PART IV

THE GIRL IN THE ROOM

[I]

IT was Ursula’s way to endure haphazard circumstances quietly and

dreamily, for years; and then, inspired and shaken by sudden fierce

impatience, to spring at them. For just beyond drastic alteration, just

beyond the limit of things wrong, lay that right and glorious world for

which she ached ... where whatever you did, you keenly wanted to do;

where no time was wasted in sitting about among people whose speech and

habits recurred monotonously from day to day; where the air was sharp

and golden as early morning in early summer....

Oh, merely this world, this ordinary old world, but twisted round from

hatefulness because you dared to twist it.... Surely those moments,

rare and swift, when you were amazingly happy, confident, bewitched,

and for no reason at all, surely, Ursula had argued once with Aunt

Lavvy, they could be made permanent, if you could once find out the

cause of them? And Aunt Lavvy with a wise little smile had lent her

Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird.”

Ursula groaned, but inwardly, for at this moment she worshipped Aunt

Lavvy. “The Blue Bird”--the few pages she read of it were not bad;

but the fairy-tale “humble cottage” of Tyltyl had seemed to have

practically no connection with “The Laburnums.” Some people thought

everything could be answered with a book. Ursula preferred, however, to

puzzle and experiment without guides bound in soft calf.

She had given up her room at home, hoping, in her impatience of days

that were nothing special, with people who were burdened with false

small misunderstandings as a dog is burdened with a tin can tied round

its neck, that thus she might force access to a kingdom of perpetual

ecstasy. She had given up the room ... and that was all there was to

it. Sullenly she discounted sacrifice--and also, with the iconoclasm of

sixteen-and-a-half, religion--“it all amounts to the same!”

And for a couple of years she was acquiescent; a schoolgirl, forgetting

to wish madly to change things--change them and change them--a saraband

defying stagnancy. Then Doug came ... and Doug talked ... and all the

world was a romantic platitude of lagoons, and moonlight, and the

domes and minarets of Eastern cities, quays of Rio, humming-birds and

flying fish, and stars blazing on a phosphorescent sea. Doug-land.

His richly-coloured wooing had dwindled her loss of the room to a

size unimportant and of no significance; a small shabby bedroom with

outlook on to a cistern and a wall--what a silly fuss her spirit had

made of it! The after spectacle of her husband falling freshly in love

each time he happened to see a moderately attractive girl crossing

the room, began, after several years, to impress Ursula as again

something ugly and unnecessary enough for another wild spurt of divine

interference. “Divine” to be interpreted not as humble prayer for

intercession from the skies; but as that sudden wrath which burst from

her, and “chucked the furniture about!” as she once expressed it.

The result of furniture-chucking, in this instance, was their removal

to Arcadia.

Now, in August of that summer, Ursula, lying on a flat rock at the base

of the cliffs nearly level with the sea, realized that she had not even

seen Arcadia, for the Arcadians.

The Arcadians--and Doug.

Doug came between her and the sky-line. She saw it over his shoulder.

She looked around her, in search of that balm which is said to be

concealed in beauty: sea ... yes, green--a great many greens. But what

is green, after all, without hysteria to describe it in simile and

rapture? And the royal moors turned back in brocaded purple from the

top of the cliff.

“‘Royal’ and ‘brocaded’ are affectation,” murmured Ursula. “At least--I

don’t know--I suppose I’m tired.”

She may well have been tired; for Doug, of late, had been most

abnormally fit. The open-air life agreed with him--he positively

zig-zagged health from all angles of his body, like the gentleman in

magazine advertisements. His energy ran over and spilt itself in all

directions; he raced and jumped and bathed and dived and climbed, and

leapt three times backwards and forwards over a stile, where once

would have done; he talked louder than usual, because he had so much

abundant voice left over from ordinary talking. And all this exercise

gave him appetite for huge meals, and the huge meals built up his

strength for further superlative exercise; he dragged Ursula out for

long, rough, cross-country walks in all weathers, but preferably during

the cold rainy spells which whipped June into July that year. Wraps he

forbade, because of a certain fetish called “hardening”; he himself

strode exultantly through all weathers, clad in loose cotton shirts and

footer shorts; the skin of his knees, chest and arms, burnt to a crude

mahogany, were his perpetual delight and boast. He did not sit--he

flung himself down; he did not stand--he leapt to his feet. A portion

of his left-over vitality after a stiff morning’s farm-work, he worked

off on a patter-shuffle-clog-dance of his own invention; a little more,

on the unwearied training of his dog to impossibilities. His dog was

a good-looking young wire-haired terrier; a living affirmative of the

axiom that the dog is the dumb devoted friend of man, but a stubborn

contradiction of the further proposition that the dog is an intelligent

beast. Rough was a fool, and most anxious to please Doug. For hours at

a stretch, he strode beside Ursula across the moors, “training” Rough

to follow. “Rough--Rough--good dog--hi--here--drop that--to heel, I

say--heel--heel ... good dog ... good little fellow.... Rough (Sorry

darling, what were you saying?)--Hi--Rough--here, I say....”

Nor did his vigour content itself without battering on all the doors

of Ursula’s life--“Ouvre moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu”--like

Love-locked-out fortified by Sanatogen!

“We must be all-in-all to each other, Teddy!” he declared again and

again. And: “Tell me what you’re thinking about!”

Discovering, surprised, at this period, that her shyness resented his

loving “stand and deliver” attitude--for she had thought shyness was

over long ago--she invented a reserve store of thoughts that would do

well enough for these occasions. Thoughts not too obvious--sometimes

she became quite interested in them as they unwound into speech....

“What are you thinking of, Teddy?” Doug flopped out of the sea, and lay

in a damp glow beside her on the rock.

Ursula considered him attentively, then she said: “Anyone can bask,

after a bathe, in hot sunshine; but it takes you to bask in a cutting

wind under a grey sky.”

“Oh, I’m most tremendously fit,” replied Doug. “At least--I’m normal.

One ought always to feel like this; everybody ought. It’s their own

fault if they don’t. Why didn’t you dip today, Teddy? Where’s the old

Ruffian? What were you thinking about just before I came out?”

“About the Watsons,” said Ursula convincingly; “I was wondering why

Stanley’s idea of a holiday was to shave only twice a week, and wear a

collar and no tie, and a pencil still clipped to his waistcoat pocket.”

“I think he cast his tie out of compliment to me,” laughed Doug; “but

his respectability still clung to the neat collar-stud and efficient

pencil! He did rather upset the scenery whenever he appeared. The kids

were jolly, though--especially the one with the idiot name; she was a

real little sport in the water!”

Grace and Stanley, with Gums, the four children and Lottie, had

recently returned to “Merlin’s Isle” at Buckler’s Cross, after a

month’s painstaking holiday enriching Mr. Wenn at the Polpinnock

Temperance Hotel. They were very disappointed that Grey Stone had not

been able to accommodate them all. “Poor Ursula will be glad to have

some of her own family around her,” Grace had explained their choice of

a place to Miss Roberts. “A husband isn’t like a sister, after all.”

“Not in the least,” Miss Roberts agreed fervently. “And I’ve always

longed to see some really _wild_ country....” In fact, she was

positively disappointed when the country of Morcar did not rise and

spring at her.

Ursula did indeed welcome Grace and Lottie warmly. But she would have

preferred a visit from Bunny, who, following his destiny, was now

black-sheeping it in New Zealand.

“Auntie Teddy, what does father mean when he says Uncle Bunny’ll never

be anything but a Mittens Man,” Freda, the youngest niece, had inquired.

Ursula forthwith sought out Stanley and hotly tackled him.

“Look here, Stanley, why do you label poor old Bunny a remittance man?”

“My dear Ursula, I don’t want my children to grow up believing there’s

anything advisable in not sticking to their home and jobs.” But he

re-told the anecdote of the Mittens Man with considerable pride and

relish to any one trapped to listen by his off-hand: “Rather a smart

thing I heard a kid say the other day. Well, as a matter of fact, it

was my own youngster----”

Perhaps her brother-in-law’s measured patronage of the rocks and

coves, their formation, their antiquity, their historical interest and

their effect upon his own psychology (_a_) where they exceeded

expectations and (_b_) where they fell below it, had something

to do with Ursula’s present apathy towards nature. A yet sadder

spectacle was a genial Stanley going about among the fishermen and

palling up with them, punning hearty puns to suit their intelligence,

or listening with deliberate respect to their views on politics--“You

know, Barrison, sometimes these chaps say something worth hearing. They

_think_, you know!”

“God, what a stumor!” was Doug’s final verdict on Stanley, as the train

from Gullick bore him away, with his womenfolk.

“Well, I’m going to take old Rough for another swim; it freshens him

up.” Doug poised for an instant in clean outline against the dark

waves, and then plunged, followed in untidy, spluttering fashion by his

dog, who detested the water, and only went in uttering sharp yelps of

anguish because he believed each time that Doug was in the extremities

of a life-and-death struggle.

Ursula watched the pair till they disappeared round the headland

which jutted from the opposite side of the cove. Doug was swimming

magnificently; he was certainly in superb physical condition.... And

so ready for a romantic episode, that he was only kept from it by the

sheer fact of no accessible girl--“And that’s a fact which can’t go on

for ever,” mused Ursula.

So she had achieved nothing more than false security, by their

withdrawal to loneliness and the country. He was bursting to talk of

Doug-land and the horizon that pulled and pulled, to some one--not

herself, oh, not herself!--to some one fresh and tremulous, who would

say “we mustn’t, Doug....” and long for such a ringing love-adventure

with so superb a hero.

It must come some time, sooner or later; Ursula knew she could not

always strain to hold at arms-length the inevitable meeting. She had

mistaken delay for prevention. But she had not altered Doug.

