Madame Claire

Susan Ertz

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

NEW YORK

MCMXXIII

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Madame Claire
[Chapter I.]	[1]
[Chapter II.]	[14]
[Chapter III.]	[26]
[Chapter IV.]	[41]
[Chapter V.]	[50]
[Chapter VI.]	[65]
[Chapter VII.]	[76]
[Chapter VIII.]	[85]
[Chapter IX.]	[97]
[Chapter X.]	[116]
[Chapter XI.]	[120]
[Chapter XII.]	[133]
[Chapter XIII.]	[144]
[Chapter XIV.]	[150]
[Chapter XV.]	[170]
[Chapter XVI.]	[176]
[Chapter XVII.]	[191]
[Chapter XVIII.]	[209]
[Chapter XIX.]	[227]
[Chapter XX.]	[243]
[Chapter XXI.]	[260]
[Chapter XXII.]	[266]
[Chapter XXIII.]	[282]
[Chapter XXIV.]	[303]
[Chapter XXV.]	[319]
[Chapter XXVI.]	[332]
[Novels of Supreme Literary Art.]
[Transcriber’s Note.]

Madame Claire

[CHAPTER I]

If you wish to be relieved from the worries of housekeeping; if you wish to cultivate the society of retired army folk, or that of blameless spinsterhood, ask for a room (inclusive terms) at the Kensington Park Hotel, Kensington. It is unprogressive, it is Early Victorian—though of late that term has lost some of its reproach—but it is eminently safe and respectable.

Although neither of these qualities had ever particularly attracted Lady Gregory—or Madame Claire, as her grandchildren called her—she found herself at the age of seventy a candidate for admission. It was out of the question for her to keep up the big house in Prince’s Gardens after her only son Eric married. Live with him she would not, valuing his love for her and his own happiness too much to risk a ménage-à-trois with a daughter-in-law—even a daughter-in-law of whom at that time she approved. For Madame Claire not only faced facts squarely, but she had a way of seeing under and around them as well, which greatly endeared her to the more discriminating of her children and grandchildren.

It was eight years since Eric had married Louise Broughton, and eight years since Madame Claire had come to live at the Kensington Park Hotel. Her little suite was arranged with charming taste. Guests of the hotel were not encouraged to furnish their own rooms, but Madame Claire had succeeded little by little in ousting the hotel atrocities and had put in their place some favorite pieces left from the sale of the house in Prince’s Gardens. Her meals were served in her sitting-room by Dawson, her elderly maid, and there too she held her little court. She had a great pity for other old ladies less fortunately placed, who were obliged to be in, yet not of, the homes of their children or grandchildren—“Always there, like pieces of furniture. Whereas,” she would say, “if my family wish to see me they must come to me, and make an occasion of it.”

A wonderful woman she was then at seventy-eight, with all her senses very much on the alert. She read a great deal, but thought more, looking out of her windows at the world. She usually dressed in gray or dark blue, avoiding black which she said was only for the young. She was more nearly beautiful at seventy-eight than at any other period of her life, though she had always been a woman of great charm. She had been a loved and invaluable wife to the late Sir Robert Gregory, whom the world knew best as ambassador to Italy. She often said that for the connoisseur there were only two countries, England and Italy.

When Robert Gregory died, leaving her a widow of sixty, she was speedily—too speedily some said—sought in marriage by their lifelong friend, Stephen de Lisle. That was eighteen years ago. Refused by her, and perhaps made to feel just a little an old fool, he went abroad in one of his black tempers, and she had not heard one word from him since. It was a great sorrow to her, for both she and her husband had loved him devotedly. The grandchildren, especially Judy and Noel, thought it a delightful romance. They liked having a grandmother who had refused a famous man at sixty and broken his heart. But it was a subject on which she would permit no affectionate comment. It would have meant so much to her to have had him as a dear contemporary and friend.

One foggy morning in late December when the whole world seemed bounded by the thick yellow fog which pressed against her window panes, Dawson brought her a letter bearing a French stamp. She knew the handwriting at once, though it had been firmer in the old days. She read a few lines of it, then stopped and turned to her maid who was busy about the room.

“Dawson,” said Madame Claire in a voice that was far from steady, “here’s a letter from Mr. de Lisle.”

“Oh, m’lady!” cried Dawson who loved surprises, “it’s like a voice from the grave, isn’t it now?”

“He’s not well,” continued her mistress, reading on. “Gout he says, poor old thing. He writes from Cannes, where he’s gone for the sunshine. He has to have a nurse. How he must hate it!”

“And you as strong and well as ever,” exulted Dawson. It was a source of peculiar joy to her when any of Madame Claire’s contemporaries fell victims to the maladies of old age, or that severest malady of all, death. Her beloved mistress seemed to her then like the winner in a great race, and who was she, Dawson, but the groom who tended and groomed the racer? She thrilled with pride.

Madame Claire read the letter through to the end, and then went at once to her desk, with as free a step, Dawson thought, as she had ever had.

“I must write to him immediately,” she said, a flush on her old cheeks.

The letter took her several hours to write, because there was so much to tell him. He kept it, as he kept all her letters, and when he died they came into Eric’s possession, and finally into the writer’s.

“My dear old Stephen,” she wrote,

“Nothing that has happened to me in the last ten years has given me as much pleasure as your letter from Cannes. After a silence a fifth of a century long, you have come alive for me again. Stephen, Stephen! How am I to forgive you for that silence? But I do forgive you, as you knew I would, and I thank you for the happiness you have given me by breaking it.

“I don’t believe you have changed much, though you say you are an invalid—gout, phlebitis, rheumatism! Infirm, crotchety old Stephen! Infirm as to legs, but very active, I gather, as to brain, heart, and temper. How I wish we might see each other! But you cannot travel, and I—yes, I can, but I will not. I motor gently down to my little house in Sussex in the summer, and back again in the autumn, and that is enough. The rest of the time I dwell in peace and security in three rooms here at the Kensington Park Hotel, and it suits me very well.

“How good it is that we can pick up the threads of our friendship again! As far as I am concerned it has neither lapsed nor waned. You say I dealt you a great blow. But, Stephen, how could you expect Robert’s widow, already a grandmother, to have married again? That, my dearest friend, would have been an elderly folly for which I would never have forgiven myself. You sulked badly, Stephen, and I think now you owe it to your years and mine to laugh. Do laugh! There is nothing like the mirth of old age, for old age knows why it laughs.

“You say you want me to write you about everything that concerns myself. I know you are only trying to cover up your tracks here, for the one you really want to hear about is Judy. I am well aware of your elderly partiality for my granddaughter, with whom you fell in love when she was seven—twenty years ago. But I don’t intend to pander to it at the expense of the others. Judy must take her turn along with the rest.

“Stephen, would you be young again? You, thinking of your gout and your phlebitis, would cry ‘Yes!’ But don’t you see that you would merely be inviting gout and phlebitis again? For myself, the answer is no, no, no! And I have been happy, too, and with reason. Not for anything would I be blind again, uncertain, groping; feeling my way, wondering where my duty lay, dreading the blows of fate before they struck, valuing happiness too highly. That is life. Now the turmoil has died down, confusion is no more. It’s like sitting on a quiet hilltop in the light of the setting sun. Fate cannot harm me—I have lived. There is nothing to be feared, and there is nothing to be expected except the kindly hand of death, and the opening of another door. Perhaps one is a little tired, but the climb, after all, was worth it, and one can think here, and listen to the cries of birds, and the sound of the wind in the grass. The lie of the land over which one has come taken a different aspect and falls into a pattern. Those woods where one felt so lost—how little they were, and how many openings they had, if one had only gone forward, instead of rushing in blind circles.…

“Gordon, my tactless grandson, said the other day that no one would dream I was nearly eighty if it were not for the evidence of the family tree. That did not please me. I take as much pride in being nearly eighty as I once took in being sixteen. After all, being an old woman is my rôle at present, and naturally it is a rôle I wish to play well. Perhaps you’ll say that I would accept old age less philosophically if I were blind, or deaf, or bedridden. I wonder? Even without all one’s faculties, surely there are thoughts and memories enough to furnish the mind. (Why, why, Stephen, don’t we cultivate contemplation?) And that tantalizing veil that shuts us off from the beyond should be wearing thin at our age, so that by watching and waiting one should be able to catch glimpses of what it hides.

“And now you will say, ‘For Heaven’s sake stop moralizing and tell me about Judy.’

“I hate describing people—especially those I love, but I will try. She is lovely in her strange way, with moments of real beauty. I say strange, because she follows no accepted rules. She is somber, but lights up charmingly when she smiles. I suppose her mouth is too wide, but I like it. She, is dark—the sort of girl who wears tawny colors well. She has brains and humor and in responsiveness is not even second to Eric. Her mother, my daughter Millicent whom you will of course remember, is foolishly trying to goad her into marriage. How I pity youth! It’s so vulnerable! Judy tells me she sometimes wakes at night in a sort of fever, hagridden by the thought that she may have made a mess of her life by not marrying this man or that, fearful that she may never meet the right one at all, hating the thought of spinsterhood, and, she says, seeing nothing else for it.

“‘What,’ you may ask, ‘are all the young men about?’ Well, we lost many of our best in the war, as you and I know full well, and Judy expects—everything—And why not, as she has everything to give? She is not a girl to make concessions easily. Noel, her younger brother, is a great joy to her. Do you remember Noel, or can you only remember Judy? He was a dear little boy in those days, with his prickly, unusual notions, and his elfishness. He is not exactly good-looking, but his height, and his extremely attractive smile make him at least noticeable. He lost his left arm in France, and is now finding it very difficult to fit into a job. His health was so bad before the war that he had never settled down to anything, and the doctors had frightened him and all of us into the belief that a severe winter cold would kill him. Then the war came, and three winters in the trenches made a new man of him.

“Gordon, of course, went back to the Foreign Office, where he seems perfectly happy. He will never fit his grandfather’s shoes, however. Robert had more wit in his little finger than Gordon has in his handsome head—but it is a very handsome head.

“Do you know that I am practicing great self-restraint? I have hardly mentioned your godson Eric—for fear, perhaps, of saying too much. He was away at school when you were last here, so he must be a very shadowy figure to you. He might have been like a son to you all these years, if only you had not cut yourself adrift from us all. For five years, you say, you have been almost within a day’s journey of England without once crossing the Channel. And yet time was when London was like a ball at your feet. Your great fault, Stephen, is that you take defeat badly. I still believe that you could have turned your political reverse at least into victory if you had stayed.

“At forty-one Eric is very like what Robert was at that age, but more dynamic. Keep that word in mind if you would know him. He infuses life into me through his voice, through his smile, through his intensely blue eyes. He is impetuous and headlong—but headlong always on the side of fairness. He has his father’s quick grasp of things. He is tremendously interested in what you say—in what he says—and in you. When he smiles he makes you smile, when he laughs you must laugh too. He treats me as if I were an interesting old friend whom he likes, as well as his mother whom he loves.

“His wife—he married Louise Broughton, the daughter of old Admiral Broughton—doesn’t in the least understand him. If I have a regret in the world it is that. But I will tell you more about her another time.

“And now a few words about Millicent whom you knew as a sedate young matron. She is still sedate. She is in fact the very embodiment of all that is correct and conventional (I almost said and dull) in the English character. By that I mean that she is always well-poised and completely mistress of herself whether at Court or in her nightdress in an open boat. (Where indeed she was, poor thing, for she was torpedoed crossing from America during the war. She had gone there to raise funds for the Belgians. An eye-witness told me she presided all the time, especially when it came to handing round the rum and biscuits. She was always a good, if stiff, hostess. He said that her nightdress, barely covered by a waterproof and a lifebelt, became by some miracle of deportment a quite proper and suitable garment, and made the women who were wrapped in furs look overdressed. I can imagine it perfectly.)

“I have never outgrown a feeling of amazement at having achieved anything as correct as Millicent. She is always certain she is right, and she never sees obstacles. When Gordon, Eric, and Noel went to the war she never worried, but looked quite calmly to their safe return, completely ignoring the awful and uncertain ground between. I believe she thought that the Almighty had a special mission to look after Pendletons and Gregorys. It seems she had some grounds for her belief, only Judy says she forgot to concentrate on Noel’s arm.

“John, her husband, is as negligible as ever. I cannot think what you found in him to dislike, unless you, like Nature, abhor a vacuum.

“As for Connie—my poor Connie! Stephen, I don’t know where she is, nor whether she’s alive or dead.

“Get better of your gout and the other things, and come to England. After all, there is no place like it. Although we are in the midst of winter and coal is scarce and dear, and though the descendants of the daughters of the horseleech have multiplied exceedingly and cry louder than ever, ‘Give, give, give!’ And although even the children nowadays seem to lisp in grumbles, for the grumbles come, it is still the best country in the world and you must come back to it and take it to your heart again before—but you hate the thought of that, so I won’t say the words.

“I will write again next week; there is so much to tell you. So good-bye, for now.

“Claire.”

[CHAPTER II]

Dawson thought her mistress must have begun to write her “memoyers,” she wrote so long. She said as much to Judy and Noel when they came to pay Madame Claire a visit the next day. They were much interested in the news. Judy remembered “Old Stephen,” as she had called him years ago, and identified him by describing a mole that he had on one cheek. It was her first experience with moles, and for a long time after she confused that little mound on his face, with the bigger mounds the moles made in the lawn, and thought that a much smaller animal of the same species must have been to blame for it.

As a child she had an extraordinary memory—a memory that seemed to go beyond the things of this life. She came trailing clouds of glory in a way that used to alarm her mother and delight her grandmother. Millicent was quite shocked at a question of hers when she was four.

“Mummy, whose little girl was I before I was yours?”

Of course Millicent answered:

“Little silly, you’ve always been my little girl.”

But Judy wouldn’t hear of it, and shook her head till the curls flew.

When her grandmother questioned her about it, she would only repeat:

“It was another mummy under the big tree.”

Millicent was convinced that she only said it to annoy.

Noel too had little peculiarities as a child. Loud music always hurt his eyes, he said, and when he heard a noisy brass band he would shut them tightly and cry out:

“It’s hideous! It’s so red. I hate that color.”

He always saw color in music and heard music in color, and never knew that he was different from other people until he went to school, and there the boys teased him out of it. Think of the individual oddnesses that are strangled (for better or for worse) in school! Limbo must be full of childish conceits and strange gleams of knowledge.

On that particular afternoon the two of them amused their grandmother even more than usual. They had no secrets from Madame Claire, which of course is the greatest compliment the young can pay to the old.

The subject of Judy’s spinsterhood was introduced by her brother. She had refused a friend of his a week before, and he pretended that the situation seriously alarmed him.

“There’s not a man on the tapis at present,” he told Madame Claire. “She’s given poor old Pat Enderby his walking papers, and I’m hanged if I know what she’s going to do now. There isn’t even a nibble that I’m aware of.”

“My dear boy,” said Judy from the other end of the sofa, “I’ve got till I’m thirty-five. That’s nearly eight years. If I don’t find somebody by that time, I’ll know I’m not intended for matrimony.”

“Every woman is intended for matrimony,” said her brother judicially.

“That’s nonsense. And anyway,” Judy defended herself, “I’ve no intention of rushing about looking for a husband. I’m quite content to stay single as long as I have you.”

“Rot,” said Noel unfeelingly. “I want a lot of nephews and nieces, and Gordon’s would be such awful prigs.”

“So might mine be,” she retorted. “There’s no telling, apparently. Who’d think that Mother was Madame Claire’s daughter?”

“Well, if they were prigs, their Uncle Noel would soon knock it out of them. Besides, provided you don’t marry a prig—which heaven forbid, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be regular young devils.”

“You seem to be well up in eugenics, Noel,” observed Madame Claire, her eyes twinkling. She was sitting near the fire in an old chair with a high, carved back. She loved their nonsense, and liked to spur them on to greater absurdities.

“He thinks he is,” Judy said. “But honestly, spinsterhood is fast losing its terrors for me. One ought to be proud of it, and put it after one’s name, like an order of merit. I shall begin signing myself, ‘Judy Pendleton, V.F.C.’ Virgin From Choice. Doesn’t it sound charming?”

“Horrible!” exclaimed Noel. “I certainly wouldn’t advertise the fact. I think spinsterhood is awful. I believe I’d rather see you a lady of easy virtue than a spinster, Judy.”

“Really, Noel!” cried Judy. “And before Madame Claire!”

“She doesn’t mind,” scoffed Noel. “Besides, she agrees with me. Don’t you, Madame Claire?”

She appeared to consider the question.

“I think spinsterhood would be less dull, in the long run,” she answered. “After all, no one is freer from ties—if that is a desirable thing—than the modern unmarried woman.”

“Of course,” Judy seconded her. “Noel’s point of view is ridiculously young. Personally I could be quite content if I had some money of my own, freedom, and a few friends.”

“Bosh,” spoke man through the mouth of Noel. “If you mean to include men friends, let me tell you that men are afraid of unmarried women over thirty-five or so. They can’t make them out. Neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.”

Judy did not pretend to dislike men.

“That’s rather a dreadful thought,” said she.

Tea arrived at this point, and Noel proceeded to make absurd conversation with Dawson, who had known the brother and sister from babyhood. Absurd, at least, on his part, but perfectly serious on hers. She always asked him how his arm was, meaning, presumably, the place where they took it off.

“Splendid, thanks, Dawes,” he replied. “They’re going to give me a new one soon, I’m glad to say. They make wonderful artificial limbs now, that can do most anything.”

“So they tell me, Mr. Noel,” said Dawson, arranging the tea things.

“For instance,” he went on, “the one I’m going to have knows all about raising chickens. It’s trained specially. I’m thinking of going in for chicken farming, you know.”

“Is that a fact, Mr. Noel?” breathed Dawson.

“Oh, yes,” went on the deceiver of women. “You see, I don’t know a thing about chickens, and all I’ll have to do will be just to follow my arm about, so to speak. It can tell the age of a pullet to a day, just by pulling its leg. That’s why they call a young hen a pullet, you know. As for eggs, it can find ’em anywhere. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the old hens hide them, this arm of mine can smell ’em out as quick as winking.”

Dawson gaped with astonishment.

“I never would have believed it, would you, m’lady?” exclaimed the dear old London-bred soul. ”They do invent wonderful things these days, don’t they now?”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” went on Noel mercilessly. “A chap I know lost both his legs in the war. He never was much of a sportsman, but he made up his mind he’d like to go in for golf. So they made him a specially trained pair of golf legs, and hang it all! the poor fellow has to play all day long now. The worst of it is he doesn’t care much about it, now that he’s had a taste of it. Bores him, he says. But those blessed legs of his, they take him off to the golf links rain or shine, every day of his life; and they won’t let him off at nine holes, either. Has to play the whole blooming eighteen.”

At this point, Dawson’s slow mind gave birth to a faint suspicion.

“Now, Mr. Noel,” she said, her plain old face red with one of her easy blushes, “I believe you’re just having me on.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said he, looking the picture of earnest candor, “you haven’t heard the half of it yet. Why, another chap I know had even worse luck than that. Nice fellow, too—has a wife and family. He lost his right arm. Well, they made a mistake with him and sent him an arm that was specially designed for another chap—a Colonel in the War Office—devil of a fellow and all that. Would you believe it, every time my friend went near a Wraf or a Waac, that arm of his nearly jumped out of its socket trying to get round the girl’s waist? Awkward, wasn’t it?”

Dawson’s expression was almost too much for him.

“Don’t look so cut up about it, Dawes,” he said, reaching for a cake. “It all came out right in the end. He and the Colonel swapped arms, and so he got his own, finally. It was specially designed for spanking the kids, and as the Colonel was a bachelor it was no good to him. So they both lived happy ever after.”

Dawson was on her way to the door. Before making her exit, she turned her crimson face toward Madame Claire.

“I do wish, m’lady,” she said, “that you’d tell Mr. Noel there’s some things that ought to be sacred. And I’ll say this, Mr. Noel. The arm you want is one that’ll pinch you when you tell fibs.”

“Good old Dawes,” commented Noel between mouthfuls. “She generally manages to get her own back.”

Judy and Noel were much interested at this time in Eric’s matrimonial affairs. Noel especially was convinced that he and Louise were on the verge of a smash-up.

“Something’s got to happen,” he said. “The tension in that house is too awful. Dining there is like sitting over a live bomb and counting the seconds.”

“I can’t think how Eric stands it,” said Judy.

Madame Claire shook her head.

“There won’t be an explosion. Nothing so dramatic. What I dread most isn’t a smash-up, but a freezing-up. Like the Nortons’, Judy. Do you remember how they avoided each other’s eyes, and never laughed, nor even smiled? Their very faces became frozen. It was terrible.”

“It would take a considerable frost to freeze Eric,” Judy remarked with a laugh.

“Fortunately,” assented her grandmother. “What I most admire about him is that he’s always ready to discuss peace. He’s always hoping for signs of friendliness from the enemy.”

“She treats him like a red-headed stepson,” Noel said indignantly. “If he’d only begun by beating her now and then——“

Madame Claire felt bound to make out a case for her daughter-in-law.

“She married the wrong man—for her—that’s all,” she said.

