Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing
happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and
Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother--a
cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to
let me come. Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is
a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs
in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it).
Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked
her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him
better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much,
but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look
so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he
let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about
Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting,
but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of
the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen
too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the
loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little
Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places
where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea
is quite blue.

“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paper had pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything look _enchanted_.

“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I was _too_ happy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.”

Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was working.

Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little girl’s loneliness he knew and understood.

He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the happy development of her temperament. He wanted to educate her with some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court, in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during the holidays, whenever he wished to see her.

It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances.

He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might come as a relief.

Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him.

Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she knew her father well.

Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of patronage.

In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life.

The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the death-blow to his own ambitions also.

He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric.

The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish landlord, was penniless.

She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders, and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the same emotion experienced in affluence.

Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well.

His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship--a temper which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle hands.

The boy, determined to call his life his own, had cut the knot of uncongenial family existence by flight.

Anne was left.

* * * * *

Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly.

On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly well.

“_To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen._” The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan. Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the South Sea Islands.

Once--this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday--he had come home for a week.

“He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told him that I ought to go away--that I had no friends, and that my life was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m wretched--_wretched_. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock in the hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining, and the sky is like lead.”

* * * * *

Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the classic _nothing_ of the diary of Louis XVI.

In thought Anne went back over the long, dreary years--the incredibly empty years of a woman whom lack of means as well as lack of opportunity cuts off from the world.

A woman moreover, whose youth was spent under conditions less elastic, less favourable to development than those of modern days.

The cold bare nave of St. Jude’s rose vividly in her mind. She saw the pews full of women in frowsy faded bonnets--the bonnets of Dalston.

She saw the parish room lighted by unshaded gas-burners, in which, shy as she was, she had held classes for work-girls. Again she watched them bending over their desks, giggling and nudging one another when she entered the room.

She remembered the look of the street when after the appointed hour for her class, she emerged from the stuffy room into the night air.

There was a butcher’s shop opposite, with a row of flaring lights, and the butcher in a greasy apron used to stand upon the pavement shouting his wares to the hurrying passers-by.

Then there was the return to the dingy house. A hurried lighting of the gas in the entrance passage, the glare of which revealed the oil-cloth on the floor, growing more worn and shabby every year. How well Anne remembered what was left of the pattern of that oil-cloth!

A descent into the kitchen followed, where she prepared the supper, and directed the clumsy movements of Harriet, the little maid-of-all-work.

Supper then with her father, who sometimes scarcely raised his head from his plate, and seldom spoke a word.

Anne remembered one or two of the curates who had tried to make friends with her.

One of them who sometimes insisted upon walking back with her from her evening class, had hovered upon the verge of a mild flirtation. But to Anne, desperately shy and unused to the society of her fellow-creatures, his words were meaningless and embarrassing. Moreover, her father was unpopular. Frequently embroiled with his colleagues, none of them sought his society, and none ventured to a house to which they were never invited.

In retrospect, she scarcely needed aid from the journal, Anne saw the years pass in grey procession. There was no note of revolt in the record of her girlhood’s days, and the reading was the sadder for its absence. No revolt, no bitterness. Only a sad acquiescence with fate, a gradual numbing of sensation, a sort of mental and moral apathy, grey, leaden, hopeless.

She paused at the words which followed the announcement of her twenty-seventh birthday.

“Last week father was taken suddenly very ill. The doctor is afraid it is paralysis.”

For three years there was no further word in the book, but Anne knew those three years by heart.

They were passed chiefly between the sick-room and the kitchen, in which she prepared invalid food, and directed the little maid in the management of the housework. Helpless as a child, her father required constant unremitting attendance, and when on the eve of her thirtieth birthday he died, Anne found herself literally penniless. The long illness had swallowed up his scanty earnings, and, unprepared for any work in the world, his daughter was left to face starvation.

Fastened inside the book was the letter which saved her.

It was written in the thin, quavering handwriting of an old woman even then ill and feeble. She opened and read it.

“Fairholme Court,
“February, 18--

“_My dear Anne_,

“_The news of your loss has just reached me. Before he died, my
husband made me promise that if you were ever free, I would ask
you to come to me. Will you come now? I am an old woman, and an
invalid. In any case, before long I must have had a companion
who would look after me, and nurse me when necessary. I cannot
offer you a very cheerful home, but if you come you will be
welcome._

“_With sincere sympathy for the grief you have sustained_,

“_Believe me_,
“_Sincerely yours_,
“_JANE BURBAGE_.”

