Burnett Minor.
"You said uncle. You weren't quite right. That's my father," she said
again.
Burnett Minor's life was full of miracles. A miracle more or less made
no difference. Her eyes sparkled. She alone of the girls believed.
"Not really?" she gasped.
Louie nodded.
"Qu'est c'qu'elle dit?" Pigou cried excitedly, somewhere at the back.
"Pooh, she didn't--she only nodded--nodding isn't a lie," a casuist
scoffed.
"Stupid, don't you see she's joking?"
But Burnett Minor was watching Louie--only to be quite sure.
"Honour?" she cried. "Spit your death?"
"Honour."
"How splen-_diferous_! And you never told us!"
But Burnett Major had already looked at her sister. She was shocked
into using her Christian name. "_Genista!_" she reproved her.
"Let me look again," said Louie.
She looked again at the man who had been cruel, faithless, divorced.
Again she handed the "Life" back.
"He keeps a public-house up the river," she said.
At that the tension was suddenly relieved. That, of course, was too
much. They breathed freely again. The derisive clamour broke out.
"Oh, don't you see? They've made it up between them--frauds!"
"Of course they have! Come and finish tea."
"She'll be saying that was the man who brought her down next!"
"Causton, I'll never, never believe another word you say!"
"Come on--the housekeeper will be here in a minute."
"Pig, you've stolen my piece of cake that I was saving!"
"Hurl the bread and butter, Mac."
And the crowd which had gathered about Louie dispersed to the tables
again.
Not until ten minutes later, when she had gone up to her own room
again, did Louie begin to wonder what had impelled her to make her
surprising declaration. But in an instant her ten-years'-old habit of
thought asserted itself again. Why have made it? Rather, why not have
made it? She would have made it sooner had occasion offered. Elwell
and the Burnetts did not drag their fathers in; she had not dragged
her father in either. She had not told them that her mother was Lord
Moone's sister--it was known, but she had not told them; why should
she have paraded the fact that her father was this redoubtable Buck,
from whose beezer the claret had flowed as he had advanced for the
twenty-eighth round? They could have known it any time they had
wanted! Conceal it? Why, had she not all her life been glorying in
that very pride of the cobbler's dog?
And still, deep down in her, she wondered whether it had been even
that sort of pride, and not rather that secret hunger of the heart
that, while she was "in at" everything, she was also "out of"
everything. Had it been that that had caused her to say quietly:
"That's my father"?
Or perhaps it was even something deeper still. Perhaps, in a word, it
had been her blind groping towards that crude and strong and cruel and
joyous life Richenda Earle had said she knew nothing about.
She wondered whether the girls downstairs were talking about her now.
Her eyes fell on the black-framed miniature of the fourth Lord Moone.
Then, as if her brain had received a number of disordered impressions
all heaped one on the top of the other, she sat down on the edge of
her bed, not so much to think as to remember again exactly what had
happened.
Gradually the disorder cleared. Phrases and the tones in which they
had been uttered began to stand forth more distinctly. Presently she
was able to allocate each to its speaker. It was her first attempt to
estimate differences in the future her declaration might have made.
Burnett Minor, of course, she could dismiss summarily. To her it had
been a high lark, that but endeared Louie to her the more. But Burnett
Major? What about her? "_Genista!_" she had exclaimed, shocked at her
young sister's apparent belief in the socially impossible. Yes, it
would be interesting to see what difference, if any, was to be seen in
Burnett Major's attitude now. And Elwell's "_Oh!_" What about that?
And Macfarlane's blank look? And what did Richenda Earle think?
Louie did not know yet.
And what about Mrs. Lovenant-Smith? Undoubtedly Mrs. Lovenant-Smith,
knowing about it herself, would have preferred Louie to keep silence.
The thought of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, however, always braced Louie. That
curious pleased coldness came into her eyes again. She would see about
Mrs. Lovenant-Smith by-and-by. In the meantime, the last thing she
intended to do was to absent herself from them all. She would go down
to supper.
She took a clean blouse from a drawer, laid it out on her bed, and
then, reaching for a towel, started for the bathroom.
Before she reached the bathroom, however, one of her conjectures was
already answered. Richenda Earle's cubicle was on the same corridor as
hers, four doors lower down, and she met Richenda herself, who had
come back from her vacation a week before, by the embrasure of one of
the latticed courtyard windows. It was almost dark; in the recess the
little reflectored oil lamp had been lighted, and it shone on the
Scholarship girl's copper hair and angular shoulders. Louie stopped.
She did so deliberately. Let Earle allude if she dared.
"You washed?" she said, on a rising note.
"No, not yet. I--I came up for a book," said Richenda.
"You're not studying to-night, are you?"
"Ye-es--oh yes, I must."
"Classification?"
"Ye-es--yes."
"How far have you got now?"
Louie's mood was on her. It was overdue, but it had come now, and she
was challenging Earle. Nevertheless, she was ignorant of what she
really challenged when she challenged Earle. Hard knowledge of the
true weight of Life will tell, and Earle's knowledge of that weight
told now. The girl's head was downhung, so that the nodule of bone at
the back of her neck caught the light sharply. Suddenly she looked up.
"But you are Lord Moone's niece, aren't you?" she said, without
preface.
Since her vacation, this daughter of a struggling Westbourne Grove
bookseller had seemed less assertive than before, and was, somehow,
none the worse for it. Louie didn't know what had made the difference,
but she momentarily dropped her point.
"Yes," she said. "Why?"
"Then----?" Richenda halted.
"Then what? The other that I told them downstairs is just as true, if
that's what you want to know."
"But--but----"
"Well, what?"
Earle evidently mitigated what she had been about to say.
"I only mean that--that you must have thought it queer, my talking as
I did--that morning, you know?"
Louie saw the approach of the first attitude for her garner.
"What morning?" she demanded.
"When they punished me--when I was washing the fruit trees."
"I remember. Well, why should I think anything queer?"
Earle's head dropped again. Again the sharp nodule of bone showed.
"Do you mean," Louie said, "that if my father's what I said, no doubt
I know as much about what you were saying as you do?"
"Oh no!" Earle said, the more quickly that that probably had been what
she had meant.
"Then what do you mean?"
"Only that it's--so odd----"
But suddenly Louie gave her towel a twitch and turned away. She spoke
with her chin over her shoulder.
