Beechwood + 

VIII + 

Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden seats and garish light that our journey began to seem⁠—as indeed I wished for the moment it might prove⁠—interminable. One after another the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare flung into it from a row of shops. + 

Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind the glass fronts. Wasn’t I myself the heiress of £110 a year? Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist’s shop. Twenty⁠—what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller. + 

After climbing a long hill⁠—the wayside houses steadily thinning out as we ascended⁠—the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as if by clockwork, opened another door⁠—that of the last house on the hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in that lighted oblong stood Mrs. Bowater. All utterly different from what I had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady, and⁠—dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first time set eyes on her lodger being carried into her house. I had in fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be. + 

Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch terra firma again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we were within the passage. + 

“Lor, miss; then here we are,” she sighed breathlessly, then returned to the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time, with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become so familiar and so endeared. Mrs. Bowater’s was a stiff and angular figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I up at her, steadily, silently. + 

“So this is the young lady,” she mused at last, as if addressing a hidden and distant listener. “I hope you are not overfatigued by your journey, miss. Please to step in.” + 

To my ear, Mrs. Bowater’s was what I should describe as a low, roaring voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hillside; but what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather’s clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling. For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused my eyes. But Mrs. Bowater came to my rescue. + 

“Food was never mentioned,” she remarked reflectively, “being as I see nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr. Pellew, I hope it will be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may expect.” + 

My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs. Bowater’s lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs. Bowater had supposed. Clean: after so many months of Mrs. Sheppey’s habits, it was this word that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new “apartment”: “It looks very comfortable, thank you, Mrs. Bowater; and I am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode.” There was nothing intentionally affected in this formal little speech. + 

“Which being so,” replied Mrs. Bowater, “there seems to be trouble with the cabman, and the day’s drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by the fire.” + 

A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. “Thank God,” said I, and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.⁠ ⁠… Alone. Only for a moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience. + 

I cried seductively, “Puss.” + 

But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be friends. + 

Whatever Pollie’s trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs. Bowater made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms to the elbow in the shallow bowl Mrs. Bowater had provided for me. And soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over the last meal we were to share together for many a long day. + 

There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with “hundreds and thousands,” and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed letters, “A Present from Dover.” Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together. But I was often at my wits’ end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately Mrs. Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening⁠—“Ladies of some sizes can’t warm the air as much as most,” as she put it. So at some little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement, and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach. + 

My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious⁠—though a leisurely⁠—talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much. + 

Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked, fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation flooded over me. + 

For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs. Bowater’s lodger moped. It was not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the sense of my small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case containing my furniture arrived. Mrs. Bowater shared a whole morning over its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied? + 

IX + 

A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs. Bowater’s apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr. Bates held my landlady in almost speechless respect. “A woman in a thousand,” he repeatedly assured me, when we were grown a little accustomed to one another; “a woman in ten thousand. And if things hadn’t been what they was, you may understand, they might have turned out different. Ah, miss, there’s one looking down on us could tell a tale.” I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but only a few flies were angling round the chandelier. + 

Mrs. Bowater’s compliments were less indirect. “That Bates,” she would say, surveying his day’s handiwork after he was gone, “is all thumbs.” + 

He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him. But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot. + 

Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him, or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed, read, and took my meals, Mr. Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber. From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious if I could have persuaded Mrs. Bowater to empty it a little. If I had kept on looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad. Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed! + 

There were two simpering plaster figures⁠—a Shepherd and Shepherdess⁠—nearly half my height on the chimneypiece, whom I particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured frame on the wall⁠—that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a sheepfold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his portrait. + 

I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs. Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals, so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened fields beyond the roadway, and let my daydreams wander at will. + 

At nine o’clock Mrs. Bowater would bring me my supper⁠—some fragments of rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with little enough to eat⁠—at least of cooked food: “It dries up in the winking of an eye.” So her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible ignored my existence. “Simple victuals, by all means, miss,” Mrs. Bowater would admit. “But if it don’t enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone.” + 

The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. “There’s the lodging, and there’s the board, the last being as you might say all but unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the reverse.” So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I thus found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over and above what I paid to Mrs. Bowater. Messrs. Harris, Harris, and Harris were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I “at once” paid over to my landlady £13 and whatever other sum was needful. The “charity” my godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather’s boxes which I kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs. Bowater advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and palpable reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious. + 

Occasionally when she had “business” to transact, Mrs. Bowater would be off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty shillings. Rather than “fine,” Mrs. Bowater preferred things “good”; and for this “goodness,” I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother’s last presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman. + 

I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company’s sake, and make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined for life and companionship, and having only my own⁠—for Mrs. Bowater was rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being⁠—I made as much, and as many, of myself as possible. + 

Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended “air.” What insidious maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs. Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my experiences in the train. But such walks⁠—though solitary enough at that hour of the day⁠—were straggly and irksome. Pollie’s arm had been a kind of second nature to me; but Mrs. Bowater, I think, had almost as fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill⁠—which led to Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane⁠—was deserted. Thought of the beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to Mrs. Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. “Besides, Mrs. Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?” + 

After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr. Bates was once more consulted. He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs. Bowater’s consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door into the street⁠—to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch, he eased that little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr. Bates! With his key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps, and I was free⁠—as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my comings-in as every self-respecting person should be. + 

“That’s what my father would have called a good job, Mr. Bates,” said I cordially. + 

He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but thought better of it. “Well, miss, what I say is, a job’s a job; and if it is a job, it’s a job that should be made a job of.” + 

As I dot the i’s and cross the t’s of this manuscript, I often think⁠—a little ruefully⁠—of Mr. Bates. + 

As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before Mrs. Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning. If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane⁠—very stony and steep. On the left, and before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty Wanderslore. To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable walk for me. + 

If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the foresight to accustom myself to Mrs. Bowater’s steep steps as well as to my cemented-in “Bateses,” as I called them. My only difficulty was to decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow “peculiar” when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades. + 

These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright. There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman. Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a careful walker to avoid a sousing. + 

The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming. Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern treetops my Kent stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the anniversary of my mother’s birthday; twined a wreath for her of ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken blackbird’s nest in the woods. + 

Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs. Bowater’s was a stuffy and meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a silly qualm. So Mrs. Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible for a tendency on my landlady’s part to express my sentiments in the third person. + 

This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not, she told me, “what you might call a religious woman,” having been compelled “to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that glitters.” She was none the less a regular attendant at St. Peter’s⁠—a church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles, and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress’s return. + 

“Not that you need making any better, miss,” Mrs. Bowater assured me. “Even a buttercup⁠—or a retriever dog, for that matter⁠—being no fuller than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there’s the next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore, where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. Not that I hold with the notion that only the good so-called will be there.” + 

This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable. + 

“Wherever I go, Mrs. Bowater,” I replied hastily, “I shall not be happy unless you are there.” + 

“D.V.,” said Mrs. Bowater, grimly, “I will.” + 

Still, I remained unconverted to St. Peter’s. Why, I hardly know: perhaps it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar’s daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had taken a “sitting,” this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs. Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation. And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with Mrs. Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as it happened to be their respective “Sundays in.” + 

This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening she went to St. Peter’s and brought back with her the text and crucial fragments of Mr. Crimble’s sermon, and on the next we read the lessons together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, “As Pants the Hart,” one of my mother’s favourite airs. But I got a little shaky at “O for the Wings,” and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill. Mrs. Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white “frilling” round her neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from Mr. Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers. + 

Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in watching through the muslin curtains the few passersby; sorting out their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimneypiece. + 

X + 

One suppertime I ventured to ask Mrs. Bowater if she would hand me down a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. “The books there,” she said, “are what they call the dead past burying its dead.” + 

Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs. Bowater and now at the coveted book. “Mr. Bowater,” she added from deep down in herself, “followed the sea.” This was, in fact, Mr. Bowater’s début in our conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone, produced a romantic expectancy in my mind. + 

“Is⁠—” I managed to whisper at last: “I hope Mr. Bowater isn’t dead?” + 

Mrs. Bowater’s eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back. + 

“Dead, no”; she echoed sepulchrally. “Worse than.” + 

By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr. Bowater was still actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that. Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I had seen in my Robinson Crusoe, and there Mr. Bowater, still “following the sea.” + 

“Never, never,” continued Mrs. Bowater in her Bible voice, “never to darken these doors again!” I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder. There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was compelled to shut my eyes. + 

But Mrs. Bowater had caught my expression. “He was, as some would say,” she explained with gloomy pride, “a handsome man. Do handsome he did never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the green of your youth⁠—though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time.⁠ ⁠…” She paused to breathe. “What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at the book if that’s all there’s to it.” With that she withdrew the dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my chair. + 

I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the palm of my hand. + 

“But oh! Mrs. Bowater!” I cried, all in a breath, running across, dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; “look, look, it’s there! It’s Orion!” + 

There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark, star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs. Bowater was moved by my enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband’s book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day. + 

Mrs. Bowater’s little house being towards the crest of the hill, with sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds made mock of man’s celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name⁠—Bellatrix, huge Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling to me! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar, topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight. + 

By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and⁠—such is human greed⁠—I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega, and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me. + 

I waited until Mrs. Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on. + 

The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a lamppost this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering Polestar to be true to Mr. Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had discovered on my parlour whatnot. + 

The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew near⁠—my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose. + 

Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs. Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion, but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart, and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the complete north for a while. + 

A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the northwest after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and lightheartedly for home. + 

The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down. All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness in the air, and that not due to my landlady’s forlorn trumpetings from above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding itself beneath a strange roof. + 

“Puss, puss,” I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heartsick cry. + 

Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to bed. + 

The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my bloodstained nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe, and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for “burnt offering,” I made Mrs. Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in garnets (one of my grandfather’s gifts). This she took down to a local jeweller’s to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a palm-tree beside a fountain. + 

Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the “Fanny” whom Mrs. Bowater had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She taught the little boys “English.” The fleeting Miss Perry returned to mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Bowater’s allusions to her were the more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not come “between us”? + 

Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: “F.: six weeks”⁠—and an extremely cross six weeks “F.” looked. For some inexplicable reason I pushed back this lady’s photograph into the book, and said nothing about it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed, in an odd fashion, to make Mrs. Bowater more admirable, her husband more formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter. + 

The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and Mr. Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair, the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch “F.,” and a far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr. Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare which dominated the small parlour. + 

Mrs. Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment. “Fractious!⁠—you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday.” + 

What was the heyday, I wondered. “Was Mr. Bowater⁠—attached to her?” seemed a less intrusive question. + 

“Doted,” she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. “But not to much purpose⁠—with an eye for every petticoat.” + 

This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Bowater,” I returned zealously, “there is just the faintest tinge of Mr. Bowater in the chin? I don’t,” I added candidly, “see the faintest glimpse of you.” + 

Mrs. Bowater merely tightened her lips. + 

“And is she like that now?” I asked presently. + 

Mrs. Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper. “It’s looks, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What’s more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment.” + 

How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother’s, and yet how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted to Mrs. Bowater’s early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of the mind that her husband’s star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which advances he made no reply. + 

My next bout of stargazing presaged disaster. I say stargazing, for it is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage. Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead. And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare wintry solitude. + 

The spectral rattle of the parched beech-leaves on the saplings, the faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering, tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in honest lamb’s-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring, unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until⁠—out of this engrossment⁠—little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along home. + 

It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if⁠—though easy⁠—it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish fashion⁠—a habit never to leave me⁠—to every sudden lovely morsel in turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St. Peter’s clock toll midnight. Was it my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don’t know, for I would sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us⁠—even a mammet like myself⁠—must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet. + 

I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white, luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the upper windows of Mrs. Bowater’s crouching house. To my utter confusion. For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me, was a muffled figure⁠—and that not my landlady’s⁠—looking out. All my fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension of telling Mrs. Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I had a lively distaste of being “found out.” + 

Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague, motionless figure⁠—to all appearance completely unaware of my presence. But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was being thought about, up there. + 

For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me⁠—to fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods. Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my “Bateses,” and so into the house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In preparation for the night’s expedition I had lain down in the early evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother’s lodger playing truant! + 

XI + 

If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it would be more decent to let Fanny “tell on me.” At length thought tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine. + 

What was that? It was day; Mrs. Bowater was herself softly calling me beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed. + 

“But, Mrs. Bowater.⁠ ⁠…” I expostulated. + 

“No, no, miss; it was in a butt they drowned the sexton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends.” + 

Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist’s to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees. + 

“Mother told me you were in bed, ill,” she said. “I hope you are better.” + 

I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again. + 

She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: “My! how you startled me!” + 

“Then it was you,” I managed to say. + 

“Oh, yes; it was me, it was me.” The words were uttered as if to herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at me. “I’m not telling,” she added softly. + 

Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. “But please do not suppose,” I began angrily, “that I am not my own mistress here. I have my own key⁠—” + 

“Oh, yes, your own mistress,” she interrupted suavely, “but you see that’s just what I’m not. And the key! why, it’s just envy that’s gnawing at the roots. I’ve never, never in my life seen anything so queer.” She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. “What were you doing out there?” + 

A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through. “I went,” said I, “to be in the woods⁠—to see the stars”; then added in a rather pompous voice, “only the southern and eastern constellations are visible from this poky little window.” + 

There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in. “I see; and you want them all. That’s odd, now,” she went on reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; “they have never attracted me very much⁠—angels’ tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon.” + 

She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of some old madrigal: “ ‘She enchants me.’ And if I had my little key, and my little secret door.⁠ ⁠… But never mind. ‘Telltale Tit, her tongue shall be slit.’ It’s safe with me. I’m no sneak. But you might like to know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I, for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons.” + 

The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark’s song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames. + 

“Will you please remember,” I broke out peremptorily, “that neither myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs. Bowater is an excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please; and⁠—and” (I seemed to be choking) “I am accustomed to take my meals alone.” + 

The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows⁠—like the eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but that of their beauty. “There you are,” she said. “One talks like one human being to another, and I should have thought you’d be grateful for that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I’m not sorry for them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don’t thrust myself on people⁠—there’s no need. But still; I’m not telling.” + 

She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned the chimneypiece. + 

And I?⁠—I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do? + 

“Heavens!” she muttered scornfully, “I gave up snivelling when I was a baby.” Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed⁠—“And there’s mother!” + 

When Mrs. Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it. + 

“Dear, dear,” she said, leaning anxiously over me, “your poor cheeks are red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren’t put a nose outside their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr. Phelps tomorrow if you are no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there’s no pain anywhere⁠—throat, limbs, or elsewhere?” + 

I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de cologne on my sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections. + 

They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind⁠—Fanny Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and gesture. That few minutes’ talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe. + 

Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again, distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference. But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening, with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life. But no tidings came of the stranger. + 

When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs. Bowater with my supper⁠—a bowl of infant’s gruel, not the customary old lady’s rusk and milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to being of so little consequence in other people’s eyes. Yet, after all, who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny had taken me as a midget, but as such a midget. Yet can I honestly say that I have ever taken her as mere Fanny, and not as such a Fanny? + 

The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her promises not to “tell” of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her. She remained an enigma. Cold and hard⁠—no one had ever spoken to me like that before. Yet her voice⁠—it was as if it had run about in my blood, and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again and shut up in one of Mrs. Ballard’s glass jars, and that a hairy woman who was a kind of mixture of Mrs. Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror. + 

Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything familiar had become a little strange. + 

Over night, too, someone⁠—and with mingled feelings I guessed who⁠—must have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick. + 

What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs. Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in Fanny’s handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs. Bowater. By a little ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post. + 

“Well there, miss, you did take me in that time,” she assured me. “And more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only scent so-called that I’ve any nose for.” + 

Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go stargazing again without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr. Phelps. Her yellowish long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face. + 

“You have made me very happy,” I said. At this small remark, the heavy eyelids trembled, but she made no reply. + 

“Did,” I managed to inquire at last, “did she have any breakfast before she went for the doctor?” + 

“A cup of tea,” said Mrs. Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took possession of me. + 

“She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am.” + 

“The danger was to keep her back,” was the obscure reply. “We don’t always see eye to eye.” + 

For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other of birdlike lightness and beauty. “Isn’t it funny?” I observed, “I had made quite, quite a different picture of her.” + 

“Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread very wary.” + 

About eleven o’clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a cheerful, hollow voice, “So this is our patient,” he bade me good morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper. + 

“And the pulse, please,” he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson sleeve of Fanny’s jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs. Bowater. + 

“You are not, I assume, aware of the⁠—the young lady’s normal pulse?” + 

“There being no cause before to consider it, I am not,” Mrs. Bowater returned. + 

“Any pain?” said Dr. Phelps. + 

“Headache,” replied Mrs. Bowater on my behalf, “and shoots in the limbs.” + 

At that Dr. Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear. + 

“H’m, a little fever,” he said musingly. “Have we any reason to suppose that we can have taken a chill?” + 

The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs. Bowater in the passage, Dr. Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away. + 

“A painstaking young man,” Mrs. Bowater summed him up in the doorway, “but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow. Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don’t have to ride in a carriage to know for one’s self.” + 

But “peace and goodwill”: I liked Dr. Phelps, and felt so much better for his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my mother’s brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread. During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr. Phelps had not deciphered it in my pulse. + 

When Mrs. Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner⁠—little but bread sauce and a sprig of holly!⁠—I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine sewing. + 

The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her features; “I’ll be bound she would, miss. I’ll give her your message.” Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but came into my eyes. + 

All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared for my enemy’s head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own. A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the evening that Fanny Bowater appeared. + 

She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green leaves in her hair. “I am going to a party,” she said, “so I can’t waste much time.” + 

“Mrs. Bowater thought you would like to see some really beautiful needlework,” I replied suavely. + 

“Well,” she said, “where is it?” + 

“Won’t you come a little closer?” + 

That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked up into the light, dwelling eyes. “It is this,” I whispered, drawing my two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. “It is only, Thank you, I wanted to say.” + 

In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. “Why, that’s nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the thing amused me.” + 

I nodded humbly. “Yes, yes,” I muttered, “Midget is as Midget wears. I know that. And⁠—and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present from me.” + 

Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. “A little ivory box!” she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, “and a Buddhist temple, how very pretty. Thank you.” + 

“Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. ‘She enchants’ you.” + 

“So it is,” she laughed, closing the box. “I was supposing,” she went on solemnly, “that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting disgrace.” + 

“Please don’t say that,” I entreated. “We may be friends, mayn’t we? I am better now.” + 

Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. “But yes,” she said, “of course”; and laughed again. + 

