A Romance of Wastdale

n, as he watched her ride away, and listened to the lanthorn cla

been awakened by his one great passion, but to have gained their being from it and to be dependent upon it for their life. They were, if one may use the phrase, the reflex of his imaginative belief in the worth of his mistress--a belief founded purely upon sentiment and sustain

life through Kate Nugent, and now that she took her gift back with her as she went, she left him stripped almost of his humanity, bare and scarred as the rugged crags surrounding him. So intense and poignant grew the fee

Kitty!" he shouted, his whole being in the cry. But no answer came back to him; he heard the lanthorn still faintly clanking against the saddle, and the

f blame for her treachery upon his own failure to understand her. But there was another man to share his blame. The thought swept down upon him--a black whirlwind blotting out even the image of Kate. If he had erred himself, it was through excess of chivalry; he could, at all events, plead that. But Hawke! Gordon was unable to think of him; he only saw him a sinister picture of malice and craft, and as he looked he became filled with a venom of hate. Hawke's face rose before his mind, every feature

*

of the beast she rode. At the bottom of the decline, however, after crossing Stockley Bridge, the path widens out on to more level ground. But it runs through pastures, and Kate's progress was impeded by a succession of gates which, since she carried no crop, compelled her to dismount to open them. But by the time she had reached Sea Toller--the long white house, lying two miles from the base of Styhead--the difficulties of

ome, however, plunged a

ily had discove

n engrossed by the necessity of regaining her letters; and, besides, she had laid her plans carefully, with perfect confidence in the fidelity of the groom. Afterwards, at Wastdale, the hurry o

er?--she dismissed him with a moment's reflection. The good man took life and his daughter's ailments easily. But her aunt! Kate remembered with a shiver that sh

that she had dropped it. It was safe, however, and she

the door, and received no answer, she had but to step into the garden to solve her perplexities. A passing vision of an old lady in bedroom slippers padding over the grass with a box of pills failed to distract her. Kate sent her wits abroad

y had already become the probability; by the time she passed Lodore, a certainty, and when she topped Castle Hill, just above Ke

a clock chimed the half-hour, lifting a silvery encouragement, and she moved on again slowly down the hill. Some twenty yards from the front of the house she dismounted, led the horse into a lane which gave on to the road, crossed a paddock at th

ly, and the groom Martin appeared and led the horse

it?" she asked

half-past f

ean, no one has n

tes made singularly unpalatable. She turned to the collie; he had followed Martin from the harnes

ught Cha

m in the yard. He mightn't hav

ter the fashion of its kind, and showed his appreciation by planting h

Good night!" and she hurried across

welcome, Mis

six, and then half-past. For now that she herself was safe, her thoughts unconsciously reverted to Gordon. She saw his face again framed in the darkness, as the light fell on it from her lanthorn, and wondered whether he was still on the bridge, looking eastwards down the Pass. That last cry of his recurred to her. "Kitty!" The name rang in her ears, stretched out into a threnody. She tried to flee from it, and it pursued her

it

all her life, Kate questione

it

with a start. A girl-cousin, one of the inten

rtled yo

onfusion, and a peal of laughter rippled through t

s it?" she a

ould not have you called

I will put you right. It's bile." Homoeopathy smiled comfortably from behind the tea-urn, and Kate for the first time thanked Providence for the birth of Dr. Hahnemann. She noticed with relief that the meal was nearly over, but gained no respite thereby. For, after breakfast, there were new presents to be inspected and acclaimed--noticeably one from Poonah, a jade idol of most admired ugliness. Kate explained her shiver of repulsion by the carven malice of its features. Then followed consultations upon frocks, interspersed with eulogies of David and predictions of the happiness

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binet against the wall. He went to it, drew out a packet of letters, and, pulling up a chair to the table, read, by the last spurts of the light, those which Kate had sent to him from Poonah. How blind he must have been, he thought. Why, effort was visible in every line of them, coldness seeking to screen itself beneath a wealth of phrases. He commenced to speculate curiously which portions were Hawke's dictation and which her own work; otherwise the letters awakened no feeling in him. Phrases here and there fixed his attention. "You came into my life like a ray of sunlight into a musty room." Yes! Hawke would have invented that, knowing how it would appeal to him. And, again, "I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes"--a postscript, scribbled hastily and smudged, eviden

uld explain it, and would demonstrate his explanation to the other's ignorance tomorrow. A gradual fading of colour from the sky made him correct himself. "To-day," he murmured, with something of quiet exultation in his voice. Only he must spare Kate; no suspicion must be allowed to connect her with the solution of his problem. "I feel th