CHAPTER VIII
A FORTUNATE MEETING

MR. WHATELY’S one idea on his return to Hammerton was to hide the fact that Roland’s sudden leaving was the result of a scandal. He wished the decision in no way to seem unpremeditated. Two days later, therefore, he went round to the Curtises’ and prepared the way by a discussion of the value of university training.

“Really, you know, Mrs. Curtis,” he said, “I very much doubt whether Oxford is as useful as we sometimes think it is. What will Roland be able to do afterwards? If I know Roland he will do precious little work. He is not very clever; I doubt if he will get into the Civil Service, and what else is there open to him? Nothing, perhaps, except schoolmastering, and he would not be much use at that. I am not at all certain that it is not wiser, on the whole, to take a boy away at about seventeen or eighteen, send him abroad for a couple of months and then put him into business.”

Mrs. Curtis was not a little surprised. For a good sixteen years Mr. Whately had refused to consider the possibility of any education for Roland other than Fernhurst and Brasenose.

“But you are not thinking of taking him away from Fernhurst and not sending him to Brasenose?” she said.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Curtis, but I have been thinking that if we could do things all over again I am not at all sure but that’s not the way I should have arranged his education.”

That was the first step.

A few nights later he came round again, and again talked of the value of two or three months in France.

“What does Roland think about it, Mr. Whately?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, I only heard from Roland on the subject to-day; he seems quite keen on it. I just threw it out as a suggestion to him. I pointed out that most of his friends will have left at the end of the term, that next year he would be rather lonely, and that there would not be anything very much for him to do when he came down from Oxford. He seemed to agree with me.”

Mrs. Curtis, however, was no fool. She had spent the greater part of her middle age sitting in front of a fire watching life drift past her, and her one amusement had been the examination of the motives and actions of her friends.

“There is something rather curious here,” she said that evening to her husband. “As long as we have known the Whatelys they have insisted on the value of public school and university education. Now, quite suddenly, they have turned round, and they are talking about business and commerce and the value of French.”

Mr. Curtis, who was a credulous creature, saw no reason why they should not change their minds if they wanted to.

“After all,” he said, “it is quite true that Latin and Greek are of very little use to anyone in the City.”

But Mrs. Curtis refused to be convinced.

“I do not care what you say,” she said. “You just wait and see.”

And, sure enough, within a week Mr. Whately had confessed his intention of taking Roland away from Fernhurst at the end of the term.

“And you are going to send him to France?” said Mrs. Curtis.

“I am not quite certain about that,” he said. “I am going to look round first to see if I can’t get him a job at once. We both agree that another year at Fernhurst would be a waste of time.”

Mrs. Curtis smiled pleasantly. As soon as he had gone she expressed herself forcibly.

“I do not believe for a moment,” she insisted, “that Mr. Whately has changed his mind without some pretty strong reason. He was frightfully anxious to see Roland captain of his house. He was so proud of everything he did at Fernhurst. There must be a row or something; unless, of course, he has lost his money.”

But that idea Mr. Curtis pooh-poohed.

“My dear Edith,” he said, “that is quite impossible. You know that Whately’s got a good salaried post in the bank. He has got no private means to lose and he is not the sort of man to live above his income. It is certainly not money. I don’t see why a man should not change his mind if he wants to.”

Mrs. Curtis again refused to be convinced.

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

April was of the same opinion. She knew perfectly well that Roland, of his own free will, would never have agreed to such a plan. There must be trouble of some sort or other, she said to herself, and Roland instantly became more interesting in her eyes. She wondered what he had done. Her knowledge of school life was based mainly upon the stories of Talbot Baines Reid, and she began to picture some adventure in which he had taken the blame upon his own shoulders. A friend of his had contracted liabilities at the Eversham Arms and Roland had become involved; or perhaps someone had endeavored to steal the papers of a Scholarship examination and Roland had been falsely accused. She could not imagine that Roland had himself done anything dishonorable, and she could not be expected to know the usual cause for which boys are suddenly removed from their school. Ralph Richmond was the only person who was likely to know the true story, and to him she went.

Now, there is in the Latin Grammar a morality contained in an example of a conditional sentence which runs in the following words: “Even though they are silent they say enough.” In spite of Ralph’s desperate efforts to assume ignorance it was quite obvious to April that he knew all about it, also that it was something that Roland would not want her to know. She was puzzled and distressed. If there had been no embarrassment between them during the holidays she would probably have written to Roland and asked him about it, but under the conditions she felt that this was impossible.

“I shall have to wait till he returns,” she said. “Perhaps he will tell me of his own accord.”

But when Roland came home he showed not the slightest inclination to tell her anything. If he were acting a part he was acting it extraordinarily well. He told her how glad he was that he was leaving Fernhurst. “One outgrows school,” he said. “It is all right for a bit. It is great fun when you are a fag and when you are half-way up; but it is not worth it when you have got responsibilities. And as I went there at thirteen—a year earlier than most people—nearly all my friends will have left. I should have been very lonely next term. I think I am well out of it.”

April reminded him of his eagerness to go to Oxford. That objection, too, he managed to brush aside.

“Oxford,” he said; “that is nothing but school over again. It is masters and work and regulations. I am very glad it is over.”

For a while she was almost tempted to believe he was telling her the truth, but as August passed she noticed that Roland seemed less satisfied with his prospects. He spoke with diminishing enthusiasm of the freedom of an office. Indeed, whenever she introduced the subject he changed it quickly.

“I expect father will find me something decent soon,” he would say, and began to talk of cricket or of some rag that he remembered.

But Mr. Whately was not finding it easy to procure a post for his son. Roland, after all, possessed no special qualifications. He had been in the Sixth Form of a public school, but he had not been a particularly brilliant member of it. He had passed no standard examinations. He was too young for any important competitive work and Mr. Whately had very few influential friends. Roland began to see before him the prospect of long days spent in a bank—a dismal prospect. “What will it lead to, father?” he used to ask, and Mr. Whately had not been able to hold out very much encouragement.

“Well, I suppose in time if you work well you would become a manager. If you do anything really brilliant you might be given some post of central organization.”

“But it is not very likely, is it, father?” said Roland.

“Not very likely; no.”

The years seemed mapped out before him and he found it difficult to maintain his pose of complacent satisfaction, so that one evening, when he felt more than ordinarily depressed, and when the need of sympathy became irresistible, he found himself telling April the story of his trouble.

She listened to him quietly, sitting huddled up in the window-seat, her knees drawn up towards her, her hands clasped beneath them. She said nothing for a while after he had finished.

“Well,” he said at last, “that’s the story. You know all about it now.”

She looked up at him. There was in her eyes neither annoyance nor repulsion nor contempt, but only interest and sympathy.

“Why did you do it, Roland?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. And because this happened to be the real reason, and because he felt it to be inadequate, he searched his memory for some more plausible account.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed to happen this way: Things were awfully dull at school, and then, during the Christmas holidays, we had that row. If it hadn’t been for that I think I should have chucked it up altogether. But you didn’t seem to care for me; it didn’t seem to matter much either way; and—well one drifts into these things.”

There was another pause.

“But I don’t understand, Roland. Do you mean to say if we hadn’t had that row at Christmas nothing of this would have happened?”

Because their disagreement had not been without its influence on Roland’s general attitude towards his school romance, and because Roland was always at the mercy of the immediate influence, and in the presence of April was unable to think that anything but April could have influenced him, he mistook the part for the whole, and assured her that if they had not had that quarrel at the dance he would have given up Dolly altogether. And because the situation was one they had often met in plays and stories they accepted it as the truth.

“It’s all my fault,” she said, “really all my fault.” And turning her head away from him she allowed her thoughts to travel back to that ineffectual hour of loneliness and resignation. “I can do nothing, nothing myself,” she said. “I can only spoil things for other people.”

At the time Roland was disappointed, but two hours later he decided that he was, on the whole, relieved that Mrs. Curtis should have chosen that particular moment to return from her afternoon call. In another moment he would have been saying things that would have complicated life most confoundedly. April had been very near tears; he disliked heroics. He would have had to do something to console her. He would probably have said to her a great many things that at the time would have seemed to him true, but which afterwards he would have regretted. He had sufficient worries of his own already.

At home life was not made easy for Roland. He received little sympathy. Ralph told him that he deserved all he had got and had been lucky to get off so cheaply. His father repeated a number of moral platitudes, the source of which Roland was able to recognize.

“After all,” said Mr. Whately, “I have been in a bank all my life; I have not done badly in it, and you, with your education and advantages, should be able to do much better.”

This was a line of argument which did not appeal to Roland. He was very fond of his father, but he had always regarded his manner of life as a fate, at all costs, to be avoided. And though his mother in his presence endeavored to make him believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, when she was alone with her husband she saw only her son’s point of view.

“If this is all we have got to offer him,” she said, “all the money and time we have spent will be wasted. If a desk at a bank is going to be the end of it, he might just as well have gone to a day school, and all the extra money we have spent could have been put away for him in a bank.”

Mr. Whately reminded her that the change in their plans was due entirely to Roland.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she said, “that is all very well. But it is a cruel shame that a boy’s whole life should depend on a thing he does when he is seventeen years old.”

Mr. Whately murmured something about it being the way of the world, adding he himself had been in a bank now for thirty years.

“Which is the very reason,” said Mrs. Whately, “that I don’t want my son to go into one”—an argument that did not touch her husband.

But talk how they might, and whatever philosophic attitude they might adopt, the practical position remained unchanged. Roland had been offered a post in a bank, which he could take up at the beginning of October. Three weeks were left him in which he might try to find something better for himself; but of this there seemed little prospect.

And as he sat in the free seats at the Oval, on an afternoon of late September, Roland had to face his position honestly, and own to himself there was no alternative to the bank.

He was lonely as he sat there in the mild sunshine watching the white figures move across the grass. That evening school would be going back and he would not be with them. It was hard to realize that in four hours’ time the cloisters would be alive with voices, that feet would be clattering up and down the study steps, that the eight-fifteen would have just arrived and the rush to the hall would have begun.

The play became slow; two professionals were wearing down the bowling. He began to feel sleepy in the languid atmosphere of this late summer afternoon. He could not concentrate his attention upon the cricket. He could think only of himself, and the river that was bearing him without his knowledge to a country he did not know.

It was not merely that he had left school, that he had exchanged one discipline for another; he had altered entirely his mode of life, and for this new life a new technique would be required. Up till now everything had been marked out clearly in definite stages; he had been working in definite lines. It was not merely that the year was divided into terms, but his career also was so divided. There had been a gradation in everything. It had been his ambition to get his firsts at football, and the path was marked out clearly for him—house cap., seconds, firsts: in form he had wanted to get into the Sixth, and here again the course had been clear—Fourth, Fifth, Sixth: he had wanted to become a house prefect; the process was the same—day room table, Lower Fourth table, Fifth Form table, Sixth Form table. He had known exactly what he was doing; everything had been made simple for him. His ambitions had been protected. It was quite different now; nothing was clearly defined. He would have to spend a certain number of hours a day in an office. Outside of that office he would be free to do what he liked. He could choose his own ambition, but as yet he could not decide what that would be. He was as dazed by the imminence of this freedom as a mortal man whose world is ordered by the limits of time and space when confronted suddenly with the problem of infinity. Roland could not come to terms with a world in which he would not be tethered to one spot by periods of three months. His reverie was interrupted by a hand that descended heavily on his shoulder and a voice he recognized, that addressed him by his name. He turned and saw Gerald Marston standing behind him.

“So you are a free man at last,” he said. “How did the rest of the term go?”

It was a pleasant surprise; and Roland welcomed the prospect of a cheery afternoon with a companion who would soon dispel his melancholy.

“Oh, not so badly,” he said. “I lay pretty quiet and saw as little of Carus Evans as I could.”

“And how is the amiable Brewster?” asked Marston.

“He’s all right, I suppose. He won’t have much of a time this year, though, I should think. He ought to have been captain of the XI., but they say now he is not responsible enough, and Jenkins, a man he absolutely hates, is going to run it instead.”

“So you’re not sorry you have left?”

Roland shrugged his shoulders.

“In a way not; if there hadn’t been a row, though, I should have had a pretty good time this term.”

“Well, you can’t have things both ways. What’s going to happen to you now?”

With most people Roland would have preferred to pass the matter off with some casual remark about his father having got him a good job in the City. He liked sympathy, but was afraid of sympathy when it became pity. He did not want the acquaintances who, six months ago, had been talking of him as “that lucky little beast, Whately,” to speak of him now as “poor old Whately; rotten luck on him; have you heard about it?” But it is always easier to make a confession to a stranger than to a person with whom one is brought into daily contact. Marston was a person with whom he felt intimate, although he knew him so little; and so he found himself telling Marston about the bank and of the dismal future that awaited him.

Marston was highly indignant.

“What a beastly shame,” he said. “You will simply hate it. Cannot your father get you something better?”

“I don’t think so. He has always lived a very quiet life; he has not got any influential friends—but really, what’s the good of talking about it? Something may turn up. Let’s watch the cricket.”

“Oh, rot, man!” expostulated Marston. “You can’t let the thing drop like this. After all, my father is rather a big pot in the varnish world; he may be able to do something.”

“But I don’t know anything about varnish.”

“You don’t need to, my dear fellow. The less you know about it the better. All you’ve got to do is to believe that our kind of varnish is the best.” And as they walked round the ground during the tea interval a happy idea occurred to Marston.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “We have got a cricket match on Saturday against the village; we’re quite likely to be a man short; at any rate we can always play twelve-a-side. You come down and stay the week-end with us. The pater’s frightfully keen on cricket. If you can manage to make a few he’s sure to be impressed, and then I’ll tell him all about you. You will get a pleasant week-end and I expect quite a good game of cricket.”

Roland naturally accepted this proposal eagerly. He did not, however, tell his people of the prospect of a job in Marston & Marston, Limited; he preferred to wait till things were settled one way or another. If he were to be disappointed, he would prefer to be disappointed alone. He did not need any sympathy at such a time.

But when he went round to the Curtises’ April could tell, from the glow in his face, that he was unusually excited about something. She did not have a chance to speak to him when he was in the drawing-room. Her mother talked and talked. Arthur had just gone back to school and she was garrulous about his outfit.

“It is so absurd, you know, Mr. Whately,” she said, “the way people say women care more about clothes than men. There is Arthur to-day; he insisted on having linen shirts instead of woolen ones, although woolen shirts are much nicer and much warmer. ‘My dear Arthur,’ I said, ‘no one can see your shirt; your waistcoat hides most of it and your tie the rest.’ But he said that all the boys wore linen shirts instead of flannel. ‘But, my dear Arthur,’ I said, ‘who is going to see what kind of a shirt you are wearing if it is covered by your waistcoat and tie? And I can cut your sleeves shorter so that they would not be seen beneath your coat.’ And do you know what he said, Mr. Whately? He said, ‘You don’t understand, mother; the boys would see that I was wearing a flannel shirt when I changed for football, and I would be ragged for it.’ Well, now, Mr. Whately, isn’t that absurd?”

She went on talking and talking about every garment she had bought for her son—his ties, his boots, his socks, his coat.

Roland hardly talked at all. His father mentioned that he was going down for the week-end to stay with some friends and take part in a cricket match.

“So that is what you are so excited about!” April had interposed. And Roland had laughed and said that that was it.

But she would not believe that he could be so excited about a game of cricket, and in the hall she had pulled him by his coat sleeve.

“What is it?” she had whispered. “Something has happened. It is not only a cricket match.”

And because he wanted to share his enthusiasm with someone, and because April looked so pretty, and because he felt that courage would flow to him from her faith in him, he confided in her his hope.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” she said. “I do hope things will turn out all right. I’ve felt so guilty all along about it; if it hadn’t been for me none of this would ever have happened.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Roland. “Things are beginning to turn right now.”

There was no time for further conversation; Mrs. Curtis had completed her doorstep homily to Mr. Whately. April pressed Roland’s hand eagerly as she said good-by to him.

“Good luck!” she whispered.

CHAPTER IX
HOGSTEAD

IT was a glorious week, and through Thursday and Friday Roland watched in nervous anticipation every cloud that crossed the pale blue sky. Sooner or later the weather must break, he felt; and it would be fatal for his prospects if it rained now. It is miserable to sit in a pavilion and watch the wicket slowly become a bog; cheeriness under such conditions is anti-social. Mr. Marston would be unable to work up any sympathy for him, and would remember him as “that fellow who came down for the cricket match that was such a fiasco”—an unfortunate association.

