Cicely’s answering wire—for a wonder correctly worded—arrived this morning at breakfast as I came down.

I’ve shown it to the Waters: explained that I must be off at once. Only Theo protested angrily, “Your chum ill? How careless of her just when we were such a jolly party, and going to Red Wharf Bay with the Charriers to-morrow, and all!” The others accepted it with scarcely a word. They didn’t even show that they found it odd that Miss Harradine, who lives in Battersea, should hand her telegram in at Euston Station—though I wondered over that myself. Not even Mrs. Waters said a word to press me to wait and send a nurse instead; she didn’t ask when I thought I might come back. If she looked questions I didn’t see them; I was steadfastly keeping my eyes for breakfast-cups, and clocks, and time-tables, and anything but the faces of these people I’m going to leave—for good. All the morning I’ve spent in my bedroom, packing-up.

Twice, while I was busily emptying drawers and laying out my things in folded heaps on the bed, I heard outside my window a whistle like a blackbird’s note; but this time I wasn’t taken in for a moment. I knew it wasn’t a blackbird. I took no notice of him.

I went on packing, laying my string-soled bathing shoes at the bottom of my trunk. A long time before I shall need those again! I let him whistle.

He tried something else.

Twice there was a sharp tap on the pane, just as when that thrush was cracking a snail. But I knew that this time it really was a pebble thrown up to catch my attention: thrown, not from the trimly-gravelled sweep in front of a big house, but from the cottage garden planted with sandy white pinks and lad’s-love—thrown to bring me down. I wasn’t to be either whistled or tapped to his side.

I rolled my sun-bonnet—there was a little rip where it had caught on a gorse prickle—into a tight pink bundle and rammed it down beside my shoes.

I wasn’t going down.

Then came a crunching on the cobbles of the path below, and a soft call of “Nancy!”

Not I; I wasn’t going down.

“Nancy!”—more urgently. “I say!”

No! Let him think what he liked of me—rude, obstinate, childish, or sullen—as long as he only didn’t guess why I didn’t mean to go down, or even look out the window to answer him. I couldn’t face it now. Not with what my own lips had first told me of the thing which I had to hold away from me, at arm’s length, for as long as I had the strength.

“Nancy!”

Evidently he was set on saying something to me—but whether it was about yesterday morning or yesterday afternoon I didn’t care. I was equally set on his not having the chance. Now I was afraid this chance would happen after lunch, and I was grateful to that which prevented his taking me up to Holyhead and seeing me off by the Euston mail alone.

I rejoiced over the timely and snorting arrival of that magenta-coloured “auto” of the Charriers, bringing over Monsieur with some more of his business-documents, and Mademoiselle with business that a child might guess at.

I leaped at their proffered lift of luggage and all, back to Holyhead Station, and the four of us went off together.

Then, sitting beside this French coquette, who seemed bent on seeming sweet to me—(Why? I suppose because the girl to whom he is engaged feels that it’s “in the picture” to be generous to the girl he has “engaged”)—my heart sank, and I wished I hadn’t accepted. We were speeding along far too fast along the level road towards the purple hump of the Holyhead mountain. We should be there too soon. Heavens! There’d be half an hour to wait at the station, and he could get what he wanted to say in then....

Why hadn’t I thought of that! If something would only happen....

It did.

Never, never has a motor breakdown been hailed with delight before by a passenger; but I blessed the fortunate accident that kept Monsieur Charrier and my employer fumbling, fidgeting and fuming about the bonnet for over half an hour by the roadside. Mademoiselle, in her lemon-coloured wrap and daring little hat, sat on the top of a low stone fence with me in my brown silk coat and skirt in which I’d first travelled down to The Lawn. I was so delighted by the delay that I could even laugh quite gaily at her as she chattered.

“Always the same! Each time that we take a passenger to make very quickly, there arrives this malheur!... Now, now, it is good? it is well? it is right? No?... Regard my father, Miss Nancy, on the earth under the auto nearly: he look like a little fat dog that has been run over, not? Ah look at this brave Billy, always the same idea, encore un spanner! Now he will lick her into shapes!... It is finish, Billy? No?... Ah, he is doing it express, on purpose.... You will loose the train, and Mademoiselle must return with you—what a chancey day!”

Mercy! Return with him?—the midnight train would be impossible—I should be kept until the next morning—Horrors! My heart was in my mouth at the thought....