"I don't love my mother," she said, "but for all that she is Lord
Moone's sister--Augustus Evelyn Francis Scarisbrick, Lord Moone. And
the other's my father. I wouldn't study too hard about it if I were
you. You have your medal to get."
She walked abruptly to the bathroom.
That night, as usual, she sat at supper between Burnett Minor and
Richenda Earle. The ordinarily irrepressible child on her left was
silent; but others, two or three places removed from Louie, leaned
back or forward from time to time to speak to her. She fancied Burnett
Minor had been crying; she was sure of this when, giving the child's
hand a pat under the table, she felt her own hand impulsively caught
and squeezed. Then, in proportion as Burnett Minor cheered up (which
she usually did very quickly), the others ceased to talk across to
Louie. It was as if, whoever did it, some normal level of chatter must
be maintained. Soon supper was as desultorily talkative as it always
was. Louie, glancing at the top table, saw that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith
knew nothing of what had happened at tea-time. She was, however, quite
ready for her the moment she should find out something.
V
One afternoon about three weeks later Louie Causton had occasion to go
into the carpenter's shed. This shed lay between the dairies and the
boiler-house that was the centre of the hot-water-pipe system, and
Priddy had a frame making there. Half this frame, protected by a board
with "Wet Paint" chalked upon it, leaned against the outside wall,
and, with his back to the sunlit doorway, a young man, whom at first
Louie took to be Priddy, was doing something at a bench. Hearing her,
he turned. It was not Priddy. Louie did not know him.
There is in the British Museum a small helmeted head very like the
young man Louie saw. It is on the upper floor, among the Tanagras, in
a case on the left as you walk from the stairs. This young man, of
course, was not helmeted. His face was handsome and slightly vacuous;
his eyes in particular had something of the blankness of the little
terra-cotta head; and his mouth was full and classically curved, and
had the slightest of smudges of dark moustache along the deeply
indented upper lip. A pair of rolling muscular shoulders showed
through his white sweater; his old trousers were tucked into a pair of
wooden-looking boots; and he was filing something. Louie wondered what
business he had there.
He told her. He spoke in a slow voice, as if he had got his
explanation by rote. He was there by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's permission,
he said.
"We had a smash with the centre-board, you see," he explained.
"Crash--just at tea-time. Izzard wanted to send it to Mazzicombe, but
I told him they'd charge nearly as much as we gave for the beastly
boat. So I'm doing it myself."
Then, as if his presence within the precincts of a horticultural
college for young women was quite explained, he bent over his filing
again. Louie, who had come for a couple of boards that had been put
aside for her, took them and went out. She was twenty yards away when
she heard the young man call slowly after her: "I say--I ought to
carry those for you, you know----"
The boards were for her bed. This she had removed from the orchard.
The new place lay quite beyond the orchard, at the foot of the hill
between Chesson's and the sea. There, for the first time on the
previous night, she had had the best of what breeze there was.
It had been the attitude of her fellow-students during the past
month--or, more fairly, what she had conceived to be their
attitude--that had caused her thus to remove herself.
It might be too much to say that she was still not as popular as ever.
These things are not demonstrable. Popular she had been; now--well, it
depended a little more than it had done. Burnett Minor, of course,
would have eaten from the same plate with her by day and shared her
bed at night had she been permitted--also had she not left for her
vacation a fortnight before; but Burnett Major--Louie was not so sure
about Burnett Major. Her attitude had been more than correct; it had
been so correct that Louie had been put altogether in the wrong. The
words, of course, had never been said, but Louie had imagined Burnett
Major's private opinion to be as follows:--
"But why didn't she tell us sooner? What earthly difference does she
suppose it would have made? Who cares about things like that? I dare
say her father's just as good as anybody else's father; for that
matter, mother's grandfather was only a farmer--mother told us so
herself; but nobody likes being treated as if they were snobs. It
showed a lack of confidence, that's what it showed; and I don't
know--now--I mean no girl, unless she _wasn't_ quite a lady,
would----" Louie could supply that part too.
"I don't care--I _love_ Causton!" she had also imagined B. Minor as
having sobbed, bold and unconvinced. "He didn't sky the wiper when his
beezer was bleeding, anyway!"
Yes: for Burnett Major, presentation and all the rest of it lay ahead.
Matters would probably have stopped at that had Louie herself allowed
them to do so; but that would not have been like Louie. Allow them to
stop there? Good gracious, no! Her cynicism had become bright indeed.
_She_ was not the girl to contaminate the innocent Burnett Minor;
neither--for she was a Scarisbrick when all was said and done--was she
going to be driven willy-nilly into the society of Richenda Earle as
company good enough for her. She could look after herself, thank you.
Coventry is no unpleasant place provided you have the putting of
yourself there, and at any rate her Coventry at the foot of the hill
was cooler at night than the other one. It meant carrying her mattress
and bedding a little farther, but she had a prizefighter's physique to
carry them with, which was more than her nearest neighbour, Elwell,
the daughter of the Treasury mandarin, could say.
It is true that she did sometimes wonder (with Burnett Major, perhaps)
whether she had not inherited also from the prizefighter something
less desirable than his physique--a discontented and ill-conditioned
nature. But that did not mend matters. It merely made her, if it did
anything at all, distrustful of herself. And as this is the story of
Louie, virtues and vices and all, her moods must go down with the
rest.
At any rate, rolled in her blanket at the foot of the hill, she could
feel the night wind on her face, and see the stars, and in her fancy
deride or boast of her parentage to her heart's content.
On the afternoon following that on which she had fetched the boards
from the carpenter's shed she went to the shed again, this time for a
couple of tent-pegs and a piece of cord for the better securing of her
blankets. The vacant young Tanagra was still there. But this time he
was not quite so vacant. He had had leisure to think of quite a number
of words.
"I say," he said, lifting slow and bashful eyes of the colour of blue
porcelain to Louie, "I've been thinking. Haven't I seen you before?"
"Yes. Yesterday," said Louie shortly. He had had the bad luck to catch
her at her brooding. But he did not seem to notice her curtness.
"No, but I mean--before----"
"When?"
"Isn't--isn't your name Chaffinger?" He almost blushed.
"No."
"Oh!"
Then she relented a little.
"I was called Chaffinger for a time. My name's Causton. I suppose
yours is Chesson, or you'd hardly be here?"
"Chesson? Why Chesson? No. Mine's Lovenant-Smith--Roy Lovenant-Smith."
