Deyes caught a vision of blue in the window, and crossed the lawn. Lady Peggy leaned over the low sill. Between them was only a fragrant border of hyacinths.

“You know that our host and hostess have deserted us?” she asked.

He nodded.

“They have gone over to this wonderful Convalescent Home that Macheson is building in the hills,” he remarked. “I am not sure that I consider it good manners to leave us to entertain one another.”

“I am not sure,” she said, “that it is proper. Wilhelmina should have considered that we are her only guests.”

She sat down in the window-sill and leaned back against the corner. She had slept well, and she was not afraid of the sunshine—blue, too, was her most becoming colour. He looked at her admiringly.

“You are really looking very well this morning,” he said.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I was expecting that.”

“I wonder,” he said, “how you others discover the secret of eternal youth. You and Macheson and Wilhelmina all look younger than you did last year. I seem to be getting older all by myself.”

She looked at him critically. There were certainly more lines about his face and the suspicion of crow’s-feet about his tired eyes.

“Age,” she said, “is simply a matter of volition. You wear yourself out fretting for the impossible!”

“One has one’s desires,” he murmured.

“But you should learn,” she said, “to let your desires be governed by your reason. It is a foolish thing to want what you may not have.”

“You think that it is like that with me?” he asked.

“All the world knows,” she answered, “that you are in love with Wilhelmina!”

“One must be in love with someone,” he remarked.

“Naturally! But why choose a woman who is head and ears in love with some one else?”

“It cannot last,” he answered, “she has married him.”

Lady Peggy reached out for a cushion and placed it behind her head.

“That certainly would seem hopeful in the case of an ordinary woman—myself, for instance,” she said. “But Wilhelmina is not an ordinary woman. She always would do things differently from other people. I don’t want to make you more unhappy than you are, but I honestly believe that Wilhelmina is going to set a new fashion. She is going to try and re-establish the life domestic amongst the upper classes.”

“She always was such a reformer,” he sighed.

Lady Peggy nodded sympathetically.

“Of course, one can’t tell how it may turn out,” she continued, “but at present they seem to have turned life into a sort of Garden of Eden, and do you know I can’t help fancying that there isn’t the slightest chance for the serpent. Wilhelmina is so fearfully obstinate.”

“The thing will cloy!” he declared.

“I fancy not,” she answered. “You see, they don’t live on sugar-plums. Victor Macheson is by way of being a masterful person, and Wilhelmina is only just beginning to realize the fascination of being ruled. Frankly, Gilbert, I don’t think there’s the slightest chance for you!”

He sighed.

“I am afraid you are right,” he said regretfully. “I began to realize it last night, when we went into the library unexpectedly, and Wilhelmina blushed. No self-respecting woman ought to blush when she is discovered being kissed by her own husband.”

“Wilhelmina,” Lady Peggy said, stretching out her hand for one of Deyes’ cigarettes, “may live to astonish us yet, but of one thing I am convinced. She will never even realize the other sex except through her own husband. I am afraid she will grow narrow—I should hate to write as her epitaph that she was an affectionate wife and devoted mother—but I am perfectly certain that that is what it will come to.”

“In that case,” Deyes remarked gloomily, “I may as well go away.”

“No! I shouldn’t do that,” Lady Peggy said. “I should try to alter my point of view.”

“Direct me, please,” he begged.

“I should try,” she continued, “to put a bridle upon my desires and take up the reins. You could lead them in a more suitable direction.”

“For instance?”

“There is myself,” she declared.

He laughed quietly.

“You!” he repeated. “Why, you are the most incorrigible flirt in Christendom. You would no more tie yourself up with one man than enter a nunnery.”

She sighed.

“I have always been misunderstood,” she declared, looking at him pathetically out of her delightful eyes. “What you call my flirtations have been simply my attempts, more or less clumsy, to gain a husband. I have been most unlucky. No one ever proposes to me!”

He laughed derisively.

“Your victims have been too loquacious,” he replied. “How about Gayton, who went to Africa because you offered to be his friend, and Horris—he came to my rooms to tell me all about it the day you refused him, and Sammy Palliser—you treated him shockingly!”

“I had forgotten them,” she admitted. “They were nice men, too, all of them, but they all made the same mistake. I remember now they did propose to me. That, of course, was fatal.”

“I scarcely see——” he began.

She patted him gently on the arm.

“My dear Gilbert,” she said, “haven’t I always said that I never intend to marry any one who proposes to me? When I have quite made up my mind, I am going to do the proposing myself!”

“Whether it is Leap Year or not?” he asked.

“Decidedly!” she answered. “Men can always shuffle out of a Leap Year declaration. My man won’t be able to escape. I can promise you that.”

“Does he—exist then?” Deyes asked.

She laughed softly.

“He’s existed for a good many years more than I have,” she answered. “I wasn’t thinking of marrying a baby.”

“Ah! Does he know?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “He ought to, but he’s such a stupid person.”

