BOOK I

THE CHILDREN

Edith Wharton

[Illustration: [Logo]]

NEW YORK LONDON

D. Appleton and Company

Mcmxxviii

COPYRIGHT — 1928 — BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_First Printing, September, 1928_

COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW, INC.

TO

MY PATIENT LISTENERS

AT

SAINTE-CLAIRE

CONTENTS

BOOK I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

BOOK II

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

BOOK III

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

BOOK IV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

BOOK I

THE CHILDREN

I

As the big liner hung over the tugs swarming about her in the bay of

Algiers, Martin Boyne looked down from the promenade deck on the troop

of first-class passengers struggling up the gangway, their faces all

unconsciously lifted to his inspection.

“Not a soul I shall want to speak to—as usual!”

Some men’s luck in travelling was inconceivable. They had only to get

into a train or on board a boat to run across an old friend; or, what

was more exciting, make a new one. They were always finding themselves

in the same compartment, or in the same cabin, with some wandering

celebrity, with the owner of a famous house, of a noted collection, or

of an odd and amusing personality—the latter case being, of course, the

rarest as it was the most rewarding.

There was, for instance, Martin Boyne’s own Great-Uncle Edward. Uncle

Edward’s travel-adventures were famed in the family. At home in America,

amid the solemn upholstery of his Boston house, Uncle Edward was the

model of complacent dullness; yet whenever he got on board a steamer, or

into a train (or a _diligence_, in his distant youth), he was singled

out by fate as the hero of some delightful encounter. It would be Rachel

during her ill-starred tour of the States; Ruskin on the lake of Geneva;

the Dean of Canterbury as Uncle Edward, with all the appropriate

emotions, was gazing on the tomb of the Black Prince; or the Duke of

Devonshire of his day, as Uncle Edward put a courteous (but probably

pointless) question to the housekeeper showing him over Chatsworth. And

instantly he would receive a proscenium box from Rachel for her

legendary first night in Boston, or be entreated by Ruskin to join him

for a month in Venice; or the Dean would invite him to stay at the

Deanery, the Duke at Chatsworth; and the net result of these experiences

would be that Uncle Edward, if questioned, would reply with his sweet

frosty smile: “Yes, Rachel had talent but no beauty”; or: “No one could

be more simple and friendly than the Duke”; or: “Ruskin really had all

the appearances of a gentleman.” Such were the impressions produced on

Uncle Edward by his unparalleled success in the great social scenes

through which, for a period of over sixty years, he moved with benignant

blindness.

Far different was the case of his great-nephew. No tremor of thought or

emotion would, in similar situations, have escaped Martin Boyne: he

would have burst all the grapes against his palate. But though he was

given to travel, and though he had travelled much, and his profession as

a civil engineer had taken him to interesting and out-of-the-way parts

of the world, and though he was always on the alert for agreeable

encounters, it was never at such times that they came to him. He would

have loved adventure, but adventure worthy of the name perpetually

eluded him; and when it has eluded a man till he is over forty it is not

likely to seek him out later.

“I believe it’s something about the shape of my nose,” he had said to

himself that very morning as he shaved in his spacious cabin on the

upper deck of the big Mediterranean cruising-steamer.

The nose in question was undoubtedly not adventurous in shape; it did

not thrust itself far forward into other people’s affairs; and the eyes

above, wide apart, deep-set, and narrowed for closer observation, were

of a guarded twilight gray which gave the nose no encouragement

whatever.

“Nobody worth bothering about—_as usual_,” he grumbled. For the day was

so lovely, the harbour of Algiers so glittering with light and heat, his

own mood so full of holiday enterprise—it was his first vacation after a

good many months on a hard exhausting job—that he could hardly believe

he really looked to the rest of the world as he had seen himself that

morning: a critical cautious man of forty-six, whom nobody could

possibly associate with the romantic or the unexpected.

“Usual luck; best I can hope for is to keep my cabin to myself for the

rest of the cruise,” he pondered philosophically, hugging himself at the

prospect of another fortnight of sea-solitude before—well, before the

fateful uncertainty of what awaited him just beyond the voyage....

“And I haven’t even _seen_ her for five years!” he reflected, with that

feeling of hollowness about the belt which prolonged apprehension gives.

Passengers were still climbing the ship’s side, and he leaned and looked

again, this time with contracted eyes and a slight widening of his

cautious nostrils. His attention had been drawn to a young woman—a slip

of a girl, rather—with a round flushed baby on her shoulder, a baby much

too heavy for her slender frame, but on whose sleepy countenance her own

was bent with a gaze of solicitude which wrung a murmur of admiration

from Boyne.

“Jove—if a fellow was younger!”

Men of forty-six do not gasp as frequently at the sight of a charming

face as they did at twenty; but when the sight strikes them it hits

harder. Boyne had not been looking for pretty faces but for interesting

ones, and it rather disturbed him to be put off his quest by anything so

out of his present way as excessive youth and a rather pathetic grace.

“Lord—the child’s ever so much too heavy for her. Must have been married

out of the nursery: damned cad, not to—”

The young face mounting toward him continued to bend over the baby, the

girl’s frail shoulders to droop increasingly under their burden, as the

congestion ahead of her forced the young lady to maintain her slanting

position halfway up the liner’s flank.

A nurse in correct bonnet and veil touched her shoulder, as if offering

to relieve her; but she only tightened her arm about the child.

Whereupon the nurse, bending, lifted in her own arms a carrot-headed

little girl of four or five in a gaudy gipsy-like frock.

“What—another? Why, it’s barbarous; it ought to be against the law! The

poor little thing—”

Here Boyne’s attention was distracted by the passage of a deck-steward

asking where he wished his chair placed. He turned to attend to this

matter, and saw, on the chair next to his, a tag bearing the name: “Mrs.

Cliffe Wheater.”

Cliffe Wheater—Cliffe Wheater! What an absurd name ... and somehow he

remembered to have smiled over it in the same way years before.... But,

good Lord, of _course_! How long he must have lived out of the world, on

his engineering jobs, first in the Argentine, then in Australia, and

since the war in Egypt—how out of step he must have become with the old

social dance of New York, not to situate Cliffe Wheater at once as the

big red-faced Chicagoan who was at Harvard with him, and who had since

become one of the showiest of New York millionaires. Cliffe Wheater, of

course—the kind of fellow who was spoken of, respectfully, as having

“interests” everywhere: Boyne recalled having run across Wheater

“interests” even in the Argentine. But the man himself, at any rate

since his marriage, was reputed to be mainly interested in Ritz Hotels

and powerful motorcars. Hadn’t he a steam-yacht too? He had a wife, at

any rate—it was all coming back to Boyne: he had married, it must be

sixteen or seventeen years ago, that good-looking Mervin girl, of New

York—Joyce Mervin—whom Boyne himself had danced and flirted with through

a remote winter not long after Harvard. Joyce Mervin: she had written to

him to announce her engagement, had enclosed a little snap-shot of

herself with “Goodbye, Martin,” scrawled across it. Had she rather

fancied Boyne—Boyne wondered? He had been too poor to try to find

out.... And now he and she were going to be deck-neighbours for a

fortnight on the magic seas between Algiers and Venice! He remembered

the face he had contemplated that morning in his shaving-glass, and

thought: “Very likely she hasn’t changed a bit; smart women last so

wonderfully; but she won’t know _me_.” The idea was half depressing and

half reassuring. After all, it would enable him to take his

observations—and to have his deck-chair moved, should the result be

disappointing.

The ship had shaken her insect-like flock of tugs and sailing-boats off

her quivering flanks; and now the great blue level spread before her as

she headed away toward the morning. Boyne got a book, pulled his hat

over his nose, and stretched out in his deck-chair, awaiting Mrs.

Wheater....

“This will do—yes, I think this will do,” said a fluty immature voice, a

girl’s voice, at his elbow. Boyne tilted his head back, and saw, a few

steps off, the slim girl who had carried the heavy baby up the gangway.

The girl paused, glanced along the line of seats in his direction,

nodded to a deck-steward, and disappeared into the doorway of a “luxe”

_suite_ farther forward. In the moment of her pause Boyne caught a small

pale face with anxiously wrinkled brows above brown eyes of tragic

width, and round red lips which, at the least provocation, might bubble

with healthy laughter. It did not occur to him now to ask if the face

were pretty or not—there were too many things going on in it for that.

As she entered her cabin he heard her say, in her firm quick voice, to

some one within: “Nanny, has Chip had his Benger? Who’s got the cabin

with Terry?”

“What a mother!” Boyne thought, still wondering if it were not much too

soon for that maternal frown to have shadowed her young forehead.

“Beg pardon, sir—there’s a new passenger booked for your cabin.” The

steward was passing with a couple of good-looking suit-cases and a

bundle of rugs.

“Oh, damn—well, it had to happen!” Boyne, with a groan, stood up and

followed the steward. “Who is it, do you know?”

“Couldn’t say, sir. Wheater—Wheater’s the name.”

Well, at last a coincidence! Mrs. Cliffe Wheater’s chair was next to his

own, and his old Harvard class-mate was to share his cabin with him.

Boyne, if not wholly pleased, was at least faintly excited and

interested by this unexpected combination of circumstances.

He turned, and saw a little boy standing in the door of the cabin,

mustering him with a dispassionate eye.

“All right—this will do,” said the boy quietly. He spoke in a slightly

high-pitched voice, neither querulous nor effeminate, but simply thin

and a little tired, like his slender person. Boyne guessed him to be

about eleven years old, and too tall and reasonable for his age—another

evidence of the physical frailty betrayed by his voice. He was neatly

dressed in English school-boy clothes, but he did not look English, he

looked cosmopolitan: as if he had been sharpened and worn down by

contact with too many different civilizations—or perhaps merely with too

many different hotels.

He continued to examine Boyne, critically but amicably; then he

remarked: “I’m in here, you know.”

“You are? I thought it was to be your father!”

“Oh, did you? That’s funny. Do you know my father?”

“I used to. In fact, I think we were at Harvard together.”

Young master Wheater looked but faintly interested. “Would you mind

telling me your name?” he asked, as if acquitting himself of a

recognized social duty.

“My name’s Boyne: Martin Boyne. But it’s so long since your father and I

met that he wouldn’t have been likely to speak of me.”

Mr. Wheater’s son reflected. “Well, I shouldn’t have been likely to be

there if he did. We’re not so awfully much with father,” he added, with

a seeming desire for accuracy.

A little girl of his own age and size, but whose pale fairness had a

warmer glow, had advanced a step or two into the cabin, and now slipped

an arm through his.

“I’ve been hunting for you everywhere,” she said. “Judith sent me.”

“Well, here’s where I am: with this gentleman.”

The little girl lifted her deeply fringed lids and bent on Boyne the

full gaze of two large and accomplished gray eyes. Then she pursed up

her poppy-red lips and looked at her brother. “For a whole

fortnight—Terry, can you _bear_ it?”

The boy flushed and pulled away his arm. “Shut up, you ass!” he

admonished her.

“Do let me ask Judith to tip the steward—”

He swung about on her angrily. “_Will_ you shut up when I tell you to?

This gentleman’s a friend of father’s.”

“Oh—” the little girl murmured; and then added, after another fringed

flash at Boyne: “He doesn’t look it.”

“Blanca—will you please get out of here?”

She wavered, her bright lips trembled, and she turned in confusion and

ran down the deck. “She doesn’t know anything—she’s only my twin,” said

Terry Wheater apologetically.

He completed his scrutiny of the cabin, looked a little wistfully at

Boyne, and then turned and sauntered away after the delinquent.

Boyne returned to the deck and his book; but though the latter

interested him, it did not prevent his keeping watch, out of the tail of

his eye, on the empty chair which bore Mrs. Wheater’s name. His

curiosity to see her had grown immensely since his encounter with her

son and daughter—in the latter of whom he discovered, as the past grew

clearer to him, a likeness to her mother at once close and remote. Joyce

Mervin—yes, she had had those same poppy-red lips in a face of

translucent pallor, and that slow skilful way of manœuvring her big

eyes; but her daughter seemed made of a finer frailer stuff, as if a

good deal of Mrs. Wheater’s substance had been left out of her, and a

drop of some rarer essence added. “Perhaps it’s because the child is

only half a person—there was always too much of her mother,” Boyne

thought, remembering Joyce Mervin as being rather aimlessly abundant.

“In such cases, it’s probably enough to be a twin,” he decided.

But how puzzling it all was! Terry was much less like Cliffe Wheater

than his twin was like their mother. There too—even more so in the boy’s

case—quality seemed to have replaced quantity. Boyne felt, he hardly

knew why, that something obvious and almost vulgar might lurk under

Blanca’s fastidiousness; but her brother could never be anything but

distinguished. What a pity such a charming lad should look so ill!

Suddenly, from the forward _suite_, the young lady with the baby

emerged. She had her sleepy cherub by the hand and was guiding him with

motherly care along the deck. She sank into the chair next to Boyne’s,

pulled the baby up on her knee, and signalled to a steward to draw a rug

over her feet. Then she leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction.

“This is something like, eh, Chip?” she said, in her gay fluty voice.

