The Shuttle
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 1 of 2

"From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were
an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate.
That an American who is making her first visit to England
should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected
place is a thing to wonder at. What can she know about it,
one thinks. But she apparently does know. They say she has
made no mistakes--even with the village people. She is managing,
in one way or another, to give work to every man who
wants it. Result, of course--unbounded rustic enthusiasm."

Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.

"How clever of her! And what sensible good feeling!
Yes--yes! She evidently has learned things somewhere. Perhaps
New York has found it wise to begin to give young
women professional training in the management of English
estates. Who knows? Not a bad idea."

It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had
in a manner spread her fame. One heard enlightening and
illustrative anecdotes of her. He related several well worth
hearing. She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected
perceptions.

"One detail of the story of old Doby's meerschaum,"
Westholt said, "pleased me enormously. She managed to convey
to him--without hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him
with embarrassment--that if he preferred a clean churchwarden
or his old briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the
new pipe. He could regard it as a trophy. Now, how did
she do that without filling him with fright and confusion, lest
she might think him not sufficiently grateful for her present?
But they tell me she did it, and that old Doby is rapturously
happy and takes the meerschaum to bed with him, but only
smokes it on Sundays--sitting at his window blowing great
clouds when his neighbours are coming from church. It was
a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like
his old pipe best."

"It was a deliciously clever girl," said Lord Dunholm.
"One wants to know and make friends with her. We must
drive over and call. I confess, I rather congratulate myself
that Anstruthers is not at home."

"So do I," Westholt answered. "One wonders a little
how far he and his sister-in-law will `foregather' when he
returns. He's an unpleasant beggar."

A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs.
Charley Jenkins, was passed by a carriage whose liveries she
recognised half way up the village street. It was the carriage
from Dunholm Castle. Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord
Westholt sat in it. They were, of course, going to call at the
Court. Miss Vanderpoel was beginning to draw people. She
naturally would. She would be likely to make quite a difference
in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her and
Lady Anstruthers had been seen driving with her, evidently
no longer an unvisitable invalid, but actually decently clothed
and in her right mind. Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that
she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding
gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the
landau. She felt that the Dunholms were important. There
were earldoms AND earldoms, and that of Dunholm was dignified
and of distinction.

A common-looking young man on a bicycle, who had wheeled
into the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a
hundred yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and
dismounted, just as Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking
after the equipage, and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.

"This is Stornham village, ain't it, ma'am?" he inquired.

"Yes, my man."  His costume and general aspect seemed to
indicate that he was of the class one addressed as "my man,"
though there was something a little odd about him.

"Thank you. That wasn't Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister
in that carriage, was it?"

"Miss Vanderpoel's----" Mrs. Brent hesitated. "Do you
mean Lady Anstruthers?"

"I'd forgotten her name. I know Miss Vanderpoel's
eldest sister lives at Stornham--Reuben S. Vanderpoel's
daughter."

"Lady Anstruthers' younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel,
and she is visiting at Stornham Court now."  Mrs. Brent could
not help adding, curiously, "Why do you ask?"

"I am going to see her. I'm an American."

Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp. She had heard
remarkable things of the democratic customs of America. It
was painful not to be able to ask questions.

"The lady in the carriage was the Countess of Dunholm,"
she said rather grandly. "They are going to the Court to
call on Miss Vanderpoel."

"Then Miss Vanderpoel's there yet. That's all right.
Thank you, ma'am," and lifting his cap again he turned into
the little public house.

The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare
visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant
in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling,
confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation
height, well dressed, and of trained bearing. The entrance hall
had lost its hopeless shabbiness. It was a complete and
picturesquely luxurious thing. The change suggested
magic. The magic which had been used, Lord Dunholm
reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth. Given
surroundings, combined with a gift for knowing values of
form and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands
of guineas on tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties,
barrenness is easily transformed.

The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it
was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstruthers, as she had
generally been called, there was to be noted alteration
also. In her case the change, being in its first stages,
could not perhaps be yet called transformation, but, aided by
softly pretty arrangement of dress and hair, a light in her
eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her skin, one recalled that
she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after all
she was only about thirty-two years old

That her sister, Miss Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not
necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither Lord Dunholm nor
his wife nor their son did hesitate. A girl with long limbs
an alluring profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round
lovely Irish-blue eyes, possesses physical capital not to be
argued about.

She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose
thin, though sometimes rather sweet, and always gay, high-
pitched young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially
struck by in the early days of the American invasion. Her
voice had a tone one would be likely to remember with pleasure.
How well she moved--how well her black head was set
on her neck! Yes, she was of the new type--the later generation.

These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it-- planned
it, perhaps, bought--figuratively speaking--the architects
and material to design and build it--bought them in
whatever country they found them, England, France, Italy
Germany--pocketing them coolly and carrying them back
home to develop, complete, and send forth into the world when
their invention was a perfected thing. Struck by the humour
of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling into the
Irish-blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which
warmed his heart. There were no pauses in the conversation
which followed. In times past, calls at Stornham had generally
held painfully blank moments. Lady Dunholm was as
pleased as her husband. A really charming girl was an enormous
acquisition to the neighbourhood.

Westholt, his father saw, had found even more than the
story of old Doby's pipe had prepared him to expect.

Country calls were not usually interesting or stimulating,
and this one was. Lord Dunholm laid subtly brilliant plans
to lead Miss Vanderpoel to talk of her native land and her
views of it. He knew that she would say things worth hearing.
Incidentally one gathered picturesque detail. To have
vibrated between the two continents since her thirteenth year,
to have spent a few years at school in one country, a few
years in another, and yet a few years more in still another,
as part of an arranged educational plan; to have crossed the
Atlantic for the holidays, and to have journeyed thousands of
miles with her father in his private car; to make the visits of a
man of great schemes to his possessions of mines, railroads, and
lands which were almost principalities--these things had been
merely details of her life, adding interest and variety, it was
true, but seeming the merely normal outcome of existence.
They were normal to Vanderpoels and others of their class
who were abnormalities in themselves when compared with the
rest of the world.

Her own very lack of any abnormality reached, in Lord
Dunholm's mind, the highest point of illustration of the phase
of life she beautifully represented--for beautiful he felt its
rare charms were.

When they strolled out to look at the gardens he found
talk with her no less a stimulating thing. She told her story
of Kedgers, and showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies
were to bloom, with the giants lifting white archangel trumpets
above them in the centre.

"He can be trusted," she said. "I feel sure he can be
trusted. He loves them. He could not love them so much
and not be able to take care of them."  And as she looked at
him in frank appeal for sympathy, Lord Dunholm felt that
for the moment she looked like a tall, queenly child.

But pleased as he was, he presently gave up his place at her
side to Westholt. He must not be a selfish old fellow and
monopolise her. He hoped they would see each other often, he
said charmingly. He thought she would be sure to like Dunholm,
which was really a thoroughly English old place, marked
by all the features she seemed so much attracted by. There
were some beautiful relics of the past there, and some rather
shocking ones--certain dungeons, for instance, and a gallows
mount, on which in good old times the family gallows had
stood. This had apparently been a working adjunct to the
domestic arrangements of every respectable family, and that
irritating persons should dangle from it had been a simple
domestic necessity, if one were to believe old stories.

"It was then that nobles were regarded with respect," he
said, with his fine smile. "In the days when a man appeared
with clang of arms and with javelins and spears before, and
donjon keeps in the background, the attitude of bent knees
and awful reverence were the inevitable results. When one
could hang a servant on one's own private gallows, or chop
off his hand for irreverence or disobedience--obedience and
reverence were a rule. Now, a month's notice is the extremity
of punishment, and the old pomp of armed servitors suggests
comic opera. But we can show you relics of it at Dunholm."

He joined his wife and began at once to make himself so
delightful to Rosy that she ceased to be afraid of him, and
ended by talking almost gaily of her London visit.

Betty and Westholt walked together. The afternoon being
lovely, they had all sauntered into the park to look at certain
views, and the sun was shining between the trees. Betty
thought the young man almost as charming as his father,
which was saying much. She had fallen wholly in love with
Lord Dunholm--with his handsome, elderly face, his voice,
his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of manner,
his courteous ease and wit. He was one of the men who
stood for the best of all they had been born to represent.
Her own father, she felt, stood for the best of all such an
American as himself should be. Lord Westholt would in time
be what his father was. He had inherited from him good
looks, good feeling, and a sense of humour. Yes, he had been
given from the outset all that the other man had been denied.
She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as "the other man," and
spoke of him.

"You know Lord Mount Dunstan?" she said.

Westholt hesitated slightly.

"Yes--and no," he answered, after the hesitation. "No
one knows him very well. You have not met him?" with a
touch of surprise in his tone.

"He was a passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed
the Atlantic. There was a slight accident and we were thrown
together for a few moments. Afterwards I met him by chance
again. I did not know who he was."

Lord Westholt showed signs of hesitation anew. In fact,
he was rather disturbed. She evidently did not know anything
whatever of the Mount Dunstans. She would not be
likely to hear the details of the scandal which had obliterated
them, as it were, from the decent world.

The present man, though he had not openly been mixed up
with the hideous thing, had borne the brand because he had
not proved himself to possess any qualities likely to recommend
him. It was generally understood that he was a bad lot also.
To such a man the allurements such a young woman as Miss
Vanderpoel would present would be extraordinary. It was
unfortunate that she should have been thrown in his way. At
the same time it was not possible to state the case clearly
during one's first call on a beautiful stranger.

"His going to America was rather spirited," said the
mellow voice beside him. "I thought only Americans took their
fates in their hands in that way. For a man of his class to face
a rancher's life means determination. It means the spirit----"
with a low little laugh at the leap of her imagination--"of the
men who were Mount Dunstans in early days and went forth
to fight for what they meant to have. He went to fight. He
ought to have won. He will win some day."

"I do not know about fighting," Lord Westholt answered.
Had the fellow been telling her romantic stories? "The general
impression was that he went to America to amuse himself."

"No, he did not do that," said Betty, with simple finality.
"A sheep ranch is not amusing----"  She stopped short and
stood still for a moment. They had been walking down the
avenue, and she stopped because her eyes had been caught by
a figure half sitting, half lying in the middle of the road, a
prostrate bicycle near it. It was the figure of a cheaply
dressed young man, who, as she looked, seemed to make an
ineffectual effort to rise.

"Is that man ill?" she exclaimed. "I think he must be."
They went towards him at once, and when they reached him he
lifted a dazed white face, down which a stream of blood was
trickling from a cut on his forehead. He was, in fact, very
white indeed, and did not seem to know what he was doing.

"I am afraid you are hurt," Betty said, and as she spoke
the rest of the party joined them. The young man vacantly
smiled, and making an unconscious-looking pass across his face
with his hand, smeared the blood over his features painfully.
Betty kneeled down, and drawing out her handkerchief, lightly
wiped the gruesome smears away. Lord Westholt saw what
had happened, having given a look at the bicycle.

"His chain broke as he was coming down the incline, and
as he fell he got a nasty knock on this stone," touching with his
foot a rather large one, which had evidently fallen from some
cartload of building material.

The young man, still vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his
breast pocket. He began to talk incoherently in good, nasal
New York, at the mere sound of which Lady Anstruthers
made a little yearning step forward.

"Superior any other," he muttered. "Tabulator spacer--
marginal release key--call your 'tention--instantly--'justable
--Delkoff--no equal on market."  And having found what he
had fumbled for, he handed a card to Miss Vanderpoel and
sank unconscious on her breast.

"Let me support him, Miss Vanderpoel," said Westholt,
starting forward.

"Never mind, thank you," said Betty. "If he has fainted
I suppose he must be laid flat on the ground. Will you please
to read the card.

It was the card Mount Dunstan had read the day before.

                       J. BURRIDGE & SON,
                      DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
              BROADWAY, NEW YORK.    G. SELDEN.

"He is probably G. Selden," said Westholt. "Travelling
in the interests of his firm, poor chap. The clue is not of much
immediate use, however."

They were fortunately not far from the house, and Westholt
went back quickly to summon servants and send for the
village doctor. The Dunholms were kindly sympathetic, and
each of the party lent a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding.
Lord Dunholm helped Miss Vanderpoel to lay the young man
down carefully.

"I am afraid," he said; "I am really afraid his leg is broken.
It was twisted under him. What can be done with him?"

Miss Vanderpoel looked at her sister.

"Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily,
Rosy?" she asked. "There is apparently nothing else to be done."

"Yes, yes," said Lady Anstruthers. "How could one send
him away, poor fellow! Let him be carried to the house."

Miss Vanderpoel smiled into Lord Dunholm's much approving,
elderly eyes.

"G. Selden is a compatriot," she said. "Perhaps he heard
I was here and came to sell me a typewriter."

Lord Westholt returning with two footmen and a light
mattress, G. Selden was carried with cautious care to the house.
The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the
ancestral oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white young
face. Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt each lent a friendly
hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping near, once or twice wiped
away an insistent trickle of blood which showed itself from
beneath the handkerchiefs. Lady Dunholm followed with
Lady Anstruthers.

Afterwards, during his convalescence, G. Selden frequently
felt with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of
his cortege at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be
for once in a position he would have designated as "out of
sight" in the novelty of its importance. To have beheld him,
borne by nobles and liveried menials, accompanied by ladies
of title, up the avenue of an English park on his way to be
cared for in baronial halls, would, he knew, have added a joy
to the final moments of his grandmother, which the consolations
of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition.
His own point of view, however, would not, it is true,
have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and
purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature. His enjoyment, in
fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of
humour, whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would
have been full fed by the incongruity of "Little Willie being
yanked along by a bunch of earls, and Reuben S. Vanderpoel's
daughters following the funeral."  That he himself should have
been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like "throwing
away money."

The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found
slight concussion of the brain and a broken leg. With Lady
Anstruthers' kind permission, it would certainly be best that
he should remain for the present where he was. So, in a
bedroom whose windows looked out upon spreading lawns and
broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably established as was
possible. G. Selden, through the capricious intervention of
Fate, if he had not "got next" to Reuben S. Vanderpoel himself,
had most undisputably "got next" to his favourite daughter.

As the Dunholm carriage rolled down the avenue there
reigned for a few minutes a reflective silence. It was Lady
Dunholm who broke it. "That," she said in her softly
decided voice, "that is a nice girl."

Lord Dunholm's agreeable, humorous smile flickered into
evidence.

"That is it," he said. "Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying
me with a quite delightful early Victorian word. I believe
I wanted it. She is a beauty and she is clever. She is a
number of other things--but she is also a nice girl. If you will
allow me to say so, I have fallen in love with her."

"If you will allow me to say so," put in Westholt, "so have
I--quite fatally."

"That," said his father, with speculation in his eye, "is
more serious."

CHAPTER XXVI

"WHAT IT MUST BE TO YOU--JUST YOU!"

G. Selden, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay and
stared at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed
through a few minutes of vacant amazement. It was a four-
post bed he was lying on, wasn't it? And his leg was bandaged
and felt unmovable. The last thing he remembered was
going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue. There was
nothing more. He had been all right then. Was this a four-
post bed or was it not? Yes, it was. And was it part of the
furnishings of a swell bedroom--the kind of bedroom he had
never been in before? Tip top, in fact? He stared and tried
to recall things--but could not, and in his bewilderment
exclaimed aloud.

"Well," he said, "if this ain't the limit! You may search ME!"

A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the
other side of the room. It was Buttle's wife, who had been
hastily called in.

"Sh--sh," she said soothingly. "Don't you worry.
Nobody ain't goin' to search you. Nobody ain't. There! Sh,
sh, sh," rather as if he were a baby. Beginning to be conscious
of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her
in a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic.
Perhaps he had got "bats in his belfry," and there was no use
in talking.

At that moment, however, the door opened and a young
lady entered. She was "a looker," G. Selden's weakness did
not interfere with his perceiving. "A looker, by gee!"  She
was dressed, as if for going out, in softly tinted, exquisite
things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the
brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The black
hair gave him a clue. It was hair like that he had seen as
Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter rode by when he stood at the park
gates at Mount Dunstan. "Bats in his belfry," of course.

"How is he?" she said to the nurse.

"He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss," the woman
answered, "but he's light-headed yet. He opened his eyes
quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he spoke queer. He said
something was the limit, and that we might search him."

Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the
disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing
that he was not delirious, she thought she understood. She
had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she
realised that the exclamation which had appeared delirium to
Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated that the unexplainableness
of the situation in which G. Selden found himself struck
him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most
extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to
satisfactory explanation.

She bent over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.

"I hope you feel better. Can you tell me?" she said.

His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a
young man who knew what he was saying.

"If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable,
thank you," he replied.

"I am glad to hear that," said Betty. "Don't be disturbed.
Your mind is quite clear."

"All I want," said G. Selden impartially, "is just to know
where I'm at, and how I blew in here. It would help me
to rest better."

"You met with an accident," the "looker" explained, still
smiling with both lips and eyes. "Your bicycle chain broke
and you were thrown and hurt yourself. It happened in the
avenue in the park. We found you and brought you in. You
are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel
Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my sister. I am Miss
Vanderpoel."

"Hully gee!" ejaculated G. Selden inevitably. "Hully
GEE!"  The splendour of the moment was such that his brain
whirled. As it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl
with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.

"That's right," Miss Vanderpoel said. "Keep them
closed. I must not talk to you until you are stronger. Lie
still and try not to think. The doctor says you are getting
on very well. I will come and see you again."

As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed
to open his eyes.

"Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel," he said. "Thank you, ma'am. And
as his eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace:
"Well, if that's her--she can have ME--and welcome!"

. . . . .

She came to see him again each day--sometimes in a linen
frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and
flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or
three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and
wonderfully trailing draperies--looking like the women he had
caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having
indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat
in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne
not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because
he wanted to see the show and get "a look-in" at the Four
Hundred. He believed very implicitly in his Four Hundred,
and privately--though perhaps almost unconsciously--cherished
the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly
as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes
his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel
in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American
dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions
of his multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the
voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without
which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.

Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday
paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with
her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he
was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and
luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into
insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this.
Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several
times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was
spoken of as "Master Ughtred."  "Master" was supposed
by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small
sons of baronets and the like. The children he knew in New
York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy,
or Bill. No parallel to "Master" had been in vogue among them.

Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little
thing, and both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking
of New York. She had not been home for years, and the
youngster had never seen it at all. He had some queer ideas
about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but
Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was
vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the
festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential
election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.

"Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please," he
said once. "I want to know what kind of an animal it is."

From a point of view somewhat different from that of
Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found
talk with him interesting. To her he did not wear the aspect
of a foreign product. She had not met and conversed with
young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent precautions
were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous
enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices; they
were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood
when seen and suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood,
was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents. This one,
lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the
kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his
adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave
her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in
common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a
realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy
conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights
were thrown upon existence in the "hall bedroom" and upon
previously unknown phases of business life in Broadway and
roaring "downtown" streets.

His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper
under rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd, impersonal
summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience
with the world in general, were, she knew, business
assets. She was even moved--no less--by the remote connection
of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel
who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern
fortune. The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and
known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them.
Fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously at every
gateway which might give ingress to some passage leading to
even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference
only to be overcome by steady and continued assault--if G.
Selden was a nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt
worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions. No one desires
the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must
persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or
force. From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered
that the first Reuben Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain
youth of soul she felt in this modern struggler for life. He had
been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she secretly liked
the better.

The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been
awakened by a singular feature of her patient's feverish
wanderings.

"He keeps muttering, miss, things I can't make out about
Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr. Penzance, and some child he
calls Little Willie. He talks to them the same as if he knew
them--same as if he was with them and they were talking to
him quite friendly."

One morning Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry
found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented
upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the mystery.

"Well, Miss Vanderpoel," he explained, "I was lying here
thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and
how well they treated me--I haven't told you about that, have I?

"That explains what Mrs. Buttle said," she answered.
"When you were delirious you talked frequently to Lord
Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. We both wondered why."

Then he told her the whole story. Beginning with his sitting on
the grassy bank outside the park, listening to the song of the
robin, he ended with the adieux at the entrance gates when the
sound of her horse's trotting hoofs had been heard by each of
them.

"What I've been lying here thinking of," he said, "is how
queer it was it happened just that way. If I hadn't stopped
just that minute, and if you hadn't gone by, and if Lord
Mount Dunstan hadn't known you and said who you were,
Little Willie would have been in London by this time, hustling
to get a cheap bunk back to New York in."

"Because?" inquired Miss Vanderpoel.

G. Selden laughed and hesitated a moment. Then he made
a clean breast of it.

"Say, Miss Vanderpoel," he said, "I hope it won't make
you mad if I own up. Ladies like you don't know anything
about chaps like me. On the square and straight out, when
I seen you and heard your name I couldn't help remembering
whose daughter you was. Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big
thing. Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to
get together and talk about what it'd mean to the chap who
could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel. We used to count
up all the business he does, and all the clerks he's got under
him pounding away on typewriters, and how they'd be bound to
get worn out and need new ones. And we'd make calculations
how many a man could unload, if he could get next. It
was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we
knew it couldn't happen really. But we used to chin about
it just for the fun of the thing. One of the boys made up a
thing about one of us saving Reuben S.'s life--dragging him
from under a runaway auto and, when he says, `What can I
do to show my gratitude, young man?' him handing out his
catalogue and saying, `I should like to call your attention to
the Delkoff, sir,' and getting him to promise he'd never use
any other, as long as he lived!"

Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter laughed as spontaneously
as any girl might have done. G. Selden laughed with her.
At any rate, she hadn't got mad, so far.

"That was what did it," he went on. "When I rode away
on my bike I got thinking about it and could not get it out
of my head. The next day I just stopped on the road and
got off my wheel, and I says to myself: `Look here, business is
business, if you ARE travelling in Europe and lunching at
Buckingham Palace with the main squeeze. Get busy! What'll the
boys say if they hear you've missed a chance like this? YOU
hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it's called, and
take your nerve with you! She can't do more than have you
fired out, and you've been fired before and got your breath after
it. So I turned round and made time. And that was how I
happened on your avenue. And perhaps it was because I was
feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and
pitched over on my head. There, I've got it off my chest. I
was thinking I should have to explain somehow."

Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice, long-
legged Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched
Betty again. The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden's world
as the flowers were of Kedgers', as the "little 'ome" was of
Mrs. Welden's.

"Were you going to try to sell ME a typewriter?" she asked.

"Well," G. Selden admitted, "I didn't know but what
there might be use for one, writing business letters on a big
place like this. Straight, I won't say I wasn't going to try
pretty hard. It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has
to rush things or he'll never get there. A chap like me HAS
to get there, somehow."

She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking
something over. Her silence and this look on her face
actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of
daring hope. He looked round at her with a faint rising of
colour.

"Say, Miss Vanderpoel--say----" he began, and then broke off.

"Yes?" said Betty, still thinking.

"C-COULD you use one--anywhere?" he said. "I don't
want to rush things too much, but--COULD you?"

"Is it easy to learn to use it?"

"Easy!" his head lifted from his pillow. "It's as easy as
falling off a log. A baby in a perambulator could learn to
tick off orders for its bottle. And--on the square--there isn't
its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel--there isn't."  He
fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his
catalogue.

"I asked the nurse to put it there. I wanted to study it
now and then and think up arguments. See--adjustable to
hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip
of paper no wider than a postage stamp. Unsurpassed paper
feed, practical ribbon mechanism--perfect and permanent
alignment. "

As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel
took it. Never had G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about
to bend upon his catalogue.

"You will raise your temperature," she said, "if you excite
yourself. You mustn't do that. I believe there are two or
three people on the estate who might be taught to use a
typewriter. I will buy three. Yes--we will say three."

She would buy three. He soared to heights. He did not
know how to thank her, though he did his best. Dizzying
visions of what he would have to tell "the boys" when he
returned to New York flashed across his mind. The daughter of
Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was
the junior assistant who had sold them to her.

"You don't know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel,"
he said, "but if you were a junior salesman you'd know. It's
not only the sale--though that's a rake-off of fifteen dollars
to me--but it's because it's YOU that's bought them. Gee!"
gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a
queer touch of pathos. "What it must be to be YOU--just YOU!"

She did not laugh. She felt as if a hand had lightly touched
her on her naked heart. She had thought of it so often--had
been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child--this difference
in human lot--this chance. Was it chance which had placed
her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel's world instead
of in that of some little cash girl with hair raked back from
a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop--or in
that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in serving
her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over
ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness
ease for the rest of existence? What did it mean? And
what Law was laid upon her? What Law which could only
work through her and such as she who had been born with
almost unearthly power laid in their hands--the reins of
monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world? Sometimes
fear touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because
she did not KNOW the Law and could only pray that her guessing
at it might be right. And, even as she thought these things, G.
Selden went on.

"You never can know," he said, "because you've always
been in it. And the rest of the world can't know, because
they've never been anywhere near it."  He stopped and
evidently fell to thinking.

"Tell me about the rest of the world," said Betty quietly.

He laughed again.

"Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn't know a
thing about it. And it's queer. It's the rest of us that mounts
up when you come to numbers. I guess it'd run into millions.
I'm not thinking of beggars and starving people, I've been
rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity
organisation, so I don't know about them. I'm just thinking
of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of
that, that waken up every morning and know they've got to
hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per--if they can stir
it up as thick as that. If it's as much as fifty per, of course,
seems like to me, they're on Easy Street. But sometimes those
that's got to fifty per--or even more--have got more things to do
with it--kids, you know, and more rent and clothes. They've
got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss Vanderpoel,
how many people do you suppose there are in a million
that don't have to worry over their next month's grocery bills,
and the rent of their flat? I bet there's not ten--and I don't
know the ten."

He did not state his case uncheerfully. "The rest of the
world" represented to him the normal condition of things.

"Most married men's a bit afraid to look an honest grocery
bill in the face. And they WILL come in--as regular as spring
hats. And I tell YOU, when a man's got to live on seventy-five
a month, a thing that'll take all the strength and energy out of
a twenty-dollar bill sorter gets him down on the mat."

Like old Mrs. Welden's, his roughly sketched picture was a
graphic one.

" 'Tain't the working that bothers most of us. We were
born to that, and most of us would feel like deadbeats if we
were doing nothing. It's the earning less than you can live
on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it. It's the having
to make a dollar-bill look like two, and watching every other
fellow try to do the same thing, and not often make the trip.
There's millions of us--just millions--every one of us with
his Delkoff to sell----" his figure of speech pleased him and
he chuckled at his own cleverness--"and thinking of it, and
talking about it, and--under his vest--half afraid that he can't
make it. And what you say in the morning when you open
your eyes and stretch yourself is, `Hully gee! I've GOT to sell
a Delkoff to-day, and suppose I shouldn't, and couldn't hold
down my job!'  I began it over my feeding bottle. So did all
the people I know. That's what gave me a sort of a jolt just
now when I looked at you and thought about you being YOU--
and what it meant."

When their conversation ended she had a much more intimate
knowledge of New York than she had ever had before,
and she felt it a rich possession. She had heard of the "hall
bedroom" previously, and she had seen from the outside the
"quick lunch" counter, but G. Selden unconsciously escorted
her inside and threw upon faces and lives the glare of a
flashlight.

"There was a thing I've been thinking I'd ask you, Miss
Vanderpoel," he said just before she left him. "I'd like you
to tell me, if you please. It's like this. You see those two
fellows treated me as fine as silk. I mean Lord Mount Dunstan
and Mr. Penzance. I never expected it. I never saw a
lord before, much less spoke to one, but I can tell you that
one's just about all right--Mount Dunstan. And the other one--
the old vicar--I've never taken to anyone since I was born
like I took to him. The way he puts on his eye-glasses and
looks at you, sorter kind and curious about you at the same
time! And his voice and his way of saying his words
--well, they just GOT me--sure. And they both of 'em
did say they'd like to see me again. Now do you think, Miss
Vanderpoel, it would look too fresh--if I was to write a polite
note and ask if either of them could make it convenient to come
and take a look at me, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. I
don't WANT to be too fresh--and perhaps they wouldn't come
anyhow--and if it is, please won't you tell me, Miss Vanderpoel?"

Betty thought of Mount Dunstan as he had stood and talked
to her in the deepening afternoon sun. She did not know
much of him, but she thought--having heard G. Selden's story
of the lunch--that he would come. She had never seen Mr.
Penzance, but she knew she should like to see him.

"I think you might write the note," she said. "I believe
they would come to see you."

"Do you?" with eager pleasure. "Then I'll do it. I'd
give a good deal to see them again. I tell you, they are just
It--both of them."

CHAPTER XXVII

LIFE

Mount Dunstan, walking through the park next morning
on his way to the vicarage, just after post time, met Mr.
Penzance himself coming to make an equally early call at
the Mount. Each of them had a letter in his hand, and each
met the other's glance with a smile.

"G. Selden," Mount Dunstan said. "And yours?"

"G. Selden also," answered the vicar. "Poor young
fellow, what ill-luck. And yet--is it ill-luck? He says not."

"He tells me it is not," said Mount Dunstan. "And I agree with
him."

Mr. Penzance read his letter aloud.

"DEAR SIR:

"This is to notify you that owing to my bike going back on
me when going down hill, I met with an accident in Stornham
Park. Was cut about the head and leg broken. Little Willie
being far from home and mother, you can see what sort of fix
he'd been in if it hadn't been for the kindness of Reuben S.
Vanderpoel's daughters--Miss Bettina and her sister Lady
Anstruthers. The way they've had me taken care of has been
great. I've been under a nurse and doctor same as if I was
Albert Edward with appendycytus (I apologise if that's not
spelt right). Dear Sir, this is to say that I asked Miss
Vanderpoel if I should be butting in too much if I dropped a line
to ask if you could spare the time to call and see me. It would
be considered a favour and appreciated by
                                   "G. SELDEN,
                    "Delkoff Typewriter Co. Broadway.

"P. S. Have already sold three Delkoffs to Miss Vanderpoel."

