
 astonish his sister-in-law to be, for once in her life, by re- 
 vealing to her the real facts of the case. Why, indeed, 
 should he prolong the mystery any longer ? He had re- 
 ceived all the proofs his heart could wish for that his sweet 
 little betrothed was marrying him for himself, not for a 
 silver-mine of the very existence of which she was ignorant, 
 and as for this lovely and enigmatic young matron, whom 
 he had seen for the first time in the character of an undress 
 figurante upon, the boards of a low theatre, and ever since 
 in that of a pure household guardian angel, he was con- 
 vinced that she was as disinterested, and guileless, and inno- 
 cent, and generally helpless, as the remainder of her help- 
 less family. It would be good fun. Jack thought, to see her 
 open those beautiful dark eyes in wonder. And the time 
 seemed ripe, too, for conveying to her the welcome informa- 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 427 
 
 tion that mere money troubles need weigh upon her mind 
 no longer, as he had reason to think that the family was 
 suffering from peculiarly straitened means at the present 
 moment. 
 
 " Well, you don't give a guess," he said, laughing, as he 
 watched her puzzled expression. 
 
 It flashed across young Mrs. Frost's mind at this mo- 
 ment, as a kind of wild, unreasoning hope, that perhaps 
 Mr. Wilton really was richer than he had professed to be, 
 and that the loss to the family by Mamy's rejection of 
 Sydney Warden might not prove so entirely disastrous in 
 its consequences as she had allowed herself to believe. 
 
 " I am so stupid about money," she observed diffidently, 
 mightily elated at the same time by the gleam of encourage- 
 ment she detected in Jack's blue eyes. " It is a selection, 
 you say ? Six hundred acres, I suppose ? " 
 
 " Not so much." 
 
 Her face fell a little. 
 
 " I don't think one can make very mu3h out of an un- 
 cleared selection. It all depends upon how much there is 
 under cultivation, and upon water frontage and seasons. 
 No, I should never guess," a little despondingly. "From 
 two to three hundred a year, perhaps ? " 
 
 " Go on," said Jack quietly ; " I will stop you when you 
 reach the figure." 
 
 " Four, then — five, six, seven. Oh, Mr. Wilton, it can't 
 be ; you must be joking ! Do you mean that really you 
 make seven hundred a year ? " 
 
 "And the rest," said Jack flippantly. "My deai- Mrs. 
 Frost, you are a long way behind in your guesses. Now, to 
 facilitate your calculations, I would suggest your counting 
 by thousands. Begin at ten thousand pounds, and go on, 
 and on, and on — don't be afraid — until I tell you to stop. 
 But, good Lord ! what is the matter with you ? Don't, 
 please ; I am quite in earnest . . . but— but have I said any- 
 thing to hurt you ? " 
 
 " No— oh no ! I can't help it ! " gasped Eila. " Let me 
 sit down, please." 
 
 She was trembling all over, and white as a ghost, and as 
 28 
 
428 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Jack, much alarmed, led her by the arm to a bench, and 
 pressed her down upon it witli brotherly tenderness, sobs of 
 hysteric vehemence broke from her one after the other in 
 rapid succession. 
 
 "Are you ill? What shall I do ? Is it my fault? What 
 is the matter ? Shall I run after your sister and call her ? " 
 queried Jack breathlessly. 
 
 The worthy fellow hardly knew what he was saying in 
 the terror occasioned him by Eila's condition, in the first 
 place, and by the fear of seeing a gesticulating French crowd 
 close around the bench in the second. 
 
 " Oh, I am better," sighed young Mrs. Frost at last, press- 
 ing her hand to her side with unconsciously theatrical 
 effect. 
 
 Tears had come to her relief. She pulled out an inade- 
 quate little square of printed cotton, in the guise of a three- 
 sou handkerchief, and wept freely into it, holding it against 
 her eyes with both hands, unmindful, apparently, of the 
 curious glances that, to Jack's immense discomfiture, were 
 beginning to be directed towards them by the passers-by. 
 
 " That's all right ! " he said reassuringly, as her sobs sub- 
 sided. " You'll be better now. Pull yourself together. I 
 suppose it's my fault. But how could I dream you would 
 take it that way ? I never heard of a person being knocked 
 over like that before by a bit of good news. I tell you^^^ — " 
 
 " A bit of good news ! " repeated Eila, laughing through 
 her tears in joyous derision. " Oh, Mr. Wilton, I may tell 
 you now. You've never known — you never can have 
 known — what it is to go through the anxiety that I have 
 suffered on account of those you love ! " 
 
 "Well, you needn't think of it any more," said Jack 
 soothingly. " Mamy will set 'em all up nicely. My selec- 
 tion is a silver-mine. There's the explanation of the mystery. 
 I meant to let you count up to seventy thousand. It brings 
 me in more than that a year, but I can't tell you the exact 
 sum. Anyhow, you see there's more than enough to doter 
 you all. Isn't that the French word for it — eh ? ' 
 
 Eila was silent. The quivering green was beginning to 
 look unreal once more. The sandy Luxembourg soil seemed 
 
EILA'S REMOESE. 429 
 
 to wave up and down. Jack's advice to her to pull herself 
 together was, after all, the best she could follow at this in- 
 stant. By-and-by she would be able to think more clearly. 
 Seventy thousand ! Seventy thousand pounds, that was to 
 say ! Not francs ; Jack had clearly said pounds. Besides, 
 he never counted in francs. Why, a little unconsidered 
 trifle extracted from such a sum as that (which, moreover, 
 as it appeared, was merely the revenue, the interest on the 
 capital, not the capital itself) would be enough to rid them 
 of the nightmare of poverty for ever. Was it to her that 
 this marvellous piece of " Arabian Nights " luck had hap- 
 pened ? Upon her and her family that this heaven-sent mir- 
 acle had alighted ? If it were so indeed, some unexpected 
 catastrophe must follow. Even in fairy-stories such marvels 
 did not occur without somebody being sacrificed. A.n earth- 
 quake or a plague must ensue. Or one of the family would 
 be run over. From whatever quarter the thunderbolt 
 might descend, it could not fail to fall soon. But, mean- 
 while, might she not indulge for one transient hour in the 
 rapture of repeating to herself that her wildest dreams, her 
 most extravagant castles in the air — higher than Jacob's 
 ladder itself — had been converted into actual prosaic facts ? 
 As for this Australian Jupiter, who had descended upon the 
 quatrieme in a shower of gold, what would he say if he 
 could know how hard she had essayed to drive him away ? 
 With an effusiveness born of the intoxication of the hour, 
 Eila laid her hand on the young man's arm, and said, half 
 laughing, half crying : 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Wilton, I have a confession to make to you. I 
 was angry with my sister for consenting so quickly to be 
 your wife. It wasn't that I didn't like you and believe in 
 you. We all did that. But I thought you were poor — and 
 — and rather reckless for a poor man ; and knowing that 
 Mamy might make a rich marriage (I am sure she has told 
 you about it herself), I did all I could to persuade her not to 
 have you." 
 
 Her voice faltered. What would have been her feelings, 
 she reflected, if her machinations had been successful, and 
 if, after driving Jack away, she had discovered too late that 
 
430 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 she had closed the legitimate door of entrance to the Alad- 
 din's cave for ever ? 
 
 Jack, for his part, appeared in no way discomposed by 
 the confession. Perhaps in his secret heart he was grateful 
 to the fair penitent for the role she had played. He an- 
 swered her that the only effect of her story was to make him 
 fonder of her sister than ever, if such a thing were possible. 
 He gloried in this fresh proof of Mamy's disinterested at- 
 tachment, and pressed his companion, now that she was 
 making a clean breast of it, to tell him as much as she 
 would about the situation of the family, and how he could 
 be the most useful to them. 
 
 " As for your wanting your sister to marry a rich fellow," 
 he said encouragingly, " it was quite right and natural of 
 you — all the more that you'd known him all your lives, 
 while me you didn't know from Adam. And I hope you'll 
 tell me how you're off for money, and what you've got to 
 depend on, and all that. I've thought sometimes you might 
 have been badly in want of a friend that first night I saw 
 you — you know where." 
 
 Eila coloured painfully at the allusion. She had almost 
 begun to cherish the illusion that Jack had forgotten the 
 circumstances of their first meeting. Still, the cordial sym- 
 pathy of his manner encouraged her to respond to his ap- 
 peal, and to make, as he had said himself, a clean breast 
 of it. ^ ' 
 
 Therefore she told him the family history from the be- 
 ginning, shielding mother, brothers, and sisters from blame 
 by taking it all upon herself. She was the manager, the 
 treasurer, the working head. It was owing to her not know- 
 ing how to calculate expenses properly that they had come 
 to grief in the first instance. She had never thought of 
 taking unforeseen disasters like her mother's illness into 
 account, and when she had appeared at the Folies-Fantassin 
 for the first and last time, the family was on the verge of 
 starvation. Then had occurred the final and crushing 
 catastrophe of the failure of the insurance company whence 
 they drew their only means of living. How she had hidden 
 the disaster from her family, in the hope of finding a way 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 431 
 
 of succour before overwhelming them with the news ; how 
 she longed for remunerative work, but knew neither where 
 to find it nor how to set about obtaining it ; how Hubert 
 had come to the rescue for several weeks — not in a settled, 
 regular way, but by providing them with restaurant dinners 
 and pleasures beyond their means ; and how she had wanted 
 to ask him to help them in a more practical, permanent 
 fashion, but was afraid to do so (this portion of her story 
 was less explicit than the rest), she narrated in broken sen- 
 tences, drawing aimless patterns the while in the gravel at 
 her feet with the point of her umbrella. 
 