Everything went well, however. Roland traveled down on the Friday night, and as he got out of the train at Hogstead station he saw the spire of the church black against a green and scarlet sky. “With such a sky it can hardly be wet to-morrow,” he said.

The Marstons were a rich family, and it was the first time Roland had seen anything of the life of really wealthy people. He was met at the station and was driven up through a long, curving drive to a Georgian house surrounded by well-kept lawns. Marston received him in a large, oak-paneled hall, and although at first Roland was a little embarrassed by the attentions of the footman, who took his hat and coat and bag, within five minutes he found himself completely at his ease, sitting in a deep arm-chair discussing with Mr. Marston the prospects of a certain young cricketer who had made his first appearance that summer at the Oval.

Mr. Marston was a fine healthy man, in the autumn of life. The enthusiasm of his early years had been spent in a bitter struggle to build up his business and he had had very little time for amusement. During the long hours at his desk and the long evenings with ledgers and account-books piled before him he had looked forward to the days when he would be able to delegate his authority and spend most of his time in the country, within the sound of bat and ball. Having had little coaching he was himself a poor performer; for which reason he was the more kindly disposed to anyone who showed promise. It was a rule of his estate that, winter as well as summer, every gardener, groom and servant should spend ten minutes each morning bowling at the nets. He lived in the hope that one day an under-gardener would be deemed worthy of transportation to the county ground.

“My son tells me you are a great performer,” he said to Roland.

“Oh, no, sir; only very moderate. I did not get into the first XI. at Fernhurst.”

“They had an awfully strong XI.,” interposed Marston. “And he had a blooming good average for the second. Didn’t you make a century against the town?”

Roland confessed that he had, but remarked that with such bowling it was very hard to do anything else.

“Well, ten other people managed to,” said Marston.

“And a century is a century whoever makes it,” said his father, who had never made as many as fifty in his life. “You’ve got to make a lot of good shots to make a hundred.”

“At any rate,” said Marston, “I don’t mind betting he gets a few to-morrow.”

And for half an hour they exchanged memories of the greatest of all games.

Roland found his evening clothes neatly laid out on his bed when he went up to change for dinner; and when he came down the whole family was assembled in the drawing-room. There were Mrs. Marston, a large rather plump woman of about fifty years old; her daughter Muriel, a small and pretty girl, with her light hair scattered over her shoulders; and two or three other members of the next day’s side. There was an intimate atmosphere of comfort and well-being to which Roland was unaccustomed. At home they had only one servant, and had to wait a good deal upon themselves. He enjoyed the silent, unobtrusive methods of the two men who waited on them. He never needed to ask for anything; as soon as he had finished his bread another piece was offered him; his glass was filled as it began to empty; and the conversation was like the meal—calm, leisured, polished.

Roland sat next to Muriel and found her a delightful companion. She was at an age when school and games filled her life completely. She told Roland of a rag that they had perpetrated on their French mistress, and he recounted her the exploits of one Foster, who used to dress up at night, go down to the Eversham Arms, sing songs and afterwards pass round the hat.

Roland had his doubts as to the existence of Foster; he had become at Fernhurst one of those mythical creatures which every school possesses—a fellow who took part in one or two amusing escapades, and around whose name had accumulated the legends of many generations. His story was worth telling, none the less.

After dinner they walked out into the garden, with the chill of the autumn night in the air. It reminded Roland that his sojourn in that warmly colored life was only temporary, and that outside it was the cold, cheerless struggle for existence.

“It is so ripping this,” he said to Muriel, “and it is so rotten to think that in a few weeks I shall be sitting down in front of a desk and adding up figures.” He told her, though she was already acquainted with the facts, of how he had left Fernhurst at the end of the term, and in a few weeks would be going into a bank.

“Oh, how beastly,” she said. “I suppose you will have rotten short holidays?”

“A fortnight a year.”

“I think it is a shame,” she said. “I am sure a boy like you ought to be leading an open-air life somewhere.”

And that night, before he fell asleep, Roland thought wistfully of the company he had met that day. It was marvelous how money smoothed everything. It was the oil that made the cogs in the social machine revolve; without it there was no rhythm or harmony, but only a broken, jarring movement. Without money he felt life must be always in a degree squalid. He remembered his own home and the numerous worries about small accounts and small expenses; he knew how it had worn down the energy of his father. He knew that such worries would never touch a girl like Muriel. How easy and good-natured all these people were; they were flowers that had been grown in a fertile soil. Everything depended upon the soil in which one was planted; the finest plants would wither if they grew far from the sunshine in a damp corner of a field.

Next day Roland awoke to a world heavy with a dripping golden mist, that heralded a bright hot day. There had been a heavy dew, and after breakfast they all walked down to the ground to look at the wicket.

“If we win the toss to-day, Gerald,” said Mr. Marston to his son, “I think we had better put them in first. It is bound to play a bit trickily for the first hour or so.”

There was no need for such subtlety, however, for the village won the toss, and, as is the way with villagers, decided to go in first.

“Good,” said Mr. Marston, “and if we have not got eight of them out by lunch I shall be very surprised.”

And, sure enough, eight of the village were out by lunch, but the score had reached one hundred and five. This was largely due to three erratic overs that had been sent down by an ecclesiastical student from Wells who had bowled, perhaps in earnest of future compromise, on the leg theory, with his field placed upon the off.

The local butcher had collected some thirty runs off these three overs, and thirty runs in a village match when the whole score of a side does not usually reach more than fifty or sixty is a serious consideration.

At lunch time Mr. Marston was most apologetic. “I had heard he was a good bowler,” he said to Roland, “and I thought it would be a good thing to give him a chance to bowl early on; and then when I saw him getting hit all over the place I imagined he was probably angling for a catch or something; and then after he had been hit about in the first two overs I had to give him a third for luck.”

“An expensive courtesy,” said Roland.

“Perhaps it was; but, after all, a hundred and five is not a great deal, and we have a good many bats on our side.”

Within half an hour’s time a hundred and five for eight had become a hundred and fifty. Under the kindly influence of his excellent champagne cup Mr. Marston had decided to give the ecclesiastical student another opportunity of justifying his reputation. He did not redeem that reputation. He sent down two overs, which resulted—in addition to three wides and a “no ball”—in twenty-five runs; and a hundred and fifty would take a lot of getting. Indeed, Mr. Marston’s XI. never looked at all like getting them.

Roland, who was sent in first, was caught at short leg in the second over; it was off a bad ball and a worse stroke—a slow, long hop that he hit right across, and skied. He was bitterly disappointed. He did not mind making ducks; it was all in the run of a game, and he never minded if he was got out by a good ball. But it was hard on such a day to throw away one’s wicket.

“Very bad luck indeed,” said Muriel, as he reached the pavilion.

“Not bad luck, bad play!” he remarked good humoredly. Having taken off his pads he sat down beside her and watched the game. It was not particularly exciting; wickets fell with great regularity. Mr. Marston made a few big hits, and his son stayed in for a little while without doing anything much more than keep his end up. In the end the total reached a hundred and thirteen, and in a one-day match a first innings result was usually final. But Mr. Marston was not at all despondent. He refused to wait for the tea interval and led his side straight on to the field.

“We don’t want any rest,” he said. “Most of us have rested the whole afternoon, and those of the other side who are not batting can have tea.”

It was now four-thirty; two hours remained before the drawing of stumps, and from now on the game became really exciting. Marston took two wickets in his first over, and at the other end a man was run out. Three wickets were down for two runs; a panic descended upon the villagers. The cobbler was sent in to join the doctor, with strict instructions not to hit on any account. The cobbler was not used to passive resistance; he played carefully for a couple of overs, then a faster ball from Marston found the edge of the bat. Short slip was for him, providentially, asleep, and the umpire signaled a four. This seemed to throw him off his balance.

“It is no good,” he said. “If I start mucking about like that I don’t stand the foggiest chance of sticking in. I’m going to have a hit.”

At the next ball he did have a hit—right across it, and his middle stump fell flat.

After this there was no serious attempt to wear down the bowling. Rustic performers—each with a style more curious than the last—drove length balls on the off stump in the direction of long on. Wickets fell quickly. The score rose; and by the time the innings was over only an hour was left for play, and ninety-two runs were required to win—ninety-two runs against time in a fading light, on a wicket that had been torn up by hob-nailed boots, was not the easiest of tasks.

“Still, we must have a shot for it,” Mr. Marston said. “We cannot be more than beaten, and we are that already.”

And so Gerald Marston and Roland went in to open the innings with the firm intention of getting on or getting out.

The start was sensational. Marston had few pretensions to style; and indeed his unorthodox, firm-footed drive had been the despair of the Fernhurst Professional. The ball, when he hit it, went into the air far more often than along the ground. And probably no one was more surprised than he was when he hit the first two balls that he received right along the ground to the boundary, past cover-point. The third ball was well up; he took a terrific drive at it, missed it, and was very nearly bowled. Roland, who was backing up closely, called him for a run, and if surprise at so unparalleled an example of impertinence had not rendered the wicket-keeper impotent, nothing could have saved him from being run out. A fever entered into Roland’s brain. He knew quite well that he ought to play carefully for a few balls to get his eye in, but that short run had flung him off his balance. The first ball he received he hit at with a horizontal bat, and it sailed, fortunately for him, over cover-point’s head for two. He attempted a similar stroke at the next ball, was less fortunate, and saw cover-point prepare himself for an apparently easy catch. But there is a kindly Providence which guards the reckless.

Cover-point was the doctor, and probably the safest man in the whole field to whom to send a catch. He was not, however, proof against the impetuous ardor of mid-off. Mid-off saw the ball in the air and saw nothing else. He rushed to where it was about to fall. He arrived at the spot just when the doctor’s hands were preparing a comfortable nest for the ball, and the doctor and mid-off fell in a heap together, with the ball beneath them!

Twelve runs had been scored in the first five balls; there had been a possible run out; a catch had been missed at cover-point. It was a worthy start to a great innings.

After that everything went right with Roland. He attempted and brought off some remarkably audacious shots. He let fly at everything that was at all pitched up to him. Sometimes he hit the ball in the center of the bat, and it sailed far into the long field, but even his mishits were powerful enough to lift the ball out of reach of the instanding fieldsman; and fortune was kind. By the time Marston was caught at the wicket the score had reached fifty-seven, and there were still twenty-five minutes left for play. At the present rate of scoring there would be no difficulty in getting the runs. At this point, however, a misfortune befell them.

In the first innings the ecclesiastical student had made a duck; he had not, indeed, received a single ball. His predecessor had been bowled by the last ball of an over, and off the first ball of the next over the man at the other end had called him for an impossible run and he had been run out. To recompense him for this ill luck Mr. Marston had put him in first wicket down. “After all,” he had said, “we ought to let the man have a show, and if he does make a duck it won’t make any difference.” He was not prepared, however, for what did occur. The ecclesiastical student was a left-handed batsman, and a sigh of relief seemed to go up from the fielding side at the revelation. They were sportsmen; they were prepared to run across in the middle of the over; but even so, the preparation of a field for a left-hander was a lengthy business.

A gray gloom descended on the pavilion.

“Well, I declare!” said Mr. Marston. “First of all he bowls on the leg theory, with his field placed on the off, and then at a moment like this he doesn’t let us know that he’s a left-hander!”

And the prospective divine appeared to be quite unconscious of the situation. He had come out to enjoy himself; so far he had not enjoyed himself greatly. He had taken no wickets, and had been responsible for the loss of some fifty runs. This was his last chance, and he was not going to hurry himself. He played his first three balls carefully, and placed the last ball of the over in front of short leg for a single. During the next four overs only eight runs were scored; four of these were from carefully placed singles, off the fifth and sixth balls in the over. Roland only had three balls altogether, and off one of these he managed to get a square leg boundary.

The total had now reached sixty-five, twenty-eight runs were still wanted, and only a quarter of an hour remained. Unless the left-hander were got out at once there seemed to be no chance of winning; this fact the village appreciated.

One would not say, of course, that the bowlers did not do their best to dismiss the ecclesiastical student; they were conscientious men. But it is very hard to bowl one’s best if one knows that one’s success will be to the eventual disadvantage of one’s side; a certain limpness is bound to creep into the attack. And if Roland had received the balls that were being sent down to his partner, there is little doubt that a couple of overs would have seen the end of the match.

Roland realized that something desperate must be done. Either the left-hander must get out, or he himself must get down to the other end; and so off the first ball of the next over Roland backed up closely. He was halfway down the pitch by the time the ball reached the batsman. It was a straight half-volley, which was met with a motionless, if perpendicular, bat. The ball trickled into the hands of mid-off.

“Come on!” yelled Roland.

It was an impossible run, and the left-hander stood, in startled dismay, a few steps outside the crease.

“Run!” yelled Roland. His partner ran a few steps, saw the ball was in the hands of mid-off, and prepared to walk back to the pavilion. Mid-off, however, was in a highly electric state. He had already imperiled severely the prospects of his side by colliding with cover-point, and was resolved, at any rate, not to make a second blunder. He had the ball in his hands. There was a chance of running a batsman out; he must get the ball to the unprotected wicket as soon as possible, and so, taking careful aim, he flung the ball at the wicket with the greatest possible violence. It missed the wicket; and a student of the score book would infer that, after having played himself in carefully and scoring four singles, F. R. Armitage opened his shoulders in fine form. He might very well remain in this illusion, for there is no further entry in the score book against that gentleman’s name. There are just four singles and a five. He did not receive another ball.

Off the next four balls of the over Roland hit two fours and a two; off the last ball he got another dangerously close single. Only ten more runs were needed: there was now ample time in which to get them. Roland got them indeed off the first four balls of the next over.

At the end of the match there was a scene of real enthusiasm, in which Mr. Armitage was the only person who took no part. He was still wondering what had induced Roland to call him for those absurd singles. He indeed took Mr. Marston aside after dinner and pointed out to him that that young man should really be given a few lessons in backing up.

“My dear sir,” he said, “it was only the merest fluke that saved my wicket—another inch and I should have been run out.”

“Well, he managed to win the match for us,” replied Mr. Marston.

“Perhaps, perhaps, but he nearly ran me out.”

Mr. Armitage was, however, the only one of the party at all alarmed by Roland’s daring. That evening Roland was a small hero. Mr. Marston could find no words too good for him.

“A splendid fellow,” he said to Gerald afterwards. “A really splendid fellow—the sort of friend I have always wanted you to make—a first-class, open, straight fellow.”

Marston thought this a good opportunity to drop a hint about Roland’s position.

“Yes—a first-class fellow,” he said. “Isn’t it rotten to think a chap like that will have to spend the whole of his life in a bank, with only a fortnight’s holiday a year, and no chance at all to develop his game!”

Mr. Marston’s rubicund face expressed appropriate disapproval.

“That fellow going to spend all his life in a bank? Preposterous! He will be simply ruined there—a fellow who can play cricket like that!”

Mr. Marston, having spent his own life at a desk, was anxious to save anyone else from a similar fate, especially a cricketer.

“Well, it seems the only thing for him to do, father; his people haven’t got much money and have no influence. I know they have tried to get him something better, but they haven’t been able to.”

“My dear Gerald, why didn’t you tell me about it? If I had known a fellow like that was being tied up in a bank I’d have tried to do something to help him.”

“Well, it’s not too late now, is it?”

“No, but it’s rather short notice, isn’t it? What could he do?”

“Pretty well anything you could give him, father. He is jolly keen.”

“Um!” said Mr. Marston; and Gerald, who knew his father well, recognized that he was about to immerse himself in deep thought, and that it would be wiser to leave him alone.

By next morning the deep thought had crystallized into an idea.

“Look here, Gerald,” said Mr. Marston. “I don’t know what this young man is worth to me from a business point of view—probably precious little at present. But he is a good fellow, the sort of young chap we really want in the business. None of us are any younger than we were. As far as I know, you are the only person under thirty in the whole show. Now, what we do want badly just now are a few more foreign connections. We have got the English market pretty well, but that is not enough. We want the French and Belgian and German markets, and later on we shall want the South American markets. Now, what I suggest is this: that when you go out to France in November you should take young Whately with you, show him round, and see what he is worth generally; and then we will send him off on a tour of his own and see how many clients he brings us. He is just the sort of fellow I want for that job. We don’t want the commercial traveler type at all; he is very good at small accounts, but he does not do for the big financiers. I want a man who is good enough to mix in society abroad—whom big men like Bertram can ask to their houses. A man like that would always have a pull over a purely business man. Now, if your young friend would care to have a shot at that, he can; and if he makes good at it he will be making more at twenty-five with us than he would be at a bank by the time he was fifty.”

