IV

Three days passed; they brought nothing new; each was a repetition

of the other; each merged itself in whist. No relief came from the

outside world; the outside world must have found out long ago that

it was not worth while driving many miles to call on the Tancreds.

Three days at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to

Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to

be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally

vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the

Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice

Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and

thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered

perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in;

there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was

looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm

and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the

women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have

another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him

lover-like, with the awful passion of the bore for his victim.

These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them

beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the

existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the

county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up,

too.

He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was

not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not

sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and

aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere

avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but

whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau

and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless

traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had

been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But

he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason

enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with

the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open

arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for

seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was

to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in

dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naif and

entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into

dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What

was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed

to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be

interesting, that he had done anything worth mentioning. Not that he

was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this attitude of

theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold

foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual

youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark,

where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to

distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's godson. The

Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.

The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified

his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was

not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep

opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of

their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional

discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake

night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got

there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He

cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had

spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the

other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward

leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.

To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.

When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger

in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new

friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed

(rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return.

As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but

temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little

trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow

had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rushing passionately

from one end of London to the other, looking up his various

acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the

result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people

failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of

town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had

abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on

these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the

morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him

a nod or a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," and

turned from him with a preoccupied air. He remembered them as they

were seven years ago, when they were all Bohemians together. They

had no manners, good or bad, in those days, those young men; they

called you by strange names; they posed you in peculiar attitudes

and made abominable caricatures of your noble profile; but they

would lend or borrow a five-pound note with equal readiness; they

would give you a supper and a shake-down at any time of the night or

morning. Now it seemed they thought twice about asking you to

dinner, if indeed they thought about it at all. So Durant had been

pleasantly surprised at his godfather's genial letter. Why, bless

his little heart, the old boy had actually pressed him to stay for a

fortnight.

Well, how was he to get through that fortnight? He decided that he

would not get through it at all. He kept himself awake devising

schemes for his liberation; he would find some business to take him

up to town to-morrow; or, if he could not find it, he would invent

it; he would send himself a telegram. And then, against his will,

his mind began running on Miss Tancred. As he had been possessed by

the ideal, so now he was haunted by the reality; it had a horrible

fascination for him. He wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been

young; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever made a joke; he wondered

if Miss Tancred had ever been in love. This third idea was so

incongruous, so impossible, that at last he found himself dallying

with it for the mere extravagant humor of the thing.

If he had only been able to make himself agreeable to Miss

Tancred--for Miss Tancred, if she had the will, had certainly the

power to help him. The unhappy young man had made a careful

inspection of the stables to see if there was a lingering chance

for him there. The sleek bays that brought him from the

station--impossible; the Colonel's cob, a creature too safe to be

exciting; and--yes, there was Miss Tancred's mare. The sight of the

fiery little beast dancing in her stall had affected him with an

uncontrollable desire to ride her. The groom, not without sympathy,

had interpreted his longing glances.

"There's a-many casts sheep's eyes at that there mare, sir; but it

'ud be as much as my place is worth, sir, to let you or any other

gentleman get atop of her. Nobody lays a 'and on that annymal but

Miss Tancred. Miss Tancred's orders, sir."

He might have known it. Miss Tancred was good for nothing, not even

for the loan of a mount.

Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and

kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from

breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his

official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the

meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She

seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton

Manor, or in that vaster entity, the Colonel.

By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to

resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's

attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented

to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.

He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing

in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was

congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked

round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a

side window. There was one hope for him. Rain had fallen over

night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was

feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.

"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you

propose to do with yourself this morning?"

Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all

bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he

proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of

trying to sketch something.

The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly

implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in

those of the house.

"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than

that."

And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and

before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle

of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.

He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the

landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy

full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the

poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that

he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, passionless

heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as

Durant loved her, for her sex with its divine caprices, its madness

and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wickshire. In

Wickshire Mother Nature is no dubious Aphrodite; she is indissolubly

married to man, and behaves like an ordinary British matron, comely

and correct. Durant saw in the immediate foreground a paddock dotted

with young firs, each in a ring fence, beyond the paddock a field

of buttercups shining with a polished gleam, beyond the buttercups a

horizon of trees. Before him to the southeast, soaring above the

roofs of Whithorn-in-Arden, a church spire pointed the way to

heaven; beyond that, traveling low above the railway cutting, a thin

line of smoke indicated the way into the world. Behind him were more

trees; the green crescent of the woods with the white front of Coton

Manor shining in their arms like a heavy, foolish face. He had no

patience with the landscape, with this Nature trimmed and tamed,

these shaven meadows and clean-cut hedges and little rectangular

plantations. It was a typical English landscape, a landscape most

unnecessarily draped, where the bosom of the hills was always

covered, and the very elms were muffled to their feet. A landscape

destitute of passion and sensual charm, a landscape like Miss

Tancred.