 Jack listened as an elder brother might have done, albeit 
 he was the younger of the two. His comment upon the 
 story was that she had undoubtedly been through a rough 
 time, but if his word went for anything, she and her be- 
 longings had come to the end of their troubles for good and 
 all. 
 
 " But what beats me," he added, confidentially, " is the 
 way your cousin behaved. Why, he gets more out of the 
 mine than I do ! I'd be afraid to say what Hubert de Merle 
 is worth at the present moment, I tell you ! " Here Jack's 
 voice sank to an impressively mysterious key. " But he was 
 always a peculiar chap, though he is awfully clever— I'll 
 say that for him— and has been a very good friend to me 
 intothe bargain; Still, we can get on without Master Hu- 
 bert, if he takes it into his head to keep out of the way. By- 
 the-by, I suppose you are the only relations he's got in the 
 world to leave his money to, aren't you ? " 
 
 "I don't know," said Eila, with a little frown; "I never 
 thought about it. One does not like to think of people dy- 
 ing for the sake of getting their money. And Hubert is not 
 very old. He might marry somebody still." 
 
 " Marry somebody ! Hubert ? " More eloquent than any 
 protestation was the incredulous wonder conveyed in Jack's 
 accents. " You're not in earnest ! Besides, he hates women, 
 and no wonder, poor fellow ! " 
 
 A faint half-smile fluttered round the corners of Eila's 
 pensive mouth. She hastened to change the current of the 
 conversation by asking when Mamy might be informed of 
 
432 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the wonderful destiny that awaited her, a destiny so won- 
 derful, indeed, that she herself could hardly believe, even 
 now, that what Jack had just told her was not all a dream. 
 
 "I have fancied such extravagant things sometimes," 
 she said. " I began to build castles in the air when I was 
 quite little, and though it is so foolish, I like to let myself 
 build them still. But I never fancied anything half so won- 
 derful as what you have told me to-day. What will mother 
 and Mamy say ? I am so wildly impatient to rush and tell 
 them this minute." 
 
 " No ; pray don't ! " said Jack earnestly. " I am keeping 
 the news for my present to your sister on our wedding-day. 
 I don't know what induced me to let the cat out of the bag 
 to you as I did, but I knew you were to be trusted. All I 
 ask you is not to say a word about it to yoiu" people for the 
 present." 
 
 And Eila was fain to do as Jack demanded. She did not 
 give the required pledge with the best grace in the world, 
 for the secret was already burning to make its escape. She 
 had carried the knowledge of evil times locked in her breast 
 without any difficulty, but to bear a load of joy unshared by 
 the family was quite another thing. Upon parting from 
 Jack, who was to come and convey the family to the restau- 
 rant after going to his hotel, she walked back to the Boule- 
 vard de I'Observatoire in a kind of dream. She told herself 
 that as the prospective sister-in-law of an " archi-millionaire " 
 she might buy an English Times at the paper-shop where it 
 was sold farther down the boulevard, but, from force of 
 habit, reproached herself for her extravagance as she drew 
 forth eight sous wherewith to pay for her purchase. It was 
 curious, upon returning, to find Mamy on her knees in the 
 kitchen filling the scuttle with coke for the declining stove. 
 An involuntary awe of her sister as of a princess in disguise 
 was Eila's first sensation. She mentally compared her to 
 the king's daughter, in Grimm's tales, who drove the geese 
 to the pond. Such an imperative desire to seize Mamy in 
 her arms and shriek out the miraculous tidings to her there 
 and then took possession of her soul, that in the dread of 
 yielding to the temptation she fled to her room, and, meet- 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 433 
 
 ing Truca on the way, clasped the child to her heart in a fer- 
 vent embrace. The little girl had not been used to these 
 demonstrations of late, and responded by clinging round 
 her sister's neck, until she was lifted in the air and carried 
 along in Eila's arms as in the days of her babyhood. 
 
 " I shall lose my senses before Mamy is married, that is 
 certain," said Eila to herself, but she found an outlet for her 
 overpowering emotions by fondling Truca. Her bonnet 
 and boa laid by after being carefully brushed and shaken 
 (she had developed a respect for her wardrobe unknown in 
 the Cowa era of her existence), she sat herself down to enjoy 
 the Times, or, at least, to make an effort to recover her self- 
 possession by studying its columns. Vain attempt ! The 
 words she read penetrated her brain, but took not the slight- 
 est effect upon her mind. She read that there had been an 
 earthquake in Japan, whereby whole villages had been 
 swept away and thousands of her fellow-creatures destroyed ; 
 that there were two fresh cases of suicide in the German 
 army ; that a disastrous mining accident, by which seven- 
 teen miners were killed and ten times seventeen entombed, 
 had occurred the day before in Wales ; and she found her- 
 self assimilating these tidings with no clearer sensation than 
 that of a complete and half -incredulous indifference. She 
 could not realize that men and women should continue to 
 be tortured out of an existence where marvels of the Jdnd 
 that had happened to herself, yere possible. The Japanese, 
 crushed out of life by falling walls, appeared to her like far- 
 away puppets, whose cries and groans had an echo of un- 
 reality. She laid down the paper, wondering at her own 
 numbness, and trying to analyze it, like a person who dis- 
 covers that one of his limbs is bereft of sensation, and con- 
 siders whether it can be frozen. The heading, however, of 
 a telegram that caught her eye as she took up the paper 
 again brought back the apprehension of real things with a 
 rush. The words ran, '■'Fatal Drowning Accident at 
 Cannes" and in the same paragraph the name of Warden 
 seemed to leap out of the printed page and imperiously 
 claim her attention. How she read the paragraph to the 
 end without crying out or attracting Truca's notice by an 
 
434 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 involuntary ejaculation of dismay was a fact she wondered 
 at afterwards. Was this, she asked herself, the first warn- 
 ing of the approach of the malignant Nemesis she had 
 dreaded ? The telegram narrated in unsympathetic news- 
 paper style the death by drowning of a young Englishman 
 of the name of Warden, staying, in company with his 
 mother and sister, at the Hotel Metropole at Cannes. He 
 had gone out alone, as it appeared, in a sailing boat, and it 
 was conjectured that he had been imprudent enough to 
 allow himself to fall asleep after making his sail fast, for 
 those who had observed the accident from the shore declared 
 that the boat had capsized because the sail had not been let 
 out at a critical moment. The body of the victim had been 
 recovered entangled in the sail. Had it not been for this 
 circumstance, he might have been easily rescued, for though 
 the boat was far out, those who had witnessed the disaster 
 from the shore had put out immediately to its assistance. 
 
 The paper dropped from Eila's fingers ; she covered her 
 eyes with her hands, pressing her palms into the sockets 
 and swallowing down the hysteric lump that rose unbidden 
 in her throat. A terrible and unreasoning fear had seized 
 her — the fear that Sydney had gone voluntarily to his death 
 under the blue Mediterranean waves. How tenfold more 
 awful the vision of his sturdy form, rigid in its cofl[in, would 
 appear, if Mamy or she had ever so remote a share in bringing 
 it there ! But Mamy's share was as nothing compared with 
 her own. Had she not in her insatiable desire to lure money 
 into the family prevented her sister from discarding Sydney 
 once and for all, and done her utmost to keep him in the 
 toils ? Perhaps the news of Mamy's engagement had come 
 when his hopes were highest, and the sudden and unex- 
 pected blasting of them had driven him to take his life in a 
 moment of desperation. Yet to couple Sydney's image with 
 suicide appeared both monstrous and improbable. To con- 
 nect it with death was hardly possible. Eila immediately 
 resolved to conceal the news from her sister until the wed- 
 ding was over. She could not answer for the effect it might 
 have upon Mamy. What if it should produce a revulsion 
 of feeling towards Jack — cause Mamy to put off the wed- 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 435 
 
 ding, or take some other ill-considered step prejudicial to 
 her marriage ? No ! In her own interest Mamy must be 
 kept in ignorance of the fatal tidings until she should be 
 safely anchored in the harbour of matrimony. By warning 
 Jack, and looking over the papers and letters addressed to 
 the quatrieme, Eila reflected that she might tide over the 
 next few days until the risk of a catastrophe was averted. 
 She therefore cut out the column containing the account of 
 the disaster, and, after reading it over once more with a 
 heavy heart, tore it into bits and scattered it to the winds of 
 heaven. Mamy was warbling recklessly as she moved about 
 the adjoining room, and the shrill gay notes jarred upon 
 Eila's ears, in which a sea-dirge would have sounded more 
 fitting at the present moment. 
 
