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+Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Kingdom Round the Corner
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Coningsby Dawson
+
+Release Date: June 5, 2008 [EBook #25702]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KINGDOM ROUND THE CORNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tamise Totterdell, Joe Free, Graeme Mackreth
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Kingdom Round the Corner--_A Novel_
+
+BOOKS BY MR. DAWSON
+
+_NOVELS_
+
+THE KINGDOM ROUND THE CORNER
+
+THE GARDEN WITHOUT WALLS
+
+SLAVES OF FREEDOM
+
+THE RAFT
+
+LAST CHANCE RIVER
+
+THE ROAD TO AVALON
+
+
+_SHORTER STORIES_
+
+THE LITTLE HOUSE--_Illustrations by Stella Langdale_
+
+THE SEVENTH CHRISTMAS--_Illustrations by Edmund Dulac_
+
+THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY--_Illustrations by W.C. Rice_
+
+
+_WAR BOOKS_
+
+CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WAR-TIME
+
+THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
+
+OUT TO WIN: THE STORY OF AMERICA IN FRANCE
+
+LIVING BAYONETS: A RECORD OF THE LAST PUSH
+
+THE TEST OF SCARLET: A ROMANCE OF REALITY
+
+
+_POEMS_
+
+FLORENCE ON A CERTAIN NIGHT
+
+THE WORKER AND OTHER POEMS
+
+[Illustration:]"_I'm sorry," Tabs apologized. "I didn't mean anything
+unkind._"
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Kingdom Round the Corner--_A Novel_
+
+_By_ CONINGSBY DAWSON
+
+_Illustrated by W.D. Stevens_
+
+   "_To every man the woman whom he loves is as Mother Earth was to her
+   legendary son: he has but to kneel and kiss her breast to know that
+   he is strong again._"--Michelet
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+Cosmopolitan Book Corporation
+
+_M C M X X I_
+
+_Copyright, 1921, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York.--All
+rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages,
+including that of the Scandinavian_
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I
+                                                            PAGE
+AN ALTERED WORLD                                              7
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+RETRIEVERS OF YOUTH                                          54
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ALL SORTS OF KINGDOMS                                        94
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE                                 134
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE AIR OF CONQUEST                                         172
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TRAMPLED ROSES                                              217
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SOME PEOPLE FIND THEIR KINGDOMS                             262
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ROUND THE CORNER                                            311
+
+
+The Illustrations by
+
+W.D. Stevens
+
+"I'M SORRY," TABS APOLOGIZED. "I DIDN'T MEAN ANYTHING
+UNKIND." (Page 33)                                 _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                     FACING PAGE
+
+TABS EXTENDED HIS HAND. BRAITHWAITE MADE NO MOTION
+TO TAKE IT.                                                 130
+
+"MRS. LOCKWOOD, WHY CAN'T YOU LET ADAIR ALONE?"             172
+
+"I WAS AFRAID YOU HAD LEFT"                                 324
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Kingdom Round the Corner
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+AN ALTERED WORLD
+
+
+I
+
+It was on a blustering March morning in 1919 that Tabs regained his
+freedom. His last five months had been spent among doctors, having
+sundry bullets extracted from his legs. He walked with a limp which was
+not too perceptible unless he grew tired. His emotions were similar to
+those of a man newly released from gaol: he felt dazed, vaguely happy
+and a little lost. He felt dazed because he hadn't remembered that the
+world was so wide and so complicated. He felt lost because he was
+discovering that this wasn't the same old world that he had left in
+1914. It hadn't paid him the compliment of marking time during his
+absence; it had marched impolitely forward. He would have to hurry to
+overtake it. What made him feel most lost at the moment was the fact
+that he had only just realized how his bravest years had been escaping.
+The reason for this realization was Terry. He had been accustomed to
+think of himself as in the first flush of manhood, with all life's
+conquests still lying ahead; it was therefore a little disconcerting to
+be told, as a matter of course, that he had only four more years to go
+till he was forty. "I'll be there at the station to meet you," Terry had
+written him. And then, she had added laughingly, "Father orders me to
+say that he only gives his permission because you're such an old friend
+and nearly middle-aged."
+
+Middle-aged! He, Tabs, middle-aged! The thought was appalling. It was a
+slander so almost true as to be incapable of disproving. He had to-day,
+to-morrow, and the next day; after that people would have the right to
+say of him that he was middle-aged. That was the real sacrifice that he
+had made in the war--he had given to it the last of his youth. And he
+had not been aware of this until he had received that letter.
+
+Now that he was aware of it, he rebelled against the sacrifice. He
+refused to be robbed. He would not allow himself to become middle-aged.
+Why, he hadn't begun to live yet. He'd only been experimenting up to the
+point when the war had started. He'd been thirty-one then, a man full of
+promise, and now he was dubbed middle-aged. He remembered with
+indignation the theory that men of forty ought to be chloroformed to
+make room for the younger generation. "But, hang it, one's years have
+nothing to do with it," he protested; "in my spirit I belong to the
+younger generation." So, to the rumbling accompaniment of the train, he
+argued his claims passionately. Had he formed them into a petition he
+would have prayed, "God, make me young again." It would have been
+because of Terry that he would have prayed.
+
+And yet he was happy--vaguely happy, as any man must be to whom the
+right to live has been restored. For the past half decade his horizon,
+and that of all the men with whom he had intimately associated, had been
+dwarfed by the thought of dying. Throughout that period he had dared to
+hope for nothing personal; he had belonged body and soul to unseen
+forces which had hurried him without explanation from one hell to
+another. He had had to subdue his pride to their authority and to train
+his courage to contemplate the shock of annihilation. Now, at the end of
+almost five years, the will and the body which had been so ruthlessly
+snatched from him, had been as ruthlessly flung back into his own
+keeping. All of a sudden, after having been enslaved in every detail,
+his will and body were set free and no one cared what became of them.
+They could be his playthings; he was allowed to do with them what he
+liked. But what did he like? It was a problem. He could so easily spoil
+them. When he reminded himself of how easily he could spoil them the
+fear of death, which would never again trouble him, was replaced by the
+fear of failure. He was furious to find that he was still capable of
+fearing. He had so confidently believed that, whatever the past five
+years had stolen from him, they had at least brought him the reward of
+never again knowing fear of any sort.
+
+That morning by the earliest train he had shaken off the dust of camps
+and started in civilian dress as his own master on the new journey. It
+was characteristic of him to start early and to slip out of his latest
+phase with so little fuss. For the first two years of his service, while
+men of his class were gaining high promotions, he had served in the
+ranks. He had done it as a uselessly proud protest. In the ranks one did
+the real work, faced most of the danger and won the fewest decorations.
+He had loved the ranks for their quiet self-effacement and had preferred
+to be reckoned in their number.
+
+It had been dawn when he had started. From the top of the hill above the
+camp he had gazed back at the huddled, sleeping rows of hutments. How
+lacking in individuality they were! How wilfully ugly! You could see
+their like in the rear of all armies. The military mind seemed incapable
+of appreciating differences and beauty. How stereotyped the past five
+years had been; yes, and, while the danger had threatened, how ennobled
+with duty! So ennobled that there had been times when it had almost
+seemed that he was on the point of finding his kingdom.
+
+What he hadn't expected was that he would be alive to-day. With that
+thought gratitude had bubbled up and he had limped away, whistling,
+through dim lanes and budding hedgerows to the little wayside country
+station.
+
+But once on board the train to London, he began to feel more like a
+fugitive escaping than a hero returning. This wasn't the end of
+soldiering that imagination had painted. There had been strident bands
+and hysteric shouting to start him on his way to the conflict. There
+had been pictorial challenges to his courage pasted on every hoarding.
+There had been extravagant promises of the welcome which would await him
+if he survived. Who remembered them to-day? He hummed over the words of
+the latest promise, "If you come back, and you will come back, the whole
+world's waiting for you." Was it? He doubted. There was something
+unpleasantly furtive about the way in which men were being stripped of
+their outward signs of valor and dribbled back into civilian life. It
+almost seemed that statesmen had discovered something to be ashamed of
+in the unforeseen heroism by which the world had been rescued.
+
+What did it matter? The world had been saved, and he had helped to save
+it. No one could deprive him of that knowledge. His joy leapt up. What
+did it matter if other people considered him nearly middle-aged? He and
+Terry must prove to them the contrary. He was free; that was what
+counted. Free to reckon his life by more than stretches of twenty-four
+hours. Free to rise or go to bed when he liked. Free to travel to the
+ends of the earth. Free to speak his mind without the dread of a
+court-martial. Never again would he be compelled to issue orders which
+he knew to be unwise; never again would he be compelled to obey them. He
+was free. And there was Terry----
+
+
+II
+
+Across the carriage-windows landscapes went leaping: the bleak clearness
+of brisk March skies; the shining grayness of meadows from which mists
+were slowly rising; the faint flush of greenness which was gathering in
+hedges; the shy pageant of spring unfolding, with the promised certainty
+of new summers which are never ending. The world looked young. As the
+train dashed by, new-born lambs, unused to such disturbances, tottered,
+bleating, after their mothers. Buds were bursting. Sap was rising. The
+chapped scars of winter were vanishing. Things which had seemed dead
+were being convulsed with life. He watched it all gladly and yet
+impatiently; it was for the end of the journey that he was waiting.
+
+On nearing London the train slowed down as though reluctant to leave the
+country. Twice it halted and he consulted his wrist-watch with a frown.
+Then it crept through Battersea, wound snake-like across the gleaming
+Thames, and came to rest in Victoria Station. Despite his lameness, he
+was the first passenger to alight. He had no luggage to attend to, save
+the newly-purchased bag which he carried. He lost no time in hurrying
+down the platform; when he hurried his limp became more pronounced. As
+he passed through the barrier he slackened his pace. By reason of his
+greater height he could glance above the heads of the crowd; his eyes
+went questing in all directions. They failed to find what they sought.
+He delayed until nearly all the people from the incoming trains had
+scuttled into the holes of the Underground; then, masking his
+disappointment, he wandered out into the station-yard to hail a taxi. An
+Army Staff car was drawn up against the curb. A thrill of hostility
+shot through him. How often, in the old days, when marching up to an
+attack, had he and his comrades huddled to the side of the road like
+sheep that these khaki-colored collies of the shepherds, who had driven
+them up to die, might splash arrogantly past them! He eyed it casually
+and was passing on, when a girl in the back seat stood up frantically
+waving. She was dressed in the latest whim of fashion; but it was her
+that he saw rather than her appointments. Her gold bobbed hair was like
+a Botticelli angel's. Her eyes were clear and deep as violets. She was
+exquisitely vibrant and alive--scarcely beautiful; her nose turned up
+and was too short for that. One sought for the right words to express
+her attraction. Perhaps it was due to her light-hearted health and
+girlish freshness.
+
+As he came up eagerly, limping with the effort, she reached out her
+hand. "Tabs, fancy you not knowing me! I don't need to call you Lord
+Taborley, do I? Between us it's still Tabs."
+
+"Terry dear! My dear Terry, at last!" He spoke queerly as though he had
+been running. Then, seeing how his intensity startled her, he let go her
+hand and laughed. "You can't blame me for not having spotted you.
+Where's all your beautiful hair that was so blowy?"
+
+She glanced up through her lashes at the tall man. "'I'm growing such a
+big girl now'--you remember the refrain from the song at the Gaiety?
+That's why. When you were a young man, girls put their hair up to show
+they were of age; nowadays they bob it."
+
+"So that's the explanation!" He climbed in and took his seat beside her.
+"That's another thing that disguised you. How was I to guess that you'd
+wangle a Staff car to meet an ex-lieutenant?"
+
+"It belongs to a friend at the War Office." She nodded her permission to
+the trim girl-soldier at the wheel to start. "He lent it to me when he
+heard that I was to meet you this morning. Taxis are so scarce, and I
+didn't know how well you could walk, so----" She turned from the subject
+abruptly. "You're so changed. I scarcely recognized you at first. I was
+expecting that you'd still be in uniform."
+
+"I was demobbed yesterday. So you find me changed! For better or for
+worse? Confess, Terry."
+
+She was aware that beneath his assumption of gayety he was hiding
+something--something that pained. He had been hurt too much already.
+With impulsive sympathy she laid her hand on his arm. "It isn't a case
+of better or worse. Between people like ourselves appearances don't
+matter. I think to me you were handsomest of all as a Tommy. How proud I
+was of you, Tabs, when you first joined up! Do you remember how I used
+to strut along beside you---- And that last night, when you went for the
+first time to the Front?"
+
+He remembered, and waited with boyish expectancy. She had stopped
+suddenly and glanced away from him. For the second time his intensity
+had frightened her. He said nothing--did nothing to help her. She
+mustered her courage to turn back with a smile. "It's long ago, isn't
+it. Tabs? I've grown such a big girl now."
+
+He brushed aside her attempt to divert him. "But you find a difference
+in me?"
+
+"A difference! You mean the difference between a man in uniform and in
+mufti? Why, yes. A uniform made you look younger. It did that for most
+men."
+
+"But more for me than for most." He was pitiless towards himself now
+that he had forced her to answer. "I've aged more than the five years
+since you slipped your arm into mine as we marched through the darkness
+to the troop-train. You never shed a tear, Terry. You kept your promise.
+Often and often when I was afraid in the trenches I remembered you, a
+white and gold slip of a girl with dry eyes, waving and waving. And
+then, somehow, because you'd kept your promise not to cry----"
+
+"Don't," she whispered. "Please don't. It's all ended. Everything's new
+and beginning afresh."
+
+"Beginning with you," he questioned, "where it left off?"
+
+If she heard him, she ignored the interrogation in his voice.
+
+
+III
+
+The girl-soldier at the wheel relieved the situation. Since leaving the
+station she had been running slower and slower, glancing back across her
+shoulder and trying to catch their attention. Just short of the great
+cross-roads at Hyde Park Corner she brought the car to a halt.
+
+"What's the matter, Prentys?" Terry asked. "Anything wrong?"
+
+"Nothing's wrong, miss; but you've not told me where to go."
+
+The girl spoke so reproachfully that Terry laughed. "Awfully sorry,
+Prentys. It's Lord Taborley's fault. He didn't tell either of us. What
+are your plans, Tabs? Where do you want to go?"
+
+"To go?"
+
+He caught at her question and examined it. To go--where did he want to
+go? He had been so certain when he had boarded the train to London early
+that morning. Ever since he had said good-by to her, nearly five years
+ago, he had known quite definitely. Each time that he had had a glimpse
+of her on those brief leaves from the Front, he had been more and more
+sure of the desired direction. Her letters coming up to him under
+shell-fire had made him even more certain--those letters compassionate
+with unashamed sincerity, written with a girl's admiration for a man who
+was jeopardizing his all that she might live in safety.
+
+And now, when he was free at last to go where he chose and she herself
+asked him, he could find no answer to her question. Why couldn't he? He
+looked at her thoughtfully with the frown of his problem in his eyes.
+What change had come over her? Or was it he who was altered? She had
+seemed so absolutely his while the terror of battle had kept them apart.
+She had written and acted as though she was his right up to---- Yes,
+right up to the point when he had been in a position to claim her.
+
+Between him and Terry there had been no engagement--only a wealth of
+interchanged affection; interchanged for the most part on paper. Once
+and only once had marriage been mentioned--on the night that he had set
+out for the first time for the Front. "You won't ask me, Tabs; I know
+that. You're too honorable. So I've got to say it. When you come back
+I'm going to marry you."
+
+"_If_ I come back, little Terry," he had corrected.
+
+"But you will--you must," she had pleaded, "for my sake."
+
+"I'll try. I'll try so hard," he had promised. "But I won't marry you
+till I'm out of khaki or the war is ended."
+
+"And I'll meet you at the train the moment you're free and we'll be
+married that very day."
+
+All this five years ago on a murky station in the tragedy of parting,
+while Belgium was being trampled and the troop-train waited. She had
+eluded the vigilance of her parents and had met him outside the
+barracks, without forewarning. Through the gloom of streets and the blur
+of the accompanying crowd, he had seen her face loom up. Her arm had
+slipped through his; she had marched beside him like any Tommy's
+sweetheart. She had been seventeen at the time; to-day she was
+two-and-twenty. In the years that had followed he had taken no step to
+make that girlish promise binding, yet increasingly its fulfillment had
+been the goal towards which he had struggled.
+
+After she had joined Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit and had gone to France he
+had missed her on his leaves; by some fatality they had been always
+missing. She had existed for him only in their correspondence and in his
+vivid imagination. And now, after so much hoping, she had become again a
+reality. He had been prepared for strangeness, but not for---- Was it
+her youth, which was to have flung wide all doors, that formed the
+barricade? Her youth which, if shared, would have put back the hands on
+the face of Time! Her relentless, flaunting youth! Youth which is
+forever hostile to age!
+
+Her growing and puzzled expression of impatience forced him to narrow
+his answer to the requirements of the moment. "What are my plans, you
+asked? I haven't any. I'm a man at a loose end and at a beginning--like
+all the world, as you yourself just stated."
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say--that every one has to live somewhere.
+I have a place all right--my old place."
+
+"Shall I tell Prentys to drive you there?"
+
+He shook his head and thrust out his long legs, throwing his weight more
+heavily against the cushions. "Not unless you didn't read my letter."
+
+Her habitual sunniness clouded. "Tabs, you're trying to be beastly. If I
+hadn't read it, I shouldn't have known to have met you, or when, or
+where."
+
+"Then you remember that it reminded you of----"
+
+She cut him short, glancing furtively at the girl at the wheel to see
+whether she had been listening. "I don't forget easily. Where do you
+want to go? Would a run into the country suit you?"
+
+"Excellently."
+
+"In what direction?"
+
+"Makes no difference."
+
+She whispered something to the girl; the car semi-circled and gathered
+speed, shooting through the traffic which was lumbering towards the
+Fulham Road and Surrey.
+
+Now that he had gained his point, he didn't seem inclined for
+conversation. He lolled back with his eyes half-shut; she sat bolt
+upright, ignoring his presence.
+
+He recalled to-day as he had pictured it. Terry was to have been still
+the girl-woman who had wanted him so badly that she had been brave
+enough to ask for him. She was to have been precisely and in every
+detail the girl from whom he had parted. She was to have been on the
+platform waiting for him, and he....
+
+Pshaw! What a sentimentalist and how easily disappointed! The old fight
+was still on in another form. It was never ended. Life was a fight from
+start to finish, calling for new and yet newer courage. He refused to be
+defeated. He would not be embittered. He would win his kingdom round the
+corner, even though it proved to be a different kingdom from the one he
+had expected. Terry couldn't have stayed seventeen always, which was the
+miracle he had demanded. She was a woman. He would have to teach her to
+love him afresh. There was no time to be lost. For all he knew there
+might be a rival--perhaps the mysterious some one at the War Office who
+had lent her this car. He leant forward good-humoredly, touching her
+hand to attract her attention, "Terry."
+
+
+IV
+
+She turned slowly, almost reluctantly. What new and disturbing question
+was he going to ask? She hadn't been prepared for this altered man with
+his limp and his gauntness and his strained intensity. She couldn't
+bring herself to believe that this grave, spent, unlaughing person at
+her side was Tabs, the gallant, care-free comrade she had asked to marry
+her. She was shocked both at him and at herself. And she had wanted to
+be so glad--to make him feel that every one was so happy at having him
+back----
+
+"Terry."
+
+At the sound of her name, spoken like that, a little thrill of his
+old-time power stirred her; it traveled up to her eyes, so that she had
+to press back the tears before she turned.
+
+"Terry, it was sentimental blackmail. I'm sorry."
+
+"What was? I don't understand."
+
+"That last letter. I oughtn't to have reminded you. What one promises at
+seventeen doesn't hold good. It was sporting of you to keep the promise
+by meeting me this morning, but---- What I'm trying to say is this; I'm
+forgetting everything that you would like me to forget."
+
+"But I'm not sure that I want you to forget anything." She widened her
+lips into a smile from which the trouble was only half dispelled. "It
+sounds horrid and unfriendly, this talk of forgetting, as though---- It
+sounds so much worse when it's put into words, as though we had
+something of which to be ashamed."
+
+"No, it's not like that. May I be terrifically honest--just as we used?"
+
+She eyed him doubtfully. It was evident that she was still timid of the
+truth. Then she nodded.
+
+"Well, you know how it was between us before I went away. You were of an
+age when most people still thought of you as a child. You _were_
+outwardly, but inside you were almost a woman. The little girl did
+things and promised things that the woman wouldn't approve to-day. And
+then take my side of it. I went out to a place where life seemed at an
+end and where, because of that, one became selfish in the demands he
+made on the people whom he had left behind--especially on the women. It
+was impossible to be normal; probably I'm not quite normal now. But the
+point is this: every man in khaki thought intensely of some one girl. It
+didn't matter whether he had the right to think of her; he just thought
+of her, and wrote to her, and carried her photo with him up to an
+attack, as if he had the right. He wasn't even much disturbed as to
+whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was
+merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a
+test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You
+understand, she was very often only a makeshift--a symbol for the woman
+he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for
+some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back--come back
+starved, emotional, tyrannic--passionate to possess all the things for
+which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so
+long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we
+were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're
+tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be
+patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take
+offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into
+meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that
+child's promise as binding."
+
+"But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you--I did
+truly."
+
+"Letting me down lightly?" he smiled.
+
+"No, an honest fact."
+
+When he gazed at her with kindly incredulity, she edged herself closer
+and bent forward in a generous effort to persuade him.
+
+"Don't you see that what you've said of yourself was true of me as
+well?"
+
+"I wasn't talking in particular of myself," he parried; "I was including
+all the other men."
+
+"Yes, but especially of yourself. It was of yourself that you were
+talking. What you've said of yourself is true of me and--oh, of almost
+all women. We saw you men march away; you seemed lost to us forever.
+Everything seemed at an end. So we did what you did--chose one man who
+would embody all our dreams and become especially ours. We wrote to
+him, shopped for him, placed his portrait on our dressing-tables, were
+anxious for him and, oh, so proud of him. We didn't stop to ask whether
+he was the man with whom we could live for always. There wasn't any
+_always_. It didn't look as though there was ever again going to be any
+_always_. And then the horror stopped and we found ourselves with a man
+on our hands--a man who, though we had known him so well, would come
+back to us different. We hadn't meant to cheat him when we made all
+those promises; but now that he's really ours, we're not sure that
+we---- All the ecstasies and tears that we wrote to him on paper----"
+She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "They don't seem real. It's
+not our fault. They belonged to the part of nurses and soldiers that we
+were acting. And now we've slipped out by the stage-door and we've
+become ourselves. Don't you see, Tabs, we men and girls have got to find
+out afresh who we are? We've almost forgotten."
+
+She seemed to have made an end, when something else occurred to her. She
+recommenced hurriedly, "We women have been spendthrifts, too; we've
+given away more than was wise--little bits of ourselves, not always to
+the one man--sometimes in the wrong directions. But which is the right
+direction? When people who were risking so much for us begged for a
+little of our affection, we never thought of that. We simply gave
+recklessly--little bits of ourselves. Now that we've regained a future,
+with room for remorse and things like that, we've become suddenly
+cautious. The swing of the pendulum----" She turned to him, as though
+proffering a smile for his forgiveness, "It's our sudden caution that
+makes us seem mean and ungracious. But I _was_ tremendously interested
+about meeting you."
+
+"Interested! Not glad or ecstatic. It's a long road from dreams to
+facts."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She said it humbly. He tried to catch the expression in her eyes, but
+all he saw was the flickering gold of her hair as the wind tossed it
+against the rounded whiteness of her neck. His brain kept muttering,
+"Little bits of herself! What did she mean by that?"
+
+A barrel-organ was grinding out a tune; children danced in the sunshine
+on the pavement. As they flashed down the street the music followed
+them. She twisted to look back and he caught her eyes. "Tabs, do you
+know what it's playing?"
+
+"Can't say I do."
+
+"It's out of the Elsie Janis revue at The Palace. I think it was written
+especially for this moment." She listened till the air reached the
+refrain and then sang the words, "_Après la guerre, there'll be a good
+time everywhere_."
+
+His stern face relaxed at her childishness. "Will there, Terry? I hope
+so. Musical chaps aren't reliable authorities. They're----"
+
+"You must _know_ so," she interrupted valiantly. Then, forgetting her
+caution, she slipped her small gloved fingers into the palm of his big
+brown hand. "You _must_. Even though I disappoint you ever so badly,
+you must know so, dear Tabs. You must seize your own good time at
+whatever cost. One girl isn't all the world."
+
+
+V
+
+"I wonder whether what we've been saying explains Adair."
+
+They were crossing one of the bridges over the Thames. He wasn't sure
+which one. Moreover, he didn't care; it was enough for him that,
+wherever they were going, they were going together--racing into a
+sun-crazed world where spring romped and shouted like a hoyden. Above
+lazy chimney-pots trees patched the sky-line with sudden greenness. At a
+greater distance soft contours of hills lay shadowed beneath stampeding
+clouds. Coldly silver beneath the bridge the river flashed, dimpled here
+and there by rapid feet where breezes, like adventurous children, rushed
+across it. He noted the bowed windows of little houses along the banks,
+their whitened steps and shining brasses. He caught the far-blown
+fragrance of hyacinths; it set him dreaming of drifting bloom and
+flower-strewn ways of woodlands. A happy world, whatever the mental
+state of its inhabitants! A world which was doing its bravest best to
+play the game by mankind! A world which was whispering at every portal
+of the senses that the business of living was immensely worth while! A
+world which----! He had reached this point, when the mention of Adair
+brought him back to the cause of his philosophizing--the inscrutable
+tenderness of the girl, half sorceress, half penitent, seated at his
+side. She had recovered her calmness by withdrawing her thin fingers
+from his enclosing hand.
+
+Adair Easterday! He didn't want to discuss him; he had more important
+things to talk about. Speaking absent-mindedly, "Adair doesn't need any
+explaining," he said.
+
+"Oh, doesn't he?" she laughed softly and looked away, creating the
+impression that she was leaving volumes unexpressed.
+
+Her air of wisdom provoked him. "Well, I've known him since we were boys
+at school together and I've never found him much of a conundrum. He's
+brilliant, and lazy, and kind. I think of all the men I've known he's
+the one who's most truly a gentleman; he's the one who has given most
+promise and who has fewest accomplishments to his credit. He may have
+puzzled you as his sister-in-law; but to me, a man of his own age, he
+presents no mystery. If anything he's too obvious; that and the fact
+that he allows himself to be too much absorbed by his wife are two of
+the reasons for his lack of success."
+
+"He doesn't allow himself to be too much absorbed by his wife now." She
+had turned deliberately that she might watch the effect of her words.
+"He doesn't even pretend to care for Phyllis any longer."
+
+"Not care for her--his own wife! Nonsense! You can't make me believe
+that." Then he reined himself in, for he suddenly realized that he was
+unconsciously adopting the tones of an elder. "That was a terribly
+modern accusation for you to make, Terry, just as if loyalties and
+affections were ostrich-plumes and ermine to be worn or discarded with
+the fashion."
+
+"That's just what they do seem to have become since we've all stopped
+fighting," she persisted. "And please don't look at me like that, Tabs,
+as though you were my commanding-officer. I'm not trying to be a cynical
+young person; I'm simply stating facts. Look at all the men for whom the
+war was a social leg-up. They were plumbers and bank-clerks and dentists
+in 1914; by the end of 1918 they were Majors and Colonels and
+Brigadiers. They didn't know where the West End was till they got into
+uniforms. Since then they've learnt the way into all the clubs and
+fashionable hotels; they've spent money like water; they've been the
+companions of men and women whom they couldn't have hoped to have met
+unless the war had shaken us all out of our class-snobbishness. But now
+that the war's ended, these men whom every one flattered for their
+bravery and whose social failings they excused while there was fighting
+to be done, have become worse snobs than ourselves. They've been
+educated out of the class for which they were fitted. War was their
+chance; it's ended, and now they have to go back to their humble jobs,
+which are the only ones by which they can gain a livelihood. Worse
+still, they've got to go back to their wives, who haven't shared their
+grandeurs, but who've played the game by them, taking care of their
+children and standing by the wash-tub. Some of them can't face up to the
+change. Peace has turned the world up-side-down. We're walking on our
+heads. You're just out of hospital, but you'll know what I mean when
+you've been a week in London."
+
+"But nothing of what you've been saying applies to Adair Easterday," he
+objected. "He wasn't a profiteer in khaki; he wasn't even in khaki. He
+made nothing; he lost nearly everything he had. Moreover, whatever
+faults he may have, he's always been a thorough-bred--a stickler for
+honor; the kind of chap who, if he had to sink, would go down with all
+his colors flying. Where his wife is concerned, he's a lover-for-all-time
+kind of fellow."
+
+She shook her head obstinately. "He isn't now. He's standing on his head
+like the rest of us."
+
+"I'm certain you're mistaken." He paused, half-minded to let the matter
+rest. He hated this contending. In the old days he and Terry had never
+argued. He glanced at her; she was smiling in a sorry, amused fashion.
+It made him feel that in accusing Adair she had cast suspicion on every
+man's constancy--his own included. Reluctantly he set himself to prove
+to her that she was incorrect.
+
+"When you were in France with Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit, I spent most of
+my leaves with Phyllis and Adair. We went about together. I lived in
+their house, got to love their kiddies, knew all that went on there. I
+think a part of my motive was that being with your sister seemed to
+bring you nearer. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't notice
+frictions and irritations. Adair was humiliated at being rejected by the
+Army because he wasn't up to physical standards. He tried every trick,
+but was always turned down. He didn't like to be seen about town; he
+felt that people were accusing him of being a slacker. He looked so well
+that he had always to be explaining why he wasn't in the trenches. It
+tried his temper. Wherever he went soldiers were being treated as
+heroes. Women were pleased to be seen escorted by a uniform--his own
+wife as well. And I'm bound to say Phyllis didn't help him. She prided
+herself on having held on to her man as though it were something that
+she'd done herself. Adair used to flare up in a passion and tell her not
+to be a fool; then, because her foolishness was all because she loved
+him, her feelings were hurt. But to say that he doesn't love her is an
+exaggeration. If there's anything the matter, the trouble is not with
+his heart but with his nerves."
+
+"Then you really haven't heard? I thought everybody----" She stifled a
+yawn. "It's the wind against my face. It always makes me sleepy," she
+apologized. "Since you haven't heard, I suppose I oughtn't to tell you.
+He's become the sort of skeleton in our family cupboard---- You're still
+incredulous! That will please mother. She'll be almost happy when she
+learns that there's at least one person who hasn't been told about it.
+She thinks that all the world talks of nothing else. As for Daddy,
+Phyllis was always his favorite and he adores her children. He goes
+about trying to find some one who'll volunteer to horsewhip Adair. I
+can't say that I feel that way myself." Her hand stole out and touched
+his arm caressingly; it seemed as though she were appealing for herself.
+"We've all either done or are on the verge of doing something foolish
+that we're sure to regret. It's not a time to be hard on anybody.
+To-morrow we may stand in need of sympathy ourselves. Horror has
+shell-shocked every one, civilians as well as fighting-men. The
+blackness of insecurity----! We're all convalescing." She halted
+abruptly, biting her lip and peering at him, suddenly aware that she had
+been confessing herself. When he only looked puzzled, she finished
+lightly, "So, you see, Tabs, though you'll think me terribly immoral, I
+keep a soft place in my heart for our skeleton."
+
+"But you don't tell me anything positive," he complained. "What has
+Adair done?"
+
+"Done!" She stared at him. "That's what I have been telling you. He's
+fallen in love with some one else."
+
+He was unwilling to believe what he had heard.
+
+"Some one else! Impossible!---- I'm sorry, Terry; I didn't mean that I
+doubted your word. You mustn't be offended, but---- I'm picturing
+Phyllis. At her best she was good and sweet and pretty enough to hold
+any man. She was such a loyal little pal--only second best to you,
+Terry. And Adair--he was such a white man, so patient with her and so
+devoted to the kiddies. I can't see him in the rôle of a runaway. And
+what on earth would he gain by it that he hasn't got already? I don't
+want to think that what you've told me---- It makes all fidelity seem so
+contemptibly temporary."
+
+Terry spoke gently. "Not that. It's infidelity that is temporary. A lot
+of us are unfaithful for the moment--it's a symptom of our illness. You
+said something a little while ago about trying to regain one's lost
+years by violence--that's what he's doing. He's mislaid the knack of
+happiness with Phyllis; he's trying to recover it with some one else."
+
+Tabs was still rebelling against the facts. "But he was such a staid old
+fellow."
+
+Terry ignored his discursiveness. "I don't think I've done wrong in
+letting you into our family secrets. You'll be made a part of them as
+soon as you meet Daddy. When he heard that you were coming to town and
+that I was going to see you, he said, 'Thank God for that. Taborley will
+be able to do something.' He has a pathetic belief in you, Tabs. One of
+the reasons why I was at the station this morning was that I might have
+the chance to tell you first, before any one else had prejudiced you
+with bitterness. Daddy wants you to dine with him to-night. He expects
+you to be the kind of moral policeman who makes the arrest. But it can't
+be done with morality. I don't think even you could manage to persuade
+Adair at the present--not with moral arguments, anyhow."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I've seen _her_."
+
+
+VI
+
+It was at this moment that a sound like a pistol-shot occurred. The car
+commenced to bump. The girl-driver applied the brakes, guided the car
+to the side of the road and jumped out.
+
+"Quite like the Front," Terry cried cheerfully; "I expect you feel at
+home when you hear a noise like that."
+
+Tabs looked round. He had been too busy talking to notice where they
+were. To the right, through wind-rumpled, tree-dotted meadows ran the
+Thames, still intensely silver in the sunshine, but somehow blither and
+more young than in London. Clouds flew high; everything was riotously
+spacious. Scattered through the vivid stretch of landscape ivy-covered
+houses stood squarely in their park-lands. Set down in the level
+distance, like children's toys, cattle browsed. The quiet greenness had
+become starred as far as eye could carry with a gentle rain of myriad
+tinted petals.
+
+"The car's got a sense of beauty," he laughed; "it chooses carefully
+when it wants to break down."
+
+"And it's all at the Government's expense," Terry smiled, glancing back
+at him across her shoulder as she scrambled out. "So it's a back tire.
+How long will it take to put right, Prentys?---- Then we may as well
+walk and let you overtake us. I don't think we're more than a mile from
+Old Windsor. We'll get something to eat at the little inn by the
+riverside. You remember the one I mean? We've been there several times
+when the General was with us."
+
+"What General is that?" Tabs asked as they trudged along between the
+hedges.
+
+"The General who lent me the car," she replied.
+
+"Oh, your friend at the War Office! I suppose he's one of the dug-outs
+who's been there all the time."
+
+"He isn't. He rose from the ranks. He's only been at a desk job since
+the Armistice." She spoke defensively, with a certain resentment. Tabs
+was quick to detect the sharpness in her voice. "I'm sorry," he
+apologized; "I didn't mean anything unkind."
+
+She halted with a sudden gesture of concern. "I _am_ inconsiderate. I
+never thought of it. Won't this walking wear you out?"
+
+"She's changing the subject," he told himself. "I wonder why?" Aloud he
+said, "Not a bit. But I can't stride along the way we used in the old
+days."
+
+Branching off to the right, they came down to a little inn by the
+water-side. It was shabby with the look of disrepair which all inns had
+at that time. Its paint was chapped and faded; its windows cracked and
+held together by pasted strips of paper. The putty had perished in
+places, so that some of the panes were on the point of falling out.
+Nevertheless, it had a brave look of carrying on triumphantly, for
+tulips and crocuses were springing neat as ever from the turf and it was
+over-hung by a green mist of trees just coming into leafage. They
+entered and took their seats at a table from which they could watch the
+pale flowing of the river through the spangled peace of the outside
+world.
+
+"It was lucky we broke down." Terry sat watching him with her square
+little face cushioned in her hands. "You see I'm training myself to
+believe," she explained, "that everything happens for the best."
+
+"A comforting philosophy for the lazy," he smiled. "It lets us all out
+of resisting temptation. Why resist anything, if everything happens for
+the best? If it were true, it would give us the license to be as flabby
+as we liked--which rather falls in line with what we were saying about
+Adair. But who is she--this woman? You say you've seen her."
+
+"You'll know soon enough for your peace of mind--probably you'll see her
+yourself before the day is out."
+
+"But can't you even tell me her name?"
+
+"Her name's Maisie Lockwood for the present."
+
+"For the present! Why for the present?"
+
+"Because one's never certain about Maisie. She was Maisie Gervis once
+and Maisie Pollock before that; there must have been a time when she was
+Maisie Something Else."
+
+Tabs couldn't quite make up his mind whether he ought to laugh or frown.
+The suspicion had crossed his mind that this composed imp of a girl, who
+could look so immensely the young lady when she liked, was playing a sly
+game with him. However he pretended to take her seriously. "In most
+social sets names are fairly permanent."
+
+Terry laughed outright and looked away from him, following the river
+with her eyes. "There's nothing permanent about Maisie. I think that's
+her attraction; that's what makes people forgive her everything. She
+starts each day afresh--it really is a new day for her, with no old
+hates or griefs or dreads to drag her down. She has no regrets because
+she remembers nothing. Whatever happened yesterday she puts out of mind;
+she forgets everything except her willingness to be friends."
+
+"Her names as well, according to your account."
+
+"Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen
+her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her.
+Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood;
+to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything--Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps."
+
+Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While
+he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that
+his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better
+and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order
+that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was
+the kinder world--a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death,
+met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they
+were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men
+like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by
+their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot
+her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!
+
+"Terry," he spoke with a show of patience, "do you think it's a matter
+about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's
+at stake. If I'm to be of any help----" He broke off, for a voice inside
+his brain had started talking, "You're old. That's exactly the way in
+which her father speaks to her." Was it her thoughts that he had heard?
+Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden
+head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.
+
+"So if I'm to help," he picked up his thread, "you mustn't mock. It
+isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts.
+How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself
+something different with each new dress?"
+
+Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. "No, with each new husband, but----"
+There came a break in her voice, "Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should
+be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met.
+We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And----"
+
+Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying.
+If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic
+débris of dishes---- As it was he leant across and assured her
+earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm---- Terry, how
+is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry;
+for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there."
+
+Drying her eyes, she nodded. "It hurts most frightfully. That's what I
+keep doing, barking my shins in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs.
+He's always going away from me----"
+
+"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently;
+"you've grown so stern."
+
+"I've seen stern things happen--a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered
+things that are so silencing."
+
+"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in
+France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't
+be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.
+It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like
+Maisie and myself."
+
+"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had
+intended.
+
+"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met
+her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."
+
+"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your class--a
+woman who has been divorced three times."
+
+"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on
+her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.
+
+"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and
+uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be
+averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured----"
+
+"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their
+country."
+
+"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could
+have elapsed between each re-marriage.
+
+"One at a time, of course," she added. "She was married to the first
+the first week of the war."
+
+"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in
+four years! She must be a very alluring person!"
+
+Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see
+you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart
+woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so
+full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less
+famous--the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll
+remember Pollock--Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our
+aces--the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed
+himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery
+about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."
+
+"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the
+illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed _A
+Conscientious War-Worker_ or something like that. And I don't forget the
+name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."
+
+"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it
+something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"
+
+"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet
+fierceness.
+
+"Oh, I don't know----" She broke off to ask the waitress whether the car
+had arrived and was answered in the affirmative. "I don't know about its
+being true. After all, she made three men happy before they went West.
+I don't see that she'd have been any more to be admired if she'd allowed
+the last two to go wretched."
+
+Tabs half-rose and then reseated himself. "An awful woman! Insatiable! A
+Lucrezia Borgia, without Lucrezia Borgia's excuse."
+
+"I knew you'd say that." Terry spoke hopelessly in a tone that dragged.
+"How do you or I know what excuses she had? How do we know why anybody
+does anything--what hidden reasons they have? And yet we're always so
+eager to condemn! I wanted to be the first to let you know about Adair
+because you always used to understand. You would have understood if
+you'd been the _you_ that you were. I thought that if I explained to you
+about Maisie---- But what's the use!"
+
+She rose from her chair and stood leaning against the table, looking
+wilted and pathetic. When she spoke again the heat had gone out of her
+words and was replaced by an appealing tenderness. "Don't you see what
+it is--why it is that I don't condemn? I'm so sorry for them--so sorry
+for you, for myself, for everybody. It hurts me here, Tabs." She laid
+her hand against her breast. "We all want what we've spent in the lost
+years. We want it so impatiently. We can't get it; but we want it at
+once--_now_. The things one wants are always in the past or the future,
+so one cheats to get them _now_."
+
+He hadn't the remotest idea what she was trying to tell him. She was
+stirred by some deep emotion--some overwhelming loneliness. For a moment
+it crossed his mind that she also was tempted--fascinated by some
+lurement of dishonor kindred to Adair's. He put the thought from him as
+preposterous and disloyal. Yet it recurred. Ever since they had met she
+had been talking curiously--talking about having given away bits of
+herself to people who were hungry, little bits of herself in wrong
+directions. She had coupled her own case with this unspeakable Maisie's.
+What was her problem?
+
+She stood there with her head bowed, like a child self-accused of
+wrong-doing, with all the flaunting joy of spring tapping against the
+window on which she had turned her back. Then it dawned on him why she
+was standing; he was between the door of escape and herself. He stepped
+aside. As she moved eagerly forward, he caught her by the points of her
+elbows and arrested her going. The wild violet eyes fluttered up to his
+fearfully and fell as he towered over her.
+
+"My very dearest!" He spoke gently in a voice from which all passion had
+been purged. "Don't blame me if I simply can't understand. Though I
+never become any more to you than I am now, I shall always be your
+comrade, believing in you and loving you. Remember that."
+
+When he released her she fled from him, leaving him alone in the shabby
+room.
+
+
+VII
+
+When he found her, she was talking to the girl-soldier in the yard of
+the inn. "But do you think that you can manage it, Prentys? It'll be
+all right in the open country, but I'm not sure that I want to risk it
+in the London traffic. We're merely joy-riding and, if anything happened
+to the car when you weren't on military duty----"
+
+"I don't see that we've got much choice, miss," the girl answered. "The
+General's orders to me were explicit, and you know what he is: obedience
+and no explanations. We've barely time to do it."
+
+Their backs were towards the inn. Tabs strolled up and made a pretense
+of inspecting the new tire.
+
+"Anything I can do?" he asked casually.
+
+It was Prentys who answered him. "I sprained my left wrist, sir, back
+there along the road." She held it out to him painfully as proof. It was
+all bound up and puffy. "It isn't very much use, sir; so I've only one
+hand and I don't know whether I'll be able----"
+
+Terry interrupted and took up the running. "I thought that the car was
+ours for the day. Prentys has just told me that General Braithwaite
+ordered her to pick him up at the War Office this afternoon at
+three-thirty. Now that she's sprained her wrist, she'll have to drive so
+carefully that there's scarcely time to do it."
+
+Tabs couldn't help smiling at the pompous importance of little people in
+this newly enfranchised world. It was only yesterday that for him also
+the foibles of Generals had been sacred. Generals had been gods whose
+tantrums and mental rheumatics had thrown whole armies into a fume and
+fret. For him that day was ended, but it still existed for this slim
+girl-soldier. He was sorry for her.
+
+"You needn't be upset," he said kindly. "I haven't renewed my license,
+but I can drive. No one's likely to interfere with me in an Army car.
+Jump in and I'll get you there with a quarter of an hour in hand."
+
+"But----"
+
+It was Terry who had spoken. Her brows puckered with thoughtfulness, she
+was gazing far away into the green distance. He waited for her to
+amplify her objection. When she maintained silence, he prompted her. "If
+it's me and my bag that's the trouble, you don't need to worry. After
+I've driven you both to the War Office, I can fudge round for a taxi.
+One can usually wangle one in the neighborhood of Whitehall."
+
+Before he had ended, he knew that his guess had missed fire. It wasn't
+his comfort that was disturbing her.
+
+"All right," she said reluctantly. "I suppose there's no other way. Get
+into the back, Prentys; I'll ride in front with Lord Taborley."
+
+He was glad to have something to occupy his attention--to be able to
+talk without the necessity of regarding her. They were both embarrassed
+by the memory of their recent tempest of emotion. "Braithwaite! So
+that's the name of the good fairy who gave us our day in the country. I
+don't remember him; but that's not remarkable. Generals at the Front
+were as common as policemen in London; you found one at every street
+corner. As for trenchdwellers like myself, we never came in touch with
+them except when we were in for a wigging. We came in touch with them
+all right then."
+
+She made no remark. He had the feeling that she was annoyed with herself
+for having let the General's name escape her. Up to that point she had
+referred to him anonymously as "a friend at the War Office." Tabs tried
+to switch to another subject without making the change offensively
+apparent. "Now that I'm a free man, I've got to reorganize a household."
+
+She kindled into interest, "Taborley House is still a hospital, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes, I handed it over to the Americans. I was glad to do that for my
+mother's sake. After all, I'm half American. At least a third of my
+boyhood was spent in the States. But they're sending most of their
+wounded home now, so I shall soon have it back on my hands. But that
+wasn't what I meant. It was too big for me; I never lived there."
+
+"Then what did you mean?"
+
+He realized that she was encouraging him to continue talking because the
+topic was safe--not because it held much attraction for her.
+
+"What I meant was that I'll have to try to collect up my old servants. I
+don't know where they all are, or who's alive and who's dead. There's
+one man I'm particularly anxious to discover."
+
+He slowed down, tooting his horn vigorously as they rounded an awkward
+corner. When they were again on the level she reminded him: "You were
+saying that you were anxious to discover----"
+
+"Oh, that man of mine! There isn't much to tell! He looked after me
+while I was up at the 'Varsity; when I left, I carried him off. I was
+always wandering, so I made him my body-servant. When we were leading
+civilized lives in cities he acted as my valet-butler-secretary. When we
+were adventuring in the remoter parts of the world, he was my
+companion-friend. I had a real affection for the chap; he was so
+genuinely distinguished and quick to learn. He'd have gone far if things
+had kept on. As it is, he's probably gone farther."
+
+"Gone farther?" She sounded half-asleep--politely lackadaisical.
+
+"Gone West," he explained shortly. "His letters became fewer. We joined
+up together in the ranks. You know all about my end of it. I suppose it
+was my mother's democratic Americanism that made me do that. We got
+drafted into different regiments. After the fighting had been going for
+a year, he stopped corresponding. The funny thing was that none of my
+letters to him was returned."
+
+She was so bored that she was scarcely listening. He cut the matter
+short by adding, "It was your mention of General Braithwaite that
+started me gossiping."
+
+She pulled herself together with a jerk and instantly became all
+attention. "How? How could my mentioning General Braithwaite do that?"
+
+He noticed again her unreasonable suspicion of hostility each time he
+made a reference to this man. Thinking it the wiser policy to overlook
+it, he answered evenly, "Because his name also happened to be
+Braithwaite."
+
+Fully fifteen minutes elapsed. "She's quite fed up with my valet," he
+told himself. He hadn't been able to contrive any fresh topic which was
+sufficiently innocuous, so he'd been keeping silent. They were again
+passing over the bridge beneath which, like a gleaming sword, lay the
+Thames, barriered on either bank by the little bow-windowed houses, with
+their shining brasses and whitened steps. They were already catching up
+with the throng of London traffic when she shook herself out of her
+self-absorption by saying, "There must be thousands of Braithwaites in
+the world."
+
+He glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. Her latest
+conversational effort tickled his sense of humor--it was so wholly
+inadequate. He laughed outright. "That's better; the high spirits will
+soon be coming back---- Thousands of Braithwaites! My dear Terry, there
+must be hundreds of thousands." Then in a graver voice, "But though
+there were thousands of millions, it wouldn't restore to me my one loyal
+man."
+
+"You loved him?" She uttered her guess softly.
+
+"Yes, and I--it's a queer thing to say about one's valet--I admired him
+tremendously."
+
+It was the best part of five years since Tabs had driven a car. He
+hadn't yet regained his old dexterity. He wasn't expert enough to attend
+to the wheel and at the same time to carry on a conversation. As he left
+the bridge he had to pass a coster's barrow which was drawn up beside
+the curb. The coster was dressed in the soiled khaki of a man recently
+released from the Army; his barrow was piled high with narcissi and
+daffodils, and a drowsy donkey drooped between the shafts. In avoiding a
+suicidal pedestrian, Tabs misjudged the room that he had to spare. He
+felt a jolt, guessed what had happened, and jammed on his brakes. A
+policeman in front of him was holding up a magisterial hand. Behind him
+a stream of familiar trench profanity was gathering in volume; under
+other circumstances he would have found a certain enjoyment in the
+sound. He looked back and saw what he expected: the barrow overturned;
+the flowers scattered, the donkey surprised out of its drowsiness,
+thrown on its back and kicking in its harness; the coster straddling the
+sudden ruin and calling down all the rigors of the law. A crowd was
+running together; it hesitated between the coster and Tabs, uncertain as
+to which would provide the more exciting entertainment. When the
+policeman waving his note-book approached the car, it plunked for Tabs.
+
+The policeman was a stout, fat-fingered, immovable kind of person. He
+said nothing till he had penciled down the car's official number. Tabs
+gave his name and address. "Lord Taborley, etc." The policeman lifted
+his slow eyes to judge for himself whether the Lord part of his
+information looked probable. The lean aristocratic face which he
+encountered seemed to correspond with the specifications recorded. He
+asked to see his Lordship's license. Tabs embarked on explanations,
+pointing to the bandaged wrist of Prentys as a confirmation of his
+facts. While he was explaining the coster joined them, having got his
+donkey on to its legs. He was violent with anger and burning to expound
+the justice of his cause. Suddenly he struck out a convincing line of
+argument, "Look at 'im, the bloomin' slacker--the pasty h'aristocrat. 'E
+didn't see no fightin'. Not 'im. But now the war's been won by poor
+blokes like meself, 'e ain't ashamed ter go banging abart in h'Army
+cars."
+
+"I know how you feel," Tabs said. "But you're mistaken; I served in the
+ranks two years myself. I was only demobbed yesterday; to-day's my first
+day out of uniform. I'll pay you whatever you think fair; so you don't
+need to work yourself up."
+
+The man's attitude changed completely. He removed his cap and scratched
+his head. "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me was pals out
+there!" He turned to the policeman, "'E ain't done me as much damidge as
+if one of them there Big Berthas 'ad landed."
+
+The policeman let his fat eyes wander from the coster to Tabs, from Tabs
+back to the coster. "I wuz too old ter go," he said inconsequently; "but
+me son's out there and won't ever come back." He crossed out the
+particulars he had written down so laboriously; when that was done, he
+fumbled his note-book back into his pocket. "If your mate 'ere says that
+it's h'all right, sir, it's h'all right so far as I'm consarned. Your
+fust day h'out of the h'Army! Well, well!" He looked at Terry with a
+world of understanding, wheeled about slowly and went ponderously back
+to his corner.
+
+"That was sportsmanly of you." It was Tabs speaking. "I'd like to know
+how much----"
+
+The coster shook his head. "It don't cost you nothink. Me and you used
+ter share."
+
+Tabs protested. The man climbed the running-board and pushed his
+grime-stained hand into the car. "Call it quits, mister, and shake for
+luck. And now the little lady, if she don't h'object."
+
+Terry shook his hand daintily. So there wasn't going to be a fight after
+all! Everything had been settled amicably! With an air of disappointment
+the crowd dispersed.
+
+"Came pretty well out of that!" Tabs remarked as the car started
+forward.
+
+"You're not to talk." Terry's voice was high-strung and emphatic. "You
+can't talk and drive--and you've got to drive like mad."
+
+"Why? What's the hurry?"
+
+"The hurry! We've wasted twenty minutes; we've barely time to get
+there."
+
+"Oh, the General! I'd forgotten. Well, it won't do the old boy any harm
+to wait. Lord, the hours he and his sort have kept me waiting on
+parade-grounds in France!"
+
+Then he remembered that this General wasn't an old boy. If he wasn't
+old, there was all the less reason for making so much effort not to be
+late. Nevertheless, to please Terry---- He could feel her body
+twitching. Every time he had to slow down for traffic he was aware of
+her impatience. Why was it of such vital importance to her that they
+should arrive in time? She wasn't too punctual by habit. A thought
+struck him; it was like a searchlight pointing out many things that had
+been dark. Her anxiety wasn't that they should arrive in time, but
+before time. She didn't intend, if she could prevent it, that he should
+meet the owner of the car. Had it not been for the double accident of
+Prentys spraining her wrist and having failed to mention that the car
+must be back by three-thirty, he would never have been allowed to know
+that there was a General. Terry had been compelled to let him drive if
+the borrowed car was to be returned; but her main object now was to
+reach the War Office a few minutes early and to smuggle him off before
+an introduction would be necessary. If they arrived punctually or late,
+the General might be already on the pavement---- Tabs bit his lip. He
+hated petty intrigue. He demanded a man's code of honor from the woman
+he adored and made no feeble excuses for feminine dishonesty. This was
+the worst disappointment she had given him.
+
+As they approached Hyde Park, when it was too late to turn off into a
+side-street, he saw that the road ahead was blocked. He worked the car
+as far forward as possible and then had to halt. Terry was nervously
+consulting her watch. "The time?" he asked.
+
+"Three-twenty-three."
+
+"Then this puts the lid on it." He beckoned to a policeman, "What's
+holding us up?"
+
+"The Queen's expected, so I'm told, sir, though us didn't 'ave no proper
+warning."
+
+At that moment the crowd out of sight commenced cheering. The cheering
+spread and drew nearer. It was taken up by people who were strung across
+the road immediately in front. A carriage flashed by in which two ladies
+were sitting, one of whom was bowing from right to left. Despite her
+irritation at the delay, Terry stood up so that she could get a clearer
+view above the clustered heads. The cheering grew deafening, then
+lessened, and sank to a hoarse murmur beneath the trees of the Park. As
+she reseated herself and the traffic lurched forward, she turned to
+Tabs, "You noticed who it was?"
+
+"The Queen."
+
+"Yes, but the lady who was with her?"
+
+"I didn't see."
+
+"It was Diana--Lady Dawn with whom I nursed. She's supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in England."
+
+"Don't know her. So I shouldn't have placed her if I had seen her."
+
+They made a clear run of it from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall and drew
+up quite marvelously before the War Office on the second.
+
+"Done it," said Tabs as he shut off the engine. "It's zero hour
+exactly."
+
+But Terry wasn't there to listen to him, as he discovered when his
+attention was free and the engine had ceased to throb. Almost before
+they had halted, she had nipped out of the car and was hailing a taxi
+which was on the point of moving off. His bag was already in process of
+being whisked from one vehicle to the other. This indecent haste to be
+rid of him roused his obstinacy; he sat still where he was and watched.
+
+She returned a little breathless and self-congratulatory. "There! Wasn't
+that clever of me? Taxis are scarce. If I hadn't collared you that one
+you might have---- Come on, Tabs, if you're stiff in your lame leg, give
+me your hand and I'll----"
+
+At that moment the dingy swing-doors of the War Office flew open and a
+red-tabbed, handsome figure of a man, with gold braid on his cap and
+crossed swords on his epaulettes, came briskly out on to the steps. He
+caught sight of Terry and, throwing her an airy salute, came with an
+eager stride towards her. He wasn't the old fogy Tabs had so
+persistently imagined. He was young, barely thirty, lean, tall and
+swift-moving as an arrow--very much what Tabs had been before he had
+spent himself at the war.
+
+"Hulloa, Terry! This is ripping. I didn't expect you---- But what's all
+this? An accident! What have you been doing to Prentys?"
+
+The voice was glad and frank, though its habit of command was
+unmistakable. Every gesture bespoke authority and arrogance of body.
+Even in this moment of geniality, "Obedience and no explanations" was
+written all over him. He was a man who believed his acceptable
+importance to be a verity established beyond the pale of challenge. Yet
+there was something lacking--a sureness of refinement, a last
+considerateness. With the first word he had spoken, Tabs had detected
+that he wasn't quite the part.
+
+Terry had hurried forward to meet him. She was saying something in a
+voice so subdued that it did not carry. She had so contrived their
+grouping--or was it an accident?--that the General's face was hidden.
+
+Tabs waited, then turned to Prentys, "My taxi-man's getting impatient.
+Will you give my thanks to the General for his kindness and make the
+explanations?---- And I hope that your wrist will soon be better."
+
+He had given the driver his address and was stepping into the taxi, when
+he heard Terry's voice, "Why, you're running away! You mustn't go
+without meeting the General. General Braithwaite, I want to introduce
+you to Lord Taborley, of whom I've spoken to you so often."
+
+Tabs limped back to the pavement and found the General regarding him
+intently. "I'm glad to make Lord Taborley's acquaintance," he said
+formally. And then to Terry, "You didn't tell me that it was for Lord
+Taborley you were borrowing my car."
+
+Before Terry could reply, Tabs was answering for her, "Then I have to
+apologize to you, sir, as well as to thank you. But we've used the same
+car often, haven't we? In fact, I'm certain that we've met many times."
+
+"Never to my knowledge." The General drew himself up stiffly. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure."
+
+The two tall men stood glooming at each other. Tabs had it on the tip of
+his tongue to say something more, but glanced at Terry and thought
+better of it. Instead he addressed her, "Do I drive you home?"
+
+The General interrupted. "It'll be out of your way. I'm going right past
+Miss Beddow's house."
+
+For the first time since they had been introduced Terry came between
+their hostility. "How did you know where Lord Taborley lived and that it
+would be out of his way? You said that this was the first time you had
+met him."
+
+Tabs refused to make her the witness of a quarrel. "Since General
+Braithwaite knows where I live, perhaps he will call and explain that to
+me later. I can't keep my cab waiting longer--are you riding with me,
+Terry?"
+
+She avoided his eyes. "With the General." And then, "You won't forget
+that you're dining to-night with father?"
+
+"To-night. At seven-thirty, I suppose, as usual?"
+
+"At seven-thirty."
+
+He raised his hat. As he drove away he felt compelled to look back just
+once to assure himself. He caught the General's features in full
+sunlight; he had not been mistaken.
+
+"So that's why my letters to him weren't returned, and that's why he
+didn't write! He's gone farther than far with a vengeance." He clenched
+his fists and frowned savagely at his crippled leg. "I felt so sure of
+her--and to have to compete with my own valet!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+RETRIEVERS OF YOUTH
+
+
+I
+
+The taxi had scarcely drawn up before a small, prim house in Brompton
+Square when the door was opened by a neat maid in immaculate cap and
+apron. She was so neat and respectful as to appear almost passionless.
+She had the high complexion of a Country girl, good gray eyes, a slim,
+attractive figure and dark, wavy hair which escaped rebelliously from
+beneath her cap. One wondered how she looked in her off-duty moments,
+when she wasn't saying, "Yes, your Lordship" and "No, your Lordship."
+Tabs mustered a smile and called to her, "Thank you, Ann. I'll be with
+you in a moment."
+
+As he paid the fare, he let his eyes wander. The outside of the house
+had been painted white, evidently in honor of his home-coming. The work
+had been only recently completed, for the chalked warning on the
+pavement was not yet obliterated, "Wet Paint Beware." He had given no
+orders; it was Ann's doing--her accustomed, tactful thoughtfulness. The
+steps were speckless as a newly laundered shirt, the brasses polished to
+the brilliancy of precious metal. His window-boxes---- He glanced along
+the fronts of his neighbors' houses; they hadn't put theirs out yet. His
+were ahead of everybody's; they made a cheerful splash of red, with
+their soldierly upstanding tulips, above the long serried line of
+area-railings. Again Ann's doing! And the snow-white curtains behind
+each row of panes were also Ann's.
+
+The driver clicked his "For Hire" sign into the upright position and
+chugged away to join the flow of traffic which thumped orchestrally past
+the end of the Square. Tabs climbed the three low steps separately; he
+had been used to take them at a bound. He tried to climb them slowly as
+though from choice, and not from necessity. He was very conscious that
+Ann was watching. As she closed the door behind him he said, "So you
+knew I was coming? You received my telegram?"
+
+"Yes, your Lordship."
+
+"I was sorry I couldn't tell you the exact hour. I didn't know it
+myself. I hope you didn't trouble to prepare lunch."
+
+"It was no trouble, your Lordship."
+
+"Then you've managed to get some one in the kitchen? They tell me that
+all the cooks have become bus-conductresses or lady-secretaries."
+
+"I did, your Lordship. My sister--the one who lost her husband at Mons.
+I thought you wouldn't object----"
+
+He cut her short. "Ann, you know I never object; you never need to go
+into details. Whatever you've done is right. From what I've seen already
+you've done splendidly."
+
+Under his praise she flushed and became a little less the servant. "I
+was afraid you might think I'd taken too much upon myself, what with the
+flower-boxes and having the house repainted. I wanted to have things
+nice for your Lordship after----" She hesitated for a word, and then
+burst out, "After all the dirt and beastliness! Your Lordship ought
+never to have gone in the ranks, begging your pardon; you weren't fitted
+for it. You ought to have gone as a General. Then you wouldn't have come
+home with that poor leg and----" She saw him wince and changed the
+subject. "But about doing things without orders, I knew that if
+Braithwaite--if Braithwaite----" Her voice sagged and her eyes misted
+over. At last Tabs saw how she looked in her off-duty moments, when she
+wasn't occupied with being respectful. The sudden memory came back of
+intuitions he had had that she and his valet might one day marry. From
+time to time he had twitted them on their fondness, taking an idle
+pleasure in forwarding the match. And Braithwaite had kissed her before
+he marched away. Ridiculous to remember it now! It signified nothing.
+People in their station kissed when they felt kindly, and on that
+occasion they had had an epoch-making pretext.
+
+Her eyes were searching his with a hungry wistfulness. "What I was
+meaning, your Lordship, was that if he had been spared, he'd have done
+things on his own and gone ahead, the same as he always did. So I,
+seeing as how he wasn't----"
+
+Tabs touched her shoulder gently. "It's all right, Ann. I appreciate
+your motives. I'm glad you went ahead. But you haven't shaken hands
+yet."
+
+He glanced in at the dining-room before he went upstairs. The table was
+spread for dinner. Cut flowers were standing about in vases. The very
+silver had a festive shine.
+
+"Again I have to be sorry," he told her. "I'm dining with Sir Tobias
+Beddow."
+
+"And Miss Terry," she inquired, "is she well?"
+
+When he went to climb the narrow stairs she refused to permit him to
+carry his bag. He guessed the reason--that he might be freer to support
+himself by the rail of the banisters. On the first small landing, which
+looked out at the back on to the Oratory and the graveyard of the Parish
+Church, there were still more flowers. When he reached his bedroom,
+three flights up, he found that his evening clothes had been all laid
+out and just as carefully as if Braithwaite--the old Braithwaite whom he
+had loved--had been there before him.
+
+As she unpacked his bag, opening and closing drawers, "I shall have to
+look round for another valet," he said.
+
+"Please don't." Her tone was sharp with earnestness.
+
+Tabs felt sorry for her. She, too, like all the world was wanting the
+thing that she could never have. He wondered whether it wouldn't be
+kinder to tell her and let her know the worst. "But sha'n't I, Ann?"
+
+With simple pathos, which was the more touching because it was so
+unconscious, she clasped her hands, "He might come back. He was never
+reported. My letters were returned unopened. I've not given over
+hoping. I shouldn't like him to find that your Lordship---- If he found
+another man in his place, he might feel like he hadn't been wanted. Me
+and sister can manage----"
+
+"But----"
+
+He got no further, for her eyes were meeting his with an appeal that was
+desperate. "A strange man--his ways would be different. He'd make one
+know that everything--everything was ended."
+
+She glanced hurriedly round for a last time to make sure that there was
+nothing she had omitted--collar, tie, silk socks, dress-shoes,
+shaving-water, razor. "I'll be listening for the bell in case there's
+anything that I've forgotten, sir."
+
+With that she closed the door between himself and her emotion. As she
+rustled discreetly down the stairs, he thought he heard a sound of
+sobbing.
+
+
+II
+
+It was too early to dress--not five o'clock yet. He made an estimate of
+the time he had to spare. If he walked across the Park to Sir Tobias
+Beddow's, that would take him from a half to three-quarters of an hour.
+At the earliest he wouldn't have to leave the house till six-thirty. So
+he had the best part of two hours during which to think out his line of
+conduct and to dress. At dinner he would meet Terry--how would she act?
+And what was the right thing for him to do as her family's trusted
+friend? He felt very tired. It took a tremendous lot out of one
+pretending to other people that one wasn't tired. He was ashamed to have
+to own to himself how quickly nowadays he could use up his physical
+reserves. For the moment there was no one to watch him; he stretched
+himself out at full length on the couch.
+
+He was glad to be back in this friendly house with its narrow stairways
+and endearing littleness; it had been his American mother's before him.
+Within its walls were the exquisite traces of a temperament and taste
+that had been hers. She hadn't always been a great lady; to the end of
+her days there had remained with her the love of small things which one
+finds in nun-like New England towns. There had been times when the
+ostentation and entertaining at Taborley House had become too much for
+her; this nest of refuge had been her secret--her place of retreat where
+she had regarnered her sincerities. She had loved the Square's
+old-fashioned primness, its tininess, its unchanging atmosphere of rest.
+It was scarcely invaded by the strum of London. In the cloud of
+greenness which drifted above its communal garden, one could still
+listen to the country sounds of birds. At the back gray religion spoke
+in the tolling bell of the Parish Church; through Sabbath stillnesses
+one could catch the pealing of the organ in the Oratory and the mutter
+of worshipers at prayer. Tabs had kept the house as she had left it. It
+was something faithful to which to return, however much he failed in the
+search for his kingdom and however far he wandered.
+
+However much he failed! This first day of freedom had been anything but
+successful. He felt as though every hope that he had had had been
+blotted out; that morning he had had no plan for the future which had
+not included Terry. What would be the upshot? Would Braithwaite accept
+his challenge to visit him? If he did, what then? He, Tabs, couldn't
+very well ask his ex-valet, merely because he was his ex-valet, to
+desist from loving the same girl. He had no doubt that Braithwaite, in
+his new incarnation as a General, did dare to love her. He had little
+doubt that Terry had shown herself at least susceptible to the glamor of
+his infatuation. How far had the matter gone between them? There lay the
+guess.
+
+He searched back, trying to piece together phrases which would indicate
+the correct answer. There was her disturbing confession about having
+given away bits of herself, little bits of herself in wrong directions.
+There was her reticence as to the ownership of the car and the way in
+which she had tried to prevent a meeting. There was her sympathy for
+Maisie's matrimonial excesses; her unnatural tolerance for Adair; her
+reiterated excuse for the current love-madness, that people had the
+right at any cost to be happy; and the eagerness with which she had
+seized on his own words, "to recover our lost years by violence." In the
+silence of his brain he heard her voice pleading, urgent with pain and
+underlying terror, "Don't you see why I don't condemn? I'm sorry for
+you, for myself, for everybody." His knowledge of the world told him
+that impassioned latitudinarians were most frequently found among those
+who had themselves offended the conventions. Whatever Terry knew or did
+not know, she was certainly aware that a match between herself and
+General Braithwaite was completely off the map and would be regarded by
+every one who counted as a _mésalliance_.
+
+And what did she know? Not that Braithwaite had been a valet--most
+decidedly not that he had been _his_ valet; at most she suspected that
+they had been acquainted when Braithwaite had moved in humbler circles.
+Had she been possessed of the exact truth, she would never have borrowed
+a car from that quarter to meet her ex-lover on his home-coming. She had
+been testing--trying to discover. She had scented a mystery--one for the
+solving of which none of the General's explanations had proved
+convincing. Then had come the unforeseen encounter outside the War
+Office and Braithwaite's falsehood, which even Terry had detected. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure." What was the
+man's game? Did he hope to erase his old identity? Did he think----
+
+At this point Tabs' patience broke down. "Dash it all," he muttered, "if
+there hadn't been a war, the fellow would have been running my
+bath-water at this moment."
+
+If there hadn't been a war! But there had; and this was only one of the
+many preposterous situations which had resulted from it. Terry was right
+in at least one thing that she had said--the world was upside down and
+walking on its head.
+
+As he lay there thinking, with the topmost branches of the trees in the
+Square weaving a tracery of green shadows against his windows, a sudden
+inspiration came to him. He sat up. "By Jove, I've got it. Terry's proud
+as Lucifer. I can stop this nonsense at any time by telling her who her
+lover was. Braithwaite will have to call to see me; I can force him to
+it. When he calls, the door will be opened by Ann. I can hold the threat
+over him that, if he doesn't promise to break with Terry, I'll expose
+him."
+
+He went across to his writing-table, selected a pen and wrote:--
+
+     _General Braithwaite,
+        The War Office,
+        Whitehall,
+        London.
+
+   Sir:
+
+   I shall be pleased to see you any time to-morrow at my house in
+   Brompton Square, which you know so well. The matter which we have to
+   discuss is urgent.
+
+     Yours truly,
+     Taborley._
+
+He addressed the envelope, sealed it and rang the bell. When Ann
+appeared, he handed it to her. "Please see that it's posted
+immediately."
+
+He had done something decisive. For the time being he felt happier.
+"Nothing like getting a thing off your chest!" He took a bath and,
+having slipped into his dressing-gown, commenced to shave. Between these
+acts he whistled snatches of street-songs to prove to himself his
+genuine light-heartedness. It was while he was drying his razor that he
+started on the wrong air. Where had he heard it? Oh, yes, the sunlit
+street, the children dancing and a voice at his side murmuring the words
+of the refrain, "Après la Guerre, there'll be a good time everywhere."
+
+The old argument commenced again, but with a new justice. "What have I
+really got against this chap? To rise from a private to a General is no
+crime; it's to his credit. We all had his chance and some of us had more
+influence; yet he got there."
+
+He tried to eliminate his own desires and wounded pride from the
+problem. For five years he had been nothing and had been glad to be
+nothing, that the cause which he believed to be righteous might triumph
+by his self-effacement. What sickness of soul had overtaken him that, on
+this, his first day of freedom, he had immediately surrendered to this
+orgy of outrageous selfishness? It was Terry that mattered and only
+Terry. The stronghold of her happiness was threatened by Braithwaite's
+lie. There was a kingdom for everybody, his old theory. As for himself,
+if he had been mistaken and his kingdom was not Terry, then he must
+press on, for it lay further up the road round some newer turning.
+Meanwhile, at whatever cost to himself he must rescue Terry's happiness.
+
+His heroic state of mind lasted no longer than it takes to set down. He
+was demanding too much of his exhausted capacity for self-abnegation. He
+was starving for her. His old hunger to win her swept over him
+ravenously. Only by winning her could his lost youth be regained.
+
+
+III
+
+He had almost completed dressing when there came a tap at the door.
+Finishing what he was doing in front of the mirror, he answered, "Yes,
+what is it, Ann?"
+
+"Before you go, I should like to speak with your Lordship."
+
+"Is it important? I've not got too much time."
+
+"It's--it's something to do with myself."
+
+"All right. Half a second."
+
+On opening the door, he saw at once that her face was disturbed.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's something to do with him, sir."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"With Braithwaite."
+
+It was evident that for Ann there was only one _him_ in the world.
+
+"Well, what of him?"
+
+Ann commenced speaking slowly. Under the stress of her nervousness she
+forgot the correct demeanor for a high-class parlor-maid and became a
+country girl, twisting the corner of her white, starched apron in her
+hands.
+
+"I was noticing the address on that letter your Lordship gave me to
+post." Tabs thought quickly, "Hullo, we're in for it. That was foolish
+of me. She's put two and two together."
+
+But Ann reassured him in her next sentence. "It was to a General at the
+War Office and I was thinking that he might help. Braithwaite and I had
+an understanding. I'm not saying we were engaged; we weren't. We didn't
+tell anybody. But we'd made up our minds to get married if he ever came
+back. If I'd been engaged to him, I'd have a right to make enquiries;
+but now, in most people's eyes, I was nothing to him. That's--that's the
+hardest part of it. You see, sir, he was never reported dead or missing
+or anything. I just stopped hearing from him. So I thought that if this
+General was your Lordship's friend----"
+
+Tabs' brain had been working. He already had a plan. "You thought that I
+might persuade him to use his influence to have the records searched?"
+
+She glanced up hopefully. "That's what I was thinking. Would he do it
+for your Lordship? I don't know how to set about things myself. It's
+this--this," she almost broke down, "this uncertainty that's a-killing
+of me. Sister knows about her man, but I----"
+
+Tabs saw the redness of sleeplessness in her eyes; it was true--the
+uncertainty was killing her. "Don't upset yourself by talking about it,"
+he said kindly. "I'll write to the General and post my request on my way
+out."
+
+He had supposed he had dismissed her and had seated himself at his desk.
+A sound behind him warned him; he looked across his shoulder to find her
+still hovering in the doorway.
+
+She answered his unspoken question as to why she was delaying. "Aren't
+there any particulars that your Lordship ought to have? Things like his
+regimental number, and his birthday, and where he was born, and all
+that? And wouldn't this help?"
+
+"What's that?"
+
+She pulled out from her apron-pocket an envelope. "It's one of his
+letters. If the General was to see it, he'd know I had the right."
+
+"May I glance through it?"
+
+Tabs unfolded the scribbled sheets of paper. They were torn from an Army
+note-book.
+
+   _"My darling Ann:
+
+   The jolly old war drags on and seems as though it were never going to
+   end. Not that I've much to kick about, for it's proved a chance for
+   me. Here's the great news. I'm in for my commission and shall soon be
+   'an officer and a gentleman.' Don't tell his Lordship if you write to
+   him or see him; he's still in the ranks and might not like it. It's
+   funny to think that I shall be his military superior before many
+   weeks are out and that, were he and I to meet, he'd have to salute
+   me. If I come through the war, I sha'n't go back to being a valet.
+   Once having been a gentleman----"_
+
+Tabs ran rapidly through this sheet and turned to the next:--
+
+   _"You're wonderfully good. I got the socks that you knitted and the
+   two parcels of food from Harrods. You mustn't spend so much of your
+   money on me. When it's all ended, I'll pay you back. We'll get
+   married and have a little cottage in a little town, the way the song
+   says that we heard together at the Comedy on my last leave. You
+   remember how it goes.
+
+     'And we'll have a little mistress in a silken gown.
+     A little doggie, a little cat,
+     A little doorstep, with WELCOME on the mat.'
+
+   "My dearest sweetheart, I love you.
+
+   "Yours, in the pink, etc."_
+
+Tabs looked up. "May I keep this for the present?--And, by the way, how
+many more of them have you?"
+
+"Nearly a hundred from the day he enlisted. That's one of the last--I
+never heard from him whether he lived to get his commission."
+
+When she had vanished, he reread the letter more carefully, made a copy
+of it and slipped the copy into another envelope addressed to General
+Braithwaite, together with a note from himself, which read, "_One of the
+important reasons why I am insistent that you shall call on me is
+contained in the enclosed copy of one of your many letters, the
+originals of all of which are in my possession. To a man of honor it
+speaks for itself_."
+
+
+IV
+
+At the red pillar-box, at the foot of the Square, he posted this second
+missive. "He'll receive them both by the first delivery to-morrow," he
+thought. "I wonder what he'll---- Rotten! But it can't be helped." Then
+he turned to the right by the Tube Station, going up the narrow old
+world passage, behind the backs of houses, through the graveyard of the
+Brompton Parish Church to Ennismore Gardens and the sudden, railed in
+solitudes of Hyde Park.
+
+There were few pedestrians about. Until he reached the Park they were
+for the most part men in evening-dress, going to dinner-parties, like
+himself. Sometimes they were accompanied by their wives or sweethearts,
+whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the
+pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually
+fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above clustered chimney-pots to
+the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had
+worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in
+marriage---- When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."
+
+Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would
+be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly
+dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his
+library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to
+see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.
+
+He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and
+slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington
+Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself
+ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his
+coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon
+feeling a patient's pulse.
+
+"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lordship in
+the library."
+
+It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for
+granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some
+absurd measure as his contemporary.
+
+As he prepared to follow, his attention was attracted by the scarlet
+band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on
+the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.
+
+
+V
+
+Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the
+fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of
+his tie.
+
+He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of
+energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his
+antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he
+might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway
+had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was
+haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility.
+One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was
+white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were
+blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top
+part of the face above the cheek-bones was noble; but the lower part
+fell away to a mouth and chin which were amiable and undecided. At the
+hour of Tabs' arrival, he was flinging up his hands and spluttering
+impotently, an inexpert swimmer in the waters of adversity.
+
+"My dear Lord Taborley! My dear fellow!" The moment he discovered his
+guest in the doorway he came darting forward. "My dear boy, this is real
+friendship. We missed you and wanted you so much.--So you're out of it
+at last? I mean the khaki."
+
+The little, wrinkled hand with its stubby fingers reached up timidly in
+an attempt to pat the big breadth of shoulders.
+
+"Yes, I'm out of it, Sir Tobias."
+
+Tabs didn't want to be patted. He was impatient of polite evasions. He
+foresaw that he was expected to spend the next five minutes in replying
+to questions which required no answers--all this as a conventional
+preface to a discussion of the delicate position of Adair and Maisie.
+But Tabs had his own problem, and one question in particular about a hat
+on the hall-table that he was burning to ask. They stood staring at each
+other, the big, fair man and the worn version of Shakespeare, both
+wondering how long it would be decorous to chatter before they clinched
+with the vital topic.
+
+"May as well sit down. There's time for a cigarette. Terry----" Sir
+Tobias made a short-winded attempt to push a second arm-chair into place
+beside the fire; Tabs achieved the desired end with one lurch of his
+body. "Terry brought some one in to tea; he's not gone yet. They never
+know when to go, these New Army fellows. Good at their job, they tell
+me, but no polish. I suppose I oughtn't to say that--ungrateful of me!
+But I'm sick of it all, the invasion of the classes, the women in
+trousers, the beggars on horseback, the Jazz music. I want the old world
+back--the womanly women, everybody labeled, and Beethoven."
+
+He pushed the cigarette-box fretfully across to Tabs, having first
+selected one for himself.
+
+"Beethoven," he snorted, "that's what I want, and no bobbed hair and
+everybody happily married."
+
+"This New Army chap who's with Terry," Tabs paused to make his voice
+unanxious and ordinary, "does she see much of him? Is she fond of him?"
+
+"Fond of him!" The little man jerked round quickly. He was in a mood to
+see the shadow of terror in the most far-fetched suggestion. "If I
+thought she was, I should pack her off to Lady Dawn and keep her with
+her until the fellow was dead or----"
+
+"What's the matter with him?" Tabs flipped the ash off his cigarette
+indifferently.
+
+"The matter with him!" Sir Tobias pulled at the point of his beard,
+making a mental effort to frame the charge. "If you'd asked me that
+question five years ago I could have told you; but not now. In 1914 we
+spoke of a man as belonging to our class and meant that he had our
+standards of conduct, our code of honor, our sense of public duty, our
+traditions--that he could be trusted to run true to form. To-day any
+man's a gentleman, provided he killed enough Germans."
+
+"But still you do feel that there's something the matter with him."
+
+"Yes, but I can't tell you for the life of me why I feel it. In many
+ways he's admirable: I believe he's about the youngest brigadier we have
+who rose from the ranks. There was no hanky-panky about his promotion
+either--no petticoat influence; it was all sheer merit and courage. He
+was a fighting-man from first to last and shared all the chances. But
+the trouble is that one doesn't know where he came from, and, therefore,
+one can't be sure where he's going. I know that sounds snobbish. You
+have the right to tell me that if a man was good enough to be butchered
+to save an old chap like myself, he ought to be good enough to sit down
+with me at the same table. But what people don't realize is that men
+have been wounded in protecting old chaps like myself in coal-mines, and
+on railroads, and a thousand other places ever since the world started,
+but until now we never felt it necessary to offer them a bed in our
+houses. War asked for the simplest gifts from men, physical strength,
+uncomplaining endurance and courage. The war's ended, and if those same
+gifts are to continue to secure social advancement, every policeman who
+captures a burglar ought to be made a bank-president. When I demand that
+a man shall have traditions to be my friend, I ask no more than when I
+refuse to buy a dog without a pedigree."
+
+"But this man, what's he called? If he's as distinguished as you say, I
+ought to have heard of him."
+
+Before his host could answer, the door was discreetly opened. "Dinner is
+being served, Sir Tobias."
+
+There was a rush of light footsteps and Terry breezed past the butler.
+"I know you're going to scold me, Daddy. It's all my fault that you were
+kept waiting. It took me so long to persuade General Braithwaite. By the
+time he'd consented---- I had to dress like a hurricane. I'm not at all
+sure that I'm properly hooked up the back. I know I feel draughty."
+Then, as though she had not remembered that he was expected, "Why,
+hullo, Tabs! In a dinner-jacket! You do look peaceful and jolly."
+
+
+VI
+
+They had taken their places at the square handsome table, illuminated at
+each corner by a silver candle-stick, red-shaded and electric-lighted.
+Tabs and Terry were seated side by side, so that he saw her always in
+profile, except when she turned to him in conversation. He saw the soft
+roundness of her shoulder, the satin pallor of her throat and breast,
+the quivering gold of her childishly wavy hair.
+
+The General sat isolated, opposite and facing them. Sir Tobias and his
+wife sat at either end--had they known it, for all the world like
+judges.
+
+Lady Beddow was a proud, unbending woman, gracious to her own sort,
+unquestioningly respectful to those above her, tender in a practical way
+to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her
+door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as
+ill-at-ease as her husband in the jostling democracy of the moment.
+
+In the hall Sir Tobias rather huffily had introduced his guests. Tabs
+had relieved the tension by smiling quietly at Braithwaite, "The General
+and I have met before."
+
+It was an uncomfortable dinner from the moment they sat down. Sir
+Tobias, although he had shown no signs of it in the library, seemed to
+have developed a resentment at having been kept waiting. No reference
+was made to this resentment, but Terry and the General were obviously
+the culprits. Sir Tobias was vaguely unhappy and had to blame somebody.
+Under the tacitly implied criticism Terry's rebellious spirits rose
+higher, but the General's authoritative assurance began to crumble.
+
+Sir Tobias was continuing the conversation which had started in the
+library. He seemed oblivious to the fact that it had then concerned the
+man who was now present. "You can't make the world afresh with a
+catastrophe. Men are like water: in a storm they rise above or sink
+below themselves. When the disturbance is ended, they tend to find their
+own level. War destroys; it never created anything."
+
+"That's not true, if you'll excuse me for contradicting you. You're
+speaking without knowledge." Braithwaite uttered himself bluntly as he
+would have done in his own Headquarters' mess--this despite the fact
+that it was Tabs whom his host had been addressing.
+
+In his astonishment, Sir Tobias nearly gagged himself with the soup that
+he was on the point of swallowing. He blinked mildly at this confident
+young man, his breast ablaze with decorations, whom he had not invited.
+"Then, in your opinion, what has war ever created," he asked with
+dangerous courtesy; "this war, for instance, that's just ended?"
+
+"This war that's just ended is the only war of which I have had any
+experience." Braithwaite glanced across at Terry for encouragement. "I
+know what it created in me and in thousands like me. It created in us
+the most valuable of all assets--character. In the bitter test of pain
+and dirt and despair we _found_ ourselves--found ourselves capable of
+more nobility than we had ever dreamt possible. We sorted out afresh, in
+hours that we thought would be our last, all our inherited superstitions
+and servilities; in so doing we discovered that God and life itself are
+much kinder than we had been informed. Because of that discovery men who
+had been timid learnt how to face death gladly, shirkers how to shoulder
+responsibility, selfish people how to become decent through the fine
+humanity of sharing. Time-servers learnt how to get up off their bellies
+and confront misfortune with a laugh. I don't know whether I make myself
+clear; perhaps one had to be a part of the great game to understand its
+lessons. That we do understand them is the reward of those who have
+survived. We've come back to you as uncomfortable fellows; we shall be
+much more uncomfortable before we're satisfied. We intend to fight for
+the same equalities in peace that you sent us out to fight for in war.
+You asked me what this particular war has created; it has created a
+complete new set of social and spiritual values. It's done away with the
+uncharity of caste."
+
+During his last words he had been gazing across the table at Tabs with a
+fearless challenge, as much as to say, "That's who I am. Now expose me."
+
+But Tabs was remembering the coster's reason for not having dragged him
+into the police-courts, "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me
+was pals out there!" Braithwaite, whether he knew it or not, had been
+doing a piece of special pleading for himself. He and Braithwaite,
+whatever they might be now, had been pals out there. Silently Tabs had
+been thinking while he had been listening, "You're right and I'm with
+you. I'd be with you still more if you'd only live up to your standards
+by sticking to Ann."
+
+It was Sir Tobias who took the offensive. The soup-plates had been
+removed and the fish-course had not yet been served. He had the leisure
+to talk. "You men who have been in the Army," he said testily,
+"especially those of you who have gained your promotion rapidly, always
+speak as if the rest of us had been receivers of stolen goods until you
+put on uniforms. Armies are composed of youth; for most of you it was
+the first time you had tasted authority. It's gone to your heads; you
+want to brush experience aside and dragoon the older world into new
+formations. You, who were civilians yourselves, have come back despising
+us civilians; your contempt is three-parts fear lest you'll fail, as you
+failed before, in the old civilian competitive struggle. You talk about
+the virtues war has taught; let's grant them and grant them
+gratefully--they saved us from destruction. But what about the frantic
+recklessness it encouraged, the cheap views of bodily chastity, the
+desperate insistence on momentary happiness?" At the mention of bodily
+chastity, Lady Beddow from the other end of the table had stuttered a
+"tut, tut!" Her husband dodged it, as a boy might dodge a wheelbarrow
+upset in his path. Without shifting his glance he ran on. "A complete
+new set of social and spiritual values! Rubbish! War places an excessive
+premium on merely brutal qualities--muscle, bone, sinew, all the
+paraphernalia of physical endurance. What use has it got for old fellows
+of intellectual attainments like myself? It takes the greatest poet,
+singer, painter, violinist; all it can do with him is to thrust a rifle
+into his hands. All brains look alike, Michael Angelo's or a
+rag-picker's, when they're spattered in the mud of a trench. Take Lord
+Taborley here, for instance--all that military stupidity could do with
+him was to keep him in the ranks for two years. You can't make me
+believe in your complete new set of social and spiritual values. A
+complete unrest and insubordination to time-honored moralities is the
+legacy of war."
+
+Having delivered himself, he tucked his napkin tighter into his
+waistcoat and attacked the fish-course, as though by this display of
+gastronomic energy he could somehow strengthen his argument.
+
+It was clear to Tabs that behind all that Sir Tobias had been saying lay
+his misery over Maisie and Adair. He saw the world always in the
+personal equation.
+
+"I agree with most of your statements," the General blundered on. "And
+yet you're wrong. You miss something. I think it's the vision of the
+stupendous heroism. You never saw it; you don't want to see it. That you
+never saw it we can understand; but that you shouldn't want to see it,
+makes us see red. It was something that we did for you, and you take it
+all for granted. You cheered us and jeered us into going because you
+were frightened. You handed us white feathers if we hesitated. You
+dragged us from our jobs and very often we were poor men, who had no
+such financial security as was yours. You promised that if we would
+share our lives with you, you'd go fifty-fifty with us on your financial
+security. There wasn't time to have deeds of agreement drawn up; we took
+you at your word. And what a lie it was! Why, I passed a blinded officer
+in Regent Street to-day peddling shoe-laces. The day before a jobless
+soldier threw himself beneath a train and his last words were, 'Over the
+top and the best of luck.' There's a Colonel I see by to-night's paper
+who's gone back to being a policeman. If you see a man in uniform
+to-day, your unspoken thought is, 'For God's sake take it off.' I tell
+you it's all wrong. It's that kind of ingratitude that leads to
+revolution. You talk about the brutality of war; it's not a patch on the
+brutality of peace. You treated men's lives as yours while the danger
+lasted, but you insist that your possessions are your own now that it's
+been averted."
+
+He took a breath and glanced round.
+
+Tabs was nodding unconscious approval. Terry's face reflected the fire
+of his own passionate indignation and enthusiasm. The butler in the
+shadows had turned his back non-committally and was making a pretense of
+fiddling with the next course. Lady Beddow sat very upright and
+startled, grasping her knife and fork as though they helped to support
+her. The only person who was still doing justice to the meal was the
+worn-out version of Shakespeare, who was responsible for the storm.
+
+The silence seemed to call for a final climax. The ex-valet cleared his
+throat. And it was to his ex-valet that Tabs listened; he had forgotten
+the General. It was as though the grimness of reality had interrupted a
+piece of play-acting. There was less heat in Braithwaite's voice now and
+more reproach. "You said nothing about caste in those days, when you
+hurried us to the shambles. You promised us---- What was it that you
+promised us?"
+
+"A kingdom round the corner," Tabs suggested. The next minute he felt
+Terry's warm little hand clinging to his own beneath the tablecloth.
+
+Braithwaite stared at Tabs to see whether he were jesting; then smiled
+in relieved friendship at this proof of comradeship from an unexpected
+quarter. "Yes, perhaps it was that--a future kindliness, where we should
+all be men together, neither free nor bond." Then again to his host,
+"You sent us out there where everything was censored. Scarcely a whisper
+of the truth reached you. The very war-correspondents were instructed to
+delete the horror and to write nothing that would disturb your calm.
+We've come back, what are left of us; we think you ought to know what
+really happened. It isn't that we take much pleasure in telling you, but
+we think that if you knew, you might be persuaded to keep at least some
+of your promises. And what do you do? You reassert your privilege to
+despise us. You stuff your fingers in your ears and talk about caste,
+and forgetting the war, and getting back to work. Sir Tobias, I'm afraid
+I'm being far too personal, but you're a sample of millions who weren't
+there. You're living in a totally altered world of whose very existence
+you're content to be unaware. Your complacency drives men like myself to
+the point of madness. We hold that you have no right to be complacent
+until the bill you put your hand to has been settled. I don't know how
+Lord Taborley feels; he's not expressed----"
+
+"Tabs feels exactly the way you do and so do I." It was Terry speaking,
+like the shrill courage of a bugle answering the slow bass of a
+trumpet-call. "We're the world that purchased victory--we three, while
+the rest of the world sat back. It was men like you two who got gassed,
+and wrenched, and tortured, and girls like myself who patched you up and
+flirted with you so that we might send you back to the Front
+cheery--girls like myself who hadn't known love, or children, or
+anything but a nursery sort of happiness. We three and people like us
+understand, because we paid the price together."
+
+"Really, Terry, I must confess there are times when you shock me." As
+Lady Beddow rose from her seat, she was the picture of disapproval. From
+the door, which the butler held open for her, she glanced back. "I think
+this discussion has gone _very_ far."
+
+As she swept out, she called across her shoulder, as one might call to a
+pet dog, "Come, Terry."
+
+
+VII
+
+But Terry did not come; she sat on tightly, just as if she were a man
+among men. Until coffee had been served and the room was free from
+servants, there was a pretense at small-talk in which Sir Tobias did not
+join. He crouched moodily in his chair, an unlighted cigar between his
+fingers, looking very old and somehow deserted. With the instinctive
+tenderness which she always showed when she knew that she had hurt,
+Terry got up and went to him. She linked her arms about his neck and
+stooped to kiss the bald-spot on his head. "Cheer up, Daddy dear; it
+isn't half as bad as it sounded. Don't you want me to light your cigar
+for you?"
+
+Tabs, to distract attention from the reconciliation, addressed the
+General. It was odd that he should feel so much sympathy for a man whom
+his letters, already beyond recall, would stir into panic in the
+morning. "Do you intend to stay in the Army, sir?"
+
+"No. But why do you ask? They're getting rid of all of us who aren't
+Regulars, no matter how brilliant our service. They're making the Army
+again a social club. I shall soon be out of uniform."
+
+"And then?" Tabs persisted.
+
+"Oh, then I shall find something else." He spoke airily, but the shadow
+which crossed his handsome face added plainly as words, "If I can find
+anything."
+
+"If it isn't impertinence," Tabs sank his voice, "may I ask what you
+intend to turn to?"
+
+The General eyed him suspiciously, wondering whether he was again about
+to lay claim to the previous embarrassing acquaintance. "I have several
+things in view," he said sketchily, "from which a man in my position
+ought to be able to choose."
+
+"Ought! But that hasn't been the story up-to-date. What of the Colonel
+you were just telling us about?" Tabs saw that another storm was
+brewing. He leant across the table and hurried on. "If the worst comes
+to the worst, I expect your old job's waiting for you. The qualities
+which have made you what you are to-day, must have been recognized and
+valued----" Terry had completed her reconciliation with her father and
+was resting her gaze upon them. Tabs altered his tone. "You put what you
+said at dinner rather strongly, sir. But I understand what you were
+driving at--it was the democracy of the front-line where courage, which
+at its best is unselfishness, was our only standard of aristocracy."
+
+Before the General could make reply, Sir Tobias had raised his
+bewildered head. "It's a thing that I for one don't want to understand.
+I don't want to go on living, if what you've said is true."
+
+Tabs turned considerately to the older man. "I think you would if you
+knew. The difference that war made to all of us who were there was that
+it taught us to judge men by their good points rather than their
+defects. It upset all our preconceived notions about society, especially
+our notions about the extreme value of race and breeding. What we
+learnt was that there's a breeding of the heart which enables a man from
+the gutter to run true to the highest form."
+
+Sir Tobias leveled his weary eyes in challenge. "Then what about Adair?"
+
+The name was out at last--the name which he had been trying to get
+uttered all evening. It didn't matter that Adair hadn't been at the war
+and had no proper place in the argument. He had wanted to break through
+his reticence due to his sense of impending family disaster. At last he
+had done it.
+
+"I think, Daddy," Terry said, "the General and I had better leave you
+and Tabs to talk alone."
+
+The next thing that Tabs saw was Terry making her escape with this other
+man. He had it in his power to settle his suspense for all time by
+saying, "One minute, Terry. You're choosing between the General and
+myself. It may help you in making your decision to know that Braithwaite
+was once----" But the coster's definition of fair-play deterred him.
+This man had been his pal in the trenches; because of that he allowed
+himself for the second time that day to be shut out from the company of
+youth. He hadn't discovered how much or how little she knew. By her
+withdrawal he was made to feel middle-aged--more nearly her father's
+contemporary than ever. Yet, as an underlying comfort to his distress,
+he had the remembered pressure of the little hand that had sought his
+own in secret friendliness.
+
+He turned to Sir Tobias. "Yes, what about Adair? Terry said that you
+wanted to consult me. If there's anything that I can say or do----"
+
+
+VIII
+
+The door was reopening. Tabs glanced back across his shoulder through
+the shadows. She was hovering just inside the threshold, hastily clad in
+her evening-wrap; beyond her in the hall the General stood fidgeting
+with his cap. Sir Tobias was sitting with his head bowed; he had not
+heard the sound of her reëntry. He spoke evidently believing that they
+two were alone. "I don't like that fellow. It's the last time he ever
+comes to my house. Whatever Terry can see in him---- And he's not good
+for Terry."
+
+She tiptoed back into the hall, pulling the door softly behind her. A
+moment later the front door closed with a bang.
+
+"What was that?" Sir Tobias looked up gnome-like and startled.
+
+Tabs guessed what it was; but because, as she had said they three had
+paid the price together, he kept her secret. "General Braithwaite,
+probably. But you were speaking of Adair?"
+
+Sir Tobias shivered, betraying his nervous tension. "A disturber," he
+said irritably, "even in his going. And yet, I suppose it's true; we
+shouldn't be sitting here comfortably to-night if it hadn't been for his
+sort."
+
+Now that it had been broached, it was anything to avoid the main topic.
+He drummed with his fingers on the table, ceased drumming and sighed
+heavily. "Yes, I was speaking of Adair. I don't understand him. I've
+grown out of touch; I don't seem to understand anybody. I'm left behind,
+somehow. People do things to-day that they never used to do. They shout
+about things from the house-tops which all my life I've mentioned only
+in whispers. Terry does; you heard what she said to-night about never
+having been loved and never having had children. The loss of
+delicacy----"
+
+"I wouldn't call it a loss of delicacy." Tabs struck a match. "I would
+call it a loss of prudishness. We all know that girls are born to be
+married and that the best of them long to have children. Why shouldn't
+they own it? You owned it long ago when you bought her dolls. The lid is
+off false reticences. I hope it stays off; we shall be a much honester
+world."
+
+"The lid's off! That's the phrase I was searching for." Sir Tobias leant
+forward confidentially. "You haven't been much in England during the
+past four years or you'd know how badly the lid is off. You men, when
+you were in the trenches, lived above yourselves; but, the moment you
+came home on leave, you taught the world that wasn't in khaki how to
+live below itself. I could tell you stories----"
+
+"I know." Tabs didn't want to hear those stories. "It was pathetic. Men
+tried to steal in a handful of hours all the passionate experiences that
+would have come to them beautifully and legitimately over forty years.
+It was like snatching from a bargain-counter things that you hadn't time
+to pay for. You were young and you were so soon to be snuffed out. The
+unthoughtful took desperately what they believed life owed them.
+They----"
+
+It was the turn of Sir Tobias to interrupt. "But so did the women--this
+Maisie woman, for instance. It was astounding--the women one would least
+have expected. All the desires we had caged through the centuries broke
+loose--caged with traditions, with public opinion and scriptural
+penalties." He was delighted with his image and went on to elaborate it.
+"They broke loose like wild animals from a menagerie. We'd always known
+they existed. Sometimes we'd paid surreptitious visits to them in
+books," the old eyes blinked cautiously, "the way one goes to the Zoo,
+to remind himself that there is a jungle somewhere. But we'd only
+regarded them as specimens; we'd never expected to meet them roaming
+about the streets loose or coming as domestic pets into our houses. Now
+the war's ended and the jungle's all about us; we can't get the animals
+back into their cages. Fellows like this General Braithwaite don't help
+matters by telling us that we oughtn't to want to get them back----"
+
+"Perhaps he's one of the animals," Tabs interpolated. "You couldn't
+expect him to want to be put back."
+
+"Perhaps he is. In fact that's what I've felt about him. That's what's
+helped me to make up my mind that he shall see no more of Terry." He
+reached out and tapped Tabs' hand, taking it for granted that he was his
+ally. "The sight's becoming far too normal--wild beasts everywhere,
+sunning themselves in impertinent freedom, as if they were house-cats.
+Nobody's shocked at it any longer. Terry isn't. Lloyd George isn't--at
+least he pretends he isn't for fear the wild beasts may lose him an
+election. No one makes a stand. It's left for private individuals like
+ourselves, to----"
+
+"To do what?"
+
+Sir Tobias lost his stride. He blinked reproachfully. "To get them back
+into their cages."
+
+For an instant Tabs nearly smiled. "And Adair--is he the first wild
+beast we tackle? Have we got to get him back into the cage of matrimony?
+Tell me about Adair."
+
+"It was no cage." Sir Tobias spoke almost resentfully. "His home was a
+kind of nest and Phyllis was the mother-bird."
+
+The butler had looked in several times to see whether he was free to
+clear away. For the first time Sir Tobias became aware of him pottering
+in the shadows. "Perhaps we'd better continue in my library."
+
+He pushed back his chair, dropped his napkin, groped after it feebly,
+then led the way solemnly across the hall. When he had seated himself
+before the fire and fortified his courage with a fresh cigar, he plunged
+headlong into the story of his son-in-law's delinquencies.
+
+
+IX
+
+"How a man who has a daughter of mine for his wife can find attraction
+in any other woman is more than I can fathom."
+
+"I agree with you there, sir." Tabs suddenly found himself carried off
+his feet and on the point of a confession. "If any man were to play
+false by Terry, I think--I think I'd brain him."
+
+Sir Tobias half-closed his eyes and regarded his guest with sleepy
+approval. "I somehow knew," he said slowly, "that that was how you
+felt." Then he opened his eyes wide and darted forward in his chair, as
+though to trace exactly the effect of his words. He was full of tricks
+and contradictions, obstinacies and tendernesses, this Punch-like old
+gentleman with the head of Shakespeare. "I knew that was how you felt,"
+he continued, "because you've seen all the love that has gone to their
+making. You were already a big fellow when they were still tiny. Wasn't
+it Terry who first called you Tabs because her tongue couldn't get round
+Taborley? Ah, I've been so proud of my girls! They were so little and
+white when they first came to us. They couldn't walk--not a step. One
+had to carry them everywhere. Then they began to crawl; they couldn't
+stand up right unless one gave them his hand. And then at last they
+walked. They walked by one's side at first and soon got tired. But as
+they grew stronger, they walked away and away, always getting more
+incomprehensible, till finally--it hasn't happened to Terry yet--till
+finally they met a man. Wait till you're a father, Lord Taborley; from
+the moment you give all that whiteness into another's keeping, you never
+cease to be jealous of him. He can never appreciate what a gift you have
+made him. He never saw her when she was little and helpless. She's your
+youth--she's everything vigorous that you were. The first time he
+affords you with a reason for hating him, you'll hate him like---- The
+way you said: so that you could brain him without compunction.
+Adair----I could cheerfully kill him."
+
+Tabs felt rather than heard the pent-up passion in his voice; it alarmed
+him with its sincerity. "But mayn't you be exaggerating?" he suggested.
+"Are you sure that Adair---- What I mean to say is, he may be only
+philandering. Heaps of men do that--go through all the motions of making
+fools of themselves and actually do nothing. He may be only expressing
+the discontent of the moment, the revolt from suspense, the flatness of
+quiet after terrible excitements. One didn't need to be a fighting-man
+to share those excitements. You say that Phyllis made a nest of her
+home. Perhaps he didn't like nests. It may be that that's done it. Adair
+can't have altered so radically over night; he wasn't forceful enough to
+erupt so disastrously. He was decent----"
+
+"I know nothing definite." The passion had died down. It was again an
+old and weary man who spoke. "I only know that she believes he's
+abandoning her and that it makes her wretched. She wants him back; if
+there's any way of getting him back, she must have him. I never denied
+anything to my girls. If money will persuade him, it's for you to find
+out how much. If this Lockwood woman has a price, let her state it. I'll
+spare nothing. Though everything else has lost its value, money still
+has the power to purchase. I can't buy back faithfulness and loyalty;
+but I should be able to buy the appearance of it. If I were you I would
+tackle this Lockwood woman first."
+
+He tossed the stub of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the
+grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He
+looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All
+women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes,
+and Lady Dawn."
+
+Tabs wondered what Lady Dawn had done to gain exemption from this
+sweeping accusation. "I'll see this Maisie Lockwood to-morrow," he said,
+"if you can tell me where she lives."
+
+Sir Tobias had risen and was seating himself at his desk. "I'll copy you
+out her address. I have it somewhere buried among these papers."
+
+He had hidden it so thoroughly that it took a few minutes to find. As he
+rustled sundry sheets and stooped over them round-shouldered, Tabs had
+time to reflect. Terry! Where was she? She was so little and unprotected
+and white. Would a day ever come when a man would play her false? At
+this moment he had it in his power to prevent that day from ever
+arriving.
+
+"Ah, here it is!" It was his host talking. Then the painful scratching
+of the pen commenced.
+
+"Sir Tobias, I want to speak to you about Terry." The scratching of the
+pen stopped, but the shoulders remained bowed. "This is an unfortunate
+night for me to choose to talk to you about her, but---- To tell the
+truth, I feel that if I don't speak to-night I may lose my chance."
+
+"What do you want to say about her?" The shoulders had unhunched
+themselves, but the head had not turned.
+
+"Only this, that I've loved her for a very long while and that if you
+don't think I'm too old, I should like your permission to ask her to
+marry me."
+
+Tabs thought to himself with a glow of satisfaction, "At last I've done
+it. And done it in just the way and at just the time that I'd always
+planned."
+
+He felt the pride of a man who had worked on schedule and been punctual
+to the second.
+
+Sir Tobias turned. His face was composed. It was some seconds before he
+spoke. "Of course this is no surprise to me. You _are_ old for her.
+You'll be fifty-five when she's scarcely forty." He paused and Tabs'
+heart sank. "You're older than her; but then you're wiser. She needs a
+husband who'll be wise." He sat leisurely as though he were resting from
+a long journey; then he stretched out his hand. Tabs went over and took
+it. "My dear fellow, there's only one thing I ask: make her always
+happy."
+
+The clock in the hall struck midnight. He lifted himself to his feet. "I
+had no idea how the time had flown. By the way, that's the address--the
+Maisie woman's."
+
+Tabs took it carelessly. It had become a thing of little consequence. He
+folded it away in his pocket. "And when shall I see Terry?" Of a sudden
+he felt that he must see her; see her and make sure of her without loss
+of time.
+
+"To-morrow, I suppose. Say about eleven."
+
+Tabs thought back. He had expected to receive a call from General
+Braithwaite about eleven, or at least to hear from him as soon as he had
+opened his morning's letters. Then he smiled to himself; when once he
+was engaged to Terry, what General Braithwaite did or did not do would
+be no longer of any importance.
+
+"Yes, about eleven, if it'll be agreeable to Terry."
+
+"There's not much doubt about its being agreeable to her."
+
+They passed out into the hall. While Tabs found his hat and coat, they
+spoke only in monosyllables. The servants had gone to bed. The house was
+intensely silent.
+
+They had got as far as the front-door and Sir Tobias already had his
+hand upon the latch, when a taxi purred up to the pavement and came to a
+halt immediately outside. "Some one stopping at the wrong house," he
+hazarded and threw the door wide. "See you again to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow."
+
+"At eleven," Sir Tobias reminded.
+
+"On the dot of eleven," Tabs confirmed.
+
+He passed into the cool night air, wistful with the fragrance of unseen
+flowers. His eyes were dazed for the moment by the sudden change of
+light. He made out the blurred silhouette of the taxi and faltered,
+thinking he might have a chance to hire it; then he saw that its shadowy
+occupants were climbing back into its deeper darkness. It seemed that
+Sir Tobias had been right; it had stopped at the wrong house.
+
+As he reached the corner where he turned, he glanced back. The taxi had
+not moved. Its occupants were again getting out--an officer and a girl.
+The girl was ringing the bell of the house that he had left, while, the
+officer was settling with the driver. As he joined her, the door opened,
+letting fall a shaft of light. There was a brief parley--evidently
+hurried explanations. Even at that distance he could recognize the
+indignant tones of Sir Tobias' angry voice. Then he heard the "Shish,
+Daddy!" from Terry. They entered. The door closed behind them. The taxi
+moved off in the opposite direction. Again there was silence--nothing
+but the fragrance of unseen flowers and the wistfulness of the cool,
+spring night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+ALL SORTS OF KINGDOMS
+
+
+I
+
+Tabs had dressed himself with more than ordinary care. He was rather
+amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little
+disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the
+strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick
+by negligence. It was nine o'clock when he sat down to breakfast; within
+two hours he would be seeing Terry.
+
+It was a gay morning, lacquered with sunshine; bustling breezes made
+young leaves of trees in the little Square murmurous. Ever since he had
+wakened he had been listening to the gossiping chirp of congregated
+sparrows and the rolling boom of tumultuous traffic. At intervals across
+the upland of roofs there had drifted to him the far-blown chime of
+bells and the slower music of clocks striking. It was like an orchestra
+scraping its chairs and tuning up before crashing into the overture of
+the happier world.
+
+Lying beside his plate as he came down he saw a single letter. It was
+addressed to him in an unfamiliar feminine hand. He picked it up and
+examined it carefully with the air of a connoisseur. So long as a
+letter remains unopened, especially when it is to a bachelor from an
+unknown woman, it retains an atmosphere of adventure. Up to a point he
+resented the intrusion. This morning his thoughts should have been so
+utterly Terry's. And yet he was piqued by it.
+
+He slit the envelope. The letter-head was embossed with a crest quite
+unknown to any but the most modern heraldry. He read:--
+
+   _Dear Lord Taborley:
+
+   I have been given to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to
+   make my acquaintance. If this is so, I shall be at home when you call
+   to-morrow afternoon. Asking your lenience for this liberty, I remain,
+
+   Yours very truly,
+
+   Maisie P. Lockwood._
+
+"To-morrow afternoon! Written yesterday! That means the afternoon of
+to-day.--And why the _P_--Maisie _P._ Lockwood? Is that for Pollock, her
+first husband?--Unusual! A rather naïve person!" Then his face went
+blank. "She must be a thought-reader! How the dickens did she guess that
+I wanted to make her acquaintance? I scarcely knew it myself at the time
+that she wrote this letter."
+
+Crushing the scented sheet in his hand, he tossed it into the empty
+grate. "My dear lady, if you can read minds so accurately at a distance,
+be assured of this: to-day I shall be too busy with Terry to have any
+time to spare on you."
+
+The door from the narrow hall partly opened. "May I come in?"
+
+At sound of her voice, he sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair. She
+made bold to look in at him. "Why, Tabs, you _are_ a late breakfaster.
+Daddy told me you were planning to see me at eleven; to save you the
+trouble, I hurried round."
+
+Like a flurry of March sunshine, Terry entered.
+
+
+II
+
+He scarcely knew how to greet her. How does one greet a girl whose
+permission he has yet to gain, whereas her father has already consented?
+Moreover, there was his last memory of her, at midnight dodging into the
+taxi to avoid him.
+
+She spared him the trouble of deciding by holding out her hand. "I know
+that you saw me. That's what I've come to talk about."
+
+Her smile as she said it was both embarrassed and frank. She looked like
+an honest youngster who had come voluntarily to confess and, if need be,
+to be spanked. Tabs noticed that her lower lip was tremulous and that
+she was whipping up her courage. His mind went back to days when she had
+really been a child and he a man--when he had bound up cut fingers for
+her, had taken her on fishing expeditions, had taught her to cast her
+first fly and, as a reward, before the nursery lights went out, had been
+allowed to see her snuggled safe in bed. Little Terry, she had been his
+tiny sister in those days whom he had loved with no thought of
+gain--just a small companion for whom he bought exciting presents
+wherever he voyaged across the world--a doll's house in China, a quirt
+in Mexico, a scarlet riding-saddle in Persia. It hurt him to see her
+afraid of him now--afraid of him because he was about to offer her the
+greatest of all presents. Was she afraid because he was too old for her?
+
+"You don't need to talk about it unless you like," he said kindly.
+"Whatever you do or have done is right."
+
+"That's not true." She wrung her hands. "Oh, Tabs, you make it so hard
+for me when you're generous. I haven't done right. I'm in a tangle. I
+don't know whether what I'll do in the future will be any better."
+
+They were still standing just as they had confronted each other when she
+had entered. Tabs glanced round the room at the used breakfast-table,
+Maisie's crumpled petition lying in the grate, the flood of sunlight and
+the tops of the heads of passers-by stealing across the pane above the
+stiff row of tulips. His eyes went back to the flower-face of this young
+girl as she stood before him, fashionably attired and battling to
+conceal the storm of her distress. The setting struck him as inadequate
+and unprivate. The hats which stole by above the row of tulips seemed to
+belong to spies. At any moment Ann might tap and request that she be
+allowed to clear the table. He believed that in the next half-hour his
+dream of the last five years was to be shattered; otherwise, if it had
+not been to spare him, why should Terry have paid him so unconventional
+a visit, at such an unconventional hour, when by every law of usage she
+should have been waiting for him to call on her?
+
+"How about upstairs?" he suggested. "In my study we shall be sure to be
+undisturbed."
+
+"No, Tabs, dear," and the little added word touched him strangely, "I've
+got to say at once what has to be said. It's like waiting at the
+dentist's--it's the waiting that's so wearing." Her face lit up with the
+ghost of a smile. "When you've faced the real pain, it's over in a
+second."
+
+She seated herself. Reluctantly he followed her example. But when she
+was seated, she found herself at a loss for words. She drew off her
+gloves, and sat there folding and refolding them. He waited for her to
+commence; the silence was unbroken, save for the laughter of children
+playing in the Square and the occasional tapping of footsteps on the
+pavement. He leant across the table and took her hand. "Terry, after all
+these years you're not afraid of me? You don't need to be. Remember what
+you've just said: it's the waiting that's so wearing; the real pain's
+over in a second. Get the real pain over; then we'll plan for the best."
+
+She looked up gratefully with eyes that were almost clear of trouble.
+"You're gentle--so different from other men. I could almost love you; I
+do love you. But not quite in the way---- You understand. I trust you
+more than any one in the world."
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+"Ah, why?" she echoed. "That's what I wish you could tell me. Why should
+I be able to offer more to--to some one else whom I trust less? So much
+less?"
+
+"But is that love, Terry? Isn't it infatuation? Could you keep on
+offering? Loving means marrying and marrying means being together
+without respite."
+
+"I know," she nodded wisely. "I know all that. I know it so well that I
+don't want to marry him or anybody--at least, not yet."
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+She took his other hand in hers, clinging to it as if she were drowning.
+"That's the second time you've asked me why. I'll tell you. Because if I
+don't say 'Yes,' I shall lose him. Even though I may not want him
+forever, I can't bear to lose him for now. You must know the
+feeling--you who are in love. And that's why," her voice choked with the
+tears that she kept back from her eyes, "that's why I promised him last
+night."
+
+"Last night!" Tabs spoke slowly, trying to bring the finality home to
+himself.
+
+"Last night," she repeated; "the night that should have been yours. The
+night I had promised to you for years." Then, in a flame of
+self-derision, "Why don't you let go my hands and hate me, now that you
+know how treacherous I am?"
+
+"You're not treacherous." He smoothed the slim fingers as though he were
+coaxing a child. "You mustn't be unjust to yourself. When we're in love
+we're all apt to be unjust; I was yesterday, to this man. Injustice,
+whether to oneself or to some one else, works most of our mischief; one
+never knows where it ends. We can't control our hearts, Terry; you've
+tried. You've tried to make your heart love me and it's refused. Don't
+be miserable because of it; you couldn't help that. And this man--he's a
+fine fellow. I always knew he was a fine fellow, until seeing him with
+you yesterday made me jealous and blinded my eyes. He's a finer fellow
+than ever now. You couldn't love him if he weren't."
+
+She wasn't giving him the enthusiastic attention that his praise
+deserved. Somewhere at the back of her mind there lay a doubt with which
+she wrestled while he strove to comfort her. He believed that he had
+guessed her doubt. "As for not trusting him the way you trust me," he
+explained, "that's natural. We know the whole of each other's lives; our
+families are the same kind of families and we share the same kind of
+friends. Whereas----"
+
+"Whereas," she broke in, "I know nothing about his past, where he lived,
+who his people were or anything. I know nothing that he enjoyed or
+laughed at before I saw him lying quietly in our hospital-ward in
+France. I've questioned him as much as I dared; but always he grows
+vague. There's something that he's hiding from me. I only gathered that
+he had known you from the way he pricked up and listened whenever your
+name was mentioned. That was why, without warning either of you,
+I----You see, I had to find out. And then, when he met you face to face
+he--he lied."
+
+"Hush, Terry."
+
+"But he did. He lied."
+
+She had withdrawn her hands from his and sat back eyeing him with a
+clear look of challenge. Tabs was at a loss to explain her change of
+attitude. Yesterday she had been all for defending this man. What did
+she gain by accusing him now that she was engaged to him? In any case
+she had employed too ugly a word. And here was a strange state of
+affairs, that it should be left to him to defend his successful rival.
+
+"A man is not compelled to know another man unless he likes," he said
+cautiously. "They may have met some time in the past under unfortunate
+circumstances--circumstances which are embarrassing to remember. The man
+to whom that memory is a disadvantage has a right to protect himself by
+sweeping it clean from his mind."
+
+"But not to lie about it to the girl he says he loves," she declared.
+"There can be only one motive for such a denial: that it covers up
+something which is dishonorable."
+
+"But there never was anything dishonorable. That I swear."
+
+"Then he believes that I would think it dishonorable," she insisted;
+"which means that he doesn't trust me. That's the reason I can't trust
+him in return. If we don't trust each other now, how can we hope that
+things would be better if we married?"
+
+Her logic was unanswerable, but she was arguing on the wrong side. At
+what was she driving? He gave it up. Was she wanting him to tell her
+where and when he and her future husband had met? The eagerness of her
+silence seemed to demand as much. But there are rules to every game. No
+pressure that she could bring to bear could make him tell her that. She
+recognized those rules by refraining from putting her request into
+words.
+
+It was he who broke the silence. His tones were puzzled. "You come to me
+on the morning that I had hoped to be engaged to you myself and you
+confide all these secrets about this other man. You insist that neither
+of you trusts the other and that you could find no happiness in
+marriage. Then why, in heaven's name, Terry, did you pledge yourself to
+him last night?"
+
+"The fear of losing him----" Her face quivered pitifully. She was on the
+verge of weeping. "He overheard what Daddy said about forbidding him the
+house. It seemed our last time together. I couldn't bear that it should
+be the last. It was to keep him near me for just a little longer that
+I----"
+
+Tabs rose and limped to the window. He dared not let himself go, the way
+his instincts urged. They might carry him too far. She looked so much
+like the little girl in short skirts he had known, as she sat there
+bravely trying not to cry. He wanted to take her on his knees, as in the
+old days. Now that she loved another man, he was not allowed to show her
+comfort in that way any longer. That she should run to him for help and
+yet love some one else, wounded his pride. What was the matter with him
+that he had failed to stir her passion? Why could he appeal only to her
+helplessness?
+
+Inside the communal garden, with its surrounding railings and locked
+gates, nurses in uniforms were pushing prams. Toddlers were tossing a
+ball across the lawn and tottering after it with excited shouts. Beneath
+a tree in the clear sunshine a young mother sat sewing. Other men's
+women! Other men's babies! He would have to set out in search of his
+kingdom afresh; all his old quests had been mistaken. But he was older
+now and lame; he lacked the energy for a new journey. It seemed to him
+that he would be alone and unwanted always.
+
+A telegraph-girl was mounting the steps. He heard the bell ring without
+interest. Gazing out, with his back towards Terry, he put to her what he
+intended should be his final question. "You promised him last
+night--then why did you hurry round to me this morning?"
+
+Her dress rustled and her breathing quickened. "Because----" she
+commenced and failed. He did not turn his head. She tried again in a
+lower voice, "Because I want you to get my promise back."
+
+He swung round and crossed to where she was still sitting. With his
+hands resting lightly on her shoulders, he stared down at her golden
+head. "But, Terry dear, why? Look at me. You must tell me."
+
+She did not look at him. "I'm frightened. Nobody knows as yet; so before
+they know---- Oh, Tabs, you're so clever; you can do anything." And then
+she repeated whimperingly, like a child over a broken toy, "I want you
+to get my promise back."
+
+"Listen to me, Terry dearest," he spoke coaxingly, "don't be a baby.
+What is it that you're asking me to do? Is it to see him for you and to
+break the news that you've altered your mind over night. You know he'll
+want reasons. What shall I tell----?"
+
+She lifted her head, stretching back her throat so that all her face
+looked up at him. "If you'll still have me----" His hands on her
+shoulders tightened. "Say that you still want me, Tabs." For answer his
+head slowly nodded, but his eyes never left her eyes. "Tell him that I'm
+engaged to you, instead."
+
+In the tumult of surprised desire he bent over her, but he got no
+further, for a tap fell on the panel of the door and the handle turned.
+He drew himself upright quickly and stepped back aloofly. "What is it?"
+
+"A telegram, your Lordship." Ann entered. "I told the girl to wait in
+case there was an answer."
+
+He tore it open, glanced through it and handed it to Terry. To Ann he
+said, "There won't be any answer."
+
+Terry read, "_Shall be delighted to have you lunch with me to-day Savoy
+Hotel one o'clock. Braithwaite._" She examined the address and looked up
+startled, "But it's to you. It's--it's as though he knew we were
+together. What made him send it?"
+
+When Tabs answered there was no echo of her excitement in his voice. "I
+wrote him yesterday asking him to call here. Evidently he preferred a
+more public place."
+
+She glanced at him shrewdly. "Why did you write him? You must have done
+that between leaving me and coming to our house to dine. I know it's no
+good my asking you." Her last words were more of a question than an
+assertion. "I can see that it's no good my asking you." "No, Terry, it's
+no good. Braithwaite's past is his own secret. But I can pledge you my
+word that it bears no stain."
+
+"Then why shouldn't he----?" She changed her question. "Shall you meet
+him to-day at lunch?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Shall you tell him what we've----?"
+
+"Not all of it, Terry."
+
+"Why not all of it? Which part are you going to leave out?"
+
+He came again to where she sat and stood gazing down on her. "Terry, why
+do you want me to tell him? Why can't you tell him yourself? It would be
+kinder."
+
+"Because---- Oh, Tabs, you do want me, don't you? Because I daren't
+trust myself to see him."
+
+"And so you want me to tell him we're engaged because you daren't trust
+yourself to tell him! Isn't that it?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And you daren't trust yourself to tell him because the moment you saw
+him you would fall again under his spell?"
+
+This time she didn't nod, but her eyes gave assent.
+
+"And what does that mean, little Terry? Whether you call it love or
+fascination, it means that even though you do not see him, your heart is
+his at present. It means that against your will he's infinitely more to
+you than I am. It means that you only ask me to become engaged to you
+in order that you may be strong to break his spell. It doesn't mean that
+I will be anything more to you to-morrow than I was last night, when you
+gave him your pledge."
+
+She tried to speak, but he halted her words. "I'm older than you are.
+Have you thought of that? I'm not the man I was; I'm lame. You can like
+me as a friend and believe me indispensable; but, if I were your
+husband, fifteen years from now when you're only the age I am
+to-day----Have you considered that? My dear, I love you so well, that
+I'll never let you tie yourself to me, till you're as certain that you
+can't risk meeting me without loving me as you're certain at this moment
+that you daren't risk meeting this other man. When you can do that----"
+
+The tenderness in his eyes hurt her. "Directly I can do that, I'll tell
+you, Tabs. And--and I believe I could almost tell you now."
+
+"If you can now," he said, "there's a test. Will you take my place at
+lunch and tell Braithwaite?"
+
+She shrank, and tried to smile, and shook her head.
+
+"Then it'll be I who'll have to do it." He tried to assume a cheerful
+manner. "But I can't give him your reason about being engaged to me. If
+it were true, which it isn't, it wouldn't be generous. If I carry any
+message, the only honorable thing for me to do is to inform him of
+everything."
+
+"Of everything?" she questioned.
+
+"Yes, of everything. I must tell him where the trouble lies and give
+him his chance to be frank with you. Only when that is done, shall I be
+free to do my utmost to win you for myself."
+
+She took his hands and drew herself up to him. "Do what you like, Tabs.
+As long as I know that I've not lost you," her voice became small and
+almost happy, "I'm content."
+
+She was tiptoeing against him. The next thing he knew he was kissing her
+warm red mouth.
+
+
+III
+
+She was gone. He had watched her from the steps until she had reached
+the end of the Square where the swirl of passing traffic had engulfed
+her. At the last moment she had looked back and smiled. For some minutes
+after she had vanished, he had stood there recalling the way in which
+her brave little figure had tripped out of sight among the blustering
+March sunshine and shadows. A child, he thought, impulsive and lacking
+in perspective, with a child's alacrity for drying its tears and
+believing in a future happiness. How would she regard this morning years
+hence in the after-glow of experience? Would she find nothing in its
+calamities but foolishness? And what relation would he himself bear to
+her when she had arrived at that stoical calm?
+
+He reëntered the house. In the room where they had been together the
+fragrance of her presence still lingered. The chair was pushed back,
+just as she had risen from it to lift her warm, red lips to his. How
+smooth they were! Again like a child's! Everything about her was young
+and undeveloped. She had kissed simply and gratefully, with none of the
+blundering, sweet surrender with which a woman clings to her lover. If
+she had ever kissed Braithwaite, she had not kissed him like that.
+
+And then Tabs was overcome with a reluctant remorse, which was tinged
+with a shameful sense of triumph. She had offered him her lips in
+gratitude; they had kindled in him the flames of passion. For the moment
+he had devoured her with kisses--her eyes, lips, cheeks and hair.
+
+If he were to keep himself in hand, he must fill his days with
+interests--_new_ interests. He must move among people and normalize
+himself. He must fight against the melancholy of his obsession. His eyes
+chanced to rest on the crumpled sheet of scented note-paper tossed into
+the empty grate. Stooping, he picked it up and smoothed it out. This
+problem of Maisie would at least divert him--besides, he had promised to
+do what he could for Adair. He noted the Chelsea address and reread the
+contents with its sly humility and hint of coquetry: "I have been given
+to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to make my acquaintance.
+If this is so, I shall be at home when you call to-morrow afternoon."
+
+She had been quite certain that he would call when she wrote those
+words. They had all the assurance of one who was fully persuaded of her
+own powers of charm and beauty.
+
+"Again, Maisie P.," he apostrophized her, "I'm bound to acknowledge that
+you know more about me than I know about myself. I didn't know that I
+wanted to make your acquaintance at the time when you were writing this
+letter. I was quite sure that I wasn't going to call upon you when I
+read it. In both cases you were the better informed, for I shall be with
+you as soon as I've fulfilled my Savoy engagement."
+
+An hour later, as he was on his way out, he found Ann waiting for him at
+the foot of the stairs.
+
+"I don't want to bother your Lordship."
+
+"You're not bothering me. What is it?"
+
+"I've been thinking that if I wrote the particulars down myself----"
+
+"The particulars! What particulars?"
+
+"About Braithwaite, sir. There were things you wouldn't know or might
+leave out. So I thought that if I stated my case myself, it might make
+things more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War Office."
+
+"It might. Are those the particulars you have in your hand?"
+
+"Yes, sir. But they're kind of private. I shouldn't like them to be read
+by just anybody. That's why---- Perhaps, if your Lordship was seeing
+your friend----"
+
+"As it happens," Tabs spoke with a careless air, "I shall be lunching
+with him to-day. I can deliver your letter direct."
+
+"Your Lordship is very kind."
+
+"Not in the least, Ann. And remember, whatever happens, that Braithwaite
+was brave and he'd expect you to be brave. If you're not---- D'you know
+what you'll do? Whether he's alive or dead, you'll let him down."
+
+Her head lifted proudly, despite the tears in her eyes. "No fear of
+that, sir. I'll never let my man down."
+
+"That's the way to talk. And don't worry too much. You know the saying
+about night always being blackest at the hour before the dawn? If we'd
+only all believe that and cheer up----"
+
+He let himself out. As he walked down the Square he tried to stroll
+jauntily; probably Ann was watching.
+
+"I could do worse than live up to that advice myself," he thought. Then,
+"And so I will, by the Lord Harry."
+
+
+IV
+
+As he passed through the doors into the Savoy, he consulted his watch;
+he was five minutes late. He halted in the middle of the foyer, gazing
+round. There was the usual collection of officers on leave or out of
+hospital, British, Overseas, American, all of them out for a good time
+and debonair. There were the usual rows of expectant girls, wondering
+whether their men had forgotten the appointment or whether the fault was
+theirs in mistaking the place of rendezvous. Here and there through the
+crowd worried and assertive literary individuals wandered, searching for
+invariably unpunctual publishers. As though Time pressed behind them
+with his scythe, hatchet-faced journalists from Fleet Street were making
+a bee-line for the restaurant. In contrast to this perfervid haste,
+self-possessed young queens of the footlights lolled with their
+admirers, importantly believing they were recognized. All the medley of
+London as it used to be, is and will be again, was there; but nowhere
+could Tabs descry a General's uniform.
+
+He went to the desk to enquire whether there was any message for him. At
+mention of the General his enquiry was received with marked respect.
+Yes, General Braithwaite lived there. No message had been left, but he
+might be in his room. While they were telephoning and he was waiting,
+Tabs remembered and smiled at remembering. Under quite other
+circumstances, on a former occasion, he and Braithwaite had stayed there
+together. The clerk interrupted his reflections. "The General's not in
+his room---- Ah, here he comes, your Lordship."
+
+Tabs turned quickly and looked in vain at first. He did not become aware
+of his host till he was standing almost at his elbow. Then he held out
+his hand, "How are you, General? You must pardon me for not having
+picked you out at once. Like all of us, you look different in mufti."
+
+"More like the old Braithwaite your Lordship used to know?" The General
+smiled. "Well, I have to thank that experience for this at least--that I
+know where to find the proper tailors. How about lunch? Are you ready?"
+
+Against a window looking out on the Embankment, one of the best tables
+had been reserved--a further proof of the new esteem in which
+Braithwaite was held. The head-waiter hurried up immediately to advise
+what he should eat and passed on his orders to subordinates with as much
+solemnity as if they had been the details for an offensive. "Yes, my
+General." "No, my General." When everything had been chosen and there
+was nothing to do but wait for the first dish to be served, Braithwaite
+leaned across to Tabs, "Your Lordship is amused. I don't blame you."
+
+Tabs drew out his case and offered him a cigarette. "I'll make a bargain
+with you, sir. Let's cut out the unfriendly formalities. I'll call you
+Braithwaite if you'll call me Taborley."
+
+The General blew a puff of smoke into the air and watched it disappear
+before he answered. In civilian clothes he bore a more distinct
+resemblance to the man he had been; and yet the resemblance only served
+to emphasize the change that had taken place in him. The old Braithwaite
+had been a slight-built, gentle creature, loyal to the point of
+self-effacement, soft-spoken and dependent on the appreciation of a
+master for his happiness. The new Braithwaite both in body and character
+had hardened. His gray eyes had concentrated into command. His
+clean-shaven cheeks and small military mustache gave him an expression
+which was tolerantly ironic. The moment you saw him, you knew beyond
+question that he was ruthlessly aware of what he wanted out of life. He
+was a sword which had lain hidden in its scabbard and was now withdrawn,
+glistening, intimidating and fiercely pointed.
+
+Tabs compared his forceful appearance with his own, where in a mirror
+their reflections sat facing each other. There was little to choose
+between them in outward gentility, despite the immense disparity of
+their chances. There was no fault to find; everything about Braithwaite
+bespoke confidence and refinement--his neatly brushed chestnut hair, his
+well-cut gray tweeds, his black, woven tie with the horse-shoe scarf-pin
+of diamonds, his fine white teeth, his trim mustache. He looked a man of
+iron will and unswerving decision, destined from birth to take control
+of crises and to shoulder responsibilities. As a last humanizing touch,
+there was a hint of cavalier devilment about him, of the gambler who was
+also a sportsman.
+
+The puff of smoke had faded. The General's eyes came back with a twinkle
+to his guest. "You're right. Between us this 'Your Lordship and General'
+business would grow tiresome. I never thought the day would come when
+I'd call you Taborley, however. As for myself, plain Braithwaite's a
+little reminiscent---- Still, we'll consider that part of our compact
+settled. And now, what?"
+
+"Do we need to hurry matters?" Tabs questioned. "This isn't a military
+court of enquiry. It wasn't my idea to meet you as though we were
+maintaining an armed neutrality. We----"
+
+"But aren't we?" Braithwaite interposed with an air of amused
+good-humor. Then he lowered his voice, "When you parted from me I was
+your valet. You didn't hear from me for the best part of four years and
+believed me dead. You came back to find that I was your superior officer
+and had tangled things up for you pretty badly. You've threatened me
+with your knowledge of a previous love-affair and you have it in your
+power to tangle up my future in return. Under the circumstances what
+else is possible but an armed neutrality?"
+
+"Let me state the case from another and, I think, a juster angle." Tabs
+paused to knock the ash from his cigarette. "Before the war you were my
+valet whom I had always treated as my friend. I believe at that time, if
+it had come to the show down, you were the man who was closest to my
+affections and whom I trusted most in all the world. I'm trying to speak
+soberly, Braithwaite, without any color of exaggeration. We'd been in
+many tight corners together--perhaps the tightest was when they tried to
+execute us in Mexico. Anyway, we'd always played the game by each other.
+In 1914 we both joined in the ranks; in 1918 you finished up as a
+General, while I was a first lieutenant. There's only one way to account
+for that: up to 1914 you'd never had your chance; when your chance came,
+you proved yourself the better man. In a way, though it's difficult for
+me to confess it, I can understand and sympathize with Terry's
+preference. Women admire bravery and merit. Ann and I admired them in
+you; we knew they were there before the war made them public."
+
+He took a breath while he watched what effect the mention of Ann's name
+had had. The General's expression from being interested and generous had
+grown suddenly obstinate and set. Tabs hurried on. "So I can understand
+Terry's preference. And yet, as you've owned, despite your advantages, I
+hold the winning card. I can joker all your aces by telling--well, the
+things to which you have referred." He leant forward across the table.
+"I don't want to have to tell. To do that I should have to make myself
+still more inferior to you than you have proved me to be in the hardest
+of all tests. There's only one occasion that would compel----"
+
+"And that?" the General enquired coldly.
+
+Before Tabs could answer, a Major in the Guards who was passing had
+halted. "Hullo, sir!" he exclaimed, addressing Braithwaite. "I was
+intending to hunt you up. I've heard a rumor about your transferring to
+the Regulars. Why don't you have a shot at my outfit?"
+
+Braithwaite introduced Lord Taborley perfunctorily, then returned to his
+friend's question. "A shot at your outfit! It's too expensive. I've got
+to make money. Besides, to become a Regular I'd have to sink my rank and
+live on my pay at that. I can't afford it. To tell the truth, I'm
+already out of the Army. I handed over the keys of my desk at the War
+Office this morning. That phase is ended."
+
+"You did! Well, if you've got something better----" The Guardsman nodded
+assent to a signaled question from a companion at another table. "Don't
+lose touch with your old set, sir," he added cheerfully as he moved
+away. "Send us the map-location of your next dug-out."
+
+The lunch arrived. Dishes were obsequiously offered for inspection and
+approval. While the meal was being served, there was no opportunity for
+private conversation. Tabs was pondering one fact which he had
+overheard. "So, he, too, was demobbed yesterday! That's why he took his
+last chance to become engaged. The glamour of a uniform---- And to-day
+he's back where he started. Poor chap!"
+
+The over-zealous waiter had at last moved out of range. Braithwaite
+lifted up his dagger gaze. "And what is that occasion--the one occasion
+which would compel you to publish my past? Perhaps I can save you the
+trouble of putting it into words. You mean if I dared to become engaged
+to Terry Beddow? I am engaged to her. I dared last night; so I must
+leave you to do your worst."
+
+He smiled with quiet triumph; gradually his smile faded into puzzlement.
+"You don't seem surprised."
+
+"I'm not," said Tabs. "Why should I be? I myself supposed, that I was
+engaged to her last night."
+
+It was Braithwaite who showed amazement. "You! Last night!"
+
+"Yes, I, last night."
+
+Braithwaite set down his knife and fork. The bleak look came into his
+eyes that had given him the nickname at the Front of "Steely Jack." He
+was silent for a full five seconds; then he said, "Lord Taborley, you're
+a man of your word, but I find it difficult to believe that."
+
+Tabs' voice was both quiet and kindly when he replied, "You'll find it
+difficult to believe a good many things before I've ended. Evidently
+Terry never told you that for over four years she and I had had an
+understanding that, when peace came, if I survived, we would be married.
+Last night, while you were proposing to her, I was asking her father's
+consent. While I was gaining his consent, you were being accepted."
+
+The blank look of astonishment which had overspread the General's face,
+quickly gave way to one of generous compassion. "On my word of honor,
+Lord Taborley, I never knew that. I thought--please forgive me--that you
+were interfering merely out of snobbishness. I ought to have known
+better. All my dealings with you should have---- I begin to understand."
+
+Tabs' old sense of friendship for the man--his man--was coming back.
+"You begin," he said, "but you don't fully understand. You and I have to
+come down to earth. Not unnaturally up till now you've chosen to treat
+me as an enemy. Perhaps I was when I sent you those two letters
+yesterday. But I'm not now. I, too, am learning. There was a coster who
+let me off arrest. Did I tell you about him? I forget. The reason he
+gave taught me a lot, 'You and me was pals out there.' And you and I
+were pals out there, Braithwaite--not master and man or junior and
+senior officer. It would be a burning shame if, now that the war's
+ended, we should fall to squabbling among ourselves."
+
+"And yet the fact remains," said Braithwaite, "that I, who used to be
+your servant, have cut you out of Terry. How are we going to remain pals
+in a case like that?"
+
+Tabs flinched at the bluntness of the words, "cut you out of Terry." For
+a moment he felt inclined to say right out, "You're mistaken. She's sent
+me to get her promise back." Instead he said, "How are we going to
+remain pals! That's what I'm here to talk about. I've made up my mind
+how I'm going to act. It's about you that I'm concerned. I'm jealous for
+you, Braithwaite. I'm proud of the fact that, whatever you are to-day,
+you were once my man--my man in the old clan sense. I want to see you
+carry yourself as bravely in your new fight as you did in the one that's
+ended. I think of the two this peace fight will be the more difficult
+test, especially for men like yourself. I lost caste during the war,
+while for you it proved a social opportunity. Now that we're back at
+peace, the process is likely to be reversed. The qualities which gave
+you high rank in a world at war won't fetch the same market value.
+You'll have to fight afresh--only this time it'll be against the
+temptation to sink below your own high standards through bitterness. In
+a General's uniform you could go anywhere. It was your passport. No one
+made enquiries. Once you're demobilized, the world asks for other
+credentials--credentials as to your profession, bank-account, friends,
+birth. What I'm trying to say is this: there's nothing dishonorable in
+your past save your own assumption that it was dishonorable. And I want
+to assure you that it isn't my purpose to drag you down. I couldn't.
+There's only one man who can do that--yourself. But _you_ can drag
+yourself below anything that you were if you go on refusing to play
+fair."
+
+Braithwaite's face went white beneath its tan. He fell to stroking his
+mustache. "You take a lot upon yourself. It's the first time that I've
+ever been accused of not playing fair."
+
+"But _I_ accuse you of it." Tabs spoke with an equal quietness. To any
+one watching they would have appeared to be two handsome men of the
+soldier type engaged in desultory conversation. "I have to accuse you of
+it. I want you to glance through this before you answer me."
+
+He drew from his pocket and passed across the letter which Ann had given
+him that morning--the letter which, to quote her words, "Might make
+things seem more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War
+Office." It was unaddressed, but as Braithwaite's eye fell on the
+sprawling handwriting of the contents, the deep flush which crept across
+his face betrayed the fact that it was recognized. He commenced to read
+the sheet with a studied carelessness; as he proceeded, the carelessness
+gave way to a troubled frown. For some time after he had finished, he
+sat motionless. When he looked up, his mood was contemptuous. "So this
+is your price?"
+
+"No price was mentioned."
+
+"But it was implied. You tell me that, at the time that I was being
+accepted, you yourself were hoping to be engaged to Miss Beddow; then
+you hand me this letter. What do you suppose I infer? What would any man
+infer? That your promise to keep my existence a secret from Ann is
+conditional on the breaking of my engagement with Miss Beddow."
+
+"Handing you Ann's letter wouldn't do that. Your engagement with Miss
+Beddow is already broken."
+
+Braithwaite jerked his chair back and stared. Then the audacity of such
+an assertion touched his sense of humor. He fell to laughing. "That at
+least is an invention."
+
+Tabs showed no resentment. There was something disturbingly convincing
+about his self-possession. "Didn't I tell you," he asked patiently,
+"that you'd find it difficult to believe a good many things before I had
+ended? I had an appointment to see Miss Beddow at her father's house
+this morning at eleven. Before I'd finished breakfast she was visiting
+me instead. She had called to make two requests: that I would see you
+to-day and get her promise back, and that I'd become engaged to her
+myself."
+
+Braithwaite lurched forward, folding his arms on the table. His voice
+was thick with passion when he spoke. "What you tell me sounds mad; but
+you'd gain nothing by telling it if it were not true."
+
+"Nothing," Tabs confirmed.
+
+"No, nothing. If it weren't true, I could go to the telephone and
+disprove your falsehood inside of ten minutes."
+
+"You could."
+
+"Then it is true--which means that you've ousted me. And that's why you
+can afford to be so calm and Christ-like. I've been wondering how you'd
+contrived this Galilean display of charity."
+
+"You've not heard me out." Tabs still spoke with friendliness. "While we
+were together your telegram arrived and I agreed to be the bearer of her
+message. But as for her second request, that I should become engaged to
+her, I refused that point-blank."
+
+"You what?" The anger cleared from Braithwaite's face, leaving the
+chalky mask of a tragic harlequin. When he spoke again it was humbly.
+"You can't blame me for not believing you. You jump about. You say
+several things which seem to point to a definite conclusion and then at
+the last moment you change it. I don't know whether you do it to amuse
+yourself at my expense or whether it's merely the way your mind works.
+At any rate, it's cruel--this cat and mouse game. I wish you'd be
+direct."
+
+"That's what I wish to be. You could help me if you'd ask questions."
+
+Braithwaite sighed, wearied beyond endurance. He was becoming less like
+the General and more like the old dependent Braithwaite every second.
+"You wanted to marry her last night, only to find she'd promised herself
+to me already. Then she comes to you this morning, offering herself, and
+you refuse her. That doesn't make sense. Why did you refuse her?"
+
+"Because if I'd taken her at her word, I shouldn't have been playing
+fair."
+
+At the recurrence of that phrase "playing fair," a momentary annoyance
+crept into Braithwaite's eyes. "I've always heard," he commenced, "that
+in love and war----"
+
+"Everything's fair," Tabs ended his quotation. "Well, in this case, it
+isn't. It was because she realized, after she'd promised herself to you,
+that in love everything isn't fair, that she asked me to get her promise
+back."
+
+"You mean as regards yourself? She'd begun to feel that she wasn't
+treating you handsomely?"
+
+"I don't mean as regards myself. You were the cause of her change of
+mind."
+
+"I!" Braithwaite's bewilderment made him hostile. "How could I have
+caused her to change her mind? I parted with her after midnight; it must
+have been shortly after nine that she was seeing you. I held no
+communication with her in any shape or form during the eight or nine
+hours that elapsed."
+
+"Nevertheless, you were the cause. She realized in the meanwhile that in
+love everything isn't fair. It isn't fair to ignore a young girl's
+happiness in order to win her hand. You had done that; though she has no
+proofs, instinctively she feels it."
+
+Braithwaite shook his head and thrust himself back with the gesture of a
+man whose patience is completely at an end. "I haven't the vaguest idea
+what you're hinting at."
+
+"Then I'll be brutally explicit. You've at no time told her who you were
+or where you came from before you made a name for yourself. You've
+evaded all her questions. You told a palpable falsehood in her presence
+when you insisted that you had never known me. You're perfectly aware
+that, if you approached her father, all the facts about your past, which
+you're suppressing, would most certainly come out. Your courting has
+been clandestine, behind the back of her family. It seems perfectly
+obvious that you're trying to lure her into a runaway match. She has
+grounds for believing that you do not trust her and, because of that,
+although you fascinate her, she finds it impossible to trust you in
+return. She trusts you so little that she did not dare to risk facing
+you and sent me in her stead. She's so sure that a marriage with you
+would be unfortunate that, in order to save herself from it, she's
+willing to become engaged to me, whom she loves only as a friend. You'll
+wonder why I tell you all this. It's because I want her to be happy. If
+you really are the man for her, she must have you. But you'll never have
+the remotest chance of winning her unless you make a clean breast----"
+
+"If I did my chances would be at an end."
+
+"If you believe that," Tabs sought for the most lenient words, "you know
+what you're doing. You'd despise to cheat at cards, but you don't mind
+cheating the woman whom you profess to love best.--And then there's
+Ann."
+
+"I'd rather not discuss Ann." The abrupt pain in Braithwaite's tone
+betrayed the grumbling ache of an old wound. "I think even you will
+grant that there are some things in a man's heart which are privately
+sacred. Ann lies entirely outside the bounds of all justifiable
+interference on your part."
+
+It took an effort for Tabs to bring himself to break down the barrier of
+reticence which this depth of feeling had imposed. "I'm sorry, General,
+but I can't agree with you." He waited for the expected protest. When it
+did not come, he carried on reluctantly, "I have a high regard for Ann.
+She's one of my household and that makes me responsible for her to an
+extent. I can't allow her to be tortured any longer with suspense--she's
+had more than three years of this horrid nightmare, hovering between
+hope and dread. Every day of the three years has been unnecessary.
+Whether you break or keep your promise to her is your concern. Whether
+she takes action against you when she knows the truth, is hers. But she
+has the right to know. To see that she knows comes within the bounds of
+any decent man's justifiable interference. One of us must tell her; the
+news would come with less grace from myself. But for you to wriggle out
+of your dilemma with silence, while she goes on breaking her heart, is
+cowardly--just as cowardly as if you'd deserted in the face of the
+enemy. I've no doubt you've sentenced more than one poor wretch to be
+shot at sunrise for doing that."
+
+Tabs pulled out his watch. He had said everything. So far as he was
+concerned the conversation was at an end. It was nearly three o'clock.
+Time had traveled quickly. He was surprised at the lateness of the hour.
+Now that his intentness was relaxed, he let his gaze wander. The room
+was nearly empty. Most of the gay little ladies who had chattered across
+the tables to their recently recovered lovers or husbands, had tripped
+away to continue their spree of celebration at a matinée or in an orgy
+of shopping. Those who were left were putting on their wraps or sipping
+the last of their coffee under the reproachful eyes of waiters. Across
+the window in a brown-gray streak flowed the wind-flecked highway of the
+Thames.
+
+Braithwaite beckoned for his bill. After the humiliation of what had
+been said it irked Tabs to have to see him pay it. The trend of the
+conversation had helped to strip him of the arrogance of his military
+honors. The mercenary subserviency of the man who handed him his
+account, seemed to arouse him to the landslide that had taken place in
+his self-esteem. He made a conscious effort to pull himself together.
+While he waited for his change, he broke the silence.
+
+"I believe you meant well by coming here. It would be foolish for me to
+pretend that I'm altogether grateful--grateful for your way of
+expressing most of the things that we've discussed together. At the same
+time, Lord Taborley, I owe you an apology if at any point I've misjudged
+your intentions. As regards Ann, you err in justice when you hold me
+accountable for all the causes of her tragedy. Both she and I, and Miss
+Beddow for the matter of that, are the victims of circumstances. It's
+scarcely my fault that I've outgrown Ann; I'm no more to blame for that
+than Terry is for having fallen in love with a man who was your servant.
+_I_ didn't make the war. _I_ didn't promote myself from a valet to a
+General. _I_ didn't even consciously allure Terry. She fascinates me as
+much as I fascinate her: I fought against her fascination at first.--But
+to get back to Ann, I let her slip out of my life because I wanted to
+spare her. I thought it would be easier for her to believe me dead than
+to be told that she was--was discarded. I couldn't be expected to
+foresee that she would display this awkward loyalty of hoping. I didn't
+know what had happened to her. She's a good-looking girl; I'd pictured
+her as married to a man of her own class, until you flung this
+bombshell at me. I'm not callous. Don't misapprehend me. I can still
+think of her with tenderness. But as for ever treating her again as my
+equal---- It would be as impossible for me to resume the old relations
+with her as it would be for your Lordship to commence them." He waited
+for some word of criticism or encouragement. When Tabs only nodded
+non-committally, he proceeded more slowly. "I don't know what I'm going
+to do. I'm fully aware, now that the war is ended, that as a has-been
+General who rose from the ranks, I have no marketable value. I have no
+specialized training to offer to a commercial world which calls for
+experts. The only knowledge that I have to sell is the old knowledge
+that you used to purchase. My house of cards has collapsed. To be
+unwisely frank, my financial resources are limited to little more than
+my war-gratuity."
+
+"And yet you're anxious to marry Terry," Tabs suggested; "to marry her
+without letting her know about any of these handicaps of which she would
+have to share the penalty."
+
+Braithwaite's head went up with a soldierly jerk. The bleak look came
+into his eyes. He was "Steely Jack" at that moment. "I have the
+confidence to believe," he said proudly, "that I shall go as far in
+peace as I did in war. Never to own that you're beaten, never to squeal
+when you're hurt, never to retreat from a position when once it has been
+captured must count back here for as much as it did out there. In France
+I had the reputation for never losing an inch of trench. I don't intend
+to lose an inch of trench now. My back is to the wall. For the present
+I can't afford to do anything gratuitously charitable; by the smallest
+waste of energy I may defeat myself. To hold any correspondence with Ann
+at this moment might mean the slamming in my own face of every door of
+opportunity. I'll do my stretcher-bearing when I've won; not a second
+before."
+
+Against his will, while he listened, the unscrupulous valor of the man
+stirred Tabs to admiration. Only the after-event could prove whether
+this verbal display of fireworks was only bombast. "And so that's your
+ultimatum?" he asked with disquieting sanity.
+
+"Yes, if that's what you call it."
+
+The waiter had returned with the receipted bill. Braithwaite was picking
+up the change. Not looking at Tabs he said, "A few minutes ago you were
+consulting your watch. I believe you have an engagement."
+
+"I have. But if we can arrive at any more definite conclusion by talking
+longer, I'll skip it. It's of no importance."
+
+Braithwaite glanced up. "Not to you, perhaps; but it may be to her."
+
+With that he commenced to lead the way out, choosing a winding path
+through the maze of tables. Not until they were traversing the great
+gold and crimson lounge, with its ornate furnishings, did Tabs catch up
+with him to ask his question. "How did you know about my engagement and
+whether it was important or not?"
+
+Braithwaite answered carelessly, "It's with Maisie, isn't it? I heard
+Terry suggest to her that she should make it. She's a nice little woman.
+I shouldn't like to be the cause of her disappointment. She was looking
+forward----" The rest was lost as a flunkey requested the registered
+number of whatever Tabs had left in the cloak-room.
+
+While they waited for the hat and cane to be produced, Tabs made a last
+attempt to persuade the General to commit himself to some promised
+course of action. "No one would be more pleased to see you succeed than
+myself. I'm not trying to hamper you. Neither is Terry; but she insists
+that unless things are to terminate between you, she must know the
+truth. Frankness with Terry necessitates frankness with Ann. You'll
+never succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your
+honor solvent. Ann's beneath you, you say--that's why you've outgrown
+her. It's not my business to dispute the fact. I didn't want to
+introduce the class view of things; but, by the same showing, you're
+beneath Terry. She's young to-day: through a lifetime she might outgrow
+_you_. She's as much your social superior as you claim to be Ann's.
+You've discarded Ann on the ground of inequality of rank. In your case
+Terry's family have a perfect right to raise the same objection."
+
+"Not at all." The answer came like the crack of a whip. Braithwaite drew
+himself up with the pride of one who had moved men like pawns across the
+checker-board of life and death. "The two cases afford no parallel. Ann
+and Terry have remained in the social stations to which they were born,
+while I--I stand outside all such ready-made, rule of thumb
+classifications. By sheer impetus of personality I have lifted myself
+out of the rut, so that not even you, with all your omniscience, dare
+prophesy how far I am going or where I shall end."
+
+It was plain that further talk would be useless. "I'm afraid I must be
+going," Tabs said. "I wish you very good luck. I hope we part friends.
+And of course you understand that I now consider myself entirely free to
+do my utmost to win Terry for myself."
+
+He extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to take it. He held
+himself erect as if prepared for an affront. His tones were icy when he
+spoke. "Before I shake hands with you, Lord Taborley, I have to know
+what you mean by your utmost. With so many playing-cards out against me,
+I don't stand the ghost of a show unless---- Perhaps I have no right to
+expect it; I never asked quarter from any man. I was going to say,
+unless you intend to be gallant----"
+
+Tabs pocketed his hand and turned to limp into the sunlit thunder of the
+Strand. "The merciful receive mercy, General. Perhaps we shall shake
+hands some other day. How gallant I am depends entirely upon yourself."
+
+
+V
+
+He emerged into the swollen thoroughfare, where the traffic roared and
+jostled like a torrent through a mountain gorge towards the broader
+freedom of Trafalgar Square. He turned westward, walking swiftly for
+the first hundred yards, rather fearing that he might be followed. Then
+he slowed down; swift walking made his limp too painfully obvious.
+
+He was dissatisfied with both himself and Braithwaite. He felt as though
+he had gone to meet some one in a wood and had heard only the muttering
+of a voice and the rustle of retreating footsteps. "If I had only seen
+his face," he thought.
+
+In recalling Braithwaite, he found himself picturing two persons, of
+both of whom he had had separate and distinct glimpses: the one the
+loyal man, who in years gone by had served him faithfully and shared so
+many of his adventures; the other the arrogant, red-tabbed superior, who
+had stolen his happiness without warning. It was impossible to resolve
+the two into one. The first he still regarded with affection. The
+second---- He had never allowed himself to hate any one. Hatred he held
+to be back of breeding--a weak man's subterfuge for acknowledging
+self-distrust. Because he had come so near to hating, he accused himself
+of censoriousness. "If I had only seen his face--the real man beneath
+the pretense--I might have understood and helped him," he muttered.
+
+[Illustration: _Tabs extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to
+take it._]
+
+And now he was going to a fresh encounter where even more sympathy would
+be required. It would be easy to condemn Maisie P. Lockwood. On a
+superficial judgment she merited nothing else. Three husbands in four
+and a half years, plus a risky flirtation with a married man were not
+the credentials of an honorable character. If he followed the advice
+of Sir Tobias Beddow, he would seek to assess her price at once. But he
+had never been accustomed to regard women in that light--as a sex whose
+virtue could be inflated or depressed by the increase or shrinkage of a
+balance at the bank. Actually he knew very little about women; riding as
+a knight-errant, with the wonder in his eyes of the mystery that might
+surprise him round the luck of any corner, he had never given himself
+much time to learn. His ideas about women were Tennysonian. He liked to
+believe that they were free from temptations, more true in their
+emotions, more generous in their affections, more unerring and unstained
+than men. He extended to them all the reverent tenderness with which he
+regarded his mothers memory. In this he saw nothing quixotic; to him the
+most hoydenish girl was a potential mother, whose body possessed a
+sacredness quite apart from herself as a slim, adventurous ark which
+would bear the future of the race across the deluge of the ages. He
+knew, as a matter of fact, that all women were invariably neither saints
+nor angels; but he clung to his chivalrous superstition as a man prays,
+though he receives no answers to his prayers. To the recorded cynicism
+of experimenters in temptation he flung back the challenge of a sadder
+cynic, "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the
+stars."
+
+So in this matter of Maisie, he argued, she couldn't be as shallow as
+her history would indicate. She was Terry's friend; that, in itself, was
+a proof of goodness. Terry had been so anxious for him to meet and
+comprehend her that she had gone behind his back to prompt the
+appointment. Well, he would make a better job of this second interview
+than he had of the one that was just ended. He must approach it, at any
+rate, without prejudice.
+
+While thinking these thoughts he reached Charing Cross. Already he was
+weary with so small an exertion. He halted, debating whether he should
+struggle further. Then he became aware of wounded Tommies, chiefly
+Overseas troops, Canadians and Australians, who from their first landing
+in England had chosen this quarter of a mile as their happy
+hunting-ground. They stood propped up against the pavement; they sat
+among the pigeons on the parapets of Trafalgar Square. They were
+laughing and chaffing, those one-legged, one-armed, derelict crusaders
+in their atrocious hospital uniforms. They were thousands of miles from
+their one and only woman; but their drawn faces grinned cheerfully and
+their jaws were squared in the old, invincible, obstinate determination
+never to admit they were down-hearted. The sight of them filled him with
+strength. Though he saw them only fugitively through gaps in the tide of
+traffic, he felt their companionship. He would always feel it--the fine,
+shared courage of men out of sight, who had adventured for an ideal as
+his companions.
+
+He crossed the top of Whitehall, passed beneath the Admiralty Arch and
+entered the garnished, graveled, tree-bordered spaciousness of the Mall.
+His old sense returned--the confidence which the Mall always gave to
+him--of Empire and world-wideness. As he strolled along, he noticed a
+board which informed the public that, by following a certain path, one
+would arrive at the Passport Office. Hidden in the greenness, set down
+in the bed of an ornamental lake which had been drained when the terror
+of air raids had threatened, he made out a low-built, sprawling shed. It
+was like a glimpse of romance. The path which led to its doorway was the
+first few hundred yards along the road that ran to Rio, Fiji and Tibet.
+One had but to enter and the journey was commenced. The sight reminded
+him of something which he had forgotten; that, though every other
+delight failed, he still possessed the wideness of the world. He could
+sail away. There were islands of the sea--Stevenson's Samoa, Conrad's
+Malay Archipelago. If people proved disappointing, there were always the
+painted solitudes which human disillusions had not withered and could
+not defile. It was a loophole worth remembering.
+
+Outside Buckingham Palace he made an unpremeditated surrender. A taxi
+was prowling along by the curb as slowly as regulations allowed. He
+raised his stick automatically as he caught the driver's eye. When the
+cab had halted, again he procrastinated with the handle of the door in
+his hand.
+
+"Where to?" the driver enquired for the second time.
+
+"To Brompton Square," he ordered uncertainly.
+
+The cab was already moving when he changed his mind. Standing up and
+leaning out of the window, "No. To Chelsea," he shouted above the
+throbbing of the engine. Then drawing out Maisie's crumpled letter, he
+read from it the address.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE
+
+
+I
+
+Tabs was not very familiar with Chelsea. He had seen it from the river a
+score of times, red-walled, umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the
+district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had
+been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired
+men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the
+negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she
+must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade
+one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She
+probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, sisterly,
+domestic type. And yet she must be something more than conventional;
+millions of merely conventional women lacked the prowess to anchor only
+one man in all the years of their life, whereas, judging by the Adair
+incident, Maisie had not yet completed her list of husbands. There was
+an undefined danger in coming into contact with such a woman, which lent
+this expedition to Chelsea an atmosphere of adventure.
+
+Did she know for what purpose he was visiting her? If she did, she was a
+bold woman--a strategist. Her position was strengthened by his coming to
+her in the guise of an invited guest. Then he remembered that he had
+made a bargain with himself to meet her with a mind unclouded by
+prejudice.
+
+He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung
+into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again
+abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted,
+timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts
+between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention
+was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly
+into the spirit of the game--the littleness and childishness of the
+attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its
+greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which
+glinted at him like spectacles. But there was something that he missed.
+
+The driver had climbed down and was opening the door. "Mulberry Tree
+Court, mister. I forget which number you told me; but there ain't so
+much of it that you're likely to lose yourself."
+
+"But where's the mulberry tree?" Tabs asked. There was in his voice the
+discontent of a disappointed child.
+
+"There never was no mulberry tree," the man replied in all seriousness.
+
+"Well, if there isn't a mulberry tree," Tabs laughed, "I suppose we must
+make shift to do without it."
+
+The man frowned and justified himself grumblingly. "It ain't my bloomin'
+fault. I've done nothin' with yer bloomin' tree."
+
+"I suppose not," said Tabs as if the matter were still in doubt.
+
+Feeling in his pocket he paid what was owing and watched the cab move
+off. Even at this last moment he was half-minded to retreat. What
+business was it of his to interfere in another man's love-affair? He
+looked stealthily round the Court to see if eyes were watching. All the
+windows were empty; nothing stirred. The fact that he was not watched
+reassured him. He glanced at the number on the nearest door, discovered
+in which direction the numbers ran and decided that his must be the
+house conspicuous for its marigold-tinted curtains, standing retiringly
+in the farthest corner.
+
+Once again he hesitated. Should he or should he not? The old
+nursery-rhyme came wandering into his head with its innocent lilt of
+jolliness:
+
+   "Here we go round the mulberry-bush,
+   The mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush;
+   Here we go round the mulberry-bush,
+   So early in the morning."
+
+"And so we do," he murmured. "Let's take a chance."
+
+
+II
+
+The door--an apple-green door--was opened by a maid as trim as Ann. Was
+Mrs. Lockwood in? She would enquire. "And your name, please, sir?--Lord
+Taborley! Certainly."
+
+She left him waiting in the hall, while she went to make her fictional
+enquiries. He was as sure that they were fictional as if he had glanced
+into the room upstairs where Maisie was making a last anxious inspection
+before her mirror. So the pretense was to be that he had called casually
+and had scarcely been expected.
+
+He tried to learn something of Maisie from the appearance of her hall.
+It was speckless. Everything in it shone with intense cleanliness and
+polish. He had noticed the same gleam about the windows, brasses and
+very doorstep before he had entered. He had noticed it again about the
+maid who had admitted him. It sent Maisie up very much in his
+estimation. It almost explained to him how she had managed to get three
+husbands. Men never know why they fall in love with a woman; more often
+than not they mistake tidiness for beauty. "If you can't be beautiful,
+be clean," Maisie's hall seemed to say; "if you can be both, you're
+invincible." Maisie was invincible, as her conquests proved. This first
+glimpse of her belongings showed that she loved cleanliness. By a jump
+in his logic Tabs began to suspect that she must be beautiful.
+
+He had pursued his observations thus far, when he heard a door
+discreetly closed overhead and the starchy rustling of the maid
+returning.
+
+"If your Lordship will step into the drawing-room, Madam will be down in
+a moment."
+
+He found himself in a long artistic room, feminine to a degree,
+exquisitely restful and yet broad-minded with signs of selection and
+travel. It was furnished according to no particular period. There was
+an Italian chest of drawers inlaid with ivory, a Dutch marquetry
+secrétaire, some Louis XVIth chairs, a mirror of old Venetian glass,
+bronzes, snuff-boxes, specimens of china, odd bits of beaten silver,
+knick-knacks of all sorts, lying scattered about with apparent
+carelessness. A fire was burning in the grate. Tea was set out on a
+table beside a companionable couch. Through French windows the smallest
+of gardens shone bravely, a-blow with bulb flowers planted in crevices
+of a rockery, at the foot of which lay an oval pond and a silent
+fountain. As though to emphasize the game of littleness, a toy-boat
+floated on the pond's surface.
+
+"Not the woman I had imagined," was his unspoken thought; "not the wily
+adventuress! But if she's not, then what----"
+
+In an attempt to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to inspect the room
+in detail. The first thing he discovered was that all the silver frames,
+which stood about, contained photographs of the same man. It struck him
+as an odd exhibition of faithfulness on the part of a woman who had had
+so many husbands. He counted the photographs; there were no less than
+five of them, recording the same face from varying angles.
+
+"Which of them, is he," he asked himself, "Pollock, Gervis, or Lockwood?
+But he mayn't be any of them. Perhaps he's a possible fourth--the
+latest. If so, here's hoping, for he shuts out Adair."
+
+He turned towards the couch, intending to sit down. As he turned, his
+gaze encountered an oil-painting hanging above the mantelpiece.
+
+"By George! How did I manage to miss that?"
+
+He stared at it with intense interest--almost with a sense of shock.
+Somewhere--he could not determine where--he had seen that face before.