It was with two minutes to spare, however, that we flung ourselves, with the hastiest of thanks, out of the motor, and rushed into the busy station that stretches down to the quay, where a couple of slanted funnels seemed as big as two leaning towers of Pisa painted red. No time to lose. He found me a corner-seat facing the engine, in a carriage with one other lady. He attended to my luggage with the speed and ease of a man who can make men obey, then he looked straight at me and began: “I haven’t time now, but look here, I shall——”

Again I baffled him.

“I have nothing to read!” I cried, as if in dismay over the fact. “Will you fetch me a paper—anything.”

With a little jerk of his shoulders he turned away to the bookstall, and I sat back in my corner looking dully out at the moving bustle on the platform below the big Norman Wilkinson posters of steamboats on a moonlit sea. Why couldn’t we start—it must be time! I’d said good-bye to his people, said it as if I were going no further than for one of my afternoon tramps at Porth Cariad with him. Now it was to him that I must say good-bye.... I couldn’t take it in yet. I didn’t want to. Above all, I didn’t want him to say it—or anything else.

Again the situation was unexpectedly saved.

The carriage-door burst open, and a man, panting with haste, flung a cape and a blue-covered English Review on to the seat opposite mine, drew his handkerchief over his brow with a “Phew!” that meant “Only just done it!” then leaped out again on to the platform, calling, “Porter! when is this train due off?”

“She ought to be off now, sir; we’ve been kept back by the boat, we’re ten minutes behind time.”

But it was not this that made me sit up and turn quickly to the man who’d dropped back into the seat opposite to me. Slim shape, soft hat, Vandyke profile—yes, I thought I’d recognized the voice. Sydney Vandeleur, of all people—and at this moment! At any other, I might have longed to pick up that English Review and hurl it at his picturesque head, but, for just this one occasion, I was overjoyed to see him. My employer wouldn’t be able to say any last words now, before him.

“Monica—Miss Trant!” exclaimed Sydney quickly. “How odd! Did you see her?”

“See whom?”

“Why, Cicely!”

Cicely! The tone in which he used her Christian name told me all there was to know, there! I’d thought so!

“I’ve been seeing her off, you know, to Ireland—the Dublin boat—just gone off.” He nodded towards the quay. “Had to get back to London to-night; I am meeting the Mamma in Pont Street to-morrow morning, and——”

“Take your seats, please! Take your seats!” The guard’s whistle was at his lips as my official fiancÉ came racing back along the platform. An armful of papers and magazines fell on to my lap.

“Here you are, Nancy. And, I say! I’m going to——”

What he was going to say broke off again with a snap. And the last glance I had of his blonde, sun-browned face and quick eyes showed them frozen in a stare of utter astonishment at the sight of my travelling-companion.

Yes—my goodness! What would he think of finding me with Sydney again?—Sydney, whose name has so often nearly cropped up between us. Would he think——?

What difference would it make if he did?

The train steamed out of the station across the flat Anglesey country, between marshlands ghostly-white with bog-cotton in the dusk.... What would he think?

This was what occupied me all the time Sydney was talking, for he was in a mood to talk to anyone. I, for example, was not the Rose, but I had shared rooms with the Rose, and he was eager to tell me about her, and how she had gone to stay with his married sister until—something or other to do with “the Mamma.” Poor Lady Vandeleur, fated to see her only son falling in love with such totally ineligible girls! First a City typist at twenty-five shillings a week; now a Bond Street mannequin!

But my employer didn’t know of this change. How could he? He probably—yes, certainly!—imagines things are as they might once have seemed to be.

Will he think I arranged this?

“Of course you know her—but not as one does now!—the last few weeks! We were together at the CafÉ Royal—He’s going to paint her—Colouring!—Wonderful! You should have seen the costume I designed for her—Five Arts Ball——Purposely giving the effect of——Quite in the period, of course!—People who understand!—Such souplesse of mind as she has——” Sydney went on to the air. My whole attention was for someone very different.

He can’t imagine I’d do anything so underhand! Even if he did imagine that—well, I couldn’t explain unless he asked. If he did ask, I could explain less than ever! Oh, why can’t I wipe four months straight out of this year and begin again? But then, there would have been Jack to help! But then, there would have been Sydney.... I should have been engaged to this creature before me in that hat, talking of Cicely’s souplesse of mind! If he—the other one—only knew what I really think of Sydney!

“Fancy,” I commented haphazard to the rhapsodist before me. “Well; I do hope everything will be all right.” And I took up the magazine my employer had tossed on to my lap—there was a picture on the cover of a pretty Summer-girl looking over the sea—and prepared to hold it up in front of me for the rest of the journey.

