TEMPLE BAR.

MAY 1874.

"TWO

Patricia Kemball.

CHAPTER XII.

HER FATHER'S FRIEND.

VO for me; one to you, Lady; none for you, Dora; and one for you, Patricia;" said Mr. Hamley, dealing out the letters like cards the next morning at breakfast.

Patricia crimsoned with undisguised embarrassment as she received a letter written in a strange hand-a man's hand-with the local postmark on the cover. She said nothing, but quietly laid it beside her plate and began to eat her breakfast.

Her aunt looked at her sharply. It seemed strange to her, first, that Patricia should have a letter at all; next, that she should be so indifferent about reading it as not to open it, as any one else would have done; or if not indifferent, then so much the reverse as not to be able to look at it before other people. Who could be her correspondent? There was something here defying and mysterious; and Mrs. Hamley never forgave either independence or mystery. People of arbitrary wills, and with a disposition to herd souls like sheep, seldom do.

This was one of the reasons why she liked dear Dora so much. She used to say, when speaking of that young person as she often did, and giving a reason for the faith that was in her, that dear Dora had not had a secret from her since she came under her roof; and had never been ashamed to give her the most minute and circumstantial account of every event in her innocent life. It was as good as being on the spot herself, Mrs. Hamley said, when Dora had been away for a day or two and came home with her budget. When she went to London last October, for instance, and stayed there for a week with the Borrodailes Mrs. Hamley not being able to accompany her, owing to what she called a chilblain and her doctor gout-her sprightly

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reminiscences were really amusement enough for weeks. She had kept a diary, dear child, on purpose to please them; and the care she had taken to put down everything she had seen and every place she had visited was beyond praise both for its cleverness and frankness. There was not an hour of her time that she could not account for; and how delightful it was to have to do with a person so thoroughly candid and trustworthy! She had no secrets indeed!-except, Mrs. Hamley might have added, when she herself wished to conceal anything from her husband; and then how clever and discreet and full of nice helpful tact the girl was! And so said Mr. Hamley on his own side when he had it in hand to hoodwink the Lady and dear Dora was his confederate. But as they never came to the comparison of notes they never found that the tact each thought consecrated to him or her only was common to both, and so went on accepting as special and private a quality which was serviceable for more purposes than their own.

If however, this strange noisy girl was going to add to her natural misdemeanours the acquired sin of making mysteries and having secrets, Mrs. Hamley felt that her cup would then indeed be too full; and that this would be just the one drop of overflowing bitterness which she could not and would not accept.

"Are you not going to read your letter, Patricia ?" she asked tartly.

"No, not yet, aunt," replied Patricia, not looking up.

"Who is your correspondent, pray?"

"I do not know, aunt."

"You do not know? A young lady, my niece, receive a letter and not know from whom, and not open it to see? What an extraordinary thing!-not quite according to my ideas of the natural action of well-bred girls," said Mrs. Hamley, very slowly, very deliberately.

"I dare say it's from the dressmaker," said Dora, coming to the rescue in her sweet peace-making way. "Give it to me, Patricia, if you are afraid to open it dear."

Patricia, not looking up from her plate, flung the letter across the table with a shy and awkward jerk, while Dora gazed at her with a reassuring smile and candid eyes. The one looked guilty and ashamed, the other showed a fine, snow-white, well-ventilated conscience which had no dark corners to hide.

"Yes, it is," she said, as she opened the note down in her lap and showed a printed circular-as the contents. "Miss Biggs has the honour to announce to her kind patrons, the Nobility and Gentry of Milltown,' &c. &c. I thought I knew the Biggs style of doing business," laughed the girl, with a pretty triumph at the difficulty being so happily ended. "Did I not tell you, Patricia, that you would be sure to have a notice, all to yourself, as soon as our local Madame Elise found you out?" she added.

"What an incomprehensible girl you are, Patricia! and what mountains you contrive to make out of molehills!" said Mrs. Hamley with displeasure; Mr. Hamley adding, as the masculine view of the subject; "My dear young lady, never throw away your powder and shot on trifles. When you have anything that you wish to conceal from Mrs. Hamley and myself, conceal it-if you can; but for goodness gracious sake don't begin a game of 'I spy I' with nothing to run for !"

"I was not playing any game and I had nothing to conceal," said Patricia a littled nettle, and looking straight up at Mr. Hamley.

She had borne her aunt's rebuke in silence, but when her aunt's husband took her in hand she found humility and the acceptance of undeserved blame difficult.

"Whew!" said that gentleman with a prolonged whistle; "but we can show fight then when we get our blood up, can we ?"

"Oh, Mr. Hamley!" broke in Dora, her fair face dimpled into the loveliest little labyrinth of smiles, "I wish you would tell us that delicious story of yours-that fight between the Irish carmen!"

Mr. Hamley laughed noisily. This fight between two Dublin carmen, which took place on the Quay when he once went over on business to what he always called Paddy-land-men of Mr. Hamley's stamp are sure to be ethnologically insolent-was his favourite battle-horse; and to be asked to repeat it was always pleasant to him, and never fatiguing. So, stretching out his legs, he began with more than usual gesture and emphasis; and the incident of the letter passed without further comment. But it shook the Hamley trust in Patricia's honesty, and inclined them to doubt her gravely, and to debate whether her apparent straightforwardness was not rather the artfulest kind of sham.