 "Mamy!" she called sharply through the door that 
 opened into the adjoining room, " stop yelling a moment 
 and answer me. Did you write to — to Cannes to say that 
 you were engaged ? " 
 
 " Yes,'' shouted Mamy, breaking into a fresh warble an 
 instant later. 
 
 " You did ? Can't you be quiet for a moment ? And did 
 you receive an answer ? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 Here a roulade, accompanied by a sound as of the rak- 
 ing out of coals, caused Eila to say more sharply than ever : 
 
 " Mamy, you will drive me mad ! When did you post 
 the letter ? Is there time for you to have had an answer ? " 
 
 " I don't know," called out her sister ; " I don't think so. 
 What does it matter ? " 
 
 " Matter ? " retorted Eila bitterly ; " nothing to you, per- 
 haps." The last three words, however, were uttered sotto 
 voce. Nor did the speaker believe in her own mind that 
 there was any real foundation for them. The proof lay in 
 the care she took that the fatal news she had learned should 
 not travel any farther. It was with a feeling as of one who 
 commits a real crime that she intercepted, two days later, a 
 black-edged envelope addressed to her sister in Mrs. War- 
 den's handwriting. If the letter it contained should reach 
 the person to whom it was addressed, farewell to the joyous 
 
436 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 anticipations of the bridal ceremony fixed for the ensuing 
 Monday. The news of the death of her rejected lover ar- 
 riving in answer to the letter announcing her engagement 
 to Jack would distress Mamy beyond measure. Yet the 
 letter might be of a kind that required an immediate an- 
 swer. Eila turned the lugubrious missive, with its deep 
 black border, over and over in her hands before she could 
 summon the resolution to open it. Granted that she knew 
 exactly how matters stood, granted even that Mamy would 
 have been the first to bid her read the letter had she been 
 by, the role of spy was odious and distasteful to her. But 
 the end must justify the means. "I will say just what I 
 did, and why I did it, when the time comes," she repeated 
 to herself, and so saying deliberately unfastened the en- 
 velope. It startled her to draw therefrom an open letter in 
 Mamy's own handwriting. This, at least, she could have 
 no right to examine, as the writer had not taken her into 
 her confidence respecting the contents. There was a second 
 letter, however, in Mrs. Warden's handwriting, and it was 
 with an ever-increasing sense of guilt that Eila unfolded it 
 and read as follows : 
 
 " My deab young Friend, 
 
 "A heart-broken mother returns you the enclosed 
 letter addressed to her beloved son. It was put into my 
 hands the evening of the d^ when the awful event took 
 place. I have been too utterly prostrated to write before, 
 and Lucy, poor girl ! is 'almost beside herself with grief. I 
 had no idea the letter was from you until I opened it, and 
 discovered to my intense surprise that my poor dear lad 
 had requested the honour of your hand, and that you had 
 deemed it expedient to refuse him, having pledged your 
 affections to another. 
 
 " He might have taken his mother into his confidence, 
 for what should I have considered but his happiness ? — 
 though doubtless I should have advised him to wait, and 
 you too, being both somewhat young to know your own 
 minds. But it is no use referring to that now. If I were 
 able to think of anything but the awful calamity that has 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 437 
 
 befallen us, I would con^atulate you on your engagement 
 to Mr. Wilton, who, if I am not mistaken, has an interest in 
 the great Gunga silver-mine. But perhaps it is another 
 Mr. Wilton. If anything could bring us the least spark of 
 consolation in our dreadful trial, it would be the great kind- 
 ness and sjTnpathy shown us by our fellow-travellers at the 
 hotel, many of them people of title. Lady Alice, an un- 
 married second daughter of an Irish peer, is devoted to my 
 poor Lucy. I think (but this is quite between ourselves) 
 that she has special reason for sharing in our grief. With- 
 out being exactly a lady's man, dear Sydney was very popu- 
 lar with our sex. I know that your mother and sisters and 
 brothers will feel for us in our profound affliction. We are 
 not without the comforting ministrations of the chaplain, 
 the Honourable Mr. Bene, but it is hard to say ' God's will 
 be done ' in these cases. 
 
 " Yours sincerely in great grief, 
 
 " Arabella Warden. 
 
 " P. 8. — Perhaps you have not heard the terrible news. I 
 fancied everybody must know. Our beloved Sydney was 
 drowned by the capsizing of a boat that he must needs go 
 sailing in by himself on the afternoon of the 11th. There 
 was an account of the disaster in the Times, and most of the 
 English and foreign papers as well." 
 
 Mamy's letter, which Eila next perused, upon the well- 
 known principle that you may as well be hung for a sheep 
 as for a lamb — a principle, by the way, which is occasionally 
 responsible for carrying us much farther than we intended 
 to go — was a short, frank, kindly epistle wherein the writer 
 referred gratefully to Sydney's constant attachment, but de- 
 clared that it was impossible now, as it had been from the 
 beginning, to feel towards him otherwise than as a sister. 
 She briefly announced her engagement to Jack Wilton, and 
 concluded with the trust that Sydney would find someone 
 to care for him as he deserved. 
 
 " There are so many girls better looking and better edu- 
 cated than I am," concluded the writer naively; "it will 
 
438 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 not be hard for you to find a wife of that sort, and as long 
 as I live I shall always remain, your sincere and grateful 
 and affectionate friend, Mamy Clare." 
 
 Two sensations resulted to Eila from her secret perusal 
 of the intercepted letters. The first was a great and over- 
 whelming sense of relief at the certainty that Sydney had 
 never known the fact of her sister's engagement, and the 
 second and less amiable sensation was a secret sense of tri- 
 umph induced by the reflection that Mrs. Warden had now 
 the proof that a member of the despised Clare family had re- 
 fused the hand of her son. To grieve keenly for the strong 
 young life cut off in its prime was not in Eila's power. Her 
 own experiences had led her to attach but little value, the- 
 oretically, to the boon of existence. In her pessimistic moods, 
 the grammatical definition which makes the verb " to be " 
 S3raonymous with the verb " to suffer " appeared to her true 
 in a deeper sense than that attributed to it by Lindley Mur- 
 ray. Nevertheless, she felt that the vision of Sydney's dead 
 face, with the sea washing over it, and the obstinate hair, 
 that would never lie straight, swaying up and down beneath 
 the waves, would haunt her imagination for many a day to 
 come. She did not believe that Mrs. Warden's grief would 
 be incurable. A mother whose heart was really broken 
 would have no thought to spare for Lady Alices and Hon- 
 ourable Mr. Benes. She considered, indeed, that of all those 
 who had known and loved Sydney, his own family not ex- 
 cepted, Mamy would mourn for hita in the most whole- 
 hearted fashion. For herself, she could not deny that the 
 extent of her grief was greatly influenced by the relation 
 in which he stood to her family. If he had still represented 
 the goal of her ambition for Mamy, she felt that she would 
 have reasoned less philosophically about the doubtful advan- 
 tage of being cut off in the flush of early manhood, while 
 one had health and wealth, and friends in plenty to make 
 life so well worth living. How to answer Mrs. Warden's 
 letter was the problem that diverted her mind from the 
 afore-mentioned unsatisfying reflections. Once you engage 
 yourself on the path of deceit, it is astonishing how circum- 
 
EILA'S REMORSE. 439 
 
 stances arise to lead you on. Evidently there was nothing 
 for it but to answer Mrs. Warden in Mamy's name. 
 
 "A little more, and I should forge her handwriting," 
 Eila said to herself bitterly ; " but she will forgive me, she 
 must forgive me, when she knows why I acted so.'' 
 
 Fortified by this reflection, young Mrs. Frost stole down 
 the staircase a couple of hours later carrying a letter ad- 
 dressed to the Hotel Metropole, Cannes, which she posted 
 with her own hands. She was not wholly dissatisfled with 
 her composition. In alluding to Sydney's death, and re- 
 membering that, after all, it was to Sydney's own mother 
 she was writing, a natural impulse of sympathy had come 
 spontaneously. She had felt herself capable of shedding 
 tears of real emotion if she had encountered Mrs. Warden 
 at the moment of writing, and words of tender regret for 
 the dead, and genuine pity for the living, flowed unsought 
 from her pen. To excuse Mamy from writing upon the 
 score of the shock she had received in the midst of her 
 bridal preparations seemed fitting enough, and so used was 
 Eila now to her self-assumed role of arch-plotter, in behalf 
 of the welfare of the family, that the remorse induced by 
 her own deceit was forgotten as soon as her letter was posted. 
 But she thought the matter over on her return, as she 
 mounted the sixty odd steps that were to land her upon the 
 qiMtrieme. 
 
 " What aim have I," she said to herself, " excepting to 
 spare Mamy and the rest unnecessary pain and distress ? If 
 the little deceit I practised fulfils this, and is only temporary, 
 why need I torment myself about it ? It is only if it should 
 fail, and I were found out, that I should feel I was to blame, 
 since the sole justification for deceiving is that the deceit 
 should be skilful enough to be entirely successful." 
 
