"I am sure, Miss Ashton, I hope you will not imagine for a moment either that I was riding carelessly or that I recognised Mr. Leigh until you spoke. I saw him plainly enough as he was crossing the road. He was not minding in the least where he was going. He would have got across us in good time if he had only kept on; but he pulled up suddenly right under my horse's nose. I am sure I was more frightened than he. By Jove! how he glared at me. I think he would have killed me there and then if he could. He was going to strike my horse with that dreadful bludgeon of his. I am sure I was much more frightened than he was," said Sir Julius, in a penitential tone of voice, as the two rode on side by side.

The other members of the party, including Mr. Ashton, had fallen behind and were also discussing the incident among themselves.

"You were quite blameless," said the girl, who was still pale and trembling. "I don't suppose the poor man was much afraid. Of what should he be afraid?"

"Well," said the baronet, stroking the arching neck of his bay, "he was within an ace of being ridden over, you know."

"And suppose he had been knocked down and ridden over, what has he to fear, poor man?" she said. Her eyes were fixed, and she was speaking as if unconscious she uttered her words. The group had turned out of the noise of Piccadilly and were riding close together.

"He might have been hurt, I mean seriously hurt. Particularly he?"

"Hurt! How could he be hurt? You might be hurt, or I might be hurt, but how could he be hurt. Particularly he! You fancy because he is maimed and misshapen he is more likely to be hurt than a sound man?"

"Assuredly."

"I cannot see that. When people say a man was hurt, they do not mean merely or mostly that he endured pain. They mean that he was injured or disabled in some way. How can you injure or disable him? He is as much injured and disabled as a man can be and live."

"That is very true; but he might have been killed. Miss Ashton, you do not mean to say you think it would be better he had been killed?" cried Sir Julius in a tone of one shocked and surprised.

"I do not know. Surely death and Heaven must be conditions of greater ease and happiness for him than for ordinary mortals."

"I am entirely of your opinion there. But from what I saw and heard of this man yesterday and to-day, I am disposed to think he has self-esteem enough to sustain him in any difficulty and carry him through any embarrassment."

"How are we to know how much of this self-esteem is assumed?"

"It does not matter whether it is assumed or not, so long as it is sustaining."

"What! Does it not matter at what expense it is hired for use? You amaze me, Sir Julius. You are generally sympathetic and sound, I think you have not been taking your lessons regularly under Lady Forcar. She would be quicker sighted in a matter of this kind." The girl shook off her air of abstraction and smiled at the young man.

"No, Miss Ashton, I am not neglecting the lectures of Lady Forcar, but of late they have not been much concerned with man. I deeply deplore it, but she has taken to pigs. Anyway she would talk of nothing but pigs yesterday, at your mother's. And even the improvement of my mind does not come within her consideration under the head of pigs, although I begged of her to be gracious and let it."

"That is very sad indeed. You must feel sorely slighted. And what has she to say about pigs?"

"Oh, I really couldn't think of half the distractingly flattering things she has to say about them. She made me miserably jealous, I assure you. She says she is going to write an article for one of the heavy, of the very heaviest, magazines, and she is going to call her article 'Dead Pigs and the Pigs that eat them,' and such harmless people as you and I are to be considered among the latter class in the title. Isn't that fearful. She says from this forth, her mission is pigs."

"I shall certainly read this wonderful article when it appears," said the girl with a laugh. "Can you tell me anything more about this article?"

"No; except that it was Mr. Leigh started the subject between her and me."

"Mr. Leigh?" said Dora gravely.

"Yes. When she saw him eat all your bread and butter, she said he was a man who, in the hands of a clever wife, might act the part of a Napoleon the Great in social matters."

