"Yes," replied Meg with a bursting heart.

"Are you sure he does?" insisted the piteous, laboring voice.

"I am sure of it, I know it!" said Meg with a world of conviction.

Elsie sighed, closed her eyes, and there was a silence. Meg thought she was asleep, when she opened her eyes again and looked round with a troubled movement.

"It is very dark," she said. "Draw back the curtains and let in the light."

"It is not day yet," said Meg.

"Stay with me, it is so dark," gasped Elsie, her hands restlessly moving as if pushing back some weight.

"I will not stir from your side, my pet," said Meg, stilling her sobs.

The gray light was stealing in. The tired nurse still slept. Meg saw the remote expression in the sick child's eyes growing more remote.

Suddenly Elsie made another ghostly attempt to sit up.

"How sweet the lilac smells!" she said. "Here is London-pride, and there's thrift. I'll pluck these for Mamey."

She struggled to get out of bed, while Meg held her tight.

"Mamey calls to me--to--say--good-night--and say my prayers," she panted, and then dropped back.

The blue lips moved as if speaking; but Meg could not distinguish the words. A realization that the child was slipping away, that phantoms were about her as she stood on the threshold of the other world, came upon Meg with an anguish of awe.

"Our Father," she began softly, impelled to pray; but Elsie seemed to pay no heed. The little hands still stirred uneasily. The lips still moved. At last Meg distinguished some broken words: "Forgive us our trespa.s.ses--as--as--Meg forgives." There came a sigh, the lips stopped muttering, and only the waxen image of what had been Elsie lay on the bed.

CHAPTER XIX.

WHO IS HE?

Five years had elapsed. Meg was eighteen; she had distanced all her compet.i.tors, and she was the head-pupil of Miss Reeves' establishment.

During those years she still remained somewhat of a solitary in the school. The girls who had been her first schoolfellows had all left. By the succeeding girls, Meg was still called repellent by some, attractive by others.

As time went on the mystery of her origin, about which her schoolmates still busied themselves, pained and humiliated her with greater poignancy. She longed to be allowed to know and love her benefactor.

When questioned as to who she thought she was--how she had come by the name of Beecham--she felt inclined to answer bitterly: "Do not call me by my name. It would be more convenient to call me by a number, as I am told the prisoners are called. Let me say I am number 18 or 24."

Mr. Standish still held an ever-present if somewhat dim place in the background of Meg's consciousness. It was a quaint half-goblin remembrance. The link between them seemed sundered forever. She had never heard from him since their parting. To Ursula alone she had spoken of that solitary time, of the friend who had been kind to her, and of the fashion-plate which had been sacred to her as her mother's portrait.

To her alone she had shown her treasured presents. One day Ursula suggested that her mysterious protector was Mr. Standish. That the stern old gentleman was perhaps a guardian appointed by this friend in his absence. Meg had disclaimed the possibility. Yet the thought that he might be lingered in her mind. As a child loves wonderland, so she dwelt upon Ursula's suggestion. She reasoned herself out of it. She laughed at it, yet it remained. Was he not the only one who had cared for her in her unsheltered childhood?

"Describe him to me," Ursula had once asked.

"I cannot," Meg answered. "It is strange. I can remember a tie he wore--dark-blue, dotted over with tiny horseshoes; and I remember a pair of slippers he had, with big red roses on the toes. I remember his hands, and the color of his hair."

"And you can't remember his face?" Ursula said in tones of disappointment.

"Perhaps if I saw him I might," answered Meg reflectively. "It is so long ago, I have a very dim recollection of his features. They beamed with kindness, and he was kind to me." And then she would tell again the many kind things he had done, the memory of which she held sacred. "Ah,"

she continued, "I used to be unable to think and speak of those things without tears, but now you see my eyes are quite dry."

Once Meg asked Mr. Fullbloom if Mr. Standish was her guardian. The elderly lawyer she had once known was dead. His brother was now the representative of her unknown benefactor. He alone visited her from the outside world. The solicitor chuckled, as if he were amazingly tickled by this question, but he answered it neither in the affirmative nor the negative.