"Oh!" said Louie. "Then you're right. We have met before, at Mallard
Bois."
Roy Lovenant-Smith appeared to be so relieved at being rid of a
perplexity that he didn't much care if they never met again.
"I thought we had," he said mildly. "You were Louie Chaffinger then. I
knew you were."
"But what," Louie asked, "are you doing here?"
He radiated simplicity.
"That centre-board, didn't I tell you? Izzard would make me go halves
in the rotten old thing; just look at her; hardly a shroud on the port
side, and the centre-board was hitched up with a piece of old rope
instead of a chain and down it came the other tea-time. It's the cabin
table as well as the centre-board, you see, and the whole thing shut
up-just like that----"
He set the inner edges of his hands together and then closed his palms
with a slap.
"All the tea--jam and all the lot," he said.
He amused Louie. "That was a pity," she said demurely.
"Wasn't it? But I say, I shall be catching it. I might use the shed,
aunt said, but she told me it was a fixed Rule about men, unless
you're a gardener, of course----"
("An obedient nephew," Louie thought.) "Then I must go at once," she
added.
"Well, I shouldn't like to get you into a row too," said Roy
Lovenant-Smith ingenuously.
"No," Louie agreed, more demurely still. "They have to be strict, you
know."
"Rather!" said Roy Lovenant-Smith heartily.
And Louie left him.
She was hardly out of sight before her laughter broke forth. "'All the
tea--jam and all the lot!'" she repeated softly, and laughed again.
She scarcely remembered this delightful young man. When, as a child of
eleven, she had played leapfrog, he could hardly have been more than
seven, and she felt herself to be far more than four years his senior
now. He was the adjutant's son, she supposed. Well, he would hardly
need Chaff's usual extenuation about his being a bad fellow at all:
Louie would be very much surprised if he had wit enough to be very
bad, or, for the matter of that, very anything else either. Once more
she laughed. At any rate she had to thank him for dispelling her
megrims for the time being. Still laughing softly, she passed through
the orchards, ascended the hill, and sought her favourite place by the
stile at the top.
She had not thought very much about young men. She had observed them
as so many phenomena, obviously superior to the animals, yet not quite
identifiable as beings with inner experiences akin to her own. They
looked at her irregular mouth and elongated chin, said the things
young men did say, and departed again, taking their various moustaches
and their unvarying smell of tobacco to some girl of the kind she knew
they accounted "pretty." They were quite different beings from the
fairy prince of her childhood; and since her childhood's days she had
grown gradually, she did not know how, to a fairly accurate estimate
in retrospect of the "little party" to which Chaff had once taken her,
pigtails and all. Her views of marriage too were coloured by that
mixed parentage that made her, she supposed, not "common" and not "a
lady." She would not marry unless this was clearly understood. What
else there might be in marriage was shadowy, to be considered after
this redoubtable magnanimity was safely out of the way.
With no young man had she ever had "a lark."
She was, however, more in the mood for a lark now--not necessarily
with a young man--than she had ever been in her life before. "Cau-ston
a vingt-quatr'ans--elle coiffe deja Sainte Catherine," the remorseless
Pigou had said: oh, had she? Did she? Moreover, you cannot put
yourself gloomily into Coventry; others must be made to see that you
consider your sequestration the most desirable of conditions. Indeed,
she had said as much to Richenda Earle only the night before.
Richenda was the only one of the girls who slept indoors, and Louie,
carrying her bed-trappings out from the house, had come upon Richenda
by the little green door of the espaliered wall that led to the
orchards. Richenda had made an advance, willing, apparently, to forget
the snub Louie had administered after the "Life and Battles"
revelation, and had offered to carry her pillow for her.
"Why do you go so far?" she had asked, as they had left the orchard
behind.
"Oh, I hate being disturbed," Louie had replied. "I'd go right down to
the shore if it wasn't for the climb up again."
"But suppose you wanted anything during the night?"
"What should I want?"
"Of course, I forgot. You don't have headaches. I have--frightful
ones."
"Then why don't you come out too? There's quite a jolly place here.
I'd help you to carry your things."
"Oh, I've got to read," Richenda had shaken her head.
"You'd be heaps better for it----"
Louie had not much in common with Richenda--save perhaps (she loved
little cuts like this at herself) that both of their fathers were
literary. But she had had that rather brutal snub on her conscience.
That had come out next.
"You do study too hard," she had said, "and--I say, Earle--I'm sorry
for what I said that night--you know--when I snapped at you and said
you'd your medal to get. Will you forget that?"
The next moment she had almost wished she hadn't said it, Earle's
hungry gratitude had shown so.
"It wasn't your fault a bit," the red-haired girl had broken out
impulsively. "It was all mine. I ought to have minded my own business.
But I was so--so----"
"Well, try sleeping up here," Louie had cut her short. "It's jolly."
But Richenda had gone on. "I was stupid," she had murmured.
"I don't know that you were. You see how it is."
"Oh, I was, I was----"
"Well, as I tell you, I don't think much of my mother's lot."
"Ah, _you_ can say so," Richenda had replied, shaking her head. Then,
as Louie had thrown down her mattress, "You don't mean to say you
undress here?" she had asked.
"Well, I don't sleep in my clothes."
"But don't your things get wet?"
"I wrap 'em in my waterproof.... You won't come up, then, and run down
to the shore for a bathe before breakfast?"
"Causton, they'll be dropping on you yet!" Earle had said, almost
frightened.
"Well, without the bathe?"
"Oh, I should die!"
And Richenda had gone back to sleep where she might find remedies for
her headaches within reach of her hand during the night.
Louie sat on the stile. The sea had a soft bloom, and the sky was of
the colour of the whites of a baby's eyes. Bees hummed among the
scabious, and blue and sulphur butterflies hovered over the patches of
wild thyme. A tramp, sullying the air behind her, crept slowly up to
Bristol; a single nodding grass-head near at hand shut her out almost
completely. Mazzicombe, down under the hill, was hidden. Louie watched
it all, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, of how sweet it was
to relax all her muscles to the point of not stumbling off the stile,
and all her mind save that she might still be just conscious that she
existed and was Louie Causton....
"Hallo," said a slow, imperturbable voice behind her; "here we are
again."
She started a little. Roy Lovenant-Smith was returning with a baulk of
old wood over his shoulder.
"Oh, it's you," she said. She did not know whether she was glad or
annoyed to be interrupted.
