INTRODUCTION
TO SALLY

[Chapter I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [XVI.]
[Transcriber's note.]

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

INTRODUCTION
TO SALLY

BY THE AUTHOR OF
“ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN”
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1926
COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

I

§

Mr. Pinner was a God-fearing man, who was afraid of everything except respectability. He married Mrs. Pinner when they were both twenty, and by the time they were both thirty if he had had to do it again he wouldn’t have. For Mrs. Pinner had several drawbacks. One was, she quarrelled; and Mr. Pinner, who prized peace, was obliged to quarrel too. Another was, she appeared to be unable to have children; and Mr. Pinner, who was fond of children, accordingly couldn’t have them either. And another, which while it lasted was in some ways the worst, was that she was excessively pretty.

This was most awkward in a shop. It continually put Mr. Pinner in false positions. And it seemed to go on so long. There seemed to be no end to the years of Mrs. Pinner’s prettiness. They did end, however; and when she was about thirty-five, worn out by her own unquiet spirit and the work of helping Mr. Pinner in the shop, as well as keeping house for him, which included doing everything single-handed, by God’s mercy she at last began to fade.

Mr. Pinner was pleased. For though her behaviour had been beyond criticism, and she had invariably, by a system of bridling and head-tossing, kept off familiarity on the part of male customers, still those customers had undoubtedly been more numerous than the others, and Mr. Pinner hadn’t liked it. It was highly unnatural, he knew, for gentlemen on their way home from their offices to wish to buy rice, for instance, when it had been bought earlier in the day by their wives or mothers. There was something underhand about it; and he, who being timid was also honest, found himself not able to be happy if there were a shadow of doubt in his mind as to the honourableness of any of his transactions. He never got used to these purchases, and was glad when the gradual disappearance of his wife’s beauty caused the gradual disappearance of the customers who made them. Money, it was true, was lost, but he preferred to lose it than to make it by means that verged in his opinion on shady.

As Mrs. Pinner faded and custom dropped off, he and she had more time on their hands, and went to bed earlier; for Mrs. Pinner, who had an untiring tongue when she was awake, and inveigled her husband into many quarrels, was obliged to leave off talking when she was asleep, and he, pretending it was because of the gas bills, got her to go to bed earlier and earlier. Besides, he wished more heartily than ever that she might have a child, if only to take her attention off him. But he longed for a child himself as well, for he was affectionate without passion, and it was his secret opinion—all his opinions were secret, because if he let them out Mrs. Pinner quarrelled—that such men are born good fathers. Something, however, had to be born besides themselves before they could show their capabilities, and Mrs. Pinner, who was passionate without affection, which in Mr. Pinner’s opinion was rather shocking, for she sometimes quite frightened him in bed, and he was sure it wasn’t at all respectable for a wife to do that, especially as next day she didn’t seem to like him any better than before, hadn’t been able to produce what was needed.

Certain it was that he couldn’t become a father without her. In this one thing he depended utterly on her; for though she believed she ruled him through and through, in every other matter at the back of his soul Mr. Pinner always secretly managed very well for himself. But here he was helpless. If she didn’t, he couldn’t. Nothing doing at all without Mrs. Pinner.

Therefore, as a first step, every evening at nine o’clock, instead of at eleven or twelve as had been their habit in the busy, tiring years, after a day of only too much leisure they went to bed. There they tossed, because of its being so early; or, rather, Mrs. Pinner tossed, while he lay quiet, such being his nature. And whether it was these regular hours, or whether it was God, who favours families, at last taking pity on the Pinners, just as Mr. Pinner was coming to the conclusion that he had best perhaps now let well alone, for he and his wife were drawing near forty, Mrs. Pinner inexplicably began to do that which she ought to have done twenty years earlier, and proceeded to go through those bodily changes, one after the other and all strictly according to precedent, which were bound to end, though for many months Mr. Pinner didn’t believe it, in either a boy or a girl; or perhaps—this was his secret longing—in both.

They ended in one girl.

‘I’m blest,’ said Mr. Pinner to himself, seeing his wife’s complete, impassioned absorption, ‘if that kid ain’t goin’ to be my salvation.’

And he wanted to have it christened Salvation, but Mrs. Pinner objected, because it wasn’t a girl’s name at all, she said; and, as she had no heart just then for quarrelling, they compromised on Salvatia.

§

Thus was Salvatia projected into the world, who afterwards became Sally. Her parents struggled against her being called Sally, because they thought it common. Their struggles, however, were vain. People were unteachable. And the child herself, from the moment she could talk, persisted in saying she was Sally.

She grew up so amazingly pretty that it soon became the Pinners’ chief concern how best to hide her. Such beauty, which began by being their pride, quickly became their anxiety. By the time Sally was twelve they were always hiding her. She was quite easy to hide, for she went meekly where she was told and stayed there, having not only inherited her father’s mild goodness, but also, partly from him and more from some unknown forbear, for she had much more of it than Mr. Pinner at his most obliging, a great desire to give satisfaction and do what was asked of her. She had none of that artfulness of the weak that was so marked a feature of Mr. Pinner. She never was different at the back of her mind from what she was on the surface of her behaviour. Life hadn’t yet forced her, as it had forced Mr. Pinner, to be secretive; it hadn’t had time. Besides, said Mr. Pinner to himself, she wasn’t married.

From her mother she had inherited nothing but her looks; translating, however, the darkness into fairness, and the prettiness into beauty,—beauty authentic, indisputable, apparent to the most unobservant. Mr. Pinner was divided between pride and fear. Mrs. Pinner concentrated entirely on her child, and was the best of prudent mothers. There, in their back parlour, they kept this secret treasure, and, like other treasures, its possession produced anxiety as well as joy. Till she was about twelve she did as other children, and went off to school by herself every day, illuminating Islington, as she passed along its streets, like a flame. Then the Pinners got a fright: she was followed. Not once or twice, but several times; and came home one day happy, her hands full of chocolates she said a gentleman had given her.

The Pinners began to hide her. Mrs. Pinner took her to school and fetched her away again every day, and in between hid her in the back parlour. Mr. Pinner did Mrs. Pinner’s work as well as his own while she was gone, and just managed to because his wife was fleet of foot and ran most of the way; otherwise it would have broken his back, for he wasn’t able to afford to keep an assistant, and had little staying power. At night, when the dear object of their love and fear was asleep, they earnestly in bed discussed what was best to be done so as to secure to her the greatest happiness together with the greatest safety. Their common care and love had harmonised them. In the child they were completely at one. No longer did Mrs. Pinner rail, and Mr. Pinner, after a time, be obliged to answer back; no longer was he forced, contrary to his nature, into quarrels. Peace prevailed, and the affection that comes from a common absorbing interest.

‘It’s all that there Sally,’ said Mr. Pinner, content at last in his married life, and unable—for he had few words—to put what he felt more glowingly.

§

But when Sally was sixteen Mrs. Pinner died; died in a few days, of a cold no worse than dozens of colds she had caught in her life and hadn’t died of.

Mr. Pinner was left with no one to help him, either in his shop or with Sally. It was an immense misfortune. He didn’t know which way to turn. He lived within the narrowest margin of safety, for in Islington there were many grocers, and he was one of the very smallest, never having had any ambition beyond the ambition for peace and enough to eat.

It was impossible for him to run the shop without help, and without the shop he and Sally would starve, so there was nothing for it but to let her take her mother’s place; and within a week his custom was doubled, and went on doubling and doubling till the local supply of males was exhausted.

It was a repetition of twenty years earlier, only much worse. Mr. Pinner was most unhappy. Sally couldn’t help smiling back when anybody smiled at her,—it was her nature; and as everybody, the minute they saw her, did smile, she was in a continual condition of radiance, and the shop seemed full of light. Mr. Pinner was distracted. He hired an assistant, having made money, announced that his daughter had gone away to boarding-school, and hid her in the back parlour. The custom dropped off, and the assistant had to go. Out came Sally again, and back came the custom. What a situation, thought Mr. Pinner, irritable and perspiring. He was worn out keeping his eye on Sally, and weighing out coffee and bacon at the same time. His responsibilities crushed him. The only solution of his difficulties would be to get the girl married to some steady fellow able to take care of her. There seemed to him to be no steady fellows in the crowd in his shop, except the ones who were already married, and they couldn’t really be steady or they wouldn’t be there. How could a married man be called steady who eagerly waited for Sally to sell him groceries he would only afterwards have to conceal from his wife? While as for the rest, they were a weedy lot of overworked and underpaid young clerks who couldn’t possibly afford to marry. Sally smiled at them all. She had none of the bridling, of the keep-off-the-grass-if-you-please, of her mother.

‘For mercy’s sake,’ Mr. Pinner would hiss in her ear, tugging her elbow as he hurried past, ‘don’t go keepin’ on makin’ pleasant faces at ’em like that.’

But what faces was she to make, then? All Sally’s faces were pleasant from the point of view of the beholder, whatever sort she made; and if she, by a great effort, and contrary to her nature, frowned at anybody, as likely as not she would be gaped at harder than ever, and asked if she wouldn’t mind doing that again.

Mr. Pinner was distracted. Even the clergy came to his shop,—came with breezy tales of being henpecked, and driven out by tyrant wives to purchase currants; and even the doctor came,—old enough surely, Mr. Pinner thought, to be ashamed of himself, running after a girl he had himself brought into the world, and pretending that what he was after was biscuits.

What he was after was, very plainly, not biscuits, nor were the clergy after currants. One and all were after Sally. And it horrified Mr. Pinner, who took round the plate on Sundays, that a child of his, so good and modest, should be the innocent cause of producing in the hearts of her fellow-creatures a desire to sin. That they desired to sin was only too evident to Mr. Pinner, driven by fear to the basest suspicions. These married gentlemen—what could it be but sin they had in their minds? They wished to sin with Sally, to sin the sin of sins; with his Sally, his spotless lamb, a child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

For a year Mr. Pinner endured it, struggling with his responsibilities and his black suspicions. The milk of his natural kindliness and respect for his betters went sour. He grew to hate the gentry. His face took on a twist of fear that became permanent. The other grocers were furious with him, accusing him among themselves of using his daughter as a decoy; and unable to bear this, for it of course got round to him, and worn out by the constant dread lest worse were yet to come, and some fine day a young whipper-snapper of a lord should be going for a walk in Islington and chance to stroll into his shop and see Sally, and then good-bye to virtue—for was any girl good enough and modest enough to stand out against the onslaughts of a lord? Mr. Pinner asked himself, who had never consciously come across any lords, and therefore was apt to think of them highly—Mr. Pinner determined to move.

He moved. After several Sundays given up to fruitless and ill-organised excursions into other suburbs, he heard by chance of a village buried far away in what seemed to him, whose England consisted of Hampstead Heath, Hampton Court, and, once, Southend, a savage and uninhabited district in Cambridgeshire, where the man who kept its one shop was weary of solitude, and wanted to come nearer London. What could be nearer London than London itself? Mr. Pinner hurried to Woodles, leaving Sally under the strictest vows not to put her terribly complicating nose out of doors.

He thought he had never seen such a place. Used to streets and crowds, he couldn’t have believed there were spots in the world so empty. It was raining, and there wasn’t a soul about. A few cottages, the shop, a church and vicarage, and a sad wet pig grunting along a ditch,—that was all. Three miles from a branch-line station, embedded in a network of muddy lanes, and the Vicar—Mr. Pinner inquired—seventy-eight with no sons, Woodles was surely the ideal place for him and Sally. Over a bottle of ginger beer he made friends with the shopkeeper, and arranged that he should come up to Islington with a view to exchanging. He came; and the exchange, after some regrettable incidents in connection with Sally which very nearly upset the whole thing, was made, and by Christmas Islington knew the Pinners no more.

§

All went well at Woodles for the first few weeks. It was a hamlet, Mr. Pinner rejoiced to discover, lived in practically exclusively by ladies. These ladies, attracted to it by the tumbledownness of its cottages, which made it both picturesque and cheap, had either never had husbands or had lost them, and accordingly, as so often happens in such circumstances, were poor. Well, Mr. Pinner didn’t mind that. He only wanted to live. He had no desire to make more than was just necessary to feed Sally. More merely meant responsibility and bother, and of those he had as much as he could do with because of Sally. He settled down, very content and safe among his widow and virgin customers, and spent a thankful Christmas, entering with hope into the New Year.

Then, one day towards the end of January, two young men rent the peace of the sunny afternoon with the unpleasant noise motor-bicycles, rushing at high speed, appear, Mr. Pinner thought, kindly even towards these, not to be able to help making, and a lady customer who chanced to be in the shop remarked, ‘It has begun.’

Mr. Pinner inquired politely what had begun, and the lady said term had, and Mr. Pinner, who didn’t know what she meant but was unwilling to show his ignorance, said, ‘And high time too.’

After that, hardly an afternoon went by without young men hurrying through Woodles. Sometimes they were on motor-bicycles, sometimes they were on horses, sometimes they were in cars, but always they hurried. Where did they all come from? Mr. Pinner was astonished, and wondered uneasily whether Sally were not somehow at the bottom of it. But she couldn’t have been, for they never so much as glanced at the shop window, from behind whose jars of bulls’-eyes and mounds of toffee he and Sally secretly observed them.

Then, gradually, he became aware of Cambridge. He hadn’t given it a thought when he came to Woodles. It was ten miles away—a place, he knew, where toffs were taught, but a place ten miles away hadn’t worried him. There he had changed, on that first visit, for the branch-line that took him within three miles of Woodles, and the village, asleep beneath its blanket of rain, had been entirely deserted, the last word in dank and misty isolation. And when he moved in, it was still asleep—asleep, this time, in the silence of the Christmas vacation, and only faintly stirred every now and again by the feeble movements of unmated ladies. It was so much out of the way that if it hadn’t been for Cambridge it would have slept for ever. But young men are restless and get everywhere. Bursting with energy, they rushed through Woodles as they rushed through all places within rushable distance. But they rushed, they didn’t stop; and Mr. Pinner consoled himself with that, and also with the knowledge he presently acquired that it was only for a few months—weeks, one might almost say, in the year, that this happened.

He bade Sally keep indoors during the afternoon hours, and hoped for the best.

§

Then, on a gusty afternoon in early March, when the mud in the lanes had turned to dust and was tearing in clouds down the street, the door opened violently, because of the wind, and a young man was blown in, and had to use all his strength to get the door shut again.

No sound of a motor had preceded him; he appeared just as one of the ladies might have appeared; and Sally was in the shop.

She was on some steps, rummaging aloft among the tins of Huntley and Palmer, and he didn’t immediately see her, and addressed himself to Mr. Pinner.

‘Have you any petrol?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ said Mr. Pinner quickly, hoping he would go away at once without noticing Sally. ‘We don’t keep it.’

‘Do you know where I can——’

The young man broke off, and stood staring upwards. ‘Christ’—he whispered under his breath, ‘Christ——’

‘Now, now,’ said Mr. Pinner with extreme irritability, only too well aware of what had happened, and in his fear slapping his knuckly little hand on the counter, ‘no blasphemy ’ere, sir, if you please——’

But he needn’t have been so angry and frightened, for this, if he had only known it, was his future son-in-law; the person who was to solve all his problems by taking over the responsibility of Sally. In a word it was, as Mr. Pinner ever afterwards described him, Mr. Luke.

II

§

At the date when he went into the shop at Woodles in search of petrol, young Luke, whose Christian name was Jocelyn, was a youth of parts, with an inventive and inquiring brain, and a thirst some of his friends at Ananias were unable to account for after knowledge. His bent was scientific; his tastes were chemical. He wished to weigh and compare, to experiment and prove. For this a quiet, undisturbed life was necessary, in which day after day he could work steadily and without interruption. What he had hoped for was to get a fellowship at Ananias. Instead, he got Sally.

It was clear to Jocelyn, considering his case later, that the matter with him at this time was youth. Nature had her eye on him. However much he wished to use his brains, and devote himself to the pursuit of scientific truth, she wished to use the rest of him, and she did. He had been proof against every other temptation she had plied him with, but he wasn’t proof against Sally; and all the things he had thought, and hoped, and been interested in up to then, seemed, directly he saw Sally, dross. A fever of desire to secure this marvel before any one else discovered her sent him almost out of his mind. He was scorched by passion, racked by fear. He knew he was no good at all from the marriage point of view, for he had no money hardly, and was certain he would be refused, and then—what then?

He need not have been afraid. At the word marriage Mr. Pinner, who had been snarling at him on his visits like an old dog who has been hurt and suspects everybody, nearly fell on his neck. Sally was in the back parlour. He had sent her there at once every time young Luke appeared in the shop, and then faced the young man defiantly, leaning with both hands on the counter, looking up at him with all his weak little bristles on end, and inquiring of him angrily, ‘Now what can I do for you to-day, sir?’

At the end of a week of this, Jocelyn, wild with fear lest the other inhabitants of the colleges of Cambridge, so perilously close for cars and bicycles, should discover and carry the girl off before he did, proposed through Mr. Pinner.

‘I want to marry your daughter,’ he stammered, his tongue dry, his eyes burning. ‘I must see her. I must talk—just to find out if she thinks she wouldn’t mind. It’s absurd, simply absurd, never to let me say a word to her——’

And Mr. Pinner, instead of pushing him out of the shop as Jocelyn, knowing his own poverty, expected, nearly fell on his neck.

‘Marry her? You did say marry, didn’t you, sir?’ he said in a trembling voice, flushing right up to his worried, kind blue eyes.

He could scarcely believe that he heard right. This young gentleman—a car, and all—nothing against him as far as he could see, and he hoped he could see as far as most people, except his youth.... But if he hadn’t been so young he mightn’t so badly have wanted to marry Sally, Mr. Pinner told himself, his eyes, now full of respect and awe, on the eager face of the suitor, for from experience he knew that everybody had wanted to do something badly with Sally, but it had hardly ever been marriage.

‘If your intentions is honourable——’ began Mr. Pinner.

‘Honourable! Good God. As though——’

‘Now, now, sir,’ interrupted Mr. Pinner gently, holding up a deprecating hand, ‘no need to get swearing. No need at all.’

‘No, no—of course not. I beg your pardon. But I must see her—I must be able to talk to her——’

‘Exactly, sir. Step inside,’ said Mr. Pinner, opening the door to the back room.

§

There sat Sally, mending in the lamplight.

‘We got a visitor,’ said Mr. Pinner, excited and proud. ‘But I’m blest, sir,’ he added, turning to Jocelyn, ‘if I knows what to call you.’

‘Luke—Jocelyn Luke,’ murmured the young man as one in a dream, his eyes on Sally.

‘Mr. Luke,’ introduced Mr. Pinner, pleased, for the name smacked agreeably of evangelists. ‘And Salvatia is ’er name, ain’t it, Salvatia? ’Er baptismal name, any’ow,’ he added, because of the way Sally was looking at him. ‘Sometimes people calls ’er Sally, but there ain’t no need to, Mr. Luke—there ain’t no need to at all, sir. Get another cup, will you, Salvatia?—and let’s ’ave our tea.’

And while she was getting the cup out of some back scullery place, wondering at suddenly becoming Salvatia, her father whispered to the suitor, ‘You go a’ead, sir, when she come back, and don’t mind me.’

Jocelyn didn’t mind him, for he forgot him the instant Sally reappeared, but he couldn’t go ahead. He sat dumb, gaping. The girl was too exquisite. She was beauty itself. From the top of her little head, with its flame-coloured hair and broad low brow and misty eyes like brown amber, down along the slender lines of her delicate body to where her small feet were thrust into shabby shoes, she was, surely, perfect. He could see no flaw. She seemed to light up the room. It was like, thought young Luke, for the first time in the presence of real beauty, suddenly being shown God. He wanted to cry. His mouth, usually so firmly shut, quivered. He sat dumb. So that it was Mr. Pinner who did what talking there was, for Sally, of the class whose womenfolk do not talk when the father brings in a friend to tea, said nothing.

Her part was to pour out the tea; and this she did gravely, her eyelashes, which just to see was to long to kiss, lying duskily on her serious face. She was serious because the visitor hadn’t yet smiled at her, so she hadn’t been able to smile back, and Jocelyn accordingly didn’t yet know about her smile; and Mr. Pinner, flushed with excitement, afraid it couldn’t be really true, sure at the same time that it was, entertained the suitor as best he could, making little jokes intended to put him at his ease and encourage him to go ahead, while at the same time trying to convey to Sally, by frowns and nods, that if she chose to make pleasant faces at this particular young gentleman she had his permission to do so.

The suitor, however, remained silent, and Sally obtuse. Her father had never behaved like this before, and she had no idea what it was all about. It was hard work for one, like Mr. Pinner, unaccustomed to social situations requiring tact and experience, and he perspired. He was relieved when his daughter cleared away the tea and went off with it into the scullery to wash up, leaving him alone with his young guest, who sat, his head sunk on his breast, following the girl with his eyes till the door was shut on her. Then, turning to her father, his thin face working with agitation, he began to pour out the whole tale of his terrible unworthiness and undesirability.

‘’Ere,’ said Mr. Pinner, pushing a tin of the best tobacco he stocked towards his upset visitor, ‘light up, won’t you, sir?’

The young man took no notice of the tobacco, and Mr. Pinner, listening attentively to all he was pouring out, couldn’t for the life of him see where the undesirability and unworthiness came in.

‘She’s a good girl,’ said Mr. Pinner, not filling his pipe either, from politeness, ‘as good a girl as ever trod this earth. And what I always say is that no good man is unworthy of the goodest girl. That’s right, ain’t it? Got to be good, of course. Beg pardon, sir, but might I ask—’ he sank his voice to a whisper, glancing at the scullery door—‘if you’re a good man, sir? I should say, gentleman. It’s a ticklish question to ’ave to ask, I know, sir, but ’er mother would ’ave wished——’

‘I don’t drink, I don’t bet, and I’m not tangled up with any woman,’ said Jocelyn. ‘I suppose that’s what you mean?’

‘Then where’s all this ’ere undesirable come in?’ inquired Mr. Pinner, puzzled.

‘I’m poor,’ said the suitor briefly.

‘Poor. That’s bad,’ agreed Mr. Pinner, shaking his head and screwing up his mouth. He knew all about being poor. He had had, first and last, his bellyful of that.

And yet on being questioned, as Mr. Pinner felt bound in duty to question, it turned out that the young gentleman was very well off indeed. He had £500 a year certain, whatever he did or didn’t do, and to Mr. Pinner, used to counting in pennies, this not only seemed enough to keep a wife and family in comfort, but also in style.

§

Sally came back, and Mr. Pinner, inspired, lifted a finger, said ‘’Ark,’ gave them to understand he heard a customer, without actually saying he did, which would have been a lie, and went away into the shop.

Sally stood there, feeling awkward. Jocelyn had got up directly she came in, and she supposed he was going to wish her a good evening and go; but he didn’t. She therefore stood first on one foot and then on the other, and felt awkward.

‘Won’t you,’ Jocelyn breathed, stretching out a hand of trembling entreaty, for he was afraid she might disappear again, ‘won’t you sit down?’

‘Well,’ said Sally shyly, ‘I don’t mind if I do——’ And for the first time Jocelyn heard the phrase he was later on to hear so often, uttered in the accent he was to try so hard to purify.

She sat down on the edge of the chair at the other side of the table. She wasn’t accustomed to sitting idle and didn’t know what to do with her hands, but she was sure it wouldn’t be manners to go on mending socks while a gentleman was in the room.

Jocelyn sat down too, the table between them, the light from the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling beating down on Sally’s head.

‘And Beauty was made flesh, and dwelt among us,’ he murmured, his eyes burning.

‘Pardon?’ said Sally, polite, but wishing her father would come back.

‘You lovely thing—you lovely, lovely thing,’ whispered Jocelyn hoarsely, his eyes like coals of fire.

At this Sally became thoroughly uneasy, and looked at him in real alarm.

‘Don’t be frightened. Your father knows. He says I may——’

‘Father?’ she repeated, much surprised.

‘Yes, yes—I asked him. He says I may. He says I may—may talk to you, make friends with you. That is,’ stammered Jocelyn, overcome by her loveliness, ‘if you’ll let me—oh, if you’ll let me....’

Sally was astonished at her father. ‘Well I never did,’ she murmured courteously. ‘Fancy father.’

‘Why? Why? Don’t you want to? Won’t you—don’t you want to?’

‘Wouldn’t say that,’ said Sally, shifting in her chair, and struggling to find the polite words. ‘Wouldn’t exactly say as ’ow I don’t want to.’

‘Then you—you’ll let me take you out? You’ll let me take you somewhere to tea? You’ll let me fetch you in the car—you’ll let me, won’t you? To-morrow?’ asked Jocelyn, leaning further across the table, his arms stretched along it towards her, reaching out to her in entreaty.

‘Father——’

‘But he says I may. It’s with his permission——’

‘Tea too?’ asked Sally, more and more astonished. ‘It ain’t much like ’im,’ she said, full of doubts.

Whereupon Jocelyn got up impetuously, and came round to her with the intention of flinging himself at her feet, and on his knees beseeching her to come out with him—he who in his life had never been on his knees to anybody.

‘Oh, Salvatia!’ he cried, coming round to her, holding out both his hands.

She hastily pushed back her chair and slipped out of it beyond his reach, sure this wasn’t proper. No gentleman had a right to call a girl by her Christian name without permission asked and granted; on that point she was quite clear. Salvatia, indeed. The gentle creature couldn’t but be affronted and hurt by this.

‘’Oo you gettin’ at, sir?’ she inquired, as in duty bound when faced by familiarity.

‘You—you!’ gasped Jocelyn, following her into the corner she had withdrawn into, and falling at her feet.

§

Mr. Pinner was of opinion that the sooner they were married the better. There was that in Mr. Luke’s eye, he told himself, which could only be got rid of by marriage; nothing but the Church could make the sentiments the young gentleman appeared to entertain for Sally right ones.

Whipt by fear, he hurried things on as eagerly as Jocelyn himself. Suppose something happened before there was time to get them married, and Mr. Luke, as he understood easily occurred with gentlemen in such circumstances, cooled off? He didn’t leave them a moment alone together after that first outing in the car when Jocelyn asked Sally to marry him, and she, obedient and wishful of pleasing everybody, besides having been talked to by her father the night before and told she had his full consent and blessing, and that it was her duty anyhow, heaven having sent Mr. Luke on purpose, had remarked amiably that she didn’t mind if she did.

After this, Mr. Pinner’s one aim was to keep them from being by themselves till they were safely man and wife. He lived in a fever of watchfulness. He was obsessed by terror on behalf of Sally’s virginity. His days were infinitely more wearing than in the worst period of Islington. Mrs. Pinner was missed and mourned quite desperately. It almost broke his back, the hurry, the anxiety, the constant gnawing fear, and the secrecy his future son-in-law insisted on.

‘What you want to be so secret for, Mr. Luke?’ he asked, black suspicion, always on the alert where Sally was concerned, clouding his naturally mild and trustful eyes.

‘You don’t want a howling mob of undergraduates round, do you?’ retorted Jocelyn.

‘Goodness gracious, I should think I didn’t, Mr. Luke,’ said Mr. Pinner, holding up both his little hands in horror. ‘She’s got a reg’lar gift, that Sally ‘as, for collecting crowds.’

‘Well, then,’ said Jocelyn irritably, whose nerves were in shreds. And added, ‘Isn’t it our job to keep them off her?’

‘Your job now, sir—or will be soon,’ said Mr. Pinner, unable to refrain from rubbing his hands at the thought of his near release from responsibility.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on calling me sir,’ snapped Jocelyn. ‘I’ve asked you not to. I keep on asking you not to.’

He was nearly in tears with strain and fatigue. Incredibly, he hadn’t once been able to kiss Sally,—not properly, not as a lover should. Always in the presence of that damned Pinner—such was the way he thought of his future father-in-law—what could he do? He couldn’t even talk to her; not really talk, not pour out the molten streams of adoration that were scalding him to death while that image of alertness sat unblinking by. What was the fellow afraid of? He had asked him at first straight out, on finding how he stuck, to leave them alone, and the answer he got was that courting should be fair and above board, and that he was obliged to be both father and mother to the poor girl.

