quite a supernal performance. So sweet a tenderness in chiding-such a dignity in repose-such courtliness in badinage it has never been my happy lot to meet upon the English boards. I assure you, Miss Churchill, that one seeks in vain for words of enough aptness and delicacy and descriptive amplitude. One is delighted, one is borne away." Before Mr. Marsh had got more than half way through this speech Lorrimer had returned unheard, and stood with a broad grin at his elbow. The poet, encountering the manager's smile, read its meaning and blushed at detection. Miss Churchill, who had kept her eyes upon the picture whilst he spoke, looked round at him like a disguised lady in an old play.

"I am obliged to you, sir," she said, with something of the accent of the stage. "Excuse me, sir. My call."

She walked to the greenroom door, at which the call-boy had indeed at that moment bawled her name. The call, however, was not for the stage. The boy handed her a letter, a formal-looking document, in a large blue cover, with a splashed seal of red wax. The actress, seeming, by a slight inclination of her head, to demand leave of the manager and the poet, broke the seal and, opening the letter, began to read. The poet watched her the while, and saw a blush rise beyond the line of necessary rouge upon her cheek. Looking up, she caught him in the act of staring at her, and with a curtsey she swept from the room.

Mr. Marsh felt that he had fared but poorly, and stood sucking at the knob of his walking-cane with a more vacuous aspect than a great man often wears. By-and-by, finding that Rosalind did not reappear, he strolled back to the dress circle, where he lounged with upward glance and rested his auburn head upon his hand in the most approved poetic manner. He was so absorbed in thinking of what the other people in the dress circle were likely to think of him, that for awhile he did not notice that the curtain still lay between him and the long-since exploited and exploded fairyland of the stage. By-and-by the scattered denizens of the dress circle drew near each other and laid their heads together. Then Lorrimer appeared between the curtain and the floats as if in act to address the limited audience, but he retired without saying a word. In the front of the house arose a whisper-something was going wrong. Aroused by this conjecture, the poet once more availed himself of the freedom his intimacy with the manager gave him, and sauntered behind the scenes. The florid Lorrimer was swearing like a Bedlamite. The ducal usurper, the banished duke, Jaques, Celia, Phoebe, and Orlando, stood about him, all in attitudes of more or less amazement.

"What's the matter, Lorrimer?" asked the poet.

"Matter?" cried Lorrimer. "The jade's off at the last minute, and this is all she leaves behind her."

The poet took from the manager's outstretched hand a note, and read this:

"Sir,-Circumstances have arisen which make it impossible that I should continue my career upon the stage. I shall be happy to repay you for all expenses you may have incurred in my behalf. Pray communicate in respect to that matter with my lawyers, Messrs. Lowe and Carter, of Clement's Inn.

"Yours very truly,

"CLARA CHURCHILL."

"She can't mean it!" cried Lorrimer, actually gasping. "I've spent three hundred pounds in money, and three thousand pounds in wit in advertising her. She wants more salary. That's what it is—she wants more salary. But, begad, since she's tried it on in this way" (he mastered his rage so far as to be able to embroider it, as it were, with a touch of mock-heroics), "if that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind to prey at fortune." Mr. Ronald Marsh sighed audibly.

"Shakespeare crowds us all from the field of popular quotation," he said inwardly. "Had Lorrimer known it he might have found a passage far more appropriate in my Epithalamium."

CHAPTER III.

WHEN Tregarthen found that his zeal for the reformation of mess-room manners had wrecked his military fortunes, he went home, and there buried himself among his books. Many, many years ago the Tregarthens, his forbears, had built for themselves a fortress for a dwellingplace, and the house had wasted away bit by bit like the other belongings of its owners, but had been modernised and added to every here and there, until it had grown and fallen into one of the oddest and most heterogeneous piles in England. A man must be curiously moulded indeed if his character is in no way affected by the character of the house in which he is bred, and a good deal of the sentiment of the frowning, rambling, stately, yet half-ruined old house had found its way into Tregarthen.