"Upon my word," Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable
fervour quite glowed, "I like that queer young fellow--
I like him. He does not wish to `butt in too much.'  Now,
there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous,
forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal--a goat, I
seem to see, preferably--forcing its way into a group or closed
circle of persons."

His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm
for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter,
even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber
& Fields.

"Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An
hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben
S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing," he said.

"It would," Mr. Penzance answered. "Let us go by all
means. We should not, I suppose," with keen delight, "be
`butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?"  He was
quite enraptured with his own aptness. "Like G. Selden, I
should not like to `butt in,' " he added.

The scent and warmth and glow of a glorious morning
filled the hour. Combining themselves with a certain normal
human gaiety which surrounded the mere thought of G. Selden,
they were good things for Mount Dunstan. Life was
strong and young in him, and he had laughed a big young laugh,
which had, perhaps tended to the waking in him of the feeling
he was suddenly conscious of--that a six-mile ride over a white,
tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after
all, if at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other
in whom life was strong and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek
and was the far fire in the blue deeps of lovely eyes, and the
slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be, in a
way, all to the good? He had thought of her on more than
one day, and felt that he wanted to see her again.

"Let us go," he answered Penzance. "One can call on an
invalid at any time. Lady Anstruthers will forgive us."

In less than an hour's time they were on their way. They
laughed and talked as they rode, their horses' hoofs striking
out a cheerful ringing accompaniment to their voices. There
is nothing more exhilarating than the hollow, regular ring and
click-clack of good hoofs going well over a fine old Roman
road in the morning sunlight. They talked of the junior
assistant salesman and of Miss Vanderpoel. Penzance was much
pleased by the prospect of seeing "this delightful and unusual
girl."  He had heard stories of her, as had Lord Westholt.
He knew of old Doby's pipe, and of Mrs. Welden's respite
from the Union, and though such incidents would seem mere
trifles to the dweller in great towns, he had himself lived and
done his work long enough in villages to know the village
mind and the scale of proportions by which its gladness and
sadness were measured. He knew more of all this than Mount
Dunstan could, since Mount Dunstan's existence had isolated
itself, from rather gloomy choice. But as he rode, Mount
Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things. There was
the suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such
suggestion was good for any man--or woman, either--who had
fallen into living in a dull, narrow groove.

"It is the new life in her which strikes me," he said. "She
has brought wealth with her, and wealth is power to do the
good or evil that grows in a man's soul; but she has brought
something more. She might have come here and brought all
the sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty, who drove
through the village and drew people to their windows, and
made clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull their forelocks,
and children bob curtsies and stare. She might have come and
gone and left a mind-dazzling memory and nothing else. A
few sovereigns tossed here and there would have earned her
a reputation--but, by gee! to quote Selden--she has begun
LIVING with them, as if her ancestors had done it for six
hundred years. And what _I_ see is that if she had come without
a penny in her pocket she would have done the same thing."
He paused a pondering moment, and then drew a sharp breath
which was an exclamation in itself. "She's Life!" he said.
"She's Life itself! Good God! what a thing it is for a man
or woman to be Life--instead of a mass of tissue and muscle
and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!"

Penzance had listened seriously.

"What you say is very suggestive," he commented. "It
strikes me as true, too. You have seen something of her also,
at least more than I have."

"I did not think these things when I saw her--though I suppose I
felt them unconsciously. I have reached this way of summing her
up by processes of exclusion and inclusion. One hears of her, as
you know yourself, and one thinks her over."

"You have thought her over?"

"A lot," rather grumpily. "A beautiful female creature
inevitably gives an unbeautiful male creature something to
think of--if he is not otherwise actively employed. I am not.
She has become a sort of dawning relief to my hopeless humours.
Being a low and unworthy beast, I am sometimes resentful enough
of the unfairness of things. She has too much."

When they rode through Stornham village they saw signs of
work already done and work still in hand. There were no
broken windows or palings or hanging wicket gates; cottage
gardens had been put in order, and there were evidences of
such cheering touches as new bits of window curtain and
strong-looking young plants blooming between them. So many
small, but necessary, things had been done that the whole
village wore the aspect of a place which had taken heart, and was
facing existence in a hopeful spirit. A year ago Mount Dunstan
and his vicar riding through it had been struck by its
neglected and dispirited look.

As they entered the hall of the Court Miss Vanderpoel was
descending the staircase. She was laughing a little to herself,
and she looked pleased when she saw them.

"It is good of you to come," she said, as they crossed the hall
to the drawing-room. "But I told him I really thought you
would. I have just been talking to him, and he was a little
uncertain as to whether he had assumed too much."

"As to whether he had `butted in,' " said Mr. Penzance.
"I think he must have said that."

"He did. He also was afraid that he might have been
`too fresh.' " answered Betty.

"On our part," said Mr. Penzance, with gentle glee, "we
hesitated a moment in fear lest we also might appear to be
`butting in.' "

Then they all laughed together. They were laughing when
Lady Anstruthers entered, and she herself joined them. But to
Mount Dunstan, who felt her to be somehow a touching little
person, there was manifest a tenderness in her feeling for G.
Selden. For that matter, however, there was something already
beginning to be rather affectionate in the attitude of each of
them. They went upstairs to find him lying in state upon a
big sofa placed near a window, and his joy at the sight of them
was a genuine, human thing. In fact, he had pondered a
good deal in secret on the possibility of these swell people
thinking he had "more than his share of gall" to expect them
to remember him after he passed on his junior assistant
salesman's way. Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters were of the
highest of his Four Hundred, but they were Americans, and
Americans were not as a rule so "stuck on themselves" as the
English. And here these two swells came as friendly as you
please. And that nice old chap that was a vicar, smiling and
giving him "the glad hand"!

Betty and Mount Dunstan left Mr. Penzance talking to the
convalescent after a short time. Mount Dunstan had asked
to be shown the gardens. He wanted to see the wonderful
things he had heard had been already done to them.

They went down the stairs together and passed through the
drawing-room into the pleasure grounds. The once neglected
lawns had already been mown and rolled, clipped and trimmed,
until they spread before the eye huge measures of green velvet;
even the beds girdling and adorning them were brilliant with
flowers.

"Kedgers!" said Betty, waving her hand. "In my
ignorance I thought we must wait for blossoms until next year;
but it appears that wonders can be brought all ready to bloom
for one from nursery gardens, and can be made to grow with
care--and daring--and passionate affection. I have seen Kedgers
turn pale with anguish as he hung over a bed of transplanted
things which seemed to droop too long. They droop
just at first, you know, and then they slowly lift their heads,
slowly, as if to listen to a Voice calling--calling. Once I sat
for quite a long time before a rose, watching it. When I saw
it BEGIN to listen, I felt a little trembling pass over my body.
I seemed to be so strangely near to such a strange thing. It
was Life--Life coming back--in answer to what we cannot hear."

She had begun lightly, and then her voice had changed. It
was very quiet at the end of her speaking. Mount Dunstan
simply repeated her last words.

"To what we cannot hear."

"One feels it so much in a garden," she said. "I have never
lived in a garden of my own. This is not mine, but I have
been living in it--with Kedgers. One is so close to Life in it--
the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of green
spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent! Why
shouldn't one tremble, if one thinks? I have stood in a potting
shed and watched Kedgers fill a shallow box with damp
rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of infinitesimal
seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to
his altars in a greenhouse. The ledges in Kedgers' green-
houses are altars. I think he offers prayers before them. Why
not? I should. And when one comes to see them, the moist
seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they
are bursting. And the next time, tiny green things are curling
outward. And, at last, there is a fairy forest of tiniest pale

green stems and leaves. And one is standing close to the
Secret of the World! And why should not one prostrate one's
self, breathing softly--and touching one's awed forehead to
the earth?"

Mount Dunstan turned and looked at her--a pause in his
step--they were walking down a turfed path, and over their
heads meeting branches of new leaves hung. Something in his
movement made her turn and pause also. They both paused
--and quite unknowingly.

"Do you know," he said, in a low and rather unusual voice,
"that as we were on our way here, I said of you to Penzance,
that you were Life--YOU!"

For a few seconds, as they stood so, his look held her--their
eyes involuntarily and strangely held each other. Something
softly glowing in the sunlight falling on them both, something
raining down in the song of a rising skylark trilling in the
blue a field away, something in the warmed incense of blossoms
near them, was calling--calling in the Voice, though they
did not know they heard. Strangely, a splendid blush rose in
a fair flood under her skin. She was conscious of it, and felt
a second's amazed impatience that she should colour like a
schoolgirl suspecting a compliment. He did not look at her
as a man looks who has made a pretty speech. His eyes met
hers straight and thoughtfully, and he repeated his last words
as he had before repeated hers.

"That YOU were Life--you!"

The bluebells under water were for the moment incredibly lovely.
Her feeling about the blush melted away as the blush itself had
done.

"I am glad you said that!" she answered. "It was a beautiful
thing to say. I have often thought that I should like it to be
true."

"It is true," he said.

Then the skylark, showering golden rain, swept down to
earth and its nest in the meadow, and they walked on.

She learned from him, as they walked together, and he also
learned from her, in a manner which built for them as they
went from point to point, a certain degree of delicate intimacy,
gradually, during their ramble, tending to make discussion and
question possible. Her intelligent and broad interest in the
work on the estate, her frank desire to acquire such practical
information as she lacked, aroused in himself an interest he
had previously seen no reason that he should feel. He realised
that his outlook upon the unusual situation was being
illuminated by an intelligence at once brilliant and fine, while
it was also full of nice shading. The situation, of course, WAS
unusual. A beautiful young sister-in-law appearing upon the
dark horizon of a shamefully ill-used estate, and restoring, with
touches of a wand of gold, what a fellow who was a blackguard
should have set in order years ago. That Lady Anstruthers'
money should have rescued her boy's inheritance
instead of being spent upon lavish viciousness went without
saying. What Mount Dunstan was most struck by was the perfect
clearness, and its combination with a certain judicial good
breeding, in Miss Vanderpoel's view of the matter. She made
no confidences, beautifully candid as her manner was, but he
saw that she clearly understood the thing she was doing, and
that if her sister had had no son she would not have done
this, but something totally different. He had an idea that
Lady Anstruthers would have been swiftly and lightly swept
back to New York, and Sir Nigel left to his own devices, in
which case Stornham Court and its village would gradually
have crumbled to decay. It was for Sir Ughtred Anstruthers
the place was being restored. She was quite clear on the matter
of entail. He wondered at first--not unnaturally--how a girl
had learned certain things she had an obviously clear knowledge
of. As they continued to converse he learned. Reuben
S. Vanderpoel was without doubt a man remarkable not only
in the matter of being the owner of vast wealth. The rising
flood of his millions had borne him upon its strange surface a
thinking, not an unthinking being--in fact, a strong and fine
intelligence. His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in
his sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating
not merely added gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions,
a human outlook worth counting as an asset. His daughter,
when she had travelled with him, had seen and talked with
him of all he himself had seen. When she had not been his
companion she had heard from him afterwards all best worth
hearing. She had become--without any special process--familiar
with the technicalities of huge business schemes, with law and
commerce and political situations. Even her childish interest
in the world of enterprise and labour had been passionate. So
she had acquired--inevitably, while almost unconsciously--a
remarkable education.

"If he had not been HIMSELF he might easily have grown tired of a
little girl constantly wanting to hear things-- constantly asking
questions," she said. "But he did not get tired. We invented a
special knock on the door of his private room. It said, `May I
come in, father?'  If he was busy he answered with one knock on
his desk, and I went away. If he had time to talk he called out,
`Come, Betty,' and I went to him. I used to sit upon the floor
and lean against his knee. He had a beautiful way of stroking my
hair or my hand as he talked. He trusted me. He told me of
great things even before he had talked of them to men. He knew I
would never speak of what was said between us in his room. That
was part of his trust. He said once that it was a part of the
evolution of race, that men had begun to expect of women
what in past ages they really only expected of each other."

Mount Dunstan hesitated before speaking.

"You mean--absolute faith--apart from affection?"

"Yes. The power to be quite silent, even when one is tempted to
speak--if to speak might betray what it is wiser to keep to one's
self because it is another man's affair. The kind of thing which
is good faith among business men. It applies to small things as
much as to large, and to other things than business."

Mount Dunstan, recalling his own childhood and his own
father, felt again the pressure of the remote mental suggestion
that she had had too much, a childhood and girlhood like this,
the affection and companionship of a man of large and
ordered intelligence, of clear and judicial outlook upon an
immense area of life and experience. There was no cause for
wonder that her young womanhood was all it presented to
himself, as well as to others. Recognising the shadow of
resentment in his thought, he swept it away, an inward sense
making it clear to him that if their positions had been
reversed, she would have been more generous than himself.

He pulled himself together with an unconscious movement of
his shoulders. Here was the day of early June, the gold of
the sun in its morning, the green shadows, the turf they
walked on together, the skylark rising again from the meadow
and showering down its song. Why think of anything else.
What a line that was which swept from her chin down her
long slim throat to its hollow! The colour between the velvet
of her close-set lashes--the remembrance of her curious splendid
blush--made the man's lost and unlived youth come back
to him. What did it matter whether she was American or
English--what did it matter whether she was insolently rich or
beggarly poor? He would let himself go and forget all but
the pleasure of the sight and hearing of her.

So as they went they found themselves laughing together
and talking without restraint. They went through the flower
and kitchen gardens; they saw the once fallen wall rebuilt
now with the old brick; they visited the greenhouses and came
upon Kedgers entranced with business, but enraptured at being
called upon to show his treasures. His eyes, turning magnetised
upon Betty, revealed the story of his soul. Mount Dunstan
remarked that when he spoke to her of his flowers it was
as if there existed between them the sympathy which might
be engendered between two who had sat up together night after
night with delicate children.

"He's stronger to-day, miss," he said, as they paused before
a new wonderful bloom. "What he's getting now is good
for him. I had to change his food, miss, but this seems all
right. His colour's better."

Betty herself bent over the flower as she might have bent
over a child. Her eyes softened, she touched a leaf with a
slim finger, as delicately as if it had been a new-born baby's
cheek. As Mount Dunstan watched her he drew a step nearer
to her side. For the first time in his life he felt the glow
of a normal and simple pleasure untouched by any bitterness.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SETTING THEM THINKING

Old Doby, sitting at his open window, with his pipe and
illustrated papers on the table by his side, began to find life
a series of thrills. The advantage of a window giving upon
the village street unspeakably increased. For many years
he had preferred the chimney corner greatly, and had rejoiced
at the drawing in of winter days when a fire must be well
kept up, and a man might bend over it, and rub his hands
slowly gazing into the red coals or little pointed flames which
seemed the only things alive and worthy the watching. The
flames were blue at the base and yellow at the top, and jumped
looking merry, and caught at bits of black coal, and set them
crackling and throwing off splinters till they were ablaze
and as much alive as the rest. A man could get comfort and
entertainment therefrom. There was naught else so good to
live with. Nothing happened in the street, and every dull
face that passed was an old story, and told an old tale of
stupefying hard labour and hard days.

But now the window was a better place to sit near. Carts
went by with men whistling as they walked by the horses
heads. Loads of things wanted for work at the Court. New
faces passed faces of workmen--sometimes grinning, "impident
youngsters," who larked with the young women, and
called out to them as they passed their cottages, if a good-
looking one was loitering about her garden gate. Old Doby
chuckled at their love-making chaff, remembering dimly that
seventy years ago he had been just as proper a young chap,
and had made love in the same way. Lord, Lord, yes! He
had been a bold young chap as ever winked an eye. Then, too,
there were the vans, heavy-loaded and closed, and coming along
slowly. Every few days, at first, there had come a van from
"Lunnon."  Going to the Court, of course. And to sit there,
and hear the women talk about what might be in them, and
to try to guess one's self, that was a rare pastime. Fine things
going to the Court these days--furniture and grandeur filling
up the shabby or empty old rooms, and making them look like
other big houses--same as Westerbridge even, so the women
said. The women were always talking and getting bits of news
somehow, and were beginning to be worth listening to, because
they had something more interesting to talk about than children's
worn-out shoes, and whooping cough.

Doby heard everything first from them. "Dang the women,
they always knowed things fust."  It was them as knowed
about the smart carriages as began to roll through the one
village street. They were gentry's carriages, with fine,
stamping horses, and jingling silver harness, and big coachmen,
and tall footmen, and such like had long ago dropped off showing
themselves at Stornham.

"But now the gentry has heard about Miss Vanderpoel,
and what's being done at the Court, and they know what it
means," said young Mrs. Doby. "And they want to see her,
and find out what she's like. It's her brings them."

Old Doby chuckled and rubbed his hands. He knew what
she was like. That straight, slim back of hers, and the thick
twist of black hair, and the way she had of laughing at you, as
cheery as if a bell was ringing. Aye, he knew all about that.

"When they see her once, they'll come agen, for sure,"
he quavered shrilly, and day by day he watched for the grand
carriages with vivid eagerness. If a day or two passed without
his seeing one, he grew fretful, and was injured, feeling that
his beauty was being neglected! "None to-day, nor yet yest'day,"
he would cackle. "What be they folk a-doin'?"

Old Mrs. Welden, having heard of the pipe, and come to
see it, had struck up an acquaintance with him, and dropped
in almost every day to talk and sit at his window. She was
a young thing, by comparison, and could bring him lively
news, and, indeed, so stir him up with her gossip that he was
in danger of becoming a young thing himself. Her groceries
and his tobacco were subjects whose interest was undying.

A great curiosity had been awakened in the county, and
visitors came from distances greater than such as ordinarily
include usual calls. Naturally, one was curious about
the daughter of the Vanderpoel who was a sort of national
institution in his own country. His name had not been so
much heard of in England when Lady Anstruthers had arrived
but there had, at first, been felt an interest in her. But she
had been a failure--a childish-looking girl--whose thin, fair,
prettiness had no distinction, and who was obviously overwhelmed
by her surroundings. She had evidently had no influence
over Sir Nigel, and had not been able to prevent his making ducks
and drakes of her money, which of course ought to have been spent
on the estate. Besides which a married woman represented fewer
potentialities than a handsome unmarried girl entitled to
expectations from huge American wealth.

So the carriages came and came again, and, stately or
unstately far-off neighbours sat at tea upon the lawn under the
trees, and it was observed that the methods and appointments
of the Court had entirely changed. Nothing looked new and
American. The silently moving men-servants could not have
been improved upon, there was plainly an excellent chef
somewhere, and the massive silver was old and wonderful. Upon
everybody's word, the change was such as it was worth a long
drive merely to see!

The most wonderful thing, however, was Lady Anstruthers
herself. She had begun to grow delicately plump, her once
drawn and haggard face had rounded out, her skin had
smoothed, and was actually becoming pink and fair, a nimbus
of pale fine hair puffed airily over her forehead, and she wore
the most charming little clothes, all of which made her look
fifteen years younger than she had seemed when, on the grounds
of ill-health, she had retired into seclusion. The renewed
relations with her family, the atmosphere by which she was
surrounded, had evidently given her a fresh lease of life, and
awakened in her a new courage.

When the summer epidemic of garden parties broke forth,
old Doby gleefully beheld, day after day, the Court carriage
drive by bearing her ladyship and her sister attired in fairest
shades and tints "same as if they was flowers."  Their delicate
vaporousness, and rare colours, were sweet delights to the
old man, and he and Mrs. Welden spent happy evenings discussing
them as personal possessions. To these two Betty
WAS a personal possession, bestowing upon them a marked
distinction. They were hers and she was theirs. No one else
so owned her. Heaven had given her to them that their last
years might be lighted with splendour.

On her way to one of the garden parties she stopped the
carriage before old Doby's cottage, and went in to him to speak
a few words. She was of pale convolvulus blue that afternoon,
and Doby, standing up touching his forelock and
Mrs. Welden curtsying, gazed at her with prayer in their
eyes. She had a few flowers in her hand, and a book of
coloured photographs of Venice.

"These are pictures of the city I told you about--the city
built in the sea--where the streets are water. You and Mrs.
Welden can look at them together," she said, as she laid
flowers and book down. "I am going to Dunholm Castle
to a garden party this afternoon. Some day I will come and
tell you about it."

The two were at the window staring spellbound, as she
swept back to the carriage between the sweet-williams and
Canterbury bells bordering the narrow garden path.

"Do you know I really went in to let them see my dress,"
she said, when she rejoined Lady Anstruthers. "Old Doby's
granddaughter told me that he and Mrs. Welden have little
quarrels about the colours I wear. It seems that they find
my wardrobe an absorbing interest. When I put the book
on the table, I felt Doby touch my sleeve with his trembling
old hand. He thought I did not know."

"What will they do with Venice?" asked Rosy.

"They will believe the water is as blue as the photographs
make it--and the palaces as pink. It will seem like a chapter
out of Revelations, which they can believe is true and not
merely `Scriptur,'--because _I_ have been there. I wish I
had been to the City of the Gates of Pearl, and could tell
them about that."

On the lawns at the garden parties she was much gazed
at and commented upon. Her height and her long slender
neck held her head above those of other girls, the dense black
of her hair made a rich note of shadow amid the prevailing
English blondness. Her mere colouring set her apart. Rosy
used to watch her with tender wonder, recalling her memory
of nine-year-old Betty, with the long slim legs and the
demanding and accusing child-eyes. She had always been this
creature even in those far-off days. At the garden party at
Dunholm Castle it became evident that she was, after a manner,
unusually the central figure of the occasion. It was not
at all surprising, people said to each other. Nothing could have
been more desirable for Lord Westholt. He combined rank
with fortune, and the Vanderpoel wealth almost constituted
rank in itself. Both Lord and Lady Dunholm seemed pleased
with the girl. Lord Dunholm showed her great attention.
When she took part in the dancing on the lawn, he looked on
delightedly. He walked about the gardens with her, and it
was plain to see that their conversation was not the ordinary
polite effort to accord, usually marking the talk between a
mature man and a merely pretty girl. Lord Dunholm sometimes
laughed with unfeigned delight, and sometimes the two
seemed to talk of grave things.

"Such occasions as these are a sort of yearly taking of the
social census of the county," Lord Dunholm explained. "One
invites ALL one's neighbours and is invited again. It is a
friendly duty one owes."

"I do not see Lord Mount Dunstan," Betty answered. "Is he here?"

She had never denied to herself her interest in Mount
Dunstan, and she had looked for him. Lord Dunholm hesitated
a second, as his son had done at Miss Vanderpoel's mention
of the tabooed name. But, being an older man, he felt
more at liberty to speak, and gave her a rather long kind look.

"My dear young lady," he said, "did you expect to see him here?"

"Yes, I think I did," Betty replied, with slow softness.
"I believe I rather hoped I should."

"Indeed! You are interested in him?"

"I know him very little. But I am interested. I will tell you
why."

She paused by a seat beneath a tree, and they sat down
together. She gave, with a few swift vivid touches, a sketch
of the red-haired second-class passenger on the Meridiana, of
whom she had only thought that he was an unhappy, rough-
looking young man, until the brief moment in which they
had stood face to face, each comprehending that the other was
to be relied on if the worst should come to the worst. She
had understood his prompt disappearance from the scene, and
had liked it. When she related the incident of her meeting
with him when she thought him a mere keeper on his own
lands, Lord Dunholm listened with a changed and thoughtful
expression. The effect produced upon her imagination by
what she had seen, her silent wandering through the sad
beauty of the wronged place, led by the man who tried stiffly
to bear himself as a servant, his unintended self-revelations,
her clear, well-argued point of view charmed him. She had seen
the thing set apart from its county scandal, and so had read
possibilities others had been blind to. He was immensely
touched by certain things she said about the First Man.

"He is one of them," she said. "They find their way in
the end--they find their way. But just now he thinks there
is none. He is standing in the dark--where the roads meet."

"You think he will find his way?" Lord Dunholm said.
"Why do you think so? "

"Because I KNOW he will," she answered. "But I cannot
tell you WHY I know."

"What you have said has been interesting to me, because
of the light your own thought threw upon what you saw. It
has not been Mount Dunstan I have been caring for, but for
the light you saw him in. You met him without prejudice,
and you carried the light in your hand. You always carry
a light, my impression is," very quietly. "Some women do."

"The prejudice you speak of must be a bitter thing for a
proud man to bear. Is it a just prejudice? What has he done?"

Lord Dunholm was gravely silent for a few moments.

"It is an extraordinary thing to reflect,"--his words came
slowly--"that it may NOT be a just prejudice. _I_ do not
know that he has done anything--but seem rather sulky, and
be the son of his father, and the brother of his brother."

"And go to America," said Betty. "He could have avoided
doing that--but he cannot be called to account for his relations.
If that is all--the prejudice is NOT just."

"No, it is not," said Lord Dunholm, "and one feels rather
awkward at having shared it. You have set me thinking
again, Miss Vanderpoel."

CHAPTER XXIX

THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN

The Shuttle having in its weaving caught up the thread
of G. Selden's rudimentary existence and drawn it, with the
young man himself, across the sea, used curiously the thread
in question, in the forming of the design of its huge web. As
wool and coarse linen are sometimes interwoven with rich
silk for decorative or utilitarian purposes, so perhaps was this
previously unvalued material employed.

It was, indeed, an interesting truth that the young man,
during his convalescence, without his own knowledge, acted
as a species of magnet which drew together persons who might
not easily otherwise have met. Mr. Penzance and Mount
Dunstan rode over to see him every few days, and their visits
naturally established relations with Stornham Court much more
intimate than could have formed themselves in the same length
of time under any of the ordinary circumstances of country
life. Conventionalities lost their prominence in friendly
intercourse with Selden. It was not, however, that he himself
desired to dispense with convention. His intense wish to "do
the right thing," and avoid giving offence was the most ingenuous
and touching feature of his broad cosmopolitan good nature.

"If I ever make a break, sir," he had once said, with
almost passionate fervour, in talking to Mr. Penzance, "please
tell me, and set me on the right track. No fellow likes to look
like a hoosier, but I don't mind that half as much as--as
seeming not to APPRECIATE."

He used the word "appreciate" frequently. It expressed
for him many degrees of thanks.

"I tell you that's fine," he said to Ughtred, who brought
him a flower from the garden. "I appreciate that."

To Betty he said more than once:

"You know how I appreciate all this, Miss Vanderpoel.
You DO know I appreciate it, don't you?"

He had an immense admiration for Mount Dunstan, and
talked to him a great deal about America, often about the
sheep ranch, and what it might have done and ought to have
done. But his admiration for Mr. Penzance became affection.
To him he talked oftener about England, and listened
to the vicar's scholarly stories of its history, its past glories
and its present ones, as he might have listened at fourteen to
stories from the Arabian Nights.

These two being frequently absorbed in conversation,
Mount Dunstan was rather thrown upon Betty's hands. When
they strolled together about the place or sat under the deep
shade of green trees, they talked not only of England and
America, but of divers things which increased their knowledge
of each other. It is points of view which reveal qualities,
tendencies, and innate differences, or accordances of thought,
and the points of view of each interested the other.

"Mr. Selden is asking Mr. Penzance questions about
English history," Betty said, on one of the afternoons in which
they sat in the shade. "I need not ask you questions. You
ARE English history."

"And you are American history," Mount Dunstan answered.

"I suppose I am."

At one of their chance meetings Miss Vanderpoel had told
Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt something of the story
of G. Selden. The novelty of it had delighted and amused
them. Lord Dunholm had, at points, been touched as Penzance
had been. Westholt had felt that he must ride over to Stornham
to see the convalescent. He wanted to learn some New York slang.

He would take lessons from Selden, and he would also buy a
Delkoff--two Delkoffs, if that would be better. He knew a
hard-working fellow who ought to have a typewriter.

"Heath ought to have one," he had said to his father.
Heath was the house-steward. "Think of the letters the poor
chap has to write to trades-people to order things, and un-
order them, and blackguard the shopkeepers when they are
not satisfactory. Invest in one for Heath, father."

"It is by no means a bad idea," Lord Dunholm reflected.
"Time would be saved by the use of it, I have no doubt."

"It saves time in any department where it can be used,"
Betty had answered. "Three are now in use at Stornham,
and I am going to present one to Kedgers. This is a
testimonial I am offering. Three weeks ago I began to use the
Delkoff. Since then I have used no other. If YOU use them
you will introduce them to the county."

She understood the feeling of the junior assistant, when
he found himself in the presence of possible purchasers. Her
blood tingled slightly. She wished she had brought a catalogue.

"We will come to Stornham to see the catalogue," Lord
Dunholm promised.

"Perhaps you will read it aloud to us," Westholt suggested
gleefully.

"G. Selden knows it by heart, and will repeat it to you
with running comments. Do you know I shall be very glad
if you decide to buy one--or two--or three," with an uplift
of the Irish blue eyes to Lord Dunholm. "The blood of the
first Reuben Vanderpoel stirs in my veins--also I have begun
to be fond of G. Selden."

Therefore it occurred that on the afternoon referred to
Lady Anstruthers appeared crossing the sward with two male
visitors in her wake.

"Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt," said Betty, rising.

For this meeting between the men Selden was, without
doubt, responsible. While his father talked to Mount
Dunstan, Westholt explained that they had come athirst for the
catalogue. Presently Betty took him to the sheltered corner
of the lawn, where the convalescent sat with Mr. Penzance.

But, for a short time, Lord Dunholm remained to converse
with Mount Dunstan. In a way the situation was
delicate. To encounter by chance a neighbour whom one--
for reasons--has not seen since his childhood, and to be equal
to passing over and gracefully obliterating the intervening
years, makes demand even upon finished tact. Lord Dunholm's
world had been a large one, and he had acquired experience
tending to the development of the most perfect
methods. If G. Selden had chanced to be the magnet which
had decided his course this special afternoon, Miss Vanderpoel
it was who had stirred in him sufficient interest in Mount
Dunstan to cause him to use the best of these methods when
he found himself face to face with him.