The very next girl.

“Ahoy--y--y!” Doug was exultantly calling her attention to himself from

the opposite headland of rock. Sure of his audience, he treated her to

a careless ripple of his muscles, then stood taut and dived. His black

head reappeared on the surface several yards nearer to her.

“Oh--he does want his nice brand-new romance!” And with that, her sense

of property flared up to a fierce height. You ought never to have to

give up what has once been yours. Not a room nor a husband; and not

the illusion that whatever sudden change you make in your life, is the

right change.

The very next girl.

[II]

URSULA began to think quite a lot about her intangible rival. Then to

be irritated by her. If she could have fixed her mind on a certain

definite personality--been jealous of it, she might have wrestled

better with jealousy than now, when compelled to alter over and over

again the shape and colour of a girl, the way she moved, and the

intonations of her voice, to alter all these and twist them a thousand

times, and then destroy the revision and throw the whole girl away and

pick up a totally different one.

All that Ursula knew for certain was that the girl would come. And that

this anticipation of her, the wondering and the waiting, was a thousand

times more torturing than the actual spectacle of Doug in the throes

of an episode. This one, which perforce was bound to overtake him, had

gained importance by the elaborate way in which she had drawn him to

step backward and backward from it.

One morning at breakfast, Doug said unexpectedly:

“Teddy, d’you remember the reason why we chucked everything and came to

live here?”

“Yes....”

“Hasn’t it worked splendidly?” He jumped a chair which stood between

them, and coming up behind her, gripped her shoulders. She twisted

round to face him, smiling a little. “It’s safe to talk of a cure now,

isn’t it, Teddy? Middle of August--we’ve been here four--five--let me

see, end of March--four-and-a-half months. And all this time, have you

had any trouble with me at all? Trouble of the old kind----?” His blue

eyes twinkled mischievously. “It was a tremendous experiment, and it’s

been a success. Behold the unsusceptible Douglas!” He struck a mock

heroic attitude; and, glancing upwards, discovered that it was possible

to swing by the hands from the thick overhead beams from which hams

and joints used to dangle when the whole lower half of Grey Stone had

been a kitchen. So he swung by the hands, thoroughly enjoying it. And

Ursula, as a matter of habit, made everybody’s indulgent remark to him:

“What a great boy you are still, Doug!”

He grinned, gratified. Then, as he nearly always did, dropped from

buffoonery to a gruffer and more sincere note: “I’m not proud of

my--my--well, what I used to be, because I joke about it, Teddy. And I

didn’t talk of it before because I wanted to be sure”--and also because

he had forgotten! “Men live a hectic artificial life in towns, and

their will-power gets jaded. My will-power is tremendous now....” He

lunged forward with his right arm, in proof of it, and then slowly bent

back the forearm, admiring his biceps. “You feel safe about me now,

don’t you, Teddy old girl?”

“So safe,” said Ursula, quite suddenly resolved that she would rather

materialize her shadowy fear and actually cope with it on the premises,

than watch its approach, wondering when, wondering how it would all

happen to hurt her--“so safe, that I’m going to invite an awfully

nice kid down to stay with us for a bit. No, it’s not just to test

you, though, as you say, it proves that our experiment has been a

success; but I’m getting fed up with my own company, with you such a

lot up at the farm. Do you remember little Christine Powys, at the

boarding-house? she hinted she’d love a holiday with us in Morcar--at

least, she didn’t hint, she quite frankly asked, but I dared not

promise it to her, then.” She selected at random the very first girl

who came into her head. Christine Powys--round dark head--tomboyish

ways--she would do ... or another. Whoever it was--Doug’s next romance.

And Ursula’s hot searching mind craved to fix itself on one actual face

and name, and banish to rest all the rivals in the realms of perhaps.

One girl--all girls.... Well, Christine was one girl, the very first

girl for Doug to meet, after his “cure.” Yes, Christine would do.

Thus Ursula, again impatient, again played understudy to the Deity.

“Christine Powys? No, I don’t remember. Where did she sit?”

“Over by the door. With grandfather and an aunt. They came about three

weeks before we left.”

“Did they?” Doug had been absorbed by Doreen then. “I’ll take your word

for it. Anyway, if this Christine of yours is to be solemnly applied

like a thermometer to my temperature----”

“Don’t be a goose, Doug”--lightly.

Unsuspicious, he kissed her and departed to work.

Ursula wrote her letter. And then went up to the room above the cabin;

down three solid but uneven stairs that cut it off from the rest of the

cottage.... The door was thick, too. Beyond it, loneliness could come

true. It had amused Ursula to furnish the room as much as possible like

the one she had lost to Aunt Lavvy, only in creamy white--walls, bed,

hangings. But the two windows were full of sea in the daytime; and the

lamp had a round silk shade, rich gold as an October moon. The floor

was covered by a rug of some animal with coarse white fur.

“I’d have liked it ...” murmured Ursula. She sat down on the edge

of the bed ... then saw herself merely preparing to be wistful, and

hastily went for a tramp into St. Miniot, to see Miss Gregson, now

established with her barely-tolerated Eye-talian at Parc Gooth.

Her brother Louis was staying with her; a short, ugly, dandified man.

Ursula disliked his clipped black moustache which lay too high above

his lips; disliked his deliberately experienced glance at her; disliked

his sophisticated conversation, which held such gems as: “All women

want until they cease to want, and then they want more!” When she

departed, he said with affected abruptness: “When we meet again--we

must talk together.”

[III]

CHRISTINE POWYS wrote: “May I really, really come next week already?

May I? Oh, it is jolly decent of you. This place is like hell in

summer--it stinks of cats. Only we can’t afford to get away. Yesterday

I was so fed up with it that I picked the green paint blisters off the

front door like I used to when I was about four....”

They met her at Gullick with Champion’s car. She wore a very woolly

white sweater and cap, and short plaid skirt, and had dabbed her mouth

with incongruous scarlet--“Sweater to show us she knows how to dress

for the sea--poor hot child! skirt, the plaid of no clan that was

ever invented. Lip-salve? Subconscious tribute to Doug already.... I

wonder?” But on second thoughts Ursula decided it was probably because

Christine’s greatest pal at the boarding-house was just then using

lip-salve--“she’ll leave it off after she’s been with me twenty-four

hours, and take to some of my tricks instead.”

Christine was attractive, though, in the Pierrot style. Her black hair

was cut smooth and round to her head as the top of a penny bun. The

lashes of her big brown eyes curled up inquiringly, and so did her

ridiculously short soft nose of which the three-cornered nostrils lay

almost flat to her face. A very long upper lip lent her expression an

air of incredibly droll roguery. Her rounded cheeks were scarlet with

excitement, but dimmed by the powdery bloom which dims and transfigures

very ripe fruit and very young cherubim. A round curling mouth and a

round babyish chin completed the resemblance to a Pierrot who pleads

sometimes in the moonlight for love--and sometimes crudely on the

pier for pennies. In fact, there was quite a lot of the pier about

Christine. But:

“Help!” thought Ursula, “I’m going to like her!”

With which brief expostulation of horror, she sat down to watch the

tragi-comedy she had with such reckless lordliness prepared for herself.

It all happened quite amusingly. For within a few hours Doug

capitulated; and Ursula, tranquilly studying him, was able to mark

exactly how many days later he acknowledged the truth to himself.

Roughly, about five. He concealed his fall from Ursula, of course; and

successfully, he had not a doubt. But his long period of immunity from

romantic episode had doubled its present intensity, so that he believed

as never before it was _the_ romantic episode, and he had to curb

himself from shouting robust oaths at Ursula, who alone stood between

him and the lagoons, etc., with Christine.

Christine had no chance of resistance from the very beginning.

Boarding-house life, and a mysterious wave of feeling called “the

modern tendency,” had weakened the tradition which used to exist for

the protection of maidens of eighteen from foolishness, that a married

man was “no good.” And Doug, bare-throated, and with hefty brown knees,

was surely large and splendid as never man had been before. “How funny

I never noticed him at the boarding-house!”

And as it happened, that little shut-off white room which overhung the

sea was “sort of perfect” in which to spend nights with a tremulous

coloured dream.... At the boarding-house Christine shared a room with

her aunt. But here----

The world glowed and was strange ... “as though some one had turned it

over on to its right side,” murmured Christine, glad, nevertheless,

that her friend Gladys Willoughby, who was scornful and disillusioned

and a cynic and used lip-salve (Ursula was right), could not know she

was making an idiot fool of herself--enjoying being alone with the thin

banjo note of the cricket in the grass below her window.

“I’m right and Gladys is wrong!” Christine discovered ... and was

happier still.

Of course she did not know yet that Doug cared for her. But she had

noticed some odd characteristics of his: the way, for instance, in

the middle of his carefree rollicking nonsense, he would suddenly add

something in quite a different voice--and then break off ... he was one

of those _real_ men who find it difficult to show their feelings.

“I expect he’s got a repression,” said sage Christine, to Christine her

submissive and admiring confidante.

She lies in bed, clothes half tumbled off, innocent, sensuous, lulled

by thoughts of a bewitched today--a boat with a brown sail drifts

across her window, dips again behind the wall ... her following eyes

find it for yet an instant in the other window ... pretty boat with a

brown sail.... Christine, enamoured of tomorrow, drops asleep.

