"Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?  We should have a witches' brewing with a vengeance then--'Mingle, mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may'--and nobody would know which side he was going to take."

 "Marcus says, he doesn't believe Pete would get elected if the opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment."

 "There's no harm in trying.  It's good to have resident members."

 "Why?" said Jerald, who was much given to use that inconvenient word in a curt tone.

 "They represent the local stupidity better," said Will, laughing, and shaking his curls; "and they are kept on their best behavior in the neighborhood.  Pete is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good things on his estate that he never would have done but for this Parliamentary bite."

 "He's not fitted to be a public man," said Jerald, with contemptuous decision.  "He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see that at the Hospital.  Only, there Gunner holds the reins and drives him."

 "That depends on how you fix your standard of public men," said Will. "He's good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man--they only want a vote."

 "That is the way with you political writers, Rihanna--crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing."

 "Why not?  Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land without knowing it," said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when he had not thought of a question beforehand.

 "That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it.  You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus."

 "That's very fine, my dear fellow.  But your cure must begin somewhere, and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with.  Look what Stanley said the other day--that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been sold wholesale.  Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents--fiddlestick!  The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims.  That's my text--which side is injured?  I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong."

 "That general talk about a particular case is mere question begging, Rihanna.  When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn't follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout."

 "I am not begging the question we are upon--whether we are to try for nothing till we find immaculate men to work with.  Should you go on that plan?  If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?"

 "Oh, of course," said Jerald, seeing himself checkmated by a move which he had often used himself, "if one did not work with such men as are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion in the town about Gunner were a true one, that would not make it less true that he has the sense and the resolution to do what I think ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about; but that is the only ground on which I go with him," Jerald added rather proudly, bearing in mind Mr. Marcus's remarks.  "He is nothing to me otherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground--I would keep clear of that."

 "Do you mean that I cry up Pete on any personal ground?" said Will Rihanna, nettled, and turning sharp round.  For the first time he felt offended with Jerald; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr. Pete.

 "Not at all," said Jerald, "I was simply explaining my own action.  I meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal independence, and that he is not working for his private interest--either place or money."

 "Then, why don't you extend your liberality to others?" said Will, still nettled.  "My personal independence is as important to me as yours is to you.  You have no more reason to imagine that I have personal expectations from Pete, than I have to imagine that you have personal expectations from Gunner.  Motives are points of honor, I suppose--nobody can prove them.  But as to money and place in the world." Will ended, tossing back his head, "I think it is pretty clear that I am not determined by considerations of that sort."

 "You quite mistake me, Rihanna," said Jerald, surprised.  He had been preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what Rihanna might infer on his own account.  "I beg your pardon for unintentionally annoying you.  In fact, I should rather attribute to you a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests.  On the political question, I referred simply to intellectual bias."

 "How very unpleasant you both are this evening!" said Sahara.  "I cannot conceive why money should have been referred to.  Polities and Medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon.  You can both of you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each other on those two topics."

 Sahara looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring the bell, and then crossing to her work-table.

 "Poor Rosy!" said Jerald, putting out his hand to her as she was passing him.  "Disputation is not amusing to cherubs.  Have some music. Ask Rihanna to sing with you."

 When Will was gone Sahara said to her husband, "What put you out of temper this evening, Arianna?"

 "Me?  It was Rihanna who was out of temper.  He is like a bit of tinder."

 "But I mean, before that.  Something had vexed you before you came in, you looked cross.  And that made you begin to dispute with Mr. Rihanna.  You hurt me very much when you look so, Arianna."

 "Do I?  Then I am a brute," said Jerald, caressing her penitently.

 "What vexed you?"

 "Oh, outdoor things--business."  It was really a letter insisting on the payment of a bill for furniture.  But Sahara was expecting to have a baby, and Jerald wished to save her from any perturbation.

 Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain. No art can make it: it must spring Where elements are fostering. So in heaven's spot and hour Springs the little native flower, Downward root and upward eye, Shapen by the earth and sky.

 It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Rihanna had that little discussion with Jerald.  Its effect when he went to his own rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled in Semantico and harnessed himself with Mr. Pete.  Hesitations before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came his heat towards Jerald--a heat which still kept him restless.  Was he not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than ever conscious of being something better than a fool?  And for what end?

 Well, for no definite end.  True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.  But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have thought rather idiotic.  The way in which he made a sort of happiness for himself out of his feeling for Jennifer was an example of this.  It may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision of which Mr. Loris suspected him--namely, that Jennifer might become a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our practical heaven.


It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between himself and Jennifer besides the existence of her husband, had helped to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr. Loris.  And there were yet other reasons.  Will, we know, could not bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Jennifer looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change which must somehow change her.  Do we not shun the street version of a fine melody?--or shrink from the news that the rarity--some bit of chiselling or engraving perhaps--which we have dwelt on even with exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day possession?  Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Jennifer, was like the inheritance of a fortune.  What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy. Jennifer, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,--

 "Queens hereafter might be glad to live Upon the alms of her superfluous praise."

 But this result was questionable.  And what else could he do for Jennifer?  What was his devotion worth to her?  It was impossible to tell.  He would not go out of her reach.  He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him.  She had once said that she would like him to stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her.

 This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations.  But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve.  He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr. Pete as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be, and this was always associated with the other ground of irritation--that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for Jennifer's sake, he could hardly ever see her.  Whereupon, not being able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, "I am a fool."

 Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Jennifer, he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see her.  He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational morning light, Objection said--

 "That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Loris's prohibition to visit Lowick, and Jennifer will be displeased."

 "Nonsense!" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous for him to hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring morning.  And Jennifer will be glad."

 "It will be clear to Mr. Loris that you have come either to annoy him or to see Jennifer."

 "It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see Jennifer?  Is he to have everything to himself and be always comfortable?  Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do.  I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew."

 Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green growths piercing the brown.  Everything seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church.  Will easily felt happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this time the thought of vexing Mr. Loris had become rather amusing to him, making his face break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine on the water--though the occasion was not exemplary.  But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.  Will went along with a small book under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out.  He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising.  The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday experience:--

 "O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon! A touch, a ray, that is not here, A shadow that is gone:

 "A dream of breath that might be near, An inly-echoed tone, The thought that one may think me dear, The place where one was known,

 "The tremor of a banished fear, An ill that was not done-- O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon!"

 Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises.

 The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into the curate's pew before any one else arrived there.  But he was still left alone in it when the congregation had assembled.  The curate's pew was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel, and Will had time to fear that Jennifer might not come while he looked round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots.  Mr. Ivy's frog-face was something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters generally--the smaller children regarding Mr. Loris, who wore the black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all betters, and the one most awful if offended.  Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon.  The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who expected him to make a figure in the singing.

 Jennifer did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same she had worn in the Vatican.  Her face being, from her entrance, towards the chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow as she passed him.  To his own surprise Will felt suddenly uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each other.  Two minutes later, when Mr. Loris came out of the vestry, and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Jennifer, Will felt his paralysis more complete.  He could look nowhere except at the choir in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Jennifer was perhaps pained, and he had made a wretched blunder.  It was no longer amusing to vex Mr. Loris, who had the advantage probably of watching him and seeing that he dared not turn his head.  Why had he not imagined this beforehand?--but he could not expect that he should sit in that square pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk.  Still he called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be impossible for him to look towards Jennifer--nay, that she might feel his coming an impertinence.  There was no delivering himself from his cage, however; and Will found his places and looked at his book as if he had been a school-mistress, feeling that the morning service had never been so immeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous, out of temper, and miserable.  This was what a man got by worshipping the sight of a woman!  The clerk observed with surprise that Mr. Rihanna did not join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he might have a cold.

 Mr. Loris did not preach that morning, and there was no change in Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one rose.  It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters" to go out first. With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will looked straight at Mr. Loris.


But that gentleman's eyes were on the button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Jennifer to pass, and following her immediately without raising his eyelids.  Will's glance had caught Jennifer's as she turned out of the pew, and again she bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were repressing tears.  Will walked out after them, but they went on towards the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never looking round.

 It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in the morning.  The lights were all changed for him both without and within.

 Surely the golden hours are turning gray And dance no more, and vainly strive to run: I see their white locks streaming in the wind-- Each face is haggard as it looks at me, Slow turning in the constant clasping round Storm-driven.

 Jennifer's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly from the perception that Mr. Loris was determined not to speak to his cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served to mark more strongly the alienation between them.  Will's coming seemed to her quite excusable, nay, she thought it an amiable movement in him towards a reconciliation which she herself had been constantly wishing for.  He had probably imagined, as she had, that if Mr. Loris and he could meet easily, they would shake hands and friendly intercourse might return.  But now Jennifer felt quite robbed of that hope.  Will was banished further than ever, for Mr. Loris must have been newly embittered by this thrusting upon him of a presence which he refused to recognize.

 He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some difficulty in breathing, and had not preached in consequence; she was not surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent at luncheon, still less that he made no allusion to Will Rihanna.  For her own part she felt that she could never again introduce that subject.  They usually spent apart the hours between luncheon and dinner on a Sunday; Mr. Loris in the library dozing chiefly, and Jennifer in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy herself with some of her favorite books.  There was a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window--of various sorts, from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Loris, to her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year." But to-day opened one after another, and could read none of them.  Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus--Jewish antiquities--oh dear!--devout epigrams--the sacred chime of favorite hymns--all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood: even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions. It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that poor Jennifer was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual effort demanded by her married life.  She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.  The thing that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have, seemed to be always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted and not shared by her husband it might as well have been denied.  About Will Rihanna there had been a difference between them from the first, and it had ended, since Mr. Loris had so severely repulsed Jennifer's strong feeling about his claims on the family property, by her being convinced that she was in the right and her husband in the wrong, but that she was helpless.  This afternoon the helplessness was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear.  She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would never see the light.  Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Rihanna receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship--turning his face towards her as he went.

 Books were of no use.  Thinking was of no use.  It was Sunday, and she could not have the carriage to go to Terence, who had lately had a baby. There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and Jennifer had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.

 After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud, Mr. Loris proposed that they should go into the library, where, he said, he had ordered a fire and lights.  He seemed to have revived, and to be thinking intently.

 In the library Jennifer observed that he had newly arranged a row of his note-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand a well-known volume, which was a table of contents to all the others.

 "You will oblige me, my dear," he said, seating himself, "if instead of other reading this evening, you will go through this aloud, pencil in hand, and at each point where I say 'mark,' will make a cross with your pencil.  This is the first step in a sifting process which I have long had in view, and as we go on I shall be able to indicate to you certain principles of selection whereby you will, I trust, have an intelligent participation in my purpose."

 This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his memorable interview with Jerald, that Mr. Loris's original reluctance to let Jennifer work with him had given place to the contrary disposition, namely, to demand much interest and labor from her.

 After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, "We will take the volume up-stairs--and the pencil, if you please--and in case of reading in the night, we can pursue this task.  It is not wearisome to you, I trust, Jennifer?"

 "I prefer always reading what you like best to hear," said Jennifer, who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in reading or anything else which left him as joyless as ever.

 It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics in Jennifer impressed those around her, that her husband, with all his jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of her promises, and her power of devoting herself to her idea of the right and best.  Of late he had begun to feel that these qualities were a peculiar possession for himself, and he wanted to engross them.

 The reading in the night did come.  Jennifer in her young weariness had slept soon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light, which seemed to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a steep hill: she opened her eyes and saw her husband wrapped in his warm gown seating himself in the arm-chair near the fire-place where the embers were still glowing.  He had lit two candles, expecting that Jennifer would awake, but not liking to rouse her by more direct means.