440 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL.* 
 
 Whence the sword of Damocles that Eila's imagination 
 had forged was to descend upon the quatrieme before the 
 day fixed for Mamy's wedding, she herself could not have 
 told. But it is a fact that she never got up in the morning 
 without a fresh terror of what the coming fourteen hours 
 were to bring, and never went to bed at night without a feel- 
 ing of relief and elation at the reflection that another day 
 had been safely lived through. When the great morning 
 actually arrived, she could not deny that Fortune had played 
 into her hands. Mamy, indeed, had been heard to wonder 
 occasionally at Sydney's obstinate silence in view of the 
 news she had seat him. 
 
 " I suppose he is sulking,'' she remarked to Eila on the 
 morning of her wedding, a remark which made young Mrs. 
 Frost wince inwardly. " I thought better of him, all the 
 same, and I shall tell him so too, next time I see him." 
 
 This was the only allusion, however, made by the bride 
 to her former lover. An hour later she had forgotten Syd- 
 ney's existence, as, arrayed in the white cashmere that Eila 
 and she had selected for the occasion, she sat in state by the 
 window of the reception-room waiting for the arrival of . the 
 bridegroom. Jack had no clearer notions respecting the 
 etiquette of courtship and marriage than Mamy herself, and 
 could not be withheld from accompanying the bride and her 
 family to his own wedding. Mamy waited for him, there- 
 fore, in her bridal bravery, " clothed in white samite, mystic, 
 wonderful," with her heart beating recognisably faster than 
 usual. Eila had insisted upon engaging the services of a 
 theatrical hairdresser, who had utterly transformed the 
 seraph head by gathering the rebellious locks into a structure 
 designated as a coiffure d la Henri quatre. The air of step- 
 ping out of an old-world court that it conferred upon Mamy 
 enchanted her elder sister, who could hardly find words in 
 which to express her admiration. 
 
 " ' To grace a cottage or adorn a palace.' How does it go ? 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 441 
 
 That is what you look fit for now, Mamy ! What will Jack 
 say ? Your hair is all turned back into a lovely square 
 from your forehead, and your head looks so exquisitely 
 small and shapely. You should always have it done like 
 that — upon great occasions, at least, you know — and wear 
 pearl ornaments with it." 
 
 " To be sure — when there is a sheep sale at the selection, 
 for instance," laughed Mamy. 
 
 "Yes, when there is a sheep sale," assented Eila glee- 
 fully, but with such a meaning air that Mamy said quickly : 
 
 " I am sure you know something you haven't told me, 
 Eila. I believe Jack's selection is quite a big station, for I 
 noticed that all of a sudden you grew quite reconciled to the 
 match. You would never have changed so if you did not 
 think Jack better off than, he says." 
 
 " He will tell you all about it himself, dear, by-and-by," 
 was Eila's complacent reply. 
 
 Despite her efforts, she could not restrain a certain tremu- 
 lous note of triumph from vibrating in her voice. Her high- 
 est air-castle was on the point of becoming a tangible fact. 
 The fairy prince had assumed the shape of a real flesh-and- 
 blood suitor, and little penniless, Bohemian Mamy, w^ithout 
 introductions into society, without money or accomplish- 
 ments or influence of any kind, had landed what was per- 
 ha;^s the greatest prize of the year in the matrimonial mar- 
 ket. At present she had no conception of the significance of 
 money. " A thousand pounds or a hundred thousand must 
 bear almost equal proportions in her eyes, but she will soon 
 learn," said Eila to herself. " Wait until she and Jack 
 throw off their incognito and appear as silver-king and 
 silver-queen in London or Paris, with a magnificent house, 
 and a yacht, and carriages, and lackeys in livery. Then 
 Mamy will see what the possession of millions signifies in 
 the world. What a mighty influence it will give them, too ! 
 Only she and Jack have no ambition. I think Mamy will 
 want to help everybody who comes begging of them. But 
 of course she will think of us all first ; and afterwards, if 
 she likes to lay aside ten or twenty thousand a year for 
 charity, I am sure it would be enough, and she and Jack 
 
442 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 might enjoy the rest of their income to their hearts' con- 
 tent." 
 
 Apropos of " all of us," Mrs. Clare had not been forgotten 
 in the preparations for celebrating her daughter's marriage. 
 Jack's hundred pounds had been transformed by Eila into 
 such multifarious packages of wearing apparel of every de- 
 scription (the nucleus of the bride's trousseau being included 
 therein) that for the entire week preceding the wedding a 
 constant procession of blue-coated, nickel-buttoned emissaries 
 from the Bon Marche and Louvre crossed each other on the 
 staircase that led to the quatriime. The enigmatic family 
 d'outre-mer assumed a place in the imagination of the con- 
 cierge pair that bordered on the miraculous. While unend- 
 ing parcels, for which cash had evidently been paid, iiowed 
 in an unbroken stream into the apartments, the members of 
 this extraordinary family might still be seen waxing the 
 floor of the quatrihne, or running out in shabby attire to a 
 neighbouring shop for eggs. One day they drove out in 
 splendom- ; on the morrow they dined upon bread and broth 
 at home. Their mysterious protector with the hump and 
 the Rubens cloak had disappeared, and morning, noon and 
 night the daughters might be seen in the company of a 
 young man who treated them with all the respect due to 
 "de veritables grandes dames," yet was evidently their pro- 
 tector in his turn. Whence came their mysterious wealth ? 
 and might not a certain portion of it be diverted from the 
 quatrieme to the loge below ? Many were the conversations 
 exchanged between the evil-looking pair upon this theme. 
 Letters which might possibly contain some compromising 
 statement that could be turned to profit were detained and 
 examined. Alas ! they were all written in the barbarous 
 English tongue. It was a question daily mooted whether 
 allies might not be found in the police, when the crowning 
 wonder of all took place in the actual undoubted marriage 
 of "la rousse," as Mamy was called in the concierge vocabu- 
 lary, to the blue-eyed young man who had accepted the suc- 
 cession of the " bossu." The concierges were only made 
 aware of this astonishing event when the wedding-party re- 
 turned from the ceremony at the Embassy. True, they had 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 443 
 
 seen the bridegroom drive to the door in a carriage and pair, 
 and run four by four up the staircase. The woman's quick 
 eyes had also detected the presence of an orchid in the but- 
 ton-hole of an immaculate frock-coat. Half an hour later 
 the enigmatic family had accompanied the visitor down the 
 staircase which the coiffeur had previously mounted early 
 in the morning, mother and daughters wearing an attire 
 which was described to the neighbours as " epatant." Mrs. 
 Clare, as I have stated before, had not been neglected, and 
 when Jack passed his wife's family in review before con- 
 ducting them to the carriages waiting below, he mentally 
 compared them with Mrs. Wilton senior and the Misses 
 Wilton, to the manifest disadvantage of the latter. There 
 was beauty enough among them, he thought, to stock a 
 hundred ordinary households. Happiness, too, is an amaz- 
 ing beautifier. The wonderful and unexpected clearing 
 away of the nightmare that had weighed upon Eila had 
 lent a new radiance to her expression. All that Hubert 
 could have given her, and more, had come into possession 
 of the family ; and the means by which it had come might 
 be proclaimed openly upon the housetops. She had not 
 dared to believe in so miraculous a turn of Fortune's wheel. 
 For a whole hour before Jack was to be looked for on the 
 wedding morning her heart had begun to fail her with terror 
 at his non-appearance. Even when he arrived, jubilant, 
 with a magnificent bunch of orchids in a cardboard box for 
 Mamy, she was only partly reassured. Something would 
 certainly happen before the wedding-party was deposited at 
 the Embassy. The horses would fall down, or some one 
 would be taken ill. Even when the perilous journey was 
 successfully accomplished, and the ceremony had begun in 
 real earnest, an agonizing terror overcame her lest that 
 mysterious personage who in novels and plays forbids the 
 banns at the supreme moment should suddenly appear upon 
 the scene. But neither in this nor in any other form did 
 the sword of Damocles descend. The bride and bridegroom 
 lent themselves to the performance with a confiding serenity 
 that spoke volumes for their trust in each other ; and Willie 
 who had been summoned from London to the wedding, and 
 29 
 
444 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 ■who had much more in common with his future brother-m- 
 law than Dick, played the part of elder brother, and gave 
 away the bride as though he had done nothing but marry 
 sisters all his life. He had only arrived upon the morning 
 of the wedding, and was therefore less splendid than the 
 rest of the party, notwithstanding the fact that Eila had 
 sent him five pounds to London wherewith to array himself 
 suitably. 
 
 The return of the wedding-party to the quatrieme was 
 conducted with the same disregard of official precedent as 
 the departure. Eila and Truca took their places in the large 
 closed landau of the bride and bridegroom, who sat upon 
 opposite seats, holding each other's hands, and looking far 
 more like a suddenly rejuvenated Darby and Joan than a 
 young couple who had only just been made man and wife. 
 Mute paeans were rising from Eila's heart as she drove along. 
 Could it be that the pale spectre of Want had been driven 
 from the family hearth for ever ? She looked at her brother- 
 in-law's sunny face with a reverential wonder as at that of 
 some Heaven-sent deliverer. Truca for her part gazed sol- 
 emnly at the wedded pair, revolving the marriage problem 
 from her own childish standpoint, and not understanding 
 why her sister should be suddenly willing to leave her home 
 and go away with a strange man. 
 