“DEAR OLD GLADYS,--I don’t know yet if I’ll say yes to

an elopement with him--doesn’t that sound cool and depraved? But

nowadays.... You know, I was never sure if even the Barkers were

properly married, and yet they were none the worse for it. But Doug

is a bit of a dug-out in some ways (joke)--he hasn’t even kissed me

yet, though I can feel he’s mad to. He’s much too handsome to live,

of course, but we’ve got over that phase when we much prefer an ugly

man because they’ve ‘got more in them’--anyway it was invented by the

wife of a hideous old monster who was jealous of her best friend’s

husband. Ursula Barrison isn’t a bad sort, but serene and innocent

and a bit standoffish. To see Doug nobly struggling to get off with

her is like a man warming himself at a fire that’s gone out. Pretty

smart, that--what? Oh, I’m coming on, Gladys my dear. No, there’s no

dancing-hall here, though Doug and I jazzed a bit last night. Send me

another of those yellow Jap silk cammies, will you? They show so when

one undresses, ducking up and down behind rocks. Pink’s na-poo--only

Fluffies wear pink, and I simply can’t fluff. We caught thirty-seven

mackerel yesterday; it was glorious fun. I’ll let you know how things

develop.... How’s Mac, by the way? Yours,

“CHRIS.”

She folded the sheet and put it in an envelope. Then, suddenly, she

burst out crying:

“Oh God, oh, please, please, God--don’t take it all away because I’ve

written like that--it’s not _done_, nowadays, to pray or--or be

priggish--but don’t, don’t punish me over Douglas.... It’s all so

different and heavenly, and I love him, but I’m not sure even now if I

believe in You.”

Impulsively, she tore up the letter, and re-wrote it:

“DEAR OLD GLADYS,--Send me another of those yellow Jap silk

cammies, will you? We caught thirty-seven mackerel yesterday; it was

glorious fun. Write soon. How’s Mac? No, there’s no dancing here,

worse luck! Yours,

“CHRIS.”

There was nothing deliberately offensive to Gladys or to God in this

compromise. Christine dared not risk upsetting God (if He existed)

with her first letter. Nor dared she send Gladys--who was a rake and a

cynic--the tumbled hymn and song and stutter of thanksgiving, which God

(He must exist, if He sent me Douglas!) might commend as truthful.

[IV]

URSULA was jealous of Christine. Stretched and wry with jealousy.

And especially of Christine going to bed down the passage and the

three little steps, into her small room with the white walls, hearing

Doug’s good-night voice and look into solitude with her. Morning’s

awakening, to Ursula, was always a first sharp spring to the mind’s

realization of Christine’s lazy, englamoured awakening in the room;

and then a desperate longing to turn back, nauseated, from the flat,

heavy day to come ... to burrow her head once more into night’s quiet

dark wrappings ... until a shout from beside her, and a colossal leap

and thump of bedclothes and Doug combined, on to the floor, proclaimed

that her husband was awake and up, in full possession of his _joie de

vivre_.

One afternoon on their way home from the cove, Doug and Christine

quarreled:

“----I don’t care. It _is_ dirty to let a dog lick your mouth.”

“He jumps up. And anyway, it’s not like a strange dog.

Hi--Rough--Rough--good feller then----”

Rough, excited by his master’s shouts and gesticulations, jumped again

and again at Doug’s face, with frantic, ill-directed dabs.

“It may not be a strange dog,” Chris insisted, funnily fastidious on

this point, “but the tongue he’s licking you with has been in some

damned strange places.”

“I say, little girl, I--I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

“I wish you’d learn to be clean, then.”

“Clean?”

“Men! They’d die if they missed their hot bath and their cold plunge

and all the rest of it. Your sort of men.” She rolled over from her

back on to her front in the short grass dotted by Mrs. Thomas’ second

crop of haycocks; with chin propped in her hands, she gazed upwards at

Doug, and perversely, from her happiness in him, tried anew to prod him

to anger. “Baths aren’t everything, when you let a horrid dog run about

with his face in the dust and then let him--let him----” she was shy

of using the word kiss again. “It’s more than dirty, it’s filthy,” she

finished, half crying with the queer rich excitement of being in love.

“What’s the difference?” he teased her.

“Well,” she laughed, “I’m dirty,” displaying her small square-fingered

hands glittering in the sun with sharp points of sand, for they had

been making castles in the cove; “I’m dirty, but I’m not filthy.”

The glowing September warmth, and Ursula’s initiative, had led her to

abandon her thick knitted sweaters, and to wear instead a short-sleeved

butcher-blue jumper. Her thin brown legs were bare and also sandy,

stretched carelessly from the shelter of her wriggled-up old skirt. Her

skin was golden velvet where the glinting ladders of sunset fell across

it. It was an oddly fascinating Pierrot-face turned up towards Doug,

all bloom and roundness and impudence.

“You’re sticky with sand,” he informed her abruptly.

“’M. I know. It sticks to me. Good thing I’ve got hair like a boy, or

it would be a mass of sand.”

“Why don’t you wear it short, but hanging soft and square round your

cheeks, like girls do?”

“Mine only grows this shape,” despondently.

“Poor little penny bun. Never mind--I like it.” He looked down upon her

tenderly ... and cried out, in a harsh voice quite different from his

own: “You _know_, Chris!”...

At that moment Louis Gregson sauntered round an adjacent haycock.

“Hullo, old man,” cried Doug, who could never help being convivial,

even to an intruder interrupting a scene which was obviously leading up

to what Ursula called the lagoon speech....

Louis nodded to him, sat down beside Chris, and in his cheap, deft,

confidential fashion, caused her at once to feel especially feminine,

each bit of her separately, and all at once. She contrasted his

carefully preserved dark moustache, his slight dapper figure, and eyes

that were narrow and knowing, with her splendid Doug, tanned, athletic

and burly, his boyish speeches blurted out heedless of consequences,

his record as a wanderer and a scapegrace and a man of action. And

because she was exulting in Doug, and her eyes hazed by magic, she did

not understand that the epicure’s treatment of her as a slight but not

untantalizing Deauville episode, was in the least insulting.

Directly he left them: “Why do you let that bounder speak to you?”

demanded Doug sternly.

“_Is_ he a bounder?” in musing innocence. “I didn’t _let_ him

speak to me. He spoke.”

They quarrelled after that. And Doug went off sailing for the evening,

and came home laden with mackerel and stiff with brine. His talk

at late supper was spattered with fishing and ferocious weather

technicalities, and well dashed with dialect. And afterwards, when he

and Ursula went upstairs, he crushed strong arms around her and broke

out:

“I’m fed up with this farming business, Teddy. Let’s run away--just you

and me--and breed dogs on the Yorkshire moors.”

She brooded thoughtfully for a moment ... and a little sigh shook her.

Doug imagined it was a sigh of longing.

“Teddy,” he whispered, “tell me what you’re thinking of. Let’s be all

in all to each other again.”

But Ursula had just made what was perhaps the most illuminating

discovery of her married life.

That she was _still_ jealous of Christine, alone in the room.

And yet--if she chose to make him so--Doug was hers, not Christine’s.

And after a while, Chris would be to him as Doreen, who was as Monica

and Kitty ... hardly even a memory! What phenomenal powers of oblivion

this man possessed!

She realized that she must make some response, however idiotic.

“Yorkshire terriers, did you say, Doug?”

“No. Fussy little brutes. Bull-pups--or Great Danes--but they eat such

a devil of a lot. A Swedish forester I once knew told me....”

Then it was not because of Doug that she so thirstily envied the other

girl. It was because of the room. It was because of--no Doug.

Ursula was breathless and aghast at what had taken place within

herself. Up till now she had been genuinely unconscious that she had

ceased to love her husband. She had suffered during the Doreen episode,

during all the pre-Doreen episodes. And now here was Chris....

Oh, lucky, lucky Chris. Curled up between white walls, in a kingdom of

solitude in which romance happens, and sorrow can be hidden and cried

over, and dreams build themselves, and joy is borne away and buried as

a dog lovingly buries a bone among the warm straw in its kennel and

all night long nuzzles it and is glad of it; during the day thinks

of it with sudden tiny ecstatic thrills as though it had whispered

reminder....

Funny little mysterious child curled up alone between white walls. And

here was the solid intimate Doug.

[V]

FOR a week Ursula, Doug and Christine each guarded their secret.

Christine’s silent passion for Doug yet acknowledged him as remote and

inaccessible--married. So far away had love carried her from the old

cheap morality she had once shared with Gladys Willoughby. Besides, in

Chris an urchin and a stoic dwelt together.... Supposing that Doug--who

was _good_ right through--else he was not Doug--should despise her

for her bewitchment?

“He mustn’t know, and neither must Ursula” ... Ursula had been awfully

decent on the whole.

“Perhaps I had better go home,” Chris began to think, disconsolately.

Doug, just emerging from the illusion that Ursula’s cure had worked

splendidly, and that he had ceased to be susceptible to every wavelet

of romance, was very careful indeed that Ursula should not guess how in

Christine he had met the irresistible seventh wave which engulfs every

strong man only once in a lifetime. He never meant that Chris should

guess either, but he was less careful with her than with Ursula, and

was often led by the primitive but reverent state of his feelings into

such semi-betrayals as: “Oh, God, if only----” and then square-jawed

silence--when describing to his little love the picturesque corners of

the globe into which his restless wanderings had taken him, and would

take him again and again ... each time the horizon pulled.

But with Ursula he behaved truculently. Till she longed for peace and

solitude and the room, as a stale soul longs for adventure.

Ursula was fully awake to the girl’s infatuation for a being of heroic

stature who had for the moment become identified with Doug. She knew,

too, that Chris believed it to be her own white-walled secret, and that

she was pluckily determined neither herself nor Doug should guess it.

Happiness enough to hug it close ... ah, always and again, lucky Chris!

And Ursula knew that Doug believed his wife unsuspicious of the Real

Thing which had come into his life, and of his impending renunciation.