+
+The picture was a half-length portrait of a woman. There was something
+extraordinarily queenly and at the same time patient in her attitude.
+Her hands, which were out of sight, seemed to be folded. She was seated,
+leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face
+appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an
+aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped
+and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat,
+which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls.
+But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the
+rounded strength of her head that gave to her that peculiarly alert
+beauty. Her dark hair was drawn from off her forehead, making clear in
+her features an expression of calm challenge. She was a woman who had
+lived and not always happily. Her calmness was the quiet of almost
+painful self-control. And her age---- With her atmosphere of experience,
+it was certainly over thirty. She was not the woman to put back the
+hands of time for any man.
+
+"It can't be of Maisie," he thought, and yet he hoped. "But it can't be
+of her," he insisted. "This woman is remote and uncapturable. She's done
+with passion. She's tasted life to the full and the taste was bitter.
+She has nothing left but her unquenchable pride, with which she tortures
+herself: her pride not to submit, not to cry out, to stand always at
+bay. That's all she has, unless----" And then, speaking aloud in his
+effort to remember, "I know her. I'm positive. And yet----"
+
+The door behind him opened. "This is nice of you, Lord Taborley.--Ah,
+you were looking at Di! Most men do that when they visit me. I ought to
+be jealous. But a word of warning; looking is as far as any of them
+get."
+
+Tabs found himself shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of
+the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was
+fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her
+credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's
+charm lay in her accessibility--the genial promise she held out of being
+willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture
+proclaimed her anxiety to find this world a pleasant place--her
+determination to make it pleasant and to be gay under every
+circumstance.
+
+She was as little, flawless and gleaming as her house. More than half
+her good looks were due to the immaculate care which she bestowed on her
+body--the whiteness of her teeth, the fineness of her well-kept hands,
+the brilliant clearness of her complexion, the wavy smoothness of her
+abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone
+and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too
+perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so
+dainty in her fragility that one longed and yet scarcely dared to touch
+her.
+
+The moment she had spoken Tabs had recognized that nothing that she had
+done or might do could obscure her atmosphere of breeding. He had met
+men like that, whose sense of race, even when they were at the lowest
+depths, had kept them superior to their environment. A pale woman of
+spun silk and gossamer, with cornflower eyes and lips like parted
+poppy-petals! This woman could be kind to the point of folly--so kind
+that her folly would appear almost virtue. She was a woman who, though
+she might love too often, would love so much that to her much would
+always be forgiven.
+
+"I must apologize," Tabs spoke gently, "for having been found staring at
+your picture."
+
+He did not know it, but men always spoke gently to Maisie. It was her
+air of trust and helplessness that did it, her tender trick of creating
+in each man the belief that she relied peculiarly on him for
+protection--all of which was totally at variance with the masterly
+efficiency with which she ran both herself and her house.
+
+"I was staring at your picture," Tabs continued, "because I thought I
+recognized----"
+
+"I daresay you did," Maisie interrupted. "Though you may not have met
+her, her face is forever in the papers. Among the family she's known as
+the Princess Czarina Bolsheviki----"
+
+"She looks it. But is she a princess?"
+
+Maisie laughed. "Not yet, but it won't be her fault if she isn't. It'll
+have to be a prince next time. If she marries again, she'll stoop to
+nothing less. Look at the way she carries her head; she almost feels the
+weight of her coronet already. But she says she's had enough of
+marriage. We've all said that. Poor dear Di, she misses a lot of fun by
+her exclusiveness. If I only had half her wealth----"
+
+She evidently wanted Tabs to ask her what she would do with it. Her eyes
+grew round with spendthrift promises of jolliness, if ever such wealth
+should come within reach of her tiny, managing hands. She looked as
+mischievously covetous as a magpie while she waited for him to put the
+obvious question.
+
+But Tabs wasn't interested in the obvious. He stuck to his enquiry.
+"What you've told me doesn't help me to recall her," he said. "Who is
+she? It's most annoying to recognize a face and not to be able to place
+it against any background."
+
+Maisie pretended to pout. "You're like all the rest of them; you come to
+see me and do nothing but talk of her. I'd have hidden her in the attic
+long ago, only she's by Sargent. She's too beautiful for hiding, and
+then no one can afford to hide her Sargent under a bushel in these hard
+times."
+
+"And still you've not told me," Tabs reproached her.
+
+
+III
+
+"Wouldn't we be more comfortable sitting down?" Maisie slid between the
+couch and the tea-table, making herself comfortable against a pile of
+cushions. When Tabs looked round for a seat, he discovered the strategy
+of the arrangement of the furniture. The nearest available chair to
+Maisie was at least four yards away; to have selected it would have been
+to have isolated himself. He would have had to have hailed her
+ridiculously across the room's breadth. It was plainly intended that he
+should challenge fate and share the couch, just as Pollock, Gervis,
+Lockwood, Adair and so many others had done before him.
+
+All this friendliness would make it a little difficult for him presently
+when he broached the subject of Adair. He had an uneasy feeling that Sir
+Tobias wouldn't approve of this way of conducting his mission. It was
+one thing to fly the white flag of truce while you parleyed with the
+enemy; it was quite another to share the same couch with her in a cozy
+room, where there were only the two of you and the jumping flames of the
+fire in the grate made the silver on the small round table glow red.
+When they weren't talking there was no sound. None of the clamor of
+London reached them. They might have been in a cave, far removed from
+everything that disturbed. And, indeed, the little piled-up rockery
+outside the windows, with the spring flowers blowing and the baby lake,
+with the toy-boat drifting on its quiet surface, rather created the
+illusion that this was a cave.
+
+A restful lethargy of kindness was creeping over him. He didn't want to
+be at enmity with anybody, least of all with this dainty sprite of a
+woman with the cornflower eyes and the flaxen hair. He no longer
+wondered that three men in succession, weary of the mud of fighting, had
+come to her for rest. He could even comprehend Adair's treachery, if it
+had gone so far as treachery. Adair had found his wife fretful--she had
+always been crying and hanging round his neck. Here he had found
+companionship, secret laughter and forgetfulness. The world owed any
+woman a large debt of liberty who could give men that. Maisie was the
+kind of woman who could bury twenty husbands and go out next morning to
+meet the twenty-first. What was far more amazing, she could do it
+without frivolity or loss of self-respect. She lived a day at a time.
+She made you feel, the moment you met her, that that was the only
+tolerable way of living. The excuse for her philosophy was its success.
+She was an expert in happiness--so expert that she could communicate her
+secret without waste of words. Probably for most men words were not
+necessary; for them their happiness was herself.
+
+From her end of the couch Maisie smiled at Tabs dreamily. "You're
+persistent when you want anything. I suppose you always get your
+desires?"
+
+"The little things, yes," he replied. "But the big things--they evade
+me."
+
+"You mean Terry."
+
+She said it without change of tone or expression, with the same happy
+smile curling up the corners of her uncruel mouth. It was disconcerting
+to have his private humiliations referred to so frankly, as though they
+were fitting subjects for casual conversation. But, after all, he
+reminded himself, his business there was to discuss her equally private
+affairs. He was hardly in a position to resent anything she might say.
+It was a duel, and she had drawn first blood. He was quick to see that
+her purpose in introducing Terry was to gain an advantage while she
+postponed the inevitable discussion of Adair.
+
+She didn't give him a chance to reply. "I know all about you and Terry,"
+she continued, "and about Braithwaite, too, for the matter of that.
+Perhaps why Terry evades you is because she isn't one of your really big
+things. You may have mistaken her for a big thing. If she is one of your
+truly big things, you'll get her. You're one of the few men who get all
+that they desire."
+
+It was possible that she was trying to flatter him; nevertheless,
+against his will, the certainty of her way of talking impressed him.
+"What makes you think that I get everything that I desire?"
+
+She laughed and snuggled closer into the cushions. "I can't put it into
+words. I just know by looking at you. You have the air."
+
+"Then what makes you say that Terry may not be one of my big things?"
+
+She glanced up at him amused. "I almost made you angry when I said
+that.--Do you really want to know? I said it because I don't think that
+she is one of your big things and, what's more, you don't think that she
+is either. Now I _have_ made you angry---- But you don't--not the sane
+you, who was and is and will be to-morrow--the you who'll outlive this
+disappointment."
+
+He was at one and the same time intrigued and offended by the turn the
+conversation had taken. His memory groped back to the first conception
+he had had of this woman--the woman who tricked married men, who used
+scented note-paper, who interpreted thoughts before they were uttered
+and forestalled actions before they had been planned--the woman whom he
+had been instructed to buy off with a price. What was he doing
+discussing his love-affair with such as her?
+
+His voice was chilling when he spoke. "It's very good of you to take
+such an interest in me. I ought to be gratified that you should think
+you know so much about me, and after so short an acquaintance--so very
+much more than I know about myself."
+
+"But I don't think; I do know far more at this moment than you know
+about yourself." Her tones were calm and lazy, unembarrassed and
+pleasant. The red glow of the fire glinting on the silver tea-service
+seemed the reflection of her cheerfulness.
+
+"If you're so certain that you know, you might tell me," he said
+stiffly.
+
+"I know---- Do you mind if I smoke?" She leant forward while he held a
+match to her cigarette. "I know that you're an intensely lonely man. All
+men have to be lonely till they're thirty if they're going to get
+anywhere. They have no time to spare. You've had no time to spare for
+women--that's why you don't understand them. Women were for you a treat
+in store, until the war broke. Then suddenly you discovered that you had
+missed the most precious thing in life. You hadn't the time to be wise
+in your choice, so you turned to some one young and accessible. Her
+youth seemed to symbolize all that you coveted at the moment; it
+symbolized going on forever. You weren't really in love with her as an
+individual; you were in love with the thought of love and youth. You
+won't believe it, but almost any young girl who was beautiful and
+willing would have served your purpose. During the terrible years you've
+clothed her with your own idealism. You've told yourself that it was for
+her that you were fighting. You've created in your heart a person she
+never was and hasn't it in her to become. You've thought of her as a
+second you, with _your_ sense of honor, _your_ passion for
+unselfishness, _your_ patience and experience gained through suffering.
+The ideal you've set up for her is contradictory and impossible. Youth
+isn't considerate, experienced, unselfish, patient. For those qualities
+you have to go to the middle years. I know what I'm talking about, for
+I've had three soldier husbands." She said it without self-reproach or
+self-glory--as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any
+woman. "You've been finding out the kind of girl she really is since
+your return--the kind of girl who prefers General Braithwaite to
+yourself and can't discriminate between the temporary and the permanent.
+You're disappointed in her. You've discovered already that she isn't the
+woman you thought you were loving. You're now only pretending that you
+still care for her because life would be too empty without your dream
+and because the right woman, for whom you've already renewed your
+search, hasn't yet turned up. Somewhere inside you at this moment your
+sane self is endorsing every word that I'm saying as true."
+
+"That's not so." His contradiction was spoken fiercely.
+
+"But it is so," the sweet voice persisted. "You yourself have tacitly
+owned it."
+
+"How?"
+
+There was the sharpness of alarm in his way of asking. Her assurance had
+startled him out of his brief anger.
+
+She laughed softly. "I think we might have tea; it'll restore our
+serenity. There's nothing like employing your hands when you want to
+keep from losing your temper. A woman learns that, even when she's only
+been married once. When she's been married three times," the cornflower
+eyes became suddenly innocent, "she knows everything.--Will you touch
+the bell? It'll save me getting up.--How, you ask. How do I know that
+you've already renewed your searching? To a man who's as head over heels
+in love as you profess to be all women, except the one woman, however
+beautiful, ought to be hanks of hair and bags of bones. I read your
+thoughts when I caught you gazing at my sister's portrait. You were
+saying to yourself, 'What if she's the woman!' And you're even
+sufficiently detached in your affections to acknowledge attraction in a
+horrid little pestering, too-much-married person like myself."
+
+
+IV
+
+It was lucky that the maid selected that moment for answering the bell.
+Things were getting uncomfortably personal. Tabs had the idea that
+Maisie had been talking against time till she should hear the footsteps
+of her reënforcements. As the maid entered, she turned towards her with
+the brightness of relief.
+
+"That's splendid of you, Porter. You guessed what we wanted.--Porter
+always guesses what I want, Lord Taborley; she's my second self. And
+Porter can tell your fortune from the cards--can't you, Porter? Only she
+never reads the cards on a Sunday; she says it brings bad luck. If you
+come here often, you must try her.--You might take that dish from
+her.--Thanks awfully. There's room for it here on this corner of the
+tray."
+
+Tabs smiled inwardly while he did his awkward best to make himself
+useful. He might know very little about women, but he knew intuitively
+quite a lot about this particular woman. He knew that Porter had guessed
+nothing, because nothing had been left to chance. He knew it as surely
+as he had known what Maisie had been doing in front of her mirror while
+he had been kept waiting. He knew that long before his arrival every
+detail of his reception had been prepared and planned, and that Porter
+had been instructed. The whole morning had been spent in dusting,
+sweeping, polishing and making ready the various dishes of dainty cakes
+and neatly-cut sandwiches which were being spread before him. He was
+certain that the kindly patronage of Maisie's way of addressing Porter
+was another part of the conspiracy.
+
+Curiously enough it was Porter who made him like and trust her more than
+he had done as yet. Porter's eyes, when they rested on her mistress,
+embraced her with a slavish worship; when they rested on him, they
+warned and dared him. He had the feeling that the man who made Maisie
+cry was likely to feel a knife in his back. Maisie must be good to be
+able to call forth such fanatical loyalty from a humble woman. He began
+to be infected by this atmosphere of idolatry. And yet----
+
+What was Maisie's object in belittling his love for Terry? What did she
+hope to gain by it? He hardly dared allow himself to suspect; thinking
+in her presence was like speaking aloud. She heard unspoken words as
+plainly as those that were uttered. But the suspicion would not be
+suppressed. Had she formed the audacious plan of winning him for
+herself? And this despite her three previous marriages, despite her
+knowledge of why he had visited her, despite his knowledge of Adair!
+
+Quick as a flash her eyes turned on him with a scarcely perceptible
+shake of her head. The door clicked discreetly as Porter left them. It
+was like clearing a ring for the second round. The dangerous intimacy,
+half tender, half inimical, returned.
+
+"There's no harm in being pleasant," her voice was musical and pleading,
+"however unpleasant the circumstances which have thrown us together.
+Taking tea with me doesn't set up any social obligation. You won't have
+to know me again or anything like that. Now that we understand each
+other---- How do you like your tea? Is it two lumps?"
+
+With the tongs poised ready to pounce, she waited for him to tell her.
+But he didn't tell her; he smiled inscrutably. He wasn't sure at what
+he was smiling. Perhaps it was that he was happy--happy in a
+worldly-wise fashion that he had never been with Terry. He could say
+anything to this woman and it wouldn't shock her--there was comfort in
+that.
+
+But she had scared up a doubt in his mind that he might have mistaken
+his kingdom. Perhaps the recovery of youth wasn't everything. There were
+things very precious in themselves, which were well lost under certain
+circumstances. Maisie's youth, for instance. She was far more enchanting
+now than she could ever have been as a girl. In losing her youth she had
+gained in sympathy; it was that that made her understand him so well. In
+a wife you wanted more than youth--the knowledge of a companion. It
+began to dawn on him that there might be truth in what she had said.
+Perhaps once again she had known him better than he knew himself. He had
+been with her less than an hour. He didn't completely trust her, and yet
+here was this astounding fact: by reason of her experience there were
+things he could say to her that he would never dream of saying to the
+girl whom he believed he loved best. And Adair, he, too----
+
+"You hadn't expected that things would be like this," she was saying,
+"just you and I, sitting like old friends and drinking tea together.
+You'd nerved yourself up for a vulgar row. I know---- Well, since you
+won't tell me how many lumps, I'll give you two."
+
+As he bent forward to receive the cup, their hands touched. The contact
+was electric. A rush of excited vitality seemed to pour into his body
+from hers. The touch was only for a second, but it left him startled and
+stark of pretenses. When he sought her eyes, they were calm as ever.
+"You're a most bewildering woman--the most bewildering I ever met," he
+confessed.
+
+"Except my sister," she corrected.
+
+He glanced up at the portrait and back to her, comparing the features.
+"Yes, I see it now. She is your sister. I ought to have guessed. But I
+haven't met her; so I don't except her."
+
+Maisie busied herself with passing the dishes. She had a way of making
+everything appear conventional by the unruffled quiet with which she
+accepted it. At the back of her mind she seemed to be smiling at the
+domestic scene she had achieved with this man, who should have been her
+enemy.
+
+"No, you haven't met her," she assented. "But until you've met her, you
+won't rest; and after you've met her, you won't rest either.--And so you
+think I'm bewildering! You thought something else, which you didn't have
+the courage to put into words. Bewildering and dangerous--the most
+dangerous woman you'd ever met--that was what you meant."
+
+He smiled with a shade of embarrassment. "I might have called you the
+most disconcerting woman; you're all of that. No man of sense, who
+valued his peace of mind, would tell any woman she was dangerous."
+
+"I don't see why. Why shouldn't he? Do tell me. I shan't be offended."
+She leant forward, absorbing him with her childish eyes, her lips
+parted with expectancy.
+
+"Because----" Tabs checked himself while he studied the tantalizing
+innocence of her expression. He felt certain that he was going to say
+something irresistibly unwise. To gain time he looked away and commenced
+aimlessly stirring his cup. "Well, if you must have it, because to tell
+a woman that would be to tempt her to be dangerous."
+
+"But I love to be tempted," she said eagerly; "temptation is the yeast
+of life." And then in a whisper, speaking less to him than to herself,
+"A woman knows that she's old when temptation ends."
+
+Like ripples from a stone flung into water the poignancy of what she had
+implied rather than uttered, spread away with a commotion which grew
+ever fainter. They sat without change of posture at either end of the
+couch, she bending towards him, he gazing down into his cup as though by
+staring into it he could retain his grip on the conventions. There was
+no sound, save the rustling of live coals in the grate. Outside the
+window the toy boat floated, a symbol of men's and women's ineffectual
+childishness, always dreaming of adventures on which they never set
+sail. Tabs pondered the hidden profundity of her words. At last he
+believed that through her he understood himself. It wasn't youth that he
+or anybody coveted; it was the more supreme boon of not growing old. He
+had just arrived at this new self-knowledge when she spoke.
+
+"To be tempted means that one's wanted--wanted dreadfully, so that it
+hurts. That's living--to be wanted. Not to be wanted is worse than
+death. When you're dead, you're forgotten and you forget. To be
+forgotten and to remember is the end of all things. Not to be wanted
+when you're alive is to beat your flesh against the walls of a tomb.
+Lord Taborley, I know what you came for." He had set down his cup. She
+covered his bronzed hands with her own passionate white ones,
+overwhelming him with a rush of words. "You came to accuse me, to bribe
+me, to buy me. You didn't want to hear me; I was already condemned. Do
+you think I don't know what's said about my marriages? I know too well.
+But it isn't vanity that makes me want to be loved. It's so right to be
+loved. It isn't wickedness. It's the terror of not being loved--the same
+terror that makes you cling to Terry though she doesn't want you in
+return---- We all want to believe that we're wanted. It's human. Without
+that life's a blank. One can't face up---- And I----"
+
+She tore her hands from him and buried her face, sobbing in the
+cushions.
+
+
+V
+
+He had done it. By some unaccountable blunder he had made her cry. What
+was it he had said? Only a minute ago she had been so radiant and
+smiling. His first thought was of Porter; she must not know. This crying
+must be stopped before she heard it. Any moment she might enter. Even
+now she might be listening at the door, preparing to enter.
+
+Another conjecture rushed into his mind--this sobbing might be part of a
+prearranged plan. Tears are the jiu-jitsu of woman's art of
+self-defense. To the world at large the man is always a villain who has
+caused them. "But I didn't cause them," he protested to himself. And
+then, "Dash it all! There's nothing gained by sitting here. I've got to
+do something."
+
+He roused himself and limped round the table to the end of the couch
+against which her face was hidden. He could see nothing but the pale
+gold of her hair, the ivory whiteness of her neck and the pitiful
+heaving of her fascinating shoulders. She looked extraordinarily like a
+doll--a broken doll which had been allowed to fall through some one's
+carelessness.
+
+"Confound it! What a brute I am!" he muttered. "What the dickens does
+one do with a woman in hysterics?"
+
+He laid his hand very timidly on her silky hair. He had had no idea that
+it was so silky. "Cheer up!" he said softly. And then again, "I do wish
+you'd cheer up."
+
+She took not the slightest notice, save that a small white hand scuttled
+out like a mouse from beneath the cushions and commenced a hurried
+search. He watched it and formed a hasty guess. It couldn't find the
+thing for which it had been sent, so he dropped his own large
+handkerchief in its path, saw it take possession of it and dive again
+beneath the cushions. It made no difference to the sobbing.
+
+What ought he to do? He couldn't endure the sound--it wrenched him. He
+bent over her, trying to turn her obstinately hidden face in his
+direction.
+
+"Maisie!" The word had slipped out. It didn't matter. It mattered so
+little that he repeated the indiscretion. "Maisie, you mustn't break
+your heart like that. No one thinks ill of you and you are wanted.
+You're wanted most awfully. Heaps of people want you."
+
+The shoulders ceased to heave for a fraction of a second, but her face
+still refused to turn. "Who-oo--who wants me?" Her voice reached him
+choked with tears and muffled.
+
+Tabs frowned. The question was a poser. Who did want her? He was blessed
+if he knew. There must be people who wanted her--Adair, for instance.
+But the mention of Adair would provide her with a reason for a new
+outburst. There was only one thing to say under the circumstances, so he
+said it. "I do."
+
+She lay so still that she might have been dead. It was frightening, this
+sudden silence after such a storm of emotion. It was so frightening that
+he had to say something more to prove to himself that she could hear.
+"You're beautiful. You're so gay when you're not crying. I don't think
+any man could prevent himself from wanting you." And then desperately,
+in a last effort, "You're most tremendously charming."
+
+Her face never stirred from the cushions, but he was aware that
+surreptitiously his borrowed handkerchief was being employed
+industriously.
+
+He had just time to compose his features before a tear-wet eye blinked
+up at him. It was an eye eloquent with gratitude and babyishly blue.
+"You're a dear," a small voice whispered.
+
+
+VI
+
+He had been called many things from time to time, but never before "a
+dear." To be called "a dear" by a beautiful woman was an entirely new
+sensation for him. It made him distinctly uncomfortable--almost ashamed.
+A gift of this sort, even though it hasn't been desired, puts the
+recipient under an obligation. When once a woman has dubbed a man "a
+dear," she expects him to live up to the part she has assigned him. Tabs
+hoped that she hadn't been as sincere as she had sounded.
+
+Taking himself off to the nearest French window, he stood staring out
+morosely--staring out at the silly little rockery, with the silly little
+pond at the foot of it, containing the silly little boat that never
+sailed anywhere. He was cross with himself and even more cross with her.
+Why couldn't she have behaved sensibly, instead of bursting like a
+rain-cloud without warning? She made mysteries out of everything, out of
+himself, Terry and even her sister's portrait. She never gave him a
+complete answer to any question. She surrounded herself with the
+atmosphere of a detective novel. He was half-minded to rush into the
+hall and make good his escape before she involved him further. Sir
+Tobias could come and conduct his own unpleasantness. How on earth was
+he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a
+dear"?
+
+But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a
+quite different emotion--an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as
+she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It
+was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her
+shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.
+
+He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her
+voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky.
+I'm better now."
+
+"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.
+
+As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded
+towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."
+
+"Wouldn't she?"
+
+He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no
+attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where
+he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever
+happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with
+her.
+
+In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head
+vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even
+when we were children we couldn't make her."
+
+It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was
+intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused
+himself to a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't
+so cruel as to try?"
+
+"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across
+to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used
+to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian
+Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when
+we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She
+was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think
+that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to
+him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one
+else has ever succeeded in making her cry."
+
+Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face--it was like the
+face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her
+cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind
+of blasphemy."
+
+"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me
+exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that
+tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels
+their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him,
+though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves
+and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it
+down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort
+its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her
+husband. He couldn't drag her down. He couldn't find her weakness. She
+was always up there. So he reviled her."
+
+A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's
+breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate
+and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a
+discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.
+
+"_Was!_ Then he's dead?"
+
+She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated
+her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."
+
+"And his name?"
+
+Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown
+woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense
+that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he
+could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.
+
+
+VII
+
+"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she
+asked quickly, "You knew him?"
+
+"Knew him!" Tabs pondered the question. "I'm not sure. But Lady
+Dawn--I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in
+France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It
+was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She passed me yesterday,
+driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry
+who did that." He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and
+stood gazing level with the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke
+wonderingly, "The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is
+Lady Dawn!"
+
+When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so
+great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again--he sat down
+for a second time on the couch beside her.
+
+"There's something wrong," he said quietly. "Either you're misinformed
+or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight."
+
+She made no attempt to conceal her amusement. She attributed his
+seriousness to sudden infatuation--an infatuation which made him seem
+ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.
+
+"Something wrong!" she echoed mockingly. "If you think that I've
+exaggerated anything that I've told you about----" She glanced up at the
+portrait. "I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm
+her----"
+
+"I didn't mean that," he interrupted impatiently. "I was referring to
+Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged
+him."
+
+Maisie laughed. "Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging
+him. He left no room for misjudgment."
+
+"But you said that he had died hating her."
+
+"He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary."
+
+"But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?"
+
+"Think that he hated her?"
+
+"No, that he died hating her?"
+
+Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a
+match. She was getting bored. "Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be
+cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses.
+Some of them were releases. They weren't all--well, to put it mildly,
+occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to
+whom German shells were merciful--more merciful than English law. If
+they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom."
+
+As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled.
+He had to steady his passion before he asked his question. "And you
+think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"
+
+Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she
+added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an
+opinion."
+
+Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone
+when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was
+the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no title; he was a Captain in
+the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozières.--Ah, I
+see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the
+difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more
+dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the
+regiment."
+
+She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the
+running, doesn't it?"
+
+It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger
+of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his
+mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had
+drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies
+against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their
+ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house
+of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd
+been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their
+imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine,
+where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as
+compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they
+were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to
+hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this
+moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while
+living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they
+should not be regretted.
+
+"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."
+
+He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room,
+limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the
+cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.
+
+"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the
+running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a
+sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.
+The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the
+finest of battalions."
+
+He became aware that he was frightening her and sank his voice. The
+lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.
+
+"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it.
+"Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why
+he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was
+a woman's photograph."
+
+She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"
+
+"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried
+it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He
+pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I
+remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches--Boche
+trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that
+woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that
+those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort
+to forget. And here you and I sit and talk---- Well, as I was saying, we
+couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that
+woman in the world for whom he cared--for whom he cared right up to the
+last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozières, that he went west.
+He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he
+had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it
+from him."
+
+He paused, suddenly exhausted. His indignation had burnt itself out.
+"I'm tired," he apologized. "I'm afraid I let myself get out of hand. I
+scared you for a moment. I'm sorry. Do you mind if I sit down?"
+
+She pushed the table back to make it easier for him to take a place
+beside her. "It's all right," she consoled him. "I know that you're only
+just out of hospital. Terry told me. You're not really recovered yet.
+Besides, it was my fault; I spoke lightly. I wasn't thinking what I
+said. But I don't feel lightly about these things. I couldn't." Then she
+said something which struck him oddly. "You know my man's out there."
+
+What did she mean by _her man_? If she had said _her men_, he could have
+comprehended. She had lost three husbands in the war. But why did she
+particularize and say, "My man"? It seemed cruel to the rest. And which
+of the three was it that she regarded as so peculiarly hers.
+
+He jerked his thoughts back. "There was something you told me about Lord
+Dawn; you said it explained him. How did it go? I think you said that he
+hated his wife as men hate God, because they love Him so much and yet He
+won't come down. Well, out there it wasn't like that. Dawn climbed up to
+her; yes, and perhaps beyond her. Out there he didn't need to pretend to
+hate her; he could afford to love her without loss of self-respect. I
+suppose he thought it was too late to tell her after all that had gone
+before."
+
+"Either that," Maisie assented, "or else---- It would be like him. Or
+else because he was too much of a sportsman. As it was, if he were
+killed, she wouldn't need to be sorry. But if he wrote her that he loved
+her and had always loved her, and then got killed---- Don't you see,
+that's where her remorse would start?"
+
+Tabs nodded. "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it.
+It's monstrous that she should go on believing----" He broke off. And
+then, "She must be told. It's merest justice--whatever it costs."
+
+
+VIII
+
+The light had been failing while they had talked. A tap fell on the
+door. Coming at that moment when their nerves were jangled, it sounded
+ominous. Their heads turned sharply. Maisie's voice was unsteady when
+she asked, "What is it? What do you want?"
+
+"It's Porter, Madam. Dinner is served."
+
+"Oh, come in, Porter. Have you laid a place for Lord Taborley?"
+
+As the maid entered, Tabs rose. "I had no idea---- Why, I've been here
+for hours. I really must apologize, Mrs. Lockwood, and be going."
+
+However much his reception had been prearranged, dinner had formed no
+part of the program. The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's
+watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance.
+
+Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said
+cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying."
+
+As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie
+silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly. "You've talked
+of everything except me," she whispered; "it was about me you came to
+talk. You _must_ before we part."
+
+Following her across the hall to the dining-room, he reflected on her
+ability for getting him into deeper and yet deeper water. He had the
+feeling that he was being led somewhere against his will--somewhere that
+might be for his good or for his harm, but which would inevitably cut
+him off from many of his old affections. He had the discomforting sense
+that he was doing something disloyal to Terry. Heaven knew what promises
+might not be exacted from him before the evening ended. When would it
+end? He would have to stay for at least an hour after coffee--that would
+bring him to nine o'clock. Sir Tobias Beddow would have been expecting
+him long before that to deliver his account of the result of his
+mission. Furthermore, Sir Tobias would be demanding an explanation as to
+how it was that, having asked for Terry's hand the night before, he was
+still unengaged to her. If he postponed the interview till to-morrow, it
+would create the appearance of lukewarmness. He couldn't very well
+excuse himself by saying that he'd spent the afternoon and evening with
+Maisie. And he couldn't get Maisie to let him off on the plea that Sir
+Tobias, her harshest critic, was waiting for him. Besides, he had
+accomplished nothing as yet; Adair Easterday had not been mentioned.
+
+If ever he made good his escape, he prayed that he might never again
+encounter a woman possessed of charm. His paramount desire was to seize
+his hat and make a furtive exit. There was nothing to prevent him but
+the politeness due from a man to a woman--and she traded on it. As he
+passed into the dining-room he was secretly on his guard. "I wonder what
+she'll do next to inveigle me?" was his thought.
+
+"It'll be only a little dinner," she explained as they seated
+themselves. "You weren't expected. But Porter always has something
+hidden away for an emergency. Don't you, Porter?"
+
+He was getting accustomed to these asides addressed to Porter. He began
+to perceive that Porter had other uses besides gliding round the table
+in a cap and apron. She was a conversational stop-gap when situations
+grew awkward, as they frequently must between an ensnared bachelor and
+an unchaperoned widow.
+
+And she was eligible; he had to own it as they sat down to their first
+meal together. Tea hadn't counted as a meal; you can serve tea to
+anybody. But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring
+dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles.
+Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains,
+revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock
+village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in
+the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the
+fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several
+houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he
+lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out
+life, than waving me farewell." He knew what she was singing then and
+followed the air in his imagination. The atmosphere of the room was
+vibrant with romance; all that was lacking was his impulse to be
+romantic.
+
+Maisie was chattering gayly and forestalling his wants. He reserved a
+small portion of his mind for her conversation--sufficient to enable him
+to reply "Yes" or "No" when the occasion seemed to demand it. It was
+clear to him that it made her happy to have a man so entirely at her
+mercy. She meant immensely well by him. Behind her mist of words she
+seemed to be saying, "Isn't it nice to be just we two together?"
+
+But he was thinking of the other three soldiermen who had played the
+game of being "just we two together" before him. The singing voice,
+drifting through the courtyard, put into words the question of his
+thought, "Where are you now? Where are you now?" Yes, where were they?
+
+He felt pity and distaste for Maisie in equal proportions. Those men had
+each in turn caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her
+pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence
+of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and
+gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was
+theirs now! She was almost virginal--as though she had never been
+touched by their passion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose
+memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out
+there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or---- Or very loving
+and lonely?
+
+She was speaking more seriously now. "We mustn't tell her. It's natural
+to be sorry for him now that he's dead." He picked up the thread and
+guessed that she was referring to Lord Dawn.
+
+"We must tell her," he said.
+
+"But we mustn't," she urged. "For years he tried to make her wretched.
+There were rumors of other women. She's found peace at last. It wouldn't
+help him to let her know that he had died loving her out there. He's
+beyond any help of ours. They all are." He surmised who the _they_ were:
+the three soldiermen who had sat there before him. In pleading for
+silence for others, she was pleading for silence for herself. Again she
+was defending herself against his thoughts. "All of the dead had their
+chance. Lord Dawn had; there were so many years in which he might have
+told her. To tell her now would be to rob----"
+
+She broke off as the maid reëntered with the coffee. Her tone changed
+instantly to one of convention. "Not here, Porter. We'll have it in the
+drawing-room."
+
+As he followed her out across the hall, he glanced at his watch. It was
+past eight o'clock. He could lose no more time. He must plunge boldly
+into the subject of his mission and bring his visit promptly to an end.
+He dreaded the temptation of that feminine room, with its coziness and
+security and quiet. It made him too much alone with her; she was not a
+woman that it was wise to be alone with too long.
+
+The moment the maid had left them and the door had closed, he became
+confirmed in the sanity of this decision. Everything in the room
+appealed to him to procrastinate. The curtains before the French
+windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence;
+the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the
+coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded
+with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces and fell
+downwards.
+
+She had seated herself on the couch. When she had filled both cups, she
+glanced up at him smilingly, patting the vacant place beside her as a
+sign that he should occupy it. He was standing before the fire, looking
+immensely tall in the semi-darkness. He could see her plainly where she
+sat beneath the lamp; but of him she could see nothing but his outline,
+for his eyes were lost in shadow. When he seemed not to have noticed her
+sign, "Come," she said coaxingly. "You don't spare yourself at all. You
+make yourself tired by so much standing."
+
+"Mrs. Lockwood----" She started as he called her that. Twice already she
+had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before
+dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I
+haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that
+nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't
+you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you--but
+why can't you?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+THE AIR OF CONQUEST
+
+
+I
+
+She sat very silently, the way he had seen men sit when they were
+wounded. She had been expecting the blow and trying to postpone it; now
+that it had fallen her only feeling was one of peace because the
+expecting was ended. Her face remained turned towards him, as it had
+been while he had been talking. As though a mask had dropped, the real,
+very tired, very young, very lonely Maisie watched him. The wistfulness
+of her beauty surprised and touched him. Several times her lips moved in
+an attempt to say something. Then, at last, "What right have you to
+ask?"
+
+"I should like to claim the right of friendship."
+
+"Of friendship!" She frowned slightly, peering from beneath the lamp in
+an effort to make out his features. Then her eyes cleared and she
+smiled. "If you don't mean it, please don't say it. You see, it would
+hurt afterwards. And--and I should like to have you for my friend."
+
+[Illustration: "_Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?_"]
+
+He came over from the fireplace and seated himself beside her. "We've
+been almost enemies--just a little afraid of each other. Isn't that so?
+It's ever so much more comfortable now; we'll be able to talk more
+easily. Tell me honestly, what do you see in Adair?"
+
+"See in him!"
+
+She commenced sipping her coffee. She looked extraordinarily like Terry
+used to do years ago, when she was a little lass and had been naughty,
+and had come reluctantly to ask pardon. He thought that if he went on
+talking he might make it easier for her.
+
+"You'll wonder why I, who never knew you until to-day, should have taken
+upon myself to broach this subject."
+
+"I don't wonder," she headed him off. "I know. Terry's my friend. Her
+father was determined to send somebody, so she worked things in order
+that you might be sent. She thought that you would be the kindest
+person."
+
+"She thought that!" Tabs was a little taken back by her assertion; it
+seemed to pledge him to kindness before he had learnt whether kindness
+was required or deserved. It made him in a sense her partisan, when he
+ought to have been impartial.
+
+"I think I can be trusted to be kind," he said; "but you must remember
+that I've got to be kind all round. I must be kind to Adair's wife and
+to his children. If this goes much further it will spell tragedy for
+them."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and laughed without mirth. "Adair's wife
+should have remembered to be kind to herself. If a woman can't keep her
+husband, she never deserved to have won him. And Adair--he's the
+easiest man to keep in the world; far too easy to be exciting. If she
+doesn't lose him to me, she'll lose him to some one else, unless----"
+And then she surprised him, "But she won't lose him to me, for I don't
+want him."
+
+Tabs sighed with relief and lit himself a cigarette. "Then that's
+settled. If you don't want him, the trouble's ended, and I think Sir
+Tobias and all of us owe you an apology."
+
+Again she laughed. This time some of her old mischief had come back.
+"You go too fast, Lord Taborley. I shouldn't advise any of you to
+apologize to me yet. It's true that I don't want him for keeps, but----"
+
+Tabs guessed the way the ground lay and went back to the question with
+which he had started. "What on earth do you see in him? That's what I
+can't make out."
+
+She kept him waiting for his answer. While he waited, like sunshine
+struggling through cloud, amused happiness fought its way into her
+expression. When she turned, she met his gaze with complete candor. She
+was again a woman of the world. "What do I see in him? Not much--only a
+makeshift, a second best. Only a man who needs me for the moment because
+he's lost his direction. You remember our conversation of this afternoon
+about having to feel that you were needed. He gives me that feeling, so
+I'm grateful. That's why I have to have him."
+
+"Are you so lonely as to stoop--well, to steal to get it?"
+
+He was sorry he had asked it. She bit her lip in an effort to keep back
+the tears and to force herself to go on brightly smiling. "Yes, as
+lonely as all that," she nodded; "so lonely that it's almost a joke."
+
+"No joke." He was at a loss what to say. "But you have friends. You go
+everywhere. You----"
+
+"Friends!" she interrupted, laughing with the high-pitched note of
+breaking nerves. "What are friends? People to whom you say, 'How d'you
+do?' here and 'How d'you do?' there, every one of whom can do without
+you. I want some one who can't do without me for a second---- No joke,
+you said. But it is almost a joke to be young, and eager, and
+good-looking, and to know how to dress, and to be so willing to love,
+and to live in the world just once, and to hear the world go by you
+laughing, and to desire so much," she paused for breath, "and to want to
+give so much that no one is willing to accept. If one didn't laugh over
+it, it would be more than one could stand. If one didn't treat it as a
+joke----"
+
+He caught her hands. "Steady, Mrs. Lockwood. Stop laughing at once.
+There's nothing to laugh about. You're nearly over the edge."
+
+She stared at him with wide eyes, filled with panic, while little
+ripples of laughter kept escaping from her, which she did her best to
+suppress.
+
+"Now, listen to me," he continued quietly: "You're not exceptional.
+You've been expressing something that there's not a man or woman that
+hasn't felt. I feel it when I realize that I may lose Terry; so does
+Braithwaite. Lord Dawn felt it when he couldn't drag his wife down to
+him and couldn't climb up to her. And his wife must have felt it too,
+when she sat always by herself. Phyllis feels it when she sees that, for
+the moment, you have more attraction for her husband than she has. And
+Adair feels it as well, when he risks his good name for a little
+desperate comfort and is willing to clothe you, for whom he professes to
+care, with all the appearance of dishonor. You're no exception; it's the
+feeling that you are exceptional that makes you unscrupulous in your
+self-pity. Get that into your head, that you're not exceptional. Half
+the world's with you in the same box; but it smiles and doesn't own it.
+Have you got that?"
+
+She nodded and tried to withdraw her hands; but he held them fast.
+
+"And now as regards this desire to be wanted; that's perfectly right and
+natural. There's nobody who doesn't share it. And I understand what you
+say about mere friendship. It's unsatisfying and impermanent. It's like
+a meal snatched at a restaurant; none of the dishes or napkins or tables
+or chairs belong to you. They've been used by other people before you
+and they'll be used by other people the moment your bill is settled.
+What you want and what every one wants, is something more than
+friendship--a human relation with one person who is so much yours that
+your intimacies are a secret from all the world."
+
+"Some one with whom I can be little," she whispered, "and foolish and
+off my guard."
+
+He smiled. "That's it exactly. But you won't get that sort of
+relationship with a man who belongs already to another woman."
+
+"One gets the pretense."
+
+He shook his head. "Not even the pretense. There was a phrase you used
+about Adair; you said he'd lost his direction. That's true; he has for
+the moment. Presently he'll refind it and the road leads back to
+Phyllis. You said something else: you called him a second best. That's
+all he is, however you take him, whether as a husband, a father or a
+lover. He lacks earnestness; he has always lacked it. I've been his
+friend for years; his flabbiness sticks out all over him. But you're not
+a second best, Mrs. Lockwood. You're a top-notcher--too fine for
+anything but the best. You really are. You ought to set a higher value
+on yourself."
+
+She had regained her composure. He showed a willingness to release her
+hands, but she let them rest where they were like tired birds, while she
+regarded him with wistful kindness.
+
+"Too fine for anything but the best! It's a long while since I heard any
+one say that. Reggie used to say it in almost those very words. But then
+Reggie," she caught her breath at the remembered ecstasy, "Reggie used
+to think that the sun rose and set for me. He was different from all
+other men. You advise me to reserve myself for the best. How can I do
+that, Lord Taborley, when the best is in the past?"
+
+She was very beautiful in the simplicity of her pathos--one of the most
+beautiful women he had ever met. She had become a little child for the
+moment and her littleness was baffling. He felt extraordinarily near to
+her and alone with her. There was no longer any danger in their
+aloneness. He realized why it was that she was able to give away so much
+of herself; there was no value in the gift, for her heart was beyond the
+capture of any man. She was the shuttered house of a vanished happiness,
+inhabited by a restless ghost. The gold light from the lamp fell in a
+pool about her. It revealed startlingly the whiteness of her arms and
+throat, the blueness of her eyes and the primrose gleam of her polished
+head. She seemed insubstantial as a dream, environed by shadows. And
+what did she mean by saying that all her best lay in the past? Surely
+she had misjudged! With her power of charm she could build her world to
+any pattern.
+
+"The best in the past! None of us know enough about the future to say
+that. The best lies ahead--always. To believe that brings our best
+within our grasp."
+
+"For me it can't." She spoke hopelessly. "No believing can do that when
+your best is dead."
+
+The finality of her despair silenced him. He could feel it like fingers
+tightening on his throat. He realized in a flash that this was how he,
+too, would be tempted to speak were he to lose Terry--that, having lost
+the best, any careless makeshift would suffice to comfort him. While he
+considered, her hands snuggled closer in his clasp, establishing a new
+sympathy.
+
+"I think," he said at last, "even though my best were dead, I should
+try to go on acting as if it lay still ahead. If I did that, round some
+new turning I might find it waiting for me as a kind of recompense."
+
+She leant forward, peering eagerly into his eyes. "Yes. You would do
+that. I'm sure of it. I knew you had something to give me the moment we
+met. That was why I wouldn't let you escape me. I've learnt the secret
+at last--the secret of your air of conquest. It isn't that you get your
+desires. It's not that. It's your belief that you will get them that
+makes you strong."
+
+Somewhere at the back of his head he remembered the pleading of Delilah
+with Samson, "Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth."
+
+He laughed. "Perhaps you have guessed. I'm what you might call a
+round-the-corner person. I have a philosophy all my own; it's a
+round-the-corner philosophy. I believe that we find everything that
+we've lost or longed for, if we'll only press on. Everything that we've
+ever loved or wanted waits for us further up the road, round some hidden
+turning. It's always further up the road and just out of sight. The
+whole trick of living is to keep your tail up and march forward with the
+appearance of success, no matter how badly other people say you've been
+defeated. More often than not, we're nearer our hidden corners than any
+of us guess; it's the pluck to struggle the last hundred yards that
+swings us round the turning and wins our kingdoms for us."
+
+She withdrew her hands and lay back against the cushions. "No amount of
+courage----" She broke off and tried afresh. "Being brave wouldn't put
+him again into my arms. You're wondering whom I'm talking about--Reggie
+Pollock, my only husband. The other two didn't count, any more than
+Adair counts. I don't say it unkindly. I do want you to believe that.
+They were passers-by--that was all. They hung their hats in the hall
+and, somehow, they stopped. They were nice boys, both of them. It seemed
+a kind of war-work to let them marry me. You see, they needed me; so
+when they said they loved me, I didn't have the heart to turn them out.
+I suppose I was too amiable. But they didn't count--not at all."
+
+"The war's over," Tabs reminded her with quiet humor. "How long is this
+amiability going to last?"
+
+She smiled dreamily. "Adair again! You don't leave him alone for long.
+If you think that I ever let him make love to me, you're mistaken. It's
+only that he's unhappy and I can do something for him."
+
+Tabs wasn't at all sure that it was only that. This fatal amiability
+might have raised quite different expectations in Adair. Like her two
+latest husbands, he might take a notion to hang his hat in her hall. If
+he did, would she abate her amiability sufficiently to tell him to hang
+it somewhere else?
+
+She was drifting; what she needed was either a tow-rope or a rudder. He
+sent his gaze questing through the shadows.
+
+"Those five photographs, all of the same man--they're of Pollock?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He was one of the first of all the aces, wasn't he? It was he who
+brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and went missing a few days
+later. You see, I remember his record. He was outstandingly brave at a
+time when the world was full of brave men. And you tell me he loved
+you?"
+
+An expression of triumph flitted across her face. "Not loved." Her voice
+was full-throated. "He adored me, and to me he was a god whom I
+worshiped. I'd have gone through hell for him. I'd----"
+
+"No, you wouldn't."
+
+The flatness of the contradiction pulled her up short. "No you
+wouldn't," he repeated quietly. "You wouldn't even go through this for
+him. You wouldn't play the game by him when he was dead. He always kept
+his end up, whatever the odds against him; but you--you couldn't. This
+was your chance to show that you were worthy of him. While he was alive,
+you played a winning game; it was easy to be true to him. But he--he was
+stauncher; he was most to be trusted when the game seemed all but lost.
+You ought to have kept his spirit alive for us; but you've understood so
+little of his spirit that you've been willing to put any stranger in his
+place--to quote your own words, any stranger who chose to hang his hat
+in your hall. Pollock was a soldier; he didn't need to be sure of
+victory to show courage. It was in tight corners that he was at his
+best. You're in a tight corner now, and you're his wife--the wife whom
+he didn't love, but adored."
+
+The brutal impact of the truth had struck her dumb at first. Her lips
+had fallen apart. While she had listened, her face had gone white. Now
+that he paused, she slipped back into the cushions, covering her eyes
+with her hands. "For God's sake stop torturing me! Though you think I'm
+as contemptible as that, don't say it. If you must speak, tell me what
+you think I ought to do."
+
+"Do! Until you find a living man who's his match, carry on as though he
+were not dead."
+
+She uncovered her eyes and sat upright, staring at him. "As though he
+were not dead. But Reggie is dead. You know as well as I do that he's
+dead."
+
+Tabs nodded. "I'm not denying it. But for all that, try to live as
+though he weren't--as though somewhere up the road, a day, a week, a
+month, a year hence he would meet you round the corner."
+
+Her interest faded forlornly. "What good would that do? It would only be
+making believe with myself."
+
+He spoke gently. "Yes, but games of make-believe come true. You couldn't
+meet _him_, but you might meet some one his equal--a man who's, perhaps,
+already waiting for you, while you squander yourself on makeshifts and
+second bests."
+
+The little silence which had ended his speech dragged on from seconds
+into minutes. In the quiet room nothing stirred. She attempted to free
+herself from his gaze by refusing to look at him. Against her will her
+eyes crept up to his, clashed, evaded, fell back and again crept up to
+them.
+
+At last, speaking humbly, she said, "I was ashamed. You made me ashamed.
+Whatever I'd done, if he came back, he wouldn't be ashamed of me. It
+wouldn't matter how cowardly I'd been or however many husbands I'd had;
+he'd be so glad to have me in his arms that he wouldn't find time to be
+ashamed of me. So I'm not going to be ashamed any longer; I'm going to
+start to live as if he were coming back. It'll be hard at first.
+Adair--he was nothing. And yet---- I shall miss him, no doubt. You said
+something this afternoon that you didn't mean."
+
+"Didn't I? What was it?"
+
+"It was when I was crying because nobody wanted me. Do you remember what
+you said? You said, 'I do,' not meaning a word of it. Could you manage
+to want me just a little, Lord Taborley? Not for long, you know; only
+till I've got past the loneliest places--till I've begun almost to
+persuade myself that he may come back. To think that you wanted me would
+help."
+
+Before he could answer, she had sprung to her feet, all but over-turning
+the lamp. "What's that?"
+
+A sharp rat-a-tat-tat had reverberated through the house. While she
+spoke, it was repeated. Her over-strung nerves gave way. As Tabs rose,
+she clung to him beseechingly. "Don't let him in. I'm not ready for him.
+Don't let him in. Go outside and send him away. Tell him anything. But
+don't let him enter."
+
+Tabs had no clear idea to whom she was referring. It might have been to
+Adair. It might have been to Pollock. It seemed more likely that it was
+to her dead husband. This talk about living as though he might come
+back had probably distraught an imagination already over-taxed.
+
+"He sha'n't enter," he assured her. "There's no need to lose your
+nerve."
+
+As he passed into the hall, he heard the starchy approach of Porter. He
+waited and halted her with, "Mrs. Lockwood asked me to answer it."
+
+When he had watched her retreat and vanish, he advanced towards the
+door. Who was it out there in the darkness whose knock had power to
+strike such terror? It was a terror the excitement of which he at least
+remotely shared. The thought crossed his mind, "Is it possible that her
+longing could have dragged him back?" He felt as though in the
+stucco-fronted gloom of Mulberry Court, Fate itself stood waiting for
+him on the other side of the panel. With conscious bravado he stretched
+out his hand and drew back the latch.
+
+
+II
+
+"Is it Mr. Easterday?"
+
+It was a woman's voice that asked the question--a deep voice, thrilling
+with emotion, that made him wonder what it would sound like with all the
+stops pulled out. He had opened the door only a little way, expecting
+that he would have to refuse admittance. At the sound of a woman's
+voice, his sense of the conventions sprang to life. It must be a good
+deal past ten and here he was answering Maisie's door as though he were
+her butler. The kind of conclusions that could be drawn were made plain
+by the caller's question, "Is it Mr. Easterday?" To be mistaken for
+Easterday annoyed him. It was tantamount to an accusation. It implied
+that, even though he were not Easterday, the proprietory way in which he
+attended to other people's doors at after ten o'clock put Him well
+within Easterday's class. Tabs was particularly annoyed to hear himself
+accused by a voice so gracious and pleasant. His surprise had evidently
+impressed her as furtiveness, for she said, "So it is Mr. Easterday?"
+
+He was at a loss what to do with her--how to turn her away. For Maisie's
+sake she must not be allowed to enter, for then she would discover that
+they had been alone. He opened the door a few inches wider and parried
+to gain time. "If it's Mr. Easterday that you're wanting, you've made a
+fortunate mistake. This is Mrs. Lockwood's house. But I happen to know
+an Easterday--an Adair Easterday; he's a personal friend. Perhaps he's
+the man you're looking for. If so, I can give you his address."
+
+This sally was greeted with a quiet, rather mocking laugh. He was using
+his eyes, trying to form an estimate of the visitor. She had arrived in
+a car, which he judged to be private, for in the light reflected from
+the windshield he could make out the livery of her chauffeur. She was
+swathed in a sumptuous wrap which looked as though it were of sable. She
+held it gathered closely about her, so that it fell in soft folds,
+revealing and at the same time concealing her figure. He was anxious to
+read her face, but the lower part was snuggled into the fur of the deep
+collar and the upper part was shadowed by a broad-brimmed tulle hat,
+from which two bird of paradise plumes spread back like wings on the
+helmet of a viking. For the rest, she had white kid gloves, which
+reached up to her elbows. Outside the glove of the left hand she wore a
+bracelet; every time she stirred the stones struck fire in the
+semi-darkness. Her hands were very small. Peeping out from below her
+gown, the buckles on her high-heeled shoes twinkled. She was mysterious,
+taunting, and strangely commanding. As she hovered there across the
+threshold, a faint perfume drifted up to him like the intoxicating
+romance of June rose-gardens under moonlight.
+
+She, too, seemed to have suffered a surprise at hearing the tones in
+which he had spoken. "His address! Oh, no, it wasn't Mr. Easterday I was
+wanting. I only supposed---- If Mrs. Lockwood's at home, I should like
+to see her."
+
+Her voice was like a chime of contralto bells. It made him think of
+Bernhardt. It imparted to the commonplaces she uttered a quite
+disproportionate intensity of drama and tragic depth. The way in which
+she had said, "Oh, no," reverberated in his memory as though the sound
+still lingered on the air.
+
+"I don't know at all," he commenced. Then he smiled at his confusion.
+"You see I'm not used to answering doors, and Mrs. Lockwood's not quite
+herself. She was very tired just now. But if you'll give me your name,
+I'll----"
+
+If he'd been left to himself, he might have succeeded in creating the
+impression that he was Maisie's physician. As it was, his conscience
+was spared the deception by the advent of the inevitable Porter. She
+sailed up behind him with an appearance so immaculate that it would have
+shed propriety on the most compromising circumstances. He instantly
+stood aside to make room for her. "Porter, here's a lady enquiring
+for----"
+
+But the lady took matters into her own hands. "Mrs. Lockwood in,
+Porter?"
+
+"Why, certainly, your Ladyship."
+
+"Then why was I shut out? Who is this gentleman who----"
+
+The rest was lost as their voices sank. The next words he caught were
+her Ladyship's, running up the scale of laughter. "Then I'm not _de
+trop_! That's a blessing!"
+
+He fell back, trying to obliterate himself, as with every sign of
+deference Porter admitted her; but in crossing the hall, she had to pass
+him. Scarcely pausing, she swept him with a pair of stone-gray eyes,
+made mischievous for the moment with merriment. "You're no good as a
+butler," she whispered. "You carry discretion too far."
+
+To his chagrin he recognized her--the one woman whom he would most have
+chosen to have met in an attitude that was dignified. She entered the
+drawing-room and was lost to sight. But she had left the door ajar and
+he heard Maisie's delighted exclamation, "Why, Di, what brings you here
+so late? This is darling of you!" His position was elaborately false. It
+grew more false every minute he delayed. He foresaw himself apologizing
+and being explained. He had no appetite for explanations. Since he had
+adventured into Mulberry Tree Court, he had twice been tempted to bolt
+for safety. Now that he was tempted for a third time, he acted blindly
+on the impulse. Having played the rôle of butler with too much
+discretion, he seized his hat and, without a thought of ceremony,
+adopted a butler's mode of escaping.
+
+
+III
+
+In the shrouded emptiness of the London night he felt himself free
+again. He came into possession of himself and found that he could think
+with his old definite clearness. In the last few hours events had rushed
+him off his feet; he had no sooner realized their significance than he
+had discovered himself in the throes of a new crisis. Now, for the
+moment, he stood aloof and could consider his actions in their true
+perspective.
+
+As he turned out of Mulberry Tree Court, he had thought he had heard a
+voice calling after him. "Lord Taborley! Lord Taborley!" He had looked
+back across the imitation village-green, where the white posts showed
+dimly like smudges of chalk. The door of Maisie's house had been opened
+wide, making a lozenge of gold against the blackness. He had fancied
+that he had seen her standing there framed, leaning out, and
+then----Yes, surely he had heard the running of slippered feet along the
+pavement. He had not waited. He scarcely knew from what he was
+escaping--perhaps from his fate, from which there is ultimately no
+escape. He seized his respite, however, for the dread of recapture was
+strong upon him.
+
+And now all hint of pursuit had died out. Tall houses stood muted
+against the sky; dim trees cast a leafy obscurity; stars glinted
+remotely like diamonds set in gun-metal. He found a healing chastity in
+his sudden aloneness; it roused in him an almost angry desire to recover
+his lost monasticism.
+
+He was amused to discover himself speculating as to whether women were
+worth the trouble they occasioned. They coerced men with sentimental
+arguments to which there were no replies. They wore away men's fortitude
+with the continual flowing of their tears. They molded men's strength
+into weakness with the magic caressing of their sex. They promised and
+disappointed, flattered and allured, captured and despised. Their
+curiosity was insatiable to possess themselves of secrets, which were no
+longer valued the moment they were divulged. Their little teasing hands,
+so destructive and lovable, had commenced the débâcle of every human
+greatness. Throughout the ages, their coaxing, pleading voices could be
+heard wheedling men's hearts to the same purpose. "Tell me, I pray thee,
+wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherein thou mightest be bound to
+afflict thee." The strength of men had eternally roused their
+resentment, whether they were the Delilahs of long ago or the Maisies of
+a modern generation. The goal of all their passion, even when it was
+unselfish, was to bind.
+
+He had nearly been bound, but he had escaped. At the thought that he
+had escaped, he felt a flood of exultant joy sweep through him. He
+smiled, believing he had discovered a humorous and more human motive for
+the exhausting piety of the anchorites. It wasn't their religious
+self-abnegation that had made them flee to scorched river-beds and
+desert hiding-places; it was their triumphant satisfaction at having
+tantalized and eluded feminine pursuit. They fled in order that they
+might possess, not deny themselves. As they became more emaciated and
+scarred and as their needs grew less, they listened. What they heard was
+ample compensation for all that they had foresworn at the hands of life.
+Far blown from distant haunts of habitation came a sound which in their
+ears was sweetest music: day and night the painful dragging of chains
+and the groan of men toiling in servitude to women.
+
+"The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!" When the last sleepy caress had
+been given, all men who lacked the caution of the anchorite, were sooner
+or later destined to hear that cry.
+
+How much nobler men had been in a womanless world! Some of them had had
+to become womanless before they could be noble. Pollock plunging to his
+death from the clouds, like an eagle struck by a thunderbolt! Lord Dawn
+with the smile of calm remembrance on his lips, purged of all his
+fruitless sex-contentions, lying white and quiet beneath the crack and
+spatter of exploding shells! Braithwaite, the ex-valet, who had proved
+himself an aristocrat in courage! And he himself, thinking only of duty,
+with every jealous ambition laid aside!
+
+And now---- The mate of the eagle was a trifler with peacocks and
+vultures. The man whose face had been molded by his last thought into an
+expression of serene faithfulness, was recalled only as one who had
+lived envenomed by disloyalty. Braithwaite, the aristocrat in courage,
+was now distinguished for his cowardice; he himself was at one and the
+same time Braithwaite's rival and grudging critic. _The Philistines be
+upon thee, Samson! And he awoke out of his sleep and said, I will go out
+as at other times and shake myself_----Asleep! He felt that he, too, had
+been asleep. All the men who had been giants in the past five years were
+either dead or sleeping. And this sudden transformation was the work of
+women, because men had come back to walk and rest with them in the soft,
+desired places. The little feminine hands had stripped them of their
+charity, had taken away their valor and had concealed liers-in-wait in
+the chamber of their affections.
+
+So his thoughts ran on, amplifying, magnifying, exaggerating the theme
+of the debilitating effects of women. But from all his accusations he
+exempted Terry. She was the Joan of Arc of his imagination, who rode on
+unvanquished across life's battlefields, inspiring to heroism with her
+shining purity. And he made one other exception--Lady Dawn. It was the
+Lady Dawn of the portrait he exempted, not the Lady Dawn who had mocked
+him in passing with her steady stone-gray eyes. In a strange way he
+discriminated between the portrait and the living woman. The portrait
+was almost his friend; the living woman was a stranger. The woman in
+the portrait was after his own heart; she had never been known to cry.
+"Do it harder; I can bear more than that." He thrilled to the pride of
+her defiance.
+
+Then he pulled himself up with a start. Again he was thinking about her.
+Yes, and though he might discriminate between the portrait and the
+living woman, it was the living woman's eyes that gleamed in the
+blackness of his mind. There was truth in what Maisie had said, that
+were he as much in love with Terry as he professed all other women,
+however beautiful, except the one woman, should be hanks of hair and
+bags of bones. He consoled himself by arguing that that was precisely
+what he had been trying to prove them by his sweeping applications of
+the conduct of Delilah.
+
+Whichever way he viewed his situation, things were in a pretty fair
+muddle--a muddle which annoyed him because it was so unmerited. He was
+pledged to Terry, while she held herself unpledged. He was committed to
+help Maisie--a distinctly unwise little lady for any bachelor to help.
+As a third party to his problem, Lady Dawn intruded herself--though why
+she should, he wasn't certain. He would have to see her, however much
+Maisie dissuaded; it was right that she should know about her husband.
+Yet was that the entire reason why he was so keen to see her? He assured
+himself very earnestly that it was, and dismissed her from his mind.
+
+For the rest of the journey home he conscientiously narrowed his
+imaginings to thoughts of Terry.
+
+
+IV
+
+It was with thoughts of her that he fitted his key in the latch. The
+Square was full of newly married couples, some of them little more than
+boys and girls--youngsters who had waited impatiently and had run
+together the moment war was ended. Others had been married just long
+enough to be proudly parading their first baby. Every morning white
+prams were wheeled out into the garden, there to be watched over by
+softly spoken nurses. Every night, as dusk came down, expectant mothers
+paced gently through the shadows, leaning on the arms of ex-officer
+husbands. It wasn't only in the trees that nests were being built. The
+Square's name might well have been changed to Honeymoon Square.
+
+And now, as Tabs pushed the door open, preparing to enter, he knew that
+all up and down the Square, behind the pall of darkness, other doors
+were being pushed back. Young couples were coming home from dinners and
+theaters. He could hear the murmur of their laughter, subdued and
+secret, hinting at intimacies of affection. The men had misplaced their
+latch-key perhaps; the girls were advising that they search another
+pocket. Or the lock refused to turn and the girls were whispering how it
+could be persuaded. Some of them were arriving in taxis; others, less
+lucky or more economic, were tripping by on foot along the pavement. He
+noticed how closely they clung together and he thought of Terry. It
+would be jolly to be young, to build a nest and, by and by, to see your
+own white pram wheeled out to take its place in the blowy greenness of
+the garden. He withdrew his key and entered, closing the door behind
+him.
+
+The house was very still. It was nearly midnight. The maids had gone to
+bed, leaving lights in the hall and on the landings. As he hung up his
+hat, the stillness was broken by the sudden ringing of the telephone. It
+rang in a peevish, scolding manner, as though this were not the first
+time and it had lost its temper with waiting. He climbed the flight of
+stairs to his library and, without waiting to switch on the lights, sat
+down at his table, taking up the receiver.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is this Lord Taborley?" a voice inquired.
+
+"Lord Taborley speaking."
+
+"This is Sir Tobias Beddow." There was a pause, followed by a little
+asthmatic cough. Then, "How are you, my dear fellow? I've been trying to
+reach you all evening. I was expecting to see you round here this
+morning at eleven.--No, I don't mean perhaps what you infer. Besides, it
+wouldn't have been any good if you had called; Terry wandered out,
+without leaving word where she was going. She didn't get back till
+nearly lunch-time. Most unaccountable conduct under the circumstances;
+but since your conduct was equally unaccountable, perhaps it was just as
+well. But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs smiled in the darkness. Sir Tobias was as simple and crafty as a
+child; he couldn't keep anything back. Then his mind jumped to the
+obvious conclusion. Terry hadn't told her parents about her morning
+interview; her parents naturally supposed that it was his fault that he
+was not engaged to her as yet. Making an effort to be diplomatic, he
+said, "Perhaps I can explain my apparent negligence to you later. It
+must seem unpardonable. I've been busy every minute over things that
+absolutely couldn't be avoided."
+
+"Of course. Of course." The words were spoken soothingly, but without
+conviction. "We men understand. It's Lady Beddow who---- Such events are
+women's great occasions. She's a stickler for form. As you say, you can
+explain later---- But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs stifled a yawn. He had suddenly discovered he was sleepy.
+
+"What was that you said?" Sir Tobias enquired suspiciously.
+
+"I didn't say anything," Tabs replied politely. "But I think I know what
+you called me up about. It was about Maisie--I mean Mrs. Lockwood."
+
+"What about her?" The question was asked carelessly; he knew at once
+that he had missed his guess. It was strange, even though he had guessed
+wrongly, that Sir Tobias should not display more interest.
+
+"What about her? Only that I've spent the last six hours with her. You
+asked me to see her as soon as possible, you remember. I had only just
+got home from being with her, when the telephone rang. She's not the
+woman we thought her."
+
+"Eh? What's that?"
+
+He repeated what he had said. He was perfectly certain that Sir Tobias
+had heard the first time. "She's not the woman we thought her." And he
+added, "There's been some mistake. She hasn't and never did have any
+designs on Adair. After we'd talked things over, she agreed of her own
+accord never to see him again."
+
+"She did!" There was a long pause, expressive of skepticism,
+dissatisfaction, or anything that he cared to conjecture. Then, "When we
+meet, you can tell me. But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs waited for him to tell him why he had called him up. He waited so
+long that it seemed to be a competition to see who would compel the
+other to break the silence first. At last he gave in. "If that wasn't
+why, why did you?"
+
+He almost heard Sir Tobias blink his eyes--those faded eyes that looked
+so blind and saw so much. "I called you up about this General
+Braithwaite. He's been here to see me on the biggest fool's errand, with
+the most unusual story which, if it's true, partly concerns yourself.
+It's too late to enter into details this evening. But I thought I'd let
+you know---- Good night."
+
+"One minute, Sir Tobias----"
+
+Before he could get any further Sir Tobias had hung up. For a few
+seconds he sat there in the darkness listening; then he hung up also and
+took himself off to bed.
+
+What object had Braithwaite had in going to see Sir Tobias? Was it his
+first step in trying to play fair? Was his "fool's errand" a formal
+request for Terry's hand in marriage and his "unusual story" a manly
+recital of the facts? And had this great advance in frankness included
+the telling of Ann? As he tossed sleeplessly from side to side, other
+problems leapt up to confront him. Had he done wisely in promising
+Maisie that, in a measure, he would compensate her for the loss of
+Adair? What would Sir Tobias think of such an intimacy when he got to
+hear of it? What would even Adair think of it? There was only one person
+who would not doubt his integrity; that was Terry. And then Lady
+Dawn--had he actually any moral right to interfere in her affairs? "Do
+it harder; I can bear more than that." He could hear her saying it in
+that deep, emotional voice of hers. He could feel her honest stone-gray
+eyes, probing his soul for motives in the darkness.
+
+Day was breaking and birds were stirring in the mist of greenness that
+topped his windows, before his eye-lids closed and he slipped off into
+forgetfulness.
+
+
+V
+
+"To-morrow's another new day," he thought as he awoke. One could meet
+any and every indebtedness to life if he only had a sufficient fund of
+to-morrows in his bank.
+
+He looked at his watch and leapt out of bed. Nine o'clock! He had slept
+late. He didn't hurry over his dressing. He could afford to be late for
+once. The mood of conquest was upon him. Maisie had said that. No, it
+wasn't _the mood_ but _the air_ of conquest that she'd said he had.
+Whichever it was, he would prove her a true prophetess. He might not
+gain all his desires, but he'd at least wear the air of one who was
+going to gain them. To-morrow was another new day, and to-morrow had
+arrived.
+
+On coming down to breakfast he scrutinized Ann's features closely to
+learn whether she had heard anything from Braithwaite. They told him
+nothing. Presently, however, while she served him, she began to open
+out.
+
+"Did your Lordship speak to the gentleman at the War Office?"
+
+Tabs had been glancing through the morning paper. He looked up. "Yes, I
+did, Ann. I placed your letter in his hands, and saw him read it."
+
+"Did he say anything or promise anything to your Lordship?"
+
+Tabs pursed his lips judicially, trying to avoid a lie. "You know what
+these War Office officials are. They never make promises to any one. But
+I believe this one's a good-hearted chap. When he realizes how much this
+thing means to you, I think he'll do his best."
+
+"Then he didn't show your Lordship my letter?"
+
+Tabs had dipped into his newspaper again. He detested the well-meant
+deceit he was compelled to practice. This time, when he answered, he
+didn't raise his eyes. "No, he didn't."
+
+But she didn't efface herself, as he had expected. She stood there, to
+one side of his chair. He felt that she was looking down at him. Just
+above the edge of his paper he could see her hands clasped together,
+pressing against each other in agitation. He abandoned his refuge and
+dropped the paper to the carpet.
+
+"Something more that you want to ask me? What is it?"
+
+"Your Lordship said that when the gentleman realized how much all this
+meant to me, he'd do his best."
+
+"That's what I said and I'm sure of it."
+
+"What I wanted to ask was, does your Lordship think he has realized?"
+
+It was the way she said it that roused his curiosity. Could she have
+guessed? Had she read the address on that letter which he had given her
+to post to General Braithwaite, and put two and two together?
+
+He met her eyes--good, gray eyes, with something of Lady Dawn's grave
+honesty in their expression. "I think he has realized."
+
+"Thank you, sir; and I'm sorry I had to trouble you."
+
+She withdrew, leaving him with the disturbing sense that she had
+intended more than she had said. He gathered up the paper from the floor
+in the hope that a perusal of it might enable him to recover his lost
+equanimity. In so doing he caught sight of the last page, which
+contained the photographic items. Braithwaite's face stared up at him.
+Above it was printed the caption, "_Youngest Ranker Brigadier Demobbed
+Yesterday_."
+
+If she had seen that, she knew. If she had seen it, what would be her
+next move--appeal or revenge? What had been the significance of her
+final question, "Does your Lordship think he has realized?" Did she know
+now; had she even known when she had written her letter that it would be
+received by Braithwaite himself?
+
+If she didn't know and had not seen the paper, he was determined that
+she should not see it. Before leaving the room, he stuffed it into the
+empty grate and applied a match. He would play fair by Braithwaite. He
+was so eager to play fair that he did not turn to go upstairs till every
+vestige of print had been licked to ashes.
+
+
+VI
+
+His library occupied the whole of the second story; even at that it was
+not very large. It had two long French windows, opening onto a veranda
+which looked out over the Square. The veranda was constructed of wrought
+iron, painted green, and ran straight across the front of the house. Ann
+used it for giving her plants an airing; they usually formed a truant
+garden beyond the panes. There was a smaller window at the back, from
+which a view could be obtained of the Oratory.
+
+The room was furnished in English red lacquer, which had been
+transferred from the collection at Taborley House, when Taborley House
+had been lent to the Americans for a military hospital. The walls were
+hung with landscapes by Zuccarelli and with Chinese portrait-groups of
+the Eighteenth Century.
+
+He had scarcely entered before the telephone renewed its irritating
+clamor, like a fretful child which yelled whenever it heard his
+footstep. He responded to its fretfulness in very much the same mood,
+seizing hold of the receiver as though he would shake it into silence.
+
+"Yes. Hullo! Hullo! Yes, this is Lord Taborley. What's that? You didn't
+catch what I---- It's Lord Taborley speaking, I said."
+
+"Well, I must say you don't sound very nice." It was a woman's amused
+voice. "Even at this distance, you make me almost afraid. I do hope you
+haven't been like that all night."
+
+Tabs made his tones more smiling. "I'm sorry if I don't sound
+sufficiently pleasant. But who are you?"
+
+"Well, who do you think?" There was a snatch of laughter. "I'm Maisie; I
+mean Mrs. Lockwood. You needn't tell me that you're not frowning,
+because I can feel it. What's the matter?"
+
+He pulled a wry face at himself in the opposite mirror and shrugged his
+shoulders. Down the 'phone he said with excessive amiability, "Nothing.
+I'm top-hole. How are you feeling?"
+
+Her answer came back like a flash, "Vulgar and not very safe." It was
+followed by a gurgle of merriment.
+
+"I'm not sure that I understand your symptoms."
+
+The gurgle was repeated. "You wouldn't. Lord Taborley never feels vulgar
+and he's always safe. But this is one of my vulgar days, when I'm not
+to be trusted. I always have one when Di has been to visit me; it's the
+relapse after contact with too high standards of respectability. I'm
+liable to do anything. I married Gervis and Lockwood after being with
+her. I shall break out to-day if you don't come at once and stop me.
+Unless--unless you don't want to stop me and would prefer the experiment
+of being vulgar together."
+
+"The prospect sounds alluring." He was trying to let her down lightly.
+"But I'm afraid I have too many engagements on hand."
+
+"Oh!" It was the _oh_ of disappointment. When she spoke again her gay
+irresponsibility had vanished and a coaxing quality had come into her
+voice. "I know you've only just got home from being with me--I mean
+comparatively speaking. I don't want to make myself a burden to you,
+but---- It's such a jolly day. Have you been up long enough to look out
+of the window? I thought we could go off somewhere--to the Zoo, perhaps,
+and drink lemonade all among the monkeys and the nuts. I woke up
+planning it. We'd limit our spending money to five shillings like
+kiddies, and do all our riding on busses. Doesn't that sound jolly?"
+
+"Immensely," he agreed; "but I'm afraid no amount of jolliness could
+tempt----"
+
+She broke in on him. "It's the kind of thing I used to do with Adair."
+
+The meaning of this last remark was plain; she was reminding him that if
+the pair of shoes vacated by Adair were to remain vacated, he must pay
+the promised price on occasions by wearing them himself. He determined
+to get behind her diplomatic hints with frankness.
+
+"I don't want you to think, Mrs. Lockwood, that because I have to refuse
+your first request I'm going back on our contract. There'll be plenty of
+other opportunities."
+
+He caught her sigh of relief across the line. When she spoke again it
+was with a new brightness and reasonableness. "I'm glad you said that.
+So you really are going to help me? I was a wee bit afraid that you'd
+gone back on your bargain by the way you ran away."
+
+It was his first experience of the advantage a woman gains when she
+attacks a man from the other end of a telephone. He had trouble in
+making his voice sound patient. He replied with conscious hypocrisy,
+"I'm sorry I created the impression of running away."
+
+"You did." Her answer came back promptly. "You created the same
+impression on us both. I had to do a lot of explaining to Di."
+
+"And I was trying to save you embarrassment," he excused himself.
+
+"Eh! What's that?"
+
+To his immense surprise a third voice--a man's--jumped in on the
+conversation. "Are you there? Is this Lord Taborley?"
+
+Tabs was just getting ready to confess that he was there and that he was
+Lord Taborley, when Maisie took matters out of his hands by informing
+the intruder that the line was occupied and that he was interrupting a
+conversation.
+
+"I'm sorry," the intruder apologized, "but my time's valuable. I've been
+kept waiting for the best part of quarter of an hour. Are you the
+telephone-girl that I'm talking to?"
+
+"Indeed I'm not," said Maisie with considerable haughtiness. "Please get
+off the line." And then to Tabs, "Are you still there, Lord Taborley?
+This is Mrs. Lockwood. Can't you postpone some of those engagements so
+that we can meet to-day?"
+
+At that moment the girl at the switch-board took a hand. There was a
+confused gabbling and buzzing of voices, out of which the suave tones of
+the intruder emerged triumphant, saying, "This is Sir Tobias Beddow. Can
+I speak with Lord Taborley?"
+
+Perhaps Maisie had heard. At all events, the moment Sir Tobias declared
+himself the line cleared.
+
+But it wasn't what Maisie had overheard that disturbed Tabs; it was the
+uncertainty as to how much of her conversation had been listened to by
+Sir Tobias. After all, prospective fathers-in-law are only human and as
+likely as any other class to jump to damaging conclusions. Tabs hung up
+the receiver, making it necessary for him to be summoned afresh before
+he acknowledged his presence at the 'phone. Then, "Good morning, Sir
+Tobias."
+
+"Good morning, my dear fellow." Sir Tobias was as courtly and friendly
+as ever. "I called you up to know whether you could run round to see me
+between now and the forenoon. Yes, the matter I mentioned to you last
+night. About eleven, you say? Very well, then, I shall expect you."
+
+
+VII
+
+No sooner had the butler with the velvet-plush manners admitted him than
+he found himself face to face with Terry. She must have known that he
+was expected and have been lying in wait for him. Before he could say a
+word, she pressed a finger to her lips, signaling caution. To the butler
+she said in a low tone, "It's all right, James; you don't need to wait.
+I'll announce Lord Taborley." The discreet James showed a fitting
+appreciation of romance by folding his plump hands across the pit of his
+stomach, making the ghost of a bow and tiptoeing noiselessly into the
+nether regions with the stealth of a conspirator.
+
+Terry's face was a picture of innocence. After Maisie she struck him as
+very young--much too young to love or to know the meaning of love. The
+sight of her freshness was forbidding. It made him seem jaded. It filled
+him with a reverence that was not far short of worship. He felt it
+impossible to think of her as performing the ordinary acts of a mortal
+world. He had the feeling that she moved on higher levels--that she was
+a creature too shy and perfect to be made the instrument of passion. She
+should be guarded in her purity like a vestal virgin, so that her
+straight young body might be forever valiant and her eyes might never
+learn the cowardice of tears.
+
+In the brave March sunlight which shafted down on her, her head looked
+more like a Botticelli angel's than ever. The raw gold of her bobbed
+hair shone solid as metal, making a sharp edge where it ended against
+the ivory pallor of her throat. She was dressed in a white tailor-made
+serge. Her violet eyes danced with eager secrets.
+
+"What are you doing to-day?" she whispered.
+
+"Nothing!" he whispered, "if you want me."
+
+"Then invite me out to lunch. I've such heaps to tell you. Don't let
+Daddy take you to his club--I know he's going to ask you. And, oh,
+before I forget, I've told them nothing about yesterday, so don't give
+me away by accident." Then in a sly aside, just as she was turning the
+door-knob to admit him to her father's library, "You've been getting on
+famously with Maisie, haven't you?"
+
+Before he could reply, they were across the threshold. There was a sound
+as of a rheumaticky hen stirring in its nest. The neck of Sir Tobias
+craned painfully round the corner of a high-backed chair.
+
+"Here's Lord Taborley to see you, Daddy. Don't keep him forever. He's
+just invited me to go out with him to lunch."
+
+Having shot her bolt, with the masterly strategy of her sex, she
+vanished, pulling the door behind her.
+
+What would Shakespeare have said under the circumstances, and what would
+a suitor have said to Shakespeare when he knew that he was suspected of
+having gone back on his request for the daughter's hand in marriage?
+Tabs almost felt that he was in the actual presence of the bard of
+Stratford, Sir Tobias looked so ineffectually pompous and overweighted
+with gravity. Both Sir Tobias and Shakespeare, in the opinion of Tabs,
+were vastly overrated persons; but the only thing Shakespearian about
+Sir Tobias this morning was the magnificent calmness of his forehead;
+his podgy body, supported by its stiff little pen-wiper legs was more
+reminiscent of Punch, as portrayed on the cover of the famous weekly
+which bears his name.
+
+"Immensely considerate of you to come," puffed Sir Tobias, levering
+himself out of his chair in order that he might shake hands.
+
+"Not kind at all," Tabs contradicted cheerfully. "I kill two birds with
+one stone; I have my conversation with you and in half an hour I carry
+off Terry."
+
+That'll make him hurry up with whatever he has to say, he thought; it
+sets a time limit.
+
+The old gentleman seemed put out to find himself deprived of his
+prerogative to be elaborate and prosy. He made a gesture, indicating
+that Tabs should copy his example and choose a chair. But Tabs ignored
+it. He had learnt that a man on his feet has the advantage, especially
+if he stands six foot two in his socks.
+
+"You'll be wanting my news," he suggested. "I told you pretty well
+everything across the telephone. I think it's a case of everybody having
+got the wind up--Phyllis particularly. Mrs. Lockwood's a very restful
+woman. I should call her a man's woman. She's bright and entertaining
+and pretty, and she owns a charming little house. She had no
+responsibilities, so she's free to entertain from morning till night.
+Adair has without doubt visited her more often than was wise. It was
+remarkably foolish of him to have made a woman-friend whom he didn't
+share with Phyllis. But I suppose he didn't dare to introduce them after
+he'd seen that Phyllis was jealous. However that may be, this dread that
+they may run away together is moonshine. Mrs. Lockwood sets too high a
+value on herself. Besides, there's only one man whom she loves or ever
+has loved for that matter. He happens to be dead!"
+
+"One moment, my dear fellow," Sir Tobias interrupted, "I always
+understood that the lady had had three husbands. Was this man one of
+them or did she have no affection for any of the men she married?"
+
+Tabs felt himself cornered--and he had been getting on so well. He
+realized that if once he allowed Sir Tobias to start questioning him he
+would get tangled up. "She's complex," he explained; "she's complex in
+her simplicity. She's one of the most simply complicated and
+complicatedly simple women that I ever met. To understand her you have
+to talk with her. I talked with her for six hours. The upshot was that
+she promised to shut her door against Adair."
+
+The innocent old eyes blinked. "I'm not modern, like you, Lord Taborley.
+I have my suspicions of these simply complicated and complicatedly
+simple women. Set me down as old-fashioned. Having been only once
+married, I can't enter into the refinements of feeling of such
+matrimonially inclined boa-constrictors as Mrs. Lockwood. I sha'n't give
+myself the chance of meeting her. I'm an old man; it would be too
+upsetting. If I talked with her, I shouldn't understand. So I must take
+your word for it that, however much appearances may have been against
+her, her motives were beyond question." He slipped forward in his chair
+with a disconcerting suddenness; for a moment his filmy eyes became
+penetrating. "She seems to have made a deep impression on you, my dear
+fellow. If your optimism proves correct and through your efforts Adair
+is free from her clutches, we all owe you a debt of gratitude. But--and
+I'm sure you won't take amiss what I'm saying--I would advise you, now
+that you've effected Adair's rescue, not to see too much of her
+yourself. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn't see her any more if I could
+help."
+
+It was clear that the benignant, sly old gentleman had overheard a
+substantial part of Maisie's telephone conversation. It was equally
+clear that his interference was wisely and kindly intended. He had a
+perfect right to be scrupulous about the conduct of a man whom he
+regarded as his future son-in-law; but he had no right to take advantage
+of the worst managed telephone-system in the world to eavesdrop on a
+private conversation. At the same time Tabs could hardly accuse him of
+eavesdropping, so he fell back on his dignity for defense.
+
+"I've always been very well able to take care of myself," he said
+quietly. "If I hadn't been, I shouldn't have undertaken your mission
+and have gone to interview the kind of woman you described. I found,
+however, that she didn't live up to your description of her; in fairness
+to her I have to let you know that. I don't think you appreciate, Sir
+Tobias, what a delicate situation you created for both of us. She's a
+woman of breeding; which goes without saying since she's Lady Dawn's
+sister--a fact which you withheld from me. You sent me to her house as a
+kind of moral policeman with a warrant for her arrest. She was well
+aware of that and she was also aware that the charge you laid against
+her was almost libelously mistaken. All I can say is that she has
+behaved very handsomely. Since you and Phyllis have misunderstood her
+friendship for Adair, she's willing to break off relations. The most
+courteous and only decent thing that we can do is to cease discussing
+her. It's an incident which does none of us much credit."
+
+As he had warmed to her defense, Tabs had been very conscious that he
+was being more than generous--perhaps even more generous than truthful.
+It hadn't been his intention at the start to depict her as a wronged and
+spotless angel; but the skepticism of the attentive old image, bleached
+with disillusions and faded with years, had goaded him to excess.
+
+Sir Tobias had listened, scratching his pointed beard thoughtfully, with
+entire amiability. He was utterly unimpressed and visibly unashamed.
+"You're a man of the world, my dear Taborley, and you have the advantage
+of having seen her. From what you say I gather that she's not bad
+looking. To the not bad looking much is forgiven. Nevertheless, I stand
+by my opinion that she's not a safe woman to see too often. However,
+you're master of your own actions and that's neither here nor there."
+
+He commenced to fumble through his pockets. When he had found his
+cigarette-case, he proffered it to Tabs, who refused it.
+
+"I wish you'd sit down, my dear fellow."
+
+Tabs glanced at his watch. There was only a quarter of an hour left of
+the time he had allotted. As a concession to Sir Tobias he seated
+himself. "It was about General Braithwaite that you called me up last
+night?"
+
+"Yes. But there's no hurry. We can discuss that over lunch."
+
+Tabs considered that the time had come to be firm. "I'm sorry, Sir
+Tobias. Terry's lunching with me. We start in something less than
+fifteen minutes."
+
+Sir Tobias screwed himself round and surveyed his future son-in-law with
+a mild amazement. For forty years he had been accustomed to having his
+own way unchallenged. "Terry can wait." He spoke as though the matter
+was now settled. "What I have to tell you is important."
+
+"And so is what I have to tell Terry." Tabs emphasized his statement by
+glancing again at his watch.
+
+For a few seconds Sir Tobias was at a loss. To hear himself opposed was
+a novel experience. Then he thought he had discovered a consoling
+reason for this obstinacy and smiled loftily, as Shakespeare retired to
+Stratford might have smiled at hearing himself reminded by Ann Hathaway
+that he was not so great a man as London had imagined.
+
+"Very well, my dear fellow," he conceded; "young blood will have its
+way. I withdraw for this once, since your plans are already made."
+
+His forgiveness was brushed aside. Time was pressing. Tabs forced him to
+the point without further ceremony or waste of words. "When you phoned
+yesterday evening it was nearly midnight, so the matter must have seemed
+urgent. You said that General Braithwaite had been to see you on a
+fool's errand, with a story that partly concerned myself. May I ask how
+it concerned me?"
+
+"You're brusque, very brusque," Sir Tobias complained. "We could have
+talked this over much better at my club."
+
+When Tabs showed no signs of relenting, he revealed his real feelings
+testily. "You know this fellow Braithwaite. You must have recognized him
+the moment you clapped eyes on him. Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+Tabs looked up quickly, taken aback and slightly resentful at the
+peremptory tones in which he was addressed. "It wasn't my business.
+Apart from that, I was aware of nothing to his discredit." Once again as
+in the case of Maisie, he was allowing himself to be goaded out of
+justice into excessive generosity.
+
+"Nothing to his discredit! That depends on your point of view." Sir
+Tobias sniffed audibly. He could be as a rude as a spoilt child. "That
+depends on how deeply interested you're in--in my daughter."
+
+"I think I gave you proof of my interest, Sir Tobias, the other evening
+when I asked----"
+
+"Pshaw! You know very well what I'm driving at, Taborley."
+
+"Nevertheless, I should like to hear you put it into words."
+
+Sir Tobias gave one of his remarkable exhibitions of youthfulness.
+Flinging aside his decrepitude, as though it had been no more than an
+affectation, he shot bolt upright, gripping the arms of his chair. "Last
+night, within a handful of hours of my forbidding him the house, he had
+the impertinence to call here to inform me that he was in love with
+Terry. Not content with that, he added insult to his impertinence by
+telling me that he had been your valet. How is it, Taborley, that on
+that evening when you dined here as his fellow-guest, you never once
+hinted by look or word that he wasn't the part he was playing? I can't
+consider that very honorable of you. As an old friend, quite apart from
+any new relationship, I had the right to expect that my interests were
+nearer to your heart. It upsets me to find I was mistaken. Have you so
+little pride in the girl you propose to marry that it doesn't offend you
+to see her gadding about with ex-servants? You saw them get up and leave
+the table that night. You heard the front-door bang and knew that they'd
+gone out together--my daughter with the fellow who used to put the studs
+into your shirts! And there you sat with me, sipping your coffee and
+chatting as though it were all perfectly right and normal. Upon my soul,
+Taborley, you're beyond my comprehending. If I, her father, can feel
+this indignation, what ought not you to feel? You're supposed to be her
+lover and you're not jealous. So far as I can see, you're not even
+disturbed."
+
+Tabs' face had gone suddenly white. He acknowledged to himself that, had
+he been Terry's father, he would have said no less. When he spoke it was
+with quiet intensity.
+
+"I am annoyed, Sir Tobias--a good deal more annoyed than I care to own
+to myself; but I try not to let my annoyance obscure my sense of
+justice. It isn't fair to consider Braithwaite in the light of a
+servant. He isn't a servant; he's won his spurs. He arrived at the
+position he occupies to-day through original and unaided merit. That the
+man who was my servant, happens to be my rival, is bitterly galling. But
+I'm not going to let it blind me to the fact that he has qualities of
+greatness. He proved those qualities, even more than on the battlefield,
+when he came to you and pluckily told you the truth about himself. God
+knows what he thought to gain by it; but I'm hats off to him."
+
+Sir Tobias threw out his hands in a disowning gesture. "I don't want to
+quarrel with you--that's the last thing I desire. But I must confess
+that I fail to sympathize with your attitude of mind. Magnanimity is all
+very well, but it's easy to be magnanimous where your affections aren't
+too deeply concerned. A man in love has no right to be magnanimous--it
+isn't a healthy sign. Lady Beddow used those very words to me this
+morning. She feels as I do, that in your attitude to Terry you lack
+something. You've let two days elapse since you asked my permission to
+approach her---- You're the same with this Maisie woman--inhumanly,
+unsatisfactorily magnanimous. You don't identify yourself with our
+antipathies--you almost side with the people who affront us. It's
+estranging and distressing. I like a man to be more emphatic in his
+loyalties and aversions. I like him to show more fire. In days that I
+can almost remember, Braithwaite's intrusion would have been an occasion
+for a duel. Terry's mother feels the same about you; it makes her
+unhappy. 'He lacks ardor'--that was how she expressed it. 'Perhaps,
+after all, he's too old for Terry,' she said. Personally I don't go as
+far as that."
+
+Now that he had made an end, Sir Tobias attempted to beam on Tabs with
+his accustomed suavity. He was skillful in saying offensive things with
+an air of consideration. When he had said, "Personally I don't go as far
+as that," he had leant out and patted Tabs' hand with a senile display
+of affection.
+
+_Too old for Terry!_ Tabs sat pondering the words. They voiced his own
+doubt--the doubt that had haunted him from the moment of his return. The
+antiquated version of Shakespeare sat watching him, plucking at his
+pointed beard and blinking his faded eyes shrewdly.
+
+Suddenly with a cavalier smile of conquest, which was strangely
+unwarranted, Tabs swung himself to his feet. "Well, Sir Tobias, we've
+talked for more than our half hour. After all, it doesn't matter a
+continental what you, or I, or Lady Beddow feels. It's Terry's feelings
+that count. I shall know what she feels before the afternoon is ended."
+
+He was holding out his hand to the surprised old gentleman, when the
+door opened just sufficiently to admit Terry's head.
+
+"Come on, your Lordship!" she laughed mockingly, "you've kept me waiting
+long enough."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+
+TRAMPLED ROSES
+
+
+I
+
+As Tabs emerged from his interview with Sir Tobias, he found Terry
+standing in the hall, doing up the last button of her gloves. James, of
+the velvet-plush manners, lost no time in proffering him his hat and
+cane, and in flinging the front-door wide. He did it with the air of a
+sentimentalist who was aiding and abetting an elopement. Tabs had the
+feeling as he limped along the pavement with Terry tripping at his side,
+that the eyes of the house which they had left followed them--followed
+them jealously, romantically, expectantly. There was only one way in
+which they could give satisfaction and that was by returning to it
+engaged.
+
+"He lacks ardor. Perhaps, after all, he's too old!" Lady Beddow's
+criticism drummed in his mind. Not very pleasant hearing!
+
+Silence was maintained till they had rounded a corner and the tall buff
+house was left behind. Then Terry raised a shy, laughing face.
+"Downcast, Tabs? You look as though you were bearing the sins of all the
+world."
+
+"Not of all the world!" he corrected gravely. "Only of three people."
+
+"Then I'm one of them. Who are the other two?"
+
+"You know already--Mrs. Lockwood and Braithwaite. I saved all your
+necks, but I broke my own."
+
+She brushed against him affectionately. "Tabs, you're a trump."
+
+Her praise displeased him. "I didn't tell you for that."
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"Because I thought you ought to know." He slackened his pace. "I thought
+you ought to know that your father isn't as keen on me as he was,
+Terry."
+
+"That's all right," she said cheerily; "I am. But what have you been
+doing to Daddy?"
+
+"Describing Mrs. Lockwood as a lady above reproach and accusing him of
+uncharity towards Braithwaite."
+
+She tossed her head and laughed outright. "You _have_ become converted!"
+
+"Converted!" He pondered her assertion. "No. I'll acknowledge that I was
+inclined to be too harsh at first. I may have become more pitiful; but
+I've not become converted, if by that you mean that I condone what these
+two people have done. I still think that Mrs. Lockwood's conduct with
+Adair was inexcusable and that Braithwaite's holding back the truth from
+you was dishonorable. In talking with your father I gave Braithwaite all
+the credit for speaking out to him like a man, and I let him suppose
+that Mrs. Lockwood had given up Adair unconditionally. As you know,
+Braithwaite didn't come up to scratch till I'd handed him your
+ultimatum; and Mrs. Lockwood---- But you don't know about her yet. I
+haven't told you."
+
+"I know," Terry smiled roguishly. "Maisie's a great abuser of the
+telephone. She called me up this morning to ask whether she might share
+you with me for a few weeks. When I asked her why, she said to help her
+to forget Adair. Of course I consented."
+
+Tabs looked down at his companion to see whether her last remark had
+been sarcastic; to his discomfort he found that it hadn't. "I'm not sure
+that I like to be lent round like that," he objected. "I was sorry for
+her last night and promised to help her; but this phoning you up to ask
+your permission puts an entirely erroneous complexion on the affair."
+
+"Not erroneous if I understand," she assured him, glancing up with
+tender frankness.
+
+He smiled at the way she cozened him. Was she willing to lend him to
+another woman because she was so sure of him, or because she didn't care
+whether she lost him?
+
+"Your father suspects me of being lukewarm about you," he said; "and I
+can't blame him. He knows nothing about our meeting yesterday. He
+doesn't know that you care for Braithwaite. All he knows is that I asked
+his permission to approach you and then let two days elapse. When I did
+come to his house again it was to defend the two people who have caused
+him most annoyance. My reason for defending them was that I might make
+things easier for you. But my position is false, Terry. Every day your
+parents are expecting that we'll become engaged; every day that we
+don't----"
+
+They had come to the Marble Arch. "Shall we hop into a taxi?" he
+enquired.
+
+She shook her head. "Let's walk a little farther--down to Hyde Park
+Corner. It's easier to say things."
+
+When he had helped her through the traffic and they were sauntering
+through the Park, she took up the thread of their conversation. "I told
+you yesterday that I was willing to become engaged to you. I'm willing
+to-day."
+
+"_Willing!_" he emphasized. "But you don't _want_. The man you love is
+Braithwaite. What difference has this confession of his made?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and looked away, so that he should not see
+the quivering of her mouth. "It's made everything impossible. I admire
+him more than ever. I admire him for having told the truth and for
+having climbed so far up by his gallantry. But---- I'm no fool, Tabs. I
+know that I couldn't marry him without bringing ridicule upon all of us.
+Noble notions about human equality don't work in practice. He's what he
+is--fine of his kind. He's finer than you or I, Tabs, only he's not our
+sort. He couldn't ever become our sort. If I were as big as he is, I
+might not mind. But I'm little and mean; I care so much for caste. And
+yet, in spite of that, I want to marry him. I oughtn't to tell you, of
+all people. But I can't tell him and I can't tell any one--any one but
+you, Tabs. I want him so much that I'm ashamed sometimes. I wouldn't
+have my people know it, so you must stick by me. Do at least as much for
+me as you promised to do for Maisie--stay with me till I can forget
+him." And then she added ruefully, "It isn't much fun for you after all
+you'd expected."
+
+He couldn't afford to let her become emotional. Riders and smart
+equipages were passing. Several times already they had been recognized.
+The introduction of Maisie's name supplied him with a loophole. "Mrs.
+Lockwood rather adds to our complication. If I'm not engaged to you and
+I see something of her, your father will never understand. If I were
+your father, I wouldn't. To be perfectly frank, he thinks already that
+I'm lenient to Maisie only because she's good-looking----"
+
+Terry didn't permit him to get further. "Daddy's probably right. Be
+honest, Tabs. Would you have stood up for her, if you'd found her fat
+and forty? Of course you wouldn't. Maisie's a dear, but she's dangerous.
+She can't help being dangerous; it's half her attraction. By the way,
+we've been walking entirely in the wrong direction."
+
+They had come out by Hyde Park Corner. "How do you make that out?" he
+asked. "I thought we would lunch at the Ritz."
+
+She began to apologize. "Before I met you this morning, I'd arranged for
+us to lunch with her--I mean with Maisie. You don't mind, do you? I was
+speaking with her over the phone and she said we must come because she
+didn't feel safe."
+
+"She said that to you, too! She said the same thing to me. But you and
+I, do we want her?"
+
+Terry nodded, making her eyes wide. "We'll all make each other more
+safe. That's what friends are for. I told her we'd be at her house by
+one."
+
+"If you told her that----" He was trying to discover whether he was
+relieved or disappointed. With an eagerness which it was hard to account
+for, he was wondering whether Lady Dawn would be there. He pulled out
+his watch. "Twelve-forty-five. We can just do it in a taxi. If you told
+her that, we'd better stick to your plans."
+
+He hailed a driver who was passing and helped her into the cab.
+
+
+II
+
+As he and Terry chugged their way to Mulberry Tree Court he eyed her,
+sitting beside him. Would he ever get her? If he did, would she prove to
+be one of his really big things? All men must have thought that their
+wives would be the really big things in their lives before they married
+them. How many of them thought that six months after they were married?
+There was Adair, for instance. But his wife was going to be the big
+thing--on that he was determined.
+
+And yet, it wasn't very big of Terry to be using him as a stalking-horse
+for her love for Braithwaite; he felt morally certain that that was what
+she was doing. She hadn't acknowledged to having seen him, but Tabs felt
+instinctively that she had seen him. He also felt that within the next
+twenty-four hours she would be seeing him again. It was impossible for
+him to accuse her of clandestine meetings of which he had no proof; at
+the same time he was distressed by the restraint that was put upon
+himself. As things were, anything might happen. When it did happen, it
+would happen suddenly and he would be in a measure to blame.
+
+And here again, in this luncheon with Maisie, he was being made a party
+to her policy of secrecy. There could be no doubt that Sir Tobias was in
+ignorance of her continual correspondence with Maisie.
+
+He looked at her. How near she seemed to him and yet in reality what
+miles away! He could listen to her voice. He could touch her. But he
+could not foresee a single one of her future actions. She was remote and
+strange and dear. She had offered to become engaged to him, but she was
+no part of him. She filled him with discomfort and unrest. For the first
+time he dared to frame his charge against her. It was in almost the same
+words as the charge which she herself had brought against Braithwaite.
+He could love her so that it seemed that if he did not win her, he would
+never be able to love any other woman; but he could not trust her. He
+began to question whether she had ever been the woman he had tried to
+think her. Perhaps she was only a dummy and his imagination had clothed
+her with affection. He had attributed to her adorable qualities----
+
+When all was said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her
+fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of
+his position and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in
+the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to
+bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him.
+"He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry
+experience and inexperience inexperience.
+
+As they sped down the Brompton Road, they passed the end of Honeymoon
+Square. In the enclosed garden among spring flowers children were still
+playing. Scattered here and there, under the thin shade of blossoming
+trees, he caught glimpses of white prams with their attendant nurses.
+The little houses--his own among them--stood all a-row, shoulder to
+shoulder, looking intensely smiling and habitable. His imagination
+reconjured all the midnights they had witnessed--the home-comings under
+cover of darkness, the secret endearments of lovers, the muffled
+laughter. Then he remembered his own dream, which he had planned to
+share with her. It was intolerable that it should escape conversion into
+reality.
+
+It seemed little short of marvelous that she should still sit beside
+him. She should have vanished with the Square. Had he given her a name,
+he would have called her his lady in heliotrope, for she was dressed in
+a heliotrope gown, trimmed round the hem and throat with gray opossum
+and topped with a little close-fitting turban of color and fur to match.
+She looked so dainty and subtly haughty, so austere in her virginal
+beauty, that it seemed to him he must have wronged her with his silent
+conjectures.
+
+"You're more than ordinarily pretty to-day," he said.
+
+"Am I? What you mean, I suppose, is that you like my gown. It's a new
+one. I'm wearing it for the first time, especially for you."
+
+She turned her laughing face towards him, violet eyes, flushed cheeks,
+golden hair, white teeth--everything aflash with instant gratitude. The
+discovery of how easily he could command her happiness touched him.
+
+"Can I make you as merry as all that just by telling you you're
+beautiful?"
+
+She compressed her lips and nodded. "It's not being told. That doesn't
+matter. It's being told by you."
+
+He felt for the moment that he had recovered her--that he had bridged
+the gulf of the years that divided. Before anything further could be
+said, they were halting in Mulberry Tree Court.
+
+
+III
+
+On entering the house with the marigold-tinted curtains he had glanced
+round casually for any signs of Lady Dawn. After Porter had shown him
+into the drawing-room Terry had left him to go in search of Maisie. He
+walked over to the tall French-windows and found himself once more
+gazing out on the garden-rockery with its oval lake, its silent fountain
+and its toy-boat that never sailed anywhere. He made an effort to
+continue gazing out, for his impulse was to turn and look at the
+portrait over the fireplace. He tantalized himself by trying to ignore
+it. But it was strange the fascination that it held for him. He had the
+feeling that behind his back the face had changed from the profile
+position in which it had been painted, so that the steady stone-gray
+eyes were challenging his attention. At last he resisted no longer;
+walking over to the fireplace, he stood gazing up at it.
+
+For a moment he tried to pretend to himself that his interest was purely
+an art-interest. It was Sargent's brush-work that he was admiring. Then
+he smiled, as much to the portrait as to himself. "Princess Czarina
+Bolsheviki," he murmured, "were you really looking at me when my back
+was turned? Did you flash your eyes away directly I obeyed your desire?
+It's the trick of every woman; but you're not like every woman, Princess
+Czarina Bolsheviki."
+
+It seemed to him almost as though the woman on the canvas was about to
+relax her pose and quiver into life. The longer he looked, the less
+aloof she became and the more her serenity trembled. He felt that he
+knew so much about her--so very much more than he had ever been told.
+There were experiences of pride and terror which were common to them
+both--the pride and terror of appalling heart-hunger. He knew for
+certain, as though those painted lips had confessed it, that he was the
+one man in the world who had the power to make her cry. And yet he
+dissociated in his mind the woman of the portrait from the woman who had
+slipped past him out of the night with the taunting, sideways smile of
+feminine triumph. The living woman could wound and disappoint; the
+woman of the portrait was his friend entirely.
+
+He was startled out of the mood into which he had fallen by the sound of
+footsteps crossing the hall. He was not going to be discovered in that
+position by Maisie for a second time. He had barely recovered his place
+by the French window, when she and Terry entered laughing. It would have
+been easy to have mistaken them for sisters, with their golden heads and
+clear complexions. Directly he caught sight of them he guessed by the
+mischief in their eyes that their laughter had been at his expense. It
+was Terry who spoke. "Oh, Tabs, how could you? It was like a little
+frightened boy."
+
+He glanced from one to the other of them for further enlightenment. "Do
+what? If you'll let me know, I'll tell you."
+
+"Run away, like you did last night," Maisie explained. "I've just been
+describing it to Terry. There was I sitting on the couch when Di
+entered. The first thing she asked me was, 'Who's your new butler?' I
+wouldn't tell her. 'He'll be here in a minute,' I said; 'I'll introduce
+him to you.' We waited for about a minute and, when you didn't come, I
+went out into the hall. 'He's gone, Madam,' Porter told me in her most
+Mayfair manner. 'Gone!' I exclaimed. 'He can't have gone without saying
+good-by.' But I was afraid you had, so I went on to the steps and called
+after you. I don't know whether you heard me. When I came back into the
+drawing-room, Di was smiling. 'I've read about lordly butlers,' she
+said, 'but it's the first time I ever met one.' So there you are! You
+can imagine what a trouble I had to clear myself. I only downed her
+suspicions when I assured her that you were on the point of becoming
+engaged to Terry."
+
+Instantly Terry's eyes sought his; the laughter died out of them. He
+shared her annoyance that Lady Dawn should have received this piece of
+information--Lady Dawn of all persons. He wasn't engaged to Terry. He
+was a long way from being engaged to her--perhaps further at this moment
+than since his return.
+
+The silence that followed made Maisie aware that she had been guilty of
+a mistake. He suspected that she had intended to be guilty of it from
+the start. Nevertheless, she played the part of innocence, making her
+cornflower eyes eloquent with apology. "Oh, I'm afraid I've put my foot
+in it. But you are almost engaged, aren't you?"
+
+Tabs laughed good-humoredly. "It's all right, Mrs. Lockwood. You didn't
+mean to, but you've paid me back in more than my own coin."
+
+Porter relieved the tension at that moment by announcing that lunch was
+served.
+
+When they had taken their seats in the front-room, overlooking the
+make-believe village-green, Terry surprised them by saying carelessly,
+"Oh, Maisie, you remember General Braithwaite whom we nursed in our
+hospital?"
+
+Maisie looked up sharply, trying to warn her that Porter was still
+present. "Of course I remember him," she said. "Since then we've both
+met him a hundred times. I think Lord Taborley would like some bread,
+Porter."
+
+But Terry wasn't to be deterred. She seemed to be taking a perverse
+delight in introducing the one subject on which it would have been most
+fitting for her to have remained silent. "Since Tabs came back we've
+found out all about the General. You'll never guess who he really is or
+was. It's difficult to say whether he is or was, now that he's
+demobilized."
+
+Tabs recognized the blaze of recklessness in her eyes, like the glare of
+lighted windows after nightfall from which the curtains have been
+suddenly thrown back. He had seen that look in her eyes at the hunt
+when, in disobedience to shouted warnings, she had looked back across
+her shoulder challengingly before taking an audacious jump. There was in
+her expression the fear of the thing she was about to do and the panic
+of determination to get it done. He attempted to turn her aside from the
+danger by slipping in quietly, "I don't think I'd discuss the General at
+this moment."
+
+"At this moment!" she flashed back with a scared smile. The sound of her
+own voice seemed to clap spurs to her excitement. "Why not at this
+moment, dear Tabs? Everything comes out sooner or later. If there's
+going to be any spreading of gossip, one takes the sting out of it by
+being the first to spread it. Besides, you oughtn't to mind. You ought
+to feel most frightfully bucked."
+
+"Nevertheless, I don't think I'd say it."
+
+Then he held his breath for, paying no heed to him, she had turned to
+Maisie. "You mustn't laugh, but it's too good to keep to oneself.
+Before he was a General, what do you think he did for a living? He used
+to clean Lord Taborley's boots. You don't believe it, but it's a fact.
+Daddy's terribly grim with me over it. Of course it was _infra dig_ to
+go footing all over town with your best friend's valet. But how was I to
+know that he'd been that? Daddy says I ought to have sensed it, if I'd
+had any sort of a social instinct. But here's the funniest thing of all,
+the way we made the discovery. I'd invited him to dine at our house on
+the very night that Tabs was Daddy's guest. I'll never forget your
+faces, Tabs, when Daddy introduced the two of you." She commenced to
+pantomime the scene with forced gayety; then she pretended to become
+aware for the first time that they weren't joining in her laughter.
+
+"What's wrong? You look as solemn as a funeral. Don't you find it
+amusing?"
+
+Porter was leaving the room. Maisie waited till the door had closed.
+Then, "You didn't intend it to be amusing. Why on earth did you say all
+this before her?"
+
+Under the rebuke Terry's face flushed defiance. She was near to tears,
+but she contrived to go on smiling. "When I want all the world to know
+anything that's private, I mention it before servants. It always works."
+
+"But----" Maisie was at a loss to find a motive for such indiscretion.
+She glanced helplessly at Tabs. "But," she objected, "surely you don't
+want all the world to know about this, Terry? You and the General have
+been such good pals, and---- I have to say it, even though Lord
+Taborley is present: there were a great number of your friends who were
+rather afraid----"
+
+"Then they won't have to be afraid any longer," Terry cut in with icy
+sweetness. "When it's reported to the General that I've told this story,
+he won't have to be rather afraid either. It'll set all his doubts at
+rest."
+
+Tabs had sat puzzled and horrified while she had been talking.
+Everything that he could remember about her was gentle; it wasn't like
+her to be cruel. Now at last he realized that it was for his sake that
+she was being cruel--far more cruel to herself than to any one else. She
+had so little faith in her strength to break with Braithwaite that she
+was building up a protective wall of contempt by the spread of this
+damaging story. If Braithwaite heard it, she might well hope to rouse
+his hatred and save herself further effort.
+
+From across the table her eyes sought his in appeal; his answered hers
+with intuitive comprehension. But his mind was stunned with apprehension
+at the discovery that her passion for this man meant so much that his
+hate would be a lighter burden than his love.
+
+Maisie turned to Tabs with veiled disdain. "I suppose it was you who
+told her this, Lord Taborley?"
+
+He paid her scant attention and continued looking at Terry. "On the
+contrary." He spoke with unruffled urbanity. "It was General
+Braithwaite--Steely Jack as he was nicknamed in the Army. He never lost
+an inch of trench, so they say. Like your own first husband, Mrs.
+Lockwood, he's most to be feared when every one else would have given up
+hoping. Like myself, though he doesn't know it, he's a round-the-corner
+person. Curious, Terry, that you should have attracted two
+round-the-corner admirers! It makes one almost believe that you're a
+round-the-corner person yourself."
+
+He had said it without consciousness of magnanimity. There was nothing
+magnanimous about stating the truth according to his code of honor. He
+was seeing the bleak look that would come into Braithwaite's face should
+he hear of this happening. He was wondering whether Braithwaite
+possessed the insight into feminine strategy not to take offense, but to
+interpret it as surrender.
+
+Terry was speaking again. "My dear Maisie, if ever you get to know Lord
+Taborley, you'll learn to have a better opinion of him. He plays with
+all his cards on the table. I think most men play like that. It's we
+women who cheat and carry spare aces and revoke when the game's going
+against us." Then came her amazing burst of frankness, "Like you did
+when, to suit your own purpose, you pretended that we were on the point
+of becoming engaged. Like I did when I told that story just now about
+Steely Jack. And again like you've done all along in your dealings with
+Adair. Why, even now, when you're ready to give him up, you can't play
+the cards that are on the table; you have to try to borrow Lord Taborley
+from me. Don't get angry. I'm not accusing you especially. We women are
+all the same; there's not one of us who can stick to the rules of the
+game." Her glance shifted to Tabs. "You used to think that I was the
+exception. You see, I'm not. The wonder is that men can even pretend to
+respect us."
+
+Long after she had finished and the conversation had taken a new turn,
+she went on gazing at him, raising and lowering her eyes as she ate her
+lunch, begging him to understand.
+
+"You're wrong, Terry." In her capacity as hostess, Maisie was making an
+attempt to get away from personalities. She was too convicted by what
+had been said to consider it wise to defend herself. "You're wrong. Men
+don't want to respect us. They love us for having faults that they
+wouldn't tolerate in themselves. They encourage us to cultivate them. It
+flatters their integrity to discover our dishonesties. They like to
+believe that we're cowards. They don't expect us to tell the truth. They
+almost resent our having a sense of honor. The woman who cheats at every
+turn and then cries in their arms when she's found out, is the kind of
+woman who always has a man to take care of her. Look at my sister, Lady
+Dawn. She's never been known to cry. She's missed everything in life
+through being almost repellently honorable."
+
+In the discussion that followed Tabs took no part, though he was often
+appealed to for an opinion. As he listened to their modulated flow of
+voices, their refined and gentle intonations, their evasive, slyly
+uttered words, he began to have an understanding of what was taking
+place. It was something primitive--the oldest of all battles. Neither
+of them wanted him, but each was prompted to covet the pretense of his
+possession. Their hunting instincts were aroused. He had taken on a
+sudden value in their eyes because each had discovered that the other
+was in pursuit of him.
+
+His thoughts went back to Lady Dawn--to her pale aloofness. She wasn't
+like this--she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous
+that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was
+a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue with himself
+again as to whether he ought to seek her out and endanger her serenity
+by telling her about Lord Dawn. It would be useless to confide such
+intentions to Maisie. He would obtain no help from her. She could
+conceive of no sympathy between a man and woman into which sex did not
+enter. The thought of sex in connection with Lady Dawn seemed an
+impertinence.
+
+The discussion went on. Luncheon was at an end. Coffee had been served.
+Cigarettes were being lighted. Again and again he was referred to. Did
+he think this and didn't he agree to that? Wasn't this true of the way
+in which men regarded women? Their differences of opinion seemed so
+trivial. Their views so immature and amateurish. He watched them with
+curious, brooding attention. They were so nobly tender in their outward
+forms. He appreciated the grace of their gestures, the fine-boned
+smallness of their bodies, the delicacy of their molding, the tendril
+thinness of their fingers, the sagacity of their tiny aristocratic
+heads, the seduction of their soft red mouths, the poetry of the fringe
+of golden lashes in which the pathos of their eyes hung enmeshed--their
+intrusive, penetrating frailty, which supplicated, denounced and
+astounded. They were so weak and yet so strong. A man could crush them
+with one arm. But they could slay a man's soul with their sweetness.
+They were equipped in every detail by their pale perfection to quicken
+and to disappoint. To disappoint! That was what they had been trying to
+persuade him for the past half-hour--that they were Nature's traps,
+cunningly contrived and baited. _The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!_
+Their self-traductions were undermining his faith in all sacredness.
+
+In the silence of his brain he fought--fought against disillusion,
+claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping
+denunciations--the woman in the portrait.
+
+A man had been passing and repassing the windows, cut into triangles by
+the looped back, marigold-tinted curtains. At first he had mistaken him
+for a different man each time he had passed. Then the lazy certainty had
+grown up within him that it was always the same man. A man who wanted
+something--wanted something that was in that house. It wasn't possible
+to make out his features. He wore a morning-coat and was top-hatted. The
+swing of his carriage was indefinitely familiar.
+
+And now he had vanished--lost courage, lost patience, given up his
+quest, perhaps. Through the triangular gaps in the panes the
+village-green showed untraversed, sunlit, tranquil, garnished.
+
+Without knocking Porter entered, looking worried.
+
+Maisie broke off from her conversation long enough to say, "A little
+later, Porter. We're not finished."
+
+She was resuming, when Porter again interrupted. "It isn't that, Madam.
+It isn't----"
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+With an elaborate air of caution Porter closed the door and set her back
+against it. "I've told him that it's no good. That you won't see him,
+Madam."
+
+"Of course not. That's quite right." Maisie bestowed her approval with
+rapid tolerance. "I can't see any one at present." Then, as an
+after-thought, "By the way, who is it?"
+
+It was then that Porter let fall her bomb. "It's no good my telling him.
+He won't go away." Her firmness crumbled. She bleated in a dramatic
+surrender to distress. The three who heard her caught the commotion of
+her alarm and waited breathless. Her explanation came at last. "It's Mr.
+Easterday." The moment she had said it, she turned and fled.
+
+The door had scarcely closed, when Maisie rose from her chair and stood
+swaying. She sank back, closing her eyes and pressing her hands against
+her breast. The mask of placidity had been wrenched from her face,
+leaving it blanched with the conflict between yearning, temptation and
+loneliness.
+
+"Adair!" she moaned. "My God, I daren't trust myself!"
+
+Unclosing her eyes, she gazed burningly at Tabs.
+
+"I was honest in what I promised. I do want to live as though Reggie
+weren't dead. How did you put it? As though he were round the corner. As
+though he were truly coming back."
+
+In the silence that followed she stifled a sob, realizing that it wasn't
+Tabs who was the obstacle. Turning hysterically to Terry, she laid hold
+of both her hands. "I can't do it--_can't, can't_ by myself. I can only
+do it if you'll tell Lord Taborley to help me."
+
+
+IV
+
+At a nod from Terry he left the table. In the hall he found an odd sight
+waiting for him. He had to look twice to make certain that this was the
+Adair Easterday whom he had known, and not a strayed and beflustered
+wedding-guest.
+
+The man before him was worried to distraction. He had the unhappy,
+panic-stricken eyes of an over-driven bullock that scents the
+slaughterhouse. And yet his dress was immaculate; he was tailored and
+laundered as though for an occasion of joy. Everything that he wore was
+discreetly festive, from the lavender gloves and shiny topper to the
+striped trousers and canvas spats. One would have said that he was a
+caricature of George Grossmith on his way to a garden-party.
+
+But he was hot--terribly hot; far more hot than he had any excuse for
+being in brisk spring weather. There were beads of perspiration on his
+forehead; his face was congested with excitement. To lend the touch of
+humor, which always lurks behind other people's tragedies, he held his
+top-hat by the brim in his right hand, as though he were taking a
+collection, while from his left, like a feather-duster, trailed an
+enormous bunch of roses. He was a short man in the late thirties,
+red-headed and inclined to be podgy. He was not built to express poetic
+passions--how many of us are, if it comes to that?--or to sustain their
+onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed
+tears. There was nothing noble in his distress--only a farcical
+appearance of wretchedness.
+
+As Tabs crossed the hall to the front-door, just inside of which Adair
+was standing, he felt an undeserved compassion for him--the kind of
+compassion one feels for a clumsy dog, which is always getting under
+people's feet. At the same time he couldn't help marveling that there
+should be two women at the same time in the world who were willing to
+compete for such a man's affections.
+
+"I happened to be lunching here," Tabs commenced conventionally. But he
+altered his tactics promptly. In the presence of his friend's
+self-advertised misery nothing but the briefest truth seemed adequate.
+
+"Old man, it's no good. She won't see you. She doesn't want you."
+Forgetting his sense of justice, he placed his hand affectionately on
+Adair's shoulder.
+
+Adair stared in a full-blown way and nodded. "She never did want me."
+
+He passed no comment on this unforeseen meeting in the little house with
+the marigold-tinted curtains. He manifested no resentment against this
+familiar angel who had been deputed to bar the gates of Eden to his
+approaches. He was incapable of surprise. He was obsessed by the
+solitary idea of his own forlornness. "I knew it. She never did want
+me." And then, in a rush of self-pity, "No one ever wanted me."
+
+"Except Phyllis," Tabs suggested.
+
+Adair appeared not to have heard. He stood like a living statue, his
+top-hat extended, his bunch of roses dangling--the picture of idiotic
+futility. Genuine emotion, however mean its origin, always has its grand
+moments. Tabs forgot the silly beginnings of this upset and the endless
+troubles it had caused. All he saw was a typical ragamuffin of humanity
+in the grip of the policeman, Nemesis. Adair had been caught trying to
+do what thousands of other ragamuffins achieved daily with success. He
+had been arrested red-handed in the act of stealing forbidden happiness.
+It was his first offense. He was inexpert and had bungled. He had
+bungled because, while assuming the rôle of roguery, he had remained at
+heart an honest man. Now that he was caught, he took the exposure of his
+dishonesty too seriously.
+
+Tabs had almost forgotten that he had been the last to speak, when Adair
+repeated his exact words, "Except Phyllis!" And then, "Poor kid! She,
+too, is unhappy."
+
+Through the marshy obscurities of his humiliation his conscience was
+building a path. With his two hands he crushed his topper back onto his
+head. The act had the vehemence of decision. In the doing of it he
+dropped the roses to the floor. There they lay forgotten--so forgotten
+that he placed his foot on them without noticing.
+
+"Home! Best be going home," he muttered.
+
+Without further explanation, he drew back the latch and let himself out
+into the sunlit Court. Delaying long enough to pick up his hat and cane,
+Tabs followed.
+
+Adair gave no sign of recognition as he caught up with him. Failing to
+hail a taxi, they boarded a bus. Tabs paid the fares. Adair sat like
+Napoleon after Waterloo, taking no notice of anything. It was the
+intensity of his thoughts that kept him silent--not moroseness.
+
+They had reached Clapham Common and had come to his garden-gate, before
+he acknowledged Tabs' presence.
+
+"I was a fool. I deserved it," he said sadly. "It's ended in exactly the
+way that any sane man would have expected."
+
+Kicking the gate open, he passed up the path. From the Common Tabs
+watched him, till he was safely within the house and the door had shut.
+
+As he turned away, he scarcely knew whether to laugh or feel vexed. The
+misfortunes of others can always be traced to folly; it is only our own
+misfortunes that are never deserved and never anything less than august.
+If Adair's love-affair had appeared ridiculous in his eyes, probably his
+own would afford materials for jest to some one else.
+
+He couldn't forget the top-hat and the trampled roses. The
+ineffectualness of all passion loomed large. It might have its value as
+an educative process, but what a waste of energy! For the moment he drew
+no distinction between Adair's guilty hankering after something which
+was forbidden and his own honorable love for Terry. The end of all
+passion was futility.
+
+Then he laughed, for in imagination he saw the world as a crestfallen
+caricature of George Grossmith, top-hatted and bespatted, wending its
+unfestive way through the centuries to an eternal garden-party, from
+which Adam and his lineage were forever debarred.
+
+
+V
+
+His exit from Mulberry Tree Court had been so hurried that he had had no
+time to make arrangements with Terry.
+
+He had no sooner knocked than the door was opened by Maisie. He was
+slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus
+suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a
+tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had not
+much time to spare.
+
+"I called in," he apologized, "because I thought you'd like to know what
+happened--and to fetch Terry."
+
+"Of course." She spoke with a cheerfulness that astonished him. "I was
+expecting you." With that she led the way across the hall to the
+drawing-room.
+
+Carrying his hat, he followed. He clung to his hat purposely; it would
+serve as a reminder that he had not come to stay long. She was on the
+point of seating herself, when she spotted it. "Oh, how rude of me!" In
+the twinkling of an eye she had deprived him of it and vanished.
+"Captured once more!" he thought.
+
+During the few seconds that she was gone, he looked about him.
+Everything was as it had been yesterday. A companionable fire glowed in
+the grate. On a table beside the couch tea was spread. Even as
+yesterday, the nearest chair to the couch was at least six feet away,
+making it necessary for any one who did not wish to appear boorish to
+share the couch with her. There was something else that he had noticed
+on entering: while he had been away she had made a complete change of
+toilet. She was now dressed in a filmy gown of emerald green, with
+shoes, stockings and buckles to match. It was a gown so _chic_ that, had
+he been a woman, he would have guessed at once that it was the latest
+from Paquin's. Inasmuch as he was a man, his sole comment was, "Plucky
+little thorough-bred! You don't catch her owning that she's down." The
+emerald shade brought out all the values of her coloring, the faint rose
+of her complexion, the daffodil gold of her flaxen hair. He had expected
+to be bored by a Magdalene repentant; instead he had found himself
+confronted by a challenging young Diana. His admiration went out to her
+for her courage.
+
+Having come back and resettled herself on the couch, she smiled up at
+him through flickering lashes. "A nice frock, don't you think? Nothing
+like a new frock after a knock-out for restoring your self-respect."
+
+"It's a charming frock. Where's Terry?"
+
+She clasped her small hands about her knees, leaning her head far back
+so that her eyes glinted up at his languidly. Perhaps it was necessary
+to do that in order to see him properly. He was still standing. And yet
+her attitude served another purpose; it called attention to the firm
+young lines of her bust and throat, and to the voluptuous curve of her
+lips, parted in patient expectancy.
+
+"Terry!" Her voice sounded drowsy. "I forgot. I ought to have given you
+her message. She couldn't stop. She had another engagement."
+
+"An engagement!" He was dumbfounded. "That's strange! She never said
+anything---- Are you sure she didn't invent it?"
+
+"Certain." Maisie sat up fully awake now. "Quite positive. But she had
+made up her mind not to keep it till, through no fault of yours, you
+gave her the chance. You don't want to believe that; it sounds as though
+she had cheated. You don't know much about women, Lord Taborley. You
+don't know because you refuse to learn. You're determined, in the face
+of every proof to the contrary, to live and die in the faith that we're
+angels." She shook her finger at him. He was amused to discover that he
+was being scolded. "Angels! We're far from it. We're very much like you
+men, with this difference, that we're cowards. What you need--this may
+sound entirely wrong--is a good sensible woman to take you in hand, and
+give you a run for your money, and teach you your own value. Why, with
+your position and charm----"
+
+"You must excuse my interrupting. Of course it all depends on what you
+mean by a run for my money. But are there many good and sensible women
+who are game for an adventure of that sort?"
+
+"Heaps of them," she assured him, imitating his mock seriousness. "The
+more outwardly good and sensible, the more inwardly they're willing."
+
+"Humph!" He pretended to be pondering this gem of information. And then,
+"But you have to own, Mrs. Lockwood, that Terry's not----"
+
+She blocked his protest with a gay little laugh. "I make no exceptions.
+Terry's exactly like the rest of us--younger and more innocent looking,
+no doubt, but just as imperfect. As regards this engagement of hers, she
+breathed no word of it until you had gone. Then she began to flirt with
+the idea that she might be able to keep it. At last she couldn't resist
+the temptation any longer. Out she came with it, that she must be going.
+I'd lay a wager I could name the person with whom----"
+
+"You'd lose your wager."
+
+"I think not." She met the threatened tempest in his eyes with calmness.
+
+"Would you give a name to this person?"
+
+"Where's the good?" She shrugged her dainty shoulders. "We both know it?
+Steely Jack. Isn't that what you call him?"
+
+Instantly she leant forward. Her whole instinct was to touch him. She
+hadn't intended to hurt him like that. He looked so defiant, and gaunt
+and deserted--such a huge, scarred boy of a man. He reminded her of one
+of those early war-posters, in which a solitary figure was depicted,
+knee-deep in barbed wire, head bandaged, hurling the last of his bombs.
+
+"Please don't be angry," she pleaded. "I was clumsy; but I was trying to
+help. When you helped me yesterday, you too were clumsy. You can't put
+on a new frock, worse luck, the way I've done, to restore your
+self-respect. But I do wish you'd buy a new something--a new race-horse
+or a new car--I don't care what as long as it would make you swank. A
+little swanking would do you all the good in the world; it would keep
+Terry from knowing how much you care. Terry's not half good enough for
+you; one day you'll acknowledge it. Still, if you really do think you
+want her, you can bring her to heel any moment by putting on an
+indifferent air. Look how jealously she flared up at me at lunch. It
+makes a woman furious to see her rejections picked up as treasures by
+another woman. The only reason why Terry brought you here to-day was to
+see for herself just how deep an impression we'd made on each other."
+
+At last she mustered the courage to touch him. Reaching out, she took
+his hand and drew him to her. He stood against her knees, looking down.
+
+Her voice was tender. "Some one had to say these things to you, just as
+you had to say things to me that weren't altogether pleasant. So why
+shouldn't I to you? After all, we're both in the same box, and the box
+is labeled NOT WANTED. It pains me to see a man like you, wasting
+himself on a girl who hasn't the sense to appreciate what he's
+offering." She raised her eyes to his with a slow smile. "Don't mistake
+me, Lord Taborley, I'm not trying to secure what you're offering for
+myself."
+
+He began to see the drift of her argument. Before he could formulate it,
+she herself had put it into words. "Can't we do a little missionary
+work, you and I, by appreciating each other just a little?"
+
+Flinging prejudices to the winds, he took a place beside her on the
+couch. Why shouldn't he? Why should he go on conserving himself so
+scrupulously for a girl who didn't value his loyalty?
+
+"I should consider it a privilege to be appreciated by you," he said
+gravely. "But let's start properly. How about dinner at the Berkeley?
+After that, if you felt like it, we could do a theatre. Would that suit
+you?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was close on midnight when they returned to Mulberry Tree Court. Not
+until he was handing her out of the taxi and Porter was standing framed
+in the open doorway, did he remember that he'd imparted none of his
+important news concerning Adair.
+
+"About Adair----" he commenced. "Or shall I put him off till to-morrow?"
+
+"Till forever." As her feet touched the pavement, she swung around on
+him with laughter. They had been very happy in the last six hours. She
+pressed close against him. He caught the sparkle of her eyes as he
+stooped above her and the faint, sweet fragrance of her hair. She rested
+an ungloved hand on his arm. It looked dim like a large white moth that
+had settled there.
+
+"I have few principles to guide me," she whispered, "but the few that I
+have I observe. I never dig up my dead and I never botanize on the
+graves of the past. Good-night. Merry dreams to you, Lord Taborley."
+
+With the suddenness of a phantom she went from him. There were a brief
+few seconds while he heard the ripple of her laughter and the rustling
+of her dress. Then the door closed. Save for the lamps of the waiting
+taxi night was again eventless and dark.
+
+
+VI
+
+That evening was the first of many such adventures. His tall limping
+figure became a familiar sight in Mulberry Tree Court.
+
+Very early in their friendship he took her advice and delighted her by
+purchasing a smart two-seater runabout which he drove himself. Sometimes
+it was at her door shortly after breakfast to transport her to where
+saddle-horses were waiting in the Park. Sometimes it would turn up about
+lunch-time and stand impatiently chugging while she changed into sport's
+clothes, after which it would dash away with her, humming contentedly,
+into the depths of the country. It was the magic-carpet which obeyed all
+her desires. After war-days, with their petrol shortages and restricted
+travel, it seemed more than ordinarily magic. It made emphatic as
+nothing else could have done, the freedom and serenity which peace had
+restored. The very fleetness of its obedience prompted her to urge Tabs
+to take her farther and ever farther afield. There were evenings when
+they dined within sight of the sea beneath the red roofs of Rye and
+started back for London across the Sussex downs, driving straight into
+the eye of the sunset. There were afternoons when they drifted over the
+Chiltern hills to where the spires and domes of Oxford rise, placid as
+masts of a sunken ship in an encroaching sea of greenness.
+
+But it was most frequently nearing midnight when the quiet of the
+secluded Court was wakened by the merry buzzing of the engine. At first
+it would come from far away, drowsily like the song of a belated bee.
+Then it would gather in volume and grow more lively, till it panted
+round the little village-green and quavered into silence in front of
+Maisie's door. Porter, with the gold light of the hall behind her, would
+always be there on the threshold to receive her mistress. It was
+difficult to guess what Porter thought. There were impromptu jaunts to
+theaters and dances. Porter had seen many gay beginnings and tearful
+endings. Her face was immobile and respectful at whatever hour he
+called.
+
+It was a curious friendship that had developed between them--a
+friendship which lived from hand to mouth, which had the appearance of
+being more than a friendship, in which nothing was premeditated. Nothing
+could be premeditated so far as he was concerned. Terry had first call
+on all his leisure--not that she availed herself of it very often;
+nevertheless, he held himself in readiness to break every engagement
+for her. Maisie was his consolation prize when Terry had failed. Maisie
+was not deceived as to the spare-man place that she held in his
+affections. She was painfully aware that at any moment their friendship
+might end as abruptly as it had started. On either side it was based on
+a common need for kindness, a common tenderness and a common desire for
+protection from loneliness. In a sense they were each a substitute for
+something postponed and more satisfying. While he was making up to her
+for the loss of Adair, she was trying to save him from the rashness of
+committing himself too fatally to Terry. They were altruists, actuated
+by self-interested motives.
+
+And yet it was a friendship not untinged by enmity. His enmity was
+awakened when she became too possessive in the demands which she made
+and especially when she let fall criticisms, however mild, concerning
+Terry. These occurrences set him thinking of the other casuals who had
+ventured on her doorstep, not meaning to stay, and had ended by hanging
+up their hats in her hall. Her enmity was roused by the courteous
+circumspection of his behavior. He never admitted her to the privacy of
+his inmost thoughts. He could be gay and gallant and bountifully
+generous, but he never permitted her to peep beneath the surface. He
+addressed her invariably as Mrs. Lockwood. The use of her surname held
+her at arm's length. She longed most frightfully to hear him call her by
+the name that was less safe. She denied to herself that she wanted him
+to make love to her; at the same time she was disappointed at the
+persistency with which he held her off. She liked to believe that, if he
+had made love to her, she would have rebuffed him. She rehearsed many
+times the indignant words with which she would have set him in his
+place; she would have reminded him that it was for Reggie Pollock she
+was waiting--as though he were not dead, but only round the corner. To
+her chagrin Tabs never gave her the least incentive to employ them.
+
+He saw her never more and frequently less than once a day. There was a
+week at a stretch when he saw nothing of her. She bridged these tedious
+intervals of expecting by the length of her telephone conversations.
+Whenever he stayed away for long, she tortured herself with suspicions
+that his courtship of Terry had begun to prosper. If he returned
+debonair and smiling, she felt confirmed in these suspicions. He was
+most dear to her when he returned in an under-mood of distress. She knew
+then that she was necessary; to be necessary was the passion of her
+heart. Then she would become gay and tender and mothering--an altogether
+sweeter, gentler and more self-effacing Maisie.
+
+Whither were they drifting--toward marriage or only toward infatuation?
+If you had asked Tabs, he would have replied promptly, "Toward neither."
+He had promised to tide her over the dull spots. She had advised him to
+take a course of education in his own value in order that he might
+increase his worth to Terry. She had told him that he ought to let some
+good sensible woman take him in hand and give him a run for his money.
+They had accepted each other at their word--that was all.
+
+At the same time he knew that that was not all. He knew that if there
+was one thing more irritating to her than being addressed as Mrs.
+Lockwood, it was his way of treating her as if she were good and
+sensible. Most women would feel affronted at hearing themselves spoken
+of as anything other than sensible and good. Good and sensible women are
+the pillars of society, but they are not usually regarded as attractive
+companions for joyous excursions in two-seater runabouts.
+
+Neither of them was entirely insensitive to the conjectures that their
+sudden intimacy had given rise to in the minds of onlookers. They were
+both too well-known and were seen together in too many different places
+to avoid the breath of gossip--even of scandal. Men were scarce after
+the wholesale butchery of the war, especially bachelors of Lord
+Taborley's class. Had he only had the conceit to know it, he had
+returned to London a strong favorite for the season's matrimonial
+sweepstakes. More than one anxious mother of unappropriated daughters
+had set him down for preference on her list of eligibles. When
+invitations poured in on him and were politely regretted, there was
+consternation and puzzlement. The puzzlement vanished when the
+explanation was whispered across a hundred dinner-tables, "Haven't you
+heard? It's Maisie Lockwood."
+
+Then would follow details of how they had been seen at sundry theaters,
+at half-a-dozen fashionable hotels and riding together in the Park.
+"She mounted on one of Lord Taborley's horses of course."
+
+"It's quite a case," people said. "If he doesn't mean matrimony, it
+would be decent to exercise more discretion. There used to be some talk
+of Terry Beddow; that's completely ended. Queer the women men fall for,
+even the quietest of them! No one's sane any longer. Had three husbands
+already, hasn't she? Quite a crowd! One would scarcely have supposed
+that an exclusive chap like Taborley would have joined in the queue to
+make a fourth. And he could have had almost any girl for the asking.
+There's never any telling."
+
+Veiled references began to appear in the society columns; but not so
+veiled that they could not be recognized. "A romance is developing
+between a noble lord, who served in the ranks during the war, and a
+vivacious beauty, three times widowed, well-known in fashionable
+circles, etc." One paper published a photograph of them riding side by
+side. After that sceptics who had not seen for themselves, were
+persuaded.
+
+It was a mad world--a world in which it was not safe to be censorious.
+The lid was off the conventions. Every one was shouting for
+happiness--happiness at all costs. When they could not get it for the
+asking, they were taking it without thought of law or penalties. There
+were few who could afford to sit in judgment and many who preferred to
+laugh. The day of authority was over. Traditions were no longer
+respected. While the war was on, men and women had been drilled into
+dumb acquiescence; now that the drilling was abolished, they had become
+a mob, avid, leaderless and uproarious.
+
+Tabs came to realize that he was not alone in his lost sense of
+direction. The right to live had been restored, but neither individuals
+nor nations were sure what they wanted to do with it. After having been
+as one in their sacrificial certainty, they had arrived at a cross-roads
+where there was no policeman to take charge. They had broken up into
+little groups, gathered about their own vociferous stump-orators. The
+result was babel. Of orators there were a plenty. They abused one
+another across the Irish Sea. They tried to shout one another down
+across the Atlantic Ocean. But the hammer-head men of righteousness were
+gone. After the apocalyptic splendor of mailed knights of Christ
+charging stern-faced down to Armageddon, the results of victory had been
+consigned to the weakling care of a race of talkers.
+
+And yet there was music and laughter. Spring rushed on. Feet that had
+marched, now moved in the rhythm of the dance. Theaters were crowded.
+Jazz-bands clashed. There were endless processions. Youth beckoned.
+Chestnut bloom grew white and fell in flurries. Women were no less
+beautiful. The sun shone thunderously.
+
+If Tabs were foolish, which he did not concede, all the world was his
+companion in foolishness. Blindly and gropingly he was still going in
+search of his kingdom. He ignored the gossip which his championship of
+Maisie had called forth. He despised it. It made him the more
+compassionate toward her--the more determined to help her to weather
+the storm. Well-meaning friends undertook to warn him. "She's most
+beautiful and charming. And she's Lady Dawn's sister, of course.
+But----Well, to put it frankly, a woman who's been married three times
+might just as well never have been married at all. Looks as though she'd
+only squandered her money in rising to the nicety of a marriage-license.
+I hope you don't mean to marry her, old chap, because she's not your
+sort."
+
+When Tabs went to the trouble of assuring these well-wishers that he did
+not intend to marry her and that she was his sort, they slipped their
+tongues into their cheeks and opened their eyes wide, "Oh, so that's the
+way of it!"
+
+Maisie reported to him similar experiences. "So you see how I'm
+regarded, as though I were no better than I should be. And I'm young and
+I've done nothing wrong. If it wasn't for your friendship, I should be
+tempted----"
+
+"But you have my friendship!" he assured her.
+
+He tried to rise superior to this petty talk of scandal-mongers, but it
+was not always possible when he remembered Terry.
+
+
+VII
+
+He met Terry as often as he could contrive, but he no longer forced
+himself upon her. He could effect nothing so long as her infatuation for
+Braithwaite lasted.
+
+Now that Sir Tobias had lost faith in him as a lover, his opportunities
+for meeting her became more rare. When Sir Tobias lost faith in any one,
+he made no attempt to disguise it. In the case of Tabs, he let him know
+it with a fine air of magnanimity, as though he were doing him a
+kindness. His frankness took the form of communicating some new
+disparaging criticism, astutely attributed to Lady Beddow, every time he
+was paid a visit.
+
+Having separated Tabs from Terry by carrying him off to his library on
+one pretext or another, he would carefully close the door and commence,
+"You men who've seen service are all unbalanced; it would be unfair to
+hold any of you responsible. You're no exception, my dear fellow, though
+you probably don't notice it in yourself. As Lady Beddow was saying to
+me this morning, 'Poor Lord Taborley, he has a rambling mind. Most
+likely it's a species of shell-shock. There's a queer look comes into
+his eyes. It's not always there. It's a look as if he were haunted. You
+ought to speak to him, Tobias--you're his oldest friend--and advise him
+to see a specialist. It's lucky we found his weakness out before things
+between him and Terry went too far.'"
+
+Or he would say, "Lady Beddow and I were talking about you, my dear
+fellow. You know she's very fond of you. She loved your mother before
+you. 'The little big lady from America,' she used to call her. She's
+naturally very much upset at the way in which you're getting yourself
+talked about. Unfortunately she holds me partly responsible for having
+induced you to visit this Maisie woman. 'You ought to have known him
+better,' she says. 'There's an immoral streak in him--an inherited
+taint, which I, for one, always suspected.' She was wondering whether
+you have any knowledge of there having been insanity in your family."
+
+After having invented such discomforting surmises and given his wife the
+credit for them, the old gentleman would blink his crafty eyes and rest
+his hand affectionately on Tabs' arm. At the end of each visit he was
+pressed to call again; but when he called, it was to find himself
+shepherded into the library, safely out of reach of Terry, in order that
+he might hear his conduct discussed afresh, either directly or by
+insinuation.
+
+He was unable to defend himself without betraying Terry. She maintained
+her silence with regard to Braithwaite, refusing to take her parents
+into her confidence. They naturally attributed the hanging fire of the
+engagement to Tabs, supposing that on the eve of his proposal he had
+been ensnared in the net of Maisie. In their eyes he cut a shabby
+figure.
+
+Behind his back Terry came to his defense. She would hear and believe no
+wrong of him. This only proved to her parents that her heart still
+followed him. They thought her very brave and became more gloomy in
+their accusations. Matters took a serious turn: her health began to
+fail. When the doctor was summoned, he ascribed the cause to secret
+worrying and prescribed a complete change. Tabs received no word of this
+happening, for Terry had become increasingly shy, so that she created
+the appearance of avoiding him. She quite definitely avoided Maisie.
+
+There came a day in early June when he went to call on her and was
+informed by the velvet-plush James that Miss Terry was out of London on
+a visit of undetermined length. When he asked for her address, James
+shook his head mournfully. She had been ill and was to be spared all
+disturbing communications. His orders were that her address was to be
+given to nobody.
+
+"But that order doesn't apply to me," Tabs urged.
+
+James became more profoundly agitated. He averted his eyes, while he
+fiddled with the last button of his plump waistcoat. "I regret to say,
+to your Lordship most especially."
+
+"Humph!" Tabs stroked his chin. "Is Sir Tobias at home?"
+
+"Your Lordship would gain nothing by seeing Sir Tobias."
+
+"You might mention to him that I called." With that he descended the
+steps and climbed into his runabout.
+
+"Turned away!" he thought. "Turned away from Terry's house!" Then his
+mind went back to two months ago--the hopes he'd had, his meeting with
+her at the station, his asking her father for her hand in marriage. It
+was like the old front-line trench, when reënforcements had failed to
+come up: there was nothing for it but to dig one's self in and stick it
+out.
+
+He had been shown the door with as little ceremony as an intruding
+peddler.
+
+
+VIII
+
+From Terry's house he went to Mulberry Tree Court, but the route that he
+chose was not direct. He drove all over the West End first, through
+Oxford Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly; then back by way of Regent
+Street, swinging to the left through Conduit Street, till he again
+struck Bond Street. He doubled and redoubled on his tracks, moving among
+crowds, feeling that he must hear the noise of crowds, yet seeing little
+of the sights on which his eyes rested. It had been like this with him
+before, after being in too close contact with calamity. It had been like
+this in war-days, when he had returned on brief leaves out of monstrous
+offensives to the appalling quiet of a normal world. He hadn't dared to
+be alone. He had felt that his sanity depended on his rubbing shoulders
+with people. He had been like a child in an empty house, leaning out of
+a window to catch the stir of life along the pavements.
+
+The gayety of the London season was at its height. Khaki was growing
+rare. Signs of war had almost completely vanished. No one wanted to talk
+about it. No one wanted to read about it. Shops had redecorated their
+windows with the necessities and luxuries of civilian requirements.
+There was a wave of spendthrift extravagance abroad. Every one in the
+streets had the look of being out for a good time. The threat of
+torturing to-morrows no longer made life haggard. If there was one
+lesson that the past five years had taught it was that each new day was
+a gift from the gods, to be enjoyed separately and drained of every
+available drop of pleasure. The restraints of duty were indefinitely
+postponed. Men and women sauntered in pairs, aimlessly and joyously.
+Work was the bondage furthest from their thoughts. They seemed aware of
+no one but themselves in their ecstasy at being reunited. Racing had
+been restarted; up and down the gutters newsboys ran shouting the
+winners. London was a Tommy on leave, insubordinately, humorously,
+contagiously happy.
+
+As he drove, Tabs argued out his problem. From house-top to house-top
+the June sky sagged like an azure canopy. Across pavements the afternoon
+sunshine lay in bars of gold. Flower-sellers stood at intervals along
+the curb, scenting the air with their country nosegays. A lazy breeze
+ruffled drooping flags which had been hung out for the latest festival.
+Everywhere there were girls in their blowy summer dresses--girls of all
+kinds and sorts. Single girls, married girls, girls who worked for their
+livings, girls whose business it was to be beautiful, girls who were
+merely drudges. There were both pathos and urgency in the sight of them.
+It was not good that they should live alone. They had wasted their youth
+too long. The great necessity for that waste was ended. Not one of them
+was a patch on Maisie.
+
+If he did not desire Maisie, why did he miss her? Was it that he would
+not allow himself to desire her? Why did he encourage his passion for
+Terry--Terry who in her mild and gentle way had become almost insolently
+unappreciative? Wouldn't he be wiser to content himself with the woman
+who was within reach rather than----?
+
+He frowned as the truth dawned on him. For the first time he had
+acknowledged it. He did love Maisie. Not as he loved Terry, of course;
+but in a more human way, to the extent of needing her companionship. He
+had made a discovery that amazed himself--a discovery that thousands of
+men had made before him: that it was possible for him to love two women
+at the same tune, utterly differently and yet with entire sincerity. He
+felt as lowered in his self-esteem as if he had committed bigamy. He was
+dumbfounded at this new twist that his emotions had developed. Without
+consulting him, they had played a trick on him which forever
+disqualified him for the larger rôle of constant lover. He felt himself
+pushed down to almost the level of a philanderer--a philanderer not much
+more august than Adair. The suspicion crossed his mind that, if he could
+believe himself in love with two women, he couldn't be very mightily in
+love with either.
+
+But he was impatient of delays--worn out with procrastinations. The
+magnificent chances of the present were slipping past him. One day he
+would be old. "_Now, now, now_, is the appointed time," throbbed his
+engine. Out of the sheer disorganization of his thoughts a desperate
+scheme took shape. Why should he not go to Maisie and say, "We're
+neither of us first in each other's affections. It's a rough-and-tumble
+world! Why be thin-skinned about it? We may become first later. Let's
+stop dreaming of kingdoms round the corner and make the best of such
+kingdoms as are ours to-day."
+
+The idea took hold of him with force. It fascinated him. He turned his
+car about. In passing through Mayfair he made a detour to glance at
+Taborley House. The American Hospital had vacated it. It looked ruined
+and forlorn. He tried to picture it as it might appear if Maisie were
+its mistress.
+
+Twenty minutes later he drew up before the retiring little villa with
+its marigold-tinted curtains. He had by no manner of means decided on
+his course of action. He could not have told you what he was going to
+say to Maisie. In this as in so many other ways, he believed himself
+abnormal. No one had ever told him that ninety-nine out of a hundred
+married men, if they spoke the truth, would have to confess that they
+had been unaware thirty seconds before they proposed that they were
+going to do so; and that the most incredible happening in their lives
+had been when, thirty seconds later, they had discovered that not only
+had they proposed, but that they had been riotously accepted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
+
+SOME PEOPLE FIND THEIR KINGDOMS
+
+
+I
+
+He was in the act of shutting off his engine when he heard himself
+accosted. "I beg your pardon, but are you, Mr. Gervis?"
+
+It was a pleasant voice--a man's. Keeping his eyes on what he was doing,
+Tabs answered in the negative. Then he recalled that Gervis had been the
+name of Maisie's second husband. "If it's the Gervis who used to live
+here," he indicated the house with a jerk of his head, "I'm afraid you
+won't find him. He's been dead these three years--killed at the Front."
+
+A quiet chuckle greeted this piece of information, followed by a hearty,
+"Thank the Lord."
+
+Tabs had finished what he was doing. As he stepped out of the car, he
+threw a contemptuous glance at the man who could be so callous. He was a
+slightly built, fresh-complexioned young fellow of middle height, with
+amiable gray eyes and a fair, closely-trimmed mustache. He belonged to
+the demobilized subaltern type and had the weary, drawn expression of
+over-strained nerves that so many young faces had at that time. He was
+dressed in a smartly fitting suit of striped navy-blue flannel and
+carried himself with the plucky alertness of a highly bred fox-terrier.
+He had a clean and gallant bearing which it was difficult to reconcile
+with the ungenerosity of his last remark. In a neat, unforceful way he
+would have been handsome, had it not been for a badly healed scar which
+ran straight across his forehead, only just escaping his eyes.
+
+Before Tabs could say anything, he was apologizing. "That sounded
+rotten. I'm sorry. But you see, I didn't know the chap. It's his wife
+that I'm trying to find. She was married to a man named Pollock when I
+knew her. I was rather a pal of Pollock's, belonged to the same squadron
+and was shot down at the same time. I've been a prisoner in Germany.
+Just got back, in fact. As you'll understand, I'm rather out of touch. I
+thought you'd be able to tell me whether she still lived here."
+
+It was very damping to his ardor at this particular moment to have
+Maisie's matrimonial past raked up. Within the next half hour he would
+very possibly be asking her to be his wife. He wasn't sure that he was
+going to; but meeting this friend of her first husband on her doorstep
+didn't help him to make up his mind. He was no longer unsympathetic to
+the young fellow, but he was quite determined that he must be sent about
+his business.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he said, "the lady you're in search of does live
+here. But she's not Mrs. Gervis any longer. She's married again. She's
+Mrs. Lockwood now."
+
+A glint of enmity came into the stranger's eyes. "Then you're Mr.
+Lockwood, perhaps?"
+
+Tabs answered him with a note of irritation. "I'm not Mr. Lockwood.
+She's a widow. Lockwood also was killed. But I really don't see why you
+should stop me on the pavement to ask so many questions. You can find
+out everything by ringing the bell."
+
+"That's right." The young fellow stroked his mustache. "But I didn't
+want to do that until I had made certain. Surely you can see how
+embarrassing---- And now this third chap's gone West, you say. Poor
+little Maisie, she hasn't had much luck."
+
+It was difficult to be brusque with a man of his own class, especially
+with a man so genuinely likeable. But he had to get rid of him. After
+having nerved himself up to the point of being at least prepared to
+propose to Maisie, he couldn't contemplate an evening of sharing her
+with a stranger and listening to the merits of her first husband.
+
+"So you're an old friend! Well, I'm afraid she won't be free this
+evening. I have an appointment with her. But, if you like, I'll mention
+that I met you and I'll let her know that you'll call--when shall we
+say--to-morrow? Perhaps you'd care to give me your name----"
+
+The young man smiled good-naturedly. "I couldn't think of troubling you
+to that extent."
+
+"In that case, I'll have to ask you to excuse me. All kinds of luck to
+you on your return. It must be rather jolly not to be a prisoner. Good
+evening."
+
+Tabs crossed the pavement and rang the bell. In order that he might
+afford no opportunity for further conversation, he stood with his face
+towards the door while he waited for it to be opened. He was very
+conscious that the stranger had not departed, but was hovering
+immediately in rear of him.
+
+It was Porter who answered his summons. "I'm sorry, your Lordship, Mrs.
+Lockwood is out---- No, she didn't leave any word. She's bound to be
+back shortly---- Why, certainly, if your Lordship has the time."
+
+While she was closing the front door, he walked across the hall and let
+himself into the drawing-room. He went directly over to the empty
+fireplace and gazed up at Lady Dawn's portrait. It always seemed to
+challenge him--seemed to be trying to say something to him. It was
+almost as though it were his conscience hanging there on the wall. He
+had an idea that it reproached him for his silence with regard to Lord
+Dawn. He felt that, were he to do what his instinctive sense of justice
+had first urged--go to Lady Dawn and tell her that her husband had cared
+for her--the painted face would be no longer turned away and the
+stone-gray eyes no longer averted.
+
+He was haunted by the obsession that he would never have any luck till
+he had vindicated the dead man's memory.
+
+It was Maisie who had prevented him up to now--Maisie with her laughter,
+her breezy arguments, her short views of life, her contempt for
+sentiment, her sledge-hammer motto, with which she shattered the past,
+"I never dig up my dead." She had made him hesitant about reopening the
+subject. Her sister was the most beautiful woman in England. A man never
+knows to what boundaries a woman's jealousy spreads. He feared lest, if
+he persisted, she might impute to him less lofty motives than the desire
+to play fair by a comrade-in-arms who had gone West.
+
+Something stirred behind him. He swung about and found himself staring
+into the face of the stranger who had accosted him on the pavement.
+
+"Sargent painted it ten years ago," the stranger said. "She's not as
+young as that now."
+
+"How did you get in?" Tabs demanded.
+
+The stranger laughed boyishly. "Not too loud or you'll give the show
+away. I followed you. The maid raised no objection. She thought we were
+together--which was exactly what I intended."
+
+"But what do you want? What right have you here?"
+
+"Want! I know what I want. As to my right, that's problematic."
+
+He turned his back on Tabs and commenced to move about the room, picking
+things up and examining them with a purposeful curiosity. He showed no
+fear, yet in all his movements there was a calculated stealth. Tabs
+watched him in amazement, wondering what he ought to do. If it came to
+grappling with him, unless he carried fire-arms, there was little doubt
+as to who would get the better of the contest. The man might be a
+lunatic, a blackmailer, a burglar; by his odd mode of entry, he had laid
+himself open to every suspicion. But he looked perfectly normal; and if
+he had been a burglar, he surely would have selected an opportunity when
+no other man was present. It was an awkward situation, this being shut
+up alone in a husbandless woman's house with an unknown intruder. It
+seemed to be an occasion for tact rather than the possible fuss of
+police interference.
+
+At this moment the stranger made a discovery.
+
+He had been examining the five silver photograph-frames, each in turn,
+with close attention. With his back towards Tabs he remarked, "It looks
+as though she hadn't forgotten him. Five reminders of his homely mug and
+not a solitary one of the also-rans! Numbers Two and Three couldn't have
+made such a deep impression." He caught his breath in a nervous shudder.
+"It's queer. Everything's queer when one's just come back. One's so
+changed that he could court his own wife without being recognized. You,
+too, were out there I should judge by the way you limp. I wonder whether
+you've got over the queerness yet. I haven't had time----"
+
+From in front of the empty fireplace, Tabs interrupted him. "Look here,
+my dear chap, I don't want to be rude and this isn't my house; but
+what's your game?"
+
+The stranger turned and smiled. His frank gray eyes were amused and
+friendly. "Upon my word, I haven't any game. I'm like yourself--just
+paying a visit."
+
+Tabs shook his head and gazed at him fixedly. "It won't do; you know
+that. You're a gentleman. Gentlemen don't get into unprotected women's
+houses by your kind of methods."
+
+"They don't. That's a fact." He laughed carelessly. "I suppose this is
+what comes of having been a prisoner in Germany. One prefers to be
+underhand."
+
+"Don't you think it's time you stopped fooling?" Tabs spoke in a
+conversational tone without temper. "There's Mrs. Lockwood to be
+considered; she may be here at any moment. It's no good coming this
+returned prisoner trick; all the prisoners in Germany were returned
+shortly after the Armistice. Eight months have elapsed."
+
+"All right. Have it your own way."
+
+The stranger ceased to wander and sat himself down at Maisie's end of
+the couch. Pulling out his cigarette-case, he offered it to Tabs. "Have
+a gasper?---- You don't need to refuse because of Maisie. If she's the
+Maisie she used to be, she won't object.---- Well, if you won't, I
+will."
+
+Tabs noticed that his hand trembled in holding the match. The man was a
+bundle of nerves; he was only maintaining this display of coolness with
+an effort. Whatever the purpose of his bold intrusion, it was not
+social, as he had pretended.
+
+"I don't like any man to think me a liar." The man spoke slowly between
+puffs at his cigarette. "You think it's all bunkum that I'm fresh out of
+Germany, but it isn't. Do you see that?" He ran his finger across the
+gash in his forehead. "That and the ill-treatment I received in the
+prison-camps made me go wuzzy. The only fact about myself that I could
+remember in all those years was Maisie. So it's natural that I should
+come to see her first. I wasn't sure of my own identity until a month
+ago. I suppose I was released at the Armistice, but for seven out of the
+past eight months I must have wandered in rags over Central Europe.
+However, all's well that ends well, and here I am."
+
+"But you knew that she'd remarried," Tabs objected suspiciously; "you
+asked me if I were Gervis."
+
+"A friend of Pollock's told me that," he explained. "Gervis was
+excusable. But this Lockwood fellow's the third. It's a bit thick! She
+certainly has been going it." He looked up suddenly. "I've been doing
+all the talking. What about yourself?"
+
+Tabs crossed the room and opened one of the long French windows which
+led out into the rockery. The golden afternoon had faded into early
+evening and a refreshing coolness was in the air. When he came back, he
+seated himself at the other end of the couch. "Just to show that there's
+no ill-feeling, I'll accept one of your gaspers, if you'll allow
+me.----There's nothing for me to explain. My name is Lord Taborley and
+I'm a friend of Mrs. Lockwood. There's nothing else."
+
+The stranger leaned forward. His humor left him, revealing his premature
+haggardness. He laid a hand on Tabs' arm and asked a question. "You're
+fond of her?"
+
+Tabs eyed him in silence, trying to divine what was intended. "At any
+rate, you are," he said kindly; "I see it now."
+
+"Not fond of her, I'm in love with her." The man's face softened as he
+made the confession. "I was in love with her when she was still the wife
+of Pollock. I've been through deep waters. I've had to wait for her like
+Jacob did for Rachel. I've lost most things--my memory, my health, my
+very likeness! but never for five minutes have I lost my love for her.
+She was the only star in my darkness----" The words fell from him with
+somber sincerity. "I don't know whether you understand----"
+
+But Tabs' thoughts had turned inwards. He was living again the
+englamored poignancy of the years when Terry had been for him precisely
+that--the only star in his darkness. The intensity of the vision was
+like a cry of warning rousing his sleeping idealism from its lethargy.
+His present errand became a treachery to be swept aside by his refound
+strength. He recognized the intruder with new eyes, not as an enemy, but
+as a comrade--a comrade marooned on the selfsame island of loneliness
+and bound to him by the common experience of a kindred adversity. He was
+like Crusoe discovering the footprint. Here, quite close to him, was a
+fellow waif who had drunk deep of his own bitter sense of desertion.
+With a thrill of sympathy, his heart turned to him.
+
+"The only star in the darkness!" He repeated the stranger's words. "For
+most of us there's been one woman who was all of that. If she fails
+us----" He stifled his pessimism. "When stars fail, one waits for the
+morning."
+
+"So you, too, had your woman!"
+
+The stranger smiled and relaxed against the cushions. "Foolish of me!
+You can't blame me. Twice I've believed that I'd lost her. First there
+was Gervis and then this Lockwood. Poor devils, I cry quits on them. But
+when I found you so at home here, you can guess what I dreaded. And yet
+you'll never guess why I followed you into this house." He lit a
+cigarette and crossed his legs. "I didn't want you to escape me till I'd
+asked a question---- Has it ever entered your head that Pollock might
+not be dead?"
+
+Tabs started. Then he sat very still. It was the commonplace tone in
+which the question had been asked that froze his blood. It was as though
+this man had said, "I can bring him back." For a moment he knew genuine
+fear--the non-physical fear which the impalpable can awake in the
+bravest mind. Through the open window the companionable mutter of London
+entered. The normality of everything on which his eyes rested did its
+best to reassure him--the mellow evening sunlight in the friendly room,
+the flowers in the rockery, the toy-boat on the pond. "I never dig up my
+dead." He remembered Maisie's motto. But what if the dead----
+
+He pulled himself together. Pollock not dead! An absurd suggestion!
+Maisie had changed her name twice since then--a sufficient proof! The
+poor fellow was demented. Everything that he had done bore the hall-mark
+of insanity. He had owned that he had been deranged to within a month
+ago. Everything that he had said might be quite true. He probably had
+been the dead man's friend and in love with Maisie at the time of her
+first marriage. The misfortunes that had befallen him had exaggerated
+his love into mania--a mania which the news of Gervis and then of
+Lockwood had rendered active. He felt an immense compassion for the man.
+There, save for the grace of God, sat himself. But what was to be done?
+Already Maisie was overdue. Not a second could be wasted. He must humor
+him and get him out of the house, if a scene was to be prevented.
+
+And all the time the stranger had been watching him--following his
+thoughts, no doubt. He spoke again. "Don't you agree with me? It would
+be damned awkward if Pollock came back."
+
+Tabs forced a smile. "I'm not so sure that I do. She never loved any one
+but her first husband. She's told me so. The other two---- I don't
+believe she herself knows how they happened. They were soldiers. They
+weren't long for this world. She didn't want to do them out of
+anything." He glanced at his watch. "By Jove, and I've not dined yet!
+I'm afraid I must be off. How about you? I'd be awfully glad if you'd
+take dinner with me."
+
+The man jumped to his feet, so that Tabs rose with him. But once they
+were on their feet an amused expression of cunning came into his eyes.
+It told Tabs plainly that he had seen through the strategy. He shook his
+head. "Very good of you. But I'm waiting for Maisie." He held out his
+hand. It was evident that he was determined to take Tabs at his word.
+"We'll meet again, perhaps. What you've just said piques my curiosity.
+Before you go, there's one more question. In your opinion what would
+Maisie's attitude be if Pollock did come back?"
+
+Tabs was instantly aware that he had made a false move. His bluff had
+been called. He'd made it impossible for himself to prolong his call; at
+the same time he didn't dare to leave this man behind in the house. It
+wasn't Maisie that he was thinking of now--he could warn her as she
+entered the Court--it was Porter. A madman was capable of anything; and
+yet, confound the chap's deceptiveness, he didn't look mad. There was
+only one chance of delaying his departure: at all costs he must involve
+him in an argument.
+
+"If Pollock came back! Curious that you should suggest that! I've sat in
+this room and discussed the possibility with Mrs. Lockwood by the hour.
+For the past two months--that's as long as I've known her--I've been
+helping her to live as though he might come back."
+
+The man's coolness instantly vanished. His excitement grew well-nigh
+beyond control. "You're not going. Sit down. You've got to explain." He
+rapped out his sentences in short, quick jerks. His voice had become
+harsh and imperative. "You can't have any idea what this means to me.
+It's ridiculous. Why should you, a living man, help her, when she's so
+beautiful, to save herself for a dead man? She didn't save herself in
+the case of Gervis and Lockwood."
+
+With a sigh of relief Tabs reseated himself. The man sank down beside
+him, crowding against him on the couch. His anxiety was sharp-pointed
+as a dagger. "Quick," he urged.
+
+"I don't know that I can be quick." Tabs spoke leisurely. He paused,
+trying to think what he should say next. "Here it is in a nutshell. Mrs.
+Lockwood, as we both know, is a more than ordinarily charming woman.
+She's the kind who, without being able to prevent herself, draws men.
+There are women like that. Her three marriages, all taking place so
+close together gave her a reputation---- You're a man of the world;
+you'll understand that I'm not trying to say anything derogatory. But
+three matrimonial adventures in such rapid succession gave her a
+reputation for lightness. She was young and pretty. She longed to live
+life. You can't blame her. For a woman life isn't a very full affair
+without a man. And yet there aren't many men who would be willing to
+choose a wife with three previous husbands to her credit. It would seem
+too much like a week-end experiment, without the option of parting when
+the week was ended. So here was the injustice of her social situation;
+without having committed a solitary indiscretion, she was damaged
+goods--debarred from matrimony, yet coveted by men. Do you realize the
+temptation----"
+
+The man half rose in his irritation. "You're not answering my question."
