LITMIR.BIZ

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of a mistaken belief, her mind scorned their credulity. But from her first hour of awakening reason she had never wavered in her ideas of right and wrong, honour and dishonour. As a child of twelve, newly entrusted with the expenditure of small sums, all her little dealings with Mrs. Potter had shown a scrupulous honesty, a delicacy and consideration, which the good woman had seldom met with in adult lodgers. The books that had made her an infidel had held before her high ideals of honour. And those other books – the books she most loved – her Shakespeare, her Spenser – had taught her all that is noblest in man and woman.

      She thought of Shakespeare's Isabella, who, not to save the life of a beloved brother, would stoop to sin. She recalled her instinctive contempt for Claudio, who, to buy that worthless life, would have sold his sister to shame.

      "My father is like Claudio," she thought; and then with a sudden compunction, "No, no, he is not selfish – he is only mistaken. It was of me he thought – and that if Kilrush loved me, and I loved him, I might be happy."

      Her tears flowed afresh. Never till Kilrush threw off the mask had she known what it was to look along the dull vista of life and see no star, to feel the days a burden, the future a blank. She missed him. Oh, how she missed him! Day after day in the parlour below she had sat looking at his empty chair, listening unawares for a footstep she was never likely to hear again. She recalled his conversation, his opinions, his criticism of her favourite books, their arguments, their almost quarrels about abstract things. His face haunted her: those exquisitely refined features upon which the only effect of age was an increased delicacy of line and colouring; the depth of thought in the dark grey eyes; the grave smile with its so swift transition from satire to a tender melancholy. Was there ever such a man? His elegance, his dignity, his manner of entering a room or leaving it, the grace of every gesture, so careless yet so unerring – every trait of character, every charm of person, which she was unconscious of having noticed in their almost daily association, seemed now to have been burnt into her brain and to be written there for ever.

      In the fortnight that had passed since they had parted, she had tried in vain to occupy herself with the work which had hitherto interested her so much as to make industry only another name for amusement. Her adaptation of Goldoni's Villeggiatura lay on her table, the pages soiled by exposure, sentence after sentence obliterated. The facile pen had lost its readiness. She found herself translating the lively Italian with a dull precision; she, who of old had so deftly turned every phrase into idiomatic English – who had lent so much of herself to her author.

      Often in these sorrowful days she had pushed aside her manuscript to scribble her recollections of Kilrush's conversation upon a stray sheet of foolscap. Often again, in those saddest moments of all, she had recalled his words of impassioned love – his tears; and her own tears had fallen thick and fast upon the disfigured page.

      Well, it was ended, that friendship which had been so sweet; and she had discovered the bitter truth that friendship between man and woman, when the woman is young and beautiful, is impossible.

      The days, weeks, months went by; and the name of Kilrush was no more spoken by Thornton or his daughter. It was as if no such being had ever had any part in their lives, any influence over their fate. Yet Thornton was studiously obedient to his patron's wishes all the time.

      Good Mrs. Potter, who was getting elderly, had for some years past groaned under the burden of the house in Rupert Buildings, with the double, or sometimes treble set of lodgers, who were needful to make the business remunerative. Servant girls were troublesome, even when paid as much as six pounds per annum, with a pound extra for tea and sugar; lodgers were not always punctual with the weekly rent, and sometimes left in her debt. Thornton paid her a low rent for his second floor and garret; but he stayed from year's end to year's end; and she valued him above the finer people who came and went in her bettermost rooms. So when he told her that he was going to remove to a rural neighbourhood, she opened her heart to him, and declared, firstly, that she was sick of London, and London husseys – otherwise domestic servants; secondly, that she could not live without Antonia; thirdly, that she had long had it in her mind to remove her goods and chattels to a countrified suburb, such as Highgate or Edmonton, and that could she be secure of one permanent lodger she would do so without loss of time.

      "Choose a genteel house to the south-west of London, somewhere between Wandsworth and Barnes, and my daughter and I will share it with you," said Thornton; and Mrs. Potter, who had no particular leaning to north or east, agreed.

      After this came a pleasant period of house-hunting, in which Antonia was by-and-by induced to take a languid interest, going in a hackney coach with Mrs. Potter and her daughter Sophy, who had served an apprenticeship to a dressmaker, and was very doubtful how to dispose of her talent now she was out of her time. After several suburban drives, through suburbs that were all garden and meadow, they discovered an old half-timbered cottage at Putney, whose casement windows looked across the Thames to the church and episcopal palace and gardens of Fulham. To Antonia, who had hardly known what it was to leave London since those distant childish years in Windsor Forest, the white walled cottage and garden seemed a heaven upon earth. Surely it must be a blissful thing to live beside that broad reach of Thames, to see willows dipping and reeds waving in the mild autumn wind, and the red sailed barges drifting slowly down stream, and to hear the rooks in the great elms yonder in the bishop's gardens, their clamorous chatter softened by the intervening river. She went back to London enchanted with Rosemary Bank, as the roomy old cottage called itself, and told her father that she thought she could be happy there.

      "Then Potter shall take the cottage to-morrow," cried Thornton, in a rapture of eagerness; "for I'll be hanged if you have looked anything but miserable for the last six weeks. Just as our luck had turned too, my – my circumstances improved – and – and Garrick promising to put our little Italian play on the stage, and to give me a benefit if it runs twenty nights."

      Tonia sighed, remembering the melancholy thoughts interwoven with every line of that lively two-act burletta which she had squeezed out of Goldoni's five-act comedy. Everybody was pleased with the neat little after-piece, most of all Patty Lester, who was to play the soubrette, in a short chintz petticoat, and high red heels to her shoes.

      The theatre seemed a source of boundless wealth, for on Mrs. Potter – who dropped in sometimes at tea-time for a gossip; or, coming on a business errand, was invited to sit down and talk – complaining that she did not know what to do with her dressmaking daughter, Thornton offered to engage Mrs. Sophy as Antonia's "woman."

      "She will have to accept a modest honorarium," he said, with his grand air, "but she will be getting her hand in to go out as waiting-woman to a lady of quality; and my Tonia will treat her more as a friend than a servant."

      Mrs. Potter snapped at the offer, though she did not know the meaning of the word "honorarium." She guessed that it meant either wages or a present, and to find that idle slut of hers an occupation, and yet have her under the maternal eye, was an unspeakable advantage.

      Antonia protested that she wanted no waiting-maid, though she loved Sophy.

      "Indeed, sir, you are not rich enough to make a fine lady of me," she said.

      "Nature has made you a lady, my love; and you are too sensible ever to become fine. When we are living in the country – and I have to come to London, occasionally, to look after my business – you will need a companion whose time will be always at your service."

      And so, with no more discussion, Sophia Potter was engaged, at a salary of ten pounds per annum, paid quarterly.

      At Rosemary Bank the changing seasons passed in a calm monotony; and it seemed to Antonia, during the second year of her life in the cottage by the Thames, as if she had never lived anywhere else. The London lodging, the Strand and Fleet Street, Miss Lester's rooms in the Piazza, receded in the distance of half-forgotten things; for the years of youth are long, and the passing of a year makes a great gap in time.

      The link between Tonia and London seemed as completely broken as if she were living in Yorkshire or in Cornwall. There was a London coach that started from the King's Head at the bottom of Putney High Street every morning, for the Golden Cross, hard by Rupert Buildings; and this coach carried Mr. Thornton and his fortunes three or four times a week, and brought him home after dark. He had so much

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