A Bachelor Husband.

by Ruby M. Ayres.

CHAPTER I

"Ah, then, was it all spring weather?

Nay! but we were young--and together."

SHE had always adored him. From the first moment he came to the house--an overgrown, good-looking schoolboy, and had started to bully and domineer over her, Marie Chester had thought him the most wonderful person in all the world. She waited on him hand and foot, she was his willing bondslave; she did not mind at all when once, in an unusual fit of eloquence, she had confided in him that she thought it was the loveliest thing on earth to have a brother, young Christopher answered almost brutally that she "talked rot, anyway, and that sisters were a bally nuisance!"

He looked at her with a sort of contempt for a moment, then added: "Besides, we're not brother and sister, really!"

They were not; but their fathers had been lifelong friends, and when George Chester's wife inconsiderately--or so her husband thought--died without presenting him with a son, and almost at the same time young Christopher Lawless was left an orphan, George Chester promptly adopted him.

"It will do Marie good to have a brother," he maintained, when his sister. Miss Chester, who kept house for him, raised an objection.

"She's spoilt--shockingly spoilt--and a boy about the place will knock off some of her airs and graces."

Young Christopher certainly did that much, if no more, for in a fortnight he had turned Marie, who was naturally rather shy and reserved, into a tomboy who climbed trees with him regardless of injury to life and limb, who rode a cob barebacked round the paddock, who did, in fact, everything he dared or ordered her to do.

Miss Chester protested to Marie's father in vain.

"Christopher is ruining her; I can do nothing with her now! She is quite a different child since he came to the house."

Marie's father chuckled. He was not a particularly refined man, and the daintiness and shyness of his little daughter had rather embarra.s.sed him. He was pleased to think that under Christopher's guiding hand she was what he chose to call "improving."

"Do her good!" he said bluntly. "Where's the harm? They're only children."

But the climax came rather violently when one afternoon Marie fell out of the loft into the yard below, and broke her arm.

One of the grooms went running to the rescue and picked her up, a forlorn little heap with a face as white as her frock.

"I fell out myself!" she said with quivering lips. "I fell out all my own self."

Young Christopher, who had clambered down the ladder from the loft, broke in violently:

"She didn't! It was my fault! She made me wild, and I pushed her. I didn't think she'd be so silly as to fall, though," he added, with an angry look at her. "And don't you trouble to tell lies about me."

The groom said afterwards that she had not shed a tear till then, but at the angry words she broke down suddenly into bitter sobbing.

She did not mind her broken arm, but she minded having offended Christopher. It was the greatest trouble she had ever known when-- as a consequence of the accident--Christopher was sent away to a boarding school.

Hereafter she only saw him by fits and starts during the holidays, and then he seemed somehow quite different.

He took but little notice of her, and he generally brought a friend home with him from school. He was getting beyond the "boy" stage, and developing a wholesome contempt for girls as a whole!

When--later--he went to a public school, he forgot to ignore her, and took to patronizing her instead. She wasn't such a bad little thing, he told her, and next term if she liked she might knit him a tie.

Marie knitted him two--which he never wore! She would have blacked his boots for him if he had expressed the slightest wish for her to do so.

Then, later still, he went to Cambridge and forgot all about her.

He hardly ever came home during vacation save for week-ends; he had so many friends, it seemed, and was in great demand amongst them all.

Marie could quite believe it. She was bitterly jealous of these unknown friends, and incidentally of the sisters which she was sure some of them must have!

She was still at school herself, and her soft brown hair was tied in a pigtail with a large bow at the end.

"You'll soon have to put your hair up if you grow so fast, Marie,"

Miss Chester said to her rather sadly, when at the end of one term she came home.

Marie glanced at herself in the gla.s.s. She was tall and slim for her age, which was not quite seventeen, and as she was entirely free from conceit she could see no beauty in her pale face and dark eyes, which, together with her name of Marie Celeste, she had inherited from her French mother.

"Am I like mother, Auntie Madge?" she asked, and Miss Chester smiled as she answered:

"You have your mother's eyes."

Marie looked at her reflection again.

"Mother was very pretty, wasn't she?" she asked, and Miss Chester said: "Yes--she was, very pretty."

Marie sighed. "Of course, I can't be like her, then," she said, resignedly, and turned away.

Presently: "Is Chris coming these holidays?" she asked.

Miss Chester shook her head.

"He did not think so. He wrote that he should go to Scotland with the Knights."

Marie flushed. "I hate the Knights," she said pettishly. She had never seen them, but on principle she hated everyone and everything who took Christopher from her.

The following year she was sent to a finishing school in Paris, and while she was there her father died suddenly.

A wire came from England late one night and Marie was packed off home the following morning.

Her father's death was no great grief to her, though in a placid sort of way she had been fond of him. She had written to him regularly every Sunday, and was grateful for all that she knew he had done for her, but any deep love she might have borne for him had long ago gone to Chris. He was the beginning and end of her girlish dreams--the center of her whole life.

As she sat in the stuffy cabin on the cross-Channel boat and listened to the waves outside her chief thought was, should she see Chris? Had they wired for him to come home from wherever he was?

He had left Cambridge now, she knew, but what he was doing or how he spent his time she did not know. All the way up in the train from Dover she was thinking of him, wondering how soon she would see him, but she never dreamed that he would meet the train, and the wild color flew to her face as she saw him coming down the crowded platform.

He looked very tall and very much of a man, she thought, as she gave him a trembling hand to shake. She felt herself very childish and insignificant beside his magnificence as she walked with him to the waiting car, for the house in the country had long since been given up, and George Chester had lived in London for some years before his death.

"Have you got your ticket?" Christopher asked, very much as he might have asked a child, and Marie fumbled in her pocket with fingers that shook.

"I nearly lost it once," she volunteered, and Chris smiled as he answered: "Yes, that's the sort of thing you would do." He looked down at her. "You haven't altered much," he said condescendingly.