‘Fair and above board! Good God,’ thought Jocelyn, driving himself back at a furious pace to Cambridge and throwing back his head in a fit of wild, nervous laughter. His father-in-law—that little man with trousers so much too long for him that they corkscrewed round his legs. His father-in-law....

But what was that in the way of grotesqueness compared to his being her father? There, indeed, was mystery: that loveliness beyond dreams should have sprung from Mr. Pinner’s little loins.

§

The widows of Woodles, and also the virgins, were extremely curious about Jocelyn’s daily visits, and tried to find out his name, and which college he belonged to. They were in no doubt as to the object of his visits, having by that time all seen Sally, and wished to warn Mr. Pinner to be careful.

They went to his shop and warned him.

Mr. Pinner, looking smaller and more sunk into his trousers than ever, thanked them profusely, and said he was being it.

‘One has to be on one’s guard with a motherless daughter,’ they said.

Mr. Pinner said he was on it.

‘And as your daughter promises to grow up some day into rather a good-looking girl——’

‘There ain’t much promise about Sally, mum—it’s been performance, performance, and nothing but performance since she was so ’igh.’

‘Oh, well—perhaps it’s not quite as bad as that,’ said the lady addressed, smiling indulgently. ‘Still, I do think she may grow into a good-looking girl, and so near Cambridge you will have to be careful. Your visitor is an undergraduate, of course?’

And Mr. Pinner, afraid of Jocelyn, afraid of his threats of hordes of young men descending on the shop if the engagement were known, said, slipping on the edge of an untruth, but just managing to clear it, ‘Couldn’t say, mum.’

She forced him, however—the woman forced him. ‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘You can’t say? You don’t know?’

So then he told it without blinking. ‘No, mum,’ he said, his harassed blue eyes on her face. ‘I don’t think the young gentleman did ’appen to mention ’is name.’

And in his heart he cried out to his conscience, ‘If they forces me to, ’ow, ’ow can I ’elp it?’

§

Between these two men, both in a state of extreme nervous tension, Sally passed her last days under her father’s roof, amiably quiescent, completely good. She did as she was told; always she had done as she was told, and it was now a habit. She liked the look of the young man who so unexpectedly was to become her husband, and was pleased that he should be a gentleman. She knew nothing about gentlemen, but she liked the sort of sound their voices made when they talked. At Islington she had preferred the visits to the shop of the clergy for just that reason—the sound their voices made when they talked. She would have been perfectly happy during the fortnight between her first setting eyes on Jocelyn and her marriage to him, if there had been a few more smiles about.

There were none. Her father was tying her up with trembling haste, as if she were a parcel to be got rid of in a hurry. Her lover’s face was haggard, and drawn in the opposite directions to those that lead to smiles. Dumbly he would gaze at her from under his overhanging brows, and every now and then burst into a brief explosion of talk she didn’t understand and hadn’t an idea how to deal with; or he would steal a shaking hand along the edge of the tablecloth, where her father couldn’t see it, and touch her dress. He looked just like somebody in a picture, thought Sally, with his thin dark face, and eyes right far back in his head,—quite blue eyes, in spite of his dark skin and hair. She liked him very much. She liked everybody very much. If only somebody had sometimes smiled, how nice it all would have been; for then she would have known for certain they were happy, and were getting what they wanted. Sally liked to be certain people were happy, and getting what they wanted. As it was, nobody could tell from their faces that these two were pleased. Sometimes in the evening, after her lover had gone and the door was locked and bolted and barred behind him, and all the windows had been examined and fastened securely, her father would calm down and cheer up; but her lover never calmed down or cheered up.

Sally, who hardly had what could be called thoughts but only feelings, was conscious of this without putting it into words. Perhaps when he had got what he wanted, which was, she was thoroughly aware, herself, he would be different. There were no doubts whatever in her mind as to what he wanted. She was too much used to the sort of thing. Not, it is true, in quite such a violent form, but then none of the others who had admired her—that is, every single male she had ever come across—had been allowed to be what her father called her fiancy, which was, Sally understood, the name of the person one was going to marry, and who might say things and behave in a way no one else might, as distinguished from the name of the person one went to the pictures with and didn’t marry, and who was a fancy. She knew that, because, though she herself had only gone to the pictures wedged between her father and mother, she had heard the girls at school talk of going with their fancies,—those girls who had all been her friends till they began to grow up, and then all, after saying horrid things to her and crying violently, had got out of her way.

As though she could help it; as though she could help having the sort of face that made them angry.

‘I ain’t made my silly face,’ she said tearfully—her delicious mouth pronounced it fice—to the last of her girl friends, to the one she was fondest of, who had hung on longest, but who couldn’t, after all, stand the look that came into the eyes of him she spoke of as her boy one day that he chanced to come across Sally.

‘No. No more you didn’t, Sally Pinner,’ furiously retorted the friend. ‘But you would ’ave if you could ’ave, so you’re nothin’ but a nypocrite—see?’

And the friend forgot herself still further, and added that Sally was a blinkin’ nypocrite; which was, as Mr. Pinner would have said had he heard it, language.

§

So that Sally in her short life had already caused trouble and uneasiness, in spite of having been so carefully kept out of the way.

Wherever there were human beings, those human beings stared at Sally and began to follow her; or, if they couldn’t follow her with their feet, did so with astonished, eager eyes as long as she was in sight. Holy Communion was the only one of the Sunday services Mr. Pinner let her go to in Woodles, because it was sparsely attended, and the few worshippers were women. But even at that solemn service the Vicar, who was seventy-eight, found it difficult altogether to shut out from his consciousness the lovely figure of grace shining like morning light in the shadows of his dark little church. He was as instantly aware of Sally the first Sunday she came to the service as every one else always was the moment she appeared anywhere, and she had the same effect on the old man as she had had on the young Jocelyn when first he saw her—he caught his breath, and for a moment was near tears. Because here, the old man perceived, at the end of his life he was at last beholding beauty,—fresh from God, still dewy from its heavenly birth; and the Vicar, who had long been a recluse, and lived entirely among his memories, which all were sentimental and poetic, bowed down in spirit before the young radiance come into his church, as before the Real Presence.

§

Such was Sally when young Jocelyn married her—mild inside, and only desiring to give satisfaction, and outside a thing that seemed made up of light. As Mr. Pinner had wished to hide her, so did Jocelyn wish to hide her, and wanted to be married in London, the least conspicuous of spots; but technical difficulties prevented this, seeing that he wanted to be married quickly, so he took the Vicar into his confidence, and got a special licence, and thus avoiding banns and publicity was married early one bright March morning, while Woodles, unaware of what was happening, was still washing up its breakfast things.

By this time Jocelyn was acquainted with Sally’s inability to give a plain answer to a question, and half expected her to reply ‘I don’t mind if I do’ to the Vicar when he asked if she would take him, Jocelyn, to be her wedded husband. She didn’t; but if she had he wouldn’t have cared, nor would the Vicar have cared. Whatever she did, whatever she said, was to these two dazzled men the one perfect gesture, the one perfect word.

But Sally, young and shy, said very little. Hardly had she spoken during the brief courtship. To the Vicar, full of awe of his office and his age, she scarcely dared raise her eyes, much less lift up her voice. It was enough, however; the old man was enthralled. Far from being surprised at Jocelyn’s determination to take his name off the books of his college and chuck his promising career and marry Sally and go up to London to pick up his living as a journalist, a profession for which he hadn’t the slightest aptitude, the Vicar understood perfectly. The college authorities, on the other hand, unaware of his reason for ruining himself, were amazed at such deliberate suicide. They had not seen Sally. The Vicar, who had, was convinced the young man was doing the one thing worth doing,—giving up everything to follow after Truth.

‘For is not Truth Beauty, and Beauty Truth?’ asked the Vicar, too old to bother any longer with material considerations.

Jocelyn and he were unanimous that it was.

§

The Vicar, indeed, was an immense comfort to Jocelyn the second and last week of his engagement, for Mr. Pinner was no comfort at all. Not that Jocelyn needed comfort at this marvellous moment; but he needed understanding, some one to talk to, some one who could and would listen intelligently. Mr. Pinner didn’t listen intelligently; he didn’t listen at all. All he did was to say heartily, ‘That’s right,’ to everything Jocelyn said, and such indiscrimination was annoying. It was a deep refreshment to get away from him and go up to the Vicarage, and there, slowly pacing up and down with the old man on the sunny path where the first daffodils were, talk with some one who so completely understood.

The Vicar concluded, from the frequency with which his young friend came to take counsel of him, that he was an orphan, but he asked no questions because he was long past the age of questions. The age of silence was his, of quiet resting on his oars, of a last warming of himself in the light of the sun, before departing hence and being no more seen. By this time, his mind being faintly bleared, he connected Sally with the Nunc Dimittis, and thanked God aloud, greatly to her confusion, for she couldn’t make out what the old gentleman was talking about, for being allowed to see, before departing in peace, the perfect loveliness of her whom he called the Lord’s Salvatia. Fitting and right was the young man’s attitude in the Vicar’s eyes; fitting and right to leave all things, and follow after this child of grace.

His unpractical attitude was immensely grateful to Jocelyn, who knew, though during this strange fortnight of thwarted love-making and arm’s-length worship he managed to forget, that one of the things he was leaving was his mother.

He hadn’t mentioned it, but he had got one.

III

§

Not a father, for he had long been dead, but a mother, whose single joy and pride he was. There she sat at home by the fire on his wedding night, thinking of him. No complete half-hour of the day could pass without the thought of Jocelyn getting into it. Her only child; so brilliant, so serious, so hard-working, so good. She loved brains. She loved diligence. She loved the man of the house to be absorbed in his work. What a halo he was about her head! Everybody round where she lived knew about him. Everybody had heard of his successes,—‘My son, who is a scholar of Ananias.... My son, who is a Prizeman of his University.... My son, who won this year’s Rutherford Prize....’ Great was her reward for having devoted her life to him and his education, and for having turned a deaf ear to those suitors who had tried to marry her when she was a young widow. She wasn’t even now, twenty years later, an old widow, but she was a widow who was less young.

She lived in one of those suburbs where much is done for the mind. She was popular in it, and looked up to. She was, in fact, one of its leading lights,—cultivated, lady-like, well-read, artistic, interested in each new movement that came along. And of a most pleasing appearance, too, being slender at an age when the mothers of the grown-up are sometimes so no longer, dark haired among the grey, smooth among the puckered, and her eyes had no crow’s feet, and were calm and beautifully clear.

She was serenely happy. The milieu suited her exactly. She had come to South Winch twenty years before from Kensington—real Kensington, not West or North, but the part that clusters round the Albert Hall—on her husband’s death, because of having to be frugal, but soon discovered it was the very place for her. Far better, she intelligently recognised, to be a leading light in a suburb, and know and be known by everybody, than extinguished and invisible in London. Besides, spring came to the suburbs in a way it never did to London, and it was the custom in South Winch, where people were determined to think highly, to think particularly highly of spring. At the bottom of her half acre there was only an iron railing separating her from a real meadow belonging to the big villa of a prosperous City man, and spring, she told the Rector, who was also a Canon, did things in that meadow it would never dream of doing near the Albert Hall.

‘Look at those dandelions,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘I do think the meanest flower that blows in its natural setting is more beautiful than the whole of those thought-out effects in Kensington Gardens.’

And the Rector—the Canon—said, ‘How true that is,’ and remarked that she was a Wordsworthian; and Mrs. Luke smiled, and said, ‘Am I?’ and wasn’t altogether pleased, for Wordsworth, she somehow felt, was no longer, in the newest opinion, what he was.

While Jocelyn, then, was worshipping Sally across the supper-table of the private sitting-room he had engaged in the hotel at Exeter, where they were breaking their journey to Cornwall, which was the place he was going to hide his honeymoon in, and Sally, unable to make head or tail of his speech and behaviour, was becoming every minute more uneasy, his mother sat, placid in the security of unconsciousness, by the fire in Almond Tree Cottage, a house which used, before the era of her careful simplicity, so foolishly to be called Beulah.

‘A cottage,’ she observed to her sympathetic friends, ‘is the proper place for me. I’m a poor woman. Five hundred a year’—why hide anything?—‘doesn’t go far these days after Income Tax has been deducted. Jocelyn has his own five hundred, or we would really have been in a quite bad way. As it is, I can just manage.’

And she did; and in her clever hands frugality merely seemed comfort gone a little thin, and nobody liked to ask her for subscriptions.

The house was small and very white, and had a small and very green garden, with a cedar on the back lawn and an almond tree on the front one. Two front gates that swang back on their hinges, and a half-moon carriage-sweep. Railings. Shrubs. The yellow sanded road. Houses opposite, with almond trees too, or, less prettily, in the front gardens of the insensitive, monkey puzzles. The hall door was blue. Such curtains as could be seen at the same time as the door were blue too. At no season of the year was there not at least one vivid flower stuck in a slender vessel in the sitting-room window. And in the sitting-room itself, on the otherwise bare walls, was one picture only,—a copy, really very well done, of a gay and charming Tiepolo ceiling—Mrs. Luke was the first in South Winch to take up Tiepolo—in which everybody was delicately happy, in spite of a crucifixion going on in one corner, and high-spirited, fat little angels tossed roses across the silvery brightness of what was evidently a perfect summer afternoon. Books, too, were present; not many, but the right ones. Blake was there; also Donne; and Sir Thomas Browne; and Proust, in French. A novel, generally Galsworthy, lay on the little table near the fire, and, by an arrangement with a circle of friends, most of the better class weeklies passed through the house in a punctual stream.

Sitting in the deep chair by the fireside table on Jocelyn’s wedding night, her dark head against the bright cushion that gave the necessary splash of colour to the restful bareness of the room, her lap full of reviews she was going to read of the best new books and plays, so as to be able to discuss them intelligently with him when he came home at Easter—only a few more days to wait,—his mother couldn’t keep her eyes from wandering off these studies to the glowing little fire of ships’ logs and neat blocks of peat, for her thoughts persisted in flying, like homing birds, to the nest they always went back to and so warmly rested in: Jocelyn, and what he was, and what he was going to be.

Other mothers had anxieties; she had never had one. Others had disappointments; she had had nothing but happy triumphs. He was retiring, it was true, and stayed up in his little attic-study when he was at home, and wouldn’t go anywhere except to a Beethoven concert—together they had studied all that has been said about Beethoven, and she had plans for proceeding to the study of all that has been said about Bach—or for long tramps with her, when they would eat bread and cheese at some wayside inn, and read aloud to each other between the mouthfuls; but how much richer was she herself for that. And the comfort of having a good son, a son who cared nothing for even so-called harmless dissipations! When she looked round at other people’s sons, and saw the furrows on their fathers’ foreheads—she smiled at her own alliterations—and heard a whisper of the dread word Debts, and knew where debts came from—betting, gambling, drinking, women, in a ghastly crescendo, how could she ever, ever be thankful enough that Jocelyn was so good? Never once had he betted, gambled, drunk, or—she smiled again at her own word—womaned; she was ready to take her oath he hadn’t. Didn’t she know him inside out? He kept nothing from her; he couldn’t have if he had wanted to, bless him, for she, who had watched him from long before he became conscious, knew him far, far better than he could possibly know himself.

Many, indeed, were her blessings. Great and conscious her content. Her dark head on the vivid cushion was full of bright—why not say it?—self-congratulation, which is the other word for thankfulness. And how not congratulate herself on the possession of that beloved, brilliant boy? While, to add to everything else, the neighbour, whose meadow of buttercups she so freely and inexpensively enjoyed from over the railing on dappled May mornings, was showing unmistakable signs of wishing to marry her. His year of widowerhood had recently come to an end, and the very next week he had begun the kind of activity that could only be described as courting; so that she had this feather, too, to add to a cap already, she gratefully acknowledged, so full of feathers. Poor? Yes, she was poor. But what was being poor? Nothing at all, if one refused to mind it.

A third time she smiled, shaking her head at the neat peat blocks as if they had been the neighbour. ‘Come, come, my friend—at our ages,’ she could hear herself saying to him with gentle and flattering raillery—he must be at least twenty years older than herself—when the moment should arrive. But it was pleasant, this, to sit in her charmingly lit room—she was clever at making lampshades—and to know that next door was a man, well set up in spite of his sixty odd years, who thought her desirable, pleasant to be certain she had only to put out her hand, and take wealth.

And who could say, she mused, but that it mightn’t be the best thing for Jocelyn too, to have a solid stepfather like that at his back, able to help him financially? She had spent happy years in the little white house, and it had rarely worried her that she should be obliged to take such ceaseless pains to hide the bones of her economies gracefully, but later on she would be older, and might be tired, and later on Jocelyn might perhaps want to marry and set up house for himself—after all, it would only be natural—and then she would be lonely, besides being ten years—she thought in ten years would be about the time he might wish to marry—less attractive than she was now, and getting not only lonelier with every year but also, she supposed, less attractive; though surely one oughtn’t to do that, if one’s mind and spirit——?

Whereas, if she married the neighbour....

§

He came in at that moment, on the pretext of bringing her back a book she had lent him, though he hadn’t read it and didn’t mean to, for it was what he, being a plain man, called high-falutin. He didn’t tell her this, because when a man is courting he cannot be candid, and he well knew that he was courting. What he wasn’t sure of was whether she knew. You never could tell with women; the best of them were artful.

He came in that evening, then, to make it finally clear to her. She was a charming woman, and much younger, he imagined, than her age, which couldn’t, he calculated, with a son of twenty-two be far short of forty-two, and he had always greatly admired the pluck with which she faced what seemed to him sheer destitution. She was the very woman, too, to have at the head of one’s table when one had friends to dinner,—good-looking, knowing how to dress, able to talk about any mortal thing, and a perfect lady. And after the friends had gone, and it was time to go to bye-bye—such were the words his thoughts clothed themselves in,—she would still be a desirable companion, even if—again his words—a bit on the thin side. That, however, would soon be set right when he had fed her up on all the good food she hadn’t ever been able to afford, and anyhow she was years and years younger than poor Annie, who had been the same age as himself, which was all right to begin with, but no sort of a show in the long run. Also, Annie had stayed common.

So the neighbour, whose name was Mr. Thorpe, arrived on Jocelyn’s wedding night about nine o’clock in the restrained sitting-room of Almond Tree Cottage, determined to make his purpose clear. That he should be refused didn’t enter his head, for he had much to offer. He was far the richest man in the parish, his two daughters were married and out of the way, his house and cars were bigger than anybody’s, and he grew pineapples. He couldn’t help thinking, he couldn’t help knowing, that for a woman of over forty he was a catch, and he went into the room, past the reverent-eyed small maid who held the door open, expanding his chest. A poverty-stricken little room, he always considered, with nothing in it of the least account, except the lady.

Yes; except the lady. But what a lady. Not a grey hair in her head, which he had carefully examined when she wasn’t looking, nor, he would wager, any tooth that wasn’t exclusively her own. And a trim ankle; and a pretty wrist. Ruffles, too. He liked ruffles at a woman’s wrist. And able to talk about any mortal thing. Annie, poor creature, had made him look like a fool when he had his friends to dinner. This one would be the finest of the feathers in a cap which, he too gratefully acknowledged, was stuck full of them.

‘All alone, eh?’ he said cheerily. ‘That’s bad.’

‘I’m used to it,’ said Mrs. Luke, smilingly holding out her slender hand, on which a single ruby—or was it a garnet? probably a garnet—caught the light. She had on a wine-coloured, soft woollen dress that Jocelyn liked, and the ring and the dress went very well together.

A pretty picture; a perfect lady. Mr. Thorpe, determined to waste no time in making his purpose clear, bent his head and kissed the hand.

‘Being used to a bad thing doesn’t make it better, but worse,’ he said, drawing up the only other really comfortable chair—Jocelyn’s—and sitting down close to her.

And he was about to embark then and there on his proposal, for he hated waste of anything, including time, and Mrs. Luke was already drawing up her shoulders to her ears in an instinctive movement of defence, for she would have liked to have had longer to turn the thing over in her mind, and discover really whether his splendid illiteracy—it was so immense as to appear magnificent—would be a source of pleasure to her or suffering, whether the pleasure of filling up his mind’s emptiness would be greater than the pains of such an exertion, whether, in short, she hadn’t better refuse him, when the little maid came in with the silver salver she had been trained to present letters on, and held it out before her mistress.

‘Letters, eh?’ said Mr. Thorpe, nettled by this interruption. ‘I should give orders they’re to be left in the—well, you can’t call it a hall, can you, so let’s say passage.’

The little maid, alarmed, sidled out of the room.

‘I would indeed, if it weren’t that I can’t bear to wait a minute when it’s a letter from Jocelyn,’ said Mrs. Luke, holding the letter tight, for she saw it was from him. ‘You wouldn’t be able to wait either, would you,’ she went on, smiling more brightly even than usual, for the mere touch of the letter made her more bright, ‘for anything you loved.’

‘No,’ said Mr. Thorpe sturdily, seizing this opening. ‘No. I wouldn’t. And that’s why I’ve come round——’

But she didn’t hear. ‘You’ll forgive me, won’t you my dear friend,’ she murmured, slitting the envelope with an enamelled paper-knife lest she should harm the dear contents, ‘but I haven’t heard from that boy for over a fortnight, and I’ve been beginning to wonder——’

‘Oh, certainly, certainly. Don’t mind me,’ said Mr. Thorpe, aggrieved. ‘Mark my words, though,’ he added, sitting up very square and broad in his chair, and giving the knees of his trousers a twitch each, ‘one shouldn’t overdo the son business.’

She didn’t hear. Her eyes were running down the lines of the letter, while she muttered something about just wanting to see if he were well.

‘Damned stuck up young prig,’ Mr. Thorpe was in the act of saying to himself, resentfully watching this absorption, when he was interrupted by a complete and alarming change in the lady.

She gave a violent shudder; she dropped the letter on the floor, as though her shaking hands couldn’t hold it; and then, fixing her large grey eyes on his, opened her mouth and moaned.

He stared at her. He couldn’t think what was the matter.

‘Sick, eh?’ he asked, staring.

‘Oh, oh——’ was all she said, turning her face from him, and burying it in the cushion.

§

Well, what does one do with a woman who buries her face in a cushion? Comforts her, of course, thought Mr. Thorpe, again seizing his opportunity. The young ass couldn’t be dead, or he wouldn’t have written. But he might——

Mr. Thorpe paused at the thought, and withdrew the hand already put out to pat. Yes; that was it. Better not comfort just yet. For the young fool had no doubt run into debt, and was being threatened with proceedings, and was trying to persuade his mother to pay, and Mr. Thorpe didn’t want to begin his betrothal with having to shell out for somebody else’s scapegrace son.

His hand, accordingly, slowly redescended on to his knee, where it rested motionless while he stared at the figure in the chair. Pretty figure. Nice lines. Graceful, even in her upset. She only needed very little, just the weeniest bit, fattening up. But she shouldn’t have spoiled that son. Women were fools about their sons.

Then, noticing that the letter was lying at his feet, and the lady, her face in the cushion, was incapable of observing what he did, he put on his eyeglasses, picked it up carefully so that it shouldn’t rustle, and, remarking to himself that all was fair in love and war, read it.

Having read it, he as carefully replaced it on the carpet, took off his eyeglasses, and began to comfort.

For it wasn’t debts, it was marriage; the best thing possible from Mr. Thorpe’s point of view—clearing the field, leaving the mother free to turn her thoughts to other ties. And a good job too, for the young ass had gone clean off his head. What a letter. He ought to be ashamed of himself, writing sick stuff like that to his mother. Married this very day. Given up Cambridge. Chucked his career. Finished with ambitions. Going to earn his own living in London. Mother bound to love—no, it was put hotter than that—worship the girl, who was more beautiful than any angel——

Tut, tut. Silly young ass, caught by the first handsome slut.

‘Better tell me about it,’ said Mr. Thorpe, leaning forward and laying his hand with unhesitating kindness on Mrs. Luke’s shoulder. ‘Nothing like getting things off one’s chest. Count on me. Whatever your son’s done I’ll help. I’ll do anything—anything at all, mind you, to help.’

And Jocelyn’s mother, completely overwhelmed by the incredible sudden smash up of everything she had lived for, did, on hearing this kind, steady male voice through her misery, turn to Mr. Thorpe as the drowning turn to any spar, and, making odd little noises, stooped down and tried to pick up the letter.

But her hands shook too much. He had to pick it up for her.

‘Read it——,’ she said in a sobbing whisper.

So he took out his eyeglasses, and read it again.

§

‘Now what you’ve got to do,’ said Mr. Thorpe, folding it up neatly when he had finished, and laying it down on the little table, ‘is to make up your mind that what’s done can’t be undone.’

Mrs. Luke, her head buried in the cushions, moaned.

‘That’s it,’ said Mr. Thorpe, a hand on each knee and an eye on her. ‘That’s the ticket.’

‘I know—I know,’ moaned Mrs. Luke. ‘But just at first—the shock——’

‘Shock, eh? I don’t know that there’s much shock about marriage,’ said Mr. Thorpe. ‘Shouldn’t be, anyhow.’

‘But so sudden—so unexpected——’

‘People will marry, you know,’ said Mr. Thorpe. ‘Especially men. Once they get set on it, nothing stops ’em.’

‘I know—I know—but Jocelyn—such a boy——’

‘Boy, eh? Age has precious little to do with it,’ said Mr. Thorpe firmly. ‘In fact, nothing.’

‘But his prospects—his career—all thrown away—ruined——’

‘Marriage never harmed a man yet,’ said Mr. Thorpe still more firmly, aware that he was being inaccurate, but also aware that no one can afford to be accurate and court simultaneously. Accuracy, Mr. Thorpe knew, comes after marriage, not before.

‘Mark my words,’ he went on, ‘that clever son of yours won’t stop being clever because he’s married. Who’s going to take his brains from him? Not a loving wife, you bet. Why, a good wife, a loving wife, doubles and trebles a man’s output.’

‘How kind you are,’ murmured Mrs. Luke, who did find this comforting. ‘But Jocelyn—my boy—to keep it from me——’

‘Bound to keep something from his mother,’ said Mr. Thorpe. ‘Mothers are all right, and a man has to have them to start with, but the day comes when a back seat is what they’ve got to climb into. Only as regards their children, mind you,’ he added. ‘A woman has many other strings to her bow, and is by no means nothing but a mother.’

‘Oh, but we were everything, everything to each other,’ moaned Mrs. Luke, stabbed afresh by the mention of a back seat. ‘Always, always. He never looked at another woman——’

‘Damned prig,’ thought Mr. Thorpe. And said out aloud, ‘Time he began, then. Though having a woman like you about,’ he added, placing his hand with determination on hers, which hung limply down holding a handkerchief while her face was still turned away, ‘ought to keep him from seeing the others all right. You’re a wonderful woman, you know—a remarkable woman.’

His voice changed. It took on the unmistakable note that is immediately followed by love-making.

‘I—think I’ll go and lie down,’ said Mrs. Luke faintly, recognising the note, and feeling she could bear no more of anything that night. ‘I—I really think I must. My head——’

She struggled to get up.

He helped her. He helped her by laying hold of both her wrists, and drawing her upwards and towards him.

‘Head, eh?’ he said, a gleam in his eyes.

‘How kind, how kind——’ she murmured distractedly, finding herself on her feet and very close to Mr. Thorpe, who still held her wrists.

She wanted her letter. She looked about helplessly for her letter, keeping her head as far away from him as she could. There was her letter—on the table—she wanted to snatch it up—to get away as quickly as possible—to hide in her bedroom—and her wrists were being held, and she couldn’t move.

‘Kind, eh? Kind, you call it?’ said Mr. Thorpe through his teeth. ‘I can be kinder than that.’ And he put his arms round her, and drew her vigorously to his chest.

‘This in exchange for Jocelyn,’ drifted through Mrs. Luke’s wretched and resisting mind.

But, even through her wretchedness and resistance she felt there was something rock-like, something solid and fixed, about Mr. Thorpe’s chest, to which in the present catastrophe, with the swirling waters of bitterest disappointment raging round her feet, it might be well to cling.

IV

§

And while these things were happening in Almond Tree Cottage, Jocelyn, in the private sitting-room of the Exeter hotel, was behaving, it seemed to Sally, in the most strange way.