+The violence in his tone was unmistakeable. "What I've got to find out
+is, what put you up to persuading her to live as though Pollock were not
+dead?"
+
+"I was coming to that." Tabs spoke reassuringly. "Beneath all her gayety
+I found, when I began to know her, that she was desperate--desperate to
+live in the sunshine and mortally afraid of shadows. At the least hint
+of shadows she grew reckless. She believed that her happiness was in the
+past. So I taught her to play a game--a game that has often saved me
+from despair. It was just this--to act as though all the goodness one
+has known still lies ahead; in her case this meant living as though the
+man whom she had loved were not dead, but waiting for her round some
+future corner. So that was why---- But I think I've answered your
+question."
+
+Tabs rose from the couch and limped over to the empty fireplace. He
+stood there beneath the portrait of Lady Dawn, supporting himself with
+one arm against the mantel. The room was beginning to fill with dusk.
+Beyond the threshold of the open window, the rockery-garden was still
+vaguely golden. The little pond was a silver mirror.
+
+Perhaps two minutes had elapsed. Uncertainly the stranger struggled to
+his feet. He moved towards the door, halted and came slowly back. He
+looked very spent, and slim, and wasted in the gathering shadows. As
+Tabs gazed down at him, he noticed that his face was prodigiously
+solemn.
+
+"I don't mind now." He swallowed like a small boy getting rid of his
+emotion. "I don't mind Gervis or Lockwood any longer; it's as though
+they'd never happened. And I don't feel hard to her, the way I might
+have. I'm glad you told her about things being round the corner. Because
+I'm Pollock. I have come back."
+
+Tabs stared at him. He was deeply moved. To humor him in his delusion
+seemed the height of callousness. Yet what else was possible under the
+circumstances?
+
+"Of course you're Pollock," he assured him gently. "One wouldn't
+recognize you from your portraits, but I ought to have guessed."
+
+The man caught the deception in his tone. He lifted up his puzzled gray
+eyes. "You don't---- No, I see you don't. You don't believe me. Yet I am
+Pollock."
+
+"My dear chap," Tabs said it coaxingly, "I don't see why you should
+think I doubt you. I'm quite certain you're Pollock--Reggie Pollock, the
+first of all the aces: the man who brought down the Zeppelin over
+Brussels. You see I know all about you. Your picture was in the papers.
+I've told you that you were expected. So why----"
+
+The front door was heard to open and close. There was the sound of
+Maisie's voice. They stood rigidly listening in the semi-darkness.
+Neither of them spoke or stirred. As she entered, a shaft of light from
+the hall preceded her. Quietly Tabs placed himself between her and the
+stranger. The stranger made no motion to thwart him; he stood like one
+turned to stone. Just across the threshold she halted, leaning forward
+slightly and peering through the shadows.
+
+"Why, Tabs," she laughed, "how romantic of you to sit waiting for me in
+the twilight!"
+
+Tabs came forward as though he were about to push her back. "I'm not
+alone, Mrs. Lockwood----"
+
+"I know. Porter told me. But why are you standing in my way?" She
+laughed again. A shiver of fear cut short her laughter. "What's the
+matter? I don't see your friend. Why don't you introduce----"
+
+"He's not my friend. He says he's yours."
+
+"Then all the more reason---- Why are you acting strangely? No, please
+let me into my own room, Tabs."
+
+He had put out his arm to prevent her. Without warning the stranger
+advanced into the shaft of light. She saw him and fell back screaming,
+covering her eyes. With a vehemence that was unexpected, he pushed Tabs
+aside and clasped her to him. "Maisie darling, don't be afraid. I'm
+real. I know everything. And I don't mind----"
+
+At sound of his voice, she uncovered her eyes. His face was close to
+hers. The fixed look of terror left her.
+
+Putting out her hands timidly, she ran her fingers along the scar in his
+forehead. "They've hurt you. Poor you! My Reggie! Oh, my lover, they've
+hurt you!"
+
+She buried her head against his shoulder and fell to weeping
+passionately.
+
+
+II
+
+Neither of them had seen him go. He had tiptoed past them like a ghost
+and out into the summer night. The sky was luminous with the dust of
+stars. A sleepy wind was blowing.
+
+He jumped into his car and sped away, making such haste that one might
+have thought he was pursued. He wheeled to the left in the direction
+that led to the Surrey hills. It was the direction he had taken with
+Terry on that March morning when she had met him at the station. He was
+making a discovery: that there is no tragedy more difficult to
+contemplate with charity than the sight of other people's happiness.
+Their follies we can tolerate and view even with compassion; but their
+joys are unendurable. Joy separates men with impassable barriers. It
+transfigures beggars into Lazaruses lying at rest in Abraham's bosom. We
+view them from afar off and their contentment increases the burning of
+our torment. No man has yet discovered how to share his joy. Only a god
+could say, "My joy I give unto you."
+
+They had not seen him go. That was the neglect that rankled. Even though
+they had seen him, they would not have cared; they would have done
+nothing to delay him. They were past all caring. Like tired ships,
+having weathered many storms, they had furled their sails in the harbor
+of desire. He had slipped by them like a demon vessel, all canvas
+spread, out-going on his endless voyage.
+
+From the door, before he left, he had looked back. The room was a-silver
+with twilight. The garden beyond was still vaguely golden. The pond
+glimmered darkly like a magic mirror. The murmur of London wove patterns
+on the silence. From the hall across the silver of the dusk, an
+intrusive shaft of light pointed like a finger at those two entranced,
+who had refound the peace that time had scattered.
+
+Even though Pollock had not returned, he himself could never have
+married her. There are violations of the austerity of the soul which the
+urgings of the flesh cannot accomplish. In the vivid flash of reality
+that had visited him he knew that now. He was angry--bitterly angry. But
+his anger was not for her; it was for himself. He could be so
+audaciously prophetic in the affairs of others. He could advise them and
+well-nigh compel them to conserve themselves for kingdoms of whose
+coming there was neither the slightest hope nor warning. His penetrating
+optimism could foresee the daringly incredible, so that it almost seemed
+in the case of Maisie that his optimism had created out of the
+incredible a fact. He could work these miracles of restraint for others;
+himself he could not restrain. His road ran straight as destiny, yet any
+lazy kingdom of mildness in a woman's eyes was capable of luring him
+aside. In his abasement he lost all faith in his self-knowledge. Hadn't
+he always been the victim of an imagination which had tricked mere
+liking into a resemblance to passion? He strutted, gestured, despaired
+till he almost persuaded himself that he was the part he was acting. But
+had he the faintest conception of what real love meant? Hadn't he always
+acted a part? Yes, even in the case of Terry!
+
+His saner judgment intervened. He hadn't always been like that. Where
+had the point of departure started? He traced back the weakness till he
+came to the moment when he had permitted his sense of justice to be
+over-ruled by a woman. It had started with Maisie, when he had allowed
+her to persuade him to hide the truth from Lady Dawn.
+
+He jammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a sudden halt. To go and
+tell her must be the first step in his redemption. Till that was done
+the curse of the dead man would follow him. It seemed to him now, as he
+looked back, that through all the spring and summer the shadow of Lord
+Dawn had crept behind him. He would go at once. He would go that night.
+He knew where he could find her. He would set out like a pilgrim of long
+ago through the moon-drenched, hay-scented sweetness of the country.
+
+His vision turned outwards. He realized for the first time where he had
+halted. He was within sight of Richmond Park, outside _The Star and
+Garter Hotel_, the old haunt of merry-makers, which had now become a
+permanent hospital for the mutilated. There were lights to mark the
+windows of men who suffered. As he watched, some leaped up; others were
+snapped out. He could hear in memory the starchy rustling of nurses and
+the creaking of springs as the patients turned. There were men in there
+without arms and legs and faces; he had shared their danger and he had
+been spared. Surely the God who had covered him with His mantle, had had
+some plan--some design of goodness for him!
+
+Far below in a curving streak of blessedness the Thames ran silvered by
+the moonlight. He could see the clumped shadows of woods and the flicker
+of ripples striking fire against the banks. More distantly London
+glowed--a golden flower cupped in the hollowed hand of night. Holding
+his breath he listened to the loudness of the quiet. Subtle ecstasies
+drifted to him, fluttering like moths against the windows of his
+mind--"lilies like thoughts, roses like words, in the sweet brain of
+June." _There was a design._ Maisie had found her kingdom. Was it too
+much to expect that round some future turning God had another kingdom
+waiting?
+
+
+III
+
+He drove back to London by the directest route. He would have to get
+supper before he made a start. By the time he had done that, packed his
+bag, and refilled his tank it would be close on midnight. Dawn Castle
+lay somewhere down in Gloucestershire. He knew the road as far as
+Oxford; after that his ideas were vague.
+
+He was a little daunted by the thought of Lady Dawn. Everything that he
+had heard about her, including his first meeting with her, had served to
+daunt him. He pictured her as a woman with a conscience clear-cut as a
+cameo--a woman, infallible and unsubdued, impatient of foolishness and
+gentle in her spirit with the cold tranquillity of a landscape under
+ice. How would she receive him, coming out of nowhere, unheralded and
+unexplained? And how could he explain the urgency that had compelled him
+to come to her? It was a delicate task that he had set himself, this
+seeking out a woman with whom he was unacquainted, that he might tell
+her that her husband had not hated her when he died. What concern was it
+of his, she might well ask. If she chose to be hostile, there were no
+arguments by which he could defend his interference. His sole
+justification was his deep-rooted conviction that he was doing right.
+
+She never cried. How often Maisie had insisted on her sister's
+abstinence from tears, as though it was something monstrous that summed
+up all her character! He would have felt far more comfortable in
+visiting her if he had been assured that she sometimes cried.
+
+As he turned into Brompton Square, he thought he caught the door of his
+house in the act of closing. He might have been mistaken. It was dark
+under the shadow of the trees. Quite possibly it had been the door of a
+neighbor's house. Nevertheless, he hugged the curb as he drove so that
+he might scan the face of any one on the pavement. Forty yards from his
+doorstep, at a point where things were darkest, a man passed him. He was
+a tall man and walked with the erectness of one who had been a soldier.
+The way in which he carried himself and strode was extraordinarily
+reminiscent. Tabs slowed down and looked back; the man moved straight
+ahead, without hesitancy or sign of recognition. It couldn't be
+Braithwaite; Ann's vicinity was the least likely place in which to find
+him.
+
+As Tabs let himself into his house, he found Ann in the hall. "Was there
+some one here to see me?" he asked.
+
+"There's been no one to see your Lordship," Ann replied respectfully.
+
+He scarcely knew what prompted him to say it. Perhaps it was the
+healthy neatness of her appearance--the extreme orderliness of her
+quiet. "Ann, you're the sanest creature I meet anywhere. You've the
+pluck of one in a million."
+
+She turned to him a face that was flushing and eyes that were unusually
+bright. "It's good of your Lordship. Your Lordship is always kind."
+
+"No, Ann, only human. I know what you've been through and I'm glad
+you're getting over it---- I have to be away to-night. I shall need some
+supper. While you're preparing it, I'll pack."
+
+On the way upstairs he telephoned the garage to send for his car and to
+return it within the hour. Then he climbed the last flight to his
+bedroom.
+
+While he packed, he kept pausing and knitting his brows. A ridiculous
+conviction was forming in his mind. "It couldn't have been," he assured
+himself. Yet the more he recalled the man on the pavement the more
+certain he was that he had been Steely Jack. But what motive could
+Braithwaite have had for calling and why should Ann try to hide the fact
+that he had called? He had lost trace of him utterly since that day when
+he had handed him Terry's ultimatum at the Savoy. Since then Terry and
+he had had many meetings, he did not doubt. Braithwaite's influence
+clung to her like her shadow. But if he was so in love with Terry, the
+more reason why he should steer clear of Ann. To have called at Brompton
+Square would have been asking for a cloudburst. It couldn't have been
+Braithwaite. And yet----
+
+And then there was Ann. Since that day when the General's portrait had
+appeared in the papers, she had given up watching for letters marked,
+"On His Majesty's Service." She had made no further enquiries as to how
+his Lordship's friend at the War Office was progressing. Her silence
+told its story; she had learned the truth. In what spirit she had
+accepted the truth Tabs had no means of guessing. Lady Hamilton, the
+little maid-of-all-work, had been the beloved of Nelson. Ann was not
+without her precedent. But the maid-of-all-work had become Lady Hamilton
+before the Admiral had set eyes on her. Steely Jack was a General, while
+Ann was still a servant. Her claims would not meet with much applause if
+they were brought before a jury.
+
+To all appearance she had resigned herself to the inevitable. Tabs was
+frankly surprised at her magnanimity and fortitude. About her fortitude
+there could be no question, but concerning her magnanimity he was not a
+little skeptical. More than once he had caught her singing as she went
+about her work. She didn't get all the words correctly; she sang them
+with improvisions, filling in the gaps where her memory failed.
+Throughout the war the song had been sung to men on leave at the
+Alhambra by the heroine who acted the revengeful part of _Tootsie_:
+
+   "Some day I'll make you love me.
+   Some day you'll call me 'Dear'.
+   You'll feel so lonely
+   And want me only;
+   I'm sure you'll want me near.
+   I know you can't forget me,
+   Though, dear, for years you'll try.
+   I'll make you miss me
+   And want to kiss me,
+   Bye and bye."
+
+She was a mystery. If she were playing a game, it was a game the
+intentions of which he could not fathom. The man whom he had passed on
+the pavement could not have been Braithwaite. Common-sense insisted on
+that.
+
+
+IV
+
+While he was at supper she gave him no chance to question her. "I'm
+motoring down to Dawn Castle," he told her. "I've left the address on my
+desk. Don't forward any letters till you hear from me. I don't suppose
+that I shall be there for more than a day. To tell the truth," he
+glanced up smiling at her seriousness, "I haven't been invited."
+
+Ann refused to be lured off her perch of reticence. She set before him
+the dish she was carrying. "I'm sure wherever your Lordship goes there's
+a welcome."
+
+He felt that he was being reproved. He had been conscious of her silent
+criticism from the moment he had announced that he would be away for the
+night. He respected Ann and was anxious for her good opinion. She was by
+long odds the most honorable woman of his acquaintance and the best,
+because she was the kindest. He had had the feeling throughout the past
+two months that there was very little that had happened inside his brain
+that had escaped her. She had disapproved of Maisie. She had shown no
+enthusiasm for Terry. She had been aware of his dangers when he himself
+was disguising them with excuses. All this he knew though no word had
+been exchanged. She had observed in all her dealings with him the
+decorum to be expected from a high-class servant. And yet she was his
+trusted friend, whose virtues compelled his admiration and whose loyalty
+commanded his affection. She thought ahead for him and smoothed his
+path. Her sense of responsibility was as tender as a sister's. Her
+humility lent it a touch of pathos. He looked up to her as men
+instinctively look up to good women in whatever grade of society they
+find them. The silent knowledge which each had of the other formed a
+bond of sympathy, the more delicate because it was unuttered.
+
+He said, "Long ago--it must have been before the war--I gave you tickets
+to see Peter Pan."
+
+"It wasn't to me your Lordship gave them. It was to Braithwaite."
+
+"Was it?" He held her eyes, striving to peer behind their curtained
+windows. It was the first time that that name had been mentioned between
+them in casual conversation. "You're right. It comes back to me now. It
+was the Christmas of 1913 that he took you. Do you remember the fairy
+who was dying? There was only one way of keeping her alive. Peter Pan
+had to make the children in the audience promise that they believed in
+fairies. When they did that, she got well. That's why I'm going to Dawn
+Castle to-night."
+
+Ann ceased abruptly from what she was doing and stared at her master in
+concern. He laughed mischievously. "Wrong again, Ann; I've not taken
+leave of my senses. Two hours ago I made the same mistake. There was a
+man who asked me whether I believed that Mrs. Lockwood's first husband,
+who was killed at the Front, would return. While I was wondering how
+long it would be before he'd grow violent, he proved to me that he was
+her first husband. So I'm believing in fairies."
+
+A secret happiness lit up her face. "Deep down beneath our doubts, most
+of us believe in fairies, I think, your Lordship." With a shy smile she
+left him.
+
+The purring of an engine warned him that the car had returned and was
+waiting. He could hear Ann in the hall, handing out his bags. He had
+finished his supper; he might as well be off. As he drove out of the
+Square, he looked back; she was standing on the steps, gazing after him.
+He had the restless certainty, now that it was too late, that she had
+had a secret which, at the last moment, she would have given the world
+to have shared with him.
+
+
+V
+
+Of that night journey in after years he remembered only the deep peace
+and the ecstasy. He was doing something at last that was right; though
+why it was right, he would have found it hard to explain. He encountered
+none of the difficulties he had anticipated in picking up his direction.
+He flew unswervingly to the mark like a bullet traveling a predestined
+path. The first sixty miles were familiar; Maisie had covered them with
+him on many occasions. By every law of emotion each landmark should have
+stirred some poignant memory, some fresh wistfulness of regret. The fact
+was that he hardly gave her a thought. When he did, it was only to wish
+her luck and to congratulate himself on his escape.
+
+Having passed through Oxford lying blanched in moonlight, he climbed out
+of the Thames valley, striking through uplands across the wold to
+Burford. From then on all memories were left behind; he had become an
+explorer in an unknown country.
+
+Everything was sleeping. How trustfully it slept! Trees were hooded like
+extinguished candles. Flowers throughout the fields clasped their faces
+in their hands. Birds, like fluffy balls, drowsed on branches. Stars
+alone were wakeful. They stooped to watch him with intent, companionable
+glances. Now and then he had to halt to flash his torch on a sign-post
+or to consult his map. For the most part he took chances and guessed.
+
+Night engulfed him, rushed past him, broke over him. He was like a ship
+thrusting forward into a trackless ocean.
+
+The paleness of dawn was in the sky as he neared Gloucester. When he
+entered, its roofs and towers were precipices of gold and fire,
+straining up to the New Jerusalem which floated in the clouds. The
+streets of the ancient city had a mystic look, white and hushed and
+tenantless. But already the cheeky sparrows were about,
+scandal-mongering beneath the eaves with an unholy disregard for the awe
+by which they were surrounded.
+
+He left Gloucester in a southwesterly direction. In fields the hay was
+lying cut. A largesse of dew had been scattered through the hedgerows
+like loot from the treasure-chests of emperors. Larks were battling up,
+striving to sing against the very bars of heaven. Every fragrance and
+sound was a messenger, guaranteeing happiness.
+
+Round a bend in the road he came across a cluster of thatched cottages,
+their white walls gleaming incandescent in the morning sunshine. Beyond
+them lay a parkland, from the edge of which rose a wooded knoll, crowned
+by a moated castle. The next mile-stone warned him that it was the
+village of Dawn he was approaching.
+
+
+VI
+
+All day he had waited--a lazy summer day, drowsy with the hum of bees
+and heavy with the perfume of cottage flowers. On entering the village
+he had put up at _The Dawn Arms_, an old-fashioned hunting hostel which
+owed its prosperity to the fame of the Dawn foxhounds. Having bathed and
+breakfasted, he had started off to leave his card on Lady Dawn. Arriving
+at the Castle, he had been informed that her Ladyship had left early
+that morning and was not expected back till early evening. He had filled
+in the morning by sleeping and the afternoon by joining a band of
+sight-seeing trippers who had driven over from Gloucester in
+gayly-painted chars-a-bancs.
+
+With a spice of amusement, he had paid his shilling for admission at the
+wooden booth outside the Castle gate and had found himself herded with a
+crowd of affectionately inclined young women and young men who perspired
+freely--the latter for the sake of greater comfort had removed their
+coats and knotted handkerchiefs about their throats. In good time a
+decrepit ex-butler had appeared to act as guide and had led the
+excursionists over the Norman part of the ruins. He had shown them the
+dungeons, the room in which a prince had been murdered and the havoc
+wrought upon the walls by Cromwellian cannon. The ever recurring theme
+of his trembling narrative was the prowess and the splendor of the
+Dawns. He was like a weak-voiced cricket chirping in the sunshine. His
+stories of bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were
+too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the
+race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of
+his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind
+to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the
+pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They
+wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly
+sheep looked up somnolently to watch them.
+
+To the few who remained the old man mumbled on. It was the nobility of
+the late Lord Dawn that he was now recounting--the daring horseman he
+had been, the deviltry of him, the lust of life he had had, the
+greatness of his possessions and how he had foregone all this beauty to
+be hammered into the defilement of the trenches like a rat, cornered in
+a sewer.
+
+"Visitors are not allowed in the part of the Castle that is inhabited.
+But, since her Ladyship's away----"
+
+Unlocking a door, he led them through a tunnel to a grilled gate,
+through the bars of which they saw the Castle's terraced rose-gardens,
+falling away steeply in a cascade of petals to a water-lilied,
+green-scummed moat which encircled the stronghold like a necklace of
+jade. Beside the water's edge a fair-haired boy in a white sailor suit
+was deeply absorbed in sailing a boat.
+
+"His little Lordship," the old man whispered.
+
+"But I didn't know---- How old?" Tabs questioned.
+
+"Eight years, sir, come December."
+
+Long after he had returned to the inn, the picture of the little boy
+remained with him. This discovery that Lord Dawn had left a son made him
+the more certain of the justice of his errand.
+
+The azure and emerald of late afternoon drifted into the ensanguined
+gold of sunset. The long-tarrying twilight had already settled when a
+messenger arrived, bearing a note. It was from her Ladyship, regretting
+her absence and saying that she would be happy to receive a visit from
+Lord Taborley that evening or at any time that was convenient.
+
+
+VII
+
+He set out at once. Heretofore, with the exception of Terry, women had
+meant little to him. But he was curious to meet this woman--curious and
+eager in a strangely boyish fashion. Every one who had mentioned her had
+spoken of her with a certain hint of fear, not untinged with adoration.
+He hadn't been aware how anxious he had been to meet her until her note
+had summoned him. He wondered whether she had any of the endearing
+humanity of her sister. He wondered whether what Pollock had said was
+true, that she looked much older than her portrait. He didn't want her
+to look older----
+
+He came to the bridge across the moat and the gateway which bore the
+grooves in which the old portcullis used to slide. He passed through the
+gateway, under the tower, into the graveled courtyard of the Castle. On
+three sides the courtyard was loop-holed and sullen, but on the fourth
+modern windows and a brass-knobbed door had been let into the solid
+masonry. Above the door, shining down on the whitened steps, a lamp
+burnt in a wrought-iron socket. Several of the windows were also
+lighted.
+
+His knock was answered by a gray-haired man, with the gravity of
+deportment which is peculiar to lawyers, undertakers and footmen. While
+the man went to inform his mistress, Tabs was left to note how the hall
+was hung with hunting trophies. Then he heard himself being requested to
+follow.
+
+Having climbed a winding stair, he was shown into a room in the turret,
+one side of which was filled by a tall leaded window gazing westward.
+The landscape which it framed, hung against the darkness like a painted
+canvas--a far-reaching expanse of tree-dotted pasture, vague with
+islands of mist and rimmed by the last faint sparks of the sunset. The
+ceiling was heavily beamed, the furniture Jacobean, the walls paneled
+and hung with many generations of family portraits. In a wide hearth a
+fire of coals and logs was burning. In the room's center stood a carved
+table on which was set a massive silver lamp, casting a solitary
+illumination.
+
+"Lord Taborley, my Lady."
+
+As his name was announced, he heard the rustle of her dress, and
+discovered that she had been seated in a low chair by the window. She
+rose with a slow grace. There was something indefinably tragic and
+foreordained about her every movement. Maisie's name for her flashed
+into his mind, "The Princess Czarina Bolsheviki." It suited her exactly.
+In those surroundings she might have posed as Mary Queen of Scots in
+prison--a queen without a kingdom whose pride was unbroken. In the
+dimness his first impression was of her queenly gentleness.
+
+"I can guess why you've come."
+
+The same deep voice that had taunted him at Maisie's, only now it was no
+longer taunting! He noticed the way she offered him her hand, with the
+arm fully extended as if to hold him away from her. She was a smaller
+woman than he had remembered; it was the courage of her bearing that had
+made her seem taller. He could not see her face distinctly; it was in
+shadow. But, when she turned, he caught the whiteness of her profile on
+the dusk, clear-cut and tranquil as a cameo. After having gazed so long
+at Sargent's painting, he would have recognized anywhere the rounded
+shapeliness of her head, the hair swept smoothly back from the calm
+forehead, the splendid strength of her throat and the delicate, wholly
+feminine half-moon of her shoulders.
+
+"Won't you sit over here? If you would prefer it, we can have more
+lamps. But they would spoil----" She indicated the vague stretch of
+country, across which mists were drifting like gray ghosts.
+
+He drew up a chair at an angle to her own, so that he could study her.
+"You say you think you know why I've come?"
+
+"I was expecting you," she said quietly. He could feel rather than see
+the steady kindness that was in her stone-gray eyes.
+
+"If you were expecting me, then your sister must have----"
+
+"My sister had nothing to do with my expecting. Can't you think of any
+one closer?"
+
+He shook his head. At first he had hoped that Maisie had told her and
+done his work for him. Evidently it wasn't that. She was attributing
+some other motive to his visit. It was a motive the disclosure of which
+called for delicacy. She had prearranged his reception. It was no
+accident that had caused him to find her alone in the dimness of the
+gathering evening. The scanty lighting of the shadowy room had been
+stage-set to spare them both embarrassment. "If it wasn't your
+sister----" He paused at a loss to know how to proceed further.
+
+Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emotional
+voice had a new tenderness. "Will you allow me to help you? We're not
+such strangers as we seem. For years I've been interested in you. I was
+always hearing of your adventures in Mexico, Korea, the Balkans and last
+of all at the Front. You've been quite a romantic figure in my life.
+You've always seemed so strong; and I admire strength immensely. I never
+dreamt that a time would ever come when I would be able to help you.
+You're in love and she's not in love with you. You're older than she is
+and it makes you unhappy. She has time to experiment, but for you it's
+different; your love is bound up with the last of your youth. Because
+you've been unhappy, you've been unwise. Your foolishness ended
+yesterday with the return of Reggie Pollock. I received the news of his
+return this morning. So you came down here to me, which was perfectly
+natural."
+
+He shifted his gaze and stared out of the window, puzzled and troubled.
+"Unfortunately for me, Lady Dawn, a good deal of what you've said is
+true. But I don't see how it makes it natural that I should have come to
+you. I've been wanting to come for a very long time, but was given to
+understand that what I had to say might be distasteful."
+
+"You must put that out of your mind." She said it comfortingly, as
+though to a little boy. "There's nothing distasteful in what you have
+to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can assure
+me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to
+risk that in order to become your ally."
+
+He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should
+like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been
+talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's
+address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my
+head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the
+whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've
+said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to
+lose her, I would rather not have---- But I didn't come here to burden
+you with my troubles. I came to do something for you--something which
+I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and
+followed me until---- It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality
+outside myself. I may make you very unhappy----"
+
+She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the
+fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the
+mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a
+vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges.
+In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features
+clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that
+they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had
+never seen such calmness. And the calmness was not alone in her
+expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms
+and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared
+to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her
+far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that
+her sympathy could not encompass--nothing that he need be ashamed to
+tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by
+reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had
+attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was
+filled with a strange sense of gratitude.
+
+Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.
+
+"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be
+afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for
+me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one--not
+even you--has the power to do that."
+
+
+VIII
+
+He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."
+
+A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth?
+You yourself tell the truth---- When they say that I never cry, they
+mean that I never let them see me."
+
+He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man.
+Not to cry at all would be monstrous; it was that which made me afraid
+of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was
+about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I
+came to talk to you."
+
+She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her
+life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of
+the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night
+without.
+
+Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"
+
+"Your husband."
+
+"But he's dead."
+
+"I know."
+
+He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He
+almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he
+continued apologetically. "I'm trespassing on things sacred. Because of
+that I've fought to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was
+inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to
+leave you in ignorance----"
+
+"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed
+pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.
+
+"In ignorance of his grandeur."
+
+He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was
+aware of her relieved suspense--at the same time of her gentle
+skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words.
+Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new
+start, he stumbled his way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of
+her unuttered doubts.
+
+"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake.
+It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By
+doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason
+for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice
+that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his
+spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the
+Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a
+sleep-walker--a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was
+the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you--to
+you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more
+intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two
+months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to
+force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If
+I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could
+resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered
+your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging----"
+
+"Who I _was_!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display
+of interest.
+
+"I mean your relation to him--that it was you who were his wife. At the
+Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his
+identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us--something to be
+sent over the top to be smashed and then to be left to sink into the
+mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a
+company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My
+acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much
+now--only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing
+earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What
+Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants
+you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry
+and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all
+through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all
+adored him--adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful
+when there was dying to be done--out at rest and in quiet sectors he was
+gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet
+he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for
+what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons
+for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him--one does in the
+presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his
+spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he
+never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the
+gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we,
+who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold--his untiring
+ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got
+to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn
+who was born out there. It was last night, after Pollock returned, that
+I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had
+been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this
+pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and
+ridicule----"
+
+He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him.
+He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She
+was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes,
+glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the
+solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily
+down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been
+stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though
+his lips had been used----
+
+"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly.
+"He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things?
+Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."
+
+"They're only part of the reasons."
+
+"There are others?"
+
+"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he
+might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it
+sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so
+intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady
+Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet
+wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and
+officers knew you, without knowing who you were. You were with us in
+the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More
+than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the
+last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went
+West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women
+meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will
+again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired
+us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've
+known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's
+portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here
+it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic.
+Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious
+pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss----"
+
+He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following
+her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his
+gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face--from the
+portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was
+ordered, you went--you accompanied him in the most real sense: he
+carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When
+he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the
+walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a
+saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness
+to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your courage; his
+kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of
+you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at
+night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a
+patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find
+him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was
+dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your
+portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when
+we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten
+all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of
+you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your
+name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."
+
+She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin
+cushioned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows
+falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse
+beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.
+
+"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"
+
+He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had
+suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started
+talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"
+
+She shook her head. "He left a child by me."
+
+"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved
+you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"
+
+Again, with a gesture, she negatived his suggestion. "He'd never have
+doubted that I would know he had died loving me."
+
+"Then why did he send me?"
+
+Even while he asked it, he marveled at his certainty that she shared his
+conviction that he had been sent.
+
+She turned her eyes full on his face and let them dwell there
+searchingly. As he returned her gaze, he noted that she was less young
+than he had supposed. She was older than her portrait. Her hair, which
+had looked night-black in the shadows, was prematurely frosted. The
+moonlight, strengthening, picked out remorselessly each silver thread.
+She was no longer capable of putting back the hands of time for any man.
+
+She had read his thoughts. The pride went out of her voice. "Perhaps he
+sent you," she faltered, "that he might give me back a little of what he
+took."
+
+"What did he take? Anything that I have----"
+
+She leant back in her chair. Her face was again in shadow. "My youth. My
+happiness."
+
+In the silence which followed he was aware that the third presence had
+departed.
+
+
+IX
+
+"Your youth! Your happiness!" He was astounded. "Strange that you should
+say that! I thought that I alone was searching."
+
+"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own
+sake, but for yours. To men like you who have lived at the Front, life
+has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children;
+what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone
+anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been
+granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises
+come to all of us, when life grows desperate--when to be alone becomes
+intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden,
+because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner
+or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The
+war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your
+loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on
+Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were
+terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known
+love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity--and that's being
+compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to
+care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman
+wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual--of a high type like
+yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because
+a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you
+want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have
+gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge.
+Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You
+purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all
+your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she
+contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of
+her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get
+used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A
+wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her
+understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry
+had?"
+
+He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had
+so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking
+aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had
+recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any
+arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing
+straight before him.
+
+What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but
+foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with
+the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable,
+undignified, absurd--on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand
+Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music.
+The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the
+need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly
+sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his
+passion for Terry was at an end.
+
+When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room,
+with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress,
+sitting so gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded
+hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For
+weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble
+display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved
+that.
+
+Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to
+him--that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall.
+Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of
+Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and
+be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung
+his idolatry on her.
+
+But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was
+disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an
+Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a
+loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.
+
+His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim
+despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no
+one else."
+
+
+X
+
+Her voice reached him out of the darkness. "To own that we've been
+mistaken takes more courage than to persist in the wrong direction. 'I
+want no one else!' We've all said that. It was through saying it that I
+brought about my shipwreck. But if you're sure that you want no one
+else, you must have her. If there's any way of getting her for you,
+I'll do my best to help."
+
+She made an effort to rise. She stood before him swaying, a blinded look
+on her face, her eyes closed, her hands stretched out. He placed his arm
+about her. Her weight sagged against him.
+
+"Not the servants," she whispered. "You and I. Give me air."
+
+With his free hand he jerked the catch and pushed the window wide. The
+cool dampness of the night streamed in on her. He stood there with her
+clasped against him, her head stretched back, her body drooping. In the
+bowl of darkness at the foot of the turret, the rose-garden floated. Out
+of sight, in the green-scummed moat, a fish leapt with a sullen splash.
+A bird called. Wheels rumbled on a distant road. Again the silence was
+unbroken. The moonlight, falling on her face, gave to it an expression
+of childishness. Her breast and throat, gleaming white as marble,
+reminded him she was a woman.
+
+She stirred. Her eyes opened. She gazed up at him wonderingly. "I'm
+better. Foolish of me!" Then, inconsequently, "How tall you are, Lord
+Taborley!"
+
+He supported her till she could lean across the sill. They leant there
+together, their faces nearly touching. His arm was still about her; she
+did not seem to notice it. He was dumb with tremulous expectancy.
+
+"It was about myself that I had to tell you," she whispered. "I was once
+like you. I wanted no one else. I knew, even while I wanted him, that he
+could never make me happy. Even when I was most in love with him, he
+had qualities which I distrusted. After marriage the distrusting grew.
+Yet all the while I was sorry for him. I would have given anything to
+undo---- His sins were mine. With another woman, less virtuous, he might
+have been good. In his yearning he tried to drag me down. I couldn't go,
+not even if going would have saved him. There was something in me, not
+exactly pride, that prevented. I have never spoken of this to anybody.
+I'm saying it to you because----"
+
+She broke off. Why was she saying it? The perfume of June roses under
+moonlight, mingling with the fragrance of her hair, was intoxicating.
+His arm about her tightened. Was she only allowing him to hold her out
+of pity because of his confession?
+
+"Because," she said, "I think before she knows of your visit it would be
+better that you should go."
+
+He failed to grasp her logic. "But if I stay, she will never know."
+
+She released herself gently and gazed at him reproachfully. "Never know!
+But you came in order that she might know."
+
+He was more than ever puzzled. He had come to tell her of her husband.
+Did she not believe him? She seemed to be accusing him. He remembered
+how she had claimed, when he had entered, that she could guess what had
+brought him. "I came solely to see you," he said, speaking slowly. "I
+was compelled, as I've told you. I give you my word of honor that my
+visit wasn't even remotely related to----"
+
+A sharply indrawn breath cut short what he was saying. They turned
+quickly, moving instinctively apart. Gazing in from the open door,
+across the pool of lamplight, was Terry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
+
+ROUND THE CORNER
+
+
+I
+
+Lady Dawn was the first to recover her composure. "Why, Terry, I thought
+you were in bed!"
+
+"I was."
+
+Terry's eyes shifted from Lady Dawn to Tabs. They were startled and
+misty with sleep. She seemed only half-awake. Her hand rested on the
+door as if ready for retreat. Her square little face was flushed; her
+gold, bobbed hair was flattened where it had pressed against the pillow.
+She was clad in a filmy negligée; her bare feet had been pushed hastily
+into slippers and peeped out rosily from beneath the hem. She looked
+immature--the way she had in days gone by when he had tiptoed to her
+bedside through the darkness to feel her tight little arms leap
+stranglingly about his neck. She had been really a tiny girl then. Why
+couldn't she have stayed like that always? Why need she have roused in
+him this torturing desire which she did nothing but rebuff?
+
+"I was asleep. I heard voices. I thought----"
+
+What had she thought? How much had she seen and heard? How long had she
+been standing there?
+
+Tabs attempted to bridge the awkward silence. "I drove down from
+London." Then he added, "That was last night."
+
+None of them had stirred. Lady Dawn advanced from the window into the
+pool of lamplight. "I think I know what you thought--that something was
+wrong. It was. I nearly fainted. If it hadn't been for Lord
+Taborley----But come inside. Why do you remain standing there?"
+
+Terry stepped just across the threshold. Having closed the door, she
+leant against it, still holding the knob in her hand. It was plain that
+she was making an effort to be valiant. She looked fragile as a peeled
+white wand; like a flower, shy and dew-wet. Life had not yet commenced
+to break her. The clinging folds of her wrap emphasized her slenderness,
+the grace of her lines and the girlish contours of her figure.
+
+Lady Dawn went to her and put her arm about her. "You're afraid. Of what
+are you afraid? Surely not of Lord Taborley? He's been telling me---- To
+be loved like that---- There was a time when I would have been proud."
+
+Terry's left hand went up to her breast. Her wild violet eyes looked
+straight before her, seeking always the face of Tabs. They seemed to
+call to him. He came slowly to the table where she could see him. It was
+his chance. Lady Dawn was his advocate. It was the chance for which he
+had waited.
+
+He was contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty,
+enviable promise and the dumb hostility of her youth; the other in the
+gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased
+understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had
+become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn---- Was it her suffering that made him
+know her as he knew himself?
+
+"I hadn't meant to intrude on you," he apologized. "I hadn't the least
+idea you were here. How should I have had? You disappeared without
+warning; at your father's house your address was refused me. Lady Dawn
+will bear me out that, at the very moment you entered, I was assuring
+her that my visit had nothing to do with you. Probably you heard."
+
+"Nothing to do with me!" There was relief in her way of saying it. She
+visibly relaxed. "Then it isn't because of me at all that you're here?"
+
+The suppressed eagerness of her question was wounding. She wanted to
+hear him state more positively that she had had nothing to do with his
+visit. Whatever she had seen before they had become aware of her, had
+had no power to rouse her jealousy. She could have given him no stronger
+proof of how absolutely he had ceased to count. He smiled bitterly. "Not
+because of you at all, Terry. The reason for my being here is strictly
+private between Lady Dawn and myself. I didn't come to worry you. You
+may set your mind at rest."
+
+"Then you didn't know or even suspect----"
+
+He laughed unhappily. "What more can I say to convince you? I haven't
+the least idea what you suppose I could suspect. What business is it of
+mine to suspect anything? And if I did, what license should I have to
+interfere? We're not as we once were. There are no longer any
+sentimental obligations that would hold us accountable to each other.
+You've shown me that you consider our relation ended. In the face of
+that, I should scarcely follow you into the country where, by all
+accounts, you've come to escape me. It's purely a coincidence that you
+find me here."
+
+He caught Lady Dawn's eyes resting on him. They were wide and clear and
+interrogating. He knew what she was remembering: that it was in this
+room within the hour that he had said, "But I want her. I can't do
+without her. I want no one else." Self-ridicule tempered his spirit into
+sharpness. He turned again to Terry.
+
+"Once and for all I should like to set your doubts at rest. You need
+have no fear that I shall ever inconvenience you. We're bound to meet
+from time to time, but I pledge you my word that I shall never refer to
+the past. You're of an age to make decisions for yourself; you've
+decided against me. You're acting quite within your privilege when you
+discard old friends. You'll wonder why I state obvious facts. I'm doing
+so in order that you may feel certain that I've withdrawn whatever
+claims I had for influencing your movements. I shall always be
+interested---- But as for presuming that anything that I might say or do
+would make the least difference to your plans, I shouldn't be so
+foolish----"
+
+Breaking away from Lady Dawn, she crossed over to him. Resting her hand
+on his arm, she sank her voice and commenced speaking so hurriedly that
+he alone could make out what she said.
+
+"I've been false and foolish. I don't need you to tell me. If you knew
+how miserable I've been and how I've despised myself---- But I can't
+help it. I go on doing things. I never used to be a beast--least of all
+to you; never until you wanted me to marry you. If I can act like this
+now, what sort of a wife---- Can't you understand? I'm trying to spare
+you. But I won't have you hate me, Tabs. I can't endure that. Every
+second that I've kept away from you, I've been wanting--not the _you_
+that you are now, but the old you. Won't you start afresh, liking me the
+way you did when--before this happened?" She seized his hand on the
+impulse and pressed it to her lips. It was the humble act of a small
+girl. "Love me just a little. I'm not really bad. Please, please forgive
+me my wickedness, dear Tabs."
+
+He stood dumbfounded and embarrassed. If they had been alone, he would
+have known what to do. He was at a loss to find a motive for this
+display of passion. Was it a ruse to get him back? He crushed the
+suspicion as unworthy. Then was it what she had seen that had made her
+possessive? Her tears fell scalding on his hands.
+
+He drew her to him. "There, there, little Terry! You mustn't. There's
+nothing to cry about. There's nothing wicked in not having loved a man.
+It's a thing that can't be helped."
+
+At the sign of his relenting, she threw away the last of her control.
+Burying her face against his coat, she clung to him. All that he could
+see of her was her golden head and her slight body, quivering with
+sobbing. Her voice reached him muffled. "But I am wicked. I've pushed
+you from me. If you knew---- If you did, you wouldn't touch me."
+
+There had been no sound, yet something warned him. He looked up. The
+door was closing.
+
+"Lady Dawn," he called. In his voice there was the tremor of anxiety.
+
+On the point of vanishing, she glanced back across her shoulder. "What
+is it, Lord Taborley?"
+
+The calmness of her austerity made emotion seem shallow. There was a
+touch of scorn in her repose.
+
+"Won't you help?"
+
+She smiled faintly. "I was. I was going."
+
+"Then please don't. It's late. Both you and she must be worn out."
+
+Like a figure of silver, she came coldly back. But there was only
+tenderness in her voice when she spoke. "Terry, did you hear what Lord
+Taborley said? He thinks he ought to be going."
+
+Slipping her arm about the girl, she led her from him. Their footsteps
+died out on the turret stairs.
+
+He waited, hoping that Lady Dawn would return. Now that she was gone, he
+was invaded with his old loneliness. The dead lords eyed him cynically
+from their canvases. Through leaded panes the moonlight fell. It seemed
+the sorcery of her spirit. The perfume of the rose-garden was her
+breath. How pale she had made his dream of Terry! How trivial she made
+all women look when she stood beside them! There was nothing in this
+gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married
+her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he
+required at the hands of a woman--it was rest.
+
+There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick
+of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till
+it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly
+into the romance of the summer's night.
+
+
+II
+
+Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay
+wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.
+
+He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he
+had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie
+had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when
+she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she
+hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had
+no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental
+attraction, however well concealed, must always be sex. They could never
+be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was
+cheating--the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other
+deriving amusement from giving less. He had held that such relations
+between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a
+clash of desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was
+no middle course between coveting a woman and neglecting her as entirely
+dispensable.
+
+But this morning his point of view was altered. He was confident that
+his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had
+never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it.
+He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood.
+His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the
+emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as
+secure as it was incomprehensible. His new affection compensated him for
+all previous failures and atoned for the humiliation of every past
+regret.
+
+At that word "affection" he halted himself. Was it affection that he
+entertained for Lady Dawn? He took a good look at the suspected word and
+decided that it was. But it was the affection of reverence. In owning
+this much he qualified his admission by insisting that his affection was
+totally devoid of passion. Passion in the presence of Lady Dawn looked
+hysteric and paltry. She inspired a serenity which had nothing to do
+with the physical. It was the charm of her character that entranced him.
+Her body scarcely figured in his thoughts; when it did, it failed to
+stir him. It was no more than the gracious vehicle through which the
+beauty of her spirit was expressed.
+
+His paramount emotion was gratitude--gratitude that she, who was reputed
+to be so cold, should so instantly have unveiled herself. There was a
+startling purity in the frankness with which she had bared her spirit
+to him. It left him awed and touched. He recognized the generosity which
+had prompted her; she had realized his need of a woman's trust. And so
+she had withheld nothing that would comfort him. She had made him feel
+safe, the way a mother does. She had picked up the little boy that lies
+hidden in the heart of every man, and had folded him in her breast.
+
+It had been shameless of her. He had not guessed that a woman could be
+so good.
+
+And she had made him so finally sure of her. He felt that he could leave
+her and know that her protection would follow him. He could return and
+be equally certain that none of her understanding would have vanished.
+She was the first woman who had impressed him with her wisdom; the only
+one who had had the courage to offer him her strength.
+
+And this was not love. He smiled exultantly. It was nobler and
+infinitely more rare. Love, as he had read of it and mistaken it in his
+experience, was a devastating energy, greedy and devouring. It was a
+continual, nagging contention between self-abasement and hostility. It
+was a humiliating attempt on the part of a man to barter something,
+which was persistently undervalued, for the feminine equivalent which
+was as persistently hoarded. It was an amalgam of physical yearning,
+wounded vanity and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading
+as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity.
+Of all the passions it was the most hypocritical--a snare-setter, a
+digger of pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He
+thanked God there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like
+an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of
+this woman's charity, had felt it yield beneath his touch, and had found
+himself immersed in the blessedness of instant and unmerited rest.
+
+Lazily he commenced to dress. From his window he could see the Castle,
+perched grave and gray against the forehead of the clouds. He wondered
+whether she was up, how she was occupying herself, whether she was
+expecting him? He listened to her voice in the silence of his brain,
+like the far-away singing of contralto bells. He saw her still face, her
+slow smiling, the proud, sweet stateliness of her pacing steps. Then his
+thoughts went back to whether he was expected.
+
+If he were not---- The thought chilled him. She had said nothing to
+encourage him to seek her afresh. What if his reappearance should cause
+her embarrassment--an embarrassment which she would betray by
+withholding herself? It was quite likely she would impute to him wrong
+motives. Already she might have repented of intimacies she had allowed.
+He had placed his arm about her. With the injustice of most women,
+though she had permitted it, she might be blaming him because the act
+had been witnessed by Terry. Terry of all persons! Having had time to
+reflect, she might be accusing him of gallantries. It was not so long
+since she had confused him with Adair. From her untypical knowledge of
+him she was entitled to estimate him as the kind of man to whom
+promiscuous caresses were a practice. He turned coward at the
+recollection of his daring. Last night it had been so involuntary and
+had seemed so natural. Why had he done it? Why had she allowed it? It
+had been the liberty of a plow-boy with a village-girl. There would be
+little room for wonder if, when next they met, she fixed a No Man's Land
+of pride between herself and his familiarity. She would have good
+reason, for their companionship would be shared by Terry. Poor little
+Terry, with her exaggerated sins and distorted self-accusations!
+
+He wandered down to breakfast disturbed by these apprehensions. As the
+morning dragged by they took shape as facts. Towards noon he could
+tolerate his uncertainty no longer. He turned his steps in the direction
+of the Castle, having first determined, if he found himself unwelcome,
+to announce that the purpose of his visit was to bid good-by before
+setting out for London.
+
+
+III
+
+He had been shown into the turret room and supplied with the daily
+papers, while the same grave image who had admitted him the night
+before, had departed in search of her Ladyship. More to calm himself
+than to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to glance through the news.
+
+It was a disjointed world that the pages reflected--not at all the
+kingdom round the corner for which the war had been fought. Honor,
+patriotism, heroism seemed forgotten words. The old ruthless scramble
+of commercialism had restarted. The honesty of everybody, whether
+individuals, governments or nations, was being doubted. Class and race
+hatreds had broken loose. Strikes were pending. The Allies were allied
+only in name; they gnashed their teeth at one another across the
+council-table in Paris. The lying game of diplomacy had been revived.
+Poison-notes were being exchanged. The tabby-cat statesmen who had been
+too old to fight, were busy sowing the seeds of future wars. The
+politicians who had nailed mankind to the cross, were casting lots for
+the raiment which had survived the sacrifice. No one asked, "Is this
+righteousness?" The only question was, "How much of it belongs to me?"
+Meanwhile, the children of honester men who had died, starved by their
+hundreds of thousands. Mothers pressed sick babies to their milkless
+breasts. The mutilated, stoical with neglect, shuffled along the
+pavements. Fanatics of despair turned hopeful eyes to Russia where a
+devilment was brewing which, should it overboil, would pour destruction
+across five continents. No one cared.
+
+He glanced through the window at the quiet landscape, lying green and
+sun-dappled against the wet, gray streak of summer sky. Was his own
+experience so universal? Were kingdoms perpetually round the corner,
+always and always out of sight?
+
+As he again took up the paper, his eye was caught by a head-line: STEELY
+JACK RUNS FOR PARLIAMENT. Immediately he forgot his pessimism and
+became absorbed. Braithwaite had come out with the true story of his
+life. He was calling on the seven million men who had seen service to
+fight on in peace for the ideals for which they had fought in war. He
+insisted that if they cast their votes together as one man, they could
+control any election. If they combined with the patriot ex-soldiers of
+other nations, they could control the world. He was out to smash
+politics and the disastrous iniquity of political compromise. His aim
+was to restore the comradeship and sharing which had enabled the old
+front-line to stand fast. He was establishing a paper. He was
+speechifying. He was to hold an immense mass meeting in the Albert
+Hall----
+
+Tabs laughed in sheer excitement. Here was one man at any rate who
+wasn't content to miss his kingdom. He might have known it. He could see
+Braithwaite's bleak look as clearly as if he stood before him. His
+instinct was to join him and say to him, in the words of the coster,
+"You and me was pals out there." He'd never lost an inch of trench.
+
+"Bravo, Braithwaite!"
+
+
+IV
+
+"I beg your pardon, your Lordship."
+
+Tabs looked up. The dignified image had returned and was standing in the
+doorway, with his chin thrust out and his nose at a high angle with his
+collar.
+
+The man coughed deferentially. "If your Lordship will follow me----"
+
+But at that moment he heard her calling from beneath the turret wall,
+"Lord Taborley!"
+
+Jumping to his feet, he hurried to the window and leant out. She was in
+her riding habit, standing on the terrace above the rose-garden. "I've
+just got back from my morning ride. I have to visit the kennels. I was
+wondering whether you would accompany me."
+
+He turned to the footman. "If you'll show me the way out to the terrace,
+I can find Lady Dawn myself."
+
+She had moved farther away to where the steps led down between the
+rose-bushes. As he came towards her through the sunlight, she pretended
+not to notice him, but stood meditatively flicking the dust from the toe
+of her boot with her crop. Even when he joined her, she did not look up.
+They descended the steps in silence. When they had turned along a path,
+where no one could observe them, she raised her eyes. "I was afraid you
+had left."
+
+He smiled, unconsciously imitating her quietness. "And I, too, was
+afraid. I was afraid you would not want me."
+
+"Why not?" She stopped to pluck a bud in passing. "I should think any
+woman would want you."
+
+He looked to see if she were chaffing. "Last night," he explained, "you
+were present when at least one woman didn't want me. That was why----"
+
+She shot a glance at him with her honest, stone-gray eyes. Her hands
+started out to touch him, but she recalled them. "You must feel sorry
+for her," she said softly. "She's so young. I think you'll live to thank
+her. She'll learn that men like you don't come every day--only once in a
+lifetime."
+
+[Illustration: "_I was afraid you had left._"]
+
+Uneasily he harked back to her first statement. "Why did you fear that I
+had left?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "You had nothing for which to stay."
+
+"There was you."
+
+"Me!" She laughed wisely. "You had to say that out of politeness. In a
+man's world I'm of no consequence. I know how I appear in your eyes.
+I've been married, so I'm no longer a novelty. I'm not so young as I
+was; I shall be older. And then I'm a mother--you forget that, Lord
+Taborley. Oh no, I have no attractions to offer."
+
+"You have friendship."
+
+"Friendship!" She repeated the word with a shake of her head. "Men never
+want merely friendship; they want less or more. They want vivacity--some
+one who will halve their years, with whom they can sport and romp. Some
+one who can have babies to them--little pink babies, with squirmy toes
+and baldy heads. They want to begin everything afresh. They're not
+looking for another man's left-overs. Even in the matter of
+disillusionizing a woman, they want to do that for themselves. Men
+who've not been married, demand that a woman shall be doing everything,
+as they are doing it, for the first time. It's their right."
+
+"But there's another side," he protested. "A woman who's been married
+has gained experience--the most dearly purchased form of knowledge, as
+you yourself have told me. She can be trusted not to expect the
+impossible. She's been over the course and knows the pitfalls. She's
+learnt the value of compromise. She ought to have learnt how to be kind.
+I think kindness is the thing that matters most. Few people are born
+with it. You have to have been wretched to acquire the knack of it."
+
+"And yet you have it," she glanced sideways at him humorously, "and you
+haven't been married."
+
+Realizing the drift of their conversation, he pulled himself up. He
+feared lest she suspected him of flirting. "You're very generous, Lady
+Dawn."
+
+They had arrived at a lookout point, where a lichen-covered summerhouse
+stood, protected on the steeper side by a low stone wall. Below them lay
+the moat, green-scummed and starred with water-lilies; throbbing in the
+midday haze, the emerald sward of the parkland seemed to float. Against
+the wall she halted. "What makes you say that I'm generous?"
+
+For all his thirty-six years, he blushed like a boy. "Because you take
+me seriously. After last night you might have been either amused or
+annoyed. The position in which I placed you was false. You thought that
+I'd come from London to urge Terry to marry me. When I told you that
+there was no one else in the world, you believed that I knew she was
+staying with you--that I was trying to persuade you to plead my cause.
+The anti-climax, after she'd surprised us, was the height of tragical
+absurdity. It reduced all my high-flown sentiments to farce. I wonder
+you were able to prevent yourself from laughing. Terry could afford such
+a scene; she's little more than a child. I can't. With four more years
+to my age I could pass for her father. No, please. I want to be hard on
+myself. Let me finish what I'm saying. I've only met you twice; on each
+occasion I've suffered a loss of dignity. The other time was when I
+tried to turn you away from Maisie's door. You're probably aware that
+since then, until Pollock's return, I've seen far more of your sister
+than was wise. In fact I've offered myself like a job lot. And yet there
+was a time when I was content to wait. I believed that one had only to
+be faithful and he'd find what he hoped for round some future corner.
+You're a proud woman, Lady Dawn. You admire strength almost cruelly.
+You're inhumanly infallible----"
+
+Her eyes filled. She slipped her hand through his arm and patted it
+comfortingly. By the contact she was comforting herself as well. "I'm
+not. I wasn't infallible when I married. My pride came later to cover up
+my fault. I don't say it to flatter you--any woman would want you."
+
+He gazed down at her. "How gentle you are!"
+
+"I understand."
+
+They strolled along in contented silence. They had trespassed far beyond
+the bounds of discretion. A diversion was caused when they reached the
+kennels. He watched her among the leaping hounds. She employed the same
+tactics to quiet them that she had used with himself. With a coaxing
+word and a caress she had them crouching at her feet. He listened to
+the precision of her orders and the definiteness of her enquiries.
+
+"You'd have made a business woman," he remarked.
+
+She laughed. "I could if I'd been forced." And then, "By the way, you're
+lunching with me, aren't you?"
+
+"I'll be delighted. But, since confessions are the fashion, I may as
+well make a clean breast. If I had found that you were upset with what
+happened last night, I'd planned to tell you I was off to London."
+
+"But you're not?"
+
+"One doesn't run away from happiness."
+
+He was afraid he had offended. Her expression clouded. She withdrew and
+walked a few paces apart. He had come almost to the point of
+apologizing, when she turned to him eyes that were misty--suspiciously
+misty for a woman who never cried. "I'm glad you had the courage to tell
+me, because I haven't felt so happy for---- I daren't own how long."
+
+On entering the Castle, she left him while she went to change for lunch.
+As he waited, he reminded himself that in a handful of seconds he would
+be meeting Terry. The anticipation provided him with none of the old
+elation. With what ecstasy he used to watch for her in days gone by, as
+though the world was reborn when she stood before him! Far from feeling
+ecstasy, he was filled with uneasiness. Her presence would recall to him
+his failure and would mock something beautiful that had commenced in
+his life. What that something was he hadn't estimated. All he knew was
+that, with the coming of Lady Dawn, every one of his problems had
+mysteriously found settlement. He was no longer humiliated. He was once
+more sure of his direction. He felt unreasonably strong and triumphant,
+as though the goal of his striving was in sight. His old dread of
+growing middle-aged impressed him as puerile. Whatever his age, she
+would always keep pace with him. She was the same age as he was. Had he
+been younger or older, he might have missed her or gone by her with
+unseeing eyes.
+
+When he entered the room in which lunch was served, he found that Lady
+Dawn was alone. Glancing at the table, he perceived with surprise that
+only two covers had been laid. She read the question in his eyes and
+answered it.
+
+"Terry's away. I forgot to tell you. She had an early breakfast and
+motored into Gloucester before I was up. The car's come back without
+her. She's sent no word as to when or how she proposes to return."
+
+"Something urgent?" he asked casually.
+
+"More likely shopping. A woman's shopping's always urgent. I'm no wiser
+than you are. The first I heard about her going was when I was informed
+she had gone."
+
+He relapsed into thought. It wasn't difficult to conjecture the reason
+for Terry's errand. She'd been no more anxious to meet him just at
+present than he had been to meet her. She'd taken the day off in the
+hope that by nightfall he would have departed.
+
+Another solution occurred to him. "Did she ever mention to you a General
+Braithwaite?"
+
+Lady Dawn met his eyes with a hint of warning. Listeners were present.
+"I believe she did," she admitted discouragingly.
+
+"The only reason why I asked was that his name's in the morning papers.
+She may have seen it before she started. If so, it might explain----"
+
+"John will know." Lady Dawn turned to the footman. "Did Miss Beddow read
+the papers, John, this morning before she left?"
+
+"She did, my Lady. It was after she had read them that she ordered the
+car."
+
+"Then that's it." Tabs dismissed the subject as unworthy of further
+discussing. "She went to Gloucester to hurry off a telegram of
+congratulation. Braithwaite's had a stroke of luck."
+
+"If that is all," Lady Dawn smiled mischievously, "I wonder that she
+didn't come back in the car. A telegram can be dispatched in five
+minutes."
+
+From then on, the threat of Terry's return hung over them, urging them
+to make the most of their respite. Everything that had started between
+them was so new and uncertain. No time-limit had been set to Tabs'
+visit; his original reason for coming to Dawn Castle was exhausted.
+There was no sufficiently plausible excuse for prolonging his stay in
+the village longer. A little absence, a little carelessness of
+forgetting, a few new interests and who could say but that this sudden
+need of each other, which had rushed them together with such compelling
+impulse, might not subside as unaccountably as it had occurred. In both
+their hearts this dread was present--this distrust of the permanency of
+their emotions. If they parted, they might meet again to find the magic
+irrecoverable.
+
+After lunch they retired to the room in the turret. She chose her
+favorite chair by the window and sat there sewing, with her work-basket
+at her feet. He sat opposite, watching the busy occupation of her hands.
+He noticed that many of the garments which she mended belonged to the
+small boy whom he had seen in the rose-garden.
+
+She looked up. "I always do everything for Eric."
+
+It was later, when tea was being served, that the small boy himself
+peered in on them. Tabs caught his jealous eyes peering round the
+doorway. "Won't you come and talk to me?"
+
+But the child ran away, despite his mother's coaxings, and refused to
+divulge his place of hiding.
+
+She apologized. "He's not quite eight yet--the only sweetheart I have."
+Later she said, "I've been thinking of what we talked last night--I mean
+his father. Would it be too far-fetched to believe that it was really he
+and not your imagination, that piloted us together?"
+
+"Not far-fetched at all. I'm sure of it. He wanted us to meet that I
+might tell you----"
+
+"What?" She bent forward, folding her hands in her lap and watching him
+searchingly. "Not about his heroism; he'd take that for granted. Not
+that he'd loved me; we both knew it. Not anything self-pitying or weak
+that would rouse my regret----"
+
+"You know." His assertion was almost a question. "Somehow he's got his
+message across to you."
+
+She lowered her eyes and resumed her sewing. "I couldn't sleep last
+night. I lay awake puzzling and remembering--remembering the long waste
+of years, the loneliness and the love that had turned to bitterness. And
+now, when ordinarily there would be no chance to make amends, he sends
+you to me, speaking through your lips and taking possession of your
+thoughts. He's trying to do something for me--something that will blot
+out my past for me, as his sacrifice has blotted out his past for him.
+Something comforting and tender----"
+
+The seconds ticked by. If she had guessed the dead man's desire, she
+refused to put it into words. The silence grew painful.
+
+Tabs looked at his watch. It was nearer six than five. He rose
+reluctantly. "I suppose I should be going."
+
+"But you're staying in the village to-night?"
+
+"I hadn't intended. There'll be moonlight. I was planning to be in
+London by morning."
+
+"Don't do that. You'll make me think you're afraid of meeting Terry.
+Dine with me to-night."
+
+She had risen. Her gesture was almost one of pleading. He smiled
+tenderly and took her hand. "Your wishes are mine. I'll run down to the
+inn and dress."
+
+By the time he returned it was nearly seven. She met him with
+ill-concealed trouble. "Terry's not back. It's strange. You see I'm
+responsible for her. And----"
+
+The footman entered with a letter. "For your Lordship."
+
+"Are you sure?" Then Tabs recollected. "Yes, of course. I left my
+address with Ann."
+
+As he took the letter he scanned the handwriting. "Odd!" When the man
+had left, he turned to Lady Dawn. "It's from her. Did you guess?"
+
+
+V
+
+"But why should she be writing when she'll be seeing you any minute?"
+
+Tabs squared his lips. He began to feel the stirring of a storm of
+anxiety. "Perhaps, because she doesn't intend to be seeing me any
+minute." He looked at the postmark. It had been mailed at eleven o'clock
+that morning in Gloucester. He tore the envelope and commenced to read.
+Before he had read far, he turned with a worried expression to Lady
+Dawn. "This concerns you as well." She came and stood beside his elbow.
+They glanced through the pages together. It was written on commercial
+note-paper of _The New Inn_, Gloucester, and ran:
+
+   DEAREST TABS:
+
+   I love you very much--just as much as ever. I always want you to feel
+   sure of that. But my love isn't the kind you've asked for. It never
+   can be. Because of this there are so many things that I've not been
+   able to tell you--so I've been avoiding and deceiving you ever since
+   you came back. I know I've not been honorable. A promise once given
+   ought to be sacred; I gave you my promise that I would marry you. But
+   that's all I could do for you now--just marry you; I couldn't give
+   you the other things you would have a right to expect. I ought to
+   have said, the other things you have earned and deserved more than
+   any man. So, though I married you, I should still be robbing you,
+   which would be even more treacherous than not fulfilling a promise.
+
+   That I'm in love with General Braithwaite is no news to you. Love may
+   not be the proper word. At least I'm so infatuated with him that
+   there's no room in my heart for any other man. Do you remember that
+   night in March, when you dined with us and asked my father for my
+   hand, and next morning early I came round in a panic to your house? I
+   didn't dare tell you all my trouble. The General had urged me to
+   elope with him. I _wish, wish, wish_ that I had. I should be his now
+   and sure of him. By delaying and suspecting I've all but lost him.
+
+   I always knew that he would be a big man--as big after the war as he
+   was while it lasted. What this morning's papers say about him proves
+   it. So for all these reasons and because I can't bear to face you at
+   the Castle, I'm taking my fate in my hands. Please tell Lady Dawn
+   that I shan't be back and excuse me in any way you can. I'm only
+   carrying one small bag; she can send the rest of my things after me.
+
+   There's one request I have to make--that neither of you will notify
+   my father till at least twenty-four hours have elapsed. All my future
+   happiness may depend on your granting this request. It's the last
+   favor I shall ever ask you.
+
+   And now, my very dear Tabs, almost my brother, if this hurts you,
+   please take revenge by bundling me out of your mind. I was never your
+   equal, never worthy of you, though you placed me on a pedestal that
+   was far above you. Comfort yourself by believing that if you'd
+   married me, you would have found this out. What a wretched quitter I
+   appear in my own eyes after all you suffered in the trenches, to have
+   reserved this worse suffering for you, when your life has been spared
+   and you had counted on me for happiness. My entire body's not worth
+   your little finger. And yet how good you've always been to me--
+
+   You'll get a better woman than I am. I think I already know who
+   she'll be; if I'm right, I shall be so very glad.
+
+   I feel so humble--so apologetic. It's such a different ending from
+   the one we dreamt when I saw you off on the troop-train with my hair
+   all blowy down my back. There's nothing gained by recalling that. I
+   meant so well by you; you've always been so much to me, my dearest,
+   loyal Tabs.
+
+   Even though you despise me, I still insist on signing myself,
+
+   Your ever affectionate
+
+   TERRY.
+
+"I'm sorry." It was Lady Dawn.
+
+He shook himself. He was so raw that even her sympathy almost wounded.
+"Don't pity me. It's she we've got to help. What's to be done?"
+
+"Done! I haven't thought. What can we----"
+
+"We can follow her and bring her back. We've got to--and we haven't much
+time. You must have read between the lines what her letter meant. After
+having turned Braithwaite down, she's gone off to beg him to elope with
+her. When a girl puts herself at a man's mercy like that, there's no
+knowing how he'll act. The chances are that, whatever he does, it won't
+be honorable. We're got to prevent her, not only for her own sake, but
+for his sake as well. He's just started on a great career; if this story
+leaks out, he'll be smashed. They'll both be smashed, for that matter.
+If she'd give him time to marry her honestly, it wouldn't matter whether
+her family had consented. But she doesn't intend to--that's why she's
+asked us to keep quiet for twenty-four hours. What we've got to do is
+not to stop her from marrying him--no one cares about that; but to catch
+her before she runs off with him."
+
+"But we don't know where----"
+
+"No, we don't." He spoke rapidly. "But we can find out. Ann can tell us.
+Ann's a maid in my house; she was practically engaged to him when he was
+my valet. Now that I look back, I'm sure she's known everything from the
+start and has seen this coming. We can get Braithwaite's address from
+her; when we know that, we shall have laid our hands on Terry."
+
+While he had been speaking, Lady Dawn had been rummaging through her
+desk. He went and bent over her, his hands on her shoulders. She was
+fingering a time-table. She looked up at him with her head leant back.
+"There's no train--nothing that will reach London till morning."
+
+"Then we must motor."
+
+Her face was still raised to his. She spoke softly. "_We!_ You say _we_
+every time. Do you mean---- What do you mean, Lord Taborley?"
+
+His intensity relaxed. Flushing with confusion, he stared down at the
+whiteness of her breast, the queenliness of her, her graying hair and
+her expectant, tender mouth. "I want you to come with me. I ought to
+have asked you properly. I've been taking you for granted and ordering
+you about."
+
+She remained very still, gazing directly up into his troubled eyes. He
+thought she was judging him. At last she whispered, "Don't be sad. I
+like you to order me."
+
+
+VI
+
+They had all night before them. If they left the Castle by ten, they
+could be in Brompton Square by five in the morning. Nothing would be
+gained by arriving earlier.
+
+Now that the first shock was over, they went into dinner as if nothing
+had happened. In the long, dim banqueting-hall there were only the two
+of them. They sat close together at the illuminated high-table like
+castaways, marooned on an island, in an ocean of brooding shadows. While
+they dined they conversed in lowered voices to prevent their plans from
+being overheard. It was decided to take Lady Dawn's Rolls Royce and to
+leave the runabout behind. The reason acknowledged was that it would be
+more dependable. The reason unmentioned was that the presence of a
+chauffeur would lend an air of much needed propriety.
+
+Gradually as they talked, the seriousness of their errand dropped from
+sight; their journey took on the complexion of an adventure. Its
+unconvention clothed it with romance. How unconventional it was they
+realized when Lady Dawn gave the butler orders concerning her departure.
+He was an old man, rigid with tradition, who, having served the family
+for three generations, had acquired the aristocratic bearing of his
+masters.
+
+"At ten o'clock, your Ladyship. To where? To London! That's a long
+journey to take at night. And the car will call at the inn first to pick
+up his Lordship's luggage. Oh, I see, my Lady. I thought at first that
+your Ladyship was going."
+
+"I am," she corrected with quiet dignity. "Lord Taborley and I are going
+on an errand of great importance. I don't want this talked about. You
+understand? And who'll be driving? Witherall! Then warn Witherall to
+keep silent."
+
+When the butler had withdrawn, she turned to Tabs. "I'm breaking all my
+precedents for you. I couldn't have told him, if I hadn't had you to
+keep me in countenance. He looked so shocked that he made me feel as if
+it were you and I, instead of Terry, who were doing the eloping. I'm
+sure that's what he thought. There'll be gossip. I shall have to pay the
+piper; but I'm too happy to-night to look ahead."
+
+"It hadn't occurred to me----" Tabs hesitated. "I've been unpardonably
+inconsiderate. I see it now--you'll be what they call compromised. In
+that case, it will be wiser----"
+
+"It won't." She bent towards him laughing. Her pearls, nestling in the
+white cleft of her bosom, gleamed dully, shaken by her quiet merriment.
+In the short time that he had known her, she had become extraordinarily
+girlish--almost girlish enough to put back the hands of time for the
+proper man. "It won't. It won't be wiser. It's never wiser to turn your
+back on happiness. I'd dare anything to-night. You've invited me; you
+can't wriggle out."
+
+"If that's how you feel----" He checked himself. Her mischief warned
+him. Instinctively he knew that she was about to ask precisely how he
+thought she felt. He cancelled what he had intended saying and
+substituted, "It's an ill-wind that blows nobody any good. And it's poor
+Terry we have to thank for this chance of being together a little
+longer!"
+
+"Is it a chance? You're not bored? You do want me?"
+
+He raised his eyes slowly. Her pain had startled him. Up to that moment
+he hadn't been awake to how utterly he had come to want her. For an
+instant he had a glimpse of the emptiness of life, should he find
+himself deprived of her comradeship.
+
+"You didn't need to ask me that!" he said quietly. "And now it's my turn
+to be inquisitive. Does it make you glad to hear me own that I want
+you?"
+
+He watched her color rise. It was like the elfin tiptoeing of her spirit
+behind the white transparent walls of her flesh. It climbed the smooth
+ascent of her breast, passed up the columned tower of her throat and
+stared out at him excitedly in the brightness of her eyes.
+
+"Men don't ask things like that," she said reproachfully, "at least,
+only when they're flirting. I sometimes think---- Don't treat me like
+all the others who were before me."
+
+"What others?"
+
+She held his gaze. "The emotional women and silly girls---- You must
+have been loved very often, Lord Taborley."
+
+To have defended himself against her tender jealousy would have been
+futile. She was plainly anxious to believe her accusation. Perhaps it
+flattered her a little. Perhaps it lent him an added touch of glamor. He
+was wondering how he should satisfy her. He could remember no hearts
+that his fascination had broken. He could rake up absolutely---- She was
+speaking again.
+
+"And yet I'm glad you compelled me to tell you that I wanted you. You're
+making me do things that I never did before in my life. I'm supposed to
+be a cold woman. You'll find people who'll say that I'm remote and
+domineering. I've only one big affection--my little boy. For your sake
+I'm leaving him alone to-night."
+
+"For mine?"
+
+"For whose else?"
+
+"I thought for Terry's."
+
+Her lips parted. The laughter died in her eyes. "In your heart you knew
+better."
+
+Then he left her and went down to the inn to pack his bag.
+
+
+VII
+
+He had paid his bill. His luggage had been carried downstairs. There was
+still a full quarter of an hour to wait. He sat in his bedroom smoking
+furiously. Before he met her again, he wanted to know precisely what had
+happened to himself--and, perhaps, to her.
+
+He was filled with self-distrust. His newly discovered propensity for
+falling in love was genuinely alarming. It wasted his time, upset his
+plans and robbed him of his mental vigor. It made him a rudderless ship
+at the mercy of any chance winds of sentiment. Up to less than three
+months ago the solitary woman in his life had been Terry. Throughout the
+war, while the masculine world had been making an amorous idiot of
+itself, he had kept his head clear and gone straight. Things had come to
+a pretty pass if now, when normality was returning and the excuse for
+running wild was out-of-date, he should start on his emotional
+escapades. His love for Terry had been deep-rooted. His fondness for
+Maisie had been the attempt of a starved heart to satisfy its craving
+with a substitute. But where was this pursuit of substitutes to end? If
+it went much further he would gain for himself the reputation of being a
+limpet who attached himself to any chance rock of feminine amiability.
+The kind of woman he cared to associate with would avoid him. If ever he
+were to fall in love again, his attentions would be so shop-worn
+that----
+
+If ever he were to fall in love again! Within the last twenty-four hours
+his irresponsible heart had committed this disastrous folly for a third
+time.
+
+He smiled cynically, as though he were two separate persons, one of whom
+was cool and calculating, while the other was improvident and
+scape-grace. How Lady Dawn would despise him, were he to reveal to her
+the stupid commotion of his mind! His excuse for blundering his way into
+her privacy had been sufficiently fantastic: that her late husband was
+employing his living brain to communicate with her from the dead. It
+must have strained her credulity to the breaking-point. If on top of
+this he were to propose to her, what possible conclusions could she
+draw? Either that in order to gain her intimacy, he had perpetrated a
+cruel fraud; or else that he was so lacking in humor as to believe that
+Lord Dawn, from beyond the grave, was arranging for his wife's second
+marriage. The drollery of a dead husband acting match-maker made him
+smile. In the middle of his smiling he pulled himself up. Why not? Why
+shouldn't a husband who had wrecked his wife's happiness, try to repair
+the damage, if that were possible, when through death he had attained a
+kinder knowledge? The Roman Church prayed to the dead whom it canonized.
+There were thousands of parents, wives, sweethearts, bereft by the war,
+who were asserting that their longing had bridged the gulf and
+penetrated----
+
+He shook himself, as though to struggle free from an invisible
+assailant. Hallucinations! All these so-called spiritualistic
+manifestations were the result of over-taxed imagination. To stick to
+facts was the only safe course; and these were the facts in his case. He
+had approached Lady Dawn as a matter of duty to tell her the truth about
+a husband whom she had not known at his best. She had misinterpreted his
+motive and had believed that he had come to confess to her his own
+failure. She had been thrown off her guard, had dropped her mask of
+stoicism and had lavished on him a reckless kindness. But other women
+had been reckless to him in their kindness. Terry had: so had Maisie.
+Women's kindness had caused his present predicament--their kindness,
+plus his awkward knack of valuing their kindness at more than its face
+worth. He had learnt his lesson. Never again would he be lured into the
+net of feminine fickleness. When he felt the temptation rising, he would
+suppress and ignore it; at any rate he would ignore it until the woman,
+who was rousing his affection, had declared her intentions beyond any
+chance of mistaking.
+
+And Lady Dawn? She was in a class by herself. He held her sacred. The
+mere thought that she should ever fall in love with him was
+impertinence. To talk cheap sentiment would be insulting. It would cause
+him to lose her friendship--a loss which he could not bear to
+contemplate. It would be taking a mean advantage of a situation created
+for an entirely different purpose.---- And yet, dare he trust himself,
+now that he was in love with her, in the intimate aloneness of a long
+night drive to London?
+
+He rose to his feet disgusted. If this was the loss of self-control that
+peace had brought, better a thousand times the rigors of the sacrifice
+that was ended. Out there he had been strong; here he was a sick dog,
+licking his sores and whimpering at his own shadow. Self-pity had
+wrought this wholesale impotence--an impotence which was infecting the
+entire world. While individuals and nations had thought only of others,
+they had been valiant; they had raced in generous competition,
+clean-limbed as athletes, towards the tape, where endeavor ends and
+eternity commences. And now this lethargy, this cowardice--this
+monstrous fat of quaking emotion!
+
+A memory flashed back on him--an afternoon in March when he had been
+obsessed by a similar discontent. It had happened in the Mall, after his
+interview with Braithwaite and just before his introduction to Maisie.
+He had come across a sign-board which had announced that, by following a
+certain path, one would arrive at the Passport Office. That narrow
+track, vanishing into the bushy greenness, had seemed to him the first
+five hundred yards of the road that led to world-wideness and freedom.
+At the end of it lay Samoa, Tibet, the Malay Archipelago--jeweled seas
+and painted solitudes which human disillusions could not wither.
+Instantly his will concentrated. By following that road he could become
+lean-souled again. By reseeking hardships, he could recover his lost
+discipline. The idea held him spellbound. It meant escape. It meant a
+return to monasticism. Then and there he determined that he would
+commence his preliminary enquiries to-morrow.
+
+Going to the window, he leant out. The quaint village street was
+sleeping. The night was so still that, it scarcely breathed; it lay like
+a tired child in the firm white arms of the moonlight. Coming smoothly
+to a halt before the hostel was a powerful car. It was a landaulet and
+the hood was lowered. Lady Dawn must have altered her plans at the last
+moment; instead of sending for him, she had come herself! Catching sight
+of him, she waved her hand. His heart became quiet. Like the night
+without, his being was flooded with a drifting whiteness that robbed the
+darkness of its terror.
+
+
+VIII
+
+As he stood by the side of the car talking to her while his bag was
+being stowed away, her manner was chillingly conventional. It was so
+conventional that it bordered on the unfriendly. About the
+unfriendliness of the chauffeur there could be no doubt. The elaborate
+care with which he tucked the robe about her Ladyship had a distinct air
+of alert possessiveness.
+
+When Tabs had taken his place beside her and the village was left
+behind, she relaxed and laughed softly. "Such a trouble I've had! They
+all disapproved of our expedition--I mean the servants. Their eyes
+accused me of---- Perhaps it's better not to be explicit. But that was
+why I called for you, instead of letting you come to the Castle. Did you
+notice anything queer about Witherall?"
+
+"Your chauffeur? I thought he rather overdid his superciliousness and
+that he treated you a little as if he were your husband. Apart from
+that----"
+
+"Apart from that," she laughed, "he made you feel entirely welcome. You
+mustn't mind him. My servants aren't used to seeing me with an escort.
+And then---- Well, an all-night ride would be a little difficult to
+explain to anybody."
+
+"I suppose it would."
+
+They relapsed into silence. It was jolly to be so near to her and,
+after the fears he had had, to know himself so trusted. She sat quite
+close to him, so that he could feel the warmth of her body. Her
+shoulders touched him; sometimes she leant against him with a gentle
+pressure. Her fragrance was all about him. The robe spread across their
+knees gave an added touch of intimacy. He glanced down at her sideways.
+She was wearing a moleskin coat with a deep collar of silver-fox. She
+had on a moleskin hat, close fitting to her glossy head. Her face was
+partly hidden by a smart veil. She was immaculate as ever--as composed
+and stylish as if she were going to a theater-party instead of on an
+all-night ride to London. But it wasn't her stylishness that impressed
+him; it was her littleness. She looked very tender and pale as she sat
+beside him. The moral back of her chauffeur, as seen through the glass,
+condemned him of unkindness. He had had no right to ask her to accompany
+him. Why should he have burdened her with his troubles? She must have
+plenty of her own, with her boy to care for and her estate to manage.
+
+"I've been selfish," he said. "You ought to be in bed and sleeping now."
+
+She smiled. "Always blaming yourself, aren't you? I shouldn't be here
+unless I'd wanted."
+
+"But why did you want?"
+
+Beneath the robe her hand commenced to grope. It stole into his own and
+lay there quietly. "Because I couldn't bear to see you hurt. You're so
+good. In some ways you're so strong; in others you're just as tiny as
+my Eric. I felt you needed me for the moment."
+
+"For the moment! I shall always need you."
+
+"I wish you might." She shook her head slowly. "But you won't. You'll go
+away. I shall hear about you--all the big things you're accomplishing
+and planning. And then I shall remember that for just one night I had
+you for my very own."
+
+"But we're always going to be friends. I shall be always coming back to
+you."
+
+"Men don't come back, Lord Taborley. A man of your temperament is least
+likely to come back. You press forward. You're eager. Wherever you go
+you form new affections. I'm not like that. I'm cold. You don't think
+so, but then I'm treating you as I never treated any other man. You
+slipped under my reserve and reached my heart before I could stop you.
+Do you know how I'm treating you? Just the way I'd like some good woman
+to treat my little Eric one day, when I'm not here and he's a man."
+
+"But you're going to be here for a long time--just as long as I am."
+There was alarm in his assertion. "I couldn't bear to think of your not
+being in the world. It wouldn't matter so much whether I saw you; it
+would be the knowledge that I could see you; that would make all the
+difference."
+
+"Would it?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure. You mustn't think that because there was Terry and--I'm
+ashamed to have to own it--a passing fancy for your sister, that I'm
+fickle."
+
+"I don't. I never thought it for a moment. What I thought was that you
+were unhappy. People do a lot of foolish things when they're unhappy."
+
+"It seems so long since I was unhappy," he said gently. "You've healed
+everything."
+
+She was shaken as though with a storm of sobbing. No sound escaped her.
+She did a thing which was as amazing as it was beautiful. Raising his
+hand which she had been holding, she hugged it against her breast.
+
+
+IX
+
+During the night he nodded. Once when he wakened, he found her tucking
+the robe more closely about him. "Go to sleep. You're tired," she
+whispered, patting his shoulder.
+
+A strange woman--strangely maternal and beautiful! She never seemed to
+think of herself. The women whom he had known had always demanded that
+men should do all the giving. Even Terry had been like that. His
+conception, of love had been of a continual bestowing with no hope of
+reciprocity. To be allowed to give throughout one's life to the woman
+beloved had seemed to him to be the maximum of married blessedness. He
+knew better now. Lady Dawn had given so generously that she had
+established a new standard; he would never again ask so little from any
+woman. He began to perceive that all his approaches to love had been
+self-abasing. In the true sense of the word he had never been in love.
+Dream-intoxicated, yes! But all that he had experienced had been desire.
+It was a new thought to him that a man must respect, even more than he
+desires, the woman whom he covets.
+
+His feeling for Lady Dawn was one of worship. When he wakened to find
+her watching over him, it seemed to him that the Mother of God sat
+beside him. When God's Mother is symbolized in a living woman, love is
+reborn into the world.
+
+The last time he awoke, dawn was breaking. The moon had grown feeble. A
+chill was in the air. He sat up. "What! Still awake! I don't believe
+you've slept a wink all night."
+
+"I haven't. I didn't want. I've been enjoying myself."
+
+"You look tired."
+
+He commenced to pile cushions behind her and tried to coax her to take
+some rest. "If you insist," she assented. "But I'd much rather not. I'm
+like a child at a party; I want to last out every moment."
+
+"Then let's talk. We're nearing London. We sha'n't get much chance for
+being alone after we arrive. We don't know what we'll find. We may be
+whisked away in opposite directions. Before we're separated, I want to
+acknowledge what I owe you."
+
+"It's cold," she shuddered, drawing closer to him. And then, "You owe me
+nothing."
+
+He was tempted to place his arm about her, but the cowardice of past
+failure was strong upon him. He was afraid lest the ordinary gestures of
+affection would cheapen him in her eyes; he was still more afraid that
+they might mean to her that he valued her too lightly. He held himself
+in hand, staring straight before him and speaking quietly.
+
+"I'm the only judge of what I owe you. I came to you broken. Life had
+made a fool of me. I'd fallen through placing my ideals too high.
+Everything was slipping. Every belief I'd ever had was open to doubt.
+Most of all I'd lost faith in the goodness of women. To explain my state
+of mind I have to tell you that the war had made me fanatical. Like
+millions of men who went out to die, I'd persuaded myself that I was
+fighting more than Germans--I was fighting to bring about the new heaven
+and the new earth. Our politicians promised us as much. You remember
+their phrases. 'A world safe for democracy! A land fit for heroes to
+live in.' When all the muck and the heartbreak were ended, we found that
+outwardly it was the same old world. Heaven was as far away as ever.
+There were no signs that any one wanted a new earth. Nations which had
+been comrades, began to wrangle. Soldiers came home to find their jobs
+held by slackers. The glorious promises had been a death-bed repentance;
+their insincerity was proved when the world recovered. But our worst
+disappointment was utterly personal--that despite the magnanimity we had
+shared and witnessed, we ourselves were no less selfish. For me all
+these disillusions were epitomized in Terry. I'd fought for her. I'd
+carried her in my heart. If I'd died, my last thoughts would have been
+of her. I came back hungry and she disowned me. That she should have
+done that made humanity a Judas and God a mocker. I don't mean you to
+believe that I gave way at once to this wholesale injustice. At first I
+made an effort to struggle against it. I'd always held that great living
+was a matter of pressing forward, of wearing an air of triumph when you
+knew you were defeated, of believing, in spite of every proof to the
+contrary, that further up the road your kingdom waited for you."
+
+He felt the pressure of her friendly hand. "It does," she assured him.
+"That's what you've taught me. It's what you taught Maisie; it's almost
+as though you'd willed her husband to come back. You're a great
+believer. All great believers have been doubters. They give away so much
+of their faith that at times they have none left for themselves. You
+limp. Don't flinch; with me there's no need to be sensitive. When you
+entered my room for the first time, you made me think of another lame
+man. Do you remember how Jacob wrestled all night with an unknown
+assailant? When dawn was breaking his thigh was out of joint, but he
+refused to let his assailant go until he had asked his name. The
+stranger would not tell him--instead he blessed him. And then Jacob knew
+it was with God he had wrestled. When the sun rose and he went upon his
+way, he halted upon his thigh. You have the look that I think he must
+have had--the look of a man who has been maimed in trying to make God
+answer questions. It's that look and your very lameness that have given
+me back something that Lord Dawn took from me--something that he knew,
+when he sent you, you could give me back: my faith in men, without
+which a woman can have no happiness."
+
+The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was
+the hour when children are born and weary people die--the hour of new
+beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers
+changing guard, salute at the cross-roads of the new day as friends.
+
+At last he broke the silence. "I thought I had nothing to give you. I
+felt so empty. You seemed so strong and immovable, like a still tree in
+a forest that was storm-shaken. You made me feel that however the wind
+raged, beneath your branches there would be always rest. I never
+knew----" He paused as though he had forgotten what he had set out to
+say. "I never guessed that a woman could be so good."
+
+"Nor I that there was so good a man."
+
+They clasped hands so tightly that it hurt. The sun was rising as they
+entered London. Trees dripped gold and birds were chattering as they
+drove into Brompton Square. It was only when they had halted before the
+sleeping house, gay with flaming window-boxes, that she released his
+hand. With the severance of contact he awoke from his trance and
+remembered the errand that had brought them.
+
+
+X
+
+He had opened the door with his latch-key and had stood aside to allow
+her to pass into the hall, when suddenly he clutched her arm and drew
+her back. He signed to her to make no sound. Together they stood
+listening. The early morning stillness was broken by a door shutting
+smartly at the top of the house, a cheerful whistling and then the
+unmistakeably firm step of a man descending.
+
+Tabs had no man in his employ, so what was a man doing in his house?
+There was no secretiveness about the stranger's movements; on the
+contrary, there was an airy boldness.
+
+The sunlight danced and nickered on the wall as if it shared the
+excitement of their suspense. The footsteps drew nearer. They paused
+dramatically. The whistling ceased abruptly. Had the stranger taken
+warning? A match was struck. He was only lighting a cigarette. The
+footsteps came on again. At the final bend of the stairs the intruder
+came in sight. He halted, mirroring their surprise, and stood staring
+down at them with a bleak, hard look. He was the man whom they had least
+expected.
+
+Tabs was the first to collect himself. He closed the front door behind
+him. "Good morning, General. You couldn't have been more prompt if we
+had telegraphed you that we were coming." When Braithwaite still stared,
+Tabs continued, "Allow me to introduce you to Lady Dawn and may I ask
+how long I have had you as my guest?"
+
+Braithwaite drew a puff at his cigarette. His manner was as haughty as
+if he had been the owner of the house. "Since last night," he said. "I
+have to thank your Lordship for a bed. Mrs. Braithwaite----" A gleam of
+amusement shot into his eyes. "Mrs. Braithwaite had a sentiment for
+spending her first night beneath your roof. Seeing that you were away
+and that I was so newly wedded"--he made an eloquent gesture--"I could
+scarcely deny her." Turning on his heel, he commenced to reascend.
+Across his shoulder he flung back, "Of course I apologize. We'll not
+trespass further. In a few minutes I'll have her dressed. In half an
+hour, at the outside, I'll remove her."
+
+"Don't be a fool." Tabs spoke sharply. "You make me wonder which of us
+is mad."
+
+Braithwaite regarded him for a moment with an enigmatic smile. "I'm not.
+Yesterday I did the wisest thing of my life." With that he vanished.
+
+Lady Dawn turned to Tabs gently. "If that's the way he feels, then he
+has. Terry's to be congratulated."
+
+"But why on earth should she have wanted to spend her marriage-night in
+my house?" Tabs questioned. "My house of all inappropriate places!
+That's what I can't understand. And what could Ann have been doing to
+consent? You remember I told you there was a time when he was
+practically engaged to Ann."
+
+They mounted the stairs till they came to the first landing. Entering
+the library, with its bright red lacquer, they sat down to await events.
+But Tabs did not sit long; he was too restless. Having flung wide the
+French windows which opened out on to the veranda, he kept going to the
+doorway to listen.
+
+He glanced at his wrist-watch. "Barely six o'clock! Upon my word, I
+don't relish the idea of her being disturbed. Braithwaite's such a
+hot-head. For all I care, they can stop here as long as they like. I'll
+take a holiday so as not to embarrass them." He faced Lady Dawn with
+troubled frankness. "The question is: _are_ they married? I've been
+trying to figure things out. They simply can't be unless he met her with
+a special license in Gloucester. And even then, I can't see how---- But
+if they're not married, surely he would never have had the audacity to
+bring her to my house. It would be too preposterous--to the house of a
+man to whom she was engaged, where she would be waited on by a woman
+with whom he was once in love."
+
+At that moment Ann entered, pretty and sleepy-eyed, with Braithwaite
+following close behind. Tabs commenced speaking at once, in order that
+he might put them at their ease as regards his intentions.
+
+"We're not here to blame any one. You, General, evidently think that I'm
+hostile. I'm not. As far as you're concerned, Ann, whatever you've done
+is right. Of course I'm a little taken aback to find that my house was
+chosen for the honeymoon. But if you'd like to have the use of it for a
+week or so and Ann doesn't object, I'll clear out and leave you to
+yourselves. You'll make me really happy if you'll accept the offer;
+it'll be a proof of friendliness. You're wondering why we surprised you
+so early. It wasn't to prevent you from marrying. It was because Lady
+Dawn was responsible for Terry and we felt that a runaway match, with
+the marriage announced after the event, might damage not only her but
+you, General, as well. I read yesterday in the papers of what you're
+doing and I want to say just this to you. You're the better man. You
+deserved to win. Last time we met you refused to shake my hand. I hope
+you'll take it now. You can afford to be magnanimous to a rival, now
+that you're Terry's husband."
+
+Tabs stood with his hand held out. Braithwaite made no motion to accept
+it; and yet his expression was generous. "I can't shake your hand as
+Terry's husband, Lord Taborley. I'm not married to her."
+
+Lady Dawn sprang to her feet and came between the two tall men. "Not
+married to her! But you intend to marry her? You told us you were
+married."
+
+Braithwaite was still smiling. "I am." To their amazement he slipped his
+arm about Ann and kissed her sleepy, tender mouth. "Terry is safe with
+your Ladyship's sister. We took her there when she arrived last night."
+
+He turned to Tabs. "You said that I was the better man. I'm not. It was
+your sense of duty that always urged me. I have to thank your Lordship
+for the greatest happiness that can befall any man. You made me see it
+as my greatest happiness, when I was in danger of becoming a cad. There
+was one thing you said to me that sank into my mind. 'You'll never
+succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your honor
+solvent.' You saved my honor. I didn't like your methods. But I thank
+you with all my heart now. If it hadn't been for you, neither Ann nor I
+would have come safely to our journey's end. I think we'd both like to
+shake your hand."
+
+
+XI
+
+It was two hours later. They were finishing their breakfast in the open,
+on the balcony of the Hyde Park Hotel. From where they sat they could
+watch a lawn-mower traveling slowly back and forth, patterning the sward
+with alternate stripes of different colored greenness. They could smell
+the acrid juices of newly cut grass. Beyond the islands of flowers and
+vivid candelabra of trees, they could see the wild fowl of the
+Serpentine rise and drift like phantoms across the sultry stretch of
+blueness. Wheels of a water-cart grumbled sleepily against the gravel.
+Moving through the sunlit shadows of the Row, riders were returning from
+their early morning gallop.
+
+They were still together--just the two of them. They were romantically
+self-conscious of the domestic appearance which their twoness caused.
+Only married couples or very ardent lovers rise, while the lazy world is
+sleeping, to keep each other company at breakfast. They had not had the
+heart to disturb the General and Ann in their temporary possession of
+the little nest-like house.
+
+Lady Dawn was speaking. "So you've done it again."
+
+"What have I done?"
+
+"What you did for Maisie. How did you put it last night? You've led them
+to their kingdom."
+
+He smiled. "I seem to have a faculty for doing that. I do for others
+what I can't do for myself."
+
+Still not looking at him, she said: "Perhaps you don't find your own
+kingdom because you're too much in love with the search. You don't want
+to bring your journey to an end. There are people like that."
+
+"I'm not one of them.--I wish you'd look at me, Lady Dawn. Do you know
+what I covet most in all the world? Rest and certainty. I don't mean a
+lazy kind of rest, but the rest of a mind at peace with itself--the
+certainty we all had while the war was on, when we were adventuring for
+the advantage of other people. I've done nothing lately that wasn't for
+myself. I want some one to live for, so that I can forget myself. I've
+been thinking----"
+
+The waiter presented the bill. Tabs scarcely knew whether to curse or
+bless. He had been approaching the danger-mark; nevertheless, he wasn't
+at all sure that he was grateful for the interruption. His heart cried
+out to him to risk humiliation by one last act of daring. Experience
+warned him that it is the sins of precaution--the follies left
+uncommitted--that are most regretted by men of seventy.
+
+She rose as he was gathering up his change. The purpose that had brought
+them to London was ended. There was no further reason for their being
+together. If they were to prolong their companionship, a new excuse must
+be invented. He saw by the tentative manner in which she waited, that
+she also had realized that. He became perturbed lest she might dismiss
+him. Speaking hurriedly to forestall her, he said, "I suppose we had
+better make sure of Terry by hunting her up at Mulberry Tree Court."
+
+She barely nodded. Perhaps she thought, now that Braithwaite had been
+eliminated as a rival, that this making sure of Terry betokened a
+rekindling of the old infatuation. A constraint grew up between them. It
+was not until they were standing on the top of the hotel steps, waiting
+for her car, that he ventured to correct the wrong impression. "Funny
+about Terry! If it hadn't been for her, we might never have been
+friends. The first day of my home-coming she drew my attention to you;
+it was too late--you had passed. You were driving with the Queen in the
+Park. I remember what Terry said. She called you Di and spoke of you as
+the most beautiful woman in England."
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard. As though she were unescorted, she
+passed before him down the steps. But the moment they were seated in the
+car, she turned to him. She looked her full age. Her face was pale with
+more than weariness. He noticed the threads of gray in her hair. Ever
+since he had seen Ann in her flushed shy exaltation, he had felt more
+keenly the pathos of Lady Dawn. It was a pathos that found an echo in
+his heart--the pathos of approaching separation. What purpose did it
+serve her to be beautiful, if she had no man of her own to admire her?
+
+"You were on the verge of telling me something, when the waiter
+interrupted," she prompted. "It began like a confession. You'd been
+speaking about living for other people and your need of rest. Then, you
+said you'd been thinking----"
+
+"It was about how one could make a man's job out of living," he answered
+quickly. "It's all wrong that one should feel decent only when he's
+attempting to get slaughtered. It takes neither brains nor perseverance
+to be dead. Any one can----"
+
+"But it was about finding rest that you were speaking."
+
+"Yes, but I've burdened you with too many of my troubles." He hesitated,
+wondering whether he dare tell her what had happened to his heart. "I've
+done nothing for you. I've only borrowed from your strength. You're the
+most restful woman, the most calm----" Then he dodged. "But since you
+ask me of what I was thinking, it was of how I might escape to the old
+hardships. I thought I'd call at the Passport Office and get in touch
+with the Royal Geographical Society, and commence arrangements to
+explore----"
+
+"Then I sha'n't be seeing you again?" She asked it in a tone of
+dreariness, bordering on terror. Her hands trembled in her lap. She
+stared straight before her.
+
+"But you will." He forced a cheerfulness into his voice which he was far
+from feeling. "These things take time. It may be weeks----"
+
+"But you'll go away. I know it."
+
+"I suppose I shall. Sooner or later I shall return. In the meanwhile we
+can write."
+
+She paid no attention to his consolation. Her face was gray as granite.
+Her hands kept folding and unfolding. There was something symbolic in
+their emptiness. "You won't come back. It's the end. You weren't sent,
+after all."
+
+How or why he said it, he never could tell. The words were utterly
+unpremeditated. He spoke them, ordinarily and unemotionally, as though
+throwing out a casual suggestion. "We could get married, if that would
+make you happier."
+
+"It's what I'd like."
+
+His heart missed a beat. He dared not credit his senses. He glanced down
+at her, prepared to find that she was mocking. The most beautiful woman
+in England! There was no mistake; she had actually asked him.
+
+"It's what I should like, too." He spoke conventionally. Nothing in his
+tone betrayed his emotion. "It's what I've been dreaming from the moment
+that we met---- When would be convenient?"
+
+"As soon as possible."
+
+"Would a week from to-day suit?"
+
+She nodded, "Or sooner."
+
+Beneath the robe his hand sought hers. He did not trust himself to look
+at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The
+secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still
+doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and
+disembodied--an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's
+end--this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything he had
+imagined!
+
+They entered Mulberry Tree Court and drew up before the house with the
+marigold-tinted curtains. It was while they were waiting for the door to
+be opened that he broke the silence. Smiling down at her with a guilty,
+glad expression he asked, "We're engaged now, I suppose?"
+
+She returned his smile less certainly. "I'm ashamed. But you won't
+go----"
+
+He laughed at the folly of her question. "Go, when I've got you, the
+woman whom I wanted!"
+
+"Then you won't go exploring? You won't exchange me for hardships?"
+
+"Di, dearest, I've done with searching."
+
+The door was opening. She pulled herself together. Porter stood before
+them, neatly laundered, with the old suspicious meekness in her glance.
+
+"Good morning, Porter. We've come to see Miss Beddow. We've been told
+that she's staying with my sister."
+
+"She is, your Ladyship. But none of them are down. She arrived so late
+and unexpected."
+
+They followed her across the hall into the sun-filled drawing-room, with
+its fragrant flowers, tall windows, rockery-garden and little oval pond,
+with the toy boat floating on its surface. The moment the door had
+closed, he had her in his arms. Now that he was sure of her possession,
+he held her desperately as if he feared that he were going to lose her.
+"Closer," she whispered. "Closer." It flashed through his memory that
+the last time he was in that room, he had been the spectator of just
+such a union and had fled from it because he was excluded.
+
+She stirred against him, lifting up her face.
+
+"This time you're really crying," he whispered. Stooping he pressed her
+lips. "They always told me you never----"
+
+Freeing her arms, she clasped him tightly about the neck. He could feel
+the weight of her body, dragging his face lower. She kissed him
+passionately, stopping his breath, as though she would breathe into him
+her very soul. "Oh, my dearest--my very dear! How cruel you were! You
+made me ask you. I thought I'd never get you."
+
+The door was opening. Terry was watching them. The first they knew of
+her presence was when she spoke.
+
+"You came to see me."
+
+They broke apart like shameful children and stood regarding her, their
+hands just touching. She seemed their elder.
+
+"I suppose you have the right to jeer at me," she continued slowly. "I'm
+left out. I was too cold. I'm too late. I didn't want what was offered
+at the time it was offered. What I didn't want once, I can't have now.
+And, perhaps, I still don't want it. Tabs used to speak of kingdoms. I
+never knew what he meant. You've all found yours--Maisie, Braithwaite,
+both of you and even Ann. Everybody, except me." She laughed to prevent
+her tears from falling. "I suppose Tabs would tell me that mine's still
+round the corner. You would, wouldn't you, Tabs?"
+
+Her need, which had been theirs, penetrated their happiness. They felt
+again the old wild pang of neglected loneliness. Sargent's painting
+above the mantelpiece, looking down on them, reminded Lady Dawn of her
+own forgotten tragedy. It was unendurable that their gladness should
+bring sorrow to Terry. With a common instinct they went towards her.
+Lady Dawn placed her arms about her. It was Tabs who spoke.
+
+"Little Terry, you're not left out. You're ours more than ever. We've
+not robbed you. We couldn't. Of you alone it's true that everything lies
+before you. All the time you've had your kingdom, though you didn't know
+it. You still have it--the Kingdom of Youth, for which we older people
+were all searching."
+
+In the silence that followed there stole to them through the summer
+sunshine, above the mutter of London, the music of a distant
+barrel-organ. In the mind of Tabs a picture formed; it was of children
+dancing along a golden pavement on that first spring morning of his
+disillusion. The tune which the barrel-organ played was the same. His
+brain sang words to the music:
+
+   "Après la guerre
+   There'll be a good time everywhere."
+
+And it was no longer an optimism--it was fulfilled promise.
+
+Surely, beyond the bounds of space, Lord Dawn also listened and was
+happy. For Tabs, as long as life lasted, it would be the marching-song
+of the kingdom round the corner.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Kingdom Round The Corner, by Coningsby Dawson.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Kingdom Round the Corner
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Coningsby Dawson
+
+Release Date: June 5, 2008 [EBook #25702]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KINGDOM ROUND THE CORNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tamise Totterdell, Joe Free, Graeme Mackreth
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>The Kingdom Round the Corner&mdash;<i>A Novel</i></h1>
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 5em;"><b>BOOKS BY MR. DAWSON</b></p>
+
+<p class='center'><b><i>NOVELS</i></b></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><span class="smcap">The Kingdom Round the Corner</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Garden Without Walls</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">Slaves of Freedom</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Raft</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">Last Chance River</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Road To Avalon</span></b></p>
+
+
+<p class='center'><b><i>SHORTER STORIES</i></b></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><span class="smcap">The Little House</span>&mdash;<i>Illustrations by Stella Langdale</i></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Seventh Christmas</span>&mdash;<i>Illustrations by Edmund Dulac</i></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Unknown Country</span>&mdash;<i>Illustrations by W.C. Rice</i></b></p>
+
+
+<p class='center'><b><i>WAR BOOKS</i></b></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><span class="smcap">Carry On: Letters in War-Time</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Glory of the Trenches</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">Out To Win: the Story of America in France</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">Living Bayonets: a Record of the Last Push</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Test of Scarlet: a Romance of Reality</span></b></p>
+
+
+<p class='center'><b><i>POEMS</i></b></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><span class="smcap">Florence on a Certain Night</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class="smcap">The Worker and Other Poems</span></b></p>
+<p class="center" style="margin-top: 5em;">
+<img src="images/illus01.jpg" alt="apology"  />
+<a id="illus01" name="illus01"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class='center'>"<i>I'm sorry," Tabs apologized. "I didn't mean anything
+unkind.</i>"(Page 33)</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="The_Kingdom_Round_the_Corner_A_Novel" id="The_Kingdom_Round_the_Corner_A_Novel"></a><i>The</i> Kingdom Round the Corner&mdash;<i>A Novel</i></h1>
+
+<h3><i>By</i> CONINGSBY DAWSON</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Illustrated by W.D. Stevens</i></h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>To every man the woman whom he loves is as Mother Earth was to her
+legendary son: he has but to kneel and kiss her breast to know that
+he is strong again.</i>"&mdash;Michelet</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 5em;"><small><span class="smcap">NEW YORK</span></small><br />
+
+Cosmopolitan Book Corporation<br />
+
+<small><i>M C M X X I</i><br />
+
+<i>Copyright, 1921, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York.&mdash;All
+rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages,
+including that of the Scandinavian</i><br />
+
+<i>Printed in the United States of America</i></small></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_FIRST">CHAPTER I</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">An Altered World</span> </b></p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_SECOND">CHAPTER II</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">Retrievers of Youth</span></b> </p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_THIRD">CHAPTER III</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">All Sorts of Kingdoms</span></b></p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_FOURTH">CHAPTER IV</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">The Complications of Maisie</span></b> </p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_FIFTH">CHAPTER V</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">The Air of Conquest</span> </b></p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_SIXTH">CHAPTER VI</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">Trampled Roses</span></b> </p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_SEVENTH">CHAPTER VII</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">Some People Find Their Kingdoms</span></b> </p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_THE_EIGHTH">CHAPTER VIII</a></h3>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;"><b><span class="smcap">Round the Corner</span></b> </p>
+
+
+<h4 style="margin-top: 5em;">The Illustrations by</h4>
+
+<h5>W.D. Stevens</h5>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 10em;">
+<a href="#illus01"><span class="smcap">"I'm sorry," Tabs apologized. "I didn't mean anything
+unkind."</span> (Page 33)</a>
+<br />
+
+<br />
+<a href="#illus02"><span class="smcap">Tabs extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion
+to take it.</span></a>      <br />
+<br />
+<a href="#illus03"><span class="smcap">"Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?"</span></a>     <br />
+<br />
+<a href="#illus04"><span class="smcap">"I was afraid you had left"</span></a>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 7 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2><i>The</i> Kingdom Round the Corner</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_FIRST" id="CHAPTER_THE_FIRST"></a>CHAPTER THE FIRST</h2>
+
+<h4>AN ALTERED WORLD</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>It was on a blustering March morning in 1919 that Tabs regained his
+freedom. His last five months had been spent among doctors, having
+sundry bullets extracted from his legs. He walked with a limp which was
+not too perceptible unless he grew tired. His emotions were similar to
+those of a man newly released from gaol: he felt dazed, vaguely happy
+and a little lost. He felt dazed because he hadn't remembered that the
+world was so wide and so complicated. He felt lost because he was
+discovering that this wasn't the same old world that he had left in
+1914. It hadn't paid him the compliment of marking time during his
+absence; it had marched impolitely forward. He would have to hurry to
+overtake it. What made him feel most lost at the moment was the fact
+that he had only just realized how his bravest years had been escaping.
+The reason for this realization was Terry. He had been accustomed to
+think of himself as in the first flush of<!-- Page 8 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> manhood, with all life's
+conquests still lying ahead; it was therefore a little disconcerting to
+be told, as a matter of course, that he had only four more years to go
+till he was forty. "I'll be there at the station to meet you," Terry had
+written him. And then, she had added laughingly, "Father orders me to
+say that he only gives his permission because you're such an old friend
+and nearly middle-aged."</p>
+
+<p>Middle-aged! He, Tabs, middle-aged! The thought was appalling. It was a
+slander so almost true as to be incapable of disproving. He had to-day,
+to-morrow, and the next day; after that people would have the right to
+say of him that he was middle-aged. That was the real sacrifice that he
+had made in the war&mdash;he had given to it the last of his youth. And he
+had not been aware of this until he had received that letter.</p>
+
+<p>Now that he was aware of it, he rebelled against the sacrifice. He
+refused to be robbed. He would not allow himself to become middle-aged.
+Why, he hadn't begun to live yet. He'd only been experimenting up to the
+point when the war had started. He'd been thirty-one then, a man full of
+promise, and now he was dubbed middle-aged. He remembered with
+indignation the theory that men of forty ought to be chloroformed to
+make room for the younger generation. "But, hang it, one's years have
+nothing to do with it," he protested; "in my spirit I belong to the
+younger generation." So, to the rumbling accompaniment of the train, he
+argued his claims passionately. Had he formed them into a petition he
+would have prayed, "God, make me young<!-- Page 9 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> again." It would have been
+because of Terry that he would have prayed.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he was happy&mdash;vaguely happy, as any man must be to whom the
+right to live has been restored. For the past half decade his horizon,
+and that of all the men with whom he had intimately associated, had been
+dwarfed by the thought of dying. Throughout that period he had dared to
+hope for nothing personal; he had belonged body and soul to unseen
+forces which had hurried him without explanation from one hell to
+another. He had had to subdue his pride to their authority and to train
+his courage to contemplate the shock of annihilation. Now, at the end of
+almost five years, the will and the body which had been so ruthlessly
+snatched from him, had been as ruthlessly flung back into his own
+keeping. All of a sudden, after having been enslaved in every detail,
+his will and body were set free and no one cared what became of them.
+They could be his playthings; he was allowed to do with them what he
+liked. But what did he like? It was a problem. He could so easily spoil
+them. When he reminded himself of how easily he could spoil them the
+fear of death, which would never again trouble him, was replaced by the
+fear of failure. He was furious to find that he was still capable of
+fearing. He had so confidently believed that, whatever the past five
+years had stolen from him, they had at least brought him the reward of
+never again knowing fear of any sort.</p>
+
+<p>That morning by the earliest train he had shaken off the dust of camps
+and started in civilian dress<!-- Page 10 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> as his own master on the new journey. It
+was characteristic of him to start early and to slip out of his latest
+phase with so little fuss. For the first two years of his service, while
+men of his class were gaining high promotions, he had served in the
+ranks. He had done it as a uselessly proud protest. In the ranks one did
+the real work, faced most of the danger and won the fewest decorations.
+He had loved the ranks for their quiet self-effacement and had preferred
+to be reckoned in their number.</p>
+
+<p>It had been dawn when he had started. From the top of the hill above the
+camp he had gazed back at the huddled, sleeping rows of hutments. How
+lacking in individuality they were! How wilfully ugly! You could see
+their like in the rear of all armies. The military mind seemed incapable
+of appreciating differences and beauty. How stereotyped the past five
+years had been; yes, and, while the danger had threatened, how ennobled
+with duty! So ennobled that there had been times when it had almost
+seemed that he was on the point of finding his kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>What he hadn't expected was that he would be alive to-day. With that
+thought gratitude had bubbled up and he had limped away, whistling,
+through dim lanes and budding hedgerows to the little wayside country
+station.</p>
+
+<p>But once on board the train to London, he began to feel more like a
+fugitive escaping than a hero returning. This wasn't the end of
+soldiering that imagination had painted. There had been strident bands
+and hysteric shouting to start him on his way<!-- Page 11 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> to the conflict. There
+had been pictorial challenges to his courage pasted on every hoarding.
+There had been extravagant promises of the welcome which would await him
+if he survived. Who remembered them to-day? He hummed over the words of
+the latest promise, "If you come back, and you will come back, the whole
+world's waiting for you." Was it? He doubted. There was something
+unpleasantly furtive about the way in which men were being stripped of
+their outward signs of valor and dribbled back into civilian life. It
+almost seemed that statesmen had discovered something to be ashamed of
+in the unforeseen heroism by which the world had been rescued.</p>
+
+<p>What did it matter? The world had been saved, and he had helped to save
+it. No one could deprive him of that knowledge. His joy leapt up. What
+did it matter if other people considered him nearly middle-aged? He and
+Terry must prove to them the contrary. He was free; that was what
+counted. Free to reckon his life by more than stretches of twenty-four
+hours. Free to rise or go to bed when he liked. Free to travel to the
+ends of the earth. Free to speak his mind without the dread of a
+court-martial. Never again would he be compelled to issue orders which
+he knew to be unwise; never again would he be compelled to obey them. He
+was free. And there was Terry&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Across the carriage-windows landscapes went leaping: the bleak clearness
+of brisk March skies;<!-- Page 12 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> the shining grayness of meadows from which mists
+were slowly rising; the faint flush of greenness which was gathering in
+hedges; the shy pageant of spring unfolding, with the promised certainty
+of new summers which are never ending. The world looked young. As the
+train dashed by, new-born lambs, unused to such disturbances, tottered,
+bleating, after their mothers. Buds were bursting. Sap was rising. The
+chapped scars of winter were vanishing. Things which had seemed dead
+were being convulsed with life. He watched it all gladly and yet
+impatiently; it was for the end of the journey that he was waiting.</p>
+
+<p>On nearing London the train slowed down as though reluctant to leave the
+country. Twice it halted and he consulted his wrist-watch with a frown.
+Then it crept through Battersea, wound snake-like across the gleaming
+Thames, and came to rest in Victoria Station. Despite his lameness, he
+was the first passenger to alight. He had no luggage to attend to, save
+the newly-purchased bag which he carried. He lost no time in hurrying
+down the platform; when he hurried his limp became more pronounced. As
+he passed through the barrier he slackened his pace. By reason of his
+greater height he could glance above the heads of the crowd; his eyes
+went questing in all directions. They failed to find what they sought.
+He delayed until nearly all the people from the incoming trains had
+scuttled into the holes of the Underground; then, masking his
+disappointment, he wandered out into the station-yard to hail a taxi. An
+Army Staff car was drawn up<!-- Page 13 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> against the curb. A thrill of hostility
+shot through him. How often, in the old days, when marching up to an
+attack, had he and his comrades huddled to the side of the road like
+sheep that these khaki-colored collies of the shepherds, who had driven
+them up to die, might splash arrogantly past them! He eyed it casually
+and was passing on, when a girl in the back seat stood up frantically
+waving. She was dressed in the latest whim of fashion; but it was her
+that he saw rather than her appointments. Her gold bobbed hair was like
+a Botticelli angel's. Her eyes were clear and deep as violets. She was
+exquisitely vibrant and alive&mdash;scarcely beautiful; her nose turned up
+and was too short for that. One sought for the right words to express
+her attraction. Perhaps it was due to her light-hearted health and
+girlish freshness.</p>
+
+<p>As he came up eagerly, limping with the effort, she reached out her
+hand. "Tabs, fancy you not knowing me! I don't need to call you Lord
+Taborley, do I? Between us it's still Tabs."</p>
+
+<p>"Terry dear! My dear Terry, at last!" He spoke queerly as though he had
+been running. Then, seeing how his intensity startled her, he let go her
+hand and laughed. "You can't blame me for not having spotted you.
+Where's all your beautiful hair that was so blowy?"</p>
+
+<p>She glanced up through her lashes at the tall man. "'I'm growing such a
+big girl now'&mdash;you remember the refrain from the song at the Gaiety?
+That's why. When you were a young man, girls put their<!-- Page 14 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> hair up to show
+they were of age; nowadays they bob it."</p>
+
+<p>"So that's the explanation!" He climbed in and took his seat beside her.
+"That's another thing that disguised you. How was I to guess that you'd
+wangle a Staff car to meet an ex-lieutenant?"</p>
+
+<p>"It belongs to a friend at the War Office." She nodded her permission to
+the trim girl-soldier at the wheel to start. "He lent it to me when he
+heard that I was to meet you this morning. Taxis are so scarce, and I
+didn't know how well you could walk, so&mdash;&mdash;" She turned from the subject
+abruptly. "You're so changed. I scarcely recognized you at first. I was
+expecting that you'd still be in uniform."</p>
+
+<p>"I was demobbed yesterday. So you find me changed! For better or for
+worse? Confess, Terry."</p>
+
+<p>She was aware that beneath his assumption of gayety he was hiding
+something&mdash;something that pained. He had been hurt too much already.
+With impulsive sympathy she laid her hand on his arm. "It isn't a case
+of better or worse. Between people like ourselves appearances don't
+matter. I think to me you were handsomest of all as a Tommy. How proud I
+was of you, Tabs, when you first joined up! Do you remember how I used
+to strut along beside you&mdash;&mdash; And that last night, when you went for the
+first time to the Front?"</p>
+
+<p>He remembered, and waited with boyish expectancy. She had stopped
+suddenly and glanced away from him. For the second time his intensity
+had<!-- Page 15 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> frightened her. He said nothing&mdash;did nothing to help her. She
+mustered her courage to turn back with a smile. "It's long ago, isn't
+it. Tabs? I've grown such a big girl now."</p>
+
+<p>He brushed aside her attempt to divert him. "But you find a difference
+in me?"</p>
+
+<p>"A difference! You mean the difference between a man in uniform and in
+mufti? Why, yes. A uniform made you look younger. It did that for most
+men."</p>
+
+<p>"But more for me than for most." He was pitiless towards himself now
+that he had forced her to answer. "I've aged more than the five years
+since you slipped your arm into mine as we marched through the darkness
+to the troop-train. You never shed a tear, Terry. You kept your promise.
+Often and often when I was afraid in the trenches I remembered you, a
+white and gold slip of a girl with dry eyes, waving and waving. And
+then, somehow, because you'd kept your promise not to cry&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't," she whispered. "Please don't. It's all ended. Everything's new
+and beginning afresh."</p>
+
+<p>"Beginning with you," he questioned, "where it left off?"</p>
+
+<p>If she heard him, she ignored the interrogation in his voice.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>The girl-soldier at the wheel relieved the situation. Since leaving the
+station she had been running slower and slower, glancing back across her
+shoulder and trying to catch their attention. Just short of the<!-- Page 16 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> great
+cross-roads at Hyde Park Corner she brought the car to a halt.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter, Prentys?" Terry asked. "Anything wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing's wrong, miss; but you've not told me where to go."</p>
+
+<p>The girl spoke so reproachfully that Terry laughed. "Awfully sorry,
+Prentys. It's Lord Taborley's fault. He didn't tell either of us. What
+are your plans, Tabs? Where do you want to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"To go?"</p>
+
+<p>He caught at her question and examined it. To go&mdash;where did he want to
+go? He had been so certain when he had boarded the train to London early
+that morning. Ever since he had said good-by to her, nearly five years
+ago, he had known quite definitely. Each time that he had had a glimpse
+of her on those brief leaves from the Front, he had been more and more
+sure of the desired direction. Her letters coming up to him under
+shell-fire had made him even more certain&mdash;those letters compassionate
+with unashamed sincerity, written with a girl's admiration for a man who
+was jeopardizing his all that she might live in safety.</p>
+
+<p>And now, when he was free at last to go where he chose and she herself
+asked him, he could find no answer to her question. Why couldn't he? He
+looked at her thoughtfully with the frown of his problem in his eyes.
+What change had come over her? Or was it he who was altered? She had
+seemed so absolutely his while the terror of battle had kept them apart.
+She had written and acted as though<!-- Page 17 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> she was his right up to&mdash;&mdash; Yes,
+right up to the point when he had been in a position to claim her.</p>
+
+<p>Between him and Terry there had been no engagement&mdash;only a wealth of
+interchanged affection; interchanged for the most part on paper. Once
+and only once had marriage been mentioned&mdash;on the night that he had set
+out for the first time for the Front. "You won't ask me, Tabs; I know
+that. You're too honorable. So I've got to say it. When you come back
+I'm going to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>If</i> I come back, little Terry," he had corrected.</p>
+
+<p>"But you will&mdash;you must," she had pleaded, "for my sake."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try. I'll try so hard," he had promised. "But I won't marry you
+till I'm out of khaki or the war is ended."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'll meet you at the train the moment you're free and we'll be
+married that very day."</p>
+
+<p>All this five years ago on a murky station in the tragedy of parting,
+while Belgium was being trampled and the troop-train waited. She had
+eluded the vigilance of her parents and had met him outside the
+barracks, without forewarning. Through the gloom of streets and the blur
+of the accompanying crowd, he had seen her face loom up. Her arm had
+slipped through his; she had marched beside him like any Tommy's
+sweetheart. She had been seventeen at the time; to-day she was
+two-and-twenty. In the years that had followed he had taken no step to
+make that girlish promise binding, yet increasingly its fulfillment had
+been the goal towards which he had struggled.<!-- Page 18 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After she had joined Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit and had gone to France he
+had missed her on his leaves; by some fatality they had been always
+missing. She had existed for him only in their correspondence and in his
+vivid imagination. And now, after so much hoping, she had become again a
+reality. He had been prepared for strangeness, but not for&mdash;&mdash; Was it
+her youth, which was to have flung wide all doors, that formed the
+barricade? Her youth which, if shared, would have put back the hands on
+the face of Time! Her relentless, flaunting youth! Youth which is
+forever hostile to age!</p>
+
+<p>Her growing and puzzled expression of impatience forced him to narrow
+his answer to the requirements of the moment. "What are my plans, you
+asked? I haven't any. I'm a man at a loose end and at a beginning&mdash;like
+all the world, as you yourself just stated."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know what you're going to say&mdash;that every one has to live somewhere.
+I have a place all right&mdash;my old place."</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I tell Prentys to drive you there?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head and thrust out his long legs, throwing his weight more
+heavily against the cushions. "Not unless you didn't read my letter."</p>
+
+<p>Her habitual sunniness clouded. "Tabs, you're trying to be beastly. If I
+hadn't read it, I shouldn't have known to have met you, or when, or
+where."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you remember that it reminded you of&mdash;&mdash;"<!-- Page 19 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She cut him short, glancing furtively at the girl at the wheel to see
+whether she had been listening. "I don't forget easily. Where do you
+want to go? Would a run into the country suit you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Excellently."</p>
+
+<p>"In what direction?"</p>
+
+<p>"Makes no difference."</p>
+
+<p>She whispered something to the girl; the car semi-circled and gathered
+speed, shooting through the traffic which was lumbering towards the
+Fulham Road and Surrey.</p>
+
+<p>Now that he had gained his point, he didn't seem inclined for
+conversation. He lolled back with his eyes half-shut; she sat bolt
+upright, ignoring his presence.</p>
+
+<p>He recalled to-day as he had pictured it. Terry was to have been still
+the girl-woman who had wanted him so badly that she had been brave
+enough to ask for him. She was to have been precisely and in every
+detail the girl from whom he had parted. She was to have been on the
+platform waiting for him, and he....</p>
+
+<p>Pshaw! What a sentimentalist and how easily disappointed! The old fight
+was still on in another form. It was never ended. Life was a fight from
+start to finish, calling for new and yet newer courage. He refused to be
+defeated. He would not be embittered. He would win his kingdom round the
+corner, even though it proved to be a different kingdom from the one he
+had expected. Terry couldn't have stayed seventeen always, which was the
+miracle he had demanded. She was a woman. He would<!-- Page 20 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> have to teach her to
+love him afresh. There was no time to be lost. For all he knew there
+might be a rival&mdash;perhaps the mysterious some one at the War Office who
+had lent her this car. He leant forward good-humoredly, touching her
+hand to attract her attention, "Terry."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>She turned slowly, almost reluctantly. What new and disturbing question
+was he going to ask? She hadn't been prepared for this altered man with
+his limp and his gauntness and his strained intensity. She couldn't
+bring herself to believe that this grave, spent, unlaughing person at
+her side was Tabs, the gallant, care-free comrade she had asked to marry
+her. She was shocked both at him and at herself. And she had wanted to
+be so glad&mdash;to make him feel that every one was so happy at having him
+back&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Terry."</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of her name, spoken like that, a little thrill of his
+old-time power stirred her; it traveled up to her eyes, so that she had
+to press back the tears before she turned.</p>
+
+<p>"Terry, it was sentimental blackmail. I'm sorry."</p>
+
+<p>"What was? I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"That last letter. I oughtn't to have reminded you. What one promises at
+seventeen doesn't hold good. It was sporting of you to keep the promise
+by meeting me this morning, but&mdash;&mdash; What I'm trying to say is this; I'm
+forgetting everything that you would like me to forget."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm not sure that I want you to forget any<!-- Page 21 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>thing." She widened her
+lips into a smile from which the trouble was only half dispelled. "It
+sounds horrid and unfriendly, this talk of forgetting, as though&mdash;&mdash; It
+sounds so much worse when it's put into words, as though we had
+something of which to be ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>"No, it's not like that. May I be terrifically honest&mdash;just as we used?"</p>
+
+<p>She eyed him doubtfully. It was evident that she was still timid of the
+truth. Then she nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know how it was between us before I went away. You were of an
+age when most people still thought of you as a child. You <i>were</i>
+outwardly, but inside you were almost a woman. The little girl did
+things and promised things that the woman wouldn't approve to-day. And
+then take my side of it. I went out to a place where life seemed at an
+end and where, because of that, one became selfish in the demands he
+made on the people whom he had left behind&mdash;especially on the women. It
+was impossible to be normal; probably I'm not quite normal now. But the
+point is this: every man in khaki thought intensely of some one girl. It
+didn't matter whether he had the right to think of her; he just thought
+of her, and wrote to her, and carried her photo with him up to an
+attack, as if he had the right. He wasn't even much disturbed as to
+whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was
+merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a
+test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You
+understand, she was very often only a makeshift&mdash;a sym<!-- Page 22 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>bol for the woman
+he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for
+some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back&mdash;come back
+starved, emotional, tyrannic&mdash;passionate to possess all the things for
+which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so
+long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we
+were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're
+tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be
+patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take
+offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into
+meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that
+child's promise as binding."</p>
+
+<p>"But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you&mdash;I did
+truly."</p>
+
+<p>"Letting me down lightly?" he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"No, an honest fact."</p>
+
+<p>When he gazed at her with kindly incredulity, she edged herself closer
+and bent forward in a generous effort to persuade him.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you see that what you've said of yourself was true of me as
+well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't talking in particular of myself," he parried; "I was including
+all the other men."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but especially of yourself. It was of yourself that you were
+talking. What you've said of yourself is true of me and&mdash;oh, of almost
+all women. We saw you men march away; you seemed lost to us forever.
+Everything seemed at an end. So we did what you did&mdash;chose one man who
+would em<!-- Page 23 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>body all our dreams and become especially ours. We wrote to
+him, shopped for him, placed his portrait on our dressing-tables, were
+anxious for him and, oh, so proud of him. We didn't stop to ask whether
+he was the man with whom we could live for always. There wasn't any
+<i>always</i>. It didn't look as though there was ever again going to be any
+<i>always</i>. And then the horror stopped and we found ourselves with a man
+on our hands&mdash;a man who, though we had known him so well, would come
+back to us different. We hadn't meant to cheat him when we made all
+those promises; but now that he's really ours, we're not sure that
+we&mdash;&mdash; All the ecstasies and tears that we wrote to him on paper&mdash;&mdash;"
+She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "They don't seem real. It's
+not our fault. They belonged to the part of nurses and soldiers that we
+were acting. And now we've slipped out by the stage-door and we've
+become ourselves. Don't you see, Tabs, we men and girls have got to find
+out afresh who we are? We've almost forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to have made an end, when something else occurred to her. She
+recommenced hurriedly, "We women have been spendthrifts, too; we've
+given away more than was wise&mdash;little bits of ourselves, not always to
+the one man&mdash;sometimes in the wrong directions. But which is the right
+direction? When people who were risking so much for us begged for a
+little of our affection, we never thought of that. We simply gave
+recklessly&mdash;little bits of ourselves. Now that we've regained a future,
+with room for remorse and things like that, we've become sud<!-- Page 24 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>denly
+cautious. The swing of the pendulum&mdash;&mdash;" She turned to him, as though
+proffering a smile for his forgiveness, "It's our sudden caution that
+makes us seem mean and ungracious. But I <i>was</i> tremendously interested
+about meeting you."</p>
+
+<p>"Interested! Not glad or ecstatic. It's a long road from dreams to
+facts."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>She said it humbly. He tried to catch the expression in her eyes, but
+all he saw was the flickering gold of her hair as the wind tossed it
+against the rounded whiteness of her neck. His brain kept muttering,
+"Little bits of herself! What did she mean by that?"</p>
+
+<p>A barrel-organ was grinding out a tune; children danced in the sunshine
+on the pavement. As they flashed down the street the music followed
+them. She twisted to look back and he caught her eyes. "Tabs, do you
+know what it's playing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't say I do."</p>
+
+<p>"It's out of the Elsie Janis revue at The Palace. I think it was written
+especially for this moment." She listened till the air reached the
+refrain and then sang the words, "<i>Apr&egrave;s la guerre, there'll be a good
+time everywhere</i>."</p>
+
+<p>His stern face relaxed at her childishness. "Will there, Terry? I hope
+so. Musical chaps aren't reliable authorities. They're&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You must <i>know</i> so," she interrupted valiantly. Then, forgetting her
+caution, she slipped her small gloved fingers into the palm of his big
+brown hand. "You <i>must</i>. Even though I disappoint you ever so<!-- Page 25 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> badly,
+you must know so, dear Tabs. You must seize your own good time at
+whatever cost. One girl isn't all the world."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>"I wonder whether what we've been saying explains Adair."</p>
+
+<p>They were crossing one of the bridges over the Thames. He wasn't sure
+which one. Moreover, he didn't care; it was enough for him that,
+wherever they were going, they were going together&mdash;racing into a
+sun-crazed world where spring romped and shouted like a hoyden. Above
+lazy chimney-pots trees patched the sky-line with sudden greenness. At a
+greater distance soft contours of hills lay shadowed beneath stampeding
+clouds. Coldly silver beneath the bridge the river flashed, dimpled here
+and there by rapid feet where breezes, like adventurous children, rushed
+across it. He noted the bowed windows of little houses along the banks,
+their whitened steps and shining brasses. He caught the far-blown
+fragrance of hyacinths; it set him dreaming of drifting bloom and
+flower-strewn ways of woodlands. A happy world, whatever the mental
+state of its inhabitants! A world which was doing its bravest best to
+play the game by mankind! A world which was whispering at every portal
+of the senses that the business of living was immensely worth while! A
+world which&mdash;&mdash;! He had reached this point, when the mention of Adair
+brought him back to the cause of his philosophizing&mdash;the inscrutable
+tenderness of the girl, half sorceress, half penitent,<!-- Page 26 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> seated at his
+side. She had recovered her calmness by withdrawing her thin fingers
+from his enclosing hand.</p>
+
+<p>Adair Easterday! He didn't want to discuss him; he had more important
+things to talk about. Speaking absent-mindedly, "Adair doesn't need any
+explaining," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, doesn't he?" she laughed softly and looked away, creating the
+impression that she was leaving volumes unexpressed.</p>
+
+<p>Her air of wisdom provoked him. "Well, I've known him since we were boys
+at school together and I've never found him much of a conundrum. He's
+brilliant, and lazy, and kind. I think of all the men I've known he's
+the one who's most truly a gentleman; he's the one who has given most
+promise and who has fewest accomplishments to his credit. He may have
+puzzled you as his sister-in-law; but to me, a man of his own age, he
+presents no mystery. If anything he's too obvious; that and the fact
+that he allows himself to be too much absorbed by his wife are two of
+the reasons for his lack of success."</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't allow himself to be too much absorbed by his wife now." She
+had turned deliberately that she might watch the effect of her words.
+"He doesn't even pretend to care for Phyllis any longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Not care for her&mdash;his own wife! Nonsense! You can't make me believe
+that." Then he reined himself in, for he suddenly realized that he was
+unconsciously adopting the tones of an elder. "That was a terribly
+modern accusation for you<!-- Page 27 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> to make, Terry, just as if loyalties and
+affections were ostrich-plumes and ermine to be worn or discarded with
+the fashion."</p>
+
+<p>"That's just what they do seem to have become since we've all stopped
+fighting," she persisted. "And please don't look at me like that, Tabs,
+as though you were my commanding-officer. I'm not trying to be a cynical
+young person; I'm simply stating facts. Look at all the men for whom the
+war was a social leg-up. They were plumbers and bank-clerks and dentists
+in 1914; by the end of 1918 they were Majors and Colonels and
+Brigadiers. They didn't know where the West End was till they got into
+uniforms. Since then they've learnt the way into all the clubs and
+fashionable hotels; they've spent money like water; they've been the
+companions of men and women whom they couldn't have hoped to have met
+unless the war had shaken us all out of our class-snobbishness. But now
+that the war's ended, these men whom every one flattered for their
+bravery and whose social failings they excused while there was fighting
+to be done, have become worse snobs than ourselves. They've been
+educated out of the class for which they were fitted. War was their
+chance; it's ended, and now they have to go back to their humble jobs,
+which are the only ones by which they can gain a livelihood. Worse
+still, they've got to go back to their wives, who haven't shared their
+grandeurs, but who've played the game by them, taking care of their
+children and standing by the wash-tub. Some of them can't face up to the
+change. Peace has turned the<!-- Page 28 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> world up-side-down. We're walking on our
+heads. You're just out of hospital, but you'll know what I mean when
+you've been a week in London."</p>
+
+<p>"But nothing of what you've been saying applies to Adair Easterday," he
+objected. "He wasn't a profiteer in khaki; he wasn't even in khaki. He
+made nothing; he lost nearly everything he had. Moreover, whatever
+faults he may have, he's always been a thorough-bred&mdash;a stickler for
+honor; the kind of chap who, if he had to sink, would go down with all
+his colors flying. Where his wife is concerned, he's a lover-for-all-time
+kind of fellow."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head obstinately. "He isn't now. He's standing on his head
+like the rest of us."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm certain you're mistaken." He paused, half-minded to let the matter
+rest. He hated this contending. In the old days he and Terry had never
+argued. He glanced at her; she was smiling in a sorry, amused fashion.
+It made him feel that in accusing Adair she had cast suspicion on every
+man's constancy&mdash;his own included. Reluctantly he set himself to prove
+to her that she was incorrect.</p>
+
+<p>"When you were in France with Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit, I spent most of
+my leaves with Phyllis and Adair. We went about together. I lived in
+their house, got to love their kiddies, knew all that went on there. I
+think a part of my motive was that being with your sister seemed to
+bring you nearer. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't notice
+frictions and irritations. Adair was humiliated at being rejected by the
+Army because he wasn't up to physical standards. He tried every<!-- Page 29 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> trick,
+but was always turned down. He didn't like to be seen about town; he
+felt that people were accusing him of being a slacker. He looked so well
+that he had always to be explaining why he wasn't in the trenches. It
+tried his temper. Wherever he went soldiers were being treated as
+heroes. Women were pleased to be seen escorted by a uniform&mdash;his own
+wife as well. And I'm bound to say Phyllis didn't help him. She prided
+herself on having held on to her man as though it were something that
+she'd done herself. Adair used to flare up in a passion and tell her not
+to be a fool; then, because her foolishness was all because she loved
+him, her feelings were hurt. But to say that he doesn't love her is an
+exaggeration. If there's anything the matter, the trouble is not with
+his heart but with his nerves."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you really haven't heard? I thought everybody&mdash;&mdash;" She stifled a
+yawn. "It's the wind against my face. It always makes me sleepy," she
+apologized. "Since you haven't heard, I suppose I oughtn't to tell you.
+He's become the sort of skeleton in our family cupboard&mdash;&mdash; You're still
+incredulous! That will please mother. She'll be almost happy when she
+learns that there's at least one person who hasn't been told about it.
+She thinks that all the world talks of nothing else. As for Daddy,
+Phyllis was always his favorite and he adores her children. He goes
+about trying to find some one who'll volunteer to horsewhip Adair. I
+can't say that I feel that way myself." Her hand stole out and touched
+his arm caressingly; it seemed as though she were appealing for herself.
+"We've<!-- Page 30 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> all either done or are on the verge of doing something foolish
+that we're sure to regret. It's not a time to be hard on anybody.
+To-morrow we may stand in need of sympathy ourselves. Horror has
+shell-shocked every one, civilians as well as fighting-men. The
+blackness of insecurity&mdash;&mdash;! We're all convalescing." She halted
+abruptly, biting her lip and peering at him, suddenly aware that she had
+been confessing herself. When he only looked puzzled, she finished
+lightly, "So, you see, Tabs, though you'll think me terribly immoral, I
+keep a soft place in my heart for our skeleton."</p>
+
+<p>"But you don't tell me anything positive," he complained. "What has
+Adair done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Done!" She stared at him. "That's what I have been telling you. He's
+fallen in love with some one else."</p>
+
+<p>He was unwilling to believe what he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>"Some one else! Impossible!&mdash;-- I'm sorry, Terry; I didn't mean that I
+doubted your word. You mustn't be offended, but&mdash;&mdash; I'm picturing
+Phyllis. At her best she was good and sweet and pretty enough to hold
+any man. She was such a loyal little pal&mdash;only second best to you,
+Terry. And Adair&mdash;he was such a white man, so patient with her and so
+devoted to the kiddies. I can't see him in the r&ocirc;le of a runaway. And
+what on earth would he gain by it that he hasn't got already? I don't
+want to think that what you've told me&mdash;&mdash; It makes all fidelity seem so
+contemptibly temporary."</p>
+
+<p>Terry spoke gently. "Not that. It's infidelity that is temporary. A lot
+of us are unfaithful for<!-- Page 31 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> the moment&mdash;it's a symptom of our illness. You
+said something a little while ago about trying to regain one's lost
+years by violence&mdash;that's what he's doing. He's mislaid the knack of
+happiness with Phyllis; he's trying to recover it with some one else."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs was still rebelling against the facts. "But he was such a staid old
+fellow."</p>
+
+<p>Terry ignored his discursiveness. "I don't think I've done wrong in
+letting you into our family secrets. You'll be made a part of them as
+soon as you meet Daddy. When he heard that you were coming to town and
+that I was going to see you, he said, 'Thank God for that. Taborley will
+be able to do something.' He has a pathetic belief in you, Tabs. One of
+the reasons why I was at the station this morning was that I might have
+the chance to tell you first, before any one else had prejudiced you
+with bitterness. Daddy wants you to dine with him to-night. He expects
+you to be the kind of moral policeman who makes the arrest. But it can't
+be done with morality. I don't think even you could manage to persuade
+Adair at the present&mdash;not with moral arguments, anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I've seen <i>her</i>."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>It was at this moment that a sound like a pistol-shot occurred. The car
+commenced to bump. The<!-- Page 32 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> girl-driver applied the brakes, guided the car
+to the side of the road and jumped out.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite like the Front," Terry cried cheerfully; "I expect you feel at
+home when you hear a noise like that."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked round. He had been too busy talking to notice where they
+were. To the right, through wind-rumpled, tree-dotted meadows ran the
+Thames, still intensely silver in the sunshine, but somehow blither and
+more young than in London. Clouds flew high; everything was riotously
+spacious. Scattered through the vivid stretch of landscape ivy-covered
+houses stood squarely in their park-lands. Set down in the level
+distance, like children's toys, cattle browsed. The quiet greenness had
+become starred as far as eye could carry with a gentle rain of myriad
+tinted petals.</p>
+
+<p>"The car's got a sense of beauty," he laughed; "it chooses carefully
+when it wants to break down."</p>
+
+<p>"And it's all at the Government's expense," Terry smiled, glancing back
+at him across her shoulder as she scrambled out. "So it's a back tire.
+How long will it take to put right, Prentys?&mdash;&mdash; Then we may as well
+walk and let you overtake us. I don't think we're more than a mile from
+Old Windsor. We'll get something to eat at the little inn by the
+riverside. You remember the one I mean? We've been there several times
+when the General was with us."</p>
+
+<p>"What General is that?" Tabs asked as they trudged along between the
+hedges.</p>
+
+<p>"The General who lent me the car," she replied.<!-- Page 33 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, your friend at the War Office! I suppose he's one of the dug-outs
+who's been there all the time."</p>
+
+<p>"He isn't. He rose from the ranks. He's only been at a desk job since
+the Armistice." She spoke defensively, with a certain resentment. Tabs
+was quick to detect the sharpness in her voice. "I'm sorry," he
+apologized; "I didn't mean anything unkind."</p>
+
+<p>She halted with a sudden gesture of concern. "I <i>am</i> inconsiderate. I
+never thought of it. Won't this walking wear you out?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's changing the subject," he told himself. "I wonder why?" Aloud he
+said, "Not a bit. But I can't stride along the way we used in the old
+days."</p>
+
+<p>Branching off to the right, they came down to a little inn by the
+water-side. It was shabby with the look of disrepair which all inns had
+at that time. Its paint was chapped and faded; its windows cracked and
+held together by pasted strips of paper. The putty had perished in
+places, so that some of the panes were on the point of falling out.
+Nevertheless, it had a brave look of carrying on triumphantly, for
+tulips and crocuses were springing neat as ever from the turf and it was
+over-hung by a green mist of trees just coming into leafage. They
+entered and took their seats at a table from which they could watch the
+pale flowing of the river through the spangled peace of the outside
+world.</p>
+
+<p>"It was lucky we broke down." Terry sat watching him with her square
+little face cushioned in her hands. "You see I'm training myself to
+believe,"<!-- Page 34 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> she explained, "that everything happens for the best."</p>
+
+<p>"A comforting philosophy for the lazy," he smiled. "It lets us all out
+of resisting temptation. Why resist anything, if everything happens for
+the best? If it were true, it would give us the license to be as flabby
+as we liked&mdash;which rather falls in line with what we were saying about
+Adair. But who is she&mdash;this woman? You say you've seen her."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll know soon enough for your peace of mind&mdash;probably you'll see her
+yourself before the day is out."</p>
+
+<p>"But can't you even tell me her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her name's Maisie Lockwood for the present."</p>
+
+<p>"For the present! Why for the present?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because one's never certain about Maisie. She was Maisie Gervis once
+and Maisie Pollock before that; there must have been a time when she was
+Maisie Something Else."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs couldn't quite make up his mind whether he ought to laugh or frown.
+The suspicion had crossed his mind that this composed imp of a girl, who
+could look so immensely the young lady when she liked, was playing a sly
+game with him. However he pretended to take her seriously. "In most
+social sets names are fairly permanent."</p>
+
+<p>Terry laughed outright and looked away from him, following the river
+with her eyes. "There's nothing permanent about Maisie. I think that's
+her attraction; that's what makes people forgive her everything. She
+starts each day afresh&mdash;it really is a new day for her, with no old
+hates or griefs or<!-- Page 35 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> dreads to drag her down. She has no regrets because
+she remembers nothing. Whatever happened yesterday she puts out of mind;
+she forgets everything except her willingness to be friends."</p>
+
+<p>"Her names as well, according to your account."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen
+her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her.
+Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood;
+to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything&mdash;Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While
+he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that
+his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better
+and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order
+that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was
+the kinder world&mdash;a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death,
+met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they
+were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men
+like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by
+their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot
+her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!</p>
+
+<p>"Terry," he spoke with a show of patience, "do you think it's a matter
+about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's
+at stake. If I'm to be of any help&mdash;&mdash;" He broke off, for a voice inside
+his brain had started talking, "You're<!-- Page 36 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> old. That's exactly the way in
+which her father speaks to her." Was it her thoughts that he had heard?
+Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden
+head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.</p>
+
+<p>"So if I'm to help," he picked up his thread, "you mustn't mock. It
+isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts.
+How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself
+something different with each new dress?"</p>
+
+<p>Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. "No, with each new husband, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+There came a break in her voice, "Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should
+be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met.
+We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying.
+If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic
+d&eacute;bris of dishes&mdash;&mdash; As it was he leant across and assured her
+earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm&mdash;&mdash; Terry, how
+is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry;
+for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there."</p>
+
+<p>Drying her eyes, she nodded. "It hurts most frightfully. That's what I
+keep doing, barking my shins in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs.
+He's always going away from me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently;
+"you've grown so stern."<!-- Page 37 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I've seen stern things happen&mdash;a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered
+things that are so silencing."</p>
+
+<p>"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in
+France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't
+be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.
+It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like
+Maisie and myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had
+intended.</p>
+
+<p>"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met
+her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your class&mdash;a
+woman who has been divorced three times."</p>
+
+<p>"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on
+her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.</p>
+
+<p>"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and
+uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be
+averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their
+country."</p>
+
+<p>"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could
+have elapsed between each re-marriage.</p>
+
+<p>"One at a time, of course," she added. "She<!-- Page 38 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> was married to the first
+the first week of the war."</p>
+
+<p>"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in
+four years! She must be a very alluring person!"</p>
+
+<p>Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see
+you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart
+woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so
+full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less
+famous&mdash;the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll
+remember Pollock&mdash;Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our
+aces&mdash;the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed
+himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery
+about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."</p>
+
+<p>"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the
+illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed <i>A
+Conscientious War-Worker</i> or something like that. And I don't forget the
+name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."</p>
+
+<p>"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it
+something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet
+fierceness.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know&mdash;&mdash;" She broke off to ask the waitress whether the car
+had arrived and was answered in the affirmative. "I don't know about its
+being true. After all, she made three men happy<!-- Page 39 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> before they went West.
+I don't see that she'd have been any more to be admired if she'd allowed
+the last two to go wretched."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs half-rose and then reseated himself. "An awful woman! Insatiable! A
+Lucrezia Borgia, without Lucrezia Borgia's excuse."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you'd say that." Terry spoke hopelessly in a tone that dragged.
+"How do you or I know what excuses she had? How do we know why anybody
+does anything&mdash;what hidden reasons they have? And yet we're always so
+eager to condemn! I wanted to be the first to let you know about Adair
+because you always used to understand. You would have understood if
+you'd been the <i>you</i> that you were. I thought that if I explained to you
+about Maisie&mdash;&mdash; But what's the use!"</p>
+
+<p>She rose from her chair and stood leaning against the table, looking
+wilted and pathetic. When she spoke again the heat had gone out of her
+words and was replaced by an appealing tenderness. "Don't you see what
+it is&mdash;why it is that I don't condemn? I'm so sorry for them&mdash;so sorry
+for you, for myself, for everybody. It hurts me here, Tabs." She laid
+her hand against her breast. "We all want what we've spent in the lost
+years. We want it so impatiently. We can't get it; but we want it at
+once&mdash;<i>now</i>. The things one wants are always in the past or the future,
+so one cheats to get them <i>now</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He hadn't the remotest idea what she was trying to tell him. She was
+stirred by some deep emotion&mdash;some overwhelming loneliness. For a moment
+it crossed his mind that she also was tempted&mdash;fasci<!-- Page 40 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>nated by some
+lurement of dishonor kindred to Adair's. He put the thought from him as
+preposterous and disloyal. Yet it recurred. Ever since they had met she
+had been talking curiously&mdash;talking about having given away bits of
+herself to people who were hungry, little bits of herself in wrong
+directions. She had coupled her own case with this unspeakable Maisie's.
+What was her problem?</p>
+
+<p>She stood there with her head bowed, like a child self-accused of
+wrong-doing, with all the flaunting joy of spring tapping against the
+window on which she had turned her back. Then it dawned on him why she
+was standing; he was between the door of escape and herself. He stepped
+aside. As she moved eagerly forward, he caught her by the points of her
+elbows and arrested her going. The wild violet eyes fluttered up to his
+fearfully and fell as he towered over her.</p>
+
+<p>"My very dearest!" He spoke gently in a voice from which all passion had
+been purged. "Don't blame me if I simply can't understand. Though I
+never become any more to you than I am now, I shall always be your
+comrade, believing in you and loving you. Remember that."</p>
+
+<p>When he released her she fled from him, leaving him alone in the shabby
+room.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>When he found her, she was talking to the girl-soldier in the yard of
+the inn. "But do you think<!-- Page 41 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> that you can manage it, Prentys? It'll be
+all right in the open country, but I'm not sure that I want to risk it
+in the London traffic. We're merely joy-riding and, if anything happened
+to the car when you weren't on military duty&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see that we've got much choice, miss," the girl answered. "The
+General's orders to me were explicit, and you know what he is: obedience
+and no explanations. We've barely time to do it."</p>
+
+<p>Their backs were towards the inn. Tabs strolled up and made a pretense
+of inspecting the new tire.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything I can do?" he asked casually.</p>
+
+<p>It was Prentys who answered him. "I sprained my left wrist, sir, back
+there along the road." She held it out to him painfully as proof. It was
+all bound up and puffy. "It isn't very much use, sir; so I've only one
+hand and I don't know whether I'll be able&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Terry interrupted and took up the running. "I thought that the car was
+ours for the day. Prentys has just told me that General Braithwaite
+ordered her to pick him up at the War Office this afternoon at
+three-thirty. Now that she's sprained her wrist, she'll have to drive so
+carefully that there's scarcely time to do it."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs couldn't help smiling at the pompous importance of little people in
+this newly enfranchised world. It was only yesterday that for him also
+the foibles of Generals had been sacred. Generals had been gods whose
+tantrums and mental rheumatics had thrown whole armies into a fume and
+fret. For him<!-- Page 42 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> that day was ended, but it still existed for this slim
+girl-soldier. He was sorry for her.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't be upset," he said kindly. "I haven't renewed my license,
+but I can drive. No one's likely to interfere with me in an Army car.
+Jump in and I'll get you there with a quarter of an hour in hand."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was Terry who had spoken. Her brows puckered with thoughtfulness, she
+was gazing far away into the green distance. He waited for her to
+amplify her objection. When she maintained silence, he prompted her. "If
+it's me and my bag that's the trouble, you don't need to worry. After
+I've driven you both to the War Office, I can fudge round for a taxi.
+One can usually wangle one in the neighborhood of Whitehall."</p>
+
+<p>Before he had ended, he knew that his guess had missed fire. It wasn't
+his comfort that was disturbing her.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," she said reluctantly. "I suppose there's no other way. Get
+into the back, Prentys; I'll ride in front with Lord Taborley."</p>
+
+<p>He was glad to have something to occupy his attention&mdash;to be able to
+talk without the necessity of regarding her. They were both embarrassed
+by the memory of their recent tempest of emotion. "Braithwaite! So
+that's the name of the good fairy who gave us our day in the country. I
+don't remember him; but that's not remarkable. Generals at the Front
+were as common as policemen in London; you found one at every street
+corner. As for trench<!-- Page 43 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>dwellers like myself, we never came in touch with
+them except when we were in for a wigging. We came in touch with them
+all right then."</p>
+
+<p>She made no remark. He had the feeling that she was annoyed with herself
+for having let the General's name escape her. Up to that point she had
+referred to him anonymously as "a friend at the War Office." Tabs tried
+to switch to another subject without making the change offensively
+apparent. "Now that I'm a free man, I've got to reorganize a household."</p>
+
+<p>She kindled into interest, "Taborley House is still a hospital, isn't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I handed it over to the Americans. I was glad to do that for my
+mother's sake. After all, I'm half American. At least a third of my
+boyhood was spent in the States. But they're sending most of their
+wounded home now, so I shall soon have it back on my hands. But that
+wasn't what I meant. It was too big for me; I never lived there."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what did you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>He realized that she was encouraging him to continue talking because the
+topic was safe&mdash;not because it held much attraction for her.</p>
+
+<p>"What I meant was that I'll have to try to collect up my old servants. I
+don't know where they all are, or who's alive and who's dead. There's
+one man I'm particularly anxious to discover."</p>
+
+<p>He slowed down, tooting his horn vigorously as they rounded an awkward
+corner. When they were again on the level she reminded him: "You were
+saying that you were anxious to discover&mdash;&mdash;"<!-- Page 44 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that man of mine! There isn't much to tell! He looked after me
+while I was up at the 'Varsity; when I left, I carried him off. I was
+always wandering, so I made him my body-servant. When we were leading
+civilized lives in cities he acted as my valet-butler-secretary. When we
+were adventuring in the remoter parts of the world, he was my
+companion-friend. I had a real affection for the chap; he was so
+genuinely distinguished and quick to learn. He'd have gone far if things
+had kept on. As it is, he's probably gone farther."</p>
+
+<p>"Gone farther?" She sounded half-asleep&mdash;politely lackadaisical.</p>
+
+<p>"Gone West," he explained shortly. "His letters became fewer. We joined
+up together in the ranks. You know all about my end of it. I suppose it
+was my mother's democratic Americanism that made me do that. We got
+drafted into different regiments. After the fighting had been going for
+a year, he stopped corresponding. The funny thing was that none of my
+letters to him was returned."</p>
+
+<p>She was so bored that she was scarcely listening. He cut the matter
+short by adding, "It was your mention of General Braithwaite that
+started me gossiping."</p>
+
+<p>She pulled herself together with a jerk and instantly became all
+attention. "How? How could my mentioning General Braithwaite do that?"</p>
+
+<p>He noticed again her unreasonable suspicion of hostility each time he
+made a reference to this man. Thinking it the wiser policy to overlook
+it, he an<!-- Page 45 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>swered evenly, "Because his name also happened to be
+Braithwaite."</p>
+
+<p>Fully fifteen minutes elapsed. "She's quite fed up with my valet," he
+told himself. He hadn't been able to contrive any fresh topic which was
+sufficiently innocuous, so he'd been keeping silent. They were again
+passing over the bridge beneath which, like a gleaming sword, lay the
+Thames, barriered on either bank by the little bow-windowed houses, with
+their shining brasses and whitened steps. They were already catching up
+with the throng of London traffic when she shook herself out of her
+self-absorption by saying, "There must be thousands of Braithwaites in
+the world."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. Her latest
+conversational effort tickled his sense of humor&mdash;it was so wholly
+inadequate. He laughed outright. "That's better; the high spirits will
+soon be coming back&mdash;&mdash; Thousands of Braithwaites! My dear Terry, there
+must be hundreds of thousands." Then in a graver voice, "But though
+there were thousands of millions, it wouldn't restore to me my one loyal
+man."</p>
+
+<p>"You loved him?" She uttered her guess softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and I&mdash;it's a queer thing to say about one's valet&mdash;I admired him
+tremendously."</p>
+
+<p>It was the best part of five years since Tabs had driven a car. He
+hadn't yet regained his old dexterity. He wasn't expert enough to attend
+to the wheel and at the same time to carry on a conversation. As he left
+the bridge he had to pass a coster's barrow which was drawn up beside
+the curb. The<!-- Page 46 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> coster was dressed in the soiled khaki of a man recently
+released from the Army; his barrow was piled high with narcissi and
+daffodils, and a drowsy donkey drooped between the shafts. In avoiding a
+suicidal pedestrian, Tabs misjudged the room that he had to spare. He
+felt a jolt, guessed what had happened, and jammed on his brakes. A
+policeman in front of him was holding up a magisterial hand. Behind him
+a stream of familiar trench profanity was gathering in volume; under
+other circumstances he would have found a certain enjoyment in the
+sound. He looked back and saw what he expected: the barrow overturned;
+the flowers scattered, the donkey surprised out of its drowsiness,
+thrown on its back and kicking in its harness; the coster straddling the
+sudden ruin and calling down all the rigors of the law. A crowd was
+running together; it hesitated between the coster and Tabs, uncertain as
+to which would provide the more exciting entertainment. When the
+policeman waving his note-book approached the car, it plunked for Tabs.</p>
+
+<p>The policeman was a stout, fat-fingered, immovable kind of person. He
+said nothing till he had penciled down the car's official number. Tabs
+gave his name and address. "Lord Taborley, etc." The policeman lifted
+his slow eyes to judge for himself whether the Lord part of his
+information looked probable. The lean aristocratic face which he
+encountered seemed to correspond with the specifications recorded. He
+asked to see his Lordship's license. Tabs embarked on explanations,
+pointing to the bandaged wrist of Prentys as a confirmation<!-- Page 47 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> of his
+facts. While he was explaining the coster joined them, having got his
+donkey on to its legs. He was violent with anger and burning to expound
+the justice of his cause. Suddenly he struck out a convincing line of
+argument, "Look at 'im, the bloomin' slacker&mdash;the pasty h'aristocrat. 'E
+didn't see no fightin'. Not 'im. But now the war's been won by poor
+blokes like meself, 'e ain't ashamed ter go banging abart in h'Army
+cars."</p>
+
+<p>"I know how you feel," Tabs said. "But you're mistaken; I served in the
+ranks two years myself. I was only demobbed yesterday; to-day's my first
+day out of uniform. I'll pay you whatever you think fair; so you don't
+need to work yourself up."</p>
+
+<p>The man's attitude changed completely. He removed his cap and scratched
+his head. "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me was pals out
+there!" He turned to the policeman, "'E ain't done me as much damidge as
+if one of them there Big Berthas 'ad landed."</p>
+
+<p>The policeman let his fat eyes wander from the coster to Tabs, from Tabs
+back to the coster. "I wuz too old ter go," he said inconsequently; "but
+me son's out there and won't ever come back." He crossed out the
+particulars he had written down so laboriously; when that was done, he
+fumbled his note-book back into his pocket. "If your mate 'ere says that
+it's h'all right, sir, it's h'all right so far as I'm consarned. Your
+fust day h'out of the h'Army! Well, well!" He looked at Terry with a
+world of understanding, wheeled about slowly and went ponderously back
+to his corner.<!-- Page 48 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That was sportsmanly of you." It was Tabs speaking. "I'd like to know
+how much&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The coster shook his head. "It don't cost you nothink. Me and you used
+ter share."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs protested. The man climbed the running-board and pushed his
+grime-stained hand into the car. "Call it quits, mister, and shake for
+luck. And now the little lady, if she don't h'object."</p>
+
+<p>Terry shook his hand daintily. So there wasn't going to be a fight after
+all! Everything had been settled amicably! With an air of disappointment
+the crowd dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>"Came pretty well out of that!" Tabs remarked as the car started
+forward.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not to talk." Terry's voice was high-strung and emphatic. "You
+can't talk and drive&mdash;and you've got to drive like mad."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? What's the hurry?"</p>
+
+<p>"The hurry! We've wasted twenty minutes; we've barely time to get
+there."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the General! I'd forgotten. Well, it won't do the old boy any harm
+to wait. Lord, the hours he and his sort have kept me waiting on
+parade-grounds in France!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he remembered that this General wasn't an old boy. If he wasn't
+old, there was all the less reason for making so much effort not to be
+late. Nevertheless, to please Terry&mdash;&mdash; He could feel her body
+twitching. Every time he had to slow down for traffic he was aware of
+her impatience. Why was it of such vital importance to her that they
+should arrive in time? She wasn't too punctual by habit.<!-- Page 49 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> A thought
+struck him; it was like a searchlight pointing out many things that had
+been dark. Her anxiety wasn't that they should arrive in time, but
+before time. She didn't intend, if she could prevent it, that he should
+meet the owner of the car. Had it not been for the double accident of
+Prentys spraining her wrist and having failed to mention that the car
+must be back by three-thirty, he would never have been allowed to know
+that there was a General. Terry had been compelled to let him drive if
+the borrowed car was to be returned; but her main object now was to
+reach the War Office a few minutes early and to smuggle him off before
+an introduction would be necessary. If they arrived punctually or late,
+the General might be already on the pavement&mdash;&mdash; Tabs bit his lip. He
+hated petty intrigue. He demanded a man's code of honor from the woman
+he adored and made no feeble excuses for feminine dishonesty. This was
+the worst disappointment she had given him.</p>
+
+<p>As they approached Hyde Park, when it was too late to turn off into a
+side-street, he saw that the road ahead was blocked. He worked the car
+as far forward as possible and then had to halt. Terry was nervously
+consulting her watch. "The time?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Three-twenty-three."</p>
+
+<p>"Then this puts the lid on it." He beckoned to a policeman, "What's
+holding us up?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Queen's expected, so I'm told, sir, though us didn't 'ave no proper
+warning."</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the crowd out of sight com<!-- Page 50 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>menced cheering. The cheering
+spread and drew nearer. It was taken up by people who were strung across
+the road immediately in front. A carriage flashed by in which two ladies
+were sitting, one of whom was bowing from right to left. Despite her
+irritation at the delay, Terry stood up so that she could get a clearer
+view above the clustered heads. The cheering grew deafening, then
+lessened, and sank to a hoarse murmur beneath the trees of the Park. As
+she reseated herself and the traffic lurched forward, she turned to
+Tabs, "You noticed who it was?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Queen."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but the lady who was with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't see."</p>
+
+<p>"It was Diana&mdash;Lady Dawn with whom I nursed. She's supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in England."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't know her. So I shouldn't have placed her if I had seen her."</p>
+
+<p>They made a clear run of it from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall and drew
+up quite marvelously before the War Office on the second.</p>
+
+<p>"Done it," said Tabs as he shut off the engine. "It's zero hour
+exactly."</p>
+
+<p>But Terry wasn't there to listen to him, as he discovered when his
+attention was free and the engine had ceased to throb. Almost before
+they had halted, she had nipped out of the car and was hailing a taxi
+which was on the point of moving off. His bag was already in process of
+being whisked from one vehicle to the other. This inde<!-- Page 51 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>cent haste to be
+rid of him roused his obstinacy; he sat still where he was and watched.</p>
+
+<p>She returned a little breathless and self-congratulatory. "There! Wasn't
+that clever of me? Taxis are scarce. If I hadn't collared you that one
+you might have&mdash;&mdash; Come on, Tabs, if you're stiff in your lame leg, give
+me your hand and I'll&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the dingy swing-doors of the War Office flew open and a
+red-tabbed, handsome figure of a man, with gold braid on his cap and
+crossed swords on his epaulettes, came briskly out on to the steps. He
+caught sight of Terry and, throwing her an airy salute, came with an
+eager stride towards her. He wasn't the old fogy Tabs had so
+persistently imagined. He was young, barely thirty, lean, tall and
+swift-moving as an arrow&mdash;very much what Tabs had been before he had
+spent himself at the war.</p>
+
+<p>"Hulloa, Terry! This is ripping. I didn't expect you&mdash;&mdash; But what's all
+this? An accident! What have you been doing to Prentys?"</p>
+
+<p>The voice was glad and frank, though its habit of command was
+unmistakable. Every gesture bespoke authority and arrogance of body.
+Even in this moment of geniality, "Obedience and no explanations" was
+written all over him. He was a man who believed his acceptable
+importance to be a verity established beyond the pale of challenge. Yet
+there was something lacking&mdash;a sureness of refinement, a last
+considerateness. With the first word he had spoken, Tabs had detected
+that he wasn't quite the part.<!-- Page 52 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Terry had hurried forward to meet him. She was saying something in a
+voice so subdued that it did not carry. She had so contrived their
+grouping&mdash;or was it an accident?&mdash;that the General's face was hidden.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs waited, then turned to Prentys, "My taxi-man's getting impatient.
