"Rachel," called her husband from his dressing-room within, whither he had just arrived from a dinner at the club, "aren't you dressed yet? I met that young woman of yours on the stairs; she seems to have more time on her hands than she knows what to do with. Why don't you make her wait on you better? She ought to be getting you ready by this time."

Rachel jumped up hastily and rang for her maid, whose ministrations, essential to the dignity of her present position, she certainly did not appreciate.

"I shall not be long dressing," she replied; "and it is early yet."

And then she went into his room to ask him if he had had a pleasant party at dinner, and whether he had enjoyed it, anxious to show him some special tenderness on this special night--anxious to find some shelter in his affection from the reminiscences that beset her.

He was a little irritable, for his gout was troubling him, and he did not respond to her advances. He patted the hand that she laid on his arm in a perfunctory manner, and sent her back to begin her preparations for the ball. He did not wish her to dress herself quickly; he wanted her to make the most of her beauty and her supplementary resources on such a great occasion.

He was very fond of his wife still, and proud of her, and good to her in his own rather tyrannical way; but his marriage with her, after a year and a half of it, had become to himself--as under the circ.u.mstances was inevitable--a very unromantic and commonplace affair.

They had lived together in tolerable peace and comfort; they had never quarrelled, simply because it was Rachel's habit to efface herself at the first symptoms of rising temper; but neither had they been companions, in any proper sense of the term.

As yet he had no active sense of injury and injustice, in that the possession of his treasure gave him such meagre compensation for all that he had paid for it, but he did feel, in a general way, that matrimony was--as he confessed he had been well warned that it would be--very tame and dull, and uninteresting, and that it would be too unreasonable altogether to expect a man to devote himself exclusively to its demands. Even little Rachel herself, he was quite sure, would not wish him to be bored to death.

And so he fell back insensibly into many of his old self-indulgent habits, and the pleasures of his bachelor life grew more than ever pleasant. This was particularly the case after his return to Melbourne, where his face became as familiar to club men as in the ante-nuptial days. Some excuse for this independence was supposed to lie in the fact that he and his wife had not yet settled down to housekeeping.

The Toorak mansion was being furnished and decorated with the treasures of art and upholstery that they had brought out with them; and until everything was completed, and the entire establishment was in proper order for their reception, and for the giving of that magnificent house-warming to which the world of Melbourne fashion was looking forward, they were inhabiting a suite of rooms in an hotel, and domestic life, consequently, was to a certain extent disorganised.

On this night of which we are speaking, Rachel thought it was very kind and attentive of him to come home to her a full hour before he needed to have done. It never occurred to her, any more than to him, that he neglected her.

The servants of the hotel, who were on the watch for a sight of her as she went to her carriage, thought her not only one of the most lovely, but one of the most fortunate of women; and so did the majority of the gay company at the Town Hall, when she made her appearance amongst them.

She had come back from Europe and all her sea-voyaging, in excellent physical health, and the last year or two of her life, in spite of sorrowful vicissitudes, had ripened and developed her beauty in a very marked degree.

She was dressed in white, but with great richness, of course--her husband had seen to that; covered with precious lace, that was as attractive to the eyes of the Melbourne ladies as the delicacy of her pure complexion was to those of the men. And she wore her necklace of diamond stars, and diamonds on her arms, and on her bosom, and in her hair; and she was altogether very magnificent, and made a great sensation.

Amongst her many admirers she noticed, when she had been in the room a little while, a short, stout man, of about forty or fifty years of age, apparently, who was a stranger to her, regarding her with much attention.

He had rather an air of distinction about him in spite of his low stature, and a noticeable absence of beauty; and she had a dim--very dim--impression that she had seen him, or someone like him, before.

He wore a fair moustache but no beard or whiskers, and his florid face was marked down one side with the puckered white scar of an old wound.

His eyes were quick and bright, and the keen observation that he brought to bear upon her through an eyegla.s.s that he put into one of them whenever she came near, obviously with the intention of studying her to the best advantage, was a little disconcerting even to an acknowledged beauty.

She was waltzing with Mr. Buxton--it was her second waltz, and he danced very well--when suddenly, high in the air over her head, the great clock chimed eleven, and all the a.s.sociations of that sacred hour gathered like ghosts around her, Roden Dalrymple holding the lighted match to his watch, while she sheltered the little flame from the wind--her head touching his cheek and his huge moustache as they looked down together to see the time--the mystic light and stillness of the peaceful night, through which the sound of the city bells came up to them, to warn them that their happiness was a thing too good to last.

"Eleven p.m.," he had called it; and "you must go home, little one," he had said. Could it have been at _that_ moment that he meant to send her away so far, and never to take her back to his arms and his heart again?

"Aw--what's the matter? Are you dizzy?" asked her partner, feeling a break and a jar in the rhythm of the measure that had been flowing so very harmoniously.

"A little," she whispered. "I should like to sit down for a few minutes--we'll go on again, if you like, presently."

He led her to a retired bench, and while she rested stood beside her, silently watching the people who continued to revolve before them. She had hardly sat down, and was beginning mechanically to fan herself, when the stranger with the eyegla.s.s came up, with a lady, who was also unknown to her, on his arm.

"Here's a seat," said the little stout man; and his partner, an elderly and amiable matron, sat down, bestowing the deprecatory smile of old-fashioned courtesy upon the two already in possession.

He took the end of the bench himself, and chatted away to her--she was his aunt, apparently--leaning a little forward, with an elbow on his knee; and Rachel, dreamily occupied as she was, was quite conscious that his keen eyes dwelt persistently, not upon his neighbour's face, but upon her own.

