At the door of the Cafe Royal they stopped, and Miss Van Tuyn laid a hand on Lady Sellingworth’s arm.

“Do come in, dearest. It will really amuse you,” she said urgently. “And—I’ll be truthful—I want to show you off to the Georgians as my friend. I want them to know how wonderful an Edwardian can be.”

“Please—please!” pleaded Jennings from under his sombrero. “Dick would revel in you. You would whip him into brilliance. I know it. You admire his work, surely?”

“I admire it very much.”

“And he is more wonderful still when he’s drunk. And to-night—I feel it—he will be drunk. I pledge myself that Dick Garstin will be drunk.”

“I’m sure it would be a very great privilege to see Mr. Garstin drunk. But I must go home. Good night, dear Beryl.”

“But the little Bolshevik! You must meet the little Bolshevik!” cried Jennings.

Lady Sellingworth shook her deer-like head, smiling.

“Good night, Mr. Craven.”

“But he is going to get you a taxi,” said Miss Van Tuyn.

“Yes, and if you will allow me I am going to leave you at your door,” said Craven, with decision.

A line appeared in Miss Van Tuyn’s low forehead, but she only said:

“And then you will come back and join us.”

“Thank you,” said Craven.

He took off his hat. Miss Van Tuyn gave him a long and eloquent look, which was really not unlike a Leap Year proposal. Then she entered the cafe with Jennings. Craven thought at that moment that her back looked unusually rigid.

A taxi was passing. He held up his hand. It stopped. Lady Sellingworth and he got in, after he had given the address to the chauffeur.

“What a lovely girl Beryl Van Tuyn is!” said Lady Sellingworth, as they drove off.

“She is—very lovely.”

“And she has a lot of courage, moral courage.”

“Is it?” he could not help saying.

“Yes. She lives as she chooses to live. And yet she isn’t married.”

“Would marriage make it all easier for her?”

“Much, if she married the man who suited her.”

“I wonder what sort of a man that would be.”

“So does she, I think. But she’s a strange girl. I should not be surprised if she were never to marry at all.”

“Don’t you think she would fall in love?”

“Yes. For I think every living woman is capable of that. But she has the sort of intellect which would not be tricked for very long by the heart. Any weakness of hers would soon be over, I fancy.”

“I dare say you are right. In fact I believe you are generally right. She told me you were a book of wisdom. And I feel that it is true.”

“Here is Berkeley Square.”

“How wrong it is of these chauffeurs to drive so fast! It is almost as bad as in Paris. They defy the law. I should like to have this man up.”

He got out. She followed him, looking immensely tall in the dimness.

“I am not going back to the Cafe Royal,” he said.

“But it will be amusing. And I think they are certainly expecting you.”

“I am not going there.”

She rang. Instantly the door was opened by the handsome middle-aged butler.

“Then come in for a little while,” she said casually. “Murgatroyd, you might bring us up some tea and lemon, or will you have whisky and soda, Mr. Craven?”

“I would much rather have tea and lemon, please,” he said.

A great fire was burning in the hall. Again Craven felt that he was in a more elegant London than the London of modern days. As he went up the wide, calm staircase, and tasted the big silence of the house, he thought of the packed crowd in the Cafe Royal, of the uproar there, of the smoke wreaths, of the staring heterogeneous faces, of the shouting or sullenly folded lips, of the—perhaps—tipsy man of genius, of Jennings with his green eyes, his black beard, his tall ebony staff, of the “little bloodthirsty thing” with the round Russian face, of Miss Van Tuyn in the midst of it all, sitting by the side of Enid Blunt, smoking cigarettes, and searching the men’s faces for the looks which were food for her craving. And he loved the contrast which was given to him.

“Do go in and sit by the fire, and I’ll come in a moment,” said the husky voice he was learning to love. “I’m just going to take off my hat.”

Craven opened the great mahogany door and went in.

The big room was very dimly lighted by two standard electric lamps, one near the fireplace, the other in a distant corner where a grand piano stood behind a huge china bowl in which a pink azalea was blooming. There was a low armchair near the fire by a sofa. He sat down in it, and picked up a book which lay on a table close beside it. What did she read—this book of wisdom?

“Musiciens d’aujourd’hui,” by Romain Rolland.

Craven thought he was disappointed. There was no revelation for him in that. He held the book on his knee, and wondered what he had expected to find, what type of book. What special line of reading was Lady Sellingworth’s likely to be? He could imagine her dreaming over “Wisdom and Destiny,” or perhaps over “The Book of Pity and of Death.” On the other hand, it seemed quite natural to think of her smiling her mocking smile over a work of delicate, or even of bitter, irony, such as Anatole France’s story of Pilate at the Baths of Baies, or study of the Penguins. He could not think that she cared for sentimental books, though she might perhaps have a taste for works dealing with genuine passion.

