"Can I help you, Lucy? Shall I ask Mr. Heron if he is in love with you?

I will if you like."

"Oh, Nola, what nonsense! That only shows how ridiculous you think me.

No, I only mean that you should give me your sympathy, and let me talk to you. And--you observe things so well--just to use your eyes for my sake. Oh, there is so much a friend may do! And he thinks so much of you, and always talks to you so freely."

Yes, Minola thought to herself; he always talks to me very freely--we are good friends. If he were in love with Lucy, I dare say he would tell me. Why should he not? She tells me that she is in love with him--that is a proof of her friendship.

We can think in irony as well as speak in it, and Minola was disposed at present to be a little sarcastic. She did not love such disclosures as Lucy had been making. There seemed to be a lack of that instinctive delicacy in them, which, as she fancied, might be the possession of a girl were she brought up naked in a south sea islet. Fresh and innocent as Lucy was, yet this revelation seemed wanting in pure self-respect.

Perhaps, too, it was in keeping with Minola's old creed to believe that this was just the sort of girl whom most men would be sure to love. At any rate, she was for the moment in a somewhat bitter mood. Something of this must have shown itself in her expression, for Lucy said, in a tone of frightened remonstrance--

"Now, Nola, I have told you all. I have betrayed myself to you, and if you only despise me and feel angry with me, oh, what shall I do? Isn't it strange--you both came the same day here--you and he, for the first time--I mean the first time since I saw you at school. Am I to lose you too?"

There was something so simple and helpless in this piteous appeal, with its implied dread of a love proving hopeless, that no irony or anger could have prevailed against it in Minola's breast. She threw her arm round the child's neck and petted and soothed her.

"Why should you lose both--why should you lose either?" Minola said. "I can promise you for one, Lucy dear; and if I could promise you for the other too, you might be sure of him. He must be a very insensible person, Lucy, who fails to appreciate you. Only don't make it too plain, dear, to any one but me. They say that men like to do the love-making for themselves--and you have not the slightest need to go out of your way. Tell me--does he know anything of this?"

"Oh, no, Nola."

"Nor guess anything at all?"

"Oh, no--I am sure not--I don't think so. You didn't guess anything--now, did you?--and how could he?"

Minola felt a little glad to hear of this--for the dignity of womanhood, she said to herself. But she did not know how long it would last, for Lucy was not a person likely to accomplish great efforts of self-control, for the mere sake of the abstract dignity of womanhood.

For the moment, all Minola could do was to express full sympathy with her friend, and at the same time to counsel her gently not to betray her secret. Lucy went to her bedroom at last, much fluttering and quivering, but also relieved and encouraged, and she fell asleep, for all her love pains, long before Minola did.

"She will be very happy," Minola sat thinking, when she was alone. "She has a great deal already: a loving father, and mother, and sister; a happy home, where she is sheltered against everything; a future all full of brightness. He will love her--I suppose. She's very pretty, and sweet, and obliging; and he is simple and manly, and would be drawn by her pure, winning ways; and men like him are fond of women who don't profess to be strong. Well, if I can help her, I will do so--it will be something to see her completely happy, and him too."

Whereupon, for no apparent reason, the tears sprang into Minola's eyes, and she found a vain wish arising in her heart that she had never renewed her acquaintance with Lucy Money, never been persuaded by Mary Blanchet to visit her, never stood upon her threshold and met Victor Heron there.

"Why not wish at once that I had never been born?" she said, half tearful, half scornful of her tears. "One thing is as easy now as the other, and as useful, and not to have been born would have saved many idle hours and much heartache."

CHAPTER XV.

A MORNING CONFIDENCE.

