"Do you mean this for an afternoon call, Harold?" asked Mabel, who did not seem altogether pleased at his arrival.

"Yes, we"re not at home now, are we Mabel?" put in audacious Dolly.

"I was kept rather late at rehearsal, and I had to dine afterwards,"

explained Caffyn; "but I shouldn"t have come in if I had not had a commission to perform. When I have done it you can send me away."

Harold Caffyn was a relation of Mrs. Langton"s. His father was high up in the consular service abroad, and he himself had lately gone on the stage, finding it more attractive than the Foreign Office, for which he had been originally intended. He had had no reason as yet to regret his apostasy, for he had obtained almost at once an engagement in a leading West-end theatre, while his social prospects had not been materially affected by the change; partly because the world has become more liberal of late in these matters, and partly because he had contrived to gain a tolerably secure position in it already, by the help of a pleasant manner and the musical and dramatic accomplishments which had led him to adopt the stage as his profession.

Like Holroyd, he had known Mabel from a child, and as she grew up had felt her attraction too much for his peace of mind. His one misgiving in going on the stage had been lest it should lessen his chance of finding favour with her.

This fear proved groundless: Mabel had not altered to him in the least. But his successes as an amateur had not followed him to the public stage; he had not as yet been entrusted with any but very minor _roles_, and was already disenchanted enough with his profession to be willing to give it up on very moderate provocation.

"Why, Holroyd, I didn"t see you over there. How are you?" he said cordially, though his secret feelings were anything but cordial, for he had long seen reason to consider Vincent as a possible rival.

"Vincent has come to say good-bye," explained Dolly. "He"s going to India to-morrow."

"Good-bye!" said Caffyn, his face clearing: "that"s rather sudden, isn"t it, Holroyd? Well, I"m very glad I am able to say good-bye too"

(as there is no doubt Caffyn was). "You never told me you were off so soon."

Holroyd had known Caffyn for several years: they had frequently met in that house, and, though there was little in common between them, their relations had always been friendly.

"It was rather sudden," Holroyd said, "and we haven"t met lately."

"And you"re off to-morrow, eh? I"m sorry. We might have managed a parting dinner before you went--it must be kept till you come back."

"What was the commission, Harold?" asked Mabel.

"Oh, ah! I met my uncle to-day, and he told me to find out if you would be able to run down to Chigbourne one Sat.u.r.day till Monday soon.

I suppose you won"t. He"s a dear old boy, but he"s rather a dull old pump to stay two whole days with."

"You forget he"s Dolly"s G.o.dfather," said Mabel.

"And he"s my uncle," said Caffyn; "but he"s not a bit the livelier for that, you know. You"re asked, too Juggins." (Juggins was a name he had for Dolly, whom he found pleasure in teasing, and who was not deeply attached to him.)

"Would you like to go, Dolly, if mother says yes?" asked Mabel.

"Is Harold going?" said Dolly.

"Harold does not happen to be asked, my Juggins," said that gentleman blandly.

"Then we"ll go, Mabel, and I shall take Frisk, because Uncle Anthony hasn"t seen him for a long time."

Holroyd saw no use in staying longer. He went into the schoolroom to see Colin, who was as sorry to say good-bye as the pile of school-books in front of him allowed, and then he returned to take leave of the others. The governess read in his face that her well-meant services had been of no avail, and sighed compa.s.sionately as she shook hands. Dolly nestled against him and cried a little, and the cool Harold felt so strongly that he could afford to be generous now, that he was genial and almost affectionate in his good wishes.

His face clouded, however, when Mabel said "Don"t ring, Ottilia. I will go to the door with Vincent--it"s the last time." "I wonder if she cares about the fellow!" he thought uneasily.

"You won"t forget to write to us as soon as you can, Vincent?" said Mabel, as they stood in the hall together. "We shall be thinking of you so often, and wondering what you are doing, and how you are."

The hall of a London house is perhaps hardly the place for love-pa.s.sages--there is something fatally ludicrous about a declaration amongst the hats and umbrellas. In spite of a consciousness of this, however, Vincent felt a pa.s.sionate impulse even then, at that eleventh hour, to tell Mabel something of what was in his heart.

But he kept silence: a surer instinct warned him that he had delayed too long to have any chance of success then. It was the fact that Mabel had no suspicion of the real nature of his feelings, and he was right in concluding as he did that to avow it then would come upon her as a shock for which she was unprepared.

Fraulein Mozer"s inclination to a sentimental view of life, and Caffyn"s tendency to see a rival in every one, had quickened their insight respectively; but Mabel herself, though girls are seldom the last to discover such symptoms, had never thought of Vincent as a possible lover, for which his own undemonstrative manner and procrastination were chiefly to blame.

He had shrunk from betraying his feelings before. "She can never care for me," he had thought; "I have done nothing to deserve her--I am n.o.body," and this had urged him on to do something which might qualify him in his own eyes, until which he had steadily kept his own counsel and seen her as seldom as possible.

Then he had written his book; and though he was not such a fool as to imagine that any woman"s heart could be approached through print alone, he could not help feeling on revising his work that he had done that which, if successful, would remove something of his own unworthiness, and might give him a new recommendation to a girl of Mabel"s literary sympathy.

But then his father"s summons to Ceylon had come--he was compelled to obey, and now he had to tear himself away with his secret still untold, and trust to time and absence (who are remarkably overrated as advocates by the way) to plead for him.

He felt the full bitterness of this as he held both her hands and looked down on her fair face with the sweet eyes that shone with a sister"s--but only a sister"s--affection. "She would have loved me in time," he thought; "but the time may never come now."