+Will you give my thanks to the General for his kindness and make the
+explanations?&mdash;&mdash; And I hope that your wrist will soon be better."</p>
+
+<p>He had given the driver his address and was stepping into the taxi, when
+he heard Terry's voice, "Why, you're running away! You mustn't go
+without meeting the General. General Braithwaite, I want to introduce
+you to Lord Taborley, of whom I've spoken to you so often."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs limped back to the pavement and found the General regarding him
+intently. "I'm glad to make Lord Taborley's acquaintance," he said
+formally. And then to Terry, "You didn't tell me that it was for Lord
+Taborley you were borrowing my car."</p>
+
+<p>Before Terry could reply, Tabs was answering for her, "Then I have to
+apologize to you, sir, as well as to thank you. But we've used the same
+car often, haven't we? In fact, I'm certain that we've met many times."</p>
+
+<p>"Never to my knowledge." The General drew himself up stiffly. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>The two tall men stood glooming at each other. Tabs had it on the tip of
+his tongue to say something more, but glanced at Terry and thought
+bet<!-- Page 53 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>ter of it. Instead he addressed her, "Do I drive you home?"</p>
+
+<p>The General interrupted. "It'll be out of your way. I'm going right past
+Miss Beddow's house."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since they had been introduced Terry came between
+their hostility. "How did you know where Lord Taborley lived and that it
+would be out of his way? You said that this was the first time you had
+met him."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs refused to make her the witness of a quarrel. "Since General
+Braithwaite knows where I live, perhaps he will call and explain that to
+me later. I can't keep my cab waiting longer&mdash;are you riding with me,
+Terry?"</p>
+
+<p>She avoided his eyes. "With the General." And then, "You won't forget
+that you're dining to-night with father?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-night. At seven-thirty, I suppose, as usual?"</p>
+
+<p>"At seven-thirty."</p>
+
+<p>He raised his hat. As he drove away he felt compelled to look back just
+once to assure himself. He caught the General's features in full
+sunlight; he had not been mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>"So that's why my letters to him weren't returned, and that's why he
+didn't write! He's gone farther than far with a vengeance." He clenched
+his fists and frowned savagely at his crippled leg. "I felt so sure of
+her&mdash;and to have to compete with my own valet!"<!-- Page 54 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_SECOND" id="CHAPTER_THE_SECOND"></a>CHAPTER THE SECOND</h2>
+
+<h4>RETRIEVERS OF YOUTH</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The taxi had scarcely drawn up before a small, prim house in Brompton
+Square when the door was opened by a neat maid in immaculate cap and
+apron. She was so neat and respectful as to appear almost passionless.
+She had the high complexion of a Country girl, good gray eyes, a slim,
+attractive figure and dark, wavy hair which escaped rebelliously from
+beneath her cap. One wondered how she looked in her off-duty moments,
+when she wasn't saying, "Yes, your Lordship" and "No, your Lordship."
+Tabs mustered a smile and called to her, "Thank you, Ann. I'll be with
+you in a moment."</p>
+
+<p>As he paid the fare, he let his eyes wander. The outside of the house
+had been painted white, evidently in honor of his home-coming. The work
+had been only recently completed, for the chalked warning on the
+pavement was not yet obliterated, "Wet Paint Beware." He had given no
+orders; it was Ann's doing&mdash;her accustomed, tactful thoughtfulness. The
+steps were speckless as a newly laundered shirt, the brasses polished to
+the brilliancy of precious metal. His window-boxes&mdash;&mdash; He glanced<!-- Page 55 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> along
+the fronts of his neighbors' houses; they hadn't put theirs out yet. His
+were ahead of everybody's; they made a cheerful splash of red, with
+their soldierly upstanding tulips, above the long serried line of
+area-railings. Again Ann's doing! And the snow-white curtains behind
+each row of panes were also Ann's.</p>
+
+<p>The driver clicked his "For Hire" sign into the upright position and
+chugged away to join the flow of traffic which thumped orchestrally past
+the end of the Square. Tabs climbed the three low steps separately; he
+had been used to take them at a bound. He tried to climb them slowly as
+though from choice, and not from necessity. He was very conscious that
+Ann was watching. As she closed the door behind him he said, "So you
+knew I was coming? You received my telegram?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"I was sorry I couldn't tell you the exact hour. I didn't know it
+myself. I hope you didn't trouble to prepare lunch."</p>
+
+<p>"It was no trouble, your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you've managed to get some one in the kitchen? They tell me that
+all the cooks have become bus-conductresses or lady-secretaries."</p>
+
+<p>"I did, your Lordship. My sister&mdash;the one who lost her husband at Mons.
+I thought you wouldn't object&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He cut her short. "Ann, you know I never object; you never need to go
+into details. Whatever you've done is right. From what I've seen already
+you've done splendidly."<!-- Page 56 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Under his praise she flushed and became a little less the servant. "I
+was afraid you might think I'd taken too much upon myself, what with the
+flower-boxes and having the house repainted. I wanted to have things
+nice for your Lordship after&mdash;&mdash;" She hesitated for a word, and then
+burst out, "After all the dirt and beastliness! Your Lordship ought
+never to have gone in the ranks, begging your pardon; you weren't fitted
+for it. You ought to have gone as a General. Then you wouldn't have come
+home with that poor leg and&mdash;&mdash;" She saw him wince and changed the
+subject. "But about doing things without orders, I knew that if
+Braithwaite&mdash;if Braithwaite&mdash;&mdash;" Her voice sagged and her eyes misted
+over. At last Tabs saw how she looked in her off-duty moments, when she
+wasn't occupied with being respectful. The sudden memory came back of
+intuitions he had had that she and his valet might one day marry. From
+time to time he had twitted them on their fondness, taking an idle
+pleasure in forwarding the match. And Braithwaite had kissed her before
+he marched away. Ridiculous to remember it now! It signified nothing.
+People in their station kissed when they felt kindly, and on that
+occasion they had had an epoch-making pretext.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were searching his with a hungry wistfulness. "What I was
+meaning, your Lordship, was that if he had been spared, he'd have done
+things on his own and gone ahead, the same as he always did. So I,
+seeing as how he wasn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs touched her shoulder gently. "It's all right, Ann. I appreciate
+your motives. I'm glad you<!-- Page 57 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> went ahead. But you haven't shaken hands
+yet."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced in at the dining-room before he went upstairs. The table was
+spread for dinner. Cut flowers were standing about in vases. The very
+silver had a festive shine.</p>
+
+<p>"Again I have to be sorry," he told her. "I'm dining with Sir Tobias
+Beddow."</p>
+
+<p>"And Miss Terry," she inquired, "is she well?"</p>
+
+<p>When he went to climb the narrow stairs she refused to permit him to
+carry his bag. He guessed the reason&mdash;that he might be freer to support
+himself by the rail of the banisters. On the first small landing, which
+looked out at the back on to the Oratory and the graveyard of the Parish
+Church, there were still more flowers. When he reached his bedroom,
+three flights up, he found that his evening clothes had been all laid
+out and just as carefully as if Braithwaite&mdash;the old Braithwaite whom he
+had loved&mdash;had been there before him.</p>
+
+<p>As she unpacked his bag, opening and closing drawers, "I shall have to
+look round for another valet," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't." Her tone was sharp with earnestness.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs felt sorry for her. She, too, like all the world was wanting the
+thing that she could never have. He wondered whether it wouldn't be
+kinder to tell her and let her know the worst. "But sha'n't I, Ann?"</p>
+
+<p>With simple pathos, which was the more touching because it was so
+unconscious, she clasped her hands, "He might come back. He was never
+reported. My<!-- Page 58 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> letters were returned unopened. I've not given over
+hoping. I shouldn't like him to find that your Lordship&mdash;&mdash; If he found
+another man in his place, he might feel like he hadn't been wanted. Me
+and sister can manage&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He got no further, for her eyes were meeting his with an appeal that was
+desperate. "A strange man&mdash;his ways would be different. He'd make one
+know that everything&mdash;everything was ended."</p>
+
+<p>She glanced hurriedly round for a last time to make sure that there was
+nothing she had omitted&mdash;collar, tie, silk socks, dress-shoes,
+shaving-water, razor. "I'll be listening for the bell in case there's
+anything that I've forgotten, sir."</p>
+
+<p>With that she closed the door between himself and her emotion. As she
+rustled discreetly down the stairs, he thought he heard a sound of
+sobbing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It was too early to dress&mdash;not five o'clock yet. He made an estimate of
+the time he had to spare. If he walked across the Park to Sir Tobias
+Beddow's, that would take him from a half to three-quarters of an hour.
+At the earliest he wouldn't have to leave the house till six-thirty. So
+he had the best part of two hours during which to think out his line of
+conduct and to dress. At dinner he would meet Terry&mdash;how would she act?
+And what was the right thing for him to do as her family's trusted
+friend? He felt very tired. It took a tre<!-- Page 59 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>mendous lot out of one
+pretending to other people that one wasn't tired. He was ashamed to have
+to own to himself how quickly nowadays he could use up his physical
+reserves. For the moment there was no one to watch him; he stretched
+himself out at full length on the couch.</p>
+
+<p>He was glad to be back in this friendly house with its narrow stairways
+and endearing littleness; it had been his American mother's before him.
+Within its walls were the exquisite traces of a temperament and taste
+that had been hers. She hadn't always been a great lady; to the end of
+her days there had remained with her the love of small things which one
+finds in nun-like New England towns. There had been times when the
+ostentation and entertaining at Taborley House had become too much for
+her; this nest of refuge had been her secret&mdash;her place of retreat where
+she had regarnered her sincerities. She had loved the Square's
+old-fashioned primness, its tininess, its unchanging atmosphere of rest.
+It was scarcely invaded by the strum of London. In the cloud of
+greenness which drifted above its communal garden, one could still
+listen to the country sounds of birds. At the back gray religion spoke
+in the tolling bell of the Parish Church; through Sabbath stillnesses
+one could catch the pealing of the organ in the Oratory and the mutter
+of worshipers at prayer. Tabs had kept the house as she had left it. It
+was something faithful to which to return, however much he failed in the
+search for his kingdom and however far he wandered.</p>
+
+<p>However much he failed! This first day of free<!-- Page 60 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>dom had been anything but
+successful. He felt as though every hope that he had had had been
+blotted out; that morning he had had no plan for the future which had
+not included Terry. What would be the upshot? Would Braithwaite accept
+his challenge to visit him? If he did, what then? He, Tabs, couldn't
+very well ask his ex-valet, merely because he was his ex-valet, to
+desist from loving the same girl. He had no doubt that Braithwaite, in
+his new incarnation as a General, did dare to love her. He had little
+doubt that Terry had shown herself at least susceptible to the glamor of
+his infatuation. How far had the matter gone between them? There lay the
+guess.</p>
+
+<p>He searched back, trying to piece together phrases which would indicate
+the correct answer. There was her disturbing confession about having
+given away bits of herself, little bits of herself in wrong directions.
+There was her reticence as to the ownership of the car and the way in
+which she had tried to prevent a meeting. There was her sympathy for
+Maisie's matrimonial excesses; her unnatural tolerance for Adair; her
+reiterated excuse for the current love-madness, that people had the
+right at any cost to be happy; and the eagerness with which she had
+seized on his own words, "to recover our lost years by violence." In the
+silence of his brain he heard her voice pleading, urgent with pain and
+underlying terror, "Don't you see why I don't condemn? I'm sorry for
+you, for myself, for everybody." His knowledge of the world told him
+that impassioned latitudinarians were most fre<!-- Page 61 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>quently found among those
+who had themselves offended the conventions. Whatever Terry knew or did
+not know, she was certainly aware that a match between herself and
+General Braithwaite was completely off the map and would be regarded by
+every one who counted as a <i>m&eacute;salliance</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And what did she know? Not that Braithwaite had been a valet&mdash;most
+decidedly not that he had been <i>his</i> valet; at most she suspected that
+they had been acquainted when Braithwaite had moved in humbler circles.
+Had she been possessed of the exact truth, she would never have borrowed
+a car from that quarter to meet her ex-lover on his home-coming. She had
+been testing&mdash;trying to discover. She had scented a mystery&mdash;one for the
+solving of which none of the General's explanations had proved
+convincing. Then had come the unforeseen encounter outside the War
+Office and Braithwaite's falsehood, which even Terry had detected. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure." What was the
+man's game? Did he hope to erase his old identity? Did he think&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>At this point Tabs' patience broke down. "Dash it all," he muttered, "if
+there hadn't been a war, the fellow would have been running my
+bath-water at this moment."</p>
+
+<p>If there hadn't been a war! But there had; and this was only one of the
+many preposterous situations which had resulted from it. Terry was right
+in at least one thing that she had said&mdash;the world was upside down and
+walking on its head.</p>
+
+<p>As he lay there thinking, with the topmost<!-- Page 62 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> branches of the trees in the
+Square weaving a tracery of green shadows against his windows, a sudden
+inspiration came to him. He sat up. "By Jove, I've got it. Terry's proud
+as Lucifer. I can stop this nonsense at any time by telling her who her
+lover was. Braithwaite will have to call to see me; I can force him to
+it. When he calls, the door will be opened by Ann. I can hold the threat
+over him that, if he doesn't promise to break with Terry, I'll expose
+him."</p>
+
+<p>He went across to his writing-table, selected a pen and wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p>
+<i>General Braithwaite,<br />
+The War Office,<br />
+Whitehall,<br />
+London.</i>
+</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Sir:</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I shall be pleased to see you any time to-morrow at my house in
+Brompton Square, which you know so well. The matter which we have to
+discuss is urgent.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>Yours truly,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><i>Taborley.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He addressed the envelope, sealed it and rang the bell. When Ann
+appeared, he handed it to her. "Please see that it's posted
+immediately."</p>
+
+<p>He had done something decisive. For the time being he felt happier.
+"Nothing like getting a thing off your chest!" He took a bath and,
+having slipped into his dressing-gown, commenced to shave. Between these
+acts he whistled snatches of street-songs to prove to himself his
+genuine light-heartedness. It was while he was drying his razor that he
+started<!-- Page 63 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> on the wrong air. Where had he heard it? Oh, yes, the sunlit
+street, the children dancing and a voice at his side murmuring the words
+of the refrain, "Apr&egrave;s la Guerre, there'll be a good time everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>The old argument commenced again, but with a new justice. "What have I
+really got against this chap? To rise from a private to a General is no
+crime; it's to his credit. We all had his chance and some of us had more
+influence; yet he got there."</p>
+
+<p>He tried to eliminate his own desires and wounded pride from the
+problem. For five years he had been nothing and had been glad to be
+nothing, that the cause which he believed to be righteous might triumph
+by his self-effacement. What sickness of soul had overtaken him that, on
+this, his first day of freedom, he had immediately surrendered to this
+orgy of outrageous selfishness? It was Terry that mattered and only
+Terry. The stronghold of her happiness was threatened by Braithwaite's
+lie. There was a kingdom for everybody, his old theory. As for himself,
+if he had been mistaken and his kingdom was not Terry, then he must
+press on, for it lay further up the road round some newer turning.
+Meanwhile, at whatever cost to himself he must rescue Terry's happiness.</p>
+
+<p>His heroic state of mind lasted no longer than it takes to set down. He
+was demanding too much of his exhausted capacity for self-abnegation. He
+was starving for her. His old hunger to win her swept over him
+ravenously. Only by winning her could his lost youth be regained.<!-- Page 64 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>He had almost completed dressing when there came a tap at the door.
+Finishing what he was doing in front of the mirror, he answered, "Yes,
+what is it, Ann?"</p>
+
+<p>"Before you go, I should like to speak with your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it important? I've not got too much time."</p>
+
+<p>"It's&mdash;it's something to do with myself."</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Half a second."</p>
+
+<p>On opening the door, he saw at once that her face was disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's something to do with him, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"With whom?"</p>
+
+<p>"With Braithwaite."</p>
+
+<p>It was evident that for Ann there was only one <i>him</i> in the world.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what of him?"</p>
+
+<p>Ann commenced speaking slowly. Under the stress of her nervousness she
+forgot the correct demeanor for a high-class parlor-maid and became a
+country girl, twisting the corner of her white, starched apron in her
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I was noticing the address on that letter your Lordship gave me to
+post." Tabs thought quickly, "Hullo, we're in for it. That was foolish
+of me. She's put two and two together."</p>
+
+<p>But Ann reassured him in her next sentence. "It was to a General at the
+War Office and I was thinking that he might help. Braithwaite and I had
+an<!-- Page 65 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> understanding. I'm not saying we were engaged; we weren't. We didn't
+tell anybody. But we'd made up our minds to get married if he ever came
+back. If I'd been engaged to him, I'd have a right to make enquiries;
+but now, in most people's eyes, I was nothing to him. That's&mdash;that's the
+hardest part of it. You see, sir, he was never reported dead or missing
+or anything. I just stopped hearing from him. So I thought that if this
+General was your Lordship's friend&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs' brain had been working. He already had a plan. "You thought that I
+might persuade him to use his influence to have the records searched?"</p>
+
+<p>She glanced up hopefully. "That's what I was thinking. Would he do it
+for your Lordship? I don't know how to set about things myself. It's
+this&mdash;this," she almost broke down, "this uncertainty that's a-killing
+of me. Sister knows about her man, but I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs saw the redness of sleeplessness in her eyes; it was true&mdash;the
+uncertainty was killing her. "Don't upset yourself by talking about it,"
+he said kindly. "I'll write to the General and post my request on my way
+out."</p>
+
+<p>He had supposed he had dismissed her and had seated himself at his desk.
+A sound behind him warned him; he looked across his shoulder to find her
+still hovering in the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>She answered his unspoken question as to why she was delaying. "Aren't
+there any particulars that your Lordship ought to have? Things like his
+regi<!-- Page 66 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>mental number, and his birthday, and where he was born, and all
+that? And wouldn't this help?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>She pulled out from her apron-pocket an envelope. "It's one of his
+letters. If the General was to see it, he'd know I had the right."</p>
+
+<p>"May I glance through it?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs unfolded the scribbled sheets of paper. They were torn from an Army
+note-book.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>"My darling Ann:</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The jolly old war drags on and seems as though it were never going to
+end. Not that I've much to kick about, for it's proved a chance for
+me. Here's the great news. I'm in for my commission and shall soon be
+'an officer and a gentleman.' Don't tell his Lordship if you write to
+him or see him; he's still in the ranks and might not like it. It's
+funny to think that I shall be his military superior before many
+weeks are out and that, were he and I to meet, he'd have to salute
+me. If I come through the war, I sha'n't go back to being a valet.
+Once having been a gentleman&mdash;&mdash;"</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Tabs ran rapidly through this sheet and turned to the next:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>"You're wonderfully good. I got the socks that you knitted and the
+two parcels of food from Harrods. You mustn't spend so much of your
+money on me. When it's all ended, I'll pay you back. We'll get
+married and have a little cottage in a little town, the way the song
+says that we heard together at the Comedy on my last leave. You
+remember how it goes.</i></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>'And we'll have a little mistress in a silken gown.<br />
+A little doggie, a little cat,<br />
+A little doorstep, with WELCOME on the mat.'</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>"My dearest sweetheart, I love you.</i></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>"Yours, in the pink, etc."</i></span></p></div><p><!-- Page 67 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked up. "May I keep this for the present?&mdash;And, by the way, how
+many more of them have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nearly a hundred from the day he enlisted. That's one of the last&mdash;I
+never heard from him whether he lived to get his commission."</p>
+
+<p>When she had vanished, he reread the letter more carefully, made a copy
+of it and slipped the copy into another envelope addressed to General
+Braithwaite, together with a note from himself, which read, "<i>One of the
+important reasons why I am insistent that you shall call on me is
+contained in the enclosed copy of one of your many letters, the
+originals of all of which are in my possession. To a man of honor it
+speaks for itself</i>."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>At the red pillar-box, at the foot of the Square, he posted this second
+missive. "He'll receive them both by the first delivery to-morrow," he
+thought. "I wonder what he'll&mdash;&mdash; Rotten! But it can't be helped." Then
+he turned to the right by the Tube Station, going up the narrow old
+world passage, behind the backs of houses, through the graveyard of the
+Brompton Parish Church to Ennismore Gardens and the sudden, railed in
+solitudes of Hyde Park.</p>
+
+<p>There were few pedestrians about. Until he reached the Park they were
+for the most part men in evening-dress, going to dinner-parties, like
+himself. Sometimes they were accompanied by their<!-- Page 68 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> wives or sweethearts,
+whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the
+pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually
+fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above clustered chimney-pots to
+the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had
+worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in
+marriage&mdash;&mdash; When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."</p>
+
+<p>Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would
+be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly
+dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his
+library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to
+see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and
+slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington
+Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself
+ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his
+coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon
+feeling a patient's pulse.</p>
+
+<p>"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lordship in
+the library."</p>
+
+<p>It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for
+granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some
+absurd measure as his contemporary.</p>
+
+<p>As he prepared to follow, his attention was at<!-- Page 69 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>tracted by the scarlet
+band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on
+the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the
+fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of
+his tie.</p>
+
+<p>He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of
+energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his
+antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he
+might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway
+had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was
+haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility.
+One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was
+white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were
+blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top
+part of the face above the cheek-bones was noble; but the lower part
+fell away to a mouth and chin which were amiable and undecided. At the
+hour of Tabs' arrival, he was flinging up his hands and spluttering
+impotently, an inexpert swimmer in the waters of adversity.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Lord Taborley! My dear fellow!" The moment he discovered his
+guest in the doorway he came darting forward. "My dear boy, this is real
+friendship. We missed you and wanted you so much.<!-- Page 70 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>&mdash;So you're out of it
+at last? I mean the khaki."</p>
+
+<p>The little, wrinkled hand with its stubby fingers reached up timidly in
+an attempt to pat the big breadth of shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm out of it, Sir Tobias."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs didn't want to be patted. He was impatient of polite evasions. He
+foresaw that he was expected to spend the next five minutes in replying
+to questions which required no answers&mdash;all this as a conventional
+preface to a discussion of the delicate position of Adair and Maisie.
+But Tabs had his own problem, and one question in particular about a hat
+on the hall-table that he was burning to ask. They stood staring at each
+other, the big, fair man and the worn version of Shakespeare, both
+wondering how long it would be decorous to chatter before they clinched
+with the vital topic.</p>
+
+<p>"May as well sit down. There's time for a cigarette. Terry&mdash;&mdash;" Sir
+Tobias made a short-winded attempt to push a second arm-chair into place
+beside the fire; Tabs achieved the desired end with one lurch of his
+body. "Terry brought some one in to tea; he's not gone yet. They never
+know when to go, these New Army fellows. Good at their job, they tell
+me, but no polish. I suppose I oughtn't to say that&mdash;ungrateful of me!
+But I'm sick of it all, the invasion of the classes, the women in
+trousers, the beggars on horseback, the Jazz music. I want the old world
+back&mdash;the womanly women, everybody labeled, and Beethoven."</p>
+
+<p>He pushed the cigarette-box fretfully across to Tabs, having first
+selected one for himself.<!-- Page 71 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Beethoven," he snorted, "that's what I want, and no bobbed hair and
+everybody happily married."</p>
+
+<p>"This New Army chap who's with Terry," Tabs paused to make his voice
+unanxious and ordinary, "does she see much of him? Is she fond of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fond of him!" The little man jerked round quickly. He was in a mood to
+see the shadow of terror in the most far-fetched suggestion. "If I
+thought she was, I should pack her off to Lady Dawn and keep her with
+her until the fellow was dead or&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with him?" Tabs flipped the ash off his cigarette
+indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>"The matter with him!" Sir Tobias pulled at the point of his beard,
+making a mental effort to frame the charge. "If you'd asked me that
+question five years ago I could have told you; but not now. In 1914 we
+spoke of a man as belonging to our class and meant that he had our
+standards of conduct, our code of honor, our sense of public duty, our
+traditions&mdash;that he could be trusted to run true to form. To-day any
+man's a gentleman, provided he killed enough Germans."</p>
+
+<p>"But still you do feel that there's something the matter with him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I can't tell you for the life of me why I feel it. In many
+ways he's admirable: I believe he's about the youngest brigadier we have
+who rose from the ranks. There was no hanky-panky about his promotion
+either&mdash;no petticoat influence; it was all sheer merit and courage. He
+was a fighting-man from first to last and shared all the chances. But<!-- Page 72 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+the trouble is that one doesn't know where he came from, and, therefore,
+one can't be sure where he's going. I know that sounds snobbish. You
+have the right to tell me that if a man was good enough to be butchered
+to save an old chap like myself, he ought to be good enough to sit down
+with me at the same table. But what people don't realize is that men
+have been wounded in protecting old chaps like myself in coal-mines, and
+on railroads, and a thousand other places ever since the world started,
+but until now we never felt it necessary to offer them a bed in our
+houses. War asked for the simplest gifts from men, physical strength,
+uncomplaining endurance and courage. The war's ended, and if those same
+gifts are to continue to secure social advancement, every policeman who
+captures a burglar ought to be made a bank-president. When I demand that
+a man shall have traditions to be my friend, I ask no more than when I
+refuse to buy a dog without a pedigree."</p>
+
+<p>"But this man, what's he called? If he's as distinguished as you say, I
+ought to have heard of him."</p>
+
+<p>Before his host could answer, the door was discreetly opened. "Dinner is
+being served, Sir Tobias."</p>
+
+<p>There was a rush of light footsteps and Terry breezed past the butler.
+"I know you're going to scold me, Daddy. It's all my fault that you were
+kept waiting. It took me so long to persuade General Braithwaite. By the
+time he'd consented&mdash;&mdash; I had to dress like a hurricane. I'm not at all
+sure<!-- Page 73 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> that I'm properly hooked up the back. I know I feel draughty."
+Then, as though she had not remembered that he was expected, "Why,
+hullo, Tabs! In a dinner-jacket! You do look peaceful and jolly."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>They had taken their places at the square handsome table, illuminated at
+each corner by a silver candle-stick, red-shaded and electric-lighted.
+Tabs and Terry were seated side by side, so that he saw her always in
+profile, except when she turned to him in conversation. He saw the soft
+roundness of her shoulder, the satin pallor of her throat and breast,
+the quivering gold of her childishly wavy hair.</p>
+
+<p>The General sat isolated, opposite and facing them. Sir Tobias and his
+wife sat at either end&mdash;had they known it, for all the world like
+judges.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Beddow was a proud, unbending woman, gracious to her own sort,
+unquestioningly respectful to those above her, tender in a practical way
+to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her
+door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as
+ill-at-ease as her husband in the jostling democracy of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>In the hall Sir Tobias rather huffily had introduced his guests. Tabs
+had relieved the tension by smiling quietly at Braithwaite, "The General
+and I have met before."</p>
+
+<p>It was an uncomfortable dinner from the moment they sat down. Sir
+Tobias, although he had shown no signs of it in the library, seemed to
+have devel<!-- Page 74 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>oped a resentment at having been kept waiting. No reference
+was made to this resentment, but Terry and the General were obviously
+the culprits. Sir Tobias was vaguely unhappy and had to blame somebody.
+Under the tacitly implied criticism Terry's rebellious spirits rose
+higher, but the General's authoritative assurance began to crumble.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias was continuing the conversation which had started in the
+library. He seemed oblivious to the fact that it had then concerned the
+man who was now present. "You can't make the world afresh with a
+catastrophe. Men are like water: in a storm they rise above or sink
+below themselves. When the disturbance is ended, they tend to find their
+own level. War destroys; it never created anything."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not true, if you'll excuse me for contradicting you. You're
+speaking without knowledge." Braithwaite uttered himself bluntly as he
+would have done in his own Headquarters' mess&mdash;this despite the fact
+that it was Tabs whom his host had been addressing.</p>
+
+<p>In his astonishment, Sir Tobias nearly gagged himself with the soup that
+he was on the point of swallowing. He blinked mildly at this confident
+young man, his breast ablaze with decorations, whom he had not invited.
+"Then, in your opinion, what has war ever created," he asked with
+dangerous courtesy; "this war, for instance, that's just ended?"</p>
+
+<p>"This war that's just ended is the only war of which I have had any
+experience." Braithwaite glanced across at Terry for encouragement. "I<!-- Page 75 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+know what it created in me and in thousands like me. It created in us
+the most valuable of all assets&mdash;character. In the bitter test of pain
+and dirt and despair we <i>found</i> ourselves&mdash;found ourselves capable of
+more nobility than we had ever dreamt possible. We sorted out afresh, in
+hours that we thought would be our last, all our inherited superstitions
+and servilities; in so doing we discovered that God and life itself are
+much kinder than we had been informed. Because of that discovery men who
+had been timid learnt how to face death gladly, shirkers how to shoulder
+responsibility, selfish people how to become decent through the fine
+humanity of sharing. Time-servers learnt how to get up off their bellies
+and confront misfortune with a laugh. I don't know whether I make myself
+clear; perhaps one had to be a part of the great game to understand its
+lessons. That we do understand them is the reward of those who have
+survived. We've come back to you as uncomfortable fellows; we shall be
+much more uncomfortable before we're satisfied. We intend to fight for
+the same equalities in peace that you sent us out to fight for in war.
+You asked me what this particular war has created; it has created a
+complete new set of social and spiritual values. It's done away with the
+uncharity of caste."</p>
+
+<p>During his last words he had been gazing across the table at Tabs with a
+fearless challenge, as much as to say, "That's who I am. Now expose me."</p>
+
+<p>But Tabs was remembering the coster's reason for not having dragged him
+into the police-courts, "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me<!-- Page 76 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+was pals out there!" Braithwaite, whether he knew it or not, had been
+doing a piece of special pleading for himself. He and Braithwaite,
+whatever they might be now, had been pals out there. Silently Tabs had
+been thinking while he had been listening, "You're right and I'm with
+you. I'd be with you still more if you'd only live up to your standards
+by sticking to Ann."</p>
+
+<p>It was Sir Tobias who took the offensive. The soup-plates had been
+removed and the fish-course had not yet been served. He had the leisure
+to talk. "You men who have been in the Army," he said testily,
+"especially those of you who have gained your promotion rapidly, always
+speak as if the rest of us had been receivers of stolen goods until you
+put on uniforms. Armies are composed of youth; for most of you it was
+the first time you had tasted authority. It's gone to your heads; you
+want to brush experience aside and dragoon the older world into new
+formations. You, who were civilians yourselves, have come back despising
+us civilians; your contempt is three-parts fear lest you'll fail, as you
+failed before, in the old civilian competitive struggle. You talk about
+the virtues war has taught; let's grant them and grant them
+gratefully&mdash;they saved us from destruction. But what about the frantic
+recklessness it encouraged, the cheap views of bodily chastity, the
+desperate insistence on momentary happiness?" At the mention of bodily
+chastity, Lady Beddow from the other end of the table had stuttered a
+"tut, tut!" Her husband dodged it, as a boy might dodge a wheelbarrow
+upset in his path. With<!-- Page 77 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>out shifting his glance he ran on. "A complete
+new set of social and spiritual values! Rubbish! War places an excessive
+premium on merely brutal qualities&mdash;muscle, bone, sinew, all the
+paraphernalia of physical endurance. What use has it got for old fellows
+of intellectual attainments like myself? It takes the greatest poet,
+singer, painter, violinist; all it can do with him is to thrust a rifle
+into his hands. All brains look alike, Michael Angelo's or a
+rag-picker's, when they're spattered in the mud of a trench. Take Lord
+Taborley here, for instance&mdash;all that military stupidity could do with
+him was to keep him in the ranks for two years. You can't make me
+believe in your complete new set of social and spiritual values. A
+complete unrest and insubordination to time-honored moralities is the
+legacy of war."</p>
+
+<p>Having delivered himself, he tucked his napkin tighter into his
+waistcoat and attacked the fish-course, as though by this display of
+gastronomic energy he could somehow strengthen his argument.</p>
+
+<p>It was clear to Tabs that behind all that Sir Tobias had been saying lay
+his misery over Maisie and Adair. He saw the world always in the
+personal equation.</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with most of your statements," the General blundered on. "And
+yet you're wrong. You miss something. I think it's the vision of the
+stupendous heroism. You never saw it; you don't want to see it. That you
+never saw it we can understand; but that you shouldn't want to see it,
+makes us see red. It was something that we did for you, and you<!-- Page 78 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> take it
+all for granted. You cheered us and jeered us into going because you
+were frightened. You handed us white feathers if we hesitated. You
+dragged us from our jobs and very often we were poor men, who had no
+such financial security as was yours. You promised that if we would
+share our lives with you, you'd go fifty-fifty with us on your financial
+security. There wasn't time to have deeds of agreement drawn up; we took
+you at your word. And what a lie it was! Why, I passed a blinded officer
+in Regent Street to-day peddling shoe-laces. The day before a jobless
+soldier threw himself beneath a train and his last words were, 'Over the
+top and the best of luck.' There's a Colonel I see by to-night's paper
+who's gone back to being a policeman. If you see a man in uniform
+to-day, your unspoken thought is, 'For God's sake take it off.' I tell
+you it's all wrong. It's that kind of ingratitude that leads to
+revolution. You talk about the brutality of war; it's not a patch on the
+brutality of peace. You treated men's lives as yours while the danger
+lasted, but you insist that your possessions are your own now that it's
+been averted."</p>
+
+<p>He took a breath and glanced round.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs was nodding unconscious approval. Terry's face reflected the fire
+of his own passionate indignation and enthusiasm. The butler in the
+shadows had turned his back non-committally and was making a pretense of
+fiddling with the next course. Lady Beddow sat very upright and
+startled, grasping her knife and fork as though they helped to support
+her. The only person who was still doing<!-- Page 79 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> justice to the meal was the
+worn-out version of Shakespeare, who was responsible for the storm.</p>
+
+<p>The silence seemed to call for a final climax. The ex-valet cleared his
+throat. And it was to his ex-valet that Tabs listened; he had forgotten
+the General. It was as though the grimness of reality had interrupted a
+piece of play-acting. There was less heat in Braithwaite's voice now and
+more reproach. "You said nothing about caste in those days, when you
+hurried us to the shambles. You promised us&mdash;&mdash; What was it that you
+promised us?"</p>
+
+<p>"A kingdom round the corner," Tabs suggested. The next minute he felt
+Terry's warm little hand clinging to his own beneath the tablecloth.</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite stared at Tabs to see whether he were jesting; then smiled
+in relieved friendship at this proof of comradeship from an unexpected
+quarter. "Yes, perhaps it was that&mdash;a future kindliness, where we should
+all be men together, neither free nor bond." Then again to his host,
+"You sent us out there where everything was censored. Scarcely a whisper
+of the truth reached you. The very war-correspondents were instructed to
+delete the horror and to write nothing that would disturb your calm.
+We've come back, what are left of us; we think you ought to know what
+really happened. It isn't that we take much pleasure in telling you, but
+we think that if you knew, you might be persuaded to keep at least some
+of your promises. And what do you do? You reassert your privilege to
+despise us. You stuff your fingers in your ears and talk about caste,<!-- Page 80 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+and forgetting the war, and getting back to work. Sir Tobias, I'm afraid
+I'm being far too personal, but you're a sample of millions who weren't
+there. You're living in a totally altered world of whose very existence
+you're content to be unaware. Your complacency drives men like myself to
+the point of madness. We hold that you have no right to be complacent
+until the bill you put your hand to has been settled. I don't know how
+Lord Taborley feels; he's not expressed&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Tabs feels exactly the way you do and so do I." It was Terry speaking,
+like the shrill courage of a bugle answering the slow bass of a
+trumpet-call. "We're the world that purchased victory&mdash;we three, while
+the rest of the world sat back. It was men like you two who got gassed,
+and wrenched, and tortured, and girls like myself who patched you up and
+flirted with you so that we might send you back to the Front
+cheery&mdash;girls like myself who hadn't known love, or children, or
+anything but a nursery sort of happiness. We three and people like us
+understand, because we paid the price together."</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Terry, I must confess there are times when you shock me." As
+Lady Beddow rose from her seat, she was the picture of disapproval. From
+the door, which the butler held open for her, she glanced back. "I think
+this discussion has gone <i>very</i> far."</p>
+
+<p>As she swept out, she called across her shoulder, as one might call to a
+pet dog, "Come, Terry."<!-- Page 81 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>But Terry did not come; she sat on tightly, just as if she were a man
+among men. Until coffee had been served and the room was free from
+servants, there was a pretense at small-talk in which Sir Tobias did not
+join. He crouched moodily in his chair, an unlighted cigar between his
+fingers, looking very old and somehow deserted. With the instinctive
+tenderness which she always showed when she knew that she had hurt,
+Terry got up and went to him. She linked her arms about his neck and
+stooped to kiss the bald-spot on his head. "Cheer up, Daddy dear; it
+isn't half as bad as it sounded. Don't you want me to light your cigar
+for you?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs, to distract attention from the reconciliation, addressed the
+General. It was odd that he should feel so much sympathy for a man whom
+his letters, already beyond recall, would stir into panic in the
+morning. "Do you intend to stay in the Army, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But why do you ask? They're getting rid of all of us who aren't
+Regulars, no matter how brilliant our service. They're making the Army
+again a social club. I shall soon be out of uniform."</p>
+
+<p>"And then?" Tabs persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then I shall find something else." He spoke airily, but the shadow
+which crossed his handsome face added plainly as words, "If I can find
+anything."<!-- Page 82 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"If it isn't impertinence," Tabs sank his voice, "may I ask what you
+intend to turn to?"</p>
+
+<p>The General eyed him suspiciously, wondering whether he was again about
+to lay claim to the previous embarrassing acquaintance. "I have several
+things in view," he said sketchily, "from which a man in my position
+ought to be able to choose."</p>
+
+<p>"Ought! But that hasn't been the story up-to-date. What of the Colonel
+you were just telling us about?" Tabs saw that another storm was
+brewing. He leant across the table and hurried on. "If the worst comes
+to the worst, I expect your old job's waiting for you. The qualities
+which have made you what you are to-day, must have been recognized and
+valued&mdash;&mdash;" Terry had completed her reconciliation with her father and
+was resting her gaze upon them. Tabs altered his tone. "You put what you
+said at dinner rather strongly, sir. But I understand what you were
+driving at&mdash;it was the democracy of the front-line where courage, which
+at its best is unselfishness, was our only standard of aristocracy."</p>
+
+<p>Before the General could make reply, Sir Tobias had raised his
+bewildered head. "It's a thing that I for one don't want to understand.
+I don't want to go on living, if what you've said is true."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs turned considerately to the older man. "I think you would if you
+knew. The difference that war made to all of us who were there was that
+it taught us to judge men by their good points rather than their
+defects. It upset all our preconceived notions about society, especially
+our notions about<!-- Page 83 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> the extreme value of race and breeding. What we
+learnt was that there's a breeding of the heart which enables a man from
+the gutter to run true to the highest form."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias leveled his weary eyes in challenge. "Then what about Adair?"</p>
+
+<p>The name was out at last&mdash;the name which he had been trying to get
+uttered all evening. It didn't matter that Adair hadn't been at the war
+and had no proper place in the argument. He had wanted to break through
+his reticence due to his sense of impending family disaster. At last he
+had done it.</p>
+
+<p>"I think, Daddy," Terry said, "the General and I had better leave you
+and Tabs to talk alone."</p>
+
+<p>The next thing that Tabs saw was Terry making her escape with this other
+man. He had it in his power to settle his suspense for all time by
+saying, "One minute, Terry. You're choosing between the General and
+myself. It may help you in making your decision to know that Braithwaite
+was once&mdash;&mdash;" But the coster's definition of fair-play deterred him.
+This man had been his pal in the trenches; because of that he allowed
+himself for the second time that day to be shut out from the company of
+youth. He hadn't discovered how much or how little she knew. By her
+withdrawal he was made to feel middle-aged&mdash;more nearly her father's
+contemporary than ever. Yet, as an underlying comfort to his distress,
+he had the remembered pressure of the little hand that had sought his
+own in secret friendliness.</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Sir Tobias. "Yes, what about Adair?<!-- Page 84 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> Terry said that you
+wanted to consult me. If there's anything that I can say or do&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<p>The door was reopening. Tabs glanced back across his shoulder through
+the shadows. She was hovering just inside the threshold, hastily clad in
+her evening-wrap; beyond her in the hall the General stood fidgeting
+with his cap. Sir Tobias was sitting with his head bowed; he had not
+heard the sound of her re&euml;ntry. He spoke evidently believing that they
+two were alone. "I don't like that fellow. It's the last time he ever
+comes to my house. Whatever Terry can see in him&mdash;&mdash; And he's not good
+for Terry."</p>
+
+<p>She tiptoed back into the hall, pulling the door softly behind her. A
+moment later the front door closed with a bang.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" Sir Tobias looked up gnome-like and startled.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs guessed what it was; but because, as she had said they three had
+paid the price together, he kept her secret. "General Braithwaite,
+probably. But you were speaking of Adair?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias shivered, betraying his nervous tension. "A disturber," he
+said irritably, "even in his going. And yet, I suppose it's true; we
+shouldn't be sitting here comfortably to-night if it hadn't been for his
+sort."</p>
+
+<p>Now that it had been broached, it was anything to avoid the main topic.
+He drummed with his<!-- Page 85 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> fingers on the table, ceased drumming and sighed
+heavily. "Yes, I was speaking of Adair. I don't understand him. I've
+grown out of touch; I don't seem to understand anybody. I'm left behind,
+somehow. People do things to-day that they never used to do. They shout
+about things from the house-tops which all my life I've mentioned only
+in whispers. Terry does; you heard what she said to-night about never
+having been loved and never having had children. The loss of
+delicacy&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't call it a loss of delicacy." Tabs struck a match. "I would
+call it a loss of prudishness. We all know that girls are born to be
+married and that the best of them long to have children. Why shouldn't
+they own it? You owned it long ago when you bought her dolls. The lid is
+off false reticences. I hope it stays off; we shall be a much honester
+world."</p>
+
+<p>"The lid's off! That's the phrase I was searching for." Sir Tobias leant
+forward confidentially. "You haven't been much in England during the
+past four years or you'd know how badly the lid is off. You men, when
+you were in the trenches, lived above yourselves; but, the moment you
+came home on leave, you taught the world that wasn't in khaki how to
+live below itself. I could tell you stories&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know." Tabs didn't want to hear those stories. "It was pathetic. Men
+tried to steal in a handful of hours all the passionate experiences that
+would have come to them beautifully and legitimately over forty years.
+It was like snatching from a bargain-counter things that you hadn't time
+to pay for.<!-- Page 86 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> You were young and you were so soon to be snuffed out. The
+unthoughtful took desperately what they believed life owed them.
+They&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was the turn of Sir Tobias to interrupt. "But so did the women&mdash;this
+Maisie woman, for instance. It was astounding&mdash;the women one would least
+have expected. All the desires we had caged through the centuries broke
+loose&mdash;caged with traditions, with public opinion and scriptural
+penalties." He was delighted with his image and went on to elaborate it.
+"They broke loose like wild animals from a menagerie. We'd always known
+they existed. Sometimes we'd paid surreptitious visits to them in
+books," the old eyes blinked cautiously, "the way one goes to the Zoo,
+to remind himself that there is a jungle somewhere. But we'd only
+regarded them as specimens; we'd never expected to meet them roaming
+about the streets loose or coming as domestic pets into our houses. Now
+the war's ended and the jungle's all about us; we can't get the animals
+back into their cages. Fellows like this General Braithwaite don't help
+matters by telling us that we oughtn't to want to get them back&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he's one of the animals," Tabs interpolated. "You couldn't
+expect him to want to be put back."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he is. In fact that's what I've felt about him. That's what's
+helped me to make up my mind that he shall see no more of Terry." He
+reached out and tapped Tabs' hand, taking it for granted that he was his
+ally. "The sight's becoming far too normal&mdash;wild beasts everywhere,
+sunning<!-- Page 87 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> themselves in impertinent freedom, as if they were house-cats.
+Nobody's shocked at it any longer. Terry isn't. Lloyd George isn't&mdash;at
+least he pretends he isn't for fear the wild beasts may lose him an
+election. No one makes a stand. It's left for private individuals like
+ourselves, to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To do what?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias lost his stride. He blinked reproachfully. "To get them back
+into their cages."</p>
+
+<p>For an instant Tabs nearly smiled. "And Adair&mdash;is he the first wild
+beast we tackle? Have we got to get him back into the cage of matrimony?
+Tell me about Adair."</p>
+
+<p>"It was no cage." Sir Tobias spoke almost resentfully. "His home was a
+kind of nest and Phyllis was the mother-bird."</p>
+
+<p>The butler had looked in several times to see whether he was free to
+clear away. For the first time Sir Tobias became aware of him pottering
+in the shadows. "Perhaps we'd better continue in my library."</p>
+
+<p>He pushed back his chair, dropped his napkin, groped after it feebly,
+then led the way solemnly across the hall. When he had seated himself
+before the fire and fortified his courage with a fresh cigar, he plunged
+headlong into the story of his son-in-law's delinquencies.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX</h4>
+
+<p>"How a man who has a daughter of mine for his wife can find attraction
+in any other woman is more than I can fathom."<!-- Page 88 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I agree with you there, sir." Tabs suddenly found himself carried off
+his feet and on the point of a confession. "If any man were to play
+false by Terry, I think&mdash;I think I'd brain him."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias half-closed his eyes and regarded his guest with sleepy
+approval. "I somehow knew," he said slowly, "that that was how you
+felt." Then he opened his eyes wide and darted forward in his chair, as
+though to trace exactly the effect of his words. He was full of tricks
+and contradictions, obstinacies and tendernesses, this Punch-like old
+gentleman with the head of Shakespeare. "I knew that was how you felt,"
+he continued, "because you've seen all the love that has gone to their
+making. You were already a big fellow when they were still tiny. Wasn't
+it Terry who first called you Tabs because her tongue couldn't get round
+Taborley? Ah, I've been so proud of my girls! They were so little and
+white when they first came to us. They couldn't walk&mdash;not a step. One
+had to carry them everywhere. Then they began to crawl; they couldn't
+stand up right unless one gave them his hand. And then at last they
+walked. They walked by one's side at first and soon got tired. But as
+they grew stronger, they walked away and away, always getting more
+incomprehensible, till finally&mdash;it hasn't happened to Terry yet&mdash;till
+finally they met a man. Wait till you're a father, Lord Taborley; from
+the moment you give all that whiteness into another's keeping, you never
+cease to be jealous of him. He can never appreciate what a gift you have
+made him. He never saw her when she was little and helpless. She's<!-- Page 89 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> your
+youth&mdash;she's everything vigorous that you were. The first time he
+affords you with a reason for hating him, you'll hate him like&mdash;&mdash; The
+way you said: so that you could brain him without compunction. Adair&mdash;&mdash;
+I could cheerfully kill him."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs felt rather than heard the pent-up passion in his voice; it alarmed
+him with its sincerity. "But mayn't you be exaggerating?" he suggested.
+"Are you sure that Adair&mdash;&mdash; What I mean to say is, he may be only
+philandering. Heaps of men do that&mdash;go through all the motions of making
+fools of themselves and actually do nothing. He may be only expressing
+the discontent of the moment, the revolt from suspense, the flatness of
+quiet after terrible excitements. One didn't need to be a fighting-man
+to share those excitements. You say that Phyllis made a nest of her
+home. Perhaps he didn't like nests. It may be that that's done it. Adair
+can't have altered so radically over night; he wasn't forceful enough to
+erupt so disastrously. He was decent&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know nothing definite." The passion had died down. It was again an
+old and weary man who spoke. "I only know that she believes he's
+abandoning her and that it makes her wretched. She wants him back; if
+there's any way of getting him back, she must have him. I never denied
+anything to my girls. If money will persuade him, it's for you to find
+out how much. If this Lockwood woman has a price, let her state it. I'll
+spare nothing. Though everything else has lost its value, money still
+has the power to purchase. I can't buy back faithfulness and loyalty;
+but I should be able to buy the appear<!-- Page 90 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>ance of it. If I were you I would
+tackle this Lockwood woman first."</p>
+
+<p>He tossed the stub of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the
+grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He
+looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All
+women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes,
+and Lady Dawn."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs wondered what Lady Dawn had done to gain exemption from this
+sweeping accusation. "I'll see this Maisie Lockwood to-morrow," he said,
+"if you can tell me where she lives."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias had risen and was seating himself at his desk. "I'll copy you
+out her address. I have it somewhere buried among these papers."</p>
+
+<p>He had hidden it so thoroughly that it took a few minutes to find. As he
+rustled sundry sheets and stooped over them round-shouldered, Tabs had
+time to reflect. Terry! Where was she? She was so little and unprotected
+and white. Would a day ever come when a man would play her false? At
+this moment he had it in his power to prevent that day from ever
+arriving.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, here it is!" It was his host talking. Then the painful scratching
+of the pen commenced.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Tobias, I want to speak to you about Terry." The scratching of the
+pen stopped, but the shoulders remained bowed. "This is an unfortunate
+night for me to choose to talk to you about her, but&mdash;&mdash; To tell the
+truth, I feel that if I don't speak to-night I may lose my chance."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want to say about her?" The<!-- Page 91 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> shoulders had unhunched
+themselves, but the head had not turned.</p>
+
+<p>"Only this, that I've loved her for a very long while and that if you
+don't think I'm too old, I should like your permission to ask her to
+marry me."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs thought to himself with a glow of satisfaction, "At last I've done
+it. And done it in just the way and at just the time that I'd always
+planned."</p>
+
+<p>He felt the pride of a man who had worked on schedule and been punctual
+to the second.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias turned. His face was composed. It was some seconds before he
+spoke. "Of course this is no surprise to me. You <i>are</i> old for her.
+You'll be fifty-five when she's scarcely forty." He paused and Tabs'
+heart sank. "You're older than her; but then you're wiser. She needs a
+husband who'll be wise." He sat leisurely as though he were resting from
+a long journey; then he stretched out his hand. Tabs went over and took
+it. "My dear fellow, there's only one thing I ask: make her always
+happy."</p>
+
+<p>The clock in the hall struck midnight. He lifted himself to his feet. "I
+had no idea how the time had flown. By the way, that's the address&mdash;the
+Maisie woman's."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs took it carelessly. It had become a thing of little consequence. He
+folded it away in his pocket. "And when shall I see Terry?" Of a sudden
+he felt that he must see her; see her and make sure of her without loss
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow, I suppose. Say about eleven."<!-- Page 92 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tabs thought back. He had expected to receive a call from General
+Braithwaite about eleven, or at least to hear from him as soon as he had
+opened his morning's letters. Then he smiled to himself; when once he
+was engaged to Terry, what General Braithwaite did or did not do would
+be no longer of any importance.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, about eleven, if it'll be agreeable to Terry."</p>
+
+<p>"There's not much doubt about its being agreeable to her."</p>
+
+<p>They passed out into the hall. While Tabs found his hat and coat, they
+spoke only in monosyllables. The servants had gone to bed. The house was
+intensely silent.</p>
+
+<p>They had got as far as the front-door and Sir Tobias already had his
+hand upon the latch, when a taxi purred up to the pavement and came to a
+halt immediately outside. "Some one stopping at the wrong house," he
+hazarded and threw the door wide. "See you again to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"At eleven," Sir Tobias reminded.</p>
+
+<p>"On the dot of eleven," Tabs confirmed.</p>
+
+<p>He passed into the cool night air, wistful with the fragrance of unseen
+flowers. His eyes were dazed for the moment by the sudden change of
+light. He made out the blurred silhouette of the taxi and faltered,
+thinking he might have a chance to hire it; then he saw that its shadowy
+occupants were climbing back into its deeper darkness. It seemed that
+Sir Tobias had been right; it had stopped at the wrong house.<!-- Page 93 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As he reached the corner where he turned, he glanced back. The taxi had
+not moved. Its occupants were again getting out&mdash;an officer and a girl.
+The girl was ringing the bell of the house that he had left, while, the
+officer was settling with the driver. As he joined her, the door opened,
+letting fall a shaft of light. There was a brief parley&mdash;evidently
+hurried explanations. Even at that distance he could recognize the
+indignant tones of Sir Tobias' angry voice. Then he heard the "Shish,
+Daddy!" from Terry. They entered. The door closed behind them. The taxi
+moved off in the opposite direction. Again there was silence&mdash;nothing
+but the fragrance of unseen flowers and the wistfulness of the cool,
+spring night.<!-- Page 94 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_THIRD" id="CHAPTER_THE_THIRD"></a>CHAPTER THE THIRD</h2>
+
+<h4>ALL SORTS OF KINGDOMS</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Tabs had dressed himself with more than ordinary care. He was rather
+amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little
+disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the
+strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick
+by negligence. It was nine o'clock when he sat down to breakfast; within
+two hours he would be seeing Terry.</p>
+
+<p>It was a gay morning, lacquered with sunshine; bustling breezes made
+young leaves of trees in the little Square murmurous. Ever since he had
+wakened he had been listening to the gossiping chirp of congregated
+sparrows and the rolling boom of tumultuous traffic. At intervals across
+the upland of roofs there had drifted to him the far-blown chime of
+bells and the slower music of clocks striking. It was like an orchestra
+scraping its chairs and tuning up before crashing into the overture of
+the happier world.</p>
+
+<p>Lying beside his plate as he came down he saw a single letter. It was
+addressed to him in an unfamiliar feminine hand. He picked it up and
+ex<!-- Page 95 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>amined it carefully with the air of a connoisseur. So long as a
+letter remains unopened, especially when it is to a bachelor from an
+unknown woman, it retains an atmosphere of adventure. Up to a point he
+resented the intrusion. This morning his thoughts should have been so
+utterly Terry's. And yet he was piqued by it.</p>
+
+<p>He slit the envelope. The letter-head was embossed with a crest quite
+unknown to any but the most modern heraldry. He read:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Dear Lord Taborley:</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I have been given to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to
+make my acquaintance. If this is so, I shall be at home when you call
+to-morrow afternoon. Asking your lenience for this liberty, I remain,</i></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>Yours very truly,</i></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 25em;"><i>Maisie P. Lockwood.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>"To-morrow afternoon! Written yesterday! That means the afternoon of
+to-day.&mdash;And why the <i>P</i>&mdash;Maisie <i>P.</i> Lockwood? Is that for Pollock, her
+first husband?&mdash;Unusual! A rather na&iuml;ve person!" Then his face went
+blank. "She must be a thought-reader! How the dickens did she guess that
+I wanted to make her acquaintance? I scarcely knew it myself at the time
+that she wrote this letter."</p>
+
+<p>Crushing the scented sheet in his hand, he tossed it into the empty
+grate. "My dear lady, if you can read minds so accurately at a distance,
+be assured of this: to-day I shall be too busy with Terry to have any
+time to spare on you."</p>
+
+<p>The door from the narrow hall partly opened. "May I come in?"<!-- Page 96 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At sound of her voice, he sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair. She
+made bold to look in at him. "Why, Tabs, you <i>are</i> a late breakfaster.
+Daddy told me you were planning to see me at eleven; to save you the
+trouble, I hurried round."</p>
+
+<p>Like a flurry of March sunshine, Terry entered.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>He scarcely knew how to greet her. How does one greet a girl whose
+permission he has yet to gain, whereas her father has already consented?
+Moreover, there was his last memory of her, at midnight dodging into the
+taxi to avoid him.</p>
+
+<p>She spared him the trouble of deciding by holding out her hand. "I know
+that you saw me. That's what I've come to talk about."</p>
+
+<p>Her smile as she said it was both embarrassed and frank. She looked like
+an honest youngster who had come voluntarily to confess and, if need be,
+to be spanked. Tabs noticed that her lower lip was tremulous and that
+she was whipping up her courage. His mind went back to days when she had
+really been a child and he a man&mdash;when he had bound up cut fingers for
+her, had taken her on fishing expeditions, had taught her to cast her
+first fly and, as a reward, before the nursery lights went out, had been
+allowed to see her snuggled safe in bed. Little Terry, she had been his
+tiny sister in those days whom he had loved with no thought of
+gain&mdash;just a small companion for whom he bought exciting presents
+wherever he voyaged across the<!-- Page 97 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> world&mdash;a doll's house in China, a quirt
+in Mexico, a scarlet riding-saddle in Persia. It hurt him to see her
+afraid of him now&mdash;afraid of him because he was about to offer her the
+greatest of all presents. Was she afraid because he was too old for her?</p>
+
+<p>"You don't need to talk about it unless you like," he said kindly.
+"Whatever you do or have done is right."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not true." She wrung her hands. "Oh, Tabs, you make it so hard
+for me when you're generous. I haven't done right. I'm in a tangle. I
+don't know whether what I'll do in the future will be any better."</p>
+
+<p>They were still standing just as they had confronted each other when she
+had entered. Tabs glanced round the room at the used breakfast-table,
+Maisie's crumpled petition lying in the grate, the flood of sunlight and
+the tops of the heads of passers-by stealing across the pane above the
+stiff row of tulips. His eyes went back to the flower-face of this young
+girl as she stood before him, fashionably attired and battling to
+conceal the storm of her distress. The setting struck him as inadequate
+and unprivate. The hats which stole by above the row of tulips seemed to
+belong to spies. At any moment Ann might tap and request that she be
+allowed to clear the table. He believed that in the next half-hour his
+dream of the last five years was to be shattered; otherwise, if it had
+not been to spare him, why should Terry have paid him so unconventional
+a visit, at such an unconventional hour, when by every<!-- Page 98 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> law of usage she
+should have been waiting for him to call on her?</p>
+
+<p>"How about upstairs?" he suggested. "In my study we shall be sure to be
+undisturbed."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Tabs, dear," and the little added word touched him strangely, "I've
+got to say at once what has to be said. It's like waiting at the
+dentist's&mdash;it's the waiting that's so wearing." Her face lit up with the
+ghost of a smile. "When you've faced the real pain, it's over in a
+second."</p>
+
+<p>She seated herself. Reluctantly he followed her example. But when she
+was seated, she found herself at a loss for words. She drew off her
+gloves, and sat there folding and refolding them. He waited for her to
+commence; the silence was unbroken, save for the laughter of children
+playing in the Square and the occasional tapping of footsteps on the
+pavement. He leant across the table and took her hand. "Terry, after all
+these years you're not afraid of me? You don't need to be. Remember what
+you've just said: it's the waiting that's so wearing; the real pain's
+over in a second. Get the real pain over; then we'll plan for the best."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up gratefully with eyes that were almost clear of trouble.
+"You're gentle&mdash;so different from other men. I could almost love you; I
+do love you. But not quite in the way&mdash;&mdash; You understand. I trust you
+more than any one in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, why?" she echoed. "That's what I wish you could tell me. Why should
+I be able to offer more<!-- Page 99 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> to&mdash;to some one else whom I trust less? So much
+less?"</p>
+
+<p>"But is that love, Terry? Isn't it infatuation? Could you keep on
+offering? Loving means marrying and marrying means being together
+without respite."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she nodded wisely. "I know all that. I know it so well that I
+don't want to marry him or anybody&mdash;at least, not yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>She took his other hand in hers, clinging to it as if she were drowning.
+"That's the second time you've asked me why. I'll tell you. Because if I
+don't say 'Yes,' I shall lose him. Even though I may not want him
+forever, I can't bear to lose him for now. You must know the
+feeling&mdash;you who are in love. And that's why," her voice choked with the
+tears that she kept back from her eyes, "that's why I promised him last
+night."</p>
+
+<p>"Last night!" Tabs spoke slowly, trying to bring the finality home to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Last night," she repeated; "the night that should have been yours. The
+night I had promised to you for years." Then, in a flame of
+self-derision, "Why don't you let go my hands and hate me, now that you
+know how treacherous I am?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're not treacherous." He smoothed the slim fingers as though he were
+coaxing a child. "You mustn't be unjust to yourself. When we're in love
+we're all apt to be unjust; I was yesterday, to this man. Injustice,
+whether to oneself or to some one else, works most of our mischief; one
+never knows<!-- Page 100 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> where it ends. We can't control our hearts, Terry; you've
+tried. You've tried to make your heart love me and it's refused. Don't
+be miserable because of it; you couldn't help that. And this man&mdash;he's a
+fine fellow. I always knew he was a fine fellow, until seeing him with
+you yesterday made me jealous and blinded my eyes. He's a finer fellow
+than ever now. You couldn't love him if he weren't."</p>
+
+<p>She wasn't giving him the enthusiastic attention that his praise
+deserved. Somewhere at the back of her mind there lay a doubt with which
+she wrestled while he strove to comfort her. He believed that he had
+guessed her doubt. "As for not trusting him the way you trust me," he
+explained, "that's natural. We know the whole of each other's lives; our
+families are the same kind of families and we share the same kind of
+friends. Whereas&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Whereas," she broke in, "I know nothing about his past, where he lived,
+who his people were or anything. I know nothing that he enjoyed or
+laughed at before I saw him lying quietly in our hospital-ward in
+France. I've questioned him as much as I dared; but always he grows
+vague. There's something that he's hiding from me. I only gathered that
+he had known you from the way he pricked up and listened whenever your
+name was mentioned. That was why, without warning either of you, I&mdash;&mdash;
+You see, I had to find out. And then, when he met you face to face
+he&mdash;he lied."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Terry."</p>
+
+<p>"But he did. He lied."</p>
+
+<p>She had withdrawn her hands from his and sat<!-- Page 101 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> back eyeing him with a
+clear look of challenge. Tabs was at a loss to explain her change of
+attitude. Yesterday she had been all for defending this man. What did
+she gain by accusing him now that she was engaged to him? In any case
+she had employed too ugly a word. And here was a strange state of
+affairs, that it should be left to him to defend his successful rival.</p>
+
+<p>"A man is not compelled to know another man unless he likes," he said
+cautiously. "They may have met some time in the past under unfortunate
+circumstances&mdash;circumstances which are embarrassing to remember. The man
+to whom that memory is a disadvantage has a right to protect himself by
+sweeping it clean from his mind."</p>
+
+<p>"But not to lie about it to the girl he says he loves," she declared.
+"There can be only one motive for such a denial: that it covers up
+something which is dishonorable."</p>
+
+<p>"But there never was anything dishonorable. That I swear."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he believes that I would think it dishonorable," she insisted;
+"which means that he doesn't trust me. That's the reason I can't trust
+him in return. If we don't trust each other now, how can we hope that
+things would be better if we married?"</p>
+
+<p>Her logic was unanswerable, but she was arguing on the wrong side. At
+what was she driving? He gave it up. Was she wanting him to tell her
+where and when he and her future husband had met? The eagerness of her
+silence seemed to demand as much.<!-- Page 102 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> But there are rules to every game. No
+pressure that she could bring to bear could make him tell her that. She
+recognized those rules by refraining from putting her request into
+words.</p>
+
+<p>It was he who broke the silence. His tones were puzzled. "You come to me
+on the morning that I had hoped to be engaged to you myself and you
+confide all these secrets about this other man. You insist that neither
+of you trusts the other and that you could find no happiness in
+marriage. Then why, in heaven's name, Terry, did you pledge yourself to
+him last night?"</p>
+
+<p>"The fear of losing him&mdash;&mdash;" Her face quivered pitifully. She was on the
+verge of weeping. "He overheard what Daddy said about forbidding him the
+house. It seemed our last time together. I couldn't bear that it should
+be the last. It was to keep him near me for just a little longer that
+I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs rose and limped to the window. He dared not let himself go, the way
+his instincts urged. They might carry him too far. She looked so much
+like the little girl in short skirts he had known, as she sat there
+bravely trying not to cry. He wanted to take her on his knees, as in the
+old days. Now that she loved another man, he was not allowed to show her
+comfort in that way any longer. That she should run to him for help and
+yet love some one else, wounded his pride. What was the matter with him
+that he had failed to stir her passion? Why could he appeal only to her
+helplessness?</p>
+
+<p>Inside the communal garden, with its surround<!-- Page 103 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>ing railings and locked
+gates, nurses in uniforms were pushing prams. Toddlers were tossing a
+ball across the lawn and tottering after it with excited shouts. Beneath
+a tree in the clear sunshine a young mother sat sewing. Other men's
+women! Other men's babies! He would have to set out in search of his
+kingdom afresh; all his old quests had been mistaken. But he was older
+now and lame; he lacked the energy for a new journey. It seemed to him
+that he would be alone and unwanted always.</p>
+
+<p>A telegraph-girl was mounting the steps. He heard the bell ring without
+interest. Gazing out, with his back towards Terry, he put to her what he
+intended should be his final question. "You promised him last
+night&mdash;then why did you hurry round to me this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>Her dress rustled and her breathing quickened. "Because&mdash;&mdash;" she
+commenced and failed. He did not turn his head. She tried again in a
+lower voice, "Because I want you to get my promise back."</p>
+
+<p>He swung round and crossed to where she was still sitting. With his
+hands resting lightly on her shoulders, he stared down at her golden
+head. "But, Terry dear, why? Look at me. You must tell me."</p>
+
+<p>She did not look at him. "I'm frightened. Nobody knows as yet; so before
+they know&mdash;&mdash; Oh, Tabs, you're so clever; you can do anything." And then
+she repeated whimperingly, like a child over a broken toy, "I want you
+to get my promise back."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen to me, Terry dearest," he spoke coaxingly, "don't be a baby.
+What is it that you're asking me to do? Is it to see him for you and to
+break the<!-- Page 104 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> news that you've altered your mind over night. You know he'll
+want reasons. What shall I tell&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her head, stretching back her throat so that all her face
+looked up at him. "If you'll still have me&mdash;&mdash;" His hands on her
+shoulders tightened. "Say that you still want me, Tabs." For answer his
+head slowly nodded, but his eyes never left her eyes. "Tell him that I'm
+engaged to you, instead."</p>
+
+<p>In the tumult of surprised desire he bent over her, but he got no
+further, for a tap fell on the panel of the door and the handle turned.
+He drew himself upright quickly and stepped back aloofly. "What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"A telegram, your Lordship." Ann entered. "I told the girl to wait in
+case there was an answer."</p>
+
+<p>He tore it open, glanced through it and handed it to Terry. To Ann he
+said, "There won't be any answer."</p>
+
+<p>Terry read, "<i>Shall be delighted to have you lunch with me to-day Savoy
+Hotel one o'clock. Braithwaite.</i>" She examined the address and looked up
+startled, "But it's to you. It's&mdash;it's as though he knew we were
+together. What made him send it?"</p>
+
+<p>When Tabs answered there was no echo of her excitement in his voice. "I
+wrote him yesterday asking him to call here. Evidently he preferred a
+more public place."</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at him shrewdly. "Why did you write him? You must have done
+that between leaving me and coming to our house to dine. I know it's no
+good my asking you." Her last words were<!-- Page 105 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> more of a question than an
+assertion. "I can see that it's no good my asking you." "No, Terry, it's
+no good. Braithwaite's past is his own secret. But I can pledge you my
+word that it bears no stain."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why shouldn't he&mdash;&mdash;?" She changed her question. "Shall you meet
+him to-day at lunch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Shall you tell him what we've&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not all of it, Terry."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not all of it? Which part are you going to leave out?"</p>
+
+<p>He came again to where she sat and stood gazing down on her. "Terry, why
+do you want me to tell him? Why can't you tell him yourself? It would be
+kinder."</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;&mdash; Oh, Tabs, you do want me, don't you? Because I daren't
+trust myself to see him."</p>
+
+<p>"And so you want me to tell him we're engaged because you daren't trust
+yourself to tell him! Isn't that it?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"And you daren't trust yourself to tell him because the moment you saw
+him you would fall again under his spell?"</p>
+
+<p>This time she didn't nod, but her eyes gave assent.</p>
+
+<p>"And what does that mean, little Terry? Whether you call it love or
+fascination, it means that even though you do not see him, your heart is
+his at present. It means that against your will he's infinitely more to
+you than I am. It means that you<!-- Page 106 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> only ask me to become engaged to you
+in order that you may be strong to break his spell. It doesn't mean that
+I will be anything more to you to-morrow than I was last night, when you
+gave him your pledge."</p>
+
+<p>She tried to speak, but he halted her words. "I'm older than you are.
+Have you thought of that? I'm not the man I was; I'm lame. You can like
+me as a friend and believe me indispensable; but, if I were your
+husband, fifteen years from now when you're only the age I am to-day&mdash;&mdash;
+Have you considered that? My dear, I love you so well, that I'll never
+let you tie yourself to me, till you're as certain that you can't risk
+meeting me without loving me as you're certain at this moment that you
+daren't risk meeting this other man. When you can do that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The tenderness in his eyes hurt her. "Directly I can do that, I'll tell
+you, Tabs. And&mdash;and I believe I could almost tell you now."</p>
+
+<p>"If you can now," he said, "there's a test. Will you take my place at
+lunch and tell Braithwaite?"</p>
+
+<p>She shrank, and tried to smile, and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it'll be I who'll have to do it." He tried to assume a cheerful
+manner. "But I can't give him your reason about being engaged to me. If
+it were true, which it isn't, it wouldn't be generous. If I carry any
+message, the only honorable thing for me to do is to inform him of
+everything."</p>
+
+<p>"Of everything?" she questioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of everything. I must tell him where the<!-- Page 107 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> trouble lies and give
+him his chance to be frank with you. Only when that is done, shall I be
+free to do my utmost to win you for myself."</p>
+
+<p>She took his hands and drew herself up to him. "Do what you like, Tabs.
+As long as I know that I've not lost you," her voice became small and
+almost happy, "I'm content."</p>
+
+<p>She was tiptoeing against him. The next thing he knew he was kissing her
+warm red mouth.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>She was gone. He had watched her from the steps until she had reached
+the end of the Square where the swirl of passing traffic had engulfed
+her. At the last moment she had looked back and smiled. For some minutes
+after she had vanished, he had stood there recalling the way in which
+her brave little figure had tripped out of sight among the blustering
+March sunshine and shadows. A child, he thought, impulsive and lacking
+in perspective, with a child's alacrity for drying its tears and
+believing in a future happiness. How would she regard this morning years
+hence in the after-glow of experience? Would she find nothing in its
+calamities but foolishness? And what relation would he himself bear to
+her when she had arrived at that stoical calm?</p>
+
+<p>He re&euml;ntered the house. In the room where they had been together the
+fragrance of her presence still lingered. The chair was pushed back,
+just as she had risen from it to lift her warm, red lips to his. How
+smooth they were! Again like a child's!<!-- Page 108 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> Everything about her was young
+and undeveloped. She had kissed simply and gratefully, with none of the
+blundering, sweet surrender with which a woman clings to her lover. If
+she had ever kissed Braithwaite, she had not kissed him like that.</p>
+
+<p>And then Tabs was overcome with a reluctant remorse, which was tinged
+with a shameful sense of triumph. She had offered him her lips in
+gratitude; they had kindled in him the flames of passion. For the moment
+he had devoured her with kisses&mdash;her eyes, lips, cheeks and hair.</p>
+
+<p>If he were to keep himself in hand, he must fill his days with
+interests&mdash;<i>new</i> interests. He must move among people and normalize
+himself. He must fight against the melancholy of his obsession. His eyes
+chanced to rest on the crumpled sheet of scented note-paper tossed into
+the empty grate. Stooping, he picked it up and smoothed it out. This
+problem of Maisie would at least divert him&mdash;besides, he had promised to
+do what he could for Adair. He noted the Chelsea address and reread the
+contents with its sly humility and hint of coquetry: "I have been given
+to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to make my acquaintance.
+If this is so, I shall be at home when you call to-morrow afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>She had been quite certain that he would call when she wrote those
+words. They had all the assurance of one who was fully persuaded of her
+own powers of charm and beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Again, Maisie P.," he apostrophized her, "I'm bound to acknowledge that
+you know more about me than I know about myself. I didn't know that I<!-- Page 109 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+wanted to make your acquaintance at the time when you were writing this
+letter. I was quite sure that I wasn't going to call upon you when I
+read it. In both cases you were the better informed, for I shall be with
+you as soon as I've fulfilled my Savoy engagement."</p>
+
+<p>An hour later, as he was on his way out, he found Ann waiting for him at
+the foot of the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to bother your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"You're not bothering me. What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been thinking that if I wrote the particulars down myself&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The particulars! What particulars?"</p>
+
+<p>"About Braithwaite, sir. There were things you wouldn't know or might
+leave out. So I thought that if I stated my case myself, it might make
+things more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War Office."</p>
+
+<p>"It might. Are those the particulars you have in your hand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. But they're kind of private. I shouldn't like them to be read
+by just anybody. That's why&mdash;&mdash; Perhaps, if your Lordship was seeing
+your friend&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"As it happens," Tabs spoke with a careless air, "I shall be lunching
+with him to-day. I can deliver your letter direct."</p>
+
+<p>"Your Lordship is very kind."</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the least, Ann. And remember, whatever happens, that Braithwaite
+was brave and he'd expect you to be brave. If you're not&mdash;&mdash; D'you<!-- Page 110 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> know
+what you'll do? Whether he's alive or dead, you'll let him down."</p>
+
+<p>Her head lifted proudly, despite the tears in her eyes. "No fear of
+that, sir. I'll never let my man down."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the way to talk. And don't worry too much. You know the saying
+about night always being blackest at the hour before the dawn? If we'd
+only all believe that and cheer up&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He let himself out. As he walked down the Square he tried to stroll
+jauntily; probably Ann was watching.</p>
+
+<p>"I could do worse than live up to that advice myself," he thought. Then,
+"And so I will, by the Lord Harry."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>As he passed through the doors into the Savoy, he consulted his watch;
+he was five minutes late. He halted in the middle of the foyer, gazing
+round. There was the usual collection of officers on leave or out of
+hospital, British, Overseas, American, all of them out for a good time
+and debonair. There were the usual rows of expectant girls, wondering
+whether their men had forgotten the appointment or whether the fault was
+theirs in mistaking the place of rendezvous. Here and there through the
+crowd worried and assertive literary individuals wandered, searching for
+invariably unpunctual publishers. As though Time pressed behind them
+with his scythe, hatchet-faced journalists from Fleet Street were making
+a bee-line for the restaurant. In<!-- Page 111 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> contrast to this perfervid haste,
+self-possessed young queens of the footlights lolled with their
+admirers, importantly believing they were recognized. All the medley of
+London as it used to be, is and will be again, was there; but nowhere
+could Tabs descry a General's uniform.</p>
+
+<p>He went to the desk to enquire whether there was any message for him. At
+mention of the General his enquiry was received with marked respect.
+Yes, General Braithwaite lived there. No message had been left, but he
+might be in his room. While they were telephoning and he was waiting,
+Tabs remembered and smiled at remembering. Under quite other
+circumstances, on a former occasion, he and Braithwaite had stayed there
+together. The clerk interrupted his reflections. "The General's not in
+his room&mdash;&mdash; Ah, here he comes, your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs turned quickly and looked in vain at first. He did not become aware
+of his host till he was standing almost at his elbow. Then he held out
+his hand, "How are you, General? You must pardon me for not having
+picked you out at once. Like all of us, you look different in mufti."</p>
+
+<p>"More like the old Braithwaite your Lordship used to know?" The General
+smiled. "Well, I have to thank that experience for this at least&mdash;that I
+know where to find the proper tailors. How about lunch? Are you ready?"</p>
+
+<p>Against a window looking out on the Embankment, one of the best tables
+had been reserved&mdash;a further proof of the new esteem in which
+Braithwaite was held. The head-waiter hurried up im<!-- Page 112 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>mediately to advise
+what he should eat and passed on his orders to subordinates with as much
+solemnity as if they had been the details for an offensive. "Yes, my
+General." "No, my General." When everything had been chosen and there
+was nothing to do but wait for the first dish to be served, Braithwaite
+leaned across to Tabs, "Your Lordship is amused. I don't blame you."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs drew out his case and offered him a cigarette. "I'll make a bargain
+with you, sir. Let's cut out the unfriendly formalities. I'll call you
+Braithwaite if you'll call me Taborley."</p>
+
+<p>The General blew a puff of smoke into the air and watched it disappear
+before he answered. In civilian clothes he bore a more distinct
+resemblance to the man he had been; and yet the resemblance only served
+to emphasize the change that had taken place in him. The old Braithwaite
+had been a slight-built, gentle creature, loyal to the point of
+self-effacement, soft-spoken and dependent on the appreciation of a
+master for his happiness. The new Braithwaite both in body and character
+had hardened. His gray eyes had concentrated into command. His
+clean-shaven cheeks and small military mustache gave him an expression
+which was tolerantly ironic. The moment you saw him, you knew beyond
+question that he was ruthlessly aware of what he wanted out of life. He
+was a sword which had lain hidden in its scabbard and was now withdrawn,
+glistening, intimidating and fiercely pointed.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs compared his forceful appearance with his own, where in a mirror
+their reflections sat facing<!-- Page 113 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> each other. There was little to choose
+between them in outward gentility, despite the immense disparity of
+their chances. There was no fault to find; everything about Braithwaite
+bespoke confidence and refinement&mdash;his neatly brushed chestnut hair, his
+well-cut gray tweeds, his black, woven tie with the horse-shoe scarf-pin
+of diamonds, his fine white teeth, his trim mustache. He looked a man of
+iron will and unswerving decision, destined from birth to take control
+of crises and to shoulder responsibilities. As a last humanizing touch,
+there was a hint of cavalier devilment about him, of the gambler who was
+also a sportsman.</p>
+
+<p>The puff of smoke had faded. The General's eyes came back with a twinkle
+to his guest. "You're right. Between us this 'Your Lordship and General'
+business would grow tiresome. I never thought the day would come when
+I'd call you Taborley, however. As for myself, plain Braithwaite's a
+little reminiscent&mdash;&mdash; Still, we'll consider that part of our compact
+settled. And now, what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do we need to hurry matters?" Tabs questioned. "This isn't a military
+court of enquiry. It wasn't my idea to meet you as though we were
+maintaining an armed neutrality. We&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But aren't we?" Braithwaite interposed with an air of amused
+good-humor. Then he lowered his voice, "When you parted from me I was
+your valet. You didn't hear from me for the best part of four years and
+believed me dead. You came back to find that I was your superior officer
+and had tangled things up for you pretty badly. You've threatened<!-- Page 114 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> me
+with your knowledge of a previous love-affair and you have it in your
+power to tangle up my future in return. Under the circumstances what
+else is possible but an armed neutrality?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me state the case from another and, I think, a juster angle." Tabs
+paused to knock the ash from his cigarette. "Before the war you were my
+valet whom I had always treated as my friend. I believe at that time, if
+it had come to the show down, you were the man who was closest to my
+affections and whom I trusted most in all the world. I'm trying to speak
+soberly, Braithwaite, without any color of exaggeration. We'd been in
+many tight corners together&mdash;perhaps the tightest was when they tried to
+execute us in Mexico. Anyway, we'd always played the game by each other.
+In 1914 we both joined in the ranks; in 1918 you finished up as a
+General, while I was a first lieutenant. There's only one way to account
+for that: up to 1914 you'd never had your chance; when your chance came,
+you proved yourself the better man. In a way, though it's difficult for
+me to confess it, I can understand and sympathize with Terry's
+preference. Women admire bravery and merit. Ann and I admired them in
+you; we knew they were there before the war made them public."</p>
+
+<p>He took a breath while he watched what effect the mention of Ann's name
+had had. The General's expression from being interested and generous had
+grown suddenly obstinate and set. Tabs hurried on. "So I can understand
+Terry's preference. And yet, as you've owned, despite your advantages, I
+hold<!-- Page 115 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> the winning card. I can joker all your aces by telling&mdash;well, the
+things to which you have referred." He leant forward across the table.
+"I don't want to have to tell. To do that I should have to make myself
+still more inferior to you than you have proved me to be in the hardest
+of all tests. There's only one occasion that would compel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And that?" the General enquired coldly.</p>
+
+<p>Before Tabs could answer, a Major in the Guards who was passing had
+halted. "Hullo, sir!" he exclaimed, addressing Braithwaite. "I was
+intending to hunt you up. I've heard a rumor about your transferring to
+the Regulars. Why don't you have a shot at my outfit?"</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite introduced Lord Taborley perfunctorily, then returned to his
+friend's question. "A shot at your outfit! It's too expensive. I've got
+to make money. Besides, to become a Regular I'd have to sink my rank and
+live on my pay at that. I can't afford it. To tell the truth, I'm
+already out of the Army. I handed over the keys of my desk at the War
+Office this morning. That phase is ended."</p>
+
+<p>"You did! Well, if you've got something better&mdash;&mdash;" The Guardsman nodded
+assent to a signaled question from a companion at another table. "Don't
+lose touch with your old set, sir," he added cheerfully as he moved
+away. "Send us the map-location of your next dug-out."</p>
+
+<p>The lunch arrived. Dishes were obsequiously offered for inspection and
+approval. While the meal was being served, there was no opportunity for
+private conversation. Tabs was pondering one fact<!-- Page 116 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> which he had
+overheard. "So, he, too, was demobbed yesterday! That's why he took his
+last chance to become engaged. The glamour of a uniform&mdash;&mdash; And to-day
+he's back where he started. Poor chap!"</p>
+
+<p>The over-zealous waiter had at last moved out of range. Braithwaite
+lifted up his dagger gaze. "And what is that occasion&mdash;the one occasion
+which would compel you to publish my past? Perhaps I can save you the
+trouble of putting it into words. You mean if I dared to become engaged
+to Terry Beddow? I am engaged to her. I dared last night; so I must
+leave you to do your worst."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled with quiet triumph; gradually his smile faded into puzzlement.
+"You don't seem surprised."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not," said Tabs. "Why should I be? I myself supposed, that I was
+engaged to her last night."</p>
+
+<p>It was Braithwaite who showed amazement. "You! Last night!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I, last night."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite set down his knife and fork. The bleak look came into his
+eyes that had given him the nickname at the Front of "Steely Jack." He
+was silent for a full five seconds; then he said, "Lord Taborley, you're
+a man of your word, but I find it difficult to believe that."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs' voice was both quiet and kindly when he replied, "You'll find it
+difficult to believe a good many things before I've ended. Evidently
+Terry never told you that for over four years she and I had had an
+understanding that, when peace came, if I survived, we would be married.
+Last night, while you were proposing to her, I was asking her father's<!-- Page 117 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+consent. While I was gaining his consent, you were being accepted."</p>
+
+<p>The blank look of astonishment which had overspread the General's face,
+quickly gave way to one of generous compassion. "On my word of honor,
+Lord Taborley, I never knew that. I thought&mdash;please forgive me&mdash;that you
+were interfering merely out of snobbishness. I ought to have known
+better. All my dealings with you should have&mdash;&mdash; I begin to understand."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs' old sense of friendship for the man&mdash;his man&mdash;was coming back.
+"You begin," he said, "but you don't fully understand. You and I have to
+come down to earth. Not unnaturally up till now you've chosen to treat
+me as an enemy. Perhaps I was when I sent you those two letters
+yesterday. But I'm not now. I, too, am learning. There was a coster who
+let me off arrest. Did I tell you about him? I forget. The reason he
+gave taught me a lot, 'You and me was pals out there.' And you and I
+were pals out there, Braithwaite&mdash;not master and man or junior and
+senior officer. It would be a burning shame if, now that the war's
+ended, we should fall to squabbling among ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet the fact remains," said Braithwaite, "that I, who used to be
+your servant, have cut you out of Terry. How are we going to remain pals
+in a case like that?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs flinched at the bluntness of the words, "cut you out of Terry." For
+a moment he felt inclined to say right out, "You're mistaken. She's sent
+me to get her promise back." Instead he said, "How<!-- Page 118 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> are we going to
+remain pals! That's what I'm here to talk about. I've made up my mind
+how I'm going to act. It's about you that I'm concerned. I'm jealous for
+you, Braithwaite. I'm proud of the fact that, whatever you are to-day,
+you were once my man&mdash;my man in the old clan sense. I want to see you
+carry yourself as bravely in your new fight as you did in the one that's
+ended. I think of the two this peace fight will be the more difficult
+test, especially for men like yourself. I lost caste during the war,
+while for you it proved a social opportunity. Now that we're back at
+peace, the process is likely to be reversed. The qualities which gave
+you high rank in a world at war won't fetch the same market value.
+You'll have to fight afresh&mdash;only this time it'll be against the
+temptation to sink below your own high standards through bitterness. In
+a General's uniform you could go anywhere. It was your passport. No one
+made enquiries. Once you're demobilized, the world asks for other
+credentials&mdash;credentials as to your profession, bank-account, friends,
+birth. What I'm trying to say is this: there's nothing dishonorable in
+your past save your own assumption that it was dishonorable. And I want
+to assure you that it isn't my purpose to drag you down. I couldn't.
+There's only one man who can do that&mdash;yourself. But <i>you</i> can drag
+yourself below anything that you were if you go on refusing to play
+fair."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite's face went white beneath its tan. He fell to stroking his
+mustache. "You take a lot upon<!-- Page 119 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> yourself. It's the first time that I've
+ever been accused of not playing fair."</p>
+
+<p>"But <i>I</i> accuse you of it." Tabs spoke with an equal quietness. To any
+one watching they would have appeared to be two handsome men of the
+soldier type engaged in desultory conversation. "I have to accuse you of
+it. I want you to glance through this before you answer me."</p>
+
+<p>He drew from his pocket and passed across the letter which Ann had given
+him that morning&mdash;the letter which, to quote her words, "Might make
+things seem more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War
+Office." It was unaddressed, but as Braithwaite's eye fell on the
+sprawling handwriting of the contents, the deep flush which crept across
+his face betrayed the fact that it was recognized. He commenced to read
+the sheet with a studied carelessness; as he proceeded, the carelessness
+gave way to a troubled frown. For some time after he had finished, he
+sat motionless. When he looked up, his mood was contemptuous. "So this
+is your price?"</p>
+
+<p>"No price was mentioned."</p>
+
+<p>"But it was implied. You tell me that, at the time that I was being
+accepted, you yourself were hoping to be engaged to Miss Beddow; then
+you hand me this letter. What do you suppose I infer? What would any man
+infer? That your promise to keep my existence a secret from Ann is
+conditional on the breaking of my engagement with Miss Beddow."</p>
+
+<p>"Handing you Ann's letter wouldn't do that. Your engagement with Miss
+Beddow is already broken."<!-- Page 120 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite jerked his chair back and stared. Then the audacity of such
+an assertion touched his sense of humor. He fell to laughing. "That at
+least is an invention."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs showed no resentment. There was something disturbingly convincing
+about his self-possession. "Didn't I tell you," he asked patiently,
+"that you'd find it difficult to believe a good many things before I had
+ended? I had an appointment to see Miss Beddow at her father's house
+this morning at eleven. Before I'd finished breakfast she was visiting
+me instead. She had called to make two requests: that I would see you
+to-day and get her promise back, and that I'd become engaged to her
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite lurched forward, folding his arms on the table. His voice
+was thick with passion when he spoke. "What you tell me sounds mad; but
+you'd gain nothing by telling it if it were not true."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," Tabs confirmed.</p>
+
+<p>"No, nothing. If it weren't true, I could go to the telephone and
+disprove your falsehood inside of ten minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"You could."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it is true&mdash;which means that you've ousted me. And that's why you
+can afford to be so calm and Christ-like. I've been wondering how you'd
+contrived this Galilean display of charity."</p>
+
+<p>"You've not heard me out." Tabs still spoke with friendliness. "While we
+were together your telegram arrived and I agreed to be the bearer of her
+message. But as for her second request, that I should become engaged to
+her, I refused that point-blank."<!-- Page 121 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You what?" The anger cleared from Braithwaite's face, leaving the
+chalky mask of a tragic harlequin. When he spoke again it was humbly.
+"You can't blame me for not believing you. You jump about. You say
+several things which seem to point to a definite conclusion and then at
+the last moment you change it. I don't know whether you do it to amuse
+yourself at my expense or whether it's merely the way your mind works.
+At any rate, it's cruel&mdash;this cat and mouse game. I wish you'd be
+direct."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I wish to be. You could help me if you'd ask questions."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite sighed, wearied beyond endurance. He was becoming less like
+the General and more like the old dependent Braithwaite every second.
+"You wanted to marry her last night, only to find she'd promised herself
+to me already. Then she comes to you this morning, offering herself, and
+you refuse her. That doesn't make sense. Why did you refuse her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if I'd taken her at her word, I shouldn't have been playing
+fair."</p>
+
+<p>At the recurrence of that phrase "playing fair," a momentary annoyance
+crept into Braithwaite's eyes. "I've always heard," he commenced, "that
+in love and war&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Everything's fair," Tabs ended his quotation. "Well, in this case, it
+isn't. It was because she realized, after she'd promised herself to you,
+that in love everything isn't fair, that she asked me to get her promise
+back."<!-- Page 122 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You mean as regards yourself? She'd begun to feel that she wasn't
+treating you handsomely?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean as regards myself. You were the cause of her change of
+mind."</p>
+
+<p>"I!" Braithwaite's bewilderment made him hostile. "How could I have
+caused her to change her mind? I parted with her after midnight; it must
+have been shortly after nine that she was seeing you. I held no
+communication with her in any shape or form during the eight or nine
+hours that elapsed."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, you were the cause. She realized in the meanwhile that in
+love everything isn't fair. It isn't fair to ignore a young girl's
+happiness in order to win her hand. You had done that; though she has no
+proofs, instinctively she feels it."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite shook his head and thrust himself back with the gesture of a
+man whose patience is completely at an end. "I haven't the vaguest idea
+what you're hinting at."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll be brutally explicit. You've at no time told her who you were
+or where you came from before you made a name for yourself. You've
+evaded all her questions. You told a palpable falsehood in her presence
+when you insisted that you had never known me. You're perfectly aware
+that, if you approached her father, all the facts about your past, which
+you're suppressing, would most certainly come out. Your courting has
+been clandestine, behind the back of her family. It seems perfectly
+obvious that you're trying to lure her into a runaway match. She has
+grounds for believing that you do not trust her and, because of that,
+although you fascinate her,<!-- Page 123 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> she finds it impossible to trust you in
+return. She trusts you so little that she did not dare to risk facing
+you and sent me in her stead. She's so sure that a marriage with you
+would be unfortunate that, in order to save herself from it, she's
+willing to become engaged to me, whom she loves only as a friend. You'll
+wonder why I tell you all this. It's because I want her to be happy. If
+you really are the man for her, she must have you. But you'll never have
+the remotest chance of winning her unless you make a clean breast&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If I did my chances would be at an end."</p>
+
+<p>"If you believe that," Tabs sought for the most lenient words, "you know
+what you're doing. You'd despise to cheat at cards, but you don't mind
+cheating the woman whom you profess to love best.&mdash;And then there's
+Ann."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd rather not discuss Ann." The abrupt pain in Braithwaite's tone
+betrayed the grumbling ache of an old wound. "I think even you will
+grant that there are some things in a man's heart which are privately
+sacred. Ann lies entirely outside the bounds of all justifiable
+interference on your part."</p>
+
+<p>It took an effort for Tabs to bring himself to break down the barrier of
+reticence which this depth of feeling had imposed. "I'm sorry, General,
+but I can't agree with you." He waited for the expected protest. When it
+did not come, he carried on reluctantly, "I have a high regard for Ann.
+She's one of my household and that makes me responsible for her to an
+extent. I can't allow her to be tortured any longer with suspense&mdash;she's
+had more than three<!-- Page 124 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> years of this horrid nightmare, hovering between
+hope and dread. Every day of the three years has been unnecessary.
+Whether you break or keep your promise to her is your concern. Whether
+she takes action against you when she knows the truth, is hers. But she
+has the right to know. To see that she knows comes within the bounds of
+any decent man's justifiable interference. One of us must tell her; the
+news would come with less grace from myself. But for you to wriggle out
+of your dilemma with silence, while she goes on breaking her heart, is
+cowardly&mdash;just as cowardly as if you'd deserted in the face of the
+enemy. I've no doubt you've sentenced more than one poor wretch to be
+shot at sunrise for doing that."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs pulled out his watch. He had said everything. So far as he was
+concerned the conversation was at an end. It was nearly three o'clock.
+Time had traveled quickly. He was surprised at the lateness of the hour.
+Now that his intentness was relaxed, he let his gaze wander. The room
+was nearly empty. Most of the gay little ladies who had chattered across
+the tables to their recently recovered lovers or husbands, had tripped
+away to continue their spree of celebration at a matin&eacute;e or in an orgy
+of shopping. Those who were left were putting on their wraps or sipping
+the last of their coffee under the reproachful eyes of waiters. Across
+the window in a brown-gray streak flowed the wind-flecked highway of the
+Thames.</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite beckoned for his bill. After the humiliation of what had
+been said it irked Tabs to<!-- Page 125 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> have to see him pay it. The trend of the
+conversation had helped to strip him of the arrogance of his military
+honors. The mercenary subserviency of the man who handed him his
+account, seemed to arouse him to the landslide that had taken place in
+his self-esteem. He made a conscious effort to pull himself together.
+While he waited for his change, he broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you meant well by coming here. It would be foolish for me to
+pretend that I'm altogether grateful&mdash;grateful for your way of
+expressing most of the things that we've discussed together. At the same
+time, Lord Taborley, I owe you an apology if at any point I've misjudged
+your intentions. As regards Ann, you err in justice when you hold me
+accountable for all the causes of her tragedy. Both she and I, and Miss
+Beddow for the matter of that, are the victims of circumstances. It's
+scarcely my fault that I've outgrown Ann; I'm no more to blame for that
+than Terry is for having fallen in love with a man who was your servant.
+<i>I</i> didn't make the war. <i>I</i> didn't promote myself from a valet to a
+General. <i>I</i> didn't even consciously allure Terry. She fascinates me as
+much as I fascinate her: I fought against her fascination at first.&mdash;But
+to get back to Ann, I let her slip out of my life because I wanted to
+spare her. I thought it would be easier for her to believe me dead than
+to be told that she was&mdash;was discarded. I couldn't be expected to
+foresee that she would display this awkward loyalty of hoping. I didn't
+know what had happened to her. She's a good-looking girl; I'd pictured
+her as mar<!-- Page 126 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>ried to a man of her own class, until you flung this
+bombshell at me. I'm not callous. Don't misapprehend me. I can still
+think of her with tenderness. But as for ever treating her again as my
+equal&mdash;&mdash; It would be as impossible for me to resume the old relations
+with her as it would be for your Lordship to commence them." He waited
+for some word of criticism or encouragement. When Tabs only nodded
+non-committally, he proceeded more slowly. "I don't know what I'm going
+to do. I'm fully aware, now that the war is ended, that as a has-been
+General who rose from the ranks, I have no marketable value. I have no
+specialized training to offer to a commercial world which calls for
+experts. The only knowledge that I have to sell is the old knowledge
+that you used to purchase. My house of cards has collapsed. To be
+unwisely frank, my financial resources are limited to little more than
+my war-gratuity."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you're anxious to marry Terry," Tabs suggested; "to marry her
+without letting her know about any of these handicaps of which she would
+have to share the penalty."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite's head went up with a soldierly jerk. The bleak look came
+into his eyes. He was "Steely Jack" at that moment. "I have the
+confidence to believe," he said proudly, "that I shall go as far in
+peace as I did in war. Never to own that you're beaten, never to squeal
+when you're hurt, never to retreat from a position when once it has been
+captured must count back here for as much as it did out there. In France
+I had the reputation for never losing an inch of trench. I don't intend
+to lose an<!-- Page 127 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> inch of trench now. My back is to the wall. For the present
+I can't afford to do anything gratuitously charitable; by the smallest
+waste of energy I may defeat myself. To hold any correspondence with Ann
+at this moment might mean the slamming in my own face of every door of
+opportunity. I'll do my stretcher-bearing when I've won; not a second
+before."</p>
+
+<p>Against his will, while he listened, the unscrupulous valor of the man
+stirred Tabs to admiration. Only the after-event could prove whether
+this verbal display of fireworks was only bombast. "And so that's your
+ultimatum?" he asked with disquieting sanity.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if that's what you call it."</p>
+
+<p>The waiter had returned with the receipted bill. Braithwaite was picking
+up the change. Not looking at Tabs he said, "A few minutes ago you were
+consulting your watch. I believe you have an engagement."</p>
+
+<p>"I have. But if we can arrive at any more definite conclusion by talking
+longer, I'll skip it. It's of no importance."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite glanced up. "Not to you, perhaps; but it may be to her."</p>
+
+<p>With that he commenced to lead the way out, choosing a winding path
+through the maze of tables. Not until they were traversing the great
+gold and crimson lounge, with its ornate furnishings, did Tabs catch up
+with him to ask his question. "How did you know about my engagement and
+whether it was important or not?"<!-- Page 128 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite answered carelessly, "It's with Maisie, isn't it? I heard
+Terry suggest to her that she should make it. She's a nice little woman.
+I shouldn't like to be the cause of her disappointment. She was looking
+forward&mdash;&mdash;" The rest was lost as a flunkey requested the registered
+number of whatever Tabs had left in the cloak-room.</p>
+
+<p>While they waited for the hat and cane to be produced, Tabs made a last
+attempt to persuade the General to commit himself to some promised
+course of action. "No one would be more pleased to see you succeed than
+myself. I'm not trying to hamper you. Neither is Terry; but she insists
+that unless things are to terminate between you, she must know the
+truth. Frankness with Terry necessitates frankness with Ann. You'll
+never succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your
+honor solvent. Ann's beneath you, you say&mdash;that's why you've outgrown
+her. It's not my business to dispute the fact. I didn't want to
+introduce the class view of things; but, by the same showing, you're
+beneath Terry. She's young to-day: through a lifetime she might outgrow
+<i>you</i>. She's as much your social superior as you claim to be Ann's.
+You've discarded Ann on the ground of inequality of rank. In your case
+Terry's family have a perfect right to raise the same objection."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all." The answer came like the crack of a whip. Braithwaite drew
+himself up with the pride of one who had moved men like pawns across the
+checker-board of life and death. "The two cases afford no parallel. Ann
+and Terry have remained<!-- Page 129 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> in the social stations to which they were born,
+while I&mdash;I stand outside all such ready-made, rule of thumb
+classifications. By sheer impetus of personality I have lifted myself
+out of the rut, so that not even you, with all your omniscience, dare
+prophesy how far I am going or where I shall end."</p>
+
+<p>It was plain that further talk would be useless. "I'm afraid I must be
+going," Tabs said. "I wish you very good luck. I hope we part friends.
+And of course you understand that I now consider myself entirely free to
+do my utmost to win Terry for myself."</p>
+
+<p>He extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to take it. He held
+himself erect as if prepared for an affront. His tones were icy when he
+spoke. "Before I shake hands with you, Lord Taborley, I have to know
+what you mean by your utmost. With so many playing-cards out against me,
+I don't stand the ghost of a show unless&mdash;&mdash; Perhaps I have no right to
+expect it; I never asked quarter from any man. I was going to say,
+unless you intend to be gallant&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs pocketed his hand and turned to limp into the sunlit thunder of the
+Strand. "The merciful receive mercy, General. Perhaps we shall shake
+hands some other day. How gallant I am depends entirely upon yourself."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>He emerged into the swollen thoroughfare, where the traffic roared and
+jostled like a torrent through a mountain gorge towards the broader
+freedom of<!-- Page 130 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> Trafalgar Square. He turned westward, walking swiftly for
+the first hundred yards, rather fearing that he might be followed. Then
+he slowed down; swift walking made his limp too painfully obvious.</p>
+
+<p>He was dissatisfied with both himself and Braithwaite. He felt as though
+he had gone to meet some one in a wood and had heard only the muttering
+of a voice and the rustle of retreating footsteps. "If I had only seen
+his face," he thought.</p>
+
+<p>In recalling Braithwaite, he found himself picturing two persons, of
+both of whom he had had separate and distinct glimpses: the one the
+loyal man, who in years gone by had served him faithfully and shared so
+many of his adventures; the other the arrogant, red-tabbed superior, who
+had stolen his happiness without warning. It was impossible to resolve
+the two into one. The first he still regarded with affection. The
+second&mdash;&mdash; He had never allowed himself to hate any one. Hatred he held
+to be back of breeding&mdash;a weak man's subterfuge for acknowledging
+self-distrust. Because he had come so near to hating, he accused himself
+of censoriousness. "If I had only seen his face&mdash;the real man beneath
+the pretense&mdash;I might have understood and helped him," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<img src="images/illus02.jpg" alt="hands"  />
+<a id="illus02" name="illus02"></a>
+</p>
+<p class='center'> <i>Tabs extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to
+take it.</i></p>
+
+<p>And now he was going to a fresh encounter where even more sympathy would
+be required. It would be easy to condemn Maisie P. Lockwood. On a
+superficial judgment she merited nothing else. Three husbands in four
+and a half years, plus a risky flirtation with a married man were not
+the credentials of an honorable character. If he followed the ad<!-- Page 131 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>vice
+of Sir Tobias Beddow, he would seek to assess her price at once. But he
+had never been accustomed to regard women in that light&mdash;as a sex whose
+virtue could be inflated or depressed by the increase or shrinkage of a
+balance at the bank. Actually he knew very little about women; riding as
+a knight-errant, with the wonder in his eyes of the mystery that might
+surprise him round the luck of any corner, he had never given himself
+much time to learn. His ideas about women were Tennysonian. He liked to
+believe that they were free from temptations, more true in their
+emotions, more generous in their affections, more unerring and unstained
+than men. He extended to them all the reverent tenderness with which he
+regarded his mothers memory. In this he saw nothing quixotic; to him the
+most hoydenish girl was a potential mother, whose body possessed a
+sacredness quite apart from herself as a slim, adventurous ark which
+would bear the future of the race across the deluge of the ages. He
+knew, as a matter of fact, that all women were invariably neither saints
+nor angels; but he clung to his chivalrous superstition as a man prays,
+though he receives no answers to his prayers. To the recorded cynicism
+of experimenters in temptation he flung back the challenge of a sadder
+cynic, "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the
+stars."</p>
+
+<p>So in this matter of Maisie, he argued, she couldn't be as shallow as
+her history would indicate. She was Terry's friend; that, in itself, was
+a proof of goodness. Terry had been so anxious for him to meet and
+comprehend her that she had gone behind<!-- Page 132 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> his back to prompt the
+appointment. Well, he would make a better job of this second interview
+than he had of the one that was just ended. He must approach it, at any
+rate, without prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>While thinking these thoughts he reached Charing Cross. Already he was
+weary with so small an exertion. He halted, debating whether he should
+struggle further. Then he became aware of wounded Tommies, chiefly
+Overseas troops, Canadians and Australians, who from their first landing
+in England had chosen this quarter of a mile as their happy
+hunting-ground. They stood propped up against the pavement; they sat
+among the pigeons on the parapets of Trafalgar Square. They were
+laughing and chaffing, those one-legged, one-armed, derelict crusaders
+in their atrocious hospital uniforms. They were thousands of miles from
+their one and only woman; but their drawn faces grinned cheerfully and
+their jaws were squared in the old, invincible, obstinate determination
+never to admit they were down-hearted. The sight of them filled him with
+strength. Though he saw them only fugitively through gaps in the tide of
+traffic, he felt their companionship. He would always feel it&mdash;the fine,
+shared courage of men out of sight, who had adventured for an ideal as
+his companions.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the top of Whitehall, passed beneath the Admiralty Arch and
+entered the garnished, graveled, tree-bordered spaciousness of the Mall.
+His old sense returned&mdash;the confidence which the Mall always gave to
+him&mdash;of Empire and world-wideness. As he strolled along, he noticed a
+board which in<!-- Page 133 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>formed the public that, by following a certain path, one
+would arrive at the Passport Office. Hidden in the greenness, set down
+in the bed of an ornamental lake which had been drained when the terror
+of air raids had threatened, he made out a low-built, sprawling shed. It
+was like a glimpse of romance. The path which led to its doorway was the
+first few hundred yards along the road that ran to Rio, Fiji and Tibet.
+One had but to enter and the journey was commenced. The sight reminded
+him of something which he had forgotten; that, though every other
+delight failed, he still possessed the wideness of the world. He could
+sail away. There were islands of the sea&mdash;Stevenson's Samoa, Conrad's
+Malay Archipelago. If people proved disappointing, there were always the
+painted solitudes which human disillusions had not withered and could
+not defile. It was a loophole worth remembering.</p>
+
+<p>Outside Buckingham Palace he made an unpremeditated surrender. A taxi
+was prowling along by the curb as slowly as regulations allowed. He
+raised his stick automatically as he caught the driver's eye. When the
+cab had halted, again he procrastinated with the handle of the door in
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Where to?" the driver enquired for the second time.</p>
+
+<p>"To Brompton Square," he ordered uncertainly.</p>
+
+<p>The cab was already moving when he changed his mind. Standing up and
+leaning out of the window, "No. To Chelsea," he shouted above the
+throbbing of the engine. Then drawing out Maisie's crumpled letter, he
+read from it the address.<!-- Page 134 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_FOURTH" id="CHAPTER_THE_FOURTH"></a>CHAPTER THE FOURTH</h2>
+
+<h4>THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Tabs was not very familiar with Chelsea. He had seen it from the river a
+score of times, red-walled, umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the
+district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had
+been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired
+men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the
+negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she
+must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade
+one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She
+probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, sisterly,
+domestic type. And yet she must be something more than conventional;
+millions of merely conventional women lacked the prowess to anchor only
+one man in all the years of their life, whereas, judging by the Adair
+incident, Maisie had not yet completed her list of husbands. There was
+an undefined danger in coming into contact with such a woman, which lent
+this expedition to Chelsea an atmosphere of adventure.<!-- Page 135 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Did she know for what purpose he was visiting her? If she did, she was a
+bold woman&mdash;a strategist. Her position was strengthened by his coming to
+her in the guise of an invited guest. Then he remembered that he had
+made a bargain with himself to meet her with a mind unclouded by
+prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung
+into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again
+abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted,
+timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts
+between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention
+was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly
+into the spirit of the game&mdash;the littleness and childishness of the
+attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its
+greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which
+glinted at him like spectacles. But there was something that he missed.</p>
+
+<p>The driver had climbed down and was opening the door. "Mulberry Tree
+Court, mister. I forget which number you told me; but there ain't so
+much of it that you're likely to lose yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"But where's the mulberry tree?" Tabs asked. There was in his voice the
+discontent of a disappointed child.</p>
+
+<p>"There never was no mulberry tree," the man replied in all seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if there isn't a mulberry tree," Tabs laughed, "I suppose we must
+make shift to do without it."<!-- Page 136 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The man frowned and justified himself grumblingly. "It ain't my bloomin'
+fault. I've done nothin' with yer bloomin' tree."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose not," said Tabs as if the matter were still in doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling in his pocket he paid what was owing and watched the cab move
+off. Even at this last moment he was half-minded to retreat. What
+business was it of his to interfere in another man's love-affair? He
+looked stealthily round the Court to see if eyes were watching. All the
+windows were empty; nothing stirred. The fact that he was not watched
+reassured him. He glanced at the number on the nearest door, discovered
+in which direction the numbers ran and decided that his must be the
+house conspicuous for its marigold-tinted curtains, standing retiringly
+in the farthest corner.</p>
+
+<p>Once again he hesitated. Should he or should he not? The old
+nursery-rhyme came wandering into his head with its innocent lilt of
+jolliness:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;">
+"Here we go round the mulberry-bush,<br />
+The mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush;<br />
+Here we go round the mulberry-bush,<br />
+So early in the morning."
+</p>
+
+<p>"And so we do," he murmured. "Let's take a chance."</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>The door&mdash;an apple-green door&mdash;was opened by a maid as trim as Ann. Was
+Mrs. Lockwood in? She would enquire. "And your name, please, sir?&mdash;Lord
+Taborley! Certainly."<!-- Page 137 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She left him waiting in the hall, while she went to make her fictional
+enquiries. He was as sure that they were fictional as if he had glanced
+into the room upstairs where Maisie was making a last anxious inspection
+before her mirror. So the pretense was to be that he had called casually
+and had scarcely been expected.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to learn something of Maisie from the appearance of her hall.
+It was speckless. Everything in it shone with intense cleanliness and
+polish. He had noticed the same gleam about the windows, brasses and
+very doorstep before he had entered. He had noticed it again about the
+maid who had admitted him. It sent Maisie up very much in his
+estimation. It almost explained to him how she had managed to get three
+husbands. Men never know why they fall in love with a woman; more often
+than not they mistake tidiness for beauty. "If you can't be beautiful,
+be clean," Maisie's hall seemed to say; "if you can be both, you're
+invincible." Maisie was invincible, as her conquests proved. This first
+glimpse of her belongings showed that she loved cleanliness. By a jump
+in his logic Tabs began to suspect that she must be beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>He had pursued his observations thus far, when he heard a door
+discreetly closed overhead and the starchy rustling of the maid
+returning.</p>
+
+<p>"If your Lordship will step into the drawing-room, Madam will be down in
+a moment."</p>
+
+<p>He found himself in a long artistic room, feminine to a degree,
+exquisitely restful and yet broad-minded with signs of selection and
+travel. It was furnished<!-- Page 138 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> according to no particular period. There was
+an Italian chest of drawers inlaid with ivory, a Dutch marquetry
+secr&eacute;taire, some Louis XVIth chairs, a mirror of old Venetian glass,
+bronzes, snuff-boxes, specimens of china, odd bits of beaten silver,
+knick-knacks of all sorts, lying scattered about with apparent
+carelessness. A fire was burning in the grate. Tea was set out on a
+table beside a companionable couch. Through French windows the smallest
+of gardens shone bravely, a-blow with bulb flowers planted in crevices
+of a rockery, at the foot of which lay an oval pond and a silent
+fountain. As though to emphasize the game of littleness, a toy-boat
+floated on the pond's surface.</p>
+
+<p>"Not the woman I had imagined," was his unspoken thought; "not the wily
+adventuress! But if she's not, then what&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In an attempt to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to inspect the room
+in detail. The first thing he discovered was that all the silver frames,
+which stood about, contained photographs of the same man. It struck him
+as an odd exhibition of faithfulness on the part of a woman who had had
+so many husbands. He counted the photographs; there were no less than
+five of them, recording the same face from varying angles.</p>
+
+<p>"Which of them, is he," he asked himself, "Pollock, Gervis, or Lockwood?
+But he mayn't be any of them. Perhaps he's a possible fourth&mdash;the
+latest. If so, here's hoping, for he shuts out Adair."</p>
+
+<p>He turned towards the couch, intending to sit<!-- Page 139 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> down. As he turned, his
+gaze encountered an oil-painting hanging above the mantelpiece.</p>
+
+<p>"By George! How did I manage to miss that?"</p>
+
+<p>He stared at it with intense interest&mdash;almost with a sense of shock.
+Somewhere&mdash;he could not determine where&mdash;he had seen that face before.</p>
+
+<p>The picture was a half-length portrait of a woman. There was something
+extraordinarily queenly and at the same time patient in her attitude.
+Her hands, which were out of sight, seemed to be folded. She was seated,
+leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face
+appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an
+aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped
+and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat,
+which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls.
+But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the
+rounded strength of her head that gave to her that peculiarly alert
+beauty. Her dark hair was drawn from off her forehead, making clear in
+her features an expression of calm challenge. She was a woman who had
+lived and not always happily. Her calmness was the quiet of almost
+painful self-control. And her age&mdash;&mdash; With her atmosphere of experience,
+it was certainly over thirty. She was not the woman to put back the
+hands of time for any man.</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be of Maisie," he thought, and yet he hoped. "But it can't be
+of her," he insisted. "This woman is remote and uncapturable. She's done
+with passion. She's tasted life to the full and the taste<!-- Page 140 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> was bitter.
+She has nothing left but her unquenchable pride, with which she tortures
+herself: her pride not to submit, not to cry out, to stand always at
+bay. That's all she has, unless&mdash;&mdash;" And then, speaking aloud in his
+effort to remember, "I know her. I'm positive. And yet&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The door behind him opened. "This is nice of you, Lord Taborley.&mdash;Ah,
+you were looking at Di! Most men do that when they visit me. I ought to
+be jealous. But a word of warning; looking is as far as any of them
+get."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs found himself shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of
+the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was
+fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her
+credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's
+charm lay in her accessibility&mdash;the genial promise she held out of being
+willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture
+proclaimed her anxiety to find this world a pleasant place&mdash;her
+determination to make it pleasant and to be gay under every
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>She was as little, flawless and gleaming as her house. More than half
+her good looks were due to the immaculate care which she bestowed on her
+body&mdash;the whiteness of her teeth, the fineness of her well-kept hands,
+the brilliant clearness of her complexion, the wavy smoothness of her
+abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone
+and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too
+perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so
+dainty in her<!-- Page 141 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> fragility that one longed and yet scarcely dared to touch
+her.</p>
+
+<p>The moment she had spoken Tabs had recognized that nothing that she had
+done or might do could obscure her atmosphere of breeding. He had met
+men like that, whose sense of race, even when they were at the lowest
+depths, had kept them superior to their environment. A pale woman of
+spun silk and gossamer, with cornflower eyes and lips like parted
+poppy-petals! This woman could be kind to the point of folly&mdash;so kind
+that her folly would appear almost virtue. She was a woman who, though
+she might love too often, would love so much that to her much would
+always be forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>"I must apologize," Tabs spoke gently, "for having been found staring at
+your picture."</p>
+
+<p>He did not know it, but men always spoke gently to Maisie. It was her
+air of trust and helplessness that did it, her tender trick of creating
+in each man the belief that she relied peculiarly on him for
+protection&mdash;all of which was totally at variance with the masterly
+efficiency with which she ran both herself and her house.</p>
+
+<p>"I was staring at your picture," Tabs continued, "because I thought I
+recognized&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I daresay you did," Maisie interrupted. "Though you may not have met
+her, her face is forever in the papers. Among the family she's known as
+the Princess Czarina Bolsheviki&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"She looks it. But is she a princess?"</p>
+
+<p>Maisie laughed. "Not yet, but it won't be her fault if she isn't. It'll
+have to be a prince next time.<!-- Page 142 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> If she marries again, she'll stoop to
+nothing less. Look at the way she carries her head; she almost feels the
+weight of her coronet already. But she says she's had enough of
+marriage. We've all said that. Poor dear Di, she misses a lot of fun by
+her exclusiveness. If I only had half her wealth&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She evidently wanted Tabs to ask her what she would do with it. Her eyes
+grew round with spendthrift promises of jolliness, if ever such wealth
+should come within reach of her tiny, managing hands. She looked as
+mischievously covetous as a magpie while she waited for him to put the
+obvious question.</p>
+
+<p>But Tabs wasn't interested in the obvious. He stuck to his enquiry.
+"What you've told me doesn't help me to recall her," he said. "Who is
+she? It's most annoying to recognize a face and not to be able to place
+it against any background."</p>
+
+<p>Maisie pretended to pout. "You're like all the rest of them; you come to
+see me and do nothing but talk of her. I'd have hidden her in the attic
+long ago, only she's by Sargent. She's too beautiful for hiding, and
+then no one can afford to hide her Sargent under a bushel in these hard
+times."</p>
+
+<p>"And still you've not told me," Tabs reproached her.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't we be more comfortable sitting down?" Maisie slid between the
+couch and the tea-table, making herself comfortable against a pile of
+cushions. When Tabs looked round for a seat, he discovered the strategy
+of the arrangement of the furniture.<!-- Page 143 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> The nearest available chair to
+Maisie was at least four yards away; to have selected it would have been
+to have isolated himself. He would have had to have hailed her
+ridiculously across the room's breadth. It was plainly intended that he
+should challenge fate and share the couch, just as Pollock, Gervis,
+Lockwood, Adair and so many others had done before him.</p>
+
+<p>All this friendliness would make it a little difficult for him presently
+when he broached the subject of Adair. He had an uneasy feeling that Sir
+Tobias wouldn't approve of this way of conducting his mission. It was
+one thing to fly the white flag of truce while you parleyed with the
+enemy; it was quite another to share the same couch with her in a cozy
+room, where there were only the two of you and the jumping flames of the
+fire in the grate made the silver on the small round table glow red.
+When they weren't talking there was no sound. None of the clamor of
+London reached them. They might have been in a cave, far removed from
+everything that disturbed. And, indeed, the little piled-up rockery
+outside the windows, with the spring flowers blowing and the baby lake,
+with the toy-boat drifting on its quiet surface, rather created the
+illusion that this was a cave.</p>
+
+<p>A restful lethargy of kindness was creeping over him. He didn't want to
+be at enmity with anybody, least of all with this dainty sprite of a
+woman with the cornflower eyes and the flaxen hair. He no longer
+wondered that three men in succession, weary of the mud of fighting, had
+come to her for rest. He could<!-- Page 144 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> even comprehend Adair's treachery, if it
+had gone so far as treachery. Adair had found his wife fretful&mdash;she had
+always been crying and hanging round his neck. Here he had found
+companionship, secret laughter and forgetfulness. The world owed any
+woman a large debt of liberty who could give men that. Maisie was the
+kind of woman who could bury twenty husbands and go out next morning to
+meet the twenty-first. What was far more amazing, she could do it
+without frivolity or loss of self-respect. She lived a day at a time.
+She made you feel, the moment you met her, that that was the only
+tolerable way of living. The excuse for her philosophy was its success.
+She was an expert in happiness&mdash;so expert that she could communicate her
+secret without waste of words. Probably for most men words were not
+necessary; for them their happiness was herself.</p>
+
+<p>From her end of the couch Maisie smiled at Tabs dreamily. "You're
+persistent when you want anything. I suppose you always get your
+desires?"</p>
+
+<p>"The little things, yes," he replied. "But the big things&mdash;they evade
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean Terry."</p>
+
+<p>She said it without change of tone or expression, with the same happy
+smile curling up the corners of her uncruel mouth. It was disconcerting
+to have his private humiliations referred to so frankly, as though they
+were fitting subjects for casual conversation. But, after all, he
+reminded himself, his business there was to discuss her equally private
+affairs. He was hardly in a position to resent anything she might say.
+It was a duel, and she had drawn first<!-- Page 145 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> blood. He was quick to see that
+her purpose in introducing Terry was to gain an advantage while she
+postponed the inevitable discussion of Adair.</p>
+
+<p>She didn't give him a chance to reply. "I know all about you and Terry,"
+she continued, "and about Braithwaite, too, for the matter of that.
+Perhaps why Terry evades you is because she isn't one of your really big
+things. You may have mistaken her for a big thing. If she is one of your
+truly big things, you'll get her. You're one of the few men who get all
+that they desire."</p>
+
+<p>It was possible that she was trying to flatter him; nevertheless,
+against his will, the certainty of her way of talking impressed him.
+"What makes you think that I get everything that I desire?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed and snuggled closer into the cushions. "I can't put it into
+words. I just know by looking at you. You have the air."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what makes you say that Terry may not be one of my big things?"</p>
+
+<p>She glanced up at him amused. "I almost made you angry when I said
+that.&mdash;Do you really want to know? I said it because I don't think that
+she is one of your big things and, what's more, you don't think that she
+is either. Now I <i>have</i> made you angry&mdash;&mdash; But you don't&mdash;not the sane
+you, who was and is and will be to-morrow&mdash;the you who'll outlive this
+disappointment."</p>
+
+<p>He was at one and the same time intrigued and offended by the turn the
+conversation had taken. His memory groped back to the first conception
+he had had of this woman&mdash;the woman who tricked mar<!-- Page 146 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>ried men, who used
+scented note-paper, who interpreted thoughts before they were uttered
+and forestalled actions before they had been planned&mdash;the woman whom he
+had been instructed to buy off with a price. What was he doing
+discussing his love-affair with such as her?</p>
+
+<p>His voice was chilling when he spoke. "It's very good of you to take
+such an interest in me. I ought to be gratified that you should think
+you know so much about me, and after so short an acquaintance&mdash;so very
+much more than I know about myself."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't think; I do know far more at this moment than you know
+about yourself." Her tones were calm and lazy, unembarrassed and
+pleasant. The red glow of the fire glinting on the silver tea-service
+seemed the reflection of her cheerfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're so certain that you know, you might tell me," he said
+stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;&mdash; Do you mind if I smoke?" She leant forward while he held a
+match to her cigarette. "I know that you're an intensely lonely man. All
+men have to be lonely till they're thirty if they're going to get
+anywhere. They have no time to spare. You've had no time to spare for
+women&mdash;that's why you don't understand them. Women were for you a treat
+in store, until the war broke. Then suddenly you discovered that you had
+missed the most precious thing in life. You hadn't the time to be wise
+in your choice, so you turned to some one young and accessible. Her
+youth seemed to symbolize all that you coveted at the moment; it
+sym<!-- Page 147 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>bolized going on forever. You weren't really in love with her as an
+individual; you were in love with the thought of love and youth. You
+won't believe it, but almost any young girl who was beautiful and
+willing would have served your purpose. During the terrible years you've
+clothed her with your own idealism. You've told yourself that it was for
+her that you were fighting. You've created in your heart a person she
+never was and hasn't it in her to become. You've thought of her as a
+second you, with <i>your</i> sense of honor, <i>your</i> passion for
+unselfishness, <i>your</i> patience and experience gained through suffering.
+The ideal you've set up for her is contradictory and impossible. Youth
+isn't considerate, experienced, unselfish, patient. For those qualities
+you have to go to the middle years. I know what I'm talking about, for
+I've had three soldier husbands." She said it without self-reproach or
+self-glory&mdash;as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any
+woman. "You've been finding out the kind of girl she really is since
+your return&mdash;the kind of girl who prefers General Braithwaite to
+yourself and can't discriminate between the temporary and the permanent.
+You're disappointed in her. You've discovered already that she isn't the
+woman you thought you were loving. You're now only pretending that you
+still care for her because life would be too empty without your dream
+and because the right woman, for whom you've already renewed your
+search, hasn't yet turned up. Somewhere inside you at this moment your
+sane self is endorsing every word that I'm saying as true."<!-- Page 148 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's not so." His contradiction was spoken fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>"But it is so," the sweet voice persisted. "You yourself have tacitly
+owned it."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>There was the sharpness of alarm in his way of asking. Her assurance had
+startled him out of his brief anger.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed softly. "I think we might have tea; it'll restore our
+serenity. There's nothing like employing your hands when you want to
+keep from losing your temper. A woman learns that, even when she's only
+been married once. When she's been married three times," the cornflower
+eyes became suddenly innocent, "she knows everything.&mdash;Will you touch
+the bell? It'll save me getting up.&mdash;How, you ask. How do I know that
+you've already renewed your searching? To a man who's as head over heels
+in love as you profess to be all women, except the one woman, however
+beautiful, ought to be hanks of hair and bags of bones. I read your
+thoughts when I caught you gazing at my sister's portrait. You were
+saying to yourself, 'What if she's the woman!' And you're even
+sufficiently detached in your affections to acknowledge attraction in a
+horrid little pestering, too-much-married person like myself."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>It was lucky that the maid selected that moment for answering the bell.
+Things were getting uncomfortably personal. Tabs had the idea that
+Maisie<!-- Page 149 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> had been talking against time till she should hear the footsteps
+of her re&euml;nforcements. As the maid entered, she turned towards her with
+the brightness of relief.</p>
+
+<p>"That's splendid of you, Porter. You guessed what we wanted.&mdash;Porter
+always guesses what I want, Lord Taborley; she's my second self. And
+Porter can tell your fortune from the cards&mdash;can't you, Porter? Only she
+never reads the cards on a Sunday; she says it brings bad luck. If you
+come here often, you must try her.&mdash;You might take that dish from
+her.&mdash;Thanks awfully. There's room for it here on this corner of the
+tray."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs smiled inwardly while he did his awkward best to make himself
+useful. He might know very little about women, but he knew intuitively
+quite a lot about this particular woman. He knew that Porter had guessed
+nothing, because nothing had been left to chance. He knew it as surely
+as he had known what Maisie had been doing in front of her mirror while
+he had been kept waiting. He knew that long before his arrival every
+detail of his reception had been prepared and planned, and that Porter
+had been instructed. The whole morning had been spent in dusting,
+sweeping, polishing and making ready the various dishes of dainty cakes
+and neatly-cut sandwiches which were being spread before him. He was
+certain that the kindly patronage of Maisie's way of addressing Porter
+was another part of the conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough it was Porter who made him like and trust her more than
+he had done as yet.<!-- Page 150 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> Porter's eyes, when they rested on her mistress,
+embraced her with a slavish worship; when they rested on him, they
+warned and dared him. He had the feeling that the man who made Maisie
+cry was likely to feel a knife in his back. Maisie must be good to be
+able to call forth such fanatical loyalty from a humble woman. He began
+to be infected by this atmosphere of idolatry. And yet&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>What was Maisie's object in belittling his love for Terry? What did she
+hope to gain by it? He hardly dared allow himself to suspect; thinking
+in her presence was like speaking aloud. She heard unspoken words as
+plainly as those that were uttered. But the suspicion would not be
+suppressed. Had she formed the audacious plan of winning him for
+herself? And this despite her three previous marriages, despite her
+knowledge of why he had visited her, despite his knowledge of Adair!</p>
+
+<p>Quick as a flash her eyes turned on him with a scarcely perceptible
+shake of her head. The door clicked discreetly as Porter left them. It
+was like clearing a ring for the second round. The dangerous intimacy,
+half tender, half inimical, returned.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no harm in being pleasant," her voice was musical and pleading,
+"however unpleasant the circumstances which have thrown us together.
+Taking tea with me doesn't set up any social obligation. You won't have
+to know me again or anything like that. Now that we understand each
+other&mdash;&mdash; How do you like your tea? Is it two lumps?"</p>
+
+<p>With the tongs poised ready to pounce, she waited for him to tell her.
+But he didn't tell her; he smiled<!-- Page 151 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> inscrutably. He wasn't sure at what
+he was smiling. Perhaps it was that he was happy&mdash;happy in a
+worldly-wise fashion that he had never been with Terry. He could say
+anything to this woman and it wouldn't shock her&mdash;there was comfort in
+that.</p>
+
+<p>But she had scared up a doubt in his mind that he might have mistaken
+his kingdom. Perhaps the recovery of youth wasn't everything. There were
+things very precious in themselves, which were well lost under certain
+circumstances. Maisie's youth, for instance. She was far more enchanting
+now than she could ever have been as a girl. In losing her youth she had
+gained in sympathy; it was that that made her understand him so well. In
+a wife you wanted more than youth&mdash;the knowledge of a companion. It
+began to dawn on him that there might be truth in what she had said.
+Perhaps once again she had known him better than he knew himself. He had
+been with her less than an hour. He didn't completely trust her, and yet
+here was this astounding fact: by reason of her experience there were
+things he could say to her that he would never dream of saying to the
+girl whom he believed he loved best. And Adair, he, too&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You hadn't expected that things would be like this," she was saying,
+"just you and I, sitting like old friends and drinking tea together.
+You'd nerved yourself up for a vulgar row. I know&mdash;&mdash; Well, since you
+won't tell me how many lumps, I'll give you two."</p>
+
+<p>As he bent forward to receive the cup, their hands touched. The contact
+was electric. A rush of ex<!-- Page 152 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>cited vitality seemed to pour into his body
+from hers. The touch was only for a second, but it left him startled and
+stark of pretenses. When he sought her eyes, they were calm as ever.
+"You're a most bewildering woman&mdash;the most bewildering I ever met," he
+confessed.</p>
+
+<p>"Except my sister," she corrected.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced up at the portrait and back to her, comparing the features.
+"Yes, I see it now. She is your sister. I ought to have guessed. But I
+haven't met her; so I don't except her."</p>
+
+<p>Maisie busied herself with passing the dishes. She had a way of making
+everything appear conventional by the unruffled quiet with which she
+accepted it. At the back of her mind she seemed to be smiling at the
+domestic scene she had achieved with this man, who should have been her
+enemy.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you haven't met her," she assented. "But until you've met her, you
+won't rest; and after you've met her, you won't rest either.&mdash;And so you
+think I'm bewildering! You thought something else, which you didn't have
+the courage to put into words. Bewildering and dangerous&mdash;the most
+dangerous woman you'd ever met&mdash;that was what you meant."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled with a shade of embarrassment. "I might have called you the
+most disconcerting woman; you're all of that. No man of sense, who
+valued his peace of mind, would tell any woman she was dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why. Why shouldn't he? Do tell me. I shan't be offended."
+She leant forward, ab<!-- Page 153 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>sorbing him with her childish eyes, her lips
+parted with expectancy.</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;&mdash;" Tabs checked himself while he studied the tantalizing
+innocence of her expression. He felt certain that he was going to say
+something irresistibly unwise. To gain time he looked away and commenced
+aimlessly stirring his cup. "Well, if you must have it, because to tell
+a woman that would be to tempt her to be dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>"But I love to be tempted," she said eagerly; "temptation is the yeast
+of life." And then in a whisper, speaking less to him than to herself,
+"A woman knows that she's old when temptation ends."</p>
+
+<p>Like ripples from a stone flung into water the poignancy of what she had
+implied rather than uttered, spread away with a commotion which grew
+ever fainter. They sat without change of posture at either end of the
+couch, she bending towards him, he gazing down into his cup as though by
+staring into it he could retain his grip on the conventions. There was
+no sound, save the rustling of live coals in the grate. Outside the
+window the toy boat floated, a symbol of men's and women's ineffectual
+childishness, always dreaming of adventures on which they never set
+sail. Tabs pondered the hidden profundity of her words. At last he
+believed that through her he understood himself. It wasn't youth that he
+or anybody coveted; it was the more supreme boon of not growing old. He
+had just arrived at this new self-knowledge when she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"To be tempted means that one's wanted&mdash;wanted dreadfully, so that it
+hurts. That's living&mdash;to be<!-- Page 154 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> wanted. Not to be wanted is worse than
+death. When you're dead, you're forgotten and you forget. To be
+forgotten and to remember is the end of all things. Not to be wanted
+when you're alive is to beat your flesh against the walls of a tomb.
+Lord Taborley, I know what you came for." He had set down his cup. She
+covered his bronzed hands with her own passionate white ones,
+overwhelming him with a rush of words. "You came to accuse me, to bribe
+me, to buy me. You didn't want to hear me; I was already condemned. Do
+you think I don't know what's said about my marriages? I know too well.
+But it isn't vanity that makes me want to be loved. It's so right to be
+loved. It isn't wickedness. It's the terror of not being loved&mdash;the same
+terror that makes you cling to Terry though she doesn't want you in
+return&mdash;&mdash; We all want to believe that we're wanted. It's human. Without
+that life's a blank. One can't face up&mdash;&mdash; And I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She tore her hands from him and buried her face, sobbing in the
+cushions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>He had done it. By some unaccountable blunder he had made her cry. What
+was it he had said? Only a minute ago she had been so radiant and
+smiling. His first thought was of Porter; she must not know. This crying
+must be stopped before she heard it. Any moment she might enter. Even
+now she might be listening at the door, preparing to enter.<!-- Page 155 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another conjecture rushed into his mind&mdash;this sobbing might be part of a
+prearranged plan. Tears are the jiu-jitsu of woman's art of
+self-defense. To the world at large the man is always a villain who has
+caused them. "But I didn't cause them," he protested to himself. And
+then, "Dash it all! There's nothing gained by sitting here. I've got to
+do something."</p>
+
+<p>He roused himself and limped round the table to the end of the couch
+against which her face was hidden. He could see nothing but the pale
+gold of her hair, the ivory whiteness of her neck and the pitiful
+heaving of her fascinating shoulders. She looked extraordinarily like a
+doll&mdash;a broken doll which had been allowed to fall through some one's
+carelessness.</p>
+
+<p>"Confound it! What a brute I am!" he muttered. "What the dickens does
+one do with a woman in hysterics?"</p>
+
+<p>He laid his hand very timidly on her silky hair. He had had no idea that
+it was so silky. "Cheer up!" he said softly. And then again, "I do wish
+you'd cheer up."</p>
+
+<p>She took not the slightest notice, save that a small white hand scuttled
+out like a mouse from beneath the cushions and commenced a hurried
+search. He watched it and formed a hasty guess. It couldn't find the
+thing for which it had been sent, so he dropped his own large
+handkerchief in its path, saw it take possession of it and dive again
+beneath the cushions. It made no difference to the sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>What ought he to do? He couldn't endure the<!-- Page 156 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> sound&mdash;it wrenched him. He
+bent over her, trying to turn her obstinately hidden face in his
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>"Maisie!" The word had slipped out. It didn't matter. It mattered so
+little that he repeated the indiscretion. "Maisie, you mustn't break
+your heart like that. No one thinks ill of you and you are wanted.
+You're wanted most awfully. Heaps of people want you."</p>
+
+<p>The shoulders ceased to heave for a fraction of a second, but her face
+still refused to turn. "Who-oo&mdash;who wants me?" Her voice reached him
+choked with tears and muffled.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs frowned. The question was a poser. Who did want her? He was blessed
+if he knew. There must be people who wanted her&mdash;Adair, for instance.
+But the mention of Adair would provide her with a reason for a new
+outburst. There was only one thing to say under the circumstances, so he
+said it. "I do."</p>
+
+<p>She lay so still that she might have been dead. It was frightening, this
+sudden silence after such a storm of emotion. It was so frightening that
+he had to say something more to prove to himself that she could hear.
+"You're beautiful. You're so gay when you're not crying. I don't think
+any man could prevent himself from wanting you." And then desperately,
+in a last effort, "You're most tremendously charming."</p>
+
+<p>Her face never stirred from the cushions, but he was aware that
+surreptitiously his borrowed handkerchief was being employed
+industriously.<!-- Page 157 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had just time to compose his features before a tear-wet eye blinked
+up at him. It was an eye eloquent with gratitude and babyishly blue.
+"You're a dear," a small voice whispered.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>He had been called many things from time to time, but never before "a
+dear." To be called "a dear" by a beautiful woman was an entirely new
+sensation for him. It made him distinctly uncomfortable&mdash;almost ashamed.
+A gift of this sort, even though it hasn't been desired, puts the
+recipient under an obligation. When once a woman has dubbed a man "a
+dear," she expects him to live up to the part she has assigned him. Tabs
+hoped that she hadn't been as sincere as she had sounded.</p>
+
+<p>Taking himself off to the nearest French window, he stood staring out
+morosely&mdash;staring out at the silly little rockery, with the silly little
+pond at the foot of it, containing the silly little boat that never
+sailed anywhere. He was cross with himself and even more cross with her.
+Why couldn't she have behaved sensibly, instead of bursting like a
+rain-cloud without warning? She made mysteries out of everything, out of
+himself, Terry and even her sister's portrait. She never gave him a
+complete answer to any question. She surrounded herself with the
+atmosphere of a detective novel. He was half-minded to rush into the
+hall and make good his escape before she involved him further. Sir
+Tobias could come and conduct his own unpleasantness. How on earth<!-- Page 158 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> was
+he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a
+dear"?</p>
+
+<p>But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a
+quite different emotion&mdash;an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as
+she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It
+was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her
+shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.</p>
+
+<p>He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her
+voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky.
+I'm better now."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded
+towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no
+attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where
+he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever
+happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with
+her.</p>
+
+<p>In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head
+vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even
+when we were children we couldn't make her."</p>
+
+<p>It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was
+intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused
+himself to<!-- Page 159 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't
+so cruel as to try?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across
+to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used
+to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian
+Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when
+we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She
+was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think
+that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to
+him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one
+else has ever succeeded in making her cry."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face&mdash;it was like the
+face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her
+cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind
+of blasphemy."</p>
+
+<p>"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me
+exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that
+tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels
+their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him,
+though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves
+and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it
+down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort
+its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her
+husband. He couldn't drag her<!-- Page 160 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> down. He couldn't find her weakness. She
+was always up there. So he reviled her."</p>
+
+<p>A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's
+breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate
+and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a
+discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Was!</i> Then he's dead?"</p>
+
+<p>She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated
+her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."</p>
+
+<p>"And his name?"</p>
+
+<p>Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown
+woman's face. He <i>had</i> seen it&mdash;of that he was certain. He had the sense
+that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he
+could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she
+asked quickly, "You knew him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Knew him!" Tabs pondered the question. "I'm not sure. But Lady
+Dawn&mdash;I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in
+France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It
+was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She passed me yesterday,
+driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry
+who did that." He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and
+stood gazing level with<!-- Page 161 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke
+wonderingly, "The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is
+Lady Dawn!"</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so
+great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again&mdash;he sat down
+for a second time on the couch beside her.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something wrong," he said quietly. "Either you're misinformed
+or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight."</p>
+
+<p>She made no attempt to conceal her amusement. She attributed his
+seriousness to sudden infatuation&mdash;an infatuation which made him seem
+ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.</p>
+
+<p>"Something wrong!" she echoed mockingly. "If you think that I've
+exaggerated anything that I've told you about&mdash;&mdash;" She glanced up at the
+portrait. "I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm
+her&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean that," he interrupted impatiently. "I was referring to
+Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged
+him."</p>
+
+<p>Maisie laughed. "Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging
+him. He left no room for misjudgment."</p>
+
+<p>"But you said that he had died hating her."</p>
+
+<p>"He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary."</p>
+
+<p>"But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Think that he hated her?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, that he died hating her?"<!-- Page 162 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a
+match. She was getting bored. "Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be
+cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses.
+Some of them were releases. They weren't all&mdash;well, to put it mildly,
+occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to
+whom German shells were merciful&mdash;more merciful than English law. If
+they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom."</p>
+
+<p>As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled.
+He had to steady his passion before he asked his question. "And you
+think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"</p>
+
+<p>Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she
+added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an
+opinion."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone
+when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was
+the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no title; he was a Captain in
+the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozi&egrave;res.&mdash;Ah, I
+see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the
+difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more
+dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the
+regiment."</p>
+
+<p>She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the
+running, doesn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger
+of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his
+mind the<!-- Page 163 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had
+drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies
+against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their
+ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house
+of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd
+been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their
+imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine,
+where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as
+compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they
+were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to
+hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this
+moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while
+living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they
+should not be regretted.</p>
+
+<p>"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."</p>
+
+<p>He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room,
+limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the
+cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the
+running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a
+sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.
+The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the
+finest of battalions."</p>
+
+<p>He became aware that he was frightening her<!-- Page 164 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> and sank his voice. The
+lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.</p>
+
+<p>"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it.
+"Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why
+he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was
+a woman's photograph."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried
+it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He
+pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I
+remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches&mdash;Boche
+trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that
+woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that
+those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort
+to forget. And here you and I sit and talk&mdash;&mdash; Well, as I was saying, we
+couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that
+woman in the world for whom he cared&mdash;for whom he cared right up to the
+last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozi&egrave;res, that he went west.
+He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he
+had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it
+from him."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, suddenly exhausted. His indignation had burnt itself out.
+"I'm tired," he apologized. "I'm afraid I let myself get out of hand. I
+scared you for a moment. I'm sorry. Do you mind if I sit down?"<!-- Page 165 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She pushed the table back to make it easier for him to take a place
+beside her. "It's all right," she consoled him. "I know that you're only
+just out of hospital. Terry told me. You're not really recovered yet.
+Besides, it was my fault; I spoke lightly. I wasn't thinking what I
+said. But I don't feel lightly about these things. I couldn't." Then she
+said something which struck him oddly. "You know my man's out there."</p>
+
+<p>What did she mean by <i>her man</i>? If she had said <i>her men</i>, he could have
+comprehended. She had lost three husbands in the war. But why did she
+particularize and say, "My man"? It seemed cruel to the rest. And which
+of the three was it that she regarded as so peculiarly hers.</p>
+
+<p>He jerked his thoughts back. "There was something you told me about Lord
+Dawn; you said it explained him. How did it go? I think you said that he
+hated his wife as men hate God, because they love Him so much and yet He
+won't come down. Well, out there it wasn't like that. Dawn climbed up to
+her; yes, and perhaps beyond her. Out there he didn't need to pretend to
+hate her; he could afford to love her without loss of self-respect. I
+suppose he thought it was too late to tell her after all that had gone
+before."</p>
+
+<p>"Either that," Maisie assented, "or else&mdash;&mdash; It would be like him. Or
+else because he was too much of a sportsman. As it was, if he were
+killed, she wouldn't need to be sorry. But if he wrote her that he loved
+her and had always loved her, and then got<!-- Page 166 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> killed&mdash;&mdash; Don't you see,
+that's where her remorse would start?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs nodded. "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it.
+It's monstrous that she should go on believing&mdash;&mdash;" He broke off. And
+then, "She must be told. It's merest justice&mdash;whatever it costs."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<p>The light had been failing while they had talked. A tap fell on the
+door. Coming at that moment when their nerves were jangled, it sounded
+ominous. Their heads turned sharply. Maisie's voice was unsteady when
+she asked, "What is it? What do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's Porter, Madam. Dinner is served."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come in, Porter. Have you laid a place for Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>As the maid entered, Tabs rose. "I had no idea&mdash;&mdash; Why, I've been here
+for hours. I really must apologize, Mrs. Lockwood, and be going."</p>
+
+<p>However much his reception had been prearranged, dinner had formed no
+part of the program. The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's
+watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said
+cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying."</p>
+
+<p>As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie
+silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly. "You've talked
+of everything except me," she whispered; "it was about<!-- Page 167 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> me you came to
+talk. You <i>must</i> before we part."</p>
+
+<p>Following her across the hall to the dining-room, he reflected on her
+ability for getting him into deeper and yet deeper water. He had the
+feeling that he was being led somewhere against his will&mdash;somewhere that
+might be for his good or for his harm, but which would inevitably cut
+him off from many of his old affections. He had the discomforting sense
+that he was doing something disloyal to Terry. Heaven knew what promises
+might not be exacted from him before the evening ended. When would it
+end? He would have to stay for at least an hour after coffee&mdash;that would
+bring him to nine o'clock. Sir Tobias Beddow would have been expecting
+him long before that to deliver his account of the result of his
+mission. Furthermore, Sir Tobias would be demanding an explanation as to
+how it was that, having asked for Terry's hand the night before, he was
+still unengaged to her. If he postponed the interview till to-morrow, it
+would create the appearance of lukewarmness. He couldn't very well
+excuse himself by saying that he'd spent the afternoon and evening with
+Maisie. And he couldn't get Maisie to let him off on the plea that Sir
+Tobias, her harshest critic, was waiting for him. Besides, he had
+accomplished nothing as yet; Adair Easterday had not been mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>If ever he made good his escape, he prayed that he might never again
+encounter a woman possessed of charm. His paramount desire was to seize
+his hat and make a furtive exit. There was nothing to prevent him but
+the politeness due from a man to a<!-- Page 168 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> woman&mdash;and she traded on it. As he
+passed into the dining-room he was secretly on his guard. "I wonder what
+she'll do next to inveigle me?" was his thought.</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be only a little dinner," she explained as they seated
+themselves. "You weren't expected. But Porter always has something
+hidden away for an emergency. Don't you, Porter?"</p>
+
+<p>He was getting accustomed to these asides addressed to Porter. He began
+to perceive that Porter had other uses besides gliding round the table
+in a cap and apron. She was a conversational stop-gap when situations
+grew awkward, as they frequently must between an ensnared bachelor and
+an unchaperoned widow.</p>
+
+<p>And she was eligible; he had to own it as they sat down to their first
+meal together. Tea hadn't counted as a meal; you can serve tea to
+anybody. But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring
+dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles.
+Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains,
+revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock
+village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in
+the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the
+fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several
+houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he
+lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out
+life, than waving me farewell." He knew what she was singing then and
+followed the air in his<!-- Page 169 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> imagination. The atmosphere of the room was
+vibrant with romance; all that was lacking was his impulse to be
+romantic.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie was chattering gayly and forestalling his wants. He reserved a
+small portion of his mind for her conversation&mdash;sufficient to enable him
+to reply "Yes" or "No" when the occasion seemed to demand it. It was
+clear to him that it made her happy to have a man so entirely at her
+mercy. She meant immensely well by him. Behind her mist of words she
+seemed to be saying, "Isn't it nice to be just we two together?"</p>
+
+<p>But he was thinking of the other three soldiermen who had played the
+game of being "just we two together" before him. The singing voice,
+drifting through the courtyard, put into words the question of his
+thought, "Where are you now? Where are you now?" Yes, where were they?</p>
+
+<p>He felt pity and distaste for Maisie in equal proportions. Those men had
+each in turn caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her
+pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence
+of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and
+gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was
+theirs now! She was almost virginal&mdash;as though she had never been
+touched by their passion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose
+memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out
+there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or&mdash;&mdash; Or very loving
+and lonely?</p>
+
+<p>She was speaking more seriously now. "We<!-- Page 170 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> mustn't tell her. It's natural
+to be sorry for him now that he's dead." He picked up the thread and
+guessed that she was referring to Lord Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"We must tell her," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But we mustn't," she urged. "For years he tried to make her wretched.
+There were rumors of other women. She's found peace at last. It wouldn't
+help him to let her know that he had died loving her out there. He's
+beyond any help of ours. They all are." He surmised who the <i>they</i> were:
+the three soldiermen who had sat there before him. In pleading for
+silence for others, she was pleading for silence for herself. Again she
+was defending herself against his thoughts. "All of the dead had their
+chance. Lord Dawn had; there were so many years in which he might have
+told her. To tell her now would be to rob&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She broke off as the maid re&euml;ntered with the coffee. Her tone changed
+instantly to one of convention. "Not here, Porter. We'll have it in the
+drawing-room."</p>
+
+<p>As he followed her out across the hall, he glanced at his watch. It was
+past eight o'clock. He could lose no more time. He must plunge boldly
+into the subject of his mission and bring his visit promptly to an end.
+He dreaded the temptation of that feminine room, with its coziness and
+security and quiet. It made him too much alone with her; she was not a
+woman that it was wise to be alone with too long.</p>
+
+<p>The moment the maid had left them and the door had closed, he became
+confirmed in the sanity of this decision. Everything in the room
+appealed to him<!-- Page 171 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> to procrastinate. The curtains before the French
+windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence;
+the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the
+coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded
+with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces and fell
+downwards.</p>
+
+<p>She had seated herself on the couch. When she had filled both cups, she
+glanced up at him smilingly, patting the vacant place beside her as a
+sign that he should occupy it. He was standing before the fire, looking
+immensely tall in the semi-darkness. He could see her plainly where she
+sat beneath the lamp; but of him she could see nothing but his outline,
+for his eyes were lost in shadow. When he seemed not to have noticed her
+sign, "Come," she said coaxingly. "You don't spare yourself at all. You
+make yourself tired by so much standing."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Lockwood&mdash;&mdash;" She started as he called her that. Twice already she
+had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before
+dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I
+haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that
+nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't
+you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you&mdash;but
+why can't you?"<!-- Page 172 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_FIFTH" id="CHAPTER_THE_FIFTH"></a>CHAPTER THE FIFTH</h2>
+
+<h4>THE AIR OF CONQUEST</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>She sat very silently, the way he had seen men sit when they were
+wounded. She had been expecting the blow and trying to postpone it; now
+that it had fallen her only feeling was one of peace because the
+expecting was ended. Her face remained turned towards him, as it had
+been while he had been talking. As though a mask had dropped, the real,
+very tired, very young, very lonely Maisie watched him. The wistfulness
+of her beauty surprised and touched him. Several times her lips moved in
+an attempt to say something. Then, at last, "What right have you to
+ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to claim the right of friendship."</p>
+
+<p>"Of friendship!" She frowned slightly, peering from beneath the lamp in
+an effort to make out his features. Then her eyes cleared and she
+smiled. "If you don't mean it, please don't say it. You see, it would
+hurt afterwards. And&mdash;and I should like to have you for my friend."</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<img src="images/illus03.jpg" alt="adair"  />
+<a id="illus03" name="illus03"></a>
+</p>
+<p class='center'> "<i>Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>He came over from the fireplace and seated himself beside her. "We've
+been almost enemies&mdash;just a little afraid of each other. Isn't that so?
+It's ever<!-- Page 173 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> so much more comfortable now; we'll be able to talk more
+easily. Tell me honestly, what do you see in Adair?"</p>
+
+<p>"See in him!"</p>
+
+<p>She commenced sipping her coffee. She looked extraordinarily like Terry
+used to do years ago, when she was a little lass and had been naughty,
+and had come reluctantly to ask pardon. He thought that if he went on
+talking he might make it easier for her.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll wonder why I, who never knew you until to-day, should have taken
+upon myself to broach this subject."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder," she headed him off. "I know. Terry's my friend. Her
+father was determined to send somebody, so she worked things in order
+that you might be sent. She thought that you would be the kindest
+person."</p>
+
+<p>"She thought that!" Tabs was a little taken back by her assertion; it
+seemed to pledge him to kindness before he had learnt whether kindness
+was required or deserved. It made him in a sense her partisan, when he
+ought to have been impartial.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I can be trusted to be kind," he said; "but you must remember
+that I've got to be kind all round. I must be kind to Adair's wife and
+to his children. If this goes much further it will spell tragedy for
+them."</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders and laughed without mirth. "Adair's wife
+should have remembered to be kind to herself. If a woman can't keep her
+husband, she never deserved to have won him. And Adair<!-- Page 174 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>&mdash;he's the
+easiest man to keep in the world; far too easy to be exciting. If she
+doesn't lose him to me, she'll lose him to some one else, unless&mdash;&mdash;"
+And then she surprised him, "But she won't lose him to me, for I don't
+want him."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs sighed with relief and lit himself a cigarette. "Then that's
+settled. If you don't want him, the trouble's ended, and I think Sir
+Tobias and all of us owe you an apology."</p>
+
+<p>Again she laughed. This time some of her old mischief had come back.
+"You go too fast, Lord Taborley. I shouldn't advise any of you to
+apologize to me yet. It's true that I don't want him for keeps, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs guessed the way the ground lay and went back to the question with
+which he had started. "What on earth do you see in him? That's what I
+can't make out."</p>
+
+<p>She kept him waiting for his answer. While he waited, like sunshine
+struggling through cloud, amused happiness fought its way into her
+expression. When she turned, she met his gaze with complete candor. She
+was again a woman of the world. "What do I see in him? Not much&mdash;only a
+makeshift, a second best. Only a man who needs me for the moment because
+he's lost his direction. You remember our conversation of this afternoon
+about having to feel that you were needed. He gives me that feeling, so
+I'm grateful. That's why I have to have him."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you so lonely as to stoop&mdash;well, to steal to get it?"<!-- Page 175 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was sorry he had asked it. She bit her lip in an effort to keep back
+the tears and to force herself to go on brightly smiling. "Yes, as
+lonely as all that," she nodded; "so lonely that it's almost a joke."</p>
+
+<p>"No joke." He was at a loss what to say. "But you have friends. You go
+everywhere. You&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Friends!" she interrupted, laughing with the high-pitched note of
+breaking nerves. "What are friends? People to whom you say, 'How d'you
+do?' here and 'How d'you do?' there, every one of whom can do without
+you. I want some one who can't do without me for a second&mdash;&mdash; No joke,
+you said. But it is almost a joke to be young, and eager, and
+good-looking, and to know how to dress, and to be so willing to love,
+and to live in the world just once, and to hear the world go by you
+laughing, and to desire so much," she paused for breath, "and to want to
+give so much that no one is willing to accept. If one didn't laugh over
+it, it would be more than one could stand. If one didn't treat it as a
+joke&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He caught her hands. "Steady, Mrs. Lockwood. Stop laughing at once.
+There's nothing to laugh about. You're nearly over the edge."</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him with wide eyes, filled with panic, while little
+ripples of laughter kept escaping from her, which she did her best to
+suppress.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, listen to me," he continued quietly: "You're not exceptional.
+You've been expressing something that there's not a man or woman that
+hasn't felt. I feel it when I realize that I may lose<!-- Page 176 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> Terry; so does
+Braithwaite. Lord Dawn felt it when he couldn't drag his wife down to
+him and couldn't climb up to her. And his wife must have felt it too,
+when she sat always by herself. Phyllis feels it when she sees that, for
+the moment, you have more attraction for her husband than she has. And
+Adair feels it as well, when he risks his good name for a little
+desperate comfort and is willing to clothe you, for whom he professes to
+care, with all the appearance of dishonor. You're no exception; it's the
+feeling that you are exceptional that makes you unscrupulous in your
+self-pity. Get that into your head, that you're not exceptional. Half
+the world's with you in the same box; but it smiles and doesn't own it.
+Have you got that?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded and tried to withdraw her hands; but he held them fast.</p>
+
+<p>"And now as regards this desire to be wanted; that's perfectly right and
+natural. There's nobody who doesn't share it. And I understand what you
+say about mere friendship. It's unsatisfying and impermanent. It's like
+a meal snatched at a restaurant; none of the dishes or napkins or tables
+or chairs belong to you. They've been used by other people before you
+and they'll be used by other people the moment your bill is settled.
+What you want and what every one wants, is something more than
+friendship&mdash;a human relation with one person who is so much yours that
+your intimacies are a secret from all the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Some one with whom I can be little," she whispered, "and foolish and
+off my guard."<!-- Page 177 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He smiled. "That's it exactly. But you won't get that sort of
+relationship with a man who belongs already to another woman."</p>
+
+<p>"One gets the pretense."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. "Not even the pretense. There was a phrase you used
+about Adair; you said he'd lost his direction. That's true; he has for
+the moment. Presently he'll refind it and the road leads back to
+Phyllis. You said something else: you called him a second best. That's
+all he is, however you take him, whether as a husband, a father or a
+lover. He lacks earnestness; he has always lacked it. I've been his
+friend for years; his flabbiness sticks out all over him. But you're not
+a second best, Mrs. Lockwood. You're a top-notcher&mdash;too fine for
+anything but the best. You really are. You ought to set a higher value
+on yourself."</p>
+
+<p>She had regained her composure. He showed a willingness to release her
+hands, but she let them rest where they were like tired birds, while she
+regarded him with wistful kindness.</p>
+
+<p>"Too fine for anything but the best! It's a long while since I heard any
+one say that. Reggie used to say it in almost those very words. But then
+Reggie," she caught her breath at the remembered ecstasy, "Reggie used
+to think that the sun rose and set for me. He was different from all
+other men. You advise me to reserve myself for the best. How can I do
+that, Lord Taborley, when the best is in the past?"</p>
+
+<p>She was very beautiful in the simplicity of her pathos&mdash;one of the most
+beautiful women he had ever<!-- Page 178 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> met. She had become a little child for the
+moment and her littleness was baffling. He felt extraordinarily near to
+her and alone with her. There was no longer any danger in their
+aloneness. He realized why it was that she was able to give away so much
+of herself; there was no value in the gift, for her heart was beyond the
+capture of any man. She was the shuttered house of a vanished happiness,
+inhabited by a restless ghost. The gold light from the lamp fell in a
+pool about her. It revealed startlingly the whiteness of her arms and
+throat, the blueness of her eyes and the primrose gleam of her polished
+head. She seemed insubstantial as a dream, environed by shadows. And
+what did she mean by saying that all her best lay in the past? Surely
+she had misjudged! With her power of charm she could build her world to
+any pattern.</p>
+
+<p>"The best in the past! None of us know enough about the future to say
+that. The best lies ahead&mdash;always. To believe that brings our best
+within our grasp."</p>
+
+<p>"For me it can't." She spoke hopelessly. "No believing can do that when
+your best is dead."</p>
+
+<p>The finality of her despair silenced him. He could feel it like fingers
+tightening on his throat. He realized in a flash that this was how he,
+too, would be tempted to speak were he to lose Terry&mdash;that, having lost
+the best, any careless makeshift would suffice to comfort him. While he
+considered, her hands snuggled closer in his clasp, establishing a new
+sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," he said at last, "even though my best<!-- Page 179 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> were dead, I should
+try to go on acting as if it lay still ahead. If I did that, round some
+new turning I might find it waiting for me as a kind of recompense."</p>
+
+<p>She leant forward, peering eagerly into his eyes. "Yes. You would do
+that. I'm sure of it. I knew you had something to give me the moment we
+met. That was why I wouldn't let you escape me. I've learnt the secret
+at last&mdash;the secret of your air of conquest. It isn't that you get your
+desires. It's not that. It's your belief that you will get them that
+makes you strong."</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere at the back of his head he remembered the pleading of Delilah
+with Samson, "Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. "Perhaps you have guessed. I'm what you might call a
+round-the-corner person. I have a philosophy all my own; it's a
+round-the-corner philosophy. I believe that we find everything that
+we've lost or longed for, if we'll only press on. Everything that we've
+ever loved or wanted waits for us further up the road, round some hidden
+turning. It's always further up the road and just out of sight. The
+whole trick of living is to keep your tail up and march forward with the
+appearance of success, no matter how badly other people say you've been
+defeated. More often than not, we're nearer our hidden corners than any
+of us guess; it's the pluck to struggle the last hundred yards that
+swings us round the turning and wins our kingdoms for us."</p>
+
+<p>She withdrew her hands and lay back against the<!-- Page 180 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> cushions. "No amount of
+courage&mdash;&mdash;" She broke off and tried afresh. "Being brave wouldn't put
+him again into my arms. You're wondering whom I'm talking about&mdash;Reggie
+Pollock, my only husband. The other two didn't count, any more than
+Adair counts. I don't say it unkindly. I do want you to believe that.
+They were passers-by&mdash;that was all. They hung their hats in the hall
+and, somehow, they stopped. They were nice boys, both of them. It seemed
+a kind of war-work to let them marry me. You see, they needed me; so
+when they said they loved me, I didn't have the heart to turn them out.
+I suppose I was too amiable. But they didn't count&mdash;not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"The war's over," Tabs reminded her with quiet humor. "How long is this
+amiability going to last?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled dreamily. "Adair again! You don't leave him alone for long.
+If you think that I ever let him make love to me, you're mistaken. It's
+only that he's unhappy and I can do something for him."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs wasn't at all sure that it was only that. This fatal amiability
+might have raised quite different expectations in Adair. Like her two
+latest husbands, he might take a notion to hang his hat in her hall. If
+he did, would she abate her amiability sufficiently to tell him to hang
+it somewhere else?</p>
+
+<p>She was drifting; what she needed was either a tow-rope or a rudder. He
+sent his gaze questing through the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>"Those five photographs, all of the same man&mdash;they're of Pollock?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."<!-- Page 181 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He was one of the first of all the aces, wasn't he? It was he who
+brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and went missing a few days
+later. You see, I remember his record. He was outstandingly brave at a
+time when the world was full of brave men. And you tell me he loved
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>An expression of triumph flitted across her face. "Not loved." Her voice
+was full-throated. "He adored me, and to me he was a god whom I
+worshiped. I'd have gone through hell for him. I'd&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>The flatness of the contradiction pulled her up short. "No you
+wouldn't," he repeated quietly. "You wouldn't even go through this for
+him. You wouldn't play the game by him when he was dead. He always kept
+his end up, whatever the odds against him; but you&mdash;you couldn't. This
+was your chance to show that you were worthy of him. While he was alive,
+you played a winning game; it was easy to be true to him. But he&mdash;he was
+stauncher; he was most to be trusted when the game seemed all but lost.
+You ought to have kept his spirit alive for us; but you've understood so
+little of his spirit that you've been willing to put any stranger in his
+place&mdash;to quote your own words, any stranger who chose to hang his hat
+in your hall. Pollock was a soldier; he didn't need to be sure of
+victory to show courage. It was in tight corners that he was at his
+best. You're in a tight corner now, and you're his wife&mdash;the wife whom
+he didn't love, but adored."</p>
+
+<p>The brutal impact of the truth had struck her<!-- Page 182 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> dumb at first. Her lips
+had fallen apart. While she had listened, her face had gone white. Now
+that he paused, she slipped back into the cushions, covering her eyes
+with her hands. "For God's sake stop torturing me! Though you think I'm
+as contemptible as that, don't say it. If you must speak, tell me what
+you think I ought to do."</p>
+
+<p>"Do! Until you find a living man who's his match, carry on as though he
+were not dead."</p>
+
+<p>She uncovered her eyes and sat upright, staring at him. "As though he
+were not dead. But Reggie is dead. You know as well as I do that he's
+dead."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs nodded. "I'm not denying it. But for all that, try to live as
+though he weren't&mdash;as though somewhere up the road, a day, a week, a
+month, a year hence he would meet you round the corner."</p>
+
+<p>Her interest faded forlornly. "What good would that do? It would only be
+making believe with myself."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke gently. "Yes, but games of make-believe come true. You couldn't
+meet <i>him</i>, but you might meet some one his equal&mdash;a man who's, perhaps,
+already waiting for you, while you squander yourself on makeshifts and
+second bests."</p>
+
+<p>The little silence which had ended his speech dragged on from seconds
+into minutes. In the quiet room nothing stirred. She attempted to free
+herself from his gaze by refusing to look at him. Against her will her
+eyes crept up to his, clashed, evaded, fell back and again crept up to
+them.</p>
+
+<p>At last, speaking humbly, she said, "I was ashamed. You made me ashamed.
+Whatever I'd<!-- Page 183 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> done, if he came back, he wouldn't be ashamed of me. It
+wouldn't matter how cowardly I'd been or however many husbands I'd had;
+he'd be so glad to have me in his arms that he wouldn't find time to be
+ashamed of me. So I'm not going to be ashamed any longer; I'm going to
+start to live as if he were coming back. It'll be hard at first.
+Adair&mdash;he was nothing. And yet&mdash;&mdash; I shall miss him, no doubt. You said
+something this afternoon that you didn't mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I? What was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was when I was crying because nobody wanted me. Do you remember what
+you said? You said, 'I do,' not meaning a word of it. Could you manage
+to want me just a little, Lord Taborley? Not for long, you know; only
+till I've got past the loneliest places&mdash;till I've begun almost to
+persuade myself that he may come back. To think that you wanted me would
+help."</p>
+
+<p>Before he could answer, she had sprung to her feet, all but over-turning
+the lamp. "What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>A sharp rat-a-tat-tat had reverberated through the house. While she
+spoke, it was repeated. Her over-strung nerves gave way. As Tabs rose,
+she clung to him beseechingly. "Don't let him in. I'm not ready for him.