Miss Tancred. He no longer felt any wild resentment against that

poor girl; he had learned to judge her leniently. If you live with

bores you inevitably become a bore; at the same time, he admitted

that she was doing her best not to bore him. Meanwhile he

transferred his hatred to her surroundings.

This young man had no philosophy beyond the general impression that

the universe was under infinite obligations to be good to him, a

belief that had found itself rather rudely shaken. He chose his view

and pitched his easel and relieved himself by one deep,

metaphysical, soul-satisfying curse at the devilry of things. Then

he set to work, and with the instinct of a born painter he tried to

find possibilities in the despised landscape. Before long he had

discovered mystery in the woods that lifted their heavy rounded

contours to the sky, gathered and massed and piled on one another

like clouds; deep mystery in their green, green drenched with

liquid and aerial gray, pierced by thick black veins and hollowed

into caverns of darkness and blue dusk. And, though he knew that he

was tying himself to the place by taking it seriously, in an hour's

time he was absorbed and happy.

He was startled by a voice behind him. "Do you think that it's so

very beautiful?"

He turned round. Miss Tancred stood looking over his shoulders, not

at him nor at his sketch, but at the distant prospect.

"It's--nice and open," he answered absently.

"Open? Wait till you've lived in it. To me it's like living with all

the doors shut."

"Too many woods, perhaps. And yet there's always a charm about a

wooded country; it's English."

"Yes, and, like everything English, it's much too serious, too

conventional, too"--she paused for her epithet--"too disgustingly

rich."

He was more startled than ever; she had put his own feeling about it

into words.

"And then it's so painfully proper and respectable. Look at those

ridiculous trees in their petticoats. English to a degree."

"Ah!--if you've been abroad----"

"I haven't been abroad."

"Proud insular boast!"

"I wasn't boasting. I was stating a fact."

"Well, you've some cause to boast. Not to have been abroad is

distinction nowadays."

"If it comes to that I've never been out of this county, except to

London now and then. You wouldn't think it."

He smiled, for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It

explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable

provincial. To be sure, her sentiments were somewhat at variance

with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he

said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she

was going to go. She did not go.

"I'm glad you've discovered something to do here. It must be so

deadly dull."

He found relief in ambiguity. "I am never dull"; adding

irrelevantly, "it's a glorious view."

She brightened visibly. "If you like I can show you a better one

than this. It's not so very far;"--she hesitated--"we might go

to-morrow, perhaps; though it wouldn't be very amusing, I'm afraid."

Again he felt a touch of compunction. She had so clearly grasped the

situation; she was so evidently sorry for him, so conscientious,

even if mistaken, in her efforts to make amends, that he found her

positively pathetic. He answered humbly that he would be delighted

if she would be so good.

Then, conscientiously again, she left him. He watched her tall

figure departing with energetic strides, and he decided that Miss

Tancred was not so bad out of doors, but that she needed a large

background.

The next morning he had the grace to remind her of her promise. They

started at a rapid pace. Durant left the paraphernalia of his art

behind him by way of intimating delicately that the hour was hers.

Miss Tancred was evidently prepared for vigorous walking. She was

dressed suitably and inoffensively in brown holland. She took him up

a long, gradually rising hill to where a group of firs stood on an

isolated mound.

Here Miss Tancred paused, with tilted profile, sniffing the ambient

air. "This," she said, "is the highest point in the county; there is

always a fresh breeze here; to-day you can smell the sea."

"Impossible; we must be right in the very center of England, about

a hundred miles from the nearest coast."

"You can hear it, then. Shut your eyes and listen."

He obeyed. The wind moved and the firs gave out their voice. He

opened his eyes and glanced at Miss Tancred. She was leaning up

against a fir; her eyes looked straight past him into the distance;

the wind had loosened the hair about her forehead; her lips were

parted, her eyes shone; there was an eagerness in her face he had

not yet seen there. It was as if a dead woman had been suddenly made

alive before him. She was gazing and listening.

"If you've never been out of Wickshire, where have you heard the

sea?"

She answered curtly, "I don't know where I've heard it"; then added,

as if by way of apology for her manner, "Do you like it?"

"Immensely."

"Then you must come up whenever you want to. You can always be alone

here."

She spoke as if she were giving him the freedom of her private

sanctuary.

"Have you any sketches of those places you've been to abroad?"

"Sketches? Any amount."

"Have you brought them with you?"

He blushed. He had brought many sketches in the hope of showing them

to a wealthy godfather and an admiring god-sister.

"Some--a few."

"I wish you'd show them to me."

"I shall be delighted." He blushed again, this time for pleasure.

With the desire to bestow a little of it, he asked rashly, "Do you

sketch, Miss Tancred? I saw some water-colors----"

"They were my mother's. I do nothing."

