I

For a Marquis he was disconcertingly hairy. So much so that even those fast diminishing people who still force themselves to believe that a title necessarily places men on a high and ethereal plane were obliged to confess that Feo’s father might have been any one,—a mere entomologist for instance, bland, concentrated and careless of appearance, who pottered about in the open after perfectly superfluous insects and forgot that such a thing as civilization existed. He had the appearance indeed of a man who sleeps in tents, scorns to consult a looking-glass and cuts his own hair with a pair of grass clippers at long intervals. On a handsome and humorous face, always somehow sun-tanned, white wiry hairs sprouted everywhere. A tremendous moustache, all akimbo, completely covered his mouth and spread along each cheek almost to his ears, from which white tufts protruded. The clean-cut jaw was shaved as high as the cheek bones, which were left, like a lawn at the roots of a tree, to run wild. Deep-set blue eyes were overhung by larky bushes and the large fine head exuded a thick thatch of obstreperous white stuff that was unmastered by a brush. And as if all this were not enough, there was a small cascade under the middle of the lower lip kept just long enough to bend up and bite in moments of deep calculation. There may have been hairs upon his conscience too, judging by his exquisite lack of memory.

His was, nevertheless, a very old title and a long line of buried Marquises had all done something, good and bad, to place the name of Amesbury in the pages of history. Rip Van Winkle, as most people called the present noble Lord, had done good and bad things too, like the rest of us,—good because his heart was kind, and bad from force of circumstances. If he had inherited a fine fortune with his father’s shoes instead of bricks and mortar mortgaged from cellar to ceiling, his might have been a different story and not one unfortunately linked up with several rather shady transactions. At fifty-five, however, life found him still abounding in optimism on the nice allowance granted to him by Fallaray, and always on the lookout, like all Micawbers, for something to turn up.

He had driven the large brake to the station to meet Feo and her party who were on their way down for the week-end. His temporary exile at Chilton Park, brought about by a universal disinclination to honor his checks, had been a little dull. He was delighted at the prospect of seeing people again, especially Mrs. Malwood. He was fond of Angoras and liked to hear them purr. So with a rather seedy square felt hat over one eye and a loose overcoat of Irish homespun over his riding kit, he clambered down from the high box, saw that the groom was at the horses’ heads and strolled into the station to talk over the impending strike of the Triple Alliance with the station master,—the parlor Bolshevist of Princes Risborough. An express swooped through the station as he stood on the platform and made a parachute of his overcoat. The London train was not due for fifteen minutes.

Tapping on the door of Mr. Sparrow’s room, he entered to find that worthy exulting over the morning paper, his pale, tubercular face flushed with excitement. The headlines announced that “England faces revolution. Mines flood as miners steal coal and await with confidence the entire support of allied unions. Great Britain on the edge of a precipice.”

“All wrong,” said Rip Van Winkle quietly. “Panicky misinterpretation of the situation, Sparrow,—much as you desire the opposite.”

The station master whipped round, his fish-like eyes strangely magnified by the strong glasses in his spectacles. “What makes yer say that, m’ Lord?” he asked, even at that moment flattered at the presence of a Marquis in his office. “Labor has England by the throat.”

“England has Labor by the seat of the pants, you should say, Sparrow. Take my word for it, the strike is not only doomed to eventual failure, however the fluctuations go, but the Labor movement will grow less and less terrorist in its methods from this day onwards.”

Mr. Sparrow threw back his head and laughed loudly,—showing an incomplete collection of very disastrous teeth. “Well, there won’t be a damned train running by this time Monday,” he said.

“I’ll bet you a thousand oak apples to one there will,” replied Lord Amesbury, “and I’ll tell you why. Every sane and law-abiding Englishman, from the small clerk to the most doddering duke, has begun to organize and this mighty revolution of yours is already as dead as mutton.”

“Oh, is that so?” Mr. Sparrow laughed again.

“That is so. You see, Sparrow, you Labor gentlemen, talking paradoxically, have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, not merely in this country but all over the world. You have been the bullies of the school and for a considerable number of years you have made our politicians stiff with fright. They have licked your boots and given way to you whenever you demanded higher wages. They pampered and petted you all through the War, from which you emerged with swollen heads and far too many pianos. When history turns its cold eye upon you, you will be summed up as a set of pretty dirty blackguards who did less to win the War than all the dud shells piled into a heap. You slacked, grumbled, threatened and held up governments for wages out of all proportion to your work. You proved the possession of criminal as well as unpatriotic instincts and you finally showed yourselves up in your true light when you deserted the mines and took the pumpers away. There isn’t any word in any dictionary to define the sort of indignation which that dastardly and wanton action has caused. The result of it has been to put the first big nail in the coffin of Labor unions. You have been discovered as men with a yellow streak. Governments now see, what they have never been able to recognize before, that labor does not form the most important section of the three sections of society, the other two being capital and the purchasing power. You have made clear to them, Master Sparrow, that labor and capital are at the mercy of the third element,—the great middle class, the people who buy from capital, pay your wages and who can at any moment, by not buying, reduce both capital and labor to nothingness. The new strike, the epoch-making strike, is of this middle class, and they haven’t struck against you but against strikes. At last the worm has turned and I venture to prophesy, foolish as it is, that after a series of damaging and expensive kicks, labor will descend to its proper place, with a just share in profits that will enable it to get a little joy out of life, freed from the tyrannical hand of unions, and with more spare time than is at present enjoyed by the members of the middle class who will continue to take the rough with the smooth, without squealing, as heretofore. In fact, I look upon this strike of miners as one of the best things that has ever happened in history and nothing gives me greater joy and greater satisfaction than to watch, as I shall do from to-day onwards, the gradual diminishing of the excessive size of the labor head.—How are your potatoes coming along?”

Without waiting for an answer, the tall old man turned quietly and left the room; while the parlor Bolshevist, stuffed with the pamphlets of Hyndman and Marks, Lenin and Trotsky, gave a vicious kick to the leg of the table and eyed the receding figure with venom.