The grave look on Dora's face changed to one of sadness. At first, when Sir Julius mentioned the dwarf's name, she thought some unkind reference was about to be made to his unhappy physical deformities. Now her anxiety was relieved on that score only to have her feelings aroused anew over the spectacle of his spiritual desolation. He marry! How could he marry? And yet he had told them he had found the model for his Pallas-Athena. She was not so simple as to think the mere intellectual being was represented to him by the model for his Pallas-Athena. Suppose he used the name of Pallas-Athena only out of shyness for what struck him as mere loveliness in woman, mere good looks and kindliness of nature? What a heart-breaking thought! What an awful torture it must be to be hungry for love and beauty in such a form!

Sir Julius Whinfield left her at the house in Curzon Street, and she went up to her own room to change her dress. She had nothing arranged for between that and dinner. Her father had gone away on foot from the house, and her mother had taken the carriage before luncheon to pay a visit to some people in whom Dora was not interested. The girl had all the afternoon to herself, and she had plenty of thought to occupy it. She threw herself in a large easy chair by the open window. Her room was at the back of the house, and looked out on a space of roofs and walls and tiny gardens. There was nothing in view to distract the eye. There was much within to exercise the spirit.

"It would be madness," was the result of deep and long thought, "to go any further. I like him well enough and admire him greatly, and I daresay-no, let me be quite candid-I _know_ he likes me. I daresay we are better disposed towards each other than one tenth of the people who marry, but that is not enough.

"We did not fall in love with one another at first sight. It was no boy and girl attachment. We were attracted towards one another by the intellectual sides of our characters. I thought I was wiser than other girls in not allowing my fancy to direct my fate. I thought he and I together might achieve great things. I am now afraid it is as great, even a greater, mistake to marry for intellect than to marry for money or position.

"I have made up my mind now. Nothing shall change me. My decision is as much for his good as my own. Last night was not the climax of what would be. It was only the first of a long line of difficulties or quarrels that would increase as time went on.

"We have been enduring one another out of admiration for one another, not loving one another for our own and love's own sake.

"It will cost me many a pang, but it must be done. I shall make no sign. I shall make no announcement. No one has been formally told we are engaged, and no one has any business to know. If people have guessed it, let them now guess the engagement has been broken off. I am not bound to enlighten them."

Then she rose and found materials for a letter, and wrote:

"Dear Mr. Hanbury,

"I have been thinking a great deal of the talk we had last night after dinner, and I have come to the conclusion that it was all for the best. We should never be able to agree. I think the least said now the better. Our engagement has not been announced to anyone. Nothing need be said about its being broken off. I hope this arrangement will be carried out with as little pain to either as possible. I shall not send you back your letters. I am sure getting back letters is always painful, and ought to be avoided. I shall burn yours, and I ask you to do the same with any notes you may have of mine. Neither will I return the few things that cannot be burned. None of them is, I think, of any intrinsic value to you beyond the value it had between you and me. I shall keep them for a week and then destroy them.

"Believe me, Mr. Hanbury, I take this step with a view to our mutual good, and in no haste or pique. I shall always think of you, with the greatest interest and respect. I should like, if you think well of it, that we may remain friends in appearance as I hope we may always be in spirit.

"I ask you for only one favour. Pray do not make any attempt whatever to treat this decision as anything but final and irrevocable.

"Yours very sincerely,
"Dora Ashton."

She determined not to post this letter until late that night. To-morrow she was dining out. She should leave home early and not come back until she had to go straight to her room to dress. After dinner, they were going to the theatre, so she should avoid all chance of meeting him if he disregarded her request and called.

So far the difficult parts of the affair had been done, and done too with much less pain than she could have imagined. She had taken the two great steps without faltering. She had made up her mind to end the engagement between her and John Hanbury, and she had written to him saying the engagement was at an end. If ill-matched people who found themselves engaged to one another only acted with her decision and promptness what an infinity of misery would be avoided. She was almost surprised it had required so little effort for her to make up her mind and to put her decision on paper. She had often heard of the miseries such a step entailed, and here she was now sitting alone in her own room after doing the very thing and feeling little the worse of it. She was but twenty-one, and she had broken with the only man she had ever seriously thought of as a lover, and it had not caused her anything like the pang she had suffered last night when he reproached her so bitterly and told her he could expect nothing but betrayal at her hands.