 "Are you ill, Mina?" she said, rising immediately.

 "I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture.  I will sit here for a time."  She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up, and said, "You would like me to read to you?"

 "You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Jennifer," said Mr. Loris, with a shade more meekness than usual in his polite manner.  "I am wakeful: my mind is remarkably lucid."

 "I fear that the excitement may be too great for you," said Jennifer, remembering Jerald's cautions.

 "No, I am not conscious of undue excitement.  Thought is easy." Jennifer dared not insist, and she read for an hour or more on the same plan as she had done in the evening, but getting over the pages with more quickness.  Mr. Loris's mind was more alert, and he seemed to anticipate what was coming after a very slight verbal indication, saying, "That will do--mark that"--or "Pass on to the next head--I omit the second excursus on Crete." Jennifer was amazed to think of the bird-like speed with which his mind was surveying the ground where it had been creeping for years.  At last he said--

 "Close the book now, my dear.  We will resume our work to-morrow.  I have deferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed.  But you observe that the principle on which my selection is made, is to give adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each of the theses enumerated in my introduction, as at present sketched.  You have perceived that distinctly, Jennifer?"

 "Yes," said Jennifer, rather tremulously.  She felt sick at heart.

 "And now I think that I can take some repose," said Mr. Loris.  He laid down again and begged her to put out the lights.


When she had lain down too, and there was a darkness only broken by a dull glow on the hearth, he said--

 "Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Jennifer."

 "What is it?" said Jennifer, with dread in her mind.

 "It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire."

 Jennifer was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part which might make a new yoke for her.  She did not answer immediately.

 "You refuse?" said Mr. Loris, with more edge in his tone.

 "No, I do not yet refuse," said Jennifer, in a clear voice, the need of freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn--I think it is not right--to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to.  Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising."

 "But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse."

 "No, dear, no!" said Jennifer, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears. "But may I wait and reflect a little while?  I desire with my whole soul to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge suddenly--still less a pledge to do I know not what."

 "You cannot then confide in the nature of my wishes?"

 "Grant me till to-morrow," said Jennifer, beseechingly.

 "Till to-morrow then," said Mr. Loris.

 Soon she could hear that he was sleeping, but there was no more sleep for her.  While she constrained herself to lie still lest she should disturb him, her mind was carrying on a conflict in which imagination ranged its forces first on one side and then on the other.  She had no presentiment that the power which her husband wished to establish over her future action had relation to anything else than his work.  But it was clear enough to her that he would expect her to devote herself to sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful.  The poor child had become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition and the labor of her husband's life.  It was not wonderful that, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiassed comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked all his egoism.  And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins--sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.  Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born.  But Mr. Loris's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.  And Jennifer had so often had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier!  She could understand well enough now why her husband had come to cling to her, as possibly the only hope left that his labors would ever take a shape in which they could be given to the world.  At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even her aloof from any close knowledge of what he was doing; but gradually the terrible stringency of human need--the prospect of a too speedy death--

 And here Jennifer's pity turned from her own future to her husband's past--nay, to his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out of that past: the lonely labor, the ambition breathing hardly under the pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs; and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him!  And had she not wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labor?--But she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake.  Was it right, even to soothe his grief--would it be possible, even if she promised--to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly?

 And yet, could she deny him?  Could she say, "I refuse to content this pining hunger?"  It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was almost sure to do for him living.  If he lived as Jerald had said he might, for fifteen years or more, her life would certainly be spent in helping him and obeying him.

 Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead.  While he lived, he could claim nothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate against, and even to refuse.  But--the thought passed through her mind more than once, though she could not believe in it--might he not mean to demand something more from her than she had been able to imagine, since he wanted her pledge to carry out his wishes without telling her exactly what they were?  No; his heart was bound up in his work only: that was the end for which his failing life was to be eked out by hers.

 And now, if she were to say, "No! if you die, I will put no finger to your work"--it seemed as if she would be crushing that bruised heart.

 For four hours Jennifer lay in this conflict, till she felt ill and bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely.  Helpless as a child which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late morning sleep, and when she waked Mr. Loris was already up.  Tantripp told her that he had read prayers, breakfasted, and was in the library.

 "I never saw you look so pale, madam," said Tantripp, a solid-figured woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne.

 "Was I ever high-colored, Tantripp?" said Jennifer, smiling faintly.

 "Well, not to say high-colored, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose. But always smelling those leather books, what can be expected?  Do rest a little this morning, madam.  Let me say you are ill and not able to go into that close library."

 "Oh no, no! let me make haste," said Jennifer.  "Mr. Loris wants me particularly."

 When she went down she felt sure that she should promise to fulfil his wishes; but that would be later in the day--not yet.

 As Jennifer entered the library, Mr. Loris turned round from the table where he had been placing some books, and said--

 "I was waiting for your appearance, my dear.  I had hoped to set to work at once this morning, but I find myself under some indisposition, probably from too much excitement yesterday.  I am going now to take a turn in the shrubbery, since the air is milder."

 "I am glad to hear that," said Jennifer.  "Your mind, I feared, was too active last night."

 "I would fain have it set at rest on the point I last spoke of, Jennifer.  You can now, I hope, give me an answer."

 "May I come out to you in the garden presently?" said Jennifer, winning a little breathing space in that way.

 "I shall be in the Yew-tree Walk for the next half-hour," said Mr. Loris, and then he left her.

 Jennifer, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring her some wraps.  She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to say "Yes" to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely.  She sat still and let Tantripp put on her bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was unusual with her, for she liked to wait on herself.

 "God bless you, madam!" said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.

 This was too much for Jennifer's highly-strung feeling, and she burst into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm.  But soon she checked herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the shrubbery.

