The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Her unresentful acceptance of things was at once significant and moving. Betty found her amazing. What she lived on it was not easy to understand. She seemed rather like a cheerful old bird, getting up each unprovided-for morning, and picking up her sustenance where she found it.

“There’s more in the sayin’ `the Lord pervides’ than a good many thinks,” she said with a small chuckle, marked more by a genial and comfortable sense of humour than by an air of meritoriously quoting the vicar. “He DO.”

She paid one and threepence a week in rent for her cottage, and this was the most serious drain upon her resources. She apparently could live without food or fire, but the rent must be paid. “An’ I do get a bit be’ind sometimes,” she confessed apologetically, “an’ then it’s a trouble to get straight.”

Her cottage was one of a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after, and “bits of ‘elp” needed, sometimes there were “movings” from one cottage to another, and “confinements” were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant. She was engagingly frank.

“When they’re new to it, an’ a bit frightened, I just give ‘em a cup of ‘ot tea, an’ joke with ‘em to cheer ‘em up,” she said. “I says to Charles Jenkins’ wife, as lives next door, `come now, me girl, it’s been goin’ on since Adam an’ Eve, an’ there’s a good many of us left, isn’t there?’ An’ a fine boy it was, too, miss, an’ ‘er up an’ about before ‘er month.”

She was paid in sixpences and spare shillings, and in cups of tea, or a fresh-baked loaf, or screws of sugar, or even in a garment not yet worn beyond repair. And she was free to run in and out, and grow a flower or so in her garden, and talk with a neighbour over the low dividing hedge.

“They want me to go into the `Ouse,’ ” reaching the dangerous subject at last. “They say I’ll be took care of an’ looked after. But I don’t want to do it, miss. I want to keep my bit of a ‘ome if I can, an’ be free to come an’ go. I’m eighty-three, an’ it won’t be long. I ‘ad a shilling a week from the parish, but they stopped it because they said I ought to go into the `Ouse.’ “

She looked at Betty with a momentarily anxious smile.

“P’raps you don’t quite understand, miss,” she said. “It’ll seem like nothin’ to you—a place like this.”

“It doesn’t,” Betty answered, smiling bravely back into the old eyes, though she felt a slight fulness of the throat. “I understand all about it.”

It is possible that old Mrs. Welden was a little taken aback by an attitude which, satisfactory to her own prejudices though it might be, was, taken in connection with fixed customs, a trifle unnatural.

“You don’t mind me not wantin’ to go?” she said.

“No,” was the answer, “not at all.”

Betty began to ask questions. How much tea, sugar, soap, candles, bread, butter, bacon, could Mrs. Welden use in a week? It was not very easy to find out the exact quantities, as Mrs. Welden’s estimates of such things had been based, during her entire existence, upon calculation as to how little, not how much she could use.

When Betty suggested a pound of tea, a half pound—the old woman smiled at the innocent ignorance the suggestion of such reckless profusion implied.

“Oh, no! Bless you, miss, no! I couldn’t never do away with it. A quarter, miss—that’d be plenty—a quarter.”

Mrs. Welden’s idea of “the best,” was that at two shillings a pound. Quarter of a pound would cost sixpence (twelve cents, thought Betty). A pound of sugar would be twopence, Mrs. Welden would use half a pound (the riotous extravagance of two cents). Half a pound of butter, “Good tub butter, miss,” would be ten pence three farthings a pound. Soap, candles, bacon, bread, coal, wood, in the quantities required by Mrs. Welden, might, with the addition of rent, amount to the dizzying height of eight or ten shillings.

“With careful extravagance,” Betty mentally summed up, “I might spend almost two dollars a week in surrounding her with a riot of luxury.”

She made a list of the things, and added some extras as an idea of her own. Life had not afforded her this kind of thing before, she realised. She felt for the first time the joy of reckless extravagance, and thrilled with the excitement of it.

“You need not think of Brexley Union any more,” she said, when she, having risen to go, stood at the cottage door with old Mrs. Welden. “The things I have written down here shall be sent to you every Saturday night. I will pay your rent.”

“Miss—miss!” Mrs. Welden looked affrighted. “It’s too much, miss. An’ coals eighteen pence a hundred!”

“Never mind,” said her ladyship’s sister, and the old woman, looking up into her eyes, found there the colour Mount Dunstan had thought of as being that of bluebells under water. “I think we can manage it, Mrs. Welden. Keep yourself as warm as you like, and sometime I will come and have a cup of tea with you and see if the tea is good.”

“Oh! Deary me!” said Mrs. Welden. “I can’t think what to say, miss. It lifts everythin’—everythin’. It’s not to be believed. It’s like bein’ left a fortune.”

When the wicket gate swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the old woman stood staring after her. And here was a piece of news to run into Charley Jenkins’ cottage and tell—and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it?

CHAPTER XXV

“WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!”

Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond. The grey mass of the castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low. The great spaces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master’s sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints—the mother ewes’ mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs— floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day’s repose. Where two who are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk. These two men—father and son—were friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholt’s first memory of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and indistinct things. They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years. After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.

“Have you seen her?” he was saying.

“Only at a distance. She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes in a cart. She drove well and–-” he laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar—”the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome.”

“The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted with,” Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness. “Any young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now—just now–-” He paused a moment as though considering. “It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to appear among us. They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices. They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate. But it never occurred to us to marry them. We did not take them seriously enough. But we began to marry them— we began to marry them, my good fellow!”

The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed also. But he recovered his seriousness.

“It was all rather a muddle at first,” he went on. “Things were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other. But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane denying—huge, fabulously resourceful in every way—area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and who began by being English—which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of `owning the earth.’ That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the map—look at the map! There we are.”

They had frequently discussed together the question of the development of international relations. Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.

“The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke,” he had once said, “has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child. But the child is shooting up amazingly—amazingly. In a way which suggests divers possibilities.”

The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had been rare and formal. From the call made upon the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock and her uneasy, childish eyes. For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return calls. One heard painful accounts of her apparent wretched ill-health and of the condition of her husband’s estate.

“As the relations between the two families have evidently been strained for years,” Lord Dunholm said, “it is interesting to hear of the sudden advent of the sister. It seems to point to reconciliation. And you say the girl is an unusual person.

“From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate. That an American who is making her first visit to England should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing to wonder at. What can she know about it, one thinks. But she apparently does know. They say she has made no mistakes—even with the village people. She is managing, in one way or another, to give work to every man who wants it. Result, of course—unbounded rustic enthusiasm.”

Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.

“How clever of her! And what sensible good feeling! Yes—yes! She evidently has learned things somewhere. Perhaps New York has found it wise to begin to give young women professional training in the management of English estates. Who knows? Not a bad idea.”

It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had in a manner spread her fame. One heard enlightening and illustrative anecdotes of her. He related several well worth hearing. She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions.

“One detail of the story of old Doby’s meerschaum,” Westholt said, “pleased me enormously. She managed to convey to him—without hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him with embarrassment—that if he preferred a clean churchwarden or his old briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the new pipe. He could regard it as a trophy. Now, how did she do that without filling him with fright and confusion, lest she might think him not sufficiently grateful for her present? But they tell me she did it, and that old Doby is rapturously happy and takes the meerschaum to bed with him, but only smokes it on Sundays—sitting at his window blowing great clouds when his neighbours are coming from church. It was a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like his old pipe best.”

“It was a deliciously clever girl,” said Lord Dunholm. “One wants to know and make friends with her. We must drive over and call. I confess, I rather congratulate myself that Anstruthers is not at home.”

“So do I,” Westholt answered. “One wonders a little how far he and his sister-in-law will `foregather’ when he returns. He’s an unpleasant beggar.”

A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs. Charley Jenkins, was passed by a carriage whose liveries she recognised half way up the village street. It was the carriage from Dunholm Castle. Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord Westholt sat in it. They were, of course, going to call at the Court. Miss Vanderpoel was beginning to draw people. She naturally would. She would be likely to make quite a difference in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her and Lady Anstruthers had been seen driving with her, evidently no longer an unvisitable invalid, but actually decently clothed and in her right mind. Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the landau. She felt that the Dunholms were important. There were earldoms AND earldoms, and that of Dunholm was dignified and of distinction.

A common-looking young man on a bicycle, who had wheeled into the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a hundred yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and dismounted, just as Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking after the equipage, and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.

“This is Stornham village, ain’t it, ma’am?” he inquired.

“Yes, my man.” His costume and general aspect seemed to indicate that he was of the class one addressed as “my man,” though there was something a little odd about him.

“Thank you. That wasn’t Miss Vanderpoel’s eldest sister in that carriage, was it?”

“Miss Vanderpoel’s–-” Mrs. Brent hesitated. “Do you mean Lady Anstruthers?”

“I’d forgotten her name. I know Miss Vanderpoel’s eldest sister lives at Stornham—Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter.”

“Lady Anstruthers’ younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel, and she is visiting at Stornham Court now.” Mrs. Brent could not help adding, curiously, “Why do you ask?”

“I am going to see her. I’m an American.”

Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp. She had heard remarkable things of the democratic customs of America. It was painful not to be able to ask questions.

“The lady in the carriage was the Countess of Dunholm,” she said rather grandly. “They are going to the Court to call on Miss Vanderpoel.”

“Then Miss Vanderpoel’s there yet. That’s all right. Thank you, ma’am,” and lifting his cap again he turned into the little public house.

The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of manservant in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling, confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well dressed, and of trained bearing. The entrance hall had lost its hopeless shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing. The change suggested magic. The magic which had been used, Lord Dunholm reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth. Given surroundings, combined with a gift for knowing values of form and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands of guineas on tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties, barrenness is easily transformed.

The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstruthers, as she had generally been called, there was to be noted alteration also. In her case the change, being in its first stages, could not perhaps be yet called transformation, but, aided by softly pretty arrangement of dress and hair, a light in her eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her skin, one recalled that she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after all she was only about thirty-two years old

That her sister, Miss Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither Lord Dunholm nor his wife nor their son did hesitate. A girl with long limbs an alluring profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round lovely Irish-blue eyes, possesses physical capital not to be argued about.

She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose thin, though sometimes rather sweet, and always gay, high-pitched young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially struck by in the early days of the American invasion. Her voice had a tone one would be likely to remember with pleasure. How well she moved—how well her black head was set on her neck! Yes, she was of the new type—the later generation.

These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it— planned it, perhaps, bought—figuratively speaking—the architects and material to design and build it—bought them in whatever country they found them, England, France, Italy Germany—pocketing them coolly and carrying them back home to develop, complete, and send forth into the world when their invention was a perfected thing. Struck by the humour of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling into the Irish-blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which warmed his heart. There were no pauses in the conversation which followed. In times past, calls at Stornham had generally held painfully blank moments. Lady Dunholm was as pleased as her husband. A really charming girl was an enormous acquisition to the neighbourhood.

Westholt, his father saw, had found even more than the story of old Doby’s pipe had prepared him to expect.

Country calls were not usually interesting or stimulating, and this one was. Lord Dunholm laid subtly brilliant plans to lead Miss Vanderpoel to talk of her native land and her views of it. He knew that she would say things worth hearing. Incidentally one gathered picturesque detail. To have vibrated between the two continents since her thirteenth year, to have spent a few years at school in one country, a few years in another, and yet a few years more in still another, as part of an arranged educational plan; to have crossed the Atlantic for the holidays, and to have journeyed thousands of miles with her father in his private car; to make the visits of a man of great schemes to his possessions of mines, railroads, and lands which were almost principalities—these things had been merely details of her life, adding interest and variety, it was true, but seeming the merely normal outcome of existence. They were normal to Vanderpoels and others of their class who were abnormalities in themselves when compared with the rest of the world.

Her own very lack of any abnormality reached, in Lord Dunholm’s mind, the highest point of illustration of the phase of life she beautifully represented—for beautiful he felt its rare charms were.

When they strolled out to look at the gardens he found talk with her no less a stimulating thing. She told her story of Kedgers, and showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies were to bloom, with the giants lifting white archangel trumpets above them in the centre.

“He can be trusted,” she said. “I feel sure he can be trusted. He loves them. He could not love them so much and not be able to take care of them.” And as she looked at him in frank appeal for sympathy, Lord Dunholm felt that for the moment she looked like a tall, queenly child.

But pleased as he was, he presently gave up his place at her side to Westholt. He must not be a selfish old fellow and monopolise her. He hoped they would see each other often, he said charmingly. He thought she would be sure to like Dunholm, which was really a thoroughly English old place, marked by all the features she seemed so much attracted by. There were some beautiful relics of the past there, and some rather shocking ones—certain dungeons, for instance, and a gallows mount, on which in good old times the family gallows had stood. This had apparently been a working adjunct to the domestic arrangements of every respectable family, and that irritating persons should dangle from it had been a simple domestic necessity, if one were to believe old stories.

“It was then that nobles were regarded with respect,” he said, with his fine smile. “In the days when a man appeared with clang of arms and with javelins and spears before, and donjon keeps in the background, the attitude of bent knees and awful reverence were the inevitable results. When one could hang a servant on one’s own private gallows, or chop off his hand for irreverence or disobedience—obedience and reverence were a rule. Now, a month’s notice is the extremity of punishment, and the old pomp of armed servitors suggests comic opera. But we can show you relics of it at Dunholm.”

He joined his wife and began at once to make himself so delightful to Rosy that she ceased to be afraid of him, and ended by talking almost gaily of her London visit.

Betty and Westholt walked together. The afternoon being lovely, they had all sauntered into the park to look at certain views, and the sun was shining between the trees. Betty thought the young man almost as charming as his father, which was saying much. She had fallen wholly in love with Lord Dunholm—with his handsome, elderly face, his voice, his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of manner, his courteous ease and wit. He was one of the men who stood for the best of all they had been born to represent. Her own father, she felt, stood for the best of all such an American as himself should be. Lord Westholt would in time be what his father was. He had inherited from him good looks, good feeling, and a sense of humour. Yes, he had been given from the outset all that the other man had been denied. She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as “the other man,” and spoke of him.

“You know Lord Mount Dunstan?” she said.

Westholt hesitated slightly.

“Yes—and no,” he answered, after the hesitation. “No one knows him very well. You have not met him?” with a touch of surprise in his tone.

“He was a passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed the Atlantic. There was a slight accident and we were thrown together for a few moments. Afterwards I met him by chance again. I did not know who he was.”

Lord Westholt showed signs of hesitation anew. In fact, he was rather disturbed. She evidently did not know anything whatever of the Mount Dunstans. She would not be likely to hear the details of the scandal which had obliterated them, as it were, from the decent world.

The present man, though he had not openly been mixed up with the hideous thing, had borne the brand because he had not proved himself to possess any qualities likely to recommend him. It was generally understood that he was a bad lot also. To such a man the allurements such a young woman as Miss Vanderpoel would present would be extraordinary. It was unfortunate that she should have been thrown in his way. At the same time it was not possible to state the case clearly during one’s first call on a beautiful stranger.

“His going to America was rather spirited,” said the mellow voice beside him. “I thought only Americans took their fates in their hands in that way. For a man of his class to face a rancher’s life means determination. It means the spirit–-” with a low little laugh at the leap of her imagination—”of the men who were Mount Dunstans in early days and went forth to fight for what they meant to have. He went to fight. He ought to have won. He will win some day.”

“I do not know about fighting,” Lord Westholt answered. Had the fellow been telling her romantic stories? “The general impression was that he went to America to amuse himself.”

“No, he did not do that,” said Betty, with simple finality. “A sheep ranch is not amusing–-” She stopped short and stood still for a moment. They had been walking down the avenue, and she stopped because her eyes had been caught by a figure half sitting, half lying in the middle of the road, a prostrate bicycle near it. It was the figure of a cheaply dressed young man, who, as she looked, seemed to make an ineffectual effort to rise.

“Is that man ill?” she exclaimed. “I think he must be.” They went towards him at once, and when they reached him he lifted a dazed white face, down which a stream of blood was trickling from a cut on his forehead. He was, in fact, very white indeed, and did not seem to know what he was doing.

“I am afraid you are hurt,” Betty said, and as she spoke the rest of the party joined them. The young man vacantly smiled, and making an unconscious-looking pass across his face with his hand, smeared the blood over his features painfully. Betty kneeled down, and drawing out her handkerchief, lightly wiped the gruesome smears away. Lord Westholt saw what had happened, having given a look at the bicycle.

“His chain broke as he was coming down the incline, and as he fell he got a nasty knock on this stone,” touching with his foot a rather large one, which had evidently fallen from some cartload of building material.

The young man, still vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his breast pocket. He began to talk incoherently in good, nasal New York, at the mere sound of which Lady Anstruthers made a little yearning step forward.

“Superior any other,” he muttered. “Tabulator spacer— marginal release key—call your ‘tention—instantly—’justable —Delkoff—no equal on market.” And having found what he had fumbled for, he handed a card to Miss Vanderpoel and sank unconscious on her breast.

“Let me support him, Miss Vanderpoel,” said Westholt, starting forward.

“Never mind, thank you,” said Betty. “If he has fainted I suppose he must be laid flat on the ground. Will you please to read the card.

It was the card Mount Dunstan had read the day before.

J. BURRIDGE & SON, DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO. BROADWAY, NEW YORK. G. SELDEN.

“He is probably G. Selden,” said Westholt. “Travelling in the interests of his firm, poor chap. The clue is not of much immediate use, however.”

