“That’s a dangerous fellow, Stuart,” remarked Baldwin Carr, who had unperceived entered the library, and, over his nephew’s shoulder, read the title: “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

Stuart Heron laid down the ponderous volume of Nietzsche, and smiled up lazily at his juvenile uncle-by-marriage: “Oh, we’re a depraved family! Not half an hour ago I caught Babs behind the drawing-room screen, reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox.”

Baldwin looked startled. “Isn’t that all right? I myself gave it to the child; the complete edition, bound in white vellum.”

“We’ll send old Nietzsche to be bound in white vellum, and rob him of his sting.”

“And this man is just as bad”; Baldwin ignored his nephew’s flippancy, and discontentedly flicked over the pages of Bernard Shaw’s “Getting Married,” which he had picked up from the floor beside the arm-chair. “They’re both mad, stark staring mad, master and disciple.”

“‘Enter Nietzsche mad in white satin, Bernard Shaw mad in white linen!’” misquoted Stuart; “yes, we must decidedly send them to the binder’s.”

Baldwin Carr had come that evening to Carlton House Terrace, to discuss a business problem with Stuart, who for three years had been a partner in the firm of Heron, Heron & Carr, Diamond Merchants. But, worried by the young man’s pernicious choice of literature, he determined to let diamonds stand over for the moment, and, instead, make an attempt to “talk Stuart out of Nietzsche.” In view of which intention, it was a pity that Babs had torn from her confession album the page on which Stuart had made shameful reply to the query: “Your Favourite Occupation?” with: “Pulling the leg of my youngest uncle.” A glimpse at this might have disillusioned Baldwin of his belief that, near to Stuart in years, he was also near in understanding.

“You see, my boy,” he began now, “these clever chaps, these would-be philosophers, they put ideas into your head.”

“Yes,” replied Stuart gently, “I think that is what they’re after, the rogues!”

“Well, but philosophy is all very well if you don’t take it seriously; just mug it up for Greats at Oxford, and so forth. But you seem inclined—you mustn’t be offended, Stuart; we’re talking as man to man, you know,—you seem inclined to apply it to everyday existence.”

“Quite.” Stuart offered the other a cigarette, and lit one himself; “I can’t conceive of a greater insult to philosophy than to accept its logic, and refuse its practical utility.”

“But, my dear lad, you surely wouldn’t dream of setting up Nietzsche, of all people, as a standard for your actions. Why, if a nation did that, we’d have the world in pieces.”

“I differ slightly from Nietzsche,” quoth Stuart Heron; “he advocates the ruthlessness of the Overman towards the mob; I agree with the Overman theory, but I consider that his supremest ruthlessness ought to be directed towards himself. Nietzsche misses the value of asceticism.”

Baldwin said after a pause: “You’ll get yourself, or other people, into a fine mess before you’ve done with all this. Why, wasn’t it something of the kind that you were spouting when it was a question of your career?”

Stuart laughed:

“Yes. Something of the kind....”

His uncle paced the room uneasily; he could not forget that he had grave responsibilities of guardianship to discharge towards this young son of Graham Heron. Graham Heron, whose death had occurred when Stuart was a boy of fifteen, had founded the great diamond business, on which had been built up the family’s immense fortune; had taken into partnership his elder and younger brothers, Derwent and Arthur, not so brilliant as himself; later, had admitted Baldwin Carr to the firm. Graham owned a personality which established him in general regard as head of the family, and his only son succeeded naturally to the same central position; more especially as Derwent’s progeny were all girls, and Arthur elected to remain a bachelor. And when school and college reported one brilliant success after another for Graham’s son, then Graham’s brothers and Graham’s widow foresaw a triumphant future in whatsoever public career the lad chose to follow up. Consideration of money there need never be; a steady flow of good luck continued to attend the firm of Heron and Carr; it seemed that the trio of diamond merchants could do no wrong. Stuart, struck by the Arabian-Nights’-like quality of their glittering trade, had nicknamed them: the Khalif, the Vizier, and the One-eyed Calendar; the last-named, unblessed by a sense of humour, was never clear why he should thus be linked to such eccentricities as almanacks and defective optics; but Stuart, even in his insolent schoolboy days, went idolized and uncensured.

When he finally came down from Oxford, three years previously, it was to find his future stretching before his feet, a veritable slope of roses. He had been reading for the Bar, and Mrs. Heron already visioned him as the Lord Chief Justice.

“But I’m going to chuck the law,” said Stuart.

His Uncle Derwent reminded him that strings had already been pulled, enabling him to devil for Sir Blair Tomlinson, foremost barrister of the day; and that a more promising start could be assured to no man.

“Quite so,” Stuart agreed. And: “I’m going to chuck the law.”

The next few weeks proved but repetitions of this incident, under various guises. Stuart had but to mention a profession—army, navy, political, diplomatic; and Uncle Derwent or Uncle Arthur or Uncle Baldwin was able speedily to procure such influence in that particular quarter, as to ensure their nephew a clear path to the very summit of ambition. And Uncle Derwent or Uncle Arthur or Uncle Baldwin had but to mention such influence procured, and Stuart speedily abandoned all idea of that particular career. The climax was reached when, by way of a test, the young man averred longings for stage laurels; and Uncle Baldwin, two evenings later, strolled into the billiard-room in Carlton House Terrace, with the triumphant tidings that London’s leading actor-manager, Sir Michael Forrest—“I used to know him very well”—had avowed himself delighted to give Mr. Stuart Heron a part in the next big autumn production, and the under-study of juvenile lead.

“I told him what they said about your Greek performance in the O.U.D.S.,” finished Baldwin Carr.

“Exactly.” Stuart paused in the act of pocketing off the red. “And if I wanted to be a sandwich-man, you, or one of you, would get me an introduction to the very person who owned the identical pitch I had set my heart on perambulating.” Changing his tactics, he pocketed the red, viciously.

“Well, but——” Uncle Baldwin liked to be literal, “what’s that got to do with it? You don’t want to be a sandwich-man, do you?” apprehensively.

“As much as anything else. Why not? It’s fatal to specialize.”

Derwent Heron laid his cue in the rack. “What’s amiss, my boy? Let us probe to the root of the matter, since we happen to be assembled in full force. Babs, my dear,” to his flapper daughter, marking for the players, “run away to your Aunt Elizabeth.”

Reluctantly Barbara obeyed, flinging Stuart a look of worship as she passed: “Lord, I am here an thou wantest me!” Youngest of a quartette, her sisters had carefully bred her in the Heron traditions.

He caught at her long russet plait: “Between ourselves, Babs,” in a whisper; “how much unearned increment have you been placing to my account?”

She flushed crimson: “Oh, Stuart, it isn’t cheating, is it? when it’s not for oneself.”

“I’ll consider the plea. How much?”

“Only ... seven.”

He laughed and released her. Then, strolling to the board, slid back his disc the requisite number. “Even in this,” he muttered.

“Out with it, Stuart,” from Uncle Arthur, erect on the hearthrug.

Arthur Heron, junior to the late Graham Heron, remained something of an enigma to the world at large, inasmuch as he very rarely spoke, but preferred to stand with his back to fireplaces; his head a little on one side, after the fashion of a benign canary; a huge cigar cocked from the left-hand corner of his mouth. When he occasionally did give vent to speech, his voice crackled thinly, like charred paper raked from the grate, so that strangers unfairly suspected him of laughing at them. In appearance he resembled a small-sized orange-pip that had lain too long in the sun, and burnt red instead of yellow.

Derwent Heron, eldest of three brothers, was best summed up by the adjective “elaborate.” Perhaps to that, one might add “punctilious.” His speech was elaborate, and so was his neck-gear; and he was punctilious in his appointments, and in his manners, and the discharge of obligations. His tastes were certainly elaborate, particularly in entrÉes. Born punctiliously, he would probably die elaborately. He was a fine-looking old gentleman, upright, white-haired, kind-eyed; distinctive by the small pointed imperial he elected to wear.

Remained Uncle Baldwin, who actually and in point of birth was not a Heron at all, and therefore far more Heron than the Herons ever aspired to be. He had, indeed, been continually obliged to remind them of their Herondom and all it entailed, since nine years before, he had entered the family by his marriage with Eunice, only sister of Derwent, Graham and Arthur, and very much their junior.

Eunice had died eleven months after; thus forming so slight a link between her husband and the Herons, that the latter family were left vaguely wondering how they had come to be nourishing in their bosom this well-bred personage with instincts as sleek and groomed as his own head; in short, how he had happened!

Baldwin dwelt at Sonning; hibernated from September to May; and during the summer months found his vocation in following up river regattas in the umpire’s boat; whence, with the aid of field-glasses, he adjudicated in a fashion sufficiently impartial to fill Pallas herself with envy. He felt occasional qualms of uneasiness respecting his young nephew’s ability to keep intact the prestige of the name. Deep down in the heart of Baldwin may have lain buried a conviction that safer on his head than on Stuart’s would have been poised the Heron crown; deeper still, perhaps, the unacknowledged and pardonable longing once and for all to kick the cub and put him in his proper place. But all of this, Baldwin was well aware, must be loyally suppressed.

“It seems to me, Stuart,” he remarked, wounded at the reception of his intercession with Sir Michael Forrest, “that you have some ambition of which you haven’t told us. If you were to own up, we would naturally give you all the assistance in our power.”

“I know you would,” Stuart interrupted, frowning heavily in the endeavour to express his meaning. “And that’s just it. You’ve got too much assistance in your power. I want to achieve—and you bring me the achievement upon a golden salver. Whatever I mention, it’s the same thing; influence, money, friends—and I’m lifted over all the rough places and deposited on the very summit of desire. What’s left to me after that? Khalif, what’s left?”

Derwent Heron made no reply to this direct appeal. He was looking over the double-sliding doors, at an arresting portrait of his brother Graham, to whom he owed everything; and who, strangely enough, had been wont to hold forth in just such an incomprehensible fashion. Was it not his, Derwent’s, business to do all he could for the advancement and prosperity of Graham’s son? unheeding any freaks and phases which the lad might have brought along from Oxford. He wished Arthur would speak. But then, Arthur never spoke. That came from being a bachelor, Derwent reflected unreasonably.

“Well,” suggested Baldwin, filling up the pause, “if you’re really keen on adventure, hardship, the philosophic-tramp business which is now the fashionable cult, there’s no harm that I can see if you roughed it for a year or two.”

—“Dressed in a suit of rags from Clarkson’s, along Broad Highways carefully laid with red carpet?” Stuart grinned. For a moment the leprechaun spirit bade him give up the attempt to lay bare the twists and turns of his mental asceticism; and instead, draw exquisite enjoyment from Baldwin’s conception of a Walt Whitman-esque existence. Then the metaphysician rejected this outlet as cheap and easy; argued that there must be means whereby three grown men of moderate intellect could be convinced of anything, if sufficient trouble be taken. The metaphysician was always inclined to be very severe with the leprechaun; but in this case the leprechaun had the last word, whispering that it would be a glorious stunt if Khalif, Vizier and One-eyed Calendar, could indeed be forced to understanding by dint of sheer brilliant reasoning. And since Stuart was above all things a Stuntorian, he forthwith tackled the task.

“Read Kipling, any of you?”

They had all read Kipling. That is to say, Uncle Arthur had chuckled in secret over “Stalky and Co.”; Uncle Derwent had seen and appreciated Forbes Robertson in the “Light that Failed,” and Uncle Baldwin remembered, at the time of the Boer war, giving a guinea to a pretty girl who had declaimed the “Absent-minded Beggar.”

“D’you know ‘Diego Valdez’? It’s in the ‘Five Nations.’”

“No,” from Derwent and Arthur. Baldwin, idly chalking cues for want of better employment, said that he might recognize it if he heard it.

Without preamble or apology, Stuart abruptly flung at them the bitter complaint of the Spanish Admiral:

—Fair beginnings, indeed, for the son of the house of Heron. The oak-panelled walls, the expensive full-sized billiard-table, the scent of good cigars, the attentive faces of his three listeners, all seemed to shout this fact aloud.

The folding-doors slid open, admitting Mrs. Heron and Babs. Baldwin raised a quick hand of warning:

“Hush. Don’t make a noise. Stuart’s reciting.”

“Damn it, Baldwin!” roared his nephew; “do you take this for a board school prize-giving?”

Softly Mrs. Heron withdrew, gliding the doors behind her, with infinite precautions not to jar them in the contact.

Stuart went on; bent slightly forward from his careless seat on the edge of the billiard-table; hands clasped between his knees; the green-shaded quadrangle of strong lights just above, biting out his features with uncompromising clarity. His tones were low and tight with the infinity of pain that underlay the next verses: Valdez recalling his old adventure days, when unknown, unfettered, he sailed in happy comradeship on the South Seas:

And a faint mockery twitched the young man’s lips, as if drawing some secret analogy with the curse of good fortune following the Spaniard’s every movement.

Baldwin flicked a fine powder of chalk from his coat-sleeve, and fixed Stuart with the super-concentrated glare of one whose attention has wandered. It was difficult to tell what was the effect of the poem on the other two men, standing with faces in deepest shadow, well above the zone of illumination.

By a curious power he possessed of projection into the future, Stuart was able to glimpse himself, victim of a self-made great career, striving passionately to escape its easeful heaviness; regain the careless freedom, the stimulating longings of non-achievement. And he saw, too, with unerring clarity, how, step by step, he, even he, another Diego Valdez, might be spurred by inspiring eloquence, noble example, to such inevitable bondage.

Baldwin thought, relieved, that the ensuing pause marked the signal for opinions to be delivered:

“I must say, I don’t see that the fellow, Diego What’s-his-name, had much to grumble at.”

Stuart looked towards Derwent, who said, rather elaborately:

“It seems to me, my dear boy, that I detect an inconsistency, if I may be permitted to make the remark. With one breath you assure us that you desire to fight your battles without assistance to detract from the joy of victory; while in the verses you so—er—ah, yes, so effectively repeated, I take it that you were voicing a distaste for the responsibilities of high office consequent on victory?”

“It does sound as if there were a flaw,” Stuart admitted, overjoyed at having evoked a point sufficiently strong to put him on the defensive: “You might reconcile it this way, Khalif: I want to do; I don’t want to become.”

Derwent enquired: “Then what are your plans? It strikes me as somewhat preposterous that you should be let work out your destiny from the very bottom of the ladder, like so many millions who have no alternative.”

“It wouldn’t do, either.” Stuart sprang from the table; and hands plunged deep in his pockets, head bent, paced moodily the length of the room. “Without the actual necessity, that would simply label me as a freak: the eccentric young millionaire who elects to work with the masses. However far I wrenched myself from your powerful wealth and influence, the mere fact of it would still prevent my struggles from being genuine. They’d be theatrical, neither more nor less. I’m damnably placed, Khalif,—and I want to be a Commissioner of Oaths!”

This last for Baldwin’s benefit, remarking with concern that his youngest uncle’s immaculately trousered leg had remained for a full twenty minutes unpulled.

“A—what?” Baldwin responded instantly. “Really, Stuart!”

“I’ve never been told the exact duties of a Commissioner of Oaths, but the title is alluring in its possibilities, in the red robust rakish twang of it. Think of being forever surrounded by an atmosphere of oaths; thundering oaths, villainous oaths, subtle sanguinary oaths,” Stuart raised eyes of sky-exalted innocence to meet Baldwin’s uneasy glare. “Hellish oaths,” he finished, gently as a child.

“Really, Stuart——” Mr. Carr had much to do to remember his allegiance. And Derwent Heron, noting signs of disturbance, hastily broke in with the subject of his meditations, before it was as ripe as he could have wished it.

“If you will permit me,” without which preamble he rarely opened speech, “I have a suggestion to offer; one which I never before submitted to you, my boy, as I assumed you were set on gaining laurels in some profession. Your many triumphs at Oxford accounting for this mistake on my part. Since it is not to be, how do you view the idea of a partnership in the business?” Impressive pause. And then the old man resumed in faintly ironic voice: “It would give you plenty to do, nothing to become,—unless it be Lord Mayor of London. And that evil can be circumvented with a little discretion and a sufficient stinginess on charity lists.”

A flicker of surprised amusement in Stuart’s eyes. “A diamond merchant,” he murmured, ... “why not? Khalif, Vizier and One-eyed Calendar—and now behold Camaralzaman! A bit fantastic, that’s all there is against it.”

Derwent heard. “If I may venture to prognosticate, you won’t find much that is fantastic about the offices in Holborn. However, you needn’t decide all at once; think the matter over. I need hardly say,” with a glance that gathered in his partners, “that your father’s son will be more than welcome; though I, for one, am disappointed, yes, certainly disappointed, that you have renounced burdens of a more glorious nature.”

“After all,” quoth Baldwin, “if we all shirked responsibility in that fashion, where would the world be?”

To which Arthur Heron, speaking for the first time: “To every Admiral his Spain. Baldwin’s thinking of the regatta season.”

“Uncle Arthur,” Stuart cried exuberantly, “your scalp at least is mine, to nail at my belt!” with which expression of gratitude to the sole convert of his evening’s eloquence, he crashed asunder the doors, and made an effective exit.

Baldwin was thinking of this scene, in the silence following his vain effort to turn Stuart from a discipleship of Nietzsche. From recognition of the fact that, in spite of philosophy, his nephew had not, after all, made such a bad diamond merchant, he suddenly remembered the object of his visit that evening:

“Look here, Stuart, what do you think of this Antoine Gobert business?”

“I think Antoine Gobert is a clever fraud.”

“Sir Fergus Macpherson seems inclined to believe there may be something in it.”

“What—that this fellow can actually manufacture diamonds indistinguishable from the real stone?”

“He thinks there may be something in it.”

“A Scotchman has no right to believe in miracles,” said Stuart carelessly; but a hard line had crept between his eyes; he had been buying stock heavily of late; and if this upstart foreigner should prove after all to be genuine in his avowals—

“Derwent spoke to Grey, and to Rupert Rosenstein. There seems to be an idea of paying Gobert a lump sum to keep him quiet, and then finance his experiments.”

“Experiments! I tell you, Baldwin, the man’s a swindler.”

“Swindler or not, there’ll be a big drop in the market if rumours get about.”

“We can hold on.”

Baldwin Carr looked doubtful, as he rose to go:

“I’m dining with Derwent, and I’ll tell him what you say, but....”

Stuart accompanied him downstairs. The dinner-gong was drowning the house in sound, and the postman had just thundered at the door. The butler stepped forward with a letter on a salver. When Baldwin had gone, Stuart slit the envelope, and drew forth a dance invitation:

“‘Madame Marcel des Essarts’—Mother, who’s Madame Marcel des Essarts?” as Mrs. Heron, on the arm of her brother-in-law, Arthur Heron, came out of the drawing-room.

“Oh, don’t you remember, Stuart? She used to visit me quite often when you were a schoolboy; a white-haired aristocratic old lady. And once or twice she brought her little granddaughter; such a pretty child, and so beautifully dressed, like a French doll, black hair and red lips and a waxen face——”

“And she wasn’t allowed to play with the tortoise for fear it should get ferocious and spring at her! Yes, I remember. She’s evidently sufficiently grown-up for the ball-room now.”

“Merle des Essarts must be about twenty,” remarked Mrs. Heron, helping herself to olives; “she has been abroad a great deal, I believe. If she is half as lovely as she promised to be, she ought to make a brilliant match.”

Stuart smiled.

“What do you think of our wizard in diamonds, Arthur?”

CHAPTER II
A CHOICE OF HEROES

The same evening, two girls were huddled in a doorway of His Majesty’s Theatre. They had drifted with the crowd down the stone steps leading from the Upper Circle, their brains struggling to return to reality from the world-that-is-not. Then a voice pierced bewilderment with the exclamation: “Why, it’s raining!” and they emerged on to an unfamiliar back street, pavements dark mirrors of glistening wet, something sinister about the hovering gnome-like figures who sprang alive at their elbows, offering in hoarse voices to fetch a vehicle. And then umbrellas began to slide up before their owners had even quitted the shelter of the outjutting porch; umbrellas with nasty vindictive spikes. Other people rolled away in landaulettes and taxi-cabs. It was essentially one of those occasions which cry out for the luxury of male protection; for the authoritative voice to say: “stay where you are for the moment, while I look for the car.” Then the beckoning summons, the dash to the kerbstone, an address given, a door slammed, the swift easy glide up the street: “Now we’re all right,” remarks the protective male, as he adjusts rug and window; “beastly night....”

Which is why Peter remarked suddenly, as they waited for one of the shadow-shapes to be faithful to the trust reposed in him: “We shall have to admit a man, Merle, because of the taxis. It’s all right to be a shivering outcast when you get home and think about it. It’s the present part of the business I object to. What on earth possessed your grandmother to want the use of her own carriage to-night?”

“It’s the birthday of an Ambassador,” Merle explained apologetically; “and she so hates going in four-wheelers.”

The crowd was thinning. Presently they would be the only two remaining in the doorway.

“It will be awful to be quite the last of all,” the elder girl went on apprehensively. “They won’t let us sleep in the theatre, I’m sure; not after the opera-glasses have been put away. And the backs of theatres aren’t in London at all; they’re in a horrible phantom neighbourhood of their own.”

—“’Ere y’are, lidies!” Their wheeled deliverance was at hand.

Peter was spending the night with Merle. She always appreciated the moment, when, softly closing behind them the door of the house in Lancaster Gate, she attended to the bolts and locks, while Merle pierced the rich blackness with the rays of a small electric lantern, which was to guide them burglariously up the thickly carpeted stairs. It was good, remembering their shivering moments in No-Man’s-Land, now to sprawl in luxury across the brocaded bed-cover, and watch Merle submit to the ministrations of the elderly French bonne, who maided Mademoiselle, and also had a great deal to say as to what was comme il faut for the latter’s general deportment.

“Bonsoir, Nicole. Et merci bien.”

“’Soir, Mesdemoiselles. And do not stay too long chattering; it is not good for the complexion.” Nicole retired.

“Good Heavens!” ejaculated Peter; “that I should live to own a friend who owns a maid. A maid and a dressing-gown. Can’t you do something about it? You know, it’s quite easy to pull off your own stockings, once you’ve learnt how.”

“Have you brought a comb this time?” Merle enquired with dangerous politeness.

“No, I haven’t. ’Cos why? ’Cos mine has only seven teeth left in its head, and I daren’t expose its nakedness to the eye of Nicole, since she will lay out the contents of my suit-case on the bed, as they do for the Lady Alice in novelette society house-parties.”

She brushed fiercely at her tangle of curling fair hair, that was not long enough for the need of hairpins, nor short enough to lie smooth to her head.

“About the comb,” she continued; “I always say: ‘don’t tell me they’ve forgotten to put it in again! That comes of letting Amy pack for me’—or Bertha or Marion or Pussy, or any other imaginary small sister I haven’t got. It quite deceives Nicole; she sympathises, lends me your second-best, and I daresay wonders at the multiplicity of my mother’s offspring.”

Merle laughed, and turning out the electric lights cunningly fitted into the three-tiered gilt candelabra, switched on instead the tiny red lamp which stood beside her Second Empire bedstead.

“VoilÀ! The appropriate lighting for the traditional girlish-chatter-while-they-brush-their-hair. Are you serious in proposing to admit a man to our duet?”

“Quite, if we can find one to suit. I want to try a trio; it might be interesting.”

“It might be dangerous,” Merle supplemented. She sat on the edge of the bed, hands clasped about her knees, the tapestried canopy casting a deep shadow on her delicately-cut features, flawless as a profile on a cameo, colourless as ivory. Something of the French chÂteau yet lurked in her quaintly courteous manners; something of the French convent in the soft voice, in the heavy eyelids swift to drop as an overweary flower. The des Essarts were of pure Gallic stock, though their devotion to the Royalist cause had half a century before caused them to seek a permanent dwelling in England. But Peter declared that Merle still carried about with her a permanent aura of white lilies in a cloister garden; that she should by rights always be clad in an Empire satin frock, high under the arms; and that if she followed her natural instincts, she would never enter or quit a room without a deep reverence.

She was certainly “of a loveliness,” as Nicole was wont to declare, morning and evening, like a Benediction.

“It might be dangerous,” Merle repeated thoughtfully.

“You mean, if one of us fell in love with him?”

“Or both.”

“‘The Man Who Came Between Them,’ or ‘The Eternal Triangle,’ 419th time of representation!” Peter flung round to face her companion, hands dramatically clutching at the toilet-table behind her.

“So, after all we’ve been to each other,” she declaimed, a long pause between each spitten word, “to let a man rupture our friendship!”

Merle took her cue instantly. She was accustomed to playing her part in whatever impromptu scene their conversation might evoke.

“We were fools,” bitter mockery curling her pretty lips; “if we hadn’t known beforehand—but we knew—we courted the danger. And it has worked itself out in the old old way.”

Peter crossed to the window, her back to the room, one hand holding back the velvet hangings, as she brooded out into the black dripping night.

“A man and two girls. What else could we expect? We’re only human beings, tho’ we did occasionally rise to immortality on the wings of swank.”

With an effort Merle retained her gravity: “Can’t we throw him out even now?” she pleaded.

But without turning, the other shook her head. “There would be a difference. Something smashed. It never looks the same after mending. And besides ... we’d miss the excitement.... Ner-no, Merle! once one admits the question of sex——”

“It’s ... rather a pity, though. Do you remember——” Merle broke off. In her voice lingered wistful regrets for the one-time careless happiness they themselves had set out to destroy. “I can’t make out,” she questioned, groping hopelessly, “when it all started, where, why. How we could have allowed it to go so far. If we hadn’t both clung to the pretence that nothing was wrong, we might have stopped it.”

And the harsh reply, so unlike Peter’s usual buoyant tones:

“Stopped his love of you, or my love for him,—which?”

Merle permitted herself an aside: “Oh, it’s to be that way, is it?”

“I think so,” and Peter also slipped for a moment out of the circle of limelight. “You, being the Beautiful One, are sure to come in an easy first. And I’d rather play the Unwanted Woman; it affords more scope for my histrionic abilities,” in proof of which, she continued her rÔle in such a natural manner that Merle was not sure or not if the tragedy had been indeed resumed.

“I’m going. There’s no sense in dragging this on indefinitely. I shall want to come back and talk about it when I get to the foot of the stairs. It’ll be funny ...” a half-laugh here that might have been a sob, “funny to think of never coming back. We’ve rehearsed this sort of good-bye so often in jest—haven’t we?”

At which Merle flung herself back among the pillows, both hands pressed tightly to her forehead.

“Pax, Peter! pax! I give it up. You’ve twisted up a rehearsal inside a rehearsal, and I don’t know any more if I’m real. Peter, I give it up.”

Peter laughed; and returning from her bowed passage to the door, leapt on to the foot of the bed, drawing up both her legs beneath her, Turkish fashion.

