MAMMON AND CO.

BY E. F. BENSON.

Mammon and Co.

12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

This latest novel by a popular author deals with personages living in the same society that was characterized by "Dodo" and "The Rubicon." Mr. Benson is thoroughly acquainted with the society in which he places the scenes of his novels of London life. In "Mammon and Co." the good genius of the tale is an American girl. The book will be found to be one of exceeding interest throughout.

Dodo.

A Detail of the Day. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"'Dodo' is a delightfully witty sketch of the 'smart' people of society.... The writer is a true artist."—London Spectator.

The Rubicon.

12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"The anticipations which must have been formed by all readers of 'Dodo' will in no wise be disappointed by 'The Rubicon.' The new work is well written, stimulating, unconventional, and, in a word, characteristic. Intellectual force is never absent, and the keen observation and knowledge of character, of which there is abundant evidence, are aided by real literary power."—Birmingham Post.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.

MAMMON

AND CO.

By E. F. BENSON

Author of DODO, THE RUBICON

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1899

Copyright, 1899,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

BOOK II

[BOOK I]

[CHAPTER I]

THE CITY DINNER

"Egotism is certainly the first," said Lady Conybeare with admirable firmness; "and your inclination towards your neighbour is the second."

Now, this was the sort of thing which Alice Haslemere liked; and she stopped abruptly in the middle of her rather languishing conversation with nobody in particular to ask for explanations. It sounded promising.

"The first what, and the second what, Kit?" she inquired.

"The first and the second lessons," said Lady Conybeare promptly. "The first and the second social virtues, if you are particular. I am going to set up a school for the propagation of social virtues, where I shall teach the upper classes to be charming. There shall be a special class for royalty."

Lady Haslemere was not generally known as being particularly particular, but she took her stand on Kit's conditional, and defended it.

"There is nothing like particularity—nothing," she said earnestly, with a sort of missionary zeal to disagree with somebody; "though some people try to get on without it."

Being a great friend of Kit's, she knew that it was sufficient for her to state a generality of any kind to get it contradicted. She was not wrong in this instance. Kit sighed with the air of a woman who meant to do her unpleasant duty like a sister and a Christian.

"Dear Alice," she said, "there is nothing so thoroughly irritating as particularity. I am not sure what you mean by it, but I suppose you allude either to people who are prudes or to people who are always letting fly precise information at one. They always want it back too. Don't you know how the people who insist on telling one the exact time are just those who ask one for the exact time. I never know the exact time, and I never want to be told it. And I hate a prudish woman," she concluded with emphasis, "as much as I abhor a well-informed man."

"Put it the other way round," said Lady Haslemere, "and I agree with you. I loathe a prudish man, and I detest a well-informed woman."

"There aren't any of either," said Lady Conybeare.

She sat up very straight in her chair as she made this surprising assertion, and arranged the lace round her throat. Her attitude gave one the impression somehow of a rakish frigate clearing for action, and on the moment came the first shot.

"I am a prude," said a low, bass voice at her elbow.

Kit scarcely glanced round.

"I know you are," she said, replying with a heavy broadside; "but then you are not a man."

"That depends on what you mean by a man," said the voice again.

The speaker was so hidden by the arms of the low chair in which he sat, that a knee, shin and foot, in a horizontal line on the invisible support of another knee, was all that could be seen of him.

"I mean a human being who likes killing things," said Kit without hesitation.

"I killed a wasp yesterday," said the voice; "at least, I think it died afterwards. Certainly I disabled it. Oh, I am sure I killed it."

"Yes, and you remembered it to-day," said Lady Conybeare briskly. "You did not really kill it; it lives in your memory, and—and poisons your life. In time it will kill you. Do you suppose Jack remembers the grouse he killed yesterday?"

"Oh, but Jack is like the oldest inhabitant," said Lady Haslemere. "He never remembers anything, just as the oldest inhabitant never remembers a flood or a thunderstorm or a famine at all like the one in question. That means they don't remember anything at all, for one famine is just like another; so are thunderstorms."

Kit paused a moment, with her head on one side, regarding the speaker.

"No; forgetfulness is not characteristic of Jack," she said, "any more than memory is. He remembers what he wants to remember, and forgets what he wants to forget. Now, it's just the opposite with me. I forget what I want to remember—horrid stories about my friends, for instance—and I remember the sort of thing I want to forget—like—like Sunday morning. Isn't it so, Jack?"

A slightly amused laugh came from a man seated in the window, who was no other than the Jack in question, and, incidentally, Kit's husband.

"It is true I make a point of forgetting unpleasant things," he said; "that is the only real use of having a memory decently under control. I forget Kit's milliner's bills——"

"So do I, darling," said Kit with sudden affection.

"No, you don't; you only remind me to forget them. I forget the names and faces of uninteresting people. I forget—no, I don't forget that——"

"What don't you forget, Jack?" demanded Kit with some sharpness. "I don't believe it."

"I don't forget that we've got to dine in the City at half-past seven. Why ever there was such an hour as half-past seven to put into a Christian clock I can't conjecture," he said in a tone of regretful wonder.

"Well, if you forget unpleasant things, and you don't forget that, perhaps it will be pleasant."

"I am quite certain it will be infernal," said Jack. "Go and dress, Kit."

Lady Conybeare frowned impatiently.

"Oh, Jack! when will you learn that I cannot do what you ask if you talk to me in that way?" she cried. "I was just going to dress. Now I can't, and we shall both be late, which will be very tiresome. You will curse and swear at me like St. Peter for keeping you waiting. How stupid you are, and how little you know me!"

Lord Conybeare looked at his watch.

"It is exactly three minutes to six," he said. "You needn't go for half an hour yet. There is loads of time—loads!"

Kit got up at once.

"That's a dear boy," she said. "Gracious! it's past the half-hour! I must fly! Good-bye, Alice; Conybeare and I will look in on you after our dinner. I think you said you were going to have a nice round game with counters. Good-bye, Tom, and learn not to be a prude."

"I'm sure you would teach me, if anybody could," said Tom rather viciously.

Kit adjusted the lace round her throat again.

"Thanks for the compliment," she said; "but prudes are born, not made. You don't shoot, you don't hunt, you remember every wasp you have possibly killed. Oh, Tom, I am afraid you are hopeless. Don't laugh. I mean what I say; at least, I think I mean the greater part of it."

"I reserve the less, then," said Tom. "I must go too. So Alice and Haslemere and I will see you to-night?"

"Yes; we'll escape as soon as we can from the dinner. Mind you take some money with you, Jack, for the round game. I must fly," she said again, and took her graceful presence very slowly out of the room.

There was a short silence, broken by Lord Conybeare.

"It is odd how you can tell a man by the hour at which he dines," he said. "Seven is an impossible hour, and the people who dine at seven are as impossible as the hour. People who dine at half-past are those who are trying to dine at eight and cannot manage it. They are also trying not to be impossible, and cannot."

Lady Haslemere got up.

"I once knew a man who dined at ten minutes to eight," she said, "which struck me as extremely curious. He was an archdeacon. I believe all archdeacons dine at ten minutes to eight. And they call it a quarter to, which is even odder."

"I don't know any archdeacons," said Tom, with a touch of wistfulness in his voice. "Introduce me to one to-night, Alice."

"Archdeacons don't come to Berkeley Street," said she.

"Why not? How exclusive! Do they expect Berkeley Street to come to them?"

"Probably. They are trained to believe nothing which is not incredible. It is exactly that which makes them impossible."

"Extremes meet," said Lord Conybeare. "The sceptic forces himself to believe everything that is perfectly credible. And he succeeds so well. Sceptics believe that they once ate nuts—we've all eaten nuts once—and are descended from apes. And how obvious is their genealogy from their faces! If I was going to be anything, it should not be a sceptic."

Lady Haslemere wandered once round the room, condemning the china silently.

"I must positively go," she said.

"Do, Alice!" said Jack; "because I want to dress. But you are rather like Kit. When she says she must fly, it means she has little intention of walking, just yet."

Lady Haslemere laughed.

"Come, Tom," she said. "We are not wanted. How deeply pathetic that is! They will want us some day, as the hangman said. Well, Jack, we shall see you later. I am going."

Lord Conybeare went upstairs to his dressing-room, revolving with some intentness the affair of this City dinner. The taking off his coat led him to wind up his watch, and he was so lost in thought that for a moment he looked surprisedly at his dress-clothes, which were laid out for him, as if pyjamas would have been a more likely find. But his linked and studded shirt was an irresistible reminder that it was dinner-time, not bedtime, and he proceeded to dress with a certain neat haste that was clearly characteristic of him. In stature he was somewhat below the average size, both in height and breadth; but one felt that an auctioneer of men might most truthfully have said, when he came to him at a sale: "Here is a rather smaller specimen, gentlemen, but much more highly finished, and very strong!"

The quick deftness of even unimportant movements certainly gave the impression of great driving power; everything he did was done unerringly; he had no fumblings with his studs, and his tie seemed to fashion a faultless, careless bow under a mere suggestion from his thin, taper-nailed fingers. He looked extremely well bred, and a certain Mephistophelian sharpness about his face, though it might have warned those whom Kit would have called prudes—for this was rather a sweeping word with her—that he might not be desirable as a friend, would certainly have warned the prudent that he would assuredly be much more undesirable as an enemy. On the whole, a prudent prude would have tried to keep on good terms with him. He appeared, in fact, even on so hasty and informal a glance as that which we are giving him as he arranges his tie, to be one of those lucky people to whom it is well to be pleasant, for it was difficult to imagine that he was afraid of anything or cared for anybody. Certain happily-constituted folk have never had any doubt about the purpose of the world, so clearly was it designed to feed and amuse them. Lord Conybeare was one of these; and in justice to the world we must say that it performed its altruistic part very decently indeed.

Jack Conybeare was still on the sunny side of thirty-five. He and Kit had been married some seven years, and had no children, a privation for which they were touchingly thankful. They had, both of them, quite sufficient responsibilities, or, to speak more precisely, liabilities; and to be in any way responsible for any liabilities beyond their own would have seemed to them a vicarious burden of the most intolerable sort. Their own, it is only fair to add, sat but lightly on them; Kit, in particular, wore hers most gracefully, like a becoming mantle. Chronic conditions, for the most part, tend to cease being acutely felt, and both she and Jack would far sooner have had a couple of thousand pounds in hand, and fifty thousand pounds in debt, than not to have owed or owned a penny. Kit had once even thought of advertising in the morning papers that a marchioness of pleasing disposition was willing to do anything in the world for a thousand pounds, and Jack had agreed that there was something in the idea, though the flaw in it was cheapness: you should not give yourself away. He himself had mortgaged every possible acre of his property, and sold all that was available to sell, and the close of every day exhibited to a wondering world how it was possible to live in the very height of fashion and luxury without any means of living at all. Had he and Kit sat down for a moment by the side of a road, or loitered in Park Lane, they would probably have been haled, by the fatherly care of English law, to the nearest magistrate, for that they had no apparent means of sustenance. Luckily they never thought of doing anything of the kind, finding it both safer and pleasanter to entertain princes and give the best balls in London.

A want of money is an amiable failing, common to the saint and the sinner alike, and does not stand in the way of the accusé acquiring great popularity. Jack, it is true, had no friends, for the very simple reason that he did not in the least want them; Kit, on the other hand, had enough for two.

Her rules of life were very uncomplicated, and they daily became more so. "You can't be too charming," was the chief of them. She took infinite pains to make herself almost universally agreeable, and was amply repaid, for she was almost universally considered to be so. This embracing desire had its drawbacks, but Kit's remedies for them quite met the case. For instance, when any woman whom she did not happen to remember by sight greeted her, as often happened, effusively at some evening party, Kit always kissed her with a corresponding effusion; if a man in the same circumstances did the same, she always said reproachfully, "You never come to see us now." In this way her total ignorance of who they were became a trivial thing; both were charmed, and when people are charmed, their names become of notable insignificance.

The finest inventions of all are the simplest, and the simplicity of Jack's modus vivendi rivalled its own subtlety and the subtlety of Kit's. He loudly professed staunch Conservative principles, always voted with the Bishops in the House of Lords on any question, and had made a special study of guano and Church ritual. A method exposed always sounds a little crude, but the crudity often belongs not to the method but to its exposure. Certainly Jack's method answered, and no method can do more. The mammon of unrighteousness, not being deceived, but not being shocked at such duplicity, thought him very clever, and the unmammon of righteousness, being deceived, was not shocked at other things which were occasionally in the air about him. With perfect justice they labelled the world scandal-loving and uncharitable when they were told these other things, and asked Jack to dinner, to show that they did not believe them. A further proof of his wisdom may be seen in the fact that he accepted such invitations, and if he and Kit left early, it was not because they were going on elsewhere to play round games, but because the laying of foundation-stones and the opening of bazaars had been so fatiguing.

But though both he and Kit were fond of appearing other than they were to sets other than their own, they were on the whole singularly unsecretive to each other. In the first place, they both knew that the other was reasonably sharp, and while each respected the other for this sharpness, they realized that any attempt to deceive would probably be detected. In the second place, a far better reason, even on the lowest grounds, on which they took it, they knew that mutual lying is a rotten basis for married life. Each allowed the other a wide latitude, and in consequence they were excellent friends, and always lent each other a helping hand if there was any scheme of mutual aggrandizement to be put through. There were just a few questions that Kit never put to Jack, nor he to her; each had a cupboard, a very little one, to which there was only one key, and they were wise enough never to ask each other for it. Such, hitherto, had been their married life—a great deal of frankness and confidence, and an absolute respect for the privacy of the other's innermost sanctum.

To-night there was a beautiful scheme in the egg ready to be hatched, or neither of them would have dreamed of dining in the City at half-past seven. Attention was just beginning to be directed to West Australian gold-mining, and the public had awoke to the fact that there were large fortunes to be made, or lost, in that direction. Thus Jack, having no fortune to lose, went into it with a light heart; he was clearly marked out as one of those who were destined to win. In pursuance of the laudable idea of avoiding a really serious financial crisis, they were dining at the Drapers' Company, where they would meet a Mr. Frank Alington, who had a whole fleet of little paper companies, it was understood, ready to be floated. Jack had met him once, and had taken this opportunity of meeting him again, hoping to find bread upon the waters. It was to be Kit's business to make herself inimitably agreeable, ask him to Park Lane, and leave the rest to Jack. She, of course, would have a finger in the profits.

Kit was delighted to take the part assigned to her. Jack had looked into her bedroom as she was dressing, and through the half-open door had said, "Very gorgeous, please, Kit," and she had understood that this was a really important operation, and that a dazzling wife was part of the apparatus necessary. She had not meant to dress very particularly; plush and cairngorms, she had once said to Jack, was the sort of thing the City really appreciated, but she was always ready, within reason, to do as Jack wished, and she told her maid to get out a dress that had arrived from Paris only that morning. But Jack's remark to her as she was dressing was the sort of hint that Kit always took. It cost so little to be pleasant in these ways, and how wise it was to obey one's husband in such matters! She had intended to keep this dress for a royal dinner a week hence, but she put it on without a murmur, and, indeed, her wifely devotion had its immediate reward.

For the dress! That surpassing man Jean Worth had said once, not to herself, but to some other customer, and no friend of hers, that it was a real pleasure to dress Lady Conybeare; and Lady Conybeare, on her side, kindly considered it a real pleasure to be dressed by Worth. Thus the gratification was mutual, and it must have been a consolation to the dressmaker, if he had to whistle long and loud for his cheque, to have his artistic pleasure to fall back on. Now Kit—a rare accomplishment—could stand orange, and to stand orange means to be admirably suited to orange. She loved it herself, Jean genuinely agreed with her, and in this dress four tints of orange chiffon, Dantè, faisan doré, Vésuve, and pomme d'or, blazed together. Even Worth, the greatly daring, had inwardly felt a qualm of audacity, but how admirably, when Kit was inside the gown, had his audacity succeeded! "Réussi!" he would have sighed had he seen it. Over all was a fine net of pale mandarin yellow, to which was tacked a cusped acanthus pattern of sequins; and Kit, looking at herself long and critically in her wardrobe glass, said "Lor'!" Her glorious red-gold hair, full of dusky flames, of a tint after which Nature blindly gropes where Paris leads the way, was the point to which Worth had worked, and his success was beyond all approval or praise.

Next came the question of jewels, and Hortense, her maid, with the artist's eye, thought that pearls and pearls only, pas un diamant, would be consummately chic. Kit saw what she meant, and from an artistic point of view devoutly agreed, but she turned up her nose at the suggestion. "We don't want to be chic, my good woman," she said. "We want to hit 'em in the eye. The rubies, Hortense!"

Now, the rubies were really fine, glorious molten lakes of colour, almost barbarically splendid, and being entailed, they had been forced to remain in the Conybeare coffers. But if ever a woman and her dress were designed and built for rubies, Kit and this creation were. Hortense, moved beyond her wont, ejaculated "Mon Dieu!" as the gorgeous baubles were clasped on Kit's dazzling neck; and her mistress, being as candid with herself as she was with her husband, smiled serenely at her own reflection.

"A touch of rouge," she said to Hortense, and when that was unerringly applied, "There," she murmured, "that will double up the City. And Jack," she added to herself, "will then proceed to pick its pockets."

She rustled across the floor, and tapped at the door of her husband's dressing-room.

"Are you ready, Jack?" she asked.

"Yes, just. Come in, Kit."

Kit took from her table the orange-red fan which Worth had sent with the dress, threw the door open and held her head very high.

"The gold-miner's wife," she remarked.

Her husband looked at her a moment in blank admiration. Seven years' husband as he was, Kit still occasionally "knocked him over" as he expressed it, and she knocked him over now. Then he laughed outright.

"That ought to fetch 'em," he said frankly.

"So I think," said Kit; "but really, Jack, it was a sacrifice putting this on. Remember that, please. I was keeping it for the royalties next week, but you said 'very gorgeous,' and I obeyed."

"Oh, blow the royalties!" said Jack. "Dress in tartan plaid for them, or a kilt even. Besides, it is bad form for a hostess to be better dressed than her guests. That dress wouldn't do at all, Kit, in your own house. They would think you were an advanced Radical."

The India-rubber-tired brougham, with its little electric lamp in the roof (Kit's only real extravagance for more than ten days, as she triumphantly told Jack) was ready when they got downstairs, and they rolled off into the gaslit roar of the streets. This way and that flashed the gleaming lights of hansoms and carriages; it was like passing through an August shower of shooting-stars. Long queues of waiting folk stretched like snakes from the pit-doors of theatres; newsboys roared their "'orrible and revoltin'" details; jewellers' shops with windows a blaze of gems signalled and winked across the streets; feathered women peacocked along, making eyes at the passers; loungers lounged; busy little men with black bags made scurrying bee-lines across the crowded roadway; buses, a plaster of advertisements, swung nodding on their way; and bicycles glided by them so spare and silent that they might have been incorporeal things. High up on house-roofs glowed the changing colours of prima-donna soaps, putting to shame the lesser lights of heaven; now an invisible gigantic penman would write Kodak with large flowing hand in red ink, then, dissatisfied, delete it, and try it again in yellow. Here the crystal signs of music-halls flashed diamonds, or the open door of a restaurant cast a brilliant square of light on to the street. Then for a moment a strident, diabolically-precise scale from a street-organ would overscore all other noises; but the hoofs and wheels which bore the hungry world to the houses of its friends to be fed reasserted itself with a crash and trample like some Valkürie-ritt; the whole town was abroad, and humming like a swarming beehive.

Kit was never tired of the spectacle of life, provided it was gay, and varied, and full. The incessant movement, the infinite separate businesses, which went to make up the great major chord of London streets, the admirable pace at which the world moved, the marvel of its contrasts, the gas, the glitter, the sordidness and the splendour rubbing shoulders, all appealed to her tremendous joie de vivre, the best and the most unvarying factor in her very living character. She had once expressed a wish to be buried, like a suicide at cross-roads, in the very centre of Piccadilly Circus. "No country churchyards or knells of parting day for me, thank you," she had said.

All down Piccadilly she was silent, looking devouringly from the window of the brougham at the kaleidoscope outside, but when they turned out of Trafalgar Square down Northumberland Avenue, to avoid the Strand, which at that hour spouts and bubbles with traffic like a weir in spring, she turned to her husband with a sigh of regret at leaving the fuller streets.

"The outline of the plot, Jack?" she said.

"Don't know it myself yet," said Jack. "But the vieux premier is Alington—a heavy, solemn man, like a butler, rather tiresome, I'm afraid. Very likely you will sit next him; he is a guest of the Drapers' like ourselves. If not, get hold of him somehow. He might dine to-morrow."

"But we give a dance to-morrow," said Kit, "and we feed only the very brightest and best."

"All the more reason for Alington coming, perhaps," said Jack. "I have heard it said that there are still a few people who care for a duke as such. It sounds odd, but let us hope he is one."

"Yes, those people are so easy to deal with," said Kit thoughtfully. "But it will upset the table, Jack."

"Of course, if you put your table as more important than possible thousands," said Jack.

"It is really a big thing then?" asked Kit.

"It is possibly a very big thing. I know no more than you yet. It may even run to a Saturday till Monday or more."

"Very good. I'll upset the whole apple-cart for it, as Mr. Rhodes says. Here we are. Let's get away early, Jack. I said we'd go to Berkeley Street afterwards."

"We'll go as early as we can," he replied. "But you mustn't risk not landing your fish because you don't play him long enough."

"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," she said. "Order the carriage for ten. I'd undertake in this gown to land the whole house of laymen by ten without a gaff. Dear Jean Worth! What a lot of money I owe him, and what a lot of pleasure he gives me! I should be puzzled to say which was the greater."

[CHAPTER II]

SUNDAY MORNING

Mr. Frank Alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact a Saturday till Monday star, almost a comet. Lord Conybeare found that the whirl and bustle of London did not allow of his seeing enough of him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days after the dinner at the Drapers' Company (Kit's playing and landing of the fish having been masterly, for she had him dead-beat long before ten), Mr. Alington arrived on a Saturday afternoon in June at what Kit called their "cottage" in Buckinghamshire.

Strictly speaking—though she did not often speak strictly—it was not a cottage at all; and it was certainly not in Buckinghamshire, but in Berkshire. But there was a rustic, almost Bohemian, sound to Kit's mind in Buckinghamshire, whereas Berkshire only reminded one of bacon, and a few miles either way made a very little difference. "And if I choose to call Berkshire the Malay Archipelago," said Kit, "who is to stop me?"

However, to adopt Kit's nomenclature, the cottage in question was a large red-brick Elizabethan house on the banks of the Thames, with a few acres of conservatories, and a charming flower-garden, leading down by green degrees and cut yew hedges to the river. But the cottage idea was not wholly absent, for they always dined in the room which had once certainly been the kitchen. The range had been removed, leaving an immense open fireplace, where it was sacrilege to burn anything but logs, and the most charming dark oak dressers, bearing under the new régime quantities of old blue Nankin ware, ran round the walls. Following the same idea, they always sat in the big hall which opened straight on to the front-door, instead of in the drawing-room. "Quite like hobnailed day-labourers," said Kit.

The analogy is obvious, and Kit's admirable taste had made the likeness almost glaring. There was a grandfather's clock there, a couple of large oak settles on each side of the fireplace, which had bronze dogs for the fire-irons, and homely Chippendale and basket chairs. A few Persian rugs, it is true, which it would have tasked a connoisseur to price, happened to be lying on the floor, but otherwise it was quite uncarpeted, and you trod on real naked wooden boards of polished oak. In all the windows but one there were tiny diamond panes of old wavy glass, which made the features of the landscape outside go up and down like a switchback as you walked across the room; and in the other window, which gave light to the serving-up-room (a highly inconvenient arrangement, in which Kit, in the rôle of labourer, delighted), were real bottom-of-glasses panes, which looked charming. The roof was gabled and not even whitewashed (being also of oak), and altogether an unexacting labourer might have spent very fairly comfortable evenings in this simple room.

The cottage idea was carried out in the garden also. The beds were all of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, London-pride, poppies, wallflowers, dahlias, mignonette, quite rustic and herbaceous, with no pincushion Italian beds, which Kit said were very expensive and out of keeping with the prevalent simplicity. They also reminded her of badly-mixed salads. Stern frugality further showed itself in the clothing of the red-brick walls which bounded the garden. Here were no flaunting, flaming creepers, bright and profitless, but homely pear-trees and apricots, which bore quite excellent fruit. A common wooden punt lay moored at the end of the garden, useful and homely, fit for the carrying of the produce of the labourer's garden to market. A pile of embroidered cushions happened at that moment to be lying in it, and Kit had also left her jewelled Russian cigarette-case there, but that was all. Even the cigarette-case was made of simple plaited straw, and the monogram and coronet set in very blue turquoises at one corner seemed to have got there by accident, as if they had been chips which had fallen out of the sky, and might be shortly expected to float back there again.

It was Sunday morning, obviously Sunday morning, and Nature was proceeding as usual on her simple but pleasant way. A brilliant sun, a gentle wind, the smooth, unruffled river, all testified to the tenderness and benignity of the powers of the air. Spring, the watery, impetuous spring of the North, had now a month ago definitely given place to summer, leaving another year in which poets, with their extraordinary want of correct observation, might forget what it had really been like, and rhyme it a hundred undeserved and unfounded courtesies. But summer had come in earnest in the latter days of May, with a marked desire to make itself pleasant, and give to the sturdy British yeoman, who had till then complained (with statistics of rainfall) of the wetness of the spring, another excellent opportunity of vilifying the dryness of the summer. Over such Providence watches with a special care, and, knowing that the one thing worse than having a grievance is to have none, gives them a kindly interchange of wet springs, dry summers, wet summers, dry springs, secure of never pleasing anybody.

