A Life Sentence. Sergeant Adeline
wistfulness of his tone, of his looks, would have softened any heart that was not hard as stone. But Florence Lepel's pale face was utterly unmoved.
"You offer me a brilliant lot," she said—"to live in a garret, I suppose, and darn your stockings, while you earn a paltry pittance as a literary man, eked out by aunt Leo's charity! You know very well that sooner than do that I put up for two years with Marion Vane's patronage and the drudgery of the schoolroom! And now, when the woman who alternately scolded and cajoled me, the woman who once took it upon her to lecture me for my behavior to her husband, the woman whom I hated as I should hate a poisonous snake—when that woman is slowly dying and leaving the field to me, am I to throw up the game, give up my chances, and go to vegetate with you in London? You know me very little if you think I would do that."
"I seem to have known you very little all my life," said Hubert bitterly. "I certainly do not understand you now. What can you get by staying here?"
"Oh, nothing, of course!" she answered tranquilly.
"What is your scheme, Florence?"
"It is of no use telling you—you might interfere again."
The anguish of doubt and anxiety in his dark eyes, if she had looked at him, would surely have moved her. But she did not look.
"I mean to stay here," she said quietly, "teaching Enid Vane, putting up with aunt Leonora's impertinences as well as I can, until I get another chance in the world. What that chance may be of course I cannot tell, but I am certain that it will come."
"You can bear to stay in this house which I—I—infinitely less blameworthy than yourself—can hardly endure to enter?"
"The world would not call you less blameworthy. I am glad that you are so far on good terms with your conscience."
"Florence," he said, almost threateningly, "take care! I will not spare you another time. If I find you involved in any other transaction of which you ought to be ashamed, I will expose you. I will tell the world the truth—that you were on the point of leaving England with Sydney Vane when I—when I——"
"When you shot him," she said, without a trace of emotion manifest in either face or voice, "and let Andrew Westwood bear the blame."
The young man winced as if he had received a blow.
"It was to shield you that I kept silence," he said, passionate agitation showing itself in his manner. "It was to save your good name. But even for your sake I would not have let the man suffer death. If we had obtained no reprieve for him, I swear that I would have given myself up and borne the punishment!"
"You were at work then? You tried to get the reprieve for him?" said his sister, with the faintest possible touch of eagerness.
"I did indeed." Hubert's voice fell into a lower key, as if he were trying, miserably enough, to justify to himself, rather than to her, what he had done. "It would be almost useless to confess my own guilt. It would be thought that I was beside myself. Who would believe me—unless you—you yourself corroborated my story? The man Westwood was a poacher, a thief, wretchedly poor and in ill-health; he has no character to lose, no friends to consider. Besides, he was morally guiltier than I. I know that he was lying in wait for Sydney Vane; I know that he had resolved to be revenged on him. Now I—I met my enemy in fair fight; I did not lie in ambush for him."
But from the darkness of his countenance it was plain that the young man's conscience was not deceived by the specious plea that he had set up for himself. Beneath her drooping eyelids Florence watched him narrowly. She read him in his weakness, his bitterness of spirit, more clearly than he could read himself. Suddenly she sat up and leaned forward so that she could touch him with one of her soft cold hands—her hands were always cold.
"Hubert," she said, with a gentle inflection of her voice which took him by surprise, "I am perhaps not as bad as you think me, dear. I do not want to quarrel with you—you are my only friend. You have saved me from worse than death. I will not be ungrateful. I will do exactly as you wish."
He looked bewildered, almost dismayed.
"Do you mean it, Florence?" he asked doubtingly.
"I do indeed. And, in return, oh, Hubert, will you set my mind at rest by promising me one thing? You will give me another chance to retrieve my wasted, ruined life, will you not? You will never tell to another what you and I know alone? You will still shield me—from—from—disgrace, Hubert—for our mother's sake?"
The tears trembled on her lashes; she slipped down from her low chair and knelt by his side, clasping her hands over his half-reluctant fingers, appealing to him with voice and look alike; and, in an evil hour for himself, he promised at any cost to shield her from the consequences of her folly and his sin.
CHAPTER V.
"Oh, you two are here together!" There was a note of surprise in Miss Vane's voice as she turned the corner of a great group of foliage-plants, and came upon brother and sister at the open library window. "I could not tell what had become of either of you. If you have finished your conversation"—with a sharp glance from Florence's wet eyelashes to Hubert's pale agitated face—"I have work for both of you. Florence, Enid has been alone all the morning; do take the child for a walk and let her have a little fresh air! And I want you to go for a stroll with me, Hubert; the General is sleeping quietly, and I have two or three things to consult you about before I go up to Marion."
The sudden gleam in Florence's eyes, quickly as it was concealed, did not escape Miss Leonora's notice as she moved away.
"What's the matter with Flossy?" she asked abruptly, stopping to throw over her head a black-lace scarf which she had been carrying on her arm. "She has been crying."
"She feels the trouble that has come upon us all, I suppose," said Hubert rather awkwardly. He pressed forward a little, so as to hold open the conservatory door for his aunt. He was glad of the opportunity of averting his face for a moment from the scrutiny of her keen eyes.
"That is not all," said Miss Vane, as she quitted the great glass-house, with its wealth of bloom and perfume, for the freshness of the outer air. She struck straight across the sunny lawn, leaving the house behind. "That is not all. Come away from the house—I don't want what I have to say to you to be overheard, and walls have ears sometimes. Your sister Florence, Hubert, was never remarkable for a very feeling heart. She is, and always was, the most unsympathetic person I ever knew."
"She has perhaps greater depth of feeling than we give her credit for," said Hubert, thinking of certain words that had been said, of certain scenes on which his eyes had rested in by-gone days.
"Not she—excuse me! Hubert, I know that she is your sister, and that men do not like to hear their sisters spoken against; but I must remind you that Florence lived ten years under my roof, and that a woman is more likely to understand a girl's nature than a young man."
"I never pretended to understand Florence," said Hubert helplessly; "she got beyond me long ago."
"She is a good deal older than you, my dear, and she has had more experiences than she would like to have known. How do I know? I only guess, but I am certain of what I say. She is nine-and-twenty, and she has been out in the world for the last eight years. There is no telling what she may not have gone through in that space of time."
Hubert was dumb—it was not in his power just then to contradict his aunt's assertions.
"I would gladly have kept her under the shelter of my roof," said Miss Vane, pursuing the tenor of her thoughts without much reference to her listener's condition of mind; "but you know as well as I do that she refused to live with me after she was twenty-one—would be a governess. Ugh! Wonder how she liked it?"
"She seemed to like it very well; she stayed four years in Russia."
"Yes,