THE WELL-BELOVED

A SKETCH OF A TEMPERAMENT

By Thomas Hardy

PREFACE

The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of thefollowing scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home ofa curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefsand singular customs, now for the most part obsolescent. Fancies, likecertain soft-wooded plants which cannot bear the silent inland frosts, but thrive by the sea in the roughest of weather, seem to grow upnaturally here, in particular amongst those natives who have no activeconcern in the labours of the 'Isle. ' Hence it is a spot apt to generatea type of personage like the character imperfectly sketched in thesepages--a native of natives--whom some may choose to call a fantast (ifthey honour him with their consideration so far), but whom others maysee only as one that gave objective continuity and a name to a delicatedream which in a vaguer form is more or less common to all men, and isby no means new to Platonic philosophers. 

To those who know the rocky coign of England here depicted--overlookingthe great Channel Highway with all its suggestiveness, and standing outso far into mid-sea that touches of the Gulf Stream soften the air tillFebruary--it is matter of surprise that the place has not been morefrequently chosen as the retreat of artists and poets in search ofinspiration--for at least a month or two in the year, the tempestuousrather than the fine seasons by preference. To be sure, one nook thereinis the retreat, at their country's expense, of other geniuses from adistance; but their presence is hardly discoverable. Yet perhaps itis as well that the artistic visitors do not come, or no more would beheard of little freehold houses being bought and sold there for a coupleof hundred pounds--built of solid stone, and dating from the sixteenthcentury and earlier, with mullions, copings, and corbels complete. Thesetransactions, by the way, are carried out and covenanted, or were tilllately, in the parish church, in the face of the congregation, suchbeing the ancient custom of the Isle. 

As for the story itself, it may be worth while to remark that, differingfrom all or most others of the series in that the interest aimed atis of an ideal or subjective nature, and frankly imaginative, verisimilitude in the sequence of events has been subordinated to thesaid aim. 

The first publication of this tale in an independent form was in 1897;but it had appeared in the periodical press in 1892, under the title of'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. ' A few chapters of that experimentalissue were rewritten for the present and final form of the narrative. 

T. H. August 1912. 

CONTENTS

 PART FIRST -- A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY. 

 I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER II. THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE III. THE APPOINTMENT IV. A LONELY PEDESTRIAN V. A CHARGE VI. ON THE BRINK VII. HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS VIII. 'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING' IX. FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE

 PART SECOND -- A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY. 

 I. THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT II. SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES III. SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST IV. SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE V. THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE VI. THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT VII. THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED VIII. HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM IX. JUXTAPOSITIONS X. SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL XI. THE IMAGE PERSISTS XII. A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN XIII. SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

 PART THIRD -- A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY. 

 I. SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON II. MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMENT III. THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION V. ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION VI. THE WELL-BELOVED IS--WHERE? VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT VIII. 'ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!'

PART FIRST -- A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY. 

 --'Now, if Time knows That Her, whose radiant brows Weave them a garland of my vows;

 Her that dares be What these lines wish to see: I seek no further, it is She. ' --R. CRASHAW. 

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER

A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steeproad which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Streetof Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singularpeninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out likethe head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with themainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by rages of the se, 'and unparalleled in its kind in Europe. 

The pedestrian was what he looked like--a young man from London and thecities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanismsat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with somethingof self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months had flownsince he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely rock of hisbirthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid many contrastingsocieties, peoples, manners, and scenes. 

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there always lookedquaint and odd after his later impressions. More than ever the spotseemed what it was said once to have been, the ancient Vindilia Island, and the Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, the houses abovehouses, one man's doorstep rising behind his neighbour's chimney, the gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing onapparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island asa solid and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longerfamiliar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly uniqueand white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitelystratified walls of oolite, The melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles, . .. 

with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as anyspectacle he had beheld afar. 

After a laborious clamber he reached the top, and walked along theplateau towards the eastern village. The time being about two o'clock, in the middle of the summer season, the road was glaring and dusty, anddrawing near to his father's house he sat down in the sun. 

He stretched out his hand upon the rock beside him. It felt warm. Thatwas the island's personal temperature when in its afternoon sleep asnow. He listened, and heard sounds: whirr-whirr, saw-saw-saw. Those werethe island's snores--the noises of the quarrymen and stone-sawyers. 

Opposite to the spot on which he sat was a roomy cottage or homestead. Like the island it was all of stone, not only in walls but inwindow-frames, roof, chimneys, fence, stile, pigsty and stable, almostdoor. 

He remembered who had used to live there--and probably lived therenow--the Caro family; the 'roan-mare' Caros, as they were called todistinguish them from other branches of the same pedigree, there beingbut half-a-dozen Christian and surnames in the whole island. He crossedthe road and looked in at the open doorway. Yes, there they were still. 

Mrs. Caro, who had seen him from the window, met him in the entry, andan old-fashioned greeting took place between them. A moment after adoor leading from the back rooms was thrown open, and a young girl aboutseventeen or eighteen came bounding in. 

'Why, 'TIS dear Joce!' she burst out joyfully. And running up to theyoung man, she kissed him. 

The demonstration was sweet enough from the owner of such anaffectionate pair of bright hazel eyes and brown tresses of hair. But itwas so sudden, so unexpected by a man fresh from towns, that he wincedfor a moment quite involuntarily; and there was some constraint in themanner in which he returned her kiss, and said, 'My pretty little Avice, how do you do after so long?'

For a few seconds her impulsive innocence hardly noticed his start ofsurprise; but Mrs. Caro, the girl's mother, had observed it instantly. With a pained flush she turned to her daughter. 

'Avice--my dear Avice! Why--what are you doing? Don't you know thatyou've grown up to be a woman since Jocelyn--Mr. Pierston--was last downhere? Of course you mustn't do now as you used to do three or four yearsago!'

The awkwardness which had arisen was hardly removed by Pierston'sassurance that he quite expected her to keep up the practice of herchildhood, followed by several minutes of conversation on generalsubjects. He was vexed from his soul that his unaware movement should sohave betrayed him. At his leaving he repeated that if Avice regarded himotherwise than as she used to do he would never forgive her; but thoughthey parted good friends her regret at the incident was visible in herface. Jocelyn passed out into the road and onward to his father's househard by. The mother and daughter were left alone. 

'I was quite amazed at 'ee, my child!' exclaimed the elder. 'A youngman from London and foreign cities, used now to the strictest companymanners, and ladies who almost think it vulgar to smile broad! How couldye do it, Avice?'

'I--I didn't think about how I was altered!' said theconscience-stricken girl. 'I used to kiss him, and he used to kiss mebefore he went away. '

'But that was years ago, my dear!'

'O yes, and for the moment I forgot! He seemed just the same to me as heused to be. '

'Well, it can't be helped now. You must be careful in the future. He'sgot lots of young women, I'll warrant, and has few thoughts left foryou. He's what they call a sculptor, and he means to be a great geniusin that line some day, they do say. '

'Well, I've done it; and it can't be mended!' moaned the girl. 

Meanwhile Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor of budding fame, had goneonward to the house of his father, an inartistic man of trade andcommerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, Jocelyn condescended to accepta yearly allowance pending the famous days to come. But the elder, having received no warning of his son's intended visit, was not at hometo receive him. Jocelyn looked round the familiar premises, glancedacross the Common at the great yards within which eternal saws weregoing to and fro upon eternal blocks of stone--the very same saws andthe very same blocks that he had seen there when last in the island, so it seemed to him--and then passed through the dwelling into the backgarden. 

Like all the gardens in the isle it was surrounded by a wall ofdry-jointed spawls, and at its further extremity it ran out into acorner, which adjoined the garden of the Caros. He had no sooner reachedthis spot than he became aware of a murmuring and sobbing on the otherside of the wall. The voice he recognized in a moment as Avice's, andshe seemed to be confiding her trouble to some young friend of her ownsex. 

'Oh, what shall I DO! what SHALL I do!' she was saying bitterly. 'Sobold as it was--so shameless! How could I think of such a thing! He willnever forgive me--never, never like me again! He'll think me a forwardhussy, and yet--and yet I quite forgot how much I had grown. But thathe'll never believe!' The accents were those of one who had for thefirst time become conscious of her womanhood, as an unwonted possessionwhich shamed and frightened her. 

'Did he seem angry at it?' inquired the friend. 

'O no--not angry! Worse. Cold and haughty. O, he's such a fashionableperson now--not at all an island man. But there's no use in talking ofit. I wish I was dead!'

Pierston retreated as quickly as he could. He grieved at the incidentwhich had brought such pain to this innocent soul; and yet it wasbeginning to be a source of vague pleasure to him. He returned to thehouse, and when his father had come back and welcomed him, and theyhad shared a meal together, Jocelyn again went out, full of an earnestdesire to soothe his young neighbour's sorrow in a way she littleexpected; though, to tell the truth, his affection for her was ratherthat of a friend than of a lover, and he felt by no means sure that themigratory, elusive idealization he called his Love who, ever sincehis boyhood, had flitted from human shell to human shell an indefinitenumber of times, was going to take up her abode in the body of AviceCaro. 

1. II. THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE

It was difficult to meet her again, even though on this lump of rock thedifficulty lay as a rule rather in avoidance than in meeting. But Avicehad been transformed into a very different kind of young woman bythe self-consciousness engendered of her impulsive greeting, and, notwithstanding their near neighbourhood, he could not encounter her, try as he would. No sooner did he appear an inch beyond his father'sdoor than she was to earth like a fox; she bolted upstairs to her room. 

Anxious to soothe her after his unintentional slight he could notstand these evasions long. The manners of the isle were primitive andstraightforward, even among the well-to-do, and noting her disappearanceone day he followed her into the house and onward to the foot of thestairs. 

'Avice!' he called. 

'Yes, Mr. Pierston. '

'Why do you run upstairs like that?'

'Oh--only because I wanted to come up for something. '

'Well, if you've got it, can't you come down again?'

'No, I can't very well. '

'Come, DEAR Avice. That's what you are, you know. '

There was no response. 

'Well, if you won't, you won't!' he continued. 'I don't want to botheryou. ' And Pierston went away. 

He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned flowers under the gardenwalls when he heard a voice behind him. 

'Mr. Pierston--I wasn't angry with you. When you were gone Ithought--you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than comeand assure you of my friendship still. '

Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him. 

'You are a good, dear girl!' said he, and, seizing her hand, set uponher cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers onthe day of his coming. 

'Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come, now! And then I'll say to you what I have never said to any other woman, living or dead: "Will you have me as your husband?"'

'Ah!--mother says I am only one of many!'

'You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn't. '

Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did notgive an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the afternoon, when she walked with him to the southern point of the island called theBeal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the treacherous cavernknown as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and splashed now as it haddone when they visited it together as children. To steady herself whilelooking in he offered her his arm, and she took it, for the first timeas a woman, for the hundredth time as his companion. 

They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered longerif Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite poetryfrom a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the villagecommanding the entrance to the island--the village that has now advancedto be a town. 

'Recite!' said he. 'Who'd have thought anybody or anything could recitedown here except the reciter we hear away there--the never speechlesssea. '

'O but we are quite intellectual now. In the winter particularly. But, Jocelyn--don't come to the recitation, will you? It would spoil myperformance if you were there, and I want to be as good as the rest. '

'I won't if you really wish me not to. But I shall meet you at the doorand bring you home. '

'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happynow; she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his comingthat she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side ofthe isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her place onthe platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was about thehour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road northwardto the Street of Wells. 

He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old thathis feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what hehad said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalledhim in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated andaccomplished women who had attracted him successively would be likely torise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused his mindof the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral part of thepersonality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short while. 

 * * *

To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had manyembodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did notrecognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston didnot. She was indescribable. 

Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified bythe weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery ofher ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, hadoccasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she nextwould be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant accessto all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night hedreamt that she was 'the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person, bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art--theimplacable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved themasquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes, black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, orplump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had neverbeen in one place long. 

By making this clear to his mind some time before to-day, he had escapeda good deal of ugly self-reproach. It was simply that she who alwaysattracted him, and led him whither she would as by a silken thread, hadnot remained the occupant of the same fleshly tabernacle in her careerso far. Whether she would ultimately settle down to one he could notsay. 

Had he felt that she was becoming manifest in Avice, he would have triedto believe that this was the terminal spot of her migrations, and havebeen content to abide by his words. But did he see the Well-Beloved inAvice at all? The question was somewhat disturbing. 

He had reached the brow of the hill, and descended towards the village, where in the long straight Roman street he soon found the lighted hall. The performance was not yet over; and by going round to the side of thebuilding and standing on a mound he could see the interior as far downas the platform level. Avice's turn, or second turn, came on almostimmediately. Her pretty embarrassment on facing the audience rather wonhim away from his doubts. She was, in truth, what is called a 'nice'girl; attractive, certainly, but above all things nice--one of the classwith whom the risks of matrimony approximate most nearly to zero. Herintelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful carriage, ensuredone thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one withmore charming and solid qualities than Avice Caro's. This was not a mereconjecture--he had known her long and thoroughly; her every mood andtemper. 

A heavy wagon passing without drowned her small soft voice for him; butthe audience were pleased, and she blushed at their applause. He nowtook his station at the door, and when the people had done pouring outhe found her within awaiting him. 

They climbed homeward slowly by the Old Road, Pierston dragging himselfup the steep by the wayside hand-rail and pulling Avice after him uponhis arm. At the top they turned and stood still. To the left of them thesky was streaked like a fan with the lighthouse rays, and under theirfront, at periods of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep, hollowstroke like the single beat of a drum, the intervals being filled with along-drawn rattling, as of bones between huge canine jaws. It came fromthe vast concave of Deadman's Bay, rising and falling against the pebbledyke. 

The evening and night winds here were, to Pierston's mind, charged witha something that did not burden them elsewhere. They brought it up fromthat sinister Bay to the west, whose movement she and he were hearingnow. It was a presence--an imaginary shape or essence from the humanmultitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of war, EastIndiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada--select people, common, and debased, whose interests and hopes had been as wide asunder asthe poles, but who had rolled each other to oneness on that restlesssea-bed. There could almost be felt the brush of their huge compositeghost as it ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking for somegood god who would disunite it again. 

The twain wandered a long way that night amid these influences--sofar as to the old Hope Churchyard, which lay in a ravine formed by alandslip ages ago. The church had slipped down with the rest of thecliff, and had long been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this lastlocal stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingeredyet, Christianity had established itself precariously at best. In thatsolemn spot Pierston kissed her. 

The kiss was by no means on Avice's initiative this time. Her formerdemonstrativeness seemed to have increased her present reserve. 

 * * *

That day was the beginning of a pleasant month passed mainly in eachother's society. He found that she could not only recite poetry atintellectual gatherings, but play the piano fairly, and sing to her ownaccompaniment. 

He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been toget her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and individuallife as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an exact copyof tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there wasnothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget allthe experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songspurchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the localvocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in ahouse that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to drawLondon suburban villas from printed copies. 

Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl'stractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the bone, but she could not escape the tendency of the age. 

The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward toit sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing. Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which hadprevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the oldstock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins, ' or 'foreigners' (asstrangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a largemeasure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice'seducation many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wonderedif, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changingmanners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires. 

1. III. THE APPOINTMENT

'Well, ' said he, 'here we are, arrived at the fag-end of my holiday. What a pleasant surprise my old home, which I have not thought worthcoming to see for three or four years, had in store for me!'

'You must go to-morrow?' she asked uneasily. 

'Yes. '

Something seemed to overweigh them; something more than the naturalsadness of a parting which was not to be long; and he decided thatinstead of leaving in the daytime as he had intended, he would defer hisdeparture till night, and go by the mail-train from Budmouth. This wouldgive him time to look into his father's quarries, and enable her, if shechose, to walk with him along the beach as far as to Henry the Eighth'sCastle above the sands, where they could linger and watch the moon riseover the sea. She said she thought she could come. 

So after spending the next day with his father in the quarries Jocelynprepared to leave, and at the time appointed set out from the stonehouse of his birth in this stone isle to walk to Budmouth-Regis by thepath along the beach, Avice having some time earlier gone down to seesome friends in the Street of Wells, which was halfway towards the spotof their tryst. The descent soon brought him to the pebble bank, andleaving behind him the last houses of the isle, and the ruins of thevillage destroyed by the November gale of 1824, he struck out along thenarrow thread of land. When he had walked a hundred yards he stopped, turned aside to the pebble ridge which walled out the sea, and sat downto wait for her. 

Between him and the lights of the ships riding at anchor in theroadstead two men passed slowly in the direction he intended to pursue. One of them recognized Jocelyn, and bade him good-night, adding, 'Wishyou joy, sir, of your choice, and hope the wedden will be soon!'

'Thank you, Seaborn. Well--we shall see what Christmas will do towardsbringing it about. '

'My wife opened upon it this mornen: "Please God, I'll up and see thatthere wedden, " says she, "knowing 'em both from their crawling days. "'

The men moved on, and when they were out of Pierston's hearing the onewho had not spoken said to his friend, 'Who was that young kimberlin? Hedon't seem one o' we. '

'Oh, he is, though, every inch o' en. He's Mr. Jocelyn Pierston, thestwone-merchant's only son up at East Quarriers. He's to be married toa stylish young body; her mother, a widow woman, carries on the samebusiness as well as she can; but their trade is not a twentieth part ofPierston's. He's worth thousands and thousands, they say, though 'a dolive on in the same wold way up in the same wold house. This son is doengreat things in London as a' image-carver; and I can mind when, as aboy, 'a first took to carving soldiers out o' bits o' stwone from thesoft-bed of his father's quarries; and then 'a made a set o' stwonenchess-men, and so 'a got on. He's quite the gent in London, they tellme; and the wonder is that 'a cared to come back here and pick up littleAvice Caro--nice maid as she is notwithstanding. .. . Hullo! there's to bea change in the weather soon. '

Meanwhile the subject of their remarks waited at the appointed placetill seven o'clock, the hour named between himself and his affianced, had struck. Almost at the moment he saw a figure coming forward from thelast lamp at the bottom of the hill. But the figure speedily resolveditself into that of a boy, who, advancing to Jocelyn, inquired if hewere Mr. Pierston, and handed him a note. 

1. IV. A LONELY PEDESTRIAN

When the boy had gone Jocelyn retraced his steps to the last lamp, andread, in Avice's hand:

'MY DEAREST, --I shall be sorry if I grieve you at all in what I am goingto say about our arrangement to meet to-night in the Sandsfoot ruin. ButI have fancied that my seeing you again and again lately is incliningyour father to insist, and you as his heir to feel, that we ought tocarry out Island Custom in our courting--your people being such oldinhabitants in an unbroken line. Truth to say, mother supposes that yourfather, for natural reasons, may have hinted to you that we ought. Now, the thing is contrary to my feelings: it is nearly left off; and I donot think it good, even where there is property, as in your case, tojustify it, in a measure. I would rather trust in Providence. 

'On the whole, therefore, it is best that I should not come--if only forappearances--and meet you at a time and place suggesting the custom, toothers than ourselves, at least, if known. 

'I am sure that this decision will not disturb you much; that you willunderstand my modern feelings, and think no worse of me for them. Anddear, if it were to be done, and we were unfortunate in it, we mightboth have enough old family feeling to think, like our forefathers, andpossibly your father, that we could not marry honourably; and hence wemight be made unhappy. 

'However, you will come again shortly, will you not, dear Jocelyn?--andthen the time will soon draw on when no more good-byes will berequired. --Always and ever yours, 'AVICE. '

Jocelyn, having read the letter, was surprised at the naivete it showed, and at Avice and her mother's antiquated simplicity in supposing that tobe still a grave and operating principle which was a bygone barbarismto himself and other absentees from the island. His father, as amoney-maker, might have practical wishes on the matter of descendantswhich lent plausibility to the conjecture of Avice and her mother; butto Jocelyn he had never expressed himself in favour of the ancient ways, old-fashioned as he was. 

Amused therefore at her regard of herself as modern, Jocelyn wasdisappointed, and a little vexed, that such an unforeseen reason shouldhave deprived him of her company. How the old ideas survived under thenew education!

The reader is asked to remember that the date, though recent in thehistory of the Isle of Slingers, was more than forty years ago. 

 * * *

Finding that the evening seemed louring, yet indisposed to go back andhire a vehicle, he went on quickly alone. In such an exposed spot thenight wind was gusty, and the sea behind the pebble barrier kicked andflounced in complex rhythms, which could be translated equally well asshocks of battle or shouts of thanksgiving. 

Presently on the pale road before him he discerned a figure, the figureof a woman. He remembered that a woman passed him while he was readingAvice's letter by the last lamp, and now he was overtaking her. 

He did hope for a moment that it might be Avice, with a changed mind. But it was not she, nor anybody like her. It was a taller, squarer formthan that of his betrothed, and although the season was only autumn shewas wrapped in furs, or in thick and heavy clothing of some kind. 

He soon advanced abreast of her, and could get glimpses of her profileagainst the roadstead lights. It was dignified, arresting, that of avery Juno. Nothing more classical had he ever seen. She walked at aswinging pace, yet with such ease and power that there was but littledifference in their rate of speed for several minutes; and during thistime he regarded and conjectured. However, he was about to pass her bywhen she suddenly turned and addressed him. 

'Mr Pierston, I think, of East Quarriers?'

He assented, and could just discern what a handsome, commanding, imperious face it was--quite of a piece with the proud tones of hervoice. She was a new type altogether in his experience; and her accentwas not so local as Avice's. 

'Can you tell me the time, please?'

He looked at his watch by the aid of a light, and in telling her that itwas a quarter past seven observed, by the momentary gleam of his match, that her eyes looked a little red and chafed, as if with weeping. 

'Mr. Pierston, will you forgive what will appear very strange to you, Idare say? That is, may I ask you to lend me some money for a day or two?I have been so foolish as to leave my purse on the dressing-table. '

It did appear strange: and yet there were features in the young lady'spersonality which assured him in a moment that she was not an impostor. He yielded to her request, and put his hand in his pocket. Here itremained for a moment. How much did she mean by the words 'some money'?The Junonian quality of her form and manner made him throw himself byan impulse into harmony with her, and he responded regally. He scented aromance. He handed her five pounds. 

His munificence caused her no apparent surprise. 'It is quite enough, thank you, ' she remarked quietly, as he announced the sum, lest sheshould be unable to see it for herself. 

While overtaking and conversing with her he had not observed that therising wind, which had proceeded from puffing to growling, and fromgrowling to screeching, with the accustomed suddenness of its changeshere, had at length brought what it promised by these vagaries--rain. The drops, which had at first hit their left cheeks like the pellets ofa popgun, soon assumed the character of a raking fusillade from thebank adjoining, one shot of which was sufficiently smart to go throughJocelyn's sleeve. The tall girl turned, and seemed to be somewhatconcerned at an onset which she had plainly not foreseen before herstarting. 

'We must take shelter, ' said Jocelyn. 

'But where?' said she. 

To windward was the long, monotonous bank, too obtusely piled to afforda screen, over which they could hear the canine crunching of pebbles bythe sea without; on their right stretched the inner bay or roadstead, the distant riding-lights of the ships now dim and glimmering; behindthem a faint spark here and there in the lower sky showed where theisland rose; before there was nothing definite, and could be nothing, till they reached a precarious wood bridge, a mile further on, Henry theEighth's Castle being a little further still. 

But just within the summit of the bank, whither it had apparently beenhauled to be out of the way of the waves, was one of the local boatscalled lerrets, bottom upwards. As soon as they saw it the pair ranup the pebbly slope towards it by a simultaneous impulse. They thenperceived that it had lain there a long time, and were comforted to findit capable of affording more protection than anybody would have expectedfrom a distant view. It formed a shelter or store for the fishermen, thebottom of the lerret being tarred as a roof. By creeping under the bows, which overhung the bank on props to leeward, they made their way within, where, upon some thwarts, oars, and other fragmentary woodwork, laya mass of dry netting--a whole sein. Upon this they scrambled and satdown, through inability to stand upright. 

1. V. A CHARGE

The rain fell upon the keel of the old lerret like corn thrown inhandfuls by some colossal sower, and darkness set in to its full shade. 

They crouched so close to each other that he could feel her furs againsthim. Neither had spoken since they left the roadway till she said, withattempted unconcern: 'This is unfortunate. '

He admitted that it was, and found, after a few further remarks hadpassed, that she certainly had been weeping, there being a suppressedgasp of passionateness in her utterance now and then. 

'It is more unfortunate for you, perhaps, than for me, ' he said, 'and Iam very sorry that it should be so. '

She replied nothing to this, and he added that it was rather a desolateplace for a woman, alone and afoot. He hoped nothing serious hadhappened to drag her out at such an untoward time. 

At first she seemed not at all disposed to show any candour on her ownaffairs, and he was left to conjecture as to her history and name, andhow she could possibly have known him. But, as the rain gave not theleast sign of cessation, he observed: 'I think we shall have to goback. '

'Never!' said she, and the firmness with which she closed her lips wasaudible in the word. 

'Why not?' he inquired. 

'There are good reasons. '

'I cannot understand how you should know me, while I have no knowledgeof you. '

'Oh, but you know me--about me, at least. '

'Indeed I don't. How should I? You are a kimberlin. '

'I am not. I am a real islander--or was, rather. .. . Haven't you heard ofthe Best-Bed Stone Company?'

'I should think so! They tried to ruin my father by getting away histrade--or, at least, the founder of the company did--old Bencomb. '

'He's my father!'

'Indeed. I am sorry I should have spoken so disrespectfully of him, forI never knew him personally. After making over his large business to thecompany, he retired, I believe, to London?'

'Yes. Our house, or rather his, not mine, is at South Kensington. Wehave lived there for years. But we have been tenants of Sylvania Castle, on the island here, this season. We took it for a month or two of theowner, who is away. '

'Then I have been staying quite near you, Miss Bencomb. My father's is acomparatively humble residence hard by. '

'But he could afford a much bigger one if he chose. '

'You have heard so? I don't know. He doesn't tell me much of hisaffairs. '

'My father, ' she burst out suddenly, 'is always scolding me for myextravagance! And he has been doing it to-day more than ever. He saidI go shopping in town to simply a diabolical extent, and exceed myallowance!'

'Was that this evening?'

'Yes. And then it reached such a storm of passion between us thatI pretended to retire to my room for the rest of the evening, but Islipped out; and I am never going back home again. '

'What will you do?'

'I shall go first to my aunt in London; and if she won't have me, I'llwork for a living. I have left my father for ever! What I should havedone if I had not met you I cannot tell--I must have walked all the wayto London, I suppose. Now I shall take the train as soon as I reach themainland. '

'If you ever do in this hurricane. '

'I must sit here till it stops. '

And there on the nets they sat. Pierston knew of old Bencomb as hisfather's bitterest enemy, who had made a great fortune by swallowing upthe small stone-merchants, but had found Jocelyn's sire a trifle too bigto digest--the latter being, in fact, the chief rival of the Best-BedCompany to that day. Jocelyn thought it strange that he should bethrown by fate into a position to play the son of the Montagues to thisdaughter of the Capulets. 

As they talked there was a mutual instinct to drop their voices, andon this account the roar of the storm necessitated their drawing quiteclose together. Something tender came into their tones as quarter-hourafter quarter-hour went on, and they forgot the lapse of time. It wasquite late when she started up, alarmed at her position. 

'Rain or no rain, I can stay no longer, ' she said. 

'Do come back, ' said he, taking her hand. 'I'll return with you. Mytrain has gone. '

'No; I shall go on, and get a lodging in Budmouth town, if ever I reachit. '

'It is so late that there will be no house open, except a little placenear the station where you won't care to stay. However, if you aredetermined I will show you the way. I cannot leave you. It would be tooawkward for you to go there alone. '

She persisted, and they started through the twanging and spinning storm. The sea rolled and rose so high on their left, and was so near them ontheir right, that it seemed as if they were traversing its bottom likethe Children of Israel. Nothing but the frail bank of pebbles dividedthem from the raging gulf without, and at every bang of the tide againstit the ground shook, the shingle clashed, the spray rose vertically, andwas blown over their heads. Quantities of sea-water trickled throughthe pebble wall, and ran in rivulets across their path to join the seawithin. The 'Island' was an island still. 

They had not realized the force of the elements till now. Pedestrianshad often been blown into the sea hereabout, and drowned, owing toa sudden breach in the bank; which, however, had something of asupernatural power in being able to close up and join itself togetheragain after such disruption, like Satan's form when, cut in two by thesword of Michael, 'The ethereal substance closed, Not long divisible. '

Her clothing offered more resistance to the wind than his, and she wasconsequently in the greater danger. It was impossible to refuse hisproffered aid. First he gave his arm, but the wind tore them apart aseasily as coupled cherries. He steadied her bodily by encircling herwaist with his arm; and she made no objection. 

 * * *

Somewhere about this time--it might have been sooner, it might have beenlater--he became conscious of a sensation which, in its incipient andunrecognized form, had lurked within him from some unnoticed moment whenhe was sitting close to his new friend under the lerret. Though ayoung man, he was too old a hand not to know what this was, andfelt alarmed--even dismayed. It meant a possible migration of theWell-Beloved. The thing had not, however, taken place; and he went onthinking how soft and warm the lady was in her fur covering, as he heldher so tightly; the only dry spots in the clothing of either being herleft side and his right, where they excluded the rain by their mutualpressure. 

As soon as they had crossed the ferry-bridge there was a little moreshelter, but he did not relinquish his hold till she requested him. Theypassed the ruined castle, and having left the island far behind themtrod mile after mile till they drew near to the outskirts of theneighbouring watering-place. Into it they plodded without pause, crossing the harbour bridge about midnight, wet to the skin. 

He pitied her, and, while he wondered at it, admired her determination. The houses facing the bay now sheltered them completely, and theyreached the vicinity of the new railway terminus (which the station wasat this date) without difficulty. As he had said, there was only onehouse open hereabout, a little temperance inn, where the people stayedup for the arrival of the morning mail and passengers from the Channelboats. Their application for admission led to the withdrawal of a bolt, and they stood within the gaslight of the passage. 

He could see now that though she was such a fine figure, quite as tallas himself, she was but in the bloom of young womanhood. Her face wascertainly striking, though rather by its imperiousness than its beauty;and the beating of the wind and rain and spray had inflamed her cheeksto peony hues. 

She persisted in the determination to go on to London by an earlymorning train, and he therefore offered advice on lesser matters only. 'In that case, ' he said, 'you must go up to your room and send down yourthings, that they may be dried by the fire immediately, or they will notbe ready. I will tell the servant to do this, and send you up somethingto eat. '

She assented to his proposal, without, however, showing any marks ofgratitude; and when she had gone Pierston despatched her the lightsupper promised by the sleepy girl who was 'night porter' at thisestablishment. He felt ravenously hungry himself, and set about dryinghis clothes as well as he could, and eating at the same time. 

At first he was in doubt what to do, but soon decided to stay wherehe was till the morrow. By the aid of some temporary wraps, andsome slippers from the cupboard, he was contriving to make himselfcomfortable when the maid-servant came downstairs with a damp armful ofwoman's raiment. 

Pierston withdrew from the fire. The maid-servant knelt down before theblaze and held up with extended arms one of the habiliments of the Junoupstairs, from which a cloud of steam began to rise. As she knelt, thegirl nodded forward, recovered herself, and nodded again. 

'You are sleepy, my girl, ' said Pierston. 

'Yes, sir; I have been up a long time. When nobody comes I lie down onthe couch in the other room. '

'Then I'll relieve you of that; go and lie down in the other room, justas if we were not here. I'll dry the clothing and put the articles herein a heap, which you can take up to the young lady in the morning. '

The 'night porter' thanked him and left the room, and he soon heard hersnoring from the adjoining apartment. Then Jocelyn opened proceedings, overhauling the robes and extending them one by one. As the steam wentup he fell into a reverie. He again became conscious of the changewhich had been initiated during the walk. The Well-Beloved was movinghouse--had gone over to the wearer of this attire. 

In the course of ten minutes he adored her. 

And how about little Avice Caro? He did not think of her as before. 

He was not sure that he had ever seen the real Beloved in that friend ofhis youth, solicitous as he was for her welfare. But, loving her or not, he perceived that the spirit, emanation, idealism, which called itselfhis Love was flitting stealthily from some remoter figure to the nearone in the chamber overhead. 

Avice had not kept her engagement to meet him in the lonely ruin, fearing her own imaginings. But he, in fact, more than she, had beeneducated out of the island innocence that had upheld old manners; andthis was the strange consequence of Avice's misapprehension. 

1. VI. ON THE BRINK

Miss Bencomb was leaving the hotel for the railway, which was quite nearat hand, and had only recently been opened, as if on purpose for thisevent. At Jocelyn's suggestion she wrote a message to inform her fatherthat she had gone to her aunt's, with a view to allaying anxiety anddeterring pursuit. They walked together to the platform and bade eachother good-bye; each obtained a ticket independently, and Jocelyn gothis luggage from the cloak-room. 

On the platform they encountered each other again, and there was a lightin their glances at each other which said, as by a flash-telegraph: 'Weare bound for the same town, why not enter the same compartment?'

They did. 

She took a corner seat, with her back to the engine; he sat opposite. The guard looked in, thought they were lovers, and did not show othertravellers into that compartment. They talked on strictly ordinarymatters; what she thought he did not know, but at every stopping stationhe dreaded intrusion. Before they were halfway to London the eventhe had just begun to realize was a patent fact. The Beloved was againembodied; she filled every fibre and curve of this woman's form. 

Drawing near the great London station was like drawing near Doomsday. How should he leave her in the turmoil of a crowded city street? Sheseemed quite unprepared for the rattle of the scene. He asked her whereher aunt lived. 

'Bayswater, ' said Miss Bencomb. 

He called a cab, and proposed that she should share it till they arrivedat her aunt's, whose residence lay not much out of the way to his own. Try as he would he could not ascertain if she understood his feelings, but she assented to his offer and entered the vehicle. 

'We are old friends, ' he said, as they drove onward. 

'Indeed, we are, ' she answered, without smiling. 

'But hereditarily we are mortal enemies, dear Juliet. '

'Yes--What did you say?'

'I said Juliet. '

She laughed in a half-proud way, and murmured: 'Your father is myfather's enemy, and my father is mine. Yes, it is so. ' And then theireyes caught each other's glance. 'My queenly darling!' he burst out;'instead of going to your aunt's, will you come and marry me?'

A flush covered her over, which seemed akin to a flush of rage. It wasnot exactly that, but she was excited. She did not answer, and he fearedhe had mortally offended her dignity. Perhaps she had only made use ofhim as a convenient aid to her intentions. However, he went on-- 'Yourfather would not be able to reclaim you then! After all, this is notso precipitate as it seems. You know all about me, my history, myprospects. I know all about you. Our families have been neighbourson that isle for hundreds of years, though you are now such a Londonproduct. '

'Will you ever be a Royal Academician?' she asked musingly, herexcitement having calmed down. 

