Chapter XIII

In the golden light of the morning, Mary bringing tea fired also a mine destined to scatter Vingie's peace to the four winds. The gray envelope addressed to her in painstaking soldierly writing contained so little and so much. His brief note thanked her for many pleasant hours, explained that an urgent summons to London prevented his calling in person. He remained hers very sincerely.

"My dear Mary," adjured her beautiful young mistress, "tell me frankly, am I getting old, are my looks fading, or have I become particularly stupid? I seem equally unpopular with men of all ages."

"I dare say it's the influenza, miss," comforted Mary. "Besides, this country life don't suit every one. I feel about a hundred myself. Are we going back to town now the major's left, miss?"

"Damn it, do you want me to run after him?" stormed Vingie. "I shall stay here at least another fortnight."

Nevertheless, in three days the letter of Eve Dufferin-Solmes made valor the better part of discretion.

"My dear old thing, why do you rot in Dorset during the height of the season? The world is most exciting and I haven't been to bed before three A.M. for a whole fortnight. Jack Plinlimmon is still very thrilled. He never goes near that girl at the Omnibus Theater now and he flew into a frightful passion the evening before last when I refused to let him kiss me. Don't you love it when they go all scarlet and trembly with rage?

"Sir Charles dined with us the other night. I think he misses you. He has an unloved look. P'r'aps it's because Mrs. Trevor-James neglects him. She is engaged in controlling a violent pursuit by Rupert Frack (I thought he was yours for the asking, darling?) and a soldier man, a Major Forrester. The atmosphere around her must be indeed volcanic. Piggy Vereker is making a book on the event--the major at evens and three to one against Rupert, with five to one against any marriage in less than two months.

"Do hurry back. You're missing ever such a lot!

"Yours,
"Eve."

"Mary," commanded Vingie, "you may pack, and tell Roberts to fill up the car with water and petrol. We return to town immediately after breakfast."

A happy smile curved the mouth of Mary. She was heard singing along the corridor.

That afternoon Vingie took tea in the small Park Street town house of Sir Charles, very appealing by reason of an entirely new frock. He beamed upon her with the instructed smile of a man who has lived, yet there lurked anxiety behind the smile.

"You do not need to be told how delighted I am to see you, my dear Virginia," he observed. "Physically a vast improvement is indicated; spiritually I detect a certain unrest. Youth has ever suffered from a serious lack of philosophy."

"My darling Charles, the very stars in their course fight against me; I am on the eve of a climax. If I die, I die going to meet it," she answered with the somber gloom of twenty-two.

Alone, she lighted a cigarette, and asked herself: "Do I really want Rupert? Isn't it just pique on account of this Trevor-James woman?" The answer came without hesitation: "If I want any one in the world, I do. I've known him since we were kids. There's no one else I'm so at home with. I believe if he'd only let himself go, he'd make a wonderful lover. That's up to me, of course. '_Toute femme doit être la maitresse de son mari_.'"

She went across to the telephone and rang up Rupert at the Foreign Office. "Rupert," she said with honey in her tone, "I'm back from the country and I want you to take me out to dinner. Will you come along at about seven?"

Indeterminate sounds of confusion quivered from the other end of the wire. "Awfully glad to hear you're back," replied a guilty voice. "I'd love to only I'm booked."

"Ah!" countered Vingie. "Any one I know?"

"I'm dining with Mrs. Trevor-James."

"Well, go along and nurse the unconquerable hope and clutch the inviolable shade," cooed Vingie, digging her finger-nails into her palms with fury.

"Any other night I'd love----"

"My dear Rupert, one can never love on any other night. It's always a case of now or never. I'm engaged for the next six weeks and after that I go to Scotland. Good-by!"

"'And that was her end, and the end of that hunting,'" she quoted miserably, staring at herself in a mirror. "My dear, you've asked for it and now you've got it. Charles told you to marry Rupert. Charles was right. Now you can't have him you want him. Silly fool, Vingie. Silly, silly fool!"

A solitary tear trickled down one cheek. She dabbed it away as Sir Charles entered.

"I'm dining out with the wildest man I know. It's like that," she declared.

"Get him to give you champagne. It puts heart into a woman like nothing else," advised Sir Charles.

When she had gone he picked up the receiver and asked for Mrs. Trevor-James' number.

"If you have an opportunity, strike!" he besought her. "The moment is propitious."

"Rupert dines here to-night. I will strike instantly," she replied.

"And, oh, Agatha," went on Sir Charles pathetically, "what is this I hear about you and Forrester? He was merely to do for Virginia what you have done for Rupert. Surely I have deserved better----"

"For you in your capacity of guardian I have performed much at great cost to myself, Charles," said an inexorable voice. "In no other sense can I do anything at all. If it were necessary I would ask you not to break your heart, but it isn't. Night-night!"