"Why don't you go and get a partner, James?" said the elderly matron.

"You don't want to dance attendance upon me, my dear--I shall do very well here until Lucy wants me. Go and find some pretty young lady, and enjoy yourself like the rest of them."

"I don't believe in pretty young ladies," replied the little man, rather bluntly. "Except Lucy--and she is engaged for the whole night, as far as I can make out."

Here ensued some comments upon Lucy, who appeared to be the lady's daughter, generally favourable to that young person. And the little man then began to inveigh against the abstract girl of the period with trenchant vigour--obviously to the great embarra.s.sment of his companion, who tried her best, but vainly, to divert him to other topics.

"In fact, there are no girls nowadays," he remarked coolly; "they are all calculating, selfish, heartless, worldly women--always excepting Lucy, of course--as soon as they cease to be children. They have only one object in life, and that is to marry a man--no, not a man necessarily, a forked stick will do--who has plenty of money."

"My dear, that is a popular sentiment, I know, and supposed to be full of wit and wisdom, but it always seems to me that it is just a little vulgar," replied his companion, frowning surrept.i.tiously, and giving uneasy sidelong glances at Rachel. "There are girls and girls, of course, just as there are men and men; we see bad and good in every cla.s.s. How beautifully this place lights up, to be sure!"

"They like a fellow to dance with them and dangle after them, and make love to them, and break his heart for them--nothing pleases them better--when they have no serious business on hand," the little man proceeded, with unabashed composure, and still gazing steadily at Rachel; "but when it comes to marriage--"

"My dear James, I am _not_ recommending marriage to you--only a harmless waltz."

"Then they are for sale to the highest bidder, whoever he may happen to be. The poor, impecunious lover--be he ever so much a lover, and the best fellow that walks the earth into the bargain--must take himself off--and cut his throat for all she cares."

At this sudden change from the plural to the singular, and at something personal and impertinent that she recognised in the tone and look of the speaker, a deep blush flooded Rachel's face, and she rose from her seat with dignity, but trembling in all her limbs.

"Aw--who the d.i.c.kens is that fellow?" Mr. Buxton whispered, with a scowl--supposing, however, that he could only be a disappointed aspirant for Rachel's hand. "He's an impudent brute, whoever he is, and I have a good mind to tell him so. What's his name, eh?"

"I don't know," said Rachel. But as she spoke, and was about to move away, the stranger rose and stood with an air of courteous deference to let her pa.s.s him--an air that somehow indicated the breeding and manners of a gentleman; and all at once it flashed across her where and when she had seen him before. He was the man who had called at Toorak and been closeted with her aunt at the time when Roden Dalrymple had promised to come for her, nearly two years ago. She had gone out into the garden, thinking he might possibly have been Roden, to intercept him as he was going away. She had had only a distant glimpse of him--of his short, square figure, and the lower part of his face--but she recognised now that this was the same man. She had not gone many steps into the room, feeling strangely overwhelmed by her discovery, when a pair of exhausted waltzers went trailing by, and one of them said to the other, "Didn't somebody say Jim Gordon was here to-night? Where is the old fellow hiding himself? I should like to see him again."

The little man with the eyegla.s.s was--of course he was--Roden Dalrymple's friend and partner.

She drew her hand from her cousin's arm, turned round, and walked deliberately back to the seat she had just quitted.

"No," she said to her pursuing cavalier, "do not come. Go and dance with somebody, and fetch me presently."

"My dear Rachel, you must allow me--aw, I couldn't really--"

"I want to speak to Mr. Gordon," she said, pausing in front of that gentleman. "Mr. Gordon, I want to ask you something. Will you kindly take me out to the lobbies--somewhere where it is quiet--if this lady will excuse you for a few minutes?"

Mr. Buxton was utterly bewildered, as well he might be. He stared, stiffened himself, and then went off to find Laura, and to tell her of the extraordinary proceedings of her cousin "with some insolent beggar whose name she said she didn't know, though she addressed him by it almost in the same breath," and to intimate (merely by way of soothing his own injured dignity) that there seemed to him something "rather fishy" going on.

And Mr. Gordon, after losing his presence of mind for about half a minute, and then only partially recovering it, silently offered his arm to the lady who had made that strange appeal to him. He had never seen her until to-night; he had hoped he never should see her, or have anything to do with her. She had been, in his imagination of her, the embodiment of all that was detestable in woman. But now something in the candid young face, unnaturally set and pale, and in the suppressed pa.s.sion and purpose of her manner, gave him compunctious misgivings, and a vague but alarming impression that there had been some blundering somewhere.

"You are Mr. Gordon, are you not?" she began hurriedly, as soon as they were out of the crowd and glare of the ball-room. "Yes, I thought so; but I did not recognise you at first. I should have waited for an introduction, but I was afraid you might go away. I think you know who I am. What you were saying just now--had it not some reference to me?"

The little man began to stammer incoherently. He was completely overbalanced by the shock of this unexpected attack. Rachel, on the contrary, usually so fluttered by an emergency, had a sort of fierce, collected calm about her.

"I am sure it had," she said. "And I want to know what you meant?"

"I--a--perhaps you are aware that I am Mr. Dalrymple's friend, Mrs.

Kingston. I am therefore, perhaps, something of a partisan--forgive me, if I forgot myself for the moment--"

"Ah," she broke out sharply, "there has been some great mistake! Tell me--quickly--before anyone is here to interrupt us--did you come to see my aunt that Christmas--the Christmas before last?"

"Certainly I came to see her and you," he replied.