CHAPTER IV.

TWO OLD LOVERS.

THE Malmaison carnations had been presented, accepted with gracious gratitude, and were lying in the lap of the lady whose ripe beauty accorded well with that of the flowers. She sat in a low chair with her back to the window, through whose rose-tinted curtains streamed a warm western light. By her side sat Lord Roydmore, the elderly gentleman who had never been so much as suspected of the folly of flirting, much less of dreaming of marrying again-by his daughter Jane. One of Mrs. Collette's hands was tenderly clasped in both of his; the other played listlessly with the flowers he had given her. The situation appeared to be full of sentiment, but there was nothing sentimental in the expression of her determined and rather dissatisfied face.

"It seems to me that we may go on in this indefinite way for the next ten years," she began impatiently. "Jane is the only one of your children to whom you owe the slightest explanation, for she is the only one whom it could affect in any way. Mrs. Graves is married and settled away, and your son has his own income and own chambers. I have made Jane like me." (Lord Roydmore winced.) "I am sure, as far as she is concerned that you might tell her you are going to marry me without any fear of her making a fuss."

"I would rather defer-in fact, I shall defer-the explanation until my daughter Florence has paid us her visit and gone home again. I don't want my home peace destroyed by any wrangling with her."

Mrs. Collette snatched her hand away from him impatiently. "Upon my word, Roydmore, I do believe that you're afraid of your eldest daughter. Nicely you must have spoilt her to let her get the upper hand of you so completely. Leave me to deal with her; I think I can hold my own with Mrs. Graves, or a dozen Mrs. Graves'!"

"I don't mean my marriage to be made the occasion of a scandalous quarrel with my family," he said, with decision;

"leave the matter to me entirely, and all will be arranged as you wish in due time."

"As 'I wish'; that's a nice way of putting it."

"Well, as we wish, then. My dearest Helen, I think I have proved my fidelity and affection; but we are no longer young people, and it would not become us to be impetuous."

An angry flush rose to her face as he uttered the truism. Certainly they were "no longer young," but she looked a good thirty years his junior.

"I am not sure that it would not become us better than this senseless dawdling at your time of life."

"You would not be hard upon me, Helen, if you knew how I am hurrying on the alterations at Roydmore for your reception when we are married."

She made a grimace.

"You mean to go to Roydmore, then, and take me? Well, it you don't care, I am sure I needn't."

"It is more than twenty-two years since we either of us have been near the place. Some of the old servants are left, it is true, but no one who will remember you."

"Yet I should scarcely consider myself a person to be forgotten, Roydmore."

"My dearest, you were a lovely girl, little more than a lovely child, in fact, in those days. Now you are a glorious woman, Helen."

"Child as I was, I managed to turn the heads of two men down there, didn't I?" she asked laughingly, and he bent forward and kissed her lips with a sudden passion that startled her and surprised himself.

"I can't bear to hear you make the most distant allusion to the man you married, the villain who caused you so much misery." She shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't often think of him, much less speak of him," she said carelessly.

"How long ago did he die? told me any of the details of his inconsistency.

Where was it? You've never

death," he asked, with curious

"You hate to hear anything about him, and as I hate mentioning him, we will drop the subject, please," she replied coolly.

"At least he had the decency to leave you provided for when he deserted you. You have never known want, Helen?"

She coloured furiously, and flung up her head.

"I have not been utterly destitute of friends. You forget some of my people were very well off, and I have not been a castaway simply because I made an unfortunate marriage in my youth."

"The very memory of which shall be blotted out by the happiness of the marriage you will make in your maturity, my darling," he said, kissing her. But Mrs. Collette had no fancy for his kisses. Whatever weaknesses she might have, they were not of a sentimental or amorous order. Accordingly she withdrew herself from his embrace, rose from her chair, and stood away from him, picking the bouquet of carnation to pieces, and re-arranging them in glasses on a little occasional table. As she did so, she glanced at him now and again, and thought how elderly he looked, and how dull it would be if younger and more interesting men were henceforth not permitted to dangle about in her train.

"How badly these florists arrange their flowers, as a rule,” she said, tugging away at the slight links which bound the flowers together. "Do you know, Roydmore, if you hadn't come along when you did and proposed to me, I should have gone into business as a lady florist. All the men would have come to me for button-holes," she wound up, with a laugh. "And you

know," she added, after a pause of a moment or two, "the trade blood in me would have been of service, and have made me a capital business woman."

