"I'll tell you that when we meet again--perhaps," she answered.

"Oh please!" he persisted. "I want to know now."

Prudence laughed softly. He detected a slight nervousness in her mirth, a quality of shyness that gratified his eager curiosity, conveying as it did that the girl was not insensible of his influence and his unspoken homage.

"You see," she said, and blushed warmly in the darkness as she leaned down towards him, "it is all a confusion of splashes of moonlight and brighter splashes of sunshine. There aren't any colours on the canvas at all."

"I'm contented with that," he said... "a luminous impression! Your fancy pleases me. My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall--just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that--inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward."

This extravagance led to further admissions. He managed very clearly to convey to his silent listener that his feeling for her was of quite an unusual quality, that he cared immensely, that he had no intention of letting her drop out of his life. He wanted to see more of her and was fully determined to do so. He made her realise that unless she disclaimed a reciprocal liking he intended taking her silence for acquiescence. He spoke so rapidly, and with so much concentrated pa.s.sion in his lowered tones, that Prudence only vaguely comprehended all that his eager words attempted to convey. She was apprehensive of discovery, and, rendered doubly nervous by this clandestine love-making and the fear of interruption, could find no words in which to reply.

She wanted time to think: the whole situation flurried her; and her heart was beating with a rapidity that made articulation difficult.

"Oh!" she said... "Oh! I didn't know... I didn't understand..."

"Well, you understand now," he answered. "Prudence, give me one word-- one kind word to carry away with me... dear!"

There followed a pause, during which her face showed dimly above him, with eyes shadowed darkly in the wan light. She leaned towards him.

"Ssh! Good-bye--dear!" she called back softly. And the next thing he realised, even as her words floated faintly down to his eager ears, was that he was standing alone in the darkness, gazing up at the place where she had stood and from whence she had vanished with startling and unaccountable suddenness.

Later Steele walked back to the quaint little hotel where he was staying, confused by the hurried sweetness of her farewell as she withdrew from her position at the window with a caution that suggested unseen interruption. He had stepped forward with noiseless haste to secure a rose which fell from her window, and carrying it with him, made his way silently out of the garden. He was never certain whether the falling of the rose had been accidental, or whether Prudence had dropped it for him as a token and a reminder; but because her hand had gathered it, he lifted it in the moonlight and touched its cool fragrance reverently with his lips. The act made him consciously her lover. The rose became a symbol--a bond between him and her. Just so long as he kept it he knew that her influence would dominate his life, and his memory of her retain its warm and vital quality, so that she would remain a beautiful inspiration amid the sordid worries of uncongenial things.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

"I heard you," Miss Matilda said in tones of immense reserve to her youngest sister on the following morning when they met on the landing at the top of the stairs, "talking from your window last night."

Prudence blushed brightly.

"Then it was you who came to my door?"

"Yes." Miss Matilda kept her maidenly gaze lowered to the carpet. Her expression was guilty, so that one might have supposed that she, and not the defiant young woman whom she accosted in this unexpected way, had engaged in clandestine whisperings overnight. "I was afraid Mary might wake. You were a little imprudent, I think."

Prudence laughed. The gently spoken reproof sounded like a play on her name.

"You are a dear," she said, and felt more kindly towards this sister whom she so little understood.

Had Miss Matilda proved less pliant to Miss Graynor's moulding she might have developed into an ordinary human being; but she had gone down under Miss Agatha's training, had imbibed the family traditions until she became saturated with the Graynor ideals and lost her own individuality.

In her heart she sympathised with her sister's indiscretions; but her mind condemned this conduct as unseemly and unbecoming in a girl of refinement.

She went downstairs in advance of Prudence, and throughout the reading of the morning prayers her pink distressed face witnessed to its owner's shame in being a partner to this flagrant deception. She was shielding her sister against her conscience: no accessory to a criminal offence could have felt more wickedly implicated. And Prudence did not care.

She was so utterly reckless that she had not bargained even with Miss Matilda for her silence. It had not occurred to Prudence that anyone could be mean enough to inform against her.

With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably.

"It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds," Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window.

Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was "tramps."

"In that case," she said with decision, "it is a matter for the police."

The smile in Prudence's eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda's downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarra.s.sment which follows upon duplicity.

Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele.

"I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning," he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his b.u.t.tons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. "I hope Morgan won't send a man like that again."

"Edward Morgan usually comes himself," Mr Graynor observed. "But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble."

"Well, of course," said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, "he is getting old."

Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty.

"Don't be absurd," interposed Miss Agatha sharply. "Mr Morgan is in the prime of life."

Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence's existence, was compelled to let the remark pa.s.s unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appet.i.te, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the sc.r.a.ppy conversation to which she paid no attention.

At the finish of the meal Miss Agatha created a diversion by requesting William to call at the police station to report that tramps had been loitering on the premises and had made havoc of the flowers in the borders. William required to be shown the borders, which he inspected with an air of pompous vexation, describing the damage as scandalous and an outrage, to the secret amus.e.m.e.nt of his youngest sister, who observed him critically from the French window of the drawing-room, which looked upon the borders in question. William was aware of her presence and of the smiling impertinence of her glance. It may have been the sight of her standing there in her scornful indifferent youth that accounted for the connecting thought which caused him to lift his eyes with swift suspicion to the window above the despoiled bed. Prudence, intercepting the upward glance, felt her cheeks suddenly aglow. For the first time since their disagreement he looked her fully in the face; then, with a change of expression that was a studied insult, he looked away.

"I don't think it is the work of a tramp," he said. "But I will inform the police. If anyone is caught loafing about the premises I'll run him in."

And Prudence, gazing upon the outraged dignity of his retreating back, laughed with considerable enjoyment.

"If only he could see how ridiculous he looks!" she mused, and stepped out upon the path, and gathered a wallflower head, which with an air of bravado she pinned in the front of her dress.

She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele's visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow's head. Bobby's incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence's horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence's frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt.

There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence.

For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle's lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented.

That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circ.u.mstances.

When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele's visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly.

"Oh, that!" she said. "That's ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background."

"The new curate!" suggested Bobby, grinning. "The chap who is fluttering the dovecots on account of his being unmarried. You devoted several letters to him, I remember. What's he like?"

"He's a little man in a big coat and a big hat," she answered. "What can be seen of him is quite nice, but it isn't much. There must be a brain of sorts under the hat, but it's little too. His chief idiosyncrasy is that he fancies himself all brain. Mrs North is trying to marry her daughter to him."

"And he prefers you," commented Bobby... "naturally."

Prudence smiled wickedly.

"He says it is the duty of a curate with only his stipend to depend upon to marry a woman of independent means. I think myself he will marry Matilda. He would like to belong to the family; the factory attracts him."

"Money-grubbing little worm!" said Bobby, who was barely a year younger than Prudence and presumed on that account to set aside her more responsible relationship. "I wish he would marry Aunt Agatha. That would be something of a lark."

"Poor little man!" said Prudence. "He's not so impossible as all that.

And he is horribly afraid of her. She makes him stammer."

Bobby laughed outright.