On the day after Denis left the Bellevue, Dorothea also departed, with her mountain of trunks. She did not see Gardiner again. Louisa paid the bill. The feelings of the rejected lover, who had to make up the account and take the money, deserve mention as being probably unique.

On the second morning after this, Lettice received a letter from her cousin, inclosing a cheque for £20 and an entreaty that she would stay on at the Bellevue. "Send it back, my dear girl, if you don't feel like taking it," Denis wrote, "or call it a loan: I'd much rather you didn't, but I shan't feel hurt if you do. Only remember I don't need the money, and I'd rather spend it this way than any other. I hate to see you looking seedy, and you're not anything like fit yet, you know. Besides, I'd like you and Gardiner to get to know each other. You never would, so long as I was there in the way." A remark which showed that Denis was no fool. Lettice, who had been looking forward to an unpeaceful time in the bosom of her family, accepted the loan with simple gratitude, and stayed. It was easy to take favors from Denis: could higher testimonial be given?

* * * * * * * * *

Bredon was a seaside place without a single villa; just half-a-dozen old cottages and a new church, standing on the verge of the chalk cliffs of Thanet. This church was a building of surprising ugliness, red brick outside, decorated inside with stenciled texts chopped up like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The east window had paper transparencies, leaded and colored to imitate glass. The holy table was a table, with obvious legs, having the Ten Commandments above and a Bible upon it—none of your papistical altars. The vicar was a robust Evangelical with a mustache. Denis did not like him very much, but he approved of his doctrine, and attended his church.

Picture him, then, on his first Sunday at home, coming out into the churchyard among that humble congregation (vicar's wife, vicar's man, school children, candidate for coals, village policeman in uniform, one girl—

and setting forth on his three-mile tramp across the marshes. Denis would neither cycle, motor, nor fly upon a Sunday. This was the more inconvenient because, if Bredon was out of the world, Dandelion Farm, the present home of the Smith aeroplane, might be said to be howling in the wilderness.

It was still early in September, and after a rainy night the sky was blue again, the air crystal-pure over the flat green land. The road had neither fence nor hedgerow, but on either side a dark blue ribbon of water lay brimming and crumpling in the sea wind. Other such dikes, intersecting, ruled out the square fields of Thanet, where red cattle, like wooden beasts out of a Noah's Ark, grazed on pastures coarsely green. There was no sign of autumn but in the sedge, withered putty-color, and rustling a dry, pleasant song. In spring the yellow iris fringed the waterways; later, forget-me-not, loosestrife, meadow-sweet; now only the tall mud-clotted stems of the willow-herb, and its pink stars seeding in silvery down. Denis walked on, content. He did not consciously think about his surroundings, but unconsciously he was happier here than among the hills and woods of Arden. Thanet was English, and he was English—well, he was Irish; but he had all the Englishman's conservatism and love for the ways of home, what foreigners call his insularity.

Straight ahead at the end of the track rose a delicately penciled group of trees, with a gray roof showing beside, and white dots of sheep on the gray-green of their pasture. This was Dandelion, videlicet Dent-de-lion. Till a few months since, the partners had rented a bungalow on the sands near Bredon; but there Denis had been so pestered with interviewers, autograph hunters, and less estimable gentry who came to pick his brains, that after some debate they had transferred themselves to this lodge in the wilderness. Part of the ground that went with the house was to be flooded, for the use of seaplanes; while there was ample space in addition for an aerodrome and for workshops, hangars, etc., which could be shut off behind a palisading, and defy curiosity.

These new erections were frankly ugly, but there was a certain dignity about the square gray Georgian farm-house and its outbuildings. Denis passed a barn, its thatched roof cushioned with mosses, then a haystack, exhaling its warm sweet scent, then the stone gate-posts of the entrance. The gate was open, and he paused to latch it; gates left to swing shake off their hinges. He walked round the curve of the drive, his mind agreeably occupied with thoughts of cold beef, came in sight of the pillared portico—thrice horrid sight! there was a car standing at the door!

It was not his partner's, for the letter was P, not LD; nor was the car itself much like the battered and beloved old racer which Wandesforde liked to use. This was a Rolls-Royce touring car of the present year's model. No chauffeur was in charge. After prowling round to satisfy the curiosity which any piece of machinery roused in his engineer's brain, Denis went into the house to make inquiries. The porch opened into a passage with rooms on either side. Denis was tiptoeing towards the kitchen, where he hoped to find his man, when the door on the left opened suddenly, revealing the visitor—Dorothea O'Connor.

