On the Western Circuit

by Thomas Hardy

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT.

By THOMAS HARDY.

I.

THE man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter named—no great man, in any sense, by the way—first had knowledge of them on an October evening in the city of Melchester. He had been standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediæval architecture in England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him.

He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of steam barrel-organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells, the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men, A lurid light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and into the square.

He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings, ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps, affixed to booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the spacious market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human figures, more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up, down, and around, like gnats against a sunset.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws, flying-leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts which occupied the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of steam-organs came.

Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than ecclesiology in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe and putting one hand in his pocket, to throw himself into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest and most patronized of the steam-circuses (as the roundabouts were called by their owners). This was one of brilliant finish, and it was now in full revolution. The musical instrument in the midst, to whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet-mouths of brass upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes.

It could now be seen that he was unlike the majority of the crowd. He was a gentlemanly young fellow, one of the species found in large towns only, and in London particularly, built on delicate lines, well, though not fashionably dressed, and appeared to belong to the professional class. Yet he had nothing square or practical about his look, much that was curvilinear and sensuous; he would have been called a man not altogether typical of the middle-class male of a century wherein sordid ambition is the master-passion that seems to be taking the time-honoured place of love.

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness—a galloping rise and fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by these equine undulations in this most delightful fair-day-game of our times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years, with every age between. At first it was difficult to catch a personality, but by and by the observer's eyes centred on the prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving.

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the brown cape, crimson skirt, light gloves and—no, not even she, but the one behind her; she with the black skirt, grey jacket, black and white hat and white cotton gloves. Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl. Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as he was able during her each brief transit across his visual field. She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding: her features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she did not know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her troubles. He himself was full of vague latter-day glooms and popular melancholies, and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young thing then and there, absolutely as happy as if she were in a Paradise.

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind the glittering rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine, horses, revolving mirrors, steam trumpets, drums, cymbals, cornets, dulcimers and other kinds of music to pause and silence, he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently over the intervening scenes, including the two plainer girls, the old woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old man with a clay pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies in the chariot, the pair of journeyman-carpenters, and others, till his select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in his sentiments. The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders were audible.

He moved round to the place whereon he reckoned she would alight; but she retained her seat. The empty saddles began to refill, and she plainly was deciding to have another turn. The young man drew up to the side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her ride.

"Oh yes!" she said, with dancing eyes. "It has be'n quite unlike anything I have ever felt in my life before!"

It was not difficult to fall into conversation with her. Unreserved—too unreserved—by nature, she was not experienced enough to be reserved by art, and after a little coaxing she answered his remarks readily. She had come to live in Melchester from a village on the Great Plain, and this was the first time that she had ever seen a steam-circus; she could not understand how such wonderful machines were made. She had come to the city on the invitation of Mrs. Harnham, who had taken her into her household to train her as a servant, if she showed any aptitude. Mrs. Harnham was a young widow-lady, who had been Miss Edith White before she married, living in the country near the speaker's cottage, and was now very kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She was even taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs. Harnham was the only friend she had in the world, and since the loss of Mr. Harnham some fifteen months ago, had wished to have her near her in preference to anybody else, though she had only lately come; allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a holiday whenever she asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady had been a rich wine-merchant of the town, but Mrs. Harnham's uncle lived temporarily with her now; in the daytime you could see the house from where they were talking. She, the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely country, and she was going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was to cost fifteen-and-ninepence.

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her in London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived at all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex two or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county day or two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and it was because it contained such girls as she.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to such passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, discontent, resignation, as none can foretell.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another heat. "Hang the expense for once," he said, "I'll pay."

She laughed till the tears came.

"Why do you laugh, dear?" said he.

"Because—you are so genteel that you must have plenty o' money, and only say that for fun!" she returned.

"Ha-ha!" laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his money she was enabled to whirl on again.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake that he had put on for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the next county-town?

II.

The square was overlooked from its remoter corner by the house of which the young girl had spoken, a dignified residence of considerable size, having several windows on each floor. Inside one of these, on the first floor, the apartment being a large drawing-room, sat a lady, in appearance from twenty-eight to thirty years of age. The blinds were still undrawn, and the lady was absently surveying the weird scene without, her cheek resting on her hand. The room was unlit from within, but enough of the glare from the market-place entered it to reveal the lady's face. She was what is called an interesting creature rather than a handsome woman; dark-eyed, thoughtful, and mobile-lipped.