“Now we can’t really quarrel, man or no man. This scene will act as a lightning-conductor, catch it on its way and render it harmless. Besides, anyhow we could never quarrel, because of your grandmother, not to mention my aunt; you know we would hear nothing but: ‘You never ask that charming Peter Kyndersley to tea, chÉrie, and you were once so fond of her’; and ‘There was a time when Merle des Essarts couldn’t be here enough’ (sniff), ‘I suppose you’ve had a tiff with her!’ A simply unbearable situation; in sheer self-defence we should have to combine forces again.”

Peter looked about her for a cigarette; then, remembering where she was, abandoned the search, and gave her whole attention to the subject in hand:

“To return to the man——”

“Is he to bring any qualifications besides a magnetic attraction for taxis?”

“Waiters,” promptly. “Knowledge of the exact shade of tone in which to address a waiter; neither jocose, nor frigid, nor yet deprecating.”

“Then suppose you station yourself near the buffet at our dance; and listen carefully to the demands for claret-cup.”

“Your dance!” snatching at the words; “Merle, you’ve hit on the exact setting for the introduction of our Extra Element of Excitement. When is it?”

“Next month. The invitations went out this morning.”

“And who’s coming? Men, I mean.”

“A hundred and twenty-two in all,” Merle murmured; “do you want their names? I’m sleepy.”

“Don’t be sleepy, then, while I’m playing at the Fates, and Destiny, and the Will of Heaven, all in one.” She reached out to the escritoire, and grabbed pencil and paper. “I’m going to make a catalogue; fire away! You know these hundred and odd males; I don’t. Fling me the most likely ones, and I’ll run them through an informal examination. Such as: ‘will you play Pirates nicely?’ ‘do you mind damp socks?’ ‘can you talk nonsense earnestly, and of earnest matters nonsensically?’ Above all, ‘do you feel equal to the manipulation of a trio?’”

“I shall enjoy watching from afar the face of your partner, while you treat him to all that. Put down Justin Carruthers, for a start.”

Peter scribbled the name: “Special distinguishing marks?”

“Black waistcoat where other people elect to wear white, and a tendency to serious intentions. Logan Thane owns a country-seat with grapes and antlers, and will, if properly trained, stand up by a mantelpiece and slash with his riding-whip. Bertie Milligan, youthful and intense, now in the clutches of a designing female; the Oxford voice—and can use it to imitate ducklings. Grey Rubinstein, fat, and the son of a judge—but with possibilities of humour. Armand Drelincourt has just bought another motor-car. Always. And will tell you about his fatal temperament. Roy Clarke, a due sense of his own importance, and could be brought to develop a sense of ours; one-steps like seven devils. Mark St. Quentin——” Merle broke off the catalogue with a laugh; “you know Mark; he was the means of bringing us together; I don’t think we’ll place another responsibility upon his soul. JosÉ di Gasparis vibrates like a cinema when he dances; and the blacking of his shoes will come off on your satin ones. Won’t that do? I can’t think of any more.”

Peter had been scribbling furiously. She glanced with critical eye down the list.

“I’ll bring this with me on the 18th, though I can’t say the material is promising. I like Logan Thane best.” She mused awhile over the names. “Yes, Merle, I think it will be Logan Thane.”

But Merle’s straight black lashes already shadowed her cheeks. She was, if anything, lovelier asleep than awake. Peter glanced at her with a certain whimsical tenderness—then crept in beside her, and switched off the crimson light.

“We do need the taxi-man,” was her last coherent thought; “she more than I. She’s more feminine. Or at least, she’s somehow allowed to show more feminine.”

Pepita Kyndersley lived with an aunt at Thatch Lane, some half an hour’s distance by rail from London. Her mother was dead. Her father, responsible for her name, a tenor ballad-singer; sometimes in evening-dress, at a private entertainment; oftener in a red hunting-coat with gilt buttons, at a pier concert. At all times, a disreputable but attractive personage, never to be mentioned by Peter’s aunt; treated by Peter herself, when she chanced to meet him twice or thrice in the year, with good-humoured and tolerant amusement, as from one man to another. Nor would she have found objection in attaching herself permanently to the “Idol of all the Capitals of Europe,” as the leaflets were wont to declare him after a tour of the watering-places between Margate and Beachy Head; such an erratic existence was not without its charms; but the Idol shook his head at her suggestion:

“I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita,” tenderly.

Peter laughed: “The ladies who find your voice so full of tears and your hair so full of wave, would lose some of their enthusiasm if they saw you forever accompanied by a grown-up daughter. Is that it?”

Bertram Kyndersley deprecated; met the said daughter’s eye—and slowly winked his own; an inexcusable loss of moral equilibrium, atoned for by the rich sobriety of his next remark:

“You are a great comfort to me, my little girl. Your poor mother said you would be a comfort to me,” for by this manner of speech did he seek reminder of his surprising parenthood, a factor he was otherwise liable to forget, but to which he fondly clung for the sake of its unanswerable link with respectability. Then he borrowed her quarterly dress allowance, and went with it a-wooing.

So Peter dwelt with her mother’s elder sister at Thatch Lane. That is to say, they had bedrooms in the same house, and took their meals together. But Miss Esther Worthing’s universe consisted of herself, wearing a high linen collar and carrying an umbrella; surrounded by houses containing each a county family—particular county a matter of indifference; surrounded in turn by churches—orthodox, of course; English public schools, mostly Eton; the whole encircled by a high wall, beyond which dwelt foreigners, Jews, artists, and suchlike. Peter being distinctly suchlike, knew herself well beyond the wall, and was quite content to abide there. Occasionally she made concessions to her aunt by allowing herself to be exploited in county circles; county in this case consisting of Thatch Lane. She had exhausted the resources of Thatch Lane practically at the outset; wrung from the place and people all they contained of stimulation; zigzagged like a streak of lightning through the lives of the young men of the neighbourhood, finished them off before they were well aware of being started; remaining still avid for something that could wear out her marvellous brain and superb body; tear from her that bright defiant liberty she claimed as her chief right; someone who could tire her ... tire her? at times she felt more weariness for lack of battle than defeat could ever have brought in its train.

Particular occupation she had none; but took her days unlinked, in something of the true vagabond spirit, each one for what it would bring her. Days that began with dawn and ended with darkness, and naught of connection between darkness and dawn. Neither did she own a knit coterie of friends; but had picked up a random assortment, and darted in and out of their separate spheres of life, as the need or the careless fancy took her. So that there was a certain lack of rhythmic swing, of cohesion, in her twenty-three years, till she met Merle des Essarts.

They flashed together at a charity subscription dance in the Assembly Hall at Thatch Lane. Merle had been motored thither by some acquaintances, forced into an extensive purchase of tickets. Peter was on the committee; and had donned for the evening an appropriate voice and expression. For she took pride in her powers of outward adjustment to whatever part she was called upon to play, while able to regard her motley the while with amused and appreciative detachment.

They happened with their respective partners at the same supper-table.

Merle’s partner cut his thumb.

“I wonder if I ought to bind it up.”

“I shouldn’t like blood-poisoning to set in.”

“It’s not worth making a fuss. I hate making a fuss.”

“I’m not saying much about it, but as a matter of fact, I’m in considerable pain.”

“Look, Miss des Essarts!”

Merle did not want to look, but the thumb of Mark St. Quentin was thrust upon her.

“It is bad, isn’t it?” courteously.

Presently she was invited to look again; and again she took an intelligent interest. It was just sufficiently bad to spoil her entrÉe.

“I’m not saying much about it——”

“Let me tie it up for you,” quoth Peter suddenly, noting the other girl’s lack of appetite.

Peter produced a dainty square of lawn and lace. Peter bent her boyish halo of hair in deep absorption over the injured member. And both her own partner and the victim supplied all the obvious patter about the “healing touch,” and “it was worth while to have suffered,” and “some people have all the luck,” and (of course) “will you let me keep the handkerchief?”—unutterable meanings in the request.

“‘When pain and anguish wring the brow,’” Merle murmured to her plate, as a very flushed ministering angel raised her head from the act of mercy.

Peter tossed her a look of indignation, and afterwards waylaid her in the corridor:

“See here,” hotly, “I don’t know who you are, but I made an ass of myself so that you should enjoy your sweetbreads, and then you rag me about it!”

“I’m sorry,” Merle replied, very penitent. “And I am grateful to you, really. But you didn’t see his ecstatic expression while you bound up the wound. Please forgive me—and let me replace the handkerchief.”

Peter liked this girl with the curious foreign lilt in her accent, and the demure sense of humour. And when a few days later a half-dozen of finely embroidered handkerchiefs arrived, together with a formal invitation to take tea with the sender, she went with a foreknowledge of having at last discovered someone who could speak her peculiarly twisted language.

She found a French bonbon in an exquisite bonbonniÈre; she found a jewel in its pink-lined casket; she found a dainty little lady, guarded and cherished as is only a “jeune fille” of French extraction; exquisitely dressed; very much in the picture, whether in the Louis-Seize drawing-room, or the Empire boudoir, or on the front seat of her grandmother’s roomy and old-fashioned barouche. And buried deep beneath these ornamentations, she found more of herself than she ever thought to encounter in a fellow-being. So much of herself, that it was almost a shock to vanity.

They did not become Best Friends in the sense of choosing each other’s hats, and walking with interlaced arms. They walked instead with interlaced lives. And from a series of vivid and incongruous patches, Peter now saw it possible to weave the pattern of her existence and Merle’s, so that the minutes were linked to the hours, and the seasons pursued one another the round of the calendar, and every haphazard personage was given a meaning, and every group of persons. And they planned undertakings and carried them through always; and robbed fiction of adventure, to place that wild-haired lass in the setting of things-that-happen. Journeys did they plot, preceded by an elaborate structure of deception for the benefit of Miss Esther Worthing, and an entirely different Édition de luxe to satisfy Madame des Essarts; thus necessitating great play for the exercise of their ingenuity. If one mood led them to revel in utterly childish delights, such as raising the golden-syrup spoon high above the plate, so as to let the shining liquid drop in coils and patterns upon the bread, a swift change of circumstances showed the twain in ultra-luxurious furs and ultra-spotless white kid gloves, setting forth solemnly, and with the moral support of a card-case, to “pay calls.” They arranged imaginary “parties,” one for the other; of which Merle’s favourite showed stately Madame des Essarts playing a prominent part with Bertram Kyndersley of the Melting Eye; though Peter inclined more to a fanciful alliance she had promoted between the Sphinx and the Albert Memorial—with dire results to the white flower of a blameless statue’s life.

Merle caught Peter’s infectious trick of light brilliant patter-talk, so that the likeness between the twain was marvellous to those who could not pierce beneath exterior resemblances. It was Peter who invariably started the vein of nonsense, Merle who capped it at the finish. Merle did not breathe the atmosphere as a matter of course; she had too long been nourished in hot-house solemnity, and her witticisms tumbled out with a surprised little lift in the voice, as if in astonishment at their escape from bondage. Nor could she ever learn sublime disregard of the feelings and conveniences of others, but would linger to propitiate the breathless fragments scattered by the swift onrush of Peter’s imperial passage; continued, in spite of her friend’s laughing remonstrances, to pay reverential homage to white hairs, and display a certain polite hauteur where persons of inferior station were in question. One jested, yes,—mais pas avec les autres! “You deserve to die on the guillotine,” quoth Peter.

But she gave in, notwithstanding her leadership, before the chill of Merle’s little reserves. For—and here lay the sting of the matter—instinct would not lead her exactly to where these reserves lay hidden; she would stumble on them unawares, without the remotest notion for what reason just that particular mention or sally or point of view, should call forth in the other a mood resembling cold water, finely sprayed. Merle herself, thus argued Peter, could on occasions be as daringly demurely blasphemous, so why....

But Peter knew well enough that the careless years she had spent knocking about with her parents and their shoddy coarse-grained good-natured associates, had done their destroying work. It is always absurd to suppose, in the popular fashion, that whatever a girl’s surroundings, her outlook can remain pure and flower-like and uncontaminated. Certain words had to be checked on her tongue; the itch for a cigarette was ever in her fingers; she was familiar with what she termed the “man-look,” and recognized too soon the dawning of intentions that needed to be checked. Other traces there were: a cool disregard as to the state of undress in which circumstances might chance to discover her straight young limbs; meanings of the under-world that attached themselves to perfectly innocent phrases. Not a very profound under-world; just below the glazed surface. And experiences had been hers, squalid enough to give pleasure in the recollection, when balancing a fragile teacup at some opulent afternoon reception.

These after-effects could hardly be considered serious; merely annoying to have perceptions so far blunted as to give no warning on the rare occasions when Merle’s greater fineness was in danger. “I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita!”—it amounted to that, after all.

CHAPTER III
PLAYING AT GOD

“I think it is going to be Logan Thane,” Peter decided, as she paused for a moment in the pleasing process of dressing for the dance, to stand bare-limbed before the fire, and feel its warmth run and leap and shiver over her skin; one of those luxuries to which memories of chill apartments and scrambled toilets now gave a zest and flavour. Peter liked equally the action of slowly drawing a cigarette from its silver case; the use of a bathroom, gleaming white tiles and silver taps and mist-wreaths dimming the mirror on the wall. Things which Merle took as a matter of course. Merle found her keenest enjoyment in escape for a whole day to Thatch Lane, to trespass over barbed-wire fencing in dank and thorny woods; discarding, for an old skirt and jersey of Peter’s, the elaborately suitable-for-the-country raiment provided by Madame des Essarts. Madame’s mental vision of these expeditions showed her granddaughter reclining upon a cushioned chair, in a very clean field, the while Miss Worthing’s footman (non-existent) asked if she took sugar and milk, and Peter added solicitously: “You must put up with our picnic teas, Merle, dearest. Will you have some Devonshire cream on your home-baked bread?”

Ever since their conversation on the second-empire bedspread, a fortnight before, the two girls were almost hypnotically persuaded that the forthcoming ball was to furnish, as far as their scheme of things was concerned, some startling issue. During their intercourse of two and a half years, the male element in its more serious form had been conspicuously and even unnaturally lacking. Peter was aware that this state of things could not possibly continue, in the case of two so magnetically alive. She had sought to forestall the Inevitable, by herself weaving in the thread. To-night she would choose its colour. To-night!... it was fun, playing at God.

Logan Thane fixed himself firmer and ever firmer in her imagination, while she put on her gold stockings and shoes, her bronze evening-dress, with its border of rich fur, and swathed gold sash. His name held possibilities; and she was not averse to the background of antlers and hothouse grapes, catalogued by Merle. She added to these, roses, and a sweet white-haired mother; picturing agreeably how the latter would describe Merle and herself as “quite at home in Thane Manor; running in and out all day; dear girls, both of them!”—Logan at this juncture tossed them an expressive smile from where he stood, as per arrangement, smiting his boot with a riding-whip.

And if he should fall in love with one or the other of them....

“It would be rough luck on Merle,” mused Peter, drawing on her long white kid gloves.

Certainly Peter was divinely human!

Someone knocking at the door:

“Are you ready?” cries Jinny, aged fourteen; “the Lesters are here, and don’t I just wish I was going too!”

Peter is staying the week-end with some twice-removed cousins in a Turnham Green boarding-house; a convenience of which she frequently availed herself, when evening pleasure-seeking made it impossible for her to catch the last train from Euston to Thatch Lane. The Lester boys and their sister, friends of Merle, had offered to fetch her in their car and bring her home again.

“And so if we don’t enjoy ourselves,” proposes Rose-Marie, a nervous dÉbutante, “we can keep to our own party....” The car moves slowly forward in a long queue.

Peter is not enthusiastic. Both the Lester boys are under twenty, and have pimples on their chins. She wishes—in the cloakroom now, and in the approved fashion letting her wrap fall languidly from her shoulders, to be caught by dexterous and silent attendants—that the thought of Merle hostess of this magnificence, did not remove her so very far from the Merle of their adventure days.

The staircase again, and conventional figures in black and white, struggling with their glove-buttons. Which of them is Logan Thane? “Wait for me,” pleads Rose-Marie, still busy with her powder-puff. A burst of music from the ballroom, striking thrilling response from the tuned-up senses. Events moving with the swift unreality of a cinema. The ballroom swims forward and engulfs Peter with its hum of talk, rising and falling like waves on a flat beach; its light mellowed by blossoms; blossoms made translucent by light. Impression of a group just within the doorway; Merle’s grandmother, from a mere solicitous voice in Lancaster Gate: “Es-tu fatiguÉe, chÉrie?” knuckles that tapped the door and a rustle that swept the staircase,—now materialized into diamonds, and Point d’AlenÇon, and dignified, almost royal, reception of the entering guests. Mademoiselle des Essarts, a little to her left, beauty in faint old-rose and lilac, silver-threaded; a tiny moon-shaped black patch below the lip; a bouquet of lilies of the valley. Mademoiselle des Essarts—“Elle est exquise,” whisper the diplomats and the ambassadors and the consuls, beribboned and bearded, who surround Madame, and lend a contrast of French court circles to the assembly of bostoning twentieth-century youth.

Mademoiselle des Essarts receives Miss Kyndersley with grave unsmiling courtesy, and introduces: “Mr. Milligan.”

Is this the owner of a new motor-car, or a Designing Female? Desperately Peter tries to collect her whirling thoughts, while Merle, according to previous arrangement, detaches herself from other duties, to present one partner after another; names that sound familiar: “the son of a judge ... can imitate ducklings ... black waistcoat where others elect to wear white,”—easily distinguishable, this last; “a life-story ... serious intentions ... seven devils and a shoe-black” ... the descriptions on the list jostle each other, and form part of the brilliant kaleidoscopic blur which goes to make Peter’s evening. She is beginning to enjoy the keen sense of expectancy with which she herself has infused the air. Light as the flutter of a peaseblossom, Merle blows across the polished floor: “Peter, have you a dance left? I want to introduce you——” no, the pink card is already scribbled over from top to bottom.

“Never mind; you can cut—let me see!” coolly Mademoiselle scans the names, and crosses off a harmless personage bearing the Oriental title of Otto Mann. “He’s not important” ... and she presents Mr. Thane, who looks rather astonished at these unceremonious proceedings, but laughingly accepts number twenty-three, the last waltz but one.

“I believe you’ll do!” thinks Peter exultantly. But nevertheless, she will give other unconscious candidates their chance. Her peculiar talent for playing up, body and soul, to whatever part be thrust upon her, can be exercised to its full in the swift coming and going, change and interchange of companionship, that is ballroom custom.

The first waltz stirs the air. The first skilful probing of the material with which she has to deal: cue given: “Don’t you find these affairs leave an empty feeling behind them?”... so be it, then; the Puritan maid—for ten minutes. And you, sir, what may be your demands? Can’t be bothered with depths, or all that bally rot? Come then, we will e’en butterfly together.... And the music strikes up for the next one-step; Papillon bows and departs, and—who will come in his stead? Walk up! walk up, gentlemen all! Here are a variety of goods in one parcel: the Artistic Understanding; the Tantalizing Sphinx; Up-to-date Woman of the World, with trick of shoe and eyelash and epigram—this for the youth who will not be thought young; quickly alternating to the Clear-eyed Delightful Child: her first dance, and it’s all such splendid fun! Almost can Thirty-nine, cynical, weary, and grizzled at the temples, be brought to say: “Little girl, you make the years fall from me....”

Peter wriggles happily. Who can denounce her conduct as unfair? Who, at a masquerade, music-led, rose-fragrant, expects to confront aught but fellow-masqueraders?... Here comes another—Aha! I recognize you, my friend; you are he who vibrates like a jelly in dancing, and—apprehensively she glances down at her gold shoes in danger from the kiss of Othello.

Take from Peter what you please, gentlemen all! not for your sakes, believe me that. For Peter’s sake; for the glorification of her talents, and for the fun of it, and because you may take from Peter what you please, so it be not Peter. And she is safe enough, dodging mischievously from one disguise to another, rather wishing—through all the breathless shift and stir and glimmer—to meet for once her equal in skill and tactics. But it will come with the twenty-third waltz of the evening, promised to Antlers-and-Hothouse-Grapes; she has staged her climax cunningly, to crown the end of masquerade.

Supper with Mark St. Quentin, who had two years previously sent her a dozen handkerchiefs, in lieu of the gory one, tenderly retained; thus making for the ministering angel a clear profit of seventeen handkerchiefs, reckoning Merle’s half-dozen. He has spent this evening in being to Peter the cement which knits loose bricks together; watching her hungrily when she slides away in the embrace of another; slipping into the gap when a partner chances to be late; taking the first dance and the last dance and the supper-dance, and any extras she cares to give, and all the numbers she wishes to cut. Quite pleasant, the consciousness of Mark St. Quentin to fill with his stolid and persistent personality the tiniest chink and crevice which the intoxicating hours might otherwise have left empty. Nor is it difficult to supply him with the goods he wants: a solicitous reference to the episode of the thumb, and Peter is established as fragrant sweet-natured woman, thank Heaven, still surviving in a century of Suffragettes and kleptomaniacs—“And druggists,” adds Mark St. Quentin; “Morphia, you know.”

After-supper hours, bringing with them the usual flushed dishevelment, actual and spiritual. Blooms beginning to droop in the heat; prevailing carelessness as to the hieroglyphics actually scrawled on the programme; bold voices, mingling with the bandsmen’s deeper notes, as they chorus to the popular encore, imperiously demanded. Lingerings on the stairs, and where softly-lit seclusion is provided for those who care to linger. Departure of the suave and elderly diplomats; Madame des Essarts must perforce wait, royalty unattended, till romping insatiable youth shall have drunk its fill. Her reflections on modern dancing, its antics and exaggerations, are such as to preclude description. She is pleased to note, however, that her granddaughter’s burnished dark head is still unruffled, her complexion unheated. “Elle est vraie des Essarts!”

Number twenty-one. Merle and Peter, skilfully guided where the throng is thickest, smile at one another in passing, eager, in the midst of enjoyment, for the mutual retrospection of the morrow. Comes the interval between twenty-two and twenty-three. Armand DrÉlincourt, for the third time in four hours, discourses with immense relish upon his fatal temperament. Peter listens attentively, but springs to her feet, interrupting the narrative at its most thrilling point, when the far-off tinkle of a bell reaches her ear: “Hadn’t we better go down?” Having settled on Logan Thane as a piratical playmate, she is frankly excited at the prospect of number twenty-three.

He is not waiting near the door of the ballroom. Neither is he in the stream descending the stairs. Peter waits impatiently till he shall choose to end his flirtation behind some draped portiÈre. Already the dancers are in full swing. Rose-Marie approaches: “Shall we go home now, Peter? Most people have left; it looks so bad to be among the last.” And behold St. Quentin standing faithful as the painted sentinel of Herculaneum: “May I have the pleasure, Miss Kyndersley?”

“I’m booked already,—where is Logan Thane?”

“But your partner seems to have deserted you. Silly fellow; he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Peter privately agrees. It takes still three minutes to convince her that Logan Thane has undoubtedly cut his dances and gone home early; and then she lets St. Quentin reap the reward of his tireless vigil: “I shall be leaving after this one, so we may as well finish it instead of the next.” She has flushed richly and her eyes are dark with annoyance. Childishly, she wants Logan Thane to have a sense of all that might have been his, had he not succumbed to weariness.

“Peter,” Rose-Marie’s voice, plaintive now; “the car has been waiting over an hour already, and mother said——”

“All right.” Peter disengages herself from the infatuated St. Quentin, murmurs her thanks to her hostess, looks around in vain for Merle, and suffers herself to be led by Rose-Marie to the cloak-room.

Downstairs, a few stray couples, clinging still to the fringes of pleasure, boston stormily to the strains of “Gipsy Love.” The massed flowers on the walls hang heavier and heavier yet. Madame has yawned twice, daintily, behind her Pompadour fan. As the last notes die away, Merle dashes for the doorway, dragging her partner in her wake.

“Peter!—she hasn’t gone yet, has she, grandmaman?” She succeeds in waylaying Peter, cloaked and reluctant, on her passage down the main staircase.

“You mustn’t go. I want you to dance the next with Stuart.” Merle’s tone conveys all she dares put into it of meaning and entreaty. Peter shakes her head, indicating Rose-Marie, inclined to be fractious.

“Leave her to me. Do go on, Peter.”

Peter wavers; the ballroom, after good-byes have been spoken and wraps adjusted, becomes doubly a place of enchantment, if only because etiquette debars from re-entering.

She looks at Stuart Heron.

And he, for his part, tries to trace the connection between a tall girl in a bronze evening-cloak, and a picture which has forced itself irrelevantly upon his mental vision: picture of a Cavalier emerging from some dark doorway; backward-floating plume, and mantle carelessly flung; swagger and smile expressive of all that lurked in his quest of love and hazard, and peradventure of hazardous love....

“Go on, Peter,” urges Merle. “You’ll like him.”

Peter hesitates no longer; tosses aside her cloak; and permits Stuart to escort her back to the regions of light whence she had thought to be self-banished. The band is crashing out in true Bacchanalian frenzy the last waltz of all, the waltz of their release. Twenty years before, and it would have been: “After the ball is over,” with its cloying suggestions of regret and sentiment; but modern youth requires something at once more abandoned and more discordant.

Stuart speaks: “She said I was going to like you.”

“And she said I was going to like you.”

Then in earnest duet: “How we’re bound to hate each other!”

He is a little above medium height; their eyes are almost on a level. He cannot rid himself of the impression that whatever he says now, is likely to matter later on. And the entire contents of his brain have wandered round the corner, and sitting there, mock his futility.

“No,” contradicting his own statement. “I don’t think we shall hate each other; at least, not more than is necessary to preserve mutual interest.” Why are they hurrying the time, those fool musicians? How long can one decently sit out with a girl, after the last candle is extinguished, and a lackey is holding her cloak in readiness? Seven minutes, perhaps? He will have to give her in that seven minutes lightning indications of all that is in him worth her knowing; whet her curiosity, and at the same time satisfy his own. The undertaking is a breathless one.

“Who are you?” Peter queries, having in vain tried to fit him with some attributes of Merle’s catalogue. “I can’t place you at all, and——”

“And what?” he leaps in, for she has paused, and there is no time to pause; two more couples have ceased to dance, and are busy encircling Madame des Essarts with an aura of thanksgiving and farewell. “And what?”

“And Merle introduced you as if you mattered.”

“Merle was quite right. I do matter.”

“Merle?”

“Why not? I’m a relic of her childhood.”

“It makes you sound like Stonehenge.”

“You strive rather after effect, don’t you?” He slings this at her, himself striving after effect.

“Of course. Would you have me display at once all the domestic virtues?”

“You haven’t any,” tauntingly. “Not one. Other girls can cook nothing but an omelette. You, I’m sure, can cook nothing at all. It must be a proud boast. I hate talking while I dance, don’t you?”