'I hope to be--I WILL be, if you will be my wife. '

His companion looked at him long. 

'Think what a short way out of your difficulty this would be, ' hecontinued. 'No bother about aunts, no fetching home by an angry father. '

It seemed to decide her. She yielded to his embrace. 

'How long will it take to marry?' Miss Bencomb asked by-and-by, withobvious self-repression. 

'We could do it to-morrow. I could get to Doctors' Commons by noonto-day, and the licence would be ready by to-morrow morning. '

'I won't go to my aunt's, I will be an independent woman! I have beenreprimanded as if I were a child of six. I'll be your wife if it is aseasy as you say. '

They stopped the cab while they held a consultation. Pierston had roomsand a studio in the neighbourhood of Campden Hill; but it would behardly desirable to take her thither till they were married. Theydecided to go to an hotel. 

Changing their direction, therefore, they went back to the Strand, andsoon ensconced themselves in one of the venerable old taverns of CoventGarden, a precinct which in those days was frequented by West-countrypeople. Jocelyn then left her and proceeded on his errand eastward. 

It was about three o'clock when, having arranged all preliminariesnecessitated by this sudden change of front, he began strolling slowlyback; he felt bewildered, and to walk was a relief. Gazing occasionallyinto this shop window and that, he called a hansom as by an inspiration, and directed the driver to 'Mellstock Gardens. ' Arrived here, he rangthe bell of a studio, and in a minute or two it was answered by a youngman in shirt-sleeves, about his own age, with a great smeared palette onhis left thumb. 

'O, you, Pierston! I thought you were in the country. Come in. I'mawfully glad of this. I am here in town finishing off a painting for anAmerican, who wants to take it back with him. '

Pierston followed his friend into the painting-room, where a prettyyoung woman was sitting sewing. At a signal from the painter shedisappeared without speaking. 

'I can see from your face you have something to say; so we'll have itall to ourselves. You are in some trouble? What'll you drink?'

'Oh! it doesn't matter what, so that it is alcohol in some shape orform. .. . Now, Somers, you must just listen to me, for I HAVE somethingto tell. '

Pierston had sat down in an arm-chair, and Somers had resumed hispainting. When a servant had brought in brandy to soothe Pierston'snerves, and soda to take off the injurious effects of the brandy, andmilk to take off the depleting effects of the soda, Jocelyn began hisnarrative, addressing it rather to Somers's Gothic chimneypiece, andSomers's Gothic clock, and Somers's Gothic rugs, than to Somers himself, who stood at his picture a little behind his friend. 

'Before I tell you what has happened to me, ' Pierston said, 'I want tolet you know the manner of man I am. '

'Lord--I know already. '

'No, you don't. It is a sort of thing one doesn't like to talk of. I lieawake at night thinking about it. '

'No!' said Somers, with more sympathy, seeing that his friend was reallytroubled. 

'I am under a curious curse, or influence. I am posed, puzzledand perplexed by the legerdemain of a creature--a deity rather; byAphrodite, as a poet would put it, as I should put it myself in marble. . .. But I forget--this is not to be a deprecatory wail, but a defence--asort of Apologia pro vita mea. '

'That's better. Fire away!'

1. VII. HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS

'You, Somers, are not, I know, one of those who continue to indulgein the world-wide, fond superstition that the Beloved One of any manalways, or even usually, cares to remain in one corporeal nook or shellfor any great length of time, however much he may wish her to do so. IfI am wrong, and you do still hold to that ancient error--well, my storywill seem rather queer. '

'Suppose you say the Beloved of some men, not of any man. '

'All right--I'll say one man, this man only, if you are so particular. We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhapsthat accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man, then, has had manyincarnations--too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived inawhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I havebeen concerned, a corpse, worse luck! Now, there is no spiritualisticnonsense in this--it is simple fact, put in the plain form that theconventional public are afraid of. So much for the principle. '

'Good. Go on. '

'Well; the first embodiment of her occurred, so nearly as I canrecollect, when I was about the age of nine. Her vehicle was a littleblue-eyed girl of eight or so, one of a family of eleven, with flaxenhair about her shoulders, which attempted to curl, but ignominiouslyfailed, hanging like chimney-crooks only. This defect used rather totrouble me; and was, I believe, one of the main reasons of my Beloved'sdeparture from that tenement. I cannot remember with any exactnesswhen the departure occurred. I know it was after I had kissed mylittle friend in a garden-seat on a hot noontide, under a blue ginghamumbrella, which we had opened over us as we sat, that passers throughEast Quarriers might not observe our marks of affection, forgetting thatour screen must attract more attention than our persons. 

'When the whole dream came to an end through her father leaving theisland, I thought my Well-Beloved had gone for ever (being then in theunpractised condition of Adam at sight of the first sunset). But she hadnot. Laura had gone for ever, but not my Beloved. 

'For some months after I had done crying for the flaxen-haired editionof her, my Love did not reappear. Then she came suddenly, unexpectedly, in a situation I should never have predicted. I was standing on thekerbstone of the pavement in Budmouth-Regis, outside the PreparatorySchool, looking across towards the sea, when a middle-aged gentleman onhorseback, and beside him a young lady, also mounted, passed down thestreet. The girl turned her head, and--possibly because I was gapingat her in awkward admiration, or smiling myself--smiled at me. Havingridden a few paces, she looked round again and smiled. 

'It was enough, more than enough, to set me on fire. I understood in amoment the information conveyed to me by my emotion--the Well-Belovedhad reappeared. This second form in which it had pleased her to take upher abode was quite a grown young woman's, darker in complexion than thefirst. Her hair, also worn in a knot, was of an ordinary brown, and so, I think, were her eyes, but the niceties of her features were not to begathered so cursorily. However, there sat my coveted one, re-embodied;and, bidding my schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could do sowithout suspicion, I hurried along the Esplanade in the direction sheand her father had ridden. But they had put their horses to a canter, and I could not see which way they had gone. In the greatest miseryI turned down a side street, but was soon elevated to a state ofexcitement by seeing the same pair galloping towards me. Flushing up tomy hair, I stopped and heroically faced her as she passed. She smiledagain, but, alas! upon my Love's cheek there was no blush of passion forme. '

Pierston paused, and drank from his glass, as he lived for a briefmoment in the scene he had conjured up. Somers reserved his comments, and Jocelyn continued--

'That afternoon I idled about the streets, looking for her in vain. WhenI next saw one of the boys who had been with me at her first passingI stealthily reminded him of the incident, and asked if he knew theriders. 

'"O yes, " he said. "That was Colonel Targe and his daughter Elsie. "

'"How old do you think she is?" said I, a sense of disparity in our agesdisturbing my mind. 

'"O--nineteen, I think they say. She's going to be married the day afterto-morrow to Captain Popp, of the 501st, and they are ordered off toIndia at once. "

'The grief which I experienced at this intelligence was such that atdusk I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an endto myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been foundclinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout, leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingencydeterred me. I should state that the marriage of my Beloved concerned melittle; it was her departure that broke my heart. I never saw her again. 

'Though I had already learnt that the absence of the corporeal matterdid not involve the absence of the informing spirit, I could scarcebring myself to believe that in this case it was possible for her toreturn to my view without the form she had last inhabited. 

'But she did. 

'It was not, however, till after a good space of time, during which Ipassed through that bearish age in boys, their early teens, when girlsare their especial contempt. I was about seventeen, and was sittingone evening over a cup of tea in a confectioner's at the very samewatering-place, when opposite me a lady took her seat with a littlegirl. We looked at each other awhile, the child made advances, till Isaid: "She's a good little thing. "

'The lady assented, and made a further remark. 

'"She has the soft fine eyes of her mother, " said I. 

'"Do you think her eyes are good?" asks the lady, as if she had notheard what she had heard most--the last three words of my opinion. 

'"Yes--for copies, " said I, regarding her. 

'After this we got on very well. She informed me that her husband hadgone out in a yacht, and I said it was a pity he didn't take her withhim for the airing. She gradually disclosed herself in the character ofa deserted young wife, and later on I met her in the street without thechild. She was going to the landing-stage to meet her husband, so shetold me; but she did not know the way. 

'I offered to show her, and did so. I will not go into particulars, butI afterwards saw her several times, and soon discovered that the Beloved(as to whose whereabouts I had been at fault so long) lurked here. Though why she had chosen this tantalizing situation of an inaccessiblematron's form when so many others offered, it was beyond me to discover. The whole affair ended innocently enough, when the lady left the townwith her husband and child: she seemed to regard our acquaintance as aflirtation; yet it was anything but a flirtation for me!

 * * *

'Why should I tell the rest of the tantalizing tale! After this, theWell-Beloved put herself in evidence with greater and greater frequency, and it would be impossible for me to give you details of her variousincarnations. She came nine times in the course of the two or threeensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as apale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neitherlight nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, Ithink, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of nogreat stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances thatI resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. Soit went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled. She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, ayoung girl I had known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have decidedthat, after all, she did not enter the form of Avice Caro, because Iretain so great a respect for her still. '

Pierston here gave in brief the history of his revived comradeship withAvice, the verge of the engagement to which they had reached, and itsunexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman intowhom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes--by nameMiss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marryoffhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry ornot--her or anybody else--in such circumstances. 

'Certainly not, ' said Somers. 'Though, if anybody, little Avice. But noteven her. You are like other men, only rather worse. Essentially, allmen are fickle, like you; but not with such perceptiveness. '

'Surely fickle is not the word? Fickleness means getting weary of athing while the thing remains the same. But I have always been faithfulto the elusive creature whom I have never been able to get a firm holdof, unless I have done so now. And let me tell you that her flittingfrom each to each individual has been anything but a pleasure forme--certainly not a wanton game of my instigation. To see the creaturewho has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze thedivinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame toashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasurefor any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to mysight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest ofsome beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left itto fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have lookedin a face for her I used to see there, and could see her there no more. '

'You ought not to marry, ' repeated Somers. 

'Perhaps I oughtn't to! Though poor Marcia will be compromised, I'mafraid, if I don't. .. . Was I not right in saying I am accursed in thisthing? Fortunately nobody but myself has suffered on account of ittill now. Knowing what to expect, I have seldom ventured on a closeacquaintance with any woman, in fear of prematurely driving away thedear one in her; who, however, has in time gone off just the same. '

Pierston soon after took his leave. A friend's advice on such a subjectweighs little. He quickly returned to Miss Bencomb. 

She was different now. Anxiety had visibly brought her down a notchor two, undone a few degrees of that haughty curl which her lip couldoccasionally assume. 'How long you have been away!' she said with a showof impatience. 

'Never mind, darling. It is all arranged, ' said he. 'We shall be able tomarry in a few days. '

'Not to-morrow?'

'We can't to-morrow. We have not been here quite long enough. '

'But how did the people at Doctors' Commons know that?'

'Well--I forgot that residence, real or assumed, was necessary, andunfortunately admitted that we had only just arrived. '

'O how stupid! But it can't be helped now. I think, dear, I should haveknown better, however!'

1. VIII. 'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING'

They lived on at the hotel some days longer, eyed curiously by thechambermaids, and burst in upon every now and then by the waiters as ifaccidentally. When they were walking together, mostly in back streetsfor fear of being recognized, Marcia was often silent, and her imperiousface looked gloomy. 

'Dummy!' he said playfully, on one of these occasions. 

'I am vexed that by your admissions at Doctors' Commons you preventedthem giving you the licence at once! It is not nice, my living on withyou like this!'

'But we are going to marry, dear!'

'Yes, ' she murmured, and fell into reverie again. 'What a sudden resolveit was of ours!' she continued. 'I wish I could get my father andmother's consent to our marriage. .. . As we can't complete it for anotherday or two, a letter might be sent to them and their answer received? Ihave a mind to write. '

Pierston expressed his doubts of the wisdom of this course, which seemedto make her desire it the more, and the result was a tiff between them. 'Since we are obliged to delay it, I won't marry without their consent!'she cried at last passionately. 

'Very well then, dear. Write, ' he said. 

When they were again indoors, she sat down to a note, but after a whilethrew aside her pen despairingly. 'No: I cannot do it!' she said. 'Ican't bend my pride to such a job. Will YOU write for me, Jocelyn?'

'I? I don't see why I should be the one, particularly as I think itpremature. '

'But you have not quarrelled with my father as I have done. '

'Well no. But there is a long-standing antagonism, which would make itodd in me to be the writer. Wait till we are married, and then I willwrite. Not till then. '

'Then I suppose I must. You don't know my father. He might forgive memarrying into any other family without his knowledge, but he thinksyours such a mean one, and so resents the trade rivalry, that he wouldnever pardon till the day of his death my becoming a Pierston secretly. I didn't see it at first. '

This remark caused an unpleasant jar on the mind of Pierston. Despitehis independent artistic position in London, he was staunch to thesimple old parent who had stubbornly held out for so many years againstBencomb's encroaching trade, and whose money had educated and maintainedJocelyn as an art-student in the best schools. So he begged her to sayno more about his mean family, and she silently resumed her letter, giving an address at a post-office that their quarters might not bediscovered, at least just yet. 

No reply came by return of post; but, rather ominously, some letters forMarcia that had arrived at her father's since her departure were senton in silence to the address given. She opened them one by one, tillon reading the last, she exclaimed, 'Good gracious!' and burst intolaughter. 

'What is it?' asked Pierston. 

Marcia began to read the letter aloud. It came from a faithful lover ofhers, a youthful Jersey gentleman, who stated that he was soon going tostart for England to claim his darling, according to her plighted word. 

She was half risible, half concerned. 'What shall I do?' she said. 

'Do? My dear girl, it seems to me that there is only one thing to do, and that a very obvious thing. Tell him as soon as possible that you arejust on the point of marriage. '

Marcia thereupon wrote out a reply to that effect, Jocelyn helping herto shape the phrases as gently as possible. 

'I repeat' (her letter concluded) 'that I had quite forgotten! I amdeeply sorry; but that is the truth. I have told my intended husbandeverything, and he is looking over my shoulder as I write. '

Said Jocelyn when he saw this set down: 'You might leave out the lastfew words. They are rather an extra stab for the poor boy. '

'Stab? It is not that, dear. Why does he want to come bothering me?Jocelyn, you ought to be very proud that I have put you in my letter atall. You said yesterday that I was conceited in declaring I might havemarried that science-man I told you of. But now you see there was yetanother available. '

He, gloomily: 'Well, I don't care to hear about that. To my mind thissort of thing is decidedly unpleasant, though you treat it so lightly. '

'Well, ' she pouted, 'I have only done half what you have done!'

'What's that?'

'I have only proved false through forgetfulness, but you have whileremembering!'

'O yes; of course you can use Avice Caro as a retort. But don't vexme about her, and make me do such an unexpected thing as regret thefalseness. '

She shut her mouth tight, and her face flushed. 

The next morning there did come an answer to the letter asking herparents' consent to her union with him; but to Marcia's amazement herfather took a line quite other than the one she had expected him totake. Whether she had compromised herself or whether she had not seemeda question for the future rather than the present with him, a nativeislander, born when old island marriage views prevailed in families; hewas fixed in his disapproval of her marriage with a hated Pierston. Hedid not consent; he would not say more till he could see her: if she hadany sense at all she would, if still unmarried, return to the home fromwhich she had evidently been enticed. He would then see what he coulddo for her in the desperate circumstances she had made for herself;otherwise he would do nothing. 

Pierston could not help being sarcastic at her father's evidently lowestimate of him and his belongings; and Marcia took umbrage at hissarcasms. 

'I am the one deserving of satire if anybody!' she said. 'I begin tofeel I was a foolish girl to run away from a father for such a trumperyreason as a little scolding because I had exceeded my allowance. '

'I advised you to go back, Marcie. '

'In a sort of way: not in the right tone. You spoke most contemptuouslyof my father's honesty as a merchant. '

'I couldn't speak otherwise of him than I did, I'm afraid, knowingwhat--'. 

'What have you to say against him?'

'Nothing--to you, Marcie, beyond what is matter of common notoriety. Everybody knows that at one time he made it the business of his life toruin my father; and the way he alludes to me in that letter shows thathis enmity still continues. '

'That miser ruined by an open-handed man like my father!' said she. 'Itis like your people's misrepresentations to say that!'

Marcia's eyes flashed, and her face burnt with an angry heat, theenhanced beauty which this warmth might have brought being killed by therectilinear sternness of countenance that came therewith. 

'Marcia--this temper is too exasperating! I could give you every step ofthe proceeding in detail--anybody could--the getting the quarries oneby one, and everything, my father only holding his own by the mostdesperate courage. There is no blinking facts. Our parents' relationsare an ugly fact in the circumstances of us two people who want tomarry, and we are just beginning to perceive it; and how we are going toget over it I cannot tell. '

She said steadily: 'I don't think we shall get over it at all!'

'We may not--we may not--altogether, ' Pierston murmured, as he gazedat the fine picture of scorn presented by his Juno's classical face anddark eyes. 

'Unless you beg my pardon for having behaved so!'

Pierston could not quite bring himself to see that he had behaved badlyto his too imperious lady, and declined to ask forgiveness for what hehad not done. 

She thereupon left the room. Later in the day she re-entered and brokea silence by saying bitterly: 'I showed temper just now, as you told me. But things have causes, and it is perhaps a mistake that you should havedeserted Avice for me. Instead of wedding Rosaline, Romeo must needsgo eloping with Juliet. It was a fortunate thing for the affections ofthose two Veronese lovers that they died when they did. In a short timethe enmity of their families would have proved a fruitful source ofdissension; Juliet would have gone back to her people, he to his; thesubject would have split them as much as it splits us. '

Pierston laughed a little. But Marcia was painfully serious, as he foundat tea-time, when she said that since his refusal to beg her pardon shehad been thinking over the matter, and had resolved to go to her aunt'safter all--at any rate till her father could be induced to agree totheir union. Pierston was as chilled by this resolve of hers as he wassurprised at her independence in circumstances which usually makewomen the reverse. But he put no obstacles in her way, and, with a kissstrangely cold after their recent ardour, the Romeo of the freestoneMontagues went out of the hotel, to avoid even the appearance ofcoercing his Juliet of the rival house. When he returned she was gone. 

 * * *

A correspondence began between these too-hastily pledged ones; andit was carried on in terms of serious reasoning upon their awkwardsituation on account of the family feud. They saw their recent love aswhat it was:

 'Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; Too like the lightning. .. '

They saw it with an eye whose calmness, coldness, and, it must be added, wisdom, did not promise well for their reunion. 

Their debates were clinched by a final letter from Marcia, sent from noother place than her recently left home in the Isle. She informed himthat her father had appeared suddenly at her aunt's, and had induced herto go home with him. She had told her father all the circumstances oftheir elopement, and what mere accidents had caused it: he had persuadedher on what she had almost been convinced of by their disagreement, that all thought of their marriage should be at least postponed for thepresent; any awkwardness and even scandal being better than that theyshould immediately unite themselves for life on the strength of a twoor three days' resultless passion, and be the wretched victims of asituation they could never change. 

Pierston saw plainly enough that he owed it to her father being aborn islander, with all the ancient island notions of matrimony lyingunderneath his acquired conventions, that the stone-merchant did notimmediately insist upon the usual remedy for a daughter's precipitancyin such cases, but preferred to await issues. 

But the young man still thought that Marcia herself, when her temperhad quite cooled, and she was more conscious of her real position, wouldreturn to him, in spite of the family hostility. There was no socialreason against such a step. In birth the pair were about on one plane;and though Marcia's family had gained a start in the accumulation ofwealth, and in the beginnings of social distinction, which lent colourto the feeling that the advantages of the match would be mainly onone side, Pierston was a sculptor who might rise to fame; so thatpotentially their marriage could not be considered inauspicious for awoman who, beyond being the probable heiress to a considerable fortune, had no exceptional opportunities. 

Thus, though disillusioned, he felt bound in honour to remain on call athis London address as long as there was the slightest chance of Marcia'sreappearance, or of the arrival of some message requesting him to joinher, that they might, after all, go to the altar together. Yet in thenight he seemed to hear sardonic voices, and laughter in the windat this development of his little romance, and during the slow andcolourless days he had to sit and behold the mournful departure of hisWell-Beloved from the form he had lately cherished, till she had almostvanished away. The exact moment of her complete withdrawal Pierstonknew not, but not many lines of her were longer discernible in Marcia'sremembered contours, nor many sounds of her in Marcia's recalledaccents. Their acquaintance, though so fervid, had been too brief forsuch lingering. 

There came a time when he learnt, through a trustworthy channel, twopieces of news affecting himself. One was the marriage of Avice Carowith her cousin, the other that the Bencombs had started on a tour roundthe world, which was to include a visit to a relation of Mr. Bencomb'swho was a banker in San Francisco. Since retiring from his former largebusiness the stone merchant had not known what to do with his leisure, and finding that travel benefited his health he had decided to indulgehimself thus. Although he was not so informed, Pierston concluded thatMarcia had discovered that nothing was likely to happen as a consequenceof their elopement, and that she had accompanied her parents. He wasmore than ever struck with what this signified--her father's obstinateantagonism to her union with one of his blood and name. 

1. IX. FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE

By degrees Pierston began to trace again the customary lines of hisexistence; and his profession occupied him much as of old. The nextyear or two only once brought him tidings, through some residents at hisformer home, of the movements of the Bencombs. The extended voyageof Marcia's parents had given them quite a zest for other scenes andcountries; and it was said that her father, a man still in vigoroushealth except at brief intervals, was utilizing the outlook whichhis cosmopolitanism afforded him by investing capital in foreignundertakings. What he had supposed turned out to be true; Marciawas with them; no necessity for joining him had arisen; and thus theseparation of himself and his nearly married wife by common consent waslikely to be a permanent one. 

It seemed as if he would scarce ever again discover the carnatedwelling-place of the haunting minion of his imagination. Having gone sonear to matrimony with Marcia as to apply for a licence, he had felt fora long while morally bound to her by the incipient contract, and wouldnot intentionally look about him in search of the vanished Ideality. Thus during the first year of Miss Bencomb's absence, when absolutelybound to keep faith with the elusive one's late incarnation if sheshould return to claim him, this man of the odd fancy would sometimestremble at the thought of what would become of his solemn intention ifthe Phantom were suddenly to disclose herself in an unexpected quarter, and seduce him before he was aware. Once or twice he imagined that hesaw her in the distance--at the end of a street, on the far sands ofa shore, in a window, in a meadow, at the opposite side of a railwaystation; but he determinedly turned on his heel, and walked the otherway. 

During the many uneventful seasons that followed Marcia's stroke ofindependence (for which he was not without a secret admiration attimes), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling springof emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwardsand ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this, certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for such a result, thathe was successful in his art, successful by a seemingly sudden spurt, which carried him at one bound over the hindrances of years. 

He prospered without effort. He was A. R. A. 

But recognitions of this sort, social distinctions, which he hadonce coveted so keenly, seemed to have no utility for him now. By theaccident of being a bachelor, he was floating in society without anysoul-anchorage or shrine that he could call his own; and, for want ofa domestic centre round which honours might crystallize, they dispersedimpalpably without accumulating and adding weight to his materialwell-being. 

He would have gone on working with his chisel with just as much zest ifhis creations had been doomed to meet no mortal eye but his own. Thisindifference to the popular reception of his dream-figures lent him acurious artistic aplomb that carried him through the gusts of opinionwithout suffering them to disturb his inherent bias. 

The study of beauty was his only joy for years onward. In the streets hewould observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to expressto a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishingto express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner likea detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, intoshops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums--mostly, when atclose quarters, to be disappointed for his pains. 

In these professional beauty-chases he sometimes cast his eye acrossthe Thames to the wharves on the south side, and to that particularone whereat his father's tons of freestone were daily landed from theketches of the south coast. He could occasionally discern the whiteblocks lying there, vast cubes so persistently nibbled by his parentfrom his island rock in the English Channel, that it seemed as if intime it would be nibbled all away. 

One thing it passed him to understand: on what field of observation thepoets and philosophers based their assumption that the passion of lovewas intensest in youth and burnt lower as maturity advanced. It waspossibly because of his utter domestic loneliness that, duringthe productive interval which followed the first years of Marcia'sdeparture, when he was drifting along from five-and-twenty toeight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved with an ardour--though, itis true, also with a self-control--unknown to him when he was green injudgment. 

 * * *

His whimsical isle-bred fancy had grown to be such an emotion that theWell-Beloved--now again visible--was always existing somewhere near him. For months he would find her on the stage of a theatre: then she wouldflit away, leaving the poor, empty carcase that had lodged her to mummon as best it could without her--a sorry lay figure to his eyes, heapedwith imperfections and sullied with commonplace. She would reappear, itmight be, in an at first unnoticed lady, met at some fashionable eveningparty, exhibition, bazaar, or dinner; to flit from her, in turn, aftera few months, and stand as a graceful shop-girl at some large draperywarehouse into which he had strayed on an unaccustomed errand. Then shewould forsake this figure and redisclose herself in the guise of somepopular authoress, piano-player, or fiddleress, at whose shrine he wouldworship for perhaps a twelvemonth. Once she was a dancing-girl at theRoyal Moorish Palace of Varieties, though during her whole continuanceat that establishment he never once exchanged a word with her, nordid she first or last ever dream of his existence. He knew that aten-minutes' conversation in the wings with the substance would sendthe elusive haunter scurrying fearfully away into some other even lessaccessible mask-figure. 

She was a blonde, a brunette, tall, petite, svelte, straight-featured, full, curvilinear. Only one quality remained unalterable: herinstability of tenure. In Borne's phrase, nothing was permanent in herbut change. 

'It is odd, ' he said to himself, 'that this experience of mine, oridiosyncrasy, or whatever it is, which would be sheer waste of timefor other men, creates sober business for me. ' For all these dreams hetranslated into plaster, and found that by them he was hitting a publictaste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised. He was, in short, in danger of drifting away from a solid artistic reputation toa popularity which might possibly be as brief as it would be brilliantand exciting. 

'You will be caught some day, my friend, ' Somers would occasionallyobserve to him. 'I don't mean to say entangled in anythingdiscreditable, for I admit that you are in practice as ideal asin theory. I mean the process will be reversed. Some woman, whoseWell-Beloved flits about as yours does now, will catch your eye, andyou'll stick to her like a limpet, while she follows her Phantom andleaves you to ache as you will. '

'You may be right; but I think you are wrong, ' said Pierston. 'Asflesh she dies daily, like the Apostle's corporeal self; because when Igrapple with the reality she's no longer in it, so that I cannot stickto one incarnation if I would. '

'Wait till you are older, ' said Somers. 

PART SECOND -- A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY

 'Since Love will needs that I shall love, Of very force I must agree: And since no chance may it remove In wealth and in adversity I shall alway myself apply To serve and suffer patiently. ' --Sir T. Wyatt. 

2. I. THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT

In the course of these long years Pierston's artistic emotionswere abruptly suspended by the news of his father's sudden death atSandbourne, whither the stone-merchant had gone for a change of air bythe advice of his physician. 

Mr. Pierston, senior, it must be admitted, had been something miserlyin his home life, as Marcia had so rashly reminded his son. But he hadnever stinted Jocelyn. He had been rather a hard taskmaster, though as apaymaster trustworthy; a ready-money man, just and ungenerous. To everyone's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was oflarge amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on--much largerthan Jocelyn had ever regarded as possible. While the son had beenmodelling and chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial shapes, thefather had been persistently chiselling for half a century at thecrude original matter of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock in theChannel; and by the aid of his cranes and pulleys, his trolleys andhis boats, had sent off his spoil to all parts of Great Britain. When Jocelyn had wound up everything and disposed of the business, asrecommended by his father's will, he found himself enabled to add abouteighty thousand pounds to the twelve thousand which he already possessedfrom professional and other sources. 

After arranging for the sale of some freehold properties in the islandother than quarries--for he did not intend to reside there--he returnedto town. He often wondered what had become of Marcia. He had promisednever to trouble her; nor for a whole twenty years had he done so;though he had often sighed for her as a friend of sterling common sensein practical difficulties. 

Her parents were, he believed, dead; and she, he knew, had never goneback to the isle. Possibly she had formed some new tie abroad, and hadmade it next to impossible to discover her by her old name. 

A reposeful time ensued. Almost his first entry into society after hisfather's death occurred one evening, when, for want of knowing whatbetter to do, he responded to an invitation sent by one of the fewladies of rank whom he numbered among his friends, and set out in acab for the square wherein she lived during three or four months of theyear. 

The hansom turned the corner, and he obtained a raking view of thehouses along the north side, of which hers was one, with the familiarlinkman at the door. There were Chinese lanterns, too, on the balcony. He perceived in a moment that the customary 'small and early' receptionhad resolved itself on this occasion into something very like great andlate. He remembered that there had just been a political crisis, which accounted for the enlargement of the Countess of Channelcliffe'sassembly; for hers was one of the neutral or non-political houses atwhich party politics are more freely agitated than at the professedlyparty gatherings. 

There was such a string of carriages that Pierston did not wait to takehis turn at the door, but unobtrusively alighted some yards off andwalked forward. He had to pause a moment behind the wall of spectatorswhich barred his way, and as he paused some ladies in white cloakscrossed from their carriages to the door on the carpet laid for thepurpose. He had not seen their faces, nothing of them but vague forms, and yet he was suddenly seized with a presentiment. Its gist was thathe might be going to re-encounter the Well-Beloved that night: after herrecent long hiding she meant to reappear and intoxicate him. That liquidsparkle of her eye, that lingual music, that turn of the head, how wellhe knew it all, despite the many superficial changes, and how instantlyhe would recognize it under whatever complexion, contour, accent, height, or carriage that it might choose to masquerade!

Pierston's other conjecture, that the night was to be a lively politicalone, received confirmation as soon as he reached the hall, where asimmer of excitement was perceptible as surplus or overflow from abovedown the staircase--a feature which he had always noticed to be presentwhen any climax or sensation had been reached in the world of party andfaction. 

'And where have you been keeping yourself so long, young man?' said hishostess archly, when he had shaken hands with her. (Pierston was alwaysregarded as a young man, though he was now about forty. ) 'O yes, ofcourse, I remember, ' she added, looking serious in a moment at thoughtof his loss. The Countess was a woman with a good-natured mannerverging on that oft-claimed feminine quality, humour, and was quicklysympathetic. 

She then began to tell him of a scandal in the political side to whichshe nominally belonged, one that had come out of the present crisis;and that, as for herself, she had sworn to abjure politics for ever onaccount of it, so that he was to regard her forthwith as a moreneutral householder than ever. By this time some more people had surgedupstairs, and Pierston prepared to move on. 

'You are looking for somebody--I can see that, ' said she. 

'Yes--a lady, ' said Pierston. 

'Tell me her name, and I'll try to think if she's here. '

'I cannot; I don't know it, ' he said. 

'Indeed! What is she like?'

'I cannot describe her, not even her complexion or dress. '

Lady Channelcliffe looked a pout, as if she thought he were teasingher, and he moved on in the current. The fact was that, for a moment, Pierston fancied he had made the sensational discovery that the Onehe was in search of lurked in the person of the very hostess he hadconversed with, who was charming always, and particularly charmingto-night; he was just feeling an incipient consternation at thepossibility of such a jade's trick in his Beloved, who had once beforechosen to embody herself as a married woman, though, happily, atthat time with no serious results. However, he felt that he had beenmistaken, and that the fancy had been solely owing to the highly chargedelectric condition in which he had arrived by reason of his recentisolation. 

The whole set of rooms formed one great utterance of the opinions of thehour. The gods of party were present with their embattled seraphim, butthe brilliancy of manner and form in the handling of public questionswas only less conspicuous than the paucity of original ideas. Noprinciples of wise government had place in any mind, a blunt and jollypersonalism as to the Ins and Outs animating all. But Jocelyn's interestdid not run in this stream: he was like a stone in a purling brook, waiting for some peculiar floating object to be brought towards him andto stick upon his mental surface. 

Thus looking for the next new version of the fair figure, he did notconsider at the moment, though he had done so at other times, that thispresentiment of meeting her was, of all presentiments, just the sort ofone to work out its own fulfilment. 

He looked for her in the knot of persons gathered round a past PrimeMinister who was standing in the middle of the largest room discoursingin the genial, almost jovial, manner natural to him at these times. Thetwo or three ladies forming his audience had been joined by anotherin black and white, and it was on her that Pierston's attention wasdirected, as well as the great statesman's, whose first sheer gazeat her, expressing 'Who are you?' almost audibly, changed into aninterested, listening look as the few words she spoke were uttered--forthe Minister differed from many of his standing in being extremelycareful not to interrupt a timid speaker, giving way in an instant ifanybody else began with him. Nobody knew better than himself that allmay learn, and his manner was that of an unconceited man who could catchan idea readily, even if he could not undertake to create one. 

The lady told her little story--whatever it was Jocelyn could not hearit--the statesman laughed: 'Haugh-haugh-haugh!'

The lady blushed. Jocelyn, wrought up to a high tension by the aforesaidpresentiment that his Shelleyan 'One-shape-of-many-names' was about toreappear, paid little heed to the others, watching for a full view ofthe lady who had won his attention. 

That lady remained for the present partially screened by her neighbours. A diversion was caused by Lady Channelcliffe bringing up somebody topresent to the ex-Minister; the ladies got mixed, and Jocelyn lost sightof the one whom he was beginning to suspect as the stealthily returnedabsentee. 

He looked for her in a kindly young lady of the house, his hostess'srelation, who appeared to more advantage that night than she had everdone before--in a sky-blue dress, which had nothing between it and thefair skin of her neck, lending her an unusually soft and sylph-likeaspect. She saw him, and they converged. Her look of 'What do you thinkof me NOW?' was suggested, he knew, by the thought that the last timethey met she had appeared under the disadvantage of mourning clothes, ona wet day in a country-house, where everybody was cross. 

'I have some new photographs, and I want you to tell me whether they aregood, ' she said. 'Mind you are to tell me truly, and no favour. '

She produced the pictures from an adjoining drawer, and they sat downtogether upon an ottoman for the purpose of examination. The portraits, taken by the last fashionable photographer, were very good, and hetold her so; but as he spoke and compared them his mind was fixed onsomething else than the mere judgment. He wondered whether the elusiveone were indeed in the frame of this girl. 

He looked up at her. To his surprise, her mind, too, was on otherthings bent than on the pictures. Her eyes were glancing away to distantpeople, she was apparently considering the effect she was producing uponthem by this cosy tete-a-tete with Pierston, and upon one in particular, a man of thirty, of military appearance, whom Pierston did not know. Quite convinced now that no phantom belonging to him was contained inthe outlines of the present young lady, he could coolly survey her as heresponded. They were both doing the same thing--each was pretending tobe deeply interested in what the other was talking about, the attentionof the two alike flitting away to other corners of the room even whenthe very point of their discourse was pending. 