They were fortunately not far from the house, and Westholt went back quickly to summon servants and send for the village doctor. The Dunholms were kindly sympathetic, and each of the party lent a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. Lord Dunholm helped Miss Vanderpoel to lay the young man down carefully.

“I am afraid,” he said; “I am really afraid his leg is broken. It was twisted under him. What can be done with him?”

Miss Vanderpoel looked at her sister.

“Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily, Rosy?” she asked. “There is apparently nothing else to be done.”

“Yes, yes,” said Lady Anstruthers. “How could one send him away, poor fellow! Let him be carried to the house.”

Miss Vanderpoel smiled into Lord Dunholm’s much approving, elderly eyes.

“G. Selden is a compatriot,” she said. “Perhaps he heard I was here and came to sell me a typewriter.”

Lord Westholt returning with two footmen and a light mattress, G. Selden was carried with cautious care to the house. The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the ancestral oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white young face. Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt each lent a friendly hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping near, once or twice wiped away an insistent trickle of blood which showed itself from beneath the handkerchiefs. Lady Dunholm followed with Lady Anstruthers.

Afterwards, during his convalescence, G. Selden frequently felt with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of his cortege at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be for once in a position he would have designated as “out of sight” in the novelty of its importance. To have beheld him, borne by nobles and liveried menials, accompanied by ladies of title, up the avenue of an English park on his way to be cared for in baronial halls, would, he knew, have added a joy to the final moments of his grandmother, which the consolations of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition. His own point of view, however, would not, it is true, have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature. His enjoyment, in fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of humour, whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would have been full fed by the incongruity of “Little Willie being yanked along by a bunch of earls, and Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughters following the funeral.” That he himself should have been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like “throwing away money.”

The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found slight concussion of the brain and a broken leg. With Lady Anstruthers’ kind permission, it would certainly be best that he should remain for the present where he was. So, in a bedroom whose windows looked out upon spreading lawns and broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably established as was possible. G. Selden, through the capricious intervention of Fate, if he had not “got next” to Reuben S. Vanderpoel himself, had most undisputably “got next” to his favourite daughter.

As the Dunholm carriage rolled down the avenue there reigned for a few minutes a reflective silence. It was Lady Dunholm who broke it. “That,” she said in her softly decided voice, “that is a nice girl.”

Lord Dunholm’s agreeable, humorous smile flickered into evidence.

“That is it,” he said. “Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying me with a quite delightful early Victorian word. I believe I wanted it. She is a beauty and she is clever. She is a number of other things—but she is also a nice girl. If you will allow me to say so, I have fallen in love with her.”

“If you will allow me to say so,” put in Westholt, “so have I—quite fatally.”

“That,” said his father, with speculation in his eye, “is more serious.”

CHAPTER XXVI

“WHAT IT MUST BE TO YOU—JUST YOU!”

G. Selden, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay and stared at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed through a few minutes of vacant amazement. It was a four-post bed he was lying on, wasn’t it? And his leg was bandaged and felt unmovable. The last thing he remembered was going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue. There was nothing more. He had been all right then. Was this a four-post bed or was it not? Yes, it was. And was it part of the furnishings of a swell bedroom—the kind of bedroom he had never been in before? Tip top, in fact? He stared and tried to recall things—but could not, and in his bewilderment exclaimed aloud.

“Well,” he said, “if this ain’t the limit! You may search ME!”

A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the other side of the room. It was Buttle’s wife, who had been hastily called in.

“Sh—sh,” she said soothingly. “Don’t you worry. Nobody ain’t goin’ to search you. Nobody ain’t. There! Sh, sh, sh,” rather as if he were a baby. Beginning to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her in a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic. Perhaps he had got “bats in his belfry,” and there was no use in talking.

At that moment, however, the door opened and a young lady entered. She was “a looker,” G. Selden’s weakness did not interfere with his perceiving. “A looker, by gee!” She was dressed, as if for going out, in softly tinted, exquisite things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The black hair gave him a clue. It was hair like that he had seen as Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter rode by when he stood at the park gates at Mount Dunstan. “Bats in his belfry,” of course.

“How is he?” she said to the nurse.

“He’s been seeming comfortable all day, miss,” the woman answered, “but he’s light-headed yet. He opened his eyes quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he spoke queer. He said something was the limit, and that we might search him.”

Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing that he was not delirious, she thought she understood. She had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she realised that the exclamation which had appeared delirium to Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated that the unexplainableness of the situation in which G. Selden found himself struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to satisfactory explanation.

She bent over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.

“I hope you feel better. Can you tell me?” she said.

His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a young man who knew what he was saying.

“If I’m not off my head, ma’am, I’m quite comfortable, thank you,” he replied.

“I am glad to hear that,” said Betty. “Don’t be disturbed. Your mind is quite clear.”

“All I want,” said G. Selden impartially, “is just to know where I’m at, and how I blew in here. It would help me to rest better.”

“You met with an accident,” the “looker” explained, still smiling with both lips and eyes. “Your bicycle chain broke and you were thrown and hurt yourself. It happened in the avenue in the park. We found you and brought you in. You are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel.”

“Hully gee!” ejaculated G. Selden inevitably. “Hully GEE!” The splendour of the moment was such that his brain whirled. As it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.

“That’s right,” Miss Vanderpoel said. “Keep them closed. I must not talk to you until you are stronger. Lie still and try not to think. The doctor says you are getting on very well. I will come and see you again.”

As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed to open his eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said. “Thank you, ma’am. And as his eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace: “Well, if that’s her—she can have ME—and welcome!”

… . .

She came to see him again each day—sometimes in a linen frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies—looking like the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see the show and get “a look-in” at the Four Hundred. He believed very implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately—though perhaps almost unconsciously—cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his multimillionaires’ wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.

Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as “Master Ughtred.” “Master” was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small sons of baronets and the like. The children he knew in New York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill. No parallel to “Master” had been in vogue among them.

Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little thing, and both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking of New York. She had not been home for years, and the youngster had never seen it at all. He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.

“Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please,” he said once. “I want to know what kind of an animal it is.”

From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting. To her he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product. She had not met and conversed with young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices; they were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen and suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the “hall bedroom” and upon previously unknown phases of business life in Broadway and roaring “downtown” streets.

His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper under rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd, impersonal summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience with the world in general, were, she knew, business assets. She was even moved—no less—by the remote connection of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern fortune. The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them. Fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously at every gateway which might give ingress to some passage leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference only to be overcome by steady and continued assault—if G. Selden was a nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions. No one desires the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or force. From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered that the first Reuben Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain youth of soul she felt in this modern struggler for life. He had been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she secretly liked the better.

The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been awakened by a singular feature of her patient’s feverish wanderings.

“He keeps muttering, miss, things I can’t make out about Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr. Penzance, and some child he calls Little Willie. He talks to them the same as if he knew them—same as if he was with them and they were talking to him quite friendly.”

One morning Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the mystery.

“Well, Miss Vanderpoel,” he explained, “I was lying here thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and how well they treated me—I haven’t told you about that, have I?

“That explains what Mrs. Buttle said,” she answered. “When you were delirious you talked frequently to Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. We both wondered why.”

Then he told her the whole story. Beginning with his sitting on the grassy bank outside the park, listening to the song of the robin, he ended with the adieux at the entrance gates when the sound of her horse’s trotting hoofs had been heard by each of them.

“What I’ve been lying here thinking of,” he said, “is how queer it was it happened just that way. If I hadn’t stopped just that minute, and if you hadn’t gone by, and if Lord Mount Dunstan hadn’t known you and said who you were, Little Willie would have been in London by this time, hustling to get a cheap bunk back to New York in.”

“Because?” inquired Miss Vanderpoel.

G. Selden laughed and hesitated a moment. Then he made a clean breast of it.

“Say, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “I hope it won’t make you mad if I own up. Ladies like you don’t know anything about chaps like me. On the square and straight out, when I seen you and heard your name I couldn’t help remembering whose daughter you was. Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big thing. Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to get together and talk about what it’d mean to the chap who could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel. We used to count up all the business he does, and all the clerks he’s got under him pounding away on typewriters, and how they’d be bound to get worn out and need new ones. And we’d make calculations how many a man could unload, if he could get next. It was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn’t happen really. But we used to chin about it just for the fun of the thing. One of the boys made up a thing about one of us saving Reuben S.’s life—dragging him from under a runaway auto and, when he says, `What can I do to show my gratitude, young man?’ him handing out his catalogue and saying, `I should like to call your attention to the Delkoff, sir,’ and getting him to promise he’d never use any other, as long as he lived!”

Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter laughed as spontaneously as any girl might have done. G. Selden laughed with her. At any rate, she hadn’t got mad, so far.

“That was what did it,” he went on. “When I rode away on my bike I got thinking about it and could not get it out of my head. The next day I just stopped on the road and got off my wheel, and I says to myself: `Look here, business is business, if you ARE travelling in Europe and lunching at Buckingham Palace with the main squeeze. Get busy! What’ll the boys say if they hear you’ve missed a chance like this? YOU hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it’s called, and take your nerve with you! She can’t do more than have you fired out, and you’ve been fired before and got your breath after it. So I turned round and made time. And that was how I happened on your avenue. And perhaps it was because I was feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and pitched over on my head. There, I’ve got it off my chest. I was thinking I should have to explain somehow.”

Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice, long-legged Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched Betty again. The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden’s world as the flowers were of Kedgers’, as the “little ‘ome” was of Mrs. Welden’s.

“Were you going to try to sell ME a typewriter?” she asked.

“Well,” G. Selden admitted, “I didn’t know but what there might be use for one, writing business letters on a big place like this. Straight, I won’t say I wasn’t going to try pretty hard. It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has to rush things or he’ll never get there. A chap like me HAS to get there, somehow.”

She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking something over. Her silence and this look on her face actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of daring hope. He looked round at her with a faint rising of colour.

“Say, Miss Vanderpoel—say–-” he began, and then broke off.

“Yes?” said Betty, still thinking.

“C-COULD you use one—anywhere?” he said. “I don’t want to rush things too much, but—COULD you?”

“Is it easy to learn to use it?”

“Easy!” his head lifted from his pillow. “It’s as easy as falling off a log. A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle. And—on the square—there isn’t its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel—there isn’t.” He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his catalogue.

“I asked the nurse to put it there. I wanted to study it now and then and think up arguments. See—adjustable to hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip of paper no wider than a postage stamp. Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism—perfect and permanent alignment. “

As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel took it. Never had G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue.

“You will raise your temperature,” she said, “if you excite yourself. You mustn’t do that. I believe there are two or three people on the estate who might be taught to use a typewriter. I will buy three. Yes—we will say three.”

She would buy three. He soared to heights. He did not know how to thank her, though he did his best. Dizzying visions of what he would have to tell “the boys” when he returned to New York flashed across his mind. The daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was the junior assistant who had sold them to her.

“You don’t know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “but if you were a junior salesman you’d know. It’s not only the sale—though that’s a rake-off of fifteen dollars to me—but it’s because it’s YOU that’s bought them. Gee!” gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a queer touch of pathos. “What it must be to be YOU—just YOU!”

She did not laugh. She felt as if a hand had lightly touched her on her naked heart. She had thought of it so often—had been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child—this difference in human lot—this chance. Was it chance which had placed her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel’s world instead of in that of some little cash girl with hair raked back from a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop—or in that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in serving her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for the rest of existence? What did it mean? And what Law was laid upon her? What Law which could only work through her and such as she who had been born with almost unearthly power laid in their hands—the reins of monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world? Sometimes fear touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because she did not KNOW the Law and could only pray that her guessing at it might be right. And, even as she thought these things, G. Selden went on.

“You never can know,” he said, “because you’ve always been in it. And the rest of the world can’t know, because they’ve never been anywhere near it.” He stopped and evidently fell to thinking.

“Tell me about the rest of the world,” said Betty quietly.

He laughed again.

“Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn’t know a thing about it. And it’s queer. It’s the rest of us that mounts up when you come to numbers. I guess it’d run into millions. I’m not thinking of beggars and starving people, I’ve been rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity organisation, so I don’t know about them. I’m just thinking of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of that, that waken up every morning and know they’ve got to hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per—if they can stir it up as thick as that. If it’s as much as fifty per, of course, seems like to me, they’re on Easy Street. But sometimes those that’s got to fifty per—or even more—have got more things to do with it—kids, you know, and more rent and clothes. They’ve got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss Vanderpoel, how many people do you suppose there are in a million that don’t have to worry over their next month’s grocery bills, and the rent of their flat? I bet there’s not ten—and I don’t know the ten.”

He did not state his case uncheerfully. “The rest of the world” represented to him the normal condition of things.

“Most married men’s a bit afraid to look an honest grocery bill in the face. And they WILL come in—as regular as spring hats. And I tell YOU, when a man’s got to live on seventy-five a month, a thing that’ll take all the strength and energy out of a twenty-dollar bill sorter gets him down on the mat.”

Like old Mrs. Welden’s, his roughly sketched picture was a graphic one.

” ‘Tain’t the working that bothers most of us. We were born to that, and most of us would feel like deadbeats if we were doing nothing. It’s the earning less than you can live on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it. It’s the having to make a dollar-bill look like two, and watching every other fellow try to do the same thing, and not often make the trip. There’s millions of us—just millions—every one of us with his Delkoff to sell–-” his figure of speech pleased him and he chuckled at his own cleverness—”and thinking of it, and talking about it, and—under his vest—half afraid that he can’t make it. And what you say in the morning when you open your eyes and stretch yourself is, `Hully gee! I’ve GOT to sell a Delkoff to-day, and suppose I shouldn’t, and couldn’t hold down my job!’ I began it over my feeding bottle. So did all the people I know. That’s what gave me a sort of a jolt just now when I looked at you and thought about you being YOU— and what it meant.”

When their conversation ended she had a much more intimate knowledge of New York than she had ever had before, and she felt it a rich possession. She had heard of the “hall bedroom” previously, and she had seen from the outside the “quick lunch” counter, but G. Selden unconsciously escorted her inside and threw upon faces and lives the glare of a flashlight.

“There was a thing I’ve been thinking I’d ask you, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said just before she left him. “I’d like you to tell me, if you please. It’s like this. You see those two fellows treated me as fine as silk. I mean Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. I never expected it. I never saw a lord before, much less spoke to one, but I can tell you that one’s just about all right—Mount Dunstan. And the other one— the old vicar—I’ve never taken to anyone since I was born like I took to him. The way he puts on his eyeglasses and looks at you, sorter kind and curious about you at the same time! And his voice and his way of saying his words —well, they just GOT me—sure. And they both of ‘em did say they’d like to see me again. Now do you think, Miss Vanderpoel, it would look too fresh—if I was to write a polite note and ask if either of them could make it convenient to come and take a look at me, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I don’t WANT to be too fresh—and perhaps they wouldn’t come anyhow—and if it is, please won’t you tell me, Miss Vanderpoel?”

Betty thought of Mount Dunstan as he had stood and talked to her in the deepening afternoon sun. She did not know much of him, but she thought—having heard G. Selden’s story of the lunch—that he would come. She had never seen Mr. Penzance, but she knew she should like to see him.

“I think you might write the note,” she said. “I believe they would come to see you.”

“Do you?” with eager pleasure. “Then I’ll do it. I’d give a good deal to see them again. I tell you, they are just It—both of them.”

CHAPTER XXVII

LIFE

Mount Dunstan, walking through the park next morning on his way to the vicarage, just after post time, met Mr. Penzance himself coming to make an equally early call at the Mount. Each of them had a letter in his hand, and each met the other’s glance with a smile.

“G. Selden,” Mount Dunstan said. “And yours?”

“G. Selden also,” answered the vicar. “Poor young fellow, what ill-luck. And yet—is it ill-luck? He says not.”

“He tells me it is not,” said Mount Dunstan. “And I agree with him.”

Mr. Penzance read his letter aloud.

“DEAR SIR:

“This is to notify you that owing to my bike going back on me when going down hill, I met with an accident in Stornham Park. Was cut about the head and leg broken. Little Willie being far from home and mother, you can see what sort of fix he’d been in if it hadn’t been for the kindness of Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughters—Miss Bettina and her sister Lady Anstruthers. The way they’ve had me taken care of has been great. I’ve been under a nurse and doctor same as if I was Albert Edward with appendycytus (I apologise if that’s not spelt right). Dear Sir, this is to say that I asked Miss Vanderpoel if I should be butting in too much if I dropped a line to ask if you could spare the time to call and see me. It would be considered a favour and appreciated by “G. SELDEN, “Delkoff Typewriter Co. Broadway.

“P. S. Have already sold three Delkoffs to Miss Vanderpoel.”

“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow— I like him. He does not wish to `butt in too much.’ Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.”

His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields.

“Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said.

“It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be `butting in’ upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to `butt in,’ ” he added.

The scent and warmth and glow of a glorious morning filled the hour. Combining themselves with a certain normal human gaiety which surrounded the mere thought of G. Selden, they were good things for Mount Dunstan. Life was strong and young in him, and he had laughed a big young laugh, which had, perhaps tended to the waking in him of the feeling he was suddenly conscious of—that a six-mile ride over a white, tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after all, if at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other in whom life was strong and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek and was the far fire in the blue deeps of lovely eyes, and the slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be, in a way, all to the good? He had thought of her on more than one day, and felt that he wanted to see her again.

“Let us go,” he answered Penzance. “One can call on an invalid at any time. Lady Anstruthers will forgive us.”

