I

The Horticultural College at Rainham Parva, now defunct, was hardly a college in the modern sense at all. Its technical books were antiquated; it had only one or two old microscopes; and it totally lacked the newer trimmings of specialisation. Its founder, a Bristol seedsman called Chesson, had bought the place cheaply, house and all, a dozen years before, and having five hardy daughters eating their heads off at home, had, as the saying is, economically emancipated them. That meant then (whatever it may mean now) that, realising that the wages of two men and a boy might be saved, he had had them down to Rainham Parva and had set them to work.

The second Miss Chesson, Miss Harriet, had shown a real aptitude for the work. She had won, after three years, a Diploma, and this Diploma, together with the presence in the house as paying boarder of a niece of Chesson's, had put an idea into the seedsman's head—the premium idea. With the Diploma properly advertised, its grantee made Principal, a premium or so forgone (called a Scholarship) and the proper person installed over all as Lady-in-Charge, Chesson had foreseen a good deal of his work being done by young women who would pay for the privilege of being allowed to do it. There is no need to describe the development of the idea. The enterprise had prospered, and when Louie Causton had put her name down on the books and paid her fees the complement of thirty girls was full.

She did not, after all, travel down alone. Her stepfather, hinting that it was not necessary to say anything about this to her mother, made the journey with her. The pair of them shortened the hours by guessing which of the young women in the same train were to be Louie's fellow-students; and when they alighted at Rainham Magna station the Captain put Louie and her traps into one of the nondescript vehicles that only saw the light when the Rainham girls arrived or departed, and drove off with her to the college. There he shook hands with the Lady-in-Charge, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, and asked her whether she was related to Lovenant-Smith of the 24th. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's reply did not actually affirm her regret that she was so related, but the Captain's affability dried up suddenly. He was returning to town by the four-o'clock train; before doing so he took a turn round the place with Louie.

"Well," he said, as Louie took her leave of him at the gates, "it's a good growing country, I should say; rum idea of yours though.... You've heard me speak of Lovenant-Smith, haven't you? Adjutant eight or nine years ago; not a bad chap at all, I should have said. She'll be one of the Shropshire lot, I expect. I knew he had people down there.... Well, mind you don't run away with a gardener. 'Bye, Mops——"

And he was off, tugging at his moustache and inwardly commenting that the whole escapade was "just like Louie."

It was a good growing country. Chesson said that the mildness of the winters was due to the Gulf Stream; Miss Harriet Chesson attributed it to ozone—ozone having been a word to conjure with at the time when she had taken her Diploma. Ozone or Gulf Stream, it provided wild violets in December, lemon-verbena that grew in trees up the sides of the cottages and had to be cut away from the upper windows, and filled the deep lanes with the hart's-tongue fern. It also brought forth rich produce. The dairy business and poultry farm flourished; crates and parcels and returned empties kept the goods clerk at Rainham Magna station busy; and, when the heather bloomed on the hill that rose between Chesson's and the sea, the "Rainham Heather Honey," green as bronze and thick as glue, was at a premium. At the crest of the hill the seedsman's estate ended. Beyond that, dropping abruptly to the west, lay deep wooded coombes, green to the very rocks of the shore.

Louie's age put her at once out of the class of the "new girl" who, in the school tales, sits pathetically on her box and waits for somebody to speak to her. She was twenty-four, and probably only one other student, the copper-haired girl with the long thin neck and the "salt-cellars" showing through her white flannel blouse, who asked her her number and offered to show her the way to her cubicle, was more than twenty-two. Her large black feathered hat (see the first part of the Captain's advice as to how she would make the most of herself), and her expensively simple navy blue coat and skirt down to her toes, further distinguished her among the tweed jackets and ankle-length skirts of the younger girls. No doubt she had her perfect management of these and her numerous other garments from her mother's former interest in the study of Drapery. If the Captain did not think her face pretty, it must be remembered that the Captain had standards of prettiness of his own. Pretty in the professional-beauty sense her irregular mouth and long chin perhaps were not. Her large, clear, pebble-grey eyes at any rate were arresting.

The copper-haired girl, having shown Louie her cubicle, offered to show her the rest of the house also. They began upstairs on the first floor, where the girls slept. The place was an old mansion in the form of a hollow square, and as they came to each latticed embrasure Louie stopped to look at the famous Rainham yew that almost filled the grassgrown inner courtyard. The corridors were dark, and sudden steps where no steps were to have been expected made of the uneven floors a series of booby-traps for those not familiar with them. Memories of the Monmouth Rebellion seemed to linger round the corners and to be shut up in the cupboards of the place. They passed downstairs. Through the doorway of the handsome Restoration faÇade they saw the yew again, dark beyond the shining flags of the hall. Louie had already been in the reception-room and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's private apartments on the right of the doorway; on the left, she was told, were the quarters of Miss Harriet (who alone of Chesson's daughters remained there) and the staff. The domestics slept at the top of the house; the four male gardeners (all married) occupied the farm a furlong away at the back.

"But wouldn't you like some tea?" said the copper-haired girl. "It's in the dining-room."

"I was told to report myself to Miss Chesson at five," said Louie, looking at her watch.

"Well, you've just time, if you're quick——"

They sought the room where the housekeeper ran cups of tea from the tap of a large and funereal bronze urn.

It was ten minutes to five when Louie entered the dining-room. Before the clock had struck five she had taken a certain position in the college.

She herself hardly knew how it happened. The room was full of noise and chatter, and near Louie, talking louder and making more noise than anybody else, was a lanky child of sixteen, to be a tall blonde beauty in another three or four years' time, but so far only a mass of unadjusted proportions and movements that lacked co-ordination. She had several distinct voices, and in one of these she was now engaged in unabashed mimicry. Louie, who had got her cup of tea, heard a bell-like "Os-trich feathers!" and she was about to put a question to the copper-haired girl when, with a mock reverence and an explosive "Your Ma-jesty!" the child swept backwards into her. She barely saved her cup of tea. The girl gave a quick turn; her Clum—" was changed to a "Sorry!" as she saw a new face, and Louie smiled.

"Your feet were all wrong," Louie said.

The blonde child turned eagerly again.

"Can you do it?" she asked.

The next moment, before Louie could get out "A drawing-room curtsy? Yes," the child had cried: "Girls! Girls! Here's somebody who knows how to do it! Do come and show us!"

"Really?" said Louie, smiling, and handing her cup of tea to the copper-haired girl.

"Yes—come here, Rhoda, and watch (that's my sister—she's to be presented, you know)."

Louie laughed. "Quickly then—I have to see Miss Chesson——"

And, pushed unceremoniously forward, and still in her feathered hat and navy blue costume, Louie made her first bow to her fellow-students at Chesson's in the deep and swanlike genuflexion she had practised with her cousin, Cynthia Scarisbrick, a couple of years before. Then she ran out, smiling.

"How ripping!" she heard somebody say as she did so. "I expect she's been presented."

Louie sought Miss Harriet.

The Principal, a businesslike, damson-complexioned woman of forty-five, with a deerstalker hat on her close-cropped curly hair, asked her what course of study she proposed to take. Louie replied (in other words) that all courses were the same to her. Miss Harriet had had that kind of student before. She asked a few further questions, and then put Louie down for the elementary course. She dismissed her with a marked syllabus and a copy of the Rules.

Louie read the Rules, nodded, as much as to say, "I thought so!" and then laughed. There was no need to ask who had drawn them up; she remembered the frigid way in which Chaff had been put into his place that afternoon. There was a serenity about them that transcended the ordinary imperative mood. "Students do not absent themselves from Morning Prayers or Divine Service without Permission." "Students do not give Orders to the Gardeners or Domestics." "Students do not pass beyond the Bounds of the College (Map appended)." If on occasion students did all of these things, that did not detract from the largior ether in which the Rules were conceived.

Nor did mere evidence to the contrary ever in the least degree abate Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's persuasion that the young ladies of Chesson's, being the daughters of gentlefolk, were by that very fact almost to be trusted to do without Rules at all.

On the following morning Louie, with leggings of doe-skin buttoned to her knees (see the second of the Captain's recommendations for the attire that suited her best), and wearing a wide-pocketed jacket not unlike a man's, began the practical study of Horticulture.

II

She was attached to the "posse" of six girls of which the copper-haired student, whose name was Richenda Earle, was the head. This girl, as the holder of the scholarship mentioned a page or two back, was the single non-fee-paying student in the place. Her father was a bookseller in Westbourne Grove, and she had kept his books for him before coming to Chesson's. She had picked up her knowledge of book-keeping at an obscure and ill-appointed Business School in Holborn, but, her health being anything but robust, she had taken up gardening under the impression that it was an out-of-doors pursuit. It was only this at Chesson's to a strictly limited extent. Whatever students did or did not learn, the output for the market had to be maintained, and this necessitated, for days and days together, work in the twelve long glass-houses, from the humid heat of which the girls came out limp and listless and relaxed. Richenda Earle suffered from these depressions more than most of them, and now only remained at the college because Miss Harriet had held out hopes for her of a place on the staff. She was easily head of all the classes of which she was a member, but was hopelessly incapable of making her personality felt. Add to all this that she was avid of popularity, and that her self-consciousness took the form of making her more assertive (without being a bit more effective) than any girl in the college, and you will see why Louie felt a little sorry for her without taking to her very much. She for her part had fastened herself on Louie from the start, and had been the first to put the question that Louie had had to answer a dozen times before she had been at Chesson's two hours.

"No, I haven't been presented," Louie had said, finding herself waylaid almost at the door of Miss Harriet's room as she had come out again. "My cousin has; that's where I learned it. We practised it together."

"I've seen them go in," Richenda had murmured, a little wistfully, a little dully; "the carriages and things, you know. I live in London."

Thereupon she had volunteered some of the information stated above, as if inviting a confidence in return. "I'm glad you're in my posse," she had concluded, as Louie had turned away without giving any information whatever about herself.

The remaining members of "Earle's posse" were the two Burnett sisters ("B Major," the girl who was to be presented, and "B Minor," the sixteen-year-old beauty-to-be), a Scotch girl called Macfarlane, and one other girl, half French, Beatrice Pigou. There were four other posses at the college, and each was told off each day to put itself under the direction of one or other of the four gardeners, to pot, "prick out," water or whatever the task might be. The gardener at present in charge of Louie's posse was a sullen young Apollo called Priddy, whose face and neck and forearms ozone or the Gulf Stream had turned to the hue of some deep and old and mellow violin; and Burnett Minor and the younger girls, talking in terms of the life to which their eyes were yet sealed, discussed Priddy with a freedom perfectly innocent and entirely appalling.

Louie had not been at Rainham Parva two days before she was wondering whether after all she wanted to stay. She didn't know really why she had come. Not one of the three commonest reasons for girls being there—a stepmother, to be able to earn a little pocket-money, or to get over a youthful love-affair—quite fitted her case. And then there were those ridiculous Rules. She supposed that if she stayed she would be on the same footing as the juniors, and she hardly thought she could submit to that. Not that the Rules did not seem to justify themselves; on the contrary, they did. Merely because Mrs. Lovenant-Smith affirmed that students did not do this or that, students as a matter of fact either did not do these things, or else consented to class themselves as transgressors when they did.

But Louie's own attitude in the face of a prohibited thing, inherited from her mother and now made inveterate by her upbringing, was invariably that of a wonder what would happen were the prohibition to be disregarded.

It was just a wonder, nothing more.

Then, on the night of her third day at Chesson's, she made up her mind to forfeit her fees and leave in the morning. The reason for her decision was this:

During the vacation certain digging had been allowed by the gardeners to fall into arrears; and Earle's posse, together with another set of six girls, had been set to do it. Now digging was the hardest work the girls were ever called upon to do, and at the beginning of the term at any rate they were spared it as much as possible. But education or output required that this digging should be done, and accordingly the twelve girls had digged for the whole morning, and in the afternoon had varied the labour by carrying heavy pots from House No. 6 to House No. 10—a distance of perhaps sixty yards. The next morning twelve girls (or rather eleven, for Burnett Minor's unset muscles had suffered but little) were half incapacitated by stiffness, and that night there was an outcry for hot baths and arnica. Louie, clad in dressing-gown and slippers and carrying her soap and sponge and towel, hobbled to the bathrooms, and came, in the box-room, upon an indignation-meeting.

This box-room was the common meeting-ground for students who awaited their turns at the baths. It lay over the back courtyard arch, and the four bathrooms adjoined it, two on either side. It was piled almost to the ceiling with trunks and boxes and dress-baskets, the white initials of which glimmered in the shadows cast by a couple of candles on the floor; but there were isolated boxes enough to make seats for the seven or eight girls already assembled there. They had slippers on their naked feet and single garments on their aching bodies; and on one of Louie's own boxes Burnett Major was peering at the little blue flame of a spirit-kettle and mixing in a row of cups the paste for that beverage of revolt—cocoa. Burnett Minor had traitorously turned the general righteous anger to private account, had "bagged" the hottest bath, and was now carolling at the top of her lungs in the right-hand bathroom.