"Yes, it's me," he replied placidly.
She was silent for a moment; then: "I thought you hadn't to hang about
here?" she said.
"Well," he put it to her candidly, "how can I get over the stile when
you're sitting on it? How can I, now?"
She laughed. "Well, I must get off on my proper side." She did so.
"There," she said.
He climbed over with great deliberateness, walked a few yards with his
piece of timber, and then turned again.
"No, you can't see her from here," he said. "She's down under the hill
there. I don't think she's worth bothering about, but Izzard says
she'll be quite all right with a new stay or two. I suppose I shall
have to get 'em."
Louie felt a return of her amusement.
"Who's Izzard?" she asked.
"Izzard?" He looked at her as if she ought to know that. "Izzard's the
other chap. Always painting, you know. Painting and mooning about and
leaving me to do all the work. He's away there somewhere now." He
pointed vaguely across the Channel. "I suppose he'll come back when
he's ready. She _is_ an old egg-box!--I say, how's your cousin Eric?
And that girl--what's her name--Cynthia, wasn't it?"
She didn't know, and told him so; she did not tell him that she didn't
care either. He cogitated for a moment, and then said:
"But I say--what do you _do_ at this place? Seems funny to me.... Mind
yourself--somebody wants to get over----"
She had not heard anybody approach. It was Priddy, going down to
Mazzicombe. Louie stood aside from the stile. Priddy climbed over it
and began to descend the hill. Lovenant-Smith looked at Louie in
surprise.
"I say," he said, "that's cool! Don't those fellows take their hats
off to you?"
"No," said Louie. Then she turned her clear grey eyes on him. She had
been fairly caught.
"Don't they? By Jove!... What are you looking at me like that for?"
The rippling laugh with which Louie replied dropped a note. "Guess!"
she said.
"How can I guess?" he asked, with his innocent and statue-like stare.
For answer, Louie glanced to where Priddy's brown bowler hat was
disappearing over the edge of the hill. Roy Lovenant-Smith saw--he
really saw----
"What?" he exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that that chap will----?"
She nodded. He stared.
"What, get you into a row for talking to me?"
"He may not."
"No, but really, joking apart?" he said incredulously.
"Perhaps he won't."
"Oh, come, I say!... Look here, shall I go back with you and explain?"
The innocent! "I don't think I would," said Louie, smothering her
laughter.
"But--hang it all! I say, I _am_ sorry!"
"Oh?"
"I mean sorry I've got you into a row, of course," he amended.
"Oh, I thought you meant sorry you stopped and talked to me."
"Of course not. That is, if it doesn't get you into a row."
"And if it did----?"
"Well, a chap doesn't like getting people into rows. Look here--that
beggar wants talking to!"
Louie dropped her eyes. "I've been in rows before," she said.
Instantly he cheered up. "Oh, I see! You mean it wouldn't be much?"
"Well, your aunt can't exactly skin me." At the recollection of Mrs.
Lovenant-Smith she glanced with satisfaction at her hands.
"Oh, I'll make that all right with her," said Roy Lovenant-Smith
hopefully.
She looked at him. He _was_ an innocent! "You know what that would
mean?" she said.
"What?"
"Well, merely that you wouldn't see me again."
His look too rested on her hands. "Why?" he asked.
She straightened herself. "Oh, never mind about it. I'm going now."
He coloured a little. "But I say--Louie--you don't mind my calling you
Louie, do you? I used to, you know.--I should like to see you again."
"Perhaps you'd better not," she said, with great demureness.
"Oh, rot!" he expostulated. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and
then leave her in the lurch!"
"You'd like to see me just once again, to see whether I'd got into a
row or not?"
"That's what I mean."
It wasn't what Louie had meant him to mean, but "Well, once, if you
like," she conceded.
"All right. What about here, at this time to-morrow?"
"I'll see if I can get away from my studies."
"Right. And if I see that chap in Mazzicombe, may I say anything to
him?"
"Please don't."
"Not about not taking his hat off?"
"Oh, they don't trouble about that sort of thing here."
"Well, they jolly well ought. All right, I won't. Good-bye----"
"Good-bye."
He took his board and followed Priddy; she turned back to the college.
She laughed again. At any rate, a lark with a pleasant image was
better than a hole-in-corner, Miss Hastings affair with a gardener.
She would _not_ "coiffe Sainte Catherine."
She duly got her wigging. She was put "on her honour" by Mrs.
Lovenant-Smith not to see the young man again who had betrayed the
confidence put in him. This struck her as quite richly arrogant. To be
put "on your honour" by somebody before whom you stand mute as a fish,
and to have it assumed that you accept the bond, was the _largior
ether_ indeed. Louie did not even feel called upon to say that she
declined to consider herself bound. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith might take her
"off her honour" again. She met Roy scarcely three hours later. The
interview he himself had had with his aunt in the meantime affected
the situation but little; his centre-board was now patched up, and the
withdrawing of the privilege of the carpenter's shed made no
difference.
They met again on the afternoon following that, and again on the one
after that. Louie found herself hoping that Izzard, whoever he was,
would not return from "over there" just yet. Let somebody else attend
to the hair-combing of the Saint.
* * * * *
A score of different things contributed to her enjoyment of that
affair of atmosphere--her "lark." First, the initiative was hers--for
her empty-eyed statue accepted everything with as much candour as if
he had been born into a virgin world on the eighth day of its
creation. Next, the mere disregarding of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was a
pleasure she felt it incumbent upon herself not to forgo. Next, there
was the instinctive courage with which she translated her sulks into
carelessness and gaiety. Next--but allow what you will for the rest:
pique, vanity, her derivation, her upbringing. When, the third time
she met Roy by the stile, the half-French girl, Pigou, came upon them,
and instantly flew to spread the news among such girls as still
remained at Chesson's, Louie's Coventry was the coveted thing she had
all along intended it should be.
For she was more than merely popular now; she was romantic, apart, a
being to be looked up to with something like awe. Meet a young man!
She felt herself to be the channel by which every girl in the place
might have access to her own dreams. They gave her longing glances,
that mutely implored her to tell them all, all about it; she talked
about everything else, but not about that, and hearts and mouths
watered. They offered to do things for her--to carry her mattress, to
do her Sunday watering, even to clean her bicycle; and Louie let
them--but told them nothing. Nay, she even drew Richenda Earle to
herself. Richenda actually carried her mattress to the foot of the
hill one night and slept out. The two mattresses were placed not six
feet apart, and, as the birds settled on the boughs and the stars
came out, Richenda set herself wistfully to pump Louie.