Chip laughed a genial well-fed laugh and fingered the brim of her hat

appreciatively. It was evident that the two had the very highest opinion

of each other.

II

It was none of Boyne’s business to tell his new neighbour that the chair

she had chosen was Mrs. Cliffe Wheater’s; the less so as she might (he

decided on closer inspection) turn out to be a governess or other

dependent of that lady’s. But no (after another look); she was too young

for the part, even if she had looked or acted it—and she didn’t. Her

tone in addressing her invisible companions was that of command, not

subservience: they were the nurses and governesses, not she. Probably

she had taken Mrs. Wheater’s chair because it was one of the few empty

ones left, and was well aware that she might presently be asked to

evacuate it. That was just what Boyne would have liked to spare her; he

didn’t see Joyce Wheater—the Joyce he had known—yielding her seat

without a battle.

“I beg your pardon; but in case somebody should claim this chair, I

might find another for you before the whole front row is taken up.”

The phrase sounded long and clumsy, but it was out before he had time to

polish it. He had to hear her voice again, and also to get her to turn

her eyes his way. She did so now, with perfect composure. Evidently she

was not surprised at his addressing her, but only at the fact he

imparted.

“Isn’t this my chair?” She reached for the label and examined it. “Yes;

I thought it was.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

“That’s all right. They _are_ filling up, aren’t they?”

Her brown eyes, under deep lashes like Blanca’s, rested on him in polite

acknowledgment of his good will; but he was too bewildered to see

anything but a starry blur.

Mrs. Cliffe Wheater, then—this child? Well, after all, why not? His Mrs.

Cliffe Wheater she obviously could not be; but in these days of

transient partnerships there was no reason for expecting it. The

Wheaters _he_ knew must have been married nearly twenty years ago; and

Cliffe Wheater, in the interval, had made money enough to treat himself

to half-a-dozen divorces and remarriages, with all the attendant outlay.

“No more to him than doing over a new house—good deal less than running

a steam-yacht,” Boyne half enviously reflected.

Yes; his neighbour was obviously a later—was the latest—Mrs. Wheater;

probably two or three removes from poor Joyce. Though why he should

think of her as poor Joyce, when in all probability she had moved off

across the matrimonial chess-board at the same rate of progression as

her first husband.... Well, at any rate, if this was a new Mrs. Cliffe

Wheater, Boyne might insinuate himself into her field of vision as an

old friend of her husband’s; a sufficient plea, he argued, between

passengers on a pleasure-cruise. Only, remembering Terry’s cool

reception of his father’s name, he hesitated. These modern matrimonial

tangles were full of peril to the absentee....

The question was answered by the appearance of Blanca, who came dancing

toward them like a butterfly waltzing over a bed of thyme.

As she approached, the young lady at Boyne’s side said severely: “Child!

Why haven’t you got on your coat? Go and ask Scopy for it at once. The

wind is cold.”

Blanca leaned against her with a caressing gesture. “All right.” But

instead of moving she slanted her gaze again toward Boyne. “He says he

used to know father,” she imparted.

The young lady turned her head also, and Boyne felt the mysterious

weight of her eyes upon his face. “How funny!” was her simple comment.

It seemed to strike all the group with equal wonder that Martin Boyne

should be on speaking terms with its chief. “Not smart enough, I

suppose; no Bond Street suit-cases,” he grumbled to himself, remembering

the freight of costly pigskin which had followed his neighbour up the

gangway.

The latter’s attention had already turned from him. “Blanca! I tell you

to go and put on your coat. And see that Terry has his.... Don’t lean on

me like that, child. Can’t you see that Chip’s asleep?”

She spoke a little wearily, almost irritably, Boyne thought; but as she

bent over the child her little profile softened, melting into something

puerile and appealing. “Hush!” she signalled; and Blanca, obedient,

tiptoed off.

Boyne, at this, invoking Uncle Edward, patron saint of the adventurous,

risked a playful comment. “You’ve got them wonderfully well in hand.”

She smiled. “Oh, they’re very good children; all except ... _Zinnie_—!”

she screamed; and Boyne, following her horrified glance, saw a stark

naked little figure with a shock of orange-coloured hair and a string of

amber beads capering toward them to the wonder and delight of the double

row of spectators in the deck-chairs.

In a flash the young lady was on her feet, and Boyne was pressing a

soap-scented bundle to his breast. “Hold Chip!” she commanded. “Oh, that

little red devil!” She sped down the deck and catching up the

orange-headed child gave her a violent shaking. “_You_’ll be catching

cold next, you wretch,” she admonished her, as if this were the head and

front of the child’s offending; and having pushed the culprit into the

arms of a pursuing nurse she regained her seat.

“How nicely you’ve held him! He’s still asleep.” She received back the

hot baby, all relaxed and slumber-scented, and the eyes she turned on

Boyne were now full of a friendly intimacy—and much younger, he thought,

than Blanca’s. “Did you ever mind a baby before?” she asked.

“Yes; but not such a good one—nor so heavy.”

She shone with pride. “Isn’t he an armful? He’s nearly two pounds

heavier than most children of two. When Beechy was his age she weighed

only....”

“Beechy?” Boyne interrupted. “I thought you called her Zinnie.”

“Zinnie? Oh, but she’s not the same as Beechy.” She laughed with

something of a child’s amusement at the ignorance of the grown up.

“Beechy’s a step—but you haven’t seen the other steps,” she reminded

herself. “I wonder where on earth they are?”

“The steps?” he echoed, in deeper bewilderment.

“Bun and Beechy. They only half belong to us, and so does Zinnie.

They’re all three step-children. But we’re just as devoted to them as if

they were altogether ours; except when Bun is naughty. Bun is my only

naughty child—oh, do hold Chip again!” she exclaimed, and once more

Boyne became the repository of that heap of rosy slumber.

“There’s Bun now—and I never trust him when he’s by himself! I _can’t_,”

she wailed, as a sturdy little brown boy in a scarlet jumper came

crawling down the deck on all fours, emitting strange animal barks and

crowings. “He’s going to do his menagerie-tricks. Oh, dear—And he can’t,

with the ship rolling like this. His mother was a lion-tamer. But he’ll

hurt himself, I know he will—oh, Scopy! Yes; do take him....”

A gaunt narrow-chested lady with a face hewn into lines of kindly

resolution, and a faded straw hat cocked sideways on her blown gray

hair, had appeared in Bun’s wake and set him on his feet as firmly as

the rolling deck permitted. His face, dusky with wrath, squared itself

for a howl; but at that moment a very small brown girl, with immense

agate-coloured eyes and a thicket of dark curls, dashed out of a

state-room, and hurried to him with outstretched arms. Instantly the

offender’s wrath turned to weeping, and the two little creatures fell

dramatically on each other’s bosoms, while the governess, unmoved by

this display of feeling, steered them sternly back to their quarters.

The young lady at Boyne’s side leaned back with a laugh. “Isn’t Scopy

funny? She can’t bear it when Bun falls on Beechy’s neck like that. She

calls it ‘so foreign and unmanly.’ And of course they _are_ foreign ...

they’re Italian ... but I’m too thankful that Beechy has such an

influence over Bun. If it weren’t for her we should have our hands full

with him.” She hugged the sleep-drunk Chip to her bosom.

“You must have your hands rather full as it is—I mean even without Bun?”

Boyne ventured, consumed by the desire to see farther into this nursery

tangle, and follow its various threads back to the young creature at his

side. “Travelling with them all like this—and without Wheater to help

you out,” he pushed on.

At this she shrugged a little. “Oh, he’s not much at helping out; he

loathes to travel with us,” she said, slightingly yet not unkindly.

Boyne was beginning to think that her detached view of human weaknesses

was perhaps the most striking thing about her.

“But Terry helps—most wonderfully,” she added, a smile of maternal

tenderness lighting her small changeful face, in which so many things

were always happening that Boyne had not yet had time to decide if it

were pretty or just curiously loveable.

“My cabin-mate,” Boyne smiled. “Yes; a big boy like that must be a

comfort.” He dared not say “a big son like that,” for he could not

believe that the girl at his side could be the mother of a tall lad of

Terry’s age. Yet she had distinctly not classed him among the “steps”!

In his perplexity he ventured: “A chap of that age is always so proud of

his mother.”

She seemed to think that this needed consideration. “Well, I don’t know

that Terry’s proud of Joyce, exactly—but he admires her, of course; we

all do. She’s so awfully handsome. I don’t believe even Blanca is going

to come up to her.”

Joyce! Boyne caught at the familiar name as at a lifebelt. Evidently his

old friend Joyce Mervin was still situated somewhere within the Wheater

labyrinth. But where? And who was this young thing who gave her her

Christian name so easily? Everything that seemed at first to enlighten

him ended only by deepening his perplexity.

“Do you know that Joyce, as you call her, used to be a great friend of

mine years ago?” There could be no harm, at least, in risking that.

“Oh, was she? How jolly! She says she looked exactly like Blanca then.

Did she? Of course she’s a little thick now—but not nearly as much so as

she imagines. She does so fret about it. It’s her great unhappiness.”

Boyne laughed. “You mean she hasn’t any worse ones?”

“Oh, no. Not now. They’ve been on a new honeymoon since Chip ... haven’t

they, old Chippo?”

“They...?” On a new honeymoon? Since Chip? Then the sleeping cherub was

not the property of the girl at his side, but of Joyce Mervin ... Joyce

Wheater ... Joyce Somebody.... Oh, how he longed to ask: “Joyce _who_?”

This last step forward seemed really to have landed him in the heart of

the labyrinth; the difficulty now was to find his way out again.

But the young lady’s confidences seemed to invite his own. Or was it

just that she had the new easy way with people? Very likely. Still, an

old fogey out of the wilderness might be excused for taking it as

something more—a sign of sympathy, almost an invitation to meet her

fresh allusions with fresh questions.

“Yes; we were friends—really great friends for a winter....”

(“That’s long, for Joyce,” said his neighbour parenthetically.)

“... such good friends that I should like to tell you my name: Martin

Boyne—and to ask what your—”

“Oh—_oh!!!_” She shrilled it out so precipitately that it cut his last

word in two. At first he could not guess the cause of this new

disturbance; but in a moment he discovered the young Bun walking with

bare feet and a cat-like agility along the backs of the outer row of

deck-chairs, while their occupants ducked out of his way and laughed

their approval of his skill.

“She was also a tight-rope dancer—his mother was,” the girl flung back,

leaping in Bun’s direction. Having caught and cuffed him, and cuffed him

again in answer to his furious squeals, she dragged him away to the firm

dishevelled lady who had previously dealt with him. When she returned to

her seat, pale and a little breathless, she looked as if her domestic

cares sometimes weighed on her too heavily. She dropped down by Boyne

with a sigh. “If ever you marry,” she enjoined him (“And how does she

know I never have?” he wondered), “don’t you have any children—that’s

all I say! Do you wonder mother and father don’t care to travel with the

lot of us?”

III

The luncheon-signal crashed in on this interrogation, and Boyne was left

alone to make what he could of it. At the first sound of the gong his

neighbour was on her feet, hardly heeding his suggestion that, if she

had not already chosen her seat, they might meet at a table for two in

the restaurant.

“Thanks a lot; but of course I lunch with my children.” And he

remembered with regret that their ocean-palace had a separate

dining-room for youthful passengers.

“Dash it—I should have liked a few minutes’ quiet talk with her.”

Instead, he drifted back to his usual place at a table of waifs and

strays like himself: an earnest lady in spectacles who was “preparing”

Sicily; an elderly man who announced every morning: “I always say the

bacon on these big liners is better than anything I can get at home”;

and a pale clergyman whose parishioners had sent him on a holiday tour,

and whose only definite idea was to refuse to visit catacombs. “I do so

want to lead a pagan life just for once,” he confided to Boyne, with an

ascetic smile which showed, between racking coughs, his worn teeth and

anæmic gums.

Luncheon over, Boyne hurried back to his corner, hoping to find the seat

at his side already occupied; but it was empty, and empty it remained as

the long blue day curved down imperceptibly toward evening.

“Father and mother don’t care to travel with the lot of us,” the girl

had said.

“Father and mother”? That, as far as Boyne could make out, could mean

only the Cliffe Wheaters, his old original Cliffe Wheaters, in their

before-the-letter state, as it were. In that case the thin eager girl at

his side would be their daughter, their eldest daughter, born probably

soon after a marriage which, some thirteen or fourteen years later, had

produced the sturdy and abundant Chip.

“Very unmodern, all that.” It gave Boyne a more encouraging view of the

conjugal state than he had lately held, and made him look forward with a

lighter mind to meeting the lady who awaited him in the Dolomites—the

lady he had not seen for five years. It must certainly be pleasant to be

the parent of a large reliable baby like Chip....

But no sooner did he imagine that he had solved the puzzle of the Cliffe

Wheaters than the image of the enigmatic trio, Zinnie, Bun and Beechy,

disarranged his neat equation. The “steps”—who on earth were the

“steps,” and how and where did they fit into the family group which

seemed, with Judith (hadn’t they called her that?) at one end, and Chip

at the other, to form its own unbroken circle? Miss Wheater, he

remembered, had tossed him a few details about the two brown children,

Bun and Beechy. “They’re foreigners ... Italians....” But if so, they

belonged neither to Cliffe Wheater nor to his wife; certainly not to his

wife, since Judith had added, in speaking of Bun: “His mother was a

lion-tamer ...” not as if using the term metaphorically, but as stating

a plain social fact.