"Oh, I see." (They were going home now.) "I was wondering what on

earth you found to do here."

"I? A great many things. Business chiefly. My father is secretary to

the Primrose League. I write all his letters for him."

"That's one way of being secretary to the Primrose League."

"The usual way, I think. Secretaries generally have

under-secretaries, haven't they? My father dictates."

Durant smiled. He could see him doing it. "What else does Colonel

Tancred do?"

"He does no end of things. All the business of the estate; and he

speaks, at meetings, everywhere. He has lectured----"

It was pathetic, her eagerness to vindicate his intellect, to record

his achievements, to convince Durant that she was proud of him, not

to let him see.

For the rest of the way she was silent, the light died out of her

eyes with every turning, and by the time they had reached Coton

Manor Miss Tancred was herself again.

At whist that evening nobody was pleased. The Colonel looked sulky

and offended, possibly at Durant's disaffection; Durant was moodier

than ever, and even Mrs. Fazakerly seemed depressed. Miss Tancred

remained imperturbable and indifferent, she won every trick without

turning a hair, but when it was all over she left the table

abruptly. She was visibly distressed. Mrs. Fazakerly gazed after her

with an affectionate stare. She turned to Durant.

"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "say something nice to her."

For the life of him Durant could think of nothing nice to say,

beyond congratulating her on her success in the accursed game.

Mrs. Fazakerly chimed in, "With or without a partner Miss Tancred

wins!"

"I always win. So, I imagine, does Mr. Durant."

"And why should I always win?"

"You? You win because you care nothing about the game."

V

If you had told Durant that the end of his first week would find him

sitting under the firs in lonely conversation with Miss Tancred, he

would have smiled at you incredulously. Yet so it was. Her fear of

him, if fear it had been, and not indifference, was wearing away.

She seemed anxious to make friends with him if possible in a less

painfully conscientious manner, and he, on his side, was beginning

to tolerate her. In fact, he went so far as to own that, if it had

not been for that ridiculous idea of his, he would have tolerated

her from the first. It was not her fault if he had been fool enough

to fall in love with her before sight or at half-sight. She had

disappointed him (hence his natural disgust); but the thing had

happened many times before in his experience. After all, he had had

no grounds for his passionate belief in Miss Tancred beyond the

argument from defect, the vague feeling that Destiny owed him amends

for her intolerable shortcomings. But Durant's mind was too sane and

versatile to be long concerned with passion yet unborn. He was not

one of those pitiable sentimentalists who imagine that every

petticoat, or at any rate every well-cut skirt, conceals a probable

ideal. Some women of his acquaintance had defined, not to say

denounced, him as a consummate and dangerous flirt, but these were

not the most discerning of their sex. Durant described himself more

correctly as a sympathetic, though dispassionate, observer of

womankind. In other words, he was not a vulgar flirt; he flirted

with understanding.

An understanding without flirtation was springing up between him and

Miss Tancred. In this God-forsaken place they were comrades in

boredom and isolation. She had said nothing, but in some impalpable

yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the Colonel

bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by

either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his

delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as

if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible

doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their

secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer

avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for

his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit beside

him for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, remaining

silent, or merely exchanging a few frank words with him before she

went her way. In these matters she was gifted with an unerring tact;

without a hint on Durant's part she seemed to know to a nicety how

far her presence was agreeable or otherwise.

This time he had gone up the hill after dinner, and had found her

sitting in the accustomed place. They had been alone that evening,

for the Colonel was dining intimately with Mrs. Fazakerly. That

lady, with a refined friendliness that did her credit, had refrained

from including Miss Tancred and Durant in the invitation, thereby

insuring them one evening's immunity from whist. Durant could make

no better use of his freedom than by spending it alone out of

doors; it seemed that Miss Tancred had done the same with hers.

She was sitting there on the edge of the mound, clasping her knees

and gazing into the distance. He apologized for his intrusion, and

she waked from her abstraction with a dreamy air, making a visible

effort to take him in and realize him. But, though she said simply

that she was glad he had come, the effect of his coming was to

plunge her into deeper abstraction. They sat for some time without

speaking. Miss Tancred had a prodigious faculty for silence, and

Durant let her have her way, being indeed indifferent to Miss

Tancred's way.

At last she spoke.

"It's odd how some people take Nature," said she; "for instance,

Mrs. Fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. She might

just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it

sends her to sleep. She can't love it for its own sake."

"You'll think me horribly rude, but I doubt if any woman can. That

is the one thing a woman is incapable of--a pure passion for Nature,

a really disinterested love of life. It's an essentially masculine

sentiment."

"I don't at all agree with you."

"Don't you? To begin with, it argues more vitality than most women

have got. They take to it as a substitute for other things; and to

be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the

other things."

"What other things?"

She was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and Durant

was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze.

