WHEN George came, he took out a family subscription to the weekly balls at the Saloon, and we go, Ariadne and I. Mother will not and Aunt Gerty may not. Mother expressly stipulates that she shall refrain from doing as she wishes in this one particular, and as Aunt Gerty is mother’s guest, she has to please her hostess. She grumbles a good deal at George’s bearishness to her, in depriving her of any source of amusement in this dull place, but as a matter of fact she is very much taken up with Mr. Bowser. He was Ariadne’s umbrella man. The Umbrella dodge came off with Aunt Gerty, and this unpoetical two became fast friends on the cliff-walk one rainy day. Mr. Bowser is a rich brewer, and very much mixed up with the politics of this place. He owns three blocks of lodging-houses on the Front. Of course Simon Hermyre’s people won’t have anything to do with him. It would be awkward if Ariadne married Simon and Bowser had previously married Ariadne’s legal aunt. If Aunt Gerty does marry Mr. Bowser, then I do think George would be justified in cutting himself off from us all. To be the brother-in-law of Mr. Bowser would be the ruin of him. Well, chay Sarah, Sarah! as George says sometimes. At any rate we have no right to interfere with Aunt Gerty trying to do the best she can for herself. She is awfully kind to us and very loyal, Mother says, and she never gets a good word from George to make her anxious to please him. Mother gives her plenty of rope in the Bowser business, on condition she doesn’t try to squeeze herself into the Saloon dancing set where George’s friends go.

The dancing at the Saloon is very poor. The balls are only an excuse for going out on the Parade and watching the sea with a man. I like to watch it best myself, without a man. I like to see the whole dark sheet of water far away, and the thin white line near by that is all there is to tell one where the little waves are lying flattened out on the shore. The tide slips in so softly, minding its own business through the long evening while the idiots above galumph about and dance polkas in the great hall inside, with flags from the Crimea on the walls that flap in the draught of the North wind, and remind us constantly that we are hung over the sea.

There is a nice boy I like—he is twelve, quite young, and doesn’t need conversing with. I simply take him about with me to prevent people meeting me and saying, the way they do, “What, child, all alo-one by yourself?” which is so irritating.

He never interferes, he trusts me, he likes me. He is the son of Sir Edward Fynes of Barsom, and they keep horses. I might say they eat horses and drink horses and sleep on horses there. Ernie wants me to like him, so he brought me a list of his father’s yearlings, with their names and weights and what they fetched at the sale written out in his own hand. It interested him, so he thought it would interest me. It must have taken him hours to do, and when he put it into my hand, and ran away, what amusement do you think I could get out of this sort of thing?

And so on for a page of foolscap. Rather an odd sort of love-letter, but I saw he meant it, and didn’t tease him.

Ernie and I moon about all the evening and watch the others. It is not etiquette to interfere with a lady who has her own cavalier, and that is why I annex Ernie, as Lady Scilly does Simon. We don’t dance. I don’t care to begin the dance racket till I am out and forced, not I, nor do I suppose the grown-ups want a couple of children getting into their legs and throwing them down. No, I watch them, and Ernie watches me.

Simon Hermyre and Lady Scilly dance half the time together. I suppose it is de rigueur. And when they are not dancing they are talking of money. I have heard them. I don’t mind listening, for, of course, money isn’t private. And I think it revolting to talk business on moonlight nights by the sea. They argue about bulls and bears and berthas, which puzzled me at first, till Ernie told me they did not mean either animals or women. Simon is not at all interested in any of them. Ernie (who is at Eton) says it is because he has nothing on, and only talks about stocks to please her.

Simon does not talk about dirty money when he is with my sister, he does not talk much about anything, and yet they seem to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps Ariadne is a rest after Lady Scilly?

One damp evening, Ariadne and he came out of the big hall together, but before she sat down in her white dress on one of the iron seats outside, Simon carefully wiped it with his handkerchief, though it hadn’t been raining. Then, without thinking apparently, he put it up to his own forehead.

“Phew! I’m hot,” he said. “It’s a weary old world! Hope I die soon!”