As for Zinnie, the little red devil, she remained wholly unaccounted

for, and there was nothing in her clever impudent face, with its

turned-up nose and freckled skin under the shock of orange hair, to

suggest any blood-relationship to the small Italians. Zinnie appeared to

be sharply and completely American—as American as Beechy and Bun were

Italian, and much more so than the three elder Wheaters, who were all so

rubbed down by cosmopolitan contacts. The “steps,” in fact, had the

definiteness of what the botanists call species, whereas Judith, Blanca

and Terry were like exquisite garden hybrids. The harder Boyne stared

into the problem the more obscure it became.

Even the least eventful sea-voyages lend themselves to favourable

propinquities, and in the course of the afternoon the gray-haired lady

whom the young Wheaters addressed as “Scopy” reappeared on deck, this

time alone, and seemingly in quest of a seat. Boyne instantly pointed

out the one next to his, and the lady, saying with an austere smile: “I

believe ours are on the other side, but I can take this while Judith’s

resting,” settled herself at his side in an attitude of angular

precision.

As she did so she gave him a look of shy benevolence, and added: “I

understand from Judith that you’re a friend of her people.”

Boyne eagerly acquiesced, and she went on to say what a comfort it was,

when they were on one of these long treks with the children, to come

across anybody who was a friend of their parents, and could be appealed

to in an emergency. “Not that there’s any particular reason at present;

but it’s a good deal of a responsibility for Judith to transport the

whole party from Biskra to Venice, and we’re always rather troubled

about Terry. Even after four months at Biskra he hasn’t picked up as

we’d hoped.... Always a little temperature in the evenings....” She

sighed, and turned away her sturdy weather-beaten face, which looked

like a cliff on whose top a hermit had built a precarious refuge—her

hat.

“You’re anxious about Terry? He does look a little drawn.” Boyne hoped

that if he adopted an easy old-friend tone she might be lured on from

one confidence to another.

“Anxious? I don’t like the word; and Judith wouldn’t admit it. But we

always have our eye on him, the dear boy—and our minds.” She sighed

again, and he saw that she had averted her head because her eyes were

filling.

“It is, as you say, a tremendous responsibility for any one as young as

Miss Wheater.” He hesitated, and then added: “I can very nearly guess

her age, for I used to see a good deal of both her parents before they

were married.”

It was a consolation to his self-esteem that the lady called “Scopy”

took this with less flippancy than her young charges. It seemed

distinctly interesting to her, and even reassuring, that Boyne should

have been a friend of the Cliffe Wheaters at any stage in their career.

“I only wish you’d gone on seeing them since,” she said, with another of

her sighs.

“Oh, our paths have been pretty widely divided; so much so that at first

I didn’t know whether ... not till I saw Chip....”

“Ah, poor little Chipstone: he’s our hope, our consolation.” She looked

down, and a faint brick-red blush crossed her face like sunset on

granite. “You see, Terry being so delicate—as twins often are—Mr.

Wheater was always anxious for another boy.”

“Well, Chip looks like a pretty solid foundation to build one’s hopes

on.”

She smiled a little bleakly, and murmured: “He’s never given us a

minute’s trouble.”

All this was deeply interesting to her hearer, but it left the three

“steps” still unaccounted for; the “steps” of whom Judith had said that

they were as much beloved as if they had been “altogether ours.”

“Not a minute’s trouble—I wish I could say as much of the others,” his

neighbour went on, yielding, as he had hoped she would, to the rare

chance of airing her grievances.

“The others? You mean—”

“Yes: those foreign children, with their scenes and their screams and

their play-acting. I shall never get used to them—never!”

“But Zinnie: Zinnie’s surely not foreign?” Boyne lured her on.

“Foreign to _our_ ways, certainly; really more so than the two others,

who, on the father’s side....” She lowered her voice, and cast a prudent

eye about her, before adding: “You’ve heard of Zinnia Lacrosse, the film

star, I suppose?”

Boyne racked his mind, which was meagrely peopled with film stars, and

finally thought he had. “Didn’t she marry some racing man the other

day—Lord Somebody?”

“I don’t know what her last enormity has been. One of them was marrying

Mr. Wheater—and having Zinnie....”

Marrying Wheater—Zinnia Lacrosse had married Cliffe Wheater? But

then—but then—who on earth was Chipstone’s mother? Boyne felt like

crying out: “Don’t pile up any more puzzles! Give me time—give me time!”

but his neighbour was now so far launched in the way of avowal that she

went on, hardly heeding him more than if his face had been the narrow

grating through which she was pouring her woes: “It’s inconceivable, but

it’s so. Mr. Wheater married Zinnia Lacrosse. And Zinnie is their child.

The truth is, he wasn’t altogether to blame; I’ve always stood up for

Mr. Wheater. What with his feeling so low after Mrs. Wheater left him,

and his wanting another boy so dreadfully ... with all those millions to

inherit....”

But Boyne held up a drowning hand. Mrs. Wheater had left Wheater? But

when—but how—but why? He implored the merciless narrator to tell him one

thing at a time—only one; all these sudden appearances of new people and

new children were so perplexing to a man who’d lived for years and years

in the wilderness....

“The wilderness? The real wilderness is the world _we_ live in; packing

up our tents every few weeks for another move.... And the marriages just

like tents—folded up and thrown away when you’ve done with them.” But

she saw, at least, that to gain his sympathy she must have his

understanding, and after another cautious glance up and down the deck

she settled down to elucidate the mystery and fill in the gaps. Of

course, she began, Judith having told her that he—Mr. Boyne was the

name? Thanks. Hers was Miss Scope, Horatia Scope (she knew the children

called her “Horror Scope” behind her back, but she didn’t mind)—well,

Judith having told her that Mr. Boyne was a friend of her parents, Miss

Scope had inferred that he had kept up with the successive episodes of

the couple’s agitated history; but now that she saw he didn’t know, she

would try to make it clear to him—if one could use the word in speaking

of such a muddled business. It took a great deal of explaining—as he

would see—but if any one could enlighten him _she_ could, for she’d come

to the Wheaters’ as Judith’s governess before Blanca and Terry were

born: before the first, no, the second serious quarrel, she added, as if

saying: “Before the Hittite invasion.”

Quarrels, it seemed, there had been many since; she had lost count, she

confessed; but the bad, the fatal, one had happened when Mrs. Wheater

had met her Prince, the wicked Buondelmonte who was the father of Bun

and Beechy: Beatrice and Astorre Buondelmonte, as the children were

really named.

Here Boyne, submerged, had to hold up his hand again. But if Zinnie was

Wheater’s child, he interrupted, were Bun and Beechy Mrs. Wheater’s? And

whose, in the name of pity, was Chipstone? Well ... Miss Scope said she

understood his wonder, his perplexity; it did him credit, she declared,

to be too high-minded to take in the whole painful truth at a glance.

No; Bun and Beechy, thank heaven, were _not_ Mrs. Wheater’s children;

they were the offspring of the unscrupulous Prince Buondelmonte and a

vile woman—a circus performer, she believed—whom he had married and

deserted before poor Mrs. Wheater became infatuated with him.

(“Infatuated” was a horrid word, she knew; but Mrs. Wheater used it

herself in speaking of that unhappy time.)

Well—Mrs. Wheater, in her madness, had insisted on leaving her husband

in order to marry Prince Buondelmonte. Mr. Wheater, though she had

behaved so badly, was very chivalrous about it, and “put himself in the

wrong” (Boyne rejoiced at the phrase) so that his wife might divorce

him; but he insisted on his right to keep Terry with him, and on an

annual visit of four months from Judith and Blanca; and as there was a

big fight over the alimony Mrs. Wheater had to give in about the

children—and that was when Judith’s heart-break began. Even as a little

thing, Miss Scope explained, Judith couldn’t bear it when her parents

quarrelled. She had had to get used to that, alas; but what she couldn’t

get used to was, after the divorce and the two remarriages, being

separated from Terry, and bundled up every year with Blanca, and sent

from pillar to post, first to one Palace Hotel and then to another,

wherever one parent or the other happened to be.... It was that, Miss

Scope thought, which had given the grown-up look to her eyes....

Luckily Mrs. Wheater’s delusion didn’t last long; the Prince hadn’t let

it. Before they’d been married a year he’d taken care to show her what

he was. Poor Judith, who was alone with her mother during the last

dreadful months, knew something of _that_. But Miss Scope realised that

she mustn’t digress, but just stick to the outline of her story till it

became a little clearer to Mr. Boyne....

Well—when Mrs. Wheater’s eyes were opened, and the final separation from

the Prince took place, she (Mrs. Wheater) was so sorry for Beatrice and

Astorre—there was really nobody kinder than Mrs. Wheater—that she kept

the poor little things with her, and had gone on keeping them ever

since. Their father had of course been only too thankful to have them

taken off his hands—and their miserable mother too. Here Miss Scope

paused for breath, and hoped that Mr. Boyne was beginning to grasp—

“Yes; beginning; but—Chipstone?” he patiently insisted.

“Oh, Chip; dear Chip’s a Wheater all right! The very image of his

father, don’t you think? But I see that I haven’t yet given you all the

threads; there are so many.... Where was I? Oh, about Mrs. Wheater’s

separation. You know there’s no divorce in Italy, and she thought she

was tied to the Prince for life. But luckily her lawyers found out that

he had been legally married—in some Italian consulate at the other end

of the world—to the mother of Bun and Beechy; and as the woman was still

alive, the Prince’s marriage with Mrs. Wheater had been bigamous, and

was immediately annulled, and she became Mrs. Wheater again—”

“And then?”

“Then she was dreadfully miserable about it all, and Mr. Wheater was

miserable too, because in the meanwhile he’d found out about the horror

he’d married, and was already suing for a divorce. And Judith, who was

thirteen by that time, and as wise and grown up as she is now, begged

and entreated her father and mother to meet and talk things over, and

see if they couldn’t come together again, so that the children would

never have to be separated, and sent backward and forward like bundles—”

“She did that? That child?”

“Judith’s never been a child—there was no time. So she got Mr. and Mrs.

Wheater together, and they were both sore and unhappy over their

blunders, and realised what a mess they’d made—and finally they decided

to try again, and they were remarried about three years ago; and then

Chip was born, and of course that has made everything all right

again—for the present.”

“The present?” Boyne gasped; and the governess smoothed back her blown

hair, and turned the worn integrity of her face on his.

“If I respect the truth, how can I say more than ‘the present’? But

really I put it that way only for fear ... for fear of the Fates

overhearing me.... Everything’s going as smoothly as can be; and we

should all be perfectly happy if it weren’t for poor Terry, whose health

never seems to be what it should.... Mr. and Mrs. Wheater adore Chip,

and are very fond of the other children; and Judith is almost sure it

will last this time.”

Miss Scope broke off, and looked away again from Boyne. Her “almost”

wrung his heart, and he wanted to put his hand out, and clasp the large

gray cotton glove clenched on her knee. But instead he only said: “If

anything can make it last, you and Judith will”; and the governess

answered: “Oh, it’s all Judith. And she has all the children behind her.

They say they refuse to be separated again. Even the little ones say so.

They’re much more attached to each other than you’d think, to hear them

bickering and wrangling. And they all worship Judith. Even the two

foreigners do.”

IV

The children, at first, had been unanimously and immovably opposed to

going to Monreale.

Long before the steamer headed for Palermo the question was debated by

them with a searching thoroughness. Judith, who had never been to

Sicily, had consulted Boyne as to the most profitable way of employing

the one day allotted to them, and after inclining to Segesta, Boyne, on

finding that everybody, including Chip, was to be of the party,

suggested Monreale as more accessible.

“And awfully beautiful too?” Judith was looking at him with hungry

ignorant eyes.

“One of the most beautiful things in the world. The mosaics alone....”

She clasped ecstatic hands. “We must go there! I’ve seen so little—”

“Why, I thought you’d travelled from one end of Europe to the other.”

“That doesn’t show you anything but sleeping-cars and Palace Hotels,

does it? Mother and father never even have a guide-book; they just ask

the hall-porter where to go. And then something always seems to prevent

their going. You must show me everything, everything.”

“Well, we’ll begin with Monreale.”

But the children took a different view. Miss Scope, unluckily, had found

an old Baedeker on the steamer, and refreshing her mind with hazy

reminiscences gleaned from former pupils, had rediscovered the name of a

wonderful ducal garden containing ever so many acres of orange-trees

always full of flowers and fruit. Her old pupils had gone there, she

recalled, and been allowed by the gardeners to pick up from the ground

as many oranges as they could carry away.

At this the children, a close self-governing body, instantly voted as

one man for the Giardino Aumale. Boyne had already observed that, in

spite of Judith’s strong influence, there were moments when she became

helpless against their serried opposition, and in the present case

argument and persuasion entirely failed. At length Terry, evidently

wishing, as the man of the party, to set the example of reasonableness,

remarked that Judith, who had all the bother of looking after them,

ought to go wherever she chose. Bun hereupon squared his mouth for a

howl, and Blanca observed tartly that by always pretending to give up

you generally got what you wanted. “Well, you’d better try then,” Terry

retorted severely, and the blood rose under his sister’s delicate skin

as if he had struck her.

