The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lady Lilith, by Stephen McKenna

THE SENSATIONALISTS: I

LADY LILITH

STEPHEN McKENNA

By STEPHEN McKENNA

THE SENSATIONALISTS

Part One: LADY LILITH

Parts Two and Three: In preparation

SONIA MARRIED

SONIA

MIDAS AND SON

NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE

THE SIXTH SENSE

SHEILA INTERVENES

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

LADY LILITH

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

AUTHOR OF "SHEILA INTERVENES," "MIDAS AND
SON," "SONIA," "SONIA MARRIED," "NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE,"
ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY MOTHER
AND
THE MEMORY
OF
MY FATHER

CONTENTS

LADY LILITH

"I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation ... I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character...."

Oscar Wilde: De Profundis.

LADY LILITH

CHAPTER ONE THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX

"Conceive of your life as an unfinished biography, and try to discover the next chapter and the end."

J. A. Spender: "The Comments of Bagshot."

"Within ten years five of us will be married and five will be dead," cried O'Rane, writing rapidly. "(Every one of us will have made such a fool of himself that it's wishing himself dead he'll be.) One will have had to cut the country. One will have lost all his money. As you seem to like jam with your powder, I've said that one—and not more—will achieve fame—by the mercy of God; one—and not more—will make great money."

The prophecy, delivered with apparent sincerity in the mellow atmosphere of dinner to a score of men between the optimistic ages of twenty and twenty-five, was, on the face of it, discouraging. He who achieved fame and he who amassed a fortune were condemned, with the rest, to pass through the contemplation of suicide or, at least, the prayerful expectation of death. And the moment for the forecast was undoubtedly ill-chosen. Seventeen of the twenty members of the Phoenix had spent the last week wrestling with examiners in their final schools; O'Rane spoke with the subconscious triumph of one who was not bidding farewell to Oxford for another year; and, if a vote had been taken, nine-tenths of his friends would have accorded him the scant portion of worldly success with which Providence in his grudging prophecy would crown their ambitions.

"Dry up, Raney," growled Jack Waring. "It's all very well for you——"

"It's a twenty-to-one chance I'm giving you," O'Rane pointed out. "You might bring off the double event. And get a wife thrown in. It would be no fun, if we all leaped to the top. 'When everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody.'"

Waring jumped up and turned to the president.

"I have to report Mr. O'Rane for singing at dinner, sir. A good, thumping fine, Sinks," he added.

Jack Summertown intercepted the ruling.

"On a point of order, sir; was that singing? If it was—oh, my Lord!"

Sinclair rose majestically from the presidential chair and turned his eyes from one disputant to the other.

"The accused is acquitted, but he's not to do it again," he ruled diplomatically. "I have to censure Lord Summertown for addressing the Chair without rising."

Ten suspended conversations were resumed, as he sat down; and Waring reverted to his own gloomy thoughts. Unaccustomed to look more than a day ahead, he was only beginning to recognize that in twenty-four hours he would have gone down from Oxford for the last time and that within four months he would have to begin reading for the bar. He had interrupted his dressing an hour before to stare out of the window, sprawling on the sill and dangling a collar and tie with idle hand.

Outside, the setting sun of a late June day filled the Broad with sleepy warmth and dyed the crumbling stone of the Sheldonian rose-red. In the middle of the road two cabmen slumbered on their boxes, pillowing their heads on their arms and leaving their horses to munch contentedly from frayed nosebags and to twitch an ear or flick a tail at too persistent flies. Rare groups of sight-seers approached the deserted gates of Trinity and Balliol, sought inspiration from guide-books and vanished diffidently from view. Oxford belonged to the ages; and for the first twenty-fifth part of the twentieth century Waring had fancied that it belonged to him. A hansom, overfilled by an American and her two daughters, jingled lazily from Holywell; the driver exhibited a contempt for Oxford no less profound than for America and waved his whip from side to side in rough time with the scornful scraps of information which he drawled through the trap.

"Ol' Clar'nd'n Buildin'. Bodleian be'ind it. Trin'ty. Balliol."

Three heads nodded and turned mechanically from right to left. The driver paused for new instructions, and an anxious voice from inside exclaimed:

"Gracious! it's a quarter of seven! Say, how many blocks are we from the depot?"

The high nasal intonation seemed to shiver the warm repose of the afternoon, and in another moment the Broad was echoing with life. A stream of bicycles poured down Parks Road; blazers of every colour flashed into sight and disappeared; men bareheaded and men in panamas, men with tennis racquets and men with dogs, men in flannels and men in tweeds, a few, even, still in white ties and coats of subfusc hue, parading the bondage of the Examination Schools, all hurried back to make ready for Hall. Oxford still belonged to them. At the gates of the colleges, deserted a moment since, the heirs of all the undergraduate ages assembled in careless disregard of their heritage; the last bicycles were tumbled into place; the last rainbow blazers and hat-ribbons vanished from sight; pipes were replaced in pockets, and necks bared from the dingy embrace of tattered gowns.

With a glance at the watch on his dressing-table, Jack Waring twisted himself to catch the reflection of his bottle-green dress-coat. It was the envied livery of the Phoenix Club, which—consistently with its name—died and came to life again once a year. At the end of every summer term not more than one survivor remained; the following Michaelmas the new president proposed and elected his own friends, choosing one junior to carry on the life and traditions of the club at the year's end. The institution had ensured for nearly two university generations and was the one constructive effort of Lord Loring's life at Oxford. With the grave self-absorption of nineteen he had demanded a club to which none but his own friends had access and of which he could nominate himself president and ordain the rules as he went on. He had long wanted a pretext, he explained in his inaugural address, for wearing a bottle-green dress-coat with brass buttons and white silk facings; and his position as founder of the club would give him an excuse for revisiting Oxford at the end of his lawful term.

A faint frown of regret and perplexity hovered over Jack Waring's plump and cheerful face, as he resumed his dressing. He had no fault to find with Oxford, where he had done more than most men and all that could be expected of any man. A case full of silver cups testified to his success in college and university Grinds; he had been Master of the Drag and a member of the Bullingdon; less than three days before he had shewn his versatility by proceeding, without the ostentation of an Honour School, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Colonel Waring had urged him to enjoy himself, and the four years had passed very satisfactorily.

"Eric!"

"Hullo! Are you ready?"

The door was kicked open, and Eric Lane sauntered in and inspected his own clothes by the revealing light of the afternoon sun. He also was frowning, for the sense of departure was heavy upon him too, and the papers that day had not been to his liking.

"Our final dissipation!" cried Jack, seizing him by the arm and clattering down the narrow staircase into the Turl. "I say, Eric, I don't half like the idea of not coming up next term; I was just beginning to find my way about this place. There you see Lincoln. Here we have Jaggers. I've never been inside Jaggers. Shall we make up a party and go to-morrow?"

A knot of Jesus men glared with the dumb fury which the small nations of the world feel towards the Great Powers. A sing-song Welsh voice commented devastatingly on the vanity of bottle-green dress-coats and their wearers.

"I can't go after that," murmured Jack with dignity. "Never imagined they understood English. Ought I to go back and apologize?" He stopped short in front of a haberdasher's shop and nodded gravely at the seductive window. Club colours and college colours contended and clashed with giant brown and yellow silk handkerchiefs adorned with white bulldogs. "We might buy them a peace-offering."

"I always wonder why you're not more disliked than you are," mused Eric.

"People only dislike me until I've given them time to see that I'm right and they're wrong," explained Jack complacently. "I was very unpopular at New College my first term. They wanted me to row—just because I'd rowed at Eton. You can't row and hunt. I never did any of the things they wanted; the people here are such sheep. Did I ever tell you that the rowing push came to rag my rooms just because I chose to dress for Hall? They said it was 'side.' Unfortunately, their spokesman was drunk, so I had to ask him to leave. It's such bad form to drink more than you can carry. Now any number of men dress for Hall. Sheep, just sheep. I think the reason you and I get on so well together is that you don't try to lead my life for me."

"Oh, I'm used to you," Eric interrupted. "Ever since I can remember, you've sat still and let every one else revolve round you. Your people, Agnes, me——"

Jack smiled at his reflection in the window. Though his self-satisfaction annoyed women and older men, no one could remain impatient with him for long. He was always too good-tempered to provide sport and too sure of himself to mind criticism. The man who is content to do nothing starts, too, with an advantage over the man who not only wants something done but would like it done in his own way. In childhood the threat that he would not be taken to a party unless he behaved himself well had only once been used against Jack; his mother found afterwards that he had genuinely enjoyed himself more at home; and ever since he had won his own way by studied inertia.

"You're so efficient!" he explained. "I should never have got through my schools but for you. And you pack so well. By the way, you've looked out the trains for to-morrow, haven't you? And arranged with Agnes for a cart to meet me? I hate writing letters.... Shall we dig together in London? If you'll find some decent rooms and a man to look after us—Agnes will help you choose the furniture—and if you'll make everything shipshape and comfortable, I'm hanged if I don't come and live with you! There!"

Eric held out his hand with affected emotion.

"That's uncommon good of you! I thought you'd want me to choose some one to live with me in your place."

"I wish you'd find somebody to go to the bar in my place," murmured Jack with a momentary return of his earlier gloom. "Can't you? The exams are quite easy for a man of your powerful intellect, and you only have to eat a few dinners and get called. I should live at Lashmar as the simple, old English country gentleman.... Hullo! we're late! You'll see about paying the fine, won't you?"

They crossed the High to a chorus of welcome flung at them from a first-floor window over a pastry-cook's shop. Two sleek heads protruded over the cushions in one tier, with three more, less lovingly cemented, in the background.

"Hurry up, Spurs," shouted the president.

The name, applied jointly and severally to the two men, had passed through ingenious refinements before reaching its present brief clarity. If Waring's Christian name was Jack, his inseparable companion Lane must be Jill; if Jack's surname was Waring, Eric's must be Gillow; the home of the furnishing trade, if not of Waring and Gillow, was Tottenham Court Road, which readily suggested Tottenham Hotspurs. An unexplained intellectual craving was at length satisfied when the pair were renamed "the Spurs."

After their first term no one shewed the psychological curiosity to wonder why so incongruous a couple lived together. Though neighbours in Hampshire, they were from different schools and of different colleges; the shrewd but consummately indolent Master of the Drag was the arbiter of taste for sporting, ultra-conservative Oxford—already a personality and almost a tradition; the fine-drawn scholar of Trinity was a recluse, a dreamer and a rebel, with ambition corroding the fabric of a too frail constitution. Outside the Phoenix they had few friends in common, for Eric's disputatious poets grew silent under the breezy onslaught of a more robust generation; Jack's intellectual hunger was satisfied by Surtees, the text-books for his schools, the Sportsman and Morning Post; while Eric, who had divided the first ten years of his life between his father's library at Lashmar Mill-House and a verandah at Broadstairs, had read quickly, brooded deeply and taken up an attitude, sometimes precocious but always clearly defined, towards problems which as yet did not exist for Jack. On one side, the friendship was founded on a worship of opposites; Eric never forgot that he had gone friendless through six years at school because he was forbidden by his doctor to play games. On the other, Jack found devotion a convenience; he respected Eric's brains and needed some one to relieve him of minor exertions and to make up his mind for him. Accordingly, though all the fourth-year men in the University would have been honoured to live with him, it was to Eric that he drawled, "By the way, have you arranged to dig with any one next term? Well, do go and find some decent quarters, there's a good fellow."

"Hullo! No fine to pay after all!" cried Jack, as he burst into the club dining-room and compared the number of covers with the members of the Phoenix already assembled. "Who's coming, Mr. President?"

"O'Rane and Deganway haven't turned up yet," answered Sinclair. "I've just had a wire from Loring to say that he's motoring down with Oakleigh and they'll probably be late. Summertown and Pentyre you can hear. It's their idea of music," he added, as a free fight broke out over the piano in the adjoining room.

Jack studied the menu, inspected the wine on the side-board and elbowed himself a place in the kneeling row at the open window. An interrupted conversation struggled back to plans for the Long Vacation and discussion of the schools. Sinclair, a stocky, simple-minded sportsman, now pitifully embarrassed by his presidential duties, had been chosen to play at Lord's for the University and for the Gentlemen; after that he would tour with the Authentics till the end of the season; and, until the following season, he would interest himself in the management of his father's mines in Yorkshire. Knightrider and Framlingham were destined for the army; Deganway and Pentyre were due to cram for the Foreign Office; Draycott proposed to study art in Paris; and Mayhew had forced his way into Fleet Street and the offices of the "Wicked World." It was a wide dispersal; and all felt that they were changing a life of proved comfort for something unknown and presumably less easy.

"What are you doing, Spurs?" Sinclair asked Eric.

"I'm not quite sure. My people want me to try for the Civil Service. I want to have a shot at journalism. You can't do anything in the Civil Service."

"Who wants to do anything?" retorted Waring from his window-seat. "Late as usual, Raney.... I only want money and decent holidays.... Sounds of a car, furiously driven. You'll have to fine 'em double, Mr. President, if it's Jim and George; once for being late and once for not coming in club dress. It is! Two dozen of fizz from each!"

He withdrew his head from the window as the car came to a standstill. A moment later Loring entered apologetically in morning dress, fingering his moustache and smiling with pleasure at the volley of welcome; George Oakleigh followed, peering with approval at the familiar beams and dingy panels of the low-ceilinged room; while O'Rane strode across the passage and brought the free fight to an end by putting the heads of the disputants into chancery, the president rapped the table and tried to allot the places.

"Gentlemen! The toast of the Phoenix will be drunk in silence," he proclaimed, as every one obstinately seated himself next to his greatest friend.

Sinclair waited until the sherry was served and then rose to his feet. Of the twenty members present only O'Rane was staying up another year: in obedience to ritual he remained seated in the vice-president's chair.

"The Phoenix is dead," announced the president.

"The Phoenix will rise again," answered the vice-president with awful gravity. Then, as the others sat down, he added reflectively, "'Wonder where we shall all be in ten years' time? 'Wonder what we shall be doing? 'Wonder how many of us will be dead?"

"You can always depend on Raney for an irresistible little note of cheerfulness," commented Loring, as he pulled in his chair and looked round to see who was present.

It was then that O'Rane flung his prophecy at the head of the club.

"Bah! You know as much about life as a Sunday School teacher!" he retorted contemptuously, banging his hand on a bell. "Where's the betting-book? And give me a pen, somebody. Let you mark my words. 'Mr. David O'Rane bets the Marquess Loring ten sovereigns that within ten years of this date five out of the twenty members present to-night will be married. A further ten sovereigns that five will be dead——'"

"Always the optimist," murmured Oakleigh from Loring's side.

"I'll bet that every one of us will have made such a fool of himself that it's wishing himself dead he'll be.... A further ten sovereigns that one at least will have had to cut the country. A further ten that one at least will have lost all his money.... I'm only dealing in averages. Ten years, I said; that's not much for any positive achievement, but I'll bet a further ten pounds that one—and not more than one—will have achieved what an independent tribunal considers fame. A further ten pounds that one of us will make great money——"

"That's sixty pounds," interposed Sinclair warningly.

"But I shan't have to pay it," answered O'Rane, writing rapidly. He read out a summary of the wager and passed the book for Loring to sign. "Besides, I'm going to be the one who makes all the money. I hope you won't be one of the five who die, Jim; or I shall have to claim against your estate and all. Which of us will achieve fame in ten years? Draycott as an Academician? I don't see it. Spurs as a judge? 'Don't see it either. The Gander as an ambassador? The other Spurs?" He looked round the table and went on quickly; half-unconsciously he had decided that Eric Lane would be the first of the five to die. "I should mark down Sinks as the first to marry; there's an appealing domesticity about him. And we shall all make colossal fools of ourselves; don't forget that! Folly's the great leveller. Jim, I think you'd better give a dinner once a year to the survivors just to see how we're getting on."

"If I don't die or cut the country," Loring assented.

O'Rane snapped the clasp of the betting-book and tossed it on a chair behind him.

"You're far too healthy and respectable," he grunted, concentrating his attention on the cooling soup. "Besides, I'm reserving that for Summertown. You know he's been sent down for good and all?"

"A man cuts the country because of the disreputability of others," answered Loring. "By the way, I'm not going to be fined for being late, Mr. President, because I had a good reason. Also, the founder of a club is never fined."

"Let's hear the reason," suggested the president.

"I've been taking the chair at a family council." Loring looked round the table until he located his cousin Knightrider. "You ought to have been there, Victor. I don't want to wash my dirty linen in public, but Victor and I have a young cousin of twelve," he explained, "who's driven her father out of one continent and is on the point of driving him out of another. Crawleigh's a most dignified and worthy viceroy, and he's my own uncle, and I wouldn't say a word against him; but a fellow on his staff told me that he'd no more control over that child than over the man in the moon. She does whatever she pleases; Government House is turned upside down, and, if any one tries to coerce her, she just runs away. They've pursued her across Canada and they've pursued her across India. Now she's been sent home. The family council was convened to decide what was to be done with her. All the uncles and aunts and cousins met together; and I need hardly tell you that we got stuck with her. So, if I disappear suddenly, you'll know that my young cousin has been too much for me. If that isn't a good reason for being late, I don't know what is."

The president adroitly reserved judgement on a fine which he knew would never be paid, and the conversation reverted to the former grim discussion of the schools and vague plans for the future. Eric Lane felt out of sympathy with his surroundings, for he alone lacked money and influence and a ready-made niche. In ten years' time Deganway would be progressing gently and comfortably in the Diplomatic; Summertown and Pentyre, who were avowedly waiting for their fathers to die, would either still be waiting or would have already succeeded; Framlingham and Knightrider would be swallowed by the army, even Jack Waring would make a career for himself at the bar or elsewhere, because men with his backing were not allowed to fail. George Oakleigh would be in the House, probably an under-secretary; Loring, with his position and an income which fluctuated between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand a year in accordance with the yield of certain mines, might be anywhere.

"What are you going to do, when you go down?" Eric asked O'Rane.

"I haven't the least idea. That's where the fun comes in," O'Rane answered buoyantly.

"Starting behind scratch?"

"Yes, that gives you an incentive. I wonder which of us will get to the top first."

"I wonder how one starts."

"Oh, you'll write. I've never had any doubt of that. That rot I was talking about averages wasn't all rot; we ought to turn out one genius, and you're going to do something very big. I declare to my soul I'm not ragging! I've seen the things you wrote for Cap and Bells, I've heard you talk and I can see you're on a different plane from the rest of us. I could probably beat you at pure scholarship, but you've a literary sense which I should never attain in a life-time. Do you care for a bet with me?"

Eric shook his head; but he felt the need of encouragement, and O'Rane was more serious than he usually condescended to be.

"I won't rob you, Raney."

"Robbery be blowed! You won't bet against your destiny. In ten years' time you'll have beaten the whole of our generation, starting behind scratch. And, God's my witness, I'd sooner have that than be born with a title and a million pounds a minute like Jim. Hullo, they're off! Jim, may I take wine with you?"

He raised his glass and was quickly followed by Oakleigh and Summertown. Loring flushed a little at the compliment of being chosen first. In order of popularity O'Rane followed as a close second, with Waring third. Pentyre, Summertown and Deganway toasted one another; Oakleigh was honoured as an afterthought by half the table. There was a moment's silence, as the glasses were recharged, and Jack Waring leaned forward with a smile.

"Eric? Best of luck."

"Best of luck, Jack."

Their eyes met, and both smiled. Then the interrupted dinner went on. Oakleigh was detected, reported and fined for smoking without permission; Pentyre was deprived of port wine for allowing the decanter to stand at his elbow. A vote was taken, and Draycott was censured for wearing a pleated shirt. Less constitutionally, Deganway was stretched on the floor and deprived of his eye-glass amid falsetto protests. Then the loving-cup went round, and all stood to drink the health of the king and of fox-hunting, the president and vice-president, absent members and "our glorious founder." Sinclair presented a seven-branch candlestick to the collection of club plate; and Loring proposed and carried a unanimous vote of thanks.

"And now a little Gilbert and Sullivan from Raney," ordained the president, as the last speech came to an end and he led the way into the next room.

Prising open a box of cigars, he sniffed it with the suspicion of inexperience and proffered it diffidently to Oakleigh. O'Rane slid on to the music-stool, while Deganway and Waring, Summertown and Eric sprawled over the top of the piano with pipes doggedly gripped between their teeth and with their chins resting on their arms, demanding of the musician that he should give them "something with a chorus." Pentyre withdrew to an armchair and fell asleep; the others formed themselves into a circle round Loring and tried to talk against the music.

"Long years ago, fourteen, may be,

When but a tiny babe of four,

Another babe played with me,

My elder by a year or more.

A little child of beauty rare,

With marvellous eyes and wondrous hair,

Who, in my child-eyes, seemed to me

All that a little child should be.

Ah, how we loved, that child and I,

How pure our baby joy!

How true our love—and, by-the-by,

He was a little boy!"

Waring, as "Angela" struck in with a deep, reproachful bass:

"Ah, old, old tale of Cupid's touch!

I thought as much—I thought as much!

He WAS a little boy"

"Patience" justified herself shyly.

"Pray don't misconstrue what I say—

Remember, pray—remember, pray,

He was a LITTLE boy"

O'Rane gave the "Wandering Minstrel" as a solo, followed by "A Pair of Sparkling Eyes" and "Is Life a Boon?"

Loring turned approvingly to George Oakleigh.

"Raney's got a ripping voice," he said. "And he's in good form to-night. All the same, we must be getting back, George, if you want to be in London early to-morrow morning. It's very pleasant to see all these boys again. Sad, too, very sad; the young lions with all their troubles before them."