Sydney—surprised and sulky—read his English Review. Presently I refused his not too pressing invitation to join him in the dining-car, and he left me for an hour and a half.

For love, that robs us women of the appetite for anything but Romance, seems to make men even hungrier for their food.

“Eus-tern!” came the familiar Cockney bawl again at last. “Eus-tern!”

It was a change, after what I’d been used to for the last few weeks, to have to fend for myself in the matter of luggage and a taxi. One doesn’t specially look to men in love for decent manners. Still—that other one knew how to pay these attentions in spite of his Odette and her gloves! Sydney’s evidently the type that pays homage to the Well-Beloved by being casual towards every other woman. He seemed to efface himself until his lukewarm offer of getting me a cab could be answered from the cab-window.

“Ah—may I tell him to drive to Marconi Mansions, Miss Trant?”

“I’ve told him, thanks. How fearfully hot it is here, and how stuffy”—I sniffed with distaste—“after the country!”

“Yes, isn’t it?—one’s almost consoled for Her being away, in that lovely, soft, pure air of Ballycool! Good night!”

The last sort of night I thought I’d have! But once back in my familiar little camp-bed in Marconi Mansions, I tucked my cotton dressing-gown round me because no sheets had been left out, and fell into that dreamless trance of utter tiredness.

I slept like a log all night.

(Next day.)

How the flat seems to have shrunk! and what a state Cicely has left it in! Has she moved all our ramshackle furniture since I was here last? Used that table to be right in the middle of the room, choking it up like this?—and where’s my dear print of “Kitty Fisher” that used to hang just there, where she’s put that framed oil-sketch of—what on earth? It looks like a study, by Blossom, of that coloured tie of Sydney’s—and there’s a little red “sold” label on it. I suppose he bought it for her out of one of the shows at the Grafton Gallery. The couch, too, is littered with books ... Marinetti ... Schnitzer ... Tangore ... Strindberg’s “Stronger Woman” ... a slender volume, “The Everlasting Mercy,” inscribed “To Cicely, from her devoted S. V.”

H’m! Cicely among the intellectuals? Well, I suppose some of us are made adaptable as water, taking the shape of any vessel we’re poured into by Man. Perhaps—perhaps I might have been the same, if——

But I do wish she’d had the souplesse or the something! to throw away, before she left, this litter of florists’ half-dead flowers, expensive stale roses and carnations, that fills up every one of our pots and crocks.

I’d better do it, I suppose....

Also I’d better wash up my breakfast-things—and Cicely’s of the day before, which are heaped upon the kitchen table.

On the top of an oily quarter-pound of butter there’s a very dirty note.

All right. I’ll wash up ... loathsome job! That kettle always took so long to boil—we ought to have a flat-bottomed one like the one they use for picnics at the Waters’. It’s a good thing I’m able to think so composedly of them. Doesn’t it show, after all, that—what I told his mother, what I thought I should have to hold away from myself so determinedly, may not really be true ... may not, anyhow, be the deep and lasting sort of “true” that I imagined? Just a fancy, a passing, summer-holiday attraction for someone who’ll never guess. It must—it shall be that. No harm in remembering him—all of them. Let’s see. To-day was to be their excursion to Red Wharf Bay. I can see the whole party—and their jolly, sun-browned faces against the throbbing blue of sea and sky. Odette Charrier will be like some bright foreign bird just alighted amid the homely gold of the Welsh gorse ... prattling away in her pretty broken English that I believe she sometimes breaks on purpose to hear Billy Waters’ amused, boyish laugh.

They’ll be together all the time to-day—no official fiancÉe to intervene with even the shadow of a claim....

Together they’ll be unpacking the picnic basket, hunting for the corkscrew, picking up big, sun-warmed pebbles from the beach to lay at the corners of the white picnic cloth to keep it from flying into the sea.

The others will be—oh, somewhere about....

Those two will stroll off after lunch, I suppose. I wonder if they’ll bathe? He wouldn’t have lost his nerve even after that afternoon swim.... Only yesterday? They’ll bathe from the rocks, I expect. And I might still have been there....

A ring at the door of the flat. Milk, Mrs. Skinner, or—what?

I’d better go and see....

They call us the unexpected sex, of whom no man can ever say what we shall be at next.

What about themselves?

Only last evening I’d left him standing, stiff with astonishment, on the Holyhead platform. This morning here he was again, blocking up the tiny entrance to our flat—my official fiancÉ!