A soft blue haze of heat and moisture hung over the river and the low-lying water-meadows on the far side, but as the hills beyond climbed upwards from the valley, they rose into an atmosphere extraordinarily clear. Though the day was hot, there was a precision of outline about the woods that cut the sky almost suggestive of a frosty morning, and even here below the heat was of a brisk quality. Everything was steeped in Sunday content, and from the gray church-tower standing guardian among the huddled hamlet-roofs came the melodious jangle of bells ringing for the eleven o'clock service. The labourers' garden was in full luxuriance of midsummer flower (for a bright and cheerful garden should be within reach of the humblest), and a rainbow of colour bounded the close-shaven lawn. Nothing, as is right, was ever done on this lawn, mossy to the foot, restful to the eye; no whitewash lines cut it up into horrible squares and oblongs, no frenzied tennis-balls ever did decapitation among the flower-beds that framed it, and you could wander about it at dusk immune from anxiety as to whether your next step would be tripped in a croquet-hoop or entangled in the snares of a drooped tennis-net. During the weeks of spring it had been a star-sown space of crocuses, like the meadow in Fra Angelico's Annunciation, but these were over, and it had again become a green, living velvet.

Kit had developed that morning at breakfast a strange unreasoning desire to go to church, and until Jack saw her eat he was almost afraid she was going to be ill. To church accordingly she had gone, dragging with her Alice Haslemere, who was staying with them. They had been put across the river in the punt, Kit armed with a huge Church service, and it was evident, so thought Conybeare as he strolled down to the water's edge after the return of the punt, that Kit had smoked a cigarette as she went across. This, by the standard of perfection, he considered a mistake. If you are going to do a thing at all, do it thoroughly, he argued to himself, and that a woman should smoke just before going to church was a lapse from the proper level. But he took the cigarette-case with its turquoise monogram from where it lay on the cushion, and put it into his pocket. As like as not Kit would step on it when she got into the punt again.

Jack had enjoyed a long conversation with Mr. Alington after dinner the evening before, and he was now strolling about the garden expecting him to come out and continue it. Alington was, as he had told Kit, a heavy-looking man, but conversationally he had not found him in the least heavy. He had the air of a solid, intelligent Englishman, whose mind had been considerably widened by extensive travel abroad, and took a large uninsular view of things. Had he been disposed to apply for a situation as a butler, no householder could have reasonably hoped to find a more trustworthy or respectable-looking man. Sobriety shone from his large mild eye, and the lines of his firm, somewhat full-lipped, mouth expressed steadiness in every curve. If as a butler he had been told that the whole of the Royal Family were coming to high tea in ten minutes, you would have felt yourself safe to bet that the intelligence would not flurry him, and that a sufficient high tea would somehow immediately appear. For so ample and well-furnished a man he had a curiously small voice, rather suggesting that it came from a distance, and he spoke his sentences in a precise manner, never correcting a word, as if he had thought them out before he opened his mouth. Colour was given to this supposition by the fact that he always paused a moment before speaking. Such a habit of speech, when worn by the majority, would predispose towards heaviness; but the result when it arrived was not, in the case of Mr. Alington, heavy. On the contrary, it was weighty—a far different thing. In the interval of reminding one of an admirable butler he irresistibly suggested a member of a Conservative Cabinet, safe of a peerage. It was only when considered as a floater of gold mines that his appearance was against him, and even then it was against him only on the score of probability, for it was impossible that even an imaginative public could invent a man in whom more primâ-facie confidence should be reposed as a trustee of the moneys of widows and fatherless.

Jack strolled in the garden for nearly half an hour before he appeared, chucking pebbles into the Thames and cigarette-ends into the flower-beds. At breakfast Mr. Alington had been dressed in a black frock-coat, but now when he made his unhurried exit from the low drawing-room French window he wore a straw hat and a suit of decorous tweed, the result, no doubt, of his observation that no one else wore Sunday clothes. He carried a malacca cane in one hand; in the other a large tune hymn-book with edges red in one light, gold in another.

"Lady Conybeare has started?" he inquired of Jack.

"Yes; she has gone to church. She went nearly half an hour ago."

Mr. Alington paused a moment.

"I had meant to go with her," he said. "I had no idea it was so late."

"There is the punt here," said Jack. "You can go now if you like. I had no idea you meant to."

"I thought everyone went to church on Sunday morning in England when they were in the country," he said. "But I would sooner not go at all than arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom."

"And I would sooner arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom than at the beginning of it," remarked Jack.

A slight look of pain crossed Mr. Alington's face, as if he had a twinge of neuralgia; but he made no further comment on Jack's levity. He leaned his tune hymn-book carefully against the bottom of his basket-chair, after feeling that the lawn was dry, and lit a cigarette.

"An exquisite morning," he said, after a moment's reflection. "The hills look as if they had been painted with cream for a medium, an effect so rare out of England."

Lord Conybeare did not reply immediately, for he had not waited all this time in the garden for Alington to hear him talk about cream. Then he went straight to the point:

"All you said last night interested me very much," he began, "and your kind offer to invest some money for me in your new group of mines——"

Mr. Alington held up a large white, deprecating hand. On the little finger was a plain gold signet-ring, bearing the motto, Fortiter fideliter feliciter.

"It is nothing," he replied; "pray don't mention it. Indeed, Lord Conybeare, if I may say so, I only made that offer as a sort of feeler. Your reply to me then, your further reference to the subject now, show me that you are kind enough to be interested in my new undertakings."

"Profoundly," said Lord Conybeare; then, with disarming frankness: "Money is the most interesting thing in the world and the most desirable. I often wish," he added, "that I saw more of it."

Alington flicked a morsel of ash off the end of his cigarette.

"That confirms me in what I was thinking of saying to you," he replied. "Now will you allow me to speak with your own frankness? Ah, observe that beautiful line traced by that skein of starlings!"

Jack looked up.

"Lovely!" he said. "Pray speak."

"It is this then. My honest belief is that there are immense fortunes to be made in West Australian mining. I believe also, again with absolute honesty, that these claims which I own are—some of them, at least, extremely rich. Now, I wish very much that I was wealthy enough to work them by myself. I regret to say that I am not. I must therefore form a company. To form a company I must have directors."

"Surely your name——" began Conybeare politely, but with only the faintest conjecture of what might be coming.

"My name, as you so kindly suggest, will no doubt be a little assistance," said Alington, "for I am not wholly unknown in such matters. But it is not enough. This Company must be English; it must be formed here; the shareholders should be largely English. Why? For a variety of reasons. In the first place, you can raise ten thousand pounds here more easily than you can raise one thousand in Australia. Again, the British public is getting ready to go mad about West Australian mining, while in Australia they regard Australian mining without, well, without any premonitory symptoms of insanity. Perhaps they underrate its future; I think they do. Perhaps the British public overrates it; that also is possible. But I bring my wares to the best market. Now I ask you, Lord Conybeare, will you be on my board? Will you be my chairman?"

He turned briskly round with the first quick movement that Conybeare had yet seen him make.

"I," he asked, "on a board of mining directors? I know about mines exactly what you told me, last night—that is to say, unless I have forgotten some of it."

The ghost of a smile flickered across Mr. Alington's broad face, and he laid his large white hand on Jack's knee. The latter seemed to regard it just as he might have regarded a harmless moth that had settled there. The poor thing did not hurt.

"You saw that I smiled," he said. "I saw that you saw it. I smiled because you spoke so far from the point. That is frank enough, is it not, to show you that I am telling you the truth. There are further proofs also."

Both in his action with his hand and in his speech the plebeian showed plain, but Jack did not resent it. He had not asked Alington down to the cottage to enjoy his refined conversation and his well-bred presence, but to talk business. That he was doing. Jack was quite pleased with him.

"I do not follow you," he said.

Mr. Alington lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one before replying, and rose to deposit the other out of sight in a garden-bed.

"Cigarette-ends are so terribly dissonant with this charming garden," he said. "Now, I am speaking to you from a purely business point of view. I supposed—it was natural, was it not?—that you were so kind as to ask me to your delightful house in order to discuss these mines. You see how frank I am."

Conybeare let his eye travel slowly down a reach of the Thames.

"Yes, that was the reason why I asked you," he said.

"And I came for exactly the same reason. The pleasure of visiting you at your 'cottage,' as Lady Conybeare so playfully calls it, is great—very great; but plain business-men like me have little time for such pleasures. Frankly, then, I should not have come unless I guessed your reason. I, too, wished to talk about these mines, Lord Conybeare, and I ask you again to be a director on my board."

He took off his straw hat—for they were sitting in the shade—and propped it carefully up against his chair by the side of the large tune hymn-book. Its removal showed a high white forehead and a circular baldness in the centre of flossy, light-brown hair, like a tonsure.

"I am a plain business man," he went on, "and when I am engaged in business I do not offer an advantageous thing to others unless I get an advantage myself; for to introduce sentiment into business is to make a pleasure of it and a failure. You must remember, my dear Lord Conybeare, that England is essentially aristocratic in her ideas. At least, so far as your nobility is Conservative, she is aristocratic. Think if Lord Salisbury joined a board how the public would clamour for allotments! Dear me, yes, the master of Hatfield might be a very rich man—a very rich man indeed."

Jack Conybeare was completely himself; he was not dazzled or unduly delighted at the offer. He merely wished to know what he got by it, taking for granted, and justly, that the man was sincere.

"Marquises still count, then," he said. "I give you my word I had no idea of it. I am glad I am a marquis. But what," he added, "do I get by it?"

"A salary," said Mr. Alington, and his usual pause gave the remark considerable weight. "But we will pass over that," he went on. "Directors, however, have the privilege of taking a great many shares before the concern is made public. In fact, in order to qualify for being a director, you must hold a considerable number."

"I am very poor," said Jack.

"That, fortunately, can be remedied," said Mr. Alington.

Jack was immensely practical, and very quick, and it was obvious at once that this was capable of two interpretations. He took the right one.

"You mean it is a certainty for me?" he said.

Again Mr. Alington let a perceptible pause intervene before he answered.

"I mean this," he said, "if you want plain speaking, and I think you do; it also suits me better. You shall be allotted a certain number of shares, say ten thousand, in my new group of mines. You will probably only have to pay the first call. You will be a director of these mines—and, by the way, there is another name I have in my mind, the owner of which I should also like to have on my board. I had the pleasure of seeing him at your house in London. Very well, I issue my prospectus, and my name, as you so kindly observed, counts for something. I, of course, as vendor, shall join the board after allotment. Yours and another I hope will be there too. Now, I feel certain in my own mind that such a board (with certain other names, which shall be my affair) will be advantageous to me. It will pay. I am certain also—I say this soberly—that between my prospectus and my board the shares will at once go up, so that if you choose you can sell out before the second call. Thus you will not be without your advantage also. We do no favour to each other; we enter into partnership each for his own advantage."

"And my duties?" asked Jack.

"Attendance, regular attendance at the meetings of the company. On those occasions I shall want you to take the chair, read the report of the manager, if there is one to hand, make the statement of the affairs of the company, and congratulate the shareholders."

"Or condole?" asked Jack.

"I hope not. I should also ask you to immediately approach Lord Abbotsworthy, and ask him to be on the board. His is the other name I mentioned."

"Whatever do you want Tom Abbotsworthy for?" asked Conybeare surprisedly.

"For much the same reason as I want you. He is already an earl—he will be a duke. Dear me, if I was not a man of business I should choose to be a duke."

Jack pondered a moment.

"It is your own concern," he said. "I will ask him with pleasure, and I think very probably he will consent. Oddly enough, he and I were talking about this sudden interest in West Australia only yesterday morning."

"I think that many other people will be talking of it before long," said Alington.

"I consent," said Jack.

Mr. Alington showed neither elation, relief, nor surprise. But he paused.

"I think you will find it worth your while," he said. "And now, Lord Conybeare, there is another point. In the working of a big scheme like this—for, I assure you, this is no cottage-garden affair—there is, as you may imagine, an enormous deal of business. Somebody has to be responsible for, or, at any rate, to sanction, all that is done. Whether we put up fresh stamps, or whether we decide to use the cyanide process for tailings, or sink a deep level, or abandon a vein, or use the sulphide reduction, to take only a few obvious instances, somebody has to be able to answer all questions, difficult ones sometimes, possibly even awkward ones. Now, are you willing to go into all this, or not? If you wish to have a voice in such matters you must go into it. On that I insist. I hear you are a first-rate authority on chemical manures—a most absorbing subject, I am sure. Are you willing to learn as much about mines? On the other hand, it is open to you and Lord Abbotsworthy to leave the whole working of such affairs to me and certain business men whom I may appoint. But, having left it, you leave it altogether. You will have no right of being consulted at all about technical points unless you will make them your study. If you decide to leave these things to those whose life has been passed in them, good. You put implicit confidence in them, and if required, you will say so, honestly, at the meetings. If, on the other hand, you wish to have a voice in technical affairs, your voice must be justified. You must make mines, technically, your study. You must go out and see mines. You must acquire, not a superficial, but a thorough knowledge of them. You must be able to form some estimate of what relation one ounce of gold to the ton bears to the cost of working, and the capital on which such a yield will pay. Now which? Choose!"

And Mr. Alington faced round squarely, a little exhausted on so hot a morning by a volubility which was rare with him, and looked Jack in the face.

"Which do you advise?" asked the other.

"I cannot undertake to advise you. I have merely given you the data of your choice, and I can do no more."

"Then spare me details," said Jack.

Mr. Alington nodded his head gravely.

"I think you are wise," he said, "though I could not take the responsibility of influencing your own opinion. I pay you for your name. Your name, to tell you the truth, is what I want. You delegate business to business men. I hope you will put the matter in the same light to Lord Abbotsworthy. With regard to your salary as chairman, I cannot make you a precise offer yet; tentatively, I should suggest five thousand a year."

Lord Conybeare had to perfection that very useful point of good breeding, namely, the ability to preserve a perfectly wooden face when hearing the most surprising news. Mr. Alington, for all the effect this information apparently had on it, might have been speaking to the leg of a table.

"That seems to me very handsome," he replied negligently.

"It seems to me about fair," said Mr. Alington.

Lord Conybeare was puzzled, and he wondered whether Kit would understand it all. How his name on a "front page," as Mr. Alington called it, with attendance at a few meetings, at which he would read a report, could be worth five thousand a year, he did not see, though he felt quite certain that Mr. Alington thought it was. Whether it would turn out to be so or not, he hardly cared at all; clearly that matter did not concern him. If anyone was willing to pay five thousand a year for his name they were perfectly welcome to have it; indeed, he would have taken a much smaller figure. He had no idea that marquises were at such a premium. His distinguished ancestry had suddenly become an industrial company, paying heavily. "The new Esau," he thought to himself, "and a great improvement on the old. I only lend my birthright, and the pottage I receive is really considerable."

Some time before they had reached this point in their conversation the punt had been taken across the river again to fetch Kit and Alice Haslemere back from church, and as Mr. Alington said his last words it had returned again with the jaded church-goers. He put on his straw hat, picked up the big tune hymn-book, and with Conybeare strolled down to the bottom of the lawn to meet them.

"Devotion is so very fatiguing," said Kit, in a harassed voice, as she stepped on to the grass. "Alice and I feel as if we had been having the influenza—don't we, dear? And I've lost my cigarette-case. It is too tiresome, because I meant to pawn it. I am sure I left it in the punt."

Jack took it out of his pocket and returned it to her.

"Thank your dear husband you didn't step on it," he remarked.

Kit took it petulantly, and lit a cigarette.

"Oh, Jack, I wish you wouldn't be so thoughtful," she said. "Thoughtful people are such a nuisance. They always remind one of what one is doing one's best to forget, and put one's cherished things in safe places. Oh, I'm so glad I'm not a clergyman. I should have to go to church again this evening. What's that book, Mr. Alington? Oh, I see. Have you and Jack been singing hymns on the lawn? How dear of you! I didn't know you thought of going to church, or I would have waited for you. I understood you were going to talk business with Jack. There is business in the air. Just a trifle stuffy."

Mr. Alington paused.

"We have been having a long and interesting talk," he replied. "One can say more on Sunday morning than in the whole of the rest of the week put together."

"Yes, that's so true," said Kit, walking on ahead with him, and smoking violently. "The man who preached knew it too. It was like a night journey, I slept so badly. And was your talk satisfactory?"

"To me, very," said Mr. Alington. "I am convinced it will also prove satisfactory to Lord Conybeare. He has kindly consented to become my chairman and a director of my new group of mines, the Carmel mines, as they will be called."

"What a nice name!" said Kit. "And shall we all make our fortunes?"

Mr. Alington nodded his massive head.

"I shall be very much surprised if we do not get a modest competence out of the Carmel mines," said he.

[CHAPTER III]

AFTER THE GEE-GEE PARTY

Lady Haslemere was entertaining what she called the "Gee-gees" or "Great Grundys" one night at her house in Berkeley Street. The "Gee-gee" party was an idea borrowed from Jack, and all who were weightiest in society came to it, a large number of them to dine, and the rest to the evening party. Just now her brother, Tom Abbotsworthy, was living with them, for his own house was being done up, and Alice had easily persuaded him to stay with them, instead of living with the Duke. Indeed to live with the Duke was nearly an impossibility; three women already had attempted to support the burden of being his Duchess, but they had all collapsed before long, leaving him in each case eminently consolable. He could hurry a person into the grave, so it was said, sooner than any man or woman in the kingdom. The last time Tom had seen him was about a week ago, at dinner somewhere, and the whole of his conversation had been to say loudly to him across the dinner-table at intervals of about two minutes, "Why don't you marry?"

Tom's presence in the house was a great boon during the season; he relieved his brother-in-law of his duties as host in an easy, unostentatious manner, thereby earning his heartfelt gratitude, and discharging these duties, instead of leaving them undischarged. Lord Haslemere himself had a habit of being unreckoned with. He was an adept at doing wire puzzles, and played a remarkably good game at billiards, but otherwise there was nothing of him. He wore whiskers, spent the greater part of his day at the club, and was known as Whisky-and-Soda, not because he had intemperate leanings in that direction, but because there was really nothing else to call him. When his wife entertained, he shrank into what there was of himself, and the majority of his guests at an evening party did not generally know him by sight. His face was one stamped with the quality of obliviality; to see him once was to insure forgetting him at least twice. But at the "Gee-gee" parties he was made tidy, which he usually was not, and put in prominent places. He had been very prominent this evening, and correspondingly unhappy. He had taken a parrot-hued Duchess into dinner, and spilt a glass of wine over her new dress, and as her Grace's temper was as high as the bridge of her nose, the evening had been unusually bitter.

The "Grundy" dinner-party was succeeded by a vast "Grundy" At Home, to which flocked all the solid people in London, including those who "bridle" when a very smart set is mentioned, and flock thirstily to their houses, like camels to a desert well, whenever they are asked. It was the usual thing. There had been a little first-rate music—during which everyone talked their loudest—and a great many pink and china-blue hydrangeas on the stairs, a positive coruscation of stars and orders and garters—for two royal princes had been included among the "Gee-gees"—and about midnight Lady Haslemere was yawning dismally behind her fan, and wondering when people would begin to go away. In the intervals of her yawns, which she concealed most admirably, she spoke excellent and vivacious French to the Hungarian Ambassador, an old bald-headed little man, who only wanted a stick to make him into a monkey on one, and laughed riotously at his stuffy little monkey-house jokes, all of which she had frequently heard before. In consequence, he considered her an extremely agreeable woman, as indeed she was.

Kit and her husband were not at the dinner, both having refused point-blank to go, on the ground that they had done their duty to "Grundy" already; but they turned up, having dined quietly at home, at about half-past eleven, with Mr. Alington in tow. He was not known to many people present, but Lady Haslemere instantly left her Ambassador, having received instructions from Kit, and led him about like a dancing bear. She introduced him to royalty, which asked him graciously whether he enjoyed England, or preferred Australia, and other questions of a highly original and penetrating kind; she presented him to stars and orders and garters, and to all the finest "Gee-gees" present, as if he had been the guest of the evening. Kit's eye was on her all the time, though she was talking to two thousand people, and saw that she did her duty.

The rooms were as pretty as decorated boxes can be, and hotter than one would have thought any boxes could possibly get. People stood packed together like sardines in a tin, cheek to jowl, and appeared to enjoy it. Anæmic men dropped inaudible questions to robust females, and ethereal-looking débutantes screamed replies to elderly Conservatives. Nobody sat down—indeed, there was not room to sit down—and the happiest of all the crowd, excepting those who had dined there, were the enviable mortals who had come on from one house, and were able to announce that they were going on to another. Three small drawing-rooms opened out the one from the other, and the doorways were inflamed and congested. Whoever took up most room seemed to stand there, and whoever took up most room seemed to be dressed in red. Altogether, one could not imagine a more successful evening. Politicians considered it a political party, those who were not quite so smart as Lady Haslemere's set considered it the smartest party of the year, and everybody who was nobody considered that everybody was there, and looked forward to buying the next issue of Smart Society, in order to see what "Belle" or "Amy" thought of it all.

The noise of two or three hundred people all talking at once in small rooms causes a roar extraordinarily strident, and, as in the case of rooms full of tobacco-smoke, intolerable unless one contributes to it oneself. Mr. Alington had to raise his small, precise voice till it sounded as if he was intoning, and the effort was considerable. This particular way of passing a pleasant evening in the heat of the summer was hitherto unknown to him, and he looked about him in mild wonder. He felt himself reminded of those crates of ducks and fowls which are to be seen on the decks of ocean-going steamers, the occupants of which are so cruelly overcrowded, and of whom the most fortunate only can thrust their beaks through the wicker of their prison-house, and quack desolately to the breeze of the sea. Lady Haslemere's rooms seemed to him to resemble these bird-crates, the only difference being that people sought this suffocating imprisonment of their own free will, because they liked it, the birds because the passengers had to be fed. One or two very tall men had their heads free, a few others stood by windows, and could breathe; but the majority could neither breathe nor hear, nor see further than their immediate neighbours. They could only quack. And they quacked.

By degrees the party thinned; an unwilling lane was cut through the crowd for the exit of the princes, and the great full-blown flowers in the hedges, so to speak, bobbed down in turn as they passed, like a field of poppies blown on by a passing wind. After them those lucky folk who were going on to another house, where they would stand shoulder to shoulder again with a slightly different crowd, and express extreme wonder that their neighbours had not been at Lady Haslemere's ("I thought everyone was there!"), made haste to follow. Outside all down the street from Berkeley Square at one end to Piccadilly at the other stretched the lines of carriage-lamps, looking like some gigantic double necklace. The congestion in the drawing-room developed into a really alarming inflammation in the cloak-room and the hall, and everyone wanted her carriage and was waiting for it, except the one unfortunate lady whose carriage stopped the whole of the way, as a stentorian policeman studiously informed her, but who could only find attached to her ticket a small opera hat instead of the cloak which should have covered her. People trod on each other's toes and heels, and entangled themselves in other folks' jewels and lace. Rain had begun to fall heavily, the red carpet from the door to the curbstone was moist and muddy, contemptuous footmen escorted elderly ladies under carriage umbrellas to their broughams, and large drops of rain fell chill on the elderly ladies' backs. Loungers of the streets criticised the outgoers with point and cockney laughter, but still the well-dressed crowd jostled and quacked and talked, and said how remarkably pleasant it had been, and how doubly delightful it was to have come here from somewhere else, and to go on somewhere else from here.

Half an hour after the departure of the princes, Lady Haslemere, who was fast ceasing to yawn, manœuvred the two or three dozen people who still could not manage to tear themselves away, into the outermost of the three drawing-rooms, and nodded to a footman who lingered in the doorway, and had obvious orders to catch her eye. Upon this he and another impassive giant glided into the innermost room, and took two green-baize-covered tables from where they had been folded against the wall, setting them in the middle of the room, and placed a dozen chairs round them; then, making use of a back staircase, so that they should not be seen by the remaining "Grundys," they brought up and laid out a cold supper, consisting chiefly of jelly and frills and froth and glass and bottles and quails and cigarettes, put cards, counters, and candles on the green-baize tables, and withdrew. Ten minutes later the last of the "Grundys" withdrew also, and the rest, some dozen people who had stood about in attitudes of the deepest dejection for the last half-hour, while a Bishop played the man of the world to Kit, heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief, and brightened up considerably. Automatically, or as if by the action of a current of air or a tide, they drifted into the inner room, and chalk lines were neatly drawn on the green-baize cloth.

Baccarat is a game admirably suited to people who have had a long day, and is believed to be a specific antidote to the gloom induced by huge "Grundy" parties. It is an effort and a strain on the mind to talk to very solid people who are interested in great questions and delight in discussion; but at baccarat the mind, so to speak, lights a cigarette, throws itself into an armchair, and puts on its slippers. Baccarat requires no judgment, no calculation, no previous knowledge of anything, and though it is full of pleasing excitement, it makes no demands whatever on the strongest or feeblest intellect. The players have only to put themselves blindly, as ladies dressing for dinner surrender themselves to a skilful maid, into the hands of Luck, and the austere elemental forces which manage the winds and waves, and decree in what order nines and other cards are dealt from packs, do the rest. You buy your counters, and when they are all gone you buy some more. If, on the other hand, they behave as counters should, and increase and multiply like rabbits, you have the pleasure of presenting them to your host at the end of the evening or the beginning of the morning, as the case may be, and he very kindly gives you shining sterling gold and rich crackling bank-notes in exchange.

Tom Abbotsworthy, since he had been staying with his sister, always took the place of host when this soothing game was being played at Berkeley Street; for Lord Haslemere, if he were not in bed, was by this time busily practising nursery cannons on the billiard-table. Occasionally he looked in, with his fidgety manner, and trifled with the froth and frills, and if there was anyone present whose greatness demanded his attendance, he took a hesitating hand. But to-night he was spared; there was only a small, intimate party, who would have found him a bore. He was slow at cards, displayed an inordinate greed for his stake, and had been known at baccarat to consider whether he should have another. This, as already stated, is unnecessary. With certain numbers you must; with all the others you must not, and consideration delays the game.

