“It’s a jolly little place enough!” “I think it’s lovely.” There was a certain tone of regret, of lingering, reluctant farewell, in both voices; though in Julian’s case it was light and patronising; in Clemence’s, dreamy and tender. As Julian spoke he shifted his position slightly as he leant against the iron railing by which they stood, and let his eyes wander over the scene before them with condescending approval. They were standing on the somewhat embryonic “sea-front” of what a few years before had been a fishing village, and was now struggling, rather inefficiently, to become a watering-place. Such season as the place could boast was entirely confined to the summer months; to the frequenters of winter resorts His survey ended finally with Clemence’s face. She was standing at his side looking “What are you looking at, Clemence?” he said, boyishly. She lifted her eyes to his quite gravely and simply. “Only the sea,” she said. “It is so beautiful, I feel as if I never could leave off looking at it. It makes me feel—oh, I can’t tell you, but it is like something great and strong to take away with one!” She looked away again. “Oh, I wish, I wish we need not go!” she said with a little sigh. “I wish we needn’t,” returned Julian; he had been dimly conscious of something in her eyes and voice which made her previous words, simple as they seemed, almost unintelligible to him, and he caught at her last sentence as containing an idea to which he could respond. “It’s an awful nuisance, isn’t it? And do you know it is time we started? Never mind. We’ll come down again soon!” They stood for another moment; Clemence looking out at the sunny sea, Julian taking another careless comprehensive view of the whole scene; and then, as though those last looks had contained their respective farewells, they turned with one accord and walked away in the direction of the railway station. And as if in turning her back upon the sunlit sea she had turned her back also upon something less definite and tangible, a certain gravity and wistfulness crept gradually over Clemence’s face as they went; crept over it to settle down into a sadness most unusual to it as the train carried them quickly away towards London. Julian, sitting opposite her, was vaguely struck by her expression. “Are you awfully sorry to go back, Clemence?” he said. She started slightly, and looked at him with a faint smile. “I suppose I am!” she said. “We have been very happy, haven’t we?” There was a wistful regret in her voice which touched him somehow, and he answered her demonstratively, with a cheery and enthusiastic augury for the future. Clemence smiled Julian broke into a boyish laugh. Her depression was by no means displeasing to him; it was a tribute to his importance, to her dependence on him; and the necessity for “cheering her up” implied the exercise of that superiority and authority in which he delighted. “Why, what a dear little goose you are, Clemence!” he said, leaning forward to take her hands in his. “A ‘Friday to Monday’ can’t last for ever, you know, but it can be repeated again and again. Why, I shall be up every day—every single day, I promise you. I shouldn’t wonder if I found I could spend the evening with you to-morrow! Won’t that console you?” She did not answer him, but she took one of his hands in hers and pressed it to her cheek. His consolation had hardly touched that strange oppression which weighed upon her; and Julian, in high feather, and quite unaware that only his voice was heard by her, “Could you—could you come home with me this afternoon?” Julian paused a moment. The question was hardly the response his words had demanded. Then he said decisively: “Quite impossible, I am sorry to say. I would if I could, you know, dear, but it’s quite impossible!” She gave his hand a little quick pressure. “I know, of course!” she murmured gently. She paused a moment, and then said in a low voice, rather irrelevantly as it seemed: “Julian”—his name still came rather hesitatingly from her lips—“do you think—do you like Mrs. Jackson?” Mrs. Jackson was the name of the woman whose rooms Julian had taken for her, and he started slightly at the question. “She’s not a bad sort,” he said, with rather startled consideration. “At least, she seems all right. Isn’t she nice to you, Clemence? Don’t you like the rooms?” “Oh, yes! yes!” she said quickly, almost as though she reproached herself for saying anything that could suggest to him even a shadow of discontent on her part. “I like them so very, very much. It is only—I don’t know what exactly. Somehow, I don’t think Mrs. Jackson is quite a nice woman.” She had spoken the last words hesitatingly and with difficulty, almost as though they came from her against her will. Julian glanced at her quickly. “What makes you think that, Clemence?” he said, with judicial masterfulness. “Have you any reason, I mean?” But Clemence was hardly able to define, even in her own pure mind, what it was that jarred upon her in her landlady’s