The Children

Book III

XVII

On the afternoon of the fourth day Boyne stood again in the sitting-room of the châlet facing the Cristallo group.

He had wired to Judith Wheater: “All right, don’t worry”; but to Mrs. Sellars he had made no sign. He knew she did not wholly approve of his journey, though she had made no unfavourable comment, and had even offered of her own accord to keep an eye on the Pension Rosenglüh in his absence. It was not necessary for Rose Sellars to formulate objections; they were latent everywhere in her delicate person, in the movements of her slim apprehensive fingers, the guarded stir of her lashes. But the sense of their lurking there, vigilant guardians of the threshold, gave a peculiar quality to every token of her approval. Boyne told himself that she was not a denier, but that rarer being, a chooser; and he was almost certain where her choice would lie when all the facts were before her.

She was out when he reached the châlet, and his conviction strengthened as he sat awaiting her. It drew its strength from the very atmosphere of the place—its self-sufficing harmony. “Willkommen, suesser Daemmerschein!” His apostrophe took in the mighty landscape which overhung him; the sense of peace flowed in on him from those great fastnesses of sun and solitude, with which the little low-ceilinged room, its books and flowers, the bit of needle-work in the armchair, the half-written letter on the desk, had the humble kinship of quietness and continuity. “I’d forgotten that anything had any meaning,” he thought to himself as he let the spell of the place weave its noiseless net about him.

“Martin—but how tired you look!” She was on the threshold, their hands and lips together. He remembered that kiss afterward.... She lingered close, her arms on his shoulders. “I didn’t even know you’d got back.” There was the faintest shadow of reproach in her tone.

“I didn’t know till the last minute when I could get away—I just jumped into the first train,” he explained. He was conscious of the weariness in his voice. He passed his hand over his eyes as though to see if it would brush away her image, or if there were still women like her in the world, all made of light and reason. “Dear!” he said, more to himself than her.

“You’ve failed?” Her eyes were full of an unmixed sympathy; there was nothing in them to remind him that they had foreseen his failure.

“No,” he exclaimed, “I’ve succeeded!”

“Oh—.” He fancied he detected a hint of flatness in the rejoinder; there are occasions, he knew, when one has to resign oneself to the hearing of good news. But no; he was unfair. It was not that, it was only the echo of his own fatigue. For, as she said, he was tired—thoroughly tired....

She continued, with a faint smile: “You don’t look like somebody who has succeeded.”

“I daresay not. I feel rather like one of the fellows they let down into a disused well, and haul up half-asphyxiated....”

“It was—asphyxiating?”

“Some of it; most of it. But I’m coming to. And I’ve got what I wanted.” He returned her smile, and sat down beside her.

“How wonderful! You mean to say you’ve reconciled the Wheaters?”

“I’ve reconciled them to the idea of not separating the children—for the present, at any rate.”

“Oh, Martin—splendid!” She was really warming to the subject now. Her face glowed with a delicate appreciation. “It will do Terry more good than all the Alps and Dolomites piled on top of one another.”

“Yes; and Judith too, incidentally.” He had no intention of not including Judith in his victory.

“Of course; but Judith’s a young lady who is eminently capable of fighting her own battles,” Mrs. Sellars smoothly rejoined.

“She ought to be—she’s had to fight everybody else’s.”

He leaned his head against the back of his armchair, and wondered what had become of the glow with which he had entered the room. It had vanished instantly under the cool touch of Mrs. Sellars’s allusion to Judith. He had succeeded, it was true: there could be no doubt that he had succeeded. The mere fact of gaining time was nine tenths of the battle; and that he had already achieved. But already, too, he was beginning to wonder how he was to fit Rose Sellars into the picture of his success. It was curious: when they were apart it was always her courage and her ardour that he felt; as soon as they came together again she seemed hemmed in by little restrictions and inhibitions.

“Do tell me just what happened,” she said.

“Well—at the very last minute they decided to make me, informally, into the children’s guardian: a sort of trial-guardian, you might call it.”

“A trial-guardian?” Her intonation, and the laugh that followed it, lifted the term into the region of the absurd. “What a jolly thing to be a trial-guardian!”

“Well, I’m not so sure.” Boyne faced her irritably. “It’s not a joke, you know.”

“I shan’t know what it is till you explain.”

Explain—explain! Yes; he knew now that the explaining was just what he was dodging away from. To Judith and Terry no explanations would be necessary. He would only have to say: “It’s all right,” and be smothered in hugs and jubilations. Those two would never think of asking for reasons—life had not accustomed them to expect any. But here sat lovely Logic, her long hands clasped attentively—

“Oh, by Jove!” Boyne exclaimed, clapping his own hands first on one pocket, then on another. “Here’s something I got for you in Venice.”

He drew forth a small parcel, stringless and shapeless, as parcels generally seemed to be when they emerged from his pockets, unwrapped the paper, and pressed the catch of a morocco box. The lid flew open, and revealed a curious crystal pendant in a network of worn enamel.

“Oh, the lovely thing! For me?”

“Oh, no; not that,” he stammered. He jerked the trinket back, wrapped the box up, and pushed it into his pocket with the exasperated sense of blushing like a boy over his blunder.

“But, Martin—”

“Here—.” He delved deeper, pulled out another parcel, in wrappings equally untidy, and took up one of the long hands lying on her knee. “This is for you.” He slipped on her fourth finger a sapphire set in diamonds. She lowered her lids on it in gentle admiration. “It’s much too beautiful,” her lips protested. Then her mockery sparkled up at him. “Only, you’ve put it on the wrong hand—at least, if it’s meant for our engagement.”

“Looks as if it were, doesn’t it?” he bantered back; but inwardly he was thinking: “Yes, that’s just the trouble—it looks like the engagement ring any other fellow would have given to any other woman. Nothing in the world to do with her and me.” Aloud he said: “I hadn’t time to find what I wanted—” and then realised that this was hardly a way of bettering his case. “I wanted something so awfully different for you,” he blundered on.

“Well, your wanting that makes it different—to me,” she said; and added, more tepidly: “Besides, it’s lovely.” She held out her left hand, and he slipped the jewel on the proper finger. “It’s rotten,” he grumbled. The ring had cost him more than he could afford, it had failed to please her, he saw himself that it was utterly commonplace—and saw also that she would never forgive him for pocketing the trinket he had first produced, which was nothing in itself, but had struck her fancy as soon as she knew it was not meant for her. Should he pull it out again, and ask her to accept it? No; after what had passed that was impossible. Judith Wheater, if he had been trying an engagement ring on her finger (preposterous fancy!) would have blurted out at once that she preferred the trinket he had shoved back into his pocket. But such tactlessness was unthinkable in Mrs. Sellars. Not for the world, he knew, would she have let him guess that she had given the other ornament a thought.

She sat turning her hand from side to side and diligently admiring the ring. “And now—do tell me just what happened.”

“Well—first, of course, a lot of talk.”

He settled himself in his chair, and tried to take up the narrative. But wherever he grasped it, the awkward thing seemed to tumble out of his hold, as if, in that respect too, he were always taking the wrong parcel out of his pocket. To begin with, it was so difficult to explain to Mrs. Sellars that, after the Wheaters had been reassured as to the safety and wellbeing of the children, the negotiations had been carried on piecemeal, desultorily, parenthetically, between swims and sun-baths, cocktails and foxtrots, poker and baccara—and, as a rule, in the presence of all the conflicting interests.

To make Mrs. Sellars understand that Lady Wrench, her husband and Gerald Ormerod had assisted at the debates as a matter of course was in itself a laborious business; to convey to her that Mrs. Lullmer—still notorious as the former Mrs. Westway—had likewise been called upon to participate, as Joyce’s possible successor, was to place too heavy a strain on her imagination. Her exquisite aloofness had kept her in genuine ignorance of the compromises and promiscuities of modern life, and left on her hands the picture of a vanished world wherein you didn’t speak to people who were discredited, or admit rivals or enemies to your confidence; and she punctuated Boyne’s narrative with murmurs of dismay and incredulity.

“But in that crowd,” Boyne explained, “no man is another man’s enemy for more than a few minutes, and no woman is any other woman’s rival. Either they forget they’ve quarrelled, or some social necessity—usually a party that none of them can bear to miss—forces them together, and makes it easier to bury their differences. But generally it’s a simple case of forgetting. Their memories are as short as a savage’s, and the feuds that savages remember have dropped out. They recall only the other primitive needs—food, finery, dancing. I suppose we are relapsing into a kind of bloodless savagery,” Boyne concluded.

Besides, he went on, in the Wheater set they could deal with things only collectively; alone, they became helpless and inarticulate. They lived so perpetually in the lime-light that they required an audience—an audience made up of their own kind. Before each other they shouted and struck attitudes; again like savages. But the chief point was that nobody could stay angry—not however much they tried. It was too much trouble, and might involve too many inconveniences, interfere with too many social arrangements. When all was said and done, all they asked was not to be bothered—and it was by gambling on that requirement that he had finally gained his point.

“And your point is, exactly—”

Well, as he got closer to it, Boyne was not even sure that it could be defined as a point. It was too shapeless and undecided; but he hoped it would serve for a time—and time was everything; especially for Terry....

“They’ve agreed to leave the children together, and to leave them here, for the next three or four months. The longest to bring round was Lady Wrench. Her husband has taken a fancy to Zinnie, and he’s so mortally bored by life in general that his wife clutches at anything that may amuse him. Luckily, according to the terms of the divorce—”

“Which divorce?” Mrs. Sellars interpolated, as though genuinely anxious to keep her hand on all the clues.

“Wheater versus Zinnia Lacrosse. It was Wheater who got the divorce from the present Lady Wrench. Legally he has the final say about Zinnie, so the mother had to give in, though she has a right to see the child at stated intervals. But of course my battle royal was over Chipstone; if the Wheaters had insisted on keeping Chipstone till their own affairs were settled in court the whole combination would have been broken up.”

“And how did you contrive to rescue Chipstone?”

Boyne sank down more deeply into his armchair, and looked up at the low ceiling. Then he straightened himself, and brought his gaze to the level of Mrs. Sellars’s. “By promising to stay here and keep an eye on the children myself. That’s my trial-guardianship.” He gave a slight laugh, which she failed to echo.

“Martin!”

His eyes continued to challenge hers. “Well—?”

She turned the sapphire hesitatingly on her finger. “But these children—you’d never even heard of them till you met them on board your steamer a few weeks ago....”

“No; that’s true.”

“You’ve taken over a pretty big responsibility.”

“I like responsibilities.”

Mrs. Sellars was still brooding over her newly imprisoned finger. “It’s very generous of you to assume this one in such a hurry. Usually one doesn’t have to go out of one’s way to find rather more of them than one can manage. But in this case, I wonder—”

“You wonder?”

“Well, I had understood from Terry—and also from your friend Judith—that what all the children really want is to go to America: to Mrs. Wheater’s mother, isn’t it?”

“Yes; that’s it; and I hope they’ll pull it off by-and-by. But at present the Wheaters won’t hear of it. I never for a moment supposed they’d consent to putting the ocean between themselves and Chip. My only chance was to persuade them that, now Terry’s in the mountains, they’d better leave him here, and the others with him, till the hot weather’s over. With those people it’s always a question of the least resistance—of temporizing and postponing. My plan saved everybody a certain amount of mental effort; so they all ended by agreeing to it. But of course it’s merely provisional.”

“Happily,” Mrs. Sellars smiled; and added, as if to correct the slight acerbity of the comment: “For you must see, dear, that you’re taking a considerable risk for the future—”

“What future?”

“Why—suppose anything goes wrong during these next few months? You’ll be answerable for whatever may happen. With seven children—and one of them already grown up!”

Boyne frowned, and stirred uneasily in his chair. “If you mean Judith, in some ways she’s as much of a child as the youngest of them.”

Mrs. Sellars smiled confidentially at her ring. “So a man would think, I suppose. But you forget that I’ve had four days alone with her.... She’s a young lady with very definite views.”

“I should hope so!”

“I agree with you that it makes her more interesting—but conceivably it might lead to complications.”

“What sort of complications?”

“You ought to know better than I do—since you tell me you’ve been frequenting the late Mrs. Westway at the Lido. Judith doesn’t pretend to hide the fact that she lived for a summer in the bosom of that edifying family....”