"——then if Earle won't do it I vote we draw lots!" Macfarlane was exclaiming shrilly as Louie opened the door. "Those lazy louts of gardeners are supposed to have all the digging done before we come up——"

They were not—not if Chesson knew it; but "Of course they are!" cried five voices at once.

"Well, I'm just not going to stand it—there——"

"And I'm not——"

"Nor me——"

"And for two pins I'd tell Priddy so!"

There was a moment's silence, but only because, all having spoken at once, all had to take breath at once.

"It's abominable——"

"Disgusting——"

"CelÀ m'embÊte——"

"Here's Causton—what do you vote, Causton?" they cried, turning to her.

"What about?" Louie asked.

"Why, everything, of course—this beastly place—and setting us to dig the first week—and Priddy's beastly cheek——"

Then every tongue was unloosed.

"And a row every time we want an extra blouse washed——"

"And washing two guineas a term extra——"

"And only the vuggles for dinner that aren't good enough for the market——" ("Vuggles" were vegetables.)

Another pause for breath.

"Let's what-d'-you-call-it—strike——"

Louie laughed as she sat stiffly down by Burnett Major.

"Oh, I'll vote for anything you like; I don't care," she said.

Then they began anew.

"Earle's head of the posse—she ought to do it——"

Richenda Earle's voice broke in in loud complaint.

"How can I? You know I would like a shot if it wasn't for my scholarship. But I should just be told that if I didn't like it I could go. Elwell's head of your lot. Elwell ought to go."

"I don't care who goes, but I will not be told to do things by Priddy."

"Priddy!——"

(Louie smiled again as there came from the bathroom the joyful voice:

"Early one mo-o-orning—as the su-un was a-rising!——")

"And those pots hadn't got to be moved—he was only making work——"

"—gros tyran!——"

"—like they kept us three weeks grading and packing tomatoes last autumn, and called it 'study'——"

"—and the bruised ones for us——"

"—not even fit for ketchup——"

"—Dothegirls Hall this establishment ought to be called!——"

Another momentary pause: then:

"—let's all sign a petition——"

"—no, a what-d'you-call-it—an ultimatum——"

"—just telling them straight——"

"Your bath, Earle——"

From the bathroom had come the gurgle of escaping water. Boiled pink, turbaned with her towel, smelling of somebody else's scented soap and radiating unrepentance that Earle's bath must be a tepid one, Burnett Minor bounced in.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, do lend me a dry towel, just to finish with. Oh, Causton, the curtsy, now that I've something loose on! Crocks! My cocoa, Major, and who said Priddy just now? 'Students do not fall in love with Priddy.' (I sha'n't hush.) Sugar, Mac, and, Causton, I wish you'd do my hair your way, just to see how it looks——"

And, twirling twice in the midst of a corolla of pink cashmere dressing-gown, she sank to the floor and began to nurse a chilblain on her heel.

Louie, her hands behind her head, leaned back and watched the scene with the greatest amusement. A master-rebel herself, she knew that here was no rebellion. The meeting, like other meetings, was merely letting off steam, and the girls who "wouldn't stand it" would be standing it exactly the same on the morrow. Well, on the morrow she herself would be off. Her boxes were only half unpacked; half-an-hour would put the other things back again. Already she saw that this Chesson's was an imposition. In the meantime, the indignation meeting was very amusing. She felt almost motherly towards these tractable revolutionaries. Her indulgence became still greater as they spoke out again.

"Another thing," a girl of Elwell's posse demanded; "why couldn't I go to Rainham yesterday to have my photograph taken?"

("Break the camera," Burnett Minor murmured to the chilblain.)

"And just because somebody'd bagged my boots and I was five minutes late the other day——"

"Je m'en fiche pas mal——" Pigou began.

("Parly Angly, voo affectay feele," from Burnett Minor.)

"I should like to see one of the gardeners at home looking at us the way Priddy does——"

"Or Miss Harriet either for that matter—she's only a sort of forewoman——"

"—applewoman——"

"—tomatoes——"

"—that's all she is really——"

"—nothing else——"

Louie laughed outright. Another gurgle had come from the bathroom, and Earle reappeared. Her announcement that the water was now cold added to the general sense of wrong.

"Not even enough hot water!"

"Scarcely a drop, ever!——"

"Odious!"

"Then will somebody come into my cubicle and rub me—not you, B Minor."

("Just give a squint out of the window, Elwell.")

("It's all right. Her lights are out. Lovey's too.")

"Well, I won't have a cold bath, to please Lovey or anybody else!"

Nor did Louie want one. She had risen. She moved to the window that looked out over the courtyard yew—the window from which watch was kept to see when Miss Harriet and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith retired—and yawned. In the middle of her yawn she suddenly laughed again.

"Good gracious!" she thought. It was too amusing.

Suddenly Richenda Earle, who also was standing by the window, spoke to her. Evidently Richenda did not think she had been fairly treated by the meeting.

"Do you think they ought to ask me to?" she complained.

Louie turned.

"To ask you to what?"

"To complain to Miss Harriet—me, the only Scholarship girl."

Louie shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. "Oh, they won't complain to Miss Harriet!"

"No—but one doesn't like to refuse things——" Earle said in injured tones.

Before Louie would have had time to reply to this, had she thought of replying to it, a diversion occurred. Nobody had heard steps approaching, but all at once the door opened, and Authority, in the person, not of Miss Harriet, but of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith herself, stood looking in. The hubbub ceased as the boiling of a kettle ceases when cold water is poured in. Several of the conspirators rose to their feet; Burnett Minor, making no bones about it, bolted behind a box. Great is even the look of Authority; it was almost a superfluity when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked in measured tones from the doorway: "What is the meaning of this?"

Already the tails of two dressing-gowns had vanished out of the other door.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked again.

Then she looked round to see on whom to fasten her displeasure.

Louie saw her look, and instantly fathomed its purpose. She and Richenda Earle stood by the window, as it were the dramatic centre of some Rembrandtesque composition to which all else was merely contributory. The Scholarship girl was going to get into a row. She, Louie, had lived for years among rows; and was leaving anyway on the morrow.

Before the "Miss Earle" had passed Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's lips Louie had stepped forward.

"We've been waiting for our baths," she said.

Perhaps already Mrs. Lovenant-Smith would have preferred Richenda Earle to Louie; there is expediency even in Authority; but the challenge, if it was that, was a public one. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith turned to Louie.

"Do you know what time it is?" she asked freezingly.

It pleased Louie to take Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's question au pied de la lettre.

"I'm afraid my watch is in my cubicle. I could tell you in a moment," she said.

This the Lady-in-Charge saw fit to ignore. She drew her own watch from her belt.

"It is ten minutes past eleven," she said. "Students are not out of bed at ten minutes past eleven. Neither are candles burning. Miss Earle——"

But again Louie interposed. After all, it was rough on the Scholarship girl.

"Miss Earle came in only a moment ago to send us to bed," she affirmed, without a tremor.

"Then," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, turning to Louie, and perhaps feeling herself once more headed off, "you, Miss Causton, as a new student, are perhaps not yet familiar with the Rules. Be so good as to come to me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning and I will explain them to you."

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith did not make the discomfited rebels file out past her. She herself retired with dignity. Students do not linger in the box-room when it is made known that they are expected to go to bed at once.

But no sooner had the door closed on Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's back than the pent-up general breath escaped again in a fluttering exhalation. In it were awe, delight, homage.

"Oh, Causton!" somebody breathed. "You are a brick!"

"Isn't she?"

"Wasn't it stunning of her?"

"You'd have caught it, Earle!"

"I saw it in her eye!"

"But I say, Causton, you'll get a wigging!"

"She didn't speak to you, you know!"

"You cut in——"

Louie felt quite confused, so much did they make of so little.

"Good gracious," she said, "what are you all talking about? That's nothing, especially as I was thinking of leaving in any case to-morrow."

There was consternation in the box-room. Had Rebellion found its leader only to lose her again immediately?

"Leaving!"

"Oh, I sha'n't leave till after ten o'clock now, you may be sure," Louie laughed.

"But—oh, I say!"

The dismayed voices dropped. There was a blank silence. It was only after half-a-minute that Burnett Minor, who had issued from cover again, begged: "Don't leave, Causton."

"Oh, I shouldn't leave because of anything like this," said Louie, enormously amused at the thought. "The place is a fraud—that's why I should leave."

"Oh, don't leave," another girl begged.

"Well, we'll see what she says to-morrow."

"She can't be too down on you——"

"Not the first time——"

Something that can only be described as a pleasant hardening came into Louie's grey eyes. Her laugh dropped a note. She looked at the adoring faces.

"That's just what I mean," she said. "If she is——"

"What?——"

"I'll stay."

And that also her stepfather would have described as "just like Louie."

III

Punctually at ten o'clock on the morrow Louie knocked at the door of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's office or drawing-room—it was both—and entered. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was writing at an escritoire that was not big enough to accommodate her elbows, and so supported her braceleted wrists only. There was something contradictory about her attitude. Its rectitude as she sat at the inconvenient little desk suggested that she expected Louie, her turn, pause and inquiring "Well?" that she did not. Louie's observant eyes had already noticed a curious inconsistency about the Lady-in-Charge. A great number of things seemed to lie on the tip of her tongue, ready, apparently against her own better judgment, to be detached from it by a perfectly-timed fillip of opposition.

And Louie had only to remember the word or two with which she had dashed Chaff's affability to be fairly sure that though cocoa and candles in the box-room at eleven o'clock at night might seem a good enough reason for the present interview, as like as not another lay behind it. She stood just within the door.

"Well, Miss Causton?"

"I think you told me to come here at ten o'clock."

"Ah, yes. Please to wait a moment."

Louie listened to the squeaking of her quill and the faint jingling at her wrists as she continued to write.

When Mrs. Lovenant-Smith turned again it was almost as if she had thought better of something or other—say of an encounter with this long-chinned, grey-eyed girl who stood, not dressed for gardening, but in a long grey morning frock, looking at her from the door.

"I merely wished to impress on you, Miss Causton, that the Rules must be observed," she said. "I believe there is a copy of them on the smaller bureau by your right hand there. Take it and be so good as to study it. That is all I wished to say."

Louie did not believe the last sentence, but no disbelief showed in her eyes. She inclined her head, but watched Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, waiting for more. She thought that if she waited more would come. It did. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, having just dismissed Louie, rescinded the decision by speaking again.

"You are older than the others," she said, "and it ought not to be too much to expect of you that you will set a good example."

Louie, perhaps gratuitously, read a meaning into the words. Perhaps you guess what it was. Many of the older people of her world still remembered her mother's first marriage, and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, though Louie did not like the look of her, was still undeniably of her world. With Louie herself the drawing-master theory of her paternity had long since gone by the board; the girl had not rested until she had discovered that her father was Buck Causton, pugilist and artists' model, none other; and if Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had ever chanced to hear of her as Louise Chaffinger, and identified that person under the name which (whether from pride, spleen, sensitiveness or what not) she had since reassumed, there would probably be something very near the tip of her tongue indeed. And just as Buck had always been a pale fighter, so Louie's own mixed blood, though it might surge at her heart, left her cheeks untinged in moments of stress. She still stood, making no motion to go.

"I don't think I quite follow you," she said slowly. "Why do you say that something 'ought not to be too much to expect'?"

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stiffened and drew in again.

"It is not necessary to follow me," she said. "You will find all that is necessary in the Rules. You may keep that copy; Rule 6 is the one I wish especially to call your attention to. Would you be so good as to pass me that bell as you go out—the small brass one on the cabinet there?"

She half turned to her writing again.

("Good gracious, what next!" thought Louie.)

The bell was a small Dutch figure in a metal farthingale, and Louie passed it. As she did so she glanced at the hand that took it. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face was wrinkled like a dried apple, and the hand, though beautifully kept, was wrinkled too, and had, moreover, rather stumpy nails. Louie's own hands were exquisite. The bell passed from hand to hand.

Whether or not it was the glance at the hands, suddenly the word too much dropped from the tip of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's tongue. She put the bell down with a little clap.

"The Rules of the college are not called into question," she said. "So far they have proved quite sufficient for the kind of student the college was founded for. By the way, why are you not dressed for the gardens?"

("'Kind of student'—good—gracious!" Louie cried in astonishment to herself. "Very well, madam——")

She spoke calmly, looking modestly down at her long cashmere skirt, but taking in her lovely hands (which toyed with the copy of the Rules) on the way.

"My dress?" she said. "Oh, I wasn't sure whether I should be staying or not."

