CHAPTER I.

Mr. Falkirk.

“We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing That skies are clear and grass is growing.”

When one has in charge a treasure which one values greatly, and which, if once made known one is pretty sure to lose, I suppose the impulse of most men would be towards a hiding-place.  So, at any rate, felt one of the men in this history.  Schools had done their secluding work for a time; tutors and governors had come and gone under an almost Carthusian vow of silence, except as to their lessons; and now with seventeen years of inexperience on his hands, Mr. Falkirk’s sensations were those of the man out West, who wanted to move off whenever another man came within twenty miles of him.

Thus, in the forlorn hope of a retreat which yet he knew must prove useless, Mr. Falkirk let the first March winds blow him out of town; and at this present time was snugly hid away in a remote village which nobody ever heard of, and where nobody ever came.

So far so good:  Mr. Falkirk rested and took breath.  Nevertheless the spring came, even there; and following close in her train, the irrepressible conflict.  Whoever succeeded in running away from his duties—­or his difficulties?  There was a flutter of young life within doors as without, and Mr. Falkirk knew it:  there were a hundred rills of music, a thousand nameless flowers to which he could not close his senses.  There was a soft, indefinable stir and sweetness, that told of the breaking of Winter bonds and the coming of Summer glories; and he could not stay the progress of things in the one case more than in the other.

Mr. Falkirk had always taken care of this girl—­the few years before his guardianship were too dim to look back to much.  From the day when she, a suddenly orphaned child, stood frightened and alone among strangers, and he came in and took her on his knee, and bade her “be a woman, and be brave.”  That was his ideal of womanhood,—­to that combination of strength and weakness he had tried to bring Wych Hazel.

Yet though she had grown up in Mr. Falkirk’s company, she never thoroughly understood him:  nature and circumstances had made him a reserved man,—­and her eyes were young.  Of a piece with his reserve was the peculiar fence of separation which he built up between all his own concerns and those of his ward.  He was poor—­she had a more than ample fortune; yet no persuading would make him live with her.  Had he been rich, perhaps she might have lived with him; but as it was, unless when lodgings were the rule, they lived in separate houses; only his was always close at hand.  Even when his ward was a little child, living at Chickaree with her nurses and housekeeper, Mr. Falkirk never spent a night in the house.  He formally bought and paid for a tiny cottage on the premises, and there he lived:  nothing done without his knowledge, nothing undone