to a whisper. Although I was but a few paces off I could hear nothing of what they were saying. When at last the carriage drove off and he came back to me, he was thoughtful, and there was a dark shade upon his face. He sat quite still for several moments without speaking. Then he looked up at me abruptly.
“If Lady Naselton’s description of our neighbor is at all correct,” he remarked, “he must be a perfect ogre.”
I nodded.
“One would imagine so. He is her godson, but she can find nothing but evil to say of him.”
“Under which circumstances it would be as well for us—for you girls especially—to carefully avoid him,” my father continued, keeping his clear, grey eyes steadily fixed upon my face. “Don’t you agree with me?”
“Most decidedly I do,” I answered.
But, curiously enough, notwithstanding his evil reputation—perhaps because of it—I was already beginning to feel a certain amount of unaccountable interest in Mr. Bruce Deville.
CHAPTER II
ON THE MOOR
After tea my father went to his study, for it was late in the week, and he was a most conscientious writer of sermons. I read for an hour, and then, tired alike of my book and my own company, I strolled up and down the drive. This restlessness was one of my greatest troubles. When the fit came I could neither work nor read nor think connectedly. It was a phase of incipient dissatisfaction with life, morbid, but inevitable. At the end of the drive nearest the road, I met Alice, my youngest sister, walking briskly with a book under her arm, and a quiet smile upon her homely face. I watched her coming towards me, and I almost envied her. What a comfort to be blessed with a placid disposition and an optimistic frame of mind!
“Well, you look as though you had been enjoying yourself,” I remarked, placing myself in her way.
“So I have—after a fashion,” she answered, good humoredly. “Are you wise to be without a hat, Kate? To look at your airy attire one would imagine that it was summer instead of autumn. Come back into the house with me.”
I laughed at her in contempt. There was a difference indeed between my muslin gown and the plain black skirt and jacket, powdered with dust, which was Alice’s usual costume.
“Have you ever known me to catch cold through wearing thin clothes or going without a hat?” I asked. “I am tired of being indoors. There have been people here all the afternoon. I wonder that your conscience allows you to shirk your part of the duty and leave all the tiresome entertaining to be done by me!”
She looked at me with wide-opened eyes and a concerned face. Alice was always so painfully literal.
“Why, I thought that you liked it!” she exclaimed. I was in an evil mood, and I determined to shock her. It was never a difficult task.
“So I do sometimes,” I answered; “but to-day my callers have been all women, winding up with an hour and a half of Lady Naselton. One gets so tired of one’s own sex! Not a single man all the afternoon. Somebody else’s husband to pass the bread and butter would have been a godsend!”
Alice pursed up her lips, and turned her head away with a look of displeasure.
“I am surprised to hear you talk like that, Kate,” she said, quietly. “Do you think that it is quite good taste?”
“Be off, you little goose!” I called after her as she passed on towards the house with quickened step and rigid head. The little sober figure turned the bend and disappeared without looking around. She was the perfect type of a clergyman’s daughter—studiously conventional, unremittingly proper, inevitably a little priggish. She was the right person in the right place. She had the supreme good fortune to be in accord with her environment. As for me, I was a veritable black sheep. I looked after her and sighed.
I had no desire to go in; on the other hand, there was nothing to stay out for. I hesitated for a moment, and then strolled on to the end of the avenue. A change in the weather seemed imminent. A grey, murky twilight had followed the afternoon of brilliant sunshine, and a low south wind was moaning amongst the Norwegian firs. I leaned over the gate with my face turned towards the great indistinct front of Deville Court. There was nothing to look at. The trees had taken to themselves fantastic shapes, little wreaths of white mist were rising from the hollows of the park. The landscape was grey, colorless, monotonous. My whole life was like that, I thought, with a sudden despondent chill. The lives of most girls must be unless they are domestic. In our little family Alice absorbed the domesticity. There was not one shred of it in my disposition.
I realized with a start that I was becoming morbid, and turned from the gate towards the house. Suddenly I heard an unexpected sound—the sound of voices close at hand. I stopped short and half turned round. A deep voice rang out upon the still, damp air—
“Get over, Madam! Get over, Marvel!”
There was the sound of the cracking of a whip and the soft patter of dogs’ feet as they came along the lane below—a narrow thoroughfare which was bounded on one side by our wall and on the other by the open stretch of park at the head of which stood Deville Court. There must have been quite twenty of them, all of the same breed—beagles—and amongst them two people were walking, a man and a woman. The man was nearest to me, and I could see him more distinctly. He was tall and very broad, with a ragged beard and long hair. He wore no collar, and there was a great rent in his shabby shooting coat. Of his features I could see nothing. He wore knickerbockers, and stockings, and thick shoes. He was by no means an ordinary looking person, but he was certainly not prepossessing. The most favorable thing about him was his carriage, which was upright and easy, but even that was in a measure spoiled by a distinct suggestion of surliness. The woman by his side I could only see very indistinctly. She was slim, and wore some sort of a plain tailor gown, but she did not appear to be young. As they came nearer to me, I slipped from the drive on to the verge of the shrubbery, standing for a moment in the shadow of a tall laurel bush. I was not seen, but I could hear their voices. The woman was speaking.
“A new vicar, or curate-in-charge, here, isn’t there, Bruce? I fancy I heard that one was expected.”
A sullen, impatient growl came from her side.
“Ay, some fellow with a daughter, Morris was telling me. The parson was bound to come, I suppose, but what the mischief does he want with a daughter?”
A little laugh from the woman—a pleasant, musical laugh.
“Daughters, I believe—I heard some one say that there were two. What a misogynist you are getting! Why shouldn’t the man have daughters if he likes? I really believe that there are two of them.”
There was a contemptuous snort, and a moment’s silence. They were exactly opposite to me now, but the hedge and the shadow of the laurels beneath which I was standing completely shielded me from observation. The man’s huge form stood out with almost startling distinctness against the grey sky. He was lashing the thistles by the side of the road with his long whip.
“Maybe!” he growled. “I’ve seen but one—a pale-faced, black-haired chit.”
I smothered a laugh. I was the pale-faced, black-haired chit, but it was scarcely a polite way of alluding