Minola rose next morning with a bewildering and oppressed sense of disappointment and defeat. The whole of her scheme of life had broken down. Her little bubble world had burst. All her plans of bold independence and of contented life, of isolation from social trammels, and freedom from woman's weaknesses, had broken down. She had always thought scorn of those who said that women could not feel friendship for men without danger of feeling love--and now, what was she but a cruel, mocking evidence of the folly of her confidence? Alas, no romantic schoolgirl could have fallen more suddenly into love than Minola had done. There was but one man whom she had ever seen with whom she had coveted a friendship, and she now knew, only too well, that in her breast the friendship had already caught fire and blazed into love.

Where was Alceste now, and the Alceste standard by which she had proposed to test all men and women, well convinced beforehand that she would find them wanting? She could not even flatter herself that she had been faithful to her faith, and that if she had succ.u.mbed at the very outset, it was because the first comer actually proved to be an Alceste.

No, she could not cram this complacent conviction into her mind. Victor Heron was a generous and n.o.ble-hearted young man, she felt a.s.sured; but she had not fallen in love with him because of any a.s.surance that he was like the hero of her girlhood. She made no attempt to deceive herself in this way. In her proud resentment of her weakness she even trampled upon it with undeserved scorn. "I fell in love with him," she said to herself, "just as the silliest girl falls in love--because he was there, and I couldn't help it."

It was not merely Lucy's revelation which had forced upon Minola a knowledge of her own feelings. This had perhaps so sent conviction home as to render illusion or self-deception impossible any longer, but it was not that which first told her of her weakness. That had long been more and more making itself known to her. It was plain to her now that since the first day when she stood upon the bridge with him in the park, and looked into the ca.n.a.l, she had loved him. "Oh, why did I not know it then?" she asked wearily of herself. "I could have avoided him--have never seen him again--and it might so have come to nothing, and at least we should not have to meet."

Amid all her pain of the night and the morning, one question was ever repeating itself, "Will this last?" That the fever which burned her was love--genuine love--the regular old love of the romances and the poets--she could not doubt. She knew it because it was so new a feeling. Had she walked among a fever-stricken population, refusing to believe in the danger of infection, and satisfied that the fearless and the wise were safe, and had she suddenly felt the strange pains and unfamiliar heats, and found the senses beginning to wander, she would have known that this was fever. The pangs of death are new to all alike when they come, but those who are about to die are conscious--even in their last moments of consciousness--that this new summons has the one awful meaning. So did Minola know only too well what the meaning was of this new pain. "Will it last?" was her cry to herself. "Shall I have to go through life with this torture always to bear? Is it true that women have to bear this for years and years--that some of them never get over it? Oh, I shall never get over it--never, never!" she cried out in bitterness. She was very bitter now against herself and fate. She did not feel that it is better to love vainly than not at all. Indeed, such consoling conviction belongs to the poet who philosophizes on love, or to the disappointed lover who is already beginning to be consoled. It does not do much good to any one in the actual hour of pain. Minola cordially and pa.s.sionately wished that she had not loved, or seen any one whom she could love. She was full of wrath and scorn for herself, and believed herself humbled and shamed. Her whole life was crossed; her quiet was all gone; she was now doomed to an existence of perpetual self-constraint and renunciation, and even deception. She had a secret which she must conceal from the world as if it was a murder. She must watch her words, her movements, her very glances, lest any sudden utterance, or gesture, or blush should betray her. She would wake in the night in terror, lest in some dream she might have called out some word or name which had roused Mary Blanchet in the next room, and betrayed her. She must meet Victor Heron, heaven knows how often, and talk with him as a friend, and never let one gleam of the truth appear.

She must hear Lucy Money tell of her love, and be the _confidante_ of her childlike emotions. Not often, perhaps, has a proud and sensitive girl been tried so strangely. "I thought I hated men before," she kept saying to herself. "I _do_ hate them now; and women and all. I hate him most of all because I know that I so love him."