“She doesn’t know it’s anything to hide. That’s what’s so touching—”

“And so terrifying. But I won’t sit here preaching prudence; you’d only hate me for it. And all this time those poor infants are waiting.” She stood up with one of her sudden changes of look and tone; as if a cloud had parted, shedding a ray of her lost youth on her. He noticed for the first time that she was all in white, a rose on her breast, and a shady hat hanging from her arm. “Do go down and see them at once, dear. It’s getting late. I’ll walk with you to the foot of the hill; then I must come back and write some letters....” He smiled at the familiar formula, and she took up his smile. “Yes; really important letters—one of them to Aunt Julia,” she bantered back. “And besides, the children will want to have you all to themselves.” Magnanimously she added: “I must say they all behaved beautifully while you were away. They seemed to feel that they must do you credit. And as for Terry—I wish he were mine! When the break up comes, as of course it will, why shouldn’t you and I adopt him?”

She put on her hat, and linked her arm in Boyne’s for the walk down the hill; but at the fringe of the wood, where the path dipped to the high road, she left him.

“You’ll come back and dine? I’ve got some news for you too,” she said as he turned down to the village.

XVIII

Recent memories of Armistice Day—remote ones of Mafeking Night, which he had chanced to experience in London—paled for Boyne in the uproar raised by the little Wheaters when, entering their pension dining-room, he told them that everything was all right.

He had not imagined that seven could be so many. The miracle of the loaves and fishes seemed as nothing to the sudden multiplication of arms, legs and lungs about that rural supper-table. At one end of the expanse of coarse linen and stout crockery, Miss Scope, rigid and spectacled, sat dispensing jam without fear or favour; at the other Judith was cutting bread and butter in complete unawareness of her immortal model. Between the two surged a sea of small heads, dusky, ruddy, silver-pale, all tossing and mixing about the golden crest of Chipstone, throned in his umpire’s chair. For a moment, as usual, Bun and Zinnie dominated the scene; then Terry, still pale, but with new life in his eyes, caught his cap from the rack with a call for three cheers to which the others improvised a piercing echo. (“Luckily we’re the only boarders just now,” Miss Scope remarked to Boyne as he pressed her hand.)

In this wonderful world nobody asked any questions; nobody seemed to care for any particulars; their one thought was to bestow on their ambassador the readiest token of their gratitude, from Blanca’s cool kiss to the damp and strangulating endearments of Beechy. To Boyne it was literally like a dip into a quick sea, with waves that burnt his eyes, choked his throat and ears, but stung him, body and brain, to fresh activity. “And now let’s kiss him all over again—and it’s my turn first!” Zinnie rapturously proposed; and as he abandoned himself once more to the battering of the breakers he caught a small voice piping: “We suppose you’ve brought some presents for us, Martin.”

The law which makes men progressively repeople the world with persons of their own age and experience had led Boyne, as he grew older, to regard human relations as more and more ruled by reason; but whenever he dipped into the universe of the infant Wheaters, where all perspective ceased, and it was far more urgent to know what presents he had brought than what fate had been meted out to them by their respective parents, he felt the joy of plunging back into reality.

The presents were there, and nobody had been forgotten, as the rapid unpacking of a small suit-case showed—nobody, that is, but Judith, who stood slightly apart, affecting an air of grown-up amusement, while Blanca and the little girls were hung with trinkets, and Bun made jubilant by an electric lamp. Even Miss Scope had an appropriate reticule, Nanny a lavishly garnished needle-case; and the bottom of the box was crammed with books for Terry.

The distributing took so long, and the ensuing disputes and counter-claims were so difficult of adjustment, that twilight was slipping down the valley when Boyne said to Judith: “Come and take a turn, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They walked along the road to a path which led up the hillside opposite to the hotels, and from there began to mount slowly toward the receding sunlight. Judith, unasked, had slipped her arm through Boyne’s, and the nearness of her light young body was like wings to him. “What a pity it’s getting dark—I believe I could climb to one of those ruby peaks!” he said, throwing his head back with a deep breath; and she instantly rejoined: “Let’s run back and get Bun’s lamp; then we could.”

Boyne laughed, and went on, in a voice of leisurely satisfaction: “Oh, Bun wouldn’t part with that lamp—not yet. Besides, we’re very well as we are; and there’ll be lots of other opportunities.”

“There will? Oh, Martin—they’re really going to let us stay?” Her strong young hands imprisoned him in a passionate grasp.

“Well, for a time. I made them see it was Terry’s best chance.”

“Of course it is! And, Martin—they’ll leave us all together? Chip and all?”

“Every man of you—for the summer, at any rate.” They had stopped in the fern-fringed path, and he stood above her, smiling down into her blissful incredulous eyes. “There’s one condition, though—” Her gaze darkened, and he added: “You’re all to be accountable to me. I’ve promised your people to keep an eye on you.”

“You mean you’re going to stay here with us?” Her lips trembled with the tears she was struggling to keep back, and he thought to himself: “It’s too much for a child’s face to express—.” Aloud he said: “Let’s sit down and watch the sunset. This tree-trunk is a pretty good proscenium box.”

They sat down, and he set forth at length the history of his negotiations. Complicated as the narrative was, it was easier to relate to his present hearer than to Mrs. Sellars, not only because fewer elucidations were necessary, but because none of the details he gave shocked or astonished Judith. The tale he told evidently seemed to her a mere bald statement of a matter-of-course affair, and she was too much occupied with its practical results to give a thought to its remoter bearings. She listened attentively to Boyne’s report of the final agreement, and when he had ended, said only: “I suppose father’s made some arrangement about paying our bills?”

“Your father’s opened an account for me: Miss Scope and I are to be your ministers of finance.”

She received this in silence; for the first time since his return he felt that the news he brought was still overshadowed for her. At last she asked: “Was father awfully angry... you know... about that money?”

The question roused Boyne with a start. He perceived that in his struggle to adjust conflicting interests he too had lost sight of the moral issue. And how confess to Judith that, as for her father, he had hardly been aware of it? He felt that it was a moment for prevarication. “Of course your father was angry—thoroughly angry—about the whole thing. Anybody would have been.”

She lowered her voice to insist: “But I mean about my taking his money?”

“Well, he’s forgiven you for that, at any rate.”

“Has he—really and truly?” Her voice lifted again joyfully. “Terry was sure he never would.”

Boyne turned about on her in surprise. “Terry—then you told him after all?”

She made a mute sign of assent. “I had to.”

“Well, I understand that.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I’m glad you did.”

“He was frightfully upset, you know. And furious with me. I was afraid I’d made him more ill. He wouldn’t believe me at first. He said if I had no more moral sense than that, the first thing I knew I’d land in prison.”

“Oh—.” Boyne could not restrain a faint laugh.

“That didn’t worry me very much, though,” Judith confessed in a more cheerful tone, “because I’ve seen a good deal more of life than Terry, and I’ve known other girls who’ve done what I did, and none of them ever went to prison.”

This did not seem as reassuring to Boyne as it did to the speaker; but the hour for severity was over, the words of rebuke died on his lips. At last he said: “The worst of it was hurting Terry, wasn’t it?” and she nodded: “Yes.”

For a while after that they sat without speaking, till she asked him if he thought the Wheaters had already started divorce proceedings. To this he could only answer that it looked so, but he still hoped they might calm down and think better of it. She received this with a gesture of incredulity, and merely remarked: “There might have been a chance if Syb Lullmer hadn’t been mixed up in it.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t call that woman by her Christian name,” Boyne interrupted.

Judith looked at him with a gentle wonder. “She wouldn’t mind. Everybody else does.” She clearly assumed that he was reproving her for failing in respect to Mrs. Lullmer.

“That’s not what I meant. But she’s such a beast.”

“Oh, well—.” Judith’s shrug implied that the epithet was too familiar to her to have kept more than a tinge of obloquy. “I rather hope she won’t marry father, though.”

“I hope to God she won’t. What I’m gambling on is that he and your mother will get so homesick for you children that they’ll patch things up on your account.”

Her smile kept its soft incredulity. “They don’t often, you know; parents don’t.”

“Well, anyhow, you’ve got a reprieve, and you must make the most of it.”

“I wish you’d say ‘we,’ not ‘you,’ Martin.”

“Why of course it’s ‘we,’ my dear—that is, as long as you all behave yourselves.”

They both laughed at this, and then fell silent, facing the sunset, and immersed, in their different ways, in the overwhelming glory of the spectacle. Judith, Boyne knew, did not feel sunsets as Rose Sellars did—they appealed to a different order of associations, and she would probably have been put to it to distinguish the quality of their splendour from that of fireworks at the Lido, or a brilliant finale at the Russian ballet. But something of the celestial radiance seemed to reach her, remote yet enfolding as a guardian wing. “It’s lovely here,” she breathed, her hand in Boyne’s.

He remembered, at a similar moment, Rose Sellars’s quoting:

All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;
    Clouds overcome it;
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel’s
    Circling its summit—

and he murmured the words half aloud.

Judith’s pressure tightened ardently on his hand. “Oh, Martin, how beautifully you do describe things! The words you find are not like anybody else’s. Terry says you ought to be a writer.”

“Well, in this case, unluckily, somebody found the words before me.”

“Oh—.” Her enthusiasm flagged. She hazarded: “Mrs. Sellars?”

He gave a little chuckle at her sharpness. “In a way, yes—but, as a matter of fact, Robert Browning got ahead of both of us.”

This seemed to give her a certain satisfaction. “Then she just cribbed it from him? Is he another friend of hers?”

“Yes; and will be of yours some day, I hope. He died long before you were born; but you’ll find some of the best of him in one of the books I brought to Terry.”

“Oh, he’s just an author, you mean,” she murmured, as if the state were a strictly posthumous one. Her attention always had a tendency to wander at the mention of books, and he thought she was probably a little vexed at having been betrayed into a conversational slip; but presently, with a return of her habitual buoyancy: “I’d rather hear you talk than anybody who’s dead,” she declared.

“All right; I’ll make it a rule to give you only my own vintage,” he agreed, gazing out past her into the light. They continued to sit there in silence, the sea of night creeping softly up to them, till at length they were caught in its chill touch. Boyne got reluctantly to his feet. “Come along, child. Time to go down,” he said.

“Oh, not down yet—up, up, up!” She caught his arm again, pulling him with all her young strength along the pine-scented steep to where the mystery of the forest drew down to meet them. “I want to climb and climb—don’t you? I want to stay up all night, as if we were coming home at sunrise from a ball. It’s like a great ballroom over there, isn’t it,” she cried, pointing to the west, “with the lights pouring out of a million windows?”

Boyne laughed, and suffered himself to be led onward. The air on that height was as fresh as youth, and all about them were the secret scents that dew and twilight waken into life. He knew that he and Judith ought to be turning homeward; but, even if she had released his captive arm, it was growing too dark to consult his watch. Besides, the wandering man in him, the man used to mountains, to long lonely tramps, to the hush and mystery of nights in the open, felt himself in the toils of the old magic. It was no longer Judith drawing him on, but the night itself beckoning him to fresh heights. The child at his side had travelled with him into the beauty as far as she could go, and now he needed nothing from her but the warmth of her nearness. His highest moments had always been solitary....

She seemed to guess that there was nothing else to say, and they continued to mount the hill in silence. As they rose the air turned colder, the fires faded, and above them arched a steel-blue heaven starred with ruddy points which grew keen and white as darkness deepened. It was not till they passed out of the fringes of the forest to an open crag above the valley, and saw the village lights sprinkling the black fields far below, that Boyne unwillingly woke to the sense of time and place.

“Oh, by Jove—you must come!” he exclaimed, swinging round to guide his companion down the ledge.

She made no answer, but turned and followed him along the descending path. He could feel that she was too tired and peaceful for reluctance. She moved beside him like a sleepy child bringing back an apronful of flowers from a happy holiday; and the fact of having reassured her so quickly awed Boyne a little, as if he had meddled with destiny. But it was pleasant, for once, to play the god, and he let himself drift away into visions of a vague millennium where all the grown people knew what they wanted, and if ever it happened that they didn’t, the children had the casting vote.

By the time they reached the pension, and Judith had loosed her hold of Boyne’s arm, he was afraid to look at his watch, but pushed her through the gate with a quick goodnight—and then, a moment later, called to her in an imperious whisper. “Judith!” She hurried back to the summons.

“Did you really think I hadn’t brought you any present?”

She gave an excited little laugh. “N—no; I really thought perhaps you had; only—”

“Only what?”

“I thought you’d forgotten some one else’s, and had imagined I shouldn’t much mind your taking mine, because I’m so much older than the others....”

“Well, of course I should have imagined that; but here it is.”

He pulled out the parcel he had inadvertently produced in Mrs. Sellars’s sitting-room, and Judith caught it to her with a gasp of pleasure.