“Terry! What a beast you are! I didn’t mean—”

Meanwhile Beechy, melting into tears at the sight of Bun’s distress, was

hugging his tumbled head against her breast with murmurs of: “_Zitto,

zitto, carissimo! Cuor mio!_” and glaring angrily at Judith and Terry.

“Well, I want to go where there’s zoranges to eat,” said Zinnie, in her

sharp metallic American voice, with which she might almost have peeled

the fruit. “—’r if I don’t, I want something a lot better’nstead, n’ I

mean to have it!”

Boyne laughed, and Judith murmured despairingly: “We’d better go to

their orange-garden.”

“Look here,” Terry interposed, “the little ones are mad to hear the end

of that story of the old old times, about the two children who’d never

seen a motor. They’re all so fed up with airships and machinery and X

rays and wireless; and you know you promised to go on with that story

some day. Why couldn’t we go to the place you want to see, and you’ll

promise and swear to finish the story there, and to have chocolates for

tea?”

“Oh—and oranges; I’ll supply the oranges,” Boyne interposed. “There’s a

jolly garden next to the cloister, and I’ll persuade the guardian to let

us in, and we’ll have a picnic tea there.”

“An’masses of zoranges?” Zinnie stipulated, with a calculating air,

while Beechy surreptitiously dried Bun’s tears on her crumpled pinafore,

and Bun, heartlessly forsaking her to turn handsprings on the deck,

shrieked out: “Noranges! Noranges! NORANGES!”

“Oh, very well; I knew—” Blanca murmured, shooting her gray glance

toward Boyne; and Judith, lifting up Chip, triumphantly declared: “He

says he wants to go to Monreale.”

“That settles it, of course,” said Blanca, with resigned eyelids.

A wordy wrangle having arisen between Zinnie, Beechy and Bun as to

whether the fruit for which they clamoured should be called zoranges or

noranges, Judith and Miss Scope took advantage of the diversion to

settle the details of the expedition with Boyne, and the next morning,

when the steamer lay to off Palermo, the little party, equipped and

eager, headed the line of passengers for the tug.

Boyne, stretched out at length on a stone bench in the sun, lay

listening with half-closed eyes to Judith’s eager plaintive voice. He

had bribed the custodian to let them pass out of the cloister into the

lavender-scented cathedral garden drowsing on its warm terrace above the

orange-orchards. Far off across the plain the mountains descended in

faint sapphire gradations to the denser sapphire of the sea, along which

the domed and towered city gleamed uncertainly. And here, close by, sat

Judith Wheater in the sun, the children heaped at her knee, and Scopy

and Nanny, at a discreet distance, knitting, and nursing the tea-basket.

Judith’s voice went on: “But when Polycarp and Lullaby drove home in the

victoria with the white horse to their mamma’s palace they found that

the zebra door-mat had got up and was eating all the flowers in the

drawing-room vases, and the big yellow birds on the wall-paper were all

flying about, and making the most dreadful mess scattering seeds about

the rooms. But the most wonderful thing was that the cuckoo from the

nursery clock was gone too, so that the nurses couldn’t tell what time

it was, and when the children ought to be put to bed and to get up

again....”

“Oh, how perfectly lovely,” chanted Bun, and Beechy chorused: “Lovelly,

lovelly....”

“Not at all,” said Judith severely. “It was the worst thing that had

happened to them yet, for the cook didn’t know what time it was either,

and nobody in the house could tell her, so there was no breakfast ready;

and the cook just went off for a ride on the zebra, because she had no

carriage of her own, and she said there was nothing else to do.”

“Why didn’t they tell their father’n’mother?” Zinnie queried in a

practical tone.

“Because they’d got new ones, who didn’t know about the cuckoo either, I

guess,” said Bun with authority.

“Then why didn’t the children go with their old fathers an’ mothers?”

Zinnie inserted.

“Because their old mother’s friend, Sally Money, wasn’t big enough ...

big enough ... big enough ... for her to take them all with her....” Bun

broke off, visibly puzzled as to what was likely to follow.

“Big enough to take them all on her back and carry them away with her.

But I daresay the new father and mother would have been all right,”

Judith pursued, “if only the children had been patient and known how to

treat them; only just at first they didn’t; and besides, at the time I

am telling you about, they happened to be away travelling—”

“Then why didn’t the children telephone to them to come back?”

“Because there weren’t any telephones in those days.”

“No telephones? Does it say so in the hist’ry books?” snapped Zinnie,

sceptical.

“Course it does, you silly. Why, when Scopy was little,” Terry reminded

them, “she lived in a house where there wasn’t any telephone.”

Beechy, ever tender-hearted, immediately prepared to cry at the thought

of Scopy’s privation; but Scopy interpolated severely: “Now, Beatrice,

don’t be _foreign_—” and the story-teller went on: “So there was no way

whatever for them to get any breakfast, and—”

“Oh, I know, I know! They starved to death, _poverini_!” Beechy

lamented, promptly transferring her grief to another object, and

flinging her little brown arms heavenward in an agony of participation.

“Not just yet. For they met on the edge of the wood—”

(“What wood? There wasn’t any wood before,” said Zinnie sharply.)

“No, but there was one now; for all the trees and flowers from the

wall-papers had come off the wall, and gone out into the garden to grow,

so that the big yellow birds should have a wood to build their nests in,

and the zebras should—”

“Zebras! There was only one zebra.” This, sardonically, from a grown-up

looking, indifferent Blanca.

“Stupid! He’d been married already and had a lot of perfectly lovely

norphans and three dear little steps like us, and Mrs. Zebra she had a

big family too, no, she had two big families,” Zinnie announced,

enumerating the successive groups on her small dimpled fingers.

“Oh, how lovely for the zebra! Then all the little zebras stayed

together always afterward—f’rever and ever. Say they did—oh, Judith,

_say_ it!” Beechy clamoured.

“Of course they did. (Zinnie, you mustn’t call Blanca stupid.) But all

this time Polycarp and Lullaby were starving, because the clock had

stopped and the cook had gone out on the zebra....”

“And they were starving—slowly starving to death ...” Zinnie gloated.

“Yes; but on the edge of the wood whom did they meet but a great big

tall gentleman with a mot—no, I mean a pony-carriage....”

“What’s a pony?”

“A little horse about as big as Bun—”

(“Oh, oh—I’m a pony!” shouted Bun, kicking and neighing.)

“And the pony-carriage was full—absolutely brim full of—what do you

think?” Judith concluded, her question drowned in a general cry of

“Oranges! No, noranges—zoranges!!!” from the leaping scrambling group

before whom, at the dramatic moment, Boyne had obligingly uncorded his

golden bales, while Miss Scope and Nanny murmured: “Now, children,

children—now—”

“And this is our chance,” said Boyne, “to make a dash for the

cathedral.”

He slipped his hand through Judith’s arm, and drew her across the

cloister and into the great echoing basilica. At first, after their long

session on the sun-drenched terrace, the place seemed veiled in an

impenetrable twilight. But gradually the tremendous walls and spandrils

began to glow with their own supernatural radiance, the solid sunlight

of gold and umber and flame-coloured mosaics, against which figures of

saints, prophets, kings and sages stood out in pale solemn hues. Boyne

led the girl toward one of the shafts of the nave, and they sat down on

its projecting base.

“Now from here you can see—”

But he presently perceived that she could see nothing. Her little

profile was studiously addressed to the direction in which he pointed,

and her head thrown back so that her lips were parted, and her long

lashes drew an upward curve against her pale skin; but nothing was

happening in the face which was usually the theatre of such varied

emotions.

She sat thus for a long time, and he did not move or speak again.

Finally she turned to him, and said in a shy voice (it was the first

time he had noticed any shyness in her): “I suppose I’m much more

ignorant than you could possibly have imagined.”

“You mean that you don’t particularly care for all this?”

She lowered her voice to answer: “I believe all those big people up

there frighten me a little.” And she added: “I’m glad I didn’t bring

Chip.”

“Child!” He let his hand fall on hers with a faint laugh. What a child

she became as soon as she was away from the other children!

“But I do want to admire it, you know,” she went on earnestly, “because

you do, and Scopy says you know such a lot about everything.”

“It’s not a question of knowing—” he began; and then broke off. For

wasn’t it, after all, exactly that? How many thousand threads of

association, strung with stored images of the eye and brain, memories of

books, of pictures, of great names and deeds, ran between him and those

superhuman images, tracing a way from his world to theirs? Yes; it had

been stupid of him to expect that a child of fifteen or sixteen, brought

up in complete ignorance of the past, and with no more comprehension

than a savage of the subtle and allusive symbolism of art, should feel

anything in Monreale but the oppression of its awful unreality. And yet

he was disappointed, for he was already busy at the masculine task of

endowing the woman of the moment with every quality which made life

interesting to himself.

“Woman—but she’s not a woman! She’s a child.” His thinking of her as

anything else was the crowning absurdity of the whole business.

Obscurely irritated with himself and her, he stood up, turning his back

impatiently on the golden abyss of the apse. “Come along; it’s chilly

here after our sun-bath. Gardens are best, after all.”

In the doorway she paused a moment and sent her gaze a little wistfully

down the mighty perspective they were leaving. “Some day, I know, I

shall want to come back here,” she said.

“Oh, well, we’ll come back together,” he replied perfunctorily.

But outside in the sunlight, with the children leaping about her, and

guiding her with joyful cries toward the outspread tea-things, she was

instantly woman again—gay, competent, composed, and wholly mistress of

the situation....

Yes; decidedly, the more Boyne saw of her the more she perplexed him,

the more difficult he found it to situate her in time and space. He did

not even know how old she was—somewhere between fifteen and seventeen,

he conjectured—nor had he as yet made up his mind if she were pretty. In

the cathedral, just now, he had thought her almost plain, with the dull

droop of her mouth, her pale complexion which looked dead when unlit by

gaiety, her thick brown hair, just thick and just brown, without the

magic which makes some women’s hair as alive as their lips, and her

small impersonal nose, a nose neither perfectly drawn like Blanca’s nor

impudently droll like Zinnie’s. The act of thus cataloguing her seemed

to reduce her to a bundle of negatives; yet here in the sunshine, her

hat thrown off her rumpled hair, and all the children scrambling over

her, her mouth became a flame, her eyes fountains of laughter, her thin

frail body a quiver of light—he didn’t know how else to put it. Whatever

she was, she was only intermittently; as if her body were the mere

vehicle of her moods, the projection of successive fears, hopes,

ardours, with hardly any material identity of its own. Strange, he

mused, that such an imponderable and elusive creature should be the

offspring of the two solid facts he recalled the Cliffe Wheaters as

being. For a reminder of Joyce Mervin as he had known her, tall,

vigorous and substantial, one must turn to Blanca, not Judith. If Blanca

had not had to spare a part of herself for the making of Terry she would

have been the reproduction of her mother. But Judith was like a thought,

a vision, an aspiration—all attributes to which Mrs. Cliffe Wheater

could never have laid claim. And Boyne, when the tired and sleepy party

were piled once more into the motor, had not yet decided what Judith

looked like, and still less if he really thought her pretty.

He fell asleep that night composing a letter to the lady in the

Dolomites. “... what you would think. A strange little creature who

changes every hour, hardly seems to have any personality of her own

except when she’s mothering her flock. Then she’s extraordinary:

playmate, mother and governess all in one; and the best of each in its

way. As for her very self, when she’s not with them, you grope for her

identity and find an instrument the wind plays on, a looking-glass that

reflects the clouds, a queer little sensitive plate, very little and

very sensitive—” and with a last flash of caution, just as sleep

overcame him, he added: “Unluckily not in the least pretty.”

V

“I’m so much interested in your picturesque description of the

little-girl-mother (sounds almost as nauseating as ‘child-wife,’ doesn’t

it?) who is conducting that heterogeneous family across Europe, while

the parents are jazzing at Venice. What an instance of modern manners;

no, not manners—there are none left—but customs! I’m sure if I saw the

little creature I should fall in love with her—as you are obviously

doing. Luckily you’ll be parting soon, or I should expect to see you

arrive here with the girl-bride of the movies and a tribe of six (or is

it seven?) adopted children. Don’t imagine, though, that in that case I

should accept the post of governess.” And then, p.s.: “Of course she’s

awfully pretty, or you wouldn’t have taken so much pains to say that

she’s not.”

One of Rose Sellars’s jolly letters: clever, understanding and humorous.

Why did Boyne feel a sudden flatness in it? Something just a trifle

mincing, self-conscious—prepared? Yes; if Mrs. Sellars excelled in one

special art it was undoubtedly that of preparation. She led up to

things—the simplest things—with the skill of a clever rider putting a

horse at a five-barred gate. All her life had been a series of

adaptations, arrangements, shifting of lights, lowering of veils,

pulling about of screens and curtains. No one could arrange a room half

so well; and she had arranged herself and her life just as skilfully.