Sir Charles hung up the receiver and rehearsed the pose of supreme grief. Then a faint smile crept into his level eyes.

"It is nerve-racking, brain-searing, altogether damnable. I would have married her to-morrow," he reflected. "Still, there is no doubt I have escaped again. I enjoy the most consistent luck of any man I know."

In the morning Vingie, soothing in her sycamore-wood bed the soul-bruises of the hectic night before, received with some astonishment a telephone call from Rupert. She rose wearily, wound a silken wrap about the inadequacy of her nightgown and staggered rather than walked to the telephone.

"Well!" she asked coldly.

"I must see you," exclaimed a deathly voice.

"You haven't dragged me out of bed to tell me that, have you?" demanded the exasperated Vingie. "I explained I was engaged for six weeks----"

"That was for dinner," objected Rupert with equal irritation. "I'm going to see you this morning if I have to tear Uncle Charles' house down to find you. When will you be dressed?"

"Oh--well--make it half past eleven," said Vingie, suppressing a giggle. "G'by." She turned away deep in thought. "Never in his life has the lad spoken to me in such a tone. Generally he is my doormat, my foot-stool. Can that elderly widow have taught him anything?"

At eleven forty-five she came down languidly to find Rupert pacing the drawing-room. He glanced up at her with ominous eyes.

"Either one of two things must happen," he began. "Either you marry me instantly or we part and never see each other again. I've been humiliated enough. First you treat me like a dog, simply using me as a convenience to fetch and carry for you, laugh at me when I speak of love and then drive me to that other woman----"

Vingie moved across to him like the ripple of wind over a field of wheat and put a gentle hand on his arm.

"My dear," she said tenderly, "has she been a brute to you? Tell me, if it helps."

"One doesn't talk about one woman to another. When I arrived at her flat last night there was the usual perfect dinner in the usual perfect setting. Afterward in the drawing-room I attempted to take Agatha in my arms, but she eluded my grasp.

"'My dear boy,' she said in a voice quite new to me, 'please don't. There is a time for embracing and a time for refraining.'

"'But when I dined with you before----' I began.

"She leaned back in her chair and looked at me out of those wonderful golden eyes, narrowed like a cat's.

"'I don't love you. When you were here before I set before you an ideal in the matter of kisses. You don't expect me to live up to my own ideal--that would be too tiresome. You are a child to me, Rupert, dear; I've played with you, as grown-ups do sometimes play with children, and now playtime is over and you must find a play-mate of your own age.'"

"And you've got the nerve to tell me all this?" demanded Vingie, her eyes blazing in her pale face.

"I have," retorted Rupert with the bland assurance that marked him as a future Cabinet Minister. "And why have I? Because your heartless manner toward me made possible this episode with Agatha. Because this other woman has been equally unfeeling. Because in future I will do as _I_ please, not as any woman pleases. _I_ propose to take everything and give nothing henceforward, and you and those like you have only yourselves to thank."

He stood before the fireplace, feet apart, hands behind his back, husband written all over him.

A curious little smile played round Vingie's adorable mouth.

"You've only kissed Agatha; you've never kissed me. You don't know what kissing is, and now you never will know." She stretched out her arms in a beautiful gesture. "These, my dear, will never draw your head down to the only place where a man's head belongs, just because you've dabbled in love and grown hot and grown cold, and simply mucked everything. You only learned half your lesson from Agatha. She let you kiss her and you did; she wouldn't let you, and you didn't. Oh, Rupert, you're a most estimable young man. Did I say man? No, that's wrong. You're not a man; you're a perfect little gentleman."

"Am I?" queried Rupert in a low growl. He stepped from the high plane of the hearth rug and moved toward her. His arms went round her in a grip of steel.

Vingie fought him like a tigress. Finally she spread her two hands over her face, and it took all his strength to wrench them away. At last her fair head lay back in the crook of his left arm and he won relentlessly to her mouth.

"And still," she gasped between kisses, "it--wouldn't mean a thing--if--I didn't want you to. But I _do_!"

"I wish," observed Vingie, arranging her hair before the mirror, "we could go out and be married now, like they do in the United States. Still it can be arranged very quietly. You'd better get a license, and we'll be done down in Dorset. I shall return there and you can follow as soon as possible. We won't even tell Charles or George Fordingbridge. I'd like it to be a surprise for them."

"What a lot you know about getting married, darling," murmured Rupert.

"Women do. They have to, my dear," she answered absently.