Chapter XVI: Part III: I (3)

Near the jetty of the yacht club the engine ceased to flutter, and the sailor, putting out his boat-hook, drew the launch to shore. The man in blue jumped out and, extending a long arm, helped the girl to land.

"Moor her where you can to-night, Mr. Weeks," he said to the head and shoulders. "I'll see the commodore to-morrow and find out why we're not given our usual berth."

"Ay, ay, sir."

"And, Weeks, have the launch sent back at three sharp, with the baggage on board. Becket needn't come. I'm going to Beverbrook immediately after lunch, and shall sleep there. Good-day, Weeks."

"Good day, Sir Bryan."

Meantime, the girl, unfurling her parasol and balancing it daintily on her shoulder, walked toward the land, looking about her with a bright interest at the blue bay, the white sails of the yachts, and the smartly dressed crowd loitering outside the yacht club enclosure. She wore a white linen princesse robe, its costly simplicity adorned only by a wide band of embroidery that ran from throat to hem, and a big gray straw hat trimmed with a wreath of what roses would look like if nature had had the good taste to make them the color of pansies--the roses that bloom in the Rue de la Paix.

Slowly as she walked, she had reached the hedge of the enclosure before her companion overtook her. Inside the lawn was not crowded. The big regatta had taken place the day before, and it was lunch hour. Such groups as were strolling up and down or sitting in little encampments of canopied arm-chairs stopped flirting or talking to stare and whisper. On some of the women's faces appeared the dubious admiration that is kept for social audacity in their sex. The girl seemed unconscious of the effect she was creating and looked about her indifferently. Espying some friends in a far corner, she signalled vigorously with her open parasol.

"Bryan, there's Lady Carphilly and Mrs. Rolf d'Oyley. I must go and talk to them. Will you come too, or wait?"

"I'll wait," the man answered shortly. "I've sent in for my letters and I'll open them here. We ought to have lunch soon. Don't be long, Flash."

A club waiter who had been standing in the offing with a pile of letters on a salver and an initialled leather dispatch case, approached and disposed them on a table near the chair into which the baronet had flung himself. Lumsden bestowed a casual glance upon the pile and looked toward the man's free hand.

"What have you got there?"

"A telegram for Miss Barbour, Sir Bryan."

"Give it to me."

The man handed it over without demur. Bryan ripped it open and read the message through. He looked thoughtful.

"How long has this been here?"

"Two days, Sir Bryan."

"Didn't they try to get it through by wireless?"

"I can't say, Sir Bryan. I'll ask if you wish."

"No: it doesn't matter. Bring me a 'John Henry'."

He slipped the opened telegram into his coat pocket and, lighting a cigar, proceeded to read his mail through, systematically, but with a pre-occupied brow.

The past twelve months had dealt hardly with Bryan. There is probably in the life of most of us some day, or preferably some night, when fate chooses to pay us the arrears of years, in which the hours as they pass over our heads grizzle them, and our tears, if tears we can shed, are a corrosive acid that bite their record upon our cheeks for all time. No one honestly mistook Lumsden for a young man after his little son's death.

It may have been something in one of the letters he had just read--may be, who knows, something even in the telegram, that made him, after he had swept his correspondence, with various pencil scribblings on the margins, into the dispatch case, recall that night with rather more deliberation than he usually permitted himself, and stare gloomily at the group into which, with much embracing and chatter, pitched in a key of congratulatory envy, Fenella had been drawn.