A man brusquely entered the room from behind and came forward.

"Oh, Edith, I didn't see you," he said. "Why are you sitting here in the dark?"

"I am looking at the fair, Uncle Stephen," replied the lady in a languid voice.

"Oh! Horrid nuisance every year! I wish it could be put a stop to."

"I like it."

"H'm. There's no accounting for taste."

For a moment he gazed from the window with her, for politeness sake, and then went out again.

In a few minutes she rang.

"Hasn't Anna come in?" asked Mrs. Harnham.

"No m'm."

"She ought to be in by this time. I meant her to go for ten minutes only."

"Shall I go and look for her, m'm?" said the housemaid alertly.

"No. It is not necessary: she is a good girl and will come soon."

However, when the servant had gone Mrs. Harnham arose, went up to her room, cloaked and bonneted herself, and proceeded down stairs, where she found her uncle.

"I want to see the fair," she said; "and I am going to look for Anna. I have made myself responsible for her, and must see she comes to no harm. She ought to be indoors. Will you come with me?"

"Oh, she's all right. I saw her on one of those whirligig things, talking to her young man as I came in. But I'll go if you wish, though I'd rather go a hundred miles the other way."

"Then please do so, uncle. I shall come to no harm alone."

She left the house and entered the crowd which thronged the market-place, where she soon discovered Anna, seated on the revolving horse. As soon as it stopped Mrs. Harnham advanced and said severely, "Anna, how can you be such a wild girl? You were only to be out for ten minutes."

Anna look blank, and the young man, who had dropped into the background, came to her assistance.

"Please don't blame her," he said very politely. "It is my fault that she has stayed. She looked so graceful on the horse that I induced her to go round again. I assure you that she has been quite safe."

"In that case I'll leave her in your hands," said Mrs. Harnham, turning to retrace her steps.

But this for the moment it was not so easy to do. Something had attracted the crowd to a spot in their rear, and the young widow, caught by its sway, found herself pressed against Anna's acquaintance without power to move away. Their faces were within a few inches of each other, his breath fanned her cheek as well as Anna's. They could do no other than smile at the accident; but neither spoke, and each waited passively. Mrs. Harnham then felt a man's hand clasping her fingers, and from the look of consciousness on the young fellow's face she knew the hand to be his: she also knew that from the position of the girl he had no other thought than that the imprisoned hand was Anna's. What prompted her to refrain from undeceiving him she could hardly tell. Not content with holding the hand, he playfully slipped two of his fingers inside her glove, against her palm. Thus matters continued till the pressure lessened, but several minutes passed before the crowd thinned sufficiently to allow Mrs. Harnham to withdraw.

"How did they get to know each other, I wonder?" she mused as she retreated. "Anna is really very forward—and he very nice."

She was so greatly struck with the young barrister's manner, voice, with the fascination of his touch, that instead of re-entering the house she turned back again and observed the pair from a screened nook. Really she argued (being little less impulsive than Anna herself) it was very excusable in Anna to encourage him, however she might have contrived to make his acquaintance; he was so gentlemanly, so fascinating, had such beautiful eyes. The thought that he was several years her junior produced a sigh.

At length the couple turned from the roundabout, towards the door of Mrs. Harnham's house, and the young man could be heard saying that he would accompany her home. Anna certainly had found a lover, apparently a very devoted one. Mrs. Harnham was quite interested in him. When they drew near the door of the wine-merchant's house, a comparatively deserted spot by this time, they stood invisible for a little while in the shadow of a wall, where they separated, Anna going on to the entrance, and her acquaintance returning across the square.

"Anna," said Mrs. Harnham, coming up. "I've been looking at you. That young man kissed you at parting, I am almost sure."

"Well," stammered Anna, "he said, if I didn't mind—it would do me no harm, and, and, him a great deal of good!"

"Ah, I thought so! And he was a stranger till to-night?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Yet I warrant you told him your name and everything about yourself?"

"He asked me."

"But he didn't tell you his?"

"Yes ma'am, he did," cried Anna victoriously. "It is Charles Bradford, of London."