The train was late and so Rip Van Winkle killed time by studying the contents of the bookstall, looking with a sort of incredulity at the stuff on which the public is fed,—illiterate fiction with glaring covers and cheap weeklies filled with egregious gossip and suggestive drawings. The extra fifteen minutes of waiting was passed very pleasantly by his Lordship because many of his old friends from the village came up to him and talked. The chemist, who had driven down personally to collect his monthly box of drugs from London, was very affable. So also was the blacksmith who had known Lord Amesbury for many years and treated him with bonhomie. They talked racing with great earnestness. The postman, the gardener from the house of the war profiteer, and the village policeman, all of them very good friends of the man upon whom they looked as representing the good old days, livened things up. With the real democracy that belongs solely to the aristocrat, Rip Van Winkle knew all about the ailments of their wives, the prospects of their children, the number of their hens and pigs and their different forms of religious worship, which he duly respected, whether they were Little Baptists, Big Baptists or Middle-sized Baptists, Minor Methodists or Major Methodists, Independent Churchmen or Dependent Churchmen, Roman Catholics or Anglicans whose Catholicism is interpreted intelligently. The village consisted perhaps of twenty-five hundred souls, but they all had their different cures, and there were as many churches and chapels in and off the High Street as there were public houses. It had always seemed to Feo’s father that honest beer is infinitely preferable to the various sorts of religion which were to be obtained in those other public houses in their various bottles, all labeled differently, and he hoped that the prohibition which had been the means of developing among the people of the United States so many drinks far more injurious than those in which alcohol prevailed would never be forced by graft and hypocrisy, self-seeking and salary-making upon the tight little island,—not always so tight as prohibitionists supposed.

Lady Feo bounded out of the train, followed by Mrs. Malwood and their two new friends recently picked up,—Feo’s latest fancy, Gordon Macquarie, a glossy young man who backed musical plays in order that he might dally with the pretty members of his choruses, and Mrs. Malwood’s most recent time-killer whose name was Dowth,—David Dowth, the Welsh mine owner, who had just succeeded to his father’s property and had invaded London to see life. Cambridge was still upon the latter’s face and very obviously upon his waistcoat. He was a green youth who would learn about women from Mrs. Malwood. They were both new to Rip Van Winkle and for that reason all the more interesting. Lola, carrying a jewel case, emerged from a compartment at the back of the train with Mrs. Malwood’s maid, similarly burdened, and it was at Lola that Lord Amesbury threw his most appreciative glance.

“French,” he said to himself. “The reincarnation of those pretty little people made immortal by Fragonard.”

Feo threw her arms round her father’s neck and kissed him on those places of his cheeks which were clear of undergrowth. “Good old Rip,” she said. “Always on the spot. Been bored, old boy?”

Lord Amesbury laughed. “To be perfectly frank, yes,” he said. “I have missed my race meetings and my bridge at Boodles, but I have been studying the awakening of spring and the psychology of bird life, all very delightful. Also I have been watching the daily changes among the trees in the beech forest. Amazingly dramatic, my dear. But it’s good to see you again and I hope your two friends are gamblers. Possibly I can make a bit out of them.”

He patted her on the shoulder and looked her up and down with admiration not unmixed with astonishment. Among the many riddles which he had never been able to solve he placed the fact that he of all men was Feo’s father. What extraordinary twist had nature performed in making his only daughter a girl instead of a boy? Standing there in her short skirt and manly looking golf shoes with lopping tongues, her beautiful square shoulders lightly covered with a coarsely knitted sweater of chestnut brown and a sort of Tyrolean hat drawn down over her ears, she looked like a young officer in the First Life Guards masquerading in women’s clothes.

II

When Lord Amesbury mounted the box with Feo at his side and turned out of the station yard into the long road which led to the old village of Princes Risborough, the first thing that caught Lola’s eyes was the white cross cut by the Romans in the chalk of the hill, on the top of which sat Chilton Park. Again and again she had stood in front of photographs of this very view. They hung in Miss Breezy’s room, neatly framed. Many times Miss Breezy herself had explained to Lola the meaning of that cross, so far as its historical significance went, and Lola had been duly impressed. The Romans,—how long ago they must have lived. But to her, more and more as her love and adoration grew, that white cross stood as a mark for the place to which Fallaray went from time to time for peace, to listen to the wind among the beech trees, to watch the sheep on the distant hills, to wander among the gardens of his old house and forget the falsity and the appalling ineptitude of his brother Ministers. The photographs had indicated very well the beauty of this scene but the sight of it in the life, all green in the first flush of spring, brought a sob to Lola’s throat. Once more the feeling came all over her that it would be at Chilton Park that she would meet Fallaray at last alone and discover her love to him,—not as lady’s maid but as the little human thing, the Eve.

She sat shoulder to shoulder with the groom opposite to Mrs. Malwood’s maid,—Dowth, Macquarie and Mrs. Malwood in close juxtaposition. But she had no ears for their conversation. As the village approached, not one single feature of it escaped her eager eyes,—its wide cobbled street, its warm Queen Anne houses, its old-fashioned shops, its Red Lion and Royal George and Black Bull, its funny little post office up three stairs, its doctor’s house all covered with creeper, its ancient church sitting hen-wise among her children. It seemed to her that all these things, old and quiet and honest, had gone to the making of Fallaray’s character; that he belonged to them and was part of them and represented them; and it gave her a curious feeling of being let into Fallaray’s secrets as she went along.

From time to time people hatted Lady Feo and one or two old women, riddled with rheumatism, bobbed—not because of any sense of serfdom, but because they liked to do so—a pleasant though inverted sense of egotism which is at the bottom of all tradition. Rip Van Winkle saluted every one with his whip; the butchers—and there were several, although meat was still one of the luxuries—the landlords of the public houses who were not so fat as they used to be before the War, the vicar, a high churchman with an astonishingly low collar, and the usual comic person who invariably retires to such villages, lives in a workman’s cottage among the remnants of passed glory and talks to any one who will listen to him of the good old days when he tooled his team of spanking bays and hobnobbed in London, when society really was society, with men of famous names and ladies of well-known frailty. This particular gentleman, Augustus Warburgh, pronounced Warborough, made himself up to look like Whistler and wore the sort of clothes which would have appealed greatly to a character actor. What he lived on no one knew. One or two people with nasty minds were convinced that his small income was derived from blackmail,—probably a most pernicious piece of libel. On his few pounds a week, however, he did himself extremely well and lived alone in a four-room cottage as antediluvian as himself, in which there were some very charming pieces of Jacobean furniture, a collection of excellent sporting prints and numerous books all well-thumbed, “Barry Lyndon” being the most favored.