"Other interests, other feelings--whatever it is that women do care

for most."

"I don't know anything about women."

Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she

knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much

to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's

attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the

discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to

please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he

from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have

been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss

Tancred was not absurd.

She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can

you?"

"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."

"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two

women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same

stuff."

"So they are inside--in their souls, I mean."

"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever

is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the

same as a pretty one, would you?"

"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that

there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a

beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."

"And if the woman, why not her soul?"

"Because--because--because there is a certain psychical quality that

is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the

cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the one

unalterable fact--the last reality."

He spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind

to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.

She seemed to be thinking that last point over.

"Yes," she said, "I'm glad you came. I believe you can help me."

"I shall be delighted if I can."

"What do you think of Mrs. Fazakerly?"

Durant was a little taken aback by the suddenness of the question.

"What should I think?"

"I--I hardly know."

She knitted her black brows till they almost touched, and propped

her chin with her hand, as if she were oppressed with the weight of

her own thoughts. It struck him that her provincial mind entertained

an unreasonable suspicion of the consummate little widow, a woman's

jealousy of the superior creature compact of sex; and a sense of

justice made him inclined to defend Mrs. Fazakerly. Besides, he

liked Mrs. Fazakerly; she, at any rate, was not a bore.

"She's a very amusing woman, and I should say she was an uncommonly

good sort, too."

To his surprise her face brightened. "Should you? Should you say

that she had a good heart?"

"Really, Miss Tancred, I can't see into Mrs. Fazakerly's heart, but

I wouldn't mind betting----"

"That she's good? And affectionate? And straight?"

"Straight as a die."

"And honest?"

"Oh, Lord, yes." He wondered whatever primitive meaning she attached

to the word.

"Well, if you think that----"

"Mind you, my opinion may be utterly worthless."

"No, no. It's just the very sort of opinion I want."

"Why should it be?"

"Because it's the opinion of a man of the world. Mrs. Fazakerly's a

woman of the world, so I thought you'd understand her. I don't."

"I've known her exactly a week, and you?"

"Two years. But then I don't observe character, and you do. And yet

I have an intuition."

"Then by all means trust your intuition."

"That's it--I daren't. The truth is, I'm afraid of myself--my

motives."

"Your motives are not yourself."

"Aren't they? If it wasn't for them I should be certain. I see she's

a dear little woman, and I know that I like her."

"Then, for Heaven's sake, go on liking her; it's the best thing you

can do."

"Isn't it rather horrid to like a person just because they may be of

use to you?"

"Not in the least. You were pleased to say I might be of use to you,

and I'm sure I hope you like me."

"Yes, I like you; but I think I like you for yourself. I'm afraid of

liking Mrs. Fazakerly from the wrong motive."

"You can't like her from the wrong motive. You can't have a motive

at all, if it comes to that. You might have a motive for killing

her, or for cultivating her acquaintance, but not for liking her.

You either like a person or not, and there's an end of it."

"If your motives are not yourself, what are they?"

"Lord only knows. Forces, tendencies, that determine your actions,

which are the very smallest part of you. What you call intuitions,

your feelings--hate (I should say you were a good hater), and

love----" (her eyes, which had been fixed on his, dropped

suddenly), "don't wait for motives. They're the only spontaneous

things about you, the only realities you know." (And of these he had

said just now that the last reality was sex. It was his point of

view, a point from which it appeared that for him Miss Tancred had

no existence.) "Of course there may be some transcendental sense in

which they're not realities at all; but as far as we are concerned

they're not only real, but positively self-existent."

As he thus discoursed, Durant blinked critically at the sky, while

his pencil described an airy curve on the infinite blue, symbolizing

the grace, the fluency, and the vastness of his thought.

"They, if you like, are you. It's very odd that you don't seem to

trust them more."

She had turned from him till her face was a thin outline against the

sky. She had a fine head, and carried it well, too; and at the

moment the twilight dealt tenderly with her dress and face; it

purified the tragic pallor of her forehead and all but defined that

vague, haunting suggestion of a possible charm. Durant had it a

moment ago--there--then. Ah! now he had lost it.

"I daren't trust my feelings. I can't. There are too many of them.

They won't work the same way. They're all fighting against each

other."

"Then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."

"If I only knew which _was_ the strongest."

"You'll know some day. In the long run, you see, the strongest is

bound to win."

"Not necessarily. There might be a number of little ones that all

together would be stronger still."

"Oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time--go for them,

throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle,

_stamp_!"

"You can't jump on your own shadow. You can't stamp on them if

they're _you_."

He groaned. Miss Tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting

in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had

about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the

action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.

"You must let yourself go, Miss Tancred--let yourself go!" And he

laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent,

Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred voluptuous, volatile,

victorious!

And then a thought struck him.

He turned and saw Miss Tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her

knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.