Marston carried the news at once to Roland.

“My lad,” he said, “that innings of yours is about the most useful thing that has ever happened to you in your life. The old man thinks so much of you he is prepared to cut me out of his will almost; at any rate, as far as I can make out, he is going to offer you a job in our business.”

“What?”

“You will have to fix it up with him, of course, but he suggested to me that you and I should go out together to France in November, and you will be able to see the sort of way we do things, and then he will give you a shot on your own as representative. If you do well at it—well, my lad, you will be pretty well made for life!”

It was wonderful news for Roland. Life, at the very moment when it had appeared to be closing in on him, had marvelously broadened out. He returned home on the Monday morning, not only excited by the prospect of a new and attractive job, but moved irresistibly by this sudden vision of a world to which he was unaccustomed—by the charm, the elegance and the direct good-naturedness of this family life.

CHAPTER X
YOUNG LOVE

ROLAND said nothing to his people of Mr. Marston’s conversation with Gerald. He disliked scenes and an atmosphere of expectation. When everything was settled finally he would tell them, but he would not risk the exposure of his hope to the chill of disappointment. He could not, however, resist the temptation to confide in April. She was young; she could share his failures as his successes. Life was before them both.

No sooner had he turned the corner of the road than he saw the door of the Curtises’ house open. April was in the porch waiting for him. “She must have been looking for me,” he thought. “Sitting in the window-seat, hoping that I would come.” His pride as well as his affection was touched by this clear proof of her interest in him.

“Well?” she said.

“I made a duck,” he answered; and his vanity noted that her brown eyes clouded suddenly with disappointment. “But that was only in the first innings,” he added.

“Oh, you pig!” she said, “and I thought that after all it had come to nothing.”

Roland laughed at the quick change to relief.

“But how do you know that I did do anything in the second innings?”

“You must have.”

“But why?”

“‘Cos—oh, I don’t know. It’s not fair to tease me, Roland; tell me what happened.” They had passed into the hall, shutting the door behind them, and she pulled impatiently at his sleeve: “Come on, tell me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I made forty-eight not out.”

“Oh, how ripping, how ripping! Come and tell me all about it,” and catching him by the hand she led him to the window-seat, from which, on that miserable afternoon, she had gazed for over an hour down the darkening street. “Come on, tell me everything.”

And though he at first endeavored to assume an attitude of superior indifference, he soon found himself telling the story of the match eagerly, dramatically. Reticence was well enough in the presence of the old and middle-aged—parents, relatives and schoolmasters—for all those who had put behind them the thrill of wakening confidence and were prepared to patronize it in others, from whose scrutiny the young had to protect their emotions with the shield of “it is no matter.” But April’s enthusiasm was fresh, unquestioning and freely given; he could not but respond to it.

She listened to the story with alert, admiring eyes. “And were they awfully pleased with you?” she said when he had finished.

“Well, it was pretty exciting.”

“And did Mr. Marston say anything to you?”

“Rather! Quite a lot. He was more excited than anyone.”

“Oh, yes, but I didn’t mean the cricket. Did he say anything about the business?”

Roland nodded.

“Oh, but, Roland, what?”

“Well, I’m not quite certain what, but I think he’s going to let me have a shot at some sort of foreign representative affair.”

“But, how splendid!” She felt that she shared, in a measure, in his success. It was in her that he had confided his hopes; it was to her that he had brought the news of his good fortune. Her face was flushed and eager, its expression softened by her faith in him. And Roland who, up till then, had regarded her as little more than a friend, her charm as a delicate, elusive fragrance, was unprepared for this simple joy in his achievement. The surprise placed in his mouth ardent, unconsidered words.

“But I shouldn’t have been able to do anything without you,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, feeling herself grow nervous, taut, expectant.

“You encouraged me when I was depressed,” he said. “You believed in me. You told me that things would come right. And because of your belief they have come right. If it hadn’t been for you I shouldn’t have worried; I should have resigned myself to the bank. As likely as not I shouldn’t have gone down to the Marstons’ at all. It’s all you.”

There was a pause. And when at last she spoke, the intonation of her voice was tender.

“Is that true, Roland, really true?”

And as she looked at him, with her clear brown eyes, he believed implicitly that it was true. He was not play-acting. His whole being was softened and made tender by her beauty, by the sight of her calm, oval face and quiet color, her hair swept in a wide curve across her forehead, gathered under the smooth skin of her neck. His manhood grew strong through her belief in him. She was the key that would open for him the gate of adventure. He leaned forward, took her hands in his, and the touch of her fingers brought to his lips an immediate avowal.

“It’s quite true, April, every word of it. I shouldn’t have done anything but for you.” Her brown eyes clouded with a mute gratitude. Gently he drew her by the hand towards him, and she made no effort to resist him. “April,” he murmured, “April.”

It was the first real kiss of his life. His mouth did not meet hers as it had met Dolly’s, in a hungry fierceness; he did not hold her in his arms as he had held Dolly; did not press her to him till she was forced, as Dolly had been, to fling her head back and gasp for breath. For an instant April’s cheek was against his and his mouth touched hers: nothing more. But in that cool contact of her lips he found for the first time the romance, poetry, ecstasy, and what you will, of love. And when his arms released her and she leaned back, her hand in his, a deep tenderness remained with them. He said nothing. There was no need for words. They sat silent in face of the mystery they had discovered.

Roland walked home in harmony with himself, with nature; one with the rhythm of life that was made manifest in the changing seasons of the year; the green leaf and the bud; the flower and the fruit; the warm days of harvesting. Hammerton was stretched languid beneath the September sunshine. The sky was blue, a pale blue, that whitened where it was cut by the sharp outline of roof and chimney-stack. The leaves that had been fresh and green in May, but had grown dull in the heat and dust of summer, were once more beautiful. The dirty green had changed to a shriveled, metallic copper. A few mornings of golden mist would break into a day of sultry splendor; then would come the first warning of frost—the chill air at sundown, the gray dawn that held no promise of sunshine. Oh, soon enough the boughs would be leafless, the streets bare and wintersome. But who could be sad on this day of suspended decadence, this afternoon laden with the heavy autumn scents? Were not the year’s decay, the lengthening evenings, part of the eternal law of nature—birth and death, spring and winter, and an awakening after sleep? The falling leaves suggested to him no analogy with the elusive enchantments of the senses.

Two days later he received a letter from Mr. Marston offering him a post of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, with all expenses found.

“You will understand, of course,” the letter ran, “that at present you are on probation. Our work is personal and requires special gifts. These gifts, however, I believe you to possess. For both our sakes I hope that you will make a success of this. Gerald is sailing for Brussels at the end of October, and I expect that you will be able to arrange to accompany him. He will tell you what you will need to take out with you. We usually make our representatives an allowance of fifteen pounds for personal expenses, but I daresay that we could in your case, if it is necessary, increase this sum.”

Roland handed the letter to his father.

Mr. Whately, as usual in the morning, was in a state of nervous excitement. He was always a considerable trial to his family at breakfast. And as often as possible Roland delayed his own appearance till he had heard the slam of the front door. It is not easy to enjoy a meal when someone is bouncing from table to sideboard, reading extracts from the morning paper, opening letters, running up and down stairs, forgetting things in the hall. Mr. Whately had never been able to face the first hour of the morning with dignity and composure. When Roland handed him Mr. Marston’s letter he received it with the impatience of a busy man, who objects to being worried by an absurd trifle.

“Yes, what is it? What is it?”

“A letter from Mr. Marston, father, that I thought you might like to read.”

“Oh, yes, of course; well, wait a minute,” and he projected himself out of the door and up the stairs. He returned to the table within a minute, panting and flustered.

“Yes; now what’s the time? Twenty-five past eight. I’ve got seven minutes. Where’s this letter of yours, Roland? Let me see.”

He picked up the letter and began to read it as he helped himself to another rasher of bacon. His agitation increased as he read.

“But I don’t understand,” he said impatiently. “What’s all this about Mr. Marston offering you a post in his business?”

“What’s that, dear?” said Mrs. Whately quickly. “Isn’t Roland going into the bank after all?”

“Yes, of course he is going into the bank,” her husband replied hastily. “It’s all settled. Don’t interrupt me, Roland. I can’t understand what you’ve been doing!”

And he flung the back of his hand against his forehead, a favorite gesture when the pressure of the conversation grew intense.

“I don’t know what it’s all about, Roland,” he continued. “I don’t know anything about this man. Who he is, and what he is. And I don’t know why you’ve been arranging all these things behind my back.”

Roland expressed surprise that his father had not welcomed the offer of so promising a post. But Mr. Whately was too flustered to consider the matter in this light. “It may be a better job,” he said, “I don’t know. But the bank has been settled and I can’t think why you should want to alter things. At any rate, I can’t stop to discuss it now,” and a minute later the front door had banged behind a querulous, irritable little man, who considered no one had any right to disturb—especially at the breakfast table—the placid course of his existence. As he left the room he flung the letter upon the table, and Mrs. Whately snatched it up eagerly. Roland watched carefully the expression of her face as she read it. At first he noted there only a relieved happiness, but as she folded the letter and handed it back he saw that she was sad.

“Of course it’s splendid, Roland,” she said. “I’m delighted, but.... Oh, well, I do think you might have told us something about it before.”

“I wanted to, mother, but one doesn’t like to shout till one’s out of the wood.”

“With friends, no, but with one’s parents—surely you might have confided in us.”

There was no such implied disapproval in April’s reception of the news. He had not seen her since the afternoon when he had kissed her, and he had wondered in what spirit she would receive him. Would there be awkward stammered explanations? Would she be coy and protest “that she had been silly, that she had not meant it, that it must never happen again?” He had little previous experience to guide him and he was still debating the point when he arrived at No. 73 Hammerton Rise.

What April Curtis did was to open the door for him, close it quickly behind him as soon as he was in the porch, take him happily by both hands and hold her face up to be kissed. There was not the least embarrassment in her action.

“Well?” she said, on a note of interrogation.

For answer he put his hand into his pocket, drew out Mr. Marston’s letter and gave it to her.

April pulled it out of the envelope, hurriedly unfolded it, and ran an engrossed eye over its contents.

“Oh, but how splendid, Roland; now it’s all right. Now there’s no need to worry about anything. Come at once and tell mother. Mother, mother!” she shouted, and catching Roland by the hand dragged him after her towards the drawing-room.

Mrs. Curtis had, through the laborious passage of fifty-two uneventful years, so trained her face to assume on all occasions an expression of pleasant sentimental interest in the affairs of others that by now her features could not be arranged to accommodate any other emotion. She appeared therefore unastonished when her name was called loudly in the hall, when the drawing-room door was flung open and a flushed, excited April stood in the doorway grasping by the hand an equally flushed but embarrassed Roland. Mrs. Curtis laid her knitting in her lap; a kindly smile spread over her glazed countenance.

“Well, my dear, and what’s all this about?” she said.

“Oh, it’s so exciting, mother. Roland’s not going into a bank after all.”

“No, dear?”

“No, mother. A Mr. Marston, you know the man whom Roland went to stay with last week, has offered him a post in his firm. It’s a lovely job. He’ll be traveling all over the world and he’s going to get a salary; of how much is it—yes, a hundred and fifty pounds a year and all expenses paid. Isn’t it splendid?”

Mrs. Curtis purred with reciprocated pleasure: “Of course it is, and how pleased your parents must be. Come and sit down here; yes, shut the door, please. You know I always said to Mr. Whately, ‘Roland is going to do something big; I’m sure of it.’ And now you see my prophecy has come true. I shall remind Mr. Whately of that next time he comes round to see me, and I shall remind him, too, that I said exactly the same thing about Arthur. ‘Mr. Whately,’ I said,” and her voice trailed off into reminiscences.

But though Mrs. Curtis was in many—and indeed in most—ways a troublesome old fool, she was not unobservant. She knew that a young girl does not rush into a drawing-room dragging a young man by the hand simply because that young man has obtained a lucrative post in a varnish factory. There must be some other cause for so vigorous an ebullition. And as Mrs. Curtis’s speculation was unvexed by the complexities of Austrian psychology, she assumed that Roland and April had fallen in love with each other. She was not surprised. She had indeed often wondered why they had not done so before. April was such a dear girl, and Roland could be trained into a highly sympathetic son-in-law. He listened to her conversation with respect and interest, whereas Ralph Richmond insisted on interrupting her. Roland would make April a good husband. Certainly she had been temporarily disquieted by Mr. Whately’s sudden decision to remove his son from school; but no doubt he had had this post in his mind’s eye and had not wished to speak of it till everything had been fixed.

Mrs. Curtis’s reverie traversed into an agreeable future; she pictured the wedding at St. Giles; they would have the full choir. There would be a reception afterwards at the Town Hall. April would look so pretty in orange blossom. Arthur would be the best man. He would stand beside the bridegroom, erect and handsome. “What fine children you have, Mrs. Curtis!” That’s what everyone would say to her. It would be the prettiest wedding there had ever been at St. Giles.... She collected herself with a start. She must not be premature. Nothing was settled yet; they were not even engaged. And of course they could not be engaged yet: They were too absurdly young. Everyone would laugh at her. Still, there might be an understanding. An understanding was first cousin to an engagement; it bound both parties. And then April and Roland would be allowed to go about together. It would be so nice for them.

When Roland had gone, she fixed on her daughter a deep, questioning look, under which April began to grow uncomfortable.

“Well, mother?” she said.

“You like Roland very much, don’t you, dear?”

“We’re great friends.”

“Only friends?”

April did not answer, and her mother repeated her question. “But you’re more than friends, aren’t you?” But April was still silent. Mrs. Curtis leaned forward and took April’s hand, lifted for a moment out of her vain complacency by the recollection of herself as she had been a quarter of a century ago, like April, with life in front of her. Through placid waters she had come to a safe anchorage, and she wondered whether for April the cruise would be as fortunate, the hand at the helm as steady. Her husband had risked little, but Roland would scarcely be satisfied with safe travel beneath the cliffs. Would April be happier or less happy than she had been? Which was the better—blue skies, calm water, gently throbbing engines, or the pitch and toss and crash of heavy seas?

“Are you very fond of him, dear?” she whispered.

“Yes, mother.”

“And he’s fond of you?”

“I think so, mother.”

“Has he told you so, dear?”

“Yes.”

A tear gathered in the corner of her eye, stung her, welled, fell upon her cheek, and this welcome relief recalled her to what she considered the necessities of the moment.

“Of course I shall have to speak to the Whatelys about it.”

A shocked, surprised expression came into April’s face.

“Oh, but why, mother?”

“Because, my dear, they may have other plans for Roland.”

“But ... oh, mother, dear, there’s no talk of engagements or anything; we’ve just ... oh, why can’t we go on as we are?”

Mrs. Curtis was firm.

“No, my dear,” she said, “it would be fair neither to you nor to them. It’s not only you and Roland that have to be considered. It’s your father and myself and Mr. and Mrs. Whately. We shall have to talk it over together.”

And so when Roland returned that evening from an afternoon with Ralph he found his father and mother sitting in the drawing-room with Mrs. Curtis.

“Ah, here’s Roland,” said Mrs. Curtis. “Come along, Roland, we’ve just been talking about you.”

Roland entered and sat on the chair nearest him. He looked from one to the other, and each in turn smiled at him reassuringly; their smile said, “Now don’t be nervous. We mean you well. You’ve only got to agree to our conditions and we’ll be ever so nice to you.” In the same way, Roland reflected, the Spanish Inquisitors had recommended conversion to the faith with a smile upon their lips, while from the adjoining room sounds came that the impenitents would be wise to associate with furnaces and screws and pliant steel.

“Yes, Roland,” said Mr. Whately, “we’ve been talking about you and April.”

“Damn!” said Roland to himself. It was like that ridiculous Dolly affair all over again. It was useless, of course, to be flustered. He was growing accustomed to this sort of scene. He supposed that April had got frightened and told her mother, or perhaps the maidservant had seen them kissing in the porch. In any case it was not very serious. They would probably forbid him to see April alone. It would be rather rotten; but the world was wide. In a few weeks’ time he would be going abroad; he could free himself of these entanglements, and when he returned he would decide what he should do. He would be economically independent. In the meantime let them talk. He settled himself back in his chair and prepared to hear at least, with patience, whatever they might have to say to him. What they did have to say came to him as a surprise.