If this was what married gentlemen were like, then she wondered that there should be any married ladies left. Enough to kill them off like flies, thought Sally, helplessly involved in frequent and alarming embraces. Still, she held on hard in her mind to what her father had said to her the evening before, when she was going up to bed,—‘Sally,’ her father had said, calling her back a moment and looking solemn, ‘don’t you take no notice of what Mr. Luke do or don’t, once ’e’s your ’usband. ’Usbands ain’t gentlemen, remember—not ordinary, day-time gentlemen, such as you thinks they are till you knows better. And you just say to yourself as ’ow your mother went through it all before you was so much as born, and she was a bit of all right, warn’t she? So you just remember that, my girl, if by any chance you should ’appen to get the fidgets.’

She did remember it, though it was Mr. Luke—so she thought of him—who had the fidgets. He didn’t seem able to sit quiet for two minutes in his chair, and eat his supper, and let her eat hers. Such a lovely supper, too—a real shame to let it get cold. What was the good of ordering a lovely supper if one wasn’t going to eat it properly?

More and more earnestly as the evening progressed did she wish herself back in the peaceful parlour behind the shop; less and less did the thought of her mother having been through all this too support her, because she became surer every minute that she hadn’t been through it. Never in his life could her father have behaved as Mr. Luke was behaving. Entirely unused to kisses, except evenings and mornings, and then just one on her cheek and over and done with at once, Sally couldn’t get over the number and length of Mr. Luke’s. Also, it surprised her very much to see a gentleman interrupt his supper—and such a lovely supper—to run round the table and go down on his knees and kiss her shoes,—new ones, of course, but still not things that ought to be kissed; it surprised her so much, that she came over quite queer each time.

She thought it a great mercy he had locked the door, so that the grand waiter couldn’t get in, for the grand waiter, staring at her while he handed her the dishes and calling her Madam, alarmed her in his way very nearly as much as Mr. Luke alarmed her in his; yet, on the other hand, if the waiter was locked out she was locked in, so that it cut both ways, thought Sally, wishing she might be let eat the meringue the waiter had left on her plate before being locked out. But every time she tried to, Mr. Luke seemed to have to be kissed.

And the way Mr. Luke, when he did stay still a minute in his chair, never took his eyes off her, and the things he said! And he didn’t seem a bit happy either, in spite of talking such a lot about heaven and the angels. If only he had seemed happy Sally wouldn’t have minded so much, for then at least somebody would have been getting some good out of it; but he looked all upset, and as if he were going to be ill,—sickening for something, she concluded.

For a long time she kept up her manners, bravely clinging to them and trying hard to guess when was the right moment to say Yes and when to say No, which was very difficult because he talked so queerly, and she hadn’t an idea what most of it meant; for a long time she was able to smile politely, if anxiously, every time she looked up and caught his fierce and burning eye; but all of a sudden, perpetually thwarted in her efforts to eat the meringue, and very hot and uncomfortable from so much kissing, she found she couldn’t do anything any more that was proper, wasn’t able to smile, said No when it ought to have been Yes, lost her nerve, and to her own surprise and excessive shame began to whimper.

Very quietly she whimpered, very beautifully, her head drooping exquisitely on its adorable little neck, while the meringue she had so badly wanted to be allowed to eat for the last quarter of an hour was finally renounced, and left to waste and dribble away its expensive cream on her plate.

Jocelyn was appalled.

‘Oh, Sally—oh, my angel—oh, my heavenly, heavenly child!’ he cried, flinging himself once again at her feet, while she once again quickly drew them up beneath her frock, as she had done each time before.

She apologised humbly. She was really terribly ashamed,—and he so good to her, spending all that money on such a splendid supper.

‘I ain’t cried but once before in my life,’ she explained, fumbling for her handkerchief, while the tears welled up in her enchanting sweet eyes. ‘When mother died, that was, but I never didn’t not else. Dunno what come over me, Mr. Luke——’

‘Only once before! When your mother died! And now on your wedding day! Oh, Sally—it’s me—I’ve made you—I, who would die a thousand deaths to spare a single perfect hair of your divine little head——’

‘Don’t say that, Mr. Luke—please now, don’t say that,’ Sally earnestly begged, much perturbed by this perpetual harping on death and angels. And having at last got out her handkerchief, she was just going to wipe her eyes decently when he snatched it from her and didn’t let her do anything, but actually kissed away the tears as they rolled out.

‘You ain’t ’alf fond of kissin’, are you, Mr. Luke,’ murmured Sally miserably, helplessly obliged to hand over her tears to what seemed to her a really horrid fate, while to herself she was saying in resigned, unhappy astonishment, ‘And them my very own eyes, too, when all’s said and done.’

§

It was three days later that Jocelyn, for the first time, said, ‘Don’t say that, Sally,’ in a tone of command.

He had told her many times not to call him Mr. Luke, told her entreatingly, caressingly, playfully, that he was her husband Jocelyn, and no longer ever any more to be Mr. anything on her darling lips; and when she forgot, for habits in Sally died hard, smilingly and adoringly reminded her.

But this time, after three whole days’ honeymoon and three whole nights, he commanded; adding in a tone of real annoyance, ‘And for God’s sake don’t look at people when they pass.’

‘I ain’t lookin’ at them,’ protested Sally, flushing, who never wanted to look at anybody, besides having been taught by the anxious Pinners that no modest girl did. ‘They looks at me.’

It was true. Jocelyn knew it was true, but nevertheless was angry, and caught hold of her arm and marched her up a side lane from the sea, up to the less inhabited hill at the back of the village.

For they were at St. Mawes, the little cut-off fishing village in South Cornwall which had lived in Jocelyn’s memory ever since, two years before, on an Easter bicycling tour with his mother, he and she had suddenly dropped down on it from the hill above, unaware of its existence till they were right on it, so completely was it tucked away and hidden. It had lived in his memory as the most difficult spot to get at, and therefore probably the most solitary, of any he had come across. Miles from a railway, miles from the nearest town, only to be reached, unless one went to it by sea, along a most difficult and tortuous road that ended by throwing one down a precipice on to a ferry-boat which took one across the Fal and shot one out at the foot of another precipice,—or so the two hills seemed to Jocelyn and his mother, who had to push their bicycles up them—he considered it the place of places to hide his honeymoon in; to hide, that is, the precious and conspicuous Sally.

His recollection of it was just a village street along the sea, an inn or two, a shop or two, a fisherman or two, and in the middle of the day complete emptiness.

The very place.

He wrote, trembling with excitement, to its post office to get him rooms, rooms for his wife and himself—his wife; oh, my God! thought Jocelyn, still a week off his wedding day.

The post office got him rooms,—a tiny bedroom, almost filled by the bed, a tiny parlour, almost filled by the table, and a fisherman and his wife, who lived in the rest of the cottage, to look after them.

The first day they were out in a boat all day being shown coves by the fisherman, who stared hard at Sally, and whenever they wanted to go back took them to see another cove instead; but the second day, the imperativeness of daily exercise having been part of Jocelyn’s early training, he felt it his duty to exercise Sally, and emerged with her during the quiet hour after their mid-day meal for a blow along the sea front.

She had already said, when he asked her if she would like to go out, that she didn’t mind if she did, and he had passed it over because he happened to be looking at her when she said it, and no one who happened to be looking at Sally when she said anything was able to pay much attention to her words. Jocelyn couldn’t, anyhow, only three days married; but out on the sea front, walking side by side, his eyes fixed ahead in growing surprise at the number of people suddenly come out, like themselves, apparently, for blows, when in answer to his remark that the place seemed more populous than he had imagined, she said, ‘It do, don’t it, Mr. Luke,’ he snapped at her.

Snapped at her. Snapped at his angel, his child of light, his being from another sphere, who ought, he had told her, making her fidget a good deal, for whatever did he mean? sit for ever on a sapphire throne, and be crowned by stars, and addressed only in the language of Beethoven’s symphonies. But then there were these confounded people suddenly sprung from nowhere, and it was enough to make any man snap, the way they looked at Sally. Where did they come from? Where were they going? What did they want?

Jocelyn seized her, and hurried her up the side path that led over the hill to the quiet country at the back. He was excessively put out. The swine—the idle, ogling swine, he thought, rushing her up the steep path at such a rate that the willing Sally, obediently putting her best leg foremost, nevertheless, light and active as she was, arrived at the top so breathless that she couldn’t speak.

Not that she wanted to speak. Never much of a hand at what her girl friends, when she still had them, used to call back-chat, the brief period of her honeymoon had taught her how safe and snug silence was compared to the draughty dangers of speech. Marriage, she already felt, groping dimly about in it, wasn’t at all like anything one was used to. It seemed swampy underfoot. You started walking along it, and it looked all right, when in you went. Husbands—difficult to know where one was with them, thought Sally. They changed about so. One moment on their knees as if one was a church, and the next rushing one off one’s feet up a hill such as one couldn’t have believed possible if one hadn’t seen it for oneself, and their face all angry. Angry? What for? wondered Sally, who was never angry.

‘It’s that hair of yours,’ said Jocelyn, got to the top, and standing still a moment, for he too was panting.

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, in a lovely surprise. He was frowning at the sea, and the bit of road along it visible at their feet, on which still crawled a few black specks.

‘’Ow?’ Sally was injudicious enough to ask; but after all it was only one word—she was careful to say only one word.

One was enough, though.

‘How, Sally—how, HOW. You really must learn to say how,’ said Jocelyn, exasperated.

‘I did say ’ow,’ explained Sally meekly.

‘Yes. You did. Exactly,’ said Jocelyn.

‘Ain’t it right to say ’ow?’ she asked, anxious for instruction.

‘Haven’t you any ear?’ was Jocelyn’s answer, turning to her with a kind of pounce.

Sally was still more surprised. What a question. Of course she had an ear. Two of them. And she was going to tell him so when his face, as he looked at her, changed to the one he had when he got talking about heaven and angels.

For how could Jocelyn stay irritated with anything like that? He had only to turn and look at her for all his silly anger to shrivel up. In the presence of her loveliness, what a mere mincing worm he was, with his precise ways of speech, and his twopenny-halfpenny little bit of superior education. As though it mattered, as though it mattered, thought Jocelyn.

‘Oh, Sally, I didn’t mean it,’ he said, catching up her hand and kissing it, which made her feel very awkward and ashamed, somehow, having a thing like that done to her hand, and in broad daylight, too, and out of doors. ‘But you should try and tuck your hair more out of sight—look, this way,’ he went on, gently taking her hat off and arranging her hair for her before putting it on again. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘it does catch the eye so, doesn’t it, my beautiful, flaming seraphim—oh, my God,’ he added under his breath, ‘how beautiful you are!’

‘It don’t make no difference,’ said Sally in a resigned voice.

‘What doesn’t?’

‘If you tucks it in or don’t. They always looks at me. We tried everything at ’ome, Father and Mother did, but they always looks at me.’

She spoke with deprecation and apology. Best let him know the worst at once, for she was thoroughly aware of her disabilities and the endless trouble she had given her parents; while as for their scoldings, and exhortations, and dark hints of bad things that might happen to her, hadn’t they rung in her ears since she was twelve? But what could she do? There she was. Having been born like that, how could she help it?

And another thing she couldn’t help, though she was unconscious that she did it, was that every time she caught the amiable eye of a stranger, and she had never yet met any stranger who hadn’t amiable eyes, she smiled. Just a little; just an involuntary gratitude for the friendliness in the eye that had been caught. And as she had two dimples, otherwise invisible, the smile, which would anyhow have been lovely on that face, was of exceeding loveliness, and complications followed, and angry chidings from the worn-out Pinners, and, in Sally, a resigned surprise.

It was while she was trying to convey to Jocelyn that whatever he did with her hair she was doomed to be looked at, and was at the same time shaking it back so as to help him to get it neat—it looked startlingly vivid against the grey background of sea and sky—that a young man called Carruthers, out for a run with his dog after a stuffy Sunday family lunch, came round the bend of the path, whistling and swinging his stick, and stopped dead when he saw her.

His dog rushed on, however, and ran up to the spirit-thing, and sniffed and wagged round it, and seemed quite pleased; so it was real, it wasn’t a spirit, it wasn’t the beginning in his own brain of hallucinations on burning, Blake-like lines.

He stood gazing. He had never seen anything like that before,—no, by Jove, nor had most other people. ‘Oh, I say—don’t, don’t, don’t put it on yet!’ he nearly cried out as he saw the hat in the dark, Iberian-looking youth’s hands being raised quickly above the girl’s head when that confounded dog disturbed them, and knew that in another instant it would descend and the light go out.

The Iberian’s movements, however, were swift and decided, and the hat was not only put on but pulled on,—tugged on with vigour as far down over her eyes as it would go; and then, after a frowning glance round, the fellow drew her hand through his arm and walked her off quickly in the opposite direction.

There was nothing left for Carruthers but to call his dog—an attractive bitch, who would have been a Sealyham if it hadn’t been for something its mother did once,—and it wasn’t Carruthers’ fault that it too should chance to be called Sally.

‘Sally! Sally!’ he therefore very naturally shouted, raising his voice as much as possible, which was a great deal. ‘Sally! Come here! Sally! Come here, I tell you!’

The hills round St. Mawes reverberated with entreaties that Sally should come.

She did come, his Sally did, but behind it, running, came the Iberian as well. The girl was out of sight round the corner. Young Carruthers watched the hurrying approach of her companion with surprise, which increased when he saw the expression on his face.

‘How dare you! How dare you!’ shouted Jocelyn directly he was near enough; upon which Carruthers’ surprise became amazement.

‘What’s up?’ he inquired.

‘How dare you call out Sally, and tell her to come here? Eh? What do you mean by it? You——’

‘I say—hold on,’ exclaimed Carruthers quickly, raising a defensive arm. ‘Hold on a bit. Look—here she is, here’s Sally——’ and he pointed to the fawning sinner.

Jocelyn’s fists fell limply to his sides. He flushed, and looked extremely foolish. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Carruthers, with immense sarcastic politeness.

‘It—it’s my wife’s name,’ stammered Jocelyn, ‘and I thought you knew her, and were incredibly cheeking her——’

Carruthers, staring at his nervous twitching face, didn’t laugh, but simply nodded. Having seen Sally he simply nodded.

‘That’s all right,’ he said gravely; and for some reason added impulsively, ‘old man.’

He watched the thin figure hurrying off again. ‘A bit of responsibility,’ he thought. ‘The poor chap looks all nerves and funk already——’ for it was plain they couldn’t have been married long, plain they were both too young to have been anything long.

Carruthers, who was as solid and matter-of-fact outside as he wasn’t inside, turned away so as not again to interrupt, and went home across the fields whistling sad tunes in minor keys. Marvellous beyond imagining to be married to beauty like that, but—yes, by God, one would be on wires the whole time, there’d be no end to one’s anxieties. And his final conclusion was that Jocelyn was a poor devil.

§

He might have concluded it even more emphatically if he could have followed him, and seen what he saw when he got round the corner where Sally had been left for a moment—only for a moment, mind you, said Jocelyn to himself indignantly,—and found her the centre of an absorbed group.

She was smiling at two men and a woman, who were smiling and talking to her with every appearance of profound and eager interest. She was, in fact, being polite; a habit against which Mr. Pinner had repeatedly warned her, but, for the reason that it wasn’t a habit at all but her natural inability not to return smiles for smiles, had warned her in vain.

These people, climbing up the hill on its other side and finding her standing there alone, had asked her, their faces wreathed in smiles and their eyes wide with astonishment and delight, the way; and she had only politely told them she was a stranger in those parts, and they were only asking her a few kindly questions, to which she had only answered, ‘’Ere on my ’oneymoon,’ and they were only expressing hopes that she would have a good time, when Jocelyn descended, swift, lean and vengeful, on the otherwise harmonious group.

‘Yes?’ said Jocelyn, scowling round at them. ‘Yes?’

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, with a gesture of all-including friendliness.

But it was no use her being friendly. Jocelyn was rude. How not be rude, with those two men standing there staring as if their eyes would bulge right out?

‘I was under the impression,’ he said, glaring at them up and down, from the top of their badly hatted heads, along their under-exercised and over-coated bodies to their unsatisfactory feet, ‘that it was possible in England to leave a lady alone for two minutes without her being subject to annoyance.’

‘I’m sure——’ began the woman of the party, turning very red, while the men looked both scared and sheepish.

‘Don’t mind ‘im,’ said Sally sweetly, desirous of mollifying.

‘On the contrary, I assure you that you had much better—much better,’ declared Jocelyn truculently. And again he pulled Sally’s hand through his arm, and again he hurried her off.

‘Really,’ he said, when they were out of sight, and only green fields, empty of everything but cows, were visible. ‘Really.’

He stopped and wiped his forehead.

‘’Ot?’ ventured Sally, timid but sympathetic.

‘To think that I can’t leave you alone a minute!’ he cried.

‘They ask me the way,’ Sally explained.

‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite. And what did you say, might I inquire?’

‘Said as ’ow I didn’t know it.’

‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite.’

‘Bein’, as one might say, a stranger in these parts,’ Sally explained still further, for these repeated quites upset her into speech.

‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite.’

‘Now don’t say that, Mr. Luke—please don’t, now,’ she begged.

‘Perhaps you, on your part, won’t say Mr. Luke,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Not quite so often. Not more than a dozen times a day, for instance.’

Sally was silent. She mustn’t think of him as Mr. Luke, she couldn’t think of him by his outlandish other name, so she thought of him as Husband. ’Usband’s cross,’ she thought; and withdrew into a prudent dumbness.

He ended by scrambling her through the hedge, and across a field as far from the path as possible; and, sitting her down with her back to everything except another hedge, tried to tell her a few things of a necessary but minatory nature.

‘Sally,’ he began, lying down on the grass beside her and taking her hand in his, ‘you know, don’t you, that I love you?’

Sally, cautiously coming out of her silence for a moment, as one who puts a toe into cold water and instantly draws it back again, said, ‘Yes, Mr.——’ stopping herself just in time, and hastily amending, ‘What I means is, yes.’

‘And you know, don’t you, that my one thought is for you and your happiness?’

Yes, she supposed she knew that, thought Sally, fidgeting uneasily, for though the voice and manner were the voice and manner of Mr. Luke there was somehow a smack about them that reminded her of her father when he was going to do what was known in the family as learning her.

‘Don’t you?’ insisted Jocelyn, as she said nothing. ‘Don’t you?’

He looked up into her face in search of an answer, and his voice faltered, he forgot completely what he was going to say, and whispering ‘Oh, I worship you!’ began kissing the hand he held, covering it with kisses, and seizing the other one and covering it with kisses too, while his ears, she could see, for his head lay in her lap, went crimson.

And Sally, who had already discovered that when Jocelyn’s ears turned crimson he did nothing but kiss her and murmur words that were not, however incomprehensible, anyhow angry ones, knew that for this time she was being let off.

V

§

He kept her indoors for the rest of the day, and decided that in future they would use the car as a means of getting well out of reach of St. Mawes, and then, leaving it in some obscure village, take the necessary exercise undisturbed. The boat would have done for getting away in, but the fisherman wouldn’t let them have it without him, and he too stared persistently at Sally. His ridiculous name was Cupp. ‘Serve him right,’ thought Jocelyn, who disliked him intensely.

These difficulties considerably interfered with the peace of the honeymoon. Having to take precautions, and scheme before doing ordinary things such as go out for a walk, seemed perfectly monstrous to Jocelyn. He was inclined, though he struggled against it, to blame Sally. He knew it was grossly unfair to blame her, but then it was outside his theories that a modest woman, however lovely, shouldn’t be able in England to proceed on her lawful occasions unmolested. There must be, he thought, something in Sally’s behaviour, though he couldn’t quite see what.

He took her away the next morning for the whole day in the car, and, leaving it at a lonely wayside inn, marched her off for the exercise they both needed. He needed it, he knew, for he was getting quite livery, and so, he dared say, was she; though it would have been as easy to imagine a new-born flower having a liver as Sally. Anyhow, she must be exercised; her health was now his concern, Jocelyn told himself. Everything of hers was now his concern. The lovely child had been miraculously handed over to him by Destiny—thus augustly did he dub Mr. Pinner—and there was no one but him to protect and guide and teach her. No one but him jolly well should, either, said Jocelyn to himself, baring his teeth at the mere thought, savagely possessive, strongly resembling a growling dog over a newly-acquired bone.

But it was trying, having to hide her like this. It came to that, that he had to hide her if he was to have any peace. Well, when he took her to London, and settled down there seriously, there wouldn’t be this trouble, because he intended to live in the slums. Slums were the places, he felt sure, for being let alone in. Not, of course, the more cut-throat kind, but obscure streets where everybody was too busy being poor to be interested in a girl’s beauty. To be interested in that, Jocelyn thought he knew, you have to have had and be going to have a properly filling dinner every day. No dinners, no love. One only had to think a little to see this must be so. In such a street, how peaceful they would be, he in one room writing, she in another room not writing. Nor would there be any servant difficulty for them either, because Sally was used to housework, and knew no other conditions than those in which she had to do it herself. He and she were going to lead simple lives, irradiated by her enchanting loveliness; and presently, when she had begun to profit by the lessons he would give her in the art of correct speech, she would be more of a companion to him, more able to—well, converse.

For the moment, he couldn’t disguise from himself, she was weak in conversation. To look at her, to look at her strangely noble little head, with everything there that is supposed to go with mind—the broad sweep of the brow, the beautifully moulded temples, the radiance in the eyes, the light that seemed to play over the vivid face with its swiftly changing expressions, each one more lovely than the last, and the whole amazing creature a poem of delicate colouring, except where colour had caught fire and become the flaming wonder of her hair—to look at this, and then hear the meagre, the really most meagre and defective observations that came out of it all, was a surprise. A growing surprise. Frankly, a growingly painful surprise. Somehow he hadn’t noticed it before, but now he every hour more plainly perceived a grave discrepancy between Sally’s appearance and her reality. Or was what he saw her reality, and what he heard mere appearance?

At night he was sure this was so. Next morning he was afraid it wasn’t. In any case, she didn’t match.

§

Curious, thought Jocelyn a day or two later, how completely Sally didn’t match. Perhaps he was getting livery, and beholding her with a jaundiced eye. It wouldn’t be surprising if this were so, seeing the reversal of his ordinary habits that marriage had made. His life till then had been one of excessive intellectual activity, and excessive sexual inactivity. Now it was just the opposite. It seemed to him that he was living entirely on his emotions and his nerves, doing nothing but make love, and never thinking a single thought worth thinking. This preoccupation with Sally’s discrepances, for instance—what, after all, were a girl’s discrepances compared to the importance, the interest, of his brain work till he met her?

He would come down to breakfast, to the sober facts of bacon and grey morning light, in a highly critical mood, feeling very old, and wise, and mature, and of course—there could be no two opinions as to that—in everything, except just physical beauty, Sally’s superior. Then she would come down, and, cautiously saying nothing, smile at him; and he would be forced, in spite of himself, to wonder, as he gazed at her in a fresh surprise, whether there could be anything in the world superior to such beauty. Not himself, anyhow, he thought, with his little inky ambitions, his desire to express and impress himself, his craving to find out and do. Sally had no cravings that he could discover; she was mere lovely acquiescence, content—and with what exquisiteness—to be.

Still, in this world one couldn’t just sit silent, and serene, and wonderful; and the minute circumstances obliged her to say something her discrepances worried him again. It really was surprising: pure perfection outside, and inside—he hated to think it, but more and more feared he recognised—pure Pinner. He must take her in hand. He must teach her, train her in the manners expected in her new sphere of life.

He pulled himself together, and took her in hand. During the second week after their marriage she was, as it were, almost constantly in hand; and towards its end Jocelyn’s consciousness of his responsibility and duty, which at first had faded away in the evening and disappeared entirely at night, stretched further and further across the day like a lengthening shadow, till at last it reached right into his very bed. The image of his mother had begun to loom nearer,—his mother, whom he had forgotten in the first fever of passion, but to whom he would undoubtedly soon now have to show Sally. Show her? Nothing so easy and sure of its effect as showing Sally, but it was what would happen immediately after she had been shown that Jocelyn, daily more able to contemplate Sally objectively as his honeymoon grew longer, began to consider.

There was no time to lose. He took her in hand. He started by attacking her h’s, whose absence had early become acutely distressing to him. Every day he devoted an hour the first thing after breakfast to them, making her talk to him, to her regret, for she by then well knew that little good came of talk, and patiently, each time she dropped one, picking it up and handing it back to her, so to speak, with careful marginal comments.

He found her most obtuse. Ordinary talk wasn’t enough. He had to invent sentences, special sentences for her to learn by heart and practise on, with little pitfalls in their middles which she was to avoid.

She seemed incapable of avoiding anything. Into each pitfall Sally invariably fell; and unwilling to believe that she couldn’t keep out of them if she really tried, Jocelyn said the sentences over and over again to her, obstinately persevering, determined she should learn.

Hefty Harry hurries after his hat. Sally drew in long breaths, and blew them out again at the beginning of each word, hoping they would turn into h’s, though for the life of her she couldn’t see any difference between the way she rendered Hefty Harry and the way Jocelyn did.

Husbands inhabit heaven. This was another one, worse than Hefty Harry, because it wasn’t enough to blow out her breath at the beginning of each word, but she had somehow to get it out in the middle of the middle one as well; besides, husbands didn’t inhabit heaven till they were dead, and Jocelyn’s habit of harping on heaven upset her, for heaven meant death first, and ever since her mother’s death, at which Sally had been present, she had had the poorest opinion of the whole thing.

During the lesson Jocelyn carefully gazed out of the window, keeping his eyes off her, because this was serious, this was important, and mustn’t be interfered with by her face. There he sat, patient but determined, holding her hand so as to reassure her, saying the sentences slowly and distinctly, while Sally, moist with effort, diligently blew. Why was it so important? she vaguely wondered. He seemed to love her a lot, especially in the evenings, and kept on telling her at the times when his ears were red how happy he was, so what more did he want? What was the use of bothering over things like h’s, which he declared were there but of which she could see no sign? She and her father, they had never worried about them, and they had got along all right. But Sally was docile; Sally was obedient and goodnatured; Sally earnestly wished to give people what they wanted; and if what Husband wanted was h’s, then she would try her utmost to provide them. If only she were quite clear as to what they were! Perhaps, by plodding, she would some day discover.

She plodded; and the nearest she got to criticism of this new development in her life was occasionally, when after breakfast Jocelyn called her over to the window, where he had placed two chairs in readiness for the lesson and pulled down the blind below the level of her head, occasionally, very occasionally, to murmur to herself, ‘Them h’s.’

§

But it wasn’t only her h’s, it wasn’t only the way she pronounced the few words that seemed to be at her disposal; there were other things that disquieted Jocelyn, as he awoke more and more from the wild first worship of her beauty. He appeared to be surrounded, out of doors and in, by an increasing number of difficulties. There was that business of not being able to go out without becoming the instant centre of the entire attention of St. Mawes,—most painful to Jocelyn, who had a fixed notion, implanted in him early in the decent cover of Almond Tree Cottage, that the truly well-bred were never conspicuous. How unpleasant, how extraordinarily unpleasant when, the morning lesson over and the need for exercise imperative, he went round to the garage to fetch the car, to find on his return the sea-wall opposite their lodgings black with expectant loungers; how unpleasant, how extraordinarily unpleasant to have to hurry Sally into the thing, as if she were the centre figure of a cause célèbre leaving the Law Courts; and the car, being an old one bought second-hand, sometimes wouldn’t start—twice that happened—and then to see how those loungers sprang into life and flocked across to help! Jocelyn, used only to quiet comings and goings and no one taking the least notice of anything he did, used, in fact to being what his mother described as well-bred, felt as if he had suddenly turned into a circus.

And indoors, too, he had difficulties, apart from and in addition to the difficulties at the lessons, for Sally showed a tendency, mild but unmistakable, to coalesce with the Cupps. She wanted to help Mrs. Cupp make the bed in the morning, she tried to clear away the breakfast, so as to save her feet, as she put it, and once, on some excuse or other, she actually left Jocelyn by himself in the parlour and got away into the kitchen, where he found her presently, on going to look, kissing a fat and hideous child that could only be a little Cupp.