"Well, if he's respectable, of course I've nothing to say against your knowing him," said her mistress, prepossessed, in spite of general principles, in the young man's favour. "But I must reconsider all that, if he attempts to renew your acquaintance. A country-bred girl like you, who has never lived in Melchester till this month, who had hardly ever seen a black-coated man till you came here, to be so sharp as to capture a young Londoner like him!"

"I didn't capture him. I didn't do anything," said Anna, in confusion.

When she was indoors and alone Mrs. Harnham thought what a highly qualified and chivalrous young man Anna's companion had seemed. There had been a magic in his wooing touch; and she wondered how he had come to be attracted by the girl.

The next morning the emotional widow went to the daily service in Melchester cathedral. In crossing the Close through the fog she again perceived him who had so interested her the previous evening, gazing up thoughtfully at the high-piled architecture of the nave: and as soon as she had taken her seat he entered and sat down in a stall opposite hers.

He did not particularly heed her; but Mrs. Harnham was continually occupied with him, and wondered more than ever what had attracted him in her unfledged young maid-servant. The widow was almost as unaccustomed as the maiden herself to the end-of-the-age young man, or she might have wondered less. Raye, having looked about him awhile, left abruptly, without regard to the service that was proceeding; and Mrs. Harnham—lonely, impressionable young creature that she was—took no further interest in praising the Lord. She wished she had married a London man who knew the subtleties of love-making as they were evidently known to him who had mistakenly caressed her hand.

III.

The calendar at Melchester had been light, occupying the court only a few hours; and the assizes at Casterbridge, the next county town on the Western Circuit, having no concern for Raye, he had not gone thither. At the next town after that they did not open till the following Monday, trials to begin on Tuesday morning. In the natural order of things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it was not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas-reliefs, were seen blowing and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High Street from his lodgings. But though he entered the assize building there was nothing for him to do, and sitting at the blue baize table in the well of the court, he mended pens with a mind far away from the case in progress. Thoughts of a frivolous flirtation, on which a week earlier he would not have believed himself capable of wasting his time, threw him into a state of dissatisfaction.

He had contrived to see again the pretty rural maiden Anna, the day after the fair, had walked out of the city with her to the earthworks of Old Melchester, and feeling a violent fancy for her had remained in Melchester all Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; by persuasion obtaining walks and meetings with the young girl six or seven times during the interval; had in brief, won her heart entirely.

He supposed it must have been owing to the seclusion in which he had lived of late in town that he had given way so unrestrainedly to a passing fancy for a young creature so charmingly inexperienced, who had placed herself so trustingly in his hands. Much he deplored trifling with her feelings for the sake of kisses upon her red lips; and he could only hope that she might not live to suffer on his account.

She had begged him to come to her again; entreated him; wept. He had promised that he would do so, and he meant to carry out that promise. Awkward as such unpremeditated attachments were, the interspace of a hundred miles—which to a girl of her limited capabilities was like a thousand—would effectually hinder this summer fancy from greatly encumbering his life; while thought of her simple love might do him the negative good of keeping him from idle pleasures in town when he wished to work hard. His circuit journeys would take him to Melchester three or four times a year; and then he could always see her.

The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his, had been spoken on the spur of the moment, without any ulterior intention whatever. He had not afterwards disturbed Anna's error, but on leaving her he had felt bound to give her an address at a stationer's not far from his chambers, at which she might write to him under the initials "C. B."

In due time Raye returned to his London chambers, having called at Melchester on his way and spent a few additional hours with his fascinating child of nature. In town he lived monotonously every day. Often he and his room were inclosed by a tawny fog from all the world besides, and when he lighted the gas to read or write by, his situation seemed so unnatural that he would look into the fire and think of that simple girl at Melchester again and again. Often, oppressed by absurd fondness for her he would enter the dim religious nave of the Law Courts because it was something like her cathedral, elbow other juniors habited like himself, and like him unretained; edge himself into this or that crowded court where a sensational case was going on, just as if he were in it, though the police officers at the door knew as well as he knew himself that he had no more concern with the business in hand than the patient idlers at the gallery door outside, who had waited to enter since eight in the morning because, like him, they belonged to the classes who live without working. But he would do these things to no purpose, and think how greatly the characters in such scenes contrasted with the pink and breezy Anna.