The hours passed much more pleasantly and briskly than during the period of the "Grundy" party. It was a warm, still night, the windows were flung wide, and the candles burned unwaveringly. Round the table were a dozen eager, attentive faces. Luck, like some Pied Piper, was fluting to the nobility and gentry, and the nobility and gentry followed her like the children of Hamelin. Now and then one of them would rise and consult the side-table to the diminishment of frills and froth, or the crisp-smelling smoke of a cigarette would hold the room for a few minutes. Most of those present had been idle all day, now they were employed and serious. Outside the rain had ceased, and for a couple of hours the never-ending symphony of wheels sank to a pianissimo. Occasionally, with a sharp-cut noise of hoofs and the jingle of a bell, a hansom would trot briskly past, and at intervals an iron-shod van made thunder in the street. But the siesta of noise was short, for time to the most is precious; barely had the world got home from its parties of the night, when those whose business it is to rise when their masters are going to bed, in order that the breakfast-table may not lack its flowers and fruits, began to get to the morning's work, and the loaded, fragrant vans went eastward. The candles had once burned down, and had been replaced by one of the impassive giants, when the hint of dawn, the same dawn that in the country illuminated with tremulous light the dewy hollows of untrodden ways, was whispered in the world. Here it but changed the blank, dark faces of the houses opposite into a more visible gray; it sucked the fire from the candles, was strangely unbecoming to Lady Haslemere, who was calculated for artificial light, and out of the darkness was born day.

There was no longer any need for the carriage-lamps to be lit when Kit and her husband got into their brougham. A very pale-blue sky, smokeless and clear, was over the city, and the breath of the morning was deliciously chill. Kit, whether from superior art or mere nature, did not look in the least out of keeping with the morning. She was a little flushed, but her flush was that of a child just awakened from a long night's rest more than that of a woman of twenty-five, excited by baccarat and sufficient—in no degree more than sufficient—champagne. Her constant harmony with her surroundings was her most extraordinary characteristic; it seemed to be an instinct, acting automatically, just as the chameleon takes its colour from its surroundings. Set her in a well-dressed mob of the world, she was the best dressed and most worldly woman there; among rosy-faced children she would look at the most a pupil teacher. Just now in Lady Haslemere's drawing-room you would have called her gambler to her finger-tips; but as she stood for a moment on the pavement outside waiting for her carriage-door to be opened, she was a child of morning.

She drew her cloak, lined with the plucked breast feathers that grow on the mother only in breeding-time, more closely about her, and drew the window half up.

"You were in luck as well as I, were you not, Jack?" she said. "I suppose I am mercenary, but I must confess I like winning other people's money. I feel as if I was earning something."

"Yes, we were both on the win to-night," said Jack.

Then he stopped, but as if he had something more to say, and to Kit as well as to him the silence was awkward.

"You noticed something?" she asked.

"Yes; Alington."

"So did I. So did Alice, I think. What a bore it is! What is to be done?"

Jack fidgeted on his seat, lit a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, and threw it away.

"Perhaps we are wrong," he said. "Perhaps he didn't cheat."

Kit did not find it worth while to reply to so half-hearted a suggestion.

"It's damned awkward," he continued, abandoning this himself. "I don't know what to do. You see, Kit, what an awful position I am in. In any case, do let us have no scandal; that sort of thing has been tried once, and I don't know that it did any good to anybody."

"Of course we will have no scandal," said Kit quickly. "If there was a scandal, you would have to break with him, and pop go the gold mines as far as we are concerned."

Jack started. His thoughts had been so absolutely identical with what his wife said, that it was as if he had heard a sudden echo. And though the thoughts had been his own, and Kit had merely stated them, yet when she did so, so unreasonable is man, he felt inclined to repudiate what she said. The thing sounded crude when put like that. Kit saw him start, divined the cause with intuitive accuracy, and felt a sudden impatient anger at him. She hated hypocritical cowardice of this kind, for, having plenty of immoral courage herself, she had no sympathy with those who were defective in it. Jack, she knew very well, had no intention of breaking with Alington, because the latter had cheated at baccarat. Then, in Heaven's name, even if you are too squeamish to be frank yourself, try to make an effort not to wince when somebody else is.

"That is what a man calls his honour," she thought to herself with amused annoyance. "It is unlike Jack, though."

Meantime her quick brain was spinning threads like a spider.

"Look here, Jack," she said in a moment. "Leave the thing entirely to me. It was stupid of me to mention it. You saw nothing: I saw nothing. You know nothing about it. There was no baccarat, no cheating, no nothing. Come."

"What are you going to do?" asked Jack doubtfully.

He had great confidence in Kit, but this matter required consideration.

"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," said Kit. "I only want you, officially, so to speak, to know nothing about this, just in case of accidents; but there will be no accidents if you let me manage it. If you want to know what I shall do, it is this: I shall go to Alice to-morrow—to-day, rather—and tell her what I saw. I am sure she saw it herself, or I should say nothing to her. I shall also add how lucky it was that only she and I noticed it. Then the whole thing shall be hushed up, though I dare say we shall watch Alington play once more to be certain about it, and if we see him cheat again, make him promise to play no more. Trust us for not letting it come out. I am in your galley about the mines, you see."

"She is to understand that I saw nothing?" asked Jack.

"Of course, of course," said Kit. "That is the whole point of it. What is your scruple? I am really unable to understand. I know it is not nice to deal with a person who cheats at cards. You have always to be on the watch. You'll have to keep your eyes open in this business of the mines, but that is your own affair. Clearly it is much better that Alice should imagine you know nothing about the cheating. She might think you ought to break with the man; people are so queer and unexpected."

"What about Tom?" asked he.

They had arrived at Park Lane, and Kit stepped out.

"Jack, will you or will you not leave the whole matter in my hands—the whole matter, you understand—without interference?"

He paused for a moment, still irresolute.

"Yes," he said at last; "but be careful."

Kit hardly heard this injunction; as soon as he had said "Yes" she turned quickly from him, and went into the house.

It was already after four, and the tops of the trees in the Park had caught the first level rays of the eastern sun. The splendid, sordid town still lay asleep, and the road was glistening from the rain which had fallen earlier in the night, and empty of passengers. But the birds, those fit companions of the dawn, were awake, and the twittered morning hymn of sparrows pricked the air. Kit went straight to her bedroom, where the rose-coloured blinds, drawn down over the wide-open windows, filled the room with soft, subdued light, and rang the bell which communicated with her maid's room. When she was likely to be out very late she always let her maid go to bed, and rang for her when she was wanted. Often she even made an effort to get to bed without her help, but this morning she was preoccupied, and rang before she could determine whether she needed her. Kit herself was one of those happily-constituted people who can do with very little sleep, though they can manage a great deal, and in these London months four or five hours during the night and a possible half-hour before dinner was sufficient to make her not only just awake, but excessively so at other times. In the country, it is true, she made up for unnatural hours by really bucolic behaviour. She took vigorous exercise every day in any weather, ate largely of wholesome things, hardly drank any wine, and slept her eight hours like a child. In this she was wiser than the majority of her world, who, in order to correct their errors in London, spend a month of digestive retirement at Carlsbad.

"Live wholesomely six months of the year," said Kit once, "and you will repair your damages. Why should I listen to German bands and drink salt water?"

Instead, she fished all August and September, cut down her cigarettes, and lived, as she said, like a milkmaid. It would have been rather a queer sort of milkmaid, but people knew what she meant.

Before her maid came (Kit's arrangement that she might go to bed was partly the result of kindness, partly of her disinclination to be waited on by a very sleepy attendant) she had taken off her jewels, and put them into her safe. There also she placed the very considerable sum of money which she had just won at baccarat, to join the rainy-day fund. Jack did not know about the rainy-day fund—it was of Kit's very private possessions; but it is only fair to her to say that if he had been in a financial impasse it would have been at his disposal. No number of outstanding bills, however, constituted an impasse till you were absolutely sued for debt; the simplest way of discharging them, a way naturally popular, was to continue ordering things at the same shops.

Kit and her husband did not meet at breakfast, but took that plebeian meal in their own rooms. And she, having told Hortense to open the windows still wider, and bring her breakfast at half-past ten, put the key of her jewel-safe under her pillow, and lay down to sleep for five hours. She would want her victoria at twelve, and she scribbled a note to Lady Haslemere saying that she would be with her at a quarter past.

Outside the day grew ever brighter, and rivulets of traffic began to flow down Park Lane. The hour of the starting of the omnibuses brought a great accession of sound, but Kit fell asleep as soon as she got into bed, and, the sleep of the just and the healthy being sound, she heard them not. She dreamed in a vague way that she had won a million pounds, but that as she was winning the last of them, which would mean eternal happiness, she cheated some undefined shadow of a penny, which, in the misty, unexplained fashion of dreams, took away the whole of her winnings. Then the smell of tea and bacon and a sudden influx of light scattered these vain and inauspicious imaginings, and she woke to another day of her worthless, selfish, aimless life.

[CHAPTER IV]

KIT'S LITTLE PLAN

To many people the events of the day before, and the anticipations of the day to come, give with the most pedantic exactness an automatic colour to the waking moments. The first pulse of conscious consciousness, without apparent cause, is happy, unhappy, or indifferent. Then comes a backward train of thought, the brain gropes for the reason of its pleasure or chagrin, something has happened, something is going to happen, and the instinct of the first moment is justified. The thing lay in the brain; it gave the colour of itself to the moment when reasoned thought was yet dormant.

Bacon and tea were the first savours of an outer world to Kit when she awoke, for she had slept soundly, but simultaneously, and not referring to these excellent things, her brain said to her, "Not nice!" Now, this was odd: she shared with her husband his opinion of the paramount importance of money, and the night before she had locked up in her safe enough to pay for six gowns at least, and a year's dentist bills, for her teeth were very good. Indeed, it was generally supposed that they were false, and though Kit always laughed with an open mouth, she had been more than once asked who her dentist was. Herein she showed less than her ordinary wisdom when she replied that she had not got one, for the malignity of the world, how incomparable she should have known, felt itself justified.

Yet in spite of that delightful round sum in her jewel-safe, the smell of bacon woke her to no sense of bliss beyond bacon. For a moment she challenged her instinct, and told herself that she was going to have tea with the Carburys, and that Coquelin was coming; that she was dining with the Arbuthnots, where they were going to play a little French farce so screaming and curious that the Censor would certainly have had a fit if he had known that such a piece had been performed within the bounds of his paternal care. All this was as it should be, yet as the river of thought began to flow more fully, she was even less pleased with the colour of the day. Something unpleasant had happened; something unpleasant was still in the air—ah! that was it, and she sat up in bed and wondered exactly how she should put it to Lady Haslemere. Anyhow she had carte blanche from Jack, and if between half-past ten and a quarter past twelve she could not think of something simple and sufficient, she was a fool, and that she knew she certainly was not.

With her breakfast came the post. There were half a dozen cards of invitation to concerts and dinners and garden-parties; an autograph note from a very great personage about her guests at the banquet next week; a number of bills making a surprising but uninteresting total; another note, which she read with interest twice, and then tore into very small pieces; and a few lines from Jack, scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.

"Do the best you can, Kit," he said; "I am off to the City to see A. I shall behave as if I knew nothing."

Kit tore up this also, but not into small pieces, with a little sigh of relief. "Sense cometh in the morning," she said to herself, and ate her breakfast with a very good appetite.

Whatever she had been doing, however unwisely she had supped, Kit always "wanted" her breakfast, and as she took it the affair of the night before seemed to her to assume a somewhat different complexion. In her heart of hearts she began to be not very sorry for the lapse in social morality of which Mr. Alington had been guilty on the previous night. It seemed to her on post-prandial consideration that it might not be altogether a bad thing that she should have some little check upon him. It might even be called a blessing, with hardly any disguise at all, and she put the position to herself thus. When you went careering about in unexplored goldfields with the owner, a comparative stranger, harnessed to your cart, it was just as well to have some sort of a break ready to your hand. Very likely it would be unnecessary to use it; indeed, she did not want to have to use it at all, but it was certainly preferable to know that it was there, and that if the comparative stranger took it into his head to bolt, he would find it suddenly clapped on. The only drawback was that Alice knew about it too; at least, Kit was morally certain that she had noticed Mr. Alington's surreptitious pushing forward of his stake after the declaration of his card, which was very clumsily done, and she would have preferred, had it been possible, that only Jack and she should have known, for a secret has only one value, and the more it is shared the less valuable does each share become, on the simple arithmetical postulate that if you divide a unit into pieces, each piece is less than the original unit.

Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more convenient did it appear that Mr. Alington should have made this little mistake, and that she should have noticed it. And, after all, perhaps it would save trouble that Alice should have noticed it too, for in all probability it would be necessary to make Alington play again and watch him. For this she must have some accomplice, and as Jack was not to come into the affair at all, there really was no better accomplice to have than Alice. To lay this trap for the bland financier did not seem to Kit to be in any way a discreditable proceeding. She put it to herself that, if a man cheated, he ought not to be allowed to play cards and win his friends' money, and that it was in justice to him that it was necessary to verify the suspicion. But that it was a low and loathsome thing to ask a man as a friend to play cards in order to see whether he cheated or not did not present itself to her. Her mind—after all, it is a question of taste—was not constructed in such a way as to be able to understand this point of view, and she was not hide-bound or pedantic in her idea of the obligation entailed by hospitality. To cheat at cards was an impossible habit, it would not do in the least; for a rich man to cheat at cards was inexplicable. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that Kit was really shocked at the latter.

In the course of an hour came an answer from Lady Haslemere. She was unavoidably out till two, but if Kit would come to lunch then she would be at home. Haslemere and Tom were both out, and they could be alone.

Kit always found Alice Haslemere excellent company, and during lunch they blackened the reputations of their more intimate friends with all the mastery of custom, and a firm though gentle touch. Like some deductive detective of unreadable fiction, Kit could most plausibly argue guilt from cigarette ashes, muddy boots, cups of tea—anything, in fact, wholly innocent in itself. But luckier than he, she had not got to wrest verdicts from reluctant juries, but only to convince Lady Haslemere, which was a far lighter task, as she could without the slightest effort believe anything bad of anybody. Kit, moreover, was a perfect genius at innuendo; it was one of the greatest charms of her conversation.

After lunch they sat in the card-room and smoked gold-tipped, opium-tainted cigarettes, and when the servants had brought coffee and left them, Kit went straight to the point, and asked Alice whether she had seen anything irregular as they played baccarat the night before.

Lady Haslemere took a sip of coffee and lit another cigarette; she intended to enjoy herself very much.

"You mean the Australian," she said. "Well, I had suspicions; that is to say, last night I felt certain. It is so easy to feel certain about that sort of thing when one is losing."

Kit laughed a sympathetic laugh.

"It is a bore, losing," she said. "If there is one thing I dislike more than winning other people's money, it is losing my own. And the certainty of last night is still a suspicion to-day?"

"Ye-es. But you know a man may mean to stake, and yet not put the counters quite clear of that dear little chalk line. I am sure, in any case, that Tom saw nothing, because I threw a hint at him this morning, which he would have understood if he had seen anything."

"Oh, Tom never sees anything," said Kit; "he is like Jack."

Lady Haslemere's natural conclusion was that Jack had not seen anything either, and for the moment Kit was saved from a more direct misstatement. Not that she had any prudish horror of misstatements, but it was idle to make one unless it was necessary; it is silly to earn a reputation for habitual prevarication. Lies are like drugs or stimulants, the more frequent use you make of them, the less effect they have, both on yourself and on other people.

"Well, then, Kit," continued Lady Haslemere, "we have not yet got much to go on. You, Tom, Jack, and I are the only four people who could really have seen: Jack and I because we were sitting directly opposite Mr. Alington, you and Tom because you were sitting one on each side of him. And of us four, you alone really think that this—this unfortunate moral collapse, I think you called it, happened. And Jack is so sharp. I don't at all agree that he never sees anything; there is nothing, rather, that he does not see. I attach as much weight to his seeing nothing as to anybody else seeing anything. You and I see things very quick, you know, dear," she added with unusual candour.

"Perhaps Jack was lighting a cigarette or something," said Kit. "Indeed, now I come to think of it, I believe he was."

"Jack can see through cigarette smoke as well as most people," remarked Alice. "But on the whole I agree with you, Kit; we cannot leave it as it is. I believe the recognised thing to do is to get him to play again and watch him."

"I believe so," said Kit, with studied unconcern.

Here she made a mistake; the unconcern was a little overdone, and it caused Lady Haslemere to look up quickly. At that moment it occurred to her for the first time that Kit was not being quite ingenuous.

"But I don't like doing that sort of thing," she went on, throwing out a feeler.

"But what else are we to do?" asked Kit, who since breakfast had evolved from her inner consciousness several admirable platitudes. "It is really not fair to Alington himself to leave it like this; to have lurking in one's mind—one can't help it—a suspicion against the man which may be quite erroneous. On the other hand, supposing it is not erroneous, supposing he did cheat, it is not fair on other people that he should be allowed to go on playing. He either did cheat or else he did not."

There was no gainsaying the common-sense of this, and Lady Haslemere was silent a moment.

"Tell Jack," she suggested at length, after racking her brains for something rather awkward to say.

As a rule she and Kit were excellent friends, and treated each other with immense frankness; but Lady Haslemere this morning had a very distinct impression that Kit was keeping something back, which annoyed her. Doubtless it was something quite trivial and unimportant, but she herself did not relish being kept in the dark about anything by anybody. But Kit replied immediately.

"I don't see why we should tell anybody, Alice," she said; "and poor dear Jack would pull his moustache off in his perplexity, if he were to know," she added, with a fine touch of local colour. "In any case, the last thing we want is a scandal, for it never looks well to see in the papers that the 'Marchioness of Conybeare, while entertaining a large baccarat party last night, detected one of her guests cheating. Her ladyship now lies in a precarious state.' You know the sort of thing. Then follow the names of the guests. I hate the public press!" she observed with dignity.

"Yes; it is like X rays," observed Lady Haslemere; "and enables the curious public to see one's bones. And however charming one may be, one's bones are not fit for public inspection. Also the papers would put the name of one of the guests with dashes for vowels, and the excited reader would draw his conclusions. Really, the upper class is terribly ill-used. It is the whipping-boy of the nation. Supposing Smith and Jones had a baccarat-party, and Smith cheated, no one would care, not even Robinson."

Kit laughed.

"That is just why I don't want to tell anybody," she said. "If three people are in a secret, the chances of it getting out are enormously greater than if only two are. Not that anyone tells it exactly; but the atmosphere gets impregnated with it. You know what happened before. One has to keep the windows open, so to speak, and let in plenty of fresh air, politics, and so on. Other people breathe the secret."

"We can't tackle the man alone," said Alice.

"Why not? A man always hates a scene, because a man is never any good at a scene; and, personally, I rather like them. I am at my best in a scene, dear; I really am ripping."

Again Lady Haslemere had a quite distinct sensation that Kit was keeping something back. She seemed to wish to prove her case against Alington, yet she did not want anybody else to know. It was puzzling why she desired a private handle against the man. Perhaps—Lady Haslemere thought she had an inkling of the truth, and decided to take a shot at it.

"Of course it would be awkward for Jack," she observed negligently, "to be connected in business with this man, if it became known that he knew that Alington had cheated at baccarat."

Kit was off her guard.

"That is just what he feels—what I feel," she said.

She made this barefaced correction with the most silken coolness; she neither hurried nor hesitated, but Lady Haslemere burst out laughing.

"My dear Kit!" she said.

Kit sat silent a moment, and then perfectly naturally she laughed too.

"Oh, Alice," she said, "how sharp you are! Really, dear, if I had been a man and had married you, we should have been King and Queen of England before you could say 'knife.' Indeed, it was very quick of you, because I didn't correct myself at all badly. I was thinking I had carried my point, and so I got careless. Now I'll apologize, dear, and I promise never to try to take you in again, partly because it's no use, and partly because you owe me one. Jack does know, and he, at my request, left me to deal with it as if he didn't. It would be very awkward for him if he knew, so to speak, officially. At present, you see, he has only his suspicions. He could not be certain any more than you or I. As you so sensibly said, dear, we have only suspicions. But now, Alice, let us leave Jack out of it. Don't let him know that you know that he knows. Dear me, how complicated! You see, he would have to break with Alington if he knew."

Lady Haslemere laughed.

"I suppose middle-class people would think us wicked?" she observed.

"Probably; and it would be so middle-class of them," said Kit. "That is the convenient thing about the middle class; they are never anything else. Now, there is no counting on the upper and lower class; at one time we both belong to the criminal class, at another we are both honest labourers. But the middle class preserves a perpetual monopoly of being shocked and thinking us wicked. And then it puts us in pillories and throws dirt. Such fun it must be, too, because it thinks we mind. So don't let us have a scandal."

Lady Haslemere pursed her pretty mouth up, and blew an excellent smoke-ring. She was a good-humoured woman, and her detection of Kit took the sting out of the other's attempted deception. She was quite pleased with herself.

"Very well, I won't tell him," she said.

"That's a dear!" said Kit cordially; "and you must see that it would do no good to tell anybody else. Jack would have to break with him if it got about, and when a reduced marquis is really wanting to earn his livelihood it is cruel to discourage him. So let's get Alington to play again, and watch him, you and I, like two cats. Then if we see him cheat again, we'll ask him to lunch and tell him so, and make him sign a paper, and stamp it and seal it and swear it, to say he'll never play again, amen."

Lady Haslemere rose.

"The two conspirators swear silence, then," she said. "But how awkward it will be, Kit, if anyone else notices it on this second occasion!"

"Bluff it out!" said Kit. "You and I will deny seeing anything at all, and say the thing is absurd. Then we'll tell this Alington that we know all about it, but that unless he misbehaves or plays again the incident will be clo-o-o-sed!"

"I should be sorry to trust my money to that man," said Alice.

"Oh, there you make a mistake," said Kit. "You are cautious in the wrong place, and I shouldn't wonder if you joined us Carmelites before long. For some reason he thinks that Conybeare's name is worth having on his 'front page,' as he calls it, and I am convinced he will give him his money's worth. He may even give him more, especially as Jack hasn't got any. He thinks Jack is very sharp, and he is quite right. You are very sharp, too, Alice, and so am I. How pleasant for us all, and how right we are to be friends! Dear me! if you, Jack, and I were enemies, we should soon make London too hot to hold any of us. As it is, the temperature is perfectly charming."

"And is this bounder going to make you and Jack very rich?" asked Lady Haslemere.

"The bounder is going to do his best," laughed Kit; "at least, Jack thinks so. But it would need a very persevering sort of bounder to make us rich for long together. Money is so restless; it is always flying about, and it so seldom flies in my direction."

"It has caught the habit from the world, perhaps," said Alice.

"I dare say. Certainly we are always flying about, and it is so tiresome having to pay ready money at booking-offices. Jack quite forgot the other day when we were going to Sandown, and he told the booking-office man to put it down to him, which he barbarously refused to do."

"How unreasonable, dear!"

"Wasn't it? I'd give a lot to be able to run up a bill with railway companies. Dear me, it's after three! I must fly. There's a bazaar for the prevention of something or the propagation of something at Knightsbridge, and I am going to support Princess Frederick, who is going to open it, and eat a large tea. How they eat, those people! We are always propagating or preventing, and one can't cancel them against each other, because one wants to propagate exactly those things one wants not to prevent."

"What are you going to propagate to-day?"

"I forget. I believe it is the anti-propagation of prevention in general. Do you go to the Hungarian ball to-night? Yes? We shall meet then. Au revoir!"

"You are so full of good works, Kit," said Lady Haslemere, with no touch of regret in her tone.

Kit laughed loudly.

"Yes, isn't it sweet of me?" she said. "Really, bazaars are an excellent policy, as good as honesty. And they tell so much more. If you have been to a bazaar it is put in the papers, whereas they don't put it in the papers if you have been honest. I often have. Bazaars are soon over, too, and you feel afterwards as if you'd earned your ball, just as you feel you've earned your dinner after bicycling."

Kit rustled pleasantly downstairs, leaving Alice in the card-room where they had talked. That lady had as keen a scent for money as Kit herself, and evidently if Kit denied herself the pleasure of causing a scandal over this cheating at baccarat (a piquant subject), she must have a strong reason for doing so. She wanted, so Lady Haslemere reasoned, to have Alington under her very private thumb, not, so she concluded, to get anything definite out of him, for blackmail was not in Kit's line, but as a precautionary measure. She followed her train of thought with admirable lucidity, and came to the very sensible conclusion that the interest that the Conybeares had in Alington was large. Indeed, taking into consideration the utter want of cash in the Conybeare establishment, it must be immense; for neither of them would have considered anything less than a fair settled income or a very large sum of money worth trying for. This being the case, she wished to have a hand in it, too.

Tom, she knew, had been approached by Mr. Alington and Jack on the subject of his becoming a director, and she determined to persuade him to do so. At present he had not decided. Anyhow, to win money out of mines was fully as respectable as to lose it at cards, and much more profitable. Besides, the daily papers might become interesting if it was a personal matter whether Bonanzas were up or Rands down. Tom had a large interest as it was in Robinsons—whatever they were, and they sounded vulgar but rich—and she had occasionally read the reports of the money market from his financial paper, as an idle person may spell out words in some unknown language. The "ursine operators," "bulls," "flatness," "tightness," "realizations"—how interesting all these terms would become if they applied to one's own money! She had often noticed that the political outlook affected the money market, and during the Fashoda time Tom had been like a bear with a sore head. To know something about politics, to have, as she had, a Conservative leader ready to whisper to her things that were not officially supposed to be whispered, would evidently be an advantage if you had an interest in prices. And the demon of speculation made his introductory bow to her.