In silence they finish the waltz. Then Stuart sweeps her through a pair of velvet hangings, down two rooms, and to a sofa at the far end of a third, before she is well aware of his intentions. She takes a sidelong survey of his outward marks: features that vie for room with his monocle and quickly-changing expression, giving an effect to his face of overcrowding; a mouth corner-tilted and impish, such as is sometimes perceived in a small street-arab, but mostly in a leprechaun, who can only be met hammering shoes on moor and crag by moonlight. She notes further that his jaw is lean, with the forward bent of a runner; and his head, which by dint of hard brushing and grooming gives at first an effect of conventional sleekness, is in reality a most rebellious and intricate affair, no hair growing in precisely the same direction as its fellow, but each insisting it will beat out like Bret Harte’s pioneer, “a way of his own, a way of his own!”

From the distant ballroom, snatches of “God save the King” drift and die and are re-born, with an effect of inexpressible melancholy. And, sighing, Stuart relinquishes desire to show the girl all his sides before dawn—philosophical, tender, childish, manly, sporting, whimsical, or political,—resigns himself to proving merely that he is original.

“You can never get away from your likeness to a Reynolds’ Angel,” À propos of nothing; “because there are five of them, so that if the expression should miss one, it will hit the next; I’m sorry for you, of course, but there is nothing to be done about it. Do you live anywhere? Forgive me for these astounding acrobatics, but I’m so afraid you will be fetched by your nurse Rose-Marie; I heard you remark she was growing fractious.”

“I live in Thatch Lane with an aunt. My mother is dead, and my father unmentionable, to save you from the agonies of a tactless question.”

... The bandsmen are dimly visible, packing away their mute instruments. A voice from the long-ago is calling faintly “Peter” ... hastily she covers the sound: “What are you? A stockbroker?”

“No,” he too has heard, and speaks rather breathlessly; “do I make love like a stockbroker?”

“You haven’t.”

“I have, in my own subtle fashion. But I can’t overleap the first stages in this Post-impressionist preliminary scamper of ours.”

... “Pet-er! Pe-ter!” clearer now—and nearer.

“A stockbroker has but seven stages of love-making, and by these shall ye know him,” laughs Peter.

“And I have a hundred and seven, and seven more after that, and by none of these shall ye know me.”

“Do you always talk about yourself?”

“No,” desperately; “I can talk about ever so many things: Cathedrals, and good form, and machinery, and how to make pins. Oh, and metaphysics. Particularly metaphysics. I took a double first at Oxford. I’ve no right to tell you, but I want you to know,” with the first touch of boyishness that has as yet escaped the hard polished surface of his manner.

... “I can’t think where she is,” Merle replies courteously, two rooms off.

... “Pee-ee-eee-ter!”

—“Confound it! How can I be eloquent with that phantom female forever squawking like the poor cat i’ the adage.”

Peter remarks, caring not a whit for Rose-Marie: “I’m sure that an adage is a medieval Scotch pantry, and that the cat was stealing the cream.”

“The ‘Cat and Adage’ wouldn’t be a bad public-house,” Stuart reflects; “in case I shouldeverwanttobuilda—damn!” in an outburst of frenzied and polysyllabic fury, as a little procession, consisting of Merle, Rose-Marie, the two brothers of Rose-Marie, and Mark St. Quentin, advance with triumphant shoutings towards the truants’ retreat.

His curses are overtopped by St. Quentin’s pÆans of victory:

“I told you I’d seen them come this way. You’ve given us a rare hunt, Miss Kyndersley.” And the eldest and most pimply of the Lester twins shakes a playful finger:

“Bedtime, you know, Miss Peter. No good running away and hiding.”

“Good night,” Stuart turns abruptly away, not caring to form part of the returning procession across three rooms. Nor does he express any audible hopes of renewing an acquaintance so delightfully begun.

“Well?” Merle threw a world of mischievous expectancy into the interrogation, when Peter paid her promised visit at tea-time the following day.

Merle was lying on the couch, her back supported by many cushions, a silken wrap thrown lightly over her feet. For Madame des Essarts cherished the notion that constitutions of delicate birth were necessarily also of delicate health, to attain which desirable consummation, she kept a venerable and witty doctor in daily attendance, and reduced Merle on the slightest provocation from the vertical to the horizontal.

Peter tossed down her hat, and sank into a curly-legged arm-chair.

“I wish this weren’t such an impossible room,” she grumbled; “what with gilt and tapestries and priceless china and painted ladies on the ceiling, I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s the sort of room you can’t take up and wrap round you. What we ought to do, Merle, is with the aid of a ladder, a big apron, and a bottle of gum, cover the walls ourselves in brown paper, like those brave bright Bohemian bachelor girls in books.”

“Well?” quoth Merle again, disregarding the Bohemian girls.

“And then the supreme insult of a central heating system, when every fibre of me yearns for firelight. How would it be to light a fire of sticks on the carpet? Would your grandmother mind?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” murmured Merle. “It’s only Aubusson, and she’s a reasonable woman, and you could always explain to her that you were being the Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Or Robinson Crusoe. Why, do you suppose, are shipwrecked islanders always called Robinson? Is it something wild and primitive that lies in the name?”

“You know,” Merle suggested gently, “it’s not necessary to be quite so garrulous, to convince me that you want to hear about Stuart Heron.”

Peter gave in: “Who is he?”

“A millionaire.”

“That’s a nuisance. Is he sensitive about it? No, he doesn’t give me the impression of being sensitive about anything. He’s hard and polished and invulnerable; Achilles without the heel.”

“Three months’ treatment, and you’ll be crying aloud that he’s all heel and no Achilles.”

Nicole entered with the tea equipage, containing much of chased silver; and conversation was for a moment suspended.

“Mademoiselle Peter should not have risen from bed to-day,” severely. “She must surely be fatigued after so late an evening.”

“I was one of those who left early,” Peter mendaciously assured the old woman, of whom she stood in distinct awe.

“Nicole, you’ve forgotten the cream, and Mdlle. Peter is here. You know her love of cream is only equalled by her hatred of cows.”

Nicole looked respectfully incredulous: “Surely not, Mademoiselle. But if it were not for the good kind cows, what would Mademoiselle put in her tea?”

“I don’t put cows in my tea,” Peter protested unhappily. And as Nicole, with many chucklings, withdrew, “Merle, why do you hold me up to scorn before your staff? And I want more about Stuart—Heron, did you say?”

“Awfully Heron. They all are. And quite indecently rich. He has a mother, and three uncles, and a married sister, and some cousins—pretty girls. Family existing for the worship of Stuart, sole son of the house of Heron. And all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Herons have them all. I don’t know much more about them, except presents; they’re for ever giving each other presents; costly trifles, such as a villa on the Riviera, or a Rolls-Royce motor, or a new hothouse, or a sackful of pink diamonds. Whenever you go there, Mrs. Heron is sure to say: ‘Oh, let me show you the chocolate-coloured page-boy that Stuart gave me because he scored a goal at football’; or ‘do help me think of a present for my brother-in-law, it’s the anniversary of his wife’s death. Last time I gave him twenty-four pairs of silk pyjamas sewn with seed-pearls; do you suppose he would like the Only Orinoco Orchid? I hear you can get it for five hundred guineas.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous, and pass the cake,” laughed Peter. “Besides, all this doesn’t explain Stuart.”

“I don’t know much about Stuart; of course I was taken there as a child, but then——” Merle’s eyes grew large and wistful, “I wasn’t a child; I was a French doll, in beautiful, expensive clothes, and not allowed to romp with the other children. So I suppose Stuart despised me. In fact, he told me as much last night; that since we’ve been grown-up he has avoided me for fear I should break. He’s only three years down from Oxford.”

“So young? I took him for about thirty.”

“Twenty-five, I believe.”

“He mentioned Oxford—isn’t Nicole going to bring that cream?—but I doggedly refused to take notice. ’Varsity is the one subject I will not discuss with the initiated; I pronounce Magdalen as God meant it to be pronounced, mix up dons with proctors, and earn for myself undying contempt. So it’s better left alone.”

Nicole entered with the cream, and the intimation that Monsieur Heron desired to speak with Mademoiselle des Essarts on the telephone.

“The game commences in earnest,” laughed Merle. “But I don’t want to get up. You answer it, Peter.”

Peter, nothing loath, ran downstairs to the boudoir, and replaced Madame des Essarts at the mouthpiece: “Hello!”

“Hello—look here,” came Stuart’s unmistakable tones from the other end; tones veiling with the typical Oxford accent a curious eagerness as of a dog forever worrying and shaking a bone. “Look here, how’s my mother?”

“I’m not good at arithmetic.”

“Your grandmother has asked me three times, and I feel I ought to have known. I said ‘quite well, thanks,’ but now I come to think of it, she isn’t. Would it be the right thing to ring off, and ring up again to contradict the statement.”

“It would be easier on the whole to cure your mother, and get it right that way.”

“I say, it isn’t Merle. It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. Merle’s lying down.”

A pause. Then a chuckle from the other end.

“I trust you have recovered from the fatigues of the dance, Peter. I recollect that you were among the last to go.”

She assured him politely that she was suffering from no ill-effects, and trusted he was the same. And she passed over the use of her Christian name.

“What are you talking about, you two girls? Irish-stew of the night before? Have I come in yet?”

“Perhaps you don’t come in.”

“I am coming in,” something very like a threat in the assurance. “I’m in already. Well in. Merle told me about the projected Triumvirate.”

Peter sped an indignant glance towards the absent Merle, for not informing her of this breach of faith; and a look of defiance at Stuart, who could not see it, for daring to laugh, which he wasn’t.

“I’m afraid I had a purpose in ’phoning,” he continued; “though it would be splendid to say I’d rung up for no reason whatever. Will you ask Merle if she’ll come with me to a dance at the Cecil, next Tuesday evening, and bring her little friend.”

Peter refused to rise to such a palpable throw. “Tickets?”

“I’ve got them. Four. Can you provide another male of some sort?”

“I’ll ask Merle. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

She returned to find Merle being cherished by her grandmother, so that a careful version of the foregoing invitation needed to be given:

“Mr. Heron is making up a party, and hopes we will join him; and at the same time benefit a charity in which he is interested.”

Madame des Essarts gave the scheme her gracious acquiescence. “He doubtless wishes to revenge himself for last night,” she mused approvingly; “but it is a somewhat hurried courtesy.” For there existed nothing in which she was so punctilious as in these social accounts of give and take; accounts which Merle insisted were as carefully noted and balanced as any butcher’s or baker’s. So much debit, so much credit; a nice perception of how many teas given went to cancel one luncheon taken. So now:

“If you are to invite another gentleman, mon enfant, it must be Mr. St. Quentin; you remember he motored us to Ranelagh.” Madame touched Peter’s cheek lightly with her hand, besought her not to tire Merle or herself with too much conversation, and rustled away, leaving in her train a faint swish and perfume. Whereupon Peter re-edited truthfully the duologue.

—“Merle, why did you tell him about the trio, and—and all that rot?”

“Rot?”

“He thinks so. He probably thinks it—oh, girlish!”

“He’s going to count,” said Merle. “And ... Peter——”

“What?”

“Three is a funny shape,” the younger girl admitted slowly. “I think it might mean two and one. And I think, Peter, we shall have to settle, you and I, to be square with each other, in the triangle.”

“What a ghastly geometrical figure: If the square ABCD standing on the base of the triangle XYZ——”

But Merle was not laughing. “We must agree to talk things out, and always get them clear, even if it should mean disloyalty to Stuart. Because I believe he’s the strongest.”

Peter considered this a moment, while she emptied the cream-jug into her cup. “Yes,” she decided at length. “But we’ll tell him that you and I are going to keep the path unblocked between us. It will be fairer; and save him from blundering.”

“He won’t blunder,” Merle prophesied. “And I think, too, that he’s capable of calling a taxi.”

Peter laughed:

“I’d forgotten the taxis; of course, they were the original means of bringing him in. But I rather wonder what he hopes to find.”

CHAPTER IV
THE SHAPE OF THREE

The shape began to assert itself already on the way to the Cecil. Merle, Peter and Stuart discovered that their three-cornered talk flashed forth with uncommon swiftness and brilliancy, as if drawing inspiration one from the other; that a spirit and being came alive that belonged not to any two of them, nor yet to any one, but could only be borne of just that conjunction of three. So that they were palpitating with eagerness to continue exploration in the kingdom which their magical number had thrown open to them, when Mark St. Quentin, symbol of a world without meanings, met them, as arranged, in the ballroom.

As far as St. Quentin was concerned, the evening proved a failure, strongly reminding him of a phase in his rather lonely childhood, when elder brothers and sisters used to glory in the flaunting of their “secrets.” Though of just what these miraculous “secrets” consisted he could never discover. Nor could he discover now what was the curious excitement that seemed to quiver in his alternate partners; and he was certainly baffled by the bewildering fashion of their talk. As well he might be; for Peter and Merle, dizzied by the constant change and interchange of male involved by quartette, occasionally allowed their separate manners to overlap, with merely amusing results when Stuart received the St. Quentin dregs, but absolutely fatal when St. Quentin was by mistake driven to cope with some startling turn of phrase that should have been Stuart’s portion.

They were being shockingly ill-bred, the three; not a doubt of it. But a hardness of heart and an oblivion of manners descends upon those who, on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, are picking up gold and silver, towards those incapable of perceiving the alluring glitter; and St. Quentin was finally reduced to concentrate his hopes upon supper, which meal he fondly anticipated might “draw them all together a bit.” Also, a man of little imagination, he ascribed the dreary void within him on contemplating the Tiddlerites, as due to hunger. So that when Stuart announced carelessly after the eighth dance: “Had about enough now, haven’t we?” he so far forgot himself as to expostulate with some fervour:

“Oh, I say. But I thought we were stopping on for supper, anyway.”

“So did I,” replied Stuart. “But my partners seem rather anxious to get home.”—Merle looked astonished, but understood that she was expected to play up to some dark sub-current of intention.

“Grandmaman did beg me not to be late,” demurely. Which happened to be true.

“But Miss Kyndersley,” St. Quentin turned with dying hopes to Peter; “won’t you stay and have supper?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, if Merle doesn’t.” Peter, not in the mood as yet to renounce gaiety, was inclined to be indignant with Stuart for his ill-disguised anxiety to quit.

“A jolly little supper,” wailed the odd man out, seeing pÂtÉ and lobster slipping irrevocably through his fingers.

On the threshold of the hotel rose another slight discussion: “I’ll see the ladies home; it’s on my way,” from Stuart.

“Oh, but——”

“It’s on my way,” firmly. And he had hailed a taxi, for which vehicles he certainly possessed magnetic attractions, had helped in Merle and Peter, and had given the address at Lancaster Gate, before St. Quentin was allowed a chance to proffer services. As the latter stood beneath the awninged steps, watching the swift departure, every line of face and figure seemed to quiver forth in resentful unison: “A jolly little supper....”

The car shot round the corner. Stuart let down the window and leant out: “Drive to the Billet-doux,” he commanded curtly, giving the name of a celebrated little French restaurant on the border-line between fashion and Bohemia.

Peter laughed, understanding; and because his methods amused her. But Merle gasped in some disturbance.

“Sorry,” said Stuart. “But it was essential to get rid of him, wasn’t it? I don’t mean him personally, but any other existent fourth.”

“But he was of our party,” Merle rebuked him gravely, conscious of being alone in her defence of good manners.

“I think not,” laughed Stuart; “merely a stage property.”

They drew up before the quaint white hostelry in Soho; set off by its dark and murky surroundings, and proclaiming aloud its aloofness from these, by the ostentatious guardianship of two commissionaires.

Passing through the swing doors, Merle was caught up by the tumult of voices and ring of glass within; forgot to be prim and censorious; gave herself over entirely to the joy of this unexpected, and—as far as Madame des Essarts was concerned—forbidden truancy.

So they came for the first time to the Billet-doux, destined to prove one of the permanent backgrounds to their triangular career. And the austere and melancholy Spanish waiter who assisted them to uncloak, did not for a moment guess how he was to be puzzled by the alternate qualities and quantities of their future comings; merely noticed that the party seemed in excellent spirits, and that the gentleman spent commendably little time and breath in his selection of the supper. And here again the girls silently approved.

Peter leant forward across the table: “There’s something to be settled without further delay,” she announced, half in mockery, and withal letting a tinge of earnest invade her tones. “It’s tactless to mention it, but—you’re a millionaire, aren’t you?”

Stuart assented, very ashamed.

“We’ve agreed to forgive,” Peter went on, “on the condition that you let us forget. No chucking about of gold purses to the populace, mark you. As long as you never permit us to see more than two sovereigns at a time, our three-ship shall endure. But the rest of your vast fortune, and all your motor-cars and boot-trees, you must hide in mattresses and banks. Is that understood?”

“Can’t you make it guineas,” he pleaded unhappily. And in consideration of his quenched demeanour, they agreed to expand the limits by a florin.

“I suppose you had better know the worst,” he continued gloomily, helping them to varieties of sardines that, like Diogenes, dwelt mainly in tubs. “I’m a diamond-merchant.”

Merle burst out laughing. “Oh, Stuart, how comical! Do you wear a silk hat?”

“And a face to match. You must invade the offices one day, and see me in the act.”

“You take it seriously, then?”

“Desperately. Notice the absorbed face of a small boy playing at grown-ups; if he were laughing all the time, he wouldn’t be enjoying the game.”

“But if we really do bear down upon you, will you give us a sign that it’s all right? Because otherwise I’m terrified of the ‘business face.’”

“One sign ye shall have, and no more. After that I’ll expect you to play also, and take proper interest in diamonds, and listen prettily to the Khalif,—it doesn’t matter about the One-eyed Calendar.”

And here Merle demanded explanations, which were midway interrupted by a wail of despair from Peter; she had somehow contrived to mix her implements so that whichever way she worked it, the fish-knife would be left for dessert. Stuart looked for enlightenment at Merle:

“Doesn’t she know? Has no one told her? Are we to pretend not to see?”

“She springs from the people,” Merle answered his aside. “The kind that wear curl-papers and barrows. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re alone.”

... Stuart and Merle, if only in jest; and Peter the outsider. Not for one moment could the flexible triangle retain its form.

“Let it be clearly understood,” broke in Peter, defiantly holding out the wrong glass, that wine might be poured into it, “that except for the benefit of Fernand, I refuse to be: ‘and your little friend also.’”

“Who is Fernand?” from Stuart.

Merle owned to an elder brother who dwelt in Paris. “Peter and I were once upon a time allowed to travel alone from England to the South of France, to join Grandmaman in Nice. En route, I gave Peter a party consisting of Fernand, and a first-class wagon-lit.”

“In juxtaposition?” murmured Stuart. Peter, for fear of Merle’s little reserves, flashed him a glance of warning. The shape had altered again.... Obviously it was impossible to keep intimacy of speech and spirit moving between more than two points; the idea was to spin it so swiftly from one to another and then on, as to give the appearance of all three simultaneously involved.

Peter took up the narrative:

“Fernand Alfonso des Essarts, the essence of decorum and propriety, met us at the Gare du Nord, and escorted us across Paris. He carried a big box of chocolates for Merle, and a smaller one for her little friend also. He conveyed to Merle the compliments of all her unknown relatives in Paris; and she cast down her eyes, transformed to an embodiment of the virginal jeune fille, convent-fresh and dewy, and conveyed to him the compliments of all his unknown relatives in London. And they thanked each other separately for each one. In this wise did they continue to converse. He asked her if she were thirsty—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you are thirsty?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I am thirsty,’ sez I, likewise convent-fresh and dewy. He displayed polite interest in her progress at the piano—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you play the piano?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I play the piano.’—I don’t, by the way, Stuart; it’s quite all right. And Fernand surveyed his beautiful boots, and probably thought of his beautiful grisette, neglected that evening for the sake of these embÊtantes young English misses. And with an inspiration he asked Merle if she had mal-de-mer in crossing—‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you had mal-de-mer in crossing?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I had mal-de-mer in crossing. Very!’ The word too much did it, and Fernand addressed me no more.”

“I hope the wagon-lit proved a compensation for your temporary effacement,” laughed Stuart.

He sat opposite them, as it were one pitted against two. And the girls marvelled anew that aught with the looks and costume and bearing of conventional man-about-town, eye-glass and knowledge of the wine-list, should yet have caught the melody of their pipes, and revealed in response his own nimble goat-legs. The proximity of the mirror which enlarged their number to six, lent a grotesque flavour to the scene, allowing each of the players the illusion of being at the same time spectator; placing the table, with its shining napery and silver, tumbled shimmer of whitebait, and dull red Burgundy in the glasses, outside and apart from reality. Stuart, catching at one moment the reflected eyes of his companions, toasted them silently in phantom wine ... and it needed a curious effort, a tug of the will, before they could recall their glances from the three puppets in looking-glass-land, to meet, each of them, their two companions in the flesh. The light and stir of the restaurant, the drifting brilliant figures from one crowded room to another, the gay groups, talking, laughing, were all, as it were, subordinated, like supers in a stage set. So the solicitous waiter, hovering, might have been stolen from some sinister Spanish masque of passion and hatred. From an outer chamber, drifted wailing snatches of violin-play. The ghost of Mark St. Quentin glided into the vacant seat to Peter’s right. “A jolly little supper,” he murmured reproachfully....

“Three coffees, black,” Stuart ordered of the waiter; “And—green Chartreuse, both of you? I think so; three green Chartreuses.” He did not consult their tastes, hoping to gauge them accurately by intuition, or else luck. He held a match to their cigarettes; and, reverting to the topic of their journey, suggested that a wagon-lit might be rather a nice domestic animal: “A tame red wagon-lit with trustful brown eyes. I wonder if my wife would let me keep one in the back-garden, among the washing.”

Merle was overcome by a vision of the future wife of the diamond-merchant hanging up the diamond-merchant’s pants on a clothes-line, every Monday morning.

“Just fancy,” Stuart burst forth, “the indignity of having to ask permission before one could keep a fox-terrier or a wagon-lit. I can not understand the state of mind which leads a man to marriage: the eternal sucking of the same orange, when there are thousands for his plucking.”

His tone was of the lightest, but Peter understood that it veiled a warning. And she was conscious of a sudden rage that he should deem a warning necessary.

“Prince of Orange,” she mocked him; “you probably waste your kingdom.”

But he boasted: “Not so. For I am aware of the exact instant just before the juice is all spent and the skin will taste bitter in my mouth. And then I cast away my orange and gather another. There are so many in the grove that sometimes indeed I am tempted to leave one half-sucked, to try the flavour of the next. But I don’t ... I don’t.”

Merle put in: “You are speaking symbolically.”

“I am,” smiling at her—his leprechaun smile.

“And what of the pips? do you swallow them in the process?”

“Rather than spit them, yes. I likewise suck silently, and with great haste, greediness and appreciation.”

“I wonder,” mused Peter, into her curling smoke-wreaths, “if the orange has any views on the subject....”

Stuart heard: “That depends on the thickness of its skin.”

“Their rejected skins shall go to make your pathway to Hell. And the whole way ye shall slip ignominiously.”

“Rather say I shall slide gloriously.”

“And bump at the bottom?”

“There are great virtues, even in a bump at the bottom, to those who understand the art of swift recovery.”

Peter mused on this, while remarking idly that the pale glint of Chartreuse held much more of evil than the frank winking serpent-green of crÊme-de-menthe.

“Are you never natural?” she queried suddenly, recalling the man to joyous sparring, from his tender admiration of Merle’s side-face, which, one among a thousand, really merited the higher appellation of profile.

“No, I don’t think so. What am I, natural? or you, or anyone else? something that sleeps and eats and walks, and never enquires. Not of such stuff are born the Orange-Suckers, the Hairpin-Visionists.”

“Hairpin-Visionists?” chorus of attracted femininity.

He explained: “If, whatever you are doing, you are able to project yourself into the future, and from that point look back again to the present, you can get your outlines clear, see where each step is leading you, obtain a sense of proportion and values on the incident. And that mental process follows the curves of an ordinary hairpin, starting at one of the points—then forward—and back again. D’you see?” he traced the diagram with his fingers on the table-cloth.

“Then you always live your life backwards, from some imaginary spot seven or eight months hence? What a grotesque looking-glass existence!”

“The Billet-doux is lowering its lights,” remarked Stuart. And called for the bill. They had supped luxuriously, and drunken of wine that lay cradled in straw, a white muffler about its slender neck. So that the reckoning amounted to two pounds three and twopence. Stuart was about to fling down three pieces of gold—when he remembered....

Here was a quandary indeed.

Leaning across to Merle, he murmured in confidential and embarrassed tones: “I say, I’m rather short of cash; forgive the awful cheek—could you lend me half a crown?”

Very gravely she produced the coin: “It’s quite all right; please don’t bother about returning it.” The notion of a Heron short of cash was truly delightful.

“Peter,” snuggling her head sleepily against the older girl’s shoulder, when they had taken their seats in the home-bound taxi. “Peter, are we going to like him? I believe we are.”

Peter looked at Stuart—and surprised a rather lorn and out-of-it expression on his face. There had been unconscious cruelty, perhaps even coquetry, in Merle’s gesture and appeal; emphasizing his position on the opposite seat; their snug drowsy security in the fortress he was attempting to storm from without.

“You realize that, don’t you?” said Peter, hammering upon the nail; “that Merle and I talk to each other; really talk. And that we’ll allow you no quarter.”

“Thank you for the danger-signal.” Stuart smiled, and ceased to resemble the lonely millionaire of fiction. The triangle for the moment was clearly isosceles: a short line connecting points X and Z at the base, while Y lay infinitely remote at the apex.

“It is going to be difficult,” thought Y exultantly.

For Stuart was nauseated by the rose-path.

And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair. Pride of youth and good looks and active limb. Pride in their need of one another, and their power to stand alone withal. Most of all, pride of brain, that could leap from point to point, nor ever lose a foothold; propound subtlety upon subtlety, each of the three eager to give the corkscrew its final twist, till towards the seventh evolution they would laughingly give up, and slowly unwind again. Brains that could be adapted to any circumstances and any company; wring enjoyment from the most unpromising material; brains that forgot not, so that reference became a language, incomprehensible save to those who had invented the cipher. Brains responsive, electric, in perfect working order. Pride of brain, surely as splendid a thing as the more usual pride of body that waits on youth.

The trio, definitely established, possessed a spirit of its own; its actions were wilful and indeterminate, and none could know its soul save by inspiration. It was built of cross-moods, cross-stimulations; and it owned no leader nor follower, but changed its several parts from moment to moment. A thing of fine complexity, the trio, that could adjust itself to the shock of any outside problem or weariness,—in fact, take unto and into itself these same problems and wearinesses, and make of them part of the whole, subjugated to its domination. And its god was the unknown, and its fear the Inevitable, and retrospect its recreation, and in the Hairpin Vision lay its safety, and in sex its slumbering danger.