An unexpected feature in that peasant maiden's conduct was that she had not as yet written to him, though he had told her she might do so if she wished. Surely a young creature had never before been so reticent in such circumstances. At length he sent her a brief line, positively requesting her to write. There was no answer by the return post, but the day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the Melchester post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and as a matter of fact did not read it for nearly half an hour, anticipating readily its terms of affectionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he turned his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity were there. It was the most charming little epistle he had ever received from woman. To be sure the language was simple and the ideas were slight; but it was so self-contained; so purely that of a young girl who felt her womanhood to be enough for her dignity that he read it through twice. Four sides were filled, and a few lines written across, after the fashion of former days; the paper, too, was common, and not of the latest shade and surface. But what of those things? He had received letters from women who were fairly called ladies, but never so sensible, so human a letter as this. He could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all remarkable or clever; the ensemble of the letter it was which won him; and beyond the one request that he would come and see her again soon there was nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye would have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did write a short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in which he cheeringly promised that he would try to see her again some day, and would never forget how much they had been to each other during their short acquaintance.

IV.

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye's letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds. She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over. "It is mine?" she said.

"Why, yes, can't you see it is?" said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the missive and the cause of the confusion.

"Oh, yes, of course," replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman's departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the letter in her pocket, and remained musing, till her eyes filled with tears.

A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her chamber. Anna's mistress looked at her, and said: "How dismal you seem this morning, Anna. What's the matter?"

"I'm not dismal, I'm glad; only I——" She stopped to stifle a sob.

"Well?"

"I've got a letter—and what good is it to me, if I can't read a word in it?"

"Why, I'll read it, child, if necessary."

"But this is from somebody—I don't want anybody to read it but myself!" Anna murmured.

"I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?"

"I think so."

Anna slowly produced the letter, saying, "Then will you read it to me, ma'am?"

This was the secret of Anna's embarrassment and flutterings. She could neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Plain where, even in days of national education, there had been no school within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there had been nobody to investigate Anna's circumstances, nobody to care about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress's phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copybook, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the letter.

Edith Harnham's large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a tender answer.

"Now—you'll do it for me, won't you, dear mistress?" said Anna eagerly. "And you'll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn't bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the earth with shame if he knew that!"

Deep concern filled Mrs. Harnham's eyes at perceiving how the girl's happiness hung on this quickly matured attachment. She blamed herself much for not interfering in a flirtation which had so unsettled the pretty little creature, though at the time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However what was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna's only protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna's eager request that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this young London man's letter, she felt seriously bound to accede, to keep alive his passion for the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.

A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham's hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in. Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna's humble note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life, the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham's.

"Won't you at least put your name yourself?" she said. "You can manage to write that by this time?"

"No, no," said Anna, shrinking back. "I should do it so bad. He'd be ashamed of me, and never see me again!"

The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.

Late on a winter evening, after the despatch of the sixth letter, Mrs. Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her uncle had retired, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day. For the first time since Raye's visit Anna had gone to stay over a night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for her maid's return and collaboration. The pleasure of writing to him what would be known to no consciousness but his, was great, and she had indulged herself therein.

Why was it a pleasure?

Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to marry an elderly wine-merchant as a pis aller, at the age of seven-and-twenty—some three years before this date—to find afterwards that she had made a mistake. He had died, and she had still remained a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; above all by his wooing touch; and with these as generators, the writing of letter after letter, and the reading of their tender answers, had insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own.

They were her own impassioned and pent up ideas—lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep up the disguise—that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's delight, who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from Anna's own lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing of that day Anna never discovered; but Mrs. Harnham did not venture to repeat the luxury of not consulting her. On Anna's return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about something, and begged Mrs, Harnham to ask him to come. This Mrs. Harnham did, although she had written but such a short time previously; and the result was that Raye sent a hasty note to say how much he was won by her sweetness; it made him feel that he must run down for a day to see her as requested.

But a week later the girl came to her mistress's room with another note, which, on being read, informed her that after all he could not find time for the journey. Anna was grieved, but by Mrs. Harnham's advice strictly refrained from reproaches or bitterness on account of this disappointment; one thing being imperative—to keep the young man's romantic interest in Anna alive. Rather, therefore, did Edith, in the name of her protégée, request him on no account to be distressed at all about his inability to come. She desired above everything to be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities. He must write tenderly as ever, and when he should come again on the Spring circuit it would be soon enough to see him.

Anna's own feelings had not been quite in accord with these expressions, but the young widow's judgment had ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. "All I want is, that niceness you can so well put into your words, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can't make up out of my own head, though I mean it and feel it exactly when you've written it down."