On the next page, the last written page in the book, Anne read these words:--

“To-morrow I go to Fairholme Court. It is eighteen years since
I saw it. I am now thirty years old, and what I said as a
child is still true. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing
will ever happen now. It is not surprising. I am very plain,
and nothing happens to a plain woman who is also poor. I ought
to be very grateful to Mrs. Burbage. She has probably saved
me from starving. I _am_ very grateful. But to-night I can’t
feel anything except that I don’t care to go on living. If I
were a religious woman I should think this sinful, but what I
said as a child is still true. I don’t like religion. I mean
that it has never affected me. Never made me happy. Perhaps I
have never yet found the religion to suit me. I don’t know.
To-morrow I begin a new life, but it will be again a life of
nursing.

“I try to be grateful for a home. I try to feel cheerful. But
all feeling seems to have gone. I remember my thoughts as a
child. I was often very eager then, and hopeful. I was often
sure in my heart that something delightful would happen to me.
But now nothing seems worth while, and I am only very tired.
Perhaps when I feel better I shall be glad that Fairholme Court
is beautiful and in the country. To-night even that doesn’t
matter.

“Hugh wrote to me after father’s death. He has saved a little
money, and with another man, a friend, he is going to start
a sheep farm in New Zealand. He is engaged to be married to a
girl he met on one of his voyages. She has since returned to
England, and they will have to wait till he has made a home for
her before they can marry. But he seems full of hope, and is
very happy.

“I am chiefly thankful for Mrs. Burbage’s invitation, because
now I need not be a burden to him. As it is, he has sent me
money which he can ill afford, though without it I could
not have existed during the past few months. He wanted my
photograph, and, to please him, I had it taken. The other
copies will be wasted. There’s no one else in the world who
wants my picture. All my things are packed. This is the end of
my life here. I wish it were the end altogether.”

A photograph, one of the wasted copies, was placed between the leaves, at the last written page.

Anne took it up, and examined it by the light of the expiring candle.

She saw a sad quiet face, with thick hair parted smoothly on either side of the forehead. It was a face which looked older than the one now bent over it. A disfiguring gown, fastened with a little tucker at the neck, concealed the long line of the throat. Except for the indication of a clear cut chin, and a mouth sweet, despite its sadness, there was no beauty, not even a suggestion of grace or charm in the picture.

Anne replaced the photograph, and slowly shut the book.

There was a look of terror on her face. She had called up a ghost--the ghost of her past self.

Like a woman whose one idea is flight, she half rose, and for a moment glanced with frightened eyes about the room.

Dawn was breaking. The eerie, grey light showed her the embroidered linen coverlet on her bed, the spindle-legged dressing-table which had once stood in the little white bedroom upstairs, the flowered curtains at the window, the bowl of sweet peas on the table at which she had been sitting.

She drew a deep breath, and moved close to the window.

The air thrilled with the voices of the birds. The trees were still motionless, as though waiting for the sun; and grey with dew, the meadows stretched away towards the dim horizon. In the rose-garden on the right, beneath the sheltering wall, the sun-dial glimmered white as pearl in the dawn-light.

The candle flared up, and went out with a flicker.

Anne turned, and groping her way in the half light, replaced the book in the drawer, and touched the spring which closed it.

IV

At four o’clock, Sylvia Carfax swung the gate of the Vicarage garden behind her, and stepped into the dusty road.

It was nearly a mile to Fairholme Court, and the sun blazed in a sky of cloudless blue, and beat upon her shoulders protected only by a blouse of thin muslin.

Sylvia was just twenty, tall slim, and, as Miss Page suggested very pretty.

In her own mind Anne often wondered when she looked at the girl’s rich black hair, which made such a striking contrast to eyes blue as the sky, that from the shelter of the Vicarage and all it represented such a southern, opulent type of beauty should have emerged.

To reach her destination Sylvia had to walk through the village, past the blacksmith’s, and past the baker’s shop, with its quaint carving over the entrance porch.

Dymfield was an ideally beautiful village, to which even the doctor’s motor-car scarcely brought more than a hint of the rush and hurry and ugliness of much of modern life.

In the gardens of the thatched cottages, summer flowers made a blaze of colour. Roses and honeysuckle clambered over porch and roof.

The church, resting peacefully in the green sea of the churchyard, was like some great rock, stained with lichen, crumbling with age, beautiful in its decay.

Near it, under the shade of mighty elms, was a row of almshouses, fine specimens of black-and-white work, and at the end of the rambling street stood the old well, with its canopy of wrought iron, and its ancient moss-grown steps.