His ancestors, for reasons of their own, had built their house upon an island, and this island faced the Cornish mainland on the one hand and the melancholy Atlantic on the other. The house stood high and bare for winter storms to rave at, and in the rougher months of the year it had constantly to be provisioned for a siege of stormy weather, since for weeks at a time it was dangerous if not impossible to approach the island. The one harbour faced the mainland with two prodigious walls of rock, and a narrow belt of smooth sand between, which ran upward towards hardy grasses, and was directly overlooked by the mansion. Those vast walls of rock and the narrow space between them were known to the local folk as the Gate of the Sea. So old a house as

that of the Tregarthens could scarcely fail to have been shot at by the local bards and soothsayers-shoot bolts enough and some of them are sure to stick-and one of many prophecies and mottoes clung. It set forth, that whatsoever good or evil the Tregarthens endured should come to them by the Gate of the Sea-a conclusion somewhat obvious, since, unless by balloon or earthquake there was no other way of approaching their dwelling-place. If the Cornish couplet be faithfully translated, it prophesies as much for character as for fortune—

What evil or good ye have or be

Shall come to you all by the Gate of the Sea.

Now, in the days when a full cellar, a roughly generous larder, and a chance of hard knocks and loot could tempt adventurous souls to follow a freebooting gentleman, Tregarthen's house might have been a pleasurable place to live in for those whose fancy lay that way. But for an almost companionless youngster, who had just learned one of the world's bitterest lessons, it was as unwholesome a residence as might anywhere have been found. Tregarthen needed home influences and cheerful companionship, but he had long been an orphan, and he had neither brother nor sister. He was not absolutely wealthy, but he had more money than he wanted, and there were few things which would have been of more use to him than the spur of poverty.

It is easy in the hot days of youth for the mind to persuade itself to anything. Tregarthen persuaded himself that he had done with the world for good and all, that it should occupy him no more, and that he would live for his studies and no other earthly thing. His studies began to lead him in a direction which it was somewhat odd that a young gentleman of the nineteenth century should take. Some ancestor of his had collected all the works of that crowd of impostors, quacks, selfdeceivers, enthusiasts, and martyrs to science who have written on the transmutation of metals, the divining rod, the elixir vitæ, the powers and properties of the stars, and so forth-all the works, that is to say, that he could in one short lifetime lay hands on. Tregarthen began to grope amongst the dark sayings of these gentry, at first with an amused interest and then with a singular growth of doubt. There might be something in the doctrine of transmutation after all.

When a man begins even to doubt on a question like that he is pretty far gone on a road which has led oftener than not to mere madness. Tregarthen saw the danger, but the study drew him and absorbed him more and more, until he began to find in it a compensation for all things. If a man could find the philosopher's stone! Let any man in his sane and sober senses surrender himself to the fancy for a moment, and where are the glories of the cave into which the magician dropped Aladdin, or the valley into which the roc carried Sinbad? They are no more than a billiard ball in comparison with Saturn. But be touched with doubt as to the bare possibility of its actual discovery, and the poor mind is

dazzled, staggered, overawed, by the magnificence of its own fancies. Tregarthen began to dream these dreams.

He lived almost alone through the wild winter and the blustering spring. Early summer found him more and more ready to surrender himself to the intoxication of this singular madness. Perhaps it needs that a certain strain of greatness shall lie in a man's nature before he can go mad in that particular way. The compact small creature whose faculties are all of a size is as safe as the compact great creature whose powers are equally well balanced.

Happily for most of us, the world is too much with us to allow us to develop to complete fulness of eccentricity. Transplanted to Jupiter the human race might find elbow room enough to grow into a huge asylum of crazy humourists, but our crowded civilisation acts upon us as close shelter acts on the trees in a plantation—the outer lines grow a little twisted, perhaps, but in the middle of the wood the stems are straight and uniform. Tregarthen in his island castle off the Cornish coast was still a little sheltered. By-and-by a shelter he had not hoped for began to grow about him.

