Chapter IX

"What begins now?"
"Happiness
Such as the world contains not."

Faunce wrote to Lady Perivale on his arrival in town, and told her the result of his journey briefly, and without detail. She might make her mind easy. The woman who resembled her would be found. He was on her track, and success was only a question of time.

Grace read the letter to Susan Rodney, who was dining with her that evening. She had been in much better spirits of late, and Sue rejoiced in the change, but did not suspect the cause. She had gone to her own den at the back of her house when Grace left her, and had not seen the carriage standing by the park gate, nor had the interview in the park come to her knowledge. Her friend, who confided most things to her, was reticent here. She attributed Lady Perivale's cheerfulness to a blind faith in Faunce the detective.

The season was drawing towards its close. Lady Morningside's white ball had been a success, all the prettiest people looking their prettiest in white frocks, and the banks of gloxinias in the hall and staircase and supper-rooms being a thing to rave about. The London season was waning. The Homburg people and the Marienbad people were going or gone. The yachting people were rushing about buying stores, or smart clothes for Cowes. The shooting people were beginning to talk about their grouse moors.

"Sue, we must positively go somewhere," Grace said. "Even you must be able to take a holiday within an hour of London; and you may be sure I shan't go far while I have this business on hand. You will come with me, won't you, Sue? I am beginning to sicken of solitude."

"I shall love to come, if you are near enough for me to run up to town once or twice a week. I have three or four pig-headed pupils who won't go away when I want them; but most of my suburbans are packing their golf clubs for Sandwich, Cromer, or North Berwick."

"You will come! That's capital! I shall take a house on the river between Windsor and Goring."

"Make it as near London as you can."

"If you are good it shall be below Windsor, even if the river is not so pretty there as it is at Wargrave or Taplow. I want to be near London, for Mr. Faunce's convenience. I hope he will have news to bring me. I wrote to beg him to call to-morrow morning--I want to know what discoveries he made in Algiers."

* * * * *

People who have twenty thousand a year, more or less, seldom have to wait for things. Lady Perivale drove to a fashionable agent in Mount Street next morning, and stated her wishes; and the appearance of her victoria and servants, and the fact that she made no mention of price, indicated that she was a client worth having. The agent knew of a charming house on a lovely reach of the river near Runnymede--gardens perfection, stables admirable, boat-house spacious, and well provided with boats at the tenant's disposal. Unluckily, he had let it the day before; but he hoped that little difficulty might be got over. He would offer his client a villa further up the river. He would write to Lady Perivale next morning.

The little difficulty was got over. The client, actual or fictitious, was mollified, and Lady Perivale took the house for a month at two hundred guineas, on the strength of a water-colour sketch. She sent some of her servants to prepare for her coming, and she and Susan Rodney were installed there at the end of the week.

The house and gardens were almost as pretty as they looked in water-colour, though the river was not quite so blue, and the roses were not quite so much like summer cabbages as the artist had made them. There were a punt and a couple of good skiffs in the boat-house; and Lady Perivale and her friend, who could both row, spent half their days on the river, where Grace met some of those quondam friends whom she had passed so often in the park; met and passed them with unalterable disdain, though sometimes she thought she saw a little look of regret, an almost appealing expression in their faces, as if they were beginning to think they might have been too hasty in their conclusions about her.

One friend she met on the river whom she did not pretend to scorn. On the second Saturday afternoon a skiff flashed past her through the July sunshine, and her eyes were quick to recognize the rower. It was Arthur Haldane. She gave an involuntary cry of surprise, and he turned his light craft, and brought it beside the roomy boat in which she and Sue were sitting, with books and work, and the _marron_ poodle, as in a floating parlour.

"Are you staying near here, Lady Perivale?" he asked, when greetings had been exchanged.

"We are living close by, Miss Rodney and I, at Runnymede Grange. I hope you won't laugh at our rowing. Our idea of a boat is only a movable summer-house. We dawdle up and down for an hour or two, and then creep into a backwater, and talk, and work, and read, all the afternoon, and one of the servants comes to us at five o'clock, and makes tea on the bank with a gipsy kettle."

"You might ask him to one of our gipsy teas, Grace," suggested Susan.

"With pleasure. Will you come this afternoon? We shall be in the little creek--the first you come to after passing Runnymede Grange, which you will know by the Italian terrace and sundial."

"I shall come and help your footman to boil the kettle."

He looked radiant. He had seen Lady Perivale's happy look when his boat neared hers, and his heart danced for joy. All the restraint he had set upon himself was flung to the winds. If she loved him, what did anything matter? It was not the world's mistrust he dreaded, or the world's contempt. His only fear had been that she should doubt him, misread his motives, rank him with the fortune-hunters who had pursued her.

"Are you staying near here?" asked Susan.

"I come up the river for a day or two now and then. There is a cottage at Staines kept by a nice old spinster, whose rooms are the pink of cleanliness, and who can cook a mutton chop. I keep a quire or two of foolscap in her garden parlour, and go there sometimes to do my work. Her garden goes down to the water, and there is a roomy arbour of hops that I share with the caterpillars, a kind of berceau, from which I can see the river and the boats going by, through the leafy screen, while nobody can see me. It is the quietest place I know of near London. The rackety people seldom come below Maidenhead."

He spent the hours between tea-time and sunset with Grace and her friend, in a summer idleness, while the poodle, who found himself receiving less attention from his mistress than usual, roamed up and down, scratching holes in the bank, and pretending to hunt rats among the sedges, evidently oppressed with ennui. Of those three friends there were two who knew not the lapse of time, and were surprised to see the great golden disc sink below the rosy water where the river curved westward, and the sombre shadows steal over keep and battlements yonder where the Royal fortress barred the evening sky.

"How short the days are getting," Grace said naively.

They two had found so much to talk about after having lived a year without meeting. All the books they had read, all the plays they had seen, the music they had heard--everything made a subject for discussion; and then it was so sweet to be there, in the full confidence of friendship, spell-bound in a present happiness, and in vague dreams of the future, sure that nothing could ever again come between them and their trust in each other.

"The days are shortening by a cock's step or so," said Sue, looking up from an afternoon tea-cloth, which she was decorating with an elaborate design in silk and gold thread, and which she had been seen engaged upon for the last ten years.

It was known as "Sue's work." It went everywhere with her, and was criticized and admired everywhere, and everybody knew that it would never be finished.

"The days are shortening, no doubt," repeated Sue; "they must begin, or we should never get to the long winter evenings, but I haven't perceived any difference yet, and I don't think there's anything odd in the sun going down at eight o'clock."

"Eight o'clock! Nonsense, Sue!" cried Lady Perivale, flinging down a volume of "The Ring and the Book," which she had been nursing all the afternoon.

"And as we are supposed to dine at eight, I think we ought to go home and put on our tea-gowns," pursued Sue, sedately.

Can there be such happiness in life; bliss that annihilates thought and time? Grace blushed crimson, ashamed of having been so happy.

Mr. Haldane bade them good night at the bottom of the garden steps, where his outrigger was waiting for him. It would have been so easy to ask him to dinner, so easy to keep him till midnight, so easy to prolong the sweetness of golden hours. But Grace was discreet. They were not lovers, only friends. She wanted to spin to its finest thread this season of sweet uncertainty, these exquisite hours on the threshold of Paradise. And then Sue might think him a bore. Sue was not overfond of masculine society. She liked to put her feet on a chair after dinner, and she sometimes liked a cigarette.

"I never smoke before men," she told Grace. "They think we do it to please, or to shock them."