How she had changed! How she had changed since then! To-day, as for many a day past, it was in nothing more precise than this loose mental phrase that his ill-defined dissatisfaction could find vent. Beyond it he seemed unable to go, and was even forced to admit a certain flimsiness in a charge out of which no better indictment could be framed. Because, whatever strain upon his finer perceptions had made the year of probation the torture it had undoubtedly been, he could not deny that she had remained true as steel to the bargain made with him in the house of death--a bargain so vague that scarcely any pretext would have been too tawdry to discharge her from it had she wished. She had sacrificed her good repute to him forthwith; had even seemed eager for circumstances that, as far as the world was concerned, should put the sacrifice past doubt, and if, of late, it had been coming back to her, as most women's is conveyed from them, in whispers, the rehabilitation was not of her own devising, but rather part of the observed tendency of murder and other violations of established usage to "out." Strangely enough, her fame fared better at women's hands than at men's, and worse among those who were convinced of her technical integrity (the phrase was even invented for her) than with those who inclined to give the ominous face of appearances its full value. I don't know why this should have been so. Perhaps vice has its own hypocrisies and canting code of law, and her resistance to the spirit after the letter had been so admirably fulfilled was held an outrage. At least she gave him no anxiety, although he knew that temptation had reached her, once from a quarter so exalted that it is not usually taken into account--even suspected one wooing as honorable as perfunctory, and although all his money and all his good will could not make him as young as the hot blood that besieged her. Her house was always open to him, at hours which his own forbearance was trusted to keep within the limits set by decorum; she kept whisky and cigars for him in her sideboard, with even the little sprig of vanilla in the cigar cabinet that she must have seen and taken note of in his own rooms. She never denied him her company nor discovered affinities among his friends; she even seemed to have a tender conscience in this regard, and looked round anxiously for him whenever the ripple of her little triumphs carried her temporarily out of hail. Whence then his secret dissatisfaction? Oh, this termless war of attainment with desire, old in human story as the history of David's unruly sons! Was Bryan the first to set a snare and grudge the fair plumage he had coveted for the marks of his own springe upon it?

She was a great success, socially. She entered the smart world, it is true, under his auspices, and because he was sulky if she was not asked to the same houses, and because it was important to a good many people that Bryan Lumsden, to say nothing of Calvert & Co., should be kept in good humor. But, once in, her own talents were quite competent to keep her in the place he had made for her. She had even reached a point now where her successes were her own, and no longer were held to throw reflected lustre upon her sponsor. She fitted quickly and easily into what, after all, was her own class. In a year she rode hard and straight and had developed a heady but hitherto successful system of tactics at bridge. Bryan no longer got the credit of her clothes, but it was generally understood she was frightfully in debt and would marry him when her creditors delivered their ultimatum. She had an infantile wit and a faculty for what the French term _choses inouïes_. One of her riddles became proverbial.

"What did the fishes say to Noah when he asked them into the ark?" "No tanks."

I subjoin a few more specimens, not with any hope that their charm will subsist in print, but just to show with what things, on pretty lips, the weary old world is prepared to be amused.

Once she was trying to collect money for some charity and no one had change. This happens sometimes even in smart society. "Oh, dear," sighed Fenella, "everybody has the hand-to-mouth disease."

She was slightly angered at a restraining clause in one of her contracts, discovered when too late.

"You're a bad man," she told the flustered manager, "and you deserve to come to a nasty sticky end."

To Rock, of ill odor in the Park, after his senile advances had been rebuffed by a snobby little Pekinese: "Don't whine, _dee-ar_! I don't believe that kind of dog knows whether it's a dog or a poll-parrot or an insect."

"Bryan's caught cold, I think," she said one morning. "He keeps calling for 'Letitia'."

If these are fair samples of the parts she put at the disposal of her new friends, her reputation is not the surprise it might be to a man who knows that the dear lady to this day conducts her conversation upon an economical little vocabulary of about three hundred words.

Maybe the conscience we have spoken of had been pricking her, for when Lumsden raised his head from his reverie the world had gone red, and he was looking at the sun through her parasol.

"You look glum, old man," said Fenella. "What's the matter? Do you want your lunch?"

Lumsden got up and stretched. He had been pulling at his moustache, and one hair--a white one--was on the shoulder of his blue reefer. She picked it off, held it up to the light, looked unfathomably at him and blew it daintily into the air.

"Perhaps we'd best have lunch now," she said. "I want to get to Beverbrook soon and see what arrangements they've made. Do you remember Edmaston, Bryan, where they put that dreadful polish down--Takko or Stikko or something--and when my foot stuck I buzzed and every one laughed?"

"Don't you feel nervous, Flash?"

"Just a teeny. When do _They_ come?"

"Oh, to dinner; but you won't be introduced till you've danced. And remember, Flash, you must only speak when you're spoken to by Them. Just answer questions."