Then it appeared why Richenda had seemed changed since her vacation.
Speaking in a low voice, she too admitted that there was
now--Somebody. Weston, his name was, Louie learned, and he was some
sort of a commercial schoolmaster at the same place in Holborn where
Richenda herself had studied. So instead of Richenda pumping Louie,
Louie pumped Richenda. What was her Mr. Weston like? Well (Richenda
said), some might think him an oddity--the Secretary Bird, his
nickname was--but he was, oh, a soul so sensitive, so gentle! Was
there any prospect of their marrying soon? Richenda sighed; it would
be a long time; if she got her post at Chesson's he might apply for a
country schoolmastership somewhere near, and then she would get a
bicycle; or if he got a "rise" in London she might relinquish her
appointment--when she got it. But in any case it could hardly be for
years. Louie asked flatly what Weston got, and was told one hundred
pounds a year. She looked up in surprise. Her own dress allowance was
treble that amount.
"And you'd get a hundred here too?" she asked.
"If I get the place--which means if I get my medal," said Richenda.
Then, Louie thought, that would be two hundred between
them--two-thirds of her dress allowance.
"But--but----," she said, "I thought people got paid more than that!"
"I told you you didn't know," said Richenda softly.
"But--but--why, my aunt paid Miss Skrine one hundred and fifty pounds,
just to go through her engagements, opening bazaars and charities and
so on--just to write down on a slate what she had to do each day!"
"Your aunt's Lady Moone," came from Richenda's couch.
"I _know_ she got one hundred and fifty pounds, _and_ lived with them.
One hundred pounds seems absurd."
"That's what father said when he apologised to me."
"But surely, all--all the people one sees aren't paid at that rate!
Why, some cooks get a thousand--I've heard that for a fact----"
"Some don't," came from the other pillow.
"Well, some do, and if you strike an average, or whatever it's
called----"
But Richenda interrupted, softly and wearily:
"Oh, you don't, don't, don't know."
Louie asked further questions. She frowned, puzzled, at the answers.
Of course Richenda herself wasn't a very effective sort of girl; if
anybody had to be downtrodden it would very likely be she; but the
things she was telling her now (Richenda had begun to talk again,
resignedly rather than bitterly) were preposterous. There must be
something wrong with Richenda, probably with her Weston too; she did
not look quite right; she was very different from the rosy housemaids
at Trant, for example. One hundred pounds a year!... She had forgotten
all about Roy. When, presently, Richenda came as near to putting a
question about him as she dared, she forgot about him again. One
hundred pounds a year!... She lay on her back, her knees up, her hands
behind her head, her sleeves fallen from her wonderful arms, the brows
above the grey eyes knitted. She was sure that _she_ could do better
than that! She even went so far as to say so. Richenda showed no
resentment.
"You've got Lord Moone behind you," she said.
"I've got a prizefighter and a public-house behind me," Louie replied.
"Yes--I know you think you know----"
Louie lay awake, still pondering it all, long after Richenda had
fallen into an uneasy sleep.
On the following afternoon she met Roy by the stile again. She was
restless, unsettled, she knew not what. She spoke almost sharply to
him.
"I'm not going to stand here with you," she said; "that's twice I've
been seen. Come down the hill."
Roy no longer urged the Rules. They walked together a hundred yards
down the hill, and sat down under a gorse-bush. He made her move quite
behind it, and even then tucked her skirt a little farther out of the
gaze of a possible passer-by.
"Now we're all right," he said. "How's Lovey this morning?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen her."
"Well, don't bite a fellow's head off, Louie."
"Then don't bother me to-day.--No, I don't want my hand held."
"What's the matter with you?"
"If you don't leave me alone I shall go. I didn't sleep till nearly
daylight."
"I didn't sleep for quite an hour, either," he said sympathetically.
"I say, isn't it funny, Louie, when you come to think of it, that till
a week ago I hadn't thought of you for years?"
"Oh, I wasn't lying awake thinking of you," she said bluntly.
"I was of you." He put out his hand again.
His approach only made her impatient. "Oh, don't!" she snapped.
"Really I shall get up and go if you worry me."
He was, as he would have put it, "keen": keen enough to begin to sulk.
She let him sulk, and watched the sea, always of a milky bloom, and
the sky, still of the hue of an infant's eyeball. After some minutes
she turned to him again.
"What _do_ people get paid?" she asked abruptly.
"What people?" He spoke over his shoulder.
"Oh, people--you know what I mean!"
"We get dashed little, I know that." (He was going into the army.)
"What sort of people? Servants and those?"
"And those--yes."
Roy expounded.
"Jolly good pay, _I_ call it; lot of lazy beggars! Why, the fellow
down there wanted to charge me two pounds for patching up that
centre-board, that I did in about a day. I shouldn't mind getting two
pounds a day!... Why?"
"I want to know."
"Some of your gardeners been grizzling to you?"
"No."
"A wonder--rotten grousing lot! They ought to have uniforms to buy,
and mess-bills and clubs and things; they'd know all about it then!
Two pounds for filing a piece of iron and putting a patch on a piece
of wood!--I think it will hold all right," he continued naively; "we
shall make a deuce of a lot of leeway if it doesn't. We're
flat-bottomed, you see, with only bilge-keels, and that reminds me;
Izzard's coming back on Wednesday; I'd a note from him this morning.
But he won't be in the way, dear, if you'll only be friends----"
She could not help laughing. After all, Richenda's "grousing" was a
little spoiling her fun. She turned to him again.
"I haven't seen her yet," she said. "Let's go down to her now."
He chuckled mildly. "You do play the dickens with the Rules, Louie."
"Bother the Rules!"
"Well, you don't want to go just this minute; it's jolly here----"
This time she did not withdraw her hand.
But he was very slow, she thought, in kissing her. He had never kissed
her yet. What was the good of being caught at--nothing?
Well, statues (she reflected), especially young ones, are slow----
Even as she was thinking it he did that very thing. Perhaps it was to
summon up resolution to do so that he had lain awake the previous
night. He kissed her cheek.
The result was curious. It was the law of her physique that most
moments of perturbation only turned her paler; but at this particular
form of perturbation she turned suddenly pink.