To do her justice Mrs. Cupp in no way that Jocelyn could see encouraged this; on the contrary, she seemed a particularly stand-offish sort of woman, who not only knew her own place but knew Sally’s as well, and wished to keep her in it. Unfortunate that Sally should be, apparently, so entirely without that knowledge.

Jocelyn did his best to impart it. ‘You belong to me now, Sally,’ he explained, ‘and my place and sphere is your place and sphere, and my relations and friends your relations and friends. I don’t go and sit in kitchens, nor am I friends, beyond what every one is in regard to that class, with the Cupps. I don’t, and therefore you mustn’t.’

Was this speech snobbish? He hoped not; he trusted not. He despised snobbishness. His mother had most carefully taught him to. She would shudder at the mere word, and the shudder had got into his childhood’s bones.

Sally gave herself great pains to understand, looking at him attentively while he spoke and coming to the conclusion that what Usband was driving at was that she had got to sit quiet and remember she was now a lady. She sat quiet, remembering it. She made no attempt at any further budging from her place, even when Mrs. Cupp dropped things off the overloaded tray at her very feet, and her fingers itched to pick them up. She managed not to; she managed to take no notice whatever of them, and, bending her head over the paper Jocelyn had written her lesson out on in a fair round hand, would bury herself in it instead, saying it out loud as he had bidden her, conning it diligently.

The room re-echoed with Hefty Harry, and the deep preliminary drawings in and blowings out of breaths that were meant to become h’s, and never did.

VI

§

It was impossible for young Carruthers, having been vouchsafed a vision of Sally, to stop himself from trying to have another. He was drawn as by a magnet. His walks, after that Sunday, took him daily down to St. Mawes, where, having briskly gone the length of the front swinging his stick, he would lean awhile—as long as he dared without becoming conspicuous—against the sea-wall, smoking and ostensibly considering the horizon, but really missing nobody who came or went along the road. The Sealyham Sally was left at home, but other dogs were brought because they are such wonderful introducers, and the road to acquaintanceship, young Carruthers knew, is paved with good dogs.

He wasn’t sure that any profit would come of it if he did see the honeymooners and get into conversation,—probably not; but he couldn’t help it; he had to try; he was drawn. And very soon he discovered which house they were staying in, because the other loungers, smoking and gazing out to sea, rare figures at ordinary times and scattered sparsely over a quarter of a mile, were now considerably increased in numbers, and thickened into a knot at one particular point. That point, Carruthers unhesitatingly concluded, was where she lived.

Unwilling to be seen doing this sort of thing, he held himself aloof from the knot, smoking his pipe at a decent distance; but none the less nothing escaped him that happened at the windows or the door of the little house. The house, he knew, for his family had lived in the neighbourhood for many years, was the house of the fisherman Cupp. And he thought, thrice happy Cupp, and three times thrice happy Mrs. Cupp,—for she would be constantly in and out of the very room, and be able to look at—no, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t say Sally, not with his own four-legged Sally so grotesquely profaning the name.

He was all wrong, however, about the Cupps. They were not at all happy; at least, Mrs. Cupp wasn’t, and unless Mrs. Cupp was happy Cupp, though he only dimly apprehended this truth and explained the fact of his discomfort in many ways that were not the right ones, couldn’t be happy either. For Mrs. Cupp, who beheld Sally with astonishment on her first appearance, no one in the least like that ever yet having been seen in St. Mawes, quickly began to have doubts as to whether her lodgers were married. Everybody in St. Mawes was married, except those who were going to be or had been, and it disturbed Mrs. Cupp terribly, who all her life had held her head high and looked people in the face, to think she was perhaps harbouring and cooking for a person who was neither virgin, wife, nor widow.

For a brief time, so brief that it could be counted in hours, Sally’s nightgown had reassured her, because it was essentially the nightgown of the really married, a nightgown that Mrs. Cupp herself might have worn, and the most moral laundress had not to blush over. Up to the chin, down to the toes, long-sleeved, stiff, solid, edged at the throat and wrists with plain scallops, this nightgown did at first help Mrs. Cupp to hope that her lodgers were all right; but back came her doubts, and more insistent than before, when she perceived that Cupp too was noticing the young person’s appearance, and, though he said nothing, was beginning to behave all sly; and they deepened finally into certainty on her becoming aware of those thickening clusters of loungers constantly hanging about opposite her house. Even young Mr. Carruthers. Oh, she saw him plain enough, and knew all right what he was after; for she hadn’t been to the pictures over at Falmouth for nothing, and she had learned from them that that sort of girl got men come buzzing round her as if she were a pot of honey and they just so many flies. Cupp shouldn’t, though. Cupp shouldn’t get buzzing. Cupp, after fifteen years of being a steady husband, wasn’t going to be let buzz—not much, said Mrs. Cupp to herself, scouring her kitchen with violence.

She said nothing to him, however, for two, as she would soon show him, could play at his game of acting sly; but when at the end of the first fortnight of the Lukes’ stay Jocelyn, on her coming in to clear away the breakfast, got out his money and was preparing as usual to pay her the next week’s lodging in advance, she told him without wasting words that the rooms were let.

‘Let?’ repeated Jocelyn, taken aback.

‘There’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp enigmatically, as she cleared the table with great swift swoops.

‘But,’ protested Jocelyn, annoyed and surprised, ‘we intended to stay at least another week.’

‘I say there’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp even more emphatically, crowding the plates noisily on to a tray. ‘And one of them’s my patience.’

Jocelyn stared. Sally, raising her head from her daily task, on which she was at that moment engaged, looked on with the air of a mild, disinterested angel.

‘But what on earth has happened? What’s the matter?’ asked Jocelyn.

‘You only got to cast an eye out of the winder to see what’s the matter,’ said Mrs. Cupp, jerking her elbow in its direction. ‘They don’t collect like that round parties that’s respectable.’

And dropping some forks off the overloaded tray she clattered out of the room.

Jocelyn turned swiftly to Sally. ‘You see?’ he said.

‘See wot?’ asked Sally, who was about to stoop and pick up the forks, but remembered not to just in time.

Yes; see what, indeed. That it was her fault? That this disgrace had been brought on him through her fault? Was that, Jocelyn asked himself, shocked at the tempest of injustice that had for an instant swept him off his feet, what he wanted her to see?

‘I meant,’ he said, ashamed of his unfairness, ‘you heard. You did hear, didn’t you, what the horrible woman was saying?’

Sally nodded. ‘Thinks we ain’t married,’ she said. She seemed quite undisturbed. ‘Well, it ain’t much use thinkin’ we ain’t when we are,’ she remarked.

‘Unfortunately she’s sure we’re not, so that we are being turned out,’ said Jocelyn, dropping her hand, which he had taken, for this placidity, which seemed to him evidence of inability to grasp a situation, instead of soothing made him angry again.

He strode across to the window, and grabbing at the blind pulled it down still lower. How inexpressibly humiliating to be turned out, how unendurable to have people thinking Sally wasn’t respectable, and that he, he of all people, would come off with a girl for that sort of loathsome lark.

‘It ain’t much use bein’ sure, when I got my marriage lines,’ said Sally with the same calm. ‘Let alone my weddin’ ring.’ And she added complacently after a minute, ‘Upstairs in my box.’ And after a further minute, ‘I mean, my marriage lines.’

Then, supposing that the interruption to the lesson might now be regarded as over, and that it would therefore be expected of her that she should get on with it, she applied herself once more with patient industry to her task.

‘H-usbands h-in’abit h-eaven,’ she began again, assiduously blowing.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Jocelyn, under his breath.

§

They left St. Mawes during the dinner hour. When Jocelyn told her they were going to leave almost at once, and she had better pack, Sally merely said Right O, and went upstairs to do it.

Right O, thought Jocelyn. Right O. Not a question, not a comment of any kind. Convenient, of course, in a way, but was this companionship? Could there be much character behind such resistlessness? Yet if she had asked questions and made comments he would, he knew, have flown at her; so that he was being unfair again and unreasonable, and he hated himself.

He usedn’t to be unfair and unreasonable, he thought, standing in front of the fireless grate, a wrathful eye on the loungers clotted on the other side of the road; and as for being angry, such a disturbance of one’s balance, whenever he had observed it in others, had seemed to him simply the sign of imperfect education. The uneducated were swept by furies, not scientific thinkers. Now just the contrary was happening, and the uneducated Sally remained serene, while he was in an almost constant condition of emotion of one kind or another. Marriage, he supposed gloomily; marriage. The invasion of the spirit by the flesh. So absurd, too, the whole thing—God, how absurd when he thought of it in the morning, and remembered the cringing worship of the night before. Absurd, absurd, this nightly abdication of the mind, this abject bowing down of the higher before the lower.... The worst of it was he didn’t seem able to help himself. Whatever his theories were in the daytime, whatever his critical detachment, he only had to be close to Sally at night....

And in the daytime, instead of at least in the daytime being tranquil and able to get back his balance, every sort of annoyance crowded on him. Were all honeymoons like this? Impossible. They hadn’t got Sally in them. It was Sally who——

The door opened, and there she was again, not ten minutes after having gone up. For Sally’s things being of the kind that are quick to pack, owing to their fewness, she was ready and down before he had had time, hardly, to be sure she was going to keep him waiting. So that he resented this too, because he wasn’t able to be angry with her over something definite and legitimate. He wanted to have a legitimate excuse for being angry with her, for it was really all her fault that they had been insulted and turned out. Of course it was. If he had been with his mother, Mrs. Cupp would have been deference itself, and that confounded sea-wall empty. It was all Sally. Looking like that. Looking so different from any one else. Looking so entirely different from the accepted idea of a decent man’s wife. Besides, she ought anyhow to have had more things to pack. That one small tin trunk of hers was a disgrace to him. Beastly thing, how he hated it. All yellow. He must get her a proper trunk, and fill it properly, before he could appear with her at Almond Tree Cottage. There certainly were drawbacks to taking a wife in her shift, as one’s forbears called it.

Yet, when she came in ready to start, she looked so astonishingly right, tin trunk or not, and quite apart from her face. She looked right; her clothes did. She might have been a young duchess, thought Jocelyn, who had never seen a duchess. He hadn’t an idea how the miracle was worked. Not by dressmakers and cleverness, of that he was certain, for the poor Pinners would have to buy clothes off the peg. Perhaps because she was so reedy tall. Perhaps because of the way she moved. Perhaps because she was so slender that there hardly seemed to be anything inside the clothes, and they couldn’t help, left in this way almost to themselves, hanging in graceful folds. But he knew well enough what was inside them—the delicate young loveliness, just beginning to flower; and at the thought his anger all left him, and he didn’t care any more about the Cupps or the sea-wall, and the feeling of humility came over him that came over him each time he saw her beauty, and he went to her and took both her hands, her little red hands, the only part of her that had been got at by life and spoilt, and kissed them, and said, ‘Forgive me, Sally.’

‘Wot you been doin’?’ asked Sally, surprised.

‘Not loving you enough,’ said Jocelyn, kissing her hands again.

‘Now don’t,’ said Sally very earnestly, ‘don’t you go thinkin’ that, now——’ for the idea that she, who had been being loved almost more than she could stand on this trip, and wouldn’t have been able to stand if it hadn’t been for knowing it was her bounden duty, might have to be loved still more if Mr. Luke got it into his head that she ought to be, excessively alarmed her.

§

The departure was not unmarked, as is sometimes said, by incident. Cupp, when the luggage had to be brought down, wasn’t to be found, Mrs. Cupp seemed incommunicably absorbed over a saucepan, and Jocelyn, with some sharpness refusing Sally’s help, whose instinct after years spent doing such things was to lay hold of anything that had to be laid hold of and drag it, got the tin box and his suitcase downstairs himself, and said Damn very loud when he knocked his head at the turn of the little staircase.

Sally heard him, and was enormously surprised and shocked. This was swearing. This was what she had been most carefully taught to look upon as real sin. Nothing else had shocked her on the honeymoon, because she had nothing to go by when it came to husbands other than her father’s assurance that, except in the daytime, they weren’t gentlemen, and her own solemn vows in church to obey; but she knew all about swearing. It was wrong. It was strictly forbidden in God’s Holy Word. That and drink were the two evils spoken of most frequently in her home, and with most condemnation. They went hand in hand. Drink ruined people; and, on their way to ruin and when they had got to it, they swore.

This is what Sally had been brought up to believe, so that when, standing in the doorway of the parlour watching Jocelyn labouring down the stairs with her trunk and longing to give him a hand, she heard him, after knocking his head, say a most loud clear damn, she was horrified. Her husband swearing. And not been drinking, either. Just had his tea as usual at breakfast, and been with her ever since, so she knew he couldn’t have. Next thing she’d have to listen to would be God’s name being taken in vain; and at the thought of that the blood of all the Pinners, that strictly God-fearing, Sunday-observing, Bible-loving race, surged to her cheeks.

‘Mr. Luke!’ she exclaimed, throwing his teaching as to the avoidance of this name to the winds.

‘Hullo?’ said Jocelyn, stopping short on the stairs and peering down at her round the edge of the tin trunk, arrested by the note in her voice.

‘You didn’t ought to swear,’ said Sally, taking all her courage in both hands, her face scarlet. ‘There’s no call for it, and you didn’t ought to swear—you know you didn’t ought to.’

‘But I only said damn,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Wouldn’t you, if you bashed your head against this confounded sticking out bit of ceiling?’

‘Mr. Luke!’ cried Sally again, her eyes filling with tears. That he should not only say bad words himself but think her capable of them.... Often she had been bewildered by things he said and did, but now she looked up at him through the tears in her eyes in a complete non-comprehension. It was as though she were boxed away from him behind a great thick wall, or cut off across a great big river, alone on an island, while he stood far off and unreachable on the opposite bank, and she had somehow to get to him, to stay close to him, because he was her husband. Dimly these images presented themselves to her mind, dimly and confused, but nevertheless producing a very clear anxiety and discomfort.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jocelyn, carefully coming down the remaining stairs and depositing the trunk sideways in the narrow passage, for though the trunk, as a trunk, was small, the passage, as a passage, was smaller; and in his turn as he looked at her he grew red, for he had just remembered that he never said damn in the presence of his mother or of the other ladies of South Winch, which was a place one didn’t swear in, however much and unexpectedly he chanced to hurt himself. Was this laissez aller in Sally’s presence due to his consciousness that she wasn’t a lady, or due to the fact that she was his wife? Jocelyn disliked both these explanations, and accordingly, in his turn, grew red.

‘Forgive me, Sally,’ he said for the second time within half an hour.

This time she had no doubt as to what had to be forgiven.

‘Promise not to do it no more,’ she begged. ‘Promise now—do.’

‘Oh Sally, I’ll promise anything, anything,’ said Jocelyn staring at her, caught again into emotion by the extraordinary beauty of her troubled face.

‘Father says,’ said Sally, still looking at him through tears, ‘that if somebody swears, then they drinks. An’ if they drinks, then they swears. An’ it goes ‘and in ‘and, and they don’t stop ever, once they starts, till they gets to——.’

She broke off, and stood looking at him in silence. The picture was too awful a one. She couldn’t go on.

‘What do they get to, my angel, my beautiful angel?’ asked Jocelyn, kissing her softly, not listening any more.

‘’Ell,’ whispered Sally.

‘Now you’re swearing,’ murmured Jocelyn dreamily, no longer fully conscious, shutting her eyes with kisses. ‘Your sweet, sweet eyes,’ he murmured, kissing them over and over again.

No, Sally couldn’t make head or tail of Mr. Luke. Better not try. Better give it up. She swearing?

§

She longed very much for the company of Mr. Pinner.

‘Father,’ she thought, while Jocelyn was fetching the car, and she was standing alone in the passage watching the luggage, for she had been bred carefully never to leave luggage an instant by itself, ‘Father—’e could tell me.’

What she wanted Mr. Pinner to tell her wasn’t at all clear in her mind, but she was quite clear that he would tell her if he could, whereas Jocelyn, who certainly could, wouldn’t. Mr. Luke, she felt in her bones, even if she had the courage to ask him anything would only be angry with her because she didn’t already know it; yet how could she know it if nobody had ever told her? At home they usedn’t to jump down one’s throat if one asked a question. ‘Snug,’ thought Sally, her head drooping in wistful recollection, while with the point of her umbrella she affectionately stroked the sides of the tin trunk, ‘snug at ’ome in the shop—snug at ’ome in the lil’ shop—’ and whatever else being married to a gentleman was, it wasn’t snug.

Marriage to a gentleman—why, you never knew where you were from one moment to another; nothing settled about it; no cut and come again feeling; all ups and downs, without, as one might say, any middles; all either cross looks or, without warning, red ears, kisses, and oh-Sallyings. It was as if words weren’t the same when a gentleman got hold of them. They seemed somehow to separate. Queer, thought Sally, wistfully stroking the tin trunk.

She groped round in her hazy thoughts. She was in a strange country, and there was a fog, and yet she had somehow to get somewhere. She swearing?

§

The car came round, and Jocelyn came in.

‘Hasn’t Cupp turned up yet?’ he asked.

Sally shook her head.

‘I want him to help me cord the luggage on,’ said Jocelyn, squeezing past between her and the trunk.

‘I can,’ said Sally.

‘No you can’t,’ snapped Jocelyn, striding to the kitchen door and opening it.

‘Is Mr. Cupp anywhere about?’ he haughtily asked the figure bent over the saucepan. He needed his help, or nothing would have induced him to speak to Mrs. Cupp again.

‘No,’ said Mrs. Cupp, without ceasing to stir; but being a good woman, who tried always to speak the truth, she amplified this into accuracy. ‘’E’s somewhere, but he ain’t about,’ said Mrs. Cupp.

For, having, a short way with her when it came to husbands, she had turned the key that morning on Cupp while he was still asleep, well knowing that he wouldn’t dare get banging and shouting lest the neighbours should find out his wife had locked him in, and his shame become public. Besides, he was aware of the reason, and would keep quiet all right, she having had a straight talk with him the night before.

Cupp had been discomfited.

‘Don’t you go thinkin’ you’re goin’ to get adulteratin’ at your age and after ’avin’ been a decent ’usband these fifteen years,’ said Mrs. Cupp.

’Oo’s been adulteratin’?’ growled Cupp, strong in the knowledge that he hadn’t, but weak in the consciousness that he would have liked to have.

‘In your ’eart you ’ave, Cupp,’ said Mrs. Cupp, who had her Bible at her fingers’ ends, ‘and Scripture says it’s the same thing.’

Cupp at this sighed deeply, for he knew it wasn’t.

‘Scripture says,’ said Mrs. Cupp, sitting up very straight in bed and addressing Cupp’s back as he lay speechless beside her, ‘that ’ooso looks at a woman an’ lusts after ’er ’as committed adultery with ’er in ’is ’eart. Ain’t you been lookin’ at that there girl and lustin’ after ’er in your ’eart, Cupp? Ain’t you? Why, I seen you. Seen you doin’ it round doors, seen you doin’ it out of winders. You been adulteratin’ all over the place. I’ll learn you to get lustin’——’

And when she went downstairs in the morning she locked him in.

So Jocelyn had to carry out the luggage himself, bidding Sally stay where she was and wait quietly till he called her, and cording it on without the assistance, curtly refused, of the loungers against the sea-wall.

His mother’s luggage on their little holiday jaunts had been so neat, so easily handled, fixed on in two minutes; but the tin trunk was a difficult, slippery shape, and anyhow an ignoble object. Every aspect of it annoyed him. It was like going about with a servant’s luggage, he thought, wrestling with the thing, which was too high and not long enough, and refused to fit in with his suitcase.

‘Off?’ inquired one of the loungers affably.

‘Looks like it,’ said Jocelyn, tugging at the cord.

What a question. Silly ass. ‘Do you mind standing a little further back?’ he said with icy anger. ‘You see, if you come so close I can’t get——’ he tugged—‘any——’ he tugged, setting his teeth—‘purchase——’

Nobody moved; neither the particular lounger he was speaking to, nor the others.

‘Upon my word, sir,’ said Jocelyn, jerking round furiously, ready to fight the lot of them.

But they were not attending to him. Their eyes were all fixed on the parlour window, to which Sally, so anxious not to keep Jocelyn waiting a minute when he called as to risk disobeying him, had stolen to see how near ready he was.

There she stood, almost full length, the blind, now that they were leaving, drawn up, and the sun shining straight on her. St. Mawes had not had such a chance before. Its other glimpses of her had been flashes. Nor had the place in all its history ever till now been visited by beauty. Pretty girls had passed through it and disappeared, or stayed in it and disappeared equally completely because of growing old, and there was a tradition that in the last century the doctor had had a wife who for a brief time was very pretty, and during that brief time caused considerable uproar; but no one living had seen her, it was all hearsay from the last generation. This at the window wasn’t hearsay. This was the thing itself, the rare, heavenly thing at its most exquisite moment. Naturally the loungers took no further heed of Jocelyn; naturally with one accord they lifted up their eyes, and greedily drank in.

Jocelyn gave the cord one final and very vicious tug, knotted it somehow, and ran indoors.

‘What on earth you must go and stand at the window for——’ he exclaimed, hurrying into the room and catching her by the arm. ‘I was going to fetch you in a minute. Come along, then—let’s start, let’s get out of this confounded place. Ready? Got everything? I don’t want any delays once we’re outside——’

Hastily he looked round the room; there was nothing there. Hastily he looked over Sally; she seemed complete. Then he rushed her out to the car exactly as if, head downwards, they were both plunging into something most unpleasant which had to be gone through before they could escape to freedom.

‘Monstrous, monstrous,’ said Jocelyn to himself. ‘The whole thing is incredible and fantastic. I might be the impresario of a prima donna or a cinema star’—and he remembered, though at the time, like so many other things, it had drifted past his ears unnoticed, that that grotesque creature his father-in-law had said Sally had a gift for collecting crowds.

How painfully true, thought Jocelyn, plunging into the one waiting outside. What a regrettable gift. Of all gifts this was the one he could best have done without in anybody he was obliged to be with; for he hated crowds, he hated public attention, he was thin-skinned and sensitive directly anything pulled him out of the happy oblivion of his work. As far as he had got in life, and it seemed to him a long way, he judged that quite the best of all conditions was to sit in an eye-proof shell, invisible to and unconscious of what is usually called the world. And speculate; and discover; and verify.

Well, no use thinking of that now.

‘Get in, get in,’ he urged under his breath, helping Sally with such energy that she was clumsier at it than usual. ‘Never mind the rug—you can arrange that afterwards. Here—I’ll hold the umbrella——’

They got off. He could drive perfectly well, yet they got off only after a series of forward bounds and the stopping of his engine. But they did get off—through the loungers, past the windows with heads at them, round the sharp corner beyond the houses, up the extraordinarily steep hill.

Sally held her breath. This hill terrified her. Suppose the car, which each time seemed very nearly to stop on it, stopped quite, couldn’t go on at all, and they rolled down backwards, down, down, straight into the sea?

But they reached the top safely. It wasn’t the car that rolled down backwards that day; it was the tin trunk, and with it Jocelyn’s suitcase.

Unconscious, they drove on towards Truro.

VII

§

They drove in total silence. Jocelyn had much to think of, and not for anything would Sally have opened her mouth when Mr. Luke’s was shut in that particular tight line. He had see-sawed back again, she knew, and was at the opposite end to what she called his oh-Sally condition. Besides, she never did say anything when she was in the car, however much he tried to make her, for from the beginning, even before there were hills, it had frightened her. Cars hadn’t come Mr. Pinner’s way, and, except for the one drive with Jocelyn that first day of his courting, she had had no experience of them till now.

This one gave her little joy. It went so fast; it had hairsbreadth escapes at corners; it had twice run over chickens, causing words with other angry gentlemen, and it was full inside, where she had to sit, of important and dangerous-looking handles and pedals that had to have the rug and her dress and her feet and her umbrella carefully kept clear of them, or there would be that which she called to herself, catching her breath with fear, an accident.

Jocelyn had said once, very peremptorily and making hurried movements with his left hand, ‘For goodness sake don’t let that rug get mixed up with the gears——’ for the car was a Morris-Cowley, and what Sally thought of with anxiety as them ’andles were between her and Jocelyn, and it had been enough. The tone of his voice on that occasion had revealed to her that a combination of rug and gears, and therefore of anything else and gears, such as dress, feet or umbrella, would be instantly disastrous, and he never had to say it again.

For the rest of the honeymoon she sat squeezed together as far away from the alarming things as she could, the rug tucked with anxious care tightly round her legs, and her feet cramped up in the corner. She was very uncomfortable, but that mattered nothing to Sally. Even if she hadn’t been afraid of what might happen, her own comfort, when the wishes of her elders and betters were in question, wouldn’t have been given a thought. The Pinners were like that. Their humility and patience would have been remarkable even in a saint, and as for their bumps of veneration, they were so big that that country would indeed be easy to govern which should be populated by many Pinners.

The late Mrs. Pinner, not of course herself a Pinner proper, but of the more turbulent blood of a race from Tottenham called Skew, had disliked these virtues in Mr. Pinner, and thought and frequently told him that a shopkeeper shouldn’t have them at all. A shopkeeper’s job, she often explained, was to leave off being poor as soon as possible, and Mr. Pinner never at any time left off being that—all because, Mrs. Pinner asserted, he had no go; and having no go was her way of describing patience and humility. But in Sally, when these qualities began to appear, she encouraged them, for they made for the child’s safety, they kept her obedient and unquestioning, they sent her cheerfully to bed when other girls were going to the pictures, and caused her to be happy for hours on end by herself in the back parlour performing simple duties. Besides, though Mrs. Pinner would have been hard put to it to give it a name, in Sally patience and humility were somehow different from what they were in Pinner. They held their heads up more. They didn’t get their tails between their legs. They were in fact in Sally, though Mrs. Pinner could only feel this dumbly, never getting anywhere near thinking it, not abject things that quivered in corners, but gracious things that came to meet one with a smile.

Filled, then, as ever, with these meek virtues, Sally, squeezed into as little space as possible, and bracing herself, having got safely to the top of the hill, to meet the next terror, which was the twisty, slippery, narrow steep road down to the ferry, and the twisty, slippery, narrow steep road up from it on the other side, and after that the terror of every corner, round each of which she was sure would lurk a broad-beamed charabanc,—was carried in the Morris-Cowley in the direction of Truro. Here, Jocelyn supposed, they had better stay the night. Here there were hotels, and he would be able to consider what he would do next.

He urged the little car along as fast as it would go, for he was possessed by the feeling that if he only got away fast enough he would get away altogether. But get away altogether from what? Certainly from St. Mawes, and Mrs. Cupp, and the loungers who all of course also supposed he and Sally weren’t married. That was the first, the immediate necessity. He had not only been turned out, but turned out, he said to himself, with contumely,—no use saying it to Sally, because she wouldn’t know what contumely was, and it did seem to him really rather absurd to be going about with somebody who had never heard even of such an ordinary thing as contumely.

It wasn’t her fault, of course, but the turning out and the contumely were obviously because of her; there was no denying that. His mother would have been sitting in those rooms at this moment, the most prized and cherished of lodgers. Obviously the whole thing was Sally’s fault, though he quite admitted she couldn’t help it. But it merely made it worse that she couldn’t, for it took away one’s confidence in the future, besides making it unfair to say anything unkind.

Feeling that if he did say anything it might easily be unkind, he kept his mouth tight shut, and drove in total silence; and Sally, whenever the road was fairly straight and could be left for a moment unwatched, looked at him out of the corners of her eyelashes, and was very sorry for Usband, who seemed upset again.

‘Stomach,’ concluded Sally, who could find no other explanation for Jocelyn’s ups and downs; and wondered whether she would ever dare bring to his notice a simple remedy her father, who sometimes suffered too but with less reserve, always had by him.

Well, there was one thing to be said for all this, thought Jocelyn, his stern eye fixed straight ahead, his brow severe, as he hurried the car along the road to the ferry—he was now awake. At last. High time too. Till then, from the day he first saw Sally, in spite of moments of grave spiritual disturbance and annoyance, he had been in a feverish dream. Out of this dream Mrs. Cupp’s conduct had shaken him, and he believed he might now be regarded as through with the phase in which he thought of nothing but the present and let the future go hang. Now he had to think. Decisions were being forced on him. Holidays end, but life goes on; honeymoons finish, but wives don’t. Here he was with a wife, and upon his soul, thought Jocelyn, precious little else,—no career, no plans, no lodgings.