It is difficult for those who dwell on the level lands of sanity to understand the peaks and valleys of mania. To fully estimate the intolerable depression which ensues on the conviction that you have a glass leg, or the secret majesty which accompanies the belief that one is Charles I., is impossible to anyone who does not know the heights and depths to which such creeds conduct the holder. But the mania for speculation—as surely a madness as either of these—is easier of comprehension. Only common-sense of the crudest kind is required; if it is supposed that your country is on the verge of war, and you happen to know for certain that reassuring events will be made public to-morrow, it is a corollary to invest all you can lay hands on in the sunken consols in the certainty of a rise to-morrow. This is as simple as A B C, and your gains are only limited by the amount that you can invest. A step further and you have before you the enchanting plan of not paying for what you buy at all. Buy merely. Consols (of this you must be sure) will rise before next settling-day, and before next settling-day sell. And thus the secret of not taking up shares is yours.

But consols are a slow gamble. They may conceivably rise two points in a day. Instead of your hundred pounds you will have a hundred and two (minus brokerage), an inglorious spoil for so many shining sovereigns to lead home. But for the sake of those who desire to experience this fascinating form of excitement in less staid a manner there are other means supplied, and the chiefest and choicest is mines. A single mining share which, judiciously bought, cost a sterling sovereign may under advantageous circumstances be worth three or four in a week or two. How much more stirring an adventure! When we estimate this in hundreds and thousands, the prospect will be found to dazzle comparatively sober eyes.

Now, of the people concerned at present in this story, no less than five, as Kit drove to her bazaar, were pondering these simple things. Alington was always pondering them and acting on them; Jack had been pondering them for a full week, Kit for the same period, and Tom Abbotsworthy was on the point of consenting to become a director. And Lady Haslemere, thinking over her interview with Kit, said to herself, with her admirable common-sense, that if there was a cake going, she might as well have a slice. She had immense confidence in the power of both Kit and Jack to take care of themselves, and knew well that neither would have stirred a finger for Mr. Alington, if they had not quite clearly considered it to be worth their while. And Kit was stirring all her fingers; she was taking Alington about as constantly as she took her pocket-handkerchief; she took him not merely to big parties and large Grundy dinners, but to the intimate gatherings of the brightest and best. For she was a good wife to Jack, and she at any rate believed that there was a cake going.

[CHAPTER V]

TOBY

Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird was not usually known as all or any of this, but as Toby. It would have been a difficult matter, requiring a faith of the most preposterous sort, to have stood in front of him and seriously said, "I believe you to be Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird," and the results of so doing might have been quite disconcerting. But having been told he was Toby, it would have been impossible to forget or to doubt it. The most vivid imagination could not conceive a more obvious Toby; the identity might almost have been guessed by a total stranger or an intelligent foreigner. He was about twenty-four years old (the usual age of Tobys), and he had a pleasantly ugly face, with a snub nose, slightly freckled. Blue eyes, in no way beautiful, but very white as to the white and blue as to the blue, looked honestly out from under a typically unintellectual forehead, above which was a shock head of sandy hair, which stood up like a terrier's coat or a doormat, and on which no brush yet invented had been known to exert a flattening tendency. He was about five foot ten in height, and broad for that. His hat had a tendency to tilt towards the back of his head, and he had big, firm hands, callous on their insides with the constant use of weapons made for the violent propulsion of balls. He always looked comfortable in his clothes, and whether he was adorning the streets of London, immaculately dressed and hot and large, or trudging through heather in homespun, he was never anything but Toby.

A further incredible fact about him, in addition to his impossible baptismal name, was that he was Jack Conybeare's younger brother, and Kit's brother-in-law. Nature, that exquisite humorist who turns so many dissimilar little figures out of the same moulds, had never shown herself a more imaginative artist than when she ordained that Jack and Toby should have the same father and mother. The more you considered their relationship, the stranger that relationship appeared. Jack, slim, aquiline, dark, with his fine, taper-fingered hands and the unmistakable marks of breeding in face and form, was sufficiently remote to all appearance from Toby—fair, snub-nosed, squat, with his big gloves and his big boots, and his chair-filling build; but in character they were, considered as brothers, perfectly irreconcilable. The elder had what we may call a spider-mind. It wove a thread invisible almost to the eye, but strong enough to bear the weight of what it was meant to bear. Obvious issues, the natural consequences of things, Jack passed by in the manner of an express rushing through a wayside station, and before Toby, to continue the metaphor, had drawn up, flushed and panting, at the platform, and read the name on the station board, Jack would be a gray streamer of smoke on the horizon. But Toby's grasp of the obvious was as sure as Jack's keen appreciation of subtleties, and though he made no dragon-fly dartings through the air, nor vanished unaware on horizon points, he went very steadily along, right in the middle of the road, and was never in any danger of falling into obvious ditches, or colliding with anyone who did not unquestionably get in his way, or where he might be expected to go.

Toby was a person who got continually slapped on the back—a lovable habit, but one which no amount of diplomacy or thread-spinning will produce. To slap Jack on the back, for instance, must always, from his earliest years, have been an impossibility. This was lucky, for he would have resented it. That nobody ever quarrelled with either of them appears at first sight a point in common; in reality it illustrates their dissimilarity. It was dangerous to quarrel with Jack; it was blankly impossible to quarrel with Toby. You dare not try it with the one; it was useless to try it with the other.

At the present moment his sister-in-law was trying her utmost to do so, and failing pitiably. Kit was not accustomed to fail or to be pitiable, and it irritated her.

"You have no sense, Toby," she was saying. "You cannot see, or you will not, where your interest lies—yes, and your duty, too."

Now, when Kit talked about duty Toby always smiled. When he smiled his eyes wrinkled up till they closed, and he showed a row of strong, clean, useful teeth. Strength, cleanliness, and utility, in fact, were his most salient features.

Kit leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer, for Toby got confused unless you gave him time. They were sitting in the tented balcony of the Hungarian Embassy, and from within came the rhythm of dance music and a delicious murmur of voices. It was the evening of the day of the bazaar, and Kit felt that she had earned her ball. The night was hot, and as she attempted the hopeless task of quarrelling with Toby she fanned herself, partly, no doubt, for the sake of the current of air, but to a psychologist, judging by her face, not without the intention of fanning the embers of her wrath. She had sat out this dance with him on purpose, and she was beginning to think that she was wasting her time.

Toby's smile broadened.

"When did you last do your duty, Kit?" he asked.

"My duty?" said Kit sharply. "We are talking about yours."

"And my duty is——"

"Not to go to that vulgar, stupid music-hall to-morrow night with that loutish friend of yours from Oxford, but to dine with us, and meet Miss Murchison. You seem to forget that Jack is your elder brother."

"My duty towards Jack——" began Toby irreverently.

"Don't be profane. You are Jack's only brother, and I tell you plainly that it is no fun being Lord Conybeare unless you have something to be Lord Conybeare with. Putting money into the estate," said Kit rather unwisely, "is like throwing it down a well."

Toby became thoughtful, and his eyes opened again. His mind worked slowly, but it soon occurred to him that he had never heard that his brother was famed for putting money into the estate.

"And taking money out of the estate is like taking it out of a well," he remarked at length, with an air of a person who is sure of his facts, but does not mean to draw inferences of any kind whatever.

Kit stared at him a moment. It had happened once or twice before that she had suspected Toby of dark sayings, and this sounded remarkably like another of them. He was so sensible that sometimes he was not at all stupid. She made a mental note of how admirable a thing is a perfectly impenetrable manner if you wish to make an innuendo; there was nothing so telling.

"Well?" she said at length.

Toby's face expressed nothing whatever. He took off a large eight and lit a cigarette.

"That's all," he said—"nothing more."

Kit decided to pass on.

"It's all very well for you now," she said, "for you have six or seven hundred a year, and you happen to like nothing so much as hitting round balls with pieces of wood and iron. It is an inexpensive taste, and you are lucky to find it amusing. In your position at present you have no calls upon you and no barrack of a house to keep up. But when you are Lord Conybeare you will find how different it is. Besides, you must marry some time, and when you marry you must marry money. Old bachelors are more absurd, if possible, than old spinsters. And goodness knows how ridiculous they are!"

"My sister-in-law is a mercenary woman," remarked Toby. "And aren't we getting on rather quick?"

"Quick!" screamed Kit. "I am painfully trying to drag you a few steps forward, and you say we are getting on quick! Now, Toby, you are twenty-five——"

"Four," said Toby.

"Oh, Toby, you are enough to madden Job! What difference does that make? I choose that you should be twenty-five! All your people marry early; they always did; and it is a most proper thing for a young man to do. Really, young men are getting quite impossible. They won't dance—you aren't dancing; they won't marry—you aren't married; they spend all their lazy, selfish lives in amusing themselves and—and ruining other people."

"It's better to amuse yourself than not to amuse yourself," said Toby. This, as he knew, was a safe draw. If Kit was at home, out she came.

"That is your view. Thank goodness there are other views," said Kit, with extraordinary energy. "Why, for instance, do you suppose that I went down to the wilds of Kensington and opened a bazaar, as I did this afternoon?"

"I can't think," said Toby. "Wasn't it awfully slow?"

He began to grin again.

"Slow? Yes, of course it was slow; but it is one's duty not to mind what is slow," continued Kit rapidly, pumping up moral sentiments with surprising fluency. "Why do you suppose Jack goes to the House whenever there is a Church Bill on? Why do I come and argue with you and quarrel with you like this?"

Toby opened his blue eyes as wide as Kit's bazaar.

"Are you quarrelling with me?" he asked. "I didn't know. Try not, Kit."

Kit laughed.

"Dear Toby, don't be so odious and tiresome," she said. "Do be nice. You can behave so nicely if you like, and the Princess was saying at the bazaar this afternoon what a dear boy you were."

"So the bazaar wasn't so slow," thought Toby, who knew that Kit had a decided weakness, quite unaccountable, for Princesses. But he was wise enough to say nothing.

"And I've taken all the trouble to ask Miss Murchison to dinner just because of you," continued Kit quickly, seeing her partner out of the corner of her eye careering wildly about in search of her. "She's perfectly charming, Toby, and very pretty, and you always like talking to pretty girls, and quite right, too; and the millions—oh, the millions! You have no one to look after you but Jack and me, and Jack is a City man now; and what will happen to the Conybeares if you don't marry money I don't know. You want money; she wants a Marquis. There it is!"

"Did you ask her?" said Toby parenthetically.

"No, darling, I did not," said Kit, with pardonable asperity. "I left that to you."

Toby sighed.

"You go so quick, Kit," he said. "You marry me to a person I've never yet seen."

Kit drew on her gloves; the partner was imminent.

"Come and see her, Toby—come and see her. That is all I ask. Oh, here you are, Ted; I've been waiting for you for ages. I thought you had thrown me over. Good-bye, Toby; to-morrow at half-past eight, and I'll promise to order iced asparagus, which I know you like."

The two went off, leaving Toby alone. Conversation of this kind with Kit always reduced him to a state of breathless mental collapse. She caught him up, so to speak, and whirled him along through endless seas of prospective alliances, to drop him at the end, a mere lifeless lump, in unknown localities, with the prospect of iced asparagus as a restorative. This question of his marriage was not a new one between them. Many times before Kit had snatched him up like this, and plumped him down in front of some extraordinarily eligible maiden. But either he or the extraordinarily eligible maiden, or both, had walked away as soon as Kit's eye was turned, and made themselves disconcerting to her schemes. But to-night Kit had shown an unusual vigour and directness. Selfish and unscrupulous as she was, she had, like everybody else, a soft spot for Toby, and she could honestly think of nothing more conducive to his highest advantage than to procure him a wealthy wife. Wealth was the sine quâ non—no other need apply; but in Miss Murchison she thought she had found very much more. The girl was a beauty—a real beauty; and though she was not of the type that appealed personally to Kit, she might easily appeal immensely to Toby. She had only come out that season, and Kit had met her but once or twice before; but a very much duller eye than Kit's could have seen that in all probability she would not be on view in the eligible department very long. She was American by origin, but had been brought up entirely in England; and her countrymen observed with pain, and the men of her adopted country with that patronizing approval over which our Continental neighbours find it so hard to keep calm, that no one would have guessed her nationality. Of her father little was known, but that little was good, for he was understood to be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, having made a colossal pile in some porky or oily manner, and to have had the good taste not to beget any other children. She and her mother had been at the bazaar that afternoon, where they had run across the pervasive Kit, who suddenly saw in her impulsive way that here at last was the very girl for Toby, wondered at her blindness in not seeing it before, and engaged them to dine next evening.

Now, Mrs. Murchison had long sighed and pined for an invitation from Kit, whom she considered to be the topmost flower of the smartest plant in the pleasant garden of society. At last her wish was fulfilled. Princes had drunk her champagne, and danced or sat out to her fiddles, and made themselves agreeable under her palms; but a small and particular set in society in which Kit most intimately moved had hitherto had nothing to say to her, and she accepted the invitation with effusion, though it meant an excuse or a subterfuge to a Countess. But Mrs. Murchison had picked up the line of London life with astonishing swiftness and great perspicuity. Her object was to get herself and her daughter, not into the cleverest or the most amusing, or, as she styled it, the "ducalest set," in London, but into what she and others, for want of a better name, called "the smart set," and she had observed, at first with surprise and pain, but unerringly, that rank counted for nothing there. She could not have told you, nor perhaps could they, what did count there, but she knew very well it was not rank.

"Why, we might play kiss-in-the-ring with the Queen and Royal Family," she had observed once to her daughter, "but we should be no nearer for that."

A year ago she would have hoarded a Countess as being a step in the ladder she proposed to get to the top of, but now she knew that no Countess, quâ Countess, mattered a straw in the attainment of the goal for which she aimed; and this particular one, whom she had already thrown over for Kit, might as well have been a milkmaid in Connecticut for all the assistance she could give her in her quest. The smart set was the smart set, here was her creed; Americans had got there before, and Americans, she fully determined, should get there again. What she expected to find there she did not know; whether it would be at all worth the pains she did not care, and she would not be at all disappointed if it was exactly like everything else, or perhaps duller. It would be sufficient for her to be there.

In many ways Mrs. Murchison was a remarkable woman, and she had a kind and excellent heart. She had been the very pretty daughter of a man who had made a fair fortune in commerce, and had let his children grow up and get educated as God pleased; but from very early years this daughter of his had made up her mind that she was not going to revolve for the remainder of her life in commercial circles, and she had divided her money fairly evenly between adornments for the body and improvements for the mind. Thus she had acquired a great fluency in French, and an accent as remarkable as it was incorrect. In the same way she had read a great deal of history, and the classical literature of both English tongues; and though she seldom managed to get her names quite right, both she and those who heard her were easily able to guess to whom she referred. Thus, when she alluded to Richard Dent de Lion, though the name sounded like a yellow flower with a milky stem, there could be no reasonable doubt that she was speaking of the Crusader; or when she told you that her husband was as rich as Crœsum, those who had ever heard of Crœsus could not fail to see that they were hearing of him now. She was fond of allusions, and her conversation was as full of plums as a cake; but as she held the sensible and irrefutable view that conversation is but a means of making oneself understood, she was quite satisfied to do so.

Mrs. Murchison was now a big handsome woman of about forty, fresh, of high colour, and beautifully dressed. In spite of her manifest absurdities and the surprising nature of her conversation, she was eminently likeable, and to her friends lovable. There was no mistaking the honesty and kindliness of her nature; she was a good woman, and in ways a wise one. Lily, her daughter, who found herself on the verge of hysterics twenty times a day at her inimitable remarks, had the intensest affection for her mother, blindly reciprocated; and the daughter, to whom the wild chase after the smart set seemed perfectly incomprehensible, was willing that all the world should think her heart was in it sooner than that her mother should suspect it was not. Mrs. Murchison herself had begun to forget her French and history a little, for she was a mere slave to this new accomplishment, social success, and found it demanded all her time and attention. She worked at it from morning till night, and from night to morning she dreamed about it. Only the night before she had thought with extraordinary vividness in her sleep that her maid had come to her bedside with a note containing a royal command to sing duets with the Queen quite quietly at 11.30 that morning, and she had awoke with a pang of rapturous anxiety to find the vision unsubstantial, and that she need not get up to practise her scales. She made no secret of her ambitions, but rather paraded them, and told her dream to the Princess Frederick at the bazaar with huge naïveté. And to see Lily married into the smart set would have caused her to say her Nunc Dimittis with a sober and grateful heart.

But the smart set was a terribly baffling Will-o'-the-Wisp kind of affair, or so it had hitherto been to her. A married daughter, an unmarried daughter even, so she observed, might be steeped in the smart set, while the mother was, figuratively speaking, in Bloomsbury. You might robe yourself from head to foot in Balas rubies, you might be a double Duchess, you might dance a cancan down Piccadilly, you might be the most amiable of God's creatures, the wittiest, the most corrupt, or the most correct of the daughters of Eve, and yet never get near it; but here was Mrs. Lancelot Gordon, who never did anything, was not even an Honourable, dressed rather worse than Mrs. Murchison's own maid, and yet was a pivot and centre of that charmed circle. Mrs. Murchison racked her brain over the problem, and came to the conclusion that no accomplishment could get you into it, no vice or virtue keep you out. That was a comfort, for she had no vices. But to-day Kit had asked her to dinner; the mystic doors perhaps were beginning to turn on their hinges, and her discarded Countess might continue to revolve on her unillumined orbit in decent and dull obscurity with her belted Earl.

[CHAPTER VI]

TOBY'S PARTNER

Toby finished his cigarette when Kit left him, and threw the end over the balcony into the street. It went flirting through the air like a small firework, and he saw it pitch on the shoulder of an immense policeman below, who looked angrily round. And so it was that the discreet Toby withdrew softly into the ballroom.

It was only a little after one, and the dancing was at its height. Everyone who intended to come had done so, and no one yet had thought of going away. From the band in the gallery came the enchanting lilt of the dance music, with its graceful stress and abatement, making it impossible not to dance. The light-hearted intoxication of rhythmic movement entering into the souls of many women whom one would naturally have supposed to have left their dancing days behind them, for reasons over which they had no control, had produced the same sort of effect in them as a warm November day does in the bluebottles who have outlived the summer, and they were deluding themselves into thinking that "June was not over, though past her full." The ballroom was ideally occupied; it was peopled enough, but not overcrowded, and like a whisper underneath the shouting band you could hear the sibilant rustle of skirts, and the "sip-sip" of shoes over the well-polished floor.

Kit and her partner were as well matched and graceful a pair as could be found in London—too well matched, the world said; but the world is never happy unless it is saying something of the sort, and the wiser there, among whom even her bitterest friends put Kit, are accustomed to discount all that is said. To repeat fresh gossip without actually believing or disbelieving it, and to hear it in the same light-hearted spirit makes the world as fresh as a daily paper to someone just arrived from long sea, and Kit's interest in what was said about her was of the most breezily superficial sort. She never intended that it should be ever so distantly possible that she should compromise herself, for she recognised with humble thankfulness how hard she was to compromise. She had done many risky things in her life, and there was safety in their very numbers. People would only say that her conduct with So-and-so had been much riskier, and yet it had come to nothing. Probably, then, this intimacy with Lord Comber was equally innocent. Other people had merely looked over hedges and been accused of stealing horses, while Kit, so to speak, had been found before now with the stolen halter in her hand; and yet her excellent grace in giving it up at the proper moment to the proper owner had got her out of what might have been a scrape to a less accomplished adventurer.

And to-night nobody talked more disagreeably than they had talked scores of times before. Up to a certain point repetition is the soul of wit; at least, the point of a joke grows by dwelling on it, but the repetition in excess is wearisome, and to-night people scarcely said more than what a beautiful couple they were.

About this there could scarcely be two opinions. Kit was very tall and slenderly made, and there was a boyish spring and grace about her dancing which gave a peculiar spontaneousness to this pretty performance. Ted Comber, a fresh-faced, handsome youth, had no extra weight on his hands; the two moved with an exquisite unanimity of motion. Amiable indiscretions and a course of life not indicated in the educational curriculum had led the authorities both at Eton and Christ Church to make their parting with him take place sooner than he had himself intended, but, as Kit said in her best manner, "He was only a boy then." He was in years not much more than a boy now; in appearance, especially by artificial light, he was a boy still, and the two numbered scarcely more than fifty years between them.

But balls are not given in order to furnish a hunting-ground for the novelist and reformer, and to-night there were few such present. Indeed, anyone must have had a soul of putty not to have laid criticism aside; not to have forgotten all that had been said before, and all that might be said afterwards, in the enchanting moment. This dance had been on the board some ten minutes when Toby entered; people with winds and what is known, by an elegant periphrasis, as a superfluity of adipose tissue had paused; and for a few minutes there were not more than half a dozen couples on the floor. Kit, secure in the knowledge that no one present except herself and Jack had been to that City dinner a fortnight before, had put on again the same orange chiffon creation as she had worn that night, and she blazed out against the man's dark clothes; she was a flame in his encircling arm. The room was nearly square, and they danced not in straight lines up, across and down, but in one big circle, coming close to the walls only at four points in the middle of the sides of the room; like some beautiful twin star they moved round a centre, revolving also on a private axis of their own. Indeed, the sight of them whirling fast and smoothly in perfect time to the delicious rhythm was so pretty that no one thought of alluding to their private axis at all. Even the Hungarian Ambassador, as sprightly a young man of eighty or thereabouts as you could wish to see, and still accustomed to lead the cotillion, recognised the superiority of the performance. "Decidedly all the rest of us cut a poor figure when those two are dancing," he said with unwonted modesty to Lady Haslemere.

But in a few minutes the room grew crowded again. Recovered couples sprang up like mushrooms on the floor, and the pace slowed. Lord Comber steered as no one else could steer, but checks infinitesimal but infinite could not but occur. It would have been good enough had it not just now been better.

"We'll wait a moment, Ted," said Kit; "perhaps at the end it will be emptier again."

She stopped opposite one of the doors.

"Shall we go on to the balcony?" he asked. "There will be no one there."

"Yes. Oh, there is Mrs. Murchison! Take me to her. I'll follow you in a moment."

Ted swore gently under his breath.

"Oh, leave the Crœsum alone," he said. "Do come now, Kit. This is my last dance with you this evening."

But Kit dropped his arm.

"Fetch Toby," she said under her voice to Lord Comber; "fetch, you understand, and at once. He is over there." Then, without a pause, "So we meet again," she said to Mrs. Murchison. "You were right and I was wrong, for I said, do you remember, that the one way not to meet a person was to go to the same dance. And did you get all those great purchases of yours home safely? You were quite too charitable! What will you do with a hundred and forty fire-screens?—or was it a hundred and forty-one? Miss Murchison, what magnificent pearls you have! They are too beautiful! Now, if I wore pearls like yours, people would say they were not real, and they would be perfectly right."

Miss Murchison was what Kit would have called at first sight an uncomfortable sort of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but uncomfortable. What she should have said to Kit's praise of her pearls Kit could not have told you, but having made yourself agreeable to anyone, it is that person's business to reply in the same strain. Else, what happens to social and festive meetings? But Miss Murchison looked neither gratified nor embarrassed. Either would have shown a proper spirit.

"They are good," she said shortly.

Kit kept a weather eye open for Toby. She could see him near, and yet far, for the room was full, being reluctantly "fetched" by Lord Comber, who appeared to be expostulating with him. There were still some seconds to elapse before he could get to them, but Kit had determined to introduce him then and there to Miss Murchison. Perhaps her beauty would be more effective than her own arguments.

"It is only quite a little dinner to-morrow," she said to Mrs. Murchison, in order to fill up the time naturally. "You will have to take a sort of pot-luck with us. A kind of 'no fish-knife' dinner."

Better and better. This was a promising beginning to the intimacy Mrs. Murchison craved. It was nothing, she said to herself, to be asked to a big dinner; the pot-luck dinner was far more to her taste.

"Well, I think that's perfectly charming of you, Lady Conybeare," she said. "If there's one thing I am folle about, it's those quiet little dinners, and one gets so little of them. Be it ever so humble, there's nothing like dining quietly with your friends."

Kit's face dimpled with merriment.

"That's so sweet of you," she said. "Oh, here's Toby. Toby, let me introduce you to Mrs. Murchison. Oh, what's your name?—I always forget. It begins with Evelyn. Anyhow, he is Conybeare's brother, you know, Mrs. Murchison."

Mrs. Murchison did not know, but she was very happy to do so. Also the informality was charming. But her happiness had a momentary eclipse. She knew that a man was introduced to a woman, and not the other way about, but might not some other rule hold when the case was between a plain miss and the brother of a Marquis? English precedence seemed to her a fearful and wonderful thing. But Kit relieved her of her difficulty.

"And Miss Murchison, Toby," she said. "Charmed to have seen you again. Till 8.30 to-morrow;" and she smiled and retreated with Ted.

Blushing honours were raining thick on the enchanted lady. "One thing leads to another," she said to herself, and here was the brother of Lord Conybeare endorsing the happy meeting of this afternoon.

Then aloud:

"Very pleased to make your acquaintance," she said, for the phrase was ineradicable. She had searched in vain for a cisatlantic equivalent, but could not get hold of one. Like the snake in spring, she had cast off the slough of many of her transatlanticisms, but "very pleased" was deeply engrained, and appeared involuntarily and inevitably.

But Toby's inflammable eye had caught the filia pulchrior.

"My sister-in-law tells me you are dining with her to-morrow," he said genially. "That is delightful."

He paused a moment, and racked his brain for another suitable remark; but, finding none, he turned abruptly to Miss Murchison.

"May I have the pleasure?" he asked. "We shall just have time for a turn before this is over."