No, he had not seen Her yet. He was not going to see her, apparently, to-night; she was scared away by the twanging political atmosphere. But he still moved on searchingly, hardly heeding certain spectral impsother than Aphroditean, who always haunted these places, and jeeringlypointed out that under the white hair of this or that ribanded oldman, with a forehead grown wrinkled over treaties which had swayed thefortunes of Europe, with a voice which had numbered sovereigns among itsrespectful listeners, might be a heart that would go inside a nut-shell;that beneath this or that white rope of pearl and pink bosom, might liethe half-lung which had, by hook or by crook, to sustain its possessorabove-ground till the wedding-day. 

At that moment he encountered his amiable host, and almostsimultaneously caught sight of the lady who had at first attracted himand then had disappeared. Their eyes met, far off as they were from eachother. Pierston laughed inwardly: it was only in ticklish excitement asto whether this was to prove a true trouvaille, and with no instinctto mirth; for when under the eyes of his Jill-o'-the-Wisp he was moreinclined to palpitate like a sheep in a fair. 

However, for the minute he had to converse with his host, LordChannelcliffe, and almost the first thing that friend said to him was:'Who is that pretty woman in the black dress with the white fluff aboutit and the pearl necklace?'

'I don't know, ' said Jocelyn, with incipient jealousy: 'I was just goingto ask the same thing. '

'O, we shall find out presently, I suppose. I daresay my wife knows. 'They had parted, when a hand came upon his shoulder. Lord Channelcliffehad turned back for an instant: 'I find she is the granddaughter of myfather's old friend, the last Lord Hengistbury. Her name is Mrs. --Mrs. Pine-Avon; she lost her husband two or three years ago, very shortlyafter their marriage. '

Lord Channelcliffe became absorbed into some adjoining dignitary of theChurch, and Pierston was left to pursue his quest alone. A young friendof his--the Lady Mabella Buttermead, who appeared in a cloud of muslinand was going on to a ball--had been brought against him by the tide. A warm-hearted, emotional girl was Lady Mabella, who laughed at thehumorousness of being alive. She asked him whither he was bent, and hetold her. 

'O yes, I know her very well!' said Lady Mabella eagerly. 'She toldme one day that she particularly wished to meet you. Poor thing--sosad--she lost her husband. Well, it was a long time ago now, certainly. Women ought not to marry and lay themselves open to such catastrophes, ought they, Mr. Pierston? _I_ never shall. I am determined never to runsuch a risk! Now, do you think I shall?'

'Marry? O no; never, ' said Pierston drily. 

'That's very satisfying. ' But Mabella was scarcely comfortable under hisanswer, even though jestingly returned, and she added: 'But sometimes Ithink I may, just for the fun of it. Now we'll steer across to her, andcatch her, and I'll introduce you. But we shall never get to her at thisrate!'

'Never, unless we adopt "the ugly rush, " like the citizens who followthe Lord Mayor's Show. '

They talked, and inched towards the desired one, who, as she discoursedwith a neighbour, seemed to be of those--

 'Female forms, whose gestures beam with mind, '

seen by the poet in his Vision of the Golden City of Islam. 

Their progress was continually checked. Pierston was as he had sometimesseemed to be in a dream, unable to advance towards the object of pursuitunless he could have gathered up his feet into the air. After tenminutes given to a preoccupied regard of shoulder-blades, back hair, glittering headgear, neck-napes, moles, hairpins, pearl-powder, pimples, minerals cut into facets of many-coloured rays, necklace-clasps, fans, stays, the seven styles of elbow and arm, the thirteen varieties ofear; and by using the toes of his dress-boots as coulters with whichhe ploughed his way and that of Lady Mabella in the direction they wereaiming at, he drew near to Mrs. Pine-Avon, who was drinking a cup of teain the back drawing-room. 

'My dear Nichola, we thought we should never get to you, because it isworse to-night, owing to these dreadful politics! But we've done it. 'And she proceeded to tell her friend of Pierston's existence hard by. 

It seemed that the widow really did wish to know him, and thatLady Mabella Buttermead had not indulged in one of the too frequentinventions in that kind. When the youngest of the trio had made the pairacquainted with each other she left them to talk to a younger man thanthe sculptor. 

Mrs. Pine-Avon's black velvets and silks, with their whiteaccompaniments, finely set off the exceeding fairness of her neck andshoulders, which, though unwhitened artificially, were without a speckor blemish of the least degree. The gentle, thoughtful creature she hadlooked from a distance she now proved herself to be; she held also soundrather than current opinions on the plastic arts, and was the firstintellectual woman he had seen there that night, except one or two asaforesaid. 

They soon became well acquainted, and at a pause in their conversationnoticed the fresh excitement caused by the arrival of some late comerswith more news. The latter had been brought by a rippling, bright-eyedlady in black, who made the men listen to her, whether they would or no. 

'I am glad I am an outsider, ' said Jocelyn's acquaintance, now seated ona sofa beside which he was standing. 'I wouldn't be like my cousin, overthere, for the world. She thinks her husband will be turned out at thenext election, and she's quite wild. '

'Yes; it is mostly the women who are the gamesters; the men only thecards. The pity is that politics are looked on as being a game forpoliticians, just as cricket is a game for cricketers; not as theserious duties of political trustees. '

'How few of us ever think or feel that "the nation of every countrydwells in the cottage, " as somebody says!'

'Yes. Though I wonder to hear you quote that. '

'O--I am of no party, though my relations are. There can be onlyone best course at all times, and the wisdom of the nation should bedirected to finding it, instead of zigzagging in two courses, accordingto the will of the party which happens to have the upper hand. '

Having started thus, they found no difficulty in agreeing on manypoints. When Pierston went downstairs from that assembly at a quarter toone, and passed under the steaming nostrils of an ambassador's horses toa hansom which waited for him against the railing of the square, he hadan impression that the Beloved had re-emerged from the shadows, withoutany hint or initiative from him--to whom, indeed, such re-emergence wasan unquestionably awkward thing. 

In this he was aware, however, that though it might be now, asheretofore, the Loved who danced before him, it was the Goddess behindher who pulled the string of that Jumping Jill. He had lately beentrying his artist hand again on the Dea's form in every conceivablephase and mood. He had become a one-part man--a presenter of her only. But his efforts had resulted in failures. In her implacable vanity shemight be punishing him anew for presenting her so deplorably. 

2. II. SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES

He could not forget Mrs. Pine-Avon's eyes, though he remembered nothingof her other facial details. They were round, inquiring, luminous. Howthat chestnut hair of hers had shone: it required no tiara to setit off, like that of the dowager he had seen there, who had put tenthousand pounds upon her head to make herself look worse than she wouldhave appeared with the ninepenny muslin cap of a servant woman. 

Now the question was, ought he to see her again? He had his doubts. But, unfortunately for discretion, just when he was coming out of therooms he had encountered an old lady of seventy, his friend Mrs. Brightwalton--the Honourable Mrs. Brightwalton--and she had hastilyasked him to dinner for the day after the morrow, stating in the honestway he knew so well that she had heard he was out of town, or she wouldhave asked him two or three weeks ago. Now, of all social things thatPierston liked it was to be asked to dinner off-hand, as a stopgap inplace of some bishop, earl, or Under-Secretary who couldn't come, andwhen the invitation was supplemented by the tidings that the ladywho had so impressed him was to be one of the guests, he had promisedinstantly. 

At the dinner, he took down Mrs. Pine-Avon upon his arm and talked tonobody else during the meal. Afterwards they kept apart awhile in thedrawing-room for form's sake; but eventually gravitated together again, and finished the evening in each other's company. When, shortly aftereleven, he came away, he felt almost certain that within those luminousgrey eyes the One of his eternal fidelity had verily taken lodgings--andfor a long lease. But this was not all. At parting, he had, almostinvoluntarily, given her hand a pressure of a peculiar and indescribablekind; a little response from her, like a mere pulsation, of thesame sort, told him that the impression she had made upon him wasreciprocated. She was, in a word, willing to go on. 

But was he able?

There had not been much harm in the flirtation thus far; but did sheknow his history, the curse upon his nature?--that he was the WanderingJew of the love-world, how restlessly ideal his fancies were, how theartist in him had consumed the wooer, how he was in constant dread lesthe should wrong some woman twice as good as himself by seeming to meanwhat he fain would mean but could not, how useless he was likely to befor practical steps towards householding, though he was all the whilepining for domestic life. He was now over forty, she was probablythirty; and he dared not make unmeaning love with the carelessselfishness of a younger man. It was unfair to go further withouttelling her, even though, hitherto, such explicitness had not beenabsolutely demanded. 

He determined to call immediately on the New Incarnation. 

She lived not far from the long, fashionable Hamptonshire Square, andhe went thither with expectations of having a highly emotional time, atleast. But somehow the very bell-pull seemed cold, although she had soearnestly asked him to come. 

As the house spoke, so spoke the occupant, much to the astonishment ofthe sculptor. The doors he passed through seemed as if they had not beenopened for a month; and entering the large drawing-room, he beheld, inan arm-chair, in the far distance, a lady whom he journeyed acrossthe carpet to reach, and ultimately did reach. To be sure it was Mrs. Nichola Pine-Avon, but frosted over indescribably. Raising her eyes in aslightly inquiring manner from the book she was reading, she leant backin the chair, as if soaking herself in luxurious sensations whichhad nothing to do with him, and replied to his greeting with a fewcommonplace words. 

The unfortunate Jocelyn, though recuperative to a degree, was at firstterribly upset by this reception. He had distinctly begun to loveNichola, and he felt sick and almost resentful. But happily hisaffection was incipient as yet, and a sudden sense of the ridiculousin his own position carried him to the verge of risibility during thescene. She signified a chair, and began the critical study of some ringsshe wore. 

They talked over the day's news, and then an organ began to grindoutside. The tune was a rollicking air he had heard at some music-hall;and, by way of a diversion, he asked her if she knew the composition. 

'No, I don't!' she replied. 

'Now, I'll tell you all about it, ' said he gravely. 'It is based on asound old melody called "The Jilt's Hornpipe. " Just as they turn Madeirainto port in the space of a single night, so this old air has beentaken and doctored, and twisted about, and brought out as a new popularditty. '

'Indeed!'

'If you are in the habit of going much to the music-halls or theburlesque theatres--'

'Yes?'

'You would find this is often done, with excellent effect. '

She thawed a little, and then they went on to talk about her house, which had been newly painted, and decorated with greenish-blue satin upto the height of a person's head--an arrangement that somewhat improvedher slightly faded, though still pretty, face, and was helped by theawnings over the windows. 

'Yes; I have had my house some years, ' she observed complacently, 'and Ilike it better every year. '

'Don't you feel lonely in it sometimes?'

'O never!'

However, before he rose she grew friendly to some degree, and when heleft, just after the arrival of three opportune young ladies she seemedregretful. She asked him to come again; and he thought he would tellthe truth. 'No: I shall not care to come again, ' he answered, in a toneinaudible to the young ladies. 

She followed him to the door. 'What an uncivil thing to say!' shemurmured in surprise. 

'It is rather uncivil. Good-bye, ' said Pierston. 

As a punishment she did not ring the bell, but left him to find his wayout as he could. 'Now what the devil this means I cannot tell, ' he saidto himself, reflecting stock-still for a moment on the stairs. And yetthe meaning was staring him in the face. 

Meanwhile one of the three young ladies had said, 'What interestingman was that, with his lovely head of hair? I saw him at LadyChannelcliffe's the other night. '

'Jocelyn Pierston. '

'O, Nichola, that IS too bad! To let him go in that shabby way, when Iwould have given anything to know him! I have wanted to know him eversince I found out how much his experiences had dictated his statuary, and I discovered them by seeing in a Jersey paper of the marriage ofa person supposed to be his wife, who ran off with him many years ago, don't you know, and then wouldn't marry him, in obedience to some novelsocial principles she had invented for herself. '

'O! didn't he marry her?' said Mrs. Pine-Avon, with a start. 'Why, Iheard only yesterday that he did, though they have lived apart eversince. '

'Quite a mistake, ' said the young lady. 'How I wish I could run afterhim!'

But Jocelyn was receding from the pretty widow's house with longstrides. He went out very little during the next few days, but about aweek later he kept an engagement to dine with Lady Iris Speedwell, whomhe never neglected, because she was the brightest hostess in London. 

By some accident he arrived rather early. Lady Iris had left thedrawing-room for a moment to see that all was right in the dining-room, and when he was shown in there stood alone in the lamplight NicholaPine-Avon. She had been the first arrival. He had not in the leastexpected to meet her there, further than that, in a general sense, atLady Iris's you expected to meet everybody. 

She had just come out of the cloak-room, and was so tender and evenapologetic that he had not the heart to be other than friendly. As theother guests dropped in, the pair retreated into a shady corner, and shetalked beside him till all moved off for the eating and drinking. 

He had not been appointed to take her across to the dining-room, but atthe table found her exactly opposite. She looked very charming betweenthe candles, and then suddenly it dawned upon him that her previousmanner must have originated in some false report about Marcia, of whoseexistence he had not heard for years. Anyhow, he was not disposed toresent an inexplicability in womankind, having found that it usuallyarose independently of fact, reason, probability, or his own deserts. 

So he dined on, catching her eyes and the few pretty words she madeopportunity to project across the table to him now and then. He wascourteously responsive only, but Mrs. Pine-Avon herself distinctly madeadvances. He re-admired her, while at the same time her conduct in herown house had been enough to check his confidence--enough even to makehim doubt if the Well-Beloved really resided within those contours, or had ever been more than the most transitory passenger through thatinteresting and accomplished soul. 

He was pondering this question, yet growing decidedly moved by theplayful pathos of her attitude when, by chance, searching his pocketfor his handkerchief, something crackled, and he felt there an unopenedletter, which had arrived at the moment he was leaving his house, and hehad slipped into his coat to read in the cab as he drove along. Pierstondrew it sufficiently forth to observe by the post-mark that it came fromhis natal isle. Having hardly a correspondent in that part of the worldnow he began to conjecture on the possible sender. 

The lady on his right, whom he had brought in, was a leading actress ofthe town--indeed, of the United Kingdom and America, for that matter--acreature in airy clothing, translucent, like a balsam or sea-anemone, without shadows, and in movement as responsive as some highlylubricated, many-wired machine, which, if one presses a particularspring, flies open and reveals its works. The spring in the presentcase was the artistic commendation she deserved and craved. At thisparticular moment she was engaged with the man on her own right, arepresentative of Family, who talked positively and hollowly, as ifshouting down a vista of five hundred years from the Feudal past. Thelady on Jocelyn's left, wife of a Lord Justice of Appeal, was in likemanner talking to her companion on the outer side; so that, for thetime, he was left to himself. He took advantage of the opportunity, drewout his letter, and read it as it lay upon his napkin, nobody observinghim, so far as he was aware. 

It came from the wife of one of his father's former workmen, and wasconcerning her son, whom she begged Jocelyn to recommend as candidatefor some post in town that she wished him to fill. But the end of theletter was what arrested him--

'You will be sorry to hear, Sir, that dear little Avice Caro, as we usedto call her in her maiden days, is dead. She married her cousin, if youdo mind, and went away from here for a good-few years, but was lefta widow, and came back a twelvemonth ago; since when she faltered andfaltered, and now she is gone. '

2. III. SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST

By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner-table recededinto the background, behind the vivid presentment of Avice Caro, andthe old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia which were inseparable from herpersonality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the boldstony promontory and the incoming West Sea. The handsome marchioness ingeranium-red and diamonds, who was visible to him on his host's righthand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sunsets that he hadwatched so many times over Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in theforeground. Between his eyes and the judge who sat next to Nichola, witha chin so raw that he must have shaved every quarter of an hour duringthe day, intruded the face of Avice, as she had glanced at him in theirlast parting. The crannied features of the evergreen society lady, who, if she had been a few years older, would have been as old-fashioned asher daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty quarries of his and Avice'sparents, down which he had clambered with Avice hundreds of times. Theivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks, and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of thecliff-built Castle, the tufts of seaweed, and the lighthouses on theisle. The salt airs of the ocean killed the smell of the viands, andinstead of the clatter of voices came the monologue of the tide off theBeal. 

More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance which shehad latterly acquired; she became a woman of his acquaintance with nodistinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies of fleshand bone merely, a person of lines and surfaces; she was a language inliving cipher no more. 

When the ladies had withdrawn it was just the same. The soul ofAvice--the only woman he had NEVER loved of those who had lovedhim--surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew near to him in the personof one of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there wasonly one painter for Jocelyn--his own memory. All that was eminentin European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless andunassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds ofliving men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilledthe interest of discourse with such a king of operators. 

Reaching the drawing-room he talked to his hostess. Though she hadentertained three-and-twenty guests at her table that night she hadknown not only what every one of them was saying and doing throughoutthe repast, but what every one was thinking. So, being an old friend, she said quietly, 'What has been troubling you? Something has, I know. Ihave been travelling over your face and have seen it there. '

Nothing could less express the meaning his recent news had for him thana statement of its facts. He told of the opening of the letter and thediscovery of the death of an old acquaintance. 

'The only woman whom I never rightly valued, I may almost say!' headded; 'and therefore the only one I shall ever regret!'

Whether she considered it a sufficient explanation or not the woman ofexperiences accepted it as such. She was the single lady of his circlewhom nothing erratic in his doings could surprise, and he often gave herstray ends of his confidence thus with perfect safety. 

He did not go near Mrs. Pine-Avon again; he could not: and on leavingthe house walked abstractedly along the streets till he found himself athis own door. In his room he sat down, and placing his hands behind hishead thought his thoughts anew. 

At one side of the room stood an escritoire, and from a lower drawertherein he took out a small box tightly nailed down. He forced the coverwith the poker. The box contained a variety of odds and ends, whichPierston had thrown into it from time to time in past years for futuresorting--an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholymass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers, and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in theprimitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in the commonestway. 

It was Avice Caro, as she had appeared during the summer month or twowhich he had spent with her on the island twenty years before this time, her young lips pursed up, her hands meekly folded. The effect of theglass was to lend to the picture much of the softness characteristic ofthe original. He remembered when it was taken--during one afternoonthey had spent together at a neighbouring watering-place, when he hadsuggested her sitting to a touting artist on the sands, there beingnothing else for them to do. A long contemplation of the likenesscompleted in his emotions what the letter had begun. He loved the womandead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life. He had thoughtof her but at distant intervals during the twenty years since thatparting occurred, and only as somebody he could have wedded. Yet now thetimes of youthful friendship with her, in which he had learnt everynote of her innocent nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionateattachment, embittered by regret beyond words. 

That kiss which had offended his dignity, which she had so childishlygiven him before her consciousness of womanhood had been awakened; whathe would have offered to have a quarter of it now!

Pierston was almost angry with himself for his feelings of this night, so unreasonably, motivelessly strong were they towards the lost youngplaymate. 'How senseless of me!' he said, as he lay in his lonely bed. She had been another man's wife almost the whole time since he wasestranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did notmake his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almostradiant, purity of this newsprung affection for a flown spirit forbadehim to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefiedand refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before. 

The next afternoon he went down to the club; not his large club, wherethe men hardly spoke to each other, but the homely one where theytold stories of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess amongthemselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that suchsecrets would go no further. But he could not tell this. So volatile andintangible was the story that to convey it in words would have been ashard as to cage a perfume. 

They observed his altered manner, and said he was in love. Pierstonadmitted that he was; and there it ended. When he reached home he lookedout of his bed-room window, and began to consider in what direction fromwhere he stood that darling little figure lay. It was straight acrossthere, under the young pale moon. The symbol signified well. Thedivinity of the silver bow was not more excellently pure than she, thelost, had been. Under that moon was the island of Ancient Slingers, andon the island a house, framed from mullions to chimney-top like theisle itself, of stone. Inside the window, the moonlight irradiating herwinding-sheet, lay Avice, reached only by the faint noises inherent inthe isle; the tink-tink of the chisels in the quarries, the surging ofthe tides in the Bay, and the muffled grumbling of the currents in thenever-pacified Race. 

He began to divine the truth. Avice, the departed one, though she hadcome short of inspiring a passion, had yet possessed a ground-qualityabsent from her rivals, without which it seemed that a fixed andfull-rounded constancy to a woman could not flourish in him. Like hisown, her family had been islanders for centuries--from Norman, Anglian, Roman, Balearic-British times. Hence in her nature, as in his, was somemysterious ingredient sucked from the isle; otherwise a racial instinctnecessary to the absolute unison of a pair. Thus, though he mightnever love a woman of the island race, for lack in her of the desiredrefinement, he could not love long a kimberlin--a woman other than ofthe island race, for her lack of this groundwork of character. 

Such was Pierston's view of things. Another fancy of his, an artist'ssuperstition merely, may be mentioned. The Caros, like some other localfamilies, suggested a Roman lineage, more or less grafted on the stockof the Slingers. Their features recalled those of the Italian peasantryto any one as familiar as he was with them; and there were evidencesthat the Roman colonists had been populous and long-abiding in and nearthis corner of Britain. Tradition urged that a temple to Venus oncestood at the top of the Roman road leading up into the isle; andpossibly one to the love-goddess of the Slingers antedated this. What sonatural as that the true star of his soul would be found nowhere but inone of the old island breed?

After dinner his old friend Somers came in to smoke, and when they hadtalked a little while Somers alluded casually to some place at whichthey would meet on the morrow. 

'I sha'n't be there, ' said Pierston. 

'But you promised?'

'Yes. But I shall be at the island--looking at a dead woman's grave. 'As he spoke his eyes turned, and remained fixed on a table near. Somersfollowed the direction of his glance to a photograph on a stand. 

'Is that she?' he asked. 

'Yes. '

'Rather a bygone affair, then?'

Pierston acknowledged it. 'She's the only sweetheart I ever slighted, Alfred, ' he said. 'Because she's the only one I ought to have cared for. That's just the fool I have always been. '

'But if she's dead and buried, you can go to her grave at any time aswell as now, to keep up the sentiment. '

'I don't know that she's buried. '

'But to-morrow--the Academy night! Of all days why go then?'

'I don't care about the Academy. '

'Pierston--you are our only inspired sculptor. You are our Praxiteles, or rather our Lysippus. You are almost the only man of this generationwho has been able to mould and chisel forms living enough to draw theidle public away from the popular paintings into the usually desertedLecture-room, and people who have seen your last pieces of stuff saythere has been nothing like them since sixteen hundred and--since thesculptors 'of the great race' lived and died--whenever that was. Well, then, for the sake of others you ought not to rush off to thatGod-forgotten sea-rock just when you are wanted in town, all for a womanyou last saw a hundred years ago. '

'No--it was only nineteen and three quarters, ' replied his friend, withabstracted literalness. He went the next morning. 

Since the days of his youth a railway had been constructed along thepebble bank, so that, except when the rails were washed away by thetides, which was rather often, the peninsula was quickly accessible. Attwo o'clock in the afternoon he was rattled along by this new means oflocomotion, under the familiar monotonous line of bran-coloured stones, and he soon emerged from the station, which stood as a strange exoticamong the black lerrets, the ruins of the washed-away village, andthe white cubes of oolite, just come to view after burial throughunreckonable geologic years. 

In entering upon the pebble beach the train had passed close to theruins of Henry the Eighth's or Sandsfoot Castle, whither Avice was tohave accompanied him on the night of his departure. Had she appeared theprimitive betrothal, with its natural result, would probably have takenplace; and, as no islander had ever been known to break that compact, she would have become his wife. 

Ascending the steep incline to where the quarrymen were chipping justas they had formerly done, and within sound of the great stone saws, helooked southward towards the Beal. 

The level line of the sea horizon rose above the surface of the isle, aruffled patch in mid-distance as usual marking the Race, whence many aLycidas had gone

 'Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world;'

but had not been blest with a poet as a friend. Against the stretch ofwater, where a school of mackerel twinkled in the afternoon light, wasdefined, in addition to the distant lighthouse, a church with its tower, standing about a quarter of a mile off, near the edge of the cliff. Thechurchyard gravestones could be seen in profile against the same vastspread of watery babble and unrest. 

Among the graves moved the form of a man clothed in a white sheet, whichthe wind blew and flapped coldly every now and then. Near him moved sixmen bearing a long box, and two or three persons in black followed. Thecoffin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the isle, while around andbeneath it the flashing lights from the sea and the school ofmackerel were reflected; a fishing-boat, far out in the Channel, beingmomentarily discernible under the coffin also. 

The procession wandered round to a particular corner, and halted, andpaused there a long while in the wind, the sea behind them, the surpliceof the priest still blowing. Jocelyn stood with his hat off: he waspresent, though he was a quarter of a mile off; and he seemed to hearthe words that were being said, though nothing but the wind was audible. 

He instinctively knew that it was none other than Avice whom he wasseeing interred; HIS Avice, as he now began presumptuously to callher. Presently the little group withdrew from before the sea-shine, anddisappeared. 

He felt himself unable to go further in that direction, and turningaside went aimlessly across the open land, visiting the various spotsthat he had formerly visited with her. But, as if tethered to thechurchyard by a cord, he was still conscious of being at the end ofa radius whose pivot was the grave of Avice Caro; and as the duskthickened he closed upon his centre and entered the churchyard gate. 

Not a soul was now within the precincts. The grave, newly shaped, waseasily discoverable behind the church, and when the same young moonarose which he had observed the previous evening from his windowin London he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the mourners andbearers. The breeze had fallen to a calm with the setting of the sun:the lighthouse had opened its glaring eye, and, disinclined to leavea spot sublimed both by early association and present regret, he movedback to the church-wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upona window-sill facing the grave. 

2. IV. SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE

The lispings of the sea beneath the cliffs were all the sounds thatreached him, for the quarries were silent now. How long he sat herelonely and thinking he did not know. Neither did he know, though he feltdrowsy, whether inexpectant sadness--that gentle soporific--lulled himinto a short sleep, so that he lost count of time and consciousness ofincident. But during some minute or minutes he seemed to see Avice Caroherself, bending over and then withdrawing from her grave in the lightof the moon. 

She seemed not a year older, not a digit less slender, not a line moreangular than when he had parted from her twenty years earlier, in thelane hard by. A renascent reasoning on the impossibility of such aphenomenon as this being more than a dream-fancy roused him with a startfrom his heaviness. 

'I must have been asleep, ' he said. 

Yet she had seemed so real. Pierston however dismissed the strangeimpression, arguing that even if the information sent him of Avice'sdeath should be false--a thing incredible--that sweet friend of hisyouth, despite the transfiguring effects of moonlight, would not nowlook the same as she had appeared nineteen or twenty years ago. Werewhat he saw substantial flesh, it must have been some other person thanAvice Caro. 

Having satisfied his sentiment by coming to the graveside there wasnothing more for him to do in the island, and he decided to return toLondon that night. But some time remaining still on his hands, Jocelyn by a natural instinct turned his feet in the direction ofEast Quarriers, the village of his birth and of hers. Passing themarket-square he pursued the arm of road to 'Sylvania Castle, ' a privatemansion of comparatively modern date, in whose grounds stood the singleplantation of trees of which the isle could boast. The cottages extendedclose to the walls of the enclosure, and one of the last of thesedwellings had been Avice's, in which, as it was her freehold, shepossibly had died. 

To reach it he passed the gates of 'Sylvania, ' and observed above thelawn wall a board announcing that the house was to be let furnished. Afew steps further revealed the cottage which with its quaint and massivestone features of two or three centuries' antiquity, was capableeven now of longer resistance to the rasp of Time than ordinary newerections. His attention was drawn to the window, still unblinded, though a lamp lit the room. He stepped back against the wall opposite, and gazed in. 

At a table covered with a white cloth a young woman stood puttingtea-things away into a corner-cupboard. She was in all respects theAvice he had lost, the girl he had seen in the churchyard and hadfancied to be the illusion of a dream. And though there was this timeno doubt about her reality, the isolation of her position in the silenthouse lent her a curiously startling aspect. Divining the explanation hewaited for footsteps, and in a few moments a quarryman passed him on hisjourney home. Pierston inquired of the man concerning the spectacle. 

'O yes, sir; that's poor Mrs. Caro's only daughter, and it must belonely for her there to-night, poor maid! Yes, good-now; she's the verydaps of her mother--that's what everybody says. '

'But how does she come to be so lonely?'

'One of her brothers went to sea and was drowned, and t'other is inAmerica. '

'They were quarryowners at one time?'

The quarryman 'pitched his nitch, ' and explained to the seeming strangerthat there had been three families thereabouts in the stone trade, whohad got much involved with each other in the last generation. They werethe Bencombs, the Pierstons, and the Caros. The Bencombs strained theirutmost to outlift the other two, and partially succeeded. They grewenormously rich, sold out, and disappeared altogether from the islandwhich had been their making. The Pierstons kept a dogged middle course, throve without show or noise, and also retired in their turn. The Caroswere pulled completely down in the competition with the other two, andwhen Widow Caro's daughter married her cousin Jim Caro, he tried toregain for the family its original place in the three-cornered struggle. He took contracts at less than he could profit by, speculated more andmore, till at last the crash came; he was sold up, went away, and lateron came back to live in this little cottage, which was his wife's byinheritance. There he remained till his death; and now his widow wasgone. Hardships had helped on her end. 

The quarryman proceeded on his way, and Pierston, deeply remorseful, knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it, lamp in hand. 

'Avice!' he said tenderly; 'Avice Caro!' even now unable to get over thestrange feeling that he was twenty years younger, addressing Avice theforsaken. 

'Ann, sir, ' said she. 

'Ah, your name is not the same as your mother's!'

'My second name is. And my surname. Poor mother married her cousin. '

'As everybody does here. .. . Well, Ann or otherwise, you are Avice to me. And you have lost her now?'

'I have, sir. '

She spoke in the very same sweet voice that he had listened to a scoreof years before, and bent eyes of the same familiar hazel inquiringlyupon him. 

'I knew your mother at one time, ' he said; 'and learning of her deathand burial I took the liberty of calling upon you. You will forgive astranger doing that?'

'Yes, ' she said dispassionately, and glancing round the room: 'This wasmother's own house, and now it is mine. I am sorry not to be in mourningon the night of her funeral, but I have just been to put some flowers onher grave, and I took it off afore going that the damp mid not spoil thecrape. You see, she was bad a long time, and I have to be careful, anddo washing and ironing for a living. She hurt her side with wringing upthe large sheets she had to wash for the Castle folks here. '

'I hope you won't hurt yourself doing it, my dear. '

'O no, that I sha'n't! There's Charl Woollat, and Sammy Scribben, andTed Gibsey, and lots o' young chaps; they'll wring anything for me ifthey happen to come along. But I can hardly trust 'em. Sam Scribbent'other day twisted a linen tablecloth into two pieces, for all theworld as if it had been a pipe-light. They never know when to stop intheir wringing. '

The voice truly was his Avice's; but Avice the Second was clearly morematter-of-fact, unreflecting, less cultivated than her mother had been. This Avice would never recite poetry from any platform, local or other, with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. There was a disappointmentin his recognition of this; yet she touched him as few had done: hecould not bear to go away. 'How old are you?' he asked. 

'Going in nineteen. '

It was about the age of her double, Avice the First, when he and she hadstrolled together over the cliffs during the engagement. But he was nowforty, if a day. She before him was an uneducated laundress, and he wasa sculptor and a Royal Academician, with a fortune and a reputation. Yetwhy was it an unpleasant sensation to him just then to recollect that hewas two score?

He could find no further excuse for remaining, and having stillhalf-an-hour to spare he went round by the road to the other or westside of the last-century 'Sylvania Castle, ' and came to the furthesthouse out there on the cliff. It was his early home. Used in the summeras a lodging-house for visitors, it now stood empty and silent, theevening wind swaying the euonymus and tamarisk boughs in the front--theonly evergreen shrubs that could weather the whipping salt gales whichsped past the walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the familiarlightship winked from the sandbank, and all at once there came to him awild wish--that, instead of having an artist's reputation, he could beliving here an illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a fair way ofwinning, the pretty laundress in the cottage hard by. 

2. V. THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE

Having returned to London he mechanically resumed his customary life;but he was not really living there. The phantom of Avice, now grown tobe warm flesh and blood, held his mind afar. He thought of nothingbut the isle, and Avice the Second dwelling therein--inhaling its saltbreath, stroked by its singing rains and by the haunted atmosphere ofRoman Venus about and around the site of her perished temple there. Thevery defects in the country girl became charms as viewed from town. 

Nothing now pleased him so much as to spend that portion of theafternoon which he devoted to out-door exercise, in haunting thepurlieus of the wharves along the Thames, where the stone of his nativerock was unshipped from the coasting-craft that had brought it thither. He would pass inside the great gates of these landing-places on theright or left bank, contemplate the white cubes and oblongs, imbibetheir associations, call up the genius loci whence they came, and almostforget that he was in London. 

One afternoon he was walking away from the mud-splashed entrance to oneof the wharves, when his attention was drawn to a female form on theopposite side of the way, going towards the spot he had just left. Shewas somewhat small, slight, and graceful; her attire alone wouldhave been enough to attract him, being simple and countrifiedto picturesqueness; but he was more than attracted by her strongresemblance to Avice Caro the younger--Ann Avice, as she had said shewas called. 

Before she had receded a hundred yards he felt certain that it was Aviceindeed; and his unifying mood of the afternoon was now so intense thatthe lost and the found Avice seemed essentially the same person. Theirexternal likeness to each other--probably owing to the cousinshipbetween the elder and her husband--went far to nourish the fantasy. Hehastily turned, and rediscovered the girl among the pedestrians. Shekept on her way to the wharf, where, looking inquiringly around her fora few seconds, with the manner of one unaccustomed to the locality, sheopened the gate and disappeared. 

Pierston also went up to the gate and entered. She had crossed to thelanding-place, beyond which a lumpy craft lay moored. Drawing nearer, he discovered her to be engaged in conversation with the skipper and anelderly woman--both come straight from the oolitic isle, as was apparentin a moment from their accent. Pierston felt no hesitation in makinghimself known as a native, the ruptured engagement between Avice'smother and himself twenty years before having been known to few or nonenow living. 

The present embodiment of Avice recognized him, and with the artlesscandour of her race and years explained the situation, though that wasrather his duty as an intruder than hers. 

'This is Cap'n Kibbs, sir, a distant relation of father's, ' she said. 'And this is Mrs. Kibbs. We've come up from the island wi'en just for atrip, and are going to sail back wi'en Wednesday. '

'O, I see. And where are you staying?'

'Here--on board. '

'What, you live on board entirely?'