He beautifully eliminated the years, he eliminated all but
the facts that the young man's father and himself had been
acquaintances in youth, that he remembered Mount Dunstan
himself as a child, that he had heard with interest of his visit
to America. Whatsoever the young man felt, he made no
sign which presented obstacles. He accepted the eliminations
with outward composure. He was a powerful-looking fellow,
with a fine way of carrying his shoulders, and an eye
which might be able to light savagely, but just now, at least,
he showed nothing of the sulkiness he was accused of.

Lord Dunholm progressed admirably with him. He soon
found that he need not be upon any strain with regard to the
eliminations. The man himself could eliminate, which was
an assistance.

They talked together when they turned to follow the others
to the retreat of G. Selden.

"Have you bought a Delkoff?" Lord Dunholm inquired.

"If I could have afforded it, I should have bought one."

"I think that we have come here with the intention of
buying three. We did not know we required them until
Miss Vanderpoel recited half a page of the catalogue to us."

"Three will mean a `rake off' of fifteen dollars to G.
Selden," said Mount Dunstan. It was, he saw, necessary that
he should explain the meaning of a "rake off," and he did so
to his companion's entertainment.

The afternoon was a satisfactory one. They were all kind
to G. Selden, and he on his part was an aid to them. In his
innocence he steered three of them, at least, through narrow
places into an open sea of easy intercourse. This was a good
beginning. The junior assistant was recovering rapidly, and
looked remarkably well. The doctor had told him that he
might try to use his leg. The inside cabin of the cheap
Liner and "little old New York" were looming up before
him. But what luck he had had, and what a holiday! It
had been enough to set a fellow up for ten years' work. It
would set up the boys merely to be told about it. He didn't
know what HE had ever done to deserve such luck as had
happened to him. For the rest of his life he would he waving
the Union Jack alongside of the Stars and Stripes.

Mr. Penzance it was who suggested that he should try the
strength of the leg now.

"Yes," Mount Dunstan said. "Let me help you."

As he rose to go to him, Westholt good-naturedly got up
also. They took their places at either side of his invalid chair
and assisted him to rise and stand on his feet.

"It's all right, gentlemen. It's all right," he called out
with a delighted flush, when he found himself upright. "I
believe I could stand alone. Thank you. Thank you."

He was able, leaning on Mount Dunstan's arm, to take a few
steps. Evidently, in a short time, he would find himself no
longer disabled.

Mr. Penzance had invited him to spend a week at the
vicarage. He was to do this as soon as he could comfortably
drive from the one place to the other. After receiving
the invitation he had sent secretly to London for one of the
Delkoffs he had brought with him from America as a specimen.
He cherished in private a plan of gently entertaining his
host by teaching him to use the machine. The vicar would
thus be prepared for that future in which surely a Delkoff
must in some way fall into his hands. Indeed, Fortune having
at length cast an eye on himself, might chance to favour
him further, and in time he might be able to send a "high-
class machine" as a grateful gift to the vicarage. Perhaps
Mr. Penzance would accept it because he would understand
what it meant of feeling and appreciation.

During the afternoon Lord Dunholm managed to talk
a good deal with Mount Dunstan. There was no air of intention
in his manner, nevertheless intention was concealed
beneath its courteous amiability. He wanted to get at the
man. Before they parted he felt he had, perhaps, learned
things opening up new points of view.

. . . . .

In the smoking-room at Dunholm that night he and his
son talked of their chance encounter. It seemed possible that
mistakes had been made about Mount Dunstan. One did not
form a definite idea of a man's character in the course of an
afternoon, but he himself had been impressed by a conviction
that there had been mistakes.

"We are rather a stiff-necked lot--in the country--when
we allow ourselves to be taken possession of by an idea,"
Westholt commented.

"I am not at all proud of the way in which we have taken
things for granted," was his father's summing up. "It is,
perhaps, worth observing," taking his cigar from his mouth
and smiling at the end of it, as he removed the ash, "that, but
for Miss Vanderpoel and G. Selden, we might never have
had an opportunity of facing the fact that we may not have
been giving fair play. And one has prided one's self on one's
fair play."

CHAPTER XXX

A RETURN

At the close of a long, warm afternoon Betty Vanderpoel
came out upon the square stone terrace overlooking the gardens,
and that part of the park which, enclosing them, caused
them, as they melted into its greenness, to lose all limitations
and appear to be only a more blooming bit of the landscape.

Upon the garden Betty's eyes dwelt, as she stood still for
some minutes taking in their effect thoughtfully.

Kedgers had certainly accomplished much. His close-
trimmed lawns did him credit, his flower beds were flushed
and azured, purpled and snowed with bloom. Sweet tall spires,
hung with blue or white or rosy flower bells, lifted their
heads above the colour of lower growths. Only the fervent
affection, the fasting and prayer of a Kedgers could have
done such wonders with new things and old. The old ones
he had cherished and allured into a renewal of existence--
the new ones he had so coaxed out of their earthen pots into
the soil, luxuriously prepared for their reception, and had
afterwards so nourished and bedewed with soft waterings, so
supported, watched over and adored that they had been almost
unconscious of their transplanting. Without assistants he
could have done nothing, but he had been given a sufficient
number of under gardeners, and had even managed to inspire
them with something of his own ambition and solicitude. The
result was before Betty's eyes in an aspect which, to such as
knew the gardens well,--the Dunholms, for instance,--was
astonishing in its success.

"I've had privileges, miss, and so have the flowers,"
Kedgers had said warmly, when Miss Vanderpoel had reported
to him, for his encouragement, Dunholm Castle's praise.
"Not one of 'em has ever had to wait for his food and drink,
nor to complain of his bed not being what he was accustomed
to. They've not had to wait for rain, for we've given it to
'em from watering cans, and, thank goodness, the season's
been kind to 'em."

Betty, descending the terrace steps, wandered down the
paths between the flower beds, glancing about her as she
went. The air of neglect and desolation had been swept
away. Buttle and Tim Soames had been given as many
privileges as Kedgers. The chief points impressed upon them
had been that the work must be done, not only thoroughly, but
quickly. As many additional workmen as they required, as
much solid material as they needed, but there must be a
despatch which at first it staggered them to contemplate. They
had not known such methods before. They had been
accustomed to work under money limitation throughout their
lives, and, when work must be done with insufficient aid, it
must be done slowly. Economy had been the chief factor in
all calculations, speed had not entered into them, so
leisureliness had become a fixed habit. But it seemed American
to sweep leisureliness away into space with a free gesture.

"It must be done QUICKLY," Miss Vanderpoel had said.
"If ten men cannot do it quickly enough, you must have
twenty--or as many more as are needed. It is time which
must be saved just now."

Time more than money, it appeared. Buttle's experience
had been that you might take time, if you did not charge for
it. When time began to mean money, that was a different
matter. If you did work by the job, you might drive in a
few nails, loiter, and return without haste; if you worked
by the hour, your absence would be inquired into. In the
present case no one could loiter. That was realised early.
The tall girl, with the deep straight look at you, made you
realise that without spoken words. She expected energy
something like her own. She was a new force and spurred them.
No man knew how it was done, but, when she appeared among
them--even in the afternoon--"lookin' that womany," holding
up her thin dress over lace petticoats, the like of which had
not been seen before, she looked on with just the same straight,
expecting eyes. They did not seem to doubt in the least that
she would find that great advance had been made.

So advance had been made, and work accomplished. As
Betty walked from one place to another she saw the signs
of it with gratification. The place was not the one she had
come to a few months ago. Hothouses, outbuildings, stables
were in repair. Work was still being done in different places.
In the house itself carpenters or decorators were enclosed
in some rooms, and at their business, but exterior order
prevailed. In the courtyard stablemen were at work, and her
own groom came forward touching his forehead. She paid a
visit to the horses. They were fine creatures, and, when she
entered their stalls, made room for her and whinnied gently,
in well-founded expectation of sugar and bread which were
kept in a cupboard awaiting her visits. She smoothed velvet
noses and patted satin sides, talking to Mason a little before
she went her way.

Then she strolled into the park. The park was always a
pleasure. She was in a thoughtful mood, and the soft green
shadowed silence lured her. The summer wind hus-s-shed
the branches as it lightly waved them, the brown earth of the
avenue was sun-dappled, there were bird notes and calls to be
heard here and there and everywhere, if one only arrested
one's attention a moment to listen. And she was in a listening
and dreaming mood--one of the moods in which bird, leaf,
and wind, sun, shade, and scent of growing things have part.

And yet her thoughts were of mundane things.

It was on this avenue that G. Selden had met with his
accident. He was still at Dunstan vicarage, and yesterday Mount
Dunstan, in calling, had told them that Mr. Penzance was
applying himself with delighted interest to a study of the
manipulation of the Delkoff.

The thought of Mount Dunstan brought with it the thought
of her father. This was because there was frequently in her
mind a connection between the two. How would the man
of schemes, of wealth, and power almost unbounded, regard
the man born with a load about his neck--chained to earth
by it, standing in the midst of his hungering and thirsting
possessions, his hands empty of what would feed them and
restore their strength? Would he see any solution of the
problem? She could imagine his looking at the situation
through his gaze at the man, and considering both in his
summing up.

"Circumstances and the man," she had heard him say.
"But always the man first."

Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of
circumstance. This Betty had learned from him. And what
could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The
question had begun to recur to her. What could she herself
have done in the care of Rosy and Stornham, if chance had
not placed in her hand the strongest lever? What she had
accomplished had been easy--easy. All that had been required
had been the qualities which control of the lever might itself
tend to create in one. Given--by mere chance again--imagination
and initiative, the moving of the lever did the rest.
If chance had not been on one's side, what then? And
where was this man's chance? She had said to Rosy, in speaking
of the wealth of America, "Sometimes one is tired of
it."  And Rosy had reminded her that there were those who
were not tired of it, who could bear some of the burden of it,
if it might be laid on their own shoulders. The great
beautiful, blind-faced house, awaiting its slow doom in the midst
of its lonely unfed lands--what could save it, and all it
represented of race and name, and the stately history of men,
but the power one professed to call base and sordid--mere
money? She felt a sudden impatience at herself for having
said she was tired of it. That was a folly which took upon
itself the aspect of an affectation.

And, if a man could not earn money--or go forth to rob
richer neighbours of it as in the good old marauding days--
or accept it if it were offered to him as a gift--what could
he do? Nothing. If he had been born a village labourer, he
could have earned by the work of his hands enough to keep
his cottage roof over him, and have held up his head among
his fellows. But for such as himself there was no mere labour
which would avail. He had not that rough honest resource.
Only the decent living and orderly management of the generations
behind him would have left to him fairly his own chance
to hold with dignity the place in the world into which Fate
had thrust him at the outset--a blind, newborn thing of
whom no permission had been asked.

"If I broke stones upon the highway for twelve hours
a day, I might earn two shillings," he had said to Betty, on
the previous day. "I could break stones well," holding out
a big arm, "but fourteen shillings a week will do no more
than buy bread and bacon for a stonebreaker."

He was ordinarily rather silent and stiff in his conversational
attitude towards his own affairs. Betty sometimes wondered
how she herself knew so much about them--how it happened
that her thoughts so often dwelt upon them. The explanation
she had once made to herself had been half irony, half serious
reflection.

"It is a result of the first Reuben Vanderpoel. It is because I
am of the fighting commercial stock, and, when I see a business
problem, I cannot leave it alone, even when it is no affair of
mine."

As an exposition of the type of the commercial fighting-stock
she presented, as she paused beneath overshadowing trees, an
aspect beautifully suggesting a far different thing.

She stood--all white from slim shoe to tilted parasol,--and
either the result of her inspection of the work done by her
order, or a combination of her summer-day mood with her
feeling for the problem, had given her a special radiance.
It glowed on lip and cheek, and shone in her Irish eyes.

She had paused to look at a man approaching down the
avenue. He was not a labourer, and she did not know him.
Men who were not labourers usually rode or drove, and this
one was walking. He was neither young nor old, and, though
at a distance his aspect was not attracting, she found that she
regarded him curiously, and waited for him to draw nearer.

The man himself was glancing about him with a puzzled
look and knitted forehead. When he had passed through the
village he had seen things he had not expected to see; when
he had reached the entrance gate, and--for reasons of his own
--dismissed his station trap, he had looked at the lodge
scrutinisingly, because he was not prepared for its picturesque
trimness. The avenue was free from weeds and in order, the
two gates beyond him were new and substantial. As he went on his
way and reached the first, he saw at about a hundred yards
distance a tall girl in white standing watching him.
Things which were not easily explainable always irritated
him. That this place--which was his own affair--should present
an air of mystery, did not improve his humour, which
was bad to begin with. He had lately been passing through
unpleasant things, which had left him feeling himself tricked
and made ridiculous--as only women can trick a man and
make him ridiculous, he had said to himself. And there had
been an acrid consolation in looking forward to the relief of
venting one's self on a woman who dare not resent.

"What has happened, confound it!" he muttered, when
he caught sight of the girl. "Have we set up a house party?"
And then, as he saw more distinctly, "Damn! What a figure!"

By this time Betty herself had begun to see more clearly.
Surely this was a face she remembered--though the passing
of years and ugly living had thickened and blurred, somewhat,
its always heavy features. Suddenly she knew it, and the look
in its eyes--the look she had, as a child, unreasoningly hated.

Nigel Anstruthers had returned from his private holiday.

As she took a few quiet steps forward to meet him, their eyes
rested on each other. After a night or two in town his were
slightly bloodshot, and the light in them was not agreeable.

It was he who spoke first, and it is possible that he did
not quite intend to use the expletive which broke from him.
But he was remembering things also. Here were eyes he, too,
had seen before--twelve years ago in the face of an
objectionable, long-legged child in New York. And his own hatred
of them had been founded in his own opinion on the best of
reasons. And here they gazed at him from the face of a
young beauty--for a beauty she was.

"Damn it!" he exclaimed; "it is Betty."

"Yes," she answered, with a faint, but entirely courteous,
smile. "It is. I hope you are very well."

She held out her hand. "A delicious hand," was what he
said to himself, as he took it. And what eyes for a girl to
have in her head were those which looked out at him between
shadows. Was there a hint of the devil in them? He
thought so--he hoped so, since she had descended on the place
in this way. But WHAT the devil was the meaning of her
being on the spot at all? He was, however, far beyond the
lack of astuteness which might have permitted him to express
this last thought at this particular juncture. He was only
betrayed into stupid mistakes, afterwards to be regretted, when
rage caused him utterly to lose control of his wits. And,
though he was startled and not exactly pleased, he was not in
a rage now. The eyelashes and the figure gave an agreeable
fillip to his humour. Howsoever she had come, she was worth
looking at.

"How could one expect such a delightful thing as this?"
he said, with a touch of ironic amiability. "It is more than
one deserves."

"It is very polite of you to say that," answered Betty.

He was thinking rapidly as he stood and gazed at her. There
were, in truth, many things to think of under circumstances
so unexpected.

"May I ask you to excuse my staring at you?" he inquired
with what Rosy had called his "awful, agreeable smile."
"When I saw you last you were a fierce nine-year-old American
child. I use the word `fierce' because--if you'll pardon
my saying so--there was a certain ferocity about you."

"I have learned at various educational institutions to
conceal it," smiled Betty.

"May I ask when you arrived?"

"A short time after you went abroad."

"Rosalie did not inform me of your arrival."

"She did not know your address. You had forgotten to leave it."

He had made a mistake and realised it. But she presented
to him no air of having observed his slip. He paused a few
seconds, still regarding her and still thinking rapidly. He
recalled the mended windows and roofs and palings in the village,
the park gates and entrance. Who the devil had done all that?
How could a mere handsome girl be concerned in it? And
yet--here she was.

"When I drove through the village," he said next, "I saw
that some remarkable changes had taken place on my property.
I feel as if you can explain them to me."

"I hope they are changes which meet with your approval."

"Quite--quite," a little curtly. "Though I confess they
mystify me. Though I am the son-in-law of an American
multimillionaire, I could not afford to make such repairs
myself."

A certain small spitefulness which was his most frequent
undoing made it impossible for him to resist adding the innuendo
in his last sentence. And again he saw it was a folly. The
impersonal tone of her reply simply left him where he had placed
himself.

"We were sorry not to be able to reach you. As it seemed
well to begin the work at once, we consulted Messrs. Townlinson
& Sheppard."

"We?" he repeated. "Am I to have the pleasure," with a
slight wryness of the mouth, "of finding Mr. Vanderpoel also
at Stornham?"

"No--not yet. As I was on the spot, I saw your solicitors
and asked their advice and approval--for my father. If he
had known how necessary the work was, it would have been
done before, for Ughtred's sake."

Her voice was that of a person who, in stating obvious facts,
provides no approach to enlightening comment upon them.
And there was in her manner the merest gracious impersonality.

"Do I understand that Mr. Vanderpoel employed someone
to visit the place and direct the work?"

"It was really not difficult to direct. It was merely a
matter of engaging labour and competent foremen."

An odd expression rose in his eyes.

"You suggest a novel idea, upon my word," he said. "Is
it possible--you see I know something of America--is it possible
I must thank YOU for the working of this magic?"

"You need not thank me," she said, rather slowly, because
it was necessary that she also should think of many things at
once. "I could not have helped doing it."

She wished to make all clear to him before he met Rosy.
She knew it was not unnatural that the unexpectedness of his
appearance might deprive Lady Anstruthers of presence of
mind. Instinct told her that what was needed in intercourse
with him was, above all things, presence of mind.

"I will tell you about it," she said. "We will walk
slowly up and down here, if you do not object."

He did not object. He wanted to hear the story as he could
not hear it from his nervous little fool of a wife, who would
be frightened into forgetting things and their sequence. What
he meant to discover was where he stood in the matter--where
his father-in-law stood, and, rather specially, to have a chance
to sum up the weaknesses and strengths of the new arrival.
That would be to his interest. In talking this thing over
she would unconsciously reveal how much vanity or emotion
or inexperience he might count upon as factors safe to use
in one's dealings with her in the future.

As he listened he was supported by the fact that he did not
lose consciousness of the eyes and the figure. But for these it
is probable that he would have gone blind with fury at certain
points which forced themselves upon him. The first was that
there had been an absurd and immense expenditure which
would simply benefit his son and not himself. He could not
sell or borrow money on what had been given. Apparently
the place had been re-established on a footing such as it had not
rested upon during his own generation, or his father's. As
he loathed life in the country, it was not he who would enjoy
its luxury, but his wife and her child. The second point was
that these people--this girl--had somehow had the sharpness
to put themselves in the right, and to place him in a position
at which he could not complain without putting himself in the
wrong. Public opinion would say that benefits had been heaped
upon him, that the correct thing had been done correctly with
the knowledge and approval of the legal advisers of his family.
It had been a masterly thing, that visit to Townlinson &
Sheppard. He was obliged to aid his self-control by a glance at
the eyelashes. She was a new sort of girl, this Betty, whose
childhood he had loathed, and, to his jaded taste, novelty
appealed enormously. Her attraction for him was also added to
by the fact that he was not at all sure that there was not
combined with it a pungent spice of the old detestation. He was
repelled as well as allured. She represented things which he
hated. First, the mere material power, which no man can
bully, whatsoever his humour. It was the power he most longed
for and, as he could not hope to possess it, most sneered at and
raged against. Also, as she talked, it was plain that her habit
of self-control and her sense of resource would be difficult
to deal with. He was a survival of the type of man whose
simple creed was that women should not possess resources, as
when they possessed them they could rarely be made to behave
themselves.

But while he thought these things, he walked by her side
and both listened and talked smiling the agreeable smile.

"You will pardon my dull bewilderment," he said. "It is
not unnatural, is it--in a mere outsider?"

And Betty, with the beautiful impersonal smile, said:

"We felt it so unfortunate that even your solicitors did not
know your address."

When, at length, they turned and strolled towards the house,
a carriage was drawing up before the door, and at the sight of
it, Betty saw her companion slightly lift his eyebrows. Lady
Anstruthers had been out and was returning. The groom got
down from the box, and two men-servants appeared upon the
steps. Lady Anstruthers descended, laughing a little as she
talked to Ughtred, who had been with her. She was dressed in
clear, pale grey, and the soft rose lining of her parasol warmed
the colour of her skin.

Sir Nigel paused a second and put up his glass.

"Is that my wife?" he said. "Really! She quite recalls New
York."

The agreeable smile was on his lips as he hastened forward.
He always more or less enjoyed coming upon Rosalie suddenly.
The obvious result was a pleasing tribute to his power.

Betty, following him, saw what occurred.

Ughtred saw him first, and spoke quick and low.

"Mother!" he said.

The tone of his voice was evidently enough. Lady Anstruthers
turned with an unmistakable start. The rose lining of her
parasol ceased to warm her colour. In fact, the parasol itself
stepped aside, and she stood with a blank, stiff, white face.

"My dear Rosalie," said Sir Nigel, going towards her.
"You don't look very glad to see me."

He bent and kissed her quite with the air of a devoted
husband. Knowing what the caress meant, and seeing Rosy's
face as she submitted to it, Betty felt rather cold. After the
conjugal greeting he turned to Ughtred.

"You look remarkably well," he said.

Betty came forward.

"We met in the park, Rosy," she explained. "We have been
talking to each other for half an hour."

The atmosphere which had surrounded her during the last
three months had done much for Lady Anstruthers' nerves.
She had the power to recover herself. Sir Nigel himself saw
this when she spoke.

"I was startled because I was not expecting to see you," she
said. "I thought you were still on the Riviera. I hope you
had a pleasant journey home."

"I had an extraordinarily pleasant surprise in finding your
sister here," he answered. And they went into the house.

In descending the staircase on his way to the drawing-room
before dinner, Sir Nigel glanced about him with interested
curiosity. If the village had been put in order, something more
had been done here. Remembering the worn rugs and the bald-
headed tiger, he lifted his brows. To leave one's house in a
state of resigned dilapidation and return to find it filled with
all such things as comfort combined with excellent taste might
demand, was an enlivening experience--or would have been so
under some circumstances. As matters stood, perhaps, he might
have felt better pleased if things had been less well done. But
they were very well done. They had managed to put themselves
in the right in this also. The rich sobriety of colour and
form left no opening for supercilious comment--which was a
neat weapon it was annoying to be robbed of.

The drawing-room was fresh, brightly charming, and full of
flowers. Betty was standing before an open window with her
sister. His wife's shoulders, he observed at once, had
absolutely begun to suggest contours. At all events, her bones
no longer stuck out. But one did not look at one's wife's
shoulders when one could turn from them to a fairness of velvet
and ivory. "You know," he said, approaching them, "I find all
this very amazing. I have been looking out of my window on to
the gardens."

"It is Betty who has done it all," said Rosy.

"I did not suspect you of doing it, my dear Rosalie," smiling.
"When I saw Betty standing in the avenue, I knew at once
that it was she who had mended the chimney-pots in the village
and rehung the gates."

For the present, at least, it was evident that he meant to
be sufficiently amiable. At the dinner table he was
conversational and asked many questions, professing a natural
interest in what had been done. It was not difficult to talk to
a girl whose eyes and shoulders combined themselves with a quick
wit and a power to attract which he reluctantly owned he had
never seen equalled. His reluctance arose from the fact that
such a power complicated matters. He must be on the defensive
until he knew what she was going to do, what he must
do himself, and what results were probable or possible. He
had spent his life in intrigue of one order or another. He
enjoyed outwitting people and rather preferred to attain an end
by devious paths. He began every acquaintance on the defensive.
His argument was that you never knew how things would turn out,
consequently, it was as well to conduct one's self
at the outset with the discreet forethought of a man in the
presence of an enemy. He did not know how things would
turn out in Betty's case, and it was a little confusing to find
one's self watching her with a sense of excitement. He would
have preferred to be cool--to be cold--and he realised that he
could not keep his eyes off her.

"I remember, with regret," he said to her later in the
evening, "that when you were a child we were enemies."

"I am afraid we were," was Betty's impartial answer.

"I am sure it was my fault," he said. "Pray forget it.
Since you have accomplished such wonders, will you not, in
the morning, take me about the place and explain to me how
it has been done?"

When Betty went to her room she dismissed her maid as
soon as possible, and sat for some time alone and waiting. She
had had no opportunity to speak to Rosy in private, and she
was sure she would come to her. In the course of half an hour
she heard a knock at the door.

Yes, it was Rosy, and her newly-born colour had fled and left
her looking dragged again. She came forward and dropped into a
low chair near Betty, letting her face fall into her hands.

"I'm very sorry, Betty," she half whispered, "but it is no use."

"What is no use?" Betty asked.

"Nothing is any use. All these years have made me such
a coward. I suppose I always was a coward, but in the old days
there never was anything to be afraid of."

"What are you most afraid of now?"

"I don't know. That is the worst. I am afraid of HIM--
just of himself--of the look in his eyes--of what he may be
planning quietly. My strength dies away when he comes near me."

"What has he said to you?" she asked.

"He came into my dressing-room and sat and talked. He
looked about from one thing to another and pretended to admire
it all and congratulated me. But though he did not sneer at
what he saw, his eyes were sneering at me. He talked about
you. He said that you were a very clever woman. I don't
know how he manages to imply that a very clever woman is
something cunning and debased--but it means that when he says it.

It seems to insinuate things which make one grow hot all over."

She put out a hand and caught one of Betty's.

"Betty, Betty," she implored. "Don't make him angry. Don't."

"I am not going to begin by making him angry," Betty said. "And
I do not think he will try to make me angry-- at first."

"No, he will not," cried Rosalie. "And--and you
remember what I told you when first we talked about him?"

"And do you remember," was Betty's answer, "what I said to you
when I first met you in the park? If we were to cable to New
York this moment, we could receive an answer in a few hours."

"He would not let us do it," said Rosy. "He would stop us in
some way--as he stopped my letters to mother--as he stopped me
when I tried to run away. Oh, Betty, I know him and you do not."

"I shall know him better every day. That is what I must
do. I must learn to know him. He said something more to
you than you have told me, Rosy. What was it?"

"He waited until Detcham left me," Lady Anstruthers
confessed, more than half reluctantly. "And then he got up to
go away, and stood with his hands resting on the chairback, and
spoke to me in a low, queer voice. He said, `Don't try to
play any tricks on me, my good girl--and don't let your sister
try to play any. You would both have reason to regret it.' "

She was a half-hypnotised thing, and Betty, watching her
with curious but tender eyes, recognised the abnormality.

"Ah, if I am a clever woman," she said, "he is a clever
man. He is beginning to see that his power is slipping away.
That was what G. Selden would call `bluff.' "

CHAPTER XXXI

NO, SHE WOULD NOT

Sir Nigel did not invite Rosalie to accompany them, when the
next morning, after breakfast, he reminded Betty of his
suggestion of the night before, that she should walk over the
place with him, and show him what had been done. He preferred
to make his study of his sister-in-law undisturbed.

There was no detail whose significance he missed as they went
about together. He had keen eyes and was a quite sufficiently
practical person on such matters as concerned his own
interests. In this case it was to his interest to make up his
mind as to what he might gain or lose by the appearance of his
wife's family. He did not mean to lose--if it could be helped--
anything either of personal importance or material benefit. And
it could only be helped by his comprehending clearly what he had
to deal with. Betty was, at present, the chief factor in the
situation, and he was sufficiently astute to see that she might
not be easy to read. His personal theories concerning women
presented to him two or three effective ways of managing them.
You made love to them, you flattered them either subtly or
grossly, you roughly or smoothly bullied them, or you harrowed
them with haughty indifference--if your love-making had produced
its proper effect--when it was necessary to lure or drive
or trick them into submission. Women should be made useful
in one way or another. Little fool as she was, Rosalie had been
useful. He had, after all was said and done, had some
comparatively easy years as the result of her existence. But she
had not been useful enough, and there had even been moments
when he had wondered if he had made a mistake in separating
her entirely from her family. There might have been more
to be gained if he had allowed them to visit her and had played
the part of a devoted husband in their presence. A great bore,

of course, but they could not have spent their entire lives at
Stornham. Twelve years ago, however, he had known very
little of Americans, and he had lost his temper. He was really
very fond of his temper, and rather enjoyed referring to it with
tolerant regret as being a bad one and beyond his control--with
a manner which suggested that the attribute was the inevitable
result of strength of character and masculine spirit. The luxury
of giving way to it was a great one, and it was exasperating
as he walked about with this handsome girl to find himself
beginning to suspect that, where she was concerned, some self-
control might be necessary. He was led to this thought because
the things he took in on all sides could only have been achieved
by a person whose mind was a steadily-balanced thing. In one's
treatment of such a creature, methods must be well chosen.
The crudest had sufficed to overwhelm Rosalie. He tried two
or three little things as experiments during their walk.

The first was to touch with dignified pathos on the subject of
Ughtred. Betty, he intimated gently, could imagine what a man's
grief and disappointment might be on finding his son and heir
deformed in such a manner. The delicate reserve with which he
managed to convey his fear that Rosalie's own uncontrolled
hysteric attacks had been the cause of the misfortune was very
well done. She had, of course, been very young and much spoiled,
and had not learned self-restraint, poor girl.

It was at this point that Betty first realised a certain hideous
thing. She must actually remain silent--there would be at
the outset many times when she could only protect her sister
by refraining from either denial or argument. If she turned
upon him now with refutation, it was Rosy who would be
called upon to bear the consequences. He would go at once to
Rosy, and she herself would have done what she had said she
would not do--she would have brought trouble upon the poor
girl before she was strong enough to bear it. She suspected
also that his intention was to discover how much she had heard,
and if she might be goaded into betraying her attitude in the
matter.

But she was not to be so goaded. He watched her closely
and her very colour itself seemed to be under her own control.
He had expected--if she had heard hysteric, garbled stories
from his wife--to see a flame of scarlet leap up on the cheek he
was admiring. There was no such leap, which was baffling in
itself. Could it be that experience had taught Rosalie the
discretion of keeping her mouth shut?

"I am very fond of Ughtred," was the sole comment he was
granted. "We made friends from the first. As he grows
older and stronger, his misfortune may be less apparent. He
will be a very clever man."

