"Vanbrunt is a Yorkshire dalesman, with Dutch trading blood in him. It is extraordinary how Dutch the people look near Goole and Hull. I shall like him better now. I always have liked him till--the last few months. You would never say Vanbrunt was a gentleman, but you would never say he wasn't. He seems apart from all class. There is no hall-mark upon him. He is himself. So you would not have him, my little Anne? That's over. It's the very devil to be refused, I can tell you. I was refused once. It was some time ago, as you may imagine, but--I have not forgotten it. I learned what London looks like in the dawn, after walking the streets all night. So it's his turn to wear out the pavement now, is it! Poor man! He'll take it hard in a bottled-up way. When next I see him I shall say: 'Aha! money can't buy everything, Vanbrunt.'" "Oh! no, father. You won't be so brutal." "No, my dear, I daresay I shall not. I shall pretend not to know. Really I have a sort of regard for him. Poor Vanbrunt!" CHAPTER XI "C'est son ignorance qui fixe son malheur." --MAETERLINCK. Did you ever, as a child, see ink made? Did you ever watch, with wondering intentness, the mixing of one little bottle of colourless fluid--which you imagined to be pure water--with another equally colourless? No change. Then at last, into the cup of clear water, the omnipotent parent hand pours out of another tiny phial two or three crystal drops. The latent ink rushes into being at the contact of those few drops. The whole cup is black with it, transfused with impenetrable darkness, terrible to look upon. We are awed, partly owing to the exceeding glory of the magician with the Vandyke hand, who knows everything, and who can work miracles at will, and partly because we did not see the change coming. We were warned that it would come by that voice of incarnate wisdom. We were all eyes. But it was there before we knew. Some of us, as older children, watch with our ignorant eyes the mysterious alchemy in our little cup of life. We are warned, but we see not. We somehow miss the sign. The water is clear, quite clear. Something more is coming, straight from the same Hand. In a moment all is darkness. A wiser woman than Janet would perhaps have known, would at any rate have feared, that a certain small cloud on her horizon, no larger than a man's hand, meant a great storm. But until it broke she did not realize that that ever-increasing ominous pageant had any connection with the hurricane that at last fell upon her: just as some of us see the rosary of life only as separate beads, not noticing the divine constraining thread, and are taken by surprise when we come to the cross. * * * * *