The material she had had to deal with was poor enough; in every way

unworthy of her; but, as her clever hands could twist a scarf into a

divan-cover, and ruffle a bit of paper into a lamp-shade, so she had

managed, out of mediocre means, a mediocre husband, an ugly New York

house, and a dull New York set, to make something distinguished,

personal, almost exciting—so that, in her little world, people were

accustomed to say “Rose Sellars” as a synonym for cleverness and

originality.

Yes; she had had the art to do that, and to do it quietly,

unobtrusively, by a touch here, a hint there, without ever reaching out

beyond her domestic and social frame-work. Her originality, in the

present day, lay in this consistency and continuity. It was what had

drawn Boyne to her in the days of his big wanderings, when, returning

from an arduous engineering job in Rumania or Brazil or Australia, he

would find, in his ever-shifting New York, the one fixed pole of Mrs.

Sellars’s front door, always the same front door at the same number of

the same street, with the same Whistler etchings and Sargent

water-colours on the drawing-room walls, and the same quiet welcome to

the same fireside.

In his homeless years that sense of her stability had appealed to him

peculiarly: the way, each time he returned, she had simply added a

little more to herself, like a rose unfurling another petal. A rose in

full sun would have burst into quicker bloom; it was part of Mrs.

Sellars’s case that she had always, as Heine put it, been like a canary

in a window facing north. Not due north, however, but a few points north

by west; so that she caught, not the sun’s first glow, but its rich

decline. He could never think of her as having been really young,

immaturely young, like this girl about whom they were exchanging

humorous letters, and who, in certain other ways, had a precocity of

experience so far beyond Mrs. Sellars’s. But the question of a woman’s

age was almost always beside the point. When a man loved a woman she was

always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was

either too old for witchery or too young for technique. “And five years

is too long a time,” he summed it up again, with a faint return of the

apprehension he always felt when he thought of his next meeting with

Mrs. Sellars.

Five years was too long; and these five, in particular, had transformed

the situation, and perhaps its heroine. It was a new Rose Sellars whom

he was to meet. When they had parted she was still a wife—resigned,

exemplary, and faithful in spite of his pleadings; now she was a widow.

The word was full of disturbing implications, and Boyne had already

begun to wonder how much of her attraction had been due to the fact that

she was unattainable. It was all very well to say that he “wasn’t that

kind of man”—the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had.

That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a

man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself.

Only by going to the Dolomites to see her could he really discover what

it was that he had found so haunting in Rose Sellars. So he was going.

“Mr. Boyne—could we have a quiet talk, do you think?”

Boyne, driven from the deck by the heat and glare, and the activities of

the other passengers, was lying on his bed, book in hand, in a state of

after-luncheon apathy. His small visitor leaned in the doorway, slender

and gray-clad: Terry Wheater, with the faint pinkness on his

cheek-bones, the brilliance in his long-lashed eyes, that made his

honest boy’s face at times so painfully beautiful.

“Why, of course, old man. Come in. You’ll be better off here than on

deck till it gets cooler.”

Terry tossed aside his cap and dropped into the chair at Boyne’s

bedside. They had shared a cabin for nearly a fortnight, and reached the

state of intimacy induced by such nearness when it does not result in

hate; but Boyne had had very few chances to talk with the boy. Terry was

always asleep when the older man turned in, and Boyne himself was up and

out long before Terry, kept in bed by the vigilant Miss Scope, had begun

his leisurely toilet. Boyne, by now, had formed a fairly clear idea of

the characteristics of the various young Wheaters, but Terry was perhaps

the one with whom he had spent the least time; and the boy’s rather

solemn tone, and grown-up phraseology, made him lay aside his book with

a touch of curiosity.

“What can I do for you, Terry?”

“Persuade them that I ought to have a tutor.”

“Them?”

“I mean the Wheaters—father and mother,” Terry corrected himself. The

children, Boyne knew, frequently referred to their parents by their

surname. The habit of doing so, Miss Scope had explained, rose from the

fact that, in the case of most of the playmates of their wandering life,

the names “father” and “mother” had to be applied, successively or

simultaneously, to so many different persons; indeed one surprising

little girl with black curls and large pearl earrings, whom they had met

the year before at Biarritz, had the habit of handing to each new

playmate a typed table of her parents’ various marriages and her own

successive adoptions. “So they all do it now; that is, speak of their

different sets of parents by their names. And my children have picked up

the habit from the others, though in their own case, luckily, it’s no

longer necessary, now that their papa and mamma have come together

again.”

“I mean father and mother,” Terry repeated. “Make them understand that I

must be educated. There’s no time to lose. And _you_ could.” His eyes

were fixed feverishly—alas, too feverishly—on Boyne’s, and his face had

the air of precocious anxiety which sometimes made Judith look so

uncannily mature.

“My dear chap—of course I’ll do anything I can for you. But I don’t

believe I shall be seeing your people this time. I’m going to jump into

the train the minute we get to Venice.”

The boy’s face fell. “You are? I’m sorry. And Judy will be awfully

sold.”

“That’s very good of her—and of you. But you see—”

“Oh, I can see that a solid fortnight of the lot of us is a good deal

for anybody,” Terry acquiesced. “All the same, Judy and I did hope you’d

stay in Venice for a day or two. We thought, you see, there were a good

many things you could do for us.”

Boyne continued to consider him thoughtfully. “I should be very glad if

I could. But I’m afraid you overrate my influence. I haven’t seen your

parents for years. They’d hardly remember me.”

“That’s just it: you’d be a novelty,” said Terry astutely.

“Well—if that’s an inducement.... Anyhow, you may be sure I’ll do what I

can ... if I find I can alter my plans....”

“Oh, if you could! You see I’ve really never had anybody to speak for

me. Scopy cuts no ice with them, and of course they think Judy’s too

young to know about education—specially as she’s never had any herself.

She can’t even spell, you know. She writes stomach with a _k_. And

they’ve let me go on like this, just with nurses and nursery-governesses

(that’s really all Scopy is), as if I wasn’t any older than Bun, when

I’m at an age when most fellows are leaving their preparatory schools.”

The boy’s face coloured with the passion of his appeal, and the flush

remained in two sharp patches on his cheeks.

“Of course,” he went on, “Judy says I’m not fair to them—that I don’t

remember what a lot they’ve had to spend for me on doctors and climate,

and all that. And they did send me to school once, and I had to be taken

away because of my beastly temperature.... I know all that. But it _was_

a sell, when I left school, just to come back again to Scopy and Nanny,

and nobody a fellow could put a question to, or get a tip from about

what other fellows are learning. Last summer, at St. Moritz, I met a boy

not much older than I am who was rather delicate too, and he’d just got

a new father who was a great reader, and who had helped him no end, and

got a tutor for him; and he’d started Cæsar, and was getting up his

Greek verbs—with a temperature every evening too. And I said to Judy:

‘Now, look at that.’ And she said, yes, it would be splendid for me to

have a tutor. And for two weeks the other fellow’s father let me work a

little with him. But then we had to go away—one of our troubles,” Terry

interrupted himself, “is that we’re so everlastingly going away. But I

suppose it’s always so with children—isn’t it?—with all the different

parents they’re divided up among, and all the parents living in

different places, and fighting so about when the children are to go to

which, and the lawyers always changing things just as you think they’re

arranged.... Of course a chap must expect to be moving about when he’s

young. But Scopy says that later parents settle down.” He added this on

a note of interrogation, and Boyne, feeling that an answer was expected,

declared with conviction: “Oh, but they do—by Jove, they do!”

Inwardly he was recalling the warm cocoon of habit in which his own

nursery and school years had been enveloped, giving time for a screen of

familiar scenes and faces to form itself about him before he was thrust

upon the world. What had struck Boyne first about the little tribe

generically known as the Wheaters was that they were so exposed, so

bared to the blast—as if they had missed some stage of hidden growth for

which Palace Hotels and Riviera Expresses afforded no sufficient

shelter. He found his gaze unable to bear the too-eager questioning of

the boy’s, and understood why Miss Scope looked away when she talked of

Terry.

“Settle down? Rather! People naturally tend to as they get older. Aren’t

your own parents proving it already? Haven’t you all got together again,

so to speak?” Boyne winced at his own exaggerated tone of optimism. It

was a delicate matter, in such cases, to catch exactly the right note.

“Yes,” Terry assented. “You’d think so. But I know children who’ve

thought so too, and been jolly well sold. The trouble is you can never

be sure when parents will really begin to feel old. Especially with all

these new ways the doctors have of making them young again. But anyhow,”

he went on more hopefully, “if you would put in a word I’m sure it would

count a lot. And Judy is sure it would too.”

“Then of course I will. I’ll stop over a day or two, and do all I can,”

Boyne assured him, casting plans and dates to the winds.

He was not certain that the appeal had not anticipated a secret yearning

of his own; a yearning not so much to postpone his arrival at Cortina

(to that he would not confess) as to defer the parting from his new

friends, and especially from Judith. The Monreale picnic had been

successfully repeated in several other scenes of classic association,

and during the gay and clamorous expeditions ashore, and the long blue

days on deck, he had been gradually penetrated by the warm animal life

which proceeds from a troop of happy healthy children. Everything about

the little Wheaters and their “steps” excited his interest and sympathy,

and not least the frailness of the tie uniting them, and their

determination that it should not be broken. There was something tragic,

to Boyne, in the mere fact of this determination—it implied a range of

experience and a power of forethought so far beyond a child’s natural

imagining. To the ordinary child, Boyne’s memories told him, separation

means something too vague to fret about beforehand, and too pleasantly

tempered, when it comes, by the excitement of novelty, and the joy of

release from routine, to be anything but a jolly adventure. Boyne could

not recall that he had ever minded being sent from home (to the

seashore, to a summer camp, or to an aunt’s, when a new baby was

expected) as long as he was allowed to take his mechanical toys with

him. Any place that had a floor on which you could build cranes and

bridges and railways was all right: if there was a beach with sand that

could be trenched and tunnelled, and water that could be dammed, then it

was heaven, even if the porridge wasn’t as good as it was at home, and

there was no mother to read stories aloud after supper.

He could only conjecture that what he called change would have seemed

permanence to the little Wheaters, and that what change signified to

them was something as radical and soul-destroying as it would have been

to Boyne to see his mechanical toys smashed, or his white mice left to

die of hunger. That it should imply a lasting separation from the warm

cluster of people, pets and things called home, would have been no more

thinkable to the infant Boyne than permanence was to the infant

Wheaters.

Judith had explained that almost all their little friends (usually

acquaintances made in the world of Palace Hotels) were in the same case

as themselves. As Terry had put it, when you were young you couldn’t

expect not to move about; and when Judith proceeded to give Boyne some

of the reasons which had leagued her little tribe against the recurrence

of such moves he had the sick feeling with which a powerless looker-on

sees the torture of an animal. The case of poor Doll Westway, for

instance, who was barely a year older than Judith, and whom they had

played with for a summer at Deauville; and now—!

Well, it was all a damned rotten business—that was what it was. And

Judith’s resolve that her children should never again be exposed to

these hazards thrilled Boyne like the gesture of a Joan of Arc. As the

character of each became more definite to him, as he measured the

distance between Blanca’s cool self-absorption, tempered only by a

nervous craving for her twin brother’s approval, and the prodigal

self-abandonment of Beechy, as he compared the detached and downright

Zinnie to the sinuous and selfish Bun, and watched the interplay of all

these youthful characters, he marvelled that the bond of Judith

Wheater’s love for them should be stronger than the sum of such

heredities. But so it was. He had seen how they could hang together

against their sister when some childish whim united them, and now he

could imagine what an impenetrable front they would present under her

leadership. Of course the Cliffe Wheaters would stay together if their

children were determined that they should; and of course they would give

Terry a tutor if he wanted one. How was it possible for any one to look

at Terry and not give him what he wanted, Boyne wondered? At any rate,

he, Boyne, meant to accompany the party to Venice and see the meeting.

Incidentally, he was beginning to be curious about seeing the Wheaters

themselves.

VI

There was no doubt about the Wheaters’ welcome. When Boyne entered the

big hall of their hotel on the Grand Canal he instantly recognized

Cliffe Wheater in the florid figure which seemed to fill the half-empty

resonant place with its own exuberance. Cliffe Wheater had been just

like that at Harvard. The only difference was that he and his cigar had

both grown bigger. And he seemed to have as little difficulty in

identifying Boyne.

“Hul_lo_!” he shouted, so that the hall rocked with his greeting, and

the extremely slim young lady in a Quaker gray frock and endless pearls

to whom he was talking turned her head toward the newcomer with a little

pout of disdain. The pout lingered as her eyes rested on Boyne, but he

perceived that it was not personally addressed to him. She had a smooth

egg-shaped face as sweetly vacuous as that of the wooden bust on which

Boyne’s grandmother’s caps used to be done up, with carmine lips of the

same glossy texture, and blue-gray eyes with long lashes that curved

backward (like the bust’s) as though they were painted on her lids; and

Boyne had the impression that her extreme repose of manner was due to

the fear of disturbing this facial harmony.

“Why, Martin dear!” she presently breathed in a low level voice, putting

out a hand heavy with rings; and Boyne understood that he was in the

presence of the once-redundant Joyce Wheater, and that in her new

fashion she was as glad to see him as ever.