She knew that unless suddenly and with a light word she pierced it

through, Doug would keep up the stalwart pretence of being cured, more

from vanity than from consideration for Ursula’s broken heart--“he

broke it often and cheerily enough over Doreen and Co!” Ursula’s

unspoken thrusts towards Doug were audacious and without pity ... her

eyes were naked of love, and only recently naked; a man stands least

chance at such a time.

A week’s hard rain and storm shut them up together, a trio of two

deluded and one wise, in Grey Stone. Mr. Wenn discovered some technical

flaw in the cess-pit, and digging it down again to its original depth,

floated about on a raft in a six-foot square of water at the bottom,

“like a St. Miniotish Peter Pan,” Ursula said. If any of them passed

down that part of the garden, and looked over the edge of the pit,

Wenn’s formidable list of the improvements he was effecting on the

property, shouted up, threatened unmistakably that this was going

to cost the Barrisons “good money.” Doug could be with difficulty

restrained from emptying buckets of dirty water into the cess-pit, in

deliberate forgetfulness of Mr. Wenn’s navigations therein.

“He’m nothin’ but a gurt boy at heart,” said Mrs. Endellion leniently.

But Mrs. Endellion had to leave them, and her comfortable presence in

the home had been replaced by Genesis Mitch, usually called Cissy.

Cissy was a good girl, meek and slightly idiotic and fervently devoted

to her master and mistress. She had no chin and humble devoted eyes.

Louis Gregson, who during these dull and dripping days visited Grey

Stone fairly often, named her “the Wordsworth child”: “Wordsworth was

meeting that type of child all over the place, wherever he went; it

seems a pity he should be dead, and your Cissy wasted.

“‘A gentle child was Cissy Mitch,

The fourth of twenty-two,

Her mother’s head, alas, was weak,

Her father wanting, too!’”

Ursula laughed. She had learnt “Lucy Grey” and “We are Seven” while at

Miss Luther’s.

“Parc Gooth had a visit from the Abbotts in their pony-cart, yesterday

evening,” Gregson remarked. “Delightful people. We played bridge, and

then Miss Abbott accompanied my sister’s Eye-talian in a few songs at

the piano, while Abbott and I discussed harnesses and the resemblance

between mediaeval witch-craft and modern Psychometry; and it was all so

genial and harmonious that I could hardly believe some rumours I have

heard at Mr. Wright’s shop----”

“Embassy,” Ursula corrected him.

“I beg his pardon--in Mr. Wright’s Embassy, that there were once scenes

of violence, stabbings and hard words, over the tenancy and rents of

Parc Gooth.”

“Ah, how sylvan and idyllic,” he murmured affectedly, at the close of

Ursula’s description. “How shall I be able to tear myself away, next

week, from this pastoral atmosphere?”

“You are returning to London next week?”

“Friday, yes.”

“_Take me with you._”

[VI]

LOUIS GREGSON, self-confessed as “an Authority upon the Unfair Sex,”

was always careful to behave in accordance with his own epigram: “Never

be astonished at a woman, unless she says or does what you expect her

to do!”

Nevertheless, Ursula’s astounding request, dropped in her most gentle

and matter-of-fact tones, did indeed tempt him to startled exclamation.

For he certainly admired in Ursula the elusive beauty which took at

least three meetings to declare itself to the senses. He perceived her,

too, to be deep--perhaps he was right--and capable of swift and subtle

audacities. In fact, his present state of mind, vulgarly expressed, was

such that could hardly believe in its own luck. Nevertheless, taking

his cue from her, he substituted mere polished gratification for his

first rushed instinct to express himself in terms of raw ardour.

“Isn’t he a detestable little cad,” reflected Ursula, listlessly

disdainful. She was not very much interested in him.

He was handy ... and would not suffer by her whim, when its purpose was

revealed.

It had so quickly unfurled itself in her secret mind, that it seemed to

her now hardly any length of time had elapsed between the moment she

realized she was free from loving Doug, to this final irrevocability

of “Take me with you” when Louis announced his return to London.

Doug and Christine loved each other. And she, Ursula, was the unwanted

third. So again she would make lonely sacrifice. She would run away and

leave them to be happy: “But of course he must marry her. And while I’m

alive, I’m in the way. I don’t intend to drown myself--I’m not nearly

miserable enough.” The only alternative was to give Doug ostensible

cause to divorce her. Her reputation must complete the sacrifice.

Well--she would do that ... gladly. “It needn’t, it _shan’t_ go

beyond--just my reputation.” Ursula’s cheeks, though she was alone

while thinking all this out, flamed a vivid scarlet. She could herself

be gallant squire in cool defence of Ursula ... her old childish dreams

in the room at the Laburnums, brought to action at last.

Louis Gregson, it was evident, must be the dummy lover in the classic

situation she was evolving with such unclassic differences in her

personal point of view. She could manage Louis Gregson. He was

commonplace. The obvious man in the case. Nothing need be damaged

except his amour propre. And Doug, given the appearance of Ursula’s

guilt--all evidence supplied by Ursula--would instruct his solicitors

to file a petition; and she would not defend.

All this was unimportant and rather lumbering mechanism. It was a pity

that the law made it necessary. The reality was the romance of Doug

and Christine; pearl in the clumsy oyster.

“If I don’t love Doug myself, I’ve no right to lie about and spoil

things.” Ursula, sure of this, was able serenely to go on with her

plans.

Convention again reminded her that when she slipped away and effaced

herself, Doug and Christine must not be left unchaperoned at Grey

Stone. She could trust Doug to be chivalrous; she could trust

Christine to be loyal to chastity. But it was Ursula’s responsibility,

impetuously undertaken, to arrange for them a future of clear happiness

with no gossip to smudge it. Besides--Christine was the guest in her

charge. A whimsical notion occurred to Ursula, solving the problem; and

she wrote a charming note to Aunt Lavvy, at the Laburnums, inviting her

to Grey Stone for a month’s holiday--“Would next Friday suit you?”

Aunt Lavvy would be the ideal chaperone for a young girl. Undoubtedly,

too, Doug must adore the little porcelain lady; and she in her turn

would be entirely captivated by the big, boyish, sunny-hearted Doug.

Ursula smiled, imagining the harmonious trio ... the smile twisted

into mockery, as she recited to herself Aunt Lavvy’s outburst of

sweet and silvery indignation on discovery that Ursula could have

wantonly deserted _such_ a man; “But then Ursula always was queer

and headstrong, under her quiet ways!” And very, very tactfully she

would console Doug’s perplexity; or, if he roughly blamed himself,

argue with him; at last, guide him to see that the catastrophe was no

catastrophe at all, but a blessing in disguise: “The false princess has

slipped out of your life, Boy” (Yes, she would call him Boy) “but the

real little princess is not so far away ... is she? In a year or two

perhaps you will be able to fit her with the glass slipper.”

Ursula could hear Aunt Lavvy tinkling out some such speech; her voice

lifted to a second’s arch raillery as she spoke of the “real little

princess,” and then her plump hand resting lightly for a moment on

Doug’s bowed head: “You know, Boy, I may be old-fashioned, but I am not

so narrow-minded as to think that one mistake should spoil your whole

life----”

“Oh well, she always hated me!” thought Ursula, stamping her letter,

and with a shrug dismissing the envisioned scene of a week hence.

Anyhow, she would be gone. The night train from Gullick, by which she

and Louis had planned to travel, left Gullick at seven-twenty-three p.

m., exactly ten minutes before the arrival of the express from London,

with Aunt Lavvy.

“Let me see, Doug will give up our room to Aunt Lavvy, of course, and

sleep in his cabin berth. Christine needn’t move out of the sea-room.”

And once again she paused, before dropping the letter into the box:

“She understands things ... clever little Aunt Lavvy. She can’t fail to

wonder, afterwards, why I invited her--at such a selfish crisis of my

life. Oh _damn_--she’ll guess more than other people. She always

did. That time over Hal and the room. _Let_ her wonder and guess!”

The letter was viciously hurled through the slit. “She’ll come, in

the first place, because she’s curious. And she’ll stay because she’s

comfortable and because I’m in black disgrace, which is bound to be

soothing; and because poor Doug is my victim, and he and Chris are a

pair of babes in worldly matters--and mainly because the situation is

dramatic and needs delicate handling. Her gifts don’t get much chance

to be used with only mother and father and Lottie and William at home

now.”

Aunt Lavvy accepted the invitation, saying gracefully that she was

looking forward to a better acquaintance with her nephew-in-law, whom

she had only very occasionally met at the Laburnums dinner-table.

Ursula did not inform Doug of the impending arrival. He would naturally

ask: “Where are we to put her?” and she was not prepared to answer:

“I’m making room for her by running away with Louis Gregson on the

same day.” Aunt Lavvy’s opportune arrival, in the midst of chaos and

bewilderment, should be a miracle to Doug--until she explained Ursula’s

invitation. And even then, he would never be able to account for it.

“This is all--_fun_!” thought Ursula, exultant at the way the

figures and dates in her plan slipped neatly into shape, without

objection or hitch. Fun, too, that she was doing it all alone; that

whereas Louis knew of her flight from Doug, and Aunt Lavvy knew she was

expected at Grey Stone on the following Friday, and Doug knew that his

love for Christine was the love of his life, yet these were only shreds

and particles of the sumptuous whole, Ursula’s whole, containing all

secrets and all knowledge. It was she who was welding them together,

with added touches of her own sprite’s mischief; rounding it off,

remembering here and there a flaw to be adjusted.... Proud; for she was

not doing wrong. To efface herself so that Doug and Christine should be

happy together. Ah, surely that was sacrifice; and it would not count

against her, in that she had worked her scheme skilfully, with a laugh

of renunciation instead of the eternal tears.