In this little place, with its old beams and uneven floors of oak, Augustus Warburgh “did” for himself, cooking his own meals, making his own bed and bringing home from his occasional trips to London mysterious bottles filled with delicatessen from Appenrodts, amazing pickles and an occasional case of unblended Balblair which he got from a relative of his who owned half of the isle of Skye. Nips of this glorious but dangerous juice he offered to his cronies in his expansive moods and delighted in seeing them immediately slide under his table with the expression worn by Charlie Chaplin after he has been plumped on the head with a meat axe. Needless to say that he and Rip Van Winkle got along together like a house on fire. They talked the same language, enjoyed the same highly spiced food, dipped back into the same period and had inevitably done the same people. The Warburgh bow as the brake passed in the High Street was not Albertian but Elizabethan.

Feo laughed as she waved her hand. “When he dies,” she said, “and I don’t think he ever will, Princes Risborough will lose one of its most beautiful notes,—like London when they did away with Jimmies. Not that I remember Jimmies, except from what you’ve told me about it. Let’s have him up to dinner one night and make him drunk.”

“You can’t,” said Lord Amesbury. “It’s impossible. There is a hole in every one of the soles of his shoes through which all the fumes of alcohol leak. You can stew him, you can pickle him, you can float him, but you cannot sink him. When everybody else is down and out, that is the time when Augustus takes the floor and rises to the eloquence and vitriolic power of Dr. Johnson.—Tell me, Feo, who is that remarkable child that you have got in tow?”

“My maid, you mean? She’s the niece of my old Breezy. Isn’t she charming? Such an honest little soul too. Does her job with the most utter neatness and nicety of touch and listens excellently. I rescued her from the stage,—I mean, of course, the chorus. A good deed in a naughty world.” That’s how she liked to put it, her memory being a little hazy. “I don’t know what will become of her. Of course, she can’t be my maid forever. Judging from the way in which my male friends look at her whenever they get the chance, I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if one of these days she eloped with a duke. It would fill me with joy to meet her in her husband’s ancestral home all covered with the family jewels and do my best to win a gracious smile. Or else she’ll marry Simpkins, who is, I hear, frightfully mashed on her, and retire to a village pub, there to imitate the domestic cat and litter the world with kittens. I dunno. Anything may happen to a girl like that. But whatever it is, it will be one of these two extremes. I hate to think about it because I like her. It’s very nice to have her about me.”

Rip Van Winkle smiled. “To parody a joke in last week’s La Vie Parisienne, I am not so old as I look, my dear.”

“You dare,” said Feo. But she laughed too. “Good Lord, Father, don’t go and do a thing like that. If I had to call that girl Mother, I think that even my sense of humor would crack.”

“A little joke, Feo,” said Rip. “Nothing more. I can’t even keep myself, you see.”

Whereupon, having left the village, the brake turned into the road that ran up to Whitecross at an angle of forty-five. The old man slowed the horses down to a walk and waved his whip towards the screen of trees which hid Chilton Park from the public gaze. “It’s been a wonderful spring,” he said. “I have watched it with infinite pleasure. It has filled my old brain with poetry and very possibly with regrets. All the same, I’m glad you have come down. I’ve been rather lonely here. The evenings are long and ghosts have a knack of coming out and standing round my chair.—How is Edmund? I regret that I have forgotten to ask you about him before. One somehow always forgets to ask about Edmund, although I see that he is regarded by George Lytham and his crowd as the new Messiah.”

Feo laughed again, showing all her wonderful teeth. “I had a quaint few minutes with Edmund the other night on the steps of Langham Hall. He had taken his mother and Aunt Betsy to a symphony concert. Do you know, I rather think that George is right about Edmund? He has all the makings of a Messiah and of course all the opportunities. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he emerged from the present generation of second-raters and led England out of its morass. But he’ll only achieve this if he continues to remain untouched by any feminine hand. Of course, he’s absolutely safe so far as I’m concerned, but there was a most peculiar look in his face the other night which startled me somewhat. I thought he’d fallen in love with me,—which would have been most inconvenient. But I was wrong.—Well, here we are at the old homestead. How it reeks of Fallaray and worthiness.”

III

But the party was not a success. Very shortly after lunch, during which Feo and Mrs. Malwood had put in good work in an unprecedented attempt to charm their new acquisitions, they all adjourned to the terrace,—that wonderful old terrace of weather-beaten stone giving on to a wide view of an Italian garden backed by a panorama of rolling hills and of the famous beech forest ten miles deep, under which, in certain parts, especially in the Icknield Way through which the Romans had passed, the leaves of immemorial summers, all red and dry, lay twenty feet deep.

Gilbert Jermyn, Feo’s brother, had dashed over on his motor bicycle from Great Marlow where he was staying with several friends, ex-flying men like himself and equally devoid of cash, trying to formulate some scheme whereby they might get back into adventure once more. Lord Amesbury had gone down to a pet place of his own to take a nap in the long grass with the sun on his face. Feo, who had been dancing until five o’clock that morning, was lying full stretch on a dozen cushions in the shadow of the house, Macquarie in attendance. Mrs. Malwood, petulant and disgruntled, was sitting near by with David Dowth. Gilbert Jermyn, who could see that he was superfluous, sat by himself on the balustrade gazing into the distance. His clean-cut face was heavy with despondency. He had forgotten to light his cigarette.

“You’re about the liveliest undertaker I’ve ever struck,” said Feo. “What the deuce is the matter with you?”

Macquarie shrugged his shoulders,—his girlishly cut coat with its tight waist and tight sleeves crinkling as he did so. “Oh, my dear,” he said, “it’s no good your expecting anything from me to-day. Under the circumstances it’s impossible for me to scintillate.”

“What do you mean?” asked Feo roughly. She had ordered this man down in her royal way, being rather taken with his tallness, youngness and smoothness, and demanded scintillation.

“But look at the position! I hate to be mercenary and talk about money, but you know, my dear thing, almost every bob I’ve got is invested in the three musical comedies now running, and if things go on as they are, every one of them will be shut down because of the coal strike. That’s a jolly nice lookout. I’m no Spartan, and I confess that I find it very difficult to be merry and bright among the gravestones of my hopes.”

