The Invisible Foe E-Book

Louise Jordan Miln

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Nothing could be more characteristic of these three children than their current occupation. Stephen usually watched the birds fly when he left the house, and the birds could be seen. And the only time his uncle Richard ever laid his hand on an orphan boy was when Stephen, three months after his arrival in the Dale Dale, opened his cage and lost Elena his pet, all because he „wanted to see how he flies. „

Leseprobe

Contents

BOOK I

THE CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK II

THE DARK

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

BOOK III

THE QUEST

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

BOOK IV

THE LIGHT

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

BOOK I

THE CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

Stephen lay on his stomach, one sharp elbow comfortable in a velvet bed of moss, his chin cupped in his palm, his beautifully shaped head thrown back, his alert face lifted to the sky, his eager eyes following hungrily the flight of a bird.

Hugh, crunched up against the big oak tree, was making a chain of blossoms, and making it awkwardly enough, with many a restless boy-sigh, many a destruction of delicate spring wild flower.

Helen was playing by herself.

Nothing could have been more characteristic of the three children than their occupations of the moment.

Stephen usually was watching birds fly, when he was out of doors, and birds were to be seen. And the only time his uncle Richard had ever laid a hand (except in rare caress or in approbation) on the orphan boy, had been when Stephen, three months after his arrival at Deep Dale, had opened its cage, and lost Helen her pet canary–all because he “wanted to see just how he flies.”

“And I did see, too,” he had told Hugh an hour after his stoically endured caning. “It was worth more than a few smacks. Bet I can fly too, some day. You wait.”

Hugh had said nothing. He was used to Stephen and Stephen’s vivid ambitions. And he was stolid.

Stephen had suffered his slight chastisement proudly–if not quite gladly–but with each faltering fall of his uncle’s cane a seed of bitterness had entered the child’s soul. He never had felt the same to “Uncle Dick” since–which was no small pity, for the orphan boy was love-hungry, and Richard Bransby his best friend.

The small punishment bred deceit but worked no cure. The men in the fowl-yard could have told sad tales of staid hens aggravated to indignant, fluttering flight, and the old gardener of peacocks goaded to rise from their self-glorified strutting and preening to fly stiff and screaming the few spaces which were their farthest. But neither the farm hands nor the gardener told. Why–it is not easy to say. They did not particularly like Stephen–few people did. But they feared him. He mastered their wills. A solitary child, not half so happy as childhood has every right to be, the boy met few he did not influence sharply. His was a masterful nature. Little altogether escaped his subtle dominance.

Stephen was not essentially cruel. His cruelty was corollary and accessory to his passion–a passion for power and for the secrets of aerial skill. He bore the birds no ill-will. He simply was obsessed to see their flight, and to study it, garnering up in his odd, isolated, accretive child’s mind–and heart–every vibrant curve and beat of their wings, every angle and bend of their bodies.

Stephen usually was watching the flight of a bird, or scheming some mechanical imitation of it.

Hugh usually was doing something for wee Helen, doing it with perspiring and sighful awkwardness and for scant thanks–or for none.

Helen usually was playing by herself, and pretending, as now, to be sharing the sport of some playfellow, perfectly tangible to her, but invisible, non-existent to the boys–a form of persistent “make believe” which greatly amused Hugh and as greatly irritated Stephen.

“Don’t pretend like that; it’s a simpleton way of going on,” the older boy called to her now, without moving his head or his eyes.

“It’s nothing of the kind,” the girl replied scornfully. “You’re blind, that’s what’s the matter–blinder’n a bat, both of you.” And she continued to laugh and chat with her “make-believe” playmates.

An elfin child herself, the children of her own delicate myth did seem the more suitable fellows for her dainty frolic than either queer Stephen or stolid, clumsy Hugh.