And now that the important part of the affair had been disposed of in a business-like way, what had she to do?

Nothing.

She could do nothing else whatever. It wanted some hours of dinner-time, and no one ever called upon them of Fridays except-him, and he would not call to-day. She should have the whole of the afternoon to herself. That was fortunate, for although she did not feel greatly depressed or cast down, she was not inclined towards company of any kind. It had been arranged early yesterday that she should ride with her father in the Park to-day, and she had not cared to plead any excuse, for she did not want to attract attention to herself, and besides, she did not feel very much in need of any excuse since she knew he would not be there. He knew they were to ride there. In fact he had promised to meet her there, but after last night he would not of course go, for he would not like the first meeting after last night to occur in so public a place and so soon after that scene.

Yes, everything was in perfectly regular order now and she had the afternoon to herself without any fear of interruption. So she could now sit down and rest, and-think.

Then she remained quite still for a long time in her easy chair, quite still, with her hand before her face and her eyes closed. The difficulties had been faced and overcome in a wise and philosophical way, and nothing remained to be done but to do nothing, and as she sat and thought this doing of nothing became harder than all that had gone before. She had told herself she was a person of convictions and principles when she was resolving on action and acting on resolve. She had no further need of her convictions and principles. She laid them aside with the writing materials out of which she had called forth that letter to Jack-to Mr. Hanbury. She did not realize until this moment, she had not had time to realize it, that she was a woman, a young girl who had given her heart to a young man, and that now he and she had parted to meet no more on the old terms.

It was easy to shut up the ceremonious gates of the temple and say worship was at an end in that place for ever. But how fared it in the penetralia of her heart? How did she face the inner chambers of her soul where the statue of her hero stood enshrined for worship? It cost but little effort to say that the god was deposed, but could she all at once effectually forbid the priestess to worship?

Ah, this doing of nothing when all had been done, was ten thousand times harder than action!

All the faculties of her reason were in favour of her decision, but what has the reason to do with the glance of an eye, or the touch of a hand, of the confiding commune of a soul in sympathy with one's own?

She understood him better than any other woman ever should. It was her anxiety that he should stand high in his own regard that made her jealous of his little weaknesses, and they were little, and only weaknesses after all, and only weaknesses in a giant, not the weaknesses of a man of common clay. If she had loved more what he was to her than what she dreamed he might be to himself and all the world, she would have taken no trouble in these matters that angered him to fury.

And why should he not be angered with her for her poor, feeble woman's interference with his lion nature? Why should he not turn upon her and revile her for coming across his path? Who was she that she must irritate him that was all the world to her, and deferred to by all men who came his way? Why should she thwart or impede him?

He was not perfect, no doubt, but who had set her the task of perfecting him?

Her haughty love.

Yes, the very intensity of her love had ended in the estrangement of the lover. She found noble qualities in the man, and she had tried to make him divine. Not because he was _her_ lover, but because she _loved him_. She had given him her heart and soul, and now she had sacrificed her love itself upon the altar of her devotion.

That was the heroic aspect of the affair, and as in all other sorrows that take large shape, the heroic aspect elevated above pain and forbade the canker of tears.

But this girl saw other aspects too.

She should miss him-oh, so bitterly! She should miss him the whole of her life forth from that hour! She should miss him in the immediate future. She had missed him that day in the Park. She should miss him tomorrow. He always came on Saturdays. He used to say he always came to Curzon Street on Saturday afternoon, like any other good young man, to see his sweetheart when the shop was shut. She should miss him on Sunday, too, for he always came on Sunday, saying, the better the day the better the deed. On Mondays he made it a point to stay away, but contrived to meet her somewhere, in the Park, or at a friend's place, or in Regent Street, and now he would stay away altogether, not making a point of it, but because she had told him to make an observance of always staying away.