It was then that Gilbert Deyes received the shock of his life. He discovered quite suddenly that her eyes were full of tears. For the first time for many years he nearly lost his head.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, dropping his voice and astonished to find that it was not quite so steady as usual, “he has been waiting!”

“I am afraid not,” she answered, looking down for a moment at the buckle in her waistband.

He looked round.

“If only he were here now,” he said. “Could one conceive a more favourable opportunity? An April morning, sunshine, flowers, everything in the air to make him forget that he is an old fogey and doesn’t deserve——”

She lifted her eyes to his, now deliciously wet. Her brows were delicately uplifted.

“I couldn’t do it,” she murmured, “unless he were in the same room.”

Deyes stepped over the hyacinths and vaulted through the window.

Wilhelmina selected a freshly cut tree-stump, carefully brushed away the sawdust, and sat down. Macheson chose another and lighted a cigarette. Eventually they decided that they were too far away, and selected a tree-trunk where there was room for both. Wilhelmina unrolled a plan, and glancing now and then at the forest of scaffold poles to their left, proceeded to try to realize the incomplete building. Macheson watched her with a smile.

“Victor,” she exclaimed, “you are not to laugh at me! Remember this is my first attempt at doing anything—worth doing, and, of course, I’m keen about it. Are you sure we shall have enough bedrooms?”

“Enough for a start, at any rate,” he answered. “We can always add to it.”

She looked once more at that forest of poles, at the slowly rising walls, through whose empty windows one could see pictures of the valley below.

“One can build——” she murmured, “one can build always. But think, Victor, what a lot of time I wasted before I knew you. I might have done so much.”

He smiled reassuringly.

“There is plenty of time,” he declared. “Better to start late and build on a sure foundation, you know. A good many of my houses had to come down as fast as they went up. Do you remember, for instance, how I wanted to convert all your villagers by storm?”

She smiled.

“Still—I’m glad you came to try,” she said softly. “That horrid foreman is watching us, Victor. I am going to look the other way.”

“He has gone now,” Macheson said, slipping his arm around her waist. “Dear, do you know I don’t think that one person can build very well alone. It’s a cold sort of building when it’s finished—the life built by a lonely man. I like the look of our palace better, Wilhelmina.”

“I should like to know where my part comes in?” she asked.

“Every room,” he answered, “will need adorning, and the lamps—one person alone can never keep them alight, and we don’t want them to go out, Wilhelmina. Do you remember the old German, who said that beautiful thoughts were the finest pictures to hang upon your walls? Think of next spring, when we shall hear the children from that miserable town running about in the woods, picking primroses—do you see how yellow they are against the green moss?”

Wilhelmina rose.

“I must really go and pick some,” she said. “What about your pheasants, Victor?”

He laughed.

“I’ll find plenty of sport, never fear,” he answered, “without keeping the kiddies shut out. Why, the country belongs to them! It’s their birthright, not ours.”

They walked through the plantation side by side. The ground was still soft with the winter’s rains, but everywhere the sunlight came sweeping in, up the glade and across the many stretching arms of tender blossoming green. The ground was starred with primroses, and in every sheltered nook were violets. A soft west wind blew in their faces as they emerged into the country lane. Below them was the valley, hung with a faint blue mist; all around them the song of birds, the growing sounds of the stirring season. Stephen Hurd came cantering by, and stopped for a moment to speak about some matter connected with the estates.

“My love to Letty,” Wilhelmina said graciously, as he rode off. Then she turned to Macheson.

“Stephen Hurd is a little corner in your house,” she remarked.

“In our house,” he protested. “I should never have considered him if he had not worked out his own salvation. If he had reached me ten minutes later——”

She gripped his arm.

“Don’t,” she begged.

He laughed.

“Don’t ever brood over grisly impossibilities,” he said. “The man never breathed who could have kept you from me. Across the hills home, or are your shoes too thin?”

He swung open the gate, and they passed through, only to descend the other side, along the broad green walk strewn with grey rocks and bordered with gorse bushes, aglow with yellow blossom. They skirted the fir plantation, received the respectful greetings of Mrs. Green at the gamekeeper’s cottage, and, crossing the lower range of hills, approached the house by the back avenue. And Wilhelmina laughed softly as they passed along the green lane, for her thoughts travelled back to one wild night when, with upraised skirts and flying, trembling footsteps, she had sped along into a new world. She clung to her husband’s arm.

“I came this way, dear, when I set out that night—to kiss you.”

He stooped down and kissed her full on the lips.

“A nice state you flung me into,” he remarked.

“It was rather an exciting evening,” she said demurely.

They walked straight into the morning-room, which was indiscreet, and Wilhelmina screamed.

“Peggy,” she cried, “Peggy, you bad girl!”

The two women went off together, of course, to talk about it, and Deyes and Macheson, like Englishmen all the world over, muttered something barely comprehensible, and then looked at one another awkwardly.

“Care for a game of billiards?” Macheson suggested.

“Right oh!” Deyes answered, in immense relief.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note:

Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters’ errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author’s words and intent.