 There were signs of perturbation in the concierge's den 
 as the wedding-party prepared to pass it on their way up to 
 the quatrieme. Jack had filled his waistcoat-pocket with 
 gold coins handy for use. Nothing but gold, and no change 
 received, was the mot (Vordre upon his marriage day. The 
 drivers, therefore, had driven away rejoicing, and now it 
 was the turn of the evil-looking pair to be bathed in the 
 Pactolus stream. Eila was too happy to have grudged even 
 the devil himself a share in the general jubilation, but she 
 turned away her eyes from the contemplation of the ex- 
 pression of hideous cupidity that transfigured the counte- 
 nances of the man and woman as tlieir fingers closed over 
 Jack's golden pourhoires. When the woman concierge had 
 recovered herself sufficiently from the pleasurable shock 
 the sight of the gold had occasioned her, she ran with servile 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 445 
 
 deference after the wedding-party, proceeding gaily up tlie 
 staircase, to wish them first that " le ciel benirait leur union," 
 and next to inform them that a monsieur was waiting to see 
 them in their apartment. Eila's heart sank at this announce- 
 ment. It was not Hubert, but a stranger — the stranger, no 
 doubt, who had come to cut the thread that held the sword 
 of Damocles suspended over her head. Certainly a mon- 
 sieur more or less need not have counted to-day, for after 
 locking the scant personal property the family possessed 
 into drawers and boxes, Eila remembered that she had pur- 
 posely left the apartment open for the convenience of the 
 men who were to bring the wedding-breakfast she had or- 
 dered the day before. The stranger might be, after all, only 
 a chef, who had come to superintend the laying of the table, 
 or was waiting to know where to place the English wedding- 
 cake that Willie had brought from London as his gift to 
 the bride, and that had not been included in the menu. 
 Reassured by this hope, but a little uneasy and apprehensive 
 withal, young Mrs. Frost hurried on in front of the rest up 
 the staircase. She had hardly reached the landing of the 
 quatrieme, however, when a man's form emerged quickly 
 from the entrance-door to the apartment, that had been left 
 standing open. She raised her eyes startled and curious. 
 The man was Reginald ! 
 
 How it was that she did not fly into his arms, the con- 
 sciousness being borne in upon her, at the instant of her seeing 
 him, that all his soul was yearning for her, can only be ex- 
 plained by the fact that Truca was close upon her heels, and 
 that Mamy and her husband were equally close upon the 
 heels of Truca. She did utter a deep-voiced " Reginald ! " 
 of utter surprise and emotion, but this need not necessarily 
 have been construed into a welcome. As for Reginald, he 
 was actually too overcome to speak. Tor a whole year the 
 vision of the treasured form in its shrunken frock had 
 haunted his thoughts by day and his dreams by night, and 
 here it was transformed under his gaze into the vision of a 
 divinely-dressed Parisian lady. Coming straight from Ho- 
 bart, and being profoundly ignorant of the mysteries of fem- 
 inine apparel, Reginald might be excused for attributing all 
 
446 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 manner of imaginary glories to what was in reality a fresh 
 little toilette enough of a creamy-hued silky material. 
 " What will not contact with the great European world ef- 
 fect ? " he thought. His heart failed him for a moment in 
 presence of this radiant and fashionably-attired apparition. 
 What possible explanation of such magnificence could there 
 be if it were not that the hideous sacrifice Eila's letter had 
 spoken of had been accomplished ? And what remained for 
 him in that case but to do as Job did, and die ? And then 
 the preparations for a feast at this hour of the morning ! 
 Had the news of her husband's death, then, been telegraphed 
 by some unknown person to young Mrs. Frost, and had she 
 immediately concluded the bargain with her hunchback 
 cousin, and married him there and then with wild and inde- 
 cent haste ? Fortunately these tragic surmises had hardly 
 had the time to shape themselves in Reginald's brain before 
 the blessed reassurance that was to lift him into the seventh 
 heaven of hope and elation had been given him by Eila 
 herself. 
 
 " Reginald ! " she had cried, bounding forward : and, as 
 he held out both hands, unable to speak for joy, only look- 
 ing eagerly and tragically into her eyes, " And on Mamy's 
 wedding-day, of all days in the year ! " she had added in 
 joyful tones. 
 
 The family was upon them by this time, and instead of 
 gathering his love to his heart — Parisian toilette and all — as 
 Reginald was hungering to do, he had no other resource 
 than to return the pressure of her hands eloquently for one 
 short instant's space. Though there was no time now for 
 an exchange of confidences, the look in her eyes had told 
 him all he wanted to know. The threatened horror had 
 been averted, and she was glad in her heai't to see him. 
 What more did he need to be assured of for the present ? 
 With this knowledge he could rest content — content ? nay, 
 as happy as man need be for the nonce. There was so much 
 to say and to hear. The exclamations of the family as they 
 saw him ; the musically nasal voices raised in chorus, bring- 
 ing back so powerfully the impression of the dear old days 
 at Cowa ; the appearance of the bride, radiantly pretty and 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 447 
 
 becomingly confused ; Truca's piping inquiries after Daisy, 
 and her disappointment at not finding that excellent animal 
 tethered to the stove in the reception-room ; the introduc- 
 tion to the bright and boyish-looking bridegroom, and the 
 startling surmise, uncommunicated to the rest, that this was 
 none other than the Jack Wilton — that was to say, the Wil- 
 ton of the Gunga silver-mine : what room did all these new 
 impressions leave for other than a vague underlying rejoic- 
 ing that the thing that mattered most of all, by the side of 
 which Parisian toilettes and friends' welcomes and silver- 
 king bridegrooms were indeed but as insignificant and 
 ephemeral dreams, that the thing that mattered beyond all 
 others in the world, was as it ought to be ? 
 
 We need not dwell upon the details of Mamy's wedding- 
 breakfast. That it was conducted upon the same free-and- 
 easy principles, or, to speak more correctly, upon the same 
 absence of all principles, as had marked her courtship and 
 marriage, we may at least be certain. The point in which it 
 differed from all other wedding-breakfasts ever heard of lay 
 in the fact that it was the bride who made the speech. She 
 made it, it is true, at the bridegroom's instigation ; or, rather, 
 the cake having been cut and healths having been drunk in 
 the best champagne procurable, she received a small slip of 
 paper from Jack's hands (Jack was sitting next to her, and 
 in this respect only the etiquette of wedding breakfasts was 
 observed), with the request that she would read it out to the 
 assembled company. As the only stranger present was 
 Eeginald, and as Reginald had never been a stranger to the 
 Clares, Mamy felt not the least diffidence in doing as she 
 was requested. The writing on the paper was in Jack's 
 hand, and was very easy to decipher. She therefore pro- 
 ceeded to read out loud as follows : 
 
 " I, Mamy Wilton " (accompanied by a smile and a blush), 
 " do declare to all here present that I settle from this day 
 forth the sum of five hundred pounds yearly upon my 
 mother for the rest of her natural life, and — oh. Jack, what 
 do you mean ? " 
 
 Here the bride cast down the paper and threw herself 
 sobbing upon her husband's breast. 
 
448 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 "That's all true," whispered Eila hysterically to Regi- 
 nald, by whose side she was sitting ; she was crying now, in 
 her turn; "it's Jack's surprise to Mamy. She thought he 
 was quite poor. "We all thought it at first. No one knew 
 but me. Oh, Reginald, what is mother saying ? " She 
 stopped uneasily to listen. 
 
 " Am I to look upon this as genuine ? " Mrs. Clare was 
 exclaiming in agitated tones. " Oh, my children, and all 
 this because I insisted upon bringing home the portrait of 
 your ancestor ! " 
 
 There was a pause. The solemn reminder from their 
 mother of the real origin of their astounding fortune caused 
 the younger members of the Clare family to look serious. 
 It was true, nevertheless. If they had not made the great 
 move, there would have been no Hubert, no Jack, no wed- 
 ding, no brother-in-law to dispense thousands to the family 
 on his marriage day. 
 
 When order was a little restored, when Mrs. Clare had 
 walked round the table and fervently embraced her son-in- 
 law and her daughter by turns, when Dick and Willie had 
 shaken hands wildly with everybody in the room, begin- 
 ning with each other, and Truca had been kissed indiscrimi- 
 nately in her turn, Mamy proceeded to read the rest of the 
 paper : 
 
 " I settle upon my sister Eila for her sole use and benefit 
 the sum of three hundred pounds a year," she continued 
 chantingly. " Willie may have a part share in one of my 
 stations if he pleases, and Dick shall have a studio of his 
 own when he has a picture in the Salon. As for Truca, I 
 shall give her a little dowry when she is old enough to 
 marry. I also hope that the family will come and visit 
 Jack and me at Gunga as long and as often as they please, 
 as soon as we have built a house large enough for their ac- 
 commodation." 
 
