CROSS CURRENTS.

BY MARY ANGELA DICKENS.

Author of "A Mist of Error,”

Success," "Kitty's Victim," etc., etc.

"What

CHAPTER XXIV.

MISS TYRRELL had given it to be understood from the first that her wedding was to be a "quiet little affair"; she should allow her brother to give no party, she declared; but she hoped that all her friends would come and say good-bye to her. She had hoped this on two or three hundred printed cards of invitation, and on the afternoon after the garden party, the "quiet little affair" was lining with carriages the street in which the Tyrrells lived, crowding the drawing-room to the verge of suffocation, and filling the staircase with a confused mass of human beings, struggling up to the drawing-room door, where "Lady Ellingham," in a wedding dress which was to be a revelation of the beautiful to the conventional herd, was receiving her numerous friends.

Lady Ellingham's smile was sweetness itself; Lady Ellingham's affectionate cordiality to all comers was unvarying; but there was the faintest shadow of annoyance about her nevertheless. To the heroine of an occasion it is distinctly annoying to hear another woman's name incessantly on the lips of the crowd assembled to do honour to herself; to know that another woman is the centre of much talk and conjecture, when public attention should be by rights concentrated on the said heroine. And every one of Miss Tyrrell's guests was asking the same question in slightly varied

"I am sorry to say she is not well enough to be here," she said. "I had a little note from her this morning. Dear girl, I am so grieved."

Lady Ellingham did not think it for the public good that she should mention that the little note she had indeed received from Selma that morning had contained no information whatever as to the writer's health, but had said simply, in the fewest possible words, that she could not come to the wedding. Nor did she think it necessary to publish it abroad that the note in question had so astonished and disconcerted her that she had taken it straight to her brother in his study, and had watched his face curiously as he read it.

Tyrrell had glanced through it, and then sat silent for a moment frowning thoughtfully.

"Better say she is ill," he had said, finally, giving the note back to his sister and returning to his work, and Miss Tyrrell had discreetly retired, burning with mixed curiosity and indignation.

The "little affair" went off brilliantly, in spite of Miss Malet's absence. At about half-past four it was hardly possible to move in the drawing-room, on the stairs, or in the tea-room, and Tyrrell at the foot

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of the staircase, and desirous of putting in an appearance in his drawing-room above, was wondering how he was to do it, when he became aware of Julian Heriot standing against the wall close to him.

"I'm afraid you're wedged in there," said Tyrrell, pleasantly. "How are you?" "How are you?" returned the other, answering the conventional greeting with its equally conventional response. "Are you proposing to go up those stairs?" glancing up at them with a slight smile as he spoke.

"Well, on the whole, I think not; not this minute at least!" returned Tyrrell, laughing. "Have you been in this corner ever since you arrived, Heriot ?"

It was a kind of tiny recess in the hall, into which Heriot had stepped back out of the crowd, and as Tyrrell stood in front of him, letting the clatter of many tongues round them dominate his voice, they were inaudible to every one but each other, and were practically alone in the midst of the crush about them. Heriot did not answer Tyrrell's question. There was a moment's pause between them, and then he said, looking straight before him at the crowded staircase with no alteration of his usual expression :

"Miss Malet is not here to-day, they say!"

"No!" answered Tyrrell. "She has knocked herself up, I'm sorry to say."

"I made a fool of myself yesterday," pursued Heriot, in the same unmoved voice, drowned for all but Tyrrell by the noise of other voices. "I proposed to Miss Malet, and she refused me, of course." He paused an instant, as though something in the crowd had caught his eye. Tyrrell, completely taken by surprise, waited in silence, eyeing him with eyes that had suddenly grown very hard and cold. "I don't argue from that very natural circumstance that there must inevitably be some one else," Heriot went on; "unless I misunderstood her altogether, she is not engaged." He had spoken the last words very slowly and deliberately, and he paused and looked Tyrrell straight in the face as he finished. "Don't you think it is time she was?" he said, quietly.

The two men faced one another for a moment, and Tyrrell tried in vain to read the cynical, impassive face before him. Then he said, carelessly, taking the other's words intentionally in the simple sense in which he knew they were not meant:

"Perhaps ! But she is younger than she looks, you know. Well, I suppose I must try to get upstairs. See you again!"

He turned away, dismissing Heriot and his words from his mind, until it should be convenient to him to reflect upon them.

He did not understand them, but the present was by no means the time for explanations. He had his duties, as host, to attend to, and he attended to them accordingly with the delightful manner which was one of his greatest social charms. Julian Heriot watched him for a little while moving to and fro in the crowdhe himself best knew how-and then he went away.