“Oh, Martin—”

“There; own up that you’d have been fearfully sold if I’d forgotten you.”

She answered solemnly: “If you’d forgotten me I should have died of it.”

“Well—run off with you; we’re hours late,” he admonished her.

“Mayn’t I look at it before you go?”

“You baby, how could you see in the dark? Besides, I tell you there’s no time.”

“Not even time to kiss you for it, Martin?”

“No,” he cried, slamming the gate shut, and starting up the hill toward his hotel at a run.

When they started on their walk nothing had been farther from Boyne’s mind than this disposal of the crystal pendant, though it was for Judith that the trinket had been chosen. Since Mrs. Sellars, owing to his blunder, had seen and coveted it, he felt a certain awkwardness about letting it appear on Judith’s neck, and decided that his little friend must again be left out in the general distribution of presents. But during their walk in the mountain dusk, while she hung on his arm, pressed close by the intruding fir-branches, he needed more and more to think of her as a child, and, thinking thus, to treat her as one. He knew how the child in her must have ached at being left out when he unpacked his gifts; and when the time came to say goodnight it was irresistible to heal that ache. There was no way of doing it but to take the pendant from his pocket—the pendant which he had meant for her, and which it had taken so long to unearth at the Venetian antiquary’s that there was no time for much thought of Mrs. Sellars’s—the pendant which was Judith’s by right because, like her, it was odd and exquisite and unaccountable.

“If only she doesn’t parade it up at the châlet!” the coward in him thought, as he climbed the hill. But all the while he knew it was exactly what she would do.

“Oh, well, damn—after all, I chose it for her,” he grumbled, as if that justified them both.

In the châlet sitting-room Mrs. Sellars, in her cool evening dress, looked up from the table at which she sat, not writing a letter but reading one. She laid it down thoughtfully as he entered.

“I’m afraid it’s awfully late—I hadn’t time to go to the hotel and brush up; you don’t mind?” he said, blinking a little in the lamplight, and passing his hand through his rumpled hair. As he bent to kiss her his glance fell on the admonishing needles of the little travelling clock at her elbow. “You don’t mean to say it’s after nine?”

“What does it matter? As a matter of fact, it’s after half-past. I was only afraid something had gone wrong about the children.”

He tossed his hat down with a laugh. “Bless you, no! Everything’s as right as right. But I had to get the Lido out of my lungs; and a long tramp was the only way.”

Her smile told him how much she loved him for hating the Lido. “And what do you think my news is? You know I said I had something to tell you. Mr. Dobree is coming here to see me—he arrives next week.” She announced the fact as if it were not only important, but even exciting.

“Oh, damn Mr. Dobree!” Boyne rejoined with a careless benevolence. The door had opened on the candlelight of their little dinner-table, on its sparkle of white wine and smell of wild strawberries and village bread. “Well, this is good enough for me,” Boyne said, as he dropped into the seat opposite Mrs. Sellars with a sense of proprietorship which made Mr. Dobree’s movements seem wholly negligible.

XIX

The next day there occurred, with a fatal punctuality, exactly what Boyne had foreseen. Mrs. Sellars had invited Judith, Terry and Blanca to lunch; and when they appeared Mrs. Sellars’s eye instantly lit on the crystal pendant, Judith’s on the sapphire ring. The mutual reconnaissance was swift and silent as the crossing of search-lights in a night sky. Judith said nothing; but Blanca, as Mrs. Sellars bent to kiss her, raised her hostess’s hand with an admiring exclamation. “A new ring! What a beauty! I never saw you wear it before.”

Mrs. Sellars smiled, and tapped Blanca’s cheek with her free hand. “What sharp eyes! But everybody seems to have had a present from Venice—so why shouldn’t I?”

Blanca returned the smile, lifting her own wrist to display a hoop of pink crystal. “Isn’t mine sweet? Nobody finds presents like Martin.”

“So I thought when he showed me Judith’s last night.”

Mrs. Sellars turned to the older girl, but not to kiss her. She reserved her endearments for the younger children, and merely laid a friendly touch on Judith’s shoulder. “Such a wonder, that pendant—I never saw one like it. Decidedly, not Venetian; seventeenth century Spanish, perhaps? It’s a puzzle. You’re lucky, my dear, to have a connaisseur to choose your presents.”

That was all—and then a jolly lunch, simple, easy, full of chaff and laughter, Mrs. Sellars, always a perfect hostess, was at her best with Terry and Blanca. The boy touched and interested her, the little girl (Boyne divined) subtly flattered her by a wide-eyed but tactful admiration. Boyne wondered if Mrs. Sellars had noticed how Blanca’s clear gray eyes darkened with envy at the praise of the crystal pendant. What a fool he had been not to give the crystal to Blanca, and the tuppenny bracelet to Judith, who would have liked it best because it came from him! Decidedly, he was doomed to blunder in his dealings with women, even when they were no more than little girls. Meanwhile Terry was telling Mrs. Sellars about the books Boyne had brought him, and how he and Judith had already hunted down Boyne’s quotation from “The Grammarian’s Funeral”—“You know, that splendid one he told Judith yesterday, about ‘all the peaks soar’; she came home last night saying it over and over for fear she’d forget it, and woke me up to hunt for it before she went to bed.”

“It was so splendid, hearing it up there on the mountain, in the dark, with the stars coming out,” Judith glowed, taking up the tale, while Blanca ingenuously added: “It was so late when Judy got home that we were all asleep, and Scopy had to go down and let her in. Did you see Scopy in her crimping-pins, Martin; or had you gone when she opened the door?”

“Yes—the coming of twilight up on the heights is something to remember,” Mrs. Sellars intervened, letting her eyes rest attentively on Boyne’s before she turned them again to Terry. “But there are better things than that in Browning, you know. Bring me your book to-morrow, and I’ll show you....”

It all went off perfectly—and Boyne, when he started the children homeward after lunch, was wondering whether tact were as soothing as a summer breeze, or as terrible as an army with banners.

He was to drop the young Wheaters at their pension, and afterward meet Mrs. Sellars at the post-office for a climb in the direction of Misurina. At the corner of the highroad descending to Cortina he signalled the hotel omnibus, packed in the twins, and walked on with Judith. At the moment he would rather have escaped from the whole party; but Judith had declared her intention of walking, and he could not do otherwise than go with her. They waited under the trees for the omnibus to sweep on with its load of dust and passengers, and almost at once Judith said: “I suppose you’re engaged to Mrs. Sellars, aren’t you, Martin?”

The suddenness of the question struck him like a blow, and he realised for the first time that he had never spoken to Rose Sellars about making their engagement known. He had never even asked her if she had broken the news to her formidable aunt, or to the galaxy of minor relatives with whom she maintained her incessant exchange of letters. Her insistence that their marriage should be put off for nearly half a year seemed to make the whole question too remote for immediate decisions. “I suppose I ought to have asked her if she wanted it announced,” he thought, reflecting remorsefully that his long exile had made him too careless of the social observances. He turned an irritated eye on Judith. “What in the world put such an idea into your head?”

“Why, your bringing her a ring from Venice, and her putting it on the finger where engagement rings are worn,” Judith replied with a smiling promptness.

“Oh, that’s the finger, is it?” Boyne said, temporising; and then, with an abrupt clutch at simplification; “Yes; I am engaged to Mrs. Sellars. But I don’t think she wants it spoken of at present.”

He turned his gaze away to the long white road glinting through the trees under which he and Judith were withdrawn. Things happened so suddenly and overwhelmingly in Judith’s face that he did not feel equal to what might be going on there till he had steadied his gaze by a protracted study of the landscape. When he looked at her again he received the shock of smiling lips and eyes, and two arms thrown filially about him.

“You darling old Martin, I’m so glad! At least I am if you are—really and truly?”

Her hug was almost as suffocating as Zinnie’s, and given—he divined it instantly—with the same wholehearted candour. “So Blanca was right after all! How lovely it must be to be in love! For I suppose that’s the reason why you’re marrying? I know you’re awfully romantic, though you sometimes put on such a gruff manner; I’m sure you wouldn’t marry just for position, or for money, or to regularise an old liaison; would you?”

“An old liaison?” Boyne laughed, but with a touch of vexation. “The ideas you’ve picked up—and the lingo! You absurd child—why, ‘regularise’ isn’t even English.... And can’t you see, can’t you imagine, that a man’s first need is to—to respect the woman he hopes to marry?”

Judith received this with a puzzled frown. “Oh, I can see it; I have, often—in books, and at the movies. But I can’t imagine it, exactly. I should have thought wanting to give her a good hug came before anything.”

Boyne shrugged impatiently. Things that seemed funny, and utterly guileless, when she said them to others, shocked him when she commented on his private concerns in the vocabulary of her tribe. “What’s the use? You’re only a baby, and you repeat things like a parrot, as all children do. Mrs. Sellars is the most perfect, the most exquisite...” He broke off, feeling that such asseverations led nowhere in particular, and continued at a tangent: “I can tell you one thing—I should never have dared to take on the job of looking after you children if she hadn’t been here—”

Judith’s face fell. “Oh, is she going to stay all summer, then?”

“I devoutly hope so! Being with somebody like her is so exactly what...” This, again, seemed to land him in a sort of rhetorical blind alley, and he stepped down from it into the dust of the highroad. “Come along; we mustn’t dawdle. I’m due at the post-office.” He was aware that a settled anger was possessing him, he hardly knew why. Hardly—yet just under the surface of his mind there stirred the uneasy sense that he was perhaps disappointed by Judith’s prompt congratulations. Half an hour earlier, he would have said that her approval would add the final touch to his happiness; that there was nothing he wanted more than to have her show herself in fact the child he was perpetually calling her. “The youngest of them all”—that was how he had described her to Mrs. Sellars. Was it possible he had not meant what he said?

He was roused by Judith’s squeeze on his arm. “I don’t know why you’re so cross with me, old Martin. I do really want anything you want....”

“That’s a good Judy... and what rot, dear, thinking I’m cross. Only, remember, it’s your secret and mine, and not another soul’s.” After all, he tried to tell himself, Judith’s knowing of his engagement was already a relief. It would do away with no end of hedging and prevaricating. And he was sure he could trust to Judith’s discretion; sure of it without her added pressure on his arm, and the solemn: “On Scopy’s book!” which had become the tribal oath of the little Wheaters. Boyne had sometimes winced at Judith’s precocious discretion, as another proof of what she had been exposed to; now he hailed in it a guaranty of peace. “Perhaps there’s something to be said for not keeping children in cotton wool—for she is only a child!” he repeated to himself, insistently.

That very evening, while he and Mrs. Sellars were talking over the likelihood of picking up some kind of a tutor for Terry, she asked irrelevantly: “By the way, do the children know of our engagement?”

Contradictory answers rose to Boyne’s lips, and he gulped them down to mumble: “I didn’t suppose I was authorized to tell anybody.”

“But hasn’t anybody guessed?”

“Well—as a matter of fact, Judith has. Today. I can’t imagine—”

Mrs. Sellars smiled. “My ring, of course. Trust Blanca, too! It was stupid of me not to think of it. But perhaps it’s better—”

“Much better.”

She pondered. “Only I’d rather no one else knew—at least for the present. Out of regard for Aunt Julia—till I’ve heard from her.” Boyne, relieved, expressed his complete agreement. “Besides,” she continued, “I like it’s being our secret, don’t you? We won’t even tell Mr. Dobree.”

“Oh, particularly not Mr. Dobree,” Boyne replied emphatically.

Two days later Mr. Dobree arrived; and Boyne learned that an event which seems negligible before it happens may fill the picture when it becomes a fact. The prospect of Mr. Dobree’s arrival had now become the fact of Mr. Dobree’s presence; and Mr. Dobree, though still spare and nimble for a man approaching sixty (he was ready, and glad, to tell you to what exercises he owed it), took up a surprising amount of room. He was like somebody who travels with a lot of unwieldy luggage—his luggage being, as it were, the very absence of it, being his tact, his self-effacingness, his general neatness and compactness. Wherever you turned, you were in the aura of Mr. Dobree’s retractility, his earnest and insistent dodging out of your way, which seemed to leave behind it a presence more oppressive than any mere physical bulk—so that a dull fat man rooted in your best armchair might have been less in the way than the slim and disappearing Mr. Dobree. Mr. Dobree’s tact seemed to Boyne like a parody of Mrs. Sellars’s; like one of those monstrous blooms into which hybridizers transform a delicate flower. It was a “show” tact, a huge, unique, disbudded tact grown under glass, and destined to be labelled, exhibited, given a prize and a name, and a page to itself in the florists’ catalogues. Such at least was Boyne’s distorted vision of the new guest at the châlet.

