The match flickered over the young man's moody face; such an expression was unusual with the cheerful brother of Lady Mabel. He merely shrugged his shoulders in answer to the question.

"The Miss Allonbys are certainly charming girls," said Mr. Fowler, after a pause. "The eldest, indeed, is most exceptional."

"You are right there," said Claud, suddenly, as though the remark unloosed his tongue. "I don't profess to understand such a nature, I must say."

His host looked inquiringly at him, surprised at the irritation of his tones.

"If I were a different fellow, I declare to you I'd make her fall in love with me," said the young man, vindictively, "if only for the pleasure of seeing her become human."

"And why don't you try it, being as you are?" asked Mr. Fowler, composedly, after a brief interval of astonishment. "Why this uncalled for modesty? Is it on account of your one defect, or because you have only one?"

Claud laughed, and flushed a little under cover of the friendly gloom.

"Miss Allonby is too near perfection to care for it in others," he said, with a suspicion of a sneer.

"Indeed? Do you think so? She seems full of faults to me."

His companion turned his head sharply towards him.

"Perhaps I hardly meant faults. I should say--amiable weakness. I only meant to express that to me she seems 'a being not too bright and good for human nature's daily food.' I am such a recluse, Mr. Cranmer, I must of necessity study my Wordsworth."

Claud was silent for a long time, and only the harmonious rushing of the brook broke the hush.

"Is that the idea she gives you?" he asked, at length. "Shall I tell you what I think of her? That she is incapable of pa.s.sion, and so unfit for her century."

"Incapable of pa.s.sion," said the elder man, slowly, "and so safe from the knowledge of infinite pain. For her sake I almost wish it were so.

Have you read her books?"

"Yes."

"Don't you think the pa.s.sion in them rings true?"

"True enough; she has wasted it there. There is her real world. I--we--"

he corrected himself very hastily--"are only shadows."

"I think that remark of yours is truer than you know," said Mr. Fowler.

"I am sure that Miss Allonby lives in a dream----"

"But you think she could be awakened?"

"If you could fuse her ideal with the real. I read a poem in the volume of Browning you lent me the other day. It told of a man who set himself to imagine the form of the woman he loved standing before him in the room. He summoned to his mind's eyes every detail of her personal appearance,--her dress, her expression,--till the power of his will brought the real woman to stand where the fancied shape had been. It is not altogether a pleasant poem, but it reminded me of her, in a way. She is standing, I conjecture, with her eyes and her heart fixed on an ideal. If a real man could take its place, he would know what the character of Wynifred Allonby really is. No other mortal ever will."

Claud smoked on for a minute or two in silence; then, taking his cigar from his mouth, he broke off the ash carefully against the sole of his boot.

"Your estimate of her is practically worthless," he remarked, "because you are supposing her to be consistent, which you know is an impossibility. No woman is consistent; if they were, not one in a hundred would ever marry at all. Who do you suppose ever married her ideal?"

"You are right, then," said his companion, thoughtfully. "The adaptability of woman is marvellous. Mercifully for us. But I have a fancy that the lady in question is an exception to most rules. One is so apt to argue from something taken for granted, and therefore most likely incorrect. We start here from the a.s.sumption that a girl's ideal is an ideal of perfection--a thing that never could be realized; and I should imagine that to be true in the majority of instances. But it's my idea that Miss Allonby has too much insight to build herself such a sand-castle. The hero of her novel is just a moderately intelligent man of the present day, with his faults fearlessly catalogued--he is no sentimental abstraction. And yet I am sure that he is not a man she has met, but a man she hopes to meet. That is to say, I am sure she had not met him when she wrote the book, but I see no reason why she should not come across him some day."

Claud made a restless movement. He tossed away the end of the cigar, threw himself back on the garden-seat, and locked his hands behind his head.

"The modern girl," he observed, "is complicated."

"Perhaps that is what makes her so interesting," said Mr. Fowler.

"Is she interesting--to you?"

"She is most interesting--to me," was the ready rejoinder.

