Jenny spent a large part of the winter in Italy, Chat being with her, Cartmell and I left in charge at home. But early in the New Year she came back and then, her mourning being over, she launched out. Without forgetting her father's injunction against spending all her income, she organized the household on a more extensive scale; new carriages and more horses, a couple of motors, and a little electric launch for the lake were among the additions she made. The out-of-doors staff grew till Cartmell had to ask for an estate-steward to take the routine off his shoulders, while Mrs. Bennet and Loft blazed with pride at the swelling numbers of their subordinates in the house itself. Jenny's taste for splendor came out. She even loved a touch of the gorgeous; old Mr. Driver's dark blue liveries assumed a decidedly brighter tint, and I heard her express regret that postilions and four horses were in these days thought ostentatious except for very great national or local potentates. "If I were a peeress, I would have them," she declared rather wistfully. If that were the condition and the only one, after all we might perhaps live to see the four horses and the postilions at Breysgate before we were many months older. By now, there was matter for much speculation about her future; the closer you were to her, the more doubtful any speculation seemed.

This was the time of her greatest glory—when she was fresh to her state and delighting in it, when all the neighborhood seemed to be at her feet, town and county vying in doing her honor—and in accepting her hospitality.

Entertainment followed entertainment; now it was the poor, now it was the rich, whom she fed and fÊted. The crown of her popularity came perhaps when she declared that she would have no London house and wanted no London season. Catsford and the county were good enough for her. The Catsford Herald and Times printed an article on this subject which was almost lyrical in its anticipation of a return of the good old days when the aristocracy found their own town enough. It was headed "Catsford a Metropolis—Why not?" And it was Jenny who was to imbue the borough with this enviable metropolitan character! This was Redeunt Saturnia regna with a vengeance!

To all outward appearance she was behaving admirably—and her acquaintance with Fillingford had reached to as near intimacy as it was ever likely to get while it rested on a basis of mere neighborly friendship. Lady Sarah had been convinced or vanquished—it was impossible to say which. At any rate she had withdrawn her opposition to intercourse between the two houses and appeared to contemplate with resignation, if not with enthusiasm, a prospect of which people had now begun to talk—not always under their breath. Fillingford Manor and Breysgate were now united closely enough for folk to ask whether they were to be united more closely still. For my own part I must admit that, if Lord Fillingford were wooing, he showed few of the usual signs; but perhaps Jenny was! I remembered the story of Rabbit—without forgetting the subject of the other nickname!

Old Cartmell was a great advocate of the Fillingford alliance. House laid to house and field to field were anathema to the Prophet; for a family lawyer they have a wonderful attraction. An estate well-rounded off, spacious, secure from encroachment and, with proper capital outlay, returning three per cent.—he admires it as the rest of us a Velasquez—well, some of us—or others, a thoroughbred. Careful man as he was, he declined to be dismayed at Jenny's growing expenditure. "The income's growing, too," he said. "It grows and must grow with the borough. Old Nick Driver had a very long head! She can't help becoming richer, whatever she does—in reason." He winked at me, adding, "After all, it isn't as if she had to buy Fillingford, is it?" I did not feel quite sure that it was not—and at a high price; but to say that would have been to travel into another sphere of discussion.

"Well, I'm very glad her affairs are so flourishing. But I wish the new liveries weren't so nearly sky-blue. I hope she won't want to put you and me in them!"

Cartmell paid no heed to the liveries. He took a puff at his cigar and said, "Now—if only she'll keep straight!" That would have seemed an odd thing to say—to anyone not near her.

Yet trouble came—most awkwardly and at a most awkward moment. Octon himself was the cause of it, and I—unluckily for myself—the only independent witness of the central incident.