The Spanish waiter, of a romantic disposition, took interest in the SeÑor and two SeÑoritas who came so frequently to the Billet-doux; and wondered when the former would begin to evince a preference. The Spanish waiter, only human, went so far as to rejoice in the sight of Peter and Stuart supping alone; since himself had begun to regard Merle with a more than waiterly eye. He was both puzzled and furious, two nights later, at the entrance of Stuart and Merle. And his bewilderment knew no bounds, when, having at last decided the SeÑoritas were at deadly enmity for their love of the capricious SeÑor, Peter and Merle shattered this most plausible theory by lunching together in perfect harmony of spirit. The Spanish waiter might stand as the first of a collection of persons convinced of the madness of the trio: collection of incidentals to their daily progress, such as railway-porters, policemen, telephone operators, grocers, boatmen, parents, rustics and Baldwin. Collection which Stuart proposed leaving to the Nation on his death: “each individual to be labelled with date and circumstance concurrent with his or her initiation to the belief of our complete insanity.”

Peter found an instance: “Specimen 41: Respectable Old Gentleman. March 2nd, 1913. On accidentally catching sight of Trio solemnly smashing egg at the end of Euston.”

“You know,” said Merle, “I don’t think he would have been so bewildered if Stuart hadn’t explained to him that we always smash eggs at supreme moments of our career; that we regard it as a religious ceremony; and that our accompanying chant is taken from Scene I of Macbeth: “When shall we three meet again?”—ending:

“It was an impromptu effort,” the author apologized. “And then he didn’t see why the discovery of the End of Euston should be a supreme moment, even in the life of a lunatic.”

Peter could best have enlightened the Respectable Old Gentleman, to whom stations were stations, neither more nor less. Euston was her terminus for Thatch Lane; and on the many occasions that Stuart had accompanied her thither, they had taken to their hearts the grim portals and endless echoing approach, the labyrinth of platform and grey mystery of booking-hall, the infinite possibilities in its stretching regions and sinister corners. Very much less than station, when their whim was to treat it as a nursery of toys; and how much more than station, when its oppressive personality foredoomed it as a backcloth for the day when their mood should be of tragedy. Peter and Stuart viewed Euston with respect; but regarded it nevertheless as theirs by virtue of understanding, a kingdom into which even Merle could not stray.

In the balancing whereof—for Stuart was careful to dole even kingdoms and secrets with perfect equality and fairness—he and Merle were both Insiders of society, permitting them likewise to be Truants from society; a privilege Peter lacked, in that one cannot play truant from a stage one has never entered. But society, rumour-fed that the charming granddaughter of Madame des Essarts, and Heron, the fabulously wealthy young diamond-merchant, were of late to be seen frequently in company one of the other, society did approve of this most desirable union; and, furthermore, did seek to forward it by a system known as “throwing-together.” Merle and Stuart, meeting on the area-steps and by the back-doors of society, had no desire whatsoever for propinquity of the hall-portals and front drawing-room; so that Merle received with polite indifference the tidings that Stuart was to be present at some glittering function; and Stuart went so far as to refuse invitations to dinner-parties, carefully prepared with a view to placing him at Merle’s side during three solid hours of mastication.

Heron and des Essarts; riches and family; youth and beauty; it was an alliance altogether too suitable, and the parties involved felt it their bounden duty not to give it visible encouragement. “I—will—not—have you made easy for me,” Stuart muttered in his most clenched voice. Truants of society both, they enjoyed their truancy as much for what they left behind, as for what they went to seek.

Peter smiled sometimes, as she reflected how little of sordid niggling money worries, of harassing debts, of the snatching hour-to-hour existence that went on in the Bohemian underworld, was known to those who have a sufficiency of baths, and travel first-class as a matter of course. Perversely enough, she hugged to herself the memory of the few years she had spent on the border-line between respectability and squalor; was glad they were hers alone, unshared by Merle or Stuart. Her one-world! ... had they each a one-world, she mused, as well as their two-world and their three-world?

She and Merle had not as yet succeeded in locating the heel of their Achilles. Stuart was hard and ruthless, that they had agreed in their many confabulations on the subject; quite without sympathy for weakness or sentiment of any kind. But signs had betrayed a vulnerable spot in him, tantalizingly indicated, vanished as soon as they attempted to follow up the trail. Childish he certainly was at times. Childish in the quick look he was wont to throw, angling for approbation, after the successful performance of what they were pleased to term a “stunt.” Childishly annoyed at any reference on their part to the kingdom as it stood before he entered it. Childishly petulant on an occasion when the girls took him adventuring in a part of the world unfamiliar to him, so that initiative fell for once into their hands. Childishly ill-mannered on another occasion, when Peter, partly in the spirit of mischief, sought to make a quartette of trio by the introduction of a new discovery in the male line. Then Stuart, even as he had done previously with Mark St. Quentin, uprose mightily in his wrath, and hurled the unoffending youth from the topmost battlements into the moat of blackness. Whereat the girls gave their officious PrÆtorian clearly to understand that with them alone lay the orders for entrance and ejection:

“You were disgustingly rude. You were worse; you hurt his feelings!——” A furiously indignant Merle, ivory burning to rose, eyes storm-grey. “You hurt him,” she repeated.

“It’s not a serious wound,” thus the culprit, coolly. “You shall go and put balm upon it, Merle. I believe you keep a balm factory for applying relief to the endless victims of my ‘disgusting rudeness.’” He loved to tease Merle, who was soft-hearted.

“It sounds like margarine,” she cried, in distasteful reference to the balm. And the incident closed on a laugh.

But childishness was not weakness; nor could it account for those moments when he seemed mutely to plead to them for something. And then the memory would be swept away in a gale of swagger, loud crows of self-approval,—accompanied always by a twinkle in the unwindowed eye, that plainly betrayed amused knowledge of his own effrontery.

“Just where Stuart suffers,” remarked Peter to Merle, in a spasm of illumination, “is that his wings of swank will always be attributed to the uplifting effects of his money-bags, and condemned accordingly. Whereas I’m perfectly certain that without a penny he would still remain as magnificently and serenely confident. It’s in him, not in his pockets. But he’ll never get a chance to prove it. And he wears himself out in the invention of opportunities to wear himself out.”

“The qualities of a Stoic rotting in the bosom of a millionaire,” reflected the other girl. “He’s rather a dear,” she added with sudden inconsequence.

Peter surveyed her quizzically: “Quite sound as yet, are you? No bones broken?”

Merle felt herself: “Heart all right—thighs—ankles—shoulder-blades——Yes, thanks, I’m perfectly sound and rather happy. How are you?” politely.

Thus theirs was the advantage, to be able to make of him a subject for discussion. Stuart knew no such relief. His search for truth in this double she-encounter had of necessity to be a solitary quest. Nor did his previous she-encounters assist him one whit. He could rely on Merle and Peter to be thoroughly loyal to one another, and unblushingly disloyal towards him, which was baffling, by way of a beginning. They showed far cleverer than the sirens who had previously essayed to lure his boat to destruction, save when he sought to compare them with females renownedly intellectual, when by sheer perversity, the two would present themselves to his mental conception as capriciously feminine, exasperating in their swift changes of mood, in their demands upon him for the impossible, in their conscious and provoking mystery. No space of time to analyse them individually as separate Sphinxes for his unravelling. As yet they were still an undivided problem.

He knew they kept guarded and intact their innermost chambers of all. Well—did he not also retain his one-world? A world in which dwelt Stuart the metaphysician, who, stronger even than Stuart the leprechaun, recognized with dismay an ability to slip out of the trio and its pattern, its march-rhythm and its corkscrew wit; get glimpses of himself as a bit of a fool; of the whole edifice they had raised, as absurd, exaggerated; doubting whether such close comradeship with two girls, save with the outlook and excuse of pure masculinity, did not contain an element—yes, though he loathed the term, an element of the fantastic? In fact, when he could add himself to the collection that was to be left to the nation. But he limited these glimpses, as being contrary to the rules of the game; would have denied them himself altogether, had he not been convinced they added to the fun,—the fun of scrambling back, aware he had been outside, a truant from truancy! The metaphysician went in fear that the leprechaun would one day lose his scrambling abilities; that the intellect would predominate over the sense of worlds beyond the reach of facts. The metaphysician was wistfully envious of the leprechaun, who continued to kick up his heels in despite of disapproval.

There likewise dwelt in the one-world a Stuart Heron known to college friends, such as Oliver Strachey, who remembered him as the finest classical scholar of his year; and other men viewing him solely in the light of a keen sportsman; a fellow good to knock about with; not much of a talker; inclined to be a bit shattering and explosive at times, but apologizing for these ebullitions by a great excess of heartiness afterwards; excess indeed, for Stuart was apt to over-emphasize his normality.

Remained Heron the diamond-merchant, who was perhaps negligible—perhaps also not.

April this year had stolen some of June’s warm gold, so that devotees of the river could for once pay homage to tender mist of green, and mating bird-song. The trio had been afloat since early hours, before the sun had yet drunk all the diamond dew from the cobwebs, and Peter more than once apologized to Stuart for the continual reminders of his trade that sparkled from every grass-blade, every opening leaf.

Their boat had pushed first into all the locks, and shot first out, nose thrust between the slowly widening gates. They had discovered an island above the broken glinting shoulder of a weir; and, annexing it for their own, played Swiss Family Robinson thereon, with great contentment, save for some slight argument concerning the parts: “Little Franz for me,” Peter declared, “because of the rides. Whatever wild animal they catch, be it ostrich or donkey or tortoise, Arab steed or earwig, there’s always ‘just room for our little Franz upon its back.’ Franz has an easy time of it. His father makes him a quiverful of arrows, and ‘off he trots, looking like a Cupid,’ That’s me. Stuart, you shall be the father.”

“I’ve no vocation for impromptu sermons on the goodness of Heaven in permitting our pigs to find truffles,” retorted Stuart. “And I want to be ‘my wilful headstrong Fritz.’ Merle shall be father—and mother.”

Merle demurred. They always cast her for the “mother” parts, she complained, simply because her hair chose to remain tidier than other people’s. At which thrust, Peter renounced the entire game, and decided she wanted to play at hounds-among-the-undergrowth. Her companions looked puzzled.

“‘The Hound of the d’Urbervilles’? Sleuth-hounds? Hounds of Low? of Ditch? Hounds of Heaven? Or just Faithful Hounds? Peter, please specify, and I might even play at being just one tiny little puppy bloodhound myself.”

In the end Stuart was the entire pack, and Master of the Hounds to boot. And then they abandoned this new sport in favour of the Spanish Armada; sailed ignited fireships down a backwater, and roused volumes of sputtering and inarticulate wrath in the bosom of a mild man of peace whose skiff they had almost set in flames.

Now, subdued to a more twilit mood, they lie dark against the quenched amber and pearl of the sunset; and reviewing their April day, they find it good. Stuart, in ostentatious proof that he needs no rest from his Herculean labours with the pole, has allowed Peter to recline full-length in the punt, her head upon his knees, the while she lazily smokes a cigarette, and complains that his bones penetrate the thickness of four cushions, and hurt the back of her neck.

“Which proves that you are a Princess by birth,” laughs Merle, squatting, a graceful Dryad, on the adjoining bank. “You remember the incident of the pea under the twelve mattresses?”

And now it is that Peter solemnly propounds the question, as to whether (a) consciousness of swank and swagger, and (b) consciousness of the irritation produced in others by swank and swagger, could or could not be held as mitigating circumstances for aforesaid swank and swagger?

“Mitigating circumstances? No, I think not,” thoughtfully Merle raises a dusky purple grape to her crimson lips. The colour-scheme thus presented might have been one of Dulac’s exotic harmonies: blue-green shadow of the Quarry Woods behind; vivid blue jersey; bluish lights in the dense black of her hair. “I should rather say that the consciousness makes one accessory before the fact.”

Stuart joins in; “The form of the question might be altered to this: does my personality justify my swank?” impishly he grins down on the upturned face of Peter across his knees. He is very unlike a man at these minutes; gnome, pixie or hobgoblin might claim him brother.

Peter retorts: “That’s a different thing altogether. And why limit the problem to yourself? I was talking generally.”

“Deceive not thyself, my child. A long and careful study of the differences between male and female intellect has finally convinced me that the latter is incapable of generalities, of completely impersonal discussion. Follow the wriggling rivers of her speech backwards to their source, and you will discover the Subjective Sea. But do you know,” with renewed earnestness; “I believe my personality does justify my swank. Otherwise you wouldn’t put up with me as you do. And if it justifies my swank, then my swank is non-existent. Swank is a thing which proceeds from a misconception of one’s status.”

“Is his swank non-existent?” murmurs Merle to the swimming atoms in a last slanting sunray; “Oh, I trow not.”

“‘Swagger’ is slightly different again.” Stuart is enjoying himself immensely. “It is the outward and visible manifestation of the swank that resides in the soul. The ‘agger’ in fact. But your question respecting the mitigating circumstances of our consciousness thereof, is rot, my dear Peter. Because swagger is consciousness, to start with. Shall we paddle her home, Merle?”

The haze of evening has crept up, white-footed, from the south. A Dryad moves from the bank, seats herself beside a Faun. The rhythmic dip and swirl of their paddles dies away into silence.

... And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair; pride in their ability to maintain without disaster this strangely exhilarating friendship of one and two; flaunt it in the very face of the Inevitable.

CHAPTER V
DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS

“I want to go a-maying,” Peter announced. Nor was her ardour abated when Merle reminded her that April was still in its heyday.

“That makes no difference if the spirit of May-day be in me. The weather is a sheer intoxication, and calls for revelry. It’s not your birthday by any chance, is it?”

“If you can wait three weeks——”

“I can’t! I can’t! I want to go a-maying.”

Merle looked at her helplessly. “But one doesn’t go a-maying in Regent Street,” she protested; “if you mean garlands and queens. I’ll crown you with hawthorn from Gerrard’s, if you insist, but the expense will be enormous. Or we’ll catch a cart-horse and plait its tail with red, white, and blue. Or I’ll treat you to an ice-cream soda at Fuller’s. You can choose between these rural delights.”

“Where’s Stuart?” Peter demanded suddenly. “I haven’t seen or heard of him for about a week.” One of Stuart’s habits was the treatment of each curt farewell as final, leaving his companions in a pleasant state of uncertainty as to his next summons to fellowship. “Where’s Stuart? P’raps it’s his birthday. ’Tisn’t mine, I know. Merle, what do you say to a grand un-birthday festival? Stuart shall take us into the country to toss cowslip balls. We’ll rout him out from his Aladdin’s Cave. Who wants diamonds in springtime, in springtime——”

“‘The only pretty ring-time,’” Merle added. “So you’re wrong about the diamonds.”

“We’ll go and look at his pretty rings.” Peter hesitated, came to a full-stop opposite one of Liberty’s windows, a tawny riot of gold and amber and copper tints. “Perhaps we’d better not,” she decided; “I hate the sort of female who can’t leave a man alone in business hours. And I hate still more the ponderous business face with which he receives her pretty importunities.”

“But Stuart!” laughed Merle. “You can surely trust Stuart enough to believe there is no City-spell on earth can hold him captive. Besides, he begged us to invade his premises one day and see him play at diamond-merchants. Don’t you remember?”

“In a silk hat; so he did. Come along then.” Peter wavered no longer, but hailed a Holborn ’bus, and followed by Merle, scrambled to the top. She was right about the weather: the warm air was a-stir with lilac promise, and passing faces gave evidence of spring-cleaning within, a more potent and magical spring-cleaning than ever achieved by mop and broom.

“I feel about six and a half,” Merle confessed gaily, as with a delighted sense of exploration they spelt out “Heron and Carr, Diamond-merchants, first floor,” among a bewilderment of brass plates, and mounted lightly the wide stone staircase.

“We want Mr. Stuart Heron, please,” to the office boy who answered their summons; and again, “We want Mr. Stuart Heron,” as a preoccupied clerk came slowly forward.

“Mr. Stuart?” The man looked reluctant. “Is it important?”

“Awfully important,” said Peter gravely. She was wondering what would be the man’s attitude if she explained that the youngest partner of the house was required for the purposes of an un-birthday celebration.

They were conducted through two or three apartments, containing nothing more thrilling than cupboards and clerks, so that Merle assumed the jewels were kept in glittering caverns below; and then ushered into an anteroom, formal and luxurious, in which were already seated several applicants for royal favour, grave men and grey, all.

“I think Mr. Stuart is engaged. What name shall I say?” The confidential clerk appeared curiously disapproving of their presence.

“Got your card-case, Merle?”

Of course Merle had her card-case. And a card. And white kid gloves with which to present it. More than could be said for Peter.

Their guide withdrew, having first motioned the girls to deep leather arm-chairs, into which they sank and were obliterated. The silence of the room became thick and muffled. A clock ticked ponderously from the chimney-piece. The assembled veterans made no sound, with the exception of one who played nervously with his feet, advancing these by slow stages towards one another, and then scurrying them apart, as if fearful of being caught in the act. Peter watched him, fascinated. It was fully ten minutes before hurried steps approached the door....

There had been changes in the firm of Heron and Carr since Stuart entered it, three years before. Uncle Arthur had embraced the opportunity to retire from business. Derwent Heron was growing old, and absented himself frequently from the office: Baldwin—well, Baldwin at the best of times was useful mostly as an ornament. Thus it befell that a great deal of responsibility fell on the shoulders of the new partner. Nor was Stuart averse to this. He was right when he said that a game lost its value unless played in all seriousness. On the whole he made few mistakes, though his lucky star ran the risk, from overwork, of becoming somewhat frayed at the edges. Frequently he deplored the difficulty of truly reckless gambling, with that officious orbit fore-dooming him ever to success. Of late, certain events had decided him to buy in a vast amount of stock, giving mostly bills in exchange. Then, like a bolt from the blue, one Antoine Gobert, from Venezuela, made his sensational announcement: no less than the discovery of a cheap preparation for the making of diamonds. The days following this revelation were fraught with the greatest strain to the merchants in the trade. It was generally acknowledged that in the case of Heron and Carr the crash consequent upon proof of Gobert’s integrity would resound loudest. It was unlucky for the youngest diamond-merchant in London that he should have been buying in with such rapidity and vigour. His elders shook their grey heads over Stuart, but consulted him notwithstanding, in this period of crisis; an unconscious tribute to certain brilliant strokes made by the firm within the past three years.

Gobert, having flung his bombshell, did not seem inclined to part too easily with the mysteries of his prescription. Rumour was busy, and prices fluctuated wildly. With difficulty was a panic averted. Stuart firmly declared the magician a fraud; continued to assert it contrary to the opinions of the majority, older men, men of deep experience. It was felt that some decisive step would have to be taken, before Gobert should make newspaper babble of his secret. Already journalism was on the scent; and once known, the romance of the thing would cause it to be gobbled greedily by the public. So the wizard was approached; discreetly sounded; finally, an offer made to him by Sir Fergus Macpherson, of the firm of Grey, Macpherson and Sons, well-known diamond-merchants. An offer of twenty thousand pounds for the purpose of private experiment; a slip of paper, containing the exact ingredients of the manufacture, to be placed, in token of good faith, at the Bank of England. Gobert refused twenty thousand pounds. Not enough. Fifty thousand then? So be it, fifty thousand. The money was paid over, and the experiments started. Then, somehow a doubt of Gobert arose and grew. And that very day, April the 16th, it was finally decided that the envelope was to be opened, the miracle laid bare. If genuine—so much the worse for dealers in diamonds; so much the worse for Stuart Heron in particular. The issue would not have loomed in his eyes so stupendous, were it not that he felt his credit with Derwent and Arthur at stake. The firm had relied on his judgment. So that, sitting in earnest consultation with Sir Fergus and a certain Rupert Rosenstein, his mouth was set in sterner lines than his age warranted, and a deep frown lay between his eyebrows.

“Well, in that case, Sir Fergus——”

The confidential clerk entered noiselessly, and handed him a card: ‘Miss Merle des Essarts.’

“Here?”

“Two young ladies, Mr. Heron. Said it was important.”

“Oh—very well. Say that I’m coming at once.”

But it was several minutes before Sir Fergus rose to take leave. And then there were so many matters that clamoured for his brain’s attention; all overshadowed by a persistently recurring vision of a factory ... ten factories ... a thousand factories; men working; swarms of busy little figures; myriads of tiny white crystals the result of their labours,—the result of a few lines of writing that awaited the evening’s examination. Glittering crystals, produced in such quantities as to flood the universe like dewfall ... pretty little crystals, but utterly valueless.

Stuart straightened his shoulders. No good anticipating the worst. He opened the door of the anteroom: “Ah, Digby, I wanted to see you,”—and he of the wandering feet looked gratified.

Peter and Merle were waiting, rather impatiently, at the far end of the apartment. Some of their April joyousness had been swamped by the oppressive atmosphere surrounding them. The sunshine, creeping through the heavily curtained window, was merely metallic here. So that they greeted Stuart with relief.

“The face is perfect,” laughed Peter. “All we expected, and more. And now please take it off. Or is it merely semi-detached?”

Stuart did not reply. Nor was there perceptible alteration in his demeanour. But Peter was too amused by his garments of black decorum, to note that to-day they were something more than skin-deep.

“But, oh, Stuart, where’s the hat? You promised us the hat! Don’t say you’ve left it in the hall?”

He turned to Merle; and though he spoke courteously, his thoughts seemed very far away.

“My clerk told me it was important. Are you in any trouble? Or—can I?”—he hesitated, obviously waiting an excuse for their presence. And Merle’s cheeks began to burn.

“We—it isn’t really important,” she faltered. “I only—we thought——” oh, to be safely down the steps and out in the street! How could she say to this stranger: “We wanted you to come a-maying because it is April.” The thrill of primroses in the air had dwindled to a pin-point of triviality.

“We wondered whether you would care to join us for a day in the country,” she finished at last, lamely.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question to-day.” He appeared to realize dimly that something more was expected of him. His eye fell on Digby, eager for attention. The confidential clerk entered: “You’re wanted on the telephone, sir. Mr. Grey.” “All right, Lewis; ask him to hold the line,” alert response now in his voice; and he had already turned to the door, when he remembered his visitors. “We must be going,” said Merle quickly. He looked relieved. “Ah, then you’ll excuse me, I know. We’re rather rushed. Would you care to have a look round the place?”—he signalled to Lewis to wait, in case his services should be required as cicerone. “There’s nothing much to see, though. No treasure-vaults,” with a groping attempt to resume the language of which he had so patently mislaid the cipher.

And Merle, likewise clutching at her rags of self-respect, responded with a forced laugh: “You don’t make the diamonds, then?”

“No,” Stuart’s tones were somewhat grim. “We don’t make the diamonds.” He paused. Then, with a quick “Good-bye,” went to answer the telephone summons. “I’ll see you directly, Digby,” thrown out on his way to the door. Baldwin Carr appeared at another entrance: “Has Macpherson gone, Stuart? Derwent wanted to speak to you——” “Right! when I’ve polished off Grey.” What was the matter with all these men, that the wrinkle lay so deep between their eyebrows?

Baldwin glanced in some surprise at the figures of Peter and Merle, standing irresolutely by the window. Then returned to his private office.

The confidential clerk showed them out. A swinging door presented them with a snatch of telephonic conversation: “Yes, it’s Mr. Stuart Heron—Yes—No, not till to-night, nothing definite—we think——” The door swung to, cutting off the rest.

On the stone steps, they came face to face with a little shrivelled man, head cocked to one side; Arthur Heron, had they known it; rat about to rejoin the sinking ship.

Out in the push and clamour of Holborn, Merle drew a long breath, put both hands up to her hot face: “I wonder if I shall ever grow cool again,” she said, rather tremulously. And: “I suppose we’ve made rather fools of ourselves.”

“Don’t!” gasped Peter. Every time she recalled the blank look which had received her first eager speeches it was as if someone had dealt her a blow in the face. Oh, the stinging ignominy which lay in the remembrance of Merle and herself, two blushing incoherent little—idiots, intruding with froth and futility into the world of real things, solid things, things that matter, world of men. And Stuart could so easily have averted humiliation from their heads: one look, one word, to prove his recollection of the thousand intimacies that had lain between them.—“A day in the country ... I’m sorry—Sorry!” She ejaculated the word aloud in accents of such furious scorn, that Merle looked round startled. He should be sorrier still, soon! His fault, every bit; not for ejecting them, but for ever having dared invite them—to meet with that.

With a sense of rawness that cried out for solitude, Peter suddenly bade Merle good-bye:

“I’m going home. Do you mind?”

And sorrowful for the mood of April so rudely shattered, Merle shook her head and passed on.

CHAPTER VI
MERLE

Thus Merle’s evening at Lancaster Gate was doomed to be a solitary one. For Madame des Essarts had sallied forth, in diamonds and dignity, to a banquet celebrating the arrival in office of a new Greek minister. The handsome old lady, with her social talents, her knowledge of foreign languages, her dainty pointed wit, the aura of martyrdom which clung to her enforced exile from the hated Republic of France—to which she could return whenever she pleased—was of the type that had, in ruffled and beruffled days, swayed kings and unmade ministers. Perhaps the secret of her lost art lay in the fact that she never for one moment forgot she was dealing with men, nor let them forget that she regarded them as such, lords and puppets. Not for Antoinette des Essarts the cheery comradeship, the quick sexless sympathy, the contempt of cajolery and intrigue, which distinguished the generation among which she now moved. And perhaps from her had come that ultra-feminine streak in Merle that expressed itself in the girl’s attitude towards Stuart; something which held out an involuntary hand for support, yet shrank, at once disdainful and startled, from too rough-and-ready an intimacy; even though, with Peter, she might rejoice at what she deemed the whole-hearted freedom of the trio.

In her soft gown of eau-de-nil—for who, argues Madame des Essarts, who of the noblesse would appear by evening light save in silk attire and satin slipper?—she dined in lonely state; seated at one end of vast acres of dinner-table, with ever at her elbow a silent personage bearing the chef’s latest inspiration. Peter should by invitation have been keeping her company this night, and making exceeding merry over the ceremonial repast. And, it may be for the fiftieth time in the past two years, Merle des Essarts breathed devout thanks to the laughing young adventuress, who had brought her from regarding as unalterable essentials eau-de-nil and a French chef, Watteau and ambassadors, all the incidentals of Merle’s quaintly formal setting, to the point of view that these were mere delightful ingredients in an ever-changing game of play; one costume, vastly becoming indeed, among a million in masquerade.

Yet to-night, lacking Peter, some of the old wistful regrets touched Merle with chilly fingers; followed her with ghostly trip into the little boudoir, grey and primrose, Lancret looped medallion-wise into the overmantel; whispered in lisping voices of a day that might possibly come when Dresden, with ribboned crook for sceptre, should again reign supreme in her life; pointed in light mockery to a picture that adorned the wall: Merle herself, aged eight, standing stiffly posed beside a sundial; hands busy with the ivory sticks of a painted fan; toes primly turned outwards; smooth, dark curls; high-waisted pink frock. One moment fixed indelibly to symbolize a whole childhood. And with whatever passionate zest she might play now, Merle knew, and hotly resented, that she could not make up for her cheated years of chÂteau and convent, of solitude and decorum and il-ne-faut-pas. To be sure, the latter phrase did not need to be said often; la petite Merle and her brother Fernand had been ever ‘bien sage lui; et elle, un vrai petit ange.’ Of course she had! Who had taught her otherwise, before her twentieth birthday?