"Now then, Miss Prue, what was there to make such a fuss about ?" laughed Dora when she and Patricia were alone in the drawing-room. You ridiculous old simpleton!" very prettily, quite in the manner of

a caress.

"I don't know," said Patricia. "I don't understand what it all meant, nor why I might not have opened the letter at table before everybody without a word being said. It was only to please you, Dora, and because you told me not, that I did not."

"You dear old thing," said Dora, "it was just a little joke! I wanted to see if you could be depended on, that was all-if you were really as loyal to your word as I believed you to be."

"I think you might have been sure of that," replied Patricia with a certain reproachful sorrow in her face. "I would trust you, Dora, without testing you."

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Well, don't look as if you were going to cry! Mrs. Hamley will be asking what is the matter, and then there will be more complications;" said Dora, shrugging her shoulders.

And Patricia was as much startled as if a cold wind had suddenly blown over her, by the cool, half-annoyed and half-indifferent tone in which the girl spoke. It did strike her as being just a little bit ungrateful after she had been going through such a disagreeable experience for her sake.

"Dr. Fletcher," said the servant opening the door.

People call early in country places, and though it was not yet quite noon there was nothing in the hour to cause a remark, so far as Milltown habits went; but Dora shrugged her shoulders again; this time petulantly. Dr. Fletcher was evidently not one of her favourites.

A tall, lean, angular man with iron-grey hair and leathery lanthorn jaws came with a kind of lazy awkwardness into the room. His eyes were large and bright, but meditative rather than observant; his face was grave, even ́sorrowful, like the face of a man who has thought much on the miseries and perplexities of life; but his smile was sweet, more sweet than joyous, and a wonderful grace of patience and kindness rested on him. He looked older than his age and he was evidently in delicate health; which was perhaps another reason why his face had that unmistakable look of a man to whom life is tragically real, not a mere summer day's holiday, and who has taken it to heart to live manfully according to that reality and to leave the summer pastimes to the children.

He was a man of private means, but by no means wealthy. When old Mr. Fletcher died he left just enough for his son and daughter to live on, without the need of sordid economy on the one side or the possibility of self-indulgent extravagance on the other. And on his death Dr. Fletcher retired from the profession which had always been irksome to him in its practical and business aspects, and came back to the old home at Milltown where he could study without interruption. He was one of the quiet men who think and are still, not one of the active sort who go out into the world to fight and cry aloud. His life was mainly an endeavour to disentangle some of the many problems which perplex society, and to create for himself some kind of intelligible hypothesis in the midst of so much that is dark and undetermined. And to do this, he went for his light to science.

Of course he was considered fatally unsound in Milltown. The most independent thinker that respectable community had ever had, he was naturally styled Atheist by people who thought religion consisted in denying the right of private judgment or individual interpretation. Men said, with a kind of shudder, that he believed neither in God nor Devil-but to disbelieve in the latter was the worse crime of the two; he was known to deny eternity of punishment— which was an awful questioning of God's mercy; and his scientific pursuits were subjects of some scorn, much reprehension, and the profoundest disbelief in their truth or value. And those who knew least

about them despised them most, and flouted him with the challenge to explain how or why a tree grew, and to recompose into life the elements he pretended to weigh and measure and tabulate in death.

His want of ambition, too, was disapproved of and held to be a shameful wrapping up of talents; and every one agreed that with his abilities he ought to do something—indeed ought to have done something long ago. They considered he had done nothing yet, because fame had not beaten her tomtom before him. The quiet rendering of a noble life seemed to be worse than nothing to the children of an age which reverences chiefly blare and tinsel. For his own part, when he was told that he ought to do something and make a fortune, he used to answer that he thought those who had enough should becontented; and that he held it ignoble in the well-endowed to still further crowd the glutted labour-market, lessening the wages of the workers by necessity by just so much as they earned for their superfluities. This might be bad political economy, he used to add with a smile. Some of his friends said it was; but it was human justice all the same; and, for the rest, political economy must go. He deprecated the race for wealth, the greed of gain, characteristic of the present day. He deprecated the tumult and excitement and clamour of our social life, the luxury and sensuality of our homes; and what he deprecated in others that he refused for himself. But Milltown did not endorse his doctrines. Indifferent to fear, to pleasure, to ambition, merely a calm, wise, just thinker who appraised things at their real value, and was content to accept certain theorems as unprovable-thewell-fed lives and uninquiring minds of that little paradise of conservative respectability had no sympathy with such an iconoclast and blasphemer of its gods! The old proverb was verified; the prophet had no honour among his townsfolk, and the most charitable interpretation of a life that dared to be real and a mind that dared to be ignorant was, that Henry Fletcher was mad. And many added, his sister Catherine with him.

Dr. Fletcher seldom called anywhere; but perhaps less frequently at Abbey Holme than even other places. Dora Drummond's pretty manners pleased him, certainly, for he had a benign kind of pleasure in contemplating children and young people and all other things fresh and beautiful; but he did not feel at one with Mr. Hamley. Not because he was a self-made man-his sympathies would have naturally gone that way-but because he was a vulgar and ostentatious man, one whom he mistrusted and took to be a mask, of which the reality was very different from the appearance. Also, he could never overcome a certain repugnance for Mrs. Hamley. That a woman of her pretensions to ultra-refinement of character, whose birth and breeding were her strong points, and who spared no sister in her sorrow, no brother in his weakness, could have sold herself to a man of Mr.