When Noel and Judy had gone, Madame Claire sat thinking about Eric and his unfortunate marriage. He was, as she had called him in her letter, dynamic. He was as impulsive and full of the love of life as his wife was joyless and cold. His chief charm lay in his perfectly sincere interest in everything and everybody. His mind was as elastic as his muscles, which were famous at Oxford, and while his wife found most things rather tedious, to him there was nothing old under the sun.

He thought he had married a charming girl, and indeed, for a while, she had charm. During his impetuous pursuit of her—for some instinct told her that the more she eluded him, the more eagerly he would pursue—she assumed a delicate sparkle that became her well. He could even remember a day when she threw out an alluring glow at which a hopeful lover might warm his hands, but it soon died, and the sparkle with it. Love may have told her how to spread the net, but of the cage in which to keep him she knew less than nothing.

Madame Claire understood better than any one else that he felt ties of the spirit far more than he felt ties of the flesh. That peculiarity he had inherited from her, for she had often been heard to say that she loved Eric because he was Eric and not because she had borne him. She declared that her affection for Judy and Noel was entirely due to their own charm and attraction for her, and had nothing to do with the fact that they were her grandchildren.

“Though I am very glad they were,” she would say, “for in that way intimacy has been made easy for us.”

With her daughter Millicent she had nothing in common but the blood tie, and though she rarely confessed it, there were times when it irked her.

And so her son found it impossible to be the conventional husband who takes his wife for granted. He never took Louise for granted for a single instant, and it shocked her. He treated her with the same courtesy and studied her moods as diligently as if she had been some one else’s wife. When he made her a present, which he liked to do, he expected her to show the same pleasure in the gift that she would have shown before their marriage. As for her, she would have asked for nothing better than to settle down into the take-everything-for-granted matrimonial jog-trot. When the clergyman pronounced them man and wife, he said, so far as Louise was concerned, the last word on the subject. Spiritual marriage was an undreamt of thing. She expected her husband to be faithful to her and to look up to her, because, after all, she came of one of the oldest families in England. So they were rapidly growing apart. Threads had become twisted and lines of communication broken. And there seemed no good reason for it all. There was still a spark among the cooling embers, but some wind that was needed to blow upon it had shifted and gone elsewhere.

There were no children—which was a greater sorrow to Eric than to the empty-handed Louise.

“A figurehead of a wife,” Judy called her, and it was true enough.

They lived in a charming house in Brook Street, which Louise complained wasn’t big enough to entertain in, and was too big to say you couldn’t entertain in. She had left the furnishing of it to Eric, admitting her own deficiency in the matter of taste. She bitterly resented his unerring instinct for the best thing and the right thing; a gift, she chose to maintain, it was unmanly to possess.

“I didn’t know I was marrying a decorator,” she was fond of saying.

[CHAPTER III]

Stephen de Lisle’s second letter, eagerly looked for by Madame Claire, came the following week.

“Dear Claire,

“Thank God for your letter. It’s put new life into me; and I assure you, I needed it. Of course it’s all tommyrot what you say about old age. Who wouldn’t want to run and jump about again, and be able to digest anything, and sit up late at night? I think this having to be coddled and looked after is an infernal nuisance.

“Yes, I was a fool to take your refusal as I did, but that can’t be helped now. You forgive me, and besides, I know well enough the loss was mine. But I couldn’t have endured London all these years. Too many people, too much noise, and too much dirt. Still, I may, gout and rheumatism permitting, come to see you and my godson and the grandchildren yet. I’m glad you remembered how fond I was of that child Judy. Most attractive child I ever saw. Twenty-seven, you say? It doesn’t seem possible. Don’t let her get married in a hurry. She is perfectly right to wait for the real thing. Instinct is the lead to follow, and hers is a right one.

“That was a wonderful letter of yours, Claire. I hope there will be many more. They give me something to look forward to. I haven’t a half dozen young people about me as you have. I’ve one niece, Monica de Lisle. Ugly, churchy, uninteresting female. You may remember her.

“Cannes is delightful, but alas! I am too old to enjoy more than the sun and the color of the sky. How do you manage to keep so young in your mind? Bob used to say you’d die young if you lived to be a hundred, and he was right.

“I’m reading Shakespeare mostly. I find the old ones the best, and he’s the best of the old ones. Omniscient, he was.

“Well, well, write again soon. Don’t tire yourself, but—write soon. Do you remember old Jock Wetherby? He’s here at this hotel. Tottering on the brink, and ten years my junior. Drink—women—all the cheapening vices. Looks it, too.

“Tell me about Judy and the others.

“Yours ever,

“Stephen.”

“P.S.—I’ve got the ugliest nurse in Christendom.”

Madame Claire read extracts from this letter to Judy, who was immensely pleased at the impression she must have made.

“Though what he saw in me, I can’t think,” she said. “My chief points, judging from photographs, were shoe-button eyes, a fringe, and a prominent stomach. But there’s no accounting for these infatuations.”

“I do wish he would come to London,” said Madame Claire as she folded the letter. “After all, London is the best place for old people. They get more consideration here than anywhere else in the world.”

The Kensington Park Hotel certainly harbored its share. On those rare occasions when Madame Claire took a meal in the dining-room she was always struck by the number of white, gray, or shining pink heads to be seen. And the faces that went with them were usually placid and content. In the lounge at tea-time they fought the war over again, they made or unmade political reputations, they discussed the food, the latest play, and most of all they discussed—the women at least—Royalty and the nobility. Not even in the drawing-rooms of the very great were exalted names so freely and intimately spoken of. One old dame with an ear trumpet, who later comes into the story, had once or twice, at Judy’s or Noel’s request, been invited into Madame Claire’s sitting room. Noel called her the Semaphore. From her they learned what it was the Royal family had for breakfast the morning war was declared, or what Princess Mary said to young Lord B—— when he trod on her toe at a dance. How these stray bits of gossip or surmise ever filtered their way down the old lady’s ear trumpet was a mystery to every one. She was an old woman of strange importance. She envied no one under Heaven. She possessed a small black instrument that seemed to be the focusing point of every fine wire of invention. She seemed to be the central office of the world’s “They Say” bureau. No one was ever rude to her, and no one, except perhaps Madame Claire and her grandchildren, ever really disbelieved her, because hardly any one does altogether disbelieve rumors, even when they come from such a source. Her greatness of course was at its height during the war, when she was generously supplied with the most astounding pieces of secret information by obliging young nephews. However, she bore the flatness of peace with serenity, contenting herself with the doings of the great. Of such, with variations, is the kingdom of Kensington!

A day or two later Eric and Louise came together to see Madame Claire. It was so long since they had done this that she felt a little flutter of hope, believing that it indicated a better state of things between them. But she found soon enough that she was wrong. Louise was possessed—in the sense that people one reads of in the Bible were possessed—by her own special demon of jealousy.

She was not jealous of any other woman—it was far less simple than that. She was jealous of the ease with which her husband made friends, of his popularity, of his charm. They had been guests at a rather political house party, where Eric was unmistakably the center of attraction. She was aware that she had been more tolerated than liked, and the knowledge did not contribute to her peace of mind. She was determined to make him feel (on any grounds whatsoever) inferior to her. She could understand and respect superiority of birth, but she distrusted and resented superiority of intellect.

“A most successful week-end,” Eric told his mother, drawing up a chair beside hers. “Their house is lovely, and I am very fond of them all. I should like to think that I am one-half as good a host as Charles Murray-Carstairs.”

“I am glad you both enjoyed it,” said Madame Claire.

“Both?” Her daughter-in-law gave a short laugh. “Candidly I was bored to tears.”

Louise was meant to be a pretty woman, but having a regular profile and an English wild rose complexion, she relied upon them to pull her through, and wore her clothes as if she despised them. Her hair was never quite tidy at the nape of her neck, and her hats of this season were undistinguishable from those of two seasons ago. She took a pride in her lack of smartness, and had a curious and mysterious belief that it was both unladylike and unpatriotic to dress in the fashion. Although she was only thirty-four, her girlishness had gone so completely that it might never have existed. The thin nostrils and small tight mouth suggested the woman of fifty. She met Eric’s eyes with a look of antagonism.

“I’ll tell you what the visit was like, Madame Claire. We couldn’t go out because of the rain, so Eric and Charles had time to ride all their hobbies. We had old plate for luncheon, cricket for tea, and politics for dinner. I don’t know what we had for breakfast. I was spared that by not coming down.”

“You see, mother,” said Eric with a gesture of the hands, “the sufferings of a woman who is married to a bore. I know of no case more deserving of pity.”

“It’s always the same,” went on his wife, “whenever we go away together. But there are always plenty of pretty women to hang upon his words, Madame Claire, so it really doesn’t matter.”

“Now there,” interrupted Eric with a smile, “there you are wrong. Never in my life have enough pretty women hung upon my words to satisfy me. I should like to see hundreds of them so hanging, and the prettier the better. Inaccuracy,” he added, turning to his mother, “is one of Louise’s greatest faults.”

“Well, Louise,” said Madame Claire, putting a hand in one of Eric’s, “time was when you led and others followed. You never used to be shy. If you were bored with politics and old silver——”

“I’m not shy,” her daughter-in-law answered. “I think subjugated would be nearer the mark.”

Eric took this up humorously.

“I have subjugated Louise,” he said with mock pride. “I’m willing to wager that no other man could have done it under fifteen years, and it has taken me only eight. And I’ve never once used the whip. Simply and solely the power of the eye. I subjugate all my wives,” he added. “I am a terrible fellow.”

He picked up and examined an old spoon that lay on Madame Claire’s table, and was about to change the subject, when his wife’s cold voice interrupted him.

“Oh, I don’t claim that you’re any worse than the general run of husbands.”

“Thank you, my dear. I can only suppose that you took one to yourself in a moment of weakness.” Then, throwing off his annoyance:

“What a charming spoon! It’s Charles the Second. You’ve never shown me this.”

“Judy gave it to me the other day,” said Madame Claire, her face brightening. “She’s very clever at picking up these things. But then—who taught her?”

“Ah, well, you can’t teach everybody,” he answered, turning it over in his fingers.

“You can’t, for instance, teach your wife,” threw in Louise. “But there’s one thing I have learnt since my marriage, Madame Claire, and that is my limitations.”

“You underrate yourself, Louise,” said Madame Claire calmly. “Do tell me about Gordon. Noel and Judy believe he’s really interested in Helen Dane. Do you think he is?”

“He’s there a great deal,” answered Eric, “but then that may mean nothing. Ottway, her father, is a good sort, but pompous.”

“Lord Ottway has dignity, if that’s what you mean,” said Louise. “I hope Gordon does marry Helen. It would be very suitable.”

“As for suitable—I don’t know,” said Madame Claire, musingly. “The girl seems a little hard—self-sufficient. Still, I don’t dislike her.”

“I only wish Judy would do as well,” Louise went on. “She’s almost certain to throw herself away on some nobody.”

“If he were a nice nobody I shouldn’t mind,” said Madame Claire.

When Louise got up to go, Madame Claire followed her into the bedroom where her fur coat was. She longed to say something to her. She felt that the words existed that might soften that bitter mood, but she could not find the right ones. She was sick at heart with anxiety. She knew that Eric’s patience was at breaking point, and that he found his wife’s sarcasm hard to bear. Louise had only lately resorted to sarcasm—that passing bell of love—and yet, underneath it all, Madame Claire felt that she loved him, and longed to be different, but that something—some strange twist in her nature—would not let her. She seemed to her like a woman pushing her frail boat farther and farther out into a dangerous current, and all the time crying weakly and piteously for help. She doubted if that cry reached any ears but hers.

“I am the only one who can help her,” she thought, and at the same time sent up a prayer to the god who understands women—if such there be.

A few days later she sent Louise a note, asking her to come and see her.

“If I can only avoid being mother-in-lawish,” she thought, “I may be able to accomplish something.”

Louise found her sitting in her high-backed chair beside a wood fire. The room was full of the scent of freesias, and she wore a few of them in the front of her gray dress.

When Louise had put aside her wraps, Madame Claire began to say what she had to say without any unnecessary preliminaries.

“Louise, I particularly wanted a talk with you to-day. I hope you’ll be very frank with me, as I mean to be very frank with you.”

“I think you’ll always find me quite willing to be frank,” replied the younger woman.

“Very well then. Perhaps you’ll tell me this. Is Eric doing everything he possibly can to make you happy?”

Louise raised her eyebrows.

“What an odd question! Yes, I suppose he is—as well as he knows how. Why?”

“Because it isn’t hard to see that you’re not happy, and it makes me very sad.”

“I suppose people do notice it,” said Louise. “I can’t help that. I’m not happy.”

“Just what I thought. Well, can you tell me the cause of it? Eric has succeeded in a good many things, and I don’t like to see him make a failure of his marriage.”

“I suppose not.”

“You two ought to be happy. You have everything; you married for love, presumably. I’m sure you’ve done your part. It must be Eric’s fault in some way.”

Louise began pulling off her gloves, her chin suddenly trembling like that of a child who is about to cry.

“It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose. We’re simply not suited to each other. Eric should have had a wife who’d be willing to sit at his feet all day long, and tell him how wonderful he is. A sort of echo.”

“Are you sure that would please him? And suppose it did—after all——”

“No!” she said with determination. “There are plenty of other people to tell him what fine speeches he makes, and how clever he is. I’m not going to be one of them. He’ll hear the truth from his wife, whether he likes it or not.”

“So you don’t think he makes good speeches?” persisted Madame Claire gently.

“I dare say he does, but——”

“I thought you said he would hear the truth from you. If he does make a good speech, I should think he’d love to hear you say so. If you do believe in him and in his ability, Louise, I wish you would let him know it. I don’t believe you have any idea how much it would mean to him.”

Louise got up and walked to the window.

“I have his ability and his cleverness thrown at me by his admirers year in and year out,” she said. “I’m sick to death of it.”

“And are you the only one who never encourages or praises him?” asked Madame Claire. “A man must find that rather bitter.”

Louise turned from the window with an abrupt movement.

“I wish him to know that he can’t have admiration and flattery from every one. It will be the ruination of him.”

“Ah! I thought so. So it’s really for his good?”

”Well, as I promised to be frank, no; I don’t suppose it is. But I can’t help it. Things have always been made too easy for him. Why should he be such a darling of the gods? Life isn’t easy and pleasant for me. Why should it be for him?”

“I see.” Madame Claire laughed suddenly. “Forgive me, Louise, but there’s something rather funny in it.”

“In what?”

“In your wanting to be a sort of hair shirt. Oh, dear me, I don’t know why I laughed. Only, my dear, there’s so very little happiness in the world. I’d forgotten there were good people going about trampling on it.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“I think I’d better go away for a while,” said Louise finally.

“Do!” urged Madame Claire. “It would be an excellent thing for both of you. Stay away from Eric long enough to be glad to see him when you get back.”

“If I were,” said Louise, “I’d never give him the satisfaction of knowing it.”

Madame Claire called once more on the deity who understands women.

“And yet, Louise,” she said, with all her courage, “you love him. You love Eric. I know you do. Some day you may find out how much, and it may be too late. That will be the tragedy. You’ll know that you had only to reach out your hand—you’re like a child, you know. Have you ever seen a child while playing with other children, receive some fancied slight, and withdraw, hurt? I have. The other children don’t even know what the trouble is, and they go on with their game. The hurt child stands apart, lonely and miserable. They call her presently to come and join them, and she longs to go, but can’t—can’t! Something won’t let her. Oh, I know, I know! I must have been that child once. I know what she feels. She stands there kicking at a stone, longing, yes, longing to go out into the sunshine again and play. She knows that game better than they do. They even call to her to come and lead them. But she can’t. She sulks. She doesn’t want to sulk. She suffers. And then the nurse comes, and the play is over, and she is taken off to bed. It is too late. It is finished.… Louise! You stupid child! Isn’t it something like that? Tell me, isn’t it?”

Madame Claire’s finger had found the spot, evidently. Louise’s hardness, her bravado, suddenly left her. Madame Claire had never seen her cry before, and the sight seemed to her very pitiful. Her tears made her seem younger.

“It is like that.” Her voice came muffled from the handkerchief she was pressing to her face. ”But I’m helpless. I can’t be different. I tell you I can’t. The more Eric tries to be nice to me, the more I harden toward him. The more I want to meet him half way, the less I’m able to. I’m not hard, really; I long to be different. But it’s too late. It’s grown on me now. I can’t stop it. I suppose I must go on like this forever. My life is a misery to me.”

* * * * * *

It was a prayer of thanksgiving that went up to the god who understands women that night. Madame Claire felt that now all things were possible. Where there had been a blank wall, there was now an open gate—for her, at least. How long it would be before the gate would be open to Eric, she dared not think.

[CHAPTER IV]

“My Dear Stephen,

“I was delighted with your letter, I believe you are feeling better, for you sounded far more like your old self. Especially the postscript, which I thought a most hopeful indication.

“Yes, I remember old Jock Wetherby. Poor old thing! How perfectly ghastly to approach the end of one’s life as a mere elderly libertine. For I feel there is very little else one could truthfully carve on his tombstone. And what a commentary on free will! He once had gifts and opportunities such as are given to few.

“Last night I went with Judy and Noel to see that enchanting sprite Karsavina. I shall never forget it. As a rule one watches people dance, but last night I danced too. I swear that my spirit left its rheumatic old body and sprang and whirled and darted in the midst of all that color and movement with the music splashing and rippling about it. For a few hours I bathed in the Fountain of Youth—that fountain whose waters, I believe, are made up of music, color, and some other ingredients that man with his slow mind has not yet discovered. Certainly I was never less conscious of flesh and bones.

“And why is it, I ask myself, that only certain combinations of sound and color can produce this effect, or give this measure of delight? Suppose, one day, some one were to hit upon the utmost perfection in arrangement of sound, color and form, would it open up a straight path like a shaft of light for our spirits to glide upon into some other world than this? For I feel we are very near that other world when our senses are so stirred and lifted up by beauty. I wonder! But perhaps there is already perfect beauty in the world, and it is only that our spirits lack the necessary freedom from earthly things—or why should we not drift into Paradise itself upon the perfume of a rose?

“At the moment my mind is very full not of Paradise but of Eric and Louise. She has decided to go and stay with her people in Norfolk for a while, where, I fear, she will continue to be unhappy. Things had come to a dangerous pass with them, and Eric is as sore and puzzled as a man can be. Hers is a strange nature. I have tried hard to find a chink in the armor of her bitterness. Poor Louise! And yet I believe she would go to the stake vowing she had been a good wife to him. There are a great many women, I find, who think that if they neither leave nor deceive their husbands they are being good wives to them. I pray that something—God knows what!—will happen, to make a change of attitude easy for her. She would have been happy, poor girl, with a dull fellow to whom she could have condescended.

“I often say to myself, Stephen, that to realize the imperfection of our relation to God, it is only necessary to realize the imperfection of our relation to one another.

“I have made a discovery of late. At least I think it is a discovery. This is it. I believe that while the majority of men are content to be merely themselves, the majority of women are busy playing some rôle or other that takes their fancy or that circumstances suggest. I think that most women are forever conscious of an audience. I shall never forget a girl I once knew—she would be a very old woman now—who pretended to have lost her lover in the Crimean War. I knew—for she made me her confidante—that it was a quite imaginary lover, and that she had invented him to make people think her inconsolable, instead of unsought, as was actually the case. So for years she played the rôle of a bereaved woman, and if she is alive she is playing it yet. Every word, every action was suited to the part, and eventually she must of course have come to believe it herself. When she talked to a girl about to be married or in love, there was always a trembling smile upon her lips, and the brightness in her eye (as the novelists say) of unshed tears.

“‘Ah, my dear, treasure your happiness. I pray you may be more fortunate than I was.’

“And youth knew her for a woman with a sad, romantic story.

“‘A liar, pure and simple,’ you may say. Not at all. Merely an actress playing her part.

“Take the case of Louise—a weak nature overshadowed by a stronger one. What does she do? Creates a rôle for herself—the rôle of a patient, slighted woman, married to a selfish and exacting man. Why? Seen under the microscope we might discover it to be an attempt to attract notice.

“Take the case of my dear Judy. Most of her friends are married. She, being very fastidious, and finding that falling in love is at present quite beyond her, creates a little rôle for herself—the rôle of a very modern, independent girl who finds that sort of love unnecessary to her happiness.

“Then there is Millicent. She too is playing a part, though she would be horrified if I told her so. Hers is to be as much as possible like her surroundings, and to imitate as closely as she can the other women of her set. She has become as conventional and as harmlessly snobbish as they. At heart she is a kindly creature, but since marrying her John she has disguised herself so well as a Pendleton that if I had not a good memory for faces I would find it hard to distinguish her from all the other Pendletons.

“And then there was Connie—poor Connie! Her rôle was that of a woman of great emotions, of devastating loves—a sort of Camille. But underneath it I imagine and hope is still the simple, credulous woman who looked for happiness where happiness was not.

“‘And,’ perhaps you’ll ask, ‘don’t men make rôles for themselves?’ Rarely; and when they do they are insufferable.

“I am very tired and must stop. Tell me who else is at Cannes.

“Accept my affectionate greetings,

“Claire.”

“P.S.—You tell me nothing of your life all these years.”