+Don't let him in. Go outside and send him away. Tell him anything. But
+don't let him enter."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had no clear idea to whom she was referring. It might have been to
+Adair. It might have been to Pollock. It seemed more likely that it was
+to her dead husband. This talk about living as though he<!-- Page 184 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> might come
+back had probably distraught an imagination already over-taxed.</p>
+
+<p>"He sha'n't enter," he assured her. "There's no need to lose your
+nerve."</p>
+
+<p>As he passed into the hall, he heard the starchy approach of Porter. He
+waited and halted her with, "Mrs. Lockwood asked me to answer it."</p>
+
+<p>When he had watched her retreat and vanish, he advanced towards the
+door. Who was it out there in the darkness whose knock had power to
+strike such terror? It was a terror the excitement of which he at least
+remotely shared. The thought crossed his mind, "Is it possible that her
+longing could have dragged him back?" He felt as though in the
+stucco-fronted gloom of Mulberry Court, Fate itself stood waiting for
+him on the other side of the panel. With conscious bravado he stretched
+out his hand and drew back the latch.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>"Is it Mr. Easterday?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a woman's voice that asked the question&mdash;a deep voice, thrilling
+with emotion, that made him wonder what it would sound like with all the
+stops pulled out. He had opened the door only a little way, expecting
+that he would have to refuse admittance. At the sound of a woman's
+voice, his sense of the conventions sprang to life. It must be a good
+deal past ten and here he was answering Maisie's door as though he were
+her butler. The kind of conclusions that could be drawn were made plain
+by the caller's question, "Is it Mr. Easterday?" To<!-- Page 185 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> be mistaken for
+Easterday annoyed him. It was tantamount to an accusation. It implied
+that, even though he were not Easterday, the proprietory way in which he
+attended to other people's doors at after ten o'clock put Him well
+within Easterday's class. Tabs was particularly annoyed to hear himself
+accused by a voice so gracious and pleasant. His surprise had evidently
+impressed her as furtiveness, for she said, "So it is Mr. Easterday?"</p>
+
+<p>He was at a loss what to do with her&mdash;how to turn her away. For Maisie's
+sake she must not be allowed to enter, for then she would discover that
+they had been alone. He opened the door a few inches wider and parried
+to gain time. "If it's Mr. Easterday that you're wanting, you've made a
+fortunate mistake. This is Mrs. Lockwood's house. But I happen to know
+an Easterday&mdash;an Adair Easterday; he's a personal friend. Perhaps he's
+the man you're looking for. If so, I can give you his address."</p>
+
+<p>This sally was greeted with a quiet, rather mocking laugh. He was using
+his eyes, trying to form an estimate of the visitor. She had arrived in
+a car, which he judged to be private, for in the light reflected from
+the windshield he could make out the livery of her chauffeur. She was
+swathed in a sumptuous wrap which looked as though it were of sable. She
+held it gathered closely about her, so that it fell in soft folds,
+revealing and at the same time concealing her figure. He was anxious to
+read her face, but the lower part was snuggled into the fur of the deep
+collar and the upper part was shadowed by<!-- Page 186 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> a broad-brimmed tulle hat,
+from which two bird of paradise plumes spread back like wings on the
+helmet of a viking. For the rest, she had white kid gloves, which
+reached up to her elbows. Outside the glove of the left hand she wore a
+bracelet; every time she stirred the stones struck fire in the
+semi-darkness. Her hands were very small. Peeping out from below her
+gown, the buckles on her high-heeled shoes twinkled. She was mysterious,
+taunting, and strangely commanding. As she hovered there across the
+threshold, a faint perfume drifted up to him like the intoxicating
+romance of June rose-gardens under moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>She, too, seemed to have suffered a surprise at hearing the tones in
+which he had spoken. "His address! Oh, no, it wasn't Mr. Easterday I was
+wanting. I only supposed&mdash;&mdash; If Mrs. Lockwood's at home, I should like
+to see her."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was like a chime of contralto bells. It made him think of
+Bernhardt. It imparted to the commonplaces she uttered a quite
+disproportionate intensity of drama and tragic depth. The way in which
+she had said, "Oh, no," reverberated in his memory as though the sound
+still lingered on the air.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know at all," he commenced. Then he smiled at his confusion.
+"You see I'm not used to answering doors, and Mrs. Lockwood's not quite
+herself. She was very tired just now. But if you'll give me your name,
+I'll&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>If he'd been left to himself, he might have succeeded in creating the
+impression that he was Mai<!-- Page 187 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>sie's physician. As it was, his conscience
+was spared the deception by the advent of the inevitable Porter. She
+sailed up behind him with an appearance so immaculate that it would have
+shed propriety on the most compromising circumstances. He instantly
+stood aside to make room for her. "Porter, here's a lady enquiring
+for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But the lady took matters into her own hands. "Mrs. Lockwood in,
+Porter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, certainly, your Ladyship."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why was I shut out? Who is this gentleman who&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The rest was lost as their voices sank. The next words he caught were
+her Ladyship's, running up the scale of laughter. "Then I'm not <i>de
+trop</i>! That's a blessing!"</p>
+
+<p>He fell back, trying to obliterate himself, as with every sign of
+deference Porter admitted her; but in crossing the hall, she had to pass
+him. Scarcely pausing, she swept him with a pair of stone-gray eyes,
+made mischievous for the moment with merriment. "You're no good as a
+butler," she whispered. "You carry discretion too far."</p>
+
+<p>To his chagrin he recognized her&mdash;the one woman whom he would most have
+chosen to have met in an attitude that was dignified. She entered the
+drawing-room and was lost to sight. But she had left the door ajar and
+he heard Maisie's delighted exclamation, "Why, Di, what brings you here
+so late? This is darling of you!" His position was elaborately false. It
+grew more false every minute he delayed. He foresaw himself apologizing
+and being<!-- Page 188 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> explained. He had no appetite for explanations. Since he had
+adventured into Mulberry Tree Court, he had twice been tempted to bolt
+for safety. Now that he was tempted for a third time, he acted blindly
+on the impulse. Having played the r&ocirc;le of butler with too much
+discretion, he seized his hat and, without a thought of ceremony,
+adopted a butler's mode of escaping.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>In the shrouded emptiness of the London night he felt himself free
+again. He came into possession of himself and found that he could think
+with his old definite clearness. In the last few hours events had rushed
+him off his feet; he had no sooner realized their significance than he
+had discovered himself in the throes of a new crisis. Now, for the
+moment, he stood aloof and could consider his actions in their true
+perspective.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned out of Mulberry Tree Court, he had thought he had heard a
+voice calling after him. "Lord Taborley! Lord Taborley!" He had looked
+back across the imitation village-green, where the white posts showed
+dimly like smudges of chalk. The door of Maisie's house had been opened
+wide, making a lozenge of gold against the blackness. He had fancied
+that he had seen her standing there framed, leaning out, and then&mdash;&mdash;
+Yes, surely he had heard the running of slippered feet along the
+pavement. He had not waited. He scarcely knew from what he was
+escaping&mdash;perhaps from his fate, from which<!-- Page 189 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> there is ultimately no
+escape. He seized his respite, however, for the dread of recapture was
+strong upon him.</p>
+
+<p>And now all hint of pursuit had died out. Tall houses stood muted
+against the sky; dim trees cast a leafy obscurity; stars glinted
+remotely like diamonds set in gun-metal. He found a healing chastity in
+his sudden aloneness; it roused in him an almost angry desire to recover
+his lost monasticism.</p>
+
+<p>He was amused to discover himself speculating as to whether women were
+worth the trouble they occasioned. They coerced men with sentimental
+arguments to which there were no replies. They wore away men's fortitude
+with the continual flowing of their tears. They molded men's strength
+into weakness with the magic caressing of their sex. They promised and
+disappointed, flattered and allured, captured and despised. Their
+curiosity was insatiable to possess themselves of secrets, which were no
+longer valued the moment they were divulged. Their little teasing hands,
+so destructive and lovable, had commenced the d&eacute;b&acirc;cle of every human
+greatness. Throughout the ages, their coaxing, pleading voices could be
+heard wheedling men's hearts to the same purpose. "Tell me, I pray thee,
+wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherein thou mightest be bound to
+afflict thee." The strength of men had eternally roused their
+resentment, whether they were the Delilahs of long ago or the Maisies of
+a modern generation. The goal of all their passion, even when it was
+unselfish, was to bind.</p>
+
+<p>He had nearly been bound, but he had escaped.<!-- Page 190 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> At the thought that he
+had escaped, he felt a flood of exultant joy sweep through him. He
+smiled, believing he had discovered a humorous and more human motive for
+the exhausting piety of the anchorites. It wasn't their religious
+self-abnegation that had made them flee to scorched river-beds and
+desert hiding-places; it was their triumphant satisfaction at having
+tantalized and eluded feminine pursuit. They fled in order that they
+might possess, not deny themselves. As they became more emaciated and
+scarred and as their needs grew less, they listened. What they heard was
+ample compensation for all that they had foresworn at the hands of life.
+Far blown from distant haunts of habitation came a sound which in their
+ears was sweetest music: day and night the painful dragging of chains
+and the groan of men toiling in servitude to women.</p>
+
+<p>"The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!" When the last sleepy caress had
+been given, all men who lacked the caution of the anchorite, were sooner
+or later destined to hear that cry.</p>
+
+<p>How much nobler men had been in a womanless world! Some of them had had
+to become womanless before they could be noble. Pollock plunging to his
+death from the clouds, like an eagle struck by a thunderbolt! Lord Dawn
+with the smile of calm remembrance on his lips, purged of all his
+fruitless sex-contentions, lying white and quiet beneath the crack and
+spatter of exploding shells! Braithwaite, the ex-valet, who had proved
+himself an aristocrat in courage! And he himself, thinking only of duty,
+with every jealous ambition laid aside!<!-- Page 191 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And now&mdash;&mdash; The mate of the eagle was a trifler with peacocks and
+vultures. The man whose face had been molded by his last thought into an
+expression of serene faithfulness, was recalled only as one who had
+lived envenomed by disloyalty. Braithwaite, the aristocrat in courage,
+was now distinguished for his cowardice; he himself was at one and the
+same time Braithwaite's rival and grudging critic. <i>The Philistines be
+upon thee, Samson! And he awoke out of his sleep and said, I will go out
+as at other times and shake myself</i>&mdash;&mdash;Asleep! He felt that he, too, had
+been asleep. All the men who had been giants in the past five years were
+either dead or sleeping. And this sudden transformation was the work of
+women, because men had come back to walk and rest with them in the soft,
+desired places. The little feminine hands had stripped them of their
+charity, had taken away their valor and had concealed liers-in-wait in
+the chamber of their affections.</p>
+
+<p>So his thoughts ran on, amplifying, magnifying, exaggerating the theme
+of the debilitating effects of women. But from all his accusations he
+exempted Terry. She was the Joan of Arc of his imagination, who rode on
+unvanquished across life's battlefields, inspiring to heroism with her
+shining purity. And he made one other exception&mdash;Lady Dawn. It was the
+Lady Dawn of the portrait he exempted, not the Lady Dawn who had mocked
+him in passing with her steady stone-gray eyes. In a strange way he
+discriminated between the portrait and the living woman. The portrait
+was almost his friend; the<!-- Page 192 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> living woman was a stranger. The woman in
+the portrait was after his own heart; she had never been known to cry.
+"Do it harder; I can bear more than that." He thrilled to the pride of
+her defiance.</p>
+
+<p>Then he pulled himself up with a start. Again he was thinking about her.
+Yes, and though he might discriminate between the portrait and the
+living woman, it was the living woman's eyes that gleamed in the
+blackness of his mind. There was truth in what Maisie had said, that
+were he as much in love with Terry as he professed all other women,
+however beautiful, except the one woman, should be hanks of hair and
+bags of bones. He consoled himself by arguing that that was precisely
+what he had been trying to prove them by his sweeping applications of
+the conduct of Delilah.</p>
+
+<p>Whichever way he viewed his situation, things were in a pretty fair
+muddle&mdash;a muddle which annoyed him because it was so unmerited. He was
+pledged to Terry, while she held herself unpledged. He was committed to
+help Maisie&mdash;a distinctly unwise little lady for any bachelor to help.
+As a third party to his problem, Lady Dawn intruded herself&mdash;though why
+she should, he wasn't certain. He would have to see her, however much
+Maisie dissuaded; it was right that she should know about her husband.
+Yet was that the entire reason why he was so keen to see her? He assured
+himself very earnestly that it was, and dismissed her from his mind.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest of the journey home he conscien<!-- Page 193 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>tiously narrowed his
+imaginings to thoughts of Terry.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>It was with thoughts of her that he fitted his key in the latch. The
+Square was full of newly married couples, some of them little more than
+boys and girls&mdash;youngsters who had waited impatiently and had run
+together the moment war was ended. Others had been married just long
+enough to be proudly parading their first baby. Every morning white
+prams were wheeled out into the garden, there to be watched over by
+softly spoken nurses. Every night, as dusk came down, expectant mothers
+paced gently through the shadows, leaning on the arms of ex-officer
+husbands. It wasn't only in the trees that nests were being built. The
+Square's name might well have been changed to Honeymoon Square.</p>
+
+<p>And now, as Tabs pushed the door open, preparing to enter, he knew that
+all up and down the Square, behind the pall of darkness, other doors
+were being pushed back. Young couples were coming home from dinners and
+theaters. He could hear the murmur of their laughter, subdued and
+secret, hinting at intimacies of affection. The men had misplaced their
+latch-key perhaps; the girls were advising that they search another
+pocket. Or the lock refused to turn and the girls were whispering how it
+could be persuaded. Some of them were arriving in taxis; others, less
+lucky or more economic, were tripping by on foot along the pavement. He
+noticed how closely they clung together and he<!-- Page 194 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> thought of Terry. It
+would be jolly to be young, to build a nest and, by and by, to see your
+own white pram wheeled out to take its place in the blowy greenness of
+the garden. He withdrew his key and entered, closing the door behind
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The house was very still. It was nearly midnight. The maids had gone to
+bed, leaving lights in the hall and on the landings. As he hung up his
+hat, the stillness was broken by the sudden ringing of the telephone. It
+rang in a peevish, scolding manner, as though this were not the first
+time and it had lost its temper with waiting. He climbed the flight of
+stairs to his library and, without waiting to switch on the lights, sat
+down at his table, taking up the receiver.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this Lord Taborley?" a voice inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord Taborley speaking."</p>
+
+<p>"This is Sir Tobias Beddow." There was a pause, followed by a little
+asthmatic cough. Then, "How are you, my dear fellow? I've been trying to
+reach you all evening. I was expecting to see you round here this
+morning at eleven.&mdash;No, I don't mean perhaps what you infer. Besides, it
+wouldn't have been any good if you had called; Terry wandered out,
+without leaving word where she was going. She didn't get back till
+nearly lunch-time. Most unaccountable conduct under the circumstances;
+but since your conduct was equally unaccountable, perhaps it was just as
+well. But that wasn't what I called you up about."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs smiled in the darkness. Sir Tobias was as<!-- Page 195 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> simple and crafty as a
+child; he couldn't keep anything back. Then his mind jumped to the
+obvious conclusion. Terry hadn't told her parents about her morning
+interview; her parents naturally supposed that it was his fault that he
+was not engaged to her as yet. Making an effort to be diplomatic, he
+said, "Perhaps I can explain my apparent negligence to you later. It
+must seem unpardonable. I've been busy every minute over things that
+absolutely couldn't be avoided."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. Of course." The words were spoken soothingly, but without
+conviction. "We men understand. It's Lady Beddow who&mdash;&mdash; Such events are
+women's great occasions. She's a stickler for form. As you say, you can
+explain later&mdash;&mdash; But that wasn't what I called you up about."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs stifled a yawn. He had suddenly discovered he was sleepy.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that you said?" Sir Tobias enquired suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say anything," Tabs replied politely. "But I think I know what
+you called me up about. It was about Maisie&mdash;I mean Mrs. Lockwood."</p>
+
+<p>"What about her?" The question was asked carelessly; he knew at once
+that he had missed his guess. It was strange, even though he had guessed
+wrongly, that Sir Tobias should not display more interest.</p>
+
+<p>"What about her? Only that I've spent the last six hours with her. You
+asked me to see her as soon as possible, you remember. I had only just
+got home from being with her, when the telephone rang. She's not the
+woman we thought her."<!-- Page 196 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Eh? What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>He repeated what he had said. He was perfectly certain that Sir Tobias
+had heard the first time. "She's not the woman we thought her." And he
+added, "There's been some mistake. She hasn't and never did have any
+designs on Adair. After we'd talked things over, she agreed of her own
+accord never to see him again."</p>
+
+<p>"She did!" There was a long pause, expressive of skepticism,
+dissatisfaction, or anything that he cared to conjecture. Then, "When we
+meet, you can tell me. But that wasn't what I called you up about."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs waited for him to tell him why he had called him up. He waited so
+long that it seemed to be a competition to see who would compel the
+other to break the silence first. At last he gave in. "If that wasn't
+why, why did you?"</p>
+
+<p>He almost heard Sir Tobias blink his eyes&mdash;those faded eyes that looked
+so blind and saw so much. "I called you up about this General
+Braithwaite. He's been here to see me on the biggest fool's errand, with
+the most unusual story which, if it's true, partly concerns yourself.
+It's too late to enter into details this evening. But I thought I'd let
+you know&mdash;&mdash; Good night."</p>
+
+<p>"One minute, Sir Tobias&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Before he could get any further Sir Tobias had hung up. For a few
+seconds he sat there in the darkness listening; then he hung up also and
+took himself off to bed.</p>
+
+<p>What object had Braithwaite had in going to see<!-- Page 197 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> Sir Tobias? Was it his
+first step in trying to play fair? Was his "fool's errand" a formal
+request for Terry's hand in marriage and his "unusual story" a manly
+recital of the facts? And had this great advance in frankness included
+the telling of Ann? As he tossed sleeplessly from side to side, other
+problems leapt up to confront him. Had he done wisely in promising
+Maisie that, in a measure, he would compensate her for the loss of
+Adair? What would Sir Tobias think of such an intimacy when he got to
+hear of it? What would even Adair think of it? There was only one person
+who would not doubt his integrity; that was Terry. And then Lady
+Dawn&mdash;had he actually any moral right to interfere in her affairs? "Do
+it harder; I can bear more than that." He could hear her saying it in
+that deep, emotional voice of hers. He could feel her honest stone-gray
+eyes, probing his soul for motives in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Day was breaking and birds were stirring in the mist of greenness that
+topped his windows, before his eye-lids closed and he slipped off into
+forgetfulness.</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>"To-morrow's another new day," he thought as he awoke. One could meet
+any and every indebtedness to life if he only had a sufficient fund of
+to-morrows in his bank.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his watch and leapt out of bed. Nine o'clock! He had slept
+late. He didn't hurry over his dressing. He could afford to be late for
+once. The mood of conquest was upon him. Maisie<!-- Page 198 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> had said that. No, it
+wasn't <i>the mood</i> but <i>the air</i> of conquest that she'd said he had.
+Whichever it was, he would prove her a true prophetess. He might not
+gain all his desires, but he'd at least wear the air of one who was
+going to gain them. To-morrow was another new day, and to-morrow had
+arrived.</p>
+
+<p>On coming down to breakfast he scrutinized Ann's features closely to
+learn whether she had heard anything from Braithwaite. They told him
+nothing. Presently, however, while she served him, she began to open
+out.</p>
+
+<p>"Did your Lordship speak to the gentleman at the War Office?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had been glancing through the morning paper. He looked up. "Yes, I
+did, Ann. I placed your letter in his hands, and saw him read it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say anything or promise anything to your Lordship?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs pursed his lips judicially, trying to avoid a lie. "You know what
+these War Office officials are. They never make promises to any one. But
+I believe this one's a good-hearted chap. When he realizes how much this
+thing means to you, I think he'll do his best."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he didn't show your Lordship my letter?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had dipped into his newspaper again. He detested the well-meant
+deceit he was compelled to practice. This time, when he answered, he
+didn't raise his eyes. "No, he didn't."</p>
+
+<p>But she didn't efface herself, as he had expected. She stood there, to
+one side of his chair. He felt that she was looking down at him. Just
+above the<!-- Page 199 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> edge of his paper he could see her hands clasped together,
+pressing against each other in agitation. He abandoned his refuge and
+dropped the paper to the carpet.</p>
+
+<p>"Something more that you want to ask me? What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your Lordship said that when the gentleman realized how much all this
+meant to me, he'd do his best."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I said and I'm sure of it."</p>
+
+<p>"What I wanted to ask was, does your Lordship think he has realized?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the way she said it that roused his curiosity. Could she have
+guessed? Had she read the address on that letter which he had given her
+to post to General Braithwaite, and put two and two together?</p>
+
+<p>He met her eyes&mdash;good, gray eyes, with something of Lady Dawn's grave
+honesty in their expression. "I think he has realized."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, sir; and I'm sorry I had to trouble you."</p>
+
+<p>She withdrew, leaving him with the disturbing sense that she had
+intended more than she had said. He gathered up the paper from the floor
+in the hope that a perusal of it might enable him to recover his lost
+equanimity. In so doing he caught sight of the last page, which
+contained the photographic items. Braithwaite's face stared up at him.
+Above it was printed the caption, "<i>Youngest Ranker Brigadier Demobbed
+Yesterday</i>."<!-- Page 200 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If she had seen that, she knew. If she had seen it, what would be her
+next move&mdash;appeal or revenge? What had been the significance of her
+final question, "Does your Lordship think he has realized?" Did she know
+now; had she even known when she had written her letter that it would be
+received by Braithwaite himself?</p>
+
+<p>If she didn't know and had not seen the paper, he was determined that
+she should not see it. Before leaving the room, he stuffed it into the
+empty grate and applied a match. He would play fair by Braithwaite. He
+was so eager to play fair that he did not turn to go upstairs till every
+vestige of print had been licked to ashes.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>His library occupied the whole of the second story; even at that it was
+not very large. It had two long French windows, opening onto a veranda
+which looked out over the Square. The veranda was constructed of wrought
+iron, painted green, and ran straight across the front of the house. Ann
+used it for giving her plants an airing; they usually formed a truant
+garden beyond the panes. There was a smaller window at the back, from
+which a view could be obtained of the Oratory.</p>
+
+<p>The room was furnished in English red lacquer, which had been
+transferred from the collection at Taborley House, when Taborley House
+had been lent to the Americans for a military hospital. The walls were
+hung with landscapes by Zuccarelli and<!-- Page 201 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> with Chinese portrait-groups of
+the Eighteenth Century.</p>
+
+<p>He had scarcely entered before the telephone renewed its irritating
+clamor, like a fretful child which yelled whenever it heard his
+footstep. He responded to its fretfulness in very much the same mood,
+seizing hold of the receiver as though he would shake it into silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Hullo! Hullo! Yes, this is Lord Taborley. What's that? You didn't
+catch what I&mdash;&mdash; It's Lord Taborley speaking, I said."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I must say you don't sound very nice." It was a woman's amused
+voice. "Even at this distance, you make me almost afraid. I do hope you
+haven't been like that all night."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs made his tones more smiling. "I'm sorry if I don't sound
+sufficiently pleasant. But who are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, who do you think?" There was a snatch of laughter. "I'm Maisie; I
+mean Mrs. Lockwood. You needn't tell me that you're not frowning,
+because I can feel it. What's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He pulled a wry face at himself in the opposite mirror and shrugged his
+shoulders. Down the 'phone he said with excessive amiability, "Nothing.
+I'm top-hole. How are you feeling?"</p>
+
+<p>Her answer came back like a flash, "Vulgar and not very safe." It was
+followed by a gurgle of merriment.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure that I understand your symptoms."</p>
+
+<p>The gurgle was repeated. "You wouldn't. Lord Taborley never feels vulgar
+and he's always safe.<!-- Page 202 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> But this is one of my vulgar days, when I'm not
+to be trusted. I always have one when Di has been to visit me; it's the
+relapse after contact with too high standards of respectability. I'm
+liable to do anything. I married Gervis and Lockwood after being with
+her. I shall break out to-day if you don't come at once and stop me.
+Unless&mdash;unless you don't want to stop me and would prefer the experiment
+of being vulgar together."</p>
+
+<p>"The prospect sounds alluring." He was trying to let her down lightly.
+"But I'm afraid I have too many engagements on hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" It was the <i>oh</i> of disappointment. When she spoke again her gay
+irresponsibility had vanished and a coaxing quality had come into her
+voice. "I know you've only just got home from being with me&mdash;I mean
+comparatively speaking. I don't want to make myself a burden to you,
+but&mdash;&mdash; It's such a jolly day. Have you been up long enough to look out
+of the window? I thought we could go off somewhere&mdash;to the Zoo, perhaps,
+and drink lemonade all among the monkeys and the nuts. I woke up
+planning it. We'd limit our spending money to five shillings like
+kiddies, and do all our riding on busses. Doesn't that sound jolly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Immensely," he agreed; "but I'm afraid no amount of jolliness could
+tempt&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She broke in on him. "It's the kind of thing I used to do with Adair."</p>
+
+<p>The meaning of this last remark was plain; she was reminding him that if
+the pair of shoes vacated by Adair were to remain vacated, he must pay
+the<!-- Page 203 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> promised price on occasions by wearing them himself. He determined
+to get behind her diplomatic hints with frankness.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to think, Mrs. Lockwood, that because I have to refuse
+your first request I'm going back on our contract. There'll be plenty of
+other opportunities."</p>
+
+<p>He caught her sigh of relief across the line. When she spoke again it
+was with a new brightness and reasonableness. "I'm glad you said that.
+So you really are going to help me? I was a wee bit afraid that you'd
+gone back on your bargain by the way you ran away."</p>
+
+<p>It was his first experience of the advantage a woman gains when she
+attacks a man from the other end of a telephone. He had trouble in
+making his voice sound patient. He replied with conscious hypocrisy,
+"I'm sorry I created the impression of running away."</p>
+
+<p>"You did." Her answer came back promptly. "You created the same
+impression on us both. I had to do a lot of explaining to Di."</p>
+
+<p>"And I was trying to save you embarrassment," he excused himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh! What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>To his immense surprise a third voice&mdash;a man's&mdash;jumped in on the
+conversation. "Are you there? Is this Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs was just getting ready to confess that he was there and that he was
+Lord Taborley, when Maisie took matters out of his hands by informing<!-- Page 204 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+the intruder that the line was occupied and that he was interrupting a
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," the intruder apologized, "but my time's valuable. I've been
+kept waiting for the best part of quarter of an hour. Are you the
+telephone-girl that I'm talking to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I'm not," said Maisie with considerable haughtiness. "Please get
+off the line." And then to Tabs, "Are you still there, Lord Taborley?
+This is Mrs. Lockwood. Can't you postpone some of those engagements so
+that we can meet to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the girl at the switch-board took a hand. There was a
+confused gabbling and buzzing of voices, out of which the suave tones of
+the intruder emerged triumphant, saying, "This is Sir Tobias Beddow. Can
+I speak with Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Maisie had heard. At all events, the moment Sir Tobias declared
+himself the line cleared.</p>
+
+<p>But it wasn't what Maisie had overheard that disturbed Tabs; it was the
+uncertainty as to how much of her conversation had been listened to by
+Sir Tobias. After all, prospective fathers-in-law are only human and as
+likely as any other class to jump to damaging conclusions. Tabs hung up
+the receiver, making it necessary for him to be summoned afresh before
+he acknowledged his presence at the 'phone. Then, "Good morning, Sir
+Tobias."</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, my dear fellow." Sir Tobias was as courtly and friendly
+as ever. "I called you up to know whether you could run round to see me
+between now and the forenoon. Yes, the matter I<!-- Page 205 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> mentioned to you last
+night. About eleven, you say? Very well, then, I shall expect you."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>No sooner had the butler with the velvet-plush manners admitted him than
+he found himself face to face with Terry. She must have known that he
+was expected and have been lying in wait for him. Before he could say a
+word, she pressed a finger to her lips, signaling caution. To the butler
+she said in a low tone, "It's all right, James; you don't need to wait.
+I'll announce Lord Taborley." The discreet James showed a fitting
+appreciation of romance by folding his plump hands across the pit of his
+stomach, making the ghost of a bow and tiptoeing noiselessly into the
+nether regions with the stealth of a conspirator.</p>
+
+<p>Terry's face was a picture of innocence. After Maisie she struck him as
+very young&mdash;much too young to love or to know the meaning of love. The
+sight of her freshness was forbidding. It made him seem jaded. It filled
+him with a reverence that was not far short of worship. He felt it
+impossible to think of her as performing the ordinary acts of a mortal
+world. He had the feeling that she moved on higher levels&mdash;that she was
+a creature too shy and perfect to be made the instrument of passion. She
+should be guarded in her purity like a vestal virgin, so that her
+straight young body might be forever valiant and her eyes might never
+learn the cowardice of tears.<!-- Page 206 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the brave March sunlight which shafted down on her, her head looked
+more like a Botticelli angel's than ever. The raw gold of her bobbed
+hair shone solid as metal, making a sharp edge where it ended against
+the ivory pallor of her throat. She was dressed in a white tailor-made
+serge. Her violet eyes danced with eager secrets.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you doing to-day?" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing!" he whispered, "if you want me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then invite me out to lunch. I've such heaps to tell you. Don't let
+Daddy take you to his club&mdash;I know he's going to ask you. And, oh,
+before I forget, I've told them nothing about yesterday, so don't give
+me away by accident." Then in a sly aside, just as she was turning the
+door-knob to admit him to her father's library, "You've been getting on
+famously with Maisie, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Before he could reply, they were across the threshold. There was a sound
+as of a rheumaticky hen stirring in its nest. The neck of Sir Tobias
+craned painfully round the corner of a high-backed chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's Lord Taborley to see you, Daddy. Don't keep him forever. He's
+just invited me to go out with him to lunch."</p>
+
+<p>Having shot her bolt, with the masterly strategy of her sex, she
+vanished, pulling the door behind her.</p>
+
+<p>What would Shakespeare have said under the circumstances, and what would
+a suitor have said to Shakespeare when he knew that he was suspected of
+having gone back on his request for the daugh<!-- Page 207 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>ter's hand in marriage?
+Tabs almost felt that he was in the actual presence of the bard of
+Stratford, Sir Tobias looked so ineffectually pompous and overweighted
+with gravity. Both Sir Tobias and Shakespeare, in the opinion of Tabs,
+were vastly overrated persons; but the only thing Shakespearian about
+Sir Tobias this morning was the magnificent calmness of his forehead;
+his podgy body, supported by its stiff little pen-wiper legs was more
+reminiscent of Punch, as portrayed on the cover of the famous weekly
+which bears his name.</p>
+
+<p>"Immensely considerate of you to come," puffed Sir Tobias, levering
+himself out of his chair in order that he might shake hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Not kind at all," Tabs contradicted cheerfully. "I kill two birds with
+one stone; I have my conversation with you and in half an hour I carry
+off Terry."</p>
+
+<p>That'll make him hurry up with whatever he has to say, he thought; it
+sets a time limit.</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman seemed put out to find himself deprived of his
+prerogative to be elaborate and prosy. He made a gesture, indicating
+that Tabs should copy his example and choose a chair. But Tabs ignored
+it. He had learnt that a man on his feet has the advantage, especially
+if he stands six foot two in his socks.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be wanting my news," he suggested. "I told you pretty well
+everything across the telephone. I think it's a case of everybody having
+got the wind up&mdash;Phyllis particularly. Mrs. Lockwood's a very restful
+woman. I should call her a man's woman.<!-- Page 208 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> She's bright and entertaining
+and pretty, and she owns a charming little house. She had no
+responsibilities, so she's free to entertain from morning till night.
+Adair has without doubt visited her more often than was wise. It was
+remarkably foolish of him to have made a woman-friend whom he didn't
+share with Phyllis. But I suppose he didn't dare to introduce them after
+he'd seen that Phyllis was jealous. However that may be, this dread that
+they may run away together is moonshine. Mrs. Lockwood sets too high a
+value on herself. Besides, there's only one man whom she loves or ever
+has loved for that matter. He happens to be dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"One moment, my dear fellow," Sir Tobias interrupted, "I always
+understood that the lady had had three husbands. Was this man one of
+them or did she have no affection for any of the men she married?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs felt himself cornered&mdash;and he had been getting on so well. He
+realized that if once he allowed Sir Tobias to start questioning him he
+would get tangled up. "She's complex," he explained; "she's complex in
+her simplicity. She's one of the most simply complicated and
+complicatedly simple women that I ever met. To understand her you have
+to talk with her. I talked with her for six hours. The upshot was that
+she promised to shut her door against Adair."</p>
+
+<p>The innocent old eyes blinked. "I'm not modern, like you, Lord Taborley.
+I have my suspicions of these simply complicated and complicatedly
+simple women. Set me down as old-fashioned. Having<!-- Page 209 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> been only once
+married, I can't enter into the refinements of feeling of such
+matrimonially inclined boa-constrictors as Mrs. Lockwood. I sha'n't give
+myself the chance of meeting her. I'm an old man; it would be too
+upsetting. If I talked with her, I shouldn't understand. So I must take
+your word for it that, however much appearances may have been against
+her, her motives were beyond question." He slipped forward in his chair
+with a disconcerting suddenness; for a moment his filmy eyes became
+penetrating. "She seems to have made a deep impression on you, my dear
+fellow. If your optimism proves correct and through your efforts Adair
+is free from her clutches, we all owe you a debt of gratitude. But&mdash;and
+I'm sure you won't take amiss what I'm saying&mdash;I would advise you, now
+that you've effected Adair's rescue, not to see too much of her
+yourself. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn't see her any more if I could
+help."</p>
+
+<p>It was clear that the benignant, sly old gentleman had overheard a
+substantial part of Maisie's telephone conversation. It was equally
+clear that his interference was wisely and kindly intended. He had a
+perfect right to be scrupulous about the conduct of a man whom he
+regarded as his future son-in-law; but he had no right to take advantage
+of the worst managed telephone-system in the world to eavesdrop on a
+private conversation. At the same time Tabs could hardly accuse him of
+eavesdropping, so he fell back on his dignity for defense.</p>
+
+<p>"I've always been very well able to take care of myself," he said
+quietly. "If I hadn't been, I<!-- Page 210 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> shouldn't have undertaken your mission
+and have gone to interview the kind of woman you described. I found,
+however, that she didn't live up to your description of her; in fairness
+to her I have to let you know that. I don't think you appreciate, Sir
+Tobias, what a delicate situation you created for both of us. She's a
+woman of breeding; which goes without saying since she's Lady Dawn's
+sister&mdash;a fact which you withheld from me. You sent me to her house as a
+kind of moral policeman with a warrant for her arrest. She was well
+aware of that and she was also aware that the charge you laid against
+her was almost libelously mistaken. All I can say is that she has
+behaved very handsomely. Since you and Phyllis have misunderstood her
+friendship for Adair, she's willing to break off relations. The most
+courteous and only decent thing that we can do is to cease discussing
+her. It's an incident which does none of us much credit."</p>
+
+<p>As he had warmed to her defense, Tabs had been very conscious that he
+was being more than generous&mdash;perhaps even more generous than truthful.
+It hadn't been his intention at the start to depict her as a wronged and
+spotless angel; but the skepticism of the attentive old image, bleached
+with disillusions and faded with years, had goaded him to excess.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias had listened, scratching his pointed beard thoughtfully, with
+entire amiability. He was utterly unimpressed and visibly unashamed.
+"You're a man of the world, my dear Taborley, and you have the advantage
+of having seen her. From<!-- Page 211 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> what you say I gather that she's not bad
+looking. To the not bad looking much is forgiven. Nevertheless, I stand
+by my opinion that she's not a safe woman to see too often. However,
+you're master of your own actions and that's neither here nor there."</p>
+
+<p>He commenced to fumble through his pockets. When he had found his
+cigarette-case, he proffered it to Tabs, who refused it.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd sit down, my dear fellow."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs glanced at his watch. There was only a quarter of an hour left of
+the time he had allotted. As a concession to Sir Tobias he seated
+himself. "It was about General Braithwaite that you called me up last
+night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. But there's no hurry. We can discuss that over lunch."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs considered that the time had come to be firm. "I'm sorry, Sir
+Tobias. Terry's lunching with me. We start in something less than
+fifteen minutes."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias screwed himself round and surveyed his future son-in-law with
+a mild amazement. For forty years he had been accustomed to having his
+own way unchallenged. "Terry can wait." He spoke as though the matter
+was now settled. "What I have to tell you is important."</p>
+
+<p>"And so is what I have to tell Terry." Tabs emphasized his statement by
+glancing again at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>For a few seconds Sir Tobias was at a loss. To hear himself opposed was
+a novel experience. Then he thought he had discovered a consoling
+reason<!-- Page 212 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> for this obstinacy and smiled loftily, as Shakespeare retired to
+Stratford might have smiled at hearing himself reminded by Ann Hathaway
+that he was not so great a man as London had imagined.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, my dear fellow," he conceded; "young blood will have its
+way. I withdraw for this once, since your plans are already made."</p>
+
+<p>His forgiveness was brushed aside. Time was pressing. Tabs forced him to
+the point without further ceremony or waste of words. "When you phoned
+yesterday evening it was nearly midnight, so the matter must have seemed
+urgent. You said that General Braithwaite had been to see you on a
+fool's errand, with a story that partly concerned myself. May I ask how
+it concerned me?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're brusque, very brusque," Sir Tobias complained. "We could have
+talked this over much better at my club."</p>
+
+<p>When Tabs showed no signs of relenting, he revealed his real feelings
+testily. "You know this fellow Braithwaite. You must have recognized him
+the moment you clapped eyes on him. Why didn't you tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked up quickly, taken aback and slightly resentful at the
+peremptory tones in which he was addressed. "It wasn't my business.
+Apart from that, I was aware of nothing to his discredit." Once again as
+in the case of Maisie, he was allowing himself to be goaded out of
+justice into excessive generosity.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing to his discredit! That depends on your point of view." Sir
+Tobias sniffed audibly. He<!-- Page 213 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> could be as a rude as a spoilt child. "That
+depends on how deeply interested you're in&mdash;in my daughter."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I gave you proof of my interest, Sir Tobias, the other evening
+when I asked&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw! You know very well what I'm driving at, Taborley."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, I should like to hear you put it into words."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias gave one of his remarkable exhibitions of youthfulness.
+Flinging aside his decrepitude, as though it had been no more than an
+affectation, he shot bolt upright, gripping the arms of his chair. "Last
+night, within a handful of hours of my forbidding him the house, he had
+the impertinence to call here to inform me that he was in love with
+Terry. Not content with that, he added insult to his impertinence by
+telling me that he had been your valet. How is it, Taborley, that on
+that evening when you dined here as his fellow-guest, you never once
+hinted by look or word that he wasn't the part he was playing? I can't
+consider that very honorable of you. As an old friend, quite apart from
+any new relationship, I had the right to expect that my interests were
+nearer to your heart. It upsets me to find I was mistaken. Have you so
+little pride in the girl you propose to marry that it doesn't offend you
+to see her gadding about with ex-servants? You saw them get up and leave
+the table that night. You heard the front-door bang and knew that they'd
+gone out together&mdash;my daughter with the fellow who used to put the studs
+into your shirts! And there<!-- Page 214 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> you sat with me, sipping your coffee and
+chatting as though it were all perfectly right and normal. Upon my soul,
+Taborley, you're beyond my comprehending. If I, her father, can feel
+this indignation, what ought not you to feel? You're supposed to be her
+lover and you're not jealous. So far as I can see, you're not even
+disturbed."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs' face had gone suddenly white. He acknowledged to himself that, had
+he been Terry's father, he would have said no less. When he spoke it was
+with quiet intensity.</p>
+
+<p>"I am annoyed, Sir Tobias&mdash;a good deal more annoyed than I care to own
+to myself; but I try not to let my annoyance obscure my sense of
+justice. It isn't fair to consider Braithwaite in the light of a
+servant. He isn't a servant; he's won his spurs. He arrived at the
+position he occupies to-day through original and unaided merit. That the
+man who was my servant, happens to be my rival, is bitterly galling. But
+I'm not going to let it blind me to the fact that he has qualities of
+greatness. He proved those qualities, even more than on the battlefield,
+when he came to you and pluckily told you the truth about himself. God
+knows what he thought to gain by it; but I'm hats off to him."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Tobias threw out his hands in a disowning gesture. "I don't want to
+quarrel with you&mdash;that's the last thing I desire. But I must confess
+that I fail to sympathize with your attitude of mind. Magnanimity is all
+very well, but it's easy to be magnanimous where your affections aren't
+too deeply concerned. A man in love has no right to<!-- Page 215 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> be magnanimous&mdash;it
+isn't a healthy sign. Lady Beddow used those very words to me this
+morning. She feels as I do, that in your attitude to Terry you lack
+something. You've let two days elapse since you asked my permission to
+approach her&mdash;&mdash; You're the same with this Maisie woman&mdash;inhumanly,
+unsatisfactorily magnanimous. You don't identify yourself with our
+antipathies&mdash;you almost side with the people who affront us. It's
+estranging and distressing. I like a man to be more emphatic in his
+loyalties and aversions. I like him to show more fire. In days that I
+can almost remember, Braithwaite's intrusion would have been an occasion
+for a duel. Terry's mother feels the same about you; it makes her
+unhappy. 'He lacks ardor'&mdash;that was how she expressed it. 'Perhaps,
+after all, he's too old for Terry,' she said. Personally I don't go as
+far as that."</p>
+
+<p>Now that he had made an end, Sir Tobias attempted to beam on Tabs with
+his accustomed suavity. He was skillful in saying offensive things with
+an air of consideration. When he had said, "Personally I don't go as far
+as that," he had leant out and patted Tabs' hand with a senile display
+of affection.</p>
+
+<p><i>Too old for Terry!</i> Tabs sat pondering the words. They voiced his own
+doubt&mdash;the doubt that had haunted him from the moment of his return. The
+antiquated version of Shakespeare sat watching him, plucking at his
+pointed beard and blinking his faded eyes shrewdly.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly with a cavalier smile of conquest, which<!-- Page 216 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> was strangely
+unwarranted, Tabs swung himself to his feet. "Well, Sir Tobias, we've
+talked for more than our half hour. After all, it doesn't matter a
+continental what you, or I, or Lady Beddow feels. It's Terry's feelings
+that count. I shall know what she feels before the afternoon is ended."</p>
+
+<p>He was holding out his hand to the surprised old gentleman, when the
+door opened just sufficiently to admit Terry's head.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, your Lordship!" she laughed mockingly, "you've kept me waiting
+long enough."<!-- Page 217 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_SIXTH" id="CHAPTER_THE_SIXTH"></a>CHAPTER THE SIXTH</h2>
+
+<h4>TRAMPLED ROSES</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>As Tabs emerged from his interview with Sir Tobias, he found Terry
+standing in the hall, doing up the last button of her gloves. James, of
+the velvet-plush manners, lost no time in proffering him his hat and
+cane, and in flinging the front-door wide. He did it with the air of a
+sentimentalist who was aiding and abetting an elopement. Tabs had the
+feeling as he limped along the pavement with Terry tripping at his side,
+that the eyes of the house which they had left followed them&mdash;followed
+them jealously, romantically, expectantly. There was only one way in
+which they could give satisfaction and that was by returning to it
+engaged.</p>
+
+<p>"He lacks ardor. Perhaps, after all, he's too old!" Lady Beddow's
+criticism drummed in his mind. Not very pleasant hearing!</p>
+
+<p>Silence was maintained till they had rounded a corner and the tall buff
+house was left behind. Then Terry raised a shy, laughing face.
+"Downcast, Tabs? You look as though you were bearing the sins of all the
+world."<!-- Page 218 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Not of all the world!" he corrected gravely. "Only of three people."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'm one of them. Who are the other two?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know already&mdash;Mrs. Lockwood and Braithwaite. I saved all your
+necks, but I broke my own."</p>
+
+<p>She brushed against him affectionately. "Tabs, you're a trump."</p>
+
+<p>Her praise displeased him. "I didn't tell you for that."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I thought you ought to know." He slackened his pace. "I thought
+you ought to know that your father isn't as keen on me as he was,
+Terry."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," she said cheerily; "I am. But what have you been
+doing to Daddy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Describing Mrs. Lockwood as a lady above reproach and accusing him of
+uncharity towards Braithwaite."</p>
+
+<p>She tossed her head and laughed outright. "You <i>have</i> become converted!"</p>
+
+<p>"Converted!" He pondered her assertion. "No. I'll acknowledge that I was
+inclined to be too harsh at first. I may have become more pitiful; but
+I've not become converted, if by that you mean that I condone what these
+two people have done. I still think that Mrs. Lockwood's conduct with
+Adair was inexcusable and that Braithwaite's holding back the truth from
+you was dishonorable. In talking with your father I gave Braithwaite all
+the credit for speaking out to him like a man, and I let him suppose
+that Mrs. Lockwood had given up Adair<!-- Page 219 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> unconditionally. As you know,
+Braithwaite didn't come up to scratch till I'd handed him your
+ultimatum; and Mrs. Lockwood&mdash;&mdash; But you don't know about her yet. I
+haven't told you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," Terry smiled roguishly. "Maisie's a great abuser of the
+telephone. She called me up this morning to ask whether she might share
+you with me for a few weeks. When I asked her why, she said to help her
+to forget Adair. Of course I consented."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked down at his companion to see whether her last remark had
+been sarcastic; to his discomfort he found that it hadn't. "I'm not sure
+that I like to be lent round like that," he objected. "I was sorry for
+her last night and promised to help her; but this phoning you up to ask
+your permission puts an entirely erroneous complexion on the affair."</p>
+
+<p>"Not erroneous if I understand," she assured him, glancing up with
+tender frankness.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at the way she cozened him. Was she willing to lend him to
+another woman because she was so sure of him, or because she didn't care
+whether she lost him?</p>
+
+<p>"Your father suspects me of being lukewarm about you," he said; "and I
+can't blame him. He knows nothing about our meeting yesterday. He
+doesn't know that you care for Braithwaite. All he knows is that I asked
+his permission to approach you and then let two days elapse. When I did
+come to his house again it was to defend the two people who have caused
+him most annoyance. My reason for defending them was that I might make
+things<!-- Page 220 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> easier for you. But my position is false, Terry. Every day your
+parents are expecting that we'll become engaged; every day that we
+don't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>They had come to the Marble Arch. "Shall we hop into a taxi?" he
+enquired.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "Let's walk a little farther&mdash;down to Hyde Park
+Corner. It's easier to say things."</p>
+
+<p>When he had helped her through the traffic and they were sauntering
+through the Park, she took up the thread of their conversation. "I told
+you yesterday that I was willing to become engaged to you. I'm willing
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Willing!</i>" he emphasized. "But you don't <i>want</i>. The man you love is
+Braithwaite. What difference has this confession of his made?"</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders and looked away, so that he should not see
+the quivering of her mouth. "It's made everything impossible. I admire
+him more than ever. I admire him for having told the truth and for
+having climbed so far up by his gallantry. But&mdash;&mdash; I'm no fool, Tabs. I
+know that I couldn't marry him without bringing ridicule upon all of us.
+Noble notions about human equality don't work in practice. He's what he
+is&mdash;fine of his kind. He's finer than you or I, Tabs, only he's not our
+sort. He couldn't ever become our sort. If I were as big as he is, I
+might not mind. But I'm little and mean; I care so much for caste. And
+yet, in spite of that, I want to marry him. I oughtn't to tell you, of
+all people. But I can't tell him and I can't tell any one&mdash;any one but
+you, Tabs. I want him<!-- Page 221 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> so much that I'm ashamed sometimes. I wouldn't
+have my people know it, so you must stick by me. Do at least as much for
+me as you promised to do for Maisie&mdash;stay with me till I can forget
+him." And then she added ruefully, "It isn't much fun for you after all
+you'd expected."</p>
+
+<p>He couldn't afford to let her become emotional. Riders and smart
+equipages were passing. Several times already they had been recognized.
+The introduction of Maisie's name supplied him with a loophole. "Mrs.
+Lockwood rather adds to our complication. If I'm not engaged to you and
+I see something of her, your father will never understand. If I were
+your father, I wouldn't. To be perfectly frank, he thinks already that
+I'm lenient to Maisie only because she's good-looking&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Terry didn't permit him to get further. "Daddy's probably right. Be
+honest, Tabs. Would you have stood up for her, if you'd found her fat
+and forty? Of course you wouldn't. Maisie's a dear, but she's dangerous.
+She can't help being dangerous; it's half her attraction. By the way,
+we've been walking entirely in the wrong direction."</p>
+
+<p>They had come out by Hyde Park Corner. "How do you make that out?" he
+asked. "I thought we would lunch at the Ritz."</p>
+
+<p>She began to apologize. "Before I met you this morning, I'd arranged for
+us to lunch with her&mdash;I mean with Maisie. You don't mind, do you? I was
+speaking with her over the phone and she said we must come because she
+didn't feel safe."</p>
+
+<p>"She said that to you, too! She said the same<!-- Page 222 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> thing to me. But you and
+I, do we want her?"</p>
+
+<p>Terry nodded, making her eyes wide. "We'll all make each other more
+safe. That's what friends are for. I told her we'd be at her house by
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"If you told her that&mdash;&mdash;" He was trying to discover whether he was
+relieved or disappointed. With an eagerness which it was hard to account
+for, he was wondering whether Lady Dawn would be there. He pulled out
+his watch. "Twelve-forty-five. We can just do it in a taxi. If you told
+her that, we'd better stick to your plans."</p>
+
+<p>He hailed a driver who was passing and helped her into the cab.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>As he and Terry chugged their way to Mulberry Tree Court he eyed her,
+sitting beside him. Would he ever get her? If he did, would she prove to
+be one of his really big things? All men must have thought that their
+wives would be the really big things in their lives before they married
+them. How many of them thought that six months after they were married?
+There was Adair, for instance. But his wife was going to be the big
+thing&mdash;on that he was determined.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, it wasn't very big of Terry to be using him as a stalking-horse
+for her love for Braithwaite; he felt morally certain that that was what
+she was doing. She hadn't acknowledged to having seen him, but Tabs felt
+instinctively that she had seen him. He also felt that within the next
+twenty-four hours she would be seeing him again. It was<!-- Page 223 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> impossible for
+him to accuse her of clandestine meetings of which he had no proof; at
+the same time he was distressed by the restraint that was put upon
+himself. As things were, anything might happen. When it did happen, it
+would happen suddenly and he would be in a measure to blame.</p>
+
+<p>And here again, in this luncheon with Maisie, he was being made a party
+to her policy of secrecy. There could be no doubt that Sir Tobias was in
+ignorance of her continual correspondence with Maisie.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her. How near she seemed to him and yet in reality what
+miles away! He could listen to her voice. He could touch her. But he
+could not foresee a single one of her future actions. She was remote and
+strange and dear. She had offered to become engaged to him, but she was
+no part of him. She filled him with discomfort and unrest. For the first
+time he dared to frame his charge against her. It was in almost the same
+words as the charge which she herself had brought against Braithwaite.
+He could love her so that it seemed that if he did not win her, he would
+never be able to love any other woman; but he could not trust her. He
+began to question whether she had ever been the woman he had tried to
+think her. Perhaps she was only a dummy and his imagination had clothed
+her with affection. He had attributed to her adorable qualities&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>When all was said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her
+fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of
+his posi<!-- Page 224 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>tion and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in
+the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to
+bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him.
+"He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry
+experience and inexperience inexperience.</p>
+
+<p>As they sped down the Brompton Road, they passed the end of Honeymoon
+Square. In the enclosed garden among spring flowers children were still
+playing. Scattered here and there, under the thin shade of blossoming
+trees, he caught glimpses of white prams with their attendant nurses.
+The little houses&mdash;his own among them&mdash;stood all a-row, shoulder to
+shoulder, looking intensely smiling and habitable. His imagination
+reconjured all the midnights they had witnessed&mdash;the home-comings under
+cover of darkness, the secret endearments of lovers, the muffled
+laughter. Then he remembered his own dream, which he had planned to
+share with her. It was intolerable that it should escape conversion into
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed little short of marvelous that she should still sit beside
+him. She should have vanished with the Square. Had he given her a name,
+he would have called her his lady in heliotrope, for she was dressed in
+a heliotrope gown, trimmed round the hem and throat with gray opossum
+and topped with a little close-fitting turban of color and fur to match.
+She looked so dainty and subtly haughty, so austere in her virginal
+beauty, that it seemed to him he must have wronged her with his silent
+conjectures.<!-- Page 225 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You're more than ordinarily pretty to-day," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I? What you mean, I suppose, is that you like my gown. It's a new
+one. I'm wearing it for the first time, especially for you."</p>
+
+<p>She turned her laughing face towards him, violet eyes, flushed cheeks,
+golden hair, white teeth&mdash;everything aflash with instant gratitude. The
+discovery of how easily he could command her happiness touched him.</p>
+
+<p>"Can I make you as merry as all that just by telling you you're
+beautiful?"</p>
+
+<p>She compressed her lips and nodded. "It's not being told. That doesn't
+matter. It's being told by you."</p>
+
+<p>He felt for the moment that he had recovered her&mdash;that he had bridged
+the gulf of the years that divided. Before anything further could be
+said, they were halting in Mulberry Tree Court.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>On entering the house with the marigold-tinted curtains he had glanced
+round casually for any signs of Lady Dawn. After Porter had shown him
+into the drawing-room Terry had left him to go in search of Maisie. He
+walked over to the tall French-windows and found himself once more
+gazing out on the garden-rockery with its oval lake, its silent fountain
+and its toy-boat that never sailed anywhere. He made an effort to
+continue gazing out, for his impulse was to turn and look at the
+portrait over<!-- Page 226 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> the fireplace. He tantalized himself by trying to ignore
+it. But it was strange the fascination that it held for him. He had the
+feeling that behind his back the face had changed from the profile
+position in which it had been painted, so that the steady stone-gray
+eyes were challenging his attention. At last he resisted no longer;
+walking over to the fireplace, he stood gazing up at it.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he tried to pretend to himself that his interest was purely
+an art-interest. It was Sargent's brush-work that he was admiring. Then
+he smiled, as much to the portrait as to himself. "Princess Czarina
+Bolsheviki," he murmured, "were you really looking at me when my back
+was turned? Did you flash your eyes away directly I obeyed your desire?
+It's the trick of every woman; but you're not like every woman, Princess
+Czarina Bolsheviki."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him almost as though the woman on the canvas was about to
+relax her pose and quiver into life. The longer he looked, the less
+aloof she became and the more her serenity trembled. He felt that he
+knew so much about her&mdash;so very much more than he had ever been told.
+There were experiences of pride and terror which were common to them
+both&mdash;the pride and terror of appalling heart-hunger. He knew for
+certain, as though those painted lips had confessed it, that he was the
+one man in the world who had the power to make her cry. And yet he
+dissociated in his mind the woman of the portrait from the woman who had
+slipped past him out of the night with the taunting, sideways smile of
+feminine triumph. The living woman could wound<!-- Page 227 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> and disappoint; the
+woman of the portrait was his friend entirely.</p>
+
+<p>He was startled out of the mood into which he had fallen by the sound of
+footsteps crossing the hall. He was not going to be discovered in that
+position by Maisie for a second time. He had barely recovered his place
+by the French window, when she and Terry entered laughing. It would have
+been easy to have mistaken them for sisters, with their golden heads and
+clear complexions. Directly he caught sight of them he guessed by the
+mischief in their eyes that their laughter had been at his expense. It
+was Terry who spoke. "Oh, Tabs, how could you? It was like a little
+frightened boy."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced from one to the other of them for further enlightenment. "Do
+what? If you'll let me know, I'll tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Run away, like you did last night," Maisie explained. "I've just been
+describing it to Terry. There was I sitting on the couch when Di
+entered. The first thing she asked me was, 'Who's your new butler?' I
+wouldn't tell her. 'He'll be here in a minute,' I said; 'I'll introduce
+him to you.' We waited for about a minute and, when you didn't come, I
+went out into the hall. 'He's gone, Madam,' Porter told me in her most
+Mayfair manner. 'Gone!' I exclaimed. 'He can't have gone without saying
+good-by.' But I was afraid you had, so I went on to the steps and called
+after you. I don't know whether you heard me. When I came back into the
+drawing-room, Di was smiling. 'I've read about lordly butlers,' she
+said, 'but it's the first<!-- Page 228 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> time I ever met one.' So there you are! You
+can imagine what a trouble I had to clear myself. I only downed her
+suspicions when I assured her that you were on the point of becoming
+engaged to Terry."</p>
+
+<p>Instantly Terry's eyes sought his; the laughter died out of them. He
+shared her annoyance that Lady Dawn should have received this piece of
+information&mdash;Lady Dawn of all persons. He wasn't engaged to Terry. He
+was a long way from being engaged to her&mdash;perhaps further at this moment
+than since his return.</p>
+
+<p>The silence that followed made Maisie aware that she had been guilty of
+a mistake. He suspected that she had intended to be guilty of it from
+the start. Nevertheless, she played the part of innocence, making her
+cornflower eyes eloquent with apology. "Oh, I'm afraid I've put my foot
+in it. But you are almost engaged, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs laughed good-humoredly. "It's all right, Mrs. Lockwood. You didn't
+mean to, but you've paid me back in more than my own coin."</p>
+
+<p>Porter relieved the tension at that moment by announcing that lunch was
+served.</p>
+
+<p>When they had taken their seats in the front-room, overlooking the
+make-believe village-green, Terry surprised them by saying carelessly,
+"Oh, Maisie, you remember General Braithwaite whom we nursed in our
+hospital?"</p>
+
+<p>Maisie looked up sharply, trying to warn her that Porter was still
+present. "Of course I remember him," she said. "Since then we've both
+met him<!-- Page 229 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> a hundred times. I think Lord Taborley would like some bread,
+Porter."</p>
+
+<p>But Terry wasn't to be deterred. She seemed to be taking a perverse
+delight in introducing the one subject on which it would have been most
+fitting for her to have remained silent. "Since Tabs came back we've
+found out all about the General. You'll never guess who he really is or
+was. It's difficult to say whether he is or was, now that he's
+demobilized."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs recognized the blaze of recklessness in her eyes, like the glare of
+lighted windows after nightfall from which the curtains have been
+suddenly thrown back. He had seen that look in her eyes at the hunt
+when, in disobedience to shouted warnings, she had looked back across
+her shoulder challengingly before taking an audacious jump. There was in
+her expression the fear of the thing she was about to do and the panic
+of determination to get it done. He attempted to turn her aside from the
+danger by slipping in quietly, "I don't think I'd discuss the General at
+this moment."</p>
+
+<p>"At this moment!" she flashed back with a scared smile. The sound of her
+own voice seemed to clap spurs to her excitement. "Why not at this
+moment, dear Tabs? Everything comes out sooner or later. If there's
+going to be any spreading of gossip, one takes the sting out of it by
+being the first to spread it. Besides, you oughtn't to mind. You ought
+to feel most frightfully bucked."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, I don't think I'd say it."</p>
+
+<p>Then he held his breath for, paying no heed to him, she had turned to
+Maisie. "You mustn't laugh,<!-- Page 230 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> but it's too good to keep to oneself.
+Before he was a General, what do you think he did for a living? He used
+to clean Lord Taborley's boots. You don't believe it, but it's a fact.
+Daddy's terribly grim with me over it. Of course it was <i>infra dig</i> to
+go footing all over town with your best friend's valet. But how was I to
+know that he'd been that? Daddy says I ought to have sensed it, if I'd
+had any sort of a social instinct. But here's the funniest thing of all,
+the way we made the discovery. I'd invited him to dine at our house on
+the very night that Tabs was Daddy's guest. I'll never forget your
+faces, Tabs, when Daddy introduced the two of you." She commenced to
+pantomime the scene with forced gayety; then she pretended to become
+aware for the first time that they weren't joining in her laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"What's wrong? You look as solemn as a funeral. Don't you find it
+amusing?"</p>
+
+<p>Porter was leaving the room. Maisie waited till the door had closed.
+Then, "You didn't intend it to be amusing. Why on earth did you say all
+this before her?"</p>
+
+<p>Under the rebuke Terry's face flushed defiance. She was near to tears,
+but she contrived to go on smiling. "When I want all the world to know
+anything that's private, I mention it before servants. It always works."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;&mdash;" Maisie was at a loss to find a motive for such indiscretion.
+She glanced helplessly at Tabs. "But," she objected, "surely you don't
+want all the world to know about this, Terry? You and the General have
+been such good pals, and&mdash;&mdash; I<!-- Page 231 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> have to say it, even though Lord
+Taborley is present: there were a great number of your friends who were
+rather afraid&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then they won't have to be afraid any longer," Terry cut in with icy
+sweetness. "When it's reported to the General that I've told this story,
+he won't have to be rather afraid either. It'll set all his doubts at
+rest."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had sat puzzled and horrified while she had been talking.
+Everything that he could remember about her was gentle; it wasn't like
+her to be cruel. Now at last he realized that it was for his sake that
+she was being cruel&mdash;far more cruel to herself than to any one else. She
+had so little faith in her strength to break with Braithwaite that she
+was building up a protective wall of contempt by the spread of this
+damaging story. If Braithwaite heard it, she might well hope to rouse
+his hatred and save herself further effort.</p>
+
+<p>From across the table her eyes sought his in appeal; his answered hers
+with intuitive comprehension. But his mind was stunned with apprehension
+at the discovery that her passion for this man meant so much that his
+hate would be a lighter burden than his love.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie turned to Tabs with veiled disdain. "I suppose it was you who
+told her this, Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>He paid her scant attention and continued looking at Terry. "On the
+contrary." He spoke with unruffled urbanity. "It was General
+Braithwaite&mdash;Steely Jack as he was nicknamed in the Army. He<!-- Page 232 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> never lost
+an inch of trench, so they say. Like your own first husband, Mrs.
+Lockwood, he's most to be feared when every one else would have given up
+hoping. Like myself, though he doesn't know it, he's a round-the-corner
+person. Curious, Terry, that you should have attracted two
+round-the-corner admirers! It makes one almost believe that you're a
+round-the-corner person yourself."</p>
+
+<p>He had said it without consciousness of magnanimity. There was nothing
+magnanimous about stating the truth according to his code of honor. He
+was seeing the bleak look that would come into Braithwaite's face should
+he hear of this happening. He was wondering whether Braithwaite
+possessed the insight into feminine strategy not to take offense, but to
+interpret it as surrender.</p>
+
+<p>Terry was speaking again. "My dear Maisie, if ever you get to know Lord
+Taborley, you'll learn to have a better opinion of him. He plays with
+all his cards on the table. I think most men play like that. It's we
+women who cheat and carry spare aces and revoke when the game's going
+against us." Then came her amazing burst of frankness, "Like you did
+when, to suit your own purpose, you pretended that we were on the point
+of becoming engaged. Like I did when I told that story just now about
+Steely Jack. And again like you've done all along in your dealings with
+Adair. Why, even now, when you're ready to give him up, you can't play
+the cards that are on the table; you have to try to borrow Lord Taborley
+from me. Don't get angry. I'm not accusing you especially. We women are
+all<!-- Page 233 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> the same; there's not one of us who can stick to the rules of the
+game." Her glance shifted to Tabs. "You used to think that I was the
+exception. You see, I'm not. The wonder is that men can even pretend to
+respect us."</p>
+
+<p>Long after she had finished and the conversation had taken a new turn,
+she went on gazing at him, raising and lowering her eyes as she ate her
+lunch, begging him to understand.</p>
+
+<p>"You're wrong, Terry." In her capacity as hostess, Maisie was making an
+attempt to get away from personalities. She was too convicted by what
+had been said to consider it wise to defend herself. "You're wrong. Men
+don't want to respect us. They love us for having faults that they
+wouldn't tolerate in themselves. They encourage us to cultivate them. It
+flatters their integrity to discover our dishonesties. They like to
+believe that we're cowards. They don't expect us to tell the truth. They
+almost resent our having a sense of honor. The woman who cheats at every
+turn and then cries in their arms when she's found out, is the kind of
+woman who always has a man to take care of her. Look at my sister, Lady
+Dawn. She's never been known to cry. She's missed everything in life
+through being almost repellently honorable."</p>
+
+<p>In the discussion that followed Tabs took no part, though he was often
+appealed to for an opinion. As he listened to their modulated flow of
+voices, their refined and gentle intonations, their evasive, slyly
+uttered words, he began to have an understanding of what was taking
+place. It was something primitive<!-- Page 234 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>&mdash;the oldest of all battles. Neither
+of them wanted him, but each was prompted to covet the pretense of his
+possession. Their hunting instincts were aroused. He had taken on a
+sudden value in their eyes because each had discovered that the other
+was in pursuit of him.</p>
+
+<p>His thoughts went back to Lady Dawn&mdash;to her pale aloofness. She wasn't
+like this&mdash;she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous
+that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was
+a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue with himself
+again as to whether he ought to seek her out and endanger her serenity
+by telling her about Lord Dawn. It would be useless to confide such
+intentions to Maisie. He would obtain no help from her. She could
+conceive of no sympathy between a man and woman into which sex did not
+enter. The thought of sex in connection with Lady Dawn seemed an
+impertinence.</p>
+
+<p>The discussion went on. Luncheon was at an end. Coffee had been served.
+Cigarettes were being lighted. Again and again he was referred to. Did
+he think this and didn't he agree to that? Wasn't this true of the way
+in which men regarded women? Their differences of opinion seemed so
+trivial. Their views so immature and amateurish. He watched them with
+curious, brooding attention. They were so nobly tender in their outward
+forms. He appreciated the grace of their gestures, the fine-boned
+smallness of their bodies, the delicacy of their molding, the tendril
+thinness of their fingers, the sagacity of their tiny aristocratic
+heads, the seduction of<!-- Page 235 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> their soft red mouths, the poetry of the fringe
+of golden lashes in which the pathos of their eyes hung enmeshed&mdash;their
+intrusive, penetrating frailty, which supplicated, denounced and
+astounded. They were so weak and yet so strong. A man could crush them
+with one arm. But they could slay a man's soul with their sweetness.
+They were equipped in every detail by their pale perfection to quicken
+and to disappoint. To disappoint! That was what they had been trying to
+persuade him for the past half-hour&mdash;that they were Nature's traps,
+cunningly contrived and baited. <i>The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!</i>
+Their self-traductions were undermining his faith in all sacredness.</p>
+
+<p>In the silence of his brain he fought&mdash;fought against disillusion,
+claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping
+denunciations&mdash;the woman in the portrait.</p>
+
+<p>A man had been passing and repassing the windows, cut into triangles by
+the looped back, marigold-tinted curtains. At first he had mistaken him
+for a different man each time he had passed. Then the lazy certainty had
+grown up within him that it was always the same man. A man who wanted
+something&mdash;wanted something that was in that house. It wasn't possible
+to make out his features. He wore a morning-coat and was top-hatted. The
+swing of his carriage was indefinitely familiar.</p>
+
+<p>And now he had vanished&mdash;lost courage, lost patience, given up his
+quest, perhaps. Through the triangular gaps in the panes the
+village-green showed untraversed, sunlit, tranquil, garnished.<!-- Page 236 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Without knocking Porter entered, looking worried.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie broke off from her conversation long enough to say, "A little
+later, Porter. We're not finished."</p>
+
+<p>She was resuming, when Porter again interrupted. "It isn't that, Madam.
+It isn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then what is it?"</p>
+
+<p>With an elaborate air of caution Porter closed the door and set her back
+against it. "I've told him that it's no good. That you won't see him,
+Madam."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not. That's quite right." Maisie bestowed her approval with
+rapid tolerance. "I can't see any one at present." Then, as an
+after-thought, "By the way, who is it?"</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Porter let fall her bomb. "It's no good my telling him.
+He won't go away." Her firmness crumbled. She bleated in a dramatic
+surrender to distress. The three who heard her caught the commotion of
+her alarm and waited breathless. Her explanation came at last. "It's Mr.
+Easterday." The moment she had said it, she turned and fled.</p>
+
+<p>The door had scarcely closed, when Maisie rose from her chair and stood
+swaying. She sank back, closing her eyes and pressing her hands against
+her breast. The mask of placidity had been wrenched from her face,
+leaving it blanched with the conflict between yearning, temptation and
+loneliness.</p>
+
+<p>"Adair!" she moaned. "My God, I daren't trust myself!"</p>
+
+<p>Unclosing her eyes, she gazed burningly at Tabs.<!-- Page 237 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I was honest in what I promised. I do want to live as though Reggie
+weren't dead. How did you put it? As though he were round the corner. As
+though he were truly coming back."</p>
+
+<p>In the silence that followed she stifled a sob, realizing that it wasn't
+Tabs who was the obstacle. Turning hysterically to Terry, she laid hold
+of both her hands. "I can't do it&mdash;<i>can't, can't</i> by myself. I can only
+do it if you'll tell Lord Taborley to help me."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>At a nod from Terry he left the table. In the hall he found an odd sight
+waiting for him. He had to look twice to make certain that this was the
+Adair Easterday whom he had known, and not a strayed and beflustered
+wedding-guest.</p>
+
+<p>The man before him was worried to distraction. He had the unhappy,
+panic-stricken eyes of an over-driven bullock that scents the
+slaughterhouse. And yet his dress was immaculate; he was tailored and
+laundered as though for an occasion of joy. Everything that he wore was
+discreetly festive, from the lavender gloves and shiny topper to the
+striped trousers and canvas spats. One would have said that he was a
+caricature of George Grossmith on his way to a garden-party.</p>
+
+<p>But he was hot&mdash;terribly hot; far more hot than he had any excuse for
+being in brisk spring weather. There were beads of perspiration on his
+forehead; his face was congested with excitement. To lend the touch of
+humor, which always lurks behind other<!-- Page 238 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> people's tragedies, he held his
+top-hat by the brim in his right hand, as though he were taking a
+collection, while from his left, like a feather-duster, trailed an
+enormous bunch of roses. He was a short man in the late thirties,
+red-headed and inclined to be podgy. He was not built to express poetic
+passions&mdash;how many of us are, if it comes to that?&mdash;or to sustain their
+onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed
+tears. There was nothing noble in his distress&mdash;only a farcical
+appearance of wretchedness.</p>
+
+<p>As Tabs crossed the hall to the front-door, just inside of which Adair
+was standing, he felt an undeserved compassion for him&mdash;the kind of
+compassion one feels for a clumsy dog, which is always getting under
+people's feet. At the same time he couldn't help marveling that there
+should be two women at the same time in the world who were willing to
+compete for such a man's affections.</p>
+
+<p>"I happened to be lunching here," Tabs commenced conventionally. But he
+altered his tactics promptly. In the presence of his friend's
+self-advertised misery nothing but the briefest truth seemed adequate.</p>
+
+<p>"Old man, it's no good. She won't see you. She doesn't want you."
+Forgetting his sense of justice, he placed his hand affectionately on
+Adair's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Adair stared in a full-blown way and nodded. "She never did want me."</p>
+
+<p>He passed no comment on this unforeseen meeting in the little house with
+the marigold-tinted curtains.<!-- Page 239 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> He manifested no resentment against this
+familiar angel who had been deputed to bar the gates of Eden to his
+approaches. He was incapable of surprise. He was obsessed by the
+solitary idea of his own forlornness. "I knew it. She never did want
+me." And then, in a rush of self-pity, "No one ever wanted me."</p>
+
+<p>"Except Phyllis," Tabs suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Adair appeared not to have heard. He stood like a living statue, his
+top-hat extended, his bunch of roses dangling&mdash;the picture of idiotic
+futility. Genuine emotion, however mean its origin, always has its grand
+moments. Tabs forgot the silly beginnings of this upset and the endless
+troubles it had caused. All he saw was a typical ragamuffin of humanity
+in the grip of the policeman, Nemesis. Adair had been caught trying to
+do what thousands of other ragamuffins achieved daily with success. He
+had been arrested red-handed in the act of stealing forbidden happiness.
+It was his first offense. He was inexpert and had bungled. He had
+bungled because, while assuming the r&ocirc;le of roguery, he had remained at
+heart an honest man. Now that he was caught, he took the exposure of his
+dishonesty too seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had almost forgotten that he had been the last to speak, when Adair
+repeated his exact words, "Except Phyllis!" And then, "Poor kid! She,
+too, is unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>Through the marshy obscurities of his humiliation his conscience was
+building a path. With his two hands he crushed his topper back onto his
+head.<!-- Page 240 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> The act had the vehemence of decision. In the doing of it he
+dropped the roses to the floor. There they lay forgotten&mdash;so forgotten
+that he placed his foot on them without noticing.</p>
+
+<p>"Home! Best be going home," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>Without further explanation, he drew back the latch and let himself out
+into the sunlit Court. Delaying long enough to pick up his hat and cane,
+Tabs followed.</p>
+
+<p>Adair gave no sign of recognition as he caught up with him. Failing to
+hail a taxi, they boarded a bus. Tabs paid the fares. Adair sat like
+Napoleon after Waterloo, taking no notice of anything. It was the
+intensity of his thoughts that kept him silent&mdash;not moroseness.</p>
+
+<p>They had reached Clapham Common and had come to his garden-gate, before
+he acknowledged Tabs' presence.</p>
+
+<p>"I was a fool. I deserved it," he said sadly. "It's ended in exactly the
+way that any sane man would have expected."</p>
+
+<p>Kicking the gate open, he passed up the path. From the Common Tabs
+watched him, till he was safely within the house and the door had shut.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned away, he scarcely knew whether to laugh or feel vexed. The
+misfortunes of others can always be traced to folly; it is only our own
+misfortunes that are never deserved and never anything less than august.
+If Adair's love-affair had appeared ridiculous in his eyes, probably his
+own would afford materials for jest to some one else.</p>
+
+<p>He couldn't forget the top-hat and the trampled<!-- Page 241 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> roses. The
+ineffectualness of all passion loomed large. It might have its value as
+an educative process, but what a waste of energy! For the moment he drew
+no distinction between Adair's guilty hankering after something which
+was forbidden and his own honorable love for Terry. The end of all
+passion was futility.</p>
+
+<p>Then he laughed, for in imagination he saw the world as a crestfallen
+caricature of George Grossmith, top-hatted and bespatted, wending its
+unfestive way through the centuries to an eternal garden-party, from
+which Adam and his lineage were forever debarred.</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>His exit from Mulberry Tree Court had been so hurried that he had had no
+time to make arrangements with Terry.</p>
+
+<p>He had no sooner knocked than the door was opened by Maisie. He was
+slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus
+suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a
+tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had not
+much time to spare.</p>
+
+<p>"I called in," he apologized, "because I thought you'd like to know what
+happened&mdash;and to fetch Terry."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course." She spoke with a cheerfulness that astonished him. "I was
+expecting you." With that she led the way across the hall to the
+drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Carrying his hat, he followed. He clung to his hat purposely; it would
+serve as a reminder that<!-- Page 242 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> he had not come to stay long. She was on the
+point of seating herself, when she spotted it. "Oh, how rude of me!" In
+the twinkling of an eye she had deprived him of it and vanished.
+"Captured once more!" he thought.</p>
+
+<p>During the few seconds that she was gone, he looked about him.
+Everything was as it had been yesterday. A companionable fire glowed in
+the grate. On a table beside the couch tea was spread. Even as
+yesterday, the nearest chair to the couch was at least six feet away,
+making it necessary for any one who did not wish to appear boorish to
+share the couch with her. There was something else that he had noticed
+on entering: while he had been away she had made a complete change of
+toilet. She was now dressed in a filmy gown of emerald green, with
+shoes, stockings and buckles to match. It was a gown so <i>chic</i> that, had
+he been a woman, he would have guessed at once that it was the latest
+from Paquin's. Inasmuch as he was a man, his sole comment was, "Plucky
+little thorough-bred! You don't catch her owning that she's down." The
+emerald shade brought out all the values of her coloring, the faint rose
+of her complexion, the daffodil gold of her flaxen hair. He had expected
+to be bored by a Magdalene repentant; instead he had found himself
+confronted by a challenging young Diana. His admiration went out to her
+for her courage.</p>
+
+<p>Having come back and resettled herself on the couch, she smiled up at
+him through flickering lashes. "A nice frock, don't you think? Nothing<!-- Page 243 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+like a new frock after a knock-out for restoring your self-respect."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a charming frock. Where's Terry?"</p>
+
+<p>She clasped her small hands about her knees, leaning her head far back
+so that her eyes glinted up at his languidly. Perhaps it was necessary
+to do that in order to see him properly. He was still standing. And yet
+her attitude served another purpose; it called attention to the firm
+young lines of her bust and throat, and to the voluptuous curve of her
+lips, parted in patient expectancy.</p>
+
+<p>"Terry!" Her voice sounded drowsy. "I forgot. I ought to have given you
+her message. She couldn't stop. She had another engagement."</p>
+
+<p>"An engagement!" He was dumbfounded. "That's strange! She never said
+anything&mdash;&mdash; Are you sure she didn't invent it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certain." Maisie sat up fully awake now. "Quite positive. But she had
+made up her mind not to keep it till, through no fault of yours, you
+gave her the chance. You don't want to believe that; it sounds as though
+she had cheated. You don't know much about women, Lord Taborley. You
+don't know because you refuse to learn. You're determined, in the face
+of every proof to the contrary, to live and die in the faith that we're
+angels." She shook her finger at him. He was amused to discover that he
+was being scolded. "Angels! We're far from it. We're very much like you
+men, with this difference, that we're cowards. What you need&mdash;this may
+sound entirely wrong&mdash;is a good sensible woman to take you in hand, and
+give you a run for<!-- Page 244 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> your money, and teach you your own value. Why, with
+your position and charm&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You must excuse my interrupting. Of course it all depends on what you
+mean by a run for my money. But are there many good and sensible women
+who are game for an adventure of that sort?"</p>
+
+<p>"Heaps of them," she assured him, imitating his mock seriousness. "The
+more outwardly good and sensible, the more inwardly they're willing."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" He pretended to be pondering this gem of information. And then,
+"But you have to own, Mrs. Lockwood, that Terry's not&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She blocked his protest with a gay little laugh. "I make no exceptions.
+Terry's exactly like the rest of us&mdash;younger and more innocent looking,
+no doubt, but just as imperfect. As regards this engagement of hers, she
+breathed no word of it until you had gone. Then she began to flirt with
+the idea that she might be able to keep it. At last she couldn't resist
+the temptation any longer. Out she came with it, that she must be going.
+I'd lay a wager I could name the person with whom&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd lose your wager."</p>
+
+<p>"I think not." She met the threatened tempest in his eyes with calmness.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you give a name to this person?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the good?" She shrugged her dainty shoulders. "We both know it?
+Steely Jack. Isn't that what you call him?"</p>
+
+<p>Instantly she leant forward. Her whole instinct was to touch him. She
+hadn't intended to hurt him like that. He looked so defiant, and gaunt
+and<!-- Page 245 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> deserted&mdash;such a huge, scarred boy of a man. He reminded her of one
+of those early war-posters, in which a solitary figure was depicted,
+knee-deep in barbed wire, head bandaged, hurling the last of his bombs.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't be angry," she pleaded. "I was clumsy; but I was trying to
+help. When you helped me yesterday, you too were clumsy. You can't put
+on a new frock, worse luck, the way I've done, to restore your
+self-respect. But I do wish you'd buy a new something&mdash;a new race-horse
+or a new car&mdash;I don't care what as long as it would make you swank. A
+little swanking would do you all the good in the world; it would keep
+Terry from knowing how much you care. Terry's not half good enough for
+you; one day you'll acknowledge it. Still, if you really do think you
+want her, you can bring her to heel any moment by putting on an
+indifferent air. Look how jealously she flared up at me at lunch. It
+makes a woman furious to see her rejections picked up as treasures by
+another woman. The only reason why Terry brought you here to-day was to
+see for herself just how deep an impression we'd made on each other."</p>
+
+<p>At last she mustered the courage to touch him. Reaching out, she took
+his hand and drew him to her. He stood against her knees, looking down.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was tender. "Some one had to say these things to you, just as
+you had to say things to me that weren't altogether pleasant. So why
+shouldn't I to you? After all, we're both in the same box, and the box
+is labeled <span class="smcap">NOT WANTED</span>. It pains<!-- Page 246 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> me to see a man like you,
+wasting himself on a girl who hasn't the sense to appreciate what he's
+offering." She raised her eyes to his with a slow smile. "Don't mistake
+me, Lord Taborley, I'm not trying to secure what you're offering for
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>He began to see the drift of her argument. Before he could formulate it,
+she herself had put it into words. "Can't we do a little missionary
+work, you and I, by appreciating each other just a little?"</p>
+
+<p>Flinging prejudices to the winds, he took a place beside her on the
+couch. Why shouldn't he? Why should he go on conserving himself so
+scrupulously for a girl who didn't value his loyalty?</p>
+
+<p>"I should consider it a privilege to be appreciated by you," he said
+gravely. "But let's start properly. How about dinner at the Berkeley?
+After that, if you felt like it, we could do a theatre. Would that suit
+you?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was close on midnight when they returned to Mulberry Tree Court. Not
+until he was handing her out of the taxi and Porter was standing framed
+in the open doorway, did he remember that he'd imparted none of his
+important news concerning Adair.</p>
+
+<p>"About Adair&mdash;&mdash;" he commenced. "Or shall I put him off till to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Till forever." As her feet touched the pavement, she swung around on
+him with laughter. They had been very happy in the last six hours. She
+pressed close against him. He caught the sparkle of her eyes as he
+stooped above her and the faint, sweet fragrance of her hair. She rested
+an un<!-- Page 247 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>gloved hand on his arm. It looked dim like a large white moth that
+had settled there.</p>
+
+<p>"I have few principles to guide me," she whispered, "but the few that I
+have I observe. I never dig up my dead and I never botanize on the
+graves of the past. Good-night. Merry dreams to you, Lord Taborley."</p>
+
+<p>With the suddenness of a phantom she went from him. There were a brief
+few seconds while he heard the ripple of her laughter and the rustling
+of her dress. Then the door closed. Save for the lamps of the waiting
+taxi night was again eventless and dark.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>That evening was the first of many such adventures. His tall limping
+figure became a familiar sight in Mulberry Tree Court.</p>
+
+<p>Very early in their friendship he took her advice and delighted her by
+purchasing a smart two-seater runabout which he drove himself. Sometimes
+it was at her door shortly after breakfast to transport her to where
+saddle-horses were waiting in the Park. Sometimes it would turn up about
+lunch-time and stand impatiently chugging while she changed into sport's
+clothes, after which it would dash away with her, humming contentedly,
+into the depths of the country. It was the magic-carpet which obeyed all
+her desires. After war-days, with their petrol shortages and restricted
+travel, it seemed more than ordinarily magic. It made emphatic as
+nothing else could have done, the freedom and serenity which<!-- Page 248 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> peace had
+restored. The very fleetness of its obedience prompted her to urge Tabs
+to take her farther and ever farther afield. There were evenings when
+they dined within sight of the sea beneath the red roofs of Rye and
+started back for London across the Sussex downs, driving straight into
+the eye of the sunset. There were afternoons when they drifted over the
+Chiltern hills to where the spires and domes of Oxford rise, placid as
+masts of a sunken ship in an encroaching sea of greenness.</p>
+
+<p>But it was most frequently nearing midnight when the quiet of the
+secluded Court was wakened by the merry buzzing of the engine. At first
+it would come from far away, drowsily like the song of a belated bee.
+Then it would gather in volume and grow more lively, till it panted
+round the little village-green and quavered into silence in front of
+Maisie's door. Porter, with the gold light of the hall behind her, would
+always be there on the threshold to receive her mistress. It was
+difficult to guess what Porter thought. There were impromptu jaunts to
+theaters and dances. Porter had seen many gay beginnings and tearful
+endings. Her face was immobile and respectful at whatever hour he
+called.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious friendship that had developed between them&mdash;a
+friendship which lived from hand to mouth, which had the appearance of
+being more than a friendship, in which nothing was premeditated. Nothing
+could be premeditated so far as he was concerned. Terry had first call
+on all his leisure&mdash;not that she availed herself of it very often;
+nevertheless, he held himself in readiness to break<!-- Page 249 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> every engagement
+for her. Maisie was his consolation prize when Terry had failed. Maisie
+was not deceived as to the spare-man place that she held in his
+affections. She was painfully aware that at any moment their friendship
+might end as abruptly as it had started. On either side it was based on
+a common need for kindness, a common tenderness and a common desire for
+protection from loneliness. In a sense they were each a substitute for
+something postponed and more satisfying. While he was making up to her
+for the loss of Adair, she was trying to save him from the rashness of
+committing himself too fatally to Terry. They were altruists, actuated
+by self-interested motives.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it was a friendship not untinged by enmity. His enmity was
+awakened when she became too possessive in the demands which she made
+and especially when she let fall criticisms, however mild, concerning
+Terry. These occurrences set him thinking of the other casuals who had
+ventured on her doorstep, not meaning to stay, and had ended by hanging
+up their hats in her hall. Her enmity was roused by the courteous
+circumspection of his behavior. He never admitted her to the privacy of
+his inmost thoughts. He could be gay and gallant and bountifully
+generous, but he never permitted her to peep beneath the surface. He
+addressed her invariably as Mrs. Lockwood. The use of her surname held
+her at arm's length. She longed most frightfully to hear him call her by
+the name that was less safe. She denied to herself that she wanted him
+to make love to her; at the same time she was dis<!-- Page 250 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>appointed at the
+persistency with which he held her off. She liked to believe that, if he
+had made love to her, she would have rebuffed him. She rehearsed many
+times the indignant words with which she would have set him in his
+place; she would have reminded him that it was for Reggie Pollock she
+was waiting&mdash;as though he were not dead, but only round the corner. To
+her chagrin Tabs never gave her the least incentive to employ them.</p>
+
+<p>He saw her never more and frequently less than once a day. There was a
+week at a stretch when he saw nothing of her. She bridged these tedious
+intervals of expecting by the length of her telephone conversations.
+Whenever he stayed away for long, she tortured herself with suspicions
+that his courtship of Terry had begun to prosper. If he returned
+debonair and smiling, she felt confirmed in these suspicions. He was
+most dear to her when he returned in an under-mood of distress. She knew
+then that she was necessary; to be necessary was the passion of her
+heart. Then she would become gay and tender and mothering&mdash;an altogether
+sweeter, gentler and more self-effacing Maisie.</p>
+
+<p>Whither were they drifting&mdash;toward marriage or only toward infatuation?
+If you had asked Tabs, he would have replied promptly, "Toward neither."
+He had promised to tide her over the dull spots. She had advised him to
+take a course of education in his own value in order that he might
+increase his worth to Terry. She had told him that he ought to let some
+good sensible woman take him in hand and give<!-- Page 251 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> him a run for his money.
+They had accepted each other at their word&mdash;that was all.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time he knew that that was not all. He knew that if there
+was one thing more irritating to her than being addressed as Mrs.
+Lockwood, it was his way of treating her as if she were good and
+sensible. Most women would feel affronted at hearing themselves spoken
+of as anything other than sensible and good. Good and sensible women are
+the pillars of society, but they are not usually regarded as attractive
+companions for joyous excursions in two-seater runabouts.</p>
+
+<p>Neither of them was entirely insensitive to the conjectures that their
+sudden intimacy had given rise to in the minds of onlookers. They were
+both too well-known and were seen together in too many different places
+to avoid the breath of gossip&mdash;even of scandal. Men were scarce after
+the wholesale butchery of the war, especially bachelors of Lord
+Taborley's class. Had he only had the conceit to know it, he had
+returned to London a strong favorite for the season's matrimonial
+sweepstakes. More than one anxious mother of unappropriated daughters
+had set him down for preference on her list of eligibles. When
+invitations poured in on him and were politely regretted, there was
+consternation and puzzlement. The puzzlement vanished when the
+explanation was whispered across a hundred dinner-tables, "Haven't you
+heard? It's Maisie Lockwood."</p>
+
+<p>Then would follow details of how they had been seen at sundry theaters,
+at half-a-dozen fashionable hotels and riding together in the Park.
+"She<!-- Page 252 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> mounted on one of Lord Taborley's horses of course."</p>
+
+<p>"It's quite a case," people said. "If he doesn't mean matrimony, it
+would be decent to exercise more discretion. There used to be some talk
+of Terry Beddow; that's completely ended. Queer the women men fall for,
+even the quietest of them! No one's sane any longer. Had three husbands
+already, hasn't she? Quite a crowd! One would scarcely have supposed
+that an exclusive chap like Taborley would have joined in the queue to
+make a fourth. And he could have had almost any girl for the asking.
+There's never any telling."</p>
+
+<p>Veiled references began to appear in the society columns; but not so
+veiled that they could not be recognized. "A romance is developing
+between a noble lord, who served in the ranks during the war, and a
+vivacious beauty, three times widowed, well-known in fashionable
+circles, etc." One paper published a photograph of them riding side by
+side. After that sceptics who had not seen for themselves, were
+persuaded.</p>
+
+<p>It was a mad world&mdash;a world in which it was not safe to be censorious.
+The lid was off the conventions. Every one was shouting for
+happiness&mdash;happiness at all costs. When they could not get it for the
+asking, they were taking it without thought of law or penalties. There
+were few who could afford to sit in judgment and many who preferred to
+laugh. The day of authority was over. Traditions were no longer
+respected. While the war was on, men and women had been drilled into
+dumb acquiescence; now<!-- Page 253 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> that the drilling was abolished, they had become
+a mob, avid, leaderless and uproarious.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs came to realize that he was not alone in his lost sense of
+direction. The right to live had been restored, but neither individuals
+nor nations were sure what they wanted to do with it. After having been
+as one in their sacrificial certainty, they had arrived at a cross-roads
+where there was no policeman to take charge. They had broken up into
+little groups, gathered about their own vociferous stump-orators. The
+result was babel. Of orators there were a plenty. They abused one
+another across the Irish Sea. They tried to shout one another down
+across the Atlantic Ocean. But the hammer-head men of righteousness were
+gone. After the apocalyptic splendor of mailed knights of Christ
+charging stern-faced down to Armageddon, the results of victory had been
+consigned to the weakling care of a race of talkers.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there was music and laughter. Spring rushed on. Feet that had
+marched, now moved in the rhythm of the dance. Theaters were crowded.
+Jazz-bands clashed. There were endless processions. Youth beckoned.
+Chestnut bloom grew white and fell in flurries. Women were no less
+beautiful. The sun shone thunderously.</p>
+
+<p>If Tabs were foolish, which he did not concede, all the world was his
+companion in foolishness. Blindly and gropingly he was still going in
+search of his kingdom. He ignored the gossip which his championship of
+Maisie had called forth. He despised it. It made him the more
+compassionate to<!-- Page 254 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>ward her&mdash;the more determined to help her to weather
+the storm. Well-meaning friends undertook to warn him. "She's most
+beautiful and charming. And she's Lady Dawn's sister, of course. But&mdash;&mdash;
+Well, to put it frankly, a woman who's been married three times might
+just as well never have been married at all. Looks as though she'd only
+squandered her money in rising to the nicety of a marriage-license. I
+hope you don't mean to marry her, old chap, because she's not your
+sort."</p>
+
+<p>When Tabs went to the trouble of assuring these well-wishers that he did
+not intend to marry her and that she was his sort, they slipped their
+tongues into their cheeks and opened their eyes wide, "Oh, so that's the
+way of it!"</p>
+
+<p>Maisie reported to him similar experiences. "So you see how I'm
+regarded, as though I were no better than I should be. And I'm young and
+I've done nothing wrong. If it wasn't for your friendship, I should be
+tempted&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you have my friendship!" he assured her.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to rise superior to this petty talk of scandal-mongers, but it
+was not always possible when he remembered Terry.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>He met Terry as often as he could contrive, but he no longer forced
+himself upon her. He could effect nothing so long as her infatuation for
+Braithwaite lasted.</p>
+
+<p>Now that Sir Tobias had lost faith in him as a<!-- Page 255 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> lover, his opportunities
+for meeting her became more rare. When Sir Tobias lost faith in any one,
+he made no attempt to disguise it. In the case of Tabs, he let him know
+it with a fine air of magnanimity, as though he were doing him a
+kindness. His frankness took the form of communicating some new
+disparaging criticism, astutely attributed to Lady Beddow, every time he
+was paid a visit.</p>
+
+<p>Having separated Tabs from Terry by carrying him off to his library on
+one pretext or another, he would carefully close the door and commence,
+"You men who've seen service are all unbalanced; it would be unfair to
+hold any of you responsible. You're no exception, my dear fellow, though
+you probably don't notice it in yourself. As Lady Beddow was saying to
+me this morning, 'Poor Lord Taborley, he has a rambling mind. Most
+likely it's a species of shell-shock. There's a queer look comes into
+his eyes. It's not always there. It's a look as if he were haunted. You
+ought to speak to him, Tobias&mdash;you're his oldest friend&mdash;and advise him
+to see a specialist. It's lucky we found his weakness out before things
+between him and Terry went too far.'"</p>
+
+<p>Or he would say, "Lady Beddow and I were talking about you, my dear
+fellow. You know she's very fond of you. She loved your mother before
+you. 'The little big lady from America,' she used to call her. She's
+naturally very much upset at the way in which you're getting yourself
+talked about. Unfortunately she holds me partly responsible for having
+induced you to visit this Maisie woman. 'You ought to have known him
+better,' she says. 'There's an im<!-- Page 256 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>moral streak in him&mdash;an inherited
+taint, which I, for one, always suspected.' She was wondering whether
+you have any knowledge of there having been insanity in your family."</p>
+
+<p>After having invented such discomforting surmises and given his wife the
+credit for them, the old gentleman would blink his crafty eyes and rest
+his hand affectionately on Tabs' arm. At the end of each visit he was
+pressed to call again; but when he called, it was to find himself
+shepherded into the library, safely out of reach of Terry, in order that
+he might hear his conduct discussed afresh, either directly or by
+insinuation.</p>
+
+<p>He was unable to defend himself without betraying Terry. She maintained
+her silence with regard to Braithwaite, refusing to take her parents
+into her confidence. They naturally attributed the hanging fire of the
+engagement to Tabs, supposing that on the eve of his proposal he had
+been ensnared in the net of Maisie. In their eyes he cut a shabby
+figure.</p>
+
+<p>Behind his back Terry came to his defense. She would hear and believe no
+wrong of him. This only proved to her parents that her heart still
+followed him. They thought her very brave and became more gloomy in
+their accusations. Matters took a serious turn: her health began to
+fail. When the doctor was summoned, he ascribed the cause to secret
+worrying and prescribed a complete change. Tabs received no word of this
+happening, for Terry had become increasingly shy, so that she created
+the appearance of avoiding him. She quite definitely avoided Maisie.<!-- Page 257 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There came a day in early June when he went to call on her and was
+informed by the velvet-plush James that Miss Terry was out of London on
+a visit of undetermined length. When he asked for her address, James
+shook his head mournfully. She had been ill and was to be spared all
+disturbing communications. His orders were that her address was to be
+given to nobody.</p>
+
+<p>"But that order doesn't apply to me," Tabs urged.</p>
+
+<p>James became more profoundly agitated. He averted his eyes, while he
+fiddled with the last button of his plump waistcoat. "I regret to say,
+to your Lordship most especially."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" Tabs stroked his chin. "Is Sir Tobias at home?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your Lordship would gain nothing by seeing Sir Tobias."</p>
+
+<p>"You might mention to him that I called." With that he descended the
+steps and climbed into his runabout.</p>
+
+<p>"Turned away!" he thought. "Turned away from Terry's house!" Then his
+mind went back to two months ago&mdash;the hopes he'd had, his meeting with
+her at the station, his asking her father for her hand in marriage. It
+was like the old front-line trench, when re&euml;nforcements had failed to
+come up: there was nothing for it but to dig one's self in and stick it
+out.</p>
+
+<p>He had been shown the door with as little ceremony as an intruding
+peddler.<!-- Page 258 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<p>From Terry's house he went to Mulberry Tree Court, but the route that he
+chose was not direct. He drove all over the West End first, through
+Oxford Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly; then back by way of Regent
+Street, swinging to the left through Conduit Street, till he again
+struck Bond Street. He doubled and redoubled on his tracks, moving among
+crowds, feeling that he must hear the noise of crowds, yet seeing little
+of the sights on which his eyes rested. It had been like this with him
+before, after being in too close contact with calamity. It had been like
+this in war-days, when he had returned on brief leaves out of monstrous
+offensives to the appalling quiet of a normal world. He hadn't dared to
+be alone. He had felt that his sanity depended on his rubbing shoulders
+with people. He had been like a child in an empty house, leaning out of
+a window to catch the stir of life along the pavements.</p>
+
+<p>The gayety of the London season was at its height. Khaki was growing
+rare. Signs of war had almost completely vanished. No one wanted to talk
+about it. No one wanted to read about it. Shops had redecorated their
+windows with the necessities and luxuries of civilian requirements.
+There was a wave of spendthrift extravagance abroad. Every one in the
+streets had the look of being out for a good time. The threat of
+torturing to-morrows no longer made life haggard. If there was one
+lesson that the past five years had taught it was that each new day was
+a gift from the gods, to be enjoyed separately and<!-- Page 259 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> drained of every
+available drop of pleasure. The restraints of duty were indefinitely
+postponed. Men and women sauntered in pairs, aimlessly and joyously.
+Work was the bondage furthest from their thoughts. They seemed aware of
+no one but themselves in their ecstasy at being reunited. Racing had
+been restarted; up and down the gutters newsboys ran shouting the
+winners. London was a Tommy on leave, insubordinately, humorously,
+contagiously happy.</p>
+
+<p>As he drove, Tabs argued out his problem. From house-top to house-top
+the June sky sagged like an azure canopy. Across pavements the afternoon
+sunshine lay in bars of gold. Flower-sellers stood at intervals along
+the curb, scenting the air with their country nosegays. A lazy breeze
+ruffled drooping flags which had been hung out for the latest festival.
+Everywhere there were girls in their blowy summer dresses&mdash;girls of all
+kinds and sorts. Single girls, married girls, girls who worked for their
+livings, girls whose business it was to be beautiful, girls who were
+merely drudges. There were both pathos and urgency in the sight of them.
+It was not good that they should live alone. They had wasted their youth
+too long. The great necessity for that waste was ended. Not one of them
+was a patch on Maisie.</p>
+
+<p>If he did not desire Maisie, why did he miss her? Was it that he would
+not allow himself to desire her? Why did he encourage his passion for
+Terry&mdash;Terry who in her mild and gentle way had become almost insolently
+unappreciative? Wouldn't he be wiser to<!-- Page 260 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> content himself with the woman
+who was within reach rather than&mdash;&mdash;?</p>
+
+<p>He frowned as the truth dawned on him. For the first time he had
+acknowledged it. He did love Maisie. Not as he loved Terry, of course;
+but in a more human way, to the extent of needing her companionship. He
+had made a discovery that amazed himself&mdash;a discovery that thousands of
+men had made before him: that it was possible for him to love two women
+at the same tune, utterly differently and yet with entire sincerity. He
+felt as lowered in his self-esteem as if he had committed bigamy. He was
+dumbfounded at this new twist that his emotions had developed. Without
+consulting him, they had played a trick on him which forever
+disqualified him for the larger r&ocirc;le of constant lover. He felt himself
+pushed down to almost the level of a philanderer&mdash;a philanderer not much
+more august than Adair. The suspicion crossed his mind that, if he could
+believe himself in love with two women, he couldn't be very mightily in
+love with either.</p>
+
+<p>But he was impatient of delays&mdash;worn out with procrastinations. The
+magnificent chances of the present were slipping past him. One day he
+would be old. "<i>Now, now, now</i>, is the appointed time," throbbed his
+engine. Out of the sheer disorganization of his thoughts a desperate
+scheme took shape. Why should he not go to Maisie and say, "We're
+neither of us first in each other's affections. It's a rough-and-tumble
+world! Why be thin-skinned about it? We may become first later. Let's
+stop<!-- Page 261 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> dreaming of kingdoms round the corner and make the best of such
+kingdoms as are ours to-day."</p>
+
+<p>The idea took hold of him with force. It fascinated him. He turned his
+car about. In passing through Mayfair he made a detour to glance at
+Taborley House. The American Hospital had vacated it. It looked ruined
+and forlorn. He tried to picture it as it might appear if Maisie were
+its mistress.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty minutes later he drew up before the retiring little villa with
+its marigold-tinted curtains. He had by no manner of means decided on
+his course of action. He could not have told you what he was going to
+say to Maisie. In this as in so many other ways, he believed himself
+abnormal. No one had ever told him that ninety-nine out of a hundred
+married men, if they spoke the truth, would have to confess that they
+had been unaware thirty seconds before they proposed that they were
+going to do so; and that the most incredible happening in their lives
+had been when, thirty seconds later, they had discovered that not only
+had they proposed, but that they had been riotously accepted.<!-- Page 262 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_SEVENTH" id="CHAPTER_THE_SEVENTH"></a>CHAPTER THE SEVENTH</h2>
+
+<h4>SOME PEOPLE FIND THEIR KINGDOMS</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>He was in the act of shutting off his engine when he heard himself
+accosted. "I beg your pardon, but are you, Mr. Gervis?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a pleasant voice&mdash;a man's. Keeping his eyes on what he was doing,
+Tabs answered in the negative. Then he recalled that Gervis had been the
+name of Maisie's second husband. "If it's the Gervis who used to live
+here," he indicated the house with a jerk of his head, "I'm afraid you
+won't find him. He's been dead these three years&mdash;killed at the Front."</p>
+
+<p>A quiet chuckle greeted this piece of information, followed by a hearty,
+"Thank the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had finished what he was doing. As he stepped out of the car, he
+threw a contemptuous glance at the man who could be so callous. He was a
+slightly built, fresh-complexioned young fellow of middle height, with
+amiable gray eyes and a fair, closely-trimmed mustache. He belonged to
+the demobilized subaltern type and had the weary, drawn expression of
+over-strained nerves that so many young faces had at that time. He was
+dressed in<!-- Page 263 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> a smartly fitting suit of striped navy-blue flannel and
+carried himself with the plucky alertness of a highly bred fox-terrier.
+He had a clean and gallant bearing which it was difficult to reconcile
+with the ungenerosity of his last remark. In a neat, unforceful way he
+would have been handsome, had it not been for a badly healed scar which
+ran straight across his forehead, only just escaping his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Before Tabs could say anything, he was apologizing. "That sounded
+rotten. I'm sorry. But you see, I didn't know the chap. It's his wife
+that I'm trying to find. She was married to a man named Pollock when I
+knew her. I was rather a pal of Pollock's, belonged to the same squadron
+and was shot down at the same time. I've been a prisoner in Germany.
+Just got back, in fact. As you'll understand, I'm rather out of touch. I
+thought you'd be able to tell me whether she still lived here."</p>
+
+<p>It was very damping to his ardor at this particular moment to have
+Maisie's matrimonial past raked up. Within the next half hour he would
+very possibly be asking her to be his wife. He wasn't sure that he was
+going to; but meeting this friend of her first husband on her doorstep
+didn't help him to make up his mind. He was no longer unsympathetic to
+the young fellow, but he was quite determined that he must be sent about
+his business.</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of fact," he said, "the lady you're in search of does live
+here. But she's not Mrs. Gervis any longer. She's married again. She's
+Mrs. Lockwood now."<!-- Page 264 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A glint of enmity came into the stranger's eyes. "Then you're Mr.
+Lockwood, perhaps?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs answered him with a note of irritation. "I'm not Mr. Lockwood.
+She's a widow. Lockwood also was killed. But I really don't see why you
+should stop me on the pavement to ask so many questions. You can find
+out everything by ringing the bell."</p>
+
+<p>"That's right." The young fellow stroked his mustache. "But I didn't
+want to do that until I had made certain. Surely you can see how
+embarrassing&mdash;&mdash; And now this third chap's gone West, you say. Poor
+little Maisie, she hasn't had much luck."</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult to be brusque with a man of his own class, especially
+with a man so genuinely likeable. But he had to get rid of him. After
+having nerved himself up to the point of being at least prepared to
+propose to Maisie, he couldn't contemplate an evening of sharing her
+with a stranger and listening to the merits of her first husband.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're an old friend! Well, I'm afraid she won't be free this
+evening. I have an appointment with her. But, if you like, I'll mention
+that I met you and I'll let her know that you'll call&mdash;when shall we
+say&mdash;to-morrow? Perhaps you'd care to give me your name&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The young man smiled good-naturedly. "I couldn't think of troubling you
+to that extent."</p>
+
+<p>"In that case, I'll have to ask you to excuse me. All kinds of luck to
+you on your return. It must be rather jolly not to be a prisoner. Good
+evening."<!-- Page 265 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tabs crossed the pavement and rang the bell. In order that he might
+afford no opportunity for further conversation, he stood with his face
+towards the door while he waited for it to be opened. He was very
+conscious that the stranger had not departed, but was hovering
+immediately in rear of him.</p>
+
+<p>It was Porter who answered his summons. "I'm sorry, your Lordship, Mrs.
+Lockwood is out&mdash;&mdash; No, she didn't leave any word. She's bound to be
+back shortly&mdash;&mdash; Why, certainly, if your Lordship has the time."</p>
+
+<p>While she was closing the front door, he walked across the hall and let
+himself into the drawing-room. He went directly over to the empty
+fireplace and gazed up at Lady Dawn's portrait. It always seemed to
+challenge him&mdash;seemed to be trying to say something to him. It was
+almost as though it were his conscience hanging there on the wall. He
+had an idea that it reproached him for his silence with regard to Lord
+Dawn. He felt that, were he to do what his instinctive sense of justice
+had first urged&mdash;go to Lady Dawn and tell her that her husband had cared
+for her&mdash;the painted face would be no longer turned away and the
+stone-gray eyes no longer averted.</p>
+
+<p>He was haunted by the obsession that he would never have any luck till
+he had vindicated the dead man's memory.</p>
+
+<p>It was Maisie who had prevented him up to now&mdash;Maisie with her laughter,
+her breezy arguments, her short views of life, her contempt for
+sentiment, her sledge-hammer motto, with which she shattered the<!-- Page 266 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> past,
+"I never dig up my dead." She had made him hesitant about reopening the
+subject. Her sister was the most beautiful woman in England. A man never
+knows to what boundaries a woman's jealousy spreads. He feared lest, if
+he persisted, she might impute to him less lofty motives than the desire
+to play fair by a comrade-in-arms who had gone West.</p>
+
+<p>Something stirred behind him. He swung about and found himself staring
+into the face of the stranger who had accosted him on the pavement.</p>
+
+<p>"Sargent painted it ten years ago," the stranger said. "She's not as
+young as that now."</p>
+
+<p>"How did you get in?" Tabs demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger laughed boyishly. "Not too loud or you'll give the show
+away. I followed you. The maid raised no objection. She thought we were
+together&mdash;which was exactly what I intended."</p>
+
+<p>"But what do you want? What right have you here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Want! I know what I want. As to my right, that's problematic."</p>
+
+<p>He turned his back on Tabs and commenced to move about the room, picking
+things up and examining them with a purposeful curiosity. He showed no
+fear, yet in all his movements there was a calculated stealth. Tabs
+watched him in amazement, wondering what he ought to do. If it came to
+grappling with him, unless he carried fire-arms, there was little doubt
+as to who would get the better of the contest. The man might be a
+lunatic, a blackmailer, a burglar; by his odd mode of entry, he had laid
+himself open to every suspicion. But he looked per<!-- Page 267 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>fectly normal; and if
+he had been a burglar, he surely would have selected an opportunity when
+no other man was present. It was an awkward situation, this being shut
+up alone in a husbandless woman's house with an unknown intruder. It
+seemed to be an occasion for tact rather than the possible fuss of
+police interference.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the stranger made a discovery.</p>
+
+<p>He had been examining the five silver photograph-frames, each in turn,
+with close attention. With his back towards Tabs he remarked, "It looks
+as though she hadn't forgotten him. Five reminders of his homely mug and
+not a solitary one of the also-rans! Numbers Two and Three couldn't have
+made such a deep impression." He caught his breath in a nervous shudder.
+"It's queer. Everything's queer when one's just come back. One's so
+changed that he could court his own wife without being recognized. You,
+too, were out there I should judge by the way you limp. I wonder whether
+you've got over the queerness yet. I haven't had time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>From in front of the empty fireplace, Tabs interrupted him. "Look here,
+my dear chap, I don't want to be rude and this isn't my house; but
+what's your game?"</p>
+
+<p>The stranger turned and smiled. His frank gray eyes were amused and
+friendly. "Upon my word, I haven't any game. I'm like yourself&mdash;just
+paying a visit."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs shook his head and gazed at him fixedly. "It won't do; you know
+that. You're a gentleman.<!-- Page 268 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> Gentlemen don't get into unprotected women's
+houses by your kind of methods."</p>
+
+<p>"They don't. That's a fact." He laughed carelessly. "I suppose this is
+what comes of having been a prisoner in Germany. One prefers to be
+underhand."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think it's time you stopped fooling?" Tabs spoke in a
+conversational tone without temper. "There's Mrs. Lockwood to be
+considered; she may be here at any moment. It's no good coming this
+returned prisoner trick; all the prisoners in Germany were returned
+shortly after the Armistice. Eight months have elapsed."</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Have it your own way."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger ceased to wander and sat himself down at Maisie's end of
+the couch. Pulling out his cigarette-case, he offered it to Tabs. "Have
+a gasper?&mdash;&mdash; You don't need to refuse because of Maisie. If she's the
+Maisie she used to be, she won't object.&mdash;&mdash; Well, if you won't, I
+will."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs noticed that his hand trembled in holding the match. The man was a
+bundle of nerves; he was only maintaining this display of coolness with
+an effort. Whatever the purpose of his bold intrusion, it was not
+social, as he had pretended.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like any man to think me a liar." The man spoke slowly between
+puffs at his cigarette. "You think it's all bunkum that I'm fresh out of
+Germany, but it isn't. Do you see that?" He ran his finger across the
+gash in his forehead. "That and the ill-treatment I received in the
+prison-camps made me go wuzzy. The only fact about myself that<!-- Page 269 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> I could
+remember in all those years was Maisie. So it's natural that I should
+come to see her first. I wasn't sure of my own identity until a month
+ago. I suppose I was released at the Armistice, but for seven out of the
+past eight months I must have wandered in rags over Central Europe.
+However, all's well that ends well, and here I am."</p>
+
+<p>"But you knew that she'd remarried," Tabs objected suspiciously; "you
+asked me if I were Gervis."</p>
+
+<p>"A friend of Pollock's told me that," he explained. "Gervis was
+excusable. But this Lockwood fellow's the third. It's a bit thick! She
+certainly has been going it." He looked up suddenly. "I've been doing
+all the talking. What about yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs crossed the room and opened one of the long French windows which
+led out into the rockery. The golden afternoon had faded into early
+evening and a refreshing coolness was in the air. When he came back, he
+seated himself at the other end of the couch. "Just to show that there's
+no ill-feeling, I'll accept one of your gaspers, if you'll allow me.&mdash;&mdash;
+There's nothing for me to explain. My name is Lord Taborley and I'm a
+friend of Mrs. Lockwood. There's nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger leaned forward. His humor left him, revealing his premature
+haggardness. He laid a hand on Tabs' arm and asked a question. "You're
+fond of her?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs eyed him in silence, trying to divine what was intended. "At any
+rate, you are," he said kindly; "I see it now."</p>
+
+<p>"Not fond of her, I'm in love with her." The<!-- Page 270 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> man's face softened as he
+made the confession. "I was in love with her when she was still the wife
+of Pollock. I've been through deep waters. I've had to wait for her like
+Jacob did for Rachel. I've lost most things&mdash;my memory, my health, my
+very likeness! but never for five minutes have I lost my love for her.
+She was the only star in my darkness&mdash;&mdash;" The words fell from him with
+somber sincerity. "I don't know whether you understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But Tabs' thoughts had turned inwards. He was living again the
+englamored poignancy of the years when Terry had been for him precisely
+that&mdash;the only star in his darkness. The intensity of the vision was
+like a cry of warning rousing his sleeping idealism from its lethargy.
+His present errand became a treachery to be swept aside by his refound
+strength. He recognized the intruder with new eyes, not as an enemy, but
+as a comrade&mdash;a comrade marooned on the selfsame island of loneliness
+and bound to him by the common experience of a kindred adversity. He was
+like Crusoe discovering the footprint. Here, quite close to him, was a
+fellow waif who had drunk deep of his own bitter sense of desertion.
+With a thrill of sympathy, his heart turned to him.</p>
+
+<p>"The only star in the darkness!" He repeated the stranger's words. "For
+most of us there's been one woman who was all of that. If she fails
+us&mdash;&mdash;" He stifled his pessimism. "When stars fail, one waits for the
+morning."</p>
+
+<p>"So you, too, had your woman!"</p>
+
+<p>The stranger smiled and relaxed against the cush<!-- Page 271 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>ions. "Foolish of me!
+You can't blame me. Twice I've believed that I'd lost her. First there
+was Gervis and then this Lockwood. Poor devils, I cry quits on them. But
+when I found you so at home here, you can guess what I dreaded. And yet
+you'll never guess why I followed you into this house." He lit a
+cigarette and crossed his legs. "I didn't want you to escape me till I'd
+asked a question&mdash;&mdash; Has it ever entered your head that Pollock might
+not be dead?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs started. Then he sat very still. It was the commonplace tone in
+which the question had been asked that froze his blood. It was as though
+this man had said, "I can bring him back." For a moment he knew genuine
+fear&mdash;the non-physical fear which the impalpable can awake in the
+bravest mind. Through the open window the companionable mutter of London
+entered. The normality of everything on which his eyes rested did its
+best to reassure him&mdash;the mellow evening sunlight in the friendly room,
+the flowers in the rockery, the toy-boat on the pond. "I never dig up my
+dead." He remembered Maisie's motto. But what if the dead&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He pulled himself together. Pollock not dead! An absurd suggestion!
+Maisie had changed her name twice since then&mdash;a sufficient proof! The
+poor fellow was demented. Everything that he had done bore the hall-mark
+of insanity. He had owned that he had been deranged to within a month
+ago. Everything that he had said might be quite true. He probably had
+been the dead man's friend and in love with Maisie at the time of her
+first marriage. The<!-- Page 272 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> misfortunes that had befallen him had exaggerated
+his love into mania&mdash;a mania which the news of Gervis and then of
+Lockwood had rendered active. He felt an immense compassion for the man.
+There, save for the grace of God, sat himself. But what was to be done?
+Already Maisie was overdue. Not a second could be wasted. He must humor
+him and get him out of the house, if a scene was to be prevented.</p>
+
+<p>And all the time the stranger had been watching him&mdash;following his
+thoughts, no doubt. He spoke again. "Don't you agree with me? It would
+be damned awkward if Pollock came back."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs forced a smile. "I'm not so sure that I do. She never loved any one
+but her first husband. She's told me so. The other two&mdash;&mdash; I don't
+believe she herself knows how they happened. They were soldiers. They
+weren't long for this world. She didn't want to do them out of
+anything." He glanced at his watch. "By Jove, and I've not dined yet!
+I'm afraid I must be off. How about you? I'd be awfully glad if you'd
+take dinner with me."</p>
+
+<p>The man jumped to his feet, so that Tabs rose with him. But once they
+were on their feet an amused expression of cunning came into his eyes.
+It told Tabs plainly that he had seen through the strategy. He shook his
+head. "Very good of you. But I'm waiting for Maisie." He held out his
+hand. It was evident that he was determined to take Tabs at his word.
+"We'll meet again, perhaps. What you've just said piques my curiosity.
+Before you go, there's one more question. In your opinion what<!-- Page 273 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> would
+Maisie's attitude be if Pollock did come back?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs was instantly aware that he had made a false move. His bluff had
+been called. He'd made it impossible for himself to prolong his call; at
+the same time he didn't dare to leave this man behind in the house. It
+wasn't Maisie that he was thinking of now&mdash;he could warn her as she
+entered the Court&mdash;it was Porter. A madman was capable of anything; and
+yet, confound the chap's deceptiveness, he didn't look mad. There was
+only one chance of delaying his departure: at all costs he must involve
+him in an argument.</p>
+
+<p>"If Pollock came back! Curious that you should suggest that! I've sat in
+this room and discussed the possibility with Mrs. Lockwood by the hour.
+For the past two months&mdash;that's as long as I've known her&mdash;I've been
+helping her to live as though he might come back."</p>
+
+<p>The man's coolness instantly vanished. His excitement grew well-nigh
+beyond control. "You're not going. Sit down. You've got to explain." He
+rapped out his sentences in short, quick jerks. His voice had become
+harsh and imperative. "You can't have any idea what this means to me.
+It's ridiculous. Why should you, a living man, help her, when she's so
+beautiful, to save herself for a dead man? She didn't save herself in
+the case of Gervis and Lockwood."</p>
+
+<p>With a sigh of relief Tabs reseated himself. The man sank down beside
+him, crowding against him<!-- Page 274 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> on the couch. His anxiety was sharp-pointed
+as a dagger. "Quick," he urged.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that I can be quick." Tabs spoke leisurely. He paused,
+trying to think what he should say next. "Here it is in a nutshell. Mrs.
+Lockwood, as we both know, is a more than ordinarily charming woman.
+She's the kind who, without being able to prevent herself, draws men.
+There are women like that. Her three marriages, all taking place so
+close together gave her a reputation&mdash;&mdash; You're a man of the world;
+you'll understand that I'm not trying to say anything derogatory. But
+three matrimonial adventures in such rapid succession gave her a
+reputation for lightness. She was young and pretty. She longed to live
+life. You can't blame her. For a woman life isn't a very full affair
+without a man. And yet there aren't many men who would be willing to
+choose a wife with three previous husbands to her credit. It would seem
+too much like a week-end experiment, without the option of parting when
+the week was ended. So here was the injustice of her social situation;
+without having committed a solitary indiscretion, she was damaged
+goods&mdash;debarred from matrimony, yet coveted by men. Do you realize the
+temptation&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The man half rose in his irritation. "You're not answering my question."
+The violence in his tone was unmistakeable. "What I've got to find out
+is, what put you up to persuading her to live as though Pollock were not
+dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was coming to that." Tabs spoke reassuringly. "Beneath all her gayety
+I found, when I<!-- Page 275 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> began to know her, that she was desperate&mdash;desperate to
+live in the sunshine and mortally afraid of shadows. At the least hint
+of shadows she grew reckless. She believed that her happiness was in the
+past. So I taught her to play a game&mdash;a game that has often saved me
+from despair. It was just this&mdash;to act as though all the goodness one
+has known still lies ahead; in her case this meant living as though the
+man whom she had loved were not dead, but waiting for her round some
+future corner. So that was why&mdash;&mdash; But I think I've answered your
+question."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs rose from the couch and limped over to the empty fireplace. He
+stood there beneath the portrait of Lady Dawn, supporting himself with
+one arm against the mantel. The room was beginning to fill with dusk.
+Beyond the threshold of the open window, the rockery-garden was still
+vaguely golden. The little pond was a silver mirror.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps two minutes had elapsed. Uncertainly the stranger struggled to
+his feet. He moved towards the door, halted and came slowly back. He
+looked very spent, and slim, and wasted in the gathering shadows. As
+Tabs gazed down at him, he noticed that his face was prodigiously
+solemn.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind now." He swallowed like a small boy getting rid of his
+emotion. "I don't mind Gervis or Lockwood any longer; it's as though
+they'd never happened. And I don't feel hard to her, the way I might
+have. I'm glad you told her about things being round the corner. Because
+I'm Pollock. I have come back."<!-- Page 276 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tabs stared at him. He was deeply moved. To humor him in his delusion
+seemed the height of callousness. Yet what else was possible under the
+circumstances?</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you're Pollock," he assured him gently. "One wouldn't
+recognize you from your portraits, but I ought to have guessed."</p>
+
+<p>The man caught the deception in his tone. He lifted up his puzzled gray
+eyes. "You don't&mdash;&mdash; No, I see you don't. You don't believe me. Yet I am
+Pollock."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear chap," Tabs said it coaxingly, "I don't see why you should
+think I doubt you. I'm quite certain you're Pollock&mdash;Reggie Pollock, the
+first of all the aces: the man who brought down the Zeppelin over
+Brussels. You see I know all about you. Your picture was in the papers.
+I've told you that you were expected. So why&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The front door was heard to open and close. There was the sound of
+Maisie's voice. They stood rigidly listening in the semi-darkness.
+Neither of them spoke or stirred. As she entered, a shaft of light from
+the hall preceded her. Quietly Tabs placed himself between her and the
+stranger. The stranger made no motion to thwart him; he stood like one
+turned to stone. Just across the threshold she halted, leaning forward
+slightly and peering through the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Tabs," she laughed, "how romantic of you to sit waiting for me in
+the twilight!"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs came forward as though he were about to push her back. "I'm not
+alone, Mrs. Lockwood&mdash;&mdash;"<!-- Page 277 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I know. Porter told me. But why are you standing in my way?" She
+laughed again. A shiver of fear cut short her laughter. "What's the
+matter? I don't see your friend. Why don't you introduce&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He's not my friend. He says he's yours."</p>
+
+<p>"Then all the more reason&mdash;&mdash; Why are you acting strangely? No, please
+let me into my own room, Tabs."</p>
+
+<p>He had put out his arm to prevent her. Without warning the stranger
+advanced into the shaft of light. She saw him and fell back screaming,
+covering her eyes. With a vehemence that was unexpected, he pushed Tabs
+aside and clasped her to him. "Maisie darling, don't be afraid. I'm
+real. I know everything. And I don't mind&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At sound of his voice, she uncovered her eyes. His face was close to
+hers. The fixed look of terror left her.</p>
+
+<p>Putting out her hands timidly, she ran her fingers along the scar in his
+forehead. "They've hurt you. Poor you! My Reggie! Oh, my lover, they've
+hurt you!"</p>
+
+<p>She buried her head against his shoulder and fell to weeping
+passionately.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Neither of them had seen him go. He had tiptoed past them like a ghost
+and out into the summer night. The sky was luminous with the dust of
+stars. A sleepy wind was blowing.<!-- Page 278 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He jumped into his car and sped away, making such haste that one might
+have thought he was pursued. He wheeled to the left in the direction
+that led to the Surrey hills. It was the direction he had taken with
+Terry on that March morning when she had met him at the station. He was
+making a discovery: that there is no tragedy more difficult to
+contemplate with charity than the sight of other people's happiness.
+Their follies we can tolerate and view even with compassion; but their
+joys are unendurable. Joy separates men with impassable barriers. It
+transfigures beggars into Lazaruses lying at rest in Abraham's bosom. We
+view them from afar off and their contentment increases the burning of
+our torment. No man has yet discovered how to share his joy. Only a god
+could say, "My joy I give unto you."</p>
+
+<p>They had not seen him go. That was the neglect that rankled. Even though
+they had seen him, they would not have cared; they would have done
+nothing to delay him. They were past all caring. Like tired ships,
+having weathered many storms, they had furled their sails in the harbor
+of desire. He had slipped by them like a demon vessel, all canvas
+spread, out-going on his endless voyage.</p>
+
+<p>From the door, before he left, he had looked back. The room was a-silver
+with twilight. The garden beyond was still vaguely golden. The pond
+glimmered darkly like a magic mirror. The murmur of London wove patterns
+on the silence. From the hall across the silver of the dusk, an
+intrusive shaft of light pointed like a finger at those two entranced,<!-- Page 279 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+who had refound the peace that time had scattered.</p>
+
+<p>Even though Pollock had not returned, he himself could never have
+married her. There are violations of the austerity of the soul which the
+urgings of the flesh cannot accomplish. In the vivid flash of reality
+that had visited him he knew that now. He was angry&mdash;bitterly angry. But
+his anger was not for her; it was for himself. He could be so
+audaciously prophetic in the affairs of others. He could advise them and
+well-nigh compel them to conserve themselves for kingdoms of whose
+coming there was neither the slightest hope nor warning. His penetrating
+optimism could foresee the daringly incredible, so that it almost seemed
+in the case of Maisie that his optimism had created out of the
+incredible a fact. He could work these miracles of restraint for others;
+himself he could not restrain. His road ran straight as destiny, yet any
+lazy kingdom of mildness in a woman's eyes was capable of luring him
+aside. In his abasement he lost all faith in his self-knowledge. Hadn't
+he always been the victim of an imagination which had tricked mere
+liking into a resemblance to passion? He strutted, gestured, despaired
+till he almost persuaded himself that he was the part he was acting. But
+had he the faintest conception of what real love meant? Hadn't he always
+acted a part? Yes, even in the case of Terry!</p>
+
+<p>His saner judgment intervened. He hadn't always been like that. Where
+had the point of departure started? He traced back the weakness till he
+came to the moment when he had permitted his sense of justice to be
+over-ruled by a woman. It had<!-- Page 280 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> started with Maisie, when he had allowed
+her to persuade him to hide the truth from Lady Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>He jammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a sudden halt. To go and
+tell her must be the first step in his redemption. Till that was done
+the curse of the dead man would follow him. It seemed to him now, as he
+looked back, that through all the spring and summer the shadow of Lord
+Dawn had crept behind him. He would go at once. He would go that night.
+He knew where he could find her. He would set out like a pilgrim of long
+ago through the moon-drenched, hay-scented sweetness of the country.</p>
+
+<p>His vision turned outwards. He realized for the first time where he had
+halted. He was within sight of Richmond Park, outside <i>The Star and
+Garter Hotel</i>, the old haunt of merry-makers, which had now become a
+permanent hospital for the mutilated. There were lights to mark the
+windows of men who suffered. As he watched, some leaped up; others were
+snapped out. He could hear in memory the starchy rustling of nurses and
+the creaking of springs as the patients turned. There were men in there
+without arms and legs and faces; he had shared their danger and he had
+been spared. Surely the God who had covered him with His mantle, had had
+some plan&mdash;some design of goodness for him!</p>
+
+<p>Far below in a curving streak of blessedness the Thames ran silvered by
+the moonlight. He could see the clumped shadows of woods and the flicker
+of ripples striking fire against the banks. More distantly London
+glowed&mdash;a golden flower cupped in the hollowed hand of night. Holding
+his breath he<!-- Page 281 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> listened to the loudness of the quiet. Subtle ecstasies
+drifted to him, fluttering like moths against the windows of his
+mind&mdash;"lilies like thoughts, roses like words, in the sweet brain of
+June." <i>There was a design.</i> Maisie had found her kingdom. Was it too
+much to expect that round some future turning God had another kingdom
+waiting?</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>He drove back to London by the directest route. He would have to get
+supper before he made a start. By the time he had done that, packed his
+bag, and refilled his tank it would be close on midnight. Dawn Castle
+lay somewhere down in Gloucestershire. He knew the road as far as
+Oxford; after that his ideas were vague.</p>
+
+<p>He was a little daunted by the thought of Lady Dawn. Everything that he
+had heard about her, including his first meeting with her, had served to
+daunt him. He pictured her as a woman with a conscience clear-cut as a
+cameo&mdash;a woman, infallible and unsubdued, impatient of foolishness and
+gentle in her spirit with the cold tranquillity of a landscape under
+ice. How would she receive him, coming out of nowhere, unheralded and
+unexplained? And how could he explain the urgency that had compelled him
+to come to her? It was a delicate task that he had set himself, this
+seeking out a woman with whom he was unacquainted, that he might tell
+her that her husband had not hated her when he died. What concern was it
+of his, she might well ask. If she chose<!-- Page 282 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> to be hostile, there were no
+arguments by which he could defend his interference. His sole
+justification was his deep-rooted conviction that he was doing right.</p>
+
+<p>She never cried. How often Maisie had insisted on her sister's
+abstinence from tears, as though it was something monstrous that summed
+up all her character! He would have felt far more comfortable in
+visiting her if he had been assured that she sometimes cried.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned into Brompton Square, he thought he caught the door of his
+house in the act of closing. He might have been mistaken. It was dark
+under the shadow of the trees. Quite possibly it had been the door of a
+neighbor's house. Nevertheless, he hugged the curb as he drove so that
+he might scan the face of any one on the pavement. Forty yards from his
+doorstep, at a point where things were darkest, a man passed him. He was
+a tall man and walked with the erectness of one who had been a soldier.
+The way in which he carried himself and strode was extraordinarily
+reminiscent. Tabs slowed down and looked back; the man moved straight
+ahead, without hesitancy or sign of recognition. It couldn't be
+Braithwaite; Ann's vicinity was the least likely place in which to find
+him.</p>
+
+<p>As Tabs let himself into his house, he found Ann in the hall. "Was there
+some one here to see me?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"There's been no one to see your Lordship," Ann replied respectfully.</p>
+
+<p>He scarcely knew what prompted him to say it.<!-- Page 283 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> Perhaps it was the
+healthy neatness of her appearance&mdash;the extreme orderliness of her
+quiet. "Ann, you're the sanest creature I meet anywhere. You've the
+pluck of one in a million."</p>
+
+<p>She turned to him a face that was flushing and eyes that were unusually
+bright. "It's good of your Lordship. Your Lordship is always kind."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Ann, only human. I know what you've been through and I'm glad
+you're getting over it&mdash;&mdash; I have to be away to-night. I shall need some
+supper. While you're preparing it, I'll pack."</p>
+
+<p>On the way upstairs he telephoned the garage to send for his car and to
+return it within the hour. Then he climbed the last flight to his
+bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>While he packed, he kept pausing and knitting his brows. A ridiculous
+conviction was forming in his mind. "It couldn't have been," he assured
+himself. Yet the more he recalled the man on the pavement the more
+certain he was that he had been Steely Jack. But what motive could
+Braithwaite have had for calling and why should Ann try to hide the fact
+that he had called? He had lost trace of him utterly since that day when
+he had handed him Terry's ultimatum at the Savoy. Since then Terry and
+he had had many meetings, he did not doubt. Braithwaite's influence
+clung to her like her shadow. But if he was so in love with Terry, the
+more reason why he should steer clear of Ann. To have called at Brompton
+Square would have been asking for a cloudburst. It couldn't have been
+Braithwaite. And yet&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>And then there was Ann. Since that day when<!-- Page 284 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> the General's portrait had
+appeared in the papers, she had given up watching for letters marked,
+"On His Majesty's Service." She had made no further enquiries as to how
+his Lordship's friend at the War Office was progressing. Her silence
+told its story; she had learned the truth. In what spirit she had
+accepted the truth Tabs had no means of guessing. Lady Hamilton, the
+little maid-of-all-work, had been the beloved of Nelson. Ann was not
+without her precedent. But the maid-of-all-work had become Lady Hamilton
+before the Admiral had set eyes on her. Steely Jack was a General, while
+Ann was still a servant. Her claims would not meet with much applause if
+they were brought before a jury.</p>
+
+<p>To all appearance she had resigned herself to the inevitable. Tabs was
+frankly surprised at her magnanimity and fortitude. About her fortitude
+there could be no question, but concerning her magnanimity he was not a
+little skeptical. More than once he had caught her singing as she went
+about her work. She didn't get all the words correctly; she sang them
+with improvisions, filling in the gaps where her memory failed.
+Throughout the war the song had been sung to men on leave at the
+Alhambra by the heroine who acted the revengeful part of <i>Tootsie</i>:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;">
+"Some day I'll make you love me.<br />
+Some day you'll call me 'Dear'.<br />
+You'll feel so lonely<br />
+And want me only;<br />
+I'm sure you'll want me near.<br />
+<!-- Page 285 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>I know you can't forget me,<br />
+Though, dear, for years you'll try.<br />
+I'll make you miss me<br />
+And want to kiss me,<br />
+Bye and bye."
+</p>
+
+<p>She was a mystery. If she were playing a game, it was a game the
+intentions of which he could not fathom. The man whom he had passed on
+the pavement could not have been Braithwaite. Common-sense insisted on
+that.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>While he was at supper she gave him no chance to question her. "I'm
+motoring down to Dawn Castle," he told her. "I've left the address on my
+desk. Don't forward any letters till you hear from me. I don't suppose
+that I shall be there for more than a day. To tell the truth," he
+glanced up smiling at her seriousness, "I haven't been invited."</p>
+
+<p>Ann refused to be lured off her perch of reticence. She set before him
+the dish she was carrying. "I'm sure wherever your Lordship goes there's
+a welcome."</p>
+
+<p>He felt that he was being reproved. He had been conscious of her silent
+criticism from the moment he had announced that he would be away for the
+night. He respected Ann and was anxious for her good opinion. She was by
+long odds the most honorable woman of his acquaintance and the best,
+because she was the kindest. He had had the feeling throughout the past
+two months that there was very little that had happened inside his brain
+that had<!-- Page 286 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> escaped her. She had disapproved of Maisie. She had shown no
+enthusiasm for Terry. She had been aware of his dangers when he himself
+was disguising them with excuses. All this he knew though no word had
+been exchanged. She had observed in all her dealings with him the
+decorum to be expected from a high-class servant. And yet she was his
+trusted friend, whose virtues compelled his admiration and whose loyalty
+commanded his affection. She thought ahead for him and smoothed his
+path. Her sense of responsibility was as tender as a sister's. Her
+humility lent it a touch of pathos. He looked up to her as men
+instinctively look up to good women in whatever grade of society they
+find them. The silent knowledge which each had of the other formed a
+bond of sympathy, the more delicate because it was unuttered.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Long ago&mdash;it must have been before the war&mdash;I gave you tickets
+to see Peter Pan."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't to me your Lordship gave them. It was to Braithwaite."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it?" He held her eyes, striving to peer behind their curtained
+windows. It was the first time that that name had been mentioned between
+them in casual conversation. "You're right. It comes back to me now. It
+was the Christmas of 1913 that he took you. Do you remember the fairy
+who was dying? There was only one way of keeping her alive. Peter Pan
+had to make the children in the audience promise that they believed in
+fairies. When they did that, she got well. That's why I'm going to Dawn
+Castle to-night."<!-- Page 287 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ann ceased abruptly from what she was doing and stared at her master in
+concern. He laughed mischievously. "Wrong again, Ann; I've not taken
+leave of my senses. Two hours ago I made the same mistake. There was a
+man who asked me whether I believed that Mrs. Lockwood's first husband,
+who was killed at the Front, would return. While I was wondering how
+long it would be before he'd grow violent, he proved to me that he was
+her first husband. So I'm believing in fairies."</p>
+
+<p>A secret happiness lit up her face. "Deep down beneath our doubts, most
+of us believe in fairies, I think, your Lordship." With a shy smile she
+left him.</p>
+
+<p>The purring of an engine warned him that the car had returned and was
+waiting. He could hear Ann in the hall, handing out his bags. He had
+finished his supper; he might as well be off. As he drove out of the
+Square, he looked back; she was standing on the steps, gazing after him.
+He had the restless certainty, now that it was too late, that she had
+had a secret which, at the last moment, she would have given the world
+to have shared with him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>Of that night journey in after years he remembered only the deep peace
+and the ecstasy. He was doing something at last that was right; though
+why it was right, he would have found it hard to explain. He encountered
+none of the difficulties he had anticipated in picking up his direction.
+He<!-- Page 288 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> flew unswervingly to the mark like a bullet traveling a predestined
+path. The first sixty miles were familiar; Maisie had covered them with
+him on many occasions. By every law of emotion each landmark should have
+stirred some poignant memory, some fresh wistfulness of regret. The fact
+was that he hardly gave her a thought. When he did, it was only to wish
+her luck and to congratulate himself on his escape.</p>
+
+<p>Having passed through Oxford lying blanched in moonlight, he climbed out
+of the Thames valley, striking through uplands across the wold to
+Burford. From then on all memories were left behind; he had become an
+explorer in an unknown country.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was sleeping. How trustfully it slept! Trees were hooded like
+extinguished candles. Flowers throughout the fields clasped their faces
+in their hands. Birds, like fluffy balls, drowsed on branches. Stars
+alone were wakeful. They stooped to watch him with intent, companionable
+glances. Now and then he had to halt to flash his torch on a sign-post
+or to consult his map. For the most part he took chances and guessed.</p>
+
+<p>Night engulfed him, rushed past him, broke over him. He was like a ship
+thrusting forward into a trackless ocean.</p>
+
+<p>The paleness of dawn was in the sky as he neared Gloucester. When he
+entered, its roofs and towers were precipices of gold and fire,
+straining up to the New Jerusalem which floated in the clouds. The
+streets of the ancient city had a mystic look, white and hushed and
+tenantless. But already the cheeky<!-- Page 289 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> sparrows were about,
+scandal-mongering beneath the eaves with an unholy disregard for the awe
+by which they were surrounded.</p>
+
+<p>He left Gloucester in a southwesterly direction. In fields the hay was
+lying cut. A largesse of dew had been scattered through the hedgerows
+like loot from the treasure-chests of emperors. Larks were battling up,
+striving to sing against the very bars of heaven. Every fragrance and
+sound was a messenger, guaranteeing happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Round a bend in the road he came across a cluster of thatched cottages,
+their white walls gleaming incandescent in the morning sunshine. Beyond
+them lay a parkland, from the edge of which rose a wooded knoll, crowned
+by a moated castle. The next mile-stone warned him that it was the
+village of Dawn he was approaching.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>All day he had waited&mdash;a lazy summer day, drowsy with the hum of bees
+and heavy with the perfume of cottage flowers. On entering the village
+he had put up at <i>The Dawn Arms</i>, an old-fashioned hunting hostel which
+owed its prosperity to the fame of the Dawn foxhounds. Having bathed and
+breakfasted, he had started off to leave his card on Lady Dawn. Arriving
+at the Castle, he had been informed that her Ladyship had left early
+that morning and was not expected back till early evening. He had filled
+in the morning by sleeping and the afternoon by joining a band of
+sight-seeing trippers who had<!-- Page 290 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> driven over from Gloucester in
+gayly-painted chars-a-bancs.</p>
+
+<p>With a spice of amusement, he had paid his shilling for admission at the
+wooden booth outside the Castle gate and had found himself herded with a
+crowd of affectionately inclined young women and young men who perspired
+freely&mdash;the latter for the sake of greater comfort had removed their
+coats and knotted handkerchiefs about their throats. In good time a
+decrepit ex-butler had appeared to act as guide and had led the
+excursionists over the Norman part of the ruins. He had shown them the
+dungeons, the room in which a prince had been murdered and the havoc
+wrought upon the walls by Cromwellian cannon. The ever recurring theme
+of his trembling narrative was the prowess and the splendor of the
+Dawns. He was like a weak-voiced cricket chirping in the sunshine. His
+stories of bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were
+too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the
+race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of
+his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind
+to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the
+pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They
+wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly
+sheep looked up somnolently to watch them.</p>
+
+<p>To the few who remained the old man mumbled on. It was the nobility of
+the late Lord Dawn that he was now recounting&mdash;the daring horseman he<!-- Page 291 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+had been, the deviltry of him, the lust of life he had had, the
+greatness of his possessions and how he had foregone all this beauty to
+be hammered into the defilement of the trenches like a rat, cornered in
+a sewer.</p>
+
+<p>"Visitors are not allowed in the part of the Castle that is inhabited.
+But, since her Ladyship's away&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Unlocking a door, he led them through a tunnel to a grilled gate,
+through the bars of which they saw the Castle's terraced rose-gardens,
+falling away steeply in a cascade of petals to a water-lilied,
+green-scummed moat which encircled the stronghold like a necklace of
+jade. Beside the water's edge a fair-haired boy in a white sailor suit
+was deeply absorbed in sailing a boat.</p>
+
+<p>"His little Lordship," the old man whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't know&mdash;&mdash; How old?" Tabs questioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Eight years, sir, come December."</p>
+
+<p>Long after he had returned to the inn, the picture of the little boy
+remained with him. This discovery that Lord Dawn had left a son made him
+the more certain of the justice of his errand.</p>
+
+<p>The azure and emerald of late afternoon drifted into the ensanguined
+gold of sunset. The long-tarrying twilight had already settled when a
+messenger arrived, bearing a note. It was from her Ladyship, regretting
+her absence and saying that she would be happy to receive a visit from
+Lord Taborley that evening or at any time that was convenient.<!-- Page 292 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>He set out at once. Heretofore, with the exception of Terry, women had
+meant little to him. But he was curious to meet this woman&mdash;curious and
+eager in a strangely boyish fashion. Every one who had mentioned her had
+spoken of her with a certain hint of fear, not untinged with adoration.
+He hadn't been aware how anxious he had been to meet her until her note
+had summoned him. He wondered whether she had any of the endearing
+humanity of her sister. He wondered whether what Pollock had said was
+true, that she looked much older than her portrait. He didn't want her
+to look older&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He came to the bridge across the moat and the gateway which bore the
+grooves in which the old portcullis used to slide. He passed through the
+gateway, under the tower, into the graveled courtyard of the Castle. On
+three sides the courtyard was loop-holed and sullen, but on the fourth
+modern windows and a brass-knobbed door had been let into the solid
+masonry. Above the door, shining down on the whitened steps, a lamp
+burnt in a wrought-iron socket. Several of the windows were also
+lighted.</p>
+
+<p>His knock was answered by a gray-haired man, with the gravity of
+deportment which is peculiar to lawyers, undertakers and footmen. While
+the man went to inform his mistress, Tabs was left to note how the hall
+was hung with hunting trophies. Then he heard himself being requested to
+follow.<!-- Page 293 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Having climbed a winding stair, he was shown into a room in the turret,
+one side of which was filled by a tall leaded window gazing westward.
+The landscape which it framed, hung against the darkness like a painted
+canvas&mdash;a far-reaching expanse of tree-dotted pasture, vague with
+islands of mist and rimmed by the last faint sparks of the sunset. The
+ceiling was heavily beamed, the furniture Jacobean, the walls paneled
+and hung with many generations of family portraits. In a wide hearth a
+fire of coals and logs was burning. In the room's center stood a carved
+table on which was set a massive silver lamp, casting a solitary
+illumination.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord Taborley, my Lady."</p>
+
+<p>As his name was announced, he heard the rustle of her dress, and
+discovered that she had been seated in a low chair by the window. She
+rose with a slow grace. There was something indefinably tragic and
+foreordained about her every movement. Maisie's name for her flashed
+into his mind, "The Princess Czarina Bolsheviki." It suited her exactly.
+In those surroundings she might have posed as Mary Queen of Scots in
+prison&mdash;a queen without a kingdom whose pride was unbroken. In the
+dimness his first impression was of her queenly gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>"I can guess why you've come."</p>
+
+<p>The same deep voice that had taunted him at Maisie's, only now it was no
+longer taunting! He noticed the way she offered him her hand, with the
+arm fully extended as if to hold him away from her. She was a smaller
+woman than he had remembered; it was the courage of her bearing that had
+made<!-- Page 294 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> her seem taller. He could not see her face distinctly; it was in
+shadow. But, when she turned, he caught the whiteness of her profile on
+the dusk, clear-cut and tranquil as a cameo. After having gazed so long
+at Sargent's painting, he would have recognized anywhere the rounded
+shapeliness of her head, the hair swept smoothly back from the calm
+forehead, the splendid strength of her throat and the delicate, wholly
+feminine half-moon of her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you sit over here? If you would prefer it, we can have more
+lamps. But they would spoil&mdash;&mdash;" She indicated the vague stretch of
+country, across which mists were drifting like gray ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>He drew up a chair at an angle to her own, so that he could study her.
+"You say you think you know why I've come?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was expecting you," she said quietly. He could feel rather than see
+the steady kindness that was in her stone-gray eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"If you were expecting me, then your sister must have&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My sister had nothing to do with my expecting. Can't you think of any
+one closer?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. At first he had hoped that Maisie had told her and
+done his work for him. Evidently it wasn't that. She was attributing
+some other motive to his visit. It was a motive the disclosure of which
+called for delicacy. She had prearranged his reception. It was no
+accident that had caused him to find her alone in the dimness of<!-- Page 295 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> the
+gathering evening. The scanty lighting of the shadowy room had been
+stage-set to spare them both embarrassment. "If it wasn't your
+sister&mdash;&mdash;" He paused at a loss to know how to proceed further.</p>
+
+<p>Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emotional
+voice had a new tenderness. "Will you allow me to help you? We're not
+such strangers as we seem. For years I've been interested in you. I was
+always hearing of your adventures in Mexico, Korea, the Balkans and last
+of all at the Front. You've been quite a romantic figure in my life.
+You've always seemed so strong; and I admire strength immensely. I never
+dreamt that a time would ever come when I would be able to help you.
+You're in love and she's not in love with you. You're older than she is
+and it makes you unhappy. She has time to experiment, but for you it's
+different; your love is bound up with the last of your youth. Because
+you've been unhappy, you've been unwise. Your foolishness ended
+yesterday with the return of Reggie Pollock. I received the news of his
+return this morning. So you came down here to me, which was perfectly
+natural."</p>
+
+<p>He shifted his gaze and stared out of the window, puzzled and troubled.
+"Unfortunately for me, Lady Dawn, a good deal of what you've said is
+true. But I don't see how it makes it natural that I should have come to
+you. I've been wanting to come for a very long time, but was given to
+understand that what I had to say might be distasteful."</p>
+
+<p>"You must put that out of your mind." She said it comfortingly, as
+though to a little boy. "There's<!-- Page 296 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> nothing distasteful in what you have
+to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can assure
+me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to
+risk that in order to become your ally."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should
+like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been
+talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's
+address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my
+head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the
+whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've
+said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to
+lose her, I would rather not have&mdash;&mdash; But I didn't come here to burden
+you with my troubles. I came to do something for you&mdash;something which
+I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and
+followed me until&mdash;&mdash; It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality
+outside myself. I may make you very unhappy&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the
+fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the
+mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a
+vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges.
+In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features
+clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that
+they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had
+never seen such calmness.<!-- Page 297 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> And the calmness was not alone in her
+expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms
+and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared
+to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her
+far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that
+her sympathy could not encompass&mdash;nothing that he need be ashamed to
+tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by
+reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had
+attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was
+filled with a strange sense of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.</p>
+
+<p>"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be
+afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for
+me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one&mdash;not
+even you&mdash;has the power to do that."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<p>He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."</p>
+
+<p>A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth?
+You yourself tell the truth&mdash;&mdash; When they say that I never cry, they
+mean that I never let them see me."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man.
+Not to cry at all would be<!-- Page 298 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> monstrous; it was that which made me afraid
+of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was
+about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I
+came to talk to you."</p>
+
+<p>She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her
+life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of
+the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night
+without.</p>
+
+<p>Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband."</p>
+
+<p>"But he's dead."</p>
+
+<p>"I know."</p>
+
+<p>He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He
+almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he
+continued apologetically. "I'm trespassing on things sacred. Because of
+that I've fought to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was
+inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to
+leave you in ignorance&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed
+pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"In ignorance of his grandeur."</p>
+
+<p>He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was
+aware of her relieved suspense&mdash;at the same time of her gentle
+skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words.
+Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new
+start, he stumbled his<!-- Page 299 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of
+her unuttered doubts.</p>
+
+<p>"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake.
+It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By
+doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason
+for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice
+that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his
+spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the
+Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a
+sleep-walker&mdash;a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was
+the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you&mdash;to
+you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more
+intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two
+months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to
+force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If
+I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could
+resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered
+your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Who I <i>was</i>!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display
+of interest.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean your relation to him&mdash;that it was you who were his wife. At the
+Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his
+identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us&mdash;something to be
+sent over the top to be smashed and then to be<!-- Page 300 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> left to sink into the
+mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a
+company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My
+acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much
+now&mdash;only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing
+earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What
+Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants
+you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry
+and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all
+through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all
+adored him&mdash;adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful
+when there was dying to be done&mdash;out at rest and in quiet sectors he was
+gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet
+he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for
+what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons
+for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him&mdash;one does in the
+presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his
+spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he
+never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the
+gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we,
+who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold&mdash;his untiring
+ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got
+to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn
+who was born out there.<!-- Page 301 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> It was last night, after Pollock returned, that
+I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had
+been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this
+pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and
+ridicule&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him.
+He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She
+was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes,
+glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the
+solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily
+down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been
+stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though
+his lips had been used&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly.
+"He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things?
+Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."</p>
+
+<p>"They're only part of the reasons."</p>
+
+<p>"There are others?"</p>
+
+<p>"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he
+might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it
+sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so
+intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady
+Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet
+wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and
+officers knew you, without know<!-- Page 302 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>ing who you were. You were with us in
+the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More
+than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the
+last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went
+West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women
+meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will
+again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired
+us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've
+known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's
+portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here
+it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic.
+Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious
+pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following
+her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his
+gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face&mdash;from the
+portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was
+ordered, you went&mdash;you accompanied him in the most real sense: he
+carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When
+he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the
+walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a
+saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness
+to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your cour<!-- Page 303 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>age; his
+kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of
+you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at
+night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a
+patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find
+him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was
+dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your
+portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when
+we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten
+all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of
+you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your
+name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."</p>
+
+<p>She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin
+cushioned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows
+falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse
+beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had
+suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started
+talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "He left a child by me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved
+you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"<!-- Page 304 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again, with a gesture, she negatived his suggestion. "He'd never have
+doubted that I would know he had died loving me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did he send me?"</p>
+
+<p>Even while he asked it, he marveled at his certainty that she shared his
+conviction that he had been sent.</p>
+
+<p>She turned her eyes full on his face and let them dwell there
+searchingly. As he returned her gaze, he noted that she was less young
+than he had supposed. She was older than her portrait. Her hair, which
+had looked night-black in the shadows, was prematurely frosted. The
+moonlight, strengthening, picked out remorselessly each silver thread.
+She was no longer capable of putting back the hands of time for any man.</p>
+
+<p>She had read his thoughts. The pride went out of her voice. "Perhaps he
+sent you," she faltered, "that he might give me back a little of what he
+took."</p>
+
+<p>"What did he take? Anything that I have&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She leant back in her chair. Her face was again in shadow. "My youth. My
+happiness."</p>
+
+<p>In the silence which followed he was aware that the third presence had
+departed.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX</h4>
+
+<p>"Your youth! Your happiness!" He was astounded. "Strange that you should
+say that! I thought that I alone was searching."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own
+sake, but for yours.<!-- Page 305 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> To men like you who have lived at the Front, life
+has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children;
+what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone
+anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been
+granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises
+come to all of us, when life grows desperate&mdash;when to be alone becomes
+intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden,
+because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner
+or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The
+war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your
+loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on
+Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were
+terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known
+love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity&mdash;and that's being
+compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to
+care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman
+wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual&mdash;of a high type like
+yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because
+a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you
+want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have
+gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge.
+Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You
+purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all<!-- Page 306 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she
+contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of
+her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get
+used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A
+wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her
+understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry
+had?"</p>
+
+<p>He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had
+so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking
+aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had
+recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any
+arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing
+straight before him.</p>
+
+<p>What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but
+foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with
+the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable,
+undignified, absurd&mdash;on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand
+Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music.
+The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the
+need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly
+sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his
+passion for Terry was at an end.</p>
+
+<p>When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room,
+with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress,
+sitting so<!-- Page 307 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded
+hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For
+weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble
+display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved
+that.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to
+him&mdash;that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall.
+Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of
+Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and
+be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung
+his idolatry on her.</p>
+
+<p>But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was
+disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an
+Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a
+loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.</p>
+
+<p>His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim
+despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no
+one else."</p>
+
+
+<h4>X</h4>
+
+<p>Her voice reached him out of the darkness. "To own that we've been
+mistaken takes more courage than to persist in the wrong direction. 'I
+want no one else!' We've all said that. It was through saying it that I
+brought about my shipwreck. But if you're sure that you want no one
+else, you must<!-- Page 308 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> have her. If there's any way of getting her for you,
+I'll do my best to help."</p>
+
+<p>She made an effort to rise. She stood before him swaying, a blinded look
+on her face, her eyes closed, her hands stretched out. He placed his arm
+about her. Her weight sagged against him.</p>
+
+<p>"Not the servants," she whispered. "You and I. Give me air."</p>
+
+<p>With his free hand he jerked the catch and pushed the window wide. The
+cool dampness of the night streamed in on her. He stood there with her
+clasped against him, her head stretched back, her body drooping. In the
+bowl of darkness at the foot of the turret, the rose-garden floated. Out
+of sight, in the green-scummed moat, a fish leapt with a sullen splash.
+A bird called. Wheels rumbled on a distant road. Again the silence was
+unbroken. The moonlight, falling on her face, gave to it an expression
+of childishness. Her breast and throat, gleaming white as marble,
+reminded him she was a woman.</p>
+
+<p>She stirred. Her eyes opened. She gazed up at him wonderingly. "I'm
+better. Foolish of me!" Then, inconsequently, "How tall you are, Lord
+Taborley!"</p>
+
+<p>He supported her till she could lean across the sill. They leant there
+together, their faces nearly touching. His arm was still about her; she
+did not seem to notice it. He was dumb with tremulous expectancy.</p>
+
+<p>"It was about myself that I had to tell you," she whispered. "I was once
+like you. I wanted no one else. I knew, even while I wanted him, that he
+could<!-- Page 309 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> never make me happy. Even when I was most in love with him, he
+had qualities which I distrusted. After marriage the distrusting grew.
+Yet all the while I was sorry for him. I would have given anything to
+undo&mdash;&mdash; His sins were mine. With another woman, less virtuous, he might
+have been good. In his yearning he tried to drag me down. I couldn't go,
+not even if going would have saved him. There was something in me, not
+exactly pride, that prevented. I have never spoken of this to anybody.
+I'm saying it to you because&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She broke off. Why was she saying it? The perfume of June roses under
+moonlight, mingling with the fragrance of her hair, was intoxicating.
+His arm about her tightened. Was she only allowing him to hold her out
+of pity because of his confession?</p>
+
+<p>"Because," she said, "I think before she knows of your visit it would be
+better that you should go."</p>
+
+<p>He failed to grasp her logic. "But if I stay, she will never know."</p>
+
+<p>She released herself gently and gazed at him reproachfully. "Never know!
+But you came in order that she might know."</p>
+
+<p>He was more than ever puzzled. He had come to tell her of her husband.
+Did she not believe him? She seemed to be accusing him. He remembered
+how she had claimed, when he had entered, that she could guess what had
+brought him. "I came solely to see you," he said, speaking slowly. "I
+was compelled, as I've told you. I give you my word of<!-- Page 310 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> honor that my
+visit wasn't even remotely related to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A sharply indrawn breath cut short what he was saying. They turned
+quickly, moving instinctively apart. Gazing in from the open door,
+across the pool of lamplight, was Terry.<!-- Page 311 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THE_EIGHTH" id="CHAPTER_THE_EIGHTH"></a>CHAPTER THE EIGHTH</h2>
+
+<h4>ROUND THE CORNER</h4>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn was the first to recover her composure. "Why, Terry, I thought
+you were in bed!"</p>
+
+<p>"I was."</p>
+
+<p>Terry's eyes shifted from Lady Dawn to Tabs. They were startled and
+misty with sleep. She seemed only half-awake. Her hand rested on the
+door as if ready for retreat. Her square little face was flushed; her
+gold, bobbed hair was flattened where it had pressed against the pillow.
+She was clad in a filmy neglig&eacute;e; her bare feet had been pushed hastily
+into slippers and peeped out rosily from beneath the hem. She looked
+immature&mdash;the way she had in days gone by when he had tiptoed to her
+bedside through the darkness to feel her tight little arms leap
+stranglingly about his neck. She had been really a tiny girl then. Why
+couldn't she have stayed like that always? Why need she have roused in
+him this torturing desire which she did nothing but rebuff?</p>
+
+<p>"I was asleep. I heard voices. I thought&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>What had she thought? How much had she seen<!-- Page 312 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> and heard? How long had she
+been standing there?</p>
+
+<p>Tabs attempted to bridge the awkward silence. "I drove down from
+London." Then he added, "That was last night."</p>
+
+<p>None of them had stirred. Lady Dawn advanced from the window into the
+pool of lamplight. "I think I know what you thought&mdash;that something was
+wrong. It was. I nearly fainted. If it hadn't been for Lord Taborley&mdash;&mdash;
+But come inside. Why do you remain standing there?"</p>
+
+<p>Terry stepped just across the threshold. Having closed the door, she
+leant against it, still holding the knob in her hand. It was plain that
+she was making an effort to be valiant. She looked fragile as a peeled
+white wand; like a flower, shy and dew-wet. Life had not yet commenced
+to break her. The clinging folds of her wrap emphasized her slenderness,
+the grace of her lines and the girlish contours of her figure.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn went to her and put her arm about her. "You're afraid. Of what
+are you afraid? Surely not of Lord Taborley? He's been telling me&mdash;&mdash; To
+be loved like that&mdash;&mdash; There was a time when I would have been proud."</p>
+
+<p>Terry's left hand went up to her breast. Her wild violet eyes looked
+straight before her, seeking always the face of Tabs. They seemed to
+call to him. He came slowly to the table where she could see him. It was
+his chance. Lady Dawn was his advocate. It was the chance for which he
+had waited.</p>
+
+<p>He was contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty,
+enviable promise and the dumb<!-- Page 313 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> hostility of her youth; the other in the
+gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased
+understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had
+become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn&mdash;&mdash; Was it her suffering that made him
+know her as he knew himself?</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't meant to intrude on you," he apologized. "I hadn't the least
+idea you were here. How should I have had? You disappeared without
+warning; at your father's house your address was refused me. Lady Dawn
+will bear me out that, at the very moment you entered, I was assuring
+her that my visit had nothing to do with you. Probably you heard."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing to do with me!" There was relief in her way of saying it. She
+visibly relaxed. "Then it isn't because of me at all that you're here?"</p>
+
+<p>The suppressed eagerness of her question was wounding. She wanted to
+hear him state more positively that she had had nothing to do with his
+visit. Whatever she had seen before they had become aware of her, had
+had no power to rouse her jealousy. She could have given him no stronger
+proof of how absolutely he had ceased to count. He smiled bitterly. "Not
+because of you at all, Terry. The reason for my being here is strictly
+private between Lady Dawn and myself. I didn't come to worry you. You
+may set your mind at rest."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you didn't know or even suspect&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed unhappily. "What more can I say to convince you? I haven't
+the least idea what you suppose I could suspect. What business is it of
+mine<!-- Page 314 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> to suspect anything? And if I did, what license should I have to
+interfere? We're not as we once were. There are no longer any
+sentimental obligations that would hold us accountable to each other.
+You've shown me that you consider our relation ended. In the face of
+that, I should scarcely follow you into the country where, by all
+accounts, you've come to escape me. It's purely a coincidence that you
+find me here."</p>
+
+<p>He caught Lady Dawn's eyes resting on him. They were wide and clear and
+interrogating. He knew what she was remembering: that it was in this
+room within the hour that he had said, "But I want her. I can't do
+without her. I want no one else." Self-ridicule tempered his spirit into
+sharpness. He turned again to Terry.</p>
+
+<p>"Once and for all I should like to set your doubts at rest. You need
+have no fear that I shall ever inconvenience you. We're bound to meet
+from time to time, but I pledge you my word that I shall never refer to
+the past. You're of an age to make decisions for yourself; you've
+decided against me. You're acting quite within your privilege when you
+discard old friends. You'll wonder why I state obvious facts. I'm doing
+so in order that you may feel certain that I've withdrawn whatever
+claims I had for influencing your movements. I shall always be
+interested&mdash;&mdash; But as for presuming that anything that I might say or do
+would make the least difference to your plans, I shouldn't be so
+foolish&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Breaking away from Lady Dawn, she crossed<!-- Page 315 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> over to him. Resting her hand
+on his arm, she sank her voice and commenced speaking so hurriedly that
+he alone could make out what she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been false and foolish. I don't need you to tell me. If you knew
+how miserable I've been and how I've despised myself&mdash;&mdash; But I can't
+help it. I go on doing things. I never used to be a beast&mdash;least of all
+to you; never until you wanted me to marry you. If I can act like this
+now, what sort of a wife&mdash;&mdash; Can't you understand? I'm trying to spare
+you. But I won't have you hate me, Tabs. I can't endure that. Every
+second that I've kept away from you, I've been wanting&mdash;not the <i>you</i>
+that you are now, but the old you. Won't you start afresh, liking me the
+way you did when&mdash;before this happened?" She seized his hand on the
+impulse and pressed it to her lips. It was the humble act of a small
+girl. "Love me just a little. I'm not really bad. Please, please forgive
+me my wickedness, dear Tabs."</p>
+
+<p>He stood dumbfounded and embarrassed. If they had been alone, he would
+have known what to do. He was at a loss to find a motive for this
+display of passion. Was it a ruse to get him back? He crushed the
+suspicion as unworthy. Then was it what she had seen that had made her
+possessive? Her tears fell scalding on his hands.</p>
+
+<p>He drew her to him. "There, there, little Terry! You mustn't. There's
+nothing to cry about. There's nothing wicked in not having loved a man.
+It's a thing that can't be helped."</p>
+
+<p>At the sign of his relenting, she threw away the<!-- Page 316 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> last of her control.
+Burying her face against his coat, she clung to him. All that he could
+see of her was her golden head and her slight body, quivering with
+sobbing. Her voice reached him muffled. "But I am wicked. I've pushed
+you from me. If you knew&mdash;&mdash; If you did, you wouldn't touch me."</p>
+
+<p>There had been no sound, yet something warned him. He looked up. The
+door was closing.</p>
+
+<p>"Lady Dawn," he called. In his voice there was the tremor of anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>On the point of vanishing, she glanced back across her shoulder. "What
+is it, Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>The calmness of her austerity made emotion seem shallow. There was a
+touch of scorn in her repose.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you help?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled faintly. "I was. I was going."</p>
+
+<p>"Then please don't. It's late. Both you and she must be worn out."</p>
+
+<p>Like a figure of silver, she came coldly back. But there was only
+tenderness in her voice when she spoke. "Terry, did you hear what Lord
+Taborley said? He thinks he ought to be going."</p>
+
+<p>Slipping her arm about the girl, she led her from him. Their footsteps
+died out on the turret stairs.</p>
+
+<p>He waited, hoping that Lady Dawn would return. Now that she was gone, he
+was invaded with his old loneliness. The dead lords eyed him cynically
+from their canvases. Through leaded panes the moonlight fell. It seemed
+the sorcery of her spirit. The perfume of the rose-garden was her
+breath. How pale she had made his dream of Terry! How trivial she made
+all women look when she stood beside them!<!-- Page 317 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> There was nothing in this
+gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married
+her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he
+required at the hands of a woman&mdash;it was rest.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick
+of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till
+it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly
+into the romance of the summer's night.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay
+wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.</p>
+
+<p>He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he
+had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie
+had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when
+she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she
+hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had
+no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental
+attraction, however well concealed, must always be sex. They could never
+be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was
+cheating&mdash;the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other
+deriving amusement from giving less. He had held that such relations
+between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a
+clash of<!-- Page 318 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was
+no middle course between coveting a woman and neglecting her as entirely
+dispensable.</p>
+
+<p>But this morning his point of view was altered. He was confident that
+his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had
+never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it.
+He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood.
+His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the
+emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as
+secure as it was incomprehensible. His new affection compensated him for
+all previous failures and atoned for the humiliation of every past
+regret.</p>
+
+<p>At that word "affection" he halted himself. Was it affection that he
+entertained for Lady Dawn? He took a good look at the suspected word and
+decided that it was. But it was the affection of reverence. In owning
+this much he qualified his admission by insisting that his affection was
+totally devoid of passion. Passion in the presence of Lady Dawn looked
+hysteric and paltry. She inspired a serenity which had nothing to do
+with the physical. It was the charm of her character that entranced him.