"He will be a very clever man if he is at all like----"  He
checked himself with a slight movement of his shoulders. "I
was going to say a thing utterly banal. I beg your pardon. I
forgot for the moment that I was not talking to an English girl."

It was so stupid that she turned and looked at him,
smiling faintly. But her answer was quite mild and soft.

"Do not deprive me of compliments because I am a mere American,"
she said. "I am very fond of them, and respond at once."

"You are very daring," he said, looking straight into her
eyes--"deliciously so. American women always are, I think."

"The young devil," he was saying internally. "The
beautiful young devil! She throws one off the track."

He found himself more and more attracted and exasperated
as they made their rounds. It was his sense of being attracted
which was the cause of his exasperation. A girl who could stir
one like this would be a dangerous enemy. Even as a friend
she would not be safe, because one faced the absurd peril of
losing one's head a little and forgetting the precautions one
should never lose sight of where a woman was concerned--the
precautions which provided for one's holding a good taut rein
in one's own hands.

They went from gardens to greenhouses, from greenhouses
to stables, and he was on the watch for the moment when she
would reveal some little feminine pose or vanity, but, this
morning, at least, she laid none bare. She did not strike him
as a being of angelic perfections, but she was very modern and
not likely to show easily any openings in her armour.

"Of course, I continue to be amazed," he commented,
"though one ought not to be amazed at anything which evolves
from your extraordinary country. In spite of your impersonal
air, I shall persist in regarding you as my benefactor. But, to
be frank, I always told Rosalie that if she would write to your
father he would certainly put things in order."

"She did write once, you will remember," answered Betty.

"Did she?" with courteous vagueness. "Really, I am
afraid I did not hear of it. My poor wife has her own little
ideas about the disposal of her income."

And Betty knew that she was expected to believe that Rosy
had hoarded the money sent to restore the place, and from
sheer weak miserliness had allowed her son's heritage to fall
to ruin. And but for Rosy's sake, she might have stopped upon
the path and, looking at him squarely, have said, "You are
lying to me. And I know the truth."

He continued to converse amiably.

"Of course, it is you one must thank, not only for rousing
in the poor girl some interest in her personal appearance, but
also some interest in her neighbours. Some women, after they
marry and pass girlhood, seem to release their hold on all desire
to attract or retain friends. For years Rosalie has given
herself up to a chronic semi-invalidism. When the mistress of a
house is always depressed and languid and does not return visits,
neighbours become discouraged and drop off, as it were."

If his wife had told stories to gain her sympathy his companion
would be sure to lose her temper and show her hand. If he could
make her openly lose her temper, he would have made an advance.

"One can quite understand that," she said. "It is a great
happiness to me to see Rosy gaining ground every day. She
has taken me out with her a good many times, and people are
beginning to realise that she likes to see them at Stornham."

"You are very delightful," he said, "with your `She has
taken me out.'  When I glanced at the magnificent array of
cards on the salver in the hall, I realised a number of things,
and quite vulgarly lost my breath. The Dunholms have been
very amiable in recalling our existence. But charming
Americans--of your order--arouse amiable emotions."

"I am very amiable myself," said Betty.

It was he who flushed now. He was losing patience at feeling
himself held with such lightness at arm's length, and at
being, in spite of himself, somehow compelled to continue to
assume a jocular courtesy.

"No, you are not," he answered.

"Not?" repeated Betty, with an incredulous lifting of her brows.

"You are charming and clever, but I rather suspect you of
being a vixen. At all events you are a spirited young woman
and quick-witted enough to understand the attraction you must
have for the sordid herd."

And then he became aware--if not of an opening in her
armour--at least of a joint in it. For he saw, near her ear, a
deepening warmth. That was it. She was quick-witted, and
she hid somewhere a hot pride.

"I confess, however," he proceeded cheerfully, "that
notwithstanding my own experience of the habits of the sordid
herd, I saw one card I was surprised to find, though really"
--shrugging his shoulders--"I ought to have been less surprised
to find it than to find any other. But it was bold. I
suppose the fellow is desperate."

"You are speaking of----?" suggested Betty.

"Of Mount Dunstan. Hang it all, it WAS bold!"  As if
in half-amused disgust.

As she had walked through the garden paths, Betty had at
intervals bent and gathered a flower, until she held in one hand
a loose, fair sheaf. At this moment she stooped to break off a
spire of pale blue campanula. And she was--as with a shock
--struck with a consciousness that she bent because she must--
because to do so was a refuge--a concealment of something she
must hide. It had come upon her without a second's warning.
Sir Nigel was right. She was a vixen--a virago. She was in
such a rage that her heart sprang up and down and her cheek
and eyes were on fire. Her long-trained control of herself
was gone. And her shock was a lightning-swift awakening to
the fact that she felt all this--she must hide her face--because
it was this one man--just this one and no other--who was
being dragged into this thing with insult.

It was an awakening, and she broke off, rather slowly, one--
two--three--even four campanula stems before she stood upright
again.

As for Nigel Anstruthers--he went on talking in his low-
pitched, disgusted voice.

"Surely he might count himself out of the running. There
will be a good deal of running, my dear Betty. You fair
Americans have learned that by this time. But that a man who
has not even a decent name to offer--who is blackballed by his
county--should coolly present himself as a pretendant is an
insolence he should be kicked for."

Betty arranged her campanulas carefully. There was no
exterior reason why she should draw sword in Lord Mount
Dunstan's defence. He had certainly not seemed to expect
anything intimately interested from her. His manner she had
generally felt to be rather restrained. But one could, in a
measure, express one's self.

"Whatsoever the `running,' " she remarked, "no pretendant
has complimented me by presenting himself, so far--and Lord
Mount Dunstan is physically an unusually strong man."

"You mean it would be difficult to kick him? Is this
partisanship? I hope not. Am I to understand," he added with
deliberation, "that Rosalie has received him here?"

"Yes."

"And that you have received him, also--as you have received
Lord Westholt?"

"Quite."

"Then I must discuss the matter with Rosalie. It is not to
be discussed with you."

"You mean that you will exercise your authority in the matter?"

"In England, my dear girl, the master of a house is still
sometimes guilty of exercising authority in matters which concern
the reputation of his female relatives. In the absence of
your father, I shall not allow you, while you are under my roof,
to endanger your name in any degree. I am, at least, your
brother by marriage. I intend to protect you."

"Thank you," said Betty.

"You are young and extremely handsome, you will have an
enormous fortune, and you have evidently had your own way
all your life. A girl, such as you are, may either make a
magnificent marriage or a ridiculous and humiliating one.
Neither American young women, nor English young men, are as
disinterested as they were some years ago. Each has begun to
learn what the other has to give."

"I think that is true," commented Betty.

"In some cases there is a good deal to be exchanged on both
sides. You have a great deal to give, and should get exchange
worth accepting. A beggared estate and a tainted title are not
good enough."

"That is businesslike," Betty made comment again.

Sir Nigel laughed quietly.

"The fact is--I hope you won't misunderstand my saying
it--you do not strike me as being UN-businesslike, yourself."

"I am not," answered Betty.

"I thought not," rather narrowing his eyes as he watched
her, because he believed that she must involuntarily show her
hand if he irritated her sufficiently. "You do not impress me
as being one of the girls who make unsuccessful marriages.
You are a modern New York beauty--not an early Victorian
sentimentalist."  He did not despair of results from his process
of irritation. To gently but steadily convey to a beautiful and
spirited young creature that no man could approach her without
ulterior motive was rather a good idea. If one could make
it clear--with a casual air of sensibly taking it for granted--
that the natural power of youth, wit, and beauty were rendered
impotent by a greatness of fortune whose proportions obliterated
all else; if one simply argued from the premise that young love
was no affair of hers, since she must always be regarded as a
gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in plain figures,
what girl, with blood in her veins, could endure it long without
wincing? This girl had undue, and, as he regarded such
matters, unseemly control over her temper and her nerves,
but she had blood enough in her veins, and presently she would
say or do something which would give him a lead.

"When you marry----" he began.

She lifted her head delicately, but ended the sentence for
him with eyes which were actually not unsmiling.

"When I marry, I shall ask something in exchange for what I have
to give."

"If the exchange is to be equal, you must ask a great deal,"
he answered. "That is why you must be protected from such
fellows as Mount Dunstan."

"If it becomes necessary, perhaps I shall be able to protect
myself," she said.

"Ah!" regretfully, "I am afraid I have annoyed you--
and that you need protection more than you suspect."  If
she were flesh and blood, she could scarcely resist resenting
the implication contained in this. But resist it she did, and
with a cool little smile which stirred him to sudden, if
irritated, admiration.

She paused a second, and used the touch of gentle regret
herself.

"You have wounded my vanity by intimating that my
admirers do not love me for myself alone."

He paused, also, and, narrowing his eyes again, looked
straight between her lashes.

"They ought to love you for yourself alone," he said, in a
low voice. "You are a deucedly attractive girl."

"Oh, Betty," Rosy had pleaded, "don't make him angry
--don't make him angry."

So Betty lifted her shoulders slightly without comment.

"Shall we go back to the house now?" she said. "Rosalie
will naturally be anxious to hear that what has been done in
your absence has met with your approval."

In what manner his approval was expressed to Rosalie, Betty
did not hear this morning, at least. Externally cool though
she had appeared, the process had not been without its results,
and she felt that she would prefer to be alone.

"I must write some letters to catch the next steamer,"
she said, as she went upstairs.

When she entered her room, she went to her writing table
and sat down, with pen and paper before her. She drew the
paper towards her and took up the pen, but the next moment
she laid it down and gave a slight push to the paper. As she
did so she realised that her hand trembled.

"I must not let myself form the habit of falling into
rages--or I shall not be able to keep still some day, when
I ought to do it," she whispered. "I am in a fury--a fury."
And for a moment she covered her face.

She was a strong girl, but a girl, notwithstanding her
powers. What she suddenly saw was that, as if by one movement
of some powerful unseen hand, Rosy, who had been the centre
of all things, had been swept out of her thought. Her
anger at the injustice done to Rosy had been as nothing
before the fire which had flamed in her at the insult flung
at the other. And all that was undue and unbalanced. One
might as well look the thing straightly in the face. Her old
child hatred of Nigel Anstruthers had sprung up again in
ten-fold strength. There was, it was true, something
abominable about him, something which made his words more
abominable than they would have been if another man had
uttered them--but, though it was inevitable that his method
should rouse one, where those of one's own blood were
concerned, it was not enough to fill one with raging flame when
his malignity was dealing with those who were almost
strangers. Mount Dunstan was almost a stranger--she had met
Lord Westholt oftener. Would she have felt the same hot
beat of the blood, if Lord Westholt had been concerned?
No, she answered herself frankly, she would not.

CHAPTER XXXII

A GREAT BALL

A certain great ball, given yearly at Dunholm Castle, was
one of the most notable social features of the county. It took
place when the house was full of its most interestingly
distinguished guests, and, though other balls might be given at
other times, this one was marked by a degree of greater state.
On several occasions the chief guests had been great personages
indeed, and to be bidden to meet them implied a selection
flattering in itself. One's invitation must convey by inference
that one was either brilliant, beautiful, or admirable, if not
important.

Nigel Anstruthers had never appeared at what the uninvited
were wont, with derisive smiles, to call The Great Panjandrum
Function--which was an ironic designation not
employed by such persons as received cards bidding them to
the festivity. Stornham Court was not popular in the county;
no one had yearned for the society of the Dowager Lady
Anstruthers, even in her youth; and a not too well-favoured young
man with an ill-favoured temper, noticeably on the lookout
for grievances, is not an addition to one's circle. At nineteen
Nigel had discovered the older Lord Mount Dunstan and
his son Tenham to be congenial acquaintances, and had been
so often absent from home that his neighbours would have
found social intercourse with him difficult, even if desirable.
Accordingly, when the county paper recorded the splendours
of The Great Panjandrum Function--which it by no means
mentioned by that name--the list of "Among those present "
had not so far contained the name of Sir Nigel Anstruthers.

So, on a morning a few days after his return, the master
of Stornham turned over a card of invitation and read it
several times before speaking.

"I suppose you know what this means," he said at last to
Rosalie, who was alone with him.

"It means that we are invited to Dunholm Castle for the
ball, doesn't it?"

Her husband tossed the card aside on the table.

"It means that Betty will be invited to every house where
there is a son who must be disposed of profitably.

"She is invited because she is beautiful and clever. She
would be invited if she had no money at all," said Rosy
daringly. She was actually growing daring, she thought
sometimes. It would not have been possible to say anything like
this a few months ago.

"Don't make silly mistakes," said Nigel. "There are a
good many handsome girls who receive comparatively little
attention. But the hounds of war are let loose, when one of
your swollen American fortunes appears. The obviousness of
it `virtuously' makes me sick. It's as vulgar--as New York."

What befel next brought to Sir Nigel a shock of curious
enlightenment, but no one was more amazed than Rosy herself.
She felt, when she heard her own voice, as if she must be
rather mad.

"I would rather," she said quite distinctly, "that you did
not speak to me of New York in that way."

"What!" said Anstruthers, staring at her with contempt
which was derision.

"It is my home," she answered. "It is not proper that I
should hear it spoken of slightingly."

"Your home! It has not taken the slightest notice of you
for twelve years. Your people dropped you as if you were a
hot potato."

"They have taken me up again."  Still in amazement at her own
boldness, but somehow learning something as she went on.

He walked over to her side, and stood before her.

"Look here, Rosalie," he said. "You have been taking
lessons from your sister. She is a beauty and young and you
are not. People will stand things from her they will not take
from you. I would stand some things myself, because it rather
amuses a man to see a fine girl peacocking. It's merely
ridiculous in you, and I won't stand it--not a bit of it."

It was not specially fortunate for him that the door opened
as he was speaking, and Betty came in with her own invitation
in her hand. He was quick enough, however, to turn to
greet her with a shrug of his shoulders.

"I am being favoured with a little scene by my wife," he
explained. "She is capable of getting up excellent little
scenes, but I daresay she does not show you that side of her
temper."

Betty took a comfortable chintz-covered, easy chair. Her
expression was evasively speculative.

"Was it a scene I interrupted?" she said. "Then I must
not go away and leave you to finish it. You were saying that
you would not `stand' something. What does a man do
when he will not `stand' a thing? It always sounds so final
and appalling--as if he were threatening horrible things such
as, perhaps, were a resource in feudal times. What IS the
resource in these dull days of law and order--and policemen?"

"Is this American chaff?" he was disagreeably conscious
that he was not wholly successful in his effort to be lofty.

The frankness of Betty's smile was quite without prejudice.

"Dear me, no," she said. "It is only the unpicturesque
result of an unfeminine knowledge of the law. And I was
thinking how one is limited--and yet how things are simplified
after all."

"Simplified!" disgustedly.

"Yes, really. You see, if Rosy were violent she could not
beat you--even if she were strong enough--because you could
ring the bell and give her into custody. And you could not
beat her because the same unpleasant thing would happen to
you. Policemen do rob things of colour, don't they? And
besides, when one remembers that mere vulgar law insists
that no one can be forced to live with another person who is
brutal or loathsome, that's simple, isn't it? You could go
away from Rosy," with sweet clearness, "at any moment
you wished--as far away as you liked."

"You seem to forget," still feeling that convincing loftiness was
not easy, "that when a man leaves his wife, or she deserts him,
it is she who is likely to be called upon to bear the onus of
public opinion."

"Would she be called upon to bear it under all circumstances?"

"Damned clever woman as you are, you know that she would,
as well as I know it."  He made an abrupt gesture with his
hand. "You know that what I say is true. Women who take
to their heels are deucedly unpopular in England."

"I have not been long in England, but I have been struck
by the prevalence of a sort of constitutional British sense of
fair play among the people who really count. The Dunholms,
for instance, have it markedly. In America it is the men
who force women to take to their heels who are deucedly
unpopular. The Americans' sense of fair play is their most
English quality. It was brought over in ships by the first
colonists--like the pieces of fine solid old furniture, one even
now sees, here and there, in houses in Virginia."

"But the fact remains," said Nigel, with an unpleasant
laugh, "the fact remains, my dear girl."

"The fact that does remain," said Betty, not unpleasantly
at all, and still with her gentle air of mere unprejudiced
speculation, "is that, if a man or woman is properly ill-
treated--PROPERLY--not in any amateurish way--they reach
the point of not caring in the least--nothing matters, but that
they must get away from the horror of the unbearable thing
--never to see or hear of it again is heaven enough to make
anything else a thing to smile at. But one could settle the
other point by experimenting. Suppose you run away from
Rosy, and then we can see if she is cut by the county."

His laugh was unpleasant again.

"So long as you are with her, she will not be cut. There
are a number of penniless young men of family in this, as
well as the adjoining, counties. Do you think Mount Dunstan
would cut her?"

She looked down at the carpet thoughtfully a moment, and
then lifted her eyes.

"I do not think so," she answered. "But I will ask him."

He was startled by a sudden feeling that she might be
capable of it.

"Oh, come now," he said, "that goes beyond a joke. You
will not do any such absurd thing. One does not want one's
domestic difficulties discussed by one's neighbours."

Betty opened coolly surprised eyes.

"I did not understand it was a personal matter," she
remarked. "Where do the domestic difficulties come in?"

He stared at her a few seconds with the look she did not
like, which was less likeable at the moment, because it combined
itself with other things.

"Hang it," he muttered. "I wish I could keep my temper as you
can keep yours," and he turned on his heel and left the room.

Rosy had not spoken. She had sat with her hands in her
lap, looking out of the window. She had at first had a moment
of terror. She had, indeed, once uttered in her soul
the abject cry: "Don't make him angry, Betty--oh, don't,
don't!"  And suddenly it had been stilled, and she had
listened. This was because she realised that Nigel himself was
listening. That made her see what she had not dared to allow
herself to see before. These trite things were true. There
were laws to protect one. If Betty had not been dealing with
mere truths, Nigel would have stopped her. He
had been supercilious, but he could not contradict her.

"Betty," she said, when her sister came to her, "you said
that to show ME things, as well as to show them to him. I
knew you did, and listened to every word. It was good for
me to hear you."

"Clear-cut, unadorned facts are like bullets," said Betty.
"They reach home, if one's aim is good. The shiftiest people
cannot evade them."

. . . . .

A certain thing became evident to Betty during the time
which elapsed between the arrival of the invitations and the
great ball. Despite an obvious intention to assume an amiable
pose for the time being, Sir Nigel could not conceal a not
quite unexplainable antipathy to one individual. This
individual was Mount Dunstan, whom it did not seem easy for
him to leave alone. He seemed to recur to him as a subject,
without any special reason, and this somewhat puzzled Betty
until she heard from Rosalie of his intimacy with Lord Tenham,
which, in a measure, explained it. The whole truth
was that "The Lout," as he had been called, had indulged
in frank speech in his rare intercourse with his brother and
his friends, and had once interfered with hot young fury in
a matter in which the pair had specially wished to avoid all
interference. His open scorn of their methods of entertaining
themselves they had felt to be disgusting impudence, which
would have been deservedly punished with a horsewhip, if the
youngster had not been a big-muscled, clumsy oaf, with a
dangerous eye. Upon this footing their acquaintance had stood
in past years, and to decide--as Sir Nigel had decided--that
the oaf in question had begun to make his bid for splendid
fortune under the roof of Stornham Court itself was a thing
not to be regarded calmly. It was more than he could stand,
and the folly of temper, which was forever his undoing,
betrayed him into mistakes more than once. This girl, with
her beauty and her wealth, he chose to regard as a sort of
property rightfully his own. She was his sister-in-law, at
least;
she was living under his roof; he had more or less the power
to encourage or discourage such aspirants as appeared. Upon
the whole there was something soothing to one's vanity in
appearing before the world as the person at present responsible
for her. It gave a man a certain dignity of position, and his
chief girding at fate had always risen from the fact that he
had not had dignity of position. He would not be held cheap in
this matter, at least. But sometimes, as he looked at the girl
he turned hot and sick, as it was driven home to him that
he was no longer young, that he had never been good-looking,
and that he had cut the ground from under his feet twelve
years ago, when he had married Rosalie! If he could have
waited--if he could have done several other things--perhaps
the clever acting of a part, and his power of domination
might have given him a chance. Even that blackguard of a
Mount Dunstan had a better one now. He was young, at least,
and free--and a big strong beast. He was forced, with bitter
reluctance, to admit that he himself was not even particularly
strong--of late he had felt it hideously.

So he detested Mount Dunstan the more for increasing
reasons, as he thought the matter over. It would seem, perhaps,
but a subtle pleasure to the normal mind, but to him there was
pleasure--support--aggrandisement--in referring to the ill case
of the Mount Dunstan estate, in relating illustrative
anecdotes, in dwelling upon the hopelessness of the outlook,
and the notable unpopularity of the man himself. A
confiding young lady from the States was required, he said
on one occasion, but it would be necessary that she should be
a young person of much simplicity, who would not be alarmed
or chilled by the obvious. No one would realise this more
clearly than Mount Dunstan himself. He said it coldly and
casually, as if it were the simplest matter of fact. If the
fellow had been making himself agreeable to Betty, it was as
well that certain points should be--as it were inadvertently
--brought before her.

Miss Vanderpoel was really rather fine, people said to each
other afterwards, when she entered the ballroom at Dunholm
Castle with her brother-in-law. She bore herself as composedly
as if she had been escorted by the most admirable
and dignified of conservative relatives, instead of by a man who
was more definitely disliked and disapproved of than any other
man in the county whom decent people were likely to meet.
Yet, she was far too clever a girl not to realise the situation
clearly, they said to each other. She had arrived in England
to find her sister a neglected wreck, her fortune squandered,
and her existence stripped bare of even such things as one felt
to be the mere decencies. There was but one thing to be
deduced from the facts which had stared her in the face. But
of her deductions she had said nothing whatever, which was,
of course, remarkable in a young person. It may be mentioned
that, perhaps, there had been those who would not have been
reluctant to hear what she must have had to say, and who had
even possibly given her a delicate lead. But the lead had never
been taken. One lady had even remarked that, on her part,
she felt that a too great reserve verged upon secretiveness,
which was not a desirable girlish quality.

Of course the situation had been so much discussed that
people were naturally on the lookout for the arrival of the
Stornham party, as it was known that Sir Nigel had returned
home, and would be likely to present himself with his wife
and sister-in-law. There was not a dowager present who did
not know how and where he had reprehensibly spent the last
months. It served him quite right that the Spanish dancing
person had coolly left him in the lurch for a younger and
more attractive, as well as a richer man. If it were not for
Miss Vanderpoel, one need not pretend that one knew nothing
about the affair--in fact, if it had not been for Miss
Vanderpoel, he would not have received an invitation--and poor
Lady Anstruthers would be sitting at home, still the forlorn
little frump and invalid she had so wonderfully ceased to be
since her sister had taken her in hand. She was absolutely
growing even pretty and young, and her clothes were really
beautiful. The whole thing was amazing.

Betty, as well as Rosalie and Nigel--knew that many people
turned undisguisedly to look at them--even to watch them
as they came into the splendid ballroom. It was a splendid
ballroom and a stately one, and Lord Dunholm and Lord
Westholt shared a certain thought when they met her, which
was that hers was distinctly the proud young brilliance of
presence which figured most perfectly against its background.
Much as people wanted to look at Sir Nigel, their eyes were
drawn from him to Miss Vanderpoel. After all it was she
who made him an object of interest. One wanted to know
what she would do with him--how she would "carry him off."
How much did she know of the distaste people felt for him,
since she would not talk or encourage talk? The Dunholms
could not have invited her and her sister, and have ignored
him; but did she not guess that they would have ignored him, if
they could? and was there not natural embarrassment in feeling
forced to appear in pomp, as it were, under his escort?

But no embarrassment was perceptible. Her manner
committed her to no recognition of a shadow of a flaw in the
character of her companion. It even carried a certain conviction
with it, and the lookers-on felt the impossibility of
suggesting any such flaw by their own manner. For this evening,
at least, the man must actually be treated as if he were an
entirely unobjectionable person. It appeared as if that was
what the girl wanted, and intended should happen.

This was what Nigel himself had begun to perceive, but
he did not put it pleasantly. Deucedly clever girl as she was,
he said to himself, she saw that it would be more agreeable
to have no nonsense talked, and no ruffling of tempers. He
had always been able to convey to people that the ruffling of
his temper was a thing to be avoided, and perhaps she had
already been sharp enough to realise this was a fact to be
counted with. She was sharp enough, he said to himself, to
see anything.

The function was a superb one. The house was superb,
the rooms of entertainment were in every proportion perfect,
and were quite renowned for the beauty of the space
they offered; the people themselves were, through centuries
of dignified living, so placed that intercourse with their
kind was an easy and delightful thing. They need never doubt
either their own effect, or the effect of their hospitalities.
Sir Nigel saw about him all the people who held enviable
place in the county. Some of them he had never known, some
of them had long ceased to recall his existence. There were
those among them who lifted lorgnettes or stuck monocles into
their eyes as he passed, asking each other in politely subdued
tones who the man was who seemed to be in attendance on
Miss Vanderpoel. Nigel knew this and girded at it internally,
while he made the most of his suave smile.

The distinguished personage who was the chief guest was
to be seen at the upper end of the room talking to a tall man
with broad shoulders, who was plainly interesting him for the
moment. As the Stornham party passed on, this person, making his
bow, retired, and, as he turned towards them, Sir Nigel
recognising him, the agreeable smile was for the moment lost.

"How in the name of Heaven did Mount Dunstan come
here?" broke from him with involuntary heat.

"Would it be rash to conclude," said Betty, as she
returned the bow of a very grand old lady in black velvet
and an imposing tiara, "that he came in response to invitation?"

The very grand old lady seemed pleased to see her, and, with
a royal little sign, called her to her side. As Betty Vanderpoel
was a great success with the Mrs. Weldens and old
Dobys of village life, she was also a success among grand old
ladies. When she stood before them there was a delicate
submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the
dignity of their years and state. Strongly conservative and
rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In
the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most
agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully
attentive as if she had been a specially perfect young
lady-in-waiting.

This one even patted Betty's hand a little, when she took
it. She was a great county potentate, who was known as
Lady Alanby of Dole--her house being one of the most
ancient and interesting in England.

"I am glad to see you here to-night," she said. "You are
looking very nice. But you cannot help that."

Betty asked permission to present her sister and brother-in-
law. Lady Alanby was polite to both of them, but she gave
Nigel a rather sharp glance through her gold pince-nez as
she greeted him.

"Janey and Mary," she said to the two girls nearest her,
"I daresay you will kindly change your chairs and let Lady
Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel sit next to me."

The Ladies Jane and Mary Lithcom, who had been ordered
about by her from their infancy, obeyed with polite smiles.
They were not particularly pretty girls, and were of the
indigent noble. Jane, who had almost overlarge blue eyes,
sighed as she reseated herself a few chairs lower down.

"It does seem beastly unfair," she said in a low voice to
her sister, "that a girl such as that should be so awfully
good-looking. She ought to have a turned-up nose."

"Thank you," said Mary, "I have a turned-up nose myself,
and I've got nothing to balance it."

"Oh, I didn't mean a nice turned-up nose like yours," said
Jane; "I meant an ugly one. Of course Lady Alanby wants
her for Tommy."  And her manner was not resigned.

"What she, or anyone else for that matter," disdainfully,
"could want with Tommy, I don't know," replied Mary.

"I do," answered Jane obstinately. "I played cricket with
him when I was eight, and I've liked him ever since. It is
AWFUL," in a smothered outburst, "what girls like us have to
suffer."

Lady Mary turned to look at her curiously.

"Jane," she said, "are you SUFFERING about Tommy?"

"Yes, I am. Oh, what a question to ask in a ballroom!
Do you want me to burst out crying?"

"No," sharply, "look at the Prince. Stare at that fat
woman curtsying to him. Stare and then wink your eyes."

Lady Alanby was talking about Mount Dunstan.

"Lord Dunholm has given us a lead. He is an old friend
of mine, and he has been talking to me about it. It appears
that he has been looking into things seriously. Modern as he
is, he rather tilts at injustices, in a quiet way. He has
satisfactorily convinced himself that Lord Mount Dunstan has
been suffering for the sins of the fathers--which must be
annoying."

"Is Lord Dunholm quite sure of that?" put in Sir Nigel,
with a suggestively civil air.

Old Lady Alanby gave him an unencouraging look.

"Quite," she said. "He would be likely to be before he
took any steps."

"Ah," remarked Nigel. "I knew Lord Tenham, you see."

Lady Alanby's look was more unencouraging still. She
quietly and openly put up her glass and stared. There were
times when she had not the remotest objection to being rude
to certain people.

"I am sorry to hear that," she observed. "There never was any
room for mistake about Tenham. He is not usually mentioned."

"I do not think this man would be usually mentioned, if
everything were known," said Nigel.

Then an appalling thing happened. Lady Alanby gazed
at him a few seconds, and made no reply whatever. She
dropped her glass, and turned again to talk to Betty. It was
as if she had turned her back on him, and Sir Nigel, still
wearing an amiable exterior, used internally some bad language.

"But I was a fool to speak of Tenham," he thought. "A great
fool."

A little later Miss Vanderpoel made her curtsy to the
exalted guest, and was commented upon again by those who
looked on. It was not at all unnatural that one should find
ones eyes following a girl who, representing a sort of royal
power, should have the good fortune of possessing such looks
and bearing.

Remembering his child bete noir of the long legs and square,
audacious little face, Nigel Anstruthers found himself
restraining a slight grin as he looked on at her dancing.
Partners flocked about her like bees, and Lady Alanby of Dole,
and other very grand old or middle-aged ladies all found the
evening more interesting because they could watch her.

"She is full of spirit," said Lady Alanby, "and she enjoys
herself as a girl should. It is a pleasure to look at her. I
like a girl who gets a magnificent colour and stars in her eyes
when she dances. It looks healthy and young."