She should miss his voice, his marvellous voice, which could be so clarion toned and commanding among men, and was so soft and tunable for her ear. When he spoke to her it always seemed that the instrumental music designed to accompany his words had fined off into silence for shame of its inadequacy. How poor and thin and harsh all voices would sound now. They would merely make idle sounds to the idle air. Of old, of that old which began its backward way only yesterday, all voices had seemed the prelude of his. They sounded merely as notes of preparation and awakening. They were only the overture, full of hints and promises.

She should miss his eyes. She should miss the clear vivid leap of flame into his eyes when he glanced at her with enthusiasm, or joy, or laughter. She should miss the gleam of that strange light which, once having caught his eye in moments of enthusiasm, appeared to bathe his face while he looked and spoke. She should miss the sound of his footstep, that fleet herald of his impatient love!

Oh, it was hard-hard-hard to be doomed to miss so much!

And all this was only what she should miss in the immediate future.

In the measure of her after life would be nothing but idle air. In her dreams of the future she had pictured him going forth from her in the morning radiant and confident, to mingle in some worthy strife, and coming back in the evening suffused with glory, to draw breaths of peaceful ease in her society, in her home, her new home, their joint home. She had thought of the reverse of this picture. She had thought of him returning weary and unsuccessful, coming home to her for rest now, and soothing service of love and inspiriting words of hope.

She had visions of later life and visions of their gradual decay, and going down the hill of life hand in hand together. She had dreamed they should never, never, never be parted.

And now they were parted for ever and ever and ever, and she should miss him to-day and to-morrow and all the days of the year now half spent, and of all the after years of her life.

She should miss him in death. She should not lie by his side in the grave. She should not be with him in the Life to Come.

All the glory of the world was only a vapour, a mist. The sunlight was a purposeless weariness. The smell of the flowers in the window-sill was thin and foretold decay. What was the use of a house and servants and food. Lethe was a river of Hell. Why? Why not a river of Paradise?

She should not be with him even in the grave-even in the grave where he could have no fear of her betraying him!

She would now take any share of humbleness in life if she might count on touching his hand and being for ever near him in the tomb.

CHAPTER XXXI
WINDING UP THE CLOCK

It was eleven o'clock that night when Tom Stamer, dressed in the seedy black clothes and wearing the false beard and whiskers he had on in the morning, started from the Borough once more for the West. He had not replaced the spectacles broken in his fall at the Hanover in Chetwynd Street. He carried a very substantial-looking walking-stick of great thickness and weight. It was not a loaded stick, but it would manifestly be a terrible weapon at close quarters, for, instead of consisting of metal only in one part of one end, it was composed of metal throughout. The seeming stick was not wood or leaded wood, but iron It was not solid, but hollow like a gas pipe, and at the end intended to touch the ground, the mouth of the tube was protected by a brass ferrule to which a small tampion was affixed. The handle was massive and crooked, and large enough to give ample hold to the largest hand of man. About a couple of inches from the crook there was a joining where the stick could be unscrewed.

Stamer accounted to the eyes of observers for carrying so massive a stick by affecting a lameness of the right leg. When he entered a dense crowd or came upon a point at which the people were hurrying, he raised the stick up from the ground and laid aside his limp. But where people were few and close observation of him possible, his lameness grew very marked, and not only did his stick seem indispensable, but he put it down on the pavement as gingerly as though the least jar caused him pain. Sympathetic people who saw him fancied he had but just come out of hospital, and were inclined to be indignant that he had not been supplied with more effectual support, such as crutches.

One old gentleman asked him if he ought not to have a second stick; Stamer snivelled and said he knew he ought, but declared with a sigh he had no money to buy another one. The old gentleman gave Stamer a shilling. Stamer touched his hat, thanked the old gentleman for his kindness and his gift, and requested Heaven to bless him. The old gentleman wore a heavy gold chain and, no doubt, a watch. But Stamer had important business on hand, and there were a great number of people about, and he did not want to run, for running would make his arm unsteady, so he asked Heaven to bless the old gentleman and forebore to rob him.