"I'll try not to disgrace you," she said airily, and led the way to the pavilion.

IX

BEATEN AT THE POST

She was very gay and flippant during lunch, and while crossing the bay, and in the motor on the way to the great ducal house, where she was going, if not to sing for her supper, at least to dance for her dinner. She was very serious and a little dictatorial on the stage, but immediately after tea took the owner of the Chaste Goddess and so much else by the arm, and proceeded to drag him on a prolonged tour of inspection, through the stables, round the noble Italian gardens--at whose lichened fawns and satyrs she made faces, expressive of the utmost scorn and defiance, but which only succeeded in being charming, and the English garden--where the leaden shepherdesses were pronounced "ducks"; into the aviary to drive four macaws to frenzy with a long straw, and back by orchid houses and hothouses to the terrace again. She picked a good many flowers and ate a quantity of fruit.

It was while she was picking grapes in the vine house that Lumsden took heart and disburthened himself of a little of his recent chagrin.

"Flash! I'm going to scold you!"

"Oh, Bryan! what for? For culling all these grapes? I like 'cull,' it sounds less greedy than 'pick.' I cull, thou culleth--no, _cullest_--she culls."

"Flash! out of all the world what made you pick on those two Jezebels to speak to on the lawn?"

"What's the matter with them besides 'jezziness'?"

"You know well enough. They're not nice women."

"Really nice women don't have much to say to me? Have you noticed it, skipper?"

"They would if----Oh! stop eating all those grapes. You'll make yourself sick."

"If what, please?"

"If you'd only do the straight thing?"

"What do you mean? Go into a refuge?"

"A _refuge_! What abominable twaddle you can talk when you like."

She laid a sticky finger over his mouth. "Tut-tut-tut! Come outside if you're going to scold. It's too fuzzy in here. You'll get a rush of brains to the head."

Outside, the garden was deserted. The centre of interest seemed to have shifted to the upper terrace. A large horny beetle was pursuing his homeward or outward way over the pounded shell of the walk. Fenella assisted him with the point of her parasol, and did not relax her good offices until he was in dazed safety upon the border. Then she looked up.

"Flash! why don't you marry me and have done with it?"

She punched six holes in the path before replying.

"What do you want to 'have done with?' Why can't we go on as we are a little longer?"

"Because it's--unnatural. There are other reasons, but that's enough."

"It isn't, if you don't let it worry you--Oh! what am I saying? Bryan, do you think we'd care as much for one another if--if I did as you say."

"Of course we should--more every day."

"Why didn't you keep getting fonder and fonder of those others, then?"

"I think that question most unseemly. You don't seem to realize I'm asking you to be my wife."

"M-m! It is hard to."

"Oh, don't be clever. Every one's clever. What are you waiting for?"

No answer.

"Shall I tell you?"

"If you think you know, dear."

"You're waiting until there's not one little bit left of the girl I fell in love with, the girl who tried to hide her bare arms under Perse's ruffle in the hall at Lulford, and who cried by the cot where my poor little urchin was dying. You've never forgiven me that cursed night in Mount Street."

"Dear! I've never mentioned it from that day to this."

"Well, it's behind everything you say. It's behind your eyes when they look at me. Can't you understand I wasn't myself."

"You were a little--eh? Weren't you, dear? Not much; just a gentlemanly glow."

"And it's your way of taking revenge for it. And a d----d cruel woman's way it is."

She laid her hand on his arm. "Bryan, don't worry me now. I've got a lot to go through to-night. It's harder than anybody thinks. There's some sense in what you say. But we can talk about it some other time.... Oh! look up there! What's happening?"

A big browny-red closed motor-car rolled along the upper terrace and stopped at the great doorway. In a moment servants--visitors seemed to run together, to range themselves in two lines, one on each side of the wide curved steps. Framed in the dark gothic arch, the Lord of Beverbrook appeared, noble, white of hair and moustache, with a serene and lofty humility in his bent head that was strangely impressive. The rest is Apotheosis. Before it we veil our dazzled eyes.