'Yes. '

'Lord, sir, ' broke in Mrs. Kibbs, 'I should be afeard o' my life to tinemy eyes among these here kimberlins at night-time; and even by day, ifso be I venture into the streets, I nowhen forget how many turnings tothe right and to the left 'tis to get back to Job's vessel--do I, Job?'

The skipper nodded confirmation. 

'You are safer ashore than afloat, ' said Pierston, 'especially in theChannel, with these winds and those heavy blocks of stone. '

'Well, ' said Cap'n Kibbs, after privately clearing something from hismouth, 'as to the winds, there idden much danger in them at this timeo' year. 'Tis the ocean-bound steamers that make the risk to craft likeours. If you happen to be in their course, under you go--cut clane intwo pieces, and they never lying-to to haul in your carcases, and nobodyto tell the tale. '

Pierston turned to Avice, wanting to say much to her, yet not knowingwhat to say. He lamely remarked at last: 'You go back the same way, Avice?'

'Yes, sir. '

'Well, take care of yourself afloat. '

'O yes. '

'I hope--I may see you again soon--and talk to you. '

'I hope so, sir. '

He could not get further, and after a while Pierston left them, and wentaway thinking of Avice more than ever. 

The next day he mentally timed them down the river, allowing for thepause to take in ballast, and on the Wednesday pictured the sail downthe open sea. That night he thought of the little craft under the bowsof the huge steam-vessels, powerless to make itself seen or heard, andAvice, now growing inexpressibly dear, sleeping in her little berth atthe mercy of a thousand chance catastrophes. 

Honest perception had told him that this Avice, fairer than her motherin face and form, was her inferior in soul and understanding. Yet thefervour which the first could never kindle in him was, almost to hisalarm, burning up now. He began to have misgivings as to some queertrick that his migratory Beloved was about to play him, or rather thecapricious Divinity behind that ideal lady. 

A gigantic satire upon the mutations of his nymph during the past twentyyears seemed looming in the distance. A forsaking of the accomplishedand well-connected Mrs. Pine-Avon for the little laundress, underthe traction of some mystic magnet which had nothing to do withreason--surely that was the form of the satire. 

But it was recklessly pleasant to leave the suspicion unrecognized asyet, and follow the lead. 

In thinking how best to do this Pierston recollected that, as wascustomary when the summer-time approached, Sylvania Castle had beenadvertised for letting furnished. A solitary dreamer like himself, whosewants all lay in an artistic and ideal direction, did not require suchgaunt accommodation as the aforesaid residence offered; but the spot wasall, and the expenses of a few months of tenancy therein he could wellafford. A letter to the agent was dispatched that night, and in a fewdays Jocelyn found himself the temporary possessor of a place which hehad never seen the inside of since his childhood, and had then deemedthe abode of unpleasant ghosts. 

2. VI. THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT

It was the evening of Pierston's arrival at Sylvania Castle, a dignifiedmanor-house in a nook by the cliffs, with modern castellations andbattlements; and he had walked through the rooms, about the lawn, and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island oftreeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure. In name, nature, and accessories the property within the girdling wall formed a completeantithesis to everything in its precincts. To find other trees betweenPebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a little in time--todig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forestof conifers lay as petrifactions, their heads all in one direction, asblown down by a gale in the Secondary geologic epoch. 

Dusk had closed in, and he now proceeded with what was, after all, thereal business of his sojourn. The two servants who had been left totake care of the house were in their own quarters, and he went outunobserved. Crossing a hollow overhung by the budding boughs heapproached an empty garden-house of Elizabethan design, which stood onthe outer wall of the grounds, and commanded by a window the fronts ofthe nearest cottages. Among them was the home of the resuscitated Avice. 

He had chosen this moment for his outlook through knowing that thevillagers were in no hurry to pull down their blinds at nightfall. And, as he had divined, the inside of the young woman's living-room wasvisible to him as formerly, illuminated by the rays of its own lamp. 

A subdued thumping came every now and then from the apartment. She wasironing linen on a flannel table-cloth, a row of such apparel hanging ona clothes-horse by the fire. Her face had been pale when he encounteredher, but now it was warm and pink with her exertions and the heat of thestove. Yet it was in perfect and passionless repose, which imparted aMinerva cast to the profile. When she glanced up, her lineaments seemedto have all the soul and heart that had characterized her mother's, and had been with her a true index of the spirit within. Could it bepossible that in this case the manifestation was fictitious? He had metwith many such examples of hereditary persistence without the qualitiessignified by the traits. He unconsciously hoped that it was at least notentirely so here. 

The room was less furnished than when he had last beheld it. The'bo-fet, ' or double corner-cupboard, where the china was formerly kept, had disappeared, its place being taken by a plain board. The tall oldclock, with its ancient oak carcase, arched brow, and humorous mouth, was also not to be seen, a cheap, white-dialled specimen doing its work. What these displacements might betoken saddened his humanity less thanit cheered his primitive instinct in pointing out how her necessitiesmight bring them together. 

Having fixed his residence near her for some lengthy time he felt inno hurry to obtrude his presence just now, and went indoors. That thisgirl's frame was doomed to be a real embodiment of that olden seductiveone--that Protean dream-creature, who had never seen fit to irradiatethe mother's image till it became a mere memory after dissolution--hedoubted less every moment. 

There was an uneasiness in recognizing such. There was somethingabnormal in his present proclivity. A certain sanity had, after all, accompanied his former idealizing passions: the Beloved had seldominformed a personality which, while enrapturing his soul, simultaneouslyshocked his intellect. A change, perhaps, had come. 

It was a fine morning on the morrow. Walking in the grounds towardsthe gate he saw Avice entering his hired castle with a broad ovalwicker-basket covered with a white cloth, which burden she bore round tothe back door. Of course, she washed for his own household: he had notthought of that. In the morning sunlight she appeared rather as a sylphthan as a washerwoman; and he could not but think that the slightnessof her figure was as ill adapted to this occupation as her mother's hadbeen. 

But, after all, it was not the washerwoman that he saw now. In frontof her, on the surface of her, was shining out that more real, moreinter-penetrating being whom he knew so well! The occupation of thesubserving minion, the blemishes of the temporary creature who formedthe background, were of the same account in the presentation of theindispensable one as the supporting posts and framework in a pyrotechnicdisplay. 

She left the house and went homeward by a path of which he was notaware, having probably changed her course because she had seen himstanding there. It meant nothing, for she had hardly become acquaintedwith him; yet that she should have avoided him was a new experience. Hehad no opportunity for a further study of her by distant observation, and hit upon a pretext for bringing her face to face with him. He foundfault with his linen, and directed that the laundress should be sentfor. 

'She is rather young, poor little thing, ' said the housemaidapologetically. 'But since her mother's death she has enough to do tokeep above water, and we make shift with her. But I'll tell her, sir. '

'I will see her myself. Send her in when she comes, ' said Pierston. 

One morning, accordingly, when he was answering a spiteful criticismof a late work of his, he was told that she waited his pleasure in thehall. He went out. 

'About the washing, ' said the sculptor stiffly. 'I am a very particularperson, and I wish no preparation of lime to be used. '

'I didn't know folks used it, ' replied the maiden, in a scared andreserved tone, without looking at him. 

'That's all right. And then, the mangling smashes the buttons. '

'I haven't got a mangle, sir, ' she murmured. 

'Ah! that's satisfactory. And I object to so much borax in the starch. '

'I don't put any, ' Avice returned in the same close way; 'never heardthe name o't afore!'

'O I see. '

All this time Pierston was thinking of the girl--or as the scientificmight say, Nature was working her plans for the next generation underthe cloak of a dialogue on linen. He could not read her individualcharacter, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whomhe had valued too late. He could not help seeing in her all that he knewof another, and veiling in her all that did not harmonize with his senseof metempsychosis. 

The girl seemed to think of nothing but the business in hand. She hadanswered to the point, and was hardly aware of his sex or of his shape. 

'I knew your mother, Avice, ' he said. 'You remember my telling you so?'

'Yes. '

'Well--I have taken this house for two or three months, and you will bevery useful to me. You still live just outside the wall?'

'Yes, sir, ' said the self-contained girl. 

Demurely and dispassionately she turned to leave--this pretty creaturewith features so still. There was something strange in seeing moveoff thus that form which he knew passing well, she who was once sothrobbingly alive to his presence that, not many yards from this spot, she had flung her arms round him and given him a kiss which, despisedin its freshness, had revived in him latterly as the dearest kiss of allhis life. And now this 'daps' of her mother (as they called her in thedialect here), this perfect copy, why did she turn away?

'Your mother was a refined and well-informed woman, I think I remember?'

'She was, sir; everybody said so. '

'I hope you resemble her. '

She archly shook her head, and drew warily away. 

'O! one thing more, Avice. I have not brought much linen, so you mustcome to the house every day. '

'Very good, sir. '

'You won't forget that?'

'O no. '

Then he let her go. He was a town man, and she an artless islander, yethe had opened himself out, like a sea-anemone, without disturbing theepiderm of her nature. It was monstrous that a maiden who had assumedthe personality of her of his tenderest memory should be so impervious. Perhaps it was he who was wanting. Avice might be Passion masking asIndifference, because he was so many years older in outward show. 

This brought him to the root of it. In his heart he was not a day olderthan when he had wooed the mother at the daughter's present age. Hisrecord moved on with the years, his sentiments stood still. 

When he beheld those of his fellows who were defined as buffers andfogeys--imperturbable, matter-of-fact, slightly ridiculous beings, past masters in the art of populating homes, schools, and colleges, andpresent adepts in the science of giving away brides--how he envied them, assuming them to feel as they appeared to feel, with their commerce andtheir politics, their glasses and their pipes. They had got past thedistracting currents of passionateness, and were in the calm waters ofmiddle-aged philosophy. But he, their contemporary, was tossed like acork hither and thither upon the crest of every fancy, precisely as hehad been tossed when he was half his present age, with the burden now ofdouble pain to himself in his growing vision of all as vanity. 

Avice had gone, and he saw her no more that day. Since he could notagain call upon her, she was as inaccessible as if she had entered themilitary citadel on the hill-top beyond them. 

In the evening he went out and paced down the lane to the Red King'scastle overhanging the cliff, beside whose age the castle he occupiedwas but a thing of yesterday. Below the castle precipice lay enormousblocks, which had fallen from it, and several of them were carved overwith names and initials. He knew the spot and the old trick well, andby searching in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names which, asa boy, he himself had cut. They were 'AVICE' and 'JOCELYN'--Avice Caro'sand his own. The letters were now nearly worn away by the weather andthe brine. But close by, in quite fresh letters, stood 'ANN AVICE, 'coupled with the name 'ISAAC. ' They could not have been there more thantwo or three years, and the 'Ann Avice' was probably Avice the Second. Who was Isaac? Some boy admirer of her child-time doubtless. 

He retraced his steps, and passed the Caros' house towards his own. Therevivified Avice animated the dwelling, and the light within the roomfell upon the window. She was just inside that blind. 

 * * *

Whenever she unexpectedly came to the castle he started, and lostplacidity. It was not at her presence as such, but at the new condition, which seemed to have something sinister in it. On the other hand, themost abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it hadmoved her prototype in the old days. She was indifferent to, almostunconscious of, his propinquity. He was no more than a statue to her;she was a growing fire to him. 

A sudden Sapphic terror of love would ever and anon come upon thesculptor, when his matured reflecting powers would insist uponinforming him of the fearful lapse from reasonableness that lay in thisinfatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he weredoomed to do penance for his past emotional wanderings (in a materialsense) by being chained in fatal fidelity to an object that hisintellect despised? One night he dreamt that he saw dimly masking behindthat young countenance 'the Weaver of Wiles' herself, 'with all hersubtle face laughing aloud. '

However, the Well-Beloved was alive again, had been lost and was found. He was amazed at the change of front in himself. She had worn theguise of strange women; she had been a woman of every class, from thedignified daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a Nubian Almeh withher handkerchief, undulating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all theseembodiments had been endowed with a certain smartness, either of theflesh or spirit: some with wit, a few with talent, and even genius. Butthe new impersonation had apparently nothing beyond sex and prettiness. She knew not how to sport a fan or handkerchief, hardly how to pull on aglove. 

But her limited life was innocent, and that went far. Poor little Avice!her mother's image: there it all lay. After all, her parentage was asgood as his own; it was misfortune that had sent her down to this. Oddas it seemed to him, her limitations were largely what he loved her for. Her rejuvenating power over him had ineffable charm. He felt as he hadfelt when standing beside her predecessor; but, alas! he was twentyyears further on towards the shade. 

2. VII. THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED

A few mornings later he was looking through an upper back window over ascreened part of the garden. The door beneath him opened, and a figureappeared tripping forth. She went round out of sight to where thegardener was at work, and presently returned with a bunch of green stufffluttering in each hand. It was Avice, her dark hair now braided upsnugly under a cap. She sailed on with a rapt and unconscious face, herthoughts a thousand removes from him. 

How she had suddenly come to be an inmate of his own house he couldnot understand, till he recalled the fact that he had given the castleservants a whole holiday to attend a review of the yeomanry in thewatering-place over the bay, on their stating that they could provide atemporary substitute to stay in the house. They had evidently calledin Avice. To his great pleasure he discovered their opinion of hisrequirements to be such a mean one that they had called in no one else. 

The Spirit, as she seemed to him, brought his lunch into the room wherehe was writing, and he beheld her uncover it. She went to the window toadjust a blind which had slipped, and he had a good view of her profile. It was not unlike that of one of the three goddesses in Rubens's'Judgment of Paris, ' and in contour was nigh perfection. But it was inher full face that the vision of her mother was most apparent. 

'Did you cook all this, Avice?' he asked, arousing himself. 

She turned and half-smiled, merely murmuring, 'Yes, sir. '

Well he knew the arrangement of those white teeth. In the junction oftwo of the upper ones there was a slight irregularity; no stranger wouldhave noticed it, nor would he, but that he knew of the same mark inher mother's mouth, and looked for it here. Till Avice the Second hadrevealed it this moment by her smile, he had never beheld that marksince the parting from Avice the First, when she had smiled under hiskiss as the copy had done now. 

Next morning, when dressing, he heard her through the ricketty floor ofthe building engaged in conversation with the other servants. Havingby this time regularly installed herself as the exponent of theLong-pursued--as one who, by no initiative of his own, had been chosenby some superior Power as the vehicle of her next debut, she attractedhim by the cadences of her voice; she would suddenly drop it to a richwhisper of roguishness, when the slight rural monotony of its narrativespeech disappeared, and soul and heart--or what seemed soul andheart--resounded. The charm lay in the intervals, using that word in itsmusical sense. She would say a few syllables in one note, and end hersentence in a soft modulation upwards, then downwards, then into herown note again. The curve of sound was as artistic as any line of beautyever struck by his pencil--as satisfying as the curves of her who wasthe World's Desire. 

The subject of her discourse he cared nothing about--it was no more hisinterest than his concern. He took special pains that in catching hervoice he might not comprehend her words. To the tones he had a right, none to the articulations. By degrees he could not exist long withoutthis sound. 

On Sunday evening he found that she went to church. He followed behindher over the open road, keeping his eye on the little hat with itsbunch of cock's feathers as on a star. When she had passed in Pierstonobserved her position and took a seat behind her. 

Engaged in the study of her ear and the nape of her white neck, hesuddenly became aware of the presence of a lady still further ahead inthe aisle, whose attire, though of black materials in the quietest form, was of a cut which rather suggested London than this Ultima Thule. Forthe minute he forgot, in his curiosity, that Avice intervened. Thelady turned her head somewhat, and, though she was veiled with unusualthickness for the season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine-Avon inthe form. 

Why should Mrs. Pine-Avon be there? Pierston asked himself, if itshould, indeed, be she. 

The end of the service saw his attention again concentrated on Avice tosuch a degree that at the critical moment of moving out he forgot themysterious lady in front of her, and found that she had left the churchby the side-door. Supposing it to have been Mrs. Pine-Avon, shewould probably be discovered staying at one of the hotels at thewatering-place over the bay, and to have come along the Pebble-bankto the island as so many did, for an evening drive. For the present, however, the explanation was not forthcoming; and he did not seek it. 

When he emerged from the church the great placid eye of the lighthouseat the Beal Point was open, and he moved thitherward a few steps toescape Nichola, or her double, and the rest of the congregation. Turning at length, he hastened homeward along the now deserted trackway, intending to overtake the revitalized Avice. But he could see nothing ofher, and concluded that she had walked too fast for him. Arrived at hisown gate he paused a moment, and perceived that Avice's little freeholdwas still in darkness. She had not come. 

He retraced his steps, but could not find her, the only persons on theroad being a man and his wife, as he knew them to be though he could notsee them, from the words of the man--

'If you had not a'ready married me, you'd cut my acquaintance! That's apretty thing for a wife to say!'

The remark struck his ear unpleasantly, and by-and-by he went backagain. Avice's cottage was now lighted: she must have come round by theother road. Satisfied that she was safely domiciled for the night heopened the gate of Sylvania Castle and retired to his room also. 

 * * *

Eastward from the grounds the cliffs were rugged and the view of theopposite coast picturesque in the extreme. A little door from the lawngave him immediate access to the rocks and shore on this side. Withoutthe door was a dip-well of pure water, which possibly had supplied theinmates of the adjoining and now ruinous Red King's castle at the timeof its erection. On a sunny morning he was meditating here when hediscerned a figure on the shore below spreading white linen upon thepebbly strand. 

Jocelyn descended. Avice, as he had supposed, had now returned to herown occupation. Her shapely pink arms, though slight, were plump enoughto show dimples at the elbows, and were set off by her purple cottonprint, which the shore-breeze licked and tantalized. He stood near, without speaking. The wind dragged a shirt-sleeve from the 'popple' orpebble which held it down. Pierston stooped and put a heavier one in itsplace. 

'Thank you, ' she said quietly. She turned up her hazel eyes, and seemedgratified to perceive that her assistant was Pierston. She hadplainly been so wrapped in her own thoughts--gloomy thoughts, by theirsigns--that she had not considered him till then. 

The young girl continued to converse with him in friendly frankness, showing neither ardour nor shyness. As for love--it was evidentlyfurther from her mind than even death and dissolution. 

When one of the sheets became intractable Jocelyn said, 'Do you hold itdown, and I'll put the popples. '

She acquiesced, and in placing a pebble his hand touched hers. 

It was a young hand, rather long and thin, a little damp and coddledfrom her slopping. In setting down the last stone he laid it, by a pureaccident, rather heavily on her fingers. 

'I am very, very sorry!' Jocelyn exclaimed. 'O, I have bruised the skin, Avice!' He seized her fingers to examine the damage done. 

'No, sir, you haven't!' she cried luminously, allowing him to retain herhand without the least objection. 'Why--that's where I scratched it thismorning with a pin. You didn't hurt me a bit with the popple-stone!'

Although her gown was purple, there was a little black crape bow uponeach arm. He knew what it meant, and it saddened him. 'Do you ever visityour mother's grave?' he asked. 

'Yes, sir, sometimes. I am going there tonight to water the daisies. '

She had now finished here, and they parted. That evening, when the skywas red, he emerged by the garden-door and passed her house. The blindswere not down, and he could see her sewing within. While he pausedshe sprang up as if she had forgotten the hour, and tossed on herhat. Jocelyn strode ahead and round the corner, and was halfway up thestraggling street before he discerned her little figure behind him. 

He hastened past the lads and young women with clinking buckets who weredrawing water from the fountains by the wayside, and took the directionof the church. With the disappearance of the sun the lighthouse hadagain set up its flame against the sky, the dark church rising in theforeground. Here he allowed her to overtake him. 

'You loved your mother much?' said Jocelyn. 

'I did, sir; of course I did, ' said the girl, who tripped so lightlythat it seemed he might have carried her on his hand. 

Pierston wished to say, 'So did I, ' but did not like to disclose eventswhich she, apparently, never guessed. Avice fell into thought, andcontinued--

'Mother had a very sad life for some time when she was about as old asI. I should not like mine to be as hers. Her young man proved false toher because she wouldn't agree to meet him one night, and it grievedmother almost all her life. I wouldn't ha' fretted about him, if I'dbeen she. She would never name his name, but I know he was a wicked, cruel man; and I hate to think of him. '

After this he could not go into the churchyard with her, and walkedonward alone to the south of the isle. He was wretched for hours. Yet hewould not have stood where he did stand in the ranks of an imaginativeprofession if he had not been at the mercy of every haunting of thefancy that can beset man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen anda national-unit that his strength lay as an artist, and he felt itchildish to complain of susceptibilities not only innate but cultivated. 

But he was paying dearly enough for his Liliths. He saw a terriblevengeance ahead. What had he done to be tormented like this? TheBeloved, after flitting from Nichola Pine-Avon to the phantom of a deadwoman whom he never adored in her lifetime, had taken up her abode inthe living representative of the dead, with a permanence of hold whichthe absolute indifference of that little brown-eyed representative onlyseemed to intensify. 

Did he really wish to proceed to marriage with this chit of a girl? Hedid: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied herhe saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment, hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commonerin character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First. But twenty years make a difference in ideals, and the added demands ofmiddle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessionsas to the spiritual content. He looked at himself in the glass, andfelt glad at those inner deficiencies in Avice which formerly would haveimpelled him to reject her. 

There was a strange difference in his regard of his present folly and ofhis love in his youthful time. Now he could be mad with method, knowingit to be madness: then he was compelled to make believe his madnesswisdom. In those days any flash of reason upon his loved one'simperfections was blurred over hastily and with fear. Such penetrativevision now did not cool him. He knew he was the creature of a tendency;and passively acquiesced. 

To use a practical eye, it appeared that, as he had once thought, thisCaro family--though it might not for centuries, or ever, furbish upan individual nature which would exactly, ideally, supplement his ownimperfect one and round with it the perfect whole--was yet the onlyfamily he had ever met, or was likely to meet, which possessed thematerials for her making. It was as if the Caros had found the clay butnot the potter, while other families whose daughters might attract himhad found the potter but not the clay. 

2. VIII. HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM

From his roomy castle and its grounds and the cliffs hard by he couldcommand every move and aspect of her who was the rejuvenated Spiritof the Past to him--in the effulgence of whom all sordid details weredisregarded. 

Among other things he observed that she was often anxious when itrained. If, after a wet day, a golden streak appeared in the sky overDeadman's Bay, under a lid of cloud, her manner was joyous and her treadlight. 

This puzzled him; and he found that if he endeavoured to encounter herat these times she shunned him--stealthily and subtly, but unmistakably. One evening, when she had left her cottage and tripped off in thedirection of the under-hill townlet, he set out by the same route, resolved to await her return along the high roadway which stretchedbetween that place and East Quarriers. 

He reached the top of the old road where it makes a sudden descent tothe townlet, but she did not appear. Turning back, he sauntered alongtill he had nearly reached his own house again. Then he retraced hissteps, and in the dim night he walked backwards and forwards on thebare and lofty convex of the isle; the stars above and around him, thelighthouse on duty at the distant point, the lightship winking fromthe sandbank, the combing of the pebble beach by the tide beneath, thechurch away south-westward, where the island fathers lay. 

He walked the wild summit till his legs ached, and his heart ached--tillhe seemed to hear on the upper wind the stones of the slingers whizzingpast, and the voices of the invaders who annihilated them, and marriedtheir wives and daughters, and produced Avice as the ultimate flower ofthe combined stocks. Still she did not come. It was more than foolish towait, yet he could not help waiting. At length he discerned a dot of afigure, which he knew to be hers rather by its motion than by its shape. 

How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest ofsubstantial things, when here, between those three sublimities--thesky, the rock, and the ocean--the minute personality of this washer-girlfilled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendousinanimate scene shrank to a corner therein. 

But all at once the approaching figure had disappeared. He looked about;she had certainly vanished. At one side of the road was a low wall, butshe could not have gone behind that without considerable trouble andsingular conduct. He looked behind him; she had reappeared further onthe road. 

Jocelyn Pierston hurried after; and, discerning his movement, Avicestood still. When he came up, she was slily shaking with restrainedlaughter. 

'Well, what does this mean, my dear girl?' he asked. 

Her inner mirth escaping in spite of her she turned askance and said:'When you was following me to Street o' Wells, two hours ago, I lookedround and saw you, and huddied behind a stone! You passed and brushedmy frock without seeing me. And when, on my way backalong, I saw youwaiting hereabout again, I slipped over the wall, and ran past you! IfI had not stopped and looked round at 'ee, you would never have catchedme!'

'What did you do that for, you elf!'

'That you shouldn't find me. '

'That's not exactly a reason. Give another, dear Avice, ' he said, as heturned and walked beside her homeward. 

She hesitated. 'Come!' he urged again. 

''Twas because I thought you wanted to be my young man, ' she answered. 

'What a wild thought of yours! Supposing I did, wouldn't you have me?'

'Not now. .. . And not for long, even if it had been sooner than now. '

'Why?'

'If I tell you, you won't laugh at me or let anybody else know?'

'Never. '

'Then I will tell you, ' she said quite seriously. ''Tis because I gettired o' my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in oneyoung man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder, and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs upsomewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I haveloved FIFTEEN a'ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say, ' sherepeated, laughing. 'I can't help it, sir, I assure you. Of course itis really, to ME, the same one all through, on'y I can't catch him!' Sheadded anxiously, 'You won't tell anybody o' this in me, will you, sir?Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me. '

Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here was this obscure and almostilliterate girl engaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, just ashe had been himself doing for the last twenty years. She was doing itquite involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her organization, puzzled allthe while at her own instinct. He suddenly thought of its bearing uponhimself, and said, with a sinking heart--

'Am I--one of them?'

She pondered critically. 

'You was; for a week; when I first saw you. '

'Only a week?'

'About that. '

'What made the being of your fancy forsake my form and go elsewhere?'

'Well--though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first--'

'Yes?'

'I found you too old soon after. '

'You are a candid young person. '

'But you asked me, sir!' she expostulated. 

'I did; and, having been answered, I won't intrude upon you longer. Socut along home as fast as you can. It is getting late. '

When she had passed out of earshot he also followed homewards. Thisseeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife whichcould cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing: to be one of thecorpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; andthis was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days. 

The startling parallel in the idiosyncracies of Avice andhimself--evinced by the elusiveness of the Beloved with her as withhim--meant probably that there had been some remote ancestor commonto both families, from whom the trait had latently descended andrecrudesced. But the result was none the less disconcerting. 

Drawing near his own gate he smelt tobacco, and could discern twofigures in the side lane leading past Avice's door. They did not, however, enter her house, but strolled onward to the narrow passconducting to Red-King Castle and the sea. He was in momentary heavinessat the thought that they might be Avice with a worthless lover, but afaintly argumentative tone from the man informed him that they were thesame married couple going homeward whom he had encountered on a previousoccasion. 

The next day he gave the servants a half-holiday to get the pretty Aviceinto the castle again for a few hours, the better to observe her. Whileshe was pulling down the blinds at sunset a whistle of peculiar qualitycame from some point on the cliffs outside the lawn. He observed thather colour rose slightly, though she bustled about as if she had noticednothing. 

Pierston suddenly suspected that she had not only fifteen past admirersbut a current one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimulated now byancient memories and present tenderness to use every effort to make herhis wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he strung himself up tosift this mystery. If he could only win her--and how could a countrygirl refuse such an opportunity?--he could pack her off to school fortwo or three years, marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, andtake his chance of the rest. As to her want of ardour for him--so sadlyin contrast with her sainted mother's affection--a man twenty yearsolder than his bride could expect no better, and he would be wellcontent to put up with it in the pleasure of possessing one in whomseemed to linger as an aroma all the charm of his youth and his earlyhome. 

2. IX. JUXTAPOSITIONS

It was a sad and leaden afternoon, and Pierston paced up the long, steeppass or street of the Wells. On either side of the road young girlsstood with pitchers at the fountains which bubbled there, and behind thehouses forming the propylaea of the rock rose the massive forehead ofthe Isle--crested at this part with its enormous ramparts as with amural crown. 

As you approach the upper end of the street all progress seems about tobe checked by the almost vertical face of the escarpment. Into it yourtrack apparently runs point-blank: a confronting mass which, if it wereto slip down, would overwhelm the whole town. But in a moment you findthat the road, the old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns at asharp angle when it reaches the base of the scarp, and ascends in thestiffest of inclines to the right. To the left there is also anotherascending road, modern, almost as steep as the first, and perfectlystraight. This is the road to the forts. 

Pierston arrived at the forking of the ways, and paused for breath. Before turning to the right, his proper and picturesque course, helooked up the uninteresting left road to the fortifications. It was new, long, white, regular, tapering to a vanishing point, like a lesson inperspective. About a quarter of the way up a girl was resting beside abasket of white linen: and by the shape of her hat and the nature of herburden he recognized her. 

She did not see him, and abandoning the right-hand course he slowlyascended the incline she had taken. He observed that her attention wasabsorbed by something aloft. He followed the direction of her gaze. Above them towered the green-grey mountain of grassy stone, herelevelled at the top by military art. The skyline was broken every nowand then by a little peg-like object--a sentry-box; and near one ofthese a small red spot kept creeping backwards and forwards monotonouslyagainst the heavy sky. 

Then he divined that she had a soldier-lover. 

She turned her head, saw him, and took up her clothes-basket to continuethe ascent. The steepness was such that to climb it unencumbered was abreathless business; the linen made her task a cruelty to her. 'You'llnever get to the forts with that weight, ' he said. 'Give it to me. '

But she would not, and he stood still, watching her as she panted up theway; for the moment an irradiated being, the epitome of a whole sex: bythe beams of his own infatuation

 '. .. .. .. Robed in such exceeding glory That he beheld her not;'

beheld her not as she really was, as she was even to himself sometimes. But to the soldier what was she? Smaller and smaller she waned up therigid mathematical road, still gazing at the soldier aloft, as Pierstongazed at her. He could just discern sentinels springing up at thedifferent coigns of vantage that she passed, but seeing who she was theydid not intercept her; and presently she crossed the drawbridge over theenormous chasm surrounding the forts, passed the sentries there also, and disappeared through the arch into the interior. Pierston could notsee the sentry now, and there occurred to him the hateful idea that thisscarlet rival was meeting and talking freely to her, the unprotectedorphan girl of his sweet original Avice; perhaps, relieved of duty, escorting her across the interior, carrying her basket, her tender bodyencircled by his arm. 

'What the devil are you staring at, as if you were in a trance?'

Pierston turned his head: and there stood his old friend Somers--stilllooking the long-leased bachelor that he was. 

'I might say what the devil do you do here? if I weren't so glad to seeyou. '

Somers said that he had come to see what was detaining his friend insuch an out-of-the-way place at that time of year, and incidentally toget some fresh air into his own lungs. Pierston made him welcome, andthey went towards Sylvania Castle. 

'You were staring, as far as I could see, at a pretty little washerwomanwith a basket of clothes?' resumed the painter. 

'Yes; it was that to you, but not to me. Behind the mere prettyisland-girl (to the world) is, in my eye, the Idea, in Platonicphraseology--the essence and epitome of all that is desirable in thisexistence. .. . I am under a doom, Somers. Yes, I am under a doom. To havebeen always following a phantom whom I saw in woman after woman whileshe was at a distance, but vanishing away on close approach, was badenough; but now the terrible thing is that the phantom does NOT vanish, but stays to tantalize me even when I am near enough to see what it is!That girl holds me, THOUGH my eyes are open, and THOUGH I see that I ama fool!'

Somers regarded the visionary look of his friend, which ratherintensified than decreased as his years wore on, but made no furtherremark. When they reached the castle Somers gazed round upon thescenery, and Pierston, signifying the quaint little Elizabethan cottage, said: 'That's where she lives. '

'What a romantic place!--and this island altogether. A man might love ascarecrow or turnip-lantern here. '

'But a woman mightn't. Scenery doesn't impress them, though they pretendit does. This girl is as fickle as--'

'You once were. '

'Exactly--from your point of view. She has told me so--candidly. And ithits me hard. '

Somers stood still in sudden thought. 'Well--that IS a strange turningof the tables!' he said. 'But you wouldn't really marry her, Pierston?'

'I would--to-morrow. Why shouldn't I? What are fame and name and societyto me--a descendant of wreckers and smugglers, like her. Besides, I knowwhat she's made of, my boy, to her innermost fibre; I know the perfectand pure quarry she was dug from: and that gives a man confidence. '

'Then you'll win. '

 * * *

While they were sitting after dinner that evening their quiet discoursewas interrupted by the long low whistle from the cliffs without. Somerstook no notice, but Pierston marked it. That whistle always occurredat the same time in the evening when Avice was helping in the house. Heexcused himself for a moment to his visitor and went out upon the darklawn. A crunching of feet upon the gravel mixed in with the articulationof the sea--steps light as if they were winged. And he supposed, twominutes later, that the mouth of some hulking fellow was upon hers, which he himself hardly ventured to look at, so touching was its youngbeauty. 

Hearing people about--among others the before-mentioned married couplequarrelling, the woman's tones having a kinship to Avice's own--hereturned to the house. Next day Somers roamed abroad to look for sceneryfor a marine painting, and, going out to seek him, Pierston met Avice. 

'So you have a lover, my lady!' he said severely. She admitted that itwas the fact. 'You won't stick to him, ' he continued. 

'I think I may to THIS one, ' said she, in a meaning tone that he failedto fathom then. 'He deserted me once, but he won't again. '

'I suppose he's a wonderful sort of fellow?'

'He's good enough for me. '

'So handsome, no doubt. '

'Handsome enough for me. '

'So refined and respectable. '

'Refined and respectable enough for me. '

He could not disturb her equanimity, and let her pass. The next daywas Sunday, and Somers having chosen his view at the other end of theisland, Pierston determined in the afternoon to see Avice's lover. Hefound that she had left her cottage stronghold, and went on towards thelighthouses at the Beal. Turning back when he had reached the nearest, he saw on the lonely road between the quarries a young man evidentlyconnected with the stone trade, with Avice the Second upon his arm. 

She looked prettily guilty and blushed a little under his glance. The man's was one of the typical island physiognomies--his featuresenergetic and wary in their expression, and half covered with a close, crisp black beard. Pierston fancied that out of his keen dark eyes thereglimmered a dry sense of humour at the situation. 

If so, Avice must have told him of Pierston's symptoms of tenderness. This girl, whom, for her dear mother's sake more than for her ownunquestionable attractiveness, he would have guarded as the apple of hiseye, how could she estimate him so flippantly!

The mortification of having brought himself to this position with theantitype, by his early slight of the type, blinded him for the moment towhat struck him a short time after. The man upon whose arm she hung wasnot a soldier. What, then, became of her entranced gaze at the sentinel?She could hardly have transferred her affections so promptly; or, togive her the benefit of his own theory, her Beloved could scarcely haveflitted from frame to frame in so very brief an interval. And which ofthem had been he who whistled softly in the dusk to her?