But the thought of that missed opportunity rankled in him. The feeling that he had been obliged to neglect business and accept charity fretted and vexed him. The thought of the mean squalid shilling made him sick, and as soon as he came to a quiet place he threw it with a curse into the middle of the road. He had shillings of his own, and didn't want charity of any man. If he had stolen the shilling that would have been a different affair. Then it would have come to him in a straightforward business-like way, and would, doubtless, be the best he could have done under the circumstances. But now it seemed the result of a fraud committed upon him, to which he had been forced to consent. It was the ransom he had under duress accepted for a gold watch and chain, and was, therefore, loathsome and detestable in his sight. Its presence could not be endured. It was abominable. Foh! He was well rid of it?

He did not approach Welbeck Place by Chetwynd Street. He did not intend repeating his visit to Mr. Williams's house. He had got there all he wanted and a little more. He kept along by the river and then retraced the way he had come that afternoon after leaving the Hanover. On his previous visit to-day to this locality he had been silent and watchful as a cat, and he had a cat's strong sense of locality. He never forgot a place he was once in; and, piercing northward from the river through a network of mean streets he had never seen until today, he hit upon the southward entrance to Welbeck Mews with as much ease and certainty as though he had lived there for twenty years.

The mews were lonely after nightfall, and the road through them little used. When Stamer found himself in the yard, the place was absolutely deserted. They were a cabman's mews and no one would, in all likelihood, have business there for a couple of hours. The night was now as dark as night ever is at that time of the year, and the place was still. It wanted about twenty minutes of twelve yet.

When Stamer came to the gable of the house next but one to the Hanover, and the wall of which formed one half of the northern boundary of the yard, he paused and listened. He could hear no sound of life or movement near him beyond the snort or cough of a horse now and then.

The ostler who waited on the cabmen lived in the house at the gable of which he stood, and at this hour he had to be aroused in case of any man returning because of accident, or a horse knocked up by some long and unexpected drive. As a rule, the ostler slept undisturbed from eleven at night till half-past four or five in the morning.

After a pause of two or three minutes, Stamer stooped, slipped off his boots, slung them around his neck, and having hitched the crook of his heavy stick to a belt he wore under his waistcoat, he laid hold of the waterpipe that descended from the gutter of the double roof to the yard, and began ascending the gable of the house with surprising agility and speed.

In less than two minutes from the time he first seized the waterpipe he disappeared in the gutter above. He crawled in a few yards from the edge and then reclined against the sloping slates of the roof to rest. The ascent had taken only a couple of minutes, but the exertion had been very great, and he was tired and out of breath.

Then he unscrewed the ferrule and withdrew the tampion and unscrewed the handle of his stick, and was busy in the darkness for a while with the weapon he carried. Overhead the stars looked pale and faint and wasting in the pall of pale yellow cloud that hangs by night over London in summer, the glare of millions of lights on the vapour rising up from the great city.

He particularly wished to have a steady hand and arm that night, in a few minutes, so he made up his mind to rest until five minutes to twelve. Then he should get into position. He should creep down the gutter until he came to the wall of the Hanover, the gable wall of the Hanover standing up over the roofs of the houses on which he now was lying. He should then be almost opposite the window at which he last night saw the dwarf wind up his clock. He should be a little out of the direct line, but not much. The width of Welbeck Place was no more from house to house than fifty feet. The distance from the wall of the house he should be on then, and the wall of Forbes's bakery could not be more than sixty feet. The weapon he carried was perfectly trustworthy at a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty yards, or more. He had been practising that afternoon and evening at an old hat at forty yards, and he had never missed it once. Forty yards was just double the distance he should be from that window if he were on a parapet instead of being at the coping tile, lying on the inside slope of the roof. Allow another ten feet for that. This would bring the distance up to seventy feet at the very outside, and he had never missed once at a hundred and twenty feet. He had given himself now and then a good deal of practice with the gun, for he enjoyed peculiar facilities; because the factory wall by which the lane at the back of his place ran, prevented anyone seeing what he was doing, and the noise of the factory drowned the whurr of the gun and the whizz of the bullet.