"So here you are at last!" she said. "I am so glad! I've been stuck here ever since eleven!"

Denis did not echo her joy. "I thought you were at Rochehaut!"

"Me? No, wasn't it funny? I had to leave, in a hurry, the very day after you did. I came off down here first thing this morning. It's a glorious run through Kent—the car did travel!"

"Your chauffeur, I suppose, is in with my man?"

"Isn't. I didn't bring one," she airily explained. "I didn't bring anybody. I hate being driven, I like to do things for myself. I've come to see the aeroplanes, you know. I told you I should!"

She stuck her hands in her pockets and propped her slim shoulders against the wall, looking up with a naughty and audacious tilt of the chin. "Here I am and you can't get rid of me!" she seemed to say.

Denis did not want her in the least. It was two o'clock, and humanity constrained him to ask her to lunch; there was not an inn for miles where she could get a meal, if he didn't, and she must actually have seen his cold beef on the table. But Denis was an Irishman, with strict ideas of propriety. Dorothea, not for the first time, had forgotten her part; while posing as a young girl, she claimed the freedom of a married woman. Reading her mistake in his face, she was quick to seize the bull by the horns.

"I suppose I've no business here, and I know you don't want me, but I'm not going back now till I've seen everything!" she announced; and then, melting into the wheedling, insinuating smile of a child: "You can look on me as a man and a brother, or you can count me as business—I am—I don't care what you do, only do forgive me, and do, do, do ask me to lunch, for I'm so hungry!"

Denis smiled too, though stiffly, making the best of it. "I shall be very pleased to show you the place, Miss O'Connor, but it's a pity you've come to-day, for you'll not see any flyin'. The men are all home, you know."

"Why, I came on purpose because I thought Sunday was the day!"

"It isn't with us."

Dorothea was subdued. She did not ask why, but meekly reËntered the room. The partners had divided the house between them, and this was Denis's den, corresponding to Wandesforde's across the passage. Wandesforde, though he lived in town and was only a casual visitor at Dent-de-lion, had made himself extremely comfortable; Denis had brought his old furniture from Bredon and dumped it in the room, just as it was. There were two sash windows, filled with small panes. Under one stood a table as big as a four-poster, covered with papers. Denis could lay his hand on any packet in the dark; but when papers are in order, unfortunately it does not follow that they are tidy. In the middle of the floor stood a second table, just large enough to take Denis's plate and the cold beef. Beside the fireplace, which had a marbled wooden mantelpiece, stood a pair of leathern arm-chairs, once plum-colored, now seamed with white cracks, and with every spring broken. The walls were covered with drab paper, fading to yellow, there was a square of drab drugget on the floor, and the ceiling was drab also, from ancient lamp smoke. Dorothea thought in passing that it was the ugliest room she had ever been in, but she, like Denis, was highly indifferent to her surroundings.

But she was by no means indifferent to her host; she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, an opinion held by other young ladies before her, though Denis's looks were not at all in the style of the barber's block. He was just under six feet in height, lightly built and light in movement, all bone and sinew. His face was thin too, a little pinched at the temples, a little hollow in the cheeks, with dark brows, dark hair, and a white skin which burnt biscuit-brown, not red. Irish coloring and deep-set, dark blue Irish eyes, "put in with a dirty finger" under their long soft lashes. The lower part of the face, nose and lips and chin, was most delicately modeled, fine, high-bred, rather ascetic in type. In short, he was as handsome as a paladin, À fendre le coeur, and so purely indifferent to the fact, one way or the other, that Lettice when she poked her soft fun at him got no more than an absent-minded smile. No rises were to be had in that quarter. But Dorothea was not given to poking fun at people; she planted her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, adoring his looks, hanging breathless on his words, divided in admiration between his person and his profession—and how those great eyes of hers could lighten and glow! They were not the same eyes, she was not the same girl who had poured out her lightnings on Harry Gardiner.

In telling her tale to Lettice, Dorothea had said less than the truth. For one thing, she was ashamed to own that she had been physically afraid of her uncle. The anger of a stupid and wrong-headed man may be a very brutal thing. When he threatened to knock her down, Dorothea gave in, in helpless rage and humiliation, bad companions for a high-spirited girl. Also she suffered more than she herself realized from her isolation. Dorothea was the born devotee; she would never have learned to hate if she had had any one to adore. But she was quite alone. The neighborhood was up in arms, no doubt, but nobody was anxious to stand forth as her champion: partly because people are always loath to interfere in a neighbor's business, partly because the unlucky little heiress had been painted by her loving relatives in such very lurid colors that some of the paint had stuck.