In a few moments she was as before. The first sign that she was Louie
again was that she forbade him to repeat the offence. He sulked again.
"All right," he said resentfully; "then we may as well go and see the
yacht."
"I don't want to see the yacht."
"Well, you needn't be stuffy about it----"
Statues _were_ distractingly slow!
Then she looked at him with a faintly mocking smile.
"Aren't you going to say you're sorry?" she challenged him (but she
had for a moment a faint return of the unhabitual colour for all
that).
He seemed to suspect that he was being mocked; nevertheless it was
with a rather tremulous boldness that he answered "No."
"Oh!"
"You see," he explained, "you did let me hold your hand."
She caught her breath. Good gracious! Why, he would be saying
presently that she had asked him to kiss her! "You see, you did let me
hold your hand!" What next?
"You know you did," he argued simply.
Even so it is written, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings----"
Suddenly she laughed. O admirable innocence, that alone can defeat
guile! After all, it was too unpardonable not to be pardoned. She
turned her face away again.
"You _are_ stupid!" she murmured, her face, even her neck, pink once
more.
At that quite a new gleam seemed to irradiate his good-looking clay.
"I say," he said slowly, as he struggled with the newness of the idea,
"you mean--do you mean?--about my not kissing you--properly?"
Oh, the heaviness! But he should kiss her "properly," as he called it,
now!
"Oh," she said briskly, "it's too late now. You can't very well after
that, can you?"
But he beamed. "Of course I can!"
"No, Roy!"
"I will----"
This was outrageous. She made as if to rise.
"No, Roy--no--you know very well you don't think I'm pretty----"
"Well, you aren't ugly," said he.
(Great heavens! She "wasn't ugly"!)
"Very well, Mr. Statue," she thought, compressing those irregular lips
whose degree of prettiness he estimated so nicely. "I'm going to be
pretty in a very few minutes, and you're going to tell me so."
"No, Roy," she said aloud; "just let's sit and talk--sensibly--I don't
know what made you behave like this all of a sudden----"
And there was none to say "Provoking hussy!"
* * * * *
An hour later they rose. It was too late to go to the yacht now. They
walked together back to the stile. Their shoulders overlapped. The
kisses came easily now.
"Then we'll go aboard her to-morrow?" he said.
"Very well."
"'Once aboard the lugger'--ha, ha--but of course she's a cutter, not a
lugger. That's just a saying, 'Once aboard the lugger.'"
"Really?"
"Yes, hadn't you heard it? 'Once aboard the lugger and the girl is
mine,' it is. And I say, you'd better put some old clothes on if I'm
to show you how the centre-board works."
"All right."
"What about Lovey?" he asked once more.
"Oh, we write down on a slate where we're going."
He held her a little away. "I--_say_!... You wouldn't tell her where,
would you?"
"Why not?"
"What--cheek!"
"She put me 'on my honour'--impudence!" quoth Louie.
"But I say--what frightful cheek!"
"Good-bye----"
"Just a minute----"
"Well----"
Then, "'Bye----"
"Good-bye----"
He called her name after her. "Louie!"
"What?"
"Good-bye----"
"Good-bye, boy----" She waved her hand.
Anyway, she thought with satisfaction, she had made him
say--swear--that she was pretty.
* * * * *
The next afternoon, as good as her word, Louie wrote on the
hall-slate: "Gone to Mazzicombe: L. Causton." Then she walked,
whistling, out of the house and up the hill.
VI
This time she fully expected to catch it, and did catch it. No time
was lost. A note from Mrs. Lovenant-Smith just before supper ordered
her to report herself immediately after that meal. At a quarter past
nine she presented herself.
The French window stood wide open, but night was fast falling over
the front lawn, and a clipped peacock of box showed against a
brownish-green sky. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stood by the window. It moved
as she turned, and there swung slowly across the pane the reflection
of the tall, yellow-shaded standard-lamp in one corner. Miss Harriet
Chesson had followed Louie in. In her hand was a piece of
paper--Louie's "conduct-report."
The beginning of the encounter was no skirmish; its end was positive
slaughter. This is no place for a report of it, round by round; it
must be summarised, even as the "Life and Battles" summarises the
combat between Buck and the terrible Piker. Louie "led," so to speak,
by asking whether she might sit down, giving as her reason that she
had had a long walk that afternoon; permission was only refused her
after she had put her hand on the back of a wheatear chair and said
again: "I think you said Yes?" She then placed the chair for Miss
Harriet to sit on, as near as possible to that of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.
She herself stood in the middle of the room.
Miss Harriet, evidently wishing she was somewhere else, read aloud the
conduct-report. It was longish and detailed. It also, as Louie well
knew, did not contain one of the real points at issue. She looked from
one to the other of the two women. The Lady-in-Charge wore a
discreetly-necked evening frock, with a fichu secured by a mourning
brooch; and her fingers kept touching this brooch, and also kept
leaving it again, as if Louie's eyes had been capable of a physical
plucking of them away. She had had Miss Harriet in, Louie knew, for
moral support. The principal's dress, too, was a give-and-take between
her gardening costume and conventional evening attire. Her indictment
read, she seemed more than ever anxious to depart. Louie, for her
part, was rather glad that she had been called in. Buck had always
fought better for the eyes upon him.
Mrs. Lovenant-Smith began correctly; her first trace of acerbity
showed only when Louie, having listened to her arraignment with
downcast eyes, lifted them for a moment to make a modest and quite
immaterial correction.
"Have the goodness to cease this exaggerated deference, Miss Causton.
It doesn't deceive me. It's only a form of veiled insolence."
Louie heard her indictment out in silence.
First blood was drawn when Louie mentioned the name of Roy
Lovenant-Smith. She called him, with aggravating naturalness, "Roy."
Mrs. Lovenant-Smith rose nearly an inch in height.
"'Roy!'" she echoed. "'Roy,' indeed!"
"I quite expected Priddy would tell you that first time. Of course he
would. The gardeners here don't like outsiders intruding," said Louie.
The point told. There was no need to mention the name of Miss
Hastings. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face deepened its ochre.
"Go on, Miss Causton," she said; while Miss Harriet timidly
interposed: "I think that's all you wanted me for?"
Louie went on. "And anyway, you gave your nephew permission to come on
the premises, which seems to me quite as much against the Rules as
anything there." She pointed to the charge-sheet.