In less than an hour’s time they were on their way. They laughed and talked as they rode, their horses’ hoofs striking out a cheerful ringing accompaniment to their voices. There is nothing more exhilarating than the hollow, regular ring and click-clack of good hoofs going well over a fine old Roman road in the morning sunlight. They talked of the junior assistant salesman and of Miss Vanderpoel. Penzance was much pleased by the prospect of seeing “this delightful and unusual girl.” He had heard stories of her, as had Lord Westholt. He knew of old Doby’s pipe, and of Mrs. Welden’s respite from the Union, and though such incidents would seem mere trifles to the dweller in great towns, he had himself lived and done his work long enough in villages to know the village mind and the scale of proportions by which its gladness and sadness were measured. He knew more of all this than Mount Dunstan could, since Mount Dunstan’s existence had isolated itself, from rather gloomy choice. But as he rode, Mount Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things. There was the suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such suggestion was good for any man—or woman, either—who had fallen into living in a dull, narrow groove.

“It is the new life in her which strikes me,” he said. “She has brought wealth with her, and wealth is power to do the good or evil that grows in a man’s soul; but she has brought something more. She might have come here and brought all the sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty, who drove through the village and drew people to their windows, and made clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull their forelocks, and children bob curtsies and stare. She might have come and gone and left a mind-dazzling memory and nothing else. A few sovereigns tossed here and there would have earned her a reputation—but, by gee! to quote Selden—she has begun LIVING with them, as if her ancestors had done it for six hundred years. And what I see is that if she had come without a penny in her pocket she would have done the same thing.” He paused a pondering moment, and then drew a sharp breath which was an exclamation in itself. “She’s Life!” he said. “She’s Life itself! Good God! what a thing it is for a man or woman to be Life—instead of a mass of tissue and muscle and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!”

Penzance had listened seriously.

“What you say is very suggestive,” he commented. “It strikes me as true, too. You have seen something of her also, at least more than I have.”

“I did not think these things when I saw her—though I suppose I felt them unconsciously. I have reached this way of summing her up by processes of exclusion and inclusion. One hears of her, as you know yourself, and one thinks her over.”

“You have thought her over?”

“A lot,” rather grumpily. “A beautiful female creature inevitably gives an unbeautiful male creature something to think of—if he is not otherwise actively employed. I am not. She has become a sort of dawning relief to my hopeless humours. Being a low and unworthy beast, I am sometimes resentful enough of the unfairness of things. She has too much.”

When they rode through Stornham village they saw signs of work already done and work still in hand. There were no broken windows or palings or hanging wicket gates; cottage gardens had been put in order, and there were evidences of such cheering touches as new bits of window curtain and strong-looking young plants blooming between them. So many small, but necessary, things had been done that the whole village wore the aspect of a place which had taken heart, and was facing existence in a hopeful spirit. A year ago Mount Dunstan and his vicar riding through it had been struck by its neglected and dispirited look.

As they entered the hall of the Court Miss Vanderpoel was descending the staircase. She was laughing a little to herself, and she looked pleased when she saw them.

“It is good of you to come,” she said, as they crossed the hall to the drawing-room. “But I told him I really thought you would. I have just been talking to him, and he was a little uncertain as to whether he had assumed too much.”

“As to whether he had `butted in,’ ” said Mr. Penzance. “I think he must have said that.”

“He did. He also was afraid that he might have been `too fresh.’ ” answered Betty.

“On our part,” said Mr. Penzance, with gentle glee, “we hesitated a moment in fear lest we also might appear to be `butting in.’ “

Then they all laughed together. They were laughing when Lady Anstruthers entered, and she herself joined them. But to Mount Dunstan, who felt her to be somehow a touching little person, there was manifest a tenderness in her feeling for G. Selden. For that matter, however, there was something already beginning to be rather affectionate in the attitude of each of them. They went upstairs to find him lying in state upon a big sofa placed near a window, and his joy at the sight of them was a genuine, human thing. In fact, he had pondered a good deal in secret on the possibility of these swell people thinking he had “more than his share of gall” to expect them to remember him after he passed on his junior assistant salesman’s way. Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughters were of the highest of his Four Hundred, but they were Americans, and Americans were not as a rule so “stuck on themselves” as the English. And here these two swells came as friendly as you please. And that nice old chap that was a vicar, smiling and giving him “the glad hand”!

Betty and Mount Dunstan left Mr. Penzance talking to the convalescent after a short time. Mount Dunstan had asked to be shown the gardens. He wanted to see the wonderful things he had heard had been already done to them.

They went down the stairs together and passed through the drawing-room into the pleasure grounds. The once neglected lawns had already been mown and rolled, clipped and trimmed, until they spread before the eye huge measures of green velvet; even the beds girdling and adorning them were brilliant with flowers.

“Kedgers!” said Betty, waving her hand. “In my ignorance I thought we must wait for blossoms until next year; but it appears that wonders can be brought all ready to bloom for one from nursery gardens, and can be made to grow with care—and daring—and passionate affection. I have seen Kedgers turn pale with anguish as he hung over a bed of transplanted things which seemed to droop too long. They droop just at first, you know, and then they slowly lift their heads, slowly, as if to listen to a Voice calling—calling. Once I sat for quite a long time before a rose, watching it. When I saw it BEGIN to listen, I felt a little trembling pass over my body. I seemed to be so strangely near to such a strange thing. It was Life—Life coming back—in answer to what we cannot hear.”

She had begun lightly, and then her voice had changed. It was very quiet at the end of her speaking. Mount Dunstan simply repeated her last words.

“To what we cannot hear.”

“One feels it so much in a garden,” she said. “I have never lived in a garden of my own. This is not mine, but I have been living in it—with Kedgers. One is so close to Life in it— the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of green spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent! Why shouldn’t one tremble, if one thinks? I have stood in a potting shed and watched Kedgers fill a shallow box with damp rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of infinitesimal seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to his altars in a greenhouse. The ledges in Kedgers’ greenhouses are altars. I think he offers prayers before them. Why not? I should. And when one comes to see them, the moist seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they are bursting. And the next time, tiny green things are curling outward. And, at last, there is a fairy forest of tiniest pale

green stems and leaves. And one is standing close to the Secret of the World! And why should not one prostrate one’s self, breathing softly—and touching one’s awed forehead to the earth?”

Mount Dunstan turned and looked at her—a pause in his step—they were walking down a turfed path, and over their heads meeting branches of new leaves hung. Something in his movement made her turn and pause also. They both paused —and quite unknowingly.

“Do you know,” he said, in a low and rather unusual voice, “that as we were on our way here, I said of you to Penzance, that you were Life—YOU!”

For a few seconds, as they stood so, his look held her—their eyes involuntarily and strangely held each other. Something softly glowing in the sunlight falling on them both, something raining down in the song of a rising skylark trilling in the blue a field away, something in the warmed incense of blossoms near them, was calling—calling in the Voice, though they did not know they heard. Strangely, a splendid blush rose in a fair flood under her skin. She was conscious of it, and felt a second’s amazed impatience that she should colour like a schoolgirl suspecting a compliment. He did not look at her as a man looks who has made a pretty speech. His eyes met hers straight and thoughtfully, and he repeated his last words as he had before repeated hers.

“That YOU were Life—you!”

The bluebells under water were for the moment incredibly lovely. Her feeling about the blush melted away as the blush itself had done.

“I am glad you said that!” she answered. “It was a beautiful thing to say. I have often thought that I should like it to be true.”

“It is true,” he said.

Then the skylark, showering golden rain, swept down to earth and its nest in the meadow, and they walked on.

She learned from him, as they walked together, and he also learned from her, in a manner which built for them as they went from point to point, a certain degree of delicate intimacy, gradually, during their ramble, tending to make discussion and question possible. Her intelligent and broad interest in the work on the estate, her frank desire to acquire such practical information as she lacked, aroused in himself an interest he had previously seen no reason that he should feel. He realised that his outlook upon the unusual situation was being illuminated by an intelligence at once brilliant and fine, while it was also full of nice shading. The situation, of course, WAS unusual. A beautiful young sister-in-law appearing upon the dark horizon of a shamefully illused estate, and restoring, with touches of a wand of gold, what a fellow who was a blackguard should have set in order years ago. That Lady Anstruthers’ money should have rescued her boy’s inheritance instead of being spent upon lavish viciousness went without saying. What Mount Dunstan was most struck by was the perfect clearness, and its combination with a certain judicial good breeding, in Miss Vanderpoel’s view of the matter. She made no confidences, beautifully candid as her manner was, but he saw that she clearly understood the thing she was doing, and that if her sister had had no son she would not have done this, but something totally different. He had an idea that Lady Anstruthers would have been swiftly and lightly swept back to New York, and Sir Nigel left to his own devices, in which case Stornham Court and its village would gradually have crumbled to decay. It was for Sir Ughtred Anstruthers the place was being restored. She was quite clear on the matter of entail. He wondered at first—not unnaturally—how a girl had learned certain things she had an obviously clear knowledge of. As they continued to converse he learned. Reuben S. Vanderpoel was without doubt a man remarkable not only in the matter of being the owner of vast wealth. The rising flood of his millions had borne him upon its strange surface a thinking, not an unthinking being—in fact, a strong and fine intelligence. His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in his sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating not merely added gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions, a human outlook worth counting as an asset. His daughter, when she had travelled with him, had seen and talked with him of all he himself had seen. When she had not been his companion she had heard from him afterwards all best worth hearing. She had become—without any special process—familiar with the technicalities of huge business schemes, with law and commerce and political situations. Even her childish interest in the world of enterprise and labour had been passionate. So she had acquired—inevitably, while almost unconsciously—a remarkable education.

“If he had not been HIMSELF he might easily have grown tired of a little girl constantly wanting to hear things— constantly asking questions,” she said. “But he did not get tired. We invented a special knock on the door of his private room. It said, `May I come in, father?’ If he was busy he answered with one knock on his desk, and I went away. If he had time to talk he called out, `Come, Betty,’ and I went to him. I used to sit upon the floor and lean against his knee. He had a beautiful way of stroking my hair or my hand as he talked. He trusted me. He told me of great things even before he had talked of them to men. He knew I would never speak of what was said between us in his room. That was part of his trust. He said once that it was a part of the evolution of race, that men had begun to expect of women what in past ages they really only expected of each other.”

Mount Dunstan hesitated before speaking.

“You mean—absolute faith—apart from affection?”

“Yes. The power to be quite silent, even when one is tempted to speak—if to speak might betray what it is wiser to keep to one’s self because it is another man’s affair. The kind of thing which is good faith among business men. It applies to small things as much as to large, and to other things than business.”

Mount Dunstan, recalling his own childhood and his own father, felt again the pressure of the remote mental suggestion that she had had too much, a childhood and girlhood like this, the affection and companionship of a man of large and ordered intelligence, of clear and judicial outlook upon an immense area of life and experience. There was no cause for wonder that her young womanhood was all it presented to himself, as well as to others. Recognising the shadow of resentment in his thought, he swept it away, an inward sense making it clear to him that if their positions had been reversed, she would have been more generous than himself.

He pulled himself together with an unconscious movement of his shoulders. Here was the day of early June, the gold of the sun in its morning, the green shadows, the turf they walked on together, the skylark rising again from the meadow and showering down its song. Why think of anything else. What a line that was which swept from her chin down her long slim throat to its hollow! The colour between the velvet of her close-set lashes—the remembrance of her curious splendid blush—made the man’s lost and unlived youth come back to him. What did it matter whether she was American or English—what did it matter whether she was insolently rich or beggarly poor? He would let himself go and forget all but the pleasure of the sight and hearing of her.

So as they went they found themselves laughing together and talking without restraint. They went through the flower and kitchen gardens; they saw the once fallen wall rebuilt now with the old brick; they visited the greenhouses and came upon Kedgers entranced with business, but enraptured at being called upon to show his treasures. His eyes, turning magnetised upon Betty, revealed the story of his soul. Mount Dunstan remarked that when he spoke to her of his flowers it was as if there existed between them the sympathy which might be engendered between two who had sat up together night after night with delicate children.

“He’s stronger to-day, miss,” he said, as they paused before a new wonderful bloom. “What he’s getting now is good for him. I had to change his food, miss, but this seems all right. His colour’s better.”

Betty herself bent over the flower as she might have bent over a child. Her eyes softened, she touched a leaf with a slim finger, as delicately as if it had been a newborn baby’s cheek. As Mount Dunstan watched her he drew a step nearer to her side. For the first time in his life he felt the glow of a normal and simple pleasure untouched by any bitterness.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SETTING THEM THINKING

Old Doby, sitting at his open window, with his pipe and illustrated papers on the table by his side, began to find life a series of thrills. The advantage of a window giving upon the village street unspeakably increased. For many years he had preferred the chimney corner greatly, and had rejoiced at the drawing in of winter days when a fire must be well kept up, and a man might bend over it, and rub his hands slowly gazing into the red coals or little pointed flames which seemed the only things alive and worthy the watching. The flames were blue at the base and yellow at the top, and jumped looking merry, and caught at bits of black coal, and set them crackling and throwing off splinters till they were ablaze and as much alive as the rest. A man could get comfort and entertainment therefrom. There was naught else so good to live with. Nothing happened in the street, and every dull face that passed was an old story, and told an old tale of stupefying hard labour and hard days.

But now the window was a better place to sit near. Carts went by with men whistling as they walked by the horses heads. Loads of things wanted for work at the Court. New faces passed faces of workmen—sometimes grinning, “impident youngsters,” who larked with the young women, and called out to them as they passed their cottages, if a good-looking one was loitering about her garden gate. Old Doby chuckled at their love-making chaff, remembering dimly that seventy years ago he had been just as proper a young chap, and had made love in the same way. Lord, Lord, yes! He had been a bold young chap as ever winked an eye. Then, too, there were the vans, heavy-loaded and closed, and coming along slowly. Every few days, at first, there had come a van from “Lunnon.” Going to the Court, of course. And to sit there, and hear the women talk about what might be in them, and to try to guess one’s self, that was a rare pastime. Fine things going to the Court these days—furniture and grandeur filling up the shabby or empty old rooms, and making them look like other big houses—same as Westerbridge even, so the women said. The women were always talking and getting bits of news somehow, and were beginning to be worth listening to, because they had something more interesting to talk about than children’s worn-out shoes, and whooping cough.

Doby heard everything first from them. “Dang the women, they always knowed things fust.” It was them as knowed about the smart carriages as began to roll through the one village street. They were gentry’s carriages, with fine, stamping horses, and jingling silver harness, and big coachmen, and tall footmen, and such like had long ago dropped off showing themselves at Stornham.

“But now the gentry has heard about Miss Vanderpoel, and what’s being done at the Court, and they know what it means,” said young Mrs. Doby. “And they want to see her, and find out what she’s like. It’s her brings them.”

Old Doby chuckled and rubbed his hands. He knew what she was like. That straight, slim back of hers, and the thick twist of black hair, and the way she had of laughing at you, as cheery as if a bell was ringing. Aye, he knew all about that.

“When they see her once, they’ll come agen, for sure,” he quavered shrilly, and day by day he watched for the grand carriages with vivid eagerness. If a day or two passed without his seeing one, he grew fretful, and was injured, feeling that his beauty was being neglected! “None to-day, nor yet yest’day,” he would cackle. “What be they folk a-doin’?”

Old Mrs. Welden, having heard of the pipe, and come to see it, had struck up an acquaintance with him, and dropped in almost every day to talk and sit at his window. She was a young thing, by comparison, and could bring him lively news, and, indeed, so stir him up with her gossip that he was in danger of becoming a young thing himself. Her groceries and his tobacco were subjects whose interest was undying.

A great curiosity had been awakened in the county, and visitors came from distances greater than such as ordinarily include usual calls. Naturally, one was curious about the daughter of the Vanderpoel who was a sort of national institution in his own country. His name had not been so much heard of in England when Lady Anstruthers had arrived but there had, at first, been felt an interest in her. But she had been a failure—a childish-looking girl—whose thin, fair, prettiness had no distinction, and who was obviously overwhelmed by her surroundings. She had evidently had no influence over Sir Nigel, and had not been able to prevent his making ducks and drakes of her money, which of course ought to have been spent on the estate. Besides which a married woman represented fewer potentialities than a handsome unmarried girl entitled to expectations from huge American wealth.

So the carriages came and came again, and, stately or unstately far-off neighbours sat at tea upon the lawn under the trees, and it was observed that the methods and appointments of the Court had entirely changed. Nothing looked new and American. The silently moving menservants could not have been improved upon, there was plainly an excellent chef somewhere, and the massive silver was old and wonderful. Upon everybody’s word, the change was such as it was worth a long drive merely to see!

The most wonderful thing, however, was Lady Anstruthers herself. She had begun to grow delicately plump, her once drawn and haggard face had rounded out, her skin had smoothed, and was actually becoming pink and fair, a nimbus of pale fine hair puffed airily over her forehead, and she wore the most charming little clothes, all of which made her look fifteen years younger than she had seemed when, on the grounds of ill-health, she had retired into seclusion. The renewed relations with her family, the atmosphere by which she was surrounded, had evidently given her a fresh lease of life, and awakened in her a new courage.

When the summer epidemic of garden parties broke forth, old Doby gleefully beheld, day after day, the Court carriage drive by bearing her ladyship and her sister attired in fairest shades and tints “same as if they was flowers.” Their delicate vaporousness, and rare colours, were sweet delights to the old man, and he and Mrs. Welden spent happy evenings discussing them as personal possessions. To these two Betty WAS a personal possession, bestowing upon them a marked distinction. They were hers and she was theirs. No one else so owned her. Heaven had given her to them that their last years might be lighted with splendour.