As she passed through the village in which from babyhood she had lived, Sylvia recognized its beauty and its peace. It seemed a place where it was always afternoon, and for that reason, to the girl who yearned for the morning, herself in the glad confident morning of life, it was intolerable.

She gave herself an impatient little shake, and hurried on.

Now, across the green, the beeches of Fairholme Court were in sight.

In summer they almost completely screened the house, and made deep shadows in the drive. Thankfully Sylvia plunged into the shade and quickened her steps.

The hall door was wide open, revealing the coolness of the white-panelled hall, and as she entered, the air was sweet with the scent of flowers.

She stopped a moment to bend over a great bowl of sweet peas.

“Everything is peaceful here too,” she thought. “But it’s interesting as well. I wonder why?”

The appearance of Burks, immaculate as usual in snowy cap and apron, interrupted her vague musing.

“Mistress is upstairs in her sitting-room. I’ll tell her you’re here, miss.”

“Thank you Burks, she expects me. I’ll go up.”

The maid disappeared, and Sylvia ran up the shallow stairs to the first floor, and knocked at a door on the right.

“Ah! my dear child!”

Anne half rose from a couch which was placed close to the window.

The matting blinds outside were half drawn to keep out the glare of the sun, and the room was filled with a light soft and green, as though it had filtered through a canopy of leaves. Beneath the blinds one caught a glimpse of one of the rose-gardens. Protected by a yew hedge, roses of all colours lifted their sweet, hot faces to the sun. A grass path running down the middle of the garden ended at a white seat, in a bower of white blossom.

Sylvia drew a deep breath. “I believe all the delicious scents in the world are here!” she exclaimed.

“That’s why I like this room in the afternoon,” said Anne. “The sun draws all the sweetness out of the roses, and sends it up here. Take off your hat, my child. You’ve had a tiring walk, I’m afraid.”

“I’d walk twenty miles in the sun to find you at the end of them,” declared Sylvia, vehemently.

Anne laughed, as she got up and rang the bell for tea.

Her white wrapper of cambric and lace trailed after her as she moved. Sylvia touched it with reverent fingers.

“You look so sweet in these things,” she said.

“I ought to have changed my gown properly to receive you. But I was reading, and too lazy to move.”

Sylvia picked up the book which lay on the sofa.

“French, I see by the yellow cover.” She began to turn over the leaves, and suddenly laughed.

“How like you to have a rose-leaf for a book-marker! _I_ should put in a hairpin, or something equally ugly. I wish I could read French easily, then you would lend me all your books, wouldn’t you, Miss Page?”

“Not all of them,” returned Anne, smiling.

“Why not? I’m sure _you_ haven’t got stupid ideas about proper reading for young girls, and all that sort of thing,” declared Sylvia, petulantly.

“I’ve got ideas on the subject, stupid or otherwise. Tea, please Burks. We’ll have it up here. And bring the pink tea-service. It goes so nicely with this room,” she explained to Sylvia in parenthesis.

“Do tell me why you wouldn’t lend me all your novels?” the girl persisted.

“Because certain books, my dear, are of no use to us till life makes them intelligible. And life can only be learnt by living it.”

“I wish I’d lived it then,” protested Sylvia.

“Oh Sylvia, there’s time enough. Don’t wish that,” returned Miss Page, quickly. She bent forward and took the girl’s hand. “Don’t wish your youth away. It goes so fast in any case. And it should be the most beautiful part of one’s life.”

“_Should be!_” replied Sylvia, passionately. “But is it? What’s the good of my youth to me, here in this dull little hole? I’d give the world to be like you, Miss Page. You’re not--not quite young, perhaps----”

“My dear, I’m almost an old woman.”

Her smile was wistful, though it was touched with amusement.

“You’ll never be that!” returned Sylvia, vehemently. “And anyhow, you’re lovely, and every one adores you. And you lead your own life and make it beautiful. And I’m perfectly certain that you _have_ had everything I want. Except that you’re not married. I suppose I shall want to be married some time or other. But, then, as you didn’t marry it must have been because you didn’t want to. Hundreds of men must have been dying to marry you. I’m sure hundreds are dying now----”

“What an awful picture of carnage!” interrupted Anne, laughing, as Burks appeared with the tea.

“What a _lovely_ tea-service!” Sylvia exclaimed, taking up one of the Sèvres cups gently to examine it. “But then everything of yours is lovely. This room is as perfect as the drawing-room, and I think I like it almost better. I love the white matting on the floor, and these green-and-white chair-covers and curtains. And I love a room lined with books. What a lot!”