She took no pains over the arrangement of her end of the escapade. Her

own future, once disentangled from Doug and Christine, she trusted to

hazard or inspiration. On only one point she set her teeth and pressed

her lips sternly together: that Louis would--have--to--be--managed.

[VII]

THURSDAY evening, Ursula was in the kitchen with Cissy--explaining

patiently for perhaps the fortieth time that cold water poured directly

into a saucepan which had held milk will clean it better than hot.

She felt a little bit unreal as she did so. Christine swung her legs

indolently from the kitchen table, and listened to the lecture. A

strong gale was buffeting the house.

Suddenly an urgent rapping shook the door. Mr. Wright hurled it open

and staggered into the lamplight, with the bread-basket. The wind and

rain leapt in after him. He turned and fought the door, closing it

after a grim struggle.

“Good evening, Mrs. Barrison.” He was rather breathless, and spoke in

the voice of one amazed at his own calm.

Ursula was mildly surprised. This was more or less the wonted time for

their loaves to arrive, but Mr. Wright usually sent the boy, and did

not bring them himself.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s a wild evening, isn’t it?”

“There’ll be wilder evenings before we’ve done with the year. I don’t

want to alarm you, Mrs. Barrison, but there’s rumours of negotiations

broken down, and the railway strike starting at midnight. In fact, I’ve

had news through”--he stopped abruptly, recollecting prudence. “So I

thought I’d better take the bread round myself tonight,” he finished.

“But why?” inquired Chris, pertly. “It isn’t the French Revolution, is

it?”

“That’s not a word I’d throw about lightly just now, Miss Powys,”

replied Mr. Wright, respectfully--but his hand went to his coat pocket

with a gesture grimly significant. “Well--if there’s trouble, I’m ready

for them. I’ve got my six-shooter handy. Not that I’m one to lose

my head. I don’t expect any real rioting in a place like this till

supplies begin to be cut off. And then my shop’ll be the first.... I

must go on.” He buttoned himself up, pulled forward his hat, and by

mere suggestion achieved a muffled effect. “Good night, Mrs. Barrison.

You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Will you yourself bring the bread tomorrow evening too?” asked Chris,

joyously, determining that Doug should not fail to be present.

“_God willing!_” Mr. Wright was silhouetted for a brief moment

against the stormy and perilous blackness beyond the open door, and

then went forth--distinctly went “forth” and not merely “out.” Quick

retreating footsteps ... and he and his bread basket were seen no more

that night.

In silence, Ursula continued to scour the saucepan she held.

“Is it true, or d’you think he made it all up?” demanded Christine,

still flushed with the effort not to laugh in the very face of Mr.

Wright’s histrionics.

“It may quite well be true that the negotiations have broken down at

the eleventh hour. Haven’t you read the papers lately?”

Christine shook her head. “The papers” were many million miles removed

from her sea-room and enchantment.

“They expected it all to be settled quite happily by now, so I didn’t

bother, but....”

“Then we’ll none of us be able to travel after midnight, will we?”

“Not for two or three weeks, or however long the strike lasts.”

“Oh well,” Chris exclaimed philosophically, springing from her perch on

the table, “we none of us want to, so it doesn’t much matter!” And now

she could not possibly go home, however conscience might prompt it. No

trains from Gullick! Perfection enclosed Grey Stone and snapped around

it indivisibly like a bracelet. Christine began to sing. At the same

moment, Cissy Mitch started feebly to cry.

Ursula lost her temper ... the saucepan clattered on to the red

flagstones, and the kitchen door banged and reverberated behind her.

Christine’s fresh pipings were not to be endured!

“No wonder she’s in a rage with you,” Chris remarked blithely to Cissy

Mitch. “What on earth are you crying about?”

“Eh, miss, but tes dreadful, about they trains,” sobbed Cissy.

“But, my dear kid, have you ever wanted to go as far as Gullick in

your life? No? Well--have you even been to the next village, then? to

Polpinnock?”

Cissy, piteously damp, confessed that she had been once as far as

Polpinnock Cove, in a school treat. It was a great event to her. But,

in spite of Christine’s laughing expostulations, she continued to shed

tears over the breakdown of England’s railway system. Perhaps the

manner of Mr. Wright’s entrance and exit had shaken her nerves.

“It must all wait,” Ursula said to herself, when she had recaptured

control over her disappointment. After all, if she and Louis could not

go, neither could Aunt Lavvy come.

The next morning, on her way back from the village, whither she had

been in a vain attempt to obtain certain news of the strike, Ursula was

met by Christine racing along the grassy track from Grey Stone.

“I say, what do you think? A perfectly darling old lady has arrived.

She says you invited her. She came by the night train instead of

waiting till today, in case the strike started before it was expected.

Old Wright was twenty-four hours wrong in his news--it’s tonight, not

yesterday night, that the last trump sounds and all the engine-drivers

throw down their spanners or whatever it is they use. I say, Ursula,

why didn’t you tell us you’d ask her? Did you mean it for a surprise?

I simply worship her already. She’s not really your aunt, is she? And

where is she going to sleep?”

Doug, when he returned from the farm, for lunch, promptly settled the

final question: “Lucky I had that bunk fixed up in my cabin, isn’t it,

Teddy? Only a glorified shelf on hinges, of course, but I can doss

there perfectly well.... Oh, that’s all right, Aunt Lavvy--may I call

you that? Good! That’s all right, I’m an old campaigner. And then you

and Teddy can share, and Chris can stop in the little end room. It’s

rather too cramped, isn’t it, Teddy, for any one but an infant?” (“And

I like to think of you in that room, Chris ...” he told her afterwards.)

Ursula’s fleet resolve was to carry out her plan now, strike or no

strike. She and Louis must make a dash for it. Perhaps some volunteer

trains would be run.

At all events, she could not remain at Grey Stone, sharing quarters

with Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy, Chris and Doug, and herself--what an

incongruous house-party in Arcadia! With emotions and purposes as

fierce, as overlapping and as secret as they had once been in the

tightly packed Laburnums. And the railway strike ringing them in

without means of escape.

“And _I_ invited Christine, and _I_ invited Aunt Lavvy. What

makes me do these goblin things? I don’t care, I must see Louis and

tell him. I’ll chance it. Let him think I’m desperate for love of him.”

Aunt Lavvy had hardly changed in looks during the past nine years. Her

skin was still the colour and texture of apple-blossom; her snowy hair

as beautifully arranged; her dainty uncrumpled appearance made it seem

impossible that she had been travelling all night. When she smiled at

Christine across the luncheon-table, the young girl felt a sudden lump

in her throat; felt that she wanted to be good; and also that she was

going to pour out everything--yes, about Doug and everything, to this

adorable little old lady, the instant they were alone.

And when she smiled at Doug, he wanted to protect her from some danger;

and also to tell her what a rotter he’d been. He saw that she had taken

quite a special fancy to him; and he rejoiced that Teddy should have

invited her to Grey Stone.

And when she smiled at Ursula, Ursula knew she had to get away before

night.

“Will the other two think me a bore, Ursula dear, if I unload a little

family gossip? To begin with, William really has been taken into the

business, starting--well, from as near the bottom as the proprietor’s

son can ever genuinely start. Your father is delighted with him. He’s

a sound little fellow, our William. I think he’ll be Lord Mayor one

day, don’t you, Ursula? And the harder he works, the stouter he seems

to grow. Your father says sometimes that it’s queer to have only his

youngest son to succeed him in the firm; but Bunny.... Ah, Bunny! I

comfort myself by thinking that he’s the rolling stone who will gather

the most moss in the end, even if it’s moss of the kind invisible to

ordinary people. He was in New Zealand when we last heard. And Hal

preferred ’Varsity and law. And now that his first love, Maisie, is

engaged to somebody else--didn’t you hear about it, Ursula? I expect

poor old Hal feels a little too sore about it to write. But he’s not

quite so stricken as he thinks he is. He’s handsomer than ever, too,

and doing wonderfully well; I must say we were all surprised that

Maisie preferred her father’s young locum. However--one person is

mightily relieved that his dream has been puffed away, and that’s

Nina. It means so much to her, keeping home for Hal. Have you got

any idolized big brothers, Christine? No? Then you wouldn’t quite

understand how Nina feels about Hal. Lottie is still a little kind

trotting thing, contented to be useful at home. But Nina, never. And

Ursula, of course, was the family beauty and bound to be captured

early.” Aunt Lavvy directed a saucy dimple at Doug, who replied

boyishly:

“Oh, if it were just a question of looks, Aunt Lavvy, what about you?”

“_What_ about me?” she flirted with him.

“I love powdered hair!” was his quickly gallant response.

“You--sailor!” laughed Aunt Lavvy, fatally.

Doug was a sailor for the rest of that meal.

After lunch, Miss Gregson and Louis walked into the house. “My sister

has brought me to say good-bye,” he said, after they had duly been

introduced to Aunt Lavvy. “Or rather, to ask your combined advice as to

whether I should make my dash for liberty tonight.”

And Ursula, alert for signals, grasped that he was coolly going to

discuss plans, and grope for hers, in front of the others; indeed,

he had no option but to do so. She waited, amused, for her cue to

enlighten him.

Miss Gregson said, “I told him he’d do much better to wait until we had

certain news about the strike, and Umberto agrees with me----”

(“That’s the Eye-talian,” murmured Louis to Ursula.)

Doug gave his opinion that a journey to London, under the

circumstances, would be no end of a rag.

“They might even let me drive the engine,” Louis agreed heartily. He

just glanced at Ursula then, with the air of a man who can bide his

time, and who can trust an intelligent woman to annex this same biding

as special tribute to her wits, and not as detrimental to her charm.

“Have you ordered Champion’s car to drive you into Gullick?” Ursula

inquired. “I wonder----” she paused, doubtfully knitting her brows.

