CHAPTER V

IN England there were several thousand acres which Keble would one day

automatically take over. In Canada, creating his own estate, he could

enjoy a satisfaction known only to the remotest of his ancestors. And as

his wilderness became productive he acquired, atavistically, the

attitude of a squire towards the people whose livelihood depended on

him. He housed them comfortably; he listened to their claims and

quarrels; he hired, discharged, and promoted with conscientious

deliberation; and every so often he wrote letters to the provincial

parliament about the state of the roads.

“Now it’s time to amuse them,” Louise had suggested. “People don’t

remember that you have installed expensive lighting plants for their

benefit, but they never forget a lively party.”

Thus was sown the seed of the New Year’s dance which was to be held in

the hall and reception rooms of the empty new house. Invitations were

issued to every soul at Hillside, and a poster tacked to the bulletin

board of the Valley post office announced that anybody who cared to make

the journey would be welcome.

Preparations for this evening revived Louise’s spirits as nothing had

done in months. No detail was left to chance. Keble, held responsible

for the music, endeavored for days to whip up the sluggish dance rhythms

of the Valley bandmaster. “I’ve done everything but stand on my head and

beat time with my feet,” he reported in desperation, “and they still

play the fox-trots as though they were dirges. Fortunately the Valley

knows no better.”

Miriam superintended the decorating of the rooms, aided by the “hands”,

who, like Birnam Wood, advanced across the white meadow obliterated

under a mass of evergreens.

Only one contretemps occurred. A few days after Christmas Mrs. Boots,

the minister’s wife, accompanied by Mrs. Sweet, wife of the mail

carrier, made her way to the Castle and warned Louise that her dance

would conflict with the “watch-night service” at the Valley church.

New Year’s fell on a Saturday, and to postpone the ball one night would

involve dancing into the early hours of the Day of Rest. Keble had made

arrangements to leave on Saturday for the east, on a short business trip

to London. To hold the entertainment over until Monday would therefore

be out of the question.

Louise had a characteristic inspiration. “Why not turn the library into

a chapel!” she exclaimed, kindling at the prospect of an extra dramatic

item on her program, “And pause at midnight for spiritual refreshments!

I’ll make everybody file in and kneel, Mr. Boots can say a prayer, and

we’ll all sing a little hymn—perfect!”

“And then go on dancing!” cried Mrs. Boots, in horror.

Mrs. Sweet reflected the horror on her friend’s face. Then her

disapproving glances traveled to a corner of the hall where some noisy

girls were making paper chains and lanterns under the direction of Pearl

Beatty.

Louise saw that she had given pain to the minister’s wife. “Forgive me,”

she said impulsively. “I’m such a heathen! But if I were a Christian I’m

sure it wouldn’t disturb my conscience to dance and pray alternately;

indeed each would gain by the contrast. What’s the point of a religion

that has to be kept in a cage?”

Mrs. Boots could have found answers if she had been given time to catch

her breath, but before she had a word ready Louise was shaking her

cordially by the hand and consigning her to a maid who was to take the

ladies to the cottage and comfort them with tea and a sight of the baby

before the mail sleigh returned to the Valley.

Whatever the concourse of the faithful at the watch-night service, there

was never an instant’s doubt as to the triumph of the forces of evil.

From the moment when Keble and the wife of the Mayor of Witney, followed

by Louise and the Mayor, stepped out at the head of a “grand march”

until daybreak on the first of January when a winded band played a

doleful version of “God Save the King”, the festivities went forward

with irresistible momentum. Keble made a speech, and then with true

British fortitude danced with every female guest. Miriam, acting on

orders, solicited dances from bashful cowboys, and once, in the grip of

an honest lad who seemed to have mistaken her for a pump, she caught the

eyes of Keble, in the grip of the new laundress, who was bolting towards

a wall with him. And they hadn’t dared to burst out laughing.

Louise darted in and out, setting everything on fire, making the dour

laugh and the obstreperous subside, launching witty sallies and personal

broadsides, robbing Pearl of her plethora of partners and leading them

captive to the feet of girls who, after living for days on the exciting

prospect, were now sitting against the wall with their poor red hands in

their laps, enjoying it, vicariously.

For Louise the evening would have been perfect but for one disturbing

remark which she overheard in the supper room. Minnie Swigger, whose

brand new “Kelly green” satin had lost something of its splendor when

contrasted with the simple black velvet in which Louise was sheathed,

had watched Miriam pass by in company with Pearl Beatty and Jack

Wallace, the proprietor of the Valley livery stable, and had vouchsafed

her criticism in an ungrateful voice which carried to Louise’s ears:

“She’s supposed to be his secretary. Either Weedgie is blind, or she

holds Miss Cread over his head as an excuse for her own little game.

Nobody but her could get away with it.”

Louise wheeled about and walked up to Minnie. “Get away with what?” she

inquired evenly.

Minnie was too startled to reply for a moment, then with the defiance

born of a bad conscience she said, “I don’t care if you did hear me. It

certainly looks funny, and that’s not my fault. And Pearl Beatty there,

as big as life! When you make a fuss over her decent fellows like Jack

Wallace get the idea she’s all right.”

“Isn’t she?”

“If you call _that_ all right!”

“Being all right is minding your own business. You’re a nice little

thing, Minnie, but you _don’t_. Not always. Don’t try to mind mine; it’s

far too much for you.”

What the natives thought was in itself a matter of indifference, but if

“things,” as Minnie alleged, did “look funny”, it was just conceivable

that the natives, for all their ignorance, saw the situation at Hillside

in a clearer perspective than any of the actors. Keble’s departure was,

therefore, in a sense opportune.

2

Although it meant twenty-four hours without sleep, Louise and Miriam

next morning insisted on accompanying Keble as far as the Valley. The

four took breakfast, along with Dr. Bruneau, at the Canada House as

Miriam’s guests. They were weary, a little feverish, and inclined to be

silent. Keble alone chatted with a volubility that betrayed his

nervousness, his regret at the separation, and his excitement at the

prospect of revisiting the home he had long ago abandoned. Louise was

pale, and kept hiding in the depths of her fur coat. Miriam and the

doctor sustained Keble’s talk, but could not relax the tension. The

stage was due in fifteen minutes.

Suddenly Louise jumped up from the table, which was being cleared by an

ill-kempt waitress with whom Keble had danced a few hours previously. “I

nearly forgot . . . the snapshots of Baby for his grandmother. They’re

still at the drug-store. I’ll run over and get them.”

“Let me go, dear,” Keble had risen.

“We’ll go together,” Louise proposed, and Miriam noted an eager light in

his eyes.

On the snowy road he tucked his glove under Louise’s arm, and they

picked their way across in silence to the drug-store.

When she had obtained the photographs and thrust them into an inner

pocket of his coat, they returned more slowly towards the hotel.

“It will seem very strange,” he said, “without you and the monkey. I

can’t tell you how disappointed I am at your refusing to come home with

me.”

“A change from us will do you good . . . You’re to give my love and the

monkey’s to everybody, and tell them I’m looking forward very much to

their visit.”

Keble stopped in the middle of the deserted street, to face her with

appealing eyes, and rested a hand on her arm. “Weedgie, that’s all so

pathetically trite, for you! Tell me, _sans facons_, why wouldn’t you

come, and why wouldn’t you let me take the snapshots of you as well as

the monkey?”

She was a little timid. This was the Louise with whom he had originally

fallen love, and whom he remembered even through her noisiest

performances. “Because I’m perverse. I want your people, if they are

going to make my acquaintance at all, to get their first impression of

me in my own setting.” She couldn’t confess that she would have been

gratified if his people had been a few degrees more pressing in their

invitations to her. “If they like me in spite of it, or even if they

don’t, I shall feel at least square with myself. But if they were to

find me passable in _their_ setting, then come out here and pooh-pooh

the Valley, I should be—oh, hurt and angry.”

Keble shook her gently. “Rubbish!”

“Mrs. Windrom thought me crude,” she said, entirely without rancor. In

her heart she thought Mrs. Windrom crude.

“Walter didn’t,” Keble retorted. “And Walter’s little finger is worth

more than his mother’s eternal soul.”

“Walter is a man, dear. Mrs. Boots doesn’t like me, and her soul is

worth thousands of little fingers,—or toes, rather.” She was stroking

his coon-skin coat.

“Toes, rather? . . . Oh, I see—Boots, toes.”

Without warning he caught her in his arms and kissed her. “You

preposterous person!” he laughed, a little abashed by his flare of

passion.

They returned silently to the hotel porch, where they were joined by

Miriam and the doctor. The stage had arrived and they were discussing

the state of the mountain road. Keble climbed into the sleigh.

When everyone had said good-bye, and the horses had been set into

motion, Keble turned to Miriam with a parting admonition regarding

business letters, then added, “Keep an eye on Louise, now that she’s

come to life again. And do give the monkey an occasional piece of

sugar.”

The last injunction was a facetious allusion to a remark made some weeks

previously by Mr. Brown, who had declared that Keble was spoiling the

baby as much as his wife spoiled her circus horse.

When the stage had disappeared, Louise turned to Miriam with an air of

being lost. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “to think of going back alone!

I never realized before how completely it’s Keble that makes the ranch

go round. I feel like _la délaissée_,—you know the girl in the ditty:

_qui pleure nuit et jour_.”

“Good gracious, Louise, don’t tell me you’re turning sentimental on top

of everything.”

“It would only be _re_-turning. I’ve always been sentimental under the

surface. At least I used to be with my dolls. And for some reason I’ve

felt like a little girl this morning.”

A cloud passed over Miriam’s sky. Lack of sleep and the dissipation of

the last week would sufficiently account for it. Faint lines indicated

the inner boundaries of her cheeks, and her eyes had lost their

agate-like clarity.

“You look like a tired little girl,” she said sadly. “I feel all of

eighty.”