+Her body scarcely figured in his thoughts; when it did, it failed to
+stir him. It was no more than the gracious vehicle through which the
+beauty of her spirit was expressed.</p>
+
+<p>His paramount emotion was gratitude&mdash;gratitude that she, who was reputed
+to be so cold, should so instantly have unveiled herself. There was a
+star<!-- Page 319 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>tling purity in the frankness with which she had bared her spirit
+to him. It left him awed and touched. He recognized the generosity which
+had prompted her; she had realized his need of a woman's trust. And so
+she had withheld nothing that would comfort him. She had made him feel
+safe, the way a mother does. She had picked up the little boy that lies
+hidden in the heart of every man, and had folded him in her breast.</p>
+
+<p>It had been shameless of her. He had not guessed that a woman could be
+so good.</p>
+
+<p>And she had made him so finally sure of her. He felt that he could leave
+her and know that her protection would follow him. He could return and
+be equally certain that none of her understanding would have vanished.
+She was the first woman who had impressed him with her wisdom; the only
+one who had had the courage to offer him her strength.</p>
+
+<p>And this was not love. He smiled exultantly. It was nobler and
+infinitely more rare. Love, as he had read of it and mistaken it in his
+experience, was a devastating energy, greedy and devouring. It was a
+continual, nagging contention between self-abasement and hostility. It
+was a humiliating attempt on the part of a man to barter something,
+which was persistently undervalued, for the feminine equivalent which
+was as persistently hoarded. It was an amalgam of physical yearning,
+wounded vanity and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading
+as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity.
+Of all the passions it was the most hypocritical&mdash;a snare-setter, a
+digger of<!-- Page 320 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He
+thanked God there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like
+an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of
+this woman's charity, had felt it yield beneath his touch, and had found
+himself immersed in the blessedness of instant and unmerited rest.</p>
+
+<p>Lazily he commenced to dress. From his window he could see the Castle,
+perched grave and gray against the forehead of the clouds. He wondered
+whether she was up, how she was occupying herself, whether she was
+expecting him? He listened to her voice in the silence of his brain,
+like the far-away singing of contralto bells. He saw her still face, her
+slow smiling, the proud, sweet stateliness of her pacing steps. Then his
+thoughts went back to whether he was expected.</p>
+
+<p>If he were not&mdash;&mdash; The thought chilled him. She had said nothing to
+encourage him to seek her afresh. What if his reappearance should cause
+her embarrassment&mdash;an embarrassment which she would betray by
+withholding herself? It was quite likely she would impute to him wrong
+motives. Already she might have repented of intimacies she had allowed.
+He had placed his arm about her. With the injustice of most women,
+though she had permitted it, she might be blaming him because the act
+had been witnessed by Terry. Terry of all persons! Having had time to
+reflect, she might be accusing him of gallantries. It was not so long
+since she had confused him with Adair. From her untypical knowledge of
+him she was entitled to estimate him<!-- Page 321 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> as the kind of man to whom
+promiscuous caresses were a practice. He turned coward at the
+recollection of his daring. Last night it had been so involuntary and
+had seemed so natural. Why had he done it? Why had she allowed it? It
+had been the liberty of a plow-boy with a village-girl. There would be
+little room for wonder if, when next they met, she fixed a No Man's Land
+of pride between herself and his familiarity. She would have good
+reason, for their companionship would be shared by Terry. Poor little
+Terry, with her exaggerated sins and distorted self-accusations!</p>
+
+<p>He wandered down to breakfast disturbed by these apprehensions. As the
+morning dragged by they took shape as facts. Towards noon he could
+tolerate his uncertainty no longer. He turned his steps in the direction
+of the Castle, having first determined, if he found himself unwelcome,
+to announce that the purpose of his visit was to bid good-by before
+setting out for London.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>He had been shown into the turret room and supplied with the daily
+papers, while the same grave image who had admitted him the night
+before, had departed in search of her Ladyship. More to calm himself
+than to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to glance through the news.</p>
+
+<p>It was a disjointed world that the pages reflected&mdash;not at all the
+kingdom round the corner for which the war had been fought. Honor,
+patriotism, hero<!-- Page 322 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>ism seemed forgotten words. The old ruthless scramble
+of commercialism had restarted. The honesty of everybody, whether
+individuals, governments or nations, was being doubted. Class and race
+hatreds had broken loose. Strikes were pending. The Allies were allied
+only in name; they gnashed their teeth at one another across the
+council-table in Paris. The lying game of diplomacy had been revived.
+Poison-notes were being exchanged. The tabby-cat statesmen who had been
+too old to fight, were busy sowing the seeds of future wars. The
+politicians who had nailed mankind to the cross, were casting lots for
+the raiment which had survived the sacrifice. No one asked, "Is this
+righteousness?" The only question was, "How much of it belongs to me?"
+Meanwhile, the children of honester men who had died, starved by their
+hundreds of thousands. Mothers pressed sick babies to their milkless
+breasts. The mutilated, stoical with neglect, shuffled along the
+pavements. Fanatics of despair turned hopeful eyes to Russia where a
+devilment was brewing which, should it overboil, would pour destruction
+across five continents. No one cared.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced through the window at the quiet landscape, lying green and
+sun-dappled against the wet, gray streak of summer sky. Was his own
+experience so universal? Were kingdoms perpetually round the corner,
+always and always out of sight?</p>
+
+<p>As he again took up the paper, his eye was caught by a head-line:
+<span class="smcap">Steely Jack Runs for Parliament</span>. Immediately he forgot his
+pessimism and<!-- Page 323 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> became absorbed. Braithwaite had come out with the true
+story of his life. He was calling on the seven million men who had seen
+service to fight on in peace for the ideals for which they had fought in
+war. He insisted that if they cast their votes together as one man, they
+could control any election. If they combined with the patriot
+ex-soldiers of other nations, they could control the world. He was out
+to smash politics and the disastrous iniquity of political compromise.
+His aim was to restore the comradeship and sharing which had enabled the
+old front-line to stand fast. He was establishing a paper. He was
+speechifying. He was to hold an immense mass meeting in the Albert
+Hall&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Tabs laughed in sheer excitement. Here was one man at any rate who
+wasn't content to miss his kingdom. He might have known it. He could see
+Braithwaite's bleak look as clearly as if he stood before him. His
+instinct was to join him and say to him, in the words of the coster,
+"You and me was pals out there." He'd never lost an inch of trench.</p>
+
+<p>"Bravo, Braithwaite!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon, your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked up. The dignified image had returned and was standing in the
+doorway, with his chin thrust out and his nose at a high angle with his
+collar.</p>
+
+<p>The man coughed deferentially. "If your Lordship will follow me&mdash;&mdash;"<!-- Page 324 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But at that moment he heard her calling from beneath the turret wall,
+"Lord Taborley!"</p>
+
+<p>Jumping to his feet, he hurried to the window and leant out. She was in
+her riding habit, standing on the terrace above the rose-garden. "I've
+just got back from my morning ride. I have to visit the kennels. I was
+wondering whether you would accompany me."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to the footman. "If you'll show me the way out to the terrace,
+I can find Lady Dawn myself."</p>
+
+<p>She had moved farther away to where the steps led down between the
+rose-bushes. As he came towards her through the sunlight, she pretended
+not to notice him, but stood meditatively flicking the dust from the toe
+of her boot with her crop. Even when he joined her, she did not look up.
+They descended the steps in silence. When they had turned along a path,
+where no one could observe them, she raised her eyes. "I was afraid you
+had left."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, unconsciously imitating her quietness. "And I, too, was
+afraid. I was afraid you would not want me."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" She stopped to pluck a bud in passing. "I should think any
+woman would want you."</p>
+
+<p>He looked to see if she were chaffing. "Last night," he explained, "you
+were present when at least one woman didn't want me. That was why&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She shot a glance at him with her honest, stone-gray eyes. Her hands
+started out to touch him,<!-- Page 325 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> but she recalled them. "You must feel sorry
+for her," she said softly. "She's so young. I think you'll live to thank
+her. She'll learn that men like you don't come every day&mdash;only once in a
+lifetime."</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<img src="images/illus04.jpg" alt="hands"  />
+<a id="illus04" name="illus04"></a>
+</p>
+<p class='center'> "<i>I was afraid you had left.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Uneasily he harked back to her first statement. "Why did you fear that I
+had left?"</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders. "You had nothing for which to stay."</p>
+
+<p>"There was you."</p>
+
+<p>"Me!" She laughed wisely. "You had to say that out of politeness. In a
+man's world I'm of no consequence. I know how I appear in your eyes.
+I've been married, so I'm no longer a novelty. I'm not so young as I
+was; I shall be older. And then I'm a mother&mdash;you forget that, Lord
+Taborley. Oh no, I have no attractions to offer."</p>
+
+<p>"You have friendship."</p>
+
+<p>"Friendship!" She repeated the word with a shake of her head. "Men never
+want merely friendship; they want less or more. They want vivacity&mdash;some
+one who will halve their years, with whom they can sport and romp. Some
+one who can have babies to them&mdash;little pink babies, with squirmy toes
+and baldy heads. They want to begin everything afresh. They're not
+looking for another man's left-overs. Even in the matter of
+disillusionizing a woman, they want to do that for themselves. Men
+who've not been married, demand that a woman shall be doing everything,
+as they are doing it, for the first time. It's their right."</p>
+
+<p>"But there's another side," he protested. "A<!-- Page 326 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> woman who's been married
+has gained experience&mdash;the most dearly purchased form of knowledge, as
+you yourself have told me. She can be trusted not to expect the
+impossible. She's been over the course and knows the pitfalls. She's
+learnt the value of compromise. She ought to have learnt how to be kind.
+I think kindness is the thing that matters most. Few people are born
+with it. You have to have been wretched to acquire the knack of it."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you have it," she glanced sideways at him humorously, "and you
+haven't been married."</p>
+
+<p>Realizing the drift of their conversation, he pulled himself up. He
+feared lest she suspected him of flirting. "You're very generous, Lady
+Dawn."</p>
+
+<p>They had arrived at a lookout point, where a lichen-covered summerhouse
+stood, protected on the steeper side by a low stone wall. Below them lay
+the moat, green-scummed and starred with water-lilies; throbbing in the
+midday haze, the emerald sward of the parkland seemed to float. Against
+the wall she halted. "What makes you say that I'm generous?"</p>
+
+<p>For all his thirty-six years, he blushed like a boy. "Because you take
+me seriously. After last night you might have been either amused or
+annoyed. The position in which I placed you was false. You thought that
+I'd come from London to urge Terry to marry me. When I told you that
+there was no one else in the world, you believed that I knew she was
+staying with you&mdash;that I was trying to persuade you to plead my cause.
+The anti-climax, after she'd surprised us, was the height of tragical<!-- Page 327 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+absurdity. It reduced all my high-flown sentiments to farce. I wonder
+you were able to prevent yourself from laughing. Terry could afford such
+a scene; she's little more than a child. I can't. With four more years
+to my age I could pass for her father. No, please. I want to be hard on
+myself. Let me finish what I'm saying. I've only met you twice; on each
+occasion I've suffered a loss of dignity. The other time was when I
+tried to turn you away from Maisie's door. You're probably aware that
+since then, until Pollock's return, I've seen far more of your sister
+than was wise. In fact I've offered myself like a job lot. And yet there
+was a time when I was content to wait. I believed that one had only to
+be faithful and he'd find what he hoped for round some future corner.
+You're a proud woman, Lady Dawn. You admire strength almost cruelly.
+You're inhumanly infallible&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes filled. She slipped her hand through his arm and patted it
+comfortingly. By the contact she was comforting herself as well. "I'm
+not. I wasn't infallible when I married. My pride came later to cover up
+my fault. I don't say it to flatter you&mdash;any woman would want you."</p>
+
+<p>He gazed down at her. "How gentle you are!"</p>
+
+<p>"I understand."</p>
+
+<p>They strolled along in contented silence. They had trespassed far beyond
+the bounds of discretion. A diversion was caused when they reached the
+kennels. He watched her among the leaping hounds. She employed the same
+tactics to quiet them that she had used with himself. With a coaxing
+word<!-- Page 328 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> and a caress she had them crouching at her feet. He listened to
+the precision of her orders and the definiteness of her enquiries.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd have made a business woman," he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed. "I could if I'd been forced." And then, "By the way, you're
+lunching with me, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be delighted. But, since confessions are the fashion, I may as
+well make a clean breast. If I had found that you were upset with what
+happened last night, I'd planned to tell you I was off to London."</p>
+
+<p>"But you're not?"</p>
+
+<p>"One doesn't run away from happiness."</p>
+
+<p>He was afraid he had offended. Her expression clouded. She withdrew and
+walked a few paces apart. He had come almost to the point of
+apologizing, when she turned to him eyes that were misty&mdash;suspiciously
+misty for a woman who never cried. "I'm glad you had the courage to tell
+me, because I haven't felt so happy for&mdash;&mdash; I daren't own how long."</p>
+
+<p>On entering the Castle, she left him while she went to change for lunch.
+As he waited, he reminded himself that in a handful of seconds he would
+be meeting Terry. The anticipation provided him with none of the old
+elation. With what ecstasy he used to watch for her in days gone by, as
+though the world was reborn when she stood before him! Far from feeling
+ecstasy, he was filled with uneasiness. Her presence would recall to him
+his failure<!-- Page 329 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> and would mock something beautiful that had commenced in
+his life. What that something was he hadn't estimated. All he knew was
+that, with the coming of Lady Dawn, every one of his problems had
+mysteriously found settlement. He was no longer humiliated. He was once
+more sure of his direction. He felt unreasonably strong and triumphant,
+as though the goal of his striving was in sight. His old dread of
+growing middle-aged impressed him as puerile. Whatever his age, she
+would always keep pace with him. She was the same age as he was. Had he
+been younger or older, he might have missed her or gone by her with
+unseeing eyes.</p>
+
+<p>When he entered the room in which lunch was served, he found that Lady
+Dawn was alone. Glancing at the table, he perceived with surprise that
+only two covers had been laid. She read the question in his eyes and
+answered it.</p>
+
+<p>"Terry's away. I forgot to tell you. She had an early breakfast and
+motored into Gloucester before I was up. The car's come back without
+her. She's sent no word as to when or how she proposes to return."</p>
+
+<p>"Something urgent?" he asked casually.</p>
+
+<p>"More likely shopping. A woman's shopping's always urgent. I'm no wiser
+than you are. The first I heard about her going was when I was informed
+she had gone."</p>
+
+<p>He relapsed into thought. It wasn't difficult to conjecture the reason
+for Terry's errand. She'd been no more anxious to meet him just at
+present<!-- Page 330 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> than he had been to meet her. She'd taken the day off in the
+hope that by nightfall he would have departed.</p>
+
+<p>Another solution occurred to him. "Did she ever mention to you a General
+Braithwaite?"</p>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn met his eyes with a hint of warning. Listeners were present.
+"I believe she did," she admitted discouragingly.</p>
+
+<p>"The only reason why I asked was that his name's in the morning papers.
+She may have seen it before she started. If so, it might explain&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"John will know." Lady Dawn turned to the footman. "Did Miss Beddow read
+the papers, John, this morning before she left?"</p>
+
+<p>"She did, my Lady. It was after she had read them that she ordered the
+car."</p>
+
+<p>"Then that's it." Tabs dismissed the subject as unworthy of further
+discussing. "She went to Gloucester to hurry off a telegram of
+congratulation. Braithwaite's had a stroke of luck."</p>
+
+<p>"If that is all," Lady Dawn smiled mischievously, "I wonder that she
+didn't come back in the car. A telegram can be dispatched in five
+minutes."</p>
+
+<p>From then on, the threat of Terry's return hung over them, urging them
+to make the most of their respite. Everything that had started between
+them was so new and uncertain. No time-limit had been set to Tabs'
+visit; his original reason for coming to Dawn Castle was exhausted.
+There was no sufficiently plausible excuse for prolonging his stay in
+the village longer. A little absence, a little carelessness of
+forgetting, a few new interests and who<!-- Page 331 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> could say but that this sudden
+need of each other, which had rushed them together with such compelling
+impulse, might not subside as unaccountably as it had occurred. In both
+their hearts this dread was present&mdash;this distrust of the permanency of
+their emotions. If they parted, they might meet again to find the magic
+irrecoverable.</p>
+
+<p>After lunch they retired to the room in the turret. She chose her
+favorite chair by the window and sat there sewing, with her work-basket
+at her feet. He sat opposite, watching the busy occupation of her hands.
+He noticed that many of the garments which she mended belonged to the
+small boy whom he had seen in the rose-garden.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up. "I always do everything for Eric."</p>
+
+<p>It was later, when tea was being served, that the small boy himself
+peered in on them. Tabs caught his jealous eyes peering round the
+doorway. "Won't you come and talk to me?"</p>
+
+<p>But the child ran away, despite his mother's coaxings, and refused to
+divulge his place of hiding.</p>
+
+<p>She apologized. "He's not quite eight yet&mdash;the only sweetheart I have."
+Later she said, "I've been thinking of what we talked last night&mdash;I mean
+his father. Would it be too far-fetched to believe that it was really he
+and not your imagination, that piloted us together?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not far-fetched at all. I'm sure of it. He wanted us to meet that I
+might tell you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What?" She bent forward, folding her hands in her lap and watching him
+searchingly. "Not<!-- Page 332 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> about his heroism; he'd take that for granted. Not
+that he'd loved me; we both knew it. Not anything self-pitying or weak
+that would rouse my regret&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You know." His assertion was almost a question. "Somehow he's got his
+message across to you."</p>
+
+<p>She lowered her eyes and resumed her sewing. "I couldn't sleep last
+night. I lay awake puzzling and remembering&mdash;remembering the long waste
+of years, the loneliness and the love that had turned to bitterness. And
+now, when ordinarily there would be no chance to make amends, he sends
+you to me, speaking through your lips and taking possession of your
+thoughts. He's trying to do something for me&mdash;something that will blot
+out my past for me, as his sacrifice has blotted out his past for him.
+Something comforting and tender&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The seconds ticked by. If she had guessed the dead man's desire, she
+refused to put it into words. The silence grew painful.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs looked at his watch. It was nearer six than five. He rose
+reluctantly. "I suppose I should be going."</p>
+
+<p>"But you're staying in the village to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't intended. There'll be moonlight. I was planning to be in
+London by morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't do that. You'll make me think you're afraid of meeting Terry.
+Dine with me to-night."</p>
+
+<p>She had risen. Her gesture was almost one of pleading. He smiled
+tenderly and took her hand. "Your wishes are mine. I'll run down to the
+inn and dress."<!-- Page 333 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>By the time he returned it was nearly seven. She met him with
+ill-concealed trouble. "Terry's not back. It's strange. You see I'm
+responsible for her. And&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The footman entered with a letter. "For your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure?" Then Tabs recollected. "Yes, of course. I left my
+address with Ann."</p>
+
+<p>As he took the letter he scanned the handwriting. "Odd!" When the man
+had left, he turned to Lady Dawn. "It's from her. Did you guess?"</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>"But why should she be writing when she'll be seeing you any minute?"</p>
+
+<p>Tabs squared his lips. He began to feel the stirring of a storm of
+anxiety. "Perhaps, because she doesn't intend to be seeing me any
+minute." He looked at the postmark. It had been mailed at eleven o'clock
+that morning in Gloucester. He tore the envelope and commenced to read.
+Before he had read far, he turned with a worried expression to Lady
+Dawn. "This concerns you as well." She came and stood beside his elbow.
+They glanced through the pages together. It was written on commercial
+note-paper of <i>The New Inn</i>, Gloucester, and ran:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dearest Tabs</span>:</p>
+
+<p>I love you very much&mdash;just as much as ever. I always want you to feel
+sure of that. But my love isn't the kind you've asked for. It never
+can be. Because of this there are so many things that I've not been
+able <!-- Page 334 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>to tell you&mdash;so I've been avoiding and deceiving you ever since
+you came back. I know I've not been honorable. A promise once given
+ought to be sacred; I gave you my promise that I would marry you. But
+that's all I could do for you now&mdash;just marry you; I couldn't give
+you the other things you would have a right to expect. I ought to
+have said, the other things you have earned and deserved more than
+any man. So, though I married you, I should still be robbing you,
+which would be even more treacherous than not fulfilling a promise.</p>
+
+<p>That I'm in love with General Braithwaite is no news to you. Love may
+not be the proper word. At least I'm so infatuated with him that
+there's no room in my heart for any other man. Do you remember that
+night in March, when you dined with us and asked my father for my
+hand, and next morning early I came round in a panic to your house? I
+didn't dare tell you all my trouble. The General had urged me to
+elope with him. I <i>wish, wish, wish</i> that I had. I should be his now
+and sure of him. By delaying and suspecting I've all but lost him.</p>
+
+<p>I always knew that he would be a big man&mdash;as big after the war as he
+was while it lasted. What this morning's papers say about him proves
+it. So for all these reasons and because I can't bear to face you at
+the Castle, I'm taking my fate in my hands. Please tell Lady Dawn
+that I shan't be back and excuse me in any way you can. I'm only
+carrying one small bag; she can send the rest of my things after me.</p>
+
+<p>There's one request I have to make&mdash;that neither of you will notify
+my father till at least twenty-four hours have elapsed. All my future
+happiness may depend on your granting this request. It's the last
+favor I shall ever ask you.</p>
+
+<p>And now, my very dear Tabs, almost my brother, if this hurts you,
+please take revenge by bundling me out of your mind. I was never your
+equal, never worthy of you, though you placed me on a pedestal that
+was <!-- Page 335 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>far above you. Comfort yourself by believing that if you'd
+married me, you would have found this out. What a wretched quitter I
+appear in my own eyes after all you suffered in the trenches, to have
+reserved this worse suffering for you, when your life has been spared
+and you had counted on me for happiness. My entire body's not worth
+your little finger. And yet how good you've always been to me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>You'll get a better woman than I am. I think I already know who
+she'll be; if I'm right, I shall be so very glad.</p>
+
+<p>I feel so humble&mdash;so apologetic. It's such a different ending from
+the one we dreamt when I saw you off on the troop-train with my hair
+all blowy down my back. There's nothing gained by recalling that. I
+meant so well by you; you've always been so much to me, my dearest,
+loyal Tabs.</p>
+
+<p>Even though you despise me, I still insist on signing myself,</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 20em;">Your ever affectionate</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 25em;"><span class="smcap">Terry</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry." It was Lady Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>He shook himself. He was so raw that even her sympathy almost wounded.
+"Don't pity me. It's she we've got to help. What's to be done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Done! I haven't thought. What can we&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We can follow her and bring her back. We've got to&mdash;and we haven't much
+time. You must have read between the lines what her letter meant. After
+having turned Braithwaite down, she's gone off to beg him to elope with
+her. When a girl puts herself at a man's mercy like that, there's no
+knowing how he'll act. The chances are that, whatever he does, it won't
+be honorable. We're got to prevent her, not<!-- Page 336 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> only for her own sake, but
+for his sake as well. He's just started on a great career; if this story
+leaks out, he'll be smashed. They'll both be smashed, for that matter.
+If she'd give him time to marry her honestly, it wouldn't matter whether
+her family had consented. But she doesn't intend to&mdash;that's why she's
+asked us to keep quiet for twenty-four hours. What we've got to do is
+not to stop her from marrying him&mdash;no one cares about that; but to catch
+her before she runs off with him."</p>
+
+<p>"But we don't know where&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, we don't." He spoke rapidly. "But we can find out. Ann can tell us.
+Ann's a maid in my house; she was practically engaged to him when he was
+my valet. Now that I look back, I'm sure she's known everything from the
+start and has seen this coming. We can get Braithwaite's address from
+her; when we know that, we shall have laid our hands on Terry."</p>
+
+<p>While he had been speaking, Lady Dawn had been rummaging through her
+desk. He went and bent over her, his hands on her shoulders. She was
+fingering a time-table. She looked up at him with her head leant back.
+"There's no train&mdash;nothing that will reach London till morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we must motor."</p>
+
+<p>Her face was still raised to his. She spoke softly. "<i>We!</i> You say <i>we</i>
+every time. Do you mean&mdash;&mdash; What do you mean, Lord Taborley?"</p>
+
+<p>His intensity relaxed. Flushing with confusion, he stared down at the
+whiteness of her breast, the queenliness of her, her graying hair and
+her ex<!-- Page 337 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>pectant, tender mouth. "I want you to come with me. I ought to
+have asked you properly. I've been taking you for granted and ordering
+you about."</p>
+
+<p>She remained very still, gazing directly up into his troubled eyes. He
+thought she was judging him. At last she whispered, "Don't be sad. I
+like you to order me."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<p>They had all night before them. If they left the Castle by ten, they
+could be in Brompton Square by five in the morning. Nothing would be
+gained by arriving earlier.</p>
+
+<p>Now that the first shock was over, they went into dinner as if nothing
+had happened. In the long, dim banqueting-hall there were only the two
+of them. They sat close together at the illuminated high-table like
+castaways, marooned on an island, in an ocean of brooding shadows. While
+they dined they conversed in lowered voices to prevent their plans from
+being overheard. It was decided to take Lady Dawn's Rolls Royce and to
+leave the runabout behind. The reason acknowledged was that it would be
+more dependable. The reason unmentioned was that the presence of a
+chauffeur would lend an air of much needed propriety.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually as they talked, the seriousness of their errand dropped from
+sight; their journey took on the complexion of an adventure. Its
+unconvention clothed it with romance. How unconventional it was they
+realized when Lady Dawn gave the butler orders concerning her departure.
+He was an old<!-- Page 338 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> man, rigid with tradition, who, having served the family
+for three generations, had acquired the aristocratic bearing of his
+masters.</p>
+
+<p>"At ten o'clock, your Ladyship. To where? To London! That's a long
+journey to take at night. And the car will call at the inn first to pick
+up his Lordship's luggage. Oh, I see, my Lady. I thought at first that
+your Ladyship was going."</p>
+
+<p>"I am," she corrected with quiet dignity. "Lord Taborley and I are going
+on an errand of great importance. I don't want this talked about. You
+understand? And who'll be driving? Witherall! Then warn Witherall to
+keep silent."</p>
+
+<p>When the butler had withdrawn, she turned to Tabs. "I'm breaking all my
+precedents for you. I couldn't have told him, if I hadn't had you to
+keep me in countenance. He looked so shocked that he made me feel as if
+it were you and I, instead of Terry, who were doing the eloping. I'm
+sure that's what he thought. There'll be gossip. I shall have to pay the
+piper; but I'm too happy to-night to look ahead."</p>
+
+<p>"It hadn't occurred to me&mdash;&mdash;" Tabs hesitated. "I've been unpardonably
+inconsiderate. I see it now&mdash;you'll be what they call compromised. In
+that case, it will be wiser&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It won't." She bent towards him laughing. Her pearls, nestling in the
+white cleft of her bosom, gleamed dully, shaken by her quiet merriment.
+In the short time that he had known her, she had become extraordinarily
+girlish&mdash;almost girlish enough to put back the hands of time for the
+proper man.<!-- Page 339 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> "It won't. It won't be wiser. It's never wiser to turn your
+back on happiness. I'd dare anything to-night. You've invited me; you
+can't wriggle out."</p>
+
+<p>"If that's how you feel&mdash;&mdash;" He checked himself. Her mischief warned
+him. Instinctively he knew that she was about to ask precisely how he
+thought she felt. He cancelled what he had intended saying and
+substituted, "It's an ill-wind that blows nobody any good. And it's poor
+Terry we have to thank for this chance of being together a little
+longer!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a chance? You're not bored? You do want me?"</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes slowly. Her pain had startled him. Up to that moment
+he hadn't been awake to how utterly he had come to want her. For an
+instant he had a glimpse of the emptiness of life, should he find
+himself deprived of her comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't need to ask me that!" he said quietly. "And now it's my turn
+to be inquisitive. Does it make you glad to hear me own that I want
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>He watched her color rise. It was like the elfin tiptoeing of her spirit
+behind the white transparent walls of her flesh. It climbed the smooth
+ascent of her breast, passed up the columned tower of her throat and
+stared out at him excitedly in the brightness of her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Men don't ask things like that," she said reproachfully, "at least,
+only when they're flirting. I sometimes think&mdash;&mdash; Don't treat me like
+all the others who were before me."</p>
+
+<p>"What others?"</p>
+
+<p>She held his gaze. "The emotional women and<!-- Page 340 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> silly girls&mdash;&mdash; You must
+have been loved very often, Lord Taborley."</p>
+
+<p>To have defended himself against her tender jealousy would have been
+futile. She was plainly anxious to believe her accusation. Perhaps it
+flattered her a little. Perhaps it lent him an added touch of glamor. He
+was wondering how he should satisfy her. He could remember no hearts
+that his fascination had broken. He could rake up absolutely&mdash;&mdash; She was
+speaking again.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet I'm glad you compelled me to tell you that I wanted you. You're
+making me do things that I never did before in my life. I'm supposed to
+be a cold woman. You'll find people who'll say that I'm remote and
+domineering. I've only one big affection&mdash;my little boy. For your sake
+I'm leaving him alone to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"For mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"For whose else?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought for Terry's."</p>
+
+<p>Her lips parted. The laughter died in her eyes. "In your heart you knew
+better."</p>
+
+<p>Then he left her and went down to the inn to pack his bag.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<p>He had paid his bill. His luggage had been carried downstairs. There was
+still a full quarter of an hour to wait. He sat in his bedroom smoking
+furiously. Before he met her again, he wanted to know precisely what had
+happened to himself&mdash;and, perhaps, to her.<!-- Page 341 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was filled with self-distrust. His newly discovered propensity for
+falling in love was genuinely alarming. It wasted his time, upset his
+plans and robbed him of his mental vigor. It made him a rudderless ship
+at the mercy of any chance winds of sentiment. Up to less than three
+months ago the solitary woman in his life had been Terry. Throughout the
+war, while the masculine world had been making an amorous idiot of
+itself, he had kept his head clear and gone straight. Things had come to
+a pretty pass if now, when normality was returning and the excuse for
+running wild was out-of-date, he should start on his emotional
+escapades. His love for Terry had been deep-rooted. His fondness for
+Maisie had been the attempt of a starved heart to satisfy its craving
+with a substitute. But where was this pursuit of substitutes to end? If
+it went much further he would gain for himself the reputation of being a
+limpet who attached himself to any chance rock of feminine amiability.
+The kind of woman he cared to associate with would avoid him. If ever he
+were to fall in love again, his attentions would be so shop-worn
+that&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>If ever he were to fall in love again! Within the last twenty-four hours
+his irresponsible heart had committed this disastrous folly for a third
+time.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled cynically, as though he were two separate persons, one of whom
+was cool and calculating, while the other was improvident and
+scape-grace. How Lady Dawn would despise him, were he to reveal to her
+the stupid commotion of his mind! His excuse for blundering his way into
+her privacy had<!-- Page 342 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> been sufficiently fantastic: that her late husband was
+employing his living brain to communicate with her from the dead. It
+must have strained her credulity to the breaking-point. If on top of
+this he were to propose to her, what possible conclusions could she
+draw? Either that in order to gain her intimacy, he had perpetrated a
+cruel fraud; or else that he was so lacking in humor as to believe that
+Lord Dawn, from beyond the grave, was arranging for his wife's second
+marriage. The drollery of a dead husband acting match-maker made him
+smile. In the middle of his smiling he pulled himself up. Why not? Why
+shouldn't a husband who had wrecked his wife's happiness, try to repair
+the damage, if that were possible, when through death he had attained a
+kinder knowledge? The Roman Church prayed to the dead whom it canonized.
+There were thousands of parents, wives, sweethearts, bereft by the war,
+who were asserting that their longing had bridged the gulf and
+penetrated&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He shook himself, as though to struggle free from an invisible
+assailant. Hallucinations! All these so-called spiritualistic
+manifestations were the result of over-taxed imagination. To stick to
+facts was the only safe course; and these were the facts in his case. He
+had approached Lady Dawn as a matter of duty to tell her the truth about
+a husband whom she had not known at his best. She had misinterpreted his
+motive and had believed that he had come to confess to her his own
+failure. She had been thrown off her guard, had dropped her mask of
+stoicism and had lavished on him a reckless kindness.<!-- Page 343 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> But other women
+had been reckless to him in their kindness. Terry had: so had Maisie.
+Women's kindness had caused his present predicament&mdash;their kindness,
+plus his awkward knack of valuing their kindness at more than its face
+worth. He had learnt his lesson. Never again would he be lured into the
+net of feminine fickleness. When he felt the temptation rising, he would
+suppress and ignore it; at any rate he would ignore it until the woman,
+who was rousing his affection, had declared her intentions beyond any
+chance of mistaking.</p>
+
+<p>And Lady Dawn? She was in a class by herself. He held her sacred. The
+mere thought that she should ever fall in love with him was
+impertinence. To talk cheap sentiment would be insulting. It would cause
+him to lose her friendship&mdash;a loss which he could not bear to
+contemplate. It would be taking a mean advantage of a situation created
+for an entirely different purpose.&mdash;&mdash; And yet, dare he trust himself,
+now that he was in love with her, in the intimate aloneness of a long
+night drive to London?</p>
+
+<p>He rose to his feet disgusted. If this was the loss of self-control that
+peace had brought, better a thousand times the rigors of the sacrifice
+that was ended. Out there he had been strong; here he was a sick dog,
+licking his sores and whimpering at his own shadow. Self-pity had
+wrought this wholesale impotence&mdash;an impotence which was infecting the
+entire world. While individuals and nations had thought only of others,
+they had been valiant; they had raced in generous competition,
+clean-limbed as<!-- Page 344 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> athletes, towards the tape, where endeavor ends and
+eternity commences. And now this lethargy, this cowardice&mdash;this
+monstrous fat of quaking emotion!</p>
+
+<p>A memory flashed back on him&mdash;an afternoon in March when he had been
+obsessed by a similar discontent. It had happened in the Mall, after his
+interview with Braithwaite and just before his introduction to Maisie.
+He had come across a sign-board which had announced that, by following a
+certain path, one would arrive at the Passport Office. That narrow
+track, vanishing into the bushy greenness, had seemed to him the first
+five hundred yards of the road that led to world-wideness and freedom.
+At the end of it lay Samoa, Tibet, the Malay Archipelago&mdash;jeweled seas
+and painted solitudes which human disillusions could not wither.
+Instantly his will concentrated. By following that road he could become
+lean-souled again. By reseeking hardships, he could recover his lost
+discipline. The idea held him spellbound. It meant escape. It meant a
+return to monasticism. Then and there he determined that he would
+commence his preliminary enquiries to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Going to the window, he leant out. The quaint village street was
+sleeping. The night was so still that, it scarcely breathed; it lay like
+a tired child in the firm white arms of the moonlight. Coming smoothly
+to a halt before the hostel was a powerful car. It was a landaulet and
+the hood was lowered. Lady Dawn must have altered her plans at the last
+moment; instead of sending for him, she had come herself! Catching sight
+of him, she waved<!-- Page 345 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> her hand. His heart became quiet. Like the night
+without, his being was flooded with a drifting whiteness that robbed the
+darkness of its terror.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<p>As he stood by the side of the car talking to her while his bag was
+being stowed away, her manner was chillingly conventional. It was so
+conventional that it bordered on the unfriendly. About the
+unfriendliness of the chauffeur there could be no doubt. The elaborate
+care with which he tucked the robe about her Ladyship had a distinct air
+of alert possessiveness.</p>
+
+<p>When Tabs had taken his place beside her and the village was left
+behind, she relaxed and laughed softly. "Such a trouble I've had! They
+all disapproved of our expedition&mdash;I mean the servants. Their eyes
+accused me of&mdash;&mdash; Perhaps it's better not to be explicit. But that was
+why I called for you, instead of letting you come to the Castle. Did you
+notice anything queer about Witherall?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your chauffeur? I thought he rather overdid his superciliousness and
+that he treated you a little as if he were your husband. Apart from
+that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Apart from that," she laughed, "he made you feel entirely welcome. You
+mustn't mind him. My servants aren't used to seeing me with an escort.
+And then&mdash;&mdash; Well, an all-night ride would be a little difficult to
+explain to anybody."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it would."</p>
+
+<p>They relapsed into silence. It was jolly to be so<!-- Page 346 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> near to her and,
+after the fears he had had, to know himself so trusted. She sat quite
+close to him, so that he could feel the warmth of her body. Her
+shoulders touched him; sometimes she leant against him with a gentle
+pressure. Her fragrance was all about him. The robe spread across their
+knees gave an added touch of intimacy. He glanced down at her sideways.
+She was wearing a moleskin coat with a deep collar of silver-fox. She
+had on a moleskin hat, close fitting to her glossy head. Her face was
+partly hidden by a smart veil. She was immaculate as ever&mdash;as composed
+and stylish as if she were going to a theater-party instead of on an
+all-night ride to London. But it wasn't her stylishness that impressed
+him; it was her littleness. She looked very tender and pale as she sat
+beside him. The moral back of her chauffeur, as seen through the glass,
+condemned him of unkindness. He had had no right to ask her to accompany
+him. Why should he have burdened her with his troubles? She must have
+plenty of her own, with her boy to care for and her estate to manage.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been selfish," he said. "You ought to be in bed and sleeping now."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled. "Always blaming yourself, aren't you? I shouldn't be here
+unless I'd wanted."</p>
+
+<p>"But why did you want?"</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the robe her hand commenced to grope. It stole into his own and
+lay there quietly. "Because I couldn't bear to see you hurt. You're so
+good. In some ways you're so strong; in others<!-- Page 347 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> you're just as tiny as
+my Eric. I felt you needed me for the moment."</p>
+
+<p>"For the moment! I shall always need you."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you might." She shook her head slowly. "But you won't. You'll go
+away. I shall hear about you&mdash;all the big things you're accomplishing
+and planning. And then I shall remember that for just one night I had
+you for my very own."</p>
+
+<p>"But we're always going to be friends. I shall be always coming back to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Men don't come back, Lord Taborley. A man of your temperament is least
+likely to come back. You press forward. You're eager. Wherever you go
+you form new affections. I'm not like that. I'm cold. You don't think
+so, but then I'm treating you as I never treated any other man. You
+slipped under my reserve and reached my heart before I could stop you.
+Do you know how I'm treating you? Just the way I'd like some good woman
+to treat my little Eric one day, when I'm not here and he's a man."</p>
+
+<p>"But you're going to be here for a long time&mdash;just as long as I am."
+There was alarm in his assertion. "I couldn't bear to think of your not
+being in the world. It wouldn't matter so much whether I saw you; it
+would be the knowledge that I could see you; that would make all the
+difference."</p>
+
+<p>"Would it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm sure. You mustn't think that because there was Terry and&mdash;I'm
+ashamed to have to own it&mdash;a passing fancy for your sister, that I'm
+fickle."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't. I never thought it for a moment. What<!-- Page 348 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> I thought was that you
+were unhappy. People do a lot of foolish things when they're unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems so long since I was unhappy," he said gently. "You've healed
+everything."</p>
+
+<p>She was shaken as though with a storm of sobbing. No sound escaped her.
+She did a thing which was as amazing as it was beautiful. Raising his
+hand which she had been holding, she hugged it against her breast.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX</h4>
+
+<p>During the night he nodded. Once when he wakened, he found her tucking
+the robe more closely about him. "Go to sleep. You're tired," she
+whispered, patting his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>A strange woman&mdash;strangely maternal and beautiful! She never seemed to
+think of herself. The women whom he had known had always demanded that
+men should do all the giving. Even Terry had been like that. His
+conception, of love had been of a continual bestowing with no hope of
+reciprocity. To be allowed to give throughout one's life to the woman
+beloved had seemed to him to be the maximum of married blessedness. He
+knew better now. Lady Dawn had given so generously that she had
+established a new standard; he would never again ask so little from any
+woman. He began to perceive that all his approaches to love had been
+self-abasing. In the true sense of the word he had never been in love.
+Dream-intoxicated, yes! But all that he had experienced had been desire.
+It was a new<!-- Page 349 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> thought to him that a man must respect, even more than he
+desires, the woman whom he covets.</p>
+
+<p>His feeling for Lady Dawn was one of worship. When he wakened to find
+her watching over him, it seemed to him that the Mother of God sat
+beside him. When God's Mother is symbolized in a living woman, love is
+reborn into the world.</p>
+
+<p>The last time he awoke, dawn was breaking. The moon had grown feeble. A
+chill was in the air. He sat up. "What! Still awake! I don't believe
+you've slept a wink all night."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't. I didn't want. I've been enjoying myself."</p>
+
+<p>"You look tired."</p>
+
+<p>He commenced to pile cushions behind her and tried to coax her to take
+some rest. "If you insist," she assented. "But I'd much rather not. I'm
+like a child at a party; I want to last out every moment."</p>
+
+<p>"Then let's talk. We're nearing London. We sha'n't get much chance for
+being alone after we arrive. We don't know what we'll find. We may be
+whisked away in opposite directions. Before we're separated, I want to
+acknowledge what I owe you."</p>
+
+<p>"It's cold," she shuddered, drawing closer to him. And then, "You owe me
+nothing."</p>
+
+<p>He was tempted to place his arm about her, but the cowardice of past
+failure was strong upon him. He was afraid lest the ordinary gestures of
+affection would cheapen him in her eyes; he was still more afraid that
+they might mean to her that he valued<!-- Page 350 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> her too lightly. He held himself
+in hand, staring straight before him and speaking quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the only judge of what I owe you. I came to you broken. Life had
+made a fool of me. I'd fallen through placing my ideals too high.
+Everything was slipping. Every belief I'd ever had was open to doubt.
+Most of all I'd lost faith in the goodness of women. To explain my state
+of mind I have to tell you that the war had made me fanatical. Like
+millions of men who went out to die, I'd persuaded myself that I was
+fighting more than Germans&mdash;I was fighting to bring about the new heaven
+and the new earth. Our politicians promised us as much. You remember
+their phrases. 'A world safe for democracy! A land fit for heroes to
+live in.' When all the muck and the heartbreak were ended, we found that
+outwardly it was the same old world. Heaven was as far away as ever.
+There were no signs that any one wanted a new earth. Nations which had
+been comrades, began to wrangle. Soldiers came home to find their jobs
+held by slackers. The glorious promises had been a death-bed repentance;
+their insincerity was proved when the world recovered. But our worst
+disappointment was utterly personal&mdash;that despite the magnanimity we had
+shared and witnessed, we ourselves were no less selfish. For me all
+these disillusions were epitomized in Terry. I'd fought for her. I'd
+carried her in my heart. If I'd died, my last thoughts would have been
+of her. I came back hungry and she disowned me. That she should have
+done that made humanity a Judas and God a<!-- Page 351 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> mocker. I don't mean you to
+believe that I gave way at once to this wholesale injustice. At first I
+made an effort to struggle against it. I'd always held that great living
+was a matter of pressing forward, of wearing an air of triumph when you
+knew you were defeated, of believing, in spite of every proof to the
+contrary, that further up the road your kingdom waited for you."</p>
+
+<p>He felt the pressure of her friendly hand. "It does," she assured him.
+"That's what you've taught me. It's what you taught Maisie; it's almost
+as though you'd willed her husband to come back. You're a great
+believer. All great believers have been doubters. They give away so much
+of their faith that at times they have none left for themselves. You
+limp. Don't flinch; with me there's no need to be sensitive. When you
+entered my room for the first time, you made me think of another lame
+man. Do you remember how Jacob wrestled all night with an unknown
+assailant? When dawn was breaking his thigh was out of joint, but he
+refused to let his assailant go until he had asked his name. The
+stranger would not tell him&mdash;instead he blessed him. And then Jacob knew
+it was with God he had wrestled. When the sun rose and he went upon his
+way, he halted upon his thigh. You have the look that I think he must
+have had&mdash;the look of a man who has been maimed in trying to make God
+answer questions. It's that look and your very lameness that have given
+me back something that Lord Dawn took from me&mdash;something that he knew,
+when he<!-- Page 352 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> sent you, you could give me back: my faith in men, without
+which a woman can have no happiness."</p>
+
+<p>The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was
+the hour when children are born and weary people die&mdash;the hour of new
+beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers
+changing guard, salute at the cross-roads of the new day as friends.</p>
+
+<p>At last he broke the silence. "I thought I had nothing to give you. I
+felt so empty. You seemed so strong and immovable, like a still tree in
+a forest that was storm-shaken. You made me feel that however the wind
+raged, beneath your branches there would be always rest. I never
+knew&mdash;&mdash;" He paused as though he had forgotten what he had set out to
+say. "I never guessed that a woman could be so good."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor I that there was so good a man."</p>
+
+<p>They clasped hands so tightly that it hurt. The sun was rising as they
+entered London. Trees dripped gold and birds were chattering as they
+drove into Brompton Square. It was only when they had halted before the
+sleeping house, gay with flaming window-boxes, that she released his
+hand. With the severance of contact he awoke from his trance and
+remembered the errand that had brought them.</p>
+
+
+<h4>X</h4>
+
+<p>He had opened the door with his latch-key and had stood aside to allow
+her to pass into the hall, when suddenly he clutched her arm and drew
+her<!-- Page 353 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> back. He signed to her to make no sound. Together they stood
+listening. The early morning stillness was broken by a door shutting
+smartly at the top of the house, a cheerful whistling and then the
+unmistakeably firm step of a man descending.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs had no man in his employ, so what was a man doing in his house?
+There was no secretiveness about the stranger's movements; on the
+contrary, there was an airy boldness.</p>
+
+<p>The sunlight danced and nickered on the wall as if it shared the
+excitement of their suspense. The footsteps drew nearer. They paused
+dramatically. The whistling ceased abruptly. Had the stranger taken
+warning? A match was struck. He was only lighting a cigarette. The
+footsteps came on again. At the final bend of the stairs the intruder
+came in sight. He halted, mirroring their surprise, and stood staring
+down at them with a bleak, hard look. He was the man whom they had least
+expected.</p>
+
+<p>Tabs was the first to collect himself. He closed the front door behind
+him. "Good morning, General. You couldn't have been more prompt if we
+had telegraphed you that we were coming." When Braithwaite still stared,
+Tabs continued, "Allow me to introduce you to Lady Dawn and may I ask
+how long I have had you as my guest?"</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite drew a puff at his cigarette. His manner was as haughty as
+if he had been the owner of the house. "Since last night," he said. "I
+have to thank your Lordship for a bed. Mrs. Braithwaite&mdash;&mdash;" A gleam of
+amusement shot into his eyes. "Mrs. Braithwaite had a sentiment for
+spend<!-- Page 354 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>ing her first night beneath your roof. Seeing that you were away
+and that I was so newly wedded"&mdash;he made an eloquent gesture&mdash;"I could
+scarcely deny her." Turning on his heel, he commenced to reascend.
+Across his shoulder he flung back, "Of course I apologize. We'll not
+trespass further. In a few minutes I'll have her dressed. In half an
+hour, at the outside, I'll remove her."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a fool." Tabs spoke sharply. "You make me wonder which of us
+is mad."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite regarded him for a moment with an enigmatic smile. "I'm not.
+Yesterday I did the wisest thing of my life." With that he vanished.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn turned to Tabs gently. "If that's the way he feels, then he
+has. Terry's to be congratulated."</p>
+
+<p>"But why on earth should she have wanted to spend her marriage-night in
+my house?" Tabs questioned. "My house of all inappropriate places!
+That's what I can't understand. And what could Ann have been doing to
+consent? You remember I told you there was a time when he was
+practically engaged to Ann."</p>
+
+<p>They mounted the stairs till they came to the first landing. Entering
+the library, with its bright red lacquer, they sat down to await events.
+But Tabs did not sit long; he was too restless. Having flung wide the
+French windows which opened out on to the veranda, he kept going to the
+doorway to listen.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at his wrist-watch. "Barely six o'clock! Upon my word, I
+don't relish the idea of her being disturbed. Braithwaite's such a
+hot-head.<!-- Page 355 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> For all I care, they can stop here as long as they like. I'll
+take a holiday so as not to embarrass them." He faced Lady Dawn with
+troubled frankness. "The question is: <i>are</i> they married? I've been
+trying to figure things out. They simply can't be unless he met her with
+a special license in Gloucester. And even then, I can't see how&mdash;&mdash; But
+if they're not married, surely he would never have had the audacity to
+bring her to my house. It would be too preposterous&mdash;to the house of a
+man to whom she was engaged, where she would be waited on by a woman
+with whom he was once in love."</p>
+
+<p>At that moment Ann entered, pretty and sleepy-eyed, with Braithwaite
+following close behind. Tabs commenced speaking at once, in order that
+he might put them at their ease as regards his intentions.</p>
+
+<p>"We're not here to blame any one. You, General, evidently think that I'm
+hostile. I'm not. As far as you're concerned, Ann, whatever you've done
+is right. Of course I'm a little taken aback to find that my house was
+chosen for the honeymoon. But if you'd like to have the use of it for a
+week or so and Ann doesn't object, I'll clear out and leave you to
+yourselves. You'll make me really happy if you'll accept the offer;
+it'll be a proof of friendliness. You're wondering why we surprised you
+so early. It wasn't to prevent you from marrying. It was because Lady
+Dawn was responsible for Terry and we felt that a runaway match, with
+the marriage announced after the event, might damage not only her but
+you, General, as well. I read yesterday in the papers of what you're
+doing and I want to say just<!-- Page 356 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> this to you. You're the better man. You
+deserved to win. Last time we met you refused to shake my hand. I hope
+you'll take it now. You can afford to be magnanimous to a rival, now
+that you're Terry's husband."</p>
+
+<p>Tabs stood with his hand held out. Braithwaite made no motion to accept
+it; and yet his expression was generous. "I can't shake your hand as
+Terry's husband, Lord Taborley. I'm not married to her."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn sprang to her feet and came between the two tall men. "Not
+married to her! But you intend to marry her? You told us you were
+married."</p>
+
+<p>Braithwaite was still smiling. "I am." To their amazement he slipped his
+arm about Ann and kissed her sleepy, tender mouth. "Terry is safe with
+your Ladyship's sister. We took her there when she arrived last night."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Tabs. "You said that I was the better man. I'm not. It was
+your sense of duty that always urged me. I have to thank your Lordship
+for the greatest happiness that can befall any man. You made me see it
+as my greatest happiness, when I was in danger of becoming a cad. There
+was one thing you said to me that sank into my mind. 'You'll never
+succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your honor
+solvent.' You saved my honor. I didn't like your methods. But I thank
+you with all my heart now. If it hadn't been for you, neither Ann nor I
+would have come safely to our journey's end. I think we'd both like to
+shake your hand."<!-- Page 357 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>XI</h4>
+
+<p>It was two hours later. They were finishing their breakfast in the open,
+on the balcony of the Hyde Park Hotel. From where they sat they could
+watch a lawn-mower traveling slowly back and forth, patterning the sward
+with alternate stripes of different colored greenness. They could smell
+the acrid juices of newly cut grass. Beyond the islands of flowers and
+vivid candelabra of trees, they could see the wild fowl of the
+Serpentine rise and drift like phantoms across the sultry stretch of
+blueness. Wheels of a water-cart grumbled sleepily against the gravel.
+Moving through the sunlit shadows of the Row, riders were returning from
+their early morning gallop.</p>
+
+<p>They were still together&mdash;just the two of them. They were romantically
+self-conscious of the domestic appearance which their twoness caused.
+Only married couples or very ardent lovers rise, while the lazy world is
+sleeping, to keep each other company at breakfast. They had not had the
+heart to disturb the General and Ann in their temporary possession of
+the little nest-like house.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Dawn was speaking. "So you've done it again."</p>
+
+<p>"What have I done?"</p>
+
+<p>"What you did for Maisie. How did you put it last night? You've led them
+to their kingdom."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. "I seem to have a faculty for doing that. I do for others
+what I can't do for myself."</p>
+
+<p>Still not looking at him, she said: "Perhaps you<!-- Page 358 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> don't find your own
+kingdom because you're too much in love with the search. You don't want
+to bring your journey to an end. There are people like that."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not one of them.&mdash;I wish you'd look at me, Lady Dawn. Do you know
+what I covet most in all the world? Rest and certainty. I don't mean a
+lazy kind of rest, but the rest of a mind at peace with itself&mdash;the
+certainty we all had while the war was on, when we were adventuring for
+the advantage of other people. I've done nothing lately that wasn't for
+myself. I want some one to live for, so that I can forget myself. I've
+been thinking&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The waiter presented the bill. Tabs scarcely knew whether to curse or
+bless. He had been approaching the danger-mark; nevertheless, he wasn't
+at all sure that he was grateful for the interruption. His heart cried
+out to him to risk humiliation by one last act of daring. Experience
+warned him that it is the sins of precaution&mdash;the follies left
+uncommitted&mdash;that are most regretted by men of seventy.</p>
+
+<p>She rose as he was gathering up his change. The purpose that had brought
+them to London was ended. There was no further reason for their being
+together. If they were to prolong their companionship, a new excuse must
+be invented. He saw by the tentative manner in which she waited, that
+she also had realized that. He became perturbed lest she might dismiss
+him. Speaking hurriedly to forestall her, he said, "I suppose we had
+better make sure of Terry by hunting her up at Mulberry Tree Court."</p>
+
+<p>She barely nodded. Perhaps she thought, now<!-- Page 359 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> that Braithwaite had been
+eliminated as a rival, that this making sure of Terry betokened a
+rekindling of the old infatuation. A constraint grew up between them. It
+was not until they were standing on the top of the hotel steps, waiting
+for her car, that he ventured to correct the wrong impression. "Funny
+about Terry! If it hadn't been for her, we might never have been
+friends. The first day of my home-coming she drew my attention to you;
+it was too late&mdash;you had passed. You were driving with the Queen in the
+Park. I remember what Terry said. She called you Di and spoke of you as
+the most beautiful woman in England."</p>
+
+<p>She gave no sign that she had heard. As though she were unescorted, she
+passed before him down the steps. But the moment they were seated in the
+car, she turned to him. She looked her full age. Her face was pale with
+more than weariness. He noticed the threads of gray in her hair. Ever
+since he had seen Ann in her flushed shy exaltation, he had felt more
+keenly the pathos of Lady Dawn. It was a pathos that found an echo in
+his heart&mdash;the pathos of approaching separation. What purpose did it
+serve her to be beautiful, if she had no man of her own to admire her?</p>
+
+<p>"You were on the verge of telling me something, when the waiter
+interrupted," she prompted. "It began like a confession. You'd been
+speaking about living for other people and your need of rest. Then, you
+said you'd been thinking&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It was about how one could make a man's job out of living," he answered
+quickly. "It's all wrong<!-- Page 360 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> that one should feel decent only when he's
+attempting to get slaughtered. It takes neither brains nor perseverance
+to be dead. Any one can&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But it was about finding rest that you were speaking."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I've burdened you with too many of my troubles." He hesitated,
+wondering whether he dare tell her what had happened to his heart. "I've
+done nothing for you. I've only borrowed from your strength. You're the
+most restful woman, the most calm&mdash;&mdash;" Then he dodged. "But since you
+ask me of what I was thinking, it was of how I might escape to the old
+hardships. I thought I'd call at the Passport Office and get in touch
+with the Royal Geographical Society, and commence arrangements to
+explore&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I sha'n't be seeing you again?" She asked it in a tone of
+dreariness, bordering on terror. Her hands trembled in her lap. She
+stared straight before her.</p>
+
+<p>"But you will." He forced a cheerfulness into his voice which he was far
+from feeling. "These things take time. It may be weeks&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll go away. I know it."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I shall. Sooner or later I shall return. In the meanwhile we
+can write."</p>
+
+<p>She paid no attention to his consolation. Her face was gray as granite.
+Her hands kept folding and unfolding. There was something symbolic in
+their emptiness. "You won't come back. It's the end. You weren't sent,
+after all."</p>
+
+<p>How or why he said it, he never could tell. The<!-- Page 361 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> words were utterly
+unpremeditated. He spoke them, ordinarily and unemotionally, as though
+throwing out a casual suggestion. "We could get married, if that would
+make you happier."</p>
+
+<p>"It's what I'd like."</p>
+
+<p>His heart missed a beat. He dared not credit his senses. He glanced down
+at her, prepared to find that she was mocking. The most beautiful woman
+in England! There was no mistake; she had actually asked him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's what I should like, too." He spoke conventionally. Nothing in his
+tone betrayed his emotion. "It's what I've been dreaming from the moment
+that we met&mdash;&mdash; When would be convenient?"</p>
+
+<p>"As soon as possible."</p>
+
+<p>"Would a week from to-day suit?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, "Or sooner."</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the robe his hand sought hers. He did not trust himself to look
+at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The
+secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still
+doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and
+disembodied&mdash;an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's
+end&mdash;this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything he had
+imagined!</p>
+
+<p>They entered Mulberry Tree Court and drew up before the house with the
+marigold-tinted curtains. It was while they were waiting for the door to
+be opened that he broke the silence. Smiling down at her with a guilty,
+glad expression he asked, "We're engaged now, I suppose?"<!-- Page 362 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She returned his smile less certainly. "I'm ashamed. But you won't
+go&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed at the folly of her question. "Go, when I've got you, the
+woman whom I wanted!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then you won't go exploring? You won't exchange me for hardships?"</p>
+
+<p>"Di, dearest, I've done with searching."</p>
+
+<p>The door was opening. She pulled herself together. Porter stood before
+them, neatly laundered, with the old suspicious meekness in her glance.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, Porter. We've come to see Miss Beddow. We've been told
+that she's staying with my sister."</p>
+
+<p>"She is, your Ladyship. But none of them are down. She arrived so late
+and unexpected."</p>
+
+<p>They followed her across the hall into the sun-filled drawing-room, with
+its fragrant flowers, tall windows, rockery-garden and little oval pond,
+with the toy boat floating on its surface. The moment the door had
+closed, he had her in his arms. Now that he was sure of her possession,
+he held her desperately as if he feared that he were going to lose her.
+"Closer," she whispered. "Closer." It flashed through his memory that
+the last time he was in that room, he had been the spectator of just
+such a union and had fled from it because he was excluded.</p>
+
+<p>She stirred against him, lifting up her face.</p>
+
+<p>"This time you're really crying," he whispered. Stooping he pressed her
+lips. "They always told me you never&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Freeing her arms, she clasped him tightly about the neck. He could feel
+the weight of her body,<!-- Page 363 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> dragging his face lower. She kissed him
+passionately, stopping his breath, as though she would breathe into him
+her very soul. "Oh, my dearest&mdash;my very dear! How cruel you were! You
+made me ask you. I thought I'd never get you."</p>
+
+<p>The door was opening. Terry was watching them. The first they knew of
+her presence was when she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"You came to see me."</p>
+
+<p>They broke apart like shameful children and stood regarding her, their
+hands just touching. She seemed their elder.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you have the right to jeer at me," she continued slowly. "I'm
+left out. I was too cold. I'm too late. I didn't want what was offered
+at the time it was offered. What I didn't want once, I can't have now.
+And, perhaps, I still don't want it. Tabs used to speak of kingdoms. I
+never knew what he meant. You've all found yours&mdash;Maisie, Braithwaite,
+both of you and even Ann. Everybody, except me." She laughed to prevent
+her tears from falling. "I suppose Tabs would tell me that mine's still
+round the corner. You would, wouldn't you, Tabs?"</p>
+
+<p>Her need, which had been theirs, penetrated their happiness. They felt
+again the old wild pang of neglected loneliness. Sargent's painting
+above the mantelpiece, looking down on them, reminded Lady Dawn of her
+own forgotten tragedy. It was unendurable that their gladness should
+bring sorrow to Terry. With a common instinct they went towards<!-- Page 364 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> her.
+Lady Dawn placed her arms about her. It was Tabs who spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Little Terry, you're not left out. You're ours more than ever. We've
+not robbed you. We couldn't. Of you alone it's true that everything lies
+before you. All the time you've had your kingdom, though you didn't know
+it. You still have it&mdash;the Kingdom of Youth, for which we older people
+were all searching."</p>
+
+<p>In the silence that followed there stole to them through the summer
+sunshine, above the mutter of London, the music of a distant
+barrel-organ. In the mind of Tabs a picture formed; it was of children
+dancing along a golden pavement on that first spring morning of his
+disillusion. The tune which the barrel-organ played was the same. His
+brain sang words to the music:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;">
+"Apr&egrave;s la guerre<br />
+There'll be a good time everywhere."
+</p>
+
+<p>And it was no longer an optimism&mdash;it was fulfilled promise.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, beyond the bounds of space, Lord Dawn also listened and was
+happy. For Tabs, as long as life lasted, it would be the marching-song
+of the kingdom round the corner.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Kingdom Round the Corner
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Coningsby Dawson
+
+Release Date: June 5, 2008 [EBook #25702]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KINGDOM ROUND THE CORNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tamise Totterdell, Joe Free, Graeme Mackreth
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Kingdom Round the Corner--_A Novel_
+
+BOOKS BY MR. DAWSON
+
+_NOVELS_
+
+THE KINGDOM ROUND THE CORNER
+
+THE GARDEN WITHOUT WALLS
+
+SLAVES OF FREEDOM
+
+THE RAFT
+
+LAST CHANCE RIVER
+
+THE ROAD TO AVALON
+
+
+_SHORTER STORIES_
+
+THE LITTLE HOUSE--_Illustrations by Stella Langdale_
+
+THE SEVENTH CHRISTMAS--_Illustrations by Edmund Dulac_
+
+THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY--_Illustrations by W.C. Rice_
+
+
+_WAR BOOKS_
+
+CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WAR-TIME
+
+THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
+
+OUT TO WIN: THE STORY OF AMERICA IN FRANCE
+
+LIVING BAYONETS: A RECORD OF THE LAST PUSH
+
+THE TEST OF SCARLET: A ROMANCE OF REALITY
+
+
+_POEMS_
+
+FLORENCE ON A CERTAIN NIGHT
+
+THE WORKER AND OTHER POEMS
+
+[Illustration:]"_I'm sorry," Tabs apologized. "I didn't mean anything
+unkind._"
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Kingdom Round the Corner--_A Novel_
+
+_By_ CONINGSBY DAWSON
+
+_Illustrated by W.D. Stevens_
+
+   "_To every man the woman whom he loves is as Mother Earth was to her
+   legendary son: he has but to kneel and kiss her breast to know that
+   he is strong again._"--Michelet
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+Cosmopolitan Book Corporation
+
+_M C M X X I_
+
+_Copyright, 1921, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York.--All
+rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages,
+including that of the Scandinavian_
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I
+                                                            PAGE
+AN ALTERED WORLD                                              7
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+RETRIEVERS OF YOUTH                                          54
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ALL SORTS OF KINGDOMS                                        94
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE                                 134
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE AIR OF CONQUEST                                         172
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TRAMPLED ROSES                                              217
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SOME PEOPLE FIND THEIR KINGDOMS                             262
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ROUND THE CORNER                                            311
+
+
+The Illustrations by
+
+W.D. Stevens
+
+"I'M SORRY," TABS APOLOGIZED. "I DIDN'T MEAN ANYTHING
+UNKIND." (Page 33)                                 _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                     FACING PAGE
+
+TABS EXTENDED HIS HAND. BRAITHWAITE MADE NO MOTION
+TO TAKE IT.                                                 130
+
+"MRS. LOCKWOOD, WHY CAN'T YOU LET ADAIR ALONE?"             172
+
+"I WAS AFRAID YOU HAD LEFT"                                 324
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Kingdom Round the Corner
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+AN ALTERED WORLD
+
+
+I
+
+It was on a blustering March morning in 1919 that Tabs regained his
+freedom. His last five months had been spent among doctors, having
+sundry bullets extracted from his legs. He walked with a limp which was
+not too perceptible unless he grew tired. His emotions were similar to
+those of a man newly released from gaol: he felt dazed, vaguely happy
+and a little lost. He felt dazed because he hadn't remembered that the
+world was so wide and so complicated. He felt lost because he was
+discovering that this wasn't the same old world that he had left in
+1914. It hadn't paid him the compliment of marking time during his
+absence; it had marched impolitely forward. He would have to hurry to
+overtake it. What made him feel most lost at the moment was the fact
+that he had only just realized how his bravest years had been escaping.
+The reason for this realization was Terry. He had been accustomed to
+think of himself as in the first flush of manhood, with all life's
+conquests still lying ahead; it was therefore a little disconcerting to
+be told, as a matter of course, that he had only four more years to go
+till he was forty. "I'll be there at the station to meet you," Terry had
+written him. And then, she had added laughingly, "Father orders me to
+say that he only gives his permission because you're such an old friend
+and nearly middle-aged."
+
+Middle-aged! He, Tabs, middle-aged! The thought was appalling. It was a
+slander so almost true as to be incapable of disproving. He had to-day,
+to-morrow, and the next day; after that people would have the right to
+say of him that he was middle-aged. That was the real sacrifice that he
+had made in the war--he had given to it the last of his youth. And he
+had not been aware of this until he had received that letter.
+
+Now that he was aware of it, he rebelled against the sacrifice. He
+refused to be robbed. He would not allow himself to become middle-aged.
+Why, he hadn't begun to live yet. He'd only been experimenting up to the
+point when the war had started. He'd been thirty-one then, a man full of
+promise, and now he was dubbed middle-aged. He remembered with
+indignation the theory that men of forty ought to be chloroformed to
+make room for the younger generation. "But, hang it, one's years have
+nothing to do with it," he protested; "in my spirit I belong to the
+younger generation." So, to the rumbling accompaniment of the train, he
+argued his claims passionately. Had he formed them into a petition he
+would have prayed, "God, make me young again." It would have been
+because of Terry that he would have prayed.
+
+And yet he was happy--vaguely happy, as any man must be to whom the
+right to live has been restored. For the past half decade his horizon,
+and that of all the men with whom he had intimately associated, had been
+dwarfed by the thought of dying. Throughout that period he had dared to
+hope for nothing personal; he had belonged body and soul to unseen
+forces which had hurried him without explanation from one hell to
+another. He had had to subdue his pride to their authority and to train
+his courage to contemplate the shock of annihilation. Now, at the end of
+almost five years, the will and the body which had been so ruthlessly
+snatched from him, had been as ruthlessly flung back into his own
+keeping. All of a sudden, after having been enslaved in every detail,
+his will and body were set free and no one cared what became of them.
+They could be his playthings; he was allowed to do with them what he
+liked. But what did he like? It was a problem. He could so easily spoil
+them. When he reminded himself of how easily he could spoil them the
+fear of death, which would never again trouble him, was replaced by the
+fear of failure. He was furious to find that he was still capable of
+fearing. He had so confidently believed that, whatever the past five
+years had stolen from him, they had at least brought him the reward of
+never again knowing fear of any sort.
+
+That morning by the earliest train he had shaken off the dust of camps
+and started in civilian dress as his own master on the new journey. It
+was characteristic of him to start early and to slip out of his latest
+phase with so little fuss. For the first two years of his service, while
+men of his class were gaining high promotions, he had served in the
+ranks. He had done it as a uselessly proud protest. In the ranks one did
+the real work, faced most of the danger and won the fewest decorations.
+He had loved the ranks for their quiet self-effacement and had preferred
+to be reckoned in their number.
+
+It had been dawn when he had started. From the top of the hill above the
+camp he had gazed back at the huddled, sleeping rows of hutments. How
+lacking in individuality they were! How wilfully ugly! You could see
+their like in the rear of all armies. The military mind seemed incapable
+of appreciating differences and beauty. How stereotyped the past five
+years had been; yes, and, while the danger had threatened, how ennobled
+with duty! So ennobled that there had been times when it had almost
+seemed that he was on the point of finding his kingdom.
+
+What he hadn't expected was that he would be alive to-day. With that
+thought gratitude had bubbled up and he had limped away, whistling,
+through dim lanes and budding hedgerows to the little wayside country
+station.
+
+But once on board the train to London, he began to feel more like a
+fugitive escaping than a hero returning. This wasn't the end of
+soldiering that imagination had painted. There had been strident bands
+and hysteric shouting to start him on his way to the conflict. There
+had been pictorial challenges to his courage pasted on every hoarding.
+There had been extravagant promises of the welcome which would await him
+if he survived. Who remembered them to-day? He hummed over the words of
+the latest promise, "If you come back, and you will come back, the whole
+world's waiting for you." Was it? He doubted. There was something
+unpleasantly furtive about the way in which men were being stripped of
+their outward signs of valor and dribbled back into civilian life. It
+almost seemed that statesmen had discovered something to be ashamed of
+in the unforeseen heroism by which the world had been rescued.
+
+What did it matter? The world had been saved, and he had helped to save
+it. No one could deprive him of that knowledge. His joy leapt up. What
+did it matter if other people considered him nearly middle-aged? He and
+Terry must prove to them the contrary. He was free; that was what
+counted. Free to reckon his life by more than stretches of twenty-four
+hours. Free to rise or go to bed when he liked. Free to travel to the
+ends of the earth. Free to speak his mind without the dread of a
+court-martial. Never again would he be compelled to issue orders which
+he knew to be unwise; never again would he be compelled to obey them. He
+was free. And there was Terry----
+
+
+II
+
+Across the carriage-windows landscapes went leaping: the bleak clearness
+of brisk March skies; the shining grayness of meadows from which mists
+were slowly rising; the faint flush of greenness which was gathering in
+hedges; the shy pageant of spring unfolding, with the promised certainty
+of new summers which are never ending. The world looked young. As the
+train dashed by, new-born lambs, unused to such disturbances, tottered,
+bleating, after their mothers. Buds were bursting. Sap was rising. The
+chapped scars of winter were vanishing. Things which had seemed dead
+were being convulsed with life. He watched it all gladly and yet
+impatiently; it was for the end of the journey that he was waiting.
+
+On nearing London the train slowed down as though reluctant to leave the
+country. Twice it halted and he consulted his wrist-watch with a frown.
+Then it crept through Battersea, wound snake-like across the gleaming
+Thames, and came to rest in Victoria Station. Despite his lameness, he
+was the first passenger to alight. He had no luggage to attend to, save
+the newly-purchased bag which he carried. He lost no time in hurrying
+down the platform; when he hurried his limp became more pronounced. As
+he passed through the barrier he slackened his pace. By reason of his
+greater height he could glance above the heads of the crowd; his eyes
+went questing in all directions. They failed to find what they sought.
+He delayed until nearly all the people from the incoming trains had
+scuttled into the holes of the Underground; then, masking his
+disappointment, he wandered out into the station-yard to hail a taxi. An
+Army Staff car was drawn up against the curb. A thrill of hostility
+shot through him. How often, in the old days, when marching up to an
+attack, had he and his comrades huddled to the side of the road like
+sheep that these khaki-colored collies of the shepherds, who had driven
+them up to die, might splash arrogantly past them! He eyed it casually
+and was passing on, when a girl in the back seat stood up frantically
+waving. She was dressed in the latest whim of fashion; but it was her
+that he saw rather than her appointments. Her gold bobbed hair was like
+a Botticelli angel's. Her eyes were clear and deep as violets. She was
+exquisitely vibrant and alive--scarcely beautiful; her nose turned up
+and was too short for that. One sought for the right words to express
+her attraction. Perhaps it was due to her light-hearted health and
+girlish freshness.
+
+As he came up eagerly, limping with the effort, she reached out her
+hand. "Tabs, fancy you not knowing me! I don't need to call you Lord
+Taborley, do I? Between us it's still Tabs."
+
+"Terry dear! My dear Terry, at last!" He spoke queerly as though he had
+been running. Then, seeing how his intensity startled her, he let go her
+hand and laughed. "You can't blame me for not having spotted you.
+Where's all your beautiful hair that was so blowy?"
+
+She glanced up through her lashes at the tall man. "'I'm growing such a
+big girl now'--you remember the refrain from the song at the Gaiety?
+That's why. When you were a young man, girls put their hair up to show
+they were of age; nowadays they bob it."
+
+"So that's the explanation!" He climbed in and took his seat beside her.
+"That's another thing that disguised you. How was I to guess that you'd
+wangle a Staff car to meet an ex-lieutenant?"
+
+"It belongs to a friend at the War Office." She nodded her permission to
+the trim girl-soldier at the wheel to start. "He lent it to me when he
+heard that I was to meet you this morning. Taxis are so scarce, and I
+didn't know how well you could walk, so----" She turned from the subject
+abruptly. "You're so changed. I scarcely recognized you at first. I was
+expecting that you'd still be in uniform."
+
+"I was demobbed yesterday. So you find me changed! For better or for
+worse? Confess, Terry."
+
+She was aware that beneath his assumption of gayety he was hiding
+something--something that pained. He had been hurt too much already.
+With impulsive sympathy she laid her hand on his arm. "It isn't a case
+of better or worse. Between people like ourselves appearances don't
+matter. I think to me you were handsomest of all as a Tommy. How proud I
+was of you, Tabs, when you first joined up! Do you remember how I used
+to strut along beside you---- And that last night, when you went for the
+first time to the Front?"
+
+He remembered, and waited with boyish expectancy. She had stopped
+suddenly and glanced away from him. For the second time his intensity
+had frightened her. He said nothing--did nothing to help her. She
+mustered her courage to turn back with a smile. "It's long ago, isn't
+it. Tabs? I've grown such a big girl now."
+
+He brushed aside her attempt to divert him. "But you find a difference
+in me?"
+
+"A difference! You mean the difference between a man in uniform and in
+mufti? Why, yes. A uniform made you look younger. It did that for most
+men."
+
+"But more for me than for most." He was pitiless towards himself now
+that he had forced her to answer. "I've aged more than the five years
+since you slipped your arm into mine as we marched through the darkness
+to the troop-train. You never shed a tear, Terry. You kept your promise.
+Often and often when I was afraid in the trenches I remembered you, a
+white and gold slip of a girl with dry eyes, waving and waving. And
+then, somehow, because you'd kept your promise not to cry----"
+
+"Don't," she whispered. "Please don't. It's all ended. Everything's new
+and beginning afresh."
+
+"Beginning with you," he questioned, "where it left off?"
+
+If she heard him, she ignored the interrogation in his voice.
+
+
+III
+
+The girl-soldier at the wheel relieved the situation. Since leaving the
+station she had been running slower and slower, glancing back across her
+shoulder and trying to catch their attention. Just short of the great
+cross-roads at Hyde Park Corner she brought the car to a halt.
+
+"What's the matter, Prentys?" Terry asked. "Anything wrong?"
+
+"Nothing's wrong, miss; but you've not told me where to go."
+
+The girl spoke so reproachfully that Terry laughed. "Awfully sorry,
+Prentys. It's Lord Taborley's fault. He didn't tell either of us. What
+are your plans, Tabs? Where do you want to go?"
+
+"To go?"
+
+He caught at her question and examined it. To go--where did he want to
+go? He had been so certain when he had boarded the train to London early
+that morning. Ever since he had said good-by to her, nearly five years
+ago, he had known quite definitely. Each time that he had had a glimpse
+of her on those brief leaves from the Front, he had been more and more
+sure of the desired direction. Her letters coming up to him under
+shell-fire had made him even more certain--those letters compassionate
+with unashamed sincerity, written with a girl's admiration for a man who
+was jeopardizing his all that she might live in safety.
+
+And now, when he was free at last to go where he chose and she herself
+asked him, he could find no answer to her question. Why couldn't he? He
+looked at her thoughtfully with the frown of his problem in his eyes.
+What change had come over her? Or was it he who was altered? She had
+seemed so absolutely his while the terror of battle had kept them apart.
+She had written and acted as though she was his right up to---- Yes,
+right up to the point when he had been in a position to claim her.
+
+Between him and Terry there had been no engagement--only a wealth of
+interchanged affection; interchanged for the most part on paper. Once
+and only once had marriage been mentioned--on the night that he had set
+out for the first time for the Front. "You won't ask me, Tabs; I know
+that. You're too honorable. So I've got to say it. When you come back
+I'm going to marry you."
+
+"_If_ I come back, little Terry," he had corrected.
+
+"But you will--you must," she had pleaded, "for my sake."
+
+"I'll try. I'll try so hard," he had promised. "But I won't marry you
+till I'm out of khaki or the war is ended."
+
+"And I'll meet you at the train the moment you're free and we'll be
+married that very day."
+
+All this five years ago on a murky station in the tragedy of parting,
+while Belgium was being trampled and the troop-train waited. She had
+eluded the vigilance of her parents and had met him outside the
+barracks, without forewarning. Through the gloom of streets and the blur
+of the accompanying crowd, he had seen her face loom up. Her arm had
+slipped through his; she had marched beside him like any Tommy's
+sweetheart. She had been seventeen at the time; to-day she was
+two-and-twenty. In the years that had followed he had taken no step to
+make that girlish promise binding, yet increasingly its fulfillment had
+been the goal towards which he had struggled.
+
+After she had joined Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit and had gone to France he
+had missed her on his leaves; by some fatality they had been always
+missing. She had existed for him only in their correspondence and in his
+vivid imagination. And now, after so much hoping, she had become again a
+reality. He had been prepared for strangeness, but not for---- Was it
+her youth, which was to have flung wide all doors, that formed the
+barricade? Her youth which, if shared, would have put back the hands on
+the face of Time! Her relentless, flaunting youth! Youth which is
+forever hostile to age!
+
+Her growing and puzzled expression of impatience forced him to narrow
+his answer to the requirements of the moment. "What are my plans, you
+asked? I haven't any. I'm a man at a loose end and at a beginning--like
+all the world, as you yourself just stated."
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say--that every one has to live somewhere.
+I have a place all right--my old place."
+
+"Shall I tell Prentys to drive you there?"
+
+He shook his head and thrust out his long legs, throwing his weight more
+heavily against the cushions. "Not unless you didn't read my letter."
+
+Her habitual sunniness clouded. "Tabs, you're trying to be beastly. If I
+hadn't read it, I shouldn't have known to have met you, or when, or
+where."
+
+"Then you remember that it reminded you of----"
+
+She cut him short, glancing furtively at the girl at the wheel to see
+whether she had been listening. "I don't forget easily. Where do you
+want to go? Would a run into the country suit you?"
+
+"Excellently."
+
+"In what direction?"
+
+"Makes no difference."
+
+She whispered something to the girl; the car semi-circled and gathered
+speed, shooting through the traffic which was lumbering towards the
+Fulham Road and Surrey.
+
+Now that he had gained his point, he didn't seem inclined for
+conversation. He lolled back with his eyes half-shut; she sat bolt
+upright, ignoring his presence.
+
+He recalled to-day as he had pictured it. Terry was to have been still
+the girl-woman who had wanted him so badly that she had been brave
+enough to ask for him. She was to have been precisely and in every
+detail the girl from whom he had parted. She was to have been on the
+platform waiting for him, and he....
+
+Pshaw! What a sentimentalist and how easily disappointed! The old fight
+was still on in another form. It was never ended. Life was a fight from
+start to finish, calling for new and yet newer courage. He refused to be
+defeated. He would not be embittered. He would win his kingdom round the
+corner, even though it proved to be a different kingdom from the one he
+had expected. Terry couldn't have stayed seventeen always, which was the
+miracle he had demanded. She was a woman. He would have to teach her to
+love him afresh. There was no time to be lost. For all he knew there
+might be a rival--perhaps the mysterious some one at the War Office who
+had lent her this car. He leant forward good-humoredly, touching her
+hand to attract her attention, "Terry."
+
+
+IV
+
+She turned slowly, almost reluctantly. What new and disturbing question
+was he going to ask? She hadn't been prepared for this altered man with
+his limp and his gauntness and his strained intensity. She couldn't
+bring herself to believe that this grave, spent, unlaughing person at
+her side was Tabs, the gallant, care-free comrade she had asked to marry
+her. She was shocked both at him and at herself. And she had wanted to
+be so glad--to make him feel that every one was so happy at having him
+back----
+
+"Terry."
+
+At the sound of her name, spoken like that, a little thrill of his
+old-time power stirred her; it traveled up to her eyes, so that she had
+to press back the tears before she turned.
+
+"Terry, it was sentimental blackmail. I'm sorry."
+
+"What was? I don't understand."
+
+"That last letter. I oughtn't to have reminded you. What one promises at
+seventeen doesn't hold good. It was sporting of you to keep the promise
+by meeting me this morning, but---- What I'm trying to say is this; I'm
+forgetting everything that you would like me to forget."
+
+"But I'm not sure that I want you to forget anything." She widened her
+lips into a smile from which the trouble was only half dispelled. "It
+sounds horrid and unfriendly, this talk of forgetting, as though---- It
+sounds so much worse when it's put into words, as though we had
+something of which to be ashamed."
+
+"No, it's not like that. May I be terrifically honest--just as we used?"
+
+She eyed him doubtfully. It was evident that she was still timid of the
+truth. Then she nodded.
+
+"Well, you know how it was between us before I went away. You were of an
+age when most people still thought of you as a child. You _were_
+outwardly, but inside you were almost a woman. The little girl did
+things and promised things that the woman wouldn't approve to-day. And
+then take my side of it. I went out to a place where life seemed at an
+end and where, because of that, one became selfish in the demands he
+made on the people whom he had left behind--especially on the women. It
+was impossible to be normal; probably I'm not quite normal now. But the
+point is this: every man in khaki thought intensely of some one girl. It
+didn't matter whether he had the right to think of her; he just thought
+of her, and wrote to her, and carried her photo with him up to an
+attack, as if he had the right. He wasn't even much disturbed as to
+whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was
+merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a
+test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You
+understand, she was very often only a makeshift--a symbol for the woman
+he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for
+some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back--come back
+starved, emotional, tyrannic--passionate to possess all the things for
+which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so
+long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we
+were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're
+tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be
+patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take
+offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into
+meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that
+child's promise as binding."
+
+"But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you--I did
+truly."
+
+"Letting me down lightly?" he smiled.
+
+"No, an honest fact."
+
+When he gazed at her with kindly incredulity, she edged herself closer
+and bent forward in a generous effort to persuade him.
+
+"Don't you see that what you've said of yourself was true of me as
+well?"
+
+"I wasn't talking in particular of myself," he parried; "I was including
+all the other men."
+
+"Yes, but especially of yourself. It was of yourself that you were
+talking. What you've said of yourself is true of me and--oh, of almost
+all women. We saw you men march away; you seemed lost to us forever.
+Everything seemed at an end. So we did what you did--chose one man who
+would embody all our dreams and become especially ours. We wrote to
+him, shopped for him, placed his portrait on our dressing-tables, were
+anxious for him and, oh, so proud of him. We didn't stop to ask whether
+he was the man with whom we could live for always. There wasn't any
+_always_. It didn't look as though there was ever again going to be any
+_always_. And then the horror stopped and we found ourselves with a man
+on our hands--a man who, though we had known him so well, would come
+back to us different. We hadn't meant to cheat him when we made all
+those promises; but now that he's really ours, we're not sure that
+we---- All the ecstasies and tears that we wrote to him on paper----"
+She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "They don't seem real. It's
+not our fault. They belonged to the part of nurses and soldiers that we
+were acting. And now we've slipped out by the stage-door and we've
+become ourselves. Don't you see, Tabs, we men and girls have got to find
+out afresh who we are? We've almost forgotten."
+
+She seemed to have made an end, when something else occurred to her. She
+recommenced hurriedly, "We women have been spendthrifts, too; we've
+given away more than was wise--little bits of ourselves, not always to
+the one man--sometimes in the wrong directions. But which is the right
+direction? When people who were risking so much for us begged for a
+little of our affection, we never thought of that. We simply gave
+recklessly--little bits of ourselves. Now that we've regained a future,
+with room for remorse and things like that, we've become suddenly
+cautious. The swing of the pendulum----" She turned to him, as though
+proffering a smile for his forgiveness, "It's our sudden caution that
+makes us seem mean and ungracious. But I _was_ tremendously interested
+about meeting you."
+
+"Interested! Not glad or ecstatic. It's a long road from dreams to
+facts."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She said it humbly. He tried to catch the expression in her eyes, but
+all he saw was the flickering gold of her hair as the wind tossed it
+against the rounded whiteness of her neck. His brain kept muttering,
+"Little bits of herself! What did she mean by that?"
+
+A barrel-organ was grinding out a tune; children danced in the sunshine
+on the pavement. As they flashed down the street the music followed
+them. She twisted to look back and he caught her eyes. "Tabs, do you
+know what it's playing?"
+
+"Can't say I do."
+
+"It's out of the Elsie Janis revue at The Palace. I think it was written
+especially for this moment." She listened till the air reached the
+refrain and then sang the words, "_Apres la guerre, there'll be a good
+time everywhere_."
+
+His stern face relaxed at her childishness. "Will there, Terry? I hope
+so. Musical chaps aren't reliable authorities. They're----"
+
+"You must _know_ so," she interrupted valiantly. Then, forgetting her
+caution, she slipped her small gloved fingers into the palm of his big
+brown hand. "You _must_. Even though I disappoint you ever so badly,
+you must know so, dear Tabs. You must seize your own good time at
+whatever cost. One girl isn't all the world."
+
+
+V
+
+"I wonder whether what we've been saying explains Adair."
+
+They were crossing one of the bridges over the Thames. He wasn't sure
+which one. Moreover, he didn't care; it was enough for him that,
+wherever they were going, they were going together--racing into a
+sun-crazed world where spring romped and shouted like a hoyden. Above
+lazy chimney-pots trees patched the sky-line with sudden greenness. At a
+greater distance soft contours of hills lay shadowed beneath stampeding
+clouds. Coldly silver beneath the bridge the river flashed, dimpled here
+and there by rapid feet where breezes, like adventurous children, rushed
+across it. He noted the bowed windows of little houses along the banks,
+their whitened steps and shining brasses. He caught the far-blown
+fragrance of hyacinths; it set him dreaming of drifting bloom and
+flower-strewn ways of woodlands. A happy world, whatever the mental
+state of its inhabitants! A world which was doing its bravest best to
+play the game by mankind! A world which was whispering at every portal
+of the senses that the business of living was immensely worth while! A
+world which----! He had reached this point, when the mention of Adair
+brought him back to the cause of his philosophizing--the inscrutable
+tenderness of the girl, half sorceress, half penitent, seated at his
+side. She had recovered her calmness by withdrawing her thin fingers
+from his enclosing hand.
+
+Adair Easterday! He didn't want to discuss him; he had more important
+things to talk about. Speaking absent-mindedly, "Adair doesn't need any
+explaining," he said.
+
+"Oh, doesn't he?" she laughed softly and looked away, creating the
+impression that she was leaving volumes unexpressed.
+
+Her air of wisdom provoked him. "Well, I've known him since we were boys
+at school together and I've never found him much of a conundrum. He's
+brilliant, and lazy, and kind. I think of all the men I've known he's
+the one who's most truly a gentleman; he's the one who has given most
+promise and who has fewest accomplishments to his credit. He may have
+puzzled you as his sister-in-law; but to me, a man of his own age, he
+presents no mystery. If anything he's too obvious; that and the fact
+that he allows himself to be too much absorbed by his wife are two of
+the reasons for his lack of success."
+
+"He doesn't allow himself to be too much absorbed by his wife now." She
+had turned deliberately that she might watch the effect of her words.
+"He doesn't even pretend to care for Phyllis any longer."
+
+"Not care for her--his own wife! Nonsense! You can't make me believe
+that." Then he reined himself in, for he suddenly realized that he was
+unconsciously adopting the tones of an elder. "That was a terribly
+modern accusation for you to make, Terry, just as if loyalties and
+affections were ostrich-plumes and ermine to be worn or discarded with
+the fashion."
+
+"That's just what they do seem to have become since we've all stopped
+fighting," she persisted. "And please don't look at me like that, Tabs,
+as though you were my commanding-officer. I'm not trying to be a cynical
+young person; I'm simply stating facts. Look at all the men for whom the
+war was a social leg-up. They were plumbers and bank-clerks and dentists
+in 1914; by the end of 1918 they were Majors and Colonels and
+Brigadiers. They didn't know where the West End was till they got into
+uniforms. Since then they've learnt the way into all the clubs and
+fashionable hotels; they've spent money like water; they've been the
+companions of men and women whom they couldn't have hoped to have met
+unless the war had shaken us all out of our class-snobbishness. But now
+that the war's ended, these men whom every one flattered for their
+bravery and whose social failings they excused while there was fighting
+to be done, have become worse snobs than ourselves. They've been
+educated out of the class for which they were fitted. War was their
+chance; it's ended, and now they have to go back to their humble jobs,
+which are the only ones by which they can gain a livelihood. Worse
+still, they've got to go back to their wives, who haven't shared their
+grandeurs, but who've played the game by them, taking care of their
+children and standing by the wash-tub. Some of them can't face up to the
+change. Peace has turned the world up-side-down. We're walking on our
+heads. You're just out of hospital, but you'll know what I mean when
+you've been a week in London."
+
+"But nothing of what you've been saying applies to Adair Easterday," he
+objected. "He wasn't a profiteer in khaki; he wasn't even in khaki. He
+made nothing; he lost nearly everything he had. Moreover, whatever
+faults he may have, he's always been a thorough-bred--a stickler for
+honor; the kind of chap who, if he had to sink, would go down with all
+his colors flying. Where his wife is concerned, he's a lover-for-all-time
+kind of fellow."
+
+She shook her head obstinately. "He isn't now. He's standing on his head
+like the rest of us."
+
+"I'm certain you're mistaken." He paused, half-minded to let the matter
+rest. He hated this contending. In the old days he and Terry had never
+argued. He glanced at her; she was smiling in a sorry, amused fashion.
+It made him feel that in accusing Adair she had cast suspicion on every
+man's constancy--his own included. Reluctantly he set himself to prove
+to her that she was incorrect.
+
+"When you were in France with Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit, I spent most of
+my leaves with Phyllis and Adair. We went about together. I lived in
+their house, got to love their kiddies, knew all that went on there. I
+think a part of my motive was that being with your sister seemed to
+bring you nearer. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't notice
+frictions and irritations. Adair was humiliated at being rejected by the
+Army because he wasn't up to physical standards. He tried every trick,
+but was always turned down. He didn't like to be seen about town; he
+felt that people were accusing him of being a slacker. He looked so well
+that he had always to be explaining why he wasn't in the trenches. It
+tried his temper. Wherever he went soldiers were being treated as
+heroes. Women were pleased to be seen escorted by a uniform--his own
+wife as well. And I'm bound to say Phyllis didn't help him. She prided
+herself on having held on to her man as though it were something that
+she'd done herself. Adair used to flare up in a passion and tell her not
+to be a fool; then, because her foolishness was all because she loved
+him, her feelings were hurt. But to say that he doesn't love her is an
+exaggeration. If there's anything the matter, the trouble is not with
+his heart but with his nerves."
+
+"Then you really haven't heard? I thought everybody----" She stifled a
+yawn. "It's the wind against my face. It always makes me sleepy," she
+apologized. "Since you haven't heard, I suppose I oughtn't to tell you.
+He's become the sort of skeleton in our family cupboard---- You're still
+incredulous! That will please mother. She'll be almost happy when she
+learns that there's at least one person who hasn't been told about it.
+She thinks that all the world talks of nothing else. As for Daddy,
+Phyllis was always his favorite and he adores her children. He goes
+about trying to find some one who'll volunteer to horsewhip Adair. I
+can't say that I feel that way myself." Her hand stole out and touched
+his arm caressingly; it seemed as though she were appealing for herself.
+"We've all either done or are on the verge of doing something foolish
+that we're sure to regret. It's not a time to be hard on anybody.
+To-morrow we may stand in need of sympathy ourselves. Horror has
+shell-shocked every one, civilians as well as fighting-men. The
+blackness of insecurity----! We're all convalescing." She halted
+abruptly, biting her lip and peering at him, suddenly aware that she had
+been confessing herself. When he only looked puzzled, she finished
+lightly, "So, you see, Tabs, though you'll think me terribly immoral, I
+keep a soft place in my heart for our skeleton."
+
+"But you don't tell me anything positive," he complained. "What has
+Adair done?"
+
+"Done!" She stared at him. "That's what I have been telling you. He's
+fallen in love with some one else."
+
+He was unwilling to believe what he had heard.
+
+"Some one else! Impossible!---- I'm sorry, Terry; I didn't mean that I
+doubted your word. You mustn't be offended, but---- I'm picturing
+Phyllis. At her best she was good and sweet and pretty enough to hold
+any man. She was such a loyal little pal--only second best to you,
+Terry. And Adair--he was such a white man, so patient with her and so
+devoted to the kiddies. I can't see him in the role of a runaway. And
+what on earth would he gain by it that he hasn't got already? I don't
+want to think that what you've told me---- It makes all fidelity seem so
+contemptibly temporary."
+
+Terry spoke gently. "Not that. It's infidelity that is temporary. A lot
+of us are unfaithful for the moment--it's a symptom of our illness. You
+said something a little while ago about trying to regain one's lost
+years by violence--that's what he's doing. He's mislaid the knack of
+happiness with Phyllis; he's trying to recover it with some one else."
+
+Tabs was still rebelling against the facts. "But he was such a staid old
+fellow."
+
+Terry ignored his discursiveness. "I don't think I've done wrong in
+letting you into our family secrets. You'll be made a part of them as
+soon as you meet Daddy. When he heard that you were coming to town and
+that I was going to see you, he said, 'Thank God for that. Taborley will
+be able to do something.' He has a pathetic belief in you, Tabs. One of
+the reasons why I was at the station this morning was that I might have
+the chance to tell you first, before any one else had prejudiced you
+with bitterness. Daddy wants you to dine with him to-night. He expects
+you to be the kind of moral policeman who makes the arrest. But it can't
+be done with morality. I don't think even you could manage to persuade
+Adair at the present--not with moral arguments, anyhow."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I've seen _her_."
+
+
+VI
+
+It was at this moment that a sound like a pistol-shot occurred. The car
+commenced to bump. The girl-driver applied the brakes, guided the car
+to the side of the road and jumped out.
+
+"Quite like the Front," Terry cried cheerfully; "I expect you feel at
+home when you hear a noise like that."
+
+Tabs looked round. He had been too busy talking to notice where they
+were. To the right, through wind-rumpled, tree-dotted meadows ran the
+Thames, still intensely silver in the sunshine, but somehow blither and
+more young than in London. Clouds flew high; everything was riotously
+spacious. Scattered through the vivid stretch of landscape ivy-covered
+houses stood squarely in their park-lands. Set down in the level
+distance, like children's toys, cattle browsed. The quiet greenness had
+become starred as far as eye could carry with a gentle rain of myriad
+tinted petals.
+
+"The car's got a sense of beauty," he laughed; "it chooses carefully
+when it wants to break down."
+
+"And it's all at the Government's expense," Terry smiled, glancing back
+at him across her shoulder as she scrambled out. "So it's a back tire.
+How long will it take to put right, Prentys?---- Then we may as well
+walk and let you overtake us. I don't think we're more than a mile from
+Old Windsor. We'll get something to eat at the little inn by the
+riverside. You remember the one I mean? We've been there several times
+when the General was with us."
+
+"What General is that?" Tabs asked as they trudged along between the
+hedges.
+
+"The General who lent me the car," she replied.
+
+"Oh, your friend at the War Office! I suppose he's one of the dug-outs
+who's been there all the time."
+
+"He isn't. He rose from the ranks. He's only been at a desk job since
+the Armistice." She spoke defensively, with a certain resentment. Tabs
+was quick to detect the sharpness in her voice. "I'm sorry," he
+apologized; "I didn't mean anything unkind."
+
+She halted with a sudden gesture of concern. "I _am_ inconsiderate. I
+never thought of it. Won't this walking wear you out?"
+
+"She's changing the subject," he told himself. "I wonder why?" Aloud he
+said, "Not a bit. But I can't stride along the way we used in the old
+days."
+
+Branching off to the right, they came down to a little inn by the
+water-side. It was shabby with the look of disrepair which all inns had
+at that time. Its paint was chapped and faded; its windows cracked and
+held together by pasted strips of paper. The putty had perished in
+places, so that some of the panes were on the point of falling out.
+Nevertheless, it had a brave look of carrying on triumphantly, for
+tulips and crocuses were springing neat as ever from the turf and it was
+over-hung by a green mist of trees just coming into leafage. They
+entered and took their seats at a table from which they could watch the
+pale flowing of the river through the spangled peace of the outside
+world.
+
+"It was lucky we broke down." Terry sat watching him with her square
+little face cushioned in her hands. "You see I'm training myself to
+believe," she explained, "that everything happens for the best."
+
+"A comforting philosophy for the lazy," he smiled. "It lets us all out
+of resisting temptation. Why resist anything, if everything happens for
+the best? If it were true, it would give us the license to be as flabby
+as we liked--which rather falls in line with what we were saying about
+Adair. But who is she--this woman? You say you've seen her."
+
+"You'll know soon enough for your peace of mind--probably you'll see her
+yourself before the day is out."
+
+"But can't you even tell me her name?"
+
+"Her name's Maisie Lockwood for the present."
+
+"For the present! Why for the present?"
+
+"Because one's never certain about Maisie. She was Maisie Gervis once
+and Maisie Pollock before that; there must have been a time when she was
+Maisie Something Else."
+
+Tabs couldn't quite make up his mind whether he ought to laugh or frown.
+The suspicion had crossed his mind that this composed imp of a girl, who
+could look so immensely the young lady when she liked, was playing a sly
+game with him. However he pretended to take her seriously. "In most
+social sets names are fairly permanent."
+
+Terry laughed outright and looked away from him, following the river
+with her eyes. "There's nothing permanent about Maisie. I think that's
+her attraction; that's what makes people forgive her everything. She
+starts each day afresh--it really is a new day for her, with no old
+hates or griefs or dreads to drag her down. She has no regrets because
+she remembers nothing. Whatever happened yesterday she puts out of mind;
+she forgets everything except her willingness to be friends."
+
+"Her names as well, according to your account."
+
+"Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen
+her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her.
+Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood;
+to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything--Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps."
+
+Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While
+he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that
+his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better
+and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order
+that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was
+the kinder world--a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death,
+met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they
+were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men
+like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by
+their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot
+her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!
+
+"Terry," he spoke with a show of patience, "do you think it's a matter
+about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's
+at stake. If I'm to be of any help----" He broke off, for a voice inside
+his brain had started talking, "You're old. That's exactly the way in
+which her father speaks to her." Was it her thoughts that he had heard?
+Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden
+head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.
+
+"So if I'm to help," he picked up his thread, "you mustn't mock. It
+isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts.
+How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself
+something different with each new dress?"
+
+Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. "No, with each new husband, but----"
+There came a break in her voice, "Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should
+be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met.
+We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And----"
+
+Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying.
+If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic
+debris of dishes---- As it was he leant across and assured her
+earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm---- Terry, how
+is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry;
+for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there."
+
+Drying her eyes, she nodded. "It hurts most frightfully. That's what I
+keep doing, barking my shins in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs.
+He's always going away from me----"
+
+"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently;
+"you've grown so stern."
+
+"I've seen stern things happen--a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered
+things that are so silencing."
+
+"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in
+France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't
+be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.
+It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like
+Maisie and myself."
+
+"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had
+intended.
+
+"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met
+her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."
+
+"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your class--a
+woman who has been divorced three times."
+
+"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on
+her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.
+
+"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and
+uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be
+averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured----"
+
+"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their
+country."
+
+"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could
+have elapsed between each re-marriage.
+
+"One at a time, of course," she added. "She was married to the first
+the first week of the war."
+
+"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in
+four years! She must be a very alluring person!"
+
+Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see
+you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart
+woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so
+full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less
+famous--the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll
+remember Pollock--Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our
+aces--the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed
+himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery
+about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."
+
+"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the
+illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed _A
+Conscientious War-Worker_ or something like that. And I don't forget the
+name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."
+
+"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it
+something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"
+
+"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet
+fierceness.
+
+"Oh, I don't know----" She broke off to ask the waitress whether the car
+had arrived and was answered in the affirmative. "I don't know about its
+being true. After all, she made three men happy before they went West.
+I don't see that she'd have been any more to be admired if she'd allowed
+the last two to go wretched."
+
+Tabs half-rose and then reseated himself. "An awful woman! Insatiable! A
+Lucrezia Borgia, without Lucrezia Borgia's excuse."
+
+"I knew you'd say that." Terry spoke hopelessly in a tone that dragged.
+"How do you or I know what excuses she had? How do we know why anybody
+does anything--what hidden reasons they have? And yet we're always so
+eager to condemn! I wanted to be the first to let you know about Adair
+because you always used to understand. You would have understood if
+you'd been the _you_ that you were. I thought that if I explained to you
+about Maisie---- But what's the use!"
+
+She rose from her chair and stood leaning against the table, looking
+wilted and pathetic. When she spoke again the heat had gone out of her
+words and was replaced by an appealing tenderness. "Don't you see what
+it is--why it is that I don't condemn? I'm so sorry for them--so sorry
+for you, for myself, for everybody. It hurts me here, Tabs." She laid
+her hand against her breast. "We all want what we've spent in the lost
+years. We want it so impatiently. We can't get it; but we want it at
+once--_now_. The things one wants are always in the past or the future,
+so one cheats to get them _now_."
+
+He hadn't the remotest idea what she was trying to tell him. She was
+stirred by some deep emotion--some overwhelming loneliness. For a moment
+it crossed his mind that she also was tempted--fascinated by some
+lurement of dishonor kindred to Adair's. He put the thought from him as
+preposterous and disloyal. Yet it recurred. Ever since they had met she
+had been talking curiously--talking about having given away bits of
+herself to people who were hungry, little bits of herself in wrong
+directions. She had coupled her own case with this unspeakable Maisie's.
+What was her problem?
+
+She stood there with her head bowed, like a child self-accused of
+wrong-doing, with all the flaunting joy of spring tapping against the
+window on which she had turned her back. Then it dawned on him why she
+was standing; he was between the door of escape and herself. He stepped
+aside. As she moved eagerly forward, he caught her by the points of her
+elbows and arrested her going. The wild violet eyes fluttered up to his
+fearfully and fell as he towered over her.
+
+"My very dearest!" He spoke gently in a voice from which all passion had
+been purged. "Don't blame me if I simply can't understand. Though I
+never become any more to you than I am now, I shall always be your
+comrade, believing in you and loving you. Remember that."
+
+When he released her she fled from him, leaving him alone in the shabby
+room.
+
+
+VII
+
+When he found her, she was talking to the girl-soldier in the yard of
+the inn. "But do you think that you can manage it, Prentys? It'll be
+all right in the open country, but I'm not sure that I want to risk it
+in the London traffic. We're merely joy-riding and, if anything happened
+to the car when you weren't on military duty----"
+
+"I don't see that we've got much choice, miss," the girl answered. "The
+General's orders to me were explicit, and you know what he is: obedience
+and no explanations. We've barely time to do it."
+
+Their backs were towards the inn. Tabs strolled up and made a pretense
+of inspecting the new tire.
+
+"Anything I can do?" he asked casually.
+
+It was Prentys who answered him. "I sprained my left wrist, sir, back
+there along the road." She held it out to him painfully as proof. It was
+all bound up and puffy. "It isn't very much use, sir; so I've only one
+hand and I don't know whether I'll be able----"
+
+Terry interrupted and took up the running. "I thought that the car was
+ours for the day. Prentys has just told me that General Braithwaite
+ordered her to pick him up at the War Office this afternoon at
+three-thirty. Now that she's sprained her wrist, she'll have to drive so
+carefully that there's scarcely time to do it."
+
+Tabs couldn't help smiling at the pompous importance of little people in
+this newly enfranchised world. It was only yesterday that for him also
+the foibles of Generals had been sacred. Generals had been gods whose
+tantrums and mental rheumatics had thrown whole armies into a fume and
+fret. For him that day was ended, but it still existed for this slim
+girl-soldier. He was sorry for her.
+
+"You needn't be upset," he said kindly. "I haven't renewed my license,
+but I can drive. No one's likely to interfere with me in an Army car.
+Jump in and I'll get you there with a quarter of an hour in hand."
+
+"But----"
+
+It was Terry who had spoken. Her brows puckered with thoughtfulness, she
+was gazing far away into the green distance. He waited for her to
+amplify her objection. When she maintained silence, he prompted her. "If
+it's me and my bag that's the trouble, you don't need to worry. After
+I've driven you both to the War Office, I can fudge round for a taxi.
+One can usually wangle one in the neighborhood of Whitehall."
+
+Before he had ended, he knew that his guess had missed fire. It wasn't
+his comfort that was disturbing her.
+
+"All right," she said reluctantly. "I suppose there's no other way. Get
+into the back, Prentys; I'll ride in front with Lord Taborley."
+
+He was glad to have something to occupy his attention--to be able to
+talk without the necessity of regarding her. They were both embarrassed
+by the memory of their recent tempest of emotion. "Braithwaite! So
+that's the name of the good fairy who gave us our day in the country. I
+don't remember him; but that's not remarkable. Generals at the Front
+were as common as policemen in London; you found one at every street
+corner. As for trenchdwellers like myself, we never came in touch with
+them except when we were in for a wigging. We came in touch with them
+all right then."
+
+She made no remark. He had the feeling that she was annoyed with herself
+for having let the General's name escape her. Up to that point she had
+referred to him anonymously as "a friend at the War Office." Tabs tried
+to switch to another subject without making the change offensively
+apparent. "Now that I'm a free man, I've got to reorganize a household."
+
+She kindled into interest, "Taborley House is still a hospital, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes, I handed it over to the Americans. I was glad to do that for my
+mother's sake. After all, I'm half American. At least a third of my
+boyhood was spent in the States. But they're sending most of their
+wounded home now, so I shall soon have it back on my hands. But that
+wasn't what I meant. It was too big for me; I never lived there."
+
+"Then what did you mean?"
+
+He realized that she was encouraging him to continue talking because the
+topic was safe--not because it held much attraction for her.
+
+"What I meant was that I'll have to try to collect up my old servants. I
+don't know where they all are, or who's alive and who's dead. There's
+one man I'm particularly anxious to discover."
+
+He slowed down, tooting his horn vigorously as they rounded an awkward
+corner. When they were again on the level she reminded him: "You were
+saying that you were anxious to discover----"
+
+"Oh, that man of mine! There isn't much to tell! He looked after me
+while I was up at the 'Varsity; when I left, I carried him off. I was
+always wandering, so I made him my body-servant. When we were leading
+civilized lives in cities he acted as my valet-butler-secretary. When we
+were adventuring in the remoter parts of the world, he was my
+companion-friend. I had a real affection for the chap; he was so
+genuinely distinguished and quick to learn. He'd have gone far if things
+had kept on. As it is, he's probably gone farther."
+
+"Gone farther?" She sounded half-asleep--politely lackadaisical.
+
+"Gone West," he explained shortly. "His letters became fewer. We joined
+up together in the ranks. You know all about my end of it. I suppose it
+was my mother's democratic Americanism that made me do that. We got
+drafted into different regiments. After the fighting had been going for
+a year, he stopped corresponding. The funny thing was that none of my
+letters to him was returned."
+
+She was so bored that she was scarcely listening. He cut the matter
+short by adding, "It was your mention of General Braithwaite that
+started me gossiping."
+
+She pulled herself together with a jerk and instantly became all
+attention. "How? How could my mentioning General Braithwaite do that?"
+
+He noticed again her unreasonable suspicion of hostility each time he
+made a reference to this man. Thinking it the wiser policy to overlook
+it, he answered evenly, "Because his name also happened to be
+Braithwaite."
+
+Fully fifteen minutes elapsed. "She's quite fed up with my valet," he
+told himself. He hadn't been able to contrive any fresh topic which was
+sufficiently innocuous, so he'd been keeping silent. They were again
+passing over the bridge beneath which, like a gleaming sword, lay the
+Thames, barriered on either bank by the little bow-windowed houses, with
+their shining brasses and whitened steps. They were already catching up
+with the throng of London traffic when she shook herself out of her
+self-absorption by saying, "There must be thousands of Braithwaites in
+the world."
+
+He glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. Her latest
+conversational effort tickled his sense of humor--it was so wholly
+inadequate. He laughed outright. "That's better; the high spirits will
+soon be coming back---- Thousands of Braithwaites! My dear Terry, there
+must be hundreds of thousands." Then in a graver voice, "But though
+there were thousands of millions, it wouldn't restore to me my one loyal
+man."
+
+"You loved him?" She uttered her guess softly.
+
+"Yes, and I--it's a queer thing to say about one's valet--I admired him
+tremendously."
+
+It was the best part of five years since Tabs had driven a car. He
+hadn't yet regained his old dexterity. He wasn't expert enough to attend
+to the wheel and at the same time to carry on a conversation. As he left
+the bridge he had to pass a coster's barrow which was drawn up beside
+the curb. The coster was dressed in the soiled khaki of a man recently
+released from the Army; his barrow was piled high with narcissi and
+daffodils, and a drowsy donkey drooped between the shafts. In avoiding a
+suicidal pedestrian, Tabs misjudged the room that he had to spare. He
+felt a jolt, guessed what had happened, and jammed on his brakes. A
+policeman in front of him was holding up a magisterial hand. Behind him
+a stream of familiar trench profanity was gathering in volume; under
+other circumstances he would have found a certain enjoyment in the
+sound. He looked back and saw what he expected: the barrow overturned;
+the flowers scattered, the donkey surprised out of its drowsiness,
+thrown on its back and kicking in its harness; the coster straddling the
+sudden ruin and calling down all the rigors of the law. A crowd was
+running together; it hesitated between the coster and Tabs, uncertain as
+to which would provide the more exciting entertainment. When the
+policeman waving his note-book approached the car, it plunked for Tabs.
+
+The policeman was a stout, fat-fingered, immovable kind of person. He
+said nothing till he had penciled down the car's official number. Tabs
+gave his name and address. "Lord Taborley, etc." The policeman lifted
+his slow eyes to judge for himself whether the Lord part of his
+information looked probable. The lean aristocratic face which he
+encountered seemed to correspond with the specifications recorded. He
+asked to see his Lordship's license. Tabs embarked on explanations,
+pointing to the bandaged wrist of Prentys as a confirmation of his
+facts. While he was explaining the coster joined them, having got his
+donkey on to its legs. He was violent with anger and burning to expound
+the justice of his cause. Suddenly he struck out a convincing line of
+argument, "Look at 'im, the bloomin' slacker--the pasty h'aristocrat. 'E
+didn't see no fightin'. Not 'im. But now the war's been won by poor
+blokes like meself, 'e ain't ashamed ter go banging abart in h'Army
+cars."
+
+"I know how you feel," Tabs said. "But you're mistaken; I served in the
+ranks two years myself. I was only demobbed yesterday; to-day's my first
+day out of uniform. I'll pay you whatever you think fair; so you don't
+need to work yourself up."
+
+The man's attitude changed completely. He removed his cap and scratched
+his head. "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me was pals out
+there!" He turned to the policeman, "'E ain't done me as much damidge as
+if one of them there Big Berthas 'ad landed."
+
+The policeman let his fat eyes wander from the coster to Tabs, from Tabs
+back to the coster. "I wuz too old ter go," he said inconsequently; "but
+me son's out there and won't ever come back." He crossed out the
+particulars he had written down so laboriously; when that was done, he
+fumbled his note-book back into his pocket. "If your mate 'ere says that
+it's h'all right, sir, it's h'all right so far as I'm consarned. Your
+fust day h'out of the h'Army! Well, well!" He looked at Terry with a
+world of understanding, wheeled about slowly and went ponderously back
+to his corner.
+
+"That was sportsmanly of you." It was Tabs speaking. "I'd like to know
+how much----"
+
+The coster shook his head. "It don't cost you nothink. Me and you used
+ter share."
+
+Tabs protested. The man climbed the running-board and pushed his
+grime-stained hand into the car. "Call it quits, mister, and shake for
+luck. And now the little lady, if she don't h'object."
+
+Terry shook his hand daintily. So there wasn't going to be a fight after
+all! Everything had been settled amicably! With an air of disappointment
+the crowd dispersed.
+
+"Came pretty well out of that!" Tabs remarked as the car started
+forward.
+
+"You're not to talk." Terry's voice was high-strung and emphatic. "You
+can't talk and drive--and you've got to drive like mad."
+
+"Why? What's the hurry?"
+
+"The hurry! We've wasted twenty minutes; we've barely time to get
+there."
+
+"Oh, the General! I'd forgotten. Well, it won't do the old boy any harm
+to wait. Lord, the hours he and his sort have kept me waiting on
+parade-grounds in France!"
+
+Then he remembered that this General wasn't an old boy. If he wasn't
+old, there was all the less reason for making so much effort not to be
+late. Nevertheless, to please Terry---- He could feel her body
+twitching. Every time he had to slow down for traffic he was aware of
+her impatience. Why was it of such vital importance to her that they
+should arrive in time? She wasn't too punctual by habit. A thought
+struck him; it was like a searchlight pointing out many things that had
+been dark. Her anxiety wasn't that they should arrive in time, but
+before time. She didn't intend, if she could prevent it, that he should
+meet the owner of the car. Had it not been for the double accident of
+Prentys spraining her wrist and having failed to mention that the car
+must be back by three-thirty, he would never have been allowed to know
+that there was a General. Terry had been compelled to let him drive if
+the borrowed car was to be returned; but her main object now was to
+reach the War Office a few minutes early and to smuggle him off before
+an introduction would be necessary. If they arrived punctually or late,
+the General might be already on the pavement---- Tabs bit his lip. He
+hated petty intrigue. He demanded a man's code of honor from the woman
+he adored and made no feeble excuses for feminine dishonesty. This was
+the worst disappointment she had given him.
+
+As they approached Hyde Park, when it was too late to turn off into a
+side-street, he saw that the road ahead was blocked. He worked the car
+as far forward as possible and then had to halt. Terry was nervously
+consulting her watch. "The time?" he asked.
+
+"Three-twenty-three."
+
+"Then this puts the lid on it." He beckoned to a policeman, "What's
+holding us up?"
+
+"The Queen's expected, so I'm told, sir, though us didn't 'ave no proper
+warning."
+
+At that moment the crowd out of sight commenced cheering. The cheering
+spread and drew nearer. It was taken up by people who were strung across
+the road immediately in front. A carriage flashed by in which two ladies
+were sitting, one of whom was bowing from right to left. Despite her
+irritation at the delay, Terry stood up so that she could get a clearer
+view above the clustered heads. The cheering grew deafening, then
+lessened, and sank to a hoarse murmur beneath the trees of the Park. As
+she reseated herself and the traffic lurched forward, she turned to
+Tabs, "You noticed who it was?"
+
+"The Queen."
+
+"Yes, but the lady who was with her?"
+
+"I didn't see."
+
+"It was Diana--Lady Dawn with whom I nursed. She's supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in England."
+
+"Don't know her. So I shouldn't have placed her if I had seen her."
+
+They made a clear run of it from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall and drew
+up quite marvelously before the War Office on the second.
+
+"Done it," said Tabs as he shut off the engine. "It's zero hour
+exactly."
+
+But Terry wasn't there to listen to him, as he discovered when his
+attention was free and the engine had ceased to throb. Almost before
+they had halted, she had nipped out of the car and was hailing a taxi
+which was on the point of moving off. His bag was already in process of
+being whisked from one vehicle to the other. This indecent haste to be
+rid of him roused his obstinacy; he sat still where he was and watched.
+
+She returned a little breathless and self-congratulatory. "There! Wasn't
+that clever of me? Taxis are scarce. If I hadn't collared you that one
+you might have---- Come on, Tabs, if you're stiff in your lame leg, give
+me your hand and I'll----"
+
+At that moment the dingy swing-doors of the War Office flew open and a
+red-tabbed, handsome figure of a man, with gold braid on his cap and
+crossed swords on his epaulettes, came briskly out on to the steps. He
+caught sight of Terry and, throwing her an airy salute, came with an
+eager stride towards her. He wasn't the old fogy Tabs had so
+persistently imagined. He was young, barely thirty, lean, tall and
+swift-moving as an arrow--very much what Tabs had been before he had
+spent himself at the war.
+
+"Hulloa, Terry! This is ripping. I didn't expect you---- But what's all
+this? An accident! What have you been doing to Prentys?"
+
+The voice was glad and frank, though its habit of command was
+unmistakable. Every gesture bespoke authority and arrogance of body.
+Even in this moment of geniality, "Obedience and no explanations" was
+written all over him. He was a man who believed his acceptable
+importance to be a verity established beyond the pale of challenge. Yet
+there was something lacking--a sureness of refinement, a last
+considerateness. With the first word he had spoken, Tabs had detected
+that he wasn't quite the part.
+
+Terry had hurried forward to meet him. She was saying something in a
+voice so subdued that it did not carry. She had so contrived their
+grouping--or was it an accident?--that the General's face was hidden.
+
+Tabs waited, then turned to Prentys, "My taxi-man's getting impatient.
+Will you give my thanks to the General for his kindness and make the
+explanations?---- And I hope that your wrist will soon be better."
+
+He had given the driver his address and was stepping into the taxi, when
+he heard Terry's voice, "Why, you're running away! You mustn't go
+without meeting the General. General Braithwaite, I want to introduce
+you to Lord Taborley, of whom I've spoken to you so often."
+
+Tabs limped back to the pavement and found the General regarding him
+intently. "I'm glad to make Lord Taborley's acquaintance," he said
+formally. And then to Terry, "You didn't tell me that it was for Lord
+Taborley you were borrowing my car."
+
+Before Terry could reply, Tabs was answering for her, "Then I have to
+apologize to you, sir, as well as to thank you. But we've used the same
+car often, haven't we? In fact, I'm certain that we've met many times."
+
+"Never to my knowledge." The General drew himself up stiffly. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure."
+
+The two tall men stood glooming at each other. Tabs had it on the tip of
+his tongue to say something more, but glanced at Terry and thought
+better of it. Instead he addressed her, "Do I drive you home?"
+
+The General interrupted. "It'll be out of your way. I'm going right past
+Miss Beddow's house."
+
+For the first time since they had been introduced Terry came between
+their hostility. "How did you know where Lord Taborley lived and that it
+would be out of his way? You said that this was the first time you had
+met him."
+
+Tabs refused to make her the witness of a quarrel. "Since General
+Braithwaite knows where I live, perhaps he will call and explain that to
+me later. I can't keep my cab waiting longer--are you riding with me,
+Terry?"
+
+She avoided his eyes. "With the General." And then, "You won't forget
+that you're dining to-night with father?"
+
+"To-night. At seven-thirty, I suppose, as usual?"
+
+"At seven-thirty."
+
+He raised his hat. As he drove away he felt compelled to look back just
+once to assure himself. He caught the General's features in full
+sunlight; he had not been mistaken.
+
+"So that's why my letters to him weren't returned, and that's why he
+didn't write! He's gone farther than far with a vengeance." He clenched
+his fists and frowned savagely at his crippled leg. "I felt so sure of
+her--and to have to compete with my own valet!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+RETRIEVERS OF YOUTH
+
+
+I
+
+The taxi had scarcely drawn up before a small, prim house in Brompton
+Square when the door was opened by a neat maid in immaculate cap and
+apron. She was so neat and respectful as to appear almost passionless.
+She had the high complexion of a Country girl, good gray eyes, a slim,
+attractive figure and dark, wavy hair which escaped rebelliously from
+beneath her cap. One wondered how she looked in her off-duty moments,
+when she wasn't saying, "Yes, your Lordship" and "No, your Lordship."
+Tabs mustered a smile and called to her, "Thank you, Ann. I'll be with
+you in a moment."
+
+As he paid the fare, he let his eyes wander. The outside of the house
+had been painted white, evidently in honor of his home-coming. The work
+had been only recently completed, for the chalked warning on the
+pavement was not yet obliterated, "Wet Paint Beware." He had given no
+orders; it was Ann's doing--her accustomed, tactful thoughtfulness. The
+steps were speckless as a newly laundered shirt, the brasses polished to
+the brilliancy of precious metal. His window-boxes---- He glanced along
+the fronts of his neighbors' houses; they hadn't put theirs out yet. His
+were ahead of everybody's; they made a cheerful splash of red, with
+their soldierly upstanding tulips, above the long serried line of
+area-railings. Again Ann's doing! And the snow-white curtains behind
+each row of panes were also Ann's.
+
+The driver clicked his "For Hire" sign into the upright position and
+chugged away to join the flow of traffic which thumped orchestrally past
+the end of the Square. Tabs climbed the three low steps separately; he
+had been used to take them at a bound. He tried to climb them slowly as
+though from choice, and not from necessity. He was very conscious that
+Ann was watching. As she closed the door behind him he said, "So you
+knew I was coming? You received my telegram?"
+
+"Yes, your Lordship."
+
+"I was sorry I couldn't tell you the exact hour. I didn't know it
+myself. I hope you didn't trouble to prepare lunch."
+
+"It was no trouble, your Lordship."
+
+"Then you've managed to get some one in the kitchen? They tell me that
+all the cooks have become bus-conductresses or lady-secretaries."
+
+"I did, your Lordship. My sister--the one who lost her husband at Mons.
+I thought you wouldn't object----"
+
+He cut her short. "Ann, you know I never object; you never need to go
+into details. Whatever you've done is right. From what I've seen already
+you've done splendidly."
+
+Under his praise she flushed and became a little less the servant. "I
+was afraid you might think I'd taken too much upon myself, what with the
+flower-boxes and having the house repainted. I wanted to have things
+nice for your Lordship after----" She hesitated for a word, and then
+burst out, "After all the dirt and beastliness! Your Lordship ought
+never to have gone in the ranks, begging your pardon; you weren't fitted
+for it. You ought to have gone as a General. Then you wouldn't have come
+home with that poor leg and----" She saw him wince and changed the
+subject. "But about doing things without orders, I knew that if
+Braithwaite--if Braithwaite----" Her voice sagged and her eyes misted
+over. At last Tabs saw how she looked in her off-duty moments, when she
+wasn't occupied with being respectful. The sudden memory came back of
+intuitions he had had that she and his valet might one day marry. From
+time to time he had twitted them on their fondness, taking an idle
+pleasure in forwarding the match. And Braithwaite had kissed her before
+he marched away. Ridiculous to remember it now! It signified nothing.
+People in their station kissed when they felt kindly, and on that
+occasion they had had an epoch-making pretext.
+
+Her eyes were searching his with a hungry wistfulness. "What I was
+meaning, your Lordship, was that if he had been spared, he'd have done
+things on his own and gone ahead, the same as he always did. So I,
+seeing as how he wasn't----"
+
+Tabs touched her shoulder gently. "It's all right, Ann. I appreciate
+your motives. I'm glad you went ahead. But you haven't shaken hands
+yet."
+
+He glanced in at the dining-room before he went upstairs. The table was
+spread for dinner. Cut flowers were standing about in vases. The very
+silver had a festive shine.
+
+"Again I have to be sorry," he told her. "I'm dining with Sir Tobias
+Beddow."
+
+"And Miss Terry," she inquired, "is she well?"
+
+When he went to climb the narrow stairs she refused to permit him to
+carry his bag. He guessed the reason--that he might be freer to support
+himself by the rail of the banisters. On the first small landing, which
+looked out at the back on to the Oratory and the graveyard of the Parish
+Church, there were still more flowers. When he reached his bedroom,
+three flights up, he found that his evening clothes had been all laid
+out and just as carefully as if Braithwaite--the old Braithwaite whom he
+had loved--had been there before him.
+
+As she unpacked his bag, opening and closing drawers, "I shall have to
+look round for another valet," he said.
+
+"Please don't." Her tone was sharp with earnestness.
+
+Tabs felt sorry for her. She, too, like all the world was wanting the
+thing that she could never have. He wondered whether it wouldn't be
+kinder to tell her and let her know the worst. "But sha'n't I, Ann?"
+
+With simple pathos, which was the more touching because it was so
+unconscious, she clasped her hands, "He might come back. He was never
+reported. My letters were returned unopened. I've not given over
+hoping. I shouldn't like him to find that your Lordship---- If he found
+another man in his place, he might feel like he hadn't been wanted. Me
+and sister can manage----"
+
+"But----"
+
+He got no further, for her eyes were meeting his with an appeal that was
+desperate. "A strange man--his ways would be different. He'd make one
+know that everything--everything was ended."
+
+She glanced hurriedly round for a last time to make sure that there was
+nothing she had omitted--collar, tie, silk socks, dress-shoes,
+shaving-water, razor. "I'll be listening for the bell in case there's
+anything that I've forgotten, sir."
+
+With that she closed the door between himself and her emotion. As she
+rustled discreetly down the stairs, he thought he heard a sound of
+sobbing.
+
+
+II
+
+It was too early to dress--not five o'clock yet. He made an estimate of
+the time he had to spare. If he walked across the Park to Sir Tobias
+Beddow's, that would take him from a half to three-quarters of an hour.
+At the earliest he wouldn't have to leave the house till six-thirty. So
+he had the best part of two hours during which to think out his line of
+conduct and to dress. At dinner he would meet Terry--how would she act?
+And what was the right thing for him to do as her family's trusted
+friend? He felt very tired. It took a tremendous lot out of one
+pretending to other people that one wasn't tired. He was ashamed to have
+to own to himself how quickly nowadays he could use up his physical
+reserves. For the moment there was no one to watch him; he stretched
+himself out at full length on the couch.
+
+He was glad to be back in this friendly house with its narrow stairways
+and endearing littleness; it had been his American mother's before him.
+Within its walls were the exquisite traces of a temperament and taste
+that had been hers. She hadn't always been a great lady; to the end of
+her days there had remained with her the love of small things which one
+finds in nun-like New England towns. There had been times when the
+ostentation and entertaining at Taborley House had become too much for
+her; this nest of refuge had been her secret--her place of retreat where
+she had regarnered her sincerities. She had loved the Square's
+old-fashioned primness, its tininess, its unchanging atmosphere of rest.
+It was scarcely invaded by the strum of London. In the cloud of
+greenness which drifted above its communal garden, one could still
+listen to the country sounds of birds. At the back gray religion spoke
+in the tolling bell of the Parish Church; through Sabbath stillnesses
+one could catch the pealing of the organ in the Oratory and the mutter
+of worshipers at prayer. Tabs had kept the house as she had left it. It
+was something faithful to which to return, however much he failed in the
+search for his kingdom and however far he wandered.
+
+However much he failed! This first day of freedom had been anything but
+successful. He felt as though every hope that he had had had been
+blotted out; that morning he had had no plan for the future which had
+not included Terry. What would be the upshot? Would Braithwaite accept
+his challenge to visit him? If he did, what then? He, Tabs, couldn't
+very well ask his ex-valet, merely because he was his ex-valet, to
+desist from loving the same girl. He had no doubt that Braithwaite, in
+his new incarnation as a General, did dare to love her. He had little
+doubt that Terry had shown herself at least susceptible to the glamor of
+his infatuation. How far had the matter gone between them? There lay the
+guess.
+
+He searched back, trying to piece together phrases which would indicate
+the correct answer. There was her disturbing confession about having
+given away bits of herself, little bits of herself in wrong directions.
+There was her reticence as to the ownership of the car and the way in
+which she had tried to prevent a meeting. There was her sympathy for
+Maisie's matrimonial excesses; her unnatural tolerance for Adair; her
+reiterated excuse for the current love-madness, that people had the
+right at any cost to be happy; and the eagerness with which she had
+seized on his own words, "to recover our lost years by violence." In the
+silence of his brain he heard her voice pleading, urgent with pain and
+underlying terror, "Don't you see why I don't condemn? I'm sorry for
+you, for myself, for everybody." His knowledge of the world told him
+that impassioned latitudinarians were most frequently found among those
+who had themselves offended the conventions. Whatever Terry knew or did
+not know, she was certainly aware that a match between herself and
+General Braithwaite was completely off the map and would be regarded by
+every one who counted as a _mesalliance_.
+
+And what did she know? Not that Braithwaite had been a valet--most
+decidedly not that he had been _his_ valet; at most she suspected that
+they had been acquainted when Braithwaite had moved in humbler circles.
+Had she been possessed of the exact truth, she would never have borrowed
+a car from that quarter to meet her ex-lover on his home-coming. She had
+been testing--trying to discover. She had scented a mystery--one for the
+solving of which none of the General's explanations had proved
+convincing. Then had come the unforeseen encounter outside the War
+Office and Braithwaite's falsehood, which even Terry had detected. "You
+mistake me. It's the first time I've had the pleasure." What was the
+man's game? Did he hope to erase his old identity? Did he think----
+
+At this point Tabs' patience broke down. "Dash it all," he muttered, "if
+there hadn't been a war, the fellow would have been running my
+bath-water at this moment."
+
+If there hadn't been a war! But there had; and this was only one of the
+many preposterous situations which had resulted from it. Terry was right
+in at least one thing that she had said--the world was upside down and
+walking on its head.
+
+As he lay there thinking, with the topmost branches of the trees in the
+Square weaving a tracery of green shadows against his windows, a sudden
+inspiration came to him. He sat up. "By Jove, I've got it. Terry's proud
+as Lucifer. I can stop this nonsense at any time by telling her who her
+lover was. Braithwaite will have to call to see me; I can force him to
+it. When he calls, the door will be opened by Ann. I can hold the threat
+over him that, if he doesn't promise to break with Terry, I'll expose
+him."
+
+He went across to his writing-table, selected a pen and wrote:--
+
+     _General Braithwaite,
+        The War Office,
+        Whitehall,
+        London.
+
+   Sir:
+
+   I shall be pleased to see you any time to-morrow at my house in
+   Brompton Square, which you know so well. The matter which we have to
+   discuss is urgent.
+
+     Yours truly,
+     Taborley._
+
+He addressed the envelope, sealed it and rang the bell. When Ann
+appeared, he handed it to her. "Please see that it's posted
+immediately."
+
+He had done something decisive. For the time being he felt happier.
+"Nothing like getting a thing off your chest!" He took a bath and,
+having slipped into his dressing-gown, commenced to shave. Between these
+acts he whistled snatches of street-songs to prove to himself his
+genuine light-heartedness. It was while he was drying his razor that he
+started on the wrong air. Where had he heard it? Oh, yes, the sunlit
+street, the children dancing and a voice at his side murmuring the words
+of the refrain, "Apres la Guerre, there'll be a good time everywhere."
+
+The old argument commenced again, but with a new justice. "What have I
+really got against this chap? To rise from a private to a General is no
+crime; it's to his credit. We all had his chance and some of us had more
+influence; yet he got there."
+
+He tried to eliminate his own desires and wounded pride from the
+problem. For five years he had been nothing and had been glad to be
+nothing, that the cause which he believed to be righteous might triumph
+by his self-effacement. What sickness of soul had overtaken him that, on
+this, his first day of freedom, he had immediately surrendered to this
+orgy of outrageous selfishness? It was Terry that mattered and only
+Terry. The stronghold of her happiness was threatened by Braithwaite's
+lie. There was a kingdom for everybody, his old theory. As for himself,
+if he had been mistaken and his kingdom was not Terry, then he must
+press on, for it lay further up the road round some newer turning.
+Meanwhile, at whatever cost to himself he must rescue Terry's happiness.
+
+His heroic state of mind lasted no longer than it takes to set down. He
+was demanding too much of his exhausted capacity for self-abnegation. He
+was starving for her. His old hunger to win her swept over him
+ravenously. Only by winning her could his lost youth be regained.
+
+
+III
+
+He had almost completed dressing when there came a tap at the door.
+Finishing what he was doing in front of the mirror, he answered, "Yes,
+what is it, Ann?"
+
+"Before you go, I should like to speak with your Lordship."
+
+"Is it important? I've not got too much time."
+
+"It's--it's something to do with myself."
+
+"All right. Half a second."
+
+On opening the door, he saw at once that her face was disturbed.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's something to do with him, sir."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"With Braithwaite."
+
+It was evident that for Ann there was only one _him_ in the world.
+
+"Well, what of him?"
+
+Ann commenced speaking slowly. Under the stress of her nervousness she
+forgot the correct demeanor for a high-class parlor-maid and became a
+country girl, twisting the corner of her white, starched apron in her
+hands.
+
+"I was noticing the address on that letter your Lordship gave me to
+post." Tabs thought quickly, "Hullo, we're in for it. That was foolish
+of me. She's put two and two together."
+
+But Ann reassured him in her next sentence. "It was to a General at the
+War Office and I was thinking that he might help. Braithwaite and I had
+an understanding. I'm not saying we were engaged; we weren't. We didn't
+tell anybody. But we'd made up our minds to get married if he ever came
+back. If I'd been engaged to him, I'd have a right to make enquiries;
+but now, in most people's eyes, I was nothing to him. That's--that's the
+hardest part of it. You see, sir, he was never reported dead or missing
+or anything. I just stopped hearing from him. So I thought that if this
+General was your Lordship's friend----"
+
+Tabs' brain had been working. He already had a plan. "You thought that I
+might persuade him to use his influence to have the records searched?"
+
+She glanced up hopefully. "That's what I was thinking. Would he do it
+for your Lordship? I don't know how to set about things myself. It's
+this--this," she almost broke down, "this uncertainty that's a-killing
+of me. Sister knows about her man, but I----"
+
+Tabs saw the redness of sleeplessness in her eyes; it was true--the
+uncertainty was killing her. "Don't upset yourself by talking about it,"
+he said kindly. "I'll write to the General and post my request on my way
+out."
+
+He had supposed he had dismissed her and had seated himself at his desk.
+A sound behind him warned him; he looked across his shoulder to find her
+still hovering in the doorway.
+
+She answered his unspoken question as to why she was delaying. "Aren't
+there any particulars that your Lordship ought to have? Things like his
+regimental number, and his birthday, and where he was born, and all
+that? And wouldn't this help?"
+
+"What's that?"
+
+She pulled out from her apron-pocket an envelope. "It's one of his
+letters. If the General was to see it, he'd know I had the right."
+
+"May I glance through it?"
+
+Tabs unfolded the scribbled sheets of paper. They were torn from an Army
+note-book.
+
+   _"My darling Ann:
+
+   The jolly old war drags on and seems as though it were never going to
+   end. Not that I've much to kick about, for it's proved a chance for
+   me. Here's the great news. I'm in for my commission and shall soon be
+   'an officer and a gentleman.' Don't tell his Lordship if you write to
+   him or see him; he's still in the ranks and might not like it. It's
+   funny to think that I shall be his military superior before many
+   weeks are out and that, were he and I to meet, he'd have to salute
+   me. If I come through the war, I sha'n't go back to being a valet.
+   Once having been a gentleman----"_
+
+Tabs ran rapidly through this sheet and turned to the next:--
+
+   _"You're wonderfully good. I got the socks that you knitted and the
+   two parcels of food from Harrods. You mustn't spend so much of your
+   money on me. When it's all ended, I'll pay you back. We'll get
+   married and have a little cottage in a little town, the way the song
+   says that we heard together at the Comedy on my last leave. You
+   remember how it goes.
+
+     'And we'll have a little mistress in a silken gown.
+     A little doggie, a little cat,
+     A little doorstep, with WELCOME on the mat.'
+
+   "My dearest sweetheart, I love you.
+
+   "Yours, in the pink, etc."_
+
+Tabs looked up. "May I keep this for the present?--And, by the way, how
+many more of them have you?"
+
+"Nearly a hundred from the day he enlisted. That's one of the last--I
+never heard from him whether he lived to get his commission."
+
+When she had vanished, he reread the letter more carefully, made a copy
+of it and slipped the copy into another envelope addressed to General
+Braithwaite, together with a note from himself, which read, "_One of the
+important reasons why I am insistent that you shall call on me is
+contained in the enclosed copy of one of your many letters, the
+originals of all of which are in my possession. To a man of honor it
+speaks for itself_."
+
+
+IV
+
+At the red pillar-box, at the foot of the Square, he posted this second
+missive. "He'll receive them both by the first delivery to-morrow," he
+thought. "I wonder what he'll---- Rotten! But it can't be helped." Then
+he turned to the right by the Tube Station, going up the narrow old
+world passage, behind the backs of houses, through the graveyard of the
+Brompton Parish Church to Ennismore Gardens and the sudden, railed in
+solitudes of Hyde Park.
+
+There were few pedestrians about. Until he reached the Park they were
+for the most part men in evening-dress, going to dinner-parties, like
+himself. Sometimes they were accompanied by their wives or sweethearts,
+whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the
+pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually
+fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above clustered chimney-pots to
+the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had
+worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in
+marriage---- When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."
+
+Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would
+be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly
+dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his
+library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to
+see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.
+
+He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and
+slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington
+Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself
+ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his
+coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon
+feeling a patient's pulse.
+
+"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lordship in
+the library."
+
+It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for
+granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some
+absurd measure as his contemporary.
+
+As he prepared to follow, his attention was attracted by the scarlet
+band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on
+the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.
+
+
+V
+
+Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the
+fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of
+his tie.
+
+He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of
+energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his
+antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he
+might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway
+had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was
+haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility.
+One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was
+white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were
+blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top
+part of the face above the cheek-bones was noble; but the lower part
+fell away to a mouth and chin which were amiable and undecided. At the
+hour of Tabs' arrival, he was flinging up his hands and spluttering
+impotently, an inexpert swimmer in the waters of adversity.
+
+"My dear Lord Taborley! My dear fellow!" The moment he discovered his
+guest in the doorway he came darting forward. "My dear boy, this is real
+friendship. We missed you and wanted you so much.--So you're out of it
+at last? I mean the khaki."
+
+The little, wrinkled hand with its stubby fingers reached up timidly in
+an attempt to pat the big breadth of shoulders.
+
+"Yes, I'm out of it, Sir Tobias."
+
+Tabs didn't want to be patted. He was impatient of polite evasions. He
+foresaw that he was expected to spend the next five minutes in replying
+to questions which required no answers--all this as a conventional
+preface to a discussion of the delicate position of Adair and Maisie.
+But Tabs had his own problem, and one question in particular about a hat
+on the hall-table that he was burning to ask. They stood staring at each
+other, the big, fair man and the worn version of Shakespeare, both
+wondering how long it would be decorous to chatter before they clinched
+with the vital topic.
+
+"May as well sit down. There's time for a cigarette. Terry----" Sir
+Tobias made a short-winded attempt to push a second arm-chair into place
+beside the fire; Tabs achieved the desired end with one lurch of his
+body. "Terry brought some one in to tea; he's not gone yet. They never
+know when to go, these New Army fellows. Good at their job, they tell
+me, but no polish. I suppose I oughtn't to say that--ungrateful of me!
+But I'm sick of it all, the invasion of the classes, the women in
+trousers, the beggars on horseback, the Jazz music. I want the old world
+back--the womanly women, everybody labeled, and Beethoven."
+
+He pushed the cigarette-box fretfully across to Tabs, having first
+selected one for himself.
+
+"Beethoven," he snorted, "that's what I want, and no bobbed hair and
+everybody happily married."
+
+"This New Army chap who's with Terry," Tabs paused to make his voice
+unanxious and ordinary, "does she see much of him? Is she fond of him?"
+
+"Fond of him!" The little man jerked round quickly. He was in a mood to
+see the shadow of terror in the most far-fetched suggestion. "If I
+thought she was, I should pack her off to Lady Dawn and keep her with
+her until the fellow was dead or----"
+
+"What's the matter with him?" Tabs flipped the ash off his cigarette
+indifferently.
+
+"The matter with him!" Sir Tobias pulled at the point of his beard,
+making a mental effort to frame the charge. "If you'd asked me that
+question five years ago I could have told you; but not now. In 1914 we
+spoke of a man as belonging to our class and meant that he had our
+standards of conduct, our code of honor, our sense of public duty, our
+traditions--that he could be trusted to run true to form. To-day any
+man's a gentleman, provided he killed enough Germans."
+
+"But still you do feel that there's something the matter with him."
+
+"Yes, but I can't tell you for the life of me why I feel it. In many
+ways he's admirable: I believe he's about the youngest brigadier we have
+who rose from the ranks. There was no hanky-panky about his promotion
+either--no petticoat influence; it was all sheer merit and courage. He
+was a fighting-man from first to last and shared all the chances. But
+the trouble is that one doesn't know where he came from, and, therefore,
+one can't be sure where he's going. I know that sounds snobbish. You
+have the right to tell me that if a man was good enough to be butchered
+to save an old chap like myself, he ought to be good enough to sit down
+with me at the same table. But what people don't realize is that men
+have been wounded in protecting old chaps like myself in coal-mines, and
+on railroads, and a thousand other places ever since the world started,
+but until now we never felt it necessary to offer them a bed in our
+houses. War asked for the simplest gifts from men, physical strength,
+uncomplaining endurance and courage. The war's ended, and if those same
+gifts are to continue to secure social advancement, every policeman who
+captures a burglar ought to be made a bank-president. When I demand that
+a man shall have traditions to be my friend, I ask no more than when I
+refuse to buy a dog without a pedigree."
+
+"But this man, what's he called? If he's as distinguished as you say, I
+ought to have heard of him."
+
+Before his host could answer, the door was discreetly opened. "Dinner is
+being served, Sir Tobias."
+
+There was a rush of light footsteps and Terry breezed past the butler.
+"I know you're going to scold me, Daddy. It's all my fault that you were
+kept waiting. It took me so long to persuade General Braithwaite. By the
+time he'd consented---- I had to dress like a hurricane. I'm not at all
+sure that I'm properly hooked up the back. I know I feel draughty."
+Then, as though she had not remembered that he was expected, "Why,
+hullo, Tabs! In a dinner-jacket! You do look peaceful and jolly."
+
+
+VI
+
+They had taken their places at the square handsome table, illuminated at
+each corner by a silver candle-stick, red-shaded and electric-lighted.
+Tabs and Terry were seated side by side, so that he saw her always in
+profile, except when she turned to him in conversation. He saw the soft
+roundness of her shoulder, the satin pallor of her throat and breast,
+the quivering gold of her childishly wavy hair.
+
+The General sat isolated, opposite and facing them. Sir Tobias and his
+wife sat at either end--had they known it, for all the world like
+judges.
+
+Lady Beddow was a proud, unbending woman, gracious to her own sort,
+unquestioningly respectful to those above her, tender in a practical way
+to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her
+door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as
+ill-at-ease as her husband in the jostling democracy of the moment.
+
+In the hall Sir Tobias rather huffily had introduced his guests. Tabs
+had relieved the tension by smiling quietly at Braithwaite, "The General
+and I have met before."
+
+It was an uncomfortable dinner from the moment they sat down. Sir
+Tobias, although he had shown no signs of it in the library, seemed to
+have developed a resentment at having been kept waiting. No reference
+was made to this resentment, but Terry and the General were obviously
+the culprits. Sir Tobias was vaguely unhappy and had to blame somebody.
+Under the tacitly implied criticism Terry's rebellious spirits rose
+higher, but the General's authoritative assurance began to crumble.
+
+Sir Tobias was continuing the conversation which had started in the
+library. He seemed oblivious to the fact that it had then concerned the
+man who was now present. "You can't make the world afresh with a
+catastrophe. Men are like water: in a storm they rise above or sink
+below themselves. When the disturbance is ended, they tend to find their
+own level. War destroys; it never created anything."
+
+"That's not true, if you'll excuse me for contradicting you. You're
+speaking without knowledge." Braithwaite uttered himself bluntly as he
+would have done in his own Headquarters' mess--this despite the fact
+that it was Tabs whom his host had been addressing.
+
+In his astonishment, Sir Tobias nearly gagged himself with the soup that
+he was on the point of swallowing. He blinked mildly at this confident
+young man, his breast ablaze with decorations, whom he had not invited.
+"Then, in your opinion, what has war ever created," he asked with
+dangerous courtesy; "this war, for instance, that's just ended?"
+
+"This war that's just ended is the only war of which I have had any
+experience." Braithwaite glanced across at Terry for encouragement. "I
+know what it created in me and in thousands like me. It created in us
+the most valuable of all assets--character. In the bitter test of pain
+and dirt and despair we _found_ ourselves--found ourselves capable of
+more nobility than we had ever dreamt possible. We sorted out afresh, in
+hours that we thought would be our last, all our inherited superstitions
+and servilities; in so doing we discovered that God and life itself are
+much kinder than we had been informed. Because of that discovery men who
+had been timid learnt how to face death gladly, shirkers how to shoulder
+responsibility, selfish people how to become decent through the fine
+humanity of sharing. Time-servers learnt how to get up off their bellies
+and confront misfortune with a laugh. I don't know whether I make myself
+clear; perhaps one had to be a part of the great game to understand its
+lessons. That we do understand them is the reward of those who have
+survived. We've come back to you as uncomfortable fellows; we shall be
+much more uncomfortable before we're satisfied. We intend to fight for
+the same equalities in peace that you sent us out to fight for in war.
+You asked me what this particular war has created; it has created a
+complete new set of social and spiritual values. It's done away with the
+uncharity of caste."
+
+During his last words he had been gazing across the table at Tabs with a
+fearless challenge, as much as to say, "That's who I am. Now expose me."
+
+But Tabs was remembering the coster's reason for not having dragged him
+into the police-courts, "Served in the ranks, did yer? Then you and me
+was pals out there!" Braithwaite, whether he knew it or not, had been
+doing a piece of special pleading for himself. He and Braithwaite,
+whatever they might be now, had been pals out there. Silently Tabs had
+been thinking while he had been listening, "You're right and I'm with
+you. I'd be with you still more if you'd only live up to your standards
+by sticking to Ann."
+
+It was Sir Tobias who took the offensive. The soup-plates had been
+removed and the fish-course had not yet been served. He had the leisure
+to talk. "You men who have been in the Army," he said testily,
+"especially those of you who have gained your promotion rapidly, always
+speak as if the rest of us had been receivers of stolen goods until you
+put on uniforms. Armies are composed of youth; for most of you it was
+the first time you had tasted authority. It's gone to your heads; you
+want to brush experience aside and dragoon the older world into new
+formations. You, who were civilians yourselves, have come back despising
+us civilians; your contempt is three-parts fear lest you'll fail, as you
+failed before, in the old civilian competitive struggle. You talk about
+the virtues war has taught; let's grant them and grant them
+gratefully--they saved us from destruction. But what about the frantic
+recklessness it encouraged, the cheap views of bodily chastity, the
+desperate insistence on momentary happiness?" At the mention of bodily
+chastity, Lady Beddow from the other end of the table had stuttered a
+"tut, tut!" Her husband dodged it, as a boy might dodge a wheelbarrow
+upset in his path. Without shifting his glance he ran on. "A complete
+new set of social and spiritual values! Rubbish! War places an excessive
+premium on merely brutal qualities--muscle, bone, sinew, all the
+paraphernalia of physical endurance. What use has it got for old fellows
+of intellectual attainments like myself? It takes the greatest poet,
+singer, painter, violinist; all it can do with him is to thrust a rifle
+into his hands. All brains look alike, Michael Angelo's or a
+rag-picker's, when they're spattered in the mud of a trench. Take Lord
+Taborley here, for instance--all that military stupidity could do with
+him was to keep him in the ranks for two years. You can't make me
+believe in your complete new set of social and spiritual values. A
+complete unrest and insubordination to time-honored moralities is the
+legacy of war."
+
+Having delivered himself, he tucked his napkin tighter into his
+waistcoat and attacked the fish-course, as though by this display of
+gastronomic energy he could somehow strengthen his argument.
+
+It was clear to Tabs that behind all that Sir Tobias had been saying lay
+his misery over Maisie and Adair. He saw the world always in the
+personal equation.
+
+"I agree with most of your statements," the General blundered on. "And
+yet you're wrong. You miss something. I think it's the vision of the
+stupendous heroism. You never saw it; you don't want to see it. That you
+never saw it we can understand; but that you shouldn't want to see it,
+makes us see red. It was something that we did for you, and you take it
+all for granted. You cheered us and jeered us into going because you
+were frightened. You handed us white feathers if we hesitated. You
+dragged us from our jobs and very often we were poor men, who had no
+such financial security as was yours. You promised that if we would
+share our lives with you, you'd go fifty-fifty with us on your financial
+security. There wasn't time to have deeds of agreement drawn up; we took
+you at your word. And what a lie it was! Why, I passed a blinded officer
+in Regent Street to-day peddling shoe-laces. The day before a jobless
+soldier threw himself beneath a train and his last words were, 'Over the
+top and the best of luck.' There's a Colonel I see by to-night's paper
+who's gone back to being a policeman. If you see a man in uniform
+to-day, your unspoken thought is, 'For God's sake take it off.' I tell
+you it's all wrong. It's that kind of ingratitude that leads to
+revolution. You talk about the brutality of war; it's not a patch on the
+brutality of peace. You treated men's lives as yours while the danger
+lasted, but you insist that your possessions are your own now that it's
+been averted."
+
+He took a breath and glanced round.
+
+Tabs was nodding unconscious approval. Terry's face reflected the fire
+of his own passionate indignation and enthusiasm. The butler in the
+shadows had turned his back non-committally and was making a pretense of
+fiddling with the next course. Lady Beddow sat very upright and
+startled, grasping her knife and fork as though they helped to support
+her. The only person who was still doing justice to the meal was the
+worn-out version of Shakespeare, who was responsible for the storm.
+
+The silence seemed to call for a final climax. The ex-valet cleared his
+throat. And it was to his ex-valet that Tabs listened; he had forgotten
+the General. It was as though the grimness of reality had interrupted a
+piece of play-acting. There was less heat in Braithwaite's voice now and
+more reproach. "You said nothing about caste in those days, when you
+hurried us to the shambles. You promised us---- What was it that you
+promised us?"
+
+"A kingdom round the corner," Tabs suggested. The next minute he felt
+Terry's warm little hand clinging to his own beneath the tablecloth.
+
+Braithwaite stared at Tabs to see whether he were jesting; then smiled
+in relieved friendship at this proof of comradeship from an unexpected
+quarter. "Yes, perhaps it was that--a future kindliness, where we should
+all be men together, neither free nor bond." Then again to his host,
+"You sent us out there where everything was censored. Scarcely a whisper
+of the truth reached you. The very war-correspondents were instructed to
+delete the horror and to write nothing that would disturb your calm.
+We've come back, what are left of us; we think you ought to know what
+really happened. It isn't that we take much pleasure in telling you, but
+we think that if you knew, you might be persuaded to keep at least some
+of your promises. And what do you do? You reassert your privilege to
+despise us. You stuff your fingers in your ears and talk about caste,
+and forgetting the war, and getting back to work. Sir Tobias, I'm afraid
+I'm being far too personal, but you're a sample of millions who weren't
+there. You're living in a totally altered world of whose very existence
+you're content to be unaware. Your complacency drives men like myself to
+the point of madness. We hold that you have no right to be complacent
+until the bill you put your hand to has been settled. I don't know how
+Lord Taborley feels; he's not expressed----"
+
+"Tabs feels exactly the way you do and so do I." It was Terry speaking,
+like the shrill courage of a bugle answering the slow bass of a
+trumpet-call. "We're the world that purchased victory--we three, while
+the rest of the world sat back. It was men like you two who got gassed,
+and wrenched, and tortured, and girls like myself who patched you up and
+flirted with you so that we might send you back to the Front
+cheery--girls like myself who hadn't known love, or children, or
+anything but a nursery sort of happiness. We three and people like us
+understand, because we paid the price together."
+
+"Really, Terry, I must confess there are times when you shock me." As
+Lady Beddow rose from her seat, she was the picture of disapproval. From
+the door, which the butler held open for her, she glanced back. "I think
+this discussion has gone _very_ far."
+
+As she swept out, she called across her shoulder, as one might call to a
+pet dog, "Come, Terry."
+
+
+VII
+
+But Terry did not come; she sat on tightly, just as if she were a man
+among men. Until coffee had been served and the room was free from
+servants, there was a pretense at small-talk in which Sir Tobias did not
+join. He crouched moodily in his chair, an unlighted cigar between his
+fingers, looking very old and somehow deserted. With the instinctive
+tenderness which she always showed when she knew that she had hurt,
+Terry got up and went to him. She linked her arms about his neck and
+stooped to kiss the bald-spot on his head. "Cheer up, Daddy dear; it
+isn't half as bad as it sounded. Don't you want me to light your cigar
+for you?"
+
+Tabs, to distract attention from the reconciliation, addressed the
+General. It was odd that he should feel so much sympathy for a man whom
+his letters, already beyond recall, would stir into panic in the
+morning. "Do you intend to stay in the Army, sir?"
+
+"No. But why do you ask? They're getting rid of all of us who aren't
+Regulars, no matter how brilliant our service. They're making the Army
+again a social club. I shall soon be out of uniform."
+
+"And then?" Tabs persisted.
+
+"Oh, then I shall find something else." He spoke airily, but the shadow
+which crossed his handsome face added plainly as words, "If I can find
+anything."
+
+"If it isn't impertinence," Tabs sank his voice, "may I ask what you
+intend to turn to?"
+
+The General eyed him suspiciously, wondering whether he was again about
+to lay claim to the previous embarrassing acquaintance. "I have several
+things in view," he said sketchily, "from which a man in my position
+ought to be able to choose."
+
+"Ought! But that hasn't been the story up-to-date. What of the Colonel
+you were just telling us about?" Tabs saw that another storm was
+brewing. He leant across the table and hurried on. "If the worst comes
+to the worst, I expect your old job's waiting for you. The qualities
+which have made you what you are to-day, must have been recognized and
+valued----" Terry had completed her reconciliation with her father and
+was resting her gaze upon them. Tabs altered his tone. "You put what you
+said at dinner rather strongly, sir. But I understand what you were
+driving at--it was the democracy of the front-line where courage, which
+at its best is unselfishness, was our only standard of aristocracy."
+
+Before the General could make reply, Sir Tobias had raised his
+bewildered head. "It's a thing that I for one don't want to understand.
+I don't want to go on living, if what you've said is true."
+
+Tabs turned considerately to the older man. "I think you would if you
+knew. The difference that war made to all of us who were there was that
+it taught us to judge men by their good points rather than their
+defects. It upset all our preconceived notions about society, especially
+our notions about the extreme value of race and breeding. What we
+learnt was that there's a breeding of the heart which enables a man from
+the gutter to run true to the highest form."
+
+Sir Tobias leveled his weary eyes in challenge. "Then what about Adair?"
+
+The name was out at last--the name which he had been trying to get
+uttered all evening. It didn't matter that Adair hadn't been at the war
+and had no proper place in the argument. He had wanted to break through
+his reticence due to his sense of impending family disaster. At last he
+had done it.
+
+"I think, Daddy," Terry said, "the General and I had better leave you
+and Tabs to talk alone."
+
+The next thing that Tabs saw was Terry making her escape with this other
+man. He had it in his power to settle his suspense for all time by
+saying, "One minute, Terry. You're choosing between the General and
+myself. It may help you in making your decision to know that Braithwaite
+was once----" But the coster's definition of fair-play deterred him.
+This man had been his pal in the trenches; because of that he allowed
+himself for the second time that day to be shut out from the company of
+youth. He hadn't discovered how much or how little she knew. By her
+withdrawal he was made to feel middle-aged--more nearly her father's
+contemporary than ever. Yet, as an underlying comfort to his distress,
+he had the remembered pressure of the little hand that had sought his
+own in secret friendliness.
+
+He turned to Sir Tobias. "Yes, what about Adair? Terry said that you
+wanted to consult me. If there's anything that I can say or do----"
+
+
+VIII
+
+The door was reopening. Tabs glanced back across his shoulder through
+the shadows. She was hovering just inside the threshold, hastily clad in
+her evening-wrap; beyond her in the hall the General stood fidgeting
+with his cap. Sir Tobias was sitting with his head bowed; he had not
+heard the sound of her reentry. He spoke evidently believing that they
+two were alone. "I don't like that fellow. It's the last time he ever
+comes to my house. Whatever Terry can see in him---- And he's not good
+for Terry."
+
+She tiptoed back into the hall, pulling the door softly behind her. A
+moment later the front door closed with a bang.
+
+"What was that?" Sir Tobias looked up gnome-like and startled.
+
+Tabs guessed what it was; but because, as she had said they three had
+paid the price together, he kept her secret. "General Braithwaite,
+probably. But you were speaking of Adair?"
+
+Sir Tobias shivered, betraying his nervous tension. "A disturber," he
+said irritably, "even in his going. And yet, I suppose it's true; we
+shouldn't be sitting here comfortably to-night if it hadn't been for his
+sort."
+
+Now that it had been broached, it was anything to avoid the main topic.
+He drummed with his fingers on the table, ceased drumming and sighed
+heavily. "Yes, I was speaking of Adair. I don't understand him. I've
+grown out of touch; I don't seem to understand anybody. I'm left behind,
+somehow. People do things to-day that they never used to do. They shout
+about things from the house-tops which all my life I've mentioned only
+in whispers. Terry does; you heard what she said to-night about never
+having been loved and never having had children. The loss of
+delicacy----"
+
+"I wouldn't call it a loss of delicacy." Tabs struck a match. "I would
+call it a loss of prudishness. We all know that girls are born to be
+married and that the best of them long to have children. Why shouldn't
+they own it? You owned it long ago when you bought her dolls. The lid is
+off false reticences. I hope it stays off; we shall be a much honester
+world."
+
+"The lid's off! That's the phrase I was searching for." Sir Tobias leant
+forward confidentially. "You haven't been much in England during the
+past four years or you'd know how badly the lid is off. You men, when
+you were in the trenches, lived above yourselves; but, the moment you
+came home on leave, you taught the world that wasn't in khaki how to
+live below itself. I could tell you stories----"
+
+"I know." Tabs didn't want to hear those stories. "It was pathetic. Men
+tried to steal in a handful of hours all the passionate experiences that
+would have come to them beautifully and legitimately over forty years.
+It was like snatching from a bargain-counter things that you hadn't time
+to pay for. You were young and you were so soon to be snuffed out. The
+unthoughtful took desperately what they believed life owed them.
+They----"
+
+It was the turn of Sir Tobias to interrupt. "But so did the women--this
+Maisie woman, for instance. It was astounding--the women one would least
+have expected. All the desires we had caged through the centuries broke
+loose--caged with traditions, with public opinion and scriptural
+penalties." He was delighted with his image and went on to elaborate it.
+"They broke loose like wild animals from a menagerie. We'd always known
+they existed. Sometimes we'd paid surreptitious visits to them in
+books," the old eyes blinked cautiously, "the way one goes to the Zoo,
+to remind himself that there is a jungle somewhere. But we'd only
+regarded them as specimens; we'd never expected to meet them roaming
+about the streets loose or coming as domestic pets into our houses. Now
+the war's ended and the jungle's all about us; we can't get the animals
+back into their cages. Fellows like this General Braithwaite don't help
+matters by telling us that we oughtn't to want to get them back----"
+
+"Perhaps he's one of the animals," Tabs interpolated. "You couldn't
+expect him to want to be put back."
+
+"Perhaps he is. In fact that's what I've felt about him. That's what's
+helped me to make up my mind that he shall see no more of Terry." He
+reached out and tapped Tabs' hand, taking it for granted that he was his
+ally. "The sight's becoming far too normal--wild beasts everywhere,
+sunning themselves in impertinent freedom, as if they were house-cats.
+Nobody's shocked at it any longer. Terry isn't. Lloyd George isn't--at
+least he pretends he isn't for fear the wild beasts may lose him an
+election. No one makes a stand. It's left for private individuals like
+ourselves, to----"
+
+"To do what?"
+
+Sir Tobias lost his stride. He blinked reproachfully. "To get them back
+into their cages."
+
+For an instant Tabs nearly smiled. "And Adair--is he the first wild
+beast we tackle? Have we got to get him back into the cage of matrimony?
+Tell me about Adair."
+
+"It was no cage." Sir Tobias spoke almost resentfully. "His home was a
+kind of nest and Phyllis was the mother-bird."
+
+The butler had looked in several times to see whether he was free to
+clear away. For the first time Sir Tobias became aware of him pottering
+in the shadows. "Perhaps we'd better continue in my library."
+
+He pushed back his chair, dropped his napkin, groped after it feebly,
+then led the way solemnly across the hall. When he had seated himself
+before the fire and fortified his courage with a fresh cigar, he plunged
+headlong into the story of his son-in-law's delinquencies.
+
+
+IX
+
+"How a man who has a daughter of mine for his wife can find attraction
+in any other woman is more than I can fathom."
+
+"I agree with you there, sir." Tabs suddenly found himself carried off
+his feet and on the point of a confession. "If any man were to play
+false by Terry, I think--I think I'd brain him."
+
+Sir Tobias half-closed his eyes and regarded his guest with sleepy
+approval. "I somehow knew," he said slowly, "that that was how you
+felt." Then he opened his eyes wide and darted forward in his chair, as
+though to trace exactly the effect of his words. He was full of tricks
+and contradictions, obstinacies and tendernesses, this Punch-like old
+gentleman with the head of Shakespeare. "I knew that was how you felt,"
+he continued, "because you've seen all the love that has gone to their
+making. You were already a big fellow when they were still tiny. Wasn't
+it Terry who first called you Tabs because her tongue couldn't get round
+Taborley? Ah, I've been so proud of my girls! They were so little and
+white when they first came to us. They couldn't walk--not a step. One
+had to carry them everywhere. Then they began to crawl; they couldn't
+stand up right unless one gave them his hand. And then at last they
+walked. They walked by one's side at first and soon got tired. But as
+they grew stronger, they walked away and away, always getting more
+incomprehensible, till finally--it hasn't happened to Terry yet--till
+finally they met a man. Wait till you're a father, Lord Taborley; from
+the moment you give all that whiteness into another's keeping, you never
+cease to be jealous of him. He can never appreciate what a gift you have
+made him. He never saw her when she was little and helpless. She's your
+youth--she's everything vigorous that you were. The first time he
+affords you with a reason for hating him, you'll hate him like---- The
+way you said: so that you could brain him without compunction.
+Adair----I could cheerfully kill him."
+
+Tabs felt rather than heard the pent-up passion in his voice; it alarmed
+him with its sincerity. "But mayn't you be exaggerating?" he suggested.
+"Are you sure that Adair---- What I mean to say is, he may be only
+philandering. Heaps of men do that--go through all the motions of making
+fools of themselves and actually do nothing. He may be only expressing
+the discontent of the moment, the revolt from suspense, the flatness of
+quiet after terrible excitements. One didn't need to be a fighting-man
+to share those excitements. You say that Phyllis made a nest of her
+home. Perhaps he didn't like nests. It may be that that's done it. Adair
+can't have altered so radically over night; he wasn't forceful enough to
+erupt so disastrously. He was decent----"
+
+"I know nothing definite." The passion had died down. It was again an
+old and weary man who spoke. "I only know that she believes he's
+abandoning her and that it makes her wretched. She wants him back; if
+there's any way of getting him back, she must have him. I never denied
+anything to my girls. If money will persuade him, it's for you to find
+out how much. If this Lockwood woman has a price, let her state it. I'll
+spare nothing. Though everything else has lost its value, money still
+has the power to purchase. I can't buy back faithfulness and loyalty;
+but I should be able to buy the appearance of it. If I were you I would
+tackle this Lockwood woman first."