That same afternoon Humphrey Cornish, oppressed with a sense that the day was coming when he must take his holiday, which he hated prospectively, and during which he revelled undemonstratively in country sights and sounds, had settled down to follow up a hard morning's work, with two or three hours more of the same kind. He had been alone in the quiet studio for more than an hour, working with concentrated, thoughtful face, so absorbed that he did not even look round when the door opened and shut again softly. He was vaguely conscious that Helen had come in and was sitting now with her needlework in her accustomed place at the other end of the room. As he had been vaguely conscious before of missing her presence, and he had no idea that half an hour had passed since her entrance, when he said, absently, without pausing in his work:

"How is she?"

Helen held her needle suspended in her hand as she lifted her head to answer. She was quite accustomed to Humphrey's ways, and accepted them simply as part of the man she loved when she could not understand them.

"She says her head is better. She didn't open the door, and I hope she was lying down," she answered, softly. "The sun must have been too hot for her yesterday," she added, meditatively, and then there was silence again in the studio as Humphrey continued his work, and Helen bent her head over the little soft white frock she was making for the little Helen. Another half hour passed, and then the silence was broken a second time. There was a man's quick step on the stair, a step which caused Helen to lay down

her work with a low exclamation of surprise, as Roger Cornish came into the

room.

"Why, Roger!" said Helen, holding out her hand to him, while Humphrey was reconciling himself to the conviction that he was interrupted, "what a surprising time of day to see you !"

Roger was rather flushed, and he shook hands with Helen absently and awkwardly, making no apology, as he usually did, for interrupting his brother's work when Humphrey collected his ideas with an effort and received him with a cordial "Hullo, Roger !" He seemed hardly to hear Helen's words; he replied to her question as to Mervyn's health vaguely and as though his thoughts were preoccupied, and after a few minutes he said, abruptly:

"Helen, don't think me the roughest fellow you know if I ask Humphrey to come downstairs with me. I-I've got some business to talk to him about."

Helen rose, laughing at him pleasantly as she did so.

ideal; but, by Heaven, I'd give all I've got-except my wife-for your right to bring that fellow to book!"

The first moment of fierce indignation over, his brother's passion had the effect of bringing Humphrey to a quieter estimate of the case. Dreamer and recluse as he was by temperament, he had far more knowledge of the London world than Roger; and the idea, though it was no less intolerable, was less inconceivable to him than to his brother.

"Who is it?" he said, shortly and sternly.

Roger broke into a fierce, harsh laugh. "The man she looked upon as a kind of guardian," he said. "The man, of all others, who ought to have kept every breath of scandal from her name. Scandal, good Heavens, and Selma! John Tyrrell!"

Then he told his brother, in short, sharp sentences, of the words he had heard the night before at his club-the words which had been cut short, and turned into a sullen apology, by such a fierce outburst from himself as had reduced the whole roomful to silence.

"Is she ill?" he said, in a low, quick tone.

"Selma?" answered Humphrey, looking at him. "No-only overtired. What's wrong, Roger? Sit down."

"I can't sit down," returned Roger, vehemently, turning and beginning to pace rest lessly up and down the room. "I've come to you, because I've turned over everything, and I can't think of any other way. You're her brother, or the next thing to it, and the only man, I suppose, who has a right to interfere. Humphrey, do you know that she's-talked about?

The last words came from him hurried and almost muffled, and there was that about them which no man could misunderstand. Humphrey moved suddenly, with a short, sharp exclamation, and then there was a moment's dead silence. broken by Humphrey.

It was

"Are you speaking of-Selma?" he said. Roger had come to a sudden stop as he spoke his last words, and was standing facing his brother, his breath coming very quick and short, his face flushed darkly.

"Yes!" he said, hoarsely. "You know how I felt for her once, Humphrey. You know that she's nothing to me now but an

There was no answer, and he turned and began to pace fiercely up and down the room again. Humphrey was sitting with a clenched hand resting on the arm of his chair, and a set, roused expression on his face. He was thinking of the headache which Helen had found so perplexing in her sister that day; and he was thinking that if such shameful gossip had come to Selma's ears, a horsewhip would be a mild instrument with which to approach the man who had been so careless as to render such a catastrophe even remotely possible.

"What's to be done?" demanded Roger, abruptly, pulling up suddenly and facing his brother. Humphrey rose, and his voice, as he spoke, was very stern and resonant.

"I shall see Tyrrell to-night," he said; and Roger, who had wished from the bottom of his heart that it was he and not the impractical Humphrey who stood to Selma in the place of a brother, was reassured by the expression of his brother's face.

Helen was somewhat surprised when she came back to the studio an hour later, thinking that any amount of business