* * * * * *

Time never seemed to Madame Claire to pass slowly, but it had never passed less slowly than now. Stephen de Lisle’s letters undoubtedly added a spice of excitement and anticipation to her days. She seldom went out (for she disliked fog, and London seemed just then to have gone to bed with a thick yellow blanket pulled over it) and she only asked those people to come to see her who, she said, touched her at the most points. She hated polite boredoms, and unless her visitors pleased or amused her, she preferred to be left to her own thoughts.

Of late her mind had run much upon her youngest daughter Connie, the beauty of the family—Connie who had “thrown her bonnet over the mill,” as the saying was in those days, and run off with Petrovitch, who was at that time first capturing London and Paris with his marvelous playing.

The blow had nearly broken her father, but Madame Claire was made of sterner stuff, and had long observed tendencies in her lovely daughter which promised to lead to this very dénouement. Connie Gregory had one of those entirely beautiful faces which seem so at variance with the tragedies they evoke. She had the prettiest and weakest mouth, and the most irresistible blue eyes that ever gave delight to a painter of pretty women. And she was “done” by all the fashionable artists of the day in every imaginable style of dress and posture. She had a very small share of wit, but with women like Connie, a little wit goes a long way. Her lovely head was forever turning to look down dark paths, and no one but her mother ever observed those sidelong glances. When she was twenty-two, she married a perfectly suitable young man, and Madame Claire hoped that the then serious duties of wifehood and motherhood would fill her shallow little head to the exclusion of dark romancing. But they had been married less than a year when Petrovitch with his leonine head and his matchless playing became the rage of London, and Connie, in company with a good many other women of her type, threw her youth and beauty, like a bouquet of flowers, at his feet. He was able to resist much, but the sheer loveliness of Connie made such an onslaught upon his bored indifference—wherein was mingled the most astonishing conceit—that when his contracts in London expired, he returned to Paris with the emotional and hysterical young wife clinging to his arm.

It was just at the outbreak of the Boer War, and Leonard Humphries, her husband, very naturally seized the opportunity of getting himself honorably shot. When that event took place, as it did some months later, people thought that Connie would at least legalize her irregular attachment by marriage, but Petrovitch produced a sturdy German wife, and scotched all such hopes. So London saw the lovely Connie no more.

Madame Claire bore her trouble with all the philosophy at her disposal. She never tried to avoid the subject, and was quite as willing to talk about Connie as about Eric or Millicent, in the wise belief that wounds exposed to the air now and then have the best chance of healing. For years after she sent letters and often money to Connie through her banker, for she knew well enough where a lack of funds might lead those uncertain steps. For a while her letters were answered, but it was not long before the answers ceased to come. She had heard nothing from Connie for many years now, and she no longer expected to hear. She thought of her as a foolish and unhappy woman, whose punishment would be, here or hereafter, self-inflicted, and understanding human nature as she did, she refrained from bitterness.

As for Eric, he was of the opinion that the world suffers less on the whole from women who love not wisely but too well, than from women who love too little. Weighed in the perhaps faulty scales of a man’s judgment, therefore, Connie was a better woman than Louise. Connie gave all and got nothing, while Louise took all without a thank you, and gave nothing. But men are always more inclined to forgive the generous sins than the ungenerous.

[CHAPTER V]

“Old Stephen’s” letter in answer to Madame Claire’s second one, contained a great deal that was of interest to her.

“Dear Claire,

“I didn’t answer your last as promptly as I wanted to because of the ills of the flesh. However, I feel freer of them to-day than I have for some time past. Your letters get better and better. I wish I could write like you. I’ve no gifts. I thought once I had a gift for politics. Well, perhaps I had, but I hadn’t the gift of pleasing—for long. I offended the Great Cham of my day, and after that it was like going down a greased slide. But better men than I have set their feet upon it. I had my say, and I paid for it, and I’d say it again if the chance came.

“You want me to tell you something of my life all these years. Well, here is an outline for you. After I left England I was in the United States for five years. A country gloriously endowed by nature, but somewhat spoilt by man. I like Americans individually; I number several of them among my few friends, but I’m not sure I like them as a race. They’re not a race—that’s the trouble—but they will be some day. There’s little racial breeding at present. As for characteristics, if you find them in the South, you lose them again in the East or West. You know more or less how an Englishman or a Frenchman’s going to act, because, exceptions excluded, they run pretty true to form. But you can’t guess how an American’s going to act until you know whether he’s Irish, German, British or Scandinavian American. Which complicates matters.

“Then I was five years in South America—three of them in Peru which I grew to love. After that—let me see—two in Burmah, one in Ceylon, and the last five in sunny spots in France and Italy—a sad spectator of war. I’ve enjoyed my travels. I have, I hope, learned much. But I can’t write about it. I’m no good at that. Can’t think how I used to write speeches once—and deliver them. I suppose living alone all these years has made me inarticulate. Miss McPherson’s afraid of me, I believe. Silly little thing. That annoys me.

“You ask me who else is in Cannes. I’m not sure I ought to tell you, but knowing you as I do, I think you’d want to be told. Connie’s here—with a man of course—and stopping at this hotel. Miss McPherson wheels me about in a chair on my goodish days, and I came upon them suddenly in the grounds this morning. Connie passed by without speaking, but I’m certain she knew me. She looks the unhappiest woman on God’s earth. Later I sent Miss McPherson to make inquiries, and it seems they call themselves Count and Countess Chiozzi. They may be for all I know. At any rate, he looks a dirty little cad. I’ll try to speak to her, for I think you would like me to. I will leave this letter open for a day or two, in case I do.

“Next day.

“I spoke to her to-day in the garden. She was alone. I said, ‘Connie, don’t you know me?’ She went a queer color, I thought, and said, ‘Yes, you’re Mr. de Lisle.’ I said, ‘You knew me yesterday,’ and she admitted it. I was in my bath-chair (beastly thing!) and I sent Miss McPherson away. Then I said, ‘Well, Connie, I see you’re the Countess Chiozzi now. Are you in Cannes for the winter?’ She said she supposed she was; that Cannes did as well as another place. She asked me if I’d been in England lately, and when I said, ‘Not in twenty years,’ she exclaimed, ‘Then you don’t know whether——’ and stopped. I knew what she wanted to ask, and said, ‘Yes, Connie, she’s alive and well, thank God. I heard from her only five days ago.’ She sat down on a bench, and we talked for some time. She was evidently wondering how much I knew, so I put her at her ease by saying I knew all about it, and I was afraid she was having a pretty rotten time. She started to flare up at that, but thought better of it, and said, ‘I am. Chiozzi is a devil. I must get away from him somehow. I’m at the end of my endurance.’ She went on to tell me about her life, and the gist of it is this. I’ll tell it in as few words as possible. She has always loved Petrovitch, she says, and no one else. He was in love with her for a time, then tired of her, as she interfered with his work. She wrote to her husband, asking him to take her back, but before he could reply a bullet took his life at Spion Kop. A year or two later she met a French officer who fell in love with her. They were to have been married, but he found out about Petrovitch and left her. Connie said bitterly that his life had been what many men’s lives are, but she wasn’t good enough. After that she went to Rome where she met an American named Freeman. She married him, and they sailed for New York on the ‘Titanic’. He was drowned, but she reached New York without so much as a wetting. She tired of New York, returned to Paris, and there met Chiozzi. They were married about four years ago. She says he is evil incarnate; but then women like Connie haven’t much choice. I asked her if I might tell you all this, and she said I might, and also sent you her love, but said she couldn’t possibly write to you herself at present. She still loves that poltroon Petrovitch, and would go around the world to see him, I believe. She ought to leave Chiozzi, that much is certain. I can see she fears him as much as she hates him.

“What a lot of people chuck away their lives in learning that passion’s a boglantern! The thing that stands chiefly in the way of human progress is the fact that we’ve each got to find things out for ourselves. Women found out what Connie’s finding out (I hope) two thousand years ago. Does that help Connie forward? Not a whit.

“I can’t write more now.

“God bless you!

“Stephen.”

The next day, Madame Claire read the letter to Judy, who was keenly interested.

“Aunt Connie has always seemed rather a fabulous creature—a sort of myth—to me,” she said. “I can’t quite realize her. Would you like me to go to Cannes and fetch both her and ‘Old Stephen’ home?”

Madame Claire thought not.

“It’s very odd you should have had three children so entirely different,” said Judy. “They all had exactly the same environment and the same care. How on earth do you account for these things?”

“I don’t,” replied her grandmother. “I can merely suppose that they all require different experiences; and they’re certainly getting them.” Her eyes rested on Judy in her brown dress and furs, and on her face with its challenging dark eyes and the too wide mouth that she loved. She wondered what experiences would be hers. Not Connie’s; and even more surely, not Millicent’s. So far her life had been even and tranquil—too tranquil for her own liking. She wanted to live. She had a great deal to give to life—and so far she had not lived at all.

“I suppose, like every one else,” went on Madame Claire, “they are working out something—I don’t know what. After all, my children are just people. So many mothers think of their own children as apart from the rest of the world. I don’t. Connie, Eric, Millicent—just people.”

“Eric isn’t,” protested Judy. “Eric is one of the gods come to earth again.”

Madame Claire laughed.

“Not Apollo!” she said. “I never liked his profile.”

“No, not Apollo. A youngish sort of Jove, but without his skittishness, or his thunders.”

“I know what you mean. There is something simple and Greek about Eric. It’s nice of you to see it.”

“It’s a great pity he’s my uncle,” remarked Judy. “Do you know, your daughter Millicent has been extremely troublesome lately? I wish you’d speak to her about it. It isn’t only the marriage topic. She wants me to pattern myself after the tiresome daughters of her most tiresome friends. You know the sort of girls I mean. They come out in droves each year, and play tennis in droves, and get married in droves, and have offspring in droves, and get buried beside their forefathers in droves. It’s so dull. I hate doing things in droves.”

This amused Madame Claire.

“Individualists have rather a bad time of it in your mother’s particular set,” she said. “Of course even I want you to marry, because I think you’d be happier in the long run; but not until you find some one you can’t do without.”

“I have a sort of presentiment,” Judy told her, flushing, “that if I ever do marry it will be some one undesirable. That is,” she hastened to explain, “undesirable from mother’s point of view.”

“But not necessarily from mine?” inquired Madame Claire.

“Not necessarily,” returned Judy.

She walked from the hotel to the house in Eaton Square where the Pendletons had lived ever since Noel was born, feeling that the world was a very blank sort of place at the moment. Having done vigorous war work for nearly five years, she was missing it more than she knew. Millicent could and did respond to the call of patriotism, and had seen her sons go forth to war like a Spartan mother; but why her only daughter should continue to do work long after the coming of peace, and when she had a comfortable home, social duties and flowers to arrange, was more than she could understand. So Judy, weary of argument, stayed at home, paid calls and arranged flowers. She felt something of an impostor, too, telling herself that she had cost her parents a great deal, and they were not getting their money’s worth. She had been educated and given an attractive polish for one purpose—to attract and wed a suitable man of a like education and polish. Being honest to the backbone she was distressed about it. She had not fulfilled her side of the contract, and her parents had, to the best of their belief, more than fulfilled theirs.

She avoided the drawing-room where there was tea and chatter, and hurried to her room, which Noel called “The Nunnery,” because of its austere simplicity. The white walls, quaint bits of furniture, and stiff little bed suggested the sixteenth century. The rest of the house was Millicent’s affair, and was “done” every few years in the prevailing mode by a well-known firm of decorators.

Noel wandered into her room soon after she reached it, and while she took off her hat and coat, he sat on the foot of the bed, which, if any one else had done it, would have seriously annoyed her.

“How’s Claire?” he asked.

“Wonderful as ever. She’s got more common sense, Noel, than the rest of the family put together. What do you think? She’s heard about Aunt Connie, through ‘Old Stephen.’ He saw her in Cannes.”

“Connie?” He whistled his astonishment. “The erring aunt! What’s she doing in Cannes?”

“She seems to have married some awful bounder, fairly recently. A Count Somebody. And she’s fearfully unhappy.”

“Why doesn’t she come home? Afraid of public opinion, and mother?”

“Well—can you wonder? She has no friends left, I suppose. It must be pretty awful for her. Of course you’ll say she’s made her own bed——”

“On the contrary, I wasn’t going to say anything so trite. What do you take me for? I’d trot her round like anything if she came here. It isn’t everybody who’s got a beautiful, notorious aunt.”

“I’m rather curious to see her,” admitted Judy. “Though I don’t suppose we’d like her particularly. She must be rather a fool to do what she did.”

“She couldn’t help it,” Noel defended her. “If you’re a certain type—well, you just are that type, and you act accordingly. That’s what she did.”

“Nonsense, Noel,” protested Judy. “That’s a useless, easy sort of philosophy. According to that, no one can help anything they do.”

“No more they can, if they’re the sort of people who do that sort of thing. When they get over being that sort of people they’ll act differently, but not before.”

“That’s a hair-splitting sort of argument,” said Judy.

“Any more than you can help being a spinster,” he explained, developing his theory. “Being the spinster type, you act accordingly. When you pull yourself together and make up your mind to be another type, you’ll cease to be a spinster. But not before.”

Judy sat down, facing him. It always amused her to discuss herself with Noel.

“Am I the spinster type?” she asked.

“Well, aren’t you? It’s fairly obvious. Look at this room!…”

“My dear boy,” she retorted, “I’d have a room like this if I had ten husbands—or even lovers, for that matter. You’ll have to do better than that. How else am I the spinster type, apart from my room?”

“You’re a spinster in your mind,” he asserted. “You think celibately.”

“Oh, now you’re being too ridiculous!” she scoffed.

He crossed his long legs and lit a cigarette.

“My dear girl, you don’t understand thought. What you think, you are.”

“You think you’re a second Solomon,” said his sister, “but you’re not.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I disagree. I am entirely modern in my thoughts. I don’t wish to be anything else. I’m not like Eric. Eric thinks we have had the best. I think we are always having the best. But to return to you.”

“Yes, do return to me. I didn’t mean to cause a digression. How can I stop being the spinster type?”

“By not hemming yourself in so much. You surround your femininity with barbed-wire entanglements.”

“Really? They don’t seem to have kept Pat Enderby out, and some others I could mention.”

“They never got in. That’s what I complain of.”

“Oh, but my dear Noel—you surely don’t think I’m going to turn myself into a sort of vampire just to please you? Not that I couldn’t—I’m almost certain I could.…”

“I never meant that. You willfully misunderstand me. Vampires are all very well on the screen, or on some paving stone in Leicester Square, but they don’t go in our sort of life. No man would willingly marry one.”

“They don’t on the screen,” she said. “They always marry the little thing with curls and the baby smile. Is that what you’d like me to be? Because I honestly don’t think that’s my type either.”

“I find arguing with women very trying,” observed Noel. “They always drag in unessentials, and dangle them before your eyes as if they were main issues. Even you do it. As for mother——”

“Never mind. Let’s get back to the main issues. I am the main issue—or my spinsterhood. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Simply this. I want you to cut the barbed-wire entanglements and come out into the open now and then. Men aren’t wild animals, after all. They’re only human beings.”

Judy suddenly decided to drop nonsense.

“Do you know why I keep inside the barbed wire?”

“No. Why?”

“Because any man that I meet in this house has been asked here in the hope that I’ll find him marriageable. And so the fairest—the only decent thing I can do is to let him know as soon as possible that I’m not in the market, so to speak. If he’s a fairly good sort and seems to find me at all interesting, I—well, I put up more barbed wire. Of course I oughtn’t to mind, but it’s all so obvious. I hate it. It was different with Pat. I liked him, and besides, he was your friend … but even then …”

“I think girls do have a rotten time of it,” agreed Noel.

“It’s made me self-conscious,” she went on. “This business of matrimony always in the air. As it is, I wouldn’t raise a finger to attract any man.”

“Not even the right one?”

“Least of all the right one.”

Noel got up and stretched himself.

“Well, old dear,” he said, “I’ll make a prophecy. When you meet the right man—hateful phrase—you’ll cut the entanglements, climb the barricades, and give yourself up to the enemy. That is, if I know anything of my sister Judy.”

“You don’t. But you’re an old darling just the same. Are you in or out?”

“Out. Dining at the club with Gordon. His show! But I’m coming home early. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Only I’m dining with the Bennetts, and they usually send me home in the Heavenly Chariot, so I think I may as well pick you up at the club.”

“Do. I’ll amuse myself somehow till you come.”

“About ten-thirty or eleven,” she told him. “And be on the look-out.”

“Right-o.” He walked to the door and then turned. “And think over what I’ve said, old girl.”

[CHAPTER VI]

The “Heavenly Chariot” was Judy’s name for the Bennetts’ shining gray car. The Pendletons had one of their own, an elderly and dignified Daimler, but for some reason unfathomable by the younger members of the family, it was never allowed out at night, when it was most wanted. Millicent thought that Forbes, the old chauffeur and ex-coachman, required his evenings to himself, and as Forbes had never been known to object to this arrangement, it stood, and the family relied on taxis, or the underground.

So that Judy was feeling uncommonly luxurious close on eleven that night, when the beautiful gray nose of the Heavenly Chariot thrust its way through the fog that had shut London from the sky for three days past. She loved the movement, the mystery of the dark streets, the soft menace of the fog.

“This is the very essence of London,” she thought.

They turned into Pall Mall, and she was sorry to think that the perfect motion would cease in a moment. What happened next, happened with such amazing suddenness that in three seconds it became a problem already to be reckoned with, a situation to be met as best one could.

They had knocked some one down in the fog. An instant before she had been reveling in that smooth slipping along—almost the annihilation of friction—and now, between the ticks of a clock, some one, because of this inconsequential little journey of theirs, was robbed of health perhaps, or life. While her mind was struggling to accept a fact so hateful, her feet had taken her to the front of the car almost before the chauffeur had brought it to a standstill. Their victim had clung to that long gray nose—clung for an instant and then gone down. Another man was bending over him, drawing him gently into the pool of radiance their lights made.

“Chip!” the other man was saying. “Chip, old man, are you badly hurt?”

There was no answer. Judy put her arm under the limp man’s shoulder, and they raised him up. He stood swaying between them.

“Take him to the car,” she said.

A constable (who seemed nebulous all but his buttons, which the light caught) loomed up out of the blackness, and demanded names and addresses. Mills, the chauffeur, seemed unable to cope with the disaster, which he considered had come upon them ready-made, out of the night.

“It was my friend’s fault entirely,” said the other man. “He started to cross without looking.”

“Can’t be too careful a night like this,” remarked the constable, making entries in his notebook.

The victim suddenly straightened himself and said in a thick voice, “I’m perfectly all right.” Then he became limp again.

It was at this moment that Noel arrived, having been keeping a look-out, as instructed by Judy. The wail of metal-studded tires being brought to a sudden stop had attracted his notice, and he came out to see what was up. The constable, observing his empty sleeve, addressed him as Captain, and things began to progress. Like many another policeman who has to do with street crossings, this one considered women biological absurdities. Mills and the victim’s friend got “Chip” into the car and made him as comfortable as possible. Noel sat outside with Mills, and Judy sat beside the injured man, overcoming an almost uncontrollable impulse to draw that bending head down to her shoulder.

For the belief had come to her, at the moment when she saw Chip’s white face in the glare from their lamps, that they had chosen the nicest man in all London to knock down.

His friend, who sat sideways in one of the small seats, introduced himself as Major Stroud, and the victim, on whom he kept an anxious eye, as Major Crosby.

“He’ll be all right as soon as we get him home and to bed,” he assured Judy. “It’s too bad, but you’re not in any way to blame. Saw the whole thing, so I know. Crosby’s always walking into things. He’s everlastingly thinking about that book of his. I tried to grab his arm, but it was too late.”

“How badly do you think he’s hurt?” She could hear the injured man’s laborious breathing, and was heartsick.

“Oh, just a knock on the head, I expect, against that curb. Thank Heaven it was no worse. Your chauffeur did splendidly. Can’t think how he avoided running over him.”

“But a knock on the head may mean——”

“Now don’t you worry about it, Miss——”

“Pendleton,” Judy said.

“Miss Pendleton. I’ll ring up the doctor as soon as we get to his rooms. He’s pretty tough—aren’t you, Chip old man?”

He put an affectionate hand on his friend’s knee. At that moment Chip swayed suddenly toward Judy’s fur-wrapped shoulder.

“Better let me sit there, Miss Pendleton,” suggested Major Stroud. “He’s no light weight.”

“It’s all right,” said Judy. “I was a V.A.D. for years.” She slipped her hand down to his wrist and felt his pulse. “Why do you say he’s always thinking about his book? What book?”

“Oh, Chip’s a writer, you see. He’s always writing something. Just now it’s a book on religions. Queer hobby for a fighting chap, isn’t it?”

The car sang its way up Campden Hill while Judy listened to what Major Stroud had to say about his friend. He was evidently devoted to him. When they stopped at last, purring softly before a narrow house in a narrow turning off Church Street, she felt she knew more about the two of them than she did about many people she had known far longer.

“Make short work of things now,” said the Major in his brisk way as he got out. “Come along, Chip old man.”

Very gently he and Mills lifted him out, and carried him into the house and up three flights of excessively dark and narrow stairs, while Judy and Noel followed behind. They had to pause once or twice as the weight and length of their burden made getting round corners very difficult.