He heard the door open gently, and got up. Lady Sellingworth came in. She had not changed her dress, which was a simple day dress of black. She had only taken off her fur and hat, and now came towards him, still wearing white gloves and holding a large black fan in her hand.

“What’s that you’ve got?” she asked. “Oh—my book!”

“Yes. I took it up because I wondered what you were reading. I think what people read by preference tells one something of what they are. I was interested to know what you read. Forgive my curiosity.”

She sat down by the fire, opened the fan, and held it between her face and the flames.

“I read all sorts of things.”

“Novels?”

“I very seldom read a novel now. Here is our tea. But I know you would rather have a whisky-and-soda.”

“As a rule I should, but not to-night. I want to drink what you are drinking.”

“And to smoke what I am smoking?” she said, with a faintly ironic smile.

“Yes—please.”

She held out a box of cigarettes. The butler went out of the room.

“I love this house,” said Craven abruptly. “I love its atmosphere.”

“It isn’t a modern atmosphere, is it?”

“Neither distinctively modern, nor in the least old-fashioned. I think the right adjective for it would be perhaps—”

He paused and sat silent for a moment.

“I hardly know. There’s something remote, distinguished and yet very warm and intimate about it.”

He looked at her and added, almost with hardihood.

“It’s not a cold, or even a reserved house.”

“Coldness and unnecessary reserve are tiresome—indeed, I might almost say abhorrent—to me.”

She had given him his tea and lemon and taken hers.

“But not aloofness?”

“You have travelled?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know how, when travelling, it is easy to get into intimacies with people whom one doesn’t want to be intimate with at home.”

“Yes. I know all about that.”

“At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but many others less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I can only call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?”

“I think it would probably be called so by some.”

“By whom?”

“Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!”

She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had something almost of youth in it.

“I wonder,” he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laugh had filled up, “I wonder whether I am one of them?”

“I don’t think you are.”

“And Ambrose Jennings?”

“That’s a clever man!” was her reply.

And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and to the type of clever mind which, unable to create, analyses the creations of others sensitively.

“But I much prefer the creators,” she presently said.

“So do I. They are like the fresh air compared with the air in a carefully closed room,” said Craven. “Talking of closed rooms, don’t you think it is strange the liking many brilliant men and women have, both creators and analysers of creators, for the atmosphere of garish or sordid cafes?”

“You are thinking of the Cafe Royal?”

“Yes. Do you know it?”

“Don’t tell Beryl—but I have never been in it. Nevertheless, I know exactly what it is like.”

“By hearsay?”

“Oh, no. In years gone by I have been into many of the cafes in Paris.”

“And did you like them and the life in them?”

“In those days they often fascinated me, as no doubt the Cafe Royal and its life fascinates Beryl to-day. The hectic appeals to something in youth, when there is often fever in the blood. Strong lights, noise, the human pressure of crowds, the sight of myriads of faces, the sound of many voices—all that represents life to us when we are young. Calm, empty spaces, single notes, room all round us for breathing amply and fully, a face here or there—that doesn’t seem like life to us then. Beryl dines with me alone sometimes. But she must finish up in the evening with a crowd if she is near the door of the place where the crowd is. And you must not tell me you never like the Cafe Royal, for if you do I shall not believe you.”

“I do like it at times,” he acknowledged. “But to-night, sitting here, the mere thought of it is almost hateful to me. It is all vermilion and orange colour, while this . . .”

“Is drab!”

“No, indeed! Dim purple, perhaps, or deepest green.”

“You couldn’t bear it for long. You would soon begin longing for vermilion again.”

“You seem to think me very young. I am twenty-nine.”

“Have you ceased to love wildness already?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “But there is something there which makes me feel as if it were almost vulgar.”

“No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful—beautiful, even. It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midst of the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkest clouds. Do you ever read William Watson?”

“I have read some of his poems.”

“There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. ‘Pass, thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to stay—‘”

She stopped and held her fan a little higher.

“I don’t know it,” he said.

“It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know when to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away.”

“But if the heart wants to remain?”

“Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that. And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old wildness—that must give youth nausea of the soul.”

She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through his veins.

Suddenly he thought of the “old guard,” and he knew that not one of the truly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.

“After all,” he thought, “it isn’t the envelope that matters; it is the letter inside.”

Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady Sellingworth’s eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.

And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that possibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth’s abrupt desertion of the “old guard” and plunge into old age. But even he did not know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way. And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved her and who was almost certain, barring the explosion of a moral bombshell, and perhaps even then, to go on loving her.

No one knew why Lady Sellingworth had abruptly and finally emerged from the world of illusions in which she had lived. But possibly a member of the underworld, a light-fingered gentleman of brazen assurance, had long ago guessed the reason for her sudden departure from the regiment of which she had been a conspicuous member; possibly he had guessed, or surmised, why she had sent in her papers. But even he could scarcely be certain.

The truth of the matter was this.