+
+He tossed the stub of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the
+grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He
+looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All
+women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes,
+and Lady Dawn."
+
+Tabs wondered what Lady Dawn had done to gain exemption from this
+sweeping accusation. "I'll see this Maisie Lockwood to-morrow," he said,
+"if you can tell me where she lives."
+
+Sir Tobias had risen and was seating himself at his desk. "I'll copy you
+out her address. I have it somewhere buried among these papers."
+
+He had hidden it so thoroughly that it took a few minutes to find. As he
+rustled sundry sheets and stooped over them round-shouldered, Tabs had
+time to reflect. Terry! Where was she? She was so little and unprotected
+and white. Would a day ever come when a man would play her false? At
+this moment he had it in his power to prevent that day from ever
+arriving.
+
+"Ah, here it is!" It was his host talking. Then the painful scratching
+of the pen commenced.
+
+"Sir Tobias, I want to speak to you about Terry." The scratching of the
+pen stopped, but the shoulders remained bowed. "This is an unfortunate
+night for me to choose to talk to you about her, but---- To tell the
+truth, I feel that if I don't speak to-night I may lose my chance."
+
+"What do you want to say about her?" The shoulders had unhunched
+themselves, but the head had not turned.
+
+"Only this, that I've loved her for a very long while and that if you
+don't think I'm too old, I should like your permission to ask her to
+marry me."
+
+Tabs thought to himself with a glow of satisfaction, "At last I've done
+it. And done it in just the way and at just the time that I'd always
+planned."
+
+He felt the pride of a man who had worked on schedule and been punctual
+to the second.
+
+Sir Tobias turned. His face was composed. It was some seconds before he
+spoke. "Of course this is no surprise to me. You _are_ old for her.
+You'll be fifty-five when she's scarcely forty." He paused and Tabs'
+heart sank. "You're older than her; but then you're wiser. She needs a
+husband who'll be wise." He sat leisurely as though he were resting from
+a long journey; then he stretched out his hand. Tabs went over and took
+it. "My dear fellow, there's only one thing I ask: make her always
+happy."
+
+The clock in the hall struck midnight. He lifted himself to his feet. "I
+had no idea how the time had flown. By the way, that's the address--the
+Maisie woman's."
+
+Tabs took it carelessly. It had become a thing of little consequence. He
+folded it away in his pocket. "And when shall I see Terry?" Of a sudden
+he felt that he must see her; see her and make sure of her without loss
+of time.
+
+"To-morrow, I suppose. Say about eleven."
+
+Tabs thought back. He had expected to receive a call from General
+Braithwaite about eleven, or at least to hear from him as soon as he had
+opened his morning's letters. Then he smiled to himself; when once he
+was engaged to Terry, what General Braithwaite did or did not do would
+be no longer of any importance.
+
+"Yes, about eleven, if it'll be agreeable to Terry."
+
+"There's not much doubt about its being agreeable to her."
+
+They passed out into the hall. While Tabs found his hat and coat, they
+spoke only in monosyllables. The servants had gone to bed. The house was
+intensely silent.
+
+They had got as far as the front-door and Sir Tobias already had his
+hand upon the latch, when a taxi purred up to the pavement and came to a
+halt immediately outside. "Some one stopping at the wrong house," he
+hazarded and threw the door wide. "See you again to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow."
+
+"At eleven," Sir Tobias reminded.
+
+"On the dot of eleven," Tabs confirmed.
+
+He passed into the cool night air, wistful with the fragrance of unseen
+flowers. His eyes were dazed for the moment by the sudden change of
+light. He made out the blurred silhouette of the taxi and faltered,
+thinking he might have a chance to hire it; then he saw that its shadowy
+occupants were climbing back into its deeper darkness. It seemed that
+Sir Tobias had been right; it had stopped at the wrong house.
+
+As he reached the corner where he turned, he glanced back. The taxi had
+not moved. Its occupants were again getting out--an officer and a girl.
+The girl was ringing the bell of the house that he had left, while, the
+officer was settling with the driver. As he joined her, the door opened,
+letting fall a shaft of light. There was a brief parley--evidently
+hurried explanations. Even at that distance he could recognize the
+indignant tones of Sir Tobias' angry voice. Then he heard the "Shish,
+Daddy!" from Terry. They entered. The door closed behind them. The taxi
+moved off in the opposite direction. Again there was silence--nothing
+but the fragrance of unseen flowers and the wistfulness of the cool,
+spring night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+ALL SORTS OF KINGDOMS
+
+
+I
+
+Tabs had dressed himself with more than ordinary care. He was rather
+amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little
+disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the
+strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick
+by negligence. It was nine o'clock when he sat down to breakfast; within
+two hours he would be seeing Terry.
+
+It was a gay morning, lacquered with sunshine; bustling breezes made
+young leaves of trees in the little Square murmurous. Ever since he had
+wakened he had been listening to the gossiping chirp of congregated
+sparrows and the rolling boom of tumultuous traffic. At intervals across
+the upland of roofs there had drifted to him the far-blown chime of
+bells and the slower music of clocks striking. It was like an orchestra
+scraping its chairs and tuning up before crashing into the overture of
+the happier world.
+
+Lying beside his plate as he came down he saw a single letter. It was
+addressed to him in an unfamiliar feminine hand. He picked it up and
+examined it carefully with the air of a connoisseur. So long as a
+letter remains unopened, especially when it is to a bachelor from an
+unknown woman, it retains an atmosphere of adventure. Up to a point he
+resented the intrusion. This morning his thoughts should have been so
+utterly Terry's. And yet he was piqued by it.
+
+He slit the envelope. The letter-head was embossed with a crest quite
+unknown to any but the most modern heraldry. He read:--
+
+   _Dear Lord Taborley:
+
+   I have been given to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to
+   make my acquaintance. If this is so, I shall be at home when you call
+   to-morrow afternoon. Asking your lenience for this liberty, I remain,
+
+   Yours very truly,
+
+   Maisie P. Lockwood._
+
+"To-morrow afternoon! Written yesterday! That means the afternoon of
+to-day.--And why the _P_--Maisie _P._ Lockwood? Is that for Pollock, her
+first husband?--Unusual! A rather naive person!" Then his face went
+blank. "She must be a thought-reader! How the dickens did she guess that
+I wanted to make her acquaintance? I scarcely knew it myself at the time
+that she wrote this letter."
+
+Crushing the scented sheet in his hand, he tossed it into the empty
+grate. "My dear lady, if you can read minds so accurately at a distance,
+be assured of this: to-day I shall be too busy with Terry to have any
+time to spare on you."
+
+The door from the narrow hall partly opened. "May I come in?"
+
+At sound of her voice, he sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair. She
+made bold to look in at him. "Why, Tabs, you _are_ a late breakfaster.
+Daddy told me you were planning to see me at eleven; to save you the
+trouble, I hurried round."
+
+Like a flurry of March sunshine, Terry entered.
+
+
+II
+
+He scarcely knew how to greet her. How does one greet a girl whose
+permission he has yet to gain, whereas her father has already consented?
+Moreover, there was his last memory of her, at midnight dodging into the
+taxi to avoid him.
+
+She spared him the trouble of deciding by holding out her hand. "I know
+that you saw me. That's what I've come to talk about."
+
+Her smile as she said it was both embarrassed and frank. She looked like
+an honest youngster who had come voluntarily to confess and, if need be,
+to be spanked. Tabs noticed that her lower lip was tremulous and that
+she was whipping up her courage. His mind went back to days when she had
+really been a child and he a man--when he had bound up cut fingers for
+her, had taken her on fishing expeditions, had taught her to cast her
+first fly and, as a reward, before the nursery lights went out, had been
+allowed to see her snuggled safe in bed. Little Terry, she had been his
+tiny sister in those days whom he had loved with no thought of
+gain--just a small companion for whom he bought exciting presents
+wherever he voyaged across the world--a doll's house in China, a quirt
+in Mexico, a scarlet riding-saddle in Persia. It hurt him to see her
+afraid of him now--afraid of him because he was about to offer her the
+greatest of all presents. Was she afraid because he was too old for her?
+
+"You don't need to talk about it unless you like," he said kindly.
+"Whatever you do or have done is right."
+
+"That's not true." She wrung her hands. "Oh, Tabs, you make it so hard
+for me when you're generous. I haven't done right. I'm in a tangle. I
+don't know whether what I'll do in the future will be any better."
+
+They were still standing just as they had confronted each other when she
+had entered. Tabs glanced round the room at the used breakfast-table,
+Maisie's crumpled petition lying in the grate, the flood of sunlight and
+the tops of the heads of passers-by stealing across the pane above the
+stiff row of tulips. His eyes went back to the flower-face of this young
+girl as she stood before him, fashionably attired and battling to
+conceal the storm of her distress. The setting struck him as inadequate
+and unprivate. The hats which stole by above the row of tulips seemed to
+belong to spies. At any moment Ann might tap and request that she be
+allowed to clear the table. He believed that in the next half-hour his
+dream of the last five years was to be shattered; otherwise, if it had
+not been to spare him, why should Terry have paid him so unconventional
+a visit, at such an unconventional hour, when by every law of usage she
+should have been waiting for him to call on her?
+
+"How about upstairs?" he suggested. "In my study we shall be sure to be
+undisturbed."
+
+"No, Tabs, dear," and the little added word touched him strangely, "I've
+got to say at once what has to be said. It's like waiting at the
+dentist's--it's the waiting that's so wearing." Her face lit up with the
+ghost of a smile. "When you've faced the real pain, it's over in a
+second."
+
+She seated herself. Reluctantly he followed her example. But when she
+was seated, she found herself at a loss for words. She drew off her
+gloves, and sat there folding and refolding them. He waited for her to
+commence; the silence was unbroken, save for the laughter of children
+playing in the Square and the occasional tapping of footsteps on the
+pavement. He leant across the table and took her hand. "Terry, after all
+these years you're not afraid of me? You don't need to be. Remember what
+you've just said: it's the waiting that's so wearing; the real pain's
+over in a second. Get the real pain over; then we'll plan for the best."
+
+She looked up gratefully with eyes that were almost clear of trouble.
+"You're gentle--so different from other men. I could almost love you; I
+do love you. But not quite in the way---- You understand. I trust you
+more than any one in the world."
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+"Ah, why?" she echoed. "That's what I wish you could tell me. Why should
+I be able to offer more to--to some one else whom I trust less? So much
+less?"
+
+"But is that love, Terry? Isn't it infatuation? Could you keep on
+offering? Loving means marrying and marrying means being together
+without respite."
+
+"I know," she nodded wisely. "I know all that. I know it so well that I
+don't want to marry him or anybody--at least, not yet."
+
+"Then why----?"
+
+She took his other hand in hers, clinging to it as if she were drowning.
+"That's the second time you've asked me why. I'll tell you. Because if I
+don't say 'Yes,' I shall lose him. Even though I may not want him
+forever, I can't bear to lose him for now. You must know the
+feeling--you who are in love. And that's why," her voice choked with the
+tears that she kept back from her eyes, "that's why I promised him last
+night."
+
+"Last night!" Tabs spoke slowly, trying to bring the finality home to
+himself.
+
+"Last night," she repeated; "the night that should have been yours. The
+night I had promised to you for years." Then, in a flame of
+self-derision, "Why don't you let go my hands and hate me, now that you
+know how treacherous I am?"
+
+"You're not treacherous." He smoothed the slim fingers as though he were
+coaxing a child. "You mustn't be unjust to yourself. When we're in love
+we're all apt to be unjust; I was yesterday, to this man. Injustice,
+whether to oneself or to some one else, works most of our mischief; one
+never knows where it ends. We can't control our hearts, Terry; you've
+tried. You've tried to make your heart love me and it's refused. Don't
+be miserable because of it; you couldn't help that. And this man--he's a
+fine fellow. I always knew he was a fine fellow, until seeing him with
+you yesterday made me jealous and blinded my eyes. He's a finer fellow
+than ever now. You couldn't love him if he weren't."
+
+She wasn't giving him the enthusiastic attention that his praise
+deserved. Somewhere at the back of her mind there lay a doubt with which
+she wrestled while he strove to comfort her. He believed that he had
+guessed her doubt. "As for not trusting him the way you trust me," he
+explained, "that's natural. We know the whole of each other's lives; our
+families are the same kind of families and we share the same kind of
+friends. Whereas----"
+
+"Whereas," she broke in, "I know nothing about his past, where he lived,
+who his people were or anything. I know nothing that he enjoyed or
+laughed at before I saw him lying quietly in our hospital-ward in
+France. I've questioned him as much as I dared; but always he grows
+vague. There's something that he's hiding from me. I only gathered that
+he had known you from the way he pricked up and listened whenever your
+name was mentioned. That was why, without warning either of you,
+I----You see, I had to find out. And then, when he met you face to face
+he--he lied."
+
+"Hush, Terry."
+
+"But he did. He lied."
+
+She had withdrawn her hands from his and sat back eyeing him with a
+clear look of challenge. Tabs was at a loss to explain her change of
+attitude. Yesterday she had been all for defending this man. What did
+she gain by accusing him now that she was engaged to him? In any case
+she had employed too ugly a word. And here was a strange state of
+affairs, that it should be left to him to defend his successful rival.
+
+"A man is not compelled to know another man unless he likes," he said
+cautiously. "They may have met some time in the past under unfortunate
+circumstances--circumstances which are embarrassing to remember. The man
+to whom that memory is a disadvantage has a right to protect himself by
+sweeping it clean from his mind."
+
+"But not to lie about it to the girl he says he loves," she declared.
+"There can be only one motive for such a denial: that it covers up
+something which is dishonorable."
+
+"But there never was anything dishonorable. That I swear."
+
+"Then he believes that I would think it dishonorable," she insisted;
+"which means that he doesn't trust me. That's the reason I can't trust
+him in return. If we don't trust each other now, how can we hope that
+things would be better if we married?"
+
+Her logic was unanswerable, but she was arguing on the wrong side. At
+what was she driving? He gave it up. Was she wanting him to tell her
+where and when he and her future husband had met? The eagerness of her
+silence seemed to demand as much. But there are rules to every game. No
+pressure that she could bring to bear could make him tell her that. She
+recognized those rules by refraining from putting her request into
+words.
+
+It was he who broke the silence. His tones were puzzled. "You come to me
+on the morning that I had hoped to be engaged to you myself and you
+confide all these secrets about this other man. You insist that neither
+of you trusts the other and that you could find no happiness in
+marriage. Then why, in heaven's name, Terry, did you pledge yourself to
+him last night?"
+
+"The fear of losing him----" Her face quivered pitifully. She was on the
+verge of weeping. "He overheard what Daddy said about forbidding him the
+house. It seemed our last time together. I couldn't bear that it should
+be the last. It was to keep him near me for just a little longer that
+I----"
+
+Tabs rose and limped to the window. He dared not let himself go, the way
+his instincts urged. They might carry him too far. She looked so much
+like the little girl in short skirts he had known, as she sat there
+bravely trying not to cry. He wanted to take her on his knees, as in the
+old days. Now that she loved another man, he was not allowed to show her
+comfort in that way any longer. That she should run to him for help and
+yet love some one else, wounded his pride. What was the matter with him
+that he had failed to stir her passion? Why could he appeal only to her
+helplessness?
+
+Inside the communal garden, with its surrounding railings and locked
+gates, nurses in uniforms were pushing prams. Toddlers were tossing a
+ball across the lawn and tottering after it with excited shouts. Beneath
+a tree in the clear sunshine a young mother sat sewing. Other men's
+women! Other men's babies! He would have to set out in search of his
+kingdom afresh; all his old quests had been mistaken. But he was older
+now and lame; he lacked the energy for a new journey. It seemed to him
+that he would be alone and unwanted always.
+
+A telegraph-girl was mounting the steps. He heard the bell ring without
+interest. Gazing out, with his back towards Terry, he put to her what he
+intended should be his final question. "You promised him last
+night--then why did you hurry round to me this morning?"
+
+Her dress rustled and her breathing quickened. "Because----" she
+commenced and failed. He did not turn his head. She tried again in a
+lower voice, "Because I want you to get my promise back."
+
+He swung round and crossed to where she was still sitting. With his
+hands resting lightly on her shoulders, he stared down at her golden
+head. "But, Terry dear, why? Look at me. You must tell me."
+
+She did not look at him. "I'm frightened. Nobody knows as yet; so before
+they know---- Oh, Tabs, you're so clever; you can do anything." And then
+she repeated whimperingly, like a child over a broken toy, "I want you
+to get my promise back."
+
+"Listen to me, Terry dearest," he spoke coaxingly, "don't be a baby.
+What is it that you're asking me to do? Is it to see him for you and to
+break the news that you've altered your mind over night. You know he'll
+want reasons. What shall I tell----?"
+
+She lifted her head, stretching back her throat so that all her face
+looked up at him. "If you'll still have me----" His hands on her
+shoulders tightened. "Say that you still want me, Tabs." For answer his
+head slowly nodded, but his eyes never left her eyes. "Tell him that I'm
+engaged to you, instead."
+
+In the tumult of surprised desire he bent over her, but he got no
+further, for a tap fell on the panel of the door and the handle turned.
+He drew himself upright quickly and stepped back aloofly. "What is it?"
+
+"A telegram, your Lordship." Ann entered. "I told the girl to wait in
+case there was an answer."
+
+He tore it open, glanced through it and handed it to Terry. To Ann he
+said, "There won't be any answer."
+
+Terry read, "_Shall be delighted to have you lunch with me to-day Savoy
+Hotel one o'clock. Braithwaite._" She examined the address and looked up
+startled, "But it's to you. It's--it's as though he knew we were
+together. What made him send it?"
+
+When Tabs answered there was no echo of her excitement in his voice. "I
+wrote him yesterday asking him to call here. Evidently he preferred a
+more public place."
+
+She glanced at him shrewdly. "Why did you write him? You must have done
+that between leaving me and coming to our house to dine. I know it's no
+good my asking you." Her last words were more of a question than an
+assertion. "I can see that it's no good my asking you." "No, Terry, it's
+no good. Braithwaite's past is his own secret. But I can pledge you my
+word that it bears no stain."
+
+"Then why shouldn't he----?" She changed her question. "Shall you meet
+him to-day at lunch?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Shall you tell him what we've----?"
+
+"Not all of it, Terry."
+
+"Why not all of it? Which part are you going to leave out?"
+
+He came again to where she sat and stood gazing down on her. "Terry, why
+do you want me to tell him? Why can't you tell him yourself? It would be
+kinder."
+
+"Because---- Oh, Tabs, you do want me, don't you? Because I daren't
+trust myself to see him."
+
+"And so you want me to tell him we're engaged because you daren't trust
+yourself to tell him! Isn't that it?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And you daren't trust yourself to tell him because the moment you saw
+him you would fall again under his spell?"
+
+This time she didn't nod, but her eyes gave assent.
+
+"And what does that mean, little Terry? Whether you call it love or
+fascination, it means that even though you do not see him, your heart is
+his at present. It means that against your will he's infinitely more to
+you than I am. It means that you only ask me to become engaged to you
+in order that you may be strong to break his spell. It doesn't mean that
+I will be anything more to you to-morrow than I was last night, when you
+gave him your pledge."
+
+She tried to speak, but he halted her words. "I'm older than you are.
+Have you thought of that? I'm not the man I was; I'm lame. You can like
+me as a friend and believe me indispensable; but, if I were your
+husband, fifteen years from now when you're only the age I am
+to-day----Have you considered that? My dear, I love you so well, that
+I'll never let you tie yourself to me, till you're as certain that you
+can't risk meeting me without loving me as you're certain at this moment
+that you daren't risk meeting this other man. When you can do that----"
+
+The tenderness in his eyes hurt her. "Directly I can do that, I'll tell
+you, Tabs. And--and I believe I could almost tell you now."
+
+"If you can now," he said, "there's a test. Will you take my place at
+lunch and tell Braithwaite?"
+
+She shrank, and tried to smile, and shook her head.
+
+"Then it'll be I who'll have to do it." He tried to assume a cheerful
+manner. "But I can't give him your reason about being engaged to me. If
+it were true, which it isn't, it wouldn't be generous. If I carry any
+message, the only honorable thing for me to do is to inform him of
+everything."
+
+"Of everything?" she questioned.
+
+"Yes, of everything. I must tell him where the trouble lies and give
+him his chance to be frank with you. Only when that is done, shall I be
+free to do my utmost to win you for myself."
+
+She took his hands and drew herself up to him. "Do what you like, Tabs.
+As long as I know that I've not lost you," her voice became small and
+almost happy, "I'm content."
+
+She was tiptoeing against him. The next thing he knew he was kissing her
+warm red mouth.
+
+
+III
+
+She was gone. He had watched her from the steps until she had reached
+the end of the Square where the swirl of passing traffic had engulfed
+her. At the last moment she had looked back and smiled. For some minutes
+after she had vanished, he had stood there recalling the way in which
+her brave little figure had tripped out of sight among the blustering
+March sunshine and shadows. A child, he thought, impulsive and lacking
+in perspective, with a child's alacrity for drying its tears and
+believing in a future happiness. How would she regard this morning years
+hence in the after-glow of experience? Would she find nothing in its
+calamities but foolishness? And what relation would he himself bear to
+her when she had arrived at that stoical calm?
+
+He reentered the house. In the room where they had been together the
+fragrance of her presence still lingered. The chair was pushed back,
+just as she had risen from it to lift her warm, red lips to his. How
+smooth they were! Again like a child's! Everything about her was young
+and undeveloped. She had kissed simply and gratefully, with none of the
+blundering, sweet surrender with which a woman clings to her lover. If
+she had ever kissed Braithwaite, she had not kissed him like that.
+
+And then Tabs was overcome with a reluctant remorse, which was tinged
+with a shameful sense of triumph. She had offered him her lips in
+gratitude; they had kindled in him the flames of passion. For the moment
+he had devoured her with kisses--her eyes, lips, cheeks and hair.
+
+If he were to keep himself in hand, he must fill his days with
+interests--_new_ interests. He must move among people and normalize
+himself. He must fight against the melancholy of his obsession. His eyes
+chanced to rest on the crumpled sheet of scented note-paper tossed into
+the empty grate. Stooping, he picked it up and smoothed it out. This
+problem of Maisie would at least divert him--besides, he had promised to
+do what he could for Adair. He noted the Chelsea address and reread the
+contents with its sly humility and hint of coquetry: "I have been given
+to understand that you are exceedingly anxious to make my acquaintance.
+If this is so, I shall be at home when you call to-morrow afternoon."
+
+She had been quite certain that he would call when she wrote those
+words. They had all the assurance of one who was fully persuaded of her
+own powers of charm and beauty.
+
+"Again, Maisie P.," he apostrophized her, "I'm bound to acknowledge that
+you know more about me than I know about myself. I didn't know that I
+wanted to make your acquaintance at the time when you were writing this
+letter. I was quite sure that I wasn't going to call upon you when I
+read it. In both cases you were the better informed, for I shall be with
+you as soon as I've fulfilled my Savoy engagement."
+
+An hour later, as he was on his way out, he found Ann waiting for him at
+the foot of the stairs.
+
+"I don't want to bother your Lordship."
+
+"You're not bothering me. What is it?"
+
+"I've been thinking that if I wrote the particulars down myself----"
+
+"The particulars! What particulars?"
+
+"About Braithwaite, sir. There were things you wouldn't know or might
+leave out. So I thought that if I stated my case myself, it might make
+things more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War Office."
+
+"It might. Are those the particulars you have in your hand?"
+
+"Yes, sir. But they're kind of private. I shouldn't like them to be read
+by just anybody. That's why---- Perhaps, if your Lordship was seeing
+your friend----"
+
+"As it happens," Tabs spoke with a careless air, "I shall be lunching
+with him to-day. I can deliver your letter direct."
+
+"Your Lordship is very kind."
+
+"Not in the least, Ann. And remember, whatever happens, that Braithwaite
+was brave and he'd expect you to be brave. If you're not---- D'you know
+what you'll do? Whether he's alive or dead, you'll let him down."
+
+Her head lifted proudly, despite the tears in her eyes. "No fear of
+that, sir. I'll never let my man down."
+
+"That's the way to talk. And don't worry too much. You know the saying
+about night always being blackest at the hour before the dawn? If we'd
+only all believe that and cheer up----"
+
+He let himself out. As he walked down the Square he tried to stroll
+jauntily; probably Ann was watching.
+
+"I could do worse than live up to that advice myself," he thought. Then,
+"And so I will, by the Lord Harry."
+
+
+IV
+
+As he passed through the doors into the Savoy, he consulted his watch;
+he was five minutes late. He halted in the middle of the foyer, gazing
+round. There was the usual collection of officers on leave or out of
+hospital, British, Overseas, American, all of them out for a good time
+and debonair. There were the usual rows of expectant girls, wondering
+whether their men had forgotten the appointment or whether the fault was
+theirs in mistaking the place of rendezvous. Here and there through the
+crowd worried and assertive literary individuals wandered, searching for
+invariably unpunctual publishers. As though Time pressed behind them
+with his scythe, hatchet-faced journalists from Fleet Street were making
+a bee-line for the restaurant. In contrast to this perfervid haste,
+self-possessed young queens of the footlights lolled with their
+admirers, importantly believing they were recognized. All the medley of
+London as it used to be, is and will be again, was there; but nowhere
+could Tabs descry a General's uniform.
+
+He went to the desk to enquire whether there was any message for him. At
+mention of the General his enquiry was received with marked respect.
+Yes, General Braithwaite lived there. No message had been left, but he
+might be in his room. While they were telephoning and he was waiting,
+Tabs remembered and smiled at remembering. Under quite other
+circumstances, on a former occasion, he and Braithwaite had stayed there
+together. The clerk interrupted his reflections. "The General's not in
+his room---- Ah, here he comes, your Lordship."
+
+Tabs turned quickly and looked in vain at first. He did not become aware
+of his host till he was standing almost at his elbow. Then he held out
+his hand, "How are you, General? You must pardon me for not having
+picked you out at once. Like all of us, you look different in mufti."
+
+"More like the old Braithwaite your Lordship used to know?" The General
+smiled. "Well, I have to thank that experience for this at least--that I
+know where to find the proper tailors. How about lunch? Are you ready?"
+
+Against a window looking out on the Embankment, one of the best tables
+had been reserved--a further proof of the new esteem in which
+Braithwaite was held. The head-waiter hurried up immediately to advise
+what he should eat and passed on his orders to subordinates with as much
+solemnity as if they had been the details for an offensive. "Yes, my
+General." "No, my General." When everything had been chosen and there
+was nothing to do but wait for the first dish to be served, Braithwaite
+leaned across to Tabs, "Your Lordship is amused. I don't blame you."
+
+Tabs drew out his case and offered him a cigarette. "I'll make a bargain
+with you, sir. Let's cut out the unfriendly formalities. I'll call you
+Braithwaite if you'll call me Taborley."
+
+The General blew a puff of smoke into the air and watched it disappear
+before he answered. In civilian clothes he bore a more distinct
+resemblance to the man he had been; and yet the resemblance only served
+to emphasize the change that had taken place in him. The old Braithwaite
+had been a slight-built, gentle creature, loyal to the point of
+self-effacement, soft-spoken and dependent on the appreciation of a
+master for his happiness. The new Braithwaite both in body and character
+had hardened. His gray eyes had concentrated into command. His
+clean-shaven cheeks and small military mustache gave him an expression
+which was tolerantly ironic. The moment you saw him, you knew beyond
+question that he was ruthlessly aware of what he wanted out of life. He
+was a sword which had lain hidden in its scabbard and was now withdrawn,
+glistening, intimidating and fiercely pointed.
+
+Tabs compared his forceful appearance with his own, where in a mirror
+their reflections sat facing each other. There was little to choose
+between them in outward gentility, despite the immense disparity of
+their chances. There was no fault to find; everything about Braithwaite
+bespoke confidence and refinement--his neatly brushed chestnut hair, his
+well-cut gray tweeds, his black, woven tie with the horse-shoe scarf-pin
+of diamonds, his fine white teeth, his trim mustache. He looked a man of
+iron will and unswerving decision, destined from birth to take control
+of crises and to shoulder responsibilities. As a last humanizing touch,
+there was a hint of cavalier devilment about him, of the gambler who was
+also a sportsman.
+
+The puff of smoke had faded. The General's eyes came back with a twinkle
+to his guest. "You're right. Between us this 'Your Lordship and General'
+business would grow tiresome. I never thought the day would come when
+I'd call you Taborley, however. As for myself, plain Braithwaite's a
+little reminiscent---- Still, we'll consider that part of our compact
+settled. And now, what?"
+
+"Do we need to hurry matters?" Tabs questioned. "This isn't a military
+court of enquiry. It wasn't my idea to meet you as though we were
+maintaining an armed neutrality. We----"
+
+"But aren't we?" Braithwaite interposed with an air of amused
+good-humor. Then he lowered his voice, "When you parted from me I was
+your valet. You didn't hear from me for the best part of four years and
+believed me dead. You came back to find that I was your superior officer
+and had tangled things up for you pretty badly. You've threatened me
+with your knowledge of a previous love-affair and you have it in your
+power to tangle up my future in return. Under the circumstances what
+else is possible but an armed neutrality?"
+
+"Let me state the case from another and, I think, a juster angle." Tabs
+paused to knock the ash from his cigarette. "Before the war you were my
+valet whom I had always treated as my friend. I believe at that time, if
+it had come to the show down, you were the man who was closest to my
+affections and whom I trusted most in all the world. I'm trying to speak
+soberly, Braithwaite, without any color of exaggeration. We'd been in
+many tight corners together--perhaps the tightest was when they tried to
+execute us in Mexico. Anyway, we'd always played the game by each other.
+In 1914 we both joined in the ranks; in 1918 you finished up as a
+General, while I was a first lieutenant. There's only one way to account
+for that: up to 1914 you'd never had your chance; when your chance came,
+you proved yourself the better man. In a way, though it's difficult for
+me to confess it, I can understand and sympathize with Terry's
+preference. Women admire bravery and merit. Ann and I admired them in
+you; we knew they were there before the war made them public."
+
+He took a breath while he watched what effect the mention of Ann's name
+had had. The General's expression from being interested and generous had
+grown suddenly obstinate and set. Tabs hurried on. "So I can understand
+Terry's preference. And yet, as you've owned, despite your advantages, I
+hold the winning card. I can joker all your aces by telling--well, the
+things to which you have referred." He leant forward across the table.
+"I don't want to have to tell. To do that I should have to make myself
+still more inferior to you than you have proved me to be in the hardest
+of all tests. There's only one occasion that would compel----"
+
+"And that?" the General enquired coldly.
+
+Before Tabs could answer, a Major in the Guards who was passing had
+halted. "Hullo, sir!" he exclaimed, addressing Braithwaite. "I was
+intending to hunt you up. I've heard a rumor about your transferring to
+the Regulars. Why don't you have a shot at my outfit?"
+
+Braithwaite introduced Lord Taborley perfunctorily, then returned to his
+friend's question. "A shot at your outfit! It's too expensive. I've got
+to make money. Besides, to become a Regular I'd have to sink my rank and
+live on my pay at that. I can't afford it. To tell the truth, I'm
+already out of the Army. I handed over the keys of my desk at the War
+Office this morning. That phase is ended."
+
+"You did! Well, if you've got something better----" The Guardsman nodded
+assent to a signaled question from a companion at another table. "Don't
+lose touch with your old set, sir," he added cheerfully as he moved
+away. "Send us the map-location of your next dug-out."
+
+The lunch arrived. Dishes were obsequiously offered for inspection and
+approval. While the meal was being served, there was no opportunity for
+private conversation. Tabs was pondering one fact which he had
+overheard. "So, he, too, was demobbed yesterday! That's why he took his
+last chance to become engaged. The glamour of a uniform---- And to-day
+he's back where he started. Poor chap!"
+
+The over-zealous waiter had at last moved out of range. Braithwaite
+lifted up his dagger gaze. "And what is that occasion--the one occasion
+which would compel you to publish my past? Perhaps I can save you the
+trouble of putting it into words. You mean if I dared to become engaged
+to Terry Beddow? I am engaged to her. I dared last night; so I must
+leave you to do your worst."
+
+He smiled with quiet triumph; gradually his smile faded into puzzlement.
+"You don't seem surprised."
+
+"I'm not," said Tabs. "Why should I be? I myself supposed, that I was
+engaged to her last night."
+
+It was Braithwaite who showed amazement. "You! Last night!"
+
+"Yes, I, last night."
+
+Braithwaite set down his knife and fork. The bleak look came into his
+eyes that had given him the nickname at the Front of "Steely Jack." He
+was silent for a full five seconds; then he said, "Lord Taborley, you're
+a man of your word, but I find it difficult to believe that."
+
+Tabs' voice was both quiet and kindly when he replied, "You'll find it
+difficult to believe a good many things before I've ended. Evidently
+Terry never told you that for over four years she and I had had an
+understanding that, when peace came, if I survived, we would be married.
+Last night, while you were proposing to her, I was asking her father's
+consent. While I was gaining his consent, you were being accepted."
+
+The blank look of astonishment which had overspread the General's face,
+quickly gave way to one of generous compassion. "On my word of honor,
+Lord Taborley, I never knew that. I thought--please forgive me--that you
+were interfering merely out of snobbishness. I ought to have known
+better. All my dealings with you should have---- I begin to understand."
+
+Tabs' old sense of friendship for the man--his man--was coming back.
+"You begin," he said, "but you don't fully understand. You and I have to
+come down to earth. Not unnaturally up till now you've chosen to treat
+me as an enemy. Perhaps I was when I sent you those two letters
+yesterday. But I'm not now. I, too, am learning. There was a coster who
+let me off arrest. Did I tell you about him? I forget. The reason he
+gave taught me a lot, 'You and me was pals out there.' And you and I
+were pals out there, Braithwaite--not master and man or junior and
+senior officer. It would be a burning shame if, now that the war's
+ended, we should fall to squabbling among ourselves."
+
+"And yet the fact remains," said Braithwaite, "that I, who used to be
+your servant, have cut you out of Terry. How are we going to remain pals
+in a case like that?"
+
+Tabs flinched at the bluntness of the words, "cut you out of Terry." For
+a moment he felt inclined to say right out, "You're mistaken. She's sent
+me to get her promise back." Instead he said, "How are we going to
+remain pals! That's what I'm here to talk about. I've made up my mind
+how I'm going to act. It's about you that I'm concerned. I'm jealous for
+you, Braithwaite. I'm proud of the fact that, whatever you are to-day,
+you were once my man--my man in the old clan sense. I want to see you
+carry yourself as bravely in your new fight as you did in the one that's
+ended. I think of the two this peace fight will be the more difficult
+test, especially for men like yourself. I lost caste during the war,
+while for you it proved a social opportunity. Now that we're back at
+peace, the process is likely to be reversed. The qualities which gave
+you high rank in a world at war won't fetch the same market value.
+You'll have to fight afresh--only this time it'll be against the
+temptation to sink below your own high standards through bitterness. In
+a General's uniform you could go anywhere. It was your passport. No one
+made enquiries. Once you're demobilized, the world asks for other
+credentials--credentials as to your profession, bank-account, friends,
+birth. What I'm trying to say is this: there's nothing dishonorable in
+your past save your own assumption that it was dishonorable. And I want
+to assure you that it isn't my purpose to drag you down. I couldn't.
+There's only one man who can do that--yourself. But _you_ can drag
+yourself below anything that you were if you go on refusing to play
+fair."
+
+Braithwaite's face went white beneath its tan. He fell to stroking his
+mustache. "You take a lot upon yourself. It's the first time that I've
+ever been accused of not playing fair."
+
+"But _I_ accuse you of it." Tabs spoke with an equal quietness. To any
+one watching they would have appeared to be two handsome men of the
+soldier type engaged in desultory conversation. "I have to accuse you of
+it. I want you to glance through this before you answer me."
+
+He drew from his pocket and passed across the letter which Ann had given
+him that morning--the letter which, to quote her words, "Might make
+things seem more sensible-like to your Lordship's friend at the War
+Office." It was unaddressed, but as Braithwaite's eye fell on the
+sprawling handwriting of the contents, the deep flush which crept across
+his face betrayed the fact that it was recognized. He commenced to read
+the sheet with a studied carelessness; as he proceeded, the carelessness
+gave way to a troubled frown. For some time after he had finished, he
+sat motionless. When he looked up, his mood was contemptuous. "So this
+is your price?"
+
+"No price was mentioned."
+
+"But it was implied. You tell me that, at the time that I was being
+accepted, you yourself were hoping to be engaged to Miss Beddow; then
+you hand me this letter. What do you suppose I infer? What would any man
+infer? That your promise to keep my existence a secret from Ann is
+conditional on the breaking of my engagement with Miss Beddow."
+
+"Handing you Ann's letter wouldn't do that. Your engagement with Miss
+Beddow is already broken."
+
+Braithwaite jerked his chair back and stared. Then the audacity of such
+an assertion touched his sense of humor. He fell to laughing. "That at
+least is an invention."
+
+Tabs showed no resentment. There was something disturbingly convincing
+about his self-possession. "Didn't I tell you," he asked patiently,
+"that you'd find it difficult to believe a good many things before I had
+ended? I had an appointment to see Miss Beddow at her father's house
+this morning at eleven. Before I'd finished breakfast she was visiting
+me instead. She had called to make two requests: that I would see you
+to-day and get her promise back, and that I'd become engaged to her
+myself."
+
+Braithwaite lurched forward, folding his arms on the table. His voice
+was thick with passion when he spoke. "What you tell me sounds mad; but
+you'd gain nothing by telling it if it were not true."
+
+"Nothing," Tabs confirmed.
+
+"No, nothing. If it weren't true, I could go to the telephone and
+disprove your falsehood inside of ten minutes."
+
+"You could."
+
+"Then it is true--which means that you've ousted me. And that's why you
+can afford to be so calm and Christ-like. I've been wondering how you'd
+contrived this Galilean display of charity."
+
+"You've not heard me out." Tabs still spoke with friendliness. "While we
+were together your telegram arrived and I agreed to be the bearer of her
+message. But as for her second request, that I should become engaged to
+her, I refused that point-blank."
+
+"You what?" The anger cleared from Braithwaite's face, leaving the
+chalky mask of a tragic harlequin. When he spoke again it was humbly.
+"You can't blame me for not believing you. You jump about. You say
+several things which seem to point to a definite conclusion and then at
+the last moment you change it. I don't know whether you do it to amuse
+yourself at my expense or whether it's merely the way your mind works.
+At any rate, it's cruel--this cat and mouse game. I wish you'd be
+direct."
+
+"That's what I wish to be. You could help me if you'd ask questions."
+
+Braithwaite sighed, wearied beyond endurance. He was becoming less like
+the General and more like the old dependent Braithwaite every second.
+"You wanted to marry her last night, only to find she'd promised herself
+to me already. Then she comes to you this morning, offering herself, and
+you refuse her. That doesn't make sense. Why did you refuse her?"
+
+"Because if I'd taken her at her word, I shouldn't have been playing
+fair."
+
+At the recurrence of that phrase "playing fair," a momentary annoyance
+crept into Braithwaite's eyes. "I've always heard," he commenced, "that
+in love and war----"
+
+"Everything's fair," Tabs ended his quotation. "Well, in this case, it
+isn't. It was because she realized, after she'd promised herself to you,
+that in love everything isn't fair, that she asked me to get her promise
+back."
+
+"You mean as regards yourself? She'd begun to feel that she wasn't
+treating you handsomely?"
+
+"I don't mean as regards myself. You were the cause of her change of
+mind."
+
+"I!" Braithwaite's bewilderment made him hostile. "How could I have
+caused her to change her mind? I parted with her after midnight; it must
+have been shortly after nine that she was seeing you. I held no
+communication with her in any shape or form during the eight or nine
+hours that elapsed."
+
+"Nevertheless, you were the cause. She realized in the meanwhile that in
+love everything isn't fair. It isn't fair to ignore a young girl's
+happiness in order to win her hand. You had done that; though she has no
+proofs, instinctively she feels it."
+
+Braithwaite shook his head and thrust himself back with the gesture of a
+man whose patience is completely at an end. "I haven't the vaguest idea
+what you're hinting at."
+
+"Then I'll be brutally explicit. You've at no time told her who you were
+or where you came from before you made a name for yourself. You've
+evaded all her questions. You told a palpable falsehood in her presence
+when you insisted that you had never known me. You're perfectly aware
+that, if you approached her father, all the facts about your past, which
+you're suppressing, would most certainly come out. Your courting has
+been clandestine, behind the back of her family. It seems perfectly
+obvious that you're trying to lure her into a runaway match. She has
+grounds for believing that you do not trust her and, because of that,
+although you fascinate her, she finds it impossible to trust you in
+return. She trusts you so little that she did not dare to risk facing
+you and sent me in her stead. She's so sure that a marriage with you
+would be unfortunate that, in order to save herself from it, she's
+willing to become engaged to me, whom she loves only as a friend. You'll
+wonder why I tell you all this. It's because I want her to be happy. If
+you really are the man for her, she must have you. But you'll never have
+the remotest chance of winning her unless you make a clean breast----"
+
+"If I did my chances would be at an end."
+
+"If you believe that," Tabs sought for the most lenient words, "you know
+what you're doing. You'd despise to cheat at cards, but you don't mind
+cheating the woman whom you profess to love best.--And then there's
+Ann."
+
+"I'd rather not discuss Ann." The abrupt pain in Braithwaite's tone
+betrayed the grumbling ache of an old wound. "I think even you will
+grant that there are some things in a man's heart which are privately
+sacred. Ann lies entirely outside the bounds of all justifiable
+interference on your part."
+
+It took an effort for Tabs to bring himself to break down the barrier of
+reticence which this depth of feeling had imposed. "I'm sorry, General,
+but I can't agree with you." He waited for the expected protest. When it
+did not come, he carried on reluctantly, "I have a high regard for Ann.
+She's one of my household and that makes me responsible for her to an
+extent. I can't allow her to be tortured any longer with suspense--she's
+had more than three years of this horrid nightmare, hovering between
+hope and dread. Every day of the three years has been unnecessary.
+Whether you break or keep your promise to her is your concern. Whether
+she takes action against you when she knows the truth, is hers. But she
+has the right to know. To see that she knows comes within the bounds of
+any decent man's justifiable interference. One of us must tell her; the
+news would come with less grace from myself. But for you to wriggle out
+of your dilemma with silence, while she goes on breaking her heart, is
+cowardly--just as cowardly as if you'd deserted in the face of the
+enemy. I've no doubt you've sentenced more than one poor wretch to be
+shot at sunrise for doing that."
+
+Tabs pulled out his watch. He had said everything. So far as he was
+concerned the conversation was at an end. It was nearly three o'clock.
+Time had traveled quickly. He was surprised at the lateness of the hour.
+Now that his intentness was relaxed, he let his gaze wander. The room
+was nearly empty. Most of the gay little ladies who had chattered across
+the tables to their recently recovered lovers or husbands, had tripped
+away to continue their spree of celebration at a matinee or in an orgy
+of shopping. Those who were left were putting on their wraps or sipping
+the last of their coffee under the reproachful eyes of waiters. Across
+the window in a brown-gray streak flowed the wind-flecked highway of the
+Thames.
+
+Braithwaite beckoned for his bill. After the humiliation of what had
+been said it irked Tabs to have to see him pay it. The trend of the
+conversation had helped to strip him of the arrogance of his military
+honors. The mercenary subserviency of the man who handed him his
+account, seemed to arouse him to the landslide that had taken place in
+his self-esteem. He made a conscious effort to pull himself together.
+While he waited for his change, he broke the silence.
+
+"I believe you meant well by coming here. It would be foolish for me to
+pretend that I'm altogether grateful--grateful for your way of
+expressing most of the things that we've discussed together. At the same
+time, Lord Taborley, I owe you an apology if at any point I've misjudged
+your intentions. As regards Ann, you err in justice when you hold me
+accountable for all the causes of her tragedy. Both she and I, and Miss
+Beddow for the matter of that, are the victims of circumstances. It's
+scarcely my fault that I've outgrown Ann; I'm no more to blame for that
+than Terry is for having fallen in love with a man who was your servant.
+_I_ didn't make the war. _I_ didn't promote myself from a valet to a
+General. _I_ didn't even consciously allure Terry. She fascinates me as
+much as I fascinate her: I fought against her fascination at first.--But
+to get back to Ann, I let her slip out of my life because I wanted to
+spare her. I thought it would be easier for her to believe me dead than
+to be told that she was--was discarded. I couldn't be expected to
+foresee that she would display this awkward loyalty of hoping. I didn't
+know what had happened to her. She's a good-looking girl; I'd pictured
+her as married to a man of her own class, until you flung this
+bombshell at me. I'm not callous. Don't misapprehend me. I can still
+think of her with tenderness. But as for ever treating her again as my
+equal---- It would be as impossible for me to resume the old relations
+with her as it would be for your Lordship to commence them." He waited
+for some word of criticism or encouragement. When Tabs only nodded
+non-committally, he proceeded more slowly. "I don't know what I'm going
+to do. I'm fully aware, now that the war is ended, that as a has-been
+General who rose from the ranks, I have no marketable value. I have no
+specialized training to offer to a commercial world which calls for
+experts. The only knowledge that I have to sell is the old knowledge
+that you used to purchase. My house of cards has collapsed. To be
+unwisely frank, my financial resources are limited to little more than
+my war-gratuity."
+
+"And yet you're anxious to marry Terry," Tabs suggested; "to marry her
+without letting her know about any of these handicaps of which she would
+have to share the penalty."
+
+Braithwaite's head went up with a soldierly jerk. The bleak look came
+into his eyes. He was "Steely Jack" at that moment. "I have the
+confidence to believe," he said proudly, "that I shall go as far in
+peace as I did in war. Never to own that you're beaten, never to squeal
+when you're hurt, never to retreat from a position when once it has been
+captured must count back here for as much as it did out there. In France
+I had the reputation for never losing an inch of trench. I don't intend
+to lose an inch of trench now. My back is to the wall. For the present
+I can't afford to do anything gratuitously charitable; by the smallest
+waste of energy I may defeat myself. To hold any correspondence with Ann
+at this moment might mean the slamming in my own face of every door of
+opportunity. I'll do my stretcher-bearing when I've won; not a second
+before."
+
+Against his will, while he listened, the unscrupulous valor of the man
+stirred Tabs to admiration. Only the after-event could prove whether
+this verbal display of fireworks was only bombast. "And so that's your
+ultimatum?" he asked with disquieting sanity.
+
+"Yes, if that's what you call it."
+
+The waiter had returned with the receipted bill. Braithwaite was picking
+up the change. Not looking at Tabs he said, "A few minutes ago you were
+consulting your watch. I believe you have an engagement."
+
+"I have. But if we can arrive at any more definite conclusion by talking
+longer, I'll skip it. It's of no importance."
+
+Braithwaite glanced up. "Not to you, perhaps; but it may be to her."
+
+With that he commenced to lead the way out, choosing a winding path
+through the maze of tables. Not until they were traversing the great
+gold and crimson lounge, with its ornate furnishings, did Tabs catch up
+with him to ask his question. "How did you know about my engagement and
+whether it was important or not?"
+
+Braithwaite answered carelessly, "It's with Maisie, isn't it? I heard
+Terry suggest to her that she should make it. She's a nice little woman.
+I shouldn't like to be the cause of her disappointment. She was looking
+forward----" The rest was lost as a flunkey requested the registered
+number of whatever Tabs had left in the cloak-room.
+
+While they waited for the hat and cane to be produced, Tabs made a last
+attempt to persuade the General to commit himself to some promised
+course of action. "No one would be more pleased to see you succeed than
+myself. I'm not trying to hamper you. Neither is Terry; but she insists
+that unless things are to terminate between you, she must know the
+truth. Frankness with Terry necessitates frankness with Ann. You'll
+never succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your
+honor solvent. Ann's beneath you, you say--that's why you've outgrown
+her. It's not my business to dispute the fact. I didn't want to
+introduce the class view of things; but, by the same showing, you're
+beneath Terry. She's young to-day: through a lifetime she might outgrow
+_you_. She's as much your social superior as you claim to be Ann's.
+You've discarded Ann on the ground of inequality of rank. In your case
+Terry's family have a perfect right to raise the same objection."
+
+"Not at all." The answer came like the crack of a whip. Braithwaite drew
+himself up with the pride of one who had moved men like pawns across the
+checker-board of life and death. "The two cases afford no parallel. Ann
+and Terry have remained in the social stations to which they were born,
+while I--I stand outside all such ready-made, rule of thumb
+classifications. By sheer impetus of personality I have lifted myself
+out of the rut, so that not even you, with all your omniscience, dare
+prophesy how far I am going or where I shall end."
+
+It was plain that further talk would be useless. "I'm afraid I must be
+going," Tabs said. "I wish you very good luck. I hope we part friends.
+And of course you understand that I now consider myself entirely free to
+do my utmost to win Terry for myself."
+
+He extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to take it. He held
+himself erect as if prepared for an affront. His tones were icy when he
+spoke. "Before I shake hands with you, Lord Taborley, I have to know
+what you mean by your utmost. With so many playing-cards out against me,
+I don't stand the ghost of a show unless---- Perhaps I have no right to
+expect it; I never asked quarter from any man. I was going to say,
+unless you intend to be gallant----"
+
+Tabs pocketed his hand and turned to limp into the sunlit thunder of the
+Strand. "The merciful receive mercy, General. Perhaps we shall shake
+hands some other day. How gallant I am depends entirely upon yourself."
+
+
+V
+
+He emerged into the swollen thoroughfare, where the traffic roared and
+jostled like a torrent through a mountain gorge towards the broader
+freedom of Trafalgar Square. He turned westward, walking swiftly for
+the first hundred yards, rather fearing that he might be followed. Then
+he slowed down; swift walking made his limp too painfully obvious.
+
+He was dissatisfied with both himself and Braithwaite. He felt as though
+he had gone to meet some one in a wood and had heard only the muttering
+of a voice and the rustle of retreating footsteps. "If I had only seen
+his face," he thought.
+
+In recalling Braithwaite, he found himself picturing two persons, of
+both of whom he had had separate and distinct glimpses: the one the
+loyal man, who in years gone by had served him faithfully and shared so
+many of his adventures; the other the arrogant, red-tabbed superior, who
+had stolen his happiness without warning. It was impossible to resolve
+the two into one. The first he still regarded with affection. The
+second---- He had never allowed himself to hate any one. Hatred he held
+to be back of breeding--a weak man's subterfuge for acknowledging
+self-distrust. Because he had come so near to hating, he accused himself
+of censoriousness. "If I had only seen his face--the real man beneath
+the pretense--I might have understood and helped him," he muttered.
+
+[Illustration: _Tabs extended his hand. Braithwaite made no motion to
+take it._]
+
+And now he was going to a fresh encounter where even more sympathy would
+be required. It would be easy to condemn Maisie P. Lockwood. On a
+superficial judgment she merited nothing else. Three husbands in four
+and a half years, plus a risky flirtation with a married man were not
+the credentials of an honorable character. If he followed the advice
+of Sir Tobias Beddow, he would seek to assess her price at once. But he
+had never been accustomed to regard women in that light--as a sex whose
+virtue could be inflated or depressed by the increase or shrinkage of a
+balance at the bank. Actually he knew very little about women; riding as
+a knight-errant, with the wonder in his eyes of the mystery that might
+surprise him round the luck of any corner, he had never given himself
+much time to learn. His ideas about women were Tennysonian. He liked to
+believe that they were free from temptations, more true in their
+emotions, more generous in their affections, more unerring and unstained
+than men. He extended to them all the reverent tenderness with which he
+regarded his mothers memory. In this he saw nothing quixotic; to him the
+most hoydenish girl was a potential mother, whose body possessed a
+sacredness quite apart from herself as a slim, adventurous ark which
+would bear the future of the race across the deluge of the ages. He
+knew, as a matter of fact, that all women were invariably neither saints
+nor angels; but he clung to his chivalrous superstition as a man prays,
+though he receives no answers to his prayers. To the recorded cynicism
+of experimenters in temptation he flung back the challenge of a sadder
+cynic, "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the
+stars."
+
+So in this matter of Maisie, he argued, she couldn't be as shallow as
+her history would indicate. She was Terry's friend; that, in itself, was
+a proof of goodness. Terry had been so anxious for him to meet and
+comprehend her that she had gone behind his back to prompt the
+appointment. Well, he would make a better job of this second interview
+than he had of the one that was just ended. He must approach it, at any
+rate, without prejudice.
+
+While thinking these thoughts he reached Charing Cross. Already he was
+weary with so small an exertion. He halted, debating whether he should
+struggle further. Then he became aware of wounded Tommies, chiefly
+Overseas troops, Canadians and Australians, who from their first landing
+in England had chosen this quarter of a mile as their happy
+hunting-ground. They stood propped up against the pavement; they sat
+among the pigeons on the parapets of Trafalgar Square. They were
+laughing and chaffing, those one-legged, one-armed, derelict crusaders
+in their atrocious hospital uniforms. They were thousands of miles from
+their one and only woman; but their drawn faces grinned cheerfully and
+their jaws were squared in the old, invincible, obstinate determination
+never to admit they were down-hearted. The sight of them filled him with
+strength. Though he saw them only fugitively through gaps in the tide of
+traffic, he felt their companionship. He would always feel it--the fine,
+shared courage of men out of sight, who had adventured for an ideal as
+his companions.
+
+He crossed the top of Whitehall, passed beneath the Admiralty Arch and
+entered the garnished, graveled, tree-bordered spaciousness of the Mall.
+His old sense returned--the confidence which the Mall always gave to
+him--of Empire and world-wideness. As he strolled along, he noticed a
+board which informed the public that, by following a certain path, one
+would arrive at the Passport Office. Hidden in the greenness, set down
+in the bed of an ornamental lake which had been drained when the terror
+of air raids had threatened, he made out a low-built, sprawling shed. It
+was like a glimpse of romance. The path which led to its doorway was the
+first few hundred yards along the road that ran to Rio, Fiji and Tibet.
+One had but to enter and the journey was commenced. The sight reminded
+him of something which he had forgotten; that, though every other
+delight failed, he still possessed the wideness of the world. He could
+sail away. There were islands of the sea--Stevenson's Samoa, Conrad's
+Malay Archipelago. If people proved disappointing, there were always the
+painted solitudes which human disillusions had not withered and could
+not defile. It was a loophole worth remembering.
+
+Outside Buckingham Palace he made an unpremeditated surrender. A taxi
+was prowling along by the curb as slowly as regulations allowed. He
+raised his stick automatically as he caught the driver's eye. When the
+cab had halted, again he procrastinated with the handle of the door in
+his hand.
+
+"Where to?" the driver enquired for the second time.
+
+"To Brompton Square," he ordered uncertainly.
+
+The cab was already moving when he changed his mind. Standing up and
+leaning out of the window, "No. To Chelsea," he shouted above the
+throbbing of the engine. Then drawing out Maisie's crumpled letter, he
+read from it the address.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE
+
+
+I
+
+Tabs was not very familiar with Chelsea. He had seen it from the river a
+score of times, red-walled, umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the
+district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had
+been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired
+men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the
+negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she
+must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade
+one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She
+probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, sisterly,
+domestic type. And yet she must be something more than conventional;
+millions of merely conventional women lacked the prowess to anchor only
+one man in all the years of their life, whereas, judging by the Adair
+incident, Maisie had not yet completed her list of husbands. There was
+an undefined danger in coming into contact with such a woman, which lent
+this expedition to Chelsea an atmosphere of adventure.
+
+Did she know for what purpose he was visiting her? If she did, she was a
+bold woman--a strategist. Her position was strengthened by his coming to
+her in the guise of an invited guest. Then he remembered that he had
+made a bargain with himself to meet her with a mind unclouded by
+prejudice.
+
+He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung
+into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again
+abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted,
+timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts
+between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention
+was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly
+into the spirit of the game--the littleness and childishness of the
+attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its
+greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which
+glinted at him like spectacles. But there was something that he missed.
+
+The driver had climbed down and was opening the door. "Mulberry Tree
+Court, mister. I forget which number you told me; but there ain't so
+much of it that you're likely to lose yourself."
+
+"But where's the mulberry tree?" Tabs asked. There was in his voice the
+discontent of a disappointed child.
+
+"There never was no mulberry tree," the man replied in all seriousness.
+
+"Well, if there isn't a mulberry tree," Tabs laughed, "I suppose we must
+make shift to do without it."
+
+The man frowned and justified himself grumblingly. "It ain't my bloomin'
+fault. I've done nothin' with yer bloomin' tree."
+
+"I suppose not," said Tabs as if the matter were still in doubt.
+
+Feeling in his pocket he paid what was owing and watched the cab move
+off. Even at this last moment he was half-minded to retreat. What
+business was it of his to interfere in another man's love-affair? He
+looked stealthily round the Court to see if eyes were watching. All the
+windows were empty; nothing stirred. The fact that he was not watched
+reassured him. He glanced at the number on the nearest door, discovered
+in which direction the numbers ran and decided that his must be the
+house conspicuous for its marigold-tinted curtains, standing retiringly
+in the farthest corner.
+
+Once again he hesitated. Should he or should he not? The old
+nursery-rhyme came wandering into his head with its innocent lilt of
+jolliness:
+
+   "Here we go round the mulberry-bush,
+   The mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush;
+   Here we go round the mulberry-bush,
+   So early in the morning."
+
+"And so we do," he murmured. "Let's take a chance."
+
+
+II
+
+The door--an apple-green door--was opened by a maid as trim as Ann. Was
+Mrs. Lockwood in? She would enquire. "And your name, please, sir?--Lord
+Taborley! Certainly."
+
+She left him waiting in the hall, while she went to make her fictional
+enquiries. He was as sure that they were fictional as if he had glanced
+into the room upstairs where Maisie was making a last anxious inspection
+before her mirror. So the pretense was to be that he had called casually
+and had scarcely been expected.
+
+He tried to learn something of Maisie from the appearance of her hall.
+It was speckless. Everything in it shone with intense cleanliness and
+polish. He had noticed the same gleam about the windows, brasses and
+very doorstep before he had entered. He had noticed it again about the
+maid who had admitted him. It sent Maisie up very much in his
+estimation. It almost explained to him how she had managed to get three
+husbands. Men never know why they fall in love with a woman; more often
+than not they mistake tidiness for beauty. "If you can't be beautiful,
+be clean," Maisie's hall seemed to say; "if you can be both, you're
+invincible." Maisie was invincible, as her conquests proved. This first
+glimpse of her belongings showed that she loved cleanliness. By a jump
+in his logic Tabs began to suspect that she must be beautiful.
+
+He had pursued his observations thus far, when he heard a door
+discreetly closed overhead and the starchy rustling of the maid
+returning.
+
+"If your Lordship will step into the drawing-room, Madam will be down in
+a moment."
+
+He found himself in a long artistic room, feminine to a degree,
+exquisitely restful and yet broad-minded with signs of selection and
+travel. It was furnished according to no particular period. There was
+an Italian chest of drawers inlaid with ivory, a Dutch marquetry
+secretaire, some Louis XVIth chairs, a mirror of old Venetian glass,
+bronzes, snuff-boxes, specimens of china, odd bits of beaten silver,
+knick-knacks of all sorts, lying scattered about with apparent
+carelessness. A fire was burning in the grate. Tea was set out on a
+table beside a companionable couch. Through French windows the smallest
+of gardens shone bravely, a-blow with bulb flowers planted in crevices
+of a rockery, at the foot of which lay an oval pond and a silent
+fountain. As though to emphasize the game of littleness, a toy-boat
+floated on the pond's surface.
+
+"Not the woman I had imagined," was his unspoken thought; "not the wily
+adventuress! But if she's not, then what----"
+
+In an attempt to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to inspect the room
+in detail. The first thing he discovered was that all the silver frames,
+which stood about, contained photographs of the same man. It struck him
+as an odd exhibition of faithfulness on the part of a woman who had had
+so many husbands. He counted the photographs; there were no less than
+five of them, recording the same face from varying angles.
+
+"Which of them, is he," he asked himself, "Pollock, Gervis, or Lockwood?
+But he mayn't be any of them. Perhaps he's a possible fourth--the
+latest. If so, here's hoping, for he shuts out Adair."
+
+He turned towards the couch, intending to sit down. As he turned, his
+gaze encountered an oil-painting hanging above the mantelpiece.
+
+"By George! How did I manage to miss that?"
+
+He stared at it with intense interest--almost with a sense of shock.
+Somewhere--he could not determine where--he had seen that face before.
+
+The picture was a half-length portrait of a woman. There was something
+extraordinarily queenly and at the same time patient in her attitude.
+Her hands, which were out of sight, seemed to be folded. She was seated,
+leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face
+appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an
+aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped
+and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat,
+which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls.
+But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the
+rounded strength of her head that gave to her that peculiarly alert
+beauty. Her dark hair was drawn from off her forehead, making clear in
+her features an expression of calm challenge. She was a woman who had
+lived and not always happily. Her calmness was the quiet of almost
+painful self-control. And her age---- With her atmosphere of experience,
+it was certainly over thirty. She was not the woman to put back the
+hands of time for any man.
+
+"It can't be of Maisie," he thought, and yet he hoped. "But it can't be
+of her," he insisted. "This woman is remote and uncapturable. She's done
+with passion. She's tasted life to the full and the taste was bitter.
+She has nothing left but her unquenchable pride, with which she tortures
+herself: her pride not to submit, not to cry out, to stand always at
+bay. That's all she has, unless----" And then, speaking aloud in his
+effort to remember, "I know her. I'm positive. And yet----"
+
+The door behind him opened. "This is nice of you, Lord Taborley.--Ah,
+you were looking at Di! Most men do that when they visit me. I ought to
+be jealous. But a word of warning; looking is as far as any of them
+get."
+
+Tabs found himself shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of
+the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was
+fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her
+credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's
+charm lay in her accessibility--the genial promise she held out of being
+willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture
+proclaimed her anxiety to find this world a pleasant place--her
+determination to make it pleasant and to be gay under every
+circumstance.
+
+She was as little, flawless and gleaming as her house. More than half
+her good looks were due to the immaculate care which she bestowed on her
+body--the whiteness of her teeth, the fineness of her well-kept hands,
+the brilliant clearness of her complexion, the wavy smoothness of her
+abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone
+and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too
+perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so
+dainty in her fragility that one longed and yet scarcely dared to touch
+her.
+
+The moment she had spoken Tabs had recognized that nothing that she had
+done or might do could obscure her atmosphere of breeding. He had met
+men like that, whose sense of race, even when they were at the lowest
+depths, had kept them superior to their environment. A pale woman of
+spun silk and gossamer, with cornflower eyes and lips like parted
+poppy-petals! This woman could be kind to the point of folly--so kind
+that her folly would appear almost virtue. She was a woman who, though
+she might love too often, would love so much that to her much would
+always be forgiven.
+
+"I must apologize," Tabs spoke gently, "for having been found staring at
+your picture."
+
+He did not know it, but men always spoke gently to Maisie. It was her
+air of trust and helplessness that did it, her tender trick of creating
+in each man the belief that she relied peculiarly on him for
+protection--all of which was totally at variance with the masterly
+efficiency with which she ran both herself and her house.
+
+"I was staring at your picture," Tabs continued, "because I thought I
+recognized----"
+
+"I daresay you did," Maisie interrupted. "Though you may not have met
+her, her face is forever in the papers. Among the family she's known as
+the Princess Czarina Bolsheviki----"
+
+"She looks it. But is she a princess?"
+
+Maisie laughed. "Not yet, but it won't be her fault if she isn't. It'll
+have to be a prince next time. If she marries again, she'll stoop to
+nothing less. Look at the way she carries her head; she almost feels the
+weight of her coronet already. But she says she's had enough of
+marriage. We've all said that. Poor dear Di, she misses a lot of fun by
+her exclusiveness. If I only had half her wealth----"
+
+She evidently wanted Tabs to ask her what she would do with it. Her eyes
+grew round with spendthrift promises of jolliness, if ever such wealth
+should come within reach of her tiny, managing hands. She looked as
+mischievously covetous as a magpie while she waited for him to put the
+obvious question.
+
+But Tabs wasn't interested in the obvious. He stuck to his enquiry.
+"What you've told me doesn't help me to recall her," he said. "Who is
+she? It's most annoying to recognize a face and not to be able to place
+it against any background."
+
+Maisie pretended to pout. "You're like all the rest of them; you come to
+see me and do nothing but talk of her. I'd have hidden her in the attic
+long ago, only she's by Sargent. She's too beautiful for hiding, and
+then no one can afford to hide her Sargent under a bushel in these hard
+times."
+
+"And still you've not told me," Tabs reproached her.
+
+
+III
+
+"Wouldn't we be more comfortable sitting down?" Maisie slid between the
+couch and the tea-table, making herself comfortable against a pile of
+cushions. When Tabs looked round for a seat, he discovered the strategy
+of the arrangement of the furniture. The nearest available chair to
+Maisie was at least four yards away; to have selected it would have been
+to have isolated himself. He would have had to have hailed her
+ridiculously across the room's breadth. It was plainly intended that he
+should challenge fate and share the couch, just as Pollock, Gervis,
+Lockwood, Adair and so many others had done before him.
+
+All this friendliness would make it a little difficult for him presently
+when he broached the subject of Adair. He had an uneasy feeling that Sir
+Tobias wouldn't approve of this way of conducting his mission. It was
+one thing to fly the white flag of truce while you parleyed with the
+enemy; it was quite another to share the same couch with her in a cozy
+room, where there were only the two of you and the jumping flames of the
+fire in the grate made the silver on the small round table glow red.
+When they weren't talking there was no sound. None of the clamor of
+London reached them. They might have been in a cave, far removed from
+everything that disturbed. And, indeed, the little piled-up rockery
+outside the windows, with the spring flowers blowing and the baby lake,
+with the toy-boat drifting on its quiet surface, rather created the
+illusion that this was a cave.
+
+A restful lethargy of kindness was creeping over him. He didn't want to
+be at enmity with anybody, least of all with this dainty sprite of a
+woman with the cornflower eyes and the flaxen hair. He no longer
+wondered that three men in succession, weary of the mud of fighting, had
+come to her for rest. He could even comprehend Adair's treachery, if it
+had gone so far as treachery. Adair had found his wife fretful--she had
+always been crying and hanging round his neck. Here he had found
+companionship, secret laughter and forgetfulness. The world owed any
+woman a large debt of liberty who could give men that. Maisie was the
+kind of woman who could bury twenty husbands and go out next morning to
+meet the twenty-first. What was far more amazing, she could do it
+without frivolity or loss of self-respect. She lived a day at a time.
+She made you feel, the moment you met her, that that was the only
+tolerable way of living. The excuse for her philosophy was its success.
+She was an expert in happiness--so expert that she could communicate her
+secret without waste of words. Probably for most men words were not
+necessary; for them their happiness was herself.
+
+From her end of the couch Maisie smiled at Tabs dreamily. "You're
+persistent when you want anything. I suppose you always get your
+desires?"
+
+"The little things, yes," he replied. "But the big things--they evade
+me."
+
+"You mean Terry."
+
+She said it without change of tone or expression, with the same happy
+smile curling up the corners of her uncruel mouth. It was disconcerting
+to have his private humiliations referred to so frankly, as though they
+were fitting subjects for casual conversation. But, after all, he
+reminded himself, his business there was to discuss her equally private
+affairs. He was hardly in a position to resent anything she might say.
+It was a duel, and she had drawn first blood. He was quick to see that
+her purpose in introducing Terry was to gain an advantage while she
+postponed the inevitable discussion of Adair.
+
+She didn't give him a chance to reply. "I know all about you and Terry,"
+she continued, "and about Braithwaite, too, for the matter of that.
+Perhaps why Terry evades you is because she isn't one of your really big
+things. You may have mistaken her for a big thing. If she is one of your
+truly big things, you'll get her. You're one of the few men who get all
+that they desire."
+
+It was possible that she was trying to flatter him; nevertheless,
+against his will, the certainty of her way of talking impressed him.
+"What makes you think that I get everything that I desire?"
+
+She laughed and snuggled closer into the cushions. "I can't put it into
+words. I just know by looking at you. You have the air."
+
+"Then what makes you say that Terry may not be one of my big things?"
+
+She glanced up at him amused. "I almost made you angry when I said
+that.--Do you really want to know? I said it because I don't think that
+she is one of your big things and, what's more, you don't think that she
+is either. Now I _have_ made you angry---- But you don't--not the sane
+you, who was and is and will be to-morrow--the you who'll outlive this
+disappointment."
+
+He was at one and the same time intrigued and offended by the turn the
+conversation had taken. His memory groped back to the first conception
+he had had of this woman--the woman who tricked married men, who used
+scented note-paper, who interpreted thoughts before they were uttered
+and forestalled actions before they had been planned--the woman whom he
+had been instructed to buy off with a price. What was he doing
+discussing his love-affair with such as her?
+
+His voice was chilling when he spoke. "It's very good of you to take
+such an interest in me. I ought to be gratified that you should think
+you know so much about me, and after so short an acquaintance--so very
+much more than I know about myself."
+
+"But I don't think; I do know far more at this moment than you know
+about yourself." Her tones were calm and lazy, unembarrassed and
+pleasant. The red glow of the fire glinting on the silver tea-service
+seemed the reflection of her cheerfulness.
+
+"If you're so certain that you know, you might tell me," he said
+stiffly.
+
+"I know---- Do you mind if I smoke?" She leant forward while he held a
+match to her cigarette. "I know that you're an intensely lonely man. All
+men have to be lonely till they're thirty if they're going to get
+anywhere. They have no time to spare. You've had no time to spare for
+women--that's why you don't understand them. Women were for you a treat
+in store, until the war broke. Then suddenly you discovered that you had
+missed the most precious thing in life. You hadn't the time to be wise
+in your choice, so you turned to some one young and accessible. Her
+youth seemed to symbolize all that you coveted at the moment; it
+symbolized going on forever. You weren't really in love with her as an
+individual; you were in love with the thought of love and youth. You
+won't believe it, but almost any young girl who was beautiful and
+willing would have served your purpose. During the terrible years you've
+clothed her with your own idealism. You've told yourself that it was for
+her that you were fighting. You've created in your heart a person she
+never was and hasn't it in her to become. You've thought of her as a
+second you, with _your_ sense of honor, _your_ passion for
+unselfishness, _your_ patience and experience gained through suffering.
+The ideal you've set up for her is contradictory and impossible. Youth
+isn't considerate, experienced, unselfish, patient. For those qualities
+you have to go to the middle years. I know what I'm talking about, for
+I've had three soldier husbands." She said it without self-reproach or
+self-glory--as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any
+woman. "You've been finding out the kind of girl she really is since
+your return--the kind of girl who prefers General Braithwaite to
+yourself and can't discriminate between the temporary and the permanent.
+You're disappointed in her. You've discovered already that she isn't the
+woman you thought you were loving. You're now only pretending that you
+still care for her because life would be too empty without your dream
+and because the right woman, for whom you've already renewed your
+search, hasn't yet turned up. Somewhere inside you at this moment your
+sane self is endorsing every word that I'm saying as true."
+
+"That's not so." His contradiction was spoken fiercely.
+
+"But it is so," the sweet voice persisted. "You yourself have tacitly
+owned it."
+
+"How?"
+
+There was the sharpness of alarm in his way of asking. Her assurance had
+startled him out of his brief anger.
+
+She laughed softly. "I think we might have tea; it'll restore our
+serenity. There's nothing like employing your hands when you want to
+keep from losing your temper. A woman learns that, even when she's only
+been married once. When she's been married three times," the cornflower
+eyes became suddenly innocent, "she knows everything.--Will you touch
+the bell? It'll save me getting up.--How, you ask. How do I know that
+you've already renewed your searching? To a man who's as head over heels
+in love as you profess to be all women, except the one woman, however
+beautiful, ought to be hanks of hair and bags of bones. I read your
+thoughts when I caught you gazing at my sister's portrait. You were
+saying to yourself, 'What if she's the woman!' And you're even
+sufficiently detached in your affections to acknowledge attraction in a
+horrid little pestering, too-much-married person like myself."
+
+
+IV
+
+It was lucky that the maid selected that moment for answering the bell.
+Things were getting uncomfortably personal. Tabs had the idea that
+Maisie had been talking against time till she should hear the footsteps
+of her reenforcements. As the maid entered, she turned towards her with
+the brightness of relief.
+
+"That's splendid of you, Porter. You guessed what we wanted.--Porter
+always guesses what I want, Lord Taborley; she's my second self. And
+Porter can tell your fortune from the cards--can't you, Porter? Only she
+never reads the cards on a Sunday; she says it brings bad luck. If you
+come here often, you must try her.--You might take that dish from
+her.--Thanks awfully. There's room for it here on this corner of the
+tray."
+
+Tabs smiled inwardly while he did his awkward best to make himself
+useful. He might know very little about women, but he knew intuitively
+quite a lot about this particular woman. He knew that Porter had guessed
+nothing, because nothing had been left to chance. He knew it as surely
+as he had known what Maisie had been doing in front of her mirror while
+he had been kept waiting. He knew that long before his arrival every
+detail of his reception had been prepared and planned, and that Porter
+had been instructed. The whole morning had been spent in dusting,
+sweeping, polishing and making ready the various dishes of dainty cakes
+and neatly-cut sandwiches which were being spread before him. He was
+certain that the kindly patronage of Maisie's way of addressing Porter
+was another part of the conspiracy.
+
+Curiously enough it was Porter who made him like and trust her more than
+he had done as yet. Porter's eyes, when they rested on her mistress,
+embraced her with a slavish worship; when they rested on him, they
+warned and dared him. He had the feeling that the man who made Maisie
+cry was likely to feel a knife in his back. Maisie must be good to be
+able to call forth such fanatical loyalty from a humble woman. He began
+to be infected by this atmosphere of idolatry. And yet----
+
+What was Maisie's object in belittling his love for Terry? What did she
+hope to gain by it? He hardly dared allow himself to suspect; thinking
+in her presence was like speaking aloud. She heard unspoken words as
+plainly as those that were uttered. But the suspicion would not be
+suppressed. Had she formed the audacious plan of winning him for
+herself? And this despite her three previous marriages, despite her
+knowledge of why he had visited her, despite his knowledge of Adair!
+
+Quick as a flash her eyes turned on him with a scarcely perceptible
+shake of her head. The door clicked discreetly as Porter left them. It
+was like clearing a ring for the second round. The dangerous intimacy,
+half tender, half inimical, returned.
+
+"There's no harm in being pleasant," her voice was musical and pleading,
+"however unpleasant the circumstances which have thrown us together.
+Taking tea with me doesn't set up any social obligation. You won't have
+to know me again or anything like that. Now that we understand each
+other---- How do you like your tea? Is it two lumps?"
+
+With the tongs poised ready to pounce, she waited for him to tell her.
+But he didn't tell her; he smiled inscrutably. He wasn't sure at what
+he was smiling. Perhaps it was that he was happy--happy in a
+worldly-wise fashion that he had never been with Terry. He could say
+anything to this woman and it wouldn't shock her--there was comfort in
+that.
+
+But she had scared up a doubt in his mind that he might have mistaken
+his kingdom. Perhaps the recovery of youth wasn't everything. There were
+things very precious in themselves, which were well lost under certain
+circumstances. Maisie's youth, for instance. She was far more enchanting
+now than she could ever have been as a girl. In losing her youth she had
+gained in sympathy; it was that that made her understand him so well. In
+a wife you wanted more than youth--the knowledge of a companion. It
+began to dawn on him that there might be truth in what she had said.
+Perhaps once again she had known him better than he knew himself. He had
+been with her less than an hour. He didn't completely trust her, and yet
+here was this astounding fact: by reason of her experience there were
+things he could say to her that he would never dream of saying to the
+girl whom he believed he loved best. And Adair, he, too----
+
+"You hadn't expected that things would be like this," she was saying,
+"just you and I, sitting like old friends and drinking tea together.
+You'd nerved yourself up for a vulgar row. I know---- Well, since you
+won't tell me how many lumps, I'll give you two."
+
+As he bent forward to receive the cup, their hands touched. The contact
+was electric. A rush of excited vitality seemed to pour into his body
+from hers. The touch was only for a second, but it left him startled and
+stark of pretenses. When he sought her eyes, they were calm as ever.
+"You're a most bewildering woman--the most bewildering I ever met," he
+confessed.
+
+"Except my sister," she corrected.
+
+He glanced up at the portrait and back to her, comparing the features.
+"Yes, I see it now. She is your sister. I ought to have guessed. But I
+haven't met her; so I don't except her."
+
+Maisie busied herself with passing the dishes. She had a way of making
+everything appear conventional by the unruffled quiet with which she
+accepted it. At the back of her mind she seemed to be smiling at the
+domestic scene she had achieved with this man, who should have been her
+enemy.
+
+"No, you haven't met her," she assented. "But until you've met her, you
+won't rest; and after you've met her, you won't rest either.--And so you
+think I'm bewildering! You thought something else, which you didn't have
+the courage to put into words. Bewildering and dangerous--the most
+dangerous woman you'd ever met--that was what you meant."
+
+He smiled with a shade of embarrassment. "I might have called you the
+most disconcerting woman; you're all of that. No man of sense, who
+valued his peace of mind, would tell any woman she was dangerous."
+
+"I don't see why. Why shouldn't he? Do tell me. I shan't be offended."
+She leant forward, absorbing him with her childish eyes, her lips
+parted with expectancy.
+
+"Because----" Tabs checked himself while he studied the tantalizing
+innocence of her expression. He felt certain that he was going to say
+something irresistibly unwise. To gain time he looked away and commenced
+aimlessly stirring his cup. "Well, if you must have it, because to tell
+a woman that would be to tempt her to be dangerous."
+
+"But I love to be tempted," she said eagerly; "temptation is the yeast
+of life." And then in a whisper, speaking less to him than to herself,
+"A woman knows that she's old when temptation ends."
+
+Like ripples from a stone flung into water the poignancy of what she had
+implied rather than uttered, spread away with a commotion which grew
+ever fainter. They sat without change of posture at either end of the
+couch, she bending towards him, he gazing down into his cup as though by
+staring into it he could retain his grip on the conventions. There was
+no sound, save the rustling of live coals in the grate. Outside the
+window the toy boat floated, a symbol of men's and women's ineffectual
+childishness, always dreaming of adventures on which they never set
+sail. Tabs pondered the hidden profundity of her words. At last he
+believed that through her he understood himself. It wasn't youth that he
+or anybody coveted; it was the more supreme boon of not growing old. He
+had just arrived at this new self-knowledge when she spoke.
+
+"To be tempted means that one's wanted--wanted dreadfully, so that it
+hurts. That's living--to be wanted. Not to be wanted is worse than
+death. When you're dead, you're forgotten and you forget. To be
+forgotten and to remember is the end of all things. Not to be wanted
+when you're alive is to beat your flesh against the walls of a tomb.
+Lord Taborley, I know what you came for." He had set down his cup. She
+covered his bronzed hands with her own passionate white ones,
+overwhelming him with a rush of words. "You came to accuse me, to bribe
+me, to buy me. You didn't want to hear me; I was already condemned. Do
+you think I don't know what's said about my marriages? I know too well.
+But it isn't vanity that makes me want to be loved. It's so right to be
+loved. It isn't wickedness. It's the terror of not being loved--the same
+terror that makes you cling to Terry though she doesn't want you in
+return---- We all want to believe that we're wanted. It's human. Without
+that life's a blank. One can't face up---- And I----"
+
+She tore her hands from him and buried her face, sobbing in the
+cushions.
+
+
+V
+
+He had done it. By some unaccountable blunder he had made her cry. What
+was it he had said? Only a minute ago she had been so radiant and
+smiling. His first thought was of Porter; she must not know. This crying
+must be stopped before she heard it. Any moment she might enter. Even
+now she might be listening at the door, preparing to enter.
+
+Another conjecture rushed into his mind--this sobbing might be part of a
+prearranged plan. Tears are the jiu-jitsu of woman's art of
+self-defense. To the world at large the man is always a villain who has
+caused them. "But I didn't cause them," he protested to himself. And
+then, "Dash it all! There's nothing gained by sitting here. I've got to
+do something."
+
+He roused himself and limped round the table to the end of the couch
+against which her face was hidden. He could see nothing but the pale
+gold of her hair, the ivory whiteness of her neck and the pitiful
+heaving of her fascinating shoulders. She looked extraordinarily like a
+doll--a broken doll which had been allowed to fall through some one's
+carelessness.
+
+"Confound it! What a brute I am!" he muttered. "What the dickens does
+one do with a woman in hysterics?"
+
+He laid his hand very timidly on her silky hair. He had had no idea that
+it was so silky. "Cheer up!" he said softly. And then again, "I do wish
+you'd cheer up."
+
+She took not the slightest notice, save that a small white hand scuttled
+out like a mouse from beneath the cushions and commenced a hurried
+search. He watched it and formed a hasty guess. It couldn't find the
+thing for which it had been sent, so he dropped his own large
+handkerchief in its path, saw it take possession of it and dive again
+beneath the cushions. It made no difference to the sobbing.
+
+What ought he to do? He couldn't endure the sound--it wrenched him. He
+bent over her, trying to turn her obstinately hidden face in his
+direction.
+
+"Maisie!" The word had slipped out. It didn't matter. It mattered so
+little that he repeated the indiscretion. "Maisie, you mustn't break
+your heart like that. No one thinks ill of you and you are wanted.
+You're wanted most awfully. Heaps of people want you."
+
+The shoulders ceased to heave for a fraction of a second, but her face
+still refused to turn. "Who-oo--who wants me?" Her voice reached him
+choked with tears and muffled.
+
+Tabs frowned. The question was a poser. Who did want her? He was blessed
+if he knew. There must be people who wanted her--Adair, for instance.
+But the mention of Adair would provide her with a reason for a new
+outburst. There was only one thing to say under the circumstances, so he
+said it. "I do."
+
+She lay so still that she might have been dead. It was frightening, this
+sudden silence after such a storm of emotion. It was so frightening that
+he had to say something more to prove to himself that she could hear.
+"You're beautiful. You're so gay when you're not crying. I don't think
+any man could prevent himself from wanting you." And then desperately,
+in a last effort, "You're most tremendously charming."
+
+Her face never stirred from the cushions, but he was aware that
+surreptitiously his borrowed handkerchief was being employed
+industriously.
+
+He had just time to compose his features before a tear-wet eye blinked
+up at him. It was an eye eloquent with gratitude and babyishly blue.
+"You're a dear," a small voice whispered.
+
+
+VI
+
+He had been called many things from time to time, but never before "a
+dear." To be called "a dear" by a beautiful woman was an entirely new
+sensation for him. It made him distinctly uncomfortable--almost ashamed.
+A gift of this sort, even though it hasn't been desired, puts the
+recipient under an obligation. When once a woman has dubbed a man "a
+dear," she expects him to live up to the part she has assigned him. Tabs
+hoped that she hadn't been as sincere as she had sounded.
+
+Taking himself off to the nearest French window, he stood staring out
+morosely--staring out at the silly little rockery, with the silly little
+pond at the foot of it, containing the silly little boat that never
+sailed anywhere. He was cross with himself and even more cross with her.
+Why couldn't she have behaved sensibly, instead of bursting like a
+rain-cloud without warning? She made mysteries out of everything, out of
+himself, Terry and even her sister's portrait. She never gave him a
+complete answer to any question. She surrounded herself with the
+atmosphere of a detective novel. He was half-minded to rush into the
+hall and make good his escape before she involved him further. Sir
+Tobias could come and conduct his own unpleasantness. How on earth was
+he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a
+dear"?
+
+But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a
+quite different emotion--an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as
+she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It
+was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her
+shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.
+
+He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her
+voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky.
+I'm better now."
+
+"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.
+
+As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded
+towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."
+
+"Wouldn't she?"
+
+He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no
+attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where
+he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever
+happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with
+her.
+
+In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head
+vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even
+when we were children we couldn't make her."
+
+It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was
+intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused
+himself to a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't
+so cruel as to try?"
+
+"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across
+to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used
+to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian
+Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when
+we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She
+was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think
+that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to
+him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one
+else has ever succeeded in making her cry."
+
+Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face--it was like the
+face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her
+cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind
+of blasphemy."
+
+"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me
+exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that
+tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels
+their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him,
+though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves
+and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it
+down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort
+its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her
+husband. He couldn't drag her down. He couldn't find her weakness. She
+was always up there. So he reviled her."
+
+A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's
+breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate
+and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a
+discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.
+
+"_Was!_ Then he's dead?"
+
+She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated
+her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."
+
+"And his name?"
+
+Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown
+woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense
+that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he
+could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.
+
+
+VII
+
+"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she
+asked quickly, "You knew him?"
+
+"Knew him!" Tabs pondered the question. "I'm not sure. But Lady
+Dawn--I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in
+France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It
+was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She passed me yesterday,
+driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry
+who did that." He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and
+stood gazing level with the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke
+wonderingly, "The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is
+Lady Dawn!"
+
+When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so
+great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again--he sat down
+for a second time on the couch beside her.
+
+"There's something wrong," he said quietly. "Either you're misinformed
+or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight."
+
+She made no attempt to conceal her amusement. She attributed his
+seriousness to sudden infatuation--an infatuation which made him seem
+ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.
+
+"Something wrong!" she echoed mockingly. "If you think that I've
+exaggerated anything that I've told you about----" She glanced up at the
+portrait. "I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm
+her----"
+
+"I didn't mean that," he interrupted impatiently. "I was referring to
+Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged
+him."
+
+Maisie laughed. "Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging
+him. He left no room for misjudgment."
+
+"But you said that he had died hating her."
+
+"He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary."
+
+"But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?"
+
+"Think that he hated her?"
+
+"No, that he died hating her?"
+
+Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a
+match. She was getting bored. "Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be
+cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses.
+Some of them were releases. They weren't all--well, to put it mildly,
+occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to
+whom German shells were merciful--more merciful than English law. If
+they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom."
+
+As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled.
+He had to steady his passion before he asked his question. "And you
+think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"
+
+Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she
+added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an
+opinion."
+
+Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone
+when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was
+the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no title; he was a Captain in
+the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozieres.--Ah, I
+see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the
+difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more
+dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the
+regiment."
+
+She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the
+running, doesn't it?"
+
+It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger
+of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his
+mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had
+drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies
+against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their
+ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house
+of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd
+been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their
+imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine,
+where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as
+compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they
+were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to
+hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this
+moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while
+living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they
+should not be regretted.
+
+"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."
+
+He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room,
+limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the
+cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.
+
+"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the
+running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a
+sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.
+The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the
+finest of battalions."
+
+He became aware that he was frightening her and sank his voice. The
+lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.
+
+"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it.
+"Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why
+he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was
+a woman's photograph."
+
+She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"
+
+"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried
+it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He
+pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I
+remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches--Boche
+trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that
+woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that
+those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort
+to forget. And here you and I sit and talk---- Well, as I was saying, we
+couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that
+woman in the world for whom he cared--for whom he cared right up to the
+last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozieres, that he went west.
+He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he
+had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it
+from him."
+
+He paused, suddenly exhausted. His indignation had burnt itself out.
+"I'm tired," he apologized. "I'm afraid I let myself get out of hand. I
+scared you for a moment. I'm sorry. Do you mind if I sit down?"
+
+She pushed the table back to make it easier for him to take a place
+beside her. "It's all right," she consoled him. "I know that you're only
+just out of hospital. Terry told me. You're not really recovered yet.
+Besides, it was my fault; I spoke lightly. I wasn't thinking what I
+said. But I don't feel lightly about these things. I couldn't." Then she
+said something which struck him oddly. "You know my man's out there."
+
+What did she mean by _her man_? If she had said _her men_, he could have
+comprehended. She had lost three husbands in the war. But why did she
+particularize and say, "My man"? It seemed cruel to the rest. And which
+of the three was it that she regarded as so peculiarly hers.
+
+He jerked his thoughts back. "There was something you told me about Lord
+Dawn; you said it explained him. How did it go? I think you said that he
+hated his wife as men hate God, because they love Him so much and yet He
+won't come down. Well, out there it wasn't like that. Dawn climbed up to
+her; yes, and perhaps beyond her. Out there he didn't need to pretend to
+hate her; he could afford to love her without loss of self-respect. I
+suppose he thought it was too late to tell her after all that had gone
+before."
+
+"Either that," Maisie assented, "or else---- It would be like him. Or
+else because he was too much of a sportsman. As it was, if he were
+killed, she wouldn't need to be sorry. But if he wrote her that he loved
+her and had always loved her, and then got killed---- Don't you see,
+that's where her remorse would start?"
+
+Tabs nodded. "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it.
+It's monstrous that she should go on believing----" He broke off. And
+then, "She must be told. It's merest justice--whatever it costs."
+
+
+VIII
+
+The light had been failing while they had talked. A tap fell on the
+door. Coming at that moment when their nerves were jangled, it sounded
+ominous. Their heads turned sharply. Maisie's voice was unsteady when
+she asked, "What is it? What do you want?"
+
+"It's Porter, Madam. Dinner is served."
+
+"Oh, come in, Porter. Have you laid a place for Lord Taborley?"
+
+As the maid entered, Tabs rose. "I had no idea---- Why, I've been here
+for hours. I really must apologize, Mrs. Lockwood, and be going."
+
+However much his reception had been prearranged, dinner had formed no
+part of the program. The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's
+watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance.
+
+Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said
+cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying."
+
+As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie
+silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly. "You've talked
+of everything except me," she whispered; "it was about me you came to
+talk. You _must_ before we part."
+
+Following her across the hall to the dining-room, he reflected on her
+ability for getting him into deeper and yet deeper water. He had the
+feeling that he was being led somewhere against his will--somewhere that
+might be for his good or for his harm, but which would inevitably cut
+him off from many of his old affections. He had the discomforting sense
+that he was doing something disloyal to Terry. Heaven knew what promises
+might not be exacted from him before the evening ended. When would it
+end? He would have to stay for at least an hour after coffee--that would
+bring him to nine o'clock. Sir Tobias Beddow would have been expecting
+him long before that to deliver his account of the result of his
+mission. Furthermore, Sir Tobias would be demanding an explanation as to
+how it was that, having asked for Terry's hand the night before, he was
+still unengaged to her. If he postponed the interview till to-morrow, it
+would create the appearance of lukewarmness. He couldn't very well
+excuse himself by saying that he'd spent the afternoon and evening with
+Maisie. And he couldn't get Maisie to let him off on the plea that Sir
+Tobias, her harshest critic, was waiting for him. Besides, he had
+accomplished nothing as yet; Adair Easterday had not been mentioned.
+
+If ever he made good his escape, he prayed that he might never again
+encounter a woman possessed of charm. His paramount desire was to seize
+his hat and make a furtive exit. There was nothing to prevent him but
+the politeness due from a man to a woman--and she traded on it. As he
+passed into the dining-room he was secretly on his guard. "I wonder what
+she'll do next to inveigle me?" was his thought.
+
+"It'll be only a little dinner," she explained as they seated
+themselves. "You weren't expected. But Porter always has something
+hidden away for an emergency. Don't you, Porter?"
+
+He was getting accustomed to these asides addressed to Porter. He began
+to perceive that Porter had other uses besides gliding round the table
+in a cap and apron. She was a conversational stop-gap when situations
+grew awkward, as they frequently must between an ensnared bachelor and
+an unchaperoned widow.
+
+And she was eligible; he had to own it as they sat down to their first
+meal together. Tea hadn't counted as a meal; you can serve tea to
+anybody. But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring
+dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles.
+Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains,
+revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock
+village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in
+the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the
+fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several
+houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he
+lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out
+life, than waving me farewell." He knew what she was singing then and
+followed the air in his imagination. The atmosphere of the room was
+vibrant with romance; all that was lacking was his impulse to be
+romantic.
+
+Maisie was chattering gayly and forestalling his wants. He reserved a
+small portion of his mind for her conversation--sufficient to enable him
+to reply "Yes" or "No" when the occasion seemed to demand it. It was
+clear to him that it made her happy to have a man so entirely at her
+mercy. She meant immensely well by him. Behind her mist of words she
+seemed to be saying, "Isn't it nice to be just we two together?"
+
+But he was thinking of the other three soldiermen who had played the
+game of being "just we two together" before him. The singing voice,
+drifting through the courtyard, put into words the question of his
+thought, "Where are you now? Where are you now?" Yes, where were they?
+
+He felt pity and distaste for Maisie in equal proportions. Those men had
+each in turn caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her
+pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence
+of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and
+gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was
+theirs now! She was almost virginal--as though she had never been
+touched by their passion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose
+memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out
+there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or---- Or very loving
+and lonely?
+
+She was speaking more seriously now. "We mustn't tell her. It's natural
+to be sorry for him now that he's dead." He picked up the thread and
+guessed that she was referring to Lord Dawn.
+
+"We must tell her," he said.
+
+"But we mustn't," she urged. "For years he tried to make her wretched.
+There were rumors of other women. She's found peace at last. It wouldn't
+help him to let her know that he had died loving her out there. He's
+beyond any help of ours. They all are." He surmised who the _they_ were:
+the three soldiermen who had sat there before him. In pleading for
+silence for others, she was pleading for silence for herself. Again she
+was defending herself against his thoughts. "All of the dead had their
+chance. Lord Dawn had; there were so many years in which he might have
+told her. To tell her now would be to rob----"
+
+She broke off as the maid reentered with the coffee. Her tone changed
+instantly to one of convention. "Not here, Porter. We'll have it in the
+drawing-room."
+
+As he followed her out across the hall, he glanced at his watch. It was
+past eight o'clock. He could lose no more time. He must plunge boldly
+into the subject of his mission and bring his visit promptly to an end.
+He dreaded the temptation of that feminine room, with its coziness and
+security and quiet. It made him too much alone with her; she was not a
+woman that it was wise to be alone with too long.
+
+The moment the maid had left them and the door had closed, he became
+confirmed in the sanity of this decision. Everything in the room
+appealed to him to procrastinate. The curtains before the French
+windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence;
+the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the
+coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded
+with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces and fell
+downwards.
+
+She had seated herself on the couch. When she had filled both cups, she
+glanced up at him smilingly, patting the vacant place beside her as a
+sign that he should occupy it. He was standing before the fire, looking
+immensely tall in the semi-darkness. He could see her plainly where she
+sat beneath the lamp; but of him she could see nothing but his outline,
+for his eyes were lost in shadow. When he seemed not to have noticed her
+sign, "Come," she said coaxingly. "You don't spare yourself at all. You
+make yourself tired by so much standing."
+
+"Mrs. Lockwood----" She started as he called her that. Twice already she
+had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before
+dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I
+haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that
+nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't
+you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you--but
+why can't you?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+THE AIR OF CONQUEST
+
+
+I
+
+She sat very silently, the way he had seen men sit when they were
+wounded. She had been expecting the blow and trying to postpone it; now
+that it had fallen her only feeling was one of peace because the
+expecting was ended. Her face remained turned towards him, as it had
+been while he had been talking. As though a mask had dropped, the real,
+very tired, very young, very lonely Maisie watched him. The wistfulness
+of her beauty surprised and touched him. Several times her lips moved in
+an attempt to say something. Then, at last, "What right have you to
+ask?"
+
+"I should like to claim the right of friendship."
+
+"Of friendship!" She frowned slightly, peering from beneath the lamp in
+an effort to make out his features. Then her eyes cleared and she
+smiled. "If you don't mean it, please don't say it. You see, it would
+hurt afterwards. And--and I should like to have you for my friend."
+
+[Illustration: "_Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?_"]
+
+He came over from the fireplace and seated himself beside her. "We've
+been almost enemies--just a little afraid of each other. Isn't that so?
+It's ever so much more comfortable now; we'll be able to talk more
+easily. Tell me honestly, what do you see in Adair?"
+
+"See in him!"
+
+She commenced sipping her coffee. She looked extraordinarily like Terry
+used to do years ago, when she was a little lass and had been naughty,
+and had come reluctantly to ask pardon. He thought that if he went on
+talking he might make it easier for her.
+
+"You'll wonder why I, who never knew you until to-day, should have taken
+upon myself to broach this subject."
+
+"I don't wonder," she headed him off. "I know. Terry's my friend. Her
+father was determined to send somebody, so she worked things in order
+that you might be sent. She thought that you would be the kindest
+person."
+
+"She thought that!" Tabs was a little taken back by her assertion; it
+seemed to pledge him to kindness before he had learnt whether kindness
+was required or deserved. It made him in a sense her partisan, when he
+ought to have been impartial.
+
+"I think I can be trusted to be kind," he said; "but you must remember
+that I've got to be kind all round. I must be kind to Adair's wife and
+to his children. If this goes much further it will spell tragedy for
+them."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and laughed without mirth. "Adair's wife
+should have remembered to be kind to herself. If a woman can't keep her
+husband, she never deserved to have won him. And Adair--he's the
+easiest man to keep in the world; far too easy to be exciting. If she
+doesn't lose him to me, she'll lose him to some one else, unless----"
+And then she surprised him, "But she won't lose him to me, for I don't
+want him."
+
+Tabs sighed with relief and lit himself a cigarette. "Then that's
+settled. If you don't want him, the trouble's ended, and I think Sir
+Tobias and all of us owe you an apology."
+
+Again she laughed. This time some of her old mischief had come back.
+"You go too fast, Lord Taborley. I shouldn't advise any of you to
+apologize to me yet. It's true that I don't want him for keeps, but----"
+
+Tabs guessed the way the ground lay and went back to the question with
+which he had started. "What on earth do you see in him? That's what I
+can't make out."
+
+She kept him waiting for his answer. While he waited, like sunshine
+struggling through cloud, amused happiness fought its way into her
+expression. When she turned, she met his gaze with complete candor. She
+was again a woman of the world. "What do I see in him? Not much--only a
+makeshift, a second best. Only a man who needs me for the moment because
+he's lost his direction. You remember our conversation of this afternoon
+about having to feel that you were needed. He gives me that feeling, so
+I'm grateful. That's why I have to have him."
+
+"Are you so lonely as to stoop--well, to steal to get it?"
+
+He was sorry he had asked it. She bit her lip in an effort to keep back
+the tears and to force herself to go on brightly smiling. "Yes, as
+lonely as all that," she nodded; "so lonely that it's almost a joke."
+
+"No joke." He was at a loss what to say. "But you have friends. You go
+everywhere. You----"
+
+"Friends!" she interrupted, laughing with the high-pitched note of
+breaking nerves. "What are friends? People to whom you say, 'How d'you
+do?' here and 'How d'you do?' there, every one of whom can do without
+you. I want some one who can't do without me for a second---- No joke,
+you said. But it is almost a joke to be young, and eager, and
+good-looking, and to know how to dress, and to be so willing to love,
+and to live in the world just once, and to hear the world go by you
+laughing, and to desire so much," she paused for breath, "and to want to
+give so much that no one is willing to accept. If one didn't laugh over
+it, it would be more than one could stand. If one didn't treat it as a
+joke----"
+
+He caught her hands. "Steady, Mrs. Lockwood. Stop laughing at once.
+There's nothing to laugh about. You're nearly over the edge."
+
+She stared at him with wide eyes, filled with panic, while little
+ripples of laughter kept escaping from her, which she did her best to
+suppress.
+
+"Now, listen to me," he continued quietly: "You're not exceptional.
+You've been expressing something that there's not a man or woman that
+hasn't felt. I feel it when I realize that I may lose Terry; so does
+Braithwaite. Lord Dawn felt it when he couldn't drag his wife down to
+him and couldn't climb up to her. And his wife must have felt it too,
+when she sat always by herself. Phyllis feels it when she sees that, for
+the moment, you have more attraction for her husband than she has. And
+Adair feels it as well, when he risks his good name for a little
+desperate comfort and is willing to clothe you, for whom he professes to
+care, with all the appearance of dishonor. You're no exception; it's the
+feeling that you are exceptional that makes you unscrupulous in your
+self-pity. Get that into your head, that you're not exceptional. Half
+the world's with you in the same box; but it smiles and doesn't own it.
+Have you got that?"
+
+She nodded and tried to withdraw her hands; but he held them fast.
+
+"And now as regards this desire to be wanted; that's perfectly right and
+natural. There's nobody who doesn't share it. And I understand what you
+say about mere friendship. It's unsatisfying and impermanent. It's like
+a meal snatched at a restaurant; none of the dishes or napkins or tables
+or chairs belong to you. They've been used by other people before you
+and they'll be used by other people the moment your bill is settled.
+What you want and what every one wants, is something more than
+friendship--a human relation with one person who is so much yours that
+your intimacies are a secret from all the world."
+
+"Some one with whom I can be little," she whispered, "and foolish and
+off my guard."
+
+He smiled. "That's it exactly. But you won't get that sort of
+relationship with a man who belongs already to another woman."
+
+"One gets the pretense."
+
+He shook his head. "Not even the pretense. There was a phrase you used
+about Adair; you said he'd lost his direction. That's true; he has for
+the moment. Presently he'll refind it and the road leads back to
+Phyllis. You said something else: you called him a second best. That's
+all he is, however you take him, whether as a husband, a father or a
+lover. He lacks earnestness; he has always lacked it. I've been his
+friend for years; his flabbiness sticks out all over him. But you're not
+a second best, Mrs. Lockwood. You're a top-notcher--too fine for
+anything but the best. You really are. You ought to set a higher value
+on yourself."
+
+She had regained her composure. He showed a willingness to release her
+hands, but she let them rest where they were like tired birds, while she
+regarded him with wistful kindness.
+
+"Too fine for anything but the best! It's a long while since I heard any
+one say that. Reggie used to say it in almost those very words. But then
+Reggie," she caught her breath at the remembered ecstasy, "Reggie used
+to think that the sun rose and set for me. He was different from all
+other men. You advise me to reserve myself for the best. How can I do
+that, Lord Taborley, when the best is in the past?"
+
+She was very beautiful in the simplicity of her pathos--one of the most
+beautiful women he had ever met. She had become a little child for the
+moment and her littleness was baffling. He felt extraordinarily near to
+her and alone with her. There was no longer any danger in their
+aloneness. He realized why it was that she was able to give away so much
+of herself; there was no value in the gift, for her heart was beyond the
+capture of any man. She was the shuttered house of a vanished happiness,
+inhabited by a restless ghost. The gold light from the lamp fell in a
+pool about her. It revealed startlingly the whiteness of her arms and
+throat, the blueness of her eyes and the primrose gleam of her polished
+head. She seemed insubstantial as a dream, environed by shadows. And
+what did she mean by saying that all her best lay in the past? Surely
+she had misjudged! With her power of charm she could build her world to
+any pattern.
+
+"The best in the past! None of us know enough about the future to say
+that. The best lies ahead--always. To believe that brings our best
+within our grasp."
+
+"For me it can't." She spoke hopelessly. "No believing can do that when
+your best is dead."
+
+The finality of her despair silenced him. He could feel it like fingers
+tightening on his throat. He realized in a flash that this was how he,
+too, would be tempted to speak were he to lose Terry--that, having lost
+the best, any careless makeshift would suffice to comfort him. While he
+considered, her hands snuggled closer in his clasp, establishing a new
+sympathy.
+
+"I think," he said at last, "even though my best were dead, I should
+try to go on acting as if it lay still ahead. If I did that, round some
+new turning I might find it waiting for me as a kind of recompense."
+
+She leant forward, peering eagerly into his eyes. "Yes. You would do
+that. I'm sure of it. I knew you had something to give me the moment we
+met. That was why I wouldn't let you escape me. I've learnt the secret
+at last--the secret of your air of conquest. It isn't that you get your
+desires. It's not that. It's your belief that you will get them that
+makes you strong."
+
+Somewhere at the back of his head he remembered the pleading of Delilah
+with Samson, "Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth."
+
+He laughed. "Perhaps you have guessed. I'm what you might call a
+round-the-corner person. I have a philosophy all my own; it's a
+round-the-corner philosophy. I believe that we find everything that
+we've lost or longed for, if we'll only press on. Everything that we've
+ever loved or wanted waits for us further up the road, round some hidden
+turning. It's always further up the road and just out of sight. The
+whole trick of living is to keep your tail up and march forward with the
+appearance of success, no matter how badly other people say you've been
+defeated. More often than not, we're nearer our hidden corners than any
+of us guess; it's the pluck to struggle the last hundred yards that
+swings us round the turning and wins our kingdoms for us."
+
+She withdrew her hands and lay back against the cushions. "No amount of
+courage----" She broke off and tried afresh. "Being brave wouldn't put
+him again into my arms. You're wondering whom I'm talking about--Reggie
+Pollock, my only husband. The other two didn't count, any more than
+Adair counts. I don't say it unkindly. I do want you to believe that.
+They were passers-by--that was all. They hung their hats in the hall
+and, somehow, they stopped. They were nice boys, both of them. It seemed
+a kind of war-work to let them marry me. You see, they needed me; so
+when they said they loved me, I didn't have the heart to turn them out.
+I suppose I was too amiable. But they didn't count--not at all."
+
+"The war's over," Tabs reminded her with quiet humor. "How long is this
+amiability going to last?"
+
+She smiled dreamily. "Adair again! You don't leave him alone for long.
+If you think that I ever let him make love to me, you're mistaken. It's
+only that he's unhappy and I can do something for him."
+
+Tabs wasn't at all sure that it was only that. This fatal amiability
+might have raised quite different expectations in Adair. Like her two
+latest husbands, he might take a notion to hang his hat in her hall. If
+he did, would she abate her amiability sufficiently to tell him to hang
+it somewhere else?
+
+She was drifting; what she needed was either a tow-rope or a rudder. He
+sent his gaze questing through the shadows.
+
+"Those five photographs, all of the same man--they're of Pollock?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He was one of the first of all the aces, wasn't he? It was he who
+brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and went missing a few days
+later. You see, I remember his record. He was outstandingly brave at a
+time when the world was full of brave men. And you tell me he loved
+you?"
+
+An expression of triumph flitted across her face. "Not loved." Her voice
+was full-throated. "He adored me, and to me he was a god whom I
+worshiped. I'd have gone through hell for him. I'd----"
+
+"No, you wouldn't."
+
+The flatness of the contradiction pulled her up short. "No you
+wouldn't," he repeated quietly. "You wouldn't even go through this for
+him. You wouldn't play the game by him when he was dead. He always kept
+his end up, whatever the odds against him; but you--you couldn't. This
+was your chance to show that you were worthy of him. While he was alive,
+you played a winning game; it was easy to be true to him. But he--he was
+stauncher; he was most to be trusted when the game seemed all but lost.
+You ought to have kept his spirit alive for us; but you've understood so
+little of his spirit that you've been willing to put any stranger in his
+place--to quote your own words, any stranger who chose to hang his hat
+in your hall. Pollock was a soldier; he didn't need to be sure of
+victory to show courage. It was in tight corners that he was at his
+best. You're in a tight corner now, and you're his wife--the wife whom
+he didn't love, but adored."
+
+The brutal impact of the truth had struck her dumb at first. Her lips
+had fallen apart. While she had listened, her face had gone white. Now
+that he paused, she slipped back into the cushions, covering her eyes
+with her hands. "For God's sake stop torturing me! Though you think I'm
+as contemptible as that, don't say it. If you must speak, tell me what
+you think I ought to do."
+
+"Do! Until you find a living man who's his match, carry on as though he
+were not dead."
+
+She uncovered her eyes and sat upright, staring at him. "As though he
+were not dead. But Reggie is dead. You know as well as I do that he's
+dead."
+
+Tabs nodded. "I'm not denying it. But for all that, try to live as
+though he weren't--as though somewhere up the road, a day, a week, a
+month, a year hence he would meet you round the corner."
+
+Her interest faded forlornly. "What good would that do? It would only be
+making believe with myself."
+
+He spoke gently. "Yes, but games of make-believe come true. You couldn't
+meet _him_, but you might meet some one his equal--a man who's, perhaps,
+already waiting for you, while you squander yourself on makeshifts and
+second bests."
+
+The little silence which had ended his speech dragged on from seconds
+into minutes. In the quiet room nothing stirred. She attempted to free
+herself from his gaze by refusing to look at him. Against her will her
+eyes crept up to his, clashed, evaded, fell back and again crept up to
+them.
+
+At last, speaking humbly, she said, "I was ashamed. You made me ashamed.
+Whatever I'd done, if he came back, he wouldn't be ashamed of me. It
+wouldn't matter how cowardly I'd been or however many husbands I'd had;
+he'd be so glad to have me in his arms that he wouldn't find time to be
+ashamed of me. So I'm not going to be ashamed any longer; I'm going to
+start to live as if he were coming back. It'll be hard at first.
+Adair--he was nothing. And yet---- I shall miss him, no doubt. You said
+something this afternoon that you didn't mean."
+
+"Didn't I? What was it?"
+
+"It was when I was crying because nobody wanted me. Do you remember what
+you said? You said, 'I do,' not meaning a word of it. Could you manage
+to want me just a little, Lord Taborley? Not for long, you know; only
+till I've got past the loneliest places--till I've begun almost to
+persuade myself that he may come back. To think that you wanted me would
+help."
+
+Before he could answer, she had sprung to her feet, all but over-turning
+the lamp. "What's that?"
+
+A sharp rat-a-tat-tat had reverberated through the house. While she
+spoke, it was repeated. Her over-strung nerves gave way. As Tabs rose,
+she clung to him beseechingly. "Don't let him in. I'm not ready for him.
+Don't let him in. Go outside and send him away. Tell him anything. But
+don't let him enter."
+
+Tabs had no clear idea to whom she was referring. It might have been to
+Adair. It might have been to Pollock. It seemed more likely that it was
+to her dead husband. This talk about living as though he might come
+back had probably distraught an imagination already over-taxed.
+
+"He sha'n't enter," he assured her. "There's no need to lose your
+nerve."
+
+As he passed into the hall, he heard the starchy approach of Porter. He
+waited and halted her with, "Mrs. Lockwood asked me to answer it."
+
+When he had watched her retreat and vanish, he advanced towards the
+door. Who was it out there in the darkness whose knock had power to
+strike such terror? It was a terror the excitement of which he at least
+remotely shared. The thought crossed his mind, "Is it possible that her
+longing could have dragged him back?" He felt as though in the
+stucco-fronted gloom of Mulberry Court, Fate itself stood waiting for
+him on the other side of the panel. With conscious bravado he stretched
+out his hand and drew back the latch.
+
+
+II
+
+"Is it Mr. Easterday?"
+
+It was a woman's voice that asked the question--a deep voice, thrilling
+with emotion, that made him wonder what it would sound like with all the
+stops pulled out. He had opened the door only a little way, expecting
+that he would have to refuse admittance. At the sound of a woman's
+voice, his sense of the conventions sprang to life. It must be a good
+deal past ten and here he was answering Maisie's door as though he were
+her butler. The kind of conclusions that could be drawn were made plain
+by the caller's question, "Is it Mr. Easterday?" To be mistaken for
+Easterday annoyed him. It was tantamount to an accusation. It implied
+that, even though he were not Easterday, the proprietory way in which he
+attended to other people's doors at after ten o'clock put Him well
+within Easterday's class. Tabs was particularly annoyed to hear himself
+accused by a voice so gracious and pleasant. His surprise had evidently
+impressed her as furtiveness, for she said, "So it is Mr. Easterday?"
+
+He was at a loss what to do with her--how to turn her away. For Maisie's
+sake she must not be allowed to enter, for then she would discover that
+they had been alone. He opened the door a few inches wider and parried
+to gain time. "If it's Mr. Easterday that you're wanting, you've made a
+fortunate mistake. This is Mrs. Lockwood's house. But I happen to know
+an Easterday--an Adair Easterday; he's a personal friend. Perhaps he's
+the man you're looking for. If so, I can give you his address."
+
+This sally was greeted with a quiet, rather mocking laugh. He was using
+his eyes, trying to form an estimate of the visitor. She had arrived in
+a car, which he judged to be private, for in the light reflected from
+the windshield he could make out the livery of her chauffeur. She was
+swathed in a sumptuous wrap which looked as though it were of sable. She
+held it gathered closely about her, so that it fell in soft folds,
+revealing and at the same time concealing her figure. He was anxious to
+read her face, but the lower part was snuggled into the fur of the deep
+collar and the upper part was shadowed by a broad-brimmed tulle hat,
+from which two bird of paradise plumes spread back like wings on the
+helmet of a viking. For the rest, she had white kid gloves, which
+reached up to her elbows. Outside the glove of the left hand she wore a
+bracelet; every time she stirred the stones struck fire in the
+semi-darkness. Her hands were very small. Peeping out from below her
+gown, the buckles on her high-heeled shoes twinkled. She was mysterious,
+taunting, and strangely commanding. As she hovered there across the
+threshold, a faint perfume drifted up to him like the intoxicating
+romance of June rose-gardens under moonlight.
+
+She, too, seemed to have suffered a surprise at hearing the tones in
+which he had spoken. "His address! Oh, no, it wasn't Mr. Easterday I was
+wanting. I only supposed---- If Mrs. Lockwood's at home, I should like
+to see her."
+
+Her voice was like a chime of contralto bells. It made him think of
+Bernhardt. It imparted to the commonplaces she uttered a quite
+disproportionate intensity of drama and tragic depth. The way in which
+she had said, "Oh, no," reverberated in his memory as though the sound
+still lingered on the air.
+
+"I don't know at all," he commenced. Then he smiled at his confusion.
+"You see I'm not used to answering doors, and Mrs. Lockwood's not quite
+herself. She was very tired just now. But if you'll give me your name,
+I'll----"
+
+If he'd been left to himself, he might have succeeded in creating the
+impression that he was Maisie's physician. As it was, his conscience
+was spared the deception by the advent of the inevitable Porter. She
+sailed up behind him with an appearance so immaculate that it would have
+shed propriety on the most compromising circumstances. He instantly
+stood aside to make room for her. "Porter, here's a lady enquiring
+for----"
+
+But the lady took matters into her own hands. "Mrs. Lockwood in,
+Porter?"
+
+"Why, certainly, your Ladyship."
+
+"Then why was I shut out? Who is this gentleman who----"
+
+The rest was lost as their voices sank. The next words he caught were
+her Ladyship's, running up the scale of laughter. "Then I'm not _de
+trop_! That's a blessing!"
+
+He fell back, trying to obliterate himself, as with every sign of
+deference Porter admitted her; but in crossing the hall, she had to pass
+him. Scarcely pausing, she swept him with a pair of stone-gray eyes,
+made mischievous for the moment with merriment. "You're no good as a
+butler," she whispered. "You carry discretion too far."
+
+To his chagrin he recognized her--the one woman whom he would most have
+chosen to have met in an attitude that was dignified. She entered the
+drawing-room and was lost to sight. But she had left the door ajar and
+he heard Maisie's delighted exclamation, "Why, Di, what brings you here
+so late? This is darling of you!" His position was elaborately false. It
+grew more false every minute he delayed. He foresaw himself apologizing
+and being explained. He had no appetite for explanations. Since he had
+adventured into Mulberry Tree Court, he had twice been tempted to bolt
+for safety. Now that he was tempted for a third time, he acted blindly
+on the impulse. Having played the role of butler with too much
+discretion, he seized his hat and, without a thought of ceremony,
+adopted a butler's mode of escaping.
+
+
+III
+
+In the shrouded emptiness of the London night he felt himself free
+again. He came into possession of himself and found that he could think
+with his old definite clearness. In the last few hours events had rushed
+him off his feet; he had no sooner realized their significance than he
+had discovered himself in the throes of a new crisis. Now, for the
+moment, he stood aloof and could consider his actions in their true
+perspective.
+
+As he turned out of Mulberry Tree Court, he had thought he had heard a
+voice calling after him. "Lord Taborley! Lord Taborley!" He had looked
+back across the imitation village-green, where the white posts showed
+dimly like smudges of chalk. The door of Maisie's house had been opened
+wide, making a lozenge of gold against the blackness. He had fancied
+that he had seen her standing there framed, leaning out, and
+then----Yes, surely he had heard the running of slippered feet along the
+pavement. He had not waited. He scarcely knew from what he was
+escaping--perhaps from his fate, from which there is ultimately no
+escape. He seized his respite, however, for the dread of recapture was
+strong upon him.
+
+And now all hint of pursuit had died out. Tall houses stood muted
+against the sky; dim trees cast a leafy obscurity; stars glinted
+remotely like diamonds set in gun-metal. He found a healing chastity in
+his sudden aloneness; it roused in him an almost angry desire to recover
+his lost monasticism.
+
+He was amused to discover himself speculating as to whether women were
+worth the trouble they occasioned. They coerced men with sentimental
+arguments to which there were no replies. They wore away men's fortitude
+with the continual flowing of their tears. They molded men's strength
+into weakness with the magic caressing of their sex. They promised and
+disappointed, flattered and allured, captured and despised. Their
+curiosity was insatiable to possess themselves of secrets, which were no
+longer valued the moment they were divulged. Their little teasing hands,
+so destructive and lovable, had commenced the debacle of every human
+greatness. Throughout the ages, their coaxing, pleading voices could be
+heard wheedling men's hearts to the same purpose. "Tell me, I pray thee,
+wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherein thou mightest be bound to
+afflict thee." The strength of men had eternally roused their
+resentment, whether they were the Delilahs of long ago or the Maisies of
+a modern generation. The goal of all their passion, even when it was
+unselfish, was to bind.
+
+He had nearly been bound, but he had escaped. At the thought that he
+had escaped, he felt a flood of exultant joy sweep through him. He
+smiled, believing he had discovered a humorous and more human motive for
+the exhausting piety of the anchorites. It wasn't their religious
+self-abnegation that had made them flee to scorched river-beds and
+desert hiding-places; it was their triumphant satisfaction at having
+tantalized and eluded feminine pursuit. They fled in order that they
+might possess, not deny themselves. As they became more emaciated and
+scarred and as their needs grew less, they listened. What they heard was
+ample compensation for all that they had foresworn at the hands of life.
+Far blown from distant haunts of habitation came a sound which in their
+ears was sweetest music: day and night the painful dragging of chains
+and the groan of men toiling in servitude to women.
+
+"The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!" When the last sleepy caress had
+been given, all men who lacked the caution of the anchorite, were sooner
+or later destined to hear that cry.
+
+How much nobler men had been in a womanless world! Some of them had had
+to become womanless before they could be noble. Pollock plunging to his
+death from the clouds, like an eagle struck by a thunderbolt! Lord Dawn
+with the smile of calm remembrance on his lips, purged of all his
+fruitless sex-contentions, lying white and quiet beneath the crack and
+spatter of exploding shells! Braithwaite, the ex-valet, who had proved
+himself an aristocrat in courage! And he himself, thinking only of duty,
+with every jealous ambition laid aside!
+
+And now---- The mate of the eagle was a trifler with peacocks and
+vultures. The man whose face had been molded by his last thought into an
+expression of serene faithfulness, was recalled only as one who had
+lived envenomed by disloyalty. Braithwaite, the aristocrat in courage,
+was now distinguished for his cowardice; he himself was at one and the
+same time Braithwaite's rival and grudging critic. _The Philistines be
+upon thee, Samson! And he awoke out of his sleep and said, I will go out
+as at other times and shake myself_----Asleep! He felt that he, too, had
+been asleep. All the men who had been giants in the past five years were
+either dead or sleeping. And this sudden transformation was the work of
+women, because men had come back to walk and rest with them in the soft,
+desired places. The little feminine hands had stripped them of their
+charity, had taken away their valor and had concealed liers-in-wait in
+the chamber of their affections.
+
+So his thoughts ran on, amplifying, magnifying, exaggerating the theme
+of the debilitating effects of women. But from all his accusations he
+exempted Terry. She was the Joan of Arc of his imagination, who rode on
+unvanquished across life's battlefields, inspiring to heroism with her
+shining purity. And he made one other exception--Lady Dawn. It was the
+Lady Dawn of the portrait he exempted, not the Lady Dawn who had mocked
+him in passing with her steady stone-gray eyes. In a strange way he
+discriminated between the portrait and the living woman. The portrait
+was almost his friend; the living woman was a stranger. The woman in
+the portrait was after his own heart; she had never been known to cry.
+"Do it harder; I can bear more than that." He thrilled to the pride of
+her defiance.
+
+Then he pulled himself up with a start. Again he was thinking about her.
+Yes, and though he might discriminate between the portrait and the
+living woman, it was the living woman's eyes that gleamed in the
+blackness of his mind. There was truth in what Maisie had said, that
+were he as much in love with Terry as he professed all other women,
+however beautiful, except the one woman, should be hanks of hair and
+bags of bones. He consoled himself by arguing that that was precisely
+what he had been trying to prove them by his sweeping applications of
+the conduct of Delilah.
+
+Whichever way he viewed his situation, things were in a pretty fair
+muddle--a muddle which annoyed him because it was so unmerited. He was
+pledged to Terry, while she held herself unpledged. He was committed to
+help Maisie--a distinctly unwise little lady for any bachelor to help.
+As a third party to his problem, Lady Dawn intruded herself--though why
+she should, he wasn't certain. He would have to see her, however much
+Maisie dissuaded; it was right that she should know about her husband.
+Yet was that the entire reason why he was so keen to see her? He assured
+himself very earnestly that it was, and dismissed her from his mind.
+
+For the rest of the journey home he conscientiously narrowed his
+imaginings to thoughts of Terry.
+
+
+IV
+
+It was with thoughts of her that he fitted his key in the latch. The
+Square was full of newly married couples, some of them little more than
+boys and girls--youngsters who had waited impatiently and had run
+together the moment war was ended. Others had been married just long
+enough to be proudly parading their first baby. Every morning white
+prams were wheeled out into the garden, there to be watched over by
+softly spoken nurses. Every night, as dusk came down, expectant mothers
+paced gently through the shadows, leaning on the arms of ex-officer
+husbands. It wasn't only in the trees that nests were being built. The
+Square's name might well have been changed to Honeymoon Square.
+
+And now, as Tabs pushed the door open, preparing to enter, he knew that
+all up and down the Square, behind the pall of darkness, other doors
+were being pushed back. Young couples were coming home from dinners and
+theaters. He could hear the murmur of their laughter, subdued and
+secret, hinting at intimacies of affection. The men had misplaced their
+latch-key perhaps; the girls were advising that they search another
+pocket. Or the lock refused to turn and the girls were whispering how it
+could be persuaded. Some of them were arriving in taxis; others, less
+lucky or more economic, were tripping by on foot along the pavement. He
+noticed how closely they clung together and he thought of Terry. It
+would be jolly to be young, to build a nest and, by and by, to see your
+own white pram wheeled out to take its place in the blowy greenness of
+the garden. He withdrew his key and entered, closing the door behind
+him.
+
+The house was very still. It was nearly midnight. The maids had gone to
+bed, leaving lights in the hall and on the landings. As he hung up his
+hat, the stillness was broken by the sudden ringing of the telephone. It
+rang in a peevish, scolding manner, as though this were not the first
+time and it had lost its temper with waiting. He climbed the flight of
+stairs to his library and, without waiting to switch on the lights, sat
+down at his table, taking up the receiver.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is this Lord Taborley?" a voice inquired.
+
+"Lord Taborley speaking."
+
+"This is Sir Tobias Beddow." There was a pause, followed by a little
+asthmatic cough. Then, "How are you, my dear fellow? I've been trying to
+reach you all evening. I was expecting to see you round here this
+morning at eleven.--No, I don't mean perhaps what you infer. Besides, it
+wouldn't have been any good if you had called; Terry wandered out,
+without leaving word where she was going. She didn't get back till
+nearly lunch-time. Most unaccountable conduct under the circumstances;
+but since your conduct was equally unaccountable, perhaps it was just as
+well. But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs smiled in the darkness. Sir Tobias was as simple and crafty as a
+child; he couldn't keep anything back. Then his mind jumped to the
+obvious conclusion. Terry hadn't told her parents about her morning
+interview; her parents naturally supposed that it was his fault that he
+was not engaged to her as yet. Making an effort to be diplomatic, he
+said, "Perhaps I can explain my apparent negligence to you later. It
+must seem unpardonable. I've been busy every minute over things that
+absolutely couldn't be avoided."
+
+"Of course. Of course." The words were spoken soothingly, but without
+conviction. "We men understand. It's Lady Beddow who---- Such events are
+women's great occasions. She's a stickler for form. As you say, you can
+explain later---- But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs stifled a yawn. He had suddenly discovered he was sleepy.
+
+"What was that you said?" Sir Tobias enquired suspiciously.
+
+"I didn't say anything," Tabs replied politely. "But I think I know what
+you called me up about. It was about Maisie--I mean Mrs. Lockwood."
+
+"What about her?" The question was asked carelessly; he knew at once
+that he had missed his guess. It was strange, even though he had guessed
+wrongly, that Sir Tobias should not display more interest.
+
+"What about her? Only that I've spent the last six hours with her. You
+asked me to see her as soon as possible, you remember. I had only just
+got home from being with her, when the telephone rang. She's not the
+woman we thought her."
+
+"Eh? What's that?"
+
+He repeated what he had said. He was perfectly certain that Sir Tobias
+had heard the first time. "She's not the woman we thought her." And he
+added, "There's been some mistake. She hasn't and never did have any
+designs on Adair. After we'd talked things over, she agreed of her own
+accord never to see him again."
+
+"She did!" There was a long pause, expressive of skepticism,
+dissatisfaction, or anything that he cared to conjecture. Then, "When we
+meet, you can tell me. But that wasn't what I called you up about."
+
+Tabs waited for him to tell him why he had called him up. He waited so
+long that it seemed to be a competition to see who would compel the
+other to break the silence first. At last he gave in. "If that wasn't
+why, why did you?"
+
+He almost heard Sir Tobias blink his eyes--those faded eyes that looked
+so blind and saw so much. "I called you up about this General
+Braithwaite. He's been here to see me on the biggest fool's errand, with
+the most unusual story which, if it's true, partly concerns yourself.
+It's too late to enter into details this evening. But I thought I'd let
+you know---- Good night."
+
+"One minute, Sir Tobias----"
+
+Before he could get any further Sir Tobias had hung up. For a few
+seconds he sat there in the darkness listening; then he hung up also and
+took himself off to bed.
+
+What object had Braithwaite had in going to see Sir Tobias? Was it his
+first step in trying to play fair? Was his "fool's errand" a formal
+request for Terry's hand in marriage and his "unusual story" a manly
+recital of the facts? And had this great advance in frankness included
+the telling of Ann? As he tossed sleeplessly from side to side, other
+problems leapt up to confront him. Had he done wisely in promising
+Maisie that, in a measure, he would compensate her for the loss of
+Adair? What would Sir Tobias think of such an intimacy when he got to
+hear of it? What would even Adair think of it? There was only one person
+who would not doubt his integrity; that was Terry. And then Lady
+Dawn--had he actually any moral right to interfere in her affairs? "Do
+it harder; I can bear more than that." He could hear her saying it in
+that deep, emotional voice of hers. He could feel her honest stone-gray
+eyes, probing his soul for motives in the darkness.
+
+Day was breaking and birds were stirring in the mist of greenness that
+topped his windows, before his eye-lids closed and he slipped off into
+forgetfulness.
+
+
+V
+
+"To-morrow's another new day," he thought as he awoke. One could meet
+any and every indebtedness to life if he only had a sufficient fund of
+to-morrows in his bank.
+
+He looked at his watch and leapt out of bed. Nine o'clock! He had slept
+late. He didn't hurry over his dressing. He could afford to be late for
+once. The mood of conquest was upon him. Maisie had said that. No, it
+wasn't _the mood_ but _the air_ of conquest that she'd said he had.
+Whichever it was, he would prove her a true prophetess. He might not
+gain all his desires, but he'd at least wear the air of one who was
+going to gain them. To-morrow was another new day, and to-morrow had
+arrived.
+
+On coming down to breakfast he scrutinized Ann's features closely to
+learn whether she had heard anything from Braithwaite. They told him
+nothing. Presently, however, while she served him, she began to open
+out.
+
+"Did your Lordship speak to the gentleman at the War Office?"
+
+Tabs had been glancing through the morning paper. He looked up. "Yes, I
+did, Ann. I placed your letter in his hands, and saw him read it."
+
+"Did he say anything or promise anything to your Lordship?"
+
+Tabs pursed his lips judicially, trying to avoid a lie. "You know what
+these War Office officials are. They never make promises to any one. But
+I believe this one's a good-hearted chap. When he realizes how much this
+thing means to you, I think he'll do his best."
+
+"Then he didn't show your Lordship my letter?"
+
+Tabs had dipped into his newspaper again. He detested the well-meant
+deceit he was compelled to practice. This time, when he answered, he
+didn't raise his eyes. "No, he didn't."
+
+But she didn't efface herself, as he had expected. She stood there, to
+one side of his chair. He felt that she was looking down at him. Just
+above the edge of his paper he could see her hands clasped together,
+pressing against each other in agitation. He abandoned his refuge and
+dropped the paper to the carpet.
+
+"Something more that you want to ask me? What is it?"
+
+"Your Lordship said that when the gentleman realized how much all this
+meant to me, he'd do his best."
+
+"That's what I said and I'm sure of it."
+
+"What I wanted to ask was, does your Lordship think he has realized?"
+
+It was the way she said it that roused his curiosity. Could she have
+guessed? Had she read the address on that letter which he had given her
+to post to General Braithwaite, and put two and two together?
+
+He met her eyes--good, gray eyes, with something of Lady Dawn's grave
+honesty in their expression. "I think he has realized."
+
+"Thank you, sir; and I'm sorry I had to trouble you."
+
+She withdrew, leaving him with the disturbing sense that she had
+intended more than she had said. He gathered up the paper from the floor
+in the hope that a perusal of it might enable him to recover his lost
+equanimity. In so doing he caught sight of the last page, which
+contained the photographic items. Braithwaite's face stared up at him.
+Above it was printed the caption, "_Youngest Ranker Brigadier Demobbed
+Yesterday_."
+
+If she had seen that, she knew. If she had seen it, what would be her
+next move--appeal or revenge? What had been the significance of her
+final question, "Does your Lordship think he has realized?" Did she know
+now; had she even known when she had written her letter that it would be
+received by Braithwaite himself?
+
+If she didn't know and had not seen the paper, he was determined that
+she should not see it. Before leaving the room, he stuffed it into the
+empty grate and applied a match. He would play fair by Braithwaite. He
+was so eager to play fair that he did not turn to go upstairs till every
+vestige of print had been licked to ashes.
+
+
+VI
+
+His library occupied the whole of the second story; even at that it was
+not very large. It had two long French windows, opening onto a veranda
+which looked out over the Square. The veranda was constructed of wrought
+iron, painted green, and ran straight across the front of the house. Ann
+used it for giving her plants an airing; they usually formed a truant
+garden beyond the panes. There was a smaller window at the back, from
+which a view could be obtained of the Oratory.
+
+The room was furnished in English red lacquer, which had been
+transferred from the collection at Taborley House, when Taborley House
+had been lent to the Americans for a military hospital. The walls were
+hung with landscapes by Zuccarelli and with Chinese portrait-groups of
+the Eighteenth Century.
+
+He had scarcely entered before the telephone renewed its irritating
+clamor, like a fretful child which yelled whenever it heard his
+footstep. He responded to its fretfulness in very much the same mood,
+seizing hold of the receiver as though he would shake it into silence.
+
+"Yes. Hullo! Hullo! Yes, this is Lord Taborley. What's that? You didn't
+catch what I---- It's Lord Taborley speaking, I said."
+
+"Well, I must say you don't sound very nice." It was a woman's amused
+voice. "Even at this distance, you make me almost afraid. I do hope you
+haven't been like that all night."
+
+Tabs made his tones more smiling. "I'm sorry if I don't sound
+sufficiently pleasant. But who are you?"
+
+"Well, who do you think?" There was a snatch of laughter. "I'm Maisie; I
+mean Mrs. Lockwood. You needn't tell me that you're not frowning,
+because I can feel it. What's the matter?"
+
+He pulled a wry face at himself in the opposite mirror and shrugged his
+shoulders. Down the 'phone he said with excessive amiability, "Nothing.
+I'm top-hole. How are you feeling?"
+
+Her answer came back like a flash, "Vulgar and not very safe." It was
+followed by a gurgle of merriment.
+
+"I'm not sure that I understand your symptoms."
+
+The gurgle was repeated. "You wouldn't. Lord Taborley never feels vulgar
+and he's always safe. But this is one of my vulgar days, when I'm not
+to be trusted. I always have one when Di has been to visit me; it's the
+relapse after contact with too high standards of respectability. I'm
+liable to do anything. I married Gervis and Lockwood after being with
+her. I shall break out to-day if you don't come at once and stop me.
+Unless--unless you don't want to stop me and would prefer the experiment
+of being vulgar together."
+
+"The prospect sounds alluring." He was trying to let her down lightly.
+"But I'm afraid I have too many engagements on hand."
+
+"Oh!" It was the _oh_ of disappointment. When she spoke again her gay
+irresponsibility had vanished and a coaxing quality had come into her
+voice. "I know you've only just got home from being with me--I mean
+comparatively speaking. I don't want to make myself a burden to you,
+but---- It's such a jolly day. Have you been up long enough to look out
+of the window? I thought we could go off somewhere--to the Zoo, perhaps,
+and drink lemonade all among the monkeys and the nuts. I woke up
+planning it. We'd limit our spending money to five shillings like
+kiddies, and do all our riding on busses. Doesn't that sound jolly?"
+
+"Immensely," he agreed; "but I'm afraid no amount of jolliness could
+tempt----"
+
+She broke in on him. "It's the kind of thing I used to do with Adair."
+
+The meaning of this last remark was plain; she was reminding him that if
+the pair of shoes vacated by Adair were to remain vacated, he must pay
+the promised price on occasions by wearing them himself. He determined
+to get behind her diplomatic hints with frankness.
+
+"I don't want you to think, Mrs. Lockwood, that because I have to refuse
+your first request I'm going back on our contract. There'll be plenty of
+other opportunities."
+
+He caught her sigh of relief across the line. When she spoke again it
+was with a new brightness and reasonableness. "I'm glad you said that.
+So you really are going to help me? I was a wee bit afraid that you'd
+gone back on your bargain by the way you ran away."
+
+It was his first experience of the advantage a woman gains when she
+attacks a man from the other end of a telephone. He had trouble in
+making his voice sound patient. He replied with conscious hypocrisy,
+"I'm sorry I created the impression of running away."
+
+"You did." Her answer came back promptly. "You created the same
+impression on us both. I had to do a lot of explaining to Di."
+
+"And I was trying to save you embarrassment," he excused himself.
+
+"Eh! What's that?"
+
+To his immense surprise a third voice--a man's--jumped in on the
+conversation. "Are you there? Is this Lord Taborley?"
+
+Tabs was just getting ready to confess that he was there and that he was
+Lord Taborley, when Maisie took matters out of his hands by informing
+the intruder that the line was occupied and that he was interrupting a
+conversation.
+
+"I'm sorry," the intruder apologized, "but my time's valuable. I've been
+kept waiting for the best part of quarter of an hour. Are you the
+telephone-girl that I'm talking to?"
+
+"Indeed I'm not," said Maisie with considerable haughtiness. "Please get
+off the line." And then to Tabs, "Are you still there, Lord Taborley?
+This is Mrs. Lockwood. Can't you postpone some of those engagements so
+that we can meet to-day?"
+
+At that moment the girl at the switch-board took a hand. There was a
+confused gabbling and buzzing of voices, out of which the suave tones of
+the intruder emerged triumphant, saying, "This is Sir Tobias Beddow. Can
+I speak with Lord Taborley?"
+
+Perhaps Maisie had heard. At all events, the moment Sir Tobias declared
+himself the line cleared.
+
+But it wasn't what Maisie had overheard that disturbed Tabs; it was the
+uncertainty as to how much of her conversation had been listened to by
+Sir Tobias. After all, prospective fathers-in-law are only human and as
+likely as any other class to jump to damaging conclusions. Tabs hung up
+the receiver, making it necessary for him to be summoned afresh before
+he acknowledged his presence at the 'phone. Then, "Good morning, Sir
+Tobias."
+
+"Good morning, my dear fellow." Sir Tobias was as courtly and friendly
+as ever. "I called you up to know whether you could run round to see me
+between now and the forenoon. Yes, the matter I mentioned to you last
+night. About eleven, you say? Very well, then, I shall expect you."
+
+
+VII
+
+No sooner had the butler with the velvet-plush manners admitted him than
+he found himself face to face with Terry. She must have known that he
+was expected and have been lying in wait for him. Before he could say a
+word, she pressed a finger to her lips, signaling caution. To the butler
+she said in a low tone, "It's all right, James; you don't need to wait.
+I'll announce Lord Taborley." The discreet James showed a fitting
+appreciation of romance by folding his plump hands across the pit of his
+stomach, making the ghost of a bow and tiptoeing noiselessly into the
+nether regions with the stealth of a conspirator.
+
+Terry's face was a picture of innocence. After Maisie she struck him as
+very young--much too young to love or to know the meaning of love. The
+sight of her freshness was forbidding. It made him seem jaded. It filled
+him with a reverence that was not far short of worship. He felt it
+impossible to think of her as performing the ordinary acts of a mortal
+world. He had the feeling that she moved on higher levels--that she was
+a creature too shy and perfect to be made the instrument of passion. She
+should be guarded in her purity like a vestal virgin, so that her
+straight young body might be forever valiant and her eyes might never
+learn the cowardice of tears.
+
+In the brave March sunlight which shafted down on her, her head looked
+more like a Botticelli angel's than ever. The raw gold of her bobbed
+hair shone solid as metal, making a sharp edge where it ended against
+the ivory pallor of her throat. She was dressed in a white tailor-made
+serge. Her violet eyes danced with eager secrets.
+
+"What are you doing to-day?" she whispered.
+
+"Nothing!" he whispered, "if you want me."
+
+"Then invite me out to lunch. I've such heaps to tell you. Don't let
+Daddy take you to his club--I know he's going to ask you. And, oh,
+before I forget, I've told them nothing about yesterday, so don't give
+me away by accident." Then in a sly aside, just as she was turning the
+door-knob to admit him to her father's library, "You've been getting on
+famously with Maisie, haven't you?"
+
+Before he could reply, they were across the threshold. There was a sound
+as of a rheumaticky hen stirring in its nest. The neck of Sir Tobias
+craned painfully round the corner of a high-backed chair.
+
+"Here's Lord Taborley to see you, Daddy. Don't keep him forever. He's
+just invited me to go out with him to lunch."
+
+Having shot her bolt, with the masterly strategy of her sex, she
+vanished, pulling the door behind her.
+
+What would Shakespeare have said under the circumstances, and what would
+a suitor have said to Shakespeare when he knew that he was suspected of
+having gone back on his request for the daughter's hand in marriage?
+Tabs almost felt that he was in the actual presence of the bard of
+Stratford, Sir Tobias looked so ineffectually pompous and overweighted
+with gravity. Both Sir Tobias and Shakespeare, in the opinion of Tabs,
+were vastly overrated persons; but the only thing Shakespearian about
+Sir Tobias this morning was the magnificent calmness of his forehead;
+his podgy body, supported by its stiff little pen-wiper legs was more
+reminiscent of Punch, as portrayed on the cover of the famous weekly
+which bears his name.
+
+"Immensely considerate of you to come," puffed Sir Tobias, levering
+himself out of his chair in order that he might shake hands.
+
+"Not kind at all," Tabs contradicted cheerfully. "I kill two birds with
+one stone; I have my conversation with you and in half an hour I carry
+off Terry."
+
+That'll make him hurry up with whatever he has to say, he thought; it
+sets a time limit.
+
+The old gentleman seemed put out to find himself deprived of his
+prerogative to be elaborate and prosy. He made a gesture, indicating
+that Tabs should copy his example and choose a chair. But Tabs ignored
+it. He had learnt that a man on his feet has the advantage, especially
+if he stands six foot two in his socks.
+
+"You'll be wanting my news," he suggested. "I told you pretty well
+everything across the telephone. I think it's a case of everybody having
+got the wind up--Phyllis particularly. Mrs. Lockwood's a very restful
+woman. I should call her a man's woman. She's bright and entertaining
+and pretty, and she owns a charming little house. She had no
+responsibilities, so she's free to entertain from morning till night.
+Adair has without doubt visited her more often than was wise. It was
+remarkably foolish of him to have made a woman-friend whom he didn't
+share with Phyllis. But I suppose he didn't dare to introduce them after
+he'd seen that Phyllis was jealous. However that may be, this dread that
+they may run away together is moonshine. Mrs. Lockwood sets too high a
+value on herself. Besides, there's only one man whom she loves or ever
+has loved for that matter. He happens to be dead!"
+
+"One moment, my dear fellow," Sir Tobias interrupted, "I always
+understood that the lady had had three husbands. Was this man one of
+them or did she have no affection for any of the men she married?"
+
+Tabs felt himself cornered--and he had been getting on so well. He
+realized that if once he allowed Sir Tobias to start questioning him he
+would get tangled up. "She's complex," he explained; "she's complex in
+her simplicity. She's one of the most simply complicated and
+complicatedly simple women that I ever met. To understand her you have
+to talk with her. I talked with her for six hours. The upshot was that
+she promised to shut her door against Adair."
+
+The innocent old eyes blinked. "I'm not modern, like you, Lord Taborley.
+I have my suspicions of these simply complicated and complicatedly
+simple women. Set me down as old-fashioned. Having been only once
+married, I can't enter into the refinements of feeling of such
+matrimonially inclined boa-constrictors as Mrs. Lockwood. I sha'n't give
+myself the chance of meeting her. I'm an old man; it would be too
+upsetting. If I talked with her, I shouldn't understand. So I must take
+your word for it that, however much appearances may have been against
+her, her motives were beyond question." He slipped forward in his chair
+with a disconcerting suddenness; for a moment his filmy eyes became
+penetrating. "She seems to have made a deep impression on you, my dear
+fellow. If your optimism proves correct and through your efforts Adair
+is free from her clutches, we all owe you a debt of gratitude. But--and
+I'm sure you won't take amiss what I'm saying--I would advise you, now
+that you've effected Adair's rescue, not to see too much of her
+yourself. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn't see her any more if I could
+help."
+
+It was clear that the benignant, sly old gentleman had overheard a
+substantial part of Maisie's telephone conversation. It was equally
+clear that his interference was wisely and kindly intended. He had a
+perfect right to be scrupulous about the conduct of a man whom he
+regarded as his future son-in-law; but he had no right to take advantage
+of the worst managed telephone-system in the world to eavesdrop on a
+private conversation. At the same time Tabs could hardly accuse him of
+eavesdropping, so he fell back on his dignity for defense.
+
+"I've always been very well able to take care of myself," he said
+quietly. "If I hadn't been, I shouldn't have undertaken your mission
+and have gone to interview the kind of woman you described. I found,
+however, that she didn't live up to your description of her; in fairness
+to her I have to let you know that. I don't think you appreciate, Sir
+Tobias, what a delicate situation you created for both of us. She's a
+woman of breeding; which goes without saying since she's Lady Dawn's
+sister--a fact which you withheld from me. You sent me to her house as a
+kind of moral policeman with a warrant for her arrest. She was well
+aware of that and she was also aware that the charge you laid against
+her was almost libelously mistaken. All I can say is that she has
+behaved very handsomely. Since you and Phyllis have misunderstood her
+friendship for Adair, she's willing to break off relations. The most
+courteous and only decent thing that we can do is to cease discussing
+her. It's an incident which does none of us much credit."
+
+As he had warmed to her defense, Tabs had been very conscious that he
+was being more than generous--perhaps even more generous than truthful.
+It hadn't been his intention at the start to depict her as a wronged and
+spotless angel; but the skepticism of the attentive old image, bleached
+with disillusions and faded with years, had goaded him to excess.
+
+Sir Tobias had listened, scratching his pointed beard thoughtfully, with
+entire amiability. He was utterly unimpressed and visibly unashamed.
+"You're a man of the world, my dear Taborley, and you have the advantage
+of having seen her. From what you say I gather that she's not bad
+looking. To the not bad looking much is forgiven. Nevertheless, I stand
+by my opinion that she's not a safe woman to see too often. However,
+you're master of your own actions and that's neither here nor there."
+
+He commenced to fumble through his pockets. When he had found his
+cigarette-case, he proffered it to Tabs, who refused it.
+
+"I wish you'd sit down, my dear fellow."
+
+Tabs glanced at his watch. There was only a quarter of an hour left of
+the time he had allotted. As a concession to Sir Tobias he seated
+himself. "It was about General Braithwaite that you called me up last
+night?"
+
+"Yes. But there's no hurry. We can discuss that over lunch."
+
+Tabs considered that the time had come to be firm. "I'm sorry, Sir
+Tobias. Terry's lunching with me. We start in something less than
+fifteen minutes."
+
+Sir Tobias screwed himself round and surveyed his future son-in-law with
+a mild amazement. For forty years he had been accustomed to having his
+own way unchallenged. "Terry can wait." He spoke as though the matter
+was now settled. "What I have to tell you is important."
+
+"And so is what I have to tell Terry." Tabs emphasized his statement by
+glancing again at his watch.
+
+For a few seconds Sir Tobias was at a loss. To hear himself opposed was
+a novel experience. Then he thought he had discovered a consoling
+reason for this obstinacy and smiled loftily, as Shakespeare retired to
+Stratford might have smiled at hearing himself reminded by Ann Hathaway
+that he was not so great a man as London had imagined.
+
+"Very well, my dear fellow," he conceded; "young blood will have its
+way. I withdraw for this once, since your plans are already made."
+
+His forgiveness was brushed aside. Time was pressing. Tabs forced him to
+the point without further ceremony or waste of words. "When you phoned
+yesterday evening it was nearly midnight, so the matter must have seemed
+urgent. You said that General Braithwaite had been to see you on a
+fool's errand, with a story that partly concerned myself. May I ask how
+it concerned me?"
+
+"You're brusque, very brusque," Sir Tobias complained. "We could have
+talked this over much better at my club."
+
+When Tabs showed no signs of relenting, he revealed his real feelings
+testily. "You know this fellow Braithwaite. You must have recognized him
+the moment you clapped eyes on him. Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+Tabs looked up quickly, taken aback and slightly resentful at the
+peremptory tones in which he was addressed. "It wasn't my business.
+Apart from that, I was aware of nothing to his discredit." Once again as
+in the case of Maisie, he was allowing himself to be goaded out of
+justice into excessive generosity.
+
+"Nothing to his discredit! That depends on your point of view." Sir
+Tobias sniffed audibly. He could be as a rude as a spoilt child. "That
+depends on how deeply interested you're in--in my daughter."
+
+"I think I gave you proof of my interest, Sir Tobias, the other evening
+when I asked----"
+
+"Pshaw! You know very well what I'm driving at, Taborley."
+
+"Nevertheless, I should like to hear you put it into words."
+
+Sir Tobias gave one of his remarkable exhibitions of youthfulness.
+Flinging aside his decrepitude, as though it had been no more than an
+affectation, he shot bolt upright, gripping the arms of his chair. "Last
+night, within a handful of hours of my forbidding him the house, he had
+the impertinence to call here to inform me that he was in love with
+Terry. Not content with that, he added insult to his impertinence by
+telling me that he had been your valet. How is it, Taborley, that on
+that evening when you dined here as his fellow-guest, you never once
+hinted by look or word that he wasn't the part he was playing? I can't
+consider that very honorable of you. As an old friend, quite apart from
+any new relationship, I had the right to expect that my interests were
+nearer to your heart. It upsets me to find I was mistaken. Have you so
+little pride in the girl you propose to marry that it doesn't offend you
+to see her gadding about with ex-servants? You saw them get up and leave
+the table that night. You heard the front-door bang and knew that they'd
+gone out together--my daughter with the fellow who used to put the studs
+into your shirts! And there you sat with me, sipping your coffee and
+chatting as though it were all perfectly right and normal. Upon my soul,
+Taborley, you're beyond my comprehending. If I, her father, can feel
+this indignation, what ought not you to feel? You're supposed to be her
+lover and you're not jealous. So far as I can see, you're not even
+disturbed."
+
+Tabs' face had gone suddenly white. He acknowledged to himself that, had
+he been Terry's father, he would have said no less. When he spoke it was
+with quiet intensity.
+
+"I am annoyed, Sir Tobias--a good deal more annoyed than I care to own
+to myself; but I try not to let my annoyance obscure my sense of
+justice. It isn't fair to consider Braithwaite in the light of a
+servant. He isn't a servant; he's won his spurs. He arrived at the
+position he occupies to-day through original and unaided merit. That the
+man who was my servant, happens to be my rival, is bitterly galling. But
+I'm not going to let it blind me to the fact that he has qualities of
+greatness. He proved those qualities, even more than on the battlefield,
+when he came to you and pluckily told you the truth about himself. God
+knows what he thought to gain by it; but I'm hats off to him."
+
+Sir Tobias threw out his hands in a disowning gesture. "I don't want to
+quarrel with you--that's the last thing I desire. But I must confess
+that I fail to sympathize with your attitude of mind. Magnanimity is all
+very well, but it's easy to be magnanimous where your affections aren't
+too deeply concerned. A man in love has no right to be magnanimous--it
+isn't a healthy sign. Lady Beddow used those very words to me this
+morning. She feels as I do, that in your attitude to Terry you lack
+something. You've let two days elapse since you asked my permission to
+approach her---- You're the same with this Maisie woman--inhumanly,
+unsatisfactorily magnanimous. You don't identify yourself with our
+antipathies--you almost side with the people who affront us. It's
+estranging and distressing. I like a man to be more emphatic in his
+loyalties and aversions. I like him to show more fire. In days that I
+can almost remember, Braithwaite's intrusion would have been an occasion
+for a duel. Terry's mother feels the same about you; it makes her
+unhappy. 'He lacks ardor'--that was how she expressed it. 'Perhaps,
+after all, he's too old for Terry,' she said. Personally I don't go as
+far as that."
+
+Now that he had made an end, Sir Tobias attempted to beam on Tabs with
+his accustomed suavity. He was skillful in saying offensive things with
+an air of consideration. When he had said, "Personally I don't go as far
+as that," he had leant out and patted Tabs' hand with a senile display
+of affection.
+
+_Too old for Terry!_ Tabs sat pondering the words. They voiced his own
+doubt--the doubt that had haunted him from the moment of his return. The
+antiquated version of Shakespeare sat watching him, plucking at his
+pointed beard and blinking his faded eyes shrewdly.
+
+Suddenly with a cavalier smile of conquest, which was strangely
+unwarranted, Tabs swung himself to his feet. "Well, Sir Tobias, we've
+talked for more than our half hour. After all, it doesn't matter a
+continental what you, or I, or Lady Beddow feels. It's Terry's feelings
+that count. I shall know what she feels before the afternoon is ended."
+
+He was holding out his hand to the surprised old gentleman, when the
+door opened just sufficiently to admit Terry's head.
+
+"Come on, your Lordship!" she laughed mockingly, "you've kept me waiting
+long enough."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+
+TRAMPLED ROSES
+
+
+I
+
+As Tabs emerged from his interview with Sir Tobias, he found Terry
+standing in the hall, doing up the last button of her gloves. James, of
+the velvet-plush manners, lost no time in proffering him his hat and
+cane, and in flinging the front-door wide. He did it with the air of a
+sentimentalist who was aiding and abetting an elopement. Tabs had the
+feeling as he limped along the pavement with Terry tripping at his side,
+that the eyes of the house which they had left followed them--followed
+them jealously, romantically, expectantly. There was only one way in
+which they could give satisfaction and that was by returning to it
+engaged.
+
+"He lacks ardor. Perhaps, after all, he's too old!" Lady Beddow's
+criticism drummed in his mind. Not very pleasant hearing!
+
+Silence was maintained till they had rounded a corner and the tall buff
+house was left behind. Then Terry raised a shy, laughing face.
+"Downcast, Tabs? You look as though you were bearing the sins of all the
+world."
+
+"Not of all the world!" he corrected gravely. "Only of three people."
+
+"Then I'm one of them. Who are the other two?"
+
+"You know already--Mrs. Lockwood and Braithwaite. I saved all your
+necks, but I broke my own."
+
+She brushed against him affectionately. "Tabs, you're a trump."
+
+Her praise displeased him. "I didn't tell you for that."
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"Because I thought you ought to know." He slackened his pace. "I thought
+you ought to know that your father isn't as keen on me as he was,
+Terry."
+
+"That's all right," she said cheerily; "I am. But what have you been
+doing to Daddy?"
+
+"Describing Mrs. Lockwood as a lady above reproach and accusing him of
+uncharity towards Braithwaite."
+
+She tossed her head and laughed outright. "You _have_ become converted!"
+
+"Converted!" He pondered her assertion. "No. I'll acknowledge that I was
+inclined to be too harsh at first. I may have become more pitiful; but
+I've not become converted, if by that you mean that I condone what these
+two people have done. I still think that Mrs. Lockwood's conduct with
+Adair was inexcusable and that Braithwaite's holding back the truth from
+you was dishonorable. In talking with your father I gave Braithwaite all
+the credit for speaking out to him like a man, and I let him suppose
+that Mrs. Lockwood had given up Adair unconditionally. As you know,
+Braithwaite didn't come up to scratch till I'd handed him your
+ultimatum; and Mrs. Lockwood---- But you don't know about her yet. I
+haven't told you."
+
+"I know," Terry smiled roguishly. "Maisie's a great abuser of the
+telephone. She called me up this morning to ask whether she might share
+you with me for a few weeks. When I asked her why, she said to help her
+to forget Adair. Of course I consented."
+
+Tabs looked down at his companion to see whether her last remark had
+been sarcastic; to his discomfort he found that it hadn't. "I'm not sure
+that I like to be lent round like that," he objected. "I was sorry for
+her last night and promised to help her; but this phoning you up to ask
+your permission puts an entirely erroneous complexion on the affair."
+
+"Not erroneous if I understand," she assured him, glancing up with
+tender frankness.
+
+He smiled at the way she cozened him. Was she willing to lend him to
+another woman because she was so sure of him, or because she didn't care
+whether she lost him?
+
+"Your father suspects me of being lukewarm about you," he said; "and I
+can't blame him. He knows nothing about our meeting yesterday. He
+doesn't know that you care for Braithwaite. All he knows is that I asked
+his permission to approach you and then let two days elapse. When I did
+come to his house again it was to defend the two people who have caused
+him most annoyance. My reason for defending them was that I might make
+things easier for you. But my position is false, Terry. Every day your
+parents are expecting that we'll become engaged; every day that we
+don't----"
+
+They had come to the Marble Arch. "Shall we hop into a taxi?" he
+enquired.
+
+She shook her head. "Let's walk a little farther--down to Hyde Park
+Corner. It's easier to say things."
+
+When he had helped her through the traffic and they were sauntering
+through the Park, she took up the thread of their conversation. "I told
+you yesterday that I was willing to become engaged to you. I'm willing
+to-day."
+
+"_Willing!_" he emphasized. "But you don't _want_. The man you love is
+Braithwaite. What difference has this confession of his made?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and looked away, so that he should not see
+the quivering of her mouth. "It's made everything impossible. I admire
+him more than ever. I admire him for having told the truth and for
+having climbed so far up by his gallantry. But---- I'm no fool, Tabs. I
+know that I couldn't marry him without bringing ridicule upon all of us.
+Noble notions about human equality don't work in practice. He's what he
+is--fine of his kind. He's finer than you or I, Tabs, only he's not our
+sort. He couldn't ever become our sort. If I were as big as he is, I
+might not mind. But I'm little and mean; I care so much for caste. And
+yet, in spite of that, I want to marry him. I oughtn't to tell you, of
+all people. But I can't tell him and I can't tell any one--any one but
+you, Tabs. I want him so much that I'm ashamed sometimes. I wouldn't
+have my people know it, so you must stick by me. Do at least as much for
+me as you promised to do for Maisie--stay with me till I can forget
+him." And then she added ruefully, "It isn't much fun for you after all
+you'd expected."
+
+He couldn't afford to let her become emotional. Riders and smart
+equipages were passing. Several times already they had been recognized.
+The introduction of Maisie's name supplied him with a loophole. "Mrs.
+Lockwood rather adds to our complication. If I'm not engaged to you and
+I see something of her, your father will never understand. If I were
+your father, I wouldn't. To be perfectly frank, he thinks already that
+I'm lenient to Maisie only because she's good-looking----"
+
+Terry didn't permit him to get further. "Daddy's probably right. Be
+honest, Tabs. Would you have stood up for her, if you'd found her fat
+and forty? Of course you wouldn't. Maisie's a dear, but she's dangerous.
+She can't help being dangerous; it's half her attraction. By the way,
+we've been walking entirely in the wrong direction."
+
+They had come out by Hyde Park Corner. "How do you make that out?" he
+asked. "I thought we would lunch at the Ritz."
+
+She began to apologize. "Before I met you this morning, I'd arranged for
+us to lunch with her--I mean with Maisie. You don't mind, do you? I was
+speaking with her over the phone and she said we must come because she
+didn't feel safe."
+
+"She said that to you, too! She said the same thing to me. But you and
+I, do we want her?"
+
+Terry nodded, making her eyes wide. "We'll all make each other more
+safe. That's what friends are for. I told her we'd be at her house by
+one."
+
+"If you told her that----" He was trying to discover whether he was
+relieved or disappointed. With an eagerness which it was hard to account
+for, he was wondering whether Lady Dawn would be there. He pulled out
+his watch. "Twelve-forty-five. We can just do it in a taxi. If you told
+her that, we'd better stick to your plans."
+
+He hailed a driver who was passing and helped her into the cab.
+
+
+II
+
+As he and Terry chugged their way to Mulberry Tree Court he eyed her,
+sitting beside him. Would he ever get her? If he did, would she prove to
+be one of his really big things? All men must have thought that their
+wives would be the really big things in their lives before they married
+them. How many of them thought that six months after they were married?
+There was Adair, for instance. But his wife was going to be the big
+thing--on that he was determined.
+
+And yet, it wasn't very big of Terry to be using him as a stalking-horse
+for her love for Braithwaite; he felt morally certain that that was what
+she was doing. She hadn't acknowledged to having seen him, but Tabs felt
+instinctively that she had seen him. He also felt that within the next
+twenty-four hours she would be seeing him again. It was impossible for
+him to accuse her of clandestine meetings of which he had no proof; at
+the same time he was distressed by the restraint that was put upon
+himself. As things were, anything might happen. When it did happen, it
+would happen suddenly and he would be in a measure to blame.
+
+And here again, in this luncheon with Maisie, he was being made a party
+to her policy of secrecy. There could be no doubt that Sir Tobias was in
+ignorance of her continual correspondence with Maisie.
+
+He looked at her. How near she seemed to him and yet in reality what
+miles away! He could listen to her voice. He could touch her. But he
+could not foresee a single one of her future actions. She was remote and
+strange and dear. She had offered to become engaged to him, but she was
+no part of him. She filled him with discomfort and unrest. For the first
+time he dared to frame his charge against her. It was in almost the same
+words as the charge which she herself had brought against Braithwaite.
+He could love her so that it seemed that if he did not win her, he would
+never be able to love any other woman; but he could not trust her. He
+began to question whether she had ever been the woman he had tried to
+think her. Perhaps she was only a dummy and his imagination had clothed
+her with affection. He had attributed to her adorable qualities----
+
+When all was said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her
+fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of
+his position and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in
+the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to
+bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him.
+"He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry
+experience and inexperience inexperience.
+
+As they sped down the Brompton Road, they passed the end of Honeymoon
+Square. In the enclosed garden among spring flowers children were still
+playing. Scattered here and there, under the thin shade of blossoming
+trees, he caught glimpses of white prams with their attendant nurses.
+The little houses--his own among them--stood all a-row, shoulder to
+shoulder, looking intensely smiling and habitable. His imagination
+reconjured all the midnights they had witnessed--the home-comings under
+cover of darkness, the secret endearments of lovers, the muffled
+laughter. Then he remembered his own dream, which he had planned to
+share with her. It was intolerable that it should escape conversion into
+reality.
+
+It seemed little short of marvelous that she should still sit beside
+him. She should have vanished with the Square. Had he given her a name,
+he would have called her his lady in heliotrope, for she was dressed in
+a heliotrope gown, trimmed round the hem and throat with gray opossum
+and topped with a little close-fitting turban of color and fur to match.
+She looked so dainty and subtly haughty, so austere in her virginal
+beauty, that it seemed to him he must have wronged her with his silent
+conjectures.
+
+"You're more than ordinarily pretty to-day," he said.
+
+"Am I? What you mean, I suppose, is that you like my gown. It's a new
+one. I'm wearing it for the first time, especially for you."
+
+She turned her laughing face towards him, violet eyes, flushed cheeks,
+golden hair, white teeth--everything aflash with instant gratitude. The
+discovery of how easily he could command her happiness touched him.
+
+"Can I make you as merry as all that just by telling you you're
+beautiful?"
+
+She compressed her lips and nodded. "It's not being told. That doesn't
+matter. It's being told by you."
+
+He felt for the moment that he had recovered her--that he had bridged
+the gulf of the years that divided. Before anything further could be
+said, they were halting in Mulberry Tree Court.
+
+
+III
+
+On entering the house with the marigold-tinted curtains he had glanced
+round casually for any signs of Lady Dawn. After Porter had shown him
+into the drawing-room Terry had left him to go in search of Maisie. He
+walked over to the tall French-windows and found himself once more
+gazing out on the garden-rockery with its oval lake, its silent fountain
+and its toy-boat that never sailed anywhere. He made an effort to
+continue gazing out, for his impulse was to turn and look at the
+portrait over the fireplace. He tantalized himself by trying to ignore
+it. But it was strange the fascination that it held for him. He had the
+feeling that behind his back the face had changed from the profile
+position in which it had been painted, so that the steady stone-gray
+eyes were challenging his attention. At last he resisted no longer;
+walking over to the fireplace, he stood gazing up at it.
+
+For a moment he tried to pretend to himself that his interest was purely
+an art-interest. It was Sargent's brush-work that he was admiring. Then
+he smiled, as much to the portrait as to himself. "Princess Czarina
+Bolsheviki," he murmured, "were you really looking at me when my back
+was turned? Did you flash your eyes away directly I obeyed your desire?