Without further attempt to find Alfred Somers Pierston walked homeward, moodily thinking that the desire to make reparation to the originalwoman by wedding and enriching the copy--which lent such anunprecedented permanence to his new love--was thwarted, as if by setintention of his destiny. 

At the door of the grounds about the castle there stood a carriage. He observed that it was not one of the homely flys from the under-hilltown, but apparently from the popular resort across the bay. Wondering why the visitor had not driven in he entered, to find in thedrawing-room Nichola Pine-Avon. 

At his first glance upon her, fashionably dressed and graceful inmovement, she seemed beautiful; at the second, when he observed that herface was pale and agitated, she seemed pathetic likewise. Altogether, she was now a very different figure from her who, sitting in her chairwith such finished composure, had snubbed him in her drawing-room inHamptonshire Square. 

'You are surprised at this? Of course you are!' she said, in a low, pleading voice, languidly lifting her heavy eyelids, while he washolding her hand. 'But I couldn't help it! I know I have done somethingto offend you--have I not? O! what can it be, that you have come away tothis outlandish rock, to live with barbarians in the midst of the Londonseason?'

'You have not offended me, dear Mrs. Pine-Avon, ' he said. 'How sorry Iam that you should have supposed it! Yet I am glad, too, that your fancyshould have done me the good turn of bringing you here to see me. '

'I am staying at Budmouth-Regis, ' she explained. 

'Then I did see you at a church-service here a little while back?'

She blushed faintly upon her pallor, and she sighed. Their eyes met. 'Well, ' she said at last, 'I don't know why I shouldn't show the virtueof candour. You know what it means. I was the stronger once; now I amthe weaker. Whatever pain I may have given you in the ups and downs ofour acquaintance I am sorry for, and would willingly repair all errorsof the past by--being amenable to reason in the future. '

It was impossible that Jocelyn should not feel a tender impulsiontowards this attractive and once independent woman, who from everyworldly point of view was an excellent match for him--a superior match, indeed, except in money. He took her hand again and held it awhile, anda faint wave of gladness seemed to flow through her. But no--he could gono further. That island girl, in her coquettish Sunday frock and littlehat with its bunch of cock's feathers held him as by strands of Manilarope. He dropped Nichola's hand. 

'I am leaving Budmouth to-morrow, ' she said. 'That was why I felt Imust call. You did not know I had been there all through the Whitsunholidays?'

'I did not, indeed; or I should have come to see you. '. 

'I didn't like to write. I wish I had, now!'

'I wish you had, too, dear Mrs. Pine-Avon. '

But it was 'Nichola' that she wanted to be. As they reached the landauhe told her that he should be back in town himself again soon, and wouldcall immediately. At the moment of his words Avice Caro, now alone, passed close along by the carriage on the other side, towards her househard at hand. She did not turn head or eye to the pair: they seemed tobe in her view objects of indifference. 

Pierston became cold as a stone. The chill towards Nichola that thepresence of the girl, --sprite, witch, troll that she was--brought withit came like a doom. He knew what a fool he was, as he had said. But hewas powerless in the grasp of the idealizing passion. He cared more forAvice's finger-tips than for Mrs. Pine-Avon's whole personality. 

Perhaps Nichola saw it, for she said mournfully: 'Now I have done allI could! I felt that the only counterpoise to my cruelty to you in mydrawing-room would be to come as a suppliant to yours. '

'It is most handsome and noble of you, my very dear friend!' said he, with an emotion of courtesy rather than of enthusiasm. 

Then adieux were spoken, and she drove away. But Pierston saw only theretreating Avice, and knew that he was helpless in her hands. The churchof the island had risen near the foundations of the Pagan temple, anda Christian emanation from the former might be wrathfully torturing himthrough the very false gods to whom he had devoted himself both inhis craft, like Demetrius of Ephesus, and in his heart. Perhaps Divinepunishment for his idolatries had come. 

2. X. SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL

Pierston had not turned far back towards the castle when he wasovertaken by Somers and the man who carried his painting lumber. Theypaced together to the door; the man deposited the articles and wentaway, and the two walked up and down before entering. 

'I met an extremely interesting woman in the road out there, ' said thepainter. 

'Ah, she is! A sprite, a sylph; Psyche indeed!'

'I was struck with her. '

'It shows how beauty will out through the homeliest guise. '

'Yes, it will; though not always. And this case doesn't prove it, forthe lady's attire was in the latest and most approved taste. '

'Oh, you mean the lady who was driving?'

'Of course. What, were you thinking of the pretty little cottage-girloutside here? I did meet her, but what's she? Very well for one'spicture, though hardly for one's fireside. This lady--'

'Is Mrs. Pine-Avon. A kind, proud woman, who'll do what people withno pride would not condescend to think of. She is leaving Budmouthto-morrow, and she drove across to see me. You know how things seemed tobe going with us at one time? But I am no good to any woman. She'sbeen very generous towards me, which I've not been to her. .. . She'llultimately throw herself away upon some wretch unworthy of her, nodoubt. '

'Do you think so?' murmured Somers. After a while he said abruptly, 'I'll marry her myself, if she'll have me. I like the look of her. '

'I wish you would, Alfred, or rather could! She has long had an ideaof slipping out of the world of fashion into the world of art. She is awoman of individuality and earnest instincts. I am in real trouble abouther. I won't say she can be won--it would be ungenerous of me to saythat. But try. I can bring you together easily. '

'I'll marry her, if she's willing!' With the phlegmatic dogmatism thatwas part of him, Somers added: 'When you have decided to marry, take thefirst nice woman you meet. They are all alike. '

'Well--you don't know her yet, ' replied Jocelyn, who could give praisewhere he could not give love. 

'But you do, and I'll take her on the strength of your judgment. Is shereally handsome?--I had but the merest glance. But I know she is, or shewouldn't have caught your discriminating eye. '

'You may take my word for it; she looks as well at hand as afar. '

'What colour are her eyes?'

'Her eyes? I don't go much in for colour, being professionally sworn toform. But, let me see--grey; and her hair rather light than dark brown. '

'I wanted something darker, ' said Somers airily. 'There are so many fairmodels among native Englishwomen. Still, blondes are useful property!. .. Well, well; this is flippancy. But I liked the look of her. '

 * * *

Somers had gone back to town. It was a wet day on the little peninsula:but Pierston walked out as far as the garden-house of his hired castle, where he sat down and smoked. This erection being on the boundary-wallof his property his ear could now and then catch the tones of Avice'svoice from her open-doored cottage in the lane which skirted his fence;and he noticed that there were no modulations in it. He knew why thatwas. She wished to go out, and could not. He had observed before thatwhen she was planning an outing a particular note would come into hervoice during the preceding hours: a dove's roundness of sound; no doubtthe effect upon her voice of her thoughts of her lover, or lovers. Yetthe latter it could not be. She was pure and singlehearted: half an eyecould see that. Whence, then, the two men? Possibly the quarrier was arelation. 

There seemed reason in this when, going out into the lane, heencountered one of the red jackets he had been thinking of. Soldierswere seldom seen in this outer part of the isle: their beat from theforts, when on pleasure, was in the opposite direction, and this manmust have had a special reason for coming hither. Pierston surveyed him. He was a round-faced, good-humoured fellow to look at, having two littlepieces of moustache on his upper lip, like a pair of minnows rampant, and small black eyes, over which the Glengarry cap straddled flat. Itwas a hateful idea that her tender cheek should be kissed by the lipsof this heavy young man, who had never been sublimed by a single battle, even with defenceless savages. 

The soldier went before her house, looked at the door, and moved on downthe crooked way to the cliffs, where there was a path back to the forts. But he did not adopt it, returning by the way he had come. This showedhis wish to pass the house again. She gave no sign, however, and thesoldier disappeared. 

Pierston could not be satisfied that Avice was in the house, and hecrossed over to the front of her little freehold and tapped at the door, which stood ajar. 

Nobody came: hearing a slight movement within he crossed the threshold. Avice was there alone, sitting on a low stool in a dark corner, asthough she wished to be unobserved by any casual passer-by. She lookedup at him without emotion or apparent surprise; but he could then seethat she was crying. The view, for the first time, of distress inan unprotected young girl towards whom he felt drawn by ties ofextraordinary delicacy and tenderness, moved Pierston beyond measure. Heentered without ceremony. 

'Avice, my dear girl!' he said. 'Something is the matter!'

She looked assent, and he went on: 'Now tell me all about it. Perhaps Ican help you. Come, tell me. '

'I can't!' she murmured. 'Grammer Stockwool is upstairs, and she'llhear!' Mrs. Stockwool was the old woman who had come to live with thegirl for company since her mother's death. 

'Then come into my garden opposite. There we shall be quite private. '

She rose, put on her hat, and accompanied him to the door. Here sheasked him if the lane were empty, and on his assuring her that it wasshe crossed over and entered with him through the garden-wall. 

The place was a shady and secluded one, though through the boughs thesea could be seen quite near at hand, its moanings being distinctlyaudible. A water-drop from a tree fell here and there, but the rain wasnot enough to hurt them. 

'Now let me hear it, ' he said soothingly. 'You may tell me with thegreatest freedom. I was a friend of your mother's, you know. That is, Iknew her; and I'll be a friend of yours. '

The statement was risky, if he wished her not to suspect him of beingher mother's false one. But that lover's name appeared to be unknown tothe present Avice. 

'I can't tell you, sir, ' she replied unwillingly; 'except that it has todo with my own changeableness. The rest is the secret of somebody else. '

'I am sorry for that, ' said he. 

'I am getting to care for one I ought not to think of, and it meansruin. I ought to get away!'. 

'You mean from the island?'

'Yes. '

Pierston reflected. His presence in London had been desired for sometime; yet he had delayed going because of his new solicitudes here. Butto go and take her with him would afford him opportunity of watchingover her, tending her mind, and developing it; while it might removeher from some looming danger. It was a somewhat awkward guardianship forhim, as a lonely man, to carry out; still, it could be done. He askedher abruptly if she would really like to go away for a while. 

'I like best to stay here, ' she answered. 'Still, I should not mindgoing somewhere, because I think I ought to. '

'Would you like London?'

Avice's face lost its weeping shape. 'How could that be?' she said. 

'I have been thinking that you could come to my house and make yourselfuseful in some way. I rent just now one of those new places calledflats, which you may have heard of; and I have a studio at the back. '

'I haven't heard of 'em, ' she said without interest. 

'Well, I have two servants there, and as my man has a holiday you canhelp them for a month or two. '

'Would polishing furniture be any good? I can do that. '

'I haven't much furniture that requires polishing. But you can clearaway plaster and clay messes in the studio, and chippings of stone, and help me in modelling, and dust all my Venus failures, and hands andheads and feet and bones, and other objects. '

She was startled, yet attracted by the novelty of the proposal. 

'Only for a time?' she said. 

'Only for a time. As short as you like, and as long. '

The deliberate manner in which, after the first surprise, Avicediscussed the arrangements that he suggested, might have told himhow far was any feeling for himself beyond friendship, and possiblygratitude, from agitating her breast. Yet there was nothing extravagantin the discrepancy between their ages, and he hoped, after shaping herto himself, to win her. What had grieved her to tears she would not moreparticularly tell. 

She had naturally not much need of preparation, but she made even lesspreparation than he would have expected her to require. She seemed eagerto be off immediately, and not a soul was to know of her departure. Why, if she were in love and at first averse to leave the island, she shouldbe so precipitate now he failed to understand. 

But he took great care to compromise in no way a girl in whom hisinterest was as protective as it was passionate. He accordingly left herto get out of the island alone, awaiting her at a station a few milesup the railway, where, discovering himself to her through thecarriage-window, he entered the next compartment, his frame pervaded bya glow which was almost joy at having for the first time in his chargeone who inherited the flesh and bore the name so early associated withhis own, and at the prospect of putting things right which had beenwrong through many years. 

2. XI. THE IMAGE PERSISTS

It was dark when the four-wheeled cab wherein he had brought Avice fromthe station stood at the entrance to the pile of flats of which Pierstonoccupied one floor--rarer then as residences in London than they arenow. Leaving Avice to alight and get the luggage taken in by the porterPierston went upstairs. To his surprise his floor was silent, and onentering with a latchkey the rooms were all in darkness. He descendedto the hall, where Avice was standing helpless beside the luggage, whilethe porter was outside with the cabman. 

'Do you know what has become of my servants?' asked Jocelyn. 

'What--and ain't they there, saur? Ah, then my belief is that what Isuspected is thrue! You didn't leave your wine-cellar unlocked, did you, saur, by no mistake?'

Pierston considered. He thought he might have left the key with hiselder servant, whom he had believed he could trust, especially as thecellar was not well stocked. 

'Ah, then it was so! She's been very queer, saur, this last week or two. O yes, sending messages down the spakin'-tube which were like madnessitself, and ordering us this and that, till we would take no notice atall. I see them both go out last night, and possibly they went for aholiday not expecting ye, or maybe for good! Shure, if ye'd written, saur, I'd ha' got the place ready, ye being out of a man, too, thoughit's not me duty at all!'

When Pierston got to his floor again he found that the cellar door wasopen; some bottles were standing empty that had been full, and manyabstracted altogether. All other articles in the house, however, appeared to be intact. His letter to his housekeeper lay in the box asthe postman had left it. 

By this time the luggage had been sent up in the lift; and Avice, likeso much more luggage, stood at the door, the hall-porter behind offeringhis assistance. 

'Come here, Avice, ' said the sculptor. 'What shall we do now? Here's apretty state of affairs!'

Avice could suggest nothing, till she was struck with the bright thoughtthat she should light a fire. 

'Light a fire?--ah, yes. .. . I wonder if we could manage. This is an oddcoincidence--and awkward!' he murmured. 'Very well, light a fire. '

'Is this the kitchen, sir, all mixed up with the parlours?'

'Yes. '

'Then I think I can do all that's wanted here for a bit; at any rate, till you can get help, sir. At least, I could if I could find thefuel-house. 'Tis no such big place as I thought!'

'That's right: take courage!' said he with a tender smile. 'Now, I'lldine out this evening, and leave the place for you to arrange as bestyou can with the help of the porter's wife downstairs. '

This Pierston accordingly did, and so their common residence began. Feeling more and more strongly that some danger awaited her in hernative island he determined not to send her back till the lover orlovers who seemed to trouble her should have cooled off. He was quitewilling to take the risk of his action thus far in his solicitous regardfor her. 

 * * *

It was a dual solitude, indeed; for, though Pierston and Avice were theonly two people in the flat, they did not keep each other company, theformer being as scrupulously fearful of going near her now that he hadthe opportunity as he had been prompt to seek her when he had none. Theylived in silence, his messages to her being frequently written on scrapsof paper deposited where she could see them. It was not without a pangthat he noted her unconsciousness of their isolated position--a positionto which, had she experienced any reciprocity of sentiment, she wouldreadily have been alive. 

Considering that, though not profound, she was hardly a matter-of-factgirl as that phrase is commonly understood, she was exasperating in thematter-of-fact quality of her responses to the friendly remarks whichwould escape him in spite of himself, as well as in her general conduct. Whenever he formed some culinary excuse for walking across the few yardsof tessellated hall which separated his room from the kitchen, and spokethrough the doorway to her, she answered, 'Yes, sir, ' or 'No, sir, 'without turning her eyes from the particular work that she was engagedin. 

In the usual course he would have obtained a couple of properlyqualified servants immediately; but he lived on with the one, or ratherthe less than one, that this cottage-girl afforded. It had been hisalmost invariable custom to dine at one of his clubs. Now he sat at homeover the miserable chop or steak to which he limited himself in dreadlest she should complain of there being too much work for one person, and demand to be sent home. A charwoman came every two or three days, effecting an extraordinary consumption of food and alcoholic liquids:yet it was not for this that Pierston dreaded her presence, but lest, inconversing with Avice, she should open the girl's eyes to the oddity ofher situation. Avice could see for herself that there must have been twoor three servants in the flat during his former residence there: but hisreasons for doing without them seemed never to strike her. 

His intention had been to keep her occupied exclusively at the studio, but accident had modified this. However, he sent her round one morning, and entering himself shortly after found her engaged in wiping thelayers of dust from the casts and models. 

The colour of the dust never ceased to amaze her. 'It is like the holdof a Budmouth collier, ' she said, 'and the beautiful faces of these claypeople are quite spoilt by it. '

'I suppose you'll marry some day, Avice?' remarked Pierston, as heregarded her thoughtfully. 

'Some do and some don't, ' she said, with a reserved smile, stillattending to the casts. '

'You are very offhand, ' said he. 

She archly weighed that remark without further speech. It wastantalizing conduct in the face of his instinct to cherish her;especially when he regarded the charm of her bending profile; thewell-characterized though softly lined nose, the round chin with, asit were, a second leap in its curve to the throat, and the sweep of theeyelashes over the rosy cheek during the sedulously lowered glance. Howfutilely he had laboured to express the character of that face in clay, and, while catching it in substance, had yet lost something that wasessential!

That evening after dusk, in the stress of writing letters, he senther out for stamps. She had been absent some quarter of an hour when, suddenly drawing himself up from over his writing-table, it flashed uponhim that he had absolutely forgotten her total ignorance of London. 

The head post-office, to which he had sent her because it was late, was two or three streets off, and he had made his request in the mostgeneral manner, which she had acceded to with alacrity enough. How couldhe have done such an unreflecting thing?

Pierston went to the window. It was half-past nine o'clock, and owing toher absence the blinds were not down. He opened the casement and steppedout upon the balcony. The green shade of his lamp screened its rays fromthe gloom without. Over the opposite square the moon hung, and to theright there stretched a long street, filled with a diminishing array oflamps, some single, some in clusters, among them an occasional blue orred one. From a corner came the notes of a piano-organ strumming out astirring march of Rossini's. The shadowy black figures of pedestriansmoved up, down, and across the embrowned roadway. Above the roofs was abank of livid mist, and higher a greenish-blue sky, in which stars werevisible, though its lower part was still pale with daylight, againstwhich rose chimney-pots in the form of elbows, prongs, and fists. 

From the whole scene proceeded a ground rumble, miles in extent, uponwhich individual rattles, voices, a tin whistle, the bark of a dog, rodelike bubbles on a sea. The whole noise impressed him with the sense thatno one in its enormous mass ever required rest. 

In this illimitable ocean of humanity there was a unit of existence, hisAvice, wandering alone. 

Pierston looked at his watch. She had been gone half an hour. It wasimpossible to distinguish her at this distance, even if she approached. He came inside, and putting on his hat determined to go out and seekher. He reached the end of the street, and there was nothing of her tobe seen. She had the option of two or three routes from this point tothe post-office; yet he plunged at random into one, till he reached theoffice to find it quite deserted. Almost distracted now by his anxietyfor her he retreated as rapidly as he had come, regaining home only tofind that she had not returned. 

He recollected telling her that if she should ever lose her way she mustcall a cab and drive home. It occurred to him that this was what shewould do now. He again went out upon the balcony; the dignified streetin which he lived was almost vacant, and the lamps stood like placedsentinels awaiting some procession which tarried long. At a point underhim where the road was torn up there stood a red light, and atthe corner two men were talking in leisurely repose, as if sunningthemselves at noonday. Lovers of a feline disposition, who were neverseen by daylight, joked and darted at each other in and out of areagates. 

His attention was fixed on the cabs, and he held his breath as thehollow clap of each horse's hoofs drew near the front of the house, onlyto go onward into the square. The two lamps of each vehicle afar dilatedwith its near approach, and seemed to swerve towards him. It was Avicesurely? No, it passed by. 

Almost frantic he again descended and let himself out of the house, moving towards a more central part, where the roar still continued. Before emerging into the noisy thoroughfare he observed a small figureapproaching leisurely along the opposite side, and hastened across tofind it was she. 

2. XII. A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN

'O Avice!' he cried, with the tenderly subdued scolding of a mother. 'What is this you have done to alarm me so!'

She seemed unconscious of having done anything, and was altogethersurprised at his anxiety. In his relief he did not speak further till heasked her suddenly if she would take his arm since she must be tired. 

'O no, sir!' she assured him, 'I am not a bit tired, and I don't requireany help at all, thank you. '

They went upstairs without using the lift, and he let her and himself inwith his latchkey. She entered the kitchen, and he, following, sat downin a chair there. 

'Where have you been?' he said, with almost angered concern on his face. 'You ought not to have been absent more than ten minutes. '

'I knew there was nothing for me to do, and thought I should like to seea little of London, ' she replied naively. 'So when I had got the stampsI went on into the fashionable streets, where ladies are all walkingabout just as if it were daytime! 'Twas for all the world like cominghome by night from Martinmas Fair at the Street o' Wells, only moregenteel. '

'O Avice, Avice, you must not go out like this! Don't you know that I amresponsible for your safety? I am your--well, guardian, in fact, and ambound by law and morals, and I don't know what-all, to deliver you up toyour native island without a scratch or blemish. And yet you indulge insuch a midnight vagary as this!'

'But I am sure, sir, the gentlemen in the street were more respectablethan they are anywhere at home! They were dressed in the latest fashion, and would have scorned to do me any harm; and as to their love-making, Inever heard anything so polite before. '

'Well, you must not do it again. I'll tell you some day why. What's thatyou have in your hand?'

'A mouse-trap. There are lots of mice in this kitchen--sooty mice, notclean like ours--and I thought I'd try to catch them. That was what Iwent so far to buy, as there were no shops open just about here. I'llset it now. '

She proceeded at once to do so, and Pierston remained in his seatregarding the operation, which seemed entirely to engross her. Itwas extraordinary, indeed, to observe how she wilfully limited herinterests; with what content she received the ordinary things that lifeoffered, and persistently refused to behold what an infinitely extendedlife lay open to her through him. If she had only said the word he wouldhave got a licence and married her the next morning. Was it possiblethat she did not perceive this tendency in him? She could hardly be awoman if she did not; and in her airy, elusive, offhand demeanour shewas very much of a woman indeed. 

'It only holds one mouse, ' he said absently. 

'But I shall hear it throw in the night, and set it again. '

He sighed and left her to her own resources and retired to rest, thoughhe felt no tendency to sleep. At some small hour of the darkness, owing, possibly, to some intervening door being left open, he heardthe mouse-trap click. Another light sleeper must have heard it too, foralmost immediately after the pit-pat of naked feet, accompanied by thebrushing of drapery, was audible along the passage towards the kitchen. After her absence in that apartment long enough to reset the trap, hewas startled by a scream from the same quarter. Pierston sprang out ofbed, jumped into his dressing-gown, and hastened in the direction of thecry. 

Avice, barefooted and wrapped in a shawl, was standing in a chair; themouse-trap lay on the floor, the mouse running round and round in itsneighbourhood. 

'I was trying to take en out, ' said she excitedly, 'and he got away fromme!'

Pierston secured the mouse while she remained standing on the chair. Then, having set the trap anew, his feeling burst out petulantly--

'A girl like you to throw yourself away upon such a commonplace fellowas that quarryman! Why do you do it!'

Her mind was so intently fixed upon the matter in hand that it wassome moments before she caught his irrelevant subject. 'Because I am afoolish girl, ' she said quietly. 

'What! Don't you love him?' said Jocelyn, with a surprised stare up ather as she stood, in her concern appearing the very Avice who had kissedhim twenty years earlier. 

'It is not much use to talk about that, ' said she. 

'Then, is it the soldier?'

'Yes, though I have never spoken to him. '

'Never spoken to the soldier?'

'Never. '

'Has either one treated you badly--deceived you?'

'No. Certainly not. '

'Well, I can't make you out; and I don't wish to know more than youchoose to tell me. Come, Avice, why not tell me exactly how things are?'

'Not now, sir!' she said, her pretty pink face and brown eyes turned insimple appeal to him from her pedestal. 'I will tell you all to-morrow;an that I will!'

He retreated to his own room and lay down meditating. Some quarter of anhour after she had retreated to hers the mouse-trap clicked again, andPierston raised himself on his elbow to listen. The place was so stilland the jerry-built door-panels so thin that he could hear the mousejumping about inside the wires of the trap. But he heard no footstepthis time. As he was wakeful and restless he again arose, proceededto the kitchen with a light, and removing the mouse reset the trap. Returning he listened once more. He could see in the far distance thedoor of Avice's room; but that thoughtful housewife had not heard thesecond capture. From the room came a soft breathing like that of aninfant. 

He entered his own chamber and reclined himself gloomily enough. Herlack of all consciousness of him, the aspect of the deserted kitchen, the cold grate, impressed him with a deeper sense of loneliness than hehad ever felt before. 

Foolish he was, indeed, to be so devoted to this young woman. Herdefencelessness, her freedom from the least thought that there lurked adanger in their propinquity, were in fact secondary safeguards, not muchless strong than that of her being her mother's image, against risk toher from him. Yet it was out of this that his depression came. 

At sight of her the next morning Pierston felt that he must put an endto such a state of things. He sent Avice off to the studio, wrote to anagent for a couple of servants, and then went round to his work. Avicewas busy righting all that she was allowed to touch. It was the girl'sdelight to be occupied among the models and casts, which for the firsttime she regarded with the wistful interest of a soul struggling toreceive ideas of beauty vaguely discerned yet ever eluding her. Thatbrightness in her mother's mind which might have descended to the secondAvice with the maternal face and form, had been dimmed by admixture withthe mediocrity of her father's, and by one who remembered like Pierstonthe dual organization the opposites could be often seen wrestlinginternally. 

They were alone in the studio, and his feelings found vent. Putting hisarms round her he said, 'My darling, sweet little Avice! I want to askyou something--surely you guess what? I want to know this: will you bemarried to me, and live here with me always and ever?'

'O, Mr. Pierston, what nonsense!'

'Nonsense?' said he, shrinking somewhat. 

'Yes, sir. '

'Well, why? Am I too old? Surely there's no serious difference?'

'O no--I should not mind that if it came to marrying. The differenceis not much for husband and wife, though it is rather much for keepingcompany. '

She struggled to get free, and when in the movement she knocked down theEmpress Faustina's head he did not try to retain her. He saw that shewas not only surprised but a little alarmed. 

'You haven't said why it is nonsense!' he remarked tartly. 

'Why, I didn't know you was thinking of me like that. I hadn't anythought of it! And all alone here! What shall I do?'

'Say yes, my pretty Avice! We'll then go out and be married at once, andnobody be any the wiser. '

She shook her head. 'I couldn't, sir. '

'It would be well for you. You don't like me, perhaps?'

'Yes I do--very much. But not in that sort of way--quite. Still, I mighthave got to love you in time, if--'

'Well, then, try, ' he said warmly. 'Your mother did!'

No sooner had the words slipped out than Pierston would have recalledthem. He had felt in a moment that they jeopardized his cause. 

'Mother loved you?' said Avice, incredulously gazing at him. 

'Yes, ' he murmured. 

'You were not her false young man, surely? That one who--'

'Yes, yes! Say no more about it. '

'Who ran away from her?'

'Almost. '

'Then I can NEVER, NEVER like you again! I didn't know it was agentleman--I--I thought--'

'It wasn't a gentleman, then. '

'O, sir, please go away! I can't bear the sight of 'ee at this moment!Perhaps I shall get to--to like you as I did; but--'

'No; I'm d----d if I'll go away!' said Pierston, thoroughly irritated. 'I have been candid with you; you ought to be the same with me!'

'What do you want me to tell?'

'Enough to make it clear to me why you don't accept this offer. Everything you have said yet is a reason for the reverse. Now, my dear, I am not angry. '

'Yes you are. '

'No I'm not. Now what is your reason?'

'The name of it is Isaac Pierston, down home. '

'How?'

'I mean he courted me, and led me on to island custom, and then I wentto chapel one morning and married him in secret, because mother didn'tcare about him; and I didn't either by that time. And then he quarrelledwith me; and just before you and I came to London he went away toGuernsey. Then I saw a soldier; I never knew his name, but I fell inlove with him because I am so quick at that! Still, as it was wrong, Itried not to think of him, and wouldn't look at him when he passed. Butit made me cry very much that I mustn't. I was then very miserable, andyou asked me to come to London. I didn't care what I did with myself, and I came. '

'Heaven above us!' said Pierston, his pale and distressed face showingwith what a shock this announcement had come. 'Why have you done suchextraordinary things? Or, rather, why didn't you tell me of thisbefore? Then, at the present moment you are the wife of a man who is inGuernsey, whom you do not love at all; but instead of him love a soldierwhom you have never spoken to; while I have nearly brought scandalupon us both by your letting me love you. Really, you are a very wickedwoman!'

'No, I am not!' she pouted. 

Still, Avice looked pale and rather frightened, and did not lift hereyes from the floor. 'I said it was nonsense in you to want to have me!'she went on, 'and, even if I hadn't been married to that horrid IsaacPierston, I couldn't have married you after you told me that you was theman who ran away from my mother. '

'I have paid the penalty!' he said sadly. 'Men of my sort always getthe worst of it somehow. Though I never did your mother any harm. Now, Avice--I'll call you dear Avice for your mother's sake and not for yourown--I must see what I can do to help you out of the difficulty thatunquestionably you are in. Why can't you love your husband now you havemarried him?'

Avice looked aside at the statuary as if the subtleties of herorganization were not very easy to define. 

'Was he that black-bearded typical local character I saw you walkingwith one Sunday? The same surname as mine; though, of course, you don'tnotice that in a place where there are only half-a-dozen surnames?'

'Yes, that was Ike. It was that evening we disagreed. He scolded me, andI answered him (you must have heard us); and the next day he went away. '

'Well, as I say, I must consider what it will be best to do for youin this. The first thing, it seems to me, will be to get your husbandhome. '

She impatiently shrugged her shoulders. 'I don't like him!'

'Then why did you marry him?'

'I was obliged to, after we'd proved each other by island custom. '

'You shouldn't have thought of such a thing. It is ridiculous and out ofdate nowadays. '

'Ah, he's so old-fashioned in his notions that he doesn't think likethat. However, he's gone. '

'Ah--it is only a tiff between you, I dare say. I'll start him inbusiness if he'll come. .. . Is the cottage at home still in your hands?'

'Yes, it is my freehold. Grammer Stockwool is taking care o' it for me. '

'Good. And back there you go straightway, my pretty madam, and wait tillyour husband comes to make it up with you. '

'I won't go!--I don't want him to come!' she sobbed. 'I want to stayhere with you, or anywhere, except where he can come!'

'You will get over that. Now, go back to the flat, there's a dear Avice, and be ready in one hour, waiting in the hall for me. '

'I don't want to!'

'But I say you shall!'

She found it was no use to disobey. Precisely at the moment appointedhe met her there himself, burdened only with a valise and umbrella, shewith a box and other things. Directing the porter to put Avice and herbelongings into a four-wheeled cab for the railway-station, he walkedonward from the door, and kept looking behind, till he saw the cabapproaching. He then entered beside the astonished girl, and onward theywent together. 

They sat opposite each other in an empty compartment, and the tediousrailway journey began. Regarding her closely now by the light ofher revelation he wondered at himself for never divining her secret. Whenever he looked at her the girl's eyes grew rebellious, and at lastshe wept. 

'I don't want to go to him!' she sobbed in a miserable voice. 

Pierston was almost as much distressed as she. 'Why did you put yourselfand me in such a position?' he said bitterly. 'It is no use to regretit now! And I can't say that I do. It affords me a way out of a tryingposition. Even if you had not been married to him you would not havemarried me!'

'Yes, I would, sir. '

'What! You would? You said you wouldn't not long ago. '

'I like you better now! I like you more and more!'

Pierston sighed, for emotionally he was not much older than she. Thathitch in his development, rendering him the most lopsided of God'screatures, was his standing misfortune. A proposal to her which crossedhis mind was dismissed as disloyalty, particularly to an inexperiencedfellow-islander and one who was by race and traditions almost akinswoman. 

Little more passed between the twain on that wretched, never-to-be-forgotten day. Aphrodite, Ashtaroth, Freyja, or whoever thelove-queen of his isle might have been, was punishing him sharply, asshe knew but too well how to punish her votaries when they reverted fromthe ephemeral to the stable mood. When was it to end--this curse of hisheart not ageing while his frame moved naturally onward? Perhaps onlywith life. 

His first act the day after depositing her in her own house was to goto the chapel where, by her statement, the marriage had been solemnized, and make sure of the fact. Perhaps he felt an illogical hope that shemight be free, even then, in the tarnished condition which such freedomwould have involved. However, there stood the words distinctly: IsaacPierston, Ann Avice Caro, son and daughter of So-and-so, married on sucha day, signed by the contracting parties, the officiating minister, andthe two witnesses. 

2. XIII. SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

One evening in early winter, when the air was dry and gusty, the darklittle lane which divided the grounds of Sylvania Castle from thecottage of Avice, and led down to the adjoining ruin of Red-King Castle, was paced by a solitary man. The cottage was the centre of his beat; itswestern limit being the gates of the former residence, its eastern thedrawbridge of the ruin. The few other cottages thereabout--all as ifcarved from the solid rock--were in darkness, but from the upper windowof Avice's tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated fromthe far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysteriousShambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into dueposition as balanced opposites. 

The sea moaned--more than moaned--among the boulders below the ruins, a throe of its tide being timed to regular intervals. These sounds wereaccompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottagechamber; so that the articulate heave of water and the articulateheave of life seemed but differing utterances of the selfsame troubledterrestrial Being--which in one sense they were. 

Pierston--for the man in the lane was he--would look from lightship tocottage window; then back again, as he waited there between the travailof the sea without, and the travail of the woman within. Soon aninfant's wail of the very feeblest was also audible in the house. Hestarted from his easy pacing, and went again westward, standing at theelbow of the lane a long time. Then the peace of the sleeping villagewhich lay that way was broken by light wheels and the trot of a horse. Pierston went back to the cottage gate and awaited the arrival of thevehicle. 

It was a light cart, and a man jumped down as it stopped. He was in abroad-brimmed hat, under which no more of him could be perceived thanthat he wore a black beard clipped like a yew fence--a typical aspect inthe island. 

'You are Avice's husband?' asked the sculptor quickly. 

The man replied that he was, in the local accent. 'I've just come in byto-day's boat, ' he added. 'I couldn't git here avore. I had contractedfor the job at Peter-Port, and had to see to't to the end. '

'Well, ' said Pierston, 'your coming means that you are willing to makeit up with her?'

'Ay, I don't know but I be, ' said the man. 'Mid so well do that asanything else!'

'If you do, thoroughly, a good business in your old line awaits you herein the island. '

'Wi' all my heart, then, ' said the man. His voice was energetic, and, though slightly touchy, it showed, on the whole, a disposition to setthings right. 