The blustering spring had passed, and here was a lovely day in midJune, with a sky of sapphire, a sea of sapphire and pearl, and a breeze of warm spice and balm. Tregarthen wandered, smoking and lost in idle meditation, to the cliffs on the right side of the sea-gate, and there cast himself full length on the warm and scented herbage. The splendour of the day was nothing to him just then, and though his bodily eyes took cognisance of one of the finest reaches of rock-bound coast England can show, he had no conscious pleasure in it. He pulled his soft hat over his eyes and surrendered himself to his pipe and his dreams. Everything was wonderfully still. He could hear the plash of the waves on the rocks below, though he gave no heed to it, and the intricate murmurs of many insects mingled drowsily with the voice of the sea, as though they were of equal volume with it. Tregarthen's dreams, under these con ditions, grew more and more dreamy; his fancies, like the sounds about him, became dim and diffused. Anything was welcome to the domination of his mind at such a moment, and a certain idle rhythm in the fall and rise of the waters down below did well enough to think about.

He was certainly not quite wide awake, and he was just as certainly not quite asleep when a vision dawned upon him. Two or three vilelypainted trees fluttered on a ragged canvas and libelled the forest of Arden. A dowdy female, and a melancholy male in a fool's coxcomb walked before the painted cloth and libelled Celia and Touchstone. Then suddenly came into sight a radiant creature, and a voice spoke in tones which blended resignation and fatigue with something almost jesting— "Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!" This voice was so near and clear that it awoke him and brought him bolt upright, sitting in the bracken. There was a sound of laughter and voices on the little strip of sand below, and, moving to the edge of the cliff, he looked over.

In fine summer weather it was a common thing for people to row across from the mainland and picnic on the island. Tregarthen's forbears had permitted this, and Tregarthen himself had never felt an objection to it until now. It may be allowed that, at the moment at which he found himself interrupted, his studies were not of the most exigent sort, yet his first thought was that the presence of these intruders and their like would be inimical to study. Then he regretted the loss of his dream, and blamed the intruders for breaking it, though the dream itself had awakened him.

His half slumber had lasted for so short a space of time that the pipe he held between his finger and thumb still sent up a streak of faint blue smoke. He stuck it between his lips again, and had turned to ramble homewards when the voice of his dream spoke in his waking ear, and stayed his footsteps.

"That is Miss Churchill, the actress," he said to himself.

"There is

not another voice like that in the world, I should fancy. I should know it amongst a thousand."

Since the night on which he had earned his own ruin by rebuking Colonel Pollard for his story of the actress he had scarcely thought about her, but he felt a curious pleasure and interest now in the belief that she was near. In spite of his shortsightedness he had a very definite idea of what she was like. It seemed to him that he could summon her face before his mind's eye quite clearly, and, as he saw it, it was worthy of her figure and her voice. He confessed to himself that he would like to see her nearer at hand, and to know how far her mind corresponded to his own impressions of her genius as an actress. It could not be difficult to devise a means of seeing her or even of speaking to her, seeing that she was actually a trespasser upon his ground. He thought, however, of a score of devices, none of which commended themselves to him, and as he thought he strolled towards the spot where the gradual rise of the sands and the more precipitous fall of the cliff brought the two upon a level. This spot was about midway between high-water line and the gates of the old mansion, and he reached it almost at the same moment with the visitors to the island. He heard the sweet voice talking again, and was more than ever persuaded that it belonged to Miss Churchill.

He polished his eyeglass in readiness to observe, and before he himself was seen he had secured a good look at every person in the little party. The lady with the sweet voice was tall and graceful, but her face was not the face of his memory. Compared with that memory the face was plain, though few people would have expressed so unfavourable a judgment had they but looked at it by itself. The eyes, of no particular colour, were large, intelligent, and sympathetic; the lips were beautiful alike in form and expression; the brow was broad and white. The skin was pallid, and the hair, like the eyes, was of no particular colour. Perhaps the want of definite colouring was the chief fault of the face; but, be that as it may, it was thrown back, for whatever beauty or charm