Louie knew perfectly well that her leaving would make, at any rate until her cubicle should be filled again, a difference of something like sixty pounds a year, with extras, to Chesson's. That is rather a lot of money to hang upon a mere breach of Rule 6. Perhaps Mrs. Lovenant-Smith betrayed herself in the quickness with which she took her up.

"Do you mean you're thinking of leaving?" she asked.

Louie, who had lifted her eyes for a moment, dropped them demurely again.

"I mean," she replied, "that I didn't know whether you were going to dismiss me or not. You see, you may not want my—kind of student. I'd rather not be in any way considered as an exception," she added.

Had Mrs. Lovenant-Smith known Louie better she would have known that she had now no intention whatever of leaving. As it was, there probably came into her head the thought that after all Louie was a Scarisbrick and a niece of Lord Moone. Ladies-in-charge of horticultural colleges do not fall foul of the Honourable Emily and Lord Moone. All at once her severity relaxed—but she hated Louie thenceforward that it must be so. She smiled a little, but the smile had a twitch in it.

"I don't think we need go quite to that extreme, Miss Causton," she said. "All the same, I'm afraid the Rules are necessary."

"I dare say," said Louie.

"And so long as that is understood, that is the chief thing. In regard to candles in particular, in an old place like this there is always the danger of fire. In fact, I'm not at all sure that a fire drill ought not to be instituted. May I add that I quite appreciated the chivalrous way in which you tried to shield Miss Earle last night? Indeed, I wanted to say that quite as much as the other. I think that is all. Good-morning, Miss Causton."

"Good-morning," said Louie, stalking out.

As she crossed the Restoration hall, "'Kind of student'—good gracious!" she exclaimed again. "To talk to me as if I were Burnett Minor! 'Kind of student!'—I wonder it doesn't occur to her that somebody might have told me all about Miss Hastings and that gardener four years ago!—'Kind of student,' indeed!"

Still without changing her clothes, she walked out past the orchards, up the hill, and sat looking down over the coombes to the sea.

Leave Chesson's, now? Oh no, nothing was farther from her thoughts! She would stay, and why? Not because she had been treated as a junior, but because she had been taken, as it were, at her own word. She herself might be perversely and nonchalantly cynical about her mixed birth, but she did not intend to allow anybody else—Mrs. Lovenant-Smith or anybody—to show as much as a flicker of consciousness of it. "Kind of student"!—Oh no, that amusement was going to be Louie's own private preserve.

For it had been her cynical amusement. Approximately, the mood took her once in five or six months, with or without occasion. Her mother knew its times and seasons, and its passings into abeyance, not into extinction. She did not call her sensitiveness morbid; quite on the contrary, she saw to it that it took the form of a pose of gaiety; she could be pitilessly gay with herself. Meek, harmless Cynthia Scarisbrick, for example, could have told tales about her gaiety when, not knowing whether she herself was eligible for presentation or not (but gathering from the tense silence on the subject that had reigned at Trant that she was not, or at any rate that her mother did not wish it), she had practised the ceremonial curtsy with her cousin. It had been Cynthia, not Louie, who had shed the tears.

But to be agreed with by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith that her origin was open to question (for the Lady-in-Charge had all but said that)—oh no, that was really too much!——

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, who took a seedsman's salary!

She might have known that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith would know all, all about her——

Then, as she sat, she began to wonder where she had heard the name of Lovenant-Smith before. She had wondered it when first she had received her prospectus at Trant. Of course her stepfather knew these other Lovenant-Smiths, the adjutant's lot, and had probably spoken of them, but she did not think it was that. For a minute or two she sought in her memory....

She was ceasing to think when the recollection came of itself. It was only a trifling one after all. One of the boys with whom she had romped at Mallard Bois—Roy she had called him then—had been, she now remembered, a Lovenant-Smith. He would be a connection of the adjutant's. Of course, she had heard the name at Mallard Bois....

Then Louie bit her lip. If there had been any doubt at all that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith knew the story of Buck there was none now. The association with Mallard Bois was quite enough....

Louie was glad she had looked insolently at those stumpy hands....

Beast!

The trees below her tossed restlessly, and far out the grey sea was whitecapped as if it had been rasped with a file. No boat had put out for the pollock-fishing or to lift a spiller that morning; only a pilot, a couple of miles out in the Channel, slowly lifted her nose for a moment and then hid it again. Louie felt a little cold, and rose. She made an attractive picture as she did so. Her brown hair was tossed by the wind, and her long grey skirt cracked behind her and clipped her limbs almost as if she had worn the garments of a man.

"Beast!" she muttered again.

Then she thought of another beast—this father of hers whose name she had not needed to take but had taken out of rancour against her mother and despite against herself. (But not for Mrs. Lovenant-Smith to turn up her nose at!) He now (she had this from Chaff) kept a public-house somewhere up the Thames—Lord Moone's cast-off brother-in-law in a public-house!—and any fitful romantic light that might ever have shone about him was now extinguished. Of course the Captain had uttered his usual wistful formula: "Not a bad fellow at all, I should have said"; but that was rather a criticism on the Captain than on Buck. Yes. Buck was simply another beast. But though he were a potman, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith should give him every bit as much deference as if he had been a brewing peer....

"And I don't care—if it is the pride of the cobbler's dog, I'm going to keep his name," Louie muttered.

Suddenly she turned and climbed the stile that led back to Chesson's land. As she did so she realised that she had been out of bounds. She laughed curtly. Rule 3! Much she cared for their Rules! What about the Rule: "Miss Hastings does not elope with What's-his-Name the gardener"?—but that would keep. In the meantime she would change into her gardening clothes before lunch. She had shown Mrs. Lovenant-Smith that she had garments of freedom. The next time Louie threatened to leave she might be able to add to the force of the threat that she would take half-a-dozen girls with her.

Well, lunch was in half-an-hour; she had just time to change.

But as she descended through the orchards again she came upon Richenda Earle. The copper-haired girl was washing an espaliered plum-tree, and as she turned her head Louie saw that she had been crying. She asked Louie if she was going.

"Leaving here, do you mean? No. What's the matter?"

The girl turned her eyes away.

"Thanks awfully for last night," she grunted. "It was ripping of you. But you see it hasn't made much difference."

"How, not made much difference?"

Richenda glanced at the tree, and from the tree to the syringe in her hand and the pail of disinfectant at her feet. "This," she said. "Anybody can do this job, and I've been sorting out pots over there all the morning," she indicated the yard behind the trees where the flower-pots and debris were kept. "And I can't threaten to leave."

"Your scholarship, of course?"

"Yes. And I'm supposed to be working for the medal."

Chesson's wanted a Horticultural Society's medal badly. They had never had one, nor were likely to get one unless Richenda Earle got it for them. Louie, who was quickly fathoming the real economy of the place, looked again at Richenda's red eyes.

"Well, they won't send you away till you've failed," she said.

But Earle made an impatient gesture, and her eyes began to stream again.

"Oh, what's a girl like you know about it!" she broke out. "Yes, I know they'll keep me till then, but you don't know anything at all about it! You would if you'd had my upbringing! You don't know what the struggle is. You think digging and carrying pots is hard work; you wouldn't if you'd seen what I've seen! When you go to London it's just shopping and theatres and suppers and things; but just you try to keep a small bookseller's accounts for him, when they're hardly worth keeping, I mean, and collecting his debts when all his money's tied up in stock and your father's nearly bankrupt—not that he's ever solvent—you'd know what I meant then!"

Then the unexpected outbreak stopped suddenly.

Louie stood silently staring. She disliked seeing anybody cry. Richenda's words had little meaning for her; she supposed they contained a hidden meaning somewhere. Then the copper-haired girl went on, more quietly but no less bitterly:

"I should get a hundred pounds a year on the staff here," she said, "that is, if they won't waste me half-days just out of spite, like they're doing this morning. That's nothing to you. You others are here just for pocket-money, but we live on your pocket-money. I suppose I oughtn't to have come here at all. Not among all you. But I begged father to let me. Father once apologised to me—that was when there was a distraint out against him, if you know what that is—because he wasn't rich. Fathers ought all to be rich, he said. There are seven of us girls at home, and only one married. Oh, I tell you, you don't know!"

Louie wondered why she preferred Richenda Earle loud and striving for the popularity she never got to Richenda Earle unburdening herself thus. She herself went brightly masked, and disliked to see another's mind naked. Richenda's mind was stripped now. It was distasteful. Somehow or other Richenda contrived to miss both the balm of popularity and the solace of private sympathy.

"I'm—I'm awfully sorry," Louie said awkwardly and a little stiffly.

At the tone Richenda drew in instantly.

"It doesn't matter," she said, compressing her lips and beginning to straighten her hair. "I shall just have to buck up, that's all. But girls of your class don't know anything about it, so you needn't think you do. There's the first gong. Come on."

As they passed the dairies a rabble of students raced past the end of the house on their way to the boot-lockers. Louie and Richenda entered by the side door. Richenda plunged at once into the scramble for house-slippers, but Louie, not having put on her garden boots that day, did not need to change. It was too late now to put on another dress. She waited by the inner door.

Suddenly she was spied by Burnett Minor. The child rushed towards her, a book in her hand.

"Are you going, Causton?" she shouted.

There was a loud "Ssssh!" They could be heard from the dining-room. The girls flocked round Louie, and hoarse, excited whispers broke out:

"Are you going?"

"She's dressed!"

"Are you going?"

"Did you see her?"

"Does Causton say she's going?"

"Ssssh—not all at once!——"

"No, I'm not going," said Louie.

Mouths gaped their very widest to make up for the inaudibility of the cheers.

"Hooray!"

"Is she going?"

"No, she's not going—hooray!"

Burnett Minor threw her book joyfully into the book-locker. Ordinarily her reading varied between an adoration of Tennyson and mocking and dramatic declamations either from the "Pansy Library," or from its brother-classics, of which the typical burlesque is "The Blood-stained Putty-knife, or The Plumber's Revenge." But this book was her album.

"I saw you come down dressed, and I did want you to put something in it if you were going," she whispered gleefully; "but you're not going! Hoo——"

Her voiceless mouth gaped wider than them all.

That midday Louie walked demurely up to Mrs. Lovenant-Smith at the head of the table and apologised for not yet having changed. From her tone Mrs. Lovenant-Smith may or may not have inferred that she had spent the hours since their interview in contrite meditation. She inclined her head graciously. But Louie, taking her place for grace between Burnett Minor and Richenda Earle, was murmuring to herself once more:

"'Class of student,' indeed!... Good gracious me!..."

IV

Louie quickly became the most popular girl in the college.

Her studies she pursued very much as who should say: "I am Louie Causton—take it or leave it." Neither Miss Harriet nor the gardeners could ever tell when she was interested in a lesson; if she learned, she concealed her processes. Before April was out—(the intervening time may be slipped over; the daily work in the gardens and houses went on as usual, the usual number of crates and parcels was despatched from Rainham Magna station, and already the girls were looking forward to June, which was always a slack month)—before April was out she could "slip" and "bud" as deftly as any when she chose; but few made more mistakes than she, and none accepted correction with her remarkable nonchalance. Afternoon "theory" she had begun to cut almost entirely. A slate hung in the hall, on which students were supposed to write down where they might be found when they left the immediate precincts of the college. One day towards the end of April there appeared on this slate: "Gone to Rainham; L. Causton." Then she awaited events with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

There were no events.

She sent to Trant for a bicycle.

Truth to tell, as the spring advanced she needed the air. The glass-houses, with their smell of musk and mould and heated pipes and cherry-pie all mingled, oppressed her; the long forcing-house, where for the time being most of the work for the markets went on, completely took the starch out of her. She felt as if she was being forced herself. She hated the sight of the twelve houses; they merely meant so much ventilation, so much shutting-down for the evenings, so much watering, so much lassitude for the girls, so much money in Chesson's pocket. She was glad she had sent for the bicycle. Somebody else might read thermometers and close down and sprinkle floors and ply the hissing hoses. Louie wanted air.

Yet even the outer air was not sharp enough. It is not an invigorating air in which the lemon-verbena grows in trees up the cottage walls and scented geranium flourishes out-of-doors like a common hedge plant. In the sunken lanes through which she idled on her bicycle the primroses, twice as big as she had ever seen them, and the cowslips, great sub-tropical clusters, were already past; and she expected to see the roses out presently, big as sunflowers. There was something almost rank in the sweet bursting out of the land. She thanked goodness that a daisy was a daisy still, modest and unmagnified. She was not used to hedges of fuchsia. Nature might have been a little more sparing of her myrtle too. Louie always dropped from her bicycle when, coming out of one of the canals of still and scented air, she saw, across a burnt heath-patch or a clump of hardy gorse, a glimpse of the sea. For the sake of a look at the sea she often walked up the hill behind Chesson's and sat on the stile she had crossed on the morning after her interview with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

Except by her example, however, she incited nobody else to break the Rules.