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

IT was the second anniversary of the death of Billy Salter. A summer

breeze played over the hillock which was surmounted by two small

tombstones. The branches of the trees which had sheltered the

grave-diggers from hail on the day of the funeral were now tossing in a

frantic effort to extend their shade to the rows of asters with which

Katie and Louise had bounded the two graves.

“Seems less lonesome for Billy, don’t it, Mrs. Eveley, when Rosie has a

flower bed too,” Katie had commented. Rosie Dixon had died before Billy

was born, but her span of life had been as limited as his own, which had

the effect of making them seem contemporaries.

As Katie had expressed it, “If both were living to-day Rosie would be

twenty-nine and Billy fourteen, just going into long pants; but really

they’re only the same age—both twelve, poor babies!”

Louise recalled the remark this August afternoon as she and Trenholme

Dare tied their horses to neighboring trees and ascended towards the

deserted graves. “I couldn’t help feeling that Katie had stumbled on an

interesting idea,” she said.

“She had,” Dare agreed. “If Katie was a savant she might have developed

it into an epoch-making theory of time.”

“How far ahead would that have got her?”

“Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude

gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards

eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The

value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely,

concrete observations like Katie’s. Conversely the beauty of Katie’s

homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and

re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton’s apple and adventures of

other scientific saints. It’s like art: the glory of music is that it is

made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that

they can all get to a musical heaven.”

Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which

merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky

whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy

to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and

unglazed,—an ocean’s ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of

icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.

The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown’s mane came to

sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply

outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding

boots.

“By all that,” she said, “you imply that philosophizing doesn’t get one

anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting

ahead like a comet.”

“Philosophy isn’t the propeller, it’s the log that records the progress

and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the

mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent _applied_

mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it

doesn’t make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than

Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that

doesn’t make him a better _liver_ than Katie. No doubt the man who can

enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the

woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God’s

evolution depends on intelligence, and _Herr Doktor_ Einstein is more

intelligent than Katie Salter, _unbedingt_. But God is strangely

ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the

status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is

merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more

luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack

Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water

have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and

mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous

for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of

still further combinations of remnants . . . The folly of regarding

Socrates as sublime and me as ridiculous is that we are one and the same

entity, just as those asters are merely a continuation of the first

aster seed, which was merely the continuation of a continuation.”

Louise recalled the discussion she had had with her father on the day of

Billy’s funeral, when they had agreed to grant cats equal rights with

Billy in the matter of immortality. “Would you go so far as to say that

Socrates and Sundown were parts of the same entity?” she inquired.

“Even further. I should include the fly that his tail can’t quite reach,

the worms under his feet, and the leaves over his head. It’s all in the

ocean . . . Stones and mud aren’t as self-assertive as radium, but who

is to say that they have no phosphorescent potentialities? If you eat a

speck of mud on your celery, doesn’t it, or something chemical in it,

become a part of you and take a more distinguished place in the realm of

things vital?”

“Then how to account for the fact that we can talk, Sundown can only

neigh, and stones can’t even sigh,—even if they _are_ full of sermons.”

“By the fact that stones are figuratively phosphorescent in an extremely

negligible degree, that Sundown is phosphorescent in an infinitely

greater degree, and that you and I are so surcharged with

phosphorescence that we simply burst into hissing flames of

intelligence. Or, if you prefer, we’re not so tightly packed as stones;

our atoms are more free to roam and collide and become interesting.

Human intelligence, with all its concomitants of reasoning and speech,

is a sort of transformation which is analogous to the remarkable things

that happen in a laboratory when certain combinations are subjected to

intense pressures and temperatures. Degrees of vitality are like the

gradations of electrical force: sluggish magnetic fields, live wires,

dynamos, power stations. Everything has some vital status, just as

everything has some electrical status.”

“But you make everything seem so impersonal and arbitrary. Don’t you

believe that human beings can voluntarily increase or decrease their

voltage and usefulness? If I determine to live up to my best instincts,

can’t I do so on my own initiative, without having been anticipated by

Fate?”

“I think of it the other way round. Your strongest instincts, good or

bad, will live up to you. They will determine your acts. The decision to

live up to them begs the question, for it is they that prompted the

decision, making up your so-called mind for you. You only said the words

of your excellent decision after the excellent decision had surged and

pulsated and battled and muscled its way through your system to the tip

of your tongue. Taking a decision is like taking a train: in reality the

train takes you.”

“According to that theory there’s nothing to stop the whole world from

going to pot, morally speaking. What if bad instincts obtain a majority

in the house?”

“Ah, but thanks be to God they won’t! Nature hasn’t gone to pot

physically, for all the efforts of plague and dyspepsia. She won’t go to

pot morally, either, though we may always need prisons, or their future

equivalents. Nature is, in the long run, economical; she balances her

books; and morality, like health, is merely a question of thrift.”

“And religion? What is it?”

“Oh,—for a slouchy metaphor, call it the sparks struck off by moral

friction.”

“That’s deep water.”

“Moral: accept the concrete and don’t try to formulate the abstract.

Katie would never have expected an apple to fall into the sky just

because she had never heard of Isaac Newton. And when she feels that

Rosie Dixon and Billy, despite arguments to the contrary, are the same

age, she has got just as far as the hypothetical metaphysician who would

turn her experience into a revolutionary theory of objective and

subjective time,—except that Katie won’t get a Nobel prize. If she

lives to be three score and ten, snug in her three dimensions, and never

hears time defined as qualitative multiplicity, she will fulfil a

sublime destiny; she will with unerring instinct and awe-inspiring

virtuosity obey complex laws which are none the less urgent for being

unformulated in her narrow skull. And when she dies, her soul, like John

Brown’s, will, though in fearfully divisible, microscopic, and

unrecognizable particles, go ‘marching on’.”

“Thank goodness Katie is miles down the road by this time where she

can’t hear what a hash she is going to be!”

“Yes, that after all marks the difference between people like Katie who

are close to the earth, and those who do get up in a metaphysical

balloon. Katie comforts herself with promises of a red plush heaven full

of harps, where she at the age of seventy-three will repair in a white

robe to rejoin her Billy, still twelve; whereas the savants who see the

world as an ant-heap are not appalled at the thought of personal

obliteration, I for one think it’s rather a lark to be a sort of

caricature on a school blackboard for three score and ten years then

turn into a thin cloud of chalk dust when higher forces rub you off;

it’s fun to speculate on the future of the particles of chalk in the

cloud.”

Louise confessed that she could not gloat over the prospect, but let it

be understood that, for the sake of feeling herself floating in the air

amongst a distinguished metaphysical crew, including Dare, she

cheerfully accepted the principle. Then something made her lean forward

and gaze towards a distant bend in the road.

“Look! That’s them!”

“What’s who?” Dare asked, and added, “grammar be blowed!”

Three touring cars, an unprecedented sight, were winding their way up

from the direction of the Valley.

“Keble’s telegram said this evening,” Louise explained, with a blank

look at her companion, followed by a glance at her wrist watch. “And

it’s not three o’clock yet. Thank heaven Miriam is at home to give them

tea.”

“Them” referred to the English travelers, whose visit had been postponed

in order that it might be embraced in a western tour which Lord Eveley

and his assistants in the Colonial Office were scheduled to make on

Imperial business. Keble had left the ranch a few days before to meet

them in Calgary and guide them hither. All through the spring and summer

he had been bringing his building work to completion, and Dare had been

on hand several weeks now, partly in the rôle of contractor, partly in

the rôle of friend. He had remained for the celebrations before

proceeding to Japan, where he was to make notes and sketches for a

commission in California.

“What a pity you won’t be on hand to receive them,” Dare sympathized.

Louise flicked her switch rebelliously. “If they say evening, they can’t

expect me to know they mean afternoon. There’s no reconciling that

discrepancy whether you call time qualitative multiplicity or plain

duration. And they’ll just have to wait.” She smiled maliciously. “I

hope they’ll look blank at each other and say, ‘Just as I thought’.”

“Why? So you can fool them all by being excessively correct?”

She was delighted. “How did you guess?”

“The clue to you is always the same. You’re a born actress.”

To herself she was thinking. “Even the most enlightened men fail to

understand that some women are capable of being the quintessence of

themselves when they’re most outrageously play-acting.” And she was not

at all sorry that Dare should fall into one of the traps laid for his

sex,—there were so many he didn’t fall into!

“I adore acting. And love being caught at it. And always go on till I

_am_.” This suggested a new thought to her. “That’s why Keble and I are

so often a hundred miles apart. I’m acting, and he doesn’t know whether

I’m acting myself or some other character, and that irritates me and I

act all the harder, and it turns into farce or tragedy, and he still

fails to catch me, and I’m too far gone in my rôle to stop, but yearn to

be caught——”

“And spanked?”

“You and Miriam spank me sometimes. Then Keble _sees_, and laughs. But

so distressingly late.”

“Hadn’t we better be starting?”

The procession had passed the Dixon ranch and was vanishing towards

Hillside.

“In a minute,” she replied, without stirring. “We don’t have to have

seen them, you know.” Then with an abrupt change of mood she surprised

him by saying, “I dread it, Dare. It’s worse than going up for

examinations.”

“You’ll probably find them delightful.”

“You’re not their wild and woolly daughter-in-law.”

He shifted his position on the grass and sat facing her, with curious,

intent eyes. There was something subduing in his regard, as in his

strength and grace. “I wonder what I am, really. I wish I knew,—my

degree of being accepted as your friend, I mean.”

She was pleasantly conscious of the urgent need to evade the intentness

of his eyes, but temporized by mocking. “Don’t try to formulate the

abstract. Those are your words, and if you don’t follow your own advice

you’ll be in the predicament Katie would be in if she tried to go up in

a balloon.”

The forthcoming meeting had unnerved her more than she cared to admit.