And while he went on like that, dropping in many “my dears” and “you dear things” as though he had known Feo all his life, instead of more or less for twenty minutes, making gestures in imitation of those of the spoilt small-part lady, Lord Amesbury’s daughter and Fallaray’s wife became gradually more and more aware of the fact that she had made a fool of herself. There was something broadly dÉclassÉ about this man which, even to one of her homogeneous nature, became a reproach. She was getting, she could see, a little careless in her choice of friends and for this one, whom she had picked out of semi-society and the musical comedy night life of London—so dull, so naked, so hungry and thirsty and so diamond seeking—to play the yellow dog and find excuses for his lack of entertainment left her, she found with astonishment, wholly without adjectives. It was indeed altogether beyond words. And she sat watching and listening to this vain and brainless person with a sort of admiration for his audacity.

As for Dowth and Mrs. Malwood they, too, were not hitting it off, and in reply to Mrs. Malwood’s impatient question the young Welshman’s answer had many points of excuse. “Three of my mines have been flooded,” he said gravely, “which knocks my future income all cock-eyed. God knows how I shall emerge from this frightful business. A week ago I was one of the richest men in England. To-day I face pauperism. It’s appalling. You expect me to sit at your feet and make love to you with the sword of Damocles hanging over my head. It can’t be done, Mrs. Malwood. And, mind you, even if the remainder of my mines escape ruin, I go under. That’s as plain as the nose on my face. The Government, always in terror of labor, has been amazingly supported in this business by the whole sanity of England, but the end of it will be that the miners will be given less wages but large shares in the profits of the coal owners. I shall probably be able to make a better living by becoming a miner myself. You sit there petulant and annoyed because I am in the depths of despondency. You’ll cry out for cake when bread has run out, like all the women of your kind, but you see in me a doomed man unable to raise a finger to save property which has been in my family for several generations. I simply can’t jibber and giggle and crack jokes with you and talk innuendoes. I was a fool to come down at all.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Malwood aghast. “Oh—I suppose you think that I ought to amuse you?”

“Yes, I do,” said Dowth.

And Mrs. Malwood also was at a loss for adjectives.

And when, presently, Rip Van Winkle appeared, smiling and sun-tanned to join what he expected to be a jovial group, he found a strange silence and a most uncomfortable air of jarring temperaments. He was well accustomed to these little parties of Feo’s and to watch her at work with new men whom she collected on her way through life. Usually they were rather riotous affairs, filled with mirth and daring. What in the name of all that was wonderful had happened to this one? He joined his son and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Gibbie,” he said, “enlighten me.”

But he got no explanation from this young man, who seemed to be like a bird whose wings had been cut. “My dear Father,” he said, “I’ve no sympathy with Feo’s little pranks. She and the Malwood girl seem to have picked up a bounder and a shivering Welsh terrier this time, and even they probably regret it. I ran over this afternoon to yarn with you, as a matter of fact. Come on, let’s get out of this. Let’s go down to the stream and sit under the trees and have it out.”

And so they left together, unnoticed by that disconcerted foursome with whose little games fate had had the impudence to interfere. And presently, seated on the bank of the brook which ran through the lower part of the park, Lord Gilbert Jermyn, ex-major Royal Air Force, D. S. O., M. C., got it off his chest. “O God,” he began, “how fed up I am with this infernal peace.”

The old man gazed at his son with amazement. “I don’t follow you,” he said. “Peace? My dear lad, we have all been praying for it and we haven’t got it yet.”

The boy, and he was nothing more than that, sat with rounded shoulders and a deep frown on his face, hunched up, flicking pieces of earth into the bubbling water.

“I know all about that,” he went on. “Of course you’ve prayed for peace. So did everybody over twenty-four. But what about us,—we who were caught as kids, before we knew anything, and taught the art of flying and sent up at any old time, careless of death, the eyes of the artillery, the protectors of the artillery, the supermen with beardless faces. What about us in this so-called peace of yours? Here we are at a loose end, with no education, because that was utterly interrupted, able to do absolutely nothing for a living,—let down, let out, looked on rather as though we were brigands because we have grown into the habit of breaking records, smashing conventions and killing as a pastime. Do you see my point, old boy? We herd together in civics when we’re not in the police courts for bashing bobbies and not in the divorce courts for running off with other people’s wives, and we ask ourselves, in pretty direct English, what the hell is going to become of us,—and echo answers what. But I can tell you this. What we want is war, perpetual bloody war, never mind who’s the enemy. You made us want it, you fitted us for it and for nothing else. We’re all pretty excellent in the air and in consequence utterly useless on earth. And when I read the papers, and I never read more than the headlines anyway, I long to see that Germany is going to take advantage of the damned stupidity of all the Allied governments, including that of America, gather up the weapons that she hasn’t returned and the men who are going to refuse to pay reparations and start the whole business over again. My God, how eagerly I’d get back into my uniform, polish up my buttons, stop drinking and smoking and get fit for flying once more. I’d sing like Caruso up there among the clouds and empty my machine gun at the first Boche who came along with a thrill of joy. That’s my job. I know no other.”

The old man’s hair stood on end,—all of it, like a white bush.

IV

Something happened that afternoon which might have swung Lola’s life on to an entirely different set of rails and put Fallaray even farther out of her reach. The unrest which had followed the War had made the acquisition of servants very difficult. The young country girls who had been glad enough to go into service in the large houses now preferred to stick to their factories, because they were able to have free evenings. The housekeeper at Chilton Park was very short-handed and in consequence asked Lola and Mrs. Malwood’s maid if they would make themselves useful. Mrs. Malwood’s didn’t see it. She had been well bitten by the trades-union bug and, therefore, was not going to do anything of any sort except her specific duties, and those as carelessly as she could. The housekeeper could go and hang herself. Violet, the girl in question, intended to lie on her bed and read Scarlet Bits until she was needed by her mistress. Lola, whose blood was good, was very glad to lend a hand. With perfect willingness she committed an offence against lady’s maids which shocked Violet to the very roots of her system. She donned a little cap and apron and turned herself into a parlor maid, a creature, as all the world knows, many pegs of the ladder beneath her own position as a lady’s maid. When, therefore, tea was served on the terrace, Lola assisted the butler, looking daintier than ever, and so utterly free from coquetry, because there was no man in the world except Fallaray for her, that she might have been a little ghost.