It was curious that she should know herself to be popular, and yet at the same time should also be secretly aware that she was a little out of things. All went well enough for the present, but only for the present. She knew quite well what would happen did she, a year or two hence, chance to meet any of her present fellow-pupils. She would not, then, be older than they in quite the same sense that she was now. They would meet; there would be eager recollections of the old days at Chesson's; oh, for that matter she could make it all up now!... "Come where we can have a really good talk! Where's Burnett Major now, and her sister? And have you heard from Elwell lately? And I wonder what's become of that red-haired girl—what was her name—Earle—yes, Earle? And of course you know Macfarlane's going to be married.... Now tell me all about what you're doing!"... Oh yes, Louie could make all this up—the bursts, the pauses, the dead stops, and then the falsely bright, perfunctory talk about Chesson's again. For she and her fellow-students would not be doing the same things. They would have taken recognised places, and Louie was not sure that she herself had a place to take. Her father and mother had seen to that. She remained a spectator. If she was liked now, it was not because she went one inch out of her way to be so. She was just as ready to go out of her way to be disliked if she must go out of it at all.

In the meantime, however, here she was at Chesson's, to all intents and purposes her own mistress, and made so much of that she had Mrs. Lovenant-Smith largely at her mercy—for, had she been requested to leave, the two Burnetts, Elwell and others would now have left with her. So, doing exactly as she liked, and adored on every hand, Louie even wondered sometimes whether she had not been wrong in supposing that restlessness and discontent were bred in the very bones of her.

She was at the very top of her popularity about the time Burnett Major gave the birthday "cocoa" in her cubicle. (That is to say, Burnett Major gave the nucleus of the "cocoa"; the rest of the party happened by a natural process of accretion.) This time the junketing was held by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's permission; it had been acceded readily. "Lovey's not such a bad old sort when you get used to her," B. Major said. It was in mid-May, on a hot evening, and, though Burnett's window was flung wide open, showing the dark yew outside, not a breath stirred, and the flames of the candles were four inches long in the air. Besides cocoa, Burnett had provided cake and biscuits and candied fruits and an enormous box of "assorted" chocolates; and Burnett's bed was like to break down with the weight of girls upon it.

Louie had had Burnett Major especially in her mind when she had painted her fancy picture of a possible meeting with her fellow-students a year or two hence. The two sisters were the daughters of a Gloucestershire M.F.H., and Louie could forgive B. Major for being a little dazzled by her approaching presentation. There was nothing unfamiliar to Louie, either, in the rest of the things she felt herself, at one and the same time, both "in at" and "out of," for probably Mewley Hall, the Burnetts' home, was not very different from Trant or Mallard Bois. But Burnett Major's position a few years hence was a forgone conclusion; she filled it already in anticipation; and the noisy talk that was in progress as Louie joined the party threw bright lights on it.

They were discussing the coming vacations. These were Chesson's yearly dread. They interrupted his supply of free labour, and there were always fewest girls when he most wanted them. As the vacation arrangements rested after all chiefly with the parents, he could do little except express his preference that as many of the girls as possible should take their holidays in the empty month of June, and his hope that those who did not do so would defer them until as late as they could. Otherwise he was, to that extent, no better off than his trade competitors.

"Here she comes," Burnett Minor was crying as Louie entered the crowded cubicle. "I want to be here when Causton is. It's all right for Major—oh, you needn't think we don't know, Major—if you aren't actually engaged he's always about the place when you're at home—and I'm going to stalk you both with a camera and then what-d'you-call-it—blackmail him——"

"Shut up, Minor, or I shall send you out," B. Major ordered.

"Then I shall tell everybody who he is and shout his name through the keyhole. It's——" She moved her lips, threatening to pronounce the name there and then.

"Sneak!" said her sister.

B. Minor bridled.

"I will tell them if you call me that again! Causton, have you a young man? (That means, Avez-voo un jeune homme, Pig?)"

"Not for you to shout his name through keyholes," Louie replied, smiling.

"No, but do tell us—have you?"

"At my age?" said Louie mockingly, sitting down on the edge of the bed and reaching for candied fruits.

"Go on—you're trying to wriggle out of it—have you?"

"Hush, little girl—open your mouth——" She popped a fruit into the mouth that itself resembled an untouched fruit.

Pigou, from the lower deck of the washstand, interposed loudly:

"Elle a vingt-quatr'ans—elle est perdue!"

"UppÉ petite chose, avec voter FranÇay," commented Burnett Minor.

"Cau-ston coiffe dÉjÀ Sainte Catherine," said the ruthless Pigou: "À vingt-quatr'ans on est dÉjÀ—pff!"

"Non elle isn't pff—rude chose! But she'll tell me when we sleep out, because I'm going to have my mattress next to hers, sha'n't I, Causton?"

"Mais elle vient d'promettre——"

"—and we shall talk about all those things you always say 'Hush' when I come in—sha'n't we, Causton?"

"Prrridd-ee!" taunted the French child: and B. Major spoke.

"But I say, Causton, when do you take your vac.—June or September?"

"And where shall you go?" somebody else demanded.

"I'm going to Ireland—father's taken a house," cried a third.

"Nobody cares where you're going! Causton, will you come home with us?"

"No; come to Ireland with us!"

"Well, can I come home with you? I loved that man who brought you here!" (Burnett Minor was the young woman who had loved Chaff.)

"It wasn't Lord Moone, was it?" Macfarlane asked.

"Or was it your father?"

"Your cocoa, Causton," said B. Major.

Louie had never been so run after before. She curled up among the slippered feet at the foot of the bed (there were four girls stretched upon it), and alternately stroked the hair and tweaked the ears of Burnett Minor, who had defeated Pigou in the scramble to put her head into Louie's lap. "I can have the pitch next to yours, can't I?" the child demanded, her eyes turned up and her face (to Louie) upside down. "There, you see, Pig, she says I can—so voo juste pouvez sechey-up, lÀ."

This sleeping out was a summer custom at Chesson's. It began with the warm weather, sometimes in June, sometimes in July. On account of the morning and evening carrying of bedding and mattresses, the "pitches" nearest the house were deemed the most desirable, and weeks ahead there was bickering about the "bagging" of them. They bickered now, and then turned to the vacations again.

Louie listened, saying little. For her, vacations in this sense hardly existed. Vacations lose their value when you study as slackly as Louie did. It might be amusing to go home with one or other of the girls for a week or two, but on the other hand she hardly thought she would. These were the things she was both "in at" and "out of." B. Major was talking about them now. Soon she would be taking her presentation lessons; she was coming out; she had an unofficial admirer; yes, Louie saw quite plainly what B. Major's future would be. What was her own going to be? She had not the least idea.... No, she did not really want a vacation. More or fewer, there would be girls at Chesson's throughout the summer. Chesson's still amused her; she could leave once for all when it ceased to amuse her. She was learning nothing. She neither wished to start a lavender farm, as Elwell, the daughter of Sir James Elwell of the Treasury, did, nor to grow peaches, as did Macfarlane, nor to add to her pocket-money by selling pot-pourri at extravagant prices to her friends, which was Burnett Major's idea—until she should marry. She could hardly sell pot-pourri to her prize-fighting father. She might (she smiled) sell him hops—she seemed to remember that beer was made of hops....

And she certainly did not intend to mug at theory for the sake of a medal, as Earle was doing at this very moment....

The party was still discussing this life which was hers and yet not hers when Miss Harriet, going her rounds, tapped at the door and entered.

"Bedtime, young ladies, please," she said. "Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's compliments, and she hopes you have enjoyed yourselves."

Her tone was that of one who might say: "You see, young ladies, what liberty you have within the Rules; isn't it much pleasanter all round?"

The party broke up.

The weeks passed. In June a number of the girls went home, Earle among them. Permission to sleep out was given, a little earlier than usual on account of the heavy mildness of the nights; and Louie lay in the orchard, between Burnett Minor and little Pigou. The convolvulus came out, great white trumpets in the hedges; the sea over the hill became of a milky blue; and there floated out to it dense tracts of odours, lilies, and syringa, jasmine and roses and hay. You wearied of the smell of meadow-sweet; in the houses you could hardly take breath. The sun was reflected piercingly from their glass roofs, and the girls spent the afternoons in deck-chairs under the shadow of the courtyard yew.

The thing that (Louie sometimes told herself afterwards) made all the difference and yet (as she also sometimes told herself) made no difference at all, began very trivially. It was just such another accident as that which, nine or ten years before, had sent her to her mother with a demand to be told "who the Honourable Mrs. Causton was."

Ordinarily, the girls at Chesson's were a little careless about the dressing of their hair. You cannot move constantly among banks of plants, and pick fruit, and net cherry-trees, and be for ever stooping over beds and frames, and keep your hair fit to be seen. Therefore, once a month or so, the girls might, if they wished, go in parties of four or five to a hairdresser's at Rainham, there to be professionally—whatever the word may be. These parties were made up more with a view to the enjoyment of the half-holiday than to the business strictly in hand; and Louie, had she cared, might have been a member of each detachment that went. On this particular day Louie had had much ado to free herself from Burnett Minor's affectionate clutch.

"Oh, do come with our lot, Causton!" B. Minor had begged. "Oh, you are rotten! You know you went with Elwell before, and with Major before that, and I do want mine properly done like yours, not just punched up the way we do it!"

"What, like Saint Catherine?" Louie laughed.

"Do come."

But Louie had shaken her off.

"He'll remember how mine's done; I was there a week ago. No, I won't come. I'm going to do some theory this afternoon."

"Oh, what a fib! You never do theory!"

"Well, I ought to. No, I won't come."

"Then will you lend me your bicycle?"

"Yes, if you like; but the others are walking, aren't they?"

"Well, I'll wobble with them."

And Louie had watched the party set out, Burnett Minor on the bicycle, "wobbling" and leaving behind her a complicated track in the dust of the drive.

She did not know why she had said she would do theory that afternoon. She supposed it was because she felt slack and bored. Nor did she do very much theory. She went into the classroom, languidly turned over the pages of an old "Balfour," wondered what it mattered to anybody at Chesson's (except perhaps to Earle) that "movements had been observed in the pollen-grains of Cereus Speciosissimus," or that "changes took place in the stamens by suppression and degenerations of various kinds." Then she glanced at a preparation on the stage of the microscope opposite Richenda Earle's empty chair, and yawned. She looked out into the courtyard. Three or four girls dozed in deck-chairs under the dark yew. There was an empty chair—but no; a clatter of washing up was going on in the kitchen under the box-room; she would go up to her cubicle.

She did so, and, pushing off her slippers, lay down on her bed.

Her window was open as far as it would go, but the yew seemed to shut out even what little air there was. All that entered was the faint acrid smell of consuming rubbish; they were slow-burning somewhere at the back. The sounds of the washing up were fainter now; a pigeon alighted on her sill. She had been an idiot, she told herself, to fag herself that morning listening to Hall's demonstration in the forcing-house. She wished there was a pond about the place, with a boat or a punt. She would have bagged the boat to sleep in. It would be jolly to be rocked to sleep in a boat or a punt.

She closed her eyes. The last thing she saw before she did so was the little black-framed miniature of the fourth Lord Moone, the last but three, in his tied wig and ensign's uniform. Louie had tacked it up by her mirror merely because it had been in her room at Trant as long as she could remember and, if one might judge from the youthful face, he was less of an opinionated fool than the other Moones—much less so than Uncle Augustus....

She turned over. Then she slept.

Sleep also was deep, too deep, at Rainham Parva. It weighed on the girl like a mulch. At five o'clock Louie could hardly drag herself out of it. She fumbled at her loosened belt and pulled out her watch. Five! The tea-gong must have gone.

Well, perhaps tea would rouse her.

She felt by the side of the bed for her slippers, rose, touched her hair as she passed the glass, and went drowsily downstairs.

As Mrs. Lovenant-Smith and Miss Harriet always took tea in their own or one another's rooms—which, for that matter, the students also were permitted to do if they chose—the meal was a noisier one than either lunch or supper. Louie heard one of Burnett Minor's several voices as she pushed at the door. The child saw Louie's face in the opening and sprang up.

"Here she is—give it to me—I'm going to read it myself——" she cried.

Burnett Minor always wanted to read it herself—"it" usually being one of the sublimer passages from the current number of the "Pansy Library" or an especially choice one from an office-boys' periodical. Louie smiled languidly now as the girl snatched a booklet from Elwell's hand and gave tongue.

"I've punctured your back tyre, Causton, but Mac has some solution and we'll mend it after tea—and I'm always to do my hair like this, Harris says—do look at it, isn't it stunning?—and now—aha!" (somebody had made a grab for her book). "Thought you'd got it, didn't you, Elwell? Now I'll read it first and then show her the picture, and that reminds me, Mac, you've never given me my 'Jack Sheppard' back that I lent you——"

Louie reached for a chair. She yawned again.