An attack of stage-fright had made her say “in a minute” when he had

suggested returning. To that was added a twinge of vertigo, as though

she felt herself standing on a precipice from which force of

circumstances would make her presently retreat, but which for that very

reason had an indefinable lure. The eyes and hands and arms and thighs

of her companion were challenging her. Meanwhile, in her

subconsciousness, the talk of “in-laws” had set in motion a tune from

_The Mikado_, and as she flicked her boots she sang a paraphrase:

“They married their son,—

They had only got one,—

To their daughter-in-law elect.”

The ruse by no means succeeded in suppressing the rebellious desire to

look over the precipice. “I wonder if they did right,” she said.

Dare looked away, and she breathed more freely, hoping yet fearing that

he would immediately resume his disturbing, overpowering intentness.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I resent it; at other times I’m thankful.”

As he was still looking away she ventured an emotional step nearer. “Do

you mind explaining that cryptic remark?”

“It’s very simple. If their son hadn’t married you, I undoubtedly would

have. And it would have been a gigantic blunder.”

“How do you know you would have?”

“I’m damned if we could have avoided it.”

“In other words, those strong instincts you were talking about,—good or

bad,—would have taken that _funeste_ direction,—the direction of

bringing us smack up against each other for better or worse.”

“For a while it would have been heaven on earth. Then hell.”

“Why?”

He still avoided her eyes. “Because strong things must clash. Because

you and I don’t permanently need each other; we’re too self-reliant.”

His unwillingness to look at her roused a demon. “I wonder if you

believe that.”

“Must one always say all one believes?”

She ignored the question and he continued. “Marriage, to be successful,

must be entered into by one leading person and one following person. We

were each born to lead. We could never play on the same team, but as

captains of opposing teams we can be profoundly chummy . . . If the

other element had been allowed in, the chumminess in the crucible would

have flared up into a white flame, but the contents of the crucible

would have been reduced to ashes.”

“Like the Kilkenny cats,” she assented, absent-mindedly.

She was now stubbornly determined to regain possession of that dangerous

glance. “Isn’t it grotesque,” she went on, “that contemptible,

weak-souled people repeatedly disregard scruples that give pause to the

strong?”

Dare held his breath, and his profile showed that he was pressing his

teeth against his lip. They had never steered so near the reefs in all

their skilfully navigated acquaintanceship. Louise pulled weakly at the

grass.

Frankness had been their support up to the present, and each was

privately acknowledging that they could no longer depend on it.

Silence. Louise felt that she ought to do something to divert his

emotions into more familiar channels. “I wish I were a man,” she said,

and the effort of uttering words made her conscious of the dryness of

her throat. She also had a freakishness of breath to contend with.

Dare collected himself, sat up, with his back partly turned to her, so

that his eyes looked over the plain. The breeze had gone down and the

afternoon light seemed to be an intrinsic property of the objects it

gilded rather than an emanation from the sun.

“What would you do if you were?” he asked.

“The incomparably splendid things you do,” she promptly replied.

“I’ve come pretty near doing some incomparably asinine things.”

“But you’ve stopped short. I would have, too, of course. Besides,” she

hesitated, then decided on one final plunge of frankness, “in a world

full of people who don’t do splendid things, you could almost have

pleaded justification in not stopping short, I imagine,—if not actual

provocation.”

She saw his fingers open, then close. For once in her life, just once,

she longed to see those strangely intent eyes fixed on her, wanted them

to come closer and closer until her own eyes must close, yet she sat

weak, watching the back of his head, then his fingers. For the second

time in her life,—the first was during Walter Windrom’s visit,—she saw

deep into the psychology of infidelity: this time more specifically.

Indeed with a crudeness that made her blush.

Suddenly he wheeled about. The look was there. She gave a strange little

cry, raised her hands slightly from the ground, and in a flash found

herself imprisoned by his arms, and mouth.

A few moments later he was on his feet, facing the valley again, his

arms folded.

He walked to the trees and saddled the ponies. But as Louise made no

move he returned and stood looking down at her. “There’s still time to

escape,” he warned her.

She was again pulling at the grass. “There’s only one way to escape from

oneself . . . And that is not to acknowledge the danger.”

“Even when mad things happen?”

“Mad things are no more disgraceful than the mad desires that

precipitate them. If you admit the desires——”

“Yes, but—good God!” It ended in an explosive sigh at the futility of

any reasoning faculty one might bring to bear on a problem that had its

source somewhere so far beneath reason’s reach.

He sat down again, at her feet, and their eyes met in a long, steady

regard.

“Do you suppose it has been—just _that_, really, all this time?” he

finally asked.

“Not _only_ that . . . Partly.”

He held out his hand and she placed hers in it, without hesitation. It

was irrevocable. During the remainder of the afternoon time and scruples

were burnt up in the white flame.

2

They rode side by side down the steep slope of the mound. The horses

were eager to return, and once in the road their riders let them canter.

Louise was ahead and as she came abreast of the Dixon ranch she reined

in and waited. Her cheeks were still flushed, her eyes restless. She

smiled with a blend of humor and frustration which Dare mistook for

regret. In his face she saw a reply to her own countenance, a reply

which took the form of a little plea for pardon, a plea grotesquely

beside the point,—as if _she_ hadn’t manoeuvred the lapse from grace!

Her frustration was physiological, the eternal waiting for an ecstasy

which Keble and Dare could command at will, but which Fate still

withheld from her. It was unfair and it was discouraging.

Dare drew up at her side. He was more handsome, more authoritative than

ever, also more tender and humble than she would ever have guessed him

capable of being. Yet also a little annoying. Men could be so

insultingly sure of themselves. Here was a man who by all the signs

ought to have been _the_ man. She had assumed as much and behaved

accordingly. But instead of bringing about the miracle, the duet for the

sake of which she had been willing to risk Keble’s dignity, he had

merely achieved the old solo, with her as instrument. “Why can’t they

understand? Why don’t they learn?” her outraged desires were crying in

protest. She tried to read them a moral lecture, but that was of no

avail. She was, after all, an animal, and it was folly to pretend that

she was not.

Dare smiled tentatively, inquiringly, waiting for her to speak.

She looked down at Sundown’s ears. “I suppose that is what I would have

done, if I had been a man. Just once.”

He shook his head. “The ‘just once’ would have been like diving into a

sea in which you would have to sink or swim. I hope you don’t mean just

once literally, for that would be as good as letting me drown.”

She was too proud to explain, and she would not raise false hopes. “We

must forget that it happened,” she finally announced.

He was bewildered. “You mean, you _can_ forget!”

She made no reply.

“It was you who said that the fulfilment is no more disgraceful than the

desire.”

At that moment she hated him for his masculine obtuseness.

She gave Sundown’s head a jerk. “I’m glad you’re going to Japan,” she

said, and dug her heels into the horse’s sides. A moment later she was

lost to view in a cloud of dust.

Like some parched and hungry wanderer who had dreamt of orchards, only

to wake up under a bruising hail of apples and pears that startled him

into forgetfulness of his thirst, Dare gasped. “Already!” It was an

ominously precipitate reminder of his theory that they were each

leaders, that neither would be content to subordinate his individuality

to the other’s.

His mind bit and gnawed at the baffling knot in a tangle which a few

moments since seemed to have yielded for good and all. As a psychologist

he was somewhat too clever, and was capable of overlooking a factor that

might have leapt to the mind of a kitchen-maid.

He took a trail that served as a short-cut to the ridge, and caught up

with Louise on the new road that branched off towards the Castle. She

turned in her saddle, and patted Sundown’s flank. “Slowpoke!” she flung

back at him, teasingly, but already relentingly. Men were such helpless,

clumsy, cruel, selfish, amiable babies.

“Been thinking,” Dare explained.

“To any purpose?”

“To excellent but piteously sad purpose. I’ve been breaking to my

unhappy ego the meaning of your parting shot.”

“What did it mean?”

“That I’m defeated.”

“In a way, I’m sorrier than you are.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

She smiled with a trace of bitter humor, earnestly. “Well, _some one_

ought to be able to subdue me. God, I need it!” Angry tears came to her

eyes, and she thrust her foot petulantly into the stirrup. Riding alone,

she had just been marveling at the narrowness of the margin by which she

had avoided the disruption of her present life. But for a grotesque

trifle, she might have been riding at this very moment _away_ from

Hillside, forever, with Dare at her side. “That’s where I score,” he

reflected, lugubriously. “For at least now I taste the desolate joy of

capitulation to a stronger opponent. While we were opponents I wished to

keep a few points ahead. The fact that I no longer wish to do so, but

ask nothing better than to be trampled on till I can’t bear it another

minute,—well, what do you make of that?”

“You’re off your game,” she evaded. “Buck up!”

They rode on in silence until they came within sight of the broad meadow

at the edge of the pine ridge.

“Louise!”

“What!”

“Do I have to go to Japan?”

“More than ever.”

3

When they dismounted and walked towards the house the sun was already

far enough below the mountains to give Hardscrapple the appearance of a

dark cardboard silhouette against the rose and green of the sky. Around

their feet grew patches of scarlet flowers with flannel petals and

brittle stocks. The lake below, seen through a clump of black pines, was

grey and glazed. The Hillside crane, on his evening grub-call, flew over

their heads towards his favorite island. As they watched his landing

Louise noticed two white crescent-shaped objects on the dark floor of

the lake near the stream which came down in steps from the canyon. It

was as though some giant seated on an overhanging ledge had been paring

his nails.

“They’re on the water already!” she cried.

“Fishing. Quite true to type,” Dare commented. “The minute rich old men

get away from home they have an uncontrollable desire to kill.”

Louise sighed at the prospect of unforeseen vagaries in her guests.

“Will they be grumpy if they don’t catch anything?”

“Probably,—and reminiscent.”

“I’m glad the flowers came out so well,” Louise remarked irrelevantly,

with an affectionate backward glance at the garden as they reached the

terrace. “With all due respect to your genius, I like my own roses

better than all this.”

“This” was indicated by a sweeping gesture which took in the Castle, the

commodious outbuildings, and a pattern of roadways and clearings.