There was to be a screen, or curtain, or blind up to-night, but that was all the better, for it made no difference to the aim or bullet, and it would prevent anything being noticed for a while, perhaps until morning no one would know.

The work would go on at the window until half-past twelve. It would be as well not to _do it_ until very near half-past; for then there would be the less time for anyone in the Hanover to spy out anything wrong, At half-past would come the noise and confusion of closing time. There would then be plenty of people about, and it would be quite easy to get away.

It was a good job there were no windows in the Hanover gable, though no one was likely to be upstairs in the public-house until after closing time. The landlord was not a married man. It was a good job there was no moon.

It would be a good job when this was done.

It was a good job he thought of waiting until just half-past twelve, for then everything would be more favourable below, and his hand and arm would have more time to steady.

It was a good job that in this country there were some things stronger than even smelling-salts!

At half-past eleven that night the private bar of the Hanover held about half-a-dozen customers. The weather was too warm for anything like a full house. Three or four of the men present were old frequenters, but it lacked the elevating presence of Oscar Leigh, who always gave the assembly a distinctly intellectual air, and it was not cheered and consoled by the radiation of wealth from Mr. Jacobs, the rich greengrocer of Sloane Street.

The three or four frequenters present were in no way distinguished beyond their loyalty to the house. They came there regularly night after night, drank, in grave silence, a regular quantity of beer and spirits, and went away at closing time with the conviction that they had been spending their time profitably attending to the improvement of their minds. They had no views on any subjects ever discussed. They had, with reference to the Hanover, only one opinion, and it was that the finishing touches of a liberal education could nowhere else in London be so freely obtained without derogation and on the self-respecting principle of every man paying his way and being theoretically as good as any other. If they could they would put a stop to summer in these islands, for summer had a thinning and depreciating effect on the company of the private bar.

A few minutes later, however, the spirits of those present rose, for first Mr. Jacobs came in, smiling and bland, and then Mr. Oscar Leigh, rubbing his forehead and complaining of the heat.

Mr. Jacobs greeted the landlord and the dwarf affably, as became a man of substance, and then, knowing no one else by name, greeted the remainder of the company generally, as became a man of politeness and consideration.

"I'll have three-pennyworth of your excellent rum hot," said Mr. Jacobs to the landlord, in a way which implied that, had not the opinion of an eminent physician been against it, he would have ordered ten times the quantity and drunk it with pleasure. Then he sat down on a seat that ran along the wall, took out of his pocket a cigar-case, opened it carefully, and, having selected a cigar, examined the weed as though it was not uncommon to discover protruding through the side of these particular cigars a diamond of priceless value or a deadly drug. Then he pierced the end of his cigar with a silver piercer which he took out of a trouser's pocket, pulled down his waistcoat, and began to smoke, wearing his hat just a trifle on one side to show that he was unbent.

Just as he had settled himself comfortably, the door of the public department opened, and a tall, thin man, with enormous ears, wearing long mutton-chop whiskers, a brown round hat, and dark chocolate-coloured clothes, entered and was served by the potman.

"I have only a minute or two. I must be off to wind up," said Leigh. "Ten minutes to twelve by your clock, Mr. Williams, that means a quarter to right time. I'll have three of rum hot, if you please."

"That's quite right, Mr. Leigh," said the landlord, proceeding to brew the punch and referring to his clock. "We always keep our clock a few minutes fast to avoid bother at closing time. The same as always, Mr. Jacobs, I see, and I _smell_."

"I beg your pardon?" said the greengrocer, as though he hadn't the least notion of what the landlord alluded to.

"A good cigar, sir. That is an excellent cigar you are smoking."

It was clear that up to that moment Mr. Jacobs had not given a thought to the quality of his cigar, for he took it from his lips, looked at it as though he was now pretty certain this particular one did not exude either priceless diamonds or deadly drugs, and said with great modesty and satisfaction, "Yes, it's not bad. I get a case now and then from my friend Isaacs of Bond Street. They cost me, let me see, about sixpence a piece."