The little girl was very pretty, a queenly little head heavy with vivid waves of gold-red hair, curved red lips eloquent of the history of centuries of womanhood, wide blue eyes, and the prettiest hands and arms that even feminine babyhood (and English babyhood, Celtic-dashed at that) had ever yet achieved; every pink-tipped finger a miracle, and each soft, beautifully molded elbow, dimpled and dented with witching chinks that simply clamored for kisses–and often got them; a sunny, docile child, yielding but unafraid, quiet and reserved, but hiding under its rose and snow robe of provocatively pretty flesh, a will that never swerved: the strongest will at Deep Dale–and that says everything of it–for both Stephen Pryde, fourteen years old, and his uncle, nearing fifty, had stronger wills than often fall to us weak mortals of drift and vacillation. These two masculine strengths of will lay rough and prominent on the surface and also sank soul-deep. The uncle’s never abated. Circumstances and youth curbed the boy’s, at times–but neither chilled nor softened it. Helen’s will lay deep and still. Her pretty, smiling surface never showed it by so much as a gentle ripple. She kept it as a sort of spiritual “Sunday best” laid away in the lavender and tissue of her secret self. As yet only her old Scotch nurse even suspected its existence and of all her little, subservient world, only that old Scotch nurse neither laughed at Helen’s dream friends–nor scoffed. In her sweet six years of life her father’s will and hers had never clashed. That, when the almost inevitable clash of child and parent, old and young, cautious experience and adventurous inexperience, came, Helen’s should prove the stronger will, and hers the victory, would have seemed absurd and incredible to all who knew them–to every one except the nurse.

Stephen and Hugh, in their different boyish ways, loved the girl-child, and wooed her.

She tolerated them both, patronized, tyrannized, and cared little for either.

Hugh was thick-set and had sweaty hands. Often he bored her.

Stephen’s odd face, already at fourteen corrugated by thought, ambition and strident personality painfully concealed, repelled her–even frightened her a little, a very little; for her cherished life and serene soul gave her little gift of fear.

Their wills clashed daily–but almost always over things about which she cared little or less than little, and did not trouble to be insistent. She yielded over such trifles–out of indifference and almost contemptuous good-nature sheerly. And the boy, “blind” here at least, misread it. But on one point Stephen never could prevail against her. She would neither renounce her invisible playmates nor even concede him that they were indeed “make-believe.”

Her will and Hugh’s never clashed. How could they? He had no will but hers.

Hugh was her slave.

Stephen, loving her as strongly and as hotly, sought to be her master. No conscious presumption this: it was his nature.

Deep Dale was all simmering blue and green to-day–with softening shadows and tones of gray; blue sky, green grass, trees green-leafed, gray-trunked–green paths, gray and green-walled, blue roofed, the early spring flowers (growing among the grasses but sparsely as yet, and being woven, too often broken-necked, into Hugh’s devoted jewelering) too tiny of modest bud and timid bloom to speck but most minutely the picture with lemon, violet or rose. The little girl’s wealth of red hair made the glory and the only emphatic color of the picture. Hugh’s hair was ash brown and dull–Stephen’s darker, growing to black–but as dull. Even the clothes of these three children painted in perfectly with the blue and green of this early May-day, Nature’s spring-song. The lads, not long out of mourning, were dressed in sober gray. Helen’s frocks came from Hanover Square, when they did not come from the Rue de Rivoli, and to-day her little frock of turquoise cashmere was embroidered and sashed with green as soft and tender as the pussy willows and their new baby leafage.

But the sun–a pale gray sun at best all day–was slipping down the sky’s blue skirt. Helen, tiring of her elvish play, or wholesomely hungry for “cambric” tea and buns, slid off the tree trunk, smiled back and waved her hand–to nothing, and turned towards the house. Hugh trotted after her, not sorry to suspend his trying toil, not sorry to approach cake and jam, but carrying his stickily woven tribute with him. But Stephen, enthralled, almost entranced, lay still, his fine chin cupped in his strong hand, his eyes–and his soul–watching a flock of birds flying nestward towards the night.

CHAPTER II

Richard Bransby had few friends because he tolerated few. Unloving towards most, rather than unlovable, his life and his personality cut deep, but in narrow channels. To him pictures were–canvas and paint, and a considerable item of expense; for he was too shrewd a business man to buy anything cheap or inferior. Knowing his own limitations as few men have the self-searching gift to do, he took no risks with his strenuously earned sovereigns, lavishly as he spent them. He spent magnificently, but he never misspent. He had too much respect to do that–respect for his money and for himself and for the honest, relentless industry with which that self had amassed that same money. He never selected the pictures for which he paid, nor even their frames. Latham did all that for him. Horace knew almost as much about pictures and music as he did about nerves, and could chat with as much suave authority about Tintoretto and Liszt, motif and chiaro-oscuro as he could about diphtheria or Bell’s palsy, and was as much at his old friend’s service in matters of art as in matters of cerebellum and aorta. Bransby cared nothing for horses, and liked dogs just “well enough”–out of doors. He was a book-worm–with one author, scarcely more. He was indifferent to his dinner, and he cared nothing at all for flowers. This last seems strange and contradictory, for the women he had loved had each been peculiarly flowerlike. But who shall attempt to gauge or plumb the contradictorinesses of human nature, or be newly surprised at them?