She was arrested by the sound of voices from the other terrace. A tall

woman whom she immediately recognized appeared at the corner, leading a

younger woman towards the parapet. With the air of a licensed guide she

was pointing across the lake towards the “Sans Souci” cottages now

tenanted by the Browns, and volubly describing points of interest.

“Over there, to the right of those three tall trees. Keble calls them

Castor and Pollux.”

Half turning towards her companion, as though Girlie’s eyes could not be

trusted to find any spot pointed out to her, Mrs. Windrom caught sight

of the advancing pair.

“Ha!” she cried, and turned her daughter round by the shoulders. “There

you precious two are at last!”

Louise hurried forward, with kisses. Girlie seemed as slow to bring her

faculties to a correct focus on Louise as she had been in respect of the

trees. She was a lithe, willowy girl with soft, colorless hair, a smile

faintly reminiscent of Walter, and limp white fingers that spread across

the bosom of a straight, dark-blue garment of incredible spotlessness,

considering the dusty motor journey from Witney. “Being less clever than

her brother,” Louise was reflecting, “she has tried to get even by

taking up outdoor things, which really don’t go with her type.”

“I was so sorry that Walter couldn’t join you in the east,” she said,

addressing Mrs. Windrom. “But he has promised us a long visit next

year.”

Girlie was getting a clearer focus. “He did nothing but rave about the

ranch after he and Mother were here,” she contributed. “Now I see why.

It’s like a private Lugano.”

Louise doubted it, but linked her arm in Girlie’s. “The only way we

could keep him here, however, was to give him a horse that broke his

ribs. I hope you’ll have better luck.”

“Walter never could ride anything but a hobby,—poetry, or first

editions. Nor play anything more energetic than croquet. As a partner at

golf he’s as helpful as a lame wrist.”

“But a darling for all that,” Louise defended.

“Oh, rather!” exclaimed Girlie, with an emphasis that seemed to add,

“That goes without saying,—certainly without _your_ saying it.”

They proceeded towards wide window-doors and entered the drawing-room,

where Miriam and the other two women had risen on hearing the hubbub.

Louise went straight to the elder woman. “I’m Louise,” she announced.

“Full of apologies.”

Her mother-in-law kissed her and presented Alice. “We arrived before we

expected. Keble got a special locomotive to bring us through the pass,

and couldn’t let you know because the telegraph office was closed.”

“It always is, in an emergency. And when it’s open, the wires are down.

We just guess back and forth. Please don’t mind my get-up. You all look

so fresh and frilly. Out here we dress like soldiers, in order to be in

keeping with our slouchy telegraph service and other modern

inconveniences.”

“I’m sure you look very comfortable,” said Lady Eveley with a maternal

smile. She was bird-like, with an abundance of white hair and a

coquettish little moiré band around her neck to conceal its ruins. When

she smiled, her good will seemed to be reiterated by a series of

wrinkles that extended as far as her forehead.

“Oh, I’m anything _but!_ First of all I’m dusty, and second of all I’m

parched.”

“There’ll be a fresh pot in a minute, dear,” said Miriam. “Do sit here.”

Mrs. Windrom was asking Dare to confirm her statement that the pillars

were Corinthian, which he could not honestly do, and by a monstrous

geographical leap their discussion wandered to a region beyond Girlie’s

focus. “Mother talks architecture as glibly as Baedeker, but she’s

really as ignorant about it as I am,” she assured Dare. “I’ve been

dragged to Italy goodness knows how many times, but the only thing I’m

sure of is the leaning tower of Pisa.”

Louise presented Dare to Lady Eveley and felt that she was being studied

by Keble’s sister. She went to sit beside Alice near tea, which Miriam

had resuscitated. She gave Miriam’s hand a grateful pat, then turning to

her sister-in-law, expressed the hope that she had found her right room.

“After living so long in a log cabin I assume that everybody will get

lost in this warehouse. Keble is so methodical he refers to right wing

and left wing, like a drill-sergeant. The only way I can remember which

room is which is by the color of the carpet or what you can see from the

windows.”

Alice was laughing, her amusement being divided between Louise’s

mock-seriousness and the reckless velocity of speech which left no gaps

for replies. She was a dry, alert, lean woman of nearly forty, who

should never have been named Alice. She had none of Keble’s grace, but

something of his openness and discernment. Alice would make as good a

judge as Keble, Louise reflected, but a less merciful jury. As to dress,

she gave Louise the impression of having ordered too much material, and

the white dots in her foulard frock merely emphasized her angles. Her

hair had once been blond like Keble’s, but was now frosted, and arranged

in a fashion that reminded Louise of the magazine covers of her

girlhood.

When there was a hiatus Alice assured her that they had all been safely

distributed and had spent an hour running back and forth comparing

quarters. “My room has a pale blue and primrose carpet, and I should

think about forty miles of entirely satisfactory view! And gladioli on

the table. How did you know, or did you, that gladioli are my favorite

flowers,—and how did they ever get here?”

Louise accepted a cup of tea and motioned Dare to a seat nearby. Lady

Eveley joined them and Miriam went out to stroll with the Windroms.

“I knew you liked them,” Louise replied, “because you once mentioned it

in a letter to Keble; and they grew in the greenhouse, for whose

perfections Mr. Dare is to be thanked. Don’t you think he has done us

rather well?”

The two women agreed in chorus. Then Alice added, “Father couldn’t

believe his eyes. He remembered the lake from a hunting trip years and

years ago. But when he saw what you and Mr. Dare and Keble have made of

it,—my dear, he almost wants it back!”

“My husband said you had made the house look like a natural part of the

landscape, Mr. Dare,” Lady Eveley leaned towards him with her timidly

maternal, confidential, richly reiterated little smile. Louise concluded

that her individuality, at its most positive, was never more than an

echo of some other person’s individuality, usually her husband’s.

“Most houses are so irrelevant to their surroundings,” Alice interposed.

“Our place in Sussex for instance. Of course it has been there since the

beginning of time, and that excuses it, but it’s fearsome to look at,

and would be in any landscape. I wish Mr. Dare would wave his wand over

it.”

“Alice thinks Keblestone too antiquated,” explained Lady Eveley. “But

her father and I are deeply attached to it, and she and Keble were both

born there. I do hope you will come and stay with us there next summer,

with the baby.”

“That priceless baby!” Alice exclaimed. “He pulled the most excruciating

faces for us. Then I gave him a beautiful rubber elephant and he flung

it square at his nurse’s eyes,—nearly blinded the poor soul. Where did

you find that nurse, Louise? She’s devotion personified.”

“He took to his grandfather at once. Sat on his knee and watched him as

though he had never seen anything so curious!”

“Baby is very rude,” Louise apologized.

“Brutally candid,” Alice agreed. “If an elephant offends him he throws

it at his nurse, and if a new grandfather is substituted, he solemnly

stares him out of countenance.”

“We shall spoil him, my dear,” said the monkey’s little grandmother.

“We’re so proud of him.”

Louise replaced her cup on the table, got up from her chair, and

implanted a playful but wholehearted kiss on the old lady’s forehead.

“I’m dying to see the grandfather who was too big to be flung in Katie’s

eyes,” she announced. “Shall we walk down to the lakeside and meet the

boats? There’s an easy path.”

She led the way, with Lady Eveley. Two or three times as they descended

the winding path the older woman patted Louise’s arm and smiled, apropos

of nothing, reassuringly. In the end Louise laughed and said, trying to

keep her frankness within gentle bounds, “You know, I’m quite floored by

your friendliness. I’ve been racking my brains to think how I could put

you at your ease, and now I find that everybody’s aim is to put me at

mine. I wish you were going to stay longer. Four days is nothing.”

“We should love to, my dear, but you see the men have so many speeches

to make, and they must be back on a certain date. It has been very

exciting. All along the way there were deputations to meet the train.

The mayors came and their wives—too amusing! And brought such pretty

flowers. Alice doesn’t object to the cameras at all, though she says her

nose is the only thing that comes out. Alice resents her nose. She says

she wouldn’t mind its size if she didn’t keep _seeing_ it, poor dear

. . . And banquets without end. I don’t see how they find so many

different things to say. My husband just stands up there——”

“And the words come to him,” interposed Louise “_I_ know.”

“Isn’t it remarkable? When I can scarcely find enough words to fill up a

letter! I’m terrified when they ask me to speak at the women’s clubs.

Canadian women are so intelligent. And so tireless. Mrs. Windrom is much

better at that kind of thing.”

“Mrs. Windrom is very clever.”

“Oh, _very!_ She always remembers names. I don’t, and Alice nudges my

elbow. She is such a good daughter. Never forgets.”

“Alice seems very alert.”

“Oh, _very!_” Lady Eveley had a soft little voice and a careful way of

setting down her words, as though they might break. “Very! She takes

after her father. Keble does too, though Keble likes quite a lot of

things I like. Perhaps the baby will take after me. Though I really

don’t see why any one should!”

Louise had an affectionate smile for this gentle grievance against

creation, and slipped her arm about the black satin waist. “Of course

Baby will take after you, dear,” she promised. “I’ll make him if he

doesn’t naturally. He takes after me when he throws elephants around,

but he takes after his father when he opens his big blue eyes and grins

a trustful, gummy grin. He’s going to be quite like Keble when he

acquires teeth and manners. Katie says so, and she’s the authority on

Baby . . . Perhaps you’ll let me take after you a little, too. But I’m

an awful hoyden.”

“You’re so clever, aren’t you!” exclaimed Lady Eveley. “We knew it, of

course, from Keble.”

Louise was serious. “The worst of that,” she mused, “is that clever

people always have a naughty side. And I’m naughty.”

“But if we were perfect our husbands would find us dull in the long run,

don’t you think?”

“There’s that, of course,” Louise agreed. How completely every one took

it for granted that there would be a long run!

They had reached the new boat-slip, and were joined by Mrs. Windrom,

Girlie, and Miriam. Dare and Alice followed, and the talk became

topographical, Mrs. Windrom finding still more objects for Girlie to

look at. Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom was even explaining the landmarks

to her.