On her way to one of the garden parties she stopped the carriage before old Doby’s cottage, and went in to him to speak a few words. She was of pale convolvulus blue that afternoon, and Doby, standing up touching his forelock and Mrs. Welden curtsying, gazed at her with prayer in their eyes. She had a few flowers in her hand, and a book of coloured photographs of Venice.

“These are pictures of the city I told you about—the city built in the sea—where the streets are water. You and Mrs. Welden can look at them together,” she said, as she laid flowers and book down. “I am going to Dunholm Castle to a garden party this afternoon. Some day I will come and tell you about it.”

The two were at the window staring spellbound, as she swept back to the carriage between the sweet-williams and Canterbury bells bordering the narrow garden path.

“Do you know I really went in to let them see my dress,” she said, when she rejoined Lady Anstruthers. “Old Doby’s granddaughter told me that he and Mrs. Welden have little quarrels about the colours I wear. It seems that they find my wardrobe an absorbing interest. When I put the book on the table, I felt Doby touch my sleeve with his trembling old hand. He thought I did not know.”

“What will they do with Venice?” asked Rosy.

“They will believe the water is as blue as the photographs make it—and the palaces as pink. It will seem like a chapter out of Revelations, which they can believe is true and not merely `Scriptur,’—because I have been there. I wish I had been to the City of the Gates of Pearl, and could tell them about that.”

On the lawns at the garden parties she was much gazed at and commented upon. Her height and her long slender neck held her head above those of other girls, the dense black of her hair made a rich note of shadow amid the prevailing English blondness. Her mere colouring set her apart. Rosy used to watch her with tender wonder, recalling her memory of nine-year-old Betty, with the long slim legs and the demanding and accusing child-eyes. She had always been this creature even in those far-off days. At the garden party at Dunholm Castle it became evident that she was, after a manner, unusually the central figure of the occasion. It was not at all surprising, people said to each other. Nothing could have been more desirable for Lord Westholt. He combined rank with fortune, and the Vanderpoel wealth almost constituted rank in itself. Both Lord and Lady Dunholm seemed pleased with the girl. Lord Dunholm showed her great attention. When she took part in the dancing on the lawn, he looked on delightedly. He walked about the gardens with her, and it was plain to see that their conversation was not the ordinary polite effort to accord, usually marking the talk between a mature man and a merely pretty girl. Lord Dunholm sometimes laughed with unfeigned delight, and sometimes the two seemed to talk of grave things.

“Such occasions as these are a sort of yearly taking of the social census of the county,” Lord Dunholm explained. “One invites ALL one’s neighbours and is invited again. It is a friendly duty one owes.”

“I do not see Lord Mount Dunstan,” Betty answered. “Is he here?”

She had never denied to herself her interest in Mount Dunstan, and she had looked for him. Lord Dunholm hesitated a second, as his son had done at Miss Vanderpoel’s mention of the tabooed name. But, being an older man, he felt more at liberty to speak, and gave her a rather long kind look.

“My dear young lady,” he said, “did you expect to see him here?”

“Yes, I think I did,” Betty replied, with slow softness. “I believe I rather hoped I should.”

“Indeed! You are interested in him?”

“I know him very little. But I am interested. I will tell you why.”

She paused by a seat beneath a tree, and they sat down together. She gave, with a few swift vivid touches, a sketch of the red-haired second-class passenger on the Meridiana, of whom she had only thought that he was an unhappy, rough-looking young man, until the brief moment in which they had stood face to face, each comprehending that the other was to be relied on if the worst should come to the worst. She had understood his prompt disappearance from the scene, and had liked it. When she related the incident of her meeting with him when she thought him a mere keeper on his own lands, Lord Dunholm listened with a changed and thoughtful expression. The effect produced upon her imagination by what she had seen, her silent wandering through the sad beauty of the wronged place, led by the man who tried stiffly to bear himself as a servant, his unintended self-revelations, her clear, well-argued point of view charmed him. She had seen the thing set apart from its county scandal, and so had read possibilities others had been blind to. He was immensely touched by certain things she said about the First Man.

“He is one of them,” she said. “They find their way in the end—they find their way. But just now he thinks there is none. He is standing in the dark—where the roads meet.”

“You think he will find his way?” Lord Dunholm said. “Why do you think so? “

“Because I KNOW he will,” she answered. “But I cannot tell you WHY I know.”

“What you have said has been interesting to me, because of the light your own thought threw upon what you saw. It has not been Mount Dunstan I have been caring for, but for the light you saw him in. You met him without prejudice, and you carried the light in your hand. You always carry a light, my impression is,” very quietly. “Some women do.”

“The prejudice you speak of must be a bitter thing for a proud man to bear. Is it a just prejudice? What has he done?”

Lord Dunholm was gravely silent for a few moments.

“It is an extraordinary thing to reflect,”—his words came slowly—”that it may NOT be a just prejudice. I do not know that he has done anything—but seem rather sulky, and be the son of his father, and the brother of his brother.”

“And go to America,” said Betty. “He could have avoided doing that—but he cannot be called to account for his relations. If that is all—the prejudice is NOT just.”

“No, it is not,” said Lord Dunholm, “and one feels rather awkward at having shared it. You have set me thinking again, Miss Vanderpoel.”

CHAPTER XXIX

THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN

The Shuttle having in its weaving caught up the thread of G. Selden’s rudimentary existence and drawn it, with the young man himself, across the sea, used curiously the thread in question, in the forming of the design of its huge web. As wool and coarse linen are sometimes interwoven with rich silk for decorative or utilitarian purposes, so perhaps was this previously unvalued material employed.

It was, indeed, an interesting truth that the young man, during his convalescence, without his own knowledge, acted as a species of magnet which drew together persons who might not easily otherwise have met. Mr. Penzance and Mount Dunstan rode over to see him every few days, and their visits naturally established relations with Stornham Court much more intimate than could have formed themselves in the same length of time under any of the ordinary circumstances of country life. Conventionalities lost their prominence in friendly intercourse with Selden. It was not, however, that he himself desired to dispense with convention. His intense wish to “do the right thing,” and avoid giving offence was the most ingenuous and touching feature of his broad cosmopolitan good nature.

“If I ever make a break, sir,” he had once said, with almost passionate fervour, in talking to Mr. Penzance, “please tell me, and set me on the right track. No fellow likes to look like a hoosier, but I don’t mind that half as much as—as seeming not to APPRECIATE.”

He used the word “appreciate” frequently. It expressed for him many degrees of thanks.

“I tell you that’s fine,” he said to Ughtred, who brought him a flower from the garden. “I appreciate that.”

To Betty he said more than once:

“You know how I appreciate all this, Miss Vanderpoel. You DO know I appreciate it, don’t you?”

He had an immense admiration for Mount Dunstan, and talked to him a great deal about America, often about the sheep ranch, and what it might have done and ought to have done. But his admiration for Mr. Penzance became affection. To him he talked oftener about England, and listened to the vicar’s scholarly stories of its history, its past glories and its present ones, as he might have listened at fourteen to stories from the Arabian Nights.

These two being frequently absorbed in conversation, Mount Dunstan was rather thrown upon Betty’s hands. When they strolled together about the place or sat under the deep shade of green trees, they talked not only of England and America, but of divers things which increased their knowledge of each other. It is points of view which reveal qualities, tendencies, and innate differences, or accordances of thought, and the points of view of each interested the other.

“Mr. Selden is asking Mr. Penzance questions about English history,” Betty said, on one of the afternoons in which they sat in the shade. “I need not ask you questions. You ARE English history.”

“And you are American history,” Mount Dunstan answered.

“I suppose I am.”

At one of their chance meetings Miss Vanderpoel had told Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt something of the story of G. Selden. The novelty of it had delighted and amused them. Lord Dunholm had, at points, been touched as Penzance had been. Westholt had felt that he must ride over to Stornham to see the convalescent. He wanted to learn some New York slang.

He would take lessons from Selden, and he would also buy a Delkoff—two Delkoffs, if that would be better. He knew a hard-working fellow who ought to have a typewriter.

“Heath ought to have one,” he had said to his father. Heath was the house-steward. “Think of the letters the poor chap has to write to tradespeople to order things, and un-order them, and blackguard the shopkeepers when they are not satisfactory. Invest in one for Heath, father.”

“It is by no means a bad idea,” Lord Dunholm reflected. “Time would be saved by the use of it, I have no doubt.”

“It saves time in any department where it can be used,” Betty had answered. “Three are now in use at Stornham, and I am going to present one to Kedgers. This is a testimonial I am offering. Three weeks ago I began to use the Delkoff. Since then I have used no other. If YOU use them you will introduce them to the county.”

She understood the feeling of the junior assistant, when he found himself in the presence of possible purchasers. Her blood tingled slightly. She wished she had brought a catalogue.

“We will come to Stornham to see the catalogue,” Lord Dunholm promised.

“Perhaps you will read it aloud to us,” Westholt suggested gleefully.

“G. Selden knows it by heart, and will repeat it to you with running comments. Do you know I shall be very glad if you decide to buy one—or two—or three,” with an uplift of the Irish blue eyes to Lord Dunholm. “The blood of the first Reuben Vanderpoel stirs in my veins—also I have begun to be fond of G. Selden.”

Therefore it occurred that on the afternoon referred to Lady Anstruthers appeared crossing the sward with two male visitors in her wake.

“Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt,” said Betty, rising.

For this meeting between the men Selden was, without doubt, responsible. While his father talked to Mount Dunstan, Westholt explained that they had come athirst for the catalogue. Presently Betty took him to the sheltered corner of the lawn, where the convalescent sat with Mr. Penzance.

But, for a short time, Lord Dunholm remained to converse with Mount Dunstan. In a way the situation was delicate. To encounter by chance a neighbour whom one— for reasons—has not seen since his childhood, and to be equal to passing over and gracefully obliterating the intervening years, makes demand even upon finished tact. Lord Dunholm’s world had been a large one, and he had acquired experience tending to the development of the most perfect methods. If G. Selden had chanced to be the magnet which had decided his course this special afternoon, Miss Vanderpoel it was who had stirred in him sufficient interest in Mount Dunstan to cause him to use the best of these methods when he found himself face to face with him.

He beautifully eliminated the years, he eliminated all but the facts that the young man’s father and himself had been acquaintances in youth, that he remembered Mount Dunstan himself as a child, that he had heard with interest of his visit to America. Whatsoever the young man felt, he made no sign which presented obstacles. He accepted the eliminations with outward composure. He was a powerful-looking fellow, with a fine way of carrying his shoulders, and an eye which might be able to light savagely, but just now, at least, he showed nothing of the sulkiness he was accused of.

Lord Dunholm progressed admirably with him. He soon found that he need not be upon any strain with regard to the eliminations. The man himself could eliminate, which was an assistance.

They talked together when they turned to follow the others to the retreat of G. Selden.

“Have you bought a Delkoff?” Lord Dunholm inquired.

“If I could have afforded it, I should have bought one.”

“I think that we have come here with the intention of buying three. We did not know we required them until Miss Vanderpoel recited half a page of the catalogue to us.”

“Three will mean a `rake off’ of fifteen dollars to G. Selden,” said Mount Dunstan. It was, he saw, necessary that he should explain the meaning of a “rake off,” and he did so to his companion’s entertainment.

The afternoon was a satisfactory one. They were all kind to G. Selden, and he on his part was an aid to them. In his innocence he steered three of them, at least, through narrow places into an open sea of easy intercourse. This was a good beginning. The junior assistant was recovering rapidly, and looked remarkably well. The doctor had told him that he might try to use his leg. The inside cabin of the cheap Liner and “little old New York” were looming up before him. But what luck he had had, and what a holiday! It had been enough to set a fellow up for ten years’ work. It would set up the boys merely to be told about it. He didn’t know what HE had ever done to deserve such luck as had happened to him. For the rest of his life he would he waving the Union Jack alongside of the Stars and Stripes.

Mr. Penzance it was who suggested that he should try the strength of the leg now.

“Yes,” Mount Dunstan said. “Let me help you.”

As he rose to go to him, Westholt good-naturedly got up also. They took their places at either side of his invalid chair and assisted him to rise and stand on his feet.

“It’s all right, gentlemen. It’s all right,” he called out with a delighted flush, when he found himself upright. “I believe I could stand alone. Thank you. Thank you.”

He was able, leaning on Mount Dunstan’s arm, to take a few steps. Evidently, in a short time, he would find himself no longer disabled.

Mr. Penzance had invited him to spend a week at the vicarage. He was to do this as soon as he could comfortably drive from the one place to the other. After receiving the invitation he had sent secretly to London for one of the Delkoffs he had brought with him from America as a specimen. He cherished in private a plan of gently entertaining his host by teaching him to use the machine. The vicar would thus be prepared for that future in which surely a Delkoff must in some way fall into his hands. Indeed, Fortune having at length cast an eye on himself, might chance to favour him further, and in time he might be able to send a “high-class machine” as a grateful gift to the vicarage. Perhaps Mr. Penzance would accept it because he would understand what it meant of feeling and appreciation.

During the afternoon Lord Dunholm managed to talk a good deal with Mount Dunstan. There was no air of intention in his manner, nevertheless intention was concealed beneath its courteous amiability. He wanted to get at the man. Before they parted he felt he had, perhaps, learned things opening up new points of view.

… . .

In the smoking-room at Dunholm that night he and his son talked of their chance encounter. It seemed possible that mistakes had been made about Mount Dunstan. One did not form a definite idea of a man’s character in the course of an afternoon, but he himself had been impressed by a conviction that there had been mistakes.

“We are rather a stiff-necked lot—in the country—when we allow ourselves to be taken possession of by an idea,” Westholt commented.

“I am not at all proud of the way in which we have taken things for granted,” was his father’s summing up. “It is, perhaps, worth observing,” taking his cigar from his mouth and smiling at the end of it, as he removed the ash, “that, but for Miss Vanderpoel and G. Selden, we might never have had an opportunity of facing the fact that we may not have been giving fair play. And one has prided one’s self on one’s fair play.”

CHAPTER XXX

A RETURN

At the close of a long, warm afternoon Betty Vanderpoel came out upon the square stone terrace overlooking the gardens, and that part of the park which, enclosing them, caused them, as they melted into its greenness, to lose all limitations and appear to be only a more blooming bit of the landscape.

Upon the garden Betty’s eyes dwelt, as she stood still for some minutes taking in their effect thoughtfully.

Kedgers had certainly accomplished much. His close-trimmed lawns did him credit, his flower beds were flushed and azured, purpled and snowed with bloom. Sweet tall spires, hung with blue or white or rosy flower bells, lifted their heads above the colour of lower growths. Only the fervent affection, the fasting and prayer of a Kedgers could have done such wonders with new things and old. The old ones he had cherished and allured into a renewal of existence— the new ones he had so coaxed out of their earthen pots into the soil, luxuriously prepared for their reception, and had afterwards so nourished and bedewed with soft waterings, so supported, watched over and adored that they had been almost unconscious of their transplanting. Without assistants he could have done nothing, but he had been given a sufficient number of under gardeners, and had even managed to inspire them with something of his own ambition and solicitude. The result was before Betty’s eyes in an aspect which, to such as knew the gardens well,—the Dunholms, for instance,—was astonishing in its success.

“I’ve had privileges, miss, and so have the flowers,” Kedgers had said warmly, when Miss Vanderpoel had reported to him, for his encouragement, Dunholm Castle’s praise. “Not one of ‘em has ever had to wait for his food and drink, nor to complain of his bed not being what he was accustomed to. They’ve not had to wait for rain, for we’ve given it to ‘em from watering cans, and, thank goodness, the season’s been kind to ‘em.”

Betty, descending the terrace steps, wandered down the paths between the flower beds, glancing about her as she went. The air of neglect and desolation had been swept away. Buttle and Tim Soames had been given as many privileges as Kedgers. The chief points impressed upon them had been that the work must be done, not only thoroughly, but quickly. As many additional workmen as they required, as much solid material as they needed, but there must be a despatch which at first it staggered them to contemplate. They had not known such methods before. They had been accustomed to work under money limitation throughout their lives, and, when work must be done with insufficient aid, it must be done slowly. Economy had been the chief factor in all calculations, speed had not entered into them, so leisureliness had become a fixed habit. But it seemed American to sweep leisureliness away into space with a free gesture.

“It must be done QUICKLY,” Miss Vanderpoel had said. “If ten men cannot do it quickly enough, you must have twenty—or as many more as are needed. It is time which must be saved just now.”

Time more than money, it appeared. Buttle’s experience had been that you might take time, if you did not charge for it. When time began to mean money, that was a different matter. If you did work by the job, you might drive in a few nails, loiter, and return without haste; if you worked by the hour, your absence would be inquired into. In the present case no one could loiter. That was realised early. The tall girl, with the deep straight look at you, made you realise that without spoken words. She expected energy something like her own. She was a new force and spurred them. No man knew how it was done, but, when she appeared among them—even in the afternoon—”lookin’ that womany,” holding up her thin dress over lace petticoats, the like of which had not been seen before, she looked on with just the same straight, expecting eyes. They did not seem to doubt in the least that she would find that great advance had been made.

So advance had been made, and work accomplished. As Betty walked from one place to another she saw the signs of it with gratification. The place was not the one she had come to a few months ago. Hothouses, outbuildings, stables were in repair. Work was still being done in different places. In the house itself carpenters or decorators were enclosed in some rooms, and at their business, but exterior order prevailed. In the courtyard stablemen were at work, and her own groom came forward touching his forehead. She paid a visit to the horses. They were fine creatures, and, when she entered their stalls, made room for her and whinnied gently, in well-founded expectation of sugar and bread which were kept in a cupboard awaiting her visits. She smoothed velvet noses and patted satin sides, talking to Mason a little before she went her way.