"Pray go on, Miss Causton," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, swallowing her
wrath. Piker Betteridge, counting the moral advantage to be more than
the pain endured, had formerly been wont to thrust out his undefended
jaw in order to prove its invulnerability to attack; Mrs.
Lovenant-Smith was doing something of the same kind now.
"Pray go on----" she said.
"And of course that's all bunkum," said Louie, warming, and pointing
once more to the paper in Miss Harriet's hand. "That isn't in the
least what you mean. What you really hate is my having told the girls
what you've had in your mind ever since I came--I mean about my
father."
"Pray go on!" The jaw was thrust out once more.
("Perhaps I'd better go?" Miss Harriet still fidgeted. Seedsmen's
daughters are not at their ease at these Olympian conflicts.)
"All right, I will go on," said Louie, warming still more. "You would
have preferred me to hold my tongue about it, and if you're thinking
of asking me to resign I should like to say now that probably at least
half-a-dozen others will go with me."
Here, however, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith scored a point.
"That may have been true a little while ago," she said, "but--go on."
And Louie remembered certain little incidents and unbendings that had
caused it to be indulgently rumoured that "Lovey wasn't such a bad old
sort once you got to know her." Louie conceded the point.
"Anyway, that's what she does mean," she said, turning to Miss
Harriet--"that she didn't want me to tell them that my father was a
prizefighter and kept a public-house!"
"Address yourself to me, if you please," ordered Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.
"Certainly! You've been set against me from the first, for that very
reason; and as for your nephew, I've known him for years and years,
and you've no business at all to have him here, and it would sound
rather well, wouldn't it, if the tale got about that you allowed----"
But at this Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's hardly held composure gave way with
a snap. Well-born but necessitous Ladies-in-Charge of horticultural
colleges do not submit to being told their duty by the daughters of
pugilists. She stamped on the floor.
"Silence!" she cried, shaking. "I was a fool ever to have had
you here! You make discipline impossible. You corrupt your
fellow-students--you make a boast of your unfortunate parentage--you
show no respect for the Rules--you think yourself at liberty to come
and go as you please--you carry on a vulgar intrigue----"
"--not with a gardener----"
("Oh, I _really_ must go my rounds!" murmured Miss Harriet; but she
lingered; the spectacle of Olympians forgetting themselves does not
occur every day.)
"--disgracing yourself among younger and more innocent girls----"
"--with a Lovenant-Smith, anyway----"
Again the stamp. "I forbid you to mention his name!"
"Roy----"
"Leave the room!"
("Please, please!" besought Miss Harriet.)
"You will pack your boxes at once!"
"I shall consult Lord Moone's lawyer first. You accepted my fees--your
college is an imposition from beginning to end, and I'll see that's
known. That will be another scandal----"
"Ah!" choked Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, perhaps with some hazy recollection
of the law of slander in her head. "You hear that, Miss Chesson? You
hear that? You heard those words?"
"No, I didn't quite catch--ladies--please!"
"If you didn't catch it, I said the whole place was a shameless
fraud," said Louie calmly.
"Very good. Ring the bell, Miss Chesson!"
But the servant appeared only in time to see Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's
complete collapse. She sank, shaking, into a chair, and gazed
unseeingly into a pigeon-hole of her desk, as if she might find some
help against this devilish girl there. As she clung (as it were) to
the ropes, Louie let her have it (so to speak) on the beezer.
"You oughtn't to be here at all, really, you know," she said. "You
ought to be in one of those places--you know--in the Queen's gift, at
Kensington or Hampton Court, with the dowagers and maids-of-honour. If
you like I'll ask my uncle whether he can't do anything."
And without waiting for an answer she swept out, not by the door, but
by the French window. The reflection of the yellow-shaded
standard-lamp swung again as she did so.
She entered the courtyard by the side door, passed under the dark yew
and the arch beneath the box-room, and made her way through the
orchard. She had reached her pitch at the foot of the hill before she
remembered that she had forgotten her mattress and blankets. She
returned in search of them. Twenty minutes later she was in bed, her
knees up, her hands clasped behind her head.
She was white with triumph. That woman! Well, Louie thought she had
held her own. She had had the last word, at all events, and an
optic-bunging one too. Now should she leave, or stay? It was entirely
a question of balance between her desire to see the last of the place
and her resolve to go at nobody's pleasure but her own. It might be
that she would have to stay another week in order to avoid the
suspicion that she was turning tail. The fraud of a place!
She lay, pale and victorious, thinking the matter over.
One thing was certain; she would not return to Trant. She supposed she
was vindictive by nature, but that would merely mean at the most a
week's gradually increasing strain on her temper and then another
series of embroilings with her mother. A philosophic elf somewhere
deep within her--it was hardly affection--bade her spare her mother
what she had not spared Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. Why seek a known trouble
at Trant? If she must take trouble with her wherever she went, she
might as well take it to a fresh place.
Before she was aware they had done so, her thoughts had flown to the
vouched-for but incredible things Richenda Earle had said about life
and London.
Lord Moone had a house, and Captain Chaffinger chambers, in London,
and she knew both. For the rest, her knowledge of the place was pretty
much what Richenda had guessed it to be--shops, restaurants, theatres.
Of her five visits two had been spent at Lord Moone's, two at
Cynthia's friends, the Kayes, and one at an hotel--this not counting
the night on which, having run away from the convent, she had occupied
Chaff's room and had wondered at his large pincushion, his pictures,
and ribboned haircurlers that he doubtless kept in memory of his
departed youth.
Her father, too, lived in London, or thereby----
She fell to wondering about her father.
There was a full but late-rising moon that night; it had not yet
cleared the tree-tops of the eastern end of the orchard below. She
watched its silver through the topmost boughs. Already it filled the
heavens with a mist of light, dimming the stars; the glister on near
leaves was brighter than the Plough over her head. Scents of the
distant gardens stole undispersed through the night; that of the
night-flowering tobacco-plant was for some minutes almost sicklily
oppressive; and behind her she heard the scurrying of the rabbits at
play.
It was odd that she thought of her father rather than of Roy. Somehow
only Roy's actual presence had the power to colour those now pale
cheeks of hers. Certainly it had done so that afternoon. For an hour,
aboard the yacht, the rose-peonies in the garden had been paler than
she. But her father had her thoughts now, and the sum of them was that
she would have given much to be able to think of him as not cruel, not
faithless, not a man who had had to be thrust back into the ditch
whence he had come. She might have sought him out then.