... An April shower of rain swept the panes, glowing sapphire-dark behind their primrose hangings. A musical pattering shower, unreal as a lit boudoir and a girl’s dreams....

—Crash! and an exquisite china clock lay shattered on the ground. A thin little chap, with freckled impertinent nose and pointed ears, looked up, startled, as Merle hastened to the rescue: “Couldn’t help it; just wanted to see how it took to pieces.”...

With wild hurrahs, a tangle of long legs and flying skirts whizzed down the banisters and landed in a heap at the foot.

Something delightful and sturdy, with dark red hair and blown-out cheeks, was marching to and fro on the polished drawing-room floor, waving flags and shouting....

Thus Merle drew from the Land of Corners, shadowy corners of the old house, dim unswept corners in her brain, dog-eared corners of forgotten picture-books, a whole host of children; ordinary, healthy, grubby youngsters, who would reduce the silent beautiful rooms to their proper state of scrum and chaos. Above all, naughty children; she collected the warm cosy naughtinesses that has never been hers; gloated over each separate deed of infamy; as if in offering to the prim sad-eyed daintily clothed image on the wall.

... Dick was for ever robbing orchards and being chased by irate farmers. But then how could he help it, this eldest son of hers, just entering that close-cropped hobnailed condition that betokens the schoolboy? And Merle liked to see his rough bullet-head buried in her lap, in moods of half-sullen contrition; would have kept it permanently there, had Dick been willing. Which he wasn’t.

... Nobody-loves-me came wandering in from the garden. Nobody-loves-me was the ugly duckling, of whom visitors were wont to say: “Never mind, my dear; the Ugly Duckling grew to be a swan, you know,” a prophecy which comforted the sufferer not a whit. She was given to brooding, this particular infant; and possessed, in addition, Bad Habits: Bad Habits, such as Biting Her Nails. And, suddenly aware of the Bitten Nails, Merle generously handed over Nobody-loves-me to Peter, who lived next door, and who could therefore be freely endowed with undesirable progeny, “because anyway,” reflected Merle, “they couldn’t all be mine.” And Dick and the Boy-girl, ringleaders both, kept her hands pretty full. Boy-girl it was who erstwhile slid the banisters; she, who climbed trees, and made ladders in her stockings—such as no young lady should—and blarneyed the cook; and once, by way of an experiment, cut short not only her own mane of hair, but also the straggly crop of Nobody-loves-me. The incarnation of swift and mischievous daring, Boy-girl; but who could be angry with her long, when she brought her coaxing Irish charm to bear on the situation?

—Why Irish? Merle was not quite sure. She knew only that it was, undeniably, Irish charm. And finally solved the riddle by making the (shadowy) father of this swarming brood, a son of Erin.

The little-mother-to-her-sisters-and-brothers, gentle, smooth-haired and fond of her needle, to be found in every well-regulated family, Merle, on consideration, also presented as a free gift to Peter. Her own unacknowledged favourite was the funny little beggar with the puck-like ears, three-cornered nostrils set to catch the rain, and scientific mind; which latter prompted him invariably to take articles to pieces for the sake of seeing how they worked. And they never worked again. There were many, many costly rarities in the house, Merle remembered happily, that literally asked for his attentions.

Or did she after all more tenderly incline to the delicate child with clustering pale-gold hair? who nervously refused to sleep without a night-light; who believed in fairies, and cherished all sorts of quaint fanciful notions about the little angels—Merle pulled herself up with a start, realizing that here she had in wanton enjoyment created a veritable chee-ild! Unable to slaughter in cold blood anything so lately born, she compromised by ... giving it to Peter. For anyhow (in guilty argument) Peter’s hair was of that peculiar pale-gold tint, and what more natural than that her offspring should inherit it?

Tumultuously alive now, all these ordinary healthy grubby youngsters; making walls within and sky without, resound with their whoops and coo-ees. A turbulent out-of-hand crew—Merle is rather afraid she is lacking in Proper Authority; in the balancing whereof, she endows the (shadowy) father with a “firm hand over the children,” in addition to his Irish birth and other excellent qualities.

A few stray naughtinesses yet to be collected from chimney-corner and rafter and cellar; such as leaving all doors open,—except, in swift amendment, when Dick rather chooses to bang them. Somebody, probably the gardener, lodges a complaint that “they chairs be rotted through again, left h’out all night in the damp.” And Nurse says it isn’t her fault that the young ladies and gentlemen won’t eat vegetables, since they will persist in stuffing chocolate just before their dinner; and Merle has much ado not to laugh, knowing, via some subtle instinct, that every secret opportunity is embraced to thrust tapioca, crusts, and spinach into the crevice between walls and cupboard; accumulated results only to be discovered at Spring-cleaning.

... Boy-girl dashes in to demand material for “dressing-up”; already she has helped herself pretty liberally; the polite request is an afterthought. The nurseries overflow with messy pets—nor does Puck ever remember to feed his guinea-pig. Nobody-loves-me has run away, for the third time in a fortnight, because the others don’t want her to play with them. His sailor-suit very green and wet and messy from an afternoon’s fishing in the pond, Copper-curls (his brothers call him Carrots) stumbles into the boudoir, trailing behind him tackle and weed and worm on the pale grey carpet. Drowsily he cuddles his firm little body against Merle’s eau-de-nil; slips a very hot hand between her cool fingers; droops his mouth to the semblance of a celestial choir-boy’s—so that she knows he has been very, very wicked, and requires forgiveness and absolution.

And now Stuart is standing before her, eyes full of trouble ... and the children tumble in quick confusion back to the Land of Corners....

Bewildered, Merle rubbed her eyes: “I didn’t hear you come in”; the door had been open, and the thick velvet pile a muffler to approaching footsteps.

“Merle, am I going to be hurled from the battlements, for failing to observe the divinity of play?”

She made no reply, not quite sure whether his mood be not of mockery. And suddenly, with a quick and—for him—rather clumsy movement, he dropped onto his knees beside her chair, buried his head deep in her lap; so that it almost seemed as if Dick ... Merle let her fingers stray, half-fearfully, among the rebellion of rough brown hair. For in the blur of twilight and dreams and pattering rain, she could not as yet entirely separate her phantom visitants from the real ones.

“Why, your coat is wet.” She bent forward to light the gas-fire in the grate. And with a gulp and a leap, the room was warm with a multitude of tiny blue tongues, licking and panting through their skull-like rings.

“I’ve been walking since five o’clock.” He was silent for a moment. Then it came out, not in a grateful unburdening torrent, but in wrung jerky sentences, of which the last caught up and contained the whole hidden cause of pain:

“I was grown-up—didn’t hear the call ... and I wasn’t even aware of it.”

Something wrong here which lay too deep for her understanding. Merle asked no questions; content to dry his coat; touch lingeringly his hair and shoulders; give him the comfort she dimly felt he most needed.

“It didn’t matter, dear.”

“You’re not going to shut me out, you and Peter?”

“We couldn’t do without you, Stuart.”

“Thank you.” A tightness in his voice seemed to have snapped at her tender assurance. His fingers, which had gripped and twisted at hers till she could have cried out with the pain, now slackened their pressure. For the moment, the girl had succeeded in exorcising the demons which were so strangely tormenting his soul.

... A hush in the room. A hush so profound, that two little figures stirred restlessly in their corner, came tip-toeing hand-in-hand towards the door of the boudoir. But——

“It’s no good,” whispered Nobody-loves-me, as she tugged Puck backwards. “He’s still there.”...

Stuart looked up suddenly: “‘Wherefore to wait my pleasure, I put my Spring aside....’ I always knew it would be damnably easy—to slip beyond the pattern and never get back....” The demons were again at work within him. If only they would leave him in peace, just for a moment, mind and body.

“Stuart, don’t you ever get tired?” she cried pitifully.

He muttered: “Dead tired,” and closing his eyes, allowed himself to relax entirely to her comforting touch, the soft coolness of her presence; as if establishing the memory of a second against which, in future turmoil and stress, he might lay his cheek, and find rest.

“Merle.”

“Yes, dear?”

He said nothing, but still pleaded; and bending down her face to his, she found their lips clinging together.

After he had gone, Merle sat awhile, wondering how much of what had passed must be told to Peter. Loyalty, and the compact they had made: whatever happened, to keep the path unblocked between them, demanded an exact account of events. But that compact had been formed in alliance against a hard and ruthless Stuart of their imaginings. Her instincts were all to protect the boy who had come to her in his trouble. He had come to her—the thought was charged with sweetness. And here she experienced a pang of pity for the girl, the other girl, who looked like being the one left out. But Peter’s anger at the morning’s episode had been hot; she would not have known how to handle him with the gloves his soreness demanded. Peter didn’t like gloves.

... For an instant, Merle contemplated treachery.

No. It was popularly supposed that two girls couldn’t be square with one another, where a man was in question. Hers to disprove the theory. A secret unshared by Peter would, moreover, be an insult to the spirit of the trio; the first menace to its continued existence. Merle hesitated no longer, but sat down at the escritoire, and wrote her letter; a letter which omitted nothing, not even the final embrace—though she winced at the thought that Peter might possibly misconstrue it to something more of man and woman, less of child. Then she rang the bell and gave orders for the missive to be taken at once to the post.

... Up the hushed staircase, and into the vast shadowy bedroom. Had Stuart’s head really lain on her lap? Or was he but one of the fantastic crowd who had been abroad that night in Lancaster Gate; sliding the banisters, playing hide-and-seek in the passages, smashing the china—while the white-haired chÂtelaine of the house took wine with the King of the Hellenes’ minister.

CHAPTER VII
PETER

On reaching home, Stuart found Baldwin Carr awaiting him in the dining-room.

“Hullo! you’re a late visitor.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” said Baldwin, from whose brow the unwonted lines of anxiety had now been ironed away. “The whole business was a fake—and Gobert has vanished off the face of the earth.”

This was sensational. Stuart helped himself to a whisky and soda.

“What do you mean by fake? the envelope——”

“Empty, my boy. Blank bit of paper, that’s all. Jove! you should have seen the faces when it was opened. Old Rosenstein! Of course we smelt a rat, and sent round to Monsieur Antoine’s apartments. Not a sign of him. Left that morning, the landlady said; bag, baggage—and incidentally, our fifty thousand. Still, compared with what it might have cost us—well, what do you think of it?”

“I take off my hat to Gobert,” replied the other, with an amused chuckle; “fifty thou. isn’t too much to pay for the privilege of acquaintance with the swindler who can rob you of it.”

“Well—ah—I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Pour me out a stiff one, Stuart, I’m just about done up. And then I must be off. Wanted to set your mind at rest first. Where have you been all these hours? Not that I blame you for bunking,”—Stuart smiled—“the strain was intolerable. I’d have escaped from the office myself, only I thought it hardly fair to Derwent.”

Nor did his nephew seek to explain the real goad which had driven him forth to pace the streets from five o’clock that April afternoon.

Baldwin set down his glass: “Good night——” he paused. Something like emotion shook his voice. “We’ve pulled through,” he said. And Stuart, knowing the other was only recalled from adding: “we Herons,” by a consideration of facts, composed his face to lines befitting the occasion, and solemnly grasped the extended hand. Baldwin’s pulling may have been of a negative order, but of his pride in firm and family, no man could remain in doubt.

Stuart fell asleep that night lulled by memory of a sweet tremulous mouth, and dark eyes, deeply tender; of a blur of eau-de-nil in a setting of pale primrose and dim grey; of cool fingers quelling to peace all the hot turbulence that tormented him; of a soft voice saying: “We can’t do without you, Stuart....”

He awoke next day to the same memory, lashing him with whips of shame. The deadly panic which had resulted from his conduct of the preceding morning, panic of clogging with moral and mental fat, his vision of worlds beyond and his capacity for play, was as nothing compared to the revolt with which he now viewed his breakdown of the evening: the brimming to the surface of weak sentiment, to find solace in a girl’s caresses. Twice—twice in twelve hours to have lost control of himself; to have taken his hand from the tiller twice; to have twice resigned stage management to an unseen power, which derided, even while it swung him from “a sense of business responsibility” to an extreme of maudlin hysteria. Stuart did not spare himself in terms of abuse. And Merle had encouraged him to make an exhibition of himself; Merle had lent a sympathetic ear to his woes; asked no questions; flooded him with rosy forgiveness. Merle had made it easy for him—easy and comfortable; dried his coat.... Stuart smouldered and chafed, seeing the incident pictured in bright colours: “A Little Mother,” and framed on the nursery wall, valued supplement to a Xmas number.

Why, in Heaven’s name, hadn’t she met him with conflict of some sort; mockery that might have braced him to action; instead of just allowing him to—slop. Verb which to Stuart expressed the apex of abomination.

A sense of justice reasserted itself. Merle was charming, no doubt of it; her response to his appeal a very idyll of fragrance and simplicity. As for his curt behaviour when the two girls had called on him in the office, well, Stuart was hardly sorry any more; save when the leprechaun recognized a glorious opportunity missed: to have proved himself able to cope with both situations in the appropriate spirit; with the light-hearted “come out to play,” in the midst of the almost unbearable tension consequent on the danger threatening the affairs of Heron and Carr.

—“Couldn’t have devised it better myself,” mused Stuart regretfully, as he gave Peter’s number to the telephone clerk.

Peter sprang out of bed, hearing the postman’s knock; and pattering barefoot downstairs, she drew from the box, Merle’s letter, in company of an oblong bill, and an envelope bearing St. Quentin’s by now familiar handwriting. Then, returning to her room, she seated herself on the edge of the bed; and, a pale-haired gleaner in the early sunshine, proceeded to examine her harvest.

The bill contained an intimation to the effect that Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was amazed that Miss Kyndersley should have ignored his repeated applications for payment, and could only suppose they had slipped her memory, as otherwise doubtless, etc.

“I call that a delicate way of putting it,” reflected Peter, with thoughts all of sunny kindness towards Mr. Lazarus. “He’s trying to spare my feelings, bless him. He shall have free tickets for dad’s next pier concert.”

Of paying there could be no question. Peter, true to the traditions of her caste, never settled her debts till actually threatened by the law; when she would hastily sell her silver hair-brushes, or borrow from her aunt, or pledge the half-of-her-next-year-but-one income; diminutive amount at best, inherited from her dead mother. She also had what she called her “submerged” periods, when by dint of forswearing the world for an entire fortnight, and working hard eight hours a day at colouring art postcards, she scraped together a sufficient sum to extricate her for a short while from the perpetual webs with which finance encumbered her pathway. Never yet had she been altogether free from pecuniary embarrassments; would indeed have missed the background of their mutterings, as those who have dwelt long by the sea cannot bear to be deprived of its eternal swish.

Mark St. Quentin, striving to mingle in equal proportions formality with infatuation, begged leave to visit her at Thatch Lane the following Sunday. Peter dimpled mischievously; she would wear a white dress, and playfully beg him to help lay the knives and forks for supper: “We have only one servant, you see; and treat you as quite one of the family”—and she dimpled again at the thought of Stuart’s disgust on anyone treating him as one of any family, anywhere.

Stuart ... a slight contraction of her bare toes, as she remembered how the said gentleman had incurred her displeasure. She wondered what his attitude was likely to be. Then opened Merle’s letter—and found out.

Peter raised her head; gazed straight through the window, across garden and hedge and field, to where the Weald hunched its back against the sky. But her eyes missed the tender greens and misty blues of the landscape; could not share in the joy of the house on discovering it at last owned, after five gloomy months, a clear black shadow to lay upon the dew-wet grass.

For she was wondering how not to be jealous.

It was not the incident itself which rankled; but recognition of a fact that long ago had carried its conviction, though only now its results: Merle was allowed, by the unseen code, to be the more feminine of the twain. She, Peter, thrust willy-nilly into the bolder, more challenging position. Was it that she was born with a tilt to her soul, as well as to her nose and chin? She could not tell. But Stuart, gravitating to her for all stimulation, had nevertheless gone to Merle for comfort. And Peter wondered furthermore why she played up so persistently to the Laughing-Cavalier qualities, with which from the very first he had chosen to endow her. And, wondering, knew yet that she must continue boyish and defiant; though she, even as Merle, wanted how much to be tender to him in his present attire of sackcloth and ashes.

The getting-up gong sounded, and Peter returned to bed.

The breakfast-gong, half an hour later, led her to the bathroom; and another quite irrelevant gong saw her wrestling with stockings. Only when the gongs finally ceased from troubling, did she descend to the dining-room, there to find Aunt Esther deeply immersed in the “Daily Camera.”

“Peter, just look at these!”

‘These’ were startling pictorial presentments of Antoine Gobert, the notorious diamond wizard; flanked on the one side by Sir Fergus Macpherson, looking like a Jew, which he wasn’t; on the other, by an elderly and speckled Stuart: “youngest partner in the firm of Heron & Carr.” Below appeared sensational accounts of the shameful fraud which had been practised, and the scene which took place in a private room of the Bank of England, at 6.30 p.m. of the previous day, when the bubble was pricked.

Peter’s lip curled as she read. So that accounted for Stuart’s sudden mood of contrition. Easy enough to find time for being sorry, after the cause of anxiety had been removed. It required no Stuart Heron for that. Nor did she consider that the strain adequately accounted for his preoccupation of the morning. According to his own standards, he should be strung up to response at any moment, however inopportune. If he could be exacting, why, so also could she. Quite cured of her yearnings towards womanly tenderness, she tossed aside the paper, and helped herself to eggs and bacon.

“Well, well,” quoth Miss Esther, “I always say that foreigners aren’t to be trusted; and I’m sure it’s very nice and pleasant to think young Mr. Heron isn’t going to be a bankrupt after all. Of course he has rather more money than he knows what to do with; but still, it’s better in the hands of a gentleman than a rogue. And these things will get in the papers, and there you are! What can you expect? However, there’s no harm done; the Bank of England is too wide-awake for that. And,” an after-thought, “Heaven will punish the swindler, I’ve no doubt.”

Thus having, according to custom, neatly packed away the entire set of events within her own private and particular boundaries; reduced each participant, including Heaven and the Bank of England, to a height convenient for patting on the head, Miss Esther Worthing asked for the marmalade.

The telephone bell rang. Peter dashed up the stairs, prepared to spurn still further into the dust the bowed and prostrate figure at the other end of the wire. Stuart’s cheery greeting, however, did not quite coincide with her expectations.

“Hullo! That you, Peter ... dear?” almost a sub-current of amusement in his tone. “What’s the attitude?”

“Bellicose,” was the spirited retort.

“Thought so. It would have been so much less obvious on your part, to have held out the hand of forgiveness.”

“You want a Briareus of forgiveness, it seems.”

“Oh. So you’ve heard from Merle.”

“Yes.”

Silence for a moment. Then:

“Doesn’t the fact that of my own accord I regained the sense of things—or rather the nonsense of things, doesn’t it all absolve me from your wrath?” still that slight mocking inflection. Peter thought how pleasant it would be to hurt him. Hurt him quite badly.

“Of your own accord?” she flung indignantly into the mouthpiece. “Why, I’ve seen the papers. Naturally, after your business troubles were so unexpectedly smoothed out, you had leisure to turn your attention to—minor matters.”

“As it happened,”—she could not complain now of too light a note in the icy incision of his speech, “I did not know that the Gobert thunderbolt had been averted, until I reached home after seeing Merle.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I did not know.”

“The envelope was opened towards half-past six, according to the Press.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

“And Merle writes that you turned up about nine o’clock.”

“To be exact, a quarter to nine.”

“And yet you knew nothing?”

“And yet I knew nothing.”

Their speeches followed each other with the thud and rebound of a swift rally over the tennis-net.

“The evidence is against you.”

“I’m not on my defence. I merely state facts.”

Peter said very gently: “Do you expect me to believe them?”

“You will—later. At present you are merely laying yourself open to the unpleasant necessity of apologizing.”

“Apologizing?” she cried, hotly resenting this turning of the tables. “For what?”

“For calling me a liar.”

“I didn’t use the word.”

“Then use it—now.”

“You’re a liar, Stuart.”

She was unable to tell if his evident anger were assumed or genuine. But, if the latter, so much the better; she anticipated a pleasurable excitement from the unexplored territory beyond the limits of his tolerance.

He was speaking again. And Peter wished he would free his voice from its straining bonds of control.

“Quite right. I am a liar. A very plausible and rather dangerous liar. But, quite by accident, in the present instance I happen to be speaking the truth. When you’ve recovered from your attitude of scepticism, ring me up. Good-bye.”

Peter went for a walk. She walked hard for a couple of hours; avoided the plunging soil of pasture-land, in favour of hard country roads, where her feet met with a ringing resistance. On reaching a village, six miles distant from Thatch Lane, she entered without hesitation the local post-office.

... “Hullo!”

“Stuart.”

“Yes?”

“I discard my attitude.”

“From weakness?”

“No. From conviction.”

“Good. Thank you.”

She rang off.

In this wise, the trio forfeited their first fine carelessness. Disintegration was imminent, though none could tell as yet which way it would manifest itself. Each of their words and actions, however trivial, took on a certain significance. For Stuart had heard in Peter’s voice the battle-ring, and tingled to its challenge. For Peter had known an instant’s jealousy of Merle. For Merle had battled with the temptation to be disloyal towards Peter. For Stuart had twice in a day ceased to be master of his moods, and vowed by all his gods these moods should neither recur again. For Merle cherished the second of them as a memory sweeter than music. For Merle had been visited by an old ghost, and by a merry host of new ones. For Peter had definitely flung her cloak, tossed her plume, donned the disguise which Stuart mistook for nature. For all these follies and cross-follies are the outcome of certain fatal desires to go a-maying on a day of April!

CHAPTER VIII
STUART GOES A-STUNTING

The girls knew that Stuart’s next act would be a carefully veiled apology to the spirit of the trio, for the moment he had been deaf to its call. Apology that would probably manifest itself in a deed of unwonted daring, originality and impudence, that none might suspect it of being an apology; deed which would firmly re-establish in the eyes of the twain his slightly shaken position. For though with Peter he had crossed swords in single combat, had known the pleasure of knocking from her grasp the weapon, the pleasure of stepping back to allow her to resume it,—not, most certainly, because he was a little gentleman, but because he preferred her blade in hand; for though with Merle he had walked awhile in a two-world too softly cushioned for his taste; yet with these things the spirit of the trio did not concern itself. Nor was it to be placated save by offering to the number three. So Peter and Merle were somewhat surprised when Stuart’s expected fireworks tamely resolved themselves into a verbally conveyed invitation to spend the first week in May with his elder sister, married to an owner of vast estates in Devonshire.

“The orchards will all be in bloom, and ought to look rather fine,” said Stuart; “by the way, did I mention that I’m invited as well? We can paint the place as red as we please; Dorothy and Ralph won’t interfere with us much. Dorothy wanted to know if she need write to you both separately, but I said it would be all right.”

“Dorothy—Ralph—Devonshire,” echoed Merle, when she was alone with Peter; “what a picture it conveys of flowered chintz and cream and low window-seats. I’m sure the tenants call her Mistress Dorothy, and she has calm grey eyes, and wears a fichu, and keys.”

“Rather an inadequate costume,” Peter murmured; “and I can’t imagine a sister of Stuart with ‘calm’ anything. Shall we accept? My country boots are done for.”

“Buy new ones.”

“New ones always take weeks to tame. I’d rather tame a bull than boots. The Bull and Boot sounds like a public-house. I wish Stuart hadn’t taught me to search for the hidden pub. in my most innocent phrases.”

“It’s rather a low habit,” Merle agreed. “Yes, I think we’ll visit Mistress Dorothy in Devon, if Grandmaman has no objections.”

Grandmaman had no objections whatever, though the invitation came somewhat too informally for her notions of etiquette. She was also at a loss how Merle was to make adequate return to her hostess, and insisted on the girl packing the gift of a three-tiered satin bonbonniÈre among her evening frocks, by way of a beginning in the balancing of ledgers.

Peter bought her boots; gladdened Miss Esther’s county soul by an entirely fabulous narrative relating to the ancient birth and lineage of Squire Ralph Orson of Orson Manor; and on the fifth of May, met her two fellow-travellers at Paddington. Stuart established her with Merle in a first-class carriage, with every possible luxury; for in detail-work he excelled, never allowing their schemes to be upset by a single hitch of the mechanical order. Then, to their astonishment, he begged leave to retire to a smoker.

“Aren’t we looking our best?” Peter demanded of Merle, as the train quitted the platform, and the belt of his Norfolk coat vanished down the corridor. “Or is he trying to impress us with the fact that for the future he intends to Lead a Man’s Life?”

They saw nothing of him during the next few hours, not even in the luncheon-car. And towards three o’clock Peter declared they must be within that distance of Dawlish, the station for Orson Manor, when respectable people with rugs would begin strapping them:

“Not having any rugs, we’ll compromise by washing our faces.”

Merle leant out of the window, and took a deep breath of the sparkling air.

“Stuart didn’t say it was near the sea,” as the train ran alongside the broken silver line of wave. “Why, this is Dawlish! Peter, here we are—we——”

The engine gathered all its slumbering forces, and thundered at the speed of a mile a minute through the tiny station in its setting of bold red rock.

“It—hasn’t—stopped,” gasped Merle. Which was obvious, seeing that her slight figure against the window was flung from side to side by the reckless pace at which the express was pounding through Devon.

And: “Stuart, it hasn’t stopped!” as that gentleman, with a pleasant smile, and still carrying his pipe, entered their compartment and sat down.

“No; this is the ‘Cornishman.’ It goes right through from Plymouth to Penzance.”

“But your sister?”

“My sister is in bed with influenza. And anyway, she’s not expecting you. I doubt if she knows of your existence.”

He rose, and surveyed with a ferocious scowl his bewildered victims.

“I’ve abducted you!” quoth Stuart. “I’ve told you often enough that I was a pirate in disguise. You wouldn’t believe me. You played with fire. Now you’re abducted without the option of a fine. Open your mouths and scream, if you like; I don’t mind.”

Peter eyed him sternly: “You mean that the invitation was a hoax? You lured us from our homes on false pretences?”

He was humming a tune from the “Pirates of Penzance,” and at the same time polishing his eye-glass. So he merely nodded assent.

Merle said quietly: “This will mean an awful row for me.”

“No, it won’t,” he reassured her; “because nobody need ever know. To all intents and purposes we’re staying at Orson Manor. Dorothy only comes to town about once every four years, and I’ll tip her the wink to play up. She’ll do it for me,” finished the lord of the house of Heron.

“But where are we going?”

“Haven’t the remotest notion. We’ll see when we get to Penzance. And I’ll let you both have a say in the matter, though it isn’t usual in cases of abduction.”