Then she strolled into the park. The park was always a pleasure. She was in a thoughtful mood, and the soft green shadowed silence lured her. The summer wind hus-s-shed the branches as it lightly waved them, the brown earth of the avenue was sun-dappled, there were bird notes and calls to be heard here and there and everywhere, if one only arrested one’s attention a moment to listen. And she was in a listening and dreaming mood—one of the moods in which bird, leaf, and wind, sun, shade, and scent of growing things have part.

And yet her thoughts were of mundane things.

It was on this avenue that G. Selden had met with his accident. He was still at Dunstan vicarage, and yesterday Mount Dunstan, in calling, had told them that Mr. Penzance was applying himself with delighted interest to a study of the manipulation of the Delkoff.

The thought of Mount Dunstan brought with it the thought of her father. This was because there was frequently in her mind a connection between the two. How would the man of schemes, of wealth, and power almost unbounded, regard the man born with a load about his neck—chained to earth by it, standing in the midst of his hungering and thirsting possessions, his hands empty of what would feed them and restore their strength? Would he see any solution of the problem? She could imagine his looking at the situation through his gaze at the man, and considering both in his summing up.

“Circumstances and the man,” she had heard him say. “But always the man first.”

Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of circumstance. This Betty had learned from him. And what could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The question had begun to recur to her. What could she herself have done in the care of Rosy and Stornham, if chance had not placed in her hand the strongest lever? What she had accomplished had been easy—easy. All that had been required had been the qualities which control of the lever might itself tend to create in one. Given—by mere chance again—imagination and initiative, the moving of the lever did the rest. If chance had not been on one’s side, what then? And where was this man’s chance? She had said to Rosy, in speaking of the wealth of America, “Sometimes one is tired of it.” And Rosy had reminded her that there were those who were not tired of it, who could bear some of the burden of it, if it might be laid on their own shoulders. The great beautiful, blind-faced house, awaiting its slow doom in the midst of its lonely unfed lands—what could save it, and all it represented of race and name, and the stately history of men, but the power one professed to call base and sordid—mere money? She felt a sudden impatience at herself for having said she was tired of it. That was a folly which took upon itself the aspect of an affectation.

And, if a man could not earn money—or go forth to rob richer neighbours of it as in the good old marauding days— or accept it if it were offered to him as a gift—what could he do? Nothing. If he had been born a village labourer, he could have earned by the work of his hands enough to keep his cottage roof over him, and have held up his head among his fellows. But for such as himself there was no mere labour which would avail. He had not that rough honest resource. Only the decent living and orderly management of the generations behind him would have left to him fairly his own chance to hold with dignity the place in the world into which Fate had thrust him at the outset—a blind, newborn thing of whom no permission had been asked.

“If I broke stones upon the highway for twelve hours a day, I might earn two shillings,” he had said to Betty, on the previous day. “I could break stones well,” holding out a big arm, “but fourteen shillings a week will do no more than buy bread and bacon for a stonebreaker.”

He was ordinarily rather silent and stiff in his conversational attitude towards his own affairs. Betty sometimes wondered how she herself knew so much about them—how it happened that her thoughts so often dwelt upon them. The explanation she had once made to herself had been half irony, half serious reflection.

“It is a result of the first Reuben Vanderpoel. It is because I am of the fighting commercial stock, and, when I see a business problem, I cannot leave it alone, even when it is no affair of mine.”

As an exposition of the type of the commercial fighting-stock she presented, as she paused beneath overshadowing trees, an aspect beautifully suggesting a far different thing.

She stood—all white from slim shoe to tilted parasol,—and either the result of her inspection of the work done by her order, or a combination of her summer-day mood with her feeling for the problem, had given her a special radiance. It glowed on lip and cheek, and shone in her Irish eyes.

She had paused to look at a man approaching down the avenue. He was not a labourer, and she did not know him. Men who were not labourers usually rode or drove, and this one was walking. He was neither young nor old, and, though at a distance his aspect was not attracting, she found that she regarded him curiously, and waited for him to draw nearer.

The man himself was glancing about him with a puzzled look and knitted forehead. When he had passed through the village he had seen things he had not expected to see; when he had reached the entrance gate, and—for reasons of his own —dismissed his station trap, he had looked at the lodge scrutinisingly, because he was not prepared for its picturesque trimness. The avenue was free from weeds and in order, the two gates beyond him were new and substantial. As he went on his way and reached the first, he saw at about a hundred yards distance a tall girl in white standing watching him. Things which were not easily explainable always irritated him. That this place—which was his own affair—should present an air of mystery, did not improve his humour, which was bad to begin with. He had lately been passing through unpleasant things, which had left him feeling himself tricked and made ridiculous—as only women can trick a man and make him ridiculous, he had said to himself. And there had been an acrid consolation in looking forward to the relief of venting one’s self on a woman who dare not resent.

“What has happened, confound it!” he muttered, when he caught sight of the girl. “Have we set up a house party?” And then, as he saw more distinctly, “Damn! What a figure!”

By this time Betty herself had begun to see more clearly. Surely this was a face she remembered—though the passing of years and ugly living had thickened and blurred, somewhat, its always heavy features. Suddenly she knew it, and the look in its eyes—the look she had, as a child, unreasoningly hated.

Nigel Anstruthers had returned from his private holiday.

As she took a few quiet steps forward to meet him, their eyes rested on each other. After a night or two in town his were slightly bloodshot, and the light in them was not agreeable.

It was he who spoke first, and it is possible that he did not quite intend to use the expletive which broke from him. But he was remembering things also. Here were eyes he, too, had seen before—twelve years ago in the face of an objectionable, long-legged child in New York. And his own hatred of them had been founded in his own opinion on the best of reasons. And here they gazed at him from the face of a young beauty—for a beauty she was.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed; “it is Betty.”

“Yes,” she answered, with a faint, but entirely courteous, smile. “It is. I hope you are very well.”

She held out her hand. “A delicious hand,” was what he said to himself, as he took it. And what eyes for a girl to have in her head were those which looked out at him between shadows. Was there a hint of the devil in them? He thought so—he hoped so, since she had descended on the place in this way. But WHAT the devil was the meaning of her being on the spot at all? He was, however, far beyond the lack of astuteness which might have permitted him to express this last thought at this particular juncture. He was only betrayed into stupid mistakes, afterwards to be regretted, when rage caused him utterly to lose control of his wits. And, though he was startled and not exactly pleased, he was not in a rage now. The eyelashes and the figure gave an agreeable fillip to his humour. Howsoever she had come, she was worth looking at.

“How could one expect such a delightful thing as this?” he said, with a touch of ironic amiability. “It is more than one deserves.”

“It is very polite of you to say that,” answered Betty.

He was thinking rapidly as he stood and gazed at her. There were, in truth, many things to think of under circumstances so unexpected.

“May I ask you to excuse my staring at you?” he inquired with what Rosy had called his “awful, agreeable smile.” “When I saw you last you were a fierce nine-year-old American child. I use the word `fierce’ because—if you’ll pardon my saying so—there was a certain ferocity about you.”

“I have learned at various educational institutions to conceal it,” smiled Betty.

“May I ask when you arrived?”

“A short time after you went abroad.”

“Rosalie did not inform me of your arrival.”

“She did not know your address. You had forgotten to leave it.”

He had made a mistake and realised it. But she presented to him no air of having observed his slip. He paused a few seconds, still regarding her and still thinking rapidly. He recalled the mended windows and roofs and palings in the village, the park gates and entrance. Who the devil had done all that? How could a mere handsome girl be concerned in it? And yet—here she was.

“When I drove through the village,” he said next, “I saw that some remarkable changes had taken place on my property. I feel as if you can explain them to me.”

“I hope they are changes which meet with your approval.”

“Quite—quite,” a little curtly. “Though I confess they mystify me. Though I am the son-in-law of an American multimillionaire, I could not afford to make such repairs myself.”

A certain small spitefulness which was his most frequent undoing made it impossible for him to resist adding the innuendo in his last sentence. And again he saw it was a folly. The impersonal tone of her reply simply left him where he had placed himself.

“We were sorry not to be able to reach you. As it seemed well to begin the work at once, we consulted Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard.”

“We?” he repeated. “Am I to have the pleasure,” with a slight wryness of the mouth, “of finding Mr. Vanderpoel also at Stornham?”

“No—not yet. As I was on the spot, I saw your solicitors and asked their advice and approval—for my father. If he had known how necessary the work was, it would have been done before, for Ughtred’s sake.”

Her voice was that of a person who, in stating obvious facts, provides no approach to enlightening comment upon them. And there was in her manner the merest gracious impersonality.

“Do I understand that Mr. Vanderpoel employed someone to visit the place and direct the work?”

“It was really not difficult to direct. It was merely a matter of engaging labour and competent foremen.”

An odd expression rose in his eyes.

“You suggest a novel idea, upon my word,” he said. “Is it possible—you see I know something of America—is it possible I must thank YOU for the working of this magic?”

“You need not thank me,” she said, rather slowly, because it was necessary that she also should think of many things at once. “I could not have helped doing it.”

She wished to make all clear to him before he met Rosy. She knew it was not unnatural that the unexpectedness of his appearance might deprive Lady Anstruthers of presence of mind. Instinct told her that what was needed in intercourse with him was, above all things, presence of mind.

“I will tell you about it,” she said. “We will walk slowly up and down here, if you do not object.”

He did not object. He wanted to hear the story as he could not hear it from his nervous little fool of a wife, who would be frightened into forgetting things and their sequence. What he meant to discover was where he stood in the matter—where his father-in-law stood, and, rather specially, to have a chance to sum up the weaknesses and strengths of the new arrival. That would be to his interest. In talking this thing over she would unconsciously reveal how much vanity or emotion or inexperience he might count upon as factors safe to use in one’s dealings with her in the future.

As he listened he was supported by the fact that he did not lose consciousness of the eyes and the figure. But for these it is probable that he would have gone blind with fury at certain points which forced themselves upon him. The first was that there had been an absurd and immense expenditure which would simply benefit his son and not himself. He could not sell or borrow money on what had been given. Apparently the place had been re-established on a footing such as it had not rested upon during his own generation, or his father’s. As he loathed life in the country, it was not he who would enjoy its luxury, but his wife and her child. The second point was that these people—this girl—had somehow had the sharpness to put themselves in the right, and to place him in a position at which he could not complain without putting himself in the wrong. Public opinion would say that benefits had been heaped upon him, that the correct thing had been done correctly with the knowledge and approval of the legal advisers of his family. It had been a masterly thing, that visit to Townlinson & Sheppard. He was obliged to aid his self-control by a glance at the eyelashes. She was a new sort of girl, this Betty, whose childhood he had loathed, and, to his jaded taste, novelty appealed enormously. Her attraction for him was also added to by the fact that he was not at all sure that there was not combined with it a pungent spice of the old detestation. He was repelled as well as allured. She represented things which he hated. First, the mere material power, which no man can bully, whatsoever his humour. It was the power he most longed for and, as he could not hope to possess it, most sneered at and raged against. Also, as she talked, it was plain that her habit of self-control and her sense of resource would be difficult to deal with. He was a survival of the type of man whose simple creed was that women should not possess resources, as when they possessed them they could rarely be made to behave themselves.

But while he thought these things, he walked by her side and both listened and talked smiling the agreeable smile.

“You will pardon my dull bewilderment,” he said. “It is not unnatural, is it—in a mere outsider?”

And Betty, with the beautiful impersonal smile, said:

“We felt it so unfortunate that even your solicitors did not know your address.”

When, at length, they turned and strolled towards the house, a carriage was drawing up before the door, and at the sight of it, Betty saw her companion slightly lift his eyebrows. Lady Anstruthers had been out and was returning. The groom got down from the box, and two menservants appeared upon the steps. Lady Anstruthers descended, laughing a little as she talked to Ughtred, who had been with her. She was dressed in clear, pale grey, and the soft rose lining of her parasol warmed the colour of her skin.

Sir Nigel paused a second and put up his glass.

“Is that my wife?” he said. “Really! She quite recalls New York.”

The agreeable smile was on his lips as he hastened forward. He always more or less enjoyed coming upon Rosalie suddenly. The obvious result was a pleasing tribute to his power.

Betty, following him, saw what occurred.

Ughtred saw him first, and spoke quick and low.

“Mother!” he said.

The tone of his voice was evidently enough. Lady Anstruthers turned with an unmistakable start. The rose lining of her parasol ceased to warm her colour. In fact, the parasol itself stepped aside, and she stood with a blank, stiff, white face.

“My dear Rosalie,” said Sir Nigel, going towards her. “You don’t look very glad to see me.”

He bent and kissed her quite with the air of a devoted husband. Knowing what the caress meant, and seeing Rosy’s face as she submitted to it, Betty felt rather cold. After the conjugal greeting he turned to Ughtred.

“You look remarkably well,” he said.

Betty came forward.

“We met in the park, Rosy,” she explained. “We have been talking to each other for half an hour.”

The atmosphere which had surrounded her during the last three months had done much for Lady Anstruthers’ nerves. She had the power to recover herself. Sir Nigel himself saw this when she spoke.

“I was startled because I was not expecting to see you,” she said. “I thought you were still on the Riviera. I hope you had a pleasant journey home.”

“I had an extraordinarily pleasant surprise in finding your sister here,” he answered. And they went into the house.

In descending the staircase on his way to the drawing-room before dinner, Sir Nigel glanced about him with interested curiosity. If the village had been put in order, something more had been done here. Remembering the worn rugs and the bald-headed tiger, he lifted his brows. To leave one’s house in a state of resigned dilapidation and return to find it filled with all such things as comfort combined with excellent taste might demand, was an enlivening experience—or would have been so under some circumstances. As matters stood, perhaps, he might have felt better pleased if things had been less well done. But they were very well done. They had managed to put themselves in the right in this also. The rich sobriety of colour and form left no opening for supercilious comment—which was a neat weapon it was annoying to be robbed of.

The drawing-room was fresh, brightly charming, and full of flowers. Betty was standing before an open window with her sister. His wife’s shoulders, he observed at once, had absolutely begun to suggest contours. At all events, her bones no longer stuck out. But one did not look at one’s wife’s shoulders when one could turn from them to a fairness of velvet and ivory. “You know,” he said, approaching them, “I find all this very amazing. I have been looking out of my window on to the gardens.”

“It is Betty who has done it all,” said Rosy.

“I did not suspect you of doing it, my dear Rosalie,” smiling. “When I saw Betty standing in the avenue, I knew at once that it was she who had mended the chimney-pots in the village and rehung the gates.”

For the present, at least, it was evident that he meant to be sufficiently amiable. At the dinner table he was conversational and asked many questions, professing a natural interest in what had been done. It was not difficult to talk to a girl whose eyes and shoulders combined themselves with a quick wit and a power to attract which he reluctantly owned he had never seen equalled. His reluctance arose from the fact that such a power complicated matters. He must be on the defensive until he knew what she was going to do, what he must do himself, and what results were probable or possible. He had spent his life in intrigue of one order or another. He enjoyed outwitting people and rather preferred to attain an end by devious paths. He began every acquaintance on the defensive. His argument was that you never knew how things would turn out, consequently, it was as well to conduct one’s self at the outset with the discreet forethought of a man in the presence of an enemy. He did not know how things would turn out in Betty’s case, and it was a little confusing to find one’s self watching her with a sense of excitement. He would have preferred to be cool—to be cold—and he realised that he could not keep his eyes off her.

“I remember, with regret,” he said to her later in the evening, “that when you were a child we were enemies.”

“I am afraid we were,” was Betty’s impartial answer.

“I am sure it was my fault,” he said. “Pray forget it. Since you have accomplished such wonders, will you not, in the morning, take me about the place and explain to me how it has been done?”

When Betty went to her room she dismissed her maid as soon as possible, and sat for some time alone and waiting. She had had no opportunity to speak to Rosy in private, and she was sure she would come to her. In the course of half an hour she heard a knock at the door.

Yes, it was Rosy, and her newly-born colour had fled and left her looking dragged again. She came forward and dropped into a low chair near Betty, letting her face fall into her hands.

“I’m very sorry, Betty,” she half whispered, “but it is no use.”

“What is no use?” Betty asked.

“Nothing is any use. All these years have made me such a coward. I suppose I always was a coward, but in the old days there never was anything to be afraid of.”

“What are you most afraid of now?”

“I don’t know. That is the worst. I am afraid of HIM— just of himself—of the look in his eyes—of what he may be planning quietly. My strength dies away when he comes near me.”

“What has he said to you?” she asked.

“He came into my dressing-room and sat and talked. He looked about from one thing to another and pretended to admire it all and congratulated me. But though he did not sneer at what he saw, his eyes were sneering at me. He talked about you. He said that you were a very clever woman. I don’t know how he manages to imply that a very clever woman is something cunning and debased—but it means that when he says it.

It seems to insinuate things which make one grow hot all over.”

She put out a hand and caught one of Betty’s.

“Betty, Betty,” she implored. “Don’t make him angry. Don’t.”

“I am not going to begin by making him angry,” Betty said. “And I do not think he will try to make me angry— at first.”

“No, he will not,” cried Rosalie. “And—and you remember what I told you when first we talked about him?”