“I’m going to wait till the doctor comes,” said Noel. “Hadn’t you better go home in the car now, Judy?”

“Why should I?” she demanded. “Can’t I wait too? I dare say I can help. Noel, isn’t it ghastly?”

“I like Chip,” said Noel. “It’s funny, but I did the moment I saw him. Didn’t you?”

Judy nodded, unable to say much. Her throat ached, and she knew she was not very far from tears. It was so grotesque and unreal, that they should have caused this unnecessary suffering.

Major Stroud telephoned to the doctor, and Mills went to fetch him, as being the quickest way. Meanwhile Noel and the Major got Chip into bed.

Judy, left to herself, explored the little flat. She lit a gas-ring in the tiny kitchenette and put a kettle on. Then she found a small store of brandy which she brought out in case it was wanted. As she busied herself getting ready things the doctor might ask for she made herself well acquainted with Chip’s home. The sitting room possessed two solidly comfortable chairs and a sofa, all covered in brown linen. There was a gate-legged table, two etchings by Rops, and a vast number of books on religious subjects. Except for the books and the etchings it was as impersonal a room as a man could have. It touched her, it was so—she searched for a word—so starved.

“Man cannot live by books alone, my poor Chip,” she thought. She seemed to see again the kindly, tired lines about his mouth and eyes. She imagined a lonely life for him, with Major Stroud as the only close human tie. They had been through two campaigns together, the latter had told her. Fancy calling the Great War a campaign! She smiled at the thought. A hard-bitten man, the Major. She supposed the two were about of an age—say, forty-three. Bachelors? Oh, undoubtedly.

Then the doctor arrived—a cheerful, bustling man with a short gray beard. He seemed to have known the two of them for years.

“I helped to bring this young man into the world,” he told Judy, clapping an affectionate hand on the Major’s solid shoulder. That gentleman, who didn’t look as though he could possibly have needed help on that or any other occasion, smiled a little sheepishly, and then the bedroom door closed upon them. Noel and Judy, left in unhappy suspense in the sitting room looked at one another.

“Why couldn’t you have knocked down some drunken rotter?” asked Noel, walking about the room with his hand in his pocket. “Why pick out Chip?”

Strange how the name had made itself at home with both of them!

“Why? Oh, Noel, I can’t bear it to be true! Haven’t we dreamt it all? If anything happens to him——”

“If only there are no beastly consequences,” said Noel, frowning, ”you may have done everybody a good turn in the end. I mean—he seems such a decent sort—I like him. And I think he might like us.”

Judy nodded.

“But I’m afraid it’s concussion, Noel.”

“It may be only very slight. Well, we’ll know in a few minutes. There was a terrible bump on his forehead, but we couldn’t find any other marks.”

“Suppose we’d killed him!” It wasn’t like Judy to suppose ghastly possibilities. “If I hadn’t gone to the club to pick you up,” she mused, “if I’d gone straight home, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Oh, hush, Judy! What’s the good of all that? Look here”—he paused in front of her—“Chip evidently isn’t well off. I intend to arrange with the doctor, about bills. So you back me up, won’t you?”

“Of course. I’d thought of that too. And Noel——”

“Well?”

“Let’s keep this to ourselves. I’d much rather not tell the family anything about it. Wouldn’t you?”

“Much. It’s our affair.”

“I’ve hardly spent any of my allowance lately. We’ll go halves about the bills.… Don’t even tell Gordon, will you?”

“Gordon? He’s about the last person I’d tell.”

Here the doctor returned, followed by Major Stroud. They closed the bedroom door softly.

“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor told them cheerfully, in that hearty voice common to the medical profession. “A man might come off worse in the hunting field any day, and no one make a fuss about it. Slight concussion and bruises, and that’s all, young lady.”

“Well, it’s quite enough,” said she. “I hate concussions. And there really are no bones broken? You’re not trying to spare our feelings?”

“Word of honor as a father of seven. You can come and see your victim with your own eyes in a day or two. Major Stroud will spend the night here on the sofa, and the nurse will be on hand in the morning, if she’s wanted. So now, Miss Juggernaut, you may roll home with a peaceful mind.”

“You’ve cheered us up a lot, sir,” said Noel, shaking hands with him.

Major Stroud took them to the door, after writing down their telephone number on a pad that the methodical Chip had hanging over his desk.

“You’ll tell him, when he comes to, how sorry we are, and how … how anxious?”

But the Major shook his head at her.

“I’ll leave that to you,” he said as they parted. “He’ll get the devil of a talking to from me—careless beggar.”

They gave the news to the waiting Mills, and drove home with little talk. When Judy reached the door of her room, she kissed Noel good night.

“I’m glad we decided not to tell any one,” she whispered. “Mother would look him up in Who’s Who. It would be horrible.”

“What about Claire?”

“Oh, we can tell her, of course.”

[CHAPTER VII]

Madame Claire was glad she was not included in the ban of silence. She was much interested in the affair. She was also—though she took care not to let Judy see it—a little excited. It was not, she felt, one of those incidents that seem to have no consequences, nor leave any mark. Something new, she believed, had been set in motion, and that something new meant to poke a disturbing finger into Judy’s life. But she forbore to ask too many questions.

She heard about it the next day, and Judy told her that Noel had already talked to Major Stroud over the telephone, and had learned that Major Crosby was still unconscious.

“He told Noel we were not to worry—the doctor’s orders I believe—and then he went on to say that he’d once been unconscious for twenty-eight hours himself, and had come to at the end of it as lively as a cricket. But then he’s a hopeless optimist, and you never can believe optimists.”

“You and Noel seem to have taken him to your hearts from the first,” commented Madame Claire. “Chip, I mean. Well, I’d back your judgments against anybody’s.”

“I think you would have felt like that too. But he isn’t going to be easy to know,” said her granddaughter.

“Isn’t he? Why?”

“He’s very shy,” answered Judy. “He had the shyest rooms I ever saw. Not a photograph to be seen, nor an ornament, nor even a novel. You know, you can guess at such a lot if there are things like that about to help you. No, there wasn’t a single clue. But the greatest clue, in a way, was the lack of clues. As though, because of his shyness, he had tried to cover up his tracks. I don’t think he wants to be known.”

“If he had to be knocked down by a motor,” said Madame Claire, “I consider it a fortunate thing that you were in it. After all, it might have been any Tom or Dick—or Miss Tom or Dick.”

“I only wish he might take that view of it,” answered Judy. “What news of Louise?”

Madame Claire hoped to hear more about Chip, but she was always quick to feel when a change of subject was wanted.

“She’s with her people in Norfolk. She wrote Eric that she was enjoying the change, but that she felt it was her duty to come back at the end of the week. Of course Eric wrote to her that she wasn’t to think of him, but that she must stay as long as she felt inclined.”

“How that must have annoyed her! For what she wanted was to come home as a martyr before she was ready. What a woman! Don’t you think it a miracle that Eric doesn’t fall in love with some one else?”

Madame Claire shook her head.

“I doubt if he ever will. He finds consolation in his friends, and in his books, and in his work of course. Eric isn’t a man who falls in love easily. And besides, I can’t help thinking that he still has hopes of Louise.”

“You think he still loves her?”

“Louise is his wife,” answered Madame Claire, “and I believe that it hurts Eric intolerably to feel that the one person in the world who should be nearest to him, and who should understand him the best, deliberately keeps aloof. He feels he has failed—and Eric hates failure.”

“If he has failed, it isn’t his fault,” said Judy. “It isn’t for lack of trying. If he’d been just a nonentity she’d have enjoyed condescending to him. As long as he is what he is—sought-after and charming—she’ll be what she is—jealous and bitter. I don’t see how he stands it.”

“Like Eric,” Madame Claire said gently, “I can’t help hoping.”

A day or two later, Judy found her reading a letter from Old Stephen.

“There’s a good deal about Connie,” she told her. “Isn’t it odd the way she seems to be coming into our lives again? Here’s what he says:

“‘And now a few words about Connie and her Count. I’ve talked to him several times, and he’s like some poisonous thing in a stagnant pond. I do wish you could persuade her to leave him, for he insults and humiliates her at every turn. She confessed to me yesterday what I already suspected—that he had gambled away most of his money and much of hers at Monte Carlo, and that he is constantly demanding more. I think it would be advisable for Eric to come here if he possibly can. She is frightened, and her nerves are on edge. I suppose he threatens her, poor woman. What do you think ought to be done?’”

“He stopped there,” said Madame Claire, “and finished the letter next day. I’ll read you the rest.

“‘I was interrupted yesterday by Miss McPherson, who wouldn’t let me write more. So I left the letter open, and I’m glad I did, for there’s a sequel. Connie left here this morning for Paris, without a word to anybody. I thought she would have written me a letter to say good-bye, but she hasn’t. I don’t know what brought matters to this head, but I suspect it had something to do with Mademoiselle Pauline, the dancer, with whom the Count has been spending much of his time, and more, I imagine, of his money. Miss McPherson, who has her human side, has taken a considerable interest in Connie’s affairs, and tells me she is sure there was a scene of some sort last night. However that may be, Connie has gone. They told me at the office that she went to Paris, but left no forwarding address. Well, my dear Claire, I fear all this will distress you, but you have a brave heart, and would wish to know. If you have any idea where Connie would be likely to have gone, to what friends or to what hotel, I cannot help thinking it would be wise to send Eric to look for her. I say this because she seemed to me a desperately unhappy woman.’

“That’s all about that,” said Madame Claire, putting the letter away.

“What do you think ought to be done?” Judy asked her.

“Eric is coming here to-night, and I’ll talk it over with him. If he can spare the time to go to Paris, I think it would be a good thing.”

“But if he doesn’t know where she is?”

“I think I can guess,” answered her grandmother. “Years ago, before the children were grown up, we used to go and stay at a little private hotel off the Avenue de la Grande Armée. In the autumn I recommended it to a friend of your mother’s, and she was delighted with it. Judging from her description, I don’t think it can have changed much. She told me that the granddaughter of the old Madame Peritôt remembered me perfectly and said that Connie, whom she described as ‘la belle Madame,’ often went there when she wished to be quiet. I feel sure she would wish to be quiet now, and I believe that if Eric goes there he will find her.”

“Do you want him to bring her to London?” inquired Judy.

“I think I had better leave that to him,” answered Madame Claire.

* * * * * *

Eric went to Paris the day following. He had no idea, when he left, whether he would try to persuade Connie to come back to London or not. He would decide that when he had seen her. Nor did he explain matters to Louise, to whom the very name of his once beautiful sister was anathema. He sent her a wire, however, which said merely, “Called out of town for few days. Probably back Monday.”

He had been working very hard, and welcomed a change of scene. He had not been out of England since serving with his regiment in France, and later in Italy, from which campaign he was invalided home shortly before the Armistice. He was now member for a London borough, having given up soldiering for politics. His rather disconcerting honesty and policy of no compromise won him more friends in the former calling than in the latter, and though he had enthusiastic friends he had equally whole-hearted enemies, among whom he began to fear he must number his wife.

The thought of a lifelong companionship with a woman who disliked, or seemed to dislike his every attribute, appalled him. He had a way of reducing problems to their simplest form, and being a clear thinker, saw facts in all their nakedness. Louise was his wife. He had tried to make her happy. She either liked him or she did not. If she did not like him, why live with him? And if she did like him, why not show that she did? It came to that. Other women liked him. Why could not his wife? He had never tried to please any other woman as he had tried to please her. The thing was an enigma. They could have had such delightful times together, for they had everything—health, youth, money, friends. Her coldness was inexplicable. She was not only cold to him, but to all men, and to most women. If she had cared for any one else he would have found a way to release her. He tried to put it out of his mind on the journey to Paris, and thought instead of Connie. He had been so proud of her beauty in the old days. He remembered her at dances, surrounded by respectfully admiring young men. How she had queened it for a while! And then—Petrovitch!

From Calais he shared a compartment with a rather charming woman with whom he fell easily into talk. He had a gift of nonsense which, when he cared to use it, most people—his wife of course excepted—found irresistible. So they sparred pleasantly till the train neared Paris. But in the end she struck a too personal note, talking about herself and her affairs with an astonishing lack of reserve, whereupon he liked her less. When they separated she gave him her address, but he forgot both it and her. She never forgot him. If he had liked her more they would have parted friends, or on the way to friendship, which would have annoyed Louise, who only made friends with people she had known or known of for years. But her candor was without simplicity, and her impulsiveness not without calculation, so she passed out of his life, for he was fastidious about women.

[CHAPTER VIII]

Eric drove at once to the little hotel off the Avenue de la Grande Armée, and made himself known. He had wired for a room at the Crillon, preferring not to stay too near Connie lest he should find her surrounded by sympathetic friends. He dreaded her friends.

The granddaughter of old Madame Peritôt, a pleasant-faced woman named Le Blanc, gave him a cordial welcome, asked immediately after Madame Claire and then told him in answer to his question that Madame la Comtesse was resting, but would undoubtedly see her brother. Who indeed, she thought, would not be glad to see such a brother—a brother with such delightful manners, whose blue eyes—Ciel! Madame Le Blanc was enchanted by the blueness of his eyes.

Eric waited in the little salon, remembering incidents of their extremely happy childhood. Madame Claire had so often brought the three of them there, during vacations. They had nearly always come to Paris en route for the coast of Brittany or Normandy when the Roman summers became unbearable. He remembered how he and Connie, an exquisite, long-legged child of fifteen, had knocked over and broken a Dresden group during a scrimmage. They had secretly substituted for it another almost exactly like the first, except that the dress of the shepherdess which had been blue with pink flowers, was now pink with blue flowers. There it stood, just where their guilty hands had placed it, so many years ago, and he could not resist taking it off the mantelpiece and examining it. It was one of old Madame Peritôt’s most prized possessions, and how they laughed when they realized that she had never noticed the difference! It might easily have met the fate just then of its unlucky predecessor, for he nearly dropped it, so suddenly and quietly did Connie enter—and such a Connie!

It was characteristic of Eric that he never said anything suitable to occasions. He kissed her cheek, and then said, holding her at arm’s length and looking at her:

“You must come and dine with me. What do you say to a sole and a broiled chicken somewhere?”

But Connie felt that something more was due to the situation, so she clung to his arm and found—or seemed to find—speech difficult.

“Eric! Is it really you? My God! After all these years! Oh, Eric!”

“Nearly twenty, isn’t it? And thirty or more since we broke the Dresden group there. Go and put your hat on. What a pretty dress!”

“You like it?” She turned about with something of her old grace and coquetry. “You were always quick to notice nice things. But how did you know where to find me, and why did you come? This seems like a dream to me. And you’re still so good-looking!”

“Thank you, my dear. No one has ever told me that. It is charming of you. I came to see you. Mother guessed you would be here. And now go and put on your hat, for I’m very hungry.”

“In a moment. I want to look at you.… I’d almost forgotten I had a brother. But how did you know I was in Paris at all? That meddlesome old Stephen de Lisle, I suppose, bless him!” Then her beautiful voice deepened. “Eric, I’ve got very old, haven’t I? Tell me the truth.”

Eric told it in his own way.

“I’m afraid I never think about age,” he said, “so it’s no good asking me. I think you look worried. Come, we’ll dine early. There’s a great deal to talk about. And don’t change. I like you in that.”

“I won’t be long.” She went to the door and then turned. “I’m being taken out to dinner by my own brother,” she said softly. “You make me feel quite—respectable, Eric.”

Her last words hurt him. If there had been any one with him he would have said as she left the room:

“Good God! The pity of it!”

It wasn’t age he meant. He cared as little for that as most intelligent men. Connie had lost her youth. That was to be expected. But she had never gained its far more interesting successor, character. It was that he missed. She was spiritually, mentally and morally down at the heel. Her face was a weary mask, her yellow hair had known the uses of peroxide as well as of adversity, and her blue eyes, paler than her brother’s, looked out, without expression, from a rim of carelessly darkened lashes. The frank vulgarity of her scarlet lips revolted him.

“All that,” he said to himself, “to win a—Chiozzi!” He had hurried her off to get her hat because he couldn’t bear to talk to her in that room of childish memories. It brought back to him too clearly the girl of fifteen, with her exquisite, sparkling face, her laughter, and that mane of fine golden hair that people in the streets too often turned to stare at.… He meant to help her, he had come to help her—but how to go about it? That he must leave to the inspiration of the moment.

When she returned, handsomely furred and too youthfully hatted, he gave her another kindly kiss to encourage her—for he could see that she was really moved—and took her arm as they went to the door. An old woman in another salon across the hall had observed their movements with the keenest interest. She carried an ear trumpet, but thanked Heaven that her eyes were as good as ever. Good enough to distinguish the paint on that woman’s cheeks—which had not prevented Mr. Gregory from kissing her. Lady Gregory’s only son! She knew he had married the youngest daughter of old Admiral Broughton, a great friend of the late King’s. He had once been heard to say to him at a garden party—it must have been in 1907—There, they are getting into a cab together. He has taken her hand—off they go! Dear, dear! How very distressing! Poor Lady Gregory, and poor neglected wife! It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. And she hadn’t lived in this wicked old world for sixty-nine years—even though most of them had been spent in Kensington—without knowing a demi-mondaine when she saw one. Odd she was to see Miss Thomkinson, a cousin of the Broughtons, the very next day. No, shocked as she was at the presence of such a woman in that house, she preferred not to speak to Madame le Blanc about it. It didn’t go to enter into arguments with these French people, and besides, her vocabulary wasn’t equal to it.

In the cab, Eric said gently:

“Well, Connie, my dear, I’ve come to help you in any way that I can, and to take you back to England with me if you wish to go. I gather that your marriage is anything but happy. Tell me about it.”

Connie tried to speak but her efforts ended in a sudden burst of tears. She sobbed openly and unbecomingly. Eric, his eyes full of pain and concern, held her hand and looked out of the window at the once familiar streets. She had lived on her emotions for so long that self-control, he supposed, was utterly beyond her now. It was true that she had cried whenever she had felt inclined, during the whole of her unhappy, stormy life. But she usually cried for a purpose. This was different. Something, probably the amazing matter-of-factness of her brother, had touched the springs of her self-pity. At one step he had spanned all that had happened in the last twenty years. He was so entirely unchanged, while she—his eyes were as clear as ever, his fitness obvious at a glance, and his face scarcely lined. He represented all that she had lost, all that was sane and clean and wholesome. He reminded her of childish cricket, and nursery teas, and days on the river, and May Week, and clean young men in flannels. She had not met a man of his type since she had left her husband. She loved the faint scent of lavender that lingered in the fresh folds of the handkerchief he presently offered her. She wondered if it would be possible for her to go back with him, into the well-ordered life that he and his kind led, away from the shoddy women who had been her companions for years and the men who were rotten to the core.

“It has been a shock to you,” Eric said. “I should have warned you.”

She shook her head. It wasn’t that. What it was she didn’t feel capable of telling him now.

She wiped her eyes and cheeks recklessly with his handkerchief. Her make-up was ruined, and for the moment she didn’t care, but presently at the sight of the well-filled restaurant she pulled herself together, and while Eric ordered dinner she busied herself repairing her haggard mask. No matter how badly Connie was looking, people always observed that she was a woman who had once been very beautiful. She joined him at the table in a few minutes, looking as though tears were as foreign to her nature as to a statue’s.

It is characteristic of Connie’s sort that they forget they have made a scene two minutes after it is over, and imagine that others forget as easily. She glanced about the crowded room as she sat down, hoping that she might be seen in the company of such a man. She was proud of him, and, to do her justice, proud of the fact that they were brother and sister, forgetting that in twenty years a resemblance that had once been remarkable had nearly vanished.

Before dinner was over, she had given him an outline of her life down to the present with commendable honesty. She had no wish, apparently, to gild the ugly sordidness of some of it, though she made it appear that her misfortunes had come to her more through the faithlessness and selfishness of men than through her own weakness. And yet men, it was obvious, were still her chief interest in life. As she talked to Eric her glance often wandered, and she made much play with her still beautiful hands.

Her dread of Chiozzi and his treatment of her seemed to Eric the most important part of her story. It was that he had to deal with now. She said he had threatened her life more than once in order to extort money from her. Her income had dwindled to barely seven hundred a year, all that remained of the considerable fortune left her by Morton Freeman. That much she had managed to keep intact, in spite of the efforts of her greedy Count.

“If I go back to him,” she said with a shudder, “he’ll have it all.”

Eric dreaded the idea of a divorce. Her affairs had already had so much unsavory publicity.

“You must not think of going back to him at present,” he told her. “Later we will see what can be done. You can write to him from London, if you wish.”

“I dread London.”

“You will be safest there. And you will find that people have forgotten. You must try to begin again, my dear, and be content with contentment, and simple things. You will not find life exciting, but you may find it pleasant. I will do what I can, and you will have mother, who is a marvel of marvels. I would suggest a little house in the country, or a small flat in town.”

She considered this, smoking a faintly perfumed cigarette.

“What are Millicent’s children like?”

“They’re delightful. You’ll love Judy and Noel.”

“But Millie won’t let them know me.”

“I doubt if Millie will have very much to say in the matter. If they choose to know you, they will.”