It was Tommy Miss Vanderpoel was dancing with when her
ladyship said this. Tommy was her grandson and a young man
of greater rank than fortune. He was a nice, frank, heavy
youth, who loved a simple county life spent in tramping about
with guns, and in friendly hobnobbing with the neighbours, and
eating great afternoon teas with people whose jokes were easy
to understand, and who were ready to laugh if you tried a joke
yourself. He liked girls, and especially he liked Jane Lithcom,
but that was a weakness his grandmother did not at all
encourage, and, as he danced with Betty Vanderpoel, he looked
over her shoulder more than once at a pair of big, unhappy blue
eyes, whose owner sat against the wall.

Betty Vanderpoel herself was not thinking of Tommy. In
fact, during this brilliant evening she faced still further
developments of her own strange case. Certain new things were
happening to her. When she had entered the ballroom she had
known at once who the man was who stood before the royal
guest--she had known before he bowed low and withdrew. And
her recognition had brought with it a shock of joy. For a few
moments her throat felt hot and pulsing. It was true--the
things which concerned him concerned her. All that happened
to him suddenly became her affair, as if in some way they
were of the same blood. Nigel's slighting of him had
infuriated her; that Lord Dunholm had offered him friendship
and hospitality was a thing which seemed done to herself, and
filled her with gratitude and affection; that he should be at
this place, on this special occasion, swept away dark things from
his path. It was as if it were stated without words that a
conservative man of the world, who knew things as they were,
having means of reaching truths, vouched for him and placed
his dignity and firmness at his side.

And there was the gladness at the sight of him. It was an
overpoweringly strong thing. She had never known anything
like it. She had not seen him since Nigel's return, and here he
was, and she knew that her life quickened in her because they
were together in the same room. He had come to them and said
a few courteous words, but he had soon gone away. At first
she wondered if it was because of Nigel, who at the time was
making himself rather ostentatiously amiable to her. Afterwards
she saw him dancing, talking, being presented to people,
being, with a tactful easiness, taken care of by his host and
hostess, and Lord Westholt. She was struck by the graceful
magic with which this tactful ease surrounded him without any
obviousness. The Dunholms had given a lead, as Lady Alanby
had said, and the rest were following it and ignoring intervals
with reposeful readiness. It was wonderfully well done.
Apparently there had been no past at all. All began with this
large young man, who, despite his Viking type, really looked
particularly well in evening dress. Lady Alanby held him by her
chair for some time, openly enjoying her talk with him, and
calling up Tommy, that they might make friends.

After a while, Betty said to herself, he would come and ask
for a dance. But he did not come, and she danced with one
man after another. Westholt came to her several times and
had more dances than one. Why did the other not come? Several
times they whirled past each other, and when it occurred
they looked--both feeling it an accident--into each other's eyes.

The strong and strange thing--that which moves on its way
as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun--
had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing, but
an ancient and common one--as common and ancient as death
and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are. As it
comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their
mere passing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens,
and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting
and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two
who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides
of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew
a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.

"I wish," Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening,
"that her eyes had some fault in their expression--that they drew
one less--that they drew ME less. I am losing my head."

"It would be better," Betty thought, "if I did not wish
so much that he would come and ask me to dance with him--
that he would not keep away so. He is keeping away for a
reason. Why is he doing it?"

The music swung on in lovely measures, and the dancers
swung with it. Sir Nigel walked dutifully through the Lancers
once with his wife, and once with his beautiful sister-in-law.
Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners,
who discovered that she was a childishly light creature who
danced extremely well. Everyone was kind to her, and the very
grand old ladies, who admired Betty, were absolutely benign in
their manner. Betty's partners paid ingenuous court to her, and
Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the
dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.

Rosy, standing for a moment looking out on the brilliancy
and state about her, meeting Betty's eyes, laughed quiveringly.

"I am in a dream," she said.

"You have awakened from a dream," Betty answered.

From the opposite side of the room someone was coming
towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.

"I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with
him," she said. "Why have you not danced with him before,
Betty?"

"He has not asked me," Betty answered. "That is the only
reason."

"Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a
few days after they met him at Stornham," Rosalie explained
in an undertone. "They wanted to know him. Then it seems
they found they liked each other. Lady Dunholm has been
telling me about it. She says Lord Dunholm thanks you,
because you said something illuminating. That was the word
she used--`illuminating.'  I believe you are always illuminating,
Betty."

Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them. How broad
his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well
built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his
eyes! Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through
some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously
demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction.
One does not call it domineering, but it is so. This
special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her
single share of force. Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as
this "other one" came to her. He did not use the ballroom
formula when he spoke to her. He said in rather a low voice:

"Will you dance with me?"

"Yes," she answered.

Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable
a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom.
Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same
interested curiosity. Some onlookers thought it singular that
they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by
reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented
with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and
circumstance. No one attempted to deny that they were an
extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes
followed them in spite of one's self.

"Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow
rather amazing," old Lady Alanby commented. "He is a
magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently
built girl. Everybody should look like that. My impression
would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of
them had any particular character. That affair of the apple was
so silly. Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman
who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her
dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband. That wonderful
black head of Miss Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near
Mount Dunstan's dark red one."

"I am glad to be dancing with him," Betty was thinking.
"I am glad to be near him."

"Will you dance this with me to the very end," asked Mount
Dunstan--"to the very late note?"

"Yes," answered Betty.

He had spoken in a low but level voice--the kind of voice
whose tone places a man and woman alone together, and wholly
apart from all others by whomsoever they are surrounded.
There had been no preliminary speech and no explanation of
the request followed. The music was a perfect thing, the
brilliant, lofty ballroom, the beauty of colour and sound about
them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm breath of flowers
in the air, the very sense of royal presence and its accompanying
state and ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged
background for the strange consciousness each held close and
silently--knowing nothing of the mind of the other.

This was what was passing through the man's mind.

"This is the thing which most men experience several times during
their lives. It would be reason enough for all the great deeds
and all the crimes one hears of. It is an enormous kind of
anguish and a fearful kind of joy. It is scarcely to be borne,
and yet, at this moment, I could kill myself and her, at the
thought of losing it. If I had begun earlier, would it have
been easier? No, it would not. With me it is bound to go
hard. At twenty I should probably not have been able to keep
myself from shouting it aloud, and I should not have known that
it was only the working of the Law. `Only!'  Good God,
what a fool I am! It is because it is only the Law that I cannot
escape, and must go on to the end, grinding my teeth together
because I cannot speak. Oh, her smooth young cheek!
Oh, the deep shadows of her lashes! And while we sway
round and round together, I hold her slim strong body in the
hollow of my arm."

It was, quite possibly, as he thought this that Nigel
Anstruthers, following him with his eyes as he passed, began to
frown. He had been watching the pair as others had, he had
seen what others saw, and now he had an idea that he saw
something more, and it was something which did not please him.
The instinct of the male bestirred itself--the curious instinct
of resentment against another man--any other man. And, in
this case, Mount Dunstan was not any other man, but one for
whom his antipathy was personal.

"I won't have that," he said to himself. "I won't have it."

. . . . .

The music rose and swelled, and then sank into soft breathing,
as they moved in harmony together, gliding and swirling
as they threaded their way among other couples who swirled and
glided also, some of them light and smiling, some exchanging
low-toned speech--perhaps saying words which, unheard by
others, touched on deep things. The exalted guest fell into
momentary silence as he looked on, being a man much attracted
by physical fineness and temperamental power and charm. A
girl like that would bring a great deal to a man and to the
country he belonged to. A great race might be founded on such
superbness of physique and health and beauty. Combined
with abnormal resources, certainly no more could be asked.
He expressed something of the kind to Lord Dunholm, who
stood near him in attendance.

To herself Betty was saying: "That was a strange thing
he asked me. It is curious that we say so little. I should
never know much about him. I have no intelligence where
he is concerned--only a strong, stupid feeling, which is not
like a feeling of my own. I am no longer Betty Vanderpoel--
and I wish to go on dancing with him--on and on--to the
last note, as he said."

She felt a little hot wave run over her cheek uncomfortably,
and the next instant the big arm tightened its clasp of her--
for just one second--not more than one. She did not know
that he, himself, had seen the sudden ripple of red colour,
and that the equally sudden contraction of the arm had been
as unexpected to him and as involuntary as the quick wave
itself. It had horrified and made him angry. He looked the
next instant entirely stiff and cold.

"He did not know it happened," Betty resolved.

"The music is going to stop," said Mount Dunstan. "I
know the waltz. We can get once round the room again before
the final chord. It was to be the last note--the very last,"
but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty laughed.

"Quite the last," she answered.

The music hastened a little, and their gliding whirl became
more rapid--a little faster--a little faster still--a running
sweep of notes, a big, terminating harmony, and the thing was
over.

"Thank you," said Mount Dunstan. "One will have it to
remember."  And his tone was slightly sardonic.

"Yes," Betty acquiesced politely.

"Oh, not you. Only I. I have never waltzed before."

Betty turned to look at him curiously.

"Under circumstances such as these," he explained. "I
learned to dance at a particularly hideous boys' school in
France. I abhorred it. And the trend of my life has made it
quite easy for me to keep my twelve-year-old vow that I would
never dance after I left the place, unless I WANTED to do it, and
that, especially, nothing should make me waltz until certain
agreeable conditions were fulfilled. Waltzing I approved of
--out of hideous schools. I was a pig-headed, objectionable
child. I detested myself even, then."

Betty's composure returned to her.

"I am trusting," she remarked, "that I may secretly regard
myself as one of the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled. Do
not dispel my hopes roughly."

"I will not," he answered. "You are, in fact, several of them."

"One breathes with much greater freedom," she responded.

This sort of cool nonsense was safe. It dispelled feelings
of tenseness, and carried them to the place where Sir Nigel
and Lady Anstruthers awaited them. A slight stir was
beginning to be felt throughout the ballroom. The royal guest
was retiring, and soon the rest began to melt away. The
Anstruthers, who had a long return drive before them, were
among those who went first.

When Lady Anstruthers and her sister returned from the
cloak room, they found Sir Nigel standing near Mount Dunstan,
who was going also, and talking to him in an amiably
detached manner. Mount Dunstan, himself, did not look
amiable, or seem to be saying much, but Sir Nigel showed
no signs of being disturbed.

"Now that you have ceased to forswear the world," he said as his
wife approached, "I hope we shall see you at Stornham. Your
visits must not cease because we cannot offer you G. Selden any
longer."

He had his own reasons for giving the invitation--several
of them. And there was a satisfaction in letting the fellow
know, casually, that he was not in the ridiculous position of
being unaware of what had occurred during his absence--that
there had been visits--and also the objectionable episode of
the American bounder. That the episode had been objectionable,
he knew he had adroitly conveyed by mere tone and manner.

Mount Dunstan thanked him in the usual formula, and
then spoke to Betty.

"G. Selden left us tremulous and fevered with ecstatic
anticipation. He carried your kind letter to Mr. Vanderpoel,
next to his heart. His brain seemed to whirl at the thought
of what `the boys' would say, when he arrived with it in
New York. You have materialised the dream of his life!"

"I have interested my father," Betty answered, with a
brilliant smile. "He liked the romance of the Reuben S.
Vanderpoel who rewarded the saver of his life by unbounded
orders for the Delkoff."

. . . . .

As their carriage drove away, Sir Nigel bent forward to
look out of the window, and having done it, laughed a little.

"Mount Dunstan does not play the game well," he remarked.

It was annoying that neither Betty nor his wife inquired
what the game in question might be, and that his temperament
forced him into explaining without encouragement.

"He should have `stood motionless with folded arms,' or
something of the sort, and `watched her equipage until it
was out of sight.' "

"And he did not?" said Betty

"He turned on his heel as soon as the door was shut."

"People ought not to do such things," was her simple
comment. To which it seemed useless to reply.

CHAPTER XXXIII

FOR LADY JANE

There is no one thing on earth of such interest as the study
of the laws of temperament, which impel, support, or entrap
into folly and danger the being they rule. As a child, not
old enough to give a definite name to the thing she watched
and pondered on, in child fashion, Bettina Vanderpoel had
thought much on this subject. As she had grown older, she
had never been ignorant of the workings of her own temperament,
and she had looked on for years at the laws which had wrought in
her father's being--the laws of strength, executive capacity,
and that pleasure in great schemes, which is roused less
by a desire for gain than for a strongly-felt necessity
for action, resulting in success. She mentally followed
other people on their way, sometimes asking herself how far
the individual was to be praised or blamed for his treading
of the path he seemed to choose. And now there was given
her the opportunity to study the workings of the nature of
Nigel Anstruthers, which was a curious thing.

He was not an individual to be envied. Never was man
more tormented by lack of power to control his special devil,
at the right moment of time, and therefore, never was there
one so inevitably his own frustration. This Betty saw after
the passing of but a few days, and wondered how far he was
conscious or unconscious of the thing. At times it appeared
to her that he was in a state of unrest--that he was as a man
wavering between lines of action, swayed at one moment by
one thought, at another by an idea quite different, and that
he was harried because he could not hold his own with himself.

This was true. The ball at Dunholm Castle had been
enlightening, and had wrought some changes in his points of
view. Also other factors had influenced him. In the first
place, the changed atmosphere of Stornham, the fitness and
luxury of his surroundings, the new dignity given to his
position by the altered aspect of things, rendered external
amiability more easy. To ride about the country on a good
horse, or drive in a smart phaeton, or suitable carriage, and to
find that people who a year ago had passed him with the
merest recognition, saluted him with polite intention, was, to
a certain degree, stimulating to a vanity which had been long
ill-fed. The power which produced these results should, of
course, have been in his own hands--his money-making father-
in-law should have seen that it was his affair to provide for
that--but since he had not done so, it was rather entertaining
that it should be, for the present, in the hands of this
extraordinarily good-looking girl.

He had begun by merely thinking of her in this manner--
as "this extraordinarily good-looking girl," and had not, for a
moment, hesitated before the edifying idea of its not being
impossible to arrange a lively flirtation with her. She was at
an age when, in his opinion, girlhood was poised for flight
with adventure, and his tastes had not led him in the direction
of youth which was fastidious. His Riviera episode had left his
vanity blistered and requiring some soothing application.
His life had worked evil with him, and he had fallen
ill on the hands of a woman who had treated him as a shattered,
useless thing whose day was done and with whom
strength and bloom could not be burdened. He had kept
his illness a hidden secret, on his return to Stornham, his one
desire having been to forget--even to disbelieve in it, but
dreams of its suggestion sometimes awakened him at night with
shudders and cold sweat. He was hideously afraid of death and
pain, and he had had monstrous pain--and while he had lain
battling with it, upon his bed in the villa on the Mediterranean,
he had been able to hear, in the garden outside, the low voices
and laughter of the Spanish dancer and the healthy, strong
young fool who was her new adorer.

When he had found himself face to face with Betty in
the avenue, after the first leap of annoyance, which had suddenly
died down into perversely interested curiosity, he could
have laughed outright at the novelty and odd unexpectedness
of the situation. The ill-mannered, impudently-staring, little
New York beast had developed into THIS! Hang it! No man
could guess what the embryo female creature might result in.
His mere shakiness of physical condition added strength to
her attraction. She was like a young goddess of health and
life and fire; the very spring of her firm foot upon the moss
beneath it was a stimulating thing to a man whose nerves
sprung secret fears upon him. There were sparks between the
sweep of her lashes, but she managed to carry herself with
the air of being as cool as a cucumber, which gave spice to
the effort to "upset" her. If she did not prove suitably
amenable, there would be piquancy in getting the better of her
--in stirring up unpleasant little things, which would make it
easier for her to go away than remain on the spot--if one
should end by choosing to get rid of her. But, for the moment,
he had no desire to get rid of her. He wanted to see what
she intended to do--to see the thing out, in fact. It amused
him to hear that Mount Dunstan was on her track. There
exists for persons of a certain type a pleasure full-fed by the
mere sense of having "got even" with an opponent. Throughout
his life he had made a point of "getting even" with
those who had irritatingly crossed his path, or much disliked
him. The working out of small or large plans to achieve this
end had formed one of his most agreeable recreations. He
had long owed Mount Dunstan a debt, which he had always
meant to pay. He had not intended to forget the episode of
the nice little village girl with whom Tenham and himself
had been getting along so enormously well, when the raging
young ass had found them out, and made an absurdly exaggerated
scene, even going so far as threatening to smash the pair of
them, marching off to the father and mother, and
setting the vicar on, and then scratching together--God knows
how--money enough to pack the lot off to America, where
they had since done well. Why should a man forgive another
who had made him look like a schoolboy and a fool? So, to
find Mount Dunstan rushing down a steep hill into this
thing, was edifying. You cannot take much out of a man
if you never encounter him. If you meet him, you are provided
by Heaven with opportunities. You can find out what
he feels most sharply, and what he will suffer most by being
deprived of. His impression was that there was a good deal
to be got out of Mount Dunstan. He was an obstinate,
haughty devil, and just the fellow to conceal with a fury of
pride a score of tender places in his hide.

At the ball he had seen that the girl's effect had been of
a kind which even money and good looks uncombined with
another thing might not have produced. And she had the
other thing--whatsoever it might be. He observed the way
in which the Dunholms met and greeted her, he marked the
glance of the royal personage, and his manner, when after
her presentation he conversed with and detained her, he saw
the turning of heads and exchange of remarks as she moved
through the rooms. Most especially, he took in the bearing
of the very grand old ladies, led by Lady Alanby of Dole.
Barriers had thrown themselves down, these portentous,
rigorous old pussycats admired her, even liked her.

"Upon my word," he said to himself. "She has a way with
her, you know. She is a combination of Ethel Newcome and
Becky Sharp. But she is more level-headed than either of them,
There's a touch of Trix Esmond, too."

The sense of the success which followed her, and the gradually-
growing excitement of looking on at her light whirls of
dance, the carnation of her cheek, and the laughter and pleasure
she drew about her, had affected him in a way by which
he was secretly a little exhilarated. He was conscious of a
rash desire to force his way through these laughing, vaunting
young idiots, juggle or snatch their dances away from them,
and seize on the girl himself. He had not for so long a time
been impelled by such agreeable folly that he had sometimes
felt the stab of the thought that he was past it. That it
should rise in him again made him feel young. There was
nothing which so irritated him against Mount Dunstan as
his own rebelling recognition of the man's youth, the strength
of his fine body, his high-held head and clear eye.

These things and others it was which swayed him, as was plain to
Betty in the time which followed, to many changes of mood.

"Are you sorry for a man who is ill and depressed," he
asked one day, "or do you despise him?"

"I am sorry."

"Then be sorry for me."

He had come out of the house to her as she sat on the lawn,
under a broad, level-branched tree, and had thrown himself
upon a rug with his hands clasped behind his head.

"Are you ill?"

"When I was on the Riviera I had a fall."  He lied simply.
"I strained some muscle or other, and it has left me
rather lame. Sometimes I have a good deal of pain."

"I am very sorry," said Betty. "Very."

A woman who can be made sorry it is rarely impossible to
manage. To dwell with pathetic patience on your grievances,
if she is weak and unintelligent, to deplore, with honest regret,
your faults and blunders, if she is strong, are not bad ideas.

He looked at her reflectively.

"Yes, you are capable of being sorry," he decided. For
a few moments of silence his eyes rested upon the view spread
before him. To give the expression of dignified reflection
was not a bad idea either.

"Do you know," he said at length, "that you produce an
extraordinary effect upon me, Betty?"

She was occupying herself by adding a few stitches to one
of Rosy's ancient strips of embroidery, and as she answered,
she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect

"Good or bad?" she inquired, with delicate abstraction.

He turned his face towards her again--this time quickly.

"Both," he answered. "Both."

His tone held the flash of a heat which he felt should have
startled her slightly. But apparently it did not.

"I do not like `both,' " with composed lightness. "If you
had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when
you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with
pride. But `both' leaves me unsatisfied. It interferes with
the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent
power. One likes to contemplate a large picture of one's self--
not plain, but coloured--as a wholesale reformer."

"I see. Thank you," stiffly and flushing. "You do not
believe me."

Her effect upon him was such that, for the moment, he
found himself choosing to believe that he was in earnest. His
desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this
result. She ought to have been rather moved--a little fluttered,
perhaps, at hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.

"You set yourself against me, as a child, Betty," he said.
"And you set yourself against me now. You will not give
me fair play. You might give me fair play."  He dropped his
voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well done. A
touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.

"What would you consider fair play?" she inquired.

"It would be fair to listen to me without prejudice--to let
me explain how it has happened that I have appeared to you
a--a blackguard--I have no doubt you would call it--and a
fool."  He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture--impatient
of himself--his fate--the tricks of bad fortune which it
implied had made of him a more erring mortal than he would
have been if left to himself, and treated decently.

"Do not put it so strongly," with conservative politeness.

"I don't refuse to admit that I am handicapped by a
devil of a temperament. That is an inherited thing."

"Ah!" said Betty. "One of the temperaments one reads
about--for which no one is to be blamed but one's deceased
relatives. After all, that is comparatively easy to deal with.
One can just go on doing what one wants to do--and then
condemn one's grandparents severely."

A repellent quality in her--which had also the trick of
transforming itself into an exasperating attraction--was that
she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious
of throughout his existence. If the injustice of fate has failed
to bestow upon a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his
exercise of the power to disturb, to enrage those who dare not
resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him,
will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed
over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow
gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be
found not wholly unsatisfying.

But in her case the inadequacy of the usual methods had
forced itself upon him. It was as if the dart being aimed
at her, she caught it in her hand in its flight, broke off its
point and threw it lightly aside without comment. Most
women cannot resist the temptation to answer a speech containing
a sting or a reproach. It was part of her abnormality that
she could let such things go by in a detached silence, which
did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon
them. This, he said, was the result of her beastly sense of
security, which, in its turn, was the result of the atmosphere
of wealth she had breathed since her birth. There had been
no obstacle which could not be removed for her, no law of
limitation had laid its rein on her neck. She had not been
taught by her existence the importance of propitiating opinion.
Under such conditions, how was fear to be learned? She had
not learned it. But for the devil in the blue between her
lashes, he realised that he should have broken loose long ago.

"I suppose I deserved that for making a stupid appeal to
sympathy," he remarked. "I will not do it again."

If she had been the woman who can be gently goaded into
reply, she would have made answer to this. But she allowed
the observation to pass, giving it free flight into space, where
it lost itself after the annoying manner of its kind.

"Have you any objection to telling me why you decided
to come to England this year?" he inquired, with a casual
air, after the pause which she did not fill in.

The bluntness of the question did not seem to disturb her.
She was not sorry, in fact, that he had asked it. She let her
work lie upon her knee, and leaned back in her low garden
chair, her hands resting upon its wicker arms. She turned on
him a clear unprejudiced gaze.

"I came to see Rosy. I have always been very fond of
her. I did not believe that she had forgotten how much we
had loved her, or how much she had loved us. I knew that
if I could see her again I should understand why she had
seemed to forget us."

"And when you saw her, you, of course, decided that I had
behaved, to quote my own words--like a blackguard and a
fool."

"It is, of course, very rude to say you have behaved like
a fool, but--if you'll excuse my saying so--that is what has
impressed me very much. Don't you know," with a moderation,
which singularly drove itself home, "that if you had
been kind to her, and had made her happy, you could have
had anything you wished for--without trouble?"

This was one of the unadorned facts which are like bullets.
Disgustedly, he found himself veering towards an outlook
which forced him to admit that there was probably truth in
what she said, and he knew he heard more truth as she went on.

"She would have wanted only what you wanted, and she
would not have asked much in return. She would not have
asked as much as I should. What you did was not business-
like."  She paused a moment to give thought to it. "You paid
too high a price for the luxury of indulging the inherited
temperament. Your luxury was not to control it. But it was a
bad investment."

"The figure of speech is rather commercial," coldly.

"It is curious that most things are, as a rule. There is
always the parallel of profit and loss whether one sees it or
not. The profits are happiness and friendship--enjoyment of
life and approbation. If the inherited temperament supplies
one with all one wants of such things, it cannot be called a
loss, of course."

"You think, however, that mine has not brought me much?"

"I do not know. It is you who know."

"Well," viciously, "there HAS been a sort of luxury in it
in lashing out with one's heels, and smashing things--and in
knowing that people prefer to keep clear."

She lifted her shoulders a little.

"Then perhaps it has paid."

"No," suddenly and fiercely, "damn it, it has not!"

And she actually made no reply to that.

"What do you mean to do?" he questioned as bluntly as
before. He knew she would understand what he meant.

"Not much. To see that Rosy is not unhappy any more.
We can prevent that. She was out of repair--as the house
was. She is being rebuilt and decorated. She knows that she
will be taken care of."

"I know her better than you do," with a laugh. "She will
not go away. She is too frightened of the row it would make--
of what I should say. I should have plenty to say. I can make
her shake in her shoes."

Betty let her eyes rest full upon him, and he saw that she
was softly summing him up--quite without prejudice, merely
in interested speculation upon the workings of type.

"You are letting the inherited temperament run away with
you at this moment," she reflected aloud--her quiet scrutiny
almost abstracted. "It was foolish to say that."

He had known it was foolish two seconds after the words
had left his lips. But a temper which has been allowed to
leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming
a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land
its owner in a ditch. This last was what her interested eyes
were obviously saying. It suited him best at the moment to
try to laugh.

"Don't look at me like that," he threw off. "As if you
were calculating that two and two make four."

"No prejudice of mine can induce them to make five or
six--or three and a half," she said. "No prejudice of mine--
or of yours."

The two and two she was calculating with were the
likelihoods and unlikelihoods of the inherited temperament, and
the practical powers she could absolutely count on if difficulty
arose with regard to Rosy.

He guessed at this, and began to make calculations himself.

But there was no further conversation for them, as they
were obliged to rise to their feet to receive visitors. Lady
Alanby of Dole and Sir Thomas, her grandson, were being
brought out of the house to them by Rosalie.

He went forward to meet them--his manner that of the
graceful host. Lady Alanby, having been welcomed by him,
and led to the most comfortable, tree-shaded chair, found his
bearing so elegantly chastened that she gazed at him with
private curiosity. To her far-seeing and highly experienced
old mind it seemed the bearing of a man who was "up to
something."  What special thing did he chance to be "up
to"? His glance certainly lurked after Miss Vanderpoel oddly.
Was he falling in unholy love with the girl, under his stupid
little wife's very nose?

She could not, however, give her undivided attention to him,
as she wished to keep her eye on her grandson and--outrageously
enough fit happened that just as tea was brought out
and Tommy was beginning to cheer up and quite come out
a little under the spur of the activities of handing bread and
butter and cress sandwiches, who should appear but the two
Lithcom girls, escorted by their aunt, Mrs. Manners, with
whom they lived. As they were orphans without money, if
the Manners, who were rather well off, had not taken them
in, they would have had to go to the workhouse, or into genteel
amateur shops, as they were not clever enough for governesses.

Mary, with her turned-up nose, looked just about as usual,
but Jane had a new frock on which was exactly the colour
of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people
about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow
gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was
not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight
girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate
bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost
invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose
characters are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady
Alanby saw Tommy's robust young body give a sort of jerk
as the party of three was brought across the grass. After
it he pulled himself together hastily, and looked stiff and
pink, shaking hands as if his elbow joint was out of order,
being at once too loose and too rigid. He began to be clumsy
with the bread and butter, and, ceasing his talk with Miss
Vanderpoel, fell into silence. Why should he go on talking?
he thought. Miss Vanderpoel was a cracking handsome girl,
but she was too clever for him, and he had to think of all
sorts of new things to say when he talked to her. And--
well, a fellow could never imagine himself stretched out on
the grass, puffing happily away at a pipe, with a girl like
that sitting near him, smiling--the hot turf smelling almost
like hay, the hot blue sky curving overhead, and both the girl
and himself perfectly happy--chock full of joy--though neither
of them were saying anything at all. You could imagine it
with some girls--you DID imagine it when you wakened early
on a summer morning, and lay in luxurious stillness listening
to the birds singing like mad.

Lady Jane was a nicely-behaved girl, and she tried to keep
her following blue eyes fixed on the grass, or on Lady
Anstruthers, or Miss Vanderpoel, but there was something like
a string, which sometimes pulled them in another direction,
and once when this had happened--quite against her will--she
was terrified to find Lady Alanby's glass lifted and fixed upon
her.

As Lady Alanby's opinion of Mrs. Manners was but a poor
one, and as Mrs. Manners was stricken dumb by her combined
dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might
have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an
effort. She applied herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs. Manners
at once, and ended by making them talk to each other.
When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the
gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval
horticultural passions which dominate the existence of all
respectable and normal country ladies, until the gulf between
them was temporarily bridged. This being achieved, she adroitly
passed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel observed
with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without
manifest discomfiture.

To the aching Tommy the manner in which, a few minutes
later, he found himself standing alone with Jane Lithcom in
a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly simple.
At the end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country,
and Miss Vanderpoel had brought him to see it. Nigel
Anstruthers had been loitering behind with Jane and Mary. As
Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped
and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing
at the foot of a bit of wall.

"Lady Jane's eyes are just the colour of this flower," she
said.

"Yes, they are," he answered, glancing down at the lovely
little blue thing as she held it in her hand. And then, with
a thump of the heart, "Most people do not think she is
pretty, but I--" quite desperately--"I DO."  His mood had
become rash.

"So do I," Betty Vanderpoel answered.

Then the others joined them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused
to talk a little--and when they went on she was with Mary
and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly,
and somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly
natural manner into a side path. Their own slow pace became
slower. In fact, in a few moments, they were standing quite
still between the green walls. Jane turned a little aside, and
picked off some small leaves, nervously. He saw the muslin
on her chest lift quiveringly.

"Oh, little Jane!" he said in a big, shaky whisper. The
following eyes incontinently brimmed over. Some shining
drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.

"Oh, Tommy," giving up, "it's no use--talking at all."

"You mustn't think--you mustn't think--ANYTHING," he falteringly
commanded, drawing nearer, because it was impossible not to do
it.