Simon talks broad Yorkshire, I notice. Lady Scilly had been Simon’s partner before Ariadne, and I had passed with my boy—that’s what the grown-up women always call their special men!—just as Simon had taken out his nice gold-backed pocket-book with his initials in diamonds that I envy him so.

“Blow these wretched figures! They won’t come!” I heard him say.

“On they come fast enough, not single spies, but in battalions,” Lady Scilly had answered pettishly; “what I complain of is that they won’t go! See if you can’t pull me through, dear boy.”

I thought it indecent of her to make poor Simon do her sums for her, on a heavenly night like this, when the tide is fully in, and all you can see through the white rails of the Esplanade is a soft creeping heap of dark water, like a pailful of ink. Simon now got up and looked down into it, and his forehead became one mass of wrinkles, like a Humphrey’s iron building.

And Ariadne got up too, and looked into the water with him, but she said nothing. I know her pretty well, and that it was because she had nothing to say, and as he evidently didn’t want her to say it, it didn’t matter. She had put her hand on the railing, and it looked very nice and white in the moonlight somehow, quite like a novel heroine’s, so she is repaid for her trouble and expense in almond paste-balls. Simon Hermyre looked at it, as I used to stand and look at a peach or an apple on the wall when I was little. He would have liked to pick it, as I would the apple or peach, and hold it tight in his own hand, I thought, but he didn’t, but sighed instead and said—

“I wish I had a mother!” That wretched Ernie boy began to giggle. I nearly smothered him, for I wanted to hear what Ariadne would say.

“Do you?” she said. “I have.”

Did any one ever hear anything so stupid and obvious? Yet Simon seemed to like it, for the next thing he said was—

“Why don’t I know your mother? I expect she is gentle and sweet like you.”

I have no doubt Ariadne would have been imbecile enough to answer Yes, not seeing the pitfall there was hidden in the words, but at that very moment George and Lady Scilly came out with a lot of other people. They came drifting along to the balustrade where we were, and Lady Scilly put her hand on Simon’s shoulder very lightly, and George put his heavily on Ariadne’s.

Simon whisked away his shoulder and wriggled as much as he dared. Ariadne of course could not move at all. She said afterwards she felt as if it was her own marriage-service, and that George was “giving this woman away” quite naturally. He likes to see her with Simon and shows it, it is the only time in his life that he is what they call fatherly.

Lady Scilly gave Simon two taps. “I love this thing, you know,” she said to George. Then, going a little way back—“Just look at them! Isn’t it idyllic? Romeo and Juliet spooning on a balcony over the sea instead of over a garden, and with a squawking gull instead of a nightingale to listen to. And I—poor I—am Romeo’s deserted Rosaline. Did Rosaline take on Mercutio, I wonder, when she had had enough of Romeo?”

She glared up at George, and the moonlight caught her face the wrong way and made her look old. All the same, she would not have dared to say all this if she hadn’t felt sure of Simon, and it proved that he hadn’t been silly enough to make her think it worth while to be jealous of Ariadne.

“I always thought Mercutio by far the most interesting character in the piece. Come, good Mercutio! Romeo, fare—I mean flirt well!”

They turned away and left Simon grinding his little pearly teeth.

“I consider all that in beastly taste!” he said, whacking the rail with Ariadne’s fan. Of course it broke, and Ariadne cried out like a baby when you have smashed its favourite toy.

Simon was thoroughly out of temper with all the world, Ariadne included. Lady Scilly had called him Romeo; well, he was jealous of Mercutio! Such is man—and boy! He spoke quite crossly to Ariadne.

“I’ll give you a new one. I’ll give you twenty new ones. Let us go in and dance—dance like the devil!”

Ernie told me a great deal about Lady Scilly after they had all gone in. He knows a lot about her, through his father, who has a place near the Scillys in Wiltshire. He says his father says that at this present moment she hasn’t got a cent to call her own; what with gambling, and betting, she is fairly broke. I wish, then, she would try to borrow money off George—just once—for that would choke him off her soonest of anything, and then he would perhaps be nicer to mother?