“And your wife—Louise?”

He hesitated.

“You may find her difficult.”

“How difficult? One of those … those good women, I suppose.” This with a sneer that made Eric wince.

“Louise is very … indifferent. Frankly, she doesn’t care a straw for me.”

“Not care for you? She must be a fool.”

He inclined his head in the slightest of bows.

“You are my sister, and prejudiced.”

“I know a man when I see one, whether he’s my brother or not.” She gave a short laugh. “Mon Dieu! I ought to, by this time.”

“My wife,” said Eric, “considers me a tiresome and conceited fellow. She dislikes a great many things about me; no doubt with reason.”

“Jealous,” commented his sister, who could see through other women.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“So some of my friends say. I cannot understand it. But you needn’t see much of each other.”

“I think I know her sort,” said Connie, watching the smoke from her cigarette. “Well, we both seem to have made a mess of things.”

This struck Eric as humorous, but not a sign of his amusement appeared in his face.

“Where is Petrovitch now?” he asked her.

She smiled to a passing acquaintance before she answered.

“In America, I believe. Still lionized and applauded. It seems to me, Eric, that men have nine lives to a woman’s one. Look at me … a worn-out wreck, while he——”

“A bad fellow, Connie,” said Eric; at which she bit her lip.

“I can’t let you say that. I love him.”

“Still?”

She nodded.

Eric looked at her as though he would like to see into her mind.

“Tell me this. I ask you as I might ask any woman in your place. Has it been worth it?”

Her eyes fell, and she seemed to be groping for words. Then she rose from the table, gathering up her long gloves and beaded bag.

“I would tell you, if I knew,” she said at last. “But I don’t know. I suppose I have lost all sense of values.”

“That is answer enough,” he replied.

* * * * * *

As they drove back to the hotel she turned to him and said:

“When do you want me to be ready?”

“I ought to go back to-morrow,” he told her. “Would that be possible for you?”

“Yes.” Then, a little dramatically, “I place myself in your hands, Eric. Do with me what you will.“

[CHAPTER IX]

It was just a week after the accident that Judy and Noel went to Campden Hill to see Major Crosby. A message had come at last from Dr. Ferguson to the effect that if Miss Juggernaut and her brother cared to see their victim, they might do so between three and five that afternoon.

Major Stroud had rung them up almost daily, and Noel had found it difficult to account to the family for the sudden interest taken in him by some one they had never heard of before. For it was a household in which reticence was frowned upon and discouraged. Only Gordon, being the eldest son, was permitted to go and come without explanations. He was naturally secretive, and on the few occasions when he was pleased to give an account of his doings, his mother listened to him with something very like reverence. So Major Stroud became “a fellow at my club,” which, as it chanced, he was, and Millicent gave up the attempt to penetrate further.

Judy had never felt as shy as on that Wednesday afternoon in the middle of January. She and Noel rode up Campden Hill on a bus, and walked briskly, for it was a bitter day, from Church Street to Chip’s rooms.

On the way up the stairs she said:

“Don’t leave me to do all the talking, Noel. I feel idiotically nervous. I don’t know what to talk about.”

“Chuck maidenly modesty to the winds for once,” he advised, “and talk about the weather.”

“You’re not very helpful.”

“And when you’ve done with the weather, there’s always the climate.”

“Thank you.”

“What I mean is, why not just be natural? I expect he’s safely unmarriageable, from the money point of view. So you can let the barbed wire alone.”

“Anyhow,” she said thankfully, “Major Stroud will be there, and he’s always noisy and cheerful.”

He was there, and at their knock admitted them, looking very large and out of place in the narrow hall. He was one of those men who seem to belong astride a high, bony horse, or in the solid armchair of a spacious London club. He shook hands with great heartiness, and led the way to the sitting room with a loud and reassuring tread.

“Visitors, Chip, old man,” he announced, and flung open the door.

Chip was lying stretched out on the sofa, pillows behind his head and a striped rug across his knees. His quiet manner of welcoming them seemed to Judy to contrast almost humorously with his friend’s bluff cheeriness.

He had a nervous little speech all ready for them.

“I’m ashamed,” he said, “to be the cause of all this bother. It’s most awfully good of you to come. You’ll forgive my not getting up, won’t you? I’m not allowed to, for some reason.”

“I should hope not,” said Noel, as they shook hands.

“As for being a bother,” Judy told him, “that’s the sort of thing invalids say when they know they’re not strong enough to be shaken. Major Crosby, I can’t—I can’t tell you how sorry we are.” She hurried on, fearful of showing emotion. “Let’s not say any more about that part of it. You know what we feel.…”

“And after all,” put in Major Stroud, after the manner of Major Strouds, “accidents will happen, ye know, and as I tell Chip, he simply barged into you.”

“Well,” said Judy, “it’s silly, both sides saying it’s their fault. But there are two good things about it. The doctor says you’ll soon be all right again, and—well, if it hadn’t been for what happened that night, we’d never have met, would we?”

“That’s a good effort, Judy,” Noel encouraged her. “I second everything you’ve said. But let’s cut out speeches now.”

They all laughed, and after that it was easier to talk.

Major Stroud monopolized Noel, to whom he seemed to have taken a great fancy, and Judy found herself cut off from the other two, in a chair beside the sofa. For there is no room so small that a party of four cannot quite easily split up into twos.

Major Crosby looked much as Judy had expected him to look. That first sight of his face in the light from the car’s lamps was, she knew, one of those mind pictures that refuse to fade. She was uncertain about the color of his eyes, which now proved to be gray, and though they smiled and had a habit of smiling as the lines about them showed, there were other lines about the forehead that spoke of anxiety. His hair was of that fine and unreliable quality that abandons its owner early in life, and Chip was already a little thin about the top. His long legs under the rug displayed pointed knees, and he moved his thin, well-shaped hands nervously.

“If I can only put him at his ease with me!” thought Judy.

They talked commonplaces at first, and then, stretching out her hand, she said:

“May I see what you were reading?”

He picked up a finely bound book that lay beside him on the rug, and gave it to her.

“I don’t know why it is,” he said, smiling, “but one always feels slightly apologetic when discovered reading poetry.”

It was The Spirit of Man, and Judy was conscious of a feeling of satisfaction. They liked the same books, then.

“It’s a dear friend,” she said.

“Really? I’m glad of that.”

“I didn’t see this,” she went on, “when I was prowling about the room the other night. For I did prowl, I admit it, and I found nothing but books on religion. You see I had to do something while I was waiting for the verdict.”

“I expect it was in my room,” he explained. “When the book I’m working on gets the better of me, or when I’m tired of it, I turn to that.”

“You’re very wise.” She put the book on a table. “Now tell me about your own book. Major Stroud spoke of it the other night, and seemed to think it was to blame for the accident.”

He laughed.

“He thinks it’s to blame for everything. It’s very dull, I’m afraid. It’s about religions. They’re my hobby. Not religion; religions. There’s a difference, you see. I’ve tried to write a book that … well, how shall I explain it? … pulls them all together. Brings out their similarities. Fuses them, so to speak. It’s tremendously interesting work and means a lot of research, and I like that.”

“How long have you been working on it?”

“Oh … not very long. Let me see.… I started it in 1910. Twelve years. Well, I suppose that is a fairly long time. But you see the war interrupted things.”

“There were four years when I suppose you did no work on it at all.”

“I managed to get in a lot of reading. I was studying Druidism when I was in the trenches—most absorbing study. That was when things were fairly peaceful, of course. And when they weren’t peaceful, one was … well, testing various beliefs, if you know what I mean. When there was heavy shelling, for instance, and you had to sit tight.”

She smiled at him.

“Is it nearly done?”

“Well, the bulk of it’s done, but I’m always adding things to it. You see I want it to be a sort of book of reference. If you want to find out where Mohammedanism resembles Buddhism you turn to where the two things are compared, belief by belief. But all this is very boring for you.”

“It isn’t. I like it. Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, with all the guidance that it has, that mankind goes so frightfully astray?”

“I suppose it is. But I always think that we expect too much of our fellow man. He’s all right. Only give him time. He’s got such a lot to unlearn.”

“You mean he has all his brutal beginnings to forget?”

He nodded.

“I imagine I see him evoluting all the way from brute to angel, or something like it. He’s about at Half Way House now, I think. Wars, of course, give him a bit of a setback.”

“I suppose they do.”

“Oh, rather! I’m sure they do. Not necessarily for every individual, you understand, but for the mass. I hate guns and noise and warfare like the majority of my kind. I always have and I always shall. But at the same time, when there’s a fight on I’ve got to be there, and if there’s going to be a top dog, I want my fellows to be it. Half Way House, you see!”

“And you think we’ll get beyond it?”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment. Do you?”

“I don’t know. I always think that mankind looks its best under the microscope, so to speak, and that it’s rather horrible when you see it in the mass.”

“Like mold?” he suggested. “Ferns and flowers and lovely shapes when you magnify it, but very nasty indeed when you look at it on a damp wall.”

“Yes. Just like that.”

Her eyes smiled back at his eyes. It was at this moment that something greater than interest awoke in her. She knew it was there; she was aware of the very instant of its coming, and she meant, later, to examine it at her leisure.

Noel and Major Stroud were engaged in studying a map of the Somme, and were oblivious to them.

“You really must meet my grandmother, Lady Gregory—or Madame Claire, as Noel and I call her. She’s the most wonderful person. When you’re better you must come and have tea with us at her hotel.”

“I should like that very much,” he said. “I get on quite well with old ladies. I find young ones rather alarming nowadays, but perhaps it’s because I don’t see much of them.”

Judy laughed at this.

“Do I alarm you?” she challenged him.

“No,” he admitted. “It’s very odd, but you don’t.”

“What a blessing! Shy people—and I am one—usually have the most devastating effect on other shy people. But you’ll love Madame Claire. She looks on the world from a kind of Olympus.”

“Yet most of us dread growing old,” he remarked.

“Yes. Isn’t it ridiculous? But I don’t. There are times when I envy her her age, and her … imperviousness. What a word!”

“It’s temperamental, that sort of thing. It’s the people who are always seeking gayety that dread old age most. Being Scotch I like grayness, and austere hills, and quiet and mystery. All old things.”

Chip was surprised at the ease with which he could talk about himself. He felt half apologetic and looked at Judy as if to say, “Forgive me, but it must be some spell that you have cast upon me.…” A look passed between them then that was to both of them an unforgettable thing.

Their words had meant nothing, but they were mutually aware of a bond—a thing as fine as gossamer, and as strong as London Bridge. Judy was conscious of a queer little electric thrill that she felt to the very tips of her fingers. Their look had so plainly said:

“You and I.… We are going to be something to each other. What will that something be?”

To cover the nakedness of that question that each was aware of in the mind of the other, Judy turned away her head.

“Noel,” she said, raising her voice, “Major Crosby and Major Stroud must come to tea at Madame Claire’s one day. Can’t we decide on an afternoon now?”

“Being one of the unemployed,” Noel answered cheerfully, “all afternoons are alike to me. When will they let you up again, Major Crosby?”

“Oh,” he said, “in three or four days I expect to be carrying on as usual.”

They decided on the following Thursday, provided Madame Claire had no other engagement, and soon Noel and Judy, for fear of tiring their victim, got up to go.

“But you’ll come and see me again, won’t you?” asked Chip, then added, “but dash it all, I forgot! I’ll be up soon.”

They laughed, and his regret that they might not come again was so real that Judy said as they shook hands:

“Don’t forget; Madame Claire’s on Thursday, at four.”

Major Stroud went out with them, leaving Chip looking after them rather wistfully.

Talking to her had been strangely easy as he lay there. It might never be the same again. He had looked at her to his heart’s content, a thing he wouldn’t have dared to do had they been talking in the ordinary way. His recollections of the accident were very confused. He had been conscious of some one at intervals—a sort of delightful presence. Major Stroud had filled in the rest for him—badly enough. The Major did not excel in word pictures.

Was she pretty … beautiful? He searched for the right word. She was lovely, that was it … lovely. She had taken off her gloves and her long ringless hands had lain in her lap as she talked. She was tall, but not too tall. He liked a woman to have height. He liked the paleness of her oval face, and the wide mouth with its satisfactory curves. Her dark brown eyes had a sparkle far at the back of them, like … like the reflection of a single star in a deep pool.…

He had been damned dull, as he always was.

“If she were only sitting there again,” he thought, “I would say everything differently. I would say things that she might remember afterwards. I’m not such a dull fellow as all that.”

Was he not? At least no woman would ever find out that he was not. He thought of his poverty and his book, that, in all probability, he alone believed in. He realized that his head had begun to ache again, and he closed his eyes.

Major Stroud went with Noel and Judy as far as the street door.

“He’ll be all right,” he assured them, indicating Chip upstairs. “Nothing to worry about now. Rest’s doin’ him good. Awfully good of you to come, Miss Pendleton, cheer him up. Terrible fellow for bein’ alone, Chip is. Neglects his friends.”

“Hasn’t he any relations?” Noel asked.

Major Stroud shook his head.

“Orphan … only child, too. He doesn’t see enough people. Not like me; I like to keep goin’ … gaddin’ about.”

Judy was amused at this. Solid, heavy Major Stroud, picturing himself as a sort of social butterfly!

“But you two see a good deal of each other, don’t you?” Judy wanted to feel sure that Chip was not altogether alone.

“Oh, Lord, yes! Good old Chip! Been through two campaigns together.” Then as Judy held out her hand, “’By, Miss Pendleton. I’ll let you know how he gets on. Ought to be out to-morrow.”

They walked briskly down Church Street, Judy with an arm through Noel’s, and her chin buried in her furs.

“Well?” said Noel.

“Well?” she echoed.

“I said it first,” remarked her brother.

“Translated, I take it to mean, how do I like Chip? Is that it?”

“Couldn’t have put it better.”

“I like him immensely,” said Judy obligingly. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Same here.” Then after a pause, “Feeling less spinsterish?”

“I don’t feel in the least spinsterish, thank you.”

“Well,” he said, “I never saw you looking less so. Chip, poor devil, lay there and gazed with his soul in his eyes.”

“Really, Noel!”

“Fact. But you’ll have to change your methods. You’ll have to cut that ‘he’ll have to come all the way to me’ business. Because he won’t; he’s too shy.”

Judy would have been in a cold fury had any one else dared to speak so to her, but she took it from Noel with perfect good humor.

“I gather you’d like me to see more of him.”

“Well, why not? If ever a man needed some woman to take an interest in him, that man is Chip.”

“He may need it, but from the little I’ve seen of him I don’t think he wants it.”

“Of course he wants it. He’s human. I wouldn’t mind having him in the family.”

Judy had to laugh.

“Don’t you think it’s rather soon to make up your mind? After all, you hardly know him.”

“That’s nothing. I liked him the first minute I saw him.”

“You have the impulsiveness of extreme youth.”

“That’s so trite,” he remarked, “to throw my youth at me. You only say that when you can’t think of anything else to say. You must cultivate originality of thought.”

“I do,” she retorted, “but it’s good manners to adjust one’s conversation to suit one’s hearers. Now let’s continue about Chip.”

“He has no money,” he went on, quite unruffled, “and that’s a pity, because you won’t get much from the family. Gordon will get it all. But you’d make a better poor man’s wife than most girls. What about the simple life for a change?”

“You go too fast, my friend. I’ve nothing against the simple life—though why they call it that I can’t think; there’s nothing less simple than trying to live on nothing a year. But what I wish to point out to you is that Major Crosby, to begin with, is not a marrying man.”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Noel, “what a cliché! How can a man be a marrying man until he marries?”

“To put it into words of one syllable, Major Crosby is not the sort of man who contemplates marriage. He is wedded to his bachelorhood and his book.”

“That’s tosh.”

“But,” she went on, “I very much hope he will let us be his friends.”

“Oh, he’ll let us right enough; if that’s what you want. By the way, we mustn’t let the Bennetts know about the accident.”

“Didn’t Mills tell them?”

“Not he. I fixed it up with old Mills. Mrs. Bennett is a nice old thing, but she’d fuss, and Chip would hate that. I’m glad we let him think it was our car. We can explain to him some day. You see, it really was his fault. He didn’t look where he was going—didn’t even stop to listen, Mills says. But I don’t want him to think we think that.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Noel. It’s getting too complicated for me.” Then she remembered something.

“Did you know Eric had gone to Paris to fetch Aunt Connie home?”

He whistled.

“No. Nobody told me.”

“Claire only told me this morning. Eric has wired for rooms for her in some small hotel, in Half Moon Street, I think. They’ll be back to-morrow. Won’t it be queer to have an aunt we’ve never seen since we were children?”

He agreed that it would.

“I think I shall rather like having a dissipated aunt,” he remarked. “It’s out of the common.”

“I expect people have exaggerated things,” Judy said. “And besides, she’s getting on, you know. She’s only a year or two younger than mother.”

“Her sort never change,” said the sage. “What about that rotten little Count?”

“I don’t know what Eric means to do about him.”

“Well, I know two people at least who will raise a row about her coming home. Mother and Louise.”

“Nobody’s told them yet,” said Judy.

He whistled again.

“I see trouble ahead.”

As they reached the house in Eaton Square the front door opened, and the figure of an immaculately dressed young man was sharply silhouetted against the yellow light.

“Hello, you two!” said he.

Gordon was extremely good-looking in his fair and rather wooden way. His beautiful evening clothes looked resplendent, and the coat he carried over one arm was there as a concession to his mother, for he was never cold.

“Hello, Gordon!” echoed the other two.

“Where’ve you been?” demanded the elder brother.

“Been to see a sick friend,” said Noel.

Gordon looked at his sister.

“Are you coming to Lady Ottway’s dance to-night? You were asked.”

“I know. But I’m not coming. I can’t stand her dances. I may be slow, but they’re slower still.”

“Don’t say you can’t stand her,” advised Gordon, bending his handsome head to light a cigarette.

“Why not? If I feel like it?”

He threw away the match and puffed experimentally on the cigarette. Then, satisfied of a light, he said casually:

“Because she’s going to be my mother-in-law. That’s why.”

“Gordon!” they exclaimed together.

“Fact. All arranged yesterday. Helen and I hope to be married early in June. So congratulate me.”

“Gordon!” cried Judy again, “what a queer boy you are! I hadn’t an inkling it had happened.” She raised her face to kiss him, but he drew back.

“Not on the front steps. Keep that for later.”

“That’s so like you,” she protested. “No one can see us. Anyway, Gordon, consider yourself kissed, and I do congratulate you, my dear, and I’m happy if you are. Does mother know?”

“Oh, yes. She’s delighted, of course.”

Noel put his hand on Gordon’s shoulder.

“I’m awfully glad, Gordon old man.”

“Thanks.” He went down the steps and hailed a taxi that was crawling toward them. “I’d have told you before,” he said over his shoulder, “only we don’t keep the same hours. Never sure of seeing you. Well, so long!”

The taxi door shut with a bang that echoed loudly in the quiet square, and he was off.

“Isn’t that Gordon all over?” asked Noel.

As Judy entered the hall she gave a little laugh that was almost a sob, and said:

“Thank God for you, Noel!”

[CHAPTER X]

Madame Claire was at her desk, writing. She was writing to Stephen, and when she did that she gave her whole attention to it.

“I am so sorry you are feeling less well. How is the phlebitis? No one ought to suffer from anything with such a pretty name. Did you ever stop to think that the names of diseases and the names of flowers are very similar? For instance, I might say, ‘Do come and see my garden. It is at its best now, and the double pneumonias are really wonderful. I suppose the mild winter had something to do with that. I’m very proud of my trailing phlebitis, too, and the laryngitises and deep purple quinsies that I put in last year are a joy to behold. The bed of asthmas and malarias that you used to admire is finer than ever this summer, and the dear little dropsies are all in bloom down by the lake, and make such a pretty showing with the blue of the anthrax border behind them!’

“Enough of nonsense. There is a great deal to tell you. I wrote you that Eric was on his way to Paris to fetch Connie. He found her, where I thought he would, and they returned to London together. He took rooms for her in a quiet little hotel, which I fear was a mistake, for Connie loathes quiet little hotels, and only goes to them when she must. However, we shall see. She came to see me the other day—poor Connie! She is, to use her own words, a wreck of a woman, but she trails the ghost of her beauty about with her, and Eric tells me people still turn to stare after her in the streets. She tried to talk to me as if we had parted only yesterday, and was as unemotional as one could wish, for which I was thankful, for emotions are only permissible when they are genuine, and not always then.

“I suppose I am a very odd old woman, Stephen, but I only felt for her what I would have felt for any other woman in her position. I had to keep reminding myself that this once beautiful, made-up woman was my daughter. I have never known that feverish mother-love that so many women experience. My children interested, amused and disappointed me—when I was stupid enough to be disappointed. I know better now. I would die for any of my children, but I cannot sentimentalize over them.

“How I digress! Connie is going to give London a try, and I hope to Heaven she will find something to interest her. She has no friends, so she will have to fall back, I suppose, on shops and theaters, and of course clothes, which she still loves. But she is not a woman to ‘take up’ things. I wish she were.

“But you will be most interested in Judy. I wrote you about the near-accident, and the man who was knocked down in the fog. He appears to have captivated both Judy and Noel, and they are bringing him here to tea this afternoon. I am most anxious to meet him, for something tells me that Judy is more interested in him than she has ever been in any man. But more of that in my next letter.