The driver of the trap was paid off, and Jocelyn and IsaacPierston--undoubtedly scions of a common stock in this isle ofintermarriages, though they had no proof of it--entered the house. Nobody was in the ground-floor room, in the centre of which stood asquare table, in the centre of the table a little wool mat, and in thecentre of the mat a lamp, the apartment having the appearance of beingrigidly swept and set in order for an event of interest. 

The woman who lived in the house with Avice now came downstairs, andto the inquiry of the comers she replied that matters were progressingfavourably, but that nobody could be allowed to go upstairs just then. After placing chairs and viands for them she retreated, and they satdown, the lamp between them--the lover of the sufferer above, who had noright to her, and the man who had every right to her, but did not loveher. Engaging in desultory and fragmentary conversation they listenedto the trampling of feet on the floor-boards overhead--Pierston full ofanxiety and attentiveness, Ike awaiting the course of nature calmly. 

Soon they heard the feeble bleats repeated, and then the localpractitioner descended and entered the room. 

'How is she now?' said Pierston, the more taciturn Ike looking up withhim for the answer that he felt would serve for two as well as for one. 

'Doing well, remarkably well, ' replied the professional gentleman, witha manner of having said it in other places; and his vehicle not being atthe door he sat down and shared some refreshment with the others. Whenhe had departed Mrs. Stockwool again stepped down, and informed themthat Ike's presence had been made known to his wife. 

The truant quarrier seemed rather inclined to stay where he was andfinish the mug of ale, but Pierston quickened him, and he ascended thestaircase. As soon as the lower room was empty Pierston leant with hiselbows on the table, and covered his face with his hands. 

Ike was absent no great time. Descending with a proprietary mien thathad been lacking before, he invited Jocelyn to ascend likewise, sinceshe had stated that she would like to see him. Jocelyn went up thecrooked old steps, the husband remaining below. 

Avice, though white as the sheets, looked brighter and happier than hehad expected to find her, and was apparently very much fortified by thepink little lump at her side. She held out her hand to him. 

'I just wanted to tell 'ee, ' she said, striving against her feebleness, 'I thought it would be no harm to see you, though 'tis rather soon--totell 'ee how very much I thank you for getting me settled again withIke. He is very glad to come home again, too, he says. Yes, you've donea good many kind things for me, sir. '

Whether she were really glad, or whether the words were expressed as amatter of duty, Pierston did not attempt to learn. 

He merely said that he valued her thanks. 'Now, Avice, ' he addedtenderly, 'I resign my guardianship of you. I hope to see your husbandin a sound little business here in a very short time. '

'I hope so--for baby's sake, ' she said, with a bright sigh. 'Wouldyou--like to see her, sir?'

'The baby? O yes--YOUR baby! You must christen her Avice. '

'Yes--so I will!' she murmured readily, and disclosed the infantwith some timidity. 'I hope you forgive me, sir, for concealing mythoughtless marriage!'

'If you forgive me for making love to you. '

'Yes. How were you to know! I wish--'

Pierston bade her good-bye, kissing her hand; turned from her and theincipient being whom he was to meet again under very altered conditions, and left the bed-chamber with a tear in his eye. 

'Here endeth that dream!' said he. 

 *****

Hymen, in secret or overt guise, seemed to haunt Pierston just at thistime with undignified mockery which savoured rather of Harlequin than ofthe torch-bearer. Two days after parting in a lone island from the girlhe had so disinterestedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers, wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with a preoccupied face. 

'My dear fellow, ' said Somers, 'what do you think! I was charged not totell you, but, hang it! I may just as well make a clean breast of it nowas later. '

'What--you are not going to. .. ' began Pierston, with divination. 

'Yes. What I said on impulse six months back I am about to carry outin cold blood. Nichola and I began in jest and ended in earnest. We aregoing to take one another next month for good and all. '

PART THIRD -- A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY

 'In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. ' --W. SHAKESPEARE. 

3. I. SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON

Twenty years had spread their films over the events which wound up withthe reunion of the second Avice and her husband; and the hoary peninsulacalled an island looked just the same as before; though many who hadformerly projected their daily shadows upon its unrelieved summerwhiteness ceased now to disturb the colourless sunlight there. 

The general change, nevertheless, was small. The silent ships came andwent from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file afterfile of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfullydragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvianwooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from thequicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through itseye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bankhad been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remainedundevoured. 

Men drank, smoked, and spat in the inns with only a little moreadulteration in their refreshments and a trifle less dialect in theirspeech than of yore. But one figure had never been seen on the Channelrock in the interval, the form of Pierston the sculptor, whose first useof the chisel that rock had instigated. 

He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in fact, at this very date he wasstaying at an hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set eyes on Avicesince parting from her in the room with her firstborn, he had managed toobtain tidings of her from time to time during the interval. In this wayPierston learnt that, shortly after their resumption of a common life inher house, Ike had ill-used her, till fortunately, the business to whichJocelyn had assisted him chancing to prosper, he became immersed inits details, and allowed Avice to pursue her household courses withoutinterference, initiating that kind of domestic reconciliation which isso calm and durable, having as its chief ingredient neither hate norlove, but an all-embracing indifference. 

At first Pierston had sent her sums of money privately, fearing lesther husband should deny her material comforts; but he soon found, to hisgreat relief, that such help was unnecessary, social ambition promptingIke to set up as quite a gentleman-islander, and to allow Avice a scopefor show which he would never have allowed in mere kindness. 

Being in Rome, as aforesaid, Pierston returned one evening to hishotel to dine, after spending the afternoon among the busts in the longgallery of the Vatican. The unconscious habit, common to so many people, of tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to discern, or to fancyhe discerned, in the Roman atmosphere, in its lights and shades, andparticularly in its reflected or secondary lights, something resemblingthe atmosphere of his native promontory. Perhaps it was that in eachcase the eye was mostly resting on stone--that the quarries of ruins inthe Eternal City reminded him of the quarries of maiden rock at home. 

This being in his mind when he sat down to dinner at the common table, he was surprised to hear an American gentleman, who sat opposite, mention the name of Pierston's birthplace. The American was talking toa friend about a lady--an English widow, whose acquaintance they hadrenewed somewhere in the Channel Islands during a recent tour, afterhaving known her as a young woman who came to San Francisco with herfather and mother many years before. Her father was then a rich man justretired from the business of a stone-merchant in the Isle of Slingers;but he had engaged in large speculations, and had lost nearly all hisfortune. Jocelyn further gathered that the widowed daughter's name wasMrs. Leverre; that she had a step-son, her husband having been a Jerseygentleman, a widower; and that the step-son seemed to be a promising andinteresting young man. 

Pierston was instantly struck with the perception that these and otherallusions, though general, were in accord with the history of hislong-lost Marcia. He hardly felt any desire to hunt her up after nearlytwo score years of separation, but he was impressed enough to resolve toexchange a word with the strangers as soon as he could get opportunity. 

He could not well attract their attention through the plants upon thewide table, and even if he had been able he was disinclined to askquestions in public. He waited on till dinner was over, and when thestrangers withdrew Pierston withdrew in their rear. 

They were not in the drawing-room, and he found that they had goneout. There was no chance of overtaking them, but Pierston, waked torestlessness by their remarks, wandered up and down the adjoining Piazzadi Spagna, thinking they might return. The streets below were immersedin shade, the front of the church of the Trinita de' Monti at thetop was flooded with orange light, the gloom of evening graduallyintensifying upon the broad, long flight of steps, which foot-passengersincessantly ascended and descended with the insignificance of ants; thedusk wrapped up the house to the left, in which Shelley had lived, andthat to the right, in which Keats had died. 

Getting back to the hotel he learnt that the Americans had only droppedin to dine, and were staying elsewhere. He saw no more of them; and onreflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, goingoff in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, wouldcare for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he wereto take the trouble to discover her. 

 * * *

Thus much Marcia. The other thread of his connection with the ancientIsle of Slingers was stirred by a letter he received from Avice a littleafter this date, in which she stated that her husband Ike had beenkilled in his own quarry by an accident within the past year; that sheherself had been ill, and though well again, and left amply providedfor, she would like to see him if he ever came that way. 

As she had not communicated for several long years, her expressed wishto see him now was likely to be prompted by something more, somethingnewer, than memories of him. Yet the manner of her writing precluded allsuspicion that she was thinking of him as an old lover whose suit eventshad now made practicable. He told her he was sorry to hear that she hadbeen ill, and that he would certainly take an early opportunity of goingdown to her home on his next visit to England. 

He did more. Her request had revived thoughts of his old home and itsassociations, and instead of awaiting other reasons for a return he madeher the operating one. About a week later he stood once again at thefoot of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the entrance to theIsle were perched like grey pigeons on a roof-side. 

At Top-o'-Hill--as the summit of the rock was mostly called--he stoodlooking at the busy doings in the quarries beyond, where the numerousblack hoisting-cranes scattered over the central plateau had theappearance of a swarm of crane-flies resting there. He went a littlefurther, made some general inquiries about the accident which hadcarried off Avice's husband in the previous year, and learnt that thoughnow a widow, she had plenty of friends and sympathizers about her, which rendered any immediate attention to her on his part unnecessary. Considering, therefore, that there was no great reason why he shouldcall on her so soon, and without warning, he turned back. Perhaps afterall her request had been dictated by a momentary feeling only, and aconsiderable strangeness to each other must naturally be the result ofa score of dividing years. Descending to the bottom he took his seat inthe train on the shore, which soon carried him along the Bank, andround to the watering-place five miles off, at which he had taken up hisquarters for a few days. 

Here, as he stayed on, his local interests revived. Whenever he went outhe could see the island that was once his home lying like a greatsnail upon the sea across the bay. It was the spring of the year; localsteamers had begun to run, and he was never tired of standing on thethinly occupied deck of one of these as it skirted the island andrevealed to him on the cliffs far up its height the ruins of Red-KingCastle, behind which the little village of East Quarriers lay. 

Thus matters went on, if they did not rather stand still, for severaldays before Pierston redeemed his vague promise to seek Avice out. Andin the meantime he was surprised by the arrival of another letter fromher by a roundabout route. She had heard, she said, that he had been onthe island, and imagined him therefore to be staying somewhere near. Whydid he not call as he had told her he would do? She was always thinkingof him, and wishing to see him. 

Her tone was anxious, and there was no doubt that she really hadsomething to say which she did not want to write. He wondered what itcould be, and started the same afternoon. 

Avice, who had been little in his mind of late years, began to renew forherself a distinct position therein. He was fully aware that since hisearlier manhood a change had come over his regard of womankind. Once theindividual had been nothing more to him than the temporary abiding-placeof the typical or ideal; now his heart showed its bent to be a growingfidelity to the specimen, with all her pathetic flaws of detail; whichflaws, so far from sending him further, increased his tenderness. Thismaturer feeling, if finer and higher, was less convenient than the old. Ardours of passion could be felt as in youth without the recuperativeintervals which had accompanied evanescence. 

The first sensation was to find that she had long ceased to live inthe little freehold cottage she had occupied of old. In answer to hisinquiries he was directed along the road to the west of the moderncastle, past the entrance on that side, and onward to the very housethat had once been his own home. There it stood as of yore, facingup the Channel, a comfortable roomy structure, the euonymus and othershrubs, which alone would stand in the teeth of the salt wind, livingon at about the same stature in front of it; but the paint-work muchrenewed. A thriving man had resided there of late, evidently. 

The widow in mourning who received him in the front parlour was, alas!but the sorry shadow of Avice the Second. How could he have fanciedotherwise after twenty years? Yet he had been led to fancy otherwise, almost without knowing it, by feeling himself unaltered. Indeed, curiously enough, nearly the first words she said to him were: 'Why--youare just the same!'

'Just the same. Yes, I am, Avice, ' he answered sadly; for this inabilityto ossify with the rest of his generation threw him out of proportionwith the time. Moreover, while wearing the aspect of comedy, it was ofthe nature of tragedy. 

'It is well to be you, sir, ' she went on. 'I have had troubles to takethe bloom off me!'

'Yes; I have been sorry for you. '

She continued to regard him curiously, with humorous interest; andhe knew what was passing in her mind: that this man, to whom she hadformerly looked up as to a person far in advance of her along the laneof life, seemed now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the pair of themobserving the world with fairly level eyes. 

He had come to her with warmth for a vision which, on reaching her, he found to have departed; and, though fairly weaned by the naturalreality, he was so far staunch as to linger hankeringly. They talked ofpast days, his old attachment, which she had then despised, being nowfar more absorbing and present to her than to himself. 

She unmistakably won upon him as he sat on. A curious closeness betweenthem had been produced in his imagination by the discovery that shewas passing her life within the house of his own childhood. Her similarsurname meant little here; but it was also his, and, added to theidentity of domicile, lent a strong suggestiveness to the accident. 

'This is where I used to sit when my parents occupied the house, 'he said, placing himself beside that corner of the fireplace whichcommanded a view through the window. 'I could see a bough of tamariskwave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassywaste towards the sea, and at night the same old lightship blinking farout there. Place yourself on the spot, to please me. '

She set her chair where he indicated, and Pierston stood close besideher, directing her gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded thenceas a boy. Her head and face--the latter thoughtful and worn enough, poorthing, to suggest a married life none too comfortable--were close to hisbreast, and, with a few inches further incline, would have touched it. 

'And now you are the inhabitant; I the visitor, ' he said. 'I am glad tosee you here--so glad, Avice! You are fairly well provided for--I thinkI may assume that?' He looked round the room at the solid mahoganyfurniture, and at the modern piano and show bookcase. 

'Yes, Ike left me comfortable. 'Twas he who thought of moving from mycottage to this larger house. He bought it, and I can live here as longas I choose to. '

Apart from the decline of his adoration to friendship, there seemed tobe a general convergence of positions which suggested that he might makeamends for the desertion of Avice the First by proposing to this Avicewhen a meet time should arrive. If he did not love her as he had donewhen she was a slim thing catching mice in his rooms in London, he couldsurely be content at his age with comradeship. After all she was onlyforty to his sixty. The feeling that he really could be thus contentwas so convincing that he almost believed the luxury of getting old andreposeful was coming to his restless, wandering heart at last. 

'Well, you have come at last, sir, ' she went on; 'and I am grateful toyou. I did not like writing, and yet I wanted to be straightforward. Have you guessed at all why I wished to see you so much that I could nothelp sending twice to you?'

'I have tried, but cannot. '

'Try again. It is a pretty reason, which I hope you'll forgive. '

'I am sure I sha'n't unriddle it. But I'll say this on my own accountbefore you tell me. I have always taken a lingering interest in you, which you must value for what it is worth. It originated, so far as itconcerns you personally, with the sight of you in that cottage round thecorner, nineteen or twenty years ago, when I became tenant of the castleopposite. But that was not the very beginning. The very beginning wasa score of years before that, when I, a young fellow of one-and-twenty, coming home here, from London, to see my father, encountered a tenderwoman as like you as your double; was much attracted by her as I sawher day after day flit past this window; till I made it my business toaccompany her in her walks awhile. I, as you know, was not a staunchfellow, and it all ended badly. But, at any rate you, her daughter, andI are friends. '

'Ah! there she is!' suddenly exclaimed Avice, whose attention hadwandered somewhat from his retrospective discourse. She was looking fromthe window towards the cliffs, where, upon the open ground quite near athand, a slender female form was seen rambling along. 'She is out fora walk, ' Avice continued. 'I wonder if she is going to call here thisafternoon? She is living at the castle opposite as governess. '

'O, she's--'

'Yes. Her education was very thorough--better even than hergrandmother's. I was the neglected one, and her father and myself bothvowed that there should be no complaint on that score about her. Wechristened her Avice, to keep up the name, as you requested. I wish youcould speak to her--I am sure you would like her. '

'Is that the baby?' faltered Jocelyn. 

'Yes, the baby. '

The person signified, now much nearer, was a still more modernized, up-to-date edition of the two Avices of that blood with whom he had beeninvolved more or less for the last forty years. A ladylike creature wasshe--almost elegant. She was altogether finer in figure than hermother or grandmother had ever been, which made her more of a woman inappearance than in years. She wore a large-disked sun-hat, with a brimlike a wheel whose spokes were radiating folds of muslin lining thebrim, a black margin beyond the muslin being the felloe. Beneath thisbrim her hair was massed low upon her brow, the colour of the thicktresses being probably, from her complexion, repeated in the irises ofher large, deep eyes. Her rather nervous lips were thin and closed, sothat they only appeared as a delicate red line. A changeable temperamentwas shown by that mouth--quick transitions from affection to aversion, from a pout to a smile. 

It was Avice the Third. 

Jocelyn and the second Avice continued to gaze ardently at her. 

'Ah! she is not coming in now; she hasn't time, ' murmured the mother, with some disappointment. 'Perhaps she means to run across in theevening. '

The tall girl, in fact, went past and on till she was out of sight. Pierston stood as in a dream. It was the very she, in all essentialparticulars, and with an intensification of general charm, who hadkissed him forty years before. When he turned his head from the windowhis eyes fell again upon the intermediate Avice at his side. Before butthe relic of the Well-Beloved, she had now become its empty shrine. Warmfriendship, indeed, he felt for her; but whatever that might have donetowards the instauration of a former dream was now hopelessly barred bythe rivalry of the thing itself in the guise of a lineal successor. 

3. II. MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMENT

Pierston had been about to leave, but he sat down again on being askedif he would stay and have a cup of tea. He hardly knew for a moment whathe did; a dim thought that Avice--the renewed Avice--might come into thehouse made his reseating himself an act of spontaneity. 

He forgot that twenty years earlier he had called the now Mrs. Pierstonan elf, a witch; and that lapse of time had probably not diminished thesubtleties implied by those epithets. He did not know that she had notedevery impression that her daughter had made upon him. 

How he contrived to attenuate and disperse the rather tenderpersonalities he had opened up with the new Avice's mother, Pierstonnever exactly defined. Perhaps she saw more than he thought shesaw--read something in his face--knew that about his nature which hegave her no credit for knowing. Anyhow, the conversation took the formof a friendly gossip from that minute, his remarks being often givenwhile his mind was turned elsewhere. 

But a chill passed through Jocelyn when there had been time forreflection. The renewed study of his art in Rome without anycounterbalancing practical pursuit had nourished and developed hisnatural responsiveness to impressions; he now felt that his old trouble, his doom--his curse, indeed, he had sometimes called it--was comeback again. His divinity was not yet propitiated for that original sinagainst her image in the person of Avice the First, and now, at the ageof one-and-sixty, he was urged on and on like the Jew Ahasuerus--or, inthe phrase of the islanders themselves, like a blind ram. 

The Goddess, an abstraction to the general, was a fairly real personageto Pierston. He had watched the marble images of her which stood in hisworking-room, under all changes of light and shade in the brighteningof morning, in the blackening of eve, in moonlight, in lamplight. Everyline and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he;and, though not a belief, it was, as has been stated, a formula, asuperstition, that the three Avices were inter-penetrated with heressence. 

'And the next Avice--your daughter, ' he said stumblingly; 'she is, yousay, a governess at the castle opposite?'

Mrs. Pierston reaffirmed the fact, adding that the girl often slept athome because she, her mother, was so lonely. She often thought she wouldlike to keep her daughter at home altogether. 

'She plays that instrument, I suppose?' said Pierston, regarding thepiano. 

'Yes, she plays beautifully; she had the best instruction that masterscould give her. She was educated at Sandbourne. '

'Which room does she call hers when at home?' he asked curiously. 

'The little one over this. '

It had been his own. 'Strange, ' he murmured. 

He finished tea, and sat after tea, but the youthful Avice did notarrive. With the Avice present he conversed as the old friend--no more. At last it grew dusk, and Pierston could not find an excuse for stayinglonger. 

'I hope to make the acquaintance--of your daughter, ' he said in leaving, knowing that he might have added with predestinate truth, 'of my newtenderly-beloved. '

'I hope you will, ' she answered. 'This evening she evidently has gonefor a walk instead of coming here. '

'And, by-the-bye, you have not told me what you especially wanted to seeme for?'

'Ah, no. I will put it off. '

'Very well. I don't pretend to guess. '

'I must tell you another time. '

'If it is any little business in connection with your late husband'saffairs, do command me. I'll do anything I can. '

'Thank you. And I shall see you again soon?'

'Certainly. Quite soon. '

When he was gone she looked reflectively at the spot where he hadbeen standing, and said: 'Best hold my tongue. It will work of itself, without my telling. '

Jocelyn went from the house, but as the white road passed under hisfeet he felt in no mood to get back to his lodgings in the town on themainland. He lingered about upon the rugged ground for a long while, thinking of the extraordinary reproduction of the original girl in thisnew form he had seen, and of himself as of a foolish dreamer in being sosuddenly fascinated by the renewed image in a personality not one-thirdof his age. As a physical fact, no doubt, the preservation of thelikeness was no uncommon thing here, but it helped the dream. 

Passing round the walls of the new castle he deviated from his homewardtrack by turning down the familiar little lane which led to the ruinedcastle of the Red King. It took him past the cottage in which the newAvice was born, from whose precincts he had heard her first infantinecry. Pausing he saw near the west behind him the new moon growingdistinct upon the glow. 

He was subject to gigantic fantasies still. In spite of himself, the sight of the new moon, as representing one who, by her so-calledinconstancy, acted up to his own idea of a migratory Well-Beloved, madehim feel as if his wraith in a changed sex had suddenly looked over thehorizon at him. In a crowd secretly, or in solitude boldly, he hadoften bowed the knee three times to this sisterly divinity on her firstappearance monthly, and directed a kiss towards her shining shape. Thecurse of his qualities (if it were not a blessing) was far from havingspent itself yet. 

In the other direction the castle ruins rose square and dusky againstthe sea. He went on towards these, around which he had played as a boy, and stood by the walls at the edge of the cliff pondering. There was nowind and but little tide, and he thought he could hear from years ago avoice that he knew. It certainly was a voice, but it came from the rocksbeneath the castle ruin. 

'Mrs. Atway!'

A silence followed, and nobody came. The voice spoke again; 'JohnStoney!'

Neither was this summons attended to. The cry continued, with moreentreaty: 'William Scribben!'

The voice was that of a Pierston--there could be no doubt of it--youngAvice's, surely? Something or other seemed to be detaining her downthere against her will. A sloping path beneath the beetling cliff andthe castle walls rising sheer from its summit, led down to the lowerlevel whence the voice proceeded. Pierston followed the pathway, andsoon beheld a girl in light clothing--the same he had seen throughthe window--standing upon one of the rocks, apparently unable to move. Pierston hastened across to her. 

'O, thank you for coming!' she murmured with some timidity. 'I have metwith an awkward mishap. I live near here, and am not frightened really. My foot has become jammed in a crevice of the rock, and I cannot get itout, try how I will. What SHALL I do!'

Jocelyn stooped and examined the cause of discomfiture. 'I think if youcan take your boot off, ' he said, 'your foot might slip out, leaving theboot behind. '

She tried to act upon this advice, but could not do so effectually. Pierston then experimented by slipping his hand into the crevice till hecould just reach the buttons of her boot, which, however, he could notunfasten any more than she. Taking his penknife from his pocket he triedagain, and cut off the buttons one by one. The boot unfastened, and outslipped the foot. 

'O, how glad I am!' she cried joyfully. 'I was fearing I should have tostay here all night. How can I thank you enough?'

He was tugging to withdraw the boot, but no skill that he could exercisewould move it without tearing. At last she said: 'Don't try any longer. It is not far to the house. I can walk in my stocking. '

'I'll assist you in, ' he said. 

She said she did not want help, nevertheless allowed him to help her onthe unshod side. As they moved on she explained that she had come outthrough the garden door; had been standing on the boulders to look atsomething out at sea just discernible in the evening light as assistedby the moon, and, in jumping down, had wedged her foot as he had foundit. 

Whatever Pierston's years might have made him look by day, in the duskof evening he was fairly presentable as a pleasing man of no markedantiquity, his outline differing but little from what it had been whenhe was half his years. He was well preserved, still upright, trimlyshaven, agile in movement; wore a tightly buttoned suit which set of anaturally slight figure; in brief, he might have been of any age as heappeared to her at this moment. She talked to him with the co-equalityof one who assumed him to be not far ahead of her own generation; and, as the growing darkness obscured him more and more, he adopted herassumption of his age with increasing boldness of tone. 

The flippant, harmless freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avicehad plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helpedPierston greatly in this role of jeune premier which he was not unreadyto play. Not a word did he say about being a native of the island;still more carefully did he conceal the fact of his having courted hergrandmother, and engaged himself to marry that attractive lady. 

He found that she had come out upon the rocks through the same littleprivate door from the lawn of the modern castle which had frequentlyafforded him egress to the same spot in years long past. Pierstonaccompanied her across the grounds almost to the entrance of themansion--the place being now far better kept and planted than when hehad rented it as a lonely tenant; almost, indeed, restored to the orderand neatness which had characterized it when he was a boy. 

Like her granny she was too inexperienced to be reserved, and duringthis little climb, leaning upon his arm, there was time for a great dealof confidence. When he had bidden her farewell, and she had entered, leaving him in the dark, a rush of sadness through Pierston's soul sweptdown all the temporary pleasure he had found in the charming girl'scompany. Had Mephistopheles sprung from the ground there and then withan offer to Jocelyn of restoration to youth on the usual terms of hisfirm, the sculptor might have consented to sell a part of himself whichhe felt less immediate need of than of a ruddy lip and cheek and anunploughed brow. 

But what could only have been treated as a folly by outsiders was almosta sorrow for him. Why was he born with such a temperament? And thisconcatenated interest could hardly have arisen, even with Pierston, butfor a conflux of circumstances only possible here. The three Avices, thesecond something like the first, the third a glorification of the first, at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial islandcustoms of intermarriage and of prenuptial union, under which conditionsthe type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child throughgenerations: so that, till quite latterly, to have seen one native manand woman was to have seen the whole population of that isolated rock, so nearly cut off from the mainland. His own predisposition and thesense of his early faithlessness did all the rest. 

He turned gloomily away, and let himself out of the precincts. Beforewalking along the couple of miles of road which would conduct him to thelittle station on the shore, he redescended to the rocks whereon he hadfound her, and searched about for the fissure which had made a prisonerof this terribly belated edition of the Beloved. Kneeling down besidethe spot he inserted his hand, and ultimately, by much wriggling, withdrew the pretty boot. He mused over it for a moment, put it in hispocket, and followed the stony route to the Street of Wells. 

3. III. THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN

There was nothing to hinder Pierston in calling upon the new Avice'smother as often as he should choose, beyond the five miles ofintervening railway and additional mile or two of clambering overthe heights of the island. Two days later, therefore, he repeated hisjourney and knocked about tea-time at the widow's door. 

As he had feared, the daughter was not at home. He sat down beside theold sweetheart who, having eclipsed her mother in past days, had noweclipsed herself in her child. Jocelyn produced the girl's boot from hispocket. 

'Then, 'tis YOU who helped Avice out of her predicament?' said Mrs. Pierston, with surprise. 

'Yes, my dear friend; and perhaps I shall ask you to help me out of minebefore I have done. But never mind that now. What did she tell you aboutthe adventure?'

Mrs. Pierston was looking thoughtfully upon him. 'Well, 'tis ratherstrange it should have been you, sir, ' she replied. She seemed to bea good deal interested. 'I thought it might have been a younger man--amuch younger man. '

'It might have been as far as feelings were concerned. .. . Now, Avice, I'll to the point at once. Virtually I have known your daughter anynumber of years. When I talk to her I can anticipate every turn of herthought, every sentiment, every act, so long did I study those things inyour mother and in you. Therefore I do not require to learn her; shewas learnt by me in her previous existences. Now, don't be shocked: I amwilling to marry her--I should be overjoyed to do it, if there wouldbe nothing preposterous about it, or that would seem like a man makinghimself too much of a fool, and so degrading her in consenting. I canmake her comparatively rich, as you know, and I would indulge her everywhim. There is the idea, bluntly put. It would set right something in mymind that has been wrong for forty years. After my death she would haveplenty of freedom and plenty of means to enjoy it. '

Mrs. Isaac Pierston seemed only a little surprised; certainly notshocked. 

'Well, if I didn't think you might be a bit taken with her!' shesaid with an arch simplicity which could hardly be called unaffected. 'Knowing the set of your mind, from my little time with you years ago, nothing you could do in this way would astonish me. '

'But you don't think badly of me for it?'

'Not at all. .. . By-the-bye, did you ever guess why I asked you tocome?. .. But never mind it now: the matter is past. .. . Of course, itwould depend upon what Avice felt. .. . Perhaps she would rather marry ayounger man. '

'And suppose a satisfactory younger man should not appear?'

Mrs. Pierston showed in her face that she fully recognized thedifference between a rich bird in hand and a young bird in the bush. Shelooked him curiously up and down. 

'I know you would make anybody a very nice husband, ' she said. 'I knowthat you would be nicer than many men half your age; and, though thereis a great deal of difference between you and her, there have been moreunequal marriages, that's true. Speaking as her mother, I can say thatI shouldn't object to you, sir, for her, provided she liked you. That iswhere the difficulty will lie. '

'I wish you would help me to get over that difficulty, ' he said gently. 'Remember, I brought back a truant husband to you twenty years ago. '

'Yes, you did, ' she assented; 'and, though I may say no great things asto happiness came of it, I've always seen that your intentions towardsme were none the less noble on that account. I would do for you what Iwould do for no other man, and there is one reason in particular whichinclines me to help you with Avice--that I should feel absolutelycertain I was helping her to a kind husband. '

'Well, that would remain to be seen. I would, at any rate, try to beworthy of your opinion. Come, Avice, for old times' sake, you must helpme. You never felt anything but friendship in those days, you know, andthat makes it easy and proper for you to do me a good turn now. '

After a little more conversation his old friend promised that she reallywould do everything that lay in her power. She did not say how simpleshe thought him not to perceive that she had already, by writing to him, been doing everything that lay in her power; had created the feelingwhich prompted his entreaty. And to show her good faith in this promiseshe asked him to wait till later in the evening, when Avice mightpossibly run across to see her. 

Pierston, who fancied he had won the younger Avice's interest, at least, by the part he had played upon the rocks the week before, had a dreadof encountering her in full light till he should have advanced a littlefurther in her regard. He accordingly was perplexed at this proposal, and, seeing his hesitation, Mrs. Pierston suggested that they shouldwalk together in the direction whence Avice would come, if she came atall. 

He welcomed the idea, and in a few minutes they started, strollingalong under the now strong moonlight, and when they reached the gates ofSylvania Castle turning back again towards the house. After two or threesuch walks up and down the gate of the castle grounds clicked, and aform came forth which proved to be the expected one. 

As soon as they met the girl recognized in her mother's companion thegentleman who had helped her on the shore; and she seemed really glad tofind that her chivalrous assistant was claimed by her parent as an oldfriend. She remembered hearing at divers times about this worthy Londonman of talent and position, whose ancestry were people of her own isle, and possibly, from the name, of a common stock with her own. 

'And you have actually lived in Sylvania Castle yourself, Mr. Pierston?'asked Avice the daughter, with her innocent young voice. 'Was it longago?'

'Yes, it was some time ago, ' replied the sculptor, with a sinking at hisheart lest she should ask how long. 

'It must have been when I was away--or when I was very little?'

'I don't think you were away. '

'But I don't think I could have been here?'

'No, perhaps you couldn't have been here. '

'I think she was hiding herself in the parsley-bed, ' said Avice's motherblandly. 

They talked in this general way till they reached Mrs. Pierston's house;but Jocelyn resisted both the widow's invitation and the desire ofhis own heart, and went away without entering. To risk, by visiblyconfronting her, the advantage that he had already gained, or fanciedhe had gained, with the re-incarnate Avice required more courage than hecould claim in his present mood. 

 * * *

Such evening promenades as these were frequent during the waxing ofthat summer moon. On one occasion, as they were all good walkers, it wasarranged that they should meet halfway between the island and the townin which Pierston had lodgings. It was impossible that by this time thepretty young governess should not have guessed the ultimate reason ofthese rambles to be a matrimonial intention; but she inclined to thebelief that the widow rather than herself was the object of Pierston'sregard; though why this educated and apparently wealthy man should beattracted by her mother--whose homeliness was apparent enough to thegirl's more modern training--she could not comprehend. 

They met accordingly in the middle of the Pebble-bank, Pierston comingfrom the mainland, and the women from the peninsular rock. Crossing thewooden bridge which connected the bank with the shore proper they movedin the direction of Henry the Eighth's Castle, on the verge of therag-stone cliff. Like the Red King's Castle on the island, the interiorwas open to the sky, and when they entered and the full moon streameddown upon them over the edge of the enclosing masonry, the whole presentreality faded from Jocelyn's mind under the press of memories. Neitherof his companions guessed what Pierston was thinking of. It was in thisvery spot that he was to have met the grandmother of the girl at hisside, and in which he would have met her had she chosen to keep theappointment, a meeting which might--nay, must--have changed the wholecurrent of his life. 

Instead of that, forty years had passed--forty years of severance fromAvice, till a secondly renewed copy of his sweetheart had arisen to fillher place. But he, alas, was not renewed. And of all this the prettyyoung thing at his side knew nothing. 

Taking advantage of the younger woman's retreat to view the sea throughan opening of the walls, Pierston appealed to her mother in a whisper:'Have you ever given her a hint of what my meaning is? No? Then I thinkyou might, if you really have no objection. '

Mrs. Pierston, as the widow, was far from being so coldly disposed inher own person towards her friend as in the days when he wanted to marryher. Had she now been the object of his wishes he would not have neededto ask her twice. But like a good mother she stifled all this, and saidshe would sound Avice there and then. 

'Avice, my dear, ' she said, advancing to where the girl mused in thewindow-gap, 'what do you think of Mr. Pierston paying his addresses toyou--coming courting, as _I_ call it in my old-fashioned way. Supposinghe were to, would you encourage him?'

'To ME, mother?' said Avice, with an inquiring laugh. 'I thought--hemeant you!'

'O no, he doesn't mean me, ' said her mother hastily. 'He is nothing morethan my friend. '

'I don't want any addresses, ' said the daughter. 

'He is a man in society, and would take you to an elegant house inLondon suited to your education, instead of leaving you to mope here. '

'I should like that well enough, ' replied Avice carelessly. 

'Then give him some encouragement. '

'I don't care enough about him to do any encouraging. It is hisbusiness, I should think, to do all. '

She spoke in her lightest vein; but the result was that when Pierston, who had discreetly withdrawn, returned to them, she walked docilely, though perhaps gloomily, beside him, her mother dropping to the rear. They came to a rugged descent, and Pierston took her hand to help her. She allowed him to retain it when they arrived on level ground. 

