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СКАЧАТЬ unnatural desire to enter into competition with that goddess. Her classical studies taught her that women had competed successfully with such rivals, and she was not morbidly self-distrustful, especially when a looking-glass was near her.

      With the letter in her hand she glanced at the mirror over the mantelpiece, and the fair vision of dark-brown lashes, gold-brown waving hair, delicate oval face, and well-shaped if rather large mouth, might have reassured her had she felt any doubts of her own attractions. But the glance she cast at herself over her shoulder was one of saucy triumph, and the smile with which she sealed her letter one of conscious power.

      Would she have been gratified if she could have seen the effect of her note? It was not at all with the sort of expression you would expect to see on the face of a man who had just received a dinner invitation transmitted through the lady of his heart from that lady's papa, that Richard Ferrier passed the note over to his brother next morning.

      'Here you are,' he said. 'Bouquet de Nihilist, trebly distilled.'

      'Well, don't let's go, then.'

      'Why, I thought you were so fond of the Count. I wonder you don't jump at it. I thought it would please you.'

      'So I do like him—he's a splendid speaker; but I didn't come to London to spend all my days and nights with him, any more than you did. Besides, I'm engaged for to-night.'

      'Oh, are you? Well, I think I shall go.'

      'You'd better leave it alone. You won't stand much chance beside a man with such a moustache as that. Besides, he sings, don't you know? and with all your solid and admirable qualities, Richard, you're not a nightingale.'

      'Nor yet a runaway rebel.'

      'I say, you'd better look a little bit after your epithets. Litvinoff doesn't look much of the running-away sort. According to what I heard last night, he can use a revolver with effect on occasion. By the way, Richard,' he went on, more seriously, 'I believe I saw a face at that club I knew, but it was only for a minute, and I lost sight of it, and I couldn't be sure.'

      'Who did you think it was?'

      'Little Alice.'

      'Think—you think!' said his brother, turning fiercely on him. 'Do you mean to say you didn't know?'

      'Know? Of course not, or I should say so. What the deuce do you mean?'

      'I should like to ask you what the deuce you mean by even debating whether or no to accept that invitation when you know you've no earthly right to go near Miss Stanley—'

      'You'd better mention your ideas to Mr Stanley. I don't in the least know what you're driving at—and I don't care; but since you choose to bring her name in, I shall throw over my other engagement and go to Morley's to-night.'

      'You can go to the devil if you choose!' said Dick, who seemed to have entirely lost his self-control, and he flung out, slamming the door behind him.

      Clare's note was bearing more fruit than she desired or anticipated in setting the brothers not so much against Litvinoff as against each other, for what but her letter could have stirred Dick's temper to this sudden and unpremeditated outbreak? What but her note and Dick's comments thereon could have ruffled Roland's ordinarily even nature in this way? It is always a mistake to play with fire; but people, girls especially, will not believe this until they have burned their own fingers, and, en passant, more of other people's valuables than they can ever estimate.

      'I wish I had spoken to that girl yesterday,' said Count Litvinoff to himself; 'it would have saved my turning out this vile afternoon. If fate has given England freedom, she has taken care to accompany the gift with a fair share of fog. I wish I could help worrying about other people's troubles. It is very absurd, but I can't get on with my work for thinking of that poor tired little face. Hard up, she looked, too. Ah, well! so shall I be very soon, unless something very unexpected turns up. I'll go now, and earn an easy conscience for this evening.'

      He threw down his pen and rose. The article on the Ethics of Revolution on which he was engaged had made but small progress that afternoon. He had felt ever since lunch that go out he must sooner or later, and the prospect was dispiriting. He glanced out of his window as he put on his fur-lined coat. From the windows of Morley's Hotel the view on a fine day is about as cheerful as any that London can present—though one may have one's private sentiments respecting the pepper-boxes which emphasise the bald ugliness of the National Gallery, and though one may sometimes wish that the slave of the lamp would bring St George's Hall from Liverpool and drop it on that splendid site. But this was not a fine day. It was a gloomy, damp, foggy, depressing, suicidal day. The fog had, with its usual adroitness, managed to hide the beauties of everything, and to magnify the uglinesses. Nelson was absolutely invisible, and the lions looked like half-drowned cats. Litvinoff shuddered as he lighted a large cigar and pulled his gloves on.

      'This is a detestable climate,' he said, as he drew the first whiffs; 'but London is about the only place I know where good cigars can be had at a price to fit the pocket of an exile. I suppose I shall soon have to leave this palatial residence, and become one of the out-at-elbows gentlemen who make life hideous in Leicester Square and Soho.'

      Like many men who have lived lonely lives, Michael Litvinoff had an inveterate habit of soliloquy. It had been strengthened by his life at the ancestral mansion on the Litvinoff estate, and had not grown less in his years of solitary wanderings.

      His walk to-day was not a pleasant one, and more than once he felt inclined to turn back. But he persevered, and when he reached the house which he had seen her enter he asked a woman on the ground floor if Miss Hatfield lived there.

      'There's a young person named Hatfield in the front attic,' was the reply, as the informant stared with all her eyes at the Count, who was certainly an unusual sort of apparition in Spray's Buildings.

      As he strode up the dirty, rotten stairs, stumbling more than once, he thought to himself, as Dick had done, that Alice did not make her new life profitable, whatever it was.

      'Poor girl!' he thought; 'if she's of the same mind now as she was when I saw her last, I suppose I must find an opportunity of doing good by stealth.'

      The house, though poor enough, did not seem to be one of those overcrowded dens of which we have heard so much lately, and which a Royal Commission is to set right, as a Royal Commission always does set everything right. Or perhaps the lodgers were birds of prey, who only came home to roost at uncertain hours; or beasts of burden, who were only stabled at midnight to be harnessed again at sunrise. At anyrate, the Count saw no one on the stairs, and he saw no one in the front attic either. Not only no one, but no thing. The door and window were both open. The room appeared to have been swept and garnished, but was absolutely empty of everything but fog. There was another door opposite, but it was closed and locked.

      'She's evidently not here. We'll try lower down.' But before he had time to turn he heard a foot on the stairs, coming up with the light and springy tread which is the result of good and well-fitting boots, and which does not mark those who walk through life, from the cradle to the grave, shod in boots several sizes too large and several pounds too heavy.

      He glanced over the broken banisters, and recoiled hastily.

      'The gentle Roland, by all that's mysterious!' he said, 'Now, what on earth can he want here? At anyrate, he'd better not see me.'

      The landing on which he stood was very dark, and there was a heap of lumber, old boxes, a hopelessly broken chair, a tub, and some boards. Litvinoff crept behind them, and in his black coat and the obscurity of the dusky landing and the dark afternoon СКАЧАТЬ