“Louise returns of her own free will—which must annoy her—to-morrow. I think she deferred her homecoming in the hope that Eric would send for her, but instead of that he begged her to stay as long as she wished. She has never met Connie, and of course they will dislike each other. At present neither she nor Millie know of Connie’s return. I thought it better to let her take root a little first, for I think any unpleasantness during the first week or two would easily dislodge her.

“I do hope to see you here, Stephen. Do you plan and hope for it too?

“I will write again very soon.

“Claire.”

She always sent Dawson out to post her letters to Stephen the moment they were written. She knew he had not her vitality nor her interests. There was little to hold him to life except her letters, and the hope he had of seeing her and those about her again.

[CHAPTER XI]

Louise returned to London in a strange state of mind. In the first place, her family, who liked Eric, had not been disposed to listen sympathetically to her rather vague complaints. She had found her sister, an enthusiastic gardener, preoccupied and full of plans for altering the gardens of Mistley; her mother too engrossed with Theosophy to listen to earthly troubles, and her father too much upset over the budget. So she had been left to herself more than she had liked. She had made up her mind to stay until Eric expressed a desire for her return, but as he did no such thing, and she felt she couldn’t stand another hour of boredom, she returned to town.

And there was something else. The day before she left, a humble cousin of her mother’s came to tea. She had been to Paris for the first time in her life, and was not to be denied the greater joy of relating her impressions. The rest of the family, murmuring appropriate excuses, drifted away after tea, and Louise was left alone with the caller. It was then that Louise received a shock.

She heard that her husband had been seen in Paris. It came out quite naturally during the conversation. It also appeared that he had been seen at some private hotel with a lady. “I dare say—a relation?” The cousin’s voice had an inquiring note. “I dare say you’ll know who it was if I describe her. A tall lady, my friend said, not very young. Fair.” And Louise said, with her brain whirling, “Oh, yes, a cousin.“ The visitor nodded. “So odd, wasn’t it, my friend having seen your husband? One never expects to see any one one knows in Paris. It’s not like dear London.”

Louise was so amazed that she forgot to feel angry and outraged. She thought of it most of the night, and in the train next morning, and she thought of it—and it seemed stranger than ever then—when she was once more in her own home, among the familiar things she had lived with for eight years.

Eric was at the House. She couldn’t remember whether it was Divorce Reform or the Plumage Bill. Anyway, he wasn’t expected back till late. She longed for some one to talk to. She had no intimate woman friend with whom she could discuss her husband; in fact, she could think of no better ear in which to pour her troubled amazement than that of her husband’s mother.

Lady Gregory was in, Dawson said over the telephone, and was not expecting visitors. She would be delighted to see Mrs. Eric.

If Louise had been accustomed to self-examination, she would have realized that she was less unhappy than she had been for some years. She was indeed conscious of an odd satisfaction. Eric, then, was less perfect than his friends and family believed. There was a chink in that shining armor, his light had suddenly become dimmed. That woman in Paris—she was not young—it had evidently been going on for years. Or was it the renewal of some old affair? Her informant had managed to convey to her that her husband’s—“cousin did you say?”—had not looked—well—quite of their world. She was thankful for that. When Eric admired Lady Norah Thorpe-Taylor, or Mrs. Dennison, or that hideous, clever Madame Fonteyn, she resented it bitterly, for she knew they had what she had not—charm. So she scoffed at charm, and prided herself on having none, nor wishing to have.

But here was something different; here was a blemish in the fabric, a rotten spot brought for the first time to light. It put her on a new footing with him, a slightly elevated footing. Let him point, if he could, to anything unworthy in her life. She had always believed him to be fastidious. Well, he was not. But she was—perhaps she was too fastidious; but then she had the defects of her qualities. Let others touch pitch and be soiled. She could almost pity Eric for lacking what she had. After all, he was merely common clay, and she had been expected to prostrate herself before an idol. Ridiculous! She would try to forgive him. Perhaps he had found her difficult to live up to.

She grew greatly in her own eyes. She no longer felt herself dwarfed by him. He must understand that. Then she would forgive and forget—except at such times as it might suit her to remember.

* * * * * *

“My dear, how much better you look!” cried Madame Claire, as Louise came into the room. “You’re a different creature. Come and tell me all about it.”

As Dawson took her hat and coat, Louise made a mental note that it was time she had new ones. Later on, she might perhaps run over to Paris for a few days, and buy clothes there. Why not?

“Do I really look better? I feel it. It’s been a delightful change, and of course one’s family do appreciate one. It’s like renewing one’s girlhood.”

“What an affected speech!” thought Madame Claire. “Louise has something on her mind.” She then said aloud:

“It amuses me to hear you talk about renewing your girlhood. How old are you? I’ve a dreadful memory for these things. Thirty-five? Ridiculously young. I always feel you don’t make the most of your youth and good looks.”

Louise gave a few touches to her hair before a mirror, and took a chair on the other side of the fireplace. There was something very restful about this room of Madame Claire’s. And her mother-in-law was a woman without prejudices, even where her own children were concerned. She felt she had done the right thing in coming to her.

“Would you be surprised to hear that I am going to turn over a new leaf? I feel I’ve been very much to blame. I’ve allowed myself to play third fiddle long enough.”

“Good!” said Madame Claire. “And what else?”

“And,” went on the younger woman, with a hint of defiance in her voice, “I’m not going to stand in awe of Eric any longer.”

“In awe—of Eric?” Madame Claire laughed. “My dear Louise, that you’ve certainly never done.”

“Well, it’s what I was always expected to do. I’ve thought a good deal about what you said the last time I was here. You were partly right. I suppose I have sulked. Well, I’m not going to sulk any more. Eric isn’t a demi-god. I know now there’s no earthly reason why I should look up to him, and admire him. He’s just like any other man.”

“But I could have told you that any time these last eight years!” cried Madame Claire, more puzzled than amused. “And besides, you yourself seem to have been well acquainted with his failings. I have sometimes thought you saw nothing else.”

“That’s because I was annoyed by his perfections.”

“Perfections! My dear, I could swear Eric has never been a prig!”

“Well, he never seemed to make mistakes like other people. And he always seemed to expect things of me that I wasn’t capable of. It got on my nerves.”

“Naturally.”

“He always made me feel I was disappointing him. And that isn’t very pleasant. But now,” said Louise, coming to the crux of the matter, “he has disappointed me. So we are quits at last.”

“Ah,” said Madame Claire, still in the dark. “That must be a relief.”

“Oddly enough, it is a relief. Horrible as the whole thing is, I—I could almost be glad of it.”

“I was wrong,” thought Madame Claire, remembering a conversation she had had with Judy. “Eric is interested in some other woman, at last.”

“And what is this horrible thing?” she asked.

“You may as well hear it,” said Louise recklessly. “If I can bear it, I should think you could too. While I was away, Eric wired me he was going out of town for a few days. He didn’t say where. I know now. He was seen at a small hotel in Paris with a—a questionable-looking woman. So our idol has feet of clay.”

There was both bitterness and triumph in her voice. Madame Claire gripped the arms of her chair and tried not to laugh. What should she do? Good had been known to come out of evil. Should she and Eric let Louise think—what she thought? Her crying need was evidently to find Eric in the wrong. Should they let her?

“I won’t say it wasn’t a shock to me,” Louise went on. “It was. I heard it while I was at Mistley. I know that it is true.”

Madame Claire was thinking:

“She is bound to know the facts sooner or later, and then she’ll feel she has been made a fool of—a thing only saints can forgive. And yet, it’s an opportunity of a sort. But what a paltry business!”

“Suppose this were really true, Louise,” she said. “At the moment I am neither denying the possibility of it, nor affirming it. But suppose it were true. How would it affect your feeling for Eric?”

“As a good woman—and I hope I am that—it revolts me. But … perhaps I’ve been hard … perhaps he’s found a lack in me.… I dare say he has.… Oh!” she cried suddenly with real emotion, “I want to forgive him! I would forgive him.”

Madame Claire felt she was hearing something she had no right to hear. She must leave this to Eric. Stupid mistake as it was, it might be the means of clearing the air. She would have nothing to do with it.

“My dear,” she said, “I am going to forget you have told me this. Later you’ll understand why. I think the whole thing can be explained, but for your explanation I prefer you should go to Eric. It concerns him the most.”

She would hear no more of it. There was something indecent in Louise’s willingness to forgive. While they talked of other things her indignation grew. Eric’s wife wanted to believe the worst of him. By the time her visitor was ready to go, she found it difficult to be polite.

“I am delighted to see you looking so much better, and so much more cheerful,” she told her, as she said good-by. “And should there prove to be nothing in this story, don’t be disheartened. You mustn’t let one disappointment discourage you.”

Louise, wondering what she meant, kissed her mechanically.

“Good-by. I’ll come and see you again in a few days if I may.”

“Do. I shall expect really good news from you then.”

When the door had closed on her, Madame Claire sat looking into the fire with a flush on her cheeks. Presently she took from a bowl on the table beside her a few violets, and after wiping their stems, tucked them into her dress.

“You deserve a bouquet,” she said to herself, “for not having been ruder. I expect they’re writing in their book up aloft, ‘January 30, Madame Claire rather less pleasant to-day to her irritating daughter-in-law.’ Well, let them.”

* * * * * *

Louise went home and dressed for dinner feeling like a warrior on the eve of battle. There had been many coldnesses in that house, but, as far back as she could remember, not a single contretemps. Dinner was at half-past eight, and there was a possibility that Eric would be late. They usually dined at eight, but the Plumage Bill—or was it the Divorce Reform Bill?—would keep him. She did her hair in a way that he had once admired, and put on a blue tea-gown that he had called charming. In fact, she took far greater pains over her rôle as injured wife than she had ever taken before. And saw no humor in it either.

Eric thought he had never seen her look so well. Take away her coldness and her pettiness, he said to himself, and she would be lovely. Perhaps if she had married some one else she would have been neither cold nor petty. He often felt very sorry for her, for though he had made the mistake, she, no doubt, suffered the most. They talked commonplaces during dinner, but once they were alone in the library, Louise confronted him with heightened color and a voice she could barely control.

It was a pitiful little comedy. Her triumph was so short lived, and the bubble of her advantage over him so soon pricked. At the end of it she found refuge from her humiliation in tears. Eric had never seen her cry like that before, and it moved him. He felt like confessing to things he had never done, or abasing himself in some way. He understood her for the first time, and though there was something ignoble in it all, and he felt the prickings of anger, he nevertheless thought her very human, at least, in wanting to find some weakness to forgive him for.

He put his arm about her, half laughing.

“Look here, Louise, don’t be so cast down. There’s always the stage door—or I could forge a check to oblige, or elope with your maid. What would you like me to do?”

She made no answer, but buried her wet face in a cushion.

“Or why not just forgive me on general principles for being a stupid fellow, and not understanding you? I expect I often hurt you when I am least aware of it. We humans are like that—we understand each other’s sensibilities so little. Why not forgive me for that? Forgive me for not having known how to make you happier?”

“You are making fun of me,” she sobbed. “You are only sneering at me.”

Something told him that she was softening, that soon she would be talking with him like a reasonable being. Was it possible that from to-night he might feel he had a friend for a wife instead of an enemy? He knew he must not let pride stand in the way of it—nor justice even. There was nothing to be gained and much to be lost by telling her that during the whole of their married life she had persistently played the fool.

“On my honor I am not,” he said. “Louise, listen to me. I am a blundering fellow. Somehow or other I have always failed to give you what you wanted. That being so, I ask your help. Help me to be what you wish me to be. We are young, and there is still time. I will do anything. I beg you to help me.”

He made her raise her head, and looked her full in the face with all the intensity those blazing blue eyes of his were capable of.

“Will you help me?”

It was undoubtedly the great moment of Louise’s life. She knew it. Eric had made it possible for her to be magnanimous. But the gods were not kind. What she was going to say to him they alone knew, for at that instant the maid came to the door, to say that Countess Chiozzi was on the telephone and would like to speak to Mr. Gregory. For Louise the interruption was maddening. Eric was about to send word that he would ring her up in the morning, and so return as quickly as possible to the business in hand, when Louise said in a stifled voice:

“I want it clearly understood that that woman is not to come into this house.”

It was hopeless, then. Eric turned to the maid.

“I’ll speak to her,” he said, and left the room. They would have to separate. There was nothing else for it.

Louise sat with bent head, smoothing out a handkerchief on her knee. She had not meant to say that. The words had come through sheer force of habit. She knew her moment was gone now, and she believed that it would never come again. If Eric had really loved her, he would have seen that she longed to be different, and that under her coldness and bitterness there was only unhappiness and longing! He ought to have seen! She folded the handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes again. She was more miserable than ever.

[CHAPTER XII]

Major Stroud had also been invited to tea at Madame Claire’s, but was to be out of town, and as Noel had to see a man about a job, the party had dwindled to three, and Chip found his way to the hotel alone. He was prompt to the minute and feeling extremely nervous. He had so looked forward to seeing Judy again that he felt sure everything—except Judy herself—would be disappointing. Madame Claire would find him uninteresting, and Judy would be kind but bored. He would very likely upset his tea. He had been a fool to accept. He had far better have stayed away and allowed himself to return to the comfortable oblivion from which the accident had dislodged him. Better be a kindly memory than a dull actuality.

But there was something reassuring about the way the homely Dawson opened the door to him and took his hat and coat. She received him like an old friend and smiled as though she shared some secret with him. The sight of Judy and his hostess bending over plans for a Pisé de Terre cottage to be built for Judy on Madame Claire’s little place in Sussex, also gave him courage. He loved plans, and was soon making suggestions and alterations in a way that, Judy said, was as domineering as an architect’s.

“It’s entirely furnished and decorated inside,” she said. “I’ve thought about it so much that I wouldn’t be surprised to find it had materialized. You must look next time you go down, Madame Claire. It might look rather odd without its outsides of course.”

It had long been a dream of Judy’s to have her own cottage—shared, needless to say, with Noel—and if they could only get it built cheaply enough, there was a chance that it might be fulfilled. At any rate, they enjoyed planning it, and if it served no other purpose it put Chip at his ease with them—a thing she had prayed for.

Madame Claire guessed easily enough that he was on the way to falling in love with Judy, and that Judy herself was on the same road. She thought there was something very lovable about Chip, and felt sure that he was as gallant a soldier as he was a modest one. Major Stroud had more than hinted to Judy that his D.S.O. should have been a V.C. Madame Claire loved a good soldier, for she had a theory that to be a good soldier a man must be a great gentleman. And, like Judy, she felt the charm of the man of forty—the age that lies like a savory filling between what is callow in the young generation and outworn in the old.

His poverty had kept him out of touch with things. She guessed that if he danced at all, it would be in the stiff, uncompromising manner of the late nineties. He should learn the new ways. He wasn’t nearly old enough to think of himself as on the shelf.

Judy inquired about his injuries. Had the stiffness nearly gone? No, it was no good his saying that it had entirely gone, because she had noticed that he was limping slightly when he came in.

“That’s old age,” he said.

“Very well. Only don’t forget to limp the next time we meet. And what about your head?”

“Oh, quite recovered, thanks! That is, it aches a bit, of course, if I do much writing, but the doctor says that’s bound to be so for a while. Really,” he said, turning to Madame Claire, “I feel I owe my life to Miss Pendleton and her chauffeur. Any one else would have run gayly over me and gone on. I think it was such amazingly good luck that it happened to be that particular car.”

“I’m rather inclined to agree with you,” laughed Madame Claire. “Some day I’d like to hear something about your book. It sounds tremendously interesting. But what I’d like to know now is this. Are all your eggs in one basket? I mean, does this book occupy your whole time, or do you work on it when other occupations permit?”

“I’m afraid that … well, that not only are all my eggs in one basket, but that there’s only one egg. You see,” he explained, “I chucked the army in order to give all my time to it. It meant as much to me as that. To my mind, no one’s ever written scientifically enough about religions.”

“That may be, but I feel you need diversions. When people become so obsessed by one idea that they walk under omnibuses and into motor cars, it’s time for an antidote.”

“That’s just what I did,” he admitted.

“Very well then, I suggest diversions.”

“But what sort? I play golf now and then, but it doesn’t take my mind off the book. Why, I remember perfectly solving a problem once—it had something to do, I think, with levitation—while I was trying to get my ball out of a bunker.”

Madame Claire laughed heartily.

“You’re a most unusual man then. What else can we think of, Judy?”

“There’s always dancing,” said Judy.

“Dancing! Of course! He must learn to dance. You can’t dance and think about religions. I defy you to do it.”

“But I couldn’t dance. I’m too old and stiff. Besides, no one would dance with me.”

“Three excuses, and none of them any good.”

“I’ll teach you,” Judy said. “I might even dance with you.”

“Would you really? That’s awfully kind. But I ought to tell you that I really don’t think I’m teachable.”

“You must let me judge of that. We might begin at Eaton Square one night, in a small way. Gordon and Noel and I often ask a few friends in for dancing, and there’s a little anteroom reserved for practicing. There will only be a few, and it won’t be at all alarming even for hermits.”

Chip looked pleased and dubious at the same time.

“There won’t be any flappers, will there? I’m terrified of flappers.”

“Nothing more flapperish than myself,” laughed Judy. “Was I ever a flapper, Madame Claire?”

“Never. Millie kept you out of sight until you were able to fly. I didn’t altogether approve. After all, we must all try our wings some time. You see, I like the present day, Major Crosby. I like it far better than what people call my own day, though why this one isn’t just as much mine as it is anybody’s, I really don’t know.”

“You’re very greedy,” Judy told her. “You had Disraeli and Gladstone and Jenny Lind, and now you want Lloyd George and Charlie Chaplin. All the same, I don’t wonder you like our age best. That one was so full of hypocrisy and sentiment.”

Madame Claire agreed with this.

“We were always pretending things. Men were always gentlemen or monsters. Young girls were always innocent as flowers. We even tried to believe that wars and poverty were picturesque and romantic.”

“And you talked too much about love,” said Judy. “That sort of golden, sticky, picture-book love that even we were taught to expect. And a gigantic hoax it is!”

“A hoax?” Chip looked at her to see if she were joking.

“Of course it is. Oh, I believed in it too, once. It’s like Santa Claus. I never could see that the pleasure of believing in him was worth the awfulness of finding out that he’s only a myth.”

Chip wondered if she were making fun of love, or whether she was merely holding the schoolgirl’s idea of it up to scorn. He didn’t know. He had never expected to find a love that would transform the world, and he had found it. What he had yet to discover was that women, after all, are the terrible realists. Men manage to preserve their illusions better. Few of them love with their eyes open, and women only really love when their eyes are open. For women are meant to see faults, being the mothers of children, and their critical faculties are more on the alert.

Judy had looked for a miracle. She had been searching for a fairy castle, and now found herself becoming interested in an imperfect modern dwelling. Chip had not asked for a miracle, and lo! it had come to pass. He listened to Judy making fun of romantic love—which she did with great satisfaction to herself until interrupted by tea—and refused to believe that she meant what she said. For romantic love does undoubtedly come to very simple people, and Chip was very simple.

He didn’t trouble to disagree with her. He was happy to be hearing from her own lips that she had never been in love. Not that it made any difference, beyond the pleasure that it gave him, for to love Judy was not the same thing where he was concerned as to make love to her. That was unthinkable.

They left Madame Claire’s together at six, and Chip, happily reckless as well as recklessly happy, walked with Judy all the way to Eaton Square. It was settled that he was to dine there and begin his rejuvenation the following Wednesday night. For Judy told herself that she couldn’t keep Chip a secret from the family forever, and they might as well meet him and get done with it.

“I hope you won’t be frightened of mother,” she said. “I don’t know why it is, but she does frighten people. I don’t think she wants to, really. She and father are very keen on what Noel calls the ‘kin game.’ You know the sort of thing I mean—who’s related to who and how.”

“I see,” said Chip.

“So perhaps you’d better tell me some of your family history. Then I could tell them, and you won’t be bothered. Because they’re sure to want to know.”

She colored as she said it, and Chip guessed that there were mortifying experiences behind her warning.

“With all the pleasure in the world,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell.”

He made short work of what there was. His father, Graham Crosby, an explorer well known to geographical societies, had lost his life from fever in a South American jungle at the age of thirty-seven. His mother, faced with the prospect of almost unendurable poverty, tried her hand at novel writing. “The sentimental kind that you would have hated,” he said with a smile. However, they had an enormous success, and enabled her to send her only son to Sandhurst. She died at the close of the Boer War. They were not related to any Crosbys that he knew of, except some excessively dull ones who lived somewhere near Aberdeen.

“Very poor pickings for your mother, I’m afraid,” he said with a laugh.

Chip left her at the door with his rather old-fashioned bow, and she watched him until he reached the corner. There he turned, as she had guessed he would, and looked back, and as the maid opened the door, she waved her hand to him gayly. He walked stiffly, thanks to the accident, and leaned a little on his stick. Dear old Chip!…

So this was love! With her it took the form of a passionate tenderness. She wanted him to have success, and happiness. She wanted to help him to get them.