“I’ve grown so old that you didn’t recognise me; but I should have known

_you_ anywhere!” she reproached him in the same smooth silvery voice.

“Old—you?” he found himself stammering; but the insipidities she

evidently awaited were interrupted by her husband.

“Know him? I should say so! Not an ounce more flesh on him than there

used to be, after all these years: how d’yer do it, I wonder? Great old

times we used to have in the groves of John Harvard, eh, Martin, my boy?

’Member that Cambridge girl you used to read poetry to? _Poetry!_ She

was a looker, too! ‘Come into the garden, Maud’.... _Garden_ they used

to call it in those days! And now I hear you’re a pal of my son’s....

Well, no, I don’t mean Chipstone—” he smiled largely— “but poor old

Terry.... Hullo, why here’s the caravan! Joyce, I say—you’ve told them

they’re to be parked out at the _Pension Grimani_? All but Chip, that

is. Can’t part with Chipstone, can we? Here they all come, Judy in the

lead as usual. Hullo, Judy girl! Chippo, old man, how goes it? Give us

your fist, my son.” He caught his last-born out of Judith’s arms, and

the others had to wait, a little crestfallen, yet obviously unsurprised,

till the proud father had filled his eyes with the beauty of his last

achievement. “Catch on to him, will you, Joyce? Look at old man Chippo!

Must have put on another five pounds since our last meeting—I swear he

has ... you just feel this calf of his! Hard as a tennis ball, it is....

Does you no end of credit, Judy. Here, pass him on to the room next to

your mother’s.... Wish you’d develop that kind of calf, Terry boy....”

“Look at _my_ calfs, too! I can show them upside down!” shouted Bun,

bursting in with a handspring upon these endearments; while Blanca,

wide-eyed and silent, fastened her absorbed gaze on the golden thatch of

her mother’s intricately rippled head, and Joyce clasped the children,

one after another, to her pearls.

Give Terry a tutor? Boy’s own idea, was it? Good old chap—always poking

around with books. Wheater would have thought that Terry knew enough to

be his own tutor by this time.... Funny, wasn’t it, for a son of _his_?

Cut out to be a Doctor of Divinity; or President of a University, maybe!

Talk of heredity—for him and Joyce to have turned out such a phenomenon!

Hoped Chipstone wouldn’t turn into a Doctor of Divinity too. But of

course they’d give Terry a tutor—wouldn’t they, Joyce? The boy was dead

right; he couldn’t be loafing about any longer with the women.... Did

Boyne happen to know of a tutor, by any chance? Wheater’d never before

had anything of the sort to bother about. Right up on schools, of

course—always meant to send Terry to Groton; but his rotten temperature

had knocked that out, so now....

The three were sitting after dinner on the balcony of the Wheaters’

apartment, watching the Grand Canal, gondola-laden, lamp-flecked,

furrowed with darting motor-boats, drift beneath them in rich coils and

glassy volutes. There was nothing doing in Venice, Wheater had

explained, so early in the season; it was as dead as the grave. Just a

handy place to meet the children in, and look them over before they were

packed off to the Engadine or Leysin. And besides, the Wheaters had come

there to pick up their new steam-yacht; the “Fancy Girl,” a real beauty.

They were going on a short cruise in her before they left for Cowes, and

Venice was a handy place to try her out. By-and-by, if Boyne liked, he

and Joyce and Wheater might drift out to the Piazza, and take an ice at

Florian’s, and a turn on the Canal—not very exciting, but the best

Wheater could suggest in the circumstances. But Boyne said: why not stay

where they were? And Joyce, with a shrug that just sufficiently

displaced the jet strap attaching her dress to her white shoulder,

remarked that Cliffe never _could_ stay where he was, but that nobody

objected to his painting Venice red if he wanted to....

“Where’d I get the paint, at this time of year? Nobody here but guys

with guide-books, and old maids being photo’d feeding the pigeons....

Hotels cram full of ’em.... Well, look here; about that tutor? You

haven’t come across anybody on your travels that would do, Martin?

University chap, and that sort of thing?”

Martin didn’t believe he had; but Mrs. Wheater, lifting a white arm to

flick her cigarette into the Canal, said: “_I_ know a tutor.”

“Hell—you _do_?” her husband laughed incredulously. “’Nother cigar, old

chap? These Coronas ain’t bad—specially made for me.” He loosed the

golden sheathings from a cigar and held his lighter to it.

“I know a tutor,” Mrs. Wheater repeated. “Exactly the right person, if

only we can persuade him to take the job.”

“Well—I’ll be blowed! Where’d you excavate him?”

She was silent for a moment; then she said: “I’ve been going to the

galleries with him. It’s the first time I’ve ever _seen_ Venice. Fanny

Tradeschi got him out from England to tutor her boys, and then she was

bored here, and rushed back to Paris, and left him stranded. His name is

Ormerod—Gerald Ormerod. It would be the greatest privilege for Terry if

he could be persuaded....”

“Oh, I guess I can persuade him all right. I don’t believe Fanny

remembered to settle with him before she left.”

“No, she didn’t; but he’s awfully proud. You’d better not take that tone

with him, Cliffe.”

“What; the tone of asking him what his screw is?”

“Shouting like that at the top of your lungs—as if everybody less rich

than yourself was deaf,” said his wife, with a slight steel edge in her

silver voice.

“Hul_lo_! That the size of it? Well, fix it up with him any old way you

like. I’m off for a round of the town.... Not coming along, Martin?

Well, so long.... Can’t for the life of me see why you’ve stuck yourself

down at that frowsy _pension_ with the children; I’m sure I could have

bullied the manager here into giving you a room.... Have it your own

way, though. And you and Joyce can map out a tour for to-morrow: only no

galleries for me, thank you! Look here—d’ye think I’d disturb Chipstone

Wheater Esqre if I was just to poke my head in and take a look at him on

my way out? Listen—my shoes don’t creak the least bit.... Oh, hang it, I

don’t care, I’m going to, anyway....”

Of the Joyce Mervin of Boyne’s youth, the young Joyce Wheater of her

early married days, nothing, apparently, was left in the slim figure

leaning over the balcony at Boyne’s elbow. Then she had been large, firm

and rosy, with a core of artless sensibility; now she seemed to have

gone through some process of dematerialization (no doubt there were

specialists for this too) which had left a translucent and imponderable

body about a hard little kernel of spirit.

“It’s impossible to make Cliffe feel _nuances_,” she murmured to her

cigarette after Wheater had gone; then, turning to Boyne: “But now we

can have a good talk—just like old times, can’t we?” She settled down in

her armchair, and exchanged her measured syllables for a sort of steely

volubility which rattled about Boyne’s head like a hail of _confetti_.

She was awfully glad to see him, really she was, she declared; he _did_

believe her when she said that, didn’t he? He’d always been such a

perfect friend, in the silly old days when she herself was just a stupid

baby, years younger in experience than Judy was now.... What did Martin

think of Judy, by the way? Did he appreciate what a miracle the child

was? Positively, she was older and wiser than any of them; and the only

human being who had any influence whatever with Cliffe....

Oh, well: Cliffe ... yes.... It was awfully dear and sweet of Martin to

say that he was glad she and Cliffe had come together again, and she was

glad too, and she was ever so proud of Chip, and she _did_ recognize

poor Cliffe’s qualities, she always had, even when things were at their

worst ... but, there, it was no use pretending with Martin, it never had

been; and there was no denying that Cliffe had got into dreadfully bad

hands when she left him ... utterly demoralized and cowed by that

beastly Lacrosse woman ... and the money pouring out like water.... Yes,

she, Joyce, had seen it was her duty to take him back; and so she had.

Because she still believed in the sanctity of marriage, in spite of

everything. She hoped Martin did too? For if you didn’t, what was there

left to hold society together? But all the same, if one came to feel

that by living with a man, even if he _was_ one’s husband, one was

denying one’s Ideal: that was awful too, wasn’t it? Didn’t Martin think

it was awful?

Yes, Martin supposed it was; but he rather thought a bunch of jolly

children were a pretty good substitute for any old Ideal he’d ever met.

Mrs. Wheater laughed, with somewhat more of the old resonance, and said

she thought so too, and that was what Judy had argued—no, Martin would

never know how wonderful Judy had been during the ghastly days when

Buondelmonte was dragging her, Joyce, through the mire, literally

through the mire! “Why, there were things I couldn’t tell even _you_,

Martin—”

Martin felt his gorge rise. “Things I hope that Judy wasn’t told, then?”

Mrs. Wheater’s shoulder again slipped its light trammels in a careless

shrug. “Bless you, you don’t have to tell the modern child things! They

seem to be born knowing them. Haven’t you found that out, you dear old

Rip van Winkle? Why, Judy’s like a mother to me, I assure you.”

“She’s got a pretty big family to mother, hasn’t she?” Boyne rejoined,

and Mrs. Wheater sighed contentedly: “Oh, but she loves it, you know!

It’s her hobby. Why, she tried to be a mother to Zinnia Lacrosse....

Fancy a child of Judy’s age attempting to keep a movie star straight!

She used to give good advice to Buondelmonte.... But that nightmare’s

over now, and we’re all together again, and there’s only Terry, poor

darling, to worry about. I _do_ worry about him, you know, Martin. And

isn’t it sweet of him to want to be properly educated? For Cliffe, of

course, education has always just been college sports and racing-motors.

That’s one reason why I’ve missed so much ... but I am determined that

Terry shall have all the opportunities I haven’t had. This tutor I was

speaking about, Gerald Ormerod—I wonder if you’d see him for me

to-morrow, Martin? It’s no use asking Cliffe—he’d just shout and brag,

and spoil the whole thing. Gerald—I’ve got to calling him Gerald because

Fanny Tradeschi always did—he comes of very good people, you see, and

he’s almost too sensitive ... too much of an idealist.... I can’t tell

you what it’s been to me, these last weeks, to see Venice through the

eyes of some one who really cares for beauty.... You’ll have a talk with

him about Terry, Martin dear? I’m sure Cliffe would give any salary you

advise—and it would be the saving of our poor Terry to be with some one

really sensitive and cultivated ... and Bun, too ... he might put some

sort of reason into Bun, who’s beginning to get quite out of hand with

Scopy.... And, Martin, don’t forget: you can fix the salary as high as

you like.”

VII

Two days later Boyne sat taking his morning coffee with Judith Wheater

at a rickety iron table in the mouldy garden of the _Pension Grimani_.

He had bribed a maid to carry out their breakfast, so that they might

escape the stuffiness of the low-ceilinged dining-room, full of

yesterday’s dinner smells, of subdued groups of old maids and giggling

bands of school-girls, and of the too-pervasive clatter of the corner

table about which Scopy and Nanny had gathered their flock. It was

Boyne’s last day in Venice, and he wanted a clear hour of it with

Judith. Presently the family would surge up like a spring tide, every

one of them—from Mr. and Mrs. Wheater, with the “Fancy Girl” lying idle

off San Giorgio, and a string of unemployed motors at Fusina, to Beechy

and Zinnie squabbling over their new necklaces from the Merceria, and

Miss Scope with a fresh set of problems for the summer—all wanting

Boyne’s advice or sympathy or consolation, or at least his passive

presence at their debates. All this was rather trying, and the eager

proximity of the little Wheaters made privacy impossible. Yet Boyne was

more than ever glad that he had resisted the persuasions of their

parents, and carried his luggage to the _Pension Grimani_ instead of to

the Palace Hotel. The mere existence of Palace Hotels was an open wound

to him. Not that he was indifferent to the material advantages they

offered. Nobody appreciated hot baths and white tiles, electric bedlamps

and prompt service, more than he whose lot was usually cast in places so

remote from them. He loved Palace Hotels; but he loathed the mere

thought of the people who frequented them.

Judy, he discovered, was of the same mind. Boyne had felt a little

resentful of the fact that only the Wheaters’ youngest-born was to share

the luxury of their hotel; it seemed rather beastly to banish the others

to frowsy lodgings around the corner. At the moment he had avoided

Judy’s eye, fearing to catch in it the reflection of his thought: most

of Judy’s feelings were beginning to reverberate in him. But now, in the

leisure of their first talk since landing, he learned that no such

feeling had marred the meeting of the little Wheaters with their

parents.

Blanca, Judith owned, probably had minded a little, just at first. Silly

Blanca—she was always rather jealous of the fuss that Joyce and father

made about Chip. Besides, she loved smartness, and picking up new ideas

about clothes from the _chic_ women in hotel restaurants; and she liked

to be seen about with Joyce, who was so smart herself, and to have other

smart ladies say: “Is this your dear little girl? We should have known

her anywhere from the likeness.”

But it was precisely because of Blanca that Judith most disliked going

to “Palaces.” “Ever since she got engaged to the lift-boy at

Biarritz....”

“Engaged?” Boyne gasped. “But, Judy ... but Blanca’s barely eleven....”

“Oh, I was engaged myself at Blanca’s age—to a page at a skating-rink.”

