LITMIR.BIZ

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with disease, almost diabolical to contemplate. Evelyn turned her eyes away with a movement of horrified impatience. And this was not at all the feeling with which Saumarez meant to inspire the woman who had once loved him. He was unwilling even now to believe that she had entirely escaped out of his power.

      “Evelyn,” he said, putting forth again that large nerveless hand, from the touch of which she shrank—“let me call you so, as in the old days. It can do no one any harm now.”

      “Surely not,” she said; “it could do no one any harm.”

      He had not expected this reply; if she had shrank from the familiarity and refused her permission, he would have been better pleased. Helpless, paralytic, dreadful to behold, he would fain have considered himself a danger to her peace of mind still.

      “I have to accept that,” he said, “like all the rest. That it doesn’t matter what I say, no man could be jealous of me. Evelyn!—I like to say the name—there’s everything that’s sweet and womanly in it. I wish I had called my little girl by that name. I thought of it, to tell the truth.”

      “Nothing could have been more unsuitable,” cried Evelyn, with a flush of anger. “I hope you did not think of it, for that would have been an insult, not a compliment to me. Mr. Saumarez, I think I must go on. Madeline expected me at——”

      “Oh, let Madeline wait a little! She has plenty of interests, and I have something very serious to say. You may think I am trying to lead you into recollections—which certainly would agitate me, if not you. You are very composed, Evelyn. I ought to be glad to see you so, but I don’t know that I am. I remember everything so well—but you—seem to have passed into another world.”

      “It is true. The world is entirely changed for me. I can scarcely believe that it was I who lived through so many experiences twenty-two years ago.”

      “I feel that there is a reproach in that—and yet if I could tell you everything—but you would not listen to me now.”

      “I am no longer interested,” she said gently, “so many things have happened since then: my father’s death, and Harry’s. How thankful I was to be able to care for them both! All these things are between me and my girlhood. It has died out of my mind. If there is anything you want to say to me, Mr. Saumarez, I hope it is on another subject than that.”

      The attempt in his eyes to convey a look of sentiment made her feel faint. But fortunately his faculties were keen enough to show him the futility of that attempt. “Yes,” he said, “it is another subject—a very different subject. I shall not live long, and I have no friends. I care for nobody, and you will say it is a natural consequence of this that nobody cares for me.”

      She made a movement of dissent in her great pity. “It cannot be so bad as that.”

      “But it is. My sister’s dead, you know, and there is really nobody. Evelyn, I have a great favour to ask you. Will you be the guardian of my boy and girl?”

      “The guardian—of your children!” She was so startled and astonished that she could only gaze at him, and could not find another word to say.

      “Why should you be so much surprised? I never thought so much of any woman as I do of you. I find you again after so many years, unchanged. Evelyn, you are changed. I said so a little while ago: but yet you are yourself, and that’s the best I know. I’d like my little Rosamond to be like you. I’d like Eddy, though he’s a rascal, to know some one that would make even him good. Evelyn, they are well enough off, they would not be any trouble in that way. Will you take them—will you be their guardian when I am gone?”

      Evelyn was not only astonished but frightened by what he asked of her. She rose up hastily. “You must not think of it—you must not think of it! What could I do for them? I have other duties of my own.”

      “It would not be so much trouble,” he said, “only to give an eye to them now and then; to have them with you when you felt inclined to ask them—nothing more. For old friendship’s sake you would not object to have my children on a visit once a year or so. I am sure you would not refuse me that?”

      “But that is very different from being their guardian.”

      “It would not be, as I should arrange it. You would give them your advice when they wanted it. You would do as much as that for any one, for the gamekeeper’s children, much more for an old friend’s—and see them now and then, and inquire how they were getting on? I should ask nothing more. Evelyn, you wouldn’t refuse an old friend, a disabled, unhappy solitary man like me?”

      “Oh, Mr. Saumarez!” she cried. He had tried to raise himself up a little in the fervour of his appeal, but fell back again in a sort of heap, the exertion and the emotion being too much for his strength. The servant appeared in a moment from where he had been watching. “He oughtn’t to be allowed to agitate himself, ma’am,” said the man reproachfully. Evelyn, alarmed, walked humbly beside the chair till they came to the gate of the Park, terrified to think that perhaps he had injured himself, that perhaps she ought to humour him by consenting to anything. He was not allowed to say any more, nor did she add a word, but he put out his hand again and pressed hers feebly as they parted. “Can I do anything?” she had asked the servant in her compunction. “Nothing but leave him quite quiet,” said the man. “It might be as much as his life is worth. I don’t hold with letting ’em talk.” Saumarez was one of a class, a mere case, to his attendant. And Evelyn felt as if she had been guilty of a kind of murder as she hurried away.

      She found Lady Leighton waiting for her for lunch, and slightly disturbed by the delay. “I have a thousand things to do, and the loss of half-an-hour puts one all out,” she said, with a little peevishness; “but I’m sure you had a reason, Evelyn, for being so late.”

      “A reason which was much against my will,” said Evelyn, telling the story of her distress, to which her friend listened very gravely. “I should take care not to meet him again,” said Lady Leighton, with a cloud on her brow. “You listen to him out of pure pity, but weak and ailing as he is, it would be sweet to his vanity to compromise a woman even now.”

      “I do not understand what you mean,” said Evelyn; “he could not compromise me, if that is it, by anything he could do, were he all that he has ever been.”

      “You don’t know what your husband might think,” said her friend; “he wouldn’t like it. He might have every confidence in you—but a man of Ned Saumarez’s character, and an old lover, and all that—he might say——”

      “My husband,” said Mrs. Rowland, feeling the blood mount to her head, “has no such ideas in his mind. He neither knows anything about Mr. Saumarez’s character, nor would he even if he did know. You mistake my feeling altogether. It is not anything about my husband that distresses me—it is the trust he wants me to undertake of his children.”

      “Oh, you may make yourself easy about that, Evelyn. That was only a blind. It is little he thinks about his children. He’ll get you to meet him and to talk to him, professedly about them—oh, I don’t doubt that! but that’s not what he means. You don’t know Ned Saumarez so well as I do,” cried Lady Leighton, putting out her hand to stop an outcry of indignation; “you don’t know the world so well as I do; you have been out of it for years, and you always were an innocent, and never did understand—”

      “Understand! that a man who is dying by inches should have—such ideas. A man on the edge of the grave—with a servant, a nurse, looking after him as if he were a child.”

      “It’s very sad, my dear, especially the last, which is incredible, I allow. How a man like that can think that a woman would—But they do all the same. You might be led yourself by pity, or perhaps by a little lingering feeling—or—well, well, I will not say that, I don’t want to make you angry—perhaps by a little vanity then, if I may say such a word.”

      “Madeline, I think you know far too much of the world.”

      “Perhaps,”

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