For Chip, the impossible thing that had happened was too dazzling, as yet, to be more than blinked at. It was as though an old dried stick had burst into blossom and leaf. As though water had been turned into wine. That Judy might be persuaded to care for him in return never entered his head. To love her was wonderful enough. Let a man of her own world, a man of wealth and standing, try to win her. Some day such a man would succeed, and he would have to bear that as he had borne lesser things. If his book received recognition, he might continue to enjoy this delightful friendship. If not, he must quietly drop out of Judy’s life. For he believed that a man had no right to accept a charming woman’s friendship unless he could lay appropriate and frequent sacrifices upon her altar. Which shows that the world had been rolling along under Chip’s very nose without his having observed the manner of its rolling.

One pleasure he permitted himself that day. He went into a little flower shop in Church Street and bought two dozen pink roses. It was one of his happiest moments; he had been so denied the joy of giving. On his card he wrote:

“I hope you will forgive me if I am doing a presumptuous thing in sending you these few flowers. But if they give you a little pleasure, I shall be well content.”

He felt bold, because he had nothing to lose. It was early February, too, with the softness of coming spring in the air, and hope dies hard in the spring, even at forty.

[CHAPTER XIII]

Stephen’s letter in reply to Madame Claire’s last was brief. She guessed that he was still suffering, and was not up to writing at any length.

“Bronchitis and phlebitis,” he wrote, “are not as pretty as they sound, although your garden amused me very much. Miss McPherson would be happy in it, that’s certain. When I’m feeling better I see her casting longing glances at old Jock Wetherby, who’s got more ailments than the doctors can put names to. But when I’m at my worst she clucks over me like a proud hen.

“Connie’s Count seems to suspect collusion. He tried to pump me about her yesterday. I was out in the sun for five minutes, and he appeared so promptly I think he’d been waiting for me. As soon as he began asking questions I had a coughing fit, so he went away. From what I hear—for I listen to gossip when it suits me to do so—Connie could get a divorce ten times over. I expect he misses her in a way. He found he could make her suffer—an occupation his sort delights in.

“Well, Claire, my dear, I cannot write more to-night. You are wonderful, and your letters are my great joy. They soothe me. I find myself growing less short-tempered, less out of love with my fellow man.

“There is a little poem that comes to my mind now and speaks of you.

“‘The world is young to-day:

Forget the gods are old,

Forget the years of gold

When all the months were May.

A little flower of Love

Is ours, without a root,

Without the end of fruit,

Yet—take the scent thereof.

There may be hope above,

There may be rest beneath;

We see them not, but Death

Is palpable—and Love.’

“It is a charming thing, and applies to old friends who love one another and whose days are transient, as well as to young lovers, whose love is perhaps transient.

“Write soon. Tell me more about Judy.

“Stephen.”

Madame Claire answered almost at once:

“Dear Stephen,

“I have your little poem by heart. Thank you for it. The older I grow, the more I value the poets. They are the bravest people I know, for they sing in defiance of a world out of joint. Think of touching the high peaks of rapture with coal at its present price, in the midst of strikes, and a much advertised crime wave! It is difficult to see that the world has improved since the war, but at least one can see that it has changed, and I like to think that it can only change for the better. So I cling to that thought and read the poets, not being one of those who can help to make it better. I feel about the world as I might feel about an Inn where I have supped and been kindly served. I hope it may flourish and not fall into evil hands. Not that I expect to return. It was, after all, only a night’s stopping place. But I should like other travelers to find it as I found it, or somewhat better.

“Judy came here to tea a day or two ago, and there came also the victim of the accident in the fog. He is, or soon will be, in love with her, and something of the sort is happening to Judy. If anything should come of it—and I feel that it may, things would not be easy for them. Millie would give the clothes off her back, and so would John, for the eldest son, but they expect their daughter to marry for a living. I would do what I could, but that would be little. My income since the war has dwindled surprisingly, and I have some of Robert’s poor relations to help. Of course, from Millie’s point of view, the man is utterly unsuitable, but he is a gallant fellow, and life has been none too kind to him. I fear, somehow, that he is one of life’s inexplicable failures, but I like him none the less for that.

“Connie has conceived an extravagant admiration for Noel. I think I said that she was not a woman to take up things, but I was wrong, for she has ‘taken up’ Noel. And really, it is amazing the change he has already wrought in her. She takes his frankness and frequent scoldings in a way I never dreamed she would. He is kindness itself to her, takes her to theaters and concerts, and seems to find her an amusing companion. He thinks she has had a pretty bad time of it—though he admits it’s her own fault—and is bent on cheering her up. She adores his brutal honesty and his entire lack of respect for age, position, or human frailties. The first time they lunched together, they met at the Ritz, and Connie, it appears, was ablaze with paint. Noel refused to set foot in the dining room until she had washed her face, and in the end she meekly sat down with nothing more in the way of make-up than a dusting of powder on her nose. Of course he is a godsend to her. Millie is very angry with me, and Louise will have none of her. Judy gets on with her well enough, but she doesn’t amuse Judy as she does Noel.

“Did I tell you Louise heard Eric was in Paris with a ‘questionable looking woman’? She was nobly prepared to forgive him, but when she learned that it was only Connie, her humiliation knew no bounds. I fear she is colder to him than ever now.

“Well, well, they must all go through with it as we did. I thank Heaven every day that Time has given me the right to sit quietly on my hilltop. I can still hear the sounds of the conflict below, and the cries of the wounded, but though they are my nearest and dearest I am too conscious of the transience of things, too aware of yesterdays and to-morrows—especially to-morrows—to concern myself greatly. I want them to be happy, but I know they won’t be, and I am not God to confer or withhold. I can do nothing but laugh at or comfort them a little. Do you think me hard? No, you know that I am not. The happiest of them all is Noel, for he, like me, is a looker-on. I don’t know how he has managed to exchange the arena for the spectators’ gallery, but he has. I think it is because he wants nothing for himself.

“As for Gordon, he is too ambitious to be happy. He is marrying partly to suit his mother, and partly to gratify his passion for being among the big-wigs, where of course, as Lord Ottway’s son-in-law, he will be. But he doesn’t know his Helen—yet. I think I do. Her chin is too long and her nose too high.

“Oh, the joy of wanting nothing! The joy of being eighty and immune! But I, even I, have one wish. And that is to see you, my old friend, again. But it is a pleasant want, like a hunger that is soon to be satisfied. For I feel I cannot lose you. Here, or there—what does it matter? I imagine you wince at that, foolish old Stephen!

“Write to me soon. I do hope you are better.

“Yours,

“Claire.”

[CHAPTER XIV]

It was February and it was sunny, and Noel had persuaded Connie to take a little gentle exercise in the Park.

She was finding London bearable, thanks to her nephew, and although she had, she said, nothing to look forward to, she was content with the present as long as the present remained as it was now.

They were discussing men in general, a topic that never lost its interest for Connie.

“Can’t think why you’re so keen on foreigners,” Noel remarked; then said in his merciless way, “the only Englishman you ever had much to do with you ran away from.”

Connie was quite soberly dressed in a dark blue coat and skirt, relieved by furs, hat, shoes and gloves of her favorite gray. She was no more made up than most of the other women who passed them. It was her forty-eighth birthday, and to celebrate it they were going to lunch at Claridge’s later.

“Foreigners interest me so much more,” she replied. “They understand women.”

“Too damn well,” agreed Noel. “Besides, the sort of men you mean only understand one sort of woman. They wouldn’t understand Judy, for instance.”

Connie smiled deprecatingly and put her head on one side.

“Well, as to that, I’m not sure I understand her myself. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed in Judy.”

“You can’t appreciate her, Connie. That’s why.”

“Perhaps.” No one ever took offense at Noel. “To my mind she isn’t feminine enough. She’s handsome, but she has no magnetism, no allure.”

“Nice English girls don’t go in for allure,” Noel said.

“Pooh!” She laughed rather scornfully. “Because they don’t know how.”

“Exactly,” agreed her nephew. “And a good thing too. Look where it landed you.”

“Now you’re being rude and British, but I forgive you. And at any rate, I have lived.”

It was Noel’s turn to laugh scornfully.

“Lived! You surely don’t call that living? Junketing around Europe with a lot of bounders! Why, Connie, you little innocent, you’d have lived a whole lot more if you’d stuck to Humphries and brought up a family.”

She threw him an appealing look.

“You might remember that it’s my birthday,” she protested.

“Jove, that’s so. And I’m hungry. Let’s start walking toward Claridge’s.”

“Walk? It’s too far. We must have a taxi.”

“No, we mustn’t. Great Scott, Connie, we’ve only walked half a mile or so. What’ll you do in the next war?”

“Well, be nice to me then.” She gave in as she usually did. “You know I’m horribly worried. I may have to go back to Chiozzi almost any day. If he finds out where I am——”

“Nonsense. He can’t make you go. You ought to divorce the little beast. I don’t call that a marriage. And anyway, one more scandal won’t matter much.”

“I’m afraid of him.”

“Has he any money of his own, or are you supporting him?”

“Oh, he has money of his own, but he’s gambled away most of it. He gambled away most of mine, too. I didn’t know how to stop it. Morton Freeman ought to have tied it up in some way, but you see he died so suddenly … that awful Titanic.…”

“What sort of a fellow was Freeman?”

“Oh, very nice, and very fond of me. But you don’t like foreigners.”

“I never said so. And besides, I don’t call Americans foreigners.”

“He stayed on the ship,” Connie went on. “He made me go. It was so brave of him. I wasn’t really in love with him. I’ve never really loved anybody but Petrovitch. But I was sorry.”

“Where is Petrovitch now?”

“In America, I think, but I’m not sure. He never writes to me.” She sighed.

“How are you getting on with Louise?” Noel asked, thinking it was time to change the subject. “I’d love to see you two together!”

“You never will,” Connie said with feeling. “Eric needn’t try to bring us together, either. I’ve seen her, and that’s enough. How I hate those thin-lipped, straw-colored women! How Eric could have married her when he might have married any one, I cannot imagine.”

“People have these sudden fancies,” said Noel.

“What about Gordon? Is it true he’s really engaged to Helen Dane? Not that I care much, as he’s never had the politeness to come and see me.”

“He’s engaged right enough. I suppose he’s happy. Gordon closes up like an oyster if you touch on anything personal. We’ve never discussed anything in our lives. Mother’s frightfully pleased about it.”

“What’s the girl like?”

“Oh, she’s all right, but she’s cut to pattern.”

“Pretty?”

“So so. Too bony, I think. But she suits Gordon. Related to everybody, rich, correct, hasn’t got an original thought in her head. Thinks she’s literary because young Shawn Bridlington the poet goes and reads his verses in her mother’s drawing-room. Affects the Bloomsbury people. Opens bazaars and things. Jove! I’d rather marry a factory girl with a harelip.”

Much of this was Greek to his aunt, who had the misfortune never to have heard of the Bloomsbury people.

“And what about Judy and that man she nearly ran over?”

“Why?” Noel asked innocently, not wishing to discuss Judy and her affairs with Connie. “What about them?”

“Is there anything in it? I hope not, because the thing’s ridiculous. Who is he? What is he?”

Noel gave an amused chuckle.

“Connie, you really are a joy. You to ask ‘Who is he? What is he?’ Don’t you try to take a leaf out of mother’s book. It isn’t your rôle.”

“Judy’s my niece, after all,” protested Connie. “Isn’t it natural that I should be interested?”

“Natural enough,” said Noel. “I hope you are. Ask me if he’s a good fellow, and if I think he could make her happy, and I’ll be delighted to answer you. But ‘who is he?’ … that sort of tosh.… I should think you’d earned the right to be human, if anybody had.”

“Very well,” answered his chastened aunt. “Is he good enough?”

“I think he’s as near being good enough as any fellow I’ve met. If he had any money at all, I should call it a match. But he hasn’t, and I don’t know how Judy would like being downright poor.”

“All the same,” Connie insisted, “I can’t help wishing that my only niece would make a good match.”

Noel raised his eyes heavenward, despairingly.

“For a woman who deemed the world well lost for love.…”

“I know,” interrupted Connie. “But you see Judy hasn’t my temperament.”

“I’ll refrain from saying ‘Thank God!’ because it’s your birthday,” returned Noel. “Here we are, and I bet I do justice to the lunch.”

They both did, and Connie had occasion to congratulate the head waiter on a very perfect Petite Marmite. She was always at her best in restaurants. She loved the crowds and the chatter and the music, and the feeling that she was being looked at, and was still worth looking at. There was even a secret hope in her heart that people would take Noel for her son. She liked to imagine them saying, “There’s a son who enjoys going about with his mother.” And Noel, who really liked Connie and pitied her, had hopes of knocking some sense into her foolish head in time. It touched him, too, that she depended on him so.

Two men came in and sat at a table at Connie’s left, and somewhat behind her. One was fat and old, with a round, coarse face. The other was at least impressive, and Noel found himself watching him. He had a dome-shaped head, rather flat at the back, and his hair, which began high up at the very summit of his temples was long and carefully brushed so as to fall slightly over the collar behind. A pair of level, frowning eyes looked out scornfully from under projecting brows, and the wide, thin lips protruded in a fierce pout. Presently, when something annoyed him, he spoke with great brusqueness to the waiter, scarcely moving his lips as he did so.

Connie heard his voice and turned, and their eyes met. Noel heard her draw in her breath sharply, and for a moment she sat staring, motionless. There was not the slightest change in the man’s expression, as he stared back at Connie. There was an empty seat at his table, and suddenly he raised a large hand with spade-shaped fingers, and beckoned.

Connie started up from her chair like an automaton, and would have gone to him, but Noel’s muscular hand closed on her wrist and fastened it to the table.

“Keep your seat!” he commanded. “Are you a dog to obey that man’s whistle? If he wants to talk to you, let him come here.”

Then as if ashamed of taking part in such an intense little drama, he dropped her hand and said lightly:

“Who’s your friend, Connie? I don’t care for his manners.”

Connie strove to reach the normal again.

“It’s Petrovitch,” she said, scarcely above a whisper.

“Thought so. Do you realize he beckoned to you as though you were his slave? I’d like to wring his beastly neck.”

“Noel! It’s Petrovitch! What does he care about our silly little conventions? He wants me. I must talk to him.”

“Then he can damn well come here. And for Heaven’s sake don’t make a scene, Connie. Eat your lunch.”

“I can’t eat. I haven’t seen him for fifteen years. Oh, Noel, I’ve never loved any one as I’ve loved him.”

“Well, I don’t see that it’s anything to have hysterics about. What of it? He’ll come and talk to you, I expect, when he’s finished that enormous lunch he’s ordered. That is, if you’re foolish enough to wait.”

“I must. Oh, Noel, have pity on me!”

Her lips trembled.

“Cheer up!” he said. “I’ll sit here all day, if you’ll order another Entre Côte. Have you ever noticed what queerly shaped heads some of these fellows have? If I were a woman, I’d study phrenology a bit. That’s where you have the best of us. You women may—and I expect often do—possess heads a congenital idiot would be proud of, but we never find it out. Don’t even show your ears, now. It isn’t fair. But your friend over there—I could tell you a whole lot about him just by looking at the back of his head.”

“Oh, he’s a devil if you like,” said the unhappy Connie, “but I love him. And he loved me, once. I’d die for him.”

“Neurotic,” Noel told her.

“Call it what you like. I’d rather spend five minutes with him than a lifetime with any one else.”

“I’d like to spend five minutes with him myself,” said Noel. “Alone. Oh,” remembering his empty sleeve, “I expect he’d wipe up the floor with me, but I’d tell him a few simple, home truths first.”

“I tell you, Noel, ordinary rules of conduct don’t apply to men like Petrovitch. He’s a genius, a heaven-born genius. You’ve never even heard him play. There’s nothing like it—there never has been anything like it. Oh, yes, he’s made me suffer, but I forgive him for it, because he’s a king among men.”

“A king! My good aunt, pull yourself together and observe the way he eats asparagus. There! I knew it … he’s dribbled some of the melted butter down his chin and on to his waist-coat. How would you like the job of spot-remover to His Highness? I suppose some wretched woman—but has he a wife? I forget.”

“He has had two,” murmured Connie.

“How any woman——” began Noel, and gave it up.

“There are men like that. They are unattractive to other men perhaps, but they have an irresistible fascination for some women. They command—we obey.”

“Cut it, Connie!” exclaimed Noel. “Do you mean to tell me that if that bounder, to satisfy his filthy vanity, said ‘Come,’ you’d go? Like a wretched poodle on a string. Good Lord! Where is your pride?”

She shook her head.

“I only know that I must talk to him again.”

They finished lunch with little conversation. Noel was angry and uncomfortable. As they drank their coffee, and he saw that Petrovitch too was nearing the end, he made another effort.

“Connie, let’s get out before he’s finished. Will you? You’ll be glad of it all your life. I promise you you will. It means a lot to me.”

His earnestness had no effect. He went on:

“You’ve always followed the line of least resistance—that’s why you’re what you are now. You’ve chucked away your life. Don’t do it again, Connie. You know what that man’s opinion of you is. He showed it pretty clearly when he beckoned to you just now. There’s just one way you can hurt him—and one way you can prove to him, and to yourself, that you’ve got the right stuff in you. Leave here with me, without speaking to him. Please, Connie. Will you?”

She wavered. Then she seized upon some words of his, and he knew that he had lost.

“Hurt him? I wouldn’t hurt him for anything in the world. I want to show him that one woman at least is faithful to him, to the end.”

This was too much for Noel. He remembered the French officer, Freeman, Chiozzi, and felt sick. His impulse was to get up and leave her then and there, but he stayed with a set jaw and angry eyes. His hair seemed to bristle with antagonism when Petrovitch pushed back his chair at last and said to his companion:

“Pardon—a moment. I go to speak to a lady.” And in a second he was at their table.

Connie gave him both hands without speaking, and he bent over them with a smile that was a mere widening of those protruding lips.

“Connie! As beautiful as ever! My dear lady, the sight of you takes ten—fifteen years from my age. I feel young again, and happy. You come to my concert next week, eh? I play for you.”

“Same old stuff!” thought Noel.

Connie released her hands, and when she spoke her voice was breathless and unnatural, as if she had been running.

“I … I didn’t know you were here.… I hadn’t seen any notices. I thought you were still in America. This is a great surprise to me, Illiodor.” Then, turning to Noel, “I want you to meet Monsieur Petrovitch, Noel. My nephew …”

Noel, standing behind his chair and feeling younger and more intolerant than he had ever felt in his life, inclined his head.

“Eh? Your nephew? Charmed.” The great man bowed, impressively. “Are you too a lover of music?” He bent his frowning gaze upon the young man. “But no, you are English. So, you will say, is the adorable aunt. But she is different. She is of the world, eh? She loves beauty, art, genius.” He moved his large hands. “Ah, Connie, you and I had much in common. They told me you had married again. Is it true?”

“I married Count Chiozzi, four years ago,” she told him. “My husband is in the south of France.”

“Always the good cosmopolitan!” he approved. Then turning once more to Noel:

“You also will come to my concert.”

“Expects me to say, ‘Yes, master!’” thought Noel.

“No, thanks,” he answered evenly and casually. “I don’t care for concerts.”

Petrovitch looked at Connie, working his prominent brows.

“Philistine, eh? No matter, you are one of us. I am staying here. You will do me the honor to dine with me to-morrow night. Good! We have much to say to one another. Perhaps also my friend Silberstein, eh? He is gourmet. He will eat, you will talk to me.” He could frown and smile at the same time, Noel observed. “At eight.”

“I’ll come,” said the fascinated Connie.

He bent once more over her hands.

“Au revoir, my dear friend,” he said, in his strangely harsh voice. “To-morrow night.” Then with an indifferent nod of the head in Noel’s direction, he returned to his table.

Connie paid the bill—she always insisted on that—in a sort of trance, with a little excited smile on her lips. As they got up to go out she threw a glance at Petrovitch, and left the room, still with that trancelike smile. It irritated Noel beyond expression. It plainly said:

“He is not indifferent to me. He has forgotten nothing. I shall live again.”

Very little was said on the way to Connie’s hotel. She was beyond speech for the present—she was reliving the days when the world was at Petrovitch’s feet, and he, the master, was at hers. For she believed now that it was the depth and tumult of his passion for her that had carried her away. She had forgotten her notes, her flowers, the interviews she had prayed for—forgotten all that. She won him by deliberate assault, but once won, she became his slave, and it was as his adoring slave in those first, brief, happy months, that she liked to remember herself.

Noel was disgusted and annoyed. Also, he was extremely disappointed. Was all his scolding, his chaffing, his affection for her, the influence he had gained, to go for nothing now? Simply because that … brute … had turned up again? Was there nothing he could say or do to save her? What would Claire say? And then he asked himself, well, what would Claire say? Why not find out? That was an idea. He would find out.

“You’ll come upstairs, won’t you?” she asked when they were in the hall of the hotel. Noel thought her invitation somewhat perfunctory. He suspected she wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Nevertheless, he meant to come, presently.

“Yes, I’ll be up in a minute,” he said. “You go on. I’ve got to ring up somebody.”

The lift carried her up out of his sight and he went into the telephone booth and rang up Madame Claire. Her telephone stood on a table close beside her chair, and he had hardly a second to wait before she answered.