"Do give me a cup of tea, somebody. I hope the watering's all done, for I'm not going to do any. What's the child got now? If it's 'Maria Martin' or 'Irene Iddesleigh,' I think I know them by heart."

The child herself answered her question. She jumped on a chair and extended an arm for silence.

"Ready?" she cried. "Now!"

"'THE LIFE AND BATTLES OF BUCK CAUSTON,'"

she declaimed in her most ringing voice,

("Causton's uncle, don't forget, girls)—

("Piker Betteridge—'Piker'—isn't it lovely?)

B. Minor drew out every syllable of the linked sweetness, and concluded;

"And lo and behold—on the cover—Buck himself—Uncle Buck, Causton—you needn't say he isn't—as large as life and twice as beautiful—there!"

She held up the booklet in triumph.

But she drew it back again, bubbling with enjoyment. "Wait till I find the gem—the one about Piker," she cried.

Her fingers fluttered rapidly through the precious pennyworth in search of the "gem."

Louie's cup of tea had been at her lips, but not a drop spilt as she put it down again. If her colour changed at all it was only as that other pale fighter's had done whose story, Price One Penny, the unconscious Burnett Minor was rapturously searching.

"Here it is!" cried B. Minor, peremptorily extending her hand again. "Listen, everybody!—

But Louie had risen and walked to the child. She held out her hand.

"Let me look," she said.

B. Minor gave her a suspicious look, as if she feared she might be reft of her treasure. "You will give it me back?"

"Oh yes."

Louie took the book.

She supposed she was awake now, but somehow a curious air of unreality enveiled whatever it was that was happening. She looked at the cover of the "Life" in her hand. The most execrable of woodcuts could hardly disguise what she saw. Traditionally posed, nude above the waist, and clad below only in tights and fighting-shoes—formidably watchful, lightly poised for the blow—in appearance at any rate he was a man and superb. But really he had been cruel, faithless, divorced.

As if she had passed merely from one state of half-wakefulness to another, she did not think of the bomb she was about to drop among the girls. She only wanted to look, and to look, and to look again at this man, who was her father.

"Isn't it just Causton's mouth and chin?" she barely heard Burnett Minor bubbling. "But I can't say she has Uncle Buck's beezer——"

Slowly Louie handed the "Life and Battles" back. At any rate she had now seen him, if only in a wretched woodcut. She looked quietly about her.

"That's my father," she said, perhaps a shade distinctly and loudly.

Then she looked about her again.

Burnett Minor jumped down from her chair. Her eyes shone flattery on Louie. The very audacity of such a lie compelled her admiration.

"O-o-oh—what a whopper!" she cried. Louie turned her eyes to Burnett Minor.

"You said uncle. You weren't quite right. That's my father," she said again.

Burnett Minor's life was full of miracles. A miracle more or less made no difference. Her eyes sparkled. She alone of the girls believed.

"Not really?" she gasped.

Louie nodded.

"Qu'est c'qu'elle dit?" Pigou cried excitedly, somewhere at the back.

"Pooh, she didn't—she only nodded—nodding isn't a lie," a casuist scoffed.

"Stupid, don't you see she's joking?"

But Burnett Minor was watching Louie—only to be quite sure.

"Honour?" she cried. "Spit your death?"

"Honour."

"How splen-diferous! And you never told us!"

But Burnett Major had already looked at her sister. She was shocked into using her Christian name. "Genista!" she reproved her.

"Let me look again," said Louie.

She looked again at the man who had been cruel, faithless, divorced. Again she handed the "Life" back.

"He keeps a public-house up the river," she said.

At that the tension was suddenly relieved. That, of course, was too much. They breathed freely again. The derisive clamour broke out.

"Oh, don't you see? They've made it up between them—frauds!"

"Of course they have! Come and finish tea."

"She'll be saying that was the man who brought her down next!"

"Causton, I'll never, never believe another word you say!"

"Come on—the housekeeper will be here in a minute."

"Pig, you've stolen my piece of cake that I was saving!"

"Hurl the bread and butter, Mac."

And the crowd which had gathered about Louie dispersed to the tables again.

Not until ten minutes later, when she had gone up to her own room again, did Louie begin to wonder what had impelled her to make her surprising declaration. But in an instant her ten-years'-old habit of thought asserted itself again. Why have made it? Rather, why not have made it? She would have made it sooner had occasion offered. Elwell and the Burnetts did not drag their fathers in; she had not dragged her father in either. She had not told them that her mother was Lord Moone's sister—it was known, but she had not told them; why should she have paraded the fact that her father was this redoubtable Buck, from whose beezer the claret had flowed as he had advanced for the twenty-eighth round? They could have known it any time they had wanted! Conceal it? Why, had she not all her life been glorying in that very pride of the cobbler's dog?

And still, deep down in her, she wondered whether it had been even that sort of pride, and not rather that secret hunger of the heart that, while she was "in at" everything, she was also "out of" everything. Had it been that that had caused her to say quietly: "That's my father"?

Or perhaps it was even something deeper still. Perhaps, in a word, it had been her blind groping towards that crude and strong and cruel and joyous life Richenda Earle had said she knew nothing about.

She wondered whether the girls downstairs were talking about her now.

Her eyes fell on the black-framed miniature of the fourth Lord Moone. Then, as if her brain had received a number of disordered impressions all heaped one on the top of the other, she sat down on the edge of her bed, not so much to think as to remember again exactly what had happened.

Gradually the disorder cleared. Phrases and the tones in which they had been uttered began to stand forth more distinctly. Presently she was able to allocate each to its speaker. It was her first attempt to estimate differences in the future her declaration might have made.

Burnett Minor, of course, she could dismiss summarily. To her it had been a high lark, that but endeared Louie to her the more. But Burnett Major? What about her? "Genista!" she had exclaimed, shocked at her young sister's apparent belief in the socially impossible. Yes, it would be interesting to see what difference, if any, was to be seen in Burnett Major's attitude now. And Elwell's "Oh!" What about that? And Macfarlane's blank look? And what did Richenda Earle think?

Louie did not know yet.

And what about Mrs. Lovenant-Smith? Undoubtedly Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, knowing about it herself, would have preferred Louie to keep silence.

The thought of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, however, always braced Louie. That curious pleased coldness came into her eyes again. She would see about Mrs. Lovenant-Smith by-and-by. In the meantime, the last thing she intended to do was to absent herself from them all. She would go down to supper.

She took a clean blouse from a drawer, laid it out on her bed, and then, reaching for a towel, started for the bathroom.

Before she reached the bathroom, however, one of her conjectures was already answered. Richenda Earle's cubicle was on the same corridor as hers, four doors lower down, and she met Richenda herself, who had come back from her vacation a week before, by the embrasure of one of the latticed courtyard windows. It was almost dark; in the recess the little reflectored oil lamp had been lighted, and it shone on the Scholarship girl's copper hair and angular shoulders. Louie stopped. She did so deliberately. Let Earle allude if she dared.

"You washed?" she said, on a rising note.

"No, not yet. I—I came up for a book," said Richenda.

"You're not studying to-night, are you?"

"Ye-es—oh yes, I must."

"Classification?"

"Ye-es—yes."

"How far have you got now?"

Louie's mood was on her. It was overdue, but it had come now, and she was challenging Earle. Nevertheless, she was ignorant of what she really challenged when she challenged Earle. Hard knowledge of the true weight of Life will tell, and Earle's knowledge of that weight told now. The girl's head was downhung, so that the nodule of bone at the back of her neck caught the light sharply. Suddenly she looked up.

"But you are Lord Moone's niece, aren't you?" she said, without preface.

Since her vacation, this daughter of a struggling Westbourne Grove bookseller had seemed less assertive than before, and was, somehow, none the worse for it. Louie didn't know what had made the difference, but she momentarily dropped her point.

"Yes," she said. "Why?"

"Then——?" Richenda halted.

"Then what? The other that I told them downstairs is just as true, if that's what you want to know."

"But—but——"

"Well, what?"

Earle evidently mitigated what she had been about to say.

"I only mean that—that you must have thought it queer, my talking as I did—that morning, you know?"

Louie saw the approach of the first attitude for her garner.

"What morning?" she demanded.

"When they punished me—when I was washing the fruit trees."

"I remember. Well, why should I think anything queer?"

Earle's head dropped again. Again the sharp nodule of bone showed.

"Do you mean," Louie said, "that if my father's what I said, no doubt I know as much about what you were saying as you do?"

"Oh no!" Earle said, the more quickly that that probably had been what she had meant.

"Then what do you mean?"

"Only that it's—so odd——"

But suddenly Louie gave her towel a twitch and turned away. She spoke with her chin over her shoulder.

"I don't love my mother," she said, "but for all that she is Lord Moone's sister—Augustus Evelyn Francis Scarisbrick, Lord Moone. And the other's my father. I wouldn't study too hard about it if I were you. You have your medal to get."

She walked abruptly to the bathroom.

That night, as usual, she sat at supper between Burnett Minor and Richenda Earle. The ordinarily irrepressible child on her left was silent; but others, two or three places removed from Louie, leaned back or forward from time to time to speak to her. She fancied Burnett Minor had been crying; she was sure of this when, giving the child's hand a pat under the table, she felt her own hand impulsively caught and squeezed. Then, in proportion as Burnett Minor cheered up (which she usually did very quickly), the others ceased to talk across to Louie. It was as if, whoever did it, some normal level of chatter must be maintained. Soon supper was as desultorily talkative as it always was. Louie, glancing at the top table, saw that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith knew nothing of what had happened at tea-time. She was, however, quite ready for her the moment she should find out something.

V

One afternoon about three weeks later Louie Causton had occasion to go into the carpenter's shed. This shed lay between the dairies and the boiler-house that was the centre of the hot-water-pipe system, and Priddy had a frame making there. Half this frame, protected by a board with "Wet Paint" chalked upon it, leaned against the outside wall, and, with his back to the sunlit doorway, a young man, whom at first Louie took to be Priddy, was doing something at a bench. Hearing her, he turned. It was not Priddy. Louie did not know him.

There is in the British Museum a small helmeted head very like the young man Louie saw. It is on the upper floor, among the Tanagras, in a case on the left as you walk from the stairs. This young man, of course, was not helmeted. His face was handsome and slightly vacuous; his eyes in particular had something of the blankness of the little terra-cotta head; and his mouth was full and classically curved, and had the slightest of smudges of dark moustache along the deeply indented upper lip. A pair of rolling muscular shoulders showed through his white sweater; his old trousers were tucked into a pair of wooden-looking boots; and he was filing something. Louie wondered what business he had there.

He told her. He spoke in a slow voice, as if he had got his explanation by rote. He was there by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's permission, he said.

"We had a smash with the centre-board, you see," he explained. "Crash—just at tea-time. Izzard wanted to send it to Mazzicombe, but I told him they'd charge nearly as much as we gave for the beastly boat. So I'm doing it myself."

Then, as if his presence within the precincts of a horticultural college for young women was quite explained, he bent over his filing again. Louie, who had come for a couple of boards that had been put aside for her, took them and went out. She was twenty yards away when she heard the young man call slowly after her: "I say—I ought to carry those for you, you know——"

The boards were for her bed. This she had removed from the orchard. The new place lay quite beyond the orchard, at the foot of the hill between Chesson's and the sea. There, for the first time on the previous night, she had had the best of what breeze there was.

It had been the attitude of her fellow-students during the past month—or, more fairly, what she had conceived to be their attitude—that had caused her thus to remove herself.

It might be too much to say that she was still not as popular as ever. These things are not demonstrable. Popular she had been; now—well, it depended a little more than it had done. Burnett Minor, of course, would have eaten from the same plate with her by day and shared her bed at night had she been permitted—also had she not left for her vacation a fortnight before; but Burnett Major—Louie was not so sure about Burnett Major. Her attitude had been more than correct; it had been so correct that Louie had been put altogether in the wrong. The words, of course, had never been said, but Louie had imagined Burnett Major's private opinion to be as follows:—

"But why didn't she tell us sooner? What earthly difference does she suppose it would have made? Who cares about things like that? I dare say her father's just as good as anybody else's father; for that matter, mother's grandfather was only a farmer—mother told us so herself; but nobody likes being treated as if they were snobs. It showed a lack of confidence, that's what it showed; and I don't know—now—I mean no girl, unless she wasn't quite a lady, would——" Louie could supply that part too.

"I don't care—I love Causton!" she had also imagined B. Minor as having sobbed, bold and unconvinced. "He didn't sky the wiper when his beezer was bleeding, anyway!"

Yes: for Burnett Major, presentation and all the rest of it lay ahead.

