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                             TWO STRANGERS




                                  TWO
                               STRANGERS

                                  BY
                             MRS. OLIPHANT

                               NEW YORK
                        R. F. FENNO AND COMPANY
                           112 FIFTH AVENUE

                            COPYRIGHT, 1895
                        R. F. FENNO AND COMPANY




CHAPTER I.


“And who is this young widow of yours whom I hear so much about? I
understand Lucy’s rapture over any stranger; but you, too, mother--”

“I too--well, there is no particular witchcraft about it; a nice young
woman has as much chance with me as with any one, Ralph--”

“Oh, if it’s only a nice young woman--”

“It’s a great deal more,” said Lucy. “Why, Miss Jones at the school is a
nice young woman--don’t you be taken in by mother’s old-fashioned
stilts. She is a darling--she is as nice as nice can be. She’s pretty,
and she’s good, and she’s clever. She has read a lot, and seen a lot,
and been everywhere, and knows heaps and heaps of people, and yet just
as simple and as nice as if she had never been married, never had a
baby, and was just a girl like the rest of us--Mother! there is nothing
wrong in what I said?” Lucy suddenly cried, stopping short and blushing
all over with the innocent alarm of a youthfulness which had not been
trained to modern modes of speech.

“Nothing wrong, certainly,” said the mother, with a half smile;
“but--there is no need for entering into all these details.”

“They would have found out immediately, though,” said Lucy, with a
lowered voice, “that there was--Tiny, you know.”

The scene was a drawing-room in a country house looking out upon what
was at this time of year the rather damp and depressing prospect of a
park, with some fine trees and a great breadth of very green, very
mossy, very wet grass. It was only October, though the end of the month;
and in the middle of the day, in the sunshine, the trees, in all their
varied colors, were a fine sight, cheerful and almost exhilarating,
beguiling the eye; but now the sun was gone, the leaves were falling in
little showers whenever the faintest breath of air arose, and where the
green turf was not veiled by their many colored remnants, it was green
with that emerald hue which means only wet; one knew as one gazed across
it that one’s foot would sink in the spongy surface, and wet, wet would
be the boot, the skirt which touched it; the men in their
knickerbockers, or those carefully turned up trousers--which we hear are
the fashion in the dryest streets of Paris and New York--suffered
comparatively little. The brushwood was all wet, with blobs of moisture
on the long brambles and drooping leaves. The park was considered a
beautiful park, though not a very large one, but it was melancholy
itself to look out for hours together upon that green expanse in such an
evening. It was not a bad evening either. There was no rain; the clouds
hung low, but as yet had given forth no shower. The air was damp but yet
brisk. There was a faint yellow glimmer of what might have been sunset
in the sky.

The windows in the Wradisley drawing-rooms were large; one of them, a
vast, shallow bow, which seemed to admit the outside into the interior,
rather than to enlighten the interior with the view of what was outside.
Mrs. Wradisley sat within reach of, but not too near, a large, very red
fire--a fire which was like the turf outside, the growth of generations,
or at least had not at all the air of having been lighted to-day or any
recent day. It did not flame, but glowed steadily, adding something to
the color of the room, but not much to the light. Later in the season,
when larger parties assembled, there was tea in the hall for the
sportsmen and the ladies who waited for them; but Mrs. Wradisley thought
the hall draughty, and much preferred the drawing-room, which was
over-furnished after the present mode of drawing-rooms, but at least
warm, and free from draughts. She was working--knitting with white pins,
or else making mysterious chains and bridges in white wool with a
cro