"I suppose this is absolutely the end," sighed Sinclair. "Shall I see you at Lord's, Jim?"

As the party began to break up, a chill of collective wistfulness descended upon it, too strong for even O'Rane to dispel.

"Yes, if you don't want me to watch the play. But I'll look intelligent."

It was still so early when the straggling escort convoyed Oakleigh and Loring into the safety of their hotel that an hour was agreeably spent by each in accompanying every one else home. Jack and Eric reached the Broad, only to turn back and take Deganway to Grove Street, and from Grove Street they all proceeded by Boar Lane to St. Aldates. Here O'Rane protested that he could not go to bed until he had disposed of Sinclair in comfort. At a quarter to twelve the whole party, intact and a little bored, found itself on Magdalen Bridge; Jack and Eric broke away at a run up Long Wall, and the others, led by O'Rane, traversed the High for the fourth time that night.

The familiar rooms at the corner of the Turl were bare and disordered with the signs of coming departure. The undulating floor of the sitting-room was littered with paper and straw, with cases of books and half-filled crates of pictures; on a dusting-sheet in one corner was gathered a miscellany of broken pipes and perished pouches, tattered note-books and sprung rackets, torn photographs, old shoes and a policeman's helmet. Overflowing trunks and yawning Gladstone bags projected from the bedrooms on to the narrow, gas-lit landing.

"Nice, comfortable quarters," observed Jack, as he looked for somewhere to sit. "It was quite a good evening, you know. The part I liked best was when it was all over. Oxford looks quite decent at night."

Eric had been trained to economy of enthusiasm in talking to Jack, who would not have understood him if he had said that the Meadows on a May morning or the Bodleian from All Souls, or the Trinity limes in leaf or a pack of low, grey clouds racing across the sky behind Magdalen Tower made him drunk with the consciousness of physical beauty. And he wondered what he could ever have said to betray to O'Rane his secret yearning for self-expression.

"Our last night in Oxford," he murmured.

"Oh, I think I shall come up occasionally and dine with the lads."

Eric said nothing; but the sense of incongruity with his surroundings still oppressed him, and he privately resolved that he would not revisit Oxford until he had done something to put himself at least on the level of his friends, perhaps above them. That night he lulled himself to sleep with a vision in which he burst on the world as a new Byron and took London by storm in a night. Comely heads turned and whispered his name, as he strode down Bond Street; the windows were full of his photograph; when he entered a room there was a hush of reverence for the new novelist, the rising playwright, the last wit and latest fashion. All his day-dreams led him to the stage. There, after twisting the house to laughter and tears, he would nonchalantly allow himself to be called before the curtain; after three gossamer epigrams, he would retire with a perfunctory bow. And there would follow supper on the stage for George Oakleigh, who was only a subordinate minister, and Loring, who was only governor of a colony, and Jack, who was only a successful barrister, and Knightrider, who was only a subaltern in the Guards, and Summertown, who was only a third secretary on leave from a distant legation, and Pentyre, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had done nothing.... The vision was so stimulating that he resolved to conjure it up again whenever he felt depressed.

They were roused in the morning by the cheerful and insistent voices of a cavalcade which reined in under Jack's windows for the last opportunity of wishing him good-bye.... Unembarrassed by spectators, he made a leisurely toilet and refused to be intimidated by Eric's prophecies that they would lose their train. "There is sure to be another," he pointed out, as he finished brushing his short, mouse-coloured hair and satisfied himself that he was smoothly shaved. Undergraduate Oxford was all too careless of its appearance, and Jack secretly believed that slovenliness in clothes was the visible sign of depravity in morals. Colonel Waring had said so, basing himself on his experience in the army. Jack respected his father's judgement, because it so often coincided with his own.

He appeared in time to see Eric distributing the last tips and counting the luggage as it was piled on top of the cabs. Waving good-bye to their landlord and surrounded by their escort, they drove with self-conscious solemnity to the station, cut a passage through the jungle of dogs and cricket bags on the platform and bribed a porter to find an empty first-class carriage and to lock the door after them. While Jack possessed himself of the papers, Eric watched the familiar landmarks fading one by one from view as the train steamed out of Oxford: Tom Tower and the Cathedral spire, the reservoir and gasworks, the Abingdon Road and Boar's Hill. The whistle of the engine as it entered Culham sounded like the last chord in an operatic score. Oxford was over. He remembered his shyness in first approaching it four years earlier and wondered whether he would as quickly overcome the sense of loneliness which filled his mind at the thought of working in London.

"When do your bar lectures start?" he asked with a drawl which attempted to emulate his companion's easy carelessness.

Jack tossed aside the Sportsman and yawned with lazy contentment.

"I haven't the least idea," he answered.

"I was thinking about rooms. I'm going up almost at once for a month on trial with the London News. You've got no preferences?"

"I'd trust your taste and judgement anywhere."

Eric laughed a little impatiently.

"You—are—the—laziest—brute—I've ever come across. Are you going to behave like this at the bar?"

Jack put up his feet and closed his eyes.

"It's not half a bad idea," he mused. "I believe, if I let it be known that I didn't want briefs, the solicitors would form up at the early door out of sheer perversity. Everything comes to him who doesn't much care whether it comes or not. You see, as soon as you want anything, you increase the demand and raise the price against yourself; it's a great thing to have studied political economy. If I ever marry it will be some one who's madly in love with me and whom I can just tolerate. If you're fool enough to try it the other way round, you're simply selling yourself into slavery.... As a matter of fact, I'm not lazy at all, but I refuse to fuss about unimportant things. I had all this business out with the guv'nor two years ago; I'd got to do something for a living, and he had all sorts of gold-lace jobs in contemplation—clerk in the House of Lords, agent to my uncle at Penley, private secretary to this man and that. I said it wasn't good enough. If I couldn't go into the army like him, I'd go somewhere where I could make money. We haven't any particular influence in the city, so I chose the bar; and I've every intention of making money there. That's important. But I can't wear myself out looking for digs when I've a kind friend to do it for me. And I never try to do more than one thing at a time. During the next few weeks I shall stay with several very pleasant people. Lady Knightrider's invited me to Raglan as usual; and I'm going to Croxton with the Pentyres; and to House of Steynes with Jim Loring; and to Ireland with George Oakleigh. I wish you'd come, too; I've got such a good country-house manor, I should like you to see it."

"I've got to work."

"So have I—every bit as much as you," Jack answered aggressively. "But I never believe in meeting trouble half-way." His voice became drowsy, and he composed himself for sleep. "Wake me, when we get to Reading."

Such philosophic detachment was a birthright, not to be bought or borrowed; and Eric looked with a mixture of amusement and envy at his slumbering friend. Some time in the autumn the bar term would begin, there would be lectures and examinations, Jack would be called; later he would pay a hundred pounds to an overworked junior for the privilege of sitting in a pupil-room and confusing his head with such papers as he was allowed to see; he would find chambers of his own and choose a circuit and open it. And get together a practice—or fail. In the meantime he slept with the sun shining on his face, trimly brushed and shaved, smiling, rosy and round-cheeked as a plough-boy.

Eric could not so casually leave the future to look after itself; and he was preparing, with a highly-strung man's dread of altercation, for a conflict with his family. Dr. Lane's suggestions were purely scholastic—a fellowship, if possible; failing that, a position on the staff of one of the great public schools. Either would give him security and a chance of earning money at once. There must be other things, of course, but a philologist lived too much out of the world to give practical advice.... Mrs. Lane favoured the Civil Service; but Eric, from the editorial chair of Cap and Bells, had lately made journalism the fabric of his day-dreams. During his last term the editor of the London News came to Oxford as guest of honour at a dinner of the Sherbrooke Club; with eye professionally skinned for rising talent, he had been first amused and then impressed by his young host; there followed a vague proposal of an article, and Eric had been careful to thrust his foot into the yielding doorway of the paper until a month's trial was suggested.

A red-brick wilderness of villas warned him that they were running into Reading. He prodded Jack awake, collected his luggage from the rack and changed into the Basingstoke train. At Winchester a dog-cart, driven by a stiff, military groom, and a pony trap, with an eight-year-old child and her governess, awaited them. The luggage appeared unhurriedly and was separated and stowed out of sight. Jack edged away after a shy greeting to Sybil Lane, and a moment later they were heading through the town for the Melton and Lashmar road.

"Roll round some time and discuss those digs," Eric shouted, as the pony-trap turned from the high-crowned Melton road and jolted into the twilight of unreclaimed woodland whose youngest trees were old and firm-rooted before the New Forest had begun to show the first green of its leaves.

"No, you come to me," Jack called back. "It's shorter for you, because you walk so much faster."

As the low lines of the Mill-House came in sight, Mrs. Lane rose from her chair by the studded front door, closed her book and waved a handkerchief in welcome. For the first time in his life Eric felt that this was no longer his home. Lashmar and Oxford belonged to a youth wherein he was not required to look for a career or to trouble about money and ambition. Within a week he would be occupying chambers of his own and earning his own living.

"Well, dear Eric, I'm very glad to see you again. You're looking thin," said his mother.

"I'm all right, thanks. How are you, mother? Is the guv'nor working?" asked Eric.

The need for action was strong upon him, and he had to explain once and for all that he aimed at something more than security and a chance of earning money at once.

"He's indoors."

Eric ducked his head and entered the long, low house. It was dark after the glowing June sunlight outside, chillingly cold, too; from the back of the house came the gentle murmur of the Bort with an unchanging drone of falling water and a regular double creak from the mill-wheel, like the slow cadence of a grandfather's clock. Through the open French windows of the dining-room he sniffed the stream's familiar scent of decay, half-smothered by the coarse reek of a blazing patch of marigolds. Lashmar Mill-House was, for Eric, a place where ambition was brought to die.

Without waiting to be disturbed, Dr. Lane rattled open the door of the library and appeared in his shirt-sleeves, fleshless, tall and stooping, with the gentle, brown eyes, black hair and aquiline nose which he had handed down to Eric. An unkempt brown moustache drooped drearily on either side of a long corncob pipe-stem, and his bony hands fidgetted with an untanned strap round his waist.

"I want to have a talk with you," said Eric to his parents. "I'm starting work next week with the London News. Jack and I are going to live together."

Mrs. Lane nursed a well-founded suspicion that Jack preyed on her son's scant vitality, but she shrank from confessing jealousy of his friend.

"Let's have a day or two to think things over," she proposed. "Journalism is very wearing."

"But everything's arranged," Eric answered.

And next morning he rose from breakfast and started through the Forest to Red Roofs and the task of pinning Jack down to the joint establishment in London. Every step on the familiar road was a gesture of farewell. There was a recognized point in the two-mile walk where even the smoke of the Mill-House chimneys was invisible; another point where he had to jump from stone to stone across a furlong of marsh; and another where the forest thinned imperceptibly and vanished. Over the tops of the last trees appeared a row of small-bricked Tudor chimneys, dusty-grey in the sunshine; then the deep red tiles of the gabled roofs; then the house itself, three-quarters covered in creeper that swung in the breeze and veiled the narrow windows with a curtain of tangled green. It was the perfect frame, Eric thought, for a perfect picture of country toryism; a social analyst could not look at the house without peopling it in imagination with the cadet branch of a rankly conservative family—conventional, godly, sporting, military and, by a freak, unexpectedly evangelical—in a word, with such a family as the Warings. The colonel was returning home from an early gallop; he reined in his horse and walked beside Eric to the gate of the stable-yard, erect and dapper, with a dictatorial voice and a hint of ill-temper in his bearing, his face weather-beaten and the white of his eyes faintly tinged with yellow.

"Hullo! How are you? How's your father? How's the magnum opus?" he asked, as he dismounted and walked towards the house. The three questions never varied, and the colonel derived immense private amusement from the thought that Dr. Lane had given thirty years of his life to an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. "Jack tells me you're going to be a journalist. Dog's life, I've always heard."

"I hope it won't be only journalism," said Eric, who was sensitive enough to be daunted by the misgiving which his proposed career excited first in his parents and now in an unbiased outsider. "I hope to do some rather more original work as well."

"Original? That's bad! Seven-act tragedies and five-volume novels." Colonel Waring had evolved the belief that young men could be coaxed out of their natural shyness by well-timed jocosity. "You must excuse me, I'm going to have my bath. You'll find every one in the smoking-room, I expect."

Eric escaped with relief and ran Jack to earth in the faded dining-room, where he was finishing a late breakfast. His sister ministered to his wants, keeping the food warm in a chafing-dish, plying him with coffee and fetching him clean plates. Mrs. Waring, plump, idle and self-indulgent, was fondly overhauling her son's wardrobe when Eric entered the room.

"Dear Jack, you can't go to Lady Knightrider's until you've ordered yourself some new shirts. These are a disgrace," she protested.

Jack nodded without looking up from his paper.

"I know. I was waiting till I got home so that Agnes could write to my man. I always forget his name. Hullo, Eric! You're bursting with energy this morning. Have some capital kidneys and bacon?"

"I came to talk about where we are going to live," Eric explained, shaking hands with Mrs. Waring.

"But I thought I'd left that to you? Why don't you and Agnes arrange something?" Jack filled a pipe and strolled towards the open window. "The guv'nor seems to have got me elected to the County Club; he rather favours my trying to get a bedroom there."

Eric felt a twinge of dismay. It was only natural that a club should have been found for Jack, as everything else was found; but Eric could not afford to let him slip away. Perhaps the suggestion was only a diplomatic hint that, if he were troubled further, he would follow the line of least resistance.

"Oh, no! You're coming with me. If you've no preferences, Agnes and I will go straight ahead."

He motioned to the girl, and they went out into the garden together. Agnes Waring, in company with her mother, had been brought up to believe that Jack was the one person in the house who mattered; though intellectually head and shoulder his superior, she had been kept at home from the day when Colonel Waring demonstrated incontrovertibly that he could not afford to send her to Newnham if Jack was to be given an adequate allowance at Oxford. Once isolated at home, she had nothing to do but to run errands for her father and brother. At her suggestion it was now arranged that Eric should look for rooms in the Temple.

Two days later he wrote that he had discovered an ideal set of chambers in Pump Court, and for a week they worked to get it in order for Jack's arrival in October. On the last afternoon Agnes looked on her completed handiwork and sighed with satisfaction and envy.

"If you're not comfortable, you ought to be," she declared. "Men are lucky creatures. I wish I could change places with you, Eric."

"So that you could wait on Jack?"

"I should like that, of course.... I hope Jack does well at the bar. You will make him work, won't you?"

Eric shrugged his shoulders and looked into the silent little court.

"Can any one make him do anything he doesn't want to? I wonder whether he was wise to choose the bar. I wonder whether I was wise to choose journalism, whether any of us.... We had a very cheerful dinner on our last night at Oxford. There were about twenty of us, and one man bet that in ten years' time five of us would be dead and a certain number bankrupt. A certain number more would have to cut the country. So far as I remember only one was to make anything of a success. Not an encouraging forecast."

"A very cynical forecast," Agnes distinguished.

"Will he win his bet?"

"Oh, a man of character can make anything of his life," she answered with a glance of fleeting interest and affection which he did not see.

Eric recalled the extraordinarily young faces at the last dinner of the Phoenix. Their outlook was frivolous and their talk trivial. He was already feeling older in ten days.

"Do you get more than one man of character in twenty?" he asked.

CHAPTER TWO THE COMING OF LILITH

"What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch?... I don't believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best: a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council."

Bernard Shaw: "An Unsocial Socialist."

The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.

Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure; Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army—the life of a public danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist, complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.

Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances. Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of "good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister to dances.

"It doesn't do to be seen lunching at your club too much," he explained to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in the morning."

Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed before the London News began to print off. The dissolution would only cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.

"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer word."

"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you? Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam' sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."

Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was ever one who could not create.

"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not quite what I hoped, though."

Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married, but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained a day dream.

"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in shirt and trousers.

"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every room.... And I loathe strangers as much as you do."

Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his apprenticeship to the London News, he had won the friendship of Martin Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is—and dialogue—and technique—and characterization. You could write a successful play to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two. You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want to kill theatricality—which is what I've tried to do all my life—you must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of a lot, if I had time.... When I'm gone, fire in your application for my berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels. Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a sketch-book with society smatterers alone."

Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation. They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own. So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists—and all who came humbly to her for a chance of meeting them—she shut her eyes to her husband's excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers" wanted him to write up a charity matinée or the amateur performance of a Restoration comedy.

Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van, Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.

"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't speak to a woman from one year's end to another——"

"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.

"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.

"Some people don't know when they're well off. I can't dance and I've nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an answer I can never make out. I suppose you like women, Eric. Every time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or pearls or eyes—honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two, with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day.... However, they're all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"

He ran down the stairs and hailed a taxi at the top of Middle Temple Lane. Since the downfall of Draycott, the Phoenix Club dinners had lost their old strict form and were no longer confined to members of the club. As Jack entered the hall, Valentine Arden, a satirical consumptive, was divesting himself of a violet-lined cloak, smoothing his long straight hair back from his forehead, patting the tie that wound twice round his collar and adjusting the straps of his trousers under his insteps. There were other friends of a younger generation whom Loring had acquired in his easy-going progress, but the older members were meagrely represented.

The first arrivals were already in the library, exchanging fragmentary news of the absentees, when their host appeared with a preoccupied frown and a jejune apology for his lateness.

"Where's Pentyre?" he asked, as he looked round the room. "Here, my friend, you'll get yourself into hot water, if you give any more parties like your last one."

"What's the row?" asked Pentyre in surprise.

"Well, I won't mention names," Loring answered, "but one of your guests has come to grief as the result of your last little gathering at Croxton. I don't say that it's your fault," he added, "except that you ought to exercise more general control in your own house. There was a certain amount of gambling, wasn't there? Some fairly big sums of money changed hands? One man lost who couldn't afford to lose, I believe. It may have been absence of mind or it may have been the only way out of the difficulty, but the man in question signed his father's name on a cheque instead of his own. The son is now on his way to one of those 'thoughtful islands where warrants never come.' D'you mean this is all news to you?"

Pentyre tugged at his moustache and shook his head in wide-eyed wonder. The only sign of discord that he could remember had occurred between his mother and Loring's own cousin, Barbara Neave. On the first night she had stayed up after Lady Pentyre had shepherded the women of the party to bed. In the morning there had been a gentle reprimand, but Lady Barbara ignored it and persisted in staying up as long as any one would stay up with her. She or one of the men—Pentyre could not remember—had started poker, which they played until two or three o'clock in the morning.

"I've never heard a word of it," he said. Less than a year had passed since he succeeded to his father's title and the ownership of Croxton Hall. The social life of the county had been brightened; but there had been one or two regrettable mishaps, and Loring always seemed to hear of them. "How did you get hold of the story?" he asked with a touch of bluster.

"From the man's father in the first place; then from my cousin Barbara. We're supposed to be responsible for her, and I tackled her about it. She won nearly five hundred pounds from this wretched boy. Of course, I made her disgorge it; but the fellow may be ruined for life. I told her so pretty plainly, and she seemed to take it as an enormous compliment."

"Who was the man?" asked Pentyre.

"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer; they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now. Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house.... That girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning séance in her bedroom after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's have some dinner and forget all about her."

The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has,—and they'll discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen, you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.

"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own cousin in order."

"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland, Erckmann——"

"You're so infernally narrow-minded."

"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody else."

A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work, and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class, excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs. Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.

In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation. Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club, because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes, and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.

"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they are alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."

Arden assumed non-moral detachment and explained that the novelist, like the sanitary inspector, entered all houses with professional impartiality.

"They've no sense of responsibility and not much feeling for decency. I don't want to make too much of this business," said Loring, as acrimony slipped out of control and threatened the peace of the dinner. "But I was thoroughly stirred up over that wretched boy and I felt it was time to make a stand."

"What are you going to do?" demanded Pentyre.

"Well, I've been knocking about in London for half a dozen years, watching these gentry, and I can see that we're not assimilating them. The egregious Pennington, that young swine Webster——"

"Both of whom I've met in this house," interposed Pentyre.

"I know. One gets roped in. Some one dragged me along to their parties, so I had to invite them back. But I don't go any more. The danger now is that they'll assimilate us. I went through my mother's book a short time ago and put a mark against certain names; and in future those people will not be invited or admitted to the house. No doubt they'll get on very happily without me, but so much mud is thrown at us in the ordinary way of business that I can't afford to put up gratuitous targets for the amusement of the gutter-press. Honestly, Pentyre, you'd feel rather small, if the Sunday Budget or Morton's Weekly came out with a 'Society Gambling Scandal.' Wouldn't you?"

Pentyre adroitly evaded the question and continued his own bombardment.

"Is your cousin's name in the condemned list?" he asked.

"It will be, if I have any trouble from her again. What I can't get people to see is that we're hanging on by our eyelids to such position as we've got. A hundred years ago we were a class apart and above criticism; nobody thought the worse of us, if we appeared at the theatre with a notorious cocotte or drank ourselves gently under the table. Our present accursed democracy was unborn. But, when once that came into existence, we could only keep ourselves from proscription by saying very loudly that we were still a class apart and were setting a standard. Democracy's too lazy and snob-ridden to be very exacting, but it's had its eye on us. George and his friends are conspiring to hamstring the poor, decent House of Lords; and, if they succeed, the rot won't stop there. I find life very pleasant, and it isn't worth a tremendous upheaval simply for the amusement of behaving like a Bank Holiday crowd.... Let's go and smoke in the library."

Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range and freshness of gossip.

"You're too provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not fair to tell a story without giving all the names."