"Of course you may, Lord Evelyn," said her mother precipitately.

Miss Murchison paused for a moment without replying, and Toby, though naturally modest, told himself that her mother's ready acceptance for her justified the pause.

"Delighted," she said.

Toby might be described as a good, useful dancer, but no more. People who persist in describing one thing in terms suitable to another speak of the poetry and the melody of motion, and the dancing Toby had no more poetry or melody in his motion than a motor car or a street piano. The tide of couples, as inexplicable in its ebb and flow as deep sea-currents, had gone down again, and they had a fairly free floor. But before they had made the circuit of the room twice Kit and Lord Comber reappeared, and Kit heaved a thankful sister-in-law's sigh.

"Toby is dancing with the Murchison girl," she said; "and she hardly ever dances. Now——"

And they glided off on to the floor.

"A design of yours?" asked Ted.

"Yes, all my own. Ego fecit, as Mrs. Murchison says. She has millions. If Jack were dead and I was a man, I should try to marry her myself. Simply millions, Ted. Don't you wish you had?"

"Certainly; but I am very content dancing with you. I prefer it."

"That is silly," said Kit. "No sane man really prefers dancing with—with anyone, to having millions."

"Why try the cynical rôle? Do you really believe that, Kit?"

"Yes, and I hate compliments. Compliments should always be insincere, and I'm sure you mean what you say. If they are sincere they are unnecessary. Oh, it's stopping. What a bore! Six bars more. Quicker—quicker!"

The coda gathered up the dreamy threads of the valse into a vivid ever-quickening pattern of sound, and came to an end with a great blare. The industrious and heated Toby wiped his forehead.

"That was delicious," he said. "Won't you have an ice or something, Miss Murchison? I say, it is sw—stewing hot, isn't it?"

Lily took his arm.

"Yes, do give me an ice," she said. "Who is that dancing with Lady Conybeare?"

Toby looked round.

"I don't see them," he said. "But I expect it's Ted Comber. Kit usually dances with him. They are supposed to be the best dancers in London. Oh yes, I see them. It is Comber."

"Do you know him?"

"Yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. We always say 'Hulloa' to each other, and then we've finished, don't you know."

"You don't like him, apparently."

"I particularly dislike him," said Toby, in a voice that was cheerful and had the real ring of sincerity.

"Why?"

"Don't know. He doesn't do any of the things he ought. He doesn't shoot, or ride, or play games. He stays at country houses, you see, and sits with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles with them in the afternoon. Not my sort."

Lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face.

"I quite agree with you," she said. "I hate men to sit on chairs and look beautiful. He was introduced to me just now, though I did not catch his name, and I felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was made, and what it cost."

"Oh, he knows all that sort of thing," said Toby. "You should hear him and Kit talking chiffon together. And you dislike that sort of inspection?"

"Intensely. But most women apparently don't."

"No: isn't it funny! So many women don't seem to know a man when they see him. Certainly Comber is very popular with them. But a man ought to be liked by men."

Miss Murchison smiled. Toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. She had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in London, as she saw it, under her mother's marchings and manœuvres to storm the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. If you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this simply to sit on a chair in the Park, to say half a dozen words to half a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at a third. All that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. She understood well enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been there was inexplicable. Mrs. Murchison had given a ball only a few weeks before at her house in Grosvenor Square, about which even after the lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. Royalty had been there, and Mrs. Murchison, in the true republican spirit, had entertained them royally. Her cotillion presents had been really marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance. But as success to Mrs. Murchison's and many other minds was measured by your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied, and had sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of the festivity clipped from society papers. The evening had been to her, as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. But to Lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate: neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. The whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally unenjoyable.

There are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. To be found dead among a heap of Duchesses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the forefront of the battle. A mob of fashionable people had eaten and drunk at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. She had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous virtue which is called hospitality. She liked to feed people. But the human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring upwards, and this point reached, Mrs. Murchison, as has been already stated, desired more. Her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not even by a "few people." Cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. Mrs. Murchison longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. It was very nice to have the Prince asking after your dachshund's cough, but she had got past that.

These things passed vaguely through Miss Murchison's mind, as she and Toby ate their ices. He was like a whiff of fresh air, she thought, to one who had been breathing a close and vitiated atmosphere. He did not ask her where she had been last night, and where she had dined to-day, and who was in the Park in the morning. He seemed to be as little of the world which danced and capered in the next room, chattering volubly about itself, as she was herself. On that point she would like information.

"Do you like London?" she asked, at length, and then thought herself inane for saying that. It sounded like one of the banalités she found so desperately stupid.

But Toby understood. He had just finished his ice, and with his spoon he made a comprehensive circle in the air. "This sort of thing, do you mean?" he asked. "All these fine people?"

"Yes, just that. All these fine people."

"It seems to me perfectly idiotic," he replied.

"Then why do you come?"

"Why? Oh, because there are a lot of people I really do like—real friends of mine, you understand, whom I see in this way. And they come for the same reason, I suppose."

Lily looked at him a moment out of her big dark eyes, and then nodded gravely.

"Yes, that makes all the difference," she said. "If you have a lot of friends here, there is a reason for coming. But——" and she stopped loyally.

Toby guessed what was on the end of her tongue, and with a certain instinct of delicacy changed the subject, or rather led it away from what he imagined was in her mind.

"I know what you mean," he said, "and everyone finds it a bore at times. One goes to a party hoping to see a particular person, and the particular person is not there. Really, I often wish I was never in London at all. But, you see, I am private secretary to my cousin Pangbourne, and while they are in office and the House is sitting I have to be in town. What would happen to the British Constitution if I wasn't, I don't dare to think."

Miss Murchison laughed.

"That must be interesting, though," she said. "I should love to be in the middle of the wheels. I notice in England that a sudden hush always comes over a room whenever a politician enters. Somebody describes the English as a race of shopkeepers. It is a very bad definition; they are much more a race of politicians. The shopkeepers come from America."

Toby shook his head.

"I wish I could notice a hush whenever I came into a room," he said. "I should feel as if I was making a mark. But I don't."

"But it is interesting, is it not?" asked Miss Murchison—"being secretary to a Minister, I mean."

Toby considered.

"Last week," he said, "I looked over the bills for the flowers in Hyde Park. They were immense, so I hope you approve of the flowers. I also checked the food of the ducks in St. James's Park, so I hope you do not think they are looking thin. Those ducks are the bane of my existence. Since then I have done nothing. My cousin comes into the secretaries' room every morning to see that we are working. He invariably finds us playing cricket with the fire-shovel. I am usually in."

"That also is interesting," said Miss Murchison. "I love games. Oh, there's my mother! I think she is looking for me."

"But I may have this dance?" asked Toby.

"I am sure she would allow me," said the girl; and as they both thought of her mother's feverish acceptance for her of the last, their eyes met.

"Let us go," said Toby gravely; and he gave her his arm back into the ballroom.

Miss Murchison, when she left half an hour later with her mother, was conscious of having enjoyed herself much more than she usually did at such parties. For the most part they seemed to her sad and strange forms of amusement. She danced with a certain number of young men, who admired her pearls or her profile. It is true that both were admirable, especially her profile. But to talk to them was like talking to order through a telephone; it seemed impossible to get beyond the banalités of the day. She was labelled, as she knew, as the heiress of the year; and it was as difficult to forget that as to forget that other people remembered it. No doubt when she got to know people more intimately it would be different; but these first weeks of débutancy could not, she thought, be considered amusing.

But Toby had been a most delightful change. Here was an ordinary human young man, who did not seem to be merely a weary automaton for going from one party to another. He was fairly stupid—an unutterable relief; for if there was one mode of conversation she detested, it was cheap epigram; and he was quite sensible and natural, a relief more unutterable.

Her mother drove home with her in a state of elation. The mystic innermost shrine was going to be unlocked at last.

"Lady Conybeare said that simply no one was coming to-morrow night," she said. "We shall be six or eight only. Lord Comber, I think, is coming, and Lord Evelyn. It will be quite an arcanum. She said she would wear only a tea-gown—I should say a tea-gown only. So chic. We will have a little tea-gown party before the end of the season, dear. You and Lord Evelyn quite hobnailed together. Did you enjoy yourself, Lily?"

"Yes, very much."

"So glad, darling. I saw no pearls so good as yours. Wear them to-morrow, dear. Lady Conybeare said she adored pearls. 'Ah, Margerita!'" And Mrs. Murchison hummed a bar or two of Siebel's song in a variety of keys. "And the evening after we go to see 'Tristram and Isolde,'" she continued. "It is a gala night, and Jean de Risky plays Tristram. How lucky we were to get the box next the royal box! I hope it won't be very hot, for I hear that everybody stops to the end in 'Tristram.' There is a Leitmotif—or is it Liebstod?—at the end, which is quite marvellous, I am told. However, we can go late. I hope it will be in Italian. Italian is the only language for singing. I remember when I was a girl I used to sing 'La donna è nobile.' I forget who wrote it; those Italian names are so alike. And what did you talk to Lord Evelyn about, dear? Was he amusing? We might ask him to our box on Thursday to see 'Tristram.'"

"I don't think he cares about Wagner," said Lily; "indeed, he told me so."

"How very unfashionable! We all like Wagner now. Personally I think it is quite enchanting; but it always sends me fast asleep, though I enjoy it very much until. But there is a great sameness in the operas; they are like those novels I used to read by Mrs. Austen—'Sense and Sensibleness,' and all the rest of them about Bath and other watering-places. I thought them very tedious; but I was told one must read them. Or was it Sir George Eliot who wrote them? Dear me, how stupid of me! Sir George was there to-night, and I never once thought of telling him how much I enjoyed his charming novels!"

"George Eliot was a woman," remarked Lily, leaning back in her corner, tremulous with heroically-repressed amusement.

"You may be right, dear; but it isn't a common name for a woman. Of course, there's George Sand. But if you are right, how lucky I did not speak about his novels to Sir George! He would not have liked being mistaken for someone else. Some of those literary men are so sensitive."

"But, you see, he did not write any of those novels," said Lily, with a sudden little spasm of laughter.

"No, dear, that is just what I was saying. How you catch one up! My dearest, I am so glad you enjoyed yourself this evening. Sometimes I have thought you looked a little bored and tired. Really, London is charming! So much jeu d'esprit about it, is there not? And to-morrow we dine at Lady Conybeare's! How pleasant, and what a wonderful dress she had on this evening! She made me feel quite a dodo—I should say a dowdy."

Lily broke into a sudden peal of laughter, and her mother beamed good-humouredly.

"Laughing again at your poor mother," she said, patting her hand. "You are always laughing, Lily; you are a perfect fille de joie. Dear me! I'm always saying the wrong word. Here we are, darling. Get out very carefully, because my dress is all over."

Lily stepped out into a perfect mob of powdered footmen who lined the steps of the Murchison mansion. Mrs. Murchison, when she took her house, gave what she called bête noire to a celebrated firm of London decorators (meaning, it is to be supposed, carte blanche) to make it as elegant and refined as money could. The result was an impression of extraordinary opulence; and the eminent firm of decorators, wise in their generation, had pleased Mrs. Murchison very well. Not the smallest part of her gratification was the immense sum she had to pay them. Money meant almost nothing to her, but it meant a good deal to other people; and to be able to say truthfully that one ceiling had cost a couple of thousand pounds was a solid cause of self-congratulation. Indeed, the contemplation of the cheque she had drawn pleased her nearly as much as what the cheque had accomplished.

She paused a moment in the hall, while one footman took off her cloak and handed it to another, and looked contentedly round on the stamped leather and the old oak, the Louis XIV. chairs, the Nankin ware, and the Persian rugs; and her mind went back for a second to the days of pitch-pine and horsehair, and in her excellent heart there rose a sudden thrill of thankfulness. Lily was already on the stairs, and her mother's eye followed her, and rested there so long that the third footman had closed the door, and stood to attention, waiting for her to move. And one hair of Lily's head was dearer to her than all the old oak and the opulence and the powdered footmen. She gave a heavy sigh, all mother.

"Put the lights out, William," she said, "or is it Thomas?"

[CHAPTER VII]

THE SOLITARY FINANCIER

Mr. Alington had not been present at the ball at the Hungarian Embassy, although Kit had taken the trouble to get him an invitation. By the evening mail had come a long report from his Australian manager, and as the report required considerable digestion, he, as always, put business before pleasure, especially since he did not dance, and devoted the evening to digesting it. It was all a report should be, concise, clear, and full, and since he had hitherto known very little, technically speaking, about his new venture, it demanded long and solitary consideration. There was a very careful map sent with it, drawn to scale, with the reef where found marked in red, where conjectured in yellow.

West Australian mining at this time was but in its infancy. A few reports only had reached England about unexplored goldfields of extraordinary richness, and, as is incident to first reports, they had gained but slender credence. But Mr. Alington had only just come back from Queensland; he had seen gold-bearing quartz, he had made a few tentative experiments to prove the richness of the ore, and had subsequently bought a very large number of claims at a comparatively low cost. Some of these he fully expected would turn out to be worthless, or scarcely worth the working; others he soberly believed would be found to be very rich. And when he opened his manager's report on the night of the Hungarian ball, he had no more certain information about them.

The manager advised, consonantly with Alington's own desire, that a group of five mines should be started, which together embraced all his claims. In number one (see map) there was, as Alington would recollect, a very rich vein of gold, which had now been traced in bore-holes through numbers four and five. Numbers two and three were outliers from the direct line of this vein, but in both a good deal of outcrop gold might be profitably worked. All, so said the manager, were, as far as could be at present seen, well worth working, for the two on which the deeper vein did not lie had gold in smaller veins close to the surface, which could be got at with comparatively little cost. It was not yet known whether there was any deeper vein in them.

Then followed a good deal of technical advice. The main difficulty, as Mr. Alington would remember, was water, and they must be prepared for heavy expenses in this item. But otherwise the property could not be better. Of the specimens sent at random for examination, those from numbers one, four, and five were very rich, and the yield appeared to be not less than five ounces to the ton. This was very high, but such were the results. The reef from which they were taken was five feet thick. Then followed some discussion as to processes; there was certainly much to be said for cyanide, but he would not recommend corrosion. It was tediously long, and there was some talk of prohibiting women from being employed in it. Certainly the white lead produced by it would bring it under the head of dangerous trades. In numbers two and three the ore was very refractory, and it was curious to find a vein so difficult in the matter of gold extraction close by the vein of one, four, and five. Hitherto, in spite of repeated experiments, they had only been able to recover 20 per cent. of the gold it contained. But a new process was being tried in certain mines in the Rand—the Bülow, was it not?—perhaps Mr. Alington would go into it and cable results. The worst of these chemical processes was that they were so expensive.

Mr. Alington looked more than ever like a butler of superior benevolence, as he sat at his table by a green-shaded reading-lamp, and made himself master of this excellent report. As he read, he inscribed from time to time neat little notes in pencil on the margin of the page, and from time to time jotted down some figures on his blotting-pad. His rooms, above a gunmaker's in St. James's Street—a temporary premise only—were admirably furnished for the wants of a business man of refined tastes and simple desires. A large revolving bookcase full of works of reference stood at his elbow, and a telephone was on the table before him. He was something of a connoisseur in pictures, and in his house on the Sussex Downs, to which he was extensively adding, he had a really fine collection of English masters. But the London fogs and corrosive smoke spelled death to pigments, and here in his modest quarters in London he had only prints. But these were truly admirable. Reynolds' Lady Crosby undulated over the fireplace; Lady Hamilton smiled irresistibly on him from under her crown of vine leaves if he looked at the opposite wall; by her sat Marie Antoinette in an old-gold frame of French work, and Mrs. Siddons was a first state with the coveted blotted edge.

But to-night Mr. Alington had no eye for these enchanting ladies; he sat long and studiously with the report in front of him, his broad, intelligent face alert with his work. From time to time he reached out a firm, plump hand to take a cigarette from a silver box which stood by his telephone, but often he sat with it unlit for ten minutes or so, absorbed in the page; or, again, he would put it down still only half smoked, as he made one of his little calculations, forget about it, and reach his hand out absently for another. In this way before midnight there were some half-dozen in his ash-tray scarcely touched. A spirit-case and a siphon stood on a tray to his right, and an hour before he had mixed himself a mild whisky-and-soda, which he had not yet tasted.

The silver bell of his Sèvres clock had already struck one when he took up the report, folded it carefully, and put it back in its registered envelope. The map, however, he spread out on the table in front of him, and continued to study it very attentively for ten minutes more. That, too, he then put in the envelope, and, leaning back in his chair, lit a cigarette in earnest and smoked it through. He was a little short-sighted, and for reading, particularly at night, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a scholastic, almost a theologian aspect. But these had long ago been pushed up on his forehead; the theologian had evidently some great matter in debate.

At length he rose, still slowly, and stood for a moment in profound thought. Then, with a sudden briskness, as of a man who had made up his mind, he took the envelope, and, putting it into a drawer in his knee-hole table, turned the key upon it.

"It will be one of the very biggest deals," he remarked to himself.

A grand piano by Bechstein stood at the other side of the room, and Bach's St. Matthew Passion Music was open upon it. Mr. Alington took it up and turned over the pages with a loving reverence. He paused a moment, and hummed in his beautiful tenor voice the recitative of "And Peter went out," and then, lighting the candles, played a few crescendo chords, and plunged into the intricacies of the great double chorus of the lightnings and thunders. The sonorous and terrible fugue grew and grew under his deft hands, rising from crescendo to crescendo with its maddened, tumultuous ground-bass. A pause of a bar, and with a great burst he attacked the second part. He sang the air of "the bottomless pit" with full voice, while his hands quivered mistily in the frenzied chromatic accompaniment. The appalling terrors of the music possessed him; he seemed like a man demented. In the last six bars he doubled the bass as if written for pedals, and with the tierce de Picardy finished in a crashing chord.

Mr. Alington pushed his rather scanty hair back from his forehead and gave a great sigh full of reverential awe, the sigh of a religious artist. He was a true musician, and his own admirable performance of the wonderful text moved him; it smelled of the flames. Then after a moment he turned to the last chorus, the most perfect piece of pathos ever translated into sound, and played it through with all the reticence and sobriety of his utmost art. The wailing cadences, the simple phrases, touched him profoundly. Unlike Mrs. Murchison, he did not consider himself bound to worship Wagner, although the operas did not sound to him the least alike. He would have told you that he thought him artistically immoral, that he violated the canons of music, as binding, so he considered, on musicians as is the moral code on a civilized society. "A brilliant savage," he said once of that master; "but I know I am unfashionable."

He sat for a long minute perfectly still when he had finished the chorus, as absorbed in the thought of it as he had been in the mines half an hour before. Unaffected moisture stood in the man's eye; his face was that of a stout and rapturous saint in a stained-glass window contemplating some beatific vision. He was alone, and perfectly honest with himself. At length he shut the piano very softly, as if afraid of disturbing the exquisite sweetness and melancholy beauty of the music by any other sound, and, candle in hand, went to his bedroom. An admirable reproduction of Holman Hunt's "Lux Mundi" hung over his fireplace; the "Triumph of the Innocents" was directly above his anchorite-looking bed. They were favourite pictures of his, not only for their subject, but for the genuineness of their feeling. They seemed to him to have grasped something of the simplicity of the real pre-Raphaelite school—something of its soberness, its constant love of form, its childlike straightforwardness. There was an old oak prie-dieu by his bedside, with several well-thumbed books of devotion on it, and he knelt there a full ten minutes before he got into bed. He was thankful for many things—his health, his wealth, his perseverance, his brains, his power of appreciating beautiful things; and he prayed for their long continuance and well-being fervently.

Mr. Alington was a sound sleeper and an early riser, and neither his new and dizzy schemes nor the pathos of the Passion Music kept him awake. He had various appointments in the City on the following morning, and was going to lunch with Lord Conybeare at White's. Jack was not there when he arrived, and he had to solace his waiting moments with the inspection of the room set aside for the reception of strangers. It was furnished with a table, on which stood an empty inkstand and a carafe of stale-looking water, two horsehair chairs, a weighing-machine, and a row of hat pegs hung up inside a shelfless bookcase. He hoped, however, that he would not in the future have to confine himself to the stranger's room when he made an appointment there, since Jack had put him up for the membership of the club, got Tom Abbotsworthy to second him, and had induced a large number of members to append their noble names to his candidature.

Jack came in before long, looking as he always looked, even in the most broiling weather—perfectly cool, unharassed, and ill to quarrel with. He never seemed to get either hot or dirty, even in the underground; smuts passed him by, and settled on the noses of his less fortunate neighbours.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "Let us have lunch at once. You have not been here long, I hope."

"Only a few moments," said Alington; "and I fancy I was here before my time."

"A fine habit," murmured Jack. "How punctual we should be between us!"

They entered the dining-room, which was rather empty, and took their seat at a small table a little removed from other lunchers.

"I did not see you last night at the Embassy," said Jack. "I thought you were sure to be there. Kit told me she had an invitation sent you, and busy men like you always seem to have time for everything."

"One has all the time there is," said Alington; "and I meant to go. But the mail brought me news—important news from Australia."

"Indeed? Good news, I hope."

"Excellent news. We shall very soon require your services."

"Ah! What will you drink?"

"Thanks, I never touch wine at lunch. A little water, please. I am a bit of an ascetic in certain ways. Yes, the news was excellent. I shall get out a prospectus at once, and float the companies. Out of the five mines, the same reef, a very rich one, runs through three. The other two are outliers from this reef, but there appears to be a good deal of surface gold. They ought to begin paying at once almost. I propose making two groups out of these five mines—one comprising the outliers, the other three the main reef. Or we might amalgamate them later. I strongly recommend your purchasing these outliers in large quantities. That, at least, is what I intend to do myself."

Jack laughed.

"It is easy to recommend my making large purchases," he said; "and I wonder if I could run up a bill for them. But circumstances over which I have long ceased to have any control——"

Mr. Alington held up his large white hand.

"You will not need to cover," he said. "Pay the first call, or, at most, the first two calls. I assure you that that will be all that is necessary. Unless I am much more mistaken than I have ever been in my life, the price will rise very soon and very considerably. You must remember that you draw a salary as a director. If you wish, I will advance that for this year."

"That would be very convenient," observed Jack with truth and candour.

"The first call will be half a crown," continued Alington. "A thousand pounds will thus enable you to command eight thousand shares."

"It is a long time since I have had eight thousand anythings," remarked Jack; "Of course, I don't count debts. I never count debts. But what will happen to me if the shares do not go up?"

"The shares will go up," said Alington dryly. "I should advise you to put yourself entirely in my hands about this. I simply cannot be wrong. As a director, you are bound to hold shares. I recommend you to put the greater part of them into these two outlying mines."

"I ask nothing better than to be guided by you," said Jack. "Many thanks for the hint."

Mr. Alington waved the thanks away, as if they were disproportionately large to the favour bestowed.

"And I should like to have a meeting of the directors on Tuesday," he said, "if that will suit you and Lord Abbotsworthy. I am going to see him this afternoon. I propose to employ my own brokers, men whom I have dealt with for years."

By degrees the room filled up, and, as the tables near them had begun to be occupied, they dismissed for the present the subject of the mines. Jack was more than content to leave his own financial venture in Alington's hands, for he felt convinced that he was playing fair with him. Habitually somewhat cynical, he would have thought twice about going bail for his most intimate acquaintance; but he believed that Alington, as he himself candidly said, was acting for his own interests in making it worth a Marquis's while to join the board. About Alington's ability he had found no two opinions; extensive inquiries showed him that on all hands he was considered the shrewdest of the shrewd. The market had already got hints about the new issue, and was waiting with some impatience for the publication of its prospectus. And the interest extended far beyond the professional operators; the British public, as Alington had said, were nearly ripe to go mad on the subject of Australian gold, and he had chosen his moment well.

[CHAPTER VIII]

THE SIMPLY NOBODY

The "quiet dinner, simply nobody," to which Kit had invited the gratified Mrs. Murchison and her daughter the night before had grown like a rolling snowball during the hours of the Hungarian ball. If you are having a quiet dinner, one more does not make any difference or change the character of the entertainment, and there had been many such. Among others, Kit had met Alice Haslemere in the Park next morning, and the latter had made an appeal ad misericordiam to her.

"I am bidden to meet a Serene Transparency or a Transparent Serenity of some sort to-night," she had said. "Who? Oh, some second-class little royalty made in Germany, and I don't intend to go, and have said so. I gave an excuse, Kit; I gave you as my excuse, because you are a sort of privileged person, and even royalty lets you do as you choose. How do you manage it, dear? I wish you would tell me. Anyhow, I said that you asked me to dine to-night six weeks ago. You see, I owe you one over that disingenuous way you treated me about Jack and the baccarat. So you did ask me, didn't you?"

Kit slowed down; she was riding a white bicycle picked out with crimson.

"Seven weeks ago, Alice," she said; "and if you had forgotten I should never have forgiven you. Quite quietly, you know; and so we are quits. Lady Conybeare's dinner," she said with some ceremony, "will be served as usual at eight-thirty."

They were both riding the wrong side of the road, and Lady Haslemere cast an offended look at her father's coachman, who did not recognise her, and made way for the carriage.

"I knew it was an old, old engagement," she said, with feeling. "And who is coming? I forget; it is so long since you told me."

"Murchison mère et fille," said Kit; "and the fille is going to marry Toby. You just see. Also Ted and Toby and the baccarat man. Jack is very thick with him just now, and my ladyship smells money. Oh, Alice, we might play baccarat again to-night; I was thinking that it would be rather tiresome having to play gooseberry to Toby all the evening, but a hand at cards would help to pass the time, would it not? Let's see, baccarat is the game where you have to try and get nine, isn't it? How pleasant! There are some other people coming, too, and there will probably be more before evening. I notice that when there are dinners for Transparencies people ask me to ask them. I am a sort of refuge from royalty."