But the trained eye of Gordon Macquarie looked her over immediately. He turned to Lady Feo, to whom he had not addressed a word for twenty minutes, and said with a sudden flash of enthusiasm, “Ye gods and little fishes, what a picture of a girl! Wouldn’t she look perfectly wonderful in the front line of the chorus on the O. P. side! An actress too, I bet you. Look at the way she’s pretending not to be alive. Of course she knows how perfectly sweet she looks in that saucy make-up.”

If Mr. Gordon Macquarie had deliberately gone out of his way to discover the most brilliant method of sentencing himself to the lethal chamber he could not have been more successful than by using that outpouring of gushing words. Feo had fully realized, from the moment that she had left the dining room, that in acquiring Gordon Macquarie she had committed the gravest faux pas of her life. Not only was he a bounder but he did not possess the imagination and the sense of proportion to know that in being invited down to Chilton Park by Lady Feo he had metaphorically been decorated with a much coverted order. His egotism and his whining fright had made him unable to maintain his fourth wall and at least imitate the ways of a gentleman. Never before in her history had Feo spent an afternoon so unpleasant and so humiliating, and now, to be obliged to listen to a pÆan of praise about her maid, if you please, was the last straw. Any other woman would probably have risen from her place among her cushions, followed Lola into the house and either boxed her ears or ordered her back to town.

But Feo had humor, and although her pride was wounded and she would willingly have given orders for Macquarie to be shot through the head, she pursued a slightly different method. She rose, gave Macquarie a most curious smile, waited until Lola had retired from the terrace, followed her and called her back just as she was about to disappear into the servants’ quarters. “Lola,” she said, “run up at once and pack my things. We are going back to town. Say nothing to anybody. Be nippy,” the word was Simpkins’s, “and in the meantime I will telephone for a car. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lady.” In Lola’s voice there must have been something of the tremendous disappointment that swept over her. But it was ignored or unnoticed by her mistress. To leave Chilton Park almost as soon as she had seen it,—not to be able to creep secretly into Fallaray’s room and stand there all alone and get from it the feeling of the man, the vibrations of his thoughts,—not to be able to steal out in the moonlight and wander among the Italian gardens made magic by the white light and picture to herself the tall ascetic lonely figure in front of whom some night she intended to move Heaven and earth to stand.

But she turned away quickly, obeyed orders without a single question and ran up the wide staircase blindly, because, for the moment, her eyes were filled with tears. But only for the moment. After all, there was nothing in this visit that could help her scheme along. She must keep her courage and her nerve, continue her course of study, watch her opportunities and be ready to seize the real chance when it presented itself. Lady Feo was bored,—which, of course, was a crime. Macquarie was a false coin. Lola could have told her that. How many exactly similar men had ogled her in the street and attempted to capture her attention. She had been amazed to see him join Lady Feo at Paddington station that morning. She instantly put him down as a counter jumper from a second-rate linen draper’s in the upper reaches of Oxford Street.—She was ready for Feo when she came up to put on her hat. Her deft fingers had worked quickly, and she was alert and bright, in spite of her huge disappointment.

It was characteristic of Feo to break up her houseparty with the most unscrupulous disregard for the convenience of the other members of it, and to care nothing for the fact that she would spoil the pleasure of her father. He and her brother, her little friend, Mrs. Malwood, and the two disappointing men must pay her bill. She never paid. It was characteristic of her, also, to turn her mind quickly, before leaving, upon some other way of obtaining amusement, as she dreaded to face a dull and barren Sunday in London. She remembered suddenly that Penelope Winchfield, one of the “gang,” had opened her house near Aylesbury, which was only a short drive from Princes Risborough. It was a brain wave. So she went to the telephone and rang up, invited herself for the week-end and went finally into the car and slipped away with Lola without saying good-by to a single person. “How I hate this place,” she said. “Something always goes wrong here.” And she turned and made a face at the old building like a naughty child.

Any other woman—at any rate, any other woman whose upbringing had been as harum-scarum as Feo’s—would have given Lola her notice and dropped her like an old shoe. But she had humor.

V

Queen’s Road, Bayswater, so far as the jeweler’s little shop was concerned, was in for a surprise that evening. Just as Lola’s mother was about to close up after a rather depressing day which had brought very little business—a few wrist watches to be attended to, nothing more—a car drove up, and from it descended Lola, carrying a handbag and smiling like a girl let out of school.

“Why, my dear,” cried Mrs. Breezy, “what does this mean? I thought you were going to Chilton Park.” But she held her ewe lamb warmly and gladly in her arms, while a shout of welcome came from behind the glass screen where the fat man sat with the microscope in his eye.

Lola laughed. “I went there,” she said, “but something happened. I’ll tell you about that later. And then Lady Feo altered her plans, drove over to Aylesbury and told me I might do anything I liked until Monday night, as there was no room for me in Mrs. Winchfield’s house. And so, of course, I came home. How are you, Mummy darling? Oh, I’m so glad to see you.” And she kissed the little woman again with a touch of exuberance and ran into the shop to pounce upon her father, all among his watches. It was good to see the way in which that man caught his little girl in his arms and held her tight.—A good girl, Lola, a good affectionate girl, working hard when there was no need for her to do so and improving herself. Good Lord, she had begun to talk like a lady and think like a lady, but she would never be too grand to come into the little old shop in Queen’s Road, Bayswater,—not Lola.

He said all that rather emotionally and this too. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t seen yer for such a long time. You’ve never missed droppin’ in upon us whenever you could get away, but this’s like a sunny day when the papers said it was goin’ to be wet,—like finding a real good tot of cognac in a bottle yer thought was empty.” And he kissed her again on both cheeks and held her away from him, the Frenchman in him coming out in his utter lack of self-consciousness. He looked her all over with a great smile on his fat face and stroked the sleeve of her blue serge coat, touched the white thing at her throat and finally pinched the lobe of one of her tiny ears.