"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.

"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being so tiresome."

Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards. There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to explore the domestic dissension at first hand.

"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out social system."

"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim said. I'm too busy to go out much, but some of the people I meet.... My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated. But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money.... Of course, the girl just wants slapping."

"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the introduction."

"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.

The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which, he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had already given her an advantage.

"I've read all your books. Witty, but very artificial," she said, as they were introduced. "The French do that sort of thing more easily, but you've not read much French, have you? There are several things I want to discuss with you. A play I've written." She drew off her gloves jerkily, splitting the thumb of one. "Did you come to see me or Aunt Kathleen? And you know Jim, of course. I want your opinion of him."

"He knows me," Arden distinguished, as he watched her carelessly calculated movements. Within sixty seconds she had shewn herself full-face and in profile, with a hat and again with two tapering hands smoothing a mass of wayward hair. He had seen her wistful and tired, as she came into the room, and again alert and galvanised at finding him there. Yet she had certainly noticed his hat in the hall; probably she had read the name and thought out her attack as she came upstairs. He was charmed by her conscientious artifice.

"You talk just like Fatty Webster's imitations of you! That's so clever of you! But why do you do it? You've arrived. There's no need to be eccentric now. But perhaps you've grown into your own pose? In that case you're right to express yourself in your own medium. Life is simply self-expression, isn't it? The discovery of the Ego, the refinement of the Ego, the presentation of the Ego." She nodded quickly at a portrait of her father in Garter robes. "It would never do to be submerged by that kind of thing. I'm always so sorry for Royalty."

As he hesitated for an answer, she put her hands to her throat, unclasped her necklace and threw it out of the window. Arden sprang across the room and looked down into the street to make sure that he had seen aright. A District Messenger-boy approached, whistling; he explored the necklace with his foot and finally picked it up.

"My dear, what are you doing?" cried Lady Knightrider in amazement.

"I went flying to-day," Lady Barbara answered, as she poured herself out a cup of tea.

"Flying!"

"Yes, I didn't tell you beforehand, because I was afraid of a scene. Besides, I should have done it, whatever you said. Johnnie Gaymer promised to take me up. I haven't been near Hurlingham. Don't bother, Mr. Arden."

"But why——?" Valentine began, startled out of his invertebrate placidity by a sensationalist more original than himself.

"Because I wasn't killed. I love that necklace more than anything in the world. It was given me when I was recovering from typhoid and every one thought I must die.... The engine stopped in mid-air, and I made sure I was going to be killed. Johnnie thought so, too. I felt I owed something to Nemesis.... I've known you by sight all this season, Mr. Arden. You weren't at the Poynters last night, by any chance? I couldn't go, because I was in disgrace. And Lord Poynter sent his car this morning with a wreath of lilies, because he was afraid I must be dead."

The short, disjointed sentences, flung out rapidly as she helped herself to cake, demanded all Arden's attention and left her aunt far behind. Lady Knightrider hurried belatedly to the window and then stretched her hand to the bell. Lady Barbara took her arm soothingly and led her back to her chair.

"Your disgrace was our diversion," said Arden.

"Did Jim tell you about it," asked Lady Barbara. "How like him! I'm beginning to think he's naturally cruel. Or unnaturally. Conscious cruelty is what divides men from animals.... Aunt Kathleen, if you fuss, I shall scream; I've been badly frightened and I hated throwing it away.... I'd sooner die than hurt any one.... Have you ever flown? I've wanted to for years; I felt it would be a new sensation. Won't it be awful when we've done so much that there are no sensations left? Aunt Kathleen's quite irrepressible, isn't she?"

After an interval of indecision Lady Knightrider had hurried out of the room and downstairs. Arden looked at his watch and prepared to follow her.

"One always lies down before dinner," he explained.

"You're going—just when we've been left a moment together?" she asked with a smile that had less of amusement than of artistic sympathy. "That's a brilliant effect. Not one man in a million would have thought of it. We must meet again. Why did you come at all? What had you heard about me? I don't recommend Aunt Kathleen's cigarettes."

She offered him her case, and Arden lighted one.

"A poker party was mentioned at dinner last night," he told her. "One casually wondered who the man was."

"Claude Arkwright. Jim says I've got his soul on my conscience. Any more questions?"

Arden laughed and for a moment shed all his mannerisms.

"Yes. What's behind all this?" he asked.

"All this what? All this me? What I do?" Lady Barbara met him unreservedly on his own chosen ground of sincerity, and her voice and smile changed. "I'm behind it. Come, you're quite clever enough to understand. I want to enjoy life and know life and meet people and read books and do things.... I won't be treated like a minor Royalty. The world's full of Jim Lorings. Wherever I go, some one says 'Not there, not there, my child.' And then! Then I go quite mad! You'll like me, I think. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Lady Lilith."

"Lilith? Who was she? Wasn't she Adam's first wife?"

"She existed before Man tasted of the tree of knowledge; before good and evil came into the world," said Arden impressively.

"I remember. I hope you won't become sententious. That went out with the last of the Wilde plays."

Lady Knightrider was standing in the hall, plump, white-haired and perplexed, peering through her lorgnettes into the street. The messenger-boy had disappeared, and the necklace with him.

"He will take it to Scotland Yard," predicted Arden reassuringly. "And then Lady Barbara will throw it away again for fear of cheating Nemesis. One despaired of meeting honest superstition in these degenerate latter days."

"I've never heard——," began Lady Knightrider. One crime jostled another and confused her mind. "Crawleigh will be furious if he finds out she's been flying."

Arden walked back to the Ritz, wondering whether the fuller study of Barbara Neave justified him in giving away points by betraying interest in her. His preliminary diagnosis discovered energy with no outlet, premature experience with unsated curiosity; public life held no mystery or attraction for the only daughter of a viceroy; unless Lord Crawleigh set himself to gain a dukedom, there were no social heights to scale; the family was too rich for her to be troubled about money; and so energy sought its outlet in making and receiving new sensations. This was well enough at sixteen or seventeen, but after another five years emotion-hunting...? He was still undecided when he encountered her a week later at Covent Garden, sitting with Summertown and Webster on a sofa outside Lady Maitland's box and having her fortune told by Sonia Dainton. Her setting was of more interest than her occupation, for Summertown and Miss Dainton were leaders of the younger cavalry in the cosmopolitan army; they echoed the noise and reflected the insistent glare of Sir Adolf Erckmann without sharing his solid prestige as a critic and patron of art. Webster was a sodden, characterless youth, who bought his way into toleration which he mistook for popularity. Arden wondered what Loring would say if he found his cousin in such company.

"The discovery of the Ego?" he enquired.

"Hullo! We're having such fun!" said Lady Barbara. "Miss Dainton's wonderful! I've had two bad illnesses, and something is going to happen soon which will change the whole of my life. I'm going to have an enormous success of some kind. And then an enormous tragedy. I'm very artistic and full of intuition. I've got a strong will and a great influence over people. Go on, Sonia."

"The line of heart—give me your other hand a minute," said Sonia Dainton. "Yes, the line of heart hasn't begun yet. When it does!"

Lady Barbara withdrew her hand abruptly.

"I don't believe you know anything about it, Sonia. Are there any good palmists in London, Mr. Arden? I collect fortune-tellers. Let's go somewhere to-morrow. Father will be back in England next month, and then I shan't be able to do anything."

"You believe in all this?" Arden asked, remembering her action with the necklace and wondering how far she was trying to beat him at his own game of extravagant effects.

"Oh, implicitly. Don't you? And I do want to find out all about the future. Let's devote a week to it and try every one."

"I might spare you two days," he answered, as he passed on to his box.

At the end of the first Arden's curiosity was satisfied. Lady Barbara was a study in crude contrasts. While she pained her family by sceptical indifference to religion, there seemed nothing that she would not believe, provided only that it did not come to her from the lips of a priest. As they drove from one clairvoyant to another, she revealed a curious knowledge of necromancy; she had read every book that she could find on Satanism and the Black Mass and would talk of astrology and the significance of dreams with grave conviction. But the cult of the fortune-tellers was inspired primarily by a desire to discuss herself and to be discussed. A single morning exhausted the possibilities of amusement from such a source, and her companions were less diverting than herself; Sonia Dainton dropped out when she found herself accorded second place, Summertown played a thin stream of monotonous jocosity over the survivors, and Webster fell asleep with an air of duty well done when he had provided luncheon for every one, discovered a new clairvoyant and driven the party to her at breakneck speed in the latest of the racing cars whose purchase constituted the overt business of his life.

They were to have met again with Lady Knightrider at the end of the season; but, when Arden and Jack Waring entered the train for Raglan, Loring awaited them with a grave face and pointed to a column notice in his paper, headed "Serious Flying Accident."

"Thank Heaven, it happened when she was with her people and not with me," he began. "That's my silly little fool of a cousin again! She got that fellow Gaymer down to Crawleigh Abbey; and, when her parents' backs were turned, they went off for a jaunt to Salisbury Plain. The manœuvres were on, so they brightened them up by flying so low that the inspecting general bolted and the troops scattered in panic. There'll be the deuce to pay for that alone. Then, on the way back, they came down in the New Forest and got hung up on a tree. Gaymer's broken a collar-bone and two ribs; and Barbara's badly shaken and bruised. Here's an opportunity for your literary genius, Valentine; help me to draft a telegram of sympathy which will shew at the same time that I think she richly deserved all she got."

The accident was Lady Barbara's formal introduction to England. Throughout 1909 there was an official pretence that she was not yet out; she would still be no more than seventeen when her parents returned, and both Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider refused to present her before that. The baptism of blood in the New Forest made her name and face known to every reader of every illustrated paper. "The ideal début for her," exclaimed Loring in disgust. "I can see her spending the rest of her life trying to live up to it."

Four days later he came into Arden's room with a letter which he threw onto the bed with a grim smile.

"Dearest Jim,

"It was sweet of you to send me that wire. I've strained my back and covered myself with bruises, but it was worth it. Fear is a wonderful sensation; I believe it's the strongest of all the emotions. I certainly feel that I shall never again get that sublimated degree of fear. I got Death. (D'you spell Death with a capital D? I always do—from respect; Death will outlast God.) You heard I had concussion? I knew I was dying and that one step would carry me over the dividing-line. There was a black curtain, like a drop-scene; and I knew that, as soon as that lifted, I should be dead and on the other side. I said to myself I wouldn't die. When I came to, the doctor was frowning terribly, and I heard him mutter, 'Just about time, too, young lady.' I wonder whether you'd be sorry, if I died, Jim. When I had appendicitis at Simla, you couldn't get through the streets for the people who were waiting to hear how the operation had gone off. The wires were blocked for three days with enquiries.

"I'm to be allowed out at the end of the week and hope to be well enough to come to you at House of Steynes with father and mother.

Your loving Barbara."

Arden smiled as he handed back the letter.

"Characteristic," he commented.

"Oh, very! Not a word about Gaymer. Or the feelings of her parents. She's had two new sensations and she can't be sure whether she'd get as good a press for her death here as in India. Crawleigh will have his hands full. You've not met him? Well, it's one thing to govern India and another to keep a little devil like that in order."

A month later, still in the detached spirit of the social satirist, Arden allowed himself to be introduced to Lady Barbara's parents in Scotland. He was anxious to study her family setting, for Lord Crawleigh was already beginning to be regarded primarily as the father of his own daughter and only in afterthought as a distinguished public servant. Fifteen years earlier he had first shewn the administrative brilliance and incapacity to work with colleagues which impel a man to a viceroyalty or the leadership of a disgruntled party of one on the cross-benches. In Canada, in Ireland and in India he had been publicly admired and privately abhorred. Without the backing of long established authority, however, he was thrown on his own resources; and paper-work genius proved itself powerless without palpable force of character. Over-sensitive to his personal dignity, he treated his wife and children with the pomp and despotism of Government House; according to Loring's description, councils were convened to decide what train should bear them from London to Crawleigh Abbey; the cook's shortcomings were minuted to Lady Crawleigh for observations and appropriate action; the servants were pinned to the straight path of their duties by proclamation, and the household books were scrutinized with an exhaustive particularity not vouchsafed to the preparation of an Indian budget.

It was the self-protective assertion of a man sensitive to his physical inadequacy. Lord Crawleigh's domed head, ascetic face and rimless spectacles were impressively intellectual, but he degenerated as he went lower. The bottom half of his face was confused with a straggling blonde moustache intended for an operatic viking; his body was too short, his legs too long; and, when he became excited, his voice rose querulous and shrill. But the viceregal manner carried him far. Lord Neave and his two younger brothers had been taught obedience at Eton; Lady Crawleigh, as her passivity and plumpness hinted, suffered from a family streak of laziness, which she shared with Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider, and from twenty-five years' experience of her husband, which she could share with no one. It required Barbara's temperamental irreverence and gipsy craving for liberty to break down the imposing forms and spirit of her father's rule. The boys, who could be caned while she remained immune, sheltered themselves behind their younger sister; and, with a woman's genius for tactical alliances and strategical choice of ground, she explored and profited by the weak places in the enemy's system of defences. Her father's public position and private dignity were her strongest accessories. "She can always blackmail him by threatening a scandal," as Loring explained.

So long as she had her own way, Arden discovered a rule of peace and mutual affection. Lady Barbara hated to be on bad terms with any one; and her parents were humanly, if reluctantly, proud of her. Throughout his visit to House of Steynes, she dominated the party by her vitality and versatile charm. Loring was in the early stages of devotion to Sonia Dainton and disappeared as long and often as possible to escape his mother and sister, who were trying to avert an engagement, and Lady Dainton, who was forcing it to a head; and in his absence Arden watched Lady Barbara posing herself in the middle of the stage, methodically sharing herself among the guests and holding her own with all. It was the fruit of early years, during which she had lived consistently in public, meeting men of every profession and country, listening, remembering, learning and giving her best in return. She shewed a nice appreciation of personality and varied her attitude with her audience. In talking to Arden himself she still gravely met pose with pose and extravagance with extravagance.

"D'you feel you know me adequately now?" she asked him on the last night. "Mr. Deganway told me you were going to write a book about me."

"And you replied, 'Only one?' It is unfortunate that Meredith has already taken 'The Egoist' as a title."

Lady Barbara turned slowly, as though he were a mirror, and gave him time to appreciate her slender height and lithe figure. One hand directed attention to her hair, as she brushed away a curl from her forehead; and she looked at him sideways with her fingers pressed against one cheek so that he should see the size and deep colour of her eyes.

"D'you think I'm unduly vain?" she asked.

"Genius demands vanity. But one comes back to the old question: what is behind it? One thinks of you in six years' time and asks oneself what will be left. You have been everywhere, Lady Lilith, and met every one whom the world considers worth meeting—they were not too numerous? No?—and you have read so much.... In six years' time you will be the best known woman in London, but there will be nothing left for you to do."

"There are always new experiences. When I had that accident in the New Forest, a man came from the other end of England, because he'd fallen in love with my photograph. He said he couldn't marry any one else after seeing me."

"It is surfeiting to be easily loved," Arden sighed. "One does not shoot sitting birds. Some day, perhaps, Lady Lilith will meet a man who goes to the other end of England to avoid her. That will be a new experience. She will follow him, of course. To find a heart will be the greatest experience of all. One will watch your career with interest."

"And describe it? Or are you afraid to risk my friendship?"

"The only book that could offend Lady Lilith is one in which she does not appear."

For the next six months Arden was compelled to study her through the press. Loring went abroad for the winter in his yacht, Lady Knightrider withdrew to Scotland, and Lord Crawleigh moved his seat of government from Berkeley Square to Hampshire. Despite the rival claims of a general election, however, she secured creditable space in the daily and weekly papers. A ball at Crawleigh Abbey was followed by an abortive rumour of her engagement to her cousin Lord John Carstairs. A prompt and unambiguous disclaimer was issued, but the findings of the commission, which Lord Crawleigh appointed under his own chairmanship to investigate his daughter's conduct, were such that he deemed it prudent to transfer his seat of government from Hampshire to Cap Martin. A series of photographs from the Riviera correspondent of the 'Catch' shewed her walking demurely with her father, playing tennis and participating less demurely in a battle of flowers and a fancy-dress carnival.

In the spring of 1910 public interest was deflected to another branch of the family, for Loring's engagement to Sonia Dainton was announced. But by that time, as Arden pointed out, a man had only himself to blame if he did not know all that was to be known of Lady Barbara Neave.

"How poor Jim must loathe all this self-advertising," said Jack Waring, when he met Arden at the County Club to discuss the engagement. "I've never even seen her, but I've had her and her hats and her clothes thrust under my eyes by these infernal papers till I'm sick of them. She's talented, she's charming. I know all the things she said to all the big pots in India. When she is twenty-one she comes in for all her godfather's money on condition that she marries a Catholic.... I suppose there must be a public for this kind of stuff, or the papers wouldn't print it; but she's on the level of a musical-comedy star. Arden, my lad, I'm an old man, but I swear people had a little more dignity and restraint in my young days. The one good thing about the court mourning is that she doesn't get so much opportunity for her antics."

"She'll emerge again, when it's over," Arden predicted. "Meanwhile, London is becoming very tiresome. Has life lost its savour? Are we growing old? One would give much for the tonic of a good scandal."

"There'll be no lack of that," Jack prophesied, "judging from the people I see in London nowadays."

CHAPTER THREE THE SPIRIT OF PAN

"A maid too easily

Conceits herself to be

Those things

Her lover sings;

And being straitly wooed,

Believes herself the Good

And Fair

He seeks in her."

Francis Thompson: "Any Saint."

"D'you remember once saying that you wanted the tonic of a good scandal?" asked Jack Waring one night three years later. "It was soon after King Edward's death."

"And we were all very respectable and dull." Valentine Arden roused from sleep, blinked at the clock and rang for a whiskey and soda. "One recalls it. There is a difference between court mourning and the second coming of Christ, but the English are the last people in the world to recognize it. And there is a difference between taking a tonic and being pelted to death with medicine bottles. Since those days one scans the paper each morning to see what new reputations have been lost. Who has made the latest Roman holiday?"

"Oh, it's this old business about your friend Barbara Neave."

Jack threw the paper to Arden and took up another in which he could read, with insignificant verbal changes, a second and equally gratifying account of his own prowess in the Court of Appeal that day. Three years earlier he had talked to Eric Lane of abandoning his unproductive criminal work on circuit; he now wondered whether he dared abandon circuit work altogether and concentrate on his London practice. After, perhaps, six years more he would be wondering whether to risk his whole practice by applying for silk. Success was none the less gratifying because he had backed his own determination against the disparaging anticipations of his friends. Jack knew as well as any one that he was not a great lawyer; but natural shrewdness gained him a reputation for sound judgement; slowness passed for caution; and the inelasticity which saved him from seeing all round a case was reinforced by an obstinate refusal to let go the single point which he had grasped. More than one over-astute witness in those three years had entered the box with assurance and left it in dismay.

Only those who had known him longest wondered occasionally whether his practice had not been bought at the price of his soul. The plea of work and a ponderous affectation of age excused him from any effort to widen his interests. As old a friend as Eric Lane was allowed to drop out of his life; he refused to enter a new house and on one pretext or another reduced the number of the old, until any time that he could spare from work was divided between his club and his home in the country. At the first his friends were at liberty to visit him, if they chose; but he was obviously happier with the two Chancery silks and the one Indian judge, all of them twice his age, in whose company he dined nightly. And the influence of Red Roofs was even more lamentable on a man who was born self-centred and opinionated; Mrs. Warning and Agnes idolized and spoiled him, the colonel crystallized an intolerant conservatism of ideas which was better justified as the mature experience of a middle-aged soldier and country gentleman than as the untried prejudice of a thirty-year-old barrister. "A man may be a prig or a bore or both," said Pentyre at a time of temporary estrangement, "but he needn't be so infernally pleased with himself about it." The school of sport and fashion which Jack had once led at Oxford entertained the same feeling, if it expressed it with more disappointment and less candour.

"The coroner would seem to have spoken with visible emotion," commented Arden, trying to disguise his relish as he read the paper which Jack had thrown to him. "One wishes one had stayed to the end."

"I've no doubt she'll try to use it as another advertisement," Jack grunted. "What her unfortunate people must think.... And what the younger generation is coming to. It's a good thing for Jim that he's being spared all this."

"Yet he also has unselfishly contributed to the general diversion," said Arden.

Three years had passed since Sonia Dainton delighted her friends by becoming engaged to Loring, and two since she astonished them by breaking off the engagement. He had at once gone abroad and was reported to be still cruising aimlessly in the East. The social ghouls had hardly sated themselves with gossip, when Webster entangled himself with the proprietress of a dancing academy and was constrained to pay damages for breach of promise; and, while this case was still being discussed, Jack Summertown proceeded to occupy the press for three days with an enquiry into a series of minor outrages inflicted on an unpopular brother officer. Valentine Arden sat through the whole variety programme, unamused and detached, watching his friends succumbing one after another to epidemic madness. "The spirit of Pan is abroad," he explained gravely.

Lady Barbara Neave had flitted on the outskirts of each new scandal; but, since her flying accident, she had contributed no scandal of her own.