"Yes, and how transparent!" remarked Lady Haslemere.

"Isn't it? and what a bad joke! But wear a tea-gown, Alice, because I told Mrs. M. to do so. Yes, we'll play detectives on the Alington this evening. I hope he'll cheat again. It must be so amusing to be a real detective. I think I shall become one if all else fails. And most things have failed."

"To see if shopping takes so long, and whether the club accounts for late hours," quoted Lady Haslemere, with a touch of regret. "But, Kit, what a blessing it is that one does not feel bound to watch one's husband! Haslemere is so safe, you know; one might as well watch St. Paul's Cathedral to see if it flirted with St. Mary Magdalene's. It would bore me to death watching him. Only once have I seen him at all excited."

"Who was the happy lady?" asked Kit, with interest.

"It wasn't a lady at all—not even me. It was a wire puzzle, and he said it was mathematically impossible, and woke me up about three in the morning to tell me so. He was really quite feverish about it. But in demonstrating to me how impossible it was he accidentally did it, upon which he became perfectly normal, and we lived happily ever afterwards."

They turned into the road north of the Serpentine by the Achilles statue, and quickened their pace.

"One always does live happily ever afterwards," said Kit thoughtfully. "Truth is quite as strange as fiction. There's the old Duchess—what a cat! And just look at her wig all sideways! But I am also thankful that one's husband is not a detective. Jack would make such a bad one. I should be ashamed of him."

"I suppose he would. He is clever," said Alice, "and criminals are so short-sighted. They make the obvious mistakes. But Jack would make a ripping criminal."

"That is just it. As a detective Jack would overlook the obvious things because they are so obvious. Consequently, he would never find out anything, because criminals always make stupid mistakes, not clever ones. Jack never found out that the mine man cheated at baccarat, for instance. Oh, I forgot, you guessed that. Look, there's Ted. How badly he rides!"

"And he never finds out about Ted," remarked Lady Haslemere, with extreme dryness.

"Never. You see, there's nothing to find out. I always tell him what a darling Ted is, and so he never thinks he is a darling. I'm very fond of Ted, but—but—— After all, frankness pays better than anything else, especially when you have nothing to conceal."

Lady Haslemere considered the proposition for a moment, but found nothing to say about it.

"How is the mine man?" she asked abruptly.

"Green bay-trees. So he must be wicked. A few nights ago, when he dined with us, I asked him to sing after dinner, and he sang a sort of evening hymn in four sharps. Don't you know the kind? He has a really beautiful voice, and it nearly made me cry, I felt so regretful for something I had forgotten. Now, that shows he must be wicked. Good people only make me yawn, because they try and adapt themselves to me and talk about worldly things. And it is only wicked people who sing hymns with real feeling, who make me want to cry. Luckily, they are rare."

"And the mines?" asked Alice.

"Well, Jack is excited about the mines, like Haslemere with the wire puzzle, and when Jack is excited it means a good deal. He told me that if things went decently we should be solvent again—it sounds like a chemical—in fact, the mines are playing up. For to make Jack and me solvent, Alice, means a lot."

They had reached the Serpentine, and Kit dismounted and rested by the rails. It was a typically fine June day. The sky was cloudless, the trees were comparatively green, large wood-pigeons wandered fatly about, and childlike old gentlemen were sailing miniature yachts across the water.

"What a pity one is not a person of simple pleasures!" remarked Lady Haslemere. "There is an old gentleman there who takes more delight in his silly little boat than you do in the prospect of solvency, or Haslemere even in a new wire puzzle. How happy he must be and how dull! I think dulness is really synonymous with happiness. Think of cows! You never found an absorbing cow, nor an unhappy one. The old gentleman has eaten a good breakfast; he will eat a good lunch. And he has probably got a balance at his bank."

"It's all stomach," said Kit regretfully—"all except the balance, I mean."

"Yes, that's what it comes to. So we shall play detectives to-night, Kit."

Kit started; she was absorbed in the toy yacht.

"Detectives? Oh, certainly," she replied. "But I almost wish we were wrong about the whole concern."

"The mine man cheated," said Alice, with decision. "I was thinking of asking Tom whether he saw."

"Oh, don't do that," said Kit. "We don't want a scandal. Look!"

A squall shattered the reflections in the calm water, and the old gentleman's toy yacht bowed to it and skimmed off like a swallow.

"Oh, how nice!" cried Kit, who was rapidly taking the colour of her surroundings. "Alice, shall we save up our money and buy a little toy yacht? Think how happy we should be!"

"If you are going to play the milkmaid, Kit," said Alice severely, "I shall go home. I won't play milkmaid for anybody. Playing gooseberry to Toby is nothing to it."

Kit sighed.

"Dear old gentleman!" she said. "Alice, I would give anything to be an old gentleman with white whiskers and a silly little yacht. Yes, I know, it is an impossible dream. About the baccarat, what were you saying?"

"I have things to say, if you will be so kind as to attend. Try to forget about your white whiskers, Kit."

"Yes, I will. There were no such white whiskers."

"Last night," said Lady Haslemere, "I lost two hundred and forty pounds and sixpence."

"How sixpence? What small stakes you must have been playing! Was it the game where you try to get nine?"

"Yes," said Alice, "and I lost the sixpence because I dropped it on the floor. I don't know how I got it, and I don't know what happened to it."

"Like Melchisedech," put in Kit.

"Exactly. Anyhow, I dropped it, and it just shows what extraordinary people people are. We all took candles and grovelled on the ground looking for that sixpence. Losing it annoyed me more than I can say. I didn't care so much about the rest."

"I should have cared much more," said Kit very fervently. "But you are quite right. And it explains to a certain extent how a very rich man like Mr. Alington can cheat over a few shillings."

"I dreamed about the sixpence too," said Alice. "I thought my salvation depended on it."

Kit did not reply at once.

"That seems inexpensive," she said at length. "I would go as far as that. Look at the yacht—oh, I forgot, I mustn't look at the yacht. Alice, I believe these mines are a big affair. Jack got up this morning at nine in order to be in the City by half-past eight, and it takes a lot to make him as punctual as that. Are you going to take a hand in them?"

"I want to, but Tom says no. He says he has more opportunity of judging, or something tedious, and will make enough for us both. He is willing to invest for me, but that is no fun."

"That is so like Jack," said Kit. "He wants me to have nothing to do with the mines. He expects to make enough for two, which is absurd, considering that nobody can possibly make enough for one. But I shall call myself Miss de Rougemont, spinster, care of the Daily Chronicle, or something, and so invest."

"Have you got a little nest-egg, dear?" asked Alice sympathetically. "How nice! I always have, but the stupid cards ate a big piece of the yolk last night."

"I know; they do. But, on the other hand, they fill it up again. I expect most women have nest-eggs of some sort. It may be money, or virtue, or vice, or secrets. Well, I'm going to drop mine slap into the Australian goldfields."

"I intend to be cautious," said Lady Haslemere. "But just to spite Tom I shall risk something. Tom was most tiresome and interfering. He says women know nothing about business. A lot he knows himself! If I had to pick out one man eminently unfitted to be director of anything, it would be Tom."

"I can't have Jack left out in the cold like that," said Kit.

"They are a pretty pair. Tom's honest; that is all that can be said for him."

Kit screamed with laughter.

"I bet you that Jack is as honest as Tom," she said. "But that is just the way with your family, dear. They all think that they have a monopoly of the cardinal virtues, just as Mr. Leiter thought he could have a corner in corn. But, seriously, I do hope and trust that Alington's mines are sound. Think how the Radical papers would shout if something—well, if something untoward happened. Salaries, you know! Supposing the British public dropped a lot of money and there was an inquiry? Personally, I think Jack is rash to be chairman. He is paid for his name—he knows that perfectly well; but directors are supposed to be dimly responsible. And his boss cheats at baccarat! Also I think he shouldn't have a salary as director; that doesn't look well."

"That will surely be periphrased in the accounts, won't it?" asked Alice.

"I hope so; periphrasis covers a multitude of cheques."

They had got round to Hyde Park Corner again, and rode slowly through the gate into the roaring street. Kit's eye brightened at the sight of life; she forgot about her dream of white whiskers.

"I think gold-mines are an excellent form of gambling," remarked Alice. "You can play directly after breakfast. Now, one can't play cards directly after breakfast. I tried the other day, but it was a hopeless failure. Even naturals looked horrid by daylight."

"Gold-mines are a tonic," said Kit "You take them after breakfast like Easton's syrup, and they pick you up wonderfully. You should see how brisk Jack is getting in the morning."

"Well, au revoir, dear. Half-past eight, isn't it? May Tom come too?"

"Oh yes, and Haslemere if you like," said Kit, turning up Park Lane.

"I don't like," called out Alice shrilly, going straight on.

Kit giggled at intervals all the way home.

Mrs. Murchison's cup of happiness was very full that evening. Though the quiet little dinner had grown about eighteen, yet everyone was of Kit's own particular set, and it was what Kit called a "Christian dinner"—that is to say, everyone called each other by their Christian names. "So much nicer than a heathen dinner," she said to Mrs. Murchison. "You may meet cannibals there."

Mrs. Murchison herself was taken in by Tom Abbotsworthy, and it is doubtful which of them enjoyed their conversation most. She was enchanted to find herself with him, and her own remarks were really memorable.

"I just adore English society," she said over the first mouthfuls of soup. "Our brightest talkers in America cannot be compared with the ordinary clubmen in London. And the dinners, how charming!"

"You find people amusing?" asked Tom.

"Yes, and the substantiality of it. Not only the viands and the drinks, but the really improving conversation—the—the tout à fait."

Tom had the greatest of all social gifts—gravity.

"You think people have less tout à fait in America?" he asked.

"There's none of it; and now I come to think of it, I mean tout ensemble. How quick of you to see what I meant! But that's just it. My heart—and I told Mr. Murchison so the first time I saw him—is English. My head may be American, but my heart is English. Those were my words, ipse dixit."

"Very remarkable," said Tom.

"The air of dignity," continued Mrs. Murchison (soup always thawed her), "and the simile of tastes which I find in England! The wealth without ostensity—I should say ostentiousness! The solid comfort and no gimcrackiness!"

"I am afraid you will find plenty of gimcrackiness if you go to the suburbs," said Tom.

"I haven't yet projected any trips to the suburbs," said Mrs. Murchison with some dignity.

"Of course not. The proper definition of suburbs is the place to which one does not go. They are merely a negative geographical expression."

"Well, I'm an Anglophobe," said Mrs. Murchison with conviction; "and I believe nothing against England, not even its suburbs. But what would you say, Lord Abbotsworthy, was the main tendency of the upper classes in England?"

Tom was slightly puzzled.

"Tendency in what line?" he asked.

"By tendency I mean the direction in which they are advancing?"

"We are advancing towards America," he replied, after a moment's thought. "That is where our fiction goes, and that is whence our inventions come."

Mrs. Murchison dropped a large truffle off her fork, and remained a moment with it poised.

"I guess that's deep," she said. "I shall cable that to Mr. Murchison."

Tom wondered silently whether Mr. Murchison would be as much puzzled by it as he was himself; but his wife proceeded to elucidate.

"The fictions are the inventions, you mean," she said. "The one goes to where the other comes from. The oneness of the two countries, in fact. The brightest thing I've heard this summer," she observed.

Tom was lost in contemplation at the thought of the deep gloom in which all else that Mrs. Murchison had heard this summer must be involved, and he was grateful when that lady, after a reflective pause on his dazzling remark, changed the subject.

"What a lovely man Lord Evelyn is!" she said.

"Lord Evelyn? Oh, Toby! Yes, he's an excellent fellow."

"By lovely, I do not refer to his personal appearance," said Mrs. Murchison, "for that is homely. But by lovely I refer to his happy and amiable disposition."

"You have hit him off completely," said Tom. "Happy and amiable is just what Toby is."

Mrs. Murchison's mind went off for a moment on a maternal excursion at the sight of Lily and Toby, who were talking eagerly together, but came quickly back again.

"And the vivacity at present depicted in his face is considerable," went on Mrs. Murchison in a burst of analytic intuition. "I just adore vivacity. Vivacity without screaming, Lord Abbotsworthy, is what I just adore. Mr. Murchison is very vivacious; but to hear him when he is being vivacious, why,—you'd think he had the chicken-pox—I should say whooping-cough."

"That must be very alarming until you are used to it," said Tom.

"It is that. And the choking fit which sometimes ensues on his hilarity—why, I have seen times and again his life hung by a hair, like the sword of Demosthenes at Belshazzar's feast."

Mrs. Murchison delivered herself of this surprising allusion with the most touching confidence. She liked a well-turned sentence, and repeated it softly to herself.

"Such anxieties are inseparable from the union of the married life," said Tom in a voice that trembled slightly.

Kit from the other side of the table had just burst out into a loud meaningless laugh, and he suspected that she had overheard.

"That's what I say," answered Mrs. Murchison; "and that's what the Prayer-Book says. The joys and the sorrows; the opportunities and the importunities."

This was slightly cryptic, but it was probable that importunity was to be taken as the opposite of opportunity. Tom chanced it, though he did not seem to remember anything in the Prayer-book which suggested the widest parallel to Mrs. Murchison's quotation. She went ahead in such a surprising manner in conversation that it was really difficult to keep up. She positively scoured the plains of thought.

"You find the opportunities, I am sure, much more numerous than the importunities," he said, faint, yet pursuing. "Yes, champagne."

"And that's just beautifully put, Lord Abbotsworthy," said Mrs. Murchison.

The tide of conversation changed, and set to opposite sides. Toby and Lily alone refused to obey the action of the tide, as if they were a rebel moon, which demanded a system of its own, refusing allegiance elsewhere, and continued to talk, regardless of the isolated unit they left on each side of them. Mrs. Murchison, who liked the agreeable hovering of the mind over first one subject and then another, which reminded her, she said, of the way in which the puma birds in the Southern States sucked honey from various flowers without alighting, was instantly involved in a sort of double-barrelled conversation with Lord Comber about the check system of baggage, and the relative position of women in England and the United States of America.

As dinner went on conversation became louder and more desultory. No one listened particularly to what anyone else was saying; the tendency for everyone to talk at once (this may have been the tendency of the upper classes which Mrs. Murchison had inquired about) became more marked, and the inimitable atmosphere of laughter was abroad. At Kit's house everyone always left the dining-room together as soon as cigarettes were handed round, for her excellent social sense told her that when people were getting on well (and at her house they always did), it was absurd for a party to go through the refrigerating process of isolation of the sexes, and waste time in thawing again. Besides, she considered it obsolete for men to sit over wine; nobody ever drank now, it was only in England that so absurd a form was kept up.

Some of the party were going on to a vague elsewhere, and Mrs. Murchison's eye caught Lily's soon after ten. She was most anxious on this first occasion not to outstay her welcome.

"It's been just too charming, Lady Conybeare," she said; "but Lily and I must go. We've got to go here and there, on and on till morning."

Kit rose. Her plan was prospering, for Lily and Toby were still talking together, and she felt particularly pleased with herself and everybody else.

"Too unkind of you to go," she said; "and if you don't come to see us again very soon, now that you know the way, I shan't forgive you. Send me a line any day and come to lunch. I am almost always in for lunch. And has Toby been making himself pleasant, Miss Murchison? He can when he likes. I saw him shaking with laughter at something you were telling him at dinner, and I longed to shout across the table and ask what it was. Good-night! Too tiresome that you have to go! Conybeare and I are going to be very domestic this evening, and not set one foot out, but sit and play cat's-cradle together when the others have gone. Mind, I only let you go under the distinct understanding that you will come back very soon, unless we've bored you both beyond forgiveness."

Jack went down with them to the front-door, and Kit as far as the head of the stairs, where she kissed her hand and looked regretfully after them, with her head a little on one side. As she expected, Mrs. Murchison gave one backward glance as she went out, and Kit kissed her hand again, smiling. Then, as soon as the front-door closed, she hurried back in a brisk business-like manner to join the others.

[CHAPTER IX]

THE PLOT MISCARRIES

Some ten or twelve people only remained in the drawing-room when Kit returned, for several had taken their departure before the Murchisons, and Toby seemed to be a target at which was being fired some straight, hard chaff. As usual, he was looking serene and pleasant, but it seemed to Kit that his smile at this moment was more the result of habit than of any entertainment that the chaff afforded him.

"Toby has made an impression," explained Alice, "and he's too modest to acknowledge it."

"Dear Toby, you made an excellent impression," said Kit, taking his arm, as he stood rather hot and stiff under the chandelier. "I'm very much pleased with you, and I'll remember you in my will."

"If he'll promise to remember you in his!" said Jack, who had returned from speeding the parting guest. "That should be worth something."

"Answer them back, Toby," said Kit. "Hit out."

"A lovely man," said Tom, "but homely. A happy and amiable disposition."

"More than can be said for you, old chap," remarked Toby. "Tom, how gray you are getting!"

"Yes, I've no chance. But you are in luck, Toby. The girl is charming, and her mother is unique."

"I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about," said Toby, amid loud laughter and a shrill cat-call from Alice. "Well, I'm going, Kit. Good-night; and try to teach Tom manners."

And Toby, still smiling genially, went towards the door. But Kit retained his arm.

"Don't go, Toby," she said. "Stop and play a bit. You like baccarat. And don't mind what Tom says. You're a credit to the family."

"Toby will bring the family more credit," said Tom, in a low, audible voice to his sister.

"Tom, be quiet," said Alice. "When you try to chaff people, it is like an elephant dancing on eggshell china."

"Toby, Alice is calling you eggshell china. Lovely but homely."

"Awfully sorry, Kit," said Toby, "but I must go. I promised to go on to the Keynes'."

Now, it was to the Keynes' that the Murchisons had gone, and Kit knew it. She saw also that Toby had had enough of the subject, and, without any more efforts to detain him, especially since he was rather tiresome at baccarat, and always won. "Well, if you must go, you must," she said. "Let's see you again soon, old boy."

Toby smiled and nodded and left the room.

"Dear Toby!" said Kit, "it was hard luck on him. How could you say such things, Tom? It's serious. The poor boy is head over ears."

"There is a phenomenon in hypnotism called suggestion, Kit," he said, as she took a seat beside him. "If a thing is suggested to the subject, the suggestion is followed. Did you suggest it?"

"Oh, in a sort of way. But Toby isn't hypnotized; he's fascinated. I am delighted he takes it seriously. She is a sweet girl, and I would sooner have Toby for my husband than anyone. I shall get him to marry me when Jack dies, like the woman in the parable. Oh, they have just put out a little green table. How queer of them! And cards! Well, I suppose, as it is there—— You play baccarat, I think, Mr. Alington?"

Mr. Alington paused, as usual, before replying, and looked benevolently at Kit and Lady Haslemere in turn.

"I shall be delighted to play," he said. "I find it very soothing after a tiring day; one does not have to think at all. I used to play a good deal in Australia, and, dear me, yes! I had the pleasure of playing the other night at your house, Lady Haslemere. Odd games we used to have in Australia. One had to keep both eyes open to see that nobody cheated. Indeed, that was not very soothing work. I have seen five nines on the table before now, which really is an excessive number. Embarrassing almost."

He had the manner of taking everybody into his confidence, and as the others were standing together as he spoke, and he a few steps from them, he had an easy opportunity to look several people in the face. Kit and Alice again received a special share of his kind and intelligent glance, and, as he finished speaking, he laughed in his pleasant voice, as if with considerable inward amusement. So, when they sat down at the card-table, out of the dozen of them there were at least two disconcerted people present, for it was not certain whether Jack had heard.

"I think he scored," said Alice, in a low voice to Kit; and Kit looked impatient, and thought so too.

When they had all taken their seats, Alington was found, as Kit and Alice had wished (and he also, if they had known it), to be opposite them. There were a few moments' delay, as the table was lined, and, playing idly with the counters he had purchased, he looked up at them.

"It is so simple to cheat at baccarat, without the clumsy device of five nines," he said. "One need only lay one's stake just on the white line, neither over it nor behind it. Then, if you win, the slightest touch and the counters will go over, and it appears that you have staked; if not, you leave them as they are. A touch of the cards will do it. So!"

He put a couple of cards face upwards on the table, as if showing his hand, and as he did it, drew his stake over the line so gently and imperceptibly that it was impossible to see that the counters moved. Kit laughed, not very pleasantly. Her laughter sounded a trifle cracked.

"Take care, all of you!" she cried. "There is a brilliant sharper present. Mr. Alington, how stupid of you to tell us! You might have won all our money without any of us being the wiser."

Alington laughed, and Alice told Kit in a low voice not to lose her temper. Alington's laugh was a great contrast to Kit's, pleasant and amused.

"I make the company a present of the only safe way to cheat at baccarat," he said. "The bank? Ah, I see Lord Conybeare takes the bank."

Death and baccarat are great levellers, and Kit in her more sententious moments used to call the latter an escape from the trammels of civilization, and a return to the natural savage instincts. Certainly nothing can be simpler; the cave-men, provided they could count as far as nine, might have played at it. And, indeed, unalloyed gambling is not a bad second, considered as a leveller, to death itself. Rich men win, poor men lose; the Countess rubs shoulders (it is not meant that she did at Kit's house) with the cocotte; Jew spoils Jew, and Gentile Gentile. The simple turn of the cards is an affair as haphazard as life. If anyone, it must be the devil who knows where and when the nines will come up, and he is incorruptible on this point. The brute loses; the honest man wins; the honest man is made a pauper; the brute a millionaire. There is certainly something fascinating about what we call Luck. No virtue or vice invented by the asceticism or perverted corruptness of man has yet made a bait that she will take. Mathematicians tell us that she is purely mathematical; yet how emphatic a denial she gives to this shallow description of her if one tries to woo her on a system! One might as well make love on the prescriptions of the "Complete Letter-writer."

On this particular night she showed herself the opposite of all the epithets with which her unintelligent worshippers have plastered her. She is called fickle—she was a pattern of devotion; she is called changeable—she exhibited an immutable face. Wherever Alington sat, whether to the right or to the left of the dealer, or whether he took the bank himself, she favoured him with a fixed, unalterable smile, a smile nailed to her features, as if her photograph was being taken. Like the two-faced Jannet, as Mrs. Murchison had once called that heathen deity, she kept the benignant aspect for him.

Now, it is one of the rules without exception in this world, that nobody likes losing at cards. People have been heard to say that they do not like winning. This statement is certainly incorrect. It is possible to play an interesting set at tennis, an enjoyable round of golf, an entrancing football match, a really memorable game of chess, and lose, but it is not humanly possible to enjoy losing at baccarat. The object of the game is to win the money of your friends in an exciting and diverting manner, but the diversion tends to become something worse than tedium if they consistently win yours. Excuses and justifications may be found for most unprofitable pursuits, and perhaps the only thing to be said in favour of gambling is that there is no nonsense about it, and, as a rule, no nonsense about those who indulge in it. No one as yet has said that it improves the breed of cards, or that he has the prosperity of the card-makers at heart. The card-table is still a place where hypocrites do not win credence from anybody.

The great goddess Luck ignored Lady Haslemere that night (for she is no respecter of persons, and cuts people whenever she chooses), merely letting her lose a few inglorious sovereigns, and devoted her attention to Alington and Kit. The latter she visited with every mark of her peculiar disfavour, and the nest-egg in her jewel-case upstairs had to be heavily unyoked. Kit seldom enjoyed herself less than she did this evening; as a rule, she had distinctly good luck at cards, and it was little short of maddening to sit there hour after hour, just to watch her stake being firmly and regularly taken away. Like most people who are generally lucky at cards, she was considered admirably good form at play; but when she was losing in this unexampled manner, she found it difficult to remain cordial, and more than once she had to force herself with an effort to remember that a hostess had duties. Alington's mild, intelligent face opposite her roused in her a kind of frenzy, and his unassumed quietness and utter absence of any signs of satisfaction at his huge winnings seemed to her in the worst taste. Both she and Lady Haslemere had seen how completely their scheme of watching him to see whether he cheated had miscarried; indeed, from the moment when he gave his little exhibition of the ease with which it was possible to defraud the table, they had realized that they might play the detective till their eyes dropped out of their heads from weariness without catching him. Lady Haslemere had given it up at once, concluding that Kit and she must have been mistaken before; Kit continued to watch him furtively and angrily, but the little detective game was not nearly so amusing as she had anticipated.

Meantime, as her stakes vanished and revanished, Kit found herself thinking absently of what Alington had shown them. It was so simple, and she almost wished that she was one of the people who cheated at cards. But she was not. Then occurred an incident.

Alington was taking the bank. Nearly opposite him, and belonging to the party on the dealer's right, was Kit. She had just been upstairs to get all that remained of her nest-egg, and in front of her lay several small counters, two of fifty pounds, and two of a hundred. She had just lost once, and counting up what remained to her, she put all her counters in a heap near the line. Again she staked fifty pounds, and on receiving her cards took them up and looked at them. She was rather excited; her hand trembled a little, and the lower edge of her cards twitched forward. Then she laid them on the table.

"Natural," she said, and as she said it, she saw that she had flicked one of her hundred-pound counters over the line, and it was staked. Almost simultaneously she caught Alington's eye; almost simultaneously Tom's voice said:

"One fifty. Well done, Kit! You've had the worst of luck all the evening."

"A fine, bold stroke," said Alington in his precise tones, still looking at her. "Luck must turn, Lady Conybeare."

For one moment Kit paused, and in that pause she was lost. Alington counted out her stake, pushed it over to her, and rose.

"A thrilling end to my bank," he said. "The first big stake this evening. Thank you, Lady Conybeare, for introducing big stakes. The game was getting a little slow."

And he went to the side-table for a cigarette.

