d not
forgotten that strange, new feeling which disturbed her heart the
morning after Mr. Smallwood was taken ill; and she experienced, half
unconsciously, a thoroughly feminine resentment against the man who had
called into being such an emotion, and then apparently had found no use
for it. So Elisabeth in her heart of hearts was at war with
Christopher--that slumbering, smouldering sort of warfare which is
ready to break out into fire and battle at the slightest provocation;
and this state of affairs did not tend to make life any the easier for
him. He felt he could have cheerfully borne it all if only Elisabeth had
been kind and had understood; but Elisabeth did not understand him in
the least, and was consequently unkind--far more unkind than she, in her
careless, light-hearted philosophy, dreamed of.

She, too, had her disappointments to bear just then. The artist-soul in
her had grown up, and was crying out for expression; and she vainly
prayed her cousin to let her go to the Slade School, and there learn to
develop the power that was in her. But Miss Farringdon belonged to the
generation which regarded art purely as a recreation--such as
fancy-work, croquet, and the like--and she considered that young women
should be trained for the more serious things of life; by which she
meant the ordering of suitable dinners for the rich and the
manufacturing of seemly garments for the poor. So Elisabeth had to
endure the agony which none but an artist can know--the agony of being
dumb when one has an angel-whispered secret to tell forth--of being
bound hand and foot when one has a God-sent message to write upon the
wall.

Now and then Miss Maria took her young cousin up to town for a few
weeks, and thus Elisabeth came to have a bowing acquaintanceship with
London; but of London as an ever-fascinating, never-wearying friend she
knew nothing. There are people who tell us that "London is delightful in
the season," and that "the country is very pretty in the summer," and we
smile at them as a man would smile at those who said that his mother was
"a pleasant person," or his heart's dearest "a charming girl." Those
who know London and the country, as London and the country deserve to be
known, do not talk in this way, for they have learned that there is no
end to the wonder or the interest or the mystery of either.

The year following Richard Smallwood's break-down, a new interest came
into Elisabeth's life. A son and heir was