Mr. Dobree (as became a man with such impedimenta) was lodged, not at Boyne’s inn, but at the “Palace” where Boyne and Mrs. Sellars had once dined. From there a brisk five minutes carried him to the châlet; except when his urgent hospitality drew Mrs. Sellars and Boyne to the big hotel. The prompt returning of invitations was a fundamental part of Mr. Dobree’s code. He seemed to think that hospitality was something a gentleman might borrow, like money, but never, in any circumstances, receive as a gift; and this obliged Mrs. Sellars to accept his repeated invitations, before, in the battle of their tacts, hers came off victorious, and she made him see that it may be more blessed to receive than to be invited out. The sapphire had vanished from her finger before Mr. Dobree’s arrival; and this precaution, for which Boyne blessed her, made him, for Mr. Dobree, simply an old friend, a guest of the Sellars’s in New York days, whom one could be suitably pleased to meet again.

Boyne was less pleased to meet Mr. Dobree. His coming was natural enough; and so was Mrs. Sellars’s pleasure at seeing him, since he brought not only the latest news of Aunt Julia but papers which settled satisfactorily the matter of Mr. Sellars’s will. Boyne had resented what promised to be a tiresome interruption of pleasant habits; but before long he discovered that Mr. Dobree’s presence left him free to spend much more time with his young friends of the Pension Rosenglüh. This made him aware that during the last weeks he had forfeited a certain amount of his liberty, and he found himself perilously pleased to recover it. He assured Mrs. Sellars that it would look very odd to Mr. Dobree, who had come to discuss family matters with his client, if a third person were present at these discussions; and armed with this argument he proceeded to dispose of his time as he pleased.

His liberation gave a new savour to the hours spent with the little Wheaters; and as for Mr. Dobree (with whom the children had had only one brief and awe-inspiring encounter), he came in very handily as the theme of the games they were always calling on Boyne to invent. To ascertain Mr. Dobree’s Christian name (Boyne told them) had long been his secret ambition; but hitherto he had not even been able to learn its first letter. A chance glimpse of Mr. Dobree’s glossy suit-cases showed his initials to be A.D., and the letter A was one calculated, as Boyne said, to give them a good gallop. Indeed, he found the puzzle so absorbing that one day, when Judith remarked on his unusual absent-mindedness, he had to own that he had not been listening to what she said because all his faculties were still absorbed in the task of guessing Mr. Dobree’s Christian name.

“But Mrs. Sellars must know—why don’t you ask her?”

“Must know? Do you think so? I doubt it.”

“But she talks of him as an old friend—as old as you.”

“Even that doesn’t convince me. I doubt if anybody knows Mr. Dobree’s Christian name. How should they? Can you imagine anybody’s ever having called him by it, or dared to ask him what it was?”

“Well, you might ask her,” suggested Judith, from whose make-up a taste for abstract speculation was absent.

“Ask her? Not for the world! Suppose she did know? All our fun would be over.”

“Of course it would,” cried Terry, plunging into the sport. “If she knows, she mustn’t be asked till we’ve exhausted every other possibility; must she, Martin?”

“Certainly not. I see you grasp the rules of the game. And now let’s proceed by elimination. Abel—Abel’s the first name in A, isn’t it, Terry?”

“No! There’s a Prince Aage of Denmark, or something; I saw him in ‘The Tatler,’” exulted Terry.

“All right. Let’s begin with Aage. Do any of you see Mr. Dobree as Aage?” This was dismissed with a general shout of incredulity.

“Well, then: as Abel—Abel Dobree? Don’t be in a hurry: try to deal with this thing in a mood of deliberateness and impartiality.”

“No, no, no—not Abel!” the assistance chorused.

“Oh, I’m going to sleep,” Judith grumbled, stretching out at full length on the sunburnt grass-bank on which the party were encamped.

“Let her—for all the use she is!” Boyne jeered. “Now then—Adam?”

“Adam’s a Polish name, isn’t it? Who was Adam?” Judith opened her eyes to ask.

“A national hero, I think,” said Blanca, with a diligent frown.

Miss Scope, perched higher up the bank, cut through these conjectures with a groan. “Children—children! One would think I’d brought you up like savages. Adam—”

“Oh, Scopy means the Adam in the Bible: but Mr. Dobree’s parents wouldn’t have called him after anybody as far away as that,” Blanca shrugged; while Zinnie interposed: “Who was already dead, and couldn’t have given him a lovely cup for his christening.” Beechy, her face wrinkling up in sympathy at such a privation, wailed out: “Oh, poor little Mr. Dobree—”; and Boyne, recognizing the difficulty, pursued: “Aeneas, then; but he’s almost as far away as Adam, I’m afraid.”

This drew him into a discussion with Terry regarding the relative seniority of the Biblical and Virgilian heroes, in the intervals of which Miss Scope continued to demand despairingly: “But what in the world are you all arguing about, when we know that Adam was the First Man?”

Judith lifted her head again from its grassy pillow. With half-closed eyes she murmured to the sky: “I don’t believe Mr. Dobree would care a bit if his godfather was Adam or not. He could buy himself any christening cup he liked. I believe he’s a very rich man.”

“Oh, then, do you think he’ll give us all some lovely presents when he goes?” Zinnie promptly inferred.

“What makes you think he’ll ever go?” Judith retorted, closing her eyes.

“Annibal—Annibal! Annibal begins with an A! I know because he was a Prince, my ancestor,” shouted Bun, leaping back into the game.

XX

Mrs. Sellars’s social discipline was too perfect to permit her, even in emergencies, to neglect one obligation for another; and after Mr. Dobree had been for a week at Cortina she said one day to Boyne: “But I’ve seen nothing lately of the little Wheaters. What’s become of them?”

He assured her that they were all right, but had probably been too shy to present themselves at the châlet since Mr. Dobree’s arrival; to which Mrs. Sellars replied, with the faintest hint of tartness, that she had never had occasion to suspect the little Wheaters of being shy, and that, furthermore, Mr. Dobree did not happen to be staying at the châlet.

Boyne smiled. “No; but they know he’s with you a good deal, and he’s a more impressive figure than they’re used to.”

He saw that she scented irony in this, and was not wholly pleased with it. “I don’t know what you mean by impressive; I didn’t know anything in the world could impress the modern hotel child. But Mr. Dobree is very sorry for them, poor dears, and I’m sure it would interest him to see something of them. Why shouldn’t we take them all on a picnic to-morrow? I know Mr. Dobree would like to invite them.”

Boyne felt that, for all the parties concerned, the undertaking might prove formidable. He pointed out that, if Zinnie and the two Buondelmonte children were included in an all-day expedition, Miss Scope’s presence would be necessary, since otherwise all Judith’s energies would be absorbed in keeping the party in order; and Mrs. Sellars acquiesced: “Yes, the poor little things are dreadfully spoilt.”

Boyne was secretly beginning to be of the same mind; but Mrs. Sellars could no longer criticise his young friends without rousing his instinctive opposition. “They certainly haven’t had much opportunity to become little Lord Fauntleroys, if that’s what you mean,” he said impatiently; and his betrothed rejoined: “What I mean is that Mr. Dobree feels sorry for them because of the kind of opportunity they have had. You see, he was one of the lawyers in the Westway divorce.”

Boyne gave her a quick look, in which he was conscious that his resentment flamed. “I’m hanged if I see what there can be in Mr. Dobree’s mind to make him connect the Westway divorce with the Wheater children.”

“Why, simply his knowledge of Judith’s intimacy with that wretched drug-soaked Doll Westway, and his familiarity with the horrible details that led up to the girl’s suicide. She and Judith were together at Deauville the very summer that she killed herself. Both their mothers had gone off heaven knows where. Judith proclaims the fact to every one, as you know.”

Boyne had removed his eyes from Mrs. Sellars’s face, and was staring out at the familiar outline of the great crimson mountains beyond the balcony. A phrase of Stevenson’s about “the lovely and detested scene” (from “The Ebb-tide,” he thought?) strayed through his mind as he gazed. It was hateful to him to think that he might hereafter come to associate those archangelic summits with Mrs. Lullmer’s smooth impervious face, and Mr. Dobree’s knowledge of the inner history of the Westway divorce.

He turned back to Mrs. Sellars. “Aren’t you getting rather sick of this place?” he asked abruptly.

She gave back his irritated stare with one of genuine surprise. “Sick of what? You mean of Cortina?”

“Of the whole show.” His sweeping gesture gathered up in one contemptuous handful the vast panorama of mountain, vale and forest. “I always feel that when scenery gets mixed up with our personal bothers all the virtue goes out of it—as if our worries were so many locusts, eating everything bare.”

Mrs. Sellars was silent for a moment; then her hand fell on his. “I’ve always been afraid, dear, that this queer responsibility you’ve assumed was going to end by getting on your nerves—”

Boyne jumped up, drawing abruptly away from her. “Responsibility? What responsibility?” He walked across the room, turned back, and awkwardly laid an answering caress on her hair. “Gammon! It’s Mr. Dobree who gets on my nerves—just a little.” (“Hypocrite!” he cursed himself inwardly.) “Fact is, I liked Cortina a damned sight better when you and I and the children had it all to ourselves.” He saw the light of reassurance in her averted cheek. “Just my beastly selfishness, I know—I needn’t tell you that men are beastly selfish, need I?” He laughed, and her faint laugh echoed his.

“Mr. Dobree is going soon, I believe,” she volunteered.

Boyne pulled himself together. “Well, that makes it a good deal easier to be unselfish while he’s here, and I take it upon myself to accept his picnic for to-morrow. I’ll drop down and announce it to the children.” He flattered himself that his simulation of buoyancy had produced the desired effect, and that his parting from Mrs. Sellars was unclouded. But halfway down the hill he stood suddenly still in the path, and exclaimed aloud: “But after he’s gone; what then?”

The picnic was beautifully successful—one of those smooth creaseless well-oiled successes as to which one feels that at any moment it may slip from one’s hold and reveal the face of failure. A very Janus of a picnic, Boyne thought....

To the chief actors, however, it presented no such duality, but was the perfect image of what constitutes A Good Time For The Young People, when made out of the happy union of tact and money. To Mr. Dobree it was certainly that, and he was justified in feeling that if you order the two roomiest and most balloon-tired motors obtainable, and fill enough hampers with the most succulent delicacies of a “Palace” restaurant, and are actuated throughout by the kindliest desire to give pleasure, happiness will automatically follow.

As regards the younger members of the party, it undoubtedly did. Terry was strong enough to enjoy the long day on the heights without fear of Miss Scope’s thermometer; Blanca was impressed by the lavish fare which replaced their habitual bread and chocolate; and the small children were in the state of effervescence induced by freedom from lessons and the sense of being the central figures of the day.

And Judith—?

After lunch the younger members of the party trailed away with Miss Scope to hunt for wild strawberries while the others sat pillowed in moss beside a silver waterfall. Boyne, supine against his boulder, studied the scene and meditated from behind a screen of pipe smoke. Judith, a little way off, leaned luxuriously against her mossy cushion, her hat tossed aside, her head resting in the curve of an immature arm. Her profile looked small and clear against the auburn tremor of bracken turned inward by the rush of the water. A live rose burned in her cheeks, darkening her eyebrows and lashes, and putting a velvet shadow under her closed lids. She had fallen asleep, and sleep surrendered her unguarded to her watchers.

“She looks almost grown up—she looks kissable. Why should she, all of a sudden?” Boyne asked himself, suddenly disturbed, not by her increased prettiness (the measure of that varied from hour to hour) but by some new quality in it. He turned his eyes away, and they fell on Mr. Dobree, who sat facing him in the studied abandon of a picnicker unused to picnics. Mr. Dobree’s inexhaustible wardrobe had supplied him with just the slightly shabby homespun suit and slightly faded hat adapted to the occasion; and Boyne wondered whether it were this change of dress which made him also seem different. But no: the difference was deeper. Despite his country clothes, Mr. Dobree did not look easier or less urban; he merely looked more excited and off his guard. His clear cautious eyes had grown blurred and furtive; one could almost see a faint line stretching from them to the recumbent Judith. Along that line it was manifest that Mr. Dobree’s thoughts were racing; and Boyne knew they were the same thoughts as his own. The discovery shocked him indescribably. But he remembered that the levelling tendencies of modern life have levelled differences of age with the rest; and that Mr. Dobree was, to all intents and purposes, but little older than himself. Moreover, he was still brisk and muscular; his glance was habitually alert; in spite of his silver hair there seemed no reason why he should not share with Boyne the contemplation of Judith’s defenceless beauty.