Richard Bransby had loved three women passionately, and had lost them all. He was no skeptic, but he was rebel. He could not, or he would not, forgive God their death, and he grudged the Heaven, to which he doubted not they had gone, their presence. Nothing could reconcile or console him–although two strong affections (and beside which he had no other) remained to him; and with them–and his books–he patched his life and kept his heart just alive.

He loved the great ship-building business he had created, and steered through many a financial tempest, around rocks of strikes and quicksands of competition, into an impregnably fortified harbor of millionairedom, with skill as devoted and as magnificent as the skill of a Drake or the devotion of a Scott, steering and nursing some great ship or tiny bark through the desperate straits of battle or the torture perils of polar ice floes.

And he loved Helen whom he had begotten–loved her tenderly for her own sweet, lovable sake, loved her more many times, and more quickly, for the sake of her mother.

He cared nothing for flowers, but he had recognized clearly how markedly the three women he had adored (for it had amounted to that) had resembled each a blossom. His mother had been like a “red, red rose that blooms in June”–a Jacqueminot or a Xavier Olibo. And it was from her he had inherited the vivid personality of his youth. She had died suddenly–when he had been in the City, chained even then to the great business he was creating–boy of twenty-three though he was–and his hot young heart was almost broken; but not quite, for Alice, his wife, had crept into it then, a graceful tea-rose-like creature, white, pink-flushed, head-heavy with perfume. Violet, his only sister, had been a pale, pretty thing, modest and sweet as the flower of her name. Helen he thought was like some rare orchid, with her elusive piquant features, her copper-red hair, her snow face, her curved crimson lips, her intangible, indescribable charm–irregular, baffling.

Alice had died at Helen’s birth, but he blamed God and turned from Him, blamed not or turned from the small plaintive destroyer who laughed and wailed in its unmothered cradle. The young wife’s death had unnerved, and had hardened him too. It injured him soul-side and body: and the hurt to his physical self threatened to be as lasting and the more baneful. A slight cardiac miscarriage caught young Dr. Latham’s trained eye on the very day of Alice Bransby’s death–and the disturbance it caused, controlled for six silent years by the one man’s will and the other man’s skill, had not disappeared or abated. Very slowly it grimly gained slight ground, and presaged to them both the possibility of worse to come.

Only yesterday Richard Bransby had taken little Helen on his knee, and holding her sunny head close to his heart had talked to her of her mother. He often held the child so–but he rarely spoke to her of the mother–and of that mother to no one else did he ever speak. Only his own angry heart and the long hungry nights knew what she had been to him–only they and his God. God! who must be divine in pity and forgiveness towards the rebel rage of husbands so sore and so faithful.

Yesterday, too, he had told the child of how like a flower his Alice, her mother, had been, and seeing how she caught at the fancy (odd in so prosaic a man) and liked it, he had gone on to speak of his own mother, her “granny,” for all the world like a deep, very red rose, and of Violet, her aunt.

Helen wriggled her glowing head from the tender prison of his hands, looked up into his sharp, tired face, clapped her own petal-like little palms, and said with a gurgling laugh and a dancing wink of her fearless blue eyes, “And you–Daddy–are just like a flower, too!”

He shook her and called her “Miss Impudence.”

“Oh! but yes, you are. I’ll tell you, you are that tall ugly cactus that Simmons says came from Mexicur–all big prickles and one poor little lonely flower ‘way up at the top by itself, grown out of the ugly leaves and the ugly thorns, and not pretty either.”