For she was going to London; that was settled. She had her allowance,
more by a half than the income Richenda and her Mr. Weston would
gladly have married on, and not one penny more of it would she waste
at Chesson's. The next day or two would almost certainly provide her
with a "good exit." Then nobody would be able to say she had slunk
out.
Oh, if her father had but not been a brute!
The moon cleared the trees, and another too-sweet tract of the
night-flowering tobacco enveloped her. A bird or two stirred. Some
time before she had thought she had heard the sound of a curlew's
whistle, low and not very near, but she had disregarded it. Now it
came again. All the effect it had was to turn her thoughts, tardily
and almost unnoticed by herself, to Roy.
She knew little about yachts; yachting was no pastime of Lord Moone's;
but even her vaunting mood relaxed to a momentary smile as she
remembered the yacht down under the hill there. Those two boys must be
crazy to risk their lives like that. They had rounded Land's End in
her, and in quite good faith evidently expected the miracle to be
repeated. The only wonder was that the centre-board had gone before
the rest of the crazy fabric. "I told you to put some old clothes on,"
Roy had apologised for his vessel, "--and I say--I don't think I'd sit
on the table if I were you--I'm not _quite_ sure about it, you
see--may have to send it to Mazzicombe after all--come on the locker."
So they had sat on the locker----
She had felt safer when, half-an-hour later, she had clambered down
into the little dinghy again. It would be Davy Jones's locker for
Master Roy and his friend Mr. Izzard unless some fatherly fisherman
took them and their boat in hand.
Then came the thoughts of her unknown father again.
* * * * *
"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"
She sat up. The whistle came from the stile up the hill. And suddenly
she knew it was no curlew. It was Roy.
She listened.
"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"
It was Roy.
She knew he would not seek her farther than the stile. Had there not
been other sleepers just below the orchard, it would still have been
the extreme of his boldness that he had got so far. But--she
remembered how from the first she had been the prime mover in their
entirely wanton flirtation--was it necessarily the extreme of hers?
Then, as the devil would have it, something brought Mrs.
Lovenant-Smith into her head again.
That woman!
All the blood left her cheeks and thronged to her heart again.
Roy would certainly not pass the stile----
She hesitated for a moment longer, and then suddenly got up from her
bed.
Her clothes were wrapped in her waterproof; she took the waterproof
and put it on. She thrust her feet into a pair of slippers. The
waterproof was not so long as the garment beneath it; the moon was now
well above the trees; it showed the hurrying white about her heels as
she walked quickly up the hill. She drew the under-garment up a
little. The waterproof was almost the colour of the scorched grass.
The small shadow that preceded her was now the thing most plainly to
be seen.
Over the stile she saw the shoulder of his white sweater. Again her
caution awoke.
"You might have put a coat on," she said, a little out of breath. "You
can be seen half-a-mile away on a night like this."
"I thought you were never going to hear me!" he said.
"Oh! You seem to have been sure I'd come if I did."
"Well, you have come, haven't you?" he answered. "I say, isn't your
hair different?"
"Well, it isn't done for a call, if that's what you mean; I always do
it like that at night, stupid. But I'm not going to stand here with
you as white as a cottage wall."
Thereupon he paid her the only compliment he ever did pay her--and
that was unintentional.
"It isn't any whiter than your feet, anyway," he said.
"Well, I'm not going to stop a minute."
"Oh, dash it all!" he protested. She did think him cool!
"Good gracious, how long do you think I _am_ going to stay?"
"Hardly worth coming for, I call it," he grumbled.
"_Thank_ you!"
"For you, I mean, of course--as if you didn't know I'd walk miles--how
you take a fellow up!"
"Well, two minutes."
Two minutes can be a very short time; five minutes had passed when,
making a movement to free herself, she said: "Let me go now, Roy--I
think we're both as mad as we can be."
"There isn't anybody about," he muttered.
More minutes passed; then:
"Do you really think my feet are white?" she whispered. A slipper had
come off.
Then, close against his breast, she made an inconsequential, halting
little appeal. "Oh, Roy--don't go in that dreadful boat again! You'll
be drowned--I know you will----"
"Should you care?" he whispered.
"Silly boy!"
"No, but should you care?"...
"Roy, let me go!" she ordered suddenly. The minutes were passing
fatally quickly.
"No--no----"
"Oh--yes----"
"I won't let you go."
"Roy, let me go, I say!"
But it was not a command now. It was a supplication--perhaps not even
that.
* * * * *
She did not love him; in her heart she knew she did not love him. He
loved her--years afterwards; only years afterwards. The thought of her
left him--but it returned to him, never to leave him again. The moon
made the crest of the hill like day, but the shadows of the
gorse-bushes lay dark on the short grass and stunted bents and the
patches of wild thyme. The moon southed, then rode less high. In the
short night a lamb called; and then the birds, reaching the shallows
of their sleep, gave a drowsy twittering and went to sleep again. It
was the false dawn. The stars grew a little brighter as a deeper
darkness possessed the earth; then in the darkness a cock crowed.
* * * * *
They met again on the next night. On the night after that they met
once more.
Only after that did she sit down, alone in the box-room, in the
twilight, to think.
Her boxes were packed and strapped, and the cart was coming for them
from Rainham Magna in the morning.
She wished Burnett Minor had been there. She would have liked to say
good-bye to the child. There was nobody else it would break her heart
to leave.
Yet Roy was still down there under the hill. The centre-board had gone
wrong again. She was to see him at the stile, in the morning, before
leaving. It seemed, somehow, superfluous.
But she did meet him. His face was set, and he had forgotten to
shave.
"Don't look like that; it wasn't your fault," she said composedly.
"It was--it was----" he muttered, hands clenched.
"Rubbish!" She gave a short laugh. "You've nothing at all to blame
yourself for."
"Oh, I have--I have."
Then he turned to her. "Louie, you've got to promise me one thing----"
But she stopped him. She knew what he was going to say.
"That's quite out of the question," she said.
"But look here!" He used the words he had used the second time they
had met. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in
the lurch. You must marry me, Louie, if--if----"
At that she had found a touch of her old irony.
"Not unless, of course?"
"Oh yes--yes."
But she turned away. "No. Good-bye."
"Won't you even kiss me?"
"No."
But there was a gentleness in her refusal such as he had never had
from her before. Kisses came hardly now.