For the first year of the three she opened her social circuit as comprehensively as an unfledged barrister. Lady Crawleigh carried her from Milford to Kenworth, from Warmslow to Lenge and from Cheniston to Granlake. Lady Barbara's interest in social analysis was roused and fed by her tour of the great houses; they required a technique different from the absolutism of Government House and the unaided personal ascendancy of London; and, if she remained unabsorbed into the new atmosphere, at least she returned to Crawleigh Abbey with a mature country-house philosophy and clear-cut ideas of what to avoid and extrude from her own parties. The second year was devoted to romantic exploration. At the end of the court mourning she met a pleasant undistinguished soldier on furlough and chose, for no better reason—so far as her parents could see—than that he was already married, to fancy herself in love with him. Their few meetings—and still more their emotional parting—convinced at least the theatrical side of her temperament that she had broken her heart in a hopeless passion. Always thin, she artistically allowed herself to waste. For twelve teeming months she passively accepted the worship of all who were intrigued by her attitude of mystery and unresponsiveness; then native impatience broke through the unconvincing crust of cynicism, and she returned to London in a dangerous state of expectancy and unsatisfied excitement. In the absence of an overt scandal, her father hoped that she was sobered from the tomboy who had spread devastation through his three viceregal terms of office; the lesser optimists opined that she was only awaiting adequate opportunity.

Disaster overtook her in the summer of 1913; and, whatever other criticism was made, no one could deny that she won notoriety in the grand manner. The facts, as disclosed in court, revealed that Sir Adolf Erckmann had given a ball at his house in Westbourne Terrace. Lady Barbara decided within a few minutes of her arrival that the party was over-crowded and tiresome. Finding her slave Webster unoccupied, she suggested that he should drive her to another dance in the country and return to Westbourne Terrace when the congestion had been relieved. As his own car was gone home, they explored the line until the unknown chauffeur of some one else's car was persuaded to take them to Rickmansworth, wait half an hour and bring them back. Lady Barbara promised that there should be no awkward consequences, if they were discovered; Webster substantiated her guarantee with a five-pound note; and, by the time that they had further cajoled him with a stimulating supper of champagne and cutlets, the driver's last reluctance was overcome.

The story was liberally punctuated with questions on the general propriety of a girl's bribing a strange chauffeur and stealing an unknown car, with comments, too, on the dignity of their carrying a bottle of champagne and a plate of cutlets into the middle of Westbourne Terrace. There followed a digression to discover how much had been consumed; Lady Barbara and Webster asserted unshakably that the chauffeur was sober and that, if his driving became erratic at any point, this was due to his admitted ignorance of the route.

While the question of sobriety was left in suspense, the expedition was reconstructed to the moment when the car reached a fork in the road and the chauffeur turned to Webster and asked "Right or left, sir?" Examined on the question of speed, Lady Barbara was sure that they were not going more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twenty-five at the outside, Webster conceded unwillingly; they could not see the speedometer. It was suggested, however, that they must have calculated how long the double journey would take; they had even noticed when the car started and when it stopped; a damaging calculation shewed that their average pace was thirty-seven miles an hour and that, if they drove slowly out of London, they must have reached forty-five or fifty miles an hour in the country. And they had not told the man to moderate his pace; it even seemed that they had encouraged him to drive faster.

At the fork in the road Webster called out, "To the right, I think"; then he saw that he was mistaken and shouted, "No! the left." In trying to change direction, the chauffeur drove into a wedge-shaped brick wall and was instantly killed. Lady Barbara and her companion escaped with a severe shaking and a few scratches from the broken glass of the wind-screen; the front of the car was smashed beyond repair.

The accident took place in open country without a house in sight. As soon as they saw that the driver was dead, Lady Barbara spread her cloak over the crushed head and broken face; Webster's nerve was gone, and she left him, whimpering, to guard the body, while she went in search of help. An early market-cart came to their rescue, and they rumbled slowly back to London, shivering in their thin clothes and glancing over their shoulders at a pair of twisted legs in black gaiters, which protruded stiffly from beneath a blood-stained cloak.

The news swept through London in the evening papers, and Lady Barbara was inundated next day with enquiries and messages of sympathy. So grudging a critic as Jack Waring contended warmly at the County Club that, apart from her silliness in rushing away to the country in the middle of the night and borrowing a car without leave, she was really not to blame; and it was a dreadful experience for any girl. By comparison with Webster she had kept her head and behaved very properly, taking the body straight to a hospital, communicating with the widow, making herself personally responsible for a liberal pension and undertaking to replace the shattered car. Before night two papers had published sympathetic interviews with her, reproducing in her own not undramatic words the abrupt transition from a careless drive to violent death, the slow passage of a funeral procession between barren grey fields, the silence and desolation of the night, the early-morning chill which beat on her unprotected arms and shoulders and the haunting sense of helplessness which dominated every other feeling. Inset was one photograph of her in evening dress and another with hollow cheeks and big ghostly eyes, in the subdued black frock which she had worn to receive her interviewers; for these Jack blamed the notorious vulgarity of the Press.

Admiration changed again to pity when the inquest opened. Sonia Dainton, who attended as an act of friendship, reported that the coroner was underbred and ill-tempered; Lady Maitland, who felt no curiosity but did not want Barbara to think that her friends were deserting her, added that he was a natural bully; and the Duchess of Ross, who hated any unpleasantness and only went—with Lord Poynter, Mrs. Shelley and Val Arden—to give the girl confidence, brought back word that, to the best of his ability and the utmost of his despotic functions, he was resolved to humiliate Lady Barbara, to discredit her associates and, without respect of persons, to put such a brand on her family and herself that they would never again dare to shew themselves among decent men and women. The witness learned on the first day that she was a pampered and spoiled child; blasée and restless, she would do anything for a new excitement; with that absence of rudimentary decorum which some people appeared to think "smart," she had lawlessly appropriated a car—the coroner wondered what she would think if any one took one of her father's cars "just for a joke"—she had helped to make the driver intoxicated, thereby shewing characteristic disregard for the safety of mere ordinary people who might also want to use the road; she or her companion—was it usual for a girl to ride about at night unattended in this way?—had incited the chauffeur to drive at a reckless rate of speed. And the price of this prank—the momentary diversion of the Lady Barbara Neave, daughter of the Marquis of Crawleigh, one time Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—was the hideous death of a man who left behind him a widow and four small children. Lady Barbara, who naturally thought that money paid for everything, was graciously and of her abundance trying to compute the dead man's cash value to his wife. The hearing was adjourned for a week, as Mr. Webster was indisposed by the shock of the accident.

Had the coroner been inspired by malice, he could not have waged a deadlier warfare than by taking three days for the inquest and allowing intervals of a week for the case to be discussed. The stream of sympathy ran dry; and, if no one criticized Lady Barbara to her face, every one chattered about the enquiry and took his time from the coroner. Repenting his precipitate tolerance, Jack Waring told the two Chancery silks and the Indian judge that it was absurd for Crawleigh to say that the man was abusing his position and stirring up class prejudice; when one looked back over the last few years, one remembered a dozen things which Lady Barbara had been allowed to do for no better reason than that she was Lady Barbara Neave; but a line had really to be drawn somewhere. If Crawleigh disliked having mud thrown at him in public, he should exercise his authority with the girl; her friends were wholly impossible....

By the time that Webster was well enough to give evidence, the tide was in flood against him. The breach of promise case was fresh in the public mind; and, if it could not relevantly be brought up against him, it had at least familiarised his appearance and history and made a dark background to his examination. Mr. Webster was a young man; he did not work for his living, as he had considerable private means; in fact, he had nothing to do except to spend money and amuse himself. Pressed to state what good he was effecting for himself or the world at large, he could only say that he was interested in the theatre and fond of motoring—another instance of this small, rich, insistent class whose social importance varied in inverse ratio as its public usefulness. Put shortly, his object in life was to kill time, to avoid boredom.

The story of the night drive was rehearsed a second time, as the coroner wished to know who had proposed it; and the suspended question of the driver's sobriety was brought up for retrial. A bottle of champagne had been mentioned; had Mr. Webster and Lady Barbara partaken of it in their idyllically democratic picnic? Mr. Webster had dined at his club; could he remember what he had drunk with his dinner? His bill would no doubt shew that.

On the second adjournment a sordid note had been introduced, alienating the last sympathisers and sinking a tragedy in a drunken frolic. No one acquainted with Webster would associate him with a temperate life; those who saw him for the first time in court with twitching hands, a puffy face and flickering eyelids drew their own conclusions. If it was a shock to look at Lady Barbara and to hear it suggested that she, too, had been hardly accountable for her actions, the shock was not wholly displeasing to those who believed in the rottenness of so-called "society."

"They say I've murdered the man," she whispered to her father, as she left the court. "They've made the foulest insinuations about Fatty Webster and me. Now they say I drink. There's not much left, is there? I shouldn't be surprised if the people in the street hooted me."

Lord Crawleigh chewed his blonde, viking moustache and hurried her across the pavement into a closed car. He had never been present at an inquest before; and a voice had murmured that the coroner was working for a verdict of manslaughter. A nondescript crowd, dotted with cameras, waited in a half-circle outside the court; it was curious, but at present it was silent. Valentine Arden paused at the door and ostentatiously raised his hat. He, too, would not have been surprised to hear hooting; and he was disappointed to have no vivid contrast for his gesture of chivalry. He wondered whether Lady Barbara was missing the hostile demonstration; it would have been a new sensation....

On the third day she appeared once more in a black hat and dress and sat with her veil up, waiting for the verdict and the coroner's comments. Arden decided that she was modelling herself on Marie Antoinette and hoped that she would be given an opportunity of speaking. At the end, the jury found that death was due to misadventure; the reporters closed their note-books, and Lord Crawleigh reached for his hat. Arden left at once for fear of spoiling his earlier effect by repetition, but the evening papers reported the invective of the coroner in full.

"I suggest to the representatives of the press that it is their duty to give the widest publicity to this case. In an experience which goes back for a good many years now, I have never regretted so bitterly that I have no power to punish those who by wanton carelessness or evil disposition contribute to the death of a man or woman as surely as if they had killed him with their own hands. We have had an illuminating picture of the life and habits of some of those who traditionally expect us to look up to them for an example. If these people are too idle or vicious or brainless to live a life which shall be of use to the community, there should at least be power to restrain them from becoming a source of public danger. The proper treatment for such incipient hooligans and reformatory children is the birch-rod: I wish I had authority to order it. Rank and wealth can only be defended if they impose obligations: to these bright ornaments of the leisured classes they only afford opportunities. There has been far too much of this kind of thing lately, and I hope I shall never again be required to deal with so disgraceful a case. These young hobbledehoys, unchecked by any domestic discipline, unrestrained by common decency, owing no obligation to any one, a law unto themselves, are a new and poisonous growth in our social life. They fulfil no useful purpose, there is no room for them."

"There was a hostile demonstration in the street," Arden announced, as he came to the end of the report.

"How she must have enjoyed it!" grunted Jack.

"One wishes one had stayed to the end. The court was not unlike a gala night at Covent Garden. You have read the descriptions of the dresses? No?"

"All this only encourages her," Jack pointed out. "I'm about the one man in London who's succeeded in not meeting her, but, if there's ever a revolution, that young woman will have done more than any one else to bring it about. And she'll be photographed getting into the tumbril; and some one will interview her on the scaffold. On my honour, I can't see what amusement she gets out of it."

"Emotion, drama, limelight, romance," Arden suggested. "Lady Barbara may be sure that every one in London is talking about her at this moment; London is her stage."

"Well, she'll have to retire from it after this," said Jack.

"She will re-emerge," Arden prophesied.

Both predictions were fulfilled before the end of the summer. Lord Crawleigh held his hand until the inquest was over, because he could not trust himself to deal even justice while the offence was fresh. For three weeks he was equally indifferent to Lady Barbara's tragic attitude, the sympathy of friends and the infamies of a hostile press: more than one anonymous letter reached him, to be read with a frown and silently filed with the documents in the case; and it was reported that a reference to his family had crept into the patter of a music-hall comedian. In the rich silence of a choleric and expressive man the nerves of family and retainers stretched to breaking-point.

On the morrow of the verdict he assembled his wife and children in the library, rehearsed the charges against Lady Barbara and made known his will. Henceforward she was to go nowhere unless attended by her mother, one of her brothers or her maid. The family would proceed to Crawleigh Abbey that day and would remain there until further notice. The ball which Lady Crawleigh was giving would be cancelled; his daughter was to refuse all invitations already accepted and to accept no more. At the end of the season she would stay in no house unless one at least of her parents accompanied her.

As he ended, Lady Barbara stole a glance round the hushed library. Her three brothers were silent and submissive; her mother helpless and pained, like an "honest broker" who saw the nations of the world flying at one another's throats, when she had exhausted herself to keep the peace; her father's eyes were burning, and he dragged at one side of his moustache as though he were trying to tear it out by the roots. In every altercation, great and small, Lady Barbara had to fight single-handed.

"But, father, you seem to think this was my fault!" she cried in bewilderment.

Lord Crawleigh handed his wife a paper with fingers that trembled.

"Here are the dates and trains," he said. "You will go to the Abbey by the 4.10 from Waterloo. I shall join you at the end of the session." He turned to his daughter without trusting himself to face her dark, reproachful eyes. "I contemplate taking you to Raglan in August and House of Steynes in September, if your aunts see fit not to withdraw your invitation——"

"But how long is this going on?" Lady Barbara interrupted.

"I cannot permit any discussion," he answered in something that was half a whisper and half a sigh.

Lady Barbara looked at him reflectively and went to her room. When she came of age, in little more than a year's time, he would have no means of coercing her. Without waiting a year she could go to Harry Manders and demand to be given a part; he had offered her one in her own duologue. But the tension of the last three weeks and the dazing examination and attack at the inquest had left her uncertain of herself. A day or two at the Abbey, even though she were snatched away in the middle of the season, would give her time to find her bearings and discover what people really thought of her.

The more she pondered, the deeper grew her bewilderment. If all had gone well, the dash to Rickmansworth and back would have been regarded as a wholly innocent diversion in the course of a tiresome evening; on her return every one else would have regretted that he had not come too; even the borrowing of the car was venial, for the owner refused to accept any compensation, though the insurance company might well make difficulties; even he regarded the expedition as a joke, which had unhappily turned to tragedy, and was far sorrier that Lady Barbara should have been upset than that the chauffeur should have been killed.

If the facts, then, were innocent, she was being persecuted by the coroner and threatened with persecution by society at large for an accident to which she had contributed nothing. The chauffeur was sober enough to drive through dense traffic on the Harrow Road; Webster—she remembered his words—had looked at his watch and said through the speaking-tube, "You can let her out a bit now, I should think. We don't want to keep you out too long." The charge that any one of them was drunk would have been more insulting if it had been less grotesque. And for this the coroner had suggested that she should be ostracized. And her simple-minded father imagined that there were other simple-minded souls who would take such a Jack-in-office at his own pontifical valuation.

She almost hoped that they would, so that she might force them in triumph to acknowledge her innocence. To start as an outcast and win her way back was a dramatic dream which almost made her wish that she was guilty. To become an outcast might be as dramatic as to rise from obscurity to a pinnacle of fame.... Napoleon owed half his place in history to St. Helena.

An undistracted fortnight at the Abbey cooled Lady Barbara's resentment and checked the more romantic flights of her imagination. Her father's judgement was clearly at fault; to run away was to admit herself in the wrong. By the time that she had got herself into perspective, the season was so near its end that she did not think it worth while to make a demonstration and to occupy her room in Berkeley Square by force. But the late summer and autumn lay before her, and, when her father came to the Abbey for a week-end in July, she informed him that she had not yet cancelled any of her arrangements for staying with friends.

"You will remain here till we go to the Riviera in February," he answered.

"But, father, I'm not going to. This is quite serious. I've been here a month without seeing a soul; I should go mad, if I had to vegetate for another seven months. If you won't let me go, I'm afraid I must go without your leave."

"That may not be as easy as you think."

"What d'you mean?"

Lord Crawleigh unlocked a red leather despatch-box, turned over his files and produced a sheet of paper which he spread before her.

"This is a copy of a cable which your cousin has sent to his mother from Surinam. I had intended taking you to House of Steynes, but that is out of the question now."

"Please arrange that Barbara and her friend are not admitted to my house. This applies to Monmouthshire and Scotland as well as London."

Lady Barbara handed back the paper and tried to laugh, but she knew that her expression was out of control. If the news had reached Surinam, it had reached every cable-station on the way; and the operators had hardly done feasting themselves on the inquest before a message, signed "Loring" and mentioning her by name, added a dainty titbit to the savoury repast. Sooner or later it would be common property that her own cousin had slammed his door in her face for fear of contamination; the family would be divided into those who knew her and those who publicly refused to know her; she would become a test-case for disreputability.

"Jim has his own standards of loyalty, hasn't he?" she commented and was infuriated to find her voice trembling. "He's usually so keen on the family that I shouldn't have thought he'd have wanted to take the whole world into his confidence. One good thing, he can't call me self-advertising after this. Have you seen the darling boy's mother? Is she—proud of him over this?"

"She was as much shocked as I was that you should have made it necessary."

"I? Father, you can't make me responsible for this. But is she proud of his chivalry? And I suppose you didn't make a fight for me? I must see her. I want to tell her about the accident." She pressed her hands to cheeks which were still hollow from the anxiety of the last two months and looked at her father over her finger-tips. "I'd never seen any one killed before, I'd never seen a dead body; and I couldn't sleep at night, because of it. I kept seeing that unhappy woman's face, too, when I had to tell her that her husband was dead. I didn't ask for sympathy, but I thought perhaps my own father and mother might have seen that I wasn't exactly—enjoying myself, that I was ill, worried out of my mind. If I had a daughter, I should have felt for her, I think, when a foul-mouthed little reptile hinted that she was drunk and that her lover had helped her kill an innocent man for her own amusement. Never a word! Do you know that for three weeks you only said 'Good-morning' to me, father? Even if I was guilty a hundred times over, it wouldn't have compromised you to be sorry that I was suffering. I don't complain. You at least left me alone. But Jim waits till I'm beaten to my knees, waits till I'm bleeding—and then hits wherever he can see a bruise or wound. That wasn't necessary, father."

Lord Crawleigh rearranged his papers without answering. He was himself so much humiliated by his nephew's cable that he had hardly thought how it might affect Barbara. She was always most formidable when she stood, as now, with drooping head, composed and subdued, speaking in an undertone and rejecting in advance any sympathy that he might belatedly offer her. She had learned in childhood to fight men with their own weapons and to fall back on her sex when the battle was going against her. He had seen her trading on pathos a hundred times with her mother and aunts, using to full advantage a pose of tired frailty, a wistful mouth and big eyes which filled with tears at will or flashed black with indignation; she could droop her head and body until she looked like a tortured martyr, or cough until she looked consumptive. Almost certainly she was acting now, but her passion for romance and a dramatic impact led her to act without knowing it.

"If you had behaved properly, this would not have happened," he threw out with weak, inconsequent irritability.

"It's too late now. Are you going to House of Steynes? Do you allow people to say that they'll be glad to see you on condition you don't bring your daughter with you? And will you invite Amy and Aunt Eleanor here to meet somebody who can't be admitted to their house?"

Lord Crawleigh had enough imagination to see the more obvious consequences of his nephew's ultimatum; but he could not devise an effective reply, and it was merely exasperating to have his own disadvantage explored and stated by Barbara.

"I talked to your aunt. She says she daren't go against Jim's wishes. After all, they're his houses. She's writing to him——"

"To intercede for me?" Lady Barbara interrupted scornfully. "When next I enter House of Steynes, it will be on his invitation. And, before I allow him to invite me, he will apologize."

"It's no use taking that line," cried her father testily. Her last two sentences had exceeded the probable limits of sincerity, and he swooped before she could escape into a convincing pathos. "If any one ought to apologize——"

Lady Barbara caught sight of her reflection, full-length, in a mirror, with her father fidgetting at her side. He looked insignificant, almost ridiculous, with his domed forehead and straggling blonde moustache, his short body and long legs. She wanted to make him see himself and to play up to their two reflections like Metternich and L'Aiglon in the mirror scene.

"I can only apologize for the fact of my existence," she sighed. "I was not responsible, father, and you know it. And, instead of standing up for your own daughter, you let her be insulted. I can't do anything with people who stab in the back, but I'm ready to meet every one! I will meet them. If they want to insult me, they can insult me to my face."

The embargo on Lady Barbara's presence only extended to the houses controlled by her cousin. In August she went to stay with Lady Knightrider in Raglan and was received with demonstrative affection. A gentle reaction had set in, inspired directly by Lord Crawleigh and aided by all who felt that Jim Loring's precipitous cable had placed the family in an intolerable position. Working in a sympathetic atmosphere, Lady Barbara enlisted her aunt's support in a campaign which was to rehabilitate her or at least to shew whether she stood in need of rehabilitation. As soon as they returned to London for the autumn, Lady Knightrider undertook to give a dance and to insist that Lady Loring and Amy should come; if Jim were home by then, she would make him come, too, and the whole ridiculous quarrel would be forgotten. Lady Barbara intended to go farther than the settlement of a family difference. The party should be a challenge to all who felt disposed to criticise her; she was determined to appear side by side with Webster and to give them their opportunity; and any one who declined to come would have to shew convincing justification for his refusal.

The invitations were sent out six weeks in advance; Lady Knightrider reasoned with those who made excuses, sent reminders to those who had accepted and surrounded herself with a staff of energetic lieutenants.

"You're coming on, Val, aren't you?" asked George Oakleigh distractedly on the night of the ball, as he prowled hungrily through the County Club with a list in his hand. He had undertaken to bring six men and was bribing them beforehand with dinner.

"A doubt has crept in," Arden replied uncertainly. "One invitation may be attributed to hospitality; four suggest panic."

"Well, if there are too few men, you'll be all the more popular; if there are too many, you can go home early. Gerry, I'm counting on you."

Deganway paused for an instant on his way to the cloak-room.