“It isn’t that yer clothes are smarter, or that yer’ve grown older or anything like that. It’s that you seem to have pulled yer feet out of this place, me girl. It doesn’t seem to be your place now.—It’s manner. It’s the way yer hold yer head, tilt yer chin up.—It’s accent. It’s the way you end yer sentences. When a woman comes into the shop and speaks to me as you do, I know that she won’t pay her bills but that her name’s in the Red Book.—You little monkey, yer’ve picked up all the tricks and manners of her ladyship. You’ll be saying ‘My God’ soon, as yer aunt tells us Lady Feo does! Well, well, well.” And he hugged her again, laughed, and then, finding that he showed certain points of his French antecedents, began to exaggerate them as he had seen Robert Nainby do at the Gaiety. He was a consummate actor and a very honest person. The two don’t always go together.

And then Mrs. Breezy, who in the meantime had been practical and shut the shop, followed them into the parlor, which seemed to Lola to be shrinking every time she saw it and more crowded with cardboard boxes, account books, alarm clocks and the surplus from the shop, and sprang a little surprise. “Who do you think’s coming to dinner to-night?” she asked.

“Is anybody coming to dinner? What a nuisance,” said Lola, who had looked forward to enjoying the company of her father and mother uninterrupted.

John Breezy gave a roguish glance at his wife and winked. “Give yer ten guesses,” he said.

“Ernest Treadwell.”

“No,” said Mrs. Breezy, “Albert Simpkins.”

“Simpky? How funny. Did you ask him or did he ask himself?”

“He asked himself,” said John Breezy.

“I asked him,” said Mrs. Breezy.

“I see. The true Simpky way. He suggested that he would like to have dinner with you and you caught the suggestion. He comes of such a long line of men who have worn their masters’ clothes that he is now a sort of second-hand edition of them all, and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if, when he falls in love, he goes to the parents first and asks their permission to propose to the daughter; and he’ll probably ask not for the daughter herself but for her hand,—which never seems to me to be much of a compliment to the daughter.”

Mrs. Breezy and her husband exchanged a quick glance. Either there was something uncanny about Lola or she knew that this very respectable man was madly in love with her. During his numerous visits to the jeweler’s shop Simpkins had invariably led the conversation round to Lola, finding a thousand phases of her character which he adored. But the last time he had been with them there was something in his manner and voice which made it easy to guess that his visit that evening was for the purpose of asking them whether they considered him worthy of becoming their son-in-law. It may be said that they considered that he was, especially after he had told them about the money inherited from his father and his own savings and confided in them his scheme of buying that very desirable inn at Wargrave, in which they could, of course, frequently spend very pleasant week-ends during the summer months. They had before this recognized in him a man of great depth of feeling, of excellent principles and a certain strange ecstasy,—somewhat paradoxical in one who nearly always appeared in a swallow-tail coat, dark trousers and a black tie.

Seeing that this was an occasion of considerable importance, Mrs. Breezy had arranged to dine in the drawing-room. It now behooved her to hurry up to her room and change her clothes and lay an extra place for Lola. The dinner itself was being cooked at that moment by the baker next door,—duck, new peas and potatoes and apple pie with a nice piece of GruyÈre cheese, which, with two bottles of Beaujolais from the Breezy cellar, would be worthy of Mr. Simpkins’s attention even though he did come from Dover Street, Mayfair.

As a matter of fact, Lola’s remark about the daughter’s hand was merely an arrow fired into the air. She had been encouraging Simpkins to look with favor upon the lovesick girl who sat so frequently upon her bed and poured out her heart. She never conceived the possibility of being herself asked for by good old Simpky, who had been so kind to her and was such a knowledgable companion at the theater. The idea of becoming his wife was grotesque, ridiculous, pathetic, hugely remote from her definite plan of life. She considered that the girl Ellen was exactly suited to him. Had she not inherited all the attributes of an innkeeper’s wife from her worthy parents who had kept the Golden Sheaf at Shepperton since away back before the great wind? So she ran up to her room to tidy herself, with her soul full of Chilton Park and Fallaray.

Simpkins arrived precisely on time, smelling of Windsor soap and brilliantine. He had indulged in a tie which had white spots upon it, discreet white spots, and into this he had stuck a golden pin,—a horse-shoe for luck. He was welcomed by Mr. Breezy in the drawing-room and immediately twigged the fact that there were four places laid.

Mr. Breezy was waggish. It is the way of a parent in all such circumstances. “My boy, who do you think?”

“I dunno. Who?” His tone was anxious and his brows were flustered.

“Lola,” said Mr. Breezy.

“Lola!—I thought she was at Chilton Park with ’er ladyship. I chose this evening because of that. This’ll make me very—well——”

“Not you,” said John Breezy. “You’re all right, me boy. We like you. That inn down at Wargrave sounds good. I can see a nice kitchen garden. I shall love to wander in it in the early morning and pull up spring onions. I’m French enough for them still. You can take it that the missus and I are all in your favor,—formalities waived. We’ll slip away after dinner, go for a little walk and you can plump the question. The betting is you’ll win.” And he clapped the disconcerted valet heartily on the back,—the rather narrow back.

“I’m very much obliged, Mr. Breezy,” said Simpkins, who had gone white to the lips, “and also to Mrs. Breezy. It’s nice to be trusted like this, and all that. But I must say, in all honesty, I wanted to take this affair step by step, so to speak. If I’d ’ad the good fortune to be encouraged by you in my desire to ask for Lola’s ’and,”—there it came,—“I should ’ave taken a week at least to ’ave thought out the proper things to say to Lola ’erself. Sometimes there’s a little laugh in the back of ’er eyes which throws a man off his words. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that. But this is very sudden and I shall ’ave to do a lot of thinking during the meal.”

“Oh, you English,” said John Breezy and roared with laughter. “Mong Doo!”

One of Simpkins’s hands fidgeted with his tie while the other straightened the feathers on the top of his head. Jumping Joseph, he was fairly up against it! How he wished he was a daring man who had traveled a little and read some of the modern novels. It was a frightful handicap to be so old-fashioned.

And then the ladies arrived,—Mrs. Breezy in a white fichu which looked like an antimacassar, a thing usually kept for Christmas day and wedding anniversaries; Lola in a neat blue suit and the highest spirits,—a charming costume.

“Hello, Simpky.”

“Good evening, Mr. Simpkins.”