Judith’s small face, as she made the admission, had the wistful air of

middle-age looking back on the sweet follies of youth. “But that was

different. He was a very nice little Swiss boy; and I only gave him one

of my hair-ribbons, and he gave me one of his livery buttons; and when

he went home for his holiday he sent me dried edelweiss, and

forget-me-nots pasted on cards. But these modern children are different.

Blanca’s boy wanted a ring with a real stone in it; and he was a horrid

big thing with a fat nose that wriggled. Terry and I could hardly bear

it. And when Scopy found out about it she made an awful row, and

threatened to write to mother ... so altogether we’re better off here.

In fact I wrote to father that we’d better put up at a place like this,

where the children can rush about and make a noise, and nobody bothers.

I think it’s rather jolly here, don’t you, Martin?”

She had called him Martin, as a matter of course, since the second day

out from Algiers; and he could never hear his name in her fresh young

trill without a stir of pleasure.

He said he thought the _Pension Grimani_ awfully jolly, and was glad it

suited the rest of them as well as it did him. Then she asked if it was

all right about Terry’s tutor, and what he thought of the young man. The

answer to this was more difficult. Boyne was not sure what he thought.

He had had an interview with Mr. Ormerod on the previous day; an

interview somewhat halting and embarrassed on his own part, perfectly

firm and self-possessed on the tutor’s. Mr. Ormerod was a good-looking

young Englishman with the University stamp upon him. He had very fair

hair, somewhat long and rumpled, lazy ironic gray eyes, and a

discontented mouth. He looked clever, moody and uncertain; but he was

cultivated and intelligent, and it seemed certain that Terry would learn

more, and be more usefully occupied, in his care than in Miss Scope’s.

Boyne’s embarrassment proceeded not only from the sense of his unfitness

to choose a tutor for anybody, but from the absurdity of having to do so

with the pupil’s parents on the spot. Mr. Ormerod, however, seemed

neither surprised nor disturbed. He had seen Terry, and was sure he was

an awfully good little chap; his only hesitation was as to the salary.

Boyne, who had fixed it to the best of his judgment, saw at once that,

though it exceeded the usual terms, it was below Mr. Ormerod’s mark. The

young man explained that the Princess Tradeschi had let him down rather

badly, and that it was a beastly nuisance, but he really couldn’t give

in about his screw. Boyne remembered Mrs. Wheater’s parting injunction,

and to get over the difficulty suggested throwing in Bun. “There’s the

little Buondelmonte boy—a sort of step-son; he’s rather a handful for

the governess, and perhaps you would take him on for part of the time.

In that case—”

This closed the transaction to Mr. Ormerod’s advantage, and enabled

Boyne to report to the Wheaters that their eldest son’s education would

begin the next day. And now he had to answer Judith’s question.

“He strikes me as clever; but I don’t know how hard he’ll make Terry

work.”

“Oh, Terry will make _him_ work. And as long as Joyce wants it I’m glad

it’s settled. If she hadn’t, father might have kicked at the price. Not

that he isn’t awfully generous to us; but he can’t see why people should

want to be educated when they don’t have to. What does it ever _lead_

to, he says.” She wrinkled her young brows pensively. “I don’t know; do

you? I can’t explain. But if Terry wants it I’m sure it’s right. You’ve

read a lot yourself, haven’t you? I don’t suppose I shall ever care much

about reading ... but what’s the use of bothering, when I should never

have a minute’s time, no matter how much I cared to do it?”

He reminded her that she might have time later, and added that, now that

her parents were in an educational mood, he wondered she didn’t take

advantage of it to get herself sent to a good school, if only to be able

to keep up with Terry. At this she smiled a little wistfully; it was the

same shy doubtful smile with which she had looked about her in the

cathedral at Monreale, trying to puzzle out what he saw in it. But her

frown of responsibility returned. “Go to school? Me? But when, I’d like

to know? There’ll always be some of the children left to look after.

Why, I shall be too old for school before Chip is anywhere near Terry’s

age. And besides, I never mean to leave the children—_never_!” She

brought the word out with the shrill emphasis he had already heard in

her voice when her flock had to be protected or reproved. “We’ve all

sworn that,” she added. “We took an awful oath one day at Biskra that

we’d never be separated again, no matter what happened. Even Chip had to

hold up his fist and say: ‘I swear.’ We did it on Scopy’s ‘Cyclopædia of

Nursery Remedies.’ And if things went wrong again, and I was off at one

of your schools, who’d see to it that the oath was kept?”

“But now that all the children are safely with your own people, couldn’t

you let the oath take care of itself, and think a little of what’s best

for you?”

She raised her eyes with a puzzled stare which made them seem as young

as Zinnie’s. “You’d like me to go to school?”

He returned the look with one of equal gravity. “Most awfully.”

Her colour rose a little. “Then I should like to.”

“Well, then—”

She shook her head and her flush faded. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever

understand—you or anybody. How could I leave the children now? I’ve got

to get them off to Switzerland in another fortnight; this is no place

for Terry. And suppose Mr. Ormerod decides he won’t come with us—”

“Won’t come with you? But it’s precisely what he’s been engaged to do!”

She gave an impatient shrug like her mother’s, and turned on Boyne a

little face sharp with interrogation. “Well, then, suppose it was mother

who didn’t want him to?”

“Your mother? Why, child, it was she who found him. She knows all about

him; she—”

“She jolly well likes doing Venice with him,” Judy completed his

sentence with a hideous promptness. It was Boyne’s turn to redden. He

averted his eyes from her with one of Miss Scope’s abrupt twists, and

pushed his chair back as if to get up. Judy leant across the table and

touched his sleeve timidly.

“I’ve said something you don’t like, Martin?”

“You’ve said something exceedingly silly. Something I should hate to

hear if you were grown up. But at your age it’s merely silly, and

doesn’t matter.”

She was on her feet in a flash, quivering with anger. “My age? My age?

What do you know about my age? I’m as old as your grandmother. I’m as

old as the hills. I suppose you think I oughtn’t to say things like that

about mother—but what am I to do, when they’re true, and there’s no one

but you that I can say them to?”

He never quite knew, when she took that tone, if he was most moved or

offended by it. There were moments when she frightened him; when he

would have given the world to believe either that she was five years

older than she said, or else that she did not know the meaning of the

words she used. At such moments it was always the vision of Rose Sellars

which took possession of him, and he found himself breathlessly

explaining this strange child to her, and feeling that what was so clear

to him would become incomprehensible as soon as he tried to make it

clear to others, and especially to Mrs. Sellars. “There’s nothing to be

done about it,” he thought despairingly. Aloud he remarked, in an

impatient tone: “You’re very foolish not to go to school.”

She made no reply, but simply said, with a return of her wistful look:

“Perhaps if you were going to stay here you’d lend me some books.”

“But I’m not going to stay here; I’m off to-morrow morning,” he answered

angrily, keeping his head turned away with an irritated sense that if he

should meet her eyes he would see tears in them.

Her own anger had dropped—he knew it without looking at her, and he had

the sense that she was standing near him, very small and pale. “Martin,

if you’d only stay! There are so many things left undecided.... Father

and mother can’t make up their minds where to go next, and it’s always

when they’ve got nothing particular to do that they quarrel. They can’t

get anybody to go on the yacht with them—not till Cowes. And if they

have to chuck the cruise father wants to go to Paris, and mother wants

to go motoring in the hill-towns of Italy (where are they, do you know?)

And if they get wrangling again what in the world is to become of us

children?”

He turned back then, and put his hand on her arm. There was an old

bench, as shaky as the table, under a sort of ragged sounding-board of

oleanders. “Sit down, my dear.” He sat beside her, smiling a little,

lighting a cigarette to prove his ease and impartiality. “You’re taking

all this much too hard, you know. You’ve too much on your shoulders, and

you’re over-tired: that’s all. I’ve been with your father and mother for

two days now, and I see no signs of anything going wrong. The only

trouble with them is that they’re too rich. That makes them fretful:

it’s like teething. Every time your father hears he’s made another

million it’s like cutting a new tooth. They hurt to bite on when one has

so many. But he’ll find people soon to go off for a cruise with him, and

then he’ll have to decide about your summer. Your people must see that

this place is not bracing enough for Terry; and they’ll want him to

settle down somewhere in the mountains, and get to work as soon as

possible.”

The tone of his voice seemed to quiet her, though he suspected that at

first she was too agitated to follow what he said. “But what sort of

people?” she brought out at length, disconsolately.

“What sort of people?”

“To go on the yacht. That’s another thing. When mother is away from

father, and I’m with her, it’s easier in some ways—except that then I

fret about the other children. When Joyce and father are together they

do all sorts of crazy things, just to be in opposition to each other.

Take up with horrid people, I mean, people who drink and have rows. And

then they get squabbling again, as they did when Buondelmonte sent

father the bill for his Rolls-Royce....”

“Buondelmonte?”

“Yes; but Joyce said we were never to talk about that—she forbade us

all.”

“She was quite right.”

“Yes; only it’s true. And they do get into all sorts of rows and muddles

about the people they pick up—”

At this moment Boyne, hearing a shuffle on the gravel, looked around and

saw the maid approaching with a card. The maid glanced doubtfully at the

two, and finally handed the card to Boyne, as the person most likely to

represent law and order in the effervescent party to which he seemed to

belong. It was a very large and stiff piece of paste-board, bearing the

name: _Marchioness of Wrench_, and underneath, in a sprawling untaught

hand: “To see my daughter Zinnie Wheater,” the “my” being scratched out

and “her” substituted for it. Boyne, after staring at this document

perplexedly, passed it on to Judith, who sprang up with an astonished

exclamation.

“Why, it must be Zinnia Lacrosse! Why, she’s married again! It’s true,

then, what Blanca saw in the papers....” She looked inquiringly at

Boyne. “Do you suppose she’s really here?”

“Of course I’m here!” cried a sharp gay voice from the doorway; and

through the unkempt shrubbery an apparition sparkling with youth and

paint and jewels swept toward them on a wave of perfume.

“Hullo, Judy—why, it’s _you_!” But the newcomer was not looking at

Judith. She stood still and scrutinised Boyne with great eyes set like

jewels in a raying-out of enamelled lashes. She had a perfectly oval

face, a small exquisitely curved mouth, and an air of innocent

corruption which gave Boyne a slightly squeamish feeling as she turned

and flung her arms about Judy.

“Well, old Judy, I’m glad to see you again.... Who’s your friend?” she

added, darting a glance at Boyne through slanting lids. All her gestures

had something smooth and automatic, and a little larger than life.

“He’s Mr. Boyne. He’s father’s friend too. This is Zinnia Lacrosse,

Martin.”

“No, it isn’t, either! It’s the Marchioness of Wrench. Only I’m just

called Lady Wrench, except on visiting-cards, and when they put me in

the newspapers, or I talk to the servants. And of course you’ll call me

Zinnia just the same, Judy. How d’ye do, Mr. Boyne?” murmured the star,

with an accession of elegance and a languidly extended hand. But she had

already mustered Boyne, and was looking over his shoulder as she

addressed him. “What I’m after is Zinnie, you know,” she smiled.

“Wrenny’s waiting in the gondola—Wrenny’s my husband—and I’ve promised

to take her out and show her to him.”

She cast an ingratiating glance at Judith, but the latter, quietly

facing her, seemed to Boyne to have grown suddenly tall and

authoritative, as she did when she had to cope with a nursery mutiny.

“Now, Zinnia,” she began, in the shrill voice which always gave Boyne a

sense of uneasiness, “you know perfectly well—”

“Know what?”

“You know what the agreement is; and you know Scopy and I aren’t going

to listen to anything—”

“Fudge, child! What d’you suppose I’d want to break the agreement for?

Not that I care such an awful lot for Cliffe’s old alimony, you know. It

don’t hardly keep me in silk stockings. If I wanted to carry Zinnie off,

that wouldn’t stop me half a second. But I only want to show Wrenny that

I can have a baby if I choose. Men are so funny about such things; he

doesn’t believe I’ve ever had one. And of course I can see he’s got to

have an heir. Look here, Judy, ain’t I always dealt with you white? Let

me see her right away, won’t you? I’ve got a lovely present for her

here, and one for you too—a real beauty.... Can’t you understand a

mother’s feelings?”

Judy still kept her adamantine erectness. Her lips, colourless and

pressed together, barely parted to reply to the film star, whose last

advance she appeared not to have noticed.

“Of course you can see Zinnie. You needn’t get excited about that. Only

you’ll see her here, with me and Mr. Boyne. All your husband has got to

do is to get out of the gondola and come into the house.”

“If you’d been brought up like a lady you’d call him Lord Wrench, Judy.”

Judith burst out laughing. “Mercy! Then you’d better call me Miss

Wheater. But if you want to see Zinnie you haven’t got any time to lose,

because father’s going to send for the children in a minute or two, and

take them all off on the yacht.”

“Oh, Judy—but he can’t prevent my seeing Zinnie!”

“Nobody wants to prevent you, if you’ll do what I say.”

The Marchioness of Wrench pondered this ultimatum for a moment, staring

down at her highly polished oval nails. Then she said sullenly: “I’ll

try; but I don’t believe he’ll get out of the gondola. He’s dead lazy.

And we wanted to take Zinnie for a row.” Judith made no reply, and

finally Lady Wrench moved back toward the vestibule door with a

reluctant step.