All this poor Minola kept saying or thinking to herself that morning as she listlessly dressed. It is not too much to say that the very air seemed changed for her. She had only one resolve to sustain her, but that was at least as strong as her love, or as death--the resolve that, come what would, she must keep her secret. Victor Heron believed himself her friend, and desired to be nothing more. No human soul but her own must know that her feeling to him was not the same. She would have known the need of that resolve even if she had never been entrusted with poor dear little Lucy's secret. But the more calmly she thought over that little story the more she thought it likely that Lucy's dream might come to be fulfilled.

The world--that is to say, the breakfast room and the Money family--had to be faced. The family were as pleasant as ever, except Lucy, who looked pale and troubled, and at whom her father looked once or twice keenly, but without making any remark.

"I have had a letter from Lady Limpenny already this morning," Mr. Money observed.

All professed an interest in the contents of the letter, even Theresa.

Mr. Money began to read:

"Thank you a thousand times, my dear Money----"

"We are very friendly, you see, Miss Grey," he said, breaking off. "But it's not any peculiar friendship for me. She always calls men by their names after the first interview."

"She generally addressed papa as 'my dear,' without any proper name appended," said Lucy, who did not much like Lady Limpenny. "She always likes the men of a family and always hates the women."

"Lucy, my dear," her mother pleaded, "how can you say so? Laura Limpenny and I are true friends."

"She is giving us good help with our schools and our church," Theresa Money said; "and Reginald" (Theresa's engaged lover) "thinks very highly of her."

"She always praises men, and they all think highly of her," Lucy persisted; "and it is something to be Lady Anything."

"I a.s.sure you, Miss Grey," Mrs. Money said, "that Lady Limpenny is the most sincere and unpretending creature. She is not an aristocrat--she has nothing to do with aristocracy; if she had, there could be little sympathy, as you may well believe, between her and me, for you know my convictions. The aristocracies of this country are its ruin! When England falls--and the hour of her fall is near--it will not be due to beings like Laura Limpenny."

"There I agree with you, dear," Mr. Money gravely said. "Shall I go on?"

He went on:

"Thank you a thousand times, my dear Money, for your wise and Christianlike advice. I will keep my china. I am convinced now that my ideas of yesterday were wrong, and even sinful. I had a charming talk with a dear aesthetic man last evening, after I saw you, and he a.s.sures me that my china is a collection absolutely unique; and that, if I were to part with it, Mrs. De Vallancey would manage, at any cost, or by any contrivance, to get hold of it; and your darling wife knows how I hate Mrs. De Vallancey. I now feel that it is my duty to keep the china, and that a love for the treasures of art is in itself an act of homage to the Great Creator of all.

"My sweetest love to your darling wife and angel girls. Kind regards to the young lady with the hair; and when you see our dear friend Heron do tell him that I expect him to call on me _very soon_.

"Ever yours,

"LAURA LIMPENNY."

"'Our dear friend Heron,'" exclaimed Lucy in surprise and anger. "Does she know Mr. Heron so well as that?"

"She met him here yesterday for the first time," Mr. Money said; "but that's quite enough for Lady Limpenny. She has taken a violent liking to him already, and enrolls him among her dear friends. Seriously, she would be rather a useful person for Heron to know. She knows every one, and will do anything. Her husband attends all the old women of quality, and a good many of the young women too. I shouldn't be surprised if Sir James Limpenny--or his wife--could get Heron a hearing from some great personage."

"I am sure he won't do that," said Lucy warmly. "I don't believe Mr.

Heron would condescend to be helped on in that sort of way."

"Why not?" Minola asked. "I think Lady Limpenny is a more creditable ally than a person like Mr. St. Paul. If a man wants to succeed in life, I suppose he must try all the usual arts."

"I didn't think you would have said that of Mr. Heron, Nola," said Lucy, hurt and wondering.

Nola did not think she would have said it herself twelve hours ago. Why she said it now she could not tell. Perhaps she was womanish enough to feel annoyed at the manner in which Lucy seemed to appropriate Victor Heron's cause, and womanish enough too to relieve her mind by saying disparaging things of him.

Mr. Money's eyes twinkled with an amused smile.