* * * * *

He had not gone to bed at two o'clock the next morning. He sat, completely dressed, smoking and looking out his bedroom window over the silvering terraces and park. The great gay house was abed: the night very still. Only to his left, above the low quadrangle of some stables or outhouses, could be seen a dim shaft of light. A murmur of voices, the sound of water running and splashing about a hose-pipe, seemed to come from that direction.

His thoughts were busy, but not directly with the girl whose interests and his own were by now tacitly associated. The night had been a new triumph for her--in a way the crown upon all the rest--but such triumphs by now were discounted in advance, felt almost to be in the order of nature. No. It was the telegram he was thinking of, the telegram that he had intercepted on the lawn at Cowes. He had not so much forgotten it till now as mentally pigeon-holed it for future consideration. This habit, acquired in business, he unconsciously followed in all the concerns of life.

Who was making himself this beggar's advocate in London. Who was "Prentice." Curse him! whoever he was. Few though the words had been, they contained a hint of some previous understanding or rendezvous. Who were the conspirators that wanted to drag a girl away from the light and laughter that was her due, (influences so desirable from every point of view) into the chill shadow of a hospital death-bed. He had long ceased to be jealous of Ingram, as of a man whom the world that was his friend had taken in hand and beaten handsomely, but there is no hatred so merciless and lawless as that with which contempt is mingled. The suppression of the telegram never struck him as dishonor, although he was not a cruel or a treacherous man. He counted it a fair counter-stroke to what he esteemed a blow in the dark, a stab from behind. Letter by letter and word for word the hateful thing was printed on his brain, but who does not know the instinct of return to a message in which substance and significance are so inversely proportioned? To have read nine times is no reason for not reading a tenth. The screed has not changed, but the mood may have; and, with the new mood, who knows what fresh meaning may not leap at us.

He got up, opened the wardrobe, and felt in the pockets of his blue coat. It was not in either of them. He considered awhile. Had he packed it, with the letters, into his dispatch case? If so, it had gone aboard to his secretary, which didn't matter much. But--no. He distinctly remembered feeling it in his pocket during the crossing to the mainland. Plainly gone, then. But where?

He took the coat off the rack and looked at it as though he would read its history since dinner. His own man was not with him, but he had stopped at Beverbrook before and knew the valeting was a little overdone. R---- was so natty himself. He had flung it on the bed when he dressed. Whoever did the room had taken it to be brushed or pressed, and the telegram had fallen out of the pocket. How could he be sure? Oh! he knew. There had been a tiny smear of white paint under the left cuff. If the coat had been taken away----He took it to the light. The white smudge was gone.

He was not pleased at the accident, but decided to dismiss the matter for the night. The faculty to do so, and to fall asleep on some pleasant thought, was part of his life's sound régime. He began to think of her again. How prettily she had carried off her success. He recalled the little bob-curtsey in the Presence, so in character after the hoydenish dance--the gleam of sub-audacity that accompanied it, which every charming woman knows she can permit herself in company, however august, where her charm is likely to be felt. But who would have done it so gracefully? He had stood aloof (it seemed more decent to), but he remembered how long she had been kept in the circle, and how every one had laughed from time to time. Her competence, her amazing competence--that was what he was never done marvelling at. Nothing seemed to scare her, nothing to dazzle her. What a genius there can be in school nicknames! And then, that chin and jaw of turned ivory, and the hair, dark and fragrant as a West India night, and the diamond twinkling in the little fleshy ear.

Suddenly he stood quite still, with his hair-brushes in his hand, listening intently. Some one was scratching stealthily on the upper panel of his bedroom door. Remember the hour--the stillness--the man's old experience, and of what his imagination was full. His heart seemed to miss two or three beats, and to resume its function thickly and heavily in his throat. The last traces of anger and dissatisfaction died away. Women had called Bryan Lumsden's face beautiful before. They might have called it so now again.

He walked to the door and opened it softly. It was she; but dressed, with her hat and veil, and with the telegram in her hand.

"Bryan!--Bryan!" she said under her breath, and then stopped. Her agitation was so great that she could not go on. He drew her gently into his room and closed the door.

"You must be careful, Flash," he said gravely. "This isn't an ordinary visit like Lulford, you know. It won't do to have any scandal here."

"Bryan, can I speak to you a minute?"

"Go on."