“And do you remember,” was Betty’s answer, “what I said to you when I first met you in the park? If we were to cable to New York this moment, we could receive an answer in a few hours.”

“He would not let us do it,” said Rosy. “He would stop us in some way—as he stopped my letters to mother—as he stopped me when I tried to run away. Oh, Betty, I know him and you do not.”

“I shall know him better every day. That is what I must do. I must learn to know him. He said something more to you than you have told me, Rosy. What was it?”

“He waited until Detcham left me,” Lady Anstruthers confessed, more than half reluctantly. “And then he got up to go away, and stood with his hands resting on the chairback, and spoke to me in a low, queer voice. He said, `Don’t try to play any tricks on me, my good girl—and don’t let your sister try to play any. You would both have reason to regret it.’ “

She was a half-hypnotised thing, and Betty, watching her with curious but tender eyes, recognised the abnormality.

“Ah, if I am a clever woman,” she said, “he is a clever man. He is beginning to see that his power is slipping away. That was what G. Selden would call `bluff.’ “

CHAPTER XXXI

NO, SHE WOULD NOT

Sir Nigel did not invite Rosalie to accompany them, when the next morning, after breakfast, he reminded Betty of his suggestion of the night before, that she should walk over the place with him, and show him what had been done. He preferred to make his study of his sister-in-law undisturbed.

There was no detail whose significance he missed as they went about together. He had keen eyes and was a quite sufficiently practical person on such matters as concerned his own interests. In this case it was to his interest to make up his mind as to what he might gain or lose by the appearance of his wife’s family. He did not mean to lose—if it could be helped— anything either of personal importance or material benefit. And it could only be helped by his comprehending clearly what he had to deal with. Betty was, at present, the chief factor in the situation, and he was sufficiently astute to see that she might not be easy to read. His personal theories concerning women presented to him two or three effective ways of managing them. You made love to them, you flattered them either subtly or grossly, you roughly or smoothly bullied them, or you harrowed them with haughty indifference—if your love-making had produced its proper effect—when it was necessary to lure or drive or trick them into submission. Women should be made useful in one way or another. Little fool as she was, Rosalie had been useful. He had, after all was said and done, had some comparatively easy years as the result of her existence. But she had not been useful enough, and there had even been moments when he had wondered if he had made a mistake in separating her entirely from her family. There might have been more to be gained if he had allowed them to visit her and had played the part of a devoted husband in their presence. A great bore,

of course, but they could not have spent their entire lives at Stornham. Twelve years ago, however, he had known very little of Americans, and he had lost his temper. He was really very fond of his temper, and rather enjoyed referring to it with tolerant regret as being a bad one and beyond his control—with a manner which suggested that the attribute was the inevitable result of strength of character and masculine spirit. The luxury of giving way to it was a great one, and it was exasperating as he walked about with this handsome girl to find himself beginning to suspect that, where she was concerned, some self-control might be necessary. He was led to this thought because the things he took in on all sides could only have been achieved by a person whose mind was a steadily-balanced thing. In one’s treatment of such a creature, methods must be well chosen. The crudest had sufficed to overwhelm Rosalie. He tried two or three little things as experiments during their walk.

The first was to touch with dignified pathos on the subject of Ughtred. Betty, he intimated gently, could imagine what a man’s grief and disappointment might be on finding his son and heir deformed in such a manner. The delicate reserve with which he managed to convey his fear that Rosalie’s own uncontrolled hysteric attacks had been the cause of the misfortune was very well done. She had, of course, been very young and much spoiled, and had not learned self-restraint, poor girl.

It was at this point that Betty first realised a certain hideous thing. She must actually remain silent—there would be at the outset many times when she could only protect her sister by refraining from either denial or argument. If she turned upon him now with refutation, it was Rosy who would be called upon to bear the consequences. He would go at once to Rosy, and she herself would have done what she had said she would not do—she would have brought trouble upon the poor girl before she was strong enough to bear it. She suspected also that his intention was to discover how much she had heard, and if she might be goaded into betraying her attitude in the matter.

But she was not to be so goaded. He watched her closely and her very colour itself seemed to be under her own control. He had expected—if she had heard hysteric, garbled stories from his wife—to see a flame of scarlet leap up on the cheek he was admiring. There was no such leap, which was baffling in itself. Could it be that experience had taught Rosalie the discretion of keeping her mouth shut?

“I am very fond of Ughtred,” was the sole comment he was granted. “We made friends from the first. As he grows older and stronger, his misfortune may be less apparent. He will be a very clever man.”

“He will be a very clever man if he is at all like–-” He checked himself with a slight movement of his shoulders. “I was going to say a thing utterly banal. I beg your pardon. I forgot for the moment that I was not talking to an English girl.”

It was so stupid that she turned and looked at him, smiling faintly. But her answer was quite mild and soft.

“Do not deprive me of compliments because I am a mere American,” she said. “I am very fond of them, and respond at once.”

“You are very daring,” he said, looking straight into her eyes—”deliciously so. American women always are, I think.”

“The young devil,” he was saying internally. “The beautiful young devil! She throws one off the track.”

He found himself more and more attracted and exasperated as they made their rounds. It was his sense of being attracted which was the cause of his exasperation. A girl who could stir one like this would be a dangerous enemy. Even as a friend she would not be safe, because one faced the absurd peril of losing one’s head a little and forgetting the precautions one should never lose sight of where a woman was concerned—the precautions which provided for one’s holding a good taut rein in one’s own hands.

They went from gardens to greenhouses, from greenhouses to stables, and he was on the watch for the moment when she would reveal some little feminine pose or vanity, but, this morning, at least, she laid none bare. She did not strike him as a being of angelic perfections, but she was very modern and not likely to show easily any openings in her armour.

“Of course, I continue to be amazed,” he commented, “though one ought not to be amazed at anything which evolves from your extraordinary country. In spite of your impersonal air, I shall persist in regarding you as my benefactor. But, to be frank, I always told Rosalie that if she would write to your father he would certainly put things in order.”

“She did write once, you will remember,” answered Betty.

“Did she?” with courteous vagueness. “Really, I am afraid I did not hear of it. My poor wife has her own little ideas about the disposal of her income.”

And Betty knew that she was expected to believe that Rosy had hoarded the money sent to restore the place, and from sheer weak miserliness had allowed her son’s heritage to fall to ruin. And but for Rosy’s sake, she might have stopped upon the path and, looking at him squarely, have said, “You are lying to me. And I know the truth.”

He continued to converse amiably.

“Of course, it is you one must thank, not only for rousing in the poor girl some interest in her personal appearance, but also some interest in her neighbours. Some women, after they marry and pass girlhood, seem to release their hold on all desire to attract or retain friends. For years Rosalie has given herself up to a chronic semi-invalidism. When the mistress of a house is always depressed and languid and does not return visits, neighbours become discouraged and drop off, as it were.”

If his wife had told stories to gain her sympathy his companion would be sure to lose her temper and show her hand. If he could make her openly lose her temper, he would have made an advance.

“One can quite understand that,” she said. “It is a great happiness to me to see Rosy gaining ground every day. She has taken me out with her a good many times, and people are beginning to realise that she likes to see them at Stornham.”

“You are very delightful,” he said, “with your `She has taken me out.’ When I glanced at the magnificent array of cards on the salver in the hall, I realised a number of things, and quite vulgarly lost my breath. The Dunholms have been very amiable in recalling our existence. But charming Americans—of your order—arouse amiable emotions.”

“I am very amiable myself,” said Betty.

It was he who flushed now. He was losing patience at feeling himself held with such lightness at arm’s length, and at being, in spite of himself, somehow compelled to continue to assume a jocular courtesy.

“No, you are not,” he answered.

“Not?” repeated Betty, with an incredulous lifting of her brows.

“You are charming and clever, but I rather suspect you of being a vixen. At all events you are a spirited young woman and quick-witted enough to understand the attraction you must have for the sordid herd.”

And then he became aware—if not of an opening in her armour—at least of a joint in it. For he saw, near her ear, a deepening warmth. That was it. She was quick-witted, and she hid somewhere a hot pride.

“I confess, however,” he proceeded cheerfully, “that notwithstanding my own experience of the habits of the sordid herd, I saw one card I was surprised to find, though really” —shrugging his shoulders—”I ought to have been less surprised to find it than to find any other. But it was bold. I suppose the fellow is desperate.”

“You are speaking of–-?” suggested Betty.

“Of Mount Dunstan. Hang it all, it WAS bold!” As if in half-amused disgust.

As she had walked through the garden paths, Betty had at intervals bent and gathered a flower, until she held in one hand a loose, fair sheaf. At this moment she stooped to break off a spire of pale blue campanula. And she was—as with a shock —struck with a consciousness that she bent because she must— because to do so was a refuge—a concealment of something she must hide. It had come upon her without a second’s warning. Sir Nigel was right. She was a vixen—a virago. She was in such a rage that her heart sprang up and down and her cheek and eyes were on fire. Her long-trained control of herself was gone. And her shock was a lightning-swift awakening to the fact that she felt all this—she must hide her face—because it was this one man—just this one and no other—who was being dragged into this thing with insult.

It was an awakening, and she broke off, rather slowly, one— two—three—even four campanula stems before she stood upright again.

As for Nigel Anstruthers—he went on talking in his low-pitched, disgusted voice.

“Surely he might count himself out of the running. There will be a good deal of running, my dear Betty. You fair Americans have learned that by this time. But that a man who has not even a decent name to offer—who is blackballed by his county—should coolly present himself as a pretendant is an insolence he should be kicked for.”

Betty arranged her campanulas carefully. There was no exterior reason why she should draw sword in Lord Mount Dunstan’s defence. He had certainly not seemed to expect anything intimately interested from her. His manner she had generally felt to be rather restrained. But one could, in a measure, express one’s self.

“Whatsoever the `running,’ ” she remarked, “no pretendant has complimented me by presenting himself, so far—and Lord Mount Dunstan is physically an unusually strong man.”

“You mean it would be difficult to kick him? Is this partisanship? I hope not. Am I to understand,” he added with deliberation, “that Rosalie has received him here?”

“Yes.”

“And that you have received him, also—as you have received Lord Westholt?”

“Quite.”

“Then I must discuss the matter with Rosalie. It is not to be discussed with you.”

“You mean that you will exercise your authority in the matter?”

“In England, my dear girl, the master of a house is still sometimes guilty of exercising authority in matters which concern the reputation of his female relatives. In the absence of your father, I shall not allow you, while you are under my roof, to endanger your name in any degree. I am, at least, your brother by marriage. I intend to protect you.”

“Thank you,” said Betty.

“You are young and extremely handsome, you will have an enormous fortune, and you have evidently had your own way all your life. A girl, such as you are, may either make a magnificent marriage or a ridiculous and humiliating one. Neither American young women, nor English young men, are as disinterested as they were some years ago. Each has begun to learn what the other has to give.”

“I think that is true,” commented Betty.

“In some cases there is a good deal to be exchanged on both sides. You have a great deal to give, and should get exchange worth accepting. A beggared estate and a tainted title are not good enough.”

“That is businesslike,” Betty made comment again.

Sir Nigel laughed quietly.

“The fact is—I hope you won’t misunderstand my saying it—you do not strike me as being UNbusinesslike, yourself.”

“I am not,” answered Betty.

“I thought not,” rather narrowing his eyes as he watched her, because he believed that she must involuntarily show her hand if he irritated her sufficiently. “You do not impress me as being one of the girls who make unsuccessful marriages. You are a modern New York beauty—not an early Victorian sentimentalist.” He did not despair of results from his process of irritation. To gently but steadily convey to a beautiful and spirited young creature that no man could approach her without ulterior motive was rather a good idea. If one could make it clear—with a casual air of sensibly taking it for granted— that the natural power of youth, wit, and beauty were rendered impotent by a greatness of fortune whose proportions obliterated all else; if one simply argued from the premise that young love was no affair of hers, since she must always be regarded as a gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in plain figures, what girl, with blood in her veins, could endure it long without wincing? This girl had undue, and, as he regarded such matters, unseemly control over her temper and her nerves, but she had blood enough in her veins, and presently she would say or do something which would give him a lead.

“When you marry–-” he began.

She lifted her head delicately, but ended the sentence for him with eyes which were actually not unsmiling.

“When I marry, I shall ask something in exchange for what I have to give.”

“If the exchange is to be equal, you must ask a great deal,” he answered. “That is why you must be protected from such fellows as Mount Dunstan.”

“If it becomes necessary, perhaps I shall be able to protect myself,” she said.

“Ah!” regretfully, “I am afraid I have annoyed you— and that you need protection more than you suspect.” If she were flesh and blood, she could scarcely resist resenting the implication contained in this. But resist it she did, and with a cool little smile which stirred him to sudden, if irritated, admiration.

She paused a second, and used the touch of gentle regret herself.

“You have wounded my vanity by intimating that my admirers do not love me for myself alone.”

He paused, also, and, narrowing his eyes again, looked straight between her lashes.

“They ought to love you for yourself alone,” he said, in a low voice. “You are a deucedly attractive girl.”

“Oh, Betty,” Rosy had pleaded, “don’t make him angry —don’t make him angry.”

So Betty lifted her shoulders slightly without comment.

“Shall we go back to the house now?” she said. “Rosalie will naturally be anxious to hear that what has been done in your absence has met with your approval.”

In what manner his approval was expressed to Rosalie, Betty did not hear this morning, at least. Externally cool though she had appeared, the process had not been without its results, and she felt that she would prefer to be alone.

“I must write some letters to catch the next steamer,” she said, as she went upstairs.

When she entered her room, she went to her writing table and sat down, with pen and paper before her. She drew the paper towards her and took up the pen, but the next moment she laid it down and gave a slight push to the paper. As she did so she realised that her hand trembled.

“I must not let myself form the habit of falling into rages—or I shall not be able to keep still some day, when I ought to do it,” she whispered. “I am in a fury—a fury.” And for a moment she covered her face.

She was a strong girl, but a girl, notwithstanding her powers. What she suddenly saw was that, as if by one movement of some powerful unseen hand, Rosy, who had been the centre of all things, had been swept out of her thought. Her anger at the injustice done to Rosy had been as nothing before the fire which had flamed in her at the insult flung at the other. And all that was undue and unbalanced. One might as well look the thing straightly in the face. Her old child hatred of Nigel Anstruthers had sprung up again in ten-fold strength. There was, it was true, something abominable about him, something which made his words more abominable than they would have been if another man had uttered them—but, though it was inevitable that his method should rouse one, where those of one’s own blood were concerned, it was not enough to fill one with raging flame when his malignity was dealing with those who were almost strangers. Mount Dunstan was almost a stranger—she had met Lord Westholt oftener. Would she have felt the same hot beat of the blood, if Lord Westholt had been concerned? No, she answered herself frankly, she would not.

CHAPTER XXXII

A GREAT BALL

A certain great ball, given yearly at Dunholm Castle, was one of the most notable social features of the county. It took place when the house was full of its most interestingly distinguished guests, and, though other balls might be given at other times, this one was marked by a degree of greater state. On several occasions the chief guests had been great personages indeed, and to be bidden to meet them implied a selection flattering in itself. One’s invitation must convey by inference that one was either brilliant, beautiful, or admirable, if not important.

Nigel Anstruthers had never appeared at what the uninvited were wont, with derisive smiles, to call The Great Panjandrum Function—which was an ironic designation not employed by such persons as received cards bidding them to the festivity. Stornham Court was not popular in the county; no one had yearned for the society of the Dowager Lady Anstruthers, even in her youth; and a not too well-favoured young man with an ill-favoured temper, noticeably on the lookout for grievances, is not an addition to one’s circle. At nineteen Nigel had discovered the older Lord Mount Dunstan and his son Tenham to be congenial acquaintances, and had been so often absent from home that his neighbours would have found social intercourse with him difficult, even if desirable. Accordingly, when the county paper recorded the splendours of The Great Panjandrum Function—which it by no means mentioned by that name—the list of “Among those present ” had not so far contained the name of Sir Nigel Anstruthers.

So, on a morning a few days after his return, the master of Stornham turned over a card of invitation and read it several times before speaking.

“I suppose you know what this means,” he said at last to Rosalie, who was alone with him.

“It means that we are invited to Dunholm Castle for the ball, doesn’t it?”

Her husband tossed the card aside on the table.

“It means that Betty will be invited to every house where there is a son who must be disposed of profitably.

“She is invited because she is beautiful and clever. She would be invited if she had no money at all,” said Rosy daringly. She was actually growing daring, she thought sometimes. It would not have been possible to say anything like this a few months ago.

“Don’t make silly mistakes,” said Nigel. “There are a good many handsome girls who receive comparatively little attention. But the hounds of war are let loose, when one of your swollen American fortunes appears. The obviousness of it `virtuously’ makes me sick. It’s as vulgar—as New York.”

What befel next brought to Sir Nigel a shock of curious enlightenment, but no one was more amazed than Rosy herself. She felt, when she heard her own voice, as if she must be rather mad.

“I would rather,” she said quite distinctly, “that you did not speak to me of New York in that way.”

“What!” said Anstruthers, staring at her with contempt which was derision.

“It is my home,” she answered. “It is not proper that I should hear it spoken of slightingly.”

“Your home! It has not taken the slightest notice of you for twelve years. Your people dropped you as if you were a hot potato.”

“They have taken me up again.” Still in amazement at her own boldness, but somehow learning something as she went on.

He walked over to her side, and stood before her.