Then came Major Trent to stay at the Anglers' Rest. He met Dorothea one morning when she had been sent out to exercise her aunt's Chow. The amiable Xit tried to bite the stranger, and did bite Dorothea when she hauled him off. Naturally Trent expressed his concern. Naturally Dorothea did not mention the incident at home. They met again next day, of course by chance, in the same place—in fine, Dorothea had found her champion. The affair was rushed through in a month. Mrs. O'Connor woke up one morning to miss her early cup of tea. She descended in a dressing-gown to scold Dorothea, but no Dorothea was to be found. She had gone, without leaving so much as the traditional note on her pin-cushion. Next day came the announcement of her marriage, by special license, to Major Trent, D.S.O.

Dorothea when she married was innocent and ignorant as a child. She came to Trent with eager fresh gratitude and affection. She spent eight months with him; eight feverish, hothouse-forcing months of premature emotion. Towards the end of the time, when his passion had cooled, and when she herself was calmed and steadied by the hope of motherhood, she began to look at her battered knight with wondering eyes, which would soon have grown critical. His tragic death, however, made criticism disloyal, and invested Trent with all his former glories. It swept away, too, the hope to which the girl had been looking forward with grave, ennobling joy. Only Louisa knew how frantically Dorothea grieved for her baby. Her long illness was really an obstinate refusal to be comforted. Louisa, it may be noted, had not been Dorothea's devoted nurse. She had been Mr. O'Connor's incomparable cook; and the unkindest blow his niece dealt was that she carried off, when she went, the only perfect maker of soufflÉs he had ever known.

Here was Dorothea, then, at twenty-one, half a child and half a woman, frantic with grief, and convinced that the murderer of her husband and child was going free unpunished. She vowed herself to vengeance as a sacred duty. She was unpersuadably sure that all she had done to Gardiner was justifiable. But Denis was different. True, he had screened the murderer, but Dorothea couldn't but own that in his shoes she would have done the same. She was not quite happy in her mind; but she crushed the scruple, telling herself that when justice is done the innocent must suffer with the guilty. She crushed it, and presently she forgot it, yes, and her vengeance into the bargain, when they went out to see the works. Aeroplanes are so exciting! After all, Dorothea was not much more than a baby, and she had long arrears of play to make up.

In old days, Denis and his man Simpson had built the machines with their own hands; later, at Bredon, they employed half-a-dozen men; now there were twenty, and the number was growing. Behind the tall palisade a nest of sheds was springing up—wood and metal working shops, rigging rooms, offices, stores, Simpson's cabin where he slept as night watchman, and finally the hangars. Great ugly erections of brickwork and corrugated iron, with gable ends and sliding doors, they caught the eye at once. The first held an unfinished seaplane, marked for rebuilding after undergoing her trials; a biplane built in 1911, now hopelessly out of date; and a BlÉriot monoplane belonging to Wandesforde which Denis hated, and which, he gravely assured his companion, would kill him if he gave it the chance. But he hurried Dorothea past these to the smaller shed, which contained only one machine: his favorite, his beloved, the 80 h.p. monoplane scout which had been entered for the Birmingham race.

She was very small, scarcely larger than Santos-Dumont's famous "Demoiselle." There was a slender bird-like body, the fuselage, in which the pilot sat, deep-sunk, with passenger behind, engine and propeller in front, the two long blades standing out like antennÆ. Pale wings arched and tilted upwards on either side, curving like the wings of a gull in flight. The whole stood on a light framework, the chassis or under-carriage, corresponding to the feet of a bird. Dorothea listened, while Denis explained the perfections of his handiwork. Tangential, lift coefficient, angle of incidence, such terms went in at one ear and out at the other; she was not interested in scientific aeronautics. Denis was expounding the principles of stream-line design, as shown in the curves of his fuselage, when she interrupted.

"Mr. Merion-Smith, will you teach me to fly?"

"Will I teach you to fly?"

"Yes. You said I could learn. I want to learn."

He shook his head, smiling. "You should go to Hendon or Brooklands. We don't run a flying school, you know."

"I don't want to go to Hendon or Brooklands, I want to go to you," retorted Dorothea flatly. "I want you to build me a machine like this one, and I want you to teach me to manage it. Will you?"

"I'm afraid that's out of the question."

"Why?"

If Denis had told the bare truth, he must have answered, Because I don't want to. As that was unsayable, he hedged.