"My dear, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

Oakleigh added a tick to his list and hurried after Jack Waring. They were still disputing, when Eric Lane was announced.

"I don't dance, I can't talk and I want to go to bed," said Jack firmly.

"You can go after half an hour," Oakleigh promised.

"Well, I'll come for one cigar, if Eric comes too. I'm an old man, George; I haven't been to a ball for ten years."

At eleven o'clock Oakleigh convoyed them securely into the drawing-room of Lady Knightrider's house in South Street. By the test of numbers the dance promised well, for the house was already crowded and Lady Barbara's relations were in full attendance. Her triumph was left incomplete by the absence of Webster, but he had been snubbed more than once in the last few months and was waiting for time to heal his reputation. She had spent the afternoon arguing with him until she felt her dignity compromised, and the embers of her ill-humour smouldered through the night.

By prearrangement Jack escaped to the smoking-room for a cigar, while Eric unbosomed himself of news which had been choking him for three days; Harry Manders had accepted a play, which was to be produced in the following autumn; after eight years of disappointment the daydream was being realized. They were still bandying congratulations and thanks, when the smoking-room was invaded by Deganway and a girl.

"Isn't that the famous Lady Barbara Neave?" Eric whispered.

Jack half turned and shook his head.

"Don't ask me. I'm shortly starring at the Halls as the one man in the world who doesn't know her and doesn't want to. I think it must be, all the same. Gerry seems to be getting called over the coals for something."

Lady Barbara's annoyance with Webster was spending itself on Deganway. There were long silences, broken by deferential squeaks of small-talk from him and restored by petulant rejoinders from her. She treated her companion with a contempt that was almost insolent and jumped restlessly to her feet, as the band began to tune up. Deganway hurried after her to the door, and the calm of the smoking room was only disturbed by half-heard music and the sound of high, rapid voices on the stairs. As his second cigar burnt low, Jack looked at his watch and beckoned Eric from his chair.

"Come and say good-bye; then you can drop me at the club," he suggested.

They steered a tortuous and apologetic course through the couples seated on the stairs and looked hopelessly for Lady Knightrider. In their absence the drawing-room had filled to overflowing, and the landings and balconies were packed to the limit of their capacity. As the next dance started, Deganway entered, blinking in the light, from one of the open French windows; Lady Barbara was still with him, but, as the music began, she was claimed and taken away.

"First time I've ever seen you indulging in frivolities like this, Jack," he said, letting fall his eye-glass and hunting for his cigarette-case.

"Well, I don't dance, and the conventional alternative is to talk to young women," answered Jack. "I confess that I can imagine less dreary pastimes—for both."

"That depends on the woman. I've spent most of the evening with Babs Neave. My dear, there's plenty of excitement in talking to her! Care to meet her?"

"I'm going home as soon as I've found Lady Knightrider," Jack answered.

"It'd pay you to talk to her for a bit. Let me introduce you! She's awful good fun—doesn't care a damn what she says or does——"

"That's her general reputation," interrupted Jack.

"Oh, you mustn't believe everything you hear about her. She's quite all right really; awful nice girl. Let me introduce you!"

Jack shook his head and took Eric by the arm.

"My dear Deganway, I've no doubt she's everything you say, but I don't care a great lot for the Websters and Penningtons and Welmans and Erckmanns and all that gang that she goes about with. They're such devilish bad style. Good-night."

Deganway grinned maliciously.

"I've a good mind to tell her what you said. Do her no end of good. And I should get a bit of my own back after the way she's been ragging me."

They stood talking by the door until the music stopped. Then Jack and Eric turned and went downstairs, while Deganway sidled up to Lady Barbara.

"No, you're tiresome to-night," she told him, when he asked for another dance. "Who are those two going out? I don't know them."

"The fair one's Jack Waring——"

"Well, I should like to know him," Lady Barbara interrupted. "I'm tired of everybody."

Deganway hurried obediently out of the room and returned a moment later with a smirk of satisfaction.

"Try again, Babs," he suggested. "Waring's not taking any."

"Do talk intelligibly, Gerry!"

"Well, I told him before that he ought to meet you. I said what good fun you were and what he was missing and all that sort of thing——"

Lady Barbara shivered at the blunt catalogue of her charms.

"What did he say?"

By natural compensation Deganway atoned for certain defects of intelligence by an excellent power of mimicry. He gave not only Jack's lilt and phraseology, but his facial changes and rather prim, tight-lipped smile.

"I tried him again," he added, "but he said he must go to bed. I don't believe he wanted to meet you."

Lady Barbara smiled composedly, but the brusque rebuff, brusquely quoted, wounded her pride as nothing had done since Jim's cable. Some one had taken up the challenge, as she had feared—or hoped.

"Sorry he's so hard to please," she answered lightly. "You can give me some supper, if you like. Who and what is he? A candid critic is so rare that I should quite like to meet him."

CHAPTER FOUR APHRODITE DEMI-MONDAINE

"What rage for fame attends both great and small!

Better be d——d than mentioned not at all!"

John Wolcott: "To the Royal Academicians."

"The Princess Juanita dawned upon respectability like Aphrodite rising from the gutters."

According to Mrs. Shelley, as quoted by Eric to George Oakleigh and the author, this was the opening sentence of Valentine Arden's "New Jerusalem," and she had given a luncheon party on the strength of it. Since her husband's death, Eric had edged gently away from her self-conscious artistic menagerie; he had been recaptured for a moment after the Coronation, when his father was knighted for "eminent services to the study of Anglo-Saxon" and he could himself be introduced as "the son of Sir Francis Lane, you know"; and it was no sooner hinted that a play of his had been accepted by Harry Manders than she dragged him back into his cage with a tacit order to stay there until his public interest was exhausted.

It was Mrs. Shelley's practice to read every book of importance on the day of publication; it was her ambition to know all about it before it was written. The new satire, she informed her guests, had engaged Arden's energies for two years and presented a picture of London society under the empire of Sir Adolf Erckmann and the cosmopolitans; the forces of respectability had not escaped the impartial lash of his ridicule, and almost every character was a portrait. Mrs. Welman waltzed unmistakably over the glittering pages with Sir Deryk Lancing; Lord Pennington, Jack Summertown and the Baroness Kohnstadt flitted from place to place like the chorus of a musical comedy, and every scandal of the last ten years was described or mentioned. If the book were ever published, Mrs. Shelley was convinced that the heavens would rain writs for libel; certainly no one would continue to know the author. She had reasoned with him, but he was apparently tired of London and contemplated impressing his personality on New York.

While no one was secure, Eric gathered that the greatest speculation surrounded the identity of "Princess Juanita." Mrs. Shelley maintained that the character must be intended for Sonia Dainton, who had joined the Erckmann faction when she broke off her engagement with Loring; Lady Maitland, who was still smarting in the belief that Arden had sketched her for his earlier "Madame Chasseresse-de-Lions," had no doubt that he was now squirting his poison at Lady Barbara Neave. "A man like that," she told Mrs. Shelley, "would never waste time on a commoner like Sonia Dainton when he could besmirch the daughter of a marquess and tickle his wretched provincial audience by calling her a princess." Her bitter words were repeated to the author, who announced that he was giving his book the sub-title "Commoner and Commoner," and dedicating it to Lady Maitland. Only when he was tired of his friends' good advice did he admit that the satire existed but in his imagination.

"One is taken altogether too literally," he complained to his friends in the smoking-room of the Thespian Club. "A grim, cultured hostess, spectacled young poets having their own poems explained to them by Lady Poynter, a dinner which one ate and tried to forget, furtive confidences on the wine from Lord Poynter, a succession of longueurs—you see the scene? Chelsea.... Earnestness.... Ill-assortment.... Without any wish to épater le bourgeois, one played with an idea, developed it, invented characters, let fall a phrase.... Perhaps one has allowed good Sir Adolf to obsess one's mind.... It was not a remarkable phrase; but one could hardly have caused a greater stir if one had telegraphed anonymously to one's friends—"Fly. All is known." Lady Knightrider almost offered one a blank cheque to stop publication. A jeu d'esprit must be labelled before it is offered to the English."

"Well, I'm glad the book's not going to be published," said Oakleigh. "That little gang's had quite enough advertisement without any help from you."

"One hates to disappoint Lady Barbara," answered Arden reflectively. "Undeniably she compels a reluctant admiration. She has lived in three continents—in regal state; she has met every one and done everything; in her leisure she has written plays, selected poetry, exhibited caricatures—not altogether contemptible—of her family and friends, patronized new schools of decoration, invented new fashions of dress and, as all the world knows, worn them. What remained? One met her first some years ago and asked oneself that question. It is still unanswered!"

"At present she's bolstering up two or three dozen people who are only received on the strength of her name," Oakleigh replied. "And she's going to find that her name isn't strong enough to carry them."

"These people go to her head," Arden replied with disgust. "One credited her with more detachment."

The campaign of rehabilitation had not been an unqualified success. Lady Knightrider aimed at reconciling Barbara with her relations rather than at reconciling her relations with her friends. There was an implied threat that she must choose one or the other; and a prevalent feeling was crystallized by Jack Waring, when he said that she was not worth knowing at the price of having to know her disorderly retinue. While she welcomed the concordat, Lady Barbara could not explain to Sir Adolf Erckmann that he was her fit companion one day and unfit the next; she might gently repel a cosmopolitan here and there, but she could not refuse all their invitations always; loyalty imposed its obligations, and stronger than loyalty was an impatient desire to tell other people to mind their own business. Yet the concordat might have endured, if the discussion of Arden's hypothetical book had not impelled Lady Knightrider hot-foot from Mrs. Shelley's house to his rooms at the Ritz. Not content with her legitimate relief at finding that "Princess Juanita" was no less a myth than "The New Jerusalem," she confided to Arden that dear Barbara did go about with "really rather dreadful people"; some one at her party had said that the girl's friends were such that he preferred not to know her. So long as she associated with them, it was only too probable that there would be another unpleasantness of some kind.

"I really think it my duty," she said on leaving, "to drop a little hint to my sister."

The nods and winks of verbal warning are apt to take on an exaggerated significance when defined in black and white. On receipt of the letter Lord Crawleigh motored to London and opened a new commission of enquiry to investigate the personal desirability of his daughter's associates. If Lady Barbara was at first bewildered, she was in no way daunted, for in the endless intermingling of groups throughout London she could usually find a sponsor for the most draggled of her friends. Sir Adolf Erckmann's private life might lead him into the Divorce Court, he might even be the "vulgar, common fellow" that her father described, but he had dined in Berkeley Square as a member of Lord Crawleigh's Departmental Committee on Indian Currency Reform. Lady Crawleigh always went to the vulgar, common fellow's famous musical parties in Westbourne Terrace. Lady Barbara had originally met Mrs. Welman at a performance of "The School for Scandal," organized by Lady Maitland for charity, and had naturally accepted the implied guarantee; it was not against civil, canon or moral law for a woman to have been on the stage. Those who, like Webster, could not so easily be defended were pushed into the background. The battle of wits ceased to be amusing when Lord Crawleigh repeated his threat that Barbara would not be allowed to go anywhere unless she were suitably chaperoned. The dreary banishment at the Abbey lingered in her memory as a summer stolen out of her life. As her patience ebbed, she decided that there must be an end of these inquisitions.

It was easy to trace her present plight through Lady Knightrider to Val Arden; but there was some one behind Arden, for her father claimed to have chapter and verse for saying that people were refusing to know her so long as she associated with her present friends. With a shock of surprise she recalled a self-satisfied young man who had in fact met her invitation to be introduced with a drawling, "Thanks very much. She may be all you say, but...."

It was incredible that one bumptious boy could do so much harm.... Even when the commission adjourned without arriving at an agreed report, Lady Barbara felt that a vendetta was being forced upon her....

She had no plan of campaign and knew nothing of her adversary but his name. Apart from Gerry Deganway she did not know of any one who was acquainted with him; and Deganway had done enough harm already without being given new opportunities. But, if the vendetta required resource, resource should be forthcoming. She called on Sonia Dainton the day after her father's inquisition and proposed that they should go for a drive. As the car entered the Park by Albert Gate, she pretended to recognize a face and said:

"Wasn't that Jack Waring?"

"I didn't see," Sonia answered.

"It was like him—though I don't know him to speak to."

"You'll find him very sticky. He's a great friend of your cousin Jim. When we were engaged, I used to see a certain amount of him. He's a heavy, Stone-Age creature; when he and Jim and George Oakleigh put their wise old heads together, there was nothing they wouldn't disapprove of!"

"I hear he's been good enough to criticize me," said Lady Barbara carelessly.

"When he doesn't even know you? What did he say?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, what does it matter? Some one started a story the other day that I took drugs. Li Webster heard a woman say, 'I was told by a friend who'd been to the same dressmaker; her arm was all red and pulpy; I believe she's been doing it for years and that's why she always wears long sleeves at night.' Have you ever seen me in long sleeves, Sonia. I've got much too good arms! And, if I wanted to take the beastly stuff, shouldn't I have it injected where it wouldn't shew? I did want to meet that woman—just to tell her to use her brains. And, if I ever meet your friend Mr. Waring——"

"My dear, he's not my friend! I was asked down to Croxton for the hunt ball at the end of this month; I made Bobby Pentyre tell me who was going to be there and, when I saw Jack Waring's name, I said 'nothin' doin'.' I know those hunt balls! Vermilion men in pink coats.... Jack will be just in his element; he'll support a wall and tell everybody that he doesn't know any of 'these modern dances,' as though it were something to be proud of."

Lady Barbara laughed mechanically and sorted the new information into its appropriate pigeon-hole. She was dining and going to a play that night with Summertown and his sister; Sally Farwell's passion for Pentyre had become a habit, and, if he did not reciprocate her passion, he could hardly refuse her friend an invitation for the ball. Once within the same house as Jack Waring, she had decided nothing save that he could not be allowed to walk through the world with his nose in the air, saying that she or her friends were "bad style."

A week later she arrived at Croxton Hall and explored the terrain for the engagement. Waring, she learned, came once a year into Buckinghamshire from old habit, because he had hunted with the Croxton from Oxford; he was returning to chambers by the breakfast-car train next day. She had few hours for making her effect; and they were further reduced when Jack drove up three-quarters of an hour late to find that the house-party was already dressed and busily adjusting its relationships. Lady Pentyre scrambled through half a dozen introductions in as many seconds and hurried her guests into the dining-room, without giving him time to dress or even to see who was there; Barbara, standing a little behind the others, escaped notice; and, when she found herself seated by prearrangement at his side, she had to introduce herself.

"I believe you're a great friend of Jim's," she began. "He's a cousin of mine, and I've often heard him speak of you."

Jack was already disconcerted by having to dine unwashed and in a tweed suit; and his embarrassment increased as he guessed at her identity. For a while he would only talk disjointedly of Jim Loring, varying his conversation with apologies for his tweed suit; he had been kept late with a consultation, and, when he began to change in the train, two women got in at Bletchley. Barbara fastened on the consultation and with deft questions encouraged him to talk about his work. She had sat next to so many shy young men at official dinners that she could put any one at his ease. At her prompting and wholly unconscious of it, Jack discoursed of the bar in general and his own practice in particular for three-quarters of the dinner and was agreeably surprised to find her so intelligent a listener.

"I oughtn't to be here, really," he confided. "I haven't the time or energy for this kind of thing, but the Croxton's an old love of mine, I've not missed a Croxton ball since I was at Oxford." He was tempted to describe his first Croxton ball; but it was a long story, and he discovered that he had been monopolizing the conversation. "You're a great dancer, I expect?" he said with the indulgence of early middle age. "I look forward to watching you to-night."

Lady Barbara began to shake her head and then stopped with closed eyes and a bitten lip.

"I'm not going," she answered. "I've had such an awful headache all day."

"I'm so sorry! I don't dance myself, but I hoped you might spare me one or two for sitting out. If you're interested in law—the bar's by no means the dry-as-dust life some people think."

Talking to her was so easy that Jack had half determined to ask if he might have supper with her. Of the rest of the evening he could dispose comfortably enough by gossiping with old Gervaise, who had been in his father's regiment, and the other veterans of the hunt. Lady Pentyre never regarded him as a dancing man in making up her numbers. It would not be half so easy to find common ground with Sally Farwell or Grace Pentyre; without meaning to be unsympathetic, he felt that Lady Barbara might have chosen any other night of the year for her headache.

"It'll be better, when you get there," he prophesied encouragingly and wondered whether she would mistake his convenience for her own triumph. So far he had not looked at her, but he now stole a glance out of the corner of his eye and saw a straight, thin nose, haggard cheeks that had a pathetic fascination for him and a mouth which drooped wistfully; the lips were red, her eyes a velvet black, fringed with long black lashes and shaded with dark rings, changing colour and size like a cat's. The white, hollow cheeks combined with the dark eyes and red lips to suggest ravaging dissipation or ill-health; he would never be surprised to be told that she was consumptive. And he could not understand how any one so thin could be so attractive.

She caught him watching her and forced a smile.

"I've only been doing rather too much lately, I expect," she said.

"That I can well believe. But after dinner—I say, have you had anything to eat?"

"I had some melon.... But I'm not very hungry. If I don't go, don't tell Aunt Kathleen—Lady Knightrider, you know—will you? She gave me this dress specially and she'd be so awfully disappointed."

"Jolly dress," Jack answered, looking unanalytically at something which he could only remember afterwards as being generally black—with bits of silver here and there—and little transparent triangular pendants hanging down from shoulder to elbow. "I hope you'll be able to come."

"I shan't be able to dance," she sighed. "Every time I turn my head—Oo! I did it then! It's like a red-hot needle at the back of the eyes...." She picked up her gloves and held out a hand, as the butler announced that the cars were at the door. "I'll say good-night and good-bye. I hope you'll enjoy yourself. And I hope I've not been too unutterably boring."

Jack felt her hand pulling gently against his.

"When I'm trying to persuade you to come on with us?" he asked.

Lady Barbara shut her eyes in a second spasm of pain.

"Do you really want me to?"

"If you're up to it."

"I will, if you want me to," she promised.

For many years longer than Jack could remember, the Croxton Ball had taken place in the vast and half-derelict "King's Arms," once famous, with its long coffee-room and unlimited stabling, as the best posting-house in the county and the beginning of the last stage for coaches running from the east and northeast coast through Oxford to South Wales and the west. Once a year the dingy grey-stone hotel, filling one side of the market-place, blazed with unaccustomed light; and the barrack of stables behind awoke to welcome the procession of tightly-packed cars that explored their way with long white fingers down the broad, uneven village street.

Jack changed his clothes and joined a shivering group by the fire in the Commercial Room. Lady Barbara was sitting apart, sniffing a bottle of salts and gently repelling those who tried to engage her for a dance.

"She oughtn't to have come," murmured Lady Pentyre, who neither understood nor forgave her son for this eleventh-hour addition. After the disgraceful episode of the poker-party, she had vowed never to have the girl in her house again; and these later scandals were no recommendation to leniency. But, before she could hint at her objections, she was told that the invitation had already been issued. "If she's beginning a chill or anything——"

Jack crossed to the distant chair and was welcomed with a smile.

"How nice you look in that coat!" Lady Barbara cried. "Are those the Croxton buttons?"

"Yes.... May I sit and talk, if you didn't have too much of me at dinner? I feel responsible for bringing you here, you know."

"But I love doing what people ask me! It's my greatest self-indulgence. When are they going to begin, and what's all the fuss about in the hall?"

A babble of angry voices floated through the open door—criticism, suggestions and conflicting orders. The Secretary came in frowning and snatched at all members of the Committee within reach.

"I'll never go to those people again!" he thundered. "After all these years, too. Band hung up on the road. Wrong train. They won't be here for half an hour!"

A murmur of disappointment swelled through the room, eddying round the hall and rising from group to group on the stairs and in the ball-room.

Lady Barbara sat up alert, without any trace of headache or fatigue. The red lips were parted expectantly, with a gleam of small white teeth.

"I'll play!"

She darted from her chair, humming to herself and only pausing to crumple her scarf into a ball and to toss it with her gloves to Jack. He caught it mechanically, wonderingly. In a moment the grave-voiced girl with the tragic eyes and hint of consumption had transformed herself into something untamed, with shining eyes and irresponsible restlessness. He listened to her voice growing fainter on the stairs, then looked with some embarrassment at the crumpled scarf and gloves.

"Sometime, somehow, somewhere—

How should I know or care?—

It is written above

That fortune and love

Are waiting for me somewhere..."

The strict waltz rhythm was slightly modified to give scope to the voice; but no one had began to dance when Jack went upstairs, and Lady Barbara had to break off and say:

"Do begin, some one!"

"We want to hear you sing," murmured a diffident voice.

"Rubbish! What d'you like? Ragtime? A waltz?"

"When you are in love,

All the world is fair;

Hearts are light with laughter gay;

Roses,—roses all the way..."

Bobby Pentyre and Sally Farwell edged through the door; Summertown and his partner followed, and within two minutes the room was three-quarters full. Jack squeezed his way forward for a better view. Lady Barbara played tirelessly, modulating from waltz to waltz, humming a line here, whistling two bars there, until the Master panted up to the piano and cried "time." She laughed and sat back on the music-stool, softly fingering the keys and looking round the ball-room to see who was there. Jack stood self-consciously stranded by the door, assuring himself of the line of his tie, pulling down his waistcoat and glancing at the hang of his knee-breeches. Her eyes met his, and she smiled.

"Say when you want me to begin again," she called out.

"Give us just a moment," begged the Secretary.