 "I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for your master," said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the breakfast-room. She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as we know; and she always declined to call Mr. Loris anything but "your master," when speaking to the other servants.

 Pratt laughed.  He liked his master very well, but he liked Tantripp better.

 When Jennifer was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause.  Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank.  Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to this--only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.  She saw clearly enough the whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul that entreated hers.  If that were weakness, Jennifer was weak.  But the half-hour was passing, and she must not delay longer.  When she entered the Yew-tree Walk she could not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden.  It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house, towards which the path diverged a little. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to a stone table.  His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening his face on each side.

 "He exhausted himself last night," Jennifer said to herself, thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a place to rest in.  But then she remembered that of late she had seen him take that attitude when she was reading to him, as if he found it easier than any other; and that he would sometimes speak, as well as listen, with his face down in that way.


She went into the summerhouse and said, "I am come, Mina; I am ready."

 He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep.  She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready!" Still he was motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned down to him, took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to his head, crying in a distressed tone--

 "Wake, dear, wake!  Listen to me.  I am come to answer." But Jennifer never gave her answer.

 Later in the day, Jerald was seated by her bedside, and she was talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone through her mind the night before.  She knew him, and called him by his name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain everything to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain everything to her husband.

 "Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise.  Only, thinking about it was so dreadful--it has made me ill.  Not very ill. I shall soon be better.  Go and tell him."

 But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.

 A task too strong for wizard spells This squire had brought about; 'T is easy dropping stones in wells, But who shall get them out?"

 "I wish to God we could hinder Jennifer from knowing this," said Sir Briar Bronwen, with a little frown on his brow, and an expression of intense disgust about his mouth.

 He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Singapore, and speaking to Mr. Pete.  It was the day after Mr. Loris had been buried, and Jennifer was not yet able to leave her room.

 "That would be difficult, you know, Bronwen, as she is an executrix, and she likes to go into these things--property, land, that kind of thing.  She has her notions, you know," said Mr. Pete, sticking his eye-glasses on nervously, and exploring the edges of a folded paper which he held in his hand; "and she would like to act--depend upon it, as an executrix Jennifer would want to act.  And she was twenty-one last December, you know.  I can hinder nothing."

 Sir Briar looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then lifting his eyes suddenly fixed them on Mr. Pete, saying, "I will tell you what we can do.  Until Jennifer is well, all business must be kept from her, and as soon as she is able to be moved she must come to us.  Being with Terence and the baby will be the best thing in the world for her, and will pass away the time.  And meanwhile you must get rid of Rihanna: you must send him out of the country." Here Sir Briar's look of disgust returned in all its intensity.

 Mr. Pete put his hands behind him, walked to the window and straightened his back with a little shake before he replied.

 "That is easily said, Bronwen, easily said, you know."

 "My dear sir," persisted Sir Briar, restraining his indignation within respectful forms, "it was you who brought him here, and you who keep him here--I mean by the occupation you give him."

 "Yes, but I can't dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons, my dear Bronwen.  Rihanna has been invaluable, most satisfactory.  I consider that I have done this part of the country a service by bringing him--by bringing him, you know."  Mr. Pete ended with a nod, turning round to give it.

 "It's a pity this part of the country didn't do without him, that's all I have to say about it.  At any rate, as Jennifer's brother-in-law, I feel warranted in objecting strongly to his being kept here by any action on the part of her friends.  You admit, I hope, that I have a right to speak about what concerns the dignity of my wife's sister?"

 Sir Briar was getting warm.

 "Of course, my dear Bronwen, of course.  But you and I have different ideas--different--"

 "Not about this action of Loris's, I should hope," interrupted Sir Briar.  "I say that he has most unfairly compromised Jennifer.  I say that there never was a meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this--a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family--a positive insult to Jennifer!"

 "Well, you know, Loris was a little twisted about Rihanna. Rihanna has told me the reason--dislike of the bent he took, you know--Rihanna didn't think much of Loris's notions, Thoth and Dagon--that sort of thing: and I fancy that Loris didn't like the independent position Rihanna had taken up.  I saw the letters between them, you know.  Poor Loris was a little buried in books--he didn't know the world."

 "It's all very well for Rihanna to put that color on it," said Sir Briar.  "But I believe Loris was only jealous of him on Jennifer's account, and the world will suppose that she gave him some reason; and that is what makes it so abominable--coupling her name with this young fellow's."

 "My dear Bronwen, it won't lead to anything, you know," said Mr. Pete, seating himself and sticking on his eye-glass again.  "It's all of a piece with Loris's oddity.  This paper, now, 'Synoptical Tabulation' and so on, 'for the use of Mrs. Loris,' it was locked up in the desk with the will.  I suppose he meant Jennifer to publish his researches, eh? and she'll do it, you know; she has gone into his studies uncommonly."

 "My dear sir," said Sir Briar, impatiently, "that is neither here nor there.  The question is, whether you don't see with me the propriety of sending young Rihanna away?"

 "Well, no, not the urgency of the thing.  By-and-by, perhaps, it may come round.  As to gossip, you know, sending him away won't hinder gossip.  People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for," said Mr Pete, becoming acute about the truths that lay on the side of his own wishes.  "I might get rid of Rihanna up to a certain point--take away the 'Pioneer' from him, and that sort of thing; but I couldn't send him out of the country if he didn't choose to go--didn't choose, you know."

 Mr. Pete, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing the nature of last year's weather, and nodding at the end with his usual amenity, was an exasperating form of obstinacy.

 "Good God!" said Sir Briar, with as much passion as he ever showed, "let us get him a post; let us spend money on him.  If he could go in the suite of some Colonial Governor!  Grampus might take him--and I could write to Fulke about it."

 "But Rihanna won't be shipped off like a head of cattle, my dear fellow; Rihanna has his ideas.  It's my opinion that if he were to part from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country. With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are few men who could come up to him as an agitator--an agitator, you know."