“I was talking to April about it this morning,” said Mrs. Curtis. “Of course I’ve noticed it for a long time. A mother can’t help seeing these things. Several times I’ve said to my husband: ‘Father, dear, haven’t you noticed that Roland and April are becoming very interested in each other?’ and he’s agreed with me. Though I haven’t liked to say anything. But then this morning it was so very plain, wasn’t it?” She paused and smiled. And Roland feeling that an answer was expected of him, said that he supposed it was.

“Yes, really quite clear, and so afterwards I had a talk with my little April and she told me all about it. And, of course, we’re all of us very pleased that you should be fond of one another, but you must realize that at present you’re much too young for there to be any talk of marriage.”

“But ...” Roland began.

“Yes, I know that you’ve got a good post in this varnish factory; but as I was saying to Mr. Whately before you came, you’re only on probation, and it’s a job that means a lot of traveling and expense that you wouldn’t be able to afford if you were a married man or were even contemplating matrimony.”

“But ...” Roland began again, and again Mrs. Curtis stopped him.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking; you say that you are content to wait; that four years, five years, six years—it’s nothing to you, that you want to be engaged now. I can quite understand it. We all can. We’ve all been young, but I’m quite certain that....”

Roland could not believe that it was real, that he was sitting in a real room, that a real woman was talking, a real scene was in the process of enaction. He listened in a stupefied amazement. What, after all, had happened? He had kissed April three times. She had asked no vows and he had given none. They were lovers he supposed, but they were boy and girl lovers. The romances of the nursery should not be taken seriously. By holding April’s hand and kissing her had he decided the course of both their lives? What were they about, these three solemn people, with their talk of marriage and engagements?

“But you don’t understand,” he began.

“Oh, yes, we do,” Mrs. Curtis interrupted. “We old people know more than you think.”

And she began to speak in her droning, mellifluous voice of the sanctity of love and of the good fortune that had led him so early to his affinity. And then all three of them began to speak together, and their words beat like hammers upon Roland’s head, till he did not know where he was, nor what they were saying to him. “It can’t be real,” he told himself. “It’s preposterous. People don’t behave like this in real life.” And when his mother came across and kissed him on the forehead and said, “We’re all so happy, Roland,” he employed every desperate device to recall himself to reality that he was accustomed to use when involved in a nightmare. He fixed his thoughts upon one issue, focused all his powers on that one point: “I will wake up. I will wake up.”

And even when it was all over, and he was in his bedroom standing before the looking-glass to arrange his tie, he could not believe that it had really happened. It was impossible that grown-up people should be so foolish. He could understand that Mrs. Curtis should be annoyed at his attentions to her daughter. He had been prepared for that. If she had said, “Roland, you’re both of you too old for that. It was well enough when you were both children, but it won’t do now; April is growing up,” he could have appreciated her point of view. Perhaps they were too old for the love-making of childhood. But that she should take up the attitude that they were too young for the serious matrimonial entanglements of man and womanhood! It was beyond the expectation of any sane intelligence.

In a way he could not help feeling annoyed with April. If she had not told her mother nothing would have happened.

“Oh, but how silly,” she said, when he told her about it next day. “I do wish I had been there. It must have been awfully funny!”

Roland had not considered it in that light and hastened to tell her so.

“I felt a most appalling fool. It was beastly. I can’t think why you told your mother anything about it.”

She looked up quickly, surprised by the note of impatience in his voice.

“But, Roland, dear, what else could I do? She asked me and I couldn’t tell a lie. Could I?”

“I don’t know,” said Roland. And he began to walk backwards and forwards, up and down the room. “I suppose you couldn’t help it, but.... Oh, well, what did you say to her?”

“Nothing much. She asked me.... Oh, but, Roland, do sit down,” she pleaded. “I can’t talk when you’re walking up and down the room.”

“All right,” said Roland, sitting down. “Go on.”

“Well, she asked me if I liked you and I said that we were great friends, and then she asked if we weren’t more than friends.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know,” said Roland, rising impatiently from his chair and walking across the room. “Of course you said we were, and that I had been making love to you, and that—oh, but what’s the good of going on with it? I know what she said and what you said, and the whole thing was out in three minutes, and then your mother comes round to my mother and they talk and they talk, and that’s how all the trouble in the world begins.”

While he was actually speaking he was sustained by the white heat of his impatience, but the moment he had stopped he was bitterly ashamed of himself. What had he done? What had he said? And April’s silence accentuated his shame. She neither turned angrily upon him nor burst into tears. She sat quietly, her hands clasped in front of her knees, looking at the floor.

After a while she rose and walked across to the window. Her back was turned to him. He felt that he must do something to shatter the poignant silence. He drew close to her and touched her hand with his, but she drew her hand away quietly, without haste or anger.

“April,” he began, “I’m....”

But she stopped him. “Don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything.”

“But I must, April. I’ve been a beast. I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s quite all right. I’ve been very foolish. There’s nothing more to be said.”

Her voice was calm and level. She kept her back turned to him, distant and unapproachable. He did not know what to do nor what to say. He had been a beast to her. He knew it. And because he had wronged her, because she had made him feel ashamed of himself, he was angry with her.

“Oh, very well then,” he said. “If you won’t talk to me, I’m going home.”

He turned and walked out of the room. In the porch he waited for a moment, thinking that she would call after him. But no sound came from the drawing-room, not even the rustle of clothes, that might have indicated the change of her position. “Oh, well,” he said, “if she’s going to sulk, let her sulk,” and he walked out of the house.

For the rest of the day he endured the humiliating discomfort of contrition. He was honest with himself. He made no attempt to excuse his behavior. There was no excuse for it. He had behaved like a cad. There was only one thing to do and that was to grovel as soon as possible. It would be an undignified proceeding, but he was quite ready to do it, if he could be certain that the performance would be accepted in the right spirit. It was not easy to grovel before a person who turned her back on you, looked out of the window and refused to listen to what you had to say.

When evening came he decided that he might do worse than make a reconnaissance of the enemy’s country under the guidance of an armed escort—in other words, that if he paid a visit to the Curtises’ with his father he would be able to see April without having the embarrassment of a private talk forced on him.

And so when Mr. Whately returned from the office he found his son waiting to take him for a walk.

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “I never expected to find you here. I thought you would be spending all your time with April now.”

Roland laughed.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, “I thought we might go round and see the Curtises together.”

“And you thought you wanted a chaperon?”

“Hardly that.”

“But you felt shy of facing the old woman?”

“That’s more like it.”

“All right, then, we’ll tackle her together.”

Roland was certain, when they arrived, that the idea of employing his father as a shield was in the nature of an inspiration. April received him without a smile; she did not even shake hands with him. Fortunately, in the effusion of Mrs. Curtis’s welcome, this omission was not noticed.

“I’m so glad you have come, both of you. April told me, Roland, that you had been round to see her this morning, and I must say I began to feel afraid that I should never see you again. I thought you would only want to come round when you could have April all to yourself. It would have been such a disappointment to me if you had; I should have so missed our little evening talks. As I was saying to my husband only yesterday, ‘I don’t know what we should do without the Whatelys,’ and he agreed with me. You know, Mr. Whately, there are some people whom we quite like, but whom we shouldn’t miss in the least if they went away and we never saw them again, and there are others who would leave a real gap. It’s funny, isn’t it? And it’s so nice, now, to think that Roland and April—though we mustn’t talk like that, must we, or they’ll begin to think they’re engaged. And we couldn’t allow that, could we, Mr. Whately?”

His body rattled with a deep chuckle. Out of the corner of his eye Roland flung a glance at April, to see what effect this wind of words was having on her, but her face was turned from him.

Mrs. Curtis then proceeded to speak of Arthur and of the letter she had received from him by the evening post. “He says—now what is it that he says? Ah, yes, here it is; he says, ‘As I am too old for the Junior games, I have been moved into the Senior League.’ Now that’s very satisfactory, isn’t it, Mr. Whately, that he should be in the Senior League? I always said he would be good at games, and April too, Mr. Whately; she would have been very good at games if she had played them. When they used to play cricket in the nursery she used to hit at the ball so well, with her arms, you know. She would have been very good, but she hasn’t had the time and they don’t go in for games very much at St. Stephen’s. Now what do you think of that new frock of hers? I got it so cheap—you can’t think how cheaply I got it. And then I got Miss Smithers to make it up for her, and April looks so pretty in it; don’t you think so, Mr. Whately?”

“Charming, of course, Mrs. Curtis, absolutely charming!”

“I thought you’d like it. And I’m sure Roland does too, though he would be too shy to own to it. You know, Mr. Whately, I felt like telling her when she put it on that Roland would have to be very careful or he would find a lot of rivals when he came back from Brussels.”

It was more than April could bear. She had endured a great deal that day and this was the final ignominy.

“How can you, mother?” she said. “How can you?” and jumping to her feet, she ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

The sudden crash reverberated through the awkward silence; then came the soft caressing voice of Mrs. Curtis: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Whately; I don’t know what April can be thinking of. But she’s like that sometimes. These young people are so difficult; one doesn’t know where to find them. Yes, that’s right, Roland, run and see if you can’t console her.”

For Roland had risen, moved deeply by the sight of April’s misery, her pathetic weakness. It was not fair. First of all he had been beastly to her, then her mother had made a fool of her. He found her in the dining room, huddled on a chair beside the fire. She turned at once to him for sympathy. She stretched out her arms, and he ran towards them, knelt before her and buried his face in her lap.

“We have been such beasts to you, April, all of us. I have felt so miserable about it all day. I didn’t know what to do. I thought you would never forgive me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven; but I love you; I do, really awfully!”

“That’s all right,” she said; “don’t worry,” and placing her hand beneath his chin she raised gently his face to hers.

It was a long kiss, one of those long passionless kisses of sympathy, pity and contrition that smooth out all difficulties, as a wave that passes over a stretch of sand leaving behind it a shining surface. For a long while they sat in each other’s arms, saying nothing, his fingers playing with her hair, her lips from moment to moment meeting his. When at last they reverted to the subject of their morning’s quarrel there was little possibility of dissension.

It was with a gay smile that she asked him why he had been so angry with her. “Why shouldn’t our parents know, Roland? They would have had to some day.”

“Oh, yes, of course, but——”

“And surely, Roland, dear,” she continued, “it’s better for us that they should know. I should have hated having to do things in secret. It would have been exciting, of course; I know that; but it wouldn’t have been fair to them, would it? They are so fond of us; they ought to have a share in our happiness.”

“That’s just what I felt,” Roland objected. “I had felt that our love had ceased to be our own, that they had taken too big a share of it. It didn’t seem to be our love affair any longer.”

“Oh, you silly darling!” and she laughed happily, relieved of her fear that there might be some deeper cause for Roland’s behavior to her. “Why should you worry about that? What does it matter if other people do know about it? Why, what’s an engagement but a letting of a lot of other people into our secret; and when we’re married, why, that’s a telling of everyone in the whole world that we’re in love with one another. What does it matter if others know?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Roland dubiously admitted.

“Of course it doesn’t. The only thing that does matter,” she said, twisting a lock of his hair round her little finger and smiling at him through half-closed eyes, “is that we’ve made up our silly quarrel and are friends again,” and bending forward she kissed him quietly and happily.

He was naturally relieved that the sympathy between them had been reËstablished; but he realized how little he had made her appreciate his misgivings. Indeed, he would have found it hard to explain them to himself. Their love was no longer fresh and spontaneous. Its growth, as that of a wild flower that is taken from a hedge and planted in a conservatory, would be no longer natural. Other hands would tend it. In April’s mind the course of love was marked by certain fixed boundaries—the avowal, the engagement, the marriage service. She did not conceive of love as existing outside these limits. She had never been in love before; and naturally she regarded love as a state of mind into which one was suddenly and miraculously surprised, and in which one continued until the end of one’s life. There was no reason why she should think differently. Her training had taught her that love could not exist outside marriage—marriage that ordained one woman for one man.

But it was different for Roland, who had learned from the vivid and fleeting romances of his boyhood that love comes and goes, irresponsible as the wind that at one moment is shaking among the branches, scattering the leaves, tossing them in the air, only to subside a moment later into calm.

These misgivings passed quickly enough, however, in the delightful novelty of the situation. It was great fun being in love; to wake in the early morning with the knowledge that as soon as breakfast was over you would run down the road and be welcomed by a charming girl, whom you would counsel to shut the door behind you quickly so that you could kiss her before anyone knew you were in the house, who would then tilt up her face prettily to yours. It was charming to sit with her in the drawing-room and hold her hand and rest your cheek against hers, to answer such questions as, “When did you first begin to love me?”

Often they would go for walks together in the autumn sunshine; occasionally they would take a bus and ride out to Kew or Hampstead, and sit on the green grass and hold hands and talk of the future. These talks were a delicious excitant to Roland’s vanity. His ambitions were strengthened by her faith in him. He saw himself rich and famous. “We’ll have a wonderful house, with stables and an orchard, and we’ll have a private cricket ground and we’ll get a pro. down from Lord’s to look after it. And we’ll have fine parties in the summer—cricket and tennis during the day, and dances in the evening!”

“And a funny little cottage,” she would murmur, “somewhere down the river, for when we want to be all by ourselves.”

It was exciting, too, when other people, grown-up people, made significant remarks.

One afternoon he was at a tea-party and a lady asked him if he would come round to lunch with them the next day. “We’ve got a nephew of ours stopping with us. An awfully jolly boy. I’m sure you and he would get on well together.” Roland, however, had to excuse himself on the grounds of a previous engagement.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “but I’ve promised to go on the river.”

“With April Curtis? Ah, I thought so.”

And the smile that accompanied the question made Roland feel very grown up and important.

These weeks of preparation for the foreign tour Roland considered however, in spite of their charm, as an interlude, a pause in the serious affairs of life. It was thus that he had always regarded his holidays. He had divided with a hard line his life at school and his life at home. The two were unrelated. April and Ralph, his parents and the Curtises belonged to a world that must remain for him always episodic. It was a pleasant world in which from time to time he might care to sojourn. But what happened to him there was of no great importance.

As he leaned over the taffrail of the steamer and felt the deck throb under him he knew that his real life had begun again. What significance had these encumbrances of his home life if he could cast them off so easily? Already they were slipping from him. The waves beat against the side of the ship, splashing the spray across the deck, and the sting of the water on his face filled him with a buoyant confidence. The thud of the engines beat through his body to a tune of triumph.

The gray line that was England faded and was lost.

CHAPTER XI
THE ROMANCE OF VARNISH

A SEPARATION of six months makes in the middle years of a man’s life little break in a relationship. Human life was compared over two thousand years ago by a Greek philosopher to the stream that is never the same from one moment to another. And though, indeed, nothing is permanent, though everything is in flux, the stream during the later stages of its passage flows quietly through soft meadows to the sea. A man of forty-five who has been married for several years may leave his family to go abroad and returning at the end of the year find his wife, his home, his friends, to all appearances, exactly as he left them.

Roland returned from Belgium a different person. He was no longer a schoolboy; he was a business man. He had been introduced to big financiers; he had listened to the discussion of important deals; he had witnessed the signatures of contracts. In the evenings he had sat with Marston and gone carefully over the accounts of the day’s transactions.

“There’s not much profit here,” Marston would say, “hardly any, in fact, when we’ve taken over-head charges, office expenses and all that into consideration. But we’re not out for profits just now. We’re building up connections. If we can make these foreign deals pay their way we’re all right. We shall crowd the other fellows out of the market, we shall make ourselves indispensable, and then we can shove our prices as high as we blooming well like.”

To Roland it was a game, with the thrills, the dangers, the recompenses of a game. He did not look on business as part of the social fabric. He did not regard wealth as a thing important in itself. A credit balance was like a score at cricket. You were setting your brains against an opponent’s. You made as many pounds as you could against his bowling. He did not allow first principles to attach disquieting corollaries. He did not ask himself whether it was just for a big firm to undersell their smaller rivals and drive them out of the market by the simple expedient of taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. Business was a game; if one was big enough to take risks one took them.

Within a month Gerald was writing home to his father with genuine enthusiasm.