“And you believe me?” + 

“Believe you?” + 

“That it was the stars? I thought Mrs. Bowater might be anxious if she knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I’m going to tell her.” + 

“Oh, dear,” she replied in a cold, small voice, “so you are still worrying about that. I⁠—I envied you.” With a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer. “Next time you go,” she breathed out to me, “we’ll go together.” + 

My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. “I could tell you the names of some of the stars now,” I said, in a last wrestle with conscience. + 

“No, no,” said Fanny Bowater, “it isn’t the stars I’m after. The first fine night we’ll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise in practical astronomy.” She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. “That’s a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what’s knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it’s a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark.” + 

“Yes,” I agreed. “And there’s still all but a full moon.” + 

“Aha!” said she. “But what a world with only one! Jupiter has scores, hasn’t he? Just think of his Love Lanes!” She rose to her feet with a sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement. + 

“I hate these parties here,” she said. “They are not worth while.” + 

“You look lov⁠—you look all right.” + 

“H’m; but what’s that when there’s no one to see.” + 

“But you see yourself. You live in it.” + 

The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just distinguish, knitted its placid brows. “Why, if that were enough, we should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps you disapprove of incense?” + 

“Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was my mother’s family right back.” + 

“That’s right,” said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my bed. + 

I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer. Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire. The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear on the night air came the words:⁠— + 

“But you made me promise not to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken your own!” + 

“Then you must confess,” was the cautious reply, “that I am consistent. As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces.” + 

“You mean that?” was the muffled retort. + 

“That,” cried the other softly, “depends entirely on what you mean by ‘mean.’ Please look happy! You’d soon grow old and uglier if there was only that scrap of moon to light your face.” + 

“Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?”⁠—the misery in the words seemed to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet.⁠ ⁠… + 

XII + 

The next afternoon Mrs. Bowater was out when Dr. Phelps made his call. It was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and pronounced that “we are doing very nicely.” As indeed I was. While this professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us, then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea. She was standing behind Dr. Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was jotting down a note in a leather pocketbook. At length I found myself repeating⁠—as if at her dictation⁠—a polite little invitation to him to take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the pocketbook, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when, “But, of course, Dr. Phelps,” Fanny broke in like one inspired, “how very thoughtless of me!” + 

“Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but⁠—” cried Dr. Phelps, with a smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room. + 

His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides, whenever Dr. Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients. + 

The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady’s window curtains. “As a matter of fact perhaps not,” he replied at last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation. + 

“I suppose, Dr. Phelps,” I then inquired, “there might be more, at any time, might there not?” Our glances this time met. He blinked. + 

“My father and mother, I mean,” I explained in some confusion, “were just of the com⁠—of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is, whether you yourself would be sorry⁠—in quite a general way, of course⁠—if you found your practice going down like that.” + 

“Going down?” + 

“I mean the patients coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of asking our own doctor, Dr. Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn’t it, that giants are usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose that kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity, mightn’t there be an improvement in the other direction? You will think I am being extremely ego⁠—egotistical. But one must take Jack’s side, mustn’t one?⁠—even if one’s Jill?” + 

“Jack?” + 

“The Giant Killer.” + 

He looked at me curiously, and his finger and thumb once more strayed up towards the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his thermometer. But instead of taking it out, he coughed. + 

“There is a norm⁠—” he began in a voice not quite his own. + 

“Ah,” I cried, interrupting him, and throwing up my hands, “there is indeed. But why, I ask myself, so vast a number of examples of it!” + 

It was as if a voice within were prompting me. Perhaps the excitement of Fanny’s homecoming was partly to blame. “I sit at my window here and watch the passersby. Norms, in mere size, Dr. Phelps, every one of them, if you allow for the few little defects in the⁠—the moulding, you know. And just think what London must be like. Why, nobody can be noticeable, there.” + 

“But surely,” Dr. Phelps smiled indulgently, though his eyelashes seemed to be in the way, “surely variety is possible, without⁠—er⁠—excess. Indeed there must be variety in order to arrive at our norm, mustn’t there?” + 

“You’d be astonished,” I assured him, “how slight the differences really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn; and age, and sex, of course; that’s all. Now, isn’t it true, Dr. Phelps, that almost any twenty women⁠—unselected, you know⁠—would weigh about a ton? And surely there’s no particular reason why just human shells should weigh as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another. One would think they tried to be⁠—manners and habits, knowledge and victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them thinking pretty much the same: Norm-Thoughts, you know; just five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn’t so much mind the monotonous packages, if the contents were different. ‘Forty feeding like one’⁠—who said that? Now, truly, Dr. Phelps, don’t you feel?⁠—It would, of course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all the little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too, wouldn’t it?⁠ ⁠… And it isn’t quite my own idea, either.” + 

Dr. Phelps cleared his throat, and looked at his watch. “But surely,” he said, with a peculiar emphasis which I have noticed men are apt to make when my sex asks intelligent or unintelligent questions: “Surely you and I are understanding one another. I try to make myself clear to you. So extremes can meet; at least I hope so.” He gave me a charming little awkward bow. “Tell me, then, what is this peculiar difference you are so anxious about? You wouldn’t like a pygmy England, a pygmy Universe, now, would you, Miss M.?” + 

It was a great pity. A pygmy England⁠—the thought dazzled me. In a few minutes Dr. Phelps would perhaps have set all my doubts at rest. But at that moment Miss Bowater came in with the tea, and the talk took quite another turn. She just made it Fanny’s size. Even Dr. Phelps looked a great deal handsomer in her company. More sociable. Nor were we to remain “three’s none.” She had finished but one slice of toast over my fire, and inflamed but one cheek, when a more protracted but far less vigorous knock than Dr. Phelps’s on the door summoned her out of the room again. And a minute or two afterwards our tea-party became one of four, and its sexes (in number, at any rate) equally matched. + 

By a happy coincidence, just as Good King Wenceslas had looked out on the Feast of Stephen, so Mr. Crimble, the curate-in-charge at St. Peter’s, had looked in. By his “Ah, Phelps!” it was evident that our guests were well acquainted with one another; and Fanny and I were soon enjoying a tea enriched by the cream of local society. Mr. Crimble had mild dark eyes, gold spectacles, rather full red lips, and a voice that reminded me of raspberries. I think he had heard of me, for he was very attentive, and handled my small cup and saucer with remarkable, if rather conspicuous, ingenuity. + 

Candles were lit. The talk soon became animated. From the weather of this Christmas we passed to the weather of last, to Dr. Phelps’s prospects of skating, and thence to the good old times, to Mr. Pickwick, to our respective childish beliefs in Santa Claus, stockings, and to credulous parents. Fanny repeated some of the naive remarks made by her pupils, and Mr. Crimble capped them with a collection of biblical bons mots culled in his Sunday School. I couldn’t glance fast enough from one to the other. Dr. Phelps steadily munched and watched Mr. Crimble. He in turn told us of a patient of his, a Mrs. Hall, who, poor old creature, was 101, and enjoyed nothing better than playing at “Old Soldier” with a small grandson. + 

“Literally, second childhood. Senile decay,” he said, passing his cup. + 

From Mrs. Hall we naturally turned to parochial affairs; and then Mr. Crimble, without more ado, bolted his mouthful of toast, in order to explain the inmost purpose of his visit. + 

He was anxious to persuade Miss Bowater to sing at the annual Parish Concert, which was to be given on New Year’s Eve. Try as he might, he had been unable to persuade his vicar of the efficacy of Watch Night Services. So a concert was to be given instead. Now, would Miss Bowater, as ever, be ever so kind, and would I add my entreaties to his? As he looked at Fanny and I did too⁠—with one of those odd turns of the mind, I was conscious that the peculiar leaning angle of his head was exactly the same as my own. Whereupon I glanced at Dr. Phelps, but he sat fair and foursquare, one feeding like forty. Fanny remaining hesitant, appeal was made to him. With almost more cordiality than Mr. Crimble appeared to relish, he agreed that the musical talent available was not so abundant as it might be, and he promised to take as many of the expensive tickets as Miss Bowater would sing songs. + 

“I don’t pretend to be musical, not like you, Crimble. But I don’t mind a pleasant voice⁠—in moderation; and I assure you, Miss Bowater, I am an excellent listener⁠—given a fair chance, you know.” + 

“But then,” said Fanny, “so am I. I believe now really⁠—and one can judge from one’s speaking voice, can’t one, Mr. Crimble?⁠—I believe you sing yourself.” + 

“Sing, Miss Bowater,” interjected Mr. Crimble, tipping back his chair. “ ‘The wedding guest here beat his chest, for he heard the loud bassoon.’ Now, conjuring tricks, eh, Phelps? With a stethoscope and a clinical thermometer; and I’ll hold the hat and make the omelette. It would bring down the house.” + 

“It was his breast he beat; not his chest,” I broke in. + 

The six eyes slid round, as if at a voice out of the clouds. There was a pause. + 

“Why, exactly,” cried Mr. Crimble, slapping his leg. + 

“But I wish Dr. Phelps would sing,” said Fanny in a small voice, passing him the sugar. + 

“He must, he shall,” said Mr. Crimble, in extreme jubilation. “So that’s settled. Thank you, Miss Bowater,” his eyes seemed to melt in his head at his success, “the programme is complete.” + 