 Joy, as Eila had already discovered, has its limits as well 
 as grief. She was not sure, indeed, that the capacity for 
 feeling happiness was not more speedily exhausted than the 
 capacity for feeling sorrow. Joy at its best is such an un- 
 certain and vaporous isossession that even to affirm that we 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 4,4.9 
 
 hold it is to risk seeing it escape us. It was with the feeling 
 of lassitude that succeeds to strong emotions of whatever 
 description that she saw her sister and Jack drive away a 
 couple of hours later in the brougham that was to convey 
 them to the railway-station. It had been settled that Mr. 
 and Mrs. Wilton should make a halt at Amiens for a couple 
 of days, and go thence vid Calais to England. Eila almost 
 felt now as though she could have paraphrased the words of 
 Simieon, and declared that, having seen the accomplishment 
 of her desires, she was ready to depart this life in peace, the 
 goal of her wildest hopes and ambitions having been 
 reached. Mamy had sailed triumphantly into port, with all 
 her sails set, like some fair and queenly vessel, taking in 
 tow the fleet of unballasted craft that had been so grievously 
 buffeted about by the waves. The poor little vessels were 
 sheltered now from storms and gales. They were securely 
 anchored in a safe haven. Jack had explained to his sister- 
 in-law before going away that she might make herself easy 
 in her mind as to the fulfilment of the promises he had 
 made in Mamy's name. Her mother's allowance, as well as 
 her own, would begin from the first of the current month. 
 Eila had expressed her regret that words for gratitude and 
 delight were so few in the English language. She would 
 have liked to find some expression adequate to the occasion, 
 but this was evidently impossible. Jack had declared him- 
 self more than sufficiently thanked, and, in truth, Eila did 
 not know how completely a certain order of eye, to which 
 hers undoubtedly belonged, can coavey the notion of grati- 
 tude when language fails to express it. Let those who have 
 read the expression in a dog's brown eyes when caressed by 
 his master's hand deny the eloquence of mute gratitude if 
 they can. 
 
 It was between four and five in the afternoon when the 
 bride and bridegroom drove away. There had been scant 
 opportunity for talking to Reginald in the interval. His 
 feelings as he realized the incredible fact that the friends he 
 had come to rescue from pauperism were now among the 
 favourites of fortune may be better imagined than described. 
 
 Eila acceded to his proposal to take a walk with him in 
 
450 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 the Luxembourg Gardens (those gardens that she had so 
 often described to him in her letters) with sober delight. 
 
 " Et d'un autre ! " said the concierge man to the con- 
 cierge woman as the pair passed through the porte-cochere 
 side by side on their way out. The weather was divine. 
 The heavenly softness of early summer was in the air. As 
 Eila walked next to her tried friend under the dainty foli- 
 age that bedecked the Luxembourg elms, her heart was too 
 full for speech. Silently she led him to a bench in a retired 
 spot away from the central avenue where the band was 
 wont to play, and there, with the memory of their last part- 
 ing upon the moonlit heights of Oowa rising vividly before 
 each of them, they sat them down and spoke as the spirit 
 moved them. 
 
 Not immediately, however. Not without a preliminary 
 exchange of inconsequential observations. Often when the 
 heart is feeling most strongly the lips utter some trivial, 
 commonplace phrase. 
 
 " Is it not a treat to see the European green after the 
 black gums ? " was Eila's demure query. 
 
 "Yes," said Reginald in the same calm tones. "Your 
 mother used to say there were no trees in Tasmania, you 
 remember. If she had said there were no leaves it would 
 have been nearer the mark." 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 " Fancy mother's prophecies coming true, after all ! " re- 
 marked Eila. 
 
 " Yes ; but by what a fluke ! " rejoined Reginald. 
 
 Something in his voice prompted her to look round at 
 him at that moment with a smile, and the little barrier of 
 conventional custom she had essayed to set up between her- 
 self and him crumbled instantly into nothingness. 
 
 " Take off your glove," he said huskily, and having done 
 as she was bid, she surrendered her hand to his caressing 
 embrace. After this all that he had to tell her sounded 
 natural enough. The drift of it, in truth, was only the pas- 
 sionate reiteration of the all-absorbing sentiment he had for 
 her. He made no allusion to the subject of her letter. It 
 would have seemed like sacrilege to recall it at this mo- 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 451 
 
 ment. Nor did he tell her as yet of her husband's death. 
 It was enough at first to try to make her realize, dimly, 
 something of what he had felt when he lost her, and of 
 what he now felt upon finding her again. 
 
 Eila listened with her head a little bent forward, her 
 fingers nervously interlacing themselves with his, as her 
 hand rested in his grasp. When he paused she answered 
 him hurriedly, in tones quite unlike those of her usually 
 calm-sounding voice. It was evident that the thing she 
 said cost her an effort to say. " I do believe you care for 
 me with all your heart, Reginald, and I often felt how bad- 
 ly I wanted you by me all this past year. I don't think I 
 am any good by myself, but I would be if I were always 
 with you. I believe there must be women who can't take 
 care of themselves — and " 
 
 Her voice quavered. His own had a break in it as he 
 repeated with a sincerity of tone that was almost tragic in 
 its intensity: "My darling! My own darling! Listen, 
 Eila. I have always loved you with a love that seems to 
 me almost superhuman. Whatever selfish thoughts I may 
 have had of appropriating you to myself — and G-od knows I 
 have had them sometimes — the love I bore you was always 
 strong enough to triumph over the desire in the end. It is 
 simply a matter of caring about you more than about my- 
 self. I hope and trust that if it had been still necessary, I 
 should have found the strength now to think of you first — 
 that instead of rushing blindly into the paradise of unlaw- 
 ful love, I should have had the power to pause on the 
 threshold for your sake as before. But Eila, my dear one, 
 such a sacrifice is no longer needed. The cause that held us 
 apart has ceased to exist. The week that I left Hobart, your 
 husband died suddenly — quite suddenly, and without suffer- 
 ing — at the asylum.'' 
 
 He heard her utter a gasping " Oh ! " as her fingers tight- 
 ened round his wrist. Then she was silent, but, to his sur- 
 prise, two tears trickled slowly from beneath her downcast 
 lashes over her cheeks on to the front of her dress. Was it 
 for the poor maniac — the echo of whose unmeaning curses 
 pursued her even now in her dreams — that she was weeping ? 
 
452 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 Or for the never-to-be re-awakened illusions of her own fool- 
 ish, passionate youth ? 
 
 " Tell me about it," she said at last, wiping her eyes, with 
 a long-drawn sigh, as though the tears had relieved her. " I 
 know you kept your promise of seeing him." 
 
 " I had seen him only a few days before, dear," Reginald 
 assured her tenderly. " It was a hopeless case, and life would 
 have been only a prolonging of mental and bodily torment. 
 It was a merciful release ; believe me " 
 
 He stopped, and she insisted once more : " TeU me all you 
 know." 
 
 And Reginald told her. The story was a long one. He 
 had not only to render an account of the manner in which 
 he had fulfilled his trust, but to give details of a hundred 
 things connected with it besides. How he had first learned 
 the news of Charles Frost's death ; how on the morrow he 
 had seen the body, which had been conveyed to Hobart for 
 burial, lying in its cofiin at Ivy Cottage ; how impressed he 
 had been by the peaceful aspect of the clay delivered of the 
 siDirit that tortured it ; how young and fair the chiselled face 
 had looked (Eila's tears had flowed freely again at this part 
 of the narrative) ; how the bitterness of the parents' grief 
 had been assuaged by the apparent resuscitation in death of 
 the child they had loved and lost. But when he had re- 
 counted all these things, gently and sympathizingly, there 
 remained yet much to be told. How a certain letter Eila 
 had written had rendered it impossible for Reginald himself 
 to remain away from her any longer ; how the very evening 
 he had made up his mind to sacrifice everything, and rush 
 across the world to rescue her, he had received the visit by 
 night of her uncle with the news of her husband's death ; 
 how, having no knowledge of the relations of the family 
 with Jack Wilton, he had expected to find them all in the 
 direst straits of poverty ; how, with her uncle's aid, and hav- 
 ing realized a few hundred pounds on his own account, he 
 had come home with the intention of persuading them to let 
 him bring them back to Hobart at all costs, far from the risk 
 of starving in the midst of plenty, and from Macchiavelian 
 hunchback cousins. 
 