Bransby sighed, and caught her quickly closer to him again–one poor insignificant attempt of a blossom lonely, alone; solitary but for thorns, and only desirable in comparison with them, and because it was the flowering–such as it was–of a plant exotic and costly: a magenta rag of a flower that stood for much money, and for nothing else!

The baby went on with the parable–pretty as he had made it, grotesqued now by her. “An’ Aunt Carline’s anover flower, too. She’s a daleeah.”

Bransby laughed. Caroline Leavitt was rather like a dahlia; neat, geometrically regular, handsome, cut and built by rule, fashionable, prim but gorgeous, as far from poetry and sentiment as anything a flower could be.

Mrs. Leavitt was his widowed cousin and housekeeper–called “Aunt” by the children. Richard and Violet had been the only children of John and Cora Bransby.

Violet, several years younger than Richard, had married six years earlier–married a human oddity, half-genius, half-adventurer, impecunious, improvident, vain. He had misused and broken her. His death was literally the only kindness he had ever done her–and it had killed her–for weak-womanlike she had loved him to the end. Perhaps such weakness is a finer, truer strength–weighed in God’s scales–than man-called strength.

Violet Pryde, dying five years after Alice’s death, left two children; the boys playing with six-year-old Helen under the oak trees. Bransby had been blind to his sister’s needs while Pryde had lived; but indeed she had hidden them with the silence, the dignity and the deft, quiet subterfuge of such natures–but at her husband’s death Bransby had hastened to ask, as gently as he could (and to the women he loved he could be gentleness itself), “How are you off? What do you need? What would you like best? What may I do?” pressing himself to her as suitor rather than almoner. But she had refused all but friendship, indeed almost had refused it, since it had never been given her dead. Her loyalty survived Pryde’s disloyal life, and even dwarfed and stunted her mother-instinct to do her utmost for her boys: her boys and Pryde’s. But her own death had followed close upon her husband’s, and then Richard Branbsy had asserted himself. He had gathered up into his own capable hands the shabby threads of her affairs–mismanaged for years, but–even so–too scant to be tangled, and the charge of her two orphaned boys.

He had brought Stephen and Hugh at once to Deep Dale and had established them there on an almost perfect parity with Helen–a parity impinged by little else than her advantage of sex and charm and presumable heirship.

Such was–in brief–the home and the home folk of Deep Dale, the millionaire shipbuilder’s toy estate a mile or two from Oxshott.

And Helen ruled it–and them.

Caroline Leavitt housekept, but small Helen reigned. Her reign was no ephemeral sovereignty–not even a constitutional queenship; it was autocracy gracious and sunshiny, but all of autocracy for all that. Helen ruled.

CHAPTER III

Richard Bransby had amassed a fortune and perfected a fad, but he had amassed no friends. In the thirty-five years in which he had gathered and nursed his fortune (for he began at fifteen) he had made but the one friend–Latham. And even this sole friendship was largely professional and in small degree quick or vibrant.

Helen might have had twenty playmates, but she greatly cared for none but her dear “make believes,” and tolerated no others but her cavalierly treated cousins.

Mrs. Leavitt gave tea to the well-to-do of the neighborhood, and took it of them. Very occasionally she and Richard dined with them alternately as hosts and guests. But none of it ran to friendship, or shaped towards intimacy. She was too fussy a woman for friendship, he too embittered and too arrogant a man.

The vicinity of Claygate and Oxshott teemed with the stucco and ornate wood “residences” of rich stockbrokers and successful business men–living elaborately in the lovely countryside–but not of it: of London still, train-catching, market-watching, silk-hatted, bridge-playing.

Bransby rarely hatted in silk, and he preferred Dickens to bridge. He nodded to his rich fellow-villagers, but he clasped them no hand-clasp.

He, too, was in the country but not of it, he too was Londoner to the core; but both in a sense quite different from them.

Deep Dale was a beautiful excrescence–but an excrescence–an elaborate florescence of his wealth, but he had never felt it “home,” except because Alice had rather liked it, and never would feel it “home” again except as Helen and his books might grow to make it so.

There was a flat, too, in Curzon Street Alice had liked it rather more than she had Deep Dale, and while she lived he had too; except that they had been more alone, and in that much more together, at Oxshott, and for that he had always been grateful to Deep Dale, and held it, for that, in some tenderness still. And Helen had been born there.