"You know what you asked me this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"I will, I will, I _will_; any time you like."

He looked at the telegram and his face hardened.

"If----?"

"Yes. If you get me to London to-night."

"Flash! it's absurd. Think of the hour! Can't you wait till morning?"

"No. I shall go mad."

"But even if the station is open, it will take hours to get a special."

"You have your car."

"Yes; but every one's in bed, and the garage probably locked up. Be reasonable."

"Oh, no they're not," she said eagerly. "I can hear them from my window. They have lamps and they're washing the cars with a hose."

"What has happened?"

She handed him the telegram quite simply. "I found this on my table. It's been opened. I don't understand----"

He read it through again and folded it quite small and evenly.

"Where's your room? You can't wait here."

"At the other end of the corridor--Oh, Bryan! God bless you!"

"_S-sh!_ How will I know it? It won't do to make a mistake."

"Can't I hang a stocking over the knob?"

He looked at her askance a moment, then put on his jacket and walked away into the darkness. After what must have seemed more, and was probably less, than half an hour, he tapped softly at her door. He was wearing the big coat she knew so well. He had wrapped her in it more than once.

"I've arranged it," he said, in a low voice, strangely gentle. "Follow me, and walk quietly."

X

A YEAR AND A DAY

We got Paul out of that dreadful lodging and into a private ward at St. Faith's. I'll never forget the way Smeaton helped. We had the very best advice, but all the doctors shook their heads over him. Some old adhesion of the lung, they said, that, under normal conditions, he might have lived till eighty and never suspected, but which privation, or a chill, or a blow, or perhaps all three, had fretted to malignity. There'd have to be an operation. It wasn't what is called a desperate one, was well within the competence of modern surgery in an ordinary case, but everything was against poor Ingram. Webber, who was watching the general condition, took no responsibility for the operation, and Tuckey, who was to do the cutting, took no responsibility for the result. As a division of responsibility, it was the neatest piece of work, I think, I have ever seen.

"It's not really strength he lacks," said Webber, after his last visit before the critical morning. "It's the _vivida vis_, the desire of life, that isn't there. Two grains of hope would be worth all the oxygen and beef-juice and brandy we could pump into him in a month."

I didn't confide to Webber that I'd already told Paul sixty thousand pounds was waiting till he was well enough to claim it, without seeing one shade of pleasurable emotion come into the tired, drooping eyes. As for Fenella, her name was never mentioned between us. I don't think he had any idea how much he had told me in that dark room at Chalk Farm, and I did not remind him. I had reason, soon enough, to bless my forbearance, for day followed day, and no answer to my telegram reached me. At Park Row I had found a sullen reluctance to give any information at all. She was travelling--she was on the sea--had left no instructions for forwarding. But a journalist is not to be thrown off the scent by a sulky and probably venal little slavey. Two telephone calls put me into possession of Lumsden's probable movements, and I knew I had not gone very far astray in sending the telegram to his care at Cowes. I never doubted for an instant that it had reached her hands. No; she had sought advice where advice, perhaps, was already backed by natural authority, and had decided that, under the circumstances----You see what I mean? It is true she might have written or wired asking for news. But trying to repair life's errors is a thankless task. Through the breach we are patching up the whole salt, dark ocean of destiny comes pouring and thundering about our stunned ears.

I slept little on the night before Paul's operation, and was up and moving restlessly about my rooms before the sun had risen. Who is it says, "Help cometh with the morning?" The Bible, probably. Anyway, I know I was heartened by seeing the rosy glow on the curtained windows opposite. It is a strange thing that I, who was to have no share in the day's great business, was probably up the first. Paul, I hope, was asleep, and I am sure Tuckey and Webber were. How far easier is work than waiting! The one has its seasons--a life may be wasted in the other.

I was looking out my sitting-room window, thinking this and many a deep solemn thought besides, when a big car, covered so thickly with mud and dust that its color could not be distinguished, and with the unmistakable appearance of having been driven far and furiously, swung--one might almost say dropped--into the crescent. I knew it was she. Oh, how I loathed myself for my doubt! I had the door open before she could put her foot on the steps.

She flashed into my face one mute, awful question in which I could tell the anguish of hours was concentrated, and I gave her the mute reply which says, "Not yet."