"Such a painful necessity is removed from your path for ever."

"The necessity of doing something never has been painful to me. I could never be an indolent, fine lady. I have done much harder work in my time than a florist has to do."

"What work? What kind of work?" he asked anxiously. "Oh, keeping the balance; keeping people on as friends who wanted to be lovers. That's awfully hard work at times, especially"—she stole a sly glance at him-" when the people were young and ardent and impressionable."

"Your reminiscences are scarcely of an order to give me pleasure," he said, rising up, and she saw that he was offended

This did not disturb her at all. She held his written offer of marriage, and therefore he might exercise his capacity for taking offence to an unlimited extent. She had been wanting him to go for the last quarter of an hour, so she chose to take the fact of his rising from his chair as the prelude to his departure.

"Good-bye," she said, holding herself so that he could not possibly kiss her again. "Mind you assert yourself if your eldest daughter tries on any of her airs with you. If you don't, I shall have to assert myself, and then there will be ructions. Tell Jane that I want her to come and meet a charming young man to-morrow; he's going to call on me about afternoon tea time. Jane might do considerably worse than capture Captain. Stafford, for he's well off, as handsome as a star, has the V.C., and holds a good staff appointment."

"Is he a new or old acquaintance?" Lord Roydmore asked. "He was a subaltern in Simla when 1 was out there with Dick; by the way, he knows the Graves', he's an old schoolchum of your son-in-law's, and he has been staying at The Court; but he's not one of the crew who leads Mrs. Graves on to-"

"Don't say the word, don't say the word," Lord Roydmore interrupted, holding up his hand imploringly. "I can't even bear to hear such a thing rumoured of my daughter, though I feel there is no truth in the rumour."

"Nonsense! You ask her husband; they say that even in this short time she has half ruined him."

"Does his friend Captain Stafford tell you this?

"No; he's as close as wax about everything that goes on at The Court. Only the other day, when I said I wanted to introduce him to Lord Roydmore's daughter, he said he knew one of them already,' in a tone that made me think he did not much care about knowing another. So then I told him what a dear girl Jane was, quite different to Mrs. Graves, and he's coming to-morrow."

"Be careful what you're about; be very sure of the stamp of man you introduce to my daughter, Helen."

"Captain Stafford is a man you can have no fear about; you'll understand that when you know him. He's thoroughly honourable; one of the very few really honourable men Dick ever introduced to me," she continued, with a scornful laugh.

"But I am keeping you from your club-how selfish of me." Then she rang the bell, and smiled so winningly at him that she made him feel she was dissmissing him summarily for the furtherance of his own pleasure.

Lord Roydmore had scarcely got himself out of the square in which Mrs. Collette lived, when a hansom dashed up to her door, and out of it got an old-fashioned looking, little, roundabout man, whose years probably numbered no more than Lord Roydmore's, but who might have been old enough to be that gentleman's father, one would have said at the first cursory glance.

Following him there stepped out of the hansom an elderly lady, cut on precisely the same pattern as himself. She also was round-about and old-fashioned in appearance, with a face brimming over with human kindess, and attired in the most expensive material and tasteless fashion. They looked thoroughly out of place, the pair of them, as they trotted through Helen Collette's theatrically-arranged hall into her meretriciouly-furnished drawing-room. Yet they trotted as those to whom the ground was quite familiar, and they both embraced her as if she had been their own child.

"My brother has been quite miserable at not having seen or heard from you for a week, Helen," the old lady commenced, "but I tell him he is too exacting. We can't expect to have so much of you as we had before your old friend Lord Roydmore and you met again."

Helen Collette had the grace to blush as she answered glibly:

Really I see very little of Lord Roydmore and Miss Herries. I try all I can to be kind to the poor motherless girl, who, although she is the Honourable Jane Herries, is a very ignorant little country bumpkin. But you know what a busy woman I am-or try to be. This appointment (which I owe to you-you dear things)-(this parenthetically, accompanied by a filial embrace of both her portly little visitors)-takes up all my time nearly. Oh! I can assure you the post of corresponding Home Decorator on a fashionable weekly, like the Empress, is no sinecure. Why people are actually writing to me now to ask what breed and colour of dogs 'goes best' with their respective drawing-rooms and boudoirs."