"Well, for one thing, I've no plane you could learn on. You need a special school machine, with duplicate control for pilot and pupil—we've nothing of the sort."

"If that's all, I'll buy one."

"Buy a machine that'll be no earthly use to you six months hence?"

"Why not? Why shouldn't I throw my money away if I want to? It's good for trade, and it can't possibly matter to you!"

Denis looked as though it mattered a good deal. Geraldine, who had followed them from the house like a dog, seized this moment to make a scrambling leap on his shoulder. He steadied her with one hand mechanically as she walked to and fro, pushing now her nose and now her tail into his face, after the inconsiderate manner of a happy cat, but obviously she was too much a matter of course to interrupt his thoughts. All he said was: "I should wait till I was older, if I were you."

"Pooh! I'm as old as that boy who was killed at Eastchurch last week, and he'd had his ticket for two years."

"Quite possibly, but then you see he is dead."

"Ah, you say that because you think I'm reckless, but that's only with money. I shouldn't be reckless flying, I should love my plane far too much." She rubbed her cheek softly against the varnished fabric of the wing.

"That remains to be seen," said Denis, smiling.

"No, it doesn't. I am careful. I've driven my car about town for two years now, and never had a summons or an accident."

Denis looked at her with more respect, but he continued to shake his head. "Go to Hendon and get your ticket, and then come back to me, and I'll build you a machine with pleasure."

"I won't. I'll learn of you, or not at all."

"Then I'm afraid it will have to be not at all."

"Oh, you are hateful," said Dorothea succinctly. She turned her back on him and marched towards the door. Half-way there she thought better of it, and came back to lay her clasped hands on his arm, frankly imploring. "Oh, do teach me!" she besought. "Do. Do. You don't know how much I want it! Why won't you? Is it because I'm not a man?"

Denis was driven a step nearer the truth. "I've really not the time. I'm a designer, not an instructor; it would not be fair to my partner to undertake outside work."

"Ah, but I shouldn't take long to learn. I'm good with machinery. Besides, if you won't teach me I won't buy one of your machines, and that'll be worse for your partner than just the few hours you'd have to give up—two, wasn't it, that man learned in the other day? Won't you at least ask Mr. Wandesforde if he'd mind? Please, please say yes!"

Denis was wishing her at Jericho. He delighted in a battle, but he had no armor against coaxing. He did not in the least want to teach Miss O'Connor, or any one else, to fly. He had a full winter's work before him on the seaplane, and he hated (like Lettice) to be dragged out of his rut. Finally, Dorothea was a woman; and women are an endless bother. Seeing a chance of evading her, he jumped at it.

"Well, I'll ask Wandesforde if you like," he conceded.

Dorothea took her hands off his arm with a nod of satisfaction. "I thought I'd get you to do it," she said. "I always know what I want and I generally get it. It's only a question of wanting it hard enough. I'll go now, and leave you in peace. You'll write to him at once, won't you?"

Oh yes, Denis would write at once. He was already concocting the letter as he locked up the sheds. "I've had a nuisance of a woman here pretending she wants to order a machine on condition that one of us teaches her to fly. Quite young, and I should say quite irresponsible. I told her, of course, that we didn't run a school, but I wouldn't absolutely refuse without consulting you."

He had got as far as this when Dorothea broke in. She was looking rather solemn.

"I forgot to say one thing. Do you mind, if you're writing to Mr. Gardiner, not telling him anything about me? Or Lettice either," she added.

"Certainly, if you wish it," said Denis after a moment.

"I do wish it."

They walked on in silence. At the steps Dorothea paused for a last word.

"I've had a quarrel with him. A bad quarrel. I don't want him to know I'm here, because if he does he'll think it his duty to write and warn you against me."

This was the truth, and, as truth often does, it conveyed a false impression.

"Gardiner?" said Denis, incredulous. "He would never do that."

"He would, he would, you don't know. He might not to any one else, but he would to you."

This was true again, and again misleading. Denis was puzzled. "I thought you and he were—friends," he said.

"Not now. He hates me."

"Gardiner hates you?"

"Yes. Thinks me wicked. Wouldn't willingly be under the same roof. He does, he does. And we can never make it up. I'm angry with Lettice too, at present, but I shall make it up with her, because I love her. But not with Mr. Gardiner—never, never."

"Well, if you say so," said Denis, "but I thought—"

Dorothea looked up with a flash of understanding. No need to put into words what he had thought about her and Gardiner.

"That?" she said. "Oh no—never, never, never!"

This time Denis believed her.