“I’ll go and fetch Zinnie,” Judith announced to Boyne, advancing to the

house by another path; but as she did so a small figure, bedizened and

glass-beaded, hurled itself across the garden and into her arms.

“Judy! That was Zinnia, wasn’t it? I saw her from my window! Nanny said

it wasn’t, but I knew it was. She hasn’t gone away without seeing her

own little Zinnie, has she? I’ll never forgive you if she has. Did she

bring a present for me? She always does. Blanca’s crazy to come down and

see her clothes, but Scopy won’t let her. She’s locked her up.”

Judith gave one of her contemptuous shrugs. “Oh, Scopy needn’t have done

that. It won’t hurt Blanca to see your mother. There, stop pinching me,

Zinnie, and don’t worry. Your mother’s coming back. She’s only gone to

get her husband to introduce him to you.”

“Her new husband? What’s his name? Nobody ever told me she had a new

husband. ’Cos they always say: ‘You’re too little to understand.’ Zif I

wasn’t Zinnia’s own little daughter! Judy, hasn’t she got a present for

me, don’t you think? If it’s nothing but choc’lates, course I’ll divvy

with the others; but if it’s jewelry I needn’t, need I?” Zinnie’s ruddy

curls spiralled upward and her face flamed with cupidity and eagerness.

With a flash of her dimpled fists she snatched the new Merceria beads

from her neck and thrust them into the pocket of her frock. “There’s no

use her seeing I’ve had presents already—you don’t mind, Martin, do

you?” she queried over her shoulder, addressing Boyne, who had given her

the necklace that morning. He burst out laughing; but Judith, before he

could intervene, caught hold of the delinquent and gave her a wrathful

shake. “You nasty false ungrateful little viper you—”

“Oo-oo-oo,” wailed Zinnie, hunching up her shoulders in a burst of sobs.

“There—now, Wrenny, you just look at that. I wish I had my lawyers here!

That’s the way those Wheater people treat my child—” Lady Wrench stood

in the garden door and pointed with a denunciatory arm toward her

weeping infant. Over her shoulder appeared the fair hair and puzzled

eyes of a very tall young man with a sickly cast of countenance, a wide

tremulous mouth and a bald forehead. “Oh, Lord, my dear,” he said.

VIII

Lady Wrench had snatched up her daughter and stood, in an approved film

attitude, pressing Zinnie’s damp cheek against her own, while the

child’s orange-coloured curls mixed with the red gold of hers. “What’s

that nasty beast been doing to momma’s darling?” she demanded, glaring

over Zinnie’s head at Judith. “Whipping you for wanting to see your own

mother, I suppose? You just tell momma what it was and she’ll....”

But Zinnie’s face had cleared, and she was obviously far too much

absorbed in her mother’s appearance to heed the unimportant questions

which were being put to her. She slid her fat fingers through the pearls

flowing in cataracts down Lady Wrench’s bosom. “Oh, Zinnia, are they

real? Blanca says they can’t be—she knows they can’t, ’cos they’re twice

as big as Joyce’s.”

“Blanca? Why, is Blanca here? Where is she?”

“Scopy’s got her locked up, so’s she can’t come down and stare at you,

but she found Martin’s op’ra glasses in his room’n she’s looking at you

through them’n she says they’re so pow’ful she can count the pearls, and

can’t she come down, please, Zinnia, ’cos she wants to see f’you’ve got

the same Callot model’s Joyce’s jess ordered, ’cos it’ll make Joyce

wild’n she’ll want to get another one instead as quick as she can.

Please, Zinnia!”

Lady Wrench’s brow had cleared as quickly as her daughter’s. She burst

out laughing and pressed her lips to Zinnie’s cheek. “There, Wrenny,

what d’you think of that, I’d like to know? Isn’t she my really truly

little girl?”

Lord Wrench had shambled slowly forward in her wake. He stood,

lax-jointed, irresolute, in his light loose flannels, a faded Homburg

hat tilted back from his perplexed brow, gazing down on the group from

the immense height to which his long limbs and endless neck uplifted

him.

“Yes, I’ll take my oath she’s that,” he replied, in a voice which seemed

to come from somewhere even higher than his hat; and he gave a cackle

that rose and overreached his voice, and went tinkling away to the

housetop.

His wife’s laugh joined and outsoared his, and she dropped down on the

bench, still hugging Zinnie. “Judy thought we wanted to _steal_ her,

Wrenny—think of that! Oh, I forgot you didn’t know each other—Lord

Wrench, Judy Wheater. And this is Mr. Boyne, a friend of Cliffe’s—aren’t

you a friend of Cliffe’s, Mr. Boyne? My present husband, the Marqu—no;

that’s wrong, I know—just my husband. But where’s Blanca, Judy? Do let

her come down, and Terry too; that’s a darling! After all, I’m their

step-mother, ain’t I? Or I was, anyhow.... Is Blanca as much of a beauty

as ever, Mr. Boyne? If that girl had more pep I wouldn’t wonder but what

I could do something with her on the screen. Judy, now, would never be

any good to us—would she, Wrenny? Too much of a lady, I always used to

tell her....”

“Shut up: here she is,” Lord Wrench interpolated. As he spoke Judith

reappeared with her younger sister. Blanca’s eyes were stretched to

their widest at the sight of her former step-mother, though her erect

spine and measured tread betrayed nothing of her eagerness to appraise

Lady Wrench’s dress and jewels. Behind them walked Miss Scope, helmeted

as if for a fray, her hands mailed in gray cotton, and clutching her

umbrella like a spear.

“Well, Blanca! How are you? How you’ve grown! And what a looker you’re

going to be! Only you’re so fearfully grand—always was, wasn’t she,

Judy? You’re a lady yourself, but you ain’t _such_ a lady. Well, Blanca,

shake hands, and let me introduce you to my new husband. Wrenny, this is

Blanca, who used to come and stay, with Terry and Judy, when Cliffe and

me were married. Where’s Terry, Blanca? Why didn’t he come down too? I’d

love to see him.”

“Terry’s with his tutor at present,” said Blanca distantly, though her

eyes never for a second detached themselves from Lady Wrench’s luminous

presence.

“But he said he wouldn’t have come down even if he hadn’t of been,”

chimed in Zinnie, peering up maliciously into her mother’s face. “He

says he isn’t ’quisitive like Blanca, and he can’t be bothered every

time somebody comes round to see the steps.”

Lord Wrench, at this, joined Boyne in a fresh burst of laughter, but his

bride looked distinctly displeased. “Well, I see Terry’s tutor hasn’t

taught him manners anyhow,” she snapped, while Miss Scope admonished her

youngest charge: “_In_quisitive, Zinnie; you’re really old enough to

begin to speak correctly.”

“No, I’m not, ’less Bun and Beechy do too,” Zinnie retorted.

“Beatrice and Astorre are foreigners,” Miss Scope rejoined severely.

“Well, so are you, you old flamingo! You’re not a real true Merrican

like us!”

“Zinnie,” cried Blanca, intervening in her brother’s behalf in her

grandest manner, “Terry never said any such thing”; but Zinnie, secure

in her mother’s embrace, laughed scorn at her rebukers, until Judith

remarked: “I’m very sorry, but children who are rude are not to be taken

on the yacht today. Father particularly told me to tell you so. Zinnie,

if you don’t apologise at once to Miss Scope I’m afraid you’ll have to

stay behind alone with Nanny.”

“No, she won’t, either, my Zinnie pet won’t! She’ll go out in the

gond’la with her own momma and her new father,” Lady Wrench triumphantly

declared. But Zinnie’s expressive countenance had undergone a sudden

change. She detached herself from the maternal embrace, and sliding to

the ground slipped across to Miss Scope and endearingly caught her by a

gray cotton hand. “Scopy, I’m not a really naughty Zinnie, say I’m

not—’cos I don’t want to go out in a bally old gond’la, I want to go’n

father’s steam-yacht, I do!”

Fresh squeals of approval from Lord Wrench greeted this hasty

retractation. “Jove—she’s jolly well right, the kid is! No doubt about

her being yours, Zinnia,” he declared; whereat the lady rejoined, with

an effort at lightness: “Zif I couldn’t have a yacht of my own any day I

like that’d steam all round that old hulk of Cliffe’s! And I will

too—you’ll see,” she added, sweeping a circular glance about the

company.

“Righto. Come along now, and we’ll pick one out,” her husband suggested

with amiable irony.

“Well, maybe I will,” she menaced, rising to her feet with the air of

throwing back an ermine train. But Blanca had advanced and was lifting

shy eyes to hers. “Your dress is so perfectly lovely, Zinnia; I think

it’s the prettiest one I ever saw you in. Isn’t it from that Russian

place mother’s always talking about, where it’s so hard to get them to

take new customers?”

The star cast a mollified smile upon her. “You bright child, you! Well,

yes; it is. But even if your mother could persuade them to take her on

she wouldn’t be able to get this model, because the Grand Duke Anastase

designed it expressly for me, and I’ve got a signed paper saying it’s

the only one of the kind they’ll ever make. See the way it’s cut across

the shoulders?”

Blanca contemplated this detail with ecstatic appreciation, and Lady

Wrench, gathering up her sable scarf, glanced victoriously about her. “I

guess anybody that wants to can buy a steam-yacht; but you can count on

one hand with two fingers missing the women that Anastase’ll take the

trouble to design a dress for.”

“Oh, I say, come on, old girl,” her husband protested, shifting his

weight wearily from one long leg to another; and Lady Wrench turned to

follow him.

“Well, goodbye, Zinnie child. Next time I’ll call for you on my two

thousand ton oil-burner. Oh, look here—seen my bag, Wrenny? I believe I

brought some caramels for the child—” She turned back, and began to

fumble in a bejewelled bag, while the two little girls’ faces fell at

the mention of caramels. But presently a gold chain strung with small

but lustrous pearls emerged from a tangle of cigarettes and bank-notes.

“Here, Zinnie, you put that on, and ask Blanca to look at the pearls

under the microscope, and then tell you if they’re false, like your

momma’s.”

Blanca paled at the allusion. “Oh, Zinnia, I never said yours were

false! Is that what that little brute told you? I only said, I couldn’t

be sure they weren’t, at that distance—”

Lady Wrench laughed imperturbably. “Well, I should think you’d have been

sure they _were_, being so accustomed to your mother’s. But movie queens

don’t have to wear fake pearls, my pet, ’cos if the real ones get stolen

they can always replace ’em. You tell that to Mrs. Cliffe Wheater number

three. And you needn’t look so scared—I bear no malice.” She drew a

small packet from the bag. “See, here’s a ring I brought you: I guess

that’ll bear testing too,” she added, flinging the little box into

Blanca’s hand.

Blanca, white with excitement, snapped open the lid, which revealed to

her swift appraising eye a little ruby set in brilliants. She drew it

forth with a rapturous “Oh, Zinnia,” and slipped it onto her hand,

hastily thrusting the box into a fold of her jumper.

“When I give presents I don’t go to the ten-cent store for them,”

remarked Lady Wrench, with a farewell wave of her hand. “So long,

everybody! Shouldn’t wonder if we met again soon by the sad sea waves.

Wrenny and I are honeymooning out at the Lido, and maybe you’ll all be

over for the bathing. It’s getting to be as gay as it is in August. All

the smart people are snapping up the bathing tents. The Duke of Mendip’s

got the one next to ours. He’s Wrenny’s best friend, you know. By-bye,

Judy. Mr. Boyne, hope you’ll dine with us some night at the Lido Palace

to meet the Duke. Ask for the Marchioness of Wrench—you’ll remember?”

She vanished in a dazzle of pearls and laughter, leaving Blanca and

Zinnie in absorbed contemplation of their trinkets till Miss Scope

marshalled them into the house to prepare for the arrival of the “Fancy

Girl”’s launch.

After the children were gone, Judy lingered for a moment in the garden

with Boyne. Her features, so tense and grown-up looking during the film

star’s visit, had melted into the small round face of a pouting child.

“Well—that’s over,” Boyne said, flinging away his cigarette as though

the gesture symbolised the act of casting out the Wrenches.

“Yes,” she assented, in a tone of indifference. “Zinnia doesn’t really

matter, you know,” she added, as if noticing his surprise. “She screams

a lot; but she doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“Well, I should think you’d be glad she didn’t, for whatever she meant

would be insufferable.”

Judith raised her eyebrows with a faint smile. “We’re more used to

fusses than you are. When there are seven children, and a lot of

parents, there’s always somebody fighting about something. But Zinnia’s

nothing like as bad as she looks.” She paused a moment, and then,

irrepressibly, as if to rid her heart of an intolerable weight: “But

Blanca got away with my present. Did you see that? I knew she would!

That’s what she came down for—to wangle it out of Zinnia. Pretending she

thought that old Callot model was one of Anastase’s! There’s nothing

mean enough for Blanca!” Her eyes had filled with large childish tears,

and one of them rolled down her cheek before she had time to throw back

her head and add proudly: “Not that I care a straw, of course. I’m too

grown up to mind about such rubbish. But I know Blanca must have noticed

my ’nitials on the box. Didn’t you see how quick she was about hiding

it?”