Altogether it was not an unsuccessful evening for the man with theunanchored heart, though possibly initial success meant worse for him inthe long run than initial failure. There was nothing marvellous in thefact of her tractability thus far. In his modern dress and style, underthe rays of the moon, he looked a very presentable gentleman indeed, while his knowledge of art and his travelled manners were not withouttheir attractions for a girl who with one hand touched the educatedmiddle-class and with the other the rude and simple inhabitants of theisle. Her intensely modern sympathies were quickened by her peculiaroutlook. 

Pierston would have regarded his interest in her as overmuch selfishif there had not existed a redeeming quality in the substratum ofold pathetic memory by which such love had been created--which stillpermeated it, rendering it the tenderest, most anxious, most protectiveinstinct he had ever known. It may have had in its composition too muchof the boyish fervour that had characterized such affection when he wascherry-cheeked, and light in the foot as a girl; but, if it was all thisfeeling of youth, it was more. 

Mrs. Pierston, in fearing to be frank, lest she might seem to be anglingfor his fortune, did not fully divine his cheerful readiness to offerit, if by so doing he could make amends for his infidelity to her familyforty years back in the past. Time had not made him mercenary, and ithad quenched his ambitions; and though his wish to wed Avice was notentirely a wish to enrich her, the knowledge that she would be enrichedbeyond anything that she could have anticipated was what allowed him toindulge his love. 

He was not exactly old he said to himself the next morning as he beheldhis face in the glass. And he looked considerably younger than he was. But there was history in his face--distinct chapters of it; his brow wasnot that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line inhis forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by pasttroubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had beenbrought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that hemight never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin, they had resulted from those months of despondency when all seemed goingagainst his art, his strength, his happiness. 'You cannot live your lifeand keep it, Jocelyn, ' he said. Time was against him and love, and timewould probably win. 

'When I went away from the first Avice, ' he continued with whimsicalmisery, 'I had a presentiment that I should ache for it some day. AndI am aching--have ached ever since this jade of an Ideal learnt theunconscionable trick of inhabiting one image only. '

Upon the whole he was not without a bodement that it would be folly topress on. 

3. IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION

This desultory courtship of a young girl which had been brought about byher mother's contrivance was interrupted by the appearance of Somers andhis wife and family on the Budmouth Esplanade. Alfred Somers, once theyouthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was now a middle-aged familyman with spectacles--spectacles worn, too, with the single object ofseeing through them--and a row of daughters tailing off to infancy, whoat present added appreciably to the income of the bathing-machine womenestablished along the sands. 

Mrs. Somers--once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs. Pine-Avon--had nowretrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother andgrandmother, giving sharp, strict regard to the current literature andart that reached the innocent presence of her long perspective of girls, with the view of hiding every skull and skeleton of life from theirdear eyes. She was another illustration of the rule that succeedinggenerations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, theiradvance as girls being lost in their recession as matrons; so that theymove up and down the stream of intellectual development like flotsamin a tidal estuary. And this perhaps not by reason of their faults asindividuals, but of their misfortune as child-rearers. 

The landscape-painter, now an Academician like Pierston himself--ratherpopular than distinguished--had given up that peculiar and personaltaste in subjects which had marked him in times past, executing insteadmany pleasing aspects of nature addressed to the furnishing householderthrough the middling critic, and really very good of their kind. In thisway he received many large cheques from persons of wealth in England andAmerica, out of which he built himself a sumptuous studio and an awkwardhouse around it, and paid for the education of the growing maidens. 

The vision of Somers's humble position as jackal to this lion of afamily and house and studio and social reputation--Somers, to whomstrange conceits and wild imaginings were departed joys never toreturn--led Pierston, as the painter's contemporary, to feel thathe ought to be one of the bygones likewise, and to put on an air ofunromantic bufferism. He refrained from entering Avice's peninsula forthe whole fortnight of Somers's stay in the neighbouring town, althoughits grey poetical outline--'throned along the sea'--greeted his eyesevery morn and eve across the roadstead. 

When the painter and his family had gone back from their bathingholiday, he thought that he, too, would leave the neighbourhood. To doso, however, without wishing at least the elder Avice good-bye would beunfriendly, considering the extent of their acquaintance. One evening, knowing this time of day to suit her best, he took the few-minutes'journey to the rock along the thin connecting string of junction, andarrived at Mrs. Pierston's door just after dark. 

A light shone from an upper chamber. On asking for his widowedacquaintance he was informed that she was ill, seriously, though notdangerously. While learning that her daughter was with her, and furtherparticulars, and doubting if he should go in, a message was sent down toask him to enter. His voice had been heard, and Mrs. Pierston would liketo see him. 

He could not with any humanity refuse, but there flashed across his mindthe recollection that Avice the youngest had never yet really seenhim, had seen nothing more of him than an outline, which might haveappertained as easily to a man thirty years his junior as to himself, and a countenance so renovated by faint moonlight as fairly tocorrespond. It was with misgiving, therefore, that the sculptor ascendedthe staircase and entered the little upper sitting-room, now arranged asa sick-chamber. 

Mrs. Pierston reclined on a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprisingthinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Comein, sir, ' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don'tlet me frighten you. '

Avice was seated beside her, reading. The girl jumped up, hardly seemingto recognize him. 'O! it's Mr. Pierston, ' she said in a moment, addingquickly, with evident surprise and off her guard: 'I thought Mr. Pierston was--'

What she had thought he was did not pass her lips, and it remaineda riddle for Jocelyn until a new departure in her manner towards himshowed that the words 'much younger' would have accurately ended thesentence. Had Pierston not now confronted her anew, he might haveendured philosophically her changed opinion of him. But he was seeingher again, and a rooted feeling was revived. 

Pierston now learnt for the first time that the widow had been visitedby sudden attacks of this sort not infrequently of late years. They weresaid to be due to angina pectoris, the latter paroxysms having been themost severe. She was at the present moment out of pain, though weak, exhausted, and nervous. She would not, however, converse about herself, but took advantage of her daughter's absence from the room to broach thesubject most in her thoughts. 

No compunctions had stirred her as they had her visitor on theexpediency of his suit in view of his years. Her fever of anxiety lestafter all he should not come to see Avice again had been not withoutan effect upon her health; and it made her more candid than she hadintended to be. 

'Troubles and sickness raise all sorts of fears, Mr. Pierston, ' shesaid. 'What I felt only a wish for, when you first named it, I havehoped for a good deal since; and I have been so anxious that--that itshould come to something! I am glad indeed that you are come. '

'My wanting to marry Avice, you mean, dear Mrs. Pierston?'

'Yes--that's it. I wonder if you are still in the same mind? You are?Then I wish something could be done--to make her agree to it--so as toget it settled. I dread otherwise what will become of her. She is not apractical girl as I was--she would hardly like now to settle down as anislander's wife; and to leave her living here alone would trouble me. '

'Nothing will happen to you yet, I hope, my dear old friend. '

'Well, it is a risky complaint; and the attacks, when they come, areso agonizing that to endure them I ought to get rid of all outsideanxieties, folk say. Now--do you want her, sir?'

'With all my soul! But she doesn't want me. '

'I don't think she is so against you as you imagine. I fancy if it wereput to her plainly, now I am in this state, it might be done. '

They lapsed into conversation on the early days of their acquaintance, until Mrs. Pierston's daughter re-entered the room. 

'Avice, ' said her mother, when the girl had been with them a fewminutes. 'About this matter that I have talked over with you so manytimes since my attack. Here is Mr. Pierston, and he wishes to be yourhusband. He is much older than you; but, in spite of it, that you willever get a better husband I don't believe. Now, will you take him, seeing the state I am in, and how naturally anxious I am to see yousettled before I die?'

'But you won't die, mother! You are getting better!'

'Just for the present only. Come, he is a good man and a clever man, anda rich man. I want you, O so much, to be his wife! I can say no more. '

Avice looked appealingly at the sculptor, and then on the floor. 'Doeshe really wish me to?' she asked almost inaudibly, turning as she spoketo Pierston. 'He has never quite said so to me. '

'My dear one, how can you doubt it?' said Jocelyn quickly. 'But I won'tpress you to marry me as a favour, against your feelings. '

'I thought Mr. Pierston was younger!' she murmured to her mother. 

'That counts for little, when you think how much there is on the otherside. Think of our position, and of his--a sculptor, with a mansion, anda studio full of busts and statues that I have dusted in my time, andof the beautiful studies you would be able to take up. Surely the lifewould just suit you? Your expensive education is wasted down here!'

Avice did not care to argue. She was outwardly gentle as her grandmotherhad been, and it seemed just a question with her of whether she must ormust not. 'Very well--I feel I ought to agree to marry him, since youtell me to, ' she answered quietly, after some thought. 'I see that itwould be a wise thing to do, and that you wish it, and that Mr. Pierstonreally does--like me. So--so that--'

Pierston was not backward at this critical juncture, despite unpleasantsensations. But it was the historic ingredient in this genealogicalpassion--if its continuity through three generations may be sodescribed--which appealed to his perseverance at the expense of hiswisdom. The mother was holding the daughter's hand; she took Pierston's, and laid Avice's in it. 

No more was said in argument, and the thing was regarded as determined. Afterwards a noise was heard upon the window-panes, as of fine sandthrown; and, lifting the blind, Pierston saw that the distant lightshipwinked with a bleared and indistinct eye. A drizzling rain had comeon with the dark, and it was striking the window in handfuls. He hadintended to walk the two miles back to the station, but it meant adrenching to do it now. He waited and had supper; and, finding theweather no better, accepted Mrs. Pierston's invitation to stay over thenight. 

Thus it fell out that again he lodged in the house he had beenaccustomed to live in as a boy, before his father had made his fortune, and before his own name had been heard of outside the boundaries of theisle. 

He slept but little, and in the first movement of the dawn sat up inbed. Why should he ever live in London or any other fashionable cityif this plan of marriage could be carried out? Surely, with this youngwife, the island would be the best place for him. It might be possibleto rent Sylvania Castle as he had formerly done--better still to buy it. If life could offer him anything worth having it would be a home withAvice there on his native cliffs to the end of his days. 

As he sat thus thinking, and the daylight increased, he discerned, ashort distance before him, a movement of something ghostly. His positionwas facing the window, and he found that by chance the looking-glasshad swung itself vertical, so that what he saw was his own shape. Therecognition startled him. The person he appeared was too grievouslyfar, chronologically, in advance of the person he felt himself to be. Pierston did not care to regard the figure confronting him so mockingly. Its voice seemed to say 'There's tragedy hanging on to this!' But thequestion of age being pertinent he could not give the spectre up, andultimately got out of bed under the weird fascination of the reflection. Whether he had overwalked himself lately, or what he had done, he knewnot; but never had he seemed so aged by a score of years as he wasrepresented in the glass in that cold grey morning light. While his soulwas what it was, why should he have been encumbered with that witheringcarcase, without the ability to shift it off for another, as his idealBeloved had so frequently done?

By reason of her mother's illness Avice was now living in the house, and, on going downstairs, he found that they were to breakfast entete-a-tete. She was not then in the room, but she entered in the courseof a few minutes. Pierston had already heard that the widow felt betterthis morning, and elated by the prospect of sitting with Avice at thismeal he went forward to her joyously. As soon as she saw him in the fullstroke of day from the window she started; and he then remembered thatit was their first meeting under the solar rays. 

She was so overcome that she turned and left the room as if she hadforgotten something; when she re-entered she was visibly pale. Sherecovered herself, and apologized. She had been sitting up the nightbefore the last, she said, and was not quite so well as usual. 

There may have been some truth in this; but Pierston could not get overthat first scared look of hers. It was enough to give daytime stabilityto his night views of a possible tragedy lurking in this weddingproject. He determined that, at any cost to his heart, there should beno misapprehension about him from this moment. 

'Miss Pierston, ' he said as they sat down, 'since it is well you shouldknow all the truth before we go any further, that there may be noawkward discoveries afterwards, I am going to tell you something aboutmyself--if you are not too distressed to hear it?'

'No--let me hear it. '

'I was once the lover of your mother, and wanted to marry her, only shewouldn't, or rather couldn't, marry me. '

'O how strange!' said the girl, looking from him to the breakfastthings, and from the breakfast things to him. 'Mother has never told methat. Yet of course, you might have been. I mean, you are old enough. '

He took the remark as a satire she had not intended. 'O yes--quite oldenough, ' he said grimly. 'Almost too old. '

'Too old for mother? How's that?'

'Because I belonged to your grandmother. '

'No? How can that be?'

'I was her lover likewise. I should have married her if I had gonestraight on instead of round the corner. '

'But you couldn't have been, Mr. Pierston! You are not old enough? Why, how old are you?--you have never told me. '

'I am very old. '

'My mother's, and my grandmother's, ' said she, looking at him no longeras at a possible husband, but as a strange fossilized relic in humanform. Pierston saw it, but meaning to give up the game he did not careto spare himself. 

'Your mother's and your grandmother's young man, ' he repeated. 

'And were you my great-grandmother's too?' she asked, with anexpectant interest in his case as a drama that overcame her personalconsiderations for a moment. 

'No--not your great-grandmother's. Your imagination beats even myconfessions!. .. But I am VERY old, as you see. '

'I did not know it!' said she in an appalled murmur. 'You do not lookso; and I thought that what you looked you were. '

'And you--you are very young, ' he continued. 

A stillness followed, during which she sat in a troubled constraint, regarding him now and then with something in her open eyes and largepupils that might have been sympathy or nervousness. Pierston ate scarceany breakfast, and rising abruptly from the table said he would take awalk on the cliffs as the morning was fine. 

He did so, proceeding along the north-east heights for nearly a mile. Hehad virtually given Avice up, but not formally. His intention had beento go back to the house in half-an-hour and pay a morning visit to theinvalid; but by not returning the plans of the previous evening might beallowed to lapse silently, as mere pourparlers that had come to nothingin the face of Avice's want of love for him. Pierston accordinglywent straight along, and in the course of an hour was at his Budmouthlodgings. 

Nothing occurred till the evening to inform him how his absence had beentaken. Then a note arrived from Mrs. Pierston; it was written in pencil, evidently as she lay. 

'I am alarmed, ' she said, 'at your going so suddenly. Avice seems tothink she has offended you. She did not mean to do that, I am sure. Itmakes me dreadfully anxious! Will you send a line? Surely you will notdesert us now--my heart is so set on my child's welfare!'

'Desert you I won't, ' said Jocelyn. 'It is too much like the originalcase. But I must let her desert me!'

On his return, with no other object than that of wishing Mrs. Pierstongood-bye, he found her painfully agitated. She clasped his hand andwetted it with her tears. 

'O don't be offended with her!' she cried. 'She's young. We are onepeople--don't marry a kimberlin! It will break my heart if you forsakeher now! Avice!'

The girl came. 'My manner was hasty and thoughtless this morning, ' shesaid in a low voice. 'Please pardon me. I wish to abide by my promise. '

Her mother, still tearful, again joined their hands; and the engagementstood as before. 

Pierston went back to Budmouth, but dimly seeing how curiously, throughhis being a rich suitor, ideas of beneficence and reparation wereretaining him in the course arranged by her mother, and urged by his owndesire in the face of his understanding. 

3. V. ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION

In anticipation of his marriage Pierston had taken a new red house ofthe approved Kensington pattern, with a new studio at the back as largeas a mediaeval barn. Hither, in collusion with the elder Avice--whosehealth had mended somewhat--he invited mother and daughter to spenda week or two with him, thinking thereby to exercise on the latter'simagination an influence which was not practicable while he was a guestat their house; and by interesting his betrothed in the fitting andfurnishing of this residence to create in her an ambition to be itsmistress. 

It was a pleasant, reposeful time to be in town. There was nobody tointerrupt them in their proceedings, and, it being out of the season, the largest tradesmen were as attentive to their wants as if those firmshad never before been honoured with a single customer whom they reallyliked. Pierston and his guests, almost equally inexperienced--for thesculptor had nearly forgotten what knowledge of householding he hadacquired earlier in life--could consider and practise thoroughly aspecies of skeleton-drill in receiving visitors when the pair shouldannounce themselves as married and at home in the coming winter season. 

Avice was charming, even if a little cold. He congratulated himself yetagain that time should have reserved for him this final chance for oneof the line. She was somewhat like her mother, whom he had loved in theflesh, but she had the soul of her grandmother, whom he had loved in thespirit--and, for that matter, loved now. Only one criticism had he topass upon his choice: though in outward semblance her grandam idealized, she had not the first Avice's candour, but rather her mother'scloseness. He never knew exactly what she was thinking and feeling. Yethe seemed to have such prescriptive rights in women of her blood thather occasional want of confidence did not deeply trouble him. 

It was one of those ripe and mellow afternoons that sometimes colourLondon with their golden light at this time of the year, and producethose marvellous sunset effects which, if they were not known to be madeup of kitchen coal-smoke and animal exhalations, would be rapturouslyapplauded. Behind the perpendicular, oblique, zigzagged, and curved zinc'tall-boys, ' that formed a grey pattern not unlike early Gothic numeralsagainst the sky, the men and women on the tops of the omnibuses saw anirradiation of topaz hues, darkened here and there into richest russet. 

There had been a sharp shower during the afternoon, and Pierston--whohad to take care of himself--had worn a pair of goloshes on his shortwalk in the street. He noiselessly entered the studio, inside whichsome gleams of the same mellow light had managed to creep, and where heguessed he should find his prospective wife and mother-in-law awaitinghim with tea. But only Avice was there, seated beside the teapot ofbrown delf, which, as artists, they affected, her back being toward him. She was holding her handkerchief to her eyes, and he saw that she wasweeping silently. 

In another moment he perceived that she was weeping over a book. By thistime she had heard him, and came forward. He made it appear that hehad not noticed her distress, and they discussed some arrangements offurniture. When he had taken a cup of tea she went away, leaving thebook behind her. 

Pierston took it up. The volume was an old school-book; Stievenard's'Lectures Francaises, ' with her name in it as a pupil at SandbourneHigh School, and date-markings denoting lessons taken at a comparativelyrecent time, for Avice had been but a novice as governess when hediscovered her. 

For a school-girl--which she virtually was--to weep over a school-bookwas strange. Could she have been affected by some subject in thereadings? Impossible. Pierston fell to thinking, and zest died for theprocess of furnishing, which he had undertaken so gaily. Somehow, thebloom was again disappearing from his approaching marriage. Yet heloved Avice more and more tenderly; he feared sometimes that in thesolicitousness of his affection he was spoiling her by indulging herevery whim. 

He looked round the large and ambitious apartment, now becoming cloudedwith shades, out of which the white and cadaverous countenances of hisstudies, casts, and other lumber peered meditatively at him, as if theywere saying, 'What are you going to do now, old boy?' They had neverlooked like that while standing in his past homely workshop, where allthe real labours of his life had been carried out. What should a man ofhis age, who had not for years done anything to speak of--certainly notto add to his reputation as an artist--want with a new place like this?It was all because of the elect lady, and she apparently did not wanthim. 

Pierston did not observe anything further in Avice to cause himmisgiving till one dinner-time, a week later, towards the end of thevisit. Then, as he sat himself between her and her mother at theirlimited table, he was struck with her nervousness, and was tempted tosay, 'Why are you troubled, my little dearest?' in tones which disclosedthat he was as troubled as she. 

'Am I troubled?' she said with a start, turning her gentle hazeleyes upon him. 'Yes, I suppose I am. It is because I have received aletter--from an old friend. '

'You didn't show it to me, ' said her mother. 

'No--I tore it up. '

'Why?'

'It was not necessary to keep it, so I destroyed it. '

Mrs. Pierston did not press her further on the subject, and Avice showedno disposition to continue it. They retired rather early, as they alwaysdid, but Pierston remained pacing about his studio a long while, musingon many things, not the least being the perception that to wed a womanmay be by no means the same thing as to be united with her. The 'oldfriend' of Avice's remark had sounded very much like 'lover. ' Otherwisewhy should the letter have so greatly disturbed her?

There seemed to be something uncanny, after all, about London, in itsrelation to his contemplated marriage. When she had first come up shewas easier with him than now. And yet his bringing her there had helpedhis cause; the house had decidedly impressed her--almost overawed her, and though he owned that by no law of nature or reason had her motheror himself any right to urge on Avice partnership with him againsther inclination, he resolved to make the most of having her under hisinfluence by getting the wedding details settled before she and hermother left. 

The next morning he proceeded to do this. When he encountered Avicethere was a trace of apprehension on her face; but he set that down toa fear that she had offended him the night before by her taciturnity. Directly he requested her mother, in Avice's presence, to get her tofix the day quite early, Mrs. Pierston became brighter and brisker. She, too, plainly had doubts about the wisdom of delay, and turning to herdaughter said, 'Now, my dear, do you hear?'

It was ultimately agreed that the widow and her daughter should goback in a day or two, to await Pierston's arrival on the wedding-eve, immediately after their return. 

 * * *

In pursuance of the arrangement Pierston found himself on the southshore of England in the gloom of the aforesaid evening, the isle, ashe looked across at it with his approach, being just discernible as amoping countenance, a creature sullen with a sense that he was about towithdraw from its keeping the rarest object it had ever owned. He hadcome alone, not to embarrass them, and had intended to halt a couple ofhours in the neighbouring seaport to give some orders relating to thewedding, but the little railway train being in waiting to take him on, he proceeded with a natural impatience, resolving to do his businesshere by messenger from the isle. 

He passed the ruins of the Tudor castle and the long featureless rib ofgrinding pebbles that screened off the outer sea, which could be heardlifting and dipping rhythmically in the wide vagueness of the Bay. At the under-hill island townlet of the Wells there were no flys, andleaving his things to be brought on, as he often did, he climbed theeminence on foot. 

Half-way up the steepest part of the pass he saw in the dusk a figurepausing--the single person on the incline. Though it was too dark toidentify faces, Pierston gathered from the way in which the haltingstranger was supporting himself by the handrail, which here bordered theroad to assist climbers, that the person was exhausted. 

'Anything the matter?' he said. 

'O no--not much, ' was returned by the other. 'But it is steep justhere. '

The accent was not quite that of an Englishman, and struck him ashailing from one of the Channel Islands. 'Can't I help you up to thetop?' he said, for the voice, though that of a young man, seemed faintand shaken. 

'No, thank you. I have been ill; but I thought I was all right again;and as the night was fine I walked into the island by the road. Itturned out to be rather too much for me, as there is some weakness leftstill; and this stiff incline brought it out. '

'Naturally. You'd better take hold of my arm--at any rate to the browhere. '

Thus pressed the stranger did so, and they went on towards the ridge, till, reaching the lime-kiln standing there the stranger abandoned hishold, saying: 'Thank you for your assistance, sir. Good-night. '

'I don't think I recognize your voice as a native's?'

'No, it is not. I am a Jersey man. Goodnight, sir. '

'Good-night, if you are sure you can get on. Here, take this stick--itis no use to me. ' Saying which, Pierston put his walking-stick into theyoung man's hand. 

'Thank you again. I shall be quite recovered when I have rested a minuteor two. Don't let me detain you, please. '

The stranger as he spoke turned his face towards the south, where theBeal light had just come into view, and stood regarding it with anobstinate fixity. As he evidently wished to be left to himself Jocelynwent on, and troubled no more about him, though the desire of the youngman to be rid of his company, after accepting his walking-stick andhis arm, had come with a suddenness that was almost emotional; andimpressionable as Jocelyn was, no less now than in youth, he wassaddened for a minute by the sense that there were people in the worldwho did not like even his sympathy. 

However, a pleasure which obliterated all this arose when Pierston drewnear to the house that was likely to be his dear home on all futurevisits to the isle, perhaps even his permanent home as he grew older andthe associations of his youth re-asserted themselves. It had been, too, his father's house, the house in which he was born, and he amused hisfancy with plans for its enlargement under the supervision of Avice andhimself. It was a still greater pleasure to behold a tall and shapelyfigure standing against the light of the open door and presumablyawaiting him. 

Avice, who it was, gave a little jump when she recognized him, butdutifully allowed him to kiss her when he reached her side; though hernervousness was only too apparent, and was like a child's towards aparent who may prove stern. 

'How dear of you to guess that I might come on at once instead oflater!' said Jocelyn. 'Well, if I had stayed in the town to go to theshops and so on, I could not have got here till the last train. How ismother?--our mother, as I shall call her soon. '

Avice said that her mother had not been so well--she feared not nearlyso well since her return from London, so that she was obliged to keepher room. The visit had perhaps been too much for her. 'But she willnot acknowledge that she is much weaker, because she will not disturb myhappiness. '

Jocelyn was in a mood to let trifles of manner pass, and he took nonotice of the effort which had accompanied the last word. They wentupstairs to Mrs. Pierston, whose obvious relief and thankfulness atsight of him was grateful to her visitor. 

'I am so, O so glad you are come!' she said huskily, as she held out herthin hand and stifled a sob. 'I have been so--'

She could get no further for a moment, and Avice turned away weeping, and abruptly left the room. 

'I have so set my heart on this, ' Mrs. Pierston went on, 'that I havenot been able to sleep of late, for I have feared I might drop offsuddenly before she is yours, and lose the comfort of seeing youactually united. Your being so kind to me in old times has made me sosure that she will find a good husband in you, that I am over anxious, Iknow. Indeed, I have not liked to let her know quite how anxious I am. '

Thus they talked till Jocelyn bade her goodnight, it being noticeablethat Mrs. Pierston, chastened by her illnesses, maintained no longerany reserve on her gladness to acquire him as her son-in-law; andher feelings destroyed any remaining scruples he might have had fromperceiving that Avice's consent was rather an obedience than a desire. As he went downstairs, and found Avice awaiting his descent, he wonderedif anything had occurred here during his absence to give Mrs. Pierstonnew uneasiness about the marriage, but it was an inquiry he couldnot address to a girl whose actions could alone be the cause of suchuneasiness. 

He looked round for her as he supped, but though she had come into theroom with him she was not there now. He remembered her telling him thatshe had had supper with her mother, and Jocelyn sat on quietly musingand sipping his wine for something near half-an-hour. Wondering thenfor the first time what had become of her, he rose and went to the door. Avice was quite near him after all--only standing at the front dooras she had been doing when he came, looking into the light of the fullmoon, which had risen since his arrival. His sudden opening of thedining-room door seemed to agitate her. 

'What is it, dear?' he asked. 

'As mother is much better and doesn't want me, I ought to go and seesomebody I promised to take a parcel to--I feel I ought. And yet, as youhave just come to see me--I suppose you don't approve of my going outwhile you are here?'

'Who is the person?'

'Somebody down that way, ' she said indefinitely. 'It is not very faroff. I am not afraid--I go out often by myself at night hereabout. '

He reassured her good-humouredly. 'If you really wish to go, my dear, ofcourse I don't object. I have no authority to do that till tomorrow, andyou know that if I had it I shouldn't use it. '

'O but you have! Mother being an invalid, you are in her place, apartfrom--to-morrow. '

'Nonsense, darling. Run across to your friend's house by all means ifyou want to. '

'And you'll be here when I come in?'

'No, I am going down to the inn to see if my things are brought up. '

'But hasn't mother asked you to stay here? The spare room was got readyfor you. .. . Dear me, I am afraid I ought to have told you. '

'She did ask me. But I have some things coming, directed to the inn, and I had better be there. So I'll wish you good-night, though it is notlate. I will come in quite early to-morrow, to inquire how your motheris going on, and to wish you good-morning. You will be back againquickly this evening?'

'O yes. '

'And I needn't go with you for company?'

'O no, thank you. It is no distance. '

Pierston then departed, thinking how entirely her manner was that of oneto whom a question of doing anything was a question of permission andnot of judgment. He had no sooner gone than Avice took a parcel froma cupboard, put on her hat and cloak, and following by the way he hadtaken till she reached the entrance to Sylvania Castle, there stoodstill. She could hear Pierston's footsteps passing down East Quarriersto the inn; but she went no further in that direction. Turning into thelane on the right, of which mention has so often been made, she wentquickly past the last cottage, and having entered the gorge beyondshe clambered into the ruin of the Red King's or Bow-and-Arrow Castle, standing as a square black mass against the moonlit, indefinite sea. 

3. VI. THE WELL-BELOVED IS--WHERE?

Mrs. Pierston passed a restless night, but this she let nobody know;nor, what was painfully evident to herself, that her prostration wasincreased by anxiety and suspense about the wedding on which she had toomuch set her heart. 

During the very brief space in which she dozed Avice came into her room. As it was not infrequent for her daughter to look in upon her thus shetook little notice, merely saying to assure the girl: 'I am better, dear. Don't come in again. Get to sleep yourself. '

The mother, however, went thinking anew. She had no apprehensions aboutthis marriage. She felt perfectly sure that it was the best thing shecould do for her girl. Not a young woman on the island but was envyingAvice at that moment; for Jocelyn was absurdly young for three score, a good-looking man, one whose history was generally known here; as alsowere the exact figures of the fortune he had inherited from his father, and the social standing he could claim--a standing, however, which thatfortune would not have been large enough to procure unassisted by hisreputation in his art. 

But Avice had been weak enough, as her mother knew, to indulge infancies for local youths from time to time, and Mrs. Pierston could nothelp congratulating herself that her daughter had been so docile in thecircumstances. Yet to every one except, perhaps, Avice herself, Jocelynwas the most romantic of lovers. Indeed was there ever such a romanceas that man embodied in his relations to her house? Rejecting the firstAvice, the second had rejected him, and to rally to the third with finalachievement was an artistic and tender finish to which it was ungratefulin anybody to be blind. 

The widow thought that the second Avice might probably not have rejectedPierston on that occasion in the London studio so many years ago ifdestiny had not arranged that she should have been secretly united toanother when the proposing moment came. 

But what had come was best. 'My God, ' she said at times that night, 'tothink my aim in writing to him should be fulfilling itself like this!'

When all was right and done, what a success upon the whole her lifewould have been. She who had begun her career as a cottage-girl, asmall quarry-owner's daughter, had sunk so low as to the positionof laundress, had engaged in various menial occupations, had made anunhappy marriage for love which had, however, in the long run, thanks toJocelyn's management, much improved her position, was at last to seeher daughter secure what she herself had just missed securing, andestablished in a home of affluence and refinement. 

Thus the sick woman excited herself as the hours went on. At last, inher tenseness it seemed to her that the time had already come at whichthe household was stirring, and she fancied she heard conversation inher daughter's room. But she found that it was only five o'clock, andnot yet daylight. Her state was such that she could see the hangings ofthe bed tremble with her tremors. She had declared overnight that shedid not require any one to sit up with her, but she now rang a littlehandbell, and in a few minutes a nurse appeared; Ruth Stockwool, anisland woman and neighbour, whom Mrs. Pierston knew well, and who knewall Mrs. Pierston's history. 

'I am so nervous that I can't stay by myself, ' said the widow. 'And Ithought I heard Becky dressing Miss Avice in her wedding things. '

'O no--not yet, ma'am. There's nobody up. But I'll get you something. '

When Mrs. Pierston had taken a little nourishment she went on: 'I can'thelp frightening myself with thoughts that she won't marry him. You seehe is older than Avice. '

'Yes, he is, ' said her neighbour. 'But I don't see how anything canhender the wedden now. '

'Avice, you know, had fancies; at least one fancy for another man; ayoung fellow of five-and-twenty. And she's been very secret and oddabout it. I wish she had raved and cried and had it out; but she's beenquite the other way. I know she's fond of him still. '

'What--that young Frenchman, Mr. Leverre o' Sandbourne? I've heard alittle of it. But I should say there wadden much between 'em. '

'I don't think there was. But I've a sort of conviction that she saw himlast night. I believe it was only to bid him good-bye, and return himsome books he had given her; but I wish she had never known him; he israther an excitable, impulsive young man, and he might make mischief. He isn't a Frenchman, though he has lived in France. His father was aJersey gentleman, and on his becoming a widower he married as his secondwife a native of this very island. That's mainly why the young man is soat home in these parts. '

'Ah--now I follow 'ee. She was a Bencomb, his stepmother: I heardsomething about her years ago. '

'Yes; her father had the biggest stone-trade on the island at one time;but the name is forgotten here now. He retired years before I was born. However, mother used to tell me that she was a handsome young woman, who tried to catch Mr. Pierston when he was a young man, and scandalizedherself a bit with him. She went off abroad with her father, who hadmade a fortune here; but when he got over there he lost it nearly all insome way. Years after she married this Jerseyman, Mr. Leverre, who hadbeen fond of her as a girl, and she brought up his child as her own. '

Mrs. Pierston paused, but as Ruth did not ask any question she presentlyresumed her self-relieving murmur:

'How Miss Avice got to know the young man was in this way. When Mrs. Leverre's husband died she came from Jersey to live at Sandbourne;and made it her business one day to cross over to this place to makeinquiries about Mr. Jocelyn Pierston. As my name was Pierston she calledupon me with her son, and so Avice and he got acquainted. When Avicewent back to Sandbourne to the finishing school they kept up theacquaintance in secret. He taught French somewhere there, and doesstill, I believe. '

'Well, I hope she'll forget en. He idden good enough. '

'I hope so--I hope so. .. . Now I'll try to get a little nap. '

Ruth Stockwool went back to her room, where, finding it would not benecessary to get up for another hour, she lay down again and soon slept. Her bed was close to the staircase, from which it was divided by a lathpartition only, and her consciousness either was or seemed to be arousedby light brushing touches on the outside of the partition, as of fingersfeeling the way downstairs in the dark. The slight noise passed, and ina few seconds she dreamt or fancied she could hear the unfastening ofthe back door. 

She had nearly sunk into another sound sleep when precisely the samephenomena were repeated; fingers brushing along the wall close to herhead, down, downward, the soft opening of the door, its close, andsilence again. 

She now became clearly awake. The repetition of the process had made thewhole matter a singular one. Early as it was the first sounds might havebeen those of the housemaid descending, though why she should have comedown so stealthily and in the dark did not make itself clear. But thesecond performance was inexplicable. Ruth got out of bed and lifted herblind. The dawn was hardly yet pink, and the light from the sandbankwas not yet extinguished. But the bushes of euonymus against the whitepalings of the front garden could be seen, also the light surface ofthe road winding away like a riband to the north entrance of SylvaniaCastle, thence round to the village, the cliffs, and the Cove behind. Upon the road two dark figures could just be discerned, one a littleway behind the other, but overtaking and joining the foremost as Ruthlooked. After all they might be quarriers or lighthouse-keepers from thesouth of the island, or fishermen just landed from a night's work. Therebeing nothing to connect them with the noises she had heard indoors shedismissed the whole subject, and went to bed again. 