He had—like Jenny—been away most of the winter, but I had no reason to suppose that they had met or even been in communication; in fact, I believe that he was in London most of the time, finishing his new book and superintending the elaborate illustrations with which it was adorned. He did, however, reappear at Hatcham Ford close on the heels of Jenny's return to Breysgate, and the two resumed their old—and somewhat curious—relations. If ever it were true of two people that they could live neither with nor without one another, it seemed true of that couple. He was always seeking her, and she ever ready and eager to welcome him; yet at every other meeting at least they had a tiff—Jenny being, I must say, seldom the aggressor, at least in the presence of third persons: perhaps her offenses, such as they were, were given in private. But there was one difference which I perceived quickly, but which Octon seemed slower to notice: I hoped that he might never notice it at all, or, if he did, accept it peaceably. Jenny preferred, if it were possible, to receive him when the household party alone was present; when the era of entertaining set in, he was bidden on the off-nights. No doubt this practice admitted of being put—and perhaps was put by Jenny—in a flattering way. But it was impossible to be safe with him—there was no telling how his temper would take him. So long as he believed that Jenny herself best liked to see him intimately, all would go well; but if once he struck on the truth—that she was yielding deference to the wishes of his enemies, her neighbors—there might very probably be an explosion. "Volcano" would get active if he thought that "Rabbit" and company—Jenny had concealed neither nickname from him—were being consulted. Or he might get just a wayward whim; if his temper were out, he would make trouble for its own sake—or to see with how much he could make her put up; each was always trying the limits of his or her power over the other.

The actual occasion of his outburst was, as usual, trivial, and perhaps—far as that was from being invariably the case—afforded him some shadow of excuse. Neither did Chat help matters. He had sent up from Hatcham Ford a bunch of splendid yellow roses, and, when he came to dinner the same evening, he naturally expected to see them on the table. "Where are my roses?" he asked abruptly, when we were half-way through dinner.

"I love them—they're beautiful—but they didn't suit my frock to-night," said Jenny, smiling. She would have managed the matter all right if she had been let alone, but Chat must needs put her oar in.

"They'll look splendid on the table to-morrow night," she remarked—as though she were saying something soothing and tactful.

"Oh, you've got a dinner-party to-morrow?" he asked—still calm, but growing dangerous.

"Nobody you'd care about," Jenny assured him; she had given Chat a look which immediately produced symptoms of flutters.

"Who's coming?"

"Oh, only Lord Fillingford and Lady Sarah, the Wares, the Rector, the Aspenicks, and one or two more."

"H'm. My roses are good enough for that lot, but I'm not, eh?"

Jenny's hand was forced; Chat had undermined her position. Not even for the sake of policy did she love to do an unhandsome thing—still less to be found out in doing one. To use the roses and slight the donor would not be handsome. She knew Aspenick's objection to meeting Octon, but probably she thought that she could keep Aspenick in order.

"I had no idea you'd care about it. I thought you liked coming quietly better. I like it so much better when I can have you to myself."

No use now! His prickles were out; he would not be cajoled.

"So I may as a rule—but it's rather marked when you never ask me to meet anyone."

"I shall be delighted to see you at dinner to-morrow," said Jenny. "Will you come?"

"Yes, I will come—I hope I know how to behave myself, don't I?"

"Oh, yes, you know well enough," she answered, delicately emphasizing the difference between knowledge and practice. "All right, I shall expect you."

"I know the meaning of it. That little Aspenick minx and her fool of a husband are trying to get me boycotted—that's it."

Jenny, as her wont was, tried to smooth him down, but with little success. He went off early, still very sulky, and growling about the Aspenicks. For what it is worth, there was no doubt that they were now busy leaders in the cabal against him, and he knew it.

"It won't be very pleasant, but we must carry it off with brave faces," said Jenny, referring to the next day's dinner. She looked vexed, though, at this crossing of her arrangements.

Probably the dinner would have passed off tolerably, if not comfortably—for Aspenick was a gentleman, and even Octon might feel that he ought to be on his good behavior—when his temper recovered. But unluckily his temper had not recovered by eleven o'clock the following morning, and it was then that the lamentable thing happened.