Occasionally, when one of these letters had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone, she would bow herself on the back of her chair and weep.

"I wish he was mine—I wish he was!" she murmured. "Yet how can I say such a wicked thing!"

V.

The damps of winter, aggravated, perhaps, by her secret heart-sickness at her lover's non-appearance, made Anna unwell, and by her own choice she went for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a consultation with her mistress as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in the girl's sheer inability to continue personally what had been begun in her name, and in the difficulty of their acting in collaboration as heretofore, she requested Mrs. Harnham—the only friend she had in the world—to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them on afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might get some friend to read them to her at least, though disqualified from replying because of the handwriting. Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.

Thus it befel that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position of having to correspond, under no supervision, with a man not her lover, in terms which were those of a devoted sweetheart, the man being one for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part, she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly, but strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it, as if intended for herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart and no other.

Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl's absence, the high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy: the vicarious intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded. For conscience' sake Edith sent on each of his letters to Anna, and, at first, exact copies of her replies; but later on these so-called copies were much abridged, and consisted of heads rather than of details.

Though selfish, and, superficially at least, infested with the self-indulgent vices of society, there was a substratum of honesty and fairness in Raye's character. He had really a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her some of the letters.

"She seems fairly ladylike," Miss Raye observed. "And bright-minded. One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one's self, poor thing."

The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that she should not suffer for his sake; he would come down in the Spring and marry her.

This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs. Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna jumped for joy like a little child. And crude directions for answering appropriately were given to Edith Harnham who on her return to the city promptly carried them out, with warm intensifications.

"Oh!" she groaned, as she threw down the pen. "Anna—poor good little fool—hasn't intelligence enough to appreciate him! How should she? While I—have neither lover nor child."

It was now February. The correspondence had continued altogether for four months; and the next letter from Raye contained incidentally a statement of his position and prospects. He said that, in offering to wed her he had, at first, contemplated the step of retiring from a profession which hitherto had brought him very slight emolument, and which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice after his union with her. But the unexpected mines of brightness and warmth that her letters had disclosed to be lurking in her sweet nature had led him to abandon that somewhat sad prospect. He felt sure that, with her powers of development, after a little private training in the social forms of London under his supervision, and a little help from a governess if necessary, she would make as good a professional man's wife as could be desired, even if he should rise to the woolsack. Many a Lord Chancellor's wife had been less intuitively a lady than she had shown herself to be in her lines to him.

"Oh—poor fellow, poor fellow!" mourned Edith Harnham.

Her distress now raged as high as her infatuation. It was she who had wrought him to this pitch—to a marriage which meant his ruin; yet she could not, in mercy to her maid, do anything to hinder his plan. Anna was coming to Melchester that week, yet she could hardly show the girl this last reply from the young man; it told too much of the second individuality that had usurped the place of the first.

Anna came, and her mistress took her into her own room for privacy. Anna began by saying with some anxiety that she was glad the wedding was so near.

"O Anna!" replied Mrs. Harnham, "I think we must tell him all—that I have been doing your writing for you—lest he should not know it till after you became his wife, and it might lead to dissension and recriminations—"

"O mis'ess dear, mis'ess—please don't tell him now!" cried Anna in deep distress. "If you were to do it, perhaps he would not marry me; and what should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to me! And I am getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the copybook you were so good as to give me, and I practise every day, and though it is so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe, if I keep on trying."

Edith looked at the copybook. The copies had been set by herself, and such progress as the girl had made was in the direction of facsimile of her mistress's hand. But even if Edith's flowing caligraphy were reproduced, the inspiration would be another thing.

"You do it so beautifully," continued Anna, "and say all that I want to say, so much better than I could say it, that I do hope you won't leave me in the lurch just now!"

"Very well," replied the kindly widow. "But I—but I thought I ought not to go on."

"Why?" Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:

"Because of its possible effect upon me."

"But It can't have any!"

"Why, child?"

"Because you are in mourning for your husband!" said Anna with lucid simplicity.

"Of course it can't," said her mistress hastily; yet glad, despite her mourning, that two or three outpourings and responses still remained to her. "But you must concentrate your attention on writing your name as I write it here."

VI.

Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of what he feared was a piece of compassionate folly, he had acquired more zest for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester; Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw herself with mournful zest into the preparations for Anna's departure. In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up with Anna and be with her through the formalities—"to see the end of her," as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made an irremediable social blunder.