Ariadne would not go to bed at all that night. She sat in the window, eating dried raisins, just to keep soul and body together. And all the time her affairs were progressing most favourably. She was vexed because she saw that Lady Scilly did not consider her worth being jealous of. I told her she was never nearer getting Simon than now when he was bringing a heart that Lady Scilly had bruised by sordid monetary considerations to her, to stroke and make well by her soothing ways. And Ariadne is soothing, she can do the silence dodge well. She is a regular walking rest-cure, I tell her, for those that like it.

Simon was unusually nice to her all the next week, just as I prophesied he would be. Then an untoward event happened.

There were dances at the Saloon only once a week. Next night a conjuror came to the Saloon Hall, called Dapping, and Aunt Gerty took us, paying one shilling each for us. There were worse seats, only sixpence, but there were also better, viz. the first four rows were three shillings. The Scilly party with Irene Lauderdale were in them, and on the other side, very obviously keeping themselves to themselves, there was Sir Frederick Hermyre and Almeria, and a severe woman aunt, and Simon in attendance. The Hermyres were staying all night at the hotel, and he had to be with them for once, waiting on his father, not on Lady Scilly. It couldn’t have been as amusing for him as her party, that laughed and joked, but still Simon as usual looked quite happy as he was. He would have thought it rude to look bored, and he did look so nice and clean, with his little retroussÉ nose next to his father’s beak, and Almeria’s large knuckle-duster of a proboscis framing them. I don’t suppose Simon even knew Ariadne and I were there, for we were a long way behind, and he doesn’t love Ariadne enough yet to scent her everywhere. Next us was Mr. Bowser, Aunt Getty’s mash, as she calls him. I believe she had told him we were to be there. Ariadne and I were disgusted at being mixed with Bowser, and tried to make believe we were a separate party, and talked hard to ourselves all the time. Ariadne was in a white muslin she had made herself—window-curtain stuff from Equality’s sale. It was pretty, but casual. She never will have patience to overcast the seams or settle which side they are to be on, definitely. She had made her hat too, of chiffon with a great trail of ivy leaves over the crown. I wished she had been dressed more soberly, considering the company we were in.

I wasn’t attending very much, but presently I heard Mr. Dapping with Mr. Bowser, who as a leading citizen had gone on the stage, planning out a sort of trick. Dapping was first blindfolded, and Bowser was to go into the body of the hall and pretend to murder some one, and Dapping would tell him afterwards whom he had murdered. Dapping even went off the platform so as to be quite sure not to see, and Mr. Bowser came down the gangway in the middle, shaking his snub head about as he selected a victim—and he had actually the cheek to choose Ariadne!

He didn’t ask Aunt Gerty or Ariadne either, if he might take this liberty, but just seized Ariadne by her thin muslin shoulder, and pretended to drive a knife into her back. It all happened before she had time to stop him. She wriggled, but of course they thought she was acting up. Then he sat down, quite pleased with himself, beside Aunt Gerty, and Mr. Dapping was released and his eyes unbandaged, and he came plunging down the gangway till he came to our row. He was intensely excited and puffing like a steam-engine, very disagreeable to hear.

He seized Ariadne by the same shoulder Bowser had murdered her at, and shook her, saying, “This is the victim!”

It made Ariadne horribly common, Aunt Gerty said afterwards, though she might easily have prevented it and told Bowser to hit one of his own class! Anyhow, poor Ariadne turned all the colours of the rose and the rainbow, and nearly cried for shame. She might as well have been on the stage, for she was just as public. All the Scilly party had of course turned round and were staring with all their eyes. Sir Frederick and Almeria never moved at all. Poor Simon did,—just once—and I saw his scared, disgusted face looking over his shoulder. I had never seen him look like that before. It was awful!

The conjuror went calmly on to the next trick, but poor Ariadne had been thoroughly upset. She whispered to me, “I can’t stand any more of this. I believe I shall faint!”

That wasn’t true, I knew, she can’t faint if she tries, but still any one could see that she was feeling very uncomfortable.

I said to my aunt, “We are going, Ariadne and I. You can stay behind if you like.”

And we got up and passed out amid a row of sympathetic—that was the worst of it—faces. Of course Aunt Gerty followed us out presently, and scolded Ariadne all the way home for allowing herself to be made a victim of. Ariadne never spoke, till we got in and up in our room. Then she burst out crying.