She struck a chord and threw "Lord Rendel" at them with such tragic intensity that, at the end, Summertown raised a husky view-holloa of applause and the decorous group at the door clapped noiselessly. Jack always freely confessed that he knew nothing of music, but he felt bathed in delightful irresponsibility, as Lady Barbara mingled old English ballads with plantation songs and jolting ragtime with waltzes which seemed to draw his heart out of his body. She was gloriously free from self-consciousness. After two false starts, which were not lost on her, he crossed the room in the wake of a little party which went to beg for its favourite tunes.

"Awfully good of you to play like this," he said, as the others edged away. "I hope you're not making the headache worse?"

"I love making people happy." She stretched out her foot and pulled a chair beside her stool. "Tell me what you'd like me to play. D'you know "Deirdre of the Sorrows"? Not the play, but the waltz. Little O'Rane wrote it. You know him, I expect, he's a great friend of my cousin Jim." At the first chords of the waltz, couples from all round the room rose and began to dance. Jack threw one leg over the other and pushed his chair a short way back, faintly and belatedly embarrassed to find himself marooned on the dais by her side. "Mr. Waring——"

"Yes?"

"I want to ask you one question. You needn't answer it, unless you like.... And then we'll leave it alone. I'm not as bad as you expected?"

Though he had warned himself at the beginning of dinner to be untiringly on his guard, Jack looked up with a start. She was absorbed in the music; her head was bowed, and she only raised it to glance with half-closed eyes at the dancers, occasionally concentrating on one couple and regulating her time by theirs.

"You've answered your own question. Rather inadequately," he added.

"Thank you ... I wish you danced! You're missing such a lot!"

"Am I? Lady Barbara, why on earth did you ask me that?"

Her head drooped lower over the keys.

"Because it hurt so!" she whispered tremulously. "Am I so vulgar?"

"Do you imagine you're quoting me?"

"Oh, Mr. Waring, be honest! You despised me before you met me. Do you now?"

"It's the last thing I should dream of doing."

"Well, wasn't it rather unfair—before you even knew me? It's done me a lot of harm ... and it hurt so terribly. If you were just to say you were sorry——?"

Her humility was so unexpected as to be bewildering.

"My dear Lady Barbara, I've only seen you once before!" he exclaimed. "I did say something about you then; I criticized the people you went about with, if you're referring to that."

"Then you don't despise me?"

"You're the greatest revelation I've ever had."

As the waltz quickened to the coda, a stout, flamboyant figure appeared in the doorway, attended by a sallow escort armed with music-cases and instruments. The Secretary ended a warm exchange of invective to cross the room and thank Lady Barbara. Refusing to give an encore to the waltz, she bowed to Jack and hurried out of the room.

Half-way down the stairs he overtook her and asked to be allowed to sit out the next dance with her.

"We can hardly leave it like this, can we?" he urged.

"Like what? I must get some air! My head will burst, if I don't!"

She ran across the hall, rattled at the door-handle and hurried into the Market Square. The December night air lashed him like a jet of icy water and cut through his clothes; thirty yards ahead, Lady Barbara was running with arms outstretched and jumping from side to side over the grey-black puddles of dull, frozen water. A group of chauffeurs by the village pound removed their pipes and watched her; then replaced them; then removed them a second time as a second figure, in pink coat and knee-breeches, pounded along the echoing street. Once she glanced back on hearing the sound of footsteps; then ran on without changing her pace. They had overshot the last house and were facing an unhedged expanse of roots and crisp furrows before he overtook her.

"I say, what are you doing?" he panted, angry at being made conspicuous by her aimless freak.

Lady Barbara pressed a hand to her side, breathing quickly. Her hair had blown into disorder, her bosom was rising and falling; and once she kicked off a shoe to caress a bruised foot, balancing herself with her other hand on his shoulder.

"Impulse," she answered.

By moonlight her eyes were black; and, as she panted gently, her parted lips and rounded cheeks made a child of her. It was at least her third incarnation since eight o'clock, but Jack had lost strict count. As she squeezed the pebble out of her shoe, he noticed the provocative whiteness of her shoulders and the softness of her hair. His own pink coat and knee-breeches added the last touch to his discomfiture; and he knew that he could never equal her in creating the unconventional in order to master it.

"I was afraid your head might have made you faint," he murmured, consciously fatuous.

"It was only partly my head. Sometimes.... Did you see "Justice"? You remember the man in solitary confinement? He knew he mustn't pound on the door; he knew he'd be punished, if he did. He pounded all the same.... I've got too much vitality; I seem sometimes as if I'm in prison...." She shivered and gave a slight cough. "Is it very cold?"

"Not more than ten degrees of frost. I thought of bringing you a cloak, but I was afraid of losing you. If you don't come back at once, impulse will land you in double pneumonia."

She slipped her arm through his and began to walk, with a slight limp, back to the hotel.

"We had a gipsy in the family, though no one's ever allowed to mention her," she announced abruptly. "D'you call me pretty? I think you would, rather. Val Arden says I'm the 'haggard Venus.' Well, any looks we've got come from her."

"With a dash of temperament thrown in. Suppose we go a bit faster and then look for a fire? You're quite well enough to dance now."

"But I'd sooner talk to you. A girl told me the other day that you were—what was the word? 'sticky'; you never had anything to say, you were prim and old maidish——"

"I'm no good at ordinary social patter," he interrupted. "But you'd hardly apply that term to our conversation to-night."

They strode incongruously down the broad village street, past the group of expectant chauffeurs and into an ill-ventilated box described as the "reading-room." Both were emotionally out of breath, and the lights of the hotel made Jack self-conscious; he stole a sidelong glance at her and waited for the next change. Wistful appeal passed into effervescent irresponsibility; the self-possession of a woman of the world alternated with the radiant joyousness of a child.... And six months earlier she had left a German Jew's ornate carnival to drive with a sodden debauchee in a stolen car and had impaled an unknown chauffeur on the grey angle of a jutting wall in Hertfordshire. And there was the aeroplane accident; and the poker-party; and a dozen other things.... His glance held admiration as well as curiosity, and she smiled with glowing friendliness.

"Aren't you going to dance at all?" he asked.

"I didn't come here for that.... Now I'm going to pay you a compliment. I got myself invited because I heard you were coming; I wanted to give you a chance of judging me at first hand. There's an opportunity for returning the compliment, if you care to take it."

Jack looked at her with a surprise which he tried to veil, as he reminded himself again that he must be on his guard.

"I only hinted that your friends weren't good enough for you," he answered. "Knowing who you were and the positions your father had held——"

"Dear Jack, don't drag in father! Isn't that what I have to fight against? Having my personality submerged by his dead pomp and glory?"

Her use of his Christian name startled him; and she watched with amusement his stiff attempt not to seem startled.

"I'd sooner think of you as Lord Crawleigh's daughter than as Sir Adolf Erckmann's friend."

Her eyes half closed, and she looked at him through the long black lashes.

"I believe you're falling in love with me."

Jack lazily threw away the end of his cigarette, dusted imaginary specks of ash from his breeches and rose slowly to his feet.

"I was only thinking what I should feel about you, if you were my sister," he said. "Ought we to be going upstairs? Lady Pentyre's rather concerned about you."

"I'll reassure her," said Lady Barbara. "Don't bother to come up; you won't be dancing."

Though she had a reserve of self-control for scenic emergencies, he had snubbed her so wantonly that she darted like a black and silver moth out of the room before he could mark a change of expression. Jack followed in time to see her locate Lady Pentyre and take the chair by her side. The warm, scented air of the ball-room struck and flushed his cheeks like the heavy breath of a hot-house. Summertown, waltzing by, disengaged one hand and whistled shrilly on his fingers above the boom and wail of the band.

"Missing two, Babs?" he called out.

Lady Barbara pressed her hand against her eyes, then drew it away and shook her head.

"I'm not dancing to-night," she answered.

Lady Pentyre turned to her with mingled anxiety and impatience.

"Aren't you feeling any better?" she asked.

"I can't say that I am. When I stand, the floor goes up and down; and, when I sit down, the room goes gently round me."

Jack was leaning aimlessly against the door, and Lady Pentyre beckoned to him. She had no intention of leaving her son to make a fool of himself with Sally Farwell; and, if she told him or young Summertown to take Lady Barbara home, she would next hear that all three had fallen down a shaft in Durham.

"Mr. Waring, you're not dancing! Do you think you could find one of the cars and take this child back to bed? I hardly like to send her alone, you know, and every one here has a party of her own to look after."

Jack bowed with adequate graciousness, but Lady Barbara intervened with a vigorous refusal.

"I couldn't think of dragging him away," she exclaimed. "This is the only ball he ever comes to; and he's been looking after me so much that he hasn't had time to see any of his friends."

"But he can be back within an hour," Lady Pentyre urged. "It's still quite early."

Lady Barbara looked uncertainly at Jack, waiting for him to become more inviting. His face expressed no concern, and he was patiently gaining time by consulting his watch and looking from one to the other of them, as though he had no personal interest in the decision.

"Would that be agreeable to you?" he asked her at length.

"I don't feel that I have any right to spoil your evening."

"Illness is hardly within your control, is it?"

She walked downstairs with a novel sense of failure and a misgiving that she had overestimated his stupidity; yet a man must be more than ordinarily stupid not to appreciate her after the trouble that she had taken. Insisting on an open car, she settled herself in one corner and looked thoughtfully at her companion's reflection in the jolting mirror of the wind-screen. Valentine Arden, who allowed disparagement to become a disease, told her to her face that she had genius; George Oakleigh had said that she had "the clearest-cut personality of her time." And these things were industriously repeated to her.

Rather Lord Crawleigh's daughter than Sir Adolf Erckmann's friend.... But Lord Crawleigh's world had no place for any woman who was above the average. In Canada, in Ireland and in India she had tasted greater personal success before she was sixteen than London could offer her in a life-time. She had seen the government of India at very close quarters; and, after that, it was impossible to feel Sonia Dainton's elation at bobbing to Royalty at the Bodmin Lodge ball in Ascot week. At other times and in other places, dusty, long streets, dazzling white and quivering with heat, had been cleared for her and lined with picked native troops; in an Empire crowded with immemorial soveranties she had been the only daughter of a man who was vicegerent of the Emperor-King.

"You spoke too soon in saying you didn't despise me," she murmured.

They had covered but two of the ten miles, and Jack instinctively avoided altercation. He was no longer interested in a girl who deliberately invited herself to the same house, singled him out and detached him, in an open car and a north-east wind, to pick a quarrel or justify herself.

"If you're feeling ill, why don't you try to go to sleep instead of making conversation?" he suggested.

"I'm not making conversation!" she answered impatiently. "You attacked me on such slender evidence that I was wondering whether you'd any better excuse for attacking people like Sir Adolf, who's a very fine musician——"

"And an impossible bounder," Jack interrupted. "My father pilled him at his club ten years ago; if he put up again, I'd pill him; if he got in, I'd resign."

"And I suppose you'd 'pill' Villon and Benvenuto Cellini and Verlaine——"

"I would, if they were friends of Erckmann," Jack answered cheerfully.

She shivered and lapsed into silence. Talking to Jack was like explaining colour to a blind man. She had never sought out the Erckmann circle; it was one of innumerable circles which a connoisseur in life patronized and sampled for its distinctive atmosphere. Her god-father, Dick Freyton, had kept a string of race-horses at Oxford and taken a double first; he had dined with the Queen one day and entertained a party of comedians and jockeys the next; he had been a gentleman-rider and an ambassador, a soldier and a collector of early printed Bibles, a competent sportsman and a more than competent poet. Touching life at every angle, there was an Elizabethan spaciousness about him;—Loring's father did not forbid him the house because Bessie Galton took her company to Liverpool and he invited them all to stay with him at Poolcup. Freyton was too big to be compromised. And the world had developed so fast that nowadays a woman could touch life at as many angles; for some it was the only thing to do. The queens of the salon were dead, the political hostesses were dying. There was room for one universalist.

They drove to the lodge of Croxton Hall in silence. It was only when she saw him dropping asleep that she fanned the discussion to life.

"It's men like you who kill art in this country," she sighed.

"I can never see why there should be a special code of morals for a fellow because he grows his hair long and plays the fiddle," Jack answered, as he helped her out of the car and rang the bell.

While he explained their return to the butler, Lady Barbara let fall her cloak into a chair and walked to a glowing fire at the end of the hall. In the fender stood a tureen of soup and an urn of cocoa; behind her a big table was invitingly set with sandwiches, cake, fruit, syphons and decanters. Jack watched her for a moment and then explored the table critically.

"Is there anything you'd like me to bring you?" he asked as he chose a cigar and poured himself a brandy and soda. "Don't forget you've had no supper."

She looked at him over one shoulder and sighed contemptuously.

"How characteristic! The indecent irregularity of missing a meal! I eat because I love nice things; one gets a new emotion sometimes. When we were at Ottawa, father took me down to Washington, and one of the secretaries at our embassy fell in love with me. We met at twelve and he was in love with me by a quarter past. I suppose he was a man of method, like you, and never declared his passion under half an hour, so for five minutes we talked about food, and he asked me if I'd ever tasted Baltimore crab-flake. I hadn't. His car was at the door of the chancery, we both got in without a word; at 12:23 we were flying down Connecticut Avenue. We drove to Baltimore without a stop, had our crab-flake and returned to Washington in time for me to have a good rest before dinner. When father began looking for me, some one explained that I'd been taken to see the Congressional Library, and everything was all right till the papers next day came out with great head-lines—'Breakneck Race for a Crab-Flake.' 'Just Bully, Says British Governor-General's Daughter' Then there was the usual unpleasantness.... But the crab-flake was a new emotion." She turned from the fire and joined him at the table. "If I start eating caviar, I never stop."

The butler returned to announce that her maid had gone to bed and to ask whether she should be called.

"Oh, it's all right, thanks," she answered. "I'm feeling much better." She had talked herself into good-humour and, when they were alone again, she looked at Jack with a smile. "Are you enjoying yourself? You look so bored. What shall I do to amuse you?"

She pulled a chair to the fire and beckoned him to her side.

"I'm sorry to seem ungracious," said Jack, as he put down his empty glass, "but I've been commissioned to send you to bed."

"But the others won't be back for hours!"

"Exactly. Barring the servants, we're alone in the house, and it wouldn't look well for us to bolt away from the ball and then sit here talking all night."

Lady Barbara sprang from the chair and faced him with amazement in her eyes.

"My dear creature, do you imagine you're compromising me?"

"That's a strong word. I'm some years older than you, Lady Barbara," he added meaningly.

"But if you knew——"

Jack interrupted her with a shake of the head.

"If you're trying to tell me some of the things you have done, you may spare yourself the trouble. I used to think you were being swept off your feet by the people you went about with. The more stories you tell me, the more I'm tempted to wonder whether you don't set the fashion. Some one's frightfully to blame for not pulling you up, though I know Jim did his best. Does it make no difference to you when a man like that refuses to have you inside his house?"

Lady Barbara walked slowly to the table.

"You must apologize for that, Mr. Waring."

She imagined that she was contending with one man over a single hasty sentence; but behind Jack stood his father, his father's regiment and his father's club, all honestly conservative and gently self-approving. Behind the sentence there lay in support a social philosophy framed in days before England was corrupted by the uncertain morals of the east and the uncouth manners of the west.

"Isn't it true?" demanded Jack, unabashed. "He cabled to his mother from Surinam after the motor smash and that inquest. I wasn't told the exact words, but you haven't been to the house very lately, have you?"

He was so certain of himself—he was always so certain of himself—that the question rang out like a taunt. Lady Barbara felt her self-control weakening.

"And your informant?" she asked, still trying not to yield ground.

"I've really forgotten. Obviously no one in the family. So, you see, there must be several people who know. For what it's worth, I have not handed the story on."

"How chivalrous!—And to a girl that you'd never met!"

"I didn't want Jim to be mixed up in a fresh scandal. And you've driven this country near enough to revolution as it is."

He picked up his hat and was starting towards the stairs, when an unexpected sound stopped him, and he turned to see her burying her face in her hands. It was a surprising collapse in one who seemed to be made of steel, though he wondered whether the tears were an artifice or a novel indulgence of emotion.

"You didn't mean what you said!" she sobbed. "Please say you were only punishing me for taking you away from the ball!"

"I've not the least desire to punish you. You've got great qualities; you were charming at dinner, you're kind and good-natured, you can be fascinating when you like. And then you spoil all you are, all you might be and do, by tricks unworthy of a chorus-girl. Arranging this meeting at all to smooth one ruffled feather of your vanity. The sham headache. Calling me by my Christian name the first time we meet. Things of that kind. That's not the grande dame, Lady Barbara."

She began to collect her gloves and cloak.

"I'm sorry," she said with trembling lips. "You won't be troubled again."

"If you were sorry, you wouldn't try to be dramatic. Your 'curtain,' like your repentance, is only the latest form of the Baltimore crab-flake—a new emotion, a new indulgence.... Look here, I shall be gone before you're up to-morrow; won't you part friends?"

He crossed the hall with a smile and held out his hand without fear of a rebuff. She looked at him and had to confess herself at fault. His heavy overcoat was hanging open, and in his knee-breeches and pink coat he looked slim and boyish; he was a booby at dinner and a clod at the ball; outside his own profession he had no more knowledge or ideas than a schoolboy. Yet she submitted to his criticism almost in silence.

"Won't you part friends?" he repeated.

Lady Barbara could not let him ride off so complacently. She pressed one hand to her side and groped her way to the table; as she leaned against it, the friendliness died out of his smile.

"I shouldn't do that again, if I were you," he counselled, reverting to his slightly nasal drawl; and this time she could have cried without feigning, for she was tired and humiliated by her consistent failure.

"I am ill," she protested. "Needless to say, you don't believe——"

"My dear Lady Barbara, the worst of taking people in by lies is that afterwards they refuse to be taken in by the truth. That always means a dreadful muddle for everybody."

There was no trace of anger in the indolent voice; a lazy, superficial smile played still over the composed face, but she felt that she had touched his vanity, which was so petty that he could allow no one even to chaff him.

"I say, you are revengeful," she cried. "Just because, in the most harmless way——"

"I don't mind any one making the most complete fool of me—once," he interrupted. "A very moderate sense of humour carries that off. One doesn't want to make a habit of it, that's all. And I always think it's a perilous thing to begin playing with the truth."

"So you'll never believe anything I say?"

"We're so very unlikely to meet that it hardly matters. Won't you shake hands?"

She held out the tips of her fingers and, as he released them, caught him by the sleeve of his coat. He noticed that she was biting her lip and had either improved her acting or lapsed into sincerity.

"Are you like Jim?" she asked. "D'you despise me so much that you refuse to meet me?"

He looked carelessly at his sleeve, but she refused to understand the movement of his eyes.

"I should be honoured to meet you. Only I never go anywhere. Lady Pentyre and Lady Knightrider are about our only two links."

"And I suppose Jim will have me turned out of their houses, when he comes back. If you knew how I hated having people angry with me.... Will you meet me, if I don't have any of my objectionable friends, if I'm on my best behaviour——"

"I don't think that your experience of my society can be so alluring as all that," he laughed.

"I've never allowed any other man to lecture me as you've done!"

"Ah, but you invited it. You don't want me to come merely for a continuation of the lecture."

"Perhaps it won't be necessary."

Her voice and eyes softened appealingly—and then became charged with perplexity, as Jack gently removed her fingers from his sleeve.

"Another new emotion, Lady Barbara?" he laughed. "You won't easily convince me that I've changed your character in a night."

"You interest me," she murmured, with a puzzled frown.

"Ah, that rang true! But I'm no good at the modern business of discussing people with themselves. A man like Val Arden does that so much better.... Lady Barbara, are you ever going to say good-night to me?"

"In a minute. Will you come to Connie Maitland's Consumptive Hospital matinée after Christmas? It's at the Olympic, and I'm dancing there. I do want you to appreciate me!"

Jack reflected for a moment and then smiled lazily.

"I'll come to the matinée, if you'll promise not to perform," he answered. "If I'm not in court.... I know I'm old-fashioned, but I call it intolerable for you to blacken your eyes and rouge your face and make sport for any one who cares to spend a guinea or two for the chance of gaping at you. It cheapens you. I'd as soon put on tights and tie myself in knots on a strip of carpet outside a public-house."

Barbara leant against the table in helpless amazement.

"You're more of a Philistine than my own father!" she cried.

Jack smiled imperturbably.

"And what would you think if Lord Crawleigh came to that same matinée and gave a display of juggling with billiard-balls?"

"I should die happy," Barbara answered with a gurgle of laughter; then more seriously, "But why on earth shouldn't he? If he can do it, if the thing's all right in itself, why should the professionals have the monopoly? I'm very good."

"No doubt. But, if you had no more idea of dancing than I have, people would still flock to see Lady Barbara Neave. Now do you understand why I loathe the whole life you lead?"

When, late that night, she thought over the long succession of snubs and insults, Barbara chose this as the most wounding. She had recited and danced, acted and sung on occasions innumerable, always hearing and feeling that she was meeting the professionals on their own ground; they themselves hurried to congratulate her, and she fancied vaguely that she was paying the stage a delicate compliment.

"I've never been told that I hawked my father's position about for advertisement," she answered quietly.

"It's the result."

He picked up his hat again and again held out his hand.

Lady Barbara locked her fingers behind her back and turned away.

"I don't like the feeling that you'll ring for carbolic as soon as I'm out of the room!" she said.

"D'you think I should?"

"You wouldn't wait!" she cried, springing round as though she were going to strike him.