“Look here, Rosalie,” he said. “You have been taking lessons from your sister. She is a beauty and young and you are not. People will stand things from her they will not take from you. I would stand some things myself, because it rather amuses a man to see a fine girl peacocking. It’s merely ridiculous in you, and I won’t stand it—not a bit of it.”

It was not specially fortunate for him that the door opened as he was speaking, and Betty came in with her own invitation in her hand. He was quick enough, however, to turn to greet her with a shrug of his shoulders.

“I am being favoured with a little scene by my wife,” he explained. “She is capable of getting up excellent little scenes, but I daresay she does not show you that side of her temper.”

Betty took a comfortable chintz-covered, easy chair. Her expression was evasively speculative.

“Was it a scene I interrupted?” she said. “Then I must not go away and leave you to finish it. You were saying that you would not `stand’ something. What does a man do when he will not `stand’ a thing? It always sounds so final and appalling—as if he were threatening horrible things such as, perhaps, were a resource in feudal times. What IS the resource in these dull days of law and order—and policemen?”

“Is this American chaff?” he was disagreeably conscious that he was not wholly successful in his effort to be lofty.

The frankness of Betty’s smile was quite without prejudice.

“Dear me, no,” she said. “It is only the unpicturesque result of an unfeminine knowledge of the law. And I was thinking how one is limited—and yet how things are simplified after all.”

“Simplified!” disgustedly.

“Yes, really. You see, if Rosy were violent she could not beat you—even if she were strong enough—because you could ring the bell and give her into custody. And you could not beat her because the same unpleasant thing would happen to you. Policemen do rob things of colour, don’t they? And besides, when one remembers that mere vulgar law insists that no one can be forced to live with another person who is brutal or loathsome, that’s simple, isn’t it? You could go away from Rosy,” with sweet clearness, “at any moment you wished—as far away as you liked.”

“You seem to forget,” still feeling that convincing loftiness was not easy, “that when a man leaves his wife, or she deserts him, it is she who is likely to be called upon to bear the onus of public opinion.”

“Would she be called upon to bear it under all circumstances?”

“Damned clever woman as you are, you know that she would, as well as I know it.” He made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “You know that what I say is true. Women who take to their heels are deucedly unpopular in England.”

“I have not been long in England, but I have been struck by the prevalence of a sort of constitutional British sense of fair play among the people who really count. The Dunholms, for instance, have it markedly. In America it is the men who force women to take to their heels who are deucedly unpopular. The Americans’ sense of fair play is their most English quality. It was brought over in ships by the first colonists—like the pieces of fine solid old furniture, one even now sees, here and there, in houses in Virginia.”

“But the fact remains,” said Nigel, with an unpleasant laugh, “the fact remains, my dear girl.”

“The fact that does remain,” said Betty, not unpleasantly at all, and still with her gentle air of mere unprejudiced speculation, “is that, if a man or woman is properly ill-treated—PROPERLY—not in any amateurish way—they reach the point of not caring in the least—nothing matters, but that they must get away from the horror of the unbearable thing —never to see or hear of it again is heaven enough to make anything else a thing to smile at. But one could settle the other point by experimenting. Suppose you run away from Rosy, and then we can see if she is cut by the county.”

His laugh was unpleasant again.

“So long as you are with her, she will not be cut. There are a number of penniless young men of family in this, as well as the adjoining, counties. Do you think Mount Dunstan would cut her?”

She looked down at the carpet thoughtfully a moment, and then lifted her eyes.

“I do not think so,” she answered. “But I will ask him.”

He was startled by a sudden feeling that she might be capable of it.

“Oh, come now,” he said, “that goes beyond a joke. You will not do any such absurd thing. One does not want one’s domestic difficulties discussed by one’s neighbours.”

Betty opened coolly surprised eyes.

“I did not understand it was a personal matter,” she remarked. “Where do the domestic difficulties come in?”

He stared at her a few seconds with the look she did not like, which was less likeable at the moment, because it combined itself with other things.

“Hang it,” he muttered. “I wish I could keep my temper as you can keep yours,” and he turned on his heel and left the room.

Rosy had not spoken. She had sat with her hands in her lap, looking out of the window. She had at first had a moment of terror. She had, indeed, once uttered in her soul the abject cry: “Don’t make him angry, Betty—oh, don’t, don’t!” And suddenly it had been stilled, and she had listened. This was because she realised that Nigel himself was listening. That made her see what she had not dared to allow herself to see before. These trite things were true. There were laws to protect one. If Betty had not been dealing with mere truths, Nigel would have stopped her. He had been supercilious, but he could not contradict her.

“Betty,” she said, when her sister came to her, “you said that to show ME things, as well as to show them to him. I knew you did, and listened to every word. It was good for me to hear you.”

“Clear-cut, unadorned facts are like bullets,” said Betty. “They reach home, if one’s aim is good. The shiftiest people cannot evade them.”

… . .

A certain thing became evident to Betty during the time which elapsed between the arrival of the invitations and the great ball. Despite an obvious intention to assume an amiable pose for the time being, Sir Nigel could not conceal a not quite unexplainable antipathy to one individual. This individual was Mount Dunstan, whom it did not seem easy for him to leave alone. He seemed to recur to him as a subject, without any special reason, and this somewhat puzzled Betty until she heard from Rosalie of his intimacy with Lord Tenham, which, in a measure, explained it. The whole truth was that “The Lout,” as he had been called, had indulged in frank speech in his rare intercourse with his brother and his friends, and had once interfered with hot young fury in a matter in which the pair had specially wished to avoid all interference. His open scorn of their methods of entertaining themselves they had felt to be disgusting impudence, which would have been deservedly punished with a horsewhip, if the youngster had not been a big-muscled, clumsy oaf, with a dangerous eye. Upon this footing their acquaintance had stood in past years, and to decide—as Sir Nigel had decided—that the oaf in question had begun to make his bid for splendid fortune under the roof of Stornham Court itself was a thing not to be regarded calmly. It was more than he could stand, and the folly of temper, which was forever his undoing, betrayed him into mistakes more than once. This girl, with her beauty and her wealth, he chose to regard as a sort of property rightfully his own. She was his sister-in-law, at least; she was living under his roof; he had more or less the power to encourage or discourage such aspirants as appeared. Upon the whole there was something soothing to one’s vanity in appearing before the world as the person at present responsible for her. It gave a man a certain dignity of position, and his chief girding at fate had always risen from the fact that he had not had dignity of position. He would not be held cheap in this matter, at least. But sometimes, as he looked at the girl he turned hot and sick, as it was driven home to him that he was no longer young, that he had never been good-looking, and that he had cut the ground from under his feet twelve years ago, when he had married Rosalie! If he could have waited—if he could have done several other things—perhaps the clever acting of a part, and his power of domination might have given him a chance. Even that blackguard of a Mount Dunstan had a better one now. He was young, at least, and free—and a big strong beast. He was forced, with bitter reluctance, to admit that he himself was not even particularly strong—of late he had felt it hideously.

So he detested Mount Dunstan the more for increasing reasons, as he thought the matter over. It would seem, perhaps, but a subtle pleasure to the normal mind, but to him there was pleasure—support—aggrandisement—in referring to the ill case of the Mount Dunstan estate, in relating illustrative anecdotes, in dwelling upon the hopelessness of the outlook, and the notable unpopularity of the man himself. A confiding young lady from the States was required, he said on one occasion, but it would be necessary that she should be a young person of much simplicity, who would not be alarmed or chilled by the obvious. No one would realise this more clearly than Mount Dunstan himself. He said it coldly and casually, as if it were the simplest matter of fact. If the fellow had been making himself agreeable to Betty, it was as well that certain points should be—as it were inadvertently —brought before her.

Miss Vanderpoel was really rather fine, people said to each other afterwards, when she entered the ballroom at Dunholm Castle with her brother-in-law. She bore herself as composedly as if she had been escorted by the most admirable and dignified of conservative relatives, instead of by a man who was more definitely disliked and disapproved of than any other man in the county whom decent people were likely to meet. Yet, she was far too clever a girl not to realise the situation clearly, they said to each other. She had arrived in England to find her sister a neglected wreck, her fortune squandered, and her existence stripped bare of even such things as one felt to be the mere decencies. There was but one thing to be deduced from the facts which had stared her in the face. But of her deductions she had said nothing whatever, which was, of course, remarkable in a young person. It may be mentioned that, perhaps, there had been those who would not have been reluctant to hear what she must have had to say, and who had even possibly given her a delicate lead. But the lead had never been taken. One lady had even remarked that, on her part, she felt that a too great reserve verged upon secretiveness, which was not a desirable girlish quality.

Of course the situation had been so much discussed that people were naturally on the lookout for the arrival of the Stornham party, as it was known that Sir Nigel had returned home, and would be likely to present himself with his wife and sister-in-law. There was not a dowager present who did not know how and where he had reprehensibly spent the last months. It served him quite right that the Spanish dancing person had coolly left him in the lurch for a younger and more attractive, as well as a richer man. If it were not for Miss Vanderpoel, one need not pretend that one knew nothing about the affair—in fact, if it had not been for Miss Vanderpoel, he would not have received an invitation—and poor Lady Anstruthers would be sitting at home, still the forlorn little frump and invalid she had so wonderfully ceased to be since her sister had taken her in hand. She was absolutely growing even pretty and young, and her clothes were really beautiful. The whole thing was amazing.

Betty, as well as Rosalie and Nigel—knew that many people turned undisguisedly to look at them—even to watch them as they came into the splendid ballroom. It was a splendid ballroom and a stately one, and Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt shared a certain thought when they met her, which was that hers was distinctly the proud young brilliance of presence which figured most perfectly against its background. Much as people wanted to look at Sir Nigel, their eyes were drawn from him to Miss Vanderpoel. After all it was she who made him an object of interest. One wanted to know what she would do with him—how she would “carry him off.” How much did she know of the distaste people felt for him, since she would not talk or encourage talk? The Dunholms could not have invited her and her sister, and have ignored him; but did she not guess that they would have ignored him, if they could? and was there not natural embarrassment in feeling forced to appear in pomp, as it were, under his escort?

But no embarrassment was perceptible. Her manner committed her to no recognition of a shadow of a flaw in the character of her companion. It even carried a certain conviction with it, and the lookers-on felt the impossibility of suggesting any such flaw by their own manner. For this evening, at least, the man must actually be treated as if he were an entirely unobjectionable person. It appeared as if that was what the girl wanted, and intended should happen.

This was what Nigel himself had begun to perceive, but he did not put it pleasantly. Deucedly clever girl as she was, he said to himself, she saw that it would be more agreeable to have no nonsense talked, and no ruffling of tempers. He had always been able to convey to people that the ruffling of his temper was a thing to be avoided, and perhaps she had already been sharp enough to realise this was a fact to be counted with. She was sharp enough, he said to himself, to see anything.

The function was a superb one. The house was superb, the rooms of entertainment were in every proportion perfect, and were quite renowned for the beauty of the space they offered; the people themselves were, through centuries of dignified living, so placed that intercourse with their kind was an easy and delightful thing. They need never doubt either their own effect, or the effect of their hospitalities. Sir Nigel saw about him all the people who held enviable place in the county. Some of them he had never known, some of them had long ceased to recall his existence. There were those among them who lifted lorgnettes or stuck monocles into their eyes as he passed, asking each other in politely subdued tones who the man was who seemed to be in attendance on Miss Vanderpoel. Nigel knew this and girded at it internally, while he made the most of his suave smile.

The distinguished personage who was the chief guest was to be seen at the upper end of the room talking to a tall man with broad shoulders, who was plainly interesting him for the moment. As the Stornham party passed on, this person, making his bow, retired, and, as he turned towards them, Sir Nigel recognising him, the agreeable smile was for the moment lost.

“How in the name of Heaven did Mount Dunstan come here?” broke from him with involuntary heat.

“Would it be rash to conclude,” said Betty, as she returned the bow of a very grand old lady in black velvet and an imposing tiara, “that he came in response to invitation?”

The very grand old lady seemed pleased to see her, and, with a royal little sign, called her to her side. As Betty Vanderpoel was a great success with the Mrs. Weldens and old Dobys of village life, she was also a success among grand old ladies. When she stood before them there was a delicate submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the dignity of their years and state. Strongly conservative and rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully attentive as if she had been a specially perfect young lady-in-waiting.

This one even patted Betty’s hand a little, when she took it. She was a great county potentate, who was known as Lady Alanby of Dole—her house being one of the most ancient and interesting in England.

“I am glad to see you here to-night,” she said. “You are looking very nice. But you cannot help that.”

Betty asked permission to present her sister and brother-in- law. Lady Alanby was polite to both of them, but she gave Nigel a rather sharp glance through her gold pince-nez as she greeted him.

“Janey and Mary,” she said to the two girls nearest her, “I daresay you will kindly change your chairs and let Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel sit next to me.”

The Ladies Jane and Mary Lithcom, who had been ordered about by her from their infancy, obeyed with polite smiles. They were not particularly pretty girls, and were of the indigent noble. Jane, who had almost overlarge blue eyes, sighed as she reseated herself a few chairs lower down.

“It does seem beastly unfair,” she said in a low voice to her sister, “that a girl such as that should be so awfully good-looking. She ought to have a turned-up nose.”

“Thank you,” said Mary, “I have a turned-up nose myself, and I’ve got nothing to balance it.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean a nice turned-up nose like yours,” said Jane; “I meant an ugly one. Of course Lady Alanby wants her for Tommy.” And her manner was not resigned.

“What she, or anyone else for that matter,” disdainfully, “could want with Tommy, I don’t know,” replied Mary.

“I do,” answered Jane obstinately. “I played cricket with him when I was eight, and I’ve liked him ever since. It is AWFUL,” in a smothered outburst, “what girls like us have to suffer.”

Lady Mary turned to look at her curiously.

“Jane,” she said, “are you SUFFERING about Tommy?”

“Yes, I am. Oh, what a question to ask in a ballroom! Do you want me to burst out crying?”

“No,” sharply, “look at the Prince. Stare at that fat woman curtsying to him. Stare and then wink your eyes.”

Lady Alanby was talking about Mount Dunstan.

“Lord Dunholm has given us a lead. He is an old friend of mine, and he has been talking to me about it. It appears that he has been looking into things seriously. Modern as he is, he rather tilts at injustices, in a quiet way. He has satisfactorily convinced himself that Lord Mount Dunstan has been suffering for the sins of the fathers—which must be annoying.”

“Is Lord Dunholm quite sure of that?” put in Sir Nigel, with a suggestively civil air.

Old Lady Alanby gave him an unencouraging look.

“Quite,” she said. “He would be likely to be before he took any steps.”

“Ah,” remarked Nigel. “I knew Lord Tenham, you see.”

Lady Alanby’s look was more unencouraging still. She quietly and openly put up her glass and stared. There were times when she had not the remotest objection to being rude to certain people.

“I am sorry to hear that,” she observed. “There never was any room for mistake about Tenham. He is not usually mentioned.”

“I do not think this man would be usually mentioned, if everything were known,” said Nigel.

Then an appalling thing happened. Lady Alanby gazed at him a few seconds, and made no reply whatever. She dropped her glass, and turned again to talk to Betty. It was as if she had turned her back on him, and Sir Nigel, still wearing an amiable exterior, used internally some bad language.

“But I was a fool to speak of Tenham,” he thought. “A great fool.”

A little later Miss Vanderpoel made her curtsy to the exalted guest, and was commented upon again by those who looked on. It was not at all unnatural that one should find ones eyes following a girl who, representing a sort of royal power, should have the good fortune of possessing such looks and bearing.

Remembering his child bete noir of the long legs and square, audacious little face, Nigel Anstruthers found himself restraining a slight grin as he looked on at her dancing. Partners flocked about her like bees, and Lady Alanby of Dole, and other very grand old or middle-aged ladies all found the evening more interesting because they could watch her.

“She is full of spirit,” said Lady Alanby, “and she enjoys herself as a girl should. It is a pleasure to look at her. I like a girl who gets a magnificent colour and stars in her eyes when she dances. It looks healthy and young.”

It was Tommy Miss Vanderpoel was dancing with when her ladyship said this. Tommy was her grandson and a young man of greater rank than fortune. He was a nice, frank, heavy youth, who loved a simple county life spent in tramping about with guns, and in friendly hobnobbing with the neighbours, and eating great afternoon teas with people whose jokes were easy to understand, and who were ready to laugh if you tried a joke yourself. He liked girls, and especially he liked Jane Lithcom, but that was a weakness his grandmother did not at all encourage, and, as he danced with Betty Vanderpoel, he looked over her shoulder more than once at a pair of big, unhappy blue eyes, whose owner sat against the wall.

Betty Vanderpoel herself was not thinking of Tommy. In fact, during this brilliant evening she faced still further developments of her own strange case. Certain new things were happening to her. When she had entered the ballroom she had known at once who the man was who stood before the royal guest—she had known before he bowed low and withdrew. And her recognition had brought with it a shock of joy. For a few moments her throat felt hot and pulsing. It was true—the things which concerned him concerned her. All that happened to him suddenly became her affair, as if in some way they were of the same blood. Nigel’s slighting of him had infuriated her; that Lord Dunholm had offered him friendship and hospitality was a thing which seemed done to herself, and filled her with gratitude and affection; that he should be at this place, on this special occasion, swept away dark things from his path. It was as if it were stated without words that a conservative man of the world, who knew things as they were, having means of reaching truths, vouched for him and placed his dignity and firmness at his side.