He stole a glance at Peter; her eyes were dancing, and the corners of her mouth tilted upwards. So that he knew he had pleased her. Though she merely said: “So that’s why you refused to travel in our company, is it?”

“I couldn’t stand your innocent chatter about Dorothy and Devon,” he confessed; “it’s weak, I own, but even a pirate has a heart that bleeds for prattling babes.”

“Yes, but look here: suppose Madame des Essarts and Mrs. Heron should come together. Your mother will know that we are not where we seem. They do meet, don’t they, Merle?”

Merle took fright at the notion. “Not often; they’re in different sets. Grandmaman moves mainly among consuls, you know. But they visit on At Home days. Oh, Stuart——”

“D’you take me for a bloomin’ amateur?” he demanded, “Haven’t I provided for every contingency? I sat me down and thought and thought and thought what one lady could be made to do, to mortally offend another. I repeat, to mortally offend another. All for the prevention of visits on At Home days. At last, I uprose, and put myrrh and frankincense upon my hair, and went unto my mother; and, ‘Mother dear,’ I said, soft as any cooing dove; ‘I can see you are harassed and beset. Would you like me to make out the list for your big reception next month?’ Fortunately, I’ve played the good son once or twice before, so my conduct couldn’t arouse the suspicions it deserved. Nay, she was touched almost to the point of tears. So I sat me down again at her desk, with lots of ceremonial and fuss—address-books heaped all round, a new ruler, and red ink, and a Bradshaw and Debrett and the telephone book; and made out a list of visitors, omitting the name of Madame des Essarts. Mark you this, Merle! Then I read the list aloud to my mother, including the name of Madame des Essarts. Mark you this also, Merle! Then my mother, well-pleased, handed to her private secretary the list, minus the name of Madame des Essarts. And Madame des Essarts, not receiving an invitation to the reception, will be mortally offended. And my mother, receiving no reply from Madame des Essarts, will likewise be mortally offended. Both mortally offended. The feud will probably extend over generations. Montague and Capulet. In consequence whereof, Merle and I will be forbidden to marry. And I’ll die for the love of a lady. ‘Lady, heyday, misery me——’”

“Stuart,” Peter broke in upon his exuberant ditty, “you’re just nothing but a stage-manager. You’re not the sort of man for vagabondage. And your grand operatic abduction will be a failure. Recollect, you wouldn’t come with us a-Maying in April.”

“No,” he cried, stung to swift retort; “but who dares say that I have not made of you April fools in May!”

The train swung over the Hamoaze and into Cornwall.

They stopped at the Land’s End, for the reason that the sea barred their further progress to the south and to the west. And they took three rooms at the Ocean Hotel, facing the sea to the south and to the west, because it was too late the night of their arrival to seek convenient caves, especially three caves of exactly the same dimensions, conditions essential to avoid jealousy and strife.

The Ocean Hotel stood on an isolation of headland, like some stone medieval fortress, frowning at the rocky imitation opposite, which ran far out into the Atlantic, and then piled itself up crag upon crag, an echo wrought in granite. Over the moors towards the sunset ran the coastguard’s path, white stones on the dark green, sheer up to an edge, lost in the drop on the further side. And over the moors towards the sunrise ran still the coastguard’s path, down an easy slope, looping a sinister crevasse, and as far as the stretching horizon line.

Peter awoke the next morning, possessed by a great lust for actual touch of the sea, where she had hitherto only enjoyed its sight and sound; and would hardly leave her companions time to wallow in the tubs of yellow cream which were a feature of their breakfast, in her impatience to run down the steep twisting path which she knew existed somewhere just outside....

But the land of Cornwall and the waves of Cornwall were not ready yet to be friends with the strangers; and all that day led them a mocking dance by crag and outjutting cape and promontory; over moor and round seven points, and never a downward way to the sea. Cast an evil spell upon the strangers, so that ever from two hundred feet below, the water beckoned them stealthily into cavernous velvet glooms; sang loudly of wonder and glory in the cold crash of breakers against the cliff; tormented them with glint of blue in its plum-darkness, hint of glittering green whenever the clouds above swirled aside to reveal patches of clear sky. For the strangers need not yet be shown what riot of colours were sheathed in scabbard of sullen grey. Peter could have dragged the elusive sun by main force into prominence, battered with fists of rage against the uncompromising fall of rock which baffled her, and mocked her, and drew her on with continual promise of a way to the sea round the next curve ... or perhaps the next ... or surely the next....

Stuart laughed at her impatience. It was a hard land, a good land; and he knew it, and did not talk about it, but was content to swing along over turf and bog and stone; aware of limitless space in which to tire his limbs. And once he came racing like a greyhound, past his comrades, towards a six-barred gate which lay ahead. Ran because his stride was swifter than any man’s. Leapt the gate because his jump was cleaner than any man’s. Then, without a run on the further side, vaulted back, and met the twain with a cry of “Mountebank!” in anticipation of how they would greet his prowess.

But under his amused self-condemnation, lay the disturbing knowledge that this desire to exhibit his utmost strength and skill was real, not assumed; desire born of the look of pleasure that, after each feat, would lurk in Peter’s eyes, though her lips continued to mock his vanity. Stuart could have shaken her for this effect on him. He did not mind at all behaving childishly, but objected vehemently to thinking childishly.

Peter perched herself upon the gate; and airily told the sea that it was all a mistake, she had no desire whatever to reach it. And the sea in response threw out a sparkle of gold and a spurt of foam, so that the longing rose in her heart fiercer than ever.

It was a gate padlocked and bolted, though it led to nowhere, and guarded nothing; and to the right and left of it lay open country; and to the immediate right and left, piled-up blocks of rough stone, for kindly assistance of those who would elude the padlocks. A mad gate in a mad country. And now the sun, thinking it had teased enough, broke in a pale dazzle on the grey land and sea; then, gaining strength, poured silver streams of light through a rent in the sky, lay in silver puddles and splashes on the water. The dark toneless granite piled itself into strange shapes of tower and turret, and all about the sea-birds wheeled and shrieked.

murmured Stuart, prone beside Merle upon the turf. And she whispered back:

“One could almost persuade oneself—yes, look, Stuart! a face at those jagged rock-windows—light flying hair and haunted eyes and ... it’s gone when you look again.”

“That’s Lyonnesse, yonder.” Peter, from her seat on the topmost bar, indicated the wide shimmering tracts of grey and silver. “The sunken lands, you know. Cities and churches and meadows ... but they must have suffered some sea-change ... white bones and thick green water and the evil coil of seaweed. A dead land, now.”

Stuart said musingly: “I see Lyonnesse more as the land where the dead wait till they are wanted again.”

Peter smiled; so like Stuart, this glimpse of an afterwards as merely the rest which comes before a fresh bout of strenuous labour. Then couldn’t he even conceive of complete and utter rest? “Where the dead wait till they are wanted again” ... she caught a fleeting glimpse of dim caverns, and a tiny figure stumbling in from the outside glare, and flinging down a torch, seized instantly by an upward-springing form, who bore it forth again; while the tired intruder stretched himself in sleep....

Heigh-ho! how serious they all were. Peter looked around her, half-dazed by this long mental immersion in dark coral-caves. The sky had meanwhile deepened into blue, and all the buried colours of earth and water had leapt into being.

“Requires a dab of red in all that backcloth of green and black, doesn’t it?” queried Peter idly; to break silence; “just for the sake of artistic effect.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Oh, say against that ledge.” She pointed half-way down an apparently inaccessible formation of cliff, jutting out at right angles to the land.

Stuart seized the scarlet cap from her head, before she was even aware of his intentions, and was almost directly over the edge of safety, and out of sight.

“Stuntorian!” murmured Peter ... but her hand dug deep into the turf, tore it up in great handfuls.

It was several minutes before they again caught sight of him, scrambling with all the agility appertaining to impossible schoolboy heroes, towards the spot indicated. His figure was reduced by distance and surroundings to absurdly small dimensions. He paused on reaching his goal, hung the patch of crimson on to the ledge of rock, waved gaily towards his far-off companions; then, cramming the cap again in his pocket, swung himself round a boulder apparently poised in mid-air, and out of their line of vision.

“We’d better turn back to meet him,” quoth Merle, springing from her perch on the gate. “It’s all right, Peter. Nothing can happen to Stuart, ever.”

But Peter had just learnt of something extremely disturbing which had happened to herself. And venting her indignation at the discovery, upon the cause thereof, refused to fall sobbing upon his neck, when he met them on the homeward way, and carelessly returned her headgear. Nor did she take outward and visible notice of bleeding abrasions upon either knee, ostentatiously displayed. But Merle—feeling his recent performance ought really not to be encouraged—treated him to a sober lecture on foolhardiness, which lasted till Peter provided distraction by leaving her right leg, as far as the thigh, in a bog of black mud.

The sun was a level blaze of gold in their eyes, by the time they trudged up the last slope, and into their fortress. They were weary with a splendid weariness of limb; and drowsy with the strangeness of that strange land; and, moreover, wind-blown and wet and satiated of beauty. Peter entered her room, and closed the door; pulled down the blind to give respite from the outside world; plunged her hands in water, and cast off her shoes and stockings. Then flung herself on the narrow bed, where Merle presently joined her. And they ate of the expensive chocolates destined for Mistress Dorothy Orson, and were at peace.

... Somebody whistling, now loudly, now softly, up and down the passages and stairs. “Yo-ho! Yo-ho!”—it was Captain Hook’s celebrated ditty haunting the Ocean Hotel. Nearing their door, it paused on a plaintive up-note of enquiry. Peter took pity on the homeless wanderer, and before Merle could protest, called him in.

“I don’t think I’ve got an apartment of my own,” said Stuart, squatting contentedly on the floor, his head against Merle’s dark shower of loosened hair. “I slept somewhere, I suppose, but where is a mystery. They must have turned my room into a step-ladder or a revolving book-case; I shall hate sleeping to-night in a revolving book-case; one would get so giddy.” He glanced around him and broke into a chuckle: “What a setting for one of Zola’s most squalid bits of realism,” he remarked.

The room was small, with a dingy paper, and an unclothed gas-jet springing from the wall. The blind that shut out daylight, and dimmed the corners to mystery, was torn, and the cord flapped a perpetual complaint. The tin basin on the washstand stood unemptied of its dirty water. Two or three towels lay across the chairs; Peter’s muddy shoes and stockings straggled in abandoned fashion over the worn bits of carpet covering the oilcloth. The aspect of the two huddled bare-legged figures on the crumpled bed-spread, carried out Stuart’s simile with remarkable fidelity; and his own presence, combined with the dainty satin bonbonniÈre, added just those last touches of immorality without which no French novel is complete. Only their moods of serene happiness were rather at variance with the puppets of fiction, evil or perhaps merely hopeless, with which Zola might have peopled the dreary chamber.

“I think, as pirates, and considering Merle lives in Lancaster Gate and owns a maid, we deserve a better nursery than this,” suggested Peter.

“We’ll build one,” Stuart assured her swiftly. “Yes, of course we will. Nothing easier. We’ll build it to suit ourselves. A playroom——”

“A piratical playroom——”

“The perfect piratical playroom.”

CHAPTER IX
A PERFECT PIRATICAL PLAYROOM

Stuart began: “We shan’t care to be disturbed, so we’d better build under water. That stretch of river between Cliveden and Cookham would make quite a good ceiling. Nor will we take it on a repairing lease, but leave the Thames Conservancy responsible for damages.”

Merle at this juncture wanted to know how he saw the Thames Conservancy; in her eyes, it wore very bright blue with lots of gilt buttons, and was always sitting round a table.

“One person?” asked Peter curiously.

“Yes. One wide person that could be stretched all round the table and be joined with a button when it met itself.”

Stuart reminded them that, so far, the room consisted of a ceiling floating on a vacuum, and that if they dawdled so long over Thames Conservancies, they’d never get the walls up before dinner.

“It’s my dinner-hour now,” said Peter, thinking herself a British workman. And Merle remarked that putting up walls was a tough job, and she hadn’t got the right tools, and must fetch her mate.

“We can’t tell yet just how big the Room will need to be, so I vote for elastic-sided walls.”

“Like boots,” Peter murmured. Then roused herself to ask for the height of the Room.

Stuart looked worried, and confessed that he could never gauge heights without the assistance of a giraffe: “Not high heights.”

“A giraffe?”

“I was once told that a giraffe measures twenty-five feet. So in my mind’s eye I always pile giraffe upon giraffe, until I get what I want. One giraffe, added to another ... and another....”

“There, there then, my beautiful,” Peter assured him soothingly, for the multiplicity of giraffe had caused a wild look to creep into his eyes; “you shall have a giraffe in the Room, of course you shall. Anyhow, Merle will want a domestic animal to cuddle on her lap. A giraffe will do nicely, besides being useful for measuring purposes.”

“We can tell the time by it, as well,” Stuart announced in eager defence of his pet. “The tide of the ceiling rises and falls about an inch every six hours; and when it falls, the animal’s head will be wet, and so he’ll always have a cold in his nose, and borrow all our handkerchiefs, and not return them. He says he can’t help it; people don’t realize what a struggle it is to keep one’s head below water.”

“But he’ll want a companion of some sort,” remarked Merle. And because she secretly hoped for a canary, she proposed a tortoise.

“What about a gift-horse? There’s something mysterious about a gift-horse, because nobody may look it in the mouth. No, not even a dentist.”

“But we will!” Stuart cried, in defiance of copy-book precept; “we’ll keep things in its mouth, for the sake of looking at them there; cigarette-cards and photograph albums.”

... A little wind flapped aside the blind, giving a momentary glimpse of sea-lapped rocks and battlements: a castle of enchantment aglow in the ebbing light. Merle immediately decided to have it transported to the Room, for her special use and benefit. Not to be outdone, Stuart and Peter ordered each a castle of like design and pattern; he stipulating, however, for a border of Norfolk Broads in lieu of the Atlantic. And because his manner was wont to become suddenly absent and remote whenever he chanced to speak of his Sailing Paradise, they quickly granted him his desire, and changed the subject, lest he should elude them altogether.

Indeed, Peter was in a terrible tangle; for she had discovered that inside her castle was a room—the Room, in fact; and this Room in its turn held a castle, the same castle—which held another Room, containing a castle, which——

“Look here,” said Stuart firmly, recalling his mind from halyard and jib, “this must be attended to at once. It’s only a recurring decimal, and if we quickly put in the dot to stop the leakage, there’s no need that it should ever recur.”

Peter demanded carelessly: “Know anything about plumbing?”

Stuart scratched his head. And the girls looked mournfully one at the other.

“Now I ask you, what is the use of a male in the house?” and: “If it were a real man, of course——”

“Damn it!” he exploded. “If you’d wanted to marry a plumber, both of you, you might have mentioned it before the ceremony.” And he added sarcastically: “I daresay St. Quentin knows a lot about plumbing.”

“Or Baldwin,” suggested Merle, who had recently met Mr. Carr at a dinner-party, and derived from him a quantity of pure happiness.

Stuart recovered his good-humour in the joy of a fresh idea: “We’ll run St. Quentin and Baldwin together, and keep the essence in a sentry-box in the Room, for the performing of odd jobs. And we’ll call him—” here a rapid hunt for suitable nomenclature, “we’ll call him Squeith.”

“Combination of St. Quentin and Keith,” commented Peter. “Very good if Baldwin’s name happened to be Keith, but as it isn’t——”

“I’m not going to be put off by a little thing like that. Squeith has got personality. Squeith pleases me. And Squeith shall immediately be set to work on that recurring decimal.”

It was perceived that even while they chattered, Room and castle had already recurred seven times, ending on a Room. And Peter said she would sleep in the last Room but one—the fifth, to be exact,—before the dot was put in.

“And then Squeith can take the animals for a run,” quoth thoughtful little Merle, who remembered that giraffes and gift-horses require a certain amount of exercise. “He can put them on a leash if he likes.”

Stuart grumbled: “He’s sure to come home without them. Or they’ll come home without him. Yes, it’s no good frowning at me, Merle,—I will bully Squeith. You’d better have your Balm-for-Wounded-Feelings factory moved into the Room; ‘Nothing but the Best Balm supplied. Beware of Counterfeit. We only use British Bull’s-grease and Home-grown Sympathy.’ I’ll write your advertisements.”

Whereat Peter exclaimed jealously that if Merle had a factory, she would have trains; she must have trains, instantly—“just as if I could ever live in a Room without trains. An Outer Circle line running the whole way round, close under the walls; with real tunnels and signal-boxes. And you can advertise your Balm inside the darkest tunnel, where it won’t disturb the landscape. My railway shall start from Euston, of course——”

—“And end at Euston,” Merle reminded her, laughing, “if it’s a Circle railway.”

“Quite right. The lines shall be laid for the purpose of taking passengers from Euston to Euston. I’ve always longed for just such a gloriously unpractical service of trains.”

And here Stuart interposed with the offer of his almost forgotten Wagon-lit, the tame red Wagon-lit with trustful brown eyes, hitherto kept in the back garden among the washing.

“Want a present too,” Merle pleaded.

He gave her a clothes-line, so that she could be perpetually wringing out her soul, and hanging it up to dry. In return for which piece of impertinence, she presented him with a nice easy rack, which he could work himself, like a barrel-organ, by turning a handle; and thus practise for half an hour every morning after breakfast, the self-torture he so affected.

“He shall have an obstacle race as well,” put in Peter lavishly; “running just inside my Outer Circle radius. With hurdles and barriers and sacks and barbed wire. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Stuart darling?”

“We should have to provide a barber to barb the wire. One can’t buy it barbed.”

“Very well; I don’t mind a few shops. Just a barber and—and a post-office, because of bull’s-eyes——”

“Stamps?” enquired Stuart anxiously.

“No. Only bull’s-eyes. Why do you think I wanted a post-office?”

Merle thought that a Moonshade Shop might be useful: “It looks as if the moonshine in the Room were likely to be strong, and Peter and I must think of our complexions. Moonshades and paralunes.” And she imagined them pretty filmy things, woven of dyed spider-webs, with opalescent handles and spikes.

Then they added to the row, a Railway Shop, which, combining butcher and baker and fishmonger in one, provided those peculiar comestibles to be met with at station-buffets and in dining-cars alone. In particular, there existed the notorious Railway-fish, white and sticky, of which large numbers should swim in a sunken tank in the Railway Shop, till such time as required for consumption.

Then, as if one shop bred another, it was discovered that these wary fish could not be caught save with a bent pin on a piece of string; thus involving the erection of a Bent-pin Shop.

“Because in the usual farthing-change packets, they only give you straight pins,” said Peter, knitting her brows; “and straight pins aren’t a bit of good for Railway-fish.”

“What about a pub. or two?” Stuart proposed carelessly.

Merle scented danger: “No, dear.”

“Just one,” he pleaded; “a nice little public-house bearing the sign: Private. There’s the ‘Cat and Adage,’ been lying about since the evening we first met, Peter.”

“Oh, if it comes to that,” she bragged, “I’ve got plenty of pubs myself: The ‘Benison,’ for instance, inspired by A. C. Benson’s life of Tennyson. That would be non-alcoholic, of course; with a permanent impression in the window, of birds dark against a peaceful sunset.”

Stuart approved of the ‘Benison.’ “I like its nice rich ripe blessing-of-the-Archbishop-of-Canterbury flavour. And Squeith can patronize it for his morning glass of milk-and-soda. I’ve thought of another one——”

“No, Stuart!” Merle threw into her voice all the pent-up anguish of an inebriate’s wife.

Stuart and Peter looked rebellious.

“I’m not going to have my nice tidy Room littered up with pubs.” Merle declared passionately. “You must keep them in the conservatory or the lumber-closet. I shall have quite enough dusting on my hands, as it is, what with three castles——”

“One of them recurring,” put in Peter.

“Yes, and two Eustons and the giraffe and a Norfolk Broad and a sentry-box and I don’t know what else. Whatever I shall do on Thursdays——”

“Thursdays?”

“Thursdays?”

“The day the Room gets turned out,” Merle enlightened their double ignorance.

“Oh!”

“It seems rather a shame that Merle should be bothered with all that,” Stuart mused thoughtfully. “What about having a property Womanly-Woman to see to the dusting?”

Peter assented rather reluctantly; she was quite sure that the Womanly-woman would make her wear gloves. “Oh well! if she became at all obstreperous, we could always break her up, and re-form her as something else. An Ancient Retainer, say; or a Rabbit. These Plasticine figures are awfully useful.”

“There’d be a bit of Womanly-Woman over from a Rabbit; enough to make a tea-spoon, or a halo, or any domestic trifle of that description.”

“Then are we to have no real human people in the Room, except just ourselves?” Merle queried. “No—children?”

Stuart shook his head. “No children. Only childishness.” For he recognized, deep down in his heart, that real children would stigmatize the Room and all it contained, as “silly rot.” And demand bricks and Noah’s Arks and Tiddley-winks. And somehow the knowledge hurt; because he knew with what fatal ease he too could slide outside and say the same: “Silly rot—silly rot——” “It isn’t! Rot, if you like—not silly rot!”... but even now he was slipping.... “It isn’t! it isn’t—Peter....”

Peter guessed what was happening: “No, of course it isn’t,” quickly. And to divert him, contributed to the Room a sailing-boat, a rustic sailing-boat, stationary, and overgrown with ivy and clematis. And from the stern should depend a tiny toy sailing-boat, price sixpence halfpenny, which they could really sail on a piece of string. “And we’ll name it the ‘Strike-me-pink,’” cried Peter fiercely.

“And paint it green,” added Stuart, feeling better. And then, in opposition, he offered a nautical summer-house, with decks, and ropes, and a burgee fluttering bravely from the mainmast.

The Room might by now be considered almost complete in its furnishings. With a Heaven-born inspiration, Merle placed in its exact centre a small bamboo table, rather rickety, on which reposed a vase of flowers.

“Don’t you think,” Peter demanded doubtfully, “that it looks a wee bit out of place among all those castles and animals and things?”

“Not at all;” Merle was inclined to be huffy. “Merely the feminine touch about the home;” and she considered the possibility of draping Euston with an antimacassar.

... Bit by bit, as the red ball of the sun quenched its fires in the chill Atlantic, so the dingy little number nine bedroom of the Ocean Hotel, grew darker and darker still. At last nothing could be descried save the grey outlines of the tin basin; a glimmer across the cracked looking-glass; on and around the bed, three figures, dimly sprawling.

But in their own Playroom, the trio disport themselves as lords and emperors. Boundless space is theirs; time without limit; while facts they prick and shrivel like toy-balloons.

Peter, astride of the engine which draws her wagon-lit, is whizzing round and round the Outer Circle, all the signals in her favour, that naught shall arrest her triumphant speed.

Merle, discovering that Stuart has, after all, succeeded in importing his private public-house, enters through its swing-doors, nothing loth to demand a strawberry-ice-cream soda. The while Stuart dangles his legs from the notched parapet of his castle; and noting Squeith in the act of hailing the bell-buoy who sells the morning muffins, impishly frustrates all such traffic by a sudden alteration of the time to half-past five p.m.

“Tea is on the table,” he chants, a super-leprechaun; “and Squeith has missed the muffin-man again! Poor Squeith! for him always the muffin that is stale; for him it is always yesterday.”

“And for us?” cries Peter, making a trumpet of her hands, as she travels past at sixty miles an hour. And just catches his shouted reply, wind-borne: “For us it is always to-morrow!”

“But it can’t be to-morrow without a to-day, can it?” argues Merle, returning refreshed from the ‘Benison.’

“Why, yes; it can be the-day-after-to-morrow from yesterday!”

... The housemaid tapped, and entered with the hot water.

“Shall I light the gas, Miss?”

“Yes, please;” Peter’s voice seemed to come from very far away.

While the housemaid hunted for the matches, a figure rose nonchalantly from the floor, and stole out into the passage. So that the flare of light revealed merely two sleepy-eyed girls lying across the bed.

CHAPTER X
CARN TREWOOFA

Stuart solved the riddle which lay in the personality of Mine Host, by declaring that whereas in summer he followed the fair and guileless calling of hotel-keeper, in winter a bolder voice summoned him forth, and he threw off his disguises, and donned ear-rings, and became a Corsair. And indeed there was that about him of jolly rakish raffish swagger, a roll in his gait, and a ruddiness of visage, and withal a disposition to solemn winking of the left eye, and a tendency to be found in odd moments dancing strange dances the length of his own hall, which gave to such a suggestion a flavour of likelihood.

Moreover, the Corsair had surrounded himself by a bewildering bevy of females, whom he called variously his wife, his cousin, his housekeeper, his secretary, and his manageress; but who were obviously delicious yieldings of his six-months’ piracy.

But the Ocean Hotel could produce no equally satisfactory solution to the problem of Merle, Peter, and Stuart; and the various possibilities in the way of marital, sentimental, immoral, or blood relationship, that their companionship entailed. Perceiving this, Stuart found gentle delight in preserving strict impartiality in the bestowal of his outward affections. The Spanish waiter at the Billet-doux would have known much in common with the Five Females of the Ocean Hotel. A climax was reached, when, under their assembled eyes, Peter entered the breakfast-room and handed a tobacco-pouch to her lord and master, reminding him in bell-like tones that he had left it in her room. Whereat a shudder passed from guest to guest, and a horrified voice remarked with more virtue than grammar, “Guessed it was her—I mean, one can always tell!”

Then enter Merle with a book and a box of matches and a green felt slipper: “You must have left them in my room, Stuart ...” and Stuart affected great embarrassment,—and they were all three very happy and contented.

But when the visitors at the hotel complained of people who go from table to table before meals; deliberately and in the sight of all, pouring cream from smaller vessels into one gigantic bowl, thereafter placed upon their own table; then the Five Females did so persistently harass and beset the Corsair, that he became quite melancholy, and would sit all day long in the porch, gazing seawards, without even the heart to nudge Peter in the ribs as she passed him by; a delicate attention she sorely missed. For he liked the trio, perhaps recognizing in them the germs of piracy, and was loth to give them notice to quit.

“You know, I really believe we shall be slung out before to-morrow,” laughed Stuart; “we’re not a bit popular.” They were at that moment topping for the first time the westward slope of moor. Not yet had they succeeded in finding their path to the sea. Peter had almost despaired of feeling the cool water swell and ebb about her ankles.

And then, suddenly, they saw Carn Trewoofa.

Carn Trewoofa lay tucked in a little cove, the green arm of the cliff flung protectingly around it, as who should say: “All right, dear; the nasty grim granite-land shan’t touch you then!” And the toy fishing-village believed this, and was at peace, drowsy and tumbled in the warm sunshine.

A toy fishing-village. Patched roofs; thatched roofs; roofs both patched and thatched; wild and abandoned young roofs, seemingly kept only in their places by heavy chains or great slabs of stone. Sturdy, ugly stone walls, defying the winds, that, despite protective arm, dealt sometimes roughly with toy villages. Dwellings of all shapes and sizes, impartial dwellings for lobster or fowl or human. Round windlass-tower, painted a startling white, presumably with what was left over from the coastguard stones. Wood and slate and tar. Overturned boats and baskets. Nets hung to dry; smocks dangling to dry; dogs and children spread to dry; and on a rough bench outside the lifeboat shed, a row of old salts, bearded and tough and stringy, and beyond the utmost limits of dryness, so that the sun could do to them no more.