“He will never speak to me again. I know he won’t. He is very proud, and I have disgraced him—disgraced him before his order!”

“You can’t disgrace that until you are married to him, I suppose, and now you never will be.”

“No,” Ariadne said, meekly, “I am unworthy of him.”

“You are very weak!” said I, “but on the whole I consider it was Aunt Gerty’s fault. Brewing away like that and not attending to her charges!”

Ariadne cried and hocketed, as the cook used to say, all night, and I tried to comfort her and tell her that Simon would probably come to call next day to show that noblesse oblige, and that he didn’t think anything of it. Of course when I remembered his face, I didn’t suppose he would ever care to see a girl who had been pummelled, first by Bowser and then by Dapping, again.

All next day Ariadne would not go out. She said she could not meet the eye of Whitby. It rained luckily. Next day she still wouldn’t, and as it was one of the best days we have had, I began to think that she was going too far with her remorse, and was quite cross with her.

“No one ever remembers anything that happened to some one else,” I said; “and they can’t see that your shoulder is black and blue under your gown.”

“I feel as if I had been publicly flogged, and I had on my white muslin too,” she moaned, though I don’t know what she meant, that it had made a more conspicuous object, or was bad for the dress, or what.

“I know one thing,” she gulped. “Aunt Gerty or no Aunt Gerty, I shall cut Mr. Bowser next time I see him—cut him dead.”

“Why not? He murdered you.”

I think this was Ariadne’s first sorrow, and lasted quite a week. She would only go out after dark, to hide her shame from every eye. Mother encouraged her, and said she knew how she must feel. To Aunt Gerty she said several times, “Never again!” which is the most awful thing to say to any one. It meant that Aunt Gerty wasn’t to be trusted with girls, and especially George’s girls. Mother gave it her well.

“You should have prevented Ariadne from letting herself down like that! I shall never hear the end of it from George.”

“George indeed! Why wasn’t George looking after his own precious kids then? I don’t think he’s got any need to talk! My Lord Scilly will be having a word with him some of these days, or I shall be very much surprised!”

“You hold your wicked, lying tongue!” was all Mother said to her. Mother, somehow, hasn’t the heart to be hard on Aunt Gerty.

I could have told Aunt Gerty that Lord Scilly was keeping quite calm. He can manage Lady Scilly well enough. I have heard him say so. “Paquerette knows the side her bread is buttered as well as any woman living! She is a right good sort, is Paquerette, only she likes to kick her heels a bit! She and I understand each other!”

He talks like this, as if they were like Darby and Joan, but Lady Scilly doesn’t agree with him, or says she doesn’t. “Scilly and I,” she once said to Ariadne, “are an astigmatic couple.” She meant, she explained, that they are like two eyes whose sight is different. I fancy his is the long-sighted eye.

Well, this little row was soon over as far as Mother and Aunt Gerty were concerned. George’s scolding was short and sweet, Aunt Gerty said, and she couldn’t possibly dislike him more than she did already. But Ariadne could not get over her disgrace for ages. She still wouldn’t stir out of the house, but I went out regularly and policed Lady Scilly and Simon. Of course this contretemps to Ariadne has had the effect of throwing them into each other’s arms worse than ever. They became inseparable. If Lady Scilly had only known it, Simon’s being near her made her look quite old and anxious, whereas she made him look young and bored.

One morning I stood and watched them leaning over the wooden rail of the quay. Everybody leans there in the mornings, it’s fashionable, and if you lean a little forward or backward you can either see or not be seen by the person who is hanging over it a few yards further on. The boats were as usual unloading their big haul of herrings, and the sleepy-eyed sailors (they have been up all night!) were sitting smoking lazily on the edges of the boats. Lady Scilly was in white linen, so awfully pure and angelic-looking that the little boys dabbed her with fish-scales as they passed her. She was talking to Simon about money earnestly, and took no notice. She was telling him that Lord Scilly likes money so much that he didn’t ever like to let it out of his hands. What business of Simon Hermyre’s is it, I should like to know, what Lord Scilly chooses to do with his money? Everybody seems to think Simon is going to be rich, because he is the son of Sir Frederick Hermyre, but that is no criterion. He always seems to have plenty of pocket-money, but I still think it mean of a full-grown woman to borrow money of a boy.

