Eleanor by Mary Augusta Ward Page A

papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his study, leaving discomfort behind him.
    Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the child’s fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice—her own difficulty always was to resist it—to try and see straight in spite of it.
* * * * *
    Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them. Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman’s crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.
    Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said—‘I have a different version of your Nemi story running in my head!—more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it. He won’t escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There is no blood on his hand—his heart is pure. There!—I imagine it so.’
    There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.
    ‘Well!—you’ll compete with Renan. He made a satire out of it. His priest is a moral gentleman who won’t kill anybody. But the populace soon settle that. They knock him on the head, as a disturber of religion.’
    ‘I had forgotten—’ said Mrs. Burgoyne absently.
    ‘But you didn’t like it, Eleanor—my little piece!’ said Manisty, after a pause. ‘So don’t pretend!’
    She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty’s depression did not yield.
    Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man’s easy tenderness awoke.
    ‘Eleanor—this air is too keen for that thin dress.’
    And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about her.
    ‘You lent it to Miss Foster’—he said, surveying her. ‘It became her—but it knows its mistress!’
    The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away from him.
    ‘Have you discovered yet’—she said—‘that that girl is extraordinarily handsome?’
    ‘Oh yes’—he said carelessly—‘with a handsomeness that doesn’t matter.’
    She laughed.
    ‘Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.’
    ‘Well, you can do most things no doubt—both with bad books, and raw girls,’—he said, with a shrug and a sigh.
    They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the glass door behind them.
* * * * *
    The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs. Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.
    She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour’s dreaming, she suddenly bent forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within