prodigal house-warming always remembered the exterior aspect of the house when the revels were at their height as even worse than the ordinary appearance; for the small red windows in the thick dark walls looked at night like the eyes of a desperate man who had drank deeply to keep up his courage in some supreme ordeal. And by day ever afterwards, to those who had been in the house at the festival, it seemed as though the house looked more aghast than ever, like the face of one who, having slept off the artificial courage, had awaked to reduced resources and increased dangers.

CHAPTER IV.

AN UNSELFISH MOTHER.

All the parties given by Mr. Grey at the Manor House were men's parties. Mrs. Grey rarely or never was to be found in the drawing-room after dinner; and, indeed, the drawing-room was seldom lighted up.

Mrs. Grey was a pretty, low-sized, dark-eyed, nervous woman, a few years the junior of her husband. He had met her first in London, in a house where she was staying on a visit with friends. She was alone in the world, had a small fortune, which, while it made her no object of pursuit in the circle she frequented, kept her independent.

There was a little mystery and a little doubt about her, and while neither the mystery nor the doubt was sufficient to disquiet anyone, it served to keep interest in her alive, and the more prudent and calculating of suitors from love-making. Individually she was popular; but while those who knew her spoke well of her in her absence, the good things said of her always began in superlatives, and, as the conversation went on, diminished to positives, and the talk usually ended with a vague "but" and an unfinished sentence.

Perhaps she was a little odd, they said. Perhaps she had French blood in her veins. Perhaps the strange blood was Spanish. She had a look not wholly English—a look denoting no close kinship with any other people. Her name was Muir, which seemed to indicate that she came of a stock north of the Tweed. Yet she had never been in Scotland, nor her father before her, nor anyone of his side, as far as he could trace back. Her mother had been the daughter of a Truro solicitor, her father a member of the Equity bar of London. Those who had known her father and mother declared that she resembled neither in her face nor her manner. She was dark, low-sized, and odd; they had both been tall, fair, and models of conventional insipidity.

When Henry Walter Grey married Miss Muir she was twenty-four years of age, he twenty-nine. The women judged her to be thirty-four, the men allowed that she might be twenty-seven; but all agreed that young Grey, with his prospects, might have done much better as far as money went.

But among the young and the chivalric of Daneford, young Grey helped forward his nascent popularity by marrying a poor wife and risking his father's displeasure for his sweetheart's sake. The young and chivalric of Daneford were never tired of pointing to the pleasantest and most prosperous man in the city as one who had made his love paramount above all other considerations in the selection of a wife.

From the time he won his wife until he lost her his manner towards her gained him daily increase of respect among the people of the city. Every indulgence and luxury which his position could afford were lavished upon her. Wives who had cause of displeasure or dissatisfaction with their husbands always cited Mr. Grey as a shining contrast to their own too economical or exacting lords. It was not alone that she was never denied anything for which she could reasonably care, but, notwithstanding the clubs and the institutions and the boards of which Mr. Grey was a member, no more domestic man lived in Daneford. He always dined at home, except on occasions of great public interest; and when he had no guests he sat reading or conversing with her, or they both went for a stroll in the fine twilight, or visited the theatre, or any other form of public amusement afforded by the town.

As the years of their married life glided by, and no child came to make an endearing interruption to the smooth course of wedded sweethearts, the attachment between the husband and wife seemed to borrow a greater depth from the soft melancholy arising out of their childless condition. It was, the town said, a thousand pities the rich, amiable, amusing, good-looking Wat Grey had no one to leave his fine business and his vast fortune to.

If a friend alluded to the fact of his childlessness he always put the subject aside with as little humour and as much gentleness as the character of the speaker allowed of. To his wife, who often made tearful allusions to the circumstance, he replied with cheerful hopefulness, and bade her set her grief for him away, as he was quite content and happy with the blessings Heaven had already sent him, chief among which was a wife he loved.

Although Mrs. Grey did not go into society, and had no ladies to dinner, she had a few visiting friends upon whom she called in turn, and who learned from her the uniform kindliness of her husband, and the great gentleness with which he accepted the absence of an heir or heiress.

In fact, the more people heard of Mr. Grey, the more he grew in popular esteem, and behind all this amiability on his part there was a factor which hugely multiplied its value. At first, when he brought his wife home to Daneford, and the people of his set began to know her a little, they all declared that she was pretty, very pretty, and a trifle odd.

Time went on, and although she lost none of her prettiness with her years—hers being the beauty that depends on bone and outline, and not on surface and colour—her peculiarities gained upon her; and whether, the Daneford folk said, it was the foreign blood that darkened her eyes and her hair and her ways, or a slight strain of madness, they could not decide, but she was, beyond all doubt, not in manner like the average English-woman of her class.

At first her peculiarities defied definition. People said she was very nice, but a little queer, cracked, crazy. She was very impulsive, and sometimes incoherent. No action of hers seemed the result of forethought or preparation. She ordered the servants to bring this, that, or the other thing, and when they came with it she told them they might take it away again, as she had changed her mind. She ordered the brougham for four, went out walking at a quarter to four, and stayed out till six, without countermanding the brougham.

About the time that Mr. Grey bought the Manor House, Mrs. Grey had a difference with her cook, and her cook left her in a violent temper. The cook had been with her ever since Mrs. Grey had first come to Daneford, and was the confidential servant of her mistress. Soon after the cook had left it reached the ears of a few acquaintances of Mr. Grey that a dreadful spectre had appeared in his household. The fact that Mrs. Grey had now been married some years and was still childless had preyed very deeply on her excitable temperament, and, dreadful to say, she not unfrequently took more wine than was good for her.

Those who heard this now saw a reason, unguessed by others, why the banker bought that odious house swathed round with that fearful wood. There his wife would be secluded, free from prying eyes and guarded against any close daily contact with neighbours. How had it been kept secret so long? The cook, now discharged, had obtained for the unhappy woman what she wanted, and the poor lady was wonderfully discreet and cautious, and until that servant went no one but the cook and the afflicted husband ever dreamed of such a thing. It was dreadful.

But the most intimate friend of Grey never knew from him, by even the faintest hint, there was a single cloud over his domestic happiness.

He always spoke of his wife in terms of the most tender consideration and kindliness. He was by no means weak or uxorious; but there was a loyal trust, an ever-active sympathy in