A toy village, no doubt! The kind that one has longed to play with, ever since first meeting it in picture book. Nor did it beguile with false whispers, as had done the rest of the false land of Cornwall. For the coastguard’s path ran straight down the cliff-side to the very doors of the first fowl-house; and the rocks and pools of the Atlantic trespassed so far into the heart of the village, that it was difficult to disentangle them. A way to the sea at last.... Merle and Peter ran shouting down and on and out, the length of a baby stone lug that curved into the water, thinking in its infant delusion, that it broke the force of the waves. And there, at the very furthest end, they turned and surveyed Carn Trewoofa, spread in a glimmer of gold before them. And they remarked the multitude of boats strewn drunkenly on the cobbled slope from the shore to the first cluster of huts; remarked the fleet of boats that rocked and swung on the vivid green of the bay; green that beyond the lug deepened and glowed to shadowed ultramarine. And they received a hint that somewhere was an inn; and somewhere else the twisted fragments of an ancient wreck; and all about were seagulls, swooping and balancing and shrieking. And well-pleased with this latest and most complete piece of nursery-ware designed for their happiness, they turned their gaze outwards, there to be met by a rust-red sail passing swift as a dream over the broken white wave-crests; while a mile nearer to the horizon, a quaint clockwork lighthouse reared itself from a group of rocks, and made believe to guard the bay.

Then Merle rubbed her eyes, and turned to Peter, and asked if it were really all to be had for the price of two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny? and might she please carry it home herself?

Stuart joined them on the lug. “They can’t yarn,” he said regretfully, jerking his thumb towards the line of ancient salts. “I’ve tried them and they can’t. In fact, I believe they’re tin.”

“Detachable?” queried Peter.

“No; on a row. I daresay it would be possible to break one off from the end. But they’re too old and glazed to be taught much; we must start with the new generation, and teach the young idea how to salt. Perhaps if we sowed among them a few volumes of W. W. Jacobs—I say, come along and explore.”

They entered Carn Trewoofa softly, as if fearful it should break or melt or in some such magical fashion manifest its unreality. And, picking her way between rope and anchor and occasionally a stray doorstep where there was no door, Merle came to a correct conclusion regarding the origin of this wonder-corner: It was smell made concrete. Someone had waved a wand over a handful of the richly mingled prevailing odour of seaweed and sea, tar and fish and clover, straw and fowl, soil and stone and lobster-pot; muttered a few compelling words—and the result was Carn Trewoofa.

The trio were just able to add to their medley of impressions, the mad swirl of paths, seven to one hut, that none could tell its back nor yet its front; and the yet madder swirl of chickens, seventy to one hen, and seven orphans to boot. Every ten yards traversed showed them a painted slab set in the wall, or in a door, or even on a roof; a slab and a slit and the word: Letters. They speculated what would happen if somebody failed to realize that this was a toy village, and posted real epistles in these alluring receptacles. “They are intended for all the letters one has never sent,” Stuart declared; “letters to my own feet, or to my great-uncle in Heaven; to the Times, and to a skylark, and to the Red King in Looking-glass Land.”

Likewise he discovered the national fisheress costume to be a cricket-cap; and counted no less than eight of these articles in the wearing. “Which proves that once, many years ago, a cricket team rounded the point in a pleasure steamer. And the Corsair lured them all to their destruction. But their caps were washed up on the shore, and worn ever since by the Women of Carn Trewoofa.—Nine! I’ll stalk the lot e’er yet I quit this spot.” He counted the tenth on the head of a buxom matron standing outside the “Longships” inn, and doing most effective things with two buckets and a pump.

She nodded pleasantly to the three, and asked them in raucous Cornish whether they were strangers in the land.

“Very,” responded Peter gloomily.

The wearer of the tenth cricket cap volunteered the information that she had rooms to let.

“At the inn!” gasped Merle.

“Nay; up-along yon villa. T’inn be nowt fur t’ young leddies.”

Smilingly she indicated a grey stone cottage standing high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill; its blind patient eyes looking steadily across the bay, past the toy fishing-fleet, to where sea and sky merged in a blue quivering haze.

They followed their guide into the tiny sitting-room of the “villa.” And there Peter cast herself with a sigh of voluptuous content upon a slippery slithery horsehair sofa; and Merle threw open the lid of a wheezy harmonium—and broke it; and Stuart remained transfixed before two black ivory elephants, which stood upon the mantelpiece. And they each and all declared their intention of remaining in their new quarters, never again to return to the disapproving atmosphere of the Ocean Hotel.

Mrs. Trenner beamed. They did not realize then that her rosy good-humour concealed the will of a Napoleon. For Mrs. Trenner was the autocrat of Carn Trewoofa; its leader and counsellor; by virtue of her unfailing prosperity and the excellence of her cooking. She owned the inn, and property besides; and she owned her husband and son and husband’s brother’s wife and their offspring, even as she now owned Merle and Peter and Stuart. The sons and husbands of other women might drown at sea; not so Mrs. Trenner’s. The chickens of other women might cross the road and be run over on the occasion of the fortnightly visit of the butcher’s cart; never Mrs. Trenner’s chickens. Therefore she wore her cricket-cap jauntily. On her indeed had fallen some of the radiance of that Star of Good Fortune under whose mellow auspices Stuart had been born. She and Stuart became, in consequence, excellent friends, though the language they spoke was mutually uncanny and perplexing.

“I’m not going to budge from here,” quoth Peter again. “J’y suis et j’y reste. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Trenner?”

Mrs. Trenner hesitated: “Well, theere t’es,” she ejaculated at last; her favourite expression in moments of emergency.

Peter continued: “Merle shall go upstairs and feel the beds, and see if the mattress is clay soil, or whatever has to be done under those circs. And Stuart can return to the hotel and pack our suit-cases.”

Stuart demurred. He might cope with the Corsair, he said, were it not for the Five Females. So they all returned to the hotel, telling Mrs. Trenner to have their dinner on the table that very evening. And they said this in all innocence, knowing nothing of the dinner, nor of what lay before them.

Before quitting Carn Trewoofa, Merle dashed through the tiny doorway marked “Mrs. Nanvorrow, Grocer,” just to see what lay hidden in its murky depths. She returned with a pennyworth of peardrops, and a fearsome account of an old ancient crone sitting in the kitchen, surrounded on floor, ceiling and walls, by china; a frenzied orgy of china; a veritable Bacchanal of china; china that sprouted and multiplied and literally asked for the destroying bull. “She squawked at me like a parrot,” Merle related in awestruck whispers, “and called me ‘dearie.’” She paused impressively. They were trudging up the cliff-path towards the Coastguard Station.

—“And I’ve discovered the eleventh cap. It was on the Witch’s head.”

Then Stuart sat down, and reproached her bitterly. He didn’t want any of the caps now, he said, if he couldn’t be left to find them himself. And anyway, stalking cricket-caps was a man’s job, in the pursuance of which, he considered Merle both unladylike and officious. “It isn’t as if I were childish about things,” concluded Stuart.

Then he looked Peter full in the eyes; and she laughed aloud at his utter childishness, knowing of the man beneath; knowing he knew she was by now aware of it. And Merle laughed with her, unconscious as yet that two of the three were playing games no more.

“Are ye all reet?” demanded Mrs. Trenner, hovering round their three chairs.

“It’s a feast of Lucullus,” sighed Peter, eating fresh young crab.

And Stuart, over an oozing pasty, declared that Mrs. Trenner must be a reincarnation of the cook primarily responsible for Epicurean philosophy.

“Well, theere t’es!” but Mrs. Trenner was obviously not satisfied. Then, nibbling at a saffron cake, Merle said gently, in words of one syllable: “The best I have yet ate, Mrs. Trenner.” And, wreathed in smiles, their landlady departed to the kitchen, there to retail to Maid Bessy, the one comprehensible bit of praise.

“Best she yet ate—thet’s what her said tu me, t’little leddy....”

“I foresee,” quoth Stuart, “that we shall have to leave to Merle the hectic chorus of praise which must inevitably accompany all our meals. Mrs. Trenner doesn’t appreciate our classic mode of expression, Peter.”

Peter moaned: “It’s awful; she gives us five times too much, and seems to take personal pride in our appetites. I daren’t leave a morsel. There’s something chubbily relentless about that woman. However, thank goodness there can be nothing more to come now.”

Mrs. Trenner entered; in one hand a plate of cheese-straws wherewith to break the camel’s back; in the other a bottle of Pond’s Extract.

“Are ye all reet?” she demanded, placing these upon the table. The three gazed, worried, at the Pond’s Extract. Was it local fashion to consume this with their cheese-straws?

“Mis’ Gurton, she thet hev t’ big room faacin’ this, she sent it over, thinkin’ ee might hev tired feet o’ nights, after walkin’,” volunteered Mis’ Gurton’s messenger. Then, hovering uncertainly awhile, in the difficulty of removing herself through the door, without assistant impetus, Mrs. Trenner shot forth: “Well, theere t’es”—and vanished.

“Evidently,” mused Peter, “one leaves Pond’s Extract in lieu of cards, up-along tu Carn Trewoofa. I suppose we are bound by etiquette to return toothpaste or Dinneford’s Magnesia upon Mis’ Gurton. They seem inclined to be friendly here.”

Outside the little square of window, the sky-colour was fast being drained and sucked into the West; and over the line of moor, a pale lemon-coloured moon wound and unwound herself like a dancer amidst trailing wisps of cloud, lilac and tender pink. Swaying rhythmically from the fading glow of day to the lifeless pallor of evening, the little dark fleet of fishing-boats could be glimpsed in the bay.

Indeed, Carn Trewoofa was inclined to be friendly with the strangers.

—Stuart leapt the low wall, and made a dash for a group of sheds huddled in the farmhouse yard.

“Come along!” he cried; and helter-skelter, through the icy sting of rain, they followed his lead.

... Something enormous hurled itself impotently against the wooden door, as they slammed it behind them.

“It’s a pig. I saw it,” gasped Peter. Her hand fumbled for the latch, could not find it; small wonder, since it existed on the further side of the door. The latter opened inwards. Peter leant against it the full weight of her body: “Help! it’s big and black and bulging—and it’s coming in!”

“Let it,” quoth Stuart indifferently. “Who are we, to object to a respectable old sow?”

But Merle, sitting exhausted in the trough, avowed a firm refusal to share this harbour of refuge with aught whatsoever in the pork line. So Stuart took Peter’s place at the door; and she sank into the trough beside Merle, and through the dim light watched with breathless interest the fierce encounter between man and beast, divided only by a thin partition of wood. Again and yet again did the ungainly monster hurl its quivering bulk to the assault, till the insecure building rocked and shook. Disgusted snortings and gruntings mingled pleasantly with the lash of the rain, and the distant chime of church-bells from Carn Trewoofa, six miles to the south from this clump of moorland huts and farms.

“My—sympathies—are all—with—the—pig,” jerked out Stuart, holding his own against terrific odds. “After all, it is her sty. An English pig’s sty is her castle.”

Chorus of indignant assent from the pig.

And then Merle was suddenly seized by an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Peter, it’s Sunday afternoon, first Sunday in the month; and our At Home day at Lancaster Gate. Did your little granddaughter’s frock come from Paris, chÈre Madame? mais tout À fait charmante.”

The pig rallied for yet a final onslaught. This time she was just able to inject a bristling snout....

Merle liked to feel that she was ‘making friends with the rustics.’ Nevertheless, sitting abreast of the low sea-wall, she looked somewhat astonished at the bearded veteran who slouched to her side; and, pointing to a picturesque abode covered by a round roof of mud, announced fiercely, and without any preamble, that it was to be razed to the ground, after he and his had dwelt therein for close on four hundred years.

“Taaken from me an’ destroyed, next Monday week. Iss. An’ me without a hoam tu put my foot in et.”

“There’s no place like home for putting one’s foot in it,” murmured Peter, in the background, to Stuart.

Merle heeded them not; she was busy sympathizing with the ‘peasant heart of England.’

“Fur why?” demanded the man, brandishing his stick. “Fur nowt. Bit o’ rain pourin’ through roof an’ in our beds. Mud isna slate.”

“No, no, indeed,” cooed Merle. (“Do be quiet, Peter.”)

The veteran swung round, and indicated a timid-looking damsel standing a few yards off: “Yon’s my daughter. Yon’s t’ girl as gets fits.” His tone rang with such pride, that Stuart stepped forward and congratulated him heartily.

“How very sad for the poor girl,” Merle raised hyacinth wells of sympathy to the weather-beaten face above hers. (“Stuart!”)

“Eh, thet’s t’lass. She du get them moastly in chapel, she du.”

“Oh,” brightly, “then wouldn’t it be better if she never went to chapel?”

A gurgle of laughter from Peter. Merle turned her back yet more squarely upon her irrepressible companions.

“Ne’er can tell when she be gettin’ one o’ they fits. Scream, she du, an’ fling up her arms.” He regarded his talented offspring intently. “Seem tu me, she be gettin’ thet way now....”

Merle fled.

“Never mind, then,” Stuart teased her half an hour later. “She shall be remembered in the hearts of the people. She shall understand the simple joys and sorrows of the rude peasantry——”

“After all,” Peter finished consolingly, “you’re the only one of us who can make Mrs. Trenner understand what pudding we want for lunch.”

Merle cried, casting herself upon their beloved horsehair sofa:

“Oh, what a day! I’ve never been so happy—and never so gloriously disgracefully untidy!”

Then Peter and Stuart looked long upon her, and looked at each other and smiled. For despite her delusions to the contrary, Merle’s vaunted ‘untidiness’ merely succeeded in fitting her to her present frame, as surely as the central figure of a Cornish Riviera poster; a daintily clad mermaid was she, pale-faced and lissom, with eyes reflecting the stormier tints of the sea; delicate ankles; blue-green jersey, closely blown to the figure; hair waving in long strands, albeit not wispily, about her shoulders.

“Merle’s appearance,” remarked Stuart, “is of the very few that can be trusted to look after itself for hours together. Now Peter’s physiognomy needs careful attention every five minutes; it burns and flushes and freckles; and her hair gets really untidy, not merely picturesquely ruffled; and her cap falls to the back of her head, and the buttons are off her skirt, and her neck is mottled mahogany, and oh, her jersey! how sagged and dragged and bagged it was——”

“But then, how it was cheap,” finished Peter.

“When are you two girls going home?” suddenly. “I’m off at to-morrow’s dawn. The call of diamonds. You’d better fix another day; we don’t want to look back on a long journey together, and a sulky, sooty arrival in London, as an ending to all this that we have had. It would be ungrateful.”

“O thou of the Hairpin Vision!” but Peter understood his mood. “When do we want to go, Merle?”

“Saturday is my birthday, and grandmaman is giving me a dinner-party of all the people I hate most. We may as well leave on Friday morning. It’s Wednesday to-day, isn’t it?” vaguely.

“Tuesday. By the way, what have you done about your letters home? Postmarks, I mean.”

“Carn Trewoofa is the nearest postal town to Orson Manor in Devonshire,” replied Merle. And Stuart sat down beside her on the sofa, and discoursed pleasantly on the lake of fire and brimstone, till Mrs. Trenner appeared to introduce them to their lunch, in its raw and natural condition. After which, she retired to cook it. Even Carn Trewoofa is no stranger to certain conditions of etiquette.

... So they all three squatted upon the outermost rock, and waited to be Caught by the Tide.

Sitting thus, bare-legged, knees hunched up to the chin, hands clasped about the knees, eyes solemn with expectation, they might have served for an illustration to some children’s tale of adventure. Peter wore a floppy crimson cap on her pale tangle of hair. Merle’s two heavy black plaits hung uncrowned. They did not speak; only gazed outwards, to desolate seas beyond the seas that have an end; and waited ... patiently. The lapping of water was the only sound. A wee crab, a green crab, waddled crookedly forth to examine with interest the thirty toes dangling into his private pool.

A south-westerly breeze blew upon their tanned throats ... and the light began to ebb.

Seven days now had they tarried in Carn Trewoofa, and had not yet succeeded in being Caught by the Tide. Therefore shame was upon them.

For the waves of Cornwall said: “If we surround them, they will merely elude us. And if they elude us, they will regard our strength and our cunning as mere attributes in a game of play invented by themselves. They are not as others, these strangers in the land. So we will not be beguiled into an attempt to drown them. They shall return to their homes without the supreme wonder and glory of being Caught by the Tide.”

Thus the Waves of Cornwall.

... And when they had been fully nineteen minutes on the outermost rock of all, waiting ... patiently ... Peter said in a very small voice: “Do you think, oh, do you think, it can be because the tide is going out?”

Stuart replied: “Peter, Peter, I didn’t like to say so before, but I am afraid it is indeed because the tide is going out.”

“If we were now in France, we would be Caught by the Tide.”

“But we are in Cornwall.”

... And sorrowfully they rose, and picked their way over the slippery boulders, towards the beckoning grey cottage that stood high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill.

The little south-westerly breeze was gaining in strength.

The little south-westerly breeze had become a south-westerly gale. It blew a great restlessness into Stuart that evening, so that he walked ceaselessly from window to door of the cottage, and at last suggested going forth to meet the elements squarely, and without the intervention of stone or glass.

Merle was drowsy from much scrambling, said she preferred to remain peacefully within.

“Come along, Peter.”

And from a lazy desire likewise to refuse the battle, the other girl quickened to something in his tones; without a word, threw on a heavy cloak; and, bare-headed, followed him through the village, and up the coastguard’s path to the crest of the cliff.

Here the wind caught them; not erratically, nor in gasping squally fashion, but a massed wall of wind, blowing steadily, straight and hard from across the sea, with never a swell nor yet a drop in the strength and sound of it. A mighty cleansing wind, causing every muscle and nerve of the body to be braced in resistance, without a second of rest or relaxation.

From far below, echoed the cold crash of breakers on the rocks. Far above, torn battalions of cloud swirled witlessly across a shuddering moon. Along the cliff, white splashes that marked by day the coastguard’s path, now came and went like evil staring faces....

Stuart swung on, unfaltering; Peter followed as best she might. Once she stumbled. He stopped, and flung a guiding arm about her.

“I can walk alone,” said Peter.

“I know you can....” The tempest hurled his voice straight past her, and across the black stretch of moor. “And it’s because you can walk alone, that you’re going to walk with me now.”

They pressed forward, eluding carefully what they thought was bog-land, only to discover on looking back, that they had been tricked by shadows. And shadows, again, resolved themselves into marsh-patches, yielding and treacherous. A fine rain sprayed their coats to a glitter. The moon had been beaten from her fields, leaving the world in a roar of darkness.... Once they halted abruptly on the verge of nothing, where the land had been eaten away. Once they followed the cliff that ran out sheer to a point, crested by dark shapes of granite, monsters thrown up Æons ago by the waves.

Peter and Stuart stood motionless for several moments, rigid bodies thrusting at the wall of wind, that blew with never a drop nor yet a swell in the strength and sound of it; stripped from them all memory of a narrower stuffier world.

—“Tired?”

“Of the wind?”

“Of me, then?”

“I’ve never yet met the man who could tire me.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

With a laugh, he turned, strode back to the mainland. Then, facing suddenly round, met her scrambling down from the granite. Met her, and put his arms about her—this time neither in support nor in guidance, but fiercely, and because of the thing that had lain crouching between them, now storm-whipped to sudden life. Her short hair beat and stung against his face. Their lips were stiff and crusted with salt. It was not a night for words. Once he spoke her name....

Later, swinging down the homeward path, they came upon sight of Carn Trewoofa, three or four stray lights splashing the darkness. It was good to know that one of these was from Merle’s lamp. Good to imagine her sitting in the battered arm-chair by the window, thinking of the other two in the turmoil outside.

Good to be the two in the turmoil outside.

CHAPTER XI
TWO—AND ONE OVER

Stuart’s departure meant for Peter and Merle a period of twoness deliciously free from the tension of extreme demand which he made upon their minds and bodies alike. Mentally and physically, they allowed themselves now to flop; excluding long tramps and dangerous climbs; mooching for the most part in and about the village, or among the shallower rocks; hardly talking; secure in the friendship that took much for granted.

The morning before Carn Trewoofa was to see the last of them, they awoke to a drenching downpour, which beat sea and moor and sky to one sodden colourless pulp. All day long the rain descended sullenly; and towards evening Merle coaxed Mrs. Trenner to transfer live fire, leaping and flaming on a shovel, from her kitchen to their sitting-room grate. Then she and Peter drew up their arm-chairs, definitely abandoned all idea of making an effort, and allowed themselves to be lulled to that half-hypnotic state of coma produced by warmth within and rain without; hush unbroken save by the muffled boom of unseen breakers on the beach.

“Good thing he’s gone,” murmured Merle; “Stuart hasn’t got a fire-light mood.”

“How d’you know?”

“Instinct.”

“I believe you’re right,” Peter conceded; “he can find pleasure in the rest he earns by utter exhaustion; none in just volupping.”

“Good word.”

“Yes,” said Peter, and proceeded to volupp, eyes half-closed, arms hanging over the side of the chair; too luxuriously lazy even to rise for a cigarette.

Dusk and the rain joined hands beyond the streaming squares of window. The moving world was very far away from Carn Trewoofa in its greyness. From the kitchen, two voices rose and fell in sing-song fashion; not seeming to belong to Mrs. Trenner or Bessy or any human shape; merely voices, monotonous, ceaseless, chanting.

Merle had since several minutes been watching Peter intently. All of a sudden she cried: “Don’t!”

The other girl roused herself from reverie: “Don’t what?”

“That sleepy-tiger look of yours. I hate it.”

“Why?”

“It’s so—replete.”

Peter laughed. “Perhaps it has been fed and wants exercise.”

“On a lead? Up and down the Park for twenty minutes every day? Oh, Peter, why haven’t I too got a tiger to sit beside yours on the wall?”

“It doesn’t sit on a wall,” retorted Peter, who was inclined to take her tiger seriously.

“Darling, you know it’s only a NestlÉ’s-Milk Advertisement Cat. The fat creamy one. We’ll call it a tiger, if you like. It’s a very fine cat.”

Peter picked up the pair of sand-shoes which Stuart had left a-sprawl on the fender; and musingly fingered the torn soles: “Millionaire’s footgear,” she murmured scornfully; certainly they were in a disgracefully tattered condition. She pulled the two elephants from the mantelpiece, and laid one at rest in either shoe.... “Elephant cradles....”

“Are you talking in your sleep?” queried Merle.

“I was pondering the matter of Cheap Sentiment,” lied Peter. “I’ve got whole Marshes of Cheap Sentiment in my being, which I dare not show, nor even countenance, but which are unmistakably spreading.”

Merle snuggled deeper into her arm-chair, and cooed encouragement: “Go on, Peter!”

“Just think,” gently rocking the elephant cradles, “if I admitted Stuart to my passion for curly-haired small infants; told him that carols sung on frosty nights bring a lump to my throat; or that organ music makes me want to be good. Yes, it does, Merle—honest injun! And I like stroking somebody’s hair in the firelight, and simply ache at times for the strong shoulder to lean on——”

“Try Stuart’s,” suggested Merle unkindly. And Peter shuddered.

“Shoulders! he’s got ridges; they’d cut like a knife; and what isn’t ridge is knobs. No, I meant the sort of shoulder, with that traditional Harris-tweed scent ‘that ever afterwards brought his image with such cruel distinctness before her mental vision.’ You understand, don’t you?”

“Of course I do; Pour qui prenez-vous moi? But your marshes are specially bad. Tell me some more.”

“Call of Spring,” continued Peter, just letting the murmured words drop from between her lips; “and the scent of jasmine on a hot night.”

“Tiger again?”

“Um.”

Merle had an inspiration: “What about letting that tiger graze on the marshes?”

“Bad for it to graze anywhere,” said Peter grimly. “Then there’s the Marsh of ‘do-you-remember’ and ‘this-time-a-year-ago,’ deep slushy ones, both of them; particular favourites of mine. And the clash of bells on New Year’s Eve awakens feelings unutterable within me. So do soldiers marching past; and a cheering crowd. I’m attached to the house in which I was born. I keep letters. I don’t mind Tennyson half as much as I pretend. And when I read about lonely children, I cry. And then I can cry at seeing myself cry—it’s a most pathetic sight!”

“Is all that genuine?” real concern now in her friend’s voice.

“Yes.... And sometimes, Merle, I just long to take the whole bag of tricks and fling them at Stuart’s head; it would be so good for him!” A half-smile tilted her lips, as she reflected how she had continually burlesqued to Stuart these same sentimental weaknesses, without once letting a hint escape that she shared in them.

The fire yawned audibly, and plopped a coal into the stillness. The sense of isolation was thick as cotton-wool.

—Crunch of footsteps up the path and on the steps. Then a loud and penetrating double knock. A dog leapt from the kitchen, barking furiously. Mrs. Trenner was heard unbolting to the intruder. The door flew open to great gusts of wind and rain. A gruff voice spoke for a moment. Retreating steps, closed door, a subdued whine from the dog ... and Mrs. Trenner brought in two sopping blurred letters that were the cause of so much sudden tumult. Then returned again to the kitchen. Silence swallowed the cottage with a gulp, and all was as before.

“Both from Stuart,” quoth Merle, handing one envelope to Peter; “how typical of him to break in with all that clamour.”

Her communication was the longer of the two, and took her several minutes to read; once or twice she laughed aloud at some brilliant flight of nonsense. At last, according to invariable custom, she tossed the scribbled-over sheets to Peter for inspection—“Here you are,” and held out her hand for the exchange....

Peter did not stir; her fingers clenched a little tighter on the letter which lay in her lap. Into her eyes had crept again that look, brooding and replete, to which Merle had so objected.

... Merle withdrew her hand. Between the two girls lay the sensation of a moment dead.

One letter which could be shown—and one which couldn’t ... Merle understood now.

The journey up to London was an uncomfortable one. Peter and Merle avoided each other as much as possible. Never before had they been brought to a pass where open discussion was mutually barred. Once, Peter mentioned very casually that Stuart in his letter ... had summoned them on arrival to meet him straightway at the Billet-doux for dinner. Merle courteously acknowledged the invitation. If matters had been otherwise, she would have rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect of being hurled direct from their primitive abode in Carn Trewoofa, to the contrasting blaze and bustle of a London restaurant. But aware that the stunt had been arranged for Peter, not for herself, she wished fervently she could withdraw altogether, wondered how long she would instinctively be forced to obey the call of trio, dance to its elusive melody. How long?—Why, how long had she already been fooled to the belief that she was necessary to complete the figure of three? How long had this—thing—been growing?... The slow train drew up with a jerk at Exeter, and refused for thirty-five minutes to stir from beside the wet shining platform. Peter was restless; thudded with her foot against the ground. And Merle, knowing now the cause, resented her restlessness: “She can’t wait till she sees him again.”