 * * *

Jocelyn had promised to pay an early visit to ascertain the state ofMrs. Pierston's health after her night's rest, her precarious conditionbeing more obvious to him than to Avice, and making him a littleanxious. Subsequent events caused him to remember that while he wasdressing he casually observed two or three boatmen standing near thecliff beyond the village, and apparently watching with deep interestwhat seemed to be a boat far away towards the opposite shore of SouthWessex. At half-past eight he came from the door of the inn and wentstraight to Mrs. Pierston's. On approaching he discovered that a strangeexpression which seemed to hang about the house-front that morning wasmore than a fancy, the gate, door, and two windows being open, thoughthe blinds of other windows were not drawn up, the whole lending avacant, dazed look to the domicile, as of a person gaping in suddenstultification. Nobody answered his knock, and walking into thedining-room he found that no breakfast had been laid. His flashingthought was, 'Mrs. Pierston is dead. '

While standing in the room somebody came downstairs, and Jocelynencountered Ruth Stockwool, an open letter fluttering in her hand. 

'O Mr. Pierston, Mr. Pierston! The Lord-a-Lord!'

'What? Mrs. Pierston--'

'No, no! Miss Avice! She is gone!--yes--gone! Read ye this, sir. It wasleft in her bedroom, and we be fairly gallied out of our senses!'

He took the letter and confusedly beheld that it was in twohandwritings, the first section being in Avice's:

'MY DEAR MOTHER, --How ever will you forgive me for what I have done!So deceitful as it seems. And yet till this night I had no idea ofdeceiving either you or Mr. Pierston. 

'Last night at ten o'clock I went out, as you may have guessed, to seeMr. Leverre for the last time, and to give him back his books, letters, and little presents to me. I went only a few steps--to Bow-and-ArrowCastle, where we met as we had agreed to do, since he could not call. When I reached the place I found him there waiting, but quite ill. He had been unwell at his mother's house for some days, and had beenobliged to stay in bed, but he had got up on purpose to come and bidme good-bye. The over-exertion of the journey upset him, and though westayed and stayed till twelve o'clock he felt quite unable to go backhome--unable, indeed, to move more than a few yards. I had tried sohard not to love him any longer, but I loved him so now that I couldnot desert him and leave him out there to catch his death. So I helpedhim--nearly carrying him--on and on to our door, and then round to theback. Here he got a little better, and as he could not stay there, andeverybody was now asleep, I helped him upstairs into the room we hadprepared for Mr. Pierston if he should have wanted one. I got him intobed, and then fetched some brandy and a little of your tonic. Did yousee me come into your room for it, or were you asleep?

'I sat by him all night. He improved slowly, and we talked over whatwe had better do. I felt that, though I had intended to give him up, Icould not now becomingly marry any other man, and that I ought to marryhim. We decided to do it at once, before anybody could hinder us. So wecame down before it was light, and have gone away to get the ceremonysolemnized. 

'Tell Mr. Pierston it was not premeditated, but the result of anaccident. I am sincerely sorry to have treated him with what he willthink unfairness, but though I did not love him I meant to obey you andmarry him. But God sent this necessity of my having to give shelter tomy Love, to prevent, I think, my doing what I am now convinced wouldhave been wrong--Ever your loving daughter, AVICE. '

The second was in a man's hand:

'DEAR MOTHER (as you will soon be to me), --Avice has clearly explainedabove how it happened that I have not been able to give her up toMr. Pierston. I think I should have died if I had not accepted thehospitality of a room in your house this night, and your daughter'stender nursing through the dark dreary hours. We love each other beyondexpression, and it is obvious that, if we are human, we cannot resistmarrying now, in spite of friends' wishes. Will you please send thenote lying beside this to my mother. It is merely to explain what I havedone--Yours with warmest regard, HENRI LEVERRE. '

Jocelyn turned away and looked out of the window. 

'Mrs. Pierston thought she heard some talking in the night, but ofcourse she put it down to fancy. And she remembers Miss Avice cominginto her room at one o'clock in the morning, and going to the tablewhere the medicine was standing. A sly girl--all the time her youngman within a yard or two, in the very room, and a using the very cleansheets that you, sir, were to have used! They are our best linen ones, got up beautiful, and a kept wi' rosemary. Really, sir, one would sayyou stayed out o' your chammer o' purpose to oblige the young man with abed!'

'Don't blame them, don't blame them!' said Jocelyn in an even andcharacterless voice. 'Don't blame her, particularly. She didn't make thecircumstances. I did. .. . It was how I served her grandmother. . .. Well, she's gone! You needn't make a mystery of it. Tell it to all the island:say that a man came to marry a wife, and didn't find her at home. Telleverybody that she's run away. It must be known sooner or later. '

One of the servants said, after waiting a few moments: 'We shan't dothat, sir. '

'Oh--Why won't you?'

'We liked her too well, with all her faults. '

'Ah--did you, ' said he; and he sighed. He perceived that the youngermaids were secretly on Avice's side. 

'How does her mother bear it?' Jocelyn asked. 'Is she awake?'

Mrs. Pierston had hardly slept, and, having learnt the tidingsinadvertently, became so distracted and incoherent as to be like aperson in a delirium; till, a few moments before he arrived, all herexcitement ceased, and she lay in a weak, quiet silence. 

'Let me go up, ' Pierston said. 'And send for the doctor. '

Passing Avice's chamber he perceived that the little bed had not beenslept on. At the door of the spare room he looked in. In one cornerstood a walking-stick--his own. 

'Where did that come from?'

'We found it there, sir. '

'Ah yes--I gave it to him. 'Tis like me to play another's game!'

It was the last spurt of bitterness that Jocelyn let escape him. He wenton towards Mrs. Pierston's room, preceded by the servant. 

'Mr. Pierston has come, ma'am, ' he heard her say to the invalid. But asthe latter took no notice the woman rushed forward to the bed. 'What hashappened to her, Mr. Pierston? O what do it mean?'

Avice the Second was lying placidly in the position in which the nursehad left her; but no breath came from her lips, and a rigidityof feature was accompanied by the precise expression which hadcharacterized her face when Pierston had her as a girl in his studio. He saw that it was death, though she appeared to have breathed her lastonly a few moments before. 

Ruth Stockwool's composure deserted her. ''Tis the shock of finding MissAvice gone that has done it!' she cried. 'She has killed her mother!'

'Don't say such a terrible thing!' exclaimed Jocelyn. 

'But she ought to have obeyed her mother--a good mother as she was! Howshe had set her heart upon the wedding, poor soul; and we couldn't helpher knowing what had happened! O how ungrateful young folk be! That girlwill rue this morning's work!'

'We must get the doctor, ' said Pierston, mechanically, hastening fromthe room. 

When the local practitioner came he merely confirmed their own verdict, and thought her death had undoubtedly been hastened by the shock of theill news upon a feeble heart, following a long strain of anxiety aboutthe wedding. He did not consider that an inquest would be necessary. 

 * * *

The two shadowy figures seen through the grey gauzes of the morning byRuth, five hours before this time, had gone on to the open place by thenorth entrance of Sylvania Castle, where the lane to the ruins of theold castle branched off. A listener would not have gathered thata single word passed between them. The man walked with difficulty, supported by the woman. At this spot they stopped and kissed each othera long while. 

'We ought to walk all the way to Budmouth, if we wish not to bediscovered, ' he said sadly. 'And I can't even get across the island, even by your help, darling. It is two miles to the foot of the hill. '

She, who was trembling, tried to speak consolingly:

'If you could walk we should have to go down the Street of Wells, whereperhaps somebody would know me? Now if we get below here to the Cove, can't we push off one of the little boats I saw there last night, andpaddle along close to the shore till we get to the north side? Then wecan walk across to the station very well. It is quite calm, and as thetide sets in that direction, it will take us along of itself, withoutmuch rowing. I've often got round in a boat that way. '

This seemed to be the only plan that offered, and abandoning thestraight road they wound down the defile spanned further on by the oldcastle arch, and forming the original fosse of the fortress. 

The stroke of their own footsteps, lightly as these fell, was flappedback to them with impertinent gratuitousness by the vertical faces ofthe rock, so still was everything around. A little further, and theyemerged upon the open ledge of the lower tier of cliffs, to the rightbeing the sloping pathway leading down to the secluded creek at theirbase--the single practicable spot of exit from or entrance to the isleon this side by a seagoing craft; once an active wharf, whence many afine public building had sailed--including Saint Paul's Cathedral. 

The timorous shadowy shapes descended the footway, one at least of themknowing the place so well that she found it scarcely necessary to guideherself down by touching the natural wall of stone on her right hand, asher companion did. Thus, with quick suspensive breathings theyarrived at the bottom, and trod the few yards of shingle which, on theforbidding shore hereabout, could be found at this spot alone. It was sosolitary as to be unvisited often for four-and-twenty hours by aliving soul. Upon the confined beach were drawn up two or threefishing-lerrets, and a couple of smaller ones, beside them being a roughslipway for launching, and a boathouse of tarred boards. The two loversunited their strength to push the smallest of the boats down the slope, and floating it they scrambled in. 

The girl broke the silence by asking, 'Where are the oars?'

He felt about the boat, but could find none. 'I forgot to look for theoars!' he said. 

'They are locked in the boathouse, I suppose. Now we can only steer andtrust to the current!'

The currents here were of a complicated kind. It was true, as the girlhad said, that the tide ran round to the north, but at a special momentin every flood there set in along the shore a narrow reflux contrary tothe general outer flow, called 'The Southern' by the local sailors. Itwas produced by the peculiar curves of coast lying east and west of theBeal; these bent southward in two back streams the up-Channel flow oneach side of the peninsula, which two streams united outside theBeal, and there met the direct tidal flow, the confluence of the threecurrents making the surface of the sea at this point to boil like a pot, even in calmest weather. The disturbed area, as is well known, is calledthe Race. 

Thus although the outer sea was now running northward to the roadsteadand the mainland of Wessex 'The Southern' ran in full force towards theBeal and the Race beyond. It caught the lovers' hapless boat in afew moments, and, unable to row across it--mere river's width thatit was--they beheld the grey rocks near them, and the grim wrinkledforehead of the isle above, sliding away northwards. 

They gazed helplessly at each other, though, in the long-living faithof youth, without distinct fear. The undulations increased in magnitude, and swung them higher and lower. The boat rocked, received a smart slapof the waves now and then, and wheeled round, so that the lightshipwhich stolidly winked at them from the quicksand, the single objectwhich told them of their bearings, was sometimes on their right hand andsometimes on their left. Nevertheless they could always discern from itthat their course, whether stemwards or sternwards, was steadily south. 

A bright idea occurred to the young man. He pulled out his handkerchiefand, striking a light, set it on fire. She gave him hers, and he madethat flare up also. The only available fuel left was the small umbrellathe girl had brought; this was also kindled in an opened state, and heheld it up by the stem till it was consumed. 

The lightship had loomed quite large by this time, and a few minutesafter they had burnt the handkerchiefs and umbrella a coloured flamereplied to them from the vessel. They flung their arms round each other. 

'I knew we shouldn't be drowned!' said Avice hysterically. 

'I thought we shouldn't too, ' said he. 

With the appearance of day a boat put off to their assistance, and theywere towed towards the heavy red hulk with the large white letters onits side. 

3. VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT

The October day thickened into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside thecorpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither, hehad acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well ashe could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease. Itwas doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so. OfAvice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and theother had emigrated, while her only child besides the present Avice haddied in infancy. As for her friends, she had become so absorbed in herambitious and nearly accomplished design of marrying her daughter toJocelyn, that she had gradually completed that estrangement betweenherself and the other islanders which had been begun so long ago aswhen, a young woman, she had herself been asked by Pierston to marryhim. On her tantalizing inability to accept the honour offered, she andher husband had been set up in a matter-of-fact business in the stonetrade by her patron, but that unforgettable request in the London studiohad made her feel ever since a refined kinship with sculpture, and aproportionate aloofness from mere quarrying, which was, perhaps, no morethan a venial weakness in Avice the Second. Her daughter's objection toJocelyn she could never understand. To her own eye he was no older thanwhen he had proposed to her. 

As he sat darkling here the ghostly outlines of former shapes taken byhis Love came round their sister the unconscious corpse, confrontinghim from the wall in sad array, like the pictured Trojan women beheld byAEneas on the walls of Carthage. Many of them he had idealized inbust and in figure from time to time, but it was not as such that heremembered and reanimated them now; rather was it in all their naturalcircumstances, weaknesses, and stains. And then as he came to himselftheir voices grew fainter; they had all gone off on their differentcareers, and he was left here alone. 

The probable ridicule that would result to him from the events of theday he did not mind in itself at all. But he would fain have removedthe misapprehensions on which it would be based. That, however, wasimpossible. Nobody would ever know the truth about him; what it was hehad sought that had so eluded, tantalized, and escaped him; what it wasthat had led him such a dance, and had at last, as he believed just nowin the freshness of his loss, been discovered in the girl who had lefthim. It was not the flesh; he had never knelt low to that. Not a womanin the world had been wrecked by him, though he had been impassionedby so many. Nobody would guess the further sentiment--the cordialloving-kindness--which had lain behind what had seemed to him theenraptured fulfilment of a pleasing destiny postponed for forty years. His attraction to the third Avice would be regarded by the world as theselfish designs of an elderly man on a maid. 

His life seemed no longer a professional man's experience, but a ghoststory; and he would fain have vanished from his haunts on thiscritical afternoon, as the rest had done. He desired to sleep awayhis tendencies, to make something happen which would put an end to hisbondage to beauty in the ideal. 

So he sat on till it was quite dark, and a light was brought. There wasa chilly wind blowing outside, and the lightship on the quicksand afarlooked harassed and forlorn. The haggard solitude was broken by a ringat the door. 

Pierston heard a voice below, the accents of a woman. They had a groundquality of familiarity, a superficial articulation of strangeness. Onlyone person in all his experience had ever possessed precisely thosetones; rich, as if they had once been powerful. Explanations seemed tobe asked for and given, and in a minute he was informed that a lady wasdownstairs whom perhaps he would like to see. 

'Who is the lady?' Jocelyn asked. 

The servant hesitated a little. 'Mrs. Leverre--the mother of the--younggentleman Miss Avice has run off with. '

'Yes--I'll see her, ' said Pierston. 

He covered the face of the dead Avice, and descended. 'Leverre, ' he saidto himself. His ears had known that name before to-day. It was the namethose travelling Americans he had met in Rome gave the woman he supposedmight be Marcia Bencomb. 

A sudden adjusting light burst upon many familiar things at that moment. He found the visitor in the drawing-room, standing up veiled, thecarriage which had brought her being in waiting at the door. By the dimlight he could see nothing of her features in such circumstances. 

'Mr. Pierston?'

'I am Mr. Pierston. '

'You represent the late Mrs. Pierston?'

'I do--though I am not one of the family. '

'I know it. .. . I am Marcia--after forty years. '

'I was divining as much, Marcia. May the lines have fallen to you inpleasant places since we last met! But, of all moments of my life, whydo you choose to hunt me up now?'

'Why--I am the step-mother and only relation of the young man your brideeloped with this morning. '

'I was just guessing that, too, as I came downstairs. But--'

'And I am naturally making inquiries. '

'Yes. Let us take it quietly, and shut the door. '

Marcia sat down. And he learnt that the conjunction of old things andnew was no accident. What Mrs. Pierston had discussed with her nurse andneighbour as vague intelligence, was now revealed to Jocelyn at firsthand by Marcia herself; how, many years after their separation, andwhen she was left poor by the death of her impoverished father, she hadbecome the wife of that bygone Jersey lover of hers, who wanted a tendernurse and mother for the infant left him by his first wife recentlydeceased; how he had died a few years later, leaving her with the boy, whom she had brought up at St. Heliers and in Paris, educating him aswell as she could with her limited means, till he became the Frenchmaster at a school in Sandbourne; and how, a year ago, she and her sonhad got to know Mrs. Pierston and her daughter on their visit to theisland, 'to ascertain, ' she added, more deliberately, 'not entirely forsentimental reasons, what had become of the man with whom I eloped inthe first flush of my young womanhood, and only missed marrying by myown will. '

Pierston bowed. 

'Well, that was how the acquaintance between the children began, andtheir passionate attachment to each other. ' She detailed how Avice hadinduced her mother to let her take lessons in French of young Leverre, rendering their meetings easy. Marcia had never thought of hinderingtheir intimacy, for in her recent years of affliction she had acquireda new interest in the name she had refused to take in her purse-proudyoung womanhood; and it was not until she knew how determined Mrs. Pierston was to make her daughter Jocelyn's wife that she had objectedto her son's acquaintance with Avice. But it was too late to hinder whathad been begun. He had lately been ill, and she had been frightened byhis not returning home the night before. The note she had received fromhim that day had only informed her that Avice and himself had gone to bemarried immediately--whither she did not know. 

'What do you mean to do?' she asked. 

'I do nothing: there is nothing to be done. .. . It is how I served hergrandmother--one of Time's revenges. '

'Served her so for me. '

'Yes. Now she me for your son. '

Marcia paused a long while thinking that over, till arousing herself sheresumed: 'But can't we inquire which way they went out of the island, orgather some particulars about them?'

'Aye--yes. We will. '

And Pierston found himself as in a dream walking beside Marcia along theroad in their common quest. He discovered that almost every one of theneighbouring inhabitants knew more about the lovers than he did himself. 

At the corner some men were engaged in conversation on the occurrence. It was allusive only, but knowing the dialect, Pierston and Marciagathered its import easily. As soon as it had got light that morning oneof the boats was discovered missing from the creek below, and when theflight of the lovers was made known it was inferred that they were theculprits. 

Unconsciously Pierston turned in the direction of the creek, withoutregarding whether Marcia followed him, and though it was darker thanwhen Avice and Leverre had descended in the morning he pursued his waydown the incline till he reached the water-side. 

'Is that you, Jocelyn?'

The inquiry came from Marcia. She was behind him, about half-way down. 

'Yes, ' he said, noticing that it was the first time she had called himby his Christian name. 

'I can't see where you are, and I am afraid to follow. '

Afraid to follow. How strangely that altered his conception of her. Till this moment she had stood in his mind as the imperious, invincibleMarcia of old. There was a strange pathos in this revelation. He wentback and felt for her hand. 'I'll lead you down, ' he said. And he didso. 

They looked out upon the sea, and the lightship shining as if it hadquite forgotten all about the fugitives. 'I am so uneasy, ' said Marcia. 'Do you think they got safely to land?'

'Yes, ' replied some one other than Jocelyn. It was a boatman smoking inthe shadow of the boathouse. He informed her that they were picked up bythe lightship men, and afterwards, at their request, taken across tothe opposite shore, where they landed, proceeding thence on foot tothe nearest railway station and entering the train for London. Thisintelligence had reached the island about an hour before. 

'They'll be married to-morrow morning!' said Marcia. 

'So much the better. Don't regret it, Marcia. He shall not lose by it. Ihave no relation in the world except some twentieth cousins in the isle, of whom her father was one, and I'll take steps at once to make her agood match for him. As for me. .. I have lived a day too long. '

3. VIII. 'ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!'

In the month of November which followed Pierston was lying dangerouslyill of a fever at his house in London. 

The funeral of the second Avice had happened to be on one of thosedrenching afternoons of the autumn, when the raw rain flies level as themissiles of the ancient inhabitants across the beaked promontory whichhas formed the scene of this narrative, scarcely alighting exceptagainst the upright sides of things sturdy enough to stand erect. One person only followed the corpse into the church as chief mourner, Jocelyn Pierston--fickle lover in the brief, faithful friend in thelong run. No means had been found of communicating with Avice before theinterment, though the death had been advertised in the local and otherpapers in the hope that it might catch her eye. 

So, when the pathetic procession came out of the church and moved roundinto the graveyard, a hired vehicle from Budmouth was seen coming atgreat speed along the open road from Top-o'-Hill. It stopped at thechurchyard gate, and a young man and woman alighted and entered, thevehicle waiting. They glided along the path and reached Pierston's sidejust as the body was deposited by the grave. 

He did not turn his head. He knew it was Avice, with Henri Leverre--bythis time, he supposed, her husband. Her remorseful grief, thoughsilent, seemed to impregnate the atmosphere with its heaviness. Perceiving that they had not expected him to be there Pierston edgedback; and when the service was over he kept still further aloof, an actof considerateness which she seemed to appreciate. 

Thus, by his own contrivance, neither Avice nor the young man heldcommunication with Jocelyn by word or by sign. After the burial theyreturned as they had come. 

It was supposed that his exposure that day in the bleakest churchyardin Wessex, telling upon a distracted mental and bodily condition, hadthrown Pierston into the chill and fever which held him swaying forweeks between life and death shortly after his return to town. When hehad passed the crisis, and began to know again that there was such astate as mental equilibrium and physical calm, he heard a whisperedconversation going on around him, and the touch of footsteps on thecarpet. The light in the chamber was so subdued that nothing around himcould be seen with any distinctness. Two living figures were present, anurse moving about softly, and a visitor. He discerned that the latterwas feminine, and for the time this was all. 

He was recalled to his surroundings by a voice murmuring the inquiry:'Does the light try your eyes?'

The tones seemed familiar: they were spoken by the woman who wasvisiting him. He recollected them to be Marcia's, and everything thathad happened before he fell ill came back to his mind. 

'Are you helping to nurse me, Marcia?' he asked. 

'Yes. I have come up to stay here till you are better, as you seem tohave no other woman friend who cares whether you are dead or alive. I amliving quite near. I am glad you have got round the corner. We have beenvery anxious. '

'How good you are!. .. And--have you heard of the others?'

'They are married. They have been here to see you, and are very sorry. She sat by you, but you did not know her. She was broken down when shediscovered her mother's death, which had never once occurred to her asbeing imminent. They have gone away again. I thought it best she shouldleave, now that you are out of danger. Now you must be quiet till I comeand talk again. '

Pierston was conscious of a singular change in himself, which had beenrevealed by this slight discourse. He was no longer the same man that hehad hitherto been. The malignant fever, or his experiences, or both, hadtaken away something from him, and put something else in its place. 

During the next days, with further intellectual expansion, he becameclearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and hecould no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalledfrom the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itselfonly on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice's good qualitiesalone had any effect on his mind; of her appearance none at all. 

At first he was appalled; and then he said, 'Thank God!'

Marcia, who, with something of her old absolutism, came to his housecontinually to inquire and give orders, and to his room to see him everyafternoon, found out for herself in the course of his convalescence thisstrange death of the sensuous side of Jocelyn's nature. She had saidthat Avice was getting extraordinarily handsome, and that she did notwonder her stepson lost his heart to her--an inadvertent remark whichshe immediately regretted, in fear lest it should agitate him. He merelyanswered, however, 'Yes; I suppose she is handsome. She's more--a wisegirl who will make a good housewife in time. .. . I wish you were nothandsome, Marcia. '

'Why?'

'I don't quite know why. Well--it seems a stupid quality to me. I can'tunderstand what it is good for any more. '

'O--I as a woman think there's good in it. '

'Is there? Then I have lost all conception of it. I don't know what hashappened to me. I only know I don't regret it. Robinson Crusoe losta day in his illness: I have lost a faculty, for which loss Heaven bepraised!'

There was something pathetic in this announcement, and Marcia sighed asshe said, 'Perhaps when you get strong it will come back to you. '

Pierston shook his head. It then occurred to him that never since thereappearance of Marcia had he seen her in full daylight, or withouta bonnet and thick veil, which she always retained on these frequentvisits, and that he had been unconsciously regarding her as the Marciaof their early time, a fancy which the small change in her voice wellsustained. The stately figure, the good colour, the classical profile, the rather large handsome nose and somewhat prominent, regular teeth, the full dark eye, formed still the Marcia of his imagination; thequeenly creature who had infatuated him when the first Avice wasdespised and her successors unknown. It was this old idea which, in hisrevolt from beauty, had led to his regret at her assumed handsomeness. He began wondering now how much remained of that presentation afterforty years. 

'Why don't you ever let me see you, Marcia?' he asked. 

'O, I don't know. You mean without my bonnet? You have never asked meto, and I am obliged to wrap up my face with this wool veil because Isuffer so from aches in these cold winter winds, though a thick veil isawkward for any one whose sight is not so good as it was. '

The impregnable Marcia's sight not so good as it was, and her facein the aching stage of life: these simple things came as sermons toJocelyn. 

'But certainly I will gratify your curiosity, ' she resumedgood-naturedly. 'It is really a compliment that you should still takethat sort of interest in me. '

She had moved round from the dark side of the room to the lamp--for thedaylight had gone--and she now suddenly took off the bonnet, veiland all. She stood revealed to his eyes as remarkably good-looking, considering the lapse of years. 

'I am--vexed!' he said, turning his head aside impatiently. 'You arefair and five-and-thirty--not a day more. You still suggest beauty. YOUwon't do as a chastisement, Marcia!'

'Ah, but I may! To think that you know woman no better after all thistime!'

'How?'

'To be so easily deceived. Think: it is lamplight; and your sight isweak at present; and. .. Well, I have no reason for being anything butcandid now, God knows! So I will tell you. .. . My husband was youngerthan myself; and he had an absurd wish to make people think he hadmarried a young and fresh-looking woman. To fall in with his vanity Itried to look it. We were often in Paris, and I became as skilled inbeautifying artifices as any passee wife of the Faubourg St. Germain. Since his death I have kept up the practice, partly because the vice isalmost ineradicable, and partly because I found that it helped mewith men in bringing up his boy on small means. At this moment Iam frightfully made up. But I can cure that. I'll come in to-morrowmorning, if it is bright, just as I really am; you'll find that Time hasnot disappointed you. Remember I am as old as yourself; and I look it. '

The morrow came, and with it Marcia, quite early, as she had promised. It happened to be sunny, and shutting the bedroom door she went round tothe window, where she uncovered immediately, in his full view, and said, 'See if I am satisfactory now--to you who think beauty vain. The restof me--and it is a good deal--lies on my dressing-table at home. I shallnever put it on again--never!'

But she was a woman; and her lips quivered, and there was a tear in hereye, as she exposed the ruthless treatment to which she had subjectedherself. The cruel morning rays--as with Jocelyn under Avice'sscrutiny--showed in their full bareness, unenriched by addition, undisguised by the arts of colour and shade, the thin remains ofwhat had once been Marcia's majestic bloom. She stood the image andsuperscription of Age--an old woman, pale and shrivelled, her foreheadploughed, her cheek hollow, her hair white as snow. To this the face heonce kissed had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, scourgings, bakings, freezings of forty invidious years--by the thinkings of morethan half a lifetime. 

'I am sorry if I shock you, ' she went on huskily but firmly, as hedid not speak. 'But the moth frets the garment somewhat in such aninterval. '

'Yes--yes!. .. Marcia, you are a brave woman. You have the courage of thegreat women of history. I can no longer love; but I admire you from mysoul!'

'Don't say I am great. Say I have begun to be passably honest. It ismore than enough. '

'Well--I'll say nothing then, more than how wonderful it is that a womanshould have been able to put back the clock of Time thirty years!'

'It shames me now, Jocelyn. I shall never do it any more!'

 * * *

As soon as he was strong enough he got her to take him round to hisstudio in a carriage. The place had been kept aired, but the shutterswere shut, and they opened them themselves. He looked round upon thefamiliar objects--some complete and matured, the main of them seedlings, grafts, and scions of beauty, waiting for a mind to grow to perfectionin. 

'No--I don't like them!' he said, turning away. 'They are as uglinessto me! I don't feel a single touch of kin with or interest in any one ofthem whatever. '

'Jocelyn--this is sad. '

'No--not at all. ' He went again towards the door. 'Now let me lookround. ' He looked back, Marcia remaining silent. 'The Aphrodites--how Iinsulted her fair form by those failures!--the Freyjas, the Nymphs andFauns, Eves, Avices, and other innumerable Well-Beloveds--I want to seethem never any more!. .. "Instead of sweet smell there shall be stink, and there shall be burning instead of beauty, " said the prophet. '

And they came away. On another afternoon they went to the NationalGallery, to test his taste in paintings, which had formerly been good. As she had expected, it was just the same with him there. He saw no moreto move him, he declared, in the time-defying presentations of Perugino, Titian, Sebastiano, and other statuesque creators than in the work ofthe pavement artist they had passed on their way. 

'It is strange!' said she. 

'I don't regret it. That fever has killed a faculty which has, afterall, brought me my greatest sorrows, if a few little pleasures. Let usbe gone. '

He was now so well advanced in convalescence that it was deemed a mostdesirable thing to take him down into his native air. Marcia agreedto accompany him. 'I don't see why I shouldn't, ' said she. 'An oldfriendless woman like me, and you an old friendless man. '

'Yes. Thank Heaven I am old at last. The curse is removed. '

It may be shortly stated here that after his departure for the islePierston never again saw his studio or its contents. He had been downthere but a brief while when, finding his sense of beauty in art andnature absolutely extinct, he directed his agent in town to disperse thewhole collection; which was done. His lease of the building was sold, and in the course of time another sculptor won admiration there fromthose who knew not Joseph. The next year his name figured on the retiredlist of Academicians. 

 * * *

As time went on he grew as well as one of his age could expect to beafter such a blasting illness, but remained on the isle, in the onlyhouse he now possessed, a comparatively small one at the top of theStreet of Wells. A growing sense of friendship which it would be foolishto interrupt led him to take a somewhat similar house for Marcia quitenear, and remove her furniture thither from Sandbourne. Whenever theafternoon was fine he would call for her and they would take a strolltogether towards the Beal, or the ancient Castle, seldom going the wholeway, his sciatica and her rheumatism effectually preventing them, except in the driest atmospheres. He had now changed his style of dressentirely, appearing always in a homely suit of local make, and of thefashion of thirty years before, the achievement of a tailoress at EastQuarriers. He also let his iron-grey beard grow as it would, and whatlittle hair he had left from the baldness which had followed the fever. And thus, numbering in years but two-and-sixty, he might have passed forseventy-five. 

Though their early adventure as lovers had happened so long ago, itshistory had become known in the isle with mysterious rapidity andfulness of detail. The gossip to which its bearing on their presentfriendship gave rise was the subject of their conversation on one ofthese walks along the cliffs. 

'It is extraordinary what an interest our neighbours take in ouraffairs, ' he observed. 'They say "those old folk ought to marry; betterlate than never. " That's how people are--wanting to round off otherpeople's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner. '

'Yes. They keep on about it to me, too, indirectly. '

'Do they! I believe a deputation will wait upon us some morning, requesting in the interests of matchmaking that we will please to getmarried as soon as possible. .. . How near we were to doing it forty yearsago, only you were so independent! I thought you would have come backand was much surprised that you didn't. '

'My independent ideas were not blameworthy in me, as an islander, thoughas a kimberlin young lady perhaps they would have been. There was simplyno reason from an islander's point of view why I should come back, sinceno result threatened from our union; and I didn't. My father kept thatview before me, and I bowed to his judgment. '

'And so the island ruled our destinies, though we were not on it. Yes--we are in hands not our own. .. . Did you ever tell your husband?'

'No. '

'Did he ever hear anything?'

'Not that I am aware. '

Calling upon her one day, he found her in a state of great discomfort. In certain gusty winds the chimneys of the little house she had takenhere smoked intolerably, and one of these winds was blowing then. Herdrawing-room fire could not be kept burning, and rather than let a womanwho suffered from rheumatism shiver fireless he asked her to comeround and lunch with him as she had often done before. As they went hethought, not for the first time, how needless it was that she should beput to this inconvenience by their occupying two houses, when one wouldbetter suit their now constant companionship, and disembarrass herof the objectionable chimneys. Moreover, by marrying Marcia, andestablishing a parental relation with the young people, the ratherdelicate business of his making them a regular allowance would become anatural proceeding. 

And so the zealous wishes of the neighbours to give a geometrical shapeto their story were fulfilled almost in spite of the chief partiesthemselves. When he put the question to her distinctly, Marcia admittedthat she had always regretted the imperious decision of her youth; andshe made no ado about accepting him. 

'I have no love to give, you know, Marcia, ' he said. 'But suchfriendship as I am capable of is yours till the end. '

'It is nearly the same with me--perhaps not quite. But, like the otherpeople, I have somehow felt, and you will understand why, that I oughtto be your wife before I die. '

It chanced that a day or two before the ceremony, which was fixed totake place very shortly after the foregoing conversation, Marcia'srheumatism suddenly became acute. The attack promised, however, to beonly temporary, owing to some accidental exposure of herself in makingpreparations for removal, and as they thought it undesirable to postponetheir union for such a reason, Marcia, after being well wrapped up, waswheeled into the church in a chair. 

 * * *

A month thereafter, when they were sitting at breakfast one morning, Marcia exclaimed 'Well--good heavens!' while reading a letter she hadjust received from Avice, who was living with her husband in a housePierston had bought for them at Sandbourne. 

Jocelyn looked up. 

'Why--Avice says she wants to be separated from Henri! Did you ever hearof such a thing! She's coming here about it to-day. '

'Separated? What does the child mean!' Pierston read the letter. 'Ridiculous nonsense!' he continued. 'She doesn't know what she wants. I say she sha'n't be separated! Tell her so, and there's an end of it. Why--how long have they been married? Not twelve months. What will shesay when they have been married twenty years!'

Marcia remained reflecting. 'I think that remorseful feeling sheunluckily has at times, of having disobeyed her mother, and caused herdeath, makes her irritable, ' she murmured. 'Poor child!'

Lunch-time had hardly come when Avice arrived, looking very tearful andexcited. Marcia took her into an inner room, had a conversation withher, and they came out together. 

'O it's nothing, ' said Marcia. 'I tell her she must go back directly shehas had some luncheon. '

'Ah, that's all very well!' sobbed Avice. 'B-b-but if you had beenm-married so long as I have, y-you wouldn't say go back like that!'

'What is it all about?' inquired Pierston. 

'He said that if he were to die I--I--should be looking out for somebodywith fair hair and grey eyes, just--just to spite him in his grave, because he's dark, and he's quite sure I don't like dark people! Andthen he said--But I won't be so treacherous as to tell any more abouthim! I wish--'

'Avice, your mother did this very thing. And she went back to herhusband. Now you are to do the same. Let me see; there is a train--'

'She must have something to eat first. Sit down, dear. '

The question was settled by the arrival of Henri himself at the endof luncheon, with a very anxious and pale face. Pierston went off to abusiness meeting, and left the young couple to adjust their differencesin their own way. 

His business was, among kindred undertakings which followed theextinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals, to advance a scheme forthe closing of the old natural fountains in the Street of Wells, becauseof their possible contamination, and supplying the townlet with waterfrom pipes, a scheme that was carried out at his expense, as is wellknown. He was also engaged in acquiring some old moss-grown, mullionedElizabethan cottages, for the purpose of pulling them down becausethey were damp; which he afterwards did, and built new ones with hollowwalls, and full of ventilators. 

At present he is sometimes mentioned as 'the late Mr. Pierston' bygourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his productions arealluded to as those of a man not without genius, whose powers wereinsufficiently recognized in his lifetime.