He drew a slip of paper from his inside pocket and brandished a silver pencil-case. “Mrs. Browning, ‘The Better Land’⁠—better and better every year. ‘Caller Herrin’ ’ to follow⁠—though what kind of herrings caller herrings are I’ve never been able to discover.” He beamed on me. “Miss Finch⁠—she is sending me the names of her songs this evening. Miss Willett and Mr. Bangor⁠—‘O that we two,’ and a queer pair they’d look; and ‘My luv is like.’ Hardy annuals. Mrs. Bullace⁠—recitations, ‘Abt Vogler,’ and no doubt a Lord Tennyson. Flute, Mr. Piper; cello, Miss Oran, a niece of Lady Pollacke’s; and for comic relief, Tom Sturgess, of course; though I hope he will be a little more⁠—er⁠—eclectic this year. And you and I,” again he turned his boyish brow on me, “will sit with Mrs. Bowater in the front row of the gallery⁠—a claque, Phelps, eh?” + 

He seemed to be in the topmost height of good spirits. Well, thought I, if social badinage and bonhomie were as pleasant and easy as this, why hadn’t my mother⁠—? + 

“But why in the gallery?” drawled Fanny suddenly from the hearthrug, with the little steel poker ready poised; “Miss M. dances.” + 

The clear voice rasped on the word. A peculiar silence followed the lingering accents. The two gentlemen’s faces smoothed themselves out, and both, I knew, though I gave them no heed, sat gazing, not at their hostess. But Fanny herself was looking at me now, her light eyes quite still in the flame of the candles, which, with their reflections in Mrs. Bowater’s pier glass were not two, but four. It was into those eyes I gazed, yet not into, only at. + 

All day my thoughts had remained on her, like bubbles in wine. All day hope of the coming night and of our expedition to the woods had been, as it were, a palace in which my girlish fancy had wandered, and now, though only a few minutes ago I had been cheeping my small extemporary philosophy into the ear of Dr. Phelps, the fires of self-contempt and hatred burned up in me hotter than ever. + 

I forgot even the dainty dressing-jacket on my back. “Miss Bowater is pleased to be satirical,” I said, my hand clenched in my lap. + 

“Now was I?” cried Fanny, appealing to Dr. Phelps, “be just to me.” Dr. Phelps opened his mouth, swallowed, and shut it again. + 

“I really think not, you know,” said Mr. Crimble persuasively, coming to her rescue. “Indeed it would be extremely kind and⁠—er⁠—entertaining; though dancing⁠—er⁠—and⁠—unless, perhaps, so many strangers.⁠ ⁠… We can count in any case on your being present, can we not, Miss M.?” He leaned over seductively, finger and thumb twitching at the plain gold cross suspended from his watch-chain on his black waistcoat. + 

“Oh, yes,” I replied, “you can count on me for the claque.” + 

The room had sunk into a stillness. Constraint was in the air. “Then that’s settled. On New Year’s Eve we⁠—we all meet again. Unless, Miss Bowater, there is any hope of seeing you meanwhile⁠—just to arrange the titles and so on of your songs on the programme.” + 

“No,” smiled Fanny, “I see no hope whatever. You forget, Mr. Crimble, there are dishes to wash. And hadn’t you better see Miss Finch first?” + 

Mr. Crimble cast a strange look at her face. He was close to her, and it was almost as if he had whispered, “Fanny.” But there was no time for further discussion. Dr. Phelps, gloved and buttoned, was already at the door. + 

Fanny returned into the room when our guests had taken their departure. I heard their male voices in vivacious talk as they marched off in the cold dark air beneath my window. + 

“I thought they were never going,” said Fanny lightly, twisting up into her hair an escaped ringlet. “I think, do you know, we had better say nothing to mother about the tea⁠—at least not yet a while. They are dull creatures: it’s pottering about so dull and sleepy a place, I suppose. What could have inspired you to invite Dr. Phelps to tea? Really, really, Miss M., you are rather astonishing. Aren’t you, now?” + 

What right had she to speak to me like this, as if we had met again after another life? She paused in her swift collection of the remnants of our feast. “Sulking?” she inquired sweetly. + 

With an effort I kept my self-possession. “You meant what you said, then? You really think I would sink to that?” + 

“ ‘Sink!’ To what? Oh, the dancing, you mean. How funny you should still be fretting about that. Still, you look quite entertaining when you are cross: ‘Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly,’ you know. Good Heavens! Surely we shouldn’t hide any kind of lights under bushels, should we? I’m sure the Reverend Harold would agree to that. Isn’t it being the least bit pedantic?” + 

“I should think,” I retorted, “Mr. Crimble would say anything pleasant to any young woman.” + 

“I have no doubt he would,” she agreed. “The other cheek also, you know. But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You are too sensitive, Miss M.” + 

“Perhaps I am.” Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between us. “I know this, anyhow⁠—that I lay awake till midnight because you had made a kind of promise to come in. Then I⁠—I ‘counted the pieces.’ ” + 

Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. “Oh, so we list⁠—” she began, turning on me, then checked herself. “I tell you this,” she said, her hand trembling, “I’m sick of it all. Those⁠—those fools! Ph! I thought that you, being as you are⁠—snippeting along out of the night⁠—might understand. There’s such a thing as friendship on false pretences, Miss M.” + 

Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her “fools.” For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the dreadful “Raca.” + 

“ ‘Understand,’ ” I said, “I do, if you would only let me. You just hide in your⁠—in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I’m only of that much account. It’s you are the⁠—foolish. Oh, don’t let us quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute.⁠ ⁠…” Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity lightened in hers. + 

“Keep there,” she said; “keep there! I won’t be a moment.” + 

She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this earlier, I shouldn’t have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I waited⁠—but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway. “Tonight!” she whispered. “And not a word, not a word!” + 

XIII + 

Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs. Bowater that evening? Our usual familiar talk dwindled to a few words this suppertime. The old conflict was raging in my mind⁠—hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs. Bowater could not hear the thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings, which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the table. She bade me good night; but paused in the doorway to look back at me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside. “Good night, miss,” she repeated; “and I’m sure, God bless you.” It was the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a cautious mockingbird out of a wood. + 

It called softly on two honeyed notes, “Mo⁠—ther!” + 

The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that would prove that Fanny had not forgotten our assignation. But I waited in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven. Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on. + 

Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound hatred of myself and even of being alive. “Well,” a cold voice said in my ear, “that’s how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend.” + 

In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I could not get out of that by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love? + 

I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders, descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen⁠—Sirius. The sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a revulsion of feeling. He was “cutting me dead.” I brazened him down. I trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting glance, as I turned, at Fanny’s window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than her company. Never more would I put trust in “any child of man.” + 

Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snakelike roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time’s hourglass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away forever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my imagination⁠—that secret still fountain⁠—of herself. Asleep now.⁠ ⁠… I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they⁠—and nearer in actuality than I had imagined. + 

A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires⁠—to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams. + 

She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together. And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her⁠—stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the faraway of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: “A-hoo.⁠ ⁠… Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!” + 

There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer⁠ ⁠… but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, “Fanny!⁠—Fanny Bowater!” + 

The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:⁠— + 

“It is I, Fanny. Here: here!” + 

Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. “I was tired of waiting,” I yawned. “There is nothing to be frightened about.” + 

Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses. + 

“Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings.” + 

“I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone.” + 

The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots? + 

“Alone! Here!” she returned. “But no wonder. It’s what you are all about.” + 

A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark. + 

“I wonder, though,” she added, “you are not frozen like⁠—like a pebble, sitting there.” + 

“But I am,” I said, laughing softly. “It doesn’t matter in me, because I’m so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just⁠—just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?” + 

For there on high⁠—and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself⁠—there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky. + 

“What sisters?” she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps. + 

“The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh⁠—yet she is all that that is about.” South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. “And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that’s the Milky Way. I don’t think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?” + 

She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then⁠—just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother’s ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars⁠—she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered. + 

“Tell me some more,” broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie. + 

“Well, there,” I cried, “is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses.” + 

“Praesepe,” drawled Fanny. + 

“Yes,” said I, unabashed, “the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny⁠—there’s little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice’s Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater’s Hair, if you had been she.” + 

Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cluster. “And see, beyond the Chair,” I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, “that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula⁠—s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, that, Fanny, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches.” + 

“Never even heard of her,” said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic. + 

“Say not so, Horatia,” I mocked, “there are more things.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I’d give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon.” + 

“But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already.” + 

“Then my old glutton can gobble up what’s left. Who taught you about them? And why,” she scanned me closely, “why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?” + 

“I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; and your father the rest.” + 

“My father,” echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent. + 

“His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead.” + 

“Oh, yes, I miss him,” was the serene retort, “and so, I fancy, does mother.” + 

“Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me⁠—something like that.” + 

“You need not be. I suppose God chooses one’s parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!” She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. “I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it’s suicidally cold. ‘Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son aise ici.’ We are going to be great friends, aren’t we?” Her eyes swept over me. “Would you like that?” + 

“Friends,” indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar. + 

I gravely nodded. “But I must come to you. You can’t come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother⁠—a little.” + 

“Oh, yes,” she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, “that is a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan’t pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother⁠—” she began again, after a pause of reflection. “Are you sorry, I mean, you aren’t⁠—you aren’t⁠—?” + 

Her look supplied the missing words. “Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think”⁠—I laughed at the memory⁠—“I was asking Dr. Phelps about that. Besides, would you be⁠—alone?” + 

“Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone”⁠—once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods⁠—“I hate it!” + 