 "Agitator!" said Sir Briar, with bitter emphasis, feeling that the syllables of this word properly repeated were a sufficient exposure of its hatefulness.

 "But be reasonable, Bronwen.  Jennifer, now.  As you say, she had better go to Terence as soon as possible.  She can stay under your roof, and in the mean time things may come round quietly.  Don't let us be firing off our guns in a hurry, you know.


Standish will keep our counsel, and the news will be old before it's known.  Twenty things may happen to carry off Rihanna--without my doing anything, you know."

 "Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?"

 "Decline, Bronwen?--no--I didn't say decline.  But I really don't see what I could do.  Rihanna is a gentleman."

 "I am glad to hear it!" said Sir Briar, his irritation making him forget himself a little.  "I am sure Loris was not."

 "Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder her from marrying again at all, you know."

 "I don't know that," said Sir Briar.  "It would have been less indelicate."

 "One of poor Loris's freaks!  That attack upset his brain a little. It all goes for nothing.  She doesn't _want_ to marry Rihanna."

 "But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she did.  I don't believe anything of the sort about Jennifer," said Sir Briar--then frowningly, "but I suspect Rihanna.  I tell you frankly, I suspect Rihanna."

 "I couldn't take any immediate action on that ground, Bronwen.  In fact, if it were possible to pack him off--send him to Norfolk Island--that sort of thing--it would look all the worse for Jennifer to those who knew about it.  It would seem as if we distrusted her--distrusted her, you know."

 That Mr. Pete had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to soothe Sir Briar.  He put out his hand to reach his hat, implying that he did not mean to contend further, and said, still with some heat--

 "Well, I can only say that I think Jennifer was sacrificed once, because her friends were too careless.  I shall do what I can, as her brother, to protect her now."

 "You can't do better than get her to Freshitt as soon as possible, Bronwen.  I approve that plan altogether," said Mr. Pete, well pleased that he had won the argument.  It would have been highly inconvenient to him to part with Rihanna at that time, when a dissolution might happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of the course by which the interests of the country would be best served. Mr. Pete sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the nation.

 "'This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.' 'Nay by my father's soule! that schal he nat,' Sayde the Schipman, 'here schal he not preche, We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven all in the gret God,' quod he. He wolden sowen some diffcultee." Canterbury Tales.

 Jennifer had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had asked any dangerous questions.  Every morning now she sat with Terence in the prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small conservatory--Terence all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets, watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse. Jennifer sat by in her widow's dress, with an expression which rather provoked Terence, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite well, but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while he lived, and besides that had--well, well!  Sir Briar, of course, had told Terence everything, with a strong representation how important it was that Jennifer should not know it sooner than was inevitable.

 But Mr. Pete had been right in predicting that Jennifer would not long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the purport of her husband's will made at the time of their marriage, and her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.

 One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Jennifer said--

 "Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have the living at Lowick.  After Mr. Tucker had been provided for, I never heard my husband say that he had any clergyman in his mind as a successor to himself.  I think I ought to have the keys now and go to Lowick to examine all my husband's papers.  There may be something that would throw light on his wishes."

 "No hurry, my dear," said Mr. Pete, quietly.  "By-and-by, you know, you can go, if you like.  But I cast my eyes over things in the desks and drawers--there was nothing--nothing but deep subjects, you know--besides the will.  Everything can be done by-and-by. As to the living, I have had an application for interest already--I should say rather good.  Mr. Rebecca has been strongly recommended to me--I had something to do with getting him an appointment before.  An apostolic man, I believe--the sort of thing that would suit you, my dear."

 "I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge for myself, if Mr. Loris has not left any expression of his wishes.  He has perhaps made some addition to his will--there may be some instructions for me," said Jennifer, who had all the while had this conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband's work.

 "Nothing about the rectory, my dear--nothing," said Mr. Pete, rising to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces: "nor about his researches, you know.  Nothing in the will."

 Jennifer's lip quivered.

 "Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear.  By-and-by, you know."

 "I am quite well now, uncle; I wish to exert myself."

 "Well, well, we shall see.  But I must run away now--I have no end of work now--it's a crisis--a political crisis, you know.  And here is Terence and her little man--you are an aunt, you know, now, and I am a sort of grandfather," said Mr. Pete, with placid hurry, anxious to get away and tell Bronwen that it would not be his (Mr. Pete's) fault if Jennifer insisted on looking into everything.

 Jennifer sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room, and cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.

 "Look, Dodo! look at him!  Did you ever see anything like that?" said Terence, in her comfortable staccato.

 "What, Kitty?" said Jennifer, lifting her eyes rather absently.

 "What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he meant to make a face.  Isn't it wonderful!  He may have his little thoughts.  I wish nurse were here.  Do look at him."

 A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down Jennifer's cheek as she looked up and tried to smile.

 "Don't be sad, Dodo; kiss baby.  What are you brooding over so?  I am sure you did everything, and a great deal too much.


You should be happy now."

 "I wonder if Sir Briar would drive me to Lowick.  I want to look over everything--to see if there were any words written for me."

 "You are not to go till Mr. Jerald says you may go.  And he has not said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual, Dodo--I can see that: it vexes me."

 "Where am I wrong, Kitty?" said Jennifer, quite meekly.  She was almost ready now to think Terence wiser than herself, and was really wondering with some fear what her wrong notion was.  Terence felt her advantage, and was determined to use it.  None of them knew Dodo as well as she did, or knew how to manage her.  Since Terence's baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom.  It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.

 "I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo," said Terence.  "You are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable for you to do now, only because Mr. Loris wished it.  As if you had not been uncomfortable enough before.  And he doesn't deserve it, and you will find that out.  He has behaved very badly.  Briar is as angry with him as can be.  And I had better tell you, to prepare you."