Kit had cheated, and she knew it, and she suspected Alington knew it. She had neither meant, intended, contemplated, nor conceived possible such a thing, yet the thing was done. In point of fact, she had done it quite unwittingly. She had never intended to push her counters over the line with the edge of her cards. But then had followed—and she knew this, too—an appreciable moment in which she perceived what had happened before Tom's voice broke in. But she had not been able to say at once, "I have made a mistake; I only staked fifty." After that each possible division of a single second made speech infinitely more impossible. To hesitate then was to be lost. Thirty seconds later her stake was paid, and to say then what had happened was not only impossible, but inconceivable. Besides, she thought to herself with a sudden relief, it was wholly unnecessary. She would tell Alington about it quite candidly, and return the money. But it was a poor ending to the evening on which she and Alice were going to watch him to see if he cheated.

That moment when she did not speak was psychologically more important than Kit knew. She had lived in the world some five-and-twenty years, and for five-and-twenty years her instincts had been forming. But during those years she had not formed an instinct of absolute, unwavering, instantaneous honesty. Before now she had been in positions where there was a choice between the perfectly upright course and the course ever so slightly crooked, and had she known the history of her soul, she would have been aware that when she had stuck to the absolutely upright line she had done so after reflection. Then came this moment when there was no time for reflection, and the habit of looking at her decisions as ever so faintly debatable had asserted itself. She had paused to consider what she should do. That, in such circumstances, was quite sufficient.

That she was ashamed was natural; that she was angry was to her more natural still. She felt that the thing had been forced on her, and so in a manner, if we take into consideration all the instincts which were undoubtedly hers at that moment, it was; how far she was to be held responsible for those instincts is a question for psychologists and those who have got to the bottom of the problem of original sin, but not for story-tellers.

She had a great command over herself, and she gathered up her stakes with a laugh. There had been no perceptible pause of any kind.

"I was just going to order the carriage to take me to the workhouse," she said, "but I can still afford to breakfast without the assistance of the poor laws. Must you go, Mr. Alington? Half-past two; is it really? I had no idea. Good-night. I hope Jack is behaving himself on your board. Mind you keep him in order; it is more than I can do."

She looked Mr. Alington full in the face as she spoke, trying, but failing, to detect the least shadow of a change in his impassive and middle-class features. But when he looked benevolently at her through his spectacles and bowed with his accustomed awkwardness, she felt a sudden lightness of heart at the thought that he had not seen. She did not examine too closely into what this lightness of heart exactly implied.

The others soon followed Mr. Alington's example, and took themselves off. Jack had walked to the front-door with Lady Haslemere, and Kit waited a moment in the drawing-room, after sending Lord Comber, who lingered, away, for him to come up again. Whether she intended to tell him what had happened she scarcely knew; that must depend. But he did not return, and before long servants entered to put out the lights. They would have withdrawn when they saw her, but she got up.

"Yes, put the lights out," she said. "Has his lordship gone out?"

"No, my lady; his lordship went upstairs to his room ten minutes ago."

Kit abandoned the idea of telling him that night. If she went to his room, it would imply that she had something to say, and she did not wish to commit herself yet. So she went to her own room, and rang for her maid.

The hair and unlacing processes seemed interminable this evening, and were intolerable even to the accompaniment of an excellent Russian cigarette. She had been given on her birthday, only a few weeks before, by Lord Comber, a wonderful silver-framed antique mirror, with the old Venetian motto on it, "Sono felice, te videndo," and it had made dressing and undressing a positive pleasure. Jack also had made himself amusing about it; he had come into her room the day after it arrived, and, seeing the motto on it, said, laughing:

"God has given you a good conceit of yourself, Kit. Where did you buy it?"

"I didn't buy it," she replied, never having intended to make a mystery about it. "Ted gave it me."

"Ted Comber? What damned impertinence!"

Kit burst out laughing.

"Jack, you are inimitable as the jealous husband," she had said. "It is a new rôle. Poor Ted! it must have cost a pot of money."

And Jack had permitted himself to leave the room, banging the door behind him.

Ted and she had laughed over the episode together.

"So like a man to ask absurd questions, and then be angry because he is told the truth," Kit had said. "It would have been quite as easy for me to lie."

But to-night not even the mirror, with its amusing associations, nor the reflection of herself, nor the Russian cigarette, could beguile the tedium of the toilet. The comb caught in her hair; her maid's hands were cold, she was clumsy; the evening post was stupid; it was late; Kit was sleepy and discontented. In fact, she was in an abominable temper.

At last it was over, and her maid left her. She got up from the chair in front of her glass, where she had been sitting in her wonderful lace dressing-gown, and took a turn up and down the room. She felt like a fractious child, out of sorts, out of gear, out of temper. Then quite suddenly she stopped, threw herself face downwards on the bed, and began to cry from sheer rebellion and impatience of this stupid world.

[CHAPTER X]

MRS. MURCHISON'S DIPLOMACY

Mrs. Murchison was sitting on a pile of cushions beneath her crimson parasol. The cushions were in a punt, and the punt was on the Thames, and it was Sunday afternoon, and she and her daughter were spending a Saturday till Monday, the last of the season, with the Conybeares. Toby, in flannels, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was resting from his labours with the punt pole, and sitting opposite this lady. It was a blazing hot day, but, in spite of the glare of the water, cooler, so Mrs. Murchison has asserted, on the river than elsewhere. In point of fact, she felt positively frizzled with the heat; but she had weaned Toby from his basket-chair under a tree on the lawn to have a private talk with him, ascertain how the land lay, and generally encourage him. This desire to speak to him privately took its birth from two words she had had with Kit the evening before. These two words, again, were the result of a conversation which Toby had had with Kit in the train coming down, and thus the fact that Toby was doomed to punt and swelter under a broiling sun instead of sitting coolly in the shade was indirectly his fault for having said what he had said to Kit.

For the last fortnight Kit had been in a state of chronic exasperation with her tiresome brother-in-law. Toby was gauging his own gait, and Kit's efforts to make him march in time with her had brought no results. He was always to be found at the houses to which Lily went, and at those houses he was always talking to her. But Kit could not bring him to the point. Elsewhere his demeanour was absent and slightly idiotic; he appeared to have something on his mind, and dressed with unusual care. Thus, as they travelled down from London on the Saturday, Kit felt herself called upon to try to put the finishing touch to the work she flattered herself she had begun so well. She had not yet told him that the Murchisons were coming. She had, in fact, only asked them the evening before.

"Who is to be there?" asked Toby, as they left Paddington.

"Oh, the usual lot: Ted and the rest, and—oh yes, Mrs. Murchison and her daughter."

Toby looked fixedly out of the window with the idiotic expression on his face, and the dawnings of a very creditable blush. There was silence a moment, and Kit watched him from behind her paper. Toby turned and caught her eye.

"Oh bother you, Kit!" he exclaimed.

Kit laid down the paper and began to laugh.

"And don't laugh," said Toby rudely; "it's all your fault."

"I should say it was Lily Murchison's," remarked Kit.

"Kit, will you be serious a minute?" said he. "I want to say things; I can't say them, you know, but you are clever—you will understand."

Kit laid her hand on his arm with a sympathetic pressure of her fingers.

"Dear Toby," she said, "I understand perfectly, and I am delighted—delighted! It is charming."

Toby looked very serious.

"Kit, I wish you had never told me to fall in love with her," he said; "it has spoilt it all. Of course, it is not in consequence of what you said that I have, but I wish you hadn't suggested it that evening at the Hungarian dance. That she is rich, and that the world knows it, stands in front of me. It is a vile world; it will say I fell in love with her only because of that. Oh, damn!"

Kit was divided between amusement and impatience.

"It has been reserved for you, Toby, to discover that riches are a bar to matrimony," she observed; "the reverse is usually believed to be the case."

Toby shook his head. Kit appeared to him quite as tiresome as he to her.

"You don't understand," he said.

Kit had a brilliant idea. She saw that Toby wanted to talk about it, so she determined not to talk, but to leave in him a little barbed shaft that might do useful work.

"We'll not talk about it, Toby," she said; "I can see you don't want to. Probably you are not in love at all, just a bit attracted. Get over it as quick as you can, there's a good boy; it makes you unsocial and distrait. Besides, how often has she seen you? With all your excellent qualities, dear Toby, you are not exactly—well, anything more than quite a poor, pleasant, plain young man. So drop the whole thing; you will neither break your heart nor hers. I have made too much of it, no doubt. I was wrong, I feel sure I was wrong, and I beg your pardon. Oh, there has been a hurricane in Florida! How too terrible!" And she buried herself again behind her paper.

Toby gave a short preoccupied grunt, and subsided into his corner, frowning angrily at the innocent features of the landscape. With all his native modesty and candour, he was not quite of Kit's way of thinking. The lover's devotion, which quite honestly swears that he is not fit to be the doormat to the beloved's boots, sees all the time that there is another possibility, and even in the ecstasy of humiliation aspires to worthier offices. Even while he swears himself a doormat, yet with a magnificent inconsistence he lifts his eyes higher than her boots. Though Toby was all that those tame reptilia, who think that every woman they meet is in love with them, are not, yet he did not at all accept Kit's suggestion that Lily could not conceivably have anything to say to him. With perfect sincerity he would say he was not worthy, but he was not at all content to have it said for him. Even more absurd was her suggestion that he was not in love himself. Distrait! he should just think he was. And he glared savagely at the outside page of Kit's Pall Mall.

Just about as they went screaming and swaying through Slough, Kit laid her paper down and yawned elaborately. Through her half-closed eyes she saw Toby glowering darkly at her from the seat opposite, and waited with amused satisfaction the working of her darts.

"Nothing in the paper," she said.

"I thought there was a famine in Florida," he observed dryly.

Kit regarded him for a moment in irritating silence.

"Florida is a long way off," she said at length. "Probably it is only a geographical expression. There are many places and people, Toby, much nearer than Florida."

The second link in the chain of circumstances which led to Toby's going punting in the heat was shorter. It occurred that same evening after dinner. Kit was sitting with Mrs. Murchison in the window of the hall, while the others were out on the lawn, when Lily entered, followed by Toby.

"I'm going to bed, mother," she said. "Good-night, Lady Conybeare; good-night, Lord Evelyn."

"Let me give you a candle," said Toby; and they left the room.

Then said Kit very softly, as if to herself: "Poor Toby! poor dear Toby."

Mrs. Murchison heard (she was meant to hear). Hence, on the following afternoon she wished for a private conversation with Toby, and at this moment they were in the punt together. Mrs. Murchison was, considered as a conversationalist, a little liable to be discursive, and heat and a heavy lunch combined to emphasize this tendency; they melted her brains, and a perfect stream of information concerning all parts of the globe came rioting out. Besides this natural bent, she considered it best to approach the subject, on which she particularly wanted to talk to Toby, by imperceptible degrees, not run at him with it as if she was a charging Dervish fighting for Allah. This accounts for her saying that the Thames reminded her so much of the Nile.

Now, Toby, like many others, snatched a fearful joy from Mrs. Murchison's conversation. He saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted anticipation, he said that he supposed it was very like indeed.

"Quite remarkably like, quite," said Mrs. Murchison, "and the closer you look, the more the simile grows upon you. Dear me, how I enjoyed that winter we spent in Egypt! How often I thought over the psalm, 'When Israel came out of Egypt'! We spent a fortnight in Cairo first, and what between the dances and the bazaars and the tombs of the Marmadukes, and the excursions, we had plenty to do. I remember so well one ride to the Pyramids of Sahara, where we met a very famous archeologist whose name I forget, but he had red whiskers and a very nervous manner, and showed us over them."

"That must have been very pleasant," said Toby.

"Most delicious. Then another day we went to see the tree under which the Virgin Mary sat when she went to Egypt, which was really a remarkable coincidence, because my name is Mary, too, and the guide gave us a leaf from it as a Memento Mary. Ah, dear me, how charming and quaint it all was! Then we went up the river in our own private diabetes and stuck on a sandbank for weeks."

Toby's breath caught in his throat for a moment, but he stiffened his risible muscle like a man.

"Didn't you find that rather tedious?" he asked.

"No, not at all; I was quite sorry when we got off, because the air was so fresh, like champagne, and the sunsets so beautiful, and every evening great flocks of ibexes and pelicans used to fly down to the river to drink. But now I come to think of it, we weren't there for weeks, but only for an hour or two, and very tiresome it was, as we wanted to get on, and Mr. Murchison's language—— Then at Luxor such sights, the great Colossus of Mammon, and the temples and the hotel gardens. And while we were there some professor or another—not the one with the red whiskers, you must understand—discovered a cylinder covered with cruciform writing, but it seemed to me quite common. And the donkey-boys were so amusing; we used to throw them piazzas, and see them scramble for them."

"Threw them what?" asked Toby politely.

"Piazzas and half-piazzas. The small silver coin of the country."

"Oh yes. You must have travelled a good deal."

"Indeed we have: Mr. Murchison was so devoted to it; I used to call him the Wandering Jew. Then from Egypt we went on to the Holy Land, La Sainte Terre, you know the French call it—so poetical. And we saw Tyre and Sodom and all those places, and where Cicero was killed at the brook Jabbok, and where Elijah went up to heaven, and Damascus—quite lovely!—and the temples of Baalzac—or was it the temple of Baal?"

"Did you go with one of Cook's tours?"

"Indeed we did not; it would have spoiled all the poetry and romance to me if we had done that. No, Mr. Murchison took his yacht, so we could go where we pleased and when we pleased and how we pleased. Then from there we went to Athens, and on through the Straits of Messina, and saw that volcano—Hecla, is it not?—and got to Rome for Easter."

"Rome is delightful, is it not?" said Toby, still playing the part of Greek-play chorus. "I have hardly travelled at all."

"Most interesting; I quite longed to be one of those poky little professors who spend all their lives hunting for grafficos in the Christian catafalques. I assure you we had quite a Childe Harold-al-Raschid pilgrimage, what with Egypt and all, quite like the Arabian Knight. It was wonderful. Travelling is so opening to the mind; I am sure I never really understood what 'from Dan even to Beersheba,' meant until I went and did it too."

"Did you go to Naples?" asked Toby, who still wanted more.

"Indeed we did, and saw Vesuvio in an eruction. Vesuvius you call it, but, somehow, when one has been to Italy, the Italian point-de-vue seems to strike one more. Dear me, yes! Vesuvio, Napoli—all those names are so much more life-like than Leghorn and Florence. And those queer little dirty picturesque streets in Napoli, where the Gomorrah live! I have often given myself up as murdered."

A spasm of inward laughter shook Toby like an aspen leaf as this incomparable lady gave him this wonderful example of the widening effects of foreign travel. But it passed in a moment.

"So like the Nile—so like the Nile," she murmured, as they slewed slowly through beds of water-lilies. "If you can imagine most of the trees taken away, Lord Evelyn, and the remainder changed into palms, and sand instead of meadows, you literally have the Nile. Indeed, the only other difference would be that the water of the Nile is quite thick and muddy, not clear like this, and, of course, the sky is much bluer. Dear Lily, how she enjoyed it!"

"Was Miss Murchison with you?" asked Toby.

Her mother settled herself comfortably in her cushions. This was more like business, and she congratulated herself on the diplomacy she had shown in leading the conversation round so naturally, via Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy, to this point.

"Yes, indeed she was; I never stir anywhere without my sweet Lily. Lily of the valley, I call her sometimes. My precious child! You see, Lord Evelyn, she was brought up in England, and for years I never saw her once. And I shall so soon have to part with her again!"

Toby, who had been leaning over the side of the punt, dabbling his blunt fingers in the cool water, sat up suddenly.

"How is that?" he asked.

"Oh, Lord Evelyn, you nearly upset the boat! These punts are so insecure! Only a plank between us and death. You see, I can't expect her to live with me always. She will marry. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and the same applies to a woman. I would not have her remain single all her life in order to be near me," said Mrs. Murchison, with a deep altruistic sigh.

Toby gave a little laugh of relief.

"Oh, I see. For the moment I thought you meant that—that something was already settled."

"No," said Mrs. Murchison; "the dear child is not so easy to please. Half London has been at her feet. But dear Lily has nothing to say to them. She sends them empty away, like the Magnificat."

Mrs. Murchison sighed.

"You are not a mother, Lord Evelyn," she went on, "and you cannot know all that is in a mother's heart, though I am sure you are delightfully sympathetic and understanding. I tell you I hardly sleep a wink at night for dreaming of Lily's future. I want her to marry some Englishman, of course. Some nice pleasant man out of the titled classes. She was born to be titled. I often shut my eyes when I look at her, and say to myself, 'Some day my darling will go into dinner before her own mother.' She has had the opportunity many times, and I have wondered lately whether my dearest has not someone in her eye—I should say her heart."

"I wonder," said Toby, with marked indifference.

"So like the Nile," said Mrs. Murchison diplomatically, giving it to be understood that the conversation was still quite general. "But the mysteries of a maiden's heart, Lord Evelyn!" she sighed. "Lily takes after me; as a child, I was so mysterious that nobody thought I should live."

"Miss Murchison is not delicate?" asked Toby.

"Dear me, no! most indelicate. Her health never gave me a moment's anxiety since she left her cradle. But she is very reticent about some things, and very thoughtful. When I was a child I used to fall in love a hundred times a day; it may have been Vanderbilt or a postman, and I used to put down their initials in a little green morocco pocket-book; but I never used to tell anyone about it, just like Lily. But you can see by her forehead how thoughtful she is, like Marie Antoinette. Doesn't Tennyson speak of the 'bar of Marie Antoinette'? She has it most marked above the eyes."

Toby's ignorance of "In Memoriam" was even less profound than Mrs. Murchison's knowledge of it, and he only murmured that he seemed to remember it, which was not true.

"Thoughtful and pensive," said Mrs. Murchison. "Dear child! how she looked forward to coming down here! And so gay at times. And never, Lord Evelyn," said Mrs. Muchison very earnestly, "has she said an unkind word to me."

By this time Toby had already turned the punt round, and was propelling it deftly back towards the lawn.

"Yes, if I could see her nicely married to some such man," said Mrs. Murchison, growing bolder. "I should be content to lie like some glorious Milton in a country churchyard. Dear me, how lovely the river is, and so like the Nile! Well, I suppose we must be going back; it should be near tea-time. I have so enjoyed my little excursion with you, Lord Toby—I beg your pardon, Lord Evelyn; and what a pleasant chat we have had, to be sure!"

And the good, kind, excellent, worldly woman beamed at Toby's brown face.

Toby never wasted time in making resolutions. Instead, he went and did the thing; and now he walked cheerfully up to the group on the lawn with his coat on his arm, and inquired if anyone had seen Miss Murchison.

"Because perhaps she would like to go for a bit in the punt," he explained.

She was not there; vague people had seen her vaguely, "some time ago"; and the advent of tea made him wait, not because he wanted tea, but because his chance of finding her was better at a well-defined centre.

The rest of the party was spending Sunday afternoon in various orthodox manners: Lord Comber was abstaining from a pile of yellow French novels he had brought out, Kit was sleeping peacefully with her mouth open in a long deck-chair, Jack was throwing sticks into the water for the spaniels, and Lady Haslemere was in her bedroom (a recognised Sunday resort, like a public garden). But tea brought everyone flocking together, like eagles to a carcass, and among them came Lily.

Toby had not seen her come out through the drawing-room window; her step on the velvet of the grass was noiseless, and it was not till she was close to the table that he looked up. Then their eyes met, black eyes and blue; and so chance a meeting, a thing which had happened a dozen times before in the course of a meal, seemed strangely to disconcert each. The most simple of all changes had come over Toby; Mrs. Murchison's words had fired his inflammable material—it was all ablaze. And that beacon must have shone from his honest open eyes, for Lily saw the change that none other saw, the private signal flying for her; and when, soon afterwards, he lounged up to her, and asked her if she would care to go out in the punt, as it was cooler now, she knew, so she thought afterwards, what was coming.

She assented, and the two went down over the close-shaven lawn to where it was moored.

[CHAPTER XI]

MR. ALINGTON OPENS CHECK

Kit, like most people who possess that master-key to immense enjoyment of life, namely, a ravenous, insatiable appetite for pleasure, had always a vital instinct to put off as long as possible anything which was unpleasant. She usually found plenty of delightful things to do every day of her life; indeed, with her tremendous joie de vivre, almost everything she did was delightful, and if there was something not delightful to be done, as a rule she did not do it. In this complicated hurly-burly of life, it is a great thing to be able to simplify, as in the tutor-ridden days one used to simplify the huge vulgar fractions which covered the page, and turned out in the end to be equivalent to zero. Kit's methods of simplification were really notable; she cut out everything which looked as if it would give trouble, and did not care in the slightest degree about the result. And if you do not care about the result, life, like vulgar fractions and the wicked, ceases from troubling.

But occasionally, so cruelly conducted is this world, she was driven to take odiously disagreeable steps, for fear of the speedy and inevitable disaster which would attend their omission. There were also certain prophylactic measures she used habitually to take, just as one goes to the dentist to avoid possible toothache in the future. Under the latter head came such small affairs as bazaar-openings and tedious "Grundy" dinners; also the yearly visit to Jack's uncle, who was a Bishop—a grim ordeal, but efficacious. They gave one a firmer stand, so to speak. It would have argued a shocking lack of worldly wisdom to neglect such simple little things, and whatever Kit lacked, she had an admirable amount of that. But the avoidance of unpleasantness in the greed for the pleasures of the moment led her constantly to put off distasteful things, in the same way in which one puts off the writing of letters, blindly hoping that if they are left unanswered long enough they will, in a manner of speaking, answer themselves. This charming result is often attained, but sometimes it is not, whereby the children of Eve are disconcerted.

The tiresome baccarat incident had now been unanswered rather more than a fortnight, during which interval Kit had not seen Mr. Alington. She told Jack that the mine-man was rather too much for her. Besides, she had introduced him to a hundred houses; if he could not swim for himself now, he never would. But when on the morning following this Sunday, as Kit, figuratively speaking, looked over her old letters to see what had to be done in the last week in London, she came upon the baccarat letter, and read it through again, hoping that she would feel that it had by now answered itself, for she had given it time. But though she was sedulous in taking a favourable view of this and all other matters concerning herself, she came to the disheartening conclusion that it had not. There was clearly only one of two things to be done—either give it more time and another chance to answer itself unaided, or answer it herself at once. And, as a wise and perhaps a good wife should, she determined to consult her husband about it, wishing that she had done so before.

The confidence between the two was, in a certain well-defined area, of an intimate kind. There were, no doubt, certain things which Kit did not tell Jack, and she on her side felt that there might be developments in the Alington scheme, for instance, into which she would not be permitted to enter. She did not resent this; everyone may have his own private sitting-room, where, if one knocks, one may be refused admittance. It was wiser then not to knock, and certainly there were things in hers which it was not her intention to show Jack. But apart from these few exceptions, Kit always told Jack everything, especially if she was in difficulties.

"It produces such peace of mind," she had said once to Alice, "to know that no one can tell your husband worse things than he already knows about you. How some women can go on letting their husbands remain in ignorance about their bills and other indiscretions, I can't conceive. Why, I should have to ask Jack every evening what he had learned about me during the day. And that sort of revelations come much better from oneself. It wears," said Kit thoughtfully, "the guise of candour, and also possibly of regret."

The two women practised great freedom of speech with each other, and Alice replied frankly:

"Sometimes I think you are a clever woman, Kit; at other times I feel sure I am wrong, and that you are the most abject of fools."

"I suppose you mean that I seem to you an abject fool now," said Kit. "Why, please?"

"Because you tell Jack only the things that don't really matter. The things which if he heard from elsewhere would really make a row, you don't tell him."

"Ah, but those are the things which nobody can tell him," said Kit, with her customary quickness, and more than her usual penetration.

This conversation occurred to her mind to-day, when she determined to ask his advice about the baccarat. The only question was whether it, too, came under the head of what nobody else could tell him. If it had been someone of her own set who had seen, or whom she suspected to have seen, the little faux pas of the hundred-pound counter, it would no doubt have come under the head of the things incommunicable. To Tom, Toby, Jack, Lord Comber, it would have been impossible to repeat such a thing. But one could not guess what ideas of honour a wild West Australian miner might have. To repeat such a thing about a woman was contrary to the code in use among her associates, and a good thing, too, thought Kit, strictly confining the question to the particular instance, and not confounding issues by a consideration of honour in general.

Even after the lapse of a fortnight the thought of that evening was a smart and a mortification. Jack was going to entrust the ship of his fortunes to the wild man who sang hymns, and played a harmonium, for aught she knew, and her really laudable desire to have some hold, some handle over him, had ended in this débâcle. It was not certain, indeed, that he had seen, but Kit could not but admit that it was highly probable. After all, honesty was the best policy, and she determined to tell Jack.

He had gone up to town by an early train, and Kit, who disliked getting up early almost as much as she disliked going to bed early, followed him later. He was out when she reached Park Lane, and it was close on lunch-time when she heard a cab drive up. Next moment the butler had announced Mr. Alington. The two looked just like brothers.

"Good-morning, Lady Conybeare," he said very smoothly. "Your husband asked me to lunch here, as we have some business to talk over. I was to give you a message, if he was not yet in, asking you not to wait lunch for him. He might"—Mr. Alington appeared to ponder deeply for a moment—"he might be detained."

This meeting was intensely annoying to Kit. She had told Jack that she had had enough of the mine-man, and it was very tiresome to have this tête-à-tête, and quite particularly disagreeable after their last meeting to see him alone. However, she put on the best face she could to the matter, and spoke with familiar geniality.

"Oh, Jack is always late," she said. "But why he should think it necessary to ask me not to wait for him is more than I can say. I suppose you have been imbuing him with business habits. Jack a business man! You have no idea how droll that seems to his wife, Mr. Alington. Let us lunch at once; I am so hungry. Kindly ring that bell just behind you, please."

Mr. Alington sat still a moment, and then rose with deliberation, but did not ring.