What a position. The lodgings, of course, were a small thing, but how being turned out of them rankled! His life had been so dignified. He and his mother had never once come across a member of the lower classes who was rude. At South Winch all was order, decency, esteem in their own set and respectfulness from everybody else. At Ananias what order, what decency, what esteem, what respectfulness. Impossible at Ananias, however modest one might be, not to know that one was looked upon as a present pride and a future adornment, with the Master at the top of the scale invariably remembering who one was and graciously smiling, and at the bottom the almost affectionate attentions of one’s warm and panting bedmaker. Impossible, too, not to know, though this, except for the pleasure it gave his mother, was of no sort of consequence, that South Winch regarded him with interest. These attitudes hadn’t at all disarranged Jocelyn’s grave balance, hadn’t at all turned his head, because of his real and complete absorption in his work; but they had been there—a fitting and seemly background, a sunny, sheltering wall against which he could expand, in quiet security, the flowers of his ambitions.

Now here he was, kicked out into the street—it amounted to that—by a person of the utmost obscurity called Cupp. Conceive it. Conceive having got into a position in which anybody called Cupp could humiliate him.

He banged his fist down on the electric horn as an outlet to his feelings. It gave a brief squeak, and was silent.

‘Horn’s gone wrong,’ he said, pressing it hard but getting nothing more out of it.

Sally’s heart gave a thump. To have anything go wrong at such a moment! For they were on that road cut in the hillside, narrow, twisty, slippery and steep, which leads on the St. Mawes side down through a wood, charming that late March afternoon with the mild sun slanting through the pale, grey-green branches of naked trees across flocks of primroses, to the King Harry Ferry. Far down on Sally’s side she could have seen, if she had dared look, the placid waters of the Fal, unruffled in their deep shelter by the wind that was blowing along the open country at the top. Her anxious eyes, however, were not in search of scenery—at no time was she anything of a hand at scenery,—they were strained towards each fresh corner as it came in sight; for one day they had met a charabanc round one of those very corners, a great wide horror taking up nearly all the road. But luckily that day they were coming up the hill, not going down it, and so they had the inside, and not the unprotected, terrifying outside edge. Now they were outside, and suppose....

‘Horn’s gone wrong,’ said Jocelyn, just as she was thinking that.

But did it matter? she asked herself, seeking comfort. She tried to hope it didn’t. Horns weren’t like wheels. One didn’t depend on them for getting along. They just made noises. Useful, as one’s voice was useful, but not essential, like one’s legs.

No, it didn’t matter much, evidently, for Usband was saying he would put it right while they were on the ferry,—and then her heart gave a much bigger thump, and seemed to leap into her mouth and crouch there trembling, for there, round the very next corner, a few yards in front of them, was another charabanc.

‘My gracious goodness,’ thought Sally, the colour ebbing out of her face as she stiffened in her seat and held on tighter. ‘My gracious goodness——’

But it was going down too; thank heaven it was going down too—making, even as they were making, for the ferry.

Jocelyn banged again on his horn, which gave another weak squeak and then was silent.

‘Oh, ’e ain’t goin’ to try and pass it? ’E ain’t goin’ to try and pass it?’ Sally asked herself, clutching the side of the car.

The charabanc, however, was unaware that anything had come down the hill behind it, and continued in the middle of the narrow road; and to Sally’s relief Jocelyn stole quietly along close up to its back, for he thought that if he kept right up against it and made no noise the people in it wouldn’t be able to see Sally, and he wouldn’t have to sit there impotently watching the look spreading over their faces when they caught sight of her that by now he knew only too well.

All went smoothly till they were on the ferry. The charabanc drove straight to the farther end of it, and Jocelyn slipped along close behind, and then, getting out, still unobserved, opened his bonnet and began to deal with the horn.

He had no side-horn with him. It had been removed by an idiot who lived on his staircase at Ananias, and who constantly saw fun where no one else did. He saw fun in removing Jocelyn’s horn; and though on serious representations being made he restored it, it hadn’t been fixed on again, because Jocelyn soon after that met Sally, and everything else was blotted from his mind. Now he remembered it, and cursed the silly idiot through whose fault it wasn’t at that moment on the car. Still, he would soon set the electric one right; there couldn’t be much the matter with it.

He proceeded, his head inside the bonnet, to set it right, and Sally, feeling safe for a bit with Jocelyn outside the car, looked on sympathetically. She wanted to help, if only by holding something, but knew she mustn’t move. The back of the great charabanc towered above their little two-seater as the stern of a liner towers above a tug. All was quiet up there. The tops of the heads of the last row of passengers were motionless, their owners no doubt being engaged in contemplating the scenery of the Fal.

Then suddenly under Jocelyn’s manipulations the horn began to blow, and the row of heads, startled into attentiveness by this unexpected shrieking immediately underneath them, turned and peered down over the edge of the charabanc’s back. Then they saw Sally, and their peering became fixed.

But Jocelyn had no time for that now; what was of importance at the moment was that the horn wouldn’t stop. It shrieked steadily; and though he leapt backwards and forwards from the part of it that was in the bonnet to the part of it that was on the steering-wheel and did things rapidly and violently in both places, it went on shrieking.

Here was a nice thing, he thought, to happen to a man whose one aim was to be unnoticed. It was fortunate that the noise drowned what he was saying, for so Sally hadn’t the shock of hearing him break his recent promise; and, much surprised at the conduct of the horn, she was shaken out of her usual prudent silence and was moved to draw Jocelyn’s attention to its behaviour by remarking, on one of his flying visits to the steering wheel, that it wasn’t half hollering.

‘Oh, shut up!’ cried Jocelyn, beside himself; and who knows whether he meant Sally or the horn?

Sally took it that he was addressing the horn, and observed sympathetically that it didn’t seem to want to.

‘If only I had a small screwdriver!’ cried Jocelyn, frantically throwing out the contents of his tool-box in search of what wasn’t there. ‘I don’t seem to have a small screwdriver—a small screwdriver—has anybody got a small screwdriver?’

The ferryman had no screwdriver, big or small, and the driver of the charabanc, descended from his place to come and look on, had none small enough; while as for the passengers, now all standing on their seats and craning their necks, nothing was to be expected of them except absorption in Sally.

‘Scissors would do—scissors, scissors!’ cried Jocelyn, who felt that if the horn didn’t stop he would go mad.

Nobody had any scissors except Sally, who got on her feet quickly and delightedly, because now she could help—the heads craned more than ever—and said she had a pair at the bottom of her trunk.

‘No, no,’ said Jocelyn, unable even for the sake of perhaps stopping the horn to face uncording and unpacking before the whole ferry that terrible tin trunk of hers. ‘Sit still, Sally——’

And he began to hit whatever part seemed nearest to the noise with his clenched fist.

‘That won’t do no good,’ said the driver of the charabanc, grinning.

The grin spread to the face of the ferryman, and began to appear on the faces piled up over the top of the charabanc.

Jocelyn saw it, and suddenly froze into icy impassiveness. Whatever the damned horn chose to do he wasn’t going to provide entertainment for a lot of blasted trippers. Besides—was he losing his temper? He, who had supposed for years that he hadn’t got one?

He slammed the bonnet to, flung the tools back into their box, got into his seat again, and sat waiting to drive off the ferry with a completely expressionless face, just as if nothing at all were happening; and Sally, deluded by his calm into supposing that he thought the horn was now all right, after waiting a moment anxiously and seeing that he didn’t do anything more, nudged him gently and told him it was still blowing.

‘Is it?’ said Jocelyn; and there was something in the look he gave her that made her more sure than ever that speech with Usband was a mistake.

It blew all the way to Truro. That was the nearest place where the thing could be taken to a garage, and kicked to pieces if nothing else would stop it. For ten miles it blew steadily. They streamed, shrieking, along the lanes and out on to the main road. The drive was a nightmare of astonished faces, of people rushing out of cottages, of children shouting, of laughter flashing and gone, to be succeeded by more and more, till the whole of every mile seemed one huge exclamation.

Sally squeezed terror-stricken into her corner. Such speed as this she had never dreamed of, nor had it ever yet been got out of the Morris-Cowley. She could only cling and hope. The noise was deafening. The little car leapt into the air at every bump in the road. Jocelyn’s face was like a marble mask. The charabanc, being bound for Falmouth, turned off to the left at the main road, and the passengers rose as one man in their seats and waved handkerchiefs of farewell; while Sally, even at such a moment unable not to be polite, let go the side of the car an instant to search with trembling fingers for her handkerchief and wave it back.

§

At Truro he stopped at the first garage he saw, a small one in the outlying part of the town, where there were few passers-by. The few there were, however, immediately collected round the car that swooped down the hill on them hooting, and still went on hooting in spite of having stopped.

How simple, if it had been his mother who was with him, to have asked her to walk on to an hotel or a confectioner’s, and wait for him while he had the horn seen to. She would have proceeded through the town unobserved and unmolested, and the hotel or confectioner would have received her without curiosity, and attended respectfully to her wants. Or she might have waited in the car, and there too she would have aroused neither interest nor comment. A lady, you see. A lady, turning, like a decent Italian house, her plain and expressionless side to the public of the street, and keeping her other side, her strictly private and delightful other side, for her family and friends.

He hurried Sally into the garage, into the furthermost depths of the garage. Not for her, he felt, were quiet walks alone through streets and unquestioning acceptance at hotels; not for him the convenience, the comfort, of a companion who in a crisis needn’t be bothered about, who automatically became effaced. Nothing effaced Sally. Her deplorable conspicuousness made it impossible for her to go anywhere without him. She had to be accompanied and protected as watchfully as if she were the Crown Jewels. Yes, or a perambulator with a baby in it that could never be left alone for an instant, and was always having to be pushed about by somebody. That somebody was himself, Jocelyn Luke; Jocelyn Luke, who as recently as a month ago was working away, hopeful and absorbed, immersed in profoundly interesting and important studies, independent, with nothing at all to trammel him or hinder him—with, on the contrary, everything and everybody conspiring to leave him as untrammelled and unhindered as possible. What was he now? Why, the perambulator’s nursemaid. Just that: the perambulator’s attendant nursemaid.

This seemed to Jocelyn fantastic.

‘Wait here, will you?’ he said, hurrying her into the garage and depositing her like a parcel in the remotest corner. ‘Don’t move, will you, till I fetch you——’

And he left her there, safe as far as he could see, and went back to the shrieking car.

She sat down thankfully on a pile of empty petrol cans. If only she could be left there for a good long while, if only she could spend the rest of the day there.... ‘Don’t move,’ Usband had said; as though she wanted to! Except that she was very hungry, really hungry now that her fears were over, for she had had no dinner yet, and it was two o’clock, how happy would she have been to stay there without moving for the rest of the afternoon. The quiet corner, away from danger, away from having to guess what she ought to say to Usband, and away from the look he gave her when she had said it, seemed almost perfect. It would have been quite perfect if there had been anything to eat.

And as if in answer to her wish, the little door into a shed at the back opened, and in walked a youth, smudged and pasty-looking as those look who work much in garages, bearing in his hand a basin tied up in a crimson handkerchief.

This was young Mr. Soper, the most promising of the mechanics employed at the garage, who daily ate his dinner in that corner. There he could sit on the pile of empty petrol cans, out of sight and yet within earshot should his services suddenly be called for; and on this particular day, his firm having been by chance extra busy all the morning, he had gone later than usual into the private shed at the back to fetch the basin of food left there for him by his landlady’s little son, so that when Jocelyn took Sally into the corner it was empty, because Mr. Soper, instead of being in the middle of his dinner as he would have been on other days, was in the act of collecting it in the shed.

‘Beg pardon, Miss,’ he said, staring at Sally, his mouth dropping open. ‘Beg pardon, I’m sure, Miss——’

And he put his arm quickly back round the door he had just come through and whipped out a chair. ‘Won’t you—won’t you sit more comfortable, Miss?’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Sally, getting up and smiling politely.

Mr. Soper’s pasty face became bright red at that smile. He proceeded to dust the seat of the chair by rubbing the bottom of his handkerchiefed basin up and down it, and then stood staring at the young lady, the basin dangling sideways in his hand, held carelessly by the knotted corners of its handkerchief, and some of its gravy accordingly dribbling out.

‘It do smell nice, don’t it,’ remarked Sally as she sat down, unable to refrain from sniffing.

‘What do, Miss?’ asked Mr. Soper, recognising with almost incredulous pleasure a manner of speech with which he was at his ease.

‘Wot you got in that there basin,’ said Sally, also recognising, and also with pleasure, accents since her marriage become very dear to her because reminiscent of home.

She smiled with the utmost friendliness at him. Mr. Soper found it difficult to believe his eyes.

‘It’s my dinner,’ said Mr. Soper, gazing at the vision.

‘Well, I didn’t suppose it was your Sunday ’at,’ said Sally, pleased to find that she too, given a chance, could say clever things. ‘Tell by the smell it ain’t a nat.’

Mr. Soper also seemed to think this clever, for he laughed, as Sally put it to herself, like anything.

‘Stew?’ she asked, her delicate nose describing little half circles of appreciative inquiry.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Soper. ‘Irish.’

‘Thought so,’ said Sally; and added with a sigh, ‘the best of the lot.’

Mr. Soper being intelligent, though handicapped at the moment by not quite believing his eyes, thought he here perceived encouragement to untie the handkerchief. He put the basin on the floor at the young lady’s feet, and untied it. She gazed at the lovely contents, at potatoes showing their sleek sides through the brimming gravy, at little ends of slender cutlets, at glimpses of bright carrots, at pearly-shouldered onions gleaming from luscious depths, with such evident longing that he was emboldened to ask her if she wouldn’t oblige him by tasting it, and telling him her opinion of it as a stew.

‘There’s stews and stews, you know, Miss,’ he said, hastily arranging it on an empty packing-case convenient for her, ‘but my old woman’s who looks after me is ’ard to beat——’

And he ran into the little shed he had come out of, and after a minute’s rummaging brought her a spoon and plate. His own spoon was in his pocket. He didn’t use a plate.

Sally tasted; and, having tasted, went on tasting. Soon there was danger that Mr. Soper’s dinner would be so much tasted that there wouldn’t be any left, but he cared nothing for that. If he had had a hundred stews, and he starving, they should all have been the young lady’s.

Sally tried not to taste too much, but she was so hungry, and the stew was so lovely. Besides, the young man kept urging her to go on. He was more like a friend than any one she had yet met. That he should never take his eyes off her didn’t disturb her in the least, for she had been used to that all her life; and his language was her language, and he didn’t make her feel nervous, and she knew instinctively that she could do nothing wrong in his sight, and she talked more to him during the half hour they ate the stew together—for she presently insisted on his getting another plate and joining in—than she had talked to Jocelyn the whole time they had known each other; talked more to him, indeed, than she had ever talked to anybody, except, when she was little, to those girl friends who had later fallen away.

How surprising, how delightful, the ease with which she said things to Mr. Soper, and the things that came into her head to say! Quite clever, she was; quite sharp, and quick at the take-up. And laugh—why, the young fellow made her laugh so that she could hardly keep from choking. Not in all her life had she laughed as Mr. Soper made her laugh. Bright, he was, and no mistake. While as for Mr. Soper himself, who could be much, much brighter, he was fortunately kept damped down to his simpler jokes by the effect the strange young lady’s loveliness had on him; so that he who in Truro was known as the life of his set, as the boldest of its wits as well as the most daring of its ladies’ men, was as mild and timid in his preliminary frisks with Sally as a lately born lamb exploring, for the first time, the beautiful strange world it had suddenly discovered.

§

Jocelyn found them there, the empty basin on the floor between them, and, sticking up in it, two spoons.

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, starting a little, for she had forgotten Jocelyn; and Mr. Soper had what he afterwards described as the turn of his life.

She with a husband? She who was hardly old enough, if you asked him, to have a father even? Got a husband all the time, and eaten his stew. He didn’t grudge her the stew, but he did think she ought to have told him she had a husband. Fancy eating his stew, and knowing she had a husband the whole time. It seemed to make it unfair. It seemed to make it somehow false pretences. And one of these blinking gentlemen, too; one of your haw-haw chaps with the brains of a rabbit, thought Mr. Soper, looking Jocelyn up and down, who took no notice of him whatever. See that written all over him, thought Mr. Soper, seeking comfort in derision,—a silly fool who couldn’t even mend his own horn. Wicked, he called it, wicked, to thieve this girl away from her own lot, filch her, before she knew what she was about, from her natural mates, go-ahead chaps like, for instance, himself, when there were thousands of female rabbits in his own class who would have fitted him like so many blooming gloves.

‘Class should stick to class,’ said Mr. Soper to himself, who belonged to at least four societies for violently welding all classes into one, the one being Mr. Soper’s.

Jocelyn ignored him. (‘Haw, haw,’ thought Mr. Soper derisively, hurt by this, and sticking out a chin that no one noticed.) Shutting his eyes to the hideous evidence of the two spoons in the basin, to which he would refer, he decided, later, he took Sally’s arm and hurried her out to the now silent Morris-Cowley. This had not been his intention when he came in. He had intended to tell her that he had just discovered the loss of the luggage, that he was going back at once to look for it, and leave her there, where she was safe and private, till he came back.

The sight of the basin and spoons forced him to other decisions. She was obviously neither safe nor private. He said nothing at all, but gripping her arm with, perhaps, unnecessary vigour seeing how unresistingly she went, hurried her out of the place and helped her, again with, perhaps, unnecessary vigour into her seat, slamming the door on her and hastening round to the other side to his own.

Mr. Soper, however, was hard on their heels. Nothing if not nippy, he was determined to see the last of her who not only was the first human being he had met to whom he could imagine going down on his knees, but also—thus did romance and reality mingle in his mind—who contained at that moment at least three-quarters of his Irish stew. It seemed to give him a claim on her. Inside himself was the remaining quarter, and it did seem to unite them. Mortified as he was, deceived as he felt himself to be, he yet couldn’t help, in his mind, making a joke about this union, which he thought so good that he decided to tell it to his friends that night at the whist-drive he was going to—it need not be repeated here,—and he was so excessively nippy, such a very smart, all-there, seize-your-opportunity young man, that he actually managed to say in Sally’s left ear during the brief moment Jocelyn was on his way round to the other side, bending down ostensibly to examine the near back tyre, ‘Whatever did you want to go and marry one of them haw-haw fellers for, when there was——’

But what there was Sally never heard, for at that instant the car leaped forward, leaving him on the kerb alone.

There he stood, looking after it; apparently merely a pale, contemptuous mechanic, full of the proper scorn for a shabby little four-year-old two-seater—he could of course date it exactly—but really a baffled young man who had just been pulled up and thwarted in the very act of falling, for the first time in his life, passionately and humbly in love.

§

The Thistle and Goat was where Jocelyn took her. It was the first hotel he saw. He had to deposit her somewhere; he couldn’t take her with him in search of the luggage, and have her hanging round while he picked it up and corded it on again, and making friends with anybody who came along. Would she obey him and stay in the bedroom, or would he be forced to the absurdity of locking her in? He was so seriously upset by the various misfortunes of the day that he was ready to behave with almost any absurdity. He was quite ready, for instance, to fight that spotted oaf at the garage; he had itched to knock him down, and had only been restrained by a vision of the crowd that would collect, and a consciousness of how it would advertise Sally. To lock her in her room was, he admitted, a violent sort of thing to do, and violence, he had been brought up to believe, was always vulgar and ridiculous, but it would anyhow be effective. Definite and strongly simple measures were, he perceived, needful with Sally, especially when one was in a hurry. He couldn’t, with the luggage lying somewhere on the road between Truro and St. Mawes, probably burst open and indecently scattered and exposed, start explaining to Sally all the things she was on no account to do while he was away collecting it. He certainly would explain; and fully; and clearly; for the spoon and basin business had been simply disgusting, and he was going to put a stop to that sort of thing once and forever, but not now,—not till there was plenty of time, so that he really might have a chance of getting into her head at least the beginning of a glimmer of what a lady simply couldn’t do. And he was so angry that he corrected this sentence, and instead of the word lady substituted the wife of a gentleman.

He locked her in.

‘If any one knocks,’ he told her before leaving her, ‘you will call out that you have locked the door, as you wish to be undisturbed. You understand me, Sally? That’s what you are to say—nothing else. Exactly and only that.’

‘Right O,’ said Sally, a little dejectedly, for his tone and expression discouraged cheerfulness, and preparing to lock the door behind him.

But it was he who locked it, much to her surprise, deftly pulling the key out of the inside of the door and slipping it into the outside before she realised what he was doing; and she heard him, having turned it, draw it out and go away.

Yes, she was locked in all right.

‘Whatever——’ began Sally in her thoughts; then gave it up, and sat down patiently on the edge of the wicker arm-chair to wait for the next thing that would happen to her.

‘Glad I ’ad that there stew,’ she reflected.

‘My wife,’ said Jocelyn to the lady in the office downstairs, as he went out still with the frown on his face caused by the realisation that he hadn’t given Sally any reason for his suddenly leaving her, and that she hadn’t asked for any—was that companionship?—‘wishes to be undisturbed till I come back.’

‘I see,’ said the lady, with what seemed to him rather a curious emphasis, and she was about to inquire where his luggage was, for the Thistle and Goat liked to know where luggage was, when he strode away.

Now what did she see, Jocelyn asked himself. Nobody had ever said I see like that to any orders given when he was travelling with his mother. The emphasis was marked. It sounded, he thought, both suspicious and pert. He went out to the car, strangling a desire to go back and ask her what she saw. Did she too think he wasn’t really married? No, no—nonsense. Probably she saw and meant nothing. Really he was becoming sensitive beyond all dignity, he thought as he drove off on his unpleasant and difficult quest.

But the lady in the office had merely expressed herself badly. What was worrying her was not what she saw but what she didn’t see, and what she didn’t see was luggage. The Thistle and Goat, in common with other hotels, liked luggage. It preferred luggage to be left rather than ladies. Now the gentleman had gone off without saying a word about it, and she tried to reassure herself by hoping, what was indeed true, that he had gone to fetch it, and that she need do nothing about it, anyhow for the present. And hardly had she settled down to a cup of after-luncheon tea in the back office when the luggage arrived, brought in by a different gentleman, and one, to her great relief, whom she knew—young Mr. Carruthers, of Trevinion Manor.

Great was the confidence the Thistle and Goat had in the family of Carruthers, whom it had known all its life. No orders given by a passing tourist could have any weight when balanced against a Carruthers request. So that when young Mr. Carruthers, learning that Mr. Luke had lately left in his car, asked to see Mrs. Luke in order to hand over her luggage personally and desired his card to be sent up, regardless of the orders given by Mr. Luke the card was sent up and the message given; and Sally received both it and the message, for the chambermaid, finding the door locked and getting no answer, because Sally thought that by saying nothing she wouldn’t be telling any lies, unlocked it with her pass-key; and Sally, having heard the message and received the card, issued forth obediently. Naturally she did. Usband had said nothing about not leaving the room. She wanted her tin box, and to get unpacked. Besides, when anybody sent for her she always went.

What had happened was that young Carruthers, strolling down as usual just before lunch across the fields to the sea-front, had found the window of the Cupp parlour flung wide open, and Mrs. Cupp vigorously shaking the hearth-rug out of it. Evidently her lodgers had left; and he went in and began asking her about them, and very soon discovered that the lean chap was Jocelyn Luke—Luke of Ananias, as Carruthers, himself at Oxford, instantly identified him, for there couldn’t well be two Jocelyn Lukes, and his reputation had ebbed across to Oxford, where he was known not unfavourably, and perhaps as on the whole the least hopelessly unpromising of the Cambridge crowd. And just as Mrs. Cupp was proceeding to tell him her opinion of the alleged Mrs. Luke, and how Cupp had only now been able to come out of his bedroom and have his dinner, there came news of the dropped luggage on the hill.

Carruthers felt that he was the very man to deal with that. He rushed off, thrust everybody aside, collected it reverently, for the tin trunk had indeed burst open, and its modest contents, of a touching propriety he thought, as he carefully put back things that felt like flannel, were scattered on the road, and then, fetching his car, took it into Truro.

It was easy, at the turn to Falmouth, to discover which way the Lukes had gone. It was also easy, on arriving in Truro, to discover which hotel they were in. He only had to describe them. Everybody had noticed them. Everybody on the road had heard their horn, and everybody had seen the beautiful young lady. And because he went into the town by the direct road, and as Jocelyn coming out of it, and sure the luggage hadn’t anyhow been dropped nearer than the top of the hill beyond the garage, took a round-about way, joining the main road only on the other side of the garage so as not again to have to set eyes on the loathsome oaf employed in it and risk being unable to resist going in and knocking him down, they missed each other precisely there; and accordingly when Jocelyn, having been all the way to St. Mawes, where he heard what had been done, got back about five, tired, very hungry, and wondering how on earth he was now going to find the officious person they said was trying to restore his belongings to him, he was told by the boots that young Mr. Carruthers had arrived just after he left, and was waiting to see him upstairs in the drawing-room.

‘Thank heaven,’ thought Jocelyn, feeling the key in his pocket, ‘that I locked her in.’

And he went into the drawing-room, and there at a table in a corner by the fire, with the remains on it of what seemed to have been an extraordinarily good and varied tea, she was sitting.

§

Carruthers—he recognised him at once as the man with the dog called Sally—was worshipping her. Decently, for Carruthers was plainly a decent chap, but worshipping her all right; it was written in every line and twist of him, as he leaned forward eagerly, telling her stories, apparently, for he was talking a great deal and she was only listening,—amusing stories, for she was smiling.

She never smiled with him, thought Jocelyn; not like that, not a real smile of just enjoyment. From the very first day, that day at tea in the Pinner parlour, she had seemed frightened of him. But she couldn’t be much frightened, for here she was openly disregarding his injunctions, and somehow got out of her locked room. That seemed to Jocelyn anything but being frightened; it seemed to him to the last degree fearless and resourceful. And how strangely at variance with her apparent shyness and retiringness that twice in one day she should have allowed strange men to feed her.

He approached their corner, pale and grim. He was tired to death after the vexatious day he had had, and very hungry after not having had anything to eat since breakfast. Carruthers had watched his opportunity, of course—waited somewhere till he had seen him go, and then taken the luggage in and asked for Sally. And Sally, somehow getting out of that room, had defied his orders and come down. Well, he couldn’t do anything with her at that moment. He was too tired to flare up. Besides—scenes; he couldn’t for ever make scenes. What a revolting form of activity to have thrust upon him! But the amount of ideas that would, he perceived, have to be got into her head if life was to be even approaching tolerable was so great that his mind, in his fatigued state, refused to consider it.

She saw him first, and, much pleased with everything, with the beautiful tea, with Mr. Carruthers’ funny stories and with her pleasant afternoon altogether, continued to smile, but at him now, and said to Carruthers, ‘’Ere comes Mr. Luke.’

And on Carruthers getting up and Jocelyn arriving at the table, introduced them.

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally; explaining Carruthers to Jocelyn by saying, ‘The gentleman as brought our traps.’

Jocelyn couldn’t be angry with Carruthers; he looked at him so friendlily, and shook his hand with what surely was a perfectly sincere heartiness. And though he was obviously bowled over by Sally—naturally, thought Jocelyn, seeing that he had none of the responsibility and only the fun—there was something curiously sympathetic in his attitude to Jocelyn himself, something that seemed, oddly, to understand.

Sally, his wife, said, for instance, ‘’Ad yer tea?’—just that, and made no attempt to give him any. But what Carruthers said, quickly going across and ringing the bell, was, ‘I bet you haven’t. You’ve had the sort of rotten day there’s no time for anything in but swearing. They’ll bring some fresh stuff in a moment. It’s a jolly good tea they give one in this place,—don’t they, Mrs. Luke.’

‘’Eavenly,’ said Sally. And turning to Jocelyn she said, more timidly, ‘’Ad to come out of the bedroom. The servant——’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ interrupted Jocelyn hastily, earnestly desiring to keep from Carruthers the knowledge that he had locked her in. Things look so different, especially domestic actions, in the eyes of a third person unaware of the attendant circumstances, thought Jocelyn.