She began to walk round examining them. “But heaps of them are French ones, so you needn’t be afraid,” she added mischievously. “Oh, and Italian too! Do you read Italian, Miss Page? Really? I ought to be afraid of you. You’re so awfully clever. I believe you keep everything you love best up here, don’t you? The pictures now--I don’t understand pictures, but I like the colour of these. This room seems more _you_ than all the rest of the house. Though it’s all like you in a way.”

“I only receive my _special_ visitors up here.”

Anne’s smile flattered and touched the girl.

She slipped down on to the sofa beside her friend, and moved close to her with a caressing movement, as she took the tea-cup from her hand.

“These cakes were baked expressly for you, so you must do them justice. Really cook makes them very prettily, doesn’t she? They’re rather like the cakes in _Goblin Market_. Do you remember how the sisters

‘_Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat?_’”

She passed them to Sylvia in their silver basket, over the rim of which fell a d’oyley of fine lace and linen.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know anything!” she exclaimed. “I shall never know anything if I stay here. Oh Miss Page, _do_ help me to get away! You can do anything with father. Please persuade him that I ought to go. You know how it is at home. I’m not really wanted. We’re quite comfortably off, and there are enough servants to do the work without _making_ work for me, to try to keep me quiet when I’m aching to go and make my own life!”

She pushed her cup away from her with an impatient movement.

Anne waited a moment. “It’s still the music, I suppose?”

“Yes. I _have_ got a voice. I know I could do something with it. And you see they don’t understand. Mother says I can take lessons from Miss Rowe at Dorminster. _Miss Rowe!_” She laughed derisively. “And father says if I sing well enough to please them at home, and to lead in the choir, what more do I want? They expect me to trot round with mother on her district calls, when I’m really only in the way. Mother _likes_ doing it. She wouldn’t give up her work to me even if I wished it. And I’m supposed to do needlework for the children, when poor Mrs. Jones down the village would be glad of it, and ought to have it. And they think I’m awful and ungrateful not to be quite happy with tennis parties and flower shows for my amusement! Oh Miss Page, don’t you think to be a daughter at home, with no money, at the mercy of your parents, unable to get away, is just like being a slave?”

She poured out the words passionately. Her hands were shaking, her eyes full of tears.

Anne looked at her, and a wave of comprehension and pity passed over her heart.

The girl’s incoherent words were echoes; they touched painful memories of years for her, long past.

She recognized the despairing cry of youth, articulate in these modern times, no longer stifled as in the days of her own girlhood.

Youth, fettered, struggling with passionate clamour to be free.

She recognized the revolt of a temperament unsuited to its environment, bound by a tyranny no less stifling because it was unconscious and even loving.

She rose, and began to walk about the room, conscious of the modern spirit, accepting it as inevitable, and in spite of all the misery it involved, right in its essence, a necessary step towards the just claim for individual liberty.

Sylvia watched her hungrily, like a prisoner who has staked his existence on the goodwill and clemency of a ruler.

“I will do what I can, Sylvia,” she said at last. “I will speak to your father. I think you ought to go.”

The girl’s face grew radiant. “Oh, you’re an _angel_!” she cried. “What should I do without you? Speak to him soon, Miss Page!” she implored. “I can’t bear it any longer. I really can’t. I get on so badly with father now, and with mother too. I can’t help it. I know I’ve got an awful temper, but they irritate me so, and----”

Anne sat down beside her on the sofa. “I will speak to your father,” she repeated. “But, my dear, I know it’s a hard, perhaps almost an impossible thing to ask you, but try to see your parents’ point of view as well as your own. They _have_ one, you know,” she added, smiling. “One that belongs to their age and the traditions of their education. To them, though you don’t believe it, their standpoint is as important as yours to you.”

“But you think mine is right?” demanded Sylvia, breathlessly.

Miss Page laughed. “For you, yes. But I’m sorry for your people.”

“I believe you’re sorry for every one,” said Sylvia, after a pause.

“There’s a tendency to get sorrier for most people as one gets older, I admit. You must bear with me, Sylvia.”

The girl flushed. “Now you’re laughing at me,” she said.

“No. Only remembering how I felt at your age, and being very sorry for you too.”

“Ought I to see every one’s point of view as you do?”

“You couldn’t. It’s not to be expected of you. And after all, it’s right that you shouldn’t. It’s the young who make history, and history is made by seeing one thing at a time to the exclusion of every other consideration. It’s only in the autumn of life that one has time to be sorry. But still my dear, you can be kind even without comprehension. Remember the immortal remark that our parents are fellow-creatures after all.”