After interminable jolts and stoppages, Paddington Station. Twenty to seven,—seven o’clock they were due at the Billet-doux. “What shall we do with our suit-cases?” “I’m taking mine to Euston waiting-room, ready to be picked up on my way home.” “Then I’ll leave mine at a convenient Tube station; Oxford Circus will do.”... They were both thankful for the suit-cases.

A taxi hailed, and directions given. And whereas Merle, in the whirl through the lit crowded streets, grieved for the laughter missed, Peter was reproaching herself for an inexplicable wish to be doing all this alone; alone to be meeting Stuart at seven o’clock. She had not seen him since that night on the moors; he had slipped away the next morning before his companions were out of bed.

Her excitement grew. Merle looked at her, once, by the flashing arc of a street-lamp—then glanced quickly away again.

Outward circumstances were well in favour of a successful trio party. Memory of dark green moor and sun-splashed waves and all the details that went to make Carn Trewoofa,—and at the doors of the Billet-doux behold now Stuart in evening-clothes and silk hat and a man-about-town set to his eyeglass: “So glad you could come,” in the Oxford voice,—had he ever really shown them his bare grazed knees?

“We do look pirates,” exclaimed Peter, laughingly conscious of brown throat, and hair tangled to a web by the salt winds. And indeed, many heads were turned to gaze after the two girls in stained tweed skirts, jerseys and caps, threading their defiant way between the tables, in the wake of the exquisite dandy.

“The same places as at our first supper?” suggested Stuart.

They assented.

So the mirror reflected the three figures, as once before. And Merle thought hard of Da Vinci’s masterpiece. She would have liked to ask if Peter were visited by the same idea, but remembered in time that the thread of intimacy had been snapped. Easy enough, now that her eyes were opened, to see what had happened to the two grown-ups, for thus she contemptuously classified her comrades; and she imagined their secret evident in every look and word; their lightest remark tingling with electricity.

... Just this once she would still be faithful to the spirit of trio. But oh, how she longed to let them know that all this elaborate comedy of maintaining for her benefit a volley of nonsense talk, was merely insulting; her eyes were clear of dust.

“Do, for pity’s sake, tell me some tales of Orson Manor, for the edification of grandmaman.”

“What’s the good?” from Peter; “you know that the very first time I come to lunch, I shall put my hoof in it up to the hilt.”

Stuart repeated puzzled: “Do hoofs have hilts? do hilts have hoofs—hooves—hilts—I say, that’s not a bad pub., the ‘Hoof and Hilt.’ Shall we put it in the Room, Merle?”

“We have seven already,” she reminded him reproachfully.

... Grown-ups, grown-ups both of them! And what was the good of forcing the play? To allow love to happen, just like other grown-ups—Merle’s lip curled. Not a man or woman in the assembled crowd but had at some time of their lives succumbed to this most ordinary passion. But the trio had boasted of their difference!... Grown-ups.

Stuart began to spin a marvellous tissue of absurdities relative to their supposed stay with his sister Dorothy in Devon. The Spanish waiter came and went with dishes. In the gleaming mirror, three marionettes talked and laughed and gesticulated, faithfully mimicking the originals at their side. At the side of the gleaming mirror, three pairs of eyes watched the marionettes, and marvelled at their likeness to life. At the table and in the mirror, three ghosts were chanting a dirge for the playtime that was over. But Merle alone heard them.

... “It was such a grotesque nightmare,” Peter was saying; “I was one side of the moon, and a cow the other. And every time the cow jumped over the moon, as cows will, I jumped as well, so as always to be on the other side of the moon to the cow. I’m not partial to cows. But it was a fearful strain, watching its face, and trying to guess from the expression exactly when it intended to jump.”

“I should have thought the double motion would become mechanical at last, like the Flip-Flap. Did you know that Mrs. Trenner asked for my address before I left, that she might send me a lobster fresh from its native soil? And can you imagine my mother when it turns up? and the butler? I haven’t the remotest notion how to account for it; Orson Manor is miles from the sea, and Dorothy never sends us lobsters.”

Suddenly, from being especially flushed and talkative and brilliant, Peter dropped to a queer moodiness; mouth sullen; feet swinging rebelliously against the leg of the table. She wanted to be alone with Stuart—wanted it—wanted it. Merle’s presence filled her with an intense exasperation. She tried at first to control these sensations; the knowledge that they were shared by Stuart would have gone far towards soothing them. But Stuart betrayed nothing of his point of view that night; from the mask of his features, he might have been totally unaware of aught unusual in the atmosphere. His manner to both girls was equally charming ... a skilled juggler, he tossed his ivory balls.

“I only succeeded once in drawing a salt into conversation,” said Merle gravely; “I couldn’t understand a word of what he was talking about, except that it related mainly to whales. So I prattled intelligently in reply, of harpoons and blubber—oh, quite professional. Peter told me afterwards that he was referring to his summer holiday at Llandudno.”

... “For God’s sake, be quiet!” prayed Peter inaudibly. All these inanities—when she and Stuart might already be embarking on the perilous seas of their double adventure. Would this ghastly meal never be over? And then what lay in store? Would he contrive somehow to snatch a moment alone with her? Surely ... somehow.

Merle was also curious to see how they would rid themselves of her superfluous company. She was disliking Stuart just a little more than Peter. Her anger against the latter was mixed with a curious sympathy; if they ever came dispassionately to talk it over, she knew that each would prove perfectly familiar with the other’s exact state of mind. But Stuart’s acting, if it were indeed acting, was a shade more perfect than either of theirs.

“Have you a train to catch, Peter?” he asked nonchalantly. Her heart drummed thickly.

“Yes. The 9.40 from Euston.”

He drew out his watch: “9.10. We’ve just time for liqueurs.”

The girls drank their pale Chartreuse in silence, too tired, after the long tense day in the train, to make any further effort. Peter felt thankfully that the time of her deliverance was at hand.

“We’ll take Peter to Euston, and then I’ll see you home, Merle,” this in the porch, while they waited for the page-boy to summon a taxi.

Sharply Peter drew in her breath. What game was he playing? Merle ... fragile little fool! Surely for once she could be trusted to look after herself.

“Do you think we can’t see through that?” shouted Merle’s pride to Stuart’s courtesy. But she choked down the longing to make a scene; her good breeding, put to the test, was proving itself no mere surface quality.

At Euston, he dashed off into the labyrinth to reclaim the suit-case and take Peter’s ticket. Nine-thirty-eight by the clock over the portals.

And now all of Peter was concentrated in the one consuming longing for a moment alone with him, before the nine-forty whirled her off to Thatch Lane. She had forgotten even what she wanted from him, what she expected the coveted moment to yield her. Only knew of a frantic desire to be quit of the third voice, the third presence....

Trio?... Peter hated the Trio.

—“Come along, quick. You’ll miss your train.” He hurried them down the stairs and through the gangway—then up again—past the barrier—on to the platform—in time to see the nine-forty steam slowly away.

Peter let escape a long quivering sigh. Reprieved for a while. There was still a chance.

“When’s the next to Thatch Lane?”

“Ten-thirteen, sir. Express. Number four platform.”

They crossed to number four. And if Peter dragged behind, Merle likewise dragged. And if Peter swung ahead—there was Merle still beside her. Or so it seemed to Peter’s overwrought fancy. And after about five minutes’ aimless waiting, she could bear it no longer, but strolled off by herself, down the dark lonely platform, till it sloped away to meet a gleaming maze of rails.

Footsteps in her wake. She mastered herself sufficiently not to turn, but triumph clamoured within her. He had understood, and followed, as she intended he should. The footsteps drew level. It was Merle.

Merle had not noticed the direction Peter had taken; but discovering the accidental proximity, she tried as naturally as possible to break an awkward silence: “This was where we broke the egg, wasn’t it?”

For beyond anger and beyond pain, lurked within her an unspoken wish that Peter would not so far give herself away; fastidious recoil of girlhood from which the bloom had—not been brushed.

She received merely a look in response to her remark. Then, without speaking, they turned and walked back to Stuart, who, absorbed in a study of the ownerless motor-cars that eccentrically bestrew Euston, had apparently not noticed their absence.

Peter said: “You and Merle had better not wait. My train won’t be in for another twenty minutes.”

“Oh, very well. You’ll be all right, won’t you? I expect Merle is fagged; she’s looking awfully white. Good night. It’s been rather a successful evening, hasn’t it?”

The two girls allowed their eyes to meet in a brief flash of understanding, sympathy even. Then Peter’s hardened again to antagonism.

“Good night, Stuart. Good night, Merle.”

“Good night.”

She was alone. And Euston was in a forbidding mood; one of those vast black moods which tend to shrink the individual to the size of a thimble.

Ten—fifteen minutes. The express thundered in. Peter stepped into a vacant compartment and sat staring dully at the framed views on the wall opposite.... So it had never really happened, their fight with the wind, and the rain-blurred letter afterwards. Never really happened, or he would have made one sign to show he remembered. She dreaded the blank journey, and dreaded the blank night to follow, wondering for what length of time her nerves would continue to throb, throb and pant like the engine of the ten-thirteen. And now a shudder in the wheels beneath her, and the train began to move ... faster and faster....

Someone ran alongside, leapt on to the footboard, tore at the handle of the door. And:

“I told the man to drive like Hell!” said Stuart.

“Oh, Lord!” reflected Stuart the following morning; “I believe I was dramatic.”

Not alone this, but having perpetrated the abominable crime of a “dramatic moment,” he now planned no deliberate attempt to destroy it. Which was significant.

“Oh Lord!” reflected Peter the following morning; “I believe I was neurotic.”

She was now perfectly normal and serenely happy. The sky streamed sunshine, and she wanted to pick daffodils. Also her recollections of the evening before were extremely hazy, beyond a disgusted impression that she had behaved rather badly.

“What on earth could have been the matter with me?” she splashed herself with cold water, and put on her best shoes and stockings, by way of signalling her change of mood. Then came to the comfortable conclusion that perhaps Merle had noticed nothing. Why, it was the child’s birthday to-day. They would have a celebration; perhaps Stuart——

Mature consideration decided that, on the whole, trios had better be suspended for a while, since their effect upon her temperament was so demoralizing. No matter! she and Merle would foot it happily in their two-world; that was still intact. She would not give up Merle, nor yet Stuart, nor yet anybody. One-world, two-world, three-world; and the Room and playtime and friendship and tigers and daffodils—she would keep them all. Why not?

Thus Peter in the train which took her that afternoon to Euston, and on the ’bus which bore her down Oxford Street.

... And she was very sorry she had been cross last night, and Merle must forgive her, and be radiantly happy as well. Why not? Who could fail to rejoice, when the earth was thrilling and teeming and bursting with the knowledge that she and Stuart were going to be in love. And they would go on going to be, till the fateful day of have-been. The actual state of love Peter determined to skip; it was too smug and settled; too lacking in divine discontent. Thus Peter on the doorstep of the house in Lancaster Gate. And she startled Madame des Essarts by singing the Pirate’s Chorus the whole way up the broad and decorous staircase:

She knocked at Merle’s door.

“Come in.”

“Hullo!” cried Peter in buoyant voice.

Merle, doing nothing in particular, was standing at the dressing-table, heaped high with dainty expensive presents, and notes, and telegrams; tokens whereby might be gathered that Mademoiselle des Essarts was twenty-two.

Mademoiselle des Essarts did not return her friend’s greeting.

“Hullo!” The repetition in a somewhat more subdued tone.

“Did Stuart catch the train?”

“How did you know?” Peter queried, astonished.

“I heard him tell the driver to hurry, the instant he had deposited me on my doorstep. ‘Drive like Hell!’ was his exact expression, I think.”

“Yes ... he just turned up in time;” a distinctly subdued voice now. There was something ominous about Merle’s lovely little face; and Peter was not quite so sure about keeping the two-world intact.

“I say—Merle—was I a beast yesterday?”

“Dear me, no; you were delightful.” It might have been the grandmother speaking in those tones of frozen hauteur. Then suddenly: “You’re in love with each other, aren’t you?”

Peter tossed off her hat and coat. “Don’t be—crude.”

“Crude!” the other blazed forth; “perhaps you think you weren’t crude—last night.”

“Last night was a mood; and I apologize. I’m quite normal again.”

“Naturally. He caught the train.”

“Merle,” Peter’s eyes were deep and troubled; “you mustn’t say that sort of thing. You. You said it as if you meant it; as if——”

“As if what?”

“As if you were jealous,” Peter blurted out.

“I am. Oh—not of Stuart; he doesn’t count in this, except that I dislike him for daring to interfere, after all we’ve been to each other.”

The speech seemed to awake an echo in the room. Peter was faintly conscious of just such another scene as this, though when and where she could not remember.

“Need he interfere?” she said at last, haltingly. Then: “I say, we’re not quarrelling, are we?”

Merle smiled: “Yes, I believe we are.” Then her look shadowed once more. “Do you think I’m going through again what I sat through at that horrible supper? The knowledge of being in the way; unwanted; seeing between you two that secret current of understanding, and all the while having to pretend I was unaware of it. The trio is dead—dead—dead. And it’s not I who have killed it. It’s you and Stuart. We found the most wonderful playtime that ever was—but you had to drag in love, like any other two people of opposite sex.”

Peter crossed to the window, her back to the room: “It might equally well have been Stuart and you.”

“For me, the point lies in the fact that it wasn’t.”

“You’d have acted the same. A man and two girls—what else could we expect, admitting him?”

In the dignified street below, a long line of lights sprang into a sudden curve of brilliance athwart the dusk. With one hand, Peter held aside the tapestried hangings ... and the touch brought with it great floods of memory. Echoes?—she had traced back the echoes now. This quarrel had been rehearsed. The Inevitable had recoiled with ironic effect on those who had dared mock it with burlesque.

She wondered at what point Merle would remember the pretence drama they had perpetrated of jealousy and farewell, when the question was first raised of admitting a third to their union. But Merle was blinded by a royal rage, would see nothing clearly till she had delivered herself of the pent-up storm of emotion:

“We were to have been so different; we three. Oh, how could you spoil it? I’ve seen thousands look at each other as you looked at one another last night—but where am I to find the games and the nursery again? Real children can’t play as we did ... and you and Stuart have fallen in love!” Her delicate features quivered with scorn for the two who could not keep it up; who had dropped from the kingdom of magic strange and new, to an old, old kingdom of magic; old as the hills and the seas and the oldest road.

Peter said never a word. She was afraid to speak, for fear of again treading on the heels of that former occasion. It was too absurd that they should thus be repeating themselves, in the very same setting, and neither able to laugh at it.

“And we knew.” Merle went on, in performance of just that which Peter dreaded; “if we hadn’t known beforehand—but we knew, and courted the danger; we did it ourselves——”

“Don’t!” from Peter ... and she walked sharply away from that—that damnable window.

Then it struck Merle. “Oh, I see. Yes, it is rather funny.” She laughed drearily. “The scene ought to go well, considering we’ve played it before. A pity the parts are reversed. You preferred the rÔle of Unwanted Woman, as giving more scope to your histrionic powers.”

“Look here,” pleaded Peter; and, hands outspread against the toilet-table behind her, she faced Merle squarely; “this sort of sparring isn’t worthy of us. For Heaven’s sake, let’s try and get a sane grip of the business.”

“In exactly that position?” murmured Merle, who had not slept as well as Peter, and was inclined to be relentless.

Desperately Peter dropped her hands; and wondered if there were one place in the whole room that she had not by farce made untenable.

“Can’t we throw him out even now?” but while she spoke, she knew it impossible.

“Pleasant companion you’d be under those circumstances,” remarked the half-bitter, half-mocking accents that sounded so strange from Merle. As if weary of conflict, she seated herself on the edge of the bed; the tapestried canopy casting a deep shadow on the pale cameo of her face.

“All over, Peter.” She held out her hand, with a gesture almost friendly. “You can’t keep the two of us, my dear, so stop thinking you can. Stuart can give you all that I give you, and his manhood into the bargain. So you’re all right. But if I did consent to stay in, I’d be aware all the while of a great chunk in your life that you were keeping hidden from me. And we’d be constantly hitting on allusions, and backing away from them, and being tactful,—and it would all be very feverish and very uncomfortable. What we’ve had has been too complete to spoil by compromise. It’s over, Peter.”

“It isn’t over,” Peter retorted fiercely. “I won’t have it over!” And she pushed hard at the Inevitable.

“Can you give up Stuart?”

“No,” softly.

“Peter, that wonderful type of friendship doesn’t exist, where the one left out rejoices at the good fortune of the other. If I had tumbled into Paradise with some man, could you have listened to my exuberant confidences, and been noble about them?”

And again Peter said softly, “No.”

Merle lay back among the pillows, hands clasped behind her head.... At any moment she might cry: “Pax, Peter, pax!”...

“I can’t bear to be the one who lags, for whom allowances must be made, passion suppressed. There’s nothing to be done, Peter; we’ve quarrelled, and we’re going to part for ever. Humiliating, isn’t it? I wonder just how we got here.”

“Playing at God,” muttered Peter savagely; and slung her cloak around her shoulders, rammed her hat on to her head. She felt she could not stand much more. Every bit of her was aching to throw strong arms about the slight figure lying on the elaborate brocade bedspread; hold her tight, in defiance of the ridiculous notion that anything could possibly arise between them, with which their boyish brains and sense of humour and glorious intimacy would be unable to cope.—And then arose memories of last night ... one must pay for these little primitive displays. With fatal clarity, she saw Merle’s point of view. Not for the victor to insult by generosity, to dictate terms of peace; according to their code, Peter, as top-dog, was powerless to make overtures; she must simply acquiesce.

“If—when ... the other thing is done with——?” she began.

“Not even then. It would never look the same....”

(Peter bit her lip, anticipating with sickening exactitude the end of the sentence.)

... “Even after mending,” finished Merle. And a spasm of anger shook the other girl from head to foot: Merle must be selecting these particular phrases on purpose!

But it was this same nightmare sense of stepping again in her own footprints, that took Peter draggingly to the door. And: “I shall want to come back and talk about it when I get to the foot of the stairs,” she said, obedient to phantom promptings.

Merle made reply: “Of course. So will I.”

The ghost of a sham farewell had completed its subtle revenge. There was no more to be said. So Peter went.

On the steps of the house at Lancaster Gate, the knowledge returned, like the flutter of banners in the sunshine, that for her the world still contained Stuart.

... Quite irrelevantly, it also struck her that she had omitted to wish Merle many happy returns of the day.

CHAPTER XII
THE CASKET LINED WITH PINK

It was such a very large room. And the child left over wanted badly to cry, because her toys had all been broken, because it was her birthday, because Peter had gone. But who could possibly cry in such a very large room, that unwound itself and escaped at the corners, whenever she tried to seek comfort in tucking the walls close about her like an eiderdown quilt. She could have cried in a little room, quite easily; but this regal apartment was Second Empire—somebody important had slept here once.

Nicole knocked and entered: “It is time for Mademoiselle to dress. Is Mademoiselle completely rested?” beaming, she exhibited an elaborate bouquet, white lilac and lilies of the valley, that had just been sent by a middle-aged admirer from the Legation.

Madame des Essarts trailed in, to discuss in what costume Merle would shine to the best advantage, at the dinner-party given in her honour that evening.

“The apricot ninon? What do you think, Nicole?”

Nicole was in favour of a quaint old-rose brocade, which suited Mademoiselle À merveille. Merle was invited to take part in the discussion. She could have indicated a startling preference for a sea-faded jersey and cap ... but she said that she preferred the brocade. Her grandmother laid cool fingers, heavily beringed, upon her head.

“Mignonne, we must call in ce bon Docteur Dufour again; you are slightly feverish. The excitement of your fÊte, is that it?”

Merle smiled. A doll had returned to its elaborate wrappings; a bon-bon was replaced in its satin casket; a jewel laid back in its nest of cotton-wool. Merle smiled: Yes, she was excited because it was her birthday. Nice things always happened on one’s birthday, was it not so? And murmuring benignly an epigram on la jeunesse, Madame departed to put herself in the hands of the coiffeur.

Merle lay back among the pillows, and watched Nicole laying out silk stockings and embroidered shoes; soft underwear; a string of pearls; a handkerchief edged in fine old lace; Nicole, drawing the curtains, fetching hot water.... “Good Heavens! that I should own a friend who owns a maid. You know it’s quite easy to pull on your stockings, once you’ve learnt the way”—How long would the memory of Peter’s mischievous remarks entangle themselves like alien threads through the dainty artificial pattern that must henceforth be woven only in dim pastels and misted silver?

“Mademoiselle is now ready for me to arrange her hair?” Ablutions performed, Merle slipped around her a silk kimono. The monogrammed tortoise-shell hair-brushes stood at hand on the panelled dressing-table; the room was deliciously warm, and fragrant with the scent of white lilac. Merle had enjoyed with all her heart this parade of luxury and ceremonial when it had stood as contrast to her secret life of adventure with Peter; their stolen days, their long tramps—oh, it had been fun, while roughing it, to remember Nicole and the waiting casket lined with pink.

But now the casket stood for all there was; the tortoise-shell toilet-service had to be taken seriously; and Merle’s eyes, looking back at her from the oval mirror, were wide and frightened with the knowledge that one could not laugh alone.

Mademoiselle des Essarts, in old-rose brocade and pearls, stands beside Madame in the Louis salon, and, with charming self-possession, helps to receive the entering guests. And now they have all arrived: well-known figures in foreign ministerial circles; courteous and urbane old gentlemen wearing decorations; brilliant and polished young gentlemen from the various embassies; the two daughters of the new Consul (invited because they were of Merle’s age); the elegant wives of numerous consuls; the white-haired Marchese di Salvador, whose rule it is never to make a remark that is not unpleasant; finally, a middle-aged member of the Legation, tall, kindly, and distinguished, his head already beflecked with grey: Jean Raoul ThÉodore, Comte de Cler, who so admires Mademoiselle des Essarts, and is enchanted to find that he is to lead her down to dinner.

General conversation round the table is mostly of a political nature, and carried on in foreign languages, the assembled company slipping with ease from one tongue to another. Merle’s partner considerately leaves her alone, remarking with instinctive delicacy that the charming child beside him is troubled, and not in a mood to talk. But presently le Vicomte d’AlenÇon turns from a spirited contest with the Marchese, to Merle on his other side, and enquires if she has received many gifts in celebration of the day which seventeen years ago was responsible for such a beautiful and talented addition to the world. His tone is sugary and indulgent, as to a petted child. She blushes and deprecates, correcting his mistake—“Twenty-two? Ma non È possibile!”—and watches him return with unmistakable relief to his argument with the Marchese.... “I agree with you, mon ami, he should never have been put in responsible office; I will see what can be done....”

Undoubtedly fascinating to insiders, this game of diplomacy. Merle would not be averse to be admitted as equal to the intricacies of wire-pulling, instead of being tossed an occasional sugar-plum to keep her quiet; but she realizes that these people are justified in thrusting her outside of their world—why is she not in her own? The universe is a series of cosy cubicles, but dreary for the strays who wander beyond the drawn curtains.... She sends a swift thought to the Room, the Perfect Piratical Playroom. Will it be sub-let, now that two of its owners are grown-up? And she imagines a grave discussion with Peter and Stuart on the subject of a suitable tenant, who would be kind to the giraffe, and keep on Squeith as included in the inventory, and....

—Twinkling the pear-shaped emeralds in her ears, the wife of the new Consul asks deferentially of her hostess if her little granddaughter will be allowed to spend a week-end at their country-seat: “My two girls here are of her age, I believe; and they would be so delighted, chÈre Madame.”

Madame is also delighted, and vouches enthusiastically for Merle’s delight. And the two daughters murmur their double delight, and wish Merle were not so beautiful, and continue to coquette with the young gentlemen from the embassies.

“But lately one never sees cette mÉchante petite,” shrills the widowed sister-in-law of Madame; “she neglects la vieille tante shamefully.”

“Merle is so much with her special friend,” Madame explains in apology; “Peter Kyndersley—a sweet girl; they are inseparable. Even now they have but just returned from a visit to Devonshire.”

“Ah, she must indeed have enjoyed that,”—they are talking at Merle, not to her—“And how well she is looking.”

“The fresh air,” says Madame; and turns the subject. Youth has received sufficient attention for the moment.

... Dancing before Merle’s eyes, a sudden vision of a tea-party of nice young girls, to celebrate her last year’s natal day, and the arrival of Peter in the rÔle of Inseparable Friend, bearing the present of a particularly hideous work-basket: “Dearest Merle, so many happy returns of the day. Just a little remembrance for your birthday; oh, a mere nothing, but I always say it’s the spirit and not the gift that matters!” A murmur of approbation here from grandmother, aunts, and visitors—and Merle, meeting the wicked twinkle in Peter’s eye, controls herself with difficulty.

—Last year.

And again: “We can’t quarrel really,” laughed Peter, “because of your grandmother. One would hear nothing but: ‘You never ask that charming Peter Kyndersley to tea, chÈrie, and you were once so fond of her.’...”

Well, that will have to be gone through as well.

The table is one blaze and glitter; the light falling on the Salviati vases; wine trembling and reflecting in the long-stemmed glasses; vivid splashes of fruit and flowers; flash of epigram from one lip to another. The Marchese is in great form to-night.... “Oh, lÀ lÀ!” and peals of laughter—

... Peter ... Peter....

The other two will not miss the games so intensely; they had played because it was their nature to play, as now they loved because it was their nature to love. But Merle had played for all her wasted years of ChÂteau and Convent; played for the prim little maiden with her toes turned out, who hung in a frame on the wall of the boudoir; played for all the children of all the world who had not the chance to play enough....

“But you are grown-up. Grown-ups cannot play.”

“We did! we did!”

“Are you sure? Were they playing—all the time?”

Had they indeed ever played, all three of them together? Yes; Merle saw clearly now when the change had occurred; when the pendulum, vibrating equally between herself and Peter, had swung completely over. It was after the April night when Stuart had come to her in his trouble, and she had given him comfort.

“But he asked for it—I only gave him what he asked for.”

Just so, my dear. Just so.

—“Merle! chÈrie!”

Merle starts guiltily from her absorption; becomes aware of Monsieur le Vicomte d’AlenÇon, as the oldest present, making a few appropriate remarks in her honour. He tugs his white imperial; bows gracefully in the direction of the so charming granddaughter of their so delightful hostess—

And now they are all clinking and drinking to the good health and good fortune of Mademoiselle des Essarts!

“It’s Merle’s birthday,” said Peter, facing Stuart over their particular table at the Billet-doux.

“Then we’ll drink to Merle’s good health,” Stuart replied.

Glasses raised—eyes meeting steadily over the rims—meeting steadily—kindling to flame—

By the time the circular stems again touch the table-cloth, Merle is forgotten.

END OF PART I