I had finished my after-breakfast work with Jenny and had left the house, to go down the hill to the Old Priory. The road through the park crosses the path I had to follow, at about seventy yards from the house. Approaching this road, I saw Lady Aspenick's tandem coming along on my right. She was, as I have said before, an accomplished whip, and tandem-driving was a favorite pastime of hers. To-day she appeared to be trying a new leader; at any rate the animal was very skittish, now rearing, now getting out of line, now sidling along—doing anything, in fact, but his plain duty. She was driving slowly and carefully, while the two grooms were half-standing, half-kneeling behind, looking over her shoulders and evidently ready to jump down and run to the leader's head at any moment. I stood watching their progress; it was pretty to see her drive. Then I became aware of Octon's massive figure coming from the opposite direction; he was walking full in the middle of the road, which at this point is not very broad—just wide enough for two carriages to pass one another between the banks, which rise sharply on either side to the height of nearly three feet.

As Lady Aspenick drew nearer to Octon, one of the grooms whistled. Octon gave way—a little. Apparently the groom—whether Lady Aspenick spoke to him or not I could not see—thought that there was not yet room enough, for he whistled again, waving his hand impatiently. Octon edged a little more to the side of the road and then stood still, apparently waiting for them to pass. He was by no means at the side of the road—neither was he now in the middle; perhaps he was a third of the way across; and, so far as I could judge, there was room for them to pass—and a sufficient margin, at any rate for a steady team. Now the groom shouted—a loud "Hi!" or some such word—in a peremptory way. I heard Octon's reply plainly. "There's plenty of room, I tell you." Lady Aspenick had her whip in her hand—ready, no doubt, to give her restless leader a flick to make him mind his manners as they went by. While this happened, I had begun to walk on again slowly, meaning to speak to Octon when the lady had passed. I was about fifteen yards away—and the tandem was just approaching where Octon stood. Just as she came up to him, Lady Aspenick loosed the long lash of her whip; it flew out and I looked to see a jump from the leader, who was dancing and capering in a very restive way. But unless she took great care—or Octon moved a bit——

The next instant, while the idea was still incomplete in my mind, the end of the lash caught him full on the face. He jumped back with a shout of rage. The leader gave a wild plunge toward the other side of the road; the cart swayed and rocked. The grooms leaped down and ran as hard as they could to the leader's head. Octon sprang forward, caught hold of the whip, wrenched it from Lady Aspenick's hand, almost pulling her out of her seat, broke it in the middle across his knee, and flung the fragments down on the road. I ran up hastily.

"You did that on purpose," he said, his voice shaking with rage. There was a red streak across his face from the cheek bone to the chin.

She was pale, but she looked at him calmly through her eyeglasses.

"Nonsense," she answered, "but if I had, it would have been only your deserts. Why didn't you give me room?"

"There was plenty of room if you knew how to drive; and, if you wanted more, you could have asked for it civilly."

"You must have seen I had a young horse." She turned to me. "Give me my whip, please, Mr. Austin. You saw what happened? I'll ask my husband to come and see you about it." Then she ordered her men to take out the refractory leader, and lead him home; she would drive back with the wheeler. She took no more notice of Octon, nor he of her (unless to watch her grooms' proceedings with a sullen stare), but as she started off, holding the broken butt of the whip in her hand, she called to me, "Tell Miss Driver we're looking forward to dinner to-night."

The grooms had looked dangerously at Octon, and were now saying something to one another; but it needed at least one to hold the horse, and Octon would be far more than a match for either of them singly. His angry eyes seemed only to hope that they would give him some excuse for violence.

"Follow your mistress," I said to them. "It's no affair of yours."

I think that they were glad to get my sanction for their retreat. Off they went, and I was left alone with Octon.

"If it had been a man, I wouldn't have left a whole bone in his body. She struck me deliberately—on purpose."