Simpkins bowed. He certainly had the Grandison manner. And while Lola brought him up to date with the state of affairs, so far as she knew them, Mrs. Breezy disappeared, stood on a chair against the fence in the back yard and received the hot dishes which were handed over to her by the baker’s wife. A couple of scrawny cats, with tails erect, attracted by the aroma of hot duck, followed her to the back door,—but got no farther. “You shall have the bones,” said Mrs. Breezy, and they were duly encouraged.

The dinner was a success, even although Simpkins sat through it in one long trance. He ate well to fortify himself and it was obvious to John Breezy, sympathetic soul that he was, that his guest was rehearsing a flowery speech of proposal. The unconscious Lola kept up a merry rattle of conversation and gave them a vivid description of the village through which she had passed that afternoon and of her drive back to town alone from Aylesbury. Of Chilton Park she said nothing. It was too sacred. And when presently John Breezy’s programme was carried out, the table cleared, the two cats rewarded for their patience and Simpkins left alone with Lola, there was a moment of shattering silence. But even then Lola was unsuspecting, and it was not until the valet unbuttoned his coat to free his swelling chest and placed himself in a supplicating attitude on the sofa at her side, that she tumbled to the situation.

“Oh, Simpky,” she said, “what are you going to do?”

It was a wonderful cue. It helped him to take the first ditch without touching either of the banks. The poor wretch slipped down upon his knees, all his pre-arranged words scattered like a load of bricks. “Ask you to marry me, Lola,” he said. “Lola, darling, I love you. I loved you the very minute you came down the area steps, which was all wrong because I thought you’d come from heaven and therefore your place was the front door. I love you and I want you to marry me, and I’ll buy the inn and work like a dog and we’ll send the boy to Lansing or the City of London School and make a gentleman of ’im.”

Not resentment, not amusement, but a great pity swept over Lola. This was a good, kind, generous man and his emotion was so simple and so genuine. And she must hurt him because it was impossible, absurd.

And so for a moment she sat very still and erect, looking exactly like a daffodil with the light on her yellow head, and her eyes shut, because there might be in them that twinkle which Simpkins had noticed and which he must not see. And presently she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, “Oh, Simpky, dear old Simpky, why couldn’t you have loved Ellen? What a difficult world it is.”

“Ellen,” he said. “Oh.”

“I can’t, Simpky. I simply can’t.”

And he sat on his heels and looked like a pricked balloon. “Ain’t I good enough, Lola?”

“Yes, quite good enough. Perhaps too good. But, oh, Simpky, I’m so awfully in love with some one else and it’s a difficult world. That’s the truth. I have to tell it to you. I can never, never marry you, never. Please accept this. Whatever happens to me, and I don’t know whatever will happen to me, I shall always remember how good you were and how proud you made me feel. But I’m so awfully in love with some one else. Awfully. And perhaps I shall never be married. That’s the truth, Simpky.”

And she bent down and kissed him on the forehead, and then got up quickly and raised the kneeling man to his feet. And he stood there, shattered, empty and wordless, with the blow that she had given him ever so softly marking his face, marking his soul.

And Lola was very, very sorry. Poor old Simpky. Poor little Ellen. It was indeed a difficult world.

VI

The next day was Saturday,—a busy day for the Breezys, the one day in the week upon which they pinned their faith to make up for slack business during the remainder of it. In the morning Lola helped her mother to make an enticing display in the windows and along the counter in the shop itself. Mrs. Breezy had recently broadened out a little and now endeavored to sell kodaks and photographic materials, self-filling pens and stationery for ladies, which is tantamount to saying that it was stationery unfit for men. During this busy and early hour, while John Breezy, one-eyed, was looking into the complaints of wrist watches, most of which were suffering from having been taken into the bath, Lola answered her mother’s silent inquiry as to what had happened the previous evening. With a duster in one hand and a silver sugar basin in the other, she looked up suddenly and said, “No, Mother, it wasn’t and will never be possible. Poor old Simpky.”

And Mrs. Breezy nodded and shrugged her shoulders. And Lola hoped that that would be the end of it. But why should she have hoped so, knowing women? A few minutes later Mrs. Breezy began.

“The inn at Wargrave would have been so nice. He said that it had an orchard on one side and a large lawn running down to the river on the other, shaded with old trees,—little tables underneath and lovers’ nooks and sweet peas growing in tubs. Ah, how nice after Queen’s Road, Bayswater. And your father could have fished for hours and I could have rearranged the furniture—and very good furniture too, he said—and made things look spick and span. And he’s a good man, is Albert Simpkins, a very unusual man, educated, religious, honest, with a sort of white flame burning in him somewhere. He would have made a good husband, dearie.—However, I suppose you know best.” And she threw an anxious glance at her little girl who had become, if anything, more of an enigma to her than ever. It didn’t matter about the apron that she wore; nor did the fact that she was very efficiently cleaning that silver thing detract from the new and subtle dignity and poise that she had acquired. And her accent, and her choice of words,—they were those of Mrs. Breezy’s favorite actress who played fashionable women. It was very extraordinary. What a good ear the child must have and what a very observant eye,—rather like her father’s, although he had to be assisted by a microscope. “You won’t think it over, I suppose?” she asked finally, long after Lola had believed the subject to be closed. Mothers have an amazing way of recurring to old arguments. But Lola shook her head again and gave a little gesture that was peculiarly French, as who should say, “My dear! Marriage!”