“He really is first class, father. I thought he would be pretty useful, but I never expected him to be a patch on what he is. He’s really keen on the job and he’s got the hang of it already. He ought to do jolly well when he comes out here alone. The big men like him; old Rosenheim told me the other day that it was a pleasure to see him about the place. ‘Such a relief,’ he said, ‘after the dried-up, hard-chinned provincials that pester me from morning to night.’ I believe it’s the best thing we ever did, getting Roland into the business.”

Roland, realizing that his work was appreciated, grew confident and hopeful of the future. They were happy days.

It is not easy to explain the friendship of two men. And Roland would have been unable to say why exactly he valued the companionship and esteem of Gerald Marston more highly than that of the many boys, such as Ralph Richmond, whom he had known longer and, on the whole, more intimately. Gerald never said anything brilliant; he was not particularly amusing; he was often irritable and moody. But from the moment when he had seen him for the first time in Brewster’s study Roland had recognized in him a potential friend. Later, when they had met at the Oval, he had felt that they understood each other, that they spoke the same language, that there was between them no need for the usual preliminaries of friendship. And during their weeks in France and Belgium this relationship or intuition was fortified by the sharing of common interests and common adventures.

The majority of these adventures were, it must be confessed, of doubtful morality, for it was only natural that Roland and Gerald should in their spare time amuse themselves after the fashion of most young men who find themselves alone in a foreign city.

In the evenings, after they had balanced their accounts, they used to walk through the warm lighted streets, surrounded by the stir of a world waking to a night of pleasure, select a brightly colored cafÉ, sit back on the red plush couch that ran the length of the room, and order iced champagne. The band would play soft, sentimental music that, mixing with the wine in their heads, would render them eager, daring and responsive, and when two girls walked slowly down the center of the room, swaying from the hips, and casting to left and right sidelong, alluring glances, naturally they smiled back, and indicated two vacant seats on either side of them. Then there would be talk and laughter and more champagne, and afterwards.... But what happened afterwards was of small importance. Gerald had had too much experience to derive much excitement from bought kisses. And for Roland, these romances were the focus of little more than a certain lukewarm kindliness and curiosity. They were not degrading, because they were not regarded so. They were equally unromantic, because neither was particularly interested in the other. Indeed, Roland was a little dismayed to find how slight, on the whole, was the pleasure, even the physical pleasure, that he received from his companion’s transports; these experiences, far from having the devastating effect that they are popularly supposed to have on a young man’s character, would have had in Roland’s life no more significance than an act of solitary indulgence, had they not been another bond between himself and Gerald. And this they most certainly were.

It was amusing to meet in the morning afterwards and exchange confidences. And as everything is transmuted by the imagination, Roland in a little while came to look on those evenings—the wine, the music, the rustle of skirts, the low laughter—not as they had been actually, but as he would have wished to have them. They became for him a gracious revel. And in London his thoughts would wander often from his ink-stained desk, from the screech of the telephone, from the eternal tapping of the typewriter, to those brightly colored cafÉs, with their atmosphere of warm comfort, the soft sensuous music, the cool sparkling champagne, the low whisper at his elbow. When he went out to lunch with Marston he would frequently contrast the glitter of a Brussels restaurant with the tawdry furniture and over-heated atmosphere of a City eating-house.

“A bit different this, isn’t it?” he would say. “Do you remember that evening when we went down the Rue de la Madeleine and found a cafÉ in that little side street?”

“That was where we met the jolly little girl in the blue dress, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. And do you remember what she said about the old Padre?”

And they would laugh together over the indelicacies that had slipped so charmingly in broken English from those red lips.

But Gerald was the one figure that remained distinct for Roland. The girls, for the most part, resembled each other so closely that he could only in rare instances recall their features or what they had worn or what they had said. He remembered far more vividly his walks with Gerald through the lighted streets, their confidences and hesitations. Should they go into this cafÉ or into that; and then when they had selected their cafÉ how Gerald would open the wine fist and carefully run his finger down the page, while the waiter would hover over him: “Yes, yes, sir, a very good wine that, sir, a very good wine indeed!” And then when the wine was ordered how they would look round at the girls who sat in couples at the marble-topped tables, sipping a citron or a bock. “What do you think of that couple over there?” “Not bad, but let’s wait a bit; something better may turn up soon”; and a little later: “Oh, look, that girl over there, the one with the green dress, just beneath the picture; try and catch her eye, she looks ripping!” They had been more exciting, those moments of expectation, than the subsequent embraces.

Gerald was always the dominant figure.

It was the expression of Gerald’s face that Roland remembered most clearly on that disappointing evening when they had taken two chorus girls to dinner at a private room and Roland’s selected had refused champagne and preferred fried sole to pheasant—an abstinence so alarming that, in spite of Roland’s protests, Gerald had suddenly decided that they would have to catch a train to Paris that evening instead of being able to wait till the morning.

And it was Gerald whom Roland particularly associated with the memory of that ignominious occasion on which he had thought at last to have discovered real romance.

They had dropped into a restaurant in the afternoon for a cup of chocolate, and had seen sitting by herself a girl who could hardly have been twenty years of age. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, under which Roland could just see, as she bent her head over her ice, the tip of her nose, the smooth curve of a cheek, the strain on the muscles of her neck. She raised the spoon delicately to her mouth, her lips closed on it and held it there. Her eyelids appeared to droop in a sort of sensual contentment. Roland watched her, fascinated; watched her till she drew the spoon slowly from her mouth. She lingered pensively, and between the even rows of her white teeth the red tip of her tongue played for a moment on the spoon. At that moment she raised her eyes, observed that Roland was staring at her, smiled, and dropped her eyes again.

“Did you see that?” whispered Roland excitedly. “She smiled at me, and she’s ripping! I must go and speak to her!”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Gerald; “a smile may not mean anything. Besides, she’s obviously not a tart and she may be known here. If she is she won’t want to be seen talking to a stranger. You sit still, like a good boy, and see if she smiles at you again.”

Against his will Roland consented. But he had his reward a few minutes later when she turned her chair to catch the waitress’s attention, and her eyes, meeting his, smiled at them again—a challenging, alluring smile, that seemed to say, “Well, are you brave enough?” He was dismayed, however, to notice that she had turned in order to ask for her bill. He saw her run her eye down the slip of paper, take some money from her purse and begin to button on her gloves, long gauntlet gloves that fastened above the elbow.

“She’s going! what shall I do?” he asked.

For answer Marston took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on it: “Meet me at the CafÉ des Colombes to-night at eight-thirty.”

“Now, walk up to the counter and pretend to choose a cake; if she wants to see any more of you she will drop her handkerchief, or purse, or at any rate give you an opportunity of speaking to her; if she does, slip this note into her hand. If she doesn’t, you can buy me an Éclair, and thank your lucky stars that you’ve been preserved from making a most abandoned fool of yourself.”

Roland was in such a hurry to get to the counter that he tripped against a table and only saved himself from falling by gripping violently the shoulder of an elderly bourgeois. By the time he had completed his apologies his charmer had very nearly reached the door.

“It’s all up,” he told himself; “she thinks me a clumsy fool, that it’s not worth her while to worry about. I ought to have gone straight up to her at once”; and he followed with dejected eyes her progress towards the door.

She was carrying in one hand an umbrella and in the other a little velvet bag. As she raised her hand to open the door, the bag slipped from her fingers and fell upon the floor. There were three persons nearer to the bag than Roland, but before even a hand had been stretched out to it he had precipitated himself forward, had picked it up and was handing it to the lady. She smiled at him with gracious gratitude. So far all had gone splendidly. Then he began to fumble. The note was in the other hand, and in the flurry of the moment he did not know how to maneuver the bag and the note into the same hand. First of all, he tried to change the bag from the right hand to the left. But his forefinger and thumb were so closely engaged with the note that the remaining three fingers failed to grasp the handle of the bag. He made a furious dive and caught the bag in his right hand just before it reached the floor. Panic seized him. He lost all sense of the proprieties. He handed the bag straight to her, and then realizing, before she had had time to take it from him, that somehow or other the note also had to come into her possession, he offered it to her between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand with less secrecy than he would have displayed in giving a tip to a waiter. The sudden change of the lady’s expression from inviting kindliness to a surprised affronted indignation threw him into so acute a fever of embarrassment that once again he endeavored to move the bag from the right hand to the left. Again he fumbled, but with a different result. He piloted the bag successfully into the lady’s hands, but allowed the note to slip from between his fingers. It fell face upwards on the floor.

Several ways of escape were open to him. He might have affected unconcern, and either picked up the piece of paper or left it where it lay. He might have kicked the note away and walked forward to open the door. He might have placed his foot on the note till the attention of the room was once again directed to its separate interests. None of these things, however, did he do. He did what was natural for him in such an unexpected situation. He did nothing. He stood quite still and gazed at the note as it lay there startlingly white against the black tiles of the floor. The eyes of everyone in the room appeared to be directed towards it. The features of the startled lady assumed an expression of horrified amazement. Two waitresses leaned over the counter in undisguised excitement; another stopped dead with a tray in her hand to survey the incriminating document. The fat gentleman against whom Roland had collided began to make some unpleasantly loud remarks to his companion. An old woman leaned forward and asked the room in general what was happening. From a far corner came the horrible suppression of a giggle.

The lady herself, who was, as a matter of fact, perfectly respectable, though she liked to be thought otherwise, and had dropped her bag accidentally, was the first to recover her composure. She fixed on Roland a glance of which as a combination of hatred and contempt he had never seen the equal, turned quickly and walked out of the restaurant. The sudden bang of the door behind her broke the tension. The various spectators of this entertaining interlude returned to their ices and their chocolate, the waitresses resumed their duties, the patron of the establishment fussed up the center of the room, and Gerald, who had watched the scene with intense if slightly nervous amusement, left his table, picked up the note, and taking Roland by the arm, led him out of the public notice, and listened to his friend’s solemn vow that never again, under any circumstances, would he be induced to open negotiations with any woman, be she never so lovely, who did not by her dress, her manner and the places she frequented proclaim unquestionably her profession.

It was hardly surprising that as a result of these adventures a more developed, more independent Roland returned at the end of his six months’ tour, a Roland, moreover, with a different attitude to himself, his future, his surroundings, who was prepared to despise the chrysalis from which he had emerged. His school-days appeared trivial.

“What a deal of fuss we made about things that didn’t really matter at all,” he said to Gerald as they leaned over the taffrail and watched the dim line that was England grow distinct, its gray slowly whitening as they drew near. “What a fuss about one’s place in form, one’s position in the house; whether one ragged or whether one didn’t rag. I can see all those masters, with their solemn faces, thinking I had perjured my immortal soul because I had walked out with a girl. They really thought it mattered.”

How puny it became in comparison with this magnificent gamble of finance! What were marks in an exam, to set against a turnover of several thousands? Duty, privilege, responsibility: what had they been but the brightly colored bricks with which children play in the nursery; and as for the fret and fever concerning their arrangement, where could be found an equivalent for the serious absorption of a child?

In the same way he thought of his home and the environment of his boyhood. What a gray world it had been! How monotonous, how arid! He remembered sitting as a child at the bars of his nursery window watching the stream of business men hurrying to their offices in the morning, their newspapers tucked under their arms. They had seemed to him like marionettes. The front door had opened. Husband and wife had exchanged a brusque embrace; the male marionette had trotted down the steps, had paused at the gate to wave his hand, and as he had turned into the street the front door had closed behind him. Always the same thing every day. And then in the evening the same stream of tired listless men hurrying home, their bulky morning paper exchanged for the slim evening newssheet. They would trot up the white stone steps, the front door would swing open, again in the porch the marionettes would kiss. It had amused him as a child, this dumb show, but as a boy he had come to hate it—and to fear it also. For he knew that this was the life that awaited him if he failed to turn to account his superior opportunities.

The fear of degenerating into a suburban business man had been always the strongest goad to his ambition. But now he could look that fear confidently in the face. He had won through out of that world of routine and friction and small economies into one of enterprise and daring and romance.

And April: he had not thought very much about her during his six months’ absence; she belonged to the world he had outgrown, a landmark on his road of adventure. And it was disconcerting to find on his return that she did not regard their relationship in this light. Roland had grown accustomed to the fleeting relationships of school that at the start of a new term could be resumed or dropped at will. He had not realized that it would be different now; that six months in Belgium were not the equivalent of a seven weeks’ summer holiday; that he would be returning to an unaltered society in which he would be expected to fulfill the obligations incurred by him before his departure. It was the reversal of the Rip Van Winkle legend. Roland had altered and was returning to a world that was precisely as he had left it.

Nothing had changed.

On the first evening he went round to visit April, and there was Mrs. Curtis as she had always been, sitting before the fire, her hands crossed over her bony bosom. She welcomed him as though he had been spending a week-end in Kent.

“I’m so glad to see you, Roland, and have you had a nice time? It must be pleasant for you to think of how soon the cricket season will be starting. I was saying to our little April only yesterday: ‘How Roland will be looking forward to it.’ What club are you thinking of joining?”

“The Marstons said something to me about my joining their local club.”

“But how jolly that would be! You’ll like that, won’t you?”

Her voice rose and fell as it had risen and fallen as long as Roland’s memory had knowledge of her. The same clock ticked over the same mantelpiece; above the table was the same picture of a cow grazing beside a stream; the curtains, once red, had not faded to a deeper brown; the carpet was no more threadbare; the same books lined the shelves that rose on either side of the fire-place; in the bracket beside the window was the calf-bound set of William Morris that had been presented to April as a prize; on the rosewood table lay yesterday’s copy of The Times. Mrs. Curtis and her setting were eternal in the scheme of things.

April, too, was as he had left her. Indeed, her life in his absence had been a pause. She had no personal existence outside Roland. She had waited for his return, thinking happily of the future. She had gone to school every morning at a quarter to nine and had returned every evening at half-past five. During the Christmas holidays she had read Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair. She was now halfway through Little Dorrit. At the end of the Michaelmas term she had gained a promotion into a higher form and in her new form she had acquitted herself creditably, finishing halfway up the class. At home she had performed cheerfully the various duties that had been allotted to her. But she had regarded those six months as an interlude in her real life; that was Roland’s now. Happiness could only come to her through him; and, being sure of happiness, she was not fretful nor impatient during the delay. She did not expect nor indeed ask of life violent transports either of ecstasy or sorrow. Her ideas of romance were domestic enough. To love and to be loved faithfully, to have children, to keep a home happy, a home to which her friends would be glad to come—this seemed to her as much as any woman had the right to need. She felt that she would be able to make Roland happy. The prospect was full of a quiet but deep contentment.

Roland had no opportunity of speaking to her on that first evening; Mrs. Curtis, as usual, monopolized the conversation. But he sat near to April. From time to time their eyes met and she smiled at him. And the next morning when he came round to see her she ran eagerly to meet him.

“It’s lovely to have you back again,” she said; “you can’t think how I’ve been looking forward to it!”

Roland was embarrassed by her eagerness. He did not know what to say and stood beside her, smiling stupidly.

She pouted.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she said. And a moment later: “I shouldn’t have thought, after six months, you’d have needed asking!”

Roland met her reproach with a stammered apology.

“I felt shy. I thought you might have got tired of me, all that long time.”

“Oh, but Roland, how horrid of you!” And she moved away from him. But he took her in his arms and made love prettily to her and consoled her.

“I daresay,” she said, “I daresay. But you didn’t write to me so very often.”

“I wanted to, but I thought your mother wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, but, Roland, that’s no excuse; she expected you to. There’s an understanding.” Then with a quiet smile: “Do you remember the row we had about that understanding?”

“I was a beast.”

“No, you weren’t; I was a silly.”

“I was miserable about it.”

“So was I. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought you’d never speak to me again, that you’d gone off in a huff, like the heroes in the story books.”

“But the heroes always come back in the story books.”

“I know, and that’s just why I thought that very likely you wouldn’t in real life. I was so unhappy I cried myself to sleep.”

“We were sillies, weren’t we?”

“But it was worth it,” said April.

“Worth it?”

“Don’t you remember how nice you were to me when we made it up?”

They laughed and kissed, and the minutes passed pleasantly. But yet their love-making fell short of Roland’s ideal of love. It was jolly; it was comfortable; but it was little more. He was not thrilled when the back of his hand brushed accidentally against hers; their kisses were hardly a lyric ecstasy. Even when he held her in his arms he was conscious of himself, outside their embrace, watching it, saying to himself: “Those two are having a good time together,” and being outside it he was envious, jealous of a happiness he did not share. It was someone else who was holding April’s hand, someone else’s head that bent to her slim shoulder. It was an exciting experience. But then had it not been exciting to walk across Hampstead Heath on a Sunday evening and observe the feverish ardors of the prostrate lovers?