“But surely,” expostulated the wiseacre in me, “that’s what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny.” + 

“Oh, but I’m going to help it. I’m not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?” + 

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head. + 

“Well, that,” replied she, “is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There’s nothing,” she added satirically, “so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it⁠—if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that.” + 

“I suppose the truth is,” said I, as if seized with a bright idea, “there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one,” I added a little drearily, “no one can share.” + 

“Quite, quite true,” said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, “the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open⁠—and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!” + 

“Poor Fanny,” I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. “All that I have shall help you.” + 

Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning. + 

I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. “Fanny,” I whispered tragically, “will you please sing to me⁠—if you are not frozenly cold? You remember⁠—the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It’s queer, isn’t it, being you and me?” + 

She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:⁠— + 

“ ’Twas a Cuckoo, cried ‘cuck-oo’ + 

In the youth of the year; + 

And the timid things nesting, + 

Crouched, ruffled in fear; + 

And the Cuckoo cried, ‘cuck-oo,’ + 

For the honest to hear. + 

One⁠—two notes: a bell sound + 

In the blue and the green; + 

‘Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!’ + 

And a silence between. + 

Ay, mistress, have a care, lest + 

Harsh love, he hie by, + 

And for kindness a monster + 

To nourish you try⁠— + 

In your bosom to lie: + 

‘Cuck-oo,’ and a ‘cuck-oo,’ + 

And ‘cuck-oo!’ ” + 

The sounds fell like beads into the quiet⁠—as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was she the monster? + 

I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny. + 

“Well,” she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. “Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?” + 

It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. “Now look at me,” I commanded. “If I went away, you couldn’t follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and⁠—and be where I was.” My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine. + 

“If,” she said, “I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too.” + 

“What do you mean?” said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers. + 

“I mean,” she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, “that I’m sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!” + 

I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me. + 

And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother’s house, I set off resolutely down the hill. + 

“You walk so slowly!” she said suddenly, turning back on me. “I will carry you.” + 

Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head. + 

“But why, why?” she repeated impatiently. “We could get there in half the time.” + 

“If you could fly, Fanny, I’d walk,” I replied stubbornly. + 

“You mean⁠—” and her cold anger distorted her face. “Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether⁠ ⁠… ?” But the question remained unfinished. + 

“I am your friend,” said I, “and that is why I will not, I will not give way to you.” It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory⁠—a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor. + 

Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom. + 

Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gatepost and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. “There is someone coming,” she whispered, “you must hurry.” She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where the head leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I. + 

I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs. Bowater apparently was sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out. + 

Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair. + 

“I am sorry, Midgetina,” she whispered into its folds, “I was impatient. Mother wouldn’t have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for⁠—for⁠—” + 

“My dear,” I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; “My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings.” With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates’s doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed. + 

XIV + 

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs. Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet⁠—their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts? + 

Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr. Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gatepost to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St. Peter’s. Next day, Holy Innocents’, he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me. + 

To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs. Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation. + 

“A cold afternoon, Mrs. Bowater,” he intoned. “The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers.” + 

My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively tête-à-tête over her seed cake and thin bread and butter. + 

But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me. + 

“Are you long with us?” he inquired, stirring his tea. + 

“I am quite, quite happy here,” I replied, with a sigh. + 

“Ah!” he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, “how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism⁠—of a mechanical, a scientific age⁠—which we have chiefly to contend against. We don’t often see you at St. Peter’s, I think?” + 

“You wouldn’t see very much of me, if I did come,” I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his “we” that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. “On the other hand,” I added, “wouldn’t there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?” + 

Mr. Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. “I wish,” he said, with a gallant little bow, “there were more like you.” + 

“More like me, Mr. Crimble?” + 

“I mean,” he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, “I mean that⁠—that you⁠—that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear.” + 

We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs. Bowater’s black currant jam. + 

“But then, I have plenty of time,” I said agreeably. “And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater’s brains.” + 

A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again. + 

“Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a⁠—a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion should be the great solvent. At least, that is my view.” + 

He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds. + 

“Mixing people must be very wearisome,” I suggested, examining his face. + 

“ ‘Wearisome,’ ” he repeated blandly. “I am sometimes at my wits’ end. No. A curate’s life is not a happy one.” Yet he confessed it almost with joy. + 

“And the visiting!” I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr. Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated. + 

“I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough.” + 

“But I assure you,” he replied, politely but firmly, “a true religion is exceedingly difficult. ‘The eye of a needle’⁠—we mustn’t forget that.” + 

“Ah, yes,” said I warmly; “that ‘eye’ will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother’s cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother.” + 

Mr. Crimble peered at me as if over a wall. + 

“I remember, too,” I went on, “one summer’s day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing⁠—bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window.” + 

“Jumped out of the window!” cried my visitor in consternation. + 

“Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn’t hurt myself. The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it⁠—the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the ‘eye’ seemed big enough when I was a child. But afterwards⁠—when I was confirmed⁠—I thought of Hell a good deal. I can’t see it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons. That can’t be right.” + 

“My dear young lady!” cried Mr. Crimble, as if shocked, “is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love.” + 

“Yes,” I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, “I believe that.” And I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. “Have you ever read Mr. Clodd’s Childhood of the World, Mr. Crimble?” + 

By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. “Mr. Clodd?⁠ ⁠… Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man.” + 

“This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr. Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were ‘Man’s struggles from darkness to twilight.’ What he meant was that no man loves darkness. At least,” I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, “not without the stars.” + 

“That is exceedingly true,” replied Mr. Crimble. “And, talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr. Hubbins.” Then it was his foot that Fanny and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: “Sick, I regret to say, no longer.” + 

“Dead?” I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him. + 

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr. Hubbins. “I should not like to go to Hell in the snow,” I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:⁠— + 

“This ae nighte, this ae nighte + 

—Every nighte and alle, + 

Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, + 

And Christe receive thy saule!” + 

“Beautiful, beautiful,” murmured Mr. Crimble, yet not without a trace of alarm in his dark eyes. “But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr. Hubbins⁠—His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end.” + 

“Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr. Crimble. Surely one must be more alive in that last hour than ever⁠—just when one’s going away. At any rate,” and I couldn’t refrain a sigh, almost of envy, “I hope I shall be. Was Mr. Hubbins a good man?” + 

“He was a most regular churchgoer,” replied my visitor a little unsteadily; “a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be greatly missed. You may remember what Mr. Ruskin wrote of his father: ‘Here lies an entirely honest merchant.’ Mr. Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr. Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven’t we,” and he cleared his throat, “haven’t we⁠—er⁠—strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?” + 

“We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world,” said I. + 

“Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn’t always think too closely. ‘Days and moments quickly flying,’ true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year. But, on the other hand, ‘we may make our lives sublime.’ Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr. Hub⁠—” + 

“Yes,” I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to the bait, “but what do you think Longfellow absolutely meant by his ‘sailor on the main’ of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody else having been shipwrecked and just leaving footprints in the sand? I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr. Crimble, that merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don’t think that can be so, because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn’t he?⁠—at least for a poet. For my part,” I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor, and on familiar ground, “I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the savages as ‘without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,’ even though he did, poor thing, ‘have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh’? Not that I mean to suggest,” I added hastily, “that Mr. Hubbins was in any sense a cannibal.” + 

“By no means,” said Mr. Crimble helplessly. “But there,” and he brushed his knees with his handkerchief, “I fear you are too much of a reader for me, and⁠—and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St. Peter’s. Mother Church has room for all, you know, in her⁠—about her footstool.” He smiled at me very kindly. “And our organist, Mr. Temple, has been treating us to some charmingly quaint old carols⁠—at least the words seem a little quaint to a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a student of poetry. Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:⁠— + 

“Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo. + 

Favete linguis.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny’s step at the door. I desisted. + 

At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs. Bowater’s firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with relief⁠—like Longfellow’s shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a ship. + 

Fanny’s pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold⁠—for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr. Crimble may have meant to include in his Odi, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater’s. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr. Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed. + 

“But, Miss Bowater,” he pleaded, “the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now.” + 

“Yes,” said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves. “It is annoying. I hadn’t a vestige of a cold last night.” + 

“But indeed, indeed,” he began, “is it wise in this severe weather⁠—?” + 

“Oh, it isn’t the weather I mind,” was the serene retort, “it’s the croaking like a frog in public.” + 

“ ‘A frog!’ ” cried Mr. Crimble beguilingly, “oh, no!” + 

But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu⁠—a little formal, and hasty⁠—and hurried off through the door to the printer. + 

When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny. + 

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, “it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn’t deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after.⁠ ⁠… And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse themselves with their bleating. I have done with it all.” + 

She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother’s looking-glass. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best. + 

“But surely,” I argued uneasily, “things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but⁠—just me. Would you care for that if you were⁠—well, what I am?” + 

“Ah, you don’t know,” a low voice replied bitterly, “you don’t know. The snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine. Boxed up here in your pretty little doll’s house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. I have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don’t know what he, in his heart, thinks of me⁠—and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!” + 

And she left me to my doll’s house⁠—a more helpless slave than ever. + 

Not only one “star” the fewer, then, dazzled St. Peter’s parish that New Year’s Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour’s practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her⁠—as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare. + 

I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a catlike cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain. + 

But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost⁠—a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word. Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image. + 

Long before the dark day of her departure⁠—a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world’s end⁠—I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimneypiece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which⁠—because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs. Bowater⁠—filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love. And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs. Bowater⁠—the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone. + 