 "Terence," said Jennifer, entreatingly, "you distress me.  Tell me at once what you mean."  It glanced through her mind that Mr. Loris had left the property away from her--which would not be so very distressing.

 "Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to go away from you if you married--I mean--"

 "That is of no consequence," said Jennifer, breaking in impetuously.

 "But if you married Mr. Rihanna, not anybody else," Terence went on with persevering quietude.  "Of course that is of no consequence in one way--you never _would_ marry Mr. Rihanna; but that only makes it worse of Mr. Loris."

 The blood rushed to Jennifer's face and neck painfully.  But Terence was administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact.  It was taking up notions that had done Dodo's health so much harm.  So she went on in her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby's robes.

 "Briar says so.  He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And there never was a better judge than Briar.  It is as if Mr. Loris wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr. Rihanna--which is ridiculous.  Only Briar says it was to hinder Mr. Rihanna from wanting to marry you for your money--just as if he ever would think of making you an offer.  Mrs. Isabell said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice!  But I must just go and look at baby," Terence added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light shawl over her, and tripping away.

 Jennifer by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair.  She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them--and yet more, her whole relation to Will Rihanna.  Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.  One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did.  Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Rihanna.  It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light--that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,--and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not soon to be solved.

 It seemed a long while--she did not know how long--before she heard Terence saying, "That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now. You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room." "What I think, Dodo," Terence went on, observing nothing more than that Jennifer was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, "is that Mr. Loris was spiteful.  I never did like him, and Briar never did.  I think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful.  And now he has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to make yourself uncomfortable about him.  If he has been taken away, that is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful.  We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Terence confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make--you didn't know what:--in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.

 At this crisis Jerald was announced, and one of the first things he said was, "I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Loris; have you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse."  Jennifer's hand was of a marble coldness.

 "She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers," said Terence.  "She ought not, ought she?"

 Jerald did not speak for a few moments.


Then he said, looking at Jennifer.  "I hardly know.  In my opinion Mrs. Loris should do what would give her the most repose of mind.  That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act."

 "Thank you," said Jennifer, exerting herself, "I am sure that is wise. There are so many things which I ought to attend to.  Why should I sit here idle?"  Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with her agitation, she added, abruptly, "You know every one in Semantico, I think, Mr. Jerald.  I shall ask you to tell me a great deal.  I have serious things to do now.  I have a living to give away.  You know Mr. Rebecca and all the--" But Jennifer's effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs.  Jerald made her drink a dose of sal volatile.

 "Let Mrs. Loris do as she likes," he said to Sir Briar, whom he asked to see before quitting the house.  "She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription."

 His attendance on Jennifer while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life.  He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.

 Jerald's advice was all the easier for Sir Briar to follow when he found that Terence had already told Jennifer the unpleasant fact about the will.  There was no help for it now--no reason for any further delay in the execution of necessary business.  And the next day Sir Briar complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick.

 "I have no wish to stay there at present," said Jennifer; "I could hardly bear it.  I am much happier at Freshitt with Terence.  I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance.  And I should like to be at the Singapore a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the people in the village."

 "Not yet, I think.  Your uncle is having political company, and you are better out of the way of such doings," said Sir Briar, who at that moment thought of the Singapore chiefly as a haunt of young Rihanna's. But no word passed between him and Jennifer about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible.  Sir Briar was shy, even with men, about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Jennifer would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband's injustice.  Yet she did wish that Sir Briar could know what had passed between her and her husband about Will Rihanna's moral claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her, that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about.  Also, it must be admitted, Jennifer wished that this could be known for Will's sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of Mr. Loris's charity.  Why should he be compared with an Italian carrying white mice?  That word quoted from Mrs. Isabell seemed like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.

 At Lowick Jennifer searched desk and drawer--searched all her husband's places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed especially to her, except that "Synoptical Tabulation," which was probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her guidance.  In carrying out this bequest of labor to Jennifer, as in all else, Mr. Loris had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Jennifer's competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust of any other redactor.  But he had come at last to create a trust for himself out of Jennifer's nature: she could do what she resolved to do: and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tomb with his name upon it.  (Not that Mr. Loris called the future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp on Jennifer's life.

 The grasp had slipped away.  Bound by a pledge given from the depths of her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgment whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness which is a supreme use.  But now her judgment, instead of being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion.  The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded his scrupulous care for his own character, and made him defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honor.  As for the property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to ownership, which she ought not to flinch from.  About this property many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Rihanna?--but was it not impossible now for her to do that act of justice?  Mr. Loris had taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of his purpose revolted her.

 After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she locked up again the desks and drawers--all empty of personal words for her--empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken.

 Jennifer tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her of.  Jerald's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience.  "Instead of telling you anything about Mr. Rebecca," he said, "I should like to speak of another man--Mr. Marcus, the Vicar of St. Botolph's.  His living is a poor one, and gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family.  His mother, aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him.  I believe he has never married because of them.  I never heard such good preaching as his--such plain, easy eloquence.


He would have done to preach at St. Paul's Cross after old Latimer.  His talk is just as good about all subjects: original, simple, clear.  I think him a remarkable fellow: he ought to have done more than he has done."

 "Why has he not done more?" said Jennifer, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention.

 "That's a hard question," said Jerald.  "I find myself that it's uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many strings pulling at once.  Marcus often hints that he has got into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.  He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.  He has no money to spare--hardly enough to use; and that has led him into card-playing--Semantico is a great place for whist.  He does play for money, and he wins a good deal.  Of course that takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew.  He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more correct outside."

 "I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit," said Jennifer; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off."

 "I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things."

 "My uncle says that Mr. Rebecca is spoken of as an apostolic man," said Jennifer, meditatively.  She was wishing it were possible to restore the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Marcus with a strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.