manner; and to Julian she was utterly unable to put her feelings into words. Her hasty disclaimer and her hesitating beginnings and falterings, however, served to remove the misgiving which had stirred him lest some knowledge of his own real life should have come to the woman’s knowledge. He was the readier to let himself be reassured and to dismiss the subject in that the train was slackening speed “You mustn’t be fanciful, Clemmie,” he said, now in a lordly and airy fashion. “I’ve no doubt Mrs. Jackson is a very jolly woman, as a matter of fact. Look here, dear, would you mind if I went and had a smoke now? It isn’t much further, you know, and one mustn’t smoke in hospital, you see!” Clemence was very pale when he joined her on the platform at Victoria—joined her after a quick glance round to see whether he must prepare himself for an encounter with an acquaintance; and she did not speak, only looked up at him with a grave, steady smile which “A four-wheeler, Julian!” she murmured pleadingly, as they emerged into the station yard. With a lofty smile at what he supposed to be nervousness on her part, he signified assent with a little condescending gesture, and stopped before a waiting cab. “Here you are,” he said. “Jump in!” She got in obediently, and as he shut the door she turned to him through the open window. “Good-bye, Julian!” she said, in a low, sweet voice. “Good-bye!” he said cheerily, smiling Julian was on his way to the club. He had a vague disinclination to the thought of going home; the house in Chelsea was always more or less distasteful to him now, and he had no intention of going thither before it was necessary. It was nearly dark by the time his destination was reached, and as his hansom drew up a few yards from the club entrance he could only see that the way was stopped by a carriage from which two ladies and a gentleman had just emerged. It was the younger of the two ladies who glanced in his direction, and said, in a pretty, uninterested voice: “Isn’t that Mr. Romayne?” Marston Loring was the man addressed, and he shot a keen, considering glance at the speaker—Miss Pomeroy. The fact that her eyes had noticed Julian when his quick ones had not, trivial as it was, was not without its significance to the man whose stock-in-trade, so to speak, was founded on clever estimate and appreciation of trifles. Was Miss Pomeroy not so entirely unobservant a nonentity as she was supposed to be, he asked himself, not for the first time; or was there another reason for her quickness in this instance? “So it is!” he said. “Hullo, old fellow!” Julian came eagerly up to the group as it paused for him on the club steps, and shook hands in his pleasantest manner with Mrs. Pomeroy. “I do believe it’s a ladies’ afternoon!” he exclaimed gaily. “What luck for me! How do you do?” shaking hands with Miss Pomeroy. “I’d actually forgotten all about it, and I’ve only just come up from Brighton! Loring, you must ask me to join your party, old man! Tell him so, Miss Pomeroy, please!” Whether strict veracity is to be imputed to a young man who professes unbounded satisfaction at finding fashionable “ladies’ teas” in full swing at his club when he has just come off a journey is perhaps doubtful; but Julian threw himself into the spirit of the moment with a frank gaiety and enthusiasm which was not to be surpassed. The greater number of the ladies who were sipping club tea as if it were a hitherto untasted nectar, and gazing at club furniture as though it were provision for the comfort of some strange animal, were acquaintances of his; and as he moved about among them his passage seemed to be marked by merrier laughs, a quicker fire of the jokes of the moment, and brighter faces than prevailed elsewhere. He was enjoying himself so thoroughly, apparently, that he was unable to tear himself away, and when he left the club at last, he sprang into a hansom, and told the driver to “put the horse along.” He and his mother were dining out together, and he had left himself barely sufficient time to dress. He ran up the steps, flinging the driver his fare, let himself in with his latchkey, and He was a little surprised, therefore, as he came downstairs, to find his mother’s maid waiting for him outside the drawing-room door with the information that Mrs. Romayne was already in the carriage; and he ran hastily downstairs, put on his overcoat, and proceeded to join her. “I’m awfully sorry, dear,” he said, with eager apology. “I thought it was earlier. The fact is, I was awfully late getting in. I found ‘ladies’ teas’ going on at the club—so awfully stupid of me to forget—you might have liked to go—and it was rather good fun. How are you, dear?” He had let himself into the brougham as he spoke, had shut the door, and seated himself by the figure he could only dimly see sitting rather back in the corner so that little or no light fell on the face. He had kissed his mother, hardly stemming the flood of his eloquence for the purpose; and he now hardly |