But if this was Boyne’s conclusion it was apparently not Mr. Dobree’s. As Boyne continued to observe him, Mr. Dobree’s habitual pinkness turned to a red which suffused even his temples and eyelids, so that his carefully brushed white hair looked like a sunlit cloud against an angry sky. But with whom was Mr. Dobree angry? Why, with himself, manifestly. His eyes still rested on the dreaming Judith; but the rest of his face looked as if every muscle were tightened in the effort to pull the eyes away. “He’s frightened—he’s frightened at himself,” Boyne thought, calling to mind—with a faint recoil from the reminder—that he also, once or twice, had been vaguely afraid of himself when he had looked too long at Judith. Had his eyes been like that, he wondered? And the muscles of his face been stretched in the effort to detach the eyes? The thing was not pleasant to visualise; and he disliked Mr. Dobree the more for serving as his mirror....

But suddenly Mr. Dobree was on his feet, his whole attention given to Mrs. Sellars. Again Boyne followed his change of direction with a start. Mrs. Sellars—but then she had been there all the time! Shadowed by her spreading hat, her light body bedded in the turf, she looked almost as young and sylvan as Judith. But somehow she had been merged in the landscape, all broken up into a dapple of sun and shade, of murmurs and soughings: her way of fitting into things sometimes had this effect of effacing her. She lifted her head, and in the shade of the hat-brim Boyne caught a delicate watchfulness of brows and lips, as of tiny live things under a protecting leaf.

Mr. Dobree was challenging her jauntily. “Do you see why those young cannibals should monopolise all the wild strawberries? Suppose we leave Mr. Boyne to mount guard over the sleeping beauty, and try to bag our share before it’s too late?”

The words said clearly enough: “Take me away—it’s high time,” and Mrs. Sellars’s gay little answer: “Come on—I’ll show you a patch they’ll never find,” seemed to declare as clearly: “I know; but I’ll see that you don’t come to any mischief.”

She was on her feet before his hands could help her up; something light and bounding in her seemed to spring to his call. “This way, this way,” she cried, starting ahead of him up the boulder-strewn way. Boyne heard their voices mounting the streamside, mingling with the noise of the water, fading and flashing out again like the glimpses of her dress through the beech-leaves. He lay without moving, watching the smoke of his pipe rise in wavering spirals, twisted out of shape by puffs of air from the waterfall. With Mr. Dobree’s withdrawal the ideas suggested by his presence had gone too; Judith Wheater seemed once more a little girl. Though perplexities and uncertainties still lingered on the verge of Boyne’s mind his central self was anchored in a deep circle of peace. Every fibre of him was alive to the exquisite moment; but he had no need to fly from it, no fear of its flying from him. Judith’s sleep was a calm pool in which he rested.

He fancied he must have been watching her for a long time, his thoughts enclosing her in a sort of calm fraternal vigilance, when she opened her eyes and turned them on him, still dewy with sleep.

“Martin!” she hailed him drowsily; then, fully awake, she sat up and exclaimed: “Darling, when are you going to be married? I’ve positively got to know at once.”

She was always startling Boyne, but she had perhaps never startled him more than by this question; for even as she spoke he had been half unconsciously putting it to himself. He remembered, as something already far off, picturesque and unreal as a youthful folly, his resentment of Mrs. Sellars’s delay in fixing a date for their marriage. Was it only two or three weeks ago that he had sent her, with a basket of gentians picked on a lofty upland, a quotation from Marvell’s “Coy Mistress”? Now all that seemed an undergraduate’s impatience. She had taught him that they were very well as they were, and if he still asked himself when they were to be married, the question had imperceptibly taken another form. “What in God’s name will become of the children after we’re married?” was the way he now instinctively put it.

He too sat up, and gazed into Judith’s sleepy eyes. As he did so he was aware that an uncomfortable redness (which did not, he hoped, resemble Mr. Dobree’s) was creeping up to his temples.

“When I’m going to be married? Why? What’s the odds? I don’t know that it’s anybody’s business, anyhow,” he grumbled in an ill-assured voice.

Judith brushed the rebuff aside. “Oh, but it is—it’s mine. For a very particular reason,” she continued, as if affectionately resolved to break down the barrier of his reserve.

“A reason? Nonsense! What has a chit like you got to do with reasons?”

“You mean I’m so unreasonable?” A quick shadow crossed her face. “You didn’t really mean that?”

“I didn’t mean anything at all—any more than you do. I only meant: why aren’t we very well as we are?”

Her eyes grew wide at this, and continued to fix him with a half mocking gravity, while her lips rounded into a smile. “Oh, but, Martin dear, it’s Mrs. Sellars who ought to say that—not you!”

Boyne burst out laughing. How could one ever keep serious for two minutes with any of these preposterous children? And once more he told himself that Judith was as preposterous, and as much of a child, as the youngest of them.

“You know, darling, you ought to be empressé, impatient, passionate,” she adjured him, as if his very life depended on his following her advice.

He leaned on his elbow and examined her with deliberation. “Well, of all the cheek—!”

She shook her head, still smiling. “I’m not cheeky; I’m really not, Martin. But sometimes you strike me as having so little experience—”

(“Thank you,” Boyne interjected.)

“Oh, I mean in those sorts of ways. As if you’d lived all your life so far away from the world.”

“From your world? So I have, thank heaven.” After a moment he added with severity: “So has Mrs. Sellars—thank heaven too.”

The girl stood up, and crossing the mossy space between them, dropped down beside him and laid her hand on his arm. “Now I’ve offended you. Doll Westway always said I had no tact. And all I wanted was to explain why I have to know as soon as possible when you’re to be married.”

“Well, you certainly haven’t explained that,” Boyne answered, turning away from her to relight his pipe.

“No; but I’m going to. And you’ll be pleased. It’s because we’ve all clubbed together—even the steps and Scopy have—to give you a really jolly wedding present; and I think you’ll like what we’ve found. We unearthed it the other day at Toblach, at the antiquaire’s. And we want to know exactly the right moment to give it to you. You do love presents, don’t you, Martin?” she urged, as if straining her utmost to reach some human chord in him. He met the question with another laugh.

“Love presents? I should think I did! Almost as much as you do.” She coloured a little at the insinuation; and perceiving this, he hastened on: “It’s awfully dear of you all, and I’m ever so grateful. But there was no need to be in such a devil of a hurry.”

Her face became all sympathy and interrogation. “Oh, Martin, you don’t mean—things haven’t gone wrong, have they?” Her look and intonation showed that she would have been genuinely distressed if they had. A pang like neuralgia shot through Boyne—yet a pang that was not all bitter. He took her hand, and laid what she had once called a “grown up kiss” on it. “Of course not, dear. And thank you—thank you for everything.... Whatever you’ve all chosen for me, I shall love.... Only, you know, there’s really no sort of hurry.”

She met this in silence, as something manifestly final. Folding her arms behind her, she let her head droop back on them, and her gaze wandered lazily skyward through the flicker of boughs.

Boyne had got his pipe going again. Gradually the tumult in his mind subsided. He sank back lazily at her side, tilting his hat over his brows, and saying to himself: “What on earth’s the use of thinking ahead, anyhow?”

Directly in the line of his vision, Judith’s sandalled feet lay in a bed of bracken, crossed like a resting Mercury’s. He could almost see the little tufted wings at the heels. For the moment his imagination was imprisoned in a circle close about them.

XXI

That evening, when the children, weary but still jubilant, had been dropped at the Pension Rosenglüh, and Boyne had joined Mrs. Sellars for a late dinner at the châlet, the first thing that struck him was that his sapphire had reappeared on her hand.

He wondered afterward how it was that he, in general so unobservant of such details, had noticed that she had resumed the modest stone; and concluded that it was because of Judith’s ridiculous cross-examination about the date of his marriage. He almost suspected that, baffled by his evasiveness, the pertinacious child had ended by addressing herself to Mrs. Sellars, and that the latter, thus challenged, had put on her ring. But no—though Judith was sometimes lacking in tact (as she herself acknowledged) this indiscretion could not be imputed to her, for the reason that Mrs. Sellars—Boyne remembered it only now—had not reappeared on the scene till it was time to pack the sleepy picnickers into the motors. She and Mr. Dobree had been a long time away. They had apparently prolonged their walk, and, incidentally, had failed to find the promised strawberries—or else had consumed them on the spot. And on the way home Judith and Mrs. Sellars had not been in the same car. Why, then, had Mrs. Sellars suddenly put on her ring? Boyne would only suppose that she had decided, for reasons unknown to him, to announce their engagement that night to Mr. Dobree, who was no doubt going to join them at dinner.

The idea obscurely irritated Boyne; he felt bored in advance by the neat and obvious things Mr. Dobree would consider it becoming to say. Boyne’s whole view of Mrs. Sellars’s friend had been changed by his sudden glimpse of the man who had looked out of Mr. Dobree’s eyes at Judith. Before that, Boyne had pigeon-holed him as the successful lawyer, able in his profession, third-rate in other capacities, with a methodically planned existence of which professional affairs filled the larger part, and the rest was divided up like a carefully-weighed vitamin diet (Mr. Dobree was strong on vitamins) between exercise, society, philanthropy and travel. Now, a long way off down this fair perspective, a small, an almost invisible Dobree, lurked and prowled, staring as he had stared at Judith. A sudden irritation filled Boyne at the thought of what, unknown to Mrs. Sellars, peered and grimaced behind her legal counsellor. It was as if Mr. Dobree had unconsciously evoked for him some tragic allegory of Judith’s future....

“Where’s your friend? Are we waiting for him?” Boyne’s question sounded abrupt in his own ears, but was received by Mrs. Sellars with her usual equanimity.

“Mr. Dobree? No, we’re not waiting for him. He’s not coming.”

Boyne felt relieved, yet vaguely baffled. If Dobree wasn’t coming (he immediately thought), why the devil wasn’t he? And what was he up to instead?

“Chucked you for a party at the ‘Palace,’ I suppose? I’m glad he didn’t drag you up there to dine with him.”

“No; I don’t think he’s giving a party—or going to one. He had letters to write; and he said he was tired.”

This seemed to dispose of the matter, and Boyne, still faintly disturbed, followed his betrothed to the dining-table, at which of late he had so seldom sat alone with her.

“Don’t you like it better like this?” she asked, smiling at him across the bowl of wild roses which stood between them.

It was indeed uncommonly pleasant to be alone with her again. She gratified him, at the outset, by praising the behaviour of the children on the picnic; and as they talked he began to think that his growing irritability, and his odd reluctance to look forward to their future together, had been caused only by the intrusion of irrelevant problems and people. “When we’re alone together everything’s always all right,” he thought, reassured.

Dinner over, they drifted out onto the balcony in the old way, and he lit his cigar, and yielded to the sense of immediate wellbeing. He saw that Rose Sellars knew he was glad to be alone with her, and that the knowledge put her at her ease, and made her want to say and do whatever would maintain that mood in him. There was something pathetic in the proud creature’s eagerness to be exactly what he wished her to be.

“Judith was looking her very prettiest today, wasn’t she? Mr. Dobree was so much struck by her,” she said softly, after a silence.

It was as if she had flung a boulder into the very middle of the garden-plot she had just been at such pains to lay out. Boyne met the remark with an exasperated laugh.

“I should say he was struck. That was fairly obvious.”

“Well—she is striking, at times,” Mrs. Sellars conceded, still more gently.

“As any lovely child is. That’s what she is—a lovely child. Dobree looks at her like a dog licking his jaws over a bone.”

“Martin—!”

“Sorry. I never could stand your elderly men who look at little girls. If your friend is so dotty about Judith, he’d better ask her to marry him. He’s rich, isn’t he? His money might be an inducement—who knows?”

“Marry her? Marry Judith? Mr. Dobree?” Mrs. Sellars gave way to a mild mirth. His words certainly sounded absurd enough when she echoed them; but Boyne, for the moment, was beyond heeding anything but the tumult in his own veins.

“Why not?” he continued. “As the poor child is situated, money is a big consideration. What’s the use of being a hypocrite about it? If she’s to fight her parents, and keep the children together, she’ll need cash, and a big pile of it; and a clever lawyer to manœuvre for her, too. I call it an ideal arrangement.”

Mrs. Sellars waited a little before answering; then she said: “I don’t see how the biggest fortune, and the cleverest lawyer in the world, could keep the Wheaters from ordering their children home the day they choose to. But I’m sure that if Judith wanted help and advice no one would be more happy to give it to her than Mr. Dobree.”

