Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/692

 10, 1864.] sat down and wrote to John Galton. It was a very foolish thing to do, but he was annoyed with Kate at the time, and it is always an unsafe thing to write to or about a person when you are angry with that person. The spur of the moment in such case is very liable to prick you into evil. However, Harold Ffrench was very earnestly set upon putting an end to all communion between Mr. Linley and the present tenants of those rooms in Piccadilly. Therefore, as the one course of "speaking to Kate about it" had failed, he took the other and surer course of writing to Kate's husband.

"Circumstances have come to my knowledge respecting him," he wrote, "which convince me that he is no fit companion for your wife. Because he is the fashion, and not found out, Kate declines to admit of my interference; perhaps she is right to submit to no dictation save yours; but I should be untrue to the regard I have always had for her if I did not caution you on the point: he is not a man to be admitted to terms of intimacy with any woman of reputation." When he had thus written, Harold Ffrench walked out in the cool night air, and did away with the possibility of repenting availingly of anything he had said in that letter, by posting it at once.

Then he went home and took himself to task; but before I relate what about, I will describe the home to which he returned, in order that the reader may feel that he had nothing concealed in it which could make the secret of its locality one of vital importance.

He had been occupying, since the date of his return from Norfolk, a suite of three rooms in a house in one of those severely respectable squares which bear a strong family likeness to one another, and bewilder the uninitiated who confound the ducal title with the family name. It was quite true, that assertion that he had made to Kate Galton when she asked him to give her his address at his lodgings: he was very "apt to change them,"—for sheer love of change, as it seemed, and certainly without any reason that seemed valid to his various landladies. He wearied of every place very quickly. He was a man who could not make to himself a home upon the earth. He had more than once striven to attach himself to places and things. But there was invariably a great hollow in the place that he could not fill, and a barrenness about his surroundings that even his taste could not beautify. So, after two or three repeated failures, he gave up the game and subsided into habits of restlessness.

The room to which he returned after posting that well-meaning letter to John Galton had little enough in it to indicate its present inhabitant's tastes. It was the usual drawing-room of the average lodging-house, nothing more. He had seated himself in it for the express purpose of thinking over some eventualities which possibly might—more than that— which probably would arise. It seemed to him that it would be better to do this in a room in which were no disturbing elements, than in one that held some few things that were still dear to him in life, as did the little room adjoining.

Had he done well, he asked himself, in bringing about this intimacy between Theo Leigh and his cousin Kate? The question would arise, therefore he deemed that he might as well argue it with his conscience, and settle it at once. His intention had been good; he had simply sought to introduce a diversity that he had deemed would be harmless enough into a very dull young life. But, in the first place, it had been the means of renewing his intercourse with Theo, and this he could not feel to be well for her; and, in the second place, through Kate's obstinacy Theo would be subjected to the scarcely less dangerous ordeal of intercourse with Mr. Linley—a man of whom Harold Ffrench had his own well-grounded reasons for thinking very badly.

"I'm sorry I did it; they were wrong to suffer her to come," he said to himself at last. By "they" he meant Theo's parents, on whom he was more than half inclined now to shift the charge of imprudence. He almost resolved to put it to Theo's reason that it would be well for her to curtail her visit to Mrs. Galton, "by which two good ends would be gained, for Kate couldn't stay on in London without her husband or a lady companion—she would have no excuse for doing so," ho thought, and by so thinking he did scanty justice' to Mrs. Galton's powers of resource; she was well prepared with another reason for remaining in London for awhile when Theo failed her. This resolution was of so exalted an order that he entertained it for some considerable time, and thought how, though it would be painful both for the girl and himself to part again so soon, that it would be wiser and better in every way that they should do so. Then he went away into the other and more congenial room, where were his books and papers and easel, and he turned an unfinished portrait that was upon the latter towards him, and leant back in an easy-chair, with a cigar between his lips; and as he looked and smoked the resolution floated away in fragrant vapour, and Harold Ffrench thought that he had much better "let things alone."

It was a selfish resolution at the best, and, looked at from the most tolerant point of view, it was a very selfish resolution that one to