She looked at the girl whimsically, and Sylvia laughed.

“How angry father would be to hear you say that!” she cried. “But you wouldn’t say it to him, of course,” she added.

“You know it’s only nonsense; and there’s such a thing as tact, my dear.”

“I know,” sighed Sylvia. “I haven’t got any.”

“That’s another of the things that comes with age.”

“All the nice things come with age, I believe.”

“Well, age should have _some_ compensations,” returned Anne, gaily.

“You have _all_ of them,” Sylvia declared. “All the pretty things that generally belong to girls, and all the interesting things that ought to belong to women. It isn’t fair. You know how to talk to every one. I should _love_ to hear what you say to father. It would be too amusing! Mrs. Dakin came in this morning, and said you were wonderful with the Frenchman who dined here last night. And the way you talk to Dr. Dakin is quite different from the way you talk to father. And of course, you’re quite different with me again. You always remind me of that verse in the Bible about being all things to all men!”

“You’re really a terrible young woman!” was Miss Page’s reply. “Go and sing me something. It’s the only way to stop you from proving me a monster of duplicity.”

“No, no,” urged Sylvia, eagerly. “You only speak to people as they can understand. But the wonderful thing is, that you know by instinct exactly what they _will_ understand, and exactly how to say it.”

“Go and sing,” repeated Anne.

Sylvia went laughing to the piano. “I feel awfully happy. I must think of something that suits.”

She considered a moment, and then broke into a gay little love-song, with a charming refrain.

Anne listened, and as she listened, her determination grew. Sylvia was right. She must go. Her voice was worth cultivating, even at the price of parental displeasure.

“Thank you dear,” she said as the clear, ringing notes ceased. “I feel as though a nightingale with brains had been kind enough to fly into my room.”

“What else would you like?” Sylvia turned her head as she sat at the piano, playing rippling notes with her left hand. The cloud had left her face, and her parted red lips were very sweet.

Anne hesitated a moment. “You read music easily, don’t you? I wonder whether you could sing me a little French song?”

She got up, and opening a cupboard in the wall, began to turn over some papers.

“Here it is,” she said at last.

Sylvia left her place, and knelt beside her friends chair, taking the music from her hand.

There were some words upon the cover, but they were in French, and in a difficult handwriting.

Anne opened the page rather quickly. “You see it’s quite short and quite simple,” she observed.

“Let me read the words first, and you must correct my pronunciation.”

She began to say the lines a little falteringly, but her quick ear soon found their lilt, and she read them well.

“How pretty! They’re quite easy words. I can understand them,” she said, going to the piano again. “Who wrote them?”

Anne did not answer, and Sylvia, engrossed in trying the accompaniment, forgot her question.

“I see how it goes!” she exclaimed, playing the first bars. Involuntarily, as she began the first bar, Miss Page put out a quick hand as though to stop her, but the girl sang on unconsciously, and the hand dropped at her side.

“It’s lovely!” Sylvia cried, playing the last notes softly over again.

“Thank you, dear,” said Anne, gently. She had crossed the room, and was trying on her garden hat.

With one hand she gathered up the folds of her long gown.

“The sun is off the roses now, and I’m going to give you some to take home to your mother. Come out and help me pick them.”

V

Dr. Dakin’s house stood in the village street. It was a plain Georgian dwelling of a type common to every English country town; a type which admirably combines comfort with a certain homely dignity.

It was covered with ivy, carefully trimmed where the rows of square-paned windows broke the front, and its long, narrow door was surmounted by the conventional classic design of skulls and garlands.

As Miss Page crossed the road towards the post-office one morning late in September, Mrs. Dakin tapped at the window of the breakfast-room, and then ran to the door.

Anne smiled as she crossed the threshold. “Why, Madge, what is it? You look radiant, my dear!”

“I am. I mean I feel radiant. Come in. Do come in. I want to tell you.”

Her voice shook with suppressed excitement, as Anne followed her across the stone-flagged hall to a room on the right.

“I’m going to Paris for a long visit!” she exclaimed, drawing up a chair for her friend close to the window. “What do you think of that?”

“I didn’t know you had friends in Paris.”

“Oh yes. Didn’t I ever tell you about Helen Didier? She was one of my school-fellows at the convent near Tours, where I went for a year. She married a Frenchman.”

“And she lives in Paris?”