Matters would probably have stopped at that had Louie herself allowed them to do so; but that would not have been like Louie. Allow them to stop there? Good gracious, no! Her cynicism had become bright indeed. She was not the girl to contaminate the innocent Burnett Minor; neither—for she was a Scarisbrick when all was said and done—was she going to be driven willy-nilly into the society of Richenda Earle as company good enough for her. She could look after herself, thank you. Coventry is no unpleasant place provided you have the putting of yourself there, and at any rate her Coventry at the foot of the hill was cooler at night than the other one. It meant carrying her mattress and bedding a little farther, but she had a prizefighter's physique to carry them with, which was more than her nearest neighbour, Elwell, the daughter of the Treasury mandarin, could say.

It is true that she did sometimes wonder (with Burnett Major, perhaps) whether she had not inherited also from the prizefighter something less desirable than his physique—a discontented and ill-conditioned nature. But that did not mend matters. It merely made her, if it did anything at all, distrustful of herself. And as this is the story of Louie, virtues and vices and all, her moods must go down with the rest.

At any rate, rolled in her blanket at the foot of the hill, she could feel the night wind on her face, and see the stars, and in her fancy deride or boast of her parentage to her heart's content.

On the afternoon following that on which she had fetched the boards from the carpenter's shed she went to the shed again, this time for a couple of tent-pegs and a piece of cord for the better securing of her blankets. The vacant young Tanagra was still there. But this time he was not quite so vacant. He had had leisure to think of quite a number of words.

"I say," he said, lifting slow and bashful eyes of the colour of blue porcelain to Louie, "I've been thinking. Haven't I seen you before?"

"Yes. Yesterday," said Louie shortly. He had had the bad luck to catch her at her brooding. But he did not seem to notice her curtness.

"No, but I mean—before——"

"When?"

"Isn't—isn't your name Chaffinger?" He almost blushed.

"No."

"Oh!"

Then she relented a little.

"I was called Chaffinger for a time. My name's Causton. I suppose yours is Chesson, or you'd hardly be here?"

"Chesson? Why Chesson? No. Mine's Lovenant-Smith—Roy Lovenant-Smith."

"Oh!" said Louie. "Then you're right. We have met before, at Mallard Bois."

Roy Lovenant-Smith appeared to be so relieved at being rid of a perplexity that he didn't much care if they never met again.

"I thought we had," he said mildly. "You were Louie Chaffinger then. I knew you were."

"But what," Louie asked, "are you doing here?"

He radiated simplicity.

"That centre-board, didn't I tell you? Izzard would make me go halves in the rotten old thing; just look at her; hardly a shroud on the port side, and the centre-board was hitched up with a piece of old rope instead of a chain and down it came the other tea-time. It's the cabin table as well as the centre-board, you see, and the whole thing shut up-just like that——"

He set the inner edges of his hands together and then closed his palms with a slap.

"All the tea—jam and all the lot," he said.

He amused Louie. "That was a pity," she said demurely.

"Wasn't it? But I say, I shall be catching it. I might use the shed, aunt said, but she told me it was a fixed Rule about men, unless you're a gardener, of course——"

("An obedient nephew," Louie thought.) "Then I must go at once," she added.

"Well, I shouldn't like to get you into a row too," said Roy Lovenant-Smith ingenuously.

"No," Louie agreed, more demurely still. "They have to be strict, you know."

"Rather!" said Roy Lovenant-Smith heartily.

And Louie left him.

She was hardly out of sight before her laughter broke forth. "'All the tea—jam and all the lot!'" she repeated softly, and laughed again. She scarcely remembered this delightful young man. When, as a child of eleven, she had played leapfrog, he could hardly have been more than seven, and she felt herself to be far more than four years his senior now. He was the adjutant's son, she supposed. Well, he would hardly need Chaff's usual extenuation about his being a bad fellow at all: Louie would be very much surprised if he had wit enough to be very bad, or, for the matter of that, very anything else either. Once more she laughed. At any rate she had to thank him for dispelling her megrims for the time being. Still laughing softly, she passed through the orchards, ascended the hill, and sought her favourite place by the stile at the top.

She had not thought very much about young men. She had observed them as so many phenomena, obviously superior to the animals, yet not quite identifiable as beings with inner experiences akin to her own. They looked at her irregular mouth and elongated chin, said the things young men did say, and departed again, taking their various moustaches and their unvarying smell of tobacco to some girl of the kind she knew they accounted "pretty." They were quite different beings from the fairy prince of her childhood; and since her childhood's days she had grown gradually, she did not know how, to a fairly accurate estimate in retrospect of the "little party" to which Chaff had once taken her, pigtails and all. Her views of marriage too were coloured by that mixed parentage that made her, she supposed, not "common" and not "a lady." She would not marry unless this was clearly understood. What else there might be in marriage was shadowy, to be considered after this redoubtable magnanimity was safely out of the way.

With no young man had she ever had "a lark."

She was, however, more in the mood for a lark now—not necessarily with a young man—than she had ever been in her life before. "Cau-ston a vingt-quatr'ans—elle coiffe dÉjÀ Sainte Catherine," the remorseless Pigou had said: oh, had she? Did she? Moreover, you cannot put yourself gloomily into Coventry; others must be made to see that you consider your sequestration the most desirable of conditions. Indeed, she had said as much to Richenda Earle only the night before.

Richenda was the only one of the girls who slept indoors, and Louie, carrying her bed-trappings out from the house, had come upon Richenda by the little green door of the espaliered wall that led to the orchards. Richenda had made an advance, willing, apparently, to forget the snub Louie had administered after the "Life and Battles" revelation, and had offered to carry her pillow for her.

"Why do you go so far?" she had asked, as they had left the orchard behind.

"Oh, I hate being disturbed," Louie had replied. "I'd go right down to the shore if it wasn't for the climb up again."

"But suppose you wanted anything during the night?"

"What should I want?"

"Of course, I forgot. You don't have headaches. I have—frightful ones."

"Then why don't you come out too? There's quite a jolly place here. I'd help you to carry your things."

"Oh, I've got to read," Richenda had shaken her head.

"You'd be heaps better for it——"

Louie had not much in common with Richenda—save perhaps (she loved little cuts like this at herself) that both of their fathers were literary. But she had had that rather brutal snub on her conscience. That had come out next.

"You do study too hard," she had said, "and—I say, Earle—I'm sorry for what I said that night—you know—when I snapped at you and said you'd your medal to get. Will you forget that?"

The next moment she had almost wished she hadn't said it, Earle's hungry gratitude had shown so.

"It wasn't your fault a bit," the red-haired girl had broken out impulsively. "It was all mine. I ought to have minded my own business. But I was so—so——"

"Well, try sleeping up here," Louie had cut her short. "It's jolly."

But Richenda had gone on. "I was stupid," she had murmured.

"I don't know that you were. You see how it is."

"Oh, I was, I was——"

"Well, as I tell you, I don't think much of my mother's lot."

"Ah, you can say so," Richenda had replied, shaking her head. Then, as Louie had thrown down her mattress, "You don't mean to say you undress here?" she had asked.

"Well, I don't sleep in my clothes."

"But don't your things get wet?"

"I wrap 'em in my waterproof.... You won't come up, then, and run down to the shore for a bathe before breakfast?"

"Causton, they'll be dropping on you yet!" Earle had said, almost frightened.

"Well, without the bathe?"

"Oh, I should die!"

And Richenda had gone back to sleep where she might find remedies for her headaches within reach of her hand during the night.

Louie sat on the stile. The sea had a soft bloom, and the sky was of the colour of the whites of a baby's eyes. Bees hummed among the scabious, and blue and sulphur butterflies hovered over the patches of wild thyme. A tramp, sullying the air behind her, crept slowly up to Bristol; a single nodding grass-head near at hand shut her out almost completely. Mazzicombe, down under the hill, was hidden. Louie watched it all, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, of how sweet it was to relax all her muscles to the point of not stumbling off the stile, and all her mind save that she might still be just conscious that she existed and was Louie Causton....

"Hallo," said a slow, imperturbable voice behind her; "here we are again."

She started a little. Roy Lovenant-Smith was returning with a baulk of old wood over his shoulder.

"Oh, it's you," she said. She did not know whether she was glad or annoyed to be interrupted.

"Yes, it's me," he replied placidly.

She was silent for a moment; then: "I thought you hadn't to hang about here?" she said.

"Well," he put it to her candidly, "how can I get over the stile when you're sitting on it? How can I, now?"

She laughed. "Well, I must get off on my proper side." She did so. "There," she said.

He climbed over with great deliberateness, walked a few yards with his piece of timber, and then turned again.

"No, you can't see her from here," he said. "She's down under the hill there. I don't think she's worth bothering about, but Izzard says she'll be quite all right with a new stay or two. I suppose I shall have to get 'em."

Louie felt a return of her amusement.

"Who's Izzard?" she asked.

"Izzard?" He looked at her as if she ought to know that. "Izzard's the other chap. Always painting, you know. Painting and mooning about and leaving me to do all the work. He's away there somewhere now." He pointed vaguely across the Channel. "I suppose he'll come back when he's ready. She is an old egg-box!—I say, how's your cousin Eric? And that girl—what's her name—Cynthia, wasn't it?"

She didn't know, and told him so; she did not tell him that she didn't care either. He cogitated for a moment, and then said:

"But I say—what do you do at this place? Seems funny to me.... Mind yourself—somebody wants to get over——"

She had not heard anybody approach. It was Priddy, going down to Mazzicombe. Louie stood aside from the stile. Priddy climbed over it and began to descend the hill. Lovenant-Smith looked at Louie in surprise.

"I say," he said, "that's cool! Don't those fellows take their hats off to you?"

"No," said Louie. Then she turned her clear grey eyes on him. She had been fairly caught.

"Don't they? By Jove!... What are you looking at me like that for?"

The rippling laugh with which Louie replied dropped a note. "Guess!" she said.

"How can I guess?" he asked, with his innocent and statue-like stare.

For answer, Louie glanced to where Priddy's brown bowler hat was disappearing over the edge of the hill. Roy Lovenant-Smith saw—he really saw——

"What?" he exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that that chap will——?"

She nodded. He stared.

"What, get you into a row for talking to me?"

"He may not."

"No, but really, joking apart?" he said incredulously.

"Perhaps he won't."

"Oh, come, I say!... Look here, shall I go back with you and explain?"

The innocent! "I don't think I would," said Louie, smothering her laughter.

"But—hang it all! I say, I am sorry!"

"Oh?"

"I mean sorry I've got you into a row, of course," he amended.

"Oh, I thought you meant sorry you stopped and talked to me."

"Of course not. That is, if it doesn't get you into a row."

"And if it did——?"

"Well, a chap doesn't like getting people into rows. Look here—that beggar wants talking to!"

Louie dropped her eyes. "I've been in rows before," she said.

Instantly he cheered up. "Oh, I see! You mean it wouldn't be much?"

"Well, your aunt can't exactly skin me." At the recollection of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith she glanced with satisfaction at her hands.

"Oh, I'll make that all right with her," said Roy Lovenant-Smith hopefully.

She looked at him. He was an innocent! "You know what that would mean?" she said.

"What?"

"Well, merely that you wouldn't see me again."

His look too rested on her hands. "Why?" he asked.

She straightened herself. "Oh, never mind about it. I'm going now."

He coloured a little. "But I say—Louie—you don't mind my calling you Louie, do you? I used to, you know.—I should like to see you again."

"Perhaps you'd better not," she said, with great demureness.

"Oh, rot!" he expostulated. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in the lurch!"

"You'd like to see me just once again, to see whether I'd got into a row or not?"

"That's what I mean."

It wasn't what Louie had meant him to mean, but "Well, once, if you like," she conceded.

"All right. What about here, at this time to-morrow?"

"I'll see if I can get away from my studies."

"Right. And if I see that chap in Mazzicombe, may I say anything to him?"

"Please don't."

"Not about not taking his hat off?"

"Oh, they don't trouble about that sort of thing here."

"Well, they jolly well ought. All right, I won't. Good-bye——"

"Good-bye."

He took his board and followed Priddy; she turned back to the college. She laughed again. At any rate, a lark with a pleasant image was better than a hole-in-corner, Miss Hastings affair with a gardener. She would not "coiffe Sainte Catherine."

She duly got her wigging. She was put "on her honour" by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith not to see the young man again who had betrayed the confidence put in him. This struck her as quite richly arrogant. To be put "on your honour" by somebody before whom you stand mute as a fish, and to have it assumed that you accept the bond, was the largior ether indeed. Louie did not even feel called upon to say that she declined to consider herself bound. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith might take her "off her honour" again. She met Roy scarcely three hours later. The interview he himself had had with his aunt in the meantime affected the situation but little; his centre-board was now patched up, and the withdrawing of the privilege of the carpenter's shed made no difference.