Girlie’s attention, however, kept straying to the boats, which were

hugging the shaded shores and advancing at a leisurely rate. In the

first boat was an object on which Girlie’s eyes could always focus

themselves with an effortless nicety. This object was her fiancé, Ernest

Tulk-Leamington, an oldish young man, who was Lord Eveley’s secretary

and a rising member of the Conservative Party. The first to step out of

the boat, he was followed by Mr. Windrom and a freckled, orange-haired

youth who proved to be Mr. Cutty.

“Any fish?” cried Mrs. Windrom. Her husband showed signs of becoming

prolix, while Mr. Cutty, behind his back, stole his thunder by

surreptitiously holding up a forked stick on which two apologetic trout

were suspended.

When the necessary ceremonies were effected, Mr. Windrom declared that

you could never be sure, in untried waters, what flies the fish would

rise to. He went on the principle of using a Royal Coach when in doubt,

but he had tried Royal Coach for an hour without getting a strike, and

had ended by putting out a spinner, by means of which he had caught——

He turned. “Those two.” But he saw that the irreverent Mr. Cutty had

already displayed the catch, and he was a little vexed at the

anticlimax, as well as at the showing, which was undoubtedly poor,

viewed against a dark mass of water and mountain, with a half dozen

animated ladies as spectators. Dare had sought Louise’s eyes, and they

smiled at the fulfilment of her fears.

The second boat was nearing the slip and Louise had a moment in which to

study her father-in-law. It was a reassuring, yet a trying moment, for

she became unnerved and felt suddenly isolated. For two pins she would

have cried. There was no definable reason for the emotion, unless it was

due to her double reaction from the graveyard episode and the

friendliness of her mother-in-law. They were all strangers, even Keble.

In some ways Keble was more of a stranger than Dare,—less an

acquaintance of her most hidden self. Her loneliness was associated,

too, in some vague way with the easy, manly intimacy of the two figures

in the boat, who were links in the chain of her own existence yet so

detached from it. Keble was undeniably an integral part of her identity,

yet as he sat at the oars he seemed to be some attractive young

traveling companion she was destined never to know.

Lord Eveley, a lean, hale figure in tweeds, a fine old edition of his

son, was reeling in his line, and speaking in a voice which carried

perfectly across the still water. Keble made replies between the slow

strokes of his oars. The yellow had faded from the light, and with its

disappearance the dark shades of the trees took on a richer tone, and

the water turned from glass to velvet. The grey of the pine needles

changed to deep, blackish green, the narrow strip of shallow water was

emerald merging into milky blue, and the pebbles at the bottom were like

ripe and green olives.

There was a lull in the chatter, and only the faint lapping noise of the

oars broke the stillness. A wave of loneliness had engulfed Louise,

despite the warm little arm that was still resting on hers. By some

considerateness which only Keble seemed to possess, his eyes turned

first of all to her. True, they immediately traveled away towards the

others and his remarks were general, but the first glance had been hers

and it had been accompanied by a quick smile,—a smile which seemed to

condone some lapse of hers; she was too immersed in her present rôle to

recall what the lapse had been. At any rate it was a most timely proof

of Keble’s reliability, and it rescued her. She smiled shyly as Keble

directed his father towards her.

By one of those mass instincts that sense drama, every one had turned to

watch. Being in the centre of the stage, she forgot her diffidence.

“Weedgie, here is a father-in-law for you. He’s an indifferent angler,

but a passable sort of pater . . . Father, this is Louise.”

“Is it really! Upon my soul!” He bestowed a paternal kiss.

“You seem so surprised!” Louise laughed. “Did you think I was a boy?”

“By Jove, you know, you might have fooled me if it had been a shade

darker. But if you had, I should have been uncommonly disappointed.

Keble, I take it, makes you disguise yourself in boys’ clothes to

protect you from irresponsible lassos?”

“Oh dear no, he hates my breeches. Besides, I can protect myself quite

extraordinarily well. The fact is, I’m at a disadvantage in these.” She

was pulling sidewise at “them”. “For when you’re got up as a man you’re

always giving yourself away: your hairpins fall out or you blush.

Whereas in feminine attire you can beat a man at his own game without

his even suspecting you’re using man-to-man tactics. That’s fun.”

“Yes. I suppose it would be,” agreed Lord Eveley. “Eve did it without

much of either, they say.”

“They say such shocking things, don’t they! . . . Didn’t you catch _any_

fish?”

“Only three. Your better half caught seven,—cheeky young blighter! One

beauty.”

Mr. Windrom needed to know what they had been caught with.

“Royal Coach,” said Keble. “It’s the best all round fly.”

Mr. Windrom was incredulous and pettish. “You must have ’em trained to

follow your boat.”

“Better luck next time, Mr. Windrom,” Louise ventured. “Keble shall go

in your boat, then they’ll have to bite. Meanwhile please show him how

to make drinkable cocktails. He needs a lesson.”

She looked at her watch, then smiled at the circle of faces. “It’s just

exactly ‘evening’, so we can consider that the party has arrived. Dinner

is in an hour. Nobody need change unless he wishes. I’m going to turn

back into a woman for dinner, just to prove to my father-in-law what an

awful failure I am as a boy. Meanwhile I’ll race anybody up the hill.”

“I’m on,” said Mr. Cutty.

“Me too,” said Dare.

“Any handicap for skirts?” inquired Alice.

“Ten yards,” Louise promptly replied. “Measure off ten yards, Keble.

Anybody else?”

“Come, Girlie,” said Mrs. Windrom. “Any handicap for old age, Louise?”

“Fifteen yards for any one over thirty-five. Come on Mr. Leamington.

Beat Mr. Dare. He wins everything I go in for . . . Grandfather, you be

starter,—you’re to say one, two, three, go. Miriam dear, you can’t be

in it, for you have to show Grandmother the easy path up. I showed her

down, but one of the many delicious things she told me on the way was

that she forgets things and has to have her elbow nudged.” Louise shot a

bright glance at Lady Eveley.

“Keble, when you’ve marked off the fifteen, sprint on up the hill and

mark a line on the gravel so we won’t go plunging on the bricks and kill

ourselves . . . Oh!”

She stopped, and every one, toeing the line, looked around. Her nervous

high spirits were infectious. Even Girlie was excited. Lord Eveley was

holding up his hand in sporting earnest. His wife, under Miriam’s wing,

beamed.

“I’m trying to think what the prizes will be. Wouldn’t be a race without

prizes. Any suggestions, Mr. Cutty?”

“Might have forfeits for the first prize, and first go at the billiard

table for another.”

“Bright head-work, Mr. Cutty. Prizes as follows: the winner must choose

between making a speech at dinner or telling a ghost story before

bedtime. The loser gets his choice between first go at the billiard

table, first choice of horses to-morrow, or ordering his favorite dish

for breakfast,—can’t say fairer than that. But if anybody _tries_ to

lose, God help him! . . . All set, Grandfather!”

The servants who were arranging the dinner-table thought the party had

gone mad when it came reeling up the slippery grass hill in a hilarious,

panting pell-mell led at first by Mrs. Windrom, who fell back in favor

of Alice Eveley, who in turn was superseded by others. Towards the end

Dare and Mr. Cutty, closely followed by Louise, were leading, then Dare

stumbled and Mr. Cutty toppled into Keble’s arms, the winner. Louise was

weak with laughter at the sight of Mr. Windrom brandishing his fishing

rod and shouting instructions over his shoulder to his faltering

helpmeet. Girlie, her skirts held high, was abreast of Mr.

Tulk-Leamington, whose gallantry interfered with his progress. Alice was

far down the line but doing as well as possible under the disadvantages

of high heels and foulard folds. In the end they all reached the line

but Mrs. Windrom, who had collapsed on the turf, facing a noisily

breathing throng.

“I’ll have that big trout for breakfast, Louise,” she gasped. “The one

Keble caught. And no one can say I didn’t _try_ to win!”

4

At breakfast Louise counted votes for a picnic by the river. “Those who

don’t fish,” she suggested, “can sit under the willows and pretend there

aren’t any mosquitoes, or play duck on the rock with Mr. Cutty and me.”

They had all come down in comically smart riding clothes. Miriam, with

her tanned skin and well-worn khaki, looked like a native in contrast to

Girlie in her grey-green whipcord. Girlie, whose horsemanship had been

loudly heralded, was eager to try out a Mexican saddle.

Mr. Tulk-Leamington stroked his prematurely bald head. “What will you do

if your pony bucks?” he asked.

Girlie languidly buttered her toast. “Ernest,” she chided, “you’re

always stirring up mares’ nests.”

“Dear me!” cried Alice. “Do they buck?”

“In wild west novels they do,” said Girlie’s fiancé. “What will you do,

Miss Eveley, if yours does?”

“I shall hang on and scream for Louise.”

Louise turned the tables on Ernest. “And you?” she inquired.

Mr. Cutty forestalled him. “He will soar into the firmament. You’ll find

him on some remote tree-top. Can’t you picture a distraught owl trying

to hatch out Ernest’s head!”

“Mercy!” Lady Eveley exclaimed, in meek distress. “They don’t really try

to throw you, do they, Louise?”

This caused an uproar. Louise reached across the table to squeeze her

hand. “Of course not, dear. They only try to throw teases like Mr.

Tulk-Leamington and devils incarnate like Mr. Cutty. Sundown is a lamb;

you’ll like him so well that you’ll be sorry when you arrive at the

picnic. Besides I’ll ride beside you all the way.”

“Sundown wouldn’t throw a fly,” Mr. Cutty broke in. “Mrs. Eveley has to

flick ’em off with her riding crop.”

Groans drowned this sally and Mr. Cutty nearly lost a spoonful of egg as

a result of a lunge directed at him by the prospective owlet.