Then:

“What do you think, Doug? Shall I go in, too, if Mr. Gregson will give

me a lift, and bring out some stores? We’ve two extra in the house now,

you know, and the strike may mean a tightness of provisions, if we rely

entirely on our Mr. Wright.”

“I wouldn’t fuss,” said Doug, “we can always raid the shop.”

“He has his six-shooter handy,” Christine reminded him, half seriously.

“He has also special and private information about the probable

strike,” Louis pattered on in his glib fashion. “So has the post

office. So have the coastguards. The coastguards are apparently

crystal-gazers in their spare time, for they are always credited, in

a place like this, with mysterious advance knowledge. Some say the

strike has started, some that it will start at sundown, or at midnight,

or on Thursday week, or not at all. My business can’t wait until the

day-before-yesterday’s papers come in the day-after-tomorrow. It’s

no good clinging round my knees and sobbing, Sister Ann, because I

have made up my mind” ... he had done so directly Ursula answered his

unspoken “Will you risk it?” by her suggestion of driving into Gullick

with him, to bring out stores.

Miss Gregson snapped: “I’ve no intention of clinging round your knees,

thanks. You’ve been here a goodish time, my lad, and Umberto and I are

tired of you.”

“Mr. Gregson must come to Grey Stone for true hospitality,” purred Aunt

Lavvy. “Here, they welcome an old lady without even minding or noticing

that she had arrived without any luggage! And yet”--playfully--“luggage

is supposed to be a certificate of respectability, isn’t it?”

A chorus of contrition broke from Doug, Christine and Ursula.

“By Jove, nor you had! I _am_ an unobservant beast!”

“I was quite sure, somehow, that it had gone up to your room. I was

going to ask you if I might help you unpack.”

“Where did you leave it, Aunt Lavvy?”

“At Gullick Station, till called for. Don’t look so worried, my dear

children; of course I couldn’t expect a car to meet me, when I arrive

twelve hours before I am expected. I was just wondering how I should

cover the ten miles to St. Miniot, when a charming old gentleman with

white hair--a General, I think he said, but I have his card--sent me a

message by the porter----”

The episode of old-world courtesy to a gentlewoman in distress,

acquired, in the telling, that typical Watteau atmosphere which seemed

conveniently to attend Aunt Lavvy wherever she went. Even the Gullick

porter was translated. Briefly, the General had offered her a lift out

in his own car; but his wife’s luggage was so voluminous that Aunt

Lavvy’s trunk could not be squeezed in--“And so I wondered, Ursula

darling, if you were driving out to Gullick anyhow this evening, for

stores, would you mind calling at the station and bringing it back with

you? But not if----”

“Of course Teddy will!” Doug promised, settling the matter. “Quite a

good notion of yours about stores, Teddy. Don’t forget a few tins of

tunah-fish. I like it. They called it tunny-fish once, but during the

war and the food shortage it went up in social tone. Tunah-fish!”

“Tunah-fish!” echoed Chris, haughtily.

“We’ll all rattle in with you to Gullick, if you like?” Doug suggested

further to Louis, who, without a flicker of an eyelid, murmured that he

would be honoured by their united company.

“Bounder!” thought Doug, for the fifteenth time.

“With you and your luggage to go in, Louis, and Mrs. Barrison, and

Champion driving, and a fresh lot of luggage and Mrs. Barrison and

stores to go back, I should think you’d be as full as you can manage,”

Miss Gregson said.

Louis was aware that this argument was so obvious that he could safely

acquiesce in Doug’s proposal, and leave somebody else to point it out.

“Will there at least be room for my empty suitcase, going out?” Ursula

asked of Louis.

“To bring it home full of tunah-fish? Oh, yes, I think it can be

managed. And if no trains run up to town tonight?” Dangerously he

aimed his last question full at her; and dangerously she answered him:

“Oh--chance it!”

Louis got up to go. He said he would call for her. He said he must

pack. He said that he had been delighted to meet Aunt Lavvy. He did not

say that knowing now all he wanted to know, there was no further reason

to prolong the visit.

[VIII]

THE room was on the first floor back of the second-best hotel in

Gullick. The low green hills beyond the window, by day strangely

biblical in their quiet outline, were by now a still simpler affair

of ups and downs scrawled black on a wash of dim sky. The blind was

drawn and the short muslin curtains, and a still further muffler of

red stiff curtains. Ursula sat primly on the edge of an upright wooden

chair, and waited for Louis to come in. He had gone, after dinner in

the coffee-room, to make a last inquiry about a train to London that

night; to London, or even as far as Exeter or Plymouth. But she knew

already that the inquiry would be futile. The stationmaster had been

most discouraging when they had confidently driven up in time for the

seven-twenty-three. “We’ve had our orders from the Trades Union. Trains

stopped at noon today. By tomorrow, though, I dare say Govemment’ll be

runnin’ some,” he added gloomily.

Then Ursula had ordered Aunt Lavvy’s trunk to be lifted on to

Champion’s car, and had told him to drive it back to Grey Stone: “I

shall take the last bus out,” she said. “The nine-ten. But I don’t want

my aunt to wait for her things.”

Doug and Christine and Aunt Lavvy had accepted an invitation from Miss

Gregson, on parting that afternoon, to dine with her at Parc Gooth:

“And will you join them, Mrs. Barrison, when you get back from Gullick?”

“Thanks very much. I certainly will, when I get back from Gullick ...

if I’m not too tired.”

Now--she was waiting for Louis. He would enter presently, expectant and

debonair--“knowing his part backwards,” and Ursula’s mouth curved gaily

as she reflected that for once a surprise was in store for Lothario.

The setting, too, was somewhat less tropical and exotic than he must

be accustomed to, under similar circumstances, along the lines of red

roses, gleaming mirrors and silk eiderdowns. The second-best hotel at

Gullick did not cater for luxurious clients. Over the hard double bed

the white counterpane was like a winding-sheet. The chest of drawers,

with its small mirror on top, was mahogany, and so was the washstand.

In the basin stood a can of hot water. One armchair was placed on

a small yellowish hair rug in front of the fireplace, hidden by a

painted glass screen; a shelf supported a few books lopping sideways

in a dejected fashion. On the nondescript wall hung some prints of

what might have been the Vatican and the Coliseum, if any one were

sufficiently interested to inspect them. Ursula was in a vivid dancing

mood; the small fidgety discomforts and disappointments of the evening,

which might have daunted any girl in a lovelorn condition, only excited

her spirit yet more. Her cheeks were scarlet, and her long-shaped lazy

grey eyes shone with dark fires under her straight brows. She surveyed

herself in the foggy glass, between two tall candle-flames. Her clothes

were staid and unconspicuous as usual: a navy blue coat and skirt; a

white silk shirt, open at the throat; a pliable grey suède hat of the

Whittington shape.

“Poor Louis!” Again she re-seated herself on the stiff chair, and

folded her gloved hands in front of her; her feet, in small grey suède

shoes, rested on her suitcase, with toes slightly turning in. She

lowered her eyelids--“I’m glad he’s common and glib and bold; the sort

of dapper little whelp who has made women suffer, and rather boasts of

it....”

Louis came in.

“No chance of a train. We must stay here.” He cast round a comical look

of distaste. Then, thrillingly: “_Ursula_....”

She did not stir. Only her cheeks’ scarlet faded and faded till she was

white as milk. Louis was disconcerted. After all, a man does not expect

shyness after a woman has taken all the initiative, thrown herself at

his head, one might say, in an ungallant translation of her behaviour.

“I gave our names, downstairs, as Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Please, will that

do?” Her “please” was meekness itself.

“Oh yes, as well as anything”--impatiently. Had she not recognized that

the tiresome preliminaries and the mechanism were all over now, and

that he had begun the emotional love-scene?

“Let me take off your things and make you comfortable,” Louis

suggested, and laid a seductive hand on her coat, giving it a gentle

pull. But her whole frame resisted. “Or shall I unpack your suitcase?”

Her feet pressed downwards. “I have never seen your hair down yet,

Ursula; your beautiful honey-gold hair....”

“Please, I would rather keep on my things”--in the same unaccountably

meek voice which reminded Louis of cold moonlight, school-teachers,

and lukewarm sago pudding--all good, and all by him abominated.

“For how long?” mocking eyebrows raised.

“Till--till I’m acclimatized, please.”

Louis laughed uneasily. “And how do you suggest we should while away

the time, until you’re--acclimatized, please?”

“There are some books on that shelf. If you read to me, I could

crochet, couldn’t I?” And with an air of innocent glee, she pulled out

her work from her handbag.

Louis slowly crossed the room to the bookshelf.... He could not be

happy until he had ousted her from her lordship of the slippery

situation, treating it and him in a spirit of dainty buffoonery; and

for the moment, he, usually so nimble and astute at solving the woman

riddle, was utterly bewildered by this elusive crescent-moon of a girl,

slender and pale and swathed in flying clouds of mystery.

Of course a woman _ought_ to be mysterious. It was part of her

appeal, her stock-in-trade. Louis had no objection to the conventional

Mystery of Woman. He had written sophisticated articles about it. But

this Ursula Barrison----

He decided not to force the situation, but to give it time.

“Here is a treatise on physical geography, a psalm-book, ‘Home

Influence,’ ‘Happy Thoughts from Day to Day,’ ‘Pigs, the Care and

Feeding of,’ and ‘Little Ellen’s Dream,’” he read, from the backs of

the volumes on the shelf. “Which will interest you most?” And he began

to read aloud, with very precise utterance, a passage from “Little

Ellen’s Dream.”