+It's the trick of every woman; but you're not like every woman, Princess
+Czarina Bolsheviki."
+
+It seemed to him almost as though the woman on the canvas was about to
+relax her pose and quiver into life. The longer he looked, the less
+aloof she became and the more her serenity trembled. He felt that he
+knew so much about her--so very much more than he had ever been told.
+There were experiences of pride and terror which were common to them
+both--the pride and terror of appalling heart-hunger. He knew for
+certain, as though those painted lips had confessed it, that he was the
+one man in the world who had the power to make her cry. And yet he
+dissociated in his mind the woman of the portrait from the woman who had
+slipped past him out of the night with the taunting, sideways smile of
+feminine triumph. The living woman could wound and disappoint; the
+woman of the portrait was his friend entirely.
+
+He was startled out of the mood into which he had fallen by the sound of
+footsteps crossing the hall. He was not going to be discovered in that
+position by Maisie for a second time. He had barely recovered his place
+by the French window, when she and Terry entered laughing. It would have
+been easy to have mistaken them for sisters, with their golden heads and
+clear complexions. Directly he caught sight of them he guessed by the
+mischief in their eyes that their laughter had been at his expense. It
+was Terry who spoke. "Oh, Tabs, how could you? It was like a little
+frightened boy."
+
+He glanced from one to the other of them for further enlightenment. "Do
+what? If you'll let me know, I'll tell you."
+
+"Run away, like you did last night," Maisie explained. "I've just been
+describing it to Terry. There was I sitting on the couch when Di
+entered. The first thing she asked me was, 'Who's your new butler?' I
+wouldn't tell her. 'He'll be here in a minute,' I said; 'I'll introduce
+him to you.' We waited for about a minute and, when you didn't come, I
+went out into the hall. 'He's gone, Madam,' Porter told me in her most
+Mayfair manner. 'Gone!' I exclaimed. 'He can't have gone without saying
+good-by.' But I was afraid you had, so I went on to the steps and called
+after you. I don't know whether you heard me. When I came back into the
+drawing-room, Di was smiling. 'I've read about lordly butlers,' she
+said, 'but it's the first time I ever met one.' So there you are! You
+can imagine what a trouble I had to clear myself. I only downed her
+suspicions when I assured her that you were on the point of becoming
+engaged to Terry."
+
+Instantly Terry's eyes sought his; the laughter died out of them. He
+shared her annoyance that Lady Dawn should have received this piece of
+information--Lady Dawn of all persons. He wasn't engaged to Terry. He
+was a long way from being engaged to her--perhaps further at this moment
+than since his return.
+
+The silence that followed made Maisie aware that she had been guilty of
+a mistake. He suspected that she had intended to be guilty of it from
+the start. Nevertheless, she played the part of innocence, making her
+cornflower eyes eloquent with apology. "Oh, I'm afraid I've put my foot
+in it. But you are almost engaged, aren't you?"
+
+Tabs laughed good-humoredly. "It's all right, Mrs. Lockwood. You didn't
+mean to, but you've paid me back in more than my own coin."
+
+Porter relieved the tension at that moment by announcing that lunch was
+served.
+
+When they had taken their seats in the front-room, overlooking the
+make-believe village-green, Terry surprised them by saying carelessly,
+"Oh, Maisie, you remember General Braithwaite whom we nursed in our
+hospital?"
+
+Maisie looked up sharply, trying to warn her that Porter was still
+present. "Of course I remember him," she said. "Since then we've both
+met him a hundred times. I think Lord Taborley would like some bread,
+Porter."
+
+But Terry wasn't to be deterred. She seemed to be taking a perverse
+delight in introducing the one subject on which it would have been most
+fitting for her to have remained silent. "Since Tabs came back we've
+found out all about the General. You'll never guess who he really is or
+was. It's difficult to say whether he is or was, now that he's
+demobilized."
+
+Tabs recognized the blaze of recklessness in her eyes, like the glare of
+lighted windows after nightfall from which the curtains have been
+suddenly thrown back. He had seen that look in her eyes at the hunt
+when, in disobedience to shouted warnings, she had looked back across
+her shoulder challengingly before taking an audacious jump. There was in
+her expression the fear of the thing she was about to do and the panic
+of determination to get it done. He attempted to turn her aside from the
+danger by slipping in quietly, "I don't think I'd discuss the General at
+this moment."
+
+"At this moment!" she flashed back with a scared smile. The sound of her
+own voice seemed to clap spurs to her excitement. "Why not at this
+moment, dear Tabs? Everything comes out sooner or later. If there's
+going to be any spreading of gossip, one takes the sting out of it by
+being the first to spread it. Besides, you oughtn't to mind. You ought
+to feel most frightfully bucked."
+
+"Nevertheless, I don't think I'd say it."
+
+Then he held his breath for, paying no heed to him, she had turned to
+Maisie. "You mustn't laugh, but it's too good to keep to oneself.
+Before he was a General, what do you think he did for a living? He used
+to clean Lord Taborley's boots. You don't believe it, but it's a fact.
+Daddy's terribly grim with me over it. Of course it was _infra dig_ to
+go footing all over town with your best friend's valet. But how was I to
+know that he'd been that? Daddy says I ought to have sensed it, if I'd
+had any sort of a social instinct. But here's the funniest thing of all,
+the way we made the discovery. I'd invited him to dine at our house on
+the very night that Tabs was Daddy's guest. I'll never forget your
+faces, Tabs, when Daddy introduced the two of you." She commenced to
+pantomime the scene with forced gayety; then she pretended to become
+aware for the first time that they weren't joining in her laughter.
+
+"What's wrong? You look as solemn as a funeral. Don't you find it
+amusing?"
+
+Porter was leaving the room. Maisie waited till the door had closed.
+Then, "You didn't intend it to be amusing. Why on earth did you say all
+this before her?"
+
+Under the rebuke Terry's face flushed defiance. She was near to tears,
+but she contrived to go on smiling. "When I want all the world to know
+anything that's private, I mention it before servants. It always works."
+
+"But----" Maisie was at a loss to find a motive for such indiscretion.
+She glanced helplessly at Tabs. "But," she objected, "surely you don't
+want all the world to know about this, Terry? You and the General have
+been such good pals, and---- I have to say it, even though Lord
+Taborley is present: there were a great number of your friends who were
+rather afraid----"
+
+"Then they won't have to be afraid any longer," Terry cut in with icy
+sweetness. "When it's reported to the General that I've told this story,
+he won't have to be rather afraid either. It'll set all his doubts at
+rest."
+
+Tabs had sat puzzled and horrified while she had been talking.
+Everything that he could remember about her was gentle; it wasn't like
+her to be cruel. Now at last he realized that it was for his sake that
+she was being cruel--far more cruel to herself than to any one else. She
+had so little faith in her strength to break with Braithwaite that she
+was building up a protective wall of contempt by the spread of this
+damaging story. If Braithwaite heard it, she might well hope to rouse
+his hatred and save herself further effort.
+
+From across the table her eyes sought his in appeal; his answered hers
+with intuitive comprehension. But his mind was stunned with apprehension
+at the discovery that her passion for this man meant so much that his
+hate would be a lighter burden than his love.
+
+Maisie turned to Tabs with veiled disdain. "I suppose it was you who
+told her this, Lord Taborley?"
+
+He paid her scant attention and continued looking at Terry. "On the
+contrary." He spoke with unruffled urbanity. "It was General
+Braithwaite--Steely Jack as he was nicknamed in the Army. He never lost
+an inch of trench, so they say. Like your own first husband, Mrs.
+Lockwood, he's most to be feared when every one else would have given up
+hoping. Like myself, though he doesn't know it, he's a round-the-corner
+person. Curious, Terry, that you should have attracted two
+round-the-corner admirers! It makes one almost believe that you're a
+round-the-corner person yourself."
+
+He had said it without consciousness of magnanimity. There was nothing
+magnanimous about stating the truth according to his code of honor. He
+was seeing the bleak look that would come into Braithwaite's face should
+he hear of this happening. He was wondering whether Braithwaite
+possessed the insight into feminine strategy not to take offense, but to
+interpret it as surrender.
+
+Terry was speaking again. "My dear Maisie, if ever you get to know Lord
+Taborley, you'll learn to have a better opinion of him. He plays with
+all his cards on the table. I think most men play like that. It's we
+women who cheat and carry spare aces and revoke when the game's going
+against us." Then came her amazing burst of frankness, "Like you did
+when, to suit your own purpose, you pretended that we were on the point
+of becoming engaged. Like I did when I told that story just now about
+Steely Jack. And again like you've done all along in your dealings with
+Adair. Why, even now, when you're ready to give him up, you can't play
+the cards that are on the table; you have to try to borrow Lord Taborley
+from me. Don't get angry. I'm not accusing you especially. We women are
+all the same; there's not one of us who can stick to the rules of the
+game." Her glance shifted to Tabs. "You used to think that I was the
+exception. You see, I'm not. The wonder is that men can even pretend to
+respect us."
+
+Long after she had finished and the conversation had taken a new turn,
+she went on gazing at him, raising and lowering her eyes as she ate her
+lunch, begging him to understand.
+
+"You're wrong, Terry." In her capacity as hostess, Maisie was making an
+attempt to get away from personalities. She was too convicted by what
+had been said to consider it wise to defend herself. "You're wrong. Men
+don't want to respect us. They love us for having faults that they
+wouldn't tolerate in themselves. They encourage us to cultivate them. It
+flatters their integrity to discover our dishonesties. They like to
+believe that we're cowards. They don't expect us to tell the truth. They
+almost resent our having a sense of honor. The woman who cheats at every
+turn and then cries in their arms when she's found out, is the kind of
+woman who always has a man to take care of her. Look at my sister, Lady
+Dawn. She's never been known to cry. She's missed everything in life
+through being almost repellently honorable."
+
+In the discussion that followed Tabs took no part, though he was often
+appealed to for an opinion. As he listened to their modulated flow of
+voices, their refined and gentle intonations, their evasive, slyly
+uttered words, he began to have an understanding of what was taking
+place. It was something primitive--the oldest of all battles. Neither
+of them wanted him, but each was prompted to covet the pretense of his
+possession. Their hunting instincts were aroused. He had taken on a
+sudden value in their eyes because each had discovered that the other
+was in pursuit of him.
+
+His thoughts went back to Lady Dawn--to her pale aloofness. She wasn't
+like this--she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous
+that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was
+a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue with himself
+again as to whether he ought to seek her out and endanger her serenity
+by telling her about Lord Dawn. It would be useless to confide such
+intentions to Maisie. He would obtain no help from her. She could
+conceive of no sympathy between a man and woman into which sex did not
+enter. The thought of sex in connection with Lady Dawn seemed an
+impertinence.
+
+The discussion went on. Luncheon was at an end. Coffee had been served.
+Cigarettes were being lighted. Again and again he was referred to. Did
+he think this and didn't he agree to that? Wasn't this true of the way
+in which men regarded women? Their differences of opinion seemed so
+trivial. Their views so immature and amateurish. He watched them with
+curious, brooding attention. They were so nobly tender in their outward
+forms. He appreciated the grace of their gestures, the fine-boned
+smallness of their bodies, the delicacy of their molding, the tendril
+thinness of their fingers, the sagacity of their tiny aristocratic
+heads, the seduction of their soft red mouths, the poetry of the fringe
+of golden lashes in which the pathos of their eyes hung enmeshed--their
+intrusive, penetrating frailty, which supplicated, denounced and
+astounded. They were so weak and yet so strong. A man could crush them
+with one arm. But they could slay a man's soul with their sweetness.
+They were equipped in every detail by their pale perfection to quicken
+and to disappoint. To disappoint! That was what they had been trying to
+persuade him for the past half-hour--that they were Nature's traps,
+cunningly contrived and baited. _The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!_
+Their self-traductions were undermining his faith in all sacredness.
+
+In the silence of his brain he fought--fought against disillusion,
+claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping
+denunciations--the woman in the portrait.
+
+A man had been passing and repassing the windows, cut into triangles by
+the looped back, marigold-tinted curtains. At first he had mistaken him
+for a different man each time he had passed. Then the lazy certainty had
+grown up within him that it was always the same man. A man who wanted
+something--wanted something that was in that house. It wasn't possible
+to make out his features. He wore a morning-coat and was top-hatted. The
+swing of his carriage was indefinitely familiar.
+
+And now he had vanished--lost courage, lost patience, given up his
+quest, perhaps. Through the triangular gaps in the panes the
+village-green showed untraversed, sunlit, tranquil, garnished.
+
+Without knocking Porter entered, looking worried.
+
+Maisie broke off from her conversation long enough to say, "A little
+later, Porter. We're not finished."
+
+She was resuming, when Porter again interrupted. "It isn't that, Madam.
+It isn't----"
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+With an elaborate air of caution Porter closed the door and set her back
+against it. "I've told him that it's no good. That you won't see him,
+Madam."
+
+"Of course not. That's quite right." Maisie bestowed her approval with
+rapid tolerance. "I can't see any one at present." Then, as an
+after-thought, "By the way, who is it?"
+
+It was then that Porter let fall her bomb. "It's no good my telling him.
+He won't go away." Her firmness crumbled. She bleated in a dramatic
+surrender to distress. The three who heard her caught the commotion of
+her alarm and waited breathless. Her explanation came at last. "It's Mr.
+Easterday." The moment she had said it, she turned and fled.
+
+The door had scarcely closed, when Maisie rose from her chair and stood
+swaying. She sank back, closing her eyes and pressing her hands against
+her breast. The mask of placidity had been wrenched from her face,
+leaving it blanched with the conflict between yearning, temptation and
+loneliness.
+
+"Adair!" she moaned. "My God, I daren't trust myself!"
+
+Unclosing her eyes, she gazed burningly at Tabs.
+
+"I was honest in what I promised. I do want to live as though Reggie
+weren't dead. How did you put it? As though he were round the corner. As
+though he were truly coming back."
+
+In the silence that followed she stifled a sob, realizing that it wasn't
+Tabs who was the obstacle. Turning hysterically to Terry, she laid hold
+of both her hands. "I can't do it--_can't, can't_ by myself. I can only
+do it if you'll tell Lord Taborley to help me."
+
+
+IV
+
+At a nod from Terry he left the table. In the hall he found an odd sight
+waiting for him. He had to look twice to make certain that this was the
+Adair Easterday whom he had known, and not a strayed and beflustered
+wedding-guest.
+
+The man before him was worried to distraction. He had the unhappy,
+panic-stricken eyes of an over-driven bullock that scents the
+slaughterhouse. And yet his dress was immaculate; he was tailored and
+laundered as though for an occasion of joy. Everything that he wore was
+discreetly festive, from the lavender gloves and shiny topper to the
+striped trousers and canvas spats. One would have said that he was a
+caricature of George Grossmith on his way to a garden-party.
+
+But he was hot--terribly hot; far more hot than he had any excuse for
+being in brisk spring weather. There were beads of perspiration on his
+forehead; his face was congested with excitement. To lend the touch of
+humor, which always lurks behind other people's tragedies, he held his
+top-hat by the brim in his right hand, as though he were taking a
+collection, while from his left, like a feather-duster, trailed an
+enormous bunch of roses. He was a short man in the late thirties,
+red-headed and inclined to be podgy. He was not built to express poetic
+passions--how many of us are, if it comes to that?--or to sustain their
+onslaught with dignity. Emotion seemed to have bloated him with unshed
+tears. There was nothing noble in his distress--only a farcical
+appearance of wretchedness.
+
+As Tabs crossed the hall to the front-door, just inside of which Adair
+was standing, he felt an undeserved compassion for him--the kind of
+compassion one feels for a clumsy dog, which is always getting under
+people's feet. At the same time he couldn't help marveling that there
+should be two women at the same time in the world who were willing to
+compete for such a man's affections.
+
+"I happened to be lunching here," Tabs commenced conventionally. But he
+altered his tactics promptly. In the presence of his friend's
+self-advertised misery nothing but the briefest truth seemed adequate.
+
+"Old man, it's no good. She won't see you. She doesn't want you."
+Forgetting his sense of justice, he placed his hand affectionately on
+Adair's shoulder.
+
+Adair stared in a full-blown way and nodded. "She never did want me."
+
+He passed no comment on this unforeseen meeting in the little house with
+the marigold-tinted curtains. He manifested no resentment against this
+familiar angel who had been deputed to bar the gates of Eden to his
+approaches. He was incapable of surprise. He was obsessed by the
+solitary idea of his own forlornness. "I knew it. She never did want
+me." And then, in a rush of self-pity, "No one ever wanted me."
+
+"Except Phyllis," Tabs suggested.
+
+Adair appeared not to have heard. He stood like a living statue, his
+top-hat extended, his bunch of roses dangling--the picture of idiotic
+futility. Genuine emotion, however mean its origin, always has its grand
+moments. Tabs forgot the silly beginnings of this upset and the endless
+troubles it had caused. All he saw was a typical ragamuffin of humanity
+in the grip of the policeman, Nemesis. Adair had been caught trying to
+do what thousands of other ragamuffins achieved daily with success. He
+had been arrested red-handed in the act of stealing forbidden happiness.
+It was his first offense. He was inexpert and had bungled. He had
+bungled because, while assuming the role of roguery, he had remained at
+heart an honest man. Now that he was caught, he took the exposure of his
+dishonesty too seriously.
+
+Tabs had almost forgotten that he had been the last to speak, when Adair
+repeated his exact words, "Except Phyllis!" And then, "Poor kid! She,
+too, is unhappy."
+
+Through the marshy obscurities of his humiliation his conscience was
+building a path. With his two hands he crushed his topper back onto his
+head. The act had the vehemence of decision. In the doing of it he
+dropped the roses to the floor. There they lay forgotten--so forgotten
+that he placed his foot on them without noticing.
+
+"Home! Best be going home," he muttered.
+
+Without further explanation, he drew back the latch and let himself out
+into the sunlit Court. Delaying long enough to pick up his hat and cane,
+Tabs followed.
+
+Adair gave no sign of recognition as he caught up with him. Failing to
+hail a taxi, they boarded a bus. Tabs paid the fares. Adair sat like
+Napoleon after Waterloo, taking no notice of anything. It was the
+intensity of his thoughts that kept him silent--not moroseness.
+
+They had reached Clapham Common and had come to his garden-gate, before
+he acknowledged Tabs' presence.
+
+"I was a fool. I deserved it," he said sadly. "It's ended in exactly the
+way that any sane man would have expected."
+
+Kicking the gate open, he passed up the path. From the Common Tabs
+watched him, till he was safely within the house and the door had shut.
+
+As he turned away, he scarcely knew whether to laugh or feel vexed. The
+misfortunes of others can always be traced to folly; it is only our own
+misfortunes that are never deserved and never anything less than august.
+If Adair's love-affair had appeared ridiculous in his eyes, probably his
+own would afford materials for jest to some one else.
+
+He couldn't forget the top-hat and the trampled roses. The
+ineffectualness of all passion loomed large. It might have its value as
+an educative process, but what a waste of energy! For the moment he drew
+no distinction between Adair's guilty hankering after something which
+was forbidden and his own honorable love for Terry. The end of all
+passion was futility.
+
+Then he laughed, for in imagination he saw the world as a crestfallen
+caricature of George Grossmith, top-hatted and bespatted, wending its
+unfestive way through the centuries to an eternal garden-party, from
+which Adam and his lineage were forever debarred.
+
+
+V
+
+His exit from Mulberry Tree Court had been so hurried that he had had no
+time to make arrangements with Terry.
+
+He had no sooner knocked than the door was opened by Maisie. He was
+slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus
+suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a
+tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had not
+much time to spare.
+
+"I called in," he apologized, "because I thought you'd like to know what
+happened--and to fetch Terry."
+
+"Of course." She spoke with a cheerfulness that astonished him. "I was
+expecting you." With that she led the way across the hall to the
+drawing-room.
+
+Carrying his hat, he followed. He clung to his hat purposely; it would
+serve as a reminder that he had not come to stay long. She was on the
+point of seating herself, when she spotted it. "Oh, how rude of me!" In
+the twinkling of an eye she had deprived him of it and vanished.
+"Captured once more!" he thought.
+
+During the few seconds that she was gone, he looked about him.
+Everything was as it had been yesterday. A companionable fire glowed in
+the grate. On a table beside the couch tea was spread. Even as
+yesterday, the nearest chair to the couch was at least six feet away,
+making it necessary for any one who did not wish to appear boorish to
+share the couch with her. There was something else that he had noticed
+on entering: while he had been away she had made a complete change of
+toilet. She was now dressed in a filmy gown of emerald green, with
+shoes, stockings and buckles to match. It was a gown so _chic_ that, had
+he been a woman, he would have guessed at once that it was the latest
+from Paquin's. Inasmuch as he was a man, his sole comment was, "Plucky
+little thorough-bred! You don't catch her owning that she's down." The
+emerald shade brought out all the values of her coloring, the faint rose
+of her complexion, the daffodil gold of her flaxen hair. He had expected
+to be bored by a Magdalene repentant; instead he had found himself
+confronted by a challenging young Diana. His admiration went out to her
+for her courage.
+
+Having come back and resettled herself on the couch, she smiled up at
+him through flickering lashes. "A nice frock, don't you think? Nothing
+like a new frock after a knock-out for restoring your self-respect."
+
+"It's a charming frock. Where's Terry?"
+
+She clasped her small hands about her knees, leaning her head far back
+so that her eyes glinted up at his languidly. Perhaps it was necessary
+to do that in order to see him properly. He was still standing. And yet
+her attitude served another purpose; it called attention to the firm
+young lines of her bust and throat, and to the voluptuous curve of her
+lips, parted in patient expectancy.
+
+"Terry!" Her voice sounded drowsy. "I forgot. I ought to have given you
+her message. She couldn't stop. She had another engagement."
+
+"An engagement!" He was dumbfounded. "That's strange! She never said
+anything---- Are you sure she didn't invent it?"
+
+"Certain." Maisie sat up fully awake now. "Quite positive. But she had
+made up her mind not to keep it till, through no fault of yours, you
+gave her the chance. You don't want to believe that; it sounds as though
+she had cheated. You don't know much about women, Lord Taborley. You
+don't know because you refuse to learn. You're determined, in the face
+of every proof to the contrary, to live and die in the faith that we're
+angels." She shook her finger at him. He was amused to discover that he
+was being scolded. "Angels! We're far from it. We're very much like you
+men, with this difference, that we're cowards. What you need--this may
+sound entirely wrong--is a good sensible woman to take you in hand, and
+give you a run for your money, and teach you your own value. Why, with
+your position and charm----"
+
+"You must excuse my interrupting. Of course it all depends on what you
+mean by a run for my money. But are there many good and sensible women
+who are game for an adventure of that sort?"
+
+"Heaps of them," she assured him, imitating his mock seriousness. "The
+more outwardly good and sensible, the more inwardly they're willing."
+
+"Humph!" He pretended to be pondering this gem of information. And then,
+"But you have to own, Mrs. Lockwood, that Terry's not----"
+
+She blocked his protest with a gay little laugh. "I make no exceptions.
+Terry's exactly like the rest of us--younger and more innocent looking,
+no doubt, but just as imperfect. As regards this engagement of hers, she
+breathed no word of it until you had gone. Then she began to flirt with
+the idea that she might be able to keep it. At last she couldn't resist
+the temptation any longer. Out she came with it, that she must be going.
+I'd lay a wager I could name the person with whom----"
+
+"You'd lose your wager."
+
+"I think not." She met the threatened tempest in his eyes with calmness.
+
+"Would you give a name to this person?"
+
+"Where's the good?" She shrugged her dainty shoulders. "We both know it?
+Steely Jack. Isn't that what you call him?"
+
+Instantly she leant forward. Her whole instinct was to touch him. She
+hadn't intended to hurt him like that. He looked so defiant, and gaunt
+and deserted--such a huge, scarred boy of a man. He reminded her of one
+of those early war-posters, in which a solitary figure was depicted,
+knee-deep in barbed wire, head bandaged, hurling the last of his bombs.
+
+"Please don't be angry," she pleaded. "I was clumsy; but I was trying to
+help. When you helped me yesterday, you too were clumsy. You can't put
+on a new frock, worse luck, the way I've done, to restore your
+self-respect. But I do wish you'd buy a new something--a new race-horse
+or a new car--I don't care what as long as it would make you swank. A
+little swanking would do you all the good in the world; it would keep
+Terry from knowing how much you care. Terry's not half good enough for
+you; one day you'll acknowledge it. Still, if you really do think you
+want her, you can bring her to heel any moment by putting on an
+indifferent air. Look how jealously she flared up at me at lunch. It
+makes a woman furious to see her rejections picked up as treasures by
+another woman. The only reason why Terry brought you here to-day was to
+see for herself just how deep an impression we'd made on each other."
+
+At last she mustered the courage to touch him. Reaching out, she took
+his hand and drew him to her. He stood against her knees, looking down.
+
+Her voice was tender. "Some one had to say these things to you, just as
+you had to say things to me that weren't altogether pleasant. So why
+shouldn't I to you? After all, we're both in the same box, and the box
+is labeled NOT WANTED. It pains me to see a man like you, wasting
+himself on a girl who hasn't the sense to appreciate what he's
+offering." She raised her eyes to his with a slow smile. "Don't mistake
+me, Lord Taborley, I'm not trying to secure what you're offering for
+myself."
+
+He began to see the drift of her argument. Before he could formulate it,
+she herself had put it into words. "Can't we do a little missionary
+work, you and I, by appreciating each other just a little?"
+
+Flinging prejudices to the winds, he took a place beside her on the
+couch. Why shouldn't he? Why should he go on conserving himself so
+scrupulously for a girl who didn't value his loyalty?
+
+"I should consider it a privilege to be appreciated by you," he said
+gravely. "But let's start properly. How about dinner at the Berkeley?
+After that, if you felt like it, we could do a theatre. Would that suit
+you?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was close on midnight when they returned to Mulberry Tree Court. Not
+until he was handing her out of the taxi and Porter was standing framed
+in the open doorway, did he remember that he'd imparted none of his
+important news concerning Adair.
+
+"About Adair----" he commenced. "Or shall I put him off till to-morrow?"
+
+"Till forever." As her feet touched the pavement, she swung around on
+him with laughter. They had been very happy in the last six hours. She
+pressed close against him. He caught the sparkle of her eyes as he
+stooped above her and the faint, sweet fragrance of her hair. She rested
+an ungloved hand on his arm. It looked dim like a large white moth that
+had settled there.
+
+"I have few principles to guide me," she whispered, "but the few that I
+have I observe. I never dig up my dead and I never botanize on the
+graves of the past. Good-night. Merry dreams to you, Lord Taborley."
+
+With the suddenness of a phantom she went from him. There were a brief
+few seconds while he heard the ripple of her laughter and the rustling
+of her dress. Then the door closed. Save for the lamps of the waiting
+taxi night was again eventless and dark.
+
+
+VI
+
+That evening was the first of many such adventures. His tall limping
+figure became a familiar sight in Mulberry Tree Court.
+
+Very early in their friendship he took her advice and delighted her by
+purchasing a smart two-seater runabout which he drove himself. Sometimes
+it was at her door shortly after breakfast to transport her to where
+saddle-horses were waiting in the Park. Sometimes it would turn up about
+lunch-time and stand impatiently chugging while she changed into sport's
+clothes, after which it would dash away with her, humming contentedly,
+into the depths of the country. It was the magic-carpet which obeyed all
+her desires. After war-days, with their petrol shortages and restricted
+travel, it seemed more than ordinarily magic. It made emphatic as
+nothing else could have done, the freedom and serenity which peace had
+restored. The very fleetness of its obedience prompted her to urge Tabs
+to take her farther and ever farther afield. There were evenings when
+they dined within sight of the sea beneath the red roofs of Rye and
+started back for London across the Sussex downs, driving straight into
+the eye of the sunset. There were afternoons when they drifted over the
+Chiltern hills to where the spires and domes of Oxford rise, placid as
+masts of a sunken ship in an encroaching sea of greenness.
+
+But it was most frequently nearing midnight when the quiet of the
+secluded Court was wakened by the merry buzzing of the engine. At first
+it would come from far away, drowsily like the song of a belated bee.
+Then it would gather in volume and grow more lively, till it panted
+round the little village-green and quavered into silence in front of
+Maisie's door. Porter, with the gold light of the hall behind her, would
+always be there on the threshold to receive her mistress. It was
+difficult to guess what Porter thought. There were impromptu jaunts to
+theaters and dances. Porter had seen many gay beginnings and tearful
+endings. Her face was immobile and respectful at whatever hour he
+called.
+
+It was a curious friendship that had developed between them--a
+friendship which lived from hand to mouth, which had the appearance of
+being more than a friendship, in which nothing was premeditated. Nothing
+could be premeditated so far as he was concerned. Terry had first call
+on all his leisure--not that she availed herself of it very often;
+nevertheless, he held himself in readiness to break every engagement
+for her. Maisie was his consolation prize when Terry had failed. Maisie
+was not deceived as to the spare-man place that she held in his
+affections. She was painfully aware that at any moment their friendship
+might end as abruptly as it had started. On either side it was based on
+a common need for kindness, a common tenderness and a common desire for
+protection from loneliness. In a sense they were each a substitute for
+something postponed and more satisfying. While he was making up to her
+for the loss of Adair, she was trying to save him from the rashness of
+committing himself too fatally to Terry. They were altruists, actuated
+by self-interested motives.
+
+And yet it was a friendship not untinged by enmity. His enmity was
+awakened when she became too possessive in the demands which she made
+and especially when she let fall criticisms, however mild, concerning
+Terry. These occurrences set him thinking of the other casuals who had
+ventured on her doorstep, not meaning to stay, and had ended by hanging
+up their hats in her hall. Her enmity was roused by the courteous
+circumspection of his behavior. He never admitted her to the privacy of
+his inmost thoughts. He could be gay and gallant and bountifully
+generous, but he never permitted her to peep beneath the surface. He
+addressed her invariably as Mrs. Lockwood. The use of her surname held
+her at arm's length. She longed most frightfully to hear him call her by
+the name that was less safe. She denied to herself that she wanted him
+to make love to her; at the same time she was disappointed at the
+persistency with which he held her off. She liked to believe that, if he
+had made love to her, she would have rebuffed him. She rehearsed many
+times the indignant words with which she would have set him in his
+place; she would have reminded him that it was for Reggie Pollock she
+was waiting--as though he were not dead, but only round the corner. To
+her chagrin Tabs never gave her the least incentive to employ them.
+
+He saw her never more and frequently less than once a day. There was a
+week at a stretch when he saw nothing of her. She bridged these tedious
+intervals of expecting by the length of her telephone conversations.
+Whenever he stayed away for long, she tortured herself with suspicions
+that his courtship of Terry had begun to prosper. If he returned
+debonair and smiling, she felt confirmed in these suspicions. He was
+most dear to her when he returned in an under-mood of distress. She knew
+then that she was necessary; to be necessary was the passion of her
+heart. Then she would become gay and tender and mothering--an altogether
+sweeter, gentler and more self-effacing Maisie.
+
+Whither were they drifting--toward marriage or only toward infatuation?
+If you had asked Tabs, he would have replied promptly, "Toward neither."
+He had promised to tide her over the dull spots. She had advised him to
+take a course of education in his own value in order that he might
+increase his worth to Terry. She had told him that he ought to let some
+good sensible woman take him in hand and give him a run for his money.
+They had accepted each other at their word--that was all.
+
+At the same time he knew that that was not all. He knew that if there
+was one thing more irritating to her than being addressed as Mrs.
+Lockwood, it was his way of treating her as if she were good and
+sensible. Most women would feel affronted at hearing themselves spoken
+of as anything other than sensible and good. Good and sensible women are
+the pillars of society, but they are not usually regarded as attractive
+companions for joyous excursions in two-seater runabouts.
+
+Neither of them was entirely insensitive to the conjectures that their
+sudden intimacy had given rise to in the minds of onlookers. They were
+both too well-known and were seen together in too many different places
+to avoid the breath of gossip--even of scandal. Men were scarce after
+the wholesale butchery of the war, especially bachelors of Lord
+Taborley's class. Had he only had the conceit to know it, he had
+returned to London a strong favorite for the season's matrimonial
+sweepstakes. More than one anxious mother of unappropriated daughters
+had set him down for preference on her list of eligibles. When
+invitations poured in on him and were politely regretted, there was
+consternation and puzzlement. The puzzlement vanished when the
+explanation was whispered across a hundred dinner-tables, "Haven't you
+heard? It's Maisie Lockwood."
+
+Then would follow details of how they had been seen at sundry theaters,
+at half-a-dozen fashionable hotels and riding together in the Park.
+"She mounted on one of Lord Taborley's horses of course."
+
+"It's quite a case," people said. "If he doesn't mean matrimony, it
+would be decent to exercise more discretion. There used to be some talk
+of Terry Beddow; that's completely ended. Queer the women men fall for,
+even the quietest of them! No one's sane any longer. Had three husbands
+already, hasn't she? Quite a crowd! One would scarcely have supposed
+that an exclusive chap like Taborley would have joined in the queue to
+make a fourth. And he could have had almost any girl for the asking.
+There's never any telling."
+
+Veiled references began to appear in the society columns; but not so
+veiled that they could not be recognized. "A romance is developing
+between a noble lord, who served in the ranks during the war, and a
+vivacious beauty, three times widowed, well-known in fashionable
+circles, etc." One paper published a photograph of them riding side by
+side. After that sceptics who had not seen for themselves, were
+persuaded.
+
+It was a mad world--a world in which it was not safe to be censorious.
+The lid was off the conventions. Every one was shouting for
+happiness--happiness at all costs. When they could not get it for the
+asking, they were taking it without thought of law or penalties. There
+were few who could afford to sit in judgment and many who preferred to
+laugh. The day of authority was over. Traditions were no longer
+respected. While the war was on, men and women had been drilled into
+dumb acquiescence; now that the drilling was abolished, they had become
+a mob, avid, leaderless and uproarious.
+
+Tabs came to realize that he was not alone in his lost sense of
+direction. The right to live had been restored, but neither individuals
+nor nations were sure what they wanted to do with it. After having been
+as one in their sacrificial certainty, they had arrived at a cross-roads
+where there was no policeman to take charge. They had broken up into
+little groups, gathered about their own vociferous stump-orators. The
+result was babel. Of orators there were a plenty. They abused one
+another across the Irish Sea. They tried to shout one another down
+across the Atlantic Ocean. But the hammer-head men of righteousness were
+gone. After the apocalyptic splendor of mailed knights of Christ
+charging stern-faced down to Armageddon, the results of victory had been
+consigned to the weakling care of a race of talkers.
+
+And yet there was music and laughter. Spring rushed on. Feet that had
+marched, now moved in the rhythm of the dance. Theaters were crowded.
+Jazz-bands clashed. There were endless processions. Youth beckoned.
+Chestnut bloom grew white and fell in flurries. Women were no less
+beautiful. The sun shone thunderously.
+
+If Tabs were foolish, which he did not concede, all the world was his
+companion in foolishness. Blindly and gropingly he was still going in
+search of his kingdom. He ignored the gossip which his championship of
+Maisie had called forth. He despised it. It made him the more
+compassionate toward her--the more determined to help her to weather
+the storm. Well-meaning friends undertook to warn him. "She's most
+beautiful and charming. And she's Lady Dawn's sister, of course.
+But----Well, to put it frankly, a woman who's been married three times
+might just as well never have been married at all. Looks as though she'd
+only squandered her money in rising to the nicety of a marriage-license.
+I hope you don't mean to marry her, old chap, because she's not your
+sort."
+
+When Tabs went to the trouble of assuring these well-wishers that he did
+not intend to marry her and that she was his sort, they slipped their
+tongues into their cheeks and opened their eyes wide, "Oh, so that's the
+way of it!"
+
+Maisie reported to him similar experiences. "So you see how I'm
+regarded, as though I were no better than I should be. And I'm young and
+I've done nothing wrong. If it wasn't for your friendship, I should be
+tempted----"
+
+"But you have my friendship!" he assured her.
+
+He tried to rise superior to this petty talk of scandal-mongers, but it
+was not always possible when he remembered Terry.
+
+
+VII
+
+He met Terry as often as he could contrive, but he no longer forced
+himself upon her. He could effect nothing so long as her infatuation for
+Braithwaite lasted.
+
+Now that Sir Tobias had lost faith in him as a lover, his opportunities
+for meeting her became more rare. When Sir Tobias lost faith in any one,
+he made no attempt to disguise it. In the case of Tabs, he let him know
+it with a fine air of magnanimity, as though he were doing him a
+kindness. His frankness took the form of communicating some new
+disparaging criticism, astutely attributed to Lady Beddow, every time he
+was paid a visit.
+
+Having separated Tabs from Terry by carrying him off to his library on
+one pretext or another, he would carefully close the door and commence,
+"You men who've seen service are all unbalanced; it would be unfair to
+hold any of you responsible. You're no exception, my dear fellow, though
+you probably don't notice it in yourself. As Lady Beddow was saying to
+me this morning, 'Poor Lord Taborley, he has a rambling mind. Most
+likely it's a species of shell-shock. There's a queer look comes into
+his eyes. It's not always there. It's a look as if he were haunted. You
+ought to speak to him, Tobias--you're his oldest friend--and advise him
+to see a specialist. It's lucky we found his weakness out before things
+between him and Terry went too far.'"
+
+Or he would say, "Lady Beddow and I were talking about you, my dear
+fellow. You know she's very fond of you. She loved your mother before
+you. 'The little big lady from America,' she used to call her. She's
+naturally very much upset at the way in which you're getting yourself
+talked about. Unfortunately she holds me partly responsible for having
+induced you to visit this Maisie woman. 'You ought to have known him
+better,' she says. 'There's an immoral streak in him--an inherited
+taint, which I, for one, always suspected.' She was wondering whether
+you have any knowledge of there having been insanity in your family."
+
+After having invented such discomforting surmises and given his wife the
+credit for them, the old gentleman would blink his crafty eyes and rest
+his hand affectionately on Tabs' arm. At the end of each visit he was
+pressed to call again; but when he called, it was to find himself
+shepherded into the library, safely out of reach of Terry, in order that
+he might hear his conduct discussed afresh, either directly or by
+insinuation.
+
+He was unable to defend himself without betraying Terry. She maintained
+her silence with regard to Braithwaite, refusing to take her parents
+into her confidence. They naturally attributed the hanging fire of the
+engagement to Tabs, supposing that on the eve of his proposal he had
+been ensnared in the net of Maisie. In their eyes he cut a shabby
+figure.
+
+Behind his back Terry came to his defense. She would hear and believe no
+wrong of him. This only proved to her parents that her heart still
+followed him. They thought her very brave and became more gloomy in
+their accusations. Matters took a serious turn: her health began to
+fail. When the doctor was summoned, he ascribed the cause to secret
+worrying and prescribed a complete change. Tabs received no word of this
+happening, for Terry had become increasingly shy, so that she created
+the appearance of avoiding him. She quite definitely avoided Maisie.
+
+There came a day in early June when he went to call on her and was
+informed by the velvet-plush James that Miss Terry was out of London on
+a visit of undetermined length. When he asked for her address, James
+shook his head mournfully. She had been ill and was to be spared all
+disturbing communications. His orders were that her address was to be
+given to nobody.
+
+"But that order doesn't apply to me," Tabs urged.
+
+James became more profoundly agitated. He averted his eyes, while he
+fiddled with the last button of his plump waistcoat. "I regret to say,
+to your Lordship most especially."
+
+"Humph!" Tabs stroked his chin. "Is Sir Tobias at home?"
+
+"Your Lordship would gain nothing by seeing Sir Tobias."
+
+"You might mention to him that I called." With that he descended the
+steps and climbed into his runabout.
+
+"Turned away!" he thought. "Turned away from Terry's house!" Then his
+mind went back to two months ago--the hopes he'd had, his meeting with
+her at the station, his asking her father for her hand in marriage. It
+was like the old front-line trench, when reenforcements had failed to
+come up: there was nothing for it but to dig one's self in and stick it
+out.
+
+He had been shown the door with as little ceremony as an intruding
+peddler.
+
+
+VIII
+
+From Terry's house he went to Mulberry Tree Court, but the route that he
+chose was not direct. He drove all over the West End first, through
+Oxford Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly; then back by way of Regent
+Street, swinging to the left through Conduit Street, till he again
+struck Bond Street. He doubled and redoubled on his tracks, moving among
+crowds, feeling that he must hear the noise of crowds, yet seeing little
+of the sights on which his eyes rested. It had been like this with him
+before, after being in too close contact with calamity. It had been like
+this in war-days, when he had returned on brief leaves out of monstrous
+offensives to the appalling quiet of a normal world. He hadn't dared to
+be alone. He had felt that his sanity depended on his rubbing shoulders
+with people. He had been like a child in an empty house, leaning out of
+a window to catch the stir of life along the pavements.
+
+The gayety of the London season was at its height. Khaki was growing
+rare. Signs of war had almost completely vanished. No one wanted to talk
+about it. No one wanted to read about it. Shops had redecorated their
+windows with the necessities and luxuries of civilian requirements.
+There was a wave of spendthrift extravagance abroad. Every one in the
+streets had the look of being out for a good time. The threat of
+torturing to-morrows no longer made life haggard. If there was one
+lesson that the past five years had taught it was that each new day was
+a gift from the gods, to be enjoyed separately and drained of every
+available drop of pleasure. The restraints of duty were indefinitely
+postponed. Men and women sauntered in pairs, aimlessly and joyously.
+Work was the bondage furthest from their thoughts. They seemed aware of
+no one but themselves in their ecstasy at being reunited. Racing had
+been restarted; up and down the gutters newsboys ran shouting the
+winners. London was a Tommy on leave, insubordinately, humorously,
+contagiously happy.
+
+As he drove, Tabs argued out his problem. From house-top to house-top
+the June sky sagged like an azure canopy. Across pavements the afternoon
+sunshine lay in bars of gold. Flower-sellers stood at intervals along
+the curb, scenting the air with their country nosegays. A lazy breeze
+ruffled drooping flags which had been hung out for the latest festival.
+Everywhere there were girls in their blowy summer dresses--girls of all
+kinds and sorts. Single girls, married girls, girls who worked for their
+livings, girls whose business it was to be beautiful, girls who were
+merely drudges. There were both pathos and urgency in the sight of them.
+It was not good that they should live alone. They had wasted their youth
+too long. The great necessity for that waste was ended. Not one of them
+was a patch on Maisie.
+
+If he did not desire Maisie, why did he miss her? Was it that he would
+not allow himself to desire her? Why did he encourage his passion for
+Terry--Terry who in her mild and gentle way had become almost insolently
+unappreciative? Wouldn't he be wiser to content himself with the woman
+who was within reach rather than----?
+
+He frowned as the truth dawned on him. For the first time he had
+acknowledged it. He did love Maisie. Not as he loved Terry, of course;
+but in a more human way, to the extent of needing her companionship. He
+had made a discovery that amazed himself--a discovery that thousands of
+men had made before him: that it was possible for him to love two women
+at the same tune, utterly differently and yet with entire sincerity. He
+felt as lowered in his self-esteem as if he had committed bigamy. He was
+dumbfounded at this new twist that his emotions had developed. Without
+consulting him, they had played a trick on him which forever
+disqualified him for the larger role of constant lover. He felt himself
+pushed down to almost the level of a philanderer--a philanderer not much
+more august than Adair. The suspicion crossed his mind that, if he could
+believe himself in love with two women, he couldn't be very mightily in
+love with either.
+
+But he was impatient of delays--worn out with procrastinations. The
+magnificent chances of the present were slipping past him. One day he
+would be old. "_Now, now, now_, is the appointed time," throbbed his
+engine. Out of the sheer disorganization of his thoughts a desperate
+scheme took shape. Why should he not go to Maisie and say, "We're
+neither of us first in each other's affections. It's a rough-and-tumble
+world! Why be thin-skinned about it? We may become first later. Let's
+stop dreaming of kingdoms round the corner and make the best of such
+kingdoms as are ours to-day."
+
+The idea took hold of him with force. It fascinated him. He turned his
+car about. In passing through Mayfair he made a detour to glance at
+Taborley House. The American Hospital had vacated it. It looked ruined
+and forlorn. He tried to picture it as it might appear if Maisie were
+its mistress.
+
+Twenty minutes later he drew up before the retiring little villa with
+its marigold-tinted curtains. He had by no manner of means decided on
+his course of action. He could not have told you what he was going to
+say to Maisie. In this as in so many other ways, he believed himself
+abnormal. No one had ever told him that ninety-nine out of a hundred
+married men, if they spoke the truth, would have to confess that they
+had been unaware thirty seconds before they proposed that they were
+going to do so; and that the most incredible happening in their lives
+had been when, thirty seconds later, they had discovered that not only
+had they proposed, but that they had been riotously accepted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
+
+SOME PEOPLE FIND THEIR KINGDOMS
+
+
+I
+
+He was in the act of shutting off his engine when he heard himself
+accosted. "I beg your pardon, but are you, Mr. Gervis?"
+
+It was a pleasant voice--a man's. Keeping his eyes on what he was doing,
+Tabs answered in the negative. Then he recalled that Gervis had been the
+name of Maisie's second husband. "If it's the Gervis who used to live
+here," he indicated the house with a jerk of his head, "I'm afraid you
+won't find him. He's been dead these three years--killed at the Front."
+
+A quiet chuckle greeted this piece of information, followed by a hearty,
+"Thank the Lord."
+
+Tabs had finished what he was doing. As he stepped out of the car, he
+threw a contemptuous glance at the man who could be so callous. He was a
+slightly built, fresh-complexioned young fellow of middle height, with
+amiable gray eyes and a fair, closely-trimmed mustache. He belonged to
+the demobilized subaltern type and had the weary, drawn expression of
+over-strained nerves that so many young faces had at that time. He was
+dressed in a smartly fitting suit of striped navy-blue flannel and
+carried himself with the plucky alertness of a highly bred fox-terrier.
+He had a clean and gallant bearing which it was difficult to reconcile
+with the ungenerosity of his last remark. In a neat, unforceful way he
+would have been handsome, had it not been for a badly healed scar which
+ran straight across his forehead, only just escaping his eyes.
+
+Before Tabs could say anything, he was apologizing. "That sounded
+rotten. I'm sorry. But you see, I didn't know the chap. It's his wife
+that I'm trying to find. She was married to a man named Pollock when I
+knew her. I was rather a pal of Pollock's, belonged to the same squadron
+and was shot down at the same time. I've been a prisoner in Germany.
+Just got back, in fact. As you'll understand, I'm rather out of touch. I
+thought you'd be able to tell me whether she still lived here."
+
+It was very damping to his ardor at this particular moment to have
+Maisie's matrimonial past raked up. Within the next half hour he would
+very possibly be asking her to be his wife. He wasn't sure that he was
+going to; but meeting this friend of her first husband on her doorstep
+didn't help him to make up his mind. He was no longer unsympathetic to
+the young fellow, but he was quite determined that he must be sent about
+his business.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he said, "the lady you're in search of does live
+here. But she's not Mrs. Gervis any longer. She's married again. She's
+Mrs. Lockwood now."
+
+A glint of enmity came into the stranger's eyes. "Then you're Mr.
+Lockwood, perhaps?"
+
+Tabs answered him with a note of irritation. "I'm not Mr. Lockwood.
+She's a widow. Lockwood also was killed. But I really don't see why you
+should stop me on the pavement to ask so many questions. You can find
+out everything by ringing the bell."
+
+"That's right." The young fellow stroked his mustache. "But I didn't
+want to do that until I had made certain. Surely you can see how
+embarrassing---- And now this third chap's gone West, you say. Poor
+little Maisie, she hasn't had much luck."
+
+It was difficult to be brusque with a man of his own class, especially
+with a man so genuinely likeable. But he had to get rid of him. After
+having nerved himself up to the point of being at least prepared to
+propose to Maisie, he couldn't contemplate an evening of sharing her
+with a stranger and listening to the merits of her first husband.
+
+"So you're an old friend! Well, I'm afraid she won't be free this
+evening. I have an appointment with her. But, if you like, I'll mention
+that I met you and I'll let her know that you'll call--when shall we
+say--to-morrow? Perhaps you'd care to give me your name----"
+
+The young man smiled good-naturedly. "I couldn't think of troubling you
+to that extent."
+
+"In that case, I'll have to ask you to excuse me. All kinds of luck to
+you on your return. It must be rather jolly not to be a prisoner. Good
+evening."
+
+Tabs crossed the pavement and rang the bell. In order that he might
+afford no opportunity for further conversation, he stood with his face
+towards the door while he waited for it to be opened. He was very
+conscious that the stranger had not departed, but was hovering
+immediately in rear of him.
+
+It was Porter who answered his summons. "I'm sorry, your Lordship, Mrs.
+Lockwood is out---- No, she didn't leave any word. She's bound to be
+back shortly---- Why, certainly, if your Lordship has the time."
+
+While she was closing the front door, he walked across the hall and let
+himself into the drawing-room. He went directly over to the empty
+fireplace and gazed up at Lady Dawn's portrait. It always seemed to
+challenge him--seemed to be trying to say something to him. It was
+almost as though it were his conscience hanging there on the wall. He
+had an idea that it reproached him for his silence with regard to Lord
+Dawn. He felt that, were he to do what his instinctive sense of justice
+had first urged--go to Lady Dawn and tell her that her husband had cared
+for her--the painted face would be no longer turned away and the
+stone-gray eyes no longer averted.
+
+He was haunted by the obsession that he would never have any luck till
+he had vindicated the dead man's memory.
+
+It was Maisie who had prevented him up to now--Maisie with her laughter,
+her breezy arguments, her short views of life, her contempt for
+sentiment, her sledge-hammer motto, with which she shattered the past,
+"I never dig up my dead." She had made him hesitant about reopening the
+subject. Her sister was the most beautiful woman in England. A man never
+knows to what boundaries a woman's jealousy spreads. He feared lest, if
+he persisted, she might impute to him less lofty motives than the desire
+to play fair by a comrade-in-arms who had gone West.
+
+Something stirred behind him. He swung about and found himself staring
+into the face of the stranger who had accosted him on the pavement.
+
+"Sargent painted it ten years ago," the stranger said. "She's not as
+young as that now."
+
+"How did you get in?" Tabs demanded.
+
+The stranger laughed boyishly. "Not too loud or you'll give the show
+away. I followed you. The maid raised no objection. She thought we were
+together--which was exactly what I intended."
+
+"But what do you want? What right have you here?"
+
+"Want! I know what I want. As to my right, that's problematic."
+
+He turned his back on Tabs and commenced to move about the room, picking
+things up and examining them with a purposeful curiosity. He showed no
+fear, yet in all his movements there was a calculated stealth. Tabs
+watched him in amazement, wondering what he ought to do. If it came to
+grappling with him, unless he carried fire-arms, there was little doubt
+as to who would get the better of the contest. The man might be a
+lunatic, a blackmailer, a burglar; by his odd mode of entry, he had laid
+himself open to every suspicion. But he looked perfectly normal; and if
+he had been a burglar, he surely would have selected an opportunity when
+no other man was present. It was an awkward situation, this being shut
+up alone in a husbandless woman's house with an unknown intruder. It
+seemed to be an occasion for tact rather than the possible fuss of
+police interference.
+
+At this moment the stranger made a discovery.
+
+He had been examining the five silver photograph-frames, each in turn,
+with close attention. With his back towards Tabs he remarked, "It looks
+as though she hadn't forgotten him. Five reminders of his homely mug and
+not a solitary one of the also-rans! Numbers Two and Three couldn't have
+made such a deep impression." He caught his breath in a nervous shudder.
+"It's queer. Everything's queer when one's just come back. One's so
+changed that he could court his own wife without being recognized. You,
+too, were out there I should judge by the way you limp. I wonder whether
+you've got over the queerness yet. I haven't had time----"
+
+From in front of the empty fireplace, Tabs interrupted him. "Look here,
+my dear chap, I don't want to be rude and this isn't my house; but
+what's your game?"
+
+The stranger turned and smiled. His frank gray eyes were amused and
+friendly. "Upon my word, I haven't any game. I'm like yourself--just
+paying a visit."
+
+Tabs shook his head and gazed at him fixedly. "It won't do; you know
+that. You're a gentleman. Gentlemen don't get into unprotected women's
+houses by your kind of methods."
+
+"They don't. That's a fact." He laughed carelessly. "I suppose this is
+what comes of having been a prisoner in Germany. One prefers to be
+underhand."
+
+"Don't you think it's time you stopped fooling?" Tabs spoke in a
+conversational tone without temper. "There's Mrs. Lockwood to be
+considered; she may be here at any moment. It's no good coming this
+returned prisoner trick; all the prisoners in Germany were returned
+shortly after the Armistice. Eight months have elapsed."
+
+"All right. Have it your own way."
+
+The stranger ceased to wander and sat himself down at Maisie's end of
+the couch. Pulling out his cigarette-case, he offered it to Tabs. "Have
+a gasper?---- You don't need to refuse because of Maisie. If she's the
+Maisie she used to be, she won't object.---- Well, if you won't, I
+will."
+
+Tabs noticed that his hand trembled in holding the match. The man was a
+bundle of nerves; he was only maintaining this display of coolness with
+an effort. Whatever the purpose of his bold intrusion, it was not
+social, as he had pretended.
+
+"I don't like any man to think me a liar." The man spoke slowly between
+puffs at his cigarette. "You think it's all bunkum that I'm fresh out of
+Germany, but it isn't. Do you see that?" He ran his finger across the
+gash in his forehead. "That and the ill-treatment I received in the
+prison-camps made me go wuzzy. The only fact about myself that I could
+remember in all those years was Maisie. So it's natural that I should
+come to see her first. I wasn't sure of my own identity until a month
+ago. I suppose I was released at the Armistice, but for seven out of the
+past eight months I must have wandered in rags over Central Europe.
+However, all's well that ends well, and here I am."
+
+"But you knew that she'd remarried," Tabs objected suspiciously; "you
+asked me if I were Gervis."
+
+"A friend of Pollock's told me that," he explained. "Gervis was
+excusable. But this Lockwood fellow's the third. It's a bit thick! She
+certainly has been going it." He looked up suddenly. "I've been doing
+all the talking. What about yourself?"
+
+Tabs crossed the room and opened one of the long French windows which
+led out into the rockery. The golden afternoon had faded into early
+evening and a refreshing coolness was in the air. When he came back, he
+seated himself at the other end of the couch. "Just to show that there's
+no ill-feeling, I'll accept one of your gaspers, if you'll allow
+me.----There's nothing for me to explain. My name is Lord Taborley and
+I'm a friend of Mrs. Lockwood. There's nothing else."
+
+The stranger leaned forward. His humor left him, revealing his premature
+haggardness. He laid a hand on Tabs' arm and asked a question. "You're
+fond of her?"
+
+Tabs eyed him in silence, trying to divine what was intended. "At any
+rate, you are," he said kindly; "I see it now."
+
+"Not fond of her, I'm in love with her." The man's face softened as he
+made the confession. "I was in love with her when she was still the wife
+of Pollock. I've been through deep waters. I've had to wait for her like
+Jacob did for Rachel. I've lost most things--my memory, my health, my
+very likeness! but never for five minutes have I lost my love for her.
+She was the only star in my darkness----" The words fell from him with
+somber sincerity. "I don't know whether you understand----"
+
+But Tabs' thoughts had turned inwards. He was living again the
+englamored poignancy of the years when Terry had been for him precisely
+that--the only star in his darkness. The intensity of the vision was
+like a cry of warning rousing his sleeping idealism from its lethargy.
+His present errand became a treachery to be swept aside by his refound
+strength. He recognized the intruder with new eyes, not as an enemy, but
+as a comrade--a comrade marooned on the selfsame island of loneliness
+and bound to him by the common experience of a kindred adversity. He was
+like Crusoe discovering the footprint. Here, quite close to him, was a
+fellow waif who had drunk deep of his own bitter sense of desertion.
+With a thrill of sympathy, his heart turned to him.
+
+"The only star in the darkness!" He repeated the stranger's words. "For
+most of us there's been one woman who was all of that. If she fails
+us----" He stifled his pessimism. "When stars fail, one waits for the
+morning."
+
+"So you, too, had your woman!"
+
+The stranger smiled and relaxed against the cushions. "Foolish of me!
+You can't blame me. Twice I've believed that I'd lost her. First there
+was Gervis and then this Lockwood. Poor devils, I cry quits on them. But
+when I found you so at home here, you can guess what I dreaded. And yet
+you'll never guess why I followed you into this house." He lit a
+cigarette and crossed his legs. "I didn't want you to escape me till I'd
+asked a question---- Has it ever entered your head that Pollock might
+not be dead?"
+
+Tabs started. Then he sat very still. It was the commonplace tone in
+which the question had been asked that froze his blood. It was as though
+this man had said, "I can bring him back." For a moment he knew genuine
+fear--the non-physical fear which the impalpable can awake in the
+bravest mind. Through the open window the companionable mutter of London
+entered. The normality of everything on which his eyes rested did its
+best to reassure him--the mellow evening sunlight in the friendly room,
+the flowers in the rockery, the toy-boat on the pond. "I never dig up my
+dead." He remembered Maisie's motto. But what if the dead----
+
+He pulled himself together. Pollock not dead! An absurd suggestion!
+Maisie had changed her name twice since then--a sufficient proof! The
+poor fellow was demented. Everything that he had done bore the hall-mark
+of insanity. He had owned that he had been deranged to within a month
+ago. Everything that he had said might be quite true. He probably had
+been the dead man's friend and in love with Maisie at the time of her
+first marriage. The misfortunes that had befallen him had exaggerated
+his love into mania--a mania which the news of Gervis and then of
+Lockwood had rendered active. He felt an immense compassion for the man.
+There, save for the grace of God, sat himself. But what was to be done?
+Already Maisie was overdue. Not a second could be wasted. He must humor
+him and get him out of the house, if a scene was to be prevented.
+
+And all the time the stranger had been watching him--following his
+thoughts, no doubt. He spoke again. "Don't you agree with me? It would
+be damned awkward if Pollock came back."
+
+Tabs forced a smile. "I'm not so sure that I do. She never loved any one
+but her first husband. She's told me so. The other two---- I don't
+believe she herself knows how they happened. They were soldiers. They
+weren't long for this world. She didn't want to do them out of
+anything." He glanced at his watch. "By Jove, and I've not dined yet!
+I'm afraid I must be off. How about you? I'd be awfully glad if you'd
+take dinner with me."
+
+The man jumped to his feet, so that Tabs rose with him. But once they
+were on their feet an amused expression of cunning came into his eyes.
+It told Tabs plainly that he had seen through the strategy. He shook his
+head. "Very good of you. But I'm waiting for Maisie." He held out his
+hand. It was evident that he was determined to take Tabs at his word.
+"We'll meet again, perhaps. What you've just said piques my curiosity.
+Before you go, there's one more question. In your opinion what would
+Maisie's attitude be if Pollock did come back?"
+
+Tabs was instantly aware that he had made a false move. His bluff had
+been called. He'd made it impossible for himself to prolong his call; at
+the same time he didn't dare to leave this man behind in the house. It
+wasn't Maisie that he was thinking of now--he could warn her as she
+entered the Court--it was Porter. A madman was capable of anything; and
+yet, confound the chap's deceptiveness, he didn't look mad. There was
+only one chance of delaying his departure: at all costs he must involve
+him in an argument.
+
+"If Pollock came back! Curious that you should suggest that! I've sat in
+this room and discussed the possibility with Mrs. Lockwood by the hour.
+For the past two months--that's as long as I've known her--I've been
+helping her to live as though he might come back."
+
+The man's coolness instantly vanished. His excitement grew well-nigh
+beyond control. "You're not going. Sit down. You've got to explain." He
+rapped out his sentences in short, quick jerks. His voice had become
+harsh and imperative. "You can't have any idea what this means to me.
+It's ridiculous. Why should you, a living man, help her, when she's so
+beautiful, to save herself for a dead man? She didn't save herself in
+the case of Gervis and Lockwood."
+
+With a sigh of relief Tabs reseated himself. The man sank down beside
+him, crowding against him on the couch. His anxiety was sharp-pointed
+as a dagger. "Quick," he urged.
+
+"I don't know that I can be quick." Tabs spoke leisurely. He paused,
+trying to think what he should say next. "Here it is in a nutshell. Mrs.
+Lockwood, as we both know, is a more than ordinarily charming woman.
+She's the kind who, without being able to prevent herself, draws men.
+There are women like that. Her three marriages, all taking place so
+close together gave her a reputation---- You're a man of the world;
+you'll understand that I'm not trying to say anything derogatory. But
+three matrimonial adventures in such rapid succession gave her a
+reputation for lightness. She was young and pretty. She longed to live
+life. You can't blame her. For a woman life isn't a very full affair
+without a man. And yet there aren't many men who would be willing to
+choose a wife with three previous husbands to her credit. It would seem
+too much like a week-end experiment, without the option of parting when
+the week was ended. So here was the injustice of her social situation;
+without having committed a solitary indiscretion, she was damaged
+goods--debarred from matrimony, yet coveted by men. Do you realize the
+temptation----"
+
+The man half rose in his irritation. "You're not answering my question."
+The violence in his tone was unmistakeable. "What I've got to find out
+is, what put you up to persuading her to live as though Pollock were not
+dead?"
+
+"I was coming to that." Tabs spoke reassuringly. "Beneath all her gayety
+I found, when I began to know her, that she was desperate--desperate to
+live in the sunshine and mortally afraid of shadows. At the least hint
+of shadows she grew reckless. She believed that her happiness was in the
+past. So I taught her to play a game--a game that has often saved me
+from despair. It was just this--to act as though all the goodness one
+has known still lies ahead; in her case this meant living as though the
+man whom she had loved were not dead, but waiting for her round some
+future corner. So that was why---- But I think I've answered your
+question."
+
+Tabs rose from the couch and limped over to the empty fireplace. He
+stood there beneath the portrait of Lady Dawn, supporting himself with
+one arm against the mantel. The room was beginning to fill with dusk.
+Beyond the threshold of the open window, the rockery-garden was still
+vaguely golden. The little pond was a silver mirror.
+
+Perhaps two minutes had elapsed. Uncertainly the stranger struggled to
+his feet. He moved towards the door, halted and came slowly back. He
+looked very spent, and slim, and wasted in the gathering shadows. As
+Tabs gazed down at him, he noticed that his face was prodigiously
+solemn.
+
+"I don't mind now." He swallowed like a small boy getting rid of his
+emotion. "I don't mind Gervis or Lockwood any longer; it's as though
+they'd never happened. And I don't feel hard to her, the way I might
+have. I'm glad you told her about things being round the corner. Because
+I'm Pollock. I have come back."
+
+Tabs stared at him. He was deeply moved. To humor him in his delusion
+seemed the height of callousness. Yet what else was possible under the
+circumstances?
+
+"Of course you're Pollock," he assured him gently. "One wouldn't
+recognize you from your portraits, but I ought to have guessed."
+
+The man caught the deception in his tone. He lifted up his puzzled gray
+eyes. "You don't---- No, I see you don't. You don't believe me. Yet I am
+Pollock."
+
+"My dear chap," Tabs said it coaxingly, "I don't see why you should
+think I doubt you. I'm quite certain you're Pollock--Reggie Pollock, the
+first of all the aces: the man who brought down the Zeppelin over
+Brussels. You see I know all about you. Your picture was in the papers.
+I've told you that you were expected. So why----"
+
+The front door was heard to open and close. There was the sound of
+Maisie's voice. They stood rigidly listening in the semi-darkness.
+Neither of them spoke or stirred. As she entered, a shaft of light from
+the hall preceded her. Quietly Tabs placed himself between her and the
+stranger. The stranger made no motion to thwart him; he stood like one
+turned to stone. Just across the threshold she halted, leaning forward
+slightly and peering through the shadows.
+
+"Why, Tabs," she laughed, "how romantic of you to sit waiting for me in
+the twilight!"
+
+Tabs came forward as though he were about to push her back. "I'm not
+alone, Mrs. Lockwood----"
+
+"I know. Porter told me. But why are you standing in my way?" She
+laughed again. A shiver of fear cut short her laughter. "What's the
+matter? I don't see your friend. Why don't you introduce----"
+
+"He's not my friend. He says he's yours."
+
+"Then all the more reason---- Why are you acting strangely? No, please
+let me into my own room, Tabs."
+
+He had put out his arm to prevent her. Without warning the stranger
+advanced into the shaft of light. She saw him and fell back screaming,
+covering her eyes. With a vehemence that was unexpected, he pushed Tabs
+aside and clasped her to him. "Maisie darling, don't be afraid. I'm
+real. I know everything. And I don't mind----"
+
+At sound of his voice, she uncovered her eyes. His face was close to
+hers. The fixed look of terror left her.
+
+Putting out her hands timidly, she ran her fingers along the scar in his
+forehead. "They've hurt you. Poor you! My Reggie! Oh, my lover, they've
+hurt you!"
+
+She buried her head against his shoulder and fell to weeping
+passionately.
+
+
+II
+
+Neither of them had seen him go. He had tiptoed past them like a ghost
+and out into the summer night. The sky was luminous with the dust of
+stars. A sleepy wind was blowing.
+
+He jumped into his car and sped away, making such haste that one might
+have thought he was pursued. He wheeled to the left in the direction
+that led to the Surrey hills. It was the direction he had taken with
+Terry on that March morning when she had met him at the station. He was
+making a discovery: that there is no tragedy more difficult to
+contemplate with charity than the sight of other people's happiness.
+Their follies we can tolerate and view even with compassion; but their
+joys are unendurable. Joy separates men with impassable barriers. It
+transfigures beggars into Lazaruses lying at rest in Abraham's bosom. We
+view them from afar off and their contentment increases the burning of
+our torment. No man has yet discovered how to share his joy. Only a god
+could say, "My joy I give unto you."
+
+They had not seen him go. That was the neglect that rankled. Even though
+they had seen him, they would not have cared; they would have done
+nothing to delay him. They were past all caring. Like tired ships,
+having weathered many storms, they had furled their sails in the harbor
+of desire. He had slipped by them like a demon vessel, all canvas
+spread, out-going on his endless voyage.
+
+From the door, before he left, he had looked back. The room was a-silver
+with twilight. The garden beyond was still vaguely golden. The pond
+glimmered darkly like a magic mirror. The murmur of London wove patterns
+on the silence. From the hall across the silver of the dusk, an
+intrusive shaft of light pointed like a finger at those two entranced,
+who had refound the peace that time had scattered.
+
+Even though Pollock had not returned, he himself could never have
+married her. There are violations of the austerity of the soul which the
+urgings of the flesh cannot accomplish. In the vivid flash of reality
+that had visited him he knew that now. He was angry--bitterly angry. But
+his anger was not for her; it was for himself. He could be so
+audaciously prophetic in the affairs of others. He could advise them and
+well-nigh compel them to conserve themselves for kingdoms of whose
+coming there was neither the slightest hope nor warning. His penetrating
+optimism could foresee the daringly incredible, so that it almost seemed
+in the case of Maisie that his optimism had created out of the
+incredible a fact. He could work these miracles of restraint for others;
+himself he could not restrain. His road ran straight as destiny, yet any
+lazy kingdom of mildness in a woman's eyes was capable of luring him
+aside. In his abasement he lost all faith in his self-knowledge. Hadn't
+he always been the victim of an imagination which had tricked mere
+liking into a resemblance to passion? He strutted, gestured, despaired
+till he almost persuaded himself that he was the part he was acting. But
+had he the faintest conception of what real love meant? Hadn't he always
+acted a part? Yes, even in the case of Terry!
+
+His saner judgment intervened. He hadn't always been like that. Where
+had the point of departure started? He traced back the weakness till he
+came to the moment when he had permitted his sense of justice to be
+over-ruled by a woman. It had started with Maisie, when he had allowed
+her to persuade him to hide the truth from Lady Dawn.
+
+He jammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a sudden halt. To go and
+tell her must be the first step in his redemption. Till that was done
+the curse of the dead man would follow him. It seemed to him now, as he
+looked back, that through all the spring and summer the shadow of Lord
+Dawn had crept behind him. He would go at once. He would go that night.
+He knew where he could find her. He would set out like a pilgrim of long
+ago through the moon-drenched, hay-scented sweetness of the country.
+
+His vision turned outwards. He realized for the first time where he had
+halted. He was within sight of Richmond Park, outside _The Star and
+Garter Hotel_, the old haunt of merry-makers, which had now become a
+permanent hospital for the mutilated. There were lights to mark the
+windows of men who suffered. As he watched, some leaped up; others were
+snapped out. He could hear in memory the starchy rustling of nurses and
+the creaking of springs as the patients turned. There were men in there
+without arms and legs and faces; he had shared their danger and he had
+been spared. Surely the God who had covered him with His mantle, had had
+some plan--some design of goodness for him!
+
+Far below in a curving streak of blessedness the Thames ran silvered by
+the moonlight. He could see the clumped shadows of woods and the flicker
+of ripples striking fire against the banks. More distantly London
+glowed--a golden flower cupped in the hollowed hand of night. Holding
+his breath he listened to the loudness of the quiet. Subtle ecstasies
+drifted to him, fluttering like moths against the windows of his
+mind--"lilies like thoughts, roses like words, in the sweet brain of
+June." _There was a design._ Maisie had found her kingdom. Was it too
+much to expect that round some future turning God had another kingdom
+waiting?
+
+
+III
+
+He drove back to London by the directest route. He would have to get
+supper before he made a start. By the time he had done that, packed his
+bag, and refilled his tank it would be close on midnight. Dawn Castle
+lay somewhere down in Gloucestershire. He knew the road as far as
+Oxford; after that his ideas were vague.
+
+He was a little daunted by the thought of Lady Dawn. Everything that he
+had heard about her, including his first meeting with her, had served to
+daunt him. He pictured her as a woman with a conscience clear-cut as a
+cameo--a woman, infallible and unsubdued, impatient of foolishness and
+gentle in her spirit with the cold tranquillity of a landscape under
+ice. How would she receive him, coming out of nowhere, unheralded and
+unexplained? And how could he explain the urgency that had compelled him
+to come to her? It was a delicate task that he had set himself, this
+seeking out a woman with whom he was unacquainted, that he might tell
+her that her husband had not hated her when he died. What concern was it
+of his, she might well ask. If she chose to be hostile, there were no
+arguments by which he could defend his interference. His sole
+justification was his deep-rooted conviction that he was doing right.
+
+She never cried. How often Maisie had insisted on her sister's
+abstinence from tears, as though it was something monstrous that summed
+up all her character! He would have felt far more comfortable in
+visiting her if he had been assured that she sometimes cried.
+
+As he turned into Brompton Square, he thought he caught the door of his
+house in the act of closing. He might have been mistaken. It was dark
+under the shadow of the trees. Quite possibly it had been the door of a
+neighbor's house. Nevertheless, he hugged the curb as he drove so that
+he might scan the face of any one on the pavement. Forty yards from his
+doorstep, at a point where things were darkest, a man passed him. He was
+a tall man and walked with the erectness of one who had been a soldier.
+The way in which he carried himself and strode was extraordinarily
+reminiscent. Tabs slowed down and looked back; the man moved straight
+ahead, without hesitancy or sign of recognition. It couldn't be
+Braithwaite; Ann's vicinity was the least likely place in which to find
+him.
+
+As Tabs let himself into his house, he found Ann in the hall. "Was there
+some one here to see me?" he asked.
+
+"There's been no one to see your Lordship," Ann replied respectfully.
+
+He scarcely knew what prompted him to say it. Perhaps it was the
+healthy neatness of her appearance--the extreme orderliness of her
+quiet. "Ann, you're the sanest creature I meet anywhere. You've the
+pluck of one in a million."
+
+She turned to him a face that was flushing and eyes that were unusually
+bright. "It's good of your Lordship. Your Lordship is always kind."
+
+"No, Ann, only human. I know what you've been through and I'm glad
+you're getting over it---- I have to be away to-night. I shall need some
+supper. While you're preparing it, I'll pack."
+
+On the way upstairs he telephoned the garage to send for his car and to
+return it within the hour. Then he climbed the last flight to his
+bedroom.
+
+While he packed, he kept pausing and knitting his brows. A ridiculous
+conviction was forming in his mind. "It couldn't have been," he assured
+himself. Yet the more he recalled the man on the pavement the more
+certain he was that he had been Steely Jack. But what motive could
+Braithwaite have had for calling and why should Ann try to hide the fact
+that he had called? He had lost trace of him utterly since that day when
+he had handed him Terry's ultimatum at the Savoy. Since then Terry and
+he had had many meetings, he did not doubt. Braithwaite's influence
+clung to her like her shadow. But if he was so in love with Terry, the
+more reason why he should steer clear of Ann. To have called at Brompton
+Square would have been asking for a cloudburst. It couldn't have been
+Braithwaite. And yet----
+
+And then there was Ann. Since that day when the General's portrait had
+appeared in the papers, she had given up watching for letters marked,
+"On His Majesty's Service." She had made no further enquiries as to how
+his Lordship's friend at the War Office was progressing. Her silence
+told its story; she had learned the truth. In what spirit she had
+accepted the truth Tabs had no means of guessing. Lady Hamilton, the
+little maid-of-all-work, had been the beloved of Nelson. Ann was not
+without her precedent. But the maid-of-all-work had become Lady Hamilton
+before the Admiral had set eyes on her. Steely Jack was a General, while
+Ann was still a servant. Her claims would not meet with much applause if
+they were brought before a jury.
+
+To all appearance she had resigned herself to the inevitable. Tabs was
+frankly surprised at her magnanimity and fortitude. About her fortitude
+there could be no question, but concerning her magnanimity he was not a
+little skeptical. More than once he had caught her singing as she went
+about her work. She didn't get all the words correctly; she sang them
+with improvisions, filling in the gaps where her memory failed.
+Throughout the war the song had been sung to men on leave at the
+Alhambra by the heroine who acted the revengeful part of _Tootsie_:
+
+   "Some day I'll make you love me.
+   Some day you'll call me 'Dear'.
+   You'll feel so lonely
+   And want me only;
+   I'm sure you'll want me near.
+   I know you can't forget me,
+   Though, dear, for years you'll try.
+   I'll make you miss me
+   And want to kiss me,
+   Bye and bye."
+
+She was a mystery. If she were playing a game, it was a game the
+intentions of which he could not fathom. The man whom he had passed on
+the pavement could not have been Braithwaite. Common-sense insisted on
+that.
+
+
+IV
+
+While he was at supper she gave him no chance to question her. "I'm
+motoring down to Dawn Castle," he told her. "I've left the address on my
+desk. Don't forward any letters till you hear from me. I don't suppose
+that I shall be there for more than a day. To tell the truth," he
+glanced up smiling at her seriousness, "I haven't been invited."
+
+Ann refused to be lured off her perch of reticence. She set before him
+the dish she was carrying. "I'm sure wherever your Lordship goes there's
+a welcome."
+
+He felt that he was being reproved. He had been conscious of her silent
+criticism from the moment he had announced that he would be away for the
+night. He respected Ann and was anxious for her good opinion. She was by
+long odds the most honorable woman of his acquaintance and the best,
+because she was the kindest. He had had the feeling throughout the past
+two months that there was very little that had happened inside his brain
+that had escaped her. She had disapproved of Maisie. She had shown no
+enthusiasm for Terry. She had been aware of his dangers when he himself
+was disguising them with excuses. All this he knew though no word had
+been exchanged. She had observed in all her dealings with him the
+decorum to be expected from a high-class servant. And yet she was his
+trusted friend, whose virtues compelled his admiration and whose loyalty
+commanded his affection. She thought ahead for him and smoothed his
+path. Her sense of responsibility was as tender as a sister's. Her
+humility lent it a touch of pathos. He looked up to her as men
+instinctively look up to good women in whatever grade of society they
+find them. The silent knowledge which each had of the other formed a
+bond of sympathy, the more delicate because it was unuttered.
+
+He said, "Long ago--it must have been before the war--I gave you tickets
+to see Peter Pan."
+
+"It wasn't to me your Lordship gave them. It was to Braithwaite."
+
+"Was it?" He held her eyes, striving to peer behind their curtained
+windows. It was the first time that that name had been mentioned between
+them in casual conversation. "You're right. It comes back to me now. It
+was the Christmas of 1913 that he took you. Do you remember the fairy
+who was dying? There was only one way of keeping her alive. Peter Pan
+had to make the children in the audience promise that they believed in
+fairies. When they did that, she got well. That's why I'm going to Dawn
+Castle to-night."
+
+Ann ceased abruptly from what she was doing and stared at her master in
+concern. He laughed mischievously. "Wrong again, Ann; I've not taken
+leave of my senses. Two hours ago I made the same mistake. There was a
+man who asked me whether I believed that Mrs. Lockwood's first husband,
+who was killed at the Front, would return. While I was wondering how
+long it would be before he'd grow violent, he proved to me that he was
+her first husband. So I'm believing in fairies."
+
+A secret happiness lit up her face. "Deep down beneath our doubts, most
+of us believe in fairies, I think, your Lordship." With a shy smile she
+left him.
+
+The purring of an engine warned him that the car had returned and was
+waiting. He could hear Ann in the hall, handing out his bags. He had
+finished his supper; he might as well be off. As he drove out of the
+Square, he looked back; she was standing on the steps, gazing after him.
+He had the restless certainty, now that it was too late, that she had
+had a secret which, at the last moment, she would have given the world
+to have shared with him.
+
+
+V
+
+Of that night journey in after years he remembered only the deep peace
+and the ecstasy. He was doing something at last that was right; though
+why it was right, he would have found it hard to explain. He encountered
+none of the difficulties he had anticipated in picking up his direction.
+He flew unswervingly to the mark like a bullet traveling a predestined
+path. The first sixty miles were familiar; Maisie had covered them with
+him on many occasions. By every law of emotion each landmark should have
+stirred some poignant memory, some fresh wistfulness of regret. The fact
+was that he hardly gave her a thought. When he did, it was only to wish
+her luck and to congratulate himself on his escape.
+
+Having passed through Oxford lying blanched in moonlight, he climbed out
+of the Thames valley, striking through uplands across the wold to
+Burford. From then on all memories were left behind; he had become an
+explorer in an unknown country.
+
+Everything was sleeping. How trustfully it slept! Trees were hooded like
+extinguished candles. Flowers throughout the fields clasped their faces
+in their hands. Birds, like fluffy balls, drowsed on branches. Stars
+alone were wakeful. They stooped to watch him with intent, companionable
+glances. Now and then he had to halt to flash his torch on a sign-post
+or to consult his map. For the most part he took chances and guessed.
+
+Night engulfed him, rushed past him, broke over him. He was like a ship
+thrusting forward into a trackless ocean.
+
+The paleness of dawn was in the sky as he neared Gloucester. When he
+entered, its roofs and towers were precipices of gold and fire,
+straining up to the New Jerusalem which floated in the clouds. The
+streets of the ancient city had a mystic look, white and hushed and
+tenantless. But already the cheeky sparrows were about,
+scandal-mongering beneath the eaves with an unholy disregard for the awe
+by which they were surrounded.
+
+He left Gloucester in a southwesterly direction. In fields the hay was
+lying cut. A largesse of dew had been scattered through the hedgerows
+like loot from the treasure-chests of emperors. Larks were battling up,
+striving to sing against the very bars of heaven. Every fragrance and
+sound was a messenger, guaranteeing happiness.
+
+Round a bend in the road he came across a cluster of thatched cottages,
+their white walls gleaming incandescent in the morning sunshine. Beyond
+them lay a parkland, from the edge of which rose a wooded knoll, crowned
+by a moated castle. The next mile-stone warned him that it was the
+village of Dawn he was approaching.
+
+
+VI
+
+All day he had waited--a lazy summer day, drowsy with the hum of bees
+and heavy with the perfume of cottage flowers. On entering the village
+he had put up at _The Dawn Arms_, an old-fashioned hunting hostel which
+owed its prosperity to the fame of the Dawn foxhounds. Having bathed and
+breakfasted, he had started off to leave his card on Lady Dawn. Arriving
+at the Castle, he had been informed that her Ladyship had left early
+that morning and was not expected back till early evening. He had filled
+in the morning by sleeping and the afternoon by joining a band of
+sight-seeing trippers who had driven over from Gloucester in
+gayly-painted chars-a-bancs.
+
+With a spice of amusement, he had paid his shilling for admission at the
+wooden booth outside the Castle gate and had found himself herded with a
+crowd of affectionately inclined young women and young men who perspired
+freely--the latter for the sake of greater comfort had removed their
+coats and knotted handkerchiefs about their throats. In good time a
+decrepit ex-butler had appeared to act as guide and had led the
+excursionists over the Norman part of the ruins. He had shown them the
+dungeons, the room in which a prince had been murdered and the havoc
+wrought upon the walls by Cromwellian cannon. The ever recurring theme
+of his trembling narrative was the prowess and the splendor of the
+Dawns. He was like a weak-voiced cricket chirping in the sunshine. His
+stories of bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were
+too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the
+race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of
+his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind
+to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the
+pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They
+wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly
+sheep looked up somnolently to watch them.
+
+To the few who remained the old man mumbled on. It was the nobility of
+the late Lord Dawn that he was now recounting--the daring horseman he
+had been, the deviltry of him, the lust of life he had had, the
+greatness of his possessions and how he had foregone all this beauty to
+be hammered into the defilement of the trenches like a rat, cornered in
+a sewer.
+
+"Visitors are not allowed in the part of the Castle that is inhabited.
+But, since her Ladyship's away----"
+
+Unlocking a door, he led them through a tunnel to a grilled gate,
+through the bars of which they saw the Castle's terraced rose-gardens,
+falling away steeply in a cascade of petals to a water-lilied,
+green-scummed moat which encircled the stronghold like a necklace of
+jade. Beside the water's edge a fair-haired boy in a white sailor suit
+was deeply absorbed in sailing a boat.
+
+"His little Lordship," the old man whispered.
+
+"But I didn't know---- How old?" Tabs questioned.
+
+"Eight years, sir, come December."
+
+Long after he had returned to the inn, the picture of the little boy
+remained with him. This discovery that Lord Dawn had left a son made him
+the more certain of the justice of his errand.
+
+The azure and emerald of late afternoon drifted into the ensanguined
+gold of sunset. The long-tarrying twilight had already settled when a
+messenger arrived, bearing a note. It was from her Ladyship, regretting
+her absence and saying that she would be happy to receive a visit from
+Lord Taborley that evening or at any time that was convenient.
+
+
+VII
+
+He set out at once. Heretofore, with the exception of Terry, women had
+meant little to him. But he was curious to meet this woman--curious and
+eager in a strangely boyish fashion. Every one who had mentioned her had
+spoken of her with a certain hint of fear, not untinged with adoration.
+He hadn't been aware how anxious he had been to meet her until her note
+had summoned him. He wondered whether she had any of the endearing
+humanity of her sister. He wondered whether what Pollock had said was
+true, that she looked much older than her portrait. He didn't want her
+to look older----
+
+He came to the bridge across the moat and the gateway which bore the
+grooves in which the old portcullis used to slide. He passed through the
+gateway, under the tower, into the graveled courtyard of the Castle. On
+three sides the courtyard was loop-holed and sullen, but on the fourth
+modern windows and a brass-knobbed door had been let into the solid
+masonry. Above the door, shining down on the whitened steps, a lamp
+burnt in a wrought-iron socket. Several of the windows were also
+lighted.
+
+His knock was answered by a gray-haired man, with the gravity of
+deportment which is peculiar to lawyers, undertakers and footmen. While
+the man went to inform his mistress, Tabs was left to note how the hall
+was hung with hunting trophies. Then he heard himself being requested to
+follow.
+
+Having climbed a winding stair, he was shown into a room in the turret,
+one side of which was filled by a tall leaded window gazing westward.
+The landscape which it framed, hung against the darkness like a painted
+canvas--a far-reaching expanse of tree-dotted pasture, vague with
+islands of mist and rimmed by the last faint sparks of the sunset. The
+ceiling was heavily beamed, the furniture Jacobean, the walls paneled
+and hung with many generations of family portraits. In a wide hearth a
+fire of coals and logs was burning. In the room's center stood a carved
+table on which was set a massive silver lamp, casting a solitary
+illumination.
+
+"Lord Taborley, my Lady."
+
+As his name was announced, he heard the rustle of her dress, and
+discovered that she had been seated in a low chair by the window. She
+rose with a slow grace. There was something indefinably tragic and
+foreordained about her every movement. Maisie's name for her flashed
+into his mind, "The Princess Czarina Bolsheviki." It suited her exactly.
+In those surroundings she might have posed as Mary Queen of Scots in
+prison--a queen without a kingdom whose pride was unbroken. In the
+dimness his first impression was of her queenly gentleness.
+
+"I can guess why you've come."
+
+The same deep voice that had taunted him at Maisie's, only now it was no
+longer taunting! He noticed the way she offered him her hand, with the
+arm fully extended as if to hold him away from her. She was a smaller
+woman than he had remembered; it was the courage of her bearing that had
+made her seem taller. He could not see her face distinctly; it was in
+shadow. But, when she turned, he caught the whiteness of her profile on
+the dusk, clear-cut and tranquil as a cameo. After having gazed so long
+at Sargent's painting, he would have recognized anywhere the rounded
+shapeliness of her head, the hair swept smoothly back from the calm
+forehead, the splendid strength of her throat and the delicate, wholly
+feminine half-moon of her shoulders.
+
+"Won't you sit over here? If you would prefer it, we can have more
+lamps. But they would spoil----" She indicated the vague stretch of
+country, across which mists were drifting like gray ghosts.
+
+He drew up a chair at an angle to her own, so that he could study her.
+"You say you think you know why I've come?"
+
+"I was expecting you," she said quietly. He could feel rather than see
+the steady kindness that was in her stone-gray eyes.
+
+"If you were expecting me, then your sister must have----"
+
+"My sister had nothing to do with my expecting. Can't you think of any
+one closer?"
+
+He shook his head. At first he had hoped that Maisie had told her and
+done his work for him. Evidently it wasn't that. She was attributing
+some other motive to his visit. It was a motive the disclosure of which
+called for delicacy. She had prearranged his reception. It was no
+accident that had caused him to find her alone in the dimness of the
+gathering evening. The scanty lighting of the shadowy room had been
+stage-set to spare them both embarrassment. "If it wasn't your
+sister----" He paused at a loss to know how to proceed further.
+
+Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emotional
+voice had a new tenderness. "Will you allow me to help you? We're not
+such strangers as we seem. For years I've been interested in you. I was
+always hearing of your adventures in Mexico, Korea, the Balkans and last
+of all at the Front. You've been quite a romantic figure in my life.
+You've always seemed so strong; and I admire strength immensely. I never
+dreamt that a time would ever come when I would be able to help you.
+You're in love and she's not in love with you. You're older than she is
+and it makes you unhappy. She has time to experiment, but for you it's
+different; your love is bound up with the last of your youth. Because
+you've been unhappy, you've been unwise. Your foolishness ended
+yesterday with the return of Reggie Pollock. I received the news of his
+return this morning. So you came down here to me, which was perfectly
+natural."
+
+He shifted his gaze and stared out of the window, puzzled and troubled.
+"Unfortunately for me, Lady Dawn, a good deal of what you've said is
+true. But I don't see how it makes it natural that I should have come to
+you. I've been wanting to come for a very long time, but was given to
+understand that what I had to say might be distasteful."
+
+"You must put that out of your mind." She said it comfortingly, as
+though to a little boy. "There's nothing distasteful in what you have
+to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can assure
+me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to
+risk that in order to become your ally."
+
+He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should
+like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been
+talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's
+address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my
+head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the
+whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've
+said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to
+lose her, I would rather not have---- But I didn't come here to burden
+you with my troubles. I came to do something for you--something which
+I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and
+followed me until---- It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality
+outside myself. I may make you very unhappy----"
+
+She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the
+fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the
+mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a
+vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges.
+In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features
+clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that
+they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had
+never seen such calmness. And the calmness was not alone in her
+expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms
+and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared
+to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her
+far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that
+her sympathy could not encompass--nothing that he need be ashamed to
+tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by
+reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had
+attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was
+filled with a strange sense of gratitude.
+
+Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.
+
+"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be
+afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for
+me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one--not
+even you--has the power to do that."
+
+
+VIII
+
+He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."
+
+A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth?
+You yourself tell the truth---- When they say that I never cry, they
+mean that I never let them see me."
+
+He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man.
+Not to cry at all would be monstrous; it was that which made me afraid
+of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was
+about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I
+came to talk to you."
+
+She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her
+life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of
+the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night
+without.
+
+Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"
+
+"Your husband."
+
+"But he's dead."
+
+"I know."
+
+He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He
+almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he
+continued apologetically. "I'm trespassing on things sacred. Because of
+that I've fought to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was
+inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to
+leave you in ignorance----"
+
+"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed
+pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.
+
+"In ignorance of his grandeur."
+
+He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was
+aware of her relieved suspense--at the same time of her gentle
+skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words.
+Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new
+start, he stumbled his way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of
+her unuttered doubts.
+
+"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake.
+It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By
+doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason
+for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice
+that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his
+spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the
+Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a
+sleep-walker--a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was
+the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you--to
+you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more
+intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two
+months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to
+force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If
+I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could
+resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered
+your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging----"
+
+"Who I _was_!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display
+of interest.
+
+"I mean your relation to him--that it was you who were his wife. At the
+Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his
+identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us--something to be
+sent over the top to be smashed and then to be left to sink into the
+mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a
+company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My
+acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much
+now--only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing
+earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What
+Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants
+you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry
+and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all
+through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all
+adored him--adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful
+when there was dying to be done--out at rest and in quiet sectors he was
+gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet
+he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for
+what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons
+for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him--one does in the
+presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his
+spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he
+never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the
+gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we,
+who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold--his untiring
+ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got
+to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn
+who was born out there. It was last night, after Pollock returned, that
+I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had
+been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this
+pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and
+ridicule----"
+
+He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him.
+He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She
+was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes,
+glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the
+solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily
+down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been
+stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though
+his lips had been used----
+
+"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly.
+"He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things?
+Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."
+
+"They're only part of the reasons."
+
+"There are others?"
+
+"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he
+might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it
+sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so
+intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady
+Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet
+wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and
+officers knew you, without knowing who you were. You were with us in
+the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More
+than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the
+last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went
+West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women
+meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will
+again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired
+us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've
+known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's
+portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here
+it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic.
+Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious
+pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss----"
+
+He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following
+her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his
+gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face--from the
+portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was
+ordered, you went--you accompanied him in the most real sense: he
+carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When
+he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the
+walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a
+saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness
+to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your courage; his
+kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of
+you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at
+night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a
+patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find
+him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was
+dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your
+portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when
+we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten
+all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of
+you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your
+name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."
+
+She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin
+cushioned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows
+falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse
+beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.
+
+"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"
+
+He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had
+suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started
+talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"
+
+She shook her head. "He left a child by me."
+
+"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved
+you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"
+
+Again, with a gesture, she negatived his suggestion. "He'd never have
+doubted that I would know he had died loving me."
+
+"Then why did he send me?"
+
+Even while he asked it, he marveled at his certainty that she shared his
+conviction that he had been sent.
+
+She turned her eyes full on his face and let them dwell there
+searchingly. As he returned her gaze, he noted that she was less young
+than he had supposed. She was older than her portrait. Her hair, which
+had looked night-black in the shadows, was prematurely frosted. The
+moonlight, strengthening, picked out remorselessly each silver thread.
+She was no longer capable of putting back the hands of time for any man.
+
+She had read his thoughts. The pride went out of her voice. "Perhaps he
+sent you," she faltered, "that he might give me back a little of what he
+took."
+
+"What did he take? Anything that I have----"
+
+She leant back in her chair. Her face was again in shadow. "My youth. My
+happiness."
+
+In the silence which followed he was aware that the third presence had
+departed.
+
+
+IX
+
+"Your youth! Your happiness!" He was astounded. "Strange that you should
+say that! I thought that I alone was searching."
+
+"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own
+sake, but for yours. To men like you who have lived at the Front, life
+has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children;
+what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone
+anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been
+granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises
+come to all of us, when life grows desperate--when to be alone becomes
+intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden,
+because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner
+or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The
+war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your
+loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on
+Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were
+terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known
+love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity--and that's being
+compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to
+care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman
+wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual--of a high type like
+yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because
+a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you
+want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have
+gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge.
+Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You
+purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all
+your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she
+contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of
+her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get
+used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A
+wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her
+understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry
+had?"
+
+He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had
+so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking
+aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had
+recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any
+arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing
+straight before him.
+
+What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but
+foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with
+the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable,
+undignified, absurd--on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand
+Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music.
+The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the
+need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly
+sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his
+passion for Terry was at an end.
+
+When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room,
+with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress,
+sitting so gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded
+hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For
+weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble
+display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved
+that.
+
+Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to
+him--that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall.
+Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of
+Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and
+be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung
+his idolatry on her.
+
+But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was
+disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an
+Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a
+loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.
+
+His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim
+despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no
+one else."
+
+
+X
+
+Her voice reached him out of the darkness. "To own that we've been
+mistaken takes more courage than to persist in the wrong direction. 'I
+want no one else!' We've all said that. It was through saying it that I
+brought about my shipwreck. But if you're sure that you want no one
+else, you must have her. If there's any way of getting her for you,
+I'll do my best to help."
+
+She made an effort to rise. She stood before him swaying, a blinded look
+on her face, her eyes closed, her hands stretched out. He placed his arm
+about her. Her weight sagged against him.
+
+"Not the servants," she whispered. "You and I. Give me air."
+
+With his free hand he jerked the catch and pushed the window wide. The
+cool dampness of the night streamed in on her. He stood there with her
+clasped against him, her head stretched back, her body drooping. In the
+bowl of darkness at the foot of the turret, the rose-garden floated. Out
+of sight, in the green-scummed moat, a fish leapt with a sullen splash.
+A bird called. Wheels rumbled on a distant road. Again the silence was
+unbroken. The moonlight, falling on her face, gave to it an expression
+of childishness. Her breast and throat, gleaming white as marble,
+reminded him she was a woman.
+
+She stirred. Her eyes opened. She gazed up at him wonderingly. "I'm
+better. Foolish of me!" Then, inconsequently, "How tall you are, Lord
+Taborley!"
+
+He supported her till she could lean across the sill. They leant there
+together, their faces nearly touching. His arm was still about her; she
+did not seem to notice it. He was dumb with tremulous expectancy.
+
+"It was about myself that I had to tell you," she whispered. "I was once
+like you. I wanted no one else. I knew, even while I wanted him, that he
+could never make me happy. Even when I was most in love with him, he
+had qualities which I distrusted. After marriage the distrusting grew.
+Yet all the while I was sorry for him. I would have given anything to
+undo---- His sins were mine. With another woman, less virtuous, he might
+have been good. In his yearning he tried to drag me down. I couldn't go,
+not even if going would have saved him. There was something in me, not
+exactly pride, that prevented. I have never spoken of this to anybody.
+I'm saying it to you because----"
+
+She broke off. Why was she saying it? The perfume of June roses under
+moonlight, mingling with the fragrance of her hair, was intoxicating.
+His arm about her tightened. Was she only allowing him to hold her out
+of pity because of his confession?
+
+"Because," she said, "I think before she knows of your visit it would be
+better that you should go."
+
+He failed to grasp her logic. "But if I stay, she will never know."
+
+She released herself gently and gazed at him reproachfully. "Never know!
+But you came in order that she might know."
+
+He was more than ever puzzled. He had come to tell her of her husband.
+Did she not believe him? She seemed to be accusing him. He remembered
+how she had claimed, when he had entered, that she could guess what had
+brought him. "I came solely to see you," he said, speaking slowly. "I
+was compelled, as I've told you. I give you my word of honor that my
+visit wasn't even remotely related to----"
+
+A sharply indrawn breath cut short what he was saying. They turned
+quickly, moving instinctively apart. Gazing in from the open door,
+across the pool of lamplight, was Terry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
+
+ROUND THE CORNER
+
+
+I
+
+Lady Dawn was the first to recover her composure. "Why, Terry, I thought
+you were in bed!"
+
+"I was."
+
+Terry's eyes shifted from Lady Dawn to Tabs. They were startled and
+misty with sleep. She seemed only half-awake. Her hand rested on the
+door as if ready for retreat. Her square little face was flushed; her
+gold, bobbed hair was flattened where it had pressed against the pillow.
+She was clad in a filmy negligee; her bare feet had been pushed hastily
+into slippers and peeped out rosily from beneath the hem. She looked
+immature--the way she had in days gone by when he had tiptoed to her
+bedside through the darkness to feel her tight little arms leap
+stranglingly about his neck. She had been really a tiny girl then. Why
+couldn't she have stayed like that always? Why need she have roused in
+him this torturing desire which she did nothing but rebuff?
+
+"I was asleep. I heard voices. I thought----"
+
+What had she thought? How much had she seen and heard? How long had she
+been standing there?
+
+Tabs attempted to bridge the awkward silence. "I drove down from
+London." Then he added, "That was last night."
+
+None of them had stirred. Lady Dawn advanced from the window into the
+pool of lamplight. "I think I know what you thought--that something was
+wrong. It was. I nearly fainted. If it hadn't been for Lord
+Taborley----But come inside. Why do you remain standing there?"
+
+Terry stepped just across the threshold. Having closed the door, she
+leant against it, still holding the knob in her hand. It was plain that
+she was making an effort to be valiant. She looked fragile as a peeled
+white wand; like a flower, shy and dew-wet. Life had not yet commenced
+to break her. The clinging folds of her wrap emphasized her slenderness,
+the grace of her lines and the girlish contours of her figure.
+
+Lady Dawn went to her and put her arm about her. "You're afraid. Of what
+are you afraid? Surely not of Lord Taborley? He's been telling me---- To
+be loved like that---- There was a time when I would have been proud."
+
+Terry's left hand went up to her breast. Her wild violet eyes looked
+straight before her, seeking always the face of Tabs. They seemed to
+call to him. He came slowly to the table where she could see him. It was
+his chance. Lady Dawn was his advocate. It was the chance for which he
+had waited.
+
+He was contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty,
+enviable promise and the dumb hostility of her youth; the other in the
+gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased
+understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had
+become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn---- Was it her suffering that made him
+know her as he knew himself?
+
+"I hadn't meant to intrude on you," he apologized. "I hadn't the least
+idea you were here. How should I have had? You disappeared without
+warning; at your father's house your address was refused me. Lady Dawn
+will bear me out that, at the very moment you entered, I was assuring
+her that my visit had nothing to do with you. Probably you heard."
+
+"Nothing to do with me!" There was relief in her way of saying it. She
+visibly relaxed. "Then it isn't because of me at all that you're here?"
+
+The suppressed eagerness of her question was wounding. She wanted to
+hear him state more positively that she had had nothing to do with his
+visit. Whatever she had seen before they had become aware of her, had
+had no power to rouse her jealousy. She could have given him no stronger
+proof of how absolutely he had ceased to count. He smiled bitterly. "Not
+because of you at all, Terry. The reason for my being here is strictly
+private between Lady Dawn and myself. I didn't come to worry you. You
+may set your mind at rest."
+
+"Then you didn't know or even suspect----"
+
+He laughed unhappily. "What more can I say to convince you? I haven't
+the least idea what you suppose I could suspect. What business is it of
+mine to suspect anything? And if I did, what license should I have to
+interfere? We're not as we once were. There are no longer any
+sentimental obligations that would hold us accountable to each other.
+You've shown me that you consider our relation ended. In the face of
+that, I should scarcely follow you into the country where, by all
+accounts, you've come to escape me. It's purely a coincidence that you
+find me here."
+
+He caught Lady Dawn's eyes resting on him. They were wide and clear and
+interrogating. He knew what she was remembering: that it was in this
+room within the hour that he had said, "But I want her. I can't do
+without her. I want no one else." Self-ridicule tempered his spirit into
+sharpness. He turned again to Terry.
+
+"Once and for all I should like to set your doubts at rest. You need
+have no fear that I shall ever inconvenience you. We're bound to meet
+from time to time, but I pledge you my word that I shall never refer to
+the past. You're of an age to make decisions for yourself; you've
+decided against me. You're acting quite within your privilege when you
+discard old friends. You'll wonder why I state obvious facts. I'm doing
+so in order that you may feel certain that I've withdrawn whatever
+claims I had for influencing your movements. I shall always be
+interested---- But as for presuming that anything that I might say or do
+would make the least difference to your plans, I shouldn't be so
+foolish----"
+
+Breaking away from Lady Dawn, she crossed over to him. Resting her hand
+on his arm, she sank her voice and commenced speaking so hurriedly that
+he alone could make out what she said.
+
+"I've been false and foolish. I don't need you to tell me. If you knew
+how miserable I've been and how I've despised myself---- But I can't
+help it. I go on doing things. I never used to be a beast--least of all
+to you; never until you wanted me to marry you. If I can act like this
+now, what sort of a wife---- Can't you understand? I'm trying to spare
+you. But I won't have you hate me, Tabs. I can't endure that. Every
+second that I've kept away from you, I've been wanting--not the _you_
+that you are now, but the old you. Won't you start afresh, liking me the
+way you did when--before this happened?" She seized his hand on the
+impulse and pressed it to her lips. It was the humble act of a small
+girl. "Love me just a little. I'm not really bad. Please, please forgive
+me my wickedness, dear Tabs."
+
+He stood dumbfounded and embarrassed. If they had been alone, he would
+have known what to do. He was at a loss to find a motive for this
+display of passion. Was it a ruse to get him back? He crushed the
+suspicion as unworthy. Then was it what she had seen that had made her
+possessive? Her tears fell scalding on his hands.
+
+He drew her to him. "There, there, little Terry! You mustn't. There's
+nothing to cry about. There's nothing wicked in not having loved a man.
+It's a thing that can't be helped."
+
+At the sign of his relenting, she threw away the last of her control.
+Burying her face against his coat, she clung to him. All that he could
+see of her was her golden head and her slight body, quivering with
+sobbing. Her voice reached him muffled. "But I am wicked. I've pushed
+you from me. If you knew---- If you did, you wouldn't touch me."
+
+There had been no sound, yet something warned him. He looked up. The
+door was closing.
+
+"Lady Dawn," he called. In his voice there was the tremor of anxiety.
+
+On the point of vanishing, she glanced back across her shoulder. "What
+is it, Lord Taborley?"
+
+The calmness of her austerity made emotion seem shallow. There was a
+touch of scorn in her repose.
+
+"Won't you help?"
+
+She smiled faintly. "I was. I was going."
+
+"Then please don't. It's late. Both you and she must be worn out."
+
+Like a figure of silver, she came coldly back. But there was only
+tenderness in her voice when she spoke. "Terry, did you hear what Lord
+Taborley said? He thinks he ought to be going."
+
+Slipping her arm about the girl, she led her from him. Their footsteps
+died out on the turret stairs.
+
+He waited, hoping that Lady Dawn would return. Now that she was gone, he
+was invaded with his old loneliness. The dead lords eyed him cynically
+from their canvases. Through leaded panes the moonlight fell. It seemed
+the sorcery of her spirit. The perfume of the rose-garden was her
+breath. How pale she had made his dream of Terry! How trivial she made
+all women look when she stood beside them! There was nothing in this
+gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married
+her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he
+required at the hands of a woman--it was rest.
+
+There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick
+of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till
+it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly
+into the romance of the summer's night.
+
+
+II
+
+Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay
+wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.
+
+He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he
+had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie
+had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when
+she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she
+hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had
+no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental
+attraction, however well concealed, must always be sex. They could never
+be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was
+cheating--the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other
+deriving amusement from giving less. He had held that such relations
+between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a
+clash of desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was
+no middle course between coveting a woman and neglecting her as entirely
+dispensable.
+
+But this morning his point of view was altered. He was confident that
+his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had
+never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it.
+He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood.
+His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the
+emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as
+secure as it was incomprehensible. His new affection compensated him for
+all previous failures and atoned for the humiliation of every past
+regret.
+
+At that word "affection" he halted himself. Was it affection that he
+entertained for Lady Dawn? He took a good look at the suspected word and
+decided that it was. But it was the affection of reverence. In owning
+this much he qualified his admission by insisting that his affection was
+totally devoid of passion. Passion in the presence of Lady Dawn looked
+hysteric and paltry. She inspired a serenity which had nothing to do
+with the physical. It was the charm of her character that entranced him.
+Her body scarcely figured in his thoughts; when it did, it failed to
+stir him. It was no more than the gracious vehicle through which the
+beauty of her spirit was expressed.
+
+His paramount emotion was gratitude--gratitude that she, who was reputed
+to be so cold, should so instantly have unveiled herself. There was a
+startling purity in the frankness with which she had bared her spirit
+to him. It left him awed and touched. He recognized the generosity which
+had prompted her; she had realized his need of a woman's trust. And so
+she had withheld nothing that would comfort him. She had made him feel
+safe, the way a mother does. She had picked up the little boy that lies
+hidden in the heart of every man, and had folded him in her breast.
+
+It had been shameless of her. He had not guessed that a woman could be
+so good.
+
+And she had made him so finally sure of her. He felt that he could leave
+her and know that her protection would follow him. He could return and
+be equally certain that none of her understanding would have vanished.
+She was the first woman who had impressed him with her wisdom; the only
+one who had had the courage to offer him her strength.
+
+And this was not love. He smiled exultantly. It was nobler and
+infinitely more rare. Love, as he had read of it and mistaken it in his
+experience, was a devastating energy, greedy and devouring. It was a
+continual, nagging contention between self-abasement and hostility. It
+was a humiliating attempt on the part of a man to barter something,
+which was persistently undervalued, for the feminine equivalent which
+was as persistently hoarded. It was an amalgam of physical yearning,
+wounded vanity and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading
+as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity.
+Of all the passions it was the most hypocritical--a snare-setter, a
+digger of pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He
+thanked God there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like
+an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of
+this woman's charity, had felt it yield beneath his touch, and had found
+himself immersed in the blessedness of instant and unmerited rest.
+
+Lazily he commenced to dress. From his window he could see the Castle,
+perched grave and gray against the forehead of the clouds. He wondered
+whether she was up, how she was occupying herself, whether she was
+expecting him? He listened to her voice in the silence of his brain,
+like the far-away singing of contralto bells. He saw her still face, her
+slow smiling, the proud, sweet stateliness of her pacing steps. Then his
+thoughts went back to whether he was expected.
+
+If he were not---- The thought chilled him. She had said nothing to
+encourage him to seek her afresh. What if his reappearance should cause
+her embarrassment--an embarrassment which she would betray by
+withholding herself? It was quite likely she would impute to him wrong
+motives. Already she might have repented of intimacies she had allowed.
+He had placed his arm about her. With the injustice of most women,
+though she had permitted it, she might be blaming him because the act
+had been witnessed by Terry. Terry of all persons! Having had time to
+reflect, she might be accusing him of gallantries. It was not so long
+since she had confused him with Adair. From her untypical knowledge of
+him she was entitled to estimate him as the kind of man to whom
+promiscuous caresses were a practice. He turned coward at the
+recollection of his daring. Last night it had been so involuntary and
+had seemed so natural. Why had he done it? Why had she allowed it? It
+had been the liberty of a plow-boy with a village-girl. There would be
+little room for wonder if, when next they met, she fixed a No Man's Land
+of pride between herself and his familiarity. She would have good
+reason, for their companionship would be shared by Terry. Poor little
+Terry, with her exaggerated sins and distorted self-accusations!
+
+He wandered down to breakfast disturbed by these apprehensions. As the
+morning dragged by they took shape as facts. Towards noon he could
+tolerate his uncertainty no longer. He turned his steps in the direction
+of the Castle, having first determined, if he found himself unwelcome,
+to announce that the purpose of his visit was to bid good-by before
+setting out for London.
+
+
+III
+
+He had been shown into the turret room and supplied with the daily
+papers, while the same grave image who had admitted him the night
+before, had departed in search of her Ladyship. More to calm himself
+than to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to glance through the news.
+
+It was a disjointed world that the pages reflected--not at all the
+kingdom round the corner for which the war had been fought. Honor,
+patriotism, heroism seemed forgotten words. The old ruthless scramble
+of commercialism had restarted. The honesty of everybody, whether
+individuals, governments or nations, was being doubted. Class and race
+hatreds had broken loose. Strikes were pending. The Allies were allied
+only in name; they gnashed their teeth at one another across the
+council-table in Paris. The lying game of diplomacy had been revived.
+Poison-notes were being exchanged. The tabby-cat statesmen who had been
+too old to fight, were busy sowing the seeds of future wars. The
+politicians who had nailed mankind to the cross, were casting lots for
+the raiment which had survived the sacrifice. No one asked, "Is this
+righteousness?" The only question was, "How much of it belongs to me?"
+Meanwhile, the children of honester men who had died, starved by their
+hundreds of thousands. Mothers pressed sick babies to their milkless
+breasts. The mutilated, stoical with neglect, shuffled along the
+pavements. Fanatics of despair turned hopeful eyes to Russia where a
+devilment was brewing which, should it overboil, would pour destruction
+across five continents. No one cared.
+
+He glanced through the window at the quiet landscape, lying green and
+sun-dappled against the wet, gray streak of summer sky. Was his own
+experience so universal? Were kingdoms perpetually round the corner,
+always and always out of sight?
+
+As he again took up the paper, his eye was caught by a head-line: STEELY
+JACK RUNS FOR PARLIAMENT. Immediately he forgot his pessimism and
+became absorbed. Braithwaite had come out with the true story of his
+life. He was calling on the seven million men who had seen service to
+fight on in peace for the ideals for which they had fought in war. He
+insisted that if they cast their votes together as one man, they could
+control any election. If they combined with the patriot ex-soldiers of
+other nations, they could control the world. He was out to smash
+politics and the disastrous iniquity of political compromise. His aim
+was to restore the comradeship and sharing which had enabled the old
+front-line to stand fast. He was establishing a paper. He was
+speechifying. He was to hold an immense mass meeting in the Albert
+Hall----
+
+Tabs laughed in sheer excitement. Here was one man at any rate who
+wasn't content to miss his kingdom. He might have known it. He could see
+Braithwaite's bleak look as clearly as if he stood before him. His
+instinct was to join him and say to him, in the words of the coster,
+"You and me was pals out there." He'd never lost an inch of trench.
+
+"Bravo, Braithwaite!"
+
+
+IV
+
+"I beg your pardon, your Lordship."
+
+Tabs looked up. The dignified image had returned and was standing in the
+doorway, with his chin thrust out and his nose at a high angle with his
+collar.
+
+The man coughed deferentially. "If your Lordship will follow me----"
+
+But at that moment he heard her calling from beneath the turret wall,
+"Lord Taborley!"
+
+Jumping to his feet, he hurried to the window and leant out. She was in
+her riding habit, standing on the terrace above the rose-garden. "I've
+just got back from my morning ride. I have to visit the kennels. I was
+wondering whether you would accompany me."
+
+He turned to the footman. "If you'll show me the way out to the terrace,
+I can find Lady Dawn myself."
+
+She had moved farther away to where the steps led down between the
+rose-bushes. As he came towards her through the sunlight, she pretended
+not to notice him, but stood meditatively flicking the dust from the toe
+of her boot with her crop. Even when he joined her, she did not look up.
+They descended the steps in silence. When they had turned along a path,
+where no one could observe them, she raised her eyes. "I was afraid you
+had left."
+
+He smiled, unconsciously imitating her quietness. "And I, too, was
+afraid. I was afraid you would not want me."
+
+"Why not?" She stopped to pluck a bud in passing. "I should think any
+woman would want you."
+
+He looked to see if she were chaffing. "Last night," he explained, "you
+were present when at least one woman didn't want me. That was why----"
+
+She shot a glance at him with her honest, stone-gray eyes. Her hands
+started out to touch him, but she recalled them. "You must feel sorry
+for her," she said softly. "She's so young. I think you'll live to thank
+her. She'll learn that men like you don't come every day--only once in a
+lifetime."
+
+[Illustration: "_I was afraid you had left._"]
+
+Uneasily he harked back to her first statement. "Why did you fear that I
+had left?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "You had nothing for which to stay."
+
+"There was you."
+
+"Me!" She laughed wisely. "You had to say that out of politeness. In a
+man's world I'm of no consequence. I know how I appear in your eyes.
+I've been married, so I'm no longer a novelty. I'm not so young as I
+was; I shall be older. And then I'm a mother--you forget that, Lord
+Taborley. Oh no, I have no attractions to offer."
+
+"You have friendship."
+
+"Friendship!" She repeated the word with a shake of her head. "Men never
+want merely friendship; they want less or more. They want vivacity--some
+one who will halve their years, with whom they can sport and romp. Some
+one who can have babies to them--little pink babies, with squirmy toes
+and baldy heads. They want to begin everything afresh. They're not
+looking for another man's left-overs. Even in the matter of
+disillusionizing a woman, they want to do that for themselves. Men
+who've not been married, demand that a woman shall be doing everything,
+as they are doing it, for the first time. It's their right."
+
+"But there's another side," he protested. "A woman who's been married
+has gained experience--the most dearly purchased form of knowledge, as
+you yourself have told me. She can be trusted not to expect the
+impossible. She's been over the course and knows the pitfalls. She's
+learnt the value of compromise. She ought to have learnt how to be kind.
+I think kindness is the thing that matters most. Few people are born
+with it. You have to have been wretched to acquire the knack of it."
+
+"And yet you have it," she glanced sideways at him humorously, "and you
+haven't been married."
+
+Realizing the drift of their conversation, he pulled himself up. He
+feared lest she suspected him of flirting. "You're very generous, Lady
+Dawn."
+
+They had arrived at a lookout point, where a lichen-covered summerhouse
+stood, protected on the steeper side by a low stone wall. Below them lay
+the moat, green-scummed and starred with water-lilies; throbbing in the
+midday haze, the emerald sward of the parkland seemed to float. Against
+the wall she halted. "What makes you say that I'm generous?"
+
+For all his thirty-six years, he blushed like a boy. "Because you take
+me seriously. After last night you might have been either amused or
+annoyed. The position in which I placed you was false. You thought that
+I'd come from London to urge Terry to marry me. When I told you that
+there was no one else in the world, you believed that I knew she was
+staying with you--that I was trying to persuade you to plead my cause.
+The anti-climax, after she'd surprised us, was the height of tragical
+absurdity. It reduced all my high-flown sentiments to farce. I wonder
+you were able to prevent yourself from laughing. Terry could afford such
+a scene; she's little more than a child. I can't. With four more years
+to my age I could pass for her father. No, please. I want to be hard on
+myself. Let me finish what I'm saying. I've only met you twice; on each
+occasion I've suffered a loss of dignity. The other time was when I
+tried to turn you away from Maisie's door. You're probably aware that
+since then, until Pollock's return, I've seen far more of your sister
+than was wise. In fact I've offered myself like a job lot. And yet there
+was a time when I was content to wait. I believed that one had only to
+be faithful and he'd find what he hoped for round some future corner.
+You're a proud woman, Lady Dawn. You admire strength almost cruelly.
+You're inhumanly infallible----"
+
+Her eyes filled. She slipped her hand through his arm and patted it
+comfortingly. By the contact she was comforting herself as well. "I'm
+not. I wasn't infallible when I married. My pride came later to cover up
+my fault. I don't say it to flatter you--any woman would want you."
+
+He gazed down at her. "How gentle you are!"
+
+"I understand."
+
+They strolled along in contented silence. They had trespassed far beyond
+the bounds of discretion. A diversion was caused when they reached the
+kennels. He watched her among the leaping hounds. She employed the same
+tactics to quiet them that she had used with himself. With a coaxing
+word and a caress she had them crouching at her feet. He listened to
+the precision of her orders and the definiteness of her enquiries.
+
+"You'd have made a business woman," he remarked.
+
+She laughed. "I could if I'd been forced." And then, "By the way, you're
+lunching with me, aren't you?"
+
+"I'll be delighted. But, since confessions are the fashion, I may as
+well make a clean breast. If I had found that you were upset with what
+happened last night, I'd planned to tell you I was off to London."
+
+"But you're not?"
+
+"One doesn't run away from happiness."
+
+He was afraid he had offended. Her expression clouded. She withdrew and
+walked a few paces apart. He had come almost to the point of
+apologizing, when she turned to him eyes that were misty--suspiciously
+misty for a woman who never cried. "I'm glad you had the courage to tell
+me, because I haven't felt so happy for---- I daren't own how long."
+
+On entering the Castle, she left him while she went to change for lunch.
+As he waited, he reminded himself that in a handful of seconds he would
+be meeting Terry. The anticipation provided him with none of the old
+elation. With what ecstasy he used to watch for her in days gone by, as
+though the world was reborn when she stood before him! Far from feeling
+ecstasy, he was filled with uneasiness. Her presence would recall to him
+his failure and would mock something beautiful that had commenced in
+his life. What that something was he hadn't estimated. All he knew was
+that, with the coming of Lady Dawn, every one of his problems had
+mysteriously found settlement. He was no longer humiliated. He was once
+more sure of his direction. He felt unreasonably strong and triumphant,
+as though the goal of his striving was in sight. His old dread of
+growing middle-aged impressed him as puerile. Whatever his age, she
+would always keep pace with him. She was the same age as he was. Had he
+been younger or older, he might have missed her or gone by her with
+unseeing eyes.
+
+When he entered the room in which lunch was served, he found that Lady
+Dawn was alone. Glancing at the table, he perceived with surprise that
+only two covers had been laid. She read the question in his eyes and
+answered it.
+
+"Terry's away. I forgot to tell you. She had an early breakfast and
+motored into Gloucester before I was up. The car's come back without
+her. She's sent no word as to when or how she proposes to return."
+
+"Something urgent?" he asked casually.
+
+"More likely shopping. A woman's shopping's always urgent. I'm no wiser
+than you are. The first I heard about her going was when I was informed
+she had gone."
+
+He relapsed into thought. It wasn't difficult to conjecture the reason
+for Terry's errand. She'd been no more anxious to meet him just at
+present than he had been to meet her. She'd taken the day off in the
+hope that by nightfall he would have departed.
+
+Another solution occurred to him. "Did she ever mention to you a General
+Braithwaite?"
+
+Lady Dawn met his eyes with a hint of warning. Listeners were present.
+"I believe she did," she admitted discouragingly.
+
+"The only reason why I asked was that his name's in the morning papers.
+She may have seen it before she started. If so, it might explain----"
+
+"John will know." Lady Dawn turned to the footman. "Did Miss Beddow read
+the papers, John, this morning before she left?"
+
+"She did, my Lady. It was after she had read them that she ordered the
+car."
+
+"Then that's it." Tabs dismissed the subject as unworthy of further
+discussing. "She went to Gloucester to hurry off a telegram of
+congratulation. Braithwaite's had a stroke of luck."
+
+"If that is all," Lady Dawn smiled mischievously, "I wonder that she
+didn't come back in the car. A telegram can be dispatched in five
+minutes."
+
+From then on, the threat of Terry's return hung over them, urging them
+to make the most of their respite. Everything that had started between
+them was so new and uncertain. No time-limit had been set to Tabs'
+visit; his original reason for coming to Dawn Castle was exhausted.
+There was no sufficiently plausible excuse for prolonging his stay in
+the village longer. A little absence, a little carelessness of
+forgetting, a few new interests and who could say but that this sudden
+need of each other, which had rushed them together with such compelling
+impulse, might not subside as unaccountably as it had occurred. In both
+their hearts this dread was present--this distrust of the permanency of
+their emotions. If they parted, they might meet again to find the magic
+irrecoverable.
+
+After lunch they retired to the room in the turret. She chose her
+favorite chair by the window and sat there sewing, with her work-basket
+at her feet. He sat opposite, watching the busy occupation of her hands.
+He noticed that many of the garments which she mended belonged to the
+small boy whom he had seen in the rose-garden.
+
+She looked up. "I always do everything for Eric."
+
+It was later, when tea was being served, that the small boy himself
+peered in on them. Tabs caught his jealous eyes peering round the
+doorway. "Won't you come and talk to me?"
+
+But the child ran away, despite his mother's coaxings, and refused to
+divulge his place of hiding.
+
+She apologized. "He's not quite eight yet--the only sweetheart I have."
+Later she said, "I've been thinking of what we talked last night--I mean
+his father. Would it be too far-fetched to believe that it was really he
+and not your imagination, that piloted us together?"
+
+"Not far-fetched at all. I'm sure of it. He wanted us to meet that I
+might tell you----"
+
+"What?" She bent forward, folding her hands in her lap and watching him
+searchingly. "Not about his heroism; he'd take that for granted. Not
+that he'd loved me; we both knew it. Not anything self-pitying or weak
+that would rouse my regret----"
+
+"You know." His assertion was almost a question. "Somehow he's got his
+message across to you."
+
+She lowered her eyes and resumed her sewing. "I couldn't sleep last
+night. I lay awake puzzling and remembering--remembering the long waste
+of years, the loneliness and the love that had turned to bitterness. And
+now, when ordinarily there would be no chance to make amends, he sends
+you to me, speaking through your lips and taking possession of your
+thoughts. He's trying to do something for me--something that will blot
+out my past for me, as his sacrifice has blotted out his past for him.
+Something comforting and tender----"
+
+The seconds ticked by. If she had guessed the dead man's desire, she
+refused to put it into words. The silence grew painful.
+
+Tabs looked at his watch. It was nearer six than five. He rose
+reluctantly. "I suppose I should be going."
+
+"But you're staying in the village to-night?"
+
+"I hadn't intended. There'll be moonlight. I was planning to be in
+London by morning."
+
+"Don't do that. You'll make me think you're afraid of meeting Terry.
+Dine with me to-night."
+
+She had risen. Her gesture was almost one of pleading. He smiled
+tenderly and took her hand. "Your wishes are mine. I'll run down to the
+inn and dress."
+
+By the time he returned it was nearly seven. She met him with
+ill-concealed trouble. "Terry's not back. It's strange. You see I'm
+responsible for her. And----"
+
+The footman entered with a letter. "For your Lordship."
+
+"Are you sure?" Then Tabs recollected. "Yes, of course. I left my
+address with Ann."
+
+As he took the letter he scanned the handwriting. "Odd!" When the man
+had left, he turned to Lady Dawn. "It's from her. Did you guess?"
+
+
+V
+
+"But why should she be writing when she'll be seeing you any minute?"
+
+Tabs squared his lips. He began to feel the stirring of a storm of
+anxiety. "Perhaps, because she doesn't intend to be seeing me any
+minute." He looked at the postmark. It had been mailed at eleven o'clock
+that morning in Gloucester. He tore the envelope and commenced to read.
+Before he had read far, he turned with a worried expression to Lady
+Dawn. "This concerns you as well." She came and stood beside his elbow.
+They glanced through the pages together. It was written on commercial
+note-paper of _The New Inn_, Gloucester, and ran:
+
+   DEAREST TABS:
+
+   I love you very much--just as much as ever. I always want you to feel
+   sure of that. But my love isn't the kind you've asked for. It never
+   can be. Because of this there are so many things that I've not been
+   able to tell you--so I've been avoiding and deceiving you ever since
+   you came back. I know I've not been honorable. A promise once given
+   ought to be sacred; I gave you my promise that I would marry you. But
+   that's all I could do for you now--just marry you; I couldn't give
+   you the other things you would have a right to expect. I ought to
+   have said, the other things you have earned and deserved more than
+   any man. So, though I married you, I should still be robbing you,
+   which would be even more treacherous than not fulfilling a promise.
+
+   That I'm in love with General Braithwaite is no news to you. Love may
+   not be the proper word. At least I'm so infatuated with him that
+   there's no room in my heart for any other man. Do you remember that
+   night in March, when you dined with us and asked my father for my
+   hand, and next morning early I came round in a panic to your house? I
+   didn't dare tell you all my trouble. The General had urged me to
+   elope with him. I _wish, wish, wish_ that I had. I should be his now
+   and sure of him. By delaying and suspecting I've all but lost him.
+
+   I always knew that he would be a big man--as big after the war as he
+   was while it lasted. What this morning's papers say about him proves
+   it. So for all these reasons and because I can't bear to face you at
+   the Castle, I'm taking my fate in my hands. Please tell Lady Dawn
+   that I shan't be back and excuse me in any way you can. I'm only
+   carrying one small bag; she can send the rest of my things after me.
+
+   There's one request I have to make--that neither of you will notify
+   my father till at least twenty-four hours have elapsed. All my future
+   happiness may depend on your granting this request. It's the last
+   favor I shall ever ask you.
+
+   And now, my very dear Tabs, almost my brother, if this hurts you,
+   please take revenge by bundling me out of your mind. I was never your
+   equal, never worthy of you, though you placed me on a pedestal that
+   was far above you. Comfort yourself by believing that if you'd
+   married me, you would have found this out. What a wretched quitter I
+   appear in my own eyes after all you suffered in the trenches, to have
+   reserved this worse suffering for you, when your life has been spared
+   and you had counted on me for happiness. My entire body's not worth
+   your little finger. And yet how good you've always been to me--
+
+   You'll get a better woman than I am. I think I already know who
+   she'll be; if I'm right, I shall be so very glad.
+
+   I feel so humble--so apologetic. It's such a different ending from
+   the one we dreamt when I saw you off on the troop-train with my hair
+   all blowy down my back. There's nothing gained by recalling that. I
+   meant so well by you; you've always been so much to me, my dearest,
+   loyal Tabs.
+
+   Even though you despise me, I still insist on signing myself,
+
+   Your ever affectionate
+
+   TERRY.
+
+"I'm sorry." It was Lady Dawn.
+
+He shook himself. He was so raw that even her sympathy almost wounded.
+"Don't pity me. It's she we've got to help. What's to be done?"
+
+"Done! I haven't thought. What can we----"
+
+"We can follow her and bring her back. We've got to--and we haven't much
+time. You must have read between the lines what her letter meant. After
+having turned Braithwaite down, she's gone off to beg him to elope with
+her. When a girl puts herself at a man's mercy like that, there's no
+knowing how he'll act. The chances are that, whatever he does, it won't
+be honorable. We're got to prevent her, not only for her own sake, but
+for his sake as well. He's just started on a great career; if this story
+leaks out, he'll be smashed. They'll both be smashed, for that matter.
+If she'd give him time to marry her honestly, it wouldn't matter whether
+her family had consented. But she doesn't intend to--that's why she's
+asked us to keep quiet for twenty-four hours. What we've got to do is
+not to stop her from marrying him--no one cares about that; but to catch
+her before she runs off with him."
+
+"But we don't know where----"
+
+"No, we don't." He spoke rapidly. "But we can find out. Ann can tell us.
+Ann's a maid in my house; she was practically engaged to him when he was
+my valet. Now that I look back, I'm sure she's known everything from the
+start and has seen this coming. We can get Braithwaite's address from
+her; when we know that, we shall have laid our hands on Terry."
+
+While he had been speaking, Lady Dawn had been rummaging through her
+desk. He went and bent over her, his hands on her shoulders. She was
+fingering a time-table. She looked up at him with her head leant back.
+"There's no train--nothing that will reach London till morning."
+
+"Then we must motor."
+
+Her face was still raised to his. She spoke softly. "_We!_ You say _we_
+every time. Do you mean---- What do you mean, Lord Taborley?"
+
+His intensity relaxed. Flushing with confusion, he stared down at the
+whiteness of her breast, the queenliness of her, her graying hair and
+her expectant, tender mouth. "I want you to come with me. I ought to
+have asked you properly. I've been taking you for granted and ordering
+you about."
+
+She remained very still, gazing directly up into his troubled eyes. He
+thought she was judging him. At last she whispered, "Don't be sad. I
+like you to order me."
+
+
+VI
+
+They had all night before them. If they left the Castle by ten, they
+could be in Brompton Square by five in the morning. Nothing would be
+gained by arriving earlier.
+
+Now that the first shock was over, they went into dinner as if nothing
+had happened. In the long, dim banqueting-hall there were only the two
+of them. They sat close together at the illuminated high-table like
+castaways, marooned on an island, in an ocean of brooding shadows. While
+they dined they conversed in lowered voices to prevent their plans from
+being overheard. It was decided to take Lady Dawn's Rolls Royce and to
+leave the runabout behind. The reason acknowledged was that it would be
+more dependable. The reason unmentioned was that the presence of a
+chauffeur would lend an air of much needed propriety.
+
+Gradually as they talked, the seriousness of their errand dropped from
+sight; their journey took on the complexion of an adventure. Its
+unconvention clothed it with romance. How unconventional it was they
+realized when Lady Dawn gave the butler orders concerning her departure.
+He was an old man, rigid with tradition, who, having served the family
+for three generations, had acquired the aristocratic bearing of his
+masters.
+
+"At ten o'clock, your Ladyship. To where? To London! That's a long
+journey to take at night. And the car will call at the inn first to pick
+up his Lordship's luggage. Oh, I see, my Lady. I thought at first that
+your Ladyship was going."
+
+"I am," she corrected with quiet dignity. "Lord Taborley and I are going
+on an errand of great importance. I don't want this talked about. You
+understand? And who'll be driving? Witherall! Then warn Witherall to
+keep silent."
+
+When the butler had withdrawn, she turned to Tabs. "I'm breaking all my
+precedents for you. I couldn't have told him, if I hadn't had you to
+keep me in countenance. He looked so shocked that he made me feel as if
+it were you and I, instead of Terry, who were doing the eloping. I'm
+sure that's what he thought. There'll be gossip. I shall have to pay the
+piper; but I'm too happy to-night to look ahead."
+
+"It hadn't occurred to me----" Tabs hesitated. "I've been unpardonably
+inconsiderate. I see it now--you'll be what they call compromised. In
+that case, it will be wiser----"
+
+"It won't." She bent towards him laughing. Her pearls, nestling in the
+white cleft of her bosom, gleamed dully, shaken by her quiet merriment.
+In the short time that he had known her, she had become extraordinarily
+girlish--almost girlish enough to put back the hands of time for the
+proper man. "It won't. It won't be wiser. It's never wiser to turn your
+back on happiness. I'd dare anything to-night. You've invited me; you
+can't wriggle out."
+
+"If that's how you feel----" He checked himself. Her mischief warned
+him. Instinctively he knew that she was about to ask precisely how he
+thought she felt. He cancelled what he had intended saying and
+substituted, "It's an ill-wind that blows nobody any good. And it's poor
+Terry we have to thank for this chance of being together a little
+longer!"
+
+"Is it a chance? You're not bored? You do want me?"
+
+He raised his eyes slowly. Her pain had startled him. Up to that moment
+he hadn't been awake to how utterly he had come to want her. For an
+instant he had a glimpse of the emptiness of life, should he find
+himself deprived of her comradeship.
+
+"You didn't need to ask me that!" he said quietly. "And now it's my turn
+to be inquisitive. Does it make you glad to hear me own that I want
+you?"
+
+He watched her color rise. It was like the elfin tiptoeing of her spirit
+behind the white transparent walls of her flesh. It climbed the smooth
+ascent of her breast, passed up the columned tower of her throat and
+stared out at him excitedly in the brightness of her eyes.
+
+"Men don't ask things like that," she said reproachfully, "at least,
+only when they're flirting. I sometimes think---- Don't treat me like
+all the others who were before me."
+
+"What others?"
+
+She held his gaze. "The emotional women and silly girls---- You must
+have been loved very often, Lord Taborley."
+
+To have defended himself against her tender jealousy would have been
+futile. She was plainly anxious to believe her accusation. Perhaps it
+flattered her a little. Perhaps it lent him an added touch of glamor. He
+was wondering how he should satisfy her. He could remember no hearts
+that his fascination had broken. He could rake up absolutely---- She was
+speaking again.
+
+"And yet I'm glad you compelled me to tell you that I wanted you. You're
+making me do things that I never did before in my life. I'm supposed to
+be a cold woman. You'll find people who'll say that I'm remote and
+domineering. I've only one big affection--my little boy. For your sake
+I'm leaving him alone to-night."
+
+"For mine?"
+
+"For whose else?"
+
+"I thought for Terry's."
+
+Her lips parted. The laughter died in her eyes. "In your heart you knew
+better."
+
+Then he left her and went down to the inn to pack his bag.
+
+
+VII
+
+He had paid his bill. His luggage had been carried downstairs. There was
+still a full quarter of an hour to wait. He sat in his bedroom smoking
+furiously. Before he met her again, he wanted to know precisely what had
+happened to himself--and, perhaps, to her.
+
+He was filled with self-distrust. His newly discovered propensity for
+falling in love was genuinely alarming. It wasted his time, upset his
+plans and robbed him of his mental vigor. It made him a rudderless ship
+at the mercy of any chance winds of sentiment. Up to less than three
+months ago the solitary woman in his life had been Terry. Throughout the
+war, while the masculine world had been making an amorous idiot of
+itself, he had kept his head clear and gone straight. Things had come to
+a pretty pass if now, when normality was returning and the excuse for
+running wild was out-of-date, he should start on his emotional
+escapades. His love for Terry had been deep-rooted. His fondness for
+Maisie had been the attempt of a starved heart to satisfy its craving
+with a substitute. But where was this pursuit of substitutes to end? If
+it went much further he would gain for himself the reputation of being a
+limpet who attached himself to any chance rock of feminine amiability.
+The kind of woman he cared to associate with would avoid him. If ever he
+were to fall in love again, his attentions would be so shop-worn
+that----
+
+If ever he were to fall in love again! Within the last twenty-four hours
+his irresponsible heart had committed this disastrous folly for a third
+time.
+
+He smiled cynically, as though he were two separate persons, one of whom
+was cool and calculating, while the other was improvident and
+scape-grace. How Lady Dawn would despise him, were he to reveal to her
+the stupid commotion of his mind! His excuse for blundering his way into
+her privacy had been sufficiently fantastic: that her late husband was
+employing his living brain to communicate with her from the dead. It
+must have strained her credulity to the breaking-point. If on top of
+this he were to propose to her, what possible conclusions could she
+draw? Either that in order to gain her intimacy, he had perpetrated a
+cruel fraud; or else that he was so lacking in humor as to believe that
+Lord Dawn, from beyond the grave, was arranging for his wife's second
+marriage. The drollery of a dead husband acting match-maker made him
+smile. In the middle of his smiling he pulled himself up. Why not? Why
+shouldn't a husband who had wrecked his wife's happiness, try to repair
+the damage, if that were possible, when through death he had attained a
+kinder knowledge? The Roman Church prayed to the dead whom it canonized.
+There were thousands of parents, wives, sweethearts, bereft by the war,
+who were asserting that their longing had bridged the gulf and
+penetrated----
+
+He shook himself, as though to struggle free from an invisible
+assailant. Hallucinations! All these so-called spiritualistic
+manifestations were the result of over-taxed imagination. To stick to
+facts was the only safe course; and these were the facts in his case. He
+had approached Lady Dawn as a matter of duty to tell her the truth about
+a husband whom she had not known at his best. She had misinterpreted his
+motive and had believed that he had come to confess to her his own
+failure. She had been thrown off her guard, had dropped her mask of
+stoicism and had lavished on him a reckless kindness. But other women
+had been reckless to him in their kindness. Terry had: so had Maisie.
+Women's kindness had caused his present predicament--their kindness,
+plus his awkward knack of valuing their kindness at more than its face
+worth. He had learnt his lesson. Never again would he be lured into the
+net of feminine fickleness. When he felt the temptation rising, he would
+suppress and ignore it; at any rate he would ignore it until the woman,
+who was rousing his affection, had declared her intentions beyond any
+chance of mistaking.
+
+And Lady Dawn? She was in a class by herself. He held her sacred. The
+mere thought that she should ever fall in love with him was
+impertinence. To talk cheap sentiment would be insulting. It would cause
+him to lose her friendship--a loss which he could not bear to
+contemplate. It would be taking a mean advantage of a situation created
+for an entirely different purpose.---- And yet, dare he trust himself,
+now that he was in love with her, in the intimate aloneness of a long
+night drive to London?
+
+He rose to his feet disgusted. If this was the loss of self-control that
+peace had brought, better a thousand times the rigors of the sacrifice
+that was ended. Out there he had been strong; here he was a sick dog,
+licking his sores and whimpering at his own shadow. Self-pity had
+wrought this wholesale impotence--an impotence which was infecting the
+entire world. While individuals and nations had thought only of others,
+they had been valiant; they had raced in generous competition,
+clean-limbed as athletes, towards the tape, where endeavor ends and
+eternity commences. And now this lethargy, this cowardice--this
+monstrous fat of quaking emotion!
+
+A memory flashed back on him--an afternoon in March when he had been
+obsessed by a similar discontent. It had happened in the Mall, after his
+interview with Braithwaite and just before his introduction to Maisie.
+He had come across a sign-board which had announced that, by following a
+certain path, one would arrive at the Passport Office. That narrow
+track, vanishing into the bushy greenness, had seemed to him the first
+five hundred yards of the road that led to world-wideness and freedom.
+At the end of it lay Samoa, Tibet, the Malay Archipelago--jeweled seas
+and painted solitudes which human disillusions could not wither.
+Instantly his will concentrated. By following that road he could become
+lean-souled again. By reseeking hardships, he could recover his lost
+discipline. The idea held him spellbound. It meant escape. It meant a
+return to monasticism. Then and there he determined that he would
+commence his preliminary enquiries to-morrow.
+
+Going to the window, he leant out. The quaint village street was
+sleeping. The night was so still that, it scarcely breathed; it lay like
+a tired child in the firm white arms of the moonlight. Coming smoothly
+to a halt before the hostel was a powerful car. It was a landaulet and
+the hood was lowered. Lady Dawn must have altered her plans at the last
+moment; instead of sending for him, she had come herself! Catching sight
+of him, she waved her hand. His heart became quiet. Like the night
+without, his being was flooded with a drifting whiteness that robbed the
+darkness of its terror.
+
+
+VIII
+
+As he stood by the side of the car talking to her while his bag was
+being stowed away, her manner was chillingly conventional. It was so
+conventional that it bordered on the unfriendly. About the
+unfriendliness of the chauffeur there could be no doubt. The elaborate
+care with which he tucked the robe about her Ladyship had a distinct air
+of alert possessiveness.
+
+When Tabs had taken his place beside her and the village was left
+behind, she relaxed and laughed softly. "Such a trouble I've had! They
+all disapproved of our expedition--I mean the servants. Their eyes
+accused me of---- Perhaps it's better not to be explicit. But that was
+why I called for you, instead of letting you come to the Castle. Did you
+notice anything queer about Witherall?"
+
+"Your chauffeur? I thought he rather overdid his superciliousness and
+that he treated you a little as if he were your husband. Apart from
+that----"
+
+"Apart from that," she laughed, "he made you feel entirely welcome. You
+mustn't mind him. My servants aren't used to seeing me with an escort.
+And then---- Well, an all-night ride would be a little difficult to
+explain to anybody."
+
+"I suppose it would."
+
+They relapsed into silence. It was jolly to be so near to her and,
+after the fears he had had, to know himself so trusted. She sat quite
+close to him, so that he could feel the warmth of her body. Her
+shoulders touched him; sometimes she leant against him with a gentle
+pressure. Her fragrance was all about him. The robe spread across their
+knees gave an added touch of intimacy. He glanced down at her sideways.
+She was wearing a moleskin coat with a deep collar of silver-fox. She
+had on a moleskin hat, close fitting to her glossy head. Her face was
+partly hidden by a smart veil. She was immaculate as ever--as composed
+and stylish as if she were going to a theater-party instead of on an
+all-night ride to London. But it wasn't her stylishness that impressed
+him; it was her littleness. She looked very tender and pale as she sat
+beside him. The moral back of her chauffeur, as seen through the glass,
+condemned him of unkindness. He had had no right to ask her to accompany
+him. Why should he have burdened her with his troubles? She must have
+plenty of her own, with her boy to care for and her estate to manage.
+
+"I've been selfish," he said. "You ought to be in bed and sleeping now."
+
+She smiled. "Always blaming yourself, aren't you? I shouldn't be here
+unless I'd wanted."
+
+"But why did you want?"
+
+Beneath the robe her hand commenced to grope. It stole into his own and
+lay there quietly. "Because I couldn't bear to see you hurt. You're so
+good. In some ways you're so strong; in others you're just as tiny as
+my Eric. I felt you needed me for the moment."
+
+"For the moment! I shall always need you."
+
+"I wish you might." She shook her head slowly. "But you won't. You'll go
+away. I shall hear about you--all the big things you're accomplishing
+and planning. And then I shall remember that for just one night I had
+you for my very own."
+
+"But we're always going to be friends. I shall be always coming back to
+you."
+
+"Men don't come back, Lord Taborley. A man of your temperament is least
+likely to come back. You press forward. You're eager. Wherever you go
+you form new affections. I'm not like that. I'm cold. You don't think
+so, but then I'm treating you as I never treated any other man. You
+slipped under my reserve and reached my heart before I could stop you.
+Do you know how I'm treating you? Just the way I'd like some good woman
+to treat my little Eric one day, when I'm not here and he's a man."
+
+"But you're going to be here for a long time--just as long as I am."
+There was alarm in his assertion. "I couldn't bear to think of your not
+being in the world. It wouldn't matter so much whether I saw you; it
+would be the knowledge that I could see you; that would make all the
+difference."
+
+"Would it?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure. You mustn't think that because there was Terry and--I'm
+ashamed to have to own it--a passing fancy for your sister, that I'm
+fickle."
+
+"I don't. I never thought it for a moment. What I thought was that you
+were unhappy. People do a lot of foolish things when they're unhappy."
+
+"It seems so long since I was unhappy," he said gently. "You've healed
+everything."
+
+She was shaken as though with a storm of sobbing. No sound escaped her.
+She did a thing which was as amazing as it was beautiful. Raising his
+hand which she had been holding, she hugged it against her breast.
+
+
+IX
+
+During the night he nodded. Once when he wakened, he found her tucking
+the robe more closely about him. "Go to sleep. You're tired," she
+whispered, patting his shoulder.
+
+A strange woman--strangely maternal and beautiful! She never seemed to
+think of herself. The women whom he had known had always demanded that
+men should do all the giving. Even Terry had been like that. His
+conception, of love had been of a continual bestowing with no hope of
+reciprocity. To be allowed to give throughout one's life to the woman
+beloved had seemed to him to be the maximum of married blessedness. He
+knew better now. Lady Dawn had given so generously that she had
+established a new standard; he would never again ask so little from any
+woman. He began to perceive that all his approaches to love had been
+self-abasing. In the true sense of the word he had never been in love.
+Dream-intoxicated, yes! But all that he had experienced had been desire.
+It was a new thought to him that a man must respect, even more than he
+desires, the woman whom he covets.
+
+His feeling for Lady Dawn was one of worship. When he wakened to find
+her watching over him, it seemed to him that the Mother of God sat
+beside him. When God's Mother is symbolized in a living woman, love is
+reborn into the world.
+
+The last time he awoke, dawn was breaking. The moon had grown feeble. A
+chill was in the air. He sat up. "What! Still awake! I don't believe
+you've slept a wink all night."
+
+"I haven't. I didn't want. I've been enjoying myself."
+
+"You look tired."
+
+He commenced to pile cushions behind her and tried to coax her to take
+some rest. "If you insist," she assented. "But I'd much rather not. I'm
+like a child at a party; I want to last out every moment."
+
+"Then let's talk. We're nearing London. We sha'n't get much chance for
+being alone after we arrive. We don't know what we'll find. We may be
+whisked away in opposite directions. Before we're separated, I want to
+acknowledge what I owe you."
+
+"It's cold," she shuddered, drawing closer to him. And then, "You owe me
+nothing."
+
+He was tempted to place his arm about her, but the cowardice of past
+failure was strong upon him. He was afraid lest the ordinary gestures of
+affection would cheapen him in her eyes; he was still more afraid that
+they might mean to her that he valued her too lightly. He held himself
+in hand, staring straight before him and speaking quietly.
+
+"I'm the only judge of what I owe you. I came to you broken. Life had
+made a fool of me. I'd fallen through placing my ideals too high.
+Everything was slipping. Every belief I'd ever had was open to doubt.
+Most of all I'd lost faith in the goodness of women. To explain my state
+of mind I have to tell you that the war had made me fanatical. Like
+millions of men who went out to die, I'd persuaded myself that I was
+fighting more than Germans--I was fighting to bring about the new heaven
+and the new earth. Our politicians promised us as much. You remember
+their phrases. 'A world safe for democracy! A land fit for heroes to
+live in.' When all the muck and the heartbreak were ended, we found that
+outwardly it was the same old world. Heaven was as far away as ever.
+There were no signs that any one wanted a new earth. Nations which had
+been comrades, began to wrangle. Soldiers came home to find their jobs
+held by slackers. The glorious promises had been a death-bed repentance;
+their insincerity was proved when the world recovered. But our worst
+disappointment was utterly personal--that despite the magnanimity we had
+shared and witnessed, we ourselves were no less selfish. For me all
+these disillusions were epitomized in Terry. I'd fought for her. I'd
+carried her in my heart. If I'd died, my last thoughts would have been
+of her. I came back hungry and she disowned me. That she should have
+done that made humanity a Judas and God a mocker. I don't mean you to
+believe that I gave way at once to this wholesale injustice. At first I
+made an effort to struggle against it. I'd always held that great living
+was a matter of pressing forward, of wearing an air of triumph when you
+knew you were defeated, of believing, in spite of every proof to the
+contrary, that further up the road your kingdom waited for you."
+
+He felt the pressure of her friendly hand. "It does," she assured him.
+"That's what you've taught me. It's what you taught Maisie; it's almost
+as though you'd willed her husband to come back. You're a great
+believer. All great believers have been doubters. They give away so much
+of their faith that at times they have none left for themselves. You
+limp. Don't flinch; with me there's no need to be sensitive. When you
+entered my room for the first time, you made me think of another lame
+man. Do you remember how Jacob wrestled all night with an unknown
+assailant? When dawn was breaking his thigh was out of joint, but he
+refused to let his assailant go until he had asked his name. The
+stranger would not tell him--instead he blessed him. And then Jacob knew
+it was with God he had wrestled. When the sun rose and he went upon his
+way, he halted upon his thigh. You have the look that I think he must
+have had--the look of a man who has been maimed in trying to make God
+answer questions. It's that look and your very lameness that have given
+me back something that Lord Dawn took from me--something that he knew,
+when he sent you, you could give me back: my faith in men, without
+which a woman can have no happiness."
+
+The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was
+the hour when children are born and weary people die--the hour of new
+beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers
+changing guard, salute at the cross-roads of the new day as friends.
+
+At last he broke the silence. "I thought I had nothing to give you. I
+felt so empty. You seemed so strong and immovable, like a still tree in
+a forest that was storm-shaken. You made me feel that however the wind
+raged, beneath your branches there would be always rest. I never
+knew----" He paused as though he had forgotten what he had set out to
+say. "I never guessed that a woman could be so good."
+
+"Nor I that there was so good a man."
+
+They clasped hands so tightly that it hurt. The sun was rising as they
+entered London. Trees dripped gold and birds were chattering as they
+drove into Brompton Square. It was only when they had halted before the
+sleeping house, gay with flaming window-boxes, that she released his
+hand. With the severance of contact he awoke from his trance and
+remembered the errand that had brought them.
+
+
+X
+
+He had opened the door with his latch-key and had stood aside to allow
+her to pass into the hall, when suddenly he clutched her arm and drew
+her back. He signed to her to make no sound. Together they stood
+listening. The early morning stillness was broken by a door shutting
+smartly at the top of the house, a cheerful whistling and then the
+unmistakeably firm step of a man descending.
+
+Tabs had no man in his employ, so what was a man doing in his house?
+There was no secretiveness about the stranger's movements; on the
+contrary, there was an airy boldness.
+
+The sunlight danced and nickered on the wall as if it shared the
+excitement of their suspense. The footsteps drew nearer. They paused
+dramatically. The whistling ceased abruptly. Had the stranger taken
+warning? A match was struck. He was only lighting a cigarette. The
+footsteps came on again. At the final bend of the stairs the intruder
+came in sight. He halted, mirroring their surprise, and stood staring
+down at them with a bleak, hard look. He was the man whom they had least
+expected.
+
+Tabs was the first to collect himself. He closed the front door behind
+him. "Good morning, General. You couldn't have been more prompt if we
+had telegraphed you that we were coming." When Braithwaite still stared,
+Tabs continued, "Allow me to introduce you to Lady Dawn and may I ask
+how long I have had you as my guest?"
+
+Braithwaite drew a puff at his cigarette. His manner was as haughty as
+if he had been the owner of the house. "Since last night," he said. "I
+have to thank your Lordship for a bed. Mrs. Braithwaite----" A gleam of
+amusement shot into his eyes. "Mrs. Braithwaite had a sentiment for
+spending her first night beneath your roof. Seeing that you were away
+and that I was so newly wedded"--he made an eloquent gesture--"I could
+scarcely deny her." Turning on his heel, he commenced to reascend.
+Across his shoulder he flung back, "Of course I apologize. We'll not
+trespass further. In a few minutes I'll have her dressed. In half an
+hour, at the outside, I'll remove her."
+
+"Don't be a fool." Tabs spoke sharply. "You make me wonder which of us
+is mad."
+
+Braithwaite regarded him for a moment with an enigmatic smile. "I'm not.
+Yesterday I did the wisest thing of my life." With that he vanished.
+
+Lady Dawn turned to Tabs gently. "If that's the way he feels, then he
+has. Terry's to be congratulated."
+
+"But why on earth should she have wanted to spend her marriage-night in
+my house?" Tabs questioned. "My house of all inappropriate places!
+That's what I can't understand. And what could Ann have been doing to
+consent? You remember I told you there was a time when he was
+practically engaged to Ann."
+
+They mounted the stairs till they came to the first landing. Entering
+the library, with its bright red lacquer, they sat down to await events.
+But Tabs did not sit long; he was too restless. Having flung wide the
+French windows which opened out on to the veranda, he kept going to the
+doorway to listen.
+
+He glanced at his wrist-watch. "Barely six o'clock! Upon my word, I
+don't relish the idea of her being disturbed. Braithwaite's such a
+hot-head. For all I care, they can stop here as long as they like. I'll
+take a holiday so as not to embarrass them." He faced Lady Dawn with
+troubled frankness. "The question is: _are_ they married? I've been
+trying to figure things out. They simply can't be unless he met her with
+a special license in Gloucester. And even then, I can't see how---- But
+if they're not married, surely he would never have had the audacity to
+bring her to my house. It would be too preposterous--to the house of a
+man to whom she was engaged, where she would be waited on by a woman
+with whom he was once in love."
+
+At that moment Ann entered, pretty and sleepy-eyed, with Braithwaite
+following close behind. Tabs commenced speaking at once, in order that
+he might put them at their ease as regards his intentions.
+
+"We're not here to blame any one. You, General, evidently think that I'm
+hostile. I'm not. As far as you're concerned, Ann, whatever you've done
+is right. Of course I'm a little taken aback to find that my house was
+chosen for the honeymoon. But if you'd like to have the use of it for a
+week or so and Ann doesn't object, I'll clear out and leave you to
+yourselves. You'll make me really happy if you'll accept the offer;
+it'll be a proof of friendliness. You're wondering why we surprised you
+so early. It wasn't to prevent you from marrying. It was because Lady
+Dawn was responsible for Terry and we felt that a runaway match, with
+the marriage announced after the event, might damage not only her but
+you, General, as well. I read yesterday in the papers of what you're
+doing and I want to say just this to you. You're the better man. You
+deserved to win. Last time we met you refused to shake my hand. I hope
+you'll take it now. You can afford to be magnanimous to a rival, now
+that you're Terry's husband."
+
+Tabs stood with his hand held out. Braithwaite made no motion to accept
+it; and yet his expression was generous. "I can't shake your hand as
+Terry's husband, Lord Taborley. I'm not married to her."
+
+Lady Dawn sprang to her feet and came between the two tall men. "Not
+married to her! But you intend to marry her? You told us you were
+married."
+
+Braithwaite was still smiling. "I am." To their amazement he slipped his
+arm about Ann and kissed her sleepy, tender mouth. "Terry is safe with
+your Ladyship's sister. We took her there when she arrived last night."
+
+He turned to Tabs. "You said that I was the better man. I'm not. It was
+your sense of duty that always urged me. I have to thank your Lordship
+for the greatest happiness that can befall any man. You made me see it
+as my greatest happiness, when I was in danger of becoming a cad. There
+was one thing you said to me that sank into my mind. 'You'll never
+succeed, however great your courage, unless you start with your honor
+solvent.' You saved my honor. I didn't like your methods. But I thank
+you with all my heart now. If it hadn't been for you, neither Ann nor I
+would have come safely to our journey's end. I think we'd both like to
+shake your hand."
+
+
+XI
+
+It was two hours later. They were finishing their breakfast in the open,
+on the balcony of the Hyde Park Hotel. From where they sat they could
+watch a lawn-mower traveling slowly back and forth, patterning the sward
+with alternate stripes of different colored greenness. They could smell
+the acrid juices of newly cut grass. Beyond the islands of flowers and
+vivid candelabra of trees, they could see the wild fowl of the
+Serpentine rise and drift like phantoms across the sultry stretch of
+blueness. Wheels of a water-cart grumbled sleepily against the gravel.
+Moving through the sunlit shadows of the Row, riders were returning from
+their early morning gallop.
+
+They were still together--just the two of them. They were romantically
+self-conscious of the domestic appearance which their twoness caused.
+Only married couples or very ardent lovers rise, while the lazy world is
+sleeping, to keep each other company at breakfast. They had not had the
+heart to disturb the General and Ann in their temporary possession of
+the little nest-like house.
+
+Lady Dawn was speaking. "So you've done it again."
+
+"What have I done?"
+
+"What you did for Maisie. How did you put it last night? You've led them
+to their kingdom."
+
+He smiled. "I seem to have a faculty for doing that. I do for others
+what I can't do for myself."
+
+Still not looking at him, she said: "Perhaps you don't find your own
+kingdom because you're too much in love with the search. You don't want
+to bring your journey to an end. There are people like that."
+
+"I'm not one of them.--I wish you'd look at me, Lady Dawn. Do you know
+what I covet most in all the world? Rest and certainty. I don't mean a
+lazy kind of rest, but the rest of a mind at peace with itself--the
+certainty we all had while the war was on, when we were adventuring for
+the advantage of other people. I've done nothing lately that wasn't for
+myself. I want some one to live for, so that I can forget myself. I've
+been thinking----"
+
+The waiter presented the bill. Tabs scarcely knew whether to curse or
+bless. He had been approaching the danger-mark; nevertheless, he wasn't
+at all sure that he was grateful for the interruption. His heart cried
+out to him to risk humiliation by one last act of daring. Experience
+warned him that it is the sins of precaution--the follies left
+uncommitted--that are most regretted by men of seventy.
+
+She rose as he was gathering up his change. The purpose that had brought
+them to London was ended. There was no further reason for their being
+together. If they were to prolong their companionship, a new excuse must
+be invented. He saw by the tentative manner in which she waited, that
+she also had realized that. He became perturbed lest she might dismiss
+him. Speaking hurriedly to forestall her, he said, "I suppose we had
+better make sure of Terry by hunting her up at Mulberry Tree Court."
+
+She barely nodded. Perhaps she thought, now that Braithwaite had been
+eliminated as a rival, that this making sure of Terry betokened a
+rekindling of the old infatuation. A constraint grew up between them. It
+was not until they were standing on the top of the hotel steps, waiting
+for her car, that he ventured to correct the wrong impression. "Funny
+about Terry! If it hadn't been for her, we might never have been
+friends. The first day of my home-coming she drew my attention to you;
+it was too late--you had passed. You were driving with the Queen in the
+Park. I remember what Terry said. She called you Di and spoke of you as
+the most beautiful woman in England."
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard. As though she were unescorted, she
+passed before him down the steps. But the moment they were seated in the
+car, she turned to him. She looked her full age. Her face was pale with
+more than weariness. He noticed the threads of gray in her hair. Ever
+since he had seen Ann in her flushed shy exaltation, he had felt more
+keenly the pathos of Lady Dawn. It was a pathos that found an echo in
+his heart--the pathos of approaching separation. What purpose did it
+serve her to be beautiful, if she had no man of her own to admire her?
+
+"You were on the verge of telling me something, when the waiter
+interrupted," she prompted. "It began like a confession. You'd been
+speaking about living for other people and your need of rest. Then, you
+said you'd been thinking----"
+
+"It was about how one could make a man's job out of living," he answered
+quickly. "It's all wrong that one should feel decent only when he's
+attempting to get slaughtered. It takes neither brains nor perseverance
+to be dead. Any one can----"
+
+"But it was about finding rest that you were speaking."
+
+"Yes, but I've burdened you with too many of my troubles." He hesitated,
+wondering whether he dare tell her what had happened to his heart. "I've
+done nothing for you. I've only borrowed from your strength. You're the
+most restful woman, the most calm----" Then he dodged. "But since you
+ask me of what I was thinking, it was of how I might escape to the old
+hardships. I thought I'd call at the Passport Office and get in touch
+with the Royal Geographical Society, and commence arrangements to
+explore----"
+
+"Then I sha'n't be seeing you again?" She asked it in a tone of
+dreariness, bordering on terror. Her hands trembled in her lap. She
+stared straight before her.
+
+"But you will." He forced a cheerfulness into his voice which he was far
+from feeling. "These things take time. It may be weeks----"
+
+"But you'll go away. I know it."
+
+"I suppose I shall. Sooner or later I shall return. In the meanwhile we
+can write."
+
+She paid no attention to his consolation. Her face was gray as granite.
+Her hands kept folding and unfolding. There was something symbolic in
+their emptiness. "You won't come back. It's the end. You weren't sent,
+after all."
+
+How or why he said it, he never could tell. The words were utterly
+unpremeditated. He spoke them, ordinarily and unemotionally, as though
+throwing out a casual suggestion. "We could get married, if that would
+make you happier."
+
+"It's what I'd like."
+
+His heart missed a beat. He dared not credit his senses. He glanced down
+at her, prepared to find that she was mocking. The most beautiful woman
+in England! There was no mistake; she had actually asked him.
+
+"It's what I should like, too." He spoke conventionally. Nothing in his
+tone betrayed his emotion. "It's what I've been dreaming from the moment
+that we met---- When would be convenient?"
+
+"As soon as possible."
+
+"Would a week from to-day suit?"
+
+She nodded, "Or sooner."
+
+Beneath the robe his hand sought hers. He did not trust himself to look
+at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The
+secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still
+doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and
+disembodied--an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's
+end--this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything he had
+imagined!
+
+They entered Mulberry Tree Court and drew up before the house with the
+marigold-tinted curtains. It was while they were waiting for the door to
+be opened that he broke the silence. Smiling down at her with a guilty,
+glad expression he asked, "We're engaged now, I suppose?"
+
+She returned his smile less certainly. "I'm ashamed. But you won't
+go----"
+
+He laughed at the folly of her question. "Go, when I've got you, the
+woman whom I wanted!"
+
+"Then you won't go exploring? You won't exchange me for hardships?"
+
+"Di, dearest, I've done with searching."
+
+The door was opening. She pulled herself together. Porter stood before
+them, neatly laundered, with the old suspicious meekness in her glance.
+
+"Good morning, Porter. We've come to see Miss Beddow. We've been told
+that she's staying with my sister."
+
+"She is, your Ladyship. But none of them are down. She arrived so late
+and unexpected."
+
+They followed her across the hall into the sun-filled drawing-room, with
+its fragrant flowers, tall windows, rockery-garden and little oval pond,
+with the toy boat floating on its surface. The moment the door had
+closed, he had her in his arms. Now that he was sure of her possession,
+he held her desperately as if he feared that he were going to lose her.
+"Closer," she whispered. "Closer." It flashed through his memory that
+the last time he was in that room, he had been the spectator of just
+such a union and had fled from it because he was excluded.
+
+She stirred against him, lifting up her face.
+
+"This time you're really crying," he whispered. Stooping he pressed her
+lips. "They always told me you never----"
+
+Freeing her arms, she clasped him tightly about the neck. He could feel
+the weight of her body, dragging his face lower. She kissed him
+passionately, stopping his breath, as though she would breathe into him
+her very soul. "Oh, my dearest--my very dear! How cruel you were! You
+made me ask you. I thought I'd never get you."
+
+The door was opening. Terry was watching them. The first they knew of
+her presence was when she spoke.
+
+"You came to see me."
+
+They broke apart like shameful children and stood regarding her, their
+hands just touching. She seemed their elder.
+
+"I suppose you have the right to jeer at me," she continued slowly. "I'm
+left out. I was too cold. I'm too late. I didn't want what was offered
+at the time it was offered. What I didn't want once, I can't have now.
+And, perhaps, I still don't want it. Tabs used to speak of kingdoms. I
+never knew what he meant. You've all found yours--Maisie, Braithwaite,
+both of you and even Ann. Everybody, except me." She laughed to prevent
+her tears from falling. "I suppose Tabs would tell me that mine's still
+round the corner. You would, wouldn't you, Tabs?"
+
+Her need, which had been theirs, penetrated their happiness. They felt
+again the old wild pang of neglected loneliness. Sargent's painting
+above the mantelpiece, looking down on them, reminded Lady Dawn of her
+own forgotten tragedy. It was unendurable that their gladness should
+bring sorrow to Terry. With a common instinct they went towards her.
+Lady Dawn placed her arms about her. It was Tabs who spoke.
+
+"Little Terry, you're not left out. You're ours more than ever. We've
+not robbed you. We couldn't. Of you alone it's true that everything lies
+before you. All the time you've had your kingdom, though you didn't know
+it. You still have it--the Kingdom of Youth, for which we older people
+were all searching."
+
+In the silence that followed there stole to them through the summer
+sunshine, above the mutter of London, the music of a distant
+barrel-organ. In the mind of Tabs a picture formed; it was of children
+dancing along a golden pavement on that first spring morning of his
+disillusion. The tune which the barrel-organ played was the same. His
+brain sang words to the music:
+
+   "Apres la guerre
+   There'll be a good time everywhere."
+
+And it was no longer an optimism--it was fulfilled promise.
+
+Surely, beyond the bounds of space, Lord Dawn also listened and was
+happy. For Tabs, as long as life lasted, it would be the marching-song
+of the kingdom round the corner.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Kingdom Round the Corner, by Coningsby Dawson
+
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