“Ah, there you’re right,” Boyne agreed with an ironic shrug.

“Well, and don’t you think perhaps it might be a good thing if she did consult him—or at least if you did, for her?”

“If I intervened in any way between Dobree and Judith I don’t think he’d thank you for putting me up to it.”

“Why—what do you mean?”

“If you don’t know what I mean I can only suppose you didn’t notice how he was looking at the child this afternoon, before you carried him off for a walk.”

Mrs. Sellars fell silent again. He saw the faint lines of perplexity weaving their net over her face, and reflected that when a woman is no longer young she can preserve her air of freshness only in the intervals of feeling. “It’s too bad,” he thought, vexed with himself for having upset the delicate balance of her serenity. But now she was smiling again, a little painfully.

“Looking at her—looking at her how?”

“Well—as I’ve told you.”

The smile persisted. “I certainly didn’t see anything like that. And neither did I carry him off for a walk; as it happens, it was he who carried me—”

“Oh, well,” Boyne murmured at this touch of feminine vanity.

Mrs. Sellars continued: “And I don’t think he’s thinking of Judith in the way you imagine—or that he can have looked at her in that way. I hope he didn’t; because, as it happens, he took me off on that walk to ask me to marry him.”

The words dropped from her with a serene detachment, as if they had been her luminous little smile made audible. “I don’t know that it’s quite fair to him to tell you,” she added, with one of her old-fashioned impulses of reserve.

It was Boyne’s turn to find no answer. For some time he sat gazing into the summer darkness without speaking. “Marry him? Marry Dobree—you?”

“You see you were right: he does want to get married,” she softly bantered. “It was what he came for—to ask me. I’d no idea.... And now he’s going away... he leaves to-morrow,” she added, with a faint sigh in which deprecation and satisfaction were perceptibly mingled. If it was her little triumph she took it meekly, even generously—but nevertheless, he saw, with a complete consciousness of what it meant.

Boyne laughed again, this time at himself.

“I don’t know what you see in it that is so absurd,” Mrs. Sellars murmured, a faint note of vexation in her voice. Again he found no reply, and she continued, with the distant air she assumed when echoing axioms current in her youth: “After all, it’s the highest honour a man can—”

“Oh, quite,” Boyne agreed good-humouredly. He rubbed his hand across his forehead, as if to brush away some inner confusion. But it was no use; he couldn’t straighten his thoughts out. He couldn’t shake off the fact that his surprise and derision had not concerned Rose Sellars at all—that his laugh had simply mocked his own power of self-deception, and uttered his relief at finding himself so deceived. “So that was all!” The words escaped him unawares. In the dusk he felt the shadowy figure at his side stiffen and withdraw from him.

“Shall we go in? It’s getting chilly,” said Mrs. Sellars, turning back toward the lamplight.

Boyne, still in the bewilderment of his own thoughts, followed her into the room. He noticed that she had grown unusually pale. She sat down beside the table, and began turning over the letters and papers which the evening post had brought. Boyne stood in front of the fireplace, his hands in his pockets, watching her movements as one letter after another slipped through her fingers. But all he could see was the sapphire ring, re-established, enthroned, proclaiming his own destiny to all concerned and unconcerned.

“So you told him you were already engaged?”

She looked up at him. “It was only fair, wasn’t it?”

“Certainly—that is, if being engaged was the only obstacle.”

“The only obstacle?”

“If you were prepared to marry Dobree, supposing you’d still been free.”

She weighed this, and then laughed a little, but without much gaiety. “How do I know what I should have done if I’d been free?”

He continued to look at her. “Do you want to try?”

The colour rose to her forehead. She dropped the letters, and composed her hands on them as if in the effort to control a secret agitation. “Is this a way of telling me you’re vexed because I announced our engagement to Mr. Dobree?”

He hesitated, feeling (and now he hated himself for feeling) that it was a moment for going warily. “Not vexed; that’s not the word. Only I did agree with you that, as long as—as nothing about our future was definitely settled—it was ever so much pleasanter keeping our private affairs to ourselves. It was your own idea, you know; you proposed it,” he reminded her, as she remained silent.

“Yes; it was my idea.” She pondered. “But you needn’t be afraid that Mr. Dobree will betray us.”

“It’s not a question of betraying. It’s just the feeling—”

“The feeling that some one else is in our secret? But all the Wheater children have been—for a long time.” She spoke the words ever so lightly, as if she had barely pencilled them on a smooth page.

Boyne was startled. He could see no analogy, but did not know how to explain that there was none. “Oh, the children; but the children don’t count. Besides, that wasn’t my fault. Judith guessed.” He smiled a little at the reminiscence. “But perhaps Mr. Dobree guessed,” he added, with a return of ease. After all, he was carrying it off very well, he thought—though what he meant by “it” he would have been put to it to say.

Mrs. Sellars gave another little laugh. “Oh, no; Mr. Dobree didn’t guess. I had to dot the i’s for him. The fact is”—she paused a moment—“he was convinced that you were in love with Judith Wheater.”

Instantly all the resentments and suspicions which Boyne had dismissed rushed back on him. He had been right, then—he had not mistaken the signs and portents. As if they were ever mistakable! “How rotten,” he said in a low voice.

Mrs. Sellars dropped one of the letters which she had absently taken up again.

“Martin—”

“Rotten. The mere thinking of such a thing—much less insinuating it to any one else. But it just shows—” He broke off, and then began again, on a fresh wave of indignation: “Shows what kind of a mind he must have. Thinking in that way about a child—a mere child—and about any man, any decent man; regarding it as possible, perhaps as natural... worst of all, suggesting it of some one standing in my position toward these children; as if I might take advantage of my opportunities to—to fall in love with a child in the schoolroom!”

Boyne’s words sounded in his own ears as if they were being megaphoned at him across the width of the room. He dropped down into the nearest chair, hot, angry, ashamed, with a throat as dry as if he had been haranguing an open-air meeting on a dusty day.

Opposite him, Mrs. Sellars remained with her hands suspended above the letters. The sapphire burned at him across the interval. “Martin... but you are in love with her!” she exclaimed. She paused a moment, and then added in a quieter voice: “I believe I’ve always known it.” They sat and looked at each other without speaking.

At length Boyne rose, and started to move around the table to where she was sitting.

“This is ridiculous—” he began.

She held up her hand, and the gesture, though evidently meant only to check the words on his lips, had the effect also of arresting his advance. He felt self-conscious and clumsy, and dimly resented her making him feel so. He was sure it was she who had been ridiculous, not he; yet, curiously enough, the conviction brought him no solace. Again they faced each other, guardedly, apprehensively, as if something fragile and precious, which they had been carrying together, had slipped between their fingers and been broken. He felt that, if he glanced at the floor, he might see the glittering fragments....

Mrs. Sellars was the first to recover her self-possession. She rose in her turn, and going up to Boyne laid her hand on his arm.

“I wonder why we’re trying to hurt each other?” She looked at him through moist lashes, and he felt himself a brute for not instantly taking her in his arms and obliterating their discussion with a kiss. But there lay the glittering fragments, and he could not seem to reach to her across them.

“Now I know what she thinks of Judith,” he reflected savagely.

“It’s all my fault, Martin; I know I’m nervous and stupid.” She was clasping his arm, pleading with lifted eyes and lips. Her self-abasement humiliated him. “If she really thinks what she says, why doesn’t she kick me out?” he wondered.

“I suppose I walked too far today, and got over-tired; and what Mr. Dobree said startled me, upset me....”

He smiled. “His asking you to marry him?”

She smiled back a little wearily. “No. But what he said about—about your interest in Judith. You must understand, dear, that sometimes your attitude about those children is a little surprising to people who don’t know all the circumstances.”

Boyne felt himself hardening again. “What business is it of people who don’t know all the circumstances? You do; that’s enough.”

She seized at this with a distressing humility. “Of course I do, dearest; of course it is. And you’ll try to forget my stupid nerves, won’t you? Try to think of me as I am when there’s nobody in the world but you and me?” Her arms stole up to his shoulders, her hands met behind his neck, and she drew his head down softly. “If only it could always be like that!”

As their lips touched he shut his eyes, and tried, with a violent effort of the will, to recall what her kiss would have meant to him on the far-off day when the news of Sellars’s death had overtaken him somewhere in the Nubian desert, and in the middle of the night he had started awake, still clutching the letter, and crying out to himself: “At last....”

XXII

Next day, when Boyne thought over the scene of the previous night, he found for it all the excuses which occur to a sensible man in the glow of his morning bath.

It was all the result of idling and lack of hard exercise; when a working man has had too long a holiday, and resting has become dawdling, Satan proverbially intervenes. But though at first Boyne assumed all the blame, by the time he began to shave he had handed over a part to Mrs. Sellars. After all, it was because of her old-fashioned scruples, her unwillingness to marry him at once, and let him get back to work, that they were still loitering in the Dolomites. It probably wasn’t safe for middle-aged people to have too much leisure in which to weigh each other’s faults and merits.

But then, again, suddenly he thought: “If we’d been married, and gone home when I wanted to, what would have become of the children?” It was undoubtedly because Mrs. Sellars had insisted on prolonging their engagement that Boyne had become involved in the Wheater problem; but when he reached this point in his retrospect he found he could not preserve his impartiality. It was impossible to face the thought of what might have happened to the little Wheaters if chance had not put him in their way....

After all, then, everything was for the best. All he had to do was to persuade Mrs. Sellars of it (which ought not to be difficult, since it was a “best” of her own devising), and to banish from his mind the disturbing figure of Mr. Dobree. Perhaps—on second thoughts—his irritability of the previous evening had been partly due to the suspicion that Mrs. Sellars, for all her affected indifference, was flattered by Mr. Dobree’s proposal. “You never can tell—” Boyne concluded, and shrugged that possibility away too. The thought that he might have had to desert his young friends in their hour of distress, and had been able, instead, to stay and help them, effaced all other considerations. So successfully did he talk himself over to this view that only one cloud remained on his horizon. Mrs. Sellars had said: “I don’t see how the biggest fortune, and the cleverest lawyer in the world, could keep the Wheaters from ordering their children home the day they choose to”; and in saying it she had put her finger on Boyne’s inmost apprehension. He had told himself the same thing a hundred times; but to hear it from any one else made the danger seem more pressing. It reminded him that the little Wheaters’ hold on him was not half as frail as his own on them, and that it was folly to indulge the illusion that he could really direct or control their fate.

And meanwhile—?

Well, he could only mark time; thank heaven it was still his to mark! The Lido season had not yet reached its climax, and till it declined and fell he was free to suppose that its devotees would linger on, hypnotized. As between taking steps for an immediate divorce, and figuring to the last in the daily round of entertainment, Boyne felt sure that not one of the persons concerned would hesitate. They could settle questions of business afterward; and it was purely as business that they regarded a matter in which the extent of the alimony was always the chief point of debate. And what could replace the excitement of a Longhi ball at the Fenice, or of a Marriage of the Doge to the Adriatic, mimed in a reconstituted Bucentaur by the rank and fashion of half Europe? No one would be leaving Venice yet.

But, all the same, the days were flying. The increasing number of arrivals at Cortina, the growing throng of motors on all the mountain ways, showed that before long fashion would be moving from the seashore to the mountains; and when the Lido broke up, what might not break up with it? Boyne felt that the question must at last be faced; that he must have a talk about it that very day with Judith.

It was more than a month since Judith and her flock had appeared at Cortina; and the various parents concerned had promised Boyne that the children should be left in the Dolomites till the summer was over. But what was such a promise worth, and what did the phrase mean on lips so regardless of the seasons? Nothing—Boyne knew it. He was conscious now that, during the last four weeks, he had never gone down to the Pension Rosenglüh without expecting to be told that a summons or a command had come from the Lido. But so far there had been none. The children were protected by the fact that there was no telephone at the pension, and that none of their parents was capable—except under the most extreme pressure—of writing a letter.

When it was impossible to telephone they could, indeed, telegraph; but even the inditing of a telegram required a concentration of mind which, Boyne knew, would become increasingly difficult as the Lido season culminated. Telegrams did, of course, come, especially in the first days, both to Boyne and to Judith: long messages from Joyce about clothes and diet, rambling communications from Lady Wrench, setting forth her rights and grievances in terms which, by the time they had passed through two Italian telegraph-offices, were as confused as the thoughts in her own mind; and lastly, a curt wire from Cliffe Wheater to Boyne: “Wish it definitely understood relinquish no rights whatever how is Chipstone reply paid.”