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL. 453 
 
 " But it is only the unexpected that happens," he con- 
 cluded, " and certainly the last thing in the world I expected 
 was to find you all rich people. As regards you and me, 
 Eila, if I consulted my own feelings alone, I would ask you 
 not to accept those three hundred pounds your brother-in- 
 law proposes to settle upon you. I would rather have you 
 without a penny in your pocket, or a dress to your back, un- 
 less it were a certain washed-out old frock you had on — do 
 you remember ? — when you came to wish me good-bye in 
 the moonlight that last night at Cowa. Have you got that 
 dress still ? I should like you to keep it, like Enid, for a re- 
 membrance. But to go back to the question of the money, 
 my dear. Being a very poor man myself, and your brother- 
 in-law having millions, it seems selfish to want to deprive 
 you of your share of the spoil, though I would rather work 
 sixteen hours a day instead of eight, to be able to feel you 
 owed everything you had to me. However, we will not dis- 
 cuss that matter now. You shall do as you like in this and 
 everything else. You can't imagine, my darling, how ines- 
 timably precious that avowal was you made me a few mo- 
 ments ago. But now our probation is at an end we need 
 never be separated again. I have enough to keep me for 
 nearly a year at home if I am careful, since the money will 
 not be needed for your family any longer, and by-and-by 
 we can be married somewhere quietly in Europe and go out 
 to settle in Hobart, where my work lies for the present. Are 
 you willing to go there with me, dear, instead of into the 
 wilds, as you offered to do awhile ago ? " 
 
 " Anywhere with you," Eila replied gravely. 
 
 There was nothing to be done for the family now, and 
 the happpiness of giving happiness, always the most power- 
 ful factor in her case, had never been more strongly appealed 
 to. If Reginald had not cared for her to the extent of mak- 
 ing her feel that she was literally conferring paradise on 
 him by giving herself to him, the prospect of marrying a 
 poor man, and of settling in Hobart, might not have been 
 altogether calculated to arouse enthusiasm. But if you create 
 a paradise for another, you cannot fail to enjoy a certain 
 reflected share in it yourself. So she replied gravely, and 
 
454: NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 with the most entire conviction, both real and apparent, 
 " Anywhere with you," as Reginald, repeated his question 
 once more before drawing her arm through his, and walk- 
 ing away with her through the gloaming from the scene of 
 their betrothal. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Six weeks had elapsed since Mrs. Wilton's departure. 
 The letters she addressed to her former home had been as 
 unsatisfactory as the letters of a happy bride must of neces- 
 sity be. The happier she is, the more reticent she becomes. 
 Eila felt vaguely that the Mamy of Cowa was gone away 
 for ever. What the Mrs. Wilton who had taken her place 
 would be like remained yet to be seen. 
 
 It was seen when the bride swept into the apartment on 
 the quatrieme upon a certain warm June afternoon. Eila, 
 who had not expected her for another hour, started back 
 with a momentary pang of non-recognition before opening 
 wide her arms, and rushing forward to clasp them round 
 her neck. 
 
 " Mamy, is it you ? Mother and the rest of them are out. 
 We did not think you could be here before six. Where is 
 your husband ? " 
 
 "Jack is at the Continental," said Mamy, disengaging 
 herself from her sister's clasp ; " I told him I must see you 
 alone for the first half-hour. He will come for me by- 
 and-by." 
 
 "Come for you, dear ! What do you mean ? We have 
 ordered a dinner from Foyot's for you here." 
 
 "Oh ! Jack thought you would all dine with us at table 
 d'hote, but it shall be as you please, Eila. I didn't remem- 
 ber it was so warm here. How do you exist in such an 
 atmosphere ? " 
 
 The tone in which the last words were uttered conveyed 
 the first subtle suggestion, or, rather, apprehension, to Eila's 
 
CONCLUSION. 455 
 
 mind that Mrs. Wilton and Mamy Clare -were two different 
 persons. There could be no question as to which was the 
 more imposing of the two. Mamy Clare's personality had 
 been expressed by a torn and washed-out blouse; young 
 Mrs. Wilton's personality was draped in a silk of the " stand- 
 by-itself " consistency, surmounted by a bonnet which re- 
 sembled a garland of dew-besprinkled forget-me-nots of 
 exquisite fidelity. Eila was sure that the glittering dew- 
 drops were scintillating diamonds. The extreme youth of 
 the wearer of this magnificent apparel was the crowning 
 point of its splendour, for though dress may take twenty 
 years away from a woman's appearance, it is only when 
 there is nothing to take away that it has a clear field for its 
 operations. Eila watched the manner in which Mamy 
 seated herself on the new armchair by the window (for the 
 name of the reception-room was no longer a by-word in the 
 family), and smiled, with a shade of sadness, however, in 
 her smile. 
 
 " You are as happy as you expected to be, dear ? " 
 
 The bride raised her eyebrows — a thing she had never 
 been wont to do in olden times — and Eila felt that this was 
 an attribute of the great lady who had taken Mamy's place. 
 
 " I'm all right," she said carelessly. Then, with a depre- 
 cating look round the room : " It seems so long ago that I 
 was living here. It's like going back to the Dark Ages to 
 think of it." 
 
 " And Jack is good to you ? " persisted Eila, kneeling by 
 her sister's side and taking her hand in hers. " Oh, Mamy 
 dear, what have you done with your hands to make them 
 so white ? And, goodness ! What rings ! I know now 
 what is meant in books by the heroine's fingers being 
 ablaze with precious stones. Doesn't it tire you to wear so 
 
 many ? " 
 
 "I take them off at night," said Mamy, stretching out her 
 hands and looking at her rings critically. "But I was al- 
 ways forgetting them at first. Jack fished them out of the 
 basin at the hotel one time, and another time we missed our 
 train going back for them." 
 
 '' And what are your plans now ? " asked Eila, a little 
 
456 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 sadly. " Oh, Mamy dear, I have a confession to make to 
 you." 
 
 "About?" 
 
 Mamy raised her eyebrows once more. They were pretty 
 brows, and the action of raising them was not unbecoming 
 to the blue orbs they crowned. Nevertheless, the gesture 
 seemed a part of Mrs. Jack Wilton, and not of Mamy Clare. 
 
 " About poor Sydney ! I could not bear to give you the 
 news just on the eve of your wedding. Jack told you, I 
 suppose ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Mamy's mouth worked a little, as in her childish days, 
 and the expression was so entirely that of the Mamy that 
 Eila had always known and loved, until a few minutes ago, 
 that she felt emboldened to put her arms around her neck 
 and kiss her. 
 
 Nevertheless, the impression that her sister was not alto- 
 gether the same continued to haunt her. In the old days 
 there was no course of action, however reckless, that Mamy 
 would not have tolerated in theory if her opinion had been 
 asked, and even if it had not been asked. Clearly at this 
 moment did the interview upon the Cowa veranda recur to 
 Eila's mind, when Mamy had declared to her that it was for 
 her that Reginald came to Cowa, boasting at the same time 
 of her own knowledge of the world, and the latitude she 
 would allow people who were fond of each other, whether 
 encumbered by matrimonial ties or not, for had she not read 
 Dumas Fils and Balzac ? 
 
 To verify how far these unconventional views, which 
 certainly could not have resulted from her own experience, 
 had withstood the sobering eilect of matrimony in Mamy's 
 case, Eila devised a small fiction as a snare. 
 
 "Not to talk about sad things now,'' she said, in allusion 
 to the reference to Sydney, " there is something about my- 
 self I ought to say, Mamy. You were always so liberal 
 when you were a girl — you used to frighten me with your 
 views sometimes — so I need not mind telling you what I 
 am thinking of doing." 
 
 " What are you thinking of doing ? " 
 
CONCLUSION. 4,5Y 
 
 Mamy's face was not encouraging. Its expression was 
 rather one of alarm than approval, and that the alarm was 
 genuine might be divined from the fact that she forgot in 
 putting her question to raise her eyebrows. 
 
 " Why " — Eila turned to the window and pretended to be 
 busy in pulling the new blind straight in order to give her- 
 self a countenance — '' nothing is done so far ; but Reginald 
 has come home.'' 
 
 " I know. You haven't forgotten he was at our wedding, 
 have you ? I knew he could never stop away from you for 
 long." 
 
 " Oh, you knew that ? " The blind, having been almost 
 mathematically readjusted, was adroitly disarranged once 
 more. "Well, Mamy, with our way of looking at things 
 now that you are married, and a power in the land, and 
 now that, thanks to your husband, mother and the rest of 
 us are provided for, would you think it very extraordinary 
 if I thought of my own life a little, and Reginald's, and all 
 the years that are slipping away, and of how happy I could 
 make him and myself, if — if we were free ? " 
 
 " But you're not free," said Mamy, with a resolute air. 
 "If you were it would be different." 
 
 " Not free in the eyes of the world, perhaps," rejoined 
 Eila softly, but just as resolutely : " but in my own eyes, 
 and in the eyes of those who know all the circumstances of 
 my life — in those of my family especially — surely I might 
 be considered free. You would have been the first once to 
 say so. We have only one life, and we know nothing about 
 another, or even whether there is any other at all. Why 
 should I let this one life be utterly spoiled ? Why should 
 I sacrifice myself and another person to a cruel and unjust 
 law, which binds two people together in defiance of all that 
 is just, and right, and natural ? I have no children ; there 
 is no one whom I can hurt if I make use of the freedom 
 that I consider my right. Tell me, Mamy, would it seem to 
 you a very dreadful thing if, knowing how much Reginald 
 cares for me, I consented to go away with him and live in 
 some quiet, out-of-the-way place, where our comings and 
 goings would matter to nobody ? You would care for me, 
 
458 NOT COUNTING THE COST. 
 
 dear, the same as ever ; and I suppose you would come and 
 see me sometimes, wouldn't you ! " 
 
 " I, perhaps ; but Jack, and Jack's sisters and his mother ! 
 Oh, Eila, you don't know what people they are ! For pity's 
 sake don't talk about anything so horrible ! And Jack 
 thinks you're the purest woman in the world. He said so — 
 he did indeed. And, oh ! pray — pray — don't talk in that way." 
 