“Yes. I haven’t seen her for ages--scarcely once since we both married. But I took it into my head to write to her a week or two ago, and just fancy! You’ll be awfully interested. She knows Monsieur Fontenelle quite well. Her husband is a friend of his.”

Anne looked up rather quickly. “Really?”

“Yes. Isn’t it strange? I happened to mention him when I wrote to her, and she knew all about him. She would, naturally, as he’s such a great man; but it’s awfully exciting that he should be a friend, isn’t it?”

“What does Harry say?” asked Anne.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He says it will do me good to have a change.”

“He will miss you horribly, my dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s so busy, you know. And when he’s at home, he’s always buried in his books. Besides, he knows I must have a change. My nerves get worse and worse, and I’m always having neuralgia. I sleep badly, too.”

“You mustn’t look so brilliant, then,” returned Anne, laughing. “You’ll be considered a fraud.”

“It’s nothing but joy,” Madge declared. “You know I’ve never been to Paris. And just think of getting out of this hole for two or three months, perhaps. I could scream with excitement at the bare idea!”

“When do you go?”

“Next month. I shall be awfully interested to meet Monsieur Fontenelle again,” she added. “He’s so clever, isn’t he? I’m rather afraid of him. I envy you for getting on with him so well.”

Anne smiled.

“Why has he never been to see you before?”

“He’s not often in England now, though he travels a great deal, and is very cosmopolitan.”

“How on earth has he learnt to speak English so perfectly?”

“He has English relations--Lady Farringchurch is one of them. And as a young man he studied over here with a friend. But in any case he’s a wonderful linguist naturally.”

“What interesting people you must have met!” exclaimed Madge, looking rather curiously at her visitor. “I suppose you met him during all those years you were travelling? I often wonder how you stand this miserable little dead-and-alive place. You must have had such an exciting life.”

Anne did not reply for a moment.

“My dear,” she said at last quietly, “when you come to my age, your garden, your books, and your friends make a very pleasant haven before you set sail.”

“And your memories, I suppose?” Madge glanced again swiftly at her friend.

“And your memories--yes,” Anne repeated.

“I shall have none,” declared Madge, restlessly. “None that count.”

Miss Page was silent. “Oh! I know you think me an ungrateful wretch!” she broke out, leaning back in her chair and tapping her foot impatiently. “Harry’s very good and all that. But I’m so _bored_. I’m bored from morning till night. When I get up every morning I think--‘Here’s another dull day, what on earth shall I do with it?’ And sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while to get up and go on.”

Anne watched her as she stared moodily into the narrow trim garden, discontent and listlessness plainly expressed by her eyes and drooping mouth.

She was a woman loved faithfully and with infinite tenderness. If she had allowed them expression, Anne’s reflection would have been translated by a smile and a sigh, both of them utterly unintelligible to the little woman at her side. Both of them were therefore repressed.

“Well!” she said aloud. “I hope you’ll have a very gay time. I’m very glad for you, my dear. Go and be happy. Where does your friend live?”

“Over by the Parc Monceau, wherever that is. _Do_ tell me what it’s like?” she begged, all animation again.

Anne stayed a few minutes longer, talking about Paris, and then rose to go.

Mrs. Dakin kissed her affectionately. “I wish you were going with me. I shall miss you horribly!” she declared.

She followed Anne to the door, and stood a moment, waving and smiling as her friend crossed the street.

All the bored discontent had vanished from her face, and her husband, who at the moment drove up in his car, thought she had never looked prettier.

The reflection was accompanied by a curious dull pain at his heart, a pain to which he was well accustomed.

“I’ll drive you home,” he called to Miss Page, stopping his car at the opposite pavement.

“So Madge is going to Paris?” she said, as they swept off.

“Yes. I hope it will do her good,” he returned shortly. “She complains of neuralgia. Perhaps a change will set that right. I hear the little Carfax girl is going to London to study this autumn?” he added after a moment. “She’s off her head with delight about it. That’s _your_ doing, of course.”

“Well, I suggested it to her father,” Anne admitted.

He laughed. “We all know your suggestions. When a witch ‘suggests,’ mere man is instantly hypnotized. Poor old Carfax can do nothing now, but put his hand in his pocket and produce the necessary fees.”

Anne smiled. “Come in and look at my hollyhocks,” she said, as they turned into the drive. “They’re really worth seeing.”

The doctor followed her through the house and across the lawn into one of the walled gardens. “How gorgeous!” he exclaimed, as she opened the gate.

The enclosure was a blaze of colour. Wine-red, white faintly flushed with pink, yellow soft as a sunset sky, the flowers stood close together in stately rows.