To all these communications Boyne returned a comprehensive “All right,” and, acting on his advice, Judith did the same, merely adding particulars as to the children’s health and happiness. “On the whole, you know,” she explained to Boyne, “it’s a relief to them all, now the thing’s settled—I always knew it would be.” She and Terry still cherished the hope that in the autumn she would be permitted to take the children out to Grandma Mervin, in America; or that, failing permission, she would be encouraged by Boyne to carry them off secretly. With this in view, she and Miss Scope saved up every penny they could of the allowance which Cliffe Wheater had agreed to make, and which Boyne dealt out to them once a week. But all these arrangements were so precarious, so dependent on the moods of unreasonable and uncertain people, that it seemed a miracle that the little party at the Pension Rosenglüh was still undisturbed. Certainly, if it had been possible to reach them by telephone they would have been scattered long ago. “As soon as they break up at the Lido they’ll be after you,” Boyne had warned Judith from the first; but she had always answered hopefully: “Oh, no: not till after Cowes, if they still go there; and if they don’t, after Venice there’s Biarritz. You’ll see. And before Biarritz there’s a fortnight in Paris for autumn clothes.”

Cowes, in due course, had been relinquished, the Lido exerting too strong a counter-attraction; but after a few more weeks that show also would be packed away in the lumber-room of spent follies.

The fact of having these questions always on his mind kept Boyne from being unduly disturbed by his discussion of the previous evening with Mrs. Sellars. In the wholesome light of morning a sentimental flurry between two sensible people who were deeply attached to each other seemed as nothing compared to the ugly reality perpetually hanging over the little Wheaters; and he felt sure that Mrs. Sellars would take the same view.

She did not disappoint him. When he presented himself at the luncheon hour the very air of the little sitting-room breathed a new serenity; it was as if she had been out early to fill it with flowers. Boyne was not used to delicate readjustments in his sentimental relations. For so many years now his feeling for Rose Sellars had been something apart, like a beautiful picture on the wall of a quiet room; and his other amorous episodes had been too brief and simple for any great amount of manœuvring. He was therefore completely reassured by the gaiety and simplicity of her welcome, and thought to himself once again that there was everything to be said in favour of a long social acquiescence. “A stupid woman, now, would insist on going over the whole thing again, like a blue-bottle that starts in banging about the room after you’re sure you’ve driven it out of the window.”

There was nothing of the blue-bottle about Mrs. Sellars; and she was timorously anxious that Boyne should know it. But her timidity was not base; if she submitted, she submitted proudly. The only sign she gave of a latent embarrassment was in her too great ease, her too blithe determination to deny it. But even this was minimised by the happy fact that she had a piece of news for him.

She did not tell him what it was till lunch was over, and they were finishing their coffee in the sitting-room: she knew the importance of not disturbing a man’s train of thought—even agreeably—while he is in the act of enjoying good food. Boyne had lit his cigar, and was meditating on the uniform excellence of the coffee she managed to give him, when she said, with a little laugh: “Only imagine—Aunt Julia’s on the Atlantic! I had a radio this morning. She says she’s coming over to Paris to see you.”

Boyne had pictured Aunt Julia—when he could spare the time for such an evocation—as something solid, ponderous, essentially immovable. She represented for him the obstinate stability of old New York in the flux of new experiments. It was like being told that Trinity Church, for instance, was taking a Loretto-flight across the Atlantic to see him.

Mrs. Sellars laughed at his incredulous stare. “Are you surprised? I’m not. You see, Aunt Julia was always the delicate sister, the one who had to be nursed. Aunt Gertrude, the strong one, who did the nursing, died last winter—and since then Aunt Julia’s been perfectly well.”

They agreed that such resurrections were not uncommon, and Mrs. Sellars went so far as to declare that, if she didn’t get to Paris in time to meet Aunt Julia, she was prepared to have the latter charter an aeroplane and descend on Cortina. “Indeed we’re only protected by the fact that I don’t believe there’s any landing-field in the Dolomites.”

She went on to say that she would have to leave in a day or two, as Aunt Julia, who was accustomed to having her path smoothed for her, had requested that hotel rooms fulfilling all her somewhat complicated requirements should be made ready for her arrival, a six-cylinder motor with balloon tires and an irreproachable chauffeur engaged to meet her at the station, and a doctor and a masseuse be found in attendance when she arrived—as a result of which precautions she hoped, after an interval of repose, to be well enough to occupy herself with her niece’s plans.

Boyne gasped. “Good Lord—what that cable must have cost her!”

“Oh, it’s not the cost that ever bothers Aunt Julia,” said Aunt Julia’s niece with a certain deference.

Boyne laughed, and agreed that Mrs. Sellars could not prudently refuse such a summons. Somehow it no longer offended him that she should obey it from motives so obviously interested. He could not have said why, but it now seemed to him natural enough that she should hold herself at the disposal of a rich old aunt. He wondered whether it was because her departure would serve to relieve a passing tension; but he dismissed this as a bit of idle casuistry. “The point is that she’s going—and that she and I will probably be awfully glad to see each other when she gets back.”

Mrs. Sellars cast a wistful look about her. After a pause she said: “You don’t know how I hate to think that our good evenings in this dear little room are so nearly over,” in a tone suggesting that she had rather expected Boyne to say it for her, and that he had somehow missed a cue.

“But why over? Not for more than a week, I hope? You’re not going to let yourself be permanently annexed by Aunt Julia?”

She smiled a little perplexedly: evidently other plans were in her mind, plans she had pictured him as instinctively divining. “Not permanently; but I don’t quite know when I shall be able to leave her—”

“Oh, I say, my dear!”

The perplexity lifted from her smile: it seemed to reach out to him like a promise. “But then I expect you to join me very soon. As soon as Aunt Julia’s blood-pressure has been taken, and the doctor and the masseuse and the chauffeur have been tested and passed upon.”

Boyne listened in astonishment. It had never seriously occurred to him that he was to be involved in the ceremony of establishing Aunt Julia on European soil. “Oh, but look here—what earthly use should I be? Why should I be butchered to make Aunt Julia’s holiday?”

“You won’t be. It will be—almost the other way round. I’m going to do everything I possibly can for Aunt Julia; everything to start her successfully on her European adventure. And then I’m going to present the bill.”

“The bill?”

She nodded gaily. “You’re the bill. I’m going to present you, and say: ‘Now you’ve seen him, can you wonder that I mean to marry him at once, whether you like it or not?’”

The words fell on a silence which Boyne, for the moment, found it impossible to break. Mrs. Sellars stood by her writing-table, her slender body leaning to him, her face lit with one of those gleams of lost youth which he had once found so exquisite and poignant. He found it so now, but with another poignancy.

“You mean—you mean—you’ve changed your mind about the date?” He broke off, the words “of our marriage” choking on his lips. Through a mist of bewilderment he saw the tender mockery of her smile, and knew how much courage it disguised. (“I stand here like a stock—what a brute she’ll think me!”)

“Did you imagine I was one of the dreadful women who never change their minds?” She came close, clasped her hands about his arm, lifted her delicate face, still alight with expectation. The face said: “Here I am: to be cherished or shattered—” and he thought again of the glittering fragments he had seen at his feet the night before. He detached her hands, and lifted them, one after another, to his kiss. If only some word—if only the right word—would come to him!

“Martin—don’t you want me to change my mind?” she suddenly challenged him. He held her hands against his breast, caressing them.

“Dear, first of all, I don’t want to be the cause of you doing anything that might offend your aunt... that might interfere... in any way... with her views....” No; he couldn’t go on; the words strangled him. He was too sure that she was aware they did not express what he was thinking, were spoken only to gain time.

But with a gentle tenacity she pursued: “It’s awfully generous of you to think of that. But don’t you suppose, dear, I’ve been miserable at asking you to linger on here when I’ve always known that what you wanted was to be married at once, and get back to work? I’ve been imprisoned in my past—I see it now; I had become the slave of all those years of conformity you used to reproach me with. For a long time I couldn’t get out of their shadow. But you’ve opened my eyes—you’ve set me free. How monstrous to have waited so long for happiness, and then to be afraid to seize it when it comes!” Her arms stole up and drew him. “I’m not afraid now, Martin. You’ve taught me not to be. Henceforth I mean to think of you first, not of Aunt Julia. I mean to marry you as soon as it can be done. I don’t suppose the formalities take very long in Paris, do they? Then, as soon as we’re married, we’ll sail for home.”

He listened in a kind of stupor, saying inwardly: “It’s not that I love her less; it can’t be that I love her less. It’s only that everything that happens between us always seems to happen at the wrong time.”

The silence prolonged itself, on her side stretched and straining, on his built up like a wall, opaque, impenetrable. From beyond it came her little far-off laugh. “Dear, I’m utterly in your hands, you see!”

Evidently there had to be an answer to that. “Rose—” he began. Pretty as her name was, he hardly ever called her by it; he had always felt her too close to him to need a name. She looked up in surprise.

He made a fresh start. “But you see, darling, how things are—”

A little tremor ran across her face. “What things?”

“You know that, after you’d refused to consider the possibility of our getting married at once, I pledged myself....”

The tremor ceased, and her face once more became smooth and impenetrable. He found himself repeating to vacancy: “I pledged myself....”

She drew quietly away, and sat down at a little distance from him. “You’re talking about your odd experiment with the Wheater children?”

“It’s more than an experiment. When I saw the parents in Venice I told them, as you know, that I’d be responsible for the welfare of the children as long as they were left with me.”

“As long as they were left with you! For life, perhaps, then?” She leaned forward, her face drawn with the valiant effort of her smile. “Martin! Is all this serious? It can’t be! You can’t really be asking me to understand that all our plans—our whole future, yours and mine—are to depend, for an indefinite length of time, on the whim of two or three chance acquaintances of yours who are too heartless and self-engrossed to look after their own children!”

Boyne paused a moment; then he said: “We had no plans—I mean, no immediate plans—when I entered into the arrangement. It was by your own choice that—”

“My own choice! Well, then, my own choice, now, is that we should have plans, immediately.” She stood up, trembling a little. She was very pale, and her thin eyebrows drew a straight black bar across her forehead. “Martin—I ask you to come with me at once to Paris.”

“At once? But just now you said in a week or two—”

“And now I say at once: to-morrow.”

He stood leaning against the chimney, as far from her as the little room allowed. A tide of resistance rose in him. “I can’t come to-morrow.”

He was conscious that she was making an intense effort to steady her quivering nerves. “Martin... I don’t want to be unreasonable....”

“You’re never unreasonable,” he said patiently.

“You mean it might have been better if I were!” she flashed back, crimsoning.

“Don’t be—now,” he pleaded.

“No.” She paused. “Very well. Come to Paris in a few days, then.”

“Look here, dear—all this is of no use. No earthly use. I can’t come in a few days, any more than I can come to-morrow. I can’t desert these children till their future is settled in one way or another. I’ve said I’d stick to them, and I mean to. If I turned my back on them now they’d lose their last chance of being able to stay together.”

She received this with bent head and hands clasped stiffly across her knee; but suddenly her self-control broke down. “But, Martin, are you mad? What business is it of yours, anyhow, what becomes of these children?”

“I don’t know,” he said simply.

“You don’t know—you don’t know?”

“No; I only feel it’s got to be. I’m pledged. I can’t get round it.”

“You can’t get round it because you don’t want to. You’re pledged because you want to be. You want to be because Mr. Dobree was right... because....”

“Rose, take care,” he interrupted, very low.

“Take care? At this hour? Of what? For whom? All I care for is to know the truth....”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“You may think you are. But the truth is something very different—something you’re not conscious of yourself, perhaps... not clearly....”

“I believe I’m telling you the whole truth.”

“That when I ask you to choose between me and the Wheater children, you choose the Wheater children—out of philanthropy?”

“I didn’t say out of philanthropy. I said I didn’t know....”

“If you don’t know, I do. You’re in love with Judith Wheater, and you’re trying to persuade yourself that you’re still in love with me.”

He lifted his hands to his face, and covered his eyes, as if from some intolerable vision she had summoned to them. “Don’t Rose, for the Lord’s sake.... Don’t let’s say stupid things—”

“But, dear, I must.” She got up and came close to him again; he felt her hands on his arm. “Listen, Martin. I love you too much not to want to help you. Try to feel that about me, won’t you? Then everything will be so much easier.”

“Yes.”

“Try to understand your own feelings—that’s the best way of sparing mine. I want the truth, that’s all. Try to see the truth, and face it with me—it’s all I ask.”