He dropped into a chair. What a comfort it was, after a fortnight of being dog alone with Sally, to hear that decent voice. It really was like music. He hadn’t, at Cambridge, cared much for the Oxford way of speaking, but how beautiful it seemed after the Pinner way. He wanted to shut his eyes and just listen to it. ‘Go on, go on,’ he wanted to say, when Carruthers paused for a moment in his pleasant talk; and he sat there, listening and eating and drinking in silence, and Carruthers looked after him, and fed him, and talked pleasantly to him, and talked pleasantly to Sally as well, and did, in fact, all the talking. There was something about Jocelyn that made Carruthers feel maternal. He was so thin. His shoulder blades stuck out so, and his lean, nervous face twitched. Carruthers thought, as he had thought on that first occasion, only this time, knowing who he was and aware of Sally’s class, with ten times more conviction, ‘Poor devil’; but he also thought, his eyes resting on the lovely thing in the corner—he had established her in the farthermost corner of the Thistle and Goat’s drawing-room, for he too had instantly begun to hide her, and she lit up its gloom as a white flower lights up the dusk—he also thought, ‘Poor angel.’

§

Yes, she was an angel, and a poor one; he was sure of that. Carruthers, so romantic inside, so square and unemotional outside, told himself she was a forlorn child-angel torn out of her natural heaven, which obviously was completely h—less and obscure, but comfortable and unexacting, and pitched into a world of strangers, the very ABC of whose speech and behaviour she didn’t understand.

After two hours tête à tête with Sally, two hours which seemed like ten minutes, so deeply was he interested, this was his conclusion. She hadn’t been very shy, not after he left off being shy, which he was for a moment or two, confused by the sheer shock of her beauty seen close; but he had soon recovered and got into his stride, which was an easy one for her to keep up with, his one idea being to please her and make her happy.

It wasn’t difficult to please Sally and make her happy; you had only to avoid frightening her. Mr. Soper hadn’t frightened her, he had fed her,—always a good beginning with a woman. Carruthers knew this, and immediately ordered tea, in spite of its still being only three o’clock; and, since the Thistle and Goat specialised in teas, the one which was presently brought was of such a conspicuous goodness, with so many strange Cornish cakes and exciting little sandwiches, besides a bowl of the Cornish cream Sally liked altogether best of anything she had learned to know on her honeymoon, that she soon felt as comfortable and friendly with Carruthers as she had with Mr. Soper.

She was at the age of jam. Cream was still enough to make her happy. And she wasn’t used to quantities. In her frugal life there had never been quantities of anything, and they excited her. Quantities combined with kindness—what could be more delightful? She didn’t suppose she had enjoyed anything so much ever as that tea. And it was sheer enjoyment, nothing to do with hunger at all, for hunger had been done away with by Mr. Soper’s stew, and this was a deliberate choosing, a splendid unnecessariness, a sense of wide margin, of freedom, of power, and no need to think of putting away what was left over for next day.

So by the time that Carruthers said, with that simplicity which made his mother sure there was no one in the world like her Gerry, ‘I’ve never seen any one as beautiful as you, and I didn’t know there could be anybody,’ Sally, unstiffened and lubricated by all the cream, was quite ready to discuss her appearance or anything else with him as far as she, restricted of speech as she was, could discuss at all, and he discovered to his deep surprise that she regarded her beauty as a thing to be apologised for, as a pity, as the same thing really as a deformity, forcing her to be conspicuous and nothing but a worry to those she loved and who loved her, and she not able to help it or alter it, or do anything at all except be sorry.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘was in a state—you’ve no idea. If any one just looked my way. And they was always lookin’.’

Carruthers nodded. Just what he had been thinking when first he saw her on the hill behind St. Mawes, with Luke trying to cover her up, to extinguish her quickly in her hat,—the responsibility, the anxiety.... But that she herself should regard it like that astonished him. Surely any woman....

‘And Mr. Luke—’e’s frightened too. ‘Ides me, same as Father and Mother used.’

‘You’re really imprisoned, then,’ said Carruthers, staring at her. ‘Imprisoned in your beauty.’

But seeing a puzzled expression come into her eyes he began to talk of other things, to tell her stories, to amuse her; for after all it wasn’t very fair to Luke, somehow, whose back happened to be turned, much against his will Carruthers was sure, to let her tell him about herself and her life. She was too defenceless. She was a child, who would talk to any stranger who was kind; and he could guess all he was entitled to know, he could see for himself the gift she held in her hands, the supreme gift for a woman, the gift beyond all others in power for the brief time it lasted, and he could see she was entirely unconscious of its value, of what might be done with it if only she knew how. And every time she opened her touchingly beautiful mouth of quick smiles and painstaking response, her h’s dropped about him in showers.

Well, who cared? She might say anything she liked, and it wouldn’t matter; in any voice, with any accent, and it wouldn’t matter. Not even if she said coy common things, or arch common things, as he half expected she would when first she spoke and startled him with the discovery of her class, would it matter, For one needn’t listen. One could always just sit and watch. Yes—who cared?

But the answer to that, he knew, wasn’t simply Nobody, it was Jocelyn Luke. Luke would care. He quite obviously did care already, though they couldn’t have been married more than two or three weeks; and she dumbly felt it, Carruthers was sure, for, after having been eager to get out of her imprisoning shell of illiteracy and say what she could while she was alone with him, directly Luke joined them she retired into a kind of anxious caution, looking at him before she said anything in answer to a question, and keeping as much as possible to Yes and No.

‘He’s been teaching her,’ thought Carruthers. ‘He’s been going for her h’s. She’s on his nerves, and she knows it—no, not knows it, but feels it. She doesn’t know anything about anything yet, but she feels a jolly lot, I’ll swear.’

Deeply interesting Lukes. What would their fate be, he wondered.

§

After Carruthers had gone, pensively driving himself back to St. Mawes in the pale spring twilight, Jocelyn, soothed by his agreeable talk and manifest friendliness, and also by the good tea, felt quite different. He no longer wanted to admonish Sally. He didn’t even want to ask her why she had come out of the bedroom. He was ashamed of that; ashamed of having locked her in, degrading her to God knew what level of childishness, of slavery, of, indeed, some pet animal that might stray—in fact, a dog. He shuddered a little, and looked at her deprecatingly, and leaning over the table took her hand and kissed it.

‘Sally,’ he murmured, suddenly for the first time since he grew up, feeling very young,—and how painfully young to be married!

Marriage. It wasn’t just love-making, he thought as he kissed her hand; love-making, and then done with it and get on with your work. It was responsibility constant and lasting, not only for the other life so queerly and suddenly and permanently joined on to one, but also for oneself in a quite new way, a way one had never till then at all considered.

He kissed her hand again.

‘Tea done ’im good,’ thought Sally.

But it was the half hour with one of his own kind, and one who, while definitely charming to him, yet so obviously and with a kind of reverence admired Sally, that had done him good. It had restored him to a condition of tranquillity, and he felt more normal, more really happy—he didn’t count his moments of wild rapture as happiness, because they somehow weren’t—than he had done since the days, now so curiously far away, before he had met her. Carruthers had reassured him. His behaviour to Sally had immensely reassured him. The world was, after all, chiefly decent. It didn’t consist solely of foul-minded Cupps, nor of impudent young men in garages. Just as there were more people in it healthy than sick, so there were more people in it who were appreciative and kindly than there were people who weren’t. Carruthers had known all about him, too. Jocelyn hadn’t credited Oxford with so much intelligent awareness. It was infinitely pleasant, after a fortnight with Sally who, wonderful as she was, uniquely wonderful he freely admitted, yet hadn’t the remotest idea of what he had done and still hoped to do—yes, by God, still hoped to do. Why not? Why chuck Cambridge after all? Why not face it with Sally, and train her who was, he knew, most obedient and only needing showing, to behave in such a way that no one, if she lived there, would dare make himself a nuisance?—it was infinitely pleasant after this to have been with somebody who knew all about him. He hadn’t got very far, of course, in his work; nobody knew that better than himself. But it had been a good enough beginning for Carruthers and Oxford to have heard of him. And the desire to go on, to proceed along the glorious path, came back to him in a mighty flood as he sat in the Thistle and Goat’s drawing-room, with that other desire appeased and seeming to be getting ready to fall into its proper place.

If Sally too could be got into her proper place, mightn’t life even yet be a triumph?

§

He wrote to his mother that night, after Sally had gone to bed. He sent her there early, and with a return of irritability, because of the way the people in the dining-room at dinner, and afterwards in the drawing-room where he and she sat in a remote corner while he had his coffee, behaved. It was really outrageous. This was his first experience of dining with her in a public place. And it was no good his glaring at the creatures, because they never gave him so much as a glance.

So he sent her to bed, and then he wrote to his mother. Better go home. Better now go home to South Winch, and not wander about in expensive hotels, with hateful old men in dinner jackets and fat women in beads staring their eyes out. Hotels were impossible with Sally; and so were lodgings, with the risk of another suspicious and insulting landlady. Besides, a fortnight was enough for a honeymoon, and for this particular honeymoon, with all its difficulties, quite enough. Home was the place. Almond Tree Cottage, and its quiet. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home to his mother, and get her meeting with Sally over, and sit in that little study of his at the top of the house where not a soul could see him, and think out what was best to do next.

His mother would help him. She had always understood and helped. Never yet had she failed him. And she would help him, too, in the business of looking after Sally,—take her off his hands sometimes, and perhaps succeed in getting her quite soon to talk like a civilised being.

It had been the last thing he had originally intended, to go with Sally to stay at his mother’s. Introduce her, of course; take her down for a day; but not stay there, for well did he know his marriage would fall like a sword on his mother, cleaving her heart. Things, however, had changed since then. He had in his haste, in his blind passion, written to her that he was going to chuck Cambridge, and now that his passion was no longer blind and he wasn’t going to chuck it—no, he’d be damned if he would; not anyhow till he had tried what it was like there with Sally—he was anxious to go to his mother and heal up at least one of the wounds he knew his letter must have made. He would ask her what she thought, having seen Sally, of the idea of her living in Cambridge. Perhaps—it flashed into his mind like light—his mother would live there too; give up Almond Tree Cottage, and live with them in Cambridge. What a solution. Then she could look after Sally, and be such a comfort, such a blessed comfort, to him as well. What a splendid, simple solution.

He threw down his pen, and stared straight in front of him. They would all be happy then—he going on with his work, Sally being taught by his mother, and his mother not separated from him.

When he went to bed, and Sally stirred in her sleep as if she were waking up, he took her in his arms and asked her if she would like to live in Cambridge.

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally, even though half asleep remembering to stick to monosyllables.

‘It’ll be better than London,’ said Jocelyn, holding her close. ‘Won’t it, my love? Won’t it, my beautiful love?’ he added in a whisper, for there was something about Sally’s hair, against which his face was, a softness, a sweetness....

‘And perhaps my mother will come and live with us too there. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, darling?’

There was a brief pause. Then, ‘Yes,’ murmured Sally.

He kissed her delicious hair. ‘Darling,’ he said tenderly, pleased by this absence of all difficulty. ‘You’re half asleep,’ he added in her ear, pushing aside the hair that lay over it with his mouth.

But was she? For, after another pause, she said, her face still turned away from him, something that sounded like Father.

‘Yes, darling?’ said Jocelyn, as she didn’t go on.

‘’E might come too, p’raps,’ murmured Sally.

‘What?’ said Jocelyn, not sure he could have heard right, bending his face nearer. ‘Your father?’

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally.

‘Your father?’ said Jocelyn again.

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally. ‘Then—we’d be tidy like—you’d ’ave ’er, and I’d ’ave ’im.’

‘Go to sleep Sally,’ said Jocelyn with sudden authority. ‘Do you know what time it is? Nearly eleven.’

VIII

§

Meanwhile, at Almond Tree Cottage, Jocelyn’s mother had become Margery to Mr. Thorpe, and he to her was Edgar.

The idea she had played with, the possibility she had smiled at, was now fact. She had reacted to Jocelyn’s marriage by getting involved, immediately and profoundly, in Mr. Thorpe. Without quite knowing how, with hardly a recollection of when, she had become engaged to him. He had caught her at the one moment in which, blind with shock, she would have clung to anything that offered support.

How could she face South Winch without support? For there was not only her inward humiliation to be dealt with, the ruin of her love and pride and the wreck of those bright ambitious dreams—surely of all ambitious dreams the most natural and creditable, the dreams of a mother for the future greatness of her son,—there was the pity of South Winch. No, she couldn’t stand pity; and pity because of Jocelyn, of all people! Of him who had been her second, more glorious self, of him who was to have been all she would have been if she could have been. South Winch couldn’t pity her if she married its richest man. There was something about wealth, when present in sufficient quantities, that silenced even culture; and everybody knew about Mr. Thorpe’s house, and grounds, and cars, and conservatories. She therefore dropped like a fruit that no longer has enough life to hold on, into the outstretched hands of Mr. Thorpe.

Jocelyn didn’t want her; Mr. Thorpe did. It was a deplorable thing, she thought, for she could still at intervals, in spite of her confusion and distress, think intelligently, that a woman couldn’t be happy, couldn’t be at peace, unless there existed somebody who wanted her, and wanted her exclusively; but there it was. Deplorable indeed, for it now flung her into Mr. Thorpe’s arms prematurely, without her having had time properly to think it out. No doubt she would have got into them in the end, but not yet, not for years and years. Now she tumbled in from a sheer instinct of self-preservation. She had to hold on to some one. She was giddy and staggering from the blow that had cut through her life. Jocelyn, her boy, her wonderful, darling boy, in whose career she had so passionately merged herself, doing everything, even the smallest thing, only with reference to him, wanted her so little that he could throw her aside, thrust her away without an instant’s hesitation, and with her his whole future, the future he and she had been working at with utter concentration for years, for the sake of a girl he had only known a fortnight. He said so in the letter. He said it was only a fortnight. One single fortnight, as against those twenty-two consecrated years.

Who was this girl, who was this person for whom he gave up everything at a moment’s notice? Mrs. Luke, shuddering, hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms; for the things that Jocelyn hadn’t said in that letter on the eve of his marriage were more terrible almost to her than those he had said,—the ominous non-reference to the girl’s family, to her upbringing, to her circumstances. Hardly had he mentioned her name. At the end, in a postcript, as if in his heart he were ashamed, he had said it was Salvatia—Salvatia!—and her father’s name was Pinner, but that he really didn’t know that it mattered, and he wouldn’t have cared, and neither would anybody else who saw her care, if she hadn’t had fifty names. And then he had added the strange words, ominously defiant, unnecessarily coarse, that he would have taken her, and so would any one else who saw her, in her shift; and then still further, and still more strangely and coarsely, he had scribbled in a shaky hand, as though he had torn open the letter again and stuck it in in a kind of frenzy of passion, ‘My God—her shift!’

Mrs. Luke hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms. Coarseness had never yet got into Almond Tree Cottage, except the coarseness consecrated by time, which it was a sign of intelligence not to mind, the coarseness, for instance, of those marvellous Elizabethans. But coarseness from Jocelyn? Oh, blind and mad, blind and mad. Where had her boy got it from, this capacity for sudden, violent, ruinous behaviour? Not from her, very certainly. It must be some of the thick, sinister blood filtered down into him from the Spanish woman her husband’s great-grandfather—Mrs. Luke had been pleased with this great-grandfather up to then, because in her own family, where there should have been four, there hadn’t been any—had married against his parents’ wishes. She hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms. But—‘This in exchange for Jocelyn?’ she couldn’t help repeating to herself that first day, trying to shut her eyes, spiritually as well as physically, trying to withdraw her attention, as even in this crisis she remembered Dr. Johnson had done in unpleasant circumstances, from Mr. Thorpe’s betrothal caresses.

Mr. Thorpe was clean and healthy; for that she was thankful. Still, she suffered a good deal that first day. Then, imperceptibly, she got used to him. Surprising how soon one gets used to a man, she thought, on whom this one’s substantial shape had made a distinctly disagreeable impression the first week she found herself up against it. By the end of a week she no longer noticed the curious springy solidity of Mr. Thorpe’s figure, which had seemed to her when he first embraced her, used as she was to the lean fragility of her late husband, so unpleasantly much. And besides, the flood of his riches began to flow over her immediately, and it was a warm flood. She hadn’t known how agreeable such a flood could be. She hadn’t had an idea of the way it could bring comfort into one’s every corner—yes, even into one’s mind when one’s mind was sore and unhappy. Riches, she had always held, were vulgar; but she now obscurely recognised that they were only vulgar if they were somebody else’s. One’s own—why, to what noble ends could not riches be directed in the hands of those who refused to use them vulgarly? Married to Mr. Thorpe, she would make of them as beautiful and graceful a thing as she had made of her poverty. And it did soothe Mrs. Luke, it did help her a great deal during these days of wreckage, that her life, which had been so spare and bony, was now becoming hourly, in every sort of pleasant way, more and more padded, more and more soft and luscious with fat.

For, if no longer precious to Jocelyn, she was precious to Mr. Thorpe, and it was his pride to pad out the meagreness of her surroundings; and though she cried herself to sleep each night because of Jocelyn, she awoke each morning comforted because of Mr. Thorpe. After twelve hours of not seeing Mr. Thorpe she could clearly perceive, what was less evident at the end of a long evening with him, her immense good fortune in having got him. A decent, honourable man. Not every woman in the forties finds at the precise right moment a decent, honourable man, who is also rich. Where would she have been now without Mr. Thorpe? He was her rock, her refuge; he was the plaster to her wounded pride, the restorer of her self-respect.

‘I can rely on him,’ she said to herself while she sat in front of her glass in the morning, brushing her thick, black hair—in the evening when she brushed it she didn’t say anything. ‘I can entirely trust him. What, after all, is education? What has education done for Jocelyn? The one thing that matters is character.’

And she would come down to find her breakfast-table strewn with fresh evidences of Mr. Thorpe’s hot-houses and love.

§

Not a word from Jocelyn all this time, not a sign. He might be dead, she thought; and it would have hurt her less if he had been. For dead he would have been for ever hers; nobody then could touch him, take him away. Crushed and bitter, she crept yet closer to Mr. Thorpe. He liked it. He liked being crept close to. He was thoroughly pleased with what in his business-like mind he referred to as his bargain.

She never mentioned Jocelyn to him, and he liked that too. ‘Young fool,’ he said, when he came round unexpectedly early one evening, and found her crying. ‘No use worrying about a fool.’

And Mrs. Luke, still further crushed by hearing Jocelyn called a fool, and therefore being forced to the deduction that she had produced one—yes, and it was true, too, in spite of his brains—could only hang on to Mr. Thorpe, and say nothing.

He liked that. He liked to be hung on to, and he had no objection to a certain amount of saying nothing in a woman. Her late husband, could he now have seen her who was once his wife, would have been surprised, for in his day she had never hung on, and had been particularly good at conversation. But there was that about Mr. Thorpe which quenched conversation. Even before her engagement, in the days of his preliminary assiduities after his wife’s death, she had found it difficult, when he came round, to keep what she understood was sometimes described as the ball rolling; and she was completely in command of herself then, in the full flood of her happiness and satisfaction. Conversation with him, the kind she and South Winch knew and practised, was out of the question. There was no exchange of opinions possible with Mr. Thorpe, because he never exchanged his, he merely emitted them and stuck to them. And they came out clothed in so very few words that they seemed to Mrs. Luke, watching him with quizzical, amused eyes—ah, those detached days, when one looked on and wasn’t involved!—almost indecently bare. Now she drooped. She bowed her head.

Mr. Thorpe liked that. He liked a woman to bow her head. Gentleness in a woman was what he liked: gentleness, and softness, and roundness. Margery was gentle all right, and soft enough in places—anyhow of speech; but she wasn’t round. Not yet. Later, of course, after the cook at Abergeldie—his house was called Abergeldie—had had a go at her, she wouldn’t know herself again. And meanwhile, to put an immediate stop to all this underfeeding, a stream of nourishment—oysters, lobsters, plovers’ eggs, his own pineapples, his own forced strawberries, his own butter and fresh eggs, and, once, a sucking pig—thickly flowed across the daisied meadow dividing Abergeldie from Almond Tree Cottage.

The little maid turned yellow, and began to get up at night and be sick. Mrs. Luke, feeling it was both wrong and grotesque to bury lobsters in the back garden, and unable either to stop the stream or deal with it herself, was forced to send most of the stuff round to her friends; and so South Winch became aware of what had happened, for nobody except Mr. Thorpe grew pineapples and bought plovers’ eggs, and nobody gave such quantities of them to a woman without being going to marry her afterwards.

Well, it was as good a way as any other of letting people know, thought Mrs. Luke, sitting in silence with Mr. Thorpe’s arm round her waist, while every now and then he furtively felt to see whether she wasn’t beginning anywhere to curve. Instead of sending round billets de faire part she sent lobsters. Rather original, she thought, with a slight return to her detached and amused earlier self. ‘Does he really think I can eat them all?’ she wondered.

And the little maid, in whose kitchen much, even so, remained, fell from one bilious paroxysm into another.

§

She was warmly congratulated. It soothed her afresh, this new importance with which she was instantly clothed. Money—she sighed, but faced it—money, even in that place where people really did try to keep their eyes well turned to the light, was a great, perhaps the greatest, power. She sighed. It oughtn’t to be so; but if it was so? And who would not be grateful, really deeply grateful, to Edgar, and put up with all his little ways, when he was so generous, so kind, and so completely devoted? Besides, his little ways would, she was sure, later on become much modified. A wife could do so much. A well-bred, intelligent wife—it was simply silly not to admit plain facts—could do everything. When she was married....

And then she found herself shrinking from the thought of when she was married. She could restrain his affection now; it was her privilege. But when she was married, it would be his privilege not to be able to be restrained. And there appeared to be no age limit to a man’s affectionateness. Here was Edgar, well over sixty and still affectionate. Really, really, thought Mrs. Luke, who even in her most ardent days had loved only with her mind.

And then one evening, nearly three weeks after the arrival of that letter of Jocelyn’s that had brought all this about, Mr. Thorpe said, ‘When’s it going to be?’

‘When is what going to be?’ she asked, starting.

To this he only replied, ‘Coy, eh?’ and sat staring at her proudly and affectionately, a hand on each knee.

Pierced by the word, Mrs. Luke hastened to say in her most level voice, ‘You mean our marriage? Surely there’s plenty of time.’

‘Time, eh? You bet there isn’t. Not for you and me. We’re no chickens, either of us.’

Mrs. Luke winced. She had never at any time tried, or wished, or pretended to be a chicken, yet to be told she wasn’t one was strangely ruffling. If it were a question of chickens, compared with Edgar she certainly was one. These things were relative. But what a way of....

And then, as before, the little maid came in with a letter, and Mr. Thorpe, vexed as before by the interruption (why that servant—well, one could hardly call a thing that size a servant; that aproned spot, then—couldn’t leave letters outside till they were wanted ...), said, curbing himself, ‘Letter, eh?’

‘From Jocelyn,’ said Mrs. Luke, who had flushed a bright flame-colour, and whose hands, as they held the letter, were shaking.

‘Thought so,’ said Mr. Thorpe in disgust.

§

He learned with profound disapproval that Jocelyn was bringing his bride to Almond Tree Cottage. He didn’t want brides about—none, that is, except his own; and he feared this precious son of hers, who had behaved to her about as badly as a son could behave, would distract Margery’s attention from her own affairs, and make her even more coy about fixing the date of her wedding than she already was.

‘Going to sponge on you,’ was his comment.

She shrank from the word.

‘Jocelyn isn’t like that,’ she said quickly.

‘Pooh,’ said Mr. Thorpe.

She shrank from this word too. Edgar was, as she well knew and quite accepted, a plain man and a rough diamond, but a man shouldn’t be too plain, a diamond shouldn’t be too rough. Besides, surely the expression was obsolete.

‘My dear Edgar,’ she protested gently.

Mr. Thorpe persisted. ‘It’s pooh all right,’ he said. ‘Young men with wives in their shifts’—he remembered every word of that first letter—‘and only five hundred a year to keep them on, always sponge. Or try to,’ he said, instinctively closing his hands over his pockets. ‘Got to live, you know. Must stay somewhere.’

‘He is going to live in London,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘You remember he said so in his first letter. Live there and do—do literary work.’

‘Bunkum,’ said Mr. Thorpe.

And this word seemed to her even more obsolete, if possible, than pooh.

But there was no time to worry about words. What was she going to do? Where was she going to put Jocelyn and his wife? How was she going to receive them? Had she better pretend to South Winch that she had known nothing about it till they had appeared on her doorstep and overwhelmed her with the news? Had she better pretend that Jocelyn had given up Cambridge because he had been offered a position in London too good to refuse? Or had she better hide them indoors till they had found rooms in London, and could be got away again without having been seen, and meanwhile go on behaving as if nothing had happened?

She lost her head. Standing there, with the letter in her shaking hands and Mr. Thorpe, who wouldn’t go away, squarely in front of her, she lost her practical, cool head, and simply couldn’t think what to do. One thing alone was clear—she was going to suffer. And presently another thing emerged into clearness, an absurd thing, but curiously difficult and unpleasant,—she had no spare-room, and in Jocelyn’s room was only the little camp bed it had pleased him (and her too, who liked to think of him as Spartan), to sleep in. This was no house for more than just herself and Jocelyn. Oh, why hadn’t she married Mr. Thorpe at once? Then she would have been established at Abergeldie by now, and able to let the pair have Almond Tree Cottage to themselves.

Abergeldie. The word brought light into her confusion. Of course. That was where they must go. Abergeldie, majestic in the size and number of its unused spare-rooms, magnificent in its conveniences, its baths, its staff of servants. She had been taken over it, as was fitting; had waded across the thickness of its carpets, admired its carved wardrobes, marble-topped washstands and immense beds, gazed from its numerous windows at its many views, wilted through its hot-houses, ached along its lawns, and knew all about it. The very place. And, given courage by the knowledge of the impossibility of housing more than one person beside herself in her own house, urged on by the picture in her mind of that tiny room upstairs and its narrow bed, she made her suggestion to Mr. Thorpe.

Nervously she made it, fearing that the reason for it, fearing that the merest most passing mention of such a thing as a bed, would bring out the side of him which she was forced to recognise as ribald. And it did. He said all the things she was so sorry to have been obliged to expect he would. But he was good-natured; he liked to feel he was helping Margery out of a fix. Also, the young fool would be away from his mother then, and perhaps some sense could be got into his head, and at the same time as sense was got in nonsense would be got out,—the nonsense, for instance, of no doubt supposing that he, Edgar Thorpe, was the sort of man who could be sponged upon beyond, say, a couple of days. Besides, he was proud of Abergeldie, and hardly anybody, what with first Annie’s being alive and then with her not being alive, had ever seen it.

So it was settled, and he went away earlier than usual to give his orders to the housekeeper; and Mrs. Luke, creeping into bed with a splitting headache, lay for hours staring at nothing, and trying to forget Mr. Thorpe’s last words.

For, after he had most affectionately embraced her, so affectionately that she was sure one of her tendons had snapped, he had said: ‘No good his trying to milk me, you know.’

Milk him?

She lay staring into the dark. Was character, after all, better than education?

§

The Canon said it was, and so did his wife. In fact at tea next day in Mrs. Luke’s little garden, on that bit of lawn round the cedar, near the low fence across which grazed Mr. Thorpe’s Jersey cows, they all three were unanimous that it was. Wonderful how daylight, ordinary things, meals, tea-cups, callers, dispelled doubts.

‘Better to have both, of course,’ said the Canon, eating Mr. Thorpe’s forced strawberries after covering them with the cream that had been, twenty-four hours earlier, inside those very cows, ‘but if that’s not possible, give me character. It’s what tells. It’s the only thing that in the long run tells.’

‘Oh, well—one isn’t seriously disputing it,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘Only these theories, if one presses them——’

She paused, and poured out more tea for Mrs. Walker.

‘For instance,’ she went on, ‘suppose a man had a cook of a completely admirable nature. If he married her, could he be happy? I mean, an educated man. Let us say a very well educated man.’

‘Certainly, if she cooked nicely,’ said the Canon, who thought he scented rather than saw the form of Mr. Thorpe lurking somewhere at the back of his delightful parishioner’s remarks, and wasn’t going to be caught.