"It wasn't a man. Why didn't you give her more room?"

"There was plenty of room?" he persisted. "The whole road isn't hers, is it?" With that he turned on his heel and sauntered off toward the south gate, in the direction of his own house.

There was the incident—and I had the grave misfortune of being the only independent witness of it. There was the incident—and there was the dinner-party in the evening, to which both the Aspenicks and Leonard Octon were bidden. Clearly the matter could not stand where it was; it was, alas! no less clear that I should have to give my evidence. Of course the meeting at dinner must not take place; whatever else might or might not follow from the affair, that much was certain. I went back to the house and asked to see Jenny.

I told her the story plainly and fully—all that I had seen and all that had been said; she did not interrupt me once.

"There it is," I ended. "His case is that he gave her plenty of room and that she purposely lashed him over the face. Hers is that he gave her too little room, deliberately annoying her, that her leader was restive and she had to use her whip, and that, if she hit him, it was his own fault for standing where he did."

"His snatching away the whip and breaking it—isn't that bad?" she asked. "Or if he thought she meant to hit him?"

"Then it's still bad, I suppose, since she's a woman; but it's perhaps understandable—above all in him."

"Well, what's your own opinion about it?"

"That's just what I don't want to give," I objected.

"But you must. I have to come to some decision about this."

"Well, then—I think he did leave her room—enough and a little more than enough; but I also think that he meant to annoy her. I'm sure he didn't mean to put her in danger of an upset, but I do think that, with such a horse as she was driving, an upset might have been the result, and he ought to have thought of that—only he doesn't know much about horses. On the other hand I don't think she deliberately made up her mind to hit him—but I do think she meant to go as near to it as she could without actually doing it; I think she meant to make him jump. That's about my idea of the truth of the matter."

"Yes, I daresay," she said thoughtfully. "When Sir John comes to you, bring him straight up here. They mustn't meet to-night, of course, but I should like to see Sir John first—if he comes this morning or soon after lunch."

"It's all very tiresome," said I lugubriously.

She suddenly put her hands in mine—in one of her moments of impulse. "Oh, yes, yes, dear friend!" she murmured with an acute note of distress in her voice. Tiresome as the affair was, it hardly seemed to call for that; but I had not yet realized her position in its full difficulty; I did not know what every new proof of Octon's "impossibility" meant to her.

Sir John arrived, hot-haste, before lunch. Happily Fillingford was with him. I say happily, for I gathered that the angry husband's first intention had been to go straight to Hatcham Ford and undertake the horse-whipping of Leonard Octon—which enterprise must have ended in broken bones for Sir John, and probably the police court for both combatants. Fillingford happened to be with him when Lady Aspenick arrived at home and told her story; with difficulty he dissuaded Aspenick from violent measures; above all, nothing must get into the papers; all the same, it was a case for decisive private action. According to my orders I took Sir John up to Jenny, and Fillingford came with us.

There—before her—we had the whole story over again. Sir John told his wife's version, I put Octon's forward against it—if only for fair play's sake. Sir John naturally would have none of Octon's, nor would Fillingford. Then I repeated my own impression of the affair. Any points in it which made for Octon Sir John violently rejected; Fillingford's attitude was wiser, the position he took up less open to the charge of prejudice; he disliked Octon intensely, but he would not rest his case on the weak foundation of an angry temper.

"I'm quite content to accept Mr. Austin's view of the facts, which he has given us so clearly and so impartially. Where does his view lead? Why to this—Not only was Mr. Octon inexcusably violent at the end, but he was the original aggressor. He did not, Mr. Austin is convinced, mean to cause danger to Lady Aspenick, but he did mean to cause her vexation—in fact to offer her an affront. In my opinion anything on her part that followed is imputable to his own fault, and he had no title to resent it. I base my decision not on Lady Aspenick's account, but on Mr. Austin's independent testimony; and I say that Mr. Octon behaved as no gentleman and as no good neighbor should."

