I used to think schoolmasters disagreeable company, because they bring with them the peremptory, domineering, correcting ways they employ in the schoolroom. I am afraid, if I went into society, people would find me objectionable for the same reason—which, indeed, I can't help, for one contracts bad habits insensibly in this world of all sorts of misdemeanours." She rose. "Good afternoon, Mr. Goodhart."

"I am sorry you should be in a hurry."

"I am not in a hurry. I am going to my lodgings to drink a cup of tea," said she, with a smile.

"Will you do me the pleasure to drink tea with me at the hotel? I am a stranger here, and I assure you your society is a singular privilege which you will not allow me to lose for a cup of tea?"

"I shall be very pleased," she answered, without hesitation. "I'm sure your thoughtful kindness, the trouble you have taken in carrying out my husband's wishes, make me very glad, indeed, to meet you."

Naturally, as a lady whose income was very limited indeed, and who was obliged to teach in order to live she was greatly touched by the kindness of the man who had taken the trouble to find her out that he might hand her the handsome and welcome sum of one hundred and fifty pounds, her husband's farewell gift.

They walked slowly to the hotel.

CHAPTER XIV

A RESCUE

S they walked, Reynolds said to Lucretia, "It is sad that you should be obliged to follow an uncongenial calling for a living. Mr. Wembly-Jones told me that your income was small-I think he said seventy pounds a year."

Mr. Wembly-Jones had said nothing of the sort; but then, Reynolds thought that he knew what he was talking about.

"It is less than that," answered Lucretia, with her cheek warmed by a little colour discharged into it by half a dozen different feelings. "Indeed, it is barely sixty."

Their eyes met as she spoke, and she witnessed a sympathy that was deeper than any that could give life to pity in a stranger in his look. He saw a sudden trouble of mind as of perplexity in the shadow her brow took, and in the compression of her lips.

"Had I thought of it," said he, "I might, on learning the name of your father, have found out where you lived by looking at his will. Your trustee would have given me your address."

"There were two, and both are dead."

"Who sends you your money?"

"It is received by the bank and forwarded to me. Mr. Wembly-Jones told me that you were an Australian.”

Reynolds did not speak.

"The income I receive," she said, "is derived from Australian bonds. I should know what they are called if I heard the name."

"New South Wales?"

"No."

"Victoria ?"

"Yes."

"I also hold in Victoria. They are very safe." She asked him some questions about Australia, and this brought them to the hotel.

As they entered, one of two men who were conversing in the hall shrieked like a locomotive whistle and fell in a fit. From all parts, from offices and rooms, people rushed. Who was it? Only his grace the Duke of. When a duke has a fit the flap is usually great in the barnyard that is the theatre of his exploit. A duke's a duke. Reynolds and Lucretia blended their gaze in an expression of awe at the noble figure (five feet eight) as it was lifted and carried away.

"Who is it?" asked Reynolds of a waiter.

The fellow told him.

"What was the matter?"

"A fit, sir. But it's well known his viscera's wore out."

After an uncontrollable fit of laughter, Reynolds ordered tea for two and passed with Lucretia into a great room and sat down with her at a table at an open window which framed the sea. When events come to pass, they lose the weight of meaning they held whilst in contemplation. Had Reynolds been told, whilst on the island of Santo Cristo, that a day might come when he would be sitting at tea opposite his wife in a hotel at Ramsgate, he personating the part of Goodhart, and

she accepting it to the very root of the credulity in her, he might, with a shrug and a smile, have held such a circumstance faintly possible, but in the uttermost degree improbable. Now that they were together he found the situation reasonable, logical, easy, though, to be sure, curious. Very soon after they had seated themselves, she said to him

"Do you know, Mr. Goodhart, that in some way I'm not able to explain you recall my husband.”

"And do you know, Mrs. Reynolds," he replied, "that in some way I can explain you recall my wife.”

"Not that you are a bit like Captain Reynolds,” she went on. "And yet you have that sort of resemblance which, if you were his brother, would be called a family likeness."

"You are like my wife in eyes, hair, colour, and figure," said he. "But she was slimmer, and had not your voice nor the power of expression I find in your eyes."

Lucretia believed that she concealed her pleasure, the pleasure of tickled vanity: but it is seldom that gratification can be so obscured that its light shall not appear in the face.

Reynolds' instructions for tea had been liberal. Strawberries and cream, prawns, brown and white bread, butter, cakes, and such things. He easily guessed that Lucretia dined in the middle of the day, and that her lonely repast would be very homely indeed-a mutton-chop say, cooked in a frying-pan, ill-dressed and ill-served, a lone lorn Mrs. Gummidge of a potato, and perhaps a sponge-cake for pudding. He had fed for twenty months upon fish fried in a shovel, and he was naturally in sympathy with Lucretia, who lived in a fifth-rate lodging-house.

If he had been pleased with his breakfast at an open window with a London stockbroker, we may conceive him immeasurably happier at tea at an open window with Lucretia. It was the singular case of a man who had resolved to woo and win, in another name, and in an unrecognized aspect, the handsome and indecorously chaste woman who had married him, and then cast him out as though he had been one of those abominable fiends whose misdeeds are recounted in Holy Writ. They had been married eight years. Commonly after eight years the most impassioned couple grow a little used to, if not a little tired of, each other. But here was a man who had got married, and had been immediately prohibited to find out what a wife meant, or what marriage was like. The painted dust still glorified this butterfly. The first love of his life still preserved the freshness and the glory of the dream. The virgin still slept in the shape of the married woman, and the wooing of her was to be made as sweetly and deliciously ardent, as though she had never been won. An odder contradiction in human affairs could not confound the understanding. Nevertheless, there they sat at tea, at an open window in a hotel in Ramsgate.

He opened his purse, and took out two guineas.

"The mate I sent ashore," said he, "found these coins in the old chest to which your husband's letter and enclosures to you had been nailed. As they may have belonged to him, will you allow me to present them to you as mementoes of his shipwreck."

She slightly flushed, bowed with the stateliness her fine figure and shape enabled her to command, and, taking the guineas in her hand and examining them, said

"I shall value them very much indeed."