He despised himself; he reminded himself that he was extraordinarily lucky to have a girl such as April in love with him; he was unworthy of her. Was not Ralph eating out his heart with envy? And yet he was dissatisfied. The Curtises’ house had become a prison for him; a soft, warm prison, with cushions and shaded lights and gentle voices, but it was a prison none the less. He was still able to leave it at will, but the time was coming when that freedom would be denied him. In a year or two their understanding would be an engagement; the engagement would drift to marriage. For the rest of his life he would be enclosed in that warm, clammy atmosphere. There was a conspiracy at work against him. His father had already begun to speak of his marriage as an accomplished fact. His mother was chiefly glad he was doing well in business because success there would make an early marriage possible. On all sides inducements were being offered him to marry—marriage with its corollary to settle down. Marry and settle down, when he was still under twenty!—before he had begun to live!

DURING the weeks that immediately followed his return, Roland found that he was, on the whole, happiest when he was at the office. He had less there to worry him. His work was new and interesting. Mr. Marston had decided that before Roland went on his tour alone he should acquire a general knowledge of the organization of the business. And so Roland spent a couple of weeks in each department, acquainting himself with the routine.

“And a pretty good slack it will be,” Gerald had said. “It’s the governor’s pet plan. He made me do it. But you won’t learn anything that’s going to be of the least use to you. All you’ve got to do in this show is to be polite and impress opulent foreigners. You don’t need to know the ingredients of varnish nor how we arrange our advertising accounts. And you can bet that the fellows themselves won’t be in any hurry to teach you. The less we know about things the better they’re pleased. They like to run their own show. If I were you I should have as lazy a time as possible.”

Under ordinary circumstances Roland would have followed this advice. He had learned at Fernhurst to do as much work as was strictly necessary, but no more. He had prepared his lessons carefully for his house tutor and the games’ master, the two persons, that is to say, who had it in their power to make his existence there either comfortable or the reverse. He had also worked hard for the few masters, such as Carus Evans, who disliked him. That was part of his armor. When Carus Evans had said to him for the third day running, “Now, I think we’ll have you, Whately,” and he had translated the passage without a slip, he felt that he was one up on Carus Evans. But for the others, the majority with whom he was only brought into casual contact, and who were pleasantly indifferent to those who caused them no trouble, he did only as much work as was needful to keep him from the detention room. Roland had rarely been inconvenienced by uncomfortable scruples about duty.

At any other time he would have spent the days of apprenticeship in placid idleness—discussion of cricket matches; visits to the window and subsequent speculation on the prospects of fine weather over the week-end; glances at his watch to see how soon he could slip from the cool of the counting house into the hot sunshine that was beating upon the streets; pleasant absorption in a novel. But Roland was worried by the family situation; he was finding life dull; he was prepared to abandon himself eagerly to any fresh enthusiasm. For want of anything better to do, without premeditation, with no thought of the power that this knowledge might one day bring him, he decided to understand the business of Marston & Marston.

On the first morning he was handed over to the care of Mr. Stevens, the head of the trade department. Mr. Stevens was a faithful servant of the firm, and, as is the way with faithful servants, considered himself to be more important than his employers.

“They may sit up in that board room of theirs,” he would say, “and they may pass their resolutions, and they may decide on this and they may decide on that, but where’d they be without their figures, I’d like to know. And who gives them their figures?”

He would chuckle and scratch his bald head, and issue a fierce series of orders to the packers. He bore no malice against his directors; he was not jealous; he knew that there were two classes, the governing and the governed, and that it had been his fate to be born among the governed.

“There always have been two classes and there always will be two classes. We can’t all be bosses.” It was a law of nature. And he considered his performances more creditable than those of his masters.

“These directors,” he would say, “they were born into the business. They’ve stayed where they was put; they haven’t gone up and they haven’t gone down. But I—I started as a packer and I’m now head of the trade department; and look you here, Jones,” he would suddenly bellow out, “if you hammer nails into a box at that rate you’ll not only not be head of a trade department, you’ll blooming soon cease to be a packer!”

It was natural that Mr. Stevens should, from his previous experience of Gerald and certain other young gentlemen, regard Roland as an agreeable trifler on the fringe of important matters.

“Well, well, sir, so you’ve come along to see how we do things down here. I expect we shall be able to show you a thing or two. Now, if you was to go and sit over in that corner you’d be out of the way and you’d be able to see the business going on.”

“I daresay, Mr. Stevens, but that won’t help me very far, will it?”

“I wouldn’t say that, sir; nothing like seeing how the machinery works.”

“But I might as well go and ask an engine driver how a train worked and then be told to sit in a corner of the platform at a railway station and watch the trains go by. I should see how they worked but I shouldn’t know much about them.”

Mr. Stevens chuckled and scratched the bald patch on his head appreciatively.

“You see, Mr. Stevens,” Roland continued, “I don’t know anything about this show at all and I know that you’re the only person in the place who can help me.”

It was a lucky shot. Roland was not then the psychologist that he was to become in the days of his power. He worked by intuition. What he had intended for a graceful compliment was a direct appeal to Mr. Stevens’ vanity, at the point where it was most susceptible to such an assault. It was a grief at times to Mr. Stevens that the authorities should regard him as little more than a useful servant, who carried out efficiently the orders that they gave him. Mr. Stevens was not ambitious; the firm had treated him fairly, had recognized his talents early and had promoted him. He had no quarrel with the firm, but he knew—what no one else in the building, with the possible exception of Perkins, the general manager, did know—that for a long time he had ceased to carry out to the letter the instructions that had been given him, and that Mr. Marston had only a general knowledge of a department that he himself knew intimately. He had arranged numerous small improvements of which Mr. Marston was ignorant, and had exploited highly profitable exchanges of material with other dealers. Mr. Marston may have perhaps noticed in the general accounts a gradual fall in packing expenses, but if he had he had attributed it, without much thought, to the increased facilities for obtaining wood and cardboard. He did not know that as the result of most delicate maneuvering and an intricate system of exchange conducted by Mr. Stevens his firm was being supplied with cardboard at the actual cost price.

Mr. Stevens did not tell him. He enjoyed his little secret. Every year he would consult the figures, scratch his bald head and chuckle. What a lot he had saved the firm! He looked forward to the day when he should tell Mr. Marston. How surprised they would all be! They had never suspected that funny old Stevens was such a good business man. In the evening hours of reverie and after lunch on Sunday he would endow the scene with that dramatic intensity that he had looked for but had not yet found in life. There were other moments, however, when he longed for appreciation. He wished that someone would realize his importance without having to have it explained to him. So that when Roland said to him, “You’re the only person in the place who can help me,” he was startled into the indulgence of his one weakness.

“Well, well, sir,” he said, and his face flushed with pleasure, “I daresay if you put it like that”; and taking Roland by the arm he led him away into his study and began to explain his accounts, his invoices, his receipts and his method of checking them. And because he had found an appreciative audience he proceeded to reveal one by one his little secrets. “Mr. Marston doesn’t know I do this, and don’t tell him; I’m keeping it as a surprise; but you can see that by letting the wood merchants have that extra percentage there, I can get tin-foil cheap enough to be able to pack our stuff at two per cent. less than it would cost ordinarily. Think what I must have saved the firm!”

There could be no question of his value; but what Roland did not then appreciate—what, for that matter, Mr. Stevens himself did not appreciate—was the value of this work in relation to the general business of the firm. Mr. Stevens was a specialist. He understood his own department but he understood nothing else. He did not realize that on the delicate balance of that two per cent. it had been possible to undersell a dangerous rival.

The same conditions, Roland discovered, existed in several other departments. Each head worked independently of the other heads. Mr. Marston, sitting at his desk, coÖrdinated their work. A one-man business: that was Mr. Marston’s program. One brain must control, otherwise there would be chaos. One department would find itself working against another department. He believed in departments because they stood for the delegation of routine work, but they must be subordinate departments. There were moments, however, when Roland wondered whether Mr. Marston’s hold on the business had not relaxed with the years. A great deal was going on of which he was ignorant. He had started the machinery and the machinery still ran smoothly, but was the guiding hand ready to deal with stoppages? Roland wondered. How much did Mr. Marston really know? Had he kept up with modern ideas, or was he still living with the ideas that were current in his youth? But more than this even, Roland wondered how much Perkins knew.

He did not like Perkins. “A good man,” Mr. Marston had called him, “as good a general manager as you’re likely to find anywhere. Not a social beauty; silent, and all that, but a good strong man. You can trust him.”

Roland did not agree with this estimate. First impressions are very often right; he was inclined to trust his intuition before his reason, and his first impression of Perkins was of an embittered, jealous man. “He hates me,” Roland thought, “because I’m stepping straight into this business through influence, with every prospect of becoming a director before I’ve finished; while he’s sweated all his life, and worked from nothing to a position that for all his ability will never carry him to the board room.” He was a man to watch. The people who have been mishandled by fortune show no mercy when they get the chance of revenge.

Perkins was scrupulously polite, but Roland felt how much he resented his intrusion, and Gerald was inclined to endorse this opinion.

“Oh, yes, a sour-faced ass,” he said; “father thinks a lot of him, though. It’s as well to keep on the right side of him. He can make things rather awkward if you don’t. He keeps an eye on most of the accounts, and he watches the travelers’ expenses pretty closely. If he gets annoyed with you he might start questioning your extras.”

They laughed, remembering how they had entered under the heading “special expenses” the charges for a lurid evening at a certain discreet establishment in the Rue des Colombes.

On the whole, Roland was happy at the office, but the evenings were distressing: the bus ride back; the walk up the hot stuffy street towards his home; the subsequent walk with his father; the same walk every day along the hard, flag-stoned roads, during which they met the same dispirited men hurrying home from work. London was horrible in June, with its metallic heat, its dust, and the dull leaves of the plane-trees scattering their mournful shadows. How somber, too, were the long evenings after the wretched two-course dinner, in the small suburban drawing-room—ill lit, ill ventilated, meanly furnished. It was not surprising that he should accept eagerly the Marstons’ frequent invitations to spend the week-end with them in the country; it was another world, a cleaner, fresher world, where you were met at the station, where you drove through a long, winding drive to an old Georgian house, where you dressed for dinner, where you drank crusted port as you cracked your walnuts. Yet it was not this material well-being that he so highly valued as the setting it provided for a gracious interchange of courtesy, for the leisured preliminaries of friendship, for ornament and decoration.

Was anything in his life better than that moment on a Friday evening when from the corner seat of a railway carriage he watched the smoke and chimneys of London fall behind him, when through the window he saw, instead of streets and shops and houses, green fields and hedges and small scattered villages, and knew that for forty-eight hours he could forget the fretted uneasiness of his home.

He was invited during August to spend a whole week at Hogstead. Several others would be there, and there would be cricket every day.

“We can’t do without you,” Mr. Marston had said, “and what’s more, we don’t intend to.”

“Of course, we don’t,” said Muriel; “you’ve got to come!”

Naturally Roland did not need much pressing.

CHAPTER XIII
LILITH OF OLD

ROLAND made during this week the acquaintance of several members of the family who had hitherto been only names to him. There was Gerald’s uncle Arnold, a long mean-faced man, and his wife, Beatrice. Afterwards, when he looked back and considered how large a part she had played, if indirectly, in his life, and for that matter in the lives of all of them, he could not help thinking that his first sight of her had been prophetic, certainly dramatic. He had just arrived, had been met by Muriel and Mr. Marston and his brother in the hall, and Muriel had insisted on taking him away at once to see her rabbits. She had come to regard him as her special friend. Gerald’s other friends were too stiff and grown up; Roland was nearer to her own age and he did not patronize her.

“Come along,” she said, “you’ve got to see my rabbits before dinner time.”

“Will they have grown up by to-morrow?” he asked.

“Well, they won’t be any younger, will they? They are such dears,” and she had taken his hand, pulling him after her. They ran down the curving path that sloped from the house to the cricket field. “I keep them in that little shed behind the pavilion,” she said. They were certainly delightful, little brown and white balls of fur, with stupid, blinking eyes. Roland and Muriel took them out of the cage and carried them on to the terrace that ran round the field, and sat there playing with them, offering them grass and dandelions.

A grass path ran between great banks of rhododendrons from the terrace towards the garden, and at the end a pergola stretched a red riot of roses parallel to the field. Suddenly at the end of the path, at the point where it met the pergola, Roland saw, framed in an arch of roses, a tall, graceful woman walking slowly on Gerald’s arm, her head bent quietly towards him. At that distance Roland could not distinguish her features, but the small oval face set in the mass of light yellow hair was delicate and the firm outlines of her body suggested that she had only recently left her girlhood behind her.

“Who’s that?” asked Roland.

“That! Oh, that’s Aunt Beatrice.”

“But who’s Aunt Beatrice?”

“Uncle Arnold’s wife.”

“What!”

Roland could hardly believe it: so young a woman married to that shriveled, prosaic solicitor.

“Oh, yes,” said Muriel, “they’ve been married nearly three years now; and they’ve got such a darling little girl: Rosemary; you’ll see her to-morrow. She’s got the loveliest hair. It crinkles when you run your fingers through it.”

“But—oh, well, I suppose it’s rather cheek, but he’s years older.”

“Uncle Arnold?” replied Muriel cheerfully. “Oh, yes, I think he must be nearly fifty.” Then after a pause, light-heartedly as though the possession of a family skeleton was something of an honor, “I don’t think they like each other much.”

“How do you know?” Roland asked.

“They are always quarreling. I never saw such a couple for it. If there’s a discussion he’s only got to take one side for her to take the other.”

“Well, I don’t see very well how she could be in love with him, he’s such a....” Roland paused, realizing that it would be hardly good manners to disparage Muriel’s uncle. But she did not intend him to leave the sentence unfinished.

“Yes,” she said, “such a.... Go on!”

“But I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t; really I didn’t. I’m sure your uncle’s awfully nice, but he’s so much older, and you can’t be in love with someone so much older than yourself.”

“I see; you’re forgiven”; then after a pause and with a mischievous smile: “Have you ever been in love, Roland?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, how lovely!” and she turned quickly and sat facing him, her knees drawn up, her hands clasped in front of them. “Now tell me all about it. I’ve always wanted to have a talk with someone who’s really been in love, and I never have.”

“What about Gerald?”

She pouted. “Gerald! Oh, well, but he laughs at me, and besides—— But come on and tell me all about it.”

She made a pretty picture as she sat there, her face alight with the eagerness of curious girlhood, and Roland felt to the full the fascination of such a confessional. “It was a long time ago,” he said, “and it’s all over now.”

“Never mind that,” Muriel persisted. “What was her name?”

“Betty.”

“And was she pretty?”

“Of course; I shouldn’t have been in love with her if she hadn’t been.”

Muriel tossed back her head and laughed. “Oh, but how absurd, Roland! Some of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen have managed to get husbands.”

“And some pretty hideous-looking men get pretty wives.”

“But I suppose the pretty wives think their ugly husbands are all right.”

“And equally I suppose the handsome husbands think their plain wives beautiful.”

They laughed together, but Muriel raised a warning finger. “We are getting off the point,” she said. “I want to know more about your Betty. Was she dark?”

“Darkish—yes.”

“And her eyes; were they dark, too?”

“I think so; they were bright.”

“What, aren’t you sure? I don’t think much of you as a lover.”

“But I can never remember the color of people’s eyes,” he pleaded. “I can’t remember the color of my mother’s or my aunt’s, or——”

“Quick, shut your eyes; what’s the color of my eyes?”

“Blue,” Roland hazarded.

“Wrong. They’re green. Cat’s eyes. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I shall write and tell your Betty about it.”

“But that’s all over long ago, I told you.”

“How did it end?”

“It never began,” laughed Roland: “she never cared for me a bit.”

Muriel pouted. “How unromantic,” she said; then added with the quick, mischievous smile, “and how silly of her!”