She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr. Phelps and Mr. Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr. Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds. Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a faraway smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in Fanny⁠—just as, in reading my childhood’s beloved volume, The Observing Eye, I had admired the crab’s cuirass and the scorpion’s horny rings⁠—because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose. + 

Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine “Monsieur Crapaud,” who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the headmistress’s, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as “God is love”⁠—when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as “literature” mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed. + 

Once and again⁠—just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould⁠—once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. “What will you do, Fanny, when you can’t mock at him?” + 

“Him?” she inquired in a breath. + 

“The him!” I said. + 

“What him?” she replied. + 

“Well,” I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, “my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much.” + 

“And my father,” she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I knew they must be dangerous, “my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady.” + 

“Well,” I repeated, “what would you do, if⁠—if you fell in love?” + 

Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, “I shall go blind.” + 

I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. “Oh, Fanny,” I whispered hopelessly, “then you know?” + 

“ ‘Know’?” echoed the smooth lips. + 

“Why, I mean,” I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his shell, “I mean that’s what that absurd little Frenchman is⁠—‘Monsieur Crapaud.’ ” + 

“Oh, no,” said Fanny calmly, “he is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine,” she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, “mine will be wide open.” + 

How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious? + 

XV + 

I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr. Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr. Crimble’s spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs. Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and “see in” the New Year. She smiled at me over it⁠—still her tranquil, though neglected self⁠—and I was half-satisfied. + 

Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label “haunts me still.” The hours drew on. Fanny returned from the concert⁠—entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it. + 

In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr. Crimble’s “few words” of sympathetic apology for her absence: “ ‘I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.’ ” She gave us Miss Willett’s and Mr. Bangor’s spirited rendering of “Oh, that we two”; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs. Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her “Abt Vogler”: “The Lady’s ‘Yes,’ ” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:⁠— + 

“Lead her from the festive boards, + 

Point her to the starry skies!⁠ ⁠…” + 

And she imitated Lady Pollacke’s niece’s⁠—Miss Oran’s⁠—cello obligato to “The Lost Chord,” with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady’s lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust. + 

At this Mrs. Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity. + 

“I suppose,” she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination, “I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn’t so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage.” + 

“Yes,” said Fanny, “but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable.” This retort set Mrs. Bowater’s countenance in an impassive mask⁠—so impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. “And, mother,” added Fanny seductively, “who taught me to sing?” + 

“The Lord knows,” cried Mrs. Bowater, with conviction, “I never did.” + 

“Yes,” muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, “but does He care?” I hastily asked Mrs. Bowater if she was glad of tomorrow’s New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr. Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy. + 

“To them going downhill, miss,” my landlady was replying to my question, “it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company⁠—nor that the journey’s then of much account until it is over. By which I don’t mean to suggest there need be gloom. But to you and Fanny here⁠—well, I expect the little that’s the present for you is mostly wasted on the future.” With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had rummaged out of her years’ hoardings for me. + 

Fanny herself, with musing head⁠—her mockings over⁠—was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body⁠—the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing⁠—that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds. + 

Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet. + 

I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny⁠—further than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St. Peter’s Mrs. Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was smiling; but was she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight. + 

The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen, seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our threshold from one year into another. + 

This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a hand of each clasping mine, Mrs. Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping each other’s health, raised the strains of “Auld Lang Syne.” There must have been Scottish blood in Mrs. Bowater; she certainly made up for some little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather’s clock in the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and we all⁠—even Mrs. Bowater⁠—burst out laughing. + 

“Good night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you,” whispered a voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down from her bedroom, and with a paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. “Oh, Fanny!” I cried. “Oh, Fanny!” + 

New Year’s Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny, which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company; often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the volumes in Mrs. Bowater’s small library were of a nautical character, and though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the world, was to console me later in Fanny’s absence, the majority defied even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders of the Nerves, we discovered among her father’s books a copy of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. + 

The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell: “1801.⁠—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord⁠—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”⁠ ⁠… And when, a few lines farther on, I read: “He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows”⁠—the apparition of who but Mr. Crumble blinked at me out of the print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, “I beheld his black eyes”; “a range of gaunt thorns”; “a wilderness of crumbling griffins”; “a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer”⁠—they rang in my mind, echoed on in my dreams. + 

And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr. Crimble, resembled Heathcliff in being “rather morose,” and in frequently expressing “an aversion to showing displays of feeling,” she was more attracted by my discovery than she condescended to confess. Jane Eyre, she said, was a better story, “though Jane herself was a fool.” What cared I? To me this book was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons’ crimson taper-lit drawing-room. + 

If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Brontë did for me. Not so for Fanny. In her “vapid listlessness” she often pretended to yawn over Wuthering Heights, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or cry “Ah!” at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book. + 

It was at the passage where Cathy⁠—in her grand plaid silk frock, white trousers, and burnished shoes⁠—returns to the dreadful Grange; and, “dismally beclouded,” Heathcliff stares out at her from his hiding-place. “ ‘He might,’ ” I read on, “ ‘well skulk behind the settle, at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. “Is Heathcliff not here?” she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors.’ ” + 

It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny’s and mine, met. But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me. + 

“Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?” I inquired. + 

My candle’s flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. “Whose?” she asked. + 

“Why, Heathcliff’s.” + 

She turned slowly away. “You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It’s merely a story. He only wanted taming. You’ll see by-and-by.” But at that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs. Bowater opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed. + 

As the day drew near for Fanny’s return to her “duties,” her mood brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes which Mrs. Bowater lavished on her⁠—to a degree that, amateur though I was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign delight in these fineries⁠—“Ah!” whispered I to each, “when she wears you she will be far, far away.” I envied the very buttons, and indeed pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain hours; to say good night to herself for me; to write day by day in the first of the evening; to share the moon: “If we both look at her at the same moment,” I argued, “it will be next to looking at one another. You cannot be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the wind.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy.” + 

She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in Holy Week⁠—then she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with the stars in the woods. She promised. At eleven she came home, and went straight up into her bedroom. I heard her footsteps. She was packing. Then silence. + 

I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble pupil. The next afternoon she was gone. + 

XVI + 

For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at had but one meaning⁠—that she was not there. I did not dare to admit into my heart a hope of the future, since it would be treason to the absent. There was an ecstatic mournfulness even in the sight of the January sun, the greening fields, the first scarcely perceptible signals of a new year. And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs. Bowater. Hardly a morning passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn’t eat the day before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief. + 

I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary calm? Why did love for things without jealousy or envy fill me with delight, pour happiness into me, and love for Fanny parch me up, suck every other interest from my mind, and all but blind my eyes? Is that true? I cannot be sure: for to remember her ravages is as difficult as to reassemble the dismal phantoms that flock into a delirious brain. And still to be honest⁠—there’s another chance: Was she to blame? Would my mind have been at peace even in its solitary woe if she had dealt truly with me? Would anyone believe it?⁠—it never occurred to me to remind myself that it might be a question merely of size. Simply because I loved, I deemed myself lovable. Yet in my heart of hearts that afternoon I had been twitting Mr. Crimble for saying his prayers! + 

But even the heart is Phoenix-like. The outer world began to break into my desolation, not least successfully when after a week or two of absence there came a post card from Fanny to her mother with a mere “love to M.” scrawled in its top right-hand corner. It was as if a wineglass of cold water had been poured down my back. It was followed by yet another little “shock.” One evening, when she had carefully set down my bowl of rusk and milk, Mrs. Bowater took up her stand opposite to me, black as an image in wood. “You haven’t been after your stars, miss, of late. It’s moping you are. I suffered myself from the same greensick fantasticalities, when I was a girl. Not that a good result’s any the better for a poor cause; but it was courting danger with your frail frame; it was indeed.” + 

I smile in remembrance of the picture presented by that conscience-stricken face of mine upturned to that stark monitor⁠—a monitor no less stark at this very moment though we are both many years older. + 

“Yes, yes,” she continued, and even the dun, fading photograph over her head might have paled at her accents. “I’m soliciting no divulgements; she wouldn’t have gone alone, and if she did, would have heard of it from me. But you must please remember, miss, I am her mother. And you will remember, miss, also,” she added, with upper lip drawn even tighter, “that your care is my care, and always will be while you are under my roof⁠—and after, please God.” + 

She soundlessly closed the door behind her, as if in so doing she were shutting up the whole matter in her mind forever, as indeed she was, for she never referred to it again. Thunderbolts fall quietly at times. I sat stupefied. But as I examine that distant conscience, I am aware, first, of a faint flitting of the problem through my mind as to why a freedom which Mrs. Bowater would have denied to Fanny should have held no dangers for me, and next, I realize that of all the emotions in conflict within me, humiliation stood head and shoulders above the rest. Indeed I flushed all over, at the thought that never for one moment⁠—then or since⁠—had I paused to consider how, on that fateful midnight, Fanny could have left the house-door bolted behind her. My utter stupidity: and Fanny’s! All these weeks my landlady had known, and said nothing. The green gooseberries of my childhood were a far less effective tonic. But I lost no love for Mrs. Bowater in this prodigious increase of respect. + 