Through the babel, Keble and the older men, having exhausted the

immediate possibilities of prize cattle, were discussing the

half-completed golf course, oblivious to frivolous issues. Only once did

Mr. Windrom seek to intrude, having overheard something about “throwing

a fly,” and this sent the younger generation off into a new gale of

unhallowed mirth.

Late in the afternoon the picnickers returned in various states of

dampness and soreness, but exuding a contentment for which Louise’s

vigilance was largely responsible. Dare and Mr. Cutty rowed to a

secluded cove to swim; Ernest went to edit his official memoranda; Mrs.

Windrom retired to sleep; Lady Eveley racked her head for words to fill

up a letter; the old men resorted to billiards; and Girlie challenged

Miriam at tennis.

Louise held court in the kitchen, where she had gone to make some

special pastries and to wheedle, scold, encourage, bully, sting, and

jolly the augmented staff into supreme efforts. She swore that the

future of the Empire hinged on the frothiness of the mousse. The cream

was not to be whipped a minute before eight; the grapes were not to be

dried, but brought in straight from the ice-box in a cold perspiration,

and Gertie was for heaven’s sake not to bump into Griggs on her way to

the side table, as she had the night before.

When her batter was consigned to the oven she ran out to the greenhouse

for flowers, and saw Keble and his sister stretched in deck chairs near

the tennis court. She waved her shears and speculated as to the subject

of their chat.

The subject, as she might have guessed, was herself.

“Why didn’t you give us an inkling?” Alice was saying. “Here you’ve been

married nearly three years, and you’ve kept this spark of the divine

fire all to yourself.”

Keble smiled with a mixture of affection and faint bitterness. “I didn’t

exactly _keep_ her, old girl. There’s no reason why you and Mother

shouldn’t have got yourself ignited before this.”

Alice considered. “But we did ask her to come to us.”

“There are ways and ways of asking. Do you suppose she can’t feel the

difference?”

Again Alice reflected. “You mean, I suppose, that if you had married

Girlie, for instance, we would have commanded her presence, on pain of

dragging her out of her lair.”

“I’m glad you see it.”

“Well, dear, wasn’t it just a bit your fault?”

“No doubt.”

“I mean, how were we to know what an original creature you had found out

here? It isn’t reasonable; there can’t be another. We had nothing to go

on but your laconic sketch,—‘wild flowers’, I remember, was your most

enthusiastic description. But there are wild flowers and wild flowers,

you know,—just as there are ‘ways and ways of asking’. There were gaps

and contradictions in your accounts, and the burden of proof rested on

you. We didn’t desire to place you in a false position. Even Claudia

Windrom reported that Louise’s tastes were very western. I might have

known that she was prejudiced, and we certainly ought to have given you

more credit for perspicuity. But men are so blind . . . Then we were

thrown off by Louise’s temperamental trip to Florida. You wrote a

forlorn sort of letter saying that she had gone off on a holiday, and it

was just after we had invited you both to come to the Riviera with us.

That seemed strange.”

“What did you think I had married, for God’s sake,—an Indian squaw?”

“Don’t be horrid! . . . We weren’t at all sure you hadn’t married a hand

grenade.”

Keble laughed. “I’m not at all certain that I haven’t.”

Alice watched him curiously, then abandoned the flicker of curiosity and

proceeded to give Louise her due. “It’s not so much her

brilliance,—though that’s remarkable,—but her tact! My dear, she could

run a political campaign single-handed. I’ve never seen the Windroms so

beautifully managed in my life. You know _we_ can’t manage them; at our

house one of the trio is always falling out of the picture. But Louise!

the instant she sees an elbow or a leg or a Windromian prejudice

sticking out she flips it back in, or widens the frame to include it,

and nobody the worse. Her way of setting people to rights and making

them feel it is they who are setting everybody else to rights is

_impayable_ . . . And the best you could say for her was wild flowers!”

“Since Mrs. Windrom was first here a good deal of water has flowed under

the bridges.”

“I’ll wager it has. Louise wouldn’t be found camping by a stagnant

pool.”

Again she watched her brother curiously. He was gazing into the

distance, at nothing.

“Sometimes I feel stagnant beside Louise,” he admitted, put off his

guard by the unwonted charm of a sisterly chat.

Alice patted his shoulder, with a gesture tender but angular. “Father is

purring with pleasure at the way you’ve stuck to your guns, sonny,

although, naturally, he wouldn’t say so for all the king’s horses and

all the king’s men. In the beginning he used to shake his head in

scepticism and sorrow. Now he never lets a dinner guest get away from

the house without dragging in you and your colonizing enterprise.

Mother, of course, has always doted and still does; but she would have,

if you’d gone in for knife-grinding. She would never conceive the

possibility of any one doubting you. I frankly did,—not you, but your

schemes.”

“There’s plenty to be done yet,” Keble said. “It will take twenty years.

Sometimes the future looks as steep to me as Hardscrapple.”

“It won’t look so steep when you’ve got your second wind. I’m full of

rosy hopes for you. What’s more, I’m jolly comfortable here. I thought I

was going to hate it. I’ve been well fed and waited on. I’ve been amused

and sauced by a witty child who isn’t in the least awed by my accursed

standoffishness. I think the most remarkable thing about Louise is that

she is kind, through and through, without _having_ to be; she could

always get her own way without bothering to be kind . . . I’ve also

discovered the thrills of being aunt to the most entrancingly ridiculous

and succulent infant I’ve ever beheld. Most of all I’ve seen Father and

Mother exchanging furtive glances of pride. What more could any old maid

ask for.”

Miriam and Girlie joined them. “It’s too warm for tennis,” Girlie

complained. “We’re debating whether to go for a swim.”

Alice thought it an excellent idea, provided she was not included.

“But these mountain lakes are icy!” Girlie shivered at the thought.

“Not if you dive in, instead of wading,” said Miriam. “Louise taught me

that.”

“I’m too tall. I might stick fast. Besides one looks so distressed in

borrowed bathing clothes.”

“And the only secluded cove is pre-empted!” Keble sympathized.

“Oh, without a costume I’d be afraid of sinking. It would seem just like

a bath, and one goes straight to the bottom of the bath-tub.”

The bathing project having died of inanition, Miriam and Girlie went

indoors.

“I’m trying to think where I’ve seen her before,” Alice said, following

Miriam with her eyes. “I keep associating her in my mind with white

sails, and strawberries. . . . Louise has known her a long while?”

“For years.”

“Delightful woman! So sensible. How lucky that she is able to help you

with your accounts. You never could add.”

“Rather. I don’t know how we could get on without her.”

“Is she stopping long?”

“Well, we can’t put her in a pumpkin shell, like Peter, and keep her

forever.”

“She must feel rather cut off from her own people, out here. Where is

her home?”

“She used to live in Washington. She has seen what are known as better

days.”

“One guesses that . . . For heaven’s sake, Keble, who is she? You know

I’m only beating about the bush.”

“She never speaks of her family. Most of it’s dead.”

“Cread—Cread.” Alice was lying in wait for an image that kept eluding

her, when suddenly she captured it. “Cowes! Of course. Before the war,

at the Graybridge place . . . You remember Aurelie Graybridge,—she was

Aurelie Streeter of New York. It was a garden party, after a race, and

Admiral Cread was there with the American Ambassador. How stupid of me

to have forgotten! I must remind her.”

Keble was uneasy. “I don’t think I would, Alice, unless she does first.

She’s uncommonly reticent about herself. She came out here for a

complete change, you see.”

“No, I don’t see,” said Alice, impatiently. “That’s just the point. But

I’ll hold my tongue . . . I wonder why she hasn’t married.” It always

seemed odd to Alice that other women didn’t marry. “Some man like Dare.

I suppose he’s young for her,—yet not enough to matter.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Keble reflected. “Discussed it with Louise once.

But they don’t seem to be attracted . . . Dare is a splendid chap.

There’s no resisting him when he gets going. He has given us all a

healthy fillip.”

“You _have_ been lucky in your companions, you and Louise!” Alice

commented.

“Rather! Oh, hello, here’s the car with the people from the Valley.

We’re going to show you some natives to-night.”

“Who is the funny little man in front?”

“That is the best-informed and most highly esteemed ‘character’ within a

radius of sixty miles,—and incidentally my father-in-law.”

“The ominous lady in black looks like the Empress Eugénie come back to

mourn her own loss!”

Keble was puzzled. “I haven’t the faintest notion who she is,—good

Lord! unless it’s Madame Mornay-Mareuil, whom we’ve been expecting off

and on for weeks!”

They had risen from their chairs. “Go and meet them,” said Alice. “I

shall lie down a while before dressing.”

CHAPTER II

AFTER a hurried knock Louise burst into Miriam’s room. Miriam was seated

before the mirror brushing her reddish-brown hair. “Who do you suppose

has turned up to the feast?” cried Louise, reaching for a chair and

impatiently rescuing the filmy pink draperies of her frock from the

handle of a drawer. “Aunt Denise, straight from Quebec! After all these

months of dilly-dallying she stalks in when we’re having a reunion of

the men her husband spent half his editorial and political career in

insulting!”

“Why didn’t she telegraph?”

“Too stingy,—heaven forgive me for saying it,—and too old-fashioned.

She arrived with Papa and the Bootses and Pearl and Amy Sweet. They were

stuffed into the car like flowers in a vase, her trunk lashed on behind.

Papa tried to telephone, but Aunt Denise said if her own niece couldn’t

take her in without being warned, she wouldn’t come at all. That’s her

spirit. What am I to do?”

“Have you explained the situation to her?”

“Does one try to explain red to a bull?”

“Then tip the others off. We’ll have to engage her on safe subjects.”

“If you _would_ Miriam. In French,—for she hates English. She behaves

as though French were the official language of Canada. . . I’ve been

waiting for something to go wrong, and now it will. ‘Claudia dear’ was

difficult enough. There’s no keeping that woman off a scent.”

“What scent?”

Louise was vexed at her slip. “Oh, scents in general. Yours in

particular is most refreshing. Is that the Coty?”