What he really meant, though he did not know how
decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could
be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose
possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.

"I am not thinking anything," cried Jane in answer. "But
she is everything, and I am nothing. Just look at her--and
then look at me, Tommy."

"I'll look at you as long as you'll let me," gulped Tommy,
and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her
shoulders, and drown his longing in her brimming eyes.

. . . . .

Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious
intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were
together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.

"You have known Sir Thomas a long time?" Betty had just said.

"Since we were children. Jane reminded me at the Dunholms' ball
that she had played cricket with him when she was eight."

"They have always liked each other?" Miss Vanderpoel suggested.

Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was
frank to revelation. But for the clear girlish liking for
herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel's, Mary would have known
her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness. She had heard
that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of
unconventional things. This splendid girl was understanding her.

"Oh! You SEE!" she broke out. "You left them together on
purpose!"

"Yes, I did."  And there was a comprehension so deep in
her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and
somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own.
"When two people want so much--care so much to be
together," Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly--even as if the
words rather forced themselves from her, "it seems as if the
whole world ought to help them--everything in the world--
the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars--oh, things have
no RIGHT to keep them apart."

Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated. She scarcely
knew that she caught at her hand.

"I have never been in the state that Jane is," she poured
forth. "And I can't understand how she can be such a fool,
but--but we care about each other more than most girls do--
perhaps because we have had no people. And it's the kind
of thing there is no use talking against, it seems. It's killing
the youngness in her. If it ends miserably, it will be as if
she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for
spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live. Her blue
eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have
cried all the colour out of them. Oh! You UNDERSTAND! I
see you do."

Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel's hands were
holding hers.

"I do! I do," she said. And she did, as a year ago she
had not known she could. "Is it Lady Alanby?" she ventured.

"Yes. Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave
him her money. And she won't if he makes her angry. She
is very determined. She will leave it to an awful cousin if
she gets in a rage. And Tommy is not clever. He could never
earn his living. Neither could Jane. They could NEVER marry.
You CAN'T defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are
a character in a book."

"Has she liked Lady Jane in the past?" Miss Vanderpoel
asked, as if she was, mentally, rapidly going over the ground,
that she might quite comprehend everything.

"Yes. She used to make rather a pet of her. She didn't
like me. She was taken by Jane's meek, attentive, obedient
ways. Jane was born a sweet little affectionate worm. Lady
Alanby can't hate her, even now. She just pushes her out of
her path."

"Because?" said Betty Vanderpoel.

Mary prefaced her answer with a brief, half-embarrassed laugh.

"Because of YOU."

"Because she thinks----?"

"I don't see how she can believe he has much of a chance.
I don't think she does--but she will never forgive him if
he doesn't make a try at finding out whether he has one or not."

"It is very businesslike," Betty made observation.

Mary laughed.

"We talk of American business outlook," she said, "but
very few of us English people are dreamy idealists. We are
of a coolness and a daring--when we are dealing with questions
of this sort. I don't think you can know the thing you
have brought here. You descend on a dull country place,
with your money and your looks, and you simply STAY and
amuse yourself by doing extraordinary things, as if there was
no London waiting for you. Everyone knows this won't last.
Next season you will be presented, and have a huge success.
You will be whirled about in a vortex, and people will sit
on the edge, and cast big strong lines, baited with the most
glittering things they can get together. You won't be able
to get away. Lady Alanby knows there would be no chance
for Tommy then. It would be too idiotic to expect it. He
must make his try now."

Their eyes met again, and Miss Vanderpoel looked neither shocked
nor angry, but an odd small shadow swept across her face. Mary,
of course, did not know that she was thinking of the thing she
had realised so often--that it was not easy to detach one's self
from the fact that one was Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter. As a
result of it here one was indecently and unwillingly disturbing
the lives of innocent, unassuming lovers.

"And so long as Sir Thomas has not tried--and found out--
Lady Jane will be made unhappy?"

"If he were to let you escape without trying, he would not
be forgiven. His grandmother has had her own way all her
life."

"But suppose after I went away someone else came?"

Mary shook her head.

"People like you don't HAPPEN in one neighbourhood twice in a
lifetime. I am twenty-six and you are the first I have seen."

"And he will only be safe if?"

Mary Lithcom nodded.

"Yes--IF," she answered. "It's silly--and frightful--but
it is true."

Miss Vanderpoel looked down on the grass a few moments,
and then seemed to arrive at a decision.

"He likes you? You can make him understand things?"  she
inquired.

"Yes."

"Then go and tell him that if he will come here and ask
me a direct question, I will give him a direct answer--which
will satisfy Lady Alanby."

Lady Mary caught her breath.

"Do you know, you are the most wonderful girl I ever
saw!" she exclaimed. "But if you only knew what I feel about
Janie!"  And tears rushed into her eyes.

"I feel just the same thing about my sister," said Miss
Vanderpoel. "I think Rosy and Lady Jane are rather alike."

. . . . .

When Tommy tramped across the grass towards her he was
turning red and white by turns, and looking somewhat like
a young man who was being marched up to a cannon's mouth.
It struck him that it was an American kind of thing he was
called upon to do, and he was not an American, but British
from the top of his closely-cropped head to the rather thick
soles of his boots. He was, in truth, overwhelmed by his
sense of his inadequacy to the demands of the brilliantly
conceived, but unheard-of situation. Joy and terror swept over
his being in waves.

The tall, proud, wood-nymph look of her as she stood under
a tree, waiting for him, would have struck his courage dead
on the spot and caused him to turn and flee in anguish, if she
had not made a little move towards him, with a heavenly,
every-day humanness in her eyes. The way she managed it was an
amazing thing. He could never have managed it at all himself.

She came forward and gave him her hand, and really it was
HER hand which held his own comparatively steady.

"It is for Lady Jane," she said. "That prevents it from being
ridiculous or improper. It is for Lady Jane. Her eyes," with a
soft-touched laugh, "are the colour of the blue speedwell I
showed you. It is the colour of babies' eyes. And hers look as
theirs do--as if they asked everybody not to hurt them."

He actually fell upon his knee, and bending his head over
her hand, kissed it half a dozen times with adoration. Good
Lord, how she SAW and KNEW!

"If Jane were not Jane, and you were not YOU," the words
rushed from him, "it would be the most outrageous--the most
impudent thing a man ever had the cheek to do."

"But it is not."  She did not draw her hand away, and
oh, the girlish kindness of her smiling, supporting look. "You
came to ask me if----"

"If you would marry me, Miss Vanderpoel," his head bending
over her hand again. "I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon.
Oh Lord, I do.'

"I thank you for the compliment you pay me," she answered. "I
like you very much, Sir Thomas--and I like you just now more than
ever--but I could not marry you. I should not make you happy,
and I should not be happy myself. The truth is----" thinking a
moment, "each of us really belongs to a different kind of person.

And each of knows the fact."

"God bless you," he said. "I think you know everything
in the world a woman can know--and remain an angel."

It was an outburst of eloquence, and she took it in the
prettiest way--with the prettiest laugh, which had in it no touch
of mockery or disbelief in him.

"What I have said is quite final--if Lady Alanby should
inquire," she said--adding rather quickly, "Someone is coming."

It pleased her to see that he did not hurry to his feet clumsily,
but even stood upright, with a shade of boyish dignity, and did
not release her hand before he had bent his head low over it
again.

Sir Nigel was bringing with him Lady Alanby, Mrs. Manners,
and his wife, and when Betty met his eyes, she knew
at once that he had not made his way to this particular
garden without intention. He had discovered that she was
with Tommy, and it had entertained him to break in upon them.

"I did not intend to interrupt Sir Thomas at his devotions,"
he remarked to her after dinner. "Accept my apologies."

"It did not matter in the least, thank you," said Betty.

. . . . .

"I am glad to be able to say, Thomas, that you did not look
an entire fool when you got up from your knees, as we came
into the rose garden."  Thus Lady Alanby, as their carriage
turned out of Stornham village.

"I'm glad myself," Tommy answered.

"What were you doing there? Even if you were asking
her to marry you, it was not necessary to go that far. We
are not in the seventeenth century.

Then Tommy flushed.

"I did not intend to do it. I could not help it. She was
so--so nice about everything. That girl is an angel. I told
her so."

"Very right and proper spirit to approach her in," answered
the old woman, watching him keenly. "Was she angel enough
to say she would marry you?"

Tommy, for some occult reason, had the courage to stare
back into his grandmother's eyes, quite as if he were a man,
and not a hobbledehoy, expecting to be bullied.

"She does not want me," he answered. "And I knew she
wouldn't. Why should she? I did what you ordered me to
do, and she answered me as I knew she would. She might
have snubbed me, but she has such a way with her--such a
way of saying things and understanding, that--that--well, I
found myself on one knee, kissing her hand--as if I was being
presented at court."

Old Lady Alanby looked out on the passing landscape.

"Well, you did your best," she summed the matter up at
last, "if you went down on your knees involuntarily. If you
had done it on purpose, it would have been unpardonable."

CHAPTER XXXIV

RED GODWYN

Stornham Court had taken its proper position in the county
as a place which was equal to social exchange in the matter
of entertainment. Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers had given
a garden party, according to the decrees of the law obtaining
in country neighbourhoods. The curiosity to behold Miss
Vanderpoel, and the change which had been worked in the well-
known desolation and disrepair, precluded the possibility of the
refusal of any invitations sent, the recipient being in his or
her right mind, and sound in wind and limb. That astonishing
things had been accomplished, and that the party was a
successful affair, could not but be accepted as truths. Garden
parties had been heard of, were a trifle repetitional, and
even dull, but at this one there was real music and real dancing,
and clever entertainments were given at intervals in a
green-embowered little theatre, erected for the occasion. These
were agreeable additions to mere food and conversation, which
were capable of palling.

To the garden party the Anstruthers did not confine
themselves. There were dinner parties at Stornham, and they also
were successful functions. The guests were of those who
make for the success of such entertainments.

"I called upon Mount Dunstan this afternoon," Sir Nigel
said one evening, before the first of these dinners. "He might
expect it, as one is asking him to dine. I wish him to be asked.
The Dunholms have taken him up so tremendously that no
festivity seems complete without him."

He had been invited to the garden party, and had appeared, but
Betty had seen little of him. It is easy to see little of a
guest at an out-of-door festivity. In assisting Rosalie to
attend to her visitors she had been much occupied, but she had
known that she might have seen more of him, if he had intended
that it should be so. He did not--for reasons of his own--intend
that it should be so, and this she became aware of. So she
walked, played in the bowling green, danced and talked with
Westholt, Tommy Alanby and others.

"He does not want to talk to me. He will not, if he can
avoid it," was what she said to herself.

She saw that he rather sought out Mary Lithcom, who was not
accustomed to receiving special attention. The two walked
together, danced together, and in adjoining chairs watched the
performance in the embowered theatre. Lady Mary enjoyed her
companion very much, but she wondered why he had
attached himself to her.

Betty Vanderpoel asked herself what they talked to each
other about, and did not suspect the truth, which was that
they talked a good deal of herself.

"Have you seen much of Miss Vanderpoel?" Lady Mary had begun by
asking.

"I have SEEN her a good deal, as no doubt you have."

Lady Mary's plain face expressed a somewhat touched
reflectiveness.

"Do you know," she said, "that the garden parties have
been a different thing this whole summer, just because one
always knew one would see her at them?"

A short laugh from Mount Dunstan.

"Jane and I have gone to every garden party within twenty
miles, ever since we left the schoolroom. And we are very
tired of them. But this year we have quite cheered up. When
we are dressing to go to something dull, we say to each other,
`Well, at any rate, Miss Vanderpoel will be there, and we
shall see what she has on, and how her things are made,' and
that's something--besides the fun of watching people make
up to her, and hearing them talk about the men who want to
marry her, and wonder which one she will take. She will not
take anyone in this place," the nice turned-up nose slightly
suggesting a derisive sniff. "Who is there who is suitable?"

Mount Dunstan laughed shortly again.

"How do you know I am not an aspirant myself?" he said.
He had a mirthless sense of enjoyment in his own brazenness.
Only he himself knew how brazen the speech was.

Lady Mary looked at him with entire composure.

"I am quite sure you are not an aspirant for anybody. And I
happen to know that you dislike moneyed international marriages.
You are so obviously British that, even if I had not been
told that, I should know it was true. Miss Vanderpoel herself
knows it is true."

"Does she?"

"Lady Alanby spoke of it to Sir Nigel, and I heard Sir Nigel
tell her."

"Exactly the kind of unnecessary thing he would be likely
to repeat."  He cast the subject aside as if it were a worthless
superfluity and went on: "When you say there is no one suitable,
you surely forget Lord Westholt."

"Yes, it's true I forgot him for the moment. But--" with
a laugh--"one rather feels as if she would require a royal duke
or something of that sort."

"You think she expects that kind of thing?" rather indifferently.

"She? She doesn't think of the subject. She simply thinks
of other things--of Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred, of the work
at Stornham and the village life, which gives her new emotions
and interest. She also thinks about being nice to people. She
is nicer than any girl I know."

"You feel, however, she has a right to expect it?" still
without more than a casual air of interest.

"Well, what do you feel yourself?" said Lady Mary. "Women who
look like that--even when they are not millionairesses--
usually marry whom they choose. I do not believe
that the two beautiful Miss Gunnings rolled into one would
have made anything as undeniable as she is. One has seen
portraits of them. Look at her as she stands there talking to
Tommy and Lord Dunholm!"

Internally Mount Dunstan was saying: "I am looking at
her, thank you," and setting his teeth a little.

But Lady Mary was launched upon a subject which swept
her along with it, and she--so to speak--ground the thing in.

"Look at the turn of her head! Look at her mouth and chin, and
her eyes with the lashes sweeping over them when she looks down!
You must have noticed the effect when she lifts them suddenly to
look at you. It's so odd and lovely that it--it almost----"

"Almost makes you jump," ended Mount Dunstan drily.

She did not laugh and, in fact, her expression became rather
sympathetically serious.

"Ah," she said, "I believe you feel a sort of rebellion
against the unfairness of the way things are dealt out. It does
seem unfair, of course. It would be perfectly disgraceful--if
she were different. I had moments of almost hating her until
one day not long ago she did something so bewitchingly kind
and understanding of other people's feelings that I gave up. It
was clever, too," with a laugh, "clever and daring. If she
were a young man she would make a dashing soldier."

She did not give him the details of the story, but went on
to say in effect what she had said to Betty herself of the
inevitable incidentalness of her stay in the country. If she had
not evidently come to Stornham this year with a purpose, she
would have spent the season in London and done the usual thing.
Americans were generally presented promptly, if they had any
position--sometimes when they had not. Lady Alanby had
heard that the fact that she was with her sister had awakened
curiosity and people were talking about her.

"Lady Alanby said in that dry way of hers that the arrival
of an unmarried American fortune in England was becoming
rather like the visit of an unmarried royalty. People ask each
other what it means and begin to arrange for it. So far, only
the women have come, but Lady Alanby says that is because the
men have had no time to do anything but stay at home and
make the fortunes. She believes that in another generation
there will be a male leisure class, and then it will swoop down
too, and marry people. She was very sharp and amusing about
it. She said it would help them to rid themselves of a plethora
of wealth and keep them from bursting."

She was an amiable, if unsentimental person, Mary Lithcom
--and was, quite without ill nature, expressing the consensus
of public opinion. These young women came to the country
with something practical to exchange in these days, and as
there were men who had certain equivalents to offer, so also
there were men who had none, and whom decency should cause
to stand aside. Mount Dunstan knew that when she had said,
"Who is there who is suitable?" any shadow of a thought of
himself as being in the running had not crossed her mind.
And this was not only for the reasons she had had the ready
composure to name, but for one less conquerable.

Later, having left Mary Lithcom, he decided to take a turn
by himself. He had done his duty as a masculine guest. He
had conversed with young women and old ones, had danced, visited
gardens and greenhouses, and taken his part in all things.
Also he had, in fact, reached a point when a few minutes of
solitude seemed a good thing. He found himself turning into
the clipped laurel walk, where Tommy Alanby had stood with
Jane Lithcom, and he went to the end of it and stood looking
out on the view.

"Look at the turn of her head," Lady Mary had said.
"Look at her mouth and chin."  And he had been looking at
them the whole afternoon, not because he had intended to do
so, but because it was not possible to prevent himself from
doing it.

This was one of the ironies of fate. Orthodox doctrine might
suggest that it was to teach him that his past rebellion had
been undue. Orthodox doctrine was ever ready with these
soothing little explanations. He had raged and sulked at
Destiny, and now he had been given something to rage for.

"No one knows anything about it until it takes him by
the throat," he was thinking, "and until it happens to a man
he has no right to complain. I was not starving before. I was
not hungering and thirsting--in sight of food and water. I
suppose one of the most awful things in the world is to feel this
and know it is no use."

He was not in the condition to reason calmly enough to see
that there might be one chance in a thousand that it was of
use. At such times the most intelligent of men and women lose
balance and mental perspicacity. A certain degree of unreasoning
madness possesses them. They see too much and too little.
There were, it was true, a thousand chances against him, but
there was one for him--the chance that selection might be on
his side. He had not that balance of thought left which might
have suggested to him that he was a man young and powerful,
and filled with an immense passion which might count for
something. All he saw was that he was notably in the position
of the men whom he had privately disdained when they helped
themselves by marriage. Such marriages he had held were
insults to the manhood of any man and the womanhood of any
woman. In such unions neither party could respect himself or
his companion. They must always in secret doubt each other,
fret at themselves, feel distaste for the whole thing. Even if a
man loved such a woman, and the feeling was mutual, to whom
would it occur to believe it--to see that they were not gross
and contemptible? To no one. Would it have occurred to
himself that such an extenuating circumstance was possible?
Certainly it would not. Pig-headed pride and obstinacy it
might be, but he could not yet face even the mere thought of
it--even if his whole position had not been grotesque. Because,
after all, it was grotesque that he should even argue with
himself. She--before his eyes and the eyes of all others--the
most desirable of women; people dinning it in one's ears that she
was surrounded by besiegers who waited for her to hold out
her sceptre, and he--well, what was he! Not that his mental
attitude was that of a meek and humble lover who felt himself
unworthy and prostrated himself before her shrine with prayers
--he was, on the contrary, a stout and obstinate Briton finding
his stubbornly-held beliefs made as naught by a certain obsession
--an intolerable longing which wakened with him in the morning,
which sank into troubled sleep with him at night--the longing to
see her, to speak to her, to stand near her, to breathe
the air of her. And possessed by this--full of the overpowering
strength of it--was a man likely to go to a woman and say,
"Give your life and desirableness to me; and incidentally support
me, feed me, clothe me, keep the roof over my head, as if
I were an impotent beggar"?

"No, by God!" he said. "If she thinks of me at all it
shall be as a man. No, by God, I will not sink to that!"

. . . . .

A moving touch of colour caught his eye. It was the rose of
a parasol seen above the laurel hedge, as someone turned into
the walk. He knew the colour of it and expected to see other
parasols and hear voices. But there was no sound, and
unaccompanied, the wonderful rose-thing moved towards him.

"The usual things are happening to me," was his thought
as it advanced. "I am hot and cold, and just now my heart
leaped like a rabbit. It would be wise to walk off, but I shall
not do it. I shall stay here, because I am no longer a reasoning
being. I suppose that a horse who refuses to back out of his
stall when his stable is on fire feels something of the same
thing."

When she saw him she made an involuntary-looking pause,
and then recovering herself, came forward.

"I seem to have come in search of you," she said. "You
ought to be showing someone the view really--and so ought I."

"Shall we show it to each other?" was his reply.

"Yes."  And she sat down on the stone seat which had been
placed for the comfort of view lovers. "I am a little tired--
just enough to feel that to slink away for a moment alone
would be agreeable. It IS slinking to leave Rosalie to battle
with half the county. But I shall only stay a few minutes."

She sat still and gazed at the beautiful lands spread before
her, but there was no stillness in her mind, neither was there
stillness in his. He did not look at the view, but at her, and
he was asking himself what he should be saying to her if he
were such a man as Westholt. Though he had boldness enough,
he knew that no man--even though he is free to speak the best
and most passionate thoughts of his soul--could be sure that
he would gain what he desired. The good fortune of Westholt,
or of any other, could but give him one man's fair chance.

But having that chance, he knew he should not relinquish it
soon. There swept back into his mind the story of the marriage
of his ancestor, Red Godwyn, and he laughed low in spite
of himself.

Miss Vanderpoel looked up at him quickly.

"Please tell me about it, if it is very amusing," she said.

"I wonder if it will amuse you," was his answer. "Do you
like savage romance?"

"Very much."

It might seem a propos de rien, but he did not care in the
least. He wanted to hear what she would say.

"An ancestor of mine--a certain Red Godwyn--was a barbarian
immensely to my taste. He became enamoured of rumours of the
beauty of the daughter and heiress of his bitterest
enemy. In his day, when one wanted a thing, one rode forth
with axe and spear to fight for it."

"A simple and alluring method," commented Betty. "What
was her name?"

She leaned in light ease against the stone back of her seat,
the rose light cast by her parasol faintly flushed her. The
silence of their retreat seemed accentuated by its background
of music from the gardens. They smiled a second bravely into
each other's eyes, then their glances became entangled, as they
had done for a moment when they had stood together in Mount
Dunstan park. For one moment each had been held prisoner
then--now it was for longer.

"Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes."

Betty tried to release herself, but could not.

"Sometimes the sea is grey," she said.

His own eyes were still in hers.

"Hers were the colour of the sea on a day when the sun shines on
it, and there are large fleece-white clouds floating in the blue
above. They sparkled and were often like bluebells under water."

"Bluebells under water sounds entrancing," said Betty.

He caught his breath slightly.

"They were--entrancing," he said. "That was evidently
the devil of it--saving your presence."

"I have never objected to the devil," said Betty. "He is
an energetic, hard-working creature and paints himself an
honest black. Please tell me the rest."

"Red Godwyn went forth, and after a bloody fight took his
enemy's castle. If we still lived in like simple, honest times,
I should take Dunholm Castle in the same way. He also took
Alys of the Eyes and bore her away captive."

"From such incidents developed the germs of the desire for
female suffrage," Miss Vanderpoel observed gently.

"The interest of the story lies in the fact that apparently
the savage was either epicure or sentimentalist, or both. He
did not treat the lady ill. He shut her in a tower chamber
overlooking his courtyard, and after allowing her three days to
weep, he began his barbarian wooing. Arraying himself in
splendour he ordered her to appear before him. He sat upon
the dais in his banquet hall, his retainers gathered about him--
a great feast spread. In archaic English we are told that the
board groaned beneath the weight of golden trenchers and
flagons. Minstrels played and sang, while he displayed all
his splendour."

"They do it yet," said Miss Vanderpoel, "in London and
New York and other places."

"The next day, attended by his followers, he took her with
him to ride over his lands. When she returned to her tower
chamber she had learned how powerful and great a chieftain
he was. She `laye softely' and was attended by many maidens,
but she had no entertainment but to look out upon the great
green court. There he arranged games and trials of strength
and skill, and she saw him bigger, stronger, and more splendid
than any other man. He did not even lift his eyes to her
window. He also sent her daily a rich gift."

"How long did this go on?"

"Three months. At the end of that time he commanded
her presence again in his banquet hall. He told her the gates
were opened, the drawbridge down and an escort waiting to take
her back to her father's lands, if she would."

"What did she do?"

"She looked at him long--and long. She turned proudly away--in
the sea-blue eyes were heavy and stormy tears, which seeing----"

"Ah, he saw them?" from Miss Vanderpoel.

"Yes. And seizing her in his arms caught her to his breast,
calling for a priest to make them one within the hour. I am
quoting the chronicle. I was fifteen when I read it first."

"It is spirited," said Betty, "and Red Godwyn was almost
modern in his methods."

While professing composure and lightness of mood, the spell
which works between two creatures of opposite sex when in
such case wrought in them and made them feel awkward and
stiff. When each is held apart from the other by fate, or will,
or circumstance, the spell is a stupefying thing, deadening even
the clearness of sight and wit.

"I must slink back now," Betty said, rising. "Will you
slink back with me to give me countenance? I have greatly
liked Red Godwyn."

So it occurred that when Nigel Anstruthers saw them again
it was as they crossed the lawn together, and people looked up
from ices and cups of tea to follow their slow progress with
questioning or approving eyes.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE TIDAL WAVE

There was only one man to speak to, and it being the nature
of the beast--so he harshly put it to himself--to be absolutely
impelled to speech at such times, Mount Dunstan laid bare his
breast to him, tearing aside all the coverings pride would have
folded about him. The man was, of course, Penzance, and the
laying bare was done the evening after the story of Red Godwyn
had been told in the laurel walk.

They had driven home together in a profound silence, the
elder man as deep in thought as the younger one. Penzance
was thinking that there was a calmness in having reached sixty
and in knowing that the pain and hunger of earlier years would
not tear one again. And yet, he himself was not untorn by
that which shook the man for whom his affection had grown
year by year. It was evidently very bad--very bad, indeed.
He wondered if he would speak of it, and wished he would, not
because he himself had much to say in answer, but because he
knew that speech would be better than hard silence.

"Stay with me to-night," Mount Dunstan said, as they
drove through the avenue to the house. "I want you to dine
with me and sit and talk late. I am not sleeping well."

They often dined together, and the vicar not infrequently
slept at the Mount for mere companionship's sake. Sometimes
they read, sometimes went over accounts, planned economies,
and balanced expenditures. A chamber still called the Chaplain's
room was always kept in readiness. It had been used
in long past days, when a household chaplain had sat below
the salt and left his patron's table before the sweets were
served. They dined together this night almost as silently as
they had driven homeward, and after the meal they went and sat
alone in the library.

The huge room was never more than dimly lighted, and the
far-off corners seemed more darkling than usual in the
insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps. Mount
Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes
smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old Doby's
Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and
began to tramp up and down--out of the dim light into the
shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor light.

"You know," he said, "what I think about most things-- you know
what I feel."

"I think I do."

"You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves
as half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves
and their houses and their blood to foreign women who
can buy them. You know how savage I have been at the mere
thought of it. And how I have sworn----"

"Yes, I know what you have sworn," said Mr. Penzance.

It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his
head rather like a bull about to charge an enemy.

"You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when
I blackguarded such men and sneered at such women--taking it for
granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath
contempt. I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross
words and rough ones to describe them."

"I have heard you."

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh
laugh. He came out of the shadow and stood still.

"Well," he said, "I am in love--as much in love as any
lunatic ever was--with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel.
There you are--and there _I_ am!"

"It has seemed to me," Penzance answered, "that it was
almost inevitable."

"My condition is such that it seems to ME that it would
be inevitable in the case of any man. When I see another man
look at her my blood races through my veins with an awful
fear and a wicked heat. That will show you the point I have
reached."  He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his
pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady. "In
turning over the pages of the volume of Life," he said, "I
have come upon the Book of Revelations."

"That is true," Penzance said.

"Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount
Dunstan went on. "And afterwards one is--for a time at
least--a sort of madman raving to one's self, either in or out of
a straitjacket--as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket
--worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man
who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without
being conscious that he is making mad love to her? This
afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of Red
Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes. I did not make a
single statement having any connection with myself, but
throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me
as of those two. I saw her in my own arms, with the tears
of Alys on her lashes. I was making mad love, though she
was unconscious of my doing it."

"How do you know she was unconscious?" remarked Mr.
Penzance. "You are a very strong man."

Mount Dunstan's short laugh was even a little awful,
because it meant so much. He let his forehead drop a moment
on to his arms as they rested on the mantelpiece.

"Oh, my God!" he said. But the next instant his head lifted
itself. "It is the mystery of the world--this thing. A tidal
wave gathering itself mountain high and crashing down upon one's
helplessness might be as easily defied. It is supposed
to disperse, I believe. That has been said so often that there
must be truth in it. In twenty or thirty or forty years one is
told one will have got over it. But one must live through the
years--one must LIVE through them--and the chief feature of
one's madness is that one is convinced that they will last
forever."

"Go on," said Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and
stood biting his lip. "Say all that you feel inclined to say.
It is the best thing you can do. I have never gone through this
myself, but I have seen and known the amazingness of it for
many years. I have seen it come and go."

"Can you imagine," Mount Dunstan said, "that the most
damnable thought of all--when a man is passing through it--
is the possibility of its GOING? Anything else rather than the
knowledge that years could change or death could end it!
Eternity seems only to offer space for it. One knows--but one
does not believe. It does something to one's brain."

"No scientist, howsoever profound, has ever discovered
what," the vicar mused aloud.

"The Book of Revelations has shown to me how--how
MAGNIFICENT life might be!"  Mount Dunstan clenched and
unclenched his hands, his eyes flashing. "Magnificent--that is
the word. To go to her on equal ground to take her hands
and speak one's passion as one would--as her eyes answered.
Oh, one would know! To bring her home to this place--having
made it as it once was--to live with her here--to be WITH
her as the sun rose and set and the seasons changed--with the
joy of life filling each of them. SHE is the joy of Life--the
very heart of it. You see where I am--you see!"

"Yes," Penzance answered. He saw, and bowed his head,
and Mount Dunstan knew he wished him to continue.

"Sometimes--of late--it has been too much for me and I
have given free rein to my fancy--knowing that there could
never be more than fancy. I was doing it this afternoon as I
watched her move about among the people. And Mary Lithcom
began to talk about her."  He smiled a grim smile.
"Perhaps it was an intervention of the gods to drag me down
from my impious heights. She was quite unconscious that she
was driving home facts like nails--the facts that every man who
wanted money wanted Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--and
that the young lady, not being dull, was not unaware of the
obvious truth! And that men with prizes to offer were ready
to offer them in a proper manner. Also that she was only a
brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be
caught in the dazzling net of the great world. And that even
Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle were not quite what she
might expect. Lady Mary was sincerely interested. She drove
it home in her ardour. She told me to LOOK at her--to LOOK
at her mouth and chin and eyelashes--and to make note of
what she stood for in a crowd of ordinary people. I could
have laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery."

Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow
on his chair's arm.

"This is profound unhappiness," he said. "It is profound
unhappiness."

Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.

"But it will pass away," went on Penzance, "and not as you fear
it must," in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient. "Not
that way. Some day--or night--you will stand heretogether, and
you will tell her all you have told me. I KNOW it will be so."

"What!" Mount Dunstan cried out. But the words had been spoken
with such absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.

It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.

"I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for
which we find no explanation--of the causes of which we only
see the effects. Long ago in looking at you in one of my
pondering moments I said to myself that YOU were of the Primeval
Force which cannot lose its way--which sweeps a clear pathway
for itself as it moves--and which cannot be held back. I said
to you just now that because you are a strong man you cannot
be sure that a woman you are--even in spite of yourself--
making mad love to, is unconscious that you are doing it. You
do not know what your strength lies in. I do not, the woman
does not, but we must all feel it, whether we comprehend it or
no. You said of this fine creature, some time since, that she
was Life, and you have just said again something of the same
kind. It is quite true. She is Life, and the joy of it. You are
two strong forces, and you are drawing together."

He rose from his chair, and going to Mount Dunstan put hishand on
his shoulder, his fine old face singularly rapt and glowing.

"She is drawing you and you are drawing her, and each is too
strong to release the other. I believe that to be true.
Both bodies and souls do it. They are not separate things. They
move on their way as the stars do--they move on their way."

As he spoke, Mount Dunstan's eyes looked into his fixedly.
Then they turned aside and looked down upon the mantel
against which he was leaning. He aimlessly picked up his pipe
and laid it down again. He was paler than before, but he
said no single word.

"You think your reasons for holding aloof from her are the
reasons of a man."  Mr. Penzance's voice sounded to him
remote. "They are the reasons of a man's pride--but that is not
the strongest thing in the world. It only imagines it is. You
think that you cannot go to her as a luckier man could. You
think nothing shall force you to speak. Ask yourself why. It
is because you believe that to show your heart would be to
place yourself in the humiliating position of a man who might
seem to her and to the world to be a base fellow."

"An impudent, pushing, base fellow," thrust in Mount Dunstan
fiercely. "One of a vulgar lot. A thing fancying even
its beggary worth buying. What has a man--whose very name
is hung with tattered ugliness--to offer?"

Penzance's hand was still on his shoulder and his look at
him was long.

"His very pride," he said at last, "his very obstinacy and
haughty, stubborn determination. Those broken because the
other feeling is the stronger and overcomes him utterly."

A flush leaped to Mount Dunstan's forehead. He set both
elbows on the mantel and let his forehead fall on his clenched
fists. And the savage Briton rose in him.

"No!" he said passionately. "By God, no!"

"You say that," said the older man, "because you have not
yet reached the end of your tether. Unhappy as you are, you
are not unhappy enough. Of the two, you love yourself the
more--your pride and your stubbornness."

"Yes," between his teeth. "I suppose I retain yet a sort of
respect--and affection--for my pride. May God leave it to me!"

Penzance felt himself curiously exalted; he knew himself
unreasoningly passing through an oddly unpractical, uplifted
moment, in whose impelling he singularly believed.

"You are drawing her and she is drawing you," he said.
"Perhaps you drew each other across seas. You will stand
here together and you will tell her of this--on this very spot."

Mount Dunstan changed his position and laughed roughly, as
if to rouse himself. He threw out his arm in a big, uneasy
gesture, taking in the room.

"Oh, come," he said. "You talk like a seer. Look about
you. Look! I am to bring her here!"

"If it is the primeval thing she will not care. Why should she?"

"She! Bring a life like hers to this! Or perhaps you mean
that her own wealth might make her surroundings becoming--
that a man would endure that?"

"If it is the primeval thing, YOU would not care. You would
have forgotten that you two had ever lived an hour apart."

He spoke with a deep, moved gravity--almost as if he were
speaking of the first Titan building of the earth. Mount Dunstan
staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to laugh
again--and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent.
It was a singular hypnotic moment, indeed. He himself was
hypnotised. A flashlight of new vision blazed before him and
left him dumb. He took up his pipe hurriedly, and with still
unsteady fingers began to refill it. When it was filled he
lighted it, and then without a word of answer left the hearth
and began to tramp up and down the room again--out of the
dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows and into
the dim light again, his brow working and his teeth holding
hard his amber mouthpiece.

The morning awakening of a normal healthy human creature
should be a joyous thing. After the soul's long hours of
release from the burden of the body, its long hours spent--
one can only say in awe at the mystery of it, "away, away"--
in flight, perhaps, on broad, tireless wings, beating softly in
fair, far skies, breathing pure life, to be brought back to renew
the strength of each dawning day; after these hours of quiescence
of limb and nerve and brain, the morning life returning
should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace at least. In
time to come this will be so, when the soul's wings are
stronger, the body more attuned to infinite law and the race a
greater power--but as yet it often seems as though the winged
thing came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate
and the chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than
not. Youth should not know such awakening, he was well
aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been
a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in
America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become
a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend--
the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to
hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light
that he had awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning
sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body,
as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night's rest, and
feeling that there was work to be done. It was all unreasoning--
there was no more to be done than on those other days
which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed
useless and empty of any worth--but this morning the mere
light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in
the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere
fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that
he could tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed
though they might be, and that the very rustics who would pass
him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people: that he had
name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning
food--it was all of use.

An alluring picture--of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in
the park rose before him. It had not called to him for many
a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags
and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding
across the grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head
thrown back as he drank in the freshness of the morning-
scented air. It was scented with dew and grass and the
breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and
thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on morning
joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-grassed hummocks
of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled back into their
holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he laughed
with friendly amusement. Cropping stags lifted their antlered
heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes
gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer
to their mothers. A skylark springing suddenly from the
grass a few yards from his feet made him stop short once and
stand looking upward and listening. Who could pass by a
skylark at five o'clock on a summer's morning--the little,
heavenly light-heart circling and wheeling, showering down
diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny pulsating,
trilling throat?

"Do you know why they sing like that? It is because all
but the joy of things has been kept hidden from them. They
knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the gold of
the sun. So they sing."  That she had once said.

He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into
his soul. Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had
never smiled in his life before. He knew it because he realised
that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality
of spirit, the same sense of being as other men. It was as
though something had swept a great clear space about him, and
having room for air he breathed deep and was glad of the
commonest gifts of being.

The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his
uncared-for boyhood. No one knew which long passed away
Mount Dunstan had made it. The oldest villager had told him
that it had "allus ben there," even in his father's time. Since
he himself had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.

Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the
water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and
trees. The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a
few flag-steps led down to the water. Birds came there to drink
and bathe and preen and dress their feathers. He knew there were
often nests in the bushes--sometimes the nests of nightingales
who filled the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with
the wonderfulness of nesting song. Sometimes a straying fawn
poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away,
as if it knew itself a trespasser.

To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water
was a rapturous thing. He swam swiftly and slowly by turns,
he floated, looking upward at heaven's blue, listening to birds'
song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day. Strength
grew in him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs. He
found himself thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended
to take to see a farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens;
he found himself thinking with pleasure of other things as simple
and common to everyday life--such things as he ordinarily
faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an
experienced bailiff. He was his own bailiff, his own steward,
merely, he had often thought, an unsuccessful farmer of half-
starved lands. But this morning neither he nor they seemed
so starved, and--for no reason--there was a future of some sort.

He emerged from his pool glowing, the turf feeling like
velvet beneath his feet, a fine light in his eyes.

"Yes," he said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of
physical well-being, "it might be a magnificent thing--mere
strong living. THIS is magnificent."

CHAPTER XXXVI

BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE

His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good
things. It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the
approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop
pickers from London. Yesterday the subject had appeared
discouraging enough. The great hop gardens of the estate had
been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural
revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county.
The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them
their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands
of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered. It had
been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and
irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason,
the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view.
Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the
application of all available resource to one end produce
appreciable results? The idea presented itself in the form of a
thing worth thinking of.

"It would provide an outlook and give one work to do," he
put it to his companion. "To have a roof over one's head, a
sound body, and work to do, is not so bad. Such things form
the whole of G. Selden's cheerful aim. His spirit is alight
within me. I will walk over and talk to Bolter."

Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost
too much for him. Holdings whose owners, either through neglect
or lack of money, have failed to do their duty as landlords in
the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and
other things, gradually fall into poor hands. Resourceful
and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under
unprosperous landlords. There were farms lying vacant on the
Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were
uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small
ways. Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been
given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose
decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord,
were dishonesties. But Mount Dunstan knew that if he
turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly
frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield
Rise would stand empty for many a year. But for his poverty
Bolter would have been a good tenant enough. He was in trouble
now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties
in the matter of "pickers."  Last year he had not been able to
pay satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the
prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.

The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after
year to the hop-growing districts know each other. They learn
also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and which
the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory
as masters, and those who are undesirable. They know by
experience or report where the best "huts" are provided, where
tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one can.

Generally the regular flocks are under a "captain," who gathers
his followers each season, manages them and looks after their
interests and their employers'. In some cases the same captain
brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and
ends by counting himself as of the soil and almost of the
family of his employer. Each hard, thick-fogged winter they
fight through in their East End courts and streets, they look
forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow
green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang
thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop clusters. Children
play " 'oppin" in dingy rooms and alleys, and talk to each
other of days when the sun shone hot and birds were singing
and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when
the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and
yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer
in the fire of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who
hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea. They never forgot
the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on
the road, the parson who came to talk, and the occasional
groups of ladies from the "great house" who came into the
gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer
questions in their gentry-sounding voices. They never knew
anything, and they always seemed to be entertained. Sometimes
there were enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be
shown how to strip the hops into the bins, and after being
shown played at the work for a little while, taking off their
gloves and showing white fingers with rings on. They always
looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their
clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near
them it was observable that they smelt nice. Generally they
gave pennies to the children before they left the garden, and
sometimes shillings to the women. The hop picking was, in
fact, a wonderful blend of work and holiday combined.

Mount Dunstan had liked the "hopping" from his first
memories of it. He could recall his sensations of welcoming a
renewal of interesting things when, season after season, he had
begun to mark the early stragglers on the road. The stragglers
were not of the class gathered under captains. They
were derelicts--tramps who spent their summers on the highways
and their winters in such workhouses as would take
them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because
sometimes they owned a rickety cart full of strange
household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators piled
with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust
or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside
fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered
kettle, when resting time had come and food must be cooked.
Gipsies there were who had cooking fires also, and hobbled
horses cropping the grass. Now and then appeared a grand
one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and
who came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During
the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures
tramping along the high road at intervals. These were men who
were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were
young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten,
or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery
slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking
lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment.
Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the
ground when pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners
of the regular army.

On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount
Dunstan passed two or three of these strays. They were the
usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop
garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it
attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of
exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of
the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an
evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to look
forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits. A slouching father of
five children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a
dirty shawl at its mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern
mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles
and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking
things and keeping an eye at the same time on the two
youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady
on their feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching
father to build the wayside fire. The mother sat upon the
grass nursing her baby and staring about her with an expression
at once stupefied and illuminated by some temporary bliss.
Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had
befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with
squeals of good cheer. This was not the humour in which such
a group usually dropped wearily on the grass at the wayside
to eat its meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging
limbs. As he drew near, Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman's
side there stood a basket full of food and a can full of milk.

Ordinarily he would have passed on, but, perhaps because of
the human glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke.

"Have you come for the hopping?" he asked.

The man touched his forehead, apparently not conscious that
the grin was yet on his face.

"Yes, sir," he answered.

"How far have you walked?"

"A good fifty miles since we started, sir. It took us a good
bit. We was pretty done up when we stopped here. But
we've 'ad a wonderful piece of good luck."  And his grin
broadened immensely.

"I am glad to hear that," said Mount Dunstan. The good
luck was plainly of a nature to have excited them greatly.
Chance good luck did not happen to people like themselves.
They were in the state of mind which in their class can only
be relieved by talk. The woman broke in, her weak mouth
and chin quite unsteady.

"Seems like it can't be true, sir," she said. "I'd only just
come out of the Union--after this one," signifying the new
baby at her breast. "I wasn't fit to drag along day after
day. We 'ad to stop 'ere 'cos I was near fainting away."

"She looked fair white when she sat down," put in the man.
"Like she was goin' off."

"And that very minute," said the woman, "a young lady
came by on 'orseback, an' the minute she sees me she stops her
'orse an' gets down."

"I never seen nothing like the quick way she done it," said
the husband. "Sharp, like she was a soldier under order.
Down an' give the bridle to the groom an' comes over"

"And kneels down," the woman took him up, "right by me an' says,
`What's the matter? What can I do?' an' finds out in two minutes
an' sends to the farm for some brandy an' all this basketful of
stuff," jerking her head towards the treasure at her side. "An'
gives 'IM," with another jerk towards her mate, "money enough to
'elp us along till I'm fair on my feet. That quick it was--that
quick," passing her hand over her forehead, "as if it wasn't for
the basket," with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle, "I wouldn't
believe but what it was a dream--I wouldn't."

"She was a very kind young lady," said Mount Dunstan,
"and you were in luck."

He gave a few coppers to the children and strode on his way. The
glow was hot in his heart, and he held his head high.

"She has gone by," he said. "She has gone by."

He knew he should find her at West Ways Farm, and he
did so. Slim and straight as a young birch tree, and elate with
her ride in the morning air, she stood silhouetted in her black
habit against the ancient whitewashed brick porch as she talked
to Bolter.

"I have been drinking a glass of milk and asking questions
about hops," she said, giving him her hand bare of glove.
"Until this year I have never seen a hop garden or a hop picker."

After the exchange of a few words Bolter respectfully melted
away and left them together.

"It was such a wonderful day that I wanted to be out
under the sky for a long time--to ride a long way," she
explained. "I have been looking at hop gardens as I rode. I
have watched them all the summer--from the time when there
was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves
looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely
tall hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it--
as if it was saying over and over again, under its breath, `Can
I get up there? Can I get up? Can I do it in time? Can
I do it in time?'  Yes, that was what they were saying, the
little bold things. I have watched them ever since, putting out
tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and climbing
like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding leaves
and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they
were beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue
of the sky if the summer were long enough. And now, look
at them!" her hand waved towards the great gardens. "Forests
of them, cool green pathways and avenues with leaf canopies
over them."

"You have seen it all," he said. "You do see things, don't
you? A few hundred yards down the road I passed something
you had seen. I knew it was you who had seen it, though the
poor wretches had not heard your name."

She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in
her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the pathway. There was
storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to
look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.

"See," she said, "see, it is like that--what we give. It is
like that."  And she tossed the earth away.

"It does not seem like that to those others."

"No, thank God, it does not. But to one's self it is the mere
luxury of self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes
tempts one to be even a trifle morbid. Don't you see," a
sudden thrill in her voice startled him, "they are on the
roadside everywhere all over the world."

"Yes. All over the world."

"Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article
about the suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were
obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry. It almost
drove me out of my childish senses. I went to my father and
threw myself into his arms in a violent fit of crying. I clung
to him and sobbed out, `Let us give it all away; let us give
it all away and be like other people!' "

"What did he say?"

"He said we could never be quite like other people. We
had a certain load to carry along the highway. It was the
thing the whole world wanted and which we ourselves wanted
as much as the rest, and we could not sanely throw it away. It
was my first lesson in political economy and I abhorred it. I
was a passionate child and beat furiously against the stone walls
enclosing present suffering. It was horrible to know that they
could not be torn down. I cried out, `When I see anyone who
is miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything
he wants--everything!'  I was ten years old, and thought
it could be done."

"But you stop by the roadside even now."

"Yes. That one can do."

"You are two strong creatures and you draw each other,"
Penzance had said. "Perhaps you drew each other across seas.
Who knows?"

Coming to West Ways on a chance errand he had, as it
were, found her awaiting him on the threshold. On her part
she had certainly not anticipated seeing him there, but--when
one rides far afield in the sun there are roads towards which
one turns as if answering a summoning call, and as her horse
had obeyed a certain touch of the rein at a certain point her
cheek had felt momentarily hot.

Until later, when the "picking" had fairly begun, the kilns
would not be at work; but there was some interest even now
in going over the ground for the first time.

"I have never been inside an oast house," she said; "Bolter
is going to show me his, and explain technicalities."

"May I come with you?" he asked.

There was a change in him. Something had lighted in his
eyes since the day before, when he had told her his story of
Red Godwyn. She wondered what it was. They went together
over the place, escorted by Bolter. They looked into
the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be
laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper
room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light
piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long "pokes"
to be pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass. Bolter
was allowed to explain the technicalities, but it was plain that
Mount Dunstan was familiar with all of them, and it was he
who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour of
things.

"When it is being done there is nearly always outside a
touch of the sharp sweetness of early autumn," he said "The
sun slanting through the little window falls on the pale yellow
heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is
rather intoxicating."

"I am coming later to see the entire process," she answered.

It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and
exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so
strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem
wholly impersonal. There are times when the whole world is
personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all
things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound
of a voice makes an unreasonable joy

"There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the
air yesterday morning," she said. "And the chaplets of briony
berries that look as if they had been thrown over the hedges
are beginning to change to scarlet here and there. The wild
rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on
the thorn trees and bushes."

"There are millions of them," Mount Dunstan said, "and
in a few weeks' time they will look like bunches of crimson
coral. When the sun shines on them they will be wonderful
to see."

What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two
nearer and nearer to each other as they walked side by side--
to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem to
cause the world to drop away and become as nothing? As
they had been isolated during their waltz in the crowded
ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now. When
they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking
simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and
measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing
within a hundred miles--within a thousand. For the first
time his height and strength conveyed to her an impression of
physical beauty. His walk and bearing gave her pleasure.
When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she
was conscious that she liked their colour, their shape, the power
of the look in them. On his part, he--for the twentieth time--
found himself newly moved by the dower nature had bestowed
on her. Had the world ever held before a woman creature so
much to be longed for?--abnormal wealth, New York and Fifth
Avenue notwithstanding, a man could only think of folding
arms round her and whispering in her lovely ear--follies, oaths,
prayers, gratitude.

And yet as they went about together there was growing in
Betty Vanderpoel's mind a certain realisation. It grew in
spite of the recognition of the change in him--the new thing
lighted in his eyes. Whatsoever he felt--if he felt anything--
he would never allow himself speech. How could he? In
his place she could not speak herself. Because he was the
strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to
any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the
nature of things, she must take up. And suddenly she
comprehended that the mere obstinate Briton in him--even apart
from greater things--had an immense attraction for her. As
she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty
in his rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and
the pride which would not be beaten.

"It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their
battles and makes them bear any horror rather than give in.
They have taken half the world with it; they are like bulldogs
and lions," she thought. "And--and I am glorying in it."

"Do you know," said Mount Dunstan, "that sometimes you
suddenly fling out the most magnificent flag of colour--as if
some splendid flame of thought had sent up a blaze?"

"I hope it is not a habit," she answered. "When one has a
splendid flare of thought one should be modest about it."

What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent
together? Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a
mere passing by. But each left something with the other and each
learned something; and the record made was deep.

At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the
white gate.

"This morning has been so much to the good," he said. "I
had thought that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this
year. I shall become absorbed in hops and you will no doubt
go away. You will make visits or go to the Riviera--or to
New York for the winter?"

"I do not know yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the
thorn trees load themselves with coral."  To herself she was
saying: "He means to keep away. I shall not see him."

As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments,
not moving from his place. At a short distance from the
farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as
she cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it--
a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well a
spirited animal. He came out upon the road almost face to
face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount
Dunstan could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in
salute. It was Lord Westholt, and what more natural than
that after an exchange of greetings the two should ride
together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward
road would be the same.

But in a breath's space Mount Dunstan realised a certain
truth--a simple, elemental thing. All the exaltation of the
morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall
through space. It was all over and done with, and he understood
it. His normal awakening in the morning, the physical
and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his
foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning.
In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had
formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had
been. Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and
believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in
tune to it. That was the explanation of his undue spirits and
hope. If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a
natural, sane right to feel all this and more. But the truth
was that he, in his guise--was one of those who are "on the
roadside everywhere--all over the world."  Poetically figurative
as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.

So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in
cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went
back to talk to Bolter.

CHAPTER XXXVII

CLOSED CORRIDORS

To spend one's days perforce in an enormous house alone is a
thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man's mind and lead
it to gloomy workings. To know the existence of a hundred
or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms;
to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of
untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the
pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing
things which human eyes behold not--is an eerie and unwholesome
thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in
a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a
score of times without being able to communicate with the
remote servants' quarters below stairs, where lay the one man
and one woman who attended him. When he came late to his
room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering
candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it
was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence
of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a
presence. He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact
that at certain times the fantasy was half believable--that there
were things which walked about softly at night--things which
did not want to be dead. He himself had picked them out
from among the pictures in the gallery--pretty, light, petulant
women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men. His theory
was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way
back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and
to be seen of warm things which were alive. But it was not
to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when
they beat upon closed doors they would not open. Still they
came back--came back. And sometimes there was a rustle and
a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of
waiting which was almost a sound.

"Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been
as I am," he had said one black night, when he had sat in
his room staring at the floor. "If a man was dragged out when
he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come
back if--God! A man COULD not be dragged away--like THIS!"

And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely
thing--a lonely thing.

But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months
his had strangely intensified itself. This, though he was not
aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the
completing parts of him were within reach--and without it.
When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table,
round which twenty people might have laughed and talked.
Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days
when he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford
servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed. It was a
ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes,
a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments. He was
the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened
again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might
by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments
of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a
support put there, seemed decent things to do.

"Whom am I doing it for?" he said to Mr. Penzance. "I
am doing it for myself--because I cannot help it. The place
seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of
his days It has stood the war of things for century after
century--the war of things. It is going now I am all that is
left to it. It is all I have. So I patch it up when I can
afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage."

Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel
rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy
and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against
a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It was the kind of cloud
which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or
even casually consider them. So Lady Anstruthers felt some
surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the
stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of
the coming storm.

"Nigel will be caught in the rain," she said to her sister.
"I wonder why he goes out now. It would be better to wait
until to-morrow."

But Sir Nigel did not think so. He had calculated matters
with some nicety. He was not exactly on such terms with
Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely
natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual
call and in an unpremeditated manner. He meant to reach
the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which
circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being
unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.

Mount Dunstan was in the library. He had sat smoking
his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll up and spread
itself, blotting out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when
the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on
with pleasure as the rush of big rain drops came down and
pelted things. It was a fine storm, and there were some imposing
claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning. As one
splendid rattle shook the air he was surprised to hear a
summons at the great hall door. Who on earth could be turning
up at this time? His man Reeve announced the arrival a few
moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers. He had, he
explained, been riding through the village when the deluge
descended, and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park
gates and ask a temporary shelter. Mount Dunstan received
him with sufficient courtesy. His appearance was not a thing
to rejoice over, but it could be endured. Whisky and soda and
a smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so
long.

Conversation was not the easiest thing in the world under
the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the way steadily after
he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities offered.
What a place it was--this! He had been struck for the hundredth
time with the impressiveness of the mass of it, the sweep
of the park and the splendid grouping of the timber, as he had
ridden up the avenue. There was no other place like it in the
county. Was there another like it in England?

"Not in its case, I hope," Mount Dunstan said.

There were a few seconds of silence. The rain poured down
in splashing sheets and was swept in rattling gusts against the
window panes.

"What the place needs is--an heiress," Anstruthers observed
in the tone of a practical man. "I believe I have heard that
your views of things are such that she should preferably NOT
be an American."

Mount Dunstan did not smile, though he slightly showed his
teeth.

"When I am driven to the wall," he answered, "I may not
be fastidious as to nationality."

Nigel Anstruthers' manner was not a bad one. He chose
that tone of casual openness which, while it does not wholly
commit itself, may be regarded as suggestive of the amiable half
confidence of speeches made as "man to man."

"My own opportunity of studying the genus American heiress
within my own gates is a first-class one. I find that it knows
what it wants and that its intention is to get it."  A short
laugh broke from him as he flicked the ash from his cigar on
to the small bronze receptacle at his elbow. "It is not many
years since it would have been difficult for a girl to be frank
enough to say, `When I marry I shall ask something in exchange
for what I have to give.' "

"There are not many who have as much to give," said
Mount Dunstan coolly.

"True," with a slight shrug. "You are thinking that men
are glad enough to take a girl like that--even one who has not
a shape like Diana's and eyes like the sea. Yes, by George,"
softly, and narrowing his lids, "she IS a handsome creature."

Mount Dunstan did not attempt to refute the statement, and
Anstruthers laughed low again.

"It is an asset she knows the value of quite clearly. That
is the interesting part of it. She has inherited the far-seeing
commercial mind. She does not object to admitting it. She
educated herself in delightful cold blood that she might be
prepared for the largest prize appearing upon the horizon. She
held things in view when she was a child at school, and obviously
attacked her French, German, and Italian conjugations
with a twelve-year-old eye on the future."

Mount Dunstan leaning back carelessly in his chair, laughed--
as it seemed--with him. Internally he was saying that the man
was a liar who might always be trusted to lie, but he knew with
shamed fury that the lies were doing something to his
soul--rolling dark vapours over it--stinging him, dragging away
props, and making him feel they had been foolish things to lean
on. This can always be done with a man in love who has slight
foundation for hope. For some mysterious and occult reason
civilisation has elected to treat the strange and great passion
as if it were an unholy and indecent thing, whose dominion over
him proper social training prevents any man from admitting
openly. In passing through its cruelest phases he must bear
himself as if he were immune, and this being the custom, he may
be called upon to endure much without the relief of striking out
with manly blows. An enemy guessing his case and possessing the
infernal gift whose joy is to dishearten and do hurt with
courteous despitefulness, may plant a poisoned arrow here and
there with neatness and fine touch, while his bound victim can,
with decency, neither start, nor utter brave howls, nor guard
himself, but must sit still and listen, hospitably supplying
smoke and drink and being careful not to make an ass of himself.

Therefore Mount Dunstan pushed the cigars nearer to his
visitor and waved his hand hospitably towards the whisky and
soda. There was no reason, in fact, why Anstruthers--or any
one indeed, but Penzance, should suspect that he had become
somewhat mad in secret. The man's talk was marked merely
by the lightly disparaging malice which was rarely to be missed
from any speech of his which touched on others. Yet it might
have been a thing arranged beforehand, to suggest adroitly
either lies or truth which would make a man see every
sickeningly good reason for feeling that in this contest he did
not count for a man at all.

"It has all been pretty obvious," said Sir Nigel. "There
is a sort of cynicism in the openness of the siege. My
impression is that almost every youngster who has met her has
taken a shot. Tommy Alanby scrambling up from his knees in one
of the rose-gardens was a satisfying sight. His much-talked-of-
passion for Jane Lithcom was temporarily in abeyance."

The rain swirled in a torrent against the window, and
casually glancing outside at the tossing gardens he went on.

"She is enjoying herself. Why not? She has the spirit of
the huntress. I don't think she talks nonsense about friendship
to the captives of her bow and spear. She knows she can
always get what she wants. A girl like that MUST have an
arrogance of mind. And she is not a young saint. She is one
of the women born with THE LOOK in her eyes. I own I should
not like to be in the place of any primeval poor brute who
really went mad over her--and counted her millions as so much
dirt."

Mount Dunstan answered with a shrug of his big shoulders:

"Apparently he would seem as remote from the reason of
to-day as the men who lived on the land when Hengist and
Horsa came--or when Caesar landed at Deal."

"He would seem as remote to her," with a shrug also.
"I should not like to contend that his point of view would not
interest her or that she would particularly discourage him. Her
eyes would call him--without malice or intention, no doubt, but
your early Briton ceorl or earl would be as well understood
by her. Your New York beauty who has lived in the market
place knows principally the prices of things."

He was not ill pleased with himself. He was putting it
well and getting rather even with her. If this fellow with his
shut mouth had a sore spot hidden anywhere he was giving him
"to think."  And he would find himself thinking, while,
whatsoever he thought, he would be obliged to continue to keep
his ugly mouth shut. The great idea was to say things WITHOUT
saying them, to set your hearer's mind to saying them for you.

"What strikes one most is a sort of commercial brilliance
in her," taking up his thread again after a smilingly reflective
pause. "It quite exhilarates one by its novelty. There's spice
in it. We English have not a look-in when we are dealing
with Americans, and yet France calls us a nation of shop-
keepers. My impression is that their women take little
inventories of every house they enter, of every man they meet. I
heard her once speaking to my wife about this place, as if she
had lived in it. She spoke of the closed windows and the state
of the gardens--of broken fountains and fallen arches. She
evidently deplored the deterioration of things which represented
capital. She has inventoried Dunholm, no doubt. That will
give Westholt a chance. But she will do nothing until after
her next year's season in London--that I'd swear. I look forward
to next year. It will be worth watching. She has been
training my wife. A sister who has married an Englishman
and has at least spent some years of her life in England has a
certain established air. When she is presented one knows she
will be a sensation. After that----" he hesitated a moment,
smiling not too pleasantly.

"After that," said Mount Dunstan, "the Deluge."

"Exactly. The Deluge which usually sweeps girls off their
feet--but it will not sweep her off hers. She will stand quite
firm in the flood and lose sight of nothing of importance which
floats past."

Mount Dunstan took him up. He was sick of hearing the
fellow's voice.

"There will be a good many things," he said; "there will be
great personages and small ones, pomps and vanities, glittering
things and heavy ones."

"When she sees what she wants," said Anstruthers, "she
will hold out her hand, knowing it will come to her. The
things which drown will not disturb her. I once made the
blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against
the importunate--as if she had been an English girl. It was
an idiotic thing to do."

"Because?" Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his
head. Anstruthers had maddeningly paused.