They met again on the afternoon following that, and again on the one after that. Louie found herself hoping that Izzard, whoever he was, would not return from "over there" just yet. Let somebody else attend to the hair-combing of the Saint.

A score of different things contributed to her enjoyment of that affair of atmosphere—her "lark." First, the initiative was hers—for her empty-eyed statue accepted everything with as much candour as if he had been born into a virgin world on the eighth day of its creation. Next, the mere disregarding of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was a pleasure she felt it incumbent upon herself not to forgo. Next, there was the instinctive courage with which she translated her sulks into carelessness and gaiety. Next—but allow what you will for the rest: pique, vanity, her derivation, her upbringing. When, the third time she met Roy by the stile, the half-French girl, Pigou, came upon them, and instantly flew to spread the news among such girls as still remained at Chesson's, Louie's Coventry was the coveted thing she had all along intended it should be.

For she was more than merely popular now; she was romantic, apart, a being to be looked up to with something like awe. Meet a young man! She felt herself to be the channel by which every girl in the place might have access to her own dreams. They gave her longing glances, that mutely implored her to tell them all, all about it; she talked about everything else, but not about that, and hearts and mouths watered. They offered to do things for her—to carry her mattress, to do her Sunday watering, even to clean her bicycle; and Louie let them—but told them nothing. Nay, she even drew Richenda Earle to herself. Richenda actually carried her mattress to the foot of the hill one night and slept out. The two mattresses were placed not six feet apart, and, as the birds settled on the boughs and the stars came out, Richenda set herself wistfully to pump Louie.

Then it appeared why Richenda had seemed changed since her vacation. Speaking in a low voice, she too admitted that there was now—Somebody. Weston, his name was, Louie learned, and he was some sort of a commercial schoolmaster at the same place in Holborn where Richenda herself had studied. So instead of Richenda pumping Louie, Louie pumped Richenda. What was her Mr. Weston like? Well (Richenda said), some might think him an oddity—the Secretary Bird, his nickname was—but he was, oh, a soul so sensitive, so gentle! Was there any prospect of their marrying soon? Richenda sighed; it would be a long time; if she got her post at Chesson's he might apply for a country schoolmastership somewhere near, and then she would get a bicycle; or if he got a "rise" in London she might relinquish her appointment—when she got it. But in any case it could hardly be for years. Louie asked flatly what Weston got, and was told one hundred pounds a year. She looked up in surprise. Her own dress allowance was treble that amount.

"And you'd get a hundred here too?" she asked.

"If I get the place—which means if I get my medal," said Richenda.

Then, Louie thought, that would be two hundred between them—two-thirds of her dress allowance.

"But—but——," she said, "I thought people got paid more than that!"

"I told you you didn't know," said Richenda softly.

"But—but—why, my aunt paid Miss Skrine one hundred and fifty pounds, just to go through her engagements, opening bazaars and charities and so on—just to write down on a slate what she had to do each day!"

"Your aunt's Lady Moone," came from Richenda's couch.

"I know she got one hundred and fifty pounds, and lived with them. One hundred pounds seems absurd."

"That's what father said when he apologised to me."

"But surely, all—all the people one sees aren't paid at that rate! Why, some cooks get a thousand—I've heard that for a fact——"

"Some don't," came from the other pillow.

"Well, some do, and if you strike an average, or whatever it's called——"

But Richenda interrupted, softly and wearily:

"Oh, you don't, don't, don't know."

Louie asked further questions. She frowned, puzzled, at the answers. Of course Richenda herself wasn't a very effective sort of girl; if anybody had to be downtrodden it would very likely be she; but the things she was telling her now (Richenda had begun to talk again, resignedly rather than bitterly) were preposterous. There must be something wrong with Richenda, probably with her Weston too; she did not look quite right; she was very different from the rosy housemaids at Trant, for example. One hundred pounds a year!... She had forgotten all about Roy. When, presently, Richenda came as near to putting a question about him as she dared, she forgot about him again. One hundred pounds a year!... She lay on her back, her knees up, her hands behind her head, her sleeves fallen from her wonderful arms, the brows above the grey eyes knitted. She was sure that she could do better than that! She even went so far as to say so. Richenda showed no resentment.

"You've got Lord Moone behind you," she said.

"I've got a prizefighter and a public-house behind me," Louie replied.

"Yes—I know you think you know——"

Louie lay awake, still pondering it all, long after Richenda had fallen into an uneasy sleep.

On the following afternoon she met Roy by the stile again. She was restless, unsettled, she knew not what. She spoke almost sharply to him.

"I'm not going to stand here with you," she said; "that's twice I've been seen. Come down the hill."

Roy no longer urged the Rules. They walked together a hundred yards down the hill, and sat down under a gorse-bush. He made her move quite behind it, and even then tucked her skirt a little farther out of the gaze of a possible passer-by.

"Now we're all right," he said. "How's Lovey this morning?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen her."

"Well, don't bite a fellow's head off, Louie."

"Then don't bother me to-day.—No, I don't want my hand held."

"What's the matter with you?"

"If you don't leave me alone I shall go. I didn't sleep till nearly daylight."

"I didn't sleep for quite an hour, either," he said sympathetically. "I say, isn't it funny, Louie, when you come to think of it, that till a week ago I hadn't thought of you for years?"

"Oh, I wasn't lying awake thinking of you," she said bluntly.

"I was of you." He put out his hand again.

His approach only made her impatient. "Oh, don't!" she snapped. "Really I shall get up and go if you worry me."

He was, as he would have put it, "keen": keen enough to begin to sulk. She let him sulk, and watched the sea, always of a milky bloom, and the sky, still of the hue of an infant's eyeball. After some minutes she turned to him again.

"What do people get paid?" she asked abruptly.

"What people?" He spoke over his shoulder.

"Oh, people—you know what I mean!"

"We get dashed little, I know that." (He was going into the army.) "What sort of people? Servants and those?"

"And those—yes."

Roy expounded.

"Jolly good pay, I call it; lot of lazy beggars! Why, the fellow down there wanted to charge me two pounds for patching up that centre-board, that I did in about a day. I shouldn't mind getting two pounds a day!... Why?"

"I want to know."

"Some of your gardeners been grizzling to you?"

"No."

"A wonder—rotten grousing lot! They ought to have uniforms to buy, and mess-bills and clubs and things; they'd know all about it then! Two pounds for filing a piece of iron and putting a patch on a piece of wood!—I think it will hold all right," he continued naÏvely; "we shall make a deuce of a lot of leeway if it doesn't. We're flat-bottomed, you see, with only bilge-keels, and that reminds me; Izzard's coming back on Wednesday; I'd a note from him this morning. But he won't be in the way, dear, if you'll only be friends——"

She could not help laughing. After all, Richenda's "grousing" was a little spoiling her fun. She turned to him again.

"I haven't seen her yet," she said. "Let's go down to her now."

He chuckled mildly. "You do play the dickens with the Rules, Louie."

"Bother the Rules!"

"Well, you don't want to go just this minute; it's jolly here——"

This time she did not withdraw her hand.

But he was very slow, she thought, in kissing her. He had never kissed her yet. What was the good of being caught at—nothing?

Well, statues (she reflected), especially young ones, are slow——

Even as she was thinking it he did that very thing. Perhaps it was to summon up resolution to do so that he had lain awake the previous night. He kissed her cheek.

The result was curious. It was the law of her physique that most moments of perturbation only turned her paler; but at this particular form of perturbation she turned suddenly pink.

In a few moments she was as before. The first sign that she was Louie again was that she forbade him to repeat the offence. He sulked again.

"All right," he said resentfully; "then we may as well go and see the yacht."

"I don't want to see the yacht."

"Well, you needn't be stuffy about it——"

Statues were distractingly slow!

Then she looked at him with a faintly mocking smile.

"Aren't you going to say you're sorry?" she challenged him (but she had for a moment a faint return of the unhabitual colour for all that).

He seemed to suspect that he was being mocked; nevertheless it was with a rather tremulous boldness that he answered "No."

"Oh!"

"You see," he explained, "you did let me hold your hand."

She caught her breath. Good gracious! Why, he would be saying presently that she had asked him to kiss her! "You see, you did let me hold your hand!" What next?

"You know you did," he argued simply.

Even so it is written, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings——"

Suddenly she laughed. O admirable innocence, that alone can defeat guile! After all, it was too unpardonable not to be pardoned. She turned her face away again.

"You are stupid!" she murmured, her face, even her neck, pink once more.

At that quite a new gleam seemed to irradiate his good-looking clay.

"I say," he said slowly, as he struggled with the newness of the idea, "you mean—do you mean?—about my not kissing you—properly?"

Oh, the heaviness! But he should kiss her "properly," as he called it, now!

"Oh," she said briskly, "it's too late now. You can't very well after that, can you?"

But he beamed. "Of course I can!"

"No, Roy!"

"I will——"

This was outrageous. She made as if to rise.

"No, Roy—no—you know very well you don't think I'm pretty——"

"Well, you aren't ugly," said he.

(Great heavens! She "wasn't ugly"!)

"Very well, Mr. Statue," she thought, compressing those irregular lips whose degree of prettiness he estimated so nicely. "I'm going to be pretty in a very few minutes, and you're going to tell me so."

"No, Roy," she said aloud; "just let's sit and talk—sensibly—I don't know what made you behave like this all of a sudden——"

And there was none to say "Provoking hussy!"

An hour later they rose. It was too late to go to the yacht now. They walked together back to the stile. Their shoulders overlapped. The kisses came easily now.

"Then we'll go aboard her to-morrow?" he said.

"Very well."

"'Once aboard the lugger'—ha, ha—but of course she's a cutter, not a lugger. That's just a saying, 'Once aboard the lugger.'"

"Really?"

"Yes, hadn't you heard it? 'Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,' it is. And I say, you'd better put some old clothes on if I'm to show you how the centre-board works."

"All right."

"What about Lovey?" he asked once more.

"Oh, we write down on a slate where we're going."

He held her a little away. "I—say!... You wouldn't tell her where, would you?"

"Why not?"

"What—cheek!"

"She put me 'on my honour'—impudence!" quoth Louie.

"But I say—what frightful cheek!"

"Good-bye——"

"Just a minute——"

"Well——"

Then, "'Bye——"

"Good-bye——"

He called her name after her. "Louie!"

"What?"

"Good-bye——"

"Good-bye, boy——" She waved her hand.

Anyway, she thought with satisfaction, she had made him say—swear—that she was pretty.

The next afternoon, as good as her word, Louie wrote on the hall-slate: "Gone to Mazzicombe: L. Causton." Then she walked, whistling, out of the house and up the hill.

VI

This time she fully expected to catch it, and did catch it. No time was lost. A note from Mrs. Lovenant-Smith just before supper ordered her to report herself immediately after that meal. At a quarter past nine she presented herself.

The French window stood wide open, but night was fast falling over the front lawn, and a clipped peacock of box showed against a brownish-green sky. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stood by the window. It moved as she turned, and there swung slowly across the pane the reflection of the tall, yellow-shaded standard-lamp in one corner. Miss Harriet Chesson had followed Louie in. In her hand was a piece of paper—Louie's "conduct-report."

The beginning of the encounter was no skirmish; its end was positive slaughter. This is no place for a report of it, round by round; it must be summarised, even as the "Life and Battles" summarises the combat between Buck and the terrible Piker. Louie "led," so to speak, by asking whether she might sit down, giving as her reason that she had had a long walk that afternoon; permission was only refused her after she had put her hand on the back of a wheatear chair and said again: "I think you said Yes?" She then placed the chair for Miss Harriet to sit on, as near as possible to that of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She herself stood in the middle of the room.

Miss Harriet, evidently wishing she was somewhere else, read aloud the conduct-report. It was longish and detailed. It also, as Louie well knew, did not contain one of the real points at issue. She looked from one to the other of the two women. The Lady-in-Charge wore a discreetly-necked evening frock, with a fichu secured by a mourning brooch; and her fingers kept touching this brooch, and also kept leaving it again, as if Louie's eyes had been capable of a physical plucking of them away. She had had Miss Harriet in, Louie knew, for moral support. The principal's dress, too, was a give-and-take between her gardening costume and conventional evening attire. Her indictment read, she seemed more than ever anxious to depart. Louie, for her part, was rather glad that she had been called in. Buck had always fought better for the eyes upon him.

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith began correctly; her first trace of acerbity showed only when Louie, having listened to her arraignment with downcast eyes, lifted them for a moment to make a modest and quite immaterial correction.

"Have the goodness to cease this exaggerated deference, Miss Causton. It doesn't deceive me. It's only a form of veiled insolence."

Louie heard her indictment out in silence.