“Yes? Oh, it’s you, Noel. Where are you?”

He told her. Then he described briefly the luncheon at Claridge’s and what befell there.

“I saw the announcement of his concert in last Sunday’s paper,” she said. “Connie never reads the papers, or she would have seen it herself. What is he like now?”

“I don’t want to use offensive language over the telephone,” he answered.

He heard Madame Claire’s laugh.

“Well, Noel, I think the whole thing is in your hands. You are the only one who can do anything with her. If I say anything she will only tell me I am trying to rob her of her happiness. You know how she talks—such sentimental nonsense!”

“But I don’t see that I can do anything either. What can I do?”

“Of course you can do something. She knows well enough that Petrovitch is here to-day and gone to-morrow, while you’re her nephew for life. Make her choose, Noel. It will appeal to her sense of the dramatic. You’ll see. Make her choose.”

“Him or me, you mean? I believe she’d choose him.”

“I’m not so sure. But try it, anyway. You’re so good about managing Connie.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“Oh, and Noel, if she chooses you, you might be magnanimous and offer to take her to his concert next week. I think you could safely do that. Good-by. I can’t talk any more. Millie is just coming up to see me, and she mustn’t hear this. Good-by and good luck!”

Noel remained for a thoughtful moment in the booth, and then went upstairs. Claire was quite right. It was the only chance.

He found his troublesome aunt waiting for him in her sitting room. She was humming softly and looking out of the window. His indignation grew as he looked at her.

“Connie,” he said quietly. “About this Petrovitch business. I’m pretty angry about it, as you know perfectly well. I’ve made up my mind that you’ll have to choose between me and that fellow, and choose here and now. You can’t have us both. If you go out to dinner with Petrovitch to-morrow night or any other night, or have anything further to do with him, that’s the end as far as I’m concerned. You won’t see me again.”

Connie came swiftly back from dreams of Petrovitch and seized Noel’s arm.

“Noel! You can’t mean that! You can’t mean that you’d drop me—have nothing more to do with me? Oh, Noel!”

“I’ve said it and I mean it. It’s up to you. If you have anything more to do with that bounder, I’ll have nothing more to do with you. And that’s flat.”

She pleaded with him. He didn’t understand Petrovitch. He didn’t understand her. Ordinary rules didn’t apply to him because he was a genius, nor to her because she loved him. If Noel were older——

That was more than he could bear.

“That’ll do, Connie. I’m not a fool. I’ve been sorry for you because you were down on your luck; and anyway, I’m always sorry for people like you. And I’m fond of you, too. But if you’re going to be so damn weak, and slop over with disgusting sentiment—well, I’m off.”

Connie looked out of the window again.

“If you’ll pull up and try to make something of your life, I’m with you. If not, I’m through.”

“I can’t give him up,” moaned Connie. “I want to talk over old times with him, and hear him say that he loved me once. It means everything to me. I must talk to him, Noel!”

“All right. Then that’s that. Well, I’m walking home. I feel I need a little air after all this. It’s good-by then, Connie?”

He held out his hand. She turned and looked at him wildly.

“Noel, I never thought you could be so hard! You don’t know how miserable you’re making me!”

“There’s Eric, too,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget he’s got no love for Petrovitch. Don’t forget Humphries was his friend. Eric’s been pretty decent to you. As for … as for Claire!…”

Tears welled into her eyes. Noel, who, like many another man, found them undermining the foundations of his wrath, softened a little.

“Sleep on it, Connie,” he said more kindly. “I’ll give you until to-morrow to make up your mind. Ring me up in the morning and let me know what you’ve decided to do. So long!”

And he turned and left her.

[CHAPTER XV]

“Bless you, Claire,” began Stephen’s next letter, “you make even my life worth living. Your letters are my one delight. All the same, we are poles apart in some things. You say, ‘Oh, the joy of wanting nothing!’ I would say, ‘Oh, the misery of wanting nothing!’ But fortunately there is one great want that keeps my old bones above ground, and that is the longing I have to see you and Judy and Eric again. Of course I was a fool not to marry. It may be fun to be a bachelor when you’re young, but it’s hell when you’re old. I marvel at the number of women who face a life of single cussedness voluntarily. With me, there has been only one woman, and she holds this letter in her hands, as she has always held the writer’s heart in her hands. But I’ve known plenty of women who would have made good wives, and perhaps given me Judys and Erics.

“Yes, you are right; I took defeat badly. My advice, now, would always be to marry—as best one can. There is nearly always a compromise to be made. There would have been no compromise, on my part, had I married you. Therefore it was not to be, for the perfect thing is always out of reach. Don’t tell me your marriage with Robert was perfect. Robert was my best friend and I knew his faults. But he made you happy, and that is the great thing. It ought to be carven on a man’s tombstone, ‘He made a woman happy.’ Well, at least, they can carve on mine, ‘He made no woman unhappy.’

“I am feeling much better to-day, so Miss McPherson is correspondingly gloomy. But she is a good, devoted soul, and has borne with me wonderfully, and I have settled something on her. Which brings me to your last letter. If Judy and that fellow want to marry, I will gladly settle something on Judy. Don’t tell her, of course. People who really care for each other ought to be endowed if they can’t afford to marry. I don’t see the good of waiting till I’m dead. I will do what I should do if Judy were my daughter. You must let me know how things go. There’s only my niece Monica to think of. She’ll give what I leave her to the Church. I don’t mind that, for though the Church has never done much for me—admittedly through my own fault—it has for other people.

“And that brings me to a subject I approach with diffidence. Don’t think me in my dotage, Claire, if I tell you that I have become interested in Spiritualism. I’ve been reading a great deal, and I have come to the unalterable conclusion that men like Crooks, Myers, Lodge and Doyle know what they are talking about. Some of us take our religion on trust. Others of us want to find out. Having floundered in a sea of agnosticism all my life long, I now begin to feel the ground beneath my feet. I got more out of the ‘Vital Message’ in an hour than I’ve got out of parsons in seventy years. I believe that if Spiritualism were rightly understood, it would fuse all religions and all sects. I need hardly tell you that the Spiritualism I mean does not depend on knockings and rappings, and the horrible fake-s?ces of the mercenary minded. Some day I must talk to you about this. I have said enough here, perhaps too much; but I wanted to tell you of the thing that has meant so much to me.

“If I continue as well as this I may come to London next month. London! Shall I know it, I wonder? It will not know me. But you will, and that is all I ask.

“Stephen.”

To this, Madame Claire made immediate reply:

“My dear Stephen,

“Your long letter was all too short for my liking. I feel you are really better, and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. About your coming I hardly dare to think. How good, how good it will be! There is a brass band of sorts playing under my window, and I wish it would stay and play all day. That shows how happy I am. And to that end, I am wondering whether it would be better to pay or to refrain from paying. I am uncritical enough at the moment to feel that any music is good music.

“How pleasant it would be if we could have appropriate music at all crucial, or difficult, or delightful moments in our lives! When one is first introduced to one’s husband’s relations, for instance. I think Chopin would help to tide us over that. In a bloodless battle with one’s dressmaker over a bill, I would recommend Tchaikowsky, or Rimsky-Korsakov. For moments of deep feeling, for love, we would each, I imagine, choose something different. I think I would choose Bach, for Bach is too great for sentiment. As for dying—every one should die to music. I should think young people, for instance, would choose to drift into eternity upon the strains of the loveliest and latest waltz. At least I have often heard them say they could die waltzing. There are bits of Wagner that I wouldn’t mind dying to. You’ll say dying is too serious a subject for jest. But I can’t see that it’s any more serious than living, which so many people are entirely frivolous about.

“Ah, no, Stephen, I don’t think you are in your dotage. I too have read a good deal about Spiritualism, and I believe that what these men say is true. But I suppose I am one of those fortunate people who have faith, and that being so I had no need of proof. I don’t know how my faith came to me. I have always had it, and so don’t deserve any credit for it. The credit goes to people like you, who have had to struggle all their lives against unbelief. I believe, too, that so long as there is a diversity of creatures on this globe, so long will there be a diversity of religions. There is only one God, but the roads to the understanding of God are many.

“And so for you, and thousands like you, there is Crooks, with his laboratories and his cameras and his proofs. And for others there is Beauty. Hear what Tagore says:

“‘Thou art the sky and Thou art also the nest.

O Thou Beautiful! How in the nest Thy love embraceth the soul with sweet sounds and color and fragrant odors!

Morning cometh there, bearing in her golden basket the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth.

And there cometh Evening, o’er lonely meadows deserted of the herds, by trackless ways, carrying in her golden pitcher cool draughts of peace from the ocean-calms of the west.

But where Thine infinite sky spreadeth for the soul to take her flight, a stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor form nor color, nor ever any word.’

“And for others again, there is simply—

“‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.…’

“Write again soon. I long to know how you are progressing.

“Yours as ever,

“Claire.”

[CHAPTER XVI]

When Noel woke, the morning after his ultimatum to Connie, he was at once aware that something was to make that day different from other days, but for a moment he couldn’t remember what that something was. Then, as the happenings of the previous day came back to him, he said to himself, "Connie and Petrovitch," and sprang out of bed. He dressed quickly—for he had reduced the business of dressing himself with one hand to an exact science—and knocked on Judy’s door. He heard her call, "Come in if it’s Noel," and obeyed. Judy was standing before her mirror, brushing her brown hair. Her bright red silk dressing gown made a lovely splash of color in the restrained little room.

“What are you up so early for?” she asked. “Something on your conscience, old boy?”

“Not on mine,” he assured her. “Mind if I smoke? I bet you often do before breakfast.”

“Never. You may though. You’ve evidently got something to tell me. Even if I am the spinster type, I understand the workings of the male mind. What’s up?”

“It’s about Connie,” he began; then broke off to say, “One of these days I’ll buy you a comfortable chair. This one’s got a back like a pew in a Quaker meetinghouse. However—you know yesterday was Connie’s birthday?”

“Of course I know. Didn’t I send her a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley? Lilies for purity. Well, what about it?”

“Perhaps you are also aware that she asked me to lunch at Claridge’s. Before we’d been there ten minutes, who do you suppose came in and sat at a table almost next to ours?”

“Chiozzi?”

“Guess again.”

“Noel, you know I hate these guessing games. Freeman? Oh, no, he’s dead. It was some one to do with Connie, I suppose. Petrovitch, then?”

“No other. The dirty dog!”

“The plot thickens!” exclaimed Judy. “What happened then?”

“Connie saw him, and nearly swooned for joy. And then if you please, the great brute saw her and beckoned. Beckoned, do you hear? And she’d have gone to him if I’d let her.”

“How beastly!”

“I talked to her gently but firmly, but she was up in the air. We got through lunch somehow, and then I tried to persuade her to get out before he could speak to her. But she wouldn’t budge. He didn’t move either until he’d almost finished feeding. Then he came to our table. I wish you could have seen Connie registering soulfulness. I can tell you, a close-up of both of them would have been pleasing to a screen audience. After twenty years the villain sees the heroine again. Tableau!”

“Yes. Well, go on.”

“We exchanged a pleasantry or two, and then he commanded Connie to dine with him to-night. Connie of course was writhing on the mat for pure joy, and barking short, happy barks. She licked his hand and meekly indicated that his lightest wish was her law. Then we went. I wasn’t feeling full of love for human nature by that time, I can tell you. I didn’t know what to do, so I rang up Claire and she advised me to issue an ultimatum. Which I did. I said that if she spoke to Petrovitch again, all was over between us. Sob stuff from Connie. I really was sorry for her. In the end I told her to sleep on it, and to ring me up in the morning. Then I left her. Do you think I did right?”

Judy considered.

“It would half kill her not to see you again. She adores you, you know. But I think Claire was right. If that won’t pull her up, nothing will. What do you think she’ll do?”

“Oh, she’ll dine with Petrovitch, all right,” prophesied Noel gloomily. “Hang it all! I thought she’d learned something. I didn’t expect her to change her nature all at once, but I did think she’d begun to see the silliness of that sort of behavior.”

“The way of the reformer is hard,” said his sister.

“Oh, I’m not trying to reform her. I only wanted to show her that she’d get more out of life if she tried another tack. And I believe she was beginning to see it, too. If only that—swine hadn’t come along!——”

“Well, stick to your guns,” advised Judy. “I have a feeling that she’ll come round. But, Noel, if she doesn’t come round?——”

“Exactly. If she doesn’t, ought I to keep my threat? After all, perhaps I’ve no right … I suppose it’s difficult … if I thought it would cure her to see him a few times, I’d let her. But he’s her hero for life, spots and all.”

“Spots?” Judy paused with upraised arms.

“Any number of ’em. On his clothes. A dirty feeder. As for his hair!…”

“Isn’t it queer, Noel? That sort of thing? I can’t understand it, can you?”

“I don’t want to,” he said shortly. “I’ve thought of kidnapping Connie and shutting her up somewhere till he goes. He’ll only be here a week or so. I saw it in the paper last night.”

Judy laughed as she pinned her hair into place.

“Poor old Connie! She’s sure to do the wrong thing, I suppose. She always has. But there’s just a chance. She’s so fond of you.”

“I’m rather fond of her. She’s a good sort, really, under all this Camille business. She doesn’t understand you though.”

“I can bear that,” replied his sister.

“It’s a funny thing,” remarked Noel, remembering her comments on the subject of Judy and Chip, “but I believe that if Connie hadn’t been … what she is … she’d have been a terribly conventional woman. I think she’s a sort of Millie-gone-wrong.”

This amused Judy greatly.

“If only mother could hear you say that!” she said.

“What’s on to-night?” he asked. “Anything doing here?”

“Have you forgotten? Major Crosby’s coming to dinner, and we promised to give him a dancing lesson.”

“Chip! So he is! This bother about Connie put it out of my head for the moment. What shall I do if she asks me to take her out to dinner? As she may do, if she decides not to see Petrovitch.”

“Then I suppose you must take her.”

“We might dine early and come here after,” he suggested. “Would mother object, do you think?”

“You’d better ask her,” she said. “Mother has only seen her once since she came back, and then she went to her hotel heavily veiled.”

Noel nodded appreciatively.

“Well, I’ll ask her. There’s no harm in Connie, poor old thing. Will Gordon be home?”

“Yes. Helen’s dining here too. I didn’t want her a bit to-night. She’s so—patronizing. Not to me, but to strangers. And Chip will be shyer than ever.”

“Well, remember,” Noel cautioned her, “Chip’s my friend. We met at the Club. It was only a few yards away, so that isn’t much of a fib. That’s what I’ve given out.”

“Very well,” said Judy. “I’m rather dreading to-night, really. I’d like to have kept Chip to ourselves, if we could. But I suppose it wouldn’t have done.”

The gong boomed loudly, and Judy flew to get a dress out of her wardrobe.

When they met at breakfast a few minutes later, they said good morning as though they hadn’t seen each other before. In the midst of their family, the brother and sister had from childhood maintained a sort of Secret Society. Their two minds, critical and inquiring from the first, had early found themselves in tune with each other and out of tune with the rest. When Judy looked back on her childhood and girlhood, it always seemed to her to be streaked with light and dark spots. The light spots were Noel’s vacations, and the times when they were together, and the dark spots were the long school terms, and—darkest spot of all—his absence at the war. But even as a child the joy of having him with her was always faintly shadowed by the fear of some day not having him. For years she had said to herself:

“If I could only love some one else as much as I do Noel, then fate would have a choice of two marks.”

And if the other members of the family objected to the brother and sister’s marked preference for each other’s society, they kept it to themselves remarkably well.

The Pendletons always had family prayers. Mrs. Pendleton insisted on them less from conviction than for the reason that all the other Pendletons had them, and she believed they had a good effect on the servants. So the entire household assembled in the dining room at a quarter to nine, and if any one was late, he or she was waited for. This morning Gordon was late, but when he was the offender, nothing was said.

Mr. Pendleton officiated. He was a little man, with what the Pendletons chose to call a handsome nose. Most people thought it merely large. His face barely escaped being intellectual, but something narrow about the forehead and peevish about the mouth, spoiled the effect. Noel looked the most like him, but Noel’s forehead and mouth had what his father’s lacked. Fortunately he took after his mother in the matter of height, for Millie was a good five inches taller than her husband. In her large, charmless way she was handsome, and had regular and uninteresting features. It was difficult to see in Judy the least trace of likeness to either of her parents, while Gordon, on the contrary, was the image of his mother, and she idolized him. She was prepared, too, to find in Helen, when she became his wife, all that she found lacking in Judy.

Prayers over, breakfast immediately followed. It was usually a quiet meal, enlivened only by excursions after food, and the rustle of newspapers. But this morning there was an uncommon amount of talk. It went as follows:

Mr. Pendleton: “Gordon, I hope you haven’t forgotten you are lunching with Sir William to-day at his club.”

Gordon: “No, father. I hadn’t forgotten. Won’t you be there too?”

Mr. Pendleton: “Unfortunately, it is not possible. I have a very trying day ahead of me.” (Mr. Pendleton was a barrister, but his large income made work less a necessity than a hobby.)

Millie: “I shall be glad when the summer comes, John, and you can take a holiday. By the way, I wish you’d all make up your minds where you want to go this year.”

Noel: “Must we decide six months ahead?”

Millie: “We always have done so. I like to know in good time what I’m going to do. We could go abroad, I suppose, but your father thinks we ought to go to Scotland as usual.”

Judy: “Why can’t we all go where we like? Must we have a holiday en masse?”

Mr. Pendleton: “You can hardly speak of a small party of five as going ‘en masse.’”

Gordon: “I won’t be one of the party, so it’s only four. You know, Mother, Helen and I will be at Ottway Castle for July and August.”

Millie: “Of course, dear. I know you are provided for. It’s Judy and Noel I was thinking of.”

Judy: “But why don’t you and father go to Scotland, and let Noel and me go somewhere else—Devon or Cornwall for a change. It’s so dull doing the same thing every year.”

Mr. Pendleton: “I think we will all go together as usual.”

(Silence.)

Judy: “Then why ask us to make up our minds where we want to go?”

Mr. Pendleton: “Your mother asked. Personally, I am convinced that Scotland is the most bracing.”

Judy: “I really don’t feel I want to be braced. Do you, Noel?”

Noel: “I loathe bracing places.”

Mr. Pendleton: “Then let us all go to Cornwall.”

Millie: “I find Cornwall so relaxing.”

Judy: “I think I’d like just to stay in Sussex with Claire.”

Mr. Pendleton: “You know, Judy, I dislike very much hearing you speak of your grandmother as Claire.”

Judy: “Sorry, father. I forgot.”

(Silence.)

Noel: “By the way, mother, I’ve got rather a good idea. I may be taking Con—Aunt Connie out to dinner to-night. Suppose I bring her here afterwards? It would cheer her up a lot. I know she likes seeing people dance. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

Gordon: “Noel, you really are a bit of an ass sometimes! You know Helen’s coming here to-night. How could I possibly ask her to meet Aunt Connie?”

Noel: “Why not?”

Gordon: “If you don’t know why not, you ought to.”

Noel: “Chuck it, Gordon! Don’t be such a prig. What about Helen’s friend, Oriana Temple? If Connie can teach her anything!——”

Gordon: “Please leave Helen and her friends out of the discussion.”

Noel: “Right. But you brought her in. Anyhow, I asked mother. Mother, you don’t mind if Connie comes here to-night, do you? After all, she’s your sister, and it would be doing her a kindness.”

Millie: “Gordon is quite right, Noel. There is no reason why we should inflict our family skeleton on Helen. If Connie is an unhappy woman, it’s entirely her own fault. She has forfeited the right to be with decent people. Don’t you agree with me, John?”

Mr. Pendleton (unexpectedly): “I think, my dear, that if we can help Connie, we ought to do so. I feel she has a claim upon us, and as Christian people we have no right to ignore it. It isn’t as though the children were growing up; and after all, Gordon, Helen is marrying into our family.”

Noel: “Good for you, dad!”

Gordon: “Let her come by all means. Helen and I will dine here another night.”

Millie: “It’s very tiresome of you, Noel, to upset everything like this. And while we’re on the subject of Aunt Connie, I want to say that I don’t mind your being polite to her, but I do not like your going about with her so much. If you had to ask her here, some other night would have done as well. I’m certain your friend Major Crosby won’t want to meet her.”

Noel: “He won’t mind. Besides, he doesn’t know anything about her. And I had a particular reason for wanting to bring her to-night.”

Gordon: “That’s settled, then. Helen and I will dine here to-morrow night, mother.”

Judy and Noel were amazed at the stand their father had taken.

“I never thought dad had it in him,” Noel said later.

“Influence of morning prayers,” answered Judy. “Father’s always nicest just after prayers.”

At ten o’clock the maid sought out Noel with the message that Countess Chiozzi was on the telephone and would like to speak to him.

“I lose, I’ll bet,” said Noel to Judy as he left the room.

“Hello, Connie!” he began cheerfully. “How’s my aunt this morning? Feeling better? Good! I was rather a beast yesterday, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, you were,” a rather dejected voice replied. “I hardly slept a wink all night. Noel, it’s … it’s breaking my heart, but I know I can’t give you up. There’s no use.… I can’t.”

Madame Claire

Madame Claire

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