He knew the importance of turning away seriousness, when it cropped up at the wrong moment, with a laugh. A man as valuably rich as Mr. Thorpe shouldn’t be taken too seriously, shouldn’t be examined and pulled about. His texture simply wouldn’t stand it. He should be said grace over, thought the Canon, who fully realised what a precious addition Mr. Thorpe’s wealth in Mrs. Luke’s hands was going to be to South Winch, and gobbled up thankfully. Gobbled up; not turned over first on the plate.

Mrs. Luke hadn’t invited the Walkers to tea. On the contrary, when first they appeared at the back door, ushered through it by the little maid who each time she saw the Canon’s gaiters was thrown by them into a fresh convulsion of respectfulness, she had been annoyed. Because all day long she had been vainly trying to collect and arrange her thoughts, soothe her nerves, prepare her mind for the evening, when Jocelyn had said he would arrive—to supper, he wrote, somewhere round eight o’clock,—and define what her attitude was going to be both to him and to the girl with the utterly ridiculous Christian name; and not having one bit succeeded, and impelled by some vague hope that out of doors she might find quiet, that in Nature she might find tranquillity and composure, had said she would have tea in the garden.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her....

Some idea like that, though she wasn’t at all a Wordsworthian and regarded him at best with indulgence, drove her out to what her corner of South Winch held of Nature,—the bit of lawn, the cedar, the Kerria japonica against the wall by the kitchen window, the meadow across the railing, full of daisies and cows, and, on that fine spring afternoon of swift shadows and sunshine, the wind, fresh and sweet with the scent of young leaves.

But once the Walkers were there she found they did her good. They distracted her. And they liked her so much. It was always pleasant and restoring to be with people who liked one. The Canon made her feel she was good-looking and important, and his wife made her feel she was important. Also, they helped with the strawberries, from which, after a fortnight of them at every meal, she had for some time turned away her eyes. Later on, when she was alone again, there would still be at least a couple of hours to decide in what sort of a way she would meet Jocelyn; quite long enough, seeing how she couldn’t, whenever she thought of the meeting, stop herself from trembling.

Oh, he had behaved outrageously to her—to her, his mother, who had given up her life to him. There had been men in past years she might have married, men of her own age and class, by whom she might have had other children and with whom she might have been happy all this time; and she had turned them down, dismissed them ruthlessly because of Jocelyn, because only Jocelyn, and his gifts and career, were to have her love and devotion. Wasn’t it a shame, wasn’t it a shame to treat her so? To behave to her as though she were his enemy, the kill-joy who mustn’t be told and mustn’t be consulted, who must be kept in the dark, shut out? And why, because he had gone mad about a girl, must he go still more mad, and ruin himself by throwing up Cambridge?

A wave of fresh misery swept over her. ‘Go on talking—please,’ she said quickly, when the Walkers, replete, fell momentarily silent.

They looked up surprised; and they were still more surprised when they saw that her face, usually delicately pale, was quite red, and her eyes full of tears.

The Canon was affectionately concerned, and his wife was concerned.

‘Are you not well, dear Mrs. Luke?’ she inquired.

‘My dear friend,’ said the Canon, setting down his cup, tidying his mouth, and taking her hand. ‘My dear, dear friend—what is it?’

Then, impulsively, she told them. ‘It’s Jocelyn,’ she said. ‘He’s married, and given up Cambridge.’

And all her mortification and bitter unhappiness engulfed her, and she began helplessly to cry.

‘Dear, dear. Dear me. Dear, dear me,’ said the Canon.

‘Dear Mrs. Luke——’ said his wife.

They sat impotently looking on. Such excessive weeping from the poised, the unemotional, the serene Mrs. Luke, was most disconcerting. One shouldn’t expose oneself like that, however unhappy one was, thought the Canon’s wife, feeling terribly uncomfortable; and even the Canon had a sensation he didn’t like, as of fig-leaves being wrenched off and flung aside.

Well, having behaved like this—really her nerves had completely gone—there was nothing left but to explain further, and after a few painful moments of trying to gulp herself quiet she told them all about it.

They were horrified. Jocelyn’s behaviour, to the Walkers who had ripening sons of their own, seemed to the last degree disgraceful. That the girl was some one to be ashamed of was very plain, or why should he have come down voluntarily from Cambridge? Marriage by itself didn’t stop a student from continuing there. He was ruined. He would never be anything now. And as representing South Winch, which had not yet in its history produced a distinguished man, the Canon felt this blighting of its hopes that some day it would be celebrated as the early home of Sir Jocelyn Luke, perhaps of Lord Luke—why not? hadn’t there been Kelvin?—very keenly.

Poor mother. Poor, poor mother.

The Canon took her hand, and, raising it reverently to his lips, kissed it. His wife didn’t mind this, because in sorrow, as in sickness, there is no sex. Nobody enjoys kissing the hand of the sick. She minded nothing the Canon did so long as he didn’t enjoy it.

‘Yes—and he’s bringing her here to-night,’ gasped Mrs. Luke, struggling to keep down a fresh outburst.

‘Here? Bringing her here? Without first asking your permission and forgiveness?’ cried the Canon. ‘Disgraceful. Outrageous. Unpardonable.’

‘Oh, isn’t it, isn’t it——’ wept Mrs. Luke into her handkerchief.

Never, never could she forgive Jocelyn. No, she never, never would. Let him manage for himself now. Let him lie as best he could on the miserable bed he had made. She would tell him so plainly, and though she couldn’t help his coming there that night she would insist that he should go away again next morning and never, never come back....

And then, over the top of her handkerchief, she saw him standing there, standing in the back-door looking at her: Jocelyn; the light of her eyes; the only thing really in her life.

‘Jocelyn—oh, Jocelyn!’

She gave a kind of sobbing sigh; she struggled to her feet; she stood, swaying a moment, holding on to the table; and then simply ran to him.

§

‘Mother——’

‘Oh—Jocelyn!’

He hugged her tighter than he had ever hugged her. He was raised quite outside his ordinary self, in this joy of getting back to her. And that she should run into his arms—she who never ran, who never showed emotion!

‘You’re not angry, Mother?’ he asked, looking down at her upturned face, still wet and red from her recent weeping.

‘Dreadfully,’ she said, smiling up at him, the strangest transfigured, watery smile.

‘Oh, Mother—I knew you wouldn’t fail me!’ he cried, infinitely relieved, infinitely melted and grateful.

‘Fail you?’

‘Oh, Mother——’

And they hugged again. His mother’s love was a miracle. Her voice was an enchantment. Just to hear the words, the precious right words, said in the precious right voice....

At the tea-table the Canon and his wife, who carefully didn’t look but yet saw, were much shocked. This surely amounted to having duped them as to her real feelings, to having got their sympathy and concern on false pretences.

‘Hadn’t we better go home, John?’ Mrs. Walker inquired of her husband.

‘Much better,’ said the Canon, who didn’t see how to do it.

He looked about for a way of escape.

There wasn’t one, except by climbing over to the cows, and that would involve them in trespass. Besides, retreat should be dignified.

‘But where——?’ Mrs. Luke was whispering, her cheek against Jocelyn’s, while with one hand she still clung hold of his neck. ‘Salvatia——?’

‘In the sitting-room,’ whispered Jocelyn. ‘I put her there. I wanted to see you first alone. Why on earth those Walkers are here to-day of all days——’

He glanced at the scene on the lawn, where the Canon and his wife, marooned at the untidy tea-table, were trying to seem absorbed in something that wasn’t happening up above their heads in the branches of the cedar.

‘You said supper-time——’

‘But I scorched to get to you quickly——’

‘Then you wanted me?’

‘Oh, Mother!’

And he hugged her again, and the Walkers looked about again for a way of escape, and again found none.

Sweet, sweet, delicious beyond dreams, was this restoration to all, to far more than all that had been apparent before, of her boy’s need of her, and of his love. If this was the effect being married had on him, then she was glad he had married. How could she be angry with a wife who brought him closer than ever, more utterly than ever, back to his mother? So, she thought, must the Prodigal Son’s father have felt about the swine his boy had had such a dose of. He wouldn’t have resented them; he must have quite liked them.

‘You’ll try and love her, won’t you, Mother?’ said Jocelyn. ‘She is—very lovable.’

And taking his mother by the hand, he led her to the sitting-room.

§

There stood the exquisite Sally; stood, because she was afraid to sit. Round her slender body she held tightly the new wrap Jocelyn, among other things, had bought her on their way through London and had instructed her to keep on till he told her to take it off. It was grey, so as to make her as invisible as possible, and was of the kind that has neither sleeves nor fastenings; and Sally, who had never been inside a thing like that before, clutched it with anxious obedience about her with both hands.

Extravagantly slender in this garment, which took on as if by magic the most delicious folds directly it got hold of Sally, and too lovely to be credible, she stood there, her lips parted in fright, and her eyes fixed on the entering Mrs. Luke.

‘Oh——’ said Mrs. Luke, catching her breath, who had read poetry, who had heard music, who knew what April mornings in the woods are like, when the sun shines through windflowers and the birds are wild with young delight.

Sally’s knees shook. She clutched the grey wrap tighter still about her. Mr. Luke’s mother was so terribly like Mr. Luke. Two of them. She hadn’t bargained for two of them. And she was worse than he was, because she was a lady. Gentlemen were difficult enough, but they did every now and then cast themselves at one’s feet and make one feel one could do what one liked for a bit, but a lady wouldn’t; a lady would always stay a lady.

The word struck cold on Sally’s heart. What did one do with a lady? And a lady, too, who seemed hardly older than her son, and as wide-awake and sharp as you please, Sally was sure. She had been imagining Jocelyn’s mother old and stout and whitehaired, and perhaps not able to see or hear very well, and therefore comfortingly slow to mark what was done amiss. And here was this thin, quick, almost young lady. No flies on her for dead certain, thought Sally, clutching her wrap.

Her heart, which felt as if it had already sunk as far as it could go, contrived to sink still farther. She stared at Mrs. Luke with the fascinated fear of a rabbit confronted by a snake; but her stare, which felt inside just as ugly and scared as that, was outside the most beautiful little look of gracious shyness, and Mrs. Luke, staring back, was for a moment quite unable to speak.

Who was this? Had Jocelyn caught and married some marvellous daughter of a patrician house? Had he been up to Olympus, and netted the young Aphrodite as, on that morning of roses, she stepped ashore from her shell?

She flushed scarlet. The perfect grace and youth, the dream-like loveliness....

‘Why,’ she murmured under her breath, ‘how beautiful——’ and took a step forward, and held out both her hands.

‘Are you really my new daughter?’ she said in a low voice. ‘You?’

With a great effort Sally managed to stand her ground, and not shrink away backwards before this alarming figure. She didn’t know what to do about the held out hands, because if she let go of the wrap so as to shake them it would fall off, and Jocelyn had said she was on no account to let it do that.

She therefore stood motionless, and her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.

Mrs. Luke came close. ‘You wonderful child—you’re Salvatia?’ she murmured.

With a great effort Sally continued to hold her ground; with a great effort she unclove her tongue.

‘That’s right,’ she said, clutching her grey wrap.

Two words; but enough. How many times had not Jocelyn told her not to say That’s right? But he had told her not to say nearly everything; she couldn’t possibly remember all the things she wasn’t to say, however hard she tried. Indeed, Sally in her flustered soul was thinking what a mercy it was she hadn’t added ‘mum.’ It had been on the tip of her tongue, faced by a lady, and she had hung on to it just in time.

Mrs. Luke, startled, was arrested for an instant in her advance. Then, not after all quite certain that she had heard what she had heard—it seemed impossible that she should have—she went close up to Sally and kissed her. She had to reach up to her for Sally was half a head the taller, besides being rigid with fright.

‘Sally, kiss my mother and make friends,’ said Jocelyn.

‘Yes, Mr. Luke——’ said Sally, making a quick downward lunge of her head.

‘Now, Sally——please,’ protested Jocelyn. ‘She can’t,’ he added, turning to his mother, ‘get used to calling me by my Christian name.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sally; and felt so very warm that she had a queer conviction that even her stomach must be blushing.

Mrs. Luke stood looking at her, trying to smile. She now knew everything. No need for words from Jocelyn, for explanations. She knew, and she understood. Up to her to behave well; up to her to behave wonderfully, and make him more than ever certain there was no one in the whole world like his mother.

‘She’ll learn,’ she said, smiling as best she could. ‘Won’t you—Salvatia?’

If only, thought Sally, she were back at Woodles; if only, only she were back safe and quiet with her father at Woodles.

‘It was inevitable,’ said Mrs. Luke, turning to Jocelyn. ‘Absolutely inevitable.’

He caught hold of his mother’s hands. That she should see that, that she should instantly understand....

‘And I congratulate you with all my heart, my dear son, and my dear daughter,’ Mrs. Luke went on, continuing to be wonderful. ‘You are both my dear, my very dear, children.’

And Jocelyn bent his head over her hand, and kissed it in a fervour of gratitude and relief.

And Sally, looking on at Usband in this new light, thought, ‘Well, I’m blest.’

IX

§

Restored by the shock both of Sally’s loveliness and language to her normal self, Mrs. Luke’s tears dried up and her emotions calmed down, and she began to think rapidly and clearly.

This situation had to be dealt with. The only person who could deal with it with any hope at all of success was herself. She would, then, grasp it firmly, as if it were a nettle, and wear it proudly, as if it were a rose. Yes, that was the line to take: wear it proudly, as if it were a rose.

More clearly than if Jocelyn had explained for an hour she saw what had happened, what couldn’t have helped happening, once chance had shown him Salvatia. From those few words of Sally’s she reconstructed the Pinner family and its conditions, and as she stood gazing at her, with one hand still in Jocelyn’s, she grouped the whole Pinner lot into the single word Gutter. Jocelyn had found and picked up beauty in a gutter. The gutter was as evident as the beauty, and as impossible to hide. Accept it, then; accept it, and make South Winch accept it. Treat it as quaint, as amusing, as completely excused by the beauty. She had made South Winch accept Tiepolo, when it didn’t in the least want to, and now see into what an enthusiasm it had lashed itself! Even so would she make it accept Salvatia; and ceaselessly every hour, every minute, she herself would educate the girl, and train her patiently, and force her gently into proper ways of speech and behaviour. Seventeen, was she? Mrs. Luke felt that with seventeen all things were possible. A child. Wax. And she was so really exquisite, so really perfect of form and colour and movement, that it would be wonderful to watch her development, her unfolding into at least the semblance of a lady.

Salvatia—‘No, no, dearest Jocelyn—not Sally, not Sally,’ she begged on his calling her that, for she had a theory that names had the power of making you be like them, and a Sally was foredoomed to unredeemable vulgarity—should have masters (perhaps mistresses would be better,) down from London, when once Mrs. Luke was married to Mr. Thorpe and could afford things; regular teachers who would give her lessons at stated hours, while she herself would give her lessons at all the unstated ones. And she would take her everywhere, to each of the South Winch festivities, whether tea-parties, or debates, or lectures, or concerts or plays, and wherever she went Salvatia should be her open glory. It would be a mistake in tactics, besides being an impossibility, to try to hide her. She should be flaunted. For, confronted by a bull, Mrs. Luke remembered, quite the best thing to do was to take it by the horns.

So swiftly do thoughts gallop through minds like Mrs. Luke’s that she had planned out her attitude in those few instants in the sitting-room, while she stood gazing at Sally and holding Jocelyn’s hand.

‘We’re going to be great friends, are we not Salvatia?’ she said, laying her free hand on her daughter-in-law’s delicate little shoulder.

Great friends? She and the lady? The bare suggestion produced in Sally that physical condition known to the Pinner family as fit to drop.

Directly questioned, however, she was forced to answer, so she said faintly, ‘Right O,’ and Mrs. Luke, smiling elaborately and patting the shoulder, said, ‘You very quaint little girl,’—and in spite of the obvious inappropriateness of these adjectives as a description of the noble young angel standing before her, she was determined that they should, roughly, represent her attitude towards her.

‘Now we’ll all have tea,’ she said, suddenly becoming gaily business-like. These children—it was she who must take them in hand. No more emotions, she decided. Her beloved Jocelyn needed her help again, couldn’t do without her.... ‘Won’t we, Jocelyn? Won’t we, Salvatia? I’ve had some already, but I’ll be greedy and have some more. Jocelyn, you go and tell Hammond——’ Hammond was the little maid’s surname, and by it, to her great astonishment who knew herself only as Lizz, she had been called since she entered Mrs. Luke’s service—‘to make fresh tea and bring it in here. You must both be dying for it. And then you can say goodbye to the Walkers for me, Jocelyn, will you?’ she called after him. ‘Tell them I’ve got a most beautiful surprise for them—quite soon, perhaps to-morrow. You’re the beautiful surprise, Salvatia,’ she said, turning to Sally smilingly, who had made a sudden forward movement as if to follow Jocelyn, and who, on seeing him go out of the room and leave her alone with his mother, was so seriously alarmed that she again had a queer conviction about her stomach, but this time that it was turning what the Pinner family called as white as a sheet.

‘Of course you know you’re beautiful, don’t you?’ said Mrs. Luke, busily pulling out the little table the tea was to be put on in the absence of the proper table in the garden, and clearing Sir Thomas Browne off it, and also two bright tulips in a clear glass vessel. ‘You must have heard that ever since you can remember.’

‘But I can’t ’elp it,’ said Sally, very anxious, her eyes on the door.

‘’Elp it? You quaint child. There’s an h in help, Salvatia dear. Help it? But why should you want to? It’s a wonderful gift, and you should thank God who gave it you, and use it entirely——’ Mrs. Luke was quite surprised at her own words, for she wasn’t at all religious, yet they came out glibly, and she concluded they were subconsciously inspired by the Canon in the garden—‘entirely to His glory.’

‘Yes, m——’

‘No—stop there, stop there,’ cried Mrs. Luke, quickly holding up her hand and smiling. ‘You were going to say ma’am, were you not, Salvatia? Well, you mustn’t. Not to me. Not to anybody. Except, of course,’ she added, feeling she couldn’t begin too soon to help the child, ‘to the Queen, and other royal ladies.’

And before her eyes floated that vision she had so often contemplated of Sir Jocelyn Luke, of Lord Luke, and now was added to it Lady Luke, the lovely Lady Luke, being presented at Court, and by that time as perfect inside as out. Properly dealt with, Jocelyn’s marriage, instead of being his ruin, might end by being one of his chief glories.

‘Sit down, little girl.’

Sally dropped as if she were shot on to the nearest chair, which was Mrs. Luke’s.

‘Not there—not that one,’ said Mrs. Luke, smiling. ‘No, dear child—nor that one,’ she added, as Sally having hastily got up again was about to drop on to the next nearest one, which was Jocelyn’s—better get her into all the little ways at once. ‘Any chair, Salvatia dear, except just those two. Yes—that’s a very comfortable one. Is not it too strange to think that this time yesterday you and I never had seen each other, and had no more idea——’

Sally, sitting down more cautiously on the edge of the third chair, didn’t think that strange at all, but very natural and nice. There had been lots of yesterdays without the lady in them, and all of them had seemed quite natural. What really was strange was that they should have left off and landed her here, shut up alone with somebody so happily till then unknown. If only, thought Sally, she could now, having been introduced and that, go somewhere where the lady wasn’t. For Mrs. Luke terrified her more than any one she had yet in her brief life come across. Worse, far worse, than her parents when, for her good, they used to give her What for, and worse even than Mr. Luke when he turned and just looked at her and didn’t say anything after she had passed some remark, was this smiling lady who patted her. She couldn’t take her eyes off Mrs. Luke, watching her with a fascinated apprehension, not knowing where she mightn’t be going to be patted next.

Sitting sideways on the very edge of her chair, and still holding her wrap tightly about her, Sally’s eyes followed Mrs. Luke’s slightest movement. In any one else it would have been a stare, and Mrs. Luke would have explained that she mustn’t, but there was nothing wrong to be found with the look in Sally’s eyes,—nothing wrong, indeed, to be found in anything she did, thought Mrs. Luke, arranging things comfortably for everybody’s tea, so long as it wasn’t speaking.

Mrs. Luke knew she was being watched, but only, so it seemed, with a lovely and gracious attentiveness. She also knew Sally was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her legs drawn up under her just as if she were trying to keep them out of something not quite nice; but no need to disturb a position which somehow seemed sheer grace. What a pity, what a pity, flashed across Mrs. Luke’s mind, that the child hadn’t happened to be born dumb! Was that wicked? No, she didn’t think so. She herself could imagine being very happy dumb, with plenty of books, and not having to talk to bores.

‘Wouldn’t you like to take your hat off, Salvatia?’ she asked, drawing Jocelyn’s chair closer to the little table.

Sally started. ‘No thank you, please——’ she said hastily.

‘Do,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘I want you to.’

‘Yes, m—yes, Mrs. Luke,’ said Sally, instantly obeying.

‘Not Mrs. Luke, dear—Mother. You must call me Moth——’

Her voice died away, and she stood staring in silence. How wonderful. How really amazingly beautiful. Like sunsets. And the girl, crowned with that bright crown of waving light, like some royal child.

She stood staring, her hands dropped by her sides. ‘What a responsibility,’ she whispered.

‘Pardon?’ said Sally, nervously.

§

The Walkers were got rid of, and Jocelyn came back frowning. They had scolded him; him, who had been completely understood and unreproached by his mother, the one person with either a right or a grievance. Having known him since he was three didn’t excuse them, he considered; and it seemed merely silly to rebuke him for leaving Cambridge when he wasn’t going to leave it. He didn’t attempt to enlighten them; he just stood and glowered, waiting till they should have done. What could old Walker know of the way one was forced to react to beauty? He had probably never set eyes on it in his life. And as for passionate love, the fiery love that had been burning him up for the last few weeks, one had only to look at Mrs. Walker to know he could never have felt that.

So he simply repeated, when the Canon paused a moment, that his mother had asked him to say good-bye for her, and then, this second time, he added, ‘She can’t come herself, because she is with my wife.’

‘Conceited young monkey,’ thought Mrs. Walker, who remembered him in petticoats, and even then giving himself airs. ‘Wife, indeed.’ Both Mrs. Walker’s sons were without gifts.

‘Your mother is an angel, sir,’ said the Canon sternly.

‘So is my wife,’ said Jocelyn, glowering.

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said the Canon, who didn’t for a moment believe it. Angels weren’t married in such a hurry. On the other hand, he was sure young devils frequently were. They got hold of one and made one. Jocelyn had been got hold of—lamentably, disastrously.

The Canon snatched up his hat. ‘Come along, Margaret,’ he said testily, squaring his shoulders.

And Margaret came along, and together they marched off into the house, along the passage, past the shut sitting-room door, accompanied by Jocelyn who showed them out in silence.

He had said no word of that pleasant part of his mother’s message, that part about having a beautiful surprise for the Walkers, perhaps to-morrow, because he was annoyed with them, and they went away more indignant with him than before, besides feeling they had been treacherously treated by their hitherto dear friend, Mrs. Luke. And Mrs. Walker, when they were safely out in the road, said what a very disagreeable young man he had grown into, and the Canon said he hoped Mr. Thorpe would lick him into shape, and Jocelyn, all unconscious of Mr. Thorpe, went back frowning to his mother, who was in the act, when he opened the door, of stroking Sally’s hair.

He forgot the tiresome Walkers, and his heart swelled with gratitude. That Sally should be taken at once to his mother’s arms like this had been outside his wildest hopes. Indeed, he had had no hopes, no clear thoughts about it at all; he only, driven by weariness of the burden of complications Sally brought into the simplest things, had come back to his mother’s feet as the Christian sinner, tired of or frightened by his sins, comes back to the feet of God. The analogy wasn’t perfect, of course; Sally, so good and beautiful, couldn’t be compared to sin. But he wanted to get back to his mother’s feet, he had a tremendous, almost childish, longing to lie there and let her kick him if she chose. He had treated her badly. He well knew he deserved it. Let her do anything in the way of rebuke and chastisement, if only he might lie there, he and his burden, safely cast down, both of them, at her feet. ‘I will arise and go to my Mother,’ had floated frequently through his head as he set the bonnet of the Morris-Cowley eastward towards London and South Winch. Naturally he hadn’t said it out loud. Sally was incapable of understanding even a simple reaction. This one, which was highly complicated, would have completely bewildered her. Besides, one can’t well speak of a reaction to its cause.

But how happy was Jocelyn at the moment when he opened the door, and saw her and his mother in that attitude of mutual affection; how deeply relieved. The cords were loosened, the weight shifted. Here this calm room, with everything in it just right, just so—its restraints, its browns and ivories, its flashes of colour, its books, its one picture; and upstairs, up under the roof, his own attic waiting for him, with its promise of work to be resumed, to be carried on as it used to be in the tranquil, fruitful days before he met Sally.

Jocelyn stood a moment looking at the scene, smiling his rare smile because he was so content. How unlike the places he had suffered in since he last was here. How unlike the Pinner lair at the back of the shop, where he had burnt in torment, and the hideous dwelling of the Cupps, where he had been insulted, and the dingy expensiveness of the Thistle and Goat, and the other three or four cynically ugly and uncomfortable rooms through which he had trailed his passion. Impossible not to smile, not to laugh almost, with gladness at getting home again. He had, he knew, all his life loved his mother, but it seemed as if he hadn’t loved her consciously till now, and he went quickly across to her and put his arm about her, and said, ‘Mother, you must never leave me. I can’t do without you. We can’t. When I go back to Cambridge—and of course I’m going back—you must come too. You’re going to live with us there. Everything depends on you. All my future, all my happiness——’

And Sally, over whose head these words were being tossed, sitting very rigid, for Mrs. Luke’s hand was still on her hair, and wholly unaccustomed to displays of family affection, once again said to herself, just for company’s sake and to keep her courage up, ‘Well, I’m blest.’

§

Mrs. Luke, however, was brought back by Jocelyn’s words to a vivid sense of Mr. Thorpe. He had sunk aside in her mind during the emotions of the last half hour. He now became distinct; extremely distinct, and frightfully near. That very evening he would be coming round after supper—he had agreed that the meal itself should be given over to reunion—in order to collect his young guests.

Jocelyn, she knew, had no idea of his existence. Mr. Thorpe, though living in South Winch, had not till then been of it. His world had been different. His wealth had separated him, and his obvious disharmony—South Winch had only to look at him to perceive it—with the things of the spirit. Also, there had been his wife. So that if mentioned, which was rarely, it had merely been with vague uninterest as the rich man in the big house in Acacia Avenue.

Now he had to be mentioned, and Jocelyn’s words made it difficult.

Mrs. Luke stood silent, her hand still on Sally’s head, encircled by Jocelyn’s arm, while he told her of the plans he had been making for the last two days, ever since it suddenly dawned on him that that was to be their future. How could she interrupt him with Mr. Thorpe? Yet Mr. Thorpe was, she was sure, the real solution. Salvatia was going to be expensive, very, if the gutter was to be properly scraped off her, and no further stretching could possibly be got out of her own income, while Jocelyn’s, of course, would be all needed for Cambridge. Yes—Mr. Thorpe, who had begun by being a refuge, had now become a godsend. Jocelyn would see it himself, when he had had him properly explained.

But how difficult to explain him—now, with the sweet balm of her boy’s dependence on her and his love being poured into her ears, her boy, who in his whole life hadn’t shown so much of either as he had in the half hour since he came home. Yet it wasn’t her fault, it was Jocelyn’s. It was his marriage that had precipitated Mr. Thorpe into their lives. Still, she didn’t blame Jocelyn, for no young man, let alone her imaginative, beauty-appreciating son, could have resisted Salvatia.

She stood silent, smiling nervously. To have to quench this happy hopefulness with Mr. Thorpe was most painful. She smiled more and more nervously. Apart from everything else, it embarrassed her, her coming marriage, it embarrassed her dreadfully, somehow, faced by her grown-up son. The memory of that almost snapped tendon last night ... suppose Jocelyn were to think she was marrying Mr. Thorpe for anything but convenience, with anything but reluctance ... suppose he were to take up a Hamlet-like attitude to her, and think—he would never, she knew, say—rude things....