First blood was drawn when Louie mentioned the name of Roy Lovenant-Smith. She called him, with aggravating naturalness, "Roy." Mrs. Lovenant-Smith rose nearly an inch in height.

"'Roy!'" she echoed. "'Roy,' indeed!"

"I quite expected Priddy would tell you that first time. Of course he would. The gardeners here don't like outsiders intruding," said Louie.

The point told. There was no need to mention the name of Miss Hastings. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face deepened its ochre.

"Go on, Miss Causton," she said; while Miss Harriet timidly interposed: "I think that's all you wanted me for?"

Louie went on. "And anyway, you gave your nephew permission to come on the premises, which seems to me quite as much against the Rules as anything there." She pointed to the charge-sheet.

"Pray go on, Miss Causton," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, swallowing her wrath. Piker Betteridge, counting the moral advantage to be more than the pain endured, had formerly been wont to thrust out his undefended jaw in order to prove its invulnerability to attack; Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was doing something of the same kind now.

"Pray go on——" she said.

"And of course that's all bunkum," said Louie, warming, and pointing once more to the paper in Miss Harriet's hand. "That isn't in the least what you mean. What you really hate is my having told the girls what you've had in your mind ever since I came—I mean about my father."

"Pray go on!" The jaw was thrust out once more.

("Perhaps I'd better go?" Miss Harriet still fidgeted. Seedsmen's daughters are not at their ease at these Olympian conflicts.)

"All right, I will go on," said Louie, warming still more. "You would have preferred me to hold my tongue about it, and if you're thinking of asking me to resign I should like to say now that probably at least half-a-dozen others will go with me."

Here, however, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith scored a point.

"That may have been true a little while ago," she said, "but—go on." And Louie remembered certain little incidents and unbendings that had caused it to be indulgently rumoured that "Lovey wasn't such a bad old sort once you got to know her." Louie conceded the point.

"Anyway, that's what she does mean," she said, turning to Miss Harriet—"that she didn't want me to tell them that my father was a prizefighter and kept a public-house!"

"Address yourself to me, if you please," ordered Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

"Certainly! You've been set against me from the first, for that very reason; and as for your nephew, I've known him for years and years, and you've no business at all to have him here, and it would sound rather well, wouldn't it, if the tale got about that you allowed——"

But at this Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's hardly held composure gave way with a snap. Well-born but necessitous Ladies-in-Charge of horticultural colleges do not submit to being told their duty by the daughters of pugilists. She stamped on the floor.

"Silence!" she cried, shaking. "I was a fool ever to have had you here! You make discipline impossible. You corrupt your fellow-students—you make a boast of your unfortunate parentage—you show no respect for the Rules—you think yourself at liberty to come and go as you please—you carry on a vulgar intrigue——"

"—not with a gardener——"

("Oh, I really must go my rounds!" murmured Miss Harriet; but she lingered; the spectacle of Olympians forgetting themselves does not occur every day.)

"—disgracing yourself among younger and more innocent girls——"

"—with a Lovenant-Smith, anyway——"

Again the stamp. "I forbid you to mention his name!"

"Roy——"

"Leave the room!"

("Please, please!" besought Miss Harriet.)

"You will pack your boxes at once!"

"I shall consult Lord Moone's lawyer first. You accepted my fees—your college is an imposition from beginning to end, and I'll see that's known. That will be another scandal——"

"Ah!" choked Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, perhaps with some hazy recollection of the law of slander in her head. "You hear that, Miss Chesson? You hear that? You heard those words?"

"No, I didn't quite catch—ladies—please!"

"If you didn't catch it, I said the whole place was a shameless fraud," said Louie calmly.

"Very good. Ring the bell, Miss Chesson!"

But the servant appeared only in time to see Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's complete collapse. She sank, shaking, into a chair, and gazed unseeingly into a pigeon-hole of her desk, as if she might find some help against this devilish girl there. As she clung (as it were) to the ropes, Louie let her have it (so to speak) on the beezer.

"You oughtn't to be here at all, really, you know," she said. "You ought to be in one of those places—you know—in the Queen's gift, at Kensington or Hampton Court, with the dowagers and maids-of-honour. If you like I'll ask my uncle whether he can't do anything."

And without waiting for an answer she swept out, not by the door, but by the French window. The reflection of the yellow-shaded standard-lamp swung again as she did so.

She entered the courtyard by the side door, passed under the dark yew and the arch beneath the box-room, and made her way through the orchard. She had reached her pitch at the foot of the hill before she remembered that she had forgotten her mattress and blankets. She returned in search of them. Twenty minutes later she was in bed, her knees up, her hands clasped behind her head.

She was white with triumph. That woman! Well, Louie thought she had held her own. She had had the last word, at all events, and an optic-bunging one too. Now should she leave, or stay? It was entirely a question of balance between her desire to see the last of the place and her resolve to go at nobody's pleasure but her own. It might be that she would have to stay another week in order to avoid the suspicion that she was turning tail. The fraud of a place!

She lay, pale and victorious, thinking the matter over.

One thing was certain; she would not return to Trant. She supposed she was vindictive by nature, but that would merely mean at the most a week's gradually increasing strain on her temper and then another series of embroilings with her mother. A philosophic elf somewhere deep within her—it was hardly affection—bade her spare her mother what she had not spared Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. Why seek a known trouble at Trant? If she must take trouble with her wherever she went, she might as well take it to a fresh place.

Before she was aware they had done so, her thoughts had flown to the vouched-for but incredible things Richenda Earle had said about life and London.

Lord Moone had a house, and Captain Chaffinger chambers, in London, and she knew both. For the rest, her knowledge of the place was pretty much what Richenda had guessed it to be—shops, restaurants, theatres. Of her five visits two had been spent at Lord Moone's, two at Cynthia's friends, the Kayes, and one at an hotel—this not counting the night on which, having run away from the convent, she had occupied Chaff's room and had wondered at his large pincushion, his pictures, and ribboned haircurlers that he doubtless kept in memory of his departed youth.

Her father, too, lived in London, or thereby——

She fell to wondering about her father.

There was a full but late-rising moon that night; it had not yet cleared the tree-tops of the eastern end of the orchard below. She watched its silver through the topmost boughs. Already it filled the heavens with a mist of light, dimming the stars; the glister on near leaves was brighter than the Plough over her head. Scents of the distant gardens stole undispersed through the night; that of the night-flowering tobacco-plant was for some minutes almost sicklily oppressive; and behind her she heard the scurrying of the rabbits at play.

It was odd that she thought of her father rather than of Roy. Somehow only Roy's actual presence had the power to colour those now pale cheeks of hers. Certainly it had done so that afternoon. For an hour, aboard the yacht, the rose-peonies in the garden had been paler than she. But her father had her thoughts now, and the sum of them was that she would have given much to be able to think of him as not cruel, not faithless, not a man who had had to be thrust back into the ditch whence he had come. She might have sought him out then.

For she was going to London; that was settled. She had her allowance, more by a half than the income Richenda and her Mr. Weston would gladly have married on, and not one penny more of it would she waste at Chesson's. The next day or two would almost certainly provide her with a "good exit." Then nobody would be able to say she had slunk out.

Oh, if her father had but not been a brute!

The moon cleared the trees, and another too-sweet tract of the night-flowering tobacco enveloped her. A bird or two stirred. Some time before she had thought she had heard the sound of a curlew's whistle, low and not very near, but she had disregarded it. Now it came again. All the effect it had was to turn her thoughts, tardily and almost unnoticed by herself, to Roy.

She knew little about yachts; yachting was no pastime of Lord Moone's; but even her vaunting mood relaxed to a momentary smile as she remembered the yacht down under the hill there. Those two boys must be crazy to risk their lives like that. They had rounded Land's End in her, and in quite good faith evidently expected the miracle to be repeated. The only wonder was that the centre-board had gone before the rest of the crazy fabric. "I told you to put some old clothes on," Roy had apologised for his vessel, "—and I say—I don't think I'd sit on the table if I were you—I'm not quite sure about it, you see—may have to send it to Mazzicombe after all—come on the locker." So they had sat on the locker——

She had felt safer when, half-an-hour later, she had clambered down into the little dinghy again. It would be Davy Jones's locker for Master Roy and his friend Mr. Izzard unless some fatherly fisherman took them and their boat in hand.

Then came the thoughts of her unknown father again.

"Ee-oooo-eee!"

She sat up. The whistle came from the stile up the hill. And suddenly she knew it was no curlew. It was Roy.

She listened.

"Ee-oooo-eee!"

It was Roy.

She knew he would not seek her farther than the stile. Had there not been other sleepers just below the orchard, it would still have been the extreme of his boldness that he had got so far. But—she remembered how from the first she had been the prime mover in their entirely wanton flirtation—was it necessarily the extreme of hers?

Then, as the devil would have it, something brought Mrs. Lovenant-Smith into her head again.

That woman!

All the blood left her cheeks and thronged to her heart again.

Roy would certainly not pass the stile——

She hesitated for a moment longer, and then suddenly got up from her bed.

Her clothes were wrapped in her waterproof; she took the waterproof and put it on. She thrust her feet into a pair of slippers. The waterproof was not so long as the garment beneath it; the moon was now well above the trees; it showed the hurrying white about her heels as she walked quickly up the hill. She drew the under-garment up a little. The waterproof was almost the colour of the scorched grass. The small shadow that preceded her was now the thing most plainly to be seen.

Over the stile she saw the shoulder of his white sweater. Again her caution awoke.

"You might have put a coat on," she said, a little out of breath. "You can be seen half-a-mile away on a night like this."

"I thought you were never going to hear me!" he said.

"Oh! You seem to have been sure I'd come if I did."

"Well, you have come, haven't you?" he answered. "I say, isn't your hair different?"

"Well, it isn't done for a call, if that's what you mean; I always do it like that at night, stupid. But I'm not going to stand here with you as white as a cottage wall."

Thereupon he paid her the only compliment he ever did pay her—and that was unintentional.

"It isn't any whiter than your feet, anyway," he said.

"Well, I'm not going to stop a minute."

"Oh, dash it all!" he protested. She did think him cool!

"Good gracious, how long do you think I am going to stay?"

"Hardly worth coming for, I call it," he grumbled.

"Thank you!"

"For you, I mean, of course—as if you didn't know I'd walk miles—how you take a fellow up!"

"Well, two minutes."

Two minutes can be a very short time; five minutes had passed when, making a movement to free herself, she said: "Let me go now, Roy—I think we're both as mad as we can be."

"There isn't anybody about," he muttered.

More minutes passed; then:

"Do you really think my feet are white?" she whispered. A slipper had come off.

Then, close against his breast, she made an inconsequential, halting little appeal. "Oh, Roy—don't go in that dreadful boat again! You'll be drowned—I know you will——"

"Should you care?" he whispered.

"Silly boy!"

"No, but should you care?"...

"Roy, let me go!" she ordered suddenly. The minutes were passing fatally quickly.

"No—no——"

"Oh—yes——"

"I won't let you go."

"Roy, let me go, I say!"

But it was not a command now. It was a supplication—perhaps not even that.

She did not love him; in her heart she knew she did not love him. He loved her—years afterwards; only years afterwards. The thought of her left him—but it returned to him, never to leave him again. The moon made the crest of the hill like day, but the shadows of the gorse-bushes lay dark on the short grass and stunted bents and the patches of wild thyme. The moon southed, then rode less high. In the short night a lamb called; and then the birds, reaching the shallows of their sleep, gave a drowsy twittering and went to sleep again. It was the false dawn. The stars grew a little brighter as a deeper darkness possessed the earth; then in the darkness a cock crowed.

They met again on the next night. On the night after that they met once more.

Only after that did she sit down, alone in the box-room, in the twilight, to think.

Her boxes were packed and strapped, and the cart was coming for them from Rainham Magna in the morning.

She wished Burnett Minor had been there. She would have liked to say good-bye to the child. There was nobody else it would break her heart to leave.

Yet Roy was still down there under the hill. The centre-board had gone wrong again. She was to see him at the stile, in the morning, before leaving. It seemed, somehow, superfluous.

But she did meet him. His face was set, and he had forgotten to shave.

"Don't look like that; it wasn't your fault," she said composedly.

"It was—it was——" he muttered, hands clenched.

"Rubbish!" She gave a short laugh. "You've nothing at all to blame yourself for."

"Oh, I have—I have."

Then he turned to her. "Louie, you've got to promise me one thing——"

But she stopped him. She knew what he was going to say.

"That's quite out of the question," she said.

"But look here!" He used the words he had used the second time they had met. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in the lurch. You must marry me, Louie, if—if——"

At that she had found a touch of her old irony.

"Not unless, of course?"

"Oh yes—yes."

But she turned away. "No. Good-bye."

"Won't you even kiss me?"

"No."

But there was a gentleness in her refusal such as he had never had from her before. Kisses came hardly now.