Jack's growing surprise merged in a novel sense of helplessness. The girl had wholly lost control of herself. Her pupils were dilated, her cheeks white with anger and fatigue; one hand gripped the back of her chair, and the other rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Not for the first time that night he felt that a man had only himself to blame for getting on to such terms with a woman. A lion's cage could be entered or avoided at will....

Yet he could not escape the feeling that even at the white-heat of passion she was enjoying her scene.

"Do part friends," he begged. "I shouldn't presume to criticize you, if I didn't think you worth it. I ask you—as a favour—to come to that matinée with me. Will you?"

Lady Barbara could not decide whether to try once again to punish him; she dared not admit that she was daunted, but she was certainly puzzled. At one moment he insulted her, at another he hoisted her on to a pinnacle and mounted guard below.

"Would you like me to come?" she asked.

"I should love you to."

"I'll come, if you want me to.... Now I think I shall go to bed. It would be a tragedy if we had another scene. Good-night, Mr. Waring."

"Good-night, Lady Barbara."

She looked at him steadily before turning to the stairs, still undecided whether to be angry or intrigued. Jack went into the library, chose himself a book, undressed slowly, read for ten minutes and dropped instantly asleep. Lady Barbara stood for many minutes in front of a long mirror, admiring the black and silver dress and watching the gleam of her arms and shoulders as she moved. Then with careless impatience she loosened the dress, leaving it to fall and lie in a tumbled heap by the fire; shoe followed shoe, stocking followed stocking; her maid would repair the havoc in the morning, and it was a relief to lapse into untidiness after so many hours of Jack Waring's orderly influence. Pulling an armchair to the fire she began to brush her hair. Six hours before, as her maid had brushed it for her, she had rehearsed the meeting with Jack up to the point when he apologized for his presumption in criticizing her. If only she had stopped then! But he was wholly different from her preconception of him; fully as 'superior'—and with as little reason—but disappointing as an intellectual antagonist; he was commonplace in mind and yet had a certain blunt stubbornness of character, a refusal to be stampeded—together with an indifference which still piqued her.

And the indifference was broken by a solicitude which he expressed in terms to earn himself a horse-whipping. Her eyes were blinded by a hot rush of shame when she remembered her gentle words and appealing voice at the piano. "I'm not as bad as you expected?" Humility was a pleasant emotion, but a losing card. At their next encounter....

She laid aside the brush and sat staring into the fire. The room grew gradually colder, but she did not notice it. Only when her ears caught the sound of subdued voices on the stairs did she rouse with a shiver and jump into bed.

CHAPTER FIVE NOBODY'S FAULT

"Cock the gun that is not loaded, cook the frozen dynamite...."

Rudyard Kipling: "Et dona ferentes."

As a matter of form and to wash her hands of personal responsibility, Lady Pentyre sent next morning for the local doctor. His advice—to take things quietly for a few days—enabled Lady Barbara to keep her promise to Jack with a good conscience. "They say that I have been doing too much," she told Sir Adolf Erckmann, "so I'm afraid I shan't be able to come to your party on Thursday...." On the same plea she wrote to Lady Maitland, promising to attend the matinée but regretting her inability to play an active part. When she had taught Jack to appreciate her, it would be time enough to shew him that her friendship was adequate guarantee for her friends.

On returning to London she angled without success for a first-hand report on him. To her earlier half-dozen words of disparagement Sonia Dainton added a break-up price for the family. The Surinam cable precluded consultation of Amy Loring, and Phyllis Knightrider could only affirm that Jack went every year to Raglan for a few days' fishing—when she was away and there was none but men present.

"I believe he's hopeless with a mixed party," she went on. "If you were told to bring a man anywhere, you'd never dream of asking him."

"Well, I think that's better than being the first man that everybody thinks of," Barbara answered. "God created Gerry Deganway to be the eternal fourteenth at dinner."

"Val Arden once said that God invented bridge so that Jack Waring might say he didn't play it," Phyllis went on. "That sums him up."

Lady Barbara was wondering whether the unintelligent appreciation of such a man was worth having, when Jack once more wantonly put himself in the wrong. After writing to remind her of the day and time of the matinée, he had gone about his business. She mislaid the letter and telephoned to his chambers to find out where she was to meet him. An unwelcoming Cockney voice answered that Mr. Waring was engaged and invited her to leave a message.

"I won't keep him a moment," answered Lady Barbara.

"Mr. Waring doesn't like being called to the 'phone when he's got a consultation on."

She hardly knew whether to be angrier with Jack for his hide-bound likes and dislikes or with the officious clerk for his interference.

"Will you be good enough to say that Lady Barbara Neave wants to speak to him?" she said in a voice of authority.

"I'll see," the clerk mumbled reluctantly. "Hold on, please."

She was not accustomed to being kept waiting, and Jack or the clerk kept her waiting so long that the Exchange enquired once whether she had finished and then cut short the call. She hung up the receiver and waited for the connection to be re-established. There was no sound for five minutes; they did not think it worth while to remember her existence or to recall that she had expressed a wish to speak to Mr. Waring, that she had been ordered to wait.... Taking down the receiver, she repeated the number. The same unwelcoming Cockney voice greeted her.

"I was trying to speak to Mr. Waring," she explained, "but I was cut off."

"Mr. Waring's ingiged—Oh, were you the lidy who just rang up? Mr. Waring says, Would you be kind enough to leave a message?"

Half an hour earlier Lady Barbara had been undecided whether to telephone herself or to arrange the meeting through her maid. Now she felt that, whatever it might cost her, she must speak to Jack without intermediaries. And, if he were engaged in a consultation (or whatever the absurd thing was called), so much the better.

"No, I don't want to leave a message," she answered. "I want to speak to him privately."

The new attack seemed only to consolidate the hateful clerk's already strong position.

"Oh, I thought it might be business. Mr. Waring never speaks to any one privately on the 'phone."

"Will you kindly ask him to make an exception, then?"

"I'm afride it's no good," answered the clerk with undisguised boredom. "And Mr. Waring won't be best pleased, if I go in agine."

While Jack should pay for his pleasure to the uttermost farthing, it was undignified to prolong an altercation with a Cockney voice, especially as she was gaining nothing.

"Mr. Waring asked me to go to the theatre with him. Will he kindly let me know when and where I'm to meet him?"

The words were repeated slowly, as the message was written down.

"When-and-where-you're to meet him. Very good. If you'll give me your number, I'll find out and 'phone you as soon as the consultation's over."

"But I want to know now! I've got arrangements of my own to make!"

It was no longer the deliberate high voice of authority. Grievance was merging in anger.

"I don't like to go in agine.... But he can't be long now. If you'll give me your number...."

The Cockney voice suggested a mean, back-bent creature with bitten nails and cunning eyes, a Uriah Heep, cringing but sinister. She did not care for him to know that she had lost her temper; only this and the need to punish Jack for his latest indignity kept her from refusing to accompany him to the theatre.

"Oh, ask him to write," she answered with attempted carelessness.

As she ceased speaking, her maid came in to say that Mr. Webster had called. They had not met since their quarrel on the afternoon of Lady Knightrider's dance; and she was secretly relieved at the hardiness of his ill-humour, for of all men he least repaid the discredit which she earned by being seen in his company. At best he was a good-natured, plastic slave with a ubiquitous car and a knack of securing seats in theatres and tables in restaurants when others failed; at worst he was an enigmatic sensualist, who attracted her because he privately frightened her. They met first on the common ground of an interest in spiritualism, later as companions in misfortune; Sonia Dainton alleged that he was always inviting chorus-girls to his rooms and giving them too much to drink for the amusement of hearing what they would say; some one else added that he smoked opium, and an agreeable air of mystery surrounded an otherwise disagreeable young man. After their last quarrel Lady Barbara had decided to give him up; and she only wavered now because she wanted a whipping-boy and felt that she was in some way scoring a point against Jack by receiving him.

"I'll see him—up here," she told her maid.

Her face was still flushed from the telephone altercation, and she posed herself carefully, backing the window, but with the curtains thrown to their widest extent, so that Webster's œdematous eyelids blinked as he crossed the room and held out a plump white hand.

"New car d'livered t'day," he wheezed. The habit, induced by intemperance, of slurring the major parts of speech and omitting the minor survived even in his sober diction. "'Wondered if you'd care come spin."

"Oh? I was wondering whether you'd been ill."

"Ill?" He shook his head and coughed. "No. Only too many cigarettes. Care come?"

"Not till you've apologized for your behaviour to me, Mr. Webster."

"Haven't least idea what mean, but I'll apologize. Always ready apologize."

As a whipping-boy he was too spiritless to be satisfying, and Lady Barbara addressed herself to the invitation. Since the accident and the inquest she had not embarked on any expeditions with him. Indeed, on the evening before she went into court, she had deliberately broken a prized Venetian vase and whispered to herself—or any one who was listening—that, if she emerged without discredit, she would never go with him again. Nemesis had accepted the vase and played false on the bargain. But, while she might fairly feel herself released from her promise, she was oppressed by premonition that disaster would overtake her if she risked her luck again with Webster.

"Where are you going to? I'm waiting for a telephone message," she answered.

At that moment the bell rang; and, as she picked up the receiver, she felt guilty towards Jack Waring; in part she had undertaken to drop her "objectionable friends," in part she felt that, if he were with her, he would stop her going.... But his clerk had been unpardonable....

Gaymer's voice invited her to dine and go to a theatre with him. She accepted and impatiently replaced the receiver.

"I'll come for a short time," she answered and felt that she was defying Jack. "I must be back for tea, though."

"Have tea my place. Madame Hilary coming. Know who mean? Perfect wonder that woman. Doesn't use medium; makes you, me, any one medium; throws you in trance, and you do talking."

The séance was more alluring than the drive, for Madame Hilary had been famous in necromantic society for more than a month. Lady Barbara had been generally forbidden by her parents to dabble in black magic, and a special warning had been issued against Madame Hilary, whose methods had made her notorious, if not as a new witch of Endor, at least as an accomplished blackmailer.

"Is she good about the future?" Lady Barbara asked. "I don't want to be told that I've lived in distant lands, sometimes among the palms, sometimes in sight of the snows. I know that better than she does."

"She don't tell you anything," Webster explained. "You do all the talking, and we listen. Better hear some one else first; people sometimes more candid than they like—afterwards."

He chuckled maliciously and followed her downstairs. For an hour they drove round Richmond Park, and, as the light began to fail, he turned back to London and brought her to his flat by the Savoy in time for tea. The drowsy joy of rapid movement through the air had calmed her nerves and blown away her ill-humour; she was too tranquil to quarrel even with Jack Waring.

As she entered the smoking-room of the flat, the early premonition of disaster returned. It was an unwholesome place after Richmond Park on a December day.... Webster himself, white-faced and orientally impassive, in a frame of yellow down cushions and a heavy atmosphere of burning cedar-wood, was a sinister mystery-monger and purveyor of forbidden fruit. She came to him for excitements and experiences which the world conspired to keep her from obtaining elsewhere. An unwholesome man.... If anything happened, she had only herself to blame.... Yet nothing could happen, unless the new clairvoyant told her something horrid about the future.... She was not going to run away from a clairvoyant....

The warm rooms, thickly curtained and heavy with scented smoke, were already half-full. Sonia Dainton and Jack Summertown were on either side of the club fender with cigarettes in their mouths; the Baroness Kohnstadt, with something of her brother Sir Adolf Erckmann's build and colouring and with all of his guttural intonation, was impressively describing Madame Hilary's powers; Lord Pennington, with a tumbler of brown brandy and soda in one hand, swayed insecurely on one arm of a chair and discharged amorous darts at a weak-mouthed girl with big eyes and a high colour, who giggled in apprehensive appreciation; on the other sat Sir Adolf, bald, bearded and fleshly, competing with Pennington for her attention. Involuntarily Lady Barbara paused in the door-way. If Jack Waring heard that she had been to Webster's rooms on such an errand in such company.... They were not worth it....

"Hullo, Babs!" "Babs darling!" "Liddle Barbara!" "How ripping!"

The usual chorus of welcome greeted her and mounted to her head. Sonia Dainton was kissing her extravagantly. Sir Adolf lurched forward to praise her looks and dress, Lord Pennington to repeat and laugh at any phrase that she let fall. Doing nothing, saying little, simply by being herself, she dominated them until the door opened a second time and a gaunt woman in a clinging black dress and hat like an embossed shield rustled into the room. Her great height and noiseless movements diverted attention from Lady Barbara; she threw up her veil with a clockwork gesture as though she were ripping it from her face. Webster advanced with a bow and was preparing to introduce her, when she stopped him with a second mechanical fling of the hand.

"Ah, no! You tell me who they are and then you say, 'Madame Hilary is an impostor; she knew a little before—and she make up the rest.' Is it not so? For an exhibition I like better to know nothing." Her eyes flashed, as she looked round on one face after another. "You, Mr. Webster, I know—your name, at least—but these others I know not at all. It is well. And I like better for you not to tell me. But you are all waiting! While I drink this tea, you shall decide who first is to make trial."

She sat down, unembarrassed by the stealthy examination to which she was being subjected on all sides, and, unpinning her veil, shewed a narrow, lined face with sunken cheeks, an aquiline nose and eyes that were lack-lustre after their initial flash. Too well-bred to seem bored, she displayed at least a want of interest which chilled the spirits of the party and left her ascendant. Webster was flustered at having to stage-manage the séance; for Sir Adolf was so diffident and Sonia so unsympathetic that he had difficulty in finding volunteers. Lady Barbara at once offered herself, but seemed impressed by his whispered warning that she had better first see what surprising exhibitions people sometimes made of themselves.

"Here, I'll start the bidding," cried Jack Summertown, jumping up from the fender. "Don't pinch my simulation-gold watch, any one. Only fair to warn you, ma'am," he went on to Madame Hilary, "that I think all this jolly old spiritualism is a fake. What do I have to do? And may I finish my goodish cork-tipped Turkish Regie?"

Madame Hilary, suddenly appreciating that she was being addressed, seemed to awake and assume new vitality. Shewing neither offence nor amusement at his scepticism, she motioned Summertown to a chair and drew her own opposite to it.

"Yes, go on smoking. It does not matter." She looked round the room with another clockwork movement, switched on a reading-lamp, so that the light shone straight into her own face, and then plunged the rest of the room in darkness. "All that is needed is for you to look at me, into my eyes. Never take your eyes off mine. I like better for you not to try, not to will yourself. I shall ask you questions, and you will answer them. Questions about the past. I like better for you not to be sympathetic. Try not to answer my questions. And, when I have persuaded you to answer them, I shall ask you more questions—about the future. And you will answer them, too. And afterwards I will tell you what you have said. So you will come to know the future."

She paused to draw breath, and Summertown, obediently looking into her eyes, finished his cigarette and tossed the end into the fire-place. He was still smiling a little; but the room was grown silent, and every one was looking at him; the gaunt, narrow face before him, grimly serious, discouraged levity, though it sharpened his desire to expose her as soon as she began her tricks. And for that the easiest thing was obstinately to answer none of her questions.

"You would that I explain?" The deliberate affectation of broken English was the accepted convention of an English actress playing the part of a Frenchwoman; every one in the room was conscious of the artificiality. The voice was unmodulated and monotonous. "In all ages men have tried to read the future. By the stars and by crystal balls and cards and numbers and pools of ink.... What can a pool of ink tell you? The future lies in yourselves. Within your bodies are seeds of new life—innumerable; and each seed holds innumerable other seeds of new life—generation after generation, seed within seed. He who put them there ordained that the Future should lie buried in the Present, as the Present lay buried in the Past—and as the Past lies buried in the Present! It is hard for Man to unbury the Future. Man has not been ready to face the light, and I—I who help you to see that light have never seen it myself. Even I do not know how glaring is that light.... But, as the seeds of the Future lie in you, so the knowledge of the Future lies there also. Man knows all the Future, as Man holds all the Future within himself, but he has forgotten. It is within his unconscious. I do not know it, but I can help you to remember. I can tell you nothing, not even your name, but you can tell me everything about yourself, Past, Present and Future. What is your name?"

Lady Barbara started with surprise when the abrupt question cut through the sleepy drone of mock-mystic jargon. Summertown was trapped into seriousness, for he answered promptly:

"John Antony Merivale-Farwell. I'm usually called Jack Summertown."

"Why are you called Jack Summertown?"

"Well, you see, Summertown's the guv'nor's second title. Thirty per cent. on your bills, and not a dam' thing else."

He looked obediently into the unwavering eyes, but Lady Barbara felt that his familiar colloquialism was a deliberate effort to break up the atmosphere of pretentious mystery.

"And your father?"

"Well, he's rather at a loose end at present. He was Councillor of Embassy at Paris, and they offered him Madrid, I believe; but he'd been ill for some time and so he chucked in his hand. Oh, who is he? Marling. Earl of."

"You are married?"

"God, no!"

"You have been in love?"

Summertown hesitated and then answered quietly:

"Oh, well, yes, I suppose so."

"Tell me about it."

Lady Barbara, watching his face as he gazed into Madame Hilary's eyes, became conscious of a change in expression; Summertown might have been drunk. His eyes were glazed, his features set and his forehead moist; he spoke cautiously, too, as though fearful of a trip in articulation.

"It sounds rather sordid," he began diffidently. "She was an awful pretty girl—in a shop. Flower-shop. I palled up with her.... I expect you'll think me an awful cad; I never meant to marry her. It would have meant such a hell of a row at home.... To do myself justice, I told her that. She knew who I was; she said that didn't matter.... The thing lasted for a year—nearly. And most of the time I went through the agony of the damned. Ask any one who thinks he knows me; you'll be told I haven't a soul to save and I'm the village idiot and all that sort of thing. All I know is—I wouldn't go through it again. I loved the girl; and I always felt that she was all right till I came along—and then I corrupted her; and though I sweated to get her to marry me, we both knew it would be God's own failure.... And the end was the most sordid part of the whole business. When I lay awake at night—I did, honest—thinking I'd dragged her half-way to Hell, another feller turned up. Number One. I was Number Two—or Ten—or Twenty.... That was nineteen-eleven, but, if you sat up till midnight telling me how rotten she was, you wouldn't be able to make me forget her. Wish to God you could!... But we were dam' well man and wife for a twelvemonth."

He laughed jerkily and grew restless, as though he were looking for the usual cigarette. Lady Barbara felt an overbalancing pull and discovered that she had been making her fingers meet in the soft flesh of Sonia Dainton's arm. Madame Hilary was triumphing. None of them could say when Jack Summertown had passed under her influence; apart from his pallor and glazed eyes, he had not changed; but there was a collective, sympathetic shudder through the room, as he told his stunted romance in characteristic colloquialisms. "Hell of a row at home.... A year—nearly.... All I know is—I wouldn't go through it again.... And then I corrupted her.... Dam' well man and wife for a twelvemonth...." And then the jerky, cynical laugh. It was Jack Summertown's manner of describing an unsuccessful meeting at Hawthorn Hill.

"You cannot forget her—but you will find some one else?" The unmodulated voice was pitiless.

"Oh, generally speaking, yes. I mean, one wants to keep the jolly old family going. But I've not got much time with this war."

"This war?"

"Well, the general bust-up. I'm in the army, you know, and I shall get finished off as soon as it starts. Goodish early door for me. Hardly seems worth it.... At least, I mean, if the girl cares for you, it's a bit rough to leave her a widow at the end of a week."

"Then you are going to be killed quite soon?"

Lady Barbara held her breath until she felt that her heart must stop. The others were doing the same. Only Madame Hilary ladled out her questions with a voice as mechanical as her gestures.

"Oh, almost at once."

"Stop!"

Lady Barbara could not tell whence the cry had come. Had they conjured up a spirit? Was God Himself cutting short their quest? But she did not believe in God.... There was a bustle of confused movement, followed by stupefied inertia. Lord Pennington, after flooding the room with light, was seen to be propping himself against the door; Madame Hilary sat blinking rapidly, so like a lone cat surrounded by reluctant terriers that little imagination was required to see the arched back and to hear the spitting tongue. Lady Barbara gripped her chair with both hands, overcoming fear. Only Webster, who had seen the experiment before and exulted in the sense of shocked terror around him, contrived to purge his face of expression.

There was a long silence.

"Well, that's that," gulped Pennington, with an unconvincing laugh.

Lady Barbara's brain was working so quickly that she had time to see and reflect on everything around her. These men who were always drinking made a sorry mess of their nerves; Pennington was hardly less incapacitated than Webster had been when they dashed into the jutting grey angle of wall. And Sonia, who did not drink but lived on excitement, was almost hysterical....

"Reached end of chapter," murmured Webster, glancing covertly at the late medium. "What deuce want spoil everything?" he demanded, in a hectoring aside, of Pennington's late giggling companion.... "Who'd like go next?"

Summertown had been peering lazily in search of cigarettes, but his host's question roused him to activity.

"Don't be in such a hurry, old son," he called out. And, turning to the hypnotist, "You were talking about the jolly old seeds. Big fleas and little fleas...."

Madame Hilary glanced at him and then, carelessly, at the group between the fire-place and the door. She was too well-bred to shew triumph.

"You tell me you doubt. Good!" she answered Summertown. "I try to explain just my theory. Now, in every man there are seeds of new life, and each seed contains seeds of other new life, of the Future...."

Webster waited until he saw Summertown nodding intelligently; then he joined the group by the door.

"What do you think of it?" he asked, like a conjuror.

The Baroness Kohnstadt shuddered.

"Ach, derrible!"

"It's the same old game," said Pennington, with newly recovered valour. "She pinned herself down to something fairly definite, but, before anything comes along to kill Summertown, she'll have vamoosed and set up in Harrogate as a beauty specialist. Agree with me, Lady Barbara?"