As he dressed for dinner that evening Roland wondered what perverse impulse had made him speak to Muriel of Betty rather than of Dolly; of either of them rather than of April; of an unsuccessful love affair that was over rather than of a successful one that was in progress. Muriel would far rather have heard of April than of Betty. How she would have pestered him with questions! Where had they met? When had he first known he was in love with her? What had he said to her? How had she answered him? It would have been great fun to confide in her. He had been foolish not to tell her. She was such a jolly girl. She had looked charming as she had sat back holding her knees, with her clear skin and slim boyish figure, and her brightly tinted lips that were always a little parted before her teeth, beautifully even teeth they were, except just at the corner of her mouth where one white tooth slightly overlapped its neighbor. She was the sort of girl that he would like to have had for a sister. He had always regretted that he had not had one, and between Muriel and himself there could have been genuine, open comradeship. She would have been a delightful companion. They would have had such fun going about together to parties, dances and the Oval. She would have received so charmingly his confidence.

And yet, on the whole, he did not know why, he was rather glad that he had not told her about April.

That night Roland sat next Beatrice at dinner, and was thus afforded an opportunity of confirming or rejecting his first impression of her. She was only twenty years old, but she looked younger, not so much on account of her slim figure and small, delicate, oval face as of her general pose and the girlish untidiness that made you think that she had not taken very long over her toilet. Her light yellow hair was drawn back carelessly from the smooth skin of her neck and forehead. It looked as though it had been crushed all the afternoon under a tightly fitting hat, and that when Beatrice had returned from her walk, probably a little late, she had flung the hat on the bed, and deciding that she could not be bothered to take down her hair and put it up again had been content to draw her comb through it once or twice with hurried, impatient fingers. This negligence, which might have been charming as the setting for mobile, vivacious features, was out of keeping with the tranquillity of her face, her quiet gestures and lack of action. She had not learned how to dress and carry herself, and this was an omission you would hardly expect in a woman who had been married for three years.

And yet she was beautiful, or perhaps not so much beautiful as different. She suggested tragedy, mystery, romance. What, Roland asked himself, lay behind the wavering luster of her eyes? And, looking at the meager, uninspired features of her husband, he wondered how she could have ever brought herself to marry him. He was a very good fellow, no doubt, of whom one might grow fond—but love—to be held in his arms, to be kissed by those dry lips! He shuddered, revolted by this dismal mating of spring and autumn.

She did not talk very much, though occasionally, when her husband made a particularly definite statement, she would raise her head and say rather contemptuously: “Oh, Arnold!” to which he would reply with heavy worded argument: “My dear girl, what you don’t understand is....” It was uncomfortable, and Roland, looking round the table, wondered whether the family was aware of it. They did not appear to be. At one end of the table Mr. Marston was discussing, in his jovial, full-blooded manner, the prospects of the cricket week, and, at the other, Mrs. Marston was informing a member of the Harrow XI. that their opponents of the morrow had recruited a couple of blues from a neighboring village. Gerald and Muriel were both laughing and chatting, and the other members of the party seemed equally not to notice the close atmosphere of impending conflict. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to it.

Roland listened carefully to all that Arnold Marston said, both during dinner and afterwards when the ladies had gone upstairs and the port had been passed for the second time round the table. He was hard, dogmatic and, at the same time, petulant in his talk. He quickly assumed that everyone who did not agree with him was ignorant and a fool. As he talked his fingers performed small gestures of annoyance; they plucked at the table cloth, fingered the water bowl, heaped the salt into small pyramids upon his plate. They were discussing the pull shot, then something of an innovation, and Roland maintained that it was absurd for school coaches not to allow boys to hit across long hops. “Why, do you know that at Fernhurst you are expected to apologize to the bowler if you make a pull shot.”

“And quite right, too,” said Mr. Arnold.

“But, why?” Roland answered him. “The pull’s perfectly safe; it’s a four every time and you can’t get more than a single if you play back to it with a straight bat.”

“I daresay, I daresay, but cricket’s cricket, and you have got to play it with a straight bat. You’ve got to play according to rules.”

“But there’s no rule that says you mayn’t hit a long hop with a crooked bat.”

Mr. Arnold fidgeted angrily.

“My dear boy, it’s no good arguing. I’ve been playing cricket and watching cricket for forty years, and the good batsmen always played a straight ball with a straight bat.”

“There are a good many who don’t.”

“That means nothing. A big man’s a rule to himself. The pull’s a dangerous stroke; it’s all right in village cricket perhaps, but no one who doesn’t play with a straight bat would get into a county side.”

“But isn’t it the object of the game to make runs?”

“Not altogether—even if you do get four runs from it instead of one, which I am prepared to doubt. We wear our clothes to keep our bodies warm, but you wouldn’t be pleased if your tailor made your coat button up to the throat, and said: ‘It covers more of you, sir; you’ll be warmer that way, and the object of clothes is to keep you warm.’”

There was a general laugh at Roland’s expense, and before it had subsided Mr. Marston had introduced another subject. Roland was annoyed; he had a distaste for anything that savored of cleverness. He regarded it as an unfair weapon in an argument. An argument should be a weighing of facts. Each side should produce its facts, and an impartial witness should give judgment. It was not fair to obscure the issue with an untrue, if amusing, simile. And once the laugh is against you it is no good continuing an argument. Arnold Marston had learned this on his election platform. He had once been asked what his party proposed to do for the unemployed; it was an awkward question, that gave many opportunities for adverse heckling. But he had obscured the issue with a laugh: “When my party gets in there will be no unemployment.” And the meeting had gone home with the opinion that he was a jolly fellow—not too serious—the sort of man that anyone could understand. It was a good trick on the platform, but it was very annoying at the dinner table, at least so the discomfited found. And Roland felt even more aggrieved as they were leaving the room and the silly ass in the Harrow XI. slapped him on the back and informed him that, “The old man got in a good one on you there.” He could understand Beatrice hating him.

He did not have another opportunity of speaking to her that evening, but as he sat in the big drawing-room among the members of the house party his attention drifted continually from the agreeable, superficial conversation that had been up to now so sympathetic to him. These trivial discussions of cricket, their friends, their careers, and, in a desultory manner, of life itself, had been invaded by a stern, critical silence. His eyes kept turning towards Beatrice as she sat in a deep arm-chair, her hands folded quietly in her lap; they followed her when she walked to the window and stood there, her arm raised above her head, looking into the garden. He would have liked to go across the room and speak to her; but what would he have been able to say? He could not tell what thoughts were passing beneath the unruffled surface; was she fretting impatiently at the tedious cricket shop? Was she criticizing them all?—she, who had seen deeper and farther and come nearer to tragedy than any of them—or was she what she appeared—a young woman moved by the poetry of a garden stilled by moonshine? When she turned away he thought that he detected a movement of her shoulders, a gesture prompted by some wandering thought or gust of feeling, that would have been significant to one who knew her, but for him was meaningless. And that night he lay awake for nearly an hour, a long time for one who thought little and to whom sleep came easily, remembering her words and actions, the intonation of her voice, and that movement by the window. As he began to lose control over thoughts she became transfigured, the counterpart of those princesses, shut away in high-walled castles, of whom he had dreamed in childhood; her husband became an ogre, leering and vindictive, who laughed at him from the turrets of impregnable battlements.

Breakfast at Hogstead was a haphazard business. It began at eight and ended at ten. No one presided over it. There were cold things on the sideboard to which you helped yourself. As soon as you came down you rang the bell and a maid appeared to ask you whether you would prefer tea or coffee and whether you would take porridge. You then sat down where you liked at the long, wide table.

When Roland came down the next morning at about a quarter to nine he found the big rush on; from half-past eight to half-past nine there were usually six or seven people at the table. Before that time there was only Mrs. Marston and anyone who had been energetic enough to take a dip in a very cold pond that was protected from sunshine by the northern terrace of the cricket field. By a quarter to ten there was usually only a long table, covered with dirty plates, to keep company with Mr. Marston, who, strangely enough, was a late riser. There were eight people in all having breakfast when Roland arrived, or, to be more exact, there were seven, for Gerald had finished his some time before, but as he had had a bathe he preferred to remain at the table and inform everyone of his courage as they came down.

“I can’t think why everyone doesn’t bathe in the morning,” he was saying; “makes one feel splendidly fit. I’m absolutely glowing all over.”

“So you’ve told us before,” said Muriel.

“I’ve told you, but I haven’t told Roland. Roland, why didn’t you come and have a bathe this morning, you old slacker? Do you no end of good.”

“Puts one’s eye out,” said Roland, repeating the old Fernhurst theory that cricket and swimming are incompatible.

“Rot, my dear chap; nothing like a bathe, nothing like it. I bet you I shall skittle them out this afternoon, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t make a few runs either.”

Roland had by this time satisfied the maid’s curiosity as to his beverage and had helped himself to a plate of tongue and ham. He turned round with the plate in his hand and looked to see where he should sit. There was a vacant place beside Gerald to which he would have been expected to direct himself; there was also a vacant place beside Beatrice: he chose the latter, and hardly realized till he had drawn back the chair that Gerald was at the opposite end of the table.

Several thoughts passed with incredible swiftness through his brain. Had anyone noticed what he had done? Would they think it curious? More important still, would Beatrice resent it? From this last anxiety he was soon freed, for Beatrice, without apparently having observed his presence, rose from the table and went into the garden. He was left with an empty chair on either side of him and no one for him to talk to; Gerald and Muriel were beyond the reach of anything less than a shout.

He finished his breakfast hurriedly in an enforced silence and walked out into the garden in the secret hope of finding Beatrice. In this he soon succeeded. She was playing croquet with her daughter on the lawn. Roland stood watching them for a moment and then walked slowly across the lawn. Beatrice glanced up at him and then went on with her game. She did not even smile at him. It would have been too much perhaps to have expected her to ask him to join them, but she might surely have made some sign of comradely recognition. After all, he had the night before taken her down to dinner; he had endeavored to be as nice as he could to her, and it annoyed him and, at the same time, attracted him to feel that he had made absolutely no impression on her.

Roland was not one of those who analyze their emotions. When he was attracted by some new interest he did not put himself in the confessional, and he did not now ask himself why or how Beatrice had appealed to him.

As a matter of fact, she did not attract him physically. Her beauty added to the glamor that enriched her loneliness, but did not touch him otherwise. It was interest he felt for her, a compelling interest for someone outside the circle of his own experience, who was content to disparage what he admired and had filled her own life with other enthusiasms. She was remote, inscrutable. She lived and ate and talked and moved among them, but she had no part there. And because he was so interested in her he was desperately anxious that she should feel some interest in him. She was a mystery for him, but he was not content she should remain a mystery; he wanted to understand her, to become friends, so that in her troubles she should turn to him for sympathy and guidance. How wonderful that would be, that this aloof and beautiful woman should share with him an intimacy that she denied her husband. He would watch her as he had watched her the previous evening moving among her friends, indifferent and apart from them, and they would sit, as they had sat, hardly noticing her, talking of their own affairs, perhaps casting towards her a glance of casual speculation: “What is she really?” they would say, and then put her from their mind and return to their bridge and their billiards and their cricket shop. But he would know, and as she turned from the window he would appreciate the significance of that little movement, that hesitation almost of the shoulders, and she would turn her eyes to him, those sad, disdainful, dove-colored eyes of hers, that invited nothing and offered nothing, but would become for him flooded with sympathy and gentle friendship; there would be no need for words—just that meeting of the eyes across a crowded drawing-room.

Immersed in reverie, he walked up and down the long grass path that ran from the cricket field to the rose garden, and when his name was shouted suddenly, shrilly and from very close, he approximated to that condition of dismay that the vernacular describes as “jumping out of one’s skin.” He turned, to see Muriel standing two yards behind him, her hands upon her hips, shaking with laughter.

“I have been watching you for ten minutes,” she said as soon as she had recovered her breath, “and it’s the funniest sight I’ve seen; you’ve been walking up and down the path with your head in the air, and your hands clenched together behind your back, and your lips were moving. I’m certain you were talking to yourself. I couldn’t think what you were doing. I sat behind that bush there and watched you going up and down and up and down, your hands clenched and your head flung back, and your lips moving, and then at last I guessed——”

“Well, what was it?”

“You were composing poetry. Now, don’t laugh, I’m serious, and I want to know who you were composing it for.”

“Well, who do you think it was?”

“That girl, of course.”

“What girl?”

“Why, the girl you told me about yesterday!”

“Oh, that——”

“Yes; oh, that! But you were now, weren’t you?”

“No, I wasn’t. You can’t see me wasting my time on poetry. Besides, I couldn’t do it.”

“Then, what were you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Who about?”

“You, of course.”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head, the light hair scattering in the sunlight. “Oh, no, no, no! If you had been thinking about me, it might have occurred to you that I had no one in this large party to amuse me and that I might very likely be lonely. And if you had thought of that, and had gone on thinking that, with your head flung back——”

“Yes, I know all about that head.”

“Well, if you had been thinking of me all that time, and hadn’t considered it worth your while to come and see what I was doing, I should be very cross with you. But as I know you weren’t I don’t mind. But come along now; what was it all about?” And, sitting down on the garden seat, she curled herself into a corner and prepared herself for catechism. “Now, come on,” she said, “who was it?”

“Well, if you want to know, it was your Aunt Beatrice.”

Muriel pouted.

“Her! What do you want to think about her for?”

“I don’t know. She’s rather interesting, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t,” and Muriel spoke sharply in a tone that Roland had never before encountered.

“But——” he began.

“Oh, never mind,” she said, “if you’ve been thinking about Aunt Beatrice for the last ten minutes you won’t want to talk about her now. Come and have a game of tennis.”

And she jumped up from her seat and walked up towards the house. Roland felt, as he prepared to follow her, that it was an abrupt way to end a conversation that she had forced on him.

And that night, as he undressed, Roland had to own to himself that altogether it had not been a satisfactory day. There had been the incident at the breakfast table, the rebuff on the croquet lawn, the coldness that had arisen between himself and Muriel, and then, although he had done fairly well in the cricket match, he had not achieved the goal which, he had to confess, had been his great incentive to prowess—namely, the approval of Beatrice.

He had made twenty-seven in the first innings—a good twenty-seven, all things considered. He had had two yorkers in his first over. He had played a large part in the gradual wearing down of the bowling, that had paved the way for some heavy hitting by the tail. He had made several very pretty shots. There had been that late cut off the fast bowler—a beauty; he had come down on it perfectly, and it had gone past second slip out of reach of the third man for three; and then there had been that four off the slow bowler who had tied up Gerald so completely; he had played him quite confidently. Mr. Marston had, indeed, complimented him on the way he had placed the short-pitched balls in front of short-square for singles. It had been a pretty useful innings, but though he had kept turning his eyes in the direction of the pavilion, and especially to the shaded side of it, where the ladies reclined in deck-chairs, he had failed to discover any manifestation of excitement, pleasure or even interest on the part of Beatrice in his achievements. True, he had once seen her hands meet in a desultory clap, but that clap had rewarded what was, after all, a comparatively simple hit, a half-volley outside the off stump that he had hit past cover to the boundary, and as that solitary clap came a full thirty seconds after the rest of the pavilion had begun clapping, and ceased a good thirty seconds before anyone else clapping in the pavilion ceased, he was obliged to feel that the applause was more the acquittal of a social duty than any recognition of his own prowess, and when he was finally given leg before to a ball, that would certainly have passed a foot above the stumps, she did not smile at him with congratulations nor did she attempt to console him, though he gave her every opportunity of doing so had she wished by walking round three sides of a rectangle, and reaching the dressing-room by means of the shaded lawn on the left of the pavilion. No. His cricket had not interested her in the least, and it was exasperating to see her face kindle with enthusiasm when the wicket keeper and the slow bowler put on fifty runs for the last wicket through a series of the most outrageous flukes that have ever disgraced a cricket field.

Not a single ball was hit along the ground and only rarely did it follow the direction in which the bat was swung. Length balls on the off stump flew over the head of mid-on, of point, and second slip, to fall time after time providentially out of reach. The fielding side grew exasperated; slow bowlers tried to bowl fast and fast bowlers had a shot with lobs; full pitches even were attempted, and these, too, were smitten violently over the heads of the instanding fieldsmen and out of reach of the deeps. It was a spectacle that would at ordinary times have flung Roland into convulsions of delight, but on this occasion it annoyed him beyond measure. He felt as must a music-hall artist whose high-class performance has been received with only mild approval when he watches the same audience lose itself in caterwauls of hilarious appreciation at the debauched antics of a vulgar comedian with a false nose and trousers turned the wrong way round who sings a song about his “ma-in-law and the boarding-house.” For there was Beatrice, who had hardly taken the trouble to watch his innings, laughing and clapping the preposterous exhibition of this last wicket pair. It was a real relief to him when the slow bowler, in a desperate effort to hook an off ball to the square by boundary, trod on his middle stump and nearly collapsed amid the dÉbris of the wicket.