He did not trust himself to say much: he might have asked and obtained a kiss, as an almost brother who was going far away, but to him that would have been the hollowest mockery.

Suppressed emotion made him abrupt and almost cold, he let her hands drop suddenly, and with nothing more than a broken "G.o.d bless you, Mabel, good-bye, dear, good-bye!" he left the house hurriedly, and the moment after he was alone on the hill with his heartache.

"So he"s gone!" remarked Caffyn, as she re-entered the drawing-room after lingering a few moments in the empty hall. "What a dear, dull old plodder it is, isn"t it? He"ll do much better at planting coffee than he ever did at law--at least, it"s to be hoped so!"

"You are very fond of calling other people dull, Harold," said Mabel, with a displeased contraction of her eyebrows. "Vincent is not in the least dull: you only speak of him like that because you don"t understand him."

"I didn"t say it disparagingly," said Caffyn. "I rather admire dulness; it"s so restful. But as you say, Mabel, I dare say I don"t understand him: he really doesn"t give a fellow a fair chance. As far as I know him, I _do_ like him uncommonly; but, at the same time, I must confess he has always given me the impression of being, don"t you know, just a trifle heavy. But very likely I"m wrong."

"Very likely indeed," said Mabel, closing the subject. But Caffyn had not spoken undesignedly, and had risked offending her for the moment for the sake of producing the effect he wanted; and he was not altogether unsuccessful. "Was Harold right?" she thought later.

"Vincent is very quiet, but I always thought there was power of some sort behind; and yet--would it not have shown itself before now? But if poor Vincent _is_ only dull, it will make no difference to me; I shall like him just as much."

But, for all that, the suggestion very effectually prevented all danger of Vincent"s becoming idealised by distance into something more interesting than a brother--which was, indeed, the reason why Caffyn made it.

Vincent himself, meanwhile, unaware--as all of us would pray to be kept unaware--of the portrait of himself, by a friend, which was being exhibited to the girl he loved, was walking down Ladbroke Hill to spend the remainder of his last evening in England in loneliness at his rooms; for he had no heart for anything else.

It was dark by that time. Above him was a clear, steel-blue sky; in front, across the hollow, rose Campden Hill, a dim, dark ma.s.s, twinkling with lights. By the square at his side a German band was playing the garden music from "Faust," with no more regard for expression and tunefulness than a German band is ever capable of; but distance softened the harshness and imperfection of their rendering, and Siebel"s air seemed to Vincent the expression of his own pa.s.sionate, unrequited devotion.

"I would do anything for her," he said, half aloud, "and yet I dared not tell her then.... But if I ever come back to her again--before it is too late--she shall know all she is and always will be to me. I will wait and hope for that."

CHAPTER IV.

MALAKOFF TERRACE.

After parting from Vincent at the end of Rotten Row, Mark Ashburn continued his walk alone through Kensington High Street and onwards, until he came to one of those quiet streets which serve as a sort of backwater to the main stream of traffic, and, turning down this, it was not long before he reached a row of small three-story houses, with their lower parts cased in stucco, but the rest allowed to remain in the original yellow-brown brick, which time had mellowed to a pleasant warm tone. "Malakoff Terrace," as the place had been christened (and the t.i.tle was a tolerable index of its date), was rather less depressing in appearance than many of its more modern neighbours, with their dismal monotony and pretentiousness. It faced a well-kept enclosure, with trim lawns and beds, and across the compact laurel hedges in the little front gardens a curious pa.s.ser-by might catch glimpses of various interiors which in nearly every case left him with an impression of cosy comfort. The outline of the terrace was broken here and there by little verandahs protecting the shallow balconies and painted a deep Indian-red or sap-green, which in summer time were gay with flowers and creepers, and one seldom pa.s.sed there then on warm and drowsy afternoons without undergoing a well-sustained fire from quite a masked battery of pianos, served from behind the fluttering white curtains at most of the long open windows on the first floor.

Even in winter and at night the terrace was cheerful, with its variety of striped and coloured blinds and curtains at the illuminated windows; and where blinds and curtains were undrawn and the little front rooms left unlighted, the firelight flickering within on shining bookcases and picture frames was no less pleasantly suggestive. Still, in every neighbourhood there will always be some houses whose exteriors are severely unattractive; without being poverty-stricken, they seem to belong to people indifferent to all but the absolutely essential, and incapable of surrounding themselves with any of the characteristic contrivances that most homes which are more than mere lodgings ama.s.s almost unconsciously. It was before a house of this latter kind that Mark stopped--a house with nothing in the shape of a verandah to relieve its formality. Behind its front railings there were no trim laurel bushes--only an uncomfortable bed of equal parts of mould and broken red tiles, in which a withered juniper was dying hard; at the windows were no bright curtain-folds or hanging baskets of trailing fern to give a touch of colour, but dusty wire blinds and hangings of a faded drab.

It was not a boarding-house, but the home in which Mark Ashburn lived with his family, who, if they were not precisely gay, were as respectable as any in the terrace, which is better in some respects than mere gaiety.

He found them all sitting down to dinner in the back parlour, a square little room with a grey paper of a large and hideous design.

His mother, a stout lady with a frosty complexion, a cold grey eye, and an injured expression about the mouth and brow, was serving out soup with a touch of the relieving officer in her manner; opposite to her was her husband, a mild little man in habitually low spirits; and the rest of the family, Mark"s two sisters, Martha and Trixie, and his younger brother, Cuthbert, were in their respective places.