 Mamy was beg^inning to whimper. Eila answered her 
 in the same soft though resolute tones. " I should not think 
 I had forfeited my right to be considered a pure woman, 
 Mamy, if I were to give up everything for the sake of Regi- 
 nald. You have a perfect right to change your opinion, but 
 would you have spoken as you are doing now a little time 
 ago ? " 
 
 " I was a child," said Mamy, pulling out a dainty piece 
 of broidered cambric and applying it to her eyes. " I did not 
 know anything of the world. None of us did. If you were 
 to do as you say; I should never be able to visit you. And 
 you can't imagine how horrified Jack's family would be. I 
 would never dare to tell him." 
 
 " And you yourself ? You would disown me, Mamy ? " 
 
 Mrs. Wilton looked at the ground instead of encounter- 
 ing her sister's eyes. 
 
 " You need not do it," she said at last, with an air of 
 vexation. 
 
 " No, I need not do it, as you say ; and I am not going to 
 do it, either. I only wanted to see whether you held the 
 same views as before. If I were free, you would not be 
 sorry to see me married to Reginald, I suppose ? " 
 
 " Sorry ! I should be awfully glad, and so would Jack. 
 He liked what he saw of him ever so much." 
 
 " Then you may be glad, Mamy, for by-and-by I mean to 
 marry Reginald." 
 
 " You will get a divorce, I suppose ? " said Mamy in con- 
 strained tones. " I hope to heaven it won't be in the papers, 
 where everyone can read it." 
 
 Eila paused a moment before she replied. 
 
 " No divorce will be necessary. My husband is dead, 
 Mamy." 
 
CONCLUSION. 459 
 
 She had intended to make this announcement very 
 quietly and solemnly, but there came a break in her voice 
 that she had not reckoned upon. She turned away her 
 head, and Mamy said nothing for a time. Then she got up, 
 threw her arms round her sister's neck, and held her close 
 to her heart. 
 
 " Dear, poor Eila ! I did not know anything about how 
 wives feel, whatever their husbands may do or become, un- 
 til I got mai-ried myself. Poor Eila, darling ! But you will 
 be very happy by-and-by with Reginald. Try to think of 
 that most if you can." 
 
 " Yes I will," said Eila, sobbing hysterically, and cling- 
 ing to her sister with fervent clasp. She felt after this that 
 Mamy had come back again, despite the rings, the diamonds, 
 and the white hands. 
 
 It was more apparent than ever that she had come back 
 when a few minutes later, notwithstanding her rings and 
 circumstance, the bride was indiscriminately hugged by 
 the remaining members of her family. Plans were dis- 
 cussed and the programme of the future drawn up that 
 evening, in the wake of a family banquet at the Conti 
 nental. Jack, who did the honours, proved himself so much 
 more apt for the role of an adoring husband and an affec- 
 tionate son-in-law than for that of an amateur pupil in 
 French, that Mrs. Clare expressed her contrition at not hav- 
 ing recognised his true vocation before. To give the crown- 
 ing touch to Eila's most elaborate air-castle, and to render it 
 a solid and dazzling reality, he proposed to treat the family 
 to the Continental tour that had been for so long the object 
 of their hopes and dreams. The offer, it is needless to say, 
 was rapturously accepted. There was one person, however, 
 who, although he was included in the invitation, would not 
 be beholden to Mamy's silver-king husband. This person 
 was Reginald. Despite the almost insurmountable desire of 
 watching over young Mrs. Frost until such time as he 
 could keep her for ever by his side, he was heroic enough to 
 declare his intention of returning to his post in Tasmania. 
 His decision was warmly combatted by the entire party, save 
 Eila, who maintained an inexplicable silence. But her lover 
 30 
 
460 NOT COUNTIKG THE COST. 
 
 must have been more than satisfied by the protest he read in 
 her eyes, for as soon as he was alone with her on their 
 homeward way along the boulevards, he spent himself in 
 explanations — unnecessary enough — of the motives for 
 which he renounced the immense joy of accompanying her 
 on her travels. Tenderness for her reputation ; a certain 
 sense of pride on his own account, which made it impossible 
 for him to accept benefits from a stranger ; the very strength 
 and passion of his adoration for her — these were the consid- 
 erations which impelled him to sacrifice the present to the 
 future. So eloquent he was in arguing against his own de- 
 sire, so evidently fearful lest she should persuade him 
 against his better judgment to remain, that for once Eila 
 was strong. She did not put her arms round his neck and 
 say " Stay "^or, rather, she did the first, but said " Go " — 
 and both he and she felt that they had taken a step upon 
 the path of renunciation, which would have advanced them 
 a long way towards the Nirvana of the Buddhists. They 
 fortified themselves by dwelling upon the vision of the 
 home that Reginald would prepare for their joint occupa- 
 tion in Tasmania, upon the possibility of their renting 
 Cowa, upon the joy of meeting again in Melboiu-ne, whither 
 Reginald intended to go to meet her in eight months' time, 
 and upon the question of where the marriage ceremony 
 would be quietly performed. There was only one terror 
 that haunted Reginald, and he confided it to his betrothed. 
 What if the hunchback cousin should reappear upon the 
 scene ? 
 
 " What — Hubert ! Oh, he will never come back ! " said 
 Eila confidently. "I have a feeling sometimes that he 
 wasn't a real person at all, only a shade we evoked from the 
 nether world by our determination to discover the owner of 
 the ruby. If he should come our way again, I will run 
 away to you directly." 
 
 But Eila was right, for Hubert was not heard of again. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 "The reader turns from its pages with the conviction that the author has no supe* 
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 ietails the few vital ones which create the finished picture. He knows how, with a 
 phrase or a word, to make you see his characters as he sees them, to make you feel 
 the full meaning of a dramatic situation." — Ne-w York Tribune. 
 
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 with pleasure sentences from almost every page, and extract incidents from almost 
 every story. But to what end ? Here is the completest book that Mr. Kipling has yet 
 given us in workmanship, the weightiest and most humane in breadth of view."— 
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 only exceeded'by the boldness offeree." — Boston Globe. 
 
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 Bookseller. 
 
 " Mr. Rudyard Kipling's place in the world of letters is unique. He sits quite aleof 
 and alone, the incomparable and inimitable master of the exi^uisitely fine art of short- 
 story writing. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson has perhaps written several tales which 
 match the run of Mr. Kipling's work, but the best of Mr. Kipling's tales are matchless, 
 and his latest collection, 'Many Inventions,' contains several such." — Philadelphia 
 Press. 
 
 "Of late essays in fiction the work of KipHng can be compared to only three — 
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 owing to this extreme care that * Many Inventions * is undoubtedly Mr. Kipling's best 
 book." — Chicago Post. 
 
 " Mr. Kipling's style is too well known to American readers to require introduction, 
 but it can scarcely be amiss to say there is not a story in this collection that does not 
 more than repay a perusal of them all." — Baltimore Atnerican, 
 
 " As a writer of short stories Rudyard Kipling is a genius. He has had imitators, 
 but they have not been successful in dimming the luster of his achievements by con- 
 trast. , . . 'Many Inventions' is the title. And they are inventions— entirely origi- 
 nal in incident, ingenious in plot, and startling by their boldness and force." — Rochester 
 Herald. 
 
 "How clever he is! This must always be the first thought on reading such a 
 collection of Kipling's stories. Here is art — art of the most consummate sort. Com- 
 pared with this» the stories of our brightest young writers become commonplace."— 
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 *' Taking the group as a whole, it may be said that the execution is up to his best 
 5n the past, while two or three sketches surpass in rounded strength and vividness ui 
 imagination anything else he has done." — Hartford Courant. 
 
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 brought to it as much as they took away. ... I have called my story a saga, merely 
 because it follows the epic method, and I must not claim for it at any point the weighty 
 responsibility of history, or serious obligations to the world of fact. But it matters not 
 to me what Icelanders may call ' The Eondman,' if they will honor me by reading it in 
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 *' Until the Appletons discovered the merits of Maarten Maartens, the foremost of 
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 epigram, an artist in description, a prophet in insight." — Boston Advertiser, 
 
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 Shows a skillful and wide acquaintance with scientific facts." — Ne'w York Herald. 
 
 " The author speculates cleverly and daringly on the scientific advance of the earth, 
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 been engaged upon the book for over two years, and has brought to bear upon it a 
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 ever since he entered Harvard. It is admirably illustrated by Dan Beard. " — Mail and 
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