“Do let me have the pleasure,” he kept saying, and “Do let me!” and goodness knows why, for she seemed to be in no hurry to prevent him! I suppose it is why people like Simon so much, that he always seems to be trying to do what they want in spite of themselves.

“Then that is settled, thank the Lord!” I heard him say at last. (My sailor buffer between me and her had begun to talk to a man below, and rather drowned their conversation.) “Just look at that sheet of silver on the floor of the boat—all one night’s haul! Suppose it was shillings and half-crowns?”

“Yes, only suppose! And the sailors treading carelessly about in it, as you might in the train of one of my silver-embroidered dresses! It is very like a full court-train, isn’t it, the one you are going to have the privilege of paying for?”

Simon said yes it was, but he didn’t seem to like her quite so much as he did since she gave in and let him pay her bill. He seemed to have grown a little bit older all of a sudden, he had a sort of aged, pinched look come over his face.

Then I saw, I positively saw, the thought of my sister Ariadne come there and make him handsome and boyish again, and I wriggled past my sailor and came round behind her and said, “How do you do?”

Lady Scilly having done with Simon for the moment, left him and went to speak to Mr. Sidney Robinson and George, who had just come up from their bathe.

“How is your sister?” Simon asked me.

“Very well, thank you—at least I mean not very well——”

“I don’t wonder. I was so sorry for her the other night.”

“Did you loathe her? Your face looked as if you did.”

“Nothing of the kind! But if I ever get a chance of doing that brute Bowser some injury I’ll—— And the people she was with——? I beg your pardon, but that young lady who was in charge of you both—wasn’t it her business to prevent Miss Vero-Taylor’s good-nature being imposed upon?”

He meant Aunt Gerty, of course. I made up my mind in a second what was best to do for the best of all.

“Oh, that person,” said I. “She wasn’t anything to do with us. Miss Gertrude Jenynge, playing at the Saloon Theatre, I believe?”

“I think that your sister should not be allowed to go to places like that alone.”

“Why, I was with her!”

“What earthly good are you, you small elf?” asked Simon seriously and kindly, smiling down at me. “I wish to goodness my sister——”

I know what he meant. That he wished he could persuade Almeria to take to Ariadne and boss her about. But he didn’t say it. He is so prim and reserved about his family. He simply asked to be remembered to Ariadne, and that he was going to stay with some people at a place called Henderland in Northumberland.

“Henderland,” said I, “that’s near where Christina lives.”

“Who is Christina?”

“Why, George’s old secretary. She is a Mrs. Ball now. You were her best man.”

“Peter Ball’s! Good old Ball! So I was. Bless me. ‘Have you forgotten, love, so soon—That church in June?’ Yes, of course I used to call her the Woman who Would—marry the good Ball, I mean. I shall be over there some time next month shooting. She gave me a general invitation.”

He wouldn’t say when he was likely to be at Rattenraw, it is a little way men have of defending themselves against girls like Ariadne. Now Ariadne and I had a particular invitation to go and stay with Christina for a fortnight, as it happened, and if Ariadne had been having this talk instead of me, she would have told him, and tried to pin him down to a time, but I was wiser. I said “Good-bye” quite shortly, as if I wasn’t at all interested in his movements, and went home. I was a little ashamed of one thing, I had told a lie about Aunt Gerty and denied her before men, as the Scripture says. But it was not for my own sake. Fifty Aunt Gertys can’t hurt me, but one can do Ariadne lots of harm and ruin her social prestige. On the way home I thought what I would do, and did it at lunch.

“Please, Aunt Gerty,” I said, “if you meet me on the quays or anywhere when I am talking to Mr. Simon Hermyre, I must beg of you not to be familiar with me, for I have told him that you were no relation, and I gave him your stage name when he asked me who you were.”

“Oh, did he ask?” said Aunt Gerty, jumping about. “He must have seen me somewhere. In Trixy’s Trust perhaps? I made a hit there. Well, child, you may as well bring us together. Use my professional name, of course.”

“All right,” said I. I did not tell her Simon was off to-morrow. Now don’t you call that eating your cake and having it!