Behind them, on either side of the dividing grass path, masses of phlox, white and rose and crimson, continued the wave of colour till it was arrested by the enclosing walls.

“Look at the butterflies,” said the doctor, instinctively lowering his voice as though he feared to disturb them.

They hovered in numbers above the silken cups of the hollyhocks. On the sulphur-coloured petals of one of them, a Purple Emperor, motionless, extended his splendid wings. Here and there, dazzling in fairy armour of peacock-blue and sheen of silver, darted a dragon-fly.

“The colour of the thing is intoxicating,” murmured Dr. Dakin.

“It reminded me this morning of an elaborately arranged ‘sensation’ scheme, planned by that madman in _À Rebours_. Only of course, he would have despised such a homely natural flower as the hollyhock.”

The doctor smiled. “What a curious anomaly you are here, my dear lady!” he declared suddenly. “And yet that’s not true either, because you also suit the place to perfection. Huysmans, and a country practice, and Carfax--and you! It’s an amazing world. I hope some intelligent Being doesn’t miss the exquisite humour of many human juxtapositions,” he added rather drily.

“I’m glad Sylvia’s going to study,” was Miss Page’s somewhat irrelevant reply. “She has a beautiful voice.”

“Quite remarkable,” he agreed. “She’ll be a difficult young woman though, if that face of hers means anything. I don’t know that you haven’t thrown her to the lions.”

“My dear doctor, isn’t it better to meet the lions, and take one’s chance, than to be preyed upon by restlessness and discontent till the whole of one’s character is worm-eaten?” asked Anne, quietly.

The doctor stooped to examine the Purple Emperor which still lay motionless, basking in the sunshine.

When he raised his head Anne saw the trouble in his eyes.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. Then abruptly, after a moment, “I wish I could give Madge the life that would suit her!” he exclaimed, jerking out the words awkwardly.

Miss Page waited a moment. “What do you think _would_ suit her?” she asked gently.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “She wants to live in London, you know. She wants a gayer life. But I should be no use in town. I shouldn’t make a living even. I haven’t the manner. It’s as much as I can do to hold my own here.”

“Every one who knows you, ends by being thankful to find a splendid friend as well as an excellent doctor,” returned Anne.

The bitterness in his face softened. “If all the world were like you,” he began with a little laugh, and paused. “I’m glad they’re not, though. There must only be one Miss Page. But that’s it,” he went on, “I must know people well--better than one could ever know them in the rush of a London practice, where the polished manner I don’t possess is absolutely necessary.”

There was a silence, while they walked the length of the grass path together.

“I ought never to have married Madge,” he broke out at last, in a low voice. “She’s too pretty, and too gay by nature, for a slow coach like me. This village life is too dull for her. She wants her dances, her theatres”--he made a vague gesture--“all that sort of thing. I can’t make her happy.”

There was a note of sad discouragement in his voice which went to his listener’s heart.

“I think you could,” she said.

He turned his head sharply. “How?” The involuntary hope died. He shook his head. “She’s bored with me.”

“Partly I think, because she imagines you are bored with her.”

He started. “_I?_ Bored with Madge?” He stopped, as though suddenly arrested, and stood staring down at the grass. “I--I don’t think you understand how much I--care for Madge. She’s the only woman I ever wanted to marry. I----”

His voice failed. Miss Page saw that his face was working.

“I _do_ know. Better than any one, perhaps. But I don’t think you understand her.”

He looked at her mutely, waiting for her next words.

“You think of her as a butterfly, don’t you? A woman with no brains, perhaps? Oh! I know,” she interrupted, as he made a gesture of protest. “I know that would make no difference.” She smiled a little. “A man doesn’t want the woman he loves to have brains. But they are useful sometimes. In her case they may be very useful. She would like a life of gaiety, of course. She’s young and pretty, and it’s only natural. But she can’t have it. Very well then, if she were nothing but a butterfly, her lot--and yours, would be hard. But Madge has a mind. Oh, she’s ignorant, of course! She says so herself. She never reads. She never thinks. But that’s habit. No one has ever taken any trouble with her. Did you notice how interested she was the evening we were really talking--the evening Monsieur Fontenelle dined here? She was proud of you then. She wished she could take part in the conversation. Her mind is empty because she has never troubled to fill it. But it’s a mind of good quality. She has the power to be interested in a thousand things. You could open a new world to her, if you were careful--and had a little tact. And we all know that you possess that admirable quality!”

The flattery of her smile was not lost upon the doctor.

Surprise, involuntary hope, gratitude, admiration, all struggled in the look with which he regarded her.