"Oh, thank God! thank God!" she said, and clasped her hands across her breast. The man in the car, stooped above the steering-wheel, did not move once nor look round.

"Can I see him now? Will he know me?"

"You won't be let see him till nine. The operation is at eleven, and there's hope. He was conscious last night but very weak. I can tell you no more."

If I sound harsh or cold, lay it to the charge of the man at the wheel.

I went on. "Shall I arrange for you to see him at nine?"

"Is it far?"

"Just across the river."

"I'll call back at quarter to nine, and you must take me."

She climbed into the car without looking at me again, and next moment was gone. Across the road I counted six blinds drawn to one side.

Lumsden never asked whether the man he had brought her a hundred and thirty miles to see was dead or alive. His face was set like a stone. In the main road he turned it to her, a mere dusty mask.

"Where do you want to go now?"

"Go to my house. I'll get you a drink and some breakfast. You must be half dead."

He headed the car for Knightsbridge without a word, and while Frances, sleep struggling with surprise in her bemused brain, was fulfilling her humble rôle in the romance by poaching two eggs over the electric stove, they sat in the dining-room on opposite sides of the table. She had filled a long, thin glass with the beverage his heart loved, but he only sipped it, which was not like Bryan, and turned the tumbler thoughtfully round and round. He avoided her eyes. He had seemed to avoid them all the way up.

"Will you come with me to--to the hospital?" she asked, when the silence had begun to weigh upon her.

"No. I don't want to see him."

"Bryan, since we're to be married, I think I'd best tell you what I wouldn't tell that night at Mount Street. Do you remember?"

"Yes. Well?"

"Dear, there's no reason, when you see him, you should feel anything but just a great, deep pity for all his unhappiness. I don't know why I didn't tell you this before. I think it was your doubting him drove me mad. And you're quite right in saying I've changed myself on purpose. It was because, after I learned the world a bit, I saw what a fraud I really was. All those little girl's ways you liked so much--they're very pretty, I dare say, but they're shams for me, anywhere off the stage. I had no right to them. I'm only what the world calls a 'good girl'--I'm only a girl at all, because he was merciful and--spared me. He must have been a very good man."

"Or a very cold one? Which?"

"Well. I'm not going to try to answer that, Bryan. It's what you call yourself an 'unseemly question'."

"You're a strange creature."

"Oh no, I'm not, Bryan. Not a bit different really to heaps and heaps of other women. I used to think I was once, at Sharland, because I didn't seem to have the other girls' ways or their curiosity. But I know better now. Do you remember Lord--the old lawyer beast that we went to the White City with? He took me on the launches, and when we were alone, he leaned over and told me--oh, something I can't even tell you, Bryan--now. He said it in French first and then, in case I didn't know what it was in French, he translated it into English. Those are the things that make us _loathe_ you, Bryan--deep, deep, deep, down in the little bit of us you never reach. But I only giggled, as any other girl would have done, any other girl who felt the same as me. And now he'll always remember me as--the woman who laughed."

"You're all a mystery."

"Not half as much as is pretended, Bryan. The mystery comes about because we don't tell the truth. Married women don't tell it, even, to one another, and it's thought shocking to tell a girl things that the first man she meets will tell her if she lets him. I hear more than most, 'cos I'm not one thing nor the other, and every one thinks I'll tell them things back, and then they'll find out what's puzzling them about us two. And we never tell you. How dare we? We find a set of rules ready made for us--by you. You take the men we really want from us because you're stronger than they are, or richer, or even braver than they are, and since it's the way you settle things among yourselves, and since you're satisfied with what you get by it, we pretend we're satisfied too. But it's one thing to conquer them, Bryan, and it's another thing to conquer us. I'll tell you a little woman's secret: No nice girl ever gives herself up quite to a man unless there's a little of _her mother_ in him. There was an awful lot in Paul. I found it out."

"A bit of an old woman, in fact?"

"Oh! I see I can't teach you. It doesn't matter. So you see, dear," in a different voice and raising her head, "there's not much left for you. But what there is I'd rather you had than any one else. I _like_ you, Bryan--I like you _so_."