A far pleasanter interruption of my sick longings for the absent one occurred the next morning. At a loss what to be reading (for Fanny had abstracted my Wuthering Heights and taken it away with her), once more shudderingly pushing aside my breakfast, I turned over the dusty, faded pile of Bowater books. And in one of them I discovered a chapter on knots. Our minds are cleverer than we think them, and not only cats have an instinct for physicking themselves. I took out a piece of silk twine from my drawer and⁠—with Fanny’s phantom sulking a while in neglect⁠—set myself to the mastery of “the ship boy’s” science. I had learned forever to distinguish between the granny and the reef (such is fate, this knot was also called the true lover’s!), and was setting about the fisherman’s bend, when there came a knock on the door⁠—and then a head. + 

It was Pollie. Until I saw her round, red, country cheek, and stiff Sunday hat, thus unexpectedly appear, I had almost forgotten how much I loved and had missed her. No doubt my landlady had been the dea ex machina that had produced her on this fine sunshine morning. Anyhow she was from heaven. Besides butter, a posy of winter jasmine, a crochet bedspread, and a varnished arbour chair made especially for me during the winter evenings by her father, Mr. Muggeridge, she brought startling news. There suddenly fell a pause in our excited talk. She drew out her handkerchief and a slow crimson mounted up over neck, cheek, ears, and brow. I couldn’t look quite away from this delicious sight, so my eyes wandered up in admiration of the artificial cornflowers and daisies in her hat. + 

Whereupon she softly blew her nose and, with a gliding glance at the shut door, she breathed out her secret. She was engaged to be married. A trying, romantic vapour seemed instantly to gather about us, in whose hush I was curiously aware not only of Pollie thus suffused, sitting with her hands loosely folded in her lap, but of myself also, perched opposite to her with eyes in which curiosity, incredulity, and even a remote consternation played upon her homely features. Time melted away, and there once more sat the old Pollie⁠—a gawk of a girl in a pinafore, munching up green apples and re-plaiting her dull brown hair. + 

Then, of course, I was bashfully challenged to name the happy man. I guessed and guessed to Pollie’s ever-increasing gusto, and at last I dared my first unuttered choice: “Well, then, it must be Adam Waggett!” + 

“Adam Waggett! Oh, miss, him! a nose like a winebottle.” + 

It was undeniable. I apologized, and Pollie surrendered her future into my hands. “It’s Bob Halibut, miss,” she whispered hoarsely. + 

And instantaneously Bob Halibut’s red head loomed louringly out at me. But I know little about husbands; and premonitions only impress us when they come true. Time was to prove that Pollie and her mother had made a prudent choice. Am I not now Mr. Halibut’s god-sister, so to speak? + 

The wedding, said Pollie, was to be in the summer. “And oh, miss”⁠—would I come? + 

The scheming that followed! The sensitive draping of difficulties on either side, the old homesick longing on mine⁠—to flee away now, at once, from this scene of my afflicted adoration. I almost hated Fanny for giving me so much pain. Mrs. Bowater was summoned to our council; my promise was given; and it was she who suggested that its being “a nice bright afternoon,” Pollie should take me for a walk. + 

But whither? It seemed a sheer waste of Pollie to take her to the woods. Thoughts of St. Peter’s, the nocturnal splendour in the cab, a hunger for novelty, the itch to spend money, and maybe a tinge of daredevilry⁠—without a moment’s hesitation I chose the shops and the “town.” Once more in my black, with two thicknesses of veil canopying my head, as if I were a joint of meat in the Dog Days, I settled myself on Pollie’s arm, and⁠—in the full publicity of three o’clock in the afternoon⁠—off we went. + 

We chattered; we laughed; we sniggled together like schoolgirls in amusement at the passersby, in the strange, busy High Street. I devoured the entrancing wares in the shop windows⁠—milliner, hairdresser and perfumer, confectioner; even the pyramids of jam jars and sugar-cones in the grocer’s, and the soaps, syrups, and sponges of Mr. Simpkins⁠—Beechwood’s pharmaceutical chemist. Out of the sovereign which I had brought with me from my treasure-chest Pollie made purchases on my behalf. For Mrs. Bowater, a muslin tie for the neck; for herself⁠—after heated controversy⁠—a pair of kid gloves and a bottle of frangipani; and for me a novel. + 

This last necessitated a visit to Mrs. Stocks’s Circulating Library. My hopes had been set on Jane Eyre. Mrs. Stocks regretted that the demand for this novel had always exceeded her supply: “What may be called the sensational style of fiction” (or was it friction?) “never lays much on our hands.” She produced, instead, and very tactfully, a comparatively diminutive copy of Miss Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It was a little shop-soiled; “But books keep, miss”; and she let me have it at a reduced price. Her great shears severed the string. Pollie and I once more set clanging the sonorous bell at the door, and emerged into the sunlight. “Oh, Pollie,” I whispered, “if only you could stay with me forever!” + 

This taste of “life” had so elated me that after fevered and silent debate I at last laughed out, and explained to Pollie that I wished to be “put down.” Her breathless arguments against this foolhardy experiment only increased my obstinacy. She was compelled to obey. Bidding her keep some little distance behind me, I settled my veil, clasped tight my Miss Austen in my arms and set my face in the direction from which we had come. One after another the wide paving-stones stretched out in front of me. It was an extraordinary experience. I was openly alone now, not with the skulking, deceitful shades and appearances of night, or the quiet flowers and trees in the enormous vacancy of nature; but in the midst of a town of men in their height⁠—and walking along there: by myself. It was as if I had suddenly realized what astonishingly active and domineering and multitudinous creatures we humans are. I can’t explain. The High Street, to use a good old phrase, “got up into my head.” My mind was in such a whirl of excitement that full consciousness of what followed eludes me. + 

The sun poured wintry bright into the house-walled gulf of a street that in my isolation seemed immeasurably vast and empty. I think my senses distorted the scene. There was the terrific glitter of glass, the clatter of traffic. A puff of wind whirled dust and grit and particles of straw into the air. The shapes of advancing pedestrians towered close above me, then, stiff with sudden attention, passed me by. My legs grew a little numb and my brain confused. The strident whistling of a butcher’s boy, with an empty, bloodstained tray over his shoulder, suddenly ceased. Saucer-eyed, he stood stock still, gulped and gaped. I kept on my course. A yelp of astonishment rent the air. Whereupon, as it seemed, from diverse angles, similar boys seemed to leap out of the ground and came whooping and revolving across the street in my direction. And now the blood so hummed in my head that it was rather my nerves than my ears which informed me of a steadily increasing murmur and trampling behind me. + 

With extraordinary vividness I recall the vision of a gigantic barouche gliding along towards me in the shine and the dust; and seated up in it a high, pompous lady who at one moment with rigid urbanity inclined her head apparently in my direction, and at the next, her face displeased as if at an offensive odour, had sunk back into her cushions, oblivious not only of Beechwood but of the whole habitable globe. Simultaneously, I was aware, even as I hastened on, first that the acquaintance whose salute she had acknowledged was Mr. Crimble, and next, that with incredible rapidity he had wheeled himself about and had instantaneously transfixed his entire attention on some object in the window of a hatter’s. + 

Until this moment, as I say, a confused but blackening elation had filled my mind. But at sight of Mr. Crimble’s rook-like stooping shoulders I began to be afraid. My shoe stumbled against a jutting paving-stone. I almost fell. Whereupon the mute concourse at my heels⁠—spreading tail of me, the comet⁠—burst into a prolonged squealing roar of delight. The next moment Pollie was at my side, stooping to my rescue. It was too late. One glance over my shoulder⁠—and terror and hatred of the whole human race engulfed me like a sea. I struck savagely at Pollie’s cotton-gloved hand. Shivering, with clenched, sticky teeth, I began to run. + 

Why this panic? Who would have harmed me? And yet on the thronging faces which I had flyingly caught sight of through my veil there lay an expression that was not solely curiosity⁠—a kind of hunger, a doglike gleam. I remember one thin-legged, ferrety, red-haired lad in particular. Well, no matter. The comedy was brief, and it was Mrs. Stocks who lowered the curtain. Attracted by all this racket and hubbub in the street, she was protruding her round head out of her precincts. Like fox to its hole, I scrambled over her wooden doorstep, whisked round her person, and fled for sanctuary into her shop. She hustled poor Pollie in after me, wheeled round on my pursuers, slammed the door in their faces, slipped its bolt, and drew down its dark blue blind. + 

In the sudden quiet and torpor of this musty gloom I turned my hunted eyes and stared at the dark strip of holland that hid me from my pursuers. So too did Mrs. Stocks. The round creature stood like a stone out of reach of the surf. Then she snorted. + 

“Them!” said she, with a flick of her duster. “A parcel of idle herrand boys. I know them: and no more decency than if you was Royalty, my dear, or a pickpocket, or a corpse run over in the street. You rest a bit, pore young thing, and compose yourself. They’ll soon grow tired of themselves.” + 

She retired into the back part of her shop beyond the muslined door and returned with a tumbler of water. I shook my head. My sight pulsed with my heartbeats. As if congealed into a drop of poison, I stared and stared at the blind. + 

“Open the door,” I said. “I’d like to go out again.” + 

“Oh, miss! oh, miss!” cried Pollie. + 

But Mrs. Stocks was of a more practical turn. After surveying my enemies from an upper window she had sent a neighbour’s little girl for a cab. By the time this vehicle arrived, with a halfhearted “Boo!” of disappointment, the concourse in the street had all but melted away, and Mrs. Stocks’s check duster scattered the rest. The cab-door slammed, the wheels ground on the kerbstone, my début was over. I had been but a nine minutes’ wonder. + 