Without waiting for an answer she plunged on. “Now I’ll have to

rearrange the seating. If I put Aunt Denise near Grandfather she may

scalp him. His triumphant progress across the continent must have rubbed

her the wrong way . . . I’ll have enough on my hands without that. If

Papa drinks one glass too many he’ll tease Aunt Denise about the Pope.

And the Bootses are fanatical teetotallers, and I wouldn’t put it past

them to dash the glass from old Papa Windrom’s lips!”

“Make me the spare woman,” Miriam offered. “That will leave me free to

shush Pearl and prompt Mrs. Brown. I’ll watch you for cues.”

Louise gave herself a final glance in the cheval glass, pulled Miriam’s

skirt straight, and left a grateful kiss on her forehead to dispel any

questioning trend that might have lingered as a consequence of the

inadvertent “scent”. Then she made her way downstairs to readjust the

place cards which Dare had decorated with appropriate caricatures.

This done she stepped out on the terrace. Dare was there, leaning

against the parapet. He offered her a cigarette and lit it in silence.

“There’s a dreadful ordeal ahead of you,” said Louise, sending a little

cloud of smoke skyward.

“I’m getting used to ordeals,” he replied.

“This is a new kind. You have to take the pastor’s wife in to dinner.”

“I shall ask her to rescue my soul from the devil.”

“She will be glad of the occasion.”

In his eyes there was a shadow of the glance that had proved

epoch-making the day before. “On second thoughts,” he added, “I shall do

no such thing. The devil is welcome to it.” He looked away, and Louise

for once could find nothing to say. “Except,” Dare finally resumed,

“that he won’t have it at any price. Neither will God. That leaves me on

my own.”

“Isn’t that——” Louise began, in a low voice, then was conscious of a

step. Turning, she saw Mrs. Windrom, in purple satin, advancing from the

front terrace, pinning to her corsage a pink rose which drew attention

to the utterly unflowerlike character of her face. The last rays of the

setting sun fell full upon the lenses of the pince-nez which Louise was

once “too damn polite” to smash.

“What have you two got your heads together about?” she inquired with an

archness that suited her as little as the rose.

“A plot,” Louise replied, holding out a hand to Mrs. Windrom, and noting

with a little pang the half cynical smile which Dare allowed himself on

seeing the ease of her transition. As if good acting were necessarily a

sin of insincerity!

“We’re terrifically mixed to-night, and owing to the unforeseen arrival

of my aunt I’ve had to throw everybody up in a blanket and pair them as

they came down. I’ve done what your clever son calls playing fast and

loose with the social alphabet: natives paired with dudes, atheists with

Methodist ministers, teetotallers with bibbers, socialists with

diehards. And all my tried and true friends have a duty to

perform,—namely to keep the talk on safe ground. Poor Aunt Denise, you

know, is the widow of that old man who was fined a dollar for libeling

the king.”

During the last few weeks Mrs. Windrom had acquired a smattering of

Canadian political history. Louise felt her stiffen.

“Aunt Denise has always lived under a cloud of illusions. First of all

in convents, then with her husband whom she transformed from a village

lawyer into a national _enfant terrible_. She wouldn’t believe a word

against him, and I think it showed rather a fine spirit. We all idolize

our husbands in some degree, though some of us take more pains not to

show it.” Louise let this remark sink in, and felt Mrs. Windrom’s

shining lenses turn towards Dare, whose gaze was negligently resting on

the opposite shore of the lake. “Consequently, if Aunt Denise should let

her illusions get the better of her tact, I do hope you two will help

change the subject.”

Mrs. Windrom enjoyed conspiracies. “You may count on me, my dear,” she

replied. “Now I must run up and see if my husband has lost his collar

buttons as usual.”

Mrs. Windrom looked at the clock on the drawing-room mantle, crossed to

a window to watch the retreating figures of Louise and Dare, then went

towards the great square hall with its rough rafters and balcony, its

shining floor, fur rugs and trophies of Keble’s marksmanship. For no

ulterior reason, but simply because she could not resist an open door,

she peeked into the dining-room, then walked upstairs.

She had timed her visit to a nicety. Her husband’s tie was being made

into a lopsided bow.

“Sore?” he asked, when she had straightened it.

“A little. But I’m used to western saddles. Madame Mornay-Mareuil has

suddenly turned up. Louise is in a panic. For heaven’s sake don’t talk

politics. I can’t see why you leave the cuff buttons till _after_ you’ve

got your shirt on. It’s so simple to put them in beforehand.”

“Simple, old girl; I just forget, that’s all.”

“What I can’t make out . . . now I’ve bent my nail! . . . is Louise’s

treatment of Keble.”

“What treatment?”

“I mean she ignores him.”

“Have you seen my other pump?”

“Do stand still. In favor of the handsome architect.”

“Steady on, Claudia dear. You’ve already dug up one scandal here. Isn’t

that enough?”

“Scandal?”

“Didn’t you tell me the good-looking secretary was making eyes at

Keble?”

Mrs. Windrom was indignant. “Most certainly not!”

“Well, those may not be the words you used. But the idea never came into

my head all on its own.”

This was highly plausible. Tremendous ideas regarding revenues and

tariffs found their way unaided into Mr. Windrom’s head, but not ideas

having to do with illicit _oeillades_.

“If you deliberately choose to distort my words!” said Mrs. Windrom.

“I don’t choose to distort anything; I was only looking—Here I am like

‘my son John’ and it’s going on for eight.”

Mrs. Windrom tranquilly fished a pump from under a discarded garment

which had been allowed to fall to the floor.

“Have you your handkerchief?”

Mr. Windrom nodded and followed his wife out to the balcony, which

overlooked the hall. He was rubbing his hands together in anticipation

of a cocktail when his wife seized his arm.

A tall, elderly woman in a trailing gown of rusty black crossed the

balcony with a slow stride and descended the stairs. She had large black

eyes, a high nose, and tightly drawn white hair streaked with black.

“Lady Macbeth!” whispered Mr. Windrom, tapping his wife’s arm and making

a face like some sixty-year-old schoolboy. “Mum’s the word, eh? _De

mortuis_——”

Mrs. Windrom was nettled. “What I can’t make out,” she said, “is how a

squat little doctor could have a sister like that!”

“You’re always running on to things you can’t make out Claudia. It’s

scarcely for want of trying.”

“I have to keep my eyes open for two, for you never see anything, and

Girlie’s blind to things she should see. If she’d had a little of

Louise’s vim four years ago——”

Mr. Windrom came to a halt and made a queer grimace.

“What’s the matter?”

“I forgot my handkerchief.”

“Really, Charles! If I reminded you once I reminded you a dozen times.”

Mr. Windrom sneezed, loud and long, and turned back towards his room.

“Come now, Claudie,” he protested, “make it six.”

2

Miriam, on the heels of the Windroms, paused to look over the railing of

the balcony. All her coaching had been leading up to this event, and

there was Louise acquitting herself with a virtuosity that effaced

Miriam from this setting as completely as Fate had effaced her from her

own.

The grey-blue twilight which came through open doors and windows dimmed

the orange of the lamps. An incredibly regal personage dominated the

assembly, and above a discreet hum Miriam heard a penetrating,

dark-toned voice saying, “_Vous allez me pardonner, ma chère Louise,

d’être descendue un peu en retard. J’ai du défaire une malle. Voilà six

jours que je voyage sans changer de robe. Vous jugerez si je suis

contente d’être installée—et dans quel petit palais! Maintenant vous

allez me présenter ces dames._”

Slim and brown, nimble and compact, Louise brought her guests in turn to

Madame Mornay-Mareuil. Miriam was annoyed that Louise should have failed

to recognize in her trying aunt a grande dame of unchallenged authority.

With instinctive deference, the company had grouped itself about her,

and Miriam smiled with a trace of vindictive satisfaction, for she had

been as quick as Louise to resent the unconscious patronage in Girlie

Windrom’s way of beginning a remark with, “Of course, out _here_——”

She went to Dare, who was standing aloof, near a window. “Have you

kissed the queen’s hand?” she inquired.

“Not yet . . . The little doctor seems to have put one over on the

Eveleys!” Dare’s lips went down with a cynical humor which Miriam noted

as new. There was also something new in his eyes. “I for one,” he said,

“am glad.”

“Why?”

“Simply in the name of poetic justice. It’s time Mrs. Eveley got a bit

of her own back,—and Boadicea there will get it for her with a

vengeance.”

Miriam gave him a smiling nod and went to obey Louise’s summons.

Dismayed by the astonished hush which had fallen over the hall when Aunt

Denise had appeared on the staircase and come slowly towards her, Louise

had quickly appreciated the dramatic value of the intrusion, and when

she had manoeuvred every one safely to the table she acknowledged that

the preliminary touch of solemnity had given her dinner party a tone

which, instead of diminishing, would incalculably augment the triumph

she had, for months now, determined that it should be. She had known

Aunt Denise only as a formidable quantity in her background, an aunt she

had seen during a single summer, after her mother’s death, but with whom

she had corresponded in a sentimental desire to maintain contact with

the only relative she could claim, except for some half mythical cousins

in Dublin. That her letters to Aunt Denise and her gifts of needlework

had been seeds sown on fertile ground was now abundantly manifest; for

Aunt Denise had assumed a protective kinship and had made that

mysterious kind of “impression” of which she herself, for all her

success, would never learn the secret.

Of the whole company only Girlie, with her defective focusing apparatus,

had failed to pay immediate homage. In a pretty white dress, she had

perfunctorily acknowledged Aunt Denise’s graciousness and begun to turn

away, when the old lady transfixed her with relentless black eyes. “I

suppose it is the fashion to walk with a bend nowadays,” Aunt Denise had

said. “It doesn’t give the lungs a chance.”

Girlie had blushed and straightened, but Aunt Denise had withdrawn her

eyes and turned them more charitably on little Mrs. Brown.

