murmured to itself through the night. An orangery or conservatory, of a charming eighteenth-century design, ran round the garden in a semicircle, its flat pilasters and mouldings of yellow stone taking under the moonlight the color and the delicacy of ivory. Beyond the terrace which bordered the garden, the ground fell to a river, of which the reaches, now dazzling, now sombre, now slipping secret under woods, and now silverly open to the gentle slopes of the park, brought wildness and romance into a scene that had else been tame. Beyond the river on a rising ground was a village church with a spire. The formal garden, the Georgian conservatory, the park, the river, the church—they breathed England and the traditional English life. All that they implied, of custom and inheritance, of strength and narrowness, of cramping prejudice and stubborn force, was very familiar to Ashe, and on the whole very congenial. He was glad to be an Englishman and a member of an English government. The ironic mood which was tolerably constant in him did not in the least interfere with his normal enjoyment of normal goods. He saw himself often as a shade among shadows, as an actor among actors; but the play was good all the same. That a man should know himself to be a fool was in his eyes, as it was in Lord Melbourne's, the first of necessities. But fool or no fool, let him find the occupations that suited him, and pursue them. On those terms life was still amply worth living, and ginger was still hot in the mouth.
This was his usual philosophy. Religiously he was a sceptic, enormously interested in religion. Should he ever become Prime Minister, as Lady Tranmore prophesied, he would know much more theology than the bishops he might be called on to appoint. Politically, at the same time, he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty. The absurdities of his own class were still more plain to him perhaps than the absurdities of the populace. But had he lived a couple of generations earlier he would have gone with passion for Catholic emancipation, and boggled at the Reform Bill. And if fate had thrown him on earlier days still, he would not, like Falkland, have died ingeminating peace; he would have fought; but on which side, no friend of his—up till now—could have been quite sure. To have the reputation of an idler, and to be in truth a plodding and unwearied student; this, at any rate, pleased him. To avow an enthusiasm, or an affection, generally seemed to him an indelicacy; only two or three people in the world knew what was the real quality of his heart. Yet no man feigns shirking without in some measure learning to shirk; and there were certain true indolences and sybaritisms in Ashe of which he was fully and contemptuously aware, without either wishing or feeling himself able to break the yoke of them.
At the present moment, however, he was rather conscious of much unusual stirring and exaltation of personality. As he stood looking out into the English night the currents of his blood ran free and fast. Never had he felt the natural appetite for living so strong in him, combined with what seemed to be at once a divination of coming change, and a thirst for it. Was it the mere advancement of his fortunes—or something infinitely subtler and sweeter? It was as though waves of softness and of yearning welled up from some unknown source, seeking an object and an outlet.
As he stood there dreaming, he suddenly became conscious of sounds in the room overhead. Or rather in the now absolute stillness of the rest of the house he realized that the movements and voices above him, which had really been going on since he entered his room, persisted when everything else had died away.
Two people were talking; or rather one voice ran on perpetually, broken at intervals by the other. He began to suspect to whom the voice belonged; and as he did so, the window above his own was thrown open. He stepped back involuntarily, but not before he had caught a few words in French, spoken apparently by Lady Kitty.
"Ciel! what a night!—and how the flowers smell! And the stars—I adore the stars! Mademoiselle—come here! Mademoiselle! answer me—I won't tell tales—now do you—really and truly—believe in God?"
A laugh, which was a laugh of pleasure, ran through Ashe, as he hurriedly put out his lights.
"Tormentor!" he said to himself—"must you put a woman through her theological paces at this time of night? Can't you go to sleep, you little whirlwind?—What's to be done? If I shut my window the noise will scare her. But I can't stand eavesdropping here."
He withdrew softly from the window and began to undress. But Lady Kitty was leaning out, and her voice carried amazingly. Heard in this way also, apart from form and face, it became a separate living thing. Ashe stood arrested, his watch that he was winding up in his hand. He had known the voice till now as something sharp and light, the sign surely of a chatterer and a flirt. To-night, as Kitty made use of it to expound her own peculiar theology to the French governess—whereof a few fragments now and then floated down to Ashe—nothing could have been more musical, melancholy, caressing. A voice full of sex, and the spell of sex.
What had she been talking of all these hours to mademoiselle? A lady whom she could never have set eyes on before this visit. He thought of her face, in the drawing-room, as she had spoken of her sister—of her eyes, so full of a bright feverish pain, which had hung upon his own.
Had she, indeed, been confiding all her home secrets to this stranger? Ashe felt a movement of distaste, almost of disgust. Yet he remembered that it was by her unconventionality, her lack of all proper reticence, or, as many would have said, all delicate feeling, that she had made her first impression upon him. Ay, that had been an impression—an impression indeed! He realized the fact profoundly, as he stood lingering in the darkness, trying not to hear the voice that thrilled him.
At last!—was she going to bed?
"Ah!—but I am a pig, to keep you up like this! Allez dormir!" (The sound of a kiss.) "I? Oh no! Why should one go to bed? It is in the night one begins to live."
She fell to humming a little French tune, then broke off.
"You remember? You promise? You have the letter?"
Asseverations apparently from mademoiselle, and a mention of eight o'clock, followed by remorse from Kitty.
"Eight o'clock! And I keep you like this. I am a brute beast! Allez—allez vite!" And quick steps scudded across the floor above, followed by the shutting of a door.
Kitty, however, came back to the window, and Ashe could still hear her sighing and talking to herself.
What had she been plotting? A letter? Conveyed by mademoiselle? To whom?
Long after all sounds above had ceased Ashe still lay awake, thinking of the story he had heard from Lord Grosville. Certainly, if he had known it, he would never have gone familiarly to Madame d'Estrées' house. Laxity, for a man of his type, is one thing; lying, meanness, and cruelty are another. What could be done for this poor child in her strange and sinister position? He was ironically conscious of a sudden heat of missionary zeal. For if the creature to be saved had not possessed such a pair of eyes—so slim a neck—such a haunting and teasing personality—what then?
The question presently plunged with him into sleep. But he had not forgotten it when he awoke.
He had just finished dressing next morning, when he chanced to see from the front window of his room, which commanded the main stretch of the park, the figure of a lady on one of the paths. She seemed to be returning from the farther end of a long avenue, and was evidently hurrying to reach the house. As she approached, however, she turned aside into a shrubbery walk and was soon lost to view. But Ashe had recognized Mademoiselle D. The matter of the letter recurred to him. He guessed that she had already delivered it. But where?
At breakfast Lady Kitty did not appear. Ashe made inquiries of the younger Miss Grosville, who replied with some tartness that she supposed Kitty had a cold, and hurried off herself to dress for Sunday-school. It was not at all the custom for young ladies to breakfast in bed on Sundays at Grosville Park, and Lady Grosville's brow was