Altogether it had been an unsatisfactory day and it was typical of the whole week. He had looked forward to it eagerly; he had meant to enjoy himself so much—the quiet mornings in the garden, the inspection of the wicket, the change into flannels, the varying fortune of cricket, the long enchantment of a warm, heavy afternoon, and afterwards the good dinner, the comradeship, the kindly interplay of talk, till finally sleep came to a mind at harmony with itself and full of agreeable echoes. How good these things had seemed to him in imagination. But, actually, there was something missing. The weather was fine, the cricket good, the company agreeable, but the harmony was broken. He was disquieted. He did not wake in the morning with that deep untroubled sense of enjoyment; he had instead, a belief that something was going to happen; he was always looking to the next thing instead of abiding contentedly in the moment.

And this mental turmoil could only be attributed to the presence of Beatrice. She disturbed him and excited him. His eyes followed her about the room. Whenever he was away from her he wondered what she was doing and wished she would come back; but in her presence he was unhappy and self-conscious. He hardly joined in the general conversation of the table for shyness of what she would think of him. On the few occasions when he sat next to her he could think of nothing to say to her, nothing, that is to say, that was individual, that might not have been, and as a matter of fact probably had been, said to her by every other young man in the room.

He would hazard some remark about the weather—it was rather hot; did she think there was any danger of a thunderstorm?

“I hope not,” she would answer; “it would spoil everything, wouldn’t it?” She assumed the voice of a mother that is endeavoring to reassure a small child. Cricket was like a plaything in the nursery. “That is what she takes me for,” he said to himself—“an overgrown schoolboy”; and he prayed for an opportunity of saying something brilliant and evocative that would startle her into an interest for him. If only he could lead the conversation away from heavy trivialities to shadowy conjectures, wistful regrets; if only they could talk of life and its disenchantments, its exquisite gestures; of sorrow, happiness and resignation. But how were they to talk of it? If she thought about him at all, which was doubtful, or in any way differentiated him from the other young men of the party, she would probably consider that he was flattered by her gracious inquiries about his batting average. How was she to know what he was feeling; and how was he to introduce so portentous a subject? He recognized with a smile what a sensation he would cause were he to lean across to her and say: “What do you, Mrs. Arnold, consider to be the ultimate significance of life?” His question would be sure to coincide with one of those sudden silences that occur unexpectedly in the middle of a meal, and his words would fall into that pool of quivering silence, scattering ripples of horror and dismay. Mr. Marston would stare at him, Muriel would giggle and say she had known all the time he was a poet, and the other members of the party would gaze at him in astonished pity. “Poor fellow!” their glances would say; “quite balmy!” And Beatrice? she would dismiss the situation with an agreeable pleasantry that would put everyone save Roland at his ease. He did not in the least see how he was to win her confidence.

His looks had not impressed her, as, indeed, why should they? His features were neither strikingly handsome nor strikingly ugly; they were ordinary. He was not clever, at least his cleverness did not transpire in conversational brilliance and repartee; and she was not interested in cricket. He envied the ease with which Gerald talked to her, the way they laughed and ragged each other. They were such good friends. It had been in Gerald’s company that he had first seen her. Was Gerald in love with her, he wondered. Gerald had never confided to him any recent love affair, and perhaps this was the reason. It was not unlikely. She was young, she was lonely, she was beautiful. He asked Muriel whether she thought there was any cause for his anxiety.

“What!” she said. “Gerald and Aunt Beatrice in love with each other!”

“Yes; why not. She’s not in love with her husband, and I don’t see why at all——” He stopped, for Muriel was fixing him with a fierce and penetrative glare.

“No,” she said, “there’s not the least danger of Gerald falling in love with Aunt Beatrice, but if you aren’t very careful, someone else will be very soon!”

He laughed uncomfortably.

“Oh, don’t be silly!”

“So you know who I mean, don’t you?”

“You mean me, I suppose.”

“Of course.”

He tried to dismiss the subject with a laugh.

“And that would never do, would it?”

It was not successful. Muriel looked more annoyed than he had ever seen her before. It was absurd of her. She must know that he was only ragging. They had always been so open with one another, so charmingly indiscreet.

“No, it wouldn’t,” she said.

He waited, thinking she was going to add some qualification to this plain denial. Her lips indeed began to frame a syllable, when in response to some swift resolution she shook her head. “Oh, well,” she said, “it doesn’t matter.”

There was no use denying it: it had not been the week he had expected.

CHAPTER XIV
THE TWO CURRENTS

ROLAND returned home dissatisfied with himself and anxious to vent the dissatisfaction on someone else. He was in a mood when the least thing would be likely to set him into a flaring temper, and at dinner his father provided the necessary excitant. They were considering the advisability of having the dining room repapered and Mr. Whately was doubting whether such an expensive improvement would be possible for their restricted means.

“I don’t know whether we can manage that just now,” he said. “We have had one or two little extras this last year or so; there was the new stair carpet and then the curtains on the second landing. I really think that we ought to be a little careful just now. Of course later on, when Roland and April are married——” And he paused to beam graciously upon his son before completing the sentence. “As I was saying, when Roland and April——” But he never completed the sentence. It remained forever an anacoluthon. It was that beam that did it. It exasperated Roland beyond words. Its graciousness became idiocy.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, father,” he said. “We’ve heard that joke too often.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Mr. Whately was for a moment too surprised to speak. He had made that little pleasantry so often that it had become part of his conversational repertory. He could not understand Roland’s outburst; at first he was hurt; then he felt that he had been insulted, and, like all weak men, he was prone to stand upon his dignity.

“That’s not the way to talk to your father, Roland.”

“I’m sorry, father, but oh, I don’t know, I....” Roland hesitated, and the matter should then have been allowed to drop. Mrs. Whately had indeed prepared to interfere with an irrelevant comment on a friend’s theory of house decoration, but Mr. Whately, having once started on an assault, was loath to abandon it. “No, Roland, that’s not at all the way to speak to me, and I don’t know what you’ve got to be impatient with me about. You know quite well that you’re going to marry April in time.”

“I know nothing of the sort.”

“Don’t be absurd; of course you do; it was arranged a long time ago.”

“No, it wasn’t; nothing’s been arranged. We’re not engaged, and I won’t have all this talk about ‘when Roland and April are married.’ Do you hear? I will not have it!”

It was a surprising outburst. Roland was usually so even tempered, and the moment afterwards he was bitterly ashamed of himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was saying.”

For a moment his father did not answer him. Then: “It’s all right, Roland,” he said; “we understand.”

But Roland saw quite clearly he was not forgiven, that his behavior had increased the estrangement that had existed between his father and himself ever since, without asking parental advice, he had abandoned the idea of the bank. They did not talk much after dinner, and Mr. Whately went to bed early, leaving Roland and his mother alone. It was easier now that he had gone.

“I feel such a beast,” Roland said. “I don’t know what made me do it. I was worried and tired. I didn’t enjoy myself as much as I had hoped to down at Hogstead.”

“I know, dear, I know. We all feel like that sometimes, but I don’t see why that particular thing should have upset you. After all, it’s a very old joke of father’s; you’ve heard it so often before.”

“I know, mother, I know. I don’t know what it was.”

He could not make clear to her, if she was unable to appreciate through her intuition, his distaste for this harping on his marriage, this inevitable event to which he had to come, the fate that he could in no way avoid.

“Really, dear,” his mother went on, “I couldn’t understand it. You haven’t had any row with April, have you?”

“Oh, no; nothing like that, nothing.”

“Then really, dear——”

“I know, mother, I know.”

It was no good trying to explain to her. Could anyone ever communicate their grief, or their happiness for that matter, to another? Was it not the fate of every human soul to be shut away from sympathy behind the wall he himself throws up for his defense?

“And, dear, while we’re on the question,” his mother was saying, “both father and I have been thinking that—well, dear, you’ve been spending rather a lot of money lately, and we thought that, though you have such a certain post, you really ought to take the opportunity of putting by a little money for setting up your house later on. Don’t you think so, dear?”

“I suppose so, mother.”

“You see you’ve got practically no expenses now. I know you pay us something every week, and it’s very good of you to, but you could quite easily save fifty pounds a year.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And don’t you think you ought to?”

“I’ll try, mother, I’ll try.”

She rose from her chair, walked across to him, and, bending down, kissed his forehead.

“We do feel for you, dear,” she said, “really we do.”

“I know you do, mother.”

For a long while after she had left him Roland remained in the drawing-room; he was burdened by a confused reaction against the influences that were shaping his future for him. He supposed he was in love with April, that one day he would marry her; but was there any need for this insistence upon domesticity? Could he not be free a little longer? His eyes traveled miserably round the small, insignificant drawing-room. The window curtains had long since yielded their fresh color to the sunshine and hung dingily in the gaslight. The wall paper was shabby and tawdry, with its festooned roses. The carpet near the door was threadbare; the coverings to the stiff-backed chairs were dull and crinkly. This was what marriage meant to men and women in his position. He contrasted the narrow room with the comfort and repose of Hogstead. What chance did people stand whose lives were circumscribed by endless financial difficulties, who could not afford to surround themselves with deep arm-chairs and heavy carpets and warm-colored wall papers? It was cruel that now, at the very moment when he had begun to escape from the drab environment of his childhood, these fetters should be attached to him. It was cruel. And rising from his chair he walked backwards and forwards, up and down the room. The days of his freedom were already numbered. They would be soon ended, the days of irresponsible, unreflecting action. It was maddening, this semblance of liberty where there was no liberty. He recalled a simile in a novel he had once read, though the name of the book and of the author had escaped his memory, in which human beings were described as fishes swimming in clear water, with the net of the fisherman about them. He was like that. He was swimming in clear water, but at any moment the fisherman might lift the net and he would be gasping and quivering on the bank.

Next day, in pitiful reaction, he presented to Mr. Marston a request to be allowed to commence his foreign tour immediately instead of, as had been previously arranged, in the beginning of the autumn.

“But, my dear fellow,” Mr. Marston expostulated, “you surely don’t want to go in the very middle of the cricket season, when you’re in such splendid form? Think what games you’ll be missing. There’s the Whittington match in August. We simply can’t do without you. And then there’s that game against Hogstead in September, in which you did so splendidly last year. It’s no good, my dear fellow, we simply can’t spare you.”

But Roland was stubborn.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, “but I do feel that I ought to be going out there soon, and July and August will be slack months—just the time to see people and form alliances. In the autumn they would be too busy to worry about me.”

Mr. Marston shrugged his shoulders. It was annoying, but still the business came first, he supposed.

“All right, my dear fellow. I daresay you are right. And I am glad to see you are so keen on your work. I only wish Gerald was.”

“Oh, but I think he is really, sir,” said Roland, who, for one horrible moment, had a feeling that he was playing a mean trick on Gerald. At school he had resented the way that little Mark-Grubber Shrimpton had gone up to Crusoe at the end of the hour to ask his questions. He had found a nasty name for such behavior then, and was there so much difference between Shrimpton’s thirst for knowledge and his own desire to travel when he might have been playing cricket? But Mr. Marston speedily reassured him.

“Oh, yes; Gerald—he’s keen enough of course, and, after all, he’s rather different. He’s known all along there was no necessity for him to over-exert himself, and I daresay he’s heard so much shop talked that he’s got pretty sick of the whole thing. You have come fresh to it.”

“Then I may go, sir?”

“Yes, yes, if you want to. I’ll ask Mr. Perkins to make an arrangement. I expect we’ll be able to get rid of you next week.”

And so it was arranged.

Two days before his departure, as he was bounding downstairs on his way to lunch, Roland was suddenly confronted at the turn of the staircase below the second landing by a tall, graceful figure, in a wide-brimmed hat and light crinkly hair. He gave a surprised gasp. “I am so sorry,” he began; then saw that it was Beatrice. “Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Arnold?” It was rather dark and for a moment she did not recognize him.

“Oh, but of course—why, it’s Mr. Whately! And how fortunate! I was wondering how I should ever get to the top of these enormous stairs. I can’t think why you don’t have a lift. I’ve come to see Gerald. Do you think you could run and tell him I’m here? I suppose I should have gone and asked one of your clerks, but they do so embarrass me. Oh, thank you so much. It is kind.”

Within a minute Roland had returned with the news that Gerald had already gone out to lunch, that his secretary did not know where he had gone, but that he had left a message stating that he was not to be expected back before three.

A look of disappointment crossed her face.

“Oh, but how annoying!” she said. “And I had wanted him to take me out to lunch. We haven’t seen each other for such a long time. I suppose it’s my own fault. I ought to have let him know. All the same, thank you so much, Mr. Whately.”

She had half turned to go, when Roland, with one of those sudden inspirations, of which a moment’s thought would have rendered him incapable, suggested that she should come out and lunch with him instead. “It would be so delightful for me if you would.”

As she turned towards him, her features expressing an obvious surprise, he wondered how on earth he had had the courage to ask her. He had never seen her look more beautiful than she did, standing there in the half light of the staircase, her pale blue dress silhouetted against the dull brown of the woodwork, and one arm flung out along the banister. For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse, when suddenly the look of surprise passed into a gracious smile.

“But how kind of you, Mr. Whately; I should love to.”

He took her to a smart but quiet restaurant that was mostly used by city men wishing to lunch unobtrusively with their secretaries, and they were lucky enough to find a corner table. At first he found conversation a little difficult; the waiter was so slow bringing the dishes. There were uncomfortable pauses in their talk. But by the time they had finished their fish, and drunk a little wine, Roland’s nervousness had passed. It was a delight to look at her, a delight to listen to the soft intonations of her voice; and here in the quiet intimacy of the restaurant he was able to appreciate even more acutely than at Hogstead the mystery and romance that surrounded her. The pathos of her life was actual to him; they were discussing a new novel that had been much praised, but of which she had complained a falsity to life.

“But then you are so different from the rest of us,” he had said.

“Ah, don’t say that,” she replied quickly. “I’m so anxious to be the same as all of you, to live your life and share your interests. It’s so lonely being different.”

She made him talk of himself, of his hopes and his ambitions. And he told her that in two days’ time he would be going abroad.

“In the middle of August! Before the cricket season’s over! What horrid luck!”

“Oh, no, I wanted to go,” said Roland. “I was getting tired of things. I wanted a change.”

She looked at him with curiosity, a new interest for him in her deep dove-colored eyes.

“You, too!” she said.

“I don’t know what it is,” Roland continued. “I feel restless; I feel I must break loose. It’s all the same, one day after another, and what does it lead to?”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her face resting upon the backs of her hands.

“Ah, don’t I know that feeling,” she said; “one waits, one says, ‘Something is sure to happen soon.’ But it doesn’t, and one goes on waiting. And one tries to run away, but one can’t escape from oneself.” Their eyes met and there seemed to be no further need for words between them. Roland’s thoughts traveled into spaces of vague and wistful speculation. A profound melancholy consumed him, a melancholy that was at the same time pleasant—a sugared sadness.

“What are you thinking of, Roland?” The use of his Christian name caused no surprise to him; it was natural that she should address him so. He answered her, his eyes looking into hers.

“I was thinking of how we spend our whole lives looking forward to things and looking back to things and that in itself the thing is nothing.”

She smiled at him. “So you’ve found that out too?” she said. Then she laughed quickly. “But you mustn’t get mournful when you are with me. You’ve all your life before you and you’re going to be frightfully successful and frightfully happy. I shall so enjoy watching you. And now I must really be rushing off. You’ve given me a most delightful time”; and she began to gather up her gloves and the silk purse that hung by a gold chain from her wrist.

Roland could do little work that afternoon; his thoughts wandered from the ledger at his side and from the files of the financial news. And that evening he was more acutely aware than usual of the uncolored dreariness of his home. For him Beatrice was the composite vision of that other world from which the course of his life was endeavoring to lead him. She represented, for him, romance, adventure, the flower and ecstasy of life.

But two days later he felt once again, as he leaned against the taffrail to watch the English coast fade into a dim haze, that he was letting drop from his shoulders the accumulated responsibilities of the past six months. Did it matter then so much what happened to him over there behind that low-lying bank of cloud if he could at any moment step out of his captivity, relinquish his anxieties and enter a world that knew nothing of April or of his parents, that accepted him on his own valuation as a young man with agreeable manners and a comfortable independence? Who that held the keys of his dungeon could be called a prisoner?