“You always say the right thing,” he declared simply. “I didn’t know the child----” He paused, but there was a look of sudden tenderness in his eyes. “Well! she’s going away now,” he began.

“And that’s such a good thing,” interrupted Miss Page, eagerly. “She will hear and see so much to interest her. She will come back with new impressions. You will have something to work on.”

They strolled out of the garden together, and across the lawn without speaking.

“Good-bye,” said the doctor, starting as though from a deep reverie, as he found himself opposite his car.

He pressed her hand warmly. “You have made me much happier,” he added shyly.

“But don’t forget to tell her very often that you love her, and that she’s the prettiest thing in the world!” Miss Page admonished him, with a laugh. “There are remarks which never bore a woman, however many times they are repeated. Those are two of them.”

VI

The midday post had come while Miss Page and the doctor talked in the garden.

As she passed through the hall after the motor-car had disappeared, Anne found her letters lying upon the table.

She turned them over, and lighted with satisfaction upon one with a foreign postmark.

Her correspondence with François Fontenelle--a correspondence of fifteen years’ duration--had never ceased to be a pleasure to her.

She picked up his letter, and went through the inner hall into the garden, to the seat under the beech tree.

Several things on the first page made her laugh. François was evidently in a gay mood when he wrote. He had more work with portraits than he could get through. He described his sitters with the light raillery he managed so well, presenting them to his reader with a felicity of phrase, a touch as skilful and clever as she well knew the portraits themselves must possess.

It was better to be François Fontenelle’s friend than his enemy, Miss Page reflected, and smiled to remember the rash women who now crowded to his studio, anxious to be painted by the popular if distinguished artist.

She guessed how many of them winced in secret at the result, and marvelled that fashion, as well as religion, should exact its willing martyrs.

“_I hear_,” he said towards the end of the letter, “_that I’m likely to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her as a school-girl--went to school with her, I think; and she has been asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow--an architect. No. You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years. He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the Correggio. You know the one I mean?_” The letter ended with talk about pictures.

Anne read it to the last word, and then sat with it still unfolded in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech under which she sat.

Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.

Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting.

To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking.

She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.

She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.

True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.

As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet.

She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion.

She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.

“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you. Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss. There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”

The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two women.

Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa, knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.

Her great abhorrence was what she called “fuss” of any sort, and as she frequently preferred to be alone, she left Anne for the most part free.

Her duties gradually became those of general supervision of the household, which composed as it was of elderly well-trained servants, proved no arduous task.

Few callers came to the house. There was never anything in the nature of entertainment at Fairholme Court. The days went on. Monotonously, peacefully, spring glided into summer, summer to autumn; the winters came and went.

A good understanding, a quiet comradeship was gradually established between the old woman and her companion, who moved so gently, whose voice was so soothing, who was always at hand when she happened to be wanted--never in the way when her presence was not required.

Anne practically led her own isolated life. Too shy to make any advances, the people of her own grade in the village, from the outset, ignored the companion of a woman who had never been popular. She was just a quiet, harmless creature, lady-like certainly, but very dull, whom they occasionally pitied for being shut up with “that disagreeable Mrs. Burbage.”

Anne found the bedroom she had loved as a child, now her own, almost unchanged. The rosebuds on the wall were faded certainly, but the dimity valance at the window, the white curtains to the bed were fresh and spotless, and the “spindly” furniture remained. The white roses had grown much taller. They clambered round the window now, and far above her head, looked down at her as she opened it in the morning.

The library was also unaltered, and in this room, and in the garden, Anne found all the joy of her life.

She was permitted to do what she liked with the garden, and, under the direction of the old gardener, who rejoiced to find some one who loved the work, and, delighted in its results, Anne planned and planted and laid the foundation for the beauty that now surrounded her. The hours in the open air restored her health. Insensibly, she grew strong and straight. Her always graceful figure developed, and though it was marred by the ill-cut gowns of the village dressmaker, she carried it superbly.

Through the long winter days, the library was her solace and delight. At first, imperfectly educated as she was, unused to reading, owing to lack of time and lack of opportunity, she was bewildered by the numberless books through which she was free to range.

But gradually she found her way; made a path for herself, and followed it to find it leading her to distant prospects. Mr. Burbage, a gentle and scholarly recluse with a catholic taste in literature, had left a fine and widely representative library behind him, containing not only the masterpieces of French as well as English prose and poetry, but many curious and rare volumes dealing with the less frequented roads of mental travel.

Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to last her for a lifetime.