But to him “Home” meant a dingy house in Marylebone, in which he had been born and his mother died. He avoided seeing it now (an undertaker tenanted the basement and the first floor, a dressmaker, whose clientèle was chiefly of the slenderly-pursed demimonde, the other two floors), but he still held it in his stubborn heart for “home.”

In business Bransby was hard, cold and implastic. He had great talent in the conduct of his affairs, indefatigable industry, undeviating devotion. Small wonder–or rather none–that he grew rich and steadily richer. But had he had the genius to rule kindlier, to be friend as well as master, to win, accept and use the friendship of the men he employed (and now sometimes a little crushed of their best possibility of service by the ruthlessness of his rule and by the unsympathy of his touch), his might well have grown one of the gigantic, wizard fortunes.

Even as things were, Morton Grant, head and trusted clerk, probably attained nearer to friendship with Richard Bransby than did any one else but Latham.

For Grant nothing was relaxed. He was dealt with as crisply and treated as drastically as any office boy of the unconsidered and driven all. Bransby’s to order; Grant’s to obey. But, for all that, the employer felt some hidden, embryonic kindliness for the employee. And the clerk was devoted to the master: accepted the latter’s tyranny almost cordially, and resented it not even at heart or unconsciously.

The two men had been born within a few doors of each other on the same long, dull street. That was a link.

Grant cherished and doted on the business of which he was but a servant as much as Bransby did–not more, because more was an impossibility. He rose for it in the morning. He lay down for it at night. He rested–so far as he did rest–on the Sabbath and on perforced holidays for it. He ate for it. He dressed for it. He went to Margate once a year, second class, for it. That was a link.

Unless it involves some form of rivalry–as cricket, competitive business, acting, popular letters, desire for the same woman, two men cannot live for the selfsame thing without it in some measure breeding in them some tinge of mutual liking.

And these two reserved, uncommunicative men had loved the same woman, and contrary to rule, that too was a link–perhaps the strongest of the three–though Bransby had never even remotely suspected it.

Morton Grant could not remember when he had not loved Violet Bransby. He had yearned for her when they both wore curls and very short dresses. He had loved her when, short-sighted and round-shouldered then as now, he had been in her class at dancing school and in the adjacent class at the Sunday School, in which the pupils, aged from four to fourteen, had been decently and discreetly segregated of sex. He had loved her on her wedding-day, and wept the hard scant tears of manhood defeated, denied and at bay, until his dull, weak eyes had been bleared and red-rimmed, and his ugly little button of a nose (he had almost none) had flamed gin-scarlet. And for that one day the beloved business had been to him nothing. He had loved her when she lay shrouded in her coffin–and now, a year after, he loved her dust in its grave–and all so silently that even she had never sensed it. For the old saying is untrue: a woman does not always know.

This poor love of his was indeed a link between the man and his master–and all the stronger because Richard had been as suspicionless as Violet herself. For Bransby would have resented it haughtily, but less and less hotly than he had resented her marriage with that “mountebank” (the term is Bransby’s and not altogether just)–but of the two he would greatly have preferred Grant as a brother-in-law.

Under Helen’s sway, Grant had never come. She was not Violet’s child. He would rather even that Bransby were childless and his fortune in entire keeping for Violet’s boys. For herself he neither liked nor disliked the little girl. But he was grateful to her for being a girl. That left the business undividedly open for Stephen and Hugh–for their future participation and ultimate management at least. And he hoped that of so large a fortune an uncle so generous to them, and so fond of Violet, would allot the brothers some considerable share.

Unlike Mr. Dombey and many other self-made millionaires, Richard Bransby had never wished for a son. Not for treble his millions would he have changed her of sex: Helen satisfied him–quite.

And perhaps unconsciously he was some trifle relieved that no son, growing up to man’s assertion, could rival or question his sole headship of “Bransby’s.”

CHAPTER IV

As Helen and Hugh came singing up the path, Bransby was driving Grant from the door. It was no friendliness that had led him to speed his visitor so far, but a desire to see if Helen were not coming. The sun was setting, and the father thought it high time she came indoors.

Grant was in disgrace. He had come unbidden, forbidden, in fact–and so unwelcome.