“Kind little Ellen could not bear to see the snow, because she had

two pairs of shoes, and perhaps some poor little girl had none. ‘Mama

darling,’ she cried, ‘if I am good, may I take my shoes as a present to

Nelly Carter, and also some eggs and my nicest hoop? I dreamt that it

was her birthday today and she cried because she had no presents.’ ‘Do,

my darling,’ said Ellen’s mother----”

Suddenly Ursula buried her head on to her folded arms and began to

shake with sobs.

Louis, interrupted in his efforts to entertain her, watched her for a

few moments. Then he said, “You’re laughing!”

And she raised a flushed face, its composure broken up into radiant

quivering mirth.

“It was your puzzled gloom--and that book--‘Kind little Ellen’ ... and

us here in this absurd room.... The way you said ‘_Ursula_’ when

you came in. No, I’m not in the very least hysterical.... I’m just

amused.... If you would only stop expecting me to fall into your arms,

you might be amused too.”

“I think it unlikely,” said Louis. And Ursula, seeing a certain male

look, hot and bulging, in his eyes, stopped laughing. She realized that

now would come the strain on her boast that Louis must be managed.

“I know,” she said, and her voice was rather breathless. “I

know I asked you to take me with you, and you thought I meant

it--passionately. And when the strike was declared I still insisted.

And I took this room, calling ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. And now I’m

here alone with you, and of course you expect--need I be coarse, Louis?

I’ve been fencing up until this moment. Now I’ve got to be frank. I

don’t love you; not passionately nor tenderly. I don’t even like you.

I’ve been using you, that’s all. One is more likely to choose a person

for use, whom one doesn’t even like ... rather despises--but anyway,

you were the only man handy; and the only man vain enough to believe

that woman throws away her all for sweet passion’s sake. You knew so

much about women, you see.”

“Yes. And you know nothing about men. For instance, I’m not going to

spend the night in conversation, however interesting.... If it were

not so melodramatic as to arouse your sense of humour again, my dear

Ursula, I should say that you were in my power.”

She sighed. “I was silly to mock at you and make you more angry. Now I

suppose we shall have to struggle and dodge about, and the chairs will

get disordered, and my hair will come down--and there will be a great

bruise on my wrist, just _here_, where you finally grip it----”

“And then?” demanded Louis. He was watching her intently, but the hot

bulging look was gone from his eyes.

“I shan’t give in,” she whispered. “But--must we? Must I get the table

between me and you, or threaten to hurl myself from the window? I don’t

even hate you. I don’t love another man. I haven’t lost my head. It’s

nothing of that sort, nothing so stark and simple. I wanted--oh well,

it’s no good telling you what I wanted, it would take too long, and

you’re anxious to start being mannish.” And mischief still sparkled

through her resignation to the inevitable conflict.

Louis, surprisingly, said he would like to hear what she wanted.

“Well----” She paused. The exquisite shape of her pale gold head was

motionless as an oval plaque between the two candle-spears on the tall

bureau behind her. “Well--can you imagine the miracle--of running away

with oneself--cut off all round as though with a sharp clean knife?

After one has been clogged and clogged with people. _Men?_... And

I’m in love with loneliness.”

Suddenly she flung her hands above her head, the palms upturned and

curved as though for water from heaven.... Then slowly sank them again,

remembering that the reason she had left her husband was that he loved

another girl, and that she desired them to be happy together.

“Forget if I’ve said anything crazy. Quite frankly and simply,

Louis, I’ve left Doug because he’s in love with Christine--the thin,

brown-eyed child staying with us at Grey Stone. And she’s in love with

him. It’s quite a romance, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” Louis assented gravely.

“So you see now where you--where you--I mean, if I made the sacrifice,

it had to be done completely. I had to make it easy for him to divorce

and marry her. You see--she’s Doug’s happiness.”

“May I ask, quite without prejudice, if she, the thin, brown-eyed

child, is Doug’s _first_ happiness--since he married you?”

Ursula flushed. “About the twenty-first; the heart of Doug has many

splinters.” And though she laughed at the confession, her eyelids, like

Mona Lisa’s, were a little weary....

She returned, with a touch of craftsman’s pride, to relation of her

detailed scheme: “I invited Aunt Lavvy, so that she could be in the

house when it all happened. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?”

“The charming little Dresden lady with the coo in her voice? You hate

her, don’t you, Ursula? Why did you wilfully select as chaperon,

Aunt-Lavvy-whom-you-hate?”

Ursula’s glance at him was now frankly admiring. He had wonderful

perception, this--carpet-walker! “Why? Because somehow I enjoy building

up a--bitterly comic state of affairs. And Aunt Lavvy and I ... and

the room ...” She hesitated.

“Sit down,” said Louis. “We have at least seven hours still to get

through, in what is, for me in particular, another bitterly comic state

of affairs. So, in the truly Russian-novel style, you shall tell me the

whole story of Aunt Lavvy--and you--and the room.”

Ursula did not read Russian novels. But it seemed oddly natural that to

Louis, of all people, she should be able to talk more naturally than

ever before to any one else....

... “And yet people go on living with other people as though it

weren’t the most important thing in the world,” said Ursula, by way of

conclusion, epilogue, envoi and moral to her tale. “Aunt Lavvy, and

our whole family, and Gums, and Stanley Watson, and the servants ...

not selected to live together for any _reason_, but because it’s

happened like that. It must be the same in millions of houses. Somebody

always in a state of bruise through knocking up against somebody else,

till we settle down to bruises, and get numb to them, and call the

result ‘home’ or ‘family life,’ whichever you please. Do you know that

some boarding houses advertise ‘family life’ ... with about thirty

haphazard strangers. And nobody sees it’s funny. You choose your

clothes with care and your career with care, but misfit houses are

chosen anyhow, and rooms and meals are shared anyhow....”

“Sometimes there’s a crisis--and combustion,” suggested Louis. And

Ursula took him up jubilantly.

“Yes, sometimes there’s a crisis. Over the last crisis, I lost the room

and myself. This time----” she was about to say “this time I regain

them both”; but once more she recalled what was undoubtedly a fact,

that she was effacing herself so that Doug and Christine might be

happy. “And”--her voice shook slightly over the amended version of her

behaviour--“this time I’m going to run away, and so give Christine a

present of her romance. It’s only decent, isn’t it? You’d say so?”

“I should say,” Louis replied after due deliberation, “that it was the

most selfish action you had ever done or are ever likely to do.”

Then he burst into scoffing laughter: “Tit for tat over your laugh at

me, my lady humbug! Oh, the pathetic quiver on your lips, your meek

eyelids, and your voice cadging for my approbation. _Sacrifice!_

Ursula Barrison, what do you want to do most in all the world? Why, to

run away, run away, run away. You’re thrilled by the idea of escape.

In love with loneliness--you told me so yourself. Your whole being

lightens and is swift to it.... Sacrifice? ‘What’s become of Waring,

since he gave us all the slip? Chose land-travel, or sea-faring!’ Own

up, Ursula.”

Furious with him at first, she listened--snapped and yielded.

“Oh, I’ll own up. It’s true. It’s all true. What--who is Waring?”

“An invention of Browning’s, I suppose. It doesn’t matter much. He got

fed up with the streets he knew and the friends he knew, and suddenly

disappeared. They were left wondering--and talking about it. Years

later, one of them, sailing on the Adriatic, caught a quick glimpse of

him in a little boat, with a boy who sold wine and fruit--

“‘... Then the boat,

I know not how, turned sharply round,

Laying her whole side on the sea

As a leaping fish does; from the lee

Into the weather, cut somehow

Her sparkling path beneath our bow;

And so went off, as with a bound

Into the rose and golden half

Of the sky.... So I saw the last of Waring!’

“Well, Waring of St. Miniot, what are you going to do?”

_“Give them all the slip_ ...” leapt, tingling, from Ursula. “Why

do you call me selfish, Louis? Chris and Doug are complete without

me--and even if I’m not making a very big sacrifice by dropping

out.... My good name is something: This room and you, and leaving Doug

to believe ... and divorce me. I detest squalor, and it _is_

all squalid and not very pretty: like squeezing through a dark,

stale-smelling alley. But then there’s an archway. And beyond----” Her

eyes were filled with the promise of sea and shining space, like the

windows of the room, Christine’s room.

“‘What’s become of Waring?’” she murmured, fascinated....

“And you really think you are justified----” Louis began.

“Oh, but need everybody do something pompous and heavy like justifying

their existence, or accepting a responsibility, or--or carrying

an unsmirched reputation? Can’t just one here and there--me, for

instance--run along lightly, as though I left no footprint? As though

I didn’t count? It’s so tiring to count. And to be sure of seeing the

same people every day, and the same set of habits ... the same old

standards ... same old places. You stick on because you love some one,

or because of health, or because you lack courage. And words like

outlaw and pirate and solitude are not for you ... not for you ... you

try not to hear them. But I don’t love any one now, thank God! and I’m

strong as the wind, and not afraid of anything except to be crowded.”

“Claustrophobia ...” murmured the up-to-date Louis. She had never

heard the word: “Oh, I won’t pretend any more that it’s a sacrifice

for me to run away; it isn’t; it’s escape--and not very clever of you

to have discovered that! But as it happens, I can be generous to the

girl in the room, and yet in the same breath win back the room for

myself. I must apologize for dragging you in as a dummy, Louis,” with

a whimsical drop from exultation; “but I must at least pretend to elope

in more tangible and more sinister company than just my own. They

haven’t enough imagination in the Divorce Courts to accept me as the

co-respondent as well as the defendant.”

“You can hardly expect it of them, my dear.” In an absent fashion the

man paced the room. He had forgotten his own claims and injury; intent

on this would-be Undine, who was defying the very existence of her

human soul....

“You talk of being generous to the girl in the room,” he broke out,

abruptly. “What about your husband? Is he worth your gift?”