"And you think I ought to be satisfied with that?"

"Well, you know what you said a year ago."

"Yes--a year ago, but not now. Yesterday perhaps, but not this morning. It's the old Scots law limit--a year and a day. Often the wisdom that doesn't come in the year comes in a night. You're too deadly wise, Flash; too utterly disillusioned. I never could stand it. There'd be nothing to teach you; nothing to break down. You believe you've taken my measure, and every time I tried to lift our lives out of the mud, I'd feel you were laughing at me--down in that little bit you've just told me of. It may be as you say, all a make-believe, but, by G--d! it doesn't do to have both know it. What do you want most, really? Your liberty?"

She did not answer or raise her head.

"Well, you can have it." He got up and took his cap off the table. "Good-bye."

She didn't speak until he had his hand on the handle of the door. And then--

"Bryan, I've never let you kiss me. You can now if you like."

He spun round on his heel, as though some one had given him a blow between the shoulders. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her, or humble her pride to death. A foul name seemed to be actually forming itself on his lips. But he came across the room, and took her in his arms, and held her a long while.

"Take care, please," she said, breathlessly, "you're hurting me--a little."

Then he let her go.

"Oh, Flash!" he said hoarsely. "Doesn't that mean anything to you? Doesn't that tell you something?"

She was looking in the mirror at a little red mark where he had pressed the earring into her neck.

"Good-bye," he said again, and she heard the hall door slam. And then the throb of the motor began to rattle the windows in their frames.

She fell upon her knees and buried her face in her hands.

XI

TWO GRAINS OF HOPE

If that early morning call at half-past five had been my only meeting with Fenella, I don't think I should have known her when she came back at nine. All the weariness had gone out of her face. Under her light cloak she was freshly and beautifully dressed. Her eyes seemed to brim with a sort of wistful happiness. I hated the task; but knowing what she was about to see, I _had_ to try and prepare her. But I soon saw I was having my trouble for nothing. I think she hardly heard me. Her heart, it was plain, was full of that brave, sane hope that, even when it is brought to nothing, I think bears sorrow best. Webber had just paid his morning visit, but she did not wait for his report. I fancy from the look he gave me that he took in the situation at a glance. I smiled back at him a little nervously. He had prescribed two grains of hope, and I was conscious of bringing an overdose.

In the private ward my impulsive companion took no notice of doctors or nurses, but went straight over to the bed on whose snowy pillow the poor wasted face lay like a gray shadow. She gave a little moan at the first sight of it: that was all. His eyes were closed. She knelt down, and passing her arm ever so gently underneath his neck, threw back her cloak, and laid the shadowy face upon the warmth, and the fragrance, and the softness beneath.

"Paul," she said at his ear, low, but so distinctly that we all heard. "Don't you know me, dear? It's Nelly, come back to take care of you, and look after you and love you all the rest of your life. You're going to get well, aren't you, dear, for her sake? 'Cos you mustn't break her heart a second time, you know. And, dear, she doesn't want you to talk; but won't you just open your poor tired eyes once, a teeny second, to show you know whose arm is round you? Because she's been waiting, waiting--oh, such a weary time! just waiting, dear, till you sent for her."

There was silence for a few seconds, broken only by the unrestrained sobbing of the little day nurse at the foot of the bed.

Then Ingram opened his eyes.

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"I don't know whether he's going to die or get well," I said, some hours later. I was trying to swallow _chateaubriand_ and champagne and unmanly emotion all at the same time, which doesn't help lucidity. But I'd been supporting an anxious day on a tin and a half of cigarettes, and the champagne was old Smeaton's fault, so perhaps I shall be forgiven. "I don't know whether he's going to get well or die. I can't feel it matters much, to-night. You'd know what I meant if you'd seen his face. Oh! it was wonderful. I think I know now how a man looks when he wakes in heaven and knows he very nearly missed it. And the Barbour woman, crooning and cooing over him, and the nurses snivelling, and all those doctors trying to pull the poor devil back to life! Yes, you can laugh if you like, Smeaton. But I say it's a damned fine old world, and I'm glad to have a place where I can sit and watch it--even if it is only a second-floor front and back in Pimlico."

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THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]