"I don't know what to think—yet," she answered. "We mustn't let her tell him, of course...."

As she stood up, her knees were trembling.

"But nobody believes in it seriously," protested Sonia Dainton with a white face.

"I do."

They had been joined by Lord Pennington's giggling companion of the armchair. Her eyes were bigger, and fear had washed away the colour from her cheeks.

"Let me try next, Fatty," she implored Webster.

"Why?"

"I want to."

"But why?"

She moved out of earshot and waited for him to join her.

"I want to," she repeated. "I won't say anything that I oughtn't to."

Webster laughed harshly. He did not want to hear the girl unfolding her history before an audience.

"Keep out of it, Dolly; only make fool yourself," he advised. "You're such little coward——"

"I know!" She seemed to take the sneer as a compliment. "But I'm gingered up now. I want to know! I want to know if I'm going to die. They said I was, but they only did it to frighten me and get me away to a sanatorium. I'm going to find out!"

While Webster was still sluggishly trying to make up his mind, she darted past him and presented herself to Madame Hilary. Summertown yielded place reluctantly and joined the group at the door. Before the lights were lowered, the Master of the Ceremonies found time to whisper, "Cut it short. Others want turn, too. Leave out Past and Present; it's Future she's interested in."

There was a rustle of dresses and a squeak of castors, as the audience settled into chairs and the lights were lowered. After the same initial silence the same droning voice pronounced the elementals of the creed. "Though men have tried by the stars and by crystal balls, by cards and numbers and pools of ink, they have not hitherto looked for the Future within themselves...."

"How long does this tripe go on?" Summertown enquired so audibly that the girl started and turned towards the shadowy group by the fire.

Madame Hilary pushed back her chair and rose to her feet with dignity.

"Please! I cannot continue—like this." At a murmured apology she consented to sit down again, and the momentarily human voice became lost in the professional drone of the mystic. "Keep your eyes on mine—so! It is all I ask. I like better that you resist, that you determine not to answer my questions. But, if you look into my eyes, you will tell me all that I ask you. You must. You are telling me now! You are telling me now your name! It is—that name?"

"Dorothea Prilton. I'm called Dolly May on the stage."

"And you have been on the stage since long?"

"Three years."

"And how old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"And why did you go on to the stage?"

"Oh, I always loved it! It's everything in the world to me! And a gentleman friend said he'd introduce me to the manager of the Pall Mall."

There was a tinkle of broken glass, as Webster's elbow swept an ash tray to the floor.

"And you expect to play great parts? What are you acting in now?"

"Well, I'm out of a shop at present. It's such killing work, you know. I had to break one contract and go into a nursing-home; and I've never really pulled up since. One doctor says it's lungs, and another says it's heart. I was never very strong, and my friend had an awful time with me. Sometimes at the end of the show, he had to give me an injection in my arm to pull me round. Of course, it saved my life, but I think it affected the heart, you know. The doctor was very angry, but I said to him, 'It's all very well for you to talk, but you weren't there at the time; I was just dying.' I shall be all right when I've had a bit of a rest."

"And you expect to play great parts?" Madame Hilary repeated.

There was no answer. As the silence lengthened, the audience looked critically at her; she had spoken hitherto with the prattling candour of her class, and the question was hardly an assault on her professional diffidence.

"And are you in love?" pursued Madame Hilary without pity.

The girl looked at her in silence but still without any expression of resentment or confusion.

"Are you never afraid of meeting some man and having to retire from the stage?"

At the third silence Summertown observed loudly:

"This is a blinking frost, you know. I said it was, from the beginning. She can't make you answer, if you don't want to."

The penetrating voice brought Madame Hilary to her feet a second time.

"Mr. Webster! Where is Mr. Webster?" she demanded. "Please! I cannot go on—like this. You ask this gentleman to go away, and I continue. Otherwise, no! I cannot."

"Oh, I say, no offence meant, you know," Summertown pleaded.

"I cannot," Madame Hilary repeated firmly. "Mr. Webster——"

The sense of the meeting, expressed in murmured protests, was against Summertown.

"Oh, all right! I'll go," he sighed. "You goin' to break away, Babs? It's an absolute frost," he whispered. "Anyone seen a goodish billycock or bowler, not to mention a cane, a rich fur coat—Oh, my God!"

He had turned on the light to look for his belongings and, while the others ringed themselves about Madame Hilary with speeches of condolence and apology, he alone had leisure to see that Miss Dorothea Prilton, known on Pall Mall programmes as "Dolly May," sat dead in the chair which he had occupied ten minutes before.

CHAPTER SIX THE SHADOW LINE

"A drunkard is one that will be a man to-morrow morning, but is now what you will make him, for he is in the power of the next man, and if a friend the better."

John Earle: "Microcosmographie."

"I knew it.... Yes.... Of course...."

Lady Barbara found herself repeating the words aloud, though no one listened to her. Now that disaster had come, she remembered her premonition; and it gave her a start over the others in recovering self-possession, so that she remained motionless instead of pathetically trying to charm the dead girl back to life. Only Webster and Summertown were making any show of keeping their heads. Madame Hilary had become hysterical; Lord Pennington, mottled and tremulous, was charging distractedly to and fro with a decanter of brandy; and Sonia Dainton, shrinking from the body, sobbed quietly to herself by the fire, while Sir Adolf towered over her, gesticulating with plump, white hands.

"Lock door," whispered Webster. "Tell 'em not s'much dam' row."

He felt the girl's pulse, hurried lumberingly into his bedroom and returned with a shaving-mirror, which he held before her lips. Then he closed the staring eyes and covered the face with a handkerchief.

"Heart failure," he pronounced. "Always had weak heart. Excitement. I tried stop her, you heard me try stop her!"

At the note of pleading in his voice, Madame Hilary's lamentations redoubled in vigour, this time in the unmistakable accent of Essex.

"Before get doctor, better decide story put up," Webster went on more collectedly. "Short and simple, I suggest. All having tea here——Said she was feeling tired——Went pale——Suddenly stopped middle sentence.... Less said about Madame Hilary, better. Best of all, send her away now. Know what coroners are."

At sound of the formidable word Lady Barbara clutched frantically at Summertown's elbow.

"Will there be an inquest?" she whispered.

"Can't help it. That's bad enough, but, if there's anything of a post mortem, we may find ourselves in the soup. 'Deceased died as result of sudden shock.' What shock? Why shock? I don't at all know that we can afford to let this woman go." He wrinkled his snub nose; and his cheerful, rather dissipated young face was grave. "Don't at all know," he repeated.

The ink-and-whitewash smell of the court came to life again in Lady Barbara's nostrils; and she heard the coroner once more urging the reporters like hounds on to their quarry. She would again appear side by side with Webster to explain away another gratuitous death. Twice in one year.... And it was not her fault.

"I can't stand it, Jack," she whispered. "I can't! I can't!"

He looked at her in surprise, for it was generally accepted that she could never lose her nerve.

"Jove! yes. I'd forgotten," he answered. "Here, Fatty!" Webster hurried to them anxiously, and Summertown became elaborately calm and practical. "Look here, old son, you've got to go through with this; the body's on your premises. And Madame must go through with it, because they may find all sorts of funny things at the post mortem. When all's said and done, you and I didn't kill her, and there's no reason why we should get the credit of it. I'm in with you to the end. I think Pennington and Sir Adolf and the Baroness ought to stay to make a quorum, but we'll talk about that later. Point is—Babs must clear out before the vet. comes; she's never been here, we know nothing about her; we must stick to that and, if need be, swear to it. And there's no need to drag Sonia into the business."

Webster reflected with slow mind, rubbing his fingers against the pad of his thumb, as though they still felt the dead eye-lids of the girl who had at last escaped him.

"Woman's tough customer," he warned them. "Blackmail you quick as thought. And looks bad—much worse—, if any one stays away inquest."

"We'll trust that she's too much rattled," Summertown answered. "And she doesn't even know who Babs is."

"Bet your life she does," Webster answered. Seeing Lady Barbara's undisguised fear, he deliberately played on it, as his price for allowing her to escape the inquest. "If she don't, dam' soon find out."

Future blackmail seemed a less evil than present exposure; and Lady Barbara only wanted to break away from the sweet-smelling, hot room and to avoid the sour-smelling, hot court. Summertown looked to her for an answer; but her eyes were blinking quickly, and two tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.

"Here, if you break down, you'll do us all in," he said, glancing furtively round the room. "Sonia's no more use than a sick headache; you've got to take charge of her and clear out before any one lodges an objection. Make certain that you've got everything before you go—no incriminating muffs or gloves. Now remember! It doesn't matter a damn where you've been, but you've not—been—here. I'll explain to the others. Get home or somewhere and establish a good fat alibi; we'll give you a start before we send for the vet."

With the shrill moans of Madame Hilary still pulsating through their heads, he pushed them out on to the landing and locked the door. Sonia ran headlong down the passage until she was caught and schooled to a careless saunter down the stairs and through the hall.

"Come home with me," Barbara ordered. "Jack's quite right about the alibi."

"But, Babs——"

"If you start talking, I shall scream!"

They found a taxi in the Strand and drove to Berkeley Square. Barbara ostentatiously ordered tea, and they subsided into chairs without speaking. The shock of death was spent and could not be repeated. Dolly May—if that was her name—was dead; surprisingly, horribly dead, but there was no more to be said about it, and Barbara could now recall without a shudder the still face and staring eyes.... She wondered what they were all doing now, whether the doctor had come.... And what had really happened—not only to the girl, but to Summertown? Even death was not so terrific as the power which Madame Hilary seemed to exert.

"Have some tea, Sonia, and try not to think about it," said Lady Barbara, hoping to restore her own tranquillity.

There would be days of agony, while she waited to see whether she would be called as a witness and required to explain her flight. Madame Hilary was not the woman to drown alone; and, though the men had shewn magnanimity and esprit de corps, one never knew what would come out in court, one never knew how far to trust people whom the tolerant Summertown himself always described colloquially as "a bit hairy about the heel." Lord Pennington ... the upward-striving baroness ... Sir Adolf ... Webster, who was an unplumbed pool of iniquity. She would always be a little at their mercy; and, without trying to injure her, people always gossiped.

Sonia Dainton abruptly set down her cup and buried her face in a cushion.

"It was—Fatty closing her eyes," she explained with a gulp; and Lady Barbara, in trying to comfort her, found herself crying in sympathy.

They were steadied by the bell of the telephone and a crisp voice, which for once was refreshing in its self-assurance.

"Mr. Waring," it announced. "My clerk told me you were expecting me to ring you up. Didn't you get my letter? I said I'd meet you by the box-office at five to two."

Lady Barbara looked in bewilderment at her watch; less than three hours had passed since her altercation with the Cockney clerk.

"I'm afraid I lost your letter," she answered, almost humbly. "Five to two. I'll try not to be late."

"I warn you that I never wait for any one," Jack laughed. "Was that all you wanted to talk to me about?"

In the first reaction from severe fright, she was prepared for an outburst of anger against the first victim—Sonia, for breaking down like a little fool; the Cockney clerk for his impertinence; and Waring himself as the mainspring of all evil. She had only gone to the flat because she felt that she was scoring a point against him. No one had ever behaved with his indifference—which was more galling than blunt rudeness; no one had ever equalled him in aloofness and self-sufficiency. His stubborn unquestioning faith in himself won her reluctant admiration. It was a new experience to find a man whom she could not twist round her finger at first meeting; if he had attended the séance, she felt that Dolly May would still be alive; he would—somehow—have intervened; perhaps he would even have persuaded her to stay at home. She would give five years of her life to have met any one with authority to stop her....

Sonia had ceased crying and was sniffing miserably at her handkerchief. The sound irritated Lady Barbara to the verge of hysteria; if the little fool could see what she looked like with pink eyes and a red nose....

"What are you doing?" she asked Jack.

"To-night? I'm dining at the club," he answered with the same crisp assurance.

"You wouldn't like to dine here?" It was an impulse which she had no time to examine, but Jack's voice, which she had never noticed before, destroyed hysterical images and brought her in contact with reality. "I'd promised to go to a play, but I'm not in the mood for it," she added.

With her disengaged hand she wrote down "Gaymer" to remind herself that she must be excused going to the theatre with him. If her name were mentioned at the inquest, she did not want to hear the coroner explaining to the reporters that she was in her stall before the doctor had finished his examination of Dolly May's dead body; even if her name went unpublished, she did not want Summertown to feel that he had stayed at his post while she pusillanimously escaped and ran off to amuse herself.

"Thanks very much," Jack answered, "but I don't think I will. You know, I hardly ever dine out. And I couldn't talk up to your level for three minutes."

"Well, shall I do the talking? I want somebody to talk to; I shall be all alone."

There was a perceptible pause; and Sonia, finding the one-sided dialogue uninteresting, looked at her watch and began collecting her furs.

"Well, I don't think I very well can, you know," said Jack, "if you're all alone."

"Not in my own house? I must say, you are the most extraordinary person! There are men—strange as it may seem—who would give a good deal for the chance of having me to themselves at dinner."

"I'm sure of it. You're wasted on me."

Candour and conceit were so nicely matched in Jack Waring that Lady Barbara could not tell from his voice whether he was laughing at her.

"I've asked you once to come," she sighed. "I'm so used to getting my own way that I thought that would be enough." She broke off into a cough and gave Sonia time to get out of the room. "If you want to see whether I've got any pride, I haven't—just now. I ask you again. I told you I wasn't in the mood to go to the play; I'm worried out of my mind. But I don't fancy being alone all the evening. If it's too much trouble to—talk up to my level, don't come. But I should like you to."

There was a moment's laughter—deliberately mocking or ingenuously unrestrained; she could never make out whether Jack was naturally or intentionally stupid.

"I can't resist the pathetic, Lady Barbara. What time shall I come?"

"We might dine about half-past eight. If you want to meet mother and make certain that I'm not compromising you, come earlier."

The taunt was left unanswered; but it was noticeable that Jack arrived in Berkeley Square at eight o'clock, when the car was at the door and the door itself open. In the hall Lord Crawleigh was being helped into a fur-coat, and a blushing young footman was paying the penalty of inexperience, clumsiness and some one else's hasty dinner. Lady Crawleigh steered a course round the storm-centre and approached the stranger with the outstretched hand of hurried welcome.

"Mr. Waring? You must forgive our running away like this; the wretched play starts at a quarter past eight. Babs will be down in a moment. You won't keep her up late, will you? We've got to go on to a party at the Carnforths, so I must leave you to see that she goes to bed in good time. She's rather overdone."

With a flying introduction to Lord Crawleigh, she rustled down the steps and into the car. Jack was shewn into the morning-room, where he smoothed his hair, straightened his tie and settled down to the evening paper, paying as little attention to the Japanese prints on the walls as he had done in the hall to a pair of historic porcelain vases which appeared from time to time at loan exhibitions and were beyond price. At Oxford and in the Temple his attitude to art was one of toleration, ungrudging and unpatronizing. "I suppose it's all right," he would say, when Eric Lane tried to interest him in a new discovery. "Not my line of country, though."

Lady Barbara came down, as he was finishing the report of a case in which he had appeared that day in the Court of Appeal. He was too much engrossed to notice that she was ten minutes late.

"'Blame me not, poor sufferer; that I tarried,'" she began. "I had such an awful headache that I could hardly get up; and I thought it would be straining our friendship if I asked you to dine with me in my room. There's not the least need for you to ask if I'm feeling better," she pouted.

Jack laughed and laid his paper tidily on the table.

"Sorry! I—I warned you I wasn't a social animal. I hope you're all right now."

"Better. I feel rather as if some one had been putting hot coals at the back of my eyes." She paused and looked at him invitingly.

"'But thy dark eyes are not dimm'd, proud Iseult!

And thy beauty never was more fair.'

Some people never take their cues."

"I haven't a book of the words, I'm afraid."

"And you've probably never heard of Matthew Arnold."

"Oh, yes, I have. He translated Homer or something. My tutor was always quoting him."

"You're wonderfully banal at times, Mr. Waring."

"Well, I warned you that I shouldn't be able to stay the course," he answered unabashed.

They dined in amicable dulness. Lady Barbara, who generally shewed a knack of knowing what she wanted and going straight for it, could not define what had made her invite him. His conversation was a minute-gun fire of laboured conventional questions about theatres, the House of Commons and her plans for Christmas. She lacked the lightness of spirit to banter him about his Cockney clerk, still less to work up a scene out of her conversation on the telephone. The humiliation of the Croxton Ball seemed very far away; and, now that she was face to face with him, she found it hard to believe that she had sat half the night staring vengefully into the fire and plotting to punish her glib critic. He was tough of hide as Fatty Webster....

The name, flashing through her mind, conjured up a picture which she had striven to forget—a hot, scented room with men and women shrinking against the walls, a dead girl in the middle and a convulsive, hysterical witch opposite her. She wondered whether they were still there, what the doctor had said....

"I hadn't time to see the paper to-night," she said. "Was there anything in it?"

"I don't think so. We won our appeal—the Great Southern Railway case; I don't know whether you've been following it—but they're sure to take it to the House of Lords. Otherwise—oh, your friend Webster seems to be in trouble again."

Lady Barbara felt as if he had struck her over the heart.

"What's he been doing?" she asked after a pause.

"Well, this time I think he was more sinned against than sinning. He had some people to tea in his flat, and one of them was inconsiderate enough to die on the premises."

"Oh, how dreadful!" She was quite satisfied with her inflection. "Where's the paper? Herbert, will you get me the evening paper out of the morning-room?"

"It's only a line or so in the stop-press," Jack warned her.

"But I want to see who was there!"

He looked at her closely, for her voice had risen in excitement. When it was too late, she realized that it would have been more natural to ask who had died. Before Jack's eyes her own fell, but she had time to wonder again whether he was stupidly incurious or deliberately secretive. There were moments when his "superiority" seemed more than a manner, when she felt bare and trapped. The placid, round-cheeked smile might have belonged to a cheerful ploughboy, but the commonplace grey eyes were sometimes intelligent and always watchful.

When the paper came, she felt that he was looking through her, and her hands trembled.

"Did you know the girl?" he asked.

"I met her once—for a moment. What a horrible thing to happen!"

"You must be glad you weren't there."

"What d'you mean?"

As the indignant, frightened question broke from her, she felt that she was behaving like a stage criminal and betraying herself because the audience expected it of her. It was a barrister's business to lure you on with innocent questions.... She was convinced that Jack knew everything and was playing with her.

"You always used to go about with him," he pointed out; and she wondered what base satisfaction one human being could derive from torturing another.

"It's curious the way you dislike people without knowing them," she answered. "Now, shall I behave like a perfect Victorian and leave you to your wine while I do a little embroidery in the drawing-room? I haven't got any embroidery and, if I had, I couldn't do it. Or would you like me to sit with you?"

When it was too late, she knew that she wanted to escape and collect herself before he went on with his inquisition.

"You won't smoke while I'm drinking port-wine, will you?" he asked without answering her question; and his impudence determined her to throw away the opportunity of retreat.

She prepared a crushing retort, discarded it for one more crushing and suddenly realized that in her present state he could beat her and very easily make her cry. If she cried, too, he would only think that she was acting....

"Please let me have one cigarette," she begged. "I'll go to the other end of the room."

As she walked away to the fire-place and stood with her elbow on the mantel-piece and her head half in shadow, Jack thought for a moment of asking her to come back; but he was not wholly reconciled to the practice of smoking among women, and Colonel Waring had taught him that to drink a vintage wine with a tainted palate was even less excusable than to enter a church without removing one's hat.

"Wouldn't you like a chair?" he asked by way of compromise.

"I prefer standing, thanks. Mr. Waring, I told you on the telephone that I was worried out of my mind. I don't know how much you've heard, but I was with Fatty Webster when that girl died. Did you know that?"

The placid, plough-boy smile faded slowly; and, as he raised his eyebrows, Lady Barbara appreciated that she was betraying herself gratuitously.

"I only know what's in the paper. What happened?"

She retained enough judgement to see that she must now tell him everything, enough prudence to exact a promise of secrecy. As she described Madame Hilary and the séance, she could see prim disapproval on his features, deepening with every name and incident in the story. For a man with no great range of facial expression, he succeeded in conveying categorical contempt for her manner of life, her friends and herself; and she forgot her troubles in a warm rush of anger.

"Just let me understand," he interrupted, as the story drew to an end. "Are you coming to me for advice, do you think I can help you? Or are you just entertaining me with your latest escapade?"

Lady Barbara gripped the edge of the mantel-piece to keep control of herself.

"Perhaps I thought I might get a little sympathy," she answered.

Jack lay back in his chair, pushing away his wine-glass and reaching for his coffee-cup. He chose a cigar and pierced it; and every act in its deliberation and absorbed care for his own comfort set her on fire to ruffle his exasperating composure.

"I should have thought the others had a prior claim on any sympathy that's going about."

"I'm afraid no amount of sympathy will bring the dead back to life," she answered in a whisper.

"I wasn't thinking of her. But the others did at least stand their ground."

"You mean I deserted my friends?" she demanded furiously.

"Well, of course you did,—if they are your friends. It wasn't your fault, but it wasn't theirs, either. Because your own record of inquests doesn't court enquiry, you're allowed to cut and run."

"I couldn't have done any good by staying."

He made no answer until he had found matches and lighted his cigar. It was evidently important that the coffee and brandy and tobacco should march abreast; evidently science and art went to the skilled lighting of a cigar; a man—or at least Jack Waring—could not be expected to attend to other people's troubles until he had made sure of his own comfort.