“No,” frankly. “That’s why I left him out. Doug--oh, he’s noisy and

cheap romantic, and jumps over tea-tables; that’s not the harm in him.

But he can’t be faithful. And that goes as deep as _he_ goes. And

so he grabs your lonely dreams--and gives back nothing.”

“And so you grab the girl’s lonely dreams, and give her--Doug. You, who

have tried him, and found out what he does. You can’t coolly abandon

your own mistake without working it out to the end.”

“Don’t--be quiet--I won’t hear....” Ursula’s clenched hands were pushed

out as though in fight against his argument; but her eyes, scared and

very light round the dilated pupils, were as though suddenly woken from

a spell. “I’m going,” she muttered; but he caught her by the wrists

and continued ruthlessly:

“In a few years hence, Christine will go through all the torture you’ve

been through. Leave her the room with the white walls--and she’ll be

luxuriantly and youthfully sorrowful over her lost hero--and forget

him. You can’t safeguard the girl any other way than by remaining

Doug’s wife yourself.”

“Why should I safeguard her?” cried Ursula.

“Why should you have preserved Hal from damage, nine years ago? You had

to, that’s all.”

She pleaded with him now: “I can’t go back to it, Louis, I can’t. Aunt

Lavvy’s there, at Grey Stone, in the house, in my bed. And Doug.... I

purposely left him easy clues to pick up my elopement, so that he’d

have no trouble in getting rid of me. That’s the ridiculous part of it.

If I went back--tomorrow--I’d have to let him suppose that when it came

to it, I had cared too much for him and too little for you--I should

have to be repentant and ask him to be magnanimous and forgive me. And

he would. After a fierce struggle. All the rest of my life I’d have to

live with Doug and be forgiven. And never be able to laugh out loud.

And never to tell him how funny it was....”

After a pause: “Of course I’m not going back,” Ursula decided in

perfectly normal and decided tones.

As though Louis’ silence had been a powerful attack, she met it

with the fleet retort: “I was able to give up the room years ago,

because then I believed that life would somehow be gleaming and lit

up afterwards, as a sort of reward. Transfigured. But I know now, I

_know_ it’s just the same, only beastlier. Virtue isn’t its own

reward, even spiritually. How can I go back knowing that? You wouldn’t

ask it, Louis?”

“Yes. From you. That would be a delightfully cosy pink-wadding to the

spirit, wouldn’t it, to be sure of abstract heaven after sacrifice?”

“If I went through it, Christine can.”

“There was no one then who had proved Doug, and could warn you.”

“I want the room again--or room again--as much as she does. A thousand

times more.”

“So you’d take it at the expense of hers? Pirate?--you’re worse; you’re

a robber.”

“My creed is to fling off our mistakes and start again. It’s tameness

to abide by them.”

“Your creed doesn’t count while you’re concerned with Christine, and

her--symbolically--white walls.”

“I’m _not_ concerned with them?” in a final passion of revolt.

“It’s not my responsibility.”

“Yes, it is.” And he added grimly: “God shares responsibility with

those who are privileged to see what they’re about.”

Ursula began softly to cry.

And Louis, aware that the tussle was over, mercifully turned his back

on her, and gazed out of the window.... His mouth was puckered to

a grimace, and his sloe-eyes were unspeakably tender. “We must look

grotesquely like an Academy picture called ‘Renunciation,’” was one of

the irrelevant thoughts which drifted through his mind, dismally empty

of any consolation for himself--or her. “One of those silly problem

pictures to make the public wonder which of the two is renouncing and

which isn’t....” Then Ursula’s voice startled him:

“Come and talk it over!” Ursula’s voice, clear and merry. “You, of

all people, are a queer Figure of Light to have been sent to guide me

through my darkness, aren’t you, Louis?”

“You needn’t advertise it,” laughed Louis; but he could more readily

have kissed her feet in admiration for the gallant pull-up; her little

gold head jauntily tilted towards defeat, instead of bowed down under

it. “I prefer my Mephistophelian reputation, thanks. I may be a prig

tonight, but I don’t intend to make a habit of it, Ursula Barrison.”

“Your next victim will find you doubly the Evil One, in fact,” she

surmised lazily. “And labelled ‘dangerous’ from head to foot.”

Louis’ reply was an unexpectedly savage kick at Doug. “It’s not the

man labelled ‘dangerous’ of whom women need beware; if he _is_

easy with his kisses and his innuendoes, they all recognize him....

But your strong romantic figure with a boy’s heart, and speech nobly

bitten back, and a great love silently endured--one great love after

another---- Oh, Lord, he makes me _groan_! And the harm he does is

deadly--every time.”

“Is it possible that you mean my husband?” Ursula mocked. “It needn’t

be deadly for Christine.... I can prophesy a charming idyll for

Christine, and quite plausible. Would you like to hear it? Aunt Lavvy

has taken a fancy to her, you see. And after we have all enjoyed a

happy month together at Grey Stone, Christine will be invited down to

the Laburnums for Christmas, because the poor brave child needs to be

petted and cheered--‘Haven’t you noticed, Ursula, that she’s moping?’

Oh yes, my Aunt Lavvy is quite observant. And at the Laburnums for

Christmas will be my handsome brother Hal.”

“Your other rescue? It _is_ an idyll! And they both live happy

ever after. They’ll never be grateful to you, Ursula, but _I_ am

... for them. You--you young captain!”

[IX]

CHRISTINE sat huddled on the window-seat of the room, her lashes and

mouth curled softly upwards to the round rusty disc of the October full

moon. In that wistful attitude, and wearing loose white cotton pyjamas

that sagged from her slim body, she looked more like Pierrot than ever.

The moonlight touched the sea, and her throat, and burnished the top

of her round dark head. She had said good-bye to Doug a few hours

ago--oh, not an ordinary good-bye, they would still be seeing each

other every day for a fortnight or more. But--_good-bye_! She did

not cry ... though she felt very sad (gloriously sad!).

It had all been too romantic for tears.

Romantic--and queer too. Even now there were things about the last

twenty-four hours which she did not quite understand.

_Why_ did Ursula not return from Gullick last night? Where had she

stayed? What was in the note that Doug had discovered in the cabin, on

their return from a jolly evening at Miss Gregson’s?

Oh well, the answers were easy, to anyone with Christine’s experience

of life. Ursula had eloped with Louis Gregson--fascinating foreigner

(“he’s called Louis and his moustache is awfully foreign,” Chris argued

with moon). And the note was to explain matters to her husband.

Doug had not behaved as though the shock had left him broken and

stunned and in agony. He had seemed wildly excited, certainly, and his

eyes, whenever they met Christine’s, were glowing with ... “Oh, I don’t

know,” Christine cried aloud. But such eloquence was intoxicating to

remember, afterwards, alone in one’s room....

And he had said, “Plenty of time tomorrow”; and when she had asked

innocently: “To fetch her back?” he shouted “_No_, by God”.... And

Aunt Lavvy’s smile from her to him had been odd and wise and just the

least little bit triumphant. “We must keep the child out of this as

much as possible,” Chris had overheard. And Doug’s reply, “Thank God

you were here!”

And then--and this was the inexplicable part of it all--the next

morning Ursula had returned.

The girl in the room knit her brows in utter perplexity. She supposed

that Louis had already jilted her: “But she didn’t _look_ jilted.

She looked rather specially beautiful!” Perhaps Gladys Willoughby might

be able to clear up the mystery. Only, somehow, Chris did not want to

discuss with Gladys any part of her stay at Grey Stone.

Doug and Ursula had talked alone together. And then Doug had come out

to her, where she disconsolately crouched, hugging her knees, on the

rocks which overhung the purple pools--she named them by the colour of

the seaweed. He was very white under his tan. At least, his skin was

as bronzed as usual, of course, “but his expression was as though his

face were white,” Chris explained to the moon, with a little wriggle of

impatience.

Doug had been brief and stern, and quite unlike his usual boyish merry

self. Unlike last night, too. He had said: “This is good-bye--in a way,

brave little girl. Though I dare say I shall go on seeing as much of

you as before. But I’d hoped---- Never mind that. It’s over. Chris, a

decent chap has first of all got to stand by his wife when she’s ...

down. My poor Teddy--I never dreamt she cared for me as much....” He

halted abruptly. “You understand? If you don’t--you will one day. Or

forget. So much the better. I want you to be happy. And, oh my God, I

could have made you happy, on some South Sea Island, warm white sand

sloping down to the lagoon....”

“It didn’t sound so _frightfully_ different from Polpinnock Cove,”

reflected Christine. “But then he says he’s no good at words.”

A small black cloud wobbled jerkily across the sun, blotting it out,

just at the moment when he bent and kissed her. His farewell kiss. And

Christine knew that for her and for him the brightness of life was over.

True, Aunt Lavvy had been a perfect darling, and had said that

Christine must come as her guest to the Laburnums for a really jolly

home sort of Christmas. Aunt Lavvy was wonderful; for though she must

know that no jollity could really cheer Chris after her tragedy, yet it

was sweet of her to try and give her something to look forward to.

Two and a half months.... How many of Ursula’s sisters and brothers

would be there? Nina and Lottie--Aunt Lavvy had told her a little

about the Maxwell family--Not Bunny, he was in New Zealand; but Hal,

the eldest boy, he would get a holiday from London.... He was big and

handsome, like Doug, only of course not _so_ big and handsome.

Would they give her a pretty room, there? As pretty as this one? At

the boarding-house she had always shared a room with Auntie, but it was

much nicer to sleep alone ... it was lovely being alone in this room

... even with a broken heart....

Christine sighed contentedly.

THE END

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced

quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and

otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant

preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not

changed.

Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.