"She answered that if it became necessary she might
perhaps be able to protect herself. She was as cool and frank as
a boy. No air pince about it--merely consciousness of being
able to put things in their right places. Made a mere male
relative feel like a fool."

"When ARE things in their right places?"  To his credit be
it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere
putting together of idle words. What man likes to be reminded
of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place.
There is always another place which seems more desirable.

"She knows--if we others do not. I suppose my right place
is at Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a
fair American should. I suppose yours is here--shut up among
your closed corridors and locked doors. There must be a lot
of them in a house like this. Don't you sometimes feel it too
large for you?"

"Always," answered Mount Dunstan.

The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side
glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under
rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been
rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough.
There was no denying that his plaything had not openly
flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers
wondered how far a man might go. He tried again.

"She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for
its condition. That is practical American. Things which are
going to pieces because money is not spent upon them--mere
money, of which all the people who count for anything have
so much--are inevitably rather disdained. They are `out of
it.'  But she likes the estate."  As he watched Mount Dunstan
he felt sure he had got it at last--the right thing. "If
you were a duke with fifty thousand a year," with a distinctly
nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, "she would--by the
Lord, I believe, she would take it over--and you with it."

Mount Dunstan got up. In his rough walking tweeds he
looked over-big--and heavy--and perilous. For two seconds
Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had
without warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or
whirled him out of his chair and kicked him. He would not
have liked it, but--for two seconds--it would have been no
surprise. In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm
muscles. But nothing of the sort occurred. During the two
seconds--perhaps three--Mount Dunstan stood still and looked
down at him. The brief space at an end, he walked over to the
hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.

"You don't like her," he said, and his manner was that of a man
dealing with a matter of fact. "Why do you talk about her?"

He had got away again--quite away.

An ugly flush shot over Anstruthers' face. There was one
more thing to say--whether it was idiotic to say it or not.
Things can always be denied afterwards, should denial appear
necessary--and for the moment his special devil possessed him.

"I do not like her!"  And his mouth twisted. "Do I not?
I am not an old woman. I am a man--like others. I chance to
like her--too much."

There was a short silence. Mount Dunstan broke it.

"Then," he remarked, "you had better emigrate to some
country with a climate which suits you. I should say that
England--for the present--does not."

"I shall stay where I am," answered Anstruthers, with a
slight hoarseness of voice, which made it necessary for him
to clear his throat. "I shall stay where she is. I will have
that satisfaction, at least. She does not mind. I am only a
racketty, middle-aged brother-in-law, and she can take care
of herself. As I told you, she has the spirit of the huntress."

"Look here," said Mount Dunstan, quite without haste,
and with an iron civility. "I am going to take the liberty
of suggesting something. If this thing is true, it would be as
well not to talk about it."

"As well for me--or for her?" and there was a serene
significance in the query.

Mount Dunstan thought a few seconds.

"I confess," he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow
between the eyes well and with directness. "I confess that
it would not have occurred to me to ask you to do anything
or refrain from doing it for her sake."

"Thank you. Perhaps you are right. One learns that one
must protect one's self. I shall not talk--neither will you. I
know that. I was a fool to let it out. The storm is over.
I must ride home."  He rose from his seat and stood smiling.
"It would smash up things nicely if the new beauty's appearance
in the great world were preceded by chatter of the unseemly
affection of some adorer of ill repute. Unfairly enough
it is always the woman who is hurt."

"Unless," said Mount Dunstan civilly, "there should arise
the poor, primeval brute, in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the
man to blame, and break every bone and sinew in his damned body."

"The newspapers would enjoy that more than she would,"
answered Sir Nigel. "She does not like the newspapers.
They are too ready to disparage the multi-millionaire, and
cackle about members of his family."

The unhidden hatred which still professed to hide itself in
the depths of their pupils, as they regarded each other, had its
birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of the earth,
or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the
blazing sun. It was well that at this moment they should
part ways.

Sir Nigel's horse being brought, he went on the way which
was his.

"It was a mistake to say what I did," he said before going.
"I ought to have held my tongue. But I am under the same
roof with her. At any rate, that is a privilege no other man
shares with me."

He rode off smartly, his horse's hoofs splashing in the rain
pools left in the avenue after the storm. He was not so sure
after all that he had made a mistake, and for the moment
he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not.
His agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate,
proud brute he had left behind, sitting alone among his
shut doors and closed corridors. They had not shaken hands
either at meeting or parting. Queer thing it was--the kind
of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset
by a woman. It was amusing enough that it should be
she who was upsetting him after all these years--impudent little
Betty, with the ferocious manner.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

AT SHANDY'S

On a late-summer evening in New York the atmosphere
surrounding a certain corner table at Shandy's cheap restaurant
in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of excitement.

The corner table in question was the favourite meeting place
of a group of young men of the G. Selden type, who usually
took possession of it at dinner time--having decided that
Shandy's supplied more decent food for fifty cents, or even for
twenty-five, than was to be found at other places of its order.
Shandy's was "about all right," they said to each other, and
patronised it accordingly, three or four of them generally dining
together, with a friendly and adroit manipulation of "portions"
and "half portions" which enabled them to add variety
to their bill of fare.

The street outside was lighted, the tide of passers-by was
less full and more leisurely in its movements than it was
during the seething, working hours of daylight, but the electric
cars swung past each other with whiz and clang of bell almost
unceasingly, their sound being swelled, at short intervals,
by the roar and rumbling rattle of the trains dashing by on
the elevated railroad. This, however, to the frequenters of
Shandy's, was the usual accompaniment of every-day New
York life and was regarded as a rather cheerful sort of thing.

This evening the four claimants of the favourite corner
table had met together earlier than usual. Jem Belter, who
"hammered" a typewriter at Schwab's Brewery, Tom Wetherbee,
who was "in a downtown office," Bert Johnson, who
was "out for the Delkoff," and Nick Baumgarten, who having
for some time "beaten" certain streets as assistant salesman
for the same illustrious machine, had been recently elevated to
a "territory" of his own, and was therefore in high spirits.

"Say!" he said. "Let's give him a fine dinner. We can
make it between us. Beefsteak and mushrooms, and potatoes
hashed brown. He likes them. Good old G. S. I shall be
right glad to see him. Hope foreign travel has not given him
the swell head."

"Don't believe it's hurt him a bit. His letter didn't sound
like it. Little Georgie ain't a fool," said Jem Belter.

Tom Wetherbee was looking over the letter referred to.
It had been written to the four conjointly, towards the
termination of Selden's visit to Mr. Penzance. The young man
was not an ardent or fluent correspondent; but Tom Wetherbee
was chuckling as he read the epistle.

"Say, boys," he said, "this big thing he's keeping back
to tell us when he sees us is all right, but what takes me is
old George paying a visit to a parson. He ain't no Young
Men's Christian Association."

Bert Johnson leaned forward, and looked at the address
on the letter paper.

"Mount Dunstan Vicarage," he read aloud. "That looks
pretty swell, doesn't it?" with a laugh. "Say, fellows, you
know Jepson at the office, the chap that prides himself on
reading such a lot? He said it reminded him of the names
of places in English novels. That Johnny's the biggest snob
you ever set your tooth into. When I told him about the
lord fellow that owns the castle, and that George seemed to
have seen him, he nearly fell over himself. Never had any use
for George before, but just you watch him make up to him
when he sees him next."

People were dropping in and taking seats at the tables.
They were all of one class. Young men who lived in hall
bedrooms. Young women who worked in shops or offices, a
couple here and there, who, living far uptown, had come to
Shandy's to dinner, that they might go to cheap seats in some
theatre afterwards. In the latter case, the girls wore their
best hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their
sense of festivity. Two or three were very pretty in their
thin summer dresses and flowered or feathered head gear,
tilted at picturesque angles over their thick hair. When each
one entered the eyes of the young men at the corner table
followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances at
her escort were always of a disparaging nature.

"There's a beaut!" said Nick Baumgarten. "Get onto
that pink stuff on her hat, will you. She done it because it's
just the colour of her cheeks."

They all looked, and the girl was aware of it, and began to
laugh and talk coquettishly to the young man who was her
companion.

"I wonder where she got Clarence?" said Jem Belter in
sarcastic allusion to her escort. "The things those lookers
have fastened on to them gets ME."

"If it was one of US, now," said Bert Johnson. Upon which
they broke into simultaneous good-natured laughter.

"It's queer, isn't it," young Baumgarten put in, "how a
fellow always feels sore when he sees another fellow with
a peach like that? It's just straight human nature, I guess."

The door swung open to admit a newcomer, at the sight
of whom Jem Belter exclaimed joyously: "Good old Georgie!
Here he is, fellows! Get on to his glad rags."

"Glad rags" is supposed to buoyantly describe such attire
as, by its freshness or elegance of style, is rendered a suitable
adornment for festive occasions or loftier leisure moments.
"Glad rags" may mean evening dress, when a young gentleman's
wardrobe can aspire to splendour so marked, but it also
applies to one's best and latest-purchased garb, in
contradistinction to the less ornamental habiliments worn every
day, and designated as "office clothes."

G. Selden's economies had not enabled him to give himself
into the hands of a Bond Street tailor, but a careful study of
cut and material, as spread before the eye in elegant coloured
illustrations in the windows of respectable shops in less
ambitious quarters, had resulted in the purchase of a well-made
suit of smart English cut. He had a nice young figure, and
looked extremely neat and tremendously new and clean, so
much so, indeed, that several persons glanced at him a little
admiringly as he was met half way to the corner table by his
friends.

"Hello, old chap! Glad to see you. What sort of a voyage? How
did you leave the royal family? Glad to get back?"

They all greeted him at once, shaking hands and slapping
him on the back, as they hustled him gleefully back to the
corner table and made him sit down.

"Say, garsong," said Nick Baumgarten to their favourite
waiter, who came at once in answer to his summons, "let's
have a porterhouse steak, half the size of this table, and with
plenty of mushrooms and potatoes hashed brown. Here's Mr.
Selden just returned from visiting at Windsor Castle, and if
we don't treat him well, he'll look down on us."

G. Selden grinned. "How have you been getting on,
Sam?" he said, nodding cheerfully to the man. They were
old and tried friends. Sam knew all about the days when
a fellow could not come into Shandy's at all, or must satisfy
his strong young hunger with a bowl of soup, or coffee and a
roll. Sam did his best for them in the matter of the size
of portions, and they did their good-natured utmost for him in
the affair of the pooled tip.

"Been getting on as well as can be expected," Sam grinned
back. "Hope you had a fine time, Mr. Selden?"

"Fine! I should smile! Fine wasn't in it," answered
Selden. "But I'm looking forward to a Shandy porterhouse
steak, all the same."

"Did they give you a better one in the Strawnd?" asked
Baumgarten, in what he believed to be a correct Cockney
accent.

"You bet they didn't," said Selden. "Shandy's takes a lot
of beating."  That last is English.

The people at the other tables cast involuntary glances at
them. Their eager, hearty young pleasure in the festivity of
the occasion was a healthy thing to see. As they sat round
the corner table, they produced the effect of gathering close
about G. Selden. They concentrated their combined attention
upon him, Belter and Johnson leaning forward on their folded
arms, to watch him as he talked.

"Billy Page came back in August, looking pretty bum,"
Nick Baumgarten began. "He'd been painting gay Paree
brick red, and he'd spent more money than he'd meant to, and
that wasn't half enough. Landed dead broke. He said he'd
had a great time, but he'd come home with rather a dark brown
taste in his mouth, that he'd like to get rid of."

"He thought you were a fool to go off cycling into the
country," put in Wetherbee, "but I told him I guessed that
was where he was 'way off. I believed you'd had the best time
of the two of you."

"Boys," said Selden, "I had the time of my life."  He
said it almost solemnly, and laid his hand on the table. "It
was like one of those yarns Bert tells us. Half the time I
didn't believe it, and half the time I was ashamed of myself
to think it was all happening to me and none of your fellows
were in it."

"Oh, well," said Jem Belter, "luck chases some fellows,
anyhow. Look at Nick, there."

"Well," Selden summed the whole thing up, "I just FELL
into it where it was so deep that I had to strike out all I knew
how to keep from drowning."

"Tell us the whole thing," Nick Baumgarten put in; "from
beginning to end. Your letter didn't give anything away."

"A letter would have spoiled it. I can't write letters
anyhow. I wanted to wait till I got right here with you fellows
round where I could answer questions. First off," with the
deliberation befitting such an opening, "I've sold machines
enough to pay my expenses, and leave some over."

"You have? Gee whiz! Say, give us your prescription.
Glad I know you, Georgy!"

"And who do you suppose bought the first three?"  At
this point, it was he who leaned forward upon the table--his
climax being a thing to concentrate upon. "Reuben S.
Vanderpoel's daughter--Miss Bettina! And, boys, she gave me a
letter to Reuben S., himself, and here it is."

He produced a flat leather pocketbook and took an envelope
from an inner flap, laying it before them on the tablecloth.
His knowledge that they would not have believed him if he
had not brought his proof was founded on everyday facts.
They would not have doubted his veracity, but the possibility
of such delirious good fortune. What they would have
believed would have been that he was playing a hilarious joke
on them. Jokes of this kind, but not of this proportion, were
common entertainments.

Their first impulse had been towards an outburst of laughter, but
even before he produced his letter a certain truthful
seriousness in his look had startled them. When he laid the
envelope down each man caught his breath. It could not be
denied that Jem Belter turned pale with emotion. Jem had
never been one of the lucky ones.

"She let me read it," said G. Selden, taking the letter from
its envelope with great care. "And I said to her: `Miss
Vanderpoel, would you let me just show that to the boys the first
night I go to Shandy's?'  I knew she'd tell me if it wasn't
all right to do it. She'd know I'd want to be told. And she
just laughed and said: `I don't mind at all. I like "the
boys."  Here is a message to them. `Good luck to you all.' "

"She said that?" from Nick Baumgarten.

"Yes, she did, and she meant it. Look at this."

This was the letter. It was quite short, and written in a
clear, definite hand.

"DEAR FATHER: This will be brought to you by Mr. G.
Selden, of whom I have written to you. Please be good to
him.
                         "Affectionately,
                                             "BETTY."

Each young man read it in turn. None of them said
anything just at first. A kind of awe had descended upon them--
not in the least awe of Vanderpoel, who, with other multi-
millionaires, were served up each week with cheerful
neighbourly comment or equally neighbourly disrespect, in huge
Sunday papers read throughout the land--but awe of the
unearthly luck which had fallen without warning to good old
G. S., who lived like the rest of them in a hall bedroom on
ten per, earned by tramping the streets for the Delkoff.

"That girl," said G. Selden gravely, "that girl is a
winner from Winnersville. I take off my hat to her. If it's the
scheme that some people's got to have millions, and others
have got to sell Delkoffs, that girl's one of those that's
entitled to the millions. It's all right she should have 'em.
There's no kick coming from me."

Nick Baumgarten was the first to resume wholly normal
condition of mind.

"Well, I guess after you've told us about her there'll be
no kick coming from any of us. Of course there's something
about you that royal families cry for, and they won't be
happy till they get. All of us boys knows that. But what
we want to find out is how you worked it so that they saw
the kind of pearl-studded hairpin you were."

"Worked it!" Selden answered. "I didn't work it. I've
got a good bit of nerve, but I never should have had enough
to invent what happened--just HAPPENED. I broke my leg
falling off my bike, and fell right into a whole bunch of them
--earls and countesses and viscounts and Vanderpoels. And
it was Miss Vanderpoel who saw me first lying on the ground.
And I was in Stornham Court where Lady Anstruthers lives
--and she used to be Miss Rosalie Vanderpoel."

"Boys," said Bert Johnson, with friendly disgust, "he's
been up to his neck in 'em."

"Cheer up. The worst is yet to come," chaffed Tom Wetherbee.

Never had such a dinner taken place at the corner table, or,
in fact, at any other table at Shandy's. Sam brought beefsteaks,
which were princely, mushrooms, and hashed brown
potatoes in portions whose generosity reached the heart. Sam
was on good terms with Shandy's carver, and had worked
upon his nobler feelings. Steins of lager beer were ventured
upon. There was hearty satisfying of fine hungers. Two of
the party had eaten nothing but one "Quick Lunch" throughout
the day, one of them because he was short of time, the
other for economy's sake, because he was short of money.
The meal was a splendid thing. The telling of the story
could not be wholly checked by the eating of food. It
advanced between mouthfuls, questions being asked and details
given in answers. Shandy's became more crowded, as the
hour advanced. People all over the room cast interested looks
at the party at the corner table, enjoying itself so hugely.
Groups sitting at the tables nearest to it found themselves
excited by the things they heard.

"That young fellow in the new suit has just come back
from Europe," said a man to his wife and daughter. "He
seems to have had a good time."

"Papa," the daughter leaned forward, and spoke in a low
voice, "I heard him say `Lord Mount Dunstan said Lady
Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel were at the garden party.'
Who do you suppose he is? "

"Well, he's a nice young fellow, and he has English clothes
on, but he doesn't look like one of the Four Hundred. Will
you have pie or vanilla ice cream, Bessy?"

Bessy--who chose vanilla ice cream--lost all knowledge of
its flavour in her absorption in the conversation at the next
table, which she could not have avoided hearing, even if she
had wished.

"She bent over the bed and laughed--just like any other
nice girl--and she said, `You are at Stornham Court, which
belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my
sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel.'  And, boys, she used to come
and talk to me every day."

"George," said Nick Baumgarten, "you take about seventy-
five bottles of Warner's Safe Cure, and rub yourself all over
with St. Jacob's Oil. Luck like that ain't HEALTHY!"

. . . . .

Mr. Vanderpoel, sitting in his study, wore the interestedly
grave look of a man thinking of absorbing things. He had
just given orders that a young man who would call in the
course of the evening should be brought to him at once, and he
was incidentally considering this young man, as he reflected
upon matters recalled to his mind by his impending arrival.
They were matters he had thought of with gradually increasing
seriousness for some months, and they had, at first, been
the result of the letters from Stornham, which each "steamer
day" brought. They had been of immense interest to him--
these letters. He would have found them absorbing as a
study, even if he had not deeply loved Betty. He read in
them things she did not state in words, and they set him
thinking.

He was not suspected by men like himself of concealing
an imagination beneath the trained steadiness of his
exterior, but he possessed more than the world knew, and it
singularly combined itself with powers of logical deduction.

If he had been with his daughter, he would have seen, day
by day, where her thoughts were leading her, and in what
direction she was developing, but, at a distance of three
thousand miles, he found himself asking questions, and
endeavouring to reach conclusions. His affection for Betty was
the central emotion of his existence. He had never told himself
that he had outgrown the kind and pretty creature he had
married in his early youth, and certainly his tender care for
her and pleasure in her simple goodness had never wavered,
but Betty had given him a companionship which had counted
greatly in the sum of his happiness. Because imagination
was not suspected in him, no one knew what she stood for
in his life. He had no son; he stood at the head of a great
house, so to speak--the American parallel of what a great
house is in non-republican countries. The power of it counted
for great things, not in America alone, but throughout the
world. As international intimacies increased, the influence
of such houses might end in aiding in the making of history.
Enormous constantly increasing wealth and huge financial
schemes could not confine their influence, but must reach far.
The man whose hand held the lever controlling them was
doing well when he thought of them gravely. Such a man
had to do with more than his own mere life and living.
This man had confronted many problems as the years had
passed. He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them
the force they had controlled, and he had seen this force--
controlled no longer--let loose upon the world, sometimes a power
of evil, sometimes scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness
and folly, which wrought harm. He was not an ambitious
man, but--perhaps because he was not only a man of thought,
but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben--these were
things he did not contemplate without restlessness. When
Rosy had gone away and seemed lost to them, he had been
glad when he had seen Betty growing, day by day, into a strong
thing. Feminine though she was, she sometimes suggested
to him the son who might have been his, but was not. As
the closeness of their companionship increased with her years,
his admiration for her grew with his love. Power left in
her hands must work for the advancement of things, and would
not be idly disseminated--if no antagonistic influence wrought
against her. He had found himself reflecting that, after all
was said, the marriage of such a girl had a sort of parallel in
that of some young royal creature, whose union might make
or mar things, which must be considered. The man who must
inevitably strongly colour her whole being, and vitally mark
her life, would, in a sense, lay his hand upon the lever also.
If he brought sorrow and disorder with him, the lever would
not move steadily. Fortunes such as his grow rapidly, and
he was a richer man by millions than he had been when
Rosalie had married Nigel Anstruthers. The memory of
that marriage had been a painful thing to him, even before
he had known the whole truth of its results. The man had
been a common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts
of good birth and the air of decent breeding. If a man who
was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer--it would be necessary
that he should be much cleverer--made the best of himself to
Betty----! It was folly to think one could guess what a
woman--or a man, either, for that matter--would love. He
knew Betty, but no man knows the thing which comes, as it
were, in the dark and claims its own--whether for good or
evil. He had lived long enough to see beautiful, strong-
spirited creatures do strange things, follow strange gods, swept
away into seas of pain by strange waves.

"Even Betty," he had said to himself, now and then. "Even
my Betty. Good God--who knows! "

Because of this, he had read each letter with keen eyes.
They were long letters, full of detail and colour, because she
knew he enjoyed them. She had a delightful touch. He
sometimes felt as if they walked the English lanes together.
His intimacy with her neighbours, and her neighbourhood, was
one of his relaxations. He found himself thinking of old
Doby and Mrs. Welden, as a sort of soporific measure, when
he lay awake at night. She had sent photographs of Stornham,
of Dunholm Castle, and of Dole, and had even found an
old engraving of Lady Alanby in her youth. Her evident
liking for the Dunholms had pleased him. They were people
whose dignity and admirableness were part of general
knowledge. Lord Westholt was plainly a young man of many
attractions. If the two were drawn to each other--and what
more natural--all would be well. He wondered if it would
be Westholt. But his love quickened a sagacity which needed
no stimulus. He said to himself in time that, though she liked
and admired Westholt, she went no farther. That others
paid court to her he could guess without being told. He had
seen the effect she had produced when she had been at home,
and also an unexpected letter to his wife from Milly Bowen
had revealed many things. Milly, having noted Mrs. Vanderpoel's
eager anxiety to hear direct news of Lady Anstruthers,
was not the person to let fall from her hand a useful
thread of connection. She had written quite at length, managing
adroitly to convey all that she had seen, and all that she
had heard. She had been making a visit within driving
distance of Stornham, and had had the pleasure of meeting
both Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel at various parties.
She was so sure that Mrs. Vanderpoel would like to hear
how well Lady Anstruthers was looking, that she ventured
to write. Betty's effect upon the county was made quite
clear, as also was the interested expectation of her appearance
in town next season. Mr. Vanderpoel, perhaps, gathered more
from the letter than his wife did. In her mind, relieved
happiness and consternation were mingled.

"Do you think, Reuben, that Betty will marry that Lord
Westholt?" she rather faltered. "He seems very nice, but
I would rather she married an American. I should feel as
if I had no girls at all, if they both lived in England."

"Lady Bowen gives him a good character," her husband
said, smiling. "But if anything untoward happens, Annie,
you shall have a house of your own half way between Dunholm
Castle and Stornham Court."

When he had begun to decide that Lord Westholt did not
seem to be the man Fate was veering towards, he not
unnaturally cast a mental eye over such other persons as the
letters mentioned. At exactly what period his thought first
dwelt a shade anxiously on Mount Dunstan he could not
have told, but he at length became conscious that it so dwelt.
He had begun by feeling an interest in his story, and had asked
questions about him, because a situation such as his suggested
query to a man of affairs. Thus, it had been natural that the
letters should speak of him. What she had written had
recalled to him certain rumours of the disgraceful old scandal.
Yes, they had been a bad lot. He arranged to put a casual-
sounding question or so to certain persons who knew English
society well. What he gathered was not encouraging. The
present Lord Mount Dunstan was considered rather a surly
brute, and lived a mysterious sort of life which might cover
many things. It was bad blood, and people were naturally
shy of it. Of course, the man was a pauper, and his place a
barrack falling to ruin. There had been something rather
shady in his going to America or Australia a few years ago.

Good looking? Well, so few people had seen him. The lady,
who was speaking, had heard that he was one of those big,
rather lumpy men, and had an ill-tempered expression. She
always gave a wide berth to a man who looked nasty-tempered.
One or two other persons who had spoken of him had conveyed
to Mr. Vanderpoel about the same amount of vaguely
unpromising information. The episode of G. Selden had been
interesting enough, with its suggestions of picturesque
contrasts and combinations. Betty's touch had made the junior
salesman attracting. It was a good type this, of a young
fellow who, battling with the discouragements of a hard life,
still did not lose his amazing good cheer and patience, and
found healthy sleep and honest waking, even in the hall
bedroom. He had consented to Betty's request that he would
see him, partly because he was inclined to like what he had
heard, and partly for a reason which Betty did not suspect.
By extraordinary chance G. Selden had seen Mount Dunstan
and his surroundings at close range. Mr. Vanderpoel had liked
what he had gathered of Mount Dunstan's attitude towards a
personality so singularly exotic to himself. Crude, uneducated,
and slangy, the junior salesman was not in any degree a fool.
To an American father with a daughter like Betty, the summing-
up of a normal, nice-natured, common young denizen of the
United States, fresh from contact with the effete, might be
subtly instructive, and well worth hearing, if it was
unconsciously expressed. Mr. Vanderpoel thought he knew how,
after he had overcome his visitor's first awkwardness--if he
chanced to be self-conscious--he could lead him to talk. What
he hoped to do was to make him forget himself and begin
to talk to him as he had talked to Betty, to ingenuously reveal
impressions and points of view. Young men of his clean,
rudimentary type were very definite about the things they liked
and disliked, and could be trusted to reveal admiration, or
lack of it, without absolute intention or actual statement.
Being elemental and undismayed, they saw things cleared of
the mists of social prejudice and modification. Yes, he felt
he should be glad to hear of Lord Mount Dunstan and the
Mount Dunstan estate from G. Selden in a happy moment of
unawareness.

Why was it that it happened to be Mount Dunstan he was
desirous to hear of? Well, the absolute reason for that he
could not have explained, either. He had asked himself
questions on the subject more than once. There was no well-
founded reason, perhaps. If Betty's letters had spoken of Mount
Dunstan and his home, they had also described Lord Westholt
and Dunholm Castle. Of these two men she had certainly
spoken more fully than of others. Of Mount Dunstan she
had had more to relate through the incident of G. Selden. He
smiled as he realised the importance of the figure of G. Selden.
It was Selden and his broken leg the two men had ridden over
from Mount Dunstan to visit. But for Selden, Betty might
not have met Mount Dunstan again. He was reason enough
for all she had said. And yet----! Perhaps, between Betty
and himself there existed the thing which impresses and
communicates without words. Perhaps, because their affection was
unusual, they realised each other's emotions. The half-defined
anxiety he felt now was not a new thing, but he confessed to
himself that it had been spurred a little by the letter the last
steamer had brought him. It was NOT Lord Westholt, it
definitely appeared. He had asked her to be his wife, and she
had declined his proposal.

"I could not have LIKED a man any more without being in
love with him," she wrote. "I LIKE him more than I can say
--so much, indeed, that I feel a little depressed by my certainty
that I do not love him."

If she had loved him, the whole matter would have been
simplified. If the other man had drawn her, the thing would
not be simple. Her father foresaw all the complications--and
he did not want complications for Betty. Yet emotions were
perverse and irresistible things, and the stronger the creature
swayed by them, the more enormous their power. But, as he
sat in his easy chair and thought over it all, the one feeling
predominant in his mind was that nothing mattered but
Betty--nothing really mattered but Betty.

In the meantime G. Selden was walking up Fifth Avenue, at
once touched and exhilarated by the stir about him and his
sense of home-coming. It was pretty good to be in little old
New York again. The hurried pace of the life about him
stimulated his young blood. There were no street cars in Fifth
Avenue, but there were carriages, waggons, carts, motors, all
pantingly hurried, and fretting and struggling when the
crowded state of the thoroughfare held them back. The
beautifully dressed women in the carriages wore no light air of
being at leisure. It was evident that they were going to keep
engagements, to do things, to achieve objects.

"Something doing. Something doing," was his cheerful
self-congratulatory thought. He had spent his life in the
midst of it, he liked it, and it welcomed him back.

The appointment he was on his way to keep thrilled him
into an uplifted mood. Once or twice a half-nervous chuckle
broke from him as he tried to realise that he had been given
the chance which a year ago had seemed so impossible that
its mere incredibleness had made it a natural subject for jokes.
He was going to call on Reuben S. Vanderpoel, and he was
going because Reuben S. had made an appointment with him.

He wore his London suit of clothes and he felt that he
looked pretty decent. He could only do his best in the matter
of bearing. He always thought that, so long as a fellow
didn't get "chesty" and kept his head from swelling, he was
all right. Of course he had never been in one of these swell
Fifth Avenue houses, and he felt a bit nervous--but Miss
Vanderpoel would have told her father what sort of fellow
he was, and her father was likely to be something like herself.
The house, which had been built since Lady Anstruthers'
marriage, was well "up-town," and was big and imposing.
When a manservant opened the front door, the square hall
looked very splendid to Selden. It was full of light, and of
rich furniture, which was like the stuff he had seen in one
or two special shop windows in Fifth Avenue--places where
they sold magnificent gilded or carven coffers and vases, pieces
of tapestry and marvellous embroideries, antiquities from
foreign palaces. Though it was quite different, it was as swell
in its way as the house at Mount Dunstan, and there were
gleams of pictures on the walls that looked fine, and no mistake.

He was expected. The man led him across the hall to Mr.
Vanderpoel's room. After he had announced his name
he closed the door quietly and went away. Mr. Vanderpoel
rose from an armchair to come forward to meet his visitor.
He was tall and straight--Betty had inherited her slender
height from him. His well-balanced face suggested the
relationship between them. He had a steady mouth, and eyes
which looked as if they saw much and far.