Jenny had listened to all the stories in silence, and in silence also she heard Fillingford's summing-up. Now she looked at him and asked briefly, "What follows?"

"It follows that he must be cut," interposed Aspenick in dogged anger.

"We have a right to protect ourselves—above all the ladies of our families—from the chance of such occurrences. They mustn't be exposed to them if we can help it; they certainly need not and must not be exposed to the unpleasantness of meeting the man who causes them. We have a right to act on that line—and I, for one, feel bound to act on it, Miss Driver."

"Not a man in the place will do anything else," declared Aspenick.

But I was wondering what Jenny would do. Almost without disguise they were presenting to her an ultimatum. They were saying, "If you want him, you can't have us. We can't come where he comes. Is he to go on coming to Breysgate? Is he to go on using your park?" She did not like dictation—nor did she like sending her friends away. To send them away on dictation—would she do that? Or would she fall into one of her rages, bid them all go hang, and throw in her lot with boycotted Octon? She turned to me.

"Do you agree with what these gentlemen say?" she asked.

In the end I liked Octon or, at any rate, found him very interesting, and I was therefore ready, for myself, to put up with his tempers and his tantrums. People who did not like him nor find him interesting could not be asked to do that. And he stood condemned on my own evidence.

"They are quite within their rights," I had to answer.

She was not in a rage; she was anxious and distressed. Nor was the anxiety all hers. Aspenick indeed had at the moment no thought but of anger on his wife's account, but Fillingford must have had other things in his mind. To put it at the lowest, he valued his acquaintance with the mistress of Breysgate Priory; there were good grounds for guessing that he valued it very much. If he had learned anything at all about her, he must have known that he was risking it now. But he showed no hesitation; he awaited her answer with a grave deference which declared the importance he attached to it but gave no reason to hope that his own course of action could be affected, whatever the answer might be.

Neither did she give the impression of hesitating—it was not exactly that. Whether in her heart she hesitated I cannot tell; if she did, she would not let them see it. Her demeanor betrayed nothing more than a pained reluctance to condemn utterly, to recognize that one who had been received as a friend and as a gentleman had by his own fault forfeited his claim to those titles. Her delay in giving her decision—for the real question now was whether she would join in Octon's ostracism—did not impugn their judgment nor seem to weigh their merits against the culprit's. It did not declare a doubt of their being right; it said only with what pain she would recognize that they were right.

"Yes—it's the only thing," she said at last.

"I was sure you would agree with us—painful as such a course is," Fillingford said.

"It's only cutting a cad," Aspenick grumbled, half under his breath. Jenny did not or would not hear him.

The bargain was struck, and fully understood without more words. Jenny's friends must not be exposed to meeting Octon at Breysgate or in Breysgate park. They would be strangers to Octon; if Jenny would be their friend, she must be a stranger to him. Dropping Octon was the condition of holding her place in their society. She understood the condition and accepted it. There was no more to be said.

They took leave and she did not ask them to stay to lunch. Her farewell to Aspenick was cold, though she made a civil reference to seeing him again at dinner—nothing was said about Octon in that connection! But toward Fillingford she showed a marked, if subdued, graciousness. Clearly she meant to convey to him that, distressed as she was by the incident and its necessary consequences, she attached no blame to him for the part he had taken—nay, was grateful to him for his counsel and guidance.

"I never had any doubt of your coming to a right decision," he told her, holding her hand for a moment longer than he need. She looked into his eyes, but said nothing; she gave the air of being heartily content to surrender her judgment to his.

I saw them off and came back to her. She was still standing in the same place, looking very thoughtful and frowning slightly; it was by no means the trustful expression with which her eyes had dwelt on Fillingford's.

"Directly after lunch I must go down to Hatcham Ford and see Mr. Octon. I want you to come with me."

"I? Not Miss Chatters?"

"You—not Chat. Don't be stupid," she said.