Advised by Latham (still a youthful, but daily growing famous physician) and enforced by his own judgment, Bransby was taking a short holiday. Thorough in all things, the merchant had abandoned his business affairs and their conduct entirely–for the moment. Grant had been ordered to manage and decide everything unaided until the master’s return, and by no means to intrude by so much as a letter or a telegram.

He had disobeyed.

That it was the first turpitude of thirty years of implicit, almost craven, fealty in no way tempered its enormity. “Preposterous!” had been Bransby’s greeting. “Preposterous,” was his good-by.

Something had gone wrong at the office, or threatened to go wrong, so important that the faithful old dog had felt obliged to come for his master’s personal and immediate decision. But he had come trembling. For his pains he had had abuse and reprimand. But he had gained his point. He had got his message through, and learned Bransby’s will. And he was going away–back to his loved drudgery, not trembling, but alert and reassured.

And though Bransby abused, secretly he approved. The link was strengthened.

Bransby was angry–but also he was flattered. He was not, concerning his business at least, and a few other things, altogether above flattery. Who is? Are you?

In his quaint way he had some interior warm liking for his commonplace factotum. He trusted him unreservedly; and trust begets liking more surely and more quickly than pity begets love. After Horace Latham, Morton Grant stood to Bransby for all of human friendship and of living comradeship.

Bransby had adopted Violet’s boys, out of love for her and out of a nepotism that was conscience rather than instinct–and, too, it was pride.

They had been with him nearly a year now, and because he counted them as one of his assets, possible appanages of his great business–and because of their daily companionship with Helen–he watched them keenly. He did not suspect it, as yet, but both little fellows were creeping slowly into a corner of the heart that still beat true enough and human under his surface of granite and steel. And Stephen began to interest him much. Indisputably Stephen Pryde was interesting. He had personality beyond Nature’s average dole to each individual of that priceless though dangerous quality. And the personality of the boy, in its young way, had no slight resemblance to that of the uncle. Stephen was an eccentric in-the-making, Richard an eccentric made and polished. Each hid his eccentricity under intense reserve and a steely suavity of bearing. That this should be so in the experienced man of fifty, disciplined by time, by experience and by personal intention, was natural, and not unusual in such types. That it was so in the small boy untried and untutored was extraordinary–it spoke much of force and presaged of his future large things good or bad, whichever might eventuate, and one probably as apt to eventuate as the other, and, whichever came, to come in no small degree. And truly the lad had force even now: perhaps it was his most salient quality, and stood to him for that useful gift–magnetism–which he somewhat lacked.

As Grant went out the two children came in. Helen took her father’s hand, and led him back to the room he had just left–and Hugh followed her doglike. The word is used in no abject sense, but in its noblest.

“Ring the bell,” Richard said to the boy, sitting down in the big chair to which his tiny mistress had propelled him. She climbed into her father’s lap and snuggled her radiant head against his arm.

“Light the fire,” Bransby ordered the maid who answered the bell almost as it rang. Bells always were answered promptly in Richard Bransby’s house. In some ways Deep Dale was more of the office or counting-house type than of the home-type, and had been so, at least, since Alice Bransby’s death.

But it was a pleasant place for all that, if somewhat a stiff, formal casket for so dainty a jewel as the red-headed child who reigned there, and life ran smoothly rather than harshly in its walls and its gates.

Certainly this was a pleasant room; and it was the master’s own room.

The fire took but an instant to catch. It was well and truly laid, and scientifically nice in its proportions and arrangement of paper, anthracite and ship’s-logs.

If the novels of Charles Dickens had pride of place as Bransby’s one fad, as they certainly had pride of place on his room’s book-full shelves, open fires came near to being a minor fad. He was inclined to be cold.

But the late afternoon was growing chilly, and little Helen watched the red and orange flames approvingly as they licked and leapt through the chinks of the fuel.

Hugh, a stocky, tweed-clad boy, as apt to be too warm as was his uncle to be too cold, lay down on the floor at a discreet distance from the hearth, but not unsociably far from the armchair.

He did not move when Mrs. Leavitt came in, but he smiled at her confidently, and she smiled back at him.

Stephen, had he been there, would have risen and moved her chair, or brought her a footstool, and she would have thanked him with a smile a little less affectionate than the one she had just given negligent Hugh.