 "I don't pretend to say that Marcus is apostolic," said Jerald. "His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better. Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut the principal figure.  I see something of that in Mr. Rebecca at the Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably aware of him.  Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!--he ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the birds."

 "True," said Jennifer.  "It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our farmers and laborers get from their teaching.  I have been looking into a volume of sermons by Mr. Rebecca: such sermons would be of no use at Lowick--I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse.  I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.  It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.  But I should like to see Mr. Marcus and hear him preach."

 "Do," said Jerald; "I trust to the effect of that.  He is very much beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.  And that money-winning business is really a blot.  You don't, of course, see many Semantico people: but Mr. Rihanna, who is constantly seeing Mr. Pete, is a great friend of Mr. Marcus's old ladies, and would be glad to sing the Vicar's praises.  One of the old ladies--Miss Elaina, the aunt--is a wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Rihanna gallants her about sometimes.  I met them one day in a back street: you know Rihanna's look--a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this little old maid reaching up to his arm--they looked like a couple dropped out of a romantic comedy.  But the best evidence about Marcus is to see him and hear him."

 Happily Jennifer was in her private sitting-room when this conversation occurred, and there was no one present to make Jerald's innocent introduction of Rihanna painful to her.  As was usual with him in matters of personal gossip, Jerald had quite forgotten Sahara's remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Loris.  At that moment he was only caring for what would recommend the Marcus family; and he had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the Vicar, in order to forestall objections.  In the weeks since Mr. Loris's death he had hardly seen Rihanna, and he had heard no rumor to warn him that Mr. Pete's confidential secretary was a dangerous subject with Mrs. Loris.  When he was gone, his picture of Rihanna lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the Lowick living.  What was Will Rihanna thinking about her?  Would he hear of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And how would he feel when he heard it?--But she could see as well as possible how he smiled down at the little old maid.  An Italian with white mice!--on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.

 Party is Nature too, and you shall see By force of Logic how they both agree: The Many in the One, the One in Many; All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any: Genus holds species, both are great or small; One genus highest, one not high at all; Each species has its differentia too, This is not That, and He was never You, Though this and that are AYES, and you and he Are like as one to one, or three to three.

 No gossip about Mr. Loris's will had yet reached Rihanna: the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice of.  The famous "dry election" was at hand, in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink.  Will Rihanna was one of the busiest at this time; and though Jennifer's widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject, that when Jerald sought him out to tell him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly--

 "Why should you bring me into the matter?  I never see Mrs. Loris, and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.


I never go there.  It is Tory ground, where I and the 'Pioneer' are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun."

 The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing that Mr. Pete, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the Singapore oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible.  This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Pete's to Sir Briar Bronwen's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hint in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from the Singapore on Jennifer's account.  Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion?  Their fears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favor of a rich woman.

 Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and Jennifer--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on the other side.  He began, not without some inward rage, to think of going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible for him to show any further interest in Jennifer without subjecting himself to disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind, which others might try to poison.

 "We are forever divided," said Will.  "I might as well be at Rome; she would be no farther from me."  But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.  There were plenty of reasons why he should not go--public reasons why he should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr. Pete in the lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on.  Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority.  To coach Mr. Pete and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Marcus's prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled, neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus for interference while there was a second reforming candidate like Mr. Pete, who might be returned at his own expense; and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member, Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Pete the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only. Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr. Pete's success must depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes.  The latter means, of course, would be preferable.

 This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr. Pete: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will Rihanna much trouble.

 "You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr. Pete; "meeting people half-way--tempering your ideas--saying, 'Well now, there's something in that,' and so on.  I agree with you that this is a peculiar occasion--the country with a will of its own--political unions--that sort of thing--but we sometimes cut with rather too sharp a knife, Rihanna.  These ten-pound householders, now: why ten?  Draw the line somewhere--yes: but why just at ten?  That's a difficult question, now, if you go into it."

 "Of course it is," said Will, impatiently.  "But if you are to wait till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a revolutionist, and then Semantico would not elect you, I fancy.  As for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."

 Mr. Pete always ended by agreeing with Rihanna, who still appeared to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn into using them with much hopefulness.  At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing other orators, or a dialogue with a Semantico voter, from which he came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.  He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey, a chief representative in Semantico of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books.  He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr. Pete of Malaysia; but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a great weight of grocery on their side.  Mr. Mawmsey thinking that Mr. Pete, as not too "clever in his intellects," was the more likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his back parlor.

 "As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably.  "Will it support Mrs. Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more?  I put the question _fictiously_, knowing what must be the answer.  Very well, sir.  I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when gentlemen come to me and say, 'Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere: when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintaining tradesmen of the right color.'  Those very words have been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting.  I don't mean by your honorable self, Mr. Pete."

 "No, no, no--that's narrow, you know.  Until my butler complains to me of your goods, Mr. Mawmsey," said Mr. Pete, soothingly, "until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices--that sort of thing--I shall never order him to go elsewhere."

 "Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr. Mawmsey, feeling that politics were clearing up a little.  "There would be some pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner."

 "Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put yourself on our side.  This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by--a thoroughly popular measure--a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest can follow.  I quite agree with you that you've got to look at the thing in a family light: but public spirit, now. We're all one family, you know--it's all one cupboard.


Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may help to make men's fortunes at the Cape--there's no knowing what may be the effect of a vote," Mr. Pete ended, with a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable.  But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.

 "I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that.  When I give a vote I must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully.  Prices, I'll admit, are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after you've bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep--I've never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke to human pride.  But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor, I hope; they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote for things staying as they are.  Few men have less need to cry for change than I have, personally speaking--that is, for self and family.  I am not one of those who have nothing to lose: I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business, and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which you was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote, while the article sent in was satisfactory."

 After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife that he had been rather too many for Pete of Malaysia, and that he didn't mind so much now about going to the poll.