And there was the gladness at the sight of him. It was an overpoweringly strong thing. She had never known anything like it. She had not seen him since Nigel’s return, and here he was, and she knew that her life quickened in her because they were together in the same room. He had come to them and said a few courteous words, but he had soon gone away. At first she wondered if it was because of Nigel, who at the time was making himself rather ostentatiously amiable to her. Afterwards she saw him dancing, talking, being presented to people, being, with a tactful easiness, taken care of by his host and hostess, and Lord Westholt. She was struck by the graceful magic with which this tactful ease surrounded him without any obviousness. The Dunholms had given a lead, as Lady Alanby had said, and the rest were following it and ignoring intervals with reposeful readiness. It was wonderfully well done. Apparently there had been no past at all. All began with this large young man, who, despite his Viking type, really looked particularly well in evening dress. Lady Alanby held him by her chair for some time, openly enjoying her talk with him, and calling up Tommy, that they might make friends.

After a while, Betty said to herself, he would come and ask for a dance. But he did not come, and she danced with one man after another. Westholt came to her several times and had more dances than one. Why did the other not come? Several times they whirled past each other, and when it occurred they looked—both feeling it an accident—into each other’s eyes.

The strong and strange thing—that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun— had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing, but an ancient and common one—as common and ancient as death and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are. As it comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their mere passing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens, and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.

“I wish,” Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening, “that her eyes had some fault in their expression—that they drew one less—that they drew ME less. I am losing my head.”

“It would be better,” Betty thought, “if I did not wish so much that he would come and ask me to dance with him— that he would not keep away so. He is keeping away for a reason. Why is he doing it?”

The music swung on in lovely measures, and the dancers swung with it. Sir Nigel walked dutifully through the Lancers once with his wife, and once with his beautiful sister-in-law. Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners, who discovered that she was a childishly light creature who danced extremely well. Everyone was kind to her, and the very grand old ladies, who admired Betty, were absolutely benign in their manner. Betty’s partners paid ingenuous court to her, and Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.

Rosy, standing for a moment looking out on the brilliancy and state about her, meeting Betty’s eyes, laughed quiveringly.

“I am in a dream,” she said.

“You have awakened from a dream,” Betty answered.

From the opposite side of the room someone was coming towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.

“I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with him,” she said. “Why have you not danced with him before, Betty?”

“He has not asked me,” Betty answered. “That is the only reason.”

“Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a few days after they met him at Stornham,” Rosalie explained in an undertone. “They wanted to know him. Then it seems they found they liked each other. Lady Dunholm has been telling me about it. She says Lord Dunholm thanks you, because you said something illuminating. That was the word she used—`illuminating.’ I believe you are always illuminating, Betty.”

Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them. How broad his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his eyes! Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction. One does not call it domineering, but it is so. This special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her single share of force. Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this “other one” came to her. He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to her. He said in rather a low voice:

“Will you dance with me?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom. Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same interested curiosity. Some onlookers thought it singular that they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and circumstance. No one attempted to deny that they were an extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one’s eyes followed them in spite of one’s self.

“Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing,” old Lady Alanby commented. “He is a magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently built girl. Everybody should look like that. My impression would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of them had any particular character. That affair of the apple was so silly. Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband. That wonderful black head of Miss Vanderpoel’s looks very nice poised near Mount Dunstan’s dark red one.”

“I am glad to be dancing with him,” Betty was thinking. “I am glad to be near him.”

“Will you dance this with me to the very end,” asked Mount Dunstan—”to the very late note?”

“Yes,” answered Betty.

He had spoken in a low but level voice—the kind of voice whose tone places a man and woman alone together, and wholly apart from all others by whomsoever they are surrounded. There had been no preliminary speech and no explanation of the request followed. The music was a perfect thing, the brilliant, lofty ballroom, the beauty of colour and sound about them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm breath of flowers in the air, the very sense of royal presence and its accompanying state and ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged background for the strange consciousness each held close and silently—knowing nothing of the mind of the other.

This was what was passing through the man’s mind.

“This is the thing which most men experience several times during their lives. It would be reason enough for all the great deeds and all the crimes one hears of. It is an enormous kind of anguish and a fearful kind of joy. It is scarcely to be borne, and yet, at this moment, I could kill myself and her, at the thought of losing it. If I had begun earlier, would it have been easier? No, it would not. With me it is bound to go hard. At twenty I should probably not have been able to keep myself from shouting it aloud, and I should not have known that it was only the working of the Law. `Only!’ Good God, what a fool I am! It is because it is only the Law that I cannot escape, and must go on to the end, grinding my teeth together because I cannot speak. Oh, her smooth young cheek! Oh, the deep shadows of her lashes! And while we sway round and round together, I hold her slim strong body in the hollow of my arm.”

It was, quite possibly, as he thought this that Nigel Anstruthers, following him with his eyes as he passed, began to frown. He had been watching the pair as others had, he had seen what others saw, and now he had an idea that he saw something more, and it was something which did not please him. The instinct of the male bestirred itself—the curious instinct of resentment against another man—any other man. And, in this case, Mount Dunstan was not any other man, but one for whom his antipathy was personal.

“I won’t have that,” he said to himself. “I won’t have it.”

… . .

The music rose and swelled, and then sank into soft breathing, as they moved in harmony together, gliding and swirling as they threaded their way among other couples who swirled and glided also, some of them light and smiling, some exchanging low-toned speech—perhaps saying words which, unheard by others, touched on deep things. The exalted guest fell into momentary silence as he looked on, being a man much attracted by physical fineness and temperamental power and charm. A girl like that would bring a great deal to a man and to the country he belonged to. A great race might be founded on such superbness of physique and health and beauty. Combined with abnormal resources, certainly no more could be asked. He expressed something of the kind to Lord Dunholm, who stood near him in attendance.

To herself Betty was saying: “That was a strange thing he asked me. It is curious that we say so little. I should never know much about him. I have no intelligence where he is concerned—only a strong, stupid feeling, which is not like a feeling of my own. I am no longer Betty Vanderpoel— and I wish to go on dancing with him—on and on—to the last note, as he said.”

She felt a little hot wave run over her cheek uncomfortably, and the next instant the big arm tightened its clasp of her— for just one second—not more than one. She did not know that he, himself, had seen the sudden ripple of red colour, and that the equally sudden contraction of the arm had been as unexpected to him and as involuntary as the quick wave itself. It had horrified and made him angry. He looked the next instant entirely stiff and cold.

“He did not know it happened,” Betty resolved.

“The music is going to stop,” said Mount Dunstan. “I know the waltz. We can get once round the room again before the final chord. It was to be the last note—the very last,” but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty laughed.

“Quite the last,” she answered.

The music hastened a little, and their gliding whirl became more rapid—a little faster—a little faster still—a running sweep of notes, a big, terminating harmony, and the thing was over.

“Thank you,” said Mount Dunstan. “One will have it to remember.” And his tone was slightly sardonic.

“Yes,” Betty acquiesced politely.

“Oh, not you. Only I. I have never waltzed before.”

Betty turned to look at him curiously.

“Under circumstances such as these,” he explained. “I learned to dance at a particularly hideous boys’ school in France. I abhorred it. And the trend of my life has made it quite easy for me to keep my twelve-year-old vow that I would never dance after I left the place, unless I WANTED to do it, and that, especially, nothing should make me waltz until certain agreeable conditions were fulfilled. Waltzing I approved of —out of hideous schools. I was a pig-headed, objectionable child. I detested myself even, then.”

Betty’s composure returned to her.

“I am trusting,” she remarked, “that I may secretly regard myself as one of the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled. Do not dispel my hopes roughly.”

“I will not,” he answered. “You are, in fact, several of them.”

“One breathes with much greater freedom,” she responded.

This sort of cool nonsense was safe. It dispelled feelings of tenseness, and carried them to the place where Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers awaited them. A slight stir was beginning to be felt throughout the ballroom. The royal guest was retiring, and soon the rest began to melt away. The Anstruthers, who had a long return drive before them, were among those who went first.

When Lady Anstruthers and her sister returned from the cloak room, they found Sir Nigel standing near Mount Dunstan, who was going also, and talking to him in an amiably detached manner. Mount Dunstan, himself, did not look amiable, or seem to be saying much, but Sir Nigel showed no signs of being disturbed.

“Now that you have ceased to forswear the world,” he said as his wife approached, “I hope we shall see you at Stornham. Your visits must not cease because we cannot offer you G. Selden any longer.”

He had his own reasons for giving the invitation—several of them. And there was a satisfaction in letting the fellow know, casually, that he was not in the ridiculous position of being unaware of what had occurred during his absence—that there had been visits—and also the objectionable episode of the American bounder. That the episode had been objectionable, he knew he had adroitly conveyed by mere tone and manner.

Mount Dunstan thanked him in the usual formula, and then spoke to Betty.

“G. Selden left us tremulous and fevered with ecstatic anticipation. He carried your kind letter to Mr. Vanderpoel, next to his heart. His brain seemed to whirl at the thought of what `the boys’ would say, when he arrived with it in New York. You have materialised the dream of his life!”

“I have interested my father,” Betty answered, with a brilliant smile. “He liked the romance of the Reuben S. Vanderpoel who rewarded the saver of his life by unbounded orders for the Delkoff.”

… . .

As their carriage drove away, Sir Nigel bent forward to look out of the window, and having done it, laughed a little.

“Mount Dunstan does not play the game well,” he remarked.

It was annoying that neither Betty nor his wife inquired what the game in question might be, and that his temperament forced him into explaining without encouragement.

“He should have `stood motionless with folded arms,’ or something of the sort, and `watched her equipage until it was out of sight.’ “

“And he did not?” said Betty

“He turned on his heel as soon as the door was shut.”

“People ought not to do such things,” was her simple comment. To which it seemed useless to reply.

CHAPTER XXXIII

FOR LADY JANE

There is no one thing on earth of such interest as the study of the laws of temperament, which impel, support, or entrap into folly and danger the being they rule. As a child, not old enough to give a definite name to the thing she watched and pondered on, in child fashion, Bettina Vanderpoel had thought much on this subject. As she had grown older, she had never been ignorant of the workings of her own temperament, and she had looked on for years at the laws which had wrought in her father’s being—the laws of strength, executive capacity, and that pleasure in great schemes, which is roused less by a desire for gain than for a strongly-felt necessity for action, resulting in success. She mentally followed other people on their way, sometimes asking herself how far the individual was to be praised or blamed for his treading of the path he seemed to choose. And now there was given her the opportunity to study the workings of the nature of Nigel Anstruthers, which was a curious thing.

He was not an individual to be envied. Never was man more tormented by lack of power to control his special devil, at the right moment of time, and therefore, never was there one so inevitably his own frustration. This Betty saw after the passing of but a few days, and wondered how far he was conscious or unconscious of the thing. At times it appeared to her that he was in a state of unrest—that he was as a man wavering between lines of action, swayed at one moment by one thought, at another by an idea quite different, and that he was harried because he could not hold his own with himself.

This was true. The ball at Dunholm Castle had been enlightening, and had wrought some changes in his points of view. Also other factors had influenced him. In the first place, the changed atmosphere of Stornham, the fitness and luxury of his surroundings, the new dignity given to his position by the altered aspect of things, rendered external amiability more easy. To ride about the country on a good horse, or drive in a smart phaeton, or suitable carriage, and to find that people who a year ago had passed him with the merest recognition, saluted him with polite intention, was, to a certain degree, stimulating to a vanity which had been long ill-fed. The power which produced these results should, of course, have been in his own hands—his money-making father-in-law should have seen that it was his affair to provide for that—but since he had not done so, it was rather entertaining that it should be, for the present, in the hands of this extraordinarily good-looking girl.

He had begun by merely thinking of her in this manner— as “this extraordinarily good-looking girl,” and had not, for a moment, hesitated before the edifying idea of its not being impossible to arrange a lively flirtation with her. She was at an age when, in his opinion, girlhood was poised for flight with adventure, and his tastes had not led him in the direction of youth which was fastidious. His Riviera episode had left his vanity blistered and requiring some soothing application. His life had worked evil with him, and he had fallen ill on the hands of a woman who had treated him as a shattered, useless thing whose day was done and with whom strength and bloom could not be burdened. He had kept his illness a hidden secret, on his return to Stornham, his one desire having been to forget—even to disbelieve in it, but dreams of its suggestion sometimes awakened him at night with shudders and cold sweat. He was hideously afraid of death and pain, and he had had monstrous pain—and while he had lain battling with it, upon his bed in the villa on the Mediterranean, he had been able to hear, in the garden outside, the low voices and laughter of the Spanish dancer and the healthy, strong young fool who was her new adorer.

When he had found himself face to face with Betty in the avenue, after the first leap of annoyance, which had suddenly died down into perversely interested curiosity, he could have laughed outright at the novelty and odd unexpectedness of the situation. The ill-mannered, impudently-staring, little New York beast had developed into THIS! Hang it! No man could guess what the embryo female creature might result in. His mere shakiness of physical condition added strength to her attraction. She was like a young goddess of health and life and fire; the very spring of her firm foot upon the moss beneath it was a stimulating thing to a man whose nerves sprung secret fears upon him. There were sparks between the sweep of her lashes, but she managed to carry herself with the air of being as cool as a cucumber, which gave spice to the effort to “upset” her. If she did not prove suitably amenable, there would be piquancy in getting the better of her —in stirring up unpleasant little things, which would make it easier for her to go away than remain on the spot—if one should end by choosing to get rid of her. But, for the moment, he had no desire to get rid of her. He wanted to see what she intended to do—to see the thing out, in fact. It amused him to hear that Mount Dunstan was on her track. There exists for persons of a certain type a pleasure full-fed by the mere sense of having “got even” with an opponent. Throughout his life he had made a point of “getting even” with those who had irritatingly crossed his path, or much disliked him. The working out of small or large plans to achieve this end had formed one of his most agreeable recreations. He had long owed Mount Dunstan a debt, which he had always meant to pay. He had not intended to forget the episode of the nice little village girl with whom Tenham and himself had been getting along so enormously well, when the raging young ass had found them out, and made an absurdly exaggerated scene, even going so far as threatening to smash the pair of them, marching off to the father and mother, and setting the vicar on, and then scratching together—God knows how—money enough to pack the lot off to America, where they had since done well. Why should a man forgive another who had made him look like a schoolboy and a fool? So, to find Mount Dunstan rushing down a steep hill into this thing, was edifying. You cannot take much out of a man if you never encounter him. If you meet him, you are provided by Heaven with opportunities. You can find out what he feels most sharply, and what he will suffer most by being deprived of. His impression was that there was a good deal to be got out of Mount Dunstan. He was an obstinate, haughty devil, and just the fellow to conceal with a fury of pride a score of tender places in his hide.

At the ball he had seen that the girl’s effect had been of a kind which even money and good looks uncombined with another thing might not have produced. And she had the other thing—whatsoever it might be. He observed the way in which the Dunholms met and greeted her, he marked the glance of the royal personage, and his manner, when after her presentation he conversed with and detained her, he saw the turning of heads and exchange of remarks as she moved through the rooms. Most especially, he took in the bearing of the very grand old ladies, led by Lady Alanby of Dole. Barriers had thrown themselves down, these portentous, rigorous old pussycats admired her, even liked her.

“Upon my word,” he said to himself. “She has a way with her, you know. She is a combination of Ethel Newcome and Becky Sharp. But she is more level-headed than either of them, There’s a touch of Trix Esmond, too.”

The sense of the success which followed her, and the gradually-growing excitement of looking on at her light whirls of dance, the carnation of her cheek, and the laughter and pleasure she drew about her, had affected him in a way by which he was secretly a little exhilarated. He was conscious of a rash desire to force his way through these laughing, vaunting young idiots, juggle or snatch their dances away from them, and seize on the girl himself. He had not for so long a time been impelled by such agreeable folly that he had sometimes felt the stab of the thought that he was past it. That it should rise in him again made him feel young. There was nothing which so irritated him against Mount Dunstan as his own rebelling recognition of the man’s youth, the strength of his fine body, his high-held head and clear eye.

These things and others it was which swayed him, as was plain to Betty in the time which followed, to many changes of mood.

“Are you sorry for a man who is ill and depressed,” he asked one day, “or do you despise him?”

“I am sorry.”

“Then be sorry for me.”

He had come out of the house to her as she sat on the lawn, under a broad, level-branched tree, and had thrown himself upon a rug with his hands clasped behind his head.

“Are you ill?”

“When I was on the Riviera I had a fall.” He lied simply. “I strained some muscle or other, and it has left me rather lame. Sometimes I have a good deal of pain.”

“I am very sorry,” said Betty. “Very.”

A woman who can be made sorry it is rarely impossible to manage. To dwell with pathetic patience on your grievances, if she is weak and unintelligent, to deplore, with honest regret, your faults and blunders, if she is strong, are not bad ideas.

He looked at her reflectively.

“Yes, you are capable of being sorry,” he decided. For a few moments of silence his eyes rested upon the view spread before him. To give the expression of dignified reflection was not a bad idea either.

“Do you know,” he said at length, “that you produce an extraordinary effect upon me, Betty?”

She was occupying herself by adding a few stitches to one of Rosy’s ancient strips of embroidery, and as she answered, she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect

“Good or bad?” she inquired, with delicate abstraction.

He turned his face towards her again—this time quickly.

“Both,” he answered. “Both.”

His tone held the flash of a heat which he felt should have startled her slightly. But apparently it did not.

“I do not like `both,’ ” with composed lightness. “If you had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with pride. But `both’ leaves me unsatisfied. It interferes with the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent power. One likes to contemplate a large picture of one’s self— not plain, but coloured—as a wholesale reformer.”