There was no answer. In the dim starlight the elder man studied the face of the younger. He thought Claud Cranmer was better-looking than he had previously considered him. There was something sweet in the expression of his mouth, something lovable in the questioning gaze of his blue-grey eyes.

The silence was broken by the fretful barking of Spot, Claud's fox-terrier. He roused himself from his reverie.

"What's up with that little beggar now, I wonder?" he said, as he rose, half-absently, and sauntered over the bridge.

"Spot! Spot! Come here! Stop that row, can't you?"

He vanished gradually among the shadows, and Henry Fowler was left alone.

"Is he in love with her, or is he not?" he dreamily asked himself. "Talk of the complications of the modern girl--there's no getting to the bottom of the modern young man. I don't believe he knows himself."

He caught his breath with something like a sigh of regret for an irreclaimable past.

"I almost wish I were young again, with a heart and a future to lay at her feet!"

It was the nearest he had ever come to a treason against the memory of Alice Willoughby. Love in his early days had seemed such a different thing--meaning just the protecting, reverential fondness of what was in every sense strong for what was in every sense weak. Now it went so far deeper--it included so many emotions, some of them almost conflicting.

Physically--in strength, size, and experience--Wynifred was his inferior. Intellectually, though she had read more books than he, he felt that they were equals. But there was a fine inner fibre--a something to which he could not give a name--an insight, a delicacy of hers which soared far above him. Something which was more than s.e.x, which no intimacy could remove or weaken--a power of spirit, a loftiness which was new in his experience of women.

The men of his day had taken it for granted that woman, however charming, was _small_; they had smiled indulgently at pretty airs and graces, at miniature spites. They had thought it only natural that these captivating creatures should pout and fret if disappointed of a new gown, should shriek at a spider, go into hysterics if thwarted, and deny the beauty of their good-looking female friends. Such a being as this naturally called forth a different species of homage from that demanded by a Wynifred Allonby, to whom everything mean, or cramped, or trivial was as foreign as it was to Henry Fowler himself. It was not that she resisted the impulse to be small; it was not in her nature; she could no more be spiteful than a horse could scratch; she had been framed otherwise.

CHAPTER XXIII.

And I said--Is this the sky, all grey and silver-suited?

And I said--Is this the sea, that lies so pale and wan?

I have dreamed, as I remember--give me time, I was reputed Once to have a steady courage--now, I fear, 'tis gone!

_Requiescat in Pace._

Claud sat somewhat despondently at Mr. Fowler's side in the tall dog-cart as they spun along the lanes from Stanton back to Lower House.

Their errand had been to convey some of the Allonbys' luggage to the station, and see the family off to London.

They were gone; and the two gentlemen who had just seen the last of them were both silent, for different reasons: Claud, because he was resenting the indifference of Wynifred's manner, and Henry, because he was secretly angry with Claud. He did not understand so much beating about the bush. Naturally Mr. Cranmer could not afford to marry an entirely portionless wife; very well, then he ought to have packed his portmanteau and taken his departure long ago, instead of following Miss Allonby hither and thither, engaging her in conversation whenever he could secure her attention, and generally behaving as though seriously attracted--risking the girl's happiness, Mr. Fowler called it. To be sure the conversations seemed usually to end in a wrangle; there was nothing tender in them. Wynifred's serenity of aspect was unruffled when Claud approached, and she never appeared to regret him when he departed in dudgeon. A secret wonder as to whether she could have refused him suggested itself, but was rejected as unlikely. Still the master of Lower House was not accustomed to see young people on such odd terms together; and it vexed him.

The last fortnight of the young artist's stay at Edge had been full of excitement; for Osmond had made full confession to the Misses Willoughby of his love and his imprudent declaration. The good ladies pa.s.sed through more violent phases of feeling than had been theirs for years.

Astonishment, fright, excitement, a vague triumph in the subjugation of the tall, handsome young man had struggled for the mastery in their hearts. Finally they had called in Mr. Fowler to arbitrate.