Chapter 56 - Page 2

her own father. He had tried to poison Dolly's mind with doses of social nonsense--in which he believed about as much as a quack believes in his own pills--but his main reliance now was placed in his hold upon her romantic heart, and in her vague ambitions. Pure and faithful love was not to be expected from his nature; but he had invested in Dolly all the affection he could spare from self. He had laboured long, and suffered much, and the red crown of his work was nigh.

Riding slowly down the hill about half a mile from the village, Carne saw a tall man coming towards him with a firm, deliberate walk. The stranger was dressed very lightly, and wore a hat that looked like a tobacco leaf, and carried a long wand in his hand, as if he were going to keep order in church. These things took the eye afar, but at shorter range became as nothing, compared with the aspect of the man himself. This was grand, with its steadfast gaze--no stare, but a calm and kind regard--its large tranquillity and power of receiving without believing the words of men; and most of all in the depth of expression reserved by experience in the forest of its hair.

Carne was about to pass in silent wonder and uneasiness, but the other gently laid the rod across his breast and stopped him, and then waited for him to ask the reason why.

"Have you any business with me, good sir?" Carne would have spoken rudely, but saw that rudeness would leave no mark upon a man like this. "If so, I must ask you to be quick. And perhaps you will tell me who you are."

"I think that you are Caryl Carne," said the stranger, not unpleasantly, but as if it mattered very little who was Caryl Carne, or whether there was any such existence.

Carne stared fiercely, for he was of touchy temper; but he might as well have stared at a bucket of water in the hope of deranging its tranquillity. "You know me. But I don't know you," he answered at last, with a jerk of his reins.

"Be in no hurry," said the other, mildly; "the weather is fine, and time plentiful. I hope to have much pleasant knowledge of you. I have the honour to be your first cousin, Erle Twemlow. Shake hands with your kinsman."

Carne offered his hand, but without his usual grace and self-possession. Twemlow took it in his broad brown palm, in which it seemed to melt away, firm though it was and muscular.

"I was going up to call on you," said Twemlow, who had acquired a habit of speaking as if he meant all the world to hear. "I feel a deep interest in your fortunes, and hope to improve them enormously. You shall hear all about it when I come up. I have passed four years in the wilds of Africa, where no white man ever trod before, and I have found out things no white man knows. We call those people savages, but they know a great deal more than we do. Shall I call to-morrow, and have a long