A stock soup had been simmering on the back of the stove for two weeks.

By the time she had tasted it, and found it perfect, Louise’s spirits

were at their highest voltage, and her eyes flashed down the table till

they encountered Miriam’s, which gave back a signal of felicitation.

Miriam, between Dare and Jack Wallace, was beating time to an argument

sustained by Lord Eveley and Pearl Beatty against Mr. Windrom and Amy

Sweet, the latter lending her aid in the form of giggles, for which

three sips of wine,—the first in her life, and drunk in open contempt

of the pledge Mrs. Boots had once persuaded her to sign,—were

responsible.

Aunt Denise was getting acquainted with Keble, treating him with a

respect that struck Louise as being inherently French. She wondered

whether French women had a somewhat more professional attitude towards

males than women of other races. Keble looked happy, but his French was

buckling under the strain, and Aunt Denise did him the honor of

continuing the conversation in English, an important concession.

Of all the scraps of talk Louise could overhear, the scrap which most

gratified her,—and she wondered why it should,—was a homely exchange

in which her father and Lady Eveley were engrossed. “It’s the pure

mountain air,” Dr. Bruneau was explaining. “He couldn’t have a better

climate to commence life in.”

“That’s what my husband was saying. You know, when Keble was ten months

old we took him to Switzerland——”

“Isn’t it, Mrs. Eveley?” broke in a voice at Louise’s right.

“Isn’t what, Mr. Boots? Mr. Cutty was pounding with his fork and I

didn’t hear.”

“Had to pound,” Mr. Cutty defended himself, “to drown Ernest. He’s

telling Mrs. Brown I stole plums from her garden.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“But justice is justice, and the point is, so did Ernest,—and his were

riper!”

Louise leaned towards Mrs. Brown, “Do spray arsenic on the rest of the

plums dear, and abolish Mr. Cutty. Wasn’t what what, Mr. Boots?”

Mrs. Windrom forestalled him. “Mr. Boots tells me that the settlers are

all turning socialists because farming doesn’t pay. Do you mean to say

you make no effort to combat such a state of affairs?”

“I dare say we ought to take more interest in politics.”

Mrs. Boots, who was beyond Mr. Cutty, left Dare long enough to

interpose, “Why not persuade Mr. Eveley to be a candidate in the coming

elections?”

Dare had seized his reprieve to whisper to Miriam, “Does all this,

to-night, make you feel fearfully alone?”

Miriam looked up as though he had startled into flight some bird of

ill-omen, but made no reply.

Dare leaned a little closer. “I fancy we’re lonely for rather similar

reasons.”

Miriam hesitated. “First of all I’m not sure what you mean. Second, if

you mean what I dare say you do,—aren’t you rather bold?”

“Oh yes,” he replied. “Very likely.”

He returned to his glass, then added, “Your acknowledgment that I was

bold satisfies me of the accuracy of my guess. As we were in the same

boat I couldn’t resist the temptation of bidding for a crumb of

commiseration. It would have been reciprocal. So my boldness wasn’t more

rude than it was humane.”

“You’re excused,” said Miriam, “under the First Offenders Act.”

Girlie Windrom, in a commendable spirit, took an opportunity to express

the hope that Madame Mornay-Mareuil, her vis-à-vis, had not found the

long train journey too fatiguing.

Madame recounted her impressions of the trip and found that Lord Eveley

was in agreement with her regarding the exorbitant prices charged in

western hotels. Accustomed as he was to express his opinions in public

platform style, he soon had Keble’s half of the table as audience, while

Louise gathered in loose threads of talk at her end. The back of her

dinner was now broken and she was standing with one foot triumphantly

resting on its prostrate form. When the ices arrived she couldn’t resist

announcing that the accompanying cakes had been made by herself. The

exclamations were silenced by Aunt Denise who lifted her voice to

complain of Louise’s cheer.

“Your table groans with luxuries, my child. You have forgotten the

lessons in thrift I taught you when you were a girl.”

For the first time the little doctor turned from Lady Eveley. “I am to

blame for that,” he said. “You see, sister, after you had left us, Nana

and Louise tried to make me eat wooden cakes made without eggs,

according to your instructions. I can’t digest wood, so I extracted from

Louise’s curly head, one by one, all the notions you had put into it,

and we lived extravagantly ever after,—it’s a sinful world, _va_.”

To soften for his sister the laughter that greeted his defense of

Louise, Dr. Bruneau added, “With you it was different, since those who

have rich spiritual lives don’t need rich food. Louise and I, poor

heathens, had nothing to indulge but our appetites.”

“You are free to do so,” returned Aunt Denise, in no wise discomfited.

“My lessons were only the principles of economy and sacrifice our mother

had taught me, the principles which, if you remember, _mon frère_, made

it possible for you and me to have an education.”

The company seemed relieved to find that royalty could, on occasion, be

“answered back”, and Lord Eveley’s hearty laugh at the mischievous but

not unkind sally had been followed by a scrutinizing glance which hinted

that the statesman had found a mind worth exploring.

By the time the fruit had appeared, duly perspiring, Louise had only two

worries left. First, the quiescence of the Windroms smote her

conscience: she felt that she had been gratuitous in warning Mrs.

Windrom, while leaving Aunt Denise a license to talk which Aunt Denise

had been well-bred enough not to abuse. Second, she was not entirely

easy in her mind regarding Dare’s silence. He had done his duty by the

pastor’s wife, yet there was some boding unhappiness in his manner.

Before the house was opened Dare had always set the key. Under the old

conditions he would have taken the whole company into his hands and

played with them. And while his moodiness was, in one sense, a deeply

stirring tribute, at the same time there was in it something which made

her feel remorseful, and afraid,—not for herself. It was as though her

conscience were pointing out to her the consequences of extravagance in

her moral kitchen. In the intellectual cakes she had baked for herself

and Dare there had perhaps been too many emotional ingredients. They

were rich and many had been eaten. Dare was conceivably experiencing

this evening the ill effects.

In the midst of her reflections Lord Eveley surprised her by rising and

delivering a little speech which was at the same time a dedication of

the house and a tribute to its mistress. Anything in the nature of

orthodox ceremony intimidated her. There were toasts,—and Miriam had

never told her what one was supposed to do in such a contingency.

Moreover she hadn’t meant to drink her last glass of wine, and rather

dazedly wished she hadn’t.

After dinner the company divided for bridge and dancing, and Louise

seized a moment to lay a sympathetic hand on Dare’s coat-sleeve.

“Are you so bored?” she whispered.

“It’s not your fault,” he replied, and the unsmiling negligence of his

manner bore witness to the ease with which he and Louise could fit into

each other’s mood.

“It won’t last much longer,” she said. “It” referred to the house party,

but Dare chose to misinterpret.

“No,” he replied, “I’m going to Japan.”

Her eyes fell. When she raised them again she noticed, with a chill,

that Mrs. Windrom, from the opposite corner, had been watching their

tête-à-tête with hawklike vigilance.

“Come and dance,” she said, drawing him toward the hall.

There another little shock was in store for her. Alice Eveley, flushed

and flattered after a dance with Jack Wallace, was proceeding across the

room, when suddenly she stopped short and chose a new direction.

On looking towards Alice’s abandoned goal to see what had caused her to

change her mind, Louise observed that Keble and Miriam were absorbed in

an unsmiling tête-à-tête of the kind that had made Mrs. Windrom feign a

sudden interest in Mrs. Brown’s cameo brooch.

She raised her arms for her partner’s embrace, and was swept into the

dance.

CHAPTER III

THREE days later Louise stood on the terrace watching the departure of

her guests. As the last car disappeared into the pines she thought of

the day when Walter and his mother drove away from the cottage which she

had named “Sans Souci.” On that day she had tensely waited for some

sympathetic sign from Keble, and he had withheld it. Now she knew that

the balance was changed, that Keble was waiting for a sign from her. Yet

all she could say was, “Thank God, that’s over!”

Recently she had had no time to project her thoughts into the future.

Until this family reunion was safely thrust into the past she had

schooled herself to be patient, as she had done under the constraint of

approaching motherhood. Both events she had regarded as primary clauses

in her matrimonial pact, and the reward she had promised herself for

executing them was complete moral freedom. She would admit nothing more

binding in the pact, for she had made a point of benefiting as little as

possible from it. If Keble had provided her with a home, she had managed

it skilfully for him. If he had placed his bank account at her disposal,

she had gone disproportionately deep into her own. An element unforeseen

in the pact was that either party to it might, in the process of

carrying out its clauses, develop personal resources for which the other

could have little use but which, on sheer grounds of human economy,

ought not to be allowed to remain unmined.

Keble had warned her that grappling with ideas might end in one of the

ideas knocking her on the head. Which was nonsense. The danger lay not

in grappling with ideas but in trying to dodge them, in letting them

lurk in your neighborhood ready to take you unawares. If you went at

them with all your might they were soon overpowered.

Yet going at them brought you face to face with other ideas lurking

farther along the path, and before you knew it you were in a field where

no one,—at times not even Dare—was able or cared to follow. And at the

prospect of forging on alone your imagination staggered a little; an

unwelcome emotion,—unwelcome because more fundamental than you had been

willing to admit,—surged up and insisted that nothing in life was worth

striving for that carried you out of the warmth of the old community of

affection. For, whatever might be achieved through adventuring in wider

fields, a catering to new minds would be entailed, an occasional leaning

upon new arms, homage from new eyes and hearts. That was inevitable,

since human beings were of necessity social. And the overwhelming pity

of it was that you would always be conscious that the neatest mind in

the world, though not the broadest, the most comfortable arms, though

not the most expert, the most candid blue eyes, though not the most

compelling, were those of the man from whom your adventurousness had

drawn you away. The thought of entirely outgrowing them gave you a

chill. When you had penetrated further into the forest of life’s

possibilities you couldn’t go on indefinitely playing hide and seek

among the trees with that old companion. He would stop at the edge of

the forest, and you must make your way through it, alone.