He dropped his hands, and turned his discouraged eyes on her. But he could only feel that he and she were farther apart than when he had last looked at her; all the rest was confusion and obscurity.

“I don’t know what the truth, as you call it, is; I swear I don’t; but I know it’s not what you think. Judith’s as much a child to me as the others—that I swear to you.”

“Then, dear—”

“Then, I’ve got to stick to them all the same,” he repeated doggedly.

For a time the two continued to stand in silence, with eyes averted, like people straining to catch some far-off sound which will signal relief from a pressing peril. Then, slowly, Boyne turned to Mrs. Sellars. His eyes rested on her profile, so thin, drawn, bloodless, that a fresh pang shot through him. He had often mocked at himself as a man who, in spite of all his wanderings, had never had a real adventure; but now he saw that he himself had been one, had been Rose Sellars’s Great Adventure, the risk and the enchantment of her life. While she had continued, during the weary years of her marriage, to be blameless, exemplary, patient and heroically gay, the thought of Boyne was storing up treasures for her which she would one day put out her hand and take—no matter how long she might have to wait. Her patience, Boyne knew, was endless—it was as long as her hair. She had trained herself to go on waiting for happiness, day after day, month after month, year after year, with the same air of bright unruffled vigilance, like a tireless animal waiting for its prey. One day her prey, her happiness, would appear, and she would snap it up; and on that day there would be no escape from her....

It was terrible, it was hideous, to be picturing her distress as something grasping and predatory; it was more painful still to be entering so acutely into her feelings while a central numbness paralysed his own. All around this numbness there was a great margin of pity and of comprehension; but he knew this was not the region by way of which he could reach her. She who had always lived the life of reason would never forgive him if he called upon her reason now....

“Rose—” he appealed to her.

She turned and he saw her face, composed, remodelled, suffused with a brilliancy like winter starlight. Her lips formed a smiling: “Dear?”

“Rose—”

She took his hand with the lightest pressure. “Dearest, what utter nonsense we’ve both been talking! Of course I don’t mean that you’re to desert the Wheater children for me—and of course you don’t mean that you’re to desert me for them; do you? I believe I understand all you feel; all your fondness for the poor little things. I should shiver at you if you hadn’t grown to love them! But you and I have managed to get each other all on edge, I don’t know how. Don’t you feel what a mistake it would be to go in and out of this question any longer? I have an idea I could find a solution almost at once, if only I weren’t trying to so hard. And so could you, no doubt.” She paused, a little breathlessly, and then resumed her eager monologue. “Let’s say goodbye till to-morrow, shall we?—and produce our respective plans of action when we meet again. And don’t forget that the problem may solve itself without regard to us, and at any minute.”

She had caught at the last splinter of the rock of Reason still visible above the flood; and there she clung, dauntless, unbeaten, uttering the right, the impartial word with lips that pined and withered for his kiss....

“Oh, my dear,” he murmured.

“To-morrow?”

“Yes—to-morrow.”

Before he could take her in his arms she had slipped out of reach, and softly, adroitly closed the door on him. Alone on the landing he was left with the sense that that deft gesture had shut him up with her forever.

XXIII

It was growing more and more evident to Boyne that he could recover his old vision of Mrs. Sellars only when they were apart. He began to think this must be due to his having loved her so long from a distance, having somehow, in consequence of their separation, established with her an ideal relation to which her slightest misapprehension, her least failure to say just what he expected, was a recurring menace.

At first the surprise of finding her, after his long absence, so much younger and more vivid than his remembrance, the glow of long-imagined caresses, the whole enchanting harmony of her presence, had hushed the inner discord. But though she was dearer to him than ever, all free communication seemed to have ceased between them—he could regain it only during those imaginary conversations in which it was he who sustained both sides of the dialogue.

This was what happened when he had walked off the pain and bewilderment of their last talk. For two hours he tramped the heights, unhappy, confused, struggling between the sense of her unreasonableness and of his own predicament; then gradually there stole back on him the serenity always associated with the silent sessions of his thought and hers. On what seemed to him the fundamental issues—questions of fairness, kindness, human charity in the widest meaning—when had she ever failed him in these wordless talks? His position with regard to the Wheater children (hadn’t he admitted it to her?) was unreasonable, indefensible, was whatever else she chose to call it; yes, but it was also human, and that would touch her in the end. He had no doubt that when they met the next day she would have her little solution ready, and be prepared to smile with him over their needless perturbation.

The thought of her deep submissive passion, which contrasted so sharply with his own uneasy self-assertiveness, was the only anxiety that remained with him. He knew now how much she loved him—but did he know how much he loved her? Supposing, for instance, that on getting back to his hotel, now, this very evening, he should find a line telling him that she had decided for both their sakes to break their engagement: well, could he honestly say that it would darken earth and heaven for him? Mortified, hurt, at a loose end—all this he would be; already the tender flesh of his vanity was shrinking, and under it he felt the thrust of wounded affection. But that was all—in the balance how little!

He got back late to the hotel, and walked unheedingly past the letter-rack toward which, at that hour, it was usual to glance for the evening mail. The porter called to him, waving a letter. The envelope bore the New York post-mark, and in the upper corner Boyne recognised the name of the big firm of contracting engineers to whom he had owed some of his most important jobs. They still wrote now and then to consult him: no doubt this letter, which had been forwarded by his London bankers, was of that nature. He pushed it into his pocket, deciding to read it after he had dined. And then he proceeded to dine, alone in a corner of the unfashionable restaurant of his hotel, of which the tables with their thick crockery and clumsy water-carafes seemed like homely fragments of a recently-disjoined table d’hôte, the long old-fashioned hotel table at which travellers used to be seated in his parents’ day. A coarse roll lay by his plate, the table bore a bunch of half-faded purply-pink cosmos in an opaque blue vase: everything about him was ugly and impersonal, yet he hugged himself for not being at the châlet table, with its air of exquisite rusticity, its bowl of cunningly-disposed wild flowers, the shaded candles, the amusing food. Yes; and he was glad, too, not to be sharing the little Wheaters’ pudding at the Pension Rosenglüh; he was suddenly aware of an intense unexpected satisfaction in being for once alone, his own master, with no one that he need be on his guard against or at his best before; no one to be tormented or enchanted by, no one to listen to and answer. “Decidedly, I’m a savage,” he thought, emptying his plateful of savourless soup with an appetite he was almost ashamed of. The moral of it, obviously, was that he had been idle too long, that what he was thirsting for at this very moment was not more rest but more work, and that the idea of giving up his life of rough and toilsome activity for the security of an office in New York, as he had aspired to do a few short months ago, now seemed intolerable. Too old for the fatigue and hardships of an engineer’s life? Why, it was the fatigues and the hardships which, physically speaking, had given the work its zest, just as the delicate mathematical calculations had provided its intellectual stimulus. The combination of two such sources of interest, so rare in other professions, was apparently what he needed to keep him straight, curb his excitable imagination, discipline his nerves, and make him wake up every morning to a steady imperturbable view of life. After dinner, sitting in the dreary little lounge, as he lit his pipe and pulled the letter from his pocket he thought: “I wish to God it was an order to start for Tierra del Fuego!”

It was nothing of the sort, of course: merely an inquiry for the address of a young engineer who had been Boyne’s assistant a few years earlier, and whom the firm in question had lost sight of. They had been struck with Boyne’s estimate of the young man’s ability, and thought they might have an interesting piece of work for him, if he happened to be available, and was not scared by hardships and responsibility. Boyne put the letter into his pocket, leaned back in his chair, and thought: “God! I wish I was his age and just starting—for anywhere.”

His mind turned round and round this thought for the rest of the evening. Perhaps he could make Mrs. Sellars understand that, after all, he had made a mistake in supposing he had reached the age for sedentary labours. Once they were married she would surely see that, for his soul’s sake, and until the remainder of his youth was used up, she must let him go off on these remote exciting expeditions which seemed the only cure for—for what? Well, for the creeping grayness of age, no doubt. The fear of that must be what ailed him. At any rate he must get away; he must. As soon as the fate of the little Wheaters was decided, and he and Rose were married, and he had established her in New York, he must get back into the glorious soul-releasing world of girders and abutments, of working stresses, curvatures and grades.

She had talked of having her little plan ready for him the next day. Well, he would have one for her, at any rate; this big comprehensive one. First, the Wheater tribe transplanted (he didn’t yet see how) to the safe shelter of Grandma Mervin’s wing; then his own marriage; then—flight! He worked himself into a glow of eloquence, as he always did in these one-sided talks, which never failed to end in convincing Mrs. Sellars because he unconsciously eliminated from them all the objections she might possibly have raised.... He went to bed with a sense of fresh air in his soul, as if the mere vision of escape had freed him....

Mrs. Sellars had not said at what hour she expected him the next day; so he decided to wait till lunch, and drop in on her then, as his habit was when they had no particular expedition in view. In the morning he usually strolled down to see how the Rosenglüh refugees were getting on; but on this occasion he left them to themselves, and did not go out till he made for the châlet. As he approached it he was startled by a queer sense of something impending. Oh, not another “scene”; Rose was much too intelligent for that. What he felt was just an uneasy qualm, as if the new air in his soul’s lungs were being gradually pumped out of them again. He glanced up at the balcony, lifting his hand to signal to her; but she was not there. He pushed open the hall door and ran up the short flight of stairs. The little sitting-room was empty: it looked speckless and orderly as a tomb. He noticed at once that the littered writing-table was swept and garnished, and that no scent of viands greeted him through the dining-room door.

She had gone—he became suddenly sure that she had gone. But why? But when? Above all, why without a word? It was so unlike her to do anything abrupt and unaccountable that his vague sense of apprehension returned.

He sat down in the armchair he always occupied, as if the familiar act must re-evoke her, call her back into the seat opposite, in the spirit if not in the flesh. But the room remained disconcertingly, remained even spiritually empty. He had the sense that she had gone indeed, and had taken her soul with her; and the discovery made a queer unexpected void in him. “This is—absurd!” he heard himself exclaiming.

“Rose!” he called out; there was no answer. He stood up, and his wandering eye travelled from the table to the mantelpiece. On its shelf he saw a letter addressed to himself. He seized it and tore it open; and all at once the accents of the writer’s reasonableness floated out into the jangled air of the little room.

“Dearest—After you left yesterday I had a radio from Aunt Julia, asking me to get to Paris as soon as I could, so I decided to motor over to Padua this morning, and catch the Orient Express. And I mean to slip off like this, without seeing you, or even letting you know that I’m going, because, on second thoughts, I believe my little plan (you know I promised you one) will be all the better for a day or two more of quiet thought; so I’ll simply write it to you from Paris instead of talking it to you hurriedly this morning.

“Besides (I’ll confess) I want to keep the picture of our happiness here intact, not frayed and rubbed by more discussion, even the friendliest. You’ll understand, I know. This being together has been something so complete, so exquisite, that I want to carry it away with me in its perfection.... I’ll write in a few days. Till then, if you can, think of me as I think of you. No heart could ask more of another. Rose.”

He sat down again, and read the letter over two or three times. It was sweet and reasonable—but it was also desperately sad. Yes; she had understood that for a time it was best for both that they should be apart. And this was her way of putting it to him. His eyes filled, and he wondered how he could have thought, the night before, that if he suddenly heard she was leaving it would be a relief....

But presently he began to visualise what the day would have been if he had found her there, and they had now been sitting over the lunch-table, “fraying and rubbing” their happiness, as she had put it, by more discussion—useless discussion. How intelligent of her to go—how merciful! Yes; he would think of her as she thought of him; he could now, without a shadow of reserve. He would bless her in all honesty for this respite....

He took a fading mountain-pink from one of the vases on the mantelpiece, put it in his pocket-book with her letter, and started to walk down to the village to send her a telegram. As he walked, he composed it, affectionately, lingeringly. He moved fast through the brisk air, and by the time he had reached the foot of the hill a pang of wholesome hunger reminded him that he had not lunched. Straight ahead, the Pension Rosenglüh lay in his path, and he knew that, even if the little Wheaters had finished their midday meal, Miss Scope would persuade the cook to conjure up an omelette for him....

Instantly he felt a sort of boyish excitement at the idea of surprising the party; and finding the front door unlatched, he crossed the hall and entered the private dining-room which had been assigned to them since the arrival of adult boarders less partial than himself to what Judith called the children’s “dinner-roar.”

His appearance was welcomed with a vocal vigour which must have made the crockery dance even in the grown-up Speise-saal across the hall. “Have the wild animals left a morsel for me?” he asked, and gaily wedged himself in between Judith and Blanca.