It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel cab at the door of a registry office in the S.W. district of London, and carefully handed down Anna, and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, when an innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the wooden horse at Melchester Fair.

Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young man—a friend of Raye's—having met them at the door, all four entered the registry office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had never known the wine merchant's widow, except at that first casual encounter, and in the flutter of the performance before them he had little opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between himself and Anna's friend.

The formalities of the wedding being concluded the four went in one cab to Raye's lodgings, newly taken in a cheap suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye had bought at a pastrycook's on his way home from Lincoln's Inn the night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye's friend was obliged to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only ones virtually present were Edith and Raye, who exchanged ideas with much animation, insomuch that the conversation was theirs alone, Anna being as a domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed startled at awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with her inadequacy.

At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, "Mrs. Harnham, my darling is so flurried that she doesn't know what she is doing or saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be necessary before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she used to treat me to in her letters."

They had planned to start early that afternoon for Tunbridge Wells, to spend a few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the writing-desk in the next room and pen a little note to his sister, who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that the ceremony was over, thanking her for her kind presents, and hoping to know her well now that she was the writer's sister as well as Charles's.

"Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt," he added, "for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be dear friends."

Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly rose and went to her.

He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her good-will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had progressed but a few lines, in the characters of a child of eight.

"Anna," he said, "what's this?"

"It only means—that I can't do it any better!" she answered, through her tears.

"Eh? Nonsense!"

"I can't!" she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. "I—I— didn't write those letters, Charles! I only told her what to write! But I am learning, oh! so fast, my dear, dear husband! And you'll forgive me, won't you, for not telling you before?" She passionately clasped his waist and laid her face against him.

He stood a few moments, abruptly turned, and shut the door upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each other.

"Do I guess rightly?" he asked, with sad quietude. "You were her scribe through all this?"

"It was necessary," said Edith.

"Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?"

"Not every word,"

"In brief, very little?"

"Very little."

"You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own conceptions, though in her name?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever write any of the letters when you were alone, without communication with her?"

"I did."

He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.

"You have deceived me—ruined me!" he murmured.

"Oh, don't say it!" she cried, jumping up and putting her hand on his shoulder. "I can't bear that!"

"Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it—why did you?"

"I began doing it in kindness to her. How could I do otherwise than try to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it for pleasure to myself."

Raye looked up.

"Why did it give you pleasure?" he asked.

"I must not tell," said she.

He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return train: could a cab be called immediately?

But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. "Well, to think of such a thing as this," he said. "Why, you and I are friends—lovers—by correspondence."

"Yes; I suppose."

"More."

"More?"

"Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married her—God help us both!—in spirit I have married you, and no other woman in the world!"

"Hush!"

"But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth, when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me that the bond is—not between me and her! Now I'll say no more. But I think I have one claim upon you."

She did not say what, and he went up to her, drew her towards him, and bent over her. "If it was all pure invention in those letters," he said, emphatically, "give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips. It is for the first and last time, remember."

She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. "You forgive me?" she said, crying.

"Yes."

"But you are ruined!"

"What matter!" he said shrugging his shoulders. "It serves me right."

She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the letter. Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.

He went back to his wife. "Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day," he said gently. "Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly."

The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married, showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he the fastidious urban was chained to work for the remainder of his life, and she the unlettered peasant chained to his side.

Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face depicting her miserable sense of the end of her impassioned dream. When at dusk she reached the Melchester station her uncle was there to meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see each other, and she went out of the station alone.

She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then returned to her drawing-room and not knowing what she did crouched down upon the floor.

"I have ruined him!" she kept repeating. "I have ruined him; because I would not deal treacherously towards her!"

In the course of half-an-hour a figure opened the door of the chamber.

"Ah, who's that?" she said, starting up, for it was dark.

"Your Uncle Stephen—who should it be?" said the worthy merchant. "I missed you at the station. Did you see Anna safely tied up? I hope so, for her own sake."

"Yes—Anna is married," she murmured.

Simultaneously with Edith's journey home Anna and her husband were sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped along to Tunbridge In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets closely written over. Unfolding one after another he read them in silence, and sighed.

"What are you doing, dear Charles?" she said timidly from the other window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.

"Reading over all those tender letters to me signed 'Anna,'" he replied with dry resignation.