‘How delightful it all sounds,’ she said at last, removing her hand from Sally’s head, who at once felt better. ‘Quite, quite delightful. But——’

‘Now, Mother, there mustn’t be any buts,’ interrupted Jocelyn. ‘It’s all settled.’ And rashly—but then he felt so happy and safe—he appealed to Sally. ‘Isn’t it, Sally,’ he said. ‘We want Mother, don’t we. And we’re going to have her, aren’t we.’

‘Yes—and Father,’ said Sally, whose ideas were simple but tenacious.

‘Father?’ repeated Mrs. Luke, touched. ‘Dear child, your poor Jocelyn has no——’

‘Mother, you and I must really have a good talk together,’ hastily interposed Jocelyn, who saw Sally’s mouth opening again. She shouldn’t say anything; she really shouldn’t say anything; the less she said the better for everybody. ‘You and I. By ourselves. This evening, when Sally——’

‘Salvatia, Jocelyn. Please, please.’

‘—— has gone up to bed.’

‘But you know, Jocelyn dear,’ said Mrs. Luke, loosening herself from his clasp and withdrawing a little, ‘that’s just what the dear child can’t go up to. Not here. Not in this tiny house. You didn’t think, of course, but there isn’t an inch of room really—not for three people. So I wanted to tell you—’ she began putting his tie straight, her eyes on it, not looking at him—‘what I’ve arranged. You’re both going to be taken in next door.’

‘Next door, Mother?’ said Jocelyn, much surprised, for he couldn’t at all recollect the next door people.

‘Well, nearly next door,’ said Mrs. Luke, diligent over his tie, and excessively annoyed to feel she was turning red. ‘At Abergeldie.’

‘Abergeldie?’ echoed Jocelyn, to whom the name was completely unfamiliar.

‘I tell you what we’ll do,’ said Mrs. Luke, as though she had suddenly had a brilliant idea, on the little maid’s appearing in the door bearing a tray that seemed twice as big as she was, and all but dropping it when she caught sight of the young lady on the chair. ‘After tea Salvatia shall go and lie down in my bedroom and rest—won’t you, Salvatia,—and you and I will have a quiet talk, dear Jocelyn—no, no, Hammond, not there; here, where I’ve put the table ready—and I’ll tell you all about—we want three cups, Hammond, not two—I’ll tell you all about——’

But she still couldn’t bring herself to mention Mr. Thorpe, and again said Abergeldie.

‘Is that lodgings?’ asked Jocelyn, who didn’t at all like the sound of it.

‘Oh, no—it isn’t lodgings,’ said Mrs. Luke brightly, giving his tie a final pat.

§

How was she to tell him about Mr. Thorpe? In what words, once she had got Salvatia upstairs out of the way, could she most quickly create in Jocelyn’s mind the image she wished to have there of a good, and honourable, and wealthy man, a man elderly and settled down, who respected and esteemed her, and because he respected and esteemed her wished to make her his wife? A good man, who would be a solid background for them all. A good man, whose feeling for her—Mrs. Luke was most anxious that Jocelyn shouldn’t suppose there was anything warm about Mr. Thorpe—was that of a kind, and much older, brother.

Preoccupied and perturbed, she poured out the tea and drank some herself, and hardly noticed what Sally was doing who, faced for the first time in her life by no table to sit up to and only her lap to put her cup and saucer and spoon and things to eat on, kept on either dropping them or spilling them.

‘Well, Mother, you’ll just have to be very patient,’ said Jocelyn, himself deeply annoyed when Sally’s spoon fell off for the third time, and for the third time made a noise on the varnished floor, which only had two rugs on it, and those far apart.

And Mrs. Luke smiled, and said ‘Of course,’ and hardly noticed, because of her deep preoccupation with Mr. Thorpe.

But when the cup itself slid sideways on the saucer and upset, and Sally’s frock was soaked and the cup broken, she was startled into awareness again, and for the moment forgot Mr. Thorpe.

‘Oh, my!’ cried Sally, shaken into speech.

‘It really isn’t of the slightest consequence, Salvatia,’ said Mrs. Luke, who was particularly fond of her teacups, of which none had ever yet been broken. ‘Pray don’t try to pick up anything. Hammond will do so. Jocelyn, ring the bell, will you? But I shouldn’t,’ she added, for naturally she was vexed at the set being spoilt, and though breeding, she knew, forbids vexation at such contretemps being shown, yet it has to get out in some form or other, ‘I shouldn’t say, “Oh, my,” when anything unexpected happens.’

‘Right O,’ murmured Sally, shattered, all Jocelyn’s teaching vanishing from her mind.

‘Nor,’ remarked Mrs. Luke, gently and very clearly, ‘should I say, “Right O”.’

‘I’ve told her not to a hundred times,’ said Jocelyn, wiping Sally’s frock with his handkerchief.

‘That’s right,’ murmured Sally, who had now lost her head, and only wanted to admit her evil-doing and be forgiven.

‘Nor, dear Salvatia,’ said Mrs. Luke, still more gently and clearly, ‘should I, I think, say that.’

So then Sally said nothing, for there seemed nothing left to say.

‘She’ll be perfectly all right ultimately,’ said Mrs. Luke, coming down to Jocelyn when presently she had taken her upstairs, and tucked her up on the bed, and told her she was tired and must rest. ‘Perfectly.’

Jocelyn was waiting in the sitting-room. He and his mother were now, having got Sally out of the way, going to have their talk.

‘You’re wonderful, Mother,’ he said.

‘Darling Jocelyn,’ smiled his mother. ‘It’s that child who is wonderful,’ she added. ‘Or will be, when she has been properly——’ she was going to say scraped, the word gutter coming once more into her mind, but of course she didn’t, and substituted something milder. ‘When she has been properly trained,’ finished Mrs. Luke.

‘It sounds like a servant,’ said Jocelyn, who was sensitive because of the tin trunk (got rid of in Truro,) and the stiff nightgowns (got rid of in Truro too,) and several other distinct and searing memories.

‘Servant? You absurd boy. She’s a duchess, who happens not to have been born right—the most beautiful duchess the world would ever have seen. Now never,’ said Mrs. Luke with much seriousness—she felt she must take this situation thoroughly in hand—‘never, never let such a word as the one you just used enter your mind in connection with Salvatia again, my dear Jocelyn.’

No, he wouldn’t tell his mother about the way Sally had seemed to drift, as if drawn, towards the Cupps, quite obviously wanting to make friends with them, nor about the way she actually had made friends with the spotted mechanic in the Truro garage. And as for Mr. Pinner, for whom he had a curious distaste and of whom the remembrance was definitely grievous to him, Jocelyn wouldn’t tell his mother about him either. He would skim over Mr. Pinner. Why intrude him? Why dot the i’s of Sally’s beginnings? His mother had heard for herself how she spoke, and knew approximately what her father must be like. Let her knowledge remain approximate.

So they went together into the garden—again Mrs. Luke instinctively sought Nature,—Jocelyn determined to keep Mr. Pinner out of his mother’s consciousness, and Mrs. Luke determined to get Mr. Thorpe into his.

§

Arm in arm they paced up and down what Mr. Thorpe persisted in calling the drying ground, in spite of Mrs. Luke’s steady reference to it as the lawn, and Jocelyn said, ‘Her family come from Islington.’

‘Suburbans. Like ourselves,’ replied his mother, with a really heavenly tact, Jocelyn thought.

But she wasn’t thinking of what he was saying and what she was answering; she was seeking a formula for Mr. Thorpe. And, to gain yet a further moment’s grace,—queer how nervous she felt—she stopped a moment in front of the Kerria japonica in the angle of the wall by the kitchen window, and asked him if he didn’t think it was doing very well that year.

‘Wonderful,’ said Jocelyn. ‘It’s all perfect.’

He sighed with contentment at his mother’s progressive and amazing tactfulness. How had she not from the first moment grasped the situation, and needed no explanation at all. Now she was grasping the Pinners, and dismissing them without a single question. ‘Suburbans. Like ourselves.’ At that moment Jocelyn positively adored his mother.

‘Quite perfect,’ he said, admiring the Kerria. ‘Wherever you are, things grow as they should, and there’s peace, and order, and exact rightness.’

‘Marriage has turned you into a flatterer,’ smiled Mrs. Luke, still putting off Mr. Thorpe.

‘It has made me realise what a mother I’ve got,’ said Jocelyn, pressing her arm.

‘Darling Jocelyn. But surely rather an unusual result?’

‘My marriage is unusual.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Luke, bracing herself. ‘Yes. I suppose—we had better talk about it.’

‘But we are talking about it.’

‘I mean the future.’

‘Well, I’ve told you my plans.’

‘But I haven’t told you mine.’

‘Yours, Mother?’

He turned his head and looked at her. Surely she was rather red?

‘You know, Jocelyn,’ she said, in a queer altered voice, ‘I was very miserable. Very, very miserable. You mustn’t forget that. I really was.’

§

How differently Mrs. Luke had meant to introduce Mr. Thorpe; how clearly she recognised that in their present situation he was their only hope, and that he should be explained with the appreciation and praise due to an only hope. And here she was prefacing him by a solemn declaration of her own unhappiness. It wasn’t at all the proper beginning. It couldn’t but be damaging to Mr. Thorpe. Besides, her pride had always been to appear before Jocelyn in every situation as completely content and calm. Breeding, she had preached to him ever since he was a tot, was invariably calm, and behaved very much like the great description of charity in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. Whatever it felt it didn’t show it. But she had had a bad time lately, a bad, bad time, and her nerves had been tried beyond, apparently, their endurance.

‘What is it, Mother?’ asked Jocelyn, surprised and troubled. Had his mother been speculating, and lost?

She made a great effort to recover her self-control, and tried to smile. ‘Really some very good news,’ she said, resuming their walk. ‘We’ll go and sit under the cedar, and I’ll——’

‘Mother, what is it?’ asked Jocelyn again anxiously as she broke off, a cold foreboding creeping round his heart. ‘You’re not going to—you’re not going to fail me now?’

‘I’m going to help you more than I’ve ever done. In fact, if it hadn’t been for this—’ she was going to say windfall, but found she couldn’t think of Mr. Thorpe as a windfall,—‘if it hadn’t been for this, I could do very little for Salvatia. She will need——’

Had his mother been speculating, and won?

But what Salvatia would need Mrs. Luke didn’t on that occasion explain, for as on their way to the cedar they passed below the open window of the bedroom Sally had been left in, they heard voices coming from it, and Mrs. Luke, much astonished, stood still.

Almond Tree Cottage was a small low house, and its first floor windows were not very far above the heads of those walking beneath them in the garden. Standing there astonished—for who could Salvatia possibly be talking to?—Mrs. Luke listened, her surprised eyes on Jocelyn’s face. He too listened, but with less surprise, for from past experience he could guess—it was painful to him—what was happening, and he guessed that Sally was reverting to type again, and coalescing with the servant.

At first there was only a murmuring—one voice by itself, then another voice by itself, then two voices together; and his mother’s face was frankly bewildered. But presently Sally’s voice emerged, and it rose in a distinct, surprising wail, and they heard it say, or rather cry, ‘Oh, Ammond—oh, Ammond——’

Twice. Just like that.

Whereupon Mrs. Luke let go suddenly of Jocelyn’s arm, and hurried indoors and upstairs.

§

‘Are you unwell, Salvatia?’ she asked quickly, opening the bedroom door.

On the edge of the bed, her stockinged feet trailing on the floor, sat Sally, and beside her, also on the edge of the bed, the little maid. Mrs. Luke couldn’t believe her eyes. Their arms were round each other. She hadn’t realised, somehow, that Hammond had any arms; not the sort that go round other people, not the sort that do anything except carry trays and sweep floors.

It came upon her with an odd shock. If Salvatia were ill, of course Hammond’s arms would be in an explainable and excusable position. But Salvatia wasn’t ill. Mrs. Luke saw that at once. She wasn’t ill, for she was crying; and people who are ill, she had observed, do not as a rule cry.

The little maid jumped up, and stood, very red and scared, with alarmed eyes fixed on her mistress. Sally did just the opposite—she lay down quickly on the bed again, and pulled the counterpane up to her chin and tried to look as if she hadn’t stirred from the position the lady had tucked her into when she left her. What she was ashamed of was crying; crying when everybody was so good to her and kind, patting and kissing her and that, even after she had broken the cup. It was terribly ungrateful of her to cry, thought Sally. But she wasn’t ashamed of having put her arm round Ammond. Friendly, she was; friendly, and seemed to know a lot for her age, which was six months less than Sally’s own. A bit shy she had been and stand-offish at first, but soon got used to Sally, who was feeling ever so lonely and strange, and when Ammond—of all the names for a girl!—came in with hot water for the lady to wash in before the next meal, Sally, taken by her friendly eye, began talking to her, and it was as great a relief as talking to the young fellow in the garage, only with the young fellow she had laughed, and with Ammond, to her confusion and shame, she did nothing but cry. But then the lady ... enough to make a cat cry, that lady ... going to live with them, and never leave them any more ... keeping on smiling smiles that looked like smiles, and weren’t....

‘I know,’ said the little maid, nodding gravely.

Knew a lot, Ammond did, for her age.

§

Sally had been very thankful when that dreadful tea was somehow finished—they had actually tried to make her have more tea, and begin the cup and lap business all over again, but she wasn’t to be caught a second time,—she had been very thankful to follow Mrs. Luke upstairs, and let herself be laid out on a bed and told she must rest till supper. Till breakfast next day she would rest if they liked, till kingdom come. She didn’t want any supper. There were forks for supper, which were worse than spoons, and perhaps they had that too just sitting round with nothing but their laps. She didn’t want anything, not anything in the world, except to be somewhere where the lady wasn’t. And the lady had drawn the curtains, and then covered her up with a counterpane, and smoothed back her hair, and told her sleep would refresh her, and bent over her and kissed her, and at last had gone away—and how thankful Sally had been, just to be alone.

Kissed her. In spite of the cup, thought Sally, who lay still as she had been told, and reflected upon all that had been her lot that afternoon. They didn’t seem able to stop kissing in that family, thought Sally, in whose own there had been a total absence of what the Pinner circle knew and condemned as pawings about. The Pinners never pawed, nor did any of their friends. Nice, that was, thought Sally wistfully; knew where you were. Among these here Lukes—so ran her dejected thoughts, with no intention of irreverence but unable, from her habit of language, to run otherwise—one never could tell where one wasn’t going to be kissed next. Hands, hair, face—nothing seemed to come amiss to them when they once got going. Kept one on the hop; made one squirmy. And Mr. Luke—he was different here. But then he kept on being different. While as for that there lady——

At this point of her meditations Sally had turned her face to the pillow and buried it, and to her surprise she found the pillow was wet, and on looking into this she discovered that it was her own tears making it wet. Then she was ashamed. But being ashamed didn’t stop her crying; once she had begun she seemed to get worse every minute. And the little maid, coming in with the hot water, had found her crying quite hard.

§

Mrs. Luke made short work of the little maid. She merely said, in that gentle voice before which all servants went down flat as ninepins, ‘Hammond, I am surprised at your disturbing Mrs. Jocelyn’s sleep—’ and the little maid, very red and with downcast eyes, sidled deprecatingly out of the room.

Then Mrs. Luke took Sally in hand, sitting in her turn on the edge of the bed.

‘Salvatia, dear—’ she said, laying her hand on the arm outlined beneath the counterpane, and addressing the averted face. ‘Salvatia, dear——’

Sally’s tears dried up instantly, for she was much too much afraid to cry, but she buried her face still deeper, and kept her eyes tight shut.

‘Don’t make confidences to a servant, dear child,’ said Mrs. Luke gently. ‘Come to Jocelyn, or to me. We’re the natural ones for you to come to in any of your little troubles. Oh, I know honeymoons are trying for a girl, and often, without knowing why, she wants a good cry. Isn’t it so, Salvatia? Then come to me, or to your husband, when you feel like that, but don’t say things to Hammond you may afterwards regret. You see, Salvatia dear, you’re a lady, aren’t you—a grown-up married lady now, and your place is with your husband and me. What, dear child? What did you say?’

Sally, however, hadn’t said anything; she had only gulped, trying to choke down her misgivings at this picture of where her place was. With the lady? ‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ she thought, in great discomfort of mind as she more and more perceived that her marriage was going to include Mrs. Luke, ‘if I ain’t bitten off more as I can chew——’ and immediately was shocked at herself for having thought it. Manners were manners. They had to be inside one, as well as out. No good saying Excuse me, Pardon, and Sorry, if inside you were thinking rude. God saw. God knew. And if you were only polite with your lips, and it wasn’t going right through you, you were being, as she remembered from her father’s teaching, a whited sepulchre.

And Mrs. Luke, contemplating the profil perdu on the pillow, the tip of the little ear, the lovely curve of the flushed cheek, and the tangle of bright hair, bent down and kissed it with a view to comfort and encouragement, and Sally, trying not to shrink farther into the pillow, said to herself, ‘At it again.’

‘Why did you cry, Salvatia?’ asked Mrs. Luke, gently.

‘Dunno,’ murmured Sally, withdrawing into the furthermost corner of her shell.

‘Then, dear, it was simply childish, wasn’t it—to cry without a reason, and to cry before a servant too. Things like that lower one’s dignity, Salvatia. And you haven’t only your own dignity to consider now, but Jocelyn’s, your husband’s.’

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Sally to herself, recognising from the tone, through all its gentleness, that she was being given What for—a new kind, and one which it was extremely difficult to follow and understand, however painstakingly she listened. Which parts, for instance, of herself and Mr. Luke were their dignities? ‘Good job I ain’t a nursin’ mother,’ she thought, for she knew all about nursing mothers, ‘or the lady’d turn my milk sour’—and immediately was much shocked at herself for having thought it. Manners were manners. They had to be inside one, as well as out. ‘Never think what you wouldn’t say,’ had been her father’s teaching; and fancy saying what she had just thought!

‘Oh Gawd,’ silently prayed Sally, who had been made to repeat a collect every Sunday to Mr. Pinner, and in whose mind bits had stuck, ‘send down the ’Oly Spirit and cleanse the thoughts of my ’eart with ’im forasmuch as without thee I ain’t able to....’

‘Perhaps, dear,’ said Mrs. Luke, finding it difficult in the face of Sally’s silence to go on—not for want of things to say, for there were so many and all so important that she hardly knew where to begin,—‘the best thing you can do is to bathe your eyes in the nice hot water Hammond has put ready, and tidy yourself a little, and then come downstairs. What do you think of that? Isn’t it a good idea? It is dull for you up here alone. But bathe your eyes well. We don’t want Jocelyn to see we’ve been crying, do we, dear child——’

And in the act of stooping to give Sally a parting kiss she heard her name being called, loud and cheerily, downstairs in the hall.

She started to her feet.

‘Margery! Margery!’ called the voice, with the cheerful insistence of one who, being betrothed, has the right to be cheerful and insistent in his fiancée’s hall.

Edgar. Come hours before his time.

§

‘Oh, hush, hush——’ besought Mrs. Luke, hurrying down to him.

‘Hush, eh?’

‘Jocelyn——’

She glanced fearfully along the passage to the backdoor.

‘He’s arrived,’ said Mr. Thorpe, not hushing at all. ‘Know that. Saw his—well, you can hardly call it a car, can you—his contraption, outside the gate.’

‘But I haven’t had time yet to tell him——’

‘That he’s been a fool?’ interrupted Mr. Thorpe.

‘Come in here,’ said Mrs. Luke, taking him by the arm and pressing him into the parlour, the door of which she shut.

‘Brought you this,’ said Mr. Thorpe, holding up a fish-basket, a big one, in front of her face. ‘Salmon. Prime cut. Thought it would be a bit of something worth eating for your—well, you don’t have dinner, do you—meal, then, to-night. Came back early from the City on purpose to get it here soon enough.’

‘How kind, how kind,’ murmured Mrs. Luke distractedly.

‘Plenty of it, too,’ said Mr. Thorpe, slapping the basket.

‘Too much, too much,’ murmured Mrs. Luke, not quite sure whether it were the salmon she was talking about.

‘Too much? Not a bit of it,’ said Mr. Thorpe. ‘I hate skimp.’

And he was going to put down his present on the nearest chair and then, she knew, fold her in one of those strong hugs that scrunched, when she bent forward and hastily took the basket from him. She couldn’t, she simply couldn’t, on this occasion be folded—not with Jocelyn sitting out there, all unsuspecting, under the cedar.

‘Never mind the basket,’ said Mr. Thorpe, who felt he had deserved well of Margery in this matter of the fish.

‘I must take it to the kitchen at once,’ said Mrs. Luke, evading his wide-opened arms, ‘or it won’t be ready in time for supper.’

‘What? No thanks, eh?’

‘Yes, yes—afterwards,’ said Mrs. Luke, slipping away to the door. ‘Jocelyn doesn’t know yet. About us, I mean. I haven’t had time——’

‘Time, eh? Not had time to tell him, you’ve netted me?’

Mr. Thorpe took out his watch. ‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘Two would be enough, but I’ll give you five. Trot along now, and come back to me sharp in five minutes. If you don’t, I’ll fetch you. Trot along.’

Trot along....

Mrs. Luke, shutting him into the parlour, asked herself, as she went down the passage bearing the heavy basket in both her delicate hands, how long it would take after marriage to weed out Mr. Thorpe’s language. To be told to trot along, however, was so grotesque—she to trot, she, surely the most dignified of South Winch’s ladies!—that it seemed to restore her composure. She would not trot. Nor would she, in the emotional sphere, do anything that corresponded to it. She would neither trot nor hurry; neither physically, nor spiritually. She declined to be bound by five minutes, and a watch in Edgar’s hand. Really he must, somehow, come up more to her level, and not be so comfortably certain that she was coming down to his. And what a way to speak of their marriage—that she had netted him!

Frozen, then, once more into calm by Mr. Thorpe’s words, she proceeded down the passage with almost more than her usual dignity, and as she passed the kitchen door she held out the fish-basket to the little maid, who came out of the shady corner where the sink was with reluctance, merely saying, ‘Boil it.’ Then, with her head held high as the heads of those are held who face the inevitable, she went out into the garden, and crossed the grass to where Jocelyn was waiting for her on the seat beneath the cedar.

This took her one minute out of the five. In another four Mr. Thorpe would come out too into the garden, to see why she didn’t return. Let him, thought Mrs. Luke, filled with the courage of the cornered. This thing couldn’t be done in five minutes; it couldn’t be fired off at Jocelyn’s head like a pistol. Foolish Edgar.

§

‘Well, Mother?’ said Jocelyn, getting up as she approached.

He had been smoking, content to leave whatever it was Sally had been doing in his mother’s capable hands, yet wishing to goodness Sally hadn’t done it. This trick of wanting to be with servants must revolt his mother. It revolted him; how much more, then, his fastidious mother.

‘I can guess what it is, I’m afraid,’ he said, as she sat down beside him.

‘No,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘You haven’t any idea.’

‘What has she been doing, Mother?’ he asked, seriously alarmed, and throwing away his cigarette.

‘Salvatia? Nothing. Nothing that matters, poor dear child. It’s not about her I want to talk. It’s about Mr. Thorpe.’

‘Mr. Thorpe?’

‘Yes. Abergeldie. That’s Mr. Thorpe’s. That’s why you are going there—because it is Mr. Thorpe’s.’

‘But why should we——?’

‘Now Jocelyn,’ she interrupted, ‘please keep well in mind that Mr. Thorpe is the most absolutely reliable, trustworthy, excellent, devoted man. I can find no flaw in his character. He is generous to a fault—really to a fault. He has a perfect genius for kindness. Indeed, I can’t tell you how highly I think of him.’

Jocelyn’s heart went cold and heavy with foreboding.

There was a little silence.

‘Yes, Mother. And?’ he said, after a minute.

‘And he is rich. Very.’

‘Yes, Mother. And?’ said Jocelyn, as she paused.

‘When I got your first letter I was, of course, very much upset,’ said Mrs. Luke, looking straight in front of her.

‘Yes, Mother. And?’ said Jocelyn, for she paused again.

‘Everything seemed to go to pieces—all I had believed in and hoped for.’

There was a longer pause.

‘Yes, Mother. And?’ said Jocelyn at last, keeping his voice as level as possible.

‘I’m not a religious woman, as you know. I hadn’t got God.’

‘No, Mother. So?’

‘So I—I turned to Mr. Thorpe.’

‘Yes, Mother. Quite.’

The bitterness of Jocelyn’s soul was complete. A black fog of anger, jealousy, wounded trust, hurt pride and cruellest disappointment engulfed him.

‘Why not say at once,’ he said, lighting another cigarette with hands he was grimly determined should be perfectly steady, ‘that you are going to marry him?’

‘If it hadn’t been for your marriage it never would have happened,’ said Mrs. Luke.

‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn, very bitter, pitching the newly-lit cigarette away. ‘Oh, quite.’

Sally again. Always, at the bottom of everything, Sally.

Then he thought, ashamed, ‘My God, I’m a mean cur’—and sat in silence, his head in his hands, not looking up at all, while his mother did her best to make him see Mr. Thorpe as she wanted him to be seen.

In her low voice, the low, educated voice Jocelyn had so much loved, she explained Mr. Thorpe and his advantages, determined that at this important, this vital moment she would not allow herself to be vexed by anything Jocelyn said.

He, however, said nothing. It simply was too awful for speech—his mother, who never during his whole life had shown signs of wanting to marry, going now, now that she was at an age when she might surely, in Jocelyn’s twenty-two year old vision, be regarded as immune, to give herself to a complete stranger, and leave him, her son who needed her, God knew, more than ever before, to his fate. That he should hate this Thorpe with a violent hatred seemed natural. Who cared for his damned money? Why should Sally—his mother kept on harping on that—be going to be expensive? As if money, much money, according to what his mother was saying, now that Sally had come on the scene, Sally who was used to being penniless, was indispensable. Masters? What need was there for masters? His mother could teach her. Clothes? Why, whatever she put on seemed to catch beauty from her—he had seen that in the shop in London where he bought the wrap: every blessed thing the women tried on her, however unattractive to begin with, the minute it touched her body became part of beauty. And how revolting, anyhow—marriage. Oh, how he hated the thought of it, how he wanted now beyond anything in the world to be away from its footling worries and complications, away from women altogether, and back at Cambridge, back in a laboratory, absorbed once more in the great tranquil splendours of research!

‘He is in the sitting-room,’ said Mrs. Luke, when she had said everything she could think of that she wished Jocelyn to suppose was true.

‘Who is?’ said Jocelyn.

‘Ah, I was afraid you would be angry,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm, ‘but I hoped that when it was all explained you would understand, and see the great, the immense advantages. Apparently you don’t, or——’ she sighed—‘won’t. Then I must be patient till you do, or will. But Mr. Thorpe is waiting.’

‘Who cares?’ inquired Jocelyn, his head in his hands; and it suddenly struck Mrs. Luke that Mr. Thorpe was waiting very quietly. The five minutes must have been up long ago; she must have been sitting there quite twenty, and yet he hadn’t come after her as he had threatened. Knowing him, as she did, for a man absolutely of his word, this struck her as odd.

‘Dear Jocelyn,’ she said, remembering the fits of dark obstinacy that had at times seized her boy in his childhood, and out of which he had only been got by the utmost patience and gentleness, ‘I won’t bother you to come in now and see Mr. Thorpe. But as he is going to be your host to-night——’

‘He isn’t,’ said Jocelyn, his head still in his hands, and his eyes still fixed on the grass at his feet.

‘But, dearest boy——’

‘I decline to go near him.’

‘But there’s positively no room here for you both——’

‘There’s London, and hotels, I suppose?’

‘Oh, Jocelyn!’

She looked at him in dismay. He didn’t move. She again put her hand on his arm. He took no notice. And aware, from past experiences, that for the next two hours at least he would probably be completely inaccessible to reason, she got up with a sigh and left him.

Well, she had told him; she had done what she had to do. She would now go back to Mr. Thorpe.

And she did go back; and opening the parlour door slowly and gently, for she was absorbed in painful thought, she found Mr. Thorpe sitting on the sofa, busily kissing Sally.

X

§

The following brief dialogue had taken place between him and Sally, before he began to kiss:

‘Crikey!’ he exclaimed, on her appearing suddenly in the doorway.