XVII + 

We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet, as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one another, and broke into a long, mirthless peal of laughter⁠—a laughter that on her side presently threatened to end in tears. I left her to recover herself, fixing my festering attention on her engagement ring⁠—two hearts in silver encircled by six sky-blue turquoises. And in the silly, helpless fashion of one against the world, I plotted revenge. + 

The cab stopped. There stood the little brick house, wholly unaffected by the tragic hours which had passed since we had so gaily set out from it. I eyed it with malice and disgust as I reascended my Bateses and preceded Pollie into the passage. Once safely within, I shrugged my shoulders and explained to Mrs. Bowater the phenomenon of the cab with such success that I verily believe she was for the moment convinced that her lodger was one of those persons who prosper in the attentions of the mob⁠—Royalty, that is, rather than pickpockets or corpses run over in the street. + 

With my new muslin tie adorning her neck, Mrs. Bowater took tea with us that afternoon, but even Pollie’s imaginative version of our adventures made no reference to the lady in the carriage, nor did she share my intense conjecture on what Mr. Crimble can have found of such engrossing interest in the hatter’s. Was it that the lady had feigned not to have seen me entirely for my sake; and that Mr. Crimble had feigned not to have seen me entirely for his? I was still poring over this problem in bed that night when there came a tap at my door. It was Pollie. She had made her way downstairs to assure herself that I was safe and comfortable. “And oh, miss,” she whispered, as she bade me a final good night, “you never see such a lovely little bedroom as Mrs. Bowater have put me into⁠—fit for a princess, and yet just quite plain! Bob’s been thinking about furniture too.” + 

So I was left alone again with forgotten Fanny, and that night I dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face of my ferrety “herrand-boy.” And afloat in the midst of the welter beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke, shuddering, breathed a blessing⁠—disjointed, nameless; turned over, and soon was once more asleep. + 

My day’s experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when, after Pollie’s departure, a knock announced Mr. Crimble, I greeted him with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he assured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals? + 

“In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny black oblongs; you can’t think how secret it looks!” + 

But Mr. Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry after the health of Mrs. Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs. Hubbins was unavailing. + 

“I speak,” he said, “of yesterday’s atrocity. There is no other word for it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own church, indeed of my mother’s house, I cannot disclaim all responsibility for it.” + 

Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk about his share. “Oh,” said I, as airily as I could, “you mean, Mr. Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even so much as a glimpse of St. Peter’s. So you see⁠—” + 

“You are kindness itself,” he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, “but the fact is,” and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, “the fact is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than⁠—than it hurt mine.” + 

“But honestly, Mr. Crimble,” I replied, glancing rather helplessly round the room, “it didn’t hurt my feelings at all. You don’t feel much, you know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is important to know where we are, isn’t it; and where other people are? And boys will be boys, as Mrs. Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose, errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very useful lesson⁠—even though I didn’t much enjoy learning it. If I am ever to get used to the world (and that is a kind of duty, Mr. Crimble, isn’t it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each other’s insides⁠—our thoughts and feelings, I mean⁠—everybody would be as peculiar there⁠—inside, you know⁠—as I am, outside. I’m afraid this is not making myself very clear.” + 

And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr. Phelps with precisely the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being “deceitful on the weights.” + 

Mr. Crimble opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly, “You see, I must be candid about such things to myself and try not to⁠—to be silly. And you were merely going to be very kind, weren’t you? I am a midget, and it’s no good denying it. The people that hooted me were not. That’s all; and if there hadn’t been so many of them, perhaps I might have been just as much amused, if not even shocked at them, as they at me. We think our own size, that’s all, and I’m perfectly certain,” I nodded at him emphatically, “I’m perfectly certain if poor Mr. Hubbins were here now, he’d⁠—he’d bear me out.” + 

Bear me out⁠—the words lingered on in my mind so distinctly, and conveyed so peculiar a picture of Mr. Hubbins’s spirit and myself, that I missed the beginning of my visitor’s reply. + 

“But I assure you,” he was saying, “it is not merely that.” The glint of perspiration was on his forehead. “In the Almighty’s sight all men are equal. Appearances are nothing. And some of us perhaps are far more precious by very reason of⁠—of passing afflictions, and⁠—” + 

“My godmother,” I interposed, “said exactly that in a letter to me a few months ago. Not that I accept the word, Mr. Crimble, the ‘afflictions,’ I mean. And as for appearances, why they are everything, aren’t they?” I gave him as cordial an imitation of a smile as I could. + 

“No, no, no; yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Crimble rapidly. “But it was not of that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward. The⁠—the hideous barbarity of the proceeding.” He had forgotten me. His eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the hatter’s window. There fell a painful pause. + 

I rose and sat down again. “But quite, quite honestly,” I interposed faintly, “they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could you have done? Why, really and truly,” I laughed feebly, “they might have had to pay, you know. It was getting⁠—getting me cheap!” + 

His head was thrown back, so that he looked under his spectacles at me, as he cried hollowly: “They might have stoned you.” + 

“Not with those pavements.” + 

“But I was there. I turned aside. You saw me?” + 

What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: “But honestly, honestly, Mr. Crimble,” I murmured out at him, “I didn’t see you see me.” + 

“Oh, ah! a woman’s way!” he adjured me desperately, turning his head from one side to the other. “But you must have known that I knew you knew I had seen you, you must confess that. And, well⁠ ⁠… as I say, I can only appeal to your generosity.” + 

“But what can I do? I’m not hurt. If it had been the other way round⁠—you scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe I might have looked into the hatter’s. Besides, when we were safe in the cab.⁠ ⁠… I mean, I’m glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even you.⁠ ⁠… It was wildly exciting, Mr. Crimble, can’t you see? And now”⁠—I ended triumphantly⁠—“and now I have another novel!” + 

At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I stood there, erect beside the bed⁠—without a thought in my head. And I began slowly, silently⁠—to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and laughed⁠—not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size. Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of solitude⁠—as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose, was my bed, my glass, my hairbrushes and bottles⁠—“Here we all are, Miss M.”⁠—and on the other side of the curtains.⁠ ⁠… And how contemptuous I had been of Pollie’s little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out once more into the world. + 

“Ah, here it is,” I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my Sense and Sensibility from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it almost ceremoniously in Mr. Crimble’s hands. A visible mist of disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened it, his eye strayed down the titlepage. + 

“Yes, yes,” he murmured, “Jane Austen⁠—a pocket edition. Macaulay, I remember.⁠ ⁠…” He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. “But you were asking me a question. What could I have done? Frankly I don’t quite know. But I might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you⁠—The Good Shepherd. But there, in short,” and the sun of relief peered through the glooms of conscience, “I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand.” His tongue came to a standstill. “And when,” he continued in a small, constrained voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, “when Miss Bowater returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to prove⁠—She would never⁠—for⁠—forgive.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to understand, to realize where my poor little “generosity” was to come in. + 

“Ah,” I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, “she won’t be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn’t, I am sure, much mind, Mr. Crimble.” + 

“Easter,” he whispered. “Well, you will write, I suppose,” and his eye wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, “and no doubt you will share our⁠—your secret.” There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice, and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why, surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid, he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys love leads us into. + 

“No,” I said solemnly. “I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she would only be amused. Everything amuses her.” + 

It seemed that we had suddenly reassumed our natural dimensions, for at that he looked at me tinily again, and with the suggestion, to which I was long accustomed, that he would rather not be observed while so looking. + 

On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, there, not on my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far more friendly towards Mr. Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could⁠—equals. I tossed a pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr. Bowater’s fixed stare on me, hastily included him within its range. + 

Mr. Crimble, Mrs. Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his “fun,” was a lonely young man. He hadn’t, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of the world to be of much service to those who had. “They,” and I think she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr. Crimble in particular, “live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according. Though, of course, there’s those who have seen a bit of trouble and cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all’s said and done.” + 

And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church⁠—no more just a number of St. Peterses than I was so many “organs,” or Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered. + 

“But he was very anxious about the concert,” I ventured to protest. + 

“I’ve no doubt,” said Mrs. Bowater shortly. + 

“But then,” I remarked with a sigh, “Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes.” + 

“It isn’t the making,” replied her mother, “but the keeping.” + 

The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was slow, because she made me think and argue with her. Apart from her, I devoured every fragment of print I could lay hands on. For when fiction palled I turned to facts, mastered the sheepshank, the running bowline, and the figure-of-eight; and wrestled on with my sea-craft. It was a hard task, and I thought it fair progress if in that I covered half a knot a day. + 

Besides which, Mrs. Bowater sometimes played with me at solitaire, draughts, or cards. In these she was a martinet, and would appropriate a fat pack at Beggar-my-neighbour with infinite gusto. How silent stood the little room, with just the click of the cards, the simmering of the kettle on the hob, and Mrs. Bowater’s occasional gruff “Four to pay.” We might have been on a desert island. I must confess this particular game soon grew a little wearisome; but I played on, thinking to please my partner, and that she had chosen it for her own sake. Until one evening, with a stifled sigh, she murmured the word, Cribbage! I was shuffling my own small pack at the moment, and paused, my eyes on their backs, in a rather wry amusement. But Fate has pretty frequently so turned the tables on me; and after that, “One for his nob,” sepulchrally broke the night-silence of Beechwood far more often than “Four to pay.” + 

Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On the one hand: “I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last night was full moon again. I saw you⁠—you only in her glass.” On the other: “Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine centuries nearer now! And how is ‘Monsieur Crapaud’?” + 