CHAPTER XI.

AT THE REBOUND.

"GOOD-BYE, Mr. Branscombe! I am off by the evening train."

Valentine tried to speak with the masterly ease of indifference.

He succeeded only in

speaking with the ill-concealed wrath of offended love, the savage nonchalance of wounded pride and the brusqueness of a decidedly unheroic fit of ill-temper. What a fool he had been! he thought bitterly. What made him tempt Providence as he had done, and put himself in the humiliating position of a rejected lover, when he ought to have seen and known beforehand that Stella would not marry him? She had been frank enough in her declared aversion for him. He could not blame her for coquetry, nor say that she had given a fellow false hopes. Why then, had he not

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accepted her lead rather than her father's false flourish of support and Augusta Latrobe's perfectly useless advocacy? It had been his own fault all through; but that did not make it the better to bear. On the contrary, it made it the worse. For he could not shelter himself behind that friendly plea of bad calculators and worse actors, and say with a flourish, accusing Providence: "Just my luck!" For just my luck had been his own wilful conduct, his vanity and his folly; and he knew it. So now when he stood at the postern gate which led from the fool's paradise in which he had been blindly walking into the stern reality of facts as they were, he had no help for it but to pass through, railing at fools' paradises in general as he stumbled over the bad places of the real thing. Wherefore he gathered up his forces and said "Good-bye" to Mr. Branscombe with affected unconcern-his departure confessing his discomforture.

"A farewell?-going by this evening's train? Indeed! Your leaving us in the midst of our pleasant villeggiatura is as sudden as it is grievous," said Finery Fred gravely.

He looked from Valentine-flushed, affectedly debonnaire, secretly angry, outwardly polite, inwardly chafing that he could not show the

insolence and temper which he felt-to Stella who, now that she had finally taken her stand and shaken off her erotic incubus, was just the least bit in the world afraid of that dear papa of hers; yet afraid only on the surface of things— resolute enough at the core !

"I must go-I-I

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stammered Val, who

had forgotten to make up an excuse and who was not good at sudden reasons delivered pointblank out of the vague.

"You have received letters of business ?-a telegram from the Master?-your father is dangerously ill?" said Mr. Branscombe with a disagreeable smile. "I see, Mr. Cowley!—the old chapelet of excuses to mask an inclination which we do not wish to confess."

"No inclination, sir, necessity," said Valentine.

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Stella, my child, will you not ask Mr. Cowley to remain yet a little while longer as our honoured guest?" said Mr. Branscombe with a sweet manner and a severe face.

By the way, Valentine Cowley paid his own hotel bills; but it sounded well to call him their guest; and Mr. Branscombe was a man whose poetic fancy was at all times grandly superior to the fettering contraction of literalness.

"Mr. Cowley knows best what he ought to

do," said Stella with a moral hardihood which surprised herself, personally quaking, as she was, with fear of her father's certain displeasure when she should be alone with him and he should have learned all.

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"Thanks for the rebuke, my child," Mr. Branscombe answered with another of his most silky and therefore most disagreeable smiles; "a rebuke somewhat sharply administered, but supremely just. Precious balms from the hand of a child, breaking a father's head but purifying his heart and directing his conduct. Thank you, my love!"

"I did not mean that, papa," said Stella earnestly.

"No?" He smiled again; this time with almost pathetic magnanimity. "Then you did what you would not. By accident you made yourself the guiding angel to your father-the lost wayfarer. By accident or design I equally thank you, my daughter."

"At all events I must go," said Val, whose ill-humour did not reach the length of liking to hear Stella virtually bullied while apparently commended, and who at this moment hated old Finery Fred almost past bearing.

"I am sorry," said Mr. Branscombe with dignity.

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Why don't you ask him to stay, Stella, when your father tells you?" said Hortensia in that low voice of hers, which sounded so dulcet, so modest and which was so audible.

"Because my daughter has not the sweet submission of her little friend," said Mr. Branscombe, answering the girl. "Because she thinks her judgment superior to her father's, and prefers the green fruit of unripeness to the golden grain of experience-that is why, my dear Miss Hortensia Lyon-and I wish it were otherwise."

"I do not wish Miss Branscombe to ask me to stay, if it is against her real wish," said Val, gallantly effacing his disappointment.

"A dutiful child should have but one wish, and that her father's," said Finery Fred with unction.

"Sometimes that is impossible," said Stella. "As now?" her father asked with meaning. Val turned a flushed face and a pair of darkened eyes towards the girl; Mr. Branscombe put on his pince-nez and looked at her seriously; Hortensia plucked at her sleeve and in her audible way again whispered:

"Do as your father wishes, Stella. It is too dreadful to see how disobedient you are!"

Augusta, who as yet had not taken any part