As soon as the shop was opened and Mrs. Breezy was on duty and John Breezy was humming softly over his most monotonous job, Lola went upstairs to the little bedroom which she had completely outgrown now, put on her hat and presently slipped out of the house. All the usual musicians were already at work on the curbstone of Queen’s Road. The strains of “Annie Laurie” were mixed with those of “Son o’ Mine” and there was one daring creature with a concertina who was desecrating Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Perambulators cluttered the pavements and eager housewives were in earnest conversation with butchers and greengrocers who had arranged their wares temptingly outside their shops so that they could be handled and considered and sampled. Lola made her way to Kensington Gardens filled with a desire which had been growing upon her ever since she woke up to make another Cinderella dash into the great world. She was seized with another overpowering eagerness to meet Fallaray on his own level. He was to be in town over the week-end. She knew that. The Government, as though it had not already enough troubles to contend with—Germany haggling and France ready to fly at her throat and America hiding her head in the sand of dead shibboleths like an ostrich—was in the throes of the big strike and its members were hurrying from one conference to another with the labor leaders. Lady Feo away, she had a wonderful chance to use that night and nothing would be easier than to dress once more at Mrs. Rumbold’s and slip into her mother’s house with a latchkey. But she was not able to go into the Gardens because they had been closed to the public. They had been turned over to the military to be used as a center for the mobilization of supplies. She could see men in khaki everywhere, going about their work with a sort of merry energy. “Back to the army agin, Sergeant, back to the army agin.” Unconcerned by the crisis which had fallen upon England and unable to wander along her favorite paths, she turned away just at the moment when a large car, followed by a line of motor busses and heterogeneous traffic, was being held up by a policeman to enable a company of boy scouts to cross the high road. She heard a shout. She saw a man in khaki with a red band round his cap and much brass on its peak and two long lines of ribbons on his chest become suddenly athletic under the stress of great excitement. The next instant her hand was seized and she looked up. It was Chalfont.

“I was just going to think about you,” she said.

“I’ve never stopped thinking of you,” said Chalfont. “What became of you? Where did you go? Where have you been? I searched every hotel in the town. I’ve been almost through every street, like Gilbert À Beckett, calling your name. Good God, why have you played with me like this?”

Somehow, for all his height and finish, in spite of his uniform and his big car and his obvious importance, he reminded her of Simpkins. (“Lola, I love you.”) The same emotion was in the voice, the same desire in the eyes. What was there in her that made her do this thing to men,—while the one man was unattainable, unapproachable? It was a difficult world.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I had to go away that night. But I was just on the verge of thinking about you again. You can’t think how glad I am to see you.”

Still holding her hand as though he would never let her escape, Chalfont mastered his voice. “You little lovely de BrÉzÉ,” he said, not choosing his words. “You strange little bird. I’ve caught you again and I’ve a damned good mind to clip your wings and put you in a cage.”

And Lola laughed. “I’ve always been a canary,” she said, “and some day you may find me in a cage.” But she didn’t add, “not your cage, however golden.” Fallaray’s was the only cage and if that were made of bits of stick it would be golden to her.

“Well, you’re back in town. That’s the chief thing. Get into my car and I’ll drive you home and let’s do something to-night. Let’s dine at the Savoy or the Carlton. I don’t care. Or don’t let’s dine. Anything you like, so long as you’re with me. I’ve got to go along to the War Office now, but I have my evening off, like any factory hand.” And he drew her towards the car, which was waiting by the curb.

“You can drive me as far as Marble Arch,” said Lola. “I must leave you there because I want to buy something in Bond Street.”

“All right, Bond Street then. I want to buy something there too.” He helped her in and said to his man, “Masterman’s, quick.”

The scout master who had drawn his company up against the railings gave a command as Chalfont helped Lola in. The boys presented arms and Chalfont returned their salute with extreme gravity. “The future strike-breakers of the country,” he said. “The best institution we’ve got.—How well you look. Don’t you think you might have sent me a line? I felt like a man in a parachute dropping from twenty-two thousand feet in the dark when I found that you had left me. It was rather a rotten trick of yours.”

“It was very rotten,” said Lola, “but it couldn’t be helped, and I may have to do it again. I don’t want you to ask me why. I don’t want you to ask me anything. There’s a wee mystery about me which I must ask you to respect. Don’t think about it. Don’t let it worry you, but whenever we go out again just let me disappear. One of these days I’ll tell you all about it, General, and probably you will be very much amused.” She ran her finger along his ribbons and gave him a little smile of respect and admiration which almost made him blush. “Well, then,” she added, “what about to-night? I’m free. That’s why I was just going to think of you and really wasn’t a bit surprised when you suddenly pounced upon me. Things happen like that, don’t they? I can meet you at the Savoy or the Carlton or anywhere else you like. Personally, I’m all for the Carlton.”

“The Carlton then,” he said. “Seven-thirty, and after that,—what?”

“Let’s leave it,” said Lola. “I love doing things on the spur of the moment.”

“You swear you’ll come?”

And Lola made a little cross over her heart.

Chalfont heaved a sigh and settled back and looked at her, longing to touch her, longing, in front of all the world, to draw her into his arms and kiss her lips. God, if only this girl knew what she had done to him.—And all the while the car bowled along, competing with every other type of car for precedence, all selfish and many badly driven. Lola had no eyes for the undercurrent of excitement that gave the crowds the look that they had worn in the first days of the War or for the outbreak of khaki that lent the streets their old familiar appearance. She was thinking ahead and making plans and tingling at the idea of dipping once more into the current of life.

Masterman’s, it turned out, was a florist’s shop, filled attractively with lovely blossoms. Chalfont sprang out and gave Lola his hand. “Come in,” he said, “and tell them where to send enough flowers to make a garden of your house. Please,—to celebrate my having found you at last.” He wished to Heaven that he might have taken her to Aspray’s and covered her with diamonds. He would willingly have gone broke to do her honor.

And one of the men came forward to offer his eager services to one who certainly must be of great importance to appear so plainly dressed.

“How kind of you,” said Lola. “Those, then,” and she pointed to a bunch of proud red roses that were standing in a vase.

“Is that all?”

“I want to carry them,” she said.

Chalfont was almost boyishly disappointed. He would like to have pictured her among a riot of color. He had not brought her there with a Machiavelian desire to hear her give her address. He was not that kind of man. “Won’t you have some more?”

But somehow—what was it in her that did these things to men—Lola could see the inn at Wargrave, its orchard and its smooth lawn with little tables under the trees and the silver stream near by, and hear the words, “I love you, Lola; am I good enough——” And she shook her head. “No more,” she said. “They’re lovely,” took them from the man and put them to her lips.

Chalfont gave his name and followed her to the street. “Now where?” he asked.

Lola held out her hand. “Nowhere else. I’m walking. A thousand thanks. Seven-thirty, the Carlton then.”

And once more Chalfont saluted, not as though to a company of boy scouts but to a queen.

And when he had gone, Lola heaved a great big sigh and put the roses to her heart. If they had come from Chilton Park—if Fallaray had cut them for her—If.