"I am lucky to find you alone, Lady Conybeare," he said, "for the truth is, there was a little matter I wanted to talk over with you."

Kit rose swiftly from her seat before he had finished his sentence, and rang the bell herself. It was answered immediately, and as the man came into the room, "Indeed; and what is that?" she said. "Is lunch ready, Poole? Let us go in, Mr. Alington. I am always so hungry in London and elsewhere."

Kit could scarcely help smiling as she spoke. She had no intention whatever of talking any little matter over with Mr. Alington, especially if it was the one she had in her mind; and she could not help feeling amused by the simplicity of the means by which she had put the stopper on the possibility of a private talk. She wished to hold no private communications with the man. She had done her part in launching him, for the convenience of Jack; she had given him to understand, or rather given other people to understand, that he was an ami de la maison, and she washed her hands of him. He was very kindly going to make Jack's fortune in return for benefits received, but he had distinctly said that the arrangement was one of mutual advantage. It was give and take; he was on the same level as your grocer or bootmaker, except that those tradesmen gave in the hopes of eventually taking, while Mr. Alington took as he went along. At the best he was a sort of cash-down shop, and Kit did not habitually deal with such. She did not consider him dangerous, and she was so well pleased with her own adroitness that she very unwisely determined to drive her advantage home.

So, as he followed her through the folding-doors into the dining-room, "What is the little matter you referred to?" she asked again, feeling perfectly secure in the presence of servants in the room.

Mr. Alington closed his eyes for a moment before he took his seat, and murmured a brief grace to himself. He opened them a moment afterwards with a short sigh, and Kit's riposte to his thrust did not seem to have ruffled or disconcerted him in the least.

His broad butler-like face was as serene as ever.

"It was a matter which I thought you might have preferred to discuss alone," he said; "but as you seem to wish it, I will tell you here. The other night when I had the pleasure of playing baccarat with you, you won on a natural——"

A flush of anger rose to Kit's face. The man was intolerable, insolent, before the servants, too; but as he spoke she felt a sudden fear of him. He looked her full in the face with mild firmness, breaking his toast with one hand, while with the other he manipulated his macaroni on the end of his fork.

"Stop!" said Kit, quick as the curl of a whiplash.

But Mr. Alington did not wince.

"You will be so kind, then, as to give me the opportunity of speaking to you privately about it," he said. "I am quite of your way of thinking. It is far better discussed so. I quite see."

Kit felt herself trembling. She was not accustomed to such bland brutality at the hands of anyone. She would have been scarcely more surprised if her stationer or butcher had suddenly appeared in the room, and urged the propriety of a private talk. Alington, it is true, had been to her house, had a right to consider himself a guest; but that made it even more intolerable. Apparently he had no idea of the distinction between guests and guests, and it would be a shocking thing if this were overlooked. Meantime he went on eating macaroni with a superb mastery over that elusive provender, in silence, since Kit did not reply.

The dining-room was one of the most charming rooms in London, rather dark, as dining-rooms should be, the walls of a sober, self-tint green, and bare but for some half-dozen small pictures of the Barbizon school, which, if alienable, would long ago have been alienated to supply the chronic scarcity of money in the Conybeare establishment. They were wonderful examples, but Kit hated them, since they could not be sold. "They make me feel like a man on a desert island with millions of gold sovereigns and no food," she had said once. The chairs were all armed, and upholstered in green brocade, and the thick Ispahan carpet made noiseless the feet of those "who stand and wait." Partly this, partly the distraction of her thoughts, brought it about that red mullets were at Kit's elbow a full ten seconds unperceived. She could not make up her mind what to do. She bitterly repented having said "Stop!" just now to Alington, for the vehemence of her interjection gave herself away. She had practically admitted that something had occurred on the night they played baccarat which she earnestly desired not to have discussed in public. A fool could have seen that, and with all her distaste for the man she did not put this label to him. And with odiously familiar deference he had agreed with her; he had assumed the right of discussing things with her in private.

Again, she could not quarrel with him. Conybeare's application to business, his early visits to the City, his frequent conferences with Alington, his unexampled preoccupation, all showed for certain that there were great issues at stake, for he would not give himself such trouble for a few five-pound notes. All this passed through her mind very rapidly, and at the end of ten seconds she leaned back in her chair, saw the red mullets, and took two of them.

"Yes, you are quite right," she said; "we will talk of it afterwards. Ah, here is Jack! Morning, Jack!"

Jack nodded to her and Alington, and took his seat.

"You have heard the news, Kit?" he asked.

"Lots; but which?"

"Toby is engaged to Miss Murchison. The Crœsum told me in the train this morning. She is coming to see you this afternoon."

Kit for the moment forgot her other worries.

"Oh, how delightful!" she cried. "Dear Toby! And Lily is most charming, and so pretty! Do you know her, Mr. Alington?"

"I have met her at your house, I think. And an heiress, is she not?"

"I believe she has a little money," said Kit. "One has heard people say so. But mere gossip, perhaps."

Jack laughed low and noiselessly.

"That will be so pleasant for Toby," he observed, "if it is true."

Kit sighed.

"What a pity that it is not the custom for a bride to settle money on her husband's brother, Jack!" she said.

"Yes, or give it in order to escape death duties. What opportunities for unusual kindness some people have!"

"Well, it is charming, anyhow," said Kit. "I noticed they went for a stroll in the punt yesterday afternoon, which I thought promising. A punt is so often a matrimonial agency. You aren't afraid of tipping it up like an ordinary boat. You proposed to me in a racing pair, or something skittish—do you remember, Jack?—and I said I'd do anything in the world if you would only row straight to shore. And you kept me to it. Hardly fair, was it, Mr. Alington?"

Mr. Alington smiled like an elderly clergyman at a school feast, and his smile was suggestive of his liking to see young people happy.

"I wonder the Matrimonial News doesn't keep a few punts for the use of clients," went on Kit, in nervous anxiety to get lunch over as quickly as possible. She had made up her mind about Alington in the last half-minute or so, and was desirous of getting a word with him, her intention being to deny his charge point-blank, and in turn accuse him. "Punts and evening hymns do wonders with people who can't quite make up their minds to propose."

Mr. Alington looked mildly interested at this surprising information, and he appeared to be weighing it carefully as he ate his quail before giving it his support.

"They might keep a small choir and a harmonium as well," went on Kit. "I believe all the respectable middle-class go to evening church on Sunday and sing hymns very loud out of one book, and propose to each other afterwards. Dear Toby, how happy he will be! How nice—how exceedingly nice!" she murmured sympathetically.

Alington and Kit had by this time finished lunch, and she rose.

"I can't stop and see you eat, Jack," she said. "Come, Mr. Alington; we will go and have coffee, and Jack will join us."

On these hot July days Kit often sat in the inner hall, which was cooler than the drawing-room. It was a charming place of palms and parquetry, with furniture at angles, and a general atmosphere of coolness and sequestered corners. Coffee came immediately with cigarettes, and Kit took one. Mr. Alington, however, explained that except on Sundays he did not allow himself to smoke till after dinner.

"I find a little abstinence very helpful," he gave as his modest excuse.

The servants withdrew, and Kit began playing with her subject.

"I am afraid you thought me very abrupt at lunch," she said, "but I have a great objection to discussing matters, which it is conceivable might be better kept private, before servants, and when you mentioned baccarat I thought it better to stop you, even at the risk of seeming very brusque. You will hardly believe it, Mr. Alington"—here her voice sank to a low confidential murmur—"you will hardly believe it, but only a few weeks ago I saw a man cheat at baccarat at a friend's house. Very distressing, was it not? I talked it over with a friend, and we found it most difficult to decide what to do. That sort of thing might so easily get about; it is so dangerous to speak before servants."

"I think you talked it over with Lady Haslemere?" remarked Mr. Alington.

Kit was stirring her coffee and smiling sweetly. She was getting on beautifully. But at these words and their peculiarly calm delivery her hand stopped stirring, and her smile faded.

"I think also you agreed to ask the suspect to play again, in order to watch him," went on the impassive butler. "Was it not so, Lady Conybeare? And I think the suspect was none other than myself."

Kit put down her coffee-cup and leaned back in her chair. The thing had gone wrong; she had meant to have got first innings on the subject of baccarat cheating, and she was rather afraid she was clean bowled. Quick as she was, she could not see her answer. Mr. Alington did not, however, look at her, nor did he pause longer than was necessary to sip his coffee.

"Your tactics were a little open, a little obvious, Lady Conybeare, if you will allow me to say so," he went on. "Delicious coffee! You exchanged so many glances with Lady Haslemere, and then looked up at me, that I could not fail to see you were watching for something. No man, I expect, likes to be suspected of so very paltry a crime as cheating at baccarat—a crime so hopelessly void of any grandeur—and no man, I am sure, likes a trap being laid for him by those whom he is entitled to consider his friends. And before I go on to the point I have in my mind I should like to say a word about this."

He cleared his throat and sipped his coffee again.

"What you and Lady Haslemere saw," he went on—"did your husband suspect me too? It does not matter—what you saw was this: I had declared a natural, and you saw me, as you thought, push a fifty-pound counter over the line. Was that not so?"

"There is no question of 'thought,'" said Kit, whom a sense of danger made the more incautious; "we saw you do it."

"Quite true. If you had observed a little more closely, you would have seen something else. Now, I ask you, the few times we have played baccarat together, did you ever see me fail to stake?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Quite so. If you had looked at the table a moment before, you would have seen I had nothing staked. What happened was this: I had staked four ten-pound counters and two fives; then, seeing that I had no more smaller ones, I withdrew them to substitute one fifty for them. At that moment I received my cards, and, taking them up I forgot for the moment to substitute my fifty. I looked at the cards, declared the natural, and you saw me push forward the fifty-pound counter quite openly, and, so you thought, clumsily. It never occurred to me for a moment there was any need of an explanation."

Kit's anger and alarm was growing on her.

"Very clumsily," she said; "we all saw it."

"It was stupid of me, no doubt, not to have explained at the time," he said, "but really I had no idea the company was so suspicious."

He paused for a moment, and his mild temper was roused at the thought of Kit's behaviour.

"But perhaps people are right to be suspicious," he added, with a raised intonation.

The shot went home, and Kit's face grew a shade paler. But she could not conceivably show that she knew what he meant, for that would be to accuse herself. Instead, she put all the insolence her voice would hold into her reply.

"And what proof have I of the truth of what you say?" she asked, fighting desperately on this battle-ground of her adversary's choosing.

"The fact that I say it," said Mr. Alington. "Also, there is corroborative evidence if I choose to adduce it. I showed you the other night, meaning merely to give you a hint, that, had I wanted, I could have cheated very neatly. Is it credible, then, even supposing that I am one of those people who cheat, that I should have done it so clumsily?"

Kit in her heart believed the man, but her superficial woman's cunning refused to give up the hold she still hoped she might have over him, her only answer to the hold she was afraid he had over her.

"We all make blunders at times," she said, in her most fiendish manner. "Unfortunately, I don't believe what you say."

Mr. Alington sipped his coffee again. His momentary irritation had quite died down; you could not have found a kinder Christian in all England.

"Fortunately, however, that matters very little," he replied.

"It does not make a man popular among us," observed Kit, "if he is known to cheat at baccarat. I understood you the other night to say that sort of thing was common in Australia. I should advise you to remember that we think differently here."

Kit had lost her temper completely, and did not stop to weigh her words. Worse than that, she lost her head, and lashed out insults with foolish defiance.

Mr. Alington crossed one leg over the other, his mouth grew a shade more compressed and precise, and his large pale eyes turned suddenly unluminous and stale like a snake's. Kit grew frightened again, and when a woman is frightened as well as angry she is not likely to score off a perfectly cool man. There was a moment's pause.

"Lady Conybeare," said he at length, "you have chosen to treat me as a knave and as a fool. And I dislike very much being treated as a knave or a fool by you. You accuse me of cheating: that I have reason to believe does not seem to you very shocking."

"May I ask why?" interrupted Kit.

Mr. Alington held up his hand, as if to deprecate any reply just now.

"And you accuse me of cheating clumsily, foolishly," he continued. "But can you really think I should be so tragic an ass as to come to you with my mere assertion that I did not cheat? I have given you your chance to believe me of your own free will; you have, I regret to say, refused it. I will now force you to believe me—force you," he repeated thoughtfully. "I have a witness, a person then present, who saw me withdraw those smaller counters and replace the larger."

Kit laughed, but uneasily.

"How very convenient!" she said. "What is his name?"

"Lord Abbotsworthy," remarked Alington. "I even took the precaution of calling his attention to what I had done. It was lucky I did. Ask Lord Abbotsworthy."

"One of your directors," said Kit, almost beside herself with anger, and rising from her chair.

"One of my directors, as you say," he replied, "and your friend. I need hardly remind you that your husband is another of my directors."

On the moment Jack came out of the dining-room. He cast one glance at Kit's face, took a cigarette, and strolled discreetly upstairs. When his wife was on the war-path and had not asked his alliance he did not give it.

"I shall be upstairs when you and my wife have finished your talk," he said over his shoulder to Alington. "Come and see me before you go."

The pause sobered Kit.

"Yes," continued Alington, "he had a moment before asked me to change him some money for small counters, and that left me with only a few small ones. Luckily, he will remember seeing me withdraw and substitute my stake. You and Lady Haslemere would have been wise to consult him before taking this somewhat questionable step of watching me. A fault of judgment—a mere fault of judgment."

Kit, figuratively speaking, threw up her hand. The desperate hope that Alington was lying was no longer tenable.

"And I await your apology," he added.

There was a long silence. Kit was not accustomed to apologize to anybody for anything. Her indifference to this man, except in so far as he could financially serve them, had undergone a startling transformation in the last hour. Indifference had given place first to anger at his insolence, then to fear. His placid, serene face had become to her an image of some infernal Juggernaut, whose car rolled on over bodies of men, yet whose eyelash never quivered. Pride battled with fear in her mind, fury with prudence. And Juggernaut (butler no longer), contrary to his ascetic habit, lit a cigarette.

"Well?" he said, when he judged that the pause was sufficiently prolonged.

Kit had sat down again in her chair, and was conscious only of two things—this inward struggle, and an absorbing hatred of the man seated opposite her.

"Supposing I refuse to apologize?" she asked at length.

"I shall regret it very much," he said; "you probably will regret it more. Come, Lady Conybeare, by what right do you make an enemy of me?"

Again there was silence. Kit knew very well how everyone would talk if this detestable business became public, which she understood to be the threat contained in Alington's words, and knew also that a rupture between Jack and him, which must inevitably follow, would not be likely to lead to their financial success in this business of the mines.

"I shall require you also to tell Lady Haslemere and your husband, if he also has at any time suspected me, into what a deplorable error you have fallen," continued Alington, dropping out his words as you drop some strong drug into a graduated glass, careful to give neither too much nor too little.

Suddenly Kit made up her mind, and having done that, she determined to act with the best possible grace.

"I apologize, Mr. Alington," she said; "I apologize sincerely. I wronged you abominably. I will do in all points as you suggest."

Mr. Alington did not move a muscle.

"I accept your apology," he said. "And please do me the favour not to treat me like a fool again, for I am far from being a fool."

This speech was not easy swallowing for Kit, but she had to take what he threw her. Alington got up.

"I have to go upstairs to see your husband," he said, "because we have a good deal of business—the shares of the new group will be on the market in a few days."

He paused a moment.

"Do not give another thought to the matter, Lady Conybeare," he said. "It is much better we should be friends. Ah, by the way, regarding that matter on which I meant to speak to you, that unfortunate affair of the hundred-pound counter—you know what I mean. Do not give another thought to that, either. I assure you that it will not be through me that it goes further. I fully believe you never meant it. Only you did not correct your mistake instantaneously, and so correction became impossible. Was it not so?"

His broad face brightened and beamed, like the face of a father speaking lovingly and consolingly to a son about some petty fault, and he held out his hand to her.

Kit wavered. She would have given anything in the world to say, "What affair of the hundred-pound counter? I don't know what you mean." But she could not. She was physically, perhaps morally, incapable of giving the words utterance. Alington had made her afraid; she was beaten, cowed. And the accuracy of his intuition astounded her. Then she gave him her hand; she had no word for him on this subject.

"Good-bye," she said—"au revoir, rather. You will be in and out a good deal, I suppose, while we are in London. There is always lunch at two. My husband is in his room upstairs. You know the way, I think."

Many people have their own pet plan of sending themselves to sleep, such as counting imaginary sheep going through a visionary hedge, or marking out a lawn-tennis court, lifting the machine as seldom as possible. Kit's method, though she usually fell asleep immediately, was to enumerate her dislikes. This was a long and remarkably varied list, beginning "Marie Corelli, parsnips," and she seldom got to the end of it. To-night she admitted Mr. Alington into the charming catalogue, and getting to his name, she did not continue the list, nor did she immediately go to sleep.

[CHAPTER XII]

THE COTTAGE BY THE SEA

Toby was sitting on the edge of an old weather-beaten breakwater, now running out lop-sidedly and burying its nose in the sand, some three miles north of Stanborough-on-Sea, making an exceedingly public toilet after his swim.

His mother, old Lady Conybeare, had a charming house down here, which had, so to speak, risen from the ranks; in other words, it had originally been two cottages, and was now a sort of rustic palace. Her husband had been a man of extraordinary good taste, and both his idea and execution of this transformation was on the high-water mark of felicity. Brick with rough-cast was the delectable manner of it, and the old cottage chambers had been run one into another like the amalgamation of separate drops of quicksilver, to produce irregular-shaped rooms with fireplaces in odd corners. He had built out a wing on one side, a block on another, a dining-room on a third; the front-door was reached through a cloister open to the sea, and supported on brick pillars; and big green Spanish oil-jars and Venetian well-tops lined the terraced walk. Opposite the front-door, on the other side of the carriage sweep, was a monastic-looking, three-sided courtyard, bounded by low-arched cloisters, and an Italian tower, square and tapering towards the top, bisected the middle side. Close abutting on this was a charming huddled group of red roofs, with beaten ironwork in the windows, suggestive of the refectory of this seaside monastery. In reality it comprised a laundry, a bakehouse, and the dynamos which supplied the electric light. For there was in reality nothing unpleasantly monastic about the place; the cloisters were admirable shelters from sun or wind, and were heavily cushioned; the bell in the tower rang folk not to prime, but to dinner; and the peas were not put in visitors' boots, but boiled and put in dishes. The house, in fact, was as habitable as it was picturesque, a high degree of merit; it was no penance at all to stay there; the electric light seemed to brighten automatically as dusk fell, even as the moon and stars begin to shine without visible lamplighter in the high-roofed hall of heaven; and there were about as many bathrooms, with hot and cold water, as there were bedrooms.

Toby was putting on his socks very leisurely; he had been down for a dip in the sea before lunch, and having lit the post-ablutive cigarette, sweetest of all that burn, he threw his towel round his neck, took his coat on his arm, and walked slowly up the steep sandy pathway to the top of the fifty-foot cliff on which the house and garden stood. Several old fishermen were standing about at the top in nautical attitudes, hitching their trousers, folding their arms, and scanning the horizon like the chorus in light opera. One had a lately-taken haul, and Toby inspected his wares with much interest. There were lobsters in blue mail—angry and irritable, which glanced sideways at one like vicious horses looking for a good opening to kick—feebly-flapping soles, anæmic whiting, a few rainbow mackerel, and, oh, heavens! crabs.

Now, temptation and crab were the two things in the world which Toby found it idle to attempt to resist, and he ordered that the biggest and best should be sent instantly up to the house. Perhaps it would be safer if he took it himself, for the mere possibility of its miscarrying was not to be borne, and grasping it gingerly by the fourth leg, he carried it, not without nervousness, wide angry pincers all agape, up across the lawn.

He went through the cloister and in at the door leading to the servants' parts, where he met a stern, stark butler.

"Oh, Lowndes," he said, "for lunch, if possible. By the hind-leg. For the cook, with my compliments, and dressed."

The transference was effected, much to Toby's relief, and he put down his towel and on his coat. There was still half an hour to wait for lunch, but that cloud had now its proverbial silver lining. Half an hour seemed an impossible time, but the silver lining was the possibility of the crab being ready by then. How long a crab took dressing Toby did not know, but if it took no longer than he did himself—and there was more of him to dress—half an hour should be sufficient for two.

Lily, who, like himself, held firmly the wholesome creed that it is impious to stop indoors while it is possible to be out, was sure to be in the garden somewhere, and Toby walked out again in his white, sea-stained tennis-shoes to find her.

The cottage had risen from the ranks, but not less remarkable had been the promotion of the garden. What a few years ago had been an unprofitable acreage of wind-swept corn, and more suggestive, by reason of its fine poppy-bearing qualities, of an opium rather than a wheat-field, was become a flowery wilderness of delight. Buckthorn, gray and green like the olives of the South, and bearing berries as if of a jaundiced holly, had been planted in shrubberies in the centre of garden-beds as screens from the wind, robbing the sea-gales of their bitter saltness before they passed over the flowers, and letting the bracing quality alone reach the plants. Mixed with the buckthorn were the yellow flames of the golden elder, noblest of the English shrubs, and rows of aspen all a-quiver with nervous feminine energy. Thus sheltered, there ran on each side of a broad space of grass away from the house an avenue of herbaceous border. Hollyhocks and sunflowers stood up behind, like tall men looking over the heads of an average crowd; shoulder-high to them were single dahlias and scarlet salvias; below them again a row of Shirley poppies, delicate in tint and texture as Liberty fabrics, and in a happy plebeian crowd at the edge mignonette, love-lies-a-bleeding, London-pride, and double daisies.

Toby sauntered silent-footed over the velvet carpet of grass up to the summer-house, faced with split planks of pollarded elm, which stood at the end, but drew an unavailing cover. Thence crossing the broad gravel walk, he tried the tennis-court, and went down the steps past flowering fuchsia-trees, where two great bronze storks of Japanese work turned a world-weary eye skywards, and explored the rose-garden. This lay in a natural dip of the land, studiously sheltered, and the wirework pergola which ran through it was on these August days one foam of pink sherbet petals. On either side were rockeries covered with creeping stonecrops, mountain-heaths, and Alpine gentians, those remote sentinels of the vegetable world. And strange to their blue eyes, accustomed to see morning break on paths untrodden of man and fields of flashing snow, must have been the soft hint of dawn in this land of tended green. But Toby saw them not, for there in a nook at the end, below an ivy-trained limb of tree, sat the queen of the rosebud garden.

Lily was not reading, in spite of the seeming evidence of an open book on her lap, for the breeze turned its leaves backwards and forwards like some student distractedly hunting up a reference. For a moment the page would lie open and unturned; then a scud of flying leaves would end in a long pause at p. 423; then one leaf would be turned very slowly, as if the unseen reader was perusing the last words very carefully, while his fingers pushed the page over to be ready for the next. Then with a bustle and scurry he would hurry on and study the advertisements at the end, and as like as not go suddenly back to the title-page.

Lily had been thinking pleasantly and idly about Toby, and the many charming things in this delightful world, when he appeared. She welcomed him with a smile in those adorable dark eyes.

"Had a nice dip?" she asked, as he sat down by her. "Oh, Toby, when we are married I shall devote my whole life to getting your hair tidy for once. Then I shall turn my face to the wall and softly expire."

"If that's your object you'll be aiming at the impossible," remarked Toby, "like that silly school-master you read me about in Browning who aimed at a million."

"Grammarian," corrected Lily, "and I'll read you no more Browning."

"Well, it does seem to be a bit above my head," said Toby, without regret. "And I bought a crab on my way up, and, oh, I love you!"

Lily laughed.

"I thought you were going to say, 'Oh, I love crab!'" she said.

"And that would be true, too," said Toby. "What a lot of true things there are, if one only looks for them!" he observed.

"That's what the Christian scientists say," remarked Lily. "They say there is no such thing as lies or evil or pain."

"Who are the Christian scientists?" asked Toby. "And what do they make of toothache?"

Lily meditated a moment.

"The Christian scientists are unsuccessful female practitioners," she observed at length. "And there isn't any toothache; it's only you who think so."

"Seems to me it's much the same thing," said Toby. "And how about lies? Supposing I said I didn't love you?"

"Or crab?"

"Or crab, even. Would that be true, therefore?"

Lily leaned forward, and put down Toby's tie, which was rising above his collar.

"Well, I think we've disposed of them," she said. "Oh dear, I wish I was a man!"

"I don't," said Toby.

"Why not? Oh, I see. Thanks. But I should like to be able to bathe from a breakwater, and buy crabs from fishermen, and have very short, untidy straight-up hair, and a profession, Toby."

"Yes," said Toby, wincing, for he knew or suspected what was coming.

"Don't say 'yes' like that. Say it as if you meant it."

Toby took a long breath, and shut his eyes.

"Yes, so help me God!" he said, very loud.

"That's better. Well, Toby, I want you—I really want you—to have a real profession. What is the use of your being secretary to your cousin? I don't believe you could say the names of the men in the Cabinet, and, as you once told me yourself, all you ever do there is to play stump-cricket in the secretary's room."

"You should have warned me that whatever I said would be used against me," said the injured Toby. "But I saw after the flowers in Hyde Park last year."

"The work of a life-time," said Lily. "I wonder they don't offer you a peerage."

"You see, I'm not a brewer," said Toby.

"Beer, beerage—a very poor joke, Toby."

"Very poor, and who made it? Besides, I think you are being sarcastic about the flowers in Hyde Park. If there's one thing I hate," said Toby violently, "it is cheap sarcasm."

"Who wouldn't be sarcastic when a great tousle-headed, able-bodied, freckle-faced scion of the aristocracy tells one that he is employed—employed, mark you—in looking after the flowers in Hyde Park?" asked Lily, with some warmth. "Why, you didn't even water them!"