Mr. Horace Fullbloom was cheery and gray-headed; his sparkling brown eyes were surrounded by crinkles, suggestive of puckers made by laughter rather than by age. His appearance suggested a mischievous humor. Like his brother, he was a bit of a dandy. He also wore a frilled shirt, an impressive bloodstone ring on his little finger, and he sported a silver snuffbox. The solicitor was a favorite with the girls. His cynicism was the sunshine of cynicism. He chaffed them with paternal familiarity, watching them with amused benevolence. He seemed to regard them as belonging to a species not deserving any serious thought or treatment.

Meg especially interested him. He always questioned her kindly about herself, and apparently relished the little tiffs that marked their intercourse.

These tiffs were caused by Meg's endeavors to find out the name of her mysterious benefactor, and by the humorous banter with which the solicitor evaded her curiosity. She had dreams of that human providence who stood between her and dest.i.tution. Every n.o.ble personality she heard or read of became a.s.sociated in Meg's mind with the thought of her guardian hero. The banter with which Mr. Fullbloom met her inquiries did not prevent Meg from waiting and watching for the feverish moment when she would again question him. Was it the stern old gentleman she remembered who twice had appeared to her? If it were, what was his name?

If it were not, who was it, then?

To the teasing humor with which the solicitor asked her why she wanted so much to know, she answered, "Because I am grateful."

"But grat.i.tude, my dear," said Mr. Fullbloom, tapping his snuffbox, "wants an object. Suppose I were to tell you it was the big stone figure on the gate, or some old parchment will and testament that is your guardian. What then? Would you feel grateful to those bloodless patrons?"

"I would be grateful to one who remembered and thought of me were he living or dead," said Meg.

"Perhaps if he be alive he is a gruff, disagreeable old curmudgeon; you might be afraid of him--you might not like him!"

Meg was not to be baffled by such answers. She wanted to know who it was she had a right to love and be grateful to. It was such pain to her also to live among people who kept wondering who she was.

More than once she put into the solicitor's hands a letter, that she asked him to deliver to her unknown friend; but to these missives, that he invariably took away with him, Mr. Fullbloom never brought an answer.

To her demand, had he delivered her letters, Mr. Fullbloom returned tantalizing answers. One day he admitted that he had put them all, every one, into the pillar post.

"But not as they were, without an address?" Meg asked in consternation.

"That was no concern of mine. I posted them," said Mr. Fullbloom.

"But where did my letters go?" she cried.

"Perhaps one went to Surrey; perhaps another found its way to York Minster; perhaps a third was carried by fate to its rightful owner," the solicitor replied with a chuckle, and eyes twinkling with the light of mischief. With a little burst of anger, Meg told him that if he would not tell her who her protector was she would rather not see him; it was so painful not to know to whom she owed all this grat.i.tude.

After this scene a long interval elapsed, during which Mr. Fullbloom did not appear; till inconsistently Meg began to long for him to come and visit her again.

It was the eve of the Easter holidays. The school was breaking up. Meg had formed a resolution. This resolution helped her to bear the pain that always accompanied the approach of the holidays. The eager plans she heard her comrades discussing were ever an occasion of pain to her sensitive nature, bringing her loneliness home more keenly.

The gentle independence that now marked Meg's manner had grown upon her of late; the stern necessity of self-support that, since her childhood, had governed her thoughts and actions, had become the ruling instinct of her life. She had determined to be no longer a burden to her protector, and the resolve heightened her spirits. Dreaming is the employment of the idle, and Meg's life was one of action.

If something of the vividness that had distinguished her glance and expression in childhood seemed to have pa.s.sed away, it was rather subdued or merged in a look, as of a habit of thought now usual to her.

Meg's appearance was a matter of discussion in the school; some called her beautiful, others vowed she was plain. Her soft, silky "no color"

hair--"mousey hair" Ursula called it--went charmingly with her complexion; it obtruded somewhat heavily over her forehead, for she was inclined to be careless about her dress. Her beauty was of the sort that you do not think of a.n.a.lyzing. It grew upon the beholder, who invariably discovered that her features possessed beauty of form, and that the whole physiognomy had the charm that is magnetic.

Meg had been contemplating writing to Mr. Fullbloom to tell him the resolve she had taken, when his presence was announced in the drawing-room.

"Well, my dear," said the solicitor, taking her two hands in his, "here I am. I did not dare to show myself before I could communicate news. You commanded me the last time I saw you not to appear in your presence until I brought you tidings of your guardian."