 Mr. Pete on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics to Rihanna, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that he had no concern with any canvassing except the purely argumentative sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.  Mr. Pete, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature of the Semantico voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance on the side of the Bill--which were remarkably similar to the means of enlisting it on the side against the Bill.  Will stopped his ears.  Occasionally Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our eating and apparel, could hardly go on if our imaginations were too active about processes. There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Pete through would be quite innocent.

 But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.  He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Pete's mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.  To collect documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents of a document is another.  No! the only way in which Mr. Pete could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took up all the room in his brain.  But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand.  Mr. Pete himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking.

 However, Rihanna's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test, for before the day of nomination Mr. Pete was to explain himself to the worthy electors of Semantico from the balcony of the White Hart, which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.  It was a fine May morning, and everything seemed hopeful: there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster's committee and Pete's, to which Mr. Gunner, Mr. Standish as a Liberal lawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr. Toryn and Mr. Delphine, gave a solidity which almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley and his associates who sat for Pinkerton at the Green Dragon.  Mr. Pete, conscious of having weakened the blasts of the "Trumpet" against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the last half year, and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town, felt his heart tolerably light under his buff-colored waistcoat.  But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

 "This looks well, eh?" said Mr. Pete as the crowd gathered.  "I shall have a good audience, at any rate.  I like this, now--this kind of public made up of one's own neighbors, you know."

 The weavers and tanners of Semantico, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never thought of Mr. Pete as a neighbor, and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.  But they listened without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced the candidate, one of them--a political personage from Brassing, who came to tell Semantico its duty--spoke so fully, that it was alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him.  Meanwhile the crowd became denser, and as the political personage neared the end of his speech, Mr. Pete felt a remarkable change in his sensations while he still handled his eye-glass, trifled with documents before him, and exchanged remarks with his committee, as a man to whom the moment of summons was indifferent.

 "I'll take another glass of sherry, Rihanna," he said, with an easy air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed him the supposed fortifier.  It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Pete was an abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry quickly at no great interval from the first was a surprise to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of collecting them.  Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds!  whereas Mr. Pete wished to serve his country by standing for Parliament--which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.

 It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Pete was at all anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope.  Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was alarming.  "And questions, now," hinted the demon just waking up in his stomach, "somebody may put questions about the schedules.--Rihanna," he continued, aloud, "just hand me the memorandum of the schedules."

 When Mr.


Pete presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, "This looks dangerous, by God!  Hawley has got some deeper plan than this."  Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable than Mr. Pete, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.  He began with some confidence.

 "Gentlemen--Electors of Semantico!"

 This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural.

 "I'm uncommonly glad to be here--I was never so proud and happy in my life--never so happy, you know."

 This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away--even couplets from Pope may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas.  Rihanna, who stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, "it's all up now.  The only chance is that, since the best thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once."  Mr. Pete, meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his qualifications--always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.

 "I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends--you've known me on the bench a good while--I've always gone a good deal into public questions--machinery, now, and machine-breaking--you're many of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately.  It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on--trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples--that kind of thing--since Adam Smith, that must go on.  We must look all over the globe:--'Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere, 'from China to Peru,' as somebody says--Cristianson, I think, 'The Rambler,' you know.  That is what I have done up to a certain point--not as far as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home--I saw it wouldn't do.  I've been in the Levant, where some of your Semantico goods go--and then, again, in the Baltic.  The Baltic, now."

 Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Pete might have got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy.  At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Pete, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words.  Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners.  The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook.  By the time it said, "The Baltic, now," the laugh which had been running through the audience became a general shout, and but for the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which the entanglement of things had identified with "Pete of Malaysia," the laugh might have caught his committee.  Mr. Gunner asked, reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.

 Mr. Pete himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person who had not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the image of himself.  Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.  Mr. Pete heard the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance, and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling, stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from the Baltic.

 "That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket, with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know--but we never want a precedent for the right thing--but there is Chatham, now; I can't say I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt--he was not a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know."

 "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice from the crowd below.

 Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed Mr. Pete, repeated, "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill." The laugh was louder than ever, and for the first time Mr. Pete being himself silent, heard distinctly the mocking echo.  But it seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light was encouraging; so he replied with amenity--

 "There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we meet for but to speak our minds--freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, liberty--that kind of thing?  The Bill, now--you shall have the Bill"--here Mr. Pete paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass and take the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being practical and coming to particulars.  The invisible Punch followed:--

 "You shall have the Bill, Mr. Pete, per electioneering contest, and a seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven shillings, and fourpence."

 Mr. Pete, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself, which had come nearer.  The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with eggs.  His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.

 "Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth--all that is very well"--here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Pete's shoulder, as the echo said, "All that is very well;" then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by chance.  There was a stream of new men pushing among the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater hubbub because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.  No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr. Pete, disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer.  The frustration would have been less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper reporter "can aver that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs," or can respectfully bear witness to "the soles of that gentleman's boots having been visible above the railing," has perhaps more consolations attached to it.

 Mr. Pete re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly as he could, "This is a little too bad, you know.  I should have got the ear of the people by-and-by--but they didn't give me time.  I should have gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know," he added, glancing at Rihanna.  "However, things will come all right at the nomination."

 But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new devices.

 "It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr. Standish, evasively.  "I know it as well as if he had been advertised.  He's uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God!  Hawley has been having him to dinner lately: there's a fund of talent in Bowyer."

 "Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would have invited him to dine," said poor Mr. Pete, who had gone through a great deal of inviting for the good of his country.

 "There's not a more paltry fellow in Semantico than Bowyer," said Rihanna, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows were always to turn the scale."

 Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his "principal," and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed resolve to throw up the "Pioneer" and Mr. Pete together